>>Hello, wonderful humans and welcome back to The Cube's Thrilling live coverage of AWS Reinvent here in Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm joined by my fantastic co-host, John Farer. John, things are really ramping up in here. Day one. >>Yep, it's packed already. I heard 70,000 maybe attendees really this year. I just saw that on Twitter. Again, it continues to show that over the past 10 years we've been here, you're seeing some of the players that were here from the beginning growing up and getting bigger and stronger, becoming more platforms, not just point solutions. You're seeing new entrants coming in, new startups, and the innovation you start to see happening, it's really compelling to fun to watch. And our next segment, we have multi 10 time Cube alumni coming on and a first timer, so it should be great. We'll get into some of the innovation, >>Not only as this guest went on the cube 10 times, he also spoke at the first AWS reinvent, just like you were covering it here with Cube. But without further ado, please welcome Ronan and Kevin from NetApp. Thank you gentlemen, both for being here and for matching in your dark blue. How's the show going for you? Ronan, I'm gonna ask you first, you've been here since the beginning. How does it feel in 2022? >>First, it's amazing to see so many people, right? So many humans in one place, flesh and blood. And it's also amazing to see, it's such a celebration for people in the cloud, right? Like this is our, this is our event, the people in the cloud. I'm really, really happy to be here and be in the cube as well. >>Fantastic. It, it is a party, it's a cloud party. Yes. How are you feeling being here, Kevin? I'm >>Feeling great. I mean, going all the way back to the early days of Spot T, which was the start that eventually got acquired as Spot by NetApp. I mean this was, this was our big event. This is what we lived for. We've gone, I've gone from everything, one of the smaller booths out here on the floor all the way up to the, the huge booth that we have today. So we've kind of grown along with the AWS ecosystem and it's just a lot of fun to get here, see all the customers and talk to everybody. >>That's a lot of fun. Fun. That's the theme that we've been talking about. And we wrote a story about on, on Silicon Angle, more that growth from that getting in and getting bigger, not just an ISV or part of the startup showcase or ecosystem. The progression of the investment on how cloud has changed deliverables. You've been part of that wave. What's the biggest walk away, what's, and what's the most important thing going on now cuz it's not stopping. You got new interests coming in and the folks are rising with the tide and getting platforms built around their products. >>Yeah, I would say, you know, years ago is, is cloud in my decision path and now it's cloud is in my decision path. How much is it and how am I going to use it? And I think especially coming up over the next year, macroeconomic events and everything going on is how do I make my next dollar in the cloud go further than my last dollar? Because I know I'm gonna be there, I know I'm gonna be growing in the cloud, so how do I effectively use it to run my business going forward? >>All right, take a minute to explain Spot now part of NetApp. What's the story? What take us through for the folks that aren't familiar with the journey, where it's come from, where it's today? >>Sure. So SPOT is all about cloud optimization. We help all of our customers deploy scale and optimize their applications in the cloud. And what we do is everything from VMs to containers to any type of custom application you want to deploy, we analyze those applications, we find the best price point to run them, we right size them, we do the automation so your DevOps team doesn't have to do it. And we basically make the whole cloud serverless for you at the end of the day. So whatever you're doing in the cloud, we'll manage that for you from the lowest level of the stack all the way up to the highest level financials. >>Is this what you call the evolved cloud state? >>It is in the evolve clouds a little bit more, and Ronan can touch on that a little bit too. The Evolve clouds not only the public cloud but also the cloud that you're building OnPrem, right? A lot of big companies, it's not necessarily a hundred percent one way or the other. The Evolve cloud is which cloud am I on? Am I on an OnPrem cloud and a public cloud or am I on multiple public clouds in an OnPrem cloud? And I think Ronan, you probably have an opinion on that too. >>Yeah, and and I think what we are hearing from our customers is that many of them are in a situation where a lot of their data has been built for years on premises. They're accelerating their move to the cloud, some of them are accelerating, they're moving into multiple cloud and that situation of an on-prem that is becoming cloudy and cloudy all the time. And then accelerated cloud adoption. This is what the customers are calling the Evolve cloud and that's what we're trying to support them in that journey. >>How many customers are you supporting in this Evolve cloud? You made it seem like you can just turnkey this for everyone, which I am here >>For it. Yeah, just to be clear, I mean we have thousands of customers, right? Everything from your small startups, people just getting going with a few VMs all the way to people scaling to tens and thousands of VMs in the cloud or even beyond VM services and you know, tens of millions of spend a month. You know, people are putting a lot of investment into the cloud and we have all walks of life under our, you know, customer portfolio. >>You know, multi-cloud has been a big topic in the industry. We call it super cloud. Cause we think super cloud kind of more represents the destination to multi-cloud. I mean everyone has multiple clouds, but they're best of breed defaults. They're not by design in most cases, but we're starting to see traction towards that potential common level services fix to late. See, I still think we're on the performance game now, so I have to ask, ask you guys. Performance has becoming back in VO speeds and feeds back during the data center days. Well, I wouldn't wanna talk speeds and feeds of solutions and then cloud comes in. Now we're at the era of cloud where people are moving their workloads there. There's a lot more automation going on, A lot more, as you said, part of the decision. It is the path. Yeah. So they say, now I wanna run my workloads on the better, faster infrastructure. No developer wants to run their apps on the slower hardware. >>I think that's a tall up for you. Ronan go. >>I mean, I put out my story, no developer ever said, give me the slower software performance and and pay more fast, >>Fastest find too fastest. >>Speed feeds your back, >>Right? And and performance comes in different, in different parameters, right? They think it is come throughput, it comes through latency. And I think even a stronger word today is price performance, right? How much am I paying for the performance that that I need? NetApp is actually offering a very, very big advantage for customers on both the high end performance as well as in the dollar per performance. That is, that is needed. This is actually one of the key differentiator that Fsx for NetApp on top is an AWS storage based on the NetApp on top storage operating system. This is one of the biggest advantages it is offering. It is SAP certified, for example, where latency is the key, is the key item. It is offering new and fastest throughput available, but also leveraging some advanced features like tiering and so on, is offering unique competitive advantage in the dollar for performance specifically. >>And why, why is performance important now, in your opinion? Obviously besides the obvious of no one wants to run their stuff on the slower infrastructure, but why are some people so into it now? >>I think performance as a single parameter is, is definitely a key influencer of the user experience. None, none of us will, will compromise our our experience. The second part is performance is critical when scale is happening, right? And especially with the scale of data performance to handle massive amounts of data is is becoming more and more critical. The last thing that I'll emphasize is again is the dollar for performance. The more data you have, the more you need to handle, the more critical for you is to handle it in a cost effective way. This is kind of, that's kind of in the, in the, in the secret sauce of the success of every workload. >>There isn't a company or person here who's not thinking about doing more faster for cheaper. So you're certainly got your finger on the pulse With that, I wanna talk about a, a customer case study. A little birdie told me that a major US airline recently just had a mass of when we're where according to my notes response time and customer experience was improved by 17 x. Now that's the type of thing that cuts cost big time. Can one of you tell me a little bit more about that? >>Yeah, so I think we all flew here somehow, right? >>Exactly. It's airlines matter. Probably most folks listening, they're >>Doing very well right now. Yes, the >>Airlines and I think we all also needed to deal with changes in the flights with, with really enormous amount of complexity in managing a business like that. We actually rank and choose what, what airline to use among other things based on the level of service that they give us. And especially at the time of crunch, a lot of users are looking through a lot of data to try to optimize, >>Plus all of them who just work this holiday weekend sidebar >>E Exactly right. Can't even, and Thanksgiving is one of these crunch times that are in the middle of this. So 70 x improvement in performance means a loss seven >>Zero or >>17 1 7 1 7 x Right? >>Well, and especially when we're talking about it looks like 50,000, 50,000 messages per minute that this customer was processing. Yes. That that's a lot. That's almost a thousand messages a second. Wow. I think my math tees up there. Yeah. >>It does allow them to operate in the next level of scale and really increase their support for the customer. It also allows them to be more efficient when it comes to cost. Now they need less infrastructure to give better service across the board. The nice thing is that it didn't require them for a lot of work. Sometimes when the customers are doing their journey to the cloud, one of the things that kind of hold them back is like, is either the fear or, or maybe is the, the concern of how much effort will it take me to achieve the same performance or even a better performance in the cloud? They are a live example that not only can you achieve, you can actually exceed the performance that I have on premises and really give customer a better service >>Customer a better service. And reliability is extremely important there. 99.9%. 99% >>99. Yes. >>Yes. That second nine obviously being very important, especially when we're talking about the order of magnitude of, of data and, and actions being taken place. How much of a priority is, is reliability and security for y'all as a team? >>So reliability is a key item for, for everybody, especially in crunch times. But reliability goes beyond the nines. Specifically reliability goes into how simple it is for you to enable backup n dr, how protected are you against ransomware? This is where netup and, and including the fsx for NETUP on top richness of data management makes a huge difference. If you are able to make your copy undeletable, that is actually a game changer when it comes to, to data protection. And this is, this is something that in the past requires a lot of work, opening vaults and other things. Yeah. Now it becomes a very simple configuration that is attached to every net up on top storage, no matter where it is. >>We heard some news at VMware explorer this past fall. Early fall. You guys were there. We saw the Broadcom acquisition. Looks like it's gonna get finalized maybe sooner than later. Lot of, so a lot of speculation around VMware. Someone called the VMware like where is VMware as in where they now, nice pun it was, it was actually Nutanix people, they go at each other all the time. But Broadcom's gonna keep vse and that's where the bread and butter, that's the, that's the goose that lays the Golden eggs. Customers are there. How do you guys see your piece there with VMware cloud on AWS that integrates solution? You guys have a big part of that ecosystem. We've covered it for years. I mean we've been to every VM world now called explorer. You guys have a huge customer base with VMware customers. What's the, what's the outlook? >>Yeah, and, and I think the important part is that a big part of the enterprise workloads are running on VMware and they will continue to run on VMware in, in, in the future. And most of them will try to run in a hybrid mode if not moving completely to the cloud. The cloud give them unparallel scale, it give them DR and backup opportunities. It does a lot of goodness to that. The partnership that NetApp brings with both VMware as well ass as well as other cloud vendors is actually a game changer. Because the minute that you go to the cloud, things like DR and backup have a different economics connected to them. Suddenly you can do compute less dr definitely on backup you can actually achieve massive savings. NetApp is the only data store that is certified to run with VMware cloud. And that actually opens to the customer's huge opportunity for unparalleled data protection as well as real, real savings, hard savings. And customers that look today and they say, I'm gonna shrink my data center, I'm gonna focus on, on moving certain things to the cloud, DR and backup and especially DR and backup VMware might be one of the easiest, fastest things to take into the cloud. And the partnership betweens VMware and NetApp might actually give you >>And the ONAP is great solution. Fsx there? Yes. I think you guys got a real advantage here and I want to get into something that's kind of a gloom and doom. I don't have to go negative on this one, Savannah, but they me nervous John. But you know, if you look at the economic realities you got a lot of companies like that are in the back of a Druva, Netta, Druva, cohesive rub. Others, you know, they, you know, there's a, their generational cloud who breaks through. What's the unique thing? Because you know there's gonna be challenges in the economy and customers are gonna vote with their wallets and they start to see as they make these architectural decisions, you guys are in the middle of it. There's not, there may not be enough to go around and the musical chairs might stop or, or not, I'm not sure. But I feel like if there's gonna be a consolidation, what does that look like? What are customers thinking? Backup recovery, cloud. That's a unique thing. You mentioned economics, it's not, you can't take the old strategy and put it there from five, 10 years ago. What's different now? >>Yeah, I think when it comes to data protection, there is a real change in, in the technology landscape that opened the door for a lot of new vendors to come and offer. Should we expect consolidation? I think microeconomic outside and other things will probably drive some of that to happen. I think there is one more parameter, John, that I wanna mention in this context, which is simplicity. Many of the storage vendors, including us, including aws, you wanna make as much of the backup NDR at basically a simple checkbox that you choose together with your main workload. This is another key capabilities that is, that is being, bringing and changing the market, >>But it also needs to move up. So it's not only simplicity, it's also about moving to the applications that you use, use, and just having it baked in. It's not about you going out and finding a replication. It's like what Ronan said, we gotta make it simple and then we gotta bake it into what they use. So one of our most recent acquisitions of Insta Cluster allows us to provide our customers with open source databases and data streaming services. When those sit on top of on tap and they sit on top of spots, infrastructure optimization, you get all that for free through the database that you use. So you don't worry about it. Your database is replicated, it's highly available, and it's running at the best cost. That's where it's going. >>Awesome. >>You also recently purchased Cloud Checker as well. Yes. Do you just purchase wonderful things all the time? We >>Do. We do. We, >>I'm not >>The, if he walk and act around and then we find the best thing and then we, we break out the checkbook, no, but more seriously, it, it rounds out what customers need for the cloud. So a lot of our customers come from storage, but they need to operate the entire cloud around the storage that they have. Cloud Checker gives us that financial visibility across every single dollar that you spend in the cloud and also gives us a better go to market motion with our MSPs and our distributors than we had in the past. So we're really excited about what cloud checker can unlock for us in >>The future. Makes a lot of sense and congratulations on all the extremely exciting things going on. Our final and closing question for our guests on this year's show is we would love your, your Instagram hot take your 32nd hot take on the most important stories, messages, themes of AWS reinvent 2022. Ronan, I'm gonna start with you cause you have a smirk >>And you do it one day ahead of the keynotes, one day ahead with you. >>You can give us a little tease a little from you. >>I think that pandemic or no pandemic face to face or no face to face, the innovation in the cloud is, is actually breaking all records. And I think this year specifically, you will see a lot of focus on data and scale. I think that's, these are two amazing things that you'll see, I think doubling down. But I'm also anxious to see tomorrow, so I'll learn more about it. >>All right. We might have to chat with you a little bit after tomorrow. Is keynotes and whatnot coming up? What >>About you? I think you're gonna hear a lot about cost. How much are you spending? How far are your dollars going? How are you using the cloud to the best of your abilities? How, how efficient are you being with your dollars in the cloud? I think that's gonna be a huge topic. It's on everybody's mind. It's the macro economics situation right now. I think it's gonna be in every session of the keynote tomorrow. All >>Right, so every >>Session. Every session, >>A bulk thing. John, we're gonna have >>That. >>I'm with him. You know, all S in general, you >>Guys have, and go look up what I said. >>Yeah, >>We'll go back and look at, >>I'm gonna check on you >>On that. The record now states. There you go, Kevin. Thank both. Put it down so much. We hope that it's a stellar show for Spotify, my NetApp. Thank you. And that we have you 10 more times and more than just this once and yeah, I, I can't wait to see, well, I can't wait to hear when your predictions are accurate tomorrow and we get to learn a lot more. >>No, you gotta go to all the sessions down just to check his >>Math on that. Yeah, no, exactly. Now we have to do our homework just to call him out. Not that we're competitive or those types of people at all. John. No. On that note, thank you both for being here with us. John, thank you so much. Thank you all for tuning in from home. We are live from Las Vegas, Nevada here at AWS Reinvent with John Furrier. My name is Savannah Peterson. You're watching the Cube, the leader in high tech coverage.

from our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley Palo Alto California this is a cute conversation hey welcome back everybody Jeffrey here with the cube we're in our Palo Alto Studios here today for a cute conversation it's a little bit of a dog days of summer conference seasons a little bit slow so we're excited we can kind of take a step back and we're gonna look back actually in time we're excited to have a very special guest rich Kolbert he is the field CTO at Dell EMC but really what we're talking about today is this data domain is 10-year anniversary of the date domain acquisition so rich first off welcome to the to the cube thanks Jeff excited to be here thanks for the invitation appreciate it I can't believe we're talking before we turned the cameras on that you join in 2006 and yet it's been 10 years I'm like wait 2006 was more than 10 can that be we're just getting old I don't know things are changing too fast no it's like a trip down memory lane and it just seems so long ago and yes in a way it also seems like yesterday I think things have gone so quickly so we're also joined in this segment by our top data analyst also the founder of wiki bond and co-ceo of Silicon angle media and founder of that as well so Dave Villante is joining us all the way from Boston Dave good to see ya hey Jeff hi rich to talk to you guys hey Dave so let's take a quick trip back 10 years ago actually maybe 11 years ago things were starting to heat up there was a lot of different vendors out there a lot of different players and things started to consolidate so I wonder if you can give us a little bit of your perspective what what's going on rich and then we'll get Dave's perspective yeah it was an interesting time right before the data domain acquisition we actually went through some economic times in 2008 and the markets are changing and and and some companies are becoming more successful some companies were struggling through that time customers were also looking for ways to to you know save money and do some interesting things there so it was a mixed feeling set of you know through that times data domain had IPO in 2007 and we were kind of going through this this explosive period of growth but you know across the board we just saw so many things change all at once and we really were surprised I think when initially was NetApp that an that they had intentions to bias and I think that was due to some of the economic factors of play and then of course EMC stepped in and and started a bidding contest with NetApp for for the company right so I Dave wonder if you could share your perspective you're sitting as an analyst you got Jo TG The Godfather of storage back in Boston what were you seeing in terms of the kind of the market dynamics and was it a surprise wouldn't that app decided to make a move well if you know first first of all I had left the storage industry for quite some time and when I started wiki bond we looked at storage and nothing had changed except one thing which was David deduplication that was new until a new tape was finally I always hated the tape the tape was finally being attacked so it was it was amazing time and EMC at the time we had some obviously great management yet Frank Sluman running data domain yo Joe Tucci who always balanced out acquisitions with organic you know in how to R&D and when Tom Georgians and NetApp said they were gonna go by David domain emt's walk right in and said no way so it was somewhat of a defensive move but at the same time when you talk to the M&A guys they said no no it's not just defense we can actually make this a growth play and that's exactly what happened Dayna domain I think at the time rich was probably a couple of hundred million dollar company and then they they popped that at the EMC and scaled that to you know well over a billion dollars and it'll maintain the the franchise and then grew it quite dramatically beyond where all the expectations were for the market the market team at the time was probably around a billion and I think ID seen rich as a over three billion today yeah one of the things that's so don't quote me on all the numbers because I'm not like you know watching the market caps and stocks but I think we'd gotten up to about a 500 million dollar run rate in terms of sales and prior to the crash I think our market cap was actually significantly higher so so our price came down you know which is one of the things I think that attracted NetApp to the game so the interesting dynamic inside the company was that the NetApp offer was was kind of the first one so they were working with the data domain leadership and they were speaking with us EMC was more of a kind of unsolicited offer so there was less communication and I remember there was a morning I was at San Francisco Airport going out to meet a customer and Joe to Chi put out a full-page ad in a local newspaper and we were reading that and that was his way of communicating to the to the people a data domain saying he wants to welcome us into the family it was quite a moment well it sure was and of course you guys were fierce competitors data domain was fierce competitors with with EMC you know fighting for for the install base and then all of a sudden you know the cultures it's somehow work EMC was was very good at acquisitions and he made it work and they not active it was an outside observer but you were there you know Frank Sluman came in did it's kind of running the the data protection organization but a lot has changed since then hasn't it I mean back then you stored you know a little bit of data I think accounting of terabytes today we live in a petabyte scale world I could talk about what's changed well you know the scales and performance certainly has changed I think the data domain platform today is about a thousand times larger than it was when it first came to market and in fact when we were being bid on by NetApp and EMC we had a flagship product is the DD 690 you know behind the scenes we had a system that was coming out that was double that size and EMC nor Netta knew about that so once the deal closed they got to find out that our size had just doubled in our performance and doubled at the same time but you're right you kind of talked about the dynamics inside of EMC EMC had a very large data protection you know division they had avemar networker santaros v TLS they also had an OEM arrangement for a competing product with the data domain platform so it was really like you know I compared to going to Hogwarts right where you have all of these different houses and we came in with with data domain and and I think the thing that really the glue that really helped it come to get was Joe Tucci you know tapping Frank's Luqman on the shoulder as the leader to bring this together and taking what was the borough division and and reforming it as the BRS division and I think we came together very quickly as a team even though people came from all of these different backgrounds you know standing for these different products rich let me follow up on that because there's a lot of M&A activity going on right now and and not very many big M&A deals are ultimately successful it turns out so what you said a little bit about you know Joe and Frank you know coming together but what are some of the other attributes that you would say that made it work it actually did what everybody hopes on an acquisition which is take great technology put it into a big sales machine and watch it grow and grow I think part of it you know quite frankly just comes down to the product and being differentiated because there are a lot of products out there and and if you take a step back they have good things that they're doing but it's very hard to find a product that says hey you're doing something that even if you put the blueprints out there it's very hard for other people to follow in those footsteps and create a similar value proposition and I think I think in this case it was a differentiated product and it had a lot of energy of its own and and I think from an EMC perspective they just stood back and said let's take this momentum and and play it out and see how how far it can take itself unfortunately I think a lot of times they don't do that right a lot of times acquiring companies don't just take this great thing and kind of get out of the way and add the juice where they can but you try to to try to change it so that's a really nice statement on Joe to G and what he was able to accomplish yeah no he was fantastic for us and and his support was tremendous but also his you know delegation and and kind of seeing how this but you know kind of having a vision of how this business unit should be formed right I think what was was very prison and then now you're part of Dell so obviously Michael Dell big personality as well the Dell technology stories he's doing a great job of pulling all these pieces together and you know kind of reinvigorating the brand coming back out of the little little side bar you know make it private for a while and come back so I wonder if you can talk about that integration how's that going as you've gone now a couple of times well I think it's been very exciting for us because the one piece that EMC had always been lacking had been the the compute part of the picture and now we have really the ability to go in and talk about the entire stack with our customers and that's that's a lot more powerful than saying here is an element of it and then if you want to go and add compute to that perhaps you know put in your virtual or physical servers then you're gonna we're going to need to partner with somebody and you know it's it's just a much cleaner story from end to end right right so the big big change obviously that wasn't around ten years ago that is around today is public cloud right huge impact not only directly in in taking workloads to the public cloud but also I think much more importantly changing the way people think about provisioning thinking about the way people think about elastic capacity so as as the market has evolved the rise of AWS and any other public clouds how has that changed what you guys are doing how are you reacting to that house at a new opportunity you know to kind of grow the maturity of the core product yeah well the thing is we have taken a lot of approach you know that's been learning and evolving as well right so so you know developers and applications really figured out AWS and the public cloud early I think data protection has has followed along with a couple years of lag in terms of doing that so you know our perspective is we learned as well right so so 2015 2016 I think there was some resistance and I think ultimately when we started to follow those workloads into the cloud there was a little bit of a lift and shift what we've learned is that the architecture really matters when you get to the cloud so the efficient use of resources the ability to do things in a cloud like way to use for example object storage instead of block storage when when the case presents itself so we took our products and virtualize them and followed them into the cloud but we realized that just taking the on-premise version of the product and putting it in the cloud itself isn't enough right because at the end of the day the customer is paying for all the underlying resources and so if your architecture is an efficient from a cost perspective as well as a performance perspective it's not going to be a viable solution and so 2017-2018 we've really seen a big acceleration in our adoption in the cloud because we have adapted our architecture to be more cloud friendly and more cost-effective for our customers to deploy but it was a learning experience for sure you know and and I think we're continuing to learn and continue to develop in that space and there's a lot of opportunity ahead of us the other big change I think that's come that we see over and over and over is really data as an asset only as an asset but as a huge valuable asset that drives your business drives real lytx but then becomes actually something that drives your company value and I think we see that and the Facebook's of the world and the googles of the world of why they have these crazy high valuations relative to here to their revenue and their profits because they're getting value for the data alright great news for you right it used to be a sample the day of the day was a pain it was expensive to store I didn't want to keep it all now everyone wants all the data they want to analyze it in real time and they want to put it in a place where they can actually put multiple applications across that same data set to do all kinds of new analytics so again super opportunity for you guys people aren't storing any less data no absolutely yeah no the data amount being stored is definitely growing one of the things that we're seeing that that's this kind of pervasive is this idea of of really using the right data the right place the right time so accessibility to whether it is a data Lake or it is your protection copies or you know an instant access of your protection copies there's a lot of different thing customers are doing with data but it's no longer a one-size-fits-all proposition like it was back in the tape automation days where I'm just throwing all of this stuff into a box and and never accessing it again right so the dynamics are changing and continue to evolve I expect that if we have this conversation two or three years down the road we're going to see some amazing things happen in the next couple of years that and some of it we were not predicting now we're gonna find out as customer demand and as innovation guides us along right because then the other big piece is the media right we've talked about tapes and the original data domain was was in response to some issues with tape and we get spinning rust as everybody likes to call it and now of course flash so yeah again see change in terms of capability the cost is coming down it's no longer the super high-end thing just for super high value applications so very transfer transformative opportunity on the on the media side as well on the flashlight as well you hit on a couple of really key things data domain was very successful because it became viable and practical to displace tape automation and nobody was a fan of their tape automation environments and now I think we're gonna see that's that same shift you know spinning disk is right now being relegated to archival and backup purposes but we're gonna hit an inflection point very soon I think we're where every instance of spinning disk probably can be questioned and so we are actually doing the you know kind of getting ahead of that curve and coming out with all flash products as a choice for a customer so we'll still have spinning disk for some backup use cases but we'll also have you know be able to offer customers a choice of the data domain technology on an all flash set of platforms and that will give customers a chance to get out of the yeah that spinning disk business as well right good I wonder if I get what if I get chime in here I you guys were talking about the the technologies and the cloud and the architecture it's interesting it David the main really started out don't hate me for saying this but as a feature product and the key feature was data deduplication data domain had the best you had a lot of guys doing post process you had you know some guys trying to do server-side avemar itself for example but they domain really killed it with regard to data David II do and if this feature product became a platform and had an architecture people became as you know unicorn times 2 plus plus and so I wanted to ask you rich about that architecture and aware it can go you're talking about different media now beyond spinning disk you know it used to be just a kind of a dumb target you've now got integrated appliances you've got software that's integrated there so it's you know you talked about the scale and the capacity where do you see this architecture going I wonder if you could comment on yeah well I think a lot of that belongs in in the realm of the data management software that speaks to it and and by having a distributed ecosystem and having things like you know distributed segment processing so we can take data domains technology and extend it out into those data management activities because a lot of the what's happening in the market is as new workloads are coming into the market they're having their own methods and native tools built-in for data protection and to be able to leverage those and have a highly consolidated affect on the backend is still extremely valuable to our customers and you're right it was a differentiated product from a deduplication standpoint but really the feature was that I can keep my 30 60 or 90 days worth of copies that are separate from my primary copies so I putting them somewhere safe I can even put them under different governance from my primary storage or my primary application owners right and it's practical and feasible and and prior to that the only real way to do that was with tape automation deduplication has become more of a broader word itself and it goes beyond what data domain does so there's deduplication and primary storage but if you look at primary storage deduplication it's good but it's designed to help you reduce the use of primary storage by 2 or 3 times it doesn't touch on the 30 60 90 days of retention that data domain does so there the similar technologies and a common use of the word but but they're two different use cases that the the remains separate I think yeah and you know as a former practitioner the other you are I think a former customer the genius part of the genius of data domain was its ability to just plug in to existing processes yes you didn't have to change things up and so it was an easy in but but it's impressive that you've been able to keep that that architecture going I wanted to ask you about market share you aided them in has always had a sixty plus percent market share I think it's at sixty now but it's it's like the Cisco of purpose-built backhaul appliances you're able to sort of dominate that little segment of the market which keeps getting bigger what but now you've got a lot of new entrants you know on VC money pouring in a lot of noise in the marketplace I feel like you guys maybe a couple years ago took your eye off the wall and now you've got this renewed sense of a vigor you know maybe it was parked partly the acquisition but you know we've talked to Beth Phelan about this a number of times you've really refreshed the portfolio so so wonder if you can talk about that and my question is what gives you confidence that you can continue to maintain your dominance yeah that's a great question and things have really changed I think starting around 2014 we were having some internal conversations about things like simplification the consumerization of IT and and all of those those dollars that you're talking about are really being poured into companies that are trying to take a different approach they're going into the white space that we had kind of left open which was simplicity right if you if you look back 10 or 15 years and you look at the the data management and enterprise backup software space enterprise backup software has been complicated and as you add more use cases it has become even more complicated and the customer base is no longer tolerant of that that's something that that maybe 10 or 15 years ago that was kind of a badge of honor to be working with complex and people just don't have the time for that there's a lot of IT generalists and folks that are out there that don't want to go to training class you know you know five days or ten days out of the year to learn how to use a product so that was a really good thing that we're seeing in the marketplace in terms of making products simpler easier to use and more approachable with things like discoverable functionality we certainly have the you know put a lot of effort into going in that direction because we think that's the right direction but what gives me confidence is the underlying storage value proposition about efficiency and performance and scale is something that we've still think that we have a strong upper hand on and when it comes down to that you know we take cloud as an example our data reduction in the cloud we think allows a much lower cost to serve and you know the customer is going to pay for that cloud storage or that cloud compute regardless of which vendor they're trusting in terms of their their solutions so simple only goes so far we think we can get there with simple but we don't necessarily see our competition having the efficiencies scalability and and so forth that we've already had so that that's good that gives me a lot of confidence so when you talk to customers what's the big problem the big hairy problem that they're trying to solve in your space and how are you guys helping so I one of the two big problems I see is is really a lot of IT teams are confronted with they've got a digital transformation going on they've got a cloud strategy going on an IT isn't necessarily being invited to the table early enough or often enough to go ahead and help with that process so what you have is you a cloud team building applications bringing things online and then the data protection the backups the snapshots whatever they're doing to make sure that that data is safe is is a bit of an afterthought and it you know I think of DevOps and I think about the ops part and I've never really come across an application team that wanted to own the business responsibility for the risk of you know backups recovery replication and all of that and I think IT has a lot of established practices that would be good to inform how those things should be built so the number one thing that I'm talking to with my customers when we're talking about this whole you know tectonic shift and in the way things are being done is that IT and the digital transformation or the cloud team do need to speak early and often and proactively about how they approach data protection because they continue to need to have a strategy that evolves and make sure they keep themselves protected as they start moving these critical workloads into the cloud it's an age-old problem with backup and data protection people think of it as a back as a bolt-on is an afterthought and your point is right on it's got to be a fundamental part of any transformation it's just like security you can't bolt it on earth just doesn't scale yeah and it's very much like you know back in the day when open systems was just coming of age there was a lot of operational discipline that the mainframe teams had and the mid-range teams had but the open systems was the Wild West and eventually open systems learned and and and a lot of that you know was knowledge sharing about best practices and you know Mis became IT now IT is becoming you know DevOps and digital transformation we're seeing a lot of that same dynamic happening again and and you know my main point is just you know start those conversations and if you're on the IT side start those conversations proactively you might not be getting invited to the digital transformation party invite yourself rich has been quite a 10 years and and as I was just watching an Andy Jazzy interview if you think the last 10 years have been crazy you ain't seen nothing yet so you guys are in a great position to stay agile and I'm gonna steal your line that it's no longer an honor to work on complicated systems that's great yeah it's been great being here thanks for having me and looking forward to maybe coming back in ten years and seeing what changed so hopefully we won't wait 10 years so rich thanks for stopping by Dave thanks for checking in from Boston and it's great to see you as well thanks you guys thanks Dave thanks Jeff [Music]

(techno music) >> From Orlando, Florida, it's The Cube. Covering SAP Sapphire Now 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome to The Cube. I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend and we are at SAP Sapphire Now 2018 in Orlando. This is a massive event. Not only are there 20,000 people here but there's about a million engaging with SAP this week online. Amazing! We're joined by a Cube alumni. Welcome back to The Cube >> Thank you Lisa. Chris Hallenbeck. You are the SVP of Database and Data Management at SAP. >> What they tell me. (laughter) >> That's what they tell you. That's what your cards say? >> It is. >> Alright. Well, thanks for coming onto The Cube. So this event is enormous. Sixteen American football fields is this space. You really can close your rings. >> Well, and it is, is the energy is just crazy. It's actually different than other years. I don't know why but it really it is. >> You know yesterday, that's what Keith and I were saying yesterday. Bill McDermott really kicked things off with such enthusiasm and genuine energy. It was really amazing to see that. You don't see that with a lot of, see levels on day one. That energy was really palpable as was. >> Enterprise applications aren't that sexy huh? (crosstalk) >> Apparently they are. >> Well, apparently they are now. >> Who knew? >> Well, and that's the thing too. You guys wanting to be one of the top ten most valuable brands in the world. Up there with Apple, Google. And one of the cool things I saw yesterday on a bus out here was ERP that you can talk to and hear from. So taking this, what was an invisible product and making it now something that people can engage with like a digital assistant at home. Remarkable. >> Well, yeah. No. The user interface which has been a huge, huge thing. We have these massive UX labs throughout the world. We have ones in Palo Alto. We have ones throughout Germany and other locations. And we've been really looking at how people engage with the software. And it's not only through a screen although that's it and we win all these Red Dot awards, the Preeminent Design Award. We get those consistently now, many a year, for the work we're doing within UI which is fabulous work. But we're also again, a lot of people aren't in front of computers anymore. So how can I actually just speak into my phone and get all the information I need? How can I have the device speak to me? How can somebody wearing gloves on an assembly line, automatically they vibrate if they're reaching for the wrong bin and would have grabbed the wrong part which create a faulty defective product. So it's all built in, our actually shoes vibrating if something else happens. And so actually this interaction of sensors in two way, taking IOT data in, and then also feeding it back into signals but that's part of the interface of the software. It's not always sitting in a screen and if you are in front of a screen, they're actually pretty great to use. >> So speaking of these consumer technologies, we've had this expectation and these technologies have changed the expectations of what our business tech is. We expect to be able to do things such as, hey, say what's the latest score from last night's game. And now there's these intelligent streams of having conversations with computers. All that is powered by the data on the backend. SAP traditionally hadn't been. We talked about it on stage this morning. SAP hadn't been known for the type of company to sub at to the real-time data entry, real-time data analytics. >> Yeah. You're all about data management. We heard something on the stage this morning. What was it? Data management suite? (crosstalk) The mature database now. (crosstalk) What is that? What's that about? >> Well, now what we're finding, you know, HANA enabled these incredible use cases and originally we were all, we actually didn't run underneath SAP applications an entire database but really a data platform that people were doing these incredible innovations on. And then of course it really started to get swept underneath and it went under BW and then it became part of Sweden HANA and everyone just focused said, oh yeah, HANA is just gonna be like Netweaver. It's just a system that runs underneath SAP and we kept saying no, it's not, no, it's not. And it was sort of but that was its main, that was where it was mostly getting deployed. And then what you're actually seeing here at Sapphire is this massive breakout of technology in full use use cases. That people are using it outside even non-SAP customers are using it to solve their individual problems. Really going after that huge, that 80% of data which is non-SAP but the challenge there with is how do you handle that? Data is now sitting out in all these different clouds. HANA was known for orchestrating data but it was really designed to do it on premise because we knew not everyone's gonna put data into our system. We came in late, right. And yeah we're the fastest growing but data was sitting in Oracle, and the TIZA and that's coming up and going into data lakes, running on ADO and we could orchestrate and move that data into HANA or do it in place. Go to the cloud, it's totally different. Average customer and CIOs are telling you they have six to eight clouds and you're like, wait, how did you get to six to eight? And you're like, yeah, they've got data in storage just in Azure, in AWS, and in Google but they've also got in all these different cloud applications and a lot are from SAP but a lot aren't and yet and so companies are telling us we've lost the view of who our customer is. We've lost view of our business. Which is the opposite of what you would have expect from this data explosion and, you know, digital transformation which was like showed up and disappeared in like two years but so how do you handle that? If I have data. So much data sitting out there. IOT data in the edge, love file data sitting in object stores, I've got data in different applications, data still on Fram. How can I actually possibly move that? You can't. There's no way to put it all together in one cloud. Everyone says, oh, bring it to my cloud. It's not viable. >> Right. So how do I actually push compute, get the data I need, refine it in place, and orchestrate and move that together with the ultimate security in governance? Which is what our customers are wanting. They're saying, how Chris for our non-SAP data and SAP, can I move data for application integration? How do I do analytics? How can I pre-press data and load it into a data lake, into a data warehouse and then I'll come back and do some other cool stuff on it with data science? And that's all about by combining HANA and data hub together in a suite with deep integrations, technically from a data center readiness it's all as a service runs in the cloud but because we're SAP it's also on Prem enabled if you still want to run it that way. And it allows you to solve these huge data problems and we also help you. We bring SAPs intellectual property of data models to this so you can use things like Enterprise Architecture designer and say look we don't have a model of customer. I'm like, well yeah, what kind of industry are you in? Okay, I've got a high tech customer model pre-built for you so then you don't have to build that from scratch. We bring the things to you. So now you can get very, very quick value right from the implementation within weeks. >> And that speed is obviously essential. >> Well, how does it. (crosstalk) >> HANA's a terror, which it's known for. >> But you're right, sorry Keith, you're right that in the consumer world because we have access to everything everywhere from so many devices, we as business people expect the same thing. >> Yeah. And so that speed is critical. You talk about, you know, multiple clouds, data in so many different sources. It's not valuable unless you can actually harness it and extract insights that may only be viable for a quarter or something like that. >> But nobody even knows where the data is and so you look at like we're about to, we were talking about HANA. I just came back and we're coming out a little bit later the year with HANA data hub 2.3 which is part of HANA data management suite and that actually has a whole metadata repository. So someone who knows what they're doing goes in and maps out where all this data is located and actually they don't have to do it all themselves, it's got heuristic-al and semantic search to automatically map and categorize data. I can then map that back to like my definition of customer or supplier and other things. Now everyone doing all the analytics and doing exactly what you're talking about Keith where can I just say into my phone, hey, someone in board meeting goes hey what were our results within two peak last year over this year and show and break that down by city and have it just pop up. Just like you say to somebody, hey high school football game, didn't those two play together? Anyone can do that on a mobile device but we don't know the data in our own company. How do you do that? And then let HANA data management suite will automatically know where the data is, orchestrate, go get it, pull it together, and deliver that back to a mobile device that you might have spoken into. >> Do you have a favorite customer that articulates just what you said? >> I do. I just actually walked out of a session. It was just and it sounds a little boring but it's incredible what people are doing. So I just walked out of a thing with the Swiss Federal Railways. Sounds boring but you know where. I live in Europe and everything is by rail, right? And so they're doing about 60 percent of the rail traffic there is passengers, 1.25 million passengers a day plus the balance of 40 percent of the trains are freight. They're having a huge problem because you use huge, it's all electrical and they're trying and so when you get up and it's growing rapidly. So they're, and they do their own power with power plants and when they go up with power plants, when they go over peak they have to spot by at just massive times a premium on that data on that. And we're actually doing this a lot of place out of rail but they also use electricity on heaters and other stuff in the cold winters and air conditioners. They're now streaming information off the trains, off of the points all the way along the signals and from all the power plants. They know peak usage. It automatically detects when they're going to go over and rather than going into the plants, it actually cuts the heaters off for a second here or there. There's heaters in all the switching equipment. They know how long they can do it. HANA managed this, this is automatically so it's IOT in but it's automatically making automated business decisions, shutting down systems programmatically, intelligently actually using machine learning and keeping it. So now what they do, so now they don't need to go out to the spot market in buy energy anymore. It has cut their electrical usage by a third. >> How much money have they saved? >> No, what's a third is how much money they've saved. The electricity is still high but they're not buying that really, really >> The premium. expensive premium and so you're streaming data, it's all over, it's all happening in real time, and it's automatically kicking out business processes without human intervention. And then it's a platform for them where they're adding all this new capability to save in other ways and so it's just, you know, simple but clean really good use. Good for the planet. It's great for the customers. And now they have, and by the way, when you hit those peaks, that's when they short-out systems and that's when trains stall out. So actually you're getting better servicing of the trains. So, yeah, it's good storage. >> So edge core cloud, great breakdown of kind of the use case. The data is being collected at the edge. Data may not even be collected in a SAP system? (crosstalk) We're doing great! >> It's reality. >> It is reality and one of the things that I think architecturally that enterprises have a hard time wrapping their head around, HANA in-memory database defeats latency when you're inside the database, when you're inside of the data center, however you were thinking about HANA data management. How does the in-memory database impact and data management impact data retrieved from the edge? Help explain the importance of metadata and willing down that data so that we can get it back to the cloud and process their important data. >> Keith, it's a great question. Sometimes, HANA is not, you know. Although we like to go it's a hammer and we think everything's a nail but sometimes you don't which is why we have data hub. And it has unique capabilities for doing something called data pipelines and movement. So we can actually do all the data transformation movement calling tensor flow in flight. We do this as the data is in movement so we're actually doing all of that processing as it's moving through. If you need extra horsepower and want to combine different data types and there's certain capabilities pipeline engines don't solve well. HANA is a service which HANA is now completely cloud native. They can actually bring up HANA in a few seconds. It will take the data flow in, compute it, it's not being used as database, it's a compute layer out at the edge, the data flows out to move on to the next step usually via a data pipeline from data hub and that service gets shut off. So you just pay from small compute when you need to bring out the big guns and then it moves on. And maybe that data never comes back into a HANA system, maybe it does, but you're using the technological underpinnings of in-memory computing in this way as just literally a flow through compute engine. >> And I think that's the disconnect a lot of organizations have because you associate s4 bases, BW, all these applications on top of the database. They don't think of HANA as something that you can spin up, spin down. >> But that's brand-new and that is what we just announced and went live last week. So HANA was, there's traditional on-prem system, bare-metal, it run virtualized but I mean talking about big arm running HANA systems. Now to actually have it, so HANA as a service came up. We rewrote the entire thing to make it completely cloud native and orchestrated. It's all containerized in elastic. It runs, it came up last week running an AWS and available also in GCP. Our target is a little bit later this year. I always have to use a safe harbor language. It'll be coming up on, it'll be coming up in Azure and after all the rest of SAPs data centers and then also coming out and in Asia through Huawei and coming up in those data centers as well as some others we have planned. And that's where you actually get this fully elastic HANA that's able to come up and come down automatically. >> So this massive transformation that you guys have achieved in 46 years, say 46 years young, 390,000 customers. >> Yeah. SAP didn't get to where it is without having a really robust symbiotic partner relationship ecosystem. We're here in the NetApp booth. There's a 150 partner sessions alone at Sapphire this week. Talk to us a little bit about how the partner ecosystem is helping you guys give customers the flexibility and the choice that they need. >> Yeah, no, and it is. SAP can't do everything. And so a lot of the aspects are that we look at in very different ways. Of course, some companies and the big corporations we deal with need strategic SIs, these strategic integrators to do consulting and other pieces and we work really closely with them on and they have specialized practices and other things on both HANA. They're extending out into the HANA data management suite. We do the same thing since we realize you need boutiques. We're the fastest geospatial engine in the world but that's a very niche piece although geospatials may be the hottest data type out there happening right now. Those are very specialized boutique firms. So we work with all of those and to help our customers when they need that. So we work with a lot of specialists. We work boutiques but we couldn't do this without hardware partners, with storages which is why we allow. There's still a lot of folks running on Prem. So we still have to have all these things so we have HANA tailor data center integration so you can certify your systems like NetApp. You can certify everything else on prem so you don't have to rebuy new hardware. Use what you have. I'm not trying to get you to buy a bunch of new appliances. And then the other one is a lot of is via and OEMs have started building out on HANA but now what they really want to do is go directly on HDMS as the cloud offering because it runs both in any cloud, which is a very unique differentiator that we run in every major cloud out there, as well as coming back and running on-premise. They can play their applications very risk-free with the extreme security and governance we're providing within that stack to build applications that they want to sell and use for enterprises. >> So you've been with SAP about six years you said and even Bill McDermott said in his keynote on day one, biggest Sapphire ever. You've seen a tremendous amount of growth. The momentum here is so palpable. The types of validation that SAP is getting through the voice of the customer, through partners like Netta, the different partner ecosystem. That validation is electric. >> Yeah. >> What excites you about everything that was just announced in the last couple of days about the rest of 2018? Where do you go from here? >> Oh my god! Okay, it's like asking me to pick my favorite child. (crosstalk) But, you know, honestly I get to. You get to see the innovations that I still enjoy. I love the full use use cases because I'm like a compute guy at heart but I see all the applications that we've done in these demonstrations. The fact that people have applications that are giving all of the analytics in line with the transactions on these gorgeous UIs. I mean you run these things on a mobile device that means the data layer has 20 milliseconds to actually not only grab the data but to do all the predictive analytics and everything you see to give you that nice two second screen to screen time on your mobile device and that's what we've worked for six years to enable. And now we're seeing that potential coming out at places like Swiss Rail. Just was talking with Gustav Rossi through the biggest cancer research labs and hospitals throughout all of Europe. They're doing all this genomic research, personalized medicine for cancer patients throughout Europe using HANA. I didn't even know about it, you know, or other ones we talked about beef farmers. Talking about smart farming throughout all the Netherlands. Reducing pesticide use, water usage dramatically down, and they increased yields by 10 percent. I mean and they're doing this on native HANA. So this area for me, the excitement of people and busting out of the SAP core traditional CIO market and moving into this 80% of data is to me exciting that people are seeing that HANA is not just an SAP appliance but it's really a general-purpose data platform for these innovation use cases. >> Helping customers change their business, change industries, save lives, pretty cool stuff. >> Yeah, I think so. >> Chris, thank you so much for stopping by The Cube and sharing with us your enthusiasm and your excitement for what you're doing at SAP. We appreciate it. >> Well, thank you very much. This was awesome. Thank you guys. >> We want to thank you for watching The Cube. Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend at SAP Sapphire 2018. Thanks for watching! (techno music)