>>Hi, everyone. And thanks for joining us today for our session on the 2020 Data Drivers Award winners. I'm excited to be here today with you. I'm a lease. Bergeron, vice president, product marketing for snowflake. Thes rewards are intended to recognize companies and individuals for using snowflakes, data cloud to drive innovation and impact in their organizations. Before we start our conversations, I want to quickly congratulate all of our award winners. First in the business awards are data driver of the year is Cisco. Our machine learning master is you Nipper, Our data sharing leader is Rakuten. Our data application of the year is observed and our data for good award goes to door dash for the individual and team awards. We first have the cost. Jane, Chief Digital officer of Paccar. We have a militiamen, director of cybersecurity and data science winning our data science Manager of the Year award at Comcast for a date. A pioneer of the year. We have Faisal KP, who's our senior manager of enterprise data Services at Pizza Hut. And lastly, we have our best data team going to McKesson, led by Jimmy Herff Data and Analytics platform leader Huge congratulations to all of these winners. It was very difficult to pick them amongst amazing set of nominations. So now let's dive into our conversations. We'll start with the data driver of the year. Representing Cisco today is Robbie. I'm a month do director data platform, data and analytics. >>Let me welcome everybody to the wonderful. Within a few years before Cisco used to be a company, you know, in making the decisions partly with the data and partly with the cuts. Because, you know, the data is told in multiple places the trading is not done right and things like that. So we, you know, really understood it. You know what was a challenge in the organism? By then we defined the data strategy on we put in a few plants in place, and it is working very well. But what is more important is basically how we provide the data towards data scientists and the data community in Cisco. I'm making them available in a highly available scalable on the elastic platforms. That's where you know, snowflake came into picture really very well for arrest, along with the other data strategies that we have had in place more importantly, data. Democratization was a key. You know, you along with the simplification, something technologies involved in the past. Our clients need to be worrying, laudable the technologies involved, you know, for example, we used to manage her before we make it. Snowflake Andi Snowflake, in a solve all of these problems for us with the ease on it. Really helping enabling a data data given ordinances in our >>system. In the data sharing leaders category, Rockhampton was our winner. We have mark staying trigger VP of analytics here to share their story. I >>wanna thank Snowflake for the award, and it's an honor to be a today. The ease of use of snowflake has allowed projects to move forward innovation to move forward in a way that it simply couldn't have done on old Duke systems or or or other platforms. And I think the truth the same is true for us on a lot of the similar topics, but also in the data sharing space, data sharing is a part off innovation. Like I think, most of the tech companies we work with certainly are business partners, merchants, but also with a range of other service providers and other technology vendors, um on other companies that we strategically share data with 2 May benefit of their service or thio to allow data modeling or advanced data collaboration or strategic business deals using the data and evaluated with the data on. But I think if you look Greece snowflake, you would see a lot of time and effort money going to just establishing that data connection that often involved substantial investments in technology data pipelines, risk evaluation, hashing, encrypt encryption. Security on what we found with snowflakes sharing functionality is that we can not eliminate those concerns, but that the technology just supports the ability to share data securely easily, quickly in a way that we could never do >>previously. Now we have a really inspiring winner of the data for good award door dash with their Project Dash Initiative here to speak about their work is act shot near Engineering manager >>Thank you sports to snowflake for recognizing us for this initiative. Eso For those of you who don't know, Dash, the logistics technology platform company that connects people with the best in their cities and Project Dash, our flagship social impact program, uses the door dash logistics platform to tackle the challenges like hunger and food waste. It was launched in 2018 on over the first two years in partnership with food recovery organizations, we powered the delivery off over £2 million of surplus food from businesses to hunger relief agencies across the U. S. And Canada. Andi simply do Toko with tremendous need has a much we were ableto power. The delivery often estimated 5.8 million meals to food insecure communities and frontline workers across 48 states on the 3.5 million off. These meals have been delivered since much. We do all of our analysis for our business functions from like product development to skills and social impact in snowflake On the numbers I just provided here actually have come from Snowflake on. We have used it to provide various forms of reporting, tow our government and non profit partners on this snowflake. We can help them understand the impact, analyzed friends and ensure complaints in cases where we are supporting efforts for agencies like FEMA, our USDA onda. Lastly, our team is really excited to be recognized by snowflake for using data for good. It has reminded us to continue doubling down on our commitment to using our product and expertise to partner with communities we operated. Thank you again. >>The winner of the machine Learning Master's word is unit for Energy. Viola Sarcoma Data Innovation leader is here on behalf of unit for >>Hello, everyone, Thanks for having me here. It's really a pleasure. And we were really proud to get this award. It means a lot for you. Nipper. It's huge recognition for our effort since last couple of years assed part of our journey and also a celebration off our success now for you. Newport. It would not be possible to start looking at Advanced Analytics techniques, not having a solid data foundation in place. And that's where we invested a lot in our cloud data platform in the cloud back by snowflake. Having this platform allowed us to employ advanced analytics techniques, combining data from Markit from fundamental data, different other sources of data like weather and extracting new friends, new signals that basically help us to partly or even in some cases fully automate some trading strategy. And we believe this will be really fundamental for for the future off raiding in our company and we will definitely invest in this area in the future. >>Our data application of the year is observed. Observers recognizes the most innovative, data driven application built on Snowflake and representing observed today is their CEO, Jeremy Burton. >>Let me just echo the thanks from the other folks on the coal. I mean snowflakes, separation of storage. Compute. I can't overstate what a really big deal it is. Um, it means that we can ingest in store data. Really? For the price of Amazon s three on board, we're in a category where vendors of historically charged for volume of data ingested. So you can imagine this really represents huge savings. Um, in addition, and maybe on a more technical note, snowflakes, elastic architectures really enables us to direct queries appropriately, based on the complexity of the query. So small queries or simple queries weaken director extra small warehouses and complex queries. We can direct, you know, for Excel. Or I think even a six x l is either there are on its way. The key thing there is that users they're not sitting around waiting for results to appear regardless of the query complexity. So I mean, really? The separation storage compute on the elastic architectures is a really big deal for us. >>Turning to the data Pioneer of the Year Award, I'm excited to be here with Faisal KP, senior manager of Enterprise Data Services from Pizza Hut. >>First of all, thank you, Snowflake, for giving this wonderful person. I think it means a lot for us in terms of validating what we're doing. I think we were one of the earlier adopters of Snowflake. We saw the vision of snowflake, you know, stories. Russell's computer separation on all the goodies, right? Right from back in 2017, I believe what snowflake enabled us is to actually get the scale with very little manpower, which is needed to man the entire system. So on the Super Bowl day, we have, you know, the entire crew literally a boardroom where the right from the CME, most of the CEOs to all the folks will be sitting and watching what is happening in the system. And we have to do a lot of real time analytics during that time. So with snowflake, you know, way used the elasticity of the platform we use, you know, platform you know their solutions, like snow pipe to basically automate the data ingestion coming through various channels, from the commas, from the stores, everything simultaneously. So as soon as the program is done, you know, we can scale scale down to our normal volume, which means we can, you know, way can save a lot. Of course. So definitely it snowflake has been game changer for us in terms of how we provide real time analytics. Our systems are used by thousands off restaurants throughout the country and, you know, by hundreds of franchisees. So the scale is something we have achieved with a lot of ability and success. >>In the category of data science Manager of the Year Award, we have a mission Min, director of cybersecurity and data science at Comcast. >>So thank you for having me and thank you for this wonderful award. So one of the biggest challenges you see in this other security spaces the tremendous amount of data that we have to compute every day to find the gold haystack. So one of the big challenges we overcame with by uniting snowflake was how do we go from like my other counterparts on the panel have said Theo operational overhead of maintaining a large data store and moved to more of results driven and data focused environment. And, you know, part of that journey was really the tremendous leadership. Comcast saying, You know, we want Thio through our day to day lives by relying less on operational work and Maura on answering questions. And so you know, over the last year we've really put Snowflake at the center of our ecosystem, knowing that it's elastic platform and its ability scale infinitely have given us the ability to dream big and use it to drop five cybersecurity. And while it's traditionally used for cybersecurity, we're starting to see the benefits right away and the beauty of the snowflake. Ecos, Miss. We're now able to enable folks that not traditionally have big data skills, but they have standards, sequel skills, and they could still work in the snowflake platform. So, you know, the transition to cloud has been very powerful for us as an organization. But I think the end story, the real takeaways, by moving our secretary operation to the cloud, we're now been able to enable more people and get the results they were looking for. You know, as other people have said fast, people hate to wait. So the scale of snowflake really shines. >>Yeah. Now, let's hear from our data Executive of the year. The Cost. Jane. Chief Digital Officer Packer. >>Thank you very much, Snowflake, for this really incredible recognition and honor of the work we're doing it back. Are we began. The first step in this process was for us to develop an enterprise Great data platform in the cloud capable off managing every aspect of data at scale. This this platform includes snowflake as our analytics data warehouse amongst many other technologies that we used for ingestion of data, data processing, uh, data governance, transactional, uh, needs and others. So this platform, once developed, has really helped us leverage data across the broad pack. Our systems and applications globally very efficiently and is enabling pack are, as a result to enhance every aspect. Selfish business with data. >>Ah, big congratulations again to all of the winners of the 2020 Data Drivers Awards. Thanks so much for joining us for a great conversation. And we hope that you enjoy the rest of the data cloud summit

>> Live from Toronto Canada, it's The Cube, covering Global Cloud and Blockchain Summit 2018, brought to you by The Cube. >> Hello, everyone welcome back to The Cube's live coverage here in Toronto for the first Global Cloud and Blockchain Summit in conjunction with the Blockchain futurist happening this week it's run. I'm John Fourier, my cohost Dave Vellante, we're here with Cube alumni, Bradley Rotter, pioneer Blockchain investor, seasoned pro was there in the early days as an investor in hedge funds, continuing to understand the impacts of cryptocurrency, and its impact for investors, and long on many of the crypto. Made some great predictions on The Cube last time at Polycon in the Bahamas. Bradley, great to see you, welcome back. >> Thank you, good to see both of you. >> Good to have you back. >> So I want to just get this out there because you have an interesting background, you're in the cutting edge, on the front lines, but you also have a history. You were early before the hedge fund craze, as a pioneer than. >> Yeah. >> Talk about that and than how it connects to today, and see if you see some similarities, talk about that. >> I actually had begun trading commodity futures contracts when I was 15. I grew up on a farm in Iowa, which is a small state in the Midwest. >> I've heard of it. >> And I was in charge of >> Was it a test market? (laughing) >> I was in charge of hedging our one corn contract so I learned learned the mechanisms of the market. It was great experience. I traded commodities all the way through college. I got to go to West Point as undergrad. And I raced back to Chicago as soon as I could to go to the University of Chicago because that's where commodities were trading. So I'd go to night school at night at the University of Chicago and listen to Nobel laureates talk about the official market theory and during the day I was trading on the floor of the the Chicago Board of Trade and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Grown men yelling, kicking, screaming, shoving and spitting, it was fabulous. (laughing) >> Sounds like Blockchain today. (laughing) >> So is that what the dynamic is, obviously we've seen the revolution, certainly of capital formation, capital deployment, efficiency, liquidity all those things are happening, how does that connect today? What's your vision of today's market? Obviously lost thirty billion dollars in value over the past 24 hours as of today and we've taken a little bit of a haircut, significant haircut, since you came on The Cube, and you actually were first to predict around February, was a February? >> February, yeah. >> You kind of called the market at that time, so props to that, >> Yup. >> Hope you're on the right >> Thank you. >> side of those shorts >> Thank you. >> But what's going on? What is happening in the capital markets, liquidity, why are the prices dropping? What's the shift? So just a recap, at the time in February, you said look I'm on short term bear, on Bitcoin, and may be other crypto because all the money that's been made. the people who made it didn't think they had to pay taxes. And now they're realizing, and you were right on. You said up and up through sort of tax season it's going to be soft and then it's going to come back and it's exactly what happened. Now it's flipped again, so your thoughts? >> So my epiphany was I woke up in the middle of the night and said oh my God, I've been to this rodeo before. I was trading utility tokens twenty years ago when they were called something else, IRUs, do you remember that term? IRU was the indefeasible right to use a strand of fiber, and as the internet started kicking off people were crazy about laying bandwidth. Firms like Global Crossing we're laying cable all over the ocean floors and they laid too much cable and the cable became dark, the fiber became dark, and firms like Global Crossing, Enron, Enron went under really as a result of that miss allocation. And so it occurred to me these utility tokens now are very similar in characteristic except to produce a utility token you don't have to rent a boat and lay cable on the ocean floor in order to produce one of these utility tokens, that everybody's buying, I mean it takes literally minutes to produce a token. So in a nutshell it's too many damn tokens. It was like the peak of the internet, which we were all involved in. It occurred to me then in January of 2000 the market was demanding internet shares and the market was really good at producing internet shares, too many of them, and it went down. So I think we're in a similar situation with cryptocurrency, the Wall Street did come in, there were a hundred plus hedge funds of all shapes and sizes scrambling and buying crypto in the fall of last year. It's kind of like Napoleon's reason for attacking Russia, seemed like a good idea at the time. (laughing) And so we're now in a corrective phase but literally there's been too many tokens. There are so many tokens that we as humans can't even deal with that. >> And the outlook, what's the outlook for you? I mean, I'll see there's some systemic things going to be flushed out, but you long on certain areas? What do you what do you see as a bright light at the end of the tunnel or sort right in front of you? What's happening from a market that you're excited about? >> At a macro scale I think it's apparent that the internet deserves its own currency, of course it does and there will be an internet currency. The trick is which currency shall that be? Bitcoin was was a brilliant construct, the the inventor of Bitcoin should get a Nobel Prize, and I hope she does. (laughing) >> 'Cause Satoshi is female, everyone knows that. (laughing) >> I got that from you actually. (laughing) But it may not be Bitcoin and that's why we have to be a little sanguine here. You know, people got a little bit too optimistic, Bitcoin's going to a hundred grand, no it's going to five hundred grand. I mean, those are all red flags based on my experience of trading on the floor and investing in hedge funds. Bitcoin, I think I'm disappointed in Bitcoins adoption, you know it's still very difficult to use Bitcoin and I was hoping by now that that would be a different scenario but it really isn't. Very few people use Bitcoin in their daily lives. I do, I've been paying my son his allowance for years in Bitcoin. Son of a bitch is rich now. (laughing) >> Damn, so on terms of like the long game, you seeing the developers adopted a theory and that was classic, you know the decentralized applications. We're here at a Cloud Blockchain kind of convergence conference where developers mattered on the Cloud. You saw a great developer, stakeholders with Amazon, Cloud native, certainly there's a lot of developers trying to make things easier, faster, smarter, with crypto. >> Yup. >> So, but all at the same time it's hard for developers. Hearing things like EOS coming on, trying to get developers. So there's a race for developer adoption, this is a major factor in some of the success and price drops too. Your thoughts on, you know the impact, has that changed anything? I mean, the Ethereum at the lowest it's been all year. >> Yup. Yeah well, that was that was fairly predictable and I've talked about that at number of talks I've given. There's only one thing that all of these ICOs have had in common, they're long Ethereum. They own Ethereum, and many of those projects, even out the the few ICO projects that I've selectively been advising I begged them to do once they raised their money in Ethereum is to convert it into cash. I said you're not in the Ethereum business, you're in whatever business that you're in. Many of them ported on to that stake, again caught up in the excitement about the the potential price appreciation but they lost track of what business they were really in. They were speculating in Ethereum. Yeah, I said they might as well been speculating in Apple stock. >> They could have done better then Ethereum. >> Much better. >> Too much supply, too many damn tokens, and they're easy to make. That's the issue. >> Yeah. >> And you've got lots of people making them. When one of the first guys I met in this space was Vitalik Buterin, he was 18 at the time and I remember meeting him I thought, this is one of the smartest guys I've ever met. It was a really fun meeting. I remember when the meeting ended and I walked away I was about 35 feet away and he LinkedIn with me. Which I thought was cute. >> That's awesome, talk about what you're investing-- >> But, now there's probably a thousand Vitalik Buterin's in the space. Many of them are at this conference. >> And a lot of people have plans. >> Super smart, great ideas, and boom, token. >> And they're producing new tokens. They're all better improved, they're borrowing the best attributes of each but we've got too many damn tokens. It's hard for us humans to be able to keep track of that. It's almost like requiring a complicated new browser download for every website you went to. We just can't do that. >> Is the analog, you remember the dot com days, you referred to it earlier, there was quality, and the quality lasted, sustained, you know, the Amazon's, the eBay's, the PayPal's, etc, are there analogs in this market, in your view, can you sniff out the sort of quality? >> There are definitely analogs, I think, but I think one of the greatest metrics that we can we can look at is that utility token being utilized? Not many of them are being utilized. I was giving a talk last month, 350 people in the audience, and I said show of hands, how many people have used a utility token this year? One hand went up. I go, Ethereum? Ethereum. Will we be using utility tokens in the future? Of course we will but it's going to have to get a whole lot easier for us humans to be able to deal with them, and understand them, and not lose them, that's the big issue. This is just as much a cybersecurity play as it is a digital currency play. >> Elaborate on that, that thought, why is more cyber security playing? >> Well, I've had an extensive background in cyber security as an investor, my mantra since 9/11 has been to invest in catalyze companies that impact the security of the homeland. A wide variety of security plays but primarily, cyber security. It occurred to me that the most valuable data in the world used to be in the Pentagon. That's no longer the case. Two reasons basically, one, the data has already been stolen. (laughing) Not funny. Two, if you steal the plans for the next generation F39 Joint Strike Force fighter, good for you, there's only two buyers. (laughing) The most valuable data in the world today, as we sit here, is a Bitcoin private key, and they're coming for them. Prominent Bitcoin holders are being hunted, kidnapped, extorted, I mean it's a rather extraordinary thing. So the cybersecurity aspect of if all of our assets are going to be digitized you better damn well keep those keys secure and so that's why I've been focused on the cybersecurity aspect. Rivets, one of the ICOs that I invested in is developing software that turns on the power of the hardware TPM, trusted execution environment, that's already on your phone. It's a place to hold keys in hardware. So that becomes fundamentally important in holding your keys. >> I mean certainly we heard stories about kidnapping that private key, I mean still how do you protect that? That's a good question, that's a really interesting question. Is it like consensus, do you have multiple people involved, do you get beaten up until you hand over your private key? >> It's been happening. It's been happening. >> What about the security token versus utility tokens? A lot of tokens now, so there's yeah, too many tokens on the utility side, but now there's a surge towards security tokens, and Greg Bettinger wrote this morning that the market has changed over and the investor side's looking more and more like traditional in structures and companies, raising money. So security token has been a, I think relief for some people in the US for sure around investing in structures they understand. Is that a real dynamic or is that going to sustain itself? How do you see security tokens? >> And we heard in the panel this morning, you were in there, where they were predicting the future of the valuation of the security tokens by the end of the year doubling, tripling, what ever it was, but what are your thoughts? >> I think security tokens are going to be the next big thing, they have so many advantages to what we now regard as share certificates. My most exciting project is that I'm heavily involved in is a project called the Entanglement Institute. That's going to, in the process of issuing security infrastructure tokens, so our idea is a public-private partnership with the US government to build the first mega quantum computing center in Newport, Rhode Island. Now the private part of the public-private partnership by the issuance of tokens you have tremendous advantages to the way securities are issued now, transparency, liquidity. Infrastructure investments are not very liquid, and if they were made more liquid more people would buy them. It occurred to me it would have been a really good idea if grandpa would have invested in the Hoover Dam. Didn't have the chance. We think that there's a substantial demand of US citizens that would love to invest in our own country and would do so if it were more liquid, if it was more transparent, if the costs were less of issuing those tokens. >> More efficient, yeah. >> So you see that as a potential way to fund public infrastructure build-outs? >> It will be helpful if infrastructure is financed in the future. >> How do you see the structure on the streets, this comes up all the time, there's different answers to this. There's not like there's one, we've seen multiple but I'm putting a security token, what am i securing against, cash flow, equity, right to convert to utility tokens? So we're starting to see a variety of mechanisms, 'cause you have to investor a security outcome. >> Yeah, so as an investor, what do you look for? >> Well, I think it's almost limitless of what these smart securities, you know can be capable of, for example one of the things that were that we're talking with various parts of the government is thinking about the tax credit. The tax credit that have been talked about at the Trump administration, that could be really changed on its head if you were able to use smart securities, if you will. Who says that the tax credit for a certain project has to be the same as all other projects? The president has promised a 1.5 trillion dollar infrastructure investment program and so far he's only 1.5 trillion away from the goal. It hasn't started yet. Wilbur Ross when, in the transition team, I had seen the white paper that he had written, was suggesting an 82% tax credit for infrastructure investment. I'm going 82%, oh my God, I've never. It's an unfathomable number. If it were 82% it would be the strongest fiscal stimulus of your lifetime and it's a crazy number, it's too big. And then I started thinking about it, maybe an 82% tax credit is warranted for a critical infrastructure as important as quantum computing or cyber security. >> Cyber security. >> Exactly, very good point, and maybe the tax credit is 15% for another bridge over the Mississippi River. We already got those. So a smart infrastructure token would allow the Larry Kudlow to turn the dial and allow economic incentive to differ based on the importance of the project. >> The value of the project. >> That is a big idea. >> That is a big idea. >> That is what we're working on. >> That is a big idea, that is a smart contract, smart securities that have allocations, and efficiencies, and incentives that aren't perverse or generic. >> It aligns with the value of the society he needs, right. Talk about quantum computing more, the potential, why quantum, what attracted you to quantum? What do you see as the future of quantum computing? >> You know, you don't you don't have to own very much Bitcoin before what wakes you up in the middle of the night is quantum computing. It's a hundred million times faster than computing as we know it today. The reason that I'm involved in this project, I believe it's a matter of national security that we form a national initiative to gain quantum supremacy, or I call it data supremacy. And right now we're lagging, the Chinese have focused on this acutely and are actually ahead, I believe of the United States. And it's going to take a national initiative, it's going to take a Manhattan Project, and that's that's really what Entanglement Institute is, is a current day Manhattan Project partnering with government and three-letter agencies, private industry, we have to hunt as a pack and focus on this or we're going to be left behind. >> And that's where that's based out of. >> Newport, Rhode Island. >> And so you got some DC presence in there too? >> Yes lots of DC presence, this is being called Quantum summer in Washington DC. Many are crediting the Entanglement Institute for that because they've been up and down the halls of Congress and DOD and other-- >> Love to introduce you to Bob Picciano, Cube alumni who heads up quantum computing for IBM, would be a great connection. They're doing trying to work their, great chips to building, open that up. Bradley thanks for coming on and sharing your perspective. Always great to see you, impeccable vision, you've got a great vision. I love the big ideas, smart securities, it's coming, that is, I think very clear. >> Thank you for sharing. >> Thank you. The Cube coverage here live in Toronto. The Cube, I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante, more live coverage, day one of three days of wall-to-wall coverage of the Blockchain futurist conference. This is the first global Cloud Blockchain Summit here kicking off the whole week. Stay with us for more after this short break.

(energetic music) >> Hi, I'm Peter Burroughs and welcome to another CUBEConversation from our wonderful studios in Palo Alto, California. Today we're talking storage, not just any kind of storage, but fast, intelligent storage. We're got NGD Systems with us, and specifically welcome back to theCUBE, Nader Salessi, CEO founder, and Scott Shadley, VP of Marketing. >> Good to see you again, Peter. >> So, the last time we were here we had a great conversation about the role that storage is going to play in overall system performance. And Nader, when I think of NGD Systems, I think of really smart people doing great engineering to create really fast high-performance products. Where are we in the state of the art of fast storage, fast systems? >> So, what we are learning from the customers, the demand of the storage continues to grow exponentially. They want larger capacity per drive. All the challenge they have, physical space is limited always and the power consumption. It is not necessarily just power consumption of the device, they have also self resources for implementing their Hyperscale Data Centers from the physical space, from buying servers, network storage. The challenge that they face is power available from the utility companies are limited. They cannot overcome that. So, if they need to increase their capacity of the storage by double the size of the storage in a year timeframe, they cannot get access to the utilities and the power. So, they need to focus on energy efficiency. >> So, when I think of NGD Systems, what I should think about is smart, fast, and efficient from a power standpoint. >> That's correct. So, that's one of the areas that we are focusing a lot to provide energy efficient. We are improving the watt per terabyte by a factor of 10 compared to the best in class available the other side of the SSD drive that exists in the industry. >> Oh, let me make sure I got that. So, by improved wattage by a factor of 10 for the same capacity. >> Correct. In meaning we are improving watts per terabyte in a same physical space. And that's the challenge that the industry is facing. >> Got it. >> The next set of the challenge that all the hyperscalers are facing, and we are learning from them, moving of the data is a challenge. It just takes time and it's not efficient. So, the more they can do inside of the drive to do the manipulation of the data without moving the data, that's what they are looking for. And that's exactly where we are focusing and with our intelligent product that we're introducing. In the fourth quarter of this year, we are introducing mass producible solution that can take it to a mass production. >> So, give us an example of that, 'cause I know you were one of the first suppliers of technology that did things like brought mass produced down closer to the data. Is that the basic notion that we're talking here, and what are the use cases we're looking at? >> So, there are by far a lot more use cases and I'll let Scott go into some of the use cases that we have implemented as an example with some large partners which we are also announcing this coming week, or next week during the FMS. So, Scott, do you want to explore? >> Yeah, absolutely, so Peter, just to give to your point. There's a lot of different ways you can look at making storage intelligent. What we looked at we took a different direction. We're not trying to just do simple things like the minor database applications, we're going for what's new and innovative in the way of things like AI and machine learning. So, we talked last time a little bit about this image similarity search concept. As Nader mentioned, we're going to be live with a guest speaker at FMS implementing a version of that. >> Now, FMS is Flash Memory Summit. >> Yes, for those that don't know, Flash Memory Summit that happens every year. Other things that we've worked on again with partners relate to things like relational databases and being able to do things like implement Google TensorFlow live in the drive. We've also been able to port docker containers directly into the drives, so then there's now a customer's ability to take any application you're running, whatever format it's in and literally drop it in a container format into the drive and execute the commands in place on the data. And we're seeing improvements of 10 to 50x on execution time of those applications because they're not physically moving data around. >> So, to put this, kind of summarize this, if a customer, user, has a choice of moving 50 terabytes around of raw data as opposed to moving maybe a couple of hundred kilobytes or megabytes of application down to the drive, then obviously you want to move the smaller down. But it requires a fair amount of processing power and control be located very close to the data. So, how's that happening? >> So, by architecting the fundamentals of the storage from a sketch, we are able to provide the right solution. So, architecting within each control, or each SSD there is a controller for managing the flash and the interfacing with the host. As part of that, we have embedded additional resources. Part of it is a quad-core application processor, 64 bit application processor that is running at at least a gigahertz that the application can come down and run on that, or operating system is running on it. In addition to that we have embedded the hardware accelerator to accelerate certain functions that makes sense to be done. Plus the access to the data tower that is readily available at a much higher bandwidth than the host interface. So, that's how we are at this end. Then of course, by providing the complete software stack to make it easy for the customers to bring their application rather than starting from scratch, or having it very specialized and custom solutions. >> So, when I think about if I'm a CIO or if I'm a senior person in infrastructure, I'm thinking, what workloads naturally lend themselves to high degrees of parallelism? Then I'm thinking, how can I move more of that parallelism closer to the data. Have I got that right? >> Exactly. >> Absolutely. >> So, how's this turning into product? >> So, for that perspective we've been releasing, or we've had released now two platforms we've called the Catalina Family of Solutions. And they've been POCs, prototypes, and some limited production volume. As Nadir mentioned, our third platform we're calling the Newport Platform is going to be an ASIC base solution that's going to be able to drive that mass marketed option that he referenced. It's a whole bunch of unique things about it. A, we have the application coprocessors. It's the first SSD controller to ever be done on a 14 nanometer process node, so that's where the energy efficiency piece of this comes into play. And the fact that we can do the densities the customers are looking for. 'Cause right now, there's a challenge in the market to be able to do a large enough drive at the right performance characteristics and power consumption to solve the need. >> So, you're following some locations in Southern California, from Catalina to Newport. In the next couple of years you'll be in the San Bernardino Mountains. >> Sure. >> So, as we think about where the technology is, so give us an example of the performance improvements, which you're seeing from an overall benchmark standpoint. >> So, one of the other use cases that it may not be intuitive to think about this is for the content of a video, for video content everywhere. So, the new generation of contents, they are large, they are massive, they require massive amounts of storage. And the old fashioned way of doing it, they have multiple drives in a server. They all converge and they go through another server for the encryption and authentication. Well, we are moving that function inside of the storage. Now, all of a sudden, same server instead of having all converging and going through one narrow pipe, all the drives concurrently can serve multiple subscriber in parallel by more than factor of 10. And that's substantial from the performance point of view. So, it is not necessary the old fashioned way of measuring it, what's the IOPS, those are the old way of measuring it. The new ways, the end users how they can access the data without being a bottleneck. And that's again, another use case of it. The other use case as Scott mentioned for the doing image similarity search, in the old fashioned way when they were accessing a billion images, it's working fine with the current SSDs, off the shelf SSDs, and the current servers, and GPUs. The challenge they are facing as they increase this database to a trillion images, it just cannot do it that old way. So, it's more than just how many gigabytes they push through or how many IOPS. It's being able to look at it from the system level point of view, and how many subscribers or how many customers can access it concurrent. >> So, you're describing a number of relatively specialized types of applications, but nonetheless, applications of significant value to their businesses. But let's talk just for a second about how a customer would employ the technology. Customers don't mind specialized or more specialized devices as long as they fit in within the conventions for how they get used. So, what's the complexity of introducing your product? >> Very good point that you're raising. Fundamentally, we are a solid state drive storage as a block storage based on PCle NVMe without any drivers. They plug it in, it's plug and play. It works. On top of that, and for this scenario of the block storage, we are the highest capacity, lowest power consumption, or lowest watt per terabytes, and servicing the majority of the market that nowadays are focused more on the read and consistent read, rather than what's the again, IOPS or how fast is the write. So, we have our architecture and the algorithms is set up that we would provide a very narrow beam of the consistent latency no matter what workload they put on it, and provide the right solution for them. Then on top of that, if they have a specialized workload or the use cases, they still can enable it or disable it based on simple software switch. >> So, Scott, when you think about partners, the ecosystem, I know that we talked about this a bit last time, getting started, expanding it, where are we in terms of NGD Systems getting the market? >> Absolutely, so from that perspective we've gone beyond the proof of concept only phase. We've actually got production orders that have shipped to customers. We're starting to see that roll out in the back half of this quarter. As Nadir mentioned, we roll into Q4 with the new product, then upgrade those customers and start getting into even larger rollouts. But it's not just a couple of mom and pop shops type of thing. It's some big names. It's some high-level partners. And we're starting to now build out the ecosystem and how to deliver it through server ODMs or other partners that can play off of the system, whether it be storage array providers or even some of the big box players. >> So, we're now here with Newport. >> Yes. >> You've no doubt got plans. We don't have to go too deep into 'em, but as your company starts to scale, what's the cadence going to look like? Are you going to be able to continue to push the state of the art from performance smarts and energy efficiency standpoint? >> Absolutely, there are already things that are in the pipeline for the next generation of how to bring more intelligence inside of the drive. With more resources for a lot more workload to be able to adapt itself to many, many use cases, rather than only maybe today it might be a dozen use cases, to go infinite. It truly is a platform rather than just a unique for this application. And then we're going to expand on that toward the next generation of it. So obviously, as we ramp up the first generation of product in mass production, the R&D's working on the next generation of the intelligence that they've got to pour into it and continue that cadence. And of course, we scale the company accordingly. >> Great news from NGD Systems. Nadir. >> It is wonderful, this FMS coming up, we are announcing there are new generation of product, as well as announcing the close partner with one of the hyperscalers that we are introducing the next generation of product. >> Fantastic, Scott Shadley, VP of Marketing. Nadir Salessi, CEO founder. NGD Systems, thanks very much again for being on theCUBE. And to you, once again, thanks for watching this CUBEConversation. Until we meet again, thanks for watching. (energetic music)

>> Live from Washington D.C. It's theCUBE covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2018 brought to you by Amazon web services and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Washington D.C. everybody you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage I'm Dave Vellante, with John Furrier, we're covering the AWS public sector summit Barry Russell is here, the General Manager of Worldwide Business Development and Operations for the AWS marketplace and service catalog and he's joined by Dmitri Alperovitch who is the co-founder and CTO of CrowdStrike a hot new company, just raised a boatload of dough we're going to talk about that, but welcome gentleman, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Barry, let's start with you. So we saw Teresa put up a slide, I tried to count and it was over two hundred ISVs and SAS providers for GovCloud, the marketplace is booming. What's going on from your perspective? >> So we launched marketplace in the GovCloud at New York summit last year, back in 2017 and we launched it in a little over four hundred products that were available. The team is more than double that now, there's nine hundred and fifty or more products available. But the exciting thing for us is that today we're able to make SAS; SAS inscription, SAS contracts available from partners such as CrowdStrike. It just gives customers more flexibility and choice in how they deploy software into a region like GovCloud. >> So Dmitri, we're going to get into the funding and the news in a second. But from your standpoint, marketplace, why the attractiveness, no concerns, it's all systems go, go hard in. What's your perspective? >> Absolutely. AWS has been a huge partner for us since really the beginning of the company. We've built our entire business on AWS, we're cloud end point security vendors so we have a little agent that lives on every server, desktop, laptop, both on premise and cloud environments. But the back-end is all on AWS where we process mass amounts of data and the exciting thing in the last year or so in partnering with AWS is being able to offer that capability to their customers through the marketplace where every asset that you have on AWS can now be protected by CrowdStrike and we're very very excited about that and actually today, we launched our 'Falcon' is the name of our product on GovCloud, offering to target primarily the Federal Government as well as the state and local and other enterprises actually, that are interested in that high level of assurance that GovCloud provides. >> What specifically- can you just drill down the product I just want to make sure that we get that right. So, you're on Amazon, you're protecting Amazon end points within their cloud. That's great for Amazon commercial enterprises, repeat one more time the public sector piece, how does that work? Who's the customer? Is it just the agency, or is it also enterprises who work with that? Talk about the dynamics. >> So when you look at our customers it's a mix of large enterprises, about twenty percent of fortune 500 companies, and various federal agencies. Basically we install on every machine they have that runs Windows, Mac or Linux systems so servers, desktops, laptops, everything within their environment but there's no on-premise equipment. So the agent connects to our cloud which runs on AWS and we collect all the execution activities that are taking place and apply machine learning and artificial intelligence to discover security threats. So it's a big data problem and we collect over a hundred billion events every single day just to give you a sense of how much that is, in two days we process the amount of data that Twitter processes in a year. So, really huge amounts of data. >> So Barry, do you go out to partners, do you even have to sell them on this concept, are they beating down your door, what's that dynamic like? >> Yeah, we work with partners that, well first of all, we have to get them to architect for AWS. So, before we even think about listing a product in marketplace, Dmitri will tell you, they have to first architect to run well on AWS so that when the software is deployed or the customer accesses that environment, it's running optimally. And the customer is protecting both assets that they have running on AWS and On-Prem. I think vendors have really warmed up to the idea of marketplace as a sales channel for them. And the reason for that is we really serve two different types of customers. One type of customer who can go to the public marketplace website and subscribe to a product, deploy that and immediately purchase it. And then, for large enterprise and public sector federal government customers, we still have that feature of private offers, which enables the customer and the vendor to negotiate on price and terms but still transact digitally through marketplace and have it all seamlessly built by AWS. Lots of flexibility for sales teams that are in the field. >> Okay, so they work out the financial arrangements and you guys facilitate that experience? >> That's right. We handle the deployment, subscription and billing for the customer. >> So obviously, you know, the commercial space SAS is exploding. What are the drivers in federal, are they similar, what are the differences? >> For customers that are wanting to move to SAS based applications, I think it's pretty simple. Customers have reached a point where they don't necessarily want to manage the underlying infrastructure or software itself. So they're really looking to manufacturers like CrowdStrike who have a fully managed SAS based environment running on AWS. All the customer wants is the outcome the functionality of the software, for it to be performant and do what the vendor said that it was going to do. Managing all of that infrastructure and underlying technology, that's the expertise of the manufacturer themselves and the movement to SAS is all about simplifying for customers. >> How about CrowdStrike news I want to get to the valuation question. You guys are valued at over three billion dollars just reported on siliconangle.com and around the world you guys raised two hundred million dollars in a round of funding. Total capitalization is about four hundred million, roughly? >> Yeah, over four hundred million. >> OK. So you're feeling good today, right? >> Very good. More than anything else it's an indication of our growth, we've doubled the company in terms of revenue last year. We had a year over year increase of five hundred percent in terms of one million dollar deals we've closed. So it's really an indication that we're separating ourselves from the rest of the pretty crowded endpoint security marketplace and establishing ourselves as a leader. >> And what's the money going to be used for? Mostly expansion, sales, marketing? >> It's further expansion, our growth internationally sales and marketing, engineering, helping build out more of the platform capabilities. >> I want to get your take on the cloud because you guys built your business on day one. We were commenting off-camera saying that with our company we have never owned a data center. Have you ever owned a data center? >> We do a few things, small things, but most of our stuff is on AWS. >> So, for the people out there trying to do cloud that don't have that clean sheet of paper of a start-up like you guys were seven years ago. The key to success, to really take advantage of the cloud, not just migrate to it, but actually use it. >> Well, you know, it's interesting in security it's been an interesting journey because when we started back in 2011, doing security in the cloud was a heresy. In fact, I remember meetings with major banks back in those days when we were telling them about our plans and how we're going to do security in a very different way. They said 'This sounds intriguing, but we'll never be a customer because we'll never do cloud." Now, most of these guys are customers, so the mindset has definitely changed a lot. And what we're seeing now is actually our competitors that for years have been trying to compete with us by saying 'Well we're on-premise, CrowdStrike is cloud, you can't trust cloud.' Now they're desperately trying to move to the cloud and of course, unless you build it natively in the cloud to begin with it's very very hard to do. You can't just put an appliance in a data center and call it a cloud, and that's what they're struggling with. >> How do customers determine whether something- How does it pass the smell test? You know, you can say you do things, what's the flaw in having that non-optimized fully cloud-ready, or born in the cloud solution? What's the test? >> That's a great question. So, one test is scalability. We replace a lot of our competitors because they just couldn't scale. Because they used traditional sequel-based databases, single appliances, not a multi-tenet environment, they deploy it to two hundred thousand end points and the thing just comes crashing down. So that's one big thing and then in terms of better security, unless this is what the cloud really gives you in security, unless you can aggregate all of this data, and we process a hundred billion events per day and do machine learning on that data to try and discover new types of attacks, you're not leveraging the benefits of the cloud you're not delivering better protection. >> We've had many interviews over the years, Dave and I, around security with Amazon. You took a lot of heat on it being not secure turns out the cloud is actually becoming more secure, you're an expert in security, you've done a lot of thread analysis over the years looking at your bio and you're successfully leading a great company. Hackers love to attack where the data is, so the cloud's complexity, if you will, or its distributive nature, makes it less hackable, some say. What's your take on that? How do you view that opportunity? So say, look at it, if I put everything in one spot, I can brute-force it, or I'm going to get hacked. What's your take on using the cloud as an opportunity to have better security? >> You know, in this day and age almost every single company that is not concerned in moving to the cloud is making a huge mistake because the reality is, when you look at the security teams that Amazon has, or other cloud providers have, they are way ahead of virtually everyone in this market. They're way ahead of the big banks that have a lot of money,6 they're certainly way ahead of the federal government, so you're getting the best of the best and security technologies they have the same level of scale that we do in terms of seeing all these types of attacks and can react a lot faster. So yes, while it may present itself as a bigger target the reality is that you'll be getting a much higher level of protection than you can ever do yourself. >> So what's the inside scoop on the tipping point? You were talking before, years ago, financial services, customers for example said 'Never, we'll never go to the cloud'. We've had many interviews, 'that's an evil word.' >> That's right. >> What was the tipping point? Was it the realization that companies like Amazon could do a better job? Was it fear of missing out? Was it economics? Was it the losses that they were taking? What was it? >> I think it was a combination of everything. It's funny because in those days we actually asked them, 'Well, how did you feel about virtualization when it came out? I bet you didn't like that either.' 'No, we didn't like that, now we use the virtualization.' 'How do you feel about open source?' 'No, no. We hated it. Now we use it.' Right, so it's a journey for a lot of companies. Whenever something new comes out that's a big paradigm shift. But a few years in typically they realize the adoption. What we're seeing now particularly in the public sector is that realization that the commercial sector went through probably three or four years ago. And now we're seeing the big push and the executive order from the present that you have to adopt cloud, that you have to move to modern IT infrastructure and we're seeing a lot of success and the federal government agencies are realizing we need to do security in particular very differently and the cloud is a huge differentiator. >> How about, anything you can add to that Barry? Your perspectives on it? >> No, we're seeing enterprise customers and not just in financial services but across all industries. On the public sector side, you have organizations like GoodWill or City and Newport and then on the enterprise side, you have really large organizations like Siemens or 3M that are not only leveraging AWS but have also started leveraging solutions that are available in the marketplace and I think that in the past couple of years we have seen a turn both in the enterprise customer and in public sector customers that are really starting to adopt cloud and move to that as their primary mechanism. >> And we have seen in the last year huge adoption of the public sector across many sensitive agencies they're starting to adopt our solution on the GovCloud platform because they're seeing the benefits of that security model. >> It's a no-brainer, really, if you look at the speed and scale that you can do things, but you've got to check the boxes of the public sector, a little bit different than the commercial enterprise. So, talk about the public sector we're here at the public sector summit, it's like a reinvent in and of itself of that ecosystem. What does the current landscape look like? What's the orientation? What's the posture of their technology strategies? What's their appetite? Can you guys just give us some color commentary on the public sector customers? >> Sure, go ahead? >> Yeah. You know, one of the reasons that GovCloud was built and stood out was to give customers that needed FedRAMP or ITAR compliancy, you know and an opportunity to operate those workloads that they were moving over. Here's what I would say, you know, it's not just traditional public sector customers, like government agencies or the federal government that are operating in GovCloud, it's also enterprise customers that serve those needs. So there's this cross-section of pollination of customers and server team partners that are serving the federal government and government entities and large educational institutions or state and local government. But they want the same level of innovation, scale, they want to free up their developers to develop new applications and services for the citizens that they serve. They want all of the same things that the enterprise customers that we've been talking about have had for a number of years. They want the exact same thing. >> The paradigm shift, Dmitri, we were talking off-camera about the public sectors looking to the private sector because there's leadership there. No-one says, 'Hey, let's just do what the government does, there's no real- the inefficiencies that use cases there. You mention paradigm shift. How has the paradigm of operating and servicing and selling and delivering product value to the public sector changed? I mean, we still hear, the Oracle, thing was in the news about the DOD JEDI project? So the old way of selling and procuring is changing? >> It is, and the fact that customers can now leveraging Amazon and buy through the marketplace, all of these services directly from Amazon without having to go do separate contracting vehicles and separate prosumers, but the other benefit you get is the SAS deployment model in times of value. Traditional security solutions as an example take literally twelve to eighteen months to deploy. We had an agency in the US government that bought our solution recently and deployed throughout the entire agency in two weeks. So that ability to automatically get value of the solution helps secure the enterprise is something that you can only achieve with a cloud-based solution. >> I talk to a lot of people in D. C., we've been covering, opening up more coverage here it's still hot-market for the cloud area and certainly government as well. And then, in an off-the-record conversation, I won't say the name, but he says 'Look, I can't deny the Amazon solution, this cloud-native stuff is amazing, when have prices ever gone up? They don't, they go down, but they take more account-control because they get more penetration. So the prices go down. In the old way, prices went up! So, again, this is the shift in the mindset where you get more business, but you're driving the prices down at the element level. Is this the key thing that you're hearing too? >> Absolutely, and when you look at some of the customers that, I don't want to speak for you, but that Amazon has acquired in terms of intelligence community and others that you would never think would ever move to the cloud given the sensitivity that they have, and yet they've realized that to do things differently, to accomplish their mission, they have to use the cloud. So we're absolutely seeing that paradigm shift and the nice thing is that it's coming both from the bottom-up with these agencies realizing that they have to do things differently, and there is support in the White House in terms of IT modernization that we need to adopt the cloud to be successful. >> So do you feel like we'll finally start turning the corner in security? What I mean by that, is if you look at some of the metrics about, OK, a company gets infiltrated, they don't even realize it for whatever, two hundred and seventy five days, we spend more on security every year but we feel less secure. Is the cloud beginning to change that or are some of those metrics or even subjective measurements, I'm happy to spend more but I want to be more secure, are we starting to see the fulfillment of that promise? >> Absolutely, no question about it. And I'll give you a very concrete example. We actually launched, two weeks ago, a guarantee. If you're a customer using our service and you get breached on a system we protect, we pay up to a million dollars of various costs that you have because we believe that we can actually secure you and we're willing to put our money where our mouth is and establish that guarantee and there's no one in the industry that is doing anything like that. >> That's putting your money where your mouth is, I mean that's fantastic, usually these guarantees give a free month of service. >> No, no, no. We will pay cash to reimburse various expenses and set a response, legal fees, everything else that comes into it. >> Congratulations for taking that step. I mean, others are going to have to follow. >> That's good leadership. One of the guys on the stage from the CIA, Dave, you had the quote said that security-- >> Cloud security on its worst day- Cloud security on its very worst day is far better than my client's server systems. (John laughs) >> So there it is, to your point, OK, let's get the plug in for you guys. So you've got eight months of you starting to work together in the marketplace. >> We did. >> Tell us about that relationship, how's it going? What do you guys do? You're selling products together? Give a quick update on the relationship between that. >> Okay, so our Falcon platform in the last eight months has been on marketplace where customers that are coming in, and provisionary resources on EC2, on AWS can immediately get Falcon to protect those resources and that has been a fantastic growth area for us. We've also been partnering on the new GuardDuty offering that Amazon launched last year we're the intelligence provider for that platform. So it's been a great partnership we're looking to do a lot more, in particular with the GovCloud in the public sector. >> Last word? >> Well for us now, we're able to have a solution we can recommend to customers that's fully SAS-based, running on AWS and proven in its capability so, you know, it's great to partner with their sales and alliance team on the commercial and public sector side. We're going to look forward to seeing what we can do for the rest of the year. >> Well, Barry, thanks for coming back again it's great to have you on theCUBE and Dmitri, wonderful, and congratulations on the raise and making some progress, really appreciate your insights. >> Thank you so much. >> You're welcome. >> Alright, keep it right there buddy, John Furrier and I will be back with Stu Miniman, we're live from AWS Public Sector Summit. You're watching theCUBE.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> And welcome back to theCUBE We continue our coverage here live. We are in the Sands at Dell Technologies World 2018. Big show, 14,000 plus they're expecting here. 4,000 just in the business partners summit alone. So a very impressive turnout here in day one, as I said, of three days of coverage on theCUBE. Along with Keith Townsend, I'm John Walls. We're now joined by Lee Caswell who's a VP of Products at VMWare. Lee, good to see you, sir. >> Great to be here, yes. >> John: Every year we get together like this, right? >> Well, you know, there's always something new to talk about, right? >> John: Absolutely, and we're also joined by Chris Stanley here, who's the IT Manager at the Celtic Manor Resorts in Newport, Wales. Chris, the first person from Wales I think I've ever met, as a matter of fact. >> Chris: (laughs) A privilege; thank you. >> For me it is, but thank you for being here. We appreciate the time. So we're talking about your migration, and, really, it wasn't a migration, it was like your head-first dive into the hyper-converged environment. You didn't tiptoe around it, you didn't wade into the water, You guys just dove right in. >> Chris: We're fearless, yes. >> What was the driver of that decision to be so fearless? >> Chris: As an organization, we've grown very quickly the last few years, and we've got significant growth in new hotels and a new conference center coming on board. And we're bursting at the seams in our existing environment, so we needed a platform that we could grow into this new environment very quickly and with predictive costs as best as we could. >> And so, Lee, walking them through this, >> Yeah, >> I mean, there's no convincing to be done here, but you do have to inspire some confidence, right? So somebody who's making a pretty bold move like this how did you approach that, and what did you do as far as assigning? >> Lee: You know, our partnership with Dell EMC is just a great testament here, right? I mean, you've taken the latest of 14G servers, for example, as part of VxRail. So you've got the best in hardware combined with VMWare underlying VCN software packaged up together, right, in a single point of support in a way that really makes us able to drop in and get started. Right, when you think about this, this is also interesting, in that here's a customer you know, in this case, you were using converged infrastructure in the past. >> It really is. Yeah. >> That's very common, right? So people who are looking for the advantage of like, how did I get the operational efficiencies? And now what you find is hyper-converge changes the operational model, and so it's around speed and agility, right? More than cost, right? And so, together, that's kind of the, our partnership is so powerful for customers looking to go and basically drive that kind of efficiency. >> Chris: Definitely, yeah. >> Keith: So, Chris, talk to us about that decision process. In typical organizations, this is Wired U, You're on theCUBE and it's so special. It's easy to talk about use cases on the edge VDI, specific, non-mission critical applications. But when it comes to stuff that runs the business, if it's down, the CIO, the CFO is at someone's desk asking when it's going to be back up. How did this discussion start? Was it from the bottom up, or was it from the top down? Exactly which teams said, "You know what? We need more agility, HCI, go!" >> Chris: Definitely from a bottom up perspective, but supported from top down when we came for it. We could see it in our environment, in our growing environment. We're a 24 hour business in a resort hotel, and we have little downtime Or, sorry, little time to do any upgrades, etc. So resilience within that environment was key to us for our uptime, so failing over with VMWare we use, with the VxWare we get now DRS and the Enterprise version which it comes with which we hadn't in our converged. So there is that automation of balancing your workloads, not having someone there watching it all the time so that has freed up a lot of time for my guys. Going forward there will be a lot more free time as well so we've got more time to concentrate on the guests and how we can make their experience better. >> So the story behind Converged systems, you know you have SAP, Oracle, BASSP, all these mission critical apps mission critical runs on CI and then everything else to run on, even from a vendor support, you know you talk to all the major software vendors, they say you all CI is the best opportunity. How did that conversation go with vendors when you said you know what, we're going to run mission critical on, I'm assuming vSAN? >> Lee: This is on vSAN in VxRail. >> vSAN, you know, we can't see your TR1 software providers and you know what, we're all vSAN, global size and scope, global? >> What, as an environment? >> Yes. >> It's a global environment really of over four hotels at the moment but growing into a bigger environment. We're going for an international conference center so kind of this sort of size, not quite as big as this but we're definitely not support from the hyper converged. And all our core systems are written on it, yes. Big Oracle databases, SQL, and our exchange service and there was a split between two clusters now in VxRail so we can, we can fail over to a node in VxRail, we can fail over to a cluster as well so as an SLE for up time we're business critical and the guys at the top of Celtic Manor have seen how that is for business you know. If we're not serving people or taking money then we're giving money back in a case for disruption. >> All right so you've been into this for a little bit less than a year now, correct? >> Correct, yes. >> I know Lee's sitting right next to you but let's just for a moment. I'm sure there has been at least a troubling moment of that transition or at least a hiccup somewhere that you had to settle, you had a problem, right? Something came up, if someone's watching this, thinking I wonder what they got hit with and how they handled it, how did you work around that, how did you adapt that, what would that be? What was the, maybe the one little hiccup right now that you've successfully- >> With deployment? >> Yeah. >> Nothing much but when we were migrating from a Converged infrastructure to a hyperconverged we added on the SANs to the hyperconverged so we could see them migrate over. A couple of servers didn't take too well to that one being motioned over. Nothing of the critical ones thankfully. But they, it was either a Windows update or once they restarted, it was only two of the servers but, we used the recover point then within VxRail and literally go back five, 10 minutes, which we did and up and running again, switched over, and we were you know, back up and running, but it was we had the decision there of, how long do we troubleshoot it for or do we just, that was our first instance of using recover point so we hadn't done it in a live environment so it was kind of, okay and pretty much out but it worked and it filled us with a lot of confidence now that we could do, we have that resilience going forward in an environment. >> Well let's talk about day two. >> I was just going to comment Ray, that this is part of the partnership that's so powerful for us right, is, you know I think VMWare learn that supporting storage systems, as we know, it's a little different than just computing. You know this, right, I mean, you know the idea of like, hey listen, a purple screen isn't the worst that can happen, 'cause you can reboot, right? It's really about, like, my data. And so when you start thinking about that, the ability for us to partner with Dell AMC who understands what it means to be supporting in a datacentric world, like that element, right is so powerful for us, right, because we've got a partner here who really understands the ability and that's part of the powerful concept of VxRail. >> So we had Tom Burns earlier and we were talking about VI and the importance of CI and there's still a great, I think, desire and temptation, and valid that CI gets you on the ground, running quickly, complex systems, easily deployed relative to traditional architectures. Talk to me about the practical of HCI, Day 2 Operations, CI, relatively easy to deploy but you still have some traditional operations concerns. What specifically did you guys see as the advantage Day two once you went to ACI? What's saving you all this time? >> Purely I think the time saver is the management of the system or the lack of management that we now need to do. There's, you've got one pane of glass to see everything which is very nice, you haven't got something separate for your SANs, your SX hosts, your networking and that support that you have, you know, there's one of them to call. You're not fighting between different entities saying it's your fault, it's your fault, there you go, sort it, so again that has freed up a lot of time, you know not knowing who to call or where to call but, you know, having one person who's going to sort it out and take ahold of that and fix it for you. And the remote support then, which is very good you know, you've got someone else monitoring your systems if you enable it, so you've got Dell support there and they can potentially see something before you do so I kind of gained another IT person for in this solution which is very nice. >> Yeah, we kind of joke you know, that a lot of people talk about hyperconvergence as if it's about us, but hyperconvergence is about you. When you think about it, right, it's about hyperconverging the IT staff. If you can hyperconverge the staff, right, that's when hyperconvergence does well, when we have one team, it's a converged team and people are like, hey listen, I'm going to go to a VMcentric management model. Now I can go and debug things right from a single console which is V center. That model works really fast, right? And where Converged still does a good job, right, is where I've got storage scaling at big scale but separate from compute separate. Hyperconvergence is about, it's about the organizational environment right? >> Very much so, bringing it all together, yeah. And it's simplistic in VMWare being so tightly integrated with VxRail was our main call against the other vendors, as a big call to, while they, you know, it's the best chef with the best ingredients, let's use that, not a dessert chef with the best ingredients >> Yeah, we have 500,000 customers who are familiar with V Center, right, and if you know V Center you know V SAN, you know VxRail, right? >> You can get simplistic again, so you already know it. >> Yeah, right. >> Well we could talk about this til we're blue in the face. I think we need to go see it in operation, don't you Keith? >> We'll set you up with some golf >> Now we're talking, be careful Chris, what you offer. Lee, Chris, good to see you guys. Thanks for being with us, we appreciate you sharing the story. Thank you very much. Back with more, here from Dell Technologies World we are live on theCUBE in Las Vegas.