(upbeat music) >> Okay, welcome back everyone at Supercloud 2 event, live here in Palo Alto, theCUBE Studios live stage performance, virtually syndicating it all over the world. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante here as Cube alumni, and special influencer guest, Howie Xu, VP of Machine Learning and Zscaler, also part-time as a CUBE analyst 'cause he is that good. Comes on all the time. You're basically a CUBE analyst as well. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for inviting me. >> John: Technically, you're not really a CUBE analyst, but you're kind of like a CUBE analyst. >> Happy New Year to everyone. >> Dave: Great to see you. >> Great to see you, Dave and John. >> John: We've been talking about ChatGPT online. You wrote a great post about it being more like Amazon, not like Google. >> Howie: More than just Google Search. >> More than Google Search. Oh, it's going to compete with Google Search, which it kind of does a little bit, but more its infrastructure. So a clever point, good segue into this conversation, because this is kind of the beginning of these kinds of next gen things we're going to see. Things where it's like an obvious next gen, it's getting real. Kind of like seeing the browser for the first time, Mosaic browser. Whoa, this internet thing's real. I think this is that moment and Supercloud like enablement is coming. So this has been a big part of the Supercloud kind of theme. >> Yeah, you talk about Supercloud, you talk about, you know, AI, ChatGPT. I really think the ChatGPT is really another Netscape moment, the browser moment. Because if you think about internet technology, right? It was brewing for 20 years before early 90s. Not until you had a, you know, browser, people realize, "Wow, this is how wonderful this technology could do." Right? You know, all the wonderful things. Then you have Yahoo and Amazon. I think we have brewing, you know, the AI technology for, you know, quite some time. Even then, you know, neural networks, deep learning. But not until ChatGPT came along, people realize, "Wow, you know, the user interface, user experience could be that great," right? So I really think, you know, if you look at the last 30 years, there is a browser moment, there is iPhone moment. I think ChatGPT moment is as big as those. >> Dave: What do you see as the intersection of things like ChatGPT and the Supercloud? Of course, the media's going to focus, journalists are going to focus on all the negatives and the privacy. Okay. You know we're going to get by that, right? Always do. Where do you see the Supercloud and sort of the distributed data fitting in with ChatGPT? Does it use that as a data source? What's the link? >> Howie: I think there are number of use cases. One of the use cases, we talked about why we even have Supercloud because of the complexity, because of the, you know, heterogeneous nature of different clouds. In order for me as a developer, in order for me to create applications, I have so many things to worry about, right? It's a complexity. But with ChatGPT, with the AI, I don't have to worry about it, right? Those kind of details will be taken care of by, you know, the underlying layer. So we have been talking about on this show, you know, over the last, what, year or so about the Supercloud, hey, defining that, you know, API layer spanning across, you know, multiple clouds. I think that will be happening. However, for a lot of the things, that will be more hidden, right? A lot of that will be automated by the bots. You know, we were just talking about it right before the show. One of the profound statement I heard from Adrian Cockcroft about 10 years ago was, "Hey Howie, you know, at Netflix, right? You know, IT is just one API call away." That's a profound statement I heard about a decade ago. I think next decade, right? You know, the IT is just one English language away, right? So when it's one English language away, it's no longer as important, API this, API that. You still need API just like hardware, right? You still need all of those things. That's going to be more hidden. The high level thing will be more, you know, English language or the language, right? Any language for that matter. >> Dave: And so through language, you'll tap services that live across the Supercloud, is what you're saying? >> Howie: You just tell what you want, what you desire, right? You know, the bots will help you to figure out where the complexity is, right? You know, like you said, a lot of criticism about, "Hey, ChatGPT doesn't do this, doesn't do that." But if you think about how to break things down, right? For instance, right, you know, ChatGPT doesn't have Microsoft stock price today, obviously, right? However, you can ask ChatGPT to write a program for you, retrieve the Microsoft stock price, (laughs) and then just run it, right? >> Dave: Yeah. >> So the thing to think about- >> John: It's only going to get better. It's only going to get better. >> The thing people kind of unfairly criticize ChatGPT is it doesn't do this. But can you not break down humans' task into smaller things and get complex things to be done by the ChatGPT? I think we are there already, you know- >> John: That to me is the real game changer. That's the assembly of atomic elements at the top of the stack, whether the interface is voice or some programmatic gesture based thing, you know, wave your hand or- >> Howie: One of the analogy I used in my blog was, you know, each person, each professional now is a quarterback. And we suddenly have, you know, a lot more linebacks or you know, any backs to work for you, right? For free even, right? You know, and then that's sort of, you should think about it. You are the quarterback of your day-to-day job, right? Your job is not to do everything manually yourself. >> Dave: You call the play- >> Yes. >> Dave: And they execute. Do your job. >> Yes, exactly. >> Yeah, all the players are there. All the elves are in the North Pole making the toys, Dave, as we say. But this is the thing, I want to get your point. This change is going to require a new kind of infrastructure software relationship, a new kind of operating runtime, a new kind of assembler, a new kind of loader link things. This very operating systems kind of concepts. >> Data intensive, right? How to process the data, how to, you know, process so gigantic data in parallel, right? That's actually a tough job, right? So if you think about ChatGPT, why OpenAI is ahead of the game, right? You know, Google may not want to acknowledge it, right? It's not necessarily they do, you know, not have enough data scientist, but the software engineering pieces, you know, behind it, right? To train the model, to actually do all those things in parallel, to do all those things in a cost effective way. So I think, you know, a lot of those still- >> Let me ask you a question. Let me ask you a question because we've had this conversation privately, but I want to do it while we're on stage here. Where are all the alpha geeks and developers and creators and entrepreneurs going to gravitate to? You know, in every wave, you see it in crypto, all the alphas went into crypto. Now I think with ChatGPT, you're going to start to see, like, "Wow, it's that moment." A lot of people are going to, you know, scrum and do startups. CTOs will invent stuff. There's a lot of invention, a lot of computer science and customer requirements to figure out. That's new. Where are the alpha entrepreneurs going to go to? What do you think they're going to gravitate to? If you could point to the next layer to enable this super environment, super app environment, Supercloud. 'Cause there's a lot to do to enable what you just said. >> Howie: Right. You know, if you think about using internet as the analogy, right? You know, in the early 90s, internet came along, browser came along. You had two kind of companies, right? One is Amazon, the other one is walmart.com. And then there were company, like maybe GE or whatnot, right? Really didn't take advantage of internet that much. I think, you know, for entrepreneurs, suddenly created the Yahoo, Amazon of the ChatGPT native era. That's what we should be all excited about. But for most of the Fortune 500 companies, your job is to surviving sort of the big revolution. So you at least need to do your walmart.com sooner than later, right? (laughs) So not be like GE, right? You know, hand waving, hey, I do a lot of the internet, but you know, when you look back last 20, 30 years, what did they do much with leveraging the- >> So you think they're going to jump in, they're going to build service companies or SaaS tech companies or Supercloud companies? >> Howie: Okay, so there are two type of opportunities from that perspective. One is, you know, the OpenAI ish kind of the companies, I think the OpenAI, the game is still open, right? You know, it's really Close AI today. (laughs) >> John: There's room for competition, you mean? >> There's room for competition, right. You know, you can still spend you know, 50, $100 million to build something interesting. You know, there are company like Cohere and so on and so on. There are a bunch of companies, I think there is that. And then there are companies who's going to leverage those sort of the new AI primitives. I think, you know, we have been talking about AI forever, but finally, finally, it's no longer just good, but also super useful. I think, you know, the time is now. >> John: And if you have the cloud behind you, what do you make the Amazon do differently? 'Cause Amazon Web Services is only going to grow with this. It's not going to get smaller. There's more horsepower to handle, there's more needs. >> Howie: Well, Microsoft already showed what's the future, right? You know, you know, yes, there is a kind of the container, you know, the serverless that will continue to grow. But the future is really not about- >> John: Microsoft's shown the future? >> Well, showing that, you know, working with OpenAI, right? >> Oh okay. >> They already said that, you know, we are going to have ChatGPT service. >> $10 billion, I think they're putting it. >> $10 billion putting, and also open up the Open API services, right? You know, I actually made a prediction that Microsoft future hinges on OpenAI. I think, you know- >> John: They believe that $10 billion bet. >> Dave: Yeah. $10 billion bet. So I want to ask you a question. It's somewhat academic, but it's relevant. For a number of years, it looked like having first mover advantage wasn't an advantage. PCs, spreadsheets, the browser, right? Social media, Friendster, right? Mobile. Apple wasn't first to mobile. But that's somewhat changed. The cloud, AWS was first. You could debate whether or not, but AWS okay, they have first mover advantage. Crypto, Bitcoin, first mover advantage. Do you think OpenAI will have first mover advantage? >> It certainly has its advantage today. I think it's year two. I mean, I think the game is still out there, right? You know, we're still in the first inning, early inning of the game. So I don't think that the game is over for the rest of the players, whether the big players or the OpenAI kind of the, sort of competitors. So one of the VCs actually asked me the other day, right? "Hey, how much money do I need to spend, invest, to get, you know, another shot to the OpenAI sort of the level?" You know, I did a- (laughs) >> Line up. >> That's classic VC. "How much does it cost me to replicate?" >> I'm pretty sure he asked the question to a bunch of guys, right? >> Good luck with that. (laughs) >> So we kind of did some napkin- >> What'd you come up with? (laughs) >> $100 million is the order of magnitude that I came up with, right? You know, not a billion, not 10 million, right? So 100 million. >> John: Hundreds of millions. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. 100 million order of magnitude is what I came up with. You know, we can get into details, you know, in other sort of the time, but- >> Dave: That's actually not that much if you think about it. >> Howie: Exactly. So when he heard me articulating why is that, you know, he's thinking, right? You know, he actually, you know, asked me, "Hey, you know, there's this company. Do you happen to know this company? Can I reach out?" You know, those things. So I truly believe it's not a billion or 10 billion issue, it's more like 100. >> John: And also, your other point about referencing the internet revolution as a good comparable. The other thing there is online user population was a big driver of the growth of that. So what's the equivalent here for online user population for AI? Is it more apps, more users? I mean, we're still early on, it's first inning. >> Yeah. We're kind of the, you know- >> What's the key metric for success of this sector? Do you have a read on that? >> I think the, you know, the number of users is a good metrics, but I think it's going to be a lot of people are going to use AI services without even knowing they're using it, right? You know, I think a lot of the applications are being already built on top of OpenAI, and then they are kind of, you know, help people to do marketing, legal documents, you know, so they're already inherently OpenAI kind of the users already. So I think yeah. >> Well, Howie, we've got to wrap, but I really appreciate you coming on. I want to give you a last minute to wrap up here. In your experience, and you've seen many waves of innovation. You've even had your hands in a lot of the big waves past three inflection points. And obviously, machine learning you're doing now, you're deep end. Why is this Supercloud movement, this wave of Supercloud and the discussion of this next inflection point, why is it so important? For the folks watching, why should they be paying attention to this particular moment in time? Could you share your super clip on Supercloud? >> Howie: Right. So this is simple from my point of view. So why do you even have cloud to begin with, right? IT is too complex, too complex to operate or too expensive. So there's a newer model. There is a better model, right? Let someone else operate it, there is elasticity out of it, right? That's great. Until you have multiple vendors, right? Many vendors even, you know, we're talking about kind of how to make multiple vendors look like the same, but frankly speaking, even one vendor has, you know, thousand services. Now it's kind of getting, what Kid was talking about what, cloud chaos, right? It's the evolution. You know, the history repeats itself, right? You know, you have, you know, next great things and then too many great things, and then people need to sort of abstract this out. So it's almost that you must do this. But I think how to abstract this out is something that at this time, AI is going to help a lot, right? You know, like I mentioned, right? A lot of the abstraction, you don't have to think about API anymore. I bet 10 years from now, you know, IT is one language away, not API away. So think about that world, right? So Supercloud in, in my opinion, sure, you kind of abstract things out. You have, you know, consistent layers. But who's going to do that? Is that like we all agreed upon the model, agreed upon those APIs? Not necessary. There are certain, you know, truth in that, but there are other truths, let bots take care of, right? Whether you know, I want some X happens, whether it's going to be done by Azure, by AWS, by GCP, bots will figure out at a given time with certain contacts with your security requirement, posture requirement. I'll think that out. >> John: That's awesome. And you know, Dave, you and I have been talking about this. We think scale is the new ratification. If you have first mover advantage, I'll see the benefit, but scale is a huge thing. OpenAI, AWS. >> Howie: Yeah. Every day, we are using OpenAI. Today, we are labeling data for them. So you know, that's a little bit of the- (laughs) >> John: Yeah. >> First mover advantage that other people don't have, right? So it's kind of scary. So I'm very sure that Google is a little bit- (laughs) >> When we do our super AI event, you're definitely going to be keynoting. (laughs) >> Howie: I think, you know, we're talking about Supercloud, you know, before long, we are going to talk about super intelligent cloud. (laughs) >> I'm super excited, Howie, about this. Thanks for coming on. Great to see you, Howie Xu. Always a great analyst for us contributing to the community. VP of Machine Learning and Zscaler, industry legend and friend of theCUBE. Thanks for coming on and sharing really, really great advice and insight into what this next wave means. This Supercloud is the next wave. "If you're not on it, you're driftwood," says Pat Gelsinger. So you're going to see a lot more discussion. We'll be back more here live in Palo Alto after this short break. >> Thank you. (upbeat music)

(electronic music) >> Hi everybody, welcome back to Supercloud 2. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host John Furrier. We're here at our tricked out Palo Alto studio. We're going live wall to wall all day. We're inserting a number of pre-recorded interviews, folks like Walmart. We just heard from Nir Zuk of Palo Alto Networks, and I'm really pleased to welcome in David Flynn. David Flynn, you may know as one of the people behind Fusion-io, completely changed the way in which people think about storing data, accessing data. David Flynn now the founder and CEO of a company called Hammerspace. David, good to see you, thanks for coming on. >> David: Good to see you too. >> And Dr. Nelu Mihai is the CEO and founder of Cloud of Clouds. He's actually built a Supercloud. We're going to get into that. Nelu, thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, Happy New Year. >> Yeah, Happy New Year. So I'm going to start right off with a little debate that's going on in the community if you guys would bring out this slide. So Bob Muglia early today, he gave a definition of Supercloud. He felt like we had to tighten ours up a little bit. He said a Supercloud is a platform, underscoring platform, that provides programmatically consistent services hosted on heterogeneous cloud providers. Now, Nelu, we have this shared doc, and you've been in there. You responded, you said, well, hold on. Supercloud really needs to be an architecture, or else we're going to have this stove pipe of stove pipes, really. And then you went on with more detail, what's the information model? What's the execution model? How are users going to interact with Supercloud? So I start with you, why architecture? The inference is that a platform, the platform provider's responsible for the architecture? Why does that not work in your view? >> No, the, it's a very interesting question. So whenever I think about platform, what's the connotation, you think about monolithic system? Yeah, I mean, I don't know whether it's true or or not, but there is this connotation of of monolithic. On the other hand, if you look at what's a problem right now with HyperClouds, from the customer perspective, they're very complex. There is a heterogeneous world where actually every single one of this HyperClouds has their own architecture. You need rocket scientists to build a cloud applications. Always there is this contradiction between cost and performance. They fight each other. And I'm quoting here a former friend of mine from Bell Labs who work at AWS who used to say "Cloud is cheap as long as you don't use it too much." (group chuckles) So clearly we need something that kind of plays from the principle point of view the role of an operating system, that seats on top of this heterogeneous HyperCloud, and there's nothing wrong by having these proprietary HyperClouds, think about processors, think about operating system and so on, so forth. But in order to build a system that is simple enough, I think we need to go deeper and understand. >> So the argument, the counterargument to that, David, is you'll never get there. You need a proprietary system to get to market sooner, to solve today's problem. Now I don't know where you stand on this platform versus architecture. I haven't asked you, but. >> I think there are aspects of both for sure. I mean it needs to be an architecture in the sense that it's broad based and open and so forth. But you know, platform, you could say as long as people can instantiate it themselves, on their own infrastructure, as long as it's something that can be deployed as, you know, software defined, you don't want the concept of platform being the monolith, you know, combined hardware and software. So it really depends on what you're focused on when you're saying platform, you know, I'd say as long as they software defined thing, to where it can literally run anywhere. I mean, because I really think what we're talking about here is the original concept of cloud computing. The ability to run anything anywhere, without having to care about the physical infrastructure. And what we have today is not that, the cloud today is a big mainframe in the sky, that just happens to be large enough that once you select which region, generally you have enough resources. But, you know, nowadays you don't even necessarily have enough resources in one region. and then you're kind of stuck. So we haven't really gotten to that utility model of computing. And you're also asked to rewrite your application, you know, to abandon the conveniences of high performance file access. You got to rewrite it to use object storage stuff. We have to get away from that. >> Okay, I want to just drill on that, 'cause I think I like that point about, there's not enough availability, but on the developer cloud, the original AWS premise was targeting developers, 'cause at that time, you have to provision a Sun box get a Cisco DSU/CSU, now you get on the cloud. But I think you're giving up the scale question, 'cause I think right now, scale is huge, enterprise grade versus cloud for developers. >> That's Right. >> Because I mean look at, Amazon, Azure, they got compute, they got storage, they got queuing, and some stuff. If you're doing a startup, you throw your app up there, localhost to cloud, no big deal. It's the scale thing that gets me- >> And you can tell by the fact that, in regions that are under high demand, right, like in London or LA, at least with the clients we work with in the median entertainment space, it costs twice as much for the exact same cloud instances that do the exact same amount of work, as somewhere out in rural Canada. So why is it you have such a cost differential, it has to do with that supply and demand, and the fact that the clouds aren't really the ability to run anything anywhere. Even within the same cloud vendor, you're stuck in a specific region. >> And that was never the original promise, right? I mean it was, we turned it into that. But the original promise was get rid of the heavy lifting of IT. >> Not have to run your own, yeah, exactly. >> And then it became, wow, okay I can run anywhere. And then you know, it's like web 2.0. You know people say why Supercloud, you and I talked about this, why do you need a name for Supercloud? It's like web 2.0. >> It's what Cloud was supposed to be. >> It's what cloud was supposed to be, (group laughing and talking) exactly, right. >> Cloud was supposed to be run anything anywhere, or at least that's what we took it as. But you're right, originally it was just, oh don't have to run your own infrastructure, and you can choose somebody else's infrastructure. >> And you did that >> But you're still bound to that. >> Dave: And People said I want more, right? >> But how do we go from here? >> That's, that's actually, that's a very good point, because indeed when the first HyperClouds were designed, were designed really focus on customers. I think Supercloud is an opportunity to design in the right way. Also having in mind the computer science rigor. And we should take advantage of that, because in fact actually, if cloud would've been designed properly from the beginning, probably wouldn't have needed Supercloud. >> David: You wouldn't have to have been asked to rewrite your application. >> That's correct. (group laughs) >> To use REST interfaces to your storage. >> Revisist history is always a good one. But look, cloud is great. I mean your point is cloud is a good thing. Don't hold it back. >> It is a very good thing. >> Let it continue. >> Let it go as as it is. >> Yeah, let that thing continue to grow. Don't impose restrictions on the cloud. Just refactor what you need to for scale or enterprise grade or availability. >> And you would agree with that, is that true or is it problem you're solving? >> Well yeah, I mean it, what the cloud is doing is absolutely necessary. What the public cloud vendors are doing is absolutely necessary. But what's been missing is how to provide a consistent interface, especially to persistent data. And have it be available across different regions, and across different clouds. 'cause data is a highly localized thing in current architecture. It only exists as rendered by the storage system that you put it in. Whether that's a legacy thing like a NetApp or an Isilon or even a cloud data service. It's localized to a specific region of the cloud in which you put that. We have to delocalize data, and provide a consistent interface to it across all sites. That's high performance, local access, but to global data. >> And so Walmart earlier today described their, what we call Supercloud, they call it the Walmart cloud native platform. And they use this triplet model. They have AWS and Azure, no, oh sorry, no AWS. They have Azure and GCP and then on-prem, where all the VMs live. When you, you know, probe, it turns out that it's only stateless in the cloud. (John laughs) So, the state stuff- >> Well let's just admit it, there is no such thing as stateless, because even the application binaries and libraries are state. >> Well I'm happy that I'm hearing that. >> Yeah, okay. >> Because actually I have a lot of debate (indistinct). If you think about no software running on a (indistinct) machine is stateless. >> David: Exactly. >> This is something that was- >> David: And that's data that needs to be distributed and provided consistently >> (indistinct) >> Across all the clouds, >> And actually, it's a nonsense, but- >> Dave: So it's an illusion, okay. (group talks over each other) >> (indistinct) you guys talk about stateless. >> Well, see, people make the confusion between state and persistent state, okay. Persistent state it's a different thing. State is a different thing. So, but anyway, I want to go back to your point, because there's a lot of debate here. People are talking about data, some people are talking about logic, some people are talking about networking. In my opinion is this triplet, which is data logic and connectivity, that has equal importance. And actually depending on the application, can have the center of gravity moving towards data, moving towards what I call execution units or workloads. And connectivity is actually the most important part of it. >> David: (indistinct). >> Some people are saying move the logic towards the data, some other people, and you are saying actually, that no, you have to build a distributed data mesh. What I'm saying is actually, you have to consider all these three variables, all these vector in order to decide, based on application, what's the most important. Because sometimes- >> John: So the application chooses >> That's correct. >> Well it it's what operating systems were in the past, was principally the thing that runs and manages the jobs, the job scheduler, and the thing that provides your persistent data (indistinct). >> Okay. So we finally got operating system into the equation, thank you. (group laughs) >> Nelu: I actually have a PhD in operating system. >> Cause what we're talking about is an operating system. So forget platform or architecture, it's an operating environment. Let's use it as a general term. >> All right. I think that's about it for me. >> All right, let's take (indistinct). Nelu, I want ask you quick, 'cause I want to give a, 'cause I believe it's an operating system. I think it's going to be a reset, refactored. You wrote to me, "The model of Supercloud has to be open theoretical, has to satisfy the rigors of computer science, and customer requirements." So unique to today, if the OS is going to be refactored, it's not going to be, may or may not be Red Hat or somebody else. This new OS, obviously requirements are for customers too but is what's the computer science that is needed? Where are we, what's the missing? Where's the science in this shift? It's not your standard OS it's not like an- (group talks over each other) >> I would beg to differ. >> (indistinct) truly an operation environment. But the, if you think about, and make analogies, what you need when you design a distributed system, well you need an information model, yeah. You need to figure out how the data is located and distributed. You need a model for the execution units, and you need a way to describe the interactions between all these objects. And it is my opinion that we need to go deeper and formalize these operations in order to make a step forward. And when we design Supercloud, and design something that is better than the current HyperClouds. And actually that is when we design something better, you make a system more efficient and it's going to be better from the cost point of view, from the performance point of view. But we need to add some math into all this customer focus centering and I really admire AWS and their executive team focusing on the customer. But now it's time to go back and see, if we apply some computer science, if you try to formalize to build a theoretical model of cloud, can we build a system that is better than existing ones? >> So David, how do you- >> this is what I'm saying. >> That's a good question >> How do You see the operating system of a, or operating environment of a decentralized cloud? >> Well I think it's layered. I mean we have operating systems that can run systems quite efficiently. Linux has sort of one in the data center, but we're talking about a layer on top of that. And I think we're seeing the emergence of that. For example, on the job scheduling side of things, Kubernetes makes a really good example. You know, you break the workload into the most granular units of compute, the containerized microservice, and then you use a declarative model to state what is needed and give the system the degrees of freedom that it can choose how to instantiate it. Because the thing about these distributed systems, is that the complexity explodes, right? Running a piece of hardware, running a single server is not a problem, even with all the many cores and everything like that. It's when you start adding in the networking, and making it so that you have many of them. And then when it's going across whole different data centers, you know, so, at that level the way you solve this is not manually (group laughs) and not procedurally. You have to change the language so it's intent based, it's a declarative model, and what you're stating is what is intended, and you're leaving it to more advanced techniques, like machine learning to decide how to instantiate that service across the cluster, which is what Kubernetes does, or how to instantiate the data across the diverse storage infrastructure. And that's what we do. >> So that's a very good point because actually what has been neglected with HyperClouds is really optimization and automation. But in order to be able to do both of these things, you need, I'm going back and I'm stubborn, you need to have a mathematical model, a theoretical model because what does automation mean? It means that we have to put machines to do the work instead of us, and machines work with what? Formula, with algorithms, they don't work with services. So I think Supercloud is an opportunity to underscore the importance of optimization and automation- >> Totally agree. >> In HyperCloud, and actually by doing that, we can also have an interesting connotation. We are also contributing to save our planet, because if you think right now. we're consuming a lot of energy on this HyperClouds and also all this AI applications, and I think we can do better and build the same kind of application using less energy. >> So yeah, great point, love that call out, the- you know, Dave and I always joke about the old, 'cause we're old, we talk about, you know, (Nelu Laughs) old history, OS/2 versus DOS, okay, OS's, OS/2 is silly better, first threaded OS, DOS never went away. So how does legacy play into this conversation? Because I buy the theoretical, I love the conversation. Okay, I think it's an OS, totally see it that way myself. What's the blocker? Is there a legacy that drags it back? Is the anchor dragging from legacy? Is there a DOS OS/2 moment? Is there an opportunity to flip the script? This is- >> I think that's a perfect example of why we need to support the existing interfaces, Operating Systems, real operating systems like Linux, understands how to present data, it's called a file system, block devices, things that that plumb in there. And by, you know, going to a REST interface and S3 and telling people they have to rewrite their applications, you can't even consume your application binaries that way, the OS doesn't know how to pull that sort of thing. So we, to get to cloud, to get to the ability to host massive numbers of tenants within a centralized infrastructure, you know, we abandoned these lower level interfaces to the OS and we have to go back to that. It's the reason why DOS ultimately won, is it had the momentum of the install base. We're seeing the same thing here. Whatever it is, it has to be a real file system and not a come down file system >> Nelu, what's your reaction, 'cause you're in the theoretical bandwagon. Let's get your reaction. >> No, I think it's a good, I'll give, you made a good analogy between OS/2 and DOS, but I'll go even farther saying, if you think about the evolution operating system didn't stop the evolution of underlying microprocessors, hardware, and so on and so forth. On the contrary, it was a catalyst for that. So because everybody could develop their own hardware, without worrying that the applications on top of operating system are going to modify. The same thing is going to happen with Supercloud. You're going to have the AWSs, you're going to have the Azure and the the GCP continue to evolve in their own way proprietary. But if we create on top of it the right interface >> The open, this is why open is important. >> That's correct, because actually you're going to see sometime ago, everybody was saying, remember venture capitals were saying, "AWS killed the world, nobody's going to come." Now you see what Oracle is doing, and then you're going to see other players. >> It's funny, Amazon's trying to be more like Microsoft. Microsoft's trying to be more like Amazon and Google- Oracle's just trying to say they have cloud. >> That's, that's correct, (group laughs) so, my point is, you're going to see a multiplication of this HyperClouds and cloud technology. So, the system has to be open in order to accommodate what it is and what is going to come. Okay, so it's open. >> So the the legacy- so legacy is an opportunity, not a blocker in your mind. And you see- >> That's correct, I think we should allow them to continue to to to be their own actually. But maybe you're going to find a way to connect with it. >> Amazon's the processor, and they're on the 80 80 80 right? >> That's correct. >> You're saying you love people trying to get put to work. >> That's a good analogy. >> But, performance levels you say good luck, right? >> Well yeah, we have to be able to take traditional applications, high performance applications, those that consume file system and persistent data. Those things have to be able to run anywhere. You need to be able to put, put them onto, you know, more elastic infrastructure. So, we have to actually get cloud to where it lives up to its billing. >> And that's what you're solving for, with Hammerspace, >> That's what we're solving for, making it possible- >> Give me the bumper sticker. >> Solving for how do you have massive quantities of unstructured file data? At the end of the day, all data ultimately is unstructured data. Have that persistent data available, across any data center, within any cloud, within any region on-prem, at the edge. And have not just the same APIs, but have the exact same data sets, and not sucked over a straw remote, but at extreme high performance, local access. So how do you have local access to globally shared distributed data? And that's what we're doing. We are orchestrating data globally across all different forms of storage infrastructure, so you have a consistent access at the highest performance levels, at the lowest level innate built into the OS, how to consume it as (indistinct) >> So are you going into the- all the clouds and natively building in there, or are you off cloud? >> So This is software that can run on cloud instances and provide high performance file within the cloud. It can take file data that's on-prem. Again, it's software, it can run in virtual or on physical servers. And it abstracts the data from the existing storage infrastructure, and makes the data visible and consumable and orchestratable across any of it. >> And what's the elevator pitch for Cloud of Cloud, give that too. >> Well, Cloud of Clouds creates a theoretical model of cloud, and it describes every single object in the cloud. Where is data, execution units, and connectivity, with one single class of very simple object. And I can, I can give you (indistinct) >> And the problem that solves is what? >> The problem that solves is, it creates this mathematical model that is necessary in order to do other interesting things, such as optimization, using sata engines, using automation, applying ML for instance. Or deep learning to automate all this clouds, if you think about in the industrial field, we know how to manage and automate huge plants. Why wouldn't it do the same thing in cloud? It's the same thing you- >> That's what you mean by theoretical model. >> Nelu: That's correct. >> Lay out the architecture, almost the bones of skeleton or something, or, and then- >> That's correct, and then on top of it you can actually build a platform, You can create your services, >> when you say math, you mean you put numbers to it, you kind of index it. >> You quantify this thing and you apply mathematical- It's really about, I can disclose this thing. It's really about describing the cloud as a knowledge graph for every single object in the graph for node, an edge is a vector. And then once you have this model, then you can apply the field theory, and linear algebra to do operation with these vectors. And it's, this creates a very interesting opportunity to let the math do this thing for us. >> Okay, so what happens with hyperscale, or it's like AWS in your model. >> So in, in my model actually, >> Are they happy with this, or they >> I'm very happy with that. >> Will they be happy with you? >> We create an interface to every single HyperCloud. We actually, we don't need to interface with the thousands of APIs, but you know, if we have the 80 20 rule, and we map these APIs into this graph, and then every single operation that is done in this graph is done from the beginning, in an optimized manner and also automation ready. >> That's going to be great. David, I want us to go back to you before we close real quick. You've had a lot of experience, multiple ventures on the front end. You talked to a lot of customers who've been innovating. Where are the classic (indistinct)? Cause you, you used to sell and invent product around the old school enterprises with storage, you know that that trajectory storage is still critical to store the data. Where's the classic enterprise grade mindset right now? Those customers that were buying, that are buying storage, they're in the cloud, they're lifting and shifting. They not yet put the throttle on DevOps. When they look at this Supercloud thing, Are they like a deer in the headlights, or are they like getting it? What's the, what's the classic enterprise look like? >> You're seeing people at different stages of adoption. Some folks are trying to get to the cloud, some folks are trying to repatriate from the cloud, because they've realized it's better to own than to rent when you use a lot of it. And so people are at very different stages of the journey. But the one thing that's constant is that there's always change. And the change here has to do with being able to change the location where you're doing your computing. So being able to support traditional workloads in the cloud, being able to run things at the edge, and being able to rationalize where the data ought to exist, and with a declarative model, intent-based, business objective-based, be able to swipe a mouse and have the data get redistributed and positioned across different vendors, across different clouds, that, we're seeing that as really top of mind right now, because everybody's at some point on this journey, trying to go somewhere, and it involves taking their data with them. (John laughs) >> Guys, great conversation. Thanks so much for coming on, for John, Dave. Stay tuned, we got a great analyst power panel coming right up. More from Palo Alto, Supercloud 2. Be right back. (bouncy music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Supercloud 2 this is Dave Vellante. We're here exploring the intersection of data and analytics and the future of cloud. And in this segment, we're going to look at the evolution of cloud, and try to test some of the Supercloud concepts and assumptions with Brian Gracely, is the founder and co-host along with Aaron Delp of the popular Cloudcast program. Amazing series, if you're not already familiar with it. The Cloudcast is one of the best ways to keep up with so many things going on in our industry. Enterprise tech, platform engineering, business models, obviously, cloud developer trends, crypto, Web 3.0. Sorry Brian, I know that's a sore spot, but Brian, thanks for coming >> That's okay. >> on the program, really appreciate it. >> Yeah, great to be with you, Dave. Happy New Year, and great to be back with everybody with SiliconANGLE again this year. >> Yeah, we love having you on. We miss working with you day-to-day, but I want to start with Gracely's theorem, which basically says, I'm going to paraphrase. For the most part, nothing new gets introduced in the enterprise tech business, patterns repeat themselves, maybe get applied in new ways. And you know this industry well, when something comes out that's new, if you take virtualization, for example, been around forever with mainframes, but then VMware applied it, solve a real problem in the client service system. And then it's like, "Okay, this is awesome." We get really excited and then after a while we pushed the architecture, we break things, introduce new things to fix the things that are broken and start adding new features. And oftentimes you do that through acquisitions. So, you know, has the cloud become that sort of thing? And is Supercloud sort of same wine, new bottle, following Gracely's theorem? >> Yeah, I think there's some of both of it. I hate to be the sort of, it depends sort of answer but, I think to a certain extent, you know, obviously Cloud in and of itself was, kind of revolutionary in that, you know, it wasn't that you couldn't rent things in the past, it was just being able to do it at scale, being able to do it with such amazing self-service. And then, you know, kind of proliferation of like, look at how many services I can get from, from one cloud, whether it was Amazon or Azure or Google. And then, you know, we, we slip back into the things that we know, we go, "Oh, well, okay, now I can get computing on demand, but, now it's just computing." Or I can get database on demand and it's, you know, it's got some of the same limitations of, of say, of database, right? It's still, you know, I have to think about IOPS and I have to think about caching, and other stuff. So, I think we do go through that and then we, you know, we have these sort of next paradigms that come along. So, you know, serverless was another one of those where it was like, okay, it seems sort of new. I don't have to, again, it was another level of like, I don't have to think about anything. And I was able to do that because, you know, there was either greater bandwidth available to me, or compute got cheaper. And what's been interesting is not the sort of, that specific thing, serverless in and of itself is just another way of doing compute, but the fact that it now gets applied as, sort of a no-ops model to, you know, again, like how do I provision a database? How do I think about, you know, do I have to think about the location of a service? Does that just get taken care of for me? So I think the Supercloud concept, and I did a thing and, and you and I have talked about it, you know, behind the scenes that maybe the, maybe a better name is Super app for something like Snowflake or other, but I think we're, seeing these these sort of evolutions over and over again of what were the big bottlenecks? How do we, how do we solve those bottlenecks? And I think the big thing here is, it's never, it's very rarely that you can take the old paradigm of what the thing was, the concept was, and apply it to the new model. So, I'll just give you an example. So, you know, something like VMware, which we all know, wildly popular, wildly used, but when we apply like a Supercloud concept of VMware, the concept of VMware has always been around a cluster, right? It's some finite number of servers, you sort of manage it as a cluster. And when you apply that to the cloud and you say, okay, there's, you know, for example, VMware in the cloud, it's still the same concept of a cluster of VMware. But yet when you look at some of these other services that would fit more into the, you know, Supercloud kind of paradigm, whether it's a Snowflake or a MongoDB Atlas or maybe what CloudFlare is doing at the edge, those things get rid of some of those old paradigms. And I think that's where stuff, you start to go, "Oh, okay, this is very different than before." Yes, it's still computing or storage, or data access, but there's a whole nother level of something that we didn't carry forward from the previous days. And that really kind of breaks the paradigm. And so that's the way I think I've started to think about, are these things really brand new? Yes and no, but I think it's when you can see that big, that thing that you didn't leave behind isn't there anymore, you start to get some really interesting new innovation come out of it. >> Yeah. And that's why, you know, lift and shift is okay, when you talk to practitioners, they'll say, "You know, I really didn't change my operating model. And so I just kind of moved it into the cloud. there were some benefits, but it was maybe one zero not three zeros that I was looking for." >> Right. >> You know, we always talk about what's great about cloud, the agility, and all the other wonderful stuff that we know, what's not working in cloud, you know, tie it into multi-cloud, you know, in terms of, you hear people talk about multi-cloud by accident, okay, that's true. >> Yep. >> What's not great about cloud. And then I want to get into, you know, is multi-cloud really a problem or is it just sort of vendor hype? But, but what's not working in cloud? I mean, you mentioned serverless and serverless is kind of narrow, right, for a lot of stateless apps, right? But, what's not great about cloud? >> Well, I think there's a few things that if you ask most people they don't love about cloud. I think, we can argue whether or not sort of this consolidation around a few cloud providers has been a good thing or a bad thing. I think, regardless of that, you know, we are seeing, we are hearing more and more people that say, look, you know, the experience I used to have with cloud when I went to, for example, an Amazon and there was, you know, a dozen services, it was easy to figure out what was going on. It was easy to figure out what my billing looked like. You know, now they've become so widespread, the number of services they have, you know, the number of stories you just hear of people who went, "Oh, I started a service over in US West and I can't find it anymore 'cause it's on a different screen. And I, you know, I just got billed for it." Like, so I think the sprawl of some of the clouds has gotten, has created a user experience that a lot of people are frustrated with. I think that's one thing. And we, you know, we see people like Digital Ocean and we see others who are saying, "Hey, we're going to be that simplified version." So, there's always that yin and yang. I think people are super frustrated at network costs, right? So, you know, and that's kind of at a lot of, at the center of maybe why we do or don't see more of these Supercloud services is just, you know, in the data center as an application owner, I didn't have to think about, well where, where does this go to? Where are my users? Yes, somebody took care of it, but when those things become front and center, that's super frustrating. That's the one area that we've seen absolutely no cost savings, cost reduction. So I think that frustrates people a lot. And then I think the third piece is just, you know, we're, we went from super centralized IT organizations, which, you know, for decades was how it worked. It was part of the reason why the cloud expanded and became a thing, right? Sort of shadow IT and I can't get things done. And then, now what we've seen is sort of this proliferation of little pockets of groups that are your IT, for lack of a better thing, whether they're called platform engineering or SRE or DevOps. But we have this, expansion, explosion if you will, of groups that, if I'm an app dev team, I go, "Hey, you helped me make this stuff run, but then the team next to you has another group and they have another group." And so you see this explosion of, you know, we don't have any standards in the company anymore. And, so sort of self-service has created its own nightmare to a certain extent for a lot of larger companies. >> Yeah. Thank you for that. So, you know, I want, I want to explore this multi-cloud, you know, by accident thing and is a real problem. You hear that a lot from vendors and we've been talking about Supercloud as this unifying layer across cloud. You know, but when you talk to customers, a lot of them are saying, "Yes, we have multiple clouds in our organization, but my group, we have mono cloud, we know the security, edicts, we know how to, you know, deal with the primitives, whether it's, you know, S3 or Azure Blob or whatever it is. And we're very comfortable with this." It's, that's how we're simplifying. So, do you think this is really a problem? Does it have merit that we need that unifying layer across clouds, or is it just too early for that? >> I think, yeah, I think what you, what you've laid out is basically how the world has played out. People have picked a cloud for a specific application or a series of applications. Yeah, and I think if you talk to most companies, they would tell you, you know, holistically, yes, we're multi-cloud, not, maybe not necessarily on, I don't necessarily love the phrase where people say like, well it happened by accident. I think it happened on purpose, but we got to multi-cloud, not in the way that maybe that vendors, you know, perceived, you know, kind of laid out a map for. So it was, it was, well you will lay out this sort of Supercloud framework. We didn't call it that back then, we just called it sort of multi-cloud. Maybe it was Kubernetes or maybe it was whatever. And different groups, because central IT kind of got disbanded or got fragmented. It turned into, go pick the best cloud for your application, for what you need to do for the business. And then, you know, multiple years later it was like, "Oh, hold on, I've got 20% in Google and 50% in AWS and I've got 30% in Azure. And, you know, it's, yeah, it's been evolution. I don't know that it's, I don't know if it's a mistake. I think it's now groups trying to figure out like, should I make sense of it? You know, should I try and standardize and I backwards standardize some stuff? I think that's going to be a hard thing for, for companies to do. 'cause I think they feel okay with where the applications are. They just happen to be in multiple clouds. >> I want to run something by you, and you guys, you and Aaron have talked about this. You know, still depending on who, which keynote you listen to, small percentage of the workloads are actually in cloud. And when you were with us at Wikibon, I think we called it true private cloud, and we looked at things like Nutanix and there were a lot of other examples of companies that were trying to replicate the hyperscale experience on Prem. >> Yeah. >> And, we would evaluate that, you know, beyond virtualization, and so we sort of defined that and, but I think what's, maybe what's more interesting than Supercloud across clouds is if you include that, that on Prem estate, because that's where most of the work is being done, that's where a lot of the proprietary tools have been built, a lot of data, a lot of software. So maybe there's this concept of sending that true private cloud to true hybrid cloud. So I actually think hybrid cloud in some cases is the more interesting use case for so-called Supercloud. What are your thoughts on that? >> Yeah, I think there's a couple aspects too. I think, you know, if we were to go back five or six years even, maybe even a little further and look at like what a data center looked like, even if it was just, "Hey we're a data center that runs primarily on VMware. We use some of their automation". Versus what you can, even what you can do in your data center today. The, you know, the games that people have seen through new types of automation through Kubernetes, through get ops, and a number of these things, like they've gotten significantly further along in terms of I can provision stuff really well, I can do multi-tenancy, I can do self-service. Is it, you know, is it still hard? Yeah. Because those things are hard to do, but there's been significant progress there. I don't, you know, I still look for kind of that, that killer application, that sort of, you know, lighthouse use case of, hybrid applications, you know, between data center and between cloud. I think, you know, we see some stuff where, you know, backup is a part of it. So you use the cloud for storage, maybe you use the cloud for certain kinds of resiliency, especially on maybe front end load balancing and stuff. But I think, you know, I think what we get into is, this being hung up on hybrid cloud or multi-cloud as a term and go like, "Look, what are you trying to measure? Are you trying to measure, you know, efficiency of of of IT usage? Are you trying to measure how quickly can I give these business, you know, these application teams that are part of a line of business resources that they need?" I think if we start measuring that way, we would look at, you know, you'd go, "Wow, it used to be weeks and months. Now we got rid of these boards that have to review everything every time I want to do a change management type of thing." We've seen a lot more self-service. I think those are the things we want to measure on. And then to your point of, you know, where does, where do these Supercloud applications fit in? I think there are a bunch of instances where you go, "Look, I have a, you know, global application, I have a thing that has to span multiple regions." That's where the Supercloud concept really comes into play. We used to do it in the data center, right? We'd had all sorts of technologies to help with that, I think you can now start to do it in the cloud. >> You know, one of the other things, trying to understand, your thoughts on this, do you think that you, you again have talked about this, like I'm with you. It's like, how is it that Google's losing, you know, 3 billion dollars a year, whatever. I mean, because when you go back and look at Amazon, when they were at that level of revenue where Google is today, they were making money, you know, and they were actually growing faster, by the way. So it's kind of interesting what's happened with Google. But, the reason I bring that up is, trying to understand if you think the hyperscalers will ever be motivated to create standards across clouds, and that may be a play for Google. I mean, obviously with Kubernetes it was like a Hail Mary and kind of made them relevant. Where would Google be without Kubernetes? But then did it achieve the objectives? We could have that conversation some other time, but do you think the hyperscalers will actually say, "Okay, we're going to lean in and create these standards across clouds." Because customers would love that, I would think, but it would sub-optimize their competitive advantage. What are your thoughts? >> I think, you know, on the surface, I would say they, they probably aren't. I think if you asked 'em the question, they would say, "Well, you know, first and foremost, you know, we do deliver standards, so we deliver a, you know, standard SQL interface or a SQL you know, or a standard Kubernetes API or whatever. So, in that, from that perspective, you know, we're not locking you into, you know, an Amazon specific database, or a Google specific database." You, you can argue about that, but I think to a certain extent, like they've been very good about, "Hey, we're going to adopt the standards that people want." A lot of times the open source standards. I think the problem is, let's say they did come up with a standard for it. I think you still have the problem of the costs of migration and you know, the longer you've, I think their bet is basically the longer you've been in some cloud. And again, the more data you sort of compile there, the data gravity concept, there's just going to be a natural thing that says, okay, the hurdle to get over to say, "Look, we want to move this to another cloud", becomes so cost prohibitive that they don't really have to worry about, you know, oh, I'm going to get into a war of standards. And so far I think they sort of realize like that's the flywheel that the cloud creates. And you know, unless they want to get into a world where they just cut bandwidth costs, like it just kind of won't happen. You know, I think we've even seen, and you know, the one example I'll use, and I forget the name of it off the top of my head, but there's a, there's a Google service. I think it's like BigQuery external or something along those lines, that allows you to say, "Look, you can use BigQuery against like S3 buckets and against other stuff." And so I think the cloud providers have kind of figured out, I'm never going to get the application out of that other guy's cloud or you know, the other cloud. But maybe I'm going to have to figure out some interesting ways to sort of work with it. And, you know, it's a little bit, it's a little janky, but that might be, you know, a moderate step that sort of gets customers where they want to be. >> Yeah. Or you know, it'd be interesting if you ever see AWS for example, running its database in other clouds, you started, even Oracle is doing that with, with with Azure, which is a form of Supercloud. My last question for you is, I want to get you thinking about sort of how the future plays out. You know, think about some of the companies that we've put forth this Supercloud, and by the way, this has been a criticism of the concept. Charles Fitzer, "Everything is Supercloud!" Which if true would defeat the purpose of course. >> Right. >> And so right with the community effort, we really tried to put some guardrails down on the essential characteristics, the deployment models, you know, so for example, running across multiple clouds with a purpose build pass, creating a common experience, metadata intelligence that solves a specific problem. I mean, the example I often use is Snowflake's governed data sharing. But yeah, Snowflake, Databricks, CloudFlare, Cohesity, you know, I just mentioned Oracle and Azure, these and others, they certainly claim to have that common experience across clouds. But my question is, again, I come back to, do customers need this capability? You know, is Mono Cloud the way to solve that problem? What's your, what are your thoughts on how this plays out in the future of, I guess, PAs, apps and cloud? >> Yeah, I think a couple of things. So, from a technology perspective, I think, you know, the companies you name, the services you've named, have sort of proven that the concept is viable and it's viable at a reasonable size, right? These aren't completely niche businesses, right? They're multi-billion dollar businesses. So, I think there's a subset of applications that, you know, maybe a a bigger than a niche set of applications that are going to use these types of things. A lot of what you talked about is very data centric, and that's, that's fine. That's that layer is, figuring that out. I think we'll see messaging types of services, so like Derek Hallison's, Caya Company runs a, sort of a Supercloud for messaging applications. So I think there'll be places where it makes a ton of sense. I think, the thing that I'm not sure about, and because again, we've been now 10 plus years of sort of super low, you know, interest rates in terms of being able to do things, is a lot of these things come out of research that have been done previously. Then they get turned into maybe somewhat of an open source project, and then they can become something. You know, will we see as much investment into the next Snowflake if, you know, the interest rates are three or four times that they used to be, do we, do we see VCs doing it? So that's the part that worries me a little bit, is I think we've seen what's possible. I think, you know, we've seen companies like what those services are. I think I read yesterday Snowflake was saying like, their biggest customers are growing at 30, like 50 or 60%. Like the, value they get out of it is becoming exponential. And it's just a matter of like, will the economics allow the next big thing to happen? Because some of these things are pretty, pretty costly, you know, expensive to get started. So I'm bullish on the idea. I don't know that it becomes, I think it's okay that it's still sort of, you know, niche plus, plus in terms of the size of it. Because, you know, if we think about all of IT it's still, you know, even microservices is a small part of bigger things. But I'm still really bullish on the idea. I like that it's been proven. I'm a little wary, like a lot of people have the economics of, you know, what might slow things down a little bit. But yeah, I, think the future is going to involve Supercloud somewhere, whatever people end up calling it. And you and I discussed that. (laughs) But I don't, I don't think it goes away. I don't think it's, I don't think it's a fad. I think it is something that people see tremendous value and it's just, it's got to be, you know, for what you're trying to do, your application specific thing. >> You're making a great point on the funding of innovation and we're entering a new era of public policy as well. R and D tax credit is now is shifting. >> Yeah. >> You know, you're going to have to capitalize that over five years now. And that's something that goes back to the 1950s and many people would argue that's at least in part what has helped the United States be so, you know, competitive in tech. But Brian, always great to talk to you. Thanks so much for participating in the program. Great to see you. >> Thanks Dave, appreciate it. Good luck with the rest of the show. >> Thank you. All right, this is Dave Vellante for John Furrier, the entire Cube community. Stay tuned for more content from Supercloud2.

(lively music) >> Good afternoon and welcome back to beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada, where we're here live from the show floor, all four days of AWS re:Invent. I'm Savannah Peterson, joined with my co-host Dave Vellante. Dave, how you doing? >> Good. Beautiful and chilly Las Vegas. Can't wait to get back to New England where it's warm. >> Balmy, New England this time of year in December. Wow, Dave, that's a bold statement. I am super excited about the conversation that we're going to be having next. And, you know, I'm not even going to tee it up. I just want to bring Dilip on. Dilip, thank you so much for being here. How you doing? >> Savannah, Dave, thank you so much. >> Hey, Dilip. >> Excited to be here. >> It's joy to have you. So, you have been working at Amazon for about 20 years. >> Almost. Almost. >> Yes. >> Feels like 20, 19 1/2. >> Which is very exciting. You've had a lot of roles. I'm going to touch on some of them, but you just came over to AWS from the physical retail side. Talk to me about that. >> Yup, so I've been to Amazon for 19 1/2 years. Done pricing, supply chain. I was Jeff Bezos technical advisor for a couple years. >> Casual name drop. >> Casual name drop. >> Savannah: But a couple people here for that name before. >> Humble brag, hashtag. And then I, for the last several years, I was leading our physical retail initiatives. We just walk out Amazon One, bringing convenience to physical spaces. And then in August, with like as those things were getting a lot of traction and we were selling to third parties, we felt that it would be better suited in AWS. And, but along with that, there was also another trend that's been brewing, which is, you know, companies have loved building on AWS. They love the infrastructure services, but increasingly, they're also asking us to build applications that are higher up in the stack. Solving key, turnkey business problems. Just walk out Amazon One or examples of that, Amazon Connect. We just recently announced supply chain, so now there's a bevy interesting services all coming together, higher up in the stack for customers. So it's an exciting time. >> It was interesting that you're able to, you know, transfer from that retail. I mean, normally, in historically, if you're within an industry, retail, manufacturing, automotive whatever. You were kind as locked in a little bit. >> Dilip: Siloed a little bit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> Because they had their own, your own value chain. And I guess, data has changed that maybe, that you can traverse now. >> Yeah, if you think about the things that we did, even when we were in retail, the tenants was less about the industries and more about how can we bring convenience to physical spaces? The fact that you don't like to wait in line is no more like likely, you know, five years from now than it is today. So, it's a very durable tenant, but it's equally applicable whether you're in a grocery store, a convenience store, a stadium, an airport. So it actually transcends any, and like supply chain, think of supply chain. Supply chain isn't, you know, targeted to any one particular industry. It has broad applicability. So these things are very, you know, horizontally applicable. >> Anything that makes my life easier, I'm down. >> Savannah: We're all here for the easy button. We've been talking about it a bit this week. I'm in. And the retail store, I mean, I'm in San Francisco. I've had the experience of going through. Very interesting and seamless journey, honestly. It's very exciting. So tell us a little bit more about the applications group at AWS. >> Yup. So as I said, you know, we are, the applications group is a combination of several services. You know, we have communication developer services, which is the ability to add simple email service or video and embed video, voice chat using a chime SDK. In a higher up in the stack, we are taking care of things that IT administrators have to deal with where you can provision an entire desktop with the workspaces or provide a femoral access to it. And then as you go up even higher up in the stack, you have productivity applications like AWS Wicker, which we just did GA, you know, last week in AWS Clean Rooms which we announced as a service in preview. And then you have, you know, Connect, which is our cloud contact center, AWS supply chain. Just walk out Amazon One, it just feels like we're getting started. >> Just a couple things going on. >> So, clean rooms. Part of the governance play, part of data sharing. Can you explain, you know, we were talking offline, but I remember back in the disk drive days. We were in a clean room, they'd show you the clean room, you couldn't go near it unless you had a hazmat suit on. So now you're applying that to data. Explain that concept. >> Yeah, so the companies across, you know, financial services or healthcare, advertising, they all want to be able to combine and pull together data`sets with their partners in order to get these collaborative insights. The problem is either the data's fragmented, it's siloed or you have, you know, data governance issues that's preventing them from sharing. And the key requirement is that they want to be able to share this data without exposing any of the underlying data. Clean rooms are always emerged as a solution to that, but the problem with that is that they're hard to maintain. They're expensive. You have to write complex privacy queries. And if you make a mistake, you risk exposing the same data that you've been, you know, studiously trying to protect. >> Trying to protect. >> You know, take advertising as an industry, as an example. You know, advertisers care about, is my ad effective? But it turns out that if you're an advertiser and let's say you're a Nike or some other advertiser and your pop, you know, you place an ad on the website. Well, you want to stop showing the ad to people who have already purchased the product. However, people who purchased the product,- >> Savannah: It happens all the time. >> that purchasing data is not accessible to them easily. But if you could combine those insights, you know, the publishers benefit, advertisers benefits. So AWS Clean Rooms is that service that allows you very easily to be able to collaborate with a group of folks and then be able to gain these collaborative insights. >> And the consumers benefit. I mean, how many times you bought, you search it. >> It happens all the time. >> They know. And like, I just bought that guys, you know? >> Yeah, no, exactly. >> Four weeks. >> And I'm like, you don't need to serve me that, you know? And we understand the marketing backend. And it's just a waste of money and energy and resources. I mean, we're talking about sustainability as well. I don't think supply chain has ever had a hotter moment than it's had the last two and a half years. Tell me more about the announcement. >> Yup, so super excited about this. As you know, as you said, supply chains have always been very critical and very core for companies. The pandemic exacerbated it. So, ours way of sort of thinking about supply chains is to say that, you know, companies have taken, over the years many, like dozens, like millions and millions of dollars of investment in building their own supply chains. But the problem with supply chains is that the reason that they're not as functional as they could be is because of the lack of visibility. Because they're strung together very many disparate systems, that lack of visibility affects agility. And so, our approach in it was to say that, well, if we could have folks use their existing supply chain what can we do to improve the investment on the ROI of what they're getting? By creating a layer on top of it, that provides them that insights, connects all of these disparate data and then provides them insights to say, well, you know, here's where you overstock, here's where you under stock. You know, this is the, you know, the carbon emission impact of being able to transfer something. So like rather without requiring people to re-platform, what's the way that we can add value in it? And then also build upon Amazon's, you know, years of supply chain experience, to be able to build these predictive analytics for customers. >> So, that's a good, I like that you started with the why. >> Yes. >> Right now, what is it? It's an abstraction layer and then you're connecting into different data points. >> Yes, that's correct. >> Injecting ML. >> Feel like you can pick in, like if you think about supply chain, you can have warehouse management systems, order management systems. It could be in disparate things. We use ML to be able to bring all of this disparate data in and create our unified data lake. Once you have that unified data lake, you can then run an insights layer on top of it to be able to say, so that as the data changes, supply chain is not a static thing. Data's constantly changing. As the data's changing, the data lake now reflects the most up-to-date information. You can have alerts and insights set up on it to say that, what are the kinds of things that you're interested in? And then more importantly, supply chain and agility is about communication. In order to be able to make certain things happen, you need to be able to communicate, you need to make sure that everyone's on the same page. And we allow for a lot of the communication and collaboration tools to be built within this platform so that you're not necessarily leaving to go and toggle from one place to the other to solve your problems. >> And in the pie chart of how people spend their time, they're spending a lot less time communicating and being proactive. >> That's correct. >> And getting ahead of the curve. They're spending more time trying to figure out actually what's going on. >> Yes. >> And that's the problem that you're going to solve. >> Well, and it ensures that the customer at the other end of that supply chain experience is going to have their expectations managed in terms of when their good might get there or whatever's going to happen. >> Exactly. >> I feel like that expectation management has been such a big part of it. Okay, I just have to ask because I'm very curious. What was it like advising Jeff? >> Quite possibly the best job that I've ever had. You know, he's a fascinating individual. >> Did he pay you to say that? >> Nope. But I would've, like, I would've done it for like, it's remarkable seeing how he thinks and his approach to problem solving. It is, you know, you could be really tactical and go very deep. You could be extremely strategic. And to be able to sort of move effortlessly between those two is a unique skill. I learned a lot. >> Yeah, absolutely. So what made you want to evolve your career at Amazon after that? 'Cause I see on your LinkedIn, you say, it was the best job you ever had. With curiosity? >> Yeah, so one of the things, so the role is designed for you to be able to transition to something new. >> Savannah: Oh, cool. >> So after I finished that role, we were just getting into our foray with physical stores. And the idea between physical stores is that, you and I as consumers, we all have a lot of choices for physical stores. You know, there's a lot of options, there's a lot of formats. And so the last thing we wanted to do is come up with another me too offering. So, our approach was that what can we do to improve convenience in physical stores? That's what resulted in just walk out to Amazon Go. That's what resulted in Amazon One, which is another in a fast, convenient, contactless way to pay using the power of your palm. And now, what started in Amazon retail is now expanded to several third parties in, you know, stadiums, convention centers, airports. >> Airport, I just had, was in the Houston airport and got to do a humanless checkout. >> Dilip: Exactly. >> And actually in Honolulu a couple weeks ago as well too. Yeah, so we're going to see more and more of this. >> Yes. >> So what Amazon, I think has over a million employees. A lot of those are warehouse employees. But what advice would you give to somebody who's somewhere inside of Amazon, maybe they're on AWS, maybe they're Amazon. What advice would you give somebody inside that's maybe, you know, hey, I've been at this job for five, six years, three, four years, whatever it is. I want to do something else. And there's so much opportunity inside Amazon, right? What would you advise them? >> My single advice, which is actually transferable and I use it for myself is choose something that makes you a little uncomfortable. >> Dave: Get out of your comfort zone. >> It's like, you got to do that. It's like, it's not the easiest thing to hear, but it's also the most satisfying. Because almost every single time that I've done it for myself, it's resulted in like, you don't really know what the answer is. You don't really know exactly where you're going to end up, but the process and the journey through it, if you experience a little bit of discomfort constantly, it makes you non complacent. It makes you sort of not take the job, sort of in a stride. You have to be on it to do it. So that's the advice that I would give anyone. >> Yeah, that's good. So something that's maybe adjacent and maybe not completely foreign to you, but also something that, you know, you got to go dig a little bit and learn. >> You're planning a career change over here, Dave? >> No, I know a lot of people in Amazon are like, hey, I'm trying to figure out what I want to do next. I mean, I love it here. I live by the LPS, you know, but, and there's so much to choose from. >> It is, you know, when I joined in 2003, there were so many things that we were sort of doing today. None of those existed. It's a fascinating company. And the evolution, you could be in 20 different places and the breadth of the kinds of things that, you know, the Amazon experience provides is timeless. It's fascinating. >> And, you know, you look at a company like Amazon, and, you know, it's so amazing. You look at this ecosystem. I've been around- >> Even a show floor. >> I've been around a lot of time. And the show floor says it all. But I've seen a lot of, you know, waves. And each subsequent wave, you know, we always talk about how many companies were in the Fortune 1000 and aren't anymore. And, but the leaders, you know, survive and they thrive. And I think it's fascinating to try to better understand the culture that enables that. You know, you look at a company like Microsoft that was irrelevant and then came back. You know, even IBM was on death store for a while and they come back and so they. And so, but Amazon just feels, you know, at the moment you feel like, "Oh wow, nothing can stop this machine." 'Cause everybody's trying to disrupt Amazon and then, you know, only the paranoid survive, all that stuff. But it's not like, past is not prologue, all right? So that's why I asked these questions. And you just said that a lot of the services today that although the ideas didn't even exist, I mean, walkout. I mean, that's just amazing. >> I think one of the things that Amazon does really well culturally is that they create the single threaded leadership. They give people focus. If you have to get something done, you have to give people focus. You can't distract them with like seven different things and then say that, oh, by the way, your eighth job is to innovate. It just doesn't work that way. It's like it's hard. Like it can be- >> And where were the energy come from that? >> Exactly. And so giving people that single threaded focus is super important. >> Frank Slootman, the CEO of Snowflake, has a great quote. He wrote on his book. He said, "If you got 14 priorities, you got none." And he asks,- >> Well said. >> he challenges people. If you had to give up everything and do only one thing for the next 365 days, what would that be? It's a really hard question to answer. >> I feel like as we're around New Year's resolution times. I mean when we thinking about that, maybe we can all share our one thing. So, Dilip, you've been with the the applications team for five months. What's coming up next? >> Well, as I said, you know, it feels like it's still day one for applications. If you think about the things, the news that we introduced and the several services that we introduced, it has applicability across a variety of horizontal industries. But then we're also feeling that there's considerable vertical applications that can be built for specific things. Like, it could be in advertising, it could be in financial services, it could be in manufacturing. The opportunities are endless. I think the notion of people wanting applications higher up in the stack and a little more turnkey solutions is also, it's not new for us, but it's also new and creative too. You know, AWS has traditionally been doing. >> So again, this relates to what we were sort of talking about before. And maybe, this came from Jazzy or maybe it came from Bezos. But you hear a lot, it's okay to be misunderstood or if we were misunderstood for a long time. So when people hear up the stack, they think, when you think about apps, you know, in the last 10 years it was taking on-prem and bringing it into the cloud. Okay, you saw that with CREM, email, CRM, service management, you know, data warehouses, et cetera. Amazon is thinking about this in a different way. It's like you're looking at the world saying, okay, how can we improve whatever? Workflows, people's lives, doing something that's not been done before? And that seems to be the kind of applications that you guys are thinking about building. >> Yeah. >> And that's unique. It's not just, okay, we're going to take something on-prem put it in the cloud. Been there, done that. That S-curve is sort of flattening now. But there's a new S-curve which is completely new workflows and innovations and processes that we really haven't thought about yet. Or you're thinking about, I presume. >> Yeah. Having said that, I'd also like to sort of remind folks that when you consider the, you know, the entire spend, the portion of workloads that are running in the cloud is a teeny tiny fraction. It's like less than 5%, like 4% or something like that. So it's a very, there's still plenty of things that can sort of move to the cloud. But you're right that there is another trend of where in the stack and the types of applications that you can provide as well. >> Yeah, new innovation that haven't well thought of yet. >> So, Dilip, we have a new tradition here on theCUBE at re:Invent. Where we're looking for your 30 minute Instagram reel, your hot take, biggest key theme, either for you, your team, or just general vibe from the show. >> General vibe from the show. Well, 19 1/2 years at Amazon, this is actually my first re:Invent, believe it or not. This is my, as a AWS employee now, as re:Invent with like launching services. So that's the first. I've been to re:Invent before, but as an attendee rather than as a person who's, you know, a contributing number of the workforce. >> Working actually? >> If you will. >> Actually doing your job. >> And so I'm just amazed at the energy and the breadth. And the, you know, from the partners to the customers to the diversity of people who are coming here from everywhere. I had meetings from people in New Zealand. Like, you know, the UK, like customers are coming at us from like very many different places. And it's fascinating for me to see. It's new for me as well given, you know, some of my past experience. But this is a, it's been a blast. >> People are pumped. >> People are pumped. >> They can't believe the booth traffic. Not only that quality. >> Right. All of our guests have talked about that. >> Like, yeah, you know, we're going to throw half of these leads away, but they're saying no, I'm having like really substantive conversations with business people. This is, I think, my 10th re:Invent. And the first one was mostly developers. And I'm like, what are you talking about? And, you know, so. Now it's a lot more business people, a lot of developers too. >> Yeah. >> It's just. >> The community really makes it. Dilip, thank you so much for joining us today on theCube. >> Thank you for having me. >> You're fantastic. I could ask you a million questions. Be sure and tell Jeff that we said hi. >> Will do. >> Savannah: Next time you guys are hanging out. And thank all of you. >> You want to go into space? >> Yeah. Yes, yes, absolutely. I'm perhaps the most space obsessed on the show. And with that, we will continue our out of this world coverage shortly from fabulous Las Vegas where we are at AWS re:Invent. It is day four with Dave Vellante. I'm Savannah Peterson and you're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech coverage. (lively music)

>>Welcome to this cube conversation. I'm Dave Nicholson, and this is part of the AWS startup showcase season two. I'm very happy to have with me Webb brown CEO of Qube cost web. Welcome to the program. How are you? I'm doing >>Great. It's great to be here, Dave. Thank you so much for having me really excited for the discussion. >>Good to see you. I guess we saw each other last down in Los Angeles for, for coop con, >>Right? Exactly. Right. Still feeling the energy from that event. Hoping we can be back together in person. Not, not too long from now. >>Yeah. Well I'll second that, well, let, let's get straight to it. Tell us, tell us about Q cost. What do you guys do? And I think just central to that question is what gives you guys the right to exist? What problem are you solving? >>Yeah, I love the question. So first and foremost coupe costs, we provide cost monitoring and cost management solutions for teams running Kubernetes or cloud native workloads. Everything we do is, is built on open source. Our founding team was working on infrastructure monitoring solutions at Google before this. And, and what we saw was as we had several teammates join the Kubernetes effort very early days at Google, we saw teams really struggling even just to, to monitor and understand Kubernetes costs, right? There's lots of complexity with the Kubernetes scheduler and being able to answer the question of what is the cost of an application or what is the cost of, you know, a team department, et cetera. And the workloads that they're deploying was really hard for most teams. If you look at CNCF study from late last year, still today, about two thirds of teams, can't answer where they are spending money. And what we saw when digging in there is that when you can't answer that question, it's really hard to be efficient. And by be efficient, we, we mean get the right balance between cost and performance and reliability. So we help teams in, in these areas and more where, you know, now have thousands of teams using our product. You know, we feel where we're just getting started on our mission as well. >>So when people hear it, when people think of coop costs, they w they naturally associate that with Kubernetes. And they think, well, Kubernetes is open-source wait, isn't that free? So what, so what costs are you tracking? Exactly. >>Yeah. Great question. We would track costs in any environment where you can run Kubernetes. So if that's on-prem, you can bring a custom pricing sheet to monitor, say the cost of your underlying CPU course, you know, GPU's memory, et cetera. If you're running in a cloud environment, we have integrations with Azure, GCP and AWS, where we would be able to reflect all the complexity of, you know, whatever deployment you have, whether you're using a spot and multiple regions where you have complex enterprise discounts are eyes savings plans, you name it, we'd be reflecting it. So it's really about, you know, not just generic prices, it's about getting the right price for your organization. >>So the infrastructure that goes into this calculation can be on premises or off premises in the form of cloud. I heard that, right? >>Yeah, that's exactly right. So all of those environments, we'd give you a visibility into all the resources that your Kubernetes clusters are consuming. Again, that's, you know, nodes, load balancers, every resource that it's directly touching also have the ability for you to pull in external costs, right? So if you have Kubernetes tenants that are using S3 or cloud sequel, or, you know, another external cloud service, we would make that connection for you. And then lastly, if you have shared costs, sometimes even like the cost of a dev ops team, we'd give you the ability to kind of allocate that back to your core infrastructure, which may be used for showback or even charged back across your, your, >>So who are the folks in an organization that are tapping into this, are these, you know, our, our, our, our developers being encouraged to be cognizant of these costs throughout the process, or is this just sort of a CFO on down visibility tool? >>Yeah, it's a great, it's a great question. And what we see is a major transformation here where, you know, kind of shift left from a cost perspective where more and more engineering teams are interested in just being aware or having transparency. So they can build a culture of accountability with costs, right, with the amazing ability to rapidly push to production and iterate, you know, with microservices and Kubernetes, it's hard to have this kind of, you know, just wait for say the finance team to review this at the end of the month or the end of the quarter. We see this increasingly be being viewed in real time by infrastructure teams, by engineering teams. Now finance is still a very important stakeholder and, you know, absolutely has a very important like seat at the table in these conversations. But increasingly these are, again, real time or near real time engineering decisions that are really moving the needle on cost and cost efficiency, overtime and performance as well. >>Now, can you use this to model what costs might be, or is this, or is this, you know, you, you mentioned monitoring in real time, is this only for pulling information as it exists, or could you do, could you use some of the aspects of, of, of your toolset to make a decision, whether something makes more sense to run on your existing infrastructure on premises versus moving into, you know, working in a cloud? Is that something that is designed for or not? >>Great question. So we do have the ability to predict cost cost going forward, based on everything we've learned about your environment, whether you're in multi-cloud hybrid cloud, et cetera. So some really interesting functionality there and a lot more coming later this year, because we do see more and more teams wanting to model the state of the future, right? As you deploy really complex technologies, like say the cluster auto scale or, or HPA in different environments, it can really challenging to do an apples to apples comparison, and we help teams do exactly that. And again, gonna have a lot more interesting announcements here later this year. >>So later that later this year, meaning not in the next few minutes while we're together, >>Nothing new to announce on that front today, but I would say, you know, expect later this quarter for us to have more. >>Okay, that sounds good. Now, now you touched on this a little bit, but I want to hone in on why this is particularly relevant now and moving into the future. You know, we've always tracking costs has always been important, you know, even before the Dawn of cloud, but why is it increasingly important? And, and, you know, there are, there are alternatives for cost tracking legacy alternatives that are out there. So talk about why it's particularly relevant now and tell us what your super power is. You know, what's the, all right. All right. >>Secrets, >>Secret sauce is something you can't share super power. You can talk about >>Absolutely >>NDA. So yes, >>Your superpower. Yeah. Great questions. So for support, just to, to, to touch on, what's fundamentally changing to make a company like ours, you know, impactful or relevant. There's really three things here first and foremost is the new abstractions or complexities that come with Kubernetes, right. Super powerful, but from a cost standpoint, make it considerably harder to accurately track costs. And the big transformation here is, you know, with Kubernetes, you can, at any given moment have 50 applications running on a single node or a single VM, you can fast forward five minutes and there could be 50 entirely new applications, right? So just assigning that VM or, you know, tagging that VM back to an application or team or department really is not relevant in those places. So just the new complexity related to costs makes this problem harder for teams. Second is what we touch on. >>Just again, the power of Cooney. Kubernetes is the ability to allow distributed engineering teams to work on many microservices concurrently. So you're no longer in a lot of ways managing this problem where they centralized kind of single point of decision-making. Oftentimes these decisions are distributed across not only your infrastructure team, but your engineering team. So just the way these decisions and, you know, innovation is happening is changing how you manage these. And lastly, it's just scale, right? The, the cloud and, you know, Kubernetes continue to be incredibly successful. You know, where as goop costs now managing billions of dollars as these numbers get bigger and bigger just becomes more of a business focus and business critical issue. So those are the, you know, the three kind of underlying themes that are changing. When I talk about what we do, that makes us special. It's really this like foundational layer of visibility that we build. >>And what we can do is in real time with a very high degree of accuracy at the largest Kubernetes clusters in the world, give you visibility at any dimension. And so from there, you can do things like have real-time monitoring. You can have real-time insights, you can allow automation to make decisions on these, you know, inputs or data feeds. You can set alerts, you can set recurring reports. All of these things are made possible because of, you know, the, the, I would say really hard work that we've done to, again, give this real-time visibility with a high degree of accuracy at, at crazy scale. >>So if we were to play little make-believe for a moment, pretend like I'm a skeptical sitting on the fence. Not sure if I want to go down this path kind of person. And I say, you know what, web, I think I have a really good handle on all of my costs so far. What would you hit me with as, as, as an example of something that people really didn't expect until they, until they were running coup costs and they had actually had that visibility, what are some of the things that people are surprised by? >>Yeah. Great question. There'd be a number, number one. I'd have, you know, one data point I want to get from you, which is, you know, for your organization or for all of your clusters, what is your cost efficiency? Can you answer that with a high degree of accuracy and by cost efficiency? >>And the answer is now. So tell me, tell me, tell me how to sign up for coupons. >>Yeah. And so the answer, the answer there is you can go get our community version, you know, you can be up and running in minutes, you don't have to share any data, right? Like it is, you know, simply a helmet install, but cost efficiency is this notion of, of every dollar that you are spending on provision resources. What percentage of those dollars are you actually utilizing? And we have, you know, we, we now have, you know, thousands of teams using our product and we've worked with, you know, hundreds of them really closely, you know, this is, you know, that's not the entire market, but in our large sample sizes, we regularly see teams start in the low 20% cost efficiency, meaning that approximately 80% is quote waste time and time. Again, we see teams just be shocked by this number. And again, most of it is not because they were measuring it and accurately or anything like that. Most teams again today still just don't have that visibility until they start working with this. >>So is that, is that sort of the, I in my house household, certain members seem to only believe that there is one position for a light switch, and that would be the on position. Is there, is this a bit of a parallel where, where folks are, are spinning up resources and then just out of sight, out of mind, maybe not spinning them down when not needed. Yeah. >>Yeah. It's, it's, that's definitely one class of the challenges I would say, you know, so today, if you look at our product, we have 14 different insights across like different dimensions of your infrastructure one, or, or I would say several of those relate to exactly what you just described, which is you spin up a VM, you spend a bit load balancer, you spin up an external IP address. You're using it. You're not paying for it. Another class is this notion of, again, I don't have an understanding of what my resources cost. I also don't have a great sense for how much my microservice or application will need. So I'm just going to turn on all the lights, which is, or I'm going to drastically over provision again, I don't know the cost, so I'm just going to kind of set it and forget it. And if my application is performing, you know, then you know, we're doing well here. Again, with this visibility, you can get much more specific, much more accurate, much more actionable with making that trade off, you know, again, down to the individual pod workload, you know, deployment, et cetera. >>So we've, we've touched on this a bit peripherally, but give me an example. You know, you, you run into someone who happens to be a happy user of coop cost. What's the dream story that you love to hear from them about what life was before was before coop costs and what life was like after? >>Yeah, there's a lot, a lot of different dimensions there. You know, one, one is, you know, working with an infrastructure team that, that used to get asked these questions a lot about, you know, why does this cost so much, or why are we spending this and Kubernetes or, or wire expenses growing the rate that they are, you know, like when this, when this works, you know, engineering teams or infrastructure teams, aren't getting asked those questions, right? The tool could cost itself is getting asked that and answering that. So I think one is infrastructure teams, not fielding those types of questions as much. Secondly, is just, you know, more and more teams rolling this out throughout their organization. And ultimately just getting, building a culture of awareness, like ownership, accountability. And then, you know, we just increasingly are seeing teams, you know, find this right balance between cost and performance again. So, you know, in certain cases, improving performance, when are resource bottlenecks in places and other places, you know, reducing costs, you know, by 10 plus million dollars, ultimately at the end of the day, we like to see just teams being more comfortable running their workloads in Kubernetes, right? That is the ultimate sign of success is just an organization, feels comfortable with how they're deploying, how they're managing, how they're spending in Kubernetes. Again, whether that be, you know, on-prem or transitioning from on-prem to a cloud in multiple clouds, et cetera. >>So we're talking to you today as part of the second season of the AWS startup showcase. What's, what's the relationship there with, with AWS? >>So it is the, the largest platform for coop costs being run today. So I believe, you know, at this point, at least a thousand different organizations running our product on AWS hosted clusters, whether they're, you know, ETS or, or self-managed, but you know, a growing number of those on, on EKS. And, you know, we've just, you know, absolutely loved working with the team across, I think at this point, you know, six or seven different groups from marketplace to their containers team, you know, obviously, you know, ETS and others, and just very much see them continuing to push the boundaries on what's possible from a scale and, you know, ease of use and, you know, just breadth of, of offering to this market. >>Well, we really look forward to having you back and hearing about some of these announcements, things that are, that are coming down the line. So we'll definitely have to touch base in the future, but just one, one final, more general question for you, where do you see Kubernetes in general going in 2022? Is it sort of a linear growth? Is there some, is there an inflection point that we see, you know, a good percentage of software that's running enterprises right now is already in that open source category, but what are your thoughts on Kubernetes in 2022? >>Yeah, I think, you know, the one word is everywhere is where I see Kubernetes in 2022, like very deep in the like large and really complex enterprises. Right. So I think you'll see just, you know, major bets there. And I think you'll continue to see more engineers adopted. And I think you'll also continue to see, you know, more and more flavors of it, right? So, you know, some teams find that running Kubernetes anymore serverless fashion is, is right for them. Others find that, you know, having full control, you know, at every part of the stack, including running their own autoscaler for example is really powerful. So I think just, you know, you'll see more and more options. And again, I think teams increasingly adopting the right, you know, abstraction level on top of Kubernetes that works for their workloads and their organizations >>Sounds good. We'll we'll, we'll come back in 2023 and we'll check and see how that, how that all panned out. Well, it's been great talking to you today as part of the startup showcase. Really appreciate it. Great to see you again. It's right about the time where I can still tell you happy new year, because we're still, we're still in January here. Hope you have a great 2022 with that from me, Dave Nicholson, part of the cube part of AWS startup showcase season two, I'd like to thank everyone for joining and stay with us for the best in hybrid tech coverage.

(upbeat music) >> Hello, and welcome to this "CUBE" conversation. I'm John Furrier, host of "theCUBE", Here in Palo Alto, California, beginning in 2022, kicking off the new year with a great conversation. We're with folks from down under, two co-founders of Instaclustr. Peter Lilley, CEO, Ben Bromhead, the CTO, Intaclustr success. 'Cause he's been on "theCUBE" before, 2018 at Amazon re:Invent. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on "theCUBE". Thanks for piping in from Down Under into Palo Alto. >> Thanks, John, it's really good to be here, I'm looking forward to the conversation. >> So, I love the name, Instaclustr. It conjures up cloud, cloud scale, modern application, server list. It just gives me a feel of things coming together. Spin me up a cluster of these kinds of feelings. The cloud is here, open sources is growing, that's what you guys are in the middle of. Take a minute to explain what you guys do real quick and this open source cloud intersection that's just going supernova right now. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, Instaclustr is on a mission to really enable the world's ambitions to use open source technology. And we do that specifically at the data layer. And we primarily do that through what we call our platform offering. And think of it as the way to make it super easy, super scalable, super reliable way to adopt open source technologies at the data layer, to build cutting edge applications in the cloud. Today used by customers all over the world. We started the business in Australia but we've very quickly become a global business. But we are the business that sits behind some of the most successful brands that are building massively scalable cloud based applications. And you did right. We sit at a real intersection of kind of four things. One is open source adoption which is an incredibly powerful journey and wave that's driving the future direction of IT. You've got managed services or managed operations and moving those onto a platform like Instaclustr. You've got the adoption of cloud and cloud as a wave, like open source is a wave. And then you've got the growth of data, everything is data-driven these days. And data is just excellent for businesses and our customers. And in a lot of cases when we work with our customers on Instaclustr today, the application and the data, the data is the business. >> Ben, I want to get your thoughts as a CTO because open source, and technology, and cloud, has been a real game changer. If you go back prior to cloud, open source is very awesome, still great, freedom, we've got code, it's just the scale of open source. And then cloud came along, changed the game, so, open source. And then new business models became, so commercial open source software is now an industry. It's not just open source, "Hey, free software." And then maybe a red hat's out there, or someone like a red hat, have some premium support. There's been innovation on the business model side. So, matching technology innovation with the business model has been a big change in the past, many, many years. And this past year in particular that's been key. And open source, open core, these are the things that people are talking about. License changes, this is a big discussion. Because you could be on the wrong side of history if you make the wrong decision here. >> Yeah, yeah, definitely. I think it's also worth, I guess, taking a step back and understanding a little bit about why have people gravitated towards open source and the cloud? Beyond kind of the hippie freedoms of, I can see the code and I have ownership, and everything's free and great. And I think the reason why it's really taken off in a commercial setting, in an enterprise setting is velocity. How much easier is it to go reach and grab a open-source tool? That you can download, you can grab, you can compile yourself, you can make it work the way you want it to do to solve a problem here and now. Versus the old school way of doing it which is with I have to go download a trial version. Oh no, some of the features are locked. I've got to go talk to a procurement or a salesperson to kind of go and solve the problem that I have. And then I've got to get that approved by my own purchasing department. And do we have budget? And all of a sudden it's way, way, way harder to solve the problem in front of you as an engineer. Whereas with open source I just go grab it and I move on. I've achieved something for the day. >> Basically all that friction that comes, you got a problem to solve, oh, open-source, I'm going to just get a hammer and hammer that nail. Wait, whoa, whoa. I got to stand in line, I got to jump over hoops, I got to do all these things. This is the hassle and friction. >> Exactly, and this is why it's often called one of the most impressive things about that. And I think on the cloud side it's the same thing, but for hardware, and capability, and compute, and memory. Previously, if you wanted to compute, oh, you're going to lodge a ticket. You've got to ask someone to rack a server in a data center. You've got to deal with three different departments. Oh my goodness. How painful is that just to get a server up to go run and do something? That's just pulling your hair out. Whereas with the cloud, that's an API call or clicking a few buttons on a console and off you go. You'd have to combine those two things. And I would say that software engineers are probably the most productive they've ever been in the last 20 years. I know sometimes it doesn't look like that but their ability to solve problems in front of them, especially using external stuff is way way, way better. >> Peter: I think when you put those two things together you get an- >> The fact of the matter is they are productive. They're putting security into the code right in the CICD pipeline. So, this is highly agile right now. So, coders are highly productive and efficient in changing the way people are rolling out applications. So, the game is over, open source has won, open core is winning. And this is where the people are confused. This is why I got you guys here? What's the difference between open source and open core? What's the big deal? Why is it so important? >> Yeah, no, great question. So, really the difference between open source and open core, it comes down to, really it's a business model. So, open core contains open-source software, that's a hundred percent true. So, usually what will happen is a company will take a project that is open source, that has an existing community around it, or they've built it, or they've contributed it, or however that genesis has happened. And then what they'll do is they'll look at all the edges around that open-source project. And I think what are some enterprise features that don't exist in the open-source project that we can build ourselves? And then sprinkle those around the edges and sell that as a proprietary offering. So, what you get is you get the core functionality is powered by an open-source project. And quite often the code is identical. But there's all these kinds of little features around the outside that might make it a little bit easier to use in an enterprise environment. Or might make it a bit easier to do some operations side of things. And they'll charge you a license for that. So, you end up in a situation where you might have adopted the open source project, but then now if you want a feature X, Y, or Z, you then need to go and fork over some money and go into that whole licensing kind of contract. So, that's the core difference between open core and open-source, right? Open core, it's got all these little proprietary bits kind of sprinkled around the outside. >> So, how would you describe your platform for your customers? Obviously, you guys are succeeding, your growth is great, we're going to get that second. But as you guys have been steadily expanding the platform of open source data technologies, what is the main solution that you guys are offering customers? Managing open source technologies? What's the main value that you guys bring to the customer? >> Yeah, definitely. So, really the main value that we bring to the customer is we allow them to, I guess, successfully adopt open source databases or database technologies without having to go down that open core path. Open core can be quite attractive, but what it does is you end up with all these many Oracles drivers. Still having to pay the toll in terms of license fees. What we do, however, is we take those open-source projects and we deliver that as a database, as a service on our managed platform. So, we take care of all the operations, the pain, the care, the feeding, patch management, backups. Everything that you need to do, whether you're running it yourself or getting someone else to run it, we'll take care of that for you. But we do it with the pure upstream open source version. So, that means you get full flexibility, full portability. And more importantly you're not paying those expensive license fees. Plus it's easy and it just works. You get that full cloud native experience and you get your database right now when you need it. >> And basically you guys solve the problem of one, I got this legacy or existing licensed technology I've got to pay for. And it may not be enabling modern applications, and they don't have a team to go do all the work (laughing). Or some companies have like a whole army of people just embedded in open-source, that's very rare. So, it sounds like you guys do both. Did I get that right, is that right? >> Yeah, definitely. So, we definitely enable it if you don't have that capability yourself. We are the outsourced option to that. It's obviously a lot more than that but it's one of those pressures that companies nowadays face. And if we take it back to that concept of developer velocity, you really want them working on your core business problems. You don't want them having to fight database infrastructure. So, you've also got the opportunity cost of having your existing engineers working on running this stuff themselves. Or running a proprietary or an open call solution themselves, when really you should be outsourcing preferably to Instaclustr. But hey, let's be honest, you should be outsourcing it to anyone so that your engineers can be focusing on your core business problems. And really letting them work on the things that make you money. >> That's very smart. You guys have a great business model. Because one of the things we've been reporting on "theCUBE" on SiliconANGLE as well, is that the database market is becoming so diverse for the right reasons. Databases are everywhere now and code is becoming horizontally scalable for the cloud but vertically specialized with machine learning. So, you're seeing applications and new databases, no one database rules the world anymore. It's not about Oracle anymore, or anything else. So, open source fits nicely into this kind of platform view. How do you guys decide which technologies go in to the platform that you support? >> Yeah, great question. So, we certainly live in a world of, I call it polyglot persistence. But a simple way of referring to that is the right tool for the right job. And so, we really live in this world where engineers will reach for a database that solves a specific problem and solves it well. As you mentioned, companies, they're no longer Oracle shops, or they're no longer MySQL shops. You'll quite often see services or applications of teams using two or three different databases to solve different challenges. And so, what we do at Instaclustr is we really look at what are the technologies that our existing customers are using, and using side-by-side with, say, some of the existing Instaclustr offerings. We take great lead from that. We also look at what are the different projects out there that are solving use cases that we don't address at the moment. So, it's very use case driven. Whether it's, "Hey, we need something that's better at," say, "Time series." Or we need something that's a little bit better at translatable workloads. Or something a bit of a better fit for a case, right? And we work with those. And I think importantly, we also have this view that in a world of polyglot persistence, you've also got data integration challenges. So, how do you keep data safe between these two different database types? So, we're also looking at how do we integrate those better and support our users on that particular journey. So, it really comes down to one, listening to your customers, seeing what's out there and what's the right use case for a given technology and then we look to adopt that. >> That's great, Ben, machine learning is completely on fire right now. People love it, they want more of it. AI everything, everyone's putting AI on every label. If it does any automation, it's magic, it's AI. So, really, we know what that's happening, it's just really database work and machine learning under the covers. Pete, the business model here has completely changed too, because now with open source as a platform you have more scale, you have differentiation opportunities. I'm sure business is doing great. Give us an update on the business side of Instaclustr. What's clicking for you guys, what's working? What's the success trajectory look like? >> Yeah, it's been an amazing journey for us. When you think about it we were founded it in 2013, so, we're eight years into our journey. When we started the business we were focused entirely on Cassandra. But as Ben talked about, we've gone in diversified those technologies onto the platform, that common experience that we offer customers. So, you can adopt any one to a number of open source technologies in a highly integrated way and really, really grow off the back of that. It's driving some phenomenal growth in our business and we've really enjoyed growth rates that have been 70, 80, 100 year on year since we've started the business. And that's led to an enormous scale and opportunities for us to invest further in the platform, invest further in additional technologies in a really highly opinionated way. I think Ben talked about that integrations, then that becomes incredibly complex as you have many, many kinds of offerings on the platform. So, Instaclustr is much more targeted in terms of how we want to take our business forward and the growth opportunity before us. We think about being deeply expert and deeply capable in a smaller subset of technologies. But those which actually integrate and inter operate for customers so they can build solutions for their applications. But do that on Instaclustr using its platform with a common experience. And, so we've grown to 270 people now around the world. We started in Australia, we've got a strong presence in the US. We recently acquired a business called credativ in Europe, which was a PostgreSQL specialist organization. And that was because, as Ben said before, talking about those technologies we bring onto our platform. PostgreSQL, huge market, disrupting Oracle, exactly the right place that we want to be as Instaclustr with pure open source offerings. We brought them into the Instaclustr family in March this year and we did that to accelerate it on our platform. And so, we think about that. We think about future technologies on their platform, what we can do, and introduced to even provide an even greater and richer experience. Cadence is new to our platform. Super exciting for us because not only is it something that provides workflow as code, as an open source experience, but as a glue technology to build a complex business technology for applications. It actually drives workloads across Cassandra, PostgreSQL and Kafka, which are kind of core technologies on our platform. Super exciting for us, a big market. Interesting kind of group of adopters. You've got Uber kind of leading the charge there with that and us partnering with them now. We see that as a massive growth opportunity for our business. And as we introduce analytics capabilities, exploration, visibility features into the platform all built on open source. So, you can build a complete top to bottom data services layer using open source technology for your platform. We think that's an incredibly exciting part of the business and a great opportunity for us. >> Opportunities to raise money, more acquisitions on the horizon? >> Well, I think acquisitions where it makes sense. I talked about credativ, where we looked at credativ, we knew that PostgreSQL was new to our market, and we were coming into that market reasonably late. So, the way we thought about that from a strategy perspective was we wanted to accelerate the richness of the capability on our platform that we introduced and became GA late last year. So, we think about when we're selecting that kind of technology, that's the perfect opportunity to consider an acquisition for us. So, as we look at what we're going to introduce in the platform over the next sort of two, three, four years, that sort of decision that will, or that sort of thinking, or frames our thinking on what we would do from an acquisition perspective. I think the other way we think about acquisitions is new markets. So, thinking about globally entering, say into the Japanese market. does that make sense because of any language requirements to be able to support customers? 'Cause one of the things that's really, really important to us is the platform is fantastic for scaling, growing, deploying, running, operating this very powerful open source technology. But so too is the importance of having deep operational open source expertise backing and being there to call on if a customer's having an application issue. And that kind of drives the need for us to have in country kind of market support. And so, when we think about those sort of opportunities, I think we think about acquisition there, isn't it like another string to the bow in terms of getting presence in a particular or an emerging market that we're interested in. >> Awesome, Ben, final question to you is, on the technology front what do you see this year emerging? A lot of changes in 2021. We've got another year of pandemic situation going on. Hopefully it goes by fast. Hopefully it won't be three years, but again, who knows? But you're seeing the cloud open source actually taking as a tailwind from the pandemic. New opportunities, companies are refreshing, they have to, they're forced. There's going to be a lot more changes. What do you see from a tech perspective in open-source, open core, and in general for large companies as opensource continues to power the innovation? >> So, definitely the pandemic has a tailwind, particularly for those companies adopting the cloud. I think it's forced a lot of their hands as well. Their five-year plans have certainly become two or three year plans around moving to the cloud. And certainly, that contest for talent means that you really want to be keeping your engineers focused on core things. So, definitely I think we're going to see a continuation of that. We're going to say the continuation of open source dominating when it comes to a database and the database market, the same with cloud. I think we're going to see the gradual march towards different adoption models within the cloud. So, server lists, right? I think we're going to see that kind of slowly mature. I think it's still a little bit early in the hype cycle there, but we're going to start to see that mature. On the ML, AI side of things as well, people have been talking about it for the last three or four years. And I'm sure to people in the industry, they're like, "Oh, we're over that." But I think on the broader industry we're still quite early in that particular cycle as people figure out, how do they use the data that they've got? How do they use that? How do they train models on that? How do they serve inference on that? And how do they unlock other things with lower down on their data stack as well when it comes to ML and AI, right? We're seeing great research papers come out from AI powered indexes, right? So, the AI is actually speeding up queries, let alone actually solving business problems. So, I think we're going to say more and more of that kind of come out. I think we're going to see more and more process capabilities and organizational responses to this explosion of data. I'm super excited to say people talking about concepts and organizational concepts like data mesh. I think that's going to be fundamental as we move forward and have to manage the complexities of dealing with this. So, it's an old industry, data, when you think about it. As soon as you had computers you had data, and it's an old industry from that perspective. But I feel like we're only just getting started and it's just heating up. So, we're super excited to see what 2022 holds for us. >> Every company will be an source AI company. It has to be no matter what. (Ben laughing) Well, thanks for sharing the data Pete and Ben, the co-founders of Instaclustr. We'll get our "CUBE" AI working on this data we got today from you guys. Thanks for sharing, great stuff. Thanks for sharing the open core perspective. We really appreciate it and congratulations on your success. Companies do need more Instaclustrs out there, and you guys are doing a great job. Thanks for coming on, I appreciate it. >> Thanks John, cheers mate. >> Thanks John. >> It's "theCUBE" Conversation here at Palo Alto. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (bright music)

>>Welcome to this cube conversation which is part of our third Aws startup showcase of this year. I'm your host lisa martin and I'm pleased to welcome to the cube ceo and co founder of White Source Romney Sasse Rami, Welcome to the program. >>Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. >>I'm excited for our audience to hear about White Source, give us that high level overview of what the company is and what you how you're helping organizations. >>Sure. So we have software engineering teams keep track of their use of open source components sometimes referred to as dependencies and primarily focused on security aspect of those dependencies and are able to very natively and very quickly identify one all of the dependencies that are being used in a certain software that's being developed and alert to any known vulnerabilities that exist in those dependencies and then nick our users through the journey of finding them prioritizing them and fixing the vulnerability is such that their software when it gets released is not at risk, >>not at risk. And one of the things we've talked so much about In the last 18 months is the threat landscape. It's changed dramatically. We've seen a huge increase in ransom where huge increase in Ddos attacks. We also are in the fifth consecutive year of a cybersecurity skills gap. It's been there for a while. We know that there have been barriers between developers and security. How does White Source help address that cybersecurity skills gap. >>So we focus on automating as much of the security practices possible. Right. So basically our main premise is that we want to be the security expert for the engineering team so that they don't have to right? So we provide tools that automate the entire process of remediating the vulnerability so that we can save the developers effort and time in becoming security expert basically saying they don't need to become security expert, they can keep doing what they do best, which is developed software and provide more business value to their employer. And we will take care of anything that has to do with security in their software for them. So basically we're trying to alleviate the need for developers to develop any kind of security related skill set. >>I got to ask you how does that address? We talked about the skills gap but also the cultural shift required for developers to then kind of exhale and and put their trust in you guys and that's a big challenge to change cultures within organizations. How do you help influence that? >>Sure. So look, when you're talking about cultural shift, it always takes time. Like these things do not happen overnight And its gradual and so we are very well aware of it and we do not expect people to have 100% confidence in us immediately in day one. Okay, so our tools and and practices account for it and we help our users uh increasingly trust us more by proving ourselves to them by first starting with providing advice and allowing them to control the pace at which they automate more of the process. Right? So initially we will just tell them what they need to do and let them do it themselves until they are, they have gained enough experience without tools to just allow us to take the full cycle for them. That's one which maybe is even more important is that we rely very heavily on crowd sourcing, Right? So we have a very extensive customer base that is made up of some of the world's leading enterprise organizations that have very complex and a large environments and across those environments, combined with our ongoing and monitoring of everything that's going on in the large world of open source projects, we have compiled a very extensive crowd source database or knowledge base, if you will, that basically gives you intel on what others are doing with those vulnerable open stores dependencies, Right? And we can give you a lot of confidence when we see that the broader community of both commercial and free opens those users have upgraded a vulnerable dependency to a safe version and are speaking to the new version, right? They're not pulling it back there, not undoing that change. And so we give you a lot of visibility into all of that information and also, you know, when when things go bad, right? If we see that many people roll back some change and uh avoiding some dependency version, then we will warn you away from upgrading that version. So I think that the fact that we are establishing our recommendations on a lot of crowd sourced data is another way for us to provide more confidence, automating actions for our users. >>The C word confidence is absolutely critical. I got to ask you though Romney, something that you you mentioned, I was always, I always like to ask start ups, you know, what was the impetus to start the company? You're the Ceo and co founder? What were some of the gaps that were missing? Was it crowdsourcing? And was it the the lack of that community to really provide that visibility to developers that you guys saw as an opportunity to fix in the market? >>Alright. So at the risk of exposing my real age, Uh tell you that the company started over 10 years ago and was actually based on previous experience that as founders had in another company when when it was time to sell it. Right? So when we sold our previous company, we had to go through a two diligence process where we were required to provide a very detailed report of all the open source dependencies that we were using and we didn't have such a report and sort of caught us off guard and we had to spend a lot of time during, you know, the most stressful part of the due diligence, finding out which open source we were using and documenting it and coming up with the report. And so that was a very personal experience we had, but it was very obvious that it's not something that we did special. Right? Everyone is developing software is relying very heavily on open source and usually doesn't track it everywhere. Soon it initially started from just the very basic need for transparency, visibility and the ability to provide a, you know, simple bill of material that's now become a big thing right around S bahn Uh, but 10 years ago it was very difficult, it was very like manually laborious task to be able to come up with your bill of material and that's sort of the experience that big. Uh, the foundation of white suits >>got it and then talk to me about your relationship with AWS and mentioned in the beginning of this segment that this is part of our third AWS startup showcase of the year. Give us an overview of your relationship with AWS from a technology partnership perspective cells marketing product. >>Sure. So we've been working with us for a very long time and they are a wonderful partner to work with. It started right at the beginning where we are a cloud native company. Right? So we're staff solution provider and from the beginning we chose aws to be the infrastructure on which to no solution and we grew together with them over time over the last 10 years. We've been scaling again and again our environment and you know, the services that we provide and have been consuming more and more on AWS services, both for infrastructure and but also and very importantly for securing our runtime environment, which they do a great job at. But then it went even further and we are now integrated with a lot of AWS services and products and technologies. So our offering is very much integrated with several AWS offerings. And even beyond that, we are working closely as they go to market partner with AWS. So we have several co marketing initiatives with them and we are part of the startup coastal program. Such that AWS sales people can coastal white source to their customers. >>I imagine that is an advantage the partnership and the deep relationship that you have with a W. S in terms of getting those customers meetings and and helping them achieve the confidence in the technologies and the power of the two companies in 10 years. We're looking at 1000 customers and some big names. I saw from your website Microsoft Comcast, uh, Splunk 23% of the Fortune 100. Tell me how the aws partnership helps you give those developers the confidence that they need to trust in your technologies. >>Sure. So, first I think the synergy is very apparent, very obvious because both AWS and us sell to the engineering departments into the devil's people. All right. So we are catering to the same users the same customers the same, even decision makers. And so it's very easy to understand. It's also very easy to tell the better together story. Right? So, it's very easy for the the the THE AWS sales people to explain to their customers why it's easily integrate Herbal and it makes the sales motion easier and transparent and fluid and it makes the customer's consumption of the joint services easier. Right? So it's for them, it's easier to work with AWS is a window knowing that they can get all these added security features from them and gained the confidence of having this solution vetted by amazon and get us as a reference for us as a vendor also makes it easier for them to trust us and to use our services uh, with peace of life. >>Sounds like a synergistic cultures as well. I want to dig into something that I saw in the notes that you guys provided that white sources enabling organizations to eliminate up to 85% of security alerts. That's a big number. How do you do that? >>Okay. First, to clarify, we're talking about open source vulnerability or its rights are not in general. Not all security for open source security alliance. We've developed a deeper analysis that goes beyond just looking at your bill of material and identifying which dependencies are vulnerable and analyzes the way in which the developers are using those dependencies and what we've found over the last three years of running that technology with real customers? over many tens of thousands of development projects. Is that on average, 85% of the vulnerabilities in open source dependencies. I'll not reachable from your code. All right. So they are still there. You're still using the dependency but you're using some other function of it, which is not vulnerable. And the vulnerable function is never actively called in your code base. So this is like very specific. It's not some generic analysis. We had to analyze your code and figure that out. And so again, the average statistics statistics, is That just 15% of vulnerabilities are quote unquote, reachable form your code and makes your software vulnerable. Right? All the others are simply not exploitable. And so it can easily be eliminated for the need to remediate. Right? So you don't have to >>got it. How are you guys helping customers? There's been a lot of data that shows companies are spending millions uh annually using multiple web app and a P. I. Security tools on average but are still having problems with those tools being effective. How does white source help customers not waste time and resources and get right to being able to identify and remediate those vulnerabilities >>short. So look again in our philosophy, is that just detecting the problem? The security issues doesn't fix anything. Right. Doesn't help you solve your problem. Right, paramount to going to visit your dentist and having them find the cavity and maybe they do an x ray and they tell you exactly which tooth it's on and how deep it is. And then just send you home and you did you need to deal with it yourself. Right? So it doesn't really solve the problem. Your your mouth still painful. You have to fix the problem in order to get any kind of value for the security service of tool, you have to, you know, close the loop, finish the process and fix the vulnerability. And so by investing a lot in automating the remediation in enabling our tools to close that cycle right to finish the job and fix the vulnerability. We enable you to actually gain the value from the various tools that you're using and make sure that your software is not exposed and not vulnerable and not just give you a report with the vulnerabilities, right? Not just find them for you. >>Got It. Last question for you is if we look at your recommendations when you're talking to customers, especially as I mentioned earlier in the conversation, the threat landscape has changed dramatically in the last 18 months when you're in customer conversations, how do you advise them to start? You start with the developers. Do you start with security or do you start by saying you've got to bring everybody together. >>So we would normally start with security uh and you know, not necessarily the developers themselves, but the engineering managers. The heads of engineering again because our main effort is to leave the developers alone. Right. We want to get as little developer involvement as possible so that they can be free to do what they need to do. Security is something they have to right? It's a sure it's not, it doesn't add business value, it just protects the business from being exposed to greater risk. And so our approach and our practice is to be a sort of exception based tool for developers and only get them involved when you absolutely have to have them chime in and do something. Otherwise, we can fully take ownership and automate the entire process of identification, prioritization and remediation for the organization and just provide reports on, you know, how many vulnerabilities we fix this month and and give them better visibility into their security posture. Yeah, but you know, we invest most of our innovation attention resources as a company to automate as much of that process as possible so that the developers don't have to spend their time on security issues. We will do it for it. >>And I imagine developer productivity goes way up for your customers? I do have one more question for you, given that here we are in the fall of 2021, what are some of the things that you're looking forward to as we go into the new year? >>I love you in the new jewish year or then you >>Uh maybe both. I was thinking, you know, just as we go into 2020 to some of the things that you're excited about. >>Sure, so look, it's it's a little difficult to be happy about something that's a problem for other people, right? Because there is a growing threat for application security and there is more and more attacks going on in the world. But I'm really looking forward to helping more people be more protected while not wasting their time. All right. So it what drives me is the ability for us as a company to provide real value for customers and not be some shelf will not be a tool that just produces reports that no one knows what to do with. And the fact that we are able to steal our users and our customers away from risk and save them. The the hassle of being attacked, being hacked, having their data stolen or having the system broken into is what I mostly look >>and there's plenty of opportunities for you guys to do just that and really add that value for those developers And the company is like I said, big brands Microsoft Comcast block Romney, thank you for joining me on the program today, talking to us about white source and how you're really feeling the gaps in the cybersecurity skills landscape and helping really transform developer productivity where security is concerned. We appreciate your time. >>Thank you. Thank you so much for having me on the show. >>My pleasure for a missus I'm lisa martin. You're watching this cube conversation. Mhm mm mm.

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE in ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Every CEO is figuring out the right balance for new hybrid business models. Now, regardless of the chosen approach, which is going to vary, technology executives, they understand they have to accelerate their digital and build resilience as well as optionality into their platforms. Now, this is driving a dramatic shift in IT investments. And at the macro level, we expect total spending to increase at as much as 8% or even more in 2021, compared to last year's contraction. Investments in cybersecurity, cloud collaboration that are enabling hybrid work as well as data, including analytics, AI, and automation are at the top of the spending priorities for CXOs. Hello everyone. And welcome to this week's Wiki Bond Cube insights, powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we're pleased to welcome back Erik Bradley, who is the chief engagement strategist at our partner, ETR. Now in this segment, we're going to share some of the latest findings from ETR's surveys and provide our commentary on what it means for the markets, for sellers, and for buyers. Erik, great to see you, my friend. Welcome back to Breaking Analysis. >> Thank you for having me, always enjoy it. We've got some fresh data to talk about on this beautiful summer Friday, so I'm ready to go. >> All right. I'm excited too. Okay, last year we saw a contraction in IT spending by at least 5%. And now we're seeing a snapback to, as I said, at least 8% growth relative to last year. You got to go back to 2007 just before the financial crisis to see this type of top line growth. The shift to hybrid work, it's exposed us to new insidious security threats. And we're going to discuss that in a lot more detail. Cloud migration of course picked up dramatically last year, and based on the recent earnings results of the big cloud players, for now we got two quarters of data, that trend continues as organizations are accelerating their digital platform build-outs, and this is bringing a lot of complexity and a greater need for so-called observability solutions, which Erik is going to talk about extensively later on in this segment. Data, we think is entering a new era of de-centralization. We see organizations not only focused on analytics and insights, but actually creating data products. Leading technology organizations like JP Morgan, they're heavily leaning into this trend toward packaging and monetizing data products. And finally, as part of the digital transformation trend, we see no slow down in spending momentum for AI and automation, generally in RPA specifically. Erik, anything you want to add to that top level narrative? >> Yeah, there's a lot to take on the macro takeaways. The first thing I want to state is that that 8, 8.5% number that started off at just 3 to 4% beginning of the year. So as the year has continued, we are just seeing this trend in budgets continue to accelerate, and we don't have any reason to believe that's going to stop. So I think we're going to just keep moving on heading into 2021. And we're going to see a banner year of spend this year and probably next as well. >> All right, now we're going to bring up a chart that shows kind of that progression here of spending momentum. So Erik, I'm going to let you comment on this chart that tracks those projections over time. >> Erik: Yeah. Great. So thank you very much for pulling this up. As you can see in the beginning part of the year, when we asked people, "What do you plan to spend throughout 2021?" They were saying it would be about a 4% increase. Which we were happy with because as you said last year, it was all negative. That continues to accelerate and is only hyper accelerating now as we head into the back half of the year. In addition, after we do this data, I always host a panel of IT end users to kind of get their feedback on what we collected, to a man, every one of them expects continued increase throughout next year. There are some concerns and uncertainty about what we're seeing right now with COVID, but even with that, they're planning their budgets now for 2022 and they're planning for even further increases going forward. >> Dave: Great, thank you. So we circled that 8%. That's really kind of where we thought it was going to land. And so we're happy with that number, but let's take a look at where the action is by technology sector. This chart that we're showing you here, it tracks spending priorities back to last September. When I believe that was the point, Erik, that cyber became the top priority in the survey, ahead of cloud collaboration, analytics, and data, and the other sectors that you see there. Now, Erik, we should explain. These areas, they're the top seven, and they outrank all the other sectors. ETR tracks many, many other sectors, but please weigh in here and share your thoughts on this data. >> Erik: Yeah. Security, security, security. It hasn't changed. It had really hasn't. The hybrid work. The fact that you're behind the firewall one day and then you're outside working from home the next, switching in and out of networks. This is just a field day for bad actors. And we have no choice right now, but to continue to spend, because as you're going to talk about in a minute, hybrid's here to stay. So we have to figure out a way to secure behind the firewall on-prem. We also have to secure our employees and our assets that are not in the office. So it is a main priority. One of the things that point out on this chart, I had a couple of ITN users talk to me about customer experience and automation really need to move from the right part of that chart to the left. So they're seeing more in what you were talking about in RPA and automation, starting to creep up heading into next year. As cloud migration matures, as you know, cybersecurity spending has been ramping up. People are going to see a little bit more on the analytics and a little bit more on the automation side going forward. >> Dave: Great. Now, this next data view- well, first of all, one of the great things about the ETR dataset is that you can ask key questions and get a time series. And I will tell you again, I go back to last March, ETR hit it. They were the first on the work from home trend. And so if you were on that trend, you were able to anticipate it. And a lot of investors I think took advantage of that. Now, but we've shown this before, but there's new data points that we want to introduce. So the data tracks how CIOs and IT buyers have responded to the pandemic since last March. Still 70% of the organizations have employees working remotely, but 39% now have employees fully returning to the office and Erik, the rest of the metrics all point toward positives for IT spending, although accelerating IT deployments there at the right peaked last year, as people realized they had to invest in the future. Your thoughts? >> Erik: Yeah, this is the slide for optimism, without a doubt. Of the entire macro survey we did, this is the most optimistic slide. It's great for overall business. It's great for business travel. This is well beyond just IT. Hiring is up. I've had some people tell me that they possibly can't hire enough people right now. They had to furlough employees, they had to stop projects, and they want to re accelerate those now. But talent is very hard to find. Another point to you about your automation and RPA, another underlying trend for there. The one thing I did want to talk about here is the hybrid workplace, but I believe there's another slide on it. So just to recap on this extremely optimistic, we're seeing a lot of hiring. We're seeing increased spending, and I do believe that that's going to continue. >> Yeah I'm glad you brought that up because a session that you and I did a while ago, we pointed out, it was earlier this year, that the skill shortage is one potential risk to our positive scenario. We'll keep an eye on that, but so I want to show another set of data that we've showed previously, but ETR again, has added some new questions in here. So note here that 60% of employees still work remotely with 33% in a hybrid model currently, and the CIO's expect that to land on about 42% hybrid workforce with around 30% working remotely, which is around, it's been consistent by the way on your surveys, but that's about double the historic norm, Eric. >> Erik: Yeah, and even further to your point Dave, recently I did a panel asking people to give me some feedback on this. And three of those four experts basically said to me, if we had greed run this survey right now, that even more people would be saying remote. That they believe that that number, that's saying they're expecting that number of people to be back in office, is actually too optimistic. They're actually saying that maybe if we had- cause as a survey launched about six, seven weeks ago before this little blip on the radar, before the little COVID hiccup we're seeing now, and they're telling me that they believe if we reran this now that it would be even more remote work, even more hybrid and less returned to the office. So that's just an update I wanted to offer on this slide. >> Dave: Yeah. Thank you for that. I mean, we're still in this kind of day to day, week to week, month to month mode, but I want to do a little double click on this. We're not going to share this data, but there was so much ETR data. We got to be selective. But if you double click on the hybrid models, you'll see that 50% of organizations plan to have time roughly equally split between onsite and remote with again around 30 or 31% mostly remote, with onsite space available if they need it. And Erik, very few don't plan to have some type of hybrid model, at least. >> Yeah, I think it was less than 10% that said it was going to be exclusively onsite. And again, that was a more optimistic scenario six, seven weeks ago than we're seeing right now throughout the country. So I agree with you, hybrid is here to stay. There really is no doubt about it. from everyone I speak to when, you know, I basically make a living talking to IT end users. Hybrid is here to stay. They're planning for it. And that's really the drive behind the spending because you have to support both. You have to give people the option. You have to, from an IT perspective, you also have to support both, right? So if somebody is in office, I need the support staff to be in office. Plus I need them to be able to remote in and fix something from home. So they're spending on both fronts right now. >> Okay. Let's get into some of the vendor performance data. And I want to start with the cloud hyperscalers. It's something that we followed pretty closely. I got some Wiki bond data, that we just had earnings released. So here's data that shows the Q2 revenue shares on the left-hand side in the pie and the growth rates for the big four cloud players on the right hand side. It goes back to Q1 2019. Now the first thing I want to say is these players generated just under $39 billion in the quarter with AWS capturing 50% of that number. I said 39, it was 29 billion, sorry, with AWS capturing 50% of that in the quarter. As you're still tracking around a third in Alibaba and GCP in the, you know, eight or 9% range. But what's most interesting to me, Erik, is that AWS, which generated almost 15 billion in the quarter, was the only player to grow its revenue, both sequentially and year over year. And Erik, I think the street is missing the real story here on Amazon. Amazon announced earnings on Thursday night. The company had a 2% miss on the top line revenues and a meaningful 22% beat on earnings per share. So the retail side of the business missed its revenue targets, so that's why everybody's freaked out. But AWS, the cloud side, saw a 4% revenue beat. So the stock was off more than 70% after hours and into Friday. Now to me, a mix shift toward AWS, that's great news for investors. Now, tepid guidance is a negative, but the shift to a more profitable cloud business is a huge positive. >> Yeah, there's a lot that goes into stock price, right? I remember I was a director of research back in the day. One of my analysts said to me, "Am I crazy for putting a $1,000 target on Amazon?" And I laughed and I said, "No, you're crazy if you don't make it $2,000." (both chuckling) So, you know, at that time it was basically the mix shift towards AWS. You're a thousand percent right. I think the tough year over year comps had something to do with that reaction. That, you know, it's just getting really hard. What's that? The law of large numbers, right? It's really hard to grow at that percentage rate when you're getting this big. But from our data perspective, we're seeing no slowdown in AWS, in cloud, none whatsoever. The only slowdown we're seeing in cloud is GCP. But to, you know, to focus on AWS, extremely strong across the board and not only just in cloud, but in all their data products as well, data and analytics. >> Yeah and I think that the AWS, don't forget folks, that funds Amazon's TAM expansion into so many different places. Okay. As we said at the top, the world of digital and hybrid work, and multi-cloud, it's more complicated than it used to be. And that means if you need to resolve issues, which everybody does, like poor application performance, et cetera, what's happening at the user level, you have to have a better way to sort of see what's going on. And that's what the emergence of the observability space is all about. So Erik, let me set this up and you have a lot of comments here because you've recently had some, and you always have had a lot of round table discussions with CXOs on this topic. So this chart plots net score or spending momentum on the vertical axis, and market share or pervasiveness in the dataset on the horizontal axis. And we inserted a table that shows the data points in detail. Now that red dotted line is just sort of Dave Vellante's subjective mark in the sand for elevated spending levels. And there are three other points here. One is Splunk as well off is two-year peak, as highlighted in the red, but Signal FX, which Splunk acquired, has made a big move northward this last quarter. As has Datadog. So Erik, what can you share with us on this hot, but increasingly crowded space? >> Yeah. I could talk about the space for a long time. As you know, I've gotten some flack over the last year and a half about, you know, kind of pointing out this trend, this negative trend in Splunk. So I do want to be the first one to say that this data set is rebounding. Splunk has been horrific in our data for going back almost two years now, straight downward trend. This is the first time we're seeing any increase, any positivity there. So I do want to be fair and state that because I've been accused of being a little too negative on Splunk in the past. But I would basically say for observability right now, it's a rising tide lifts all boats, if I can use a New England phrase. The data across the board in analytics for these observability players is up, is accelerating. None more so than Datadog. And it's exactly your point, David. The complexity, the increased cloud migration is a perfect setup for Datadog, which is a cloud native. It focuses on microservices. It focuses on cloud observability. Old Splunk was just application monitoring. Don't get me wrong, they're changing, but they were on-prem application monitoring, first and foremost. Datadog came out as cloud native. They, you know, do microservices. This is just a perfect setup for them. And not only is Datadog leading the observability, it's leading the entire analytics sector, all of it. Not just the observability niche. So without a doubt, that is the strongest that we're seeing. It's leading Dynatrace new Relic. The only one that really isn't rebounding is Cisco App Dynamics. That's getting the dreaded legacy word really attached to it. But this space is really on fire, elastic as well, really doing well in this space. New Relic has shown a little bit of improvement as well. And what I heard when I asked my panelists about this, is that because of the maturity of cloud migration, that this observability has to grow. Spending on this has to happen. So they all say the chart looks right. And it's really just about the digital transformation maturity. So that's largely what they think is happening here. And they don't really see it getting, you know, changing anytime soon. >> Yeah, and I would add, and you see that it's getting crowded. You saw a service now acquired LightStep, and they want to get into the game. You mentioned, you know, last deck of the elk stack is, you know, the open source alternative, but then we see a company who's raised a fair amount of money, startup, chaos search, coming in, going after kind of the complexity of the elk stack. You've got honeycomb, which has got a really innovative approach, Jeremy Burton's company observes. So you have venture capital coming in. So we'll see if those guys could be disruptive enough or are they, you know, candidates to get acquired? We'll see how that all- you know that well. The M and A space. You think this space is ripe for M and A? >> I think it's ripe for consolidation, M and A. Something has to shake out. There's no doubt. I do believe that all of these can be standalone. So we shall see what's happened to, you mentioned the Splunk acquisition of Signal FX, just a house cleaning point. That was really nice acceleration by Signal FX, but it was only 20 citations. We'd looked into this a little bit deeper. Our data scientists did. It appears as if the majority of people are just signaling spunk and not FX separately. So moving forward for our data set, we're going to combine those two, so we don't have those anomalies going forward. But that type of acquisition does show what we should expect to see more of in this group going forward. >> Well that's I want to mention. That's one of the challenges that any data company has, and you guys do a great job of it. You're constantly having to reevaluate. There's so much M and A going on in the industry. You've got to pick the right spots in terms of when to consolidate. There's some big, you know, Dell and EMC, for example. You know, you've beautifully worked through that transition. You're seeing, you know, open shift and red hat with IBM. You just got to be flexible. And that's where it's valuable to be able to have a pipeline to guys like Erik, to sort of squint through that. So thank you for that clarification. >> Thank you too, because having a resource like you with industry knowledge really helps us navigate some of those as well for everyone out there. So that's a lot to do with you do Dave, >> Thank you. It's going to be interesting to watch Splunk. Doug Merritt's made some, you know, management changes, not the least of which is bringing in Teresa Carlson to run go to market. So if you know, I'd be interested if they are hitting, bouncing off the bottom and rising up again. They have a great customer base. Okay. Let's look at some of the same dimensions. Go ahead. You got a comment? >> A few of ETR's clients looked at our data and then put a billion dollar investment into it too. So obviously I agree. (Dave laughing) Splunk is looking like it's set for a rebound, and it's definitely something to watch, I agree. >> Not to rat hole in this, but I got to say. When I look back, cause theCUBE gives us kind of early visibility. So companies with momentum and you talk to the customers that all these shows that we go to. I will tell you that three companies stood out last decade. It was Splunk. It was Service Now and Tableau. And you could tell just from just discussions with their customers, the enthusiasm in that customer base. And so that's a real asset, and that helps them build them a moat. So we'll see. All right, let's take a look at the same dimensions now for cyber. This is cybersecurity net score in the vertical, and market share in the horizontal. And I filtered by in greater than a hundred shared in because just gets so crowded. Erik, the only things I would point out here is CrowdStrike and Zscaler continue to shine, CyberArk also showing momentum over that 40% line. Very impressively, Palo Alto networks, which has a big presence in the market. They've bounced back. We predicted that a while back. Your round table suggested people like working with Palo Alto. They're a gold standard. You know, we had reported earlier on that divergence with four to net in terms of valuation and some of the challenges they had in cloud, clearly, you know, back with the momentum. And of course, Microsoft in the upper, right. It's just, they're literally off the charts and obviously a major player here, but your thoughts on cyber? >> Erik: Yeah. Going back to the backdrop. Security, security, security. It has been the number one priority going back to last September. No one sees it changing. It has to happen. The threat vectors are actually expanding and we have no choice but to spend here. So it is not surprising to see. You did name our three favorite names. So as you know, we look at the dataset, we see which ones have the most positive inflections, and we put outlooks on those. And you did mention Zscaler, Okta and CrowdStrike, by far the three standouts that we're seeing. I just recently did a huge panel on Okta talking about their acquisition of Auth Zero. They're pushed into Sale Point space, trying to move just from single sign on and MFA to going to really privileged account management. There is some hurdles there. Really Okta's ability to do this on-prem is something that a little bit of the IT end users are concerned about. But what we're seeing right now, both Okta and Auth Zero are two of the main adopted names in security. They look incredibly well set up. Zscaler as well. With the ZTNA push more towards zero trust, Zscaler came out so hot in their IPO. And everyone was wondering if it was going to trail off just like Snowflake. It's not trailing off. This thing just keeps going up into the right, up into the right. The data supports a lot of tremendous growth for the three names that you just mentioned. >> Yeah. Yeah. I'm glad you brought up Auth Zero. We had reported on that earlier. I just feel like that was a great acquisition. You had Okta doing the belly to belly enterprise, you know, selling. And the one thing that they really lacked was that developer momentum. And that's what Auth Zero brings. Just a smart move by Todd McKinnon and company. And I mean, so this, you know, I want to, I want to pull up another chart show a quick snapshot of some of the players in the survey who show momentum and have you comment on this. We haven't mentioned Snowflake so far, but they remain again with like this gold standard of net score, they've consistently had those high marks with regard to spending velocity. But here's some other data. Erik, how should we interpret this? >> Erik: Yeah, just to harp on Snowflake for a second. Right, I mean the rich get richer. They came out- IPO was so hyped, so it was hard for us as a research company to say, "Oh, you know, well, you know, we agree." But we did. The data is incredible. You can't beat the management team. You can't beat what they're doing. They've got so much cash. I can't wait to see what they do with it. And meanwhile, you would expect something that debuted with that high of a net score, that high of spending velocity to trail off. It would be natural. It's not Dave, it's still accelerating. It's gone even higher. It's at all time highs. And we just don't see it stopping anytime soon. It's a really interesting space right now. Maybe another name to look at on here that I think is pretty interesting, kind of a play on return to business is Kupa. It's a great project expense management tool that got hit really hard. Listen, traveling stopped, business expense stopped, and I did a panel on it. And a lot of our guys basically said, "Yeah, it was the first thing I cut." But we're seeing a huge rebound in spending there in that space. So that's a name that I think might be worth being called out on a positive side. Negative, If you look down to the bottom right of that chart, unfortunately we're seeing some issues in RingCentral and Zoom. Anything that's sort of playing in this next, you know, video conferencing, IP telephony space, they seem to be having really decelerating spending. Also now with Zoom's acquisition of five nine. I'm not really sure how RingCentral's going to compete on that. But yeah, that's one where we debuted for the first time with a negative outlook on that name. And looking and asking to some of the people in our community, a lot of them say externally, you still need IP telepany, but internally you don't. Because the You Cast communication systems are getting so sophisticated, that if I have Teams, if I have Slack, I don't need phones anymore. (chuckling) That you and I can just do a Slack call. We can do a Teams call. And many of them are saying I'm truly ripping out my IP Telepany internally as soon as possible because we just don't need it. So this whole collaboration, productivity space is here to stay. And it's got wide ranging implications to some of these more legacy type of tools. >> You know, one of the other things I'd call out on this chart is Accenture. You and I had a session earlier this year, and we had predicted that that skill shortage was going to lead to an uptick in traditional services. We've certainly seen that. I mean, IBM beat its quarter on the strength of services largely. And seeing Accenture on that is I think confirmation. >> Yeah that was our New Year prediction show, right Dave? When we made top 10 predictions? >> That's right. That was part of our predictions show. Exactly, good memory. >> The data is really showing that continue. People want the projects, they need to do the projects, but hiring is very difficult. So obviously the number one beneficiary there are going to be the Accentures of the world. >> All right. So let's do a quick wrap. I'm going to make a few comments and then have you bring us home, Erik. So we laid out our scenario for the tech spending rebound. We definitely believe last year tracked downward, along with GDP contraction. It was interesting. Gardner doesn't believe, at least factions of Gardner don't believe there's a correlation between GDP and tech spending. But, you know, I personally think there generally is some kind of relatively proportional pattern there. And I think we saw contraction last year. People are concerned about inflation. Of course, that adds some uncertainty. And as well, as you mentioned around the Delta variant. But I feel as though that the boards of directors and CEOs, they've mandated that tech execs have to build out digital platforms for the future. They're data centric. They're highly automated, to your earlier points. They're intelligent with AI infused, and that's going to take investment. I feel like the tech community has said, "Look, we know what to do here. We're dealing with hybrid work. We can't just stop doing what we're doing. Let's move forward." You know, and as you say, we're flying again and so forth. You know, getting hybrid right is a major priority that directly impacts strategies. Technology strategies, particularly around security, cloud, the productivity of remote workers with collaboration. And as we've said many times, we are entering a new era of data that's going to focus on decentralized data, building data products, and Erik let's keep an eye on this observability space. Lot of interest there, and buyers have a number of choices. You know, do they go with a specialist, as we saw recently, we've seen in the past, or did they go with the generalist like Service Now with the acquisition of LightStep? You know, it's going to be interesting. A lot of people are going to get into this space, start bundling into larger platforms. And so as you said, there's probably not enough room for all the players. We're going to see some consolidation there. But anyway, let me give you the final word here. >> Yeah, no, I completely agree with all of it. And I think your earlier points are spot on, that analytics and automation are certainly going to be moving more and more to that left of that chart we had of priorities. I think as we continue that survey heading into 2022, we'll have some fresh data for you again in a few months, that's going to start looking at 2022 priorities and overall spend. And the one other area that I keep hearing about over and over and over again is customer experience. There's a transition from good old CRM to CXM. Right now, everything is digital. It is not going away. So you need an omni-channel support to not only track your customer experience, but improve it. Make sure there's a two way communication. And it's a really interesting space. Salesforce is going to migrate into it. We've got Qualtrics out there. You've got Medallia. You've got FreshWorks, you've got Sprinkler. You got some names out there. And everyone I keep talking to on the IT end user side keeps bringing up customer experience. So let's keep an eye on that as well. >> That's a great point. And again, it brings me back to Service Now. We wrote a piece last week that's sort of, Service Now and Salesforce are on a collision course. We've said that for many, many years. And you've got this platform of platforms. They're just kind of sucking in different functions saying, "Hey, we're friends with everybody." But as you know Erik, software companies, they want to own it all. (both chuckling) All right. Hey Erik, thank you so much. I want to thank you for coming back on. It's always a pleasure to have you on Breaking Analysis. Great to see you. >> Love the partnership. Love the collaboration. Let's go enjoy this summer Friday. >> All right. Let's do. Okay, remember everybody, these episodes, they're all available as podcasts, wherever you listen. All you got to do is search Breaking Analysis Podcast, click subscribe to the series. Check out ETR's website at etr.plus. They've just launched a new website. They've got a whole new pricing model. It's great to see that innovation going on. Now remember we also publish a full report every week on WikiBond.com and SiliconAngle.com. You can always email me, appreciate the back channel comments, the metadata insights. David.Vellante@SiliconAngle.com. DM me on Twitter @DVellante or comment on the LinkedIn posts. This is Dave Vellante for Erik Bradley and theCUBE insights powered by ETR. Have a great week, a good rest of summer, be well. And we'll see you next time. (inspiring music)

(bright upbeat music) >> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE Conversation. >> Well happy New Year, one and all welcome to 2021 in Cube Conversation continuing our ongoing series. I hope your New Year is off to a great start. I know that the end of 2020 was a very good one for Ivanti. And Jim Schaper, the CEO is going to join us to talk about that as is Nayaki Nayyar, or rather the EVP and the Chief Product Officer. So Nayaki and Jim, good to have you here with you on theCUBE and Happy New Year to you. >> Thank you, John. Happy New Year to you. 2020, I think for a lot of us couldn't get out of here quick enough. Although we had some great things happen to our company at the very end of the year. So anxious to talk to you about it and we appreciate the opportunity. >> You bet. So we're talking about two major acquisitions that you made that both closed near the end of the year back in December, not too long ago. One with Pulse Secure, the other with MobileIron. Two companies that provide you with additional expertise in terms of mobile security and the enterprise security space. And so Jim, if you would, let's first talk about just for the big picture, the acquisitions that were made and what those moves will do for you going forward. >> Okay, great, John. We closed both acquisitions interestingly enough, on December 2nd. We've been fortunate to have them part of our company now for about the last 30 days. One of the things that we made a decision on a number of months ago was that we had a real opportunity in the markets that we serve to really build our business more quickly through a series of acquisitions that strategically made sense for us, our investors and more importantly our customers. And that really is why we chose MobileIron and Pulse, for different reasons but nonetheless all very consistent with our longterm strategy of securing the end points on every network, in every location around the world. And so consequently, when you think about it and we've all witnessed here over the last 30 days or so, all of the security breaches, all of the things that go along with that, and our real focus is ensuring that every company and every individual on their network, outside their firewall, inside their firewall, on any device is secure. And so with these two particular acquisitions, in addition to the assets that we already had as a part of Ivanti, really puts us in a competitively advantaged position to deliver to the edge, and Nayaki will talk about this. The ability to secure those devices and ensure that they're secure from phishing expeditions or breaches or all of those kinds of things. So these two particular acquisitions really puts us on the map and puts us in a leadership position in the security market. So we're thrilled to have both of them. >> Before I go off to Nayaki, I want to follow with the point that you've made Jim talking about security breaches. We're all well aware. You know, the news from what we've been hearing out from the federal level about the state actors and the kind of these infiltrations of major US systems if not international systems. Some Interpol data, I read 207 some odd percent increase in breaches just in the post COVID time or in the COVID time, the past year. That gets your attention, does it not? And what does that say to you about the aggressive nature of these kinds of activities? >> Well, that they're getting more sophisticated every day and they're getting more aggressive. I think one of the most frightening conversations I had was a briefing with our chief security officer about how many attempted breaches of our network and our systems that he sees every single day. And we're able to identify what foreign actors are really trying to penetrate our systems or what are they trying to do. But the one thing I will leave you with is they're becoming much more sophisticated, whether you're inside the firewall or whether you're on your iPhone as an extension of the network, there the level of sophistication is startling. And unfortunately in many cases, as evidenced by the recent breaches, you don't even know you've had a breach for could be months, weeks, days. And so what damage is done. And so as we look forward, and as Nayaki kind of walks you through our product strategy, what you're going to hear a lot of is how do we self protect? How do we self-learn the devices at the edge, on the end of the networks, such that they can recognize foreign actors or any breach capability that somebody is trying to employ? And so, yeah, it's frightening how sophisticated and how frequent they have become. >> I think the one thing that really struck me as I read about the breaches was not so much the damage that has been done, but the damage that could be done prospectively and about which we have no idea. You don't know, it's like somebody lurking in your closet and they're going to stay there for a couple of months and wait for the time that maybe your guard is even more down. So I was, that's what shocks me. And they Nayaki, let's talk about your strategy then. You picked up obviously a couple of companies, one in the, kind of the enterprise IT space. Now the one in the VPN space, add into your already extensive portfolio. So I imagine from your office, wearing the hat of the chief product officer, you're just to look in your chops right now. You've got a lot more resources at your disposal. >> Yeah, we are very very busy John, but to Jim's point, one of the trends we are seeing in the market as we enter into the post COVID era, where everyone is working from anywhere, be it from home, be it from office, while on the move, every organization, every enterprise is struggling with this. What we call this explosive growth of devices. Devices being mobile devices, client-based devices, IoT devices, the data that is being generated from these devices, and to your point, the cybersecurity threats. It is predicted that there has been 30000% increase in the cybersecurity threats that are being targeted primarily at the remote workers. So you can imagine whether it's phishing attacks, malware attacks, I mean just an explosive growth of devices, data, cybersecurity attacks at the remote workers. So organizations need automation to be able to address this growth and this complexity which is where Ivanti's focus in discovering all the devices and managing those devices. So as we bring the MobileIron portfolio and Ivanti's portfolio together, now we can help our customers manage every type of devices be it Windows devices, Mac devices, Linux, iOS, Android devices, and secure those devices. The zero trust access that users need, the remote users need, all the way from cloud access to the endpoint is what the strength of both MobileIron and Pulse brings to our entire portfolio holistically. So we are truly excited for our customers. Now they can leverage our entire end to end stack to discover, manage secure and service all those devices that they now have to service for their employees. >> Explain to me, or just walk me through zero trust in terms of how you define that. I've read about trust nothing, verify everything, those kinds of explanations. But if you would, from your perspective, what does zero trust encompass, not only on your side, but on your client's side? Because you want to give them tools to do things for themselves to self heal and self serve and those kinds of things. >> So, zero trust is you don't trust anything. You validate and certify everything. So the access users have on your network, the access they have on the mobile devices, the applications they are accessing, the data that they are accessing. So being able to validate every access that they have when they come into your network is what the whole zero trust access really means. So, the combination of Ivanti's portfolio and also Pulse that zero trust access all the way from as users are accessing that network data, cloud data, endpoint data, is where our entire zero trust access truly differentiates. And as we bring that with our UEM portfolio with the MobileIron, there is no other vendor in the market that has that holistic offering, internal offering. >> I'm sorry, go ahead, please. >> It's interesting, John, you talk about timing is everything, right? And when we began discussions with MobileIron, it was right before COVID hit. And we had a great level of expertise inside the pre-acquisition of Ivanti to be able to secure the end points at the desktop level. But we struggled a bit with having all of the capabilities that we needed to manage mobile devices and tablets and basically anything that is attached to the network. That's what they really brought to us. And having done a number of acquisitions historically in my career, this was probably the easiest integration that we had simply because we did what they didn't do and they did what we didn't do. And then they brought some additional technologies. But what's really changed in the environment because of this work from home or work from anywhere as as we like to articulate it, is you've got multiple environments that you've got to manage. It isn't just, what's on the end of the VPN, the network, it's what's on the end points of the cloud. What kind of cloud are you running? You're running a public cloud, you're running a private cloud. Is it a hybrid environment? And so the ability to and the need to be able to do that is pretty significant. And so that's one of the real advantages that both the Pulse as well as the MobileIron acquisitions really brought to the combined offering from a product standpoint. >> Yeah, I'd like to follow up on that then, just because the cloud environment provides so many benefits, obviously, but it also provides this huge layer of complexity that comes on top of all this because you just talked about it. You can have public, you can have hybrid cloud, you can have on-prem, whatever, right? You have all these options. And yet you, Ivanti, are having to provide security on multiple levels and multiple platforms or multiple environments. And how much more complex or challenging is your mission now because of consumer demand and the capabilities the technology is providing your clients. >> Well, it's certainly more complex and Nayaki is better equipped to probably talk in detail about this. But if you just take a step back and think about it, you think about internet of things, right? I used to have a thermostat. And that thermostat control was controlled by the thermostat on the wall. Now everything is on WiFi. If I've got a problem, I had a a problem with a streaming music capability which infected other parts of my home network. And so everything is, that's just one example of how complicated and how wired everything is really become. Except when it comes to the mobile devices, which are still always remote. You've always got it with you. I don't what it was like for you, John, but you know, historically I've used my phone on email, texts and phone calls. Now it's actually a business tool. But it's a remote business tool that you still have to secure, you still have to manage and you still have to find an identify on the end of the network. That's where we really come into play. Nayaki, anything you want to add to that? >> Yeah, so, to Jim's point, John, and to your question also, as customers have what we call the multi-cloud offering. There are public clouds, private clouds, on-prem data centers, devices on the edge, and as you extend into the IOT world, being able to provide that seamless access, this is a zero trust access all the way from the cloud applications to the applications that are running on-prem, in your data centers and also the applications that are running on your devices and the IoT applications, is what that entire end to end zero trust access, is where our competitive strength resides with Pulse coming into our portfolio. Before Ivanti didn't have this. We were primarily a patch management vendor in the security space, but now we truly extend beyond that patch to this end to end access all the way from cloud to edge is what we call. And then when we combine that with our UEM portfolio in our endpoint management with MobileIron and also service management, that convergence of positive three pillars is where we truly differentiate and compete and win in the market. >> Nayaki, how does internet of things factor into this? Cause I look at sensor technology, I'm just thinking about all the billions of what you have now, right? With whether it's farming or agricultural inputs, business inputs, meteorological, or whatever. I'm sure, you're considering this as well as part of a major play of yours in terms of providing IoT security. How more proliferated is that now and how much of that is kind of in your concern zone you might say? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, just taking these trends we have in managing the end points, we will extend that into the IoT world also. John, when we say IoT world, in an industry where the devices are like healthcare devices. So, stay tuned, in January release we'll be releasing how we will be discovering managing and securing for the healthcare devices like Siemens devices, Bayer devices, Canon devices. So, you're spot on how we can leverage the strength we have in managing end points. Also IoT devices, that same capabilities that we can bring to each of the industry verticals. Now we're not trying to solve the entire vertical market but certain industry verticals where we have a strong footprint. Healthcare is a strong footprint for us. Telcos is a strong footprint for us. So that's where you will see us extending into those IoT devices too. >> Okay, so, in going forward, Jim, if you would just, let's talk about your 2021 in terms of how you further integrate these offerings that you've acquired right now. All of a sudden you've got 30 days of, you know, which is snap of a finger. But what do you see how 2021 is going to lay out, especially with distributed workforces, right? We know that's here. That's a new normal. And with a whole new set of demands on networks and certainly the need for security. >> That's exactly correct, John. I mean, everything is changed and it's never going back to the way it was. You know, everybody has their own definition of the new normal. I guess my definition is at some point in time when things do return to some form of normality, a portion of our workforce will always work from home. To what degree remains to be seen. I don't think we're different from virtually any other industry or any other company. It does put increased demands ,complexity and requirements around how you run your internal IT business. But as Nayaki talked about kind of our virtual service desk offering where you're not going to have a service desk anymore. It's got to be virtual. Well, you have to be able to still provide those services outside of your normal network. And so that's going to be a continued big push for us. I'm incredibly pleased with the way in which the employee bases of the acquired companies have really folded in and become one with our company. And I think as we all recognize cultural differences between organizations can be quite significant and an impediment to really moving forward. Fortunately for us, we have found that both of these organizations fit really nicely from an employee, from a values perspective, from a goals and objectives perspective. And so we did most of the heavy lifting on all the integration shortly after we closed the transactions on the 2nd of December. And so we've moved beyond what I would call the normal kind of concerns and asked around what's going to happen in this and that. We're now kind of heads down in what's the long-term integration going to look like from a product standpoint. We're already looking at additional acquisitions that will continue to take us deeper and wider into our three product pillars, as Nayaki described. And that'll be an ongoing kind of steady dose of acquisitions as we continue to supplement our organic growth within organic growth. >> But you've got to answer my question. I was going to ask you, you founded the company four years ago. There were two big acquisitions back in 2017. We waited four years Jim, until you dip back into that pole again. So the plan, maybe not to wait four years before moving on. >> No trust me, you won't be waiting another four years. Now you've got to bear in mind, John. I wasn't here four years ago. >> That's right, okay. Fair enough. That's okay. I want to thank you both for the time today. Congratulations on sealing those deals back in December and we certainly wish you all the best going forward. And of course, a very happy and a very safe new year for you and yours. >> Same to you, John. Thanks so much for the time. And so it was a pleasure to spend time with you today. >> Thank you, John. Happy New Year again. Thank you. Thank you. (upbeat music)

>>from >>around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent >>2020 sponsored >>by Intel, AWS and our community >>partners. >>Hi. And welcome to the cubes coverage of AWS reinvent 2020. I'm your host, Justin Warren. And today I am joined by two lovely gentlemen. We have Brian Cahill from a company called Frog Slur, which is interesting. And we also have Chad Kenny from Clooney. Oh, gentlemen, welcome to AWS reinvent 2020 Chad, It's bean about what A year since I think we last spoke at at reinvent last year. Why don't you catch us up on what's been happening in the last year of the Korean Times >>s? Um we're excited to be here. Justin, thanks so much for the introduction and hosting us. So it's been an exciting action back here. I will say we've had a bunch of new innovations. I think last time we talked, we were just getting our first native solution inside of AWS for EBS. And since then we've evolved the dissolution dramatically. Claudio is ah, secure backup is a service offering for the enterprise, and this allowed us to be able to scale from just EBS into being the industry's first platform to go across public, private and SAS all in one service, >>and >>we innovated within AWS a ton. So we expanded from CBS Thio, Easy to and RDS. We brought in one of the most native services Outside of snapshots. We kind of progress the enterprise from the traditional snapshot primitive into a true enterprise class Back up on built in a time series Data Lake that allows, you know, enterprises to decouple their data from the infrastructure and really be able to provide tons of value into the future. So it's an exciting time for us. Toe, you know, really bring new innovative solutions to the market. >>That's an impressive amount of work given whatever else has been going on in the last 12 months, Teoh be able to ship that much stuff. You've been really, really busy. Um, brought Brian on now. Brian Frog Slayer. Tell me. Tell me a bit about the background for the name of the company they >>frogs layer. The name actually came from a initial founder who, you know, was trying to protect the animals, wanted to take care of nature and stuff and actually stepped on frog. So you got nicknamed by his buddies frogs here and that, then became the company name. >>So tell us about frogs layer. What is it that and your role there. What is it the Frog Slayer does? And what's your role there? >>Frogs there does business consulting. And then we developed custom software star goals to help businesses get past ah, hurdle. So a growth business that's that's kind of stuck make them more efficient, more productive thing kind of move to the next level. And my role here is the head of I t. That custom software rebuild we host for our clients. And so we try to offer to them is a SAS solution. So it's not only a custom software, but it's kind of offered a SAS solution them to consume. >>Terrific. So >>how long has >>the relationship with Clooney I've been going on? >>It's been about four months now, >>all right. And how did you get introduced Thio chat on the team in Colombia? >>Um, we started with AWS writing our own backup scripts and as we started to move more of their past services like RDS and then RDS went to serve Earless and Aurora the You just have to keep upgrading and changing and tweaking your scripts. And so we started looking round to say, Is there, uh is there a software we could use instead of doing this ourselves? And so through a bar, we got connected with Clooney? Oh, we're checking out a whole bunch of solutions. And most of them were snapshot managers just using the a p i s to do the same things we were doing. Whereas Clooney I was doing it totally differently where they would actually take a snapshot and then rehydrate it, take that data and then make it more like a traditional backup where you could d duplicate it and save on costs and stuff. >>Right? Okay, so, Chad, is that something that you've been? Is that one of the many features that you've added in the last 12 months? Or is this something that a little more fundamental to the way Columbia works? It's >>very fundamental. I think what we're doing is both doing efficiencies around the data itself. So do you do compression and, of course, security around encryption. But we ingest the data index and catalog it on, then make it so that customers could get fine grained granularity for how they restore even down to the database record. And so one of the big things that we've seen, especially in Cloud First customers such as frogs Layer is they're really trying to use either the native tools to start with or build your own type. Models on the costs increased dramatically. The complexity of not having a catalog and index make restores incredibly hard. Andi. It just becomes, ah, much more painful model of hidden costs, left and right. And so what we wanted to do was really provide unique simplicity to be able to protect all of the AWS accounts and even all of the data assets across clouds in one single pane of glass and give a user experience that was dramatically different than having to run very scripts or build your own or have a tool on prim and have a different tool for this cloud versus another cloud. And by having this consolidated index obviously drive a ton of value around leverage from the data, >>Hmm, >>interesting. So, Brian, you mentioned that this is your relationship with Colombia has Bean only about sort of four months that sort of smack in the middle of the pandemic that's been going on here was Was that a trigger for you looking at alternate options? Or were Or is this something that you've been planning for a while? >>No. This has been on a road map for a little while. Um, just as we start using more AWS services and trying to figure out how do we scale what we're doing? Um, we're looking for Mormon Enterprise Backup. But then, as we looked around most the backup solutions, you end up hosting the software upgrade in the software and maintaining things on. >>Have you noticed a major change since you've been using Colombia? >>Yes, What Cuneo offered was the ability to because it's a fast solution. It's a There's an air gap between us and the backup, so I'm not hosting the backups or the data. It's in a separate account, and I can't even delete it. So there's kind of a protection level that someone who are and can't accidentally delete the stuff we're backing up >>right? And one thing that I've noticed is in the news a lot more over the last couple of days. But it's certainly been hitting a lot this year is the idea of ransomware. So a lot of customers that certainly that I speak to have been quite concerned that what's going on with that? So how are you Brian addressing that within your organization? Do you feel comfortable that you're well protected and what else are you looking at? But you're trying to protect yourselves from >>right when it comes to ransom, where we try to have our client data in such a way that no one person can access or delete all of it. And so that's where we initially had separate AWS accounts for every client and with Columbia we now have Colonial maintains that separation. So they're keeping that air gap for us. And then, you know, we're doing our own stuff internally. Just make sure we don't get something. But the backups, including our kind of that second step for say something, gets past all of our safeguards. We've got another safeguard in place that >>sounds pretty prudent. So, Chad, is that is that something that you're hearing from a lot of customers? The need for this separation of powers within the system? >>Yeah, it's coming up quite often. And I think one of the big challenges here is to deliver an air gap solution with other types of data protection products. Whether it's on primer in the cloud have a ton of complexity to it, whether you're buying a separate appliance and you have to create a network air gap or whether you're actually replicating from one AWS account into another AWS account, the cost just double. And so what we built in was a system that not only is immutable, but as Brian mentioned, there's no ability to actually delete the data because the timeto live for the data that's persisted is defined by the policy. And so if a bad actor was to get into the environment, there's no way that they could potentially go into our system and actually delete anything. But if you look at like AWS as an example, if most customers they're storing snapshots inside their account as a hole on theirs, vulnerabilities even beyond, you know, ran somewhere and just on accident or a bad actor even inside the environment that's not even ran somewhere. And so protecting that is one of the key capabilities of the platform where We're outside of the service outside of the cloud, in many cases to protect the customer's data on make sure that they can restore it to any account in the event that even a bad actor gets access to it. Yeah. So, Brian, one thing >>that I like to ask customers about, particularly and cloud services is they've changed the way that we do things. And why Why we started using cloud is often not what we're actually using it for today. So with respect to Cuneo and your services that you're running in cloud, what's something that you've noticed that you're now doing? That surprises you? One of those added bonus is that you weren't really expecting. Have you seen anything like that? As you've managed Thio to start using Clooney Oh, that did everything that you wanted it to do. And now you're finding there's these new opportunities. >>Yeah. One of the big advantages of Colombia was when we took snapshots and replicated them out of the source AWS account. It's like in the source account. There was d duplication enabled. Once you replicated to another AWS account, it re hydrates the snapshot. So everyone takes up the full amount of space And to start hitting this like, how much data do I retain versus like, Oh, this is really expensive. I should like, you know, lower my retention. And we just that totally went away with Clooney. Oh, and then as far as the cloud is, the whole what's cool is that they're kind of more past services. So rds where I don't maintain, you know, patches on the O. S or on the sequel or yours, um, application service where you're not maintaining the OS. That's kind of moving at the next level up faras less less that you're maintaining your more maintaining your code in your application, >>right? And how important is the cloud native capability of Columbia? There's plenty of backup solutions around, and we've We've had them for many years because data protection is not a new idea. Ah, lot of a lot of what other side now cloud native. We try to put things into the cloud first. How important is it? Toe have something which understands cloud native >>and it basically means they're totally aware of what we're doing. And so they're not trying to take an old solution and make it fit in the cloud. They built it for the cloud from the ground up. So when you get in there user interface, there's not all of these old buttons and knobs and stuff. It's very simple. It's a policy, a tag. And then inside the account, the tag grabs objects. So they've made a very simple user interface that's saves a lot of time on implementation. >>Excellent. What are some of the things that you're looking to do in the future now that you've better things in and you've now got four months of solid experience with the product? What are you anticipating that you're going to be doing next? >>Um, we're excited about We're starting. But some are customers in a jurors cloud with Clooney was developing capabilities for that, and then Colombia is also working on capabilities for some of our business applications. So the idea of having all of our kind of backups in one place and less separate buckets you've got to go manages exciting. >>Yes, so Chad multi cloud hybrid cloud. Their words sort of called to be the controversy over the over the years. It does certainly sound like a lot of customers they're using, or at least exploring multiple, different options on Certainly for yourselves, you'll have customers who exist in in one cloud and others that will be in a different one. So how are you addressing the idea of of hybrid cloud and multi cloud? >>Great question. So our belief is that data is going to disperse itself Mawr and Mawr, especially as time goes on and there's multiple faces, this kind of cloud adoption that we see we see kind of, you know, the initial lift into Public Cloud, which kind of created that first hybrid example than theirs. You know the optimization within the clouds, so they're looking for cost reduction and operational izing. And then it's kind of like looking at ways of how doe I utilize different clouds for different things that may be mawr operationalized arm or optimized than others. And so we really believe in this world of creating a single platform or fabric that goes and expands across all clouds, consolidates and index and catalog into one view for the end user, and allows them to be able to push data to any cloud that they need to longer term. And at the same time, protect it. The fun part about migrations is yeah, you could move data, but when you're protecting it at the same time to it allows you to actually keep your production up and running, restore a dev environment somewhere else to play around with it and do it in multiple different potential clouds on then have that initial data that's still fully protected in your environment. And so I'd say that the protection side is a really cool on. The second one is Brian mentioned was the whole Data Lake concept that sits behind where we decouple the data from the infrastructure and with past services. This is incredibly important because, let's say, a year and a half from now, the database engines not even supported with the snapshot that you have left over in your account you've been retaining, you've not got to go through the process of upgrading and getting it up to the rev toe actually even get it working in our world, we create logical backups of those data sets, and they're instantaneously available for direct query access, even right in the gooey. And so now this decoupling of infrastructure brings significant value, right now but into the future. This opens up opportunities to be able to do et al pipelines and actually levers the data well beyond back up into other use cases, >>sort of to finish up looking forward. Always, like Thio have a bit of a view of what the future future holds. Its one of my favorite parts of being at reinvent is we get to see the new technology and and what the possibilities are for for what we could use. It takes something, take it home, have a bit of a play with it and and see what we could do for next year. So but if you Brian, we'll start with you. What are you looking forward to in 2021? What do your your future plans? >>Looking forward to migrating mawr of our stuff toe platform as a service offerings where we're taking advantage of the fact that the cloud has built some of the base layers and we could just build on top of that and then the second one that's exciting is the scalability. So with a B, A s, a server lists and the other land and different things that they're running out where we don't need to run physically. See two instances, air always on databases, but things that can scale up and down based on our client workload. That's just exciting as far as our infrastructure and and just the ability for cost savings, but also that just just in time, scaling for our customer demand >>and chad yourselves at Columbia What what can we Can you give us a hint of what we we might see in 2021 from Clooney? Oh, >>yes. So the first thing I'd say that I'm most excited about any New Year is just seeing the advantages customers get with the platform, right? Like we did a lot of innovation during this time. I'd say Cove, it had, you know, some benefits and some downsides from just company growth and, you know, not being close together and having that feeling. But we innovated incredibly quickly, and we were heads down and highly efficient, and eso I'm excited about really showcasing a lot of the innovation that we built during this year, and I think our customers are moving to the cloud faster than ever. And so I'm excited toe to see a lot of that. What you'll see from us is more and more innovation outside of just, you know, the traditional realm. Changing the user experience dramatically with new innovations, which sounds kind of broad. But think of it as creating more and more of that fabric. We're going to get into new public clouds. We're going to get into new SAS services. We're going to expand the user experience in the core platform for recover ability, for security, for enabling easy work flows for various different use cases. And so I'm excited about taking the data and really leveraging it into multiple different use cases outside of data protection on into the future. >>Well, it sounds like we have a lot to look forward to from Cuneo. I I personally look forward to hearing more about it. Hopefully we get to catch up. Ah, little bit earlier, Not not quite. Wait a full 12 months between reinvents, but if not, we'll definitely be seeing you again next year and and hearing about all of the new innovations that you've managed to come up with. You've got 12 months. There's plenty of time. Yeah, definitely Awesome. Sorry. Thank you very much. Brian Brian Kale from Frogs Layer and Pritchard, Kenny from Clooney. Oh, did my guest today. I've been Justin Warren for the Cube and all of our coverage here for AWS reinvent 2020. Do check out all the rest of the videos on. We will see you next time. >>Take care, Yeah.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of Dell Technologies. World Digital Experience Brought to You by Dell Technologies. >>Welcome to the Cubes coverage of Dell Technologies World. The Digital Experience in 2020 I'm Lisa Martin, and I'm pleased to welcome back one of our alumni on the Cube. Joining me is Gil Shorts in the SPP and the Edge Portfolio Strategy at Execution for Dell Technologies. Gil, it's great to see you, even virtually. >>It's great to see you again, Lisa. >>It wouldn't be a Dell Technologies world if I didn't get a chance to talk to you. We didn't have you on the Cube, so we appreciate it. And you are very socially distant from me. I am in California. You're in Israel, so we're following guidelines. But one of the one of the other things that's changed since I've lasting you is you're now in this new role with respect to edge. Tell me a little bit about that. >>Well, a few months ago, the Dell Technologies Management asked me to look after our, um, its strategy and execution. Um, they put me in this role to execute on a strategy that has been developed for a while. Look at the market looking, looking at the opportunity. Onda also, you know, based on where I came from with VX rail looking at similar concept, that would be implemented across the board. And so here I am today in the process of setting up 18 that would help the company to capture that future opportunity. >>Well, congratulations on that. So we've been talking about the edge for a while. It isn't anything new, but talk to us about what's going on from Dell Technologies Perspective. What are some of the things that you're seeing with respect to the value that the Edge will provide two businesses in any industry? >>Um, you're right and he's not new. We have bean at the edge, all of us, the industry, definitely Dell Technologies forever. What's different is that for the last few years, a lot of the applications that are there to capture information and make real time decisions have bean in data centers or in the cloud, and we used to connect all sorts of sensors directly to those of data centers or clouds. Well, now we have too much information. That information is very costly. to move. It takes time to move it. I'm sometimes you don't want to move into a cloud or even your own data center. And so the industry is starting to move more and more. Compute storage, networking towards the edge. Eso It's nothing new, but you know there's use cases. Some of them are all use cases that need to migrate towards where the data is created to be a manufacturing plant or a retail store or or a minor or utility company. And there are a new use cases that are just being enabled by technology by, uh, better connectivity. Um, computer vision. You know, it used to be there in a store. There was a point of sale. Well, now there's a self check out, sometimes with the front detection capability. So all of those presents a fairly drastic change, where some expectation as 75% of the world's data, is created outside of the traditional data center cloud by 2025. And that's why we need to be working towards being the best choice for our customers for the edge applications. >>So, yeah, you quoted Gartner saying that 75% of that cloud enterprised it or the enterprise data is going to be processed outside formal data center or the cloud by 2025 is, you said That's in five short years, hopefully short years when we return to normal, so tremendous amount of change going on. But you also talk about some new use cases. I'm just curious, since the world has so dramatically changed our since we last saw you in person, are any of those use cases driven by the pandemic and how many businesses have had to Tibbett so quickly and change their way of operating? >>Well, that that's a very good example of how edge applications are being being leveraged. Obviously, computer vision, thermal imaging. Um, in some places, though, that's, you know, a very loaded term. You know, some social distancing applications are being created around the world. The the the world is a new way to respond to this, uh, this pandemic. But this pandemic, you know, will come will hopefully go soon. Go away soon when we get the vaccine. Um, but even day to day has changed the we doom or in a digital manner, we leverage more sensors and all sorts of electronic feelers out there. Um, you know, I talked to in agriculture Company recently that they have a robot that looks at their plans every day and decides which one are healthy and which one are sick and what to do about it. Um, they have a robot that follows that one and take section, and I suggested that they should have another robot to just eat the fruits. And, you know, none of us will be required anymore. But the point is, on a mission e no applications are being created because we can, and that that requires real time decision making. And that's why compute and storage and networking are moving towards where the data is created, and hence the growth in edge applications as we see them, >>that really time implication is absolutely critical. And that's something that businesses, whether it's agricultural or construction or retail, for example, or manufacturing that needs that real time insight. We talk about that all the time. We also talk about the term, you know, businesses need to get actionable insights from data, and that's one of those terms, like data driven. That could mean multiple different things. What from Dell technologies perspective, enabling a business to get actionable insights from data. What does that mean from Dell? Text perspective. And how is the edge of facilitator of that? >>Well, I think we need to look at, you know, our value, it our focus, which is in the infrastructure. I'm there. And so if somebody has information created at the edge, they would have their own way to analyze that data. Sometimes it's gonna be people data scientists with another latest application. Many times more and more, it's gonna be machines through machine learning that will analyze the situation and make recommendations. Either way, this environment needs to be up and running. It needs to be resilient. It needs to be outside of the data center, which presents a lot of challenges. Um, it's, you know, fragmented technology that is moving from different places to the edge in multiple multiple physical and environmental constraints. Um, those environments are remote and distributed. It's not in your data center, which means that you need to make sure that you have reliable service and support. You also need to secure it better. Suddenly, there is more entry points of things that people could touch and on great problems for the organization. So our job, in my opinion, is to solve those problems is to say, Look, you know, you need to move towards the edge to analyze your data, to make decisions. We're here to solve that problem and and allow you to do this without making a significant significant trade off, you know, versus doing it in your own data center or in the cloud. >>Yeah, I was talking to one of Dell Technologies customers the other day who has tens of thousands of sensors and cameras all over the world, or maybe great work there. And I'm thinking all of the challenges with respect to the environmental implications or right physical implications. And I was thinking, you know, the business is doing edge in California. The last month would have been very challenged with things like the smoke. How do you help organizations to enable that infrastructure to be reliable under different physical and environmental conditions? >>That's a great question, and I will just say before before I have said specifically that while the physical constraints are something that we usually talk about when we talk about EJ, I actually think that the bigger problem is management. Um, but we're not unaware for the physical requirements. So we are busy delivering recognized short depth. You know, servers we just launched recently. The extra to a platform, Highly ragged eyes, short depth will speak server that can go from minus, you know, sells you some to 55 cents you saw in temperature. Um, or you know, the ability to connect those through, you know, software defined networking. Or if I talk about a little bit of my heritage taking the same extra, too, with the VM or Visa V X range stack and said, you know, putting it out there as a ruggedized but also remotely managed in full stack solution. Um, So you will see us putting out and have bean different form factors front and serviceability, different temperature ranges, a different kind of CPS, all of those. But I will also tell you that we're gonna focus heavily on the way to manage those and secure them and update them because I think that's where the simplification comes, not just from the form factor of themselves. >>Yeah, that has been the heterogeneous and and very widely distributed nature of the H has been a barrier for businesses for quite a while. Can you unpack that a little bit? Mawr In terms of the simplification of the management, How is Dele? Technology is going to enable a business to achieve that. >>Well, let's start with what? What? What we have out there in the market today. Somebody could have a cloud native application developed, you know, maybe even all containerized. And they could run it on tansy t k g on the VX rail, and they could run it in thousands of locations around the world. I'm centrally managing all of those Andre the phone factors being, you know, regular server or ragged, A server. Um, the ability to run your edge application as an extension off your cloud model is also very important getting to consistent operation. So, for example, somebody is using VM, or Cloud Foundation in their data center. Could leverage that recently large capability off multiple multi classroom manager. So now you have a central VM or club foundation managing multiple classes out there on DSO, we bring together the physical attributes and the management attributes on at the same time. Um, if you expand on it I also think the Dell will have to meet customers where they are with, you know, the the ability to get simplifying and automate solutions for their choice off applications where they are today. And so that's what we're going to be working towards. >>So when you're talking with customers who are either looking to expand their edge operations, simplify them like you were just talking about, or even those businesses that are looking to explore and exploit the edge for operational improvement and maybe being able to deliver a better customer experience. I'd love to know how you approach those different customers. For example, I know that Dell says Don't consider the edge of separate problem. >>That's true the and I don't think customers look at the edges a separate problem either. In other words, the most conversations today would would look at in architecture that has some cloud and some edge. That cloud could be in their own hybrid cloud solution in the data center or a hyper scaler solution that they're running on. Um, if you think about the most generic problem at the edge, it's an analytics problem, right? So we know. So we know the data is created at the edge, it's going to be analyzed by definition. If you talk about machine learning, for example, parts would happen at the edge. What would happen in the data center or in the cloud? Um, if you look at any other type of analytics, you'll make some real time decisions. But save some of the information back in the cloud. So it's not a separate decision anymore. It's got to be somehow connected to your infrastructure. And I think that also learns toe. More and more organizations are putting together the O. T. What we call it operational technology in the i t. Um, when they're trying to leverage I t best practices in the OT space, and I think that's how they're coming together, right, you have to transform. You need to do something with the data. You look at a new architectures. I t brings that cloud or hybrid cloud or distributed computer architectures er into those more traditional environments. >>A little bit about that we've tried and we've talked about the I T. O T. Convergence and relationships in the past many times on the queue. But that's an essential component here, so that not only can a business really face those barriers, confront them and eliminate them, but it's also sometimes a bit culturally challenging. What do you see when you talk with customers and you recognize that's one of the things that they need to do with the line? I t n ot what? Your recommendations there, >>Um, first of all is I always wonder if ot people now we're calling them ot people. I certainly know that I t people are identified as I d. I think multi people are head of engineering head of production. You know, they run their businesses and and they've been doing things they you know, it's not like they haven't been doing even the analysis. Even nothing really is New Year. But they would use the, you know, the machine manufacturer on prem solution or a cloud solution to many specific so solutions worm or bespoke or specific specific machine specific problems. Oh, the advent off edge computing and those environments moving closer to the edge and the architecture unable to consolidate, by the way one of the strength until technology has. And so instead of just solving a you know, a A I don't know. Machine maintenance schedule or improvement in a plan. We can have an environment that's all that and possibly the video surveillance and maybe the plan. TRP. There is no need anymore to solve any problems specifically with a specific solution. That's where I t comes in, because that's what I T has been doing for a long time. So that conversation that bridge between solving specific problem and putting together an architectural ER that could consolidate multiple use cases and be part of an overall cloud our data center to its strategy. It's very, very helpful for both sides because because it's it's very effective. Um, I think more and more customers are realizing that that was conversations are happening and I t is being put into recommend a solution. So Andi, I think in fact, there's some research that shows that that is happening, Andi, that sets us up to have the right conversation with right, um, owners in those accounts. >>That's excellent. That brings up another question. I had you mentioned the word bespoke a minute or so ago, and I thought, you know so many of the of the edge deployments. There's complexity there. There might be unique requirements depending on business, depending on vertical. What's Dell Technologies approach to tackling the edge? Consistently like like the top three things that you go to with every opportunity every day appointment that you know, these three things fundamentally must be and part of the foundation. >>I think we touched on those. I think the recognition that it's part of a larger strategy is one. And so it's gonna be playing along in that you know that strategy, that data center to edge or cloud strategy. Um, the other one is the management that you put in place. And so, by the way, even even a few things that we we are gap today, which is why we are investing in the edge. Um, like the ability to provision with zero touch simplifying that experience, though we are very good at life cycle management, for example, which is the next thing. So it's that consistent operation between core and edge, which is very important. It's the physical constraints that have to be addressed in, I think, more important than anything is the ability to get support because you can't be everywhere that is considered for us and that you need somebody to be there in Tel. Um, you know, his people almost everywhere around the world that can be there on on a short notice to take care of problems. Moreover, many of our technologies dial home, and so we know when things happen even before they do. Um so I think sometimes people mention enterprise. Great. You know, it's It's a very important consideration to look at those edge. Sometimes people think that edge is small and possibly not as, um um, requiring as a Davis and replication. In my opinion, the workloads that are now going to the head require enterprise grade treatment and to end. And so you know, it's it's the management. It's the physical environment in the support that you may require that are very common. >>Excellent. Thank you. So last question for you. Since we don't get to do a physical Dell Technologies world this year, hopefully we will again one day soon. I want to know in this new role what are you you're excited about with respect to edge when you're engaging with customers, presumably over video conferencing. What are some of the things that you see that you're really excited about safe for the next sector. 12 months? >>Well, look, from a business perspective. Clearly, um, the the pendulum is swinging our way in a sense of customer need. What we have, which is very nice, because you can solve customer problems with a lot of experience and a amazing portfolio, though it has some gaps that we're gonna work on, Which is why you know what we're investing from a personal standpoint, it's It's kind of a rare opportunity to touch real life things. If that makes any sense, Every conversation is about tangible things that people do. They manufacturer, they save lives. They are growing plants. Um, it is. It has a very physical element that makes makes it so much more interesting. It also the edges. You know, it's the one area that we deal with. It has a paan almost in every sentence, so you can go for a conversation without anybody or anybody can >>Ugo. Now let's let's end it with a great panel for the edge. >>I know So what? No, I'm just saying, maybe I'm living on the edge. Who knows? >>Oh, nice living on the edge. I think that's what we're all doing during this coven. 19. Well, Gil, it's been so great to have you back on the Cube. Thank you for your time. I look forward to seeing you. Hopefully the next event in person. >>I hope so too. Lisa. Good to see you. >>Likewise. Bar Guillotine Arnson. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes. Coverage of Dell Technologies, World 2020. A digital experience.

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, with coverage of the Global .NEXT digital experience. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. And welcome to theCUBE's coverage of the Nutanix .NEXT global digital experience. We've been at the Nutanix shows since the first time they ever happened, way back at the Fontainebleau, in Miami, of course. Nutanix is now a public company. A lot of news, a lot going on, and the first time they've done, first, a global event and digital event because this was the convergence of the events that they were originally going to have both in North America as well as Europe. So happy to welcome back to the program. To help kick it off, first of all, we have Monica Kumar, she's the Senior Vice President of Marketing with Nutanix. And also joining us is Virginia Gambale, she is a Managing Partner at Azimuth Partners LLC and also a board member of Nutanix. Virginia, Monica, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you so much for having us. >> Thank you, Stu. >> So the event here, of course, the line we've used at many of those shows is, how do we bring people together even while we're apart? Good energy, great speakers, everything from Dr. Condoleezza Rice and Simon Sinek, in the opening, in Trevor Noah for some entertainment in day two, and lots of announcements with partners, customers, of course, speaking, and lots of the Nutants. So, Monica, maybe I start with you. You've had a very a close role in helping to shape a lot of what's going on here. I kind of teed up. Give us, from your standpoint, really, kind of the goals, give us a little bit of insight into putting this together for an online audience versus the kind of party that we have for the users when they come together in-person. >> Yeah, thank you so much, Stu. And I'm so excited to have Virginia here with us as well. You know, obviously, the world is so different now. And one of the biggest things that we've been doing for the last six, seven months is figuring out how do we stay connected with our customers, with our partners, with our own employees, and society at large? So, along the same lines, .NEXT has evolved to, of course, also being a virtual event, but at the same time, the biggest design factor for .NEXT is really the connection with customers, partners, our own employees, and influencers, and society at large. So you'll see a lot of our agenda is designed around future of work and what does it mean to be a leader and a technology leader, a technology provider in this world while we are living through the pandemic. We're also talking about future of education, future of healthcare, future financial services, all the things that matter to us as human beings, and then what's the role that technology is going to play in that, and, of course, how can Nutanix as a technology vendor help our customers navigate these uncertain times. So that's how most of our content is on day-one. And then day-two is really all about the latest and greatest cool tech. And you're going to hear a lot about and you've heard a lot about cloud technology and cloud being that constant enabler of innovation for businesses and for IT. So all of our hybrid cloud, multicloud, our core hyperconverged infrastructure, and how that's evolving to hybrid cloud infrastructure, it's about platform as a service, DevOps, I mean, database solutions, and these are competing solutions, you name it. So that's going to be at day-two. And then day-three is a partner exchange. So, obviously, partners are really important to us. That's the village, the ecosystem. And we have a whole day dedicated to our partners in helping understand how can we together bring the best solutions to market. >> Virginia, I'd love to get your experience so far with the event that you've attended. >> Well, I always find that .NEXT experiences a very broadening, enriching experience. I tell people who have never heard of cloud, who are well in the cloud, who are wanting to just learn about it, just sort of standing at the precipice of embarking on this journey, to watch or participate or go to the .NEXT for Nutanix, because it is so rich with content and speakers that are so intelligent about an experience about what they are doing and embarking on. And then in addition to that, there's always a hint and a lookout at the future and where we are going and where we need to think about where we are going. So I am very excited. The first part of this virtual .NEXT, I didn't know what to expect, but I am extremely pleased. >> Well, yeah, Virginia, you bring up a really good point. It's not just the cool technology, and there's lots of that, but what, personally, how do I enrich myself, how do I reach my career, how do enrich my community, that heart that Nutanix talks a lot about. Monica, obviously cloud has been a very important piece of the discussion. I noticed a little bit of shift in marketing. For a couple of years, the enterprise cloud was the discussion. Dheeraj's teams is out, he said, "Okay, we're going to change HCI from hyperconverged infrastructure to hybrid cloud infrastructure." You and I had had a conversation when the announcement of Nutanix Clusters with AWS, and at the show, Scott Guthrie, of course, wearing the signature red polo, and deeper partnership with Microsoft for Azure. Definitely, lots of excitement around that because Microsoft is a company that most people partner with and work with and use their technologies. And things like Azure Arc have the real promise to help us live in this hybrid and multicloud world. So we'd love to just briefly touch on the cloud pieces, what you're seeing in the news from Nutanix's standpoint? >> Absolutely. So one of the big pieces of news that's come out of .NEXT is a partnership with Azure, and we are super-excited for that partnership. Not only is Nutanix Clusters going to be available on Azure and we are jointly developing that solution to bring hybrid cloud solution to customers, you rightfully mentioned Azure Arc, we are also working to integrate Azure Arc across on-premises and Azure cloud. So, ultimately, for us, it's really about technology being a means to an end. The end is business outcomes for our customers, the end is a better customer experience, better employee experience, growth for the company in terms of revenue and profitability. And ultimately, that's what technology is doing, is really simplifying the use of cloud technology and build that hybrid cloud fabric that customers can deploy very quickly, very easily, seamlessly, and then manage it very easily, oh, and by the way, also be able to move their apps and data and license across the on-premises and, in this case, Azure environment. So very excited. By the way, we don't just stop there. When you say cloud, and when we say hybrid cloud and multicloud, it's, of course, on-premises, it's, of course, the hyperscaler clouds, but then there are service provider clouds. Because in region, and then, by the way, I don't know if you heard Khaled Soudani, he's the CTO at SocGen, he joined us as well in one of the keynotes, and obviously, they are building hybrid clouds. And when we talk about hybrid cloud to customers, it's also service provider cloud, which could be for data locality, data residency regions. It's also Nutanix's own cloud, the Nutanix cloud. So that's definitely one of the big pieces of news coming out of .NEXT, is this morphing or I would say evolution of hyperconverged infrastructure to becoming the hybrid cloud infrastructure. >> Virginia, of course, the big discussion this year has been the impact of COVID and what that's meant to IT priorities, CIO priorities. In a lot of the conversations we've been having on theCUBE this year, there's been a real acceleration on a lot of those cloud initiatives that Monica was talking about. So what are you hearing? What are you seeing? What are some of those imperatives that are either accelerating or, and are there some things that people are saying, "Hey, we might want to put this on ice for a few months?" >> Well, I can tell you, from my work with clients, the many public boards that I sit on, which span from financial services, to pure tech, all the way through to consumer-facing businesses, I really see the spectrum. And three years ago, when I was on theCUBE, we were talking about standing at the precipice and jumping in. Now, we are full on, we are in it. And Monica talked about all these different public clouds and the various providers who are leading their own way. But what I love and I think it's really important is that we need an independent company that actually begins to step back and help all the leaders that are running technology and operations and customer-facing functions, to be able to help them do their job. So here we are today, talking to various CEOs and C-suite executives. And the big issues are, "Okay, this stuff isn't so scary, we are in it, we need it for being able to function in the COVID world, and we also need it because our customers need us to need this, to have it." So, when we look at our portfolio of how businesses are investing in technology and other areas going forward, innovation, cost management, and also cyber seemed to be sort of the three very important themes of the day. And I believe that, today, as we sit through the next few days with .NEXT, we are really going to find stories, experiences, and visions about how we can actually address all three of those. >> Yeah, I think the point, Virginia, you're making is so fantastic, that this is the age of innovation while organizations also have to focus on cost intelligence. And that's the number one thing we're hearing from our customers. I mean, like when you were talking, it just reminded me, in the old days and maybe even up to five years ago, and the CIOs were all about knowing technology knowhow and managing costs, and like it was a cost center. But now you look at IT, IT is at the forefront of driving innovation. IT is at the forefront of adopting cloud. But at the same time, IT is also tasked with being smart about cost optimization. So you're right, that's exactly what we're also going to discuss the .NEXT, is how can technology help our customers innovate and, at the same time, be intelligent about cost optimization and which cloud to use for which workloads, for example. >> Yes, and also having the flexibility and the optionality to be able to put these things together. >> Well, yeah, Monica, simplicity was always at the core of what Nutanix did. And talking about the hybrid cloud solutions, it's very important you talk about the fact that it's the same operational model wherever things lived. The one piece that you didn't cover yet, that Virginia teed up, cyber security. So, absolutely, we would need innovation, we need to look at costs, but security is something that went from, it was already at the top of the list, to, oh, my gosh, in 2020, it feels like it's even higher there. So how does Nutanix make sure that, Nutanix along with your partners are making sure that companies, their data, their employees are all secure as possible? >> Absolutely. You mentioned that simplicity is a design principle for Nutanix from day-one, add to that security, security has been a guiding light from day-one, and security is built into our platform. It's not an afterthought, it's something we designed our products to incorporate right from the beginning. And there's a reason for that. The reason is we have over 17,000 customers, and a lot of them are running big, huge enterprise business critical workloads on Nutanix, including public sector, including state and local governments. And we have to ensure that they are able to make the environment secure using Nutanix technology. So whether it's our core technology platform, where we have things built in like data encryption, audit capabilities, or whether it's some of our new portfolio products. Last time, I think, Stu, we talked about how Nutanix offers now this complete cloud platform. 10 years ago, we started with a core foundation, which is hyperconverged infrastructure. But in the last few years, we've added on data center services, like other storage, different types of storage, consolidation, ability for customers, networking options, DR, we've added DevOps and database services, we've added desktop services. If you combine all of those three together with our digital infrastructure services, that's a complete cloud platform that has to be secure for our customers to run enterprise apps on databases, analytics workloads, and also build cloud native applications and run on it, and be able to run the same stack in a public cloud or private on-premises cloud. That has to be secure, so that's the number one design principle for Nutanix. >> Virginia, if Dave Alante was here, he would probably throw out the line that security has really become a board-level discussion. Well, you sit on a few boards, so I'd love to hear a little bit of your insights there as to the security that Monica talked about. Is this something that comes up at every board meeting? What kind of concerns are there out there today? >> Well, Stu, there is no question, it historically has come up at every board meeting. And one of the issues with that has always been the cost growth and escalation that takes place, and can we keep throwing more dollars at securing our environment. Fast-forward, look where we are today. We are highly dispersed workforce. So our attack surface has increased exponentially. And when we think about all the products that we're using, from virtual desktop and functioning from wherever we are in this world, how can that not help, but in the mind of a board director who doesn't know too much about technology, it would frighten them even more. However, the thing that I constantly always underscore is the sooner we move to these more modernized infrastructures, the better our ability will be to secure our environment at a very cost-efficient model. Because these technologies, particularly like Nutanix, have security built into them. And instead of having to add constantly to our cyber workforce, who's going to be looking at and parsing through information, we are able to have these embedded sensors and our ability to have the infrastructure talk to us about where our vulnerabilities are, as opposed to us having to go in and try to figure that out either post event or at some point pre any type of event. So it's very exciting time. I really encourage people to just get off our legacy environments as fast as we can and go to these modernized technology infrastructures and to the vendors who make this invisible to us. And I think the board members start to then say, "Okay, I can begin to understand that." I often give an example of if you're building a smart house versus you buy an old house and you're trying to put cameras on the side and sensors in the windows and in the doors, you can't possibly be as effective in your security as if you built it from the ground up to be secure. >> Yeah, definitely, it is challenging to retrofit that. Modernization is definitely a drum beat we've seen. Monica, a question for you on that theme is, in many ways, the current economic situation is a challenge, but it's also a forcing function. If I can need to keep up, if I need my employees to stay productive, I often need to rapidly adapt some modern solutions like Virginia was saying. Any words on that from what you're hearing from your customers and how Nutanix is helping? >> Absolutely. As I said earlier, I think the more IT leaders we talk to, it's become clear to us that there's three major mandates for IT that they are supporting. It's business growth, it's customer experience, and it's employee experience. So, in terms of modernization, absolutely, we find that IT stakeholders are very keen to go on a journey, which kind of looks like this, and again, it may not be the same for everybody, but starting with data center modernization or what we call infrastructure modernization. So really standardizing and consolidating all the key workloads so they can most efficiently use the data center assets. But then the next step very quickly becomes automation. And I think that's what Virginia was alluding to earlier, is we can no longer throw more and more people at things like security and provisioning and patching and updating and expect us to deliver the service-level agreements we have with business. So automation becomes really key. And, of course, with AI and machine learning, there's a lot of solutions out there around automation, and Nutanix is obviously big in terms of automating. Our one-click upgrades are legendary. That's even before people talked about AI and machine learning, we've been offering them. But then the next step becomes, very quickly, is, okay, great, I've automated everything, IT has become a service, my stakeholders are, I'm able to deliver the service-level agreements, well, what's next? How do I get the flexibility to on-demand spin up environments? And I think that's where the linkage with public cloud comes in, that's where customers are starting to build hybrid cloud. And then the ultimate nirvana that we're hearing from many customers is, they want to be able to use the right cloud for the right workload. A lot of our customers don't want to be stuck, and I'm using the word stuck kind of loosely, but just not with one public cloud. Just like our customers use a lot of different hardware providers in some cases, they also want to have the optionality of using an Azure for one workload, maybe an AWS for something else, maybe it's on-premises for something else, maybe it's a service provider for something else, and that's the ultimate nirvana for IT. So that would be the ultimate modernization, is where you have this kind of like an infinite computing solution, where you can go tap into any resource you need at the point in time that you need it for and be able to pay the right price for that and have a single management across everything. So you don't have to worry about the complexity of managing for environments, it's all done through one single plane, and that's where Nutanix comes in. Really, that's what we are doing, is making it really easy for our customers to reach from this infrastructure modernization, all the way to this hybrid multicloud world, with a single, unified management plan, the ability to move data, applications, and license around as they choose to, and have a cost-optimized solution. >> And let me add to that because I love what Monica is saying. You know, as a corporate fiduciary, I want my partners to do what they do best. So having each cloud provider really continue down the path of the areas that they are best in class in as opposed to wasting their time competing with each other on the same stuff, which doesn't help me evolve as a consumer, and it doesn't help them grow their business. And so, by enabling this kind of hybrid world, we are allowing each of these cloud providers to be able to do what they do best, which helps us invest in our future as consumers. >> All right, so Virginia, talking about fiduciary duties, as a board member, there's a topic that was talked a little bit at the show, but we'd love your feedback. And Monica, I want to hear the company's superior parent. Of course, I'm talking about the founder and CEO, Dheeraj Pandey is, there's a transition, there's a look, looking for the new CEO. If I have the line right, he's he said he will be a Nutant forever even though his role will become a little bit more invisible, of course, what Nutanix has been trying to do with infrastructure and clouds before. So, Virginia, what does this mean for today and for the direction of the company? And then Monica, I would love kind of the internal look from an employee standpoint. >> Well, Stu, thank you for asking the question. I actually did a significant post on LinkedIn a couple of days ago because I really wanted to express to the world how blown away I am by our founder, Dheeraj. I've been working with him now over the last three years. And as I have gotten to know him, and I have worked with a lot of founders in my life, and I've worked with a lot of CEOs who were founders and some that were not founders, they were just CEOs and they came in after the fact, and it is rare that you find an individual that is just so focused on driving the mission forward in a very selfless way. And from the very beginning, people who ended up talking to with our CEO over their life's journey with Nutanix over the last 10, 11 years, will say the same exact same thing, which is, his single focus was about the mission and how Nutanix can support and grow the mission of the organization and what the world needs today. And it is rare that an individual will say, at a certain point in time, "I have taken this thing that I have created to a certain point, and now, it is yet at another inflection point, and it needs to continue on in a significant way. So being concerned about every facet, from do I have the right talent, do I have the right offering, do I have the right capital position, do I have the right board, do I have the right person at the helm? And I have spent a lot of time talking with Dheeraj, which is a gift and a pleasure in life, and to be able to have a candid conversation about where is Nutanix going next and how best to get there. And for a CEO to be able to sit down and talk to their board about that, it is really unique. And to have someone who cares so much about the future of the company, I was really blown away. So I'm very excited about our prospects going forward. Otherwise, I would not have joined this board. We all have, our lives are challenged, and life is short, and we want to spend the time doing the things that we believe in and we love and support. So I am very excited for the next chapter. We have built an incredible base. And now we're poised for very significant growth. And I think to underscore that, you saw the performance of the company was extremely good, the partnerships that are coming out, this is exactly the time when you want to, again, self-effacing, disrupting yourself, looking at where we need to go next. The time to do that is not at the point where you are there and you've arrived at that next step, but just as you're about to take off on a launch. And I think we're here. And I'm very excited. >> Yeah, I'll add to that. So, first of all, Virginia, we are so thrilled that you're on the board. As far as Dheeraj goes, I believe he's a force of nature. I think that's what Virginia said. And look, I'm a parent, and for those of you who are parents out there, this will probably resonate. When a child is born, you nurture your child and you take care of them. At some point, they leave for college. And for me, it was a hard one coming from a different culture, but I almost seem this is akin to that. Dheeraj is the founding father of Nutanix. He has really nurtured the company, he's built it up, he's given us all the right culture principles, and now, he's sending us off to call it saying, "Okay, this is the next phase of your life, go do the best you can and take Nutanix to the next level." And I'm really, really proud to be part of this company, I've been here for a year-and-a-half, we have amazing talent, people are important, we have amazing innovations. And, by the way, this new year, we started a fiscal year in August, it's going to be full of amazing innovations. I mean, this is only the beginning, what you've heard in the last two or three weeks, a lot more is coming down. And then there are some process that we've put in place so people process technology, process to actually scale as a larger company. So I think what Dheeraj has done is really set us up for the next phase of our life, and he's always going to be there for us as an advisor just like a parent is there for the child when they're off to college and off to doing other things in life. That's what I believe. >> Well, Monica and Virginia, thank you so much for sharing the updates. theCUBE really appreciates being able to be part of the Nutanix .NEXT event, and great to catch up with both of you. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you for continuing to work with us. Thank you. >> All right, stay tuned for more from Nutanix .NEXT digital experience. I'm Stu Miniman. And thank you for watching theCUBE. (gentle music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, with coverage of the Global .NEXT digital experience. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. And welcome to theCUBE's coverage of the Nutanix .NEXT global digital experience. We've been at the Nutanix shows since the first time they ever happened, way back at the Fontainebleau, in Miami, of course. Nutanix is now a public company. A lot of news, a lot going on, and the first time they've done, first, a global event and digital event because this was the convergence of the events that they were originally going to have both in North America as well as Europe. So happy to welcome back to the program. To help kick it off, first of all, we have Monica Kumar, she's the Senior Vice President of Marketing with Nutanix. And also joining us is Virginia Gambale, she is a Managing Partner at Azimuth Partners LLC and also a board member of Nutanix. Virginia, Monica, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you so much for having us. >> Thank you, Stu. >> So the event here, of course, the line we've used at many of those shows is, how do we bring people together even while we're apart? Good energy, great speakers, everything from Dr. Condoleezza Rice and Simon Sinek, in the opening, in Trevor Noah for some entertainment in day two, and lots of announcements with partners, customers, of course, speaking, and lots of the Newtons. So, Monica, maybe I start with you. You've had a very a close role in helping to shape a lot of what's going on here. I kind of teed up. Give us, from your standpoint, really, kind of the goals, give us a little bit of insight into putting this together for an online audience versus the kind of party that we have for the users when they come together in-person. >> Yeah, thank you so much, Stu. And I'm so excited to have Virginia here with us as well. You know, obviously, the world is so different now. And one of the biggest things that we've been doing for the last six, seven months is figuring out how do we stay connected with our customers, with our partners, with our own employees, and society at large? So, along the same lines, .NEXT has evolved to, of course, also being a virtual event, but at the same time, the biggest design factor for .NEXT is really the connection with customers, partners, our own employees, and influencers, and society at large. So you'll see a lot of our agenda is designed around future of work and what does it mean to be a leader and a technology leader, a technology provider in this world while we are living through the pandemic. We're also talking about future of education, future of healthcare, future financial services, all the things that matter to us as human beings, and then what's the role that technology is going to play in that, and, of course, how can Nutanix as a technology vendor help our customers navigate these uncertain times. So that's how most of our content is on day-one. And then day-two is really all about the latest and greatest cool tech. And you're going to hear a lot about and you've heard a lot about cloud technology and cloud being that constant enabler of innovation for businesses and for IT. So all of our hybrid cloud, multicloud, our core hyperconverged infrastructure, and how that's evolving to hybrid cloud infrastructure, it's about platform as a service, DevOps, I mean, database solutions, and these are competing solutions, you name it. So that's going to be at day-two. And then day-three is a partner exchange. So, obviously, partners are really important to us. That's the village, the ecosystem. And we have a whole day dedicated to our partners in helping understand how can we together bring the best solutions to market. >> Virginia, I'd love to get your experience so far with the event that you've attended. >> Well, I always find that .NEXT experiences a very broad and enriching experience. I tell people who have never heard of cloud, who are well in the cloud, who are wanting to just learn about it, just sort of standing at the precipice of embarking on this journey, to watch or participate or go to the .NEXT for Nutanix, because it is so rich with content and speakers that are so intelligent about an experience about what they are doing and embarking on. And then in addition to that, there's always a hint and a lookout at the future and where we are going and where we need to think about where we are going. So I am very excited. The first part of this virtual .NEXT, I didn't know what to expect, but I am extremely pleased. >> Well, yeah, Virginia, you bring up a really good point. It's not just the cool technology, and there's lots of that, but what, personally, how do I enrich myself, how do I reach my career, how do enrich my community, that heart that Nutanix talks a lot about. Monica, obviously cloud has been a very important piece of the discussion. I noticed a little bit of shift in marketing. For a couple of years, the enterprise cloud was the discussion. Dheeraj's teams is out, he said, "Okay, we're going to change HCI from hyperconverged infrastructure to hybrid cloud infrastructure." You and I had had a conversation when the announcement of Nutanix Clusters with AWS, and at the show, Scott Guthrie, of course, wearing the signature red polo, and deeper partnership with Microsoft for Azure. Definitely, lots of excitement around that because Microsoft is a company that most people partner with and work with and use their technologies. And things like Azure Arc have the real promise to help us live in this hybrid and multicloud world. So we'd love to just briefly touch on the cloud pieces, what you're seeing in the news from Nutanix's standpoint? >> Absolutely. So one of the big pieces of news that's come out of .NEXT is a partnership with Azure, and we are super-excited for that partnership. Not only is Nutanix Clusters going to be available on Azure and we are jointly developing that solution to bring hybrid cloud solution to customers, you rightfully mentioned Azure Arc, we are also working to integrate Azure Arc across on-premises and Azure cloud. So, ultimately, for us, it's really about technology being a means to an end. The end is business outcomes for our customers, the end is a better customer experience, better employee experience, growth for the company in terms of revenue and profitability. And ultimately, that's what technology is doing, is really simplifying the use of cloud technology and build that hybrid cloud fabric that customers can deploy very quickly, very easily, seamlessly, and then manage it very easily, oh, and by the way, also be able to move their apps and data and license across the on-premises and, in this case, Azure environment. So very excited. By the way, we don't just stop there. When you say cloud, and when we say hybrid cloud and multicloud, it's, of course, on-premises, it's, of course, the hyperscaler clouds, but then there are service provider clouds. Because in region, and then, by the way, I don't know if you heard Khaled Soudani, he's the CTO at SocGen, he joined us as well in one of the keynotes, and obviously, they are building hybrid clouds. And when we talk about hybrid cloud to customers, it's also service provider cloud, which could be for data locality, data residency regions. It's also Nutanix's own cloud, the Nutanix cloud. So that's definitely one of the big pieces of news coming out of .NEXT, is this morphing or I would say evolution of hyperconverged infrastructure to becoming the hybrid cloud infrastructure. >> Virginia, of course, the big discussion this year has been the impact of COVID and what that's meant to IT priorities, CIO priorities. In a lot of the conversations we've been having on theCUBE this year, there's been a real acceleration on a lot of those cloud initiatives that Monica was talking about. So what are you hearing? What are you seeing? What are some of those imperatives that are either accelerating or, and are there some things that people are saying, "Hey, we might want to put this on ice for a few months?" >> Well, I can tell you, from my work with clients, the many public boards that I sit on, which span from financial services, to pure tech, all the way through to consumer-facing businesses, I really see the spectrum. And three years ago, when I was on theCUBE, we were talking about standing at the precipice and jumping in. Now, we are full on, we are in it. And Monica talked about all these different public clouds and the various providers who are leading their own way. But what I love and I think it's really important is that we need an independent company that actually begins to step back and help all the leaders that are running technology and operations and customer-facing functions, to be able to help them do their job. So here we are today, talking to various CEOs and C-suite executives. And the big issues are, "Okay, this stuff isn't so scary, we are in it, we need it for being able to function in the COVID world, and we also need it because our customers need us to need this, to have it." So, when we look at our portfolio of how businesses are investing in technology and other areas going forward, innovation, cost management, and also cyber seemed to be sort of the three very important themes of the day. And I believe that, today, as we sit through the next few days with .NEXT, we are really going to find stories, experiences, and visions about how we can actually address all three of those. >> Yeah, I think the point, Virginia, you're making is so fantastic, that this is the age of innovation while organizations also have to focus on cost intelligence. And that's the number one thing we're hearing from our customers. I mean, like when you were talking, it just reminded me, in the old days and maybe even up to five years ago, and the CIOs were all about knowing technology knowhow and managing costs, and like it was a cost center. But now you look at IT, IT is at the forefront of driving innovation. IT is at the forefront of adopting cloud. But at the same time, IT is also tasked with being smart about cost optimization. So you're right, that's exactly what we're also going to discuss the .NEXT, is how can technology help our customers innovate and, at the same time, be intelligent about cost optimization and which cloud to use for which workloads, for example. >> Yes, and also having the flexibility and the optionality to be able to put these things together. >> Well, yeah, Monica, simplicity was always at the core of what Nutanix did. And talking about the hybrid cloud solutions, it's very important you talk about the fact that it's the same operational model wherever things lived. The one piece that you didn't cover yet, that Virginia teed up, cyber security. So, absolutely, we would need innovation, we need to look at costs, but security is something that went from, it was already at the top of the list, to, oh, my gosh, in 2020, it feels like it's even higher there. So how does Nutanix make sure that, Nutanix along with your partners are making sure that companies, their data, their employees are all secure as possible? >> Absolutely. You mentioned that simplicity is a design principle for Nutanix from day-one, add to that security, security has been a guiding light from day-one, and security is built into our platform. It's not an afterthought, it's something we designed our products to incorporate right from the beginning. And there's a reason for that. The reason is we have over 17,000 customers, and a lot of them are running big, huge enterprise business critical workloads on Nutanix, including public sector, including state and local governments. And we have to ensure that they are able to make the environment secure using Nutanix technology. So whether it's our core technology platform, where we have things built in like data encryption, audit capabilities, or whether it's some of our new portfolio products. Last time, I think, Stu, we talked about how Nutanix offers now this complete cloud platform. 10 years ago, we started with a core foundation, which is hyperconverged infrastructure. But in the last few years, we've added on data center services, like other storage, different types of storage, consolidation, ability for customers, networking options, DR, we've added DevOps and database services, we've added desktop services. If you combine all of those three together with our digital infrastructure services, that's a complete cloud platform that has to be secure for our customers to run enterprise apps on databases, analytics workloads, and also build cloud native applications and run on it, and be able to run the same stack in a public cloud or private on-premises cloud. That has to be secure, so that's the number one design principle for Nutanix. >> Virginia, if Dave Alante was here, he would probably throw out the line that security has really become a board-level discussion. Well, you sit on a few boards, so I'd love to hear a little bit of your insights there as to the security that Monica talked about. Is this something that comes up at every board meeting? What kind of concerns are there out there today? >> Well, Stu, there is no question, it historically has come up at every board meeting. And one of the issues with that has always been the cost growth and escalation that takes place, and can we keep throwing more dollars at securing our environment. Fast-forward, look where we are today. We are highly dispersed workforce. So our attack surface has increased exponentially. And when we think about all the products that we're using, from virtual desktop and functioning from wherever we are in this world, how can that not help, but in the mind of a board director who doesn't know too much about technology, it would frighten them even more. However, the thing that I constantly always underscore is the sooner we move to these more modernized infrastructures, the better our ability will be to secure our environment at a very cost-efficient model. Because these technologies, particularly like Nutanix, have security built into them. And instead of having to add constantly to our cyber workforce, who's going to be looking at and parsing through information, we are able to have these embedded sensors and our ability to have the infrastructure talk to us about where our vulnerabilities are, as opposed to us having to go in and try to figure that out either post event or at some point pre any type of event. So it's very exciting time. I really encourage people to just get off our legacy environments as fast as we can and go to these modernized technology infrastructures and to the vendors who make this invisible to us. And I think the board members start to then say, "Okay, I can begin to understand that." I often give an example of if you're building a smart house versus you buy an old house and you're trying to put cameras on the side and sensors in the windows and in the doors, you can't possibly be as effective in your security as if you built it from the ground up to be secure. >> Yeah, definitely, it is challenging to retrofit that. Modernization is definitely a drum beat we've seen. Monica, a question for you on that theme is, in many ways, the current economic situation is a challenge, but it's also a forcing function. If I can need to keep up, if I need my employees to stay productive, I often need to rapidly adapt some modern solutions like Virginia was saying. Any words on that from what you're hearing from your customers and how Nutanix is helping? >> Absolutely. As I said earlier, I think the more IT leaders we talk to, it's become clear to us that there's three major mandates for IT that they are supporting. It's business growth, it's customer experience, and it's employee experience. So, in terms of modernization, absolutely, we find that IT stakeholders are very keen to go on a journey, which kind of looks like this, and again, it may not be the same for everybody, but starting with data center modernization or what we call infrastructure modernization. So really standardizing and consolidating all the key workloads so they can most efficiently use the data center assets. But then the next step very quickly becomes automation. And I think that's what Virginia was alluding to earlier, is we can no longer throw more and more people at things like security and provisioning and patching and updating and expect us to deliver the service-level agreements we have with business. So automation becomes really key. And, of course, with AI and machine learning, there's a lot of solutions out there around automation, and Nutanix is obviously big in terms of automating. Our one-click upgrades are legendary. That's even before people talked about AI and machine learning, we've been offering them. But then the next step becomes, very quickly, is, okay, great, I've automated everything, IT has become a service, my stakeholders are, I'm able to deliver the service-level agreements, well, what's next? How do I get the flexibility to on-demand spin up environments? And I think that's where the linkage with public cloud comes in, that's where customers are starting to build hybrid cloud. And then the ultimate nirvana that we're hearing from many customers is, they want to be able to use the right cloud for the right workload. A lot of our customers don't want to be stuck, and I'm using the word stuck kind of loosely, but just not with one public cloud. Just like our customers use a lot of different hardware providers in some cases, they also want to have the optionality of using an Azure for one workload, maybe an AWS for something else, maybe it's on-premises for something else, maybe it's a service provider for something else, and that's the ultimate nirvana for IT. So that would be the ultimate modernization, is where you have this kind of like an infinite computing solution, where you can go tap into any resource you need at the point in time that you need it for and be able to pay the right price for that and have a single management across everything. So you don't have to worry about the complexity of managing for environments, it's all done through one single plane, and that's where Nutanix comes in. Really, that's what we are doing, is making it really easy for our customers to reach from this infrastructure modernization, all the way to this hybrid multicloud world, with a single, unified management plan, the ability to move data, applications, and license around as they choose to, and have a cost-optimized solution. >> And let me add to that because I love what Monica is saying. You know, as a corporate fiduciary, I want my partners to do what they do best. So having each cloud provider really continue down the path of the areas that they are best in class in as opposed to wasting their time competing with each other on the same stuff, which doesn't help me evolve as a consumer, and it doesn't help them grow their business. And so, by enabling this kind of hybrid world, we are allowing each of these cloud providers to be able to do what they do best, which helps us invest in our future as consumers. >> All right, so Virginia, talking about fiduciary duties, as a board member, there's a topic that was talked a little bit at the show, but we'd love your feedback. And Monica, I want to hear the company's superior parent. Of course, I'm talking about the founder and CEO, Dheeraj Pandey is, there's a transition, there's a look, looking for the new CEO. If I have the line right, he's he said he will be a Newton forever even though his role will become a little bit more invisible, of course, what Nutanix has been trying to do with infrastructure and clouds before. So, Virginia, what does this mean for today and for the direction of the company? And then Monica, I would love kind of the internal look from an employee standpoint. >> Well, Stu, thank you for asking the question. I actually did a significant post on LinkedIn a couple of days ago because I really wanted to express to the world how blown away I am by our founder, Dheeraj. I've been working with him now over the last three years. And as I have gotten to know him, and I have worked with a lot of founders in my life, and I've worked with a lot of CEOs who were founders and some that were not founders, they were just CEOs and they came in after the fact, and it is rare that you find an individual that is just so focused on driving the mission forward in a very selfless way. And from the very beginning, people who ended up talking to with our CEO over their life's journey with Nutanix over the last 10, 11 years, will say the same exact same thing, which is, his single focus was about the mission and how Nutanix can support and grow the mission of the organization and what the world needs today. And it is rare that an individual will say, at a certain point in time, "I have taken this thing that I have created to a certain point, and now, it is yet at another inflection point, and it needs to continue on in a significant way. So being concerned about every facet, from do I have the right talent, do I have the right offering, do I have the right capital position, do I have the right board, do I have the right person at the helm? And I have spent a lot of time talking with Dheeraj, which is a gift and a pleasure in life, and to be able to have a candid conversation about where is Nutanix going next and how best to get there. And for a CEO to be able to sit down and talk to their board about that, it is really unique. And to have someone who cares so much about the future of the company, I was really blown away. So I'm very excited about our prospects going forward. Otherwise, I would not have joined this board. We all have, our lives are challenged, and life is short, and we want to spend the time doing the things that we believe in and we love and support. So I am very excited for the next chapter. We have built an incredible base. And now we're poised for very significant growth. And I think to underscore that, you saw the performance of the company was extremely good, the partnerships that are coming out, this is exactly the time when you want to, again, self-effacing, disrupting yourself, looking at where we need to go next. The time to do that is not at the point where you are there and you've arrived at that next step, but just as you're about to take off on a launch. And I think we're here. And I'm very excited. >> Yeah, I'll add to that. So, first of all, Virginia, we are so thrilled that you're on the board. As far as Dheeraj goes, I believe he's a force of nature. I think that's what Virginia said. And look, I'm a parent, and for those of you who are parents out there, this will probably resonate. When a child is born, you nurture your child and you take care of them. At some point, they leave for college. And for me, it was a hard one coming from a different culture, but I almost seem this is akin to that. Dheeraj is the founding father of Nutanix. He has really nurtured the company, he's built it up, he's given us all the right culture principles, and now, he's sending us off to call it saying, "Okay, this is the next phase of your life, go do the best you can and take Nutanix to the next level." And I'm really, really proud to be part of this company, I've been here for a year-and-a-half, we have amazing talent, people are important, we have amazing innovations. And, by the way, this new year, we started a fiscal year in August, it's going to be full of amazing innovations. I mean, this is only the beginning, what you've heard in the last two or three weeks, a lot more is coming down. And then there are some process that we've put in place so people process technology, process to actually scale as a larger company. So I think what Dheeraj has done is really set us up for the next phase of our life, and he's always going to be there for us as an advisor just like a parent is there for the child when they're off to college and off to doing other things in life. That's what I believe. >> Well, Monica and Virginia, thank you so much for sharing the updates. theCUBE really appreciates being able to be part of the Nutanix .NEXT event, and great to catch up with both of you. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you for continuing to work with us. Thank you. >> All right, stay tuned for more from Nutanix .NEXT digital experience. I'm Stu Miniman. And thank you for watching theCUBE. (gentle music)

>>From the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston. It's the cube covering IBM thing brought to you by IBM. >>Hi everybody. We're back. This is Dave Volante for the cube and you watching our continuous coverage of the IBM thing, 2020 digital event experience. And ed Walsh is here as the general manager. So the IBM storage division and software defined infrastructure. Ed, last time you were about to four feet to my left. I wish you were face to face but this'll, this'll have to do. Thanks for coming on the new normal. I like to call this maybe the new abnormal as some of us are still in lockdown but is the new normal. So we'll see more of this. So welcome it. I embrace it. No. So had you, you've obviously seen a number of, of downturns. You've run a lot, a lot of businesses, you've been on rocket ship businesses, you've been at IBM for a couple of stints. Obviously we've never seen anything like this. >>When did you first start getting visibility, uh, that this was going to be an issue? Obviously you guys have presence in China, okay. In AP. Uh, but when did you start to see it and what was your first move for the team? Yeah, sure. And so, uh, yeah, I've had the opportunity to lead a couple businesses and that was it. Okay. One, 2008. Ah, and this is, it is very different. But as far as our visibility on this, um, we have a worldwide and I'll say awesome. Right. Okay. So we saw this as far as a supply chain issue, um, and we came into it hot from Q4. We had a very good Q4 so I came into it hot or something. Why? So we are tracking it early and then we started to see the issues in China in late January. Then of course they shut down, came back to open after the Chinese new year in to be honest, they weren't quite back. >>So we were watching it almost as a support. Right. Main challenge. Yes. We do a lot of business in China, so we were also watching that, but it was light chain. But every single day managing that supply chain, I get out and give a compliment to my team. Uh, I don't think anyone has a better supply chain, but then of course quickly moved and everyone says, well, you should have seen it. This happened really fast. So it's a, it's different than other crises because it actually has to do with humans in life. Okay. All the other crisis were financial crisis. These, and we largely just manage the business through it and you're worried about your employees from the stress level, but you don't worry about the employees by the health level. So, uh, so we did see it early with supply chain that quickly gotten demand. And to be honest, when Italy went down, well, when Italy had the challenges that it happened so fast, when it shut down, uh, that was kind of a big wake up call for us. >>Mmm. You saw IBM respond very quickly. Um, everyone was at home almost immediately, even in countries weren't set up for it really took care of our people. But then we immediately, you saw the IBM was going to work really helping our clients. So we saw it kind of early, but it went from a hundred percent supply chain to a demand issue. And then we did have different real uh, interesting is a bad word, but interesting supply chain challenges as well. What it went on different countries stopping shipping's coming in, had to get a government approvals to get things. Mmm. So it was a good partnership with some of our um, get things where they need be in the right time. Ah. But it was probably a, I'll remember this quarter for a lot of different reasons. Um, and it worked out good for us. But uh, to be honest, it was, it is different from the other crisis's because it wasn't just a financial issue, which I think were just getting into actually, um, it was human and you saw different, two of our best regions were Italy and Spain that you think, Whoa, why? >>You know, you think the thing about other than going on in the quarter and but it was a relationship. It was, you know, we got our, the IB members got safe real quick, but then we quickly got them to engage with the clients, but we didn't Bush and was natural. Next thing you know that trust, I think there was a flight back to quality. You saw these different companies and that was the things they had to get done. Um, but it was, it was pretty amazing quarter to me. It was more seeing the team, you see your teams reacted. Crisis is in challenges in different ways and sometimes they paralyzed and we didn't see that at all in the team, which was pretty intelligent. Um, but we it coming from the beginning, call it before this we saw supply chain did, we came into Q1 hot on supply. So we kind of saw our early and we're already doing drills. So we saw it kind of right when it was hitting. Okay. >>But it was interesting you used the term interesting the challenging because it was sort of not only day to day for you, it was probably like minute by minute, hour by hour, country by country, region by region. How did you change the way in which you communicated to your teams or did you >>well so quickly? Um, so one I think culture, so I've been in a couple different companies, big and small. Mmm. I've seen different cultures react and the IBM culture is one that I've, I kind of look back and on this last quarter just because it's very customer intimacy. You don't have to, if the customer's in trouble, you can't stop them from running to help the clients. So we saw a natural, you know, we, IBM made sure they oil is refined to have one at home. Well we saw them quickly go after it. So most of it, any indication you do see it if these crisises um, you see some groups kind of freeze and, and you have to kind of walk them through it and make sure one, they're okay. This, this one was different yet to make sure your team was okay. Um, both mentally, physically, and their families. >>And it was a different stress level, was very personal and effected all of them. Where are the financial crises? In fact, it didn't affect everyone as much. It was more sterile. Uh, this one was wow, really different from a leadership. Um, but it's all the same. You have to get the team together and make sure they're healthy, happy, a healthy and mentally healthy too. And then you have to get people to kind of how do you go drive and help clients out. In this case it was helping you make sure your clients are okay, they're healthy, and then what can we do to help them? And I think that became more natural. And then of course it's Viber, Katelyn's drive, the business supply chain, which is I would say with any of the different um, challenges. But it's all communication. Well on this one, it was really had to check with the team often. >>We also had this new normal, I call this the new abnormal, which, you know, all of a sudden you can't meet with people so you couldn't get people physically together. So I call abnormal cause we're still, we'll get to the new normal, we'll use a lot more remote type of communication. But it was, I've never been so busy and I'm on video calls with all my teams every day. You see people using different tools to communicate like Slack, but also a lot more video. Uh, so it's communication, communication, which is the same thing. It's all the same thing with teams getting together, getting your direction. Well in this one it was mixture. They're safe first and then move on. Same thing with clients. Make sure let's say. Yeah. And that was what was fundamentally different about this. Um, Hey, what's up? Yeah. You know, and we were both grinders. >>I always joke, I work a half day every day. It doesn't matter which 12 hours the same way I have it twice. I'd take 12 hour days in a heartbeat these days. I mean, it's just really been crazy and I have to agree that the teams around the world at our, at our client space, of course the cube teams have barely really stepped up. But I want to ask you about the quarter. You're right. You came in hot in December, meaning you had a really good Q4. I, you know, I reached out to Tom Rosamilia last week, members said, Hey, nice announcement. And he said, did you cover it? I said, I did. And I sent them my breaking analysis. I, I really dug into the life cycles of the Z and how it affects, you know, IBM's overall business. And I predicted this is going to go on for several quarters where IBM has done a real chill tailwind, not only in, in systems hardware, but also, you know, the storage piece of the system's hardware business. >>We saw that last 40 accrued 19% and storage 60. Yeah. In, in, in Z hardware. Pretty amazing what's going on. Unpack. Okay. The quarter for us a little bit. Yeah. So if it wasn't for the crisis, I think all that would be plate. We had some announcements okay. Across the entire source portfolio. So what we do for storage for Z big announcements in Q3, uh, directly aligned with what we do with the new store. You know, the new Z, uh, you get a lot of value. One-on-one is three. So a lot of senators, I think it's different platform. So hit the demand and what clients are trying to do. Mmm. Bring a new, you know, uh, cloud development platforms, you know, native cloud development, but also using cloud. So there's a whole bunch of different things we brought to that platform. But we also launched new AI platforms, so stores for AI and big data. >>Uh, and then it the one we launched our new distributor. So we're kind of coming in from an offering set in fact water, uh, you know, 19% growth. Um, I think it's like speaks volumes no on the offering. Yes. But more how are we reacting to their clients more than anything else? I think it was a, Ashley's I talked about earlier, it was an interesting quarter. I think it's clients were responding to the flight equality, but also who's engaging with them the right way. So we do have a company absolutely refresh offerings across. In fact, this quarter, every single one of our offerings, every single new offerings group. Yeah. It's more of a, if you have the right offerings meet in the market, helping them with it, it correct after two, right. Your own journey. The cloud, moving, modernizing your environment. We need to free up our teams. >>We did a dramatic simplification on but what we do with storage or Z, but also distributed storage and what we do for storage AI and a big focus on cyber resiliency. Those are hitting what I'll say the market was in Q4 but they happen to also be hitting the market for what's going on now the noodles. So a lot of the simplification was that, how do you remote manage, how do you do things? One of the biggest things we do to our clients is, and we have all these tools, we give you a lot of things for free baseline, but we also have these increase the pro versions. We're just said, take them, I use them because it allows you to monitor and manage your environment better remotely. It was all web based. Uh, and that was one of the biggest things to do. But that is hidden the market. >>That's, that's the new normal. And we did that across those Z distributed storage. Mmm. But also what we did in a cyber resiliency in AI. I want to hit on a couple of those points. I mean, I'm going to start with the cyber resiliency because we were one of the first to report with our, with our partner ETR, our data partner that the work from home offset it was somewhat cushioning the downturn. I mean it's ugly, but chill worked from home pivot and that included, uh, uh, solutions around ransomware, data protection, cyber resiliency. So yep. Investment, actually 20% of the CIO is that we surveyed actually by not spending more in 2020, because of there wasn't zoom and WebEx, it was, there was other infrastructure around it, VDI, et cetera. So you're seeing that, uh, it sounds like, well, maybe talk a little bit about, so the cyber resiliency, and I'm especially interested in the context of going forward, feels like this is going to be one of those permanent things. >>You know, clients might sacrifice some near term profitability to have more flexibility and resiliency in their business and not rely so much on just narrow dr but more business continuance. No, I think you agree. In fact, um, we've always been, you know, a leader in business continuance. We still are. But cyber resiliency is yes. What a million different factories hovering from a ransomware or uh, um, you know, malware incident is different fundamentally different tool sets than what you're doing. You need to have a copy of your data of course, but very different than when if you were dr single server come up and running. Okay. You see us and mostly I think we're ahead of it because as IBM, we're the largest outsource firm in the world. So we actually live with these incidents as IBM. So in normal storage you hear about them and typically it's a storage issue. >>That issue that came back running. We are living with what we do or how to, our storage or outsourcing or strategic outsourcing group. And so we're putting into all of our products a lot of unique things from cyber resiliency. So what we did for storage for Z, it literally is a safe card. Copies an offering that little gifty 500 recover points. Yeah. Separated administratively and physically. So you're really able to literally, internal and external threats, protect yourself best in class. No one else has a solution set. We did the same thing and distributed. So, but in distributed, what we're trying to do is help people, not only, I used the term, left the boom and right up, boom, left the boom is before incident. How do you prepare? How do you have the right backup recovery? How do you have the right tool sets? Recover points? >>How do you protect yourself? How do you make sure you're um, you know, monitoring for ransomware? Every single night we'll get back power tools. Okay? The right of boom is once you do get hit, you go into this incident response situation where eyes drawn, your lights are on you. How do you give the humans, uh, the right cool. So they can react the right way and be quick. So also storage plays a huge role with ransomware and malware. Also. You get into, all right, the boom hits, you get the call, it's from the CEO. You got to fix it. You need new tools. Right? What recover point do you go back to? Um, it's iterative in nature. Uh, well yeah, it hit on, I got a call on Friday, but I don't know when the malware got and it was a Wednesday or Tuesday. It might be different per system. >>It's an internet process. You need the right tools, you use all your copies, primary storage, secondary storage for sure. He copies VR copies and find out what's your best recover point. And it's imperative you have to Lily bring up environments, you have to have fence network capabilities and all your tools to allow you to literally bring them up quickly in succession or altogether find them. That's recover point you get to as soon as you can. So those are the things I think we're leading. And we launched all this before this issue. Well we also saw an increase in malware in our client set. So to be honest, you know, even with all this crisis that we're seeing an increase and in malware, ransomware is where the storage infrastructure layer really matters in the incident response capability where if you have an incident, someone stole your data sets and typically storage guys that they call now IBM has great solution sets around their AI, direct driven. >>The ability is to allow you to protect yourself there. But this is on ransomware. It's something that storage plays a huge role. We do undistributed we do on mainframe with specialized solution sets. No one else in the industry is doing that. And of course back, uh, and recovery. Yeah. Quick recovery and orchestrated fashion. That's what we do around spectrum protect all day long. Right. Okay. Yeah. Last time we met. Oh, okay. You shared with us your, your consolidation strategy, your big, you know, announcement, uh, last fall, uh, and obviously, you know, great board or 90% growth. Well, a lot of that was drafting off the Z and the, you know, the hundred, but, but I'm wondering how that, how that consolidation work. We talked about the challenges of doing that know yep. The importance of that, how others are going to have to respond. And we're seeing that in the industry for a lot of the large portfolio players. >>But how did that, you know, how's that going? Can you give us, what, can you tell us about the progress there terms of its uptake and adoption? Sure, sure. So really what we did is we kind of looked at the industry and said everyone's adding too much complexity. You know, the whole industry is based on having a high end mid range and low end storage environment and the high end did everything custom and silk concrete performance, but you had to pay a price for it. And then the whole industry is based upon just get each of the next gen. So if you're a high end about problem is every client has high end, mid range and low in storage. So you have dual vendor strategy, but what you do is you have to, the whole industry is just getting to the next high end. Uh, you see EMC, Dell hashtag next generation, midbrain storage, the whole industry, including in the past, IBM was structure and getting you there. >>So we basically announced no more of that. Doesn't make sense. It used to, it no longer makes sense. We drive a lot of innovation what we're doing with Silicon, but software and we need to one platform, one platform that allow you at different price points down the stack from low end, mid range and high end, well without compromise. What's a dramatic simplification, right? Uh, that was a well-respected, you know, I would say we got an unbelievable response from that. And you saw a dramatic growth. So you kind of hit upon, we grew across all of our segments. Yes. We had a good growth on what we do for stores for Z. Well, we had an equally good growth at, as we did on distribute storage. So if you have physical environments, virtual environments, VMware, hyper V containers, public cloud, hybrid cloud, our distributed storage portfolio. >>So one of the biggest increases. Mmm. And we, again, we grew in every one of these segments. So one the simplification. Okay. Chapter two, how do you free up your team? How do you modernize your applications so you can innovate? Mmm. critical. You're free of your team. So that one thing that we also did a lot of, you know, Billy do remote management. I made it very simple to use Mmm. And simple to support, which also helps them the new normal, but it hit the right tone with it, our partners, but also our clients. And you saw a pretty massive uptick after the February announcement. So it was only half a quarter. We saw quite a large lift. I want to ask you about the storage for big data and AI as well. There seems to be a new emerging workload. You got all this data out there collected and Hadoop and analytics over the last 10 years. >>Now you're applying, we've talked about this, the new innovation cocktail. You got data AI and okay, well it gives you the scale whether it's on grammar in the public cloud, uh, but there seems to be a new workload where you get up what kind of a data store. You've got the analytic workloads that are in there. You've got some data science tooling, uh, and other, you know, AI that, that seems to be an emerging workload beyond, um, just kind of infrastructure as a service. But okay, really new way to get insights out of data, data, wonderful insights or not yet. So talk about that workload and how that is, is powering your business. And what are you seeing there? Well, I think this is where I see IBM, uh, really I'm helping clients with this journey to building smarter businesses cause AI is going to be in every workload. >>You're bringing up very specific workloads around machine learning, learning, bring customer on Silicon, like GPS into it, on these big data Lake. Uh, how do you take a data swamp and make a data Lake? Um, okay. Uh, what I'll say is IBM's doing this and we use the term ladder, the AI, and there's no AI without IAA information architecture. You have to have the right infrastructure to do it. We also see different groups having random acts of AI, a data scientist and the visionary does something is kind of interesting. Another group does something interesting and maybe a third. It's like the early days of data warehousing, but they're not able to take it together and bring it to, they can infuse AI across all the processes in a company and have one single view of the truth. Do we see people going through this natural progression, some start independently, a fight technology then bring it together. >>So everything we're doing from, I'll talk about what we're doing is storage infrastructure servers, but also across what we're doing, you know, are um, Mmm cloud pack for data offering and make it very simple for you to pull and get the use case out of it. But for storage is about when you want to bring it together, you need the right performance. But we bar none have the best source for AI. And data. It's based upon our, you know, Lily, um, award-winning. Yeah. Scale up a file system called GPFS or spectrum scale. It runs the largest AI supercomputers in the world. The same as X software, but you can buy it to your device that we launched it in December, which is feller. ESS, um, 3000 is a single all flash array. It's a cluster, but you can no compromise. You go from that device and the largest AI supercomputer in the world configuration, exact same technology, hardware and software that we do. >>Floyd. So now you can start small and grow and then we're helping along. How do you get the value out of it? So that's typically where storage ends. I gave you the best platform you can possibly have, cost effective, small, and you can scale to the biggest thing you want to do. The next thing we're doing, which people say, well that's not storage and why are you doing that? We're doing things called spectrum discover. It's managing your metadata and making your data scientists the most productive possible. They spent any 80% of the time literally just understanding the data, tagging the data, organizing it so they know what they're doing with, cause if you don't have the right AI data sets, you really can't get the outcome. Okay. But we have what's called spectrum discover works across a whole bunch of other products, but also all of our portfolio, both object storage file system block allows you to look at an environment, organize it, and save dramatic amount of time for data scientists. >>And of course that's easy feed into all the things we do around cloud pack for data, which is where IBM has really put a lot of these open source and our own tools together so you can move forward pretty quickly. The key thing is how does IBM help you not technology. We know what you want to accomplish, let's help you but not limit you by we're letting you use all the different open source. Yes. I just want allow you to move forward and help you in that journey. And it is a journey and we're meeting clients where they are because everyone's on it different. Yeah. I guess segment of the journey and how do we help you go through it and from a storage, uh, you're seeing that environment really double every quarter. Mmm. For the people that are looking for it, no one really touches us. >>Mmm. In fact, our number two and three customers, Mmm. Competitors in the space use the same software that we OEM so we're in a very good position when it comes to stores for AI, big data. So they say it's better to be lucky than good. I say it's, it's better to be good and lucky. And so, you know, we're not going back it's not happening. we've got this new abnormal, as you call it, and you've done a lot of the hard work in terms of rationalizing the port folio. You've done the R and D and you started this years ago and it took a long time. Mmm. But I wonder if you could just talk about why you feel like you're in a good position coming out of this thing and who knows how we're going to come out of it, but what are the critical components that you feel you have in your arsenal that will make you stronger and more competitive or you know, relative to, you know, the, uh, the landscape out there, your thoughts? >>Yeah. So now this is going to sound, uh, well good. So all these different issues we've been through all these Bryce disease we've been through in our careers. Um, there's an old adage, if you can last room and you get resourced, you can come out stronger. And it's very true. So you can grow, you can do the right things, but you have to have the right offerings. Sometimes that's low, lucky you entered, right? I think we perfectly with the right innovation that did take us years ago, but we're hitting the current market. But also what I'll say is the new normal market. Mmm. And I think that's an opportunity. And I've always said, listen, the world doesn't need another storage. Right. Well, they're looking for solutions around the source challenges and I think what we've done around product portfolio with, we use the term offerings was the offerings around it with a different software allows you to actually, we're really free, you know, if it's really chapter two now we're trying to do monetize your core infrastructure, you need to free up your team so they can innovate. >>We're going to do that dramatically in what we're doing. Storage, they help you with that journey to cloud either OnPrem or into the public cloud or really what we see is a hybrid multicloud fabric happening, but also we do cyber resiliency as we built it from the or. So I think we're good hitting it, right? Mmm. Now the new normal is all the things that it has to be simple, it has to be rope managed and those are all the things we made massive investments across every one of our portfolio items. They just got launched a launch in the last two quarters. So I think we're in good stead. But to be honest, in these times, as we talked earlier, you work harder. You've got to really embrace the client feedback. Mmm. I think IBM is a good position to do that. Also with the greater IBM, we see vigor, Mmm. Opportunity set to find out how to help clients. >>Okay. We're the number one AI company in the world. So we're seeing what clients really want to do with AI and how they. There's actually holding it back. Number one outsourcer. We're seeing how people are really dealing with cyber resiliency and especially now where ransomware, where storage really impacts you. We're seeing exactly how to do it and what tools push forward and that's where you're seeing very unique opportunities in these times. If you can have the right product, the right go to market and do very well and more importantly you'd do it by helping clients. If you can help clients through this, do you come out stronger? I think some other people's storage, it becomes more challenging. I don't think people just want you know, the next flash array. I think they're looking for solution sets a companies to help them get through and get to the really the new, I think we're going to get to the new normal. I think this is a new abnormal, I can't call it normal. When we're all locked away, the new normal is going to be much faster. You're gonna have to go faster. So I think IBM and the IBM storage is aligned with let's help you with the cloud journey. Let's help you build our businesses. We'll make sure cyber resiliency built in there. Well, we're going to, you're seeing it across every division of IBM, step up and help you in that. Mmm. In that direction. That's what I think is differentiated. Why I'm excited about >>what we're doing. IBM in general, but also, yeah, again, storage is perfectly aligned with that overall mission and it's, it's kind of exciting to see it kind of play out in front of class. Well, I think you're right. I think the last decade was a lot of, it was about the all flash data center and, and the future is about powering innovation infrastructure for machine intelligence. Uh, and, and really getting insights out of data scaling. Uh, ed ed Walsh. Always great to have you on the, uh, hopefully we can do this, you know, a little closer face to face, maybe six feet apart. Um, and then eventually we could shake hands or high five or whatever it works. Thanks so much for coming to the Cuba. It's great to see you looking good and stay safe. Hey, thank you. Stay safe. All right. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volante for the cube and our continuous coverage of the IBM, that 20, 20 digital events experience. I'll be right back. Sorry for the short break.

>> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is the CUBE Conversation. >> Hello everybody, welcome to this special CXO Series that I've been running over the past couple weeks, my name is Dave Vellante and what I've been doing is bringing in executives from around the industry to try to better understand how they're dealing with this COVID crisis, what some of their fundamental communications principles are, and I'm really pleased to invite in Sri Srinivasan, who's the Senior Vice President and GM of Cisco Collaborations. Sri, great to see you again. It seems like just a long time ago actually, but it was just January that we were in Barcelona together, wow, a lot has changed. >> A lot has changed, Dave. Dave, thanks for having me on the show, it's always a pleasure to see you and I'm so happy to see you safe and sound today. >> Yeah, ditto, we're all in this together, as they say so I want to go back to, I mean we were in January we were getting clenches of this thing. We were definitely a little bit worried but not really fully grasping the impact. At what point did you kind of realize that you were going to have to adjust, and how did you shift your priorities as a leader? >> Yeah, so, Dave we started seeing this right out of the Chinese New Year, coming out of the Chinese New Year, on February 11th, if my memory serves me right. Users out of China started increasing, connecting to their global sites by multiples. Like, they went up as much as 22 times, on the night of February 11th and right off the bat we started seeing it expanding to South Korea, Japan, Singapore, Australia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, and towards the end of February, we started seeing it going to Europe in terms of expanded volumes where people working from home. Europe has expanded nearly four times for us, Asia pack has expanded nearly three to four times in terms of total usage and from the second week of March, it's US, our biggest market, which has more than doubled and as you may have heard, this past month in March, we served 324 million attendees on our meeting platform. We provide a whole slew of collaboration capability set. The fundamental principle for us that we apply is, provide customers with business continuity, while keeping their employees and their families safe. That is the fundamental principle we apply and one of my engineers said it really well. He said, "for every WebEx engineer-hour spent, "we now keep people safe for 14 thousand hours, "or 583 days". That is the amount of time through virtual capability set we're able to bring people together safely and continue their businesses forward as is nearly normal. >> I mean, the numbers are unbelievable. Chuck Robbins, over a month ago, said you guys held, and this is early March, 3.2 million meetings and 5.5 billion minutes, and the numbers have just gone up from then. Guys, I wonder if you could bring up the chart, I want to set up this conversation and so, we along with our partner ETR, we're one of the first to report sort of the impact of COVID on IT Budgets and what this chart is showing is that, that gray bar says 35% of those CIO's that we talked to said they don't expect any change in spending for 2020. >> Sri: Mhm. >> Dave: The green side over 20% said they expect to spend more and then you can see the big red. So overall, we've taken the overall forecast at the beginning of the year was plus 4% was kind of the consensus for IT spend. We're now down to minus 4%. The point though is that it would be a lot worse Sri, were it not for that green, which is being driven by the work from home offset, and it's not just collaborations tools, its networking, its security, its VPN, it's all the infrastructure around that so I wonder if you could comment and add a little bit of color to what you're seeing in the space. >> I think we're seeing immense expansion of work from home capabilities. Work from home is new for so many people, like for people like me it's the norm but there's so many people who are coming into it cold for the very first time, it can be daunting and that requires investments from organizations, I think CIOs IT infrastructure heads are working to make sure they provide the best secure collaboration canvas for people to work in from home, understanding the challenges of last mile excellence, security challenges and things of that sort so there is a ton of investment going on, in speeding up that investment and I see something coming out of this, which is recognition that organizations are going to have to fix and modernize their digital infrastructure. Why is that important? I think environmental sustainability has something called LEED Certification. Very similar to that work from home is going to have some type of certification that says, an organization is ready for this type of a mass upheaval moment where their infrastructures keep their businesses alive, kicking and thriving through any situation and I think what we have seen is many organizations struggle getting to that first step. Now, technology allows them to move very fast these days but no organization wants to struggle through it in the future, whether it's public sector or commercial enterprise, it's one and the same. >> I think that's a great point, one of the things I wanted to ask you was about some of the things that you've learned and maybe some of the things that are going to be permanent and I think that, people didn't expect this obviously and so do you feel as though that organizations will kind of rethink and that portions of this will become permanent, maybe they'll sub-optimize, in the near-term profitability and try to optimize for business resilience and the flexibility to do things like work from home, your thoughts. >> So Dave, I do see some things becoming permanent, right? Do I expect the volumes of collaboration to go down? No, it's never going to go back to the same level. The world as we know it is going to change forever. We are going to have a Post-COVID era and that's going to be changed for the better. There's a number of employees who are being skeptical, reticent to working from home, who are suddenly going to say, work from home thing is not so bad after all so you're going to have that moment for sure and then you're going to also have a set of employers who are going to look at a much wider pool of applicants that are cross timezone, geography, language barriers, it's going to help an organization increase their diversity and inclusiveness ocean, making their products and services much better so I think we are opening up the surface area for innovation as a result and you will see a lot of the work from home technologies get better and better, we're being forced to be better because we now have to be relatable, discernible easy to a new class of worker that has never seen these technologies and it is across all kinds of barriers that technology has to adhere itself to so I do see a lot of goodness coming in and you know what, at the end of the day, it's really good for the environment too >> I want to ask you how you're supporting customers. The data partner that I mentioned ETR, the other day I sat in one of their CIO Roundtables and it's a private conversation with (mumbles) and CIOs and they were asking them like, who's helping you through this and who's not and they mentioned, for instance, back in the 2009 timeframe, there was one company they won't mention. It was doing audits right after the crisis. That was not a cool thing but I got to give Cisco some props it came up that they really were helping in three areas and one of the CIOs just really mentioned this and called it out. He said, collaboration tools, network, we're a Cisco customer so we're relying more on the network and then the security piece so specifically how are you supporting your customers in this crisis? >> So, towards the end of February, what we did is we opened up our collaboration technology and Chuck said something very profound to me. He basically said, "let's make sure we do right by our customers "and keep them safe through this exercise." What we came out with was a set of free offers. We expanded (mumbles) free offer by providing unlimited meeting time, up to a hundred participants toll dial-in into our meetings infrastructure in 52 countries. We didn't basically just say, hey, only in countries afflicted by the virus, we basically made it as global as we could make it possible and then we provided enterprise trials through our partner routes to market that is an enterprise could sign up for a 90-day thing, no strings attached. Just take on the collaboration platform and whether it's calling, meetings, our device infrastructure and just take advantage of it and in a secure fashion using our security portfolio using extensions of our network portfolio and just continue to operate so we've added close to north of 15 million users through our free offers to date that (mumbles) >> Wow. >> and no strings attached. We're not asking for a credit card or a contract at the end of it, if you like it, and we come out at the other end of it, we are happy that they're safe and if they stay a long-term customer of ours, we are happy about that too. >> I mean, that's awesome. We saw recently a lot of talk about big tech and a lot of attacks on big tech and you're seeing big tech really step up, so thank you for that. You know us. We're not gotcha media, but it's I feel it's really important to ask you this. Zoom has had some clear issues with security. Eric Yuan, was instrumental in developing WebEx so what assurances can you give (Sri coughs) your customers and our audience that you're not subjected to similar security gaps and flaws? >> So let's talk about our security principles, right? Our security principles are very clear, we are open and transparent about the issues we face, the investments we make and we will be very open in terms of our posture. Secondly, we will never rent or sell customers data. Thirdly, we have a growth mindset around security. It's a differentiator. You never get complacent about security, you keep on investing in it and to be honest with you, WebEx has come a very long way since some of the comments that were made in the press by some of our competitors. circa 2012 WebEx versus now there's so much innovation that has happened Dave. We've had over 100 major software updates so I would rather have our competitors focus on their issues rather than, give us kudos in public. Our promise to our customers is to be open, transparent and continuously invest in the space because the moment you take your eyes off it, you've opened yourself up for a set of attacks so we're not going to ever say we are fully secure. You just have to continually invest in the growing threat posture world we live in today. >> So I want to follow up on that because I mean, I'm not a security expert, but I've interviewed enough people to know that they will tell you, you can't just bolt on security, you got to build it in and it's a hard thing to do. Some of your security pros Gee Rittenhouse, TK Keanini would definitely second this so, >> Yeah. >> How, you're saying you've spent a lot of time obviously designing in and I'm inferring not bolting on so I wonder if you could add some color to the sort of types of things that you've done to really, assure your customers that you're secure. >> Yeah, so I think security is in the DNA of Cisco, pun intended in many ways. We pride ourselves in our craft and to be honest with you, security starts at the time of design for us and it's not a checkbox exercise at the end of the ship cycle. You build for security. You build for privacy and compliance and you build with one simple rule. It's your customers data, we are custodians and we need to be protectors of it all the way through. We do not sacrifice experience for security. We never will. We build high-grade experiences but we never give up on security capability set and whether it's free, whether it's premium, whether it's paid. We have the same levels of security, yes, we do have additional security add ons and finally, we have a culture where there are groups within Cisco that continually test us. They don't report to me, they report to chuck and the board and they pretty much are continuously measuring our threat posture. These are world class organizations that keep you on your toes and I'm so thankful for that. It helps our customers safe, it helps us be better. It helps us stay current with the threat postures and this is years of investment. This is not something you can do in 90 days or 30 days. You'd be doing lip service to it. This is something you've got to do, critical, intentional, deliberate investments that pay off in the long-term. >> Yeah, and things like penetration testing, it's not a one shot deal, you got to do it on an ongoing basis. I want to come back to productivity. There are some organizations that are concerned they're struggling a little bit with productivity, particularly with the work from home. What advice would you give to organizations in terms of being able to maintain that productivity? They might take a little bit of hit but what would you tell them? >> I think change is difficult. Change is not easy. I'll take my own story here. Dave, two years back when I joined Cisco work from home was a alien culture to me based on where I came from, for the first month I did struggle. I had my questions, I had my trepidations of is this really going to work? Am I going to be able to run thousands of engineers, multibillion dollar business from home or while traveling on a plane because we have so many development centers across the globe and I'm a remote worker. I really saw this as opening up new horizons for me starting the first month. I took it on with gusto so I think my guidance to organizations is help end users deal with that change. If you force it down their throats, it's not going to work. You've got to understand their pains, you've going to make it more pleasing. You've got to introduce things like a digital water cooler talk, you've got to make it easy on them, you've got to talk about improvements in a remote-work setting like providing them with a set of accessories that make it easier for you to work from home. One of the core principles we have and i espouse within my organization is by working from home, you're intruding into your family's space. I think it's so important to make sure you let your family in on your work and when kids walk into the door, today, when we work at Cisco, we actually share our family and we share our joy with the wider teams and we are so proud of such culture so be very open and make sure that you understand that you're intruding into somebody else's house when you're working from home. >> Yeah, we have dogs barking, we have kids playing games and crawling all over us, that's great. one of the... >> The dogs barking we have solved we have an AI technology that brings it down. >> Mutes the barking. That's good, I need one. >> Absolutely. >> So one of my big takeaways and you really underscored it here is we're not going back to 2019. The digital transformation that we talk about and that frankly many give lip service (mumbles) but it is now going to be accelerated and it's ironic, we're starting a new decade but this digital transformation is going to be accelerated and collaboration is going to be a key underpinning so I'll ask you to give us some final thoughts, will you please? >> Yeah, I think, people to people collaboration is so important in this day and age. As such, industry has been changing from a task-based hierarchy driven world to a group-outcome based synergistic, a bring people along type culture and that brings people along type cultures now, thanks to collaboration technology, becoming independent of timezone, you don't have to worry about language barriers anymore or cultural boundaries. Think of the type of ideation you can do by bringing people across the world together with a low carbon footprint and what this time has shown us is that businesses can still continue to operate and operate really well when you bring people together using these virtual technologies and capability sets. You're saving people some time by having them work from home like you don't have to travel 30 and 40 minutes to get to work. You're just doing doing your thing from wherever you are and that saves so much in cost, in capability sets and the concept of hoteliering and open spaces in different organizations is only going to sprout even further because not everybody is going to have a home office, have an office, a set office, in within the enterprise CEOs are going to see that as a cost saving opportunity that they can funnel back into the growth of the organization. Right? So I think it's a plethora of opportunity in front of us and that these technologies are going to get monumentally better in the months to come. >> We're definitely entering a new chapter. Sri, thanks so much for sharing your insights and some of your leadership principles and thanks to Cisco, for all that you guys are doing some of the pro bono work. I know some of the volunteerism that Chuck has talked about. Really appreciate your time. >> Thanks Dave. Always a pleasure, stay safe. >> And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From the CUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Welcome to this special CUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier here in Palo Alto, California. In our remote studio, we have a quarantine crew here during this COVID-19 crisis. Here talking about the crisis and the impact to business and overall work. Joined by a great guest Dustin Kirkland, CUBE alumni, who's now the chief product officer at Apex Clearing. This COVID-19 has really demonstrated to the mainstream world stage, not just inside the industry that we've been covering for many, many years, that the idea of at-scale means something completely different, and certainly DevOps and Agile is going mainstream to survive, and people are realizing that now. No better guest than have Dustin join us, who's had experiences in open source. He's worked across the industry from Ubuntu, Open Stack, Kubernetes, Google, Canonical. Dustin, welcome back to the CUBE here remotely. Looking good. >> Yeah, yeah, thanks, John. Last time we talked, I was in the studio, and here we are talking over the internet. This is a lot of fun. >> Well, I really appreciate it. I know you've been in your new role since September. A lot's changed, but one of the things why I wanted to talk with you is because you and I have talked many times around DevOps. This has been the industry conversation. We've been inside the ropes. Now you're starting to see, with this new scale of work-at-home forcing all kinds of new pressure points, giving people the realization that the entire life with digital and with technology can be different, doesn't have to be augmented with their existing life. It's a full-on technology driven impact, and I think a lot of people are learning that, and certainly, healthcare and finance are two areas, in particular, that are impacted heavily. Obviously, people are worried about the economy, and we're worried about people's lives. These are two major areas, but even outside that, there's new entrepreneurs right now that I know who are working on new ventures. You're seeing people working on new solutions. This is kind of bringing the DevOps concept to areas that quite frankly weren't there. I want to get your thoughts and reaction to that. >> Yeah, without a doubt, I mean, the whole world has changed in 30 short days. We knew something was amiss in China. We knew that there was a lot of danger for people. The danger for business, though, didn't become apparent until vast swathes of the work force got sent home. And there's a number of businesses and industries that are coping relatively well with this. Certainly those who have previously adopted, or have experienced, doing work remotely, doing business by video, teleconference, having resources in the cloud, having people and expertise who are able to continue working at nearly 100% capacity in 100% remote environments. There's a lot of technology behind that, and there are some industries, and in particular, some firms, some organizations, that were really adept and were able to make that shift almost overnight. Maybe there were a couple bumps along the way, some VPN settings needed to be tweaked, and Zoom settings needed to be changed a little bit, but for many, this was a relatively smooth transition, and we may be doing this for a very long time. >> Yeah, I want to get your thoughts, before we get into some of the product stuff that you guys are working on and some other things. What's your general reaction to people in your circles, inside industry and tech industry, and outside, what are you seeing a reaction to this new scale, work from home, social distancing, isolation, what are your observations? >> Yeah, you know, I think we're in for a long haul. This is going to be the new normal for quite some time. I think it's super important to check on the people you care about, and before we get into dev and tech, check on the people you care about, especially people who either aren't yet respecting the social distancing norms and impress upon them the importance that, hey, this is about you, this is about the people you care about, it's about people you don't even know, because there are plenty of people who can carry this and not even know. So definitely check on the people that you care about. And reach out to those people and stay in touch. We all need one another more than ever, right? I manage a team, and it's super important, I think, to understand how much stress everyone is under. I've got over a dozen people that report to me. Most of them have kids and families. We start out our weekly staff meeting now, and we bring the kids in. They're curious, they want to know what's going on. First five, 10 minutes of our meeting is meet the family. And that demystifies some of what we're doing, and actually keeps the other 50 minutes of the meeting pretty quiet in our experience. But it's really humanized an aspect of work from home that's always been a bit taboo. We laugh about the reporter in Korea whose kid and his wife came in during the middle of a live on-air interview. There's certainly, I've worked from home for almost 12 years, like, those are really uncomfortable situations. Until about a month ago, when that just became the norm. And from that perspective, I think there's a humanization that we're far more understanding of people who work from home now than ever before. >> It's funny, I've heard people say, you know, my wife didn't know what I did until I started working at home. And comments to seeing people's family, and saying, wow, that's awesome, and just bringing a personal connection, not just this software mechanism that connects people for some meeting, and we've all been on those meetings. They go long, and you're sitting there, and you're turning the camera off so you can sneeze. All those things are happening. But when you start to think about, beyond it being a software mechanism, that it's a social equation right now. People have shared experiences. It's been an interesting time. >> Yeah, and just sharing those experiences. We do a think internal on our Slack channel every day. We try to post a picture. We call it hashtag recess, and at recess we take a picture of walking the dogs, or playing with the kids, or gardening, or whatever it is, going for a run. Again, just trying to make the best of this, take advantage of, you know, it's hard working from home, but trying to take advantage of some of those once in a lifetime opportunities we have here. And my team has started pub quiz on Fridays, so we're mostly spread across, in the U.S., so we're able to do this at a reasonable hour, but the last couple of Fridays, we've jumped on a Zoom, downloaded a pub trivia game, most of us a crack a beer, or glass of wine, or a cocktail, and you know, it's just, it actually puts a punctuate mark on the end of the week, puts a period on the end of the week. Because that's the other thing about this, man, if you don't have some boundaries, it's easy to go from an eight or nine hour normal day to 10, 12, 14, 16 hour days, Saturday bleeds into Sunday bleeds into Monday, and then the rat race takes over. >> You got to get the exercise. You have a routine. That's my experience. What's your advice for people who are working at home for the first time? Do you have any best practices? >> I actually had a blog post on this about two weeks ago and put up almost a shopping list of some of the things that I've assembled here in the work from home environment. It's something I've been doing since 2008, so it's been there for a good long while. It's a little bit hard to accumulate all the technology that you need, but I would say, most important, have a space, some kind of space. Some people have more room or less, but even just a corner in a master bedroom with a standup desk, some space that is your own, that the family understands and respects. The other best practice is set some time boundaries. I like to start my day early. I'll try to break more a little bit for that recess, see the family some, and then knock off at a reasonable hour, so establish those boundaries. Yeah, I've got a bunch of tips in that blog post I can shoot you after this, but it's the sort of thing that, be a bit understanding, too, of other people in this situation for the first time, perhaps. So you know, offer whatever help and assistance you can, and be understanding that, man, things just aren't like they used to be. >> That's great advice. Thanks for the insights. Want to get to something that I see happening, and this always kind of happens when you see these waves where there's a downturn, or there's some sort of an event. In this case it's catastrophic in the way it vectored in like this and the impact that we just discussed. But what comes out of it is creativity around entrepreneurial activity, and certainly reinvention, businesses reforming, retrenching, resetting, whatever word, pivot, digital transformation, there's plenty of words for it. But this is the time where people can actually get a lot done. I always comment, in my last interview I did, you know, Shakespeare wrote Macbeth when he was sheltering in place, and Isaac Newton invented calculus, so you can actually get some work done. And you're starting to see people look at the new technology and start disrupting old incumbent markets, because now more than ever, things are exposed. The opportunity of recognition becomes clearer. So I wanted to get your thoughts on this. You're a product person, you've got a lot of product management skills, and you're currently taking this DevOps to financial market with fintech and your business, so you're applying known principles and software and tech and disrupting an existing industry. I think this is going to be a common trend for the next five years. >> Yeah, so on that first note, I think you're exactly right. There will be a reckoning, and there will be a ton of opportunities that come out of this for the already or the rapidly transformed digital native, digital focused business. There will be some that survive and thrive here. I think you're seeing a lot of this with the popularity of Zoom that has spiked recently. I think you're going to see technologies like DocuSign being used in places that, some of those places that still require wet signatures, but you just can't get to the notary and sign a, I don't know, a refi on your mortgage or something like that. And so I think you're going to see a bunch of those. The biggest opportunities are really around our education system. I've got two kids at home, and I'm in a pretty forward thinking school district in Austin, Texas, you know, but that's not the norm where our teachers are conducting classes and assignments over Zoom. I've got a kindergartener and a second grader. There's somewhat limits to what they can do with technology. I think you're going to see a lot of entrepreneurial solutions that develop in that space, and that's going to go from K through 12, and then into college. You think about how universities have had to shift and cancel classes, and what's happening with graduation. I've got a six and an eight year old, and I've been told I need to save $200,000 apiece for each of them to go to college, which is just an astounding number, especially to someone like me, who went to an inexpensive public university on a scholarship. Saving that kind of money for college, and just thinking about how much more efficient our education system might be with a lot more digital, a lot more digital education, digital testing and classes, while still maintaining the college experience, what that's going to look like in 10 years. I think we're going to see a lot of changes over these next 18 months to our educational system. >> Dustin, talk about the event dynamics. Physical events don't exist currently. Certainly, when they do come back, they should, and they will, the role of the virtual space is going to be highlighted and new opportunities will emerge. You mentioned education. People learn, not just for school, whether they're kids, whether they're professionals, learning and collaboration, work tools are going to reshape. What's your take on that marketplace, because we got to do virtual events. You can't just replicate a physical event and move it to digital. It's a complex system. >> Yeah, you're talking about an entire industry. We saw the Google Events, Google Next, Google IO, the Microsoft Events, just across the, I'm here in Austin, Texas, all of South by Southwest was canceled, which is just, it's breathtaking. When does that come back, and what does it look like? Is it a year or two or more from now? Events is where I spend my time, and when I get on a plane, and I fly somewhere, I'm usually going to a conference or trade show. Think about the sports industry. People who get on a plane, they go to an NFL game. John, I don't have all the answers, man, but I'm telling you, that entire industry is rapidly, rapidly going to evolve. I hope and pray that one day we're back to a, I can go back to a college football game again. I hope I can sit in a CUBE studio at a CUBE Con or an Open Stack or some other conference again. >> Hey, we should do a rerun, because I was watching the Patriots game last night, Tom Brady beating the Chiefs, October from last year. It was one of the best games of the season, went down to the wire, and I watched it, and I'm like, okay, that's Tom Brady, he's still in the Patriot uniform on the TV. Do we do reruns? This is the question. Right now, there's a big void for the next three months. What do we do? Do we replay the highlights from the CUBE? Do we have physical get togethers with Zoom? What's your take on how people should think about these events? >> Yeah, you know, the reruns only go so far, right? I'm a Texas Aggie, man. I could watch Johnny Football in his prime anytime. But I know what happened, and those games are just not as exciting as something that's a surprise. I'm actually curious about e-sports for the first time. What would it look like to watch a couple of kids who are really good at Madden Football on a Playstation go at it? What would other games that I've never seen look like? In our space, it's a lot more about, I think, podcasts and live content and staying connected and apprised of what's going on, making-- Oh, we locked up there for a second. It's, I think it's going to be really interesting. I'm still following you guys. I certainly see you active on social media. I'm sort of more addicted than ever to the live news, and in fact, I'm ready to start seeing some stuff that doesn't involve COVID-19, so from that perspective, man, keep churning out good content, and good content that's pertinent to the rest of our industry. >> That's great stuff. Well, Dustin, take a minute to explain what you're doing at Apex Clearing, your mission, and what are you guys excited about. >> Yeah, so Apex Clearing, we're a fintech. We're a very forward-focused, digitally-focused fintech. We are well positioned to continue servicing the needs of our clients in this environment. We went fully remote the first week of March, long before it was mandatory, and our business shifted pretty seamlessly. We worked through a couple of hiccups, provisioning extra VPN IP addresses, and upgrading a couple of service plans on some of the softwares, the service we buy, but besides that, our team has done just a marvelous job transitioning to remote. We are in the broker, dealer, and registered advisor space, so we provide the clearing services, which handles stock trades, equity trades, in the back end, and the custodial services. We actually hold, safeguard, the equities that our correspondents, we call our clients correspondents, their retail customers end up holding. So we've been around in our current form since about 2012. This was a retread of a previous company that was bought and retooled as Apex Clearing in 2012. Very shortly after that, we helped Robinhood, Wealthfront, Betterment, a whole bunch of really forward-looking companies reinvent what it meant to buy and sell and trade securities online, and to hold assets in a robo advisor like Betterment. Today, we are definitely well-known, well-respected for how quickly and seamlessly our APIs can be used by our correspondents in building really modern e-banking and e-brokerage experiences. >> So you guys-- >> So that went-- >> Are you guys like a DevOps platform-- >> We're more like software as a service for fintech and brokerage. So our products are largely APIs that our correspondents use their own credentials to interact with, and then using our APIs, they can open accounts, which means get an account number from the systems that allows them to then fund that account, connect via ACH and other bank connectivity platforms, transfer cash into those accounts, and then start conducting trades. Some of our correspondents have that down to a 60-second experience in a mobile app. From a mobile app, you can register for that account, if you need to, take a picture of an IED, have all of that imported, add your tax information, have that account number associated with your banking account, move a couple hundred dollars into that banking account, and then if the stock market's open, start buying and selling stock in that same window. >> Great, well, I wanted to talk about this, because to the earlier bigger picture, I think people are going to be applying DevOps principles, younger entrepreneurs, but also, reborn, if you will, professionals who are old school IT or whatever, moving faster. And you wrote a blog post I want to get your thoughts on. You wrote it on April second. How we've adapted Ubuntu's time-based release cycles to fintech and software as a service. What is that all about? What's the meaning behind this post? You guys are doing something new, unique, or-- >> To this industry and to many of the people around me, even our clients and customers around me, this is a whole new world. They've never seen anything like it. To those of us who have been around Linux, open source, certainly Ubuntu, Open Stack, Kubernetes, it's just standard operating procedures. There's nothing surprising about it, necessarily. But either it's some combination of the financial services world, just the nature of proprietary software, but also the concept of software as a service, SaaS, which is very different than Ubuntu or Kubernetes or Open Stack, which is released software, right. We ship software at the end of an Ubuntu cycle or a Kubernetes cycle. It's very different when you're a software as a service platform, and it's a matter of rolling out to production some changes, and those changes then going live. So, I wrote a post mainly to give some transparency, largely to our clients, our correspondents. We've got a couple hundred customers that use the Apex platform. I've met with many of them in a sort of one-on-many, one-to-one, one-on-many basis, where I'll show up and deliver the product road map, a couple of product managers will come and do a deep dive. Part of what we communicate to those customers is around, now, around our release cycles, and to many of them, it's a foreign concept that they've just never seen or heard before, and so I put together the blog post. We shared it internally, and educated the teams, and it was well-received. We shared it externally privately with a number of customers, and it was well-received, and a couple of them, actually a couple of the Silicon Valley based customers said, hey, why don't you just put this out there on Medium or on your blog or under an Apex banner, because this actually would be really well-received by others in the family, other partners in the family. So I'm happy to kind of dive into a couple of the key principles here, and we can sort of talk through it if you're interested, John. >> Well, I think the main point is you guys have a release cycle that is the speed of open source to SaaS, and fintech, which again, proprietary stuff is slower, monolithic. >> Yeah, the key principle is that we've taken this, and we've made it predictable and transparent, and we commit to these cycles. You know, most people maybe familiar with Ubuntu releasing twice a year, right, April and October, Ubuntu has released every April and October since 2004. I was involved with Ubuntu between 2008 and 2018 as an engineer, an engineering manager, and then a product manager, and eventually a VP of product at Canonical, and that was very much my life for 10 years, oriented around that. In that time, I spent a lot of time around Open Stack, which adopted a very similar model. Open Stack's released every six months, just after the Ubuntu release. A number of the members of the technical team and the committee that formed Open Stack came out of either Ubuntu or Canonical or both, and really helped influence that community. It's actually quite similar in Kubernetes, which developed independent, generally, of Ubuntu. Kubernetes releases on a quarterly basis, about every three months, and again, it's the sort of thing where it's just a cycle. It happens like clockwork every three months. So when I joined Apex and took a look at a number of the needs that we had, our correspondents had, our relationship managers, our sales team, the client-facing people in the organization, one of the biggest items that bubbled straight to the top is our customers wanted more transparency into our road maps, tighter commitments on when we're going to deliver things, and the ability to influence those. And you know what, that's not dissimilar from any product managers plight anywhere in the industry. But what I was able to do is take some of those principles that are common around Ubuntu and Kubernetes and Open Stack, which by the way, are quite familiar. We use a lot of Ubuntu and Kubernetes inside of Apex, and many of our correspondents are quite familiar with those cycles, but they'd never really seen or heard of a software as a service, a SaaS vendor, using something like that. So that's what's new. >> You've got some cycles going now. You've got schedules, so just looking here, just to get this out there, 'cause I think it's data. You did it last year in October, November, mid-cycle in January of this year. You've got a couple summits coming up? >> Yeah, that's right, we've broken it down into three cycles per year, three 16-week cycles per year. So it's a little bit more frequent than the twice a year Ubuntu, not quite as frenetic as the quarterly Kubernetes cycles. 16 weeks time three is 48. That leaves us four weeks of slack, really to handle Thanksgiving and Christmas and end of year holidays, Chinese New Year, whatever might come up. I'll tell you from experience, that's always been a struggle in the Ubuntu and Open Stack and Kubernetes world, it's hard to plan around those cycles, so what we've done here is we've actually just allocated four weeks of a slush fund to take care of that. We're at three 16-week cycles per year. We version them according to the year and then an iterator. So 20A, 20B, 20C are our three cycles in 2020, and we'll do 21A, B, and C next year. Each of those cycles has three summits. So to your point about we get together, back in the before everyone stopped traveling, we very much enjoyed twice a year getting together for CUBE con. We very much enjoyed the Open Stack summits and the various Ubuntu summits. Inside of a small company like ours, these were physical. We'd get together in Dallas or New York or Chicago or Portland, which is the four places we have offices. We were doing that basically every six weeks or so for one of these summits. Now they're all virtual. We handle them over Zoom. When they were physical, we'd do the summit in about three days of packed agendas, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Now that we've gone to virtual, we've actually spread it a little bit thinner across the week, and so we've done, we've poked some holes in the day, which has been an interesting learning experience, and I think we're all much happier with the most recent summit we did, spreading it over the course of the week, accounting for time zones, giving ourself, everyone, lunch breaks and stuff. >> Well, we'll have to keep checking in. I want to certainly collaborate with you on the virtual digital, check your progress. We're all learning, and iterating, if you will, on the value that you can do with these digital ones. Try to get that success with physical, not always easy. Appreciate, and you're looking good, looking good and safe. Stay safe, and great to check in with you, and congratulations on the new opportunity. >> Yeah, thanks, John. >> Appreciate it. Dustin Kirkland, chief product officer at Apex Clearing. I'm John Furrier with the CUBE, checking in with a remote interview during this time when we are getting all the information of best practices on how to deal with this new at-scale, the new shift that is digital, that is impacting, and opportunities are there, certainly a lot of challenges, and hopefully, the healthcare, the finance, and the business models of these companies can continue and get back to work soon. But certainly, the people are still sheltered in place, working hard, being creative, be the coverage here in the CUBE. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (bright electronic music)