>>Everyone wants a cloud operating model. Since the introduction of the modern cloud. Last decade, the entire technology landscape has changed. We've learned a lot from the hyperscalers, especially from AWS. Now, one thing is certain in the technology business. It's so competitive. Then if a faster, better, cheaper idea comes along, the industry will move quickly to adopt it. They'll add their unique value and then they'll bring solutions to the market. And that's precisely what's happening throughout the technology industry because of cloud. And one of the best examples is Amazon's nitro. That's AWS has custom built hypervisor that delivers on the promise of more efficiently using resources and expanding things like processor, optionality for customers. It's a secret weapon for Amazon. As, as we, as we wrote last year, every infrastructure company needs something like nitro to compete. Why do we say this? Well, Wiki Bon our research arm estimates that nearly 30% of CPU cores in the data center are wasted. >>They're doing work that they weren't designed to do well, specifically offloading networking, storage, and security tasks. So if you can eliminate that waste, you can recapture dollars that drop right to the bottom line. That's why every company needs a nitro like solution. As a result of these developments, customers are rethinking networks and how they utilize precious compute resources. They can't, or won't put everything into the public cloud for many reasons. That's one of the tailwinds for tier two cloud service providers and why they're growing so fast. They give options to customers that don't want to keep investing in building out their own data centers, and they don't want to migrate all their workloads to the public cloud. So these providers and on-prem customers, they want to be more like hyperscalers, right? They want to be more agile and they do that. They're distributing, networking and security functions and pushing them closer to the applications. >>Now, at the same time, they're unifying their view of the network. So it can be less fragmented, manage more efficiently with more automation and better visibility. How are they doing this? Well, that's what we're going to talk about today. Welcome to changing the game for cloud networking made possible by pluribus networks. My name is Dave Vellante and today on this special cube presentation, John furrier, and I are going to explore these issues in detail. We'll dig into new solutions being created by pluribus and Nvidia to specifically address offloading, wasted resources, accelerating performance, isolating data, and making networks more secure all while unifying the network experience. We're going to start on the west coast and our Palo Alto studios, where John will talk to Mike of pluribus and AMI, but Donnie of Nvidia, then we'll bring on Alessandra Bobby airy of pluribus and Pete Lummus from Nvidia to take a deeper dive into the technology. And then we're gonna bring it back here to our east coast studio and get the independent analyst perspective from Bob Liberte of the enterprise strategy group. We hope you enjoy the program. Okay, let's do this over to John >>Okay. Let's kick things off. We're here at my cafe. One of the TMO and pluribus networks and NAMI by Dani VP of networking, marketing, and developer ecosystem at Nvidia. Great to have you welcome folks. >>Thank you. Thanks. >>So let's get into the, the problem situation with cloud unified network. What problems are out there? What challenges do cloud operators have Mike let's get into it. >>Yeah, it really, you know, the challenges we're looking at are for non hyperscalers that's enterprises, governments, um, tier two service providers, cloud service providers, and the first mandate for them is to become as agile as a hyperscaler. So they need to be able to deploy services and security policies. And second, they need to be able to abstract the complexity of the network and define things in software while it's accelerated in hardware. Um, really ultimately they need a single operating model everywhere. And then the second thing is they need to distribute networking and security services out to the edge of the host. Um, we're seeing a growth in cyber attacks. Um, it's, it's not slowing down. It's only getting worse and, you know, solving for this security problem across clouds is absolutely critical. And the way to do it is to move security out to the host. >>Okay. With that goal in mind, what's the pluribus vision. How does this tie together? >>Yeah. So, um, basically what we see is, uh, that this demands a new architecture and that new architecture has four tenants. The first tenant is unified and simplified cloud networks. If you look at cloud networks today, there's, there's sort of like discreet bespoke cloud networks, you know, per hypervisor, per private cloud edge cloud public cloud. Each of the public clouds have different networks that needs to be unified. You know, if we want these folks to be able to be agile, they need to be able to issue a single command or instantiate a security policy across all those locations with one command and not have to go to each one. The second is like I mentioned, distributed security, um, distributed security without compromise, extended out to the host is absolutely critical. So micro-segmentation and distributed firewalls, but it doesn't stop there. They also need pervasive visibility. >>You know, it's, it's, it's sort of like with security, you really can't see you can't protect what you can't see. So you need visibility everywhere. The problem is visibility to date has been very expensive. Folks have had to basically build a separate overlay network of taps, packet brokers, tap aggregation infrastructure that really needs to be built into this unified network I'm talking about. And the last thing is automation. All of this needs to be SDN enabled. So this is related to my comment about abstraction abstract, the complexity of all of these discreet networks, physic whatever's down there in the physical layer. Yeah. I don't want to see it. I want to abstract it. I wanted to find things in software, but I do want to leverage the power of hardware to accelerate that. So that's the fourth tenant is SDN automation. >>Mike, we've been talking on the cube a lot about this architectural shift and customers are looking at this. This is a big part of everyone who's looking at cloud operations next gen, how do we get there? How do customers get this vision realized? >>That's a great question. And I appreciate the tee up. I mean, we're, we're here today for that reason. We're introducing two things today. Um, the first is a unified cloud networking vision, and that is a vision of where pluribus is headed with our partners like Nvidia longterm. Um, and that is about, uh, deploying a common operating model, SDN enabled SDN, automated hardware, accelerated across all clouds. Um, and whether that's underlying overlay switch or server, um, hype, any hypervisor infrastructure containers, any workload doesn't matter. So that's ultimately where we want to get. And that's what we talked about earlier. Um, the first step in that vision is what we call the unified cloud fabric. And this is the next generation of our adaptive cloud fabric. Um, and what's nice about this is we're not starting from scratch. We have a, a, an award-winning adaptive cloud fabric product that is deployed globally. Um, and in particular, uh, we're very proud of the fact that it's deployed in over a hundred tier one mobile operators as the network fabric for their 4g and 5g virtualized cores. We know how to build carrier grade, uh, networking infrastructure, what we're doing now, um, to realize this next generation unified cloud fabric is we're extending from the switch to this Nvidia Bluefield to DPU. We know there's a, >>Hold that up real quick. That's a good, that's a good prop. That's the blue field and video. >>It's the Nvidia Bluefield two DPU data processing unit. And, um, uh, you know, what we're doing, uh, fundamentally is extending our SDN automated fabric, the unified cloud fabric out to the host, but it does take processing power. So we knew that we didn't want to do, we didn't want to implement that running on the CPU, which is what some other companies do because it consumes revenue generating CPU's from the application. So a DPU is a perfect way to implement this. And we knew that Nvidia was the leader with this blue field too. And so that is the first that's, that's the first step in the getting into realizing this vision. >>I mean, Nvidia has always been powering some great workloads of GPU. Now you've got DPU networking and then video is here. What is the relationship with clothes? How did that come together? Tell us the story. >>Yeah. So, you know, we've been working with pluribus for quite some time. I think the last several months was really when it came to fruition and, uh, what pluribus is trying to build and what Nvidia has. So we have, you know, this concept of a Bluefield data processing unit, which if you think about it, conceptually does really three things, offload, accelerate an isolate. So offload your workloads from your CPU to your data processing unit infrastructure workloads that is, uh, accelerate. So there's a bunch of acceleration engines. So you can run infrastructure workloads much faster than you would otherwise, and then isolation. So you have this nice security isolation between the data processing unit and your other CPU environment. And so you can run completely isolated workloads directly on the data processing unit. So we introduced this, you know, a couple of years ago, and with pluribus, you know, we've been talking to the pluribus team for quite some months now. >>And I think really the combination of what pluribus is trying to build and what they've developed around this unified cloud fabric, uh, is fits really nicely with the DPU and running that on the DPU and extending it really from your physical switch, all the way to your host environment, specifically on the data processing unit. So if you think about what's happening as you add data processing units to your environment. So every server we believe over time is going to have data processing units. So now you'll have to manage that complexity from the physical network layer to the host layer. And so what pluribus is really trying to do is extending the network fabric from the host, from the switch to the host, and really have that single pane of glass for network operators to be able to configure provision, manage all of the complexity of the network environment. >>So that's really how the partnership truly started. And so it started really with extending the network fabric, and now we're also working with them on security. So, you know, if you sort of take that concept of isolation and security isolation, what pluribus has within their fabric is the concept of micro-segmentation. And so now you can take that extended to the data processing unit and really have, um, isolated micro-segmentation workloads, whether it's bare metal cloud native environments, whether it's virtualized environments, whether it's public cloud, private cloud hybrid cloud. So it really is a magical partnership between the two companies with their unified cloud fabric running on, on the DPU. >>You know, what I love about this conversation is it reminds me of when you have these changing markets, the product gets pulled out of the market and, and you guys step up and create these new solutions. And I think this is a great example. So I have to ask you, how do you guys differentiate what sets this apart for customers with what's in it for the customer? >>Yeah. So I mentioned, you know, three things in terms of the value of what the Bluefield brings, right? There's offloading, accelerating, isolating, that's sort of the key core tenants of Bluefield. Um, so that, you know, if you sort of think about what, um, what Bluefields, what we've done, you know, in terms of the differentiation, we're really a robust platform for innovation. So we introduced Bluefield to, uh, last year, we're introducing Bluefield three, which is our next generation of Bluefields, you know, we'll have five X, the arm compute capacity. It will have 400 gig line rate acceleration, four X better crypto acceleration. So it will be remarkably better than the previous generation. And we'll continue to innovate and add, uh, chips to our portfolio every, every 18 months to two years. Um, so that's sort of one of the key areas of differentiation. The other is the, if you look at Nvidia and, and you know, what we're sort of known for is really known for our AI artificial intelligence and our artificial intelligence software, as well as our GPU. >>So you look at artificial intelligence and the combination of artificial intelligence plus data processing. This really creates the, you know, faster, more efficient, secure AI systems from the core of your data center, all the way out to the edge. And so with Nvidia, we really have these converged accelerators where we've combined the GPU, which does all your AI processing with your data processing with the DPU. So we have this convergence really nice convergence of that area. And I would say the third area is really around our developer environment. So, you know, one of the key, one of our key motivations at Nvidia is really to have our partner ecosystem, embrace our technology and build solutions around our technology. So if you look at what we've done with the DPU, with credit and an SDK, which is an open SDK called Doka, and it's an open SDK for our partners to really build and develop solutions using Bluefield and using all these accelerated libraries that we expose through Doka. And so part of our differentiation is really building this open ecosystem for our partners to take advantage and build solutions around our technology. >>You know, what's exciting is when I hear you talk, it's like you realize that there's no one general purpose network anymore. Everyone has their own super environment Supercloud or these new capabilities. They can really craft their own, I'd say, custom environment at scale with easy tools. Right. And it's all kind of, again, this is the new architecture Mike, you were talking about, how does customers run this effectively? Cost-effectively and how do people migrate? >>Yeah, I, I think that is the key question, right? So we've got this beautiful architecture. You, you know, Amazon nitro is a, is a good example of, of a smart NIC architecture that has been successfully deployed, but enterprises and serve tier two service providers and tier one service providers and governments are not Amazon, right? So they need to migrate there and they need this architecture to be cost-effective. And, and that's, that's super key. I mean, the reality is deep user moving fast, but they're not going to be, um, deployed everywhere on day one. Some servers will have DPS right away, some servers will have use and a year or two. And then there are devices that may never have DPS, right. IOT gateways, or legacy servers, even mainframes. Um, so that's the beauty of a solution that creates a fabric across both the switch and the DPU, right. >>Um, and by leveraging the Nvidia Bluefield DPU, what we really like about it is it's open. Um, and that drives, uh, cost efficiencies. And then, um, uh, you know, with this, with this, our architectural approach effectively, you get a unified solution across switch and DPU workload independent doesn't matter what hypervisor it is, integrated visibility, integrated security, and that can, uh, create tremendous cost efficiencies and, and really extract a lot of the expense from, from a capital perspective out of the network, as well as from an operational perspective, because now I have an SDN automated solution where I'm literally issuing a command to deploy a network service or to create or deploy our security policy and is deployed everywhere, automatically saving the oppor, the network operations team and the security operations team time. >>All right. So let me rewind that because that's super important. Get the unified cloud architecture, I'm the customer guy, but it's implemented, what's the value again, take, take me through the value to me. I have a unified environment. What's the value. >>Yeah. So I mean, the value is effectively, um, that, so there's a few pieces of value. The first piece of value is, um, I'm creating this clean D mark. I'm taking networking to the host. And like I mentioned, we're not running it on the CPU. So in implementations that run networking on the CPU, there's some conflict between the dev ops team who owned the server and the NetApps team who own the network because they're installing software on the, on the CPU stealing cycles from what should be revenue generating. Uh CPU's. So now by, by terminating the networking on the DPU, we click create this real clean DMARC. So the dev ops folks are happy because they don't necessarily have the skills to manage network and they don't necessarily want to spend the time managing networking. They've got their network counterparts who are also happy the NetApps team, because they want to control the networking. >>And now we've got this clean DMARC where the DevOps folks get the services they need and the NetApp folks get the control and agility they need. So that's a huge value. Um, the next piece of value is distributed security. This is essential. I mentioned earlier, you know, put pushing out micro-segmentation and distributed firewall, basically at the application level, right, where I create these small, small segments on an by application basis. So if a bad actor does penetrate the perimeter firewall, they're contained once they get inside. Cause the worst thing is a bad actor, penetrates a perimeter firewall and can go wherever they want and wreak havoc. Right? And so that's why this, this is so essential. Um, and the next benefit obviously is this unified networking operating model, right? Having, uh, uh, uh, an operating model across switch and server underlay and overlay, workload agnostic, making the life of the NetApps teams much easier so they can focus their time on really strategy instead of spending an afternoon, deploying a single villain, for example. >>Awesome. And I think also from my standpoint, I mean, perimeter security is pretty much, I mean, they're out there, it gets the firewall still out there exists, but pretty much they're being breached all the time, the perimeter. So you have to have this new security model. And I think the other thing that you mentioned, the separation between dev ops is cool because the infrastructure is code is about making the developers be agile and build security in from day one. So this policy aspect is, is huge. Um, new control points. I think you guys have a new architecture that enables the security to be handled more flexible. >>Right. >>That seems to be the killer feature here, >>Right? Yeah. If you look at the data processing unit, I think one of the great things about sort of this new architecture, it's really the foundation for zero trust it's. So like you talked about the perimeter is getting breached. And so now each and every compute node has to be protected. And I think that's sort of what you see with the partnership between pluribus and Nvidia is the DPU is really the foundation of zero trust. And pluribus is really building on that vision with, uh, allowing sort of micro-segmentation and being able to protect each and every compute node as well as the underlying network. >>This is super exciting. This is an illustration of how the market's evolving architectures are being reshaped and refactored for cloud scale and all this new goodness with data. So I gotta ask how you guys go into market together. Michael, start with you. What's the relationship look like in the go to market with an Nvidia? >>Sure. Um, I mean, we're, you know, we're super excited about the partnership, obviously we're here together. Um, we think we've got a really good solution for the market, so we're jointly marketing it. Um, uh, you know, obviously we appreciate that Nvidia is open. Um, that's, that's sort of in our DNA, we're about open networking. They've got other ISV who are gonna run on Bluefield too. We're probably going to run on other DPS in the, in the future, but right now, um, we're, we feel like we're partnered with the number one, uh, provider of DPS in the world and, uh, super excited about, uh, making a splash with it. >>I'm in get the hot product. >>Yeah. So Bluefield too, as I mentioned was GA last year, we're introducing, uh, well, we now also have the converged accelerator. So I talked about artificial intelligence or artificial intelligence with the Bluefield DPU, all of that put together on a converged accelerator. The nice thing there is you can either run those workloads. So if you have an artificial intelligence workload and an infrastructure workload, you can warn them separately on the same platform or you can actually use, uh, you can actually run artificial intelligence applications on the Bluefield itself. So that's what the converged accelerator really brings to the table. Uh, so that's available now. Then we have Bluefield three, which will be available late this year. And I talked about sort of, you know, uh, how much better that next generation of Bluefield is in comparison to Bluefield two. So we will see Bluefield three shipping later on this year, and then our software stack, which I talked about, which is called Doka we're on our second version are Doka one dot two. >>We're releasing Doka one dot three, uh, in about two months from now. And so that's really our open ecosystem framework. So allow you to program the Bluefields. So we have all of our acceleration libraries, um, security libraries, that's all packed into this STK called Doka. And it really gives that simplicity to our partners to be able to develop on top of Bluefield. So as we add new generations of Bluefield, you know, next, next year, we'll have, you know, another version and so on and so forth Doka is really that unified unified layer that allows, um, Bluefield to be both forwards compatible and backwards compatible. So partners only really have to think about writing to that SDK once, and then it automatically works with future generations of Bluefields. So that's sort of the nice thing around, um, around Doka. And then in terms of our go to market model, we're working with every, every major OEM. So, uh, later on this year, you'll see, you know, major server manufacturers, uh, releasing Bluefield enabled servers. So, um, more to come >>Awesome, save money, make it easier, more capabilities, more workload power. This is the future of, of cloud operations. >>Yeah. And, and, and, uh, one thing I'll add is, um, we are, um, we have a number of customers as you'll hear in the next segment, um, that are already signed up and we'll be working with us for our, uh, early field trial starting late April early may. Um, we are accepting registrations. You can go to www.pluribusnetworks.com/e F T a. If you're interested in signing up for, um, uh, being part of our field trial and providing feedback on the product, >>Awesome innovation and network. Thanks so much for sharing the news. Really appreciate it. Thanks so much. Okay. In a moment, we'll be back to look deeper in the product, the integration security zero trust use cases. You're watching the cube, the leader in enterprise tech coverage, >>Cloud networking is complex and fragmented slowing down your business. How can you simplify and unify your cloud networks to increase agility and business velocity? >>Pluribus unified cloud networking provides a unified simplify and agile network fabric across all clouds. It brings the simplicity of a public cloud operation model to private clouds, dramatically reducing complexity and improving agility, availability, and security. Now enterprises and service providers can increase their business philosophy and delight customers in the distributed multi-cloud era. We achieve this with a new approach to cloud networking, pluribus unified cloud fabric. This open vendor, independent network fabric, unifies, networking, and security across distributed clouds. The first step is extending the fabric to servers equipped with data processing units, unifying the fabric across switches and servers, and it doesn't stop there. The fabric is unified across underlay and overlay networks and across all workloads and virtualization environments. The unified cloud fabric is optimized for seamless migration to this new distributed architecture, leveraging the power of the DPU for application level micro-segmentation distributed fireball and encryption while still supporting those servers and devices that are not equipped with a DPU. Ultimately the unified cloud fabric extends seamlessly across distributed clouds, including central regional at edge private clouds and public clouds. The unified cloud fabric is a comprehensive network solution. That includes everything you need for clouds, networking built in SDN automation, distributed security without compromises, pervasive wire speed, visibility and application insight available on your choice of open networking switches and DP use all at the lowest total cost of ownership. The end result is a dramatically simplified unified cloud networking architecture that unifies your distributed clouds and frees your business to move at cloud speed, >>To learn more, visit www.pluribusnetworks.com. >>Okay. We're back I'm John ferry with the cube, and we're going to go deeper into a deep dive into unified cloud networking solution from Clovis and Nvidia. And we'll examine some of the use cases with Alessandra Burberry, VP of product management and pullovers networks and Pete Bloomberg who's director of technical marketing and video remotely guys. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. >>Yeah. >>So deep dive, let's get into the what and how Alexandra we heard earlier about the pluribus Nvidia partnership and the solution you're working together on what is it? >>Yeah. First let's talk about the water. What are we really integrating with the Nvidia Bluefield, the DPO technology, uh, plugable says, um, uh, there's been shipping, uh, in, uh, in volume, uh, in multiple mission critical networks. So this advisor one network operating systems, it runs today on a merchant silicone switches and effectively it's a standard open network operating system for data center. Um, and the novelty about this system that integrates a distributed control plane for, at water made effective in SDN overlay. This automation is a completely open and interoperable and extensible to other type of clouds is not enclosed them. And this is actually what we're now porting to the Nvidia DPO. >>Awesome. So how does it integrate into Nvidia hardware and specifically how has pluribus integrating its software with the Nvidia hardware? >>Yeah, I think, uh, we leverage some of the interesting properties of the Bluefield, the DPO hardware, which allows actually to integrate, uh, um, uh, our software, our network operating system in a manner which is completely isolated and independent from the guest operating system. So the first byproduct of this approach is that whatever we do at the network level on the DPU card that is completely agnostic to the hypervisor layer or OSTP layer running on, uh, on the host even more, um, uh, we can also independently manage this network, know that the switch on a Neek effectively, um, uh, managed completely independently from the host. You don't have to go through the network operating system, running on x86 to control this network node. So you throw yet the experience effectively of a top of rack for virtual machine or a top of rack for, uh, Kubernetes bots, where instead of, uh, um, if you allow me with the analogy instead of connecting a server knee directly to a switchboard, now you're connecting a VM virtual interface to a virtual interface on the switch on an ache. >>And, uh, also as part of this integration, we, uh, put a lot of effort, a lot of emphasis in, uh, accelerating the entire, uh, data plane for networking and security. So we are taking advantage of the DACA, uh, Nvidia DACA API to program the accelerators. And these accomplished two things with that. Number one, uh, you, uh, have much greater performance, much better performance. They're running the same network services on an x86 CPU. And second, this gives you the ability to free up, I would say around 20, 25% of the server capacity to be devoted either to, uh, additional workloads to run your cloud applications, or perhaps you can actually shrink the power footprint and compute footprint of your data center by 20%, if you want to run the same number of compute workloads. So great efficiencies in the overall approach, >>And this is completely independent of the server CPU, right? >>Absolutely. There is zero code from running on the x86, and this is what we think this enables a very clean demarcation between computer and network. >>So Pete, I gotta get, I gotta get you in here. We heard that, uh, the DPU is enabled cleaner separation of dev ops and net ops. Can you explain why that's important because everyone's talking DevSecOps right now, you've got net ops, net, net sec ops, this separation. Why is this clean separation important? >>Yeah, I think it's a, you know, it's a pragmatic solution in my opinion. Um, you know, we wish the world was all kind of rainbows and unicorns, but it's a little, a little messier than that. And I think a lot of the dev ops stuff and that, uh, mentality and philosophy, there's a natural fit there. Right? You have applications running on servers. So you're talking about developers with those applications integrating with the operators of those servers. Well, the network has always been this other thing and the network operators have always had a very different approach to things than compute operators. And, you know, I think that we, we in the networking industry have gotten closer together, but there's still a gap there's still some distance. And I think in that distance, isn't going to be closed. And so, you know, again, it comes down to pragmatism and I think, you know, one of my favorite phrases is look good fences, make good neighbors. And that's what this is. >>Yeah. That's a great point because dev ops has become kind of the calling card for cloud, right. But dev ops is as simply infrastructure as code and infrastructure is networking, right? So if infrastructure is code, you know, you're talking about, you know, that part of the stack under the covers under the hood, if you will, this is super important distinction. And this is where the innovation is. Can you elaborate on how you see that? Because this is really where the action is right now. >>Yeah, exactly. And I think that's where, um, one from, from the policy, the security that the zero trust aspect of this, right? If you get it wrong on that network side, all of a sudden you, you can totally open up that those capabilities. And so security is part of that. But the other part is thinking about this at scale, right? So we're taking one top of rack switch and adding, you know, up to 48 servers per rack. And so that ability to automate, orchestrate and manage at scale becomes absolutely critical. >>I'll Sandra, this is really the why we're talking about here, and this is scale. And again, getting it right. If you don't get it right, you're going to be really kind of up, you know what you know, so this is a huge deal. Networking matters, security matters, automation matters, dev ops, net ops, all coming together, clean separation, um, help us understand how this joint solution with Nvidia fits into the pluribus unified cloud networking vision, because this is what people are talking about and working on right now. >>Yeah, absolutely. So I think here with this solution, we're attacking two major problems in cloud networking. One is, uh, operation of, uh, cloud networking. And the second is a distributing security services in the cloud infrastructure. First, let me talk about the first water. We really unifying. If we're unifying something, something must be at least fragmented or this jointed and the, what is this joint that is actually the network in the cloud. If you look holistically, how networking is deployed in the cloud, you have your physical fabric infrastructure, right? Your switches and routers, you'll build your IP clause fabric leaf in spine typologies. This is actually a well understood the problem. I, I would say, um, there are multiple vendors, uh, uh, with, uh, um, uh, let's say similar technologies, um, very well standardized, whether you will understood, um, and almost a commodity, I would say building an IP fabric these days, but this is not the place where you deploy most of your services in the cloud, particularly from a security standpoint, two services are actually now moved into the compute layer where you actually were called builders, have to instrument the, a separate, uh, network virtualization layer, where they deploy segmentation and security closer to the workloads. >>And this is where the complication arise. These high value part of the cloud network is where you have a plethora of options that they don't talk to each other. And they are very dependent on the kind of hypervisor or compute solution you choose. Um, for example, the networking API to be between an GSXI environment or an hyper V or a Zen are completely disjointed. You have multiple orchestration layers. And when, and then when you throw in also Kubernetes in this, in this, in this type of architecture, uh, you're introducing yet another level of networking. And when Kubernetes runs on top of VMs, which is a prevalent approach, you actually just stacking up multiple networks on the compute layer that they eventually run on the physical fabric infrastructure. Those are all ships in the nights effectively, right? They operate as completely disjointed. And we're trying to attack this problem first with the notion of a unified fabric, which is independent from any workloads, whether it's this fabric spans on a switch, which can be con connected to a bare metal workload, or can span all the way inside the DPU, uh, where, um, you have, uh, your multi hypervisor compute environment. >>It's one API, one common network control plane, and one common set of segmentation services for the network. That's probably the number one, >>You know, it's interesting you, man, I hear you talking, I hear one network month, different operating models reminds me of the old serverless days. You know, there's still servers, but they call it serverless. Is there going to be a term network list? Because at the end of the day, it should be one network, not multiple operating models. This, this is a problem that you guys are working on. Is that right? I mean, I'm not, I'm just joking server listen network list, but the idea is it should be one thing. >>Yeah, it's effectively. What we're trying to do is we are trying to recompose this fragmentation in terms of network operation, across physical networking and server networking server networking is where the majority of the problems are because of the, uh, as much as you have standardized the ways of building, uh, physical networks and cloud fabrics with IP protocols and internet, you don't have that kind of, uh, uh, sort of, uh, um, um, uh, operational efficiency, uh, at the server layer. And, uh, this is what we're trying to attack first. The, with this technology, the second aspect we're trying to attack is are we distribute the security services throughout the infrastructure, more efficiently, whether it's micro-segmentation is a stateful firewall services, or even encryption. Those are all capabilities enabled by the blue field, uh, uh, the Butte technology and, uh, uh, we can actually integrate those capabilities directly into the nettle Fabrica, uh, limiting dramatically, at least for east-west traffic, the sprawl of, uh, security appliances, whether virtual or physical, that is typically the way the people today, uh, segment and secure the traffic in the cloud. >>Awesome. Pete, all kidding aside about network lists and serverless kind of fun, fun play on words there, the network is one thing it's basically distributed computing, right? So I love to get your thoughts about this distributed security with zero trust as the driver for this architecture you guys are doing. Can you share in more detail the depth of why DPU based approach is better than alternatives? >>Yeah, I think what's, what's beautiful and kind of what the DPU brings. That's new to this model is a completely isolated compute environment inside. So, you know, it's the, uh, yo dog, I heard you like a server, so I put a server inside your server. Uh, and so we provide, uh, you know, armed CPU's memory and network accelerators inside, and that is completely isolated from the host. So the server, the, the actual x86 host just thinks it has a regular Nick in there, but you actually have this full control plane thing. It's just like taking your top of rack switch and shoving it inside of your compute node. And so you have not only the separation, um, within the data plane, but you have this complete control plane separation. So you have this element that the network team can now control and manage, but we're taking all of the functions we used to do at the top of rack switch, and we're just shooting them now. >>And, you know, as time has gone on we've, we've struggled to put more and more and more into that network edge. And the reality is the network edge is the compute layer, not the top of rack switch layer. And so that provides this phenomenal enforcement point for security and policy. And I think outside of today's solutions around virtual firewalls, um, the other option is centralized appliances. And even if you can get one that can scale large enough, the question is, can you afford it? And so what we end up doing is we kind of hope that of aliens good enough, or we hope that if the excellent tunnel is good enough and we can actually apply more advanced techniques there because we can't physically, you know, financially afford that appliance to see all of the traffic. And now that we have a distributed model with this accelerator, we could do it. >>So what's the what's in it for the customer. I real quick, cause I think this is interesting point. You mentioned policy, everyone in networking knows policy is just a great thing and it adds, you hear it being talked about up the stack as well. When you start getting to orchestrating microservices and whatnot, all that good stuff going on there, containers and whatnot and modern applications. What's the benefit to the customers with this approach? Because what I heard was more scale, more edge deployment, flexibility, relative to security policies and application enablement. I mean, is that what what's the customer get out of this architecture? What's the enablement. >>It comes down to, uh, taking again the capabilities that were in that top of rack switch and asserting them down. So that makes simplicity smaller blast radiuses for failure, smaller failure domains, maintenance on the networks, and the systems become easier. Your ability to integrate across workloads becomes infinitely easier. Um, and again, you know, we always want to kind of separate each one of those layers. So just as in say, a VX land network, my leaf and spine don't have to be tightly coupled together. I can now do this at a different layer. And so you can run a DPU with any networking in the core there. And so you get this extreme flexibility. You can start small, you can scale large. Um, you know, to me, the, the possibilities are endless. Yes, >>It's a great security control plan. Really flexibility is key. And, and also being situationally aware of any kind of threats or new vectors or whatever's happening in the network. Alessandra, this is huge upside, right? You've already identified some successes with some customers on your early field trials. What are they doing and why are they attracted to the solution? >>Yeah, I think the response from customers has been, uh, the most, uh, encouraging and, uh, exciting, uh, for, uh, for us to, uh, to sort of continue and work and develop this product. And we have actually learned a lot in the process. Um, we talked to tier two tier three cloud providers. Uh, we talked to, uh, SP um, software Tyco type of networks, uh, as well as a large enterprise customers, um, in, uh, one particular case. Um, uh, one, uh, I think, um, let me, let me call out a couple of examples here, just to give you a flavor. Uh, there is a service provider, a cloud provider, uh, in Asia who is actually managing a cloud, uh, where they are offering services based on multiple hypervisors. They are native services based on Zen, but they also are on ramp into the cloud, uh, workloads based on, uh, ESI and, uh, uh, and KVM, depending on what the customer picks from the piece on the menu. >>And they have the problem of now orchestrating through their orchestrate or integrating with the Zen center with vSphere, uh, with, uh, open stack to coordinate these multiple environments and in the process to provide security, they actually deploy virtual appliances everywhere, which has a lot of costs, complication, and eats up into the server CPU. The problem is that they saw in this technology, they call it actually game changing is actually to remove all this complexity of in a single network and distribute the micro-segmentation service directly into the fabric. And overall, they're hoping to get out of it, uh, uh, tremendous, uh, um, opics, uh, benefit and overall, um, uh, operational simplification for the cloud infrastructure. That's one potent a use case. Uh, another, uh, large enterprise customer global enterprise customer, uh, is running, uh, both ESI and hyper V in that environment. And they don't have a solution to do micro-segmentation consistently across hypervisors. >>So again, micro-segmentation is a huge driver security looks like it's a recurring theme, uh, talking to most of these customers and in the Tyco space, um, uh, we're working with a few types of customers on the CFT program, uh, where the main goal is actually to our Monet's network operation. They typically handle all the VNF search with their own homegrown DPDK stack. This is overly complex. It is frankly also as low and inefficient, and then they have a physical network to manage the, the idea of having again, one network, uh, to coordinate the provision in our cloud services between the, the take of VNF, uh, and, uh, the rest of the infrastructure, uh, is extremely powerful on top of the offloading capability of the, by the bluefin DPOs. Those are just some examples. >>That was a great use case, a lot more potential. I see that with the unified cloud networking, great stuff, feed, shout out to you guys at Nvidia had been following your success for a long time and continuing to innovate as cloud scales and pluribus here with the unified networking, kind of bring it to the next level. Great stuff. Great to have you guys on. And again, software keeps driving the innovation again, networking is just a part of it, and it's the key solution. So I got to ask both of you to wrap this up. How can cloud operators who are interested in, in this, uh, new architecture and solution, uh, learn more because this is an architectural shift. People are working on this problem. They're trying to think about multiple clouds of trying to think about unification around the network and giving more security, more flexibility, uh, to their teams. How can people learn more? >>Yeah, so, uh, all Sandra and I have a talk at the upcoming Nvidia GTC conference. Um, so that's the week of March 21st through 24th. Um, you can go and register for free and video.com/at GTC. Um, you can also watch recorded sessions if you ended up watching us on YouTube a little bit after the fact. Um, and we're going to dive a little bit more into the specifics and the details and what we're providing in the solution. >>Alexandra, how can people learn more? >>Yeah, absolutely. People can go to the pluribus, a website, www boost networks.com/eft, and they can fill up the form and, uh, they will contact durables to either know more or to know more and actually to sign up for the actual early field trial program, which starts at the end of April. >>Okay. Well, we'll leave it there. Thanks. You both for joining. Appreciate it up next. You're going to hear an independent analyst perspective and review some of the research from the enterprise strategy group ESG. I'm John ferry with the >>Cube. Thanks for watching. >>Okay. We've heard from the folks at networks and Nvidia about their effort to transform cloud networking and unify bespoke infrastructure. Now let's get the perspective from an independent analyst and to do so. We welcome in ESG, senior analysts, Bob LA Liberte, Bob. Good to see you. Thanks for coming into our east coast studios. >>Oh, thanks for having me. It's great to be >>Here. Yeah. So this, this idea of unified cloud networking approach, how serious is it? What's what's driving it. >>Yeah, there's certainly a lot of drivers behind it, but probably the first and foremost is the fact that application environments are becoming a lot more distributed, right? So the, it pendulum tends to swing back and forth. And we're definitely on one that's swinging from consolidated to distributed. And so applications are being deployed in multiple private data centers, multiple public cloud locations, edge locations. And as a result of that, what you're seeing is a lot of complexity. So organizations are having to deal with this highly disparate environment. They have to secure it. They have to ensure connectivity to it and all that's driving up complexity. In fact, when we asked in one of our last surveys and last year about network complexity, more than half 54% came out and said, Hey, our network environment is now either more or significantly more complex than it used to be. >>And as a result of that, what you're seeing is it's really impacting agility. So everyone's moving to these modern application environments, distributing them across areas so they can improve agility yet it's creating more complexity. So a little bit counter to the fact and, you know, really counter to their overarching digital transformation initiatives. From what we've seen, you know, nine out of 10 organizations today are either beginning in process or have a mature digital transformation process or initiative, but their top goals, when you look at them, it probably shouldn't be a surprise. The number one goal is driving operational efficiency. So it makes sense. I've distributed my environment to create agility, but I've created a lot of complexity. So now I need these tools that are going to help me drive operational efficiency, drive better experience. >>I mean, I love how you bring in the data yesterday. Does a great job with that. Uh, questions is, is it about just unifying existing networks or is there sort of a need to rethink kind of a do-over network, how networks are built? >>Yeah, that's a, that's a really good point because certainly unifying networks helps right. Driving any kind of operational efficiency helps. But in this particular case, because we've made the transition to new application architectures and the impact that's having as well, it's really about changing and bringing in new frameworks and new network architectures to accommodate those new application architectures. And by that, what I'm talking about is the fact that these new modern application architectures, microservices, containers are driving a lot more east west traffic. So in the old days, it used to be easier in north south coming out of the server, one application per server, things like that. Right now you've got hundreds, if not thousands of microservices communicating with each other users communicating to them. So there's a lot more traffic and a lot of it's taking place within the servers themselves. The other issue that you starting to see as well from that security perspective, when we were all consolidated, we had those perimeter based legacy, you know, castle and moat security architectures, but that doesn't work anymore when the applications aren't in the castle, right. >>When everything's spread out that that no longer happens. So we're absolutely seeing, um, organizations trying to, trying to make a shift. And, and I think much, like if you think about the shift that we're seeing with all the remote workers and the sassy framework to enable a secure framework there, this it's almost the same thing. We're seeing this distributed services framework come up to support the applications better within the data centers, within the cloud data centers, so that you can drive that security closer to those applications and make sure they're, they're fully protected. Uh, and that's really driving a lot of the, you know, the zero trust stuff you hear, right? So never trust, always verify, making sure that everything is, is, is really secure micro-segmentation is another big area. So ensuring that these applications, when they're connected to each other, they're, they're fully segmented out. And that's again, because if someone does get a breach, if they are in your data center, you want to limit the blast radius, you want to limit the amount of damage that's done. So that by doing that, it really makes it a lot harder for them to see everything that's in there. >>You know, you mentioned zero trust. It used to be a buzzword, and now it's like become a mandate. And I love the mode analogy. You know, you build a moat to protect the queen and the castle, the Queens left the castles, it's just distributed. So how should we think about this, this pluribus and Nvidia solution. There's a spectrum, help us understand that you've got appliances, you've got pure software solutions. You've got what pluribus is doing with Nvidia, help us understand that. >>Yeah, absolutely. I think as organizations recognize the need to distribute their services to closer to the applications, they're trying different models. So from a legacy approach, you know, from a security perspective, they've got these centralized firewalls that they're deploying within their data centers. The hard part for that is if you want all this traffic to be secured, you're actually sending it out of the server up through the rack, usually to in different location in the data center and back. So with the need for agility, with the need for performance, right, that adds a lot of latency. Plus when you start needing to scale, that means adding more and more network connections, more and more appliances. So it can get very costly as well as impacting the performance. The other way that organizations are seeking to solve this problem is by taking the software itself and deploying it on the servers. Okay. So that's a, it's a great approach, right? It brings it really close to the applications, but the things you start running into there, there's a couple of things. One is that you start seeing that the DevOps team start taking on that networking and security responsibility, which they >>Don't want to >>Do, they don't want to do right. And the operations teams loses a little bit of visibility into that. Um, plus when you load the software onto the server, you're taking up precious CPU cycles. So if you're really wanting your applications to perform at an optimized state, having additional software on there, isn't going to, isn't going to do it. So, you know, when we think about all those types of things, right, and certainly the other side effects of that is the impact of the performance, but there's also a cost. So if you have to buy more servers because your CPU's are being utilized, right, and you have hundreds or thousands of servers, right, those costs are going to add up. So what, what Nvidia and pluribus have done by working together is to be able to take some of those services and be able to deploy them onto a smart Nick, right? >>To be able to deploy the DPU based smart SMARTNICK into the servers themselves. And then pluribus has come in and said, we're going to unify create that unified fabric across the networking space, into those networking services all the way down to the server. So the benefits of having that are pretty clear in that you're offloading that capability from the server. So your CPU's are optimized. You're saving a lot of money. You're not having to go outside of the server and go to a different rack somewhere else in the data center. So your performance is going to be optimized as well. You're not going to incur any latency hit for every trip round trip to the, to the firewall and back. So I think all those things are really important. Plus the fact that you're going to see from a, an organizational aspect, we talked about the dev ops and net ops teams. The network operations teams now can work with the security teams to establish the security policies and the networking policies. So that they've dev ops teams. Don't have to worry about that. So essentially they just create the guardrails and let the dev op team run. Cause that's what they want. They want that agility and speed. >>Yeah. Your point about CPU cycles is key. I mean, it's estimated that 25 to 30% of CPU cycles in the data center are wasted. The cores are wasted doing storage offload or, or networking or security offload. And, you know, I've said many times everybody needs a nitro like Amazon nugget, but you can't go, you can only buy Amazon nitro if you go into AWS. Right. Everybody needs a nitro. So is that how we should think about this? >>Yeah. That's a great analogy to think about this. Um, and I think I would take it a step further because it's, it's almost the opposite end of the spectrum because pluribus and video are doing this in a very open way. And so pluribus has always been a proponent of open networking. And so what they're trying to do is extend that now to these distributed services. So leverage working with Nvidia, who's also open as well, being able to bring that to bear so that organizations can not only take advantage of these distributed services, but also that unified networking fabric, that unified cloud fabric across that environment from the server across the switches, the other key piece of what pluribus is doing, because they've been doing this for a while now, and they've been doing it with the older application environments and the older server environments, they're able to provide that unified networking experience across a host of different types of servers and platforms. So you can have not only the modern application supported, but also the legacy environments, um, you know, bare metal. You could go any type of virtualization, you can run containers, et cetera. So a wide gambit of different technologies hosting those applications supported by a unified cloud fabric from pluribus. >>So what does that mean for the customer? I don't have to rip and replace my whole infrastructure, right? >>Yeah. Well, think what it does for, again, from that operational efficiency, when you're going from a legacy environment to that modern environment, it helps with the migration helps you accelerate that migration because you're not switching different management systems to accomplish that. You've got the same unified networking fabric that you've been working with to enable you to run your legacy as well as transfer over to those modern applications. Okay. >>So your people are comfortable with the skillsets, et cetera. All right. I'll give you the last word. Give us the bottom line here. >>So yeah, I think obviously with all the modern applications that are coming out, the distributed application environments, it's really posing a lot of risk on these organizations to be able to get not only security, but also visibility into those environments. And so organizations have to find solutions. As I said, at the beginning, they're looking to drive operational efficiency. So getting operational efficiency from a unified cloud networking solution, that it goes from the server across the servers to multiple different environments, right in different cloud environments is certainly going to help organizations drive that operational efficiency. It's going to help them save money for visibility, for security and even open networking. So a great opportunity for organizations, especially large enterprises, cloud providers who are trying to build that hyperscaler like environment. You mentioned the nitro card, right? This is a great way to do it with an open solution. >>Bob, thanks so much for, for coming in and sharing your insights. Appreciate it. >>You're welcome. Thanks. >>Thanks for watching the program today. Remember all these videos are available on demand@thekey.net. You can check out all the news from today@siliconangle.com and of course, pluribus networks.com many thanks diplomas for making this program possible and sponsoring the cube. This is Dave Volante. Thanks for watching. Be well, we'll see you next time.

>>Okay, let's kick things off. We're here at my capital. One of the CMO of pluribus networks and AMI by Dani VP of networking, marketing developer ecosystem at Nvidia. Great to have you welcome folks. Thank you. Thanks. So let's get into the, the problem situation with cloud unified network. What problems are out there? What challenges do cloud operators have Mike let's get into? >>Yeah, really, you know, the challenges we're looking at are for non hyperscalers that's enterprises, governments, tier two service providers, cloud service providers, and the first mandate for them is to become as agile as a hyperscaler. So they need to be able to deploy services and security policies in seconds. They need to be able to abstract the complexity of the network and define things in software while it's accelerated in hardware. Really ultimately they need a single operating model everywhere. And then the second thing is they need to distribute networking and security services out to the edge of the host. We're seeing a growth in cyber attacks. It's it's not slowing down. It's only getting worse and, you know, solving for this security problem across clouds is absolutely critical. And the way to do it is to move security out to the host. >>Okay. With that goal in mind, what's the pluribus vision. How does this tie together? >>Yeah, so basically what we see is that this demands a new architecture and that new architecture has four tenants. The first tenant is unified and simplified cloud networks. If you look at cloud networks today, there's, there's sort of like discrete bespoke cloud networks, you know, per hypervisor, per private cloud edge cloud public cloud. Each of the public clouds have different networks that needs to be unified. You know, if we want these folks to be able to be agile, they need to be able to issue a single command or instantiate a security policy across all of those locations with one command and not have to go to each one. The second is like I mentioned, distributed security, distributed security without compromise, extended out to the host is absolutely critical. So micro-segmentation and distributed firewalls, but it doesn't stop there. They also need pervasive visibility. You know, it's, it's, it's sort of like with security, you really can't see you can't protect what you can't see. >>So you need visibility everywhere. The problem is visibility to date has been very expensive. Folks have had to basically build a separate overlay network of taps, packet brokers, tap aggregation infrastructure that really needs to be built into this unified network I'm talking about. And the last thing is automation. All of this needs to be SDN enabled. So this is related to my comment about abstraction abstract, the complexity of all these discreet networks, physic whatever's down there in the physical layer. Yeah. I don't want to see it. I want abstract it. I wanted to find things in software, but I do want to leverage the power of hardware to accelerate that. So that's the fourth tenant is SDN automation. >>Mike, we've been talking on the cable a lot about this architectural shift and customers are looking at this. This is a big part of everyone who's looking at cloud operations next gen, how do we get there? How do customers get this vision realized? >>That's a great question. And I appreciate the tee up. I mean, we're, we're here today for that reason. We're introducing two things today. The first is a unified cloud networking vision. And that is a vision of where pluribus is headed with our partners like Nvidia longterm. And that is about deploying a common operating model, SDN enabled SDN, automated hardware, accelerated across all clouds and whether that's underlying overlay switch or server hype, any hypervisor infrastructure containers, any workload doesn't matter. So that's ultimately where we want to get. And that's what we talked about earlier. The first step in that vision is what we call the unified cloud fabric. And this is the next generation of our adaptive cloud fabric. And what's nice about this is we're not starting from scratch. We have an award-winning adaptive cloud fabric product that is deployed globally. And in particular we're very proud of the fact that it's deployed in over a hundred tier one mobile operators as the network fabric for their 4g and 5g virtualized cores. We know how to build carrier grade networking infrastructure. What we're doing now to realize this next generation unified cloud fabric is we're extending from the switch to this Nvidia Bluefield to DPU. We, >>No, there's all that up real quick. That's a good, that's a good prop. That's the blue field and video. >>It's the Nvidia Bluefield two DPU data processing unit. And you know, what we're doing fundamentally is extending our SDN automated fabric, the unified cloud fabric out to the host, but it does take processing power. So we knew that we didn't want to do, we didn't want to implement that running on the CPU, which is what some other companies do because it consumes revenue generating CPU's from the application. So a DPU is a perfect way to implement this. And we knew that Nvidia was the leader with this blue field too. And so that is the first that's, that's the first step in the getting into realizing this vision >>And video has always been powering some great workloads of GPU. Now you've got DP networking, and then video is here. What is the relationship with clothes? How did that come together? Tell us the story. >>Yeah. So, you know, we've been working with pluribus for quite some time. I think the last several months was really when it came to fruition and what pluribus is trying build and what Nvidia has. So we have, you know, this concept of a Bluefield data processing unit, which if you think about it, conceptually does really three things, offload, accelerate an isolate. So offload your workloads from your CPU to your data processing unit infrastructure workloads, that is a accelerate. So there's a bunch of acceleration engine. So you can run infrastructure workloads much faster than you would otherwise, and then isolation. So you have this nice security isolation between the data processing unit and your other CPU environment. And so you can run completely isolated workloads directly on the data processing unit. So we introduced this, you know, a couple of years ago, and with pluribus, you know, we've been talking to the pluribus team for quite some months now. >>And I think really the combination of what pluribus is trying to build and what they've developed around this unified cloud fabric is fits really nicely with the DPU and running that on the DPU and extending it really from your physical switch, all the way to your host environment, specifically on the data processing unit. So if you think about what's happening as you add data processing units to your environment. So every server we believe over time is going to have data processing units. So now you'll have to manage that complexity from the physical network layer to the host layer. And so what pluribus is really trying to do is extending the network fabric from the host, from the switch to the host, and really have that single pane of glass for network operators to be able to configure provision, manage all of the complexity of the network environment. >>So that's really how the partnership truly started. And so it started really with extending the network fabric, and now we're also working with them on security. So, you know, if you sort of take that concept of isolation and security isolation, what pluribus has within their fabric is the concept of micro-segmentation. And so now you can take that extended to the data processing unit and really have isolated micro-segmentation workloads, whether it's bare metal cloud native environments, whether it's virtualized environments, whether it's public cloud, private cloud hybrid cloud. So it really is a magical partnership between the two companies with their unified cloud fabric running on, on the DPU. >>I love about this conversation is it reminds me of when you have these changing markets, the product gets pulled out of the market and, and you guys step up and create these new solutions. And I think this is a great example. So I have to ask you, how do you guys differentiate what sets this apart for customers with what's in it for the, >>Yeah. So I mentioned, you know, three things in terms of the value of what the Bluefield brings, right? There's offloading, accelerating, isolating, that's sort of the key core tenants of Bluefield, so that, you know, if you sort of think about what, what Bluefield, what we've done, you know, in terms of the differentiation, we're really a robust platform for innovation. So we introduced Bluefield to last year, we're introducing Bluefield three, which is our next generation of Bluefields, you know, we'll have five X, the arm compute capacity. It will have 400 gig line rate acceleration for X better crypto acceleration. So it will be remarkably better than the previous generation. And we'll continue to innovate and add, you know, chips to our portfolio every, every 18 months to two years. So that's sort of one of the key areas of differentiation. The other is the, if you look at Nvidia and, and you know, what we're sort of known for is really known for our AI artificial intelligence and our artificial intelligence software, as well as our GPU. >>So you look at artificial intelligence and the combination of artificial intelligence plus data processing. This really creates the faster, more efficient, secure AI systems from, you know, the core of your data center all the way out to the edge. And so with Nvidia, we really have these converged accelerators where we've combined the GPU, which does all your AI processing with your data processing with the DPU. So we have this convergence really nice convergence of, of that area. And I would say the third area is really around our developer environment. So, you know, one of the key, one of our key motivations at Nvidia is really to have our partner ecosystem, embrace our technology and build solutions around our technology. So if you look at what we've done with the DPU, with credit and an SDK, which is an open SDK called Doka, and it's an open SDK for our partners to really build and develop solutions using Bluefield and using all these accelerated libraries that we expose through Doka. And so part of our differentiation is really building this open ecosystem for our partners to take advantage and build solutions around our technology. >>You know, it's exciting is when I hear you talk, it's like you realize that there's no one general purpose network anymore. Everyone has their own super environment Supercloud or these new capabilities. They can really craft their own, I'd say custom environment at scale with easy tools. Right. And it's all kind of, again, this is the new architecture Mike, you were talking about, how does customers run this effectively? Cost-effectively and how do people migrate? >>Yeah, I think that is the key question, right? So we've got this beautiful architecture. You, you know, Amazon nitro is a, is a good example of, of a smart NIC architecture that has been successfully deployed, but enterprises and serve tier two service providers and tier one service providers and governments are not Amazon, right? So they need to migrate there and they need this architecture to be cost-effective. And, and that's, that's super key. I mean, the reality is deep user moving fast, but they're not going to be deployed everywhere on day one. Some servers will ha have DPS right away. Some servers will have deep use in a year or two. And then there are devices that may never have DPS, right? IOT gateways, or legacy servers, even mainframes. So that's the beauty of a solution that creates a fabric across both the switch and the DPU, right? >>And by leveraging the Nvidia Bluefield DPU, what we really like about it is it's open and that drives cost efficiencies. And then, you know, with this, with this, our architectural approach effectively, you get a unified solution across switch and DPU workload independent doesn't matter what hypervisor it is, integrated visibility, integrated security, and that can create tremendous cost efficiencies and really extract a lot of the expense from, from a capital perspective out of the network, as well as from an operational perspective, because now I have an SDN automated solution where I'm literally issuing a command to deploy a network service or to create or deploy our security policy and is deployed everywhere, automatically saving the oper, the network operations team and the security operations team time. >>All right. So let me rewind that because that's super important. Get the unified cloud architecture, I'm the customer, but it's implemented, what's the value again, take, take me through the value to me. I have a unified environment. What's the value. >>Yeah. So I mean, the value is effectively. So there's a few pieces of value. The first piece of value is I'm creating this clean D mark. I'm taking networking to the host. And like I mentioned, we're not running it on the CPU. So in implementations that run networking on the CPU, there's some conflict between the dev ops team who owned the server and the NetApps team who own the network because they're installing software on the, on the CPU stealing cycles from what should be revenue generating CPU's. So now by, by terminating the networking on the DPU, we click create this real clean DMARC. So the dev ops folks are happy because they don't necessarily have the skills to manage network and they don't necessarily want to spend the time managing networking. They've got their network counterparts who are also happy the NetApps team, because they want to control the networking. >>And now we've got this clean DMARC where the dev ops folks get the services they need and the NetApp folks get the control and agility they need. So that's a huge value. The next piece of value is distributed security. This is essential. I mentioned earlier, you know, put pushing out micro-segmentation and distributed firewall, basically at the application level, right, where I create these small, small segments on an application by application basis. So if a bad actor does penetrate the perimeter firewall, they're contained once they get inside. Cause the worst thing is a bad actor penetrates at perimeter firewall, and it can go wherever they want and wreak havoc, right? And so that's why this, this is so essential. And the next benefit obviously is this unified networking operating model, right? Having an operating model, switch and server underlay and overlay, workload agnostic, making the life of the NetApps teams much easier so they can focus their time on really strategy instead of spending an afternoon, deploying a single V LAN for example. >>Awesome. And I think also from my standpoint, I mean, perimeter security is pretty much, I mean, they're out there, it gets the firewall still out there exists, but pretty much they're being breached all the time, the perimeter. So you have to have this new security model. And I think the other thing that you mentioned, the separation between dev ops is cool because the infrastructure is code is about making the developers be agile and build security in from day one. So this policy aspect is, is huge new control points. I think you guys have a new architecture that enables the security to be handled more flexible. Right. That seems to be the killer feature, >>Right? Yeah. If you look at the data processing unit, I think one of the great things about sort of this new architecture, it's really the foundation for zero trust it's. So like you talked about the perimeter is getting breached. And so now each and every compute node has to be protected. And I think that's sort of what you see with the partnership between pluribus and Nvidia is the DPU is really the foundation of zero trust. And pluribus is really building on that vision with allowing sort of micro-segmentation and being able to protect each and every compute node as well as the underlying network. >>And this is an illustration of how the market's evolving architectures are being reshaped and refactored for cloud scale and all this new goodness with data. So I got to ask how you guys go into market together. Michael, start with you. What's the relationship look like in the go to market with an Nvidia? >>Sure. I mean, we're, you know, we're super excited about the partnership. Obviously we're here together. We think we've got a really good solution for the market, so we're jointly marketing it. You know, obviously we appreciate that Nvidia is open that's, that's sort of in our DNA, we're about open networking. They've got other ISV who are gonna run on Bluefield too. We're probably going to run on other DPS in the future, but right now we're we feel like we're partnered with the number one provider of DPS in the world and super excited about making a splash with it >>In video, get the hot product. >>Yeah. So Bluefield too, as I mentioned was GA last year, we're introducing well, we now also have the converged accelerator. So I talked about artificial intelligence or artificial intelligence software with the Bluefield DPU, all of that put together on a converged accelerator. The nice thing there is you can either run those workloads. So if you have an artificial intelligence workload and an infrastructure workload, you can warn them separately on the same platform or you can actually use, you can actually run artificial intelligence applications on the Bluefield itself. So that's what the converged accelerator really brings the table. So that's available now. Then we have Bluefield three, which will be available late this year. And I talked about sort of, you know, how much better that next generation of Bluefield is in comparison to Bluefield two. So we will see Bluefield three shipping later on this year, and then our software stack, which I talked about, which is called Doka we're on our second version are DACA one dot two. >>We're releasing Doka one dot three in about two months from now. And so that's really our open ecosystem framework. So allow you to program the Bluefields. So we have all of our acceleration libraries, security libraries, that's all packed into this SDK called Doka. And it really gives that simplicity to our partners to be able to develop on top of Bluefield. So as we add new generations of Bluefield, you know, next, next year, we'll have, you know, another version and so on and so forth. Doka is really that unified unified layer that allows Bluefield to be both forwards compatible and backwards compatible. So partners only really have to think about writing to that SDK once and then it automatically works with future generations of Bluefields. So that's sort of the nice thing around, around Doka. And then in terms of our go to market model, we're working with every, every major OEM. So later on this year, you'll see, you know, major server manufacturers releasing Bluefield enabled servers, so more to come >>Save money, make it easier, more capabilities, more workload power. This is the future of, of cloud operations. Yeah. >>And one thing I'll add is we are, we have a number of customers as you'll hear in the next segment that are already signed up and we'll be working with us for our early field trial starting late April early may. We are accepting registrations. You can go to www.pluribusnetworks.com/e F T if you're interested in signing up for being part of our field trial and, and providing feedback on the product, >>Awesome innovation and network. Thanks so much for sharing the news. Really appreciate it. Thanks so much. Okay. In a moment, we'll be back to the deeper in the product, the integration security zero trust use cases. You're watching the cube, the leader in enterprise tech coverage.

>> Narrator: From around the globe, It's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021 brought to you by IBM. >> Hi, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual. We're not yet in real life. We're doing another remote interviews with two great guests Cube Alumni. Of course, I'm John Furrier your host of theCUBE. We've got Jason McGee, IBM fellow VP and CTO of IBM's cloud platform and Octavian the Nazis senior vice president Hybrid Cloud engineering at NetApp. Both Cube alumni, is great to see you both. Thanks for coming on theCUBE >> Yeah, great to be here. >> Thanks for having us. >> So we were just talking before we came on camera that, it feels like we've had this conversation, a long time ago we have, Hybrid Cloud has been on a trajectory for both of you guys in many times on theCUBE. So now it's mainstream, it's here in the real world. Everyone gets it. There's no real debate. Now multicloud that's people are debating that which means that's right around the corner. So Hybrid Cloud is here and now Jason this is really the focus. And this is also brings together the NetApp in your partnership and talk about the relationship first with Hybrid Cloud. >> Yeah, I mean, you know look we've talked a number of times together. I think in the industry, maybe a few years ago people were debating whether Hybrid Cloud was a real thing. We don't have that conversation anymore. I think, you know, enterprises today, especially maybe in the face of COVID and kind of how we work differently now realize that their cloud journey is going to be a mix of on-prem and off-prem systems probably going to be a mix of multiple public cloud providers. And what they're looking for now is how do I do that? And how do I manage that hybrid environment? How do I have a consistent platform across the different environments I want to operate in? And then how do I get more and more of my workload into those environments? And it's been interesting. I think the first waves of cloud were infrastructure centric and externally application focused they were easier things. And now we're moving into more mission critical more stateful, more data oriented workloads. And that brings with a new challenges on where applications run and how we leverage the club. >> Octavian, you guys had a great relationship with IBM over the years, data centric company NetApp has always been great engineering team. You're on the cloud, Hybrid Cloud engineering. What's the current status of the relationship. Give us an update on how it's vectoring into the Hybrid Cloud since you're a senior vice president of Hybrid Cloud engineering. >> Well, so first of all, I want to recognize 20 years of a successful partnership with IBM. I think NetApp and IBM have been companies that have embraced digital transformation and technology trends to enable that digital transformation for our customers. And we've been very successful. I think there is a very strong joint Hybrid Cloud value proposition for customers on NetApps storage and data services compliment what IBM does in terms of products and solutions both for on-premise deployments in the cloud. I think together we can build more complete solutions, solutions that span data mobility, data governance for the new workrooms that Jason has talked about. >> And how has some of the customer challenges that you're seeing obviously software defined networking software defined storage, DevOps is now turned into DevSecOps. So you have now that programmability requirement with for dynamic applications, applications driven, infrastructure, all these buzz words point to one thing, the infrastructure has to be resilient and respond to the applications. >> Yeah, I would say infrastructure will continue to be top of mind for everybody, whether they're building a private cloud or whether they we're trying to leverage, something like IBM cloud. I think, you know, people want to consume, infrastructure is an API. I think they want to simplicity, security. I think they want to manage their costs very well. I think we're very proud to be partnering with IBM cloud to build such capabilities. >> Jason how are you guys helping some of these customers as they look at new things and sometimes retrofitting and refactoring previous stuff during transforming, but also innovating at the same time. There's a lot of that going on. What are you guys doing to help with the Hybrid challenges? >> Yeah, I mean, you know, there's a lot of dimensions to that problem but the one that I think has been kind of most interesting over the last year has been how kind of the consumption model of public cloud, API driven, self service, capabilities operated for you how that consumption model is starting to spread because I think one of the challenges with hybrid and one of the challenges as customers are looking at these, more mission critical data centric kind of workloads was well, I can't always move that application to the public cloud data center or I need that application to live out on the network, closer to my end users. So, you know, out where data is being generated, maybe in an IOT context and when you had those requirements you had to kind of switch operating models. You, you had to kind of move away from a public cloud service consumption model to a software deployment model. And we have a common platform and things like open shift that can run everywhere but the missing piece was how do I consume everything as a service everywhere? And so recently we launched this thing called IBM been satellite, which we've been working with Octavian and his team on, on how we can actually extend the public cloud experience back into the data center, out to the edge and allow people to kind of mix both location flexibility with public cloud consumption. And when you do that, you of course running a much more diverse infrastructure environment. You have to integrate with different storage environments and you wind up with like multi-tiered applications you know, some stuff on the edge and some stuff in the core. And so data replication and data management start to become really interesting because you're kind of distributing your workloads across this complex environment. >> Here we've seen that relationship between compute and storage change a lot over the past decade as the evolution goes. Octavian, I got to ask you this is critical path for companies. They want the storage ready infrastructure. You guys have been doing that for many decades pardon me with IBM, for sure. But now they're all getting Hybrid Cloud big time and it's not, it's attributed computing. It's what it is. It's the operating model. When someone asks you guys what your capabilities are how do you answer that in today's world? Because you have storage as well known. You got a great product people know that. But what is NetApp's capabilities? When I say I'm going all in and Hybrid Cloud complete changeover. >> So what we have been doing is basically rewriting a lot of our software with a few design points in mind. The software-defined has been definitely one of the key design points. The second is the Hybrid Cloud in the containerization of our operating systems. So they can run both in traditional environments as well as in the cloud. I think the last thing that we wanted to do it's enabled the speed of scale. And that has been by building, you know intrinsically in the product, both support or in also using Kubernetes as an infrastructure to achieve that agility, that scale. >> So how about this data fabric vision? Because to me, this is comes up all the time in my conversations with practitioners the number one problem at their, and problem that they're to solve in the conversation tends to I hear what was that control plane Kubernetes, horizontally scalable this all points to data being available., So how do you create that availability? What is data fabric mean? What does all this mean in a hybrid context? >> Well if you think about it, data fabric it's a Hybrid Cloud concept, right? This is about enabling data governance, data, mobility data security in an environment where some of the applications were run on premises or at the edge or the smart edge and many of the, perhaps data links and analytics, and services, rich services will be in a central locations or many or perhaps some large know data centers. So you need to have, the type of capabilities data services to enable that mobility that governance, that security across this continuum that spans the edge, the core and the cloud. >> Jason, you mentioned satellite before Cloud Satellite. Could you go into more detail on that? I know it's kind of a new product, what is that about and tell me what's the benefits and why is it exist and what problems does it solve? >> Yeah, so in the most simple terms, Cloud Satellite is the capability to extend IBM's, public cloud into on-prem infrastructure at the edge or in a multicloud context to other public cloud infrastructures. And so you can consume all the services in the public cloud that you need to to build your application, OpenShift as a service database, as DevTools, AI capabilities instead of being limited to only being able to consume those services in IBM's re you know, cloud regions you can now add your private data center or add your Metro provider, or add your AWS or Azure accounts and now consume those services consistently across all those environments. And that really allows you to kind of combine the benefits of public cloud with kind of location independence you see in hybrid and lets us solve new problems. Like, you know, it's really interesting. We're seeing like AI and data being a primary driver. You know I need my application to live in a certain country or to live next to my mainframe or to live like, in a Metro because all of my, I'm doing like video analytics on a bunch of cameras and I'm not going to stream all that data back to halfway across the country to some cloud region. And so it lets you extend out in that way. And when you do that, of course, you now move the cloud into a more diverse infrastructure environment. And so like we've been working with NetApp on how do we then expose NetApp storage into this environment when I'm running in the data center or I'm running at the edge and I need to store that data replicate the data, secure it. Well, how do I kind of plug those two things together? I think John, at the beginning you kind of alluded to this idea of, things are becoming more application centric, right? And we're trying to run a IT architecture that's more centered around the application. Well, by combining clouds knowledge of kind of where everything's running with that common platform like OpenShift with Kubernetes aware of data fabric and storage layer, you really can achieve that. You can have an application centric kind of management that spans those environments. >> Yeah, I'm want to come back to that whole impact on IT because this has come up as a major theme here. Think at the it transformation is going to be more about cloud scale, but I want to get to Octavian on the satellite on NetApp's role and how you compliment that. How do you guys fit in? He just mentioned that you guys are playing with Cloud Satellite. Obviously this looks like an operating model. How does NetApp fit in. >> Simply put we extend and enable the capabilities that IBM satellite platform provides. I think Jason referred to the storage aspects and you know what we are doing it's enabling not only storage but rich data services around new theory based on temperature, or replicated snapshots or capabilities around, you know, caching, high availability, encryption and so forth. So we believe that our technology integrate very well with red hat openShift and the Kubernetes aspect enable the application mobility in that translation of really distributed computing at scale, from the traditional data center to the edge and to the massive Ops that IBM is building. >> You know, I got to say, but watching you guys work together for many decades now and covering you with theCUBE for the past 10 years or 11 years now been a great partnership. I got to say one thing, that's obvious to me and our team and mainly the world is now you've got a new CEO over at IBM you have a Cloud Focus that's on unwavering. Arvind loves the cloud we all know that. Ecosystems are changing without, you already had a big ecosystem and partnerships. Now it seems to be moving to a level where you got to have that ecosystem really thrive in the cloud. So I guess we'll use the last couple of minutes. If you guys don't mind explaining how the IBM NetApp relationship in the new context of this new partnership new ecosystem or a new kind of world helps customers and how you guys are working together. >> Yeah, I mean, I could start, I mean I think you're right, that cloud is all about platforms and about kind of the overall environment people operate in and the ecosystem is really critical. And I think things like satellite have given us new ways to work together. I mean, IBM and NetApp, as we said I've been working together for a long time. We rely on them all in our public cloud, for example, in our storage tiers. But with the kind of idea of distributed cloud in the boundaries of public cloud spreading to all of these new environments, those were just new places where we can build really interesting valuable integrations for our clients so that they can deal with data, deal with these more complex apps, in all the places that they exist. So I think it's been actually really exciting to kind of leverage that opportunity to find, new ways to work together and deliver solutions for our clients. >> Octavian. >> I will say that data is the ecosystem and we all know that there's more data right now being created outside of the traditional data center be it in the cloud or at the edge. So our mission is to enable that, Hybrid Cloud or data mobility and enabled persistence rich data, storage services, whatever data is being created. I think IBM's new satellite platform, comes in and broadens the aperture of people being able to consume IBM's services at the edge and or a remote office and I think that's very exciting. >> You guys are both experts and solely season executives to DevOps, DevSecOps, DataOps, whatever you want to call data's here, ecosystems. Guys thanks for coming on theCUBE Really appreciate the insight. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Okay, IBM Think CUBE coverage. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music) (tranquil music)

>>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of an AI ops virtual forum brought to you by Broadcom. >>Welcome to the AI ops virtual forum. Finally, some Artan extended to be talking with rich lane now, senior analyst, serving infrastructure and operations professionals at Forrester. Rich. It's great to have you today. >>Thank you for having me. I think it's going to be a really fun conversation to have today. >>It is. We're going to be setting the stage for, with Richard, for the it operations challenges and the need for AI ops. That's kind of our objective here in the next 15 minutes. So rich talk to us about some of the problems that enterprise it operations are facing now in this year, that is 2020 that are going to be continuing into the next year. >>Yeah, I mean, I think we've been on this path for a while, but certainly the last eight months has, uh, has accelerated, uh, this problem and, and brought a lot of things to light that, that people were, you know, they were going through the day to day firefighting as their goal way of life. Uh, it's just not sustainable anymore. You a highly distributed environment or in the need for digital services. And, you know, one of them has been building for a while really is in the digital age, you know, we're providing so many, uh, uh, the, the interactions with customers online. Um, we've, we've added these layers of complexity, um, to applications, to infrastructure, you know, or we're in the, in the cloud or a hybrid or multi-cloud, or do you know you name it using cloud native technologies? We're using legacy stuff. We still have mainframe out there. >>Uh, you know, the, just the, the vast amount of things we have to keep track of now and process and look at the data and signals from, it's just, it's a really untenable for, for humans to do that in silos now, uh, in, in, you know, when you add to that, you know, when companies are so heavily invested in gone on the digital transformation path, and it's accelerated so much in the last, uh, year or so that, you know, we're getting so much of our business in revenue derived from these services that they become core to the business. They're not afterthoughts anymore. It's not just about having a website presence. It's, it's about deriving core business value from the services you're providing to your, through your customers. And a lot of cases, customers you're never going to meet or see at that. So it's even more important to be vigilant. >>And on top of the quality of that service that you're giving them. And then when you think about just the staffing issues we have, there's just not enough bodies to go around it in operations anymore. Um, you know, we're not going to be able to hire, you know, like we did 10 years ago, even. Uh, so that's where we need the systems to be able to bring those operational efficiencies to bear. When we say operational efficiencies, we don't mean, you know, uh, lessening head count because we can't do that. That'd be foolish. What we mean is getting the head count. We have back to burping on and higher level things, you know, working on, uh, technology refreshes and project work that that brings better digital services to customers and get them out of doing these sort of, uh, low, uh, complexity, high volume tasks that they're spending at least 20%, if not more on our third day, each day. So I think that the more we can bring intelligence to bear and automation to take those things out of their hands, the better off we are going forward. >>And I'm sure those workers are wanting to be able to have the time to deliver more value, more strategic value to the organization, to their role. And as you're saying, you know, was the demand for digital services is spiking. It's not going to go down and as consumers, if w if we have another option and we're not satisfied, we're going to go somewhere else. So, so it's really about not just surviving this time right now, it's about how do I become a business that's going to thrive going forward and exceeding expectations that are now just growing and growing. So let's talk about AI ops as a facilitator of collaboration, across business folks, it folks developers, operations, how can it facilitate collaboration, which is even more important these days? >>Yeah. So one of the great things about it is now, you know, years ago, have I gone years, as they say, uh, we would buy a tool to fit each situation. And, you know, someone that worked in network and others who will somebody worked in infrastructure from a, you know, Linux standpoint, have their tool, somebody who's from storage would have their tool. And what we found was we would have an incident, a very high impact incident occur. Everybody would get on the phone, 24 people all be looking at their siloed tool, they're siloed pieces of data. And then we'd still have to try to like link point a to B to C together, you know, just to institutional knowledge. And, uh, there was just ended up being a lot of gaps there because we couldn't understand that a certain thing happening over here was related to an advantage over here. >>Um, now when we bring all that data into one umbrella, one data Lake, whatever we want to call it, a lot of smart analytics to that data, uh, and normalize that data in a way we can contextualize it from, you know, point a to point B all the way through the application infrastructure stack. Now, the conversation changes now, the conversation changes to here is the problem, how are we going to fix it? And we're getting there immediately versus three, four or five hours of, uh, you know, hunting and pecking and looking at things and trying to try to extrapolate what we're seeing across disparate systems. Um, and that's really valuable. And in what that does is now we can change the conversation for measuring things. And in server up time and data center, performance metrics as to how are we performing as a business? How are we overall in, in real time, how are businesses being impacted by service disruption? >>We know how much money losing per minute hour, or what have you, uh, and what that translate lights into brand damage and things along those lines, that people are very interested in that. And, you know, what is the effect of making decisions either brief from a product change side? You know, if we're, we're, we're always changing the mobile apps and we're always changing the website, but do we understand what value that brings us or what negative impact that has? We can measure that now and also sales, marketing, um, they run a campaign here's your, you know, coupon for 12% off today only, uh, what does that drive to us with user engagement? We can measure that now in real time, we don't have to wait for those answers anymore. And I think, you know, having all those data and understanding the cause and effect of things increases, it enhances these feedback loops of we're making decisions as a business, as a whole to make, bring better value to our customers. >>You know, how does that tie into ops and dev initiatives? How does everything that we do if I make a change to the underlying architectures that help move the needle forward, does that hinder things, uh, all these things factor into it. In fact, there into the customer experience, which is what we're trying to do at the end of the day, w w whether operations people like it or not, we are all in the customer experience business now. And we have to realize that and work closer than ever with our business and dev partners to make sure we're delivering the highest level of customer experience we can. >>Uh, customer experience is absolutely critical for a number of reasons. I always kind of think it's inextricably linked with employee experience, but let's talk about long-term value because as organizations and every industry has pivoted multiple times this year and will probably continue to do so for the foreseeable future, for them to be able to get immediate value that let's, let's not just stop the bleeding, but let's allow them to get a competitive advantage and be really become resilient. What are some of the, uh, applications that AI ops can deliver with respect to long-term value for an organization? >>Yeah, and I think that it's, you know, you touched upon this a very important point that there is a set of short term goals you want to achieve, but they're really going to be looking towards 12, 18 months down the road. What is it going to have done for you? And I think this helps framing out for you what's most important because it'd be different for every enterprise. Um, and it also shows the ROI of doing this because there is some, you know, change is going to be involved with things you're gonna have to do. But when you look at the, the, the longer time horizon of what it brings to your business as a whole, uh it's to me, at least it all seems, it seems like a no brainer to not do it. Um, you know, thinking about the basic things, like, you know, faster remediation of, of, uh, client impacting incidents, or maybe, maybe even predictive of sort of detection of these incidents that will affect clients. >>So now you're getting, you know, at scale, you know, it's very hard to do when you have hundreds of thousands of optics of the management that relate to each other, but now you're having letting the machines and the intelligence layer find out where that problem is. You know, it's not the red thing, it's the yellow thing. Go look at that. Um, it's reducing the amount of finger pointing and what have you like resolved between teams now, everybody's looking at the same data, the same sort of, uh, symptoms and like, Oh yeah, okay. This is telling us, you know, here's the root cause you should investigate this huge, huge thing. Um, and, and it's something we never thought we'd get to where, uh, this, this is where we smart enough to tell us these things, but this, again, this is the power of having all the data under one umbrella >>And the smart analytics. >>Um, and I think really, you know, it's a boat. Uh, if you look at where infrastructure and operations people are today, and especially, you know, eight months, nine months, whatever it is into the pandemic, uh, a lot of them are getting really burnt out with doing the same repetitive tasks over and over again. Um, just trying to keep the lights on, you know, we need, we need to extract those things for those people, uh, just because it just makes no sense to do something over and over again, the same remediation step, just we should automate those things. So getting that sort of, uh, you know, drudgery off their hands, if you will, and, and get them into, into all their important things they should be doing, you know, they're really hard to solve problems. That's where the human shine, um, and that's where, you know, having a, you know, really high level engineers, that's what they should be doing, you know, and just being able to do things I >>Think in a much faster, >>In a more efficient manner, when you think about an incident occurring, right. In, in a level, one technician picks that up and he goes and triaged that maybe run some tests. He has a script, >>Uh, or she, uh, and, >>You know, uh, they open a ticket and they enrich the ticket. They call it some log files. They can look up for the servers on it. You're in an hour and a half into an incident before anyone's even looked at it. If we could automate all of that, >>Why wouldn't we, that makes it easier for everyone. Um, >>Yeah. And I really think that's where the future is, is, is, is bringing this intelligent automation to bear, to take, knock down all the little things that consume the really, the most amount of time. When you think about it, if you aggregate it over the course of a quarter or a year, a great deal of your time is spent just doing that minutiae again, why don't we automate that? And we should. So I really think that's, that's where you get to look long-term. I think also the sense of we're going to be able to measure everything in the sense of business KPIs versus just IT-centric KPIs. That's really where we going to get to in the digital age. And I think we waited too long to do that. I think our operations models were all voted. I think, uh, you know, a lot of, a lot of the KPIs we look at today are completely outmoded. They don't really change if you think about it. When we look at the monthly reports over the course of a year, uh, so let's do something different. And now having all this data and the smart analytics, we can do something different. Absolutely. I'm glad >>That you brought up kind of looking at the impact that AI ops can make on, on minutiae and burnout. That's a really huge problem that so many of us are facing in any industry. And we know that there's some amount of this that's going to continue for a while longer. So let's get our let's leverage intelligent automation to your point, because we can to be able to allow our people to not just be more efficient, but to be making a bigger impact. And there's that mental component there that I think is absolutely critical. I do want to ask you what are some of these? So for those folks going, all right, we've got to do this. It makes sense. We see some short-term things that we need. We need short-term value. We need long-term value as you've just walked us through. What are some of the obstacles that you'd say, Hey, be on the lookout for this to wipe it out of the way. >>Yeah. I, I think there's, you know, when you think about the obstacles, I think people don't think about what are big changes for their organization, right? You know, they're, they're going to change process. They're going to change the way teams interact. They're they're going to change a lot of things, but they're all for the better. So what we're traditionally really bad in infrastructure and operations is communication, marketing, a new initiative, right? We don't go out and get our peers agreement to it where the product owner is, you know, and say, okay, this is what it gets you. This is where it changes. People just hear I'm losing something, I'm losing control over something. You're going to get rid of the tools that I have, but I love I've spent years building out perfecting, um, and that's threatening to people and understandably so because people think if I start losing tools, I start losing head count. >>And then, whereas my department at that point, um, but that's not what this is all about. Uh, this, this isn't a replacement for people. This isn't a replacement for teams. This isn't augmentation. This is getting them back to doing the things they should be doing and less of the stuff they shouldn't be doing. And frankly, it's, it's about providing better services. So when in the end, it's counterintuitive to be against it because it's gonna make it operations look better. It's gonna make us show us that we are the thought leaders in delivering digital services that we can, um, constantly be perfecting the way we're doing it. And Oh, by the way, we can help the business be better. Also at the same time. Uh, I think some of the mistakes people really don't make, uh, really do make, uh, is not looking at their processes today, trying to figure out what they're gonna look like tomorrow when we bring in advanced automation and intelligence, uh, but also being prepared for what the future state is, you know, in talking to one company, they were like, yeah, we're so excited for this. >>Uh, we, we got rid of our old 15 year old laundering system and the same day we stepped a new system. Uh, one problem we had though, was we weren't ready for the amount of incidents that had generated on day one. And it wasn't because we did anything wrong or the system was wrong or what have you. It did the right thing actually, almost too. Well, what it did is it uncovered a lot of really small incidents through advanced correlations. We didn't know we had, so there were things lying out there that were always like, huh, that's weird. That system acts strange sometimes, but we can never pin it down. We found all of those things, which is good. It goes, but it kind of made us all kind of sit back and think, and then our readership are these guys doing their job. Right? >>And then we had to go through an evolution of, you know, just explaining we were 15 years behind from a visibility standpoint to our environment, but technologies that we deployed in applications had moved ahead and modernized. So this is like a cautionary tale of falling too far behind from a sort of a monitoring and intelligence and automation standpoint. Um, so I thought that was a really good story for something like, think about as Eagle would deploy these modern systems. But I think if he really, you know, the marketing to people, so they're not threatened, I think thinking about your process and then what's, what's your day one and then look like, and then what's your six and 12 months after that looks like, I think settling all that stuff upfront just sets you up for success. >>All right. Rich, take us home here. Let's summarize. How can clients build a business case for AI ops? What do you recommend? >>Yeah. You know, I actually get that question a lot. It's usually, uh, almost always the number one, uh, question in, in, um, you know, webinars like this and conversations that, that the audience puts in. So I wouldn't be surprised, but if that was true, uh, going forward from this one, um, yeah, people are like, you know, Hey, we're all in. We want to do this. We know this is the way forward, but the guy who writes the checks, the CIO, the VP of ops is like, you know, I I've signed lots of checks over the years for tools wise is different. Um, and when I guide people to do is to sit back and, and start doing some hard math, right. Uh, one of the things that resonates with the leadership is dollars and cents. It's not percentages. So saying, you know, it's, it brings us a 63% reduction and MTTR is not going to resonate. >>Uh, Oh, even though it's a really good number, you know, uh, I think what it is, you have to put it in terms of avoid, if we could avoid that 63%. Right. You know, um, what does that mean for our, our digital services as far as revenue, right. We know that every hour system down, I think, uh, you know, typically in the market, you see is about $500,000 an hour for enterprise. We'll add that up over the course of the year. What are you losing in revenue? Add to that brand damage loss of customers, you know, uh, Forrester puts out a really big, uh, casino, um, uh, customer experience index every year that measures that if you're delivering good Udall services, bad digital services, if you could raise that up, what does that return to you in revenue? And that's a key thing. And then you just look at the, the, uh, hours of lost productivity. >>I call it, I might call it something else, but I think it's a catchy name. Meaning if a core internal system is down say, and you know, you have a customer service desk of a thousand customer service people, and they can't do that look up or fix that problem for clients for an hour. How much money does that lose you? And you multiply it out. You know, average customer service desk person makes X amount an hour times this much time. This many times it happens. Then you start seeing the real, sort of a power of AI ops for this incident avoidance, or at least lowering the impact of these incidents. And people have put out in graphs and spreadsheets and all this, and then I'm doing some research around this actually to, to, to put out something that people can use to say, the project funds itself in six to 12 months, it's paid for itself. And then after that it's returning money to the business. Why would you not do that? And when you start framing the conversation, that way, the little light bulb turn on for the people that sign the checks. For sure. >>That's great advice for folks to be thinking about. I loved how you talked about the 63% reduction in something. I think that's great. What does it impact? How does it impact the revenue for the organization? If we're avoiding costs here, how do we drive up revenue? So having that laser focus on revenue is great advice for folks in any industry, looking to build a business case for AI ops. I think you set the stage for that rich beautifully, and you were right. This was a fun conversation. Thank you for your time. Thank you. And thanks for watching >>From around the globe with digital coverage. >>Welcome back to the Broadcom AI ops, virtual forum, Lisa Martin here talking with Eastman Nasir global product management at Verizon. We spent welcome back. >>Hi. Hello. Uh, what a pleasure. >>So 2020 the year of that needs no explanation, right? The year of massive challenges and wanting to get your take on the challenges that organizations are facing this year as the demand to deliver digital products and services has never been higher. >>Yeah. So I think this is something it's so close to all the far far, right? It's, uh, it's something that's impacted the whole world equally. And I think regardless of which industry you rent, you have been impacted by this in one form or the other, and the ICT industry, the information and communication technology industry, you know, Verizon being really massive player in that whole arena. It has just been sort of struck with this massive consummation we have talked about for a long time, we have talked about these remote surgery capabilities whereby you've got patients in Kenya who are being treated by an expert sitting in London or New York, and also this whole consciousness about, you know, our carbon footprint and being environmentally conscious. This pandemic has taught us all of that and brought us to the forefront of organization priorities, right? The demand. I think that's, that's a very natural consequence of everybody sitting at home. >>And the only thing that can keep things still going is this data communication, right? But I wouldn't just say that that is, what's kind of at the heart of all of this. Just imagine if we are to realize any of these targets of the world is what leadership is setting for themselves. Hey, we have to be carbon neutral by X year as a country, as a geography, et cetera, et cetera. You know, all of these things require you to have this remote working capabilities, this remote interaction, not just between humans, but machine to machine interactions. And this there's a unique value chain, which is now getting created that you've got people who are communicating with other people or communicating with other machines, but the communication is much more. I wouldn't even use the term real time because we've used real time for voice and video, et cetera. >>We're talking low latency, microsecond decision-making that can either cut somebody's, you know, um, our trees or that could actually go and remove the tumor, that kind of stuff. So that has become a reality. Everybody's asking for it, remote learning, being an extremely massive requirement where, you know, we've had to enable these, uh, these virtual classrooms ensuring the type of connectivity, ensuring the type of type of privacy, which is just so, so critical. You can't just have everybody in a go on the internet and access a data source. You have to be concerned about the integrity and security of that data as the foremost. So I think all of these things, yes, we have not been caught off guard. We were pretty forward-looking in our plans and our evolution, but yes, it's fast track the journey that we would probably believe we would have taken in three years. It has brought that down to two quarters where we've had to execute them. >>Right. Massive acceleration. All right. So you articulated the challenges really well. And a lot of the realities that many of our viewers are facing. Let's talk now about motivations, AI ops as a tool, as a catalyst for helping organizations overcome those challenges. >>So yeah. Now on that I said, you can imagine, you know, it requires microsecond decision-making which human being on this planet can do microsecond decision-making on complex network infrastructure, which is impacting end user applications, which have multitudes of effect. You know, in real life, I use the example of a remote surgeon. Just imagine that, you know, even because of you just use your signal on the quality of that communication for that microsecond, it could be the difference between killing somebody in saving somebody's life. And it's not predictable. We talk about autonomous vehicles. Uh, we talk about this transition to electric vehicles, smart motorways, et cetera, et cetera, in federal environment, how is all of that going to work? You have so many different components coming in. You don't just have a network and security anymore. You have software defined networking. That's coming, becoming a part of that. >>You have mobile edge computing that is rented for the technologies. 5g enables we're talking augmented reality. We're talking virtual reality. All of these things require that resources and why being carbon conscious. We told them we just want to build a billion data centers on this planet, right? We, we have to make sure that resources are given on demand and the best way of resources can be given on demand and could be most efficient is that the thing is being made at million microsecond and those resources are accordingly being distributed, right? If you're relying on people, sipping their coffees, having teas, talking to somebody else, you know, just being away on holiday. I don't think we're going to be able to handle that one that we have already stepped into. Verizon's 5g has already started businesses on that transformational journey where they're talking about end user experience personalization. >>You're going to have events where people are going to go, and it's going to be three-dimensional experiences that are purely customized for you. How, how does that all happen without this intelligence sitting there and a network with all of these multiple layers? So spectrum, it doesn't just need to be intuitive. Hey, this is my private IP traffic. This is public traffic. You know, it has to not be in two, or this is an application that I have to prioritize over another task to be intuitive to the criticality and the context of those transactions. Again, that's surgeons. So be it's much more important than postman setting and playing a video game. >>I'm glad that you think that that's excellent. Let's go into some specific use cases. What are some of the examples that you gave? Let's kind of dig deeper into some of the, what you think are the lowest hanging fruit for organizations kind of pan industry to go after. >>Excellent. Brian, and I think this, this like different ways to look at the lowest hanging fruit, like for somebody like revising who is a managed services provider, you know, very comprehensive medicines, but we obviously have food timing, much lower potentially for some of our customers who want to go on that journey. Right? So for them to just go and try and harness the power of the foods might be a bit higher hanging, but for somebody like us, the immediate ones would be to reduce the number of alarms that are being generated by these overlay services. You've got your basic network, then you've got your whole software defined networking on top of that, you have your hybrid clouds, you have your edge computing coming on top of that. You know? So all of that means if there's an outage on one device on the network, I want to make this very real for everybody, right? >>It's like device and network does not stop all of those multiple applications or monitoring tools from raising and raising thousands of alarm and everyone, one capacity. If people are attending to those thousands of alarms, it's like you having a police force and there's a burglary in one time and the alarm goes off and 50 bags. How, how are you kind of make the best use of your police force? You're going to go investigate 50 bags or do you want to investigate where the problem is? So it's as real as that, I think that's the first wins where people can save so much cost, which is coming from being wasted and resources running around, trying to figure stuff out immediately. I'm tied this with network and security network and security is something which has you did even the most, you know, I mean single screens in our engineering, well, we took it to have network experts, separate people, security experts, separate people to look for different things, but there are security events that can impact the performance of a network. >>And then just drop the case on the side of et cetera, which could be falsely attributed to the metric. And then if you've got multiple parties, which are then the chapter clear stakeholders, you can imagine the blame game that goes on finding fingers, taking names, not taking responsibility that don't has all this happened. This is the only way to bring it all together to say, okay, this is what takes priority. If there's an event that has happened, what is its correlation to the other downstream systems, devices, components, and these are applications. And then subsequently, you know, like isolating it to the right cost where you can most effectively resolve that problem. Thirdly, I would say on demand, virtualized resource, virtualized resources, the heart and soul, the spirit of status that you can have them on demand. So you can automate the allocation of these resources based on customer's consumption their peaks, their cramps, all of that comes in. >>You see, Hey, typically on a Wednesday, the traffic was up significantly for this particular application, you know, going to this particular data center, you could have this automated system, uh, which is just providing those resources, you know, on demand. And so it is to have a much better commercial engagement with customers and just a much better service assurance model. And then one more thing on top of that, which is very critical is that as I was saying, giving that intelligence to the networks to start having context of the criticality of a transaction, that doesn't make sense to them. You can't have that because for that, you need to have this, you know, monkey their data. You need to have multi-cam system, which are monitoring and controlling different aspects of your overall end user application value chain to be communicating with each other. And, you know, that's the only way to sort of achieve that goal. And that only happens with AI. It's not possible >>So it was when you clearly articulated some obvious, low hanging fruit and use cases that organizations can go after. Let's talk now about some of the considerations, you talked about the importance of a network and AI ops, the approach I assume, needs to be modular support needs to be heterogeneous. Talk to us about some of those key considerations that you would recommend. >>Absolutely. So again, basically starting with the network, because if there's, if the metrics sitting at the middle of all of this is not working, then things can communicate with each other, right? And the cloud doesn't work, nothing metal. That's the hardest part of this, but that's the frequency. When you talk about machine to machine communication or IOT, it's just the biggest transformation of the span of every company is going for IOT now to drive those costs, efficiencies, and had, something's got some experience, the integrity of the topic karma, right? The security, integrity of that. How do you maintain integrity of your data beyond just a secure network components? That is true, right? That's where you're getting to the whole arena blockchain technologies, where you have to use digital signatures or barcodes that machine then, and then an intelligence system is automatically able to validate and verify the integrity of the data and the commands that are being executed by those end-user told them what I need to tell them that. >>So it's IOT machines, right? That is paramount. And if anybody is not keeping that into their equation, that in its own self is any system that is therefore maintaining the integrity of your commands and your hold that sits on those, those machines. Right? Second, you have your network. You need to have any else platform, which is able to restless all the fast network information, et cetera. And coupled with that data integrity piece, because for the management, ultimately they need to have a coherent view of the analytics, et cetera, et cetera. They need to know where the problems are again, right? So let's say if there's a problem with the integrity of the commands that are being executed by the machine, that's a much bigger problem than not being able to communicate with that machine and the best thing, because you'd rather not talk to the machine or have to do anything if it's going to start doing wrong things. >>So I think that's where it is. It's very intuitive. It's not true. You have to have subsequently if you have some kind of faith and let me use that use case self autonomous vehicles. Again, I think we're going to see in the next five years, because he's smart with the rates, et cetera, it won't separate autonomous cars. It's much more efficient, it's much more space, et cetera, et cetera. So within that equation, you're going to have systems which will be specialists in looking at aspects and transactions related to those systems. For example, in autonomous moving vehicles, brakes are much more important than the Vipers, right? So this kind of intelligence, it will be multiple systems who have to sit, N nobody has to, one person has to go in one of these systems. I think these systems should be open source enough that they, if you were able to integrate them, right, if something's sitting in the cloud, you were able to integrate for that with obviously the regard of the security and integrity of your data that has to traverse from one system to the other extremely important. >>So I'm going to borrow that integrity theme for a second, as we go into our last question, and that is this kind of take a macro look at the overall business impact that AI ops can help customers make. I'm thinking of, you know, the integrity of teams aligning business in it, which we probably can't talk about enough. We're helping organizations really effectively measure KPIs that deliver that digital experience that all of us demanding consumers expect. What's the overall impact. What would you say in summary fashion? >>So I think the overall impact is a lot of costs. That's customized and businesses gives the time to the time of enterprises. Defense was inevitable. It's something that for the first time, it will come to life. And it's something that is going to, you know, start driving cost efficiencies and consciousness and awareness within their own business, which is obviously going to have, you know, it domino kind of an effect. So one example being that, you know, you have problem isolation. I talked about network security, this multi-layers architecture, which enables this new world of 5g, um, at the heart of all of it, it has to identify the problem to the source, right? Not be bogged down by 15 different things that are going wrong. What is causing those 15 things to go wrong, right? That speed to isolation in its own sense can make millions and millions of dollars to organizations after we organize it. Next one is obviously overall impacted customer experience. Uh, 5g was given out of your customers, expecting experiences from you, even if you're not expecting to deliver them in 2021, 2022, it would have customers asking for those experience or walking away, if you do not provide those experience. So it's almost like a business can do nothing every year. They don't have to reinvest if they just want to die on the line, businesses want remain relevant. >>Businesses want to adopt the latest and greatest in technology, which enables them to, you know, have that superiority and continue it. So from that perspective that continue it, he will read that they write intelligence systems that tank rationalizing information and making decisions supervised by people, of course were previously making some of those. >>That was a great summary because you're right, you know, with how demanding consumers are. We don't get what we want quickly. We churn, right? We go somewhere else and we could find somebody that can meet those expectations. So it has been thanks for doing a great job of clarifying the impact and the value that AI ops can bring to organizations that sounds really now is we're in this even higher demand for digital products and services, which is not going away. It's probably going to only increase it's table stakes for any organization. Thank you so much for joining me today and giving us your thoughts. >>Pleasure. Thank you. We'll be right back with our next segment. >>Digital applications and services are more critical to a positive customer and employee experience than ever before. But the underlying infrastructure that supports these apps and services has become increasingly complex and expanding use of multiple clouds, mobile and microservices, along with modern and legacy infrastructure can make it difficult to pinpoint the root cause when problems occur, it can be even more difficult to determine the business impact your problems that occur and resolve them efficiently. AI ops from Broadcom can help first by providing 360 degree visibility, whether you have hybrid cloud or a cloud native AI ops from Broadcom provides a clear line of sight, including apt to infrastructure and network visibility across hybrid environments. Second, the solution gives you actionable insights by correlating an aggregating data and applying AI and machine learning to identify root causes and even predict problems before users are impacted. Third AI ops from Broadcom provides intelligent automation that identifies potential solutions when problems occur applied to the best one and learns from the effectiveness to improve response in case the problem occurs. Again, finally, the solution enables organizations to achieve digit with jelly by providing feedback loops across development and operations to allow for continuous improvements and innovation through these four capabilities. AI ops from Broadcom can help you reduce service outages, boost, operational efficiency, and effectiveness and improve customer and employee experience. To learn more about AI ops from Broadcom, go to broadcom.com/ai ops from around the globe. >>It's the cube with digital coverage of AI ops virtual forum brought to you by Broadcom. >>Welcome back to the AI ops virtual forum, Lisa Martin here with Srinivasan, Roger Rajagopal, the head of product and strategy at Broadcom. Raj, welcome here, Lisa. I'm excited for our conversation. So I wanted to dive right into a term that we hear all the time, operational excellence, right? We hear it everywhere in marketing, et cetera, but why is it so important to organizations as they head into 2021? And tell us how AI ops as a platform can help. >>Yeah. Well, thank you. First off. I wanna, uh, I want to welcome our viewers back and, uh, I'm very excited to, uh, to share, um, uh, more info on this topic. You know, uh, here's what we believe as we work with large organizations, we see all our organizations are poised to get out of the, uh, the pandemic and look for a brood for their own business and helping customers get through this tough time. So fiscal year 2021, we believe is going to be a combination of, uh, you know, resiliency and agility at the, at the same time. So operational excellence is critical because the business has become more digital, right? There are going to be three things that are going to be more sticky. Uh, you know, remote work is going to be more sticky, um, cost savings and efficiency is going to be an imperative for organizations and the continued acceleration of digital transformation of enterprises at scale is going to be in reality. So when you put all these three things together as a, as a team that is, uh, you know, that's working behind the scenes to help the businesses succeed, operational excellence is going to be, make or break for organizations, >>Right with that said, if we kind of strip it down to the key capabilities, what are those key capabilities that companies need to be looking for in an AI ops solution? >>Yeah, you know, so first and foremost, AI ops means many things to many, many folks. So let's take a moment to simply define it. The way we define AI ops is it's a system of intelligence, human augmented system that brings together full visibility across app infra and network elements that brings together disparate data sources and provides actionable intelligence and uniquely offers intelligent automation. Now, the, the analogy many folks draw is the self-driving car. I mean, we are in the world of Teslas, uh, but you know, uh, but self-driving data center is it's too far away, right? Autonomous systems are still far away. However, uh, you know, application of AI ML techniques to help deal with volume velocity, veracity of information, uh, is, is critical. So that's how we look at AI ops and some of the key capabilities that we, uh, that we, uh, that we work with our customers to help them on our own for eight years. >>Right? First one is eyes and ears. What we call full stack observability. If you do not know what is happening in your systems, uh, you know, that that serve up your business services. It's going to be pretty hard to do anything, uh, in terms of responsiveness, right? So from stack observability, the second piece is what we call actionable insights. So when you have disparate data sources, tools, sprawls data coming at you from, uh, you know, uh, from a database systems, it systems customer management systems, ticketing systems. How do you find the needle from the haystack? And how do you respond rapidly from a myriad of problems as CEO of red? The third area is what we call intelligent automation. Well, identifying the problem to act on is important, and then acting on automating that and creating, uh, a recommendation system where, uh, you know, you can be proactive about it is even more important. And finally, all of this focuses on efficiency. What about effectiveness? Effectiveness comes when you create a feedback loop, when what happens in production is related to your support systems and your developers so that they can respond rapidly. So we call that continuous feedback. So these are the four key capabilities that, uh, you know, uh, you should look for in an AI ops system. And that's what we offer as well. >>Russia, there's four key capabilities that businesses need to be looking for. I'm wondering how those help to align business. And it it's, again like operational excellence. It's something that we talk about a lot is the alignment of business. And it a lot more challenging, easier said than done, right. But I want you to explain how can AI ops help with that alignment and align it outputs to business outcomes? >>Yeah. So, you know, one of the things, uh, I'm going to say something that is, uh, that is, uh, that is simple, but, but, but this harder, but alignment is not on systems alignment is with people, right? So when people align, when organizations align, when cultures align, uh, dramatic things can happen. So in the context of AI ops VC, when, when SRE is aligned with the DevOps engineers and information architects and, uh, uh, you know, it operators, uh, you know, they enable organizations to reduce the gap between intent and outcome or output and outcome that said, uh, you know, these personas need mechanisms to help them better align, right. Help them better visualize, see the, you know, what we call single source of truth, right? So there are four key things that I want to call out. When we work with large enterprises, we find that customer journey alignment with the, you know, what we call it systems is critical. >>So how do you understand your business imperatives and your customer journey goals, whether it is car to a purchase or whether it is, uh, you know, bill shock scenarios and Swan alignment on customer journey to your it systems is one area that you can reduce the gap. The second area is how do you create a scenario where your teams can find problems before your customers do right outage scenarios and so on. So that's the second area of alignment. The third area of alignment is how can you measure business impact driven services? Right? There are several services that an organization offers versus an it system. Some services are more critical to the business than others, and these change in a dynamic environment. So how do you, how do you understand that? How do you measure that and how, how do you find the gaps there? So that's the third area of alignment that we, that we help and last but not least there are, there are things like NPS scores and others that, that help us understand alignment, but those are more long-term. But in the, in the context of, uh, you know, operating digitally, uh, you want to use customer experience and business, uh, you know, a single business outcome, uh, as a, as a key alignment factor, and then work with your systems of engagement and systems of interaction, along with your key personas to create that alignment. It's a people process technology challenge. >>So, whereas one of the things that you said there is that it's imperative for the business to find a problem before a customer does, and you talked about outages there, that's always a goal for businesses, right. To prevent those outages, how can AI ops help with that? Yeah, >>So, you know, outages, uh, talk, you know, go to resiliency of a system, right? And they also go to, uh, uh, agility of the same system, you know, if you're a customer and if you're whipping up your mobile app and it takes more than three milliseconds, uh, you know, you're probably losing that customer, right. So outages mean different things, you know, and there's an interesting website called down detector.com that actually tracks all the old pages of publicly available services, whether it's your bank or your, uh, you know, tele telecom service or a mobile service and so on and so forth. In fact, the key question around outages for, from, uh, from, uh, you know, executives are the question of, are you ready? Right? Are you ready to respond to the needs of your customers and your business? Are you ready to rapidly resolve an issue that is impacting customer experience and therefore satisfaction? >>Are you creating a digital trust system where customers can be, you know, um, uh, you know, customers can feel that their information is secure when they transact with you, all of these, getting into the notion of resiliency and outages. Now, you know, one of the things that, uh, that I, I often, uh, you know, work with customers around, you know, would that be find as the radius of impact is important when you deal with outages? What I mean by that is problems occur, right? How do you respond? How quickly do you take two seconds, two minutes, 20 minutes, two hours, 20 hours, right? To resolve the problem that radius of impact is important. That's where, you know, you have to bring a gain people, process technology together to solve that. And the key thing is you need a system of intelligence that can aid your teams, you know, look at the same set of parameters so that you can respond faster. That's the key here. >>We look at digital transformation at scale. Raj, how does AI ops help influence that? >>You know, um, I'm going to take a slightly long-winded way to answer this question. See when it comes to digital transformation at scale, the focus on business purpose and business outcome becomes extremely critical. And then the alignment of that to your digital supply chain, right, are the, are the, are the key factors that differentiate winners in the, in their digital transformation game? Really, what we have seen, uh, with, with winners is they operate very differently. Like for example, uh, you know, Nike matures, its digital business outcomes by shoes per second, right? Uh, Apple by I-phones per minute, Tesla by model threes per month, are you getting this, getting it right? I mean, you want to have a clear business outcome, which is a measure of your business, uh, in effect, I mean, ENC, right? Which, which, uh, um, my daughter use and I use very well. >>Right. Uh, you know, uh, they measure by revenue per hour, right? I mean, so these are key measures. And when you have a key business outcome measure like that, you can everything else, because you know what these measures, uh, you know, uh, for a bank, it may be deposits per month, right now, when you move money from checking account to savings account, or when you do direct deposits, those are, you know, banks need liquidity and so on and so forth. But, you know, the, the key thing is that single business outcome has a Starburst effect inside the it organization that touches a single money moment from checking a call to savings account can touch about 75 disparate systems internally. Right? So those think about it, right? I mean, all, all we're doing is moving money from checking account a savings account. Now that goats into a it production system, there are several applications. >>There is a database, there is, there are infrastructures, there are load balancers that are webs. You know, you know, the web server components, which then touches your, your middleware component, which is a queuing system, right. Which then touches your transactional system. Uh, and, uh, you know, which may be on your main frames, what we call mobile to mainframe scenario, right? And we are not done yet. Then you have a security and regulatory compliance system that you have to touch a fraud prevention system that you have to touch, right? A state department regulation that you may have to meet and on and on and on, right? This is the chat that it operations teams face. And when you have millions of customers transacting, right, suddenly this challenge cannot be managed by human beings alone. So therefore you need a system of intelligence that augments human intelligence and acts as your, you know, your, your eyes and ears in a way to, to point pinpoint where problems are. >>Right. So digital transformation at scale really requires a very well thought out AI ops system, a platform, an open extensible platform that, uh, you know, uh, that is heterogeneous in nature because there's tools, products in organizations. There is a lot of databases in systems. There are millions of, uh, uh, you know, customers and hundreds of partners and vendors, you know, making up that digital supply chain. So, you know, AI ops is at the center of an enabling an organization achieve digital op you know, transformation at scale last but not least. You need continuous feedback loop. Continuous feedback loop is the ability for a production system to inform your dev ops teams, your finance teams, your customer experience teams, your cost modeling teams about what is going on so that they can so that they can reduce the intent, come gap. >>All of this need to come together, what we call BizOps. >>That was a great example of how you talked about the Starburst effect. I actually never thought about it in that way, when you give the banking example, but what you should is the magnitude of systems. The fact that people alone really need help with that, and why intelligent automation and AI ops can be transformative and enable that scale. Raj, it's always a pleasure to talk with you. Thanks for joining me today. And we'll be right back with our next segment. Welcome back to the AI ops virtual forum. We've heard from our guests about the value of AI ops and why and how organizations are adopting AI ops platforms. But now let's see AI ops inaction and get a practical view of AI ops to deep Dante. The head of AI ops at Broadcom is now going to take you through a quick demo. >>Hello. So they've gotta head off AI ops and automation here. What I'm going to do today is talk through some of the key capabilities and differentiators of Broadcom's CII ops solution in this solution, which can be delivered on cloud or on-prem. We bring a variety of metric alarm log and applauded data from multiple sources, EPM, NetApps, and infrastructure monitoring tools to provide a single point of observability and control. Let me start where our users mostly stock key enterprises like FSI, telcos retailers, et cetera, do not manage infrastructure or applications without having a business context. At the end of the day, they offer business services governed by SLS service level objectives and SLI service level indicators are service analytics, which can scale to a few thousand services, lets our customers create and monitor the services as per their preference. They can create a hierarchy of services based on their business practice. >>For example, here, the sub services are created based on functional subsistence for certain enterprises. It could be based on location. Users can import these services from their favorite CMDB. What's important to note that not all services are born equal. If you are a modern bank, you may want to prioritize tickets coming from digital banking, for example, and this application lets you rank them as per the KPI of your choice. We can source the availability, not merely from the state of the infrastructure, whether they're running or not. But from the SLS that represent the state of the application, when it comes to triaging issues related to the service, it is important to have a complete view of the topology. The typology can show both east-west elements from mobile to mainframe or not South elements in a network flow. This is particularly relevant for a large enterprise who could be running the systems of engagement on the cloud and system of records on mainframe inside the firewall here, you can see that the issue is related to the mainframe kick server. >>You can expand to see the actual alarm, which is sourced from the mainframe operational intelligence. Similarly, clicking on network will give the hub and spoke view of the network devices, the Cisco switches and routers. I can click on the effected router and see all the details Broadcom's solution stores, the ontological model of the typology in the form of a journal graph where one can not only view the current state of the typology, but the past as well, talking of underlying data sources, the solution uses best of the pre data stores for structured and unstructured data. We have not only leveraged the power of open source, but have actively contributed back to the community. One of the key innovations is evident in our dashboarding framework because we have enhanced the open source Grafana technology to support these diverse data sources here. You can see a single dashboard representing applications to infrastructure, to mainframe again, sourcing a variety of data from these sources. >>When we talk to customers, one of the biggest challenges that they face today is related to alarms because of a proliferation of tools. They are currently drowning in an ocean of hundreds and thousands of alarms. This increases the Elmont support cost to tens of dollars per ticket, and also affects LTO efficiency leading to an average of five to six hours of meantime to resolution here is where we have the state of the art innovation utilizing the power of machine learning and ontology to arrive at the root cause we not only clusterize alarms based on text, but employ the technique of 41st. We look at the topology then at the time window duplicate text based on NLP. And lastly learn from continuous training of the model to deduce what we call situations. This is an example of a situation. As you can see, we provide a time-based evidence of how things unfolded and arrive at a root cause. >>Lastly, the solution provides a three 60 degree closed loop remediation either through a ticketing system or by direct invocation of automation actions instead of firing hard-coded automation runbooks for certain conditions, the tool leverage is machine learning to rank automation actions based on past heuristics. That's why we call it intelligent automation to summarize AI ops from Broadcom helps you achieve operational excellence through full stack observability, coupled with AIML that applies across modern hybrid cloud environments, as well as legacy ones uniquely. It ties these insights with intelligent automation to improve customer experience. Thank you for watching from around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of AI ops virtual forum brought to you by Broadcom. >>Welcome to our final segment today. So we've discussed today. The value that AI ops will bring to organizations in 2021, we'll discuss that through three different perspectives. And so now we want to bring those perspectives together and see if we can get a consensus on where AI ops needs to go for folks to be successful with it in the future. So bringing back some folks Richland is back with us. Senior analysts, serving infrastructure and operations professionals at Forrester smartness here is also back in global product management at Verizon and Srinivasan, Reggie Gopaul head of product and strategy at Broadcom guys. Great to have you back. So let's jump in and rich, we're going to, we're going to start with you, but we are going to get all three of you, a chance to answer the questions. So we've talked about why organizations should adopt AI ops, but what happens if they choose not to what challenges would they face? Basically what's the cost of organizations doing nothing >>Good question, because I think in operations for a number of years, we've kind of stand stood, Pat, where we are, where we're afraid change things sometimes, or we just don't think about a tooling as often. The last thing to change because we're spending so much time doing project work and modernization and fighting fires on a daily basis. >>Problem is going to get worse. If we do nothing, >>You know, we're building new architectures like containers and microservices, which means more things to mind and keep running. Um, we're building highly distributed systems. We're moving more and more into this hybrid world, a multi-cloud world, uh, it's become over-complicate and I'll give a short anecdote. I think, eliminate this. Um, when I go to conferences and give speeches, it's all infrastructure operations people. And I say, you know, how many people have three X, five X, you know, uh, things to monitor them. They had, you know, three years ago, two years ago, and everyone's saying how many people have hired more staff in that time period, zero hands go up. That's the gap we have to fill. And we have to fill that through better automation, more intelligent systems. It's the only way we're going to be able to fill back out. >>What's your perspective, uh, if organizations choose not to adopt AI ops. Yeah. So I'll do that. Yeah. So I think it's, I would just relate it to a couple of things that probably everybody >>Tired off lately and everybody can relate to. And this would resonate that we have 5g, which is all set to transform the world. As we know it, I don't have a lot of communication with these smart cities, smart communities, IOT, which is going to make us pivotal to the success of businesses. And as you've seen with this call with, you know, transformation of the world, that there's a, there's a much bigger cost consciousness out there. People are trying to become much more, forward-looking much more sustainable. And I think at the heart of all of this, that the necessity that you have intelligent systems, which are bastardizing more than enough information that previously could've been overlooked because if you don't measure engagement, not going right. People not being on the same page of this using two examples or hundreds of things, you know, that play a part in things, but not coming together in the best possible way. So I think it has an absolute necessity to drive those cost efficiencies rather than, you know, left right and center laying off people who are like 10 Mattel to your business and have a great tribal knowledge of your business. So to speak, you can drive these efficiencies through automating a lot of those tasks that previously were being very manually intensive or resource intensive. And you could allocate those resources towards doing much better things, which let's be very honest going into 20, 21 after what we've seen with 2020, it's going to be mandate treat. >>And so Raj, I saw you shaking your head there when he was mom was sharing his thoughts. What are your thoughts about that sounds like you agree. Yeah. I mean, uh, you know, uh, to put things in perspective, right? I mean we're firmly in the digital economy, right? Digital economy, according to the Bureau of economic analysis is 9% of the U S GDP. Just, you know, think about it in, in, in, in, in the context of the GDP, right? It's only ranked lower, slightly lower than manufacturing, which is at 11.3% GDP and slightly about finance and insurance, which is about seven and a half percent GDP. So the digital economy is firmly in our lives, right. And as Huisman was talking about it, you know, software eats the world and digital, operational excellence is critical for customers, uh, to, uh, you know, to, uh, to drive profitability and growth, uh, in the digital economy. >>It's almost, you know, the key is digital at scale. So when, uh, when rich talks about some of the challenges and when Huseman highlights 5g as an example, those are the things that, that, that come to mind. So to me, what is the cost or perils of doing nothing? You know, uh, it's not an option. I think, you know, more often than not, uh, you know, C-level execs are asking head of it and they are key influencers, a single question, are you ready? Are you ready in the context of addressing spikes in networks because of the pandemic scenario, are you ready in the context of automating away toil? Are you ready to respond rapidly to the needs of the digital business? I think AI ops is critical. >>That's a great point. Roger, where does stick with you? So we got kind of consensus there, as you said, wrapping it up. This is basically a, not an option. This is a must to go forward for organizations to be successful. So let's talk about some quick wins, or as you talked about, you know, organizations and sea levels asking, are you ready? What are some quick wins that that organizations can achieve when they're adopting AI? >>You know, um, immediate value. I think I would start with a question. How often do your customers find problems in your digital experience before you do think about that? Right. You know, if you, if you, you know, there's an interesting web, uh, website, um, uh, you know, down detector.com, right? I think, uh, in, in Europe there is an equal amount of that as well. It ha you know, people post their digital services that are down, whether it's a bank that, uh, you know, customers are trying to move money from checking account, the savings account and the digital services are down and so on and so forth. So some and many times customers tend to find problems before it operations teams do. So a quick win is to be proactive and immediate value is visibility. If you do not know what is happening in your complex systems that make up your digital supply chain, it's going to be hard to be responsive. So I would start there >>Visibility this same question over to you from Verizon's perspective, quick wins. >>Yeah. So I think first of all, there's a need to ingest this multi-care spectrum data, which I don't think is humanly possible. You don't have people having expertise, you know, all the seven layers of the OSI model and then across network and security and at the application level. So I think you need systems which are now able to get that data. It shouldn't just be wasted reports that you're paying for on a monthly basis. It's about time that you started making the most of those in the form of identifying what are the efficiencies within your ecosystem. First of all, what are the things, you know, which could be better utilized subsequently you have the >>Opportunity to reduce the noise of a trouble tickets handling. It sounds pretty trivial, but >>An average you can imagine every trouble tickets has the cost in dollars, right? >>So, and there's so many tickets and there's art >>That get created on a network and across an end user application value, >>We're talking thousands, you know, across and end user >>Application value chain could be million in >>A year. So, and so many of those are not really, >>He, you know, a cause of concern because the problem is something. >>So I think that whole triage is an immediate cost saving and the bigger your network, the bigger >>There's a cost of things, whether you're a provider, whether you're, you know, the end customer at the end of the day, not having to deal with problems, which nobody can resolve, which are not meant to be dealt with. There's so many of those situations, right, where service has just been adopted, >>Which is just coordinate quality, et cetera, et cetera. So many reasons. So those are the, >>So there's some of the immediate cost saving them. They are really, really significant. >>Secondly, I would say Raj mentioned something about, you know, the user, >>Your application value chain, and an understanding of that, especially with this hybrid cloud environment, >>Et cetera, et cetera, right? The time it takes to identify a problem in an end user application value chain across the seven layers that I mentioned with the OSI reference model across network and security and the application environment. It's something that >>In its own self has massive cost to business, >>Right? That could be >>No sale transactions that could be obstructed because of this. There could be, and I'm going to use a really interesting example. >>We talk about IOT. The integrity of the IOT machine is exciting. >>Family is pivotal in this new world that we're stepping into. >>You could be running commands, >>Super efficient. He has, everything is being told to the machine really fast with sending yeah. >>Everything there. What if it's hacked? And if that's okay, >>Robotic arm starts to involve the things you don't want it to do. >>So there's so much of that. That becomes a part of this naturally. And I believe, yes, this is not just like from a cost >>standpoint, but anything going wrong with that code base, et cetera, et cetera. These are massive costs to the business in the form of the revenue. They have lost the perception in the market as a result, the fed, >>You know, all that stuff. So >>These are a couple of very immediate problems, but then you also have the whole player virtualized resources where you can automate the allocation, you know, the quantification of an orchestration of those virtualized resources, rather than a person having to, you know, see something and then say, Oh yeah, I need to increase capacity over here, because then it's going to have this particular application. You have systems doing this stuff and to, you know, Roger's point your customer should not be identifying your problems before you, because this digital is where it's all about perception. >>Absolutely. We definitely don't want the customers finding it before. So rich, let's wrap this particular question up with you from that senior analyst perspective, how can companies use make big impact quickly with AI ops? Yeah, >>Yeah, I think, you know, and it was been really summed up some really great use cases there. I think with the, uh, you know, one of the biggest struggles we've always had in operations is isn't, you know, the mean time to resolve. We're pretty good at resolving the things. We just have to find the thing we have to resolve. That's always been the problem and using these advanced analytics and machine learning algorithms now across all machine and application data, our tendency is humans is to look at the console and say, what's flashing red. That must be what we have to fix, but it could be something that's yellow, somewhere else, six services away. And we have made things so complicated. And I think this is what it was when I was saying that we can't get there anymore on our own. We need help to get there in all of this stuff that the outline. >>So, so well builds up to a higher level thing of what is the customer experience about what is the customer journey? And we've struggled for years in the digital world and measuring that a day-to-day thing. We know an online retail. If you're having a bad experience at one retailer, you just want your thing. You're going to go to another retailer, brand loyalty. Isn't one of like it, wasn't a brick and mortal world where you had a department store near you. So you were loyal to that because it was in your neighborhood, um, online that doesn't exist anymore. So we need to be able to understand the customer from that first moment, they touch a digital service all the way from their, their journey through that digital service, the lowest layer, whether it be a database or the network, what have you, and then back to them again, and we're not understanding, is that a good experience? >>We gave them. How does that compare to last week's experience? What should we be doing to improve that next week? Uh, and I think companies are starting and then the pandemic certainly, you know, push this timeline. If you listened to the, the, the CEO of Microsoft, he's like, you know, 10 years of digital transformation written down. And the first several months of this, um, in banks and in financial institutions, I talked to insurance companies, aren't slowing down. They're trying to speed up. In fact, what they've discovered is that they're, you know, obviously when we were on lockdown or what have you, they use of digital servers is spiked very high. What they've learned is they're never going to go back down. They're never going to return to pretend endemic levels. So now they're stuck with this new reality. Well, how do we service those customers and how do we make sure we keep them loyal to our brand? >>Uh, so, you know, they're looking for modernization opportunities. A lot of that that's things have been exposed. And I think Raj touched upon this very early in the conversation is visibility gaps. Now that we're on the outside, looking in at the data center, we know we architect things in a very way. Uh, we better ways of making these correlations across the Sparrow technologies to understand where the problems lies. We can give better services to our customers. And I think that's really what we're going to see a lot of the innovation and the people really clamoring for these new ways of doing things that starting, you know, now, I mean, I've seen it in customers, but I think really the push through the end of this year to next year when, you know, economy and things like that straightened out a little bit more, I think it really, people are gonna take a hard look of where they are and is, you know, AI ops the way forward for them. And I think they'll find it. The answer is yes, for sure. >>So we've, we've come to a consensus that, of what the parallels are of organizations, basically the cost of doing nothing. You guys have given some great advice on where some of those quick wins are. Let's talk about something Raj touched on earlier is organizations, are they really ready for truly automated AI? Raj, I want to start with you readiness factor. What are your thoughts? >>Uh, you know, uh, I think so, you know, we place our, her lives on automated systems all the time, right? In our, in our day-to-day lives, in the, in the digital world. I think, uh, you know, our, uh, at least the customers that I talk to our customers are, uh, are, uh, you know, uh, have a sophisticated systems. Like for example, advanced automation is a reality. If you look at social media, AI and ML and automation are used to automate away, uh, misinformation, right? If you look at financial institutions, AI and ML are used to automate away a fraud, right? So I want to ask our customers why can't we automate await oil in it, operation systems, right? And that's where our customers are. Then the, you know, uh, I'm a glass half full, uh, cleanup person, right? Uh, this pandemic has been harder on many of our customers, but I think what we have learned from our customers is they've Rose to the occasion. >>They've used digital as a key needs, right? At scale. That's what we see with, you know, when, when Huseman and his team talk about, uh, you know, network operational intelligence, right. That's what it means to us. So I think they are ready, the intersection of customer experience it and OT, operational technology is ripe for automation. Uh, and, uh, you know, I, I wanna, I wanna sort of give a shout out to three key personas in this mix. It's about people, right? One is the SRE persona, you know, site, reliability engineer. The other is the information security persona. And the third one is the it operator automation engineer persona. These folks in organizations are building a system of intelligence that can respond rapidly to the needs of their digital business. We at Broadcom, we are in the business of helping them construct a system of intelligence that will create a human augmented solution for them. Right. So when I see, when I interact with large enterprise customers, I think they, they, you know, they, they want to achieve what I would call advanced automation and AI ML solutions. And that's squarely, very I ops is, you know, is going as it, you know, when I talk to rich and what, everything that rich says, you know, that's where it's going and that's what we want to help our customers to. So, which about your perspective of organizations being ready for truly automated AI? >>I think, you know, the conversation has shifted a lot in the last, in, in pre pandemic. Uh, I'd say at the end of last year, we're, you know, two years ago, people I'd go to conferences and people come up and ask me like, this is all smoke and mirrors, right? These systems can't do this because it is such a leap forward for them, for where they are today. Right. We we've sort of, you know, in software and other systems, we iterate and we move forward slowly. So it's not a big shock. And this is for a lot of organizations that big, big leap forward where they're, they're running their operations teams today. Um, but now they've come around and say, you know what? We want to do this. We want all the automations. We want my staff not doing the low complexity, repetitive tasks over and over again. >>Um, you know, and we have a lot of those kinds of legacy systems. We're not going to rebuild. Um, but they need certain care and feeding. So why are we having operations? People do those tasks? Why aren't we automating those out? I think the other piece is, and I'll, I'll, I'll send this out to any of the operations teams that are thinking about going down this path is that you have to understand that the operations models that we're operating under in, in INO and have been for the last 25 years are super outdated and they're fundamentally broken for the digital age. We have to start thinking about different ways of doing things and how do we do that? Well, it's, it's people, organization, people are going to work together differently in an AI ops world, um, for the better. Um, but you know, there's going to be the, the age of the 40 person bridge call thing. >>Troubleshooting is going away. It's going to be three, four, five focused engineers that need to be there for that particular incident. Um, a lot of process mailer process we have in our level, one level, two engineering. What have you running of tickets, gathering of artifacts, uh, during an incident is going to be automated. That's a good thing. We should be doing those, those things by hand anymore. So I'd say that the, to people's like start thinking about what this means to your organization. Start thinking about the great things we can do by automating things away from people, having to do them over and over again. And what that means for them, getting them matched to what they want to be doing is high level engineering tasks. They want to be doing monitorization, working with new tools and technologies. Um, these are all good things that help the organization perform better as a whole great advice and great kind of some of the thoughts that you shared rich for what the audience needs to be on the lookout. For one, I want to go over to you, give me your thoughts on what the audience that should be on the lookout for, or put on your agendas in the next 12 months. >>So there's like a couple of ways to answer that question. One thing would be in the form of, you know, what are some of the things they have to be concerned about in terms of implementing this solution or harnessing its power. The other one could be, you know, what are the perhaps advantages they should look to see? So if I was to talk about the first one, let's say that, what are some of the things I have to watch out for like possible pitfalls that everybody has data, right? So yeah, there's one strategy we say, okay, you've got the data, let's see what we can do with them. But then there's the exact opposite side, which has to be considered when you're doing that analysis. What are the use cases that you're looking to drive? Right. But then use cases you have to understand, are you taking a reactive use case approach? >>Are you taking active use cases, right? Or, yeah, that's a very, very important concentration. Then you have to be very cognizant of where does this data that you have, where does it reside? What are the systems and where does it need to go to in order for this AI function to happen and subsequently if there needs to be any backward communication with all of that data in a process manner. So I think these are some of the very critical points because you can have an AI solution, which is sitting in a customer data center. It could be in a managed services provider data center, like, right, right. It could be in a cloud data center, like an AWS or something, or you could have hybrid views, et cetera, all of that stuff. So you have to be very mindful of where you're going to get the data from is going to go to what are the use cases you're trying to get out to do a bit of backward forward. >>Okay, we've got this data thing and I think it's a journey. Nobody can come in and say, Hey, you've built this fantastic thing. It's like Terminator two. I think it's a journey where we built starting with the network. My personal focus always comes down to the network and with 5g so much, so much more right with 5g, you're talking low latency communication. That's like the true power of 5g, right? It's low latency, it's ultra high bandwidth, but what's the point of that low latency. If then subsequently the actions that need to be taken to prevent any problems in application, IOT applications, remote surgeries, uh, self driving vehicles, et cetera, et cetera. What if that's where people are sitting and sipping their coffees and trying to take action that needs to be in low latency as well. Right? So these are, I think some of the fundamental things that you have to know your data, your use cases, that location, where it needs to be exchanged, what are the parameters around that for extending that data? >>And I think from that point at one word, it's all about realizing, you know, sense of business outcomes. Unless AI comes in as a digital labor that shows you, I have, I have reduced your this amount of time and that's a result of big problems or identified problems for anything. Or I have saved you this much resource in a month, in a year or whatever timeline that people want to see it. So I think those are some of the initial starting points, and then it all starts coming together. But the key is it's not one system that can do everything. You have to have a way where, you know, you can share data once you've caught all of that data into one system. Maybe you can send it to another system at make more, take more advantage, right? That system might be an AI and IOT system, which is just looking at all of your street and make it sure that Hey parents. So it's still off just to be more carbon neutral and all that great stuff, et cetera, et cetera, >>Stuff for the audience to can cigarette rush, take us time from here. What are some of the takeaways that you think the audience really needs to be laser focused on as we move forward into the next year? You know, one thing that, uh, I think a key takeaway is, um, uh, you know, as we embark on 2021, closing the gap between intent and outcome and outputs and outcome will become critical, is critical. Uh, you know, especially for, uh, you know, uh, digital transformation at scale for organizations context in the, you know, for customer experience becomes even more critical as who Swan Huseman was talking, uh, you know, being network network aware network availability is, is a necessary condition, but not sufficient condition anymore. Right? The what, what, what customers have to go towards is going from network availability to network agility with high security, uh, what we call app aware networks, right? How do you differentiate between a trade, a million dollar trade that's happening between, uh, you know, London and New York, uh, uh, versus a YouTube video training that an employee is going through? Worse is a YouTube video that millions of customers are, are >>Watching, right? Three different context, three different customer scenarios, right? That is going to be critical. And last but not least feedback loop, uh, you know, responsiveness is all about feedback loop. You cannot predict everything, but you can respond to things faster. I think these are sort of the three, three things that, uh, that, uh, you know, customers aren't going to have to have to really think about. And that's also where I believe AI ops, by the way, AI ops and I I'm. Yeah. You know, one of the points that was smart and shout out to what he was saying was heterogeneity is key, right? There is no homogeneous tool in the world that can solve problems. So you want an open extensible system of intelligence that, that can harness data from disparate data sources provide that visualization, the actionable insight and the human augmented recommendation systems that are so needed for, uh, you know, it operators to be successful. I think that's where it's going. >>Amazing. You guys just provided so much content context recommendations for the audience. I think we accomplished our goal on this. I'll call it power panel of not only getting to a consensus of what, where AI ops needs to go in the future, but great recommendations for what businesses in any industry need to be on the lookout for rich Huisman Raj, thank you for joining me today. We want to thank you for watching. This was such a rich session. You probably want to watch it again. Thanks for your time. Thanks so much for attending and participating in the AI OBS virtual forum. We really appreciate your time and we hope you really clearly understand the value that AI ops platforms can deliver to many types of organizations. I'm Lisa Martin, and I want to thank our speakers today for joining. We have rich lane from Forrester who's fund here from Verizon and Raj from Broadcom. Thanks everyone. Stay safe..

>>Hello everyone. This is Dave Vellante, and I want to welcome you to the cubes presentation of accelerating automation with dev net in this special program, we're going to explore how to accelerate digital transformation and how the global pandemic is changing the way we work and the kinds of work that we do, the cube has pulled together experts from Cisco dev net. Now dev net is essentially Cisco as code. I've said many times in the cube, but in my opinion, it's the most impressive initiative coming out of any established enterprise infrastructure company. What Cisco has done brilliantly with dev net is to create an API economy by leveraging its large infrastructure portfolio and its ecosystem. But the linchpin of dev net is the army of trained Cisco engineers, including those with the elite CC I E designation. Now dev net was conceived to train people on how to code infrastructure and develop applications in integrations. It's a platform to create new value and automation is a key to that. Creativity. Now let's kick things off with the architect of dev net senior vice president in general manager of Cisco's dev net and CX ecosystem success. Susie, we roam around the globe presenting accelerating automation with damnit brought to you by Cisco. >>Hello and welcome to the cube. I'm Sean for a year host. We've got a great conversation, a virtual event, accelerating automation with dev net, Cisco dev net. And of course we got the Cisco brain trust here, our cube alumni, Susie wee vice president, senior vice president GM, and also CTO of Cisco dev net and ecosystem success CX all that great stuff. Many Wade Lee, who's the director, senior director of dev net certifications, Eric field, director of developer advocacy, Susie Mandy, Eric. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Great to see you, John. So we're not in first. We don't, can't be at the dev net zone. We can't be on site doing dev net creative, all the great stuff we've been doing over the past few years where virtual the cube virtual. Thanks for coming on. Uh, Susie, I gotta ask you because you know, we've been talking years ago when you started this mission and just the success you've had has been awesome, but dev net create has brought on a whole nother connective tissue to the dev net community. This is what this ties into the theme of accelerating automation with dev net, because you said to me, I think four years ago, everything should be a service or X AAS as it's called and automation plays a critical role. Um, could you please share your vision because this is really important and still only five to 10% of the enterprises have containerized things. So there's a huge growth curve coming with developing and programmability. What's your, what's your vision? >>Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what we know is that as more and more businesses are >>Coming online is, I mean, they're all online, but as they're growing into the cloud is they're growing in new areas. As we're dealing with security is everyone's dealing with the pandemic. There's so many things going on. Uh, but what happens is there's an infrastructure that all of this is built on and that infrastructure has networking. It has security, it has all of your compute and everything that's in there. And what matters is how can you take a business application and tie it to that infrastructure? How can you take, you know, customer data? How can you take business applications? How can you connect up the world securely and then be able to, you know, really satisfy everything that businesses need. And in order to do that, you know, the whole new tool that we've always talked about is that the network is programmable. The infrastructure is programmable and you don't need just apps riding on top, but now they get to use all of that power of the infrastructure to perform even better. And in order to get there, what you need to do is automate everything. You can't configure networks manually. You can't be manually figuring out policies, but you want to use that agile infrastructure in which you can really use automation. You can rise to higher level business processes and tie all of that up and down the staff by leveraging automation. >>You know, I remember a few years ago when dev net created for start a, I interviewed Todd Nightingale and we were talking about Meraki, you know, not to get in the weeds, but you know, switches and hubs and wireless. But if you look at what we were talking about, then this is kind of what's going on now. And we were just recently, I think our last physical event was a Cisco, um, uh, Europe in Barcelona before all the COVID hit. And you had this massive cloud surgeon scale happening going on, right when the pandemic hit. And even now more than ever the cloud scale, the modern apps, the momentum hasn't stopped because there's more pressure now to continue addressing more innovation at scale because the pressure to do that, um, cause the business stay alive. And to get your thoughts on, um, what's going on in your world because you were there in person now we're six months in scale is huge. >>We are. Yeah, absolutely. And what happened is as all of our customers, as businesses around the world, as we ourselves all dealt with, how do we run a business from home? You know, how do we keep people safe? How do we keep people at home and how do we work? And then it turns out, you know, business keeps rolling, but we've had to automate even more because you have to go home and then figure out how from home, can I make sure that my it infrastructure is automated out from home? Can I make sure that every employee is out there and working safely and securely, you know, things like call center workers, which had to go into physical locations and be in kind of, you know, just, you know, blocked off rooms to really be secure with their company's information. They had to work from home. >>So we had to extend business applications to people's homes, uh, in countries like, you know, well around the world, but also in India where it was actually not, you know, not, they wouldn't let, they didn't have rules to let people work from home in these areas. So then what had to do was automate everything and make sure that we could administer, you know, all of our customers could administer these systems from home. So that put extra stress on automation. It put extra stress on our customer's digital transformation and it just forced them to, you know, automate digitally, transform quicker. And they had to, because you couldn't just go into a server room and tweak your servers, you had to figure out how to automate all of that. And we're still all in that environment today. >>Now one of the hottest trends before the pandemic was observability, uh, Coobernetti's serve, uh, microservices. So those things, again, all dev ops and, you know, have you guys got some acquisitions, you about thousand eyes? Um, um, you've got a new one you just bought, um, recently port shift to raise the game in security Cooper and all these microservices. So observability super hot, but then people go work at home. As you mentioned, how do you observe, what are you observing? The network is under a huge pressure. I mean, it's crashing on people's zooms and WebExes and, uh, education, huge amount of network pressure. How are people adapting to this and the app side? How are you guys looking at the what's being programmed? What are some of the things that you're seeing with use cases around this program? Ability, challenge and observability challenges. It's a huge deal. >>Yeah, absolutely. And, um, you know, going back to Todd Nightingale, right. You know, back when we talked to Todd before he had Meraki and he had designed this simplicity, this ease of use this cloud managed, you know, doing everything from one central place and now he has Cisco's entire enterprise and cloud business. So he is now applying that at that bigger, um, at that bigger scale for Cisco and for our customers. And he is building in the observability and the dashboards and the automation and the API APIs into all of it. Um, but when we take a look at what our customers needed is again, they had to build it all in. Um, they have to build in and what happened was how your network was doing, how secure your infrastructure was, how well you could enable people to work from home and how well you could reach customers. >>All of that used to be an it conversation. It became a CEO and a board level conversation. So all of a sudden CEOs were actually calling on the heads of it and the CIO and saying, you know, how's our VPN connectivity is everybody working from home? How many people are connected and able to work and what's their productivity. So all of a sudden, all these things that were really infrastructure, it stuff became a board level conversation. And, you know, once again, at first, everybody was panicked and just figuring out how to get people working. But now what we've seen in all of our customers is that they are now building in automation and digital transformation and these architectures, and that gives them a chance to build in that observability, you know, looking for those events, the dashboards, you know, so it really has, has been fantastic to see what our customers are doing and what our partners are doing to really rise to that next level. >>Cause you know, you got to go, but real quick, um, describe what accelerating automation with dev net means. Well, you've >>Been falling, you know, we've been working together on dev net and the vision of the infrastructure programmability and everything for quite some time. And the thing that's really happened is yes, you need to automate, but yes, it takes people to do that and you need the right skill sets and the programmability. So a networker can't be a networker. A networker has to be a network automation developer. And so it is about people and it is about bringing infrastructure expertise together with software expertise and letting people rumblings are definite community has risen to this challenge. Um, people have jumped in, they've gotten their certifications. We have thousands of people getting certified. Uh, you know, we have, you know, Cisco getting certified. We have individuals, we have partners, you know, they're just really rising to the occasion. So accelerate, accelerating automation while it is about going digital. It's also about people rising to the level of, you know, being able to put infrastructure and software expertise together to enable this next chapter of business applications of, you know, cloud directed businesses and cloud growth. So it actually is about people just as much as it is about automation and technology. >>We got dev net created right around the corner, virtual unfortunate won't be in person, but we'll be virtual. Susie. Thank you for your time. We're going to dig into those people, challenges with Mandy and Eric. Thank you for coming on. I know you've got to go, but stay with us. We're going to dig in with Mandy and Eric. >>Thanks. Thank you so much. Have fun. Thanks John. >>Okay. Mandy, you heard, uh, Susie is about people and one of the things that's close to your heart and you've been driving is, uh, as senior director of dev net certifications, um, is getting people leveled up. I mean the demand for skills, cybersecurity network, programmability automation, network design solution architect, cloud multicloud design. These are new skills that are needed. Can you give us the update on what you're doing to help people get into the acceleration of automation game? >>Oh yes, absolutely. The, you know, what we've been seeing is a lot of those business drivers that Susie was mentioning, those are, what's accelerating a lot of the technology changes and that's creating new job roles or new needs on existing job roles where they need new skills. We are seeing customers, partners, people in our community really starting to look at, you know, things like DevSecOps engineer, network, automation, engineer, network, automation, developer, which Susie mentioned and looking at how these fit into their organization, the problems that they solve in their organization. And then how do people build the skills to be able to take on these new job roles or add that job role to their current scope and broaden out and take on new challenges. >>Eric, I want to go to you for a quick second on this, um, um, piece of getting the certifications. Um, first, before you get started, describe what your role is as director developer advocacy, because that's always changing and evolving. What's the state of it now because with COVID people are working at home, they have more time to contact, switch and get some certifications and that they can code more. What's your >>Absolutely. So it's interesting. It definitely is changing a lot. A lot of our historically a lot of focus for my team has been on those outward events. So going to the Devin that creates the Cisco lives and helping the community connect and to help share tech mountain technical information with them, um, doing hands on workshops and really getting people into how do you really start solving these problems? Um, so that's had to pivot quite a bit. Um, obviously Cisco live us. We pivoted very quickly to a virtual event when, when conditions changed and we're able to actually connect as we found out with a much larger audience. So, you know, as opposed to in person where you're bound by the parameters of, you know, how big the convention center is, uh, we were actually able to reach a worldwide audience with our, uh, our definite data that was kind of attached on to Cisco live. >>And we got great feedback from the audience that now we were actually able to get that same enablement out to so many more people that otherwise might not have been able to make it. Um, but to your broader question of, you know, what my team does. So that's one piece of it is getting that information out to the community. So as part of that, there's a lot of other things we do as well. We were always helping out build new sandboxes and your learning labs, things like that, that they can come and get whenever they're looking for it out on a dev net site. And then my team also looks after communities such as the Cisco learning network where this there's a huge community that has historically been there to support people working on their Cisco certifications. We've seen a huge shift now in that group, that all of the people that have been there for years are now looking at the domain certifications and helping other people that are trying to get on board with programmability. They're taking a lot of those same community enablement skills and propping up the community with, you know, helping you answer questions, helping provide content. They've moved now into the dump space as well, and are helping people with that service or what it's great seeing the community come along and really see that. Okay. >>I ask you on the trends around automation, what skills and what developer patterns are you seeing with automation? Are, is there anything in particular, obviously network automation has been around for a long time. Cisco has been leader in that, but as you move up, the stack as modern applications are building, do you see any patterns or trends around what is accelerating automation? What are people learning? >>Yeah, absolutely. So you mentioned a observability was big before COVID and we actually really saw that amplified during COVID. So a lot of people have come to us looking for insights. How can I get that better observability, uh, now that we need it? Well, we're virtual. Um, so that's actually been a huge uptake and we've seen a lot of people that weren't necessarily out looking for things before that are now figuring out how can I do this at scale? I think one good example that, uh, Susie was talking about the VPN example, and we actually had a number SES in the Cisco community that had customers dealing with that very thing where they very quickly had to ramp up. And one in particular actually wrote a bunch of automation to go out and measure all of the different parameters that it departments might care about, about their firewalls, things that you do normally look at me old days, you would size your firewalls based on, you know, assuming a certain number of people working from home. >>And when that number went to a hundred percent things like licenses started coming into play, where they needed to make sure they have the right capacity in their platforms that they weren't necessarily designed for. So one of the STDs actually wrote a bunch of code to go out, use some open source tooling, to monitor and alert on these things and then published it. So the whole community code could go out and get a copy of it, try it out their own environment. And we saw a lot of interest around that in trying to figure out, okay, now I can take that and I can adapt it to what I need to see for my observability. >>That's great. Mandy. I want to get your thoughts on this too, because as automation continues to scale, um, it's going to be a focus and people are at home and you guys had a lot of content online for you recorded every session that didn't the dev Ned zone learnings going on, sometimes linearly. And nonlinearly you got the certifications, which is great. That's key, key, great success there. People are interested, but what are the learnings? Are you seeing? What are people doing? What's the top top trends. >>Yeah. So what we're seeing is like you said, people are at home, they've got time. They want to advance their skillset. And just like any kind of learning people want choice because they want to be able to choose what's matches their time that's available and their learning style. So we're seeing some people who want to dive into full online study groups with mentors, leading them through a study plan. And we have two new, uh, expert led study groups like that. We're also seeing whole teams at different companies who want to do, uh, an immersive learning experience together, uh, with projects and office hours and things like that. And we have a new, um, offer that we've been putting together for people who want those kinds of team experiences called automation boot camp. And then we're also seeing individuals who want to be able to, you know, dive into a topic, do a hands on lab, get some skills, go to the rest of the day of do their work and then come back the next day. >>And so we have really modular self-driven hands on learning through the dev net fundamentals course, which is available through dev net. And then there's also people who are saying, I just want to use the technology. I like to experiment and then go, you know, read the instructions, read the manual, do the deeper learning. And so they're, they're spending a lot of time in our dev net sandbox, trying out different technologies, Cisco technologies with open source technologies, getting hands on and building things. And three areas where we're seeing a lot of interest in specific technologies. One is around SD wan. There's a huge interest in people skilling up there because of all the reasons that we've been talking about security is a focus area where people are dealing with new, new kinds of threats, having to deal with them in new ways and then automating their data center, using infrastructure as code type principles. So those are three areas where we're seeing a lot of interest and you'll be hearing some more about that at dev net create >>Eric and Mandy. If you guys can wrap up this accelerate automation with dev net package and a virtual event here, um, and also tee up dev net create because dev net create has been a very kind of grassroots, organically building momentum over the years. And again, it's super important cause it's now the app world coming together with networking, you know, end to end programmability and with everything as a service that you guys are doing everything with API APIs, I'm only can imagine the enablement that's gonna create. Can you share the summary real quick on accelerating automation with dev net and tee up dev net create Mandy, we'll start with you. >>Yes, I'll go first. And then Eric can close this out. Um, so just like we've been talking about with you at every Devin event over the past years, you know, damnit is bringing APIs across our whole portfolio and up and down the stack and accelerating, uh, automation with dev net. Susie mentioned the people aspect of that the people's skilling up and how that transformed teams, transforms teams. And I think that it's all connected in how businesses are being pushed on their transformation because of current events. That's also a great opportunity for people to advance their careers and take advantage of some of that quickly changing landscape. And so what I think about accelerating automation with dev net, it's about the Duveneck community. It's about people getting those new skills and all the creativity and problem solving that will be unleashed by that community. With those new skills. >>Eric take us home. He accelerating automation, dev net and dev net create a lot of developer action going on in cloud native right now, your thoughts? >>Absolutely. I think it's exciting. I mentioned the transition to virtual for Devin that day, this year for Cisco live. And we're seeing, we're able to leverage it even further with create this year. So, whereas it used to be, you know, confined by the walls that we were within for the event. Now we're actually able to do things like we're adding the start now track for people that want to be there. They want to be a developer, a network automation developer, for instance, we've now got attract just for them where they can get started and start learning. Some of the skills they'll need, even if some of the other technical sessions were a little bit deeper than what they were ready for. Um, so I love that we're able to bring that together with the experienced community that we usually do from across the industry, bringing us all kinds of innovative talks, talking about ways that they're leveraging technology, leveraging the cloud, to do new and interesting things to solve their business challenges. So I'm really excited to bring that whole mix together, as well as getting some of our business units together too, and talk straight from their engineering departments. What are they doing? What are they seeing? What are they thinking about when they're building new APIs into their platforms? What are the, what problems are they hoping >>That customers will be able to solve with them? So I think together seeing all of that and then bringing the community together from all of our usual channels. So like I said, Cisco learning network, we've got a ton of community coming together, sharing their ideas and helping each other grow those skills. I see nothing but acceleration ahead of us for automation. >>Awesome. Thanks so much. >>Can I add one, add one more thing? Yeah. I was just gonna say the other really exciting thing about create this year with the virtual nature of it is that it's happening in three regions. And, um, you know, we're so excited to see the people joining from all the different regions and, uh, content and speakers and the region stepping up to have things personalized to their area, to their community. And so that's a whole new experience for them that create that's going to be fantastic this year. >>Yeah. That's what I was going to close out and just put the final bow on that. By saying that you guys have always been successful with great content focused on the people in the community. I think now during what this virtual dev net virtual dev net create virtual, the cube virtual, I think we're learning new things. People working in teams and groups and sharing content, we're going to learn new things. We're going to try new things and ultimately people will rise up and we'll be resilient. I think when you have this kind of opportunity, it's really fun. And we'll, we'll, we'll ride the wave with you guys. So thank you so much for taking the time to come on the cube and talk about your awesome accelerating automation and dev net. Great. Looking forward to it. Thank you. >>Thank you so much. Happy to be here. >>Okay. I'm Jennifer with the cube virtual here in Palo Alto studios doing the remote content amendment virtual tour face to face. Thank you so much for watching and we'll see you at dev net create thanks for watching. >>Welcome back. And Jeffrey, >>The cube coming to you from our Palo Alto studio with ongoing coverage of the Cisco dev data van, it's called accelerating automation with dev net and the new normal. And we certainly know the new normal is, is not going away. They've been doing this since the middle of March or all the way to October. And so we're excited to have our next guest is Thomas Shively. He's the vice president of product marketing and data center networking for the intent based networking group at Cisco Thomas. Great to see you. >>Hey, good to see you too. Yeah. Yeah. Everybody can see on our background. Exactly, >>Exactly. So, I mean, I'm curious, we've talked to a lot of people. We talked to a lot of leaders, you know, especially like back in March and April with this light switch moment, which was, you know, no time to prep and suddenly everybody has to work from home. Teachers got to teach from home. And so you got the kids home, you got the spouse home, everybody's home trying to get on the network and do their zoom calls in their classes. I'm curious from your perspective, you guys are right there on the, on the network you're right in the infrastructure. What did you hear and see kind of from your customers when suddenly, you know, March 16 hit and everybody had to go home. >>Wow, good point. Hey, I do think we all appreciate the network >>Much more than we used to do before. Uh, and then the only other difference is I'm really more on WebEx calls and zoom calls, but, you know, otherwise, uh, yes. Um, what, what I do see actually is that as I said, network becomes much more operative as a critical piece. And so before we really talked a lot about, uh, agility and flexibility these days, we talk much more about resiliency quite frankly. Uh, and what do I need to have in place with respect to network to get my things from left to right. And you know, it, 2000 East to West, as we say on the data center. Right. Uh, and that just is for most of my customers, a very, very important topic at this point. >>Right. You know, it's, it's amazing to think, you know, had this happened, you know, five years ago, 10 years ago, you know, the ability for so many people in, in, in the information industry to be able to actually make that transition relatively seamlessly, uh, is, is actually pretty amazing. I'm sure there was some, some excitement and some kudos in terms of, you know, it, it is all based on the network and it is kind of this quiet thing in the background that nobody pays attention to. It's like a ref in the football game until they make a bad play. So, you know, it, it is pretty fascinating that you and your colleagues have put this infrastructure and that enabled us to really make that move with, with, with really no prep, no planning and actually have a whole lot of services delivered into our homes that we're used to getting at the office are used to getting at school. >>Yeah. And I mean, to your point, I mean, some of us did some planning, can we clearly talking about some of these, these trends and the way I look at this trans as being distributed data centers and, um, having the ability to move your workloads and access for users to wherever you want to be. And so I think that clearly went on for a while then. So in a sense, we, we, we prep was, or no, but we're prepping for it. Um, but as I said, resiliency just became so much more important than, you know, one of the things I actually do a little block, a little, little, uh, abrupt before a block I put out end of August around resiliency. Uh, you, you, if he didn't, if he didn't put this in place, you better put it in place. Because I think as we all know, we sold our match. This is like maybe two or three months, we're now in October. Um, and I sing, this is the new normal for some time being. Yeah, >>I think so. So let's stick on that theme in terms of, of trends, right? The other great, uh, trend as public cloud, um, and hybrid cloud and multi cloud, there's all types of variants on that theme you had in that blog post about, uh, resiliency in data center, cloud networking, data center cloud, you know, some people think, wait, it's, it's kind of an either, or I either got my data center or I've got my stuff in the cloud and I've got public cloud. And then as I said, hybrid cloud, you're talking really specifically about enabling, um, both inner inner data center resiliency within multi data centers within the same enterprise, as well as connecting to the cloud. That's probably counterintuitive for some people to think that that's something that Cisco is excited about and supporting. So I wonder if you can share, you know, kind of how the market is changing, how you guys are reacting and really putting the things in place to deliver customer choice. >>Yeah, no, it's actually, to me, it's really not a counterintuitive because in the end was what, uh, I'm focusing on. And the company is focused on is what our customers want to do and need to do. Uh, and that's really, um, would, you know, most people call hybrid cloud or multi-cloud, uh, in, in the end, what it is, what it is, is really the ability to have the flexibility to move your workloads where you want them to be. And there are different reasons why you want to place them, right? You might've placed them for security reasons. You might have played some compliance reasons, depending on which customer segment you after, if you're in the United States or in Europe or in Asia, there are a lot of different reasons where you're going to put your sinks. And so I sing in the end, what a, an enterprise looks for is that agility, flexibility, and resiliency. >>And so really what you want to put in place is what we call like the cloud on ramp, right? You need to have an ability to move sings as needed. But the logic context section, which we see in the last couple of months, accelerating is really this whole seam around digital transformation, uh, which goes hand in hand then was, uh, the requirement on the at T side really do. And I T operations transformation, right. How it operates. Uh, and I think that's really exciting to see, and this is where a lot of my discussions I was customers, uh, what does it actually mean with respect to the it organization and what are the operational changes? This a lot of our customers are going through quite frankly, accelerated right. Going through, >>Right. And, and automation is in the title of the event. So automation is, you know, is an increasingly important thing, you know, as the, as we know, and we hear all the time, you know, the flows of data, the complexity of the data, either on the security or the way the network's moving, or as you said, shifting workloads around, based on the dynamic situations, whether that's business security, et cetera, in a software defined networking has been around for a while. How are you seeing kind of this evolution in adding more automation, you know, to more and more processes to free up those, those, um, no kind of limited resources in terms of really skilled people to focus on the things that they should be focused on and not stuff that, that hopefully you can, you know, get a machine to run with some level of. >>Yeah. Yeah. That's a good point. And I said the tech line, I have, you know, sometimes when my mind is really going from a cloud ready, which is in most of our infrastructure is today to cloud native. And so let me a little expand on those, right? There's like the cloud ready is basically what we have put in place over the last five to six years, all the infrastructure that all our customers have, network infrastructure, all the nexus 9,000, they're all cloud ready. Right. And what this really means, do you have API APIs everywhere, right? Whether this is on the box, whether it's on the controller, whether this is on the operations tools, all of these are API enabled and that's just the foundation for automation, right? You have to have that. Now, the next step really is what do you do with that capability? >>Right? And this is the integration with a lot of automation tools, uh, and that's a whole range, right? And this is where the it operation transformation kicks in different customers at different speeds, right? Some just, you know, I use these API APIs and use NoMo tools that they have on a network world just to pull information. Some customers go for further and saying, I want to integrate this with some CMDB tools. Some go even further and saying, this is like the cloud native pleasing, Oh, I want to use, let's say red hat Ansible. I want to use, uh, how she called Terraform and use those things to actually drive how I manage my infrastructure. And so that's really the combination of the automation capability. Plus the integration with relevant cloud native enabling tools that really is happening at this point. We're seeing customers accelerating that, that motion, which really then drives us how they run their it operations. Right? And so that's a pretty exciting, exciting area to see a given. I, we have the infrastructure in place. There's no need for customers to actually do change something. Most of them have already the infrastructures that can do this. It is just no doing the operational change. The process changes to actually get there. >>Right. And it's funny, we, we recently covered, you know, PagerDuty and, and they highlight what you just talked about. The cloud native, which is, you know, all of these applications now are so interdependent on all these different API APIs, you know, pulling data from all of these applications. So a, when they work great, it's terrific. But if there's a problem, you know, there's a whole lot of potential throat to choke out there and find, find those issues. And it's all being connected via the network. So, you know, it's even more critically important, not only for the application, but for all these little tiny components within the application to deliver, you know, ultimately a customer experience within a very small units of time, uh, so that you don't lose that customer. You, you complete that transaction. They, they check out of their shopping cart. You know, all these, these things that are now created with cloud native applications that just couldn't really do before. >>No, you're absolutely right. And that's, this is like, just sit. I'm actually very excited because it opens up a lot of abilities for our customers, how they want to actually structure the operation. Right? One of the nice things around this or automation plus, uh, tool integration, cloning to, and integration is you actually opened this up, not a soul automation train, not just to the network operations personnel, right. You also open it up and can use this for the second ops person or for the dev ops person or for the cloud ops engineering team. Right. Because the way it's structured, the way we built this, um, is literally as an API interface and you can now decide, what is your process do you want to have? And what traditional, you have a request network, operation teams executes the request using these tools and then hand it back over. >>Or do you say, Hey, maybe some of these security things I got to hand over the sec ups team, and they can directly call these these KPIs, right? Or even one step further, you can have the opportunity that the dev ops or the application team actually says, Hey, I got to write a whole infrastructure as code kind of a script or template, and I just execute. Right. And it's really just using what the infrastructure provides. And so that whole range of different user roles and our customer base, what they can do with the automation capability that's available. It's just very, very exciting way because it's literally unleashes a lot of flexibility, how they want to structure and how they want to rebuild the it operations processes. >>That's interesting, you know, cause the, you know, the DevOps culture has taken over a lot, right. Obviously change software programming for the last 20 years. And I think, you know, there's a, there's a lot of just kind of the concept of dev ops versus necessarily, you know, the actual things that you do to execute that technique. And I don't think most people would think of, you know, network ops or, you know, net ops, you know, whatever the equivalent is in the networking world to have, you know, kind of a fast changing dynamic, uh, kind of point of view versus a, you know, stick it in, you know, spec it, stick it in, lock it down. So I wonder if you can, you can share how, you know, kind of that dev ops, um, attitude point of view, workflow, whatever the right verb is, has impacted, you know, things at Cisco and the way you guys think about networking and flexibility within the networking world. >>Yeah, literally, absolutely. And again, it's all customer driven, right? There's none of those. None of those is really actually, you know, a little bit of credit, maybe some of us where we have a vision, but a lot of it is just customer driven feedback. Uh, and yeah, we, we do have network operations teams comes to saying, Hey, we use Ansible heavily on the compute side, we might use this for alpha seven. We want to use the same for networking. And so we made available all these integrations, uh, with sobriety as a state, whether these are the switches, whether these are ACI decent, a controller or our multicell orchestration capabilities, all of these has Ansible integration the way to the right. Uh, the other one, as I mentioned, that how she formed Turco Terraform, we have integrations available and they see the requests for these tools to use that. >>Uh, and so that is emotion where in for all the, you know, and, uh, another block actually does out there, we just posted saying, Neil, all set what you can do and then a Palo to this, right. Just making the integration available. We also have a very, very heavy focus on definite and enablement and training, uh, and you know, a little plugin. I know, uh, probably, uh, part of the segment, the whole definite community that Cisco has is very, very vibrant. Uh, and the beauty of this is right. If you look at us, whether you're a NetApps person or dev ops person or SecOps person, it doesn't really matter. It has a lot of like capability available to just help you get going or go from one level to the next level. Right. And it's simplest thing that like sent books and why moments where you can, we know what's out stress, try sinks out snippets of code Coda there, you can do all of these things. And so we do see it's a kind of a push and pull a tremendous amount of interest and a tremendous, uh, uh, time people spend to learn quite frankly. And that's another site product of, of, you know, the situation we're in and people said, Oh man, and say, okay, online learning, that's the thing. So these, these, these tools are used very, very heavily. Right, >>Right. That's awesome. Cause you know, we've, we've had Susie Lee on a number of times and I know he and Mandy and the team really built this dev net thing. And it really follows along this other theme that we see consistently across other pieces of tech, which is democratization, right. Democratization of the access tool, taking it out of, of just a mahogany row with, again, a really limited number of people that know how to make it work and can make the changes and then opening up to a software defined world where now that the, you know, the, it says application centric, point of view, where the people that are building the apps to go create competitive advantage. Now don't have to wait for, you know, the one network person to help them out out of these environments. Really interesting. And I wonder if, you know, when you look at what's happening with public cloud and how they kind of change the buying parameter, how they kind of changed the degree of difficulty to get projects started, you know, how you guys have kind of integrated that, that type of thought process to make it easier for app developers to get their job done. >>Yeah. I mean, again, it's, it's, uh, I typically look at this more from a, from a customer lands, right? It's the transformation process and it always starts as I want agility. I want flexibility. I want to resiliency, right. This is where we talk to a business owner, what they're looking for. And then that translates into, into an I operations process, right? Your strategy needs to map then how you actually do this. Uh, and that just drives then what tools do you want to have available to actually enable this? Right. And the enablement again is for different roles, right? There is you need to give sync services to the app developer and, uh, the, the platform team and the security team, right. To your point. So the network, uh, can act at the same speed, but you also give to us to the network operations teams because they need to, uh, adjust. >>Then they have the ability to react to, uh, to some of these requirements. Right. And it's not just automation. I say, we, we, we focused on that, but there's also to your point, the, the need, how do I extend between data centers? You know, just, just for backup and recovery and how do I extend into, into public clouds, right? Uh, and in the end, that's a, that's a network connectivity problem. Uh, and we have soft as, uh, we have made as available. We have integrations into, uh, AWS. We have integrations into a joy to actually make this very easy from a, from a network perspective to extend your private, private networks into which of private networks on these public clouds. So from an app development perspective, now it looks like he's on the same network. It's a protective enterprise network. Some of it might sit here. >>Some of it might sit here, but it's really looking the same. And that's really in the enticing, what a business looks at, right. They don't necessarily want to say, I need to have something separate for this deployment. What's a separate for that deployment. What they want is I need to deploy something. I need to do this resilient. And the resilient way in an agile way gives me the tools. And so that's really where we focused, um, and what we're driving, right? It's that combination of automation consistently, and then definite tools, uh, available that we support. Uh, but they're all open. Uh, they're all standard tools as the ones I mentioned, right. That everybody's using. So I'm not getting into this. Oh, this is specific to Cisco, right. It's really democratisation. I actually liked your term. Yeah. >>Yeah. It's, it's a great terminate. And it's, it's really interesting, especially with, with the API APIs and the way everything is so tied together that everyone kind of has to enable this because that's what the customer is demanding. Um, and it is all about the applications and the workloads and where those things are moving, but they don't really want to manage that. They just want to, you know, deliver business benefit to their customers and respond to, uh, you know, competitive threats in the marketplace, et cetera. So it's really an interesting time for the infrastructure, you know, to really support kind of this app first point of view, uh, versus the other way around is kind of what it used to be and, and enable this hyper fast development hyper fast, uh, change in, in, in the competitive landscape or else you will be left behind. Um, so super important stuff. >>Yeah, no, I totally agree. And as I said, I mean, it's, it's kind of interesting is we, we started on the Cisco data center side. We started this probably six or seven years ago. Uh, when we, when we named the application centric, uh, clearly a lot of these concepts evolve, uh, but in a sense it is that reversal of the role from the network provides something and you use to, uh, this is what I want to do. And I need a service, uh, thinking on a networking side to expose. So as that can be consumed. And so that clearly is playing out. Um, and as I said, automation is a key key foundation that we put in place, uh, and our customers, most of our customers at this point, uh, on these, on these products, uh, they have all the capabilities they are, they can literally take advantage. There's really nothing that stops them point. >>Well, it's good times for you because I'm sure you've seen all the memes and in social media, right. What what's driving your digital transformation is that the CEO, the CMO or COVID, and we all know the answer to the question. So I don't think the, the pace of change is going to slow down anytime soon. So keeping the network up and enabling us all to get done, what we have to get done and all the little magic that happens behind the scenes. >>Yeah. No thanks. Thanks for having me. And again, yeah. If you're listening and you're wondering, how do I get started Cisco? Definitely just the place to go. It's fantastic. Fantastic. I highly recommend everybody roll up his sleeves and you know, the best races you can have. >>And we know once the physical events come back, we've been to dev net create a bunch of times, and it's a super vibrant, super excited, but really engaged community sharing. Lots of information is kind of, it's still kind of that early vibe, you know, where everyone is still really enthusiastic and really about learning and sharing information. So, you know, like say Susie and the team are really built a great thing, and we're a, we're happy to continue to cover it. And eventually we'll be back, uh, face to face. I look forward to that as well. All right, thanks. Uh, he's Thomas I'm Jeff, you're watching continuing coverage of Cisco dev net accelerating with automation and programmability >>Kia. Nini is here. He's a distinguished engineer at Cisco TK, my friend. Good to see you again. How are you? Good. I mean, you and I were in Barcelona in January and, you know, we knew we saw this thing coming, but we didn't see it coming this way. Did we know that no one did, but yeah, that was right before everything happened. Well, it's weird. Right? I mean, we were, you know, we, we, it was in the back of our minds in January, we sort of had Barcelona's hasn't really been hit yet. It looked like it was really isolated in China, but, uh, but wow, what a change and I guess, I guess I'd say I'd start with the, we're seeing really a secular change in, in your space and security identity, access management, cloud security, endpoint security. I mean, all of a sudden these things explode as the work from home pivot has occurred, and it feels like these changes are permanent or semi-permanent, what are you seeing out there? >>I don't think anybody thinks the world's going to go back the way it was. Um, to some degree it's, it's changed forever. Um, you know, I, I, I do a lot of my work remotely. Um, and, and so, you know, being a remote worker, isn't such a big deal for me, but for some, it was a huge impact. And like I said, you know, um, remote education, you know, everybody's on the opposite side of a computer. And so the digital infrastructure has just become a lot more important to protect the integrity of it essentially is almost our own integrity these days. Yeah. And when you see that, you know, that work from home pivot, I mean, you know, our estimates are, or along with our partner, DTR about 16% of the workforce was at home working from home prior to COVID and now it's know, North of 70% >>Plus, and that's going to come down maybe a little bit over the next, next six months. We'll see what happens with the fall surge, but, but people essentially accept, expect that to at least double that 16%, you know, going forward indefinitely. So how, what does that, what kind of pressure does that put on the security infrastructure and how, how organizations are approaching security? >>Yeah, I, I just think, uh, from a mindset standpoint, you know, what was optional, uh, maybe, um, last year, uh, is no longer optional and I don't think it's going to go back. Um, I think, I think a lot of people, uh, have changed the way, you know, they live and the way they work. Um, and they're doing it in ways, hopefully that, you know, in some cases, uh, yield more productivity, um, again, um, you know, usually with technology that's severely effective, it doesn't pick sides. So the security slant to it is it frankly works just as well for the bad guys. And so that's, that's the balance we need to keep, which is we need to be extra diligent, uh, on how we go about securing infrastructure, uh, how we go about securing even our, our social channels, because remember all our social channels now are digital. So that's, that's become the new norm. >>You know, you've helped me understand over the years. I remember a line you shared with me in the cube one time is that the adversary is highly capable as sort of the, of the phrase that you used. And, and essentially the way you describe it, as you know, your job as a security practitioner is to decrease the bad guy's return on investment, you know, increase their costs, increase the numerator, but as, as work shifts from home, yeah, I'm in my house, you know, my wifi in my, you know, router with my, you know, dog's name is the password, you know, it's much, much harder for me to, to increase that denominator at home. So can you help? >>Yeah. I mean, it's, it is, it is truly, um, when you think, when you get into the mind of the adversary and, and, uh, you know, the cyber crime out there, they're honestly just like any other business they're trying to operate with high margin. And so if you can get there, if you can get in there and erode their margin, frankly go find something else to do. Um, and, and again, you know, you know, the shift we experienced day to day is it's not just our kids are online in school and, uh, our work is online, but all of the groceries we order, um, you know, this Thanksgiving and holiday season, uh, a lot more online shopping is going to place. So everything's gone digital. And so the question is, you know, how, how do we up our game there so that we can go about our business, uh, effectively. And I make it very expensive for the adversary to operate, uh, and take care of their business. Cause it's nasty stuff. >>I want to ask you about automation generally, and then specifically how it applies to security. So we, I mean, we certainly saw the ascendancy of the hyperscalers and of course they really attacked the it labor problem. We learned a lot from that and an it organizations have applied much of that thinking. And it's critical at scale. I mean, you just can't scale humans at the pace, the technology scales today, how does that apply to security and specifically, how is automation affecting security? >>Yeah, it's, it's, it's the topic these days. Um, you know, businesses, I think, realize that they can't continue to grow at human scale. And so the reason why automation and things like AI and machine learning have a lot of value is because everyone's trying to expand, uh, and operate at machine scale. Now, I mean that for, for businesses, I mean that for, you know, education and everything else now, so are the adversaries, right? So it's expensive for them to operate at Cuban scale and they are going to machine scale, going to machine scale, uh, a necessity is that you're going to have to harness some level of automation, have the machines, uh, work on your behalf, have the machines carry your intent. Um, and when you do that, um, you can do it safely or you could do it dangerously. And that that's really kind of your choice. Um, you know, just because you can automate something doesn't mean you should, um, you, you wanna make sure that frankly, the adversary can't get in there and use that automation on their behalf. So it's, it's a tricky thing because, you know, if, when you take the phrase, you know, uh, how do we, how do we automate security? Well, you actually have to, uh, take care of, of securing the automation first. >>Yeah. We talked about this in Barcelona, where you were explaining that, you know, the, the bad guys, the adversaries are essentially, you know, weaponizing using your own tooling, which makes them appear safe because it's, they're hiding in plain sight. >>Well, there's, they're clever, uh, give them that, um, you know, that there's this phrase that they, they always talk about called living off the land. Um, there's no sense in them coming into your network and bringing their tools and, uh, and being detective, you know, if they can use the tools that's already there, then, uh, they have a higher degree of, of evading, uh, your protection. If they can pose as Alice or Bob, who's already been credentialed and move around your network, then they're moving around the network as Alice or Bob. They're not marked as the adversary. So again, you know, having the detection methods available to find their behavior anomalies and things like that become a paramount, but also, you know, having the automation to contain them, to eradicate them, to, you know, minimize their effectiveness, um, without it, I mean, ideally without human interaction, cause you, you just, can you move faster, you move quicker. Um, and I, I see that with an asterisk because, um, if, if done wrong, frankly, um, you're just making their job more effective. >>I wonder if we could talk about the market a little bit, uh, it's I'm in the security space, cybersecurity 80 plus billion, which by the way, is just a little infant Tessa mill component of our GDP. So we're not spending nearly enough to protect that massive, uh, GDP, but guys, I wonder if you could bring up the chart because when you talk to CSOs and you ask them, what's your, what's your biggest challenge? Let's say lack of talent. And, and so what this chart shows is from ETR, our, our, our survey partner and on the vertical axis is net score. And that's an indication of spending momentum on the horizontal axis is market share, which is a measure of presence, a pervasiveness, if you will, inside the data sets. And so there's a couple of key points here. I wanted to put forth to our audience and then get your reactions. >>So you can see Cisco, I highlighted in red, Cisco is business and security is very, very strong. We see it every quarter. It's a growth area that Chuck Robbins talks about on the, on the conference call. And so you can see on the horizontal axis, you've got, you know, big presence in the data set. I mean, Microsoft is out there, but they're everywhere, but you're right there in that, in that data set. And then you've got for such a large presence, you've got a lot of momentum in the marketplace, so that's very impressive. But the other point here is you've got this huge buffet of options. There's just a zillion vendors here. And that just adds to the complexity. This is of course only a subset of what's in the security space. You know, the people who answered for the survey. So my question is how can Cisco help simplify this picture? Is it automation? Is it, you know, you guys have done some really interesting tuck in acquisitions and you're bringing that integration together. Can you talk about that a little bit? >>Yeah. I mean, that's an impressive chart. I mean, when you look to the left there it's, um, I had a customer tell me once that, you know, I came to this trade show, looking for transportation, and these people are trying to sell me car parts. Um, that's the frustration customers have, you know, and I think what Cisco has done really well is to really focus on the outcomes. Um, what is the customer outcome? Cause ultimately that's, that is what the customer wants. You know, there might be a few steps to get to that outcome, but the closest you can closer, you can get to delivering outcomes for the customer, the better you are. And I think, I think security in general has just year over year have been just written with, um, you need to be an expert. Um, you need to buy all these parts and put it together yourself. And, and I think, I think those days are behind us, but particularly as, as security becomes more pervasive and we're, you know, we're selling to the business, we're not selling to the, you know, t-shirt wearing hacker anymore. >>Yeah. So, well, well, how does cloud fit in here? Because I think there's a lot of misconceptions about cloud people that God put my data in the cloud I'm safe, but you know, of course we know it's a shared responsibility model. So I'm interested in your, your thoughts on that. Is it really, is it a sense of complacency? A lot of the cloud vendors, by the way, say, Oh, the state of security is great in the cloud. Whereas many of us out there saying, wow, it's, it's not so great. Uh, so what are your thoughts on that, that whole narrative and what Cisco's play in, in cloud? >>I think cloud, um, when you look at the services that are delivered via the cloud, you see that exact pattern, which is you see customers paying for the outcome or as close to the outcome as possible. Um, you know, no, no data center required, no disk drive required, you just get storage, you know, it's, it's, it's all of those things that are again, closer to the outcome. I think the thing that interests me about cloud two is it's really been, it's really punctuated the way we go about building systems. Um, again, at machine scale. So, you know, before, when I write code and I think about what computers are gonna run on, or, you know, what servers are going to is you're going to run on those. Those thoughts never crossed my mind anymore. You know, I'm modeling the intent of what the service should do and the machines then figure it out. So, you know, for instance, on Tuesday, if the entire internet shows up, uh, the, the system works without fail. And if on Wednesday, if only North America shows up, you know, so what, but, but there's no way you could staff that, right? There's just no human scale approach that gets you there. And that's, that's the beauty of all of this cloud stuff is, um, it really is, uh, the next level of how we computer science. >>So you're talking about infrastructure as code and that applies to, you know, security as code. That's what, you know, dev net is really all about. I've said many times, I think Cisco of the, the large established enterprise companies is one of the few, if not the only, that really has figured out, you know, that developer angle, because it's practical do, you're not trying to force your way into developers, but, you know, I wonder if you could, you could talk a little bit about that trend and where you see it going. >>Yeah, no, that is, that is truly the trend. Every time I walk into dev net, um, the big halls at Cisco live, it is Cisco as code. Um, everything about Cisco is being presented through an API. It is automation ready. And, and frankly, that is, um, that is the love language of the cloud. Um, it's it's machines, if the machines talking to machines in very effective ways. So, you know, it is the, the, uh, I, I think, I think necessary, maybe not sufficient but necessary for, um, you know, doing all the machine scale stuff. What what's also necessary, uh, is to, um, to secure if, if infrastructure is code therefore, um, what, what secure, uh, what security methodologies do we have today that we use to secure code while we have automated testing, we have threat modeling, right? Those things actually have to be now applied to infrastructure. So when I, when I talk about how do you do, uh, automation securely, you do it the same way you secure your code, you test it, you, you threaten model, you, you, you say, you know, Ken, my adversary, uh, exhibit something here that drives the automation in a way that I didn't intend it to go. Um, so all of those practices apply. It's just, everything is code these days. >>I've often said that security and privacy are sort of two sides of the same coin. And I want to ask you a question and it's really, to me, it's not necessarily Cisco and company likes companies like Cisco's responsibility, but I wonder if there's a way in which you can help. And of course, there's this Netflix documentary circling around the social dilemma. I don't know if you have a chance to see it, but basically dramatize is the way in which companies are appropriating our data to sell us ads and, you know, creating our own little set of facts, et cetera. And that comes down to sort of how we think about privacy and admin. It's good from the standpoint of awareness, you know, you may or may not care if you're a social media user. I love tick doc. I don't care, but they sort of laid out this pretty scary scenario with a lot of the inventors of those technologies. You have any thoughts on that? And you'll consist go play a role there in terms of protecting our privacy mean beyond GDPR and California consumer privacy act. Um, what do you think? >>Yeah. Um, uh, I'll give you my, you know, my humble opinion is you, you fix social problems with social tools, you fixed technology problems with technology tools. Um, I think there is a social problem. Um, uh, that needs to be rectified the, you know, um, we, we, weren't built as human beings to live and interact with an environment that agrees with us all the time. It's just pretty wrong. So yeah, that, that, that, um, that series that really kind of wake up a lot of people it is, is, you know, it's probably every day I hear somebody asked me if I, I saw, um, but I do think it also, you know, with that level of awareness, I think we, we overcome it or we compensate by what number one, just being aware that it's happening. Um, number two, you know, how you go about solving it, I think maybe come down to an individual or even a community's, um, solution and what might be right for one community might be, you know, not the same for the other. So you have to be respectful in that manner. >>Yeah. So it's, it's, it's almost, I think if I could, you know, play back, what I heard is, is yeah. Technology, you know, maybe got us into this problem, but technology alone is not going to get us out of the problem. It's not like some magic AI bot is going to solve this. It's got to be, you know, society has to really, really take this on as your premise. >>When I, when I first started playing online games, I'm going back to, you know, the text based adventure stuff like muds and Mose. I did a talk at, at MIT one time and, um, this old curmudgeon in the back of the room, um, we were talking about democracy and we were talking about, you know, the social processes that we had modeled in our game and this and that. And this guy just gave us the SmackDown. He needs to be walked up to the front of the room and said, you know, all you techies, you judge efficiency by how long it takes. He says, democracy is a completely the opposite, which is you need to sleep on it. In fact, you shouldn't be scared if somebody can decide in a minute, what is good for the community? It, two weeks later, they probably have a better idea of what's good for the community. So it almost has the opposite dynamic. And that was super interesting to me, >>Really interesting, you know, you read the, like the, the Lincoln historians and he was criticized in the day for having taken so long, you know, to make certain decisions, but, you know, ultimately when he acted acted with, with confidence. Um, so to that point, but, um, so what, what else are you working on these days that, uh, that are, that is, is interesting that maybe you want to share with our audience? Anything that's really super exciting for you or are you >>Yeah. You know, generally speaking, um, try not try and make it a little harder for the bad guys to operate. I guess that's a general theme making it simpler for the common person to use, uh, tools. Um, again, you know, all of these security tools, no matter how fancy it is, it's not that we're losing the complexity, it's that we're moving the complexity away from the user so that they can drive at human scale. And we can do things at machine scale and kind of working those two together is sort of the, the, the magic recipe. Um, it's, it's not easy, but, um, but it is, it is fun. So that's, that's what keeps me engaged. >>I'm definitely seeing, I wonder if you see it as just sort of a, obviously a heightened organization awareness, but I'm also seeing shifts in the organizational structures. You know, the, you know, it used to be a sec ops team and an Island. Okay, it's your problem? You know, the, the, the CSO cannot report into the, to the CIO because that's like the Fox in the hen house, a lot of those structures are, are, are changing. It seems, and be becoming a, this responsibility is coming much more ubiquitous across the organization. What are you seeing there? And what are you? >>And it's so familiar to me because, you know, um, I, I started out as a musician. So, you know, bands bands are a great analogy. You know, you play bass, I big guitar. You know, somebody else plays drums, everybody knows their role and you create something that's larger than the sum of all parts. And so that, that analogy I think, is coming to, you know, we, we saw it sort of with dev ops where, you know, the developer, doesn't just throw their coat over the wall and it's somebody else's problem. They move together as a band. And, and that's what I think, um, organizations are seeing is that, you know, why, why stop there? Why not include marketing? Why not include sales? Why don't we move together as a business? Not just here's the product and here's the rest of the business. That's, that's, that's pretty awesome. Um, I think, uh, we see a lot of those patterns, uh, particularly for the highly high performance businesses. >>You know, in fact, it's interesting, you have great analogy by the way. And you actually see in that within Cisco, you're seeing sort of a, and I know sometimes you guys don't like to talk about the plumbing, but I think it matters. I mean, you've got a leadership structure now. I I've talked to many of them. They seem to really be more focused on how their connect connecting, you know, across organizations. And it's increasingly critical in this world of, you know, of silo busters. Isn't it? >>Yeah, no, I mean, you almost, as, as you move further and further away, you know, you can see how ridiculous it was before it would be like acquiring the band and say, okay, all your guitar players go over here. All your bass players go over there. Like what happened to the band? That's what I'm talking about is, you know, moving all of those disciplines, moving together and servicing the same backlog and achieving the same successes together is just so awesome. Well, I, I always feel better after talking to you. You know, I remember I remember art. Coviello used to put out his letter every year and I was reading. I'd get depressed. We spend all this money now we're less secure. But when I talked to you TK, I feel like much more optimistic. So I really appreciate the time you spend on the cube. It's, it's awesome to have you as a guest. I love these, I love these sessions. So things thanks for inviting me and I miss you, you know, hopefully, you know, next year we can get together at some of the Cisco shows or other shows, but be well and stay weird. Like the sign says kidney, thanks so much for coming to the Q. We, uh, we really appreciate it. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volante. We've right back with our next guest. This short break, >>After the cubes coverage, just to keep virtuals coverage of dev net create virtual. We're not face to face the cubes been there with dev net and dev net create. Since the beginning, dev net create was really a part of the dev net community. Looking out at the external market outside of Cisco, which essentially is the cloud native world, which is going mainstream. We've got a great guest here. Who's, who's been the company's been on the cube. Many times. We've been talking to them recently acquired by Cisco thousand eyes. We have Joe Vaccaro is beast vice president of product. Uh, Joe, welcome to the cube. Thanks for coming on. Great. And thanks for having me. You have the keys to the kingdom, you, the vice president of product, which means you get to look inside and you get to look outside, figure it all out, uh, make everything run on thousand eyes. >>You guys have been finding common language, uh, across multiple layers of network intelligence, external services. This is the heart of what we're seeing in innovation with multi-cloud microservices, cloud native. This is really a hot area it's converged in multiple theaters and technology. Super important. I want to get into that with you, but first thousand eyes is recently acquired by Cisco, um, big acquisition, uh, super important, the new CEO of Cisco, very clear API, everything we're seeing that come out. That's a big theme at dev net create the ecosystem of Cisco's going outside their own, you know, their, their walls outside of the Cisco network operators, network engineers. We're talking to developers talking programmability. This is the big theme. What's it like at Cisco? Tell us, honestly, the COVID hits. You get acquired by Cisco, tell us what's happening. >>Yeah, it's really been an exciting six months for the entire team and customers, >>You know, as we all kind of shifted to the new normal of working from home. And I think, you know, that change alone really kind of amplified. Even some of the fundamental beliefs that we have as a company that you know, cloud is becoming the new data center or customers that Indra internet has become the new network and the new enterprise network backbone. And that SAS has really become the new application stack. And as you think about these last six months, those fundamental truths have never been more evident as we rely upon the cloud to be able to, to work as we rely upon our own home networks and the internet in order to be productive. And as we access more sized applications on a daily basis. And as you think about those fundamental truths, what's common across all of them is that you rely upon them now more than ever, not only to run your business, but to any of your employees would be productive, but you don't own them. And if you don't own them, then you lack the ability in a traditional way to be able to understand that digital experience. And I think that's ultimately what, what thousand eyes is trying to solve for. And I think it's really being amplified in really these last six months. >>Talk about the Cova dynamic because I think it highlighted and certainly accelerated digital transformation, but specifically exposes opportunities, challenges, weaknesses, I've talked to many CXOs CSOs. Uh, sec security is huge. Um, the home of the conference book talk track we'll get to in a second, but it exposes what's worth doubling down on what to abandoned from a project standpoint, as people start to look at their priorities, they're going, Hey, we got to have a connected experience. We got to have security. People are working at home. No one has VPNs at home. VPNs are passe. Maybe it's SD when maybe it's something else they're on a backbone. They're connecting to the internet, a lot of different diversity in connections. At the same time, you got a ton of modern apps running for these networks. This is a huge issue. COVID is exposed this at scale. What's your view on this? And what is thousand eyes thinking about this? >>You know, if you think about the kind of legacy application delivery, it went from largely users in an office connected over, say a dedicated corporate network, largely to traditional say internal hosted applications. And that was a early, simple, uh, connectivity bath. And as you mentioned, we've seen amplifications in terms of the diversity from the users. So users are not in the office. Now they're connected in distributed disparate locations that are dynamically changing. And you think that how they're getting to that application, they're going across a really complex service chain of different network services that are working together across as public internet backbone will totally to land them on an application. And then those applications themselves are becoming now, as you mentioned, distributed largely based upon a microservices architecture and increasing their own dependence upon third party sample size applications to fulfill say, functions of that application, those three things together. >>Ultimately you're creating that level level of complex service chain that really makes it difficult to understand the digital experience and ultimately the it organization newly chartered with not just delivering the infrastructure, but delivering the right experience. And you then have a way to be able to see, to gain that visibility, that experience, you know, to measure it and understand, and to provide that intelligence and then ultimately to act on it, to be able to ensure that your employees, as well as your customers are getting the right overall, um, approach to being able to leverage those assets. >>It's funny, you know, as you get into some of these high-scale environments, a lot of these concepts are converging. You know, we had terms like automation, self healing networks. Um, you mentioned microservices early, you mentioned data at the clouds, the new data center, uh, or when's the new land. However, we're going to look at it. It's a whole different architecture. So I want to get your thoughts on, on the automation piece of networking and internet outages, for instance, um, because when you, you know, there's so many outages going up and down, it is like, uh, catching, looking for a needle in a haystack, right. So, um, we've had this conversation with you guys on the cube before, how does automation occur when you guys look at those kinds of things? Uh, what's important to look at, can you comment on and react to, you know, the internet outages and how you find resolve those? >>Yeah. It's um, it was really great. And as you mentioned, automation really in a place that a key, when you think about the, just a broad problem that it is trying to drive and, you know, from our lens, we look at it in really three ways. First off is you have to be able to gain the level of visibility from where it matters and be able to, to test and be able to provide that level of active measurements across the, the type of ways you want to be able to inspect the network. But then also from the right vantage points, you want to inspect it. But what we talk about right inside, you know, data, um, alone, doesn't solve that problem. As you mentioned, that needle in the haystack, you know, data just provides the raw metrics that are screaming across the screen. You have to then enable that data to provide meeting. >>You need to enable that data become intelligent. And that intelligence comes through the automation of being able to process that data very quickly, allow you to be able to see the unseen, to allow you to be able to quickly understand the issues that are happening across this digital supply chain to identify issues that are even happening outside of your own control across the public internet. And then the last step of automation really comes in the form of the action, right? How do you enable that intelligence to be put, to use? How do you enable that intelligence to then drive across the rest of your it workflow as well as to be able to be used as a signaling engine, to be able to then make the fundamental changes back at the network fabric, whether that is a dressing or modifying your BGB pairing, that we see happen within our customers using thousand eyes data, to be able to route around major internet outages that we've seen over the past six months, or to be able to then that data, to be able to optimize the ultimate experience that they're delivering to both our customers, as well as our employees, >>Classic policy based activity, taking it to a whole nother level. I got to get your thoughts on the employees working at home. Okay. Because, um, you know, most it, people are like, Oh yeah, we're going to forecast in cases of disruption or a hurricane or a flood or hurricane Sandy, but now with COVID, everyone's working at home. So who would have forecasted a hundred percent, um, you know, work from home, which puts a lot of pressure on him, everything. So I got to ask you, now that employees are working at home, how do you tie network visibility to the actual user experience? >>Yeah, that's a great question. As you, you know, we saw it within our own customer base, you know, when COVID head and we saw this rise of work from home, it teams were really scrambling and said, okay, I have to light up this, say VPN infrastructure, or I need to now be able to support my users in a work from home situation where I don't control the corporate network. In essence, now you have essentially thousands. Every employee is acting across their own corporate network and people were then using thousand eyes in different ways to be able to monitor their CTPs infrastructure across, back into the corporate network, as well as in using our thousand eyes end point agents that runs on a local, a user's laptop or machine in their home to help you to be able to gain that visibility down to that last mile of connectivity. >>Because when a user calls up support and says, I'm having trouble say accessing my application, whether that's Salesforce or something else, what ultimately might be causing that issue might not necessarily be a Salesforce issue, right? It could be the device in the device performance in terms of CPU, memory utilization. It could be the wifi and the signal quality within your wifi network. It could be your access point. It could be your raw, local home router. It can be your local ISP. It could be the path that you're taking ultimately to your corporate network or that application. There's so many places that could go wrong that are now difficult to be able to see, unless you have the ability to see comprehensively from the user to the application, and to be able to understand that full end to end path, >>You know, it teams have also been disrupted. They've been on offsite prop off property as well, but you've got the cloud. How has your technology helped the it teams? Can you give some examples there? Um, >>Yeah, a great way is, you know, how people use thousand eyes as part of that data sharing ecosystem. Again, that notion of how do you go from visibility to intelligence action and where in the past you might be able as an it administrator to walk over to their network team and say, Hey, can you take a look at what I'm seeing now? That's no longer available. So how do you be able to work efficiently as the United organization? You know, we think a thousand eyes in how our customers are using us a thousand times becomes a common operating language that allows them to be able to analyze across from the application down into the underlying infrastructure, through those different layers of the network what's happening. And where do you need to focus your attention? And then furthermore, with 10,000 eyes in terms of a need, enabling that data sharing ecosystem, leveraging our share link capability really gives them the ability to say, you know, what, here's what I'm seeing and be able to send that to anybody within the it organization. But it goes even further and many times in recent times, as well as over the course of people using thousand eyes, they take those share links and actually send them to their external providers because they're not just looking to resolve issues within their own it organization. They're having to work collaboratively with a different ISP. If they're pairing with, with their cloud providers that they're appearing, uh, they're leveraging, or the SAS applications that are part of that core dependency of how they deliver their experience. >>I asked you the question, we think about levels of visibility and making the lives easier for it. Teams. Um, you see a lot of benefits with thousand eyes. You pointed out a few of them just got to ask you the question. So if I'm an it person I'm in the trenches, are you guys have, uh, an aspirin or a vitamin or both? Can you give an example because there's a lot of pain point out there. So yeah. Give me a cup, a couple Advils and aspirins, but also you're an enabler to the new things are evolving. You pointed out some use case. You talk about the difference between where you're helping people pain points and also enabling them be successful for it teams. >>Yeah, that's a great analogy. You're thinking it, like you said, it definitely sits on both sides of that spectrum, you know, thousand eyes is the trusted tool, the source of truth for it. Organizations when issues are happening as their alarm bells are ringing, as they are generating the, um, the different, uh, on call, uh, to be able to jump into a war situation thousand eyes is that trusted source of truth. Allow them to focus, to be able to resolve that issue in the heat of the moment. But that was a nice also when we think about baselining, your experience, what's important is not understanding that experience at that moment at time, but also how that's deviated over time. And so by leveraging thousand eyes on a continuous basis, it gives you that ability to see the history of that experience, to understand how your network is changing is as you mentioned, networks are constantly evolving, right? >>The internet itself is constantly changing. It's an organic system, and you need to be able to understand not only what are the metrics that are moving out of your bounds, but then what is potentially the cause of that as a network has evolved. And then furthermore, you can be begin to use that as you mentioned, in terms of your vitamin type of an analogy, to be able to understand the health of your system over time on a baseline basis so that you can begin to, uh, be able to ensure its success in a great way to really kind of bring that to light. As people using say, thousand eyes as part of the same se land-based rollout, where you're looking to say benchmark, and you can confidence as you look to scale out in either, you know, benchmarking different ESPs within that, I feel like connectivity for as you look to ensure a level of success with a single branch, give you that competence to then scale out to the rest of your organization. >>That's great insights. The classic financial model ROI got baseline and upside, right? You got handle the baseline as you pointed out, and the upside music experience connectivity, you know, application performance, which drives revenue, et cetera. So great point. Great insight, Joe. Thank you so much for that insight. It's got a final question for you. I want to just riff a little bit with you on the industry. A lot of us have been having debates about automation and who doesn't, who doesn't love automation. Automation is awesome, right? Automate things, but as the trend starts going on, as everything is a service or X, a S as it's called, certainly Cisco's going down that road. Talk about your view about the difference between automation and everything is a service because at the end of the day, everything will be a service, but without automation, you really can't have services, right? So, you know, automation, automation, automation, great, great drum to bang all day long, but then also you got the same business side saying as a service, as a service, pushing that into the products, it means not trivial. Talk about, talk about how you look at automation and everything as a service and the relationship and interplay between those two concepts. >>Yeah. Ultimately I think about in terms of what is the problem that the business is trying to solve in ultimately, what is the deal that they're trying to face? And in many ways, right, they're being exploded with increase of data that needs, they need to be able to not only process and gather, but then be able to then make use of, and then from that, as we mentioned, once you've processed that data and you've said, gather the insights from it. You need to be able to then act on that data. And automation plays a key role of allowing you to be able to then put that through your workflow. Because again, as that, it experience becomes even more complex as more and more services get put into that digital supply chain. As you adopt say increased complexity within your infrastructure, by moving to a multicloud architecture where you look to increase the number of say, network services that you're leveraging across that digital experience. >>Ultimately you need with the level of automation, you'll be able to see outside of your own vantage point. You need to be able to look at the problem from as broad of a, a broad of a way as possible. And, you know, data and automation allows you to be able to do what is fundamentally difficult to do from a very narrow point of view, in terms of the visibility you gather intelligence you generate, and then ultimately, how do you act on that data as quick as possible to be able to provide the value of what you're looking for. >>It's like a feature it's under the hood. The feature of everything comes to the surface is automation, data, machine learning, all the goodness in the software. I mean, that's really kind of what we're talking about here. Isn't it a final question for you as we wrap up, uh, dev net create really, again, is going beyond Cisco's dev net community going into the industry ecosystem where developers are there. Um, these are folks that want infrastructure as code. They want network as code. So network programmability, huge topic. We've been having that conversation, uh, with Cisco and others throughout the industry for the past three years. What's your message to developers out there that are watching this who say, Hey, I just want to develop code. Like I want, you know, you guys got that. That was nice. Thanks so much. You know, you take care of that. I just want to write code. What's your message to those folks out there who want to tap some of these new services, these new automation, these new capabilities, what's your message. >>And ultimately, I think, you know, when you're looking at thousand eyes, um, you know, from a fraud perspective, you know, we try to build our product in an API first model to allow you to be able to then shift left of how you think about that overall experience. And from a developer standpoint, you know, what I'd say is, is that while you're developing in your silo, you're going to be part of a larger ultimate system. In your experience you deliver within your application is now going to be dependent upon not only the infrastructure that's running upon, but the network it's connected to, and then ultimately the user in the sense of that user and by leveraging that thousand eyes and being able to then integrate thousand into how you think closely on that experience, that's going to help ensure that ultimately the application experience that the developer's looking to deliver meets that objective. And I think what I would say is, you know, while you need to focus on your, uh, your role as a developer, having the understanding of how you fit into the larger ecosystem and what the reality of the, of how your users access that application is critical. >>Awesome, Joe, thank you so much. Again, trust is everything letting people understand that what's going on underneath is going to be viable and capable. You guys got a great product and congratulations on the acquisition that Cisco made of your company. We've been following you guys for a long time and a great technology chops, great market traction, congratulations to everyone, 1,009. Thanks for coming on sharing. I appreciate it. Thanks Joe Vaccaro, vice president of product here, but thousand nine is now part of Cisco, John, for your host of the cube cube virtual for dev net, create virtual. Thanks for watching. >>Even prior to the pandemic, there was a mandate to automate the hyperscale cloud companies. They've shown us that to scale. You really have to automate you human labor. It just can't keep up with the pace of technology. Now, post COVID that automation mandate is even more pressing. Now what about the marketplace? What are S E seeing on the horizon? The cubes Jeff Frick speaks with Cisco engineers to gather their insights and explore the definite specialized partner program. We've got a Coon Jacobs. He's the director of systems engineering for Cisco. >>Good to see Kuhn. >>Thank you for having me >>Joining him as Eric nip. He is the VP of system systems engineering for Cisco. Good to see Eric. Good to be here. Thank you. Pleasure. So before we jump into kind of what's going on now in this new great world of programmability and, and control, I want to kind of go back to the future for a minute because when I was doing some research for this interview, it was cool. I saw an old presentation that you were giving from 2006 about the changing evolution of the, uh, the changing evolution of networking and moving from. I think that the theme was a human centered human centered network. And you were just starting to touch a little bit on video and online video. Oh my goodness, how far we have come, but I would love to get kind of a historical perspective because we've been talking a lot and I know Eric son plays football about the football analogy of the network is kind of like an offensive lineman where if they're doing a good job, you don't hear much about them, but they're really important to everything. >>And the only time you hear about them as the women, the flag gets thrown. So if you look back with the historical perspective, the load and the numbers and the evolution of the network, as we've moved to this modern time, and, you know, thank goodness cause of COVID hit five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, you know, all of us in the information space would not have been able to make this transition. So I just, I just love to get some historical perspective cause you've been kind of charting this and mapping this for a very long time. >>Yeah. W we absolutely have. I think, you know, what you're referring to was back in the day, the human network campaign, and to your point, the load, the number of hosts that traffic that just overall, the intelligence of the network has just evolved tremendously over these last decade and a half, uh, 15 years or so. And you look at where we are now in terms of the programmable nature of the network and what that enables in terms of new degrees of relevance that we can create for the customers and how, you know, the role of it has changed entirely again, especially during this pandemic, you know, the fact that it's now as a serve as an elastic is absolutely fundamental to being able to ensure, uh, on an ongoing basis, a great customer experience. And so, uh, it's been, it's been, uh, a very interesting ride. >>And then just to close the loop, the, one of your more later interviews talking to Sylvia, your question is, are you a developer or an engineer? So it was, and, and your whole advice to all these network engineers is just, just don't jump in and start doing some coding and learning. So, you know, the focus and really the emphasis and where the opportunity to differentiate as a company is completely shifting gears over to the, you know, really software defined side. >>Oh, absolutely. So I mean, you look at how the software world and the network has come together and how we're applying now, you know, basically the same construct of CIC pipeline to network, uh, infrastructure, look at network really as, and get all of the benefits from that. And the familiarity of it, the way that our engineers have had to evolve. And that is just, you know, quite, quite significant in, in, in like the skill set. And the best thing is jump in, right. You know, dip your toe in the water, but continue to evolve that skill set. And, you know, don't, don't be shy. It's a leap of faith for some of us who've been in the industry a bit longer. We like to look at ourselves as the craftsman of the network, but now it's definitely a software centricity and programmability, right? >>So Eric, you've got some digital exhaust out there too, that I was able to dig up going back to 2002 752 page book and the very back corner of a dark dirty dusty Amazon warehouse is managing Cisco network security, 752 pages. Wow. How has security change from a time where before I could just read a book, a big book, you know, throw some protocols in and probably block a bunch of ports to the world that we live in today, where everything is connected. Everything is API driven, everything is software defined. You've got pieces of workloads spread out all over the place and Oh, by the way, you need to bake security in at every single level of the application stack. >>Yeah, no, I'm so, wow. The kudos that you, you found that book I'm really impressed. There was a thank you a little street, correct. So I want to hit on something that you, you talked about. Cause I think it's very important to, to this overall conversation. If we think about the scale of the network and Coon hit on it briefly, you talked about it as well. We're seeing a massive explosion of devices by the estimated by the end of this year, there's going to be about 27 billion devices on the global internet. That's about 3.7 devices for every man, woman and child life. And if we extrapolate that out over the course of the next decade on the growth trajectory we're on. And if you look at some of the published research on this, it's estimated there could be upwards of 500 billion devices accessing the global internet on a, on a daily basis in the primarily that, that, that is a IOT devices, that's digitally connected devices. >>Anything that can be connected will be connected, but then introduces a really interesting security challenge because every one of those devices that is accessing the global internet is within a company's infrastructure or accessing pieces of corporate data is a potential attack factor. So we really need to, and I think the right expression for this is we need to reimagine security because security is, as you said, not about parameters. You know, I wrote that book back in 2002, I was talking about firewalls and a cutting edge technology was intrusion prevention and intrusion detection. Now we need to look at security really in the, in the guys up or under the, under the, under the realm of really two aspects, the identity who is accessing the data and the context, what data is being accessed. And that is going to require a level of intelligence, a level of automation and the technologies like machine learning and automated intelligence are going to be our artificial intelligence rather are going to be table stakes because of the sheer scale of what we're trying to secure is going to be untenable under current, you know, just current security practices. I mean, the network is going to have to be incredibly intelligent and leverage again, a lot of that, uh, that AI type of data to match patterns of potential attacks and ideally shut them down before they ever cause any type of damage. >>Yeah, it's really interesting. I mean, one thing that COVID has done a bunk many things is kind of retaught us all about the power of exponential curves and how extremely large those things are and how fast they grow. We at Dave runs it on a Google cloud a couple of years ago. And I remember him talking about early days at Google when they were starting to map out kind of, as you described kind of map out their growth curves, and they just figured out they could not hire if they hired everybody, they couldn't hire enough people to deal with it. Right. So really kind of rethinking automation and rethinking about the way that you manage these things and the level, right. The old, is it a pet or is it, or is it, um, uh, part of a herd and, and I think it's interesting what you talked about, uh, con really the human powered internet and being driven by a lot of this video, but to what you just said, Eric, the next big wave, right. >>Is IOT and five G. And I think, you know, you talk about 3.7 million devices per person. That's nothing compared to right. All these sensors and all these devices and all these factories, because five G is really targeted to machine the machines, which there's a lot of them and they trade a lot of information really, really quickly. So, you know, I want to go back to you Coon thinking about this next great wave in a five G IOT kind of driven world where it's kind of like when voice kind of fell off compared to IP traffic on the network. I think you're going to see the same thing, kind of human generated data relative to machine generated data is also going to fall off dramatically as a machine generated data just skyrocket through the roof. >>Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think too, also what Eric touched on the visibility on that, and they've been able to process that data at the edge. That's going to catalyze cloud adoption even further, and it's going to, you know, make the role of the network, the connectivity of it all and the security within that crucially important. And then you look at the role of programmability within that. We're seeing the evolution going so fast. You look at the element of the software defined network in an IOT speed space. We see that we have a host Sarah that are not necessarily, um, you know, behaving like other hosts would, uh, on a network, for example, manufacturing floor, uh, production robot, or a security camera. And what we're seeing is we're seeing, you know, partners and customers employing programmability to make sure that we overcome some of the shortcomings, uh, in terms of where the network is at, but then how do you customize it in terms of the relevance that can provide, >>Um, bringing on board those, uh, those hosts in a very transparent way, and then, you know, keep, keep the agility of it and keep the speed of innovation going. >>So, Eric, I want to come back to you and shift gears kind of back to the people will leave the IOT in the machines along, along for a minute, but I'm curious about what does beat the boss. I mean, I go to your LinkedIn profile and it's just filled with congratulatory statements, but everyone's talking about beating the boss. You know, it's, it's a really, you know, kind of interesting and different way to, to motivate people, to build this new skillset in terms of getting software certifications, uh, within the Cisco world. And I just thought it was really cute the way that you, uh, clearly got people motivated, cause there's posts all over the place and they've all got their, their nice big badge or their certification, but, you know, at a higher level, it is a different motivation to be a developer versus an you're an a technician. And it's kind of a different point of view. And I just wonder if you could share, you know, some of the ways that you're, you're kind of encouraging, you know, kind of this transformation within your own workforce, as well as the partners, et cetera, and really adopting kind of almost a software first and this program kind of point of view versus, you know, I'm just wiring stuff up. >>Apparently a lot of people like to beat me. So I mean, not itself was a, was a, a, it was a great success, but you know, if we think we take a step back, you know, what is Cisco about as an organization? Um, I mean, obviously he looked back to the very early days of our vision, right? It was, it was to change the way the world worked, played, live and learn. And that you think about, and you hit on this when we were, you know, we were discussion with co with Kuhn in the early days of COVID. We really saw that play out as so much shifted from, you know, in-person type of interactions to virtual interactions in the network that, uh, that our, our customers, our partners, our employees built over the course of the last several years, the last three decades really helped the world continue to, um, to, to do business for students to continue to go to school or clinicians, to connect with patients. >>If I think about that mission to me, programmability is just the next iteration of that mission, continuing to enable the world to communicate, continuing, to enable customers, employees, uh, partners, uh, to essentially leverage the network for more than just connectivity now to leverage it for critical insight. Again, if we look at some of the, uh, some of the use cases that we're seeing for social distancing and contact tracing and network has a really important place to play there because we can pull insight from it, but it isn't necessarily an out of the box type of integration. So I look at programmability and in what we're doing with, with dev net to give relevance to the network for those types of really critical conversations that every organization is having right now, it's a way to extrapolate. It's a way to pull critical data so that I can make a decision. >>And if that is automated, or if that decision requires some type of manual intervention, regardless, we're still about connecting. And in this case, we're connecting insight with the people who need it most, right. The debit challenge we ran is really in respect for how critical this new skill set is going to be. It's not enough, like I said, just to connect the world anymore. We need to leverage that network, the network for that critical insight. And when we drove, we were, we created the beat, the boss challenge. It was really simple. Hey guys, I think this is important and I am going to go out and I'm going to achieve the certification myself, because I don't want to continue to be very relevant. I want to continue to be able to provide that insight for my customers and partners. So therefore I'm going for anybody that can get there before me. Maybe there's a little incentive tied to it and the incentive, although it's funny, we interviewed a lot of, a lot of our team who, who achieved it when incentive was secondary, they just wanted to have the bragging rights, like yeah, I beat Eric. Right? >>Right. Absolutely. No, it's a, it's it, you know, putting your money where your mouth is, right. If it's important, then why you should do it too. And, and you know, the whole, you're not asking people to do what you wouldn't do yourself. So I think there's a lot of good leadership, uh, leadership lessons there as well, but I want to extend kind of the conversation on the covert impact, right? Cause I'm sure you've seen all the social media means, you know, who's driving your digital transformation, the CEO, the CMO or COVID. And we all know the answer to the question, but you know, you guys have already been dealing with kind of an increased complexity around enterprise infrastructure world in terms of cloud and public cloud and hybrid cloud and multi cloud. And people are trying to move stuff all the way around now suddenly had this COVID moment right in, in March, which is really a light switch moment. >>People didn't have time to plan or prepare for suddenly everybody working from home. And it's not only you, but your spouse and your kids and everybody else. So I, but now we're six months plus into this thing. And I would just love to get your perspective and kind of the change from, Oh my goodness, we have to react to the light switch moment. What do we do to make sure people can, can get, get what they need when they need it from where they are a bubble, but then really moving from this is a, an emergency situation, a stop gap situation to, Hmm, this is going to extend for some period of time. And even when it's the acute crisis is over, you know, this is going to drive a real change in the way that people communicate in the way that people, where they sit and do their jobs and, and kind of how customers are responding accordingly as the, you know, kind of the narrative has changed from an emergency stop gap to this is the new normal that we really need to plan for. >>So, uh, I think, I think you said it very well. I think anything that could be digitized, any, any interaction that could be driven virtually was, and what's interesting is we, as you said, we went from that light switch moment where I, and I believe the status, this, and I'll probably get number wrong, but like in the United States here at the beginning, at the end of February, about 2% of the knowledge worker population was virtual, you know, working from home or in a, in a remote work environment. And over the course of about 11 days, that number went from 2% to 70%. Wow. Interesting that it worked, you know, there was a lot of hiccups along the way, and there was a lot of organizations making really quick decisions on how do I enable VPN scale of mass? How do I leverage, uh, you know, things like WebEx for virtual meetings and virtual connectivity, uh, much faster now that as you said, that we kind of gotten out of the fog of, of, of war for our fog of battle organizations are looking at what they accomplished. >>And it was nothing short of Herculean and looking at this now from a transition to, Oh my gosh, we need to change too. We have an opportunity to change. And we're looking, we see a lot of organizations specifically around, uh, financial services, healthcare, uh, the, uh, the K through 20, uh, educational environment, all looking at how can they do more virtually for a couple of reasons. Obviously there is a significant safety factor. And again, we're still in that we're still on the height of this pandemic. They want to make sure their employees, their customers, students, patients remain safe. But second, um, we've found in, in discussions with a lot of senior it executives that our customers, that people are happier working from home, people are more productive working from home. And that, again, the network that's been built over the course of the last few decades has been resilient enough to allow that to happen. >>And then third, there is a potential cost savings here outside of people. The next most expensive resource that organizations are paying for is real estate. If they can shrink that real estate footprint while providing a better user experience at the locations that they're maintaining, again, leveraging things like location services, leveraging things like a unified collaboration. That's very personalized to the end user's experience. They're going to do that. And again, they're going to save money. They're going to have happier employees and ultimately they're going to make their, uh, their employees and their customers a lot safer. So we see, we believe that there is in some parts of the economy, a shift that is going to be more permanent and some estimates put it as high as 15% of the current workforce is going to stay in there in a virtual or a semi virtual working environment for the foreseeable future. >>And I, and I, and I would say, I'd say 15% is low, especially if you, if you qualify it with, you know, part time, right. I, there was a great interview we were doing and talking about working from home, we used to work from home as the exception, right? Cause the cable person was coming, are you getting a new washing machine or something where now that's probably getting, you know, in many cases we'll shift to the other where I'm generally gonna work from home unless, you know, somebody is in town or having an important meeting or there's some special collaboration that drives me to be in. But you know, I want to go back to you Kuhn and, and really doubled down on, you know, I think most people spent too much time focusing, especially, we'll just say within the virtual events base where we play on the things you can't do virtually, we can't meet in the hall. >>We can't grab a quick coffee and a drink instead of focusing on the positive things like we're accomplishing right here, you're in Belgium, right. Eric is in Ohio, we're in California. Um, and you know, we didn't take three days to, to travel and, and check into a hotel and all that stuff to get together, uh, for this period of time. So there's a lot of stuff that digital enables. And I think, you know, people need to focus more on that versus continuing to focus on the two or three things that, that it doesn't replace and it doesn't replace those. So let's just get that off the table and move on with our lives. Cause those aren't coming back anytime soon. >>No, totally. I think it's the balance of those things. It's guarding the fact that you're not necessarily working for home. I think the trick there is you could be sleeping at the office, but I think the positives are way, way more outspoken. Um, I, you know, I look at myself, I got much more exercise time in these last couple of months than I usually do because you don't travel. You don't have the jet lag and the connection. And then you talked about those face to face moments. I think a lot of people are in a way, um, wanting to go back to the office part time as, as Eric also explained. But a lot of it you can do virtually we have virtual coffees with team or, you know, even here in Belgium, our, our local general manager has a virtual effort. TIF every Friday obviously skipped the one this week. But, uh, you know, there's, there's ways to be very creative with the technology and the quality of the technology that the network enables, um, you know, to, to get the best of both worlds. Right? >>So I just, we're going to wrap the segment. I want to give you guys both the last word you both been at Cisco for a while and, you know, Susie, we, and the team on dev net has really grown this thing. I think we were there at the very beginning couple of four, five, six years ago. I can't keep track of time anymore, but you know, it's really, really grown and, you know, the timing is terrific to get into this more software defined world, which is where we are. I wonder if you could just, you know, kind of share a couple thoughts as you know, with a little bit of perspective and you know, what you're excited about today and kind of what you see coming down the road since you guys have been there for a while you've been in this space, uh, let's start with Yukon. >>I think the possibility it creates, I think really programmability software defined is really about the art of the possible it's what you can dream up and then go code. Um, uh, Eric talked about the relevance of it and how it maximizes that relevance on a customer basis. Um, you know, and then it is the evolution of, of the teams in terms of the creativity that they can bring to it. Uh, we're seeing really people dive into that and customers, um, co-creating with us. And I think that's where we're going in terms of like the evolution of the value proposition there in terms of what technology >>Can provide, but also how it impacts people. Has it been discussed and redefines process? >>I love that the art of the possible, which is a lot harder to execute in a, in hardware than software certainly takes a lot longer. I'd love to get your, uh, your thoughts. >>Absolutely. So I started my career at Cisco, uh, turning, uh, putting IP phones onto the network. And back then, you know, it was, you know, 2001, 2002, when, uh, the idea of putting telephones onto the network was such a, um, just such an objectionable idea. And so many purists were telling us all the reasons it wouldn't work. Now, if we go forward again, 19 years, the idea of not having them plugging into the network is a ridiculous idea. So we have a, we're looking at an inflection point in this industry, and it's really, it's not about programming. It's not necessarily about programming. It's about doing it smarter. It's about being more efficient. It's about driving automation, but again, it is, it's about unlocking the value of what the network is. We've moved so far past. What can, you know, just connectivity, the network touches everything and it's more workload moves to the cloud is more workload moves to things like containers. >>Um, the network is the really, the only common element that ties all of these things together. The network needs to take its rightful place, uh, in the end, the, it lexicon as being that critical or that poor critical insight provider, um, for, for how users are interacting with the network, how users are interacting with applications, how applications are interacting with them in another program, ability is a way to do that more efficiently, uh, with greater a greater degree of certainty with much greater relevance into the overall delivery of it services and digitization. So to me, I think we're going to look back 20 years from now, probably even 10 and say, man, we used to configure things manually. What was that like? And I think, I think really this is, this is the future. And I think we want to be aligned with where we're going versus where we've been. >>All right. Well, Coon, Eric, thank you for, for sharing your perspective. You know, it's, it's really nice to have, you know, some historical reference, uh, and it's also nice to be living in a new age where you can, you can, you know, stay at the same company and, and still refresh, you know, new challenges, new opportunities and grow this thing. Cause as you said, I remember those IP first IP phone days and I thought, well, mob bell must be happy because the old mother's day problem is finally solved when we don't have to have a dedicated connection between every mother and every child in the middle of may. So good news. So thank you very much for sharing your, uh, your insights and really, uh, really enjoyed the >>Thank you. >>We've been covering dev net create for a number of years. I think since the very first show and Susie, we and the team really built a practice, built a company, built a lot of momentum around software in the Cisco ecosystem and in getting devs really to start to build applications and drive kind of the whole software defined networking thing forward. And a big part of that is partners and working with partners and, and developing solutions and, you know, using brain power, that's outside of the four walls of Cisco. So we're excited to have, uh, our next guest, uh, a partner for someone is Brad Hoss. He is the engineering director for dev ops at Presidio, Brad. Great to see you. >>Hey Jeff, great to be here. >>Absolutely. And joining him is Chuck Stickney. Chuck is the business development architect for Cisco dev net partners. And he has been driving a whole lot of partner activity for a very long period of time. Chuck, great to see you. >>Thanks Jeff. Great to be here and looking forward to this conversation. >>Absolutely. So let's, let's start with you Chuck, because I think, um, you know, you're leading this kind of partner effort and, and you know, software defined, networking has been talked about for a long time and you know, it's really seems to be maturing and, and software defined everything right. Has been taking over, especially with, with virtualization and moving the flexibility and the customer program ability customability in software and Mo and taking some of that off the hardware. Talk about, you know, the programs that you guys are putting together and how important it is to have partners to kind of move this whole thing forward, versus just worrying about people that have Cisco badges. >>Yeah, Jeff, absolutely. So along this whole journey of dev net where we're, we're trying to leverage that customization and innovation built on top of our Cisco platforms, most of Cisco's businesses transacted through partners. And what we hear from our customers and our partners is they want to, our customers want to way to be able to identify, does this partner have the capabilities and the skills necessary to help me go down this automation journey I'm trying to do, do a new implementation. I want to automate that. How can I find a partner to, to get there? And then we have some of our partners that have been building these practices going along the step in that journey with us for the last six years, they really want to say, Hey, how can I differentiate myself against my competitors and give an edge to my customers to show them that, yes, I have these capabilities. I've built a business practice. I have technology, I have technologists that really understand this capability and they have the net certifications to prove it, help me be able to differentiate myself throughout our ecosystem. So that's really what our Danette partner specialization is all about. >>Right. That's great. And Brad, you're certainly one of those partners and I want to get your perspective because partners are oftentimes a little bit closer to the customer cause you've got your kind of own set of customers that you're building solutions and just reflect on, we know what happened, uh, back in March 15th, when basically everybody was told to go home and you can't go to work. So, you know, there's all the memes and social media about who, you know, who pushed forward your digital transformation, the CEO, the CMO or COVID. And we all know what the answer is, whatever you can share some information as to what happened then, and really for your business and your customers, and then reflect now we're six months into it months plus, and, and you know, this new normal is going to continue for a while. How's the customer attitudes kind of changed now that they're kind of buckled down past the light switch moment and really we need to put in place some foundation to carry forward for a very long time potentially. >>Yeah, it's really quite interesting actually, you know, when code first hit, we got a lot of requests to help with automation of provisioning our customers and in the whole digital transformation got really put on hold for a little bit there and I'd say it became more of, of the workplace transformation. So we were quickly, uh, you know, migrating customers to, you know, new typologies where instead of the, the, you know, users sitting in those offices, they were sitting at home and we had to get them connected rapidly in a, we have a lot of success there in those beginning months with, you know, using automation and programmability, um, building, you know, provisioning portals for our customers to get up and running really fast. Um, and that, that, that was what it looked like in those early days. And then over time, I'd say that's the asks from our customers has started to transition a little bit. >>You know, now they're asking, you know, how can I take advantage of the technology to, you know, look at my offices in a different way, you know, for example, you know, how many people are coming in and out of those locations, you know, what's the usage of my conference rooms. Um, are there, uh, are there, um, situations where I can use that information? Like how many people are in the building and at a certain point in time and make real estate decisions on that, you know, like, do I even need this office anymore? So, so the conversations have really changed in ways that you couldn't have imagined before March. Right. >>And I wonder with, with you Chuck, in terms of the Cisco point of view, I mean, the network is amazing. It had had, COVID struck five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, you know, clearly there's a lot of industries that are suffering badly entertainment, um, restaurant, business, transportation, they, you know, hospitality, but for those of us in kind of the information industry, the switch was pretty easy. Um, you know, and, and the network enables the whole thing. And so I wonder if, you know, kind of from your perspective as, as suddenly, you know, the importance of the network, the importance of security and the ability now to move to this new normal very quickly from a networking perspective. And then on top of that, having, you know, dev net with, with the software defined on top, you guys were pretty much in a good space as good as space as you could be given this new challenge thrown at you. >>Yeah, Jeff, we completely agree with that. A new Cisco has pushed the idea that the network is transformational. The network is the foundation, and as our customers have really adopted that message, it is enabled that idea for the knowledge workers to be able to continue on. So for myself, I've, I've worked for home the entire time I've been at Cisco. So the last 13 years, this is, you know, the, the change to the normalcy is I never get on a plane anymore, but my day to day functions are still the same. And it's built because of the capabilities we have with the network. I think the transition that we've seen in the industry, as far as kind of moving to that application type of economy, as we go to microservices, as we go to a higher dependency upon cloud, those things have really enabled the world really to be able to better respond to this, to this COVID situation. And I think it's helped to, to justify the investments that's that our customers have made as well as what our partners have been, being able to do to deliver on that multicloud capability, to take those applications, get them closer to the end user instead of sitting in a common data center and then making it more applicable to, to users wherever they may be, not just inside of that traditional form. >>Right. Right. It's interesting that Brad, you, you made a comment on another interview. I was watching getting ready for this one in terms of, uh, applications now being first class citizens was, was what you said. And it's kind of interesting coming from an infrastructure point of view, where before it was, you know, what do I have and what can I build on it now really it's the infrastructure that responds back to the application. And even though you guys are both in the business of, of networking and infrastructure, it's still this recognition that apps first is the way to go, because that gives people the competitive advantage that it gives them the ability to react in the marketplace and to innovate and move faster. So, you know, it's, it's a really interesting twist to be able to support an application first, by having a software defined in a more programmable infrastructure stack. >>Yeah, no doubt. And, you know, I think that the whole push to cloud was really interesting in the early days, it was like, Hey, we're going to change our applications to be cloud first. You know? And then I think the terminology changed over time, um, to more cloud native. So when we, when we look at what cloud has done over the past five years with customers moving, you know, their, their assets into the cloud in the early days that we were all looking at it just like another data center, but what it's really become is a place to host your applications. So when we talk about cloud migrations with our customers now, we're, we're no longer talking about, you know, the assets per se, we're talking about the applications and what did those applications look like? And even what defines an application right now, especially with the whole move to cloud native and microservices in the automation that helps make that all happen with infrastructure as code. >>You're now able to bundle the infrastructure with those applications together as a single unit. So when you define that application, as infrastructure, as code the application in this definition of what those software assets for the infrastructure are, all are wrapped together and you've got change control, version control, um, and it's all automated, you know, it's, it's a beautiful thing. And I think it's something that we've all kind of hoped would happen. You know, in, when I look back at the early definitions of software defined networking, I think everybody was trying to figure it out and they didn't really fully understand what that meant now that we can actually define what that network infrastructure could look like as it's, as it's wrapped around that application in a code template, maybe that's Terraform or Ansible, whatever that might be, whatever method or tool that you're using to bring it all together. It's, you know, it's really interesting now, I think, I think we've gotten to the point where it's starting to make a lot more sense than, you know, those early days of SDN, uh we're out, you know, it was, was it a controller or is it a new version of SNMP? You know, now it makes sense it's actually something tangible. >>Right, right. But still check, as you said, right. There's still a lot of API APIs and there's still a lot of component pieces to these applications that are all run off the network that all have to fit, uh, that had to fit together. You know, we cover PagerDuty summit and you know, their whole thing is trying to find out where the, where the problems are within the very few microseconds that you have before the customer abandons their shopping cart or whatever the particular application. So again, the network infrastructure and the program ability super important. But I wonder if you could speak to the automation because there's just too much stuff going on for individual people to keep track of and they shouldn't be keeping track of it because they need to be focusing on the important stuff, not this increasing amount of bandwidth and traffic going through the network. >>Yeah, absolutely. Jeff said the bandwidth that's necessary in order to support everybody working from home to support this video conference. I mean, we used to do this sitting face to face. Now we're doing this over the internet. The amount of people necessary to, to be able to facilitate that type of traffic. If we're doing it the way we did 10 years ago, we would not scale it's automation. That makes that possible. That allows us to look higher up the ability to do that. Automatic provisional provisioning. Now that we're in microservices now, everything is cloud native. We have the ability to, to better, to better adjust, to and adapt to changes that happen with the infrastructure below hand. So if something goes wrong, we can very quickly spend something ups to take that load off where traditionally it was open up a ticket. Let me get someone in there, let me fix it. >>Now it's instantaneously identify the solution, go to my playbook, figure out exactly what solution I need to deploy and put that out there. And the network engineering team, the infrastructure engineering team, they just simply need to get notified that this happened. And as long as there's traceability and a point that Brad made, as far as you being able to go through here doing the automation of the documentation side of it. I know when I was a network engineer, one of the last things we ever did was documentation. But now that we have the API is from the infrastructure. And then the ability to tie that into other systems like an IP address management or a change control, or a trouble ticketing system, that whole idea of I made an infrastructure change. And now I can automatically do that documentation update and record. I know who did it. I know when they did it and I know what they did, and I know what the test results were even five years ago, that was fantasy land. Now, today that's just the new normal, that's just how we all operate. Right. >>Right, right. So I want to get your take on the other side, >>Cloud multicloud >>Public cloud, you know, as, as I think you said Brad, when public cloud first came out, there was kind of this, this rush into, we're going to throw everything in there then for, for, for different reasons. People decided maybe that's not the best, the best solution, but really it's horses for courses. Right. And, and I think it was pretty interesting that, that you guys are all supporting the customers that are trying to figure out where they're going to put their workloads. And Oh, by the way, that might not be a static place, right. It might be moving around based on, you know, maybe I do my initial dev and, and, and Amazon. And then when I go into production, maybe I want to move it into my data center and then maybe I'm having a big promotion or something I want to flex capability. So from, from your perspective in helping customers work through this, cause still there's a lot of opinions about what is multicloud, what is hybrid cloud and you know, it's horses for courses, how are you helping people navigate that? And what does having programmable infrastructure enable you to do for helping customers kind of sort through, you know, everybody talks about their journey. I think there's still, you know, kind of bumbling down, bumbling down paths, trying to find new things, what works, what doesn't work. And I think it's still really early days and trying to mesh all this stuff together. Yeah, >>Yeah. No doubt. It is still early days. And you know, I, I, I go back to it being application centric because, you know, being able to understand that application, when you move to the cloud, it may not look like what it used to look like when you, when you move it over there, you may be breaking parts off of it. Some of them might be running on a platform as a service while other pieces of it are running as infrastructure as service. And some of it might still be in your data center. Those applications are becoming much more complex than they used to be because we're breaking them apart into different services. Those services could live all over the place. So with automation, we really gain the power of being able to combine those things. As I mentioned earlier, those resources, wherever they are and be defined in that infrastructure as code and automation. >>But you know, aside from, I think we focus a lot about provisioning. When we talk about automation, we also have these amazing capabilities on, on the side of, uh, operations too. Like we've got streaming telemetry, and the ability to gain insights into what's going on in ways that we didn't have before, or at least in the, in, you know, in the early days of monitoring software, right? You knew exactly what that device was, where it was. It probably had a friendly name, like maybe it was, uh, something from the Hobbit right now. You've got things coming up and spinning and spinning up and spinning down, moving all over the place. In that thing. You used to know what that was. Now you have to quickly figure out where it went. So the observability factor is a huge thing that I think everybody, um, should be paying attention to attention, to moving forward with regards to when you're moving things to the cloud or even to other data centers or, you know, in your premise, I'm breaking that into microservices. >>You really need to understand what's going on. And the, you know, programmability and API APIs and, you know, yang models are tied into streaming telemetry. Now there's just so many great things coming out of this, you know, and it's all like a data structure that, that people who are going down this path and the dev net path there, they're learning these data structures and being able to rationalize and make sense of that. And once you understand that, then all of these things come together, whether it's cloud or a router or switch, um, Amazon, you know, it doesn't matter. You're on, you're all speaking a common language, which is that data structure. >>That's great. Chuck, I want to shift gears a little bit. Cause there was something that you said in another interview when I was getting ready for this one about, about in a dev net, really opening up a whole different class of partners for Cisco, um, as, as really more of a software, a software lead versus kind of the traditional networking lead. I wonder if you can put a little more color on that. Um, because clearly as you said, partners are super important. It's your primary go to market and, and Presidios, I'm sure the best partner that you have in the whole world that's and you know, you said there's some, there's some, you know, non traditional people that would not ever be a Cisco partner that suddenly you guys are playing with because of really the software lead. >>Yeah. Jeff that's exactly right. So as we've been talking to folks with dev nets and whether it'd be at one of the Cisco live events in the dev net zone or the prior dev net create events, we'll have, we'll have people come up to us who Cisco today views as a, as a customer because they're not in our partner ecosystem. They want to be able to deliver these capabilities to our customers, but they have no interest in being in the resell market. This what we're doing with the doublet that gives us the ability to bring those partners into the ecosystem, share them with our extremely large dev net community so they can get access to those, to those potential customers. But also it allows us to do partner to partner type of integration. So Brad and Presidio, they built a fantastic networking. They always have the fantastic networking business, but they've built this fantastic automation business that's there, but they may come into, into a scenario where it's working with a vertical or working with the technology case that they may not have an automation practice for. >>We can leverage some of these software specific partners to come in there and do a joint, go to markets where, so they can go where that traditional channel partner can leverage their deep Cisco knowledge in those customer relationships that they have and bring in that software partner almost as a subcontractor to help them deliver that additional business value on top of that traditional stack, that brings us to this business outcomes that the customers are looking for and a much faster fashion and a much more collaborative fashion. That's terrific. Well, again, it's a, it's, it's unfortunate that we can't be in person. I mean, the, the Cisco dev net shows, you know, they're still small, they're still intimate. There's still a lot of, uh, information sharing and, you know, great to see you. And like I said, we've been at the computer museum, I think the last couple of years and in, in San Francisco. So I look forward to a time that we can actually be together, uh, maybe, maybe for next year's event, but, uh, thank you very much for stopping by and sharing the information. Really appreciate it. Happy to be here from around the globe. It's the cube presenting, accelerating automation with Devin brought to you by Cisco. >>When I'm Sean for the cube, your host for accelerating automation with dev net, with Cisco, and we're here to close out the virtual event with Mindy Whaley, senior director, Mandy, take it away. >>Thank you, John. It's been great to be here at this virtual event and hearing all these different automation stories from our different technology groups, from customers and partners. And what I'd like to take a minute now is to let people know how they can continue this experience at DevNet create, which is our free virtual event happening globally. On October 13th, there's going to be some really fun stuff. We're going to have our annual demo jam, which is kind of like an open mic for demos, where the community gets to show what they've been building. We're also going to be, um, giving out and recognizing our dev net creator award winners for this year, which is a really great time where we recognize our community contributors who have been giving back to the community throughout the year. And then we find really interesting channels. We have our creators channels, which is full of technical talks, lightening talks. >>This is where our community, external Cisco people come in share what they've been working on, what they've been working learning during the year. We also have a channel called API action, which is where you can go deep into, you know, IOT or collaboration or data center automation and get demos talks from engineers on how to do certain use cases. And also a new segment called street from engineering, where you get to hear from the engineers, building those products as well. And we have a start now for those people just getting started, who may need to dive into some basics around coding, API APIs and get that's a whole channel dedicated to getting them started so that they can start to participate in some of the fun challenges that we're going to have during the event. And we're going to have a few fun things. Like we have some definite advocate team members who are awesome, musically talented. They're going to share some performances with us. So, um, we encourage everyone to join us there. Pick your favorite channel, uh, join us in whichever time zone you live in. Cause we'll be in three different time zones. And, um, we would love for you to be there and to hear from you during the event. Thanks so much. >>That's awesome. Very innovative, multiple time zones, accelerating automation with dev net. Thank you so much for watching and we'll see you at dev net create thanks for watching.

>> Live from London, England, it's theCUBE. Covering .NEXT Conference Europe, 2018. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, my cohost Joep Piscaer, and you're watching theCUBE here at Nutanix .NEXT, London, 2018. Happy to welcome back to the program the co-founder, CEO, and chairman of Nutanix, Dheeraj Pandey. Dheeraj, thanks so much. Congratulations on 3500 people here at the third annual European show, and thanks so much for having theCUBE. >> Thank you, my pleasure. >> All right. So, Dheeraj, first of all, you got a lot going on. Big company event here, last night you announced the Q1 2019 earnings. I guess, step back for a second. Nutanix is now, nine years since the founding, you've been public now for a little while, you got to be feeling good. The company's reached a certain size, very respected in the marketplace. So how are you and the team feeling? >> Yeah, well, I tell people that it's actually fun to be a public company. And obviously there is a cost to being a public company, because you're on a quarterly treadmill, in some sense. But Wall Street also keeps you honest. Just like Main Street keeps you honest on quality of product and customer service, Wall Street keeps you honest on spend and what does it really mean to grow at scale. So I like the fact that there is two good streets that are keeping the company honest. And it's really fun to think about capital allocation, one of the big things as you grow. I mean, you're going to spend more than a billion dollars this year alone. How do you allocate capital wisely is something that I think a lot about in (mumbles). >> Yeah. So, at this show, you kind of change some of the positioning of the portfolio. It's the Core, Essentials, and Enterprise, and right, that asset allocation, when I look at Essential, Xi Cloud, there's all these different pieces, some of them through acquisition, some of them created internally. You need to be careful that you don't over-commit, but when do you decide to kill stuff or keep it going, so you got a lot of plates to spin now, a lot more than you did a year or two ago. >> Yeah, absolutely, and it's not just product development. It's also marketing and sales and G&A. I mean, there's other departments we need to think hard about. Like, how do you create brand awareness for these new things? How do you do demand generation? How do you have a specialty sales force? All those things have to be considered, so, nine years, it's been a journey, but it still looks like it's nothing. And we're still a very small company, and we need to think hard about the next five years, in some sense. >> Yeah. So, one of the metrics you gave Wall Street to be able to look at is, what percentage of customers are using more than just the Core? So the Essentials or the Enterprise. And if I got it right, it's up to 19% from 15%, the quarter before. I wonder, is the packaging, how much of that is for Wall Street? Somebody cynically might look and be like, hey, is the Core market slowing down? And therefore you need to expand. We've all seen public companies that need to go into adjacencies, and shouldn't you stick to your knitting? You've got a great solid product with leadership in the marketplace. >> Yep, absolutely. Also, look, we are not bundling them in SKUs so we cannot force customers to actually buy them. We're not doing financial engineering of dollars, because these not SKUs or bundles. This is a journey which is mostly advisory, in some sense. This is how you should start, this is how you should go, and this is advisory for our sellers and our buyers and our channel people. Everybody needs to say, look, have the customer go through the journey. If you had to do what he just said, probably would've bundled them in SKUs and then allocated capital to one or the other. I think, to your other comment about just sticking to the core, Juniper stuck to the core. And many companies out there which just stayed as a single-box company, they stayed at the core. And eventually you realize the market has moved faster than your core itself. So there's this business school thinking, they call it the Icarus Effect. The Icarus Effect is all about, I'm so good at what I do that I can fly to the sun and nothing will happen. But you don't realize that Icarus, the wings were actually pasted using wax. And you go to the sun, and the sun actually melts the wax. So companies like FGI and SUN, Norca, many companies just stuck to one thing. And they couldn't evolve, actually. >> Obviously you're not sticking to the core alone, right? You're expanding the portfolio, I mean, you're not just an infrastructure company anymore. You do so much on top of the infrastructure on-prem. You have so many SAP services, so how do you manage the portfolio in terms of the customer journey? Because there's so much to tell to a customer. How do you sell it? How do you convince a customer to go from Core to Essentials to Enterprise? >> The most important thing is leverage. Is Essentials going to leverage Core, and is the Enterprise going to leverage Essentials and Core itself? Case in point, Files is completely built on top of Core. So every time somebody's using Files, they're also using Core. If you think about Flow, it uses AHV underneath. Frame, and case in point. When it's going to deliver desktops, it's going to use Files because every desktop needs a filer as well. And then when Frame delivers desktops on-prem, it's going to use all the Core. So the important thing is how they don't become disparate things, like they're all going in their own direction, is there a level of progressiveness where you say, well, if you're using the Enterprise features, a lot of them actually go in and drag in the Core as well as Essentials. So how do we build that progressive experience for the customer, where each of these layers are actually being utilized, is the important piece. >> Dheeraj, so, we're talking a lot about the expansion beyond the Core. But there was a pretty significant activity that your team did on Core itself. So the first time I heard about it, it basically said, we're doing an entire file system rewrite. Think of it almost as AoS 2.0. Now, from a product name, I believe it's 5.10, so I might have trouble remembering which release it was, but talk about what went involved in that. Obviously a lot has changed in the nine years since you created it, so. >> Absolutely. Yeah, yesterday in the earnings call I talked about it too, that people scoff at Core infrastructure. Like, oh, it's going to be a commodity because it's good enough infrastructure. But then I argue that there's no such thing as good enough infrastructure. And companies struggle when they don't focus on infrastructure itself. It's like food, shelter, clothing in the Maslow's hierarchy of needs. If you don't get that, then there's no point self-actualizing it. So, Core infrastructure completely destroys network insecurity. You got to get it right. I mean, look at Oracle, how it's struggling with IaaS. And look at Google, they're trying to figure out how to make it relevant for the Enterprise. Azure has like three or four different stacks for infrastructure. One for old 265, one for Azure DB, one for Azure, and now they're rewriting it for Azure itself. VMware has three different infrastructure stacks. One for three tier, where they are very happily, they're saying, look, let EMC, their NetApps actually are underneath, and Cisco's, and stuff like that. And then they have this software-defined infrastructure with commodity servers. And finally, they have VMware-enabled AWS which is going to use AWS services. So now you have three different forks of your core base, in some sense. And for us, what's important is how we use a single core base for everything. So architecture matters. I was arguing yesterday in the earnings call that good enough infrastructure is an oxymoron. You need to get core right before you can go and try to live the other layers of the Maslow's hierarchy of needs, actually. And that's why we went back and thought about, as the workloads were growing and increasing, and we had mission-critical stuff in memory databases, what do we need to really do about the way we lay out the data and lay out the metadata? So as you know, metadata is at the core of anything in systems, and especially storage systems. And the metadata of our erstwhile system was actually very completely distributed. And then we realized that some things can be local, and some things can be distributed, and that's better scale. Again, going back to this understanding of what things can be represented locally for a certain disk versus what things need to be global so that you can go and say, okay, where is this data really located? What drive? But once you go to the drive, you can actually get more metadata. So, again, you're getting more progressive scanning. So at the end of the day, our engineers are constantly thinking about performance and scalability, and how do you change the wings of the plane at 35,000 feet? It's a very big challenge. >> So that's one of the issues, right? So you're still focusing on your own infrastructure layer, right? But many customers do already have presence in a different hardware stack, or the public cloud, or some service provider. So not everything runs on your platform. So how are you planning to deliver the services ensemble to customers that don't necessarily run on AoS? >> So that's the multi-cloud journey, which is basically the enterprise journey of our customers. I said this yesterday in the earnings call as well, that all our services should be available both on-prem and off-prem. This idea of a VPC, that is multi-location, is what hybrid cloud is all about. So how do you get a virtual private cloud to really span multiple clouds in multiple locations? I think you saw from the demos today of how you're really running all of AoS on top of GCP virtual infrastructure. And in the course of the coming year or two, you'll see us do the same thing, BEM at Amazon, BEM at Azure. Because they deliver servers in their data centers and that's leverage for them because they've already gone and spent so much money on data centers that it's easy for them to deliver a physical server that our software can run on top of. And if people are not using AoS, they'll still want to use things like Frame and Beam and COM and other such things like that. >> Yep, Dheeraj, what are you hearing from customers and how do you think of hybrid, as it were? You know, a lot of attention gets played to things like Azure Stack from Microsoft from VMware on AWS, I know you've got some view points on this. >> Yeah, no, in fact, so if you go back five years, hyperconvergence had become a buzz word maybe three, four years ago. And there were a lot of companies doing hyperconvergence. And only one or two have survived and it's us and VMware, basically have survived that. Everybody else has a checkbox because the customers said well, what about that? Will we have a check box? But, it's really about operating system sort of hyperconvergence. And it has to be honest. And it has to really blur the lines between compute and storage and networking and security. I think hybrid needs to be honest and one of the killer things that hybrid needs is blurring the lines between networks, blurring the lines on storage so you can do one click replication and one click fail over. So a lot of those things have required a lot of innovations from us. That's why we were delayed in Xi. We didn't want to just put up data centers and just like that. I mean, if you go back in time to many hardware companies were putting open stack data centers and calling it their new cloud in response to Amazon. And VMware tried vCloud Air. And they had a charter to go spend money. They weren't going to spend a ton of money on hardware. Without even knowing that the cloud is not about data centers. Cloud is about an experience. It's about eCommerce and computing coming together. And you have to be passionate about a catalog. You know, the marketplace, the catalog so that people can really go and consume things from a catalog. I think that's what our experience has been that. Look, if you don't think of it like a retail giant or retail customer, which is what Amazon has done such a good job of. You know, they've thought about computing as an eCommerce problem as opposed to as a compute storage networking problem itself. And those are the lessons that we have learned about hybrid just as much >> Alright, you did a nice job on the keynote, laying out that Nutanix, like your customers, you're going through a journey. The crawl-walk-run, if you will. We got a tease in the keynote this morning about something cloud native. Where you're going. Final question for you is as you look at the company, you said it's still young, where are your customers going, where are some of the things they need to work on, and that Nutanix will mature with them as we look to move forward? >> Well, I mean, look. I think everybody knows where customers are headed. They're questioning who fulfills the promise because the requirements are all the same. They all want to go and use next generation infrastructure, they want to modernize their data centers, the infrastructure. They want to use some things that they want to own, some things they want to rent. The question is, where is the best experience possible? And by that, I mean not just systems experience of hybrid clouds but also customer service and having an ever-growing catalog and being able to deliver things for developers and devops. And technology will come and go. Two, three years ago, the Puppet and Chef were the hottest thing on, now today, it's Kubernetes. Tomorrow, it's going to be something else. It's the fact that what you see is what you do. And what you do is what you say. In our business, it's about integrity. I was arguing about this yesterday in the earnings call, as well, that building business software is a little bit easier. I shouldn't trivialize it as much but if people use business software, they can work around weaknesses of business software. But if you are in the business of infrastructure, applications cannot work around weaknesses of infrastructure. So integrity matters a lot in our space, actually, and that is about great products, great customer service, fast innovation, recovering fast, being resilient. Those are the things that we focus a lot on. >> Alright, well, Dheeraj, thanks again, always. We didn't even get to talk about the width part, the fourth H that you've been talking about for the honest, humble, and hungry. So, thank you. Congratulations to the team and always appreciate you having on our program. >> My pleasure. >> Alright, for Joep Piscaer, I'm Stu Miniman. Stay with us. Two days live of wall to wall coverage. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (light music) >> I have been in the software and technology industry for over 12 years now. And so I've had the opportunity as a marketer.

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, everyone. It's theCUBE live here in Las Vegas for Vmworld 2018. It's theCUBE's three days of wall-to-wall coverage. I'm John Furrier with my co-host this segment, Alan Cohen, who's an industry legend, retired now, doing a lot of boards, as our guest analyst here for this segment. Our next two guests-- >> Another word for unemployed. (all laugh) >> Bartender in Silicon Valley ??? On boards. Our next two guests, Bruce Shaw, Senior Director of Globalization Solutions, remaking what it means to partner in the cloud, and of course, Keith Norbie, theCUBE alumuni, Manager of bus dev, does the bus dev for NetApp. Guys, thanks for coming on. Thanks for spending the time. >> Oh, thanks for having us. >> The first thing I want to get to is, give us an update on the relationship with NetApp and VMware. Obviously, Pat Gelsinger, spring in his step. Go back three years ago, his job was on the line. So much has happened, the relationship with Amazon, the clarity around the cloud, cloud operations, the role of infrastructure in that, with devops driving programmable infrastructure. Kind of the world's spinning in the NetApps front door right now. >> Yeah, we feel pretty good about it. Keith, he runs that relationship, so I'll let him lead the answer. >> I thought it was best said, and we can kind of unite together, VMware and NetApp on moving from data centers to centers of data. NetApp's been on this data visionary, and sort of the data authority track for a couple years now. You guys have known that; you've been to a net admin site. The relationship, really, is complementary from that perspective, and it goes back many years, more than a decade. If you look at our common base, VMware, of course, has 500,000 users in its install base. We've got a couple 100,000, so it's a gigantic opportunity together to move people exactly in the acts that Pat talked about in the keynote, act one through act four, and getting us all to multi cloud. When you look at the relationship, and the base of the ONTAP products that we have VMware and the architecture, all the way to cloud volumes, and then the latest architecture that we've just done with VMware for NetApp HCI, there's a lot to talk about. >> I've been covering NetApp since theCUBE, nine years, This is our ninth VMWorld, but I've been following the company since the late 90s when they went public. Always a culture of learning and adaptability, but to survive in the past 10 years, specifically, it's really been about adaptation, because if you look at that model, a lot of losers are dead, bankrupt, see companies come and go, but the ones that are customer-centric seem to win. Jassy on stage, very customer-centric. VMware, listening to their customers, got a great community. You guys have a very loyal customer base, both on the customer side, going back to the original products and the partners. >> Right. >> So Bruce, as you think about partnering in the cloud era, when you're now looking at all kinds of different relationships, whether it's in the staff from a technology standpoint, or go to market, or whatever the machination of the relationship is, you got to think differently, so I got to ask you the question. How do you partner? 'Cause it's not just about the profit anymore. What is value in this era? Take a minute to explain the vision. >> Yeah, and you hit it right in the head. The value question is no longer the primary driver of what you're going after. When I say value, just pure revenue stream. You want to look at, obviously, the evolution to an ecosystem, and we spent a lot of time with that on the internal side. Not that anybody cares about what we do under the covers. We restructured our business units from one single business unit into three, so we've got a cloud-focused CDS, which is cloud focuses on the hyperscalers, and our cloud volumes business. CIBU, which is our conversion, hyperconversion infrastrcutures, and then of course, the guys that handle ONTAP, and the big stuff on the back end that provides the building blocks to all of that. >> These are dedicated teams, right? >> Dedicated teams. Dedicated business units, and that gives us the potential of three pathways, in terms of which we partner, and my goal since I came in to run the group in January has been, how do we transition from a traditional alliances organization to evolve to one where we're much more focused on production of solutions, designing with our partners solutions that meet in the market. We're a very channel-focused company. We obviously, you look at the success that NetApp's had over the 10 years with Cisco and FlexPod, that's a meet in the market model, focused on validation to provide solutions for customers, for industry problems, and trying to replicate that through key strategic partners that hit the ecosystem to do it, and that's been a very effective approach for us, and we've spent a lot of time kind of recrafting the organization to match up both with our BUs, and then our delivery through what we call pathways, and that pathway begins from everything, from the channels to the GSIs. We have a new G100 account group, and then to our own sales force, of course. >> All right, so what's in it for me as the customer? I'm like, at the end of the day, it's like, okay, you're reorganized, sounds good. Focused teams, highly cohesive, good segmentation, dedicated teams. What's the impact for the customer? >> The impact for you guys, it's easier to implement, lower cost, quicker delivery, and the assurance that you actually have a validated architecture that's using best of ??? For what you want, as opposed to, I've bought a monolithic stack of something and I'm locked in, and maybe it's the a piece of this and the b of that. You can actually choose your Lego bricks to put together, and we'll stand behind it with the validation that this works. >> Maybe to just kind of pull a layer back on that. Obviously today, we have Andy Jassy on stage with VMware a year later. People were extremely cynical a year ago when that announcement went down. Here they are, they're throwing up their hands. Actually, today-- >> Capitulation was the term. >> Yeah, right, it's capitulation now, but if you are now partnering, and you're building alliances in the cloud era. Three or four years ago, people were saying, "The cloud, they're the enemy. "We can't do business with that." That's what they said, that their customers, their partnerships. How has that changed, and how do you think about partnerships with the cloud providers today? >> Three years ago, the smart people out there said the cloud is going to kill NetApp. >> Right. >> Right? We're an on-premise, standalone storage company. The cloud is the end. Well, fast forward to now, the cloud is our best friend. It's our biggest growing area. You look at the business we do with the hyperscalers under Anthony Lye, and that's the fastest-growing piece of the business we got. We've made it very easy, through ONTAP, to work in either a cloud only relationship, or a hybrid, where you're moving things from on-prem to off-prem and vice versa, and that's becoming main focus of our business, and from an alliances standpoint, of course, once you have it in our own key ingredient, then it's what are the partners that we partner with to bring them into that, to make it a more cohesive solution. >> And then ???Senator, if I might have a second question. >> Of course. >> If I am a customer, and on one side you have your alliance with VMware, and the other side I have my growing initiatives with AWS, or Google Cloud, it doesn't matter. Where does NetApp fit between those two environments? 'Cause you have alliances with both sides. >> Yeah. >> Sure. >> What do I count on NetApp for, because I'm looking multi cloud, I'm looking at migration. How do I think about you in that-- >> To me, I think it's pretty clear. It's all of it needs data to run, just like software needs hardware to run on. Even though it's in cloud, it's rendered. It is all about the transition of being very hardware-defined to being software-defined, to being really function-defined, and once you start to modernize an architecture that way, or a general organization that's trying to deliver IT services, it's the delivery of those things the start to define where you have to take things that are both on-prem and in the cloud, so the entire thing around multi cloud sort of requires that you have strategies for things that are in current data centers that just have to become more cloud-like in their functions and their functionality. Delivering it as a service is not just the mantra, but it's the time to value, and it's the consumption style. As an example, as we're trying to do things on-prem with our NetApp HCI solution, doing embedded OEM with VMware isn't because we want to sell VMware licenses. It's because we want to make it as fast a possible, and as easy for our customer to be able to turn it on and start using it, similar to your experience buying a new iPhone. We want to have you be able to add software to it, like NSX, like vRealize, or a full VMware private cloud stack is something that will hopefully take minutes, rather than hours, weeks or months, because we want that time to value, that consumption experience to be the king, and that extends to data protection, that extends to security. We're not just a storage company. We're a data company that's really in the game for the full stack, and the advantage we have is that we're in all the hyperscalers, and I think we can help VMware there, ??? >> The piece I'd add, I think that's different than before, is most companies think about alliances is us plus them, and in the cloud environment, it's us plus plus plus plus plus to get a solution, and having a much different approach, where it's, okay, we're going to have to be multi-partnered in a cloud environment to go get this done, and that also requires a different alliance motion. >> Less tennis, more soccer. >> Yeah, exactly (John laughs). Great analogy. >> It's yours. >> Tell them the source was theCUBE. >> This show demonstrates how an ecosystem has really extracted the maximum value out of the partners, because there's a ton of this extension to the partner, the channel partner, the pathway partner, to really go and do, moreso than VMware having to do it all themselves, or NetApp having to do it all themselves. It is about that three-way partnership between the product, the solution, and the delivery partner itself, and what AWS even say to them, they said in the partner keynote yesterday that what they want out of the partners is capabilities, and isn't that awesome? We want competencies and capabilities to understand who can deliver these certain capabilities, security, networking, storage, app refactoring, you can go down the list. >> I want to ask you guys, while I've got you both here. I want to get your reaction to something Pat Gelsinger said. He said two things I want get your comments on. One was, he made a comment that said, "No one should ever have to pay for DR ever again CapEx," and two, he made a comment about how AI's 30 years old, and, "Hello, AI, good to see you. "Welcome to the introduction of AI, 30 years later." >> I think he said it's an overnight 30-year success. >> It's an overnight 30-year success, exactly. So one, never pay for DR CapEx, and then hello AI, so again, that kind of signals what's going on. You got the service model, and then you got AI. It's an enabler, and one is a changeover. Curious what are your thoughts on the reaction to those two comments. >> I think the DR statement, while bold, might not be the solution for everybody (John laughs). I think there's certain folks that would say, based on their requirements, they have to have a traditional DR regardless, whether it's compliance or whatever else, but certainly, you should look at how the cloud infrastructure is targeted. There's a lot of cost savings to be gleaned from that, and we are absolutely investing in how we take the services we offer and make them much more readily available as a consumption model, as you go, as you consume, as opposed to a traditional CapEx type purchase. >> So a little bit over the top, but kind of directionally correct, in your mind? >> Yeah absolutely. >> Never going to go away. It's kind of like storage, it never went away. >> Certainly, I think it will continue to decline and decline and decline, but also to declare it over, people still buy desktops, right? That was declared dead in '97. >> Dave and I were just talking about infrastructures were supposed to be dead 10 years ago. >> Pat's always said he's been a fan of NetApp, so I don't want to project words into his mouth, but I think he's been there for us, in a majority of the NetApp and VMware interactions at Vmworld. >> There's a picture of Pat wearing a NetApp jersey at a CUBE event. >> Yes, that was a big moment for us, obviously. >> So the AI piece too, any thoughts on that comment or the AI comment? >> I'll defer the AI to him, but I would just say that on the DR thing is that, we already have that in cloud volumes, and a lot of the data services we're doing in AWS and the public cloud, so I think we present a clear example of that. AI. >> AI, Pat's exactly right. Something that's been around forever, that's really getting a lot of air time right now, but he's precisely right. We see the growth of AI applications in usage is absolutely huge, and when you combine that with the types of instruments that are collecting data, what's wired today versus what wasn't two, three, five years ago, obviously, as a storage company, there's just an exponential amount of data growth that's being captured out there, based upon these AI type machines that are only getting faster and smarter, so for us, we're welcoming the the 30-year success. It's great that it's here to the party. As we look at that ecosystem, that's where we're heavily investing and expanding our partnerships and our routes to market, because we're all so focused on that. >> Maybe just to follow on that, so the traditional conversation people have about cloud is it's somebody else's data center. >> It's somebody else's, right. >> But now, the cloud discussion is about, we were just talking about AI, self-driving cars, edge clouds, so the nature of where all this data reside is becoming much more dynamic and much more distributed. >> That's the point, it's much more distributed. >> How does that fit in to where you guys are going? >> We think it's great. It fits perfectly with our business model of being able to move your data around in a multi cloud environment, and have it where you need it to be, whether it's on the edge, even further out, kind of the fog of the cloud, or all the way at the center where you want it to be, so we think it fits the model that we have, from data everywhere, the data fabric. That's really what we've been designing for years and pushing to. This is the realization of that strategy. In our minds, is that's what we're arriving at. >> Partner program, quick update as we wrap up. What's the update on any kind of tiering? Do you guys have a strategy? You've obviously got more partners engaged. Sounds like cloud gives more touch points. Give a quick overview of what's going on. >> Jeff McCullough's our channel chief. He has done a great job coming in, and absolutely driving that program more aggressively out in to the field in North America. We've got a bunch of stuff, but I don't want to steal his thunder coming up at Insight, >> (laughs) That's okay. >> Not sure what I can steal at the moment. We are aggressively investing in the channel program. We have been, and will continue to be a channel-driven company. Even myself as the alliances head, we look at always, and Keith mentioned it, that third piece of the three in the box is always who's the delivery partner, and how can we help them, and obviously, the underlying tenet of that always is, let's make it meaningful, and let's be honest, meaningful to a partner is, they make money, they have services that they can absolutely embrace and then deliver. >> What's next for the relationship with AWS, and what other top partners you have. You mentioned NVIDIA before we came on camera. What's next for VMware and some of your top name partners? >> We've got some big announcements coming up with VMware, if you want to tease one of them. >> The reality in the world is that, if you want to buy solutions from VMware, a VMware validated design is kind of the pathway to really getting the mark of validation, and so we're on that path as well. We're looking to get that down the road. We've got some early tracks to it. We announced the first leg of that at this show called the net verified architecture for VMware private cloud. That gives us the first proof points that we're running the entire stack on NetApp HCI. We're going to use this as a way, along with ONTAP over time to be able to have on-prem solutions, as well as cloud volumes. With futures, they showcased it yesterday, with some future previews of VMC with cloud volumes, so look for that to come in the future timeframe. >> ONTAP AI? >> ONTAP AI. >> Back to your AI question, we just announced a joint meet in the market solution with NVIDIA, a conversion architecture, where it's NetApp storage, NVIDIA's GTX CPU servers. We've got some switching in there from Cisco, and you've got a very solid conversion infrastructre that goes specifically and targets the AI market. >> And AI, they're a pretty strategic partner, you guys with NVIDIA. >> They are. >> They've been hot lately, I mean, talk about AI. >> There's a lot of guys smiling in that booth over there. (Bruce and John laugh) They look pretty happy. >> They can't make enough GPUs for all those block chain miners. >> I think the key factor for the new alliance model is that the context shifts depending upon the market you're trying to reach, so if it's the AI market, typically NVIDIA's going to lead that conversation. If you flip it to the EUC market, and you look at GPU acceleration for BDI, they're an ecosystem to VMware driving the Horizon package, so it's a very interesting context that you have to be very savvy on to understand how the technologies fit together in a way that solution partners already today are putting them together for customers, and that AWS and all the hyperscalers know natively. >> You guys get a lot of good props. Congratulations on your success. Notable hallway conversations, certainly here and out in the field, I've talked with customers. You guys are good. With the solid state drives, and the software investment you made, it's paying off, so congratulations. >> Flash has been huge for us. >> Good luck with the new reorganization. Bruce, Keith, good too see you. >> It's great to see a solid player of come through the ACI. >> We're here on theCUBE. We'll be right back. Stay with us for more live coverage after this short break. I'm John Furrier with Alan Cohen. We'll be right back; stay with us.

>> Live. From San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Google Cloud Next 2018. Brought to you by Google Cloud and its ecosystem partners. (techno music) >> Hello, everyone, welcome back to our day two of live coverage here in San Francisco, California for Google Next's conference called Next 2018, Google Next 2018 is the hashtag. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We're kickin' off day two. We just heard the keynotes, they're finishing up. Most of the meat of the keynote is out there, so we're going to just dive in and start the analysis. We got a tight schedule again, great guests, we have all the cloud-native folks comin' up from Google. We're going to hear from customers, and from partners. We're going to hear all the action. We're going to break it down for you. But first we want to do kind of a breakdown on the keynote, do analyze it and give some critical analysis, and also, things we think Google's doing great. Dave, day two, we've got three days of wall-to-wall coverage, go to the siliconangle.com for special journalism cloud series, a lot of articles hitting, a lot of CUBE videos, go to theCube.net, just check out those videos. That's our site, where all the videos are. Dave, day one, we had a great close yesterday; I thought it was phenomenal. But I thought we nailed it, today, too. And one of the things we were talkin' about in the first day close, editorially, was saying, hey, you know, this AI is super important. Today, in the keynote, more AI, more under the covers, more speed of announcements. Google kind of taking a playbook out of Amazon, let's get some announcements out there, I wouldn't say that the pace of announcements meets AWS, in terms of the announcements, but the focus is on a very few core things: AI, RollaData, Cloud-Native, Cloud Functions, Cloud Services Platform. This is the Google, that they're lifting the curtain. We're startin' to see some action. Your thoughts on the keynote... >> Well, I think you're absolutely right, I think Google realizes that it's got to compete with Amazon, from the keynote standpoint, demonstrating innovations, putting out a lot of function. I will say this, maybe it doesn't match Amazon's pace of innovation and announcements, but when you compare what these cloud-guys do with the traditional enterprise shows that we go to, there's no comparison. Even this morning, keynote day two, was drinking from a fire hose, there are dozens of announcements that Google made today. I would say just a couple of things, critical analysis, Google, everything is very scripted, as is all these shows, Amazon is very scripted as well, but they're reading everything, which I don't like, I would rather see them have a little bit more teleprompter, friendly, sort of presentation. So that's just sort of a little side comment. But the content is very good. The big themes I took away today, even though they didn't use this term, is really they're treating infrastructure as code. They're deploying infrastructure and microservices from code, as developers. So that was a theme that cut through the entire morning. Big announcement was the GA of Cloud Functions. It's been in beta, now it's Serverless, it's been in beta for a long time. And then a number of other announcements that we're going to go through and talk about, but those were some of the big highlights. But AutoML, I want to talk about that a little bit, talk a lot about developer agility. Threw out a couple of examples of customers, we heard from Chevron, we heard from Twitter, so they're starting to give examples, again, not as many Amazon, but real customers in the enterprise, customers like Mastercard, so, they're dropping some names... You're starting to see their belief manifest into actual adoption. But I'd like to ask you, John, what's your sense of the adoption bell curve, and the maturity curve, of the Google customer? >> Great question, I think for me, just kind of squinting through all of the noise, and looking at the announcements specifically, and how the portfolio of the show's going, it's very clear that Google is saying, we are here to play, we are here to win, we're going to take the long game on this cloud business. We have a ton to bring to the table, I call it the "bring out the Howitzers, the big guns." And they're doing that, they're bringing major technology, BigQuery, BigTable, Spanner, and a variety of other things, from the core Google business, bringing that out there and making it consumable; said that yesterday. Today, we looked at what's goin' on. You're seeing AI within G Suite. Leading by example, by demonstrating, look at it, this is how we use AI, you could use it, too, but not jamming AI and G Suite down the throats of the customer. AI and BigTable, I thought was pretty significant, because you can now bring machine learning and artificial intelligence, so to speak, into a data warehouse-like environment, where there's not a lot of data movement, data prep, it just happens. And then the Cloud Services Platform, the CSP, that Eyal Menor, the Vice President of Engineering, rolled out, I found interesting. The key move there was Cloud Functions. They now need to have Serverless up and running, and obviously Lambda's AWS. The uptake on the enterprise with Lambda has been significant, more than they thought. We heard that from Amazon, so I expect that Cloud Functions, and having this foundational layer with Kubernetes doubling down. The Kubernetes, Istio, and these Cloud Functions, represent that foundation. Knative open source projects, again, another arrow in their quiver around their open source contribution. This is Google, they're bringing the goods to the party, the open source party. This is an under-appreciated value proposition, in my opinion; I think a lot of people don't understand the implications of what's going to go on with this. This upstream contribution, and the downstream benefits that's going to come from their contra open source, is highly strategic. We used to call it, in the old days, "Kool-Aid injection." That's the way you ingratiate into the community with your software, ultimately the best software should win. There's not a lot of politics in open source, as there was once was, so I think that's fine. Now, to the question of migration, Google Cloud is showin' some customers up there, but I don't think they're going to, they're a long ways away from winning enterprises. What you see Google winning now is the AlphaTechies. The guys who were, and gals, who know tech, they know scale, and they can come in and appreciate the goodness of Google, they can appreciate the 10x advantages we heard from Danielle, with Spanner. These are what I call people with massive tech chops. They understand the tech, they've had problems, they need an aspirin, they need a steroid, and they need a growth hormone, right? They don't just need a pain-killer, they need solutions. These guys can make it happen. They jump in, take the machinery, and make that scale. The second level on the trajectory of their growth, on the adoption curve, is what I call, "Smart SMB, Smart enterprises." These are enterprises that have really strong technical people, where the internal conversations is not "if we should go to cloud," it's "how should we go to cloud?" And the DNA of the makeup of the technical people will decide the cloud they go with. And if it's engineering-led, meaning they have strong network operations, strong dev-team, then they have people who know what they're doing, they gravitate to Google Cloud. The third phase, which I think is not yet attainable, although aspirational, for Google, is the classic enterprise. "Man, I've been buying IT for years, oh my god, I'm like a straight-jacket of innovation, nothing's happening!" They're like, "we got to go to the cloud, how do we do it?" It's a groping for a strategy, right? So, Amazon gets those guys, because there's some things that shadow IT that Amazon can deliver, in more options, than what Google has. So I think I don't see Google knockin' that down in the short term, anytime soon. They can do plenty of business. Again, this is a trajectory that has an economy of scale to it, as an advantage, as a competitive advantage, by doing that. If Google tries to become Amazon, and meet their trajectory, the diseconomies of scale plays against Google. This is critical, Google does not want to do that, and they're not doing that, so I think the strategy of Google is right on the money. Nail the early adopters, the alpha geeks. Hit the engineering teams within the smartest companies, or small businesses, and then wait to hit that mainstream market, two, three years from now. So I think there's a multi-year journey for Google. Again, this diseconomies of scale is not what they want, they have tons of leverage in the tech, and the data, and the AI. So to me, they're right on track. They're now getting into the phase two. Smart. I give them credit for that. >> Let me pick up on a couple of things you said, and tie it into the keynotes from this morning. But I want to start with some of the conversations that you and I had last night, and around the show, with some of the GCP users. So, we've been asking them, okay, well how do you like GCP? Whaddya like? What don't you like? How does it compare with Azure? How does it compare with Amazon? And the feedback has been consistent. Tech is great, a lot of confidence in the tech. Obviously what Google's doing is they're using the tech internally, and then they're pointing it to the external world. It comes out in beta, and then they harden it, like they did today with Serverless and GOGA. The tech's great. Documentation has a little bit to be desired; we heard that as a consistence theme. Functionality not as rich in the infrastructure side as AWS, and not as enterprise app friendly as Azure, but very, very solid capabilities. This comes from people in financial services, people in healthcare, people from oil and gas. So, it's been consistent feedback that we've heard across the user base. You mentioned Knative; Knative is a new open source project, that brings Serverless to Kubernetes, and it was brought forth by Pivotal, IBM, RedHat, SAP, obviously Google, and others. Again, a big theme of the keynotes this morning was developer agility, bringing microservices, and services, and things like Kubernetes, to the developer community. Now, I want to talk about another example of a customer, Chevron. Is Google crushing it in traditional enterprise IT in the cloud? Well, no, you're bringing up the point that they're not. But, what they are doing, is doing well in places where people are solving data-oriented business problems with technology. Is that IT? It's not a traditional IT, but it's technology. Let me give you an example, Chevron was up on stage today, and they gave an example of they have thousands and thousands of docs, of topographical data points, and they use this thing called AutoML to ingest all the data into a model that they built, and visualize that data, to identify high-probability drilling zones and sites in the Gulf of Mexico. Dramatically compressed the time that it would have taken. In fact, they wouldn't have been able to do this. So they ingested the data, auto-categorized all the data to simplify it, put it into buckets, and then mapped it into their model, which was tuned over time, and identified the higher probability of sites for drilling. That's using tech to solve a business problem, drive productivity; Google crushes it with those type of data applications, really good example. >> And AutoML drives that, and this is where, again, a machine learning, AutoML, AI operation, we mentioned that yesterday, the IT operations sector is going to be decimated. But I think the big tell sign for me is when I look at the cloud shows, Amazon definitely has competition with Google, so that anyone who says Google's way far back in the market share, which you know I think is bastardized, I think those market share numbers don't mean anything because there's so much sandbagging going on; I could look at any one and say Microsoft's just sandbagging the numbers, and Amazon not really, if Amazon could probably sandbag the numbers even more by putting revenue from their partner ecosystem. Google throws G Suite in there, but they could throw AdWords in there and say technically that's running on their cloud, and be the number one cloud. What is a good cloud? When you have a cloud, if you can make a situation where you can take a customer and get them on the cloud easily, in a simplified, accelerated way, that is a success formula. What you heard on stage today was kind of, naw, I won't say underplayed, they certainly played it up and got some applause, is Velostrata and these services. They bought a company called Velostrata in May of this past year, and what they do is essentially the migration. We had a guest on, a user yesterday, migrating from Oracle to Spanner, 10x value, major reduction in price. They didn't say 10x, but significant; we'll try to get those numbers, she wouldn't say. But what Velostrata does is allows you to migrate to existing apps in a very easy, non-disruptive way, from on-prem to the cloud. This is the killer app for the leading clouds. They need tools to move workloads and databases to their cloud, because as clients and enterprises start to do taste tests, kick the tires in cloud, they're going to want to know what's the better cloud. So, the sales motto is simply go try it before you buy it. It's cloud. You can rent it. This is the value of the cloud. So, Amazon's done an extremely awesome job at this, Google has to step up, and I think Velostrata's one of many. I think the Kubernetes piece is critical, around managing legacy workloads, and adding new cloud natives. Between Velostrata, and the Knative, and the Cloud Functions, I think Google is shoring up their offerings, and it makes them a formidable competitor for certain workloads, and those early adopters, and that Stage Two, small, medium, or Smart enterprise, as a foundational element. I think that is a tell sign, and I got to give them props for that, and again, you can get an Oracle database into cloud, you're going to win a lot of business. If you can get an app workload running on Google Cloud seamlessly, in a very easy, meaningful way, it's just going to rain money. >> So let's talk about something we just talked about, how Google's not crushing it in traditional enterprise apps, but let's talk about some-- >> For now. >> of things we heard today, where they're trying to get into that space. So they announced today support on GCP for Oracle RAC, real application clusters, and exit data, and then SAP, via a partnership with Accenture. So Accenture does crush it with Oracle and SAP. Now, here's the problem: Oracle will play its licensing games, we've seen this with Amazon, where essentially, Oracle's license costs are double in AWS, they'll do the same thing for Google, I guarantee it, than they are in Oracle's cloud. So, 2x. It's already incredibly expensive. So, Oracle's going to use its pricing strategy to lock out competitors. So, that's a big deal, but we also saw some stuff on security: Cloud Armor, automatically defending against DDoS attacks, that's a big deal. We heard about shielded VMs, so secure VMs within GCP. These are things that traditional enterprises, it's going to resonate with traditional enterprises. >> Yeah, but here's the thing, then, we have one final point. I know we're going to run over a little bit of time, here, but I wanted to get it out there. You mentioned Oracle and the licenses. It's not just about Oracle, and their costs, and that disadvantage that could happen for a lot of people, and what cloud clearly has some benefits on a lot of cost. Here's the problem, like any Mafia business, Dave, we always talk about the cloud Mafias, and the on-premise Mafias. Oracle has an ecosystem of people who make a boatload of money around these licenses. So, you have a lot of perverse incentives around keeping the old stuff around, okay? So, as the global SIs, you mentioned Accenture, Deloitte, and others, those guys may salute the Google Cloud flag and the ecosystem, but at the end of the day, it's going to come down to money for them. So, if the perverse incentive is to stay in the old ways, saying "hey, okay, if we keep the license in there I get more better billing hours and I can roll out more deployments." Because what clouds do, and what Google's actually enabling, is enabling for the automation of those systems and those services, so you're going to see a future, very quickly, where half of the work that Accenture and Deloitte get paid on is going to be gone. From weeks to minutes; months, to weeks, to minutes. This is not a good monetization playbook for Accenture, and those guys. >> Well. >> So Google has to shift a ecosystem strategy that's smart and makes people money. At the end of the day-- >> No doubt. >> That's going to be a healthy ecosystem for every dollar of Google spend, it has to be at least 5 to 15x ecosystem dollars. I just don't see it right now. >> The big consultancies love to eat at the trough, as we like to say. But let's talk about the ecosystem, because you and I, we've walked the floor a couple times now. We mentioned Accenture, Cognizant is here, RedHead is here, KPMG, Salesforce, Marketo, Tata, everybody's here. UiPath, a startup in RPA; Cohesity's here. Rubrik's here, Intel's here, everybody's here, except AWS isn't here. >> Obviously. >> (chuckles softly) And Microsoft's not here. The other point that I think is worth mentioning, is again, big theme here is internally tested and then we point it at the market. Chevron, Autotrader, Mastercard, you're starting to see these names trickle out, other traditional enterprise. They announced today a partnership with NetApp for file sharing, for NFS workloads. So you're seeing NetApp lean in to the cloud in a big way. NetApps, back! You know you were seein' that. You saw Twitter on the Google Cloud. So you're seeing more and more examples of real companies, real businesses. >> I'll just end this segment by saying one thing quickly, the high IQ people in the industry, whether it's customers, partners, or vendors, are going to have to increase their 3D chess game, because as the money shifts around, the zero-sum game in my mind, it's going to shift to the value. Things are going to get automated either way, and that could be core businesses. So, the innovative dilemma is in play for many, many people. You got to be smart, and you got to land in a position, you got to know where the puck is going to be, skate to where the puck is going to be. It's going to require the highest IQ: tech IQ, and also business IQ, to make sure that you are making money as the world turns, because those dollars are up for grabs. The dollars are shifting as the new ecosystem rolls out. If you're relying on old ways to make money, you are in for a world of hurt if you don't have a plan. So, to me, that's the big story, I think, in the cloud that Google's driving. Google's driving massive acceleration, massive value creation, massive ecosystem opportunities, but it's not your grandfather's ecosystem, it's different. So we're going to see, we're going to test people, we're going to challenge it, we're going to have conversations here in TheCube. The day two of three days of live coverage. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Stay with us as we kick off day two. We'll be right back. (techno music)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, NetApp and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back everyone. This is theCUBE's coverage here in Orlando, Florida at Cisco Live 2018. Our first year here at Cisco Live. We were in Barcelona this past year. Again, Cisco transforming to a next generation set of networking capabilities while maintaining all the existing networks and all the security. I'm John Furrier your host with Stu Miniman my co-host for the next three days. Our next guest is Arun Garg. Welcome to theCUBE. You are the Director of Product Management Converged Infrastructure Group at NetApp. >> Correct, thank you very much for having me on your show and it's a pleasure to meet with you. >> One of the things that we've been covering a lot lately is the NetApp's really rise in the cloud. I mean NetApp's been doing a lot of work on the cloud. I mean I've wrote stories back when Tom Georges was the CEO when Amazon just came on the scene. NetApp has been really into the cloud and from the customer's standpoint but now with storage and elastic resources and server lists, the customers are now startin' to be mindful. >> Absolutely. >> Of how to maximize the scale and with All Flash kind of a perfect storm. What are you guys up to? What's your core thing that you guys are talking about here at Cisco Live? >> So absolutely, thank you. So George Kurian, our CEO at NetApp, is very much in taking us to the next generation and the cloud. Within that I take care of some of the expansion plans we have on FlexPod with Cisco and in that we have got two new things that we are announcing right now. One is the FlexPod for Healthcare which is in FlexPod we've been doing horizontal application so far which are like the data bases, tier one database, as well as applications from Microsoft and virtual desktops. Now we are going vertical. Within the vertical our application, the first one we're looking in the vertical is healthcare. And so it's FlexPod for Healthcare. That's the first piece that we are addressing. >> What's the big thing with update on FlexPod? Obviously FlexPod's been very successful. What's the modernization aspect of it because Cisco's CEO was onstage today talking about Cisco's value proposition, about the old ways now transitioning to a new network architecture in the modern era. What's the update on FlexPod? Take a minute to explain what are the cool, new things going on with FlexPod. >> Correct, so the All Flash FAS, which is the underlying technology, which is driving the FlexPod, has really picked up over the last year as customers keep wanting to improve their infrastructure with better latencies and better performance the All Flash FAS has driven even the FlexPod into the next generation. So that's the place where we are seeing double-digit growth over the last five quarters consistently in FlexPod. So that's a very important development for us. We've also done more of the standard CVDs that we do on SAP and a few other are coming out. So those are all out there. Now we are going to make sure that all these assets can be consumed by the vertical industry in healthcare. And there's another solution we'll talk about, the managed private cloud on FlexPod. >> Yeah, Arun, I'd love to talk about the private cloud. So I think back to when Cisco launched UCS it was the storage partners that really helped drive that modernization for virtualization. NetApp with FlexPod, very successful over the years doing that. As we know, virtualization isn't enough to really be a private cloud. All the things that Chuck Robbins is talking about onstage, how do I modernize, how do I get you know, automation in there? So help us connect the dots as to how we got from you know, a good virtualized platform to this is, I think you said managed private cloud, FlexPod in Cisco. >> Absolutely. So everybody likes to consume a cloud. It's easy to consume a cloud. You go and you click on I need a VM, small, medium, large, and I just want to see a dashboard with how my VMs are doing. But in reality it's more difficult to just build your own cloud. There's complexity associated with it. You need a service platform where you can give a ticket, then you need an orchestration platform where you can set up the infrastructure, then you need a monitoring platform which will show you all of the ways your infrastructure's working. You need a capacity planning tool. There's tens of tools that need to be integrated. So what we have done is we have partnered with some of the premium partners and some DSIs who have already built this. So the risk of a customer using their private cloud infrastructure is minimized and therefore these partners also have a managed service. So when you combine the fact that you have a private cloud infrastructure in the software domain as well as a managed service and you put it on the on-prem FlexPod that are already sold then the customer benefits from having the best of both worlds, a cloud-like experience on their own premise. And that is what we are delivering with this FlexPod managed private cloud solution. >> Talk about the relationship with Cisco. So we're here at Cisco Live you guys have a good relationship with Cisco. What should customers understand about the relationship? What are the top bullet points and value opportunities and what does it mean to the impact for the customer? >> So we, all these solutions we work very closely with the Cisco business unit and we jointly develop these solutions. So within that what we do is there's the BU to BU interaction where the solution is developed and defined. There is a marketing to marketing interaction where the collateral gets created and reviewed by both parties. So you will not put a FlexPod brand unless the two companies agree. >> So it's tightly integrated. >> It's tightly integrated. The sales teams are aligned, the marketing, the communications team, the channel partner team. That's the whole value that the end customer gets because when a partner goes to a high-end enterprise customer he knows that both Cisco and NetApp teams can be brought to the table for the customer to showcase the value as well as help them through it all. >> Yeah, over in one of the other areas that's been talked about this show we talk about modernization. You talk about things like microservices. >> Yes. >> Containers are pretty important. How does that story of containerization fit into FlexPod? >> Absolutely. So containerization helps you get workloads, the cloud-native workloads or the type two native. Type two workloads as Gartner calls them. So our mode two. What we do is we work with the Cisco teams and we already had a CVD design with a hybrid cloud with a Cisco cloud center platform, which is the quicker acquisition. And we showed a design with that. What we are now bringing to the table is the ability for our customers to benefit with a managed service on top of it. So that's the piece we are dealing with the cloud teams. With the Cisco team the ACI fabric is very important to them. So that ACI fabric is visible and shown in our designs whether you do SAP, you do Oracle, you do VDI and you do basic infrastructure or you do the managed private cloud or FlexPod on Healthcare. All of these have the core networking technologies from Cisco, as well as the cloud technologies from Cisco in a form factor or in a manner that easily consumable by our customers. >> Arun, talk about the customer use cases. So say you've got a customer, obviously you guys have a lot of customers together with Cisco, they're doing some complex things with the technology, but for the customer out there that has not yet kinda went down the NetApp Cisco route, what do they do? 'Cause a lot of storage guys are lookin' at All Flash, so check, you guys have that. They want great performance, check. But then they gotta integrate. So what do you say to the folks watching that aren't yet customers about what they should look at and evaluate vis-a-vis your opportunity with them and say the competition? >> So yes, there are customers who are doing all this as separate silos, but the advantage of taking a converged infrastructure approach is that you benefit from the years of man experience or person experience that we have put behind in our labs to architect this, make sure that everything is working correctly and therefore is reduces their deployment time and reduces the risk. And if you want to be agile and faster even in the traditional infrastructure, while you're being asked to go to the cloud you can do it with our FlexPod design guides. If you want the cloud-like experience then you can do it with a managed private cloud solution on your premise. >> So they got options and they got flexibility on migrating to the cloud or architecting that. >> Yes. >> Okay, great, now I'm gonna ask you another question. This comes up a lot on theCUBE and certainly we see it in the industry. One of the trends is verticalization. >> Yes. >> So verticalization is not a new thing. Vertical industry, people go to market that way, they build products that are custom to verticals. But with cloud one of the benefits of cloud and kind of a cloud operations is you have a horizontally scalable capability. So how do you guys look at that, because these verticals, they gotta get closer to the front lines and have apps that are customized. I mean data that's fastly delivered to the app. How should verticals think about architecting storage to maintain the scale of horizontally scalable but yet provide customization into the applications that might be unique to the vertical? >> Okay, so let me give a trend first and then I'll get to the specific. So in the vertical industry, the next trend is industry clouds. For example, you have healthcare clouds and you'll have clouds to specific industries. And the reason is because these industries have to keep their data on-prem. So the data gravity plays a lot of impact in all of these decisions. And the security of their data. So that is getting into industry-specific clouds. The second pieces are analytics. So customers now are finding that data is valuable and the insight you can get from the data are actually more valuable. So what they want is the data on their premise, they want the ability all in their control so to say, they want the ability to not only run their production applications but also the ability to run analytics on top of that. In the specific example for health care what it does is when you have All Flash FAS it provides you a faster response for the patient because the physician is able to get the diagnostics done better if he has some kind of analytics helping him. [Interviewer] - Yeah. >> Plus the first piece I talked about, the rapid deployment is very important because you want to get your infrastructure set up so I can give an example on that too. >> Well before we get to the example, this is an important point because I think this is really the big megatrend. It's not really kinda talked much about but it's pretty happening is that what you just pointed out was it's not just about speeds and feeds and IOPs, the performance criteria to the industry cloud has other new things like data, the role of data, what they're using for the application. >> Correct. >> So it's just you've gotta have table stakes of great, fast storage. >> Yes. >> But it's gotta be integrated into what is becoming a use case for the verticals. Did I get that right? >> Yes, absolutely. So I'll give two examples. One I can name the customer. So they'll come at our booth tomorrow, in a minute here. So LCMC Health, part of UMC, and they have the UMC Medical Center. So when New Orleans had this Katrina disaster in Louisiana, so they came up with they need a hospital, fast. And they decided on FlexPod because within three months with the wire one's architecture and application they could scale their whole IT data center for health care. So that has helped them tremendously to get it up and running. Second is with the All Flash FAS they're able to provide faster response to their customer. So that's a typical example that we see in these kind of industries. >> Arun, thanks for coming on theCUBE. We really appreciate it. You guys are doing a great job. In following NetApps recent success lately, as always, NetApp's always goin' the next level. Quick question for you to end the segment. What's your take of Cisco Live this year? What's some of the vibe of the show? So I know it's day one, there's a lot more to come and you're just getting a sense of it. What's the vibe? What's coming out of the show this year? What's the big ah-ha? >> So I attended the keynote today and it was very interesting because Cisco has taken networking to the next level within 10 base networking, its data and analytics where you can put on a subscription mode on all the pieces of the infrastructure networking. And that's exactly the same thing which NetApp is doing, where we are going up in the cloud with this subscription base. And when you add the two subscription base then for us, at least in the managed private cloud solution we can provide the subscription base through the managed private cloud through our managed service provider. So knowing where the industry was going, knowing where Cisco was going and knowing where we want to go, we have come up with this solution which matches both these trends of Cisco as well as NetApp. >> And the number of connected devices going up every day. >> Yes. >> More network connections, more geo domains, it's complicated. >> It is complicated, but if you do it correctly we can help you find a way through it. >> Arun, thank you for coming on theCUBE. I'm John Furrier here on theCUBE with Stu Miniman here with NetApp at Cisco Live 2018. Back with more live coverage after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Hi, welcome to theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin, with Keith Townsend, and we are with NetApp in their booth at SAP SAPPHIRE 2018. Welcoming Mike McGibbney to theCUBE, from SAP. You're the SVP of SuccessFactors Service, Delivery and Operations. Welcome. >> Well, thank you. >> So, SuccessFactors, largest people cloud in the world. So you probably a little bit busy. >> Just a little bit. >> Tell us about what you're doing at SuccessFactors. >> So I'm responsible for the delivery and operation of the cloud service. So we service all of our customers and continue to introduce new capabilities into that cloud. We support them from payroll, all the way through recruitment. Basically, from hire to retire. >> So Mike, not your first cloud. Little background and history. Me and Mike have been on the, well probably one of the toughest projects, politically, I've ever been on. >> Yes, definitely. >> So there's history, but great history. We deliver success. This isn't your first cloud. >> No. >> You've built clouds before. What's fundamentally different about the SAP people cloud versus clouds you've built in the past? >> I think the speed. The way this is accelerating, both the breadth of the capabilities that we're offering when you think about the integrations into SAP, and the growth. So this is moving truly at cloud speed. The things that we're shooting for today are already past. So we constantly have to be focused out there on the horizon. We've gotta adapt very quickly. And we've gotta implement very quickly. Our customers need it to accelerate their business. And our services need that support underneath them as well. >> So you guys, as you said, have this, have this long history, so I'll let you guys chat in a minute. But in terms of customer experience, customer engagement, customer influence, that was kind of a lot of undertone in the keynote this morning. 50 million business users on SuccessFactors and 60 industries. How do you, needing to get to the speed that you just mentioned how do you get that customer feedback to drive evolution of the product as fast as they're demanding it? >> Well, so the product and engineering team have a whole system around customer engagements with delivery panels and steering committees. But from an operations side, we felt that it was important as well. We have a whole organization that is focused on engaging the customer. We built our operational centers. And we do probably about 60 customer tours a year through our operational centers. We also do about 200 customer calls from the operational team a month. So globally, we work with the pre-sales, the CEE groups, and some of the other SAP support groups, to make sure that we have boots on the ground, understanding what our customers want, understanding what their experience is, so we can continue to adjust and reset the bar where it needs to be. >> So Lisa, I'm not gonna dominate the conversation. Me and Mike can probably, we'll crack open a beer in a minute, (laughter) and we'll continue. But there's other hero numbers on the stage. Let's talk about the high level first and then me and Mike can geek out. What are some of the other Xers reveals? >> Oh, good question. I think just some of the industries. I always like to see which industries are kind of leading edge here. So he mentioned 23,000 HANA users and 25 different industries. And I'm curious, that's a lot. And I'm curious to see what some of the key use cases are that you guys are driving with helping some customers in many industries that hire to retire. What are some of the key use cases that you're helping those customers to drive? >> Well, I think we have a good presence in about every vertical, from both the public and the private sector. The suite of tools that we have, service the entire, each of those use cases. I think when you start to think about the SAP suite and the integration story that they talked about, with the intelligence and the analytics on top, that just takes it to another level. And I think that's really underlying important message. I think and that's what's gonna help, not only SuccessFactors, but SAP continue to drive and lead across the board. >> So can we talk a little bit about customer interaction? I think traditionally, you've served up infrastructures to developers directly. But a lot of cases, your direct customer may be your actual business user looking to transform digitally. Talk about the experience, the difference in experience of running the cloud that was consumed by other technologies, to potentially running a cloud that's centered on people who are thinking about people and customers. >> Yeah, that's a great question because these are business-critical activities. You think about something like learning, right? That's used to certify pilots before they can take off. So we can actually, the availability and the delivery of that service, is critical. Large amusement parks have to certify all the ride handlers. So this thing has to be available 24 by seven, 365 days a week. And that's just something like learning. When you think about some of the other facets, they are entrenched in our customers' modern business processes. And they're all critical. So when we look at these, we have to look at 'em like we used to, some of the most critical functions in the backend. So we run them like you would, from an operational perspective, like a bank, okay? With that resilience, those practices, that focus. But we also have to do it at the speed of cloud. (laughs) >> I was just gonna ask that question. You have two competing episodes. You know, I like to, well, people. Well, SAP process is 70 percent of the transactions in the world. It is called, has been called, the cash register of the cloud. It is the ultimate system of record. Therefore, it should never be touched. However, we have to move fast. We have to digitally transform their commercial entities that want to build cool new applications on Fiori, et cetera. There are other business integrations. How do you weigh those two, what seems like competing interests? >> I think Bert laid out the data strategy and how we're gonna integrate the data across the suite. And that's gonna be the key, right? Instead of integrating and porting to, we're gonna have single sources of data where data is gonna reside. We're gonna use that as a system of record, as the suite evolves. That'll give it the data integrity that it needs, also the performance and integration perspective. >> So we're sponsored by the data driven company, NetApp, who is powering one of the most powerful data platforms on the planet, SAP. Talk about the relationship and importance of NetApps, NetApp vision in supporting your vision. >> So NetApp was here at SAP long before I started, but I have a, probably a 20 year, probably 17 to 20 year history, with that app. And you know, data is critical. The storage, the access, the performance. And they've been a critical part of almost every architecture I've worked on today. Rock solid performance, rock solid reliability, but more important to me, is the partnership with the company, and the support that we get. Not just on the stuff that we're doing today, but thinking about how we're gonna change in the future, and supporting us as we evolve, and helping us plan and think through that as well. >> One of the things that Bill talked about this morning, as well, is getting to this 4th gen of customer experience. That these expectations, we've talked about speed. That it's, everything has to be done yesterday, right? How are you guys working with NetApp delivering that 4th generation customer experience, internally and to your 50 million business users? >> Well, I think you touched on bits and pieces of it. It's a whole suite of-- It's a whole program of plans, right? Between Fiori, you know, all those things in the front end, where the customer touches. But in the backend, it's about speed and reliability to their data, right? So our architectures are getting simplified. Our data's getting condensed. We need the compliance pieces and that's where NetApp kinda play a core role in, in those pieces. >> So back in traditional infrastructures and operations, we could tell speeds and feeds as one of the best features of why you should use one service over another. As you describe the way, everyone expects speeds and feeds. What are some of the value props or KPIs for your new environment? >> So, we've really shifted. So one of the things that we've done is we've actually added operational intelligence. So we have basically a brain that sits on top of our cloud environment. It looks at all of the transactions. It filters out all the noise. So the speeds and feeds are part of a, now a service or a business function, that we're delivering. That metric down by itself is important. But unless you can correlate it to some business impact, or something happening, it doesn't really have the weight that it needs. >> Right. >> So now what we're looking at is we've ingested and mapped all of the business transactions. We can proactively focus on the ones. So we filter out 99 and change percent of the noise. And then we prorate the things that we need to kinda pivot and focus on. We have three global operational centers around the world. One in Budapest. One in Bangalore. And one in Reston. And then we have a global operation center that sits on the top, so the regionals sit in the region. And they look at all of that feedback from that intelligence. >> So getting those key performance indicators out of the system As I looked at LinkedIn, I looked at some of the common folks we have. You have a pretty consistent core team that support you over the past two or three different major iterations you've done. Talk through how collectively your team has looked at new innovations and operation deliveries such as DevOps. And you've changed the way that your core team approaches these challenges and the outcomes that you've been able to realize. >> So for us, it's about, you know the architecture and technology evolves. As it evolves, it makes a few things simpler. And also, introduces some usually more complex challenges. But it's mitigating risk, delivering performance and reliability, and maturing your actions. So if we do those basic things as we mature the technology underneath, we can drive that. So the team has been focused on, when we think about DevOps, we think about delivering seamlessly new capabilities, features into the cloud. How do we do that with a minimized risk, through automation, and seamless, right? So it's how we segmented the application, how we built the resilience in, how our processes understand and validate and be able to stand in if something happens. >> I'm wondering on that, from maybe a pivot is, we talk about often times, at different events. Whether we're talking about advanced analytics or data science skills gap. Or I think Bill even said like, upskilling. Think I heard that term this morning. I'm curious, as you were saying that, that the folks that you've been working with for a long time on different projects. What are some of the skills that they're able to, you may be able to enable them to learn, by being part of SAP? Is it something that helps accelerate their ability to develop even better, more competitive products? >> Yeah, so SAP has one of the best talent pools I've ever seen across. Some very brilliant people in every business line. So there's best practices that can be learned from everything that we do. All you have to do is be able to have the conversations and look around. When we brought the team in, about two years ago, we did a whole skills analyses, gap analyses, of the skills that we had. We looked at our operating model, created a new operating model that was enabling us to evolve from an operational perspective. And then put plans in place, and use the tools that we sell to help deliver development to the team. So basically, we became our own customer. We drove development of our, upskilling our existing resources, and we supplemented where needed. And we also pulled from the collective knowledge of SAP. So doing those three things, helped us really accelerate and execute something that typically would take three years in less than 12 months. >> Last question, Mike, for you. This morning's energetic keynote, we've talked about it a number of times already today. Really, I think somebody on the show earlier said, likened Bill McDermott to kind of, really an evangelist, which is really refreshing. You don't see a lot of C-levels that are that, where you can feel and kinda see their passion. The SAP has been very vocal for a while about really wanting to disrupt the marketplace for CRM. Some big news coming out today. I'm just wondering, kind of culturally, to wrap this up, what excites you about this train that you're on at SAP? >> I think that the message is electrifying. And inside of SAP, you feel that. So we've been feeling it as these bits and pieces have been coming out over the last year. So this is just a culmination of all the little pieces that we've known inside and we're able to share externally. So I'm extremely excited about where we're at and where we're going. And obviously, anytime I get to hear Bill speak, it just amplifies it. >> Yeah, that energy was really, you can feel it from wherever you were. It was awesome. Mike, thanks so much for stopping by and catching up with your old buddy Keith and me and sharing what you guys are doing with SuccessFactors. >> Excellent, excellent. Thanks very much. >> Thanks for -- Oh sorry, and thanks for watching theCUBE. Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend, from SAP SAPPHIRE in the NetApp booth. Thanks for watching. (fast tempo music)

>> Announcer: Live from Chicago, Illinois, it's theCUBE! Covering VeeamOn 2018. Brought to you by Veeam. >> We're back in the windy city, and this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with Stu Miniman this is our second day of covering VeeamOn 2018, second year of theCUBE at VeeamOn Danny Allan is here, he's the Vice President of Product Strategy at Veeam. Welcome back to theCUBE, it's good to see you again. >> Thank you, very excited to be here! >> Loved the keynote yesterday, gave a lot of detail. The bumper sticker, the summary on your product strategy, how would you summarize your product strategy? >> It is to be the most comprehensive intelligent data management platform that meets the demands of the enterprise. >> So, when you say intelligent data management, people hear that, and they don't--certainly don't go immediately to backup and data protection, so you've expanded that notion of what you guys do, there's a TAM expansion there as well, which is great. What do you guys mean by intelligent data management? >> So, believe it's a journey first of all, right? And it starts with backup in our application, I know that there are vendors that are saying hey this is a new world, completely different. You know what, the cornerstone of this, is still backup in our application so that is the first stage in this journey. We believe that, right now, especially the customers I'm talking to, they're deploying things on the public Cloud, they're deploying things SAS Clouds, it's all over the place, it's growing, it's sprawling, they're trying to get their hands around it. So they have to do that first, is the next step, and then it's an evolution beyond that to okay, now we understand it, now let me do something with it, let me actually drive the business to better outcomes. >> So, some things we know, or we believe anyway, that data protection and orchestration are moving up on the list of priorities for CXOs. That's I think very clear, you would agree. But there's a dichotomy that exists between the perception from the business side, as to, what can be done in terms of data protection, particularly with regard to the degrees of automation and what IT today can deliver. So there's tension there, and there's, frankly lots of opportunity for churn. When you talk to people about, okay, are you going to switch data protection vendors as you go to this digitalization, multi-Cloud? Or you went to them, and they go no we're totally open, we have an open mind. So that's good news for you guys. So thinking about those trends, how do you take advantage, from a product standpoint? >> Well Veeam has been known, I always talk about three words, it just works, people love us because the software works and it's reliable. So that's the starting point in all of this, the opportunity I believe is in that, it just works. And so if we take them through this journey, towards intelligent data management, every step has to be about it just works. In some ways, the step from stage one to stage two, which is aggregating data, is at an infrastructure level, as you get to the later stages of three, four, five, it's it just works at a business level, and so our focus is still going to be on that simplicity, reliability, making sure the platform works. >> So I want to follow up on that, because, it just works obviously is going to resonate with the IT pro, who's got to deal with failed backups, with poor reporting, with lousy recovery, blah, you know, slow, etc, etc, etc, gettin' pounded because they're losing data, we all know that thankless world. But in terms of the business side, there's billions of dollars being left on the table by businesses in the fortune one thousand because they have inadequate data protection, processes, procedures, architectures. Not, I mean there's becoming aware of it, but what's the above-the-line message? So, it just works, how do you crack through that billions of dollars of opportunity and get CFOs to open up the wallet? That is the great opportunity for you guys, I think. >> It is, so they have challenges in a number of areas, right compliance, security, regulatory, we don't talk to executives at the C level and hear them say oh I need backup, I need replication, they're saying reduce my costs. Well if you can leverage it just works, and deploy this in a way that requires less FTEs, that makes it simpler to do it, that can give them attestation, proof, that hey, I can fail over to the public Cloud, I can burst up to the public Cloud or a manage Cloud, if I can give that fluidity, that's an it just works at an ROI perspective. Or, we talked about intelligent data management, sometimes, I'll be honest, I roll my eyes when I hear artificial intelligence. And that's not because it's not real, it's because what we haven't done is taken it just works and applied it to the business. So an example of this, forget artificial intelligence for a moment, one of the examples I give is, if you see malware crossing the network, that is a really good time to do something, let's leverage that intelligence to provide an outcome. And that's an it just works at the business level rather than at the infrastructure level. >> Alright, so Danny, above the message it's, any data, any app, across any Cloud. We have these pesky little things called like, physics, and data gravity, and the like. So protecting, getting access to my data in the public cloud versus the edge with, where we're going to see 90+% of the data in the future versus my traditional data centers where it's providing the stats. It's a complicated world, how do you make it that simple? >> So let me expand our benefits into a third area, so Veeam took off, in that it was easy to use, it was reliable, but the second one is the portability and the agnosticism of the platform, you didn't need media servers, it was all self-describing backup things, VBKs or vibs, without trying to get too technical here, that self-describing capability allows us to move between infrastructures. In some ways what VMware did, at the hardware level, they decouple the workload from a physical server, we're decoupling the workload from the infrastructure on which it sits because it's this self-describing, very portable format, that enables fluidity of movement. >> I haven't heard much about Edge yet, is that a place that you expect to begin to have a play? >> Yes, and I expect we have to do that, and the reason is because a lot of the computing now is happening at the edge and you want to make you actions out of the edge. There's this concept in the US Air Force called the OODA loop, observe, orient, decide, and act, and you would try to act out on the edge, but my belief is that data protection systems will do some of that protection out on the edge, but sometimes they won't know what to do, and so the information will be sent back to the Cloud, or sent back to the core to make a better business decision on what should we do with this data. >> You think about your platform, we were talking to Peter McKay about, you've kind of gone from a product company to a platform company. We talked about that a little bit, but I wonder if we can dig into it more from a standpoint of your role as head of product strategy. What does platform mean, where do you see that platform going, can you share a little roadmap with us? >> Platform to me has kind of three connotations to it, one is that you have the capabilities within the platform that are very broad, and we believe we have that, we can cover physical/virtual Cloud, we have orchestration, we have reporting, we have all of those capabilities. The second, though, is comprehensive APIs, you need to have the extensibility in a platform that you can actually talk to the ecosystem of partners. And that's actually the third area, it's being able to work with your Ciscos and your NetApps, and your HPEs and all of our partners to deliver these better outcomes. >> Yeah, I mean, it's funny, last year, Stu, when you saw Veeam, and you took the introduction of those capabilities. I noted, I remember the ascendancy of EMC back in the day, they did a really good job of connecting to everything that was out there. I mean, it sounds so simple, but it's integration work, they just went in and rolled up their sleeves and did the dirty work. >> A lot of work Dave, I've got the scars, living in interrupt lab, so. (laughing) >> And you guys do that dirty work, and every time you do that it expands your total available market. I don't want to say it's unique in the business, but you seem to have an aptitude to do it without it appearing to be such a heavy lift to the marketplace. Why is that? >> Well it's, frankly it's a scalability thing, we're an almost one billion dollar company, this year we should cross a billion dollars in bookings, and if you want to scale, to add more and more partners, you take our storage integrations for example we were doing maybe one a year for a few years, and we recognized all these vendors knocking on our door saying hey, give us that capability. And so we've added, just in the last six months, IBM, Lenovo, Infinit App, Pure. The only way you can do that, is to have a consistent API framework that people can plug into. It's the way we scale. >> Again, I look at a company like VMware, we saw all the sort of integration challenges that they went through, and the limited resources they had, you remember it, and the Cartel got the SDKs first, and it took forever to get the integrations done a year later you might see some function. It just seems like you guys have some sort of good process internally to actually make this stuff work. >> We're the largest small company you've ever met, we're really agile internally. It helps us to respond to the customer requests, they come to us and say hey I want this, I want this. If we can't respond to that quickly we'll never be successful. >> Danny, I just wonder if you can expand a little bit on the Cloud opportunity. Should we be looking to see more Cloud services out of Veeam kind of layer on what's happening, you have the acquisition a year ago, and-- >> Unquestionably, so I'd say 2017 was the year of agents, we added support for physical and for Cloud, but through agents. I tell everyone that 2018 is really the year of the Cloud for us, we started the year by acquiring N2W software, but last week for example, it's not even making huge PR announcements, we just release version two of backup for Office 365, which adds OneDrive and Sharepoint support. And you'll see in the next release of our product, Anton has a break-in session on this today, another huge capability around, not just integrating with the cloud but actually integrating in a way that provides business value. I'm a big believer in, you don't just put a check-box in, I support Cloud, I can send things to the Cloud, it's how do I actually use the Cloud in a way that delivers business outcome. So this year actually, 2018 is about Cloud for Veeam. >> I want to follow up on that because as an observer of this industry for a long time there seems to be sort of two philosophies, and you just laid out yours, you're not a big believer in check-boxes, and I've seen it, you're an old company. We got every feature, and they would take the salesperson, we have this they don't. Grr, headlock, buy it! (Danny laughing) So you're not trying to do the check-box game, you're trying to map business value, or your features and capabilities to business value for the customer, that's how you sell, and emphasize in your sales motions? >> Yeah, so, this is somewhat of a controversial statement, but we sometimes say we won't be first to market with a feature, we'll be first to market with a solution. So you can come out with, for example, sending things to object storage in the Cloud, and if you're sending up a one gigabyte object, that is a totally--you're not going to leverage that in the real world. But if you deliver that in a way that is actually effective, then you can leverage the Cloud as a tool, because the Cloud is not a destination for most of these enterprises, it's a tool in their toolbox that they use to solve a problem. So we're all about solving those problems. >> Excellent. Alright, Danny, thanks so much for coming back on theCUBE, we'll give you last word on VeeamOn 2018, and maybe give us a little preview of what we can expect? >> Well, we're really excited to be here, the most exciting thing to me is, is the recognition, the conversation with customers about this journey towards intelligent data management, as you said, most customers are in stage one, stage two, but for us this is a partnership, this isn't us just giving software, this is talking to customers, talking to partners, making them successful. >> Alright well hey, congratulations on a great show, and all the success. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you very much, happy to be here! >> Alright keep it right there everybody, Stu and I will be back with our next guest. From Chicago, theCUBE, VeeamOn 2018. We'll be right back. (light music)

>> Announcer: Live from San Jose it's The Cube presenting Big Data, Silicon Valley brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media and its ecosystem partners. >> Good morning. Welcome to The Cube. We are on day two of our coverage our event Big Data SV. I'm Lisa Martin with my cohost Dave Vellante. We're down the street from the Strata Data Conference. This is The Cube's tenth big data event and we had a great day yesterday learning a lot from myriad guests on very different nuances of big data journey where things are going. We're excited to welcome back to The Cube an alumni, Octavian Tanase, the Senior Vice President of Data ONTAP fron Net App. Octavian, welcome back to The Cube. >> Glad to be here. >> So you've been at the Strata Data Conference for the last couple of days. From a big data perspective, what are some of the things that you're hearing, in terms of from a customer's perspective on what's working, what challenges, opportunities? I'm very excited to be here and learn about the innovation of our partners in the industry and share with our partners and our customers what we're doing to enable them to drive more value out of that data. The reality is that data has become the 21st Century gold or oil that powers the business and everybody's looking to apply new techniques, a lot of times machine learning, deep learning, to draw more value of the data, make better decisions and compete in the marketplace. Octavian, you've been at NetApp now eight years and I've been watching NetApp, as we were talking about offline, for decades and I've seen the ebb and flow and this company has transformed many, many times. The latest, obviously cloud came in, flash came into play and then you're also going through a major transition in the customer based to clustered ONTAP. You seemed to negotiate that. NetApp is back, thriving, stock's up. What's happening at NetApp? What's the culture like these days? Give us the update. >> I think we've been very fortunate to have a CEO like George Kurian, who has been really focused on helping us do basically fewer things better, really focus on our core business, simplify our operations and continue to innovate and this is probably the area that I'm most excited about. It's always good to make sure that you accelerate the business, make it simpler for your customers and your partners to do business with you, but what you have to do is innovate. We are a product company. We are passionate about innovation. I believe that we are innovating with more pace than many of the startups in the space so that's probably the most exciting thing that has been part of our transformation. >> So let's talk about big data. Back in the day if you had a big data problem you would buy a big Unix box, maybe buy some Oracle licenses, try to put all your data into that box and that became your data warehouse. The brilliance of Hadoop was hey we can leave the data where it is. There's too much data to put into the box so we're going to bring five megabytes to code to a petabyte of data. And the other piece of it is CFOs loved it, because we're going to reduce the cost of our expensive data warehouse and we're going to buy off the shelf components: white box, servers and off the shelf disk drives. We're going to put that together and life will be good. Well as things matured, the old client-server days, it got very expensive, you needed enterprise grade. So where does NetApp fit into that equation, because originally big storage companies like NetApp, they weren't part of the equation? Has that changed? >> Absolutely. One of the things that has enabled that transformation, that change is we made a deliberate decision to focus on software defined and making sure that the ONTAP operating system is available wherever data is being created: on the edge in an IoT device, in the traditional data center or in the cloud. So we are in the unique position to enable analytics, big data, wherever those applications reside. One of the things that we've recently done is we've partnered with IDC and what the study, what the analysis has shown is that deploying in analytics, a Hadoop or NoSQL type of solution on top of NetApp is half the cost of DAS. So when you consider the cost of servers, the licenses that you're going to have to pay for, these commercial implementations of Hadoop as well as the storage and the data infrastructure, you are much better off choosing NetApp than a white box type of solution. >> Let's unpack that a little bit, because if I infer correctly from what you said normally you would say the operational costs are going to be dramatically lower, it's easier to manage a professional system like a NetApp ONTAP, it's integrated, great software, but am I hearing you correctly, you're saying the acquisition costs are actually less than if I'm buying white box? A lot of people are going to be skeptical about that, say Octavian no way, it's cheaper to buy white box stuff. Defend that statement. >> Absolutely. If you're looking at the whole solution that includes the server and the storage, what NetApp enables you to do if you're running the solution on top of ONTAP you reduce the need for so many servers. If you reduce that number you also reduce the licensing cost. Moreover, if you actually look at the core value proposition of the storage layer there, DAS typically makes three copies of the data. We don't. We are very greedy and we're making sure that you're using shared storage and we are applying a bunch of storage efficiency techniques to further compress, compact that data for world class storage efficiency. >> So cost efficiency is obviously a great benefit for any company when they're especially evolving, from a digital perspective. What are some of the business level benefits? You mentioned speed a minute ago. What is Data ONTAP and even ONTAP in the cloud enabling your enterprise customers to achieve at the business level, maybe from faster time to market, identifying with machine learning and AI new products? Give me an example of maybe a customer that you think really articulates the value that ONTAP in the cloud can deliver. >> One of the things that's really important is to have your data management capability, whatever the data is being produced so ONTAP being consumed either as a VM or a service ... I don't know if you've seen some of the partnerships that we have with AWS and Azure. We're able to offer the same rich data management capabilities, not only the traditional data center, but in the cloud. What that really enables customers to do is to simplify and have the same operating system, the same data management platform for the both the second platform traditional applications as well as for the third platform applications. I've seen a company like Adobe be very successful in deploying their infrastructure, their services not only on prem in their traditional data center, but using ONTAP Cloud. So we have more than about 1,500 customers right now that have adopted ONTAP in the AWS cloud. >> What are you seeing in terms of the adoption of flash and I'm particularly interested in the intersection of flash adoption and the developer angle, because we've seen, in certain instances, certain organizations are able to share data off of flash much more efficiently that you would be, for instance, of a spinning disk? Have you seen a developer impact in your customer base? >> Absolutely I think most of customers initially have adopted flash, because of high throughput and low latency. I think over time customers really understood and identified with the overall value proposition in cost of ownership in flash that it enables them to consolidate multiple workloads in a smaller footprint. So that enables you to then reduce the cost to operate that infrastructure and it really gives you a range of applications that you can deploy that you were never able to do that. Everybody's looking to do in place, in line analytics that now are possible, because of this fast media. Folks are looking to accelerate old applications in which they cannot invest anymore, but they just want to run faster. Flash also tends to be more reliable than traditional storage, so customers definitely appreciate that fewer things could go wrong so overall the value proposition of flash, it's all encompassing and we believe that in the near future flash will be the defacto standard in everybody's data center, whether it's on prem or in the cloud. >> How about backup and recovery in big data? We obviously, in the enterprise, very concerned about data protection. What's similar in big data? What's different and what's NetApp's angle on that? >> I think data protection and data security will never stop being important to our customers. Security's top of mind for everybody in the industry and it's a source of resume changing events, if you would, and they're typically not promotions. So we have invested a tremendous deal in certifications for HIPAA, for FIPS, we are enabling encryption, both at rest and in flight. We've done a lot of work to make sure that the encryption can happen in software layer, to make sure that we give the customers best storage class efficiency and what we're also leveraging is the innovation that ONTAP has done over many years to protect the data, replicate its snapshots, peering the data to the cloud. These are techniques that we're commonly using to reduce the cost of ownership, also protect the data the customers deploy. >> So security's still a hot topic and, like you said, it probably always will be, but it's a shared responsibility, right? So customers leveraging NetApps safe or on prem hybrid also using Azure or AWS, who's your target audience? If you're talking to the guys and gals that are still managing storage are you also having the CSO or the security guys come in, the gals, to understand we've got this appointment in Azure or AWS so we're going to bring in ONTAP to facilitate this? There's a shared responsibility of security. Who's at the table, from your perspective, in your customers that you need to help understand how they facilitate true security? >> It's definitely been a transformative event where more and more people in IQ organizations are involved in the decisions that are required to deploy the applications. There was a time when we would talk only to the storage admin. After a while we started talking to the application admin, the virtualization admin and now you're talking to the line of business who has that vested interest to make sure that they can harness the power of the data in their environment. So you have the CSO, you have the traditional infrastructure people, you have the app administration and you have the app owner, the business owner that are all at the table that are coming and looking to choose the best of breed solution for their data management. >> What are the conversations like with your CXO, executives? Everybody talks about digital transformation. It's kind of an overused term, but there's real substance when you actually peel the onion. What are you seeing as NetApp's role in effecting digital transformations within your customer base? >> I think we have a vision of how we can help enterprises take advantage of the digital transformation and adopt it. I think we have three tenants of that vision. Number one is we're helping customers harness the power of the cloud. Number two, we're looking to enable them to future proof their investments and build the next generation data center. And number three, nobody starts with a fresh slate so we're looking to help customers modernize their current infrastructure through storage. We have a lot of expertise in storage. We've helped, over time, customers time and again adopt disruptive technologies in nondisruptive ways. We're looking to adopt these technologies and trends on behalf of our customers and then help them use them in a seamless safe way. >> And continue their evolution to identify new revenue streams, new products, new opportunities and even probably give other lines of business access to this data that they need to understand is there value here, how can we harness it faster than our competitors, right? >> Absolutely. It's all about deriving value out of the data. I think earlier I called it the gold of the 21st Century. This is a trend that will continue. I believe there will be no enterprise or center that won't focus on using machine learning, deep learning, analytics to derive more value out of the data to find more customer touch points, to optimize their business to really compete in the marketplace. >> Data plus AI plus cloud economics are the new innovation drivers of the next 10, 20 years. >> Completely agree. >> Well Octavian thanks so much for spending time with us this morning sharing what's new at NetApp, some of the visions that you guys have and also some of the impact that you're making with customers. We look forward to having you back on the program in the near future. >> Thank you. Appreciate having the time. >> And for my cohost Dave Vellante I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching The Cube live on day two of coverage of our event, Big Data SV. We're at this really cool venue, Forager Tasting Room. Come down here, join us, get to hear all these great conversations. Stick around and we'll be right back with our next guest after a short break. (electronic music)

>> Narrator: 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, here in Berlin, Germany. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my co-host Peter Burris. We are joined by Tim Pitcher, he is the Vice President, Next-Generation Data Centre for NetApp. Thanks so much for coming on the program. It's an absolute pleasure, it's a pleasure to be here. So let's start just defining for our viewers the Next-Generation Data Centre, how it's built, how it's founded. Yeah so, if you think about NetApp today we think about our customers really consuming technology in three ways. We've got sort of more, we're modernizing traditional data centers and architectures using data management and flash storage and these sorts of things and this really is our back yard, this is what we've been doing for years and years, been incredibly successful at it. And the big disrupter in many ways is Cloud and so our partnerships with the major hyperscalers are critically important to us as well. But there's a third piece to the jigsaw which is the Next-Generation Data Centre and the way we think about that is that if you imagine that you want to use Cloud services but you want to do a lot of that yourself, you want to take advantage of the sort of simple, scalable, automated nature of Cloud then that's really what we're delivering in the Next-Generation Data Centre for our customers. So the Next-Generation Data Centre is being driven by technology advances, business requirements, the realities of data, what are the practical things that are driving, or indicating, the steps that people should take as they think about new technology and new business practices? I mean, the big driver is really to remove a lot of complexity from their business so if you think about going to the Cloud, you're making a really very simple consumption choice. You're saying I'm going to consume data and services from the public Cloud environment and that drives a similar behavior inside large organizations as well, organizations of all sizes. So they're thinking about how do they build private Cloud, take advantage of both with a hybrid Cloud environment, or they can have multiple public Cloud instances as well. So they're thinking about it all very differently and they're thinking about the most appropriate services that they're trying to deliver or the most appropriate way to deliver that application or that data set, if you will, to their customers. So it's not like everything needs to be in one place, and also critically customers very often want to change that as well so they'll make a decision to put something in a public cloud, it might not be the best fit over time for whatever reason, so they want to bring it back in house and deliver that on their own infrastructure and when they do that they want to take advantage, they like what they've had in the Cloud so they want to put that on premise. So the real drive is they really want simplicity, they're really focused on a much more performant outcome that's focused on simplicity focused on how you scale your business and being able to have truly multi-tenant environments that give you the predictability of your traditional architectures if you will, the architectures you know well and have been using for a long time. You want to be able to do that in a Cloud like environment because you the economics of Cloud but you get the predictability of dedicated environments. So which of the customers that you work with are in fact executing this Next-Generation Data Centre strategy most beautifully in your opinion? Well so, if you think about the strategy that NetApp has for our Next-Gen Data Centre is really based on two companies that they acquired. One is Object Storage platform called StorageGRID Webscale the other one is SolidFire. Which, SolidFire was a young, emerging, hot technology company that was focused on delivering what I've just articulated, simple technologies, simple storage platform operated at scale, completely automated and SolidFire was born out of a service provider, born out of a service provider at the same time as OpenStack so it's kind of unique in that perspective. The company was formed to solve a problem and the problem that Rackspace really were looking to solve was how do they take their managed service clients and move them into the Cloud, what's stopping them doing that? And the answer is obviously customers worry about security and things like that but the key thing that was really stopping them was their concern about performance. So if I'm going to share, put all my stuff in with everybody else's, in a shared environment, how do I know I'm going to get what I'm paying for how do I know that I'm not going to have somebody else's applications consume all the services that are going to be given to me? So as a consequence, this was the thing that prevented people going to the Cloud so this is what the company formed to fix so SolidFire came out of that and that's our background and that's why NetApp acquired us because very different way of looking at things so as a consequence service providers are really at the forefront of how they deliver services to their customers and they leveraged SolidFire and we were very successful as an independent company selling to service providers and have been increasingly successful now that we're part of NetApp. Our very first customer for example is in Jersey and is still a very happy NetApp customer, a company called Calligo and they offer tiered services all on SolidFire, trusted Cloud services in and off-shore kind of environment they're focused on the financial services community and things like that. And now we have also major services providers like 1and1 in Germany, which is one of the largest services providers in Europe, long time NetApp customer and they're a SolidFire customer for their public Cloud services as well for the Cloud that they offer. And in the UK as well, Interoute, major service provider. What I like about them is one, they deal with a massive amount of traffic, they've got a huge network so very traffic intensive, but also they really take advantage of NetApp being, sorry, SolidFire being part of NetApp now so they use the on-tap base products in their manage services which those products are optimized for that kind of environment but for their Cloud environment where they're offering tiered services they use SolidFire so they've got us on both sides of the house if you will and so its a great example of SolidFire being part of NetApp, why that's so powerful, why that's so successful. And companies like Internet Solutions in South Africa is one major service provider in South Africa, big consumer of SolidFire and now is part of NetApp, it's a much better place for them because we've got a big business in South Africa, we're very successful there, so we're part of that team now and they go from strength to strength. So now the next challenge is taking some of the best practices that have emerged from what you've learned from working with these service providers and transferring them to other industries. Yeah so, we're seeing a lot in Fin-tech right now, Farmer is a good market for us, Astrozeneca uses SolidFire so a great example of one of NetApps long-term and major customers that's now consuming products and services from other business units and other offerings that we have across a much broader portfolio so they're very happy customers now. That's part of our global account business. Business Wire in the UAE is another example of a successful business transformation that they're doing as well. We've seen a lot of activity in Dev-ops, these products are perfect for Dev-ops because they're so simple, they don't require management they're completely automated, you're not building those large infrastructures of people to support these environments. And it's much quicker to be able to launch applications because of the simple nature of the technology you can launch applications, new products, new services so your time to market is an awful lot quicker as well. Great, well thanks so much for coming on the show Tim, it's been really fun talking to you. It's been a pleasure, thanks very much. I'm Rebecca Knight for Peter Burris, we will have more from NetApp Insight just after this. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering NetApp Insight 2017. Brought to you by NetApps. >> Welcome back everyone, we are live in Las Vegas this is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE's flagship program where we go out to events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Keith Townsend. We're here at NetApp Insight 2017 here at the Mandalay Bay with two great guests, a senior executive, senior NetApp folks, are going to share some insight on what's going on. We have Mark Bregman is the Senior Vice President and CTO thanks for coming on. John Woodall VP of Engineering at Integrated Archive Systems. The first partner of NetApp going back in the day. Welcome to theCUBE thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> So we've seen that movie before, you know every cycle of innovation there's always opportunities. Interesting now we're in a cycle where you can see some new waves out there coming in. And we think we're surfing on some waves now, but the tsunami's coming. Everything from blockchain down to just cloud growth like crazy. You guys have done extremely well. You've seen them before, these transitions. People are busy right now, your customers are super busy. They've got app development going on, DevOps, they've got security unbuckling from IT becoming critical, data governance. What should they know about in this transition that they may miss or they should pay attention to. >> Well, I would say that the thing that is probably the most profound is we've gone through a couple of big transitions, as you mentioned, in the industry as a whole. 20, 30 years ago we would talk to customers and they'd start with infrastructure and they'd talk about servers and storage. 10, 15 years ago they start with applications and they'd talk about their ERP or whatever software. That would decide then the infrastructure. Today they're starting with data and companies are realizing that data is the thing that's going to transform their business. And then based on that data, what software am I going to use and then talk about infrastructure. So the conversation's kind of turned around completely from where it was 20 years ago. >> John, you've been a partner, I see the partner landscape certainly changing. You seeing resellers and VAR's and I think, does the word VAB even exist, value added business? They're actually building their own tech because there's opportunities to be a service provider. Almost like a telco, who would have thought? >> It's crazy, it's crazy. I think I think from our perspective as a longtime partner, we've been successful with NetApp through transitions. We were talking before about the resiliency of NetApp in going through transitions. They've done it again, the keynote today filled with a lot of, what I call, mic-drop moments of yet another level of innovation. But you're right things have flipped almost 180 degrees in the discussion that starting with data, starting with a business outcome, as part of the discussion. It's not about what can I sell, it's about in solving the problem, do I accelerate the pace of my business. Do I open up new ways to monetize in my business. Do I drive efficiencies in my business that translate to the bottom line. As a reseller and as a partner, we have to transition with that because the discussion changes, the skill sets change and it becomes much more of a services play on the front-end and to help through and then becomes managed services, as you know, and that. >> Mark I want to ask your a question. We were joking with the product marketing team on the cloud earlier that you know the slogan should be, I don't know NetApp could do that. It just keeps happening, oh, I didn't know they did that. While that's kind of a history NetApp, but I want to ask something specific. We see it's a success out there in the cloud, you look no further than Amazon Web Services. Now Microsoft's kind of catching up to the rear, Google's there's some other people are trying to kind of get in there. But Amazon's the winner when it comes to the number of announcements you see an event and I'm sure at Reinvent coming up is going to be a tsunami of their bigger announcements, more services so it's a plethora. And so that's an indicator of success. And also the new differentiator, at scale, as you got to keep iterating, you guys have a slew of announcements, so running engineering and being the CEO. What's going on at NetApp? What's the conversation like, you have all these roadmaps, is it just all this innovation, is it part of the plan and just give us some insight into how this all works. >> Well, I think for a long time, maybe for the first 20 years of the company, we were almost like a one product company. The innovations were all in that lane. They were all, you know, make this a better product, make ONTAP better and customers love that because they were growing with us. What's happened is it's kind of exploded in multiple dimensions. So we continue to innovate in our core. But at same time we're having to say, how can we use this capability in a completely different way, in the cloud? How can we help customers manage their data, no matter where it is, not just on our ONTAP systems. We made the acquisition of a little over a year ago, a year and a half ago, of SolidFire, to get into an area of a different approach to managing storage. And it's not sometimes people get it confused and they go that's how you got into flash. Frankly, we're already doing flash units and have flash in all of our product lines. The real reason we did that was to get into this more programmatic, scale out, API driven model of administration of storage. And we're having to do that in so many dimensions. so as we expand those dimensions, Of course we have to expand our innovation. We have to innovate at the given rate in each of threads. >> The old joke in Silicon Valley is you know get lucky once and you get rich. And it's hard, you know, the sophomore jinx whatever you want to call it, repeated successes is a sign of success and certainly as a partner you want to, you don't want to one trick pony at all. Now, I got to ask you, given the NetApp history of those successes, the data fabric is very good positioning I like that position because it's got a lot around it's super important, you think data is the new wave it's going to come bigger than cloud in terms of its impact. What from NetApp, for the customers that are watching and especially new customers, as you take new territory down with data, what is it about the NetApp portfolio, or the architecture the DNA that makes you guys relevant in this data fabric equation? Because you can't just get there overnight because of diseconomies of scale. What is it about NetApp that makes them super relevant? Couple things, one thing, what's the one thing? >> Well, I think I think it becomes back to I think you even said the term, DNA. It's what is it about NetApp, why are we one that's been around for 25 years and continue to make it through these transitions. And I think it's because, first of all, we don't rest on our laurels, we're not caught up in the innovator's dilemma of continuing to just refine what we already have. We'll do that, but we also recognize that there are emerging new customer needs. And our basic intellectual capital can be applied in different ways. So when I talk to our engineers, they don't talk about I build controllers that go into arrays that manage data. They realize that deeper down there's a kind of intellectual capital could go into a piece of software in the cloud. And there's a customer problem that we can go solve. So I think it's about being motivated by solving those customer data problems. >> So culture, some culture. >> It's culture. >> What are the products now, so you have a data, storage, storage stores data. So you don't need rocket science to figure out that you're storing data. >> I'll give you an example, there a lot of competitors in the flash storage business that have come into the market and basically gave up on us because we were late coming to that market. But we came in the market, we accelerated, we passed them, why is that? Partly, we built a good product at the flash storage layer. But more importantly we leveraged all of the storage management which we'd already built over 20 years. And so now we're suddenly out there with a very rock solid flash engine but it's supported by all the other capabilities which make it valuable to our customers. So it's not just, hey, here's a new tool, it's here's a new solution to your problem. And I think that's a big part of our DNA. And our technology side is we've been in data management for 20 years, we just never talked about it that way. >> So John, we had Dave Hitz on earlier, and he said that one of the keys to keeping away from the innovators dilemma has been that NetApp has leaned into the thing that will kill us. I tweeted that out, that's an awesome pull, that they've leaned into the things. As a partner though, that can be a bit scary. Technology is especially enterprise tech is a very stable thing. NetApp has been with ONTAP a very traditional partner even with fads and bringing those innovations to flash. How's that ride been for you guys over the past 25 years. >> It has been consistent, it has been a great partnership, and it continues to be a great partnership because as I look out and hone my portfolio of offerings and partnerships, NetApp stays very high in, that not just because we have a great run rate business, but because NetApp, in their innovation allows me to continue to solve problems with an existing partner, which makes us more efficient. Now, having said that we talked about you mentioned data fabric. That's a completely different discussion from a storage company. At first you think okay, I'm replicating data, I have a transport layer, that's fine. But what are you doing beyond that? I think you begin to see a new NetApp emerging as software defined. An organizing principle in my mind of the data fabric is it gives the customer freedom and flexibility that just buying storage doesn't give you. It gives them the flexibility to deploy in the cloud, next to the cloud, on-prem, as a virtual instance, as an AMI in the cloud, et cetera. So it allows the customer to place data and workloads where and when and how they want that makes sense for their business, not NetApp's business, or my business and so in that we're starting to see now with Anthony Lye's demo today of Cloud Orchestrator. >> Which, by the way, isn't shipping yet, but it's multi-cloud. >> Multi-cloud? >> It's multi-cloud instance. >> Yeah, that right there, and its applications, it's provisioning VM's, it's provisioning. >> If you guys get that to the market fast, it will be the first multi, True multi, orbiting call it real multi-cloud There's a lot of fake multi-cloud out there but that would be a real use case. >> And that's a completely different discussion so you know to kind of plagiarize, you can teach an old storage dog a new trick. So they transformed to meet the emerging needs of a new market, we are have to transform with them. So there's a bit of bumpiness that we're all going to experience as we learn that and do that. >> John, I just want to drill-down on that, I want to get also your both perspectives. What you're really teasing out with the Cloud Orchestrator demo in my mind, the impact of that demo significance is you guys as a storage company, now a data company, are enabling opportunities with the data. That's clearly what's happening, obviously, no debate there. But the impact is to developers. Now the developer dynamic is as these devops guys come in, there's new, there's re-skilling going on. So the biggest challenge of multi-cloud is each cloud has its own way to pipeline data or do things with data. So making that easy, I don't want to have to hire guys to program for each cloud. >> Mark: And they're hard to find. >> It's incredible, it's too hard. Abstracting that away is going to be a boon for the developer market. That's a new market, that's a different thing than NetApp. >> It's a very different market than we've been in before. >> So what are you doing? What's the plan, just continue to enable developers? >> Well, the comment you made earlier, about lean in to the thing that's going to kill you is exactly right, I wouldn't have said it quite like that but I'm not Dave Hitz. So we definitely, when we see a challenge we lean into it. And and that does two things, it's a little bit like, I don't know was it TaeKwonDo where you use the other competitors energy? >> I think it's judo. >> Think it's judo, use the other energy, the power the other opponent to win. And that's kind of what we're doing. I think when you do that it means we have to transform and our partners do, and you're a partner that's been with us long time, you've been through a lot of transitions. >> Yes we have. >> Well judo move is about leverage, and that's about having installed, you guys have that leverage with your customers. >> And the customers are moving as well, so we could try to keep them, hold them back. Or we can move with them and actually accelerate them to where they're going to our benefit, and to our partners benefit and I think that's what Dave was referring to. Well, Mark and John love to have you guys on, love to do a follow-up segment in Palo Alto, our offices are really across the yard from each other, certainly if you guys are in Sunnyvale This is a super important conversation. I'll give you guys the last word, impact to customers for NetApp with the new capabilities with data center innovation modernization, next gen data center, on-premise, true private cloud and power a horse in the cloud with data. All that working together in some cases end to end or in pieces whatever the customers is. What does it mean to the customer this new. >> I'll steal a line from our marketing teams and what it really means is it's going to enable customers to change the world with data. Transform their business, create new opportunities. >> It's a new wave in the economy. It's going to be disruptive and tumultuous for some. We have an opportunity to go into a customer and to help them find new ways, with their data, because the two key assets of company now is people and then data. So the people are there taking their data, allowing them to find new opportunities to go to market faster. NetApp's in a unique position. >> It reminds me of value creation, I mean a lot of stuff with blockchain you see the indicators, almost the Web1.0 again. You see in the new shift in architecture happening upside down it's almost reverse. >> The developer model's right. I mean you talk about Amazon, I think from 2008 until 2014 or 15 they introduced about three thousand new services on their platform. I don't see an average IT organization doing that. >> I think that rates gone up now. >> It's on an exponential growth there. >> I think we're starting to see the swim lanes, if you will, I'm calling them native clouds because they're so native. But they're also powering a new ecosystem and part of it, I wish we had more time to talk about the partner equation. There a lot of musical chairs going on in the partner ecosystem. You've been with NetApp from the beginning, congratulations. Congratulations on all the success on the platform and the product innovation. It's theCUBE bringing you the innovation and the data through our data fabric called theCUBE. We'll be back with more live coverage after this short break. >> Announcer: Coming off barrier breakers, status quo smashers, world.

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