>>Welcome back to HPD discovered 2021. My name is Dave Volonte and you're watching the cubes virtual coverage of discovering we're super excited to have Jason Newton back in the cube. He's part of the HPV mastermind alliance behind its messaging and marketing and he's been instrumental and up leveling the conversation over the last several years from ports and lungs and gigahertz, two topics that resonate with business technology executives, which is basically every executive on the planet. Jason. Great to see you welcome back to the program. >>Hey, I'm thrilled to be here. >>Okay, We're gonna talk about the future of enterprise tech and the evolution of cloud hybrid cloud, its expansion to the edge where we are today, where we're headed and how we're going to get there. And I'm excited to start this off. We're living in an era where value and competition. We talk about this all the time is defined by data and the insights that organizations can extract from that data, the products and services that >>they can build, >>that our data centric, What do you think this means to HP and what does it mean for your customers? >>Well, I think we're at the right moment at the right time and I think for the customer it just what's happening now, what's possible to create value from data, it's just a tremendous opportunity to accelerate the transformation they were already driving for their business. Um, we're seeing our customers do amazing things with data, not just monetizing data, but like world changing types of things around uh healthcare and finance, transforming experiences for their customers and all of this is being driven by data. >>Well, I'm, I'm excited to see how you guys approach that. I mean you're talking about this, you know, the cloud to edge strategy and I've been having discussions with various execs at discover obviously remotely about how far hp egos and certainly you're gonna have compute everywhere. And Aruba seems to me to be a really interesting part of that platform. You're gonna go to the deep edge, so you got a lot of assets in the arsenal. How are you thinking about that? >>Well, it really needs to come together into one experience and you mentioned Aruba, I mean that's where it all starts with secure connectivity. The more that we connect things up in a secure way, the more data that we're going to be able to create, analyze and act upon. So it really plays a critical world. But if you look at h p e, we really have an embarrassment of riches of assets and expertise and partnerships at global scale and there's not a part of our business that isn't focused on some part of the data challenges that customers have, from edge computing to supercomputing to storage. What we're doing with the Admiral software, it's all focused on helping customers take in that data and then create insights from it, create new innovations from it. >>Talk a little bit more about the customer challenges that you're specifically solving at H. P. E. What what do you see there? How are you thinking about that? >>And I think one of the biggest ones where the conversation always starts with is you know I have a lot of data but it's all in silos. Um even within my organization or in some cases I know there's data out there but it's in another silo. How do I get access to it? How do I hear that word a lot When we talk to customers, you need to get access for my teams to that data. So first step is just how do I bring it all together? How do I Federated all of that data in one place? That's one area that we're helping customers solve. Um The second is in order to bring those those pieces together, the different data owners have to have a trust right to share the data because often there's not an incentive for them to do that. Like I own the data, I don't want to share it. So we have to establish different parameters or capabilities in order to enable that type of of trust and sharing. And there has to be some mutual benefit right as part of that. And we see that with inside of companies and we see it with multiple different organizations. Once you can overcome those, those are really hard challenges. Once you overcome those things, everything becomes astronomically more easy to deal with and everything starts to go faster. And that's kind of where we're trying to get people on that modern day to maturity curve up to that point where they do have federation. They do have curation, they are able to share. They know what they're going to benefit from it. And then we can get on to the task of enabling the teams to do analytics. It's at speed and scale. >>You talk you talk about federation. So there's an interesting challenge that you're describing and you and I have had some good conversations about this because you want to kind of you to obtain that data if you will and put it in a place that you can actually get to it, share it, make it discoverable. And of course at the same time it's all over the place. So you've kind of got these these pods that are that can talk to each other uh and facilitate that, that kind of data sharing and then what I call, you know, building data products, building data services and technology is at the point now, it's evolving to enable us to do that. It's a look back at the last 10 years, it's just far too complex. >>Yeah, we heard Antonio earlier today talk about, you know, building not private clouds, but private data spaces. And it's really that idea of how do I, how do I bring an experience to the data? Right. That is agile and fast and cloud, like or cloud. And in the case of what we're actually doing now building a cloud platform um if that's exactly where customers are trying to get to um and we look at these data spaces as the advantage by going bringing that to the data. Obviously there's the, you know, the physics of it, the performance and that kind of thing. But you know, we can pay more attention to like data sovereignty laws, um, you know, we can dress things like data ownership within these spaces so that teams can come together and freely collaborate and and act on that data together. >>You know, I've been watching you guys for now several years and you've you've taken this messaging and marketing thing pretty seriously. Even a lot of times, you know, we see it all a lot of times is this gimmicks and I don't mean that necessarily a bad way. There's actually some really good gimmicky marketing that gets a lot of attention, but your approach is different. Um it's very thoughtful. Uh it's cultural, I'll say you're trying to cultural sort of what you say with what you do. And so I want to ask you how you're going about, you know, changing the way in which you provide solutions. I sort of alluded that uh, to that at the top versus how you've done it in the past and how you're helping customers redefine their business for success. >>Well, the way that we're thinking about that is um and I think you heard it very clearly and consistently from Antonio earlier today, we're transforming into an edge to cloud company. Okay, We are building an edge to cloud platform. That is Green Lake. That platform is the way that will deliver cloud services to our customers for their workloads to their datasets wherever that needs to be. We're committed to a truly hybrid model, right edge on prem cloud together. So those elements, it starts to crystallize. I think a lot more about who this company is. The type of challenges that we need to solve. Talking about the things is not, is not interesting to customers. They want to know what problems can you help me solve? How fast can you do it right? What outcome can you help me achieve? And that's the way that you know, we, we talked about this a lot dave that we continue to transform and have those, those more meaningful conversations and like I said, every time we get to the data challenges, they know the opportunities there. They have a dream and a vision of what they want to go do. They just need a partner like HP to help them get there. >>So we talk a lot about Green Lake and as a service, you guys were threw the gauntlet down first. I gotta give you props because you're kind of all in on it. You're not a halfway house. I'll give you that much. But now we've seen at least I can count at least four other large competitors follow suit. How should we think about your strategy and specifically your advantage relative to the competitors? Let's let's talk first in terms of as a service in Green Lake and then maybe >>overall. Yeah, I mean, I think you see a lot of people following Green Lakes lead, we've been out in front for a while. We were the first to say the world will be hybrid and it is, we were the first to make the big bet at the edge. We were the first to see that not all the data is going to go into one unified location, it's going to continue to be distributed and therefore a cloud experience has to travel to that data. We created the Green Lake brand years before anybody else did. And now, while they're just now trying to figure out how do I do hardware is a service or a better way to sell my products. We're moving on, we're focused on the workloads and the workflows and the data sets. Um, Green Lake is much, much more mature and now that we have everybody on board across the company, we're moving much faster as well. Right? And that's more of a statement for the traditional competitors. Right? The traditional spaces, you know, they're still just stuck on like hardware, service infrastructure as a service were at the workload level and much higher. And I think what you're seeing from the public cloud players is, wow, data center an on prem and edges hard. Um, a lot harder than, than I think they really anticipated. And uh, you know, they're, they're reassessing. So I feel like we're in the place where the world is moving to, right? And we're really writing, you know, the first chapter of the new hp? Um Not the last >>has it, has it changed the way this as a service mentality, has it changed the way or how has it changed the way in which your product groups >>are behaving? Um quite a bit um you know, it is a mindset shift and you know it's and uh I think we have the culture that will successfully enabled because we've always been so customer centric, I think as you move two and as a service it becomes much more about how do I ensure customer success? Right? How do I, how do I put an environment in place and then use that as an opportunity to solve more problems across our customers environments? So I think that aspect is what you know really is driving our thinking now is what new services can I can I land on the green Lake edge to cloud platform to solve different data centric challenges? >>Yeah. You talked about, you know, lead and where you are in the majority model. What do you what do you what was the hardest part about making that change? Was it the, was it the leadership was that the sales compensation, was it to get the product guys out of the widgets? What was the hardest thing? >>Yeah, I think, I think go to market is as big a challenge as anything. Um You know, I I think in marketing it's our job to show the art of the possible in the future um even if it's uncomfortable for the organization. Um and I think that helps articulate Antonio's vision and give him a true north and he's a fabulous leader in a culture that you know, they believe and trust in him and so they're following. Um, but, you know, the challenges are, um, not so much, you know, the technology, uh, in many cases it is the people and the skills and uh, you know, building those new relationships within accounts and uh, those aspects, those intangible things. Um, so, you know, we're doing a lot around um enablement, sales, enablement. And of course with our uh, and most importantly with our our partners who are out there selling for us. It is a it is a new approach, but it's a good approach because it's so customer centric, it's not product centric. >>So what are the, so how are the customers and partners reacting? Of course you're gonna say great, but how do you know, like, what what kind of metrics do you look at, what kind of things that are important to you to track, that gives you confidence that you're you're on the right track. >>They're buying more stuff. >>Okay, rhetoric. >>Yeah. No, I mean um like I think there was some skepticism, you know, at first because we have been doing some of that infrastructure as a service type of thing for a while before we ever had a Green Lake brand. And they're like, well, is this just the same thing? Like No, we're truly cloud defying this platform. We're building a cloud native platform. You saw it in the announcements today, right? With cloud native security, just like you get in the public cloud that you can deploy and run these these workloads um in your choice of location and the more that we can show evidence of our messaging in the experience that we actually deliver. That's when customers start to lean. And so we look at a ton of metrics. I mean, you know, it's not one data point. We listen to Gardner. Um you know, we have our own internal research that we do, we're constantly getting feedback from our field. In fact, last week was two weeks ago, we had a board of advisors meeting brought in, you know, some of our top top customers just to hear from them, you know, um you know, what are we doing? Good, What we're not doing good. So it's it's a lot of different pieces that go into, how are we doing with the customer and how are they into this? But this is we're only doing what they told us they wanted. Bring me bring the cloud to me and my data. I can't move at all. But I don't want different operating models. I want a consistent experience. I want to be able to focus and innovate. I don't want to deal with, you know, the underlying pieces of the infrastructure. >>Right? And >>so yeah, we're doing what they ask. >>So they okay, but that sounds good. But then it's hard to do that. I mean, you got to put real is, that's a lot of elbow grease, a lot of investment, a lot of innovation. Uh, like you say, you got to line the organizations. That's, that's not a trivial task. I mean, I tell you, Jason, I've been, I've been hearing this, you know, early days, even 10 years ago, I think we're finally at the point now where the industry is responding to what those customers really want. And of course, you know, it's like Steve jobs with the iPhone, ask them what they want, they're not going to tell you an iPhone, right? They maybe they didn't know 10 years ago, but I think it really came into focus in the last several years and investment is a key there. >>Yeah. I mean I think the last decade was the digital transformation was all about, you know, how do I bring speed to code and take advantage of public cloud and and I think that took us further. It took us, but now, okay, the next chapter is a very data century. How do I bring speed agility to data and data analytics and especially at the edge and where things are, you know, need to live. How do I make a consistent experience that's gonna be our focus for the next 10 years. And like I said, I feel like we're at the right moment in history as a company with the right assets, expertise partnerships to go and help customers take advantage of that. >>Well it's interesting the last decade we talked about big data. We don't use that term much anymore, but like many things like the internet for example, it's over something or maybe it's overhyped at the beginning, but it's always under hyped when you actually see the force that can be. I I feel like we actually are now entering the true data era. So, so you're excited about a lot of things obviously as a service, but I gotta, I got a sense there's more that you're not sharing with us. So what are you most excited about for HP in the future? >>Well, like I said, becoming that edge to cloud company watching Green Lake blossom as it is. I mean tremendous innovations that we announced today and yes, there's things I can't share that I know are coming later this year. I have seen the roadmaps. It's it's it's really compelling, very compelling and impressive the things that we're doing with asthma role combined that together with with Green Lake and that experience the types of data analytic platform environments that we can build to unify those data silos to accelerate the machine learning and analytics teams. Um it's really all coming together and those are the things that I'm excited about. Um you know, changing that perception of H. P. E. Is infrastructure as a service and hardware is a service and that kind of thing. It's not about as a service is the experience, right? The value is in the data and watching us be able to help customers solve those data challenges and seize those those data opportunities is what I'm most excited about. >>Well the other thing too is the world has some big challenges, population and energy. You know, we could just make the huge list and and I feel like tech companies not only are in a position to help but I think they have a they have a responsibility and I gotta say I think most tech companies big large tech companies are stepping up and have great leadership around that. And what are your thoughts on that? >>Well yeah we talked about value from data. It's all about the insights is where the value comes from but values not always about profit and monetization data truly does have the opportunity to solve some of the world's biggest challenges. Um I was just reading this morning about C. G. A. I. R. And the things that they're doing in agriculture with these, they've got a big data set platform that um I think could be literally the thing that ends up helping solve world hunger. The thing that everyone sort of jokes about. I'm like no seriously now with the data that could be possible. >>Yeah, I think you're right, I think we are going to solve world hunger, world nutrition maybe a different story, but we'll tackle that next. Um last question, you know, what else should we be focused on at discover how can folks learn more >>well? You know, this is a three day event, so today was really about the news and excitement and clarifying our position as an edge to cloud company and the Green Lake is our edge to cloud platform. The way that we deliver the cloud to you. Um Tomorrow is really about how all of that vision strategy manifests itself into the experience and the products and solutions that you can consume. Um There'll also be a lot of sharing of uh the keynote is when I'm looking forward to with Dr England Go, he's ahead of ai and he's gonna be sharing all the lessons and learnings from hundreds of engagements that he's been driving with customers, showing exactly how to overcome the data silo problem, the trust problem, how to bring agility to analytics and then thursday is kind of the geek out day, right? We get to talk to Hewlett Packard labs, we get to go and touch the technology, meet the technologists, interact with them. Um and and understand what are those technologies that are gonna be crucial You know, for the next 10 years of data driven transformation. >>Some really exciting stuff there. Jason, thank you so much for spending some time on the cube again. Really great to see you. >>I appreciate the invite every time is a pleasure. Thank you. >>Thanks for being with us for our ongoing coverage of HPD discovered 21 this is Dave Volonte, you're watching the cube. The leader in digital check coverage will be right back. >>Mhm. Mhm.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to HPEDiscover 2021. My name is Dave Vellante and you're watching the Cube's virtual coverage of Discover, and we're super excited to have Jason Newton back in the cube. He's part of the HPE mastermind alliance behind its messaging and marketing. And he's been instrumental in up leveling the conversation over the last several years from ports and LUNs and gigahertz to topics that resonate with business technology executives, which is basically every executive on the planet. Jason, great to see you, welcome back to the program. >> Hey, I'm thrilled to be here. >> Okay, we're going to talk about the future of enterprise tech and the evolution of cloud, hybrid cloud, it's expansion to the edge, where we are today, where we're headed and how we're going to get there. And I'm excited to start this off. We're living in an era where value and competition, we talk about this all the time, it's defined by data and the insights that organizations can extract from that data, the products and services that they can build, that are data centric, what do you think this means to HPE and what does it mean for your customers? >> Well, I think we're at the right moment of the right time and I think for the customer, it just what's happening now, what's possible to create value from data is just a tremendous opportunity to accelerate the transformation they were already driving for their business. We're seeing our customers do amazing things with data, not just monetizing data, but like world-changing types of things around in healthcare, in finance, transforming experiences for their customers and all of this is being driven by data. >> Well, I'm excited to see how you guys approach that. I mean, you're talking about this the cloud-to-edge strategy and I've been having discussions with various execs at Discover, obviously, remotely about how far HPE goes and certainly you're going to have compute everywhere. And Aruba seems to me to be a really interesting part of that platform. You're going to go to the deep edge. So, you got a lot of assets in the arsenal, how are you thinking about that? >> Well, it really all needs to come together into one experience. And you mentioned Aruba, I mean, that's where it all starts, with secure connectivity. The more that we connect things up in a secure way, the more data that we're going to be able to create, analyze and act upon. So, it really plays a critical role. But if you look at HPE, we really have an embarrassment of riches of assets and expertise and partnerships at global scale and there's not a part of our business that isn't focused on some part of the data challenges that customers have. From edge computing to super computing, to storage, what we're doing with the SRL software, it's all focused on helping customers take in that data and then create insights from it, Create new innovations from it. >> Talk a little bit more about the customer challenges that you're specifically solving at HPE. What do you see there? How are you thinking about that? >> I think one of the biggest ones the conversation always starts with is "I have a lot of data, but it's all in silos. Even within my organization or in some cases, I know there's data out there, but it's in another silo. How do I get access to it?" I hear that word a lot when we talk to customers "I need to get access for my teams to that data." So, first step is just, how do I bring it all together? How do I federate all of that data in one place? That's one area that we're helping customers solve. The second is in order to bring those pieces together, the different data owners have to have a trust to share the data 'cause often there's not an incentive for them to do that. Like I own the data, I don't want to share it. So, we have to establish different parameters or capabilities in order to enable that type of trust and sharing and there has to be some mutual benefit as part of that and we see that with inside of companies and we see it with multiple different organizations. Once you can overcome those, those are really hard challenges. Once you overcome those things, everything becomes astronomically more easy to deal with and everything starts to go faster. And that's where we're trying to get people on that modern data maturity curve up to that point where they do have Federation, they do have curation, they are able to share, they know what they're going to benefit from it and then we can get onto the task of enabling the teams to do analytics at speed and scale. >> Yeah, you talk about Federation. And so there's an interesting challenge that you're describing and you and I have had some good conversations about this because you want to tame that data, if you will, put it in a place that you can actually get to it, share it, make it discoverable. And of course at the same time, it's all over the place. So, you've got these pods that could talk to each other and facilitate that data sharing and then what I call building data products, building data services, and technology is at the point now it's evolving to enable us to do that. Look back at the last 10 years, it was just far too complex. >> Yeah, we heard Antonio earlier today talk about building, not private clouds, but private data spaces. And it's really that idea of how do I bring an experience to the data that is agile and fast and cloud-like? Or cloud, in the case of what we're actually doing now, building a cloud platform. That's exactly where customers are trying to get to. And we look at these data spaces as the advantage by going, bringing that to the data. Obviously there's the the physics of it, the performance and that kind of thing. But we can pay more attention to like-data sovereignty laws, we can address things like data ownership within these spaces so that teams can come together and freely collaborate and act on that data together. >> You know, I've been watching you guys for now several years and you've taken this messaging and marketing thing pretty seriously. Even a lot of times we see it all. A lot of times it's gimmicks and I don't mean that necessarily in a bad way. There are actually some really good gimmicky marketing that gets a lot of attention, but your approach is different. It's very thoughtful, it's cultural, I'll say. You're trying to get and acculturate what you say with what you do. And so I want to ask you, how are you going about changing the way in which you provide solutions? I alluded that to that at the top, versus how you've done it in the past and how you're helping customers redefine their business for success? >> Well, the way that we're thinking about that is, and I think you heard it very clearly and succinctly from Antonio earlier today, we're transforming into an edge-to-cloud company. We are building an edge-to-cloud platform that is GreenLake. That platform is the way that we'll deliver cloud services to our customers, for their workloads, to their data sets, wherever that needs to be. We're committed to a truly hybrid model. Edge, Onprem, Cloud together. And so those elements, it starts to crystallize, I think a lot more about who this company is and the type of challenges that we need to solve. Talking about the things is not interesting to customers. They want to know what problems can you help me solve, how fast can you do it, what outcome can you help me achieve? And that's the way that we've, we've talked about this a lot, Dave, that we continue to transform and have those more meaningful conversations. And like I said, every time we get to the data challenges, they know the opportunities there, they have a dream and a vision of what they want to go do. They just need a partner like HPE to help them get there. >> So, we talk a lot about GreenLake and as a service, you guys threw the gauntlet down first, I got to give you props because you're all in on it. You're not a halfway house, I'll give you that much. But now we've seen, at least, I could count, at least four other large competitors follow suit. How should we think about your strategy and specifically your advantage relative to the competitors? Let's talk first in terms of as a service in GreenLake and then maybe overall. >> Yeah, I mean, I think you see a lot of people following GreenLake's lead. I mean, we've been out in front for a while. We were the first to say the world will be hybrid and it is, we were the first to make the big bet at the edge, we were the first to see that not all the data's going to go into one unified location, it's going to continue to be distributed and therefore cloud experience has to travel to that data. We created the GreenLake brand years before anybody else did. And now, they're just now trying to figure out, "Well, how do I do hardware as a service or a better way to sell my products?" We're moving on. We're focused on the workloads and the workflows and the data sets. GreenLake is much, much more mature and now that we have everybody onboard across the company, we're moving much faster as well. And that's more of a statement for the traditional competitors, the traditional spaces, they're still just stuck on like hardware as a service, infrastructure as a service. We're at the workload level and much higher. And I think what you're seeing from the public cloud players is, wow, Data Center and On-prem and Edge is hard. A lot harder than I think they really anticipated. And they're reassessing. So, I feel like we're in the place where the world is moving to. And we're really writing the first chapter of the new HPE, not the last. >> Has it changed, the way this as a service mentality, has it changed the way or how has it changed the way in which your product groups are behaving? >> Quite a bit. It is a mindset shift and I think we have the culture that will successfully enable that 'cause we've always been so customer centric. I think as you move to an as a service, it becomes much more about, "How do I ensure customer success?" How do I put an environment in place and then use that as an opportunity to solve more problems across our customer's environments?" I think that aspect is what, really is driving our thinking now is what new services can I land on the GreenLake Edge-to-Cloud platform to solve different data-centric challenges? >> You talked about lead and where you are in the maturity model, what was the hardest part about making that change? Was it the leadership? Was it the sales compensation? Was it to get the product guys out of the widgets? What was the hardest thing? >> Yeah, I think, I think go to market is as big a challenge as anything, I think in marketing, it's our job to show the art of the possible in the future, even if it's uncomfortable for the organization. And I think that helps articulate Antonio's vision and give him a true north. And he's a fabulous leader in a culture that they believe in trust in him. And so they're following, but the challenges are not so much the technology. In many cases, it is the people and the skills and building those new relationships within accounts and those aspects, those intangible things. So we're doing a lot around enablement, sales enablement, and of course, and most importantly with our partners who are out there selling for us. It is a new approach, but it's a good approach 'cause it's so customer centric, it's not product centric. >> So, how are the customers and partners reacting? Of course, you're going to say great, but how do you know? Like what metrics do you look at? What things that are important to you to track that give you confidence that you're on the right track? >> They're buying more stuff. >> Yeah, okay, that's a good metric. >> Yeah, yeah, no, I mean, like, I think there was some skepticism at first, because we had been doing some of that infrastructure as a service type of thing for a while before we ever had a GreenLake brand. And they're like, "This is just the same thing." Like, no, we're truly, cloudifying this platform. We are building a cloud-native platform, you saw it in the announcements today. With cloud native security, just like you get in the public cloud, but you can deploy and run these workloads in your choice of location. And the more that we can show evidence of our messaging in the experience that we actually deliver, that's when customers start to lean in. So, we look at a ton of metrics. I mean, it's not one data point. We listen to Gartner, we have our own internal research that we do. We're constantly getting feedback from our field. In fact, last week, was it two weeks ago, we had a board of advisors meeting, brought in some of our top, top customers just to hear from them. "What are we doing good, what are we not doing good?" So, it's a lot of different pieces that go into, how are we doing with the customer and how are they into this? We're only doing what they told us they wanted. "Bring the cloud to me and my data. I can't move at all, but I don't want different operating models. I want a consistent experience. I want to be able to focus and innovate. I don't want to deal with the underlying pieces of the infrastructure." Yeah, we're doing what they ask. >> Okay, that sounds good, but then it's hard to do that. I mean, you got to put real, that's a lot of elbow grease, a lot of investment, a lot of innovation, like you say, you got to align the organizations. That's not a trivial task. I mean, I tell you, Jason, I've been hearing this early days, even 10 years ago, I think we're finally at the point now where the industry is responding to what those customers really want. And of course, it's like Steve jobs with the iPhone, ask them what they want, they're not going to tell you an iPhone. Maybe they didn't know 10 years ago, but I think it really came into focus in the last several years and investment is the key there. >> Yeah, I think the last decade was, the digital transformation was all about how do I bring speed to code and take advantage of public cloud and I think that took us further, it took us, but now, okay, the next chapter is a very data centric, how do I bring speed and agility to data and data analytics and especially at the edge and where things are need to live, how do I make a consistent experience? That's going to be our focus for the next 10 years. And like I said, I feel like we're at the right moment in history as a company with the right assets, expertise, partnerships to go in and help customers take advantage of that. >> Well, it's interesting. The last decade we talked about big data, we don't use that term much anymore, but like many things like the internet, for example, it was all of a sudden, maybe it's over-hyped at the beginning, but it's always under hyped when you actually see the force it can be. I feel like we actually are now entering the true data era. So, you're excited about a lot of things, obviously as a service, but I got a sense there's more that you're not sharing with us. So, what are you most excited about for HPE in the future? >> Well, like I said becoming that edge-to-cloud company, watching GreenLake blossom as it is, I mean, tremendous innovations that we announced today and yes, there's things I can't share that I know are coming later this year. I've seen the roadmaps, it's really compelling, very compelling and impressive. The things that we're doing with Azmeril, combine that together with GreenLake and that experience, the types of data and analytic platform environments that we can build to unify those data silos, to accelerate the machine learning and analytics teams, it's really all coming together. And those are the things that I'm excited about. You know, changing that perception of HPE as infrastructure, as a service and hardware as a service and that kind of thing. As a service it's the experience, right? The value is in the data and watching us be able to help customers solve those data challenges and seize those data opportunities is what I'm most excited about. >> Well, the other thing too, is the world has some big challenges, population and energy, we can just make the huge list and I feel like tech companies not only are in a position to help, but I think they have a responsibility. And I got to say, I think most tech companies, large tech companies are stepping up and have great leadership around that and what are your thoughts on that? >> Well, yeah, we talked about value from data. It's all about the insights is where the value comes from, but value is not always about profit and monetization. I mean, data truly does have the opportunity to solve some of the world's biggest challenges. I was just reading this morning about, was it CGAIR? And the things that they're doing in agriculture with these, they've got a big data-set platform that I think could be literally the thing that ends up helping solve world hunger, the thing that everyone jokes about, I'm like, "No, seriously now with the data, that could be possible." >> Yeah, I think you're right. I think we are going to solve world hunger and world nutrition, maybe a different story, but we'll tackle that next. Last question, what else should we be focused on at Discover, how can folks learn more? >> Well this is a three-day event. So, today was really about the news and the excitement and clarifying our position as an edge-to-cloud company and that GreenLake is our edge-to-cloud platform, the way that we deliver the cloud to you. Tomorrow is really about how all of that vision strategy manifests itself into the experience and the products and the solutions that you can consume. They'll also be a lot of sharing of the keynote, is what I'm looking forward to with Dr. Ingram Gore, he's our head of AI, and he's going to be sharing all the lessons and learnings from hundreds of engagements that he's been driving with customers showing exactly how to overcome the data silo problem, the trust problem, how to bring agility to analytics and then Thursday is the geek-out day, we get to talk to Hewlett Packard labs, we get to go and touch the technology, meet the technologists, interact with them and understand what are those technologies that are going to be crucial for the next 10 years of data-driven transformation. >> Some really exciting stuff there, Jason. Thank you so much for spending some time on the Cube again. Really great to see you. >> I appreciate the invite every time is a pleasure. Thank you. >> All right and thanks for being with us for our ongoing coverage of HPEDiscover '21. This is Dave Vellante, you're watching the Cube, the leader in digital tech coverage. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

(ethereal music) >> Welcome to the special Cube Conversation. I'm John Furrier, your host of "The Cube" here in Palo Alto, California. We've got two great remote guests here having a conversation around security, security convergence with platforms around networking and security with cybersecurity at an all time high, the need for understanding how to manage the breaches how to understand them, prevent them, everything in between cybersecurity and data are the number one conversation happening in the world today. We got two great guests, we've got Nirav Shah, VP of products at Fortinet and Peter Newton's senior director of products at Fortinet. The product leaders in the hottest cybersecurity company. And guys, thanks for coming on this Cube Conversation. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you, John. >> So last month or so I talked to John Madison about the Fortinet new release, FortiOS 7.0, as well as highlighting the convergence that's going on between the platforms around companies trying to consolidate and or manage or grow and build, converting networking and security together. Seeing that happening in real time, still doesn't change the underpinnings of how the internet works, and how these companies are structured. But the need for security is at an all time high. Talk about the impact to the customer. Do you guys have the keys to the kingdom here, product group? What is the killer product? What are customers doing? Give us the overview of why there's such a big need for the security platforms right now. >> Yeah, absolutely John. So if you see today's environment, we have seen working from anywhere it's become normal. And as part of that, we have seen so many different network edges. At the same time, they have different devices that they're using from anywhere. So what's important is as users have different devices, different users and applications that they're consuming from Cloud, we have to make sure that we provide security across the endpoint, across all network edges, and going to the Cloud compute. And for that kind of approach, you cannot have point products provide the visibility control and management. You need to have a comprehensive cybersecurity platform, which gives you security from that endpoint, to the edge, to the user, so that you have a simple but effective management and have a solid security in place to get that working from anywhere in a much more better user experience way. And that's exactly Fortinet describes as the security fabric platform. >> It's interesting not to kind of go on a tangent here, but to illustrate the point is, if you look at all the cyber security challenges that we're facing globally, especially here in the United States, the public private partnerships are increasing. We're seeing more public sector, commercial integration, the role of data. We've covered this on SiliconANGLE and many other cube interviews, especially with you guys. And there's all this kind of new approaches. Everyone's trying everything. They're buying every product that's out there, but now there's like overload. There's too much product. And that the obvious thing that's becoming clear, as cloud-scale, the evolution of this new edge environment. And so with that becomes the importance two trends that you guys are participating in. I want to get your thoughts on this because that's called SASE and SD-WAN. We know SD-WAN, but SASE stands for Secure Access Service Edge. That's I think Gartner made that term up or someone made that term up, but that's a new technology. And you've got SD-WAN, these are traditionally had been like edge for like branch offices. Now evolve now as pure network edges than a distributed computing environment. What's so important about these two topics. Nirav take us through the changes that are happening and why it's important for enterprises to get a handle on this >> Yeah John. So, as you said, SASE, Secured Access Services Edge. Really the foundation of that topic is the convergence of networking and security. And as you mentioned, Fortinet has been doing a lot of innovation in this area, right? Six years back, we pioneered the convergence of security and networking with security SD-WAN but what's happening now with the SASE is, as that working from anywhere continues to remain the dominant trend, users are looking for a Cloud-Delivered Security. And that's what Fortinet recently announced, where we can provide the most comprehensive Cloud-Delivered Security for remote users. For thin edge. You can still, anytime access from any device. To give you an example, now, our remote users, they are still at home or they can be branch of one user, but still have that always on threat protection with the consistent security given in the Cloud. So they don't have to go anymore from the branch or data center, but have a direct connectivity to the Cloud Security before they access SaaS application. That's what one of the SASE trend is. Second thing, John we are observing is users are now, as they are going back to the hybrid workforce, they are looking for a thin edge right? To your point of an edge, edge is still intelligent and a very important but there is an interesting architectural shift of, can I just use an intelligent networking there move my CapEx to OPEX and have security in Cloud? That unified security, unified policy is again becoming important. That's what SASE-- >> Okay, so I like this Cloud-Delivered Security. This is a hybrid workforce you're addressing with this marketplace, that's clear. Hybrid is a everywhere, hybrid cloud, hybrid workforce, hybrid events are coming. I mean, we love covering events physically but also now virtual. Everything's impacted by the word hybrid and Cloud. But talk about this thin edge. What do you mean by that? I mean I think thin edge, I think thin clients, the old trend. What is thin edge mean? >> Yeah, so there're different organizations are looking at the architecture in a different way. Some organizations are thinking about having a very simple branch where it is used for modern networking technologies, while security has been shifted to the Cloud deliver. What happens with this model is, now they are relying more into technologies like SD-WAN on edge to provide that intelligence steering, while everything in the security is being done in a Cloud compute way for both remote users and thin edge environment. Now the good news here is, they don't have to worry about the security patching, or any of those security capabilities. It is all done by Fortinet as they go and use the SaaS applications performance >> I want to come back and drill down on that but I want to get Peter in here in the Zero Trust equation because one of the things that comes up all the time with this edge discussion is network access. I mean, you go back to the old days of computing, you had edge log in, you'd come in, radius servers, all these things were happening, pretty simple cut paradigm. It's gotten so complicated now, Peter. So Zero Trust is a hot area. It's not only one of the things but it's a super important, what is Zero Trust these days? >> Zero Trust is indeed a very hot term because I think part of it is just it sounds great from a security standpoint, Zero Trust, you don't trust anyone, but it really comes down to a philosophical approach of how do you address the user's data applications that you want to protect? And the idea of Zero Trust and really what's driving it is the fact that as we've been talking, people are working remotely. The perimeter of the organization has dissolved. And so you no longer can afford to have a trusted internal zone and an untrusted external zone. Everything has to be "Zero Trust." So this means that you need to be authenticating and verifying users and devices on a repeat and regular basis, and you want to when you're bringing them on and giving them access to assets and applications, you want to do that with as granular of control as possible. So the users and devices have access to what they need, but no more. And that's kind of the basic tenets of Zero Trust. And that's what, it's really about prioritizing the applications and data, as opposed to just looking at, am I bringing someone into my network. >> God, the concept of Zero Trust, obviously hot. What's the difference between Zero Trust Access and Zero Trust Network Access, or as people say ZTA versus ZTNA? I mean, is there a nuance there? I mean, what's the difference between the two? >> That's actually a really good question because they both have the Zero Trust in the name. ZTNA is actually a specific term that a Gardner created or other analyst I should say, created 10 years ago. And this refers specifically to controlling application to controlling access to applications. whereas Zero Trust, overall Zero Trust access deals with both users and devices coming on to networks, how are you connecting them on? What kind of access are you giving them on the network? ZTNA is specifically how are you bringing users and connecting them to applications? Whether those applications are on premise or in the Cloud. >> So what the NA is more like the traditional old VPN model connecting users from home or whatever. Just connecting across the network with user to app. Is that right? >> That's actually a really good insight, but ironically the VPN clinical benefits of this are actually an outgrowth of the ZTNA model because ZTA doesn't differentiate between when you're on network or off network. It creates a secure tunnel automatically no matter where the user is, but VPN is all just about creating a secure tunnel when you're remote. ZTNA just does that automatically. So it's a lot easier, a lot simpler. You get a hundred percent compliance and then you also have that same secure tunnel even when you're "on a safe network" because with Zero Trust, you don't trust anything. So yes it really is leading to the evolution of VPN connectivity. >> So Nirav I want to get back to you on tie that circle back to what we were talking about around hybrid. So everyone says everything's moving to the Cloud. That's what people think. And Cloud ops is essentially what hybrid is. So connect the dots here between the zero trust, zero trust A and NA with the move to the hybrid cloud model. How does that, how does it, what's the difference between the two? Where's the connection? What's the relevance for your customers and the marketplace? >> Yeah, I think that again goes back to that SASE framework where ZTNA plays a huge role because John, we talked about when users are working from anywhere in this hybrid workforce, one of the important thing is to not give them this implicit trust right? To the applications, enabling the explicit trust is very important. And that is what ZTNA does. And the interesting thing about Fortinet is we provide all of this part of FortiOS and users can deploy anywhere. So as they are going to the Cloud-Delivered Security, they can enable ZTNA there so that we make sure this user at what time, which application they're accessing and should we give them that access or not. So great way to have ZTNA, SASE, everything in one unified policy and provide that anytime access for any device with a trusting place. >> Okay, real quick question to you is, what's the difference between SASE, Secure Access Service Edge, and SD-WAN? Real quick. >> Yeah, so SD-WAN is one of the core foundation element of SASE, right? So far we talked about the Cloud-Delivered Security, which is all important part of the security of the service. SASE is another element, which is a networking and a service where SD-WAN plays a foundation role. And John that's where I was saying earlier that the intelligent edge modern technology that SD-WAN provides is absolutely necessary for a successful SASE deployment, right? If users who are sitting anywhere, if they can't get the right application steering, before they provide the Cloud-Delivered Security, then they are not going to get the user experience. So having the right SD-WAN foundation in that edge, working in tandem with the Cloud-Delivered Security makes a win-win situation for both networking and security teams. >> So Peter, I want to talk to you. Last night I was on a chat on the Clubhouse app with some cybersecurity folks and they don't talk in terms of "I got ZTNA and I got some SASE and SD-WEN, they're talking mostly about just holistically their environment. So could you just clarify the difference 'cause this can be confusing between Zero Trust Network Access ZTNA versus SASE because it's kind of the same thing, but I know it's nuance, but, is there a difference there? People get confused by this when I hear people talking 'cause like they just throw jargon around and they say, "Oh, with Zero Trust we're good. What does that even mean? >> Yeah, we get a lot of that when talking with customers because the two technologies are so complimentary and similar, they're both dealing with security for remote workers. However sassy is really dealing with that kind of firewall in the Cloud type service, where the remote user gets the experience and protection of being behind a firewall, ZTNA is about controlling the application and giving them that secure tunnel to the application. So they're different things one's kind of that firewall and service, security and service, even networking in a service. But ZTNA is really about, how do I have the policies no matter where our user is, to give them access to specific applications and then give them a secure tunnel to that application? So very complimentary, but again, they are separate things. >> What's the landscape out there with competitive because has there products, I mean you guys are product folks. You'll get the product question. Is it all kind of in one thing, is this bundled in? Do you guys have a unique solution? Some people have it, they don't. What's the marketplace look like from a product standpoint? >> Yeah. So John, that starts back to the platform that we talked about, right? Fortinet always believes in not to develop a point product, but doing organic development which is part of a broader platform. So when we look at the thing like SASE, which required a really enterprise grade networking and security stack, Fortinet has organically developed them SD-WAN, we are a leading vendor, for the Gartner magic quadrant leader there, network firewall, including whether they deployed on Cloud, on-prem or a segmentation. We are a leader there. So when you combine both of them and ZTNA is part of it, there is only handful of vendor you will see in the industry who can provide the consistent security, networking, and security together and have that better user experience for the single management. So clearly there's a lot of buzz John, about a lot of vendors talk about it. But when you go to the details and see this kind of unified policy of networking and security, Fortinet is emerging as a leader. >> Well I always like talking the experts like you guys on this topic. And we get into the conversations around the importance under the hood. SASE, SD-WEN, we've been covering that for a long time. And now with Zero Trust becoming such a prominent architectural feature in Cloud and hybrid, super important under the hood. At the end of the day though, I got to ask the customers question, which is, "what's in it for me? "I care about breaches. "I don't want to be breached. "The government's not helping me over the top. "I got to defend myself. "I have to put resources in place, it's expensive, "and nevermind if I get breached." The criticality of that alone, is a risk management discussion. These are huge table. These are huge stakes and the stakes are high. So what I care about is are you going to stop the breaches? I need the best security in town. What do you say to that? >> Yeah this goes back to the beginning. We talked about consistent certified security, right John. So yes a SASE model is interesting. Customers are going to move to Cloud, but it's going to be a journey. Customers are not going Cloud first day one. They are going to take a hybrid approach where security is required in a segment, in an edge and on the Cloud. And that's where having a solid security in place is a number one requirement. And when you look at the history of Fortinet, over the last 20 years, how we have done, with our FortiGuard Labs, our threat intelligence and ability for us to protect over 450,000 customers, that's a big achievement. And for us to continue to provide that security but more importantly, continue to go out, and do a third-party certification with many organization to make sure no matter where customers are deploying security, it is that same enterprise grade security deployment. And that's very important that we talk to our users to make sure they validate that. >> Peter would weigh in on this. Customers don't want any breaches. How do you help them with the best security? What's your take on that? >> Well, to kind of reiterate what Nirav said earlier, we really believe that security is a team sport. And you do need best in class products at each individual element, but more importantly you need those products we talking together. So the fact that we have industry leading firewalls, the fact that we have industry-leading SD-WAN, we've got industry leading products to cover the entire gamut of the end point all the way email application, Cloud, all these products while it's important that they're, third-party validated as Nirav was mentioning, it's more important that they actually talk together. They're integrated and provide automated actions. Today's cyber security moves so fast. You need that team approach to be able to protect and stop those breaches. >> Well, you guys have a great enterprise grade solution. I got to say, I've been covering you guys for many years now and you guys have been upfront, out front on the data aspect of it with FortiGuards. And I think people are starting to realize now that data is the key, value proposition is not a secret anymore. Used to be kind of known for the people inside the ropes. So congratulations. I do know that there's a lot action happening. I want to give you guys a chance to at the end of this conversation now to just put a plug in Fortinet because there's more people coming into the workforce now. Post pandemic, young people with computer science degrees and other degrees that want to go into career with cybersecurity, could you guys share both your perspective on for the young people watching or people re-skilling, what opportunities there are from a coding standpoint, and or from say an analyst perspective. What are some of the hot openings? 'cause there are thousands and thousands of jobs give a quick plug for Fortinet and what openings you guys might have. >> Well, certainly in the cyber industry, one of the major trends we have is a work place shortage. There are not enough trained professionals who know about cybersecurity. So for those who are interested in retooling or starting their career, cybersecurity is an ongoing field. It's going to be around for a long time. I highly encourage those interested, come take a look at Fortinet. We offer free training. So you can start from knowing nothing to becoming certified up to a security architect level, and all those, all that training is now available for free. So it's a great time to star, great time to come into the industry. The industry needs you >> Any particularly areas, Peter you see that's like really jumping off the page. >> Well, it's hybrid, knowing Cloud, knowing on-prem, knowing the traffic, knowing the data on the applications, there's just so much to do. >> You're the head of product, you've got all, probably a ton of openings but seriously young people trying to figure out where to jump in, what are the hot areas? Where can people dig in and get retrained and or find their career? >> Yeah, no, I think to reiterate what Peter said, right? The program that Fortinet has built, LSE one, two, three which is free available, is a great foundation. Because that actually goes into the detail of many topics we touched upon. Even though we are talking about SD-WAN, SASE, ZTNA, fundamentally these are the networking and security technologies to make sure users are able to do the right work in the user experience. And that will be really helpful to the young people who are looking to learn more and go into this area. So highly encouraged to take those training, reach out to us. We are there to provide any mentorship, anything that is required to help them in that journey. >> Anything jump off the page in terms of areas that you think are super hot, that are in need. >> Certainly there's convergence of networking and security. There is a growing need of how and what is Zero Trust is? and how the security is applied everywhere. Definitely that's a topic of mine for a lot of our customers, and that's an area, it's a good thing to gain more knowledge and utilize it. >> Nirav and Peter, thank you for coming on. You guys are both experts and the leaders at Fortinet, the product team. The need for security platform is an all time high consolidating tools into a platform. More tools are needed and there's new tools coming. So I'm expecting to have more great conversations as the world evolves. Certainly the edge is super important. Thanks for coming on, appreciate it. >> Thanks for having us. >> Okay, Cube Conversation on security here in the Palo Alto studios. I'm John furrier. Thanks for watching. (ethereal music)

(tech music) >> Announcer: Live from Madrid, Spain, it's the CUBE, covering HPE Discover Madrid 2017 brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. >> Welcome back to Madrid everybody this is the CUBE. The leader in live tech coverage. This is day one of our coverage of HPE Discover 2017. I'm Dave Vollante with my co-host Peter Burris. Jim Jackson is here, he's the senior vice president of the Enterprise Group at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. >> Happy to be here. Good to see you again and Jason Newton, vice president of global marketing at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Guys, it wouldn't be a Discover without some big news, transitioning to Antonio. We're about to hear the key note but Jim, set up the week for us. The big news that we can expect. Show us a little leg. >> Yeah well first of all, thanks for having us here guys. We're really excited for this week. It's gonna be probably one of our biggest weeks of innovation. We've got a pretty amazing Discover lined up. So you're gonna see us talk about AI in the data center, so bringing predictive analytics from our Nimble acquisition it's called info site. We're extending that to three par so that really helps our customers predict and anticipate problems and solve them in advance. So that's really software-based leading with that. Another area is we're bringing consumption-based capabilities. A whole new suite of consumption offerings. We're branding it HPE Green Lake and it's really, think of purpose-built solutions for things like backup, SAP, data like environments but it's really outcomes as a service. So we're not able to give our customers the ability to have infrastructure as a service, and now outcomes as a service. And the other part of making hybrid IT simple that you're gonna hear about is how we're really helping our customers unify and manage that multi cloud environment. So applications are sitting in public clouds, private clouds, what we're hearing from our customers is, hey we need to be able to manage this a lot easier and have holistic ability to see all of that. So you're gonna see us talk about that on main stage as well. So new brands, a lot of innovation. We've also got some partnerships that we'll be rolling out later today. So a lot happening. >> Jason, you've spent a lot of time, sweat, toil, blood on branding. Obviously you're a big part of the branding exercise. Up leveling the messaging, we had you on two or three years ago, and you said, look, we're gonna change things. We're gonna shift the focus from product and widgets and really talk about what customers care about. How has that gone? Where are you at with that? It resonates extremely well with customers. In fact we just got out of a panel where we had four of our top customers, ABV, Dreamworks, IKEA and Nokia. And we just spent an hour just talking about their digital transformation journey and what they're all about. The room was packed. I think we had over 400 people who were in there. That's showing that we can be an innovation partner to those customers enabling them to share their stories at a venue like this is really powerful. >> We're becoming much more software and services led and it's really all about experiences. Providing that experience that our customers are looking for. >> Just follow up to that, so a lot of people think oh well HP, spun merge it's software business but you're leading with services and software. So help us clear that. >> We're doing a ton in software today. So if you just think of our software portfolio. We have HP 1V to manage our customers complete infrastructure estate, service storage and networking. We extended that last year with composability so HP and Synergy, we have over a thousand new customers since we announced that last year actually at this event. So we're seeing a lot of progress. Synergy enables our customers to really have one environment that can flex to the needs of multiple different applications so reduces over provisioning. AI, I talked about AI in the data center. So what we're doing with info site, that's software based, we're extending that to 3PAR and you'll see us extend that to other parts of the portfolio going forward. Nyara, and on the Aruba side of the house, software based. Aruba is very software centric and then of course, we'll be announcing this afternoon our code name project new stack, really about helping to manage that multi cloud environment. A lot happening in the software space and an area that we're very focused on. >> One of the things... By the way, we think that those three things that you mentioned, automation in the data center, on-premise capabilities and a cross multi cloud approach to management and managing your assets, absolutely spot-on. And we think ultimately and here's a question, we think that what's going to drive the determination is what does the data need? So talk to us a little bit about how you are articulating the idea of data as the new value source, the new value and hardware infrastructure and software and these capabilities, making it possible for the work to exist where the data requires. >> Yeah and I'll start maybe you can pile on a little bit. Our conversation starts with apps and data so we're starting the dialogue there and you know what we're seeing is you know really moving from large data centers, or only large data centers to centers of data that are really everywhere, right? So we're starting to see that edge really starting to proliferate and drive a lot more change, and what our customers are saying is wherever might, regardless of where my data sits, I need to manage it, I need to secure it, I need to process it, I need to be able to translate it into insight and that's really what our strategy is all about. We've been talking for the last couple of years about making hybrid IT simple. and we're really doing a lot in that space. So for example, we announced the acquisition of cloud technology partners and really what we're trying to do there it's the foremost authority really in helping customers understand how to migrate applications to to AWS or even to Google or Azure, and when you combine that with our on-prem capabilities, it really now starts to talk about data, we want to say your data is what matters and we want to help you manage that holistically. The software investments that we're doing enable you to have that complete view. And then from a consumption perspective, some of the things I talked about earlier, rolling that out right, making it easier to consume this as a service and only pay for what I use. So, we are in alignment. It all starts with data and wherever that data sits, it's how do I manage it? >> And that's why Aruba is such a great asset for us, because a lot of people think about Aruba as you know, you just replace copper wire and WiFi ... And hey, don't get me wrong, it's a money-making great business, but if you'd asked Kierty, he'd probably say we're a data business, right? >> Peter: We did ask him, and that is what he said. >> Is that what he said? Well, good, we're on message then. We're on message today, alright, yeah. I mean, because that's where the action is happening, that's where the data is being created, and so everything that they're doing around the the security 360 platform, the mobile first platform, everything is centered around, how do I draw a value in context from that data? >> Well I want to ask you about Aruba, because when you acquired Aruba, we said wow, this is a great business, it's gonna be a growth business, but is it a strategic weapon for HPE? Is it a strategic infrastructure component? From a messaging standpoint, It's all about the intelligent edge, that you've up-leveled that. Where'd that come from? Maybe take us through sort of the anatomy of-- >> Well I mean, the message is just exactly what we were saying. That if if value is gonna be created at the edge, if the data's gonna be coming from the edge, we have to drive a whole lot more intelligence into that edge in order to collect, process, analyze, secure the data that's coming in and make use of it, right? So I mean, that's where the genesis of the intelligent edge came from. >> Yeah, I mean I would say the other thing about Aruba that we're really seeing is all about experiences. So when we talk to our customers about Aruba, they're looking to deliver a different experience. Whether it's in retail, whether it's in stadiums, whether it's in the campus space. It's all about delivering a better experience. And that's really the value prop behind Aruba. Very software centric, open software, mobile solution. The other thing is, it's enabling us to engage more and more with parts of the company, customers that we might not have had as much engagement before. You know, the c-suite, you know, talking more with the line of business. because what they're focused on is how do I deliver that better experience? And Aruba's really playing a key role in doing that. We also have the view that ultimately, and you started the conversation about data, and we totally agree. But it has to be thought of from the edge, to the core, to the cloud. So whether we engage with Aruba, whether we engage with our core data center, capabilities, and our strengths there, or with services ... That's enabling us to holistically have a much more strategic conversation with our customers. So we're excited about that. >> I'd like to dig a little bit on this notion of AI for the data center, or AI for managing IT (mumbles). We'd like to talk about the difference between a breadth-first, which is I'm gonna do this, like in this big broad way, and we'll figure out how we're gonna get the components to participate, versus a depth-first. Which is, let's lean on suppliers, who know that hardware, know the software best, and ask them to create simulacrums, you know, digital representations that then will allow me to apply AI machine learning, et cetera. We like the depth-first approach, but customers ultimately want to see this bloom into a breadth approach. Talk to us a little bit about how individual elements are being represented, but in a coherent consistent way, so that you can get to a broader, overall set of automation across entire infrastructure. >> Well, I mean, I think that you're seeing the paradigm shift now. I mean for decades we've been chasing this idea that we can make the one tool to rule them all, this sort of magic management environment, one single pane of glass, everyone says that right? >> I've written a lot of research papers that suggested that, right? >> Right? And look, I think that's, we're done, alright? And the only thing we can do now is, how do we embed intelligence to make the infrastructure so smart it can take care of itself? And that's ultimately the experience that our customers are telling us that they want, right? Is, I don't want to be an expert on IT anymore. I don't wanna touch this stuff, I don't want to deal with it. >> Peter: Not just want, need. >> Right? I can't handle it, right? I mean, the scale and speed of everything is beyond the capacity ... I can't hire enough people to take care of it. So you know, I think starting there and saying, okay we're gonna start embedding that type of intelligence. Right now it's mostly predictive analytics type of stuff, but increasingly you're gonna see more true AI come in not just in the data center, with what we're doing with Nimble, right? But also with Nyara. Now we call it introspect, right at the edge. How do we start weaving that across to do a variety of things? Whether it's maintenance or performance optimization, or security. I think thinking of it like a continuous platform across the infrastructure is gonna give you that depth and kind of breadth of control that you're looking for. >> So that leads to kind of an ecosystem question, and I liked your comments on that. Because the question of breadth or depth, the answer is yes, you got to have both. The ecosystem posture has totally changed in the last year or so, subsequent. Because we had PWC on today. We've had Veam on earlier. These are-- >> Jason: They love us. Partners that you're putting forth, yeah. >> Jason: We're making them money. >> For sure, right. But they are partners that previously, you know, you wouldn't have profiled. Whether on stage, on the Cube, wherever. >> Jason: Yeah. >> How has the ecosystem evolved? >> I mean it's opening up a whole new set of opportunities for us. You know, if you think of when we had ES, a lot of people just felt like, hey we were gonna compete with them, right? Now that ES has spun out, we actually created another great partner in ES, but we've got a whole host of other SIs that want to engage with us. They want to take our capabilities in IT systems. Our consumption capabilities, and then align it with a value prop that they'll bring. So you talked about Veam for example, right? Data availability is really, really important for customers. So taking HPE and Veam together, we're able to deliver a great solution from data protection to recovery. Really powerful stuff, and we're seeing some great opportunities out there in the marketplace, and a very strong ROI. I mean, we have some data that says, hey over five years, is a 200% ROI. Another area, when you think of just partnering, right? Is what we're doing with our channel partners. So we're giving them more solutions that are channel centric, that we're driving through our channel organization, yeah. And then, we just announced a relationship a couple weeks ago with Rackspace. It's a managed private cloud, open source solution. We're using our consumption capabilities, combined with with Rackspace, their environment. And this is giving our customers the flexibility to now spin up very quickly, a private cloud environment that they're looking for with a lot of the public cloud capabilities. Very strong economics behind it. And then the edge, that's the other area we're seeing lots of new partnering opportunities as the edge continues to expand. So we believe that innovation is a team sport, and we're leaning in really hard, and I know you know the Gartner's and the IDCs don't track who are the best partners, but I think if they did, we would be at the top of the list. >> Well, probably a lot of this activity was going on previously, so it's not like you're starting from ground zero. >> Jim: Correct. >> But you just, from a marketing standpoint, you really didn't talk about it, because you had colleagues, whether it was from EDS or the software division that's saying, hey, don't talk about that, help us out here. So, how has that changed the way in which you market? One of the big values is your go-to-market. I mean, people are drooling to now partner with HPE. >> Yeah, and one of the big reasons is honestly, is point next. Because they see the value in what Accenture or PwC, or Wipro can bring from understanding a business, or whatever, versus the deep technical knowledge of a point next to come in, and what they really love is the consumption model stuff that we've been able to wrap around it. They see that customers want, that in order to move fast with less risk, right? You've gotta have some sort of financial lever that says, okay, I can start small and I can grow over time. I'm not putting all my money out in one place and we've been building that with flex capacity over the last several years. You're gonna see, well, I guess we announced yesterday, a new Green Lake ... Making that even simpler to consume. Every one of our partner says, I wanna take your IT expertise in that consumption based model and wrap it around a total solution. And that's what's like white-hot right now, and there's unlimited opportunity right now from ... As Jim said, edge to core to cloud. >> And we have another one we're gonna announce on stage in a couple of hours, so we're pretty excited about that as well. >> Well, you see that in the numbers too, yeah. >> Jason: I think we might have a clue what that is. >> We're excited about that. >> Yeah, I know, it is. Well, look, and you kind of you kind of gave something of a preview when you talked about the three things that you want to be able to do. Because there's one brand that hasn't been mentioned yet. But ultimately the business is recognizing that the technology questions that we're raising here are crucial to their future success, but they don't want them to be a continuous source of antagonism. >> Group: Right. >> So they recognize that they need the capability, but they want to dramatically simplify the degree to which it's evasive. I once had a CIO tell me that the value of my infrastructure is adversely proportional to the degree to which anybody in my business knows anything about it. So how do you then take steps to ensure that your customers don't know anything about the infrastructure, even though they have the infrastructure where the data demands, which is gonna be at the edge, and on premise? >> I think that's some of the things we're focused on now. So software to make infrastructure much more frictionless. And you're not really worrying about managing that infrastructure, it's just there to power the business, to deliver the business. Consumption-based offerings with Green Lake, this is truly purpose-built stacks for specific things, because our customers are telling us, I don't want to have to set all that up and manage it, but I want that outcome, and I only want to pay for what I use. So those are just a couple of examples of how we're trying to simplify it. Because ultimately it's all about the experience and the outcome and being able to translate all that data into insight. >> Well, when you're simplifying your face to the world, we heard in the last earnings call, new reporting structure going forward. Hybrid IT ... intelligent edge, and financial services, which is exploding, the consumption base modeling 22% growth last quarter. So organizationally, presumably, you've started to take that shape, and that's how you're presenting your face to the world. Is that right? >> Yeah, and that's helping us to really break down some of the silos, that has existed in this company for a while. And you're seeing that really, really becoming much more unified in terms of how we go to market, and how we think about engaging with our partners how we engage with our customers. >> Are your customers breaking down those silos at a consistent rate? Are you a little bit ahead, a little bit behind? How would you evaluate that? I think it's a transition, it depends on which customer, which sector. We still see some of some of them that are maybe a little behind. Some that are a little bit ahead, but really everybody wants to start the conversation much more about, how do I move faster? How do I accelerate my business? It's all focused on outcomes starting at that data level, and then how can you help me? And this is where I think some of the acquisitions that we've made, like CTP are very empowerful, and then all the software capabilities that we're bringing as well. So we're leading the dialogue much more around that. >> And the only way they're gonna get there is to break down those silos. >> Jim: Absolutely, absolutely. And we have to help them do that, right? We have to help them do that and give them the solutions to do this. >> So Jim, I want to go back to a point that you made about those other two research firms, Gartner and IDC I think it was. But you said that if they were measuring the value, or if there was a magic quadrant for who is the best partner, you guys would be up in the upper right hand quadrant? But partners in this world, especially here in Europe, are more than just the big guys. >> Jim: Yes. >> How are you taking steps to ensure that that large mass of crucially important companies out there, that still where a lot of that innovation, a lot of that excitement really is, are coming with you, are able to move with you? Because your ability to certainly provide them with financial support is important, but your ability to show them the future, and have them see their business in the future, is going to be crucial to whether or not they stay with you. >> And I think we're doing a couple of things. We created our Pathfinder program, I'm sure you guys are aware of that, right? So these are some of the newer partners coming up, we're actually investing in them, helping to scale them, because we think it's going to be unique innovation. Another area is this program that we have called Cloud 28 Plus, where we have a whole network of providers, service providers, ISVs, SPs, that's part of a network that we're able to grow and kind of scale that ecosystem, so I don't know if you want to comment anything more on that, but-- >> Jason: Up to 700 now (mumbles). >> Yeah, so Saviea is very passionate about this obviously, but he's done some some really good things-- >> Peter: And he should be passionate about it. >> But that gives us an ecosystem now of partners who are part of that HPE ecosystem, but different use cases, different compliance needs, they sit in different regions, so we're able to give our customers a lot of that flexibility. >> Alright, gotta give us something on the key note. Just a tidbit. What can you share? A little nugget? >> I mean, you know-- >> Dave: Teaser. >> Some themes we've talked about. You'll hear the word friction free a lot, how do we make things invisible? And really demonstrating how with services and software, and consumption-based service models, can we do that for customers? You'll hear a lot of those themes. We'll highlight some of the things we've announced over the last 24 hours, a few weeks. So we'll emphasize what we've done around Nimble and info site, and the importance of AI in the data center. We'll obviously spotlight point next, and Anna and her energy, she's gonna be out there and really firing people up. And a few surprises in the software space that will come today, that it'll probably cause the market to do a bit of a double take and say who is that that's doing this again? Yeah, it's us, it's HPE doing that. >> And you'll see us also talk about a little bit of a vision in terms of how we see the market starting more at the edge, bringing in AI, composing for different kinds of environments, and then how HPE has really been able to invest, so we're gonna start to show that over the last couple years, we have had a very clear agenda where we want it to go, and now that's all coming to fruition, so we'll start to show all that holistically in terms of our technology vision. So that's another thing that we're gonna be highlighting. >> Great. Perfect timing, we can hear the announcement. Keynotes are coming up, we'll be broadcasting those on our twitch channel. Siliconangle.com/twitch You can go to HPE.com and see the keynotes as well. Gents, great energy, awesome to see you. >> It's great to see you guys, thank you. >> We'll be watching the college football ranks. You guys have a fun little rivalry of Ohio State here. >> The Ohio State. >> Dave: ... Yale, but nobody cares. >> Baker for Heisman. >> Dave: Gents, thanks very much for coming. >> Thanks guys, appreciate it. >> Keep right there everybody, we'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. (soft tech music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Manhattan. It's theCUBE! Covering AWS Summit New York City 2017. Brought to you by Amazon web services. >> And welcome back here on theCUBE. The flagship broadcast of SiliconANGLE TV where our colleague John Furrier likes to say we extract the signal from the noise. Doing that here at AWS Summit here in midtown along with Stu Miniman. I'm John Walls and we're joined now by Ben Newton who's the analytics lead at Sumo Logic. And I said Ben, what is an analytics lead? If you were to give me the elevator speech on that? You said you're the geek who stays up all night and fiddles with stuff. >> That's why I joined Sumo Logic. I love finding the things that other people didn't find. And when I first joined, I was staying up until 2:00 a.m. every night playing around with the data. My wife started getting worried about me. (laughter) But that was the path that I set on. >> You're the guy that looks at the clouds and sees the man's nose, right? >> Yeah exactly, exactly. >> It's just it's in data that's all. >> Yeah, yeah. >> So I hear this concept. But we'll jump in here about continuous intelligence, right? >> Ben: Yeah. >> It's machine data and there's just this constant stream. I mean, how do you see that? How do you define that? And how does that play with how you, what you do? >> Yeah, no absolutely. So, I've been around a little while. And when I started out, there was a particular set of problems we were trying to solve. You know, we had the $100,000 Sun Microsystem servers. You drop 'em on the floor, somebody gets fired. But it was a very particular problem set. What's happened now is that the market is really changing. And so, the amount of data is just growing exponentially. So I kind of have my own conjoined triangle slide that I like to show people. But basically, things are getting smaller and smaller and smaller. We're going from these monolithic services to microservices, IOT. And the scale is just getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And what that means is that the amount of data being produced is it's bigger than anyone ever imagined. I was just looking up some numbers that Barkley says it's going to be 16 zettabytes. I had to look that up. That's a billion terabytes by 2020. That's like watching the whole Netflix catalog 30 million times. (laughter) That's the amount of data that customers are dealing with and that's what's exciting about this space I think. >> So, I remember at Re:Invent. You see Sumo's like the booth when you walk in. They actually had sumo wrestlers one year. (laughter) Remind me, just wrestling. I've got all that data. How do I take advantage of that? How do I democratize the analytics on data? What are the big challenges? You said customers used to be dropping a server on the floor. How are they getting their arms around this? How are they really leveraging their data? And leveraging analytics more? >> Yeah, I got to wrestle one of those sumos. (laughter) He let me win a little bit. (laughter) And then it was over. >> Did you have to wear the outfit? >> Luckily no. That was good for everybody. Yeah, you know, I think ... A few years ago, it was all about big data. And it was all about how much data they could get in. And I think you saw some announcements from AWS today. Really people are getting their hands around it. Now it's all about fast data. Like what can I do in real time? And that's what people are struggling with. They have this massive amount of data that's just sitting there unused. And people weren't actually getting value out of to drive the business. And that's really the next goal I think over the next few years is how can our customers and these companies get more value out of data they have without having to invest in all this costly infrastructure to do it? >> I think a few years ago, it was big data. I'm going to take the compute and I'm going to move it to the data. >> Yeah. >> Now, last year at Re:Invent, talked to a lot of the companies. They're working with Hadoop and the like, and they said the data lakes are now in the public cloud. >> Ben: Yes. >> But now I've got edge computing. I kind of have the data side, the public cloud, and the edge. And I'm never going to get all my data in the same place so how am I managing all of those various pools of data? >> Ben: Yeah. >> How do I make sure I get the right data in the right place so I can make the decisions that I need to when I need to? >> Yeah, it's a good question. So, a lot of what we're trying to do now is trying to help customers get the data in the way they want it. Just like you said. So, before, it might have been about here's our standard way. And here's our agent. You go install that. Now we're trying to provide ways for them to get the data in they want. We're providing APIs and basically trying to move towards becoming more of a platform. So the customers are sending us with third party tools they like. Because I was talking to one of my developers. And I asked him, if somebody came and said to you, you need to change the way you produce your data to use this product, what is he going to say? And he used a four letter word I can't repeat. That's how they think about it. They don't want to have to change the way they do things. So what we do is we provide lots of different ways of getting from multiple clouds from multiple tools. Open source tools. We don't care. Making it as easy as possible to get the data in. >> You know, if Stu and I were different clients of yours. What matters to Stu is much different that what matters to me, right? So how do you go about helping determine access to data in a context that I want it, >> Ben: Yeah. as opposed to the data that Stu wants at the time that he wants it? Cause it's just not about finding real time stuff, right? It's about also finding value at it. >> Ben: Yeah. >> And helping me put action to it. >> You know absolutely John. So I think there's a couple different ways. One is making it easy to get the data in like we just talked about. Another way is actually building a COSMO that matches how you use the data. The typical way that analytics tools have done it in the past, including us before, was kind of a one size fits all model. So last year we announced our unified logs and metric product which was trying to appeal to long term trending. And so now, what we're moving towards as well is providing a model that allows our customers, we call it cloud flex. It allows them to organize their data in the way that makes the most sense. So, maybe you want to keep your security data for a year. But you want to keep your operational data for seven days. That's fine. But organizing the way that makes most sense to you and match your cost to your data. I mean, this is the path that I think AWS has really set. That we're basically meeting customers where they're at. Allowing them to use it. And the second thing is also making easy for their customers to get to that data. And use it in the way they like. So you can make it easy to get in, cost efficient model, and then make it really easy for the user to get to that data. >> Ben, who are you working with the most? Maybe you're working across all these but Amazon was talking a lot about the data scientist this morning. All the ETL challenges >> Yeah. >> that are happening. I know there's a big boost for developers. I expect there's probably something with Lambda >> Yeah. >> that you're involved in. But what are some of those hot button issues that you're seeing across some of the customer roles? >> Sure, sure. I think one thing where you say that with data scientist. I mean we all know that there's a data scientist shortage. We have data scientists at Sumo Logic. They're hard to find. And so part of this is making it, one of the hot button issues is can I get people that don't have that background access to the data? And so, I may want to geek out and write inquiries and staying up to 2:00 a.m. writing that. Most people don't. That's (mumble), right? Not surprising. >> Stu: Right. >> So, a lot of that is how can you make it easier for our developers for example that have another job to do. This is not their main job. To get access to that data and use it. And so for example, one of the things we've done for customers we did for ourselves at Sumo is even making that data accessible to other parts of the business. So for example, our sales reps at Sumo Logic actually use that data to drive the customer interactions. So they can go to a customer and say, hey, we're seeing how you're using a tool. We think you could get value out of these other five things. And work with them in a constructive way. For example, a couple of other clients I've worked with. They're actually using the data in their marketing departments and their sales departments and putting this up on the wall so that other parts of the business are getting access to it beyond dev ops and IT ops, which is huge value to them, right? >> Sumo, I'm just curious. Sumo Logic, umm, where from the name? What's the genesis of that? >> Well the official story is that it's about Sumo, big data. The real story is that our founder Christian loves dogs. And he has a dog named Sumo. And so, it really fit well. It fit the name cause of big data but it also it fit it because he had a >> Alright. >> he had a dog named Sumo. >> I'll buy that. Just curious. Ben, thanks for being with us. We appreciate the time here on theCUBE and you could have taken him I know, if you really wanted to. >> I appreciate that. >> You could have, no doubt. (laughter) Ben Newton. Analytics lead at Sumo Logic joining us here on theCUBE. Back with more from AWS Summit in New York right after this break. (upbeat techno music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE covering HPE Discover 2017 brought to you by Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. >> Hello and welcome back to Las Vegas for theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Discover 2017 or HPE Discover 2017. This is theCUBE, our flagship program from SiliconeANGLE media. We go out to the events, and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconeANGLE. with my co-founder, Dave Vellante, my co-host. Our next guest, Jason Newton, Vice President of HP Marketing Pan-HPE Market cross HP, and Jim Jackson, Senior Vice President of Enterprise Group Marketing. The big dogs here at HP laying out the show here for 2017. Guys, great show again, our seventh year, appreciate it. But this year, more than ever, is a seminal moment, obviously everyone knows what's going on in the news, is a huge shift in the market place, what's happening at the show, set the scene for us, what's the backdrop? You guys lined up all the messaging, you have the whole set up to the show, tell us: what is this show about this year? >> First, welcome to Discover, guys! We're really excited to have you guys here. And you know, we got a lot going on at this show, so for example, yesterday, we had our Global Partners Summit so we brought out top 1300 partners, and we had an amazing session with them. This week starts Discover, so it's going to run for the next three days. We've exceeded our tenants targets, so we're feeling really good about it. I think what that shows is there's a lot of interest, a lot of energy, a lot of passion, for what Hewlett-Packard Enterprise can bring. You know, I'm not going to go through all the mechanics of the separation and the spin merger, but I would say that that was all designed to make us a faster, more nimbler company, and one that is really aligned to where we want to take our partners on their digital transformation journey. You know, what we're seeing today, is digital transformation is impacting every single customer and every single industry, and digital business is technology, and really, that's where we play and that's why we're so excited to get our story out. And when you look at over the last year, there's a lot that's happened at this company around really innovation, acquisitions, and ecosystem. Just look at some of the innovation that we've brought to the market, Synergy. Amazing innovation, it created a new category, it really enables our customers to now get a public cloud experience, but on PRIM. And we're hearing from a lot of customers, I want to leave my applications on PRIM, but I need that capability. So we're delivering that with that kind of innovation. Another one is HPC. High growing market, we're leading in that space. What we're doing in the storage flash space, we rebooted, and rebranded our services organization, it's not called Pointnext. We want to help our customers point next to whats' next for their business. When you look at the Edge, just amazing innovation happening there, whether it's Aruba technology, whether it's what we're doing with all of our Edge compute solutions, so just a tons of things happening and then when you layer on top of that all the acquisitions. SGI, we're already the leader in HPC, we have 140 of the top 500 systems, SGI makes our position that much stronger. That's a hot market, it's growing at six to eight percent. SimpliVity, when we brought our capabilities, our UI from our technology, combined it with the data services from SimpliVity, we now have the leading HC solution in the industry. When you look at Niara, that gives up additional capabilities at the Edge to help secure that. When we look at Cloud Cruiser, we can help customers understand and balance what's happening across their workloads. And then Nimble gives us just an amazing portfolio across storage. We're really the leader now in the storage space when you look at the ability to dress almost any use case, from MSA to SimpliVity, for customers looking for more of that hyperconverge play, to Nimble, to 3PAR. Our strategy, super simple. Make hybrid IT simple, power the Intelligent Edge, and it's not just the compute, it's to bring the analytics so that we can translate insight into action, and really to bring the services to help our customers on their journey. And those services are our Pointnext services complimented by our partner services. So, you know what, we're fired up, we're excited, there's a lot happening. >> You guys got so much going on and we've documented the whole spin merge thing 'till the cows come home, we've already done that. You guys got a lot going on, a lot of customers are talking a lot of people are talking about you in the industry, at an industry level, certainly at a partnership level, you guys have always been customer focused. We heard that, you mentioned that, they kind of want to know: what is HP going to do now? You're going to put the stake in the ground, they want to know what's happening, where is the phoenix coming from out from all this decoupling, and more agile messaging, it's a lot of corporate governance, corporate development, I get that, what's next? When are you guys going to put the stake in the ground, you going to be aggressive, when are we expecting to hear from Meg Whitman? >> This week, right, you're going to see it this week. I think that's why we're so excited, this is our opportunity to bring our story together and talk about the innovation and the outcomes that we're delivering for our customers. We are playing offense, and you're going to see that this week. You know, I think one of the themes about this whole week is really about outcomes. I just hosted a panel, with four amazing customers, we had Dreamworks on there, we had CenterPoint Energy, we had CallidusCloud, and I had one more, can't think of it, Merck. And just amazing stories in terms of their digital transformation journey and how HPE is helping to enable that. You're going to hear that on main stage, we're going to have additional customers, Symmetry, others, talking about their digital transformation journey. So, we're really fired up about the main stage, and the story that we're going to get out today. Backstage talking with the executives, they're ready to rock and roll. You know, we know we have a great story and we need to package it, we need to send it out there to the marketplace, and that's what's going to happen later today. In addition to the outcomes, and I think that's what's different about us maybe from some of our other competitors who come to these similar events and just have a bunch of products, we're really talking about how our technology is enabling outcomes but you're going to see a lot of innovation today as well really themed along our strategy. We're going to highlight and roll out the next generation of our compute experience. We're going to talk about how we're delivering the industry's most secure industry standard servers. That's complimented by a whole set of announcements we did last week on our storage portfolio, and the software defined space updates to our synergy solution to HP OneView, and then we're going to be previewing our multi cloud hybrid stack, which will be available later in the year. When you look at the edge, new campus solution, core solution, so what we're really doing is if you think of a data center course which we're bringing that to the campus, so we can essentially now manage from the ceiling, to the side, to the floor. So we're bringing all the capabilities. Asset tracking capabilities coming in as well. Pointnext, we're bringing in new innovations to the marketplace around Consume. Jason, maybe you can talk a little bit about some of the IOT Edge stuff that's coming out as well. >> Yeah, I mean we think, a core part of our strategy is to power the Intelligent Edge. We think that's where all the innovation is going and increasingly, you know, we think about data and getting insights from data, right? Going forward, we're going to start thinking about how do I take data and put it into action, right? The Edge is a place, and there's lot of different places that we can bring technology to bear to put into action and create value and so, tons of examples of what we'll be talking about with customers and really interwoven within that are the need for analytics, you know, big data, high performance computing, having a renaissance because of that, and the need for hybrid computing right because the stuff needs to be secure and it needs to be driven by applications, and so it really is a great way to try to exemplify why our strategy is the right strategy and why it's a winning one, because those are the unique elements that are going to power this world going forward, and we've got 'em. >> 43% of data will be analyzed at the Edge by 2020, so think about that, right. >> Yeah and we actually think that it'll be much higher over time, that moving around all this data is going to be challenging, I know you're working on the speed of light problem in the labs, and that number I think will increase. So, I wanted to ask you about messaging because messaging in very important. It clarifies your vision and it underscores your relevance to customers and previously a lot of the HP and now it's HPE, messaging was very product centric, and one tended to get lost in that. How have you sort of transformed your messaging architecture to address things like outcomes and business impacts. >> Yeah, you know customers today, it's really about outcomes, right, so technology matters but if you just look at making hybrid IT simple, as an example, that's a easy statement to say, hybrid IT is not simple. So when you, think of the messaging though, of how we're talking to our customers about that it's really at multiple different levels and let me give you a couple of examples. It's, first of all, the services from Pointnext, how do we come and engage them, and help them characterize their applications, understand their environment, and ultimately give them a roadmap with the right mix of technology, not only for today, but for the future. So, that's an example of leading much more with services in terms of our Pointnext services, in terms of how we're engaging our customers. Getting very disciplined in terms of when you think about okay how do I want to run my hybrid IT environment? We believe it runs best on a software defined infrastructure solution, Synergy gives us that. So, customers are telling us, hey I want to have more on PRIM, or I want to be able to run my applications on PRIM but I need the same experience that I can get from a public cloud, we can now do that with Synergy. Fully programmable, we're seeing amazing interaction with it we have almost 400 customers engaging, and that pipeline is continuing to grow. And then I think the third part of it, when you talk about solutions, again it's not just about technology, it's how do I want to consume this, right? So, we're hearing from our customers, you know, I need, not all of them want to just buy it from us and install it. So, we do amazing things here that we probably haven't gotten out to the market, and you're going to see us get a lot louder this week about that. For example, through our flexible financial services organization, we have amazing capabilities to really engage with other parts of the line of business, the CFO, and talk to them about how do you really want to finance this, what kind of business relationship are you looking for? With Flexible Capacity services, we bring amazing capabilities to help our customers get a public cloud experience on PRIM, so it's sitting on their environment, we're managing it, they only pay for what they use. The other part of it is, it is customers are telling us increasingly, hey you know what I want to actually have a network of service providers that I can get services from. We have done that through our Cloud28+ and our service provider partner ready program, we have a whole set of service providers optimized for infrastructure, for applications, many of them are located close to our customers, so just a few examples, I think of how we're trying to bring this all together, and a solution message is really elevating it and saying: what is the outcome you're trying to drive, starting there, and then looking at engaging them holistically across all of that. So you're seeing more and more of that. Our demos highlight that, that's the stuff we're trying to highlight at the show. >> Dave, can I pile on to the message piece, too, as well? His messaging guy here, for Jim. You know, there's a lot of noise also out on the marketplace, and I think one of the keys is the advantage of being a more focused company now, we can be much more simple, and forthright and direct in our messaging, right, in terms of who we are, what we're about, what's our strategy, what are the elements that we're putting in place to execute that strategy and it's I think it's really important because you don't get but 60 seconds, right, in front of a customer, or to grab their attention off a Twitter feed, or whatever and so, simplicity is really really important, and I think the advantage of an event like this is it brings our strategy and that message to life, I mean it's three dimensional out there right. It's living and breathing, we bring the customers forward first, that's the lead of every message because that's what other customers want to hear about, what are you going to do for me, right? >> Well, lets talk about the messaging and how it translate, from as I always say, if you got the sizzle you better have the steak, to use that old expression. Just as a random example, the user experience is changing significantly in IT, I mean yesterday I was delayed coming in Southwest coming from Silicone Valley and, you know they sold my seat, they didn't have to drag me off the plane, but you know I'm getting some help in the analog face to face but I got on Twitter, had to DM Southwest, instant channel to Southwest. That proves that the interface to technology in a digital business is changing. Now IT is transforming in a similar way, how are you guys taking the messaging of simplicity at the same time as the product evolution is shifting and architectures are changing. The people who have to consume and manage this stuff, their work is changing, so how do you guys talk about that because that's really where the meat on the bone is sitting that's where the rubber is hitting the road, your thoughts? >> I'll start, and maybe Jason you can pile on, you know I think Jason poked at it, we are a much simpler company today, so our strategy is very clean. It's to make hybrid IT simple, it's to power the Intelligent Edge, and it's to bring the services to help our customer go along that journey. So just starting with that simple message means that we can get out whole organization, our partner organization, on message in terms of what we bring and how we can help them to do that. I think the other part this that's really important is we view innovation today as really a team sport, and as we become more focused, we're actually leaning in a lot harder to our partner ecosystem. Whether it's our traditional partners, like Microsoft and SAP, whether it's new partners like Docker, Mesosphere, you know bringing the containerized environments, or actually curating a new set of partners for the future with Partner Next. Because it is about getting it down the simple thing of what's the outcome you're trying to drive, what's the technology, and the ecosystem and how can we be the company to help bring that forward? And I think that's a lot of the simplicity that you're going to see. You know on stage later today, I think why we're so excited about this is, you know you're going to hear Meg talk a little bit about the journey we've been on but more importantly the outcomes that we're delivering for customers and then what we're going to do is we're going to feature three customer scenarios, talking about what they have done, what their journey has been, their outcomes, their experiences and what they can do today, and then of course, how HP technology is enabling that. >> We had in our opening, Dave and I always talk about this, because we love the shiny new toy. Certainly I'm from Silicone Valley, he's from the east coast but the reality is that all this stuff about declining markets here and there is always a shift to another growth market, even on PRIM, you know, people might buy and consume and interface differently with technology but it doesn't mean that the data is slowing down, it doesn't mean that the value creation is changing, it's shifting. So I think that has really been something that I think you guys have had online, maybe lost in some of the tactical things but, you know, from new style of IT, to this, it's been kind of a cadence that you've been on it's not like you guys are groping for messaging. >> What goes down, yeah, and you can't just snap your fingers and be the transformed company that you want, right, but we're moving at break-neck speed on that and it does all go back to the advantage of that strategy, and the world you just described, right, you want to be nimble. You know, there may be something next month we've never heard of that disrupts the entire container market, right, containers become oh that's so yesterday, we want to be the company that's ready to pounce on the next thing, right, and we're geared to do that. You know, competitors - >> John: (mumbles) containers in microseconds is kind of a big deal, and it's coming out of the labs. >> Well you know, the other thing, I want to just add, so you talk about customers, you start with the customer the technology business is always moved faster pretty much than any business, but now, every customer is technology company, and so they're accelerating the pace, so you've got to accelerate that pace with them and be that provider. Digital transformation is all about data, it's all about becoming a technology company. So what's the message to your customers in terms of your role in helping them accelerate their transformation? >> Well, I think you pretty much hit it, right, in the statement that I use is digital business is technology. You are not going to seed with your digital transformation unless you have the right technology foundation and that's what we heard from those customers on the panel. It's about speed, it's about flexibility, it's about having the right technology that enables me to deliver services back to my internal clients at the speed I need to do it. And you know, that's where our innovation is really focused today, and that's why we're seeing a lot of customers coming to us and saying I want to understand how you did it for CenterPoint, or for Dreamworks and how we can take advantage of that. The other part of it is, technology is a big part of it but it's also the learning and the expertise that we can bring to actually make that technology work in that customer environment - we know how to do that. We're proven in doing that, and I think that's something because we're close to the technology, we not only have the right innovation, we have the right expertise to make it work for our customers, and that's important. >> I don't even think it's early innings either, Dave, I think it's not the game hasn't even started and I think you know one of the things that we believe and we're doing some research on is, we think asset evaluations is going to be completely data driven. Data will be an asset and that will impact the evaluation mechanism to >> Dave: Data is the new currency! >> John: To companies' value, so I think the shift is so early. So, riding the wave, guys thanks so much for coming on theCUBE we really appreciate it. Looking forward to the keynote from Meg Whitman to hear the messaging. Congratulations as you guys continue to - >> Dave: We're fired up! >> Jason: He's fired up. >> Dave: There's a lot of energy, Meg's fired up >> Jason: She's going to bring it today - >> Dave: Antonio is fired up, there's a lot of energy at the company, and you know, we're just excited to get our story out and engage customers. Thanks guys for the opportunity. >> Live here from HPE Discover, this is theCUBE's exclusive coverage, we'll be back with more live action. Three days of wall to wall coverage after this short break. (electronic music)

hi everybody welcome back to re invent 2022. this is thecube's exclusive coverage we're here at the satellite set it's up on the fifth floor of the Venetian Conference Center and this is part of the global startup program the AWS startup showcase series that we've been running all through last year and and into this year with AWS and featuring some of its its Global Partners Ed wallson series the CEO of chaos search many times Cube Alum and Kevin Miller there's also a cube Alum vice president GM of S3 at AWS guys good to see you again yeah great to see you Dave hi Kevin this is we call this our Super Bowl so this must be like your I don't know uh World Cup it's a pretty big event yeah it's the World Cup for sure yeah so a lot of S3 talk you know I mean that's what got us all started in 2006 so absolutely what's new in S3 yeah it's been a great show we've had a number of really interesting launches over the last few weeks and a few at the show as well so you know we've been really focused on helping customers that are running Mass scale data Lakes including you know whether it's structured or unstructured data we actually announced just a few just an hour ago I think it was a new capability to give customers cross-account access points for sharing data securely with other parts of the organization and that's something that we'd heard from customers is as they are growing and have more data sets and they're looking to to get more out of their data they are increasingly looking to enable multiple teams across their businesses to access those data sets securely and that's what we provide with cross-count access points we also launched yesterday our multi-region access point failover capabilities and so again this is where customers have data sets and they're using multiple regions for certain critical workloads they're now able to to use that to fail to control the failover between different regions in AWS and then one other launch I would just highlight is some improvements we made to storage lens which is our really a very novel and you need capability to help customers really understand what storage they have where who's accessing it when it's being accessed and we added a bunch of new metrics storage lens has been pretty exciting for a lot of customers in fact we looked at the data and saw that customers who have adopted storage lens typically within six months they saved more than six times what they had invested in turning storage lens on and certainly in this environment right now we have a lot of customers who are it's pretty top of mind they're looking for ways to optimize their their costs in the cloud and take some of those savings and be able to reinvest them in new innovation so pretty exciting with the storage lens launch I think what's interesting about S3 is that you know pre-cloud Object Store was this kind of a niche right and then of course you guys announced you know S3 in 2006 as I said and okay great you know cheap and deep storage simple get put now the conversations about how to enable value from from data absolutely analytics and it's just a whole new world and Ed you've talked many times I love the term yeah we built chaos search on the on the shoulders of giants right and so the under underlying that is S3 but the value that you can build on top of that has been key and I don't think we've talked about his shoulders and Giants but we've talked about how we literally you know we have a big Vision right so hard to kind of solve the challenge to analytics at scale we really focus on the you know the you know Big Data coming environment get analytics so we talk about the on the shoulders Giants obviously Isaac Newton's you know metaphor of I learned from everything before and we layer on top so really when you talk about all the things come from S3 like I just smile because like we picked it up naturally we went all in an S3 and this is where I think you're going Dave but everyone is so let's just cut the chase like so any of the data platforms you're using S3 is what you're building but we did it a little bit differently so at first people using a cold storage like you said and then they ETL it up into a different platforms for analytics of different sorts now people are using it closer they're doing caching layers and cashing out and they're that's where but that's where the attributes of a scale or reliability are what we did is we actually make S3 a database so literally we have no persistence outside that three and that kind of comes in so it's working really well with clients because most of the thing is we pick up all these attributes of scale reliability and it shows up in the clients environments and so when you launch all these new scalable things we just see it like our clients constantly comment like one of our biggest customers fintech in uh Europe they go to Black Friday again black Friday's not one days and they lose scale from what is it 58 terabytes a day and they're going up to 187 terabytes a day and we don't Flinch they say how do you do that well we built our platform on S3 as long as you can stream it to S3 so they're saying I can't overrun S3 and it's a natural play so it's it's really nice that but we take out those attributes but same thing that's why we're able to you know help clients get you know really you know Equifax is a good example maybe they're able to consolidate 12 their divisions on one platform we couldn't have done that without the scale and the performance of what you can get S3 but also they saved 90 I'm able to do that but that's really because the only persistence is S3 and what you guys are delivering but and then we really for focus on shoulders Giants we're doing on top of that innovating on top of your platforms and bringing that out so things like you know we have a unique data representation that makes it easy to ingest this data because it's kind of coming at you four v's of big data we allow you to do that make it performant on s3h so now you're doing hot analytics on S3 as if it's just a native database in memory but there's no memory SSC caching and then multi-model once you get it there don't move it leverage it in place so you know elasticsearch access you know Cabana grafana access or SQL access with your tools so we're seeing that constantly but we always talk about on the shoulders of giants but even this week I get comments from our customers like how did you do that and most of it is because we built on top of what you guys provided so it's really working out pretty well and you know we talk a lot about digital transformation of course we had the pleasure sitting down with Adam solipski prior John Furrier flew to Seattle sits down his annual one-on-one with the AWS CEO which is kind of cool yeah it was it's good it's like study for the test you know and uh and so but but one of the interesting things he said was you know we're one of our challenges going forward is is how do we go Beyond digital transformation into business transformation like okay well that's that's interesting I was talking to a customer today AWS customer and obviously others because they're 100 year old company and they're basically their business was they call them like the Uber for for servicing appliances when your Appliance breaks you got to get a person to serve it a service if it's out of warranty you know these guys do that so they got to basically have a you know a network of technicians yeah and they gotta deal with the customers no phone right so they had a completely you know that was a business transformation right they're becoming you know everybody says they're coming a software company but they're building it of course yeah right on the cloud so wonder if you guys could each talk about what's what you're seeing in terms of changing not only in the sort of I.T and the digital transformation but also the business transformation yeah I know I I 100 agree that I think business transformation is probably that one of the top themes I'm hearing from customers of all sizes right now even in this environment I think customers are looking for what can I do to drive top line or you know improve bottom line or just improve my customer experience and really you know sort of have that effect where I'm helping customers get more done and you know it is it is very tricky because to do that successfully the customers that are doing that successfully I think are really getting into the lines of businesses and figuring out you know it's probably a different skill set possibly a different culture different norms and practices and process and so it's it's a lot more than just a like you said a lot more than just the technology involved but when it you know we sort of liquidate it down into the data that's where absolutely we see that as a critical function for lines of businesses to become more comfortable first off knowing what data sets they have what data they they could access but possibly aren't today and then starting to tap into those data sources and then as as that progresses figuring out how to share and collaborate with data sets across a company to you know to correlate across those data sets and and drive more insights and then as all that's being done of course it's important to measure the results and be able to really see is this what what effect is this having and proving that effect and certainly I've seen plenty of customers be able to show you know this is a percentage increase in top or bottom line and uh so that pattern is playing out a lot and actually a lot of how we think about where we're going with S3 is related to how do we make it easier for customers to to do everything that I just described to have to understand what data they have to make it accessible and you know it's great to have such a great ecosystem of partners that are then building on top of that and innovating to help customers connect really directly with the businesses that they're running and driving those insights well and customers are hours today one of the things I loved that Adam said he said where Amazon is strategically very very patient but tactically we're really impatient and the customers out there like how are you going to help me increase Revenue how are you going to help me cut costs you know we were talking about how off off camera how you know software can actually help do that yeah it's deflationary I love the quote right so software's deflationary as costs come up how do you go drive it also free up the team and you nail it it's like okay everyone wants to save money but they're not putting off these projects in fact the digital transformation or the business it's actually moving forward but they're getting a little bit bigger but everyone's looking for creative ways to look at their architecture and it becomes larger larger we talked about a couple of those examples but like even like uh things like observability they want to give this tool set this data to all the developers all their sres same data to all the security team and then to do that they need to find a way an architect should do that scale and save money simultaneously so we see constantly people who are pairing us up with some of these larger firms like uh or like keep your data dog keep your Splunk use us to reduce the cost that one and one is actually cheaper than what you have but then they use it either to save money we're saving 50 to 80 hard dollars but more importantly to free up your team from the toil and then they they turn around and make that budget neutral and then allowed to get the same tools to more people across the org because they're sometimes constrained of getting the access to everyone explain that a little bit more let's say I got a Splunk or data dog I'm sifting through you know logs how exactly do you help so it's pretty simple I'll use dad dog example so let's say using data dog preservability so it's just your developers your sres managing environments all these platforms are really good at being a monitoring alerting type of tool what they're not necessarily great at is keeping the data for longer periods like the log data the bigger data that's where we're strong what you see is like a data dog let's say you're using it for a minister for to keep 30 days of logs which is not enough like let's say you're running environment you're finding that performance issue you kind of want to look to last quarter in last month in or maybe last Black Friday so 30 days is not enough but will charge you two eighty two dollars and eighty cents a gigabyte don't focus on just 280 and then if you just turn the knob and keep seven days but keep two years of data on us which is on S3 it goes down to 22 cents plus our list price of 80 cents goes to a dollar two compared to 280. so here's the thing what they're able to do is just turn a knob get more data we do an integration so you can go right from data dog or grafana directly into our platform so the user doesn't see it but they save money A lot of times they don't just save the money now they use that to go fund and get data dog to a lot more people make sense so it's a creativity they're looking at it and they're looking at tools we see the same thing with a grafana if you look at the whole grafana play which is hey you can't put it in one place but put Prometheus for metrics or traces we fit well with logs but they're using that to bring down their costs because a lot of this data just really bogs down these applications the alerting monitoring are good at small data they're not good at the big data which is what we're really good at and then the one and one is actually less than you paid for the one so it and it works pretty well so things are really unpredictable right now in the economy you know during the pandemic we've sort of lockdown and then the stock market went crazy we're like okay it's going to end it's going to end and then it looked like it was going to end and then it you know but last year it reinvented just just in that sweet spot before Omicron so we we tucked it in which which was awesome right it was a great great event we really really missed one physical reinvent you know which was very rare so that's cool but I've called it the slingshot economy it feels like you know you're driving down the highway and you got to hit the brakes and then all of a sudden you're going okay we're through it Oh no you're gonna hit the brakes again yeah so it's very very hard to predict and I was listening to jassy this morning he was talking about yeah consumers they're still spending but what they're doing is they're they're shopping for more features they might be you know buying a TV that's less expensive you know more value for the money so okay so hopefully the consumer spending will get us out of this but you don't really know you know and I don't yeah you know we don't seem to have the algorithms we've never been through something like this before so what are you guys seeing in terms of customer Behavior given that uncertainty well one thing I would highlight that I think particularly going back to what we were just talking about as far as business and digital transformation I think some customers are still appreciating the fact that where you know yesterday you may have had to to buy some Capital put out some capital and commit to something for a large upfront expenditure is that you know today the value of being able to experiment and scale up and then most importantly scale down and dynamically based on is the experiment working out am I seeing real value from it and doing that on a time scale of a day or a week or a few months that is so important right now because again it gets to I am looking for a ways to innovate and to drive Top Line growth but I I can't commit to a multi-year sort of uh set of costs to to do that so and I think plenty of customers are finding that even a few months of experimentation gives them some really valuable insight as far as is this going to be successful or not and so I think that again just of course with S3 and storage from day one we've been elastic pay for what you use if you're not using the storage you don't get charged for it and I think that particularly right now having the applications and the rest of the ecosystem around the storage and the data be able to scale up and scale down is is just ever more important and when people see that like typically they're looking to do more with it so if they find you usually find these little Department projects but they see a way to actually move faster and save money I think it is a mix of those two they're looking to expand it which can be a nightmare for sales Cycles because they take longer but people are looking well why don't you leverage this and go across division so we do see people trying to leverage it because they're still I don't think digital transformation is slowing down but a lot more to be honest a lot more approvals at this point for everything it is you know Adam and another great quote in his in his keynote he said if you want to save money the Cloud's a place to do it absolutely and I read an article recently and I was looking through and I said this is the first time you know AWS has ever seen a downturn because the cloud was too early back then I'm like you weren't paying attention in 2008 because that was the first major inflection point for cloud adoption where CFO said okay stop the capex we're going to Opex and you saw the cloud take off and then 2010 started this you know amazing cycle that we really haven't seen anything like it where they were doubling down in Investments and they were real hardcore investment it wasn't like 1998 99 was all just going out the door for no clear reason yeah so that Foundation is now in place and I think it makes a lot of sense and it could be here for for a while where people are saying Hey I want to optimize and I'm going to do that on the cloud yeah no I mean I've obviously I certainly agree with Adam's quote I think really that's been in aws's DNA from from day one right is that ability to scale costs with with the actual consumption and paying for what you use and I think that you know certainly moments like now are ones that can really motivate change in an organization in a way that might not have been as palatable when it just it didn't feel like it was as necessary yeah all right we got to go give you a last word uh I think it's been a great event I love all your announcements I think this is wonderful uh it's been a great show I love uh in fact how many people are here at reinvent north of 50 000. yeah I mean I feel like it was it's as big if not bigger than 2019. people have said ah 2019 was a record when you count out all the professors I don't know it feels it feels as big if not bigger so there's great energy yeah it's quite amazing and uh and we're thrilled to be part of it guys thanks for coming on thecube again really appreciate it face to face all right thank you for watching this is Dave vellante for the cube your leader in Enterprise and emerging Tech coverage we'll be right back foreign

(upbeat music) >> Good morning everybody. Welcome back to Las Vegas. This is day four of theCUBE's wall-to-wall coverage of our Super Bowl, aka AWS re:Invent 2022. I'm here with my co-host, Paul Gillin. My name is Dave Vellante. Sanjay Poonen is in the house, CEO and president of Cohesity. He's sitting in as our guest market watcher, market analyst, you know, deep expertise, new to the job at Cohesity. He was kind enough to sit in, and help us break down what's happening at re:Invent. But Paul, first thing, this morning we heard from Werner Vogels. He was basically given a masterclass on system design. It reminded me of mainframes years ago. When we used to, you know, bury through those IBM blue books and red books. You remember those Sanjay? That's how we- learned back then. >> Oh God, I remember those, Yeah. >> But it made me think, wow, now you know IBM's more of a systems design, nobody talks about IBM anymore. Everybody talks about Amazon. So you wonder, 20 years from now, you know what it's going to be. But >> Well- >> Werner's amazing. >> He pulled out a 24 year old document. >> Yup. >> That he had written early in Amazon's evolution about synchronous design or about essentially distributed architectures that turned out to be prophetic. >> His big thing was nature is asynchronous. So systems are asynchronous. Synchronous is an illusion. It's an abstraction. It's kind of interesting. But, you know- >> Yeah, I mean I've had synonyms for things. Timeless architecture. Werner's an absolute legend. I mean, when you think about folks who've had, you know, impact on technology, you think of people like Jony Ive in design. >> Dave: Yeah. >> You got to think about people like Werner in architecture and just the fact that Andy and the team have been able to keep him engaged that long... I pay attention to his keynote. Peter DeSantis has obviously been very, very influential. And then of course, you know, Adam did a good job, you know, watching from, you know, having watched since I was at the first AWS re:Invent conference, at time was President SAP and there was only a thousand people at this event, okay? Andy had me on stage. I think I was one of the first guest of any tech company in 2011. And to see now this become like, it's a mecca. It's a mother of all IT events, and watch sort of even the transition from Andy to Adam is very special. I got to catch some of Ruba's keynote. So while there's some new people in the mix here, this has become a force of nature. And the last time I was here was 2019, before Covid, watched the last two ones online. But it feels like, I don't know 'about what you guys think, it feels like it's back to 2019 levels. >> I was here in 2019. I feel like this was bigger than 2019 but some people have said that it's about the same. >> I think it was 60,000 versus 50,000. >> Yes. So close. >> It was a little bigger in 2019. But it feels like it's more active. >> And then last year, Sanjay, you weren't here but it was 25,000, which was amazing 'cause it was right in that little space between Omicron, before Omicron hit. But you know, let me ask you a question and this is really more of a question about Amazon's maturity and I know you've been following them since early days. But the way I get the question, number one question I get from people is how is Amazon AWS going to be different under Adam than it was under Andy? What do you think? >> I mean, Adam's not new because he was here before. In some senses he knows the Amazon culture from prior, when he was running sales and marketing prior. But then he took the time off and came back. I mean, this will always be, I think, somewhat Andy's baby, right? Because he was the... I, you know, sent him a text, "You should be really proud of what you accomplished", but you know, I think he also, I asked him when I saw him a few weeks ago "Are you going to come to re:Invent?" And he says, "No, I want to leave this to be Adam's show." And Adam's going to have a slightly different view. His keynotes are probably half the time. It's a little bit more vision. There was a lot more customer stories at the beginning of it. Taking you back to the inspirational pieces of it. I think you're going to see them probably pulling up the stack and not just focused in infrastructure. Many of their platform services are evolved. Many of their, even application services. I'm surprised when I talk to customers. Like Amazon Connect, their sort of call center type technologies, an app layer. It's getting a lot. I mean, I've talked to a couple of Fortune 500 companies that are moving off Ayer to Connect. I mean, it's happening and I did not know that. So it's, you know, I think as they move up the stack, the platform's gotten more... The data centric stack has gotten, and you know, in the area we're working with Cohesity, security, data protection, they're an investor in our company. So this is an important, you know, both... I think tech player and a partner for many companies like us. >> I wonder the, you know, the marketplace... there's been a big push on the marketplace by all the cloud companies last couple of years. Do you see that disrupting the way softwares, enterprise software is sold? >> Oh, for sure. I mean, you have to be a ostrich with your head in the sand to not see this wave happening. I mean, what's it? $150 billion worth of revenue. Even though the growth rates dipped a little bit the last quarter or so, it's still aggregatively between Amazon and Azure and Google, you know, 30% growth. And I think we're still in the second or third inning off a grand 1 trillion or 2 trillion of IT, shifting not all of it to the cloud, but significantly faster. So if you add up all of the big things of the on-premise world, they're, you know, they got to a certain size, their growth is stable, but stalling. These guys are growing significantly faster. And then if you add on top of them, platform companies the data companies, Snowflake, MongoDB, Databricks, you know, Datadog, and then apps companies on top of that. I think the move to the Cloud is inevitable. In SaaS companies, I don't know why you would ever implement a CRM solution on-prem. It's all gone to the Cloud. >> Oh, it is. >> That happened 15 years ago. I mean, begin within three, five years of the advent of Salesforce. And the same thing in HR. Why would you deploy a HR solution now? You've got Workday, you've got, you know, others that are so some of those apps markets are are just never coming back to an on-prem capability. >> Sanjay, I want to ask you, you built a reputation for being able to, you know, forecast accurately, hit your plan, you know, you hit your numbers, you're awesome operator. Even though you have a, you know, technology degree, which you know, that's a two-tool star, multi-tool star. But I call it the slingshot economy. This is like, I mean I've seen probably more downturns than anybody in here, you know, given... Well maybe, maybe- >> Maybe me. >> You and I both. I've never seen anything like this, where where visibility is so unpredictable. The economy is sling-shotting. It's like, oh, hurry up, go Covid, go, go go build, build, build supply, then pull back. And now going forward, now pulling back. Slootman said, you know, on the call, "Hey the guide, is the guide." He said, "we put it out there, We do our best to hit it." But you had CrowdStrike had issues you know, mid-market, ServiceNow. I saw McDermott on the other day on the, on the TV. I just want to pay, you know, buy from the guy. He's so (indistinct) >> But mixed, mixed results, Salesforce, you know, Octa now pre-announcing, hey, they're going to be, or announcing, you know, better visibility, forward guide. Elastic kind of got hit really hard. HPE and Dell actually doing really well in the enterprise. >> Yep. >> 'Course Dell getting killed in the client. But so what are you seeing out there? How, as an executive, do you deal with such poor visibility? >> I think, listen, what the last two or three years have taught us is, you know, with the supply chain crisis, with the surge that people thought you may need of, you know, spending potentially in the pandemic, you have to start off with your tech platform being 10 x better than everybody else. And differentiate, differentiate. 'Cause in a crowded market, but even in a market that's getting tougher, if you're not differentiating constantly through technology innovation, you're going to get left behind. So you named a few places, they're all technology innovators, but even if some of them are having challenges, and then I think you're constantly asking yourselves, how do you move from being a point product to a platform with more and more services where you're getting, you know, many of them moving really fast. In the case of Roe, I like him a lot. He's probably one of the most savvy operators, also that I respect. He calls these speedboats, and you know, his core platform started off with the firewall network security. But he's built now a very credible cloud security, cloud AI security business. And I think that's how you need to be thinking as a tech executive. I mean, if you got core, your core beachhead 10 x better than everybody else. And as you move to adjacencies in these new platforms, have you got now speedboats that are getting to a point where they are competitive advantage? Then as you think of the go-to-market perspective, it really depends on where you are as a company. For a company like our size, we need partners a lot more. Because if we're going to, you know, stand on the shoulders of giants like Isaac Newton said, "I see clearly because I stand on the shoulders giants." I need to really go and cultivate Amazon so they become our lead partner in cloud. And then appropriately Microsoft and Google where I need to. And security. Part of what we announced last week was, last month, yeah, last couple of weeks ago, was the data security alliance with the biggest security players. What was I trying to do with that? First time ever done in my industry was get Palo Alto, CrowdStrike, Wallace, Tenable, CyberArk, Splunk, all to build an alliance with me so I could stand on their shoulders with them helping me. If you're a bigger company, you're constantly asking yourself "how do you make sure you're getting your, like Amazon, their top hundred customers spending more with that?" So I think the the playbook evolves, and I'm watching some of these best companies through this time navigate through this. And I think leadership is going to be tested in enormously interesting ways. >> I'll say. I mean, Snowflake is really interesting because they... 67% growth, which is, I mean, that's best in class for a company that's $2 billion. And, but their guide was still, you know, pretty aggressive. You know, so it's like, do you, you know, when it when it's good times you go, "hey, we can we can guide conservatively and know we can beat it." But when you're not certain, you can't dial down too far 'cause your investors start to bail on you. It's a really tricky- >> But Dave, I think listen, at the end of the day, I mean every CEO should not be worried about the short term up and down in the stock price. You're building a long-term multi-billion dollar company. In the case of Frank, he has, I think I shot to a $10 billion, you know, analytics data warehousing data management company on the back of that platform, because he's eyeing the market that, not just Teradata occupies today, but now Oracle occupies or other databases, right? So his tam as it grows bigger, you're going to have some of these things, but that market's big. I think same with Palo Alto. I mean Datadog's another company, 75% growth. >> Yeah. >> At 20% margins, like almost rule of 95. >> Amazing. >> When they're going after, not just the observability market, they're eating up the sim market, security analytics, the APM market. So I think, you know, that's, you look at these case studies of companies who are going from point product to platforms and are steadily able to grow into new tams. You know, to me that's very inspiring. >> I get it. >> Sanjay: That's what I seek to do at our com. >> I get that it's a marathon, but you know, when you're at VMware, weren't you looking at the stock price every day just out of curiosity? I mean listen, you weren't micromanaging it. >> You do, but at the end of the day, and you certainly look at the days of earnings and so on so forth. >> Yeah. >> Because you want to create shareholder value. >> Yeah. >> I'm not saying that you should not but I think in obsession with that, you know, in a short term, >> Going to kill ya. >> Makes you, you know, sort of myopically focused on what may not be the right thing in the long term. Now in the long arc of time, if you're not creating shareholder value... Look at what happened to Steve Bomber. You needed Satya to come in to change things and he's created a lot of value. >> Dave: Yeah, big time. >> But I think in the short term, my comments were really on the quarter to quarter, but over a four a 12 quarter, if companies are growing and creating profitable growth, they're going to get the valuation they deserve. >> Dave: Yeah. >> Do you the... I want to ask you about something Arvind Krishna said in the previous IBM earnings call, that IT is deflationary and therefore it is resistant to the macroeconomic headwinds. So IT spending should actually thrive in a deflation, in a adverse economic climate. Do you think that's true? >> Not all forms of IT. I pay very close attention to surveys from, whether it's the industry analysts or the Morgan Stanleys, or Goldman Sachs. The financial analysts. And I think there's a gluc in certain sectors that will get pulled back. Traditional view is when the economies are growing people spend on the top line, front office stuff, sales, marketing. If you go and look at just the cloud 100 companies, which are the hottest private companies, and maybe with the public market companies, there's way too many companies focused on sales and marketing. Way too many. I think during a downsizing and recession, that's going to probably shrink some, because they were all built for the 2009 to 2021 era, where it was all about the top line. Okay, maybe there's now a proposition for companies who are focused on cost optimization, supply chain visibility. Security's been intangible, that I think is going to continue to an investment. So I tell, listen, if you are a tech investor or if you're an operator, pay attention to CIO priorities. And right now, in our business at Cohesity, part of the reason we've embraced things like ransomware protection, there is a big focus on security. And you know, by intelligently being a management and a security company around data, I do believe we'll continue to be extremely relevant to CIO budgets. There's a ransomware, 20 ransomware attempts every second. So things of that kind make you relevant in a bank. You have to stay relevant to a buying pattern or else you lose momentum. >> But I think what's happening now is actually IT spending's pretty good. I mean, I track this stuff pretty closely. It's just that expectations were so high and now you're seeing earnings estimates come down and so, okay, and then you, yeah, you've got the, you know the inflationary factors and your discounted cash flows but the market's actually pretty good. >> Yeah. >> You know, relative to other downturns that if this is not a... We're not actually not in a downturn. >> Yeah. >> Not yet anyway. It may be. >> There's a valuation there. >> You have to prepare. >> Not sales. >> Yeah, that's right. >> When I was on CNBC, I said "listen, it's a little bit like that story of Joseph. Seven years of feast, seven years of famine." You have to prepare for potentially your worst. And if it's not the worst, you're in good shape. So will it be a recession 2023? Maybe. You know, high interest rates, inflation, war in Russia, Ukraine, maybe things do get bad. But if you belt tightening, if you're focused in operational excellence, if it's not a recession, you're pleasantly surprised. If it is one, you're prepared for it. >> All right. I'm going to put you in the spot and ask you for predictions. Expert analysis on the World Cup. What do you think? Give us the breakdown. (group laughs) >> As my... I wish India was in the World Cup, but you can't get enough Indians at all to play soccer well enough, but we're not, >> You play cricket, though. >> I'm a US man first. I would love to see one of Brazil, or Argentina. And as a Messi person, I don't know if you'll get that, but it would be really special for Messi to lead, to end his career like Maradonna winning a World Cup. I don't know if that'll happen. I'm probably going to go one of the Latin American countries, if the US doesn't make it far enough. But first loyalty to the US team, and then after one of the Latin American countries. >> And you think one of the Latin American countries is best bet to win or? >> I don't know. It's hard to tell. They're all... What happens now at this stage >> So close, right? >> is anybody could win. >> Yeah. You just have lots of shots of gold. I'm a big soccer fan. It could, I mean, I don't know if the US is favored to win, but if they get far enough, you get to the finals, anybody could win. >> I think they get Netherlands next, right? >> That's tough. >> Really tough. >> But... The European teams are good too, but I would like to see US go far enough, and then I'd like to see Latin America with team one of Argentina, or Brazil. That's my prediction. >> I know you're a big Cricket fan. Are you able to follow Cricket the way you like? >> At god unearthly times the night because they're in Australia, right? >> Oh yeah. >> Yeah. >> I watched the T-20 World Cup, select games of it. Yeah, you know, I'm not rapidly following every single game but the World Cup games, I catch you. >> Yeah, it's good. >> It's good. I mean, I love every sport. American football, soccer. >> That's great. >> You get into basketball now, I mean, I hope the Warriors come back strong. Hey, how about the Warriors Celtics? What do we think? We do it again? >> Well- >> This year. >> I'll tell you what- >> As a Boston Celtics- >> I would love that. I actually still, I have to pay off some folks from Palo Alto office with some bets still. We are seeing unprecedented NBA performance this year. >> Yeah. >> It's amazing. You look at the stats, it's like nothing. I know it's early. Like nothing we've ever seen before. So it's exciting. >> Well, always a pleasure talking to you guys. >> Great to have you on. >> Thanks for having me. >> Thank you. Love the expert analysis. >> Sanjay Poonen. Dave Vellante. Keep it right there. re:Invent 2022, day four. We're winding up in Las Vegas. We'll be right back. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (lighthearted soft music)

>>Hello, everyone. Welcome to the cubes presentation of the 80, but startup showcases MarTech is the focus. And this is all about the emerging cloud scale customer experience. This is season two, episode three of the ongoing series covering the exciting, fast growing startups from the cloud AWS ecosystem to talk about the future and what's available now, where are the actions? I'm your host John fur. Today. We joined by Cub alumni, Jerry Chen partner at Greylock ventures. Jerry. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on, >>John. Thanks for having me back. I appreciate you welcome there for season two. Uh, as a, as a guest star, >><laugh>, you know, Hey, you know, season two, it's not a one and done it's continued coverage. We, we got the episodic, uh, cube flicks model going >>Here. Well, you know, congratulations, the, the coverage on this ecosystem around AWS has been impressive, right? I think you and I have talked a long time about AWS and the ecosystem building. It just continues to grow. And so the coverage you did last season, all the events of this season is, is pretty amazing from the data security to now marketing. So it's, it's great to >>Watch. And 12 years now, the cube been running. I remember 2013, when we first met you in the cube, we just left VMware just getting into the venture business. And we were just riffing the next 80. No one really kind of knew how big it would be. Um, but we were kinda riffing on. We kind of had a sense now it's happening. So now you start to see every vertical kind of explode with the right digital transformation and disruption where you see new incumbents. I mean, new Newton brands get replaced the incumbent old guard. And now in MarTech, it's ripe for, for disruption because web two has gone on to web 2.5, 3, 4, 5, um, cookies are going away. You've got more governance and privacy challenges. There's a slew of kind of ad tech baggage, but yet lots of new data opportunities. Jerry, this is a huge, uh, thing. What's your take on this whole MarTech cloud scale, uh, >>Market? I, I think, I think to your point, John, that first the trends are correct and the bad and the good or good old days, the battle days MarTech is really about your webpage. And then email right there. There's, there's the emails, the only channel and the webpage was only real estate and technology to care about fast forward, you know, 10 years you have webpages, mobile apps, VR experiences, car experiences, your, your, your Alexa home experiences. Let's not even get to web three web 18, whatever it is. Plus you got text messages, WhatsApp, messenger, email, still great, et cetera. So I think what we've seen is both, um, explosion and data, uh, explosion of channel. So sources of data have increases and the fruits of the data where you can reach your customers from text, email, phone calls, etcetera have exploded too. So the previous generation created big company responses, Equa, you know, that exact target that got acquired by Oracle or, or, um, Salesforce, and then companies like, um, you know, MailChimp that got acquired as well, but into it, you're seeing a new generation companies for this new stack. So I, I think it's exciting. >>Yeah. And you mentioned all those things about the different channels and stuff, but the key point is now the generation shifts going on, not just technical generation, uh, and platform and tools, it's the people they're younger. They don't do email. They have, you know, proton mail accounts, zillion Gmail accounts, just to get the freebie. Um, they're like, they're, they'll do subscriptions, but not a lot. So the generational piece on the human side is huge. Okay. And then you got the standards, bodies thrown away, things like cookies. Sure. So all this is makes it for a complicated, messy situation. Um, so out of this has to come a billion dollar startup in my mind, >>I, I think multiple billion dollars, but I think you're right in the sense that how we want engage with the company branch, either consumer brands or business brands, no one wants to pick a phone anymore. Right? Everybody wants to either chat or DM people on Twitter. So number one, the, the way we engage is different, both, um, where both, how like chat or phone, but where like mobile device, but also when it's the moment when we need to talk to a company or brand be it at the store, um, when I'm shopping in real life or in my car or at the airport, like we want to reach the brands, the brands wanna reach us at the point of decision, the point of support, the point of contact. And then you, you layer upon that the, the playing field, John of privacy security, right? All these data silos in the cloud, the, the, the, the game has changed and become even more complicated with the startup. So the startups are gonna win. Will do, you know, the collect, all the data, make us secure in private, but then reach your customers when and where they want and how they want it. >>So I gotta ask you, because you had a great podcast just this week, published and snowflake had their event going on the data cloud, there's a new kind of SAS platform vibe going on. You're starting to see it play out. Uh, and one of the things I, I noticed on your podcast with the president of Hashi Corp, who was on people should listen to that podcast. It's on gray matter, which is the Greylocks podcast, uh, plug for you guys. He mentioned he mentions the open source dynamic, right? Sure. And, and I like what he, things, he said, he said, software business has changed forever. It's my words. Now he said infrastructure, but I'm saying software in general, more broader infrastructure and software as a category is all open source. One game over no debate. Right. You agree? >>I, I think you said infrastructure specifically starts at open source, but I would say all open source is one more or less because open source is in every bit of software. Right? And so from your operating system to your car, to your mobile phone, open source, not necessarily as a business model or, or, or whatever, we can talk about that. But open source as a way to build software distribute, software consume software has one, right? It is everywhere. So regardless how you make money on it, how you build software, an open source community ha has >>One. Okay. So let's just agree. That's cool. I agree with that. Let's take it to the next level. I'm a company starting a company to sell to big companies who pay. I gotta have a proprietary advantage. There's gotta be a way. And there is, I know you've talked about it, but I have my opinion. There is needs to be a way to be proprietary in a way that allows for that growth, whether it's integration, it's not gonna be on software license or maybe support or new open source model. But how does startups in the MarTech this area in general, when they disrupt or change the category, they gotta get value creation going. What's your take on, on building. >>You can still build proprietary software on top of open source, right? So there's many companies out there, um, you know, in a company called rock set, they've heavily open source technology like Rock's DB under the hood, but they're running a cloud database. That's proprietary snowflake. You talk about them today. You know, it's not open source technology company, but they use open source software. I'm sure in the hoods, but then there's open source companies, data break. So let's not confus the two, you can still build proprietary software. There's just components of open source, wherever we go. So number one is you can still build proprietary IP. Number two, you can get proprietary data sources, right? So I think increasingly you're seeing companies fight. I call this systems intelligence, right, by getting proprietary data, to train your algorithms, to train your recommendations, to train your applications, you can still collect data, um, that other competitors don't have. >>And then it can use the data differently, right? The system of intelligence. And then when you apply the system intelligence to the end user, you can create value, right? And ultimately, especially marketing tech, the highest level, what we call the system of engagement, right? If, if the chat bot the mobile UI, the phone, the voice app, etcetera, if you own the system of engagement, be a slack, or be it, the operating system for a phone, you can also win. So still multiple levels to play John in multiple ways to build proprietary advantage. Um, just gotta own system record. Yeah. System intelligence, system engagement. Easy, right? Yeah. >>Oh, so easy. Well, the good news is the cloud scale and the CapEx funded there. I mean, look at Amazon, they've got a ton of open storage. You mentioned snowflake, but they're getting a proprietary value. P so I need to ask you MarTech in particular, that means it's a data business, which you, you pointed out and we agree. MarTech will be about the data of the workflows. How do you get those workflows what's changing and how these companies are gonna be building? What's your take on it? Because it's gonna be one of those things where it might be the innovation on a source of data, or how you handle two parties, ex handling encrypted data sets. I don't know. Maybe it's a special encryption tool, so we don't know what it is. What's your what's, what's your outlook on this area? >>I, I, I think that last point just said is super interesting, super genius. It's integration or multiple data sources. So I think either one, if it's a data business, do you have proprietary data? Um, one number two with the data you do have proprietary, not how do you enrich the data and do you enrich the data with, uh, a public data set or a party data set? So this could be cookies. It could be done in Brad street or zoom info information. How do you enrich the data? Number three, do you have machine learning models or some other IP that once you collected the data, enriched the data, you know, what do you do with the data? And then number four is once you have, um, you know, that model of the data, the customer or the business, what do you deal with it? Do you email, do you do a tax? >>Do you do a campaign? Do you upsell? Do you change the price dynamically in our customers? Do you serve a new content on your website? So I think that workflow to your point is you can start from the same place, what to do with the data in between and all the, on the out the side of this, this pipeline is where a MarTech company can have then. So like I said before, it was a website to an email go to website. You know, we have a cookie fill out a form. Yeah. I send you an email later. I think now you, you can't just do a website to email, it's a website plus mobile apps, plus, you know, in real world interaction to text message, chat, phone, call Twitter, a whatever, you know, it's >>Like, it's like, they're playing checkers in web two and you're talking 3d chess. <laugh>, I mean, there's a level, there's a huge gap between what's coming. And this is kind of interesting because now you mentioned, you know, uh, machine learning and data, and AI is gonna factor into all this. You mentioned, uh, you know, rock set. One of your portfolios has under the hood, you know, open source and then use proprietary data and cloud. Okay. That's a configuration, that's an architecture, right? So architecture will be important in terms of how companies posture in this market, cuz MarTech is ripe for innovation because it's based on these old technologies, but there's tons of workflows, but you gotta have the data. Right. And so if I have the best journey map from a client that goes to a website, but then they go and they do something in the organic or somewhere else. If I don't have that, what good is it? It's like a blind spot. >>Correct. So I think you're seeing folks with the data BS, snowflake or data bricks, or an Amazon that S three say, Hey, come to my data cloud. Right. Which, you know, Snowflake's advertising, Amazon will say the data cloud is S3 because all your data exists there anyway. So you just, you know, live on S3 data. Bricks will say, S3 is great, but only use Amazon tools use data bricks. Right. And then, but on top of that, but then you had our SaaS companies like Oracle, Salesforce, whoever, and say, you know, use our qua Marketo, exact target, you know, application as a system record. And so I think you're gonna have a battle between, do I just work my data in S3 or where my data exists or gonna work my data, some other application, like a Marketo Ella cloud Z target, um, or, you know, it could be a Twilio segment, right. Was combination. So you'll have this battle between these, these, these giants in the cloud, easy, the castles, right. Versus, uh, the, the, the, the contenders or the, or the challengers as we call >>'em. Well, great. Always chat with the other. We always talk about castles in the cloud, which is your work that you guys put out, just an update on. So check out greylock.com. They have castles on the cloud, which is a great thesis on and a map by the way ecosystem. So you guys do a really good job props to Jerry and the team over at Greylock. Um, okay. Now I gotta ask kind of like the VC private equity sure. Market question, you know, evaluations. Uh, first of all, I think it's a great time to do a startup. So it's a good time to be in the VC business. I think the next two years, you're gonna find some nice gems, but also you gotta have that cleansing period. You got a lot of overvaluation. So what happened with the markets? So there's gonna be a lot of M and a. So the question is what are some of the things that you see as challenges for product teams in particular that might have that killer answer in MarTech, or might not have the runway if there's no cash, um, how do people partner in this modern era, cuz scale's a big deal, right? Mm-hmm <affirmative> you can measure everything. So you get the combination of a, a new kind of M and a market coming, a potential growth market for the right solution. Again, value's gotta be be there. What's your take on this market? >>I, I, I think you're right. Either you need runway, so cash to make it through, through this next, you know, two, three years, whatever you think the market Turmo is or two, you need scale, right? So if you're at a company of scale and you have enough data, you can probably succeed on your own. If not, if you're kind of in between or early to your point, either one focus, a narrower wedge, John, just like we say, just reduce the surface area. And next two years focus on solving one problem. Very, very well, or number two in this MarTech space, especially there's a lot of partnership and integration opportunities to create a complete solution together, to compete against kind of the incumbents. Right? So I think they're folks with the data, they're folks doing data, privacy, security, they're post focusing their workflow or marketing workflows. You're gonna see either one, um, some M and a, but I definitely can see a lot of Coopers in partnership. And so in the past, maybe you would say, I'm just raise another a hundred million dollars and do what you're doing today. You might say, look, instead of raising more money let's partner together or, or merge or find a solution. So I think people are gonna get creative. Yeah. Like said scarcity often is good. Yeah. I think forces a lot more focus and a lot more creativity. >>Yeah. That's a great point. I'm glad you brought that up up. Cause I didn't think you were gonna go there. I was gonna ask that biz dev activity is going to be really fundamental because runway combined with the fact that, Hey, you know, if you know, get real or you're gonna go under is a real issue. So now people become friends. They're like, okay, if we partner, um, it's clearly a good way to go if you can get there. So what advice would you give companies? Um, even most experienced, uh, founders and operators. This is a different market, right? It's a different kind of velocity, obviously architectural data. You mentioned some of those key things. What's the posture to partner. What's your advice? What's the combat man manual to kind of compete in this new biz dev world where some it's a make or break time, either get the funding, get the customers, which is how you get funding or you get a biz dev deal where you combine forces, uh, go to market together or not. What's your advice? >>I, I think that the combat manual is either you're partnering for one or two things, either one technology or two customers or sometimes both. So it would say which partnerships, youre doing for technology EG solution completers. Like you have, you know, this puzzle piece, I have this puzzle piece data and data privacy and let's work together. Um, or number two is like, who can help you with customers? And that's either a, I, they can be channel for you or, or vice versa or can share customers and you can actually go to market together and find customers jointly. So ideally you're partner for one, if not the other, sometimes both. And just figure out where in your life cycle do you need? Um, friends. >>Yeah. Great. My final question, Jerry, first of all, thanks for coming on and sharing your in insight as usual. Always. Awesome final question for the folks watching that are gonna be partnering and buying product and services from these startups. Um, there's a select few great ones here and obviously every other episode as well, and you've got a bunch you're investing in this, it's actually a good market for the ones that are lean companies that are lean and mean have value. And the cloud scale does provide that. So a lot of companies are getting it right, they're gonna break through. So they're clearly gonna be getting customers the buyer side, how should they be looking through the lens right now and looking at companies, what should they look for? Um, and they like to take chances with seeing that. So it's not so much, they gotta be vetted, but you know, how do they know the winners from the pretenders? >>You know, I, I think the customers are always smart. I think in the, in the, in the past in market market tech, especially they often had a budget to experiment with. I think you're looking now the customers, the buyer technologies are looking for a hard ROI, like a return on investment. And before think they might experiment more, but now they're saying, Hey, are you gonna help me save money or increase revenue or some hardcore metric that they care about? So I think, um, the startups that actually have a strong ROI, like save money or increased revenue and can like point empirically how they do that will, will, you know, rise to the top of, of the MarTech landscape. And customers will see that they're they're, the customers are smart, right? They're savvy buyers. They, they, they, they, they can smell good from bad and they're gonna see the strong >>ROI. Yeah. And the other thing too, I like to point out, I'd love to get your reaction real quick is a lot of the companies have DNA, any open source or they have some community track record where communities now, part of the vetting. I mean, are they real good people? >>Yeah. I, I think open stores, like you said, in the community in general, like especially all these communities that move on slack or discord or something else. Right. I think for sure, just going through all those forums, slack communities or discord communities, you can see what's a good product versus next versus bad. Don't go to like the other sites. These communities would tell you who's working. >>Well, we got a discord channel on the cube now had 14,000 members. Now it's down to six, losing people left and right. We need a moderator, um, to get on. If you know anyone on discord, anyone watching wants to volunteer to be the cube discord, moderator. Uh, we could use some help there. Love discord. Uh, Jerry. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. What's new at Greylock. What's some of the things happening. Give a quick plug for the firm. When you guys working on, I know there's been some cool things happening, new investments, people moving. >>Yeah. Look we're we're Greylock partners, seed series a firm. I focus at enterprise software. I have a team with me that also does consumer investing as well as crypto investing like all firms. So, but we're we're seed series a occasionally later stage growth. So if you're interested, uh, FA me@jkontwitterorjgreylock.com. Thank you, John. >>Great stuff, Jerry. Thanks for coming on. This is the Cube's presentation of the, a startup showcase. MarTech is the series this time, emerging cloud scale customer experience where the integration and the data matters. This is season two, episode three of the ongoing series covering the hottest cloud startups from the ADWS ecosystem. Um, John farrier, thanks for watching.

>> 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)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hello, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage, CUBE Virtual's coverage, CUBE digital coverage, of AWS Summit, virtual online, Amazon Summit's normally in face-to-face all around the world, it's happening now online, follow the sun. Of course, we want to bring theCUBE coverage like we do at the events digitally, and we've got a great guest that usually comes on face-to-face, he's coming on virtual, Sanjay Poonen, the chief operating officer of VMware. Sanjay great to see you, thanks for coming in virtually, you look great. >> Hey, John thank you very much. Always a pleasure to talk to you. This is the new reality. We both happen to live very close to each other, me in Los Altos, you in Palo Alto, but here we are in this new mode of communication. But the good news is I think you guys at theCUBE were pioneering a lot of digital innovation, the AI platform, so hopefully it's not much of an adjustment for you guys to move digital. >> It's not really a pivot, just move the boat, put the sails up and sail into the next generation, which brings up really the conversation that we're seeing, which is this digital challenge, the virtual world, it's virtualization, Sanjay, it sounds like VMware. Virtualization spawned so much opportunity, it created Amazon, some say, I'd say. Virtualizing our world, life is now integrated, we're immersed into each other, physical and digital, you got edge computing, you got cloud native, this is now a clear path to customers that recognize with the pandemic challenges of at-scale, that they have to operate their business, reset, reinvent, and grow coming out of this pandemic. This has been a big story that we've been talking about and a lot of smart managers looking at projects saying, I'm doubling down on that, and I'm going to move the resources from this, the people and budget, to this new reality. This is a tailwind for the folks who were prepared, the ones that have the experience, the ones that did the work. theCUBE, thanks for the props, but VMware as well. Your thoughts and reaction to this new reality, because it has to be cloud native, otherwise it doesn't work, your thoughts. >> Yeah, I think, John, you're right on. We were very fortunate as a company to invent the term virtualization for an x86 architecture and the category 20 years ago when Diane founded this great company. And I would say you're right, the public cloud is the instantiation of virtualization at its sort of scale format and we're excited about this Amazon partnership, we'll talk more about that. This new world of doing everything virtual has taken the same concepts to whole new levels. We are partnering very closely with companies like Zoom, because a good part of this is being able to deliver video experiences in there, we'll talk about that if needed. Cloud native security, we announced an acquisition today in container security that's very important because we're making big moves in security, security's become very important. I would just say, John, the first thing that was very important to us as we began to shelter in place was the health of our employees. Ironically, if I go back to, in January I was in Davos, in fact some of your other folks who were on the show earlier, Matt Garman, Andy, we were all there in January. The crisis already started in China, but it wasn't on the world scene as much of a topic of discussion. Little did we know, three, four weeks later, fast forward to February things were moving so quickly. I remember a Friday late in February where we were just about to go the next week to Las Vegas for our in-person sales kickoffs. Thousands of people, we were going to do, I think, five or 6,000 people in Las Vegas and then another 3,000 in Barcelona, and then finally in Singapore. And it had not yet been categorized a pandemic. It was still under this early form of some worriable virus. We decided for the health and safety of our employees to turn the entire event that was going to happen on Monday to something virtual, and I was so proud of the VMware team to just basically pivot just over the weekend. To change our entire event, we'd been thinking about video snippets. We have to become in this sort of virtual, digital age a little bit like TV producers like yourself, turn something that's going to be one day sitting in front of an audience to something that's a lot shorter, quicker snippets, so we began that, and the next thing we began doing over the next several weeks while the shelter in place order started, was systematically, first off, tell our employees, listen, focus on your health, but if you're healthy, turn your attention to serving your customers. And we began to see, which we'll talk about hopefully in the context of the discussion, parts of our portfolio experience a tremendous amount of interest for a COVID-centered world. Our digital workplace solutions, endpoint security, SD-WAN, and that trifecta began to be something that we began to see story after story of customers, hospitals, schools, governments, retailers, pharmacies telling us, thank you, VMware, for helping us when we needed those solutions to better enable our people on the front lines. And all VMware's role, John, was to be a digital first responder to the first responder, and that gave tremendous amount of motivation to all of our employees into it. >> Yeah, and I think that's a great point. One of the things we've been talking about, and you guys have been aligned with this, you mentioned some of those points, is that as we work at home, it points out that digital and technology is now part of lifestyle. So we used to talk about consumerization of IT, or immersion with augmented reality and virtual reality, and then talk about the edge of the network as an endpoint, we are at the edge of the network, we're at home, so this highlights some of the things that are in demand, workspaces, VPN provisioning, these new tools, that some cases we've been hearing people that no one ever thought of having a forecast of 100% VPN penetration. Okay, you did the AirWatch deal way back when you first started, these are now fruits of those labors. So I got to ask you, as managers of your customer base are out there thinking, okay, I got to double down on the right growth strategy for this post-pandemic world, the smart managers are going to look at the technologies enabled for business outcome, so I have to ask you, innovation strategies are one thing, saying it, putting it place, but now more than ever, putting them in action is the mandate that we're hearing from customers. Okay I need an innovation strategy, and I got to put it into action fast. What do you say to those customers? What is VMware doing with AWS, with cloud, to make those innovation strategies not only plausible but actionable? >> That's a great question, John. We focused our energy, before even COVID started, as we prepared for this year, going into sales kickoffs and our fiscal year, around five priorities. Number one was enabling the world to be multicloud, private cloud and public cloud, and clearly our partnership here with Amazon is the best example of that and they are our preferred cloud partner. Secondly, building modern apps with microservices and cloud native, what we call app modernization. Thirdly, which is a key part to the multicloud, is building out the entire network stack, data center networking, the firewalls, the load bouncing in SD-WAN, so I'd call that cloud network. Number four, the modernization of workplace with an additional workspace solution, Workspace ONE. And five, intrinsic security from all aspects of security, network, endpoint, and cloud. So those five priorities were what we began to think through, organize our portfolio, we call them solution pillars, and for any of your viewers who're interested, there's a five-minute version of the VMware story around those five pillars that you can watch on YouTube that I did, you just search for Sanjay Poonen and five-minute story. But then COVID hit us, and we said, okay we got to take these strategies now and make them more actionable. Exactly your question, right? So a subset of that portfolio of five began to become more actionable, because it's pointless going and talking about stuff and it's like, hey, listen, guys, I'm a house on fire, I don't care about the curtains and all the wonderful art. You got to help me through this crisis. So a subset of that portfolio became kind of what was those, think about now your laptop at home, or your endpoint at home. People wanted, on top of their Zoom call, or surrounding their Zoom call, a virtual desktop managed easily, so we began to see Workspace ONE getting a lot of interest from our customers, especially the VDI part of that portfolio. Secondly, that laptop at home needed to be secured. Traditional, old, legacy AV solutions that've worked, enter Carbon Black, so Workspace ONE plus Carbon Black, one and two. Third, that laptop at home needs network acceleration, because we're dialoguing and, John, we don't want any latency. Enter SD-WAN. So the trifecta of Workspace ONE, Carbon Black and VeloCloud, that began to see even more interest and we began to hone in our portfolio around those three. So that's an example of where you have a general strategy, but then you apply it to take action in the midst of a crisis, and then I say, listen, that trifecta, let's just go and present what we can do, we call that the business continuity or business resilience part of our portfolio. We began to start talking to customers, and saying, here's our business continuity solution, here's what we could do to help you, and we targeted hospitals, schools, governments, pharmacies, retailers, the ones who're on the front line of this and said again, that line I said earlier, we want to be a digital first responder to you, you are the real first responder. Right before this call I got off a CIO call with the CIO of a major hospital in the northeast area. What gives me great joy, John, is the fact that we are serving them. Their beds are busting at the seam, in serving patients-- >> And ransomware's a huge problem you guys-- >> We're serving them. >> And great stuff there, Sanjay, I was just on a call this morning with a bunch of folks in the security industry, thought leaders, was in DC, some generals were there, some real thought leaders, trying to figure out security policy around biosecurity, COVID-19, and this invisible disruption, and they were equating it to like the World Wars. Big inflection point, and one of the generals said, in those times of crisis you need alliances. So I got to ask you, COVID-19 is impactful, it's going to have serious impact on the critical nature of it, like you said, the house is on fire, don't worry about the curtains. Alliances matter more than ever when you need to come together. You guys have an ecosystem, Amazon's got an ecosystem, this is going to be a really important test to the alliances out there. How do you view that as you look forward? You need the alliances to be successful, to compete and win in the new world as this invisible enemy, if you will, or disruptor happens, what's your thoughts? >> Yeah, I'll answer in a second, just for your viewers, I sneezed, okay? I've been on your show dozens of time, John, but in your live show, if I sneezed, you'd hear the loud noise. The good news in digital is I can mute myself when a sneeze is about to happen, and we're able to continue the conversation, so these are some side benefits of the digital part of it. But coming to your question on alliance, super important. Ecosystems are how the world run around, united we stand, divided we fall. We have made ecosystems, I've always used this phrase internally at VMware, sort of like Isaac Newton, we see clearly because we stand on the shoulders of giants. So VMware is always able to be bigger of a company if we stand on the shoulders of bigger giants. Who were those companies 20 years ago when Diane started the company? It was the hardware economy of Intel and then HP and Dell, at the time IBM, now Lenovo, Cisco, NetApp, DMC. Today, the new hardware companies Amazon, Azure, Google, whoever have you, we were very, I think, prescient, if you would, to think about that and build a strategic partnership with Amazon three or four years ago. I've mentioned on your show before, Andy's a close friend, he was a classmate over at Harvard Business School, Pat, myself, Ragoo, really got close to Andy and Matt Garman and Mike Clayville and several members of their teams, Teresa Carlson, and began to build a partnership that I think is one of the most incredible success stories of a partnership. And Dell's kind of been a really strong partner with us on private cloud, having now Amazon with public cloud has been seminal, we do regular meetings and build deep integration of, VMware Cloud and AWS is not some announcement two or three years ago. It's deep engineering between, Bask's now in a different role, but in his previous role, that and people like Mark Lohmeyer in our team. And that deep engineering allows us to know and tell customers this simple statement, which both VMware and Amazon reps tell their customers today, if you have a workload running on vSphere, and you want to move that to Amazon, the best place, the preferred place for that is VMware Cloud and Amazon. If you try to refactor that onto a native VC 2, it's a waste of time and money. So to have the entire army of VMware and Amazon telling customers that statement is a huge step, because it tells customers, we have 70 million virtual machines running on-prem. If customers are looking to move those workloads to Amazon, the best place for that VMware Cloud and AWS, and we have some credible customer case studies. Freddie Mac was at VMworld last year. IHS Markit was at VMworld last year talking about it. Those are two examples and many more started it, so we would like to have every VMware and Amazon customer that's thinking about VMware to look at this partnership as one of the best in the industry and say very similar to what Andy I think said on stage at the time of this announcement, it doesn't have to be now a trade-off between public and private cloud, you can get the best of both worlds. That's what we're trying to do here-- >> That's a great point, I want to get your thoughts on leadership, as you look at COVID-19, one of our tracks we're going to be promoting heavily on theCUBE.net and our sites, around how to manage through this crisis. Andy Jassy was quoted on the fireside chat, which is coming up here in North America, but I saw it yesterday in New Zealand time as I time shifted over there, it's a two-sided door versus a one-sided door. That was kind of his theme is you got to be able to go both ways. And I want to get your thoughts, because you might know what you're doing in certain contexts, but if you don't know where you're going, you got to adjust your tactics and strategies to match that, and there's and old expression, if you don't know where you're going, every road will take you there, okay? And so a lot of enterprise CXOs or CEOs have to start thinking about where they want to go with their business, this is the growth strategy. Then you got to understand which roads to take. Your thoughts on this? Obviously we've been thinking it's cloud native, but if I'm a decision maker, I want to make sure I have an architecture that's going to carry me forward to the future. I need to make sure that I know where I'm going, so I know what road I'm on. Versus not knowing where I'm going, and every road looks good. So your thoughts on leadership and what people should be thinking around knowing what their destination is, and then the roads to take? >> John, I think it's the most important question in this time. Great leaders are born through crisis, whether it's Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, Roosevelt, any of the leaders since then, in any country, Mahatma Gandhi in India, the country I grew up, Nelson Mandela, MLK, all of these folks were born through crisis, sometimes severe crisis, they had to go to jail, they were born through wars. I would say, listen, similar to the people you talked about, yeah, there's elements of this crisis that similar to a World War, I was talking to my 80 year old father, he's doing well. I asked him, "When was the world like this?" He said, "Second World War." I don't think this crisis is going to last six years. It might be six or 12 months, but I really don't think it'll be six years. Even the health care professionals aren't. So what do we learn through this crisis? It's a test of our leadership, and leaders are made or broken during this time. I would just give a few guides to leaders, this is something tha, Andy's a great leader, Pat, myself, we all are thinking through ways by which we can exercise this. Think of Sully Sullenberger who landed that plane on the Hudson. Did he know when he flew that airbus, US Airways airbus, that few flock of birds were going to get in his engine, and that he was going to have to land this plane in the Hudson? No, but he was making decisions quickly, and what did he exude to his co-pilot and to the rest of staff, calmness and confidence and appropriate communication. And I think it's really important as leaders, first off, that we communicate, communicate, communicate, communicate to our employees. First, our obligation is first to our employees, our family first, and then of course to our company employees, all 30,000 at VMware, and I'm sure similarly Andy does it to his, whatever, 60, 70,000 at AWS. And then you want to be able to communicate to them authentically and with clarity. People are going to be reading between the lines of everything you say, so one of the things I've sought to do with my team, all the front office functions report to me, is do half an hour Zoom video conferences, in the time zone that's convenient to them, so Japan, China, India, Europe, in their time zone, so it's 10 o'clock my time because it's convenient to Japan, and it's just 10 minutes of me speaking of what I'm seeing in the world, empathizing with them but listening to them for 20 minutes. That is communication. Authentically and with clarity, and then turn your attention to your employees, because we're going stir crazy sitting at home, I get it. And we've got to abide by the ordinances with whatever country we're in, turn your attention to your customers. I've gotten to be actually more productive during this time in having more customer conference calls, video conference calls on Zoom or whatever platform with them, and I'm looking at this now as an opportunity to engage in a new way. I have to be better prepared, like I said, these are shorter conversations, they're not as long. Good news I don't have to all over the place, that's better for my family, better for the carbon emission of the world, and also probably for my life long term. And then the third thing I would say is pick one area that you can learn and improve. For me, the last few years, two, three years, it's been security. I wanted to get the company into security, as you saw today we've announced mobile, so I helped architect the acquisition of Carbon Black, very similar to kind of the moves I've made six years ago around AirWatch, very key part to all of our focus to getting more into security, and I made it a personal goal that this year, at the start of the year, before COVID, I was going to meet 1,000 CISOs, in the Fortune 1000 Global 2000. Okay, guess what, COVID happens, and quite frankly that goal's gotten a little easier, because it's much easier for me to meet a lot more people on Zoom video conferences. I could probably do five, 10 per day, and if there's 200 working days in a day, I can easily get there, if I average about five per day, and sometimes I'm meeting them in groups of 10, 20. >> So maybe we can get you on theCUBE more often too, 'cause you have access to a video camera. >> That is my growth mindset for this year. So pick a growth mindset area. Satya Nadella puts this pretty well, "Move from being a know-it-all to a learn-it-all." And that's the mindset, great company. Andy has that same philosophy for Amazon, I think the great leaders right now who are running these cloud companies have that growth mindset. Pick an area that you can grow in this time, and you will find ways to do it. You'll be able to learn online and then be able to teach in some fashion. So I think communicate effectively, authentically, turn your attention to serving your customers, and then pick some growth area that you can learn yourself, and then we will come out of this crisis collectively, individuals and as partners, like VMware and Amazon, and then collectively as a society, I believe we'll come out stronger. >> Awesome great stuff, great insight there, Sanjay. Really appreciate you sharing that leadership. Back to the more of technical questions around leadership is cloud native. It's clear that there's going to be a line in the sand, if you will, there's going to be a right side of history, people are going to have to be on the right side of history, and I believe it's cloud native. You're starting to see this emersion. You guys have some news, you just announced today, you acquired a Kubernetes security startup, around Kubernetes, obviously Kubernetes needs security, it's one of those key new enablers, disruptive enablers out there. Cloud native is a path that is a destination opportunity for people to think about, why that acquisition? Why that company? Why is VMware making this move? >> Yeah, we felt as we talked about our plans in security, backing up to things I talked about in my last few appearances on your show at VMworld, when we announced Carbon Black, was we felt the security industry was broken because there was too many point benders, and we figured there'd be three to five control points, network, endpoint, cloud, where we could play a much more pronounced role at moving a lot of these point benders, I describe this as not having to force our customers to go to a doctor and say I've got to eat 5,000 tablets to get healthy, you make it part of your diet, you make it part of the infrastructure. So how do we do that? With network security, we're off to the races, we're doing a lot more data center networking, firewall, load bouncing, SD-WAN. Really, reality is we can eat into a lot of the point benders there that I've just been, and quite frankly what's happened to us very gratifying in the network security area, you've seen the last few months, some firewall vendors are buying SD-WAN players, kind of following our strategy. That's a tremendous validation of the fact that the network security space is being disrupted. Okay, move to endpoint security, part of the reason we acquired Carbon Black was to unify the client side, Workspace ONE and Carbon Black should come together, and we're well under way in doing that, make Carbon Black agentless on the server side with vSphere, we're well on the way to that, you'll see that very soon. By the way both those things are something that the traditional endpoint players can't do. And then bring out new forms of workload. Servers that are virtualized by VMware is just one form of work. What are other workloads? AWS, the public clouds, and containers. Container's just another workload. And we've been looking at container security for a long time. What we didn't want to do was buy another static analysis player, another platform and replatform it. We felt that we could get great technology, we have incredible grandeur on container cell. It's sort of Red Hat and us, they're the only two companies who are doing Kubernetes scales. It's not any of these endpoint players who understand containers. So Kubernetes, VMware's got an incredible brand and relevance and knowledge there. The networking part of it, service mesh, which is kind of a key component also to this. We've been working with Google and others like Istio in service mesh, we got a lot of IP there that the traditional endpoint players, Symantec, McAfee, Trend, CrowdStrike, don't know either Kubernetes or service mesh well. We add now container security into this, we really distinguish ourselves further from the traditional endpoint players with bringing together, not just the endpoint platform that can do containers, but also Kubernetes service mesh. So why is that important? As people think about their future in containers, they'll want to do this at the runtime level, not at the static level. They'll want to do it at build time And they'll want to have it integrated with some of their networking capabilities like service mesh. Who better to think about that IP and that evolution than VMware, and now we bring, I think it's 12 to 14 people we're bringing in from this acquisition. Several of them in Israel, some of them here in Palo Alto, and they will build that platform into the tech that VMware has onto the Carbon Black cloud and we will deliver that this year. It's not going to be years from now. >> Did you guys talk about the-- >> Our capability, and then we can bring the best of Carbon Black, with Tanzu, service mesh, and even future innovation, like, for example, there's a big movement going around, this thing call open policy agent OPA, which is an open source effort around policy management. You should expect us to embrace that, there could be aspects of OPA that also play into the future of this container security movement, so I think this is a really great move for Patrick and his team, I'm very excited. Patrick is the CEO of Carbon Black and the leader of that security business unit, and he came to me and said, "Listen, one of the areas "we need to move in is container security "because it's the number one request I'm hearing "from our CESOs and customers." I said, "Go ahead Patrick. "Find out who are the best player you could acquire, "but you have to triangulate that strategy "with the Tanzu team and the NSX team, "and when you have a unified strategy what we should go, "we'll go an make the right acquisition." And I'm proud of what he was able to announce today. >> And I noticed you guys on the release didn't talk about the acquisition amount. Was it not material, was it a small amount? >> No, we don't disclose small, it's a tuck-in acquisition. You should think of this as really bringing us some tech and some talent, and being able to build that into the core of the platform of Carbon Black. Carbon Black was the real big move we made. Usually what we do, you saw this with AirWatch, right, anchor on a fairly big move. We paid I think 2.1 billion for Carbon Black, and then build and build and build on top of that, partner very heavily, we didn't talk about that. If there's time we could talk about it. We announced today a security alliance with top SIEM players, in what's called a sock alliance. Who's announced in there? Splunk, IBM QRadar, Google Chronicle, Sumo Logic, and Exabeam, five of the biggest SIEM players are embracing VMware in endpoint security, saying, Carbon Black is who we want to work with. Nobody else has that type of partnership, so build, partner, and then buy. But buy is always very carefully thought through, we're not one of these companies like CA of the past that just bought every company and then it becomes a graveyard of dead acquisition. Our view is we're very disciplined about how we think about acquisition. Acquisitions for us are often the last resort, because we'd prefer to build and partner. But sometimes for time-to-market reasons, we acquire, and when we acquire, it's thoughtful, it's well-organized within VMware, and we take care of our people, 'cause we want, I mean listen, why do acquisitions fail? Because the good people leave. So we're excited about this team, the team in Israel, and the team in Palo Alto, they come from Octarine. We're going to integrate them rapidly into the platform, and this is a good evidence of VMware investing more in security, and our Q3 earnings pulled, John, I said, sorry, we said that the security business was a billion dollar business at VMware already, primarily from network, but some from endpoint. This is evidence of us putting more fuel behind that fire. It's only been six, seven months and Patrick's made his first acquisition inside Carbon Black, so you're going to see us investing more in security, it's an important priority for the company, and I expect us to be a very prominent player in these three pillars, network security, endpoint security, endpoint is both client and the workload, and cloud. Network, endpoint, cloud, they are the three areas where we think there's lots of room for innovation in security. >> Well, we'll be watching, we'll be reporting and analyzing the moves. Great playbook, by the way. Love that organic partnering and then key acquisitions which you build around, it's a great playbook, I think it's very relevant for this time. The most important question I have to ask you, Sanjay, and this is a personal question, because you're the leader of VMware, I noticed that, we all know you're into music, you've been putting music online, kind of a virtual band. You've also hired a CUBE alumni, Victoria Verango from McAfee who also puts up music, you've got some musicians, but you kind of know how to do the digital moves there, so the question is, will the music at VMworld this year be virtual? >> Oh, man. Victoria is actually an even better musician than me. I'm excited about his marketing gifts, but I'm also excited to watch him. But yeah, you've heard him sing, he's got a voice that's somewhat similar to Sting, so we, just for fun, in our Diwali, which is an Indian celebration last year, Tom Corn, myself, and a wonderful lady named Divya, who's got a beautiful voice, had sung a song, which was off the soundtrack of the Bollywood movie, "Secret Superstar," and we just for fun decided to record that in our three separate homes, and put that out on YouTube. You can listen, it's just a two or three-minute run, and it kind of went a little bit viral. And I was thinking to myself, hey, if this is one way by which we can let the VMware community know that, hey, you know what, art conquers COVID-19, you can do music even socially distant, and bring out the spirit of VMware, which is community. So we might build on that idea, Victoria and I were talking about that last night and saying, hey, maybe we do a virtual music kind of concert of maybe 10 or 15 or 20 voices in the various different countries. Record piece of a song and music and put it out there. I think these are just ways by which we're having fun in a virtual setting where people get to see a different side of VMware where, and the intent here, we're all amateurs, John, we're not like great. There are going to be mistakes in this music. If you listen to that audio, it sounds a little tinny, 'cause we're recording it off our iPhone and our iPad microphone. But we'll do the best we can, the point is just to show the human spirit and to show that we care, and at the end of the day, see, the COVID-19 virus has no prejudice on color of skin, or nationality, or ethnicity. It's affecting the whole world. We all went into the tunnel at different times, we will come out of this tunnel together and we will be a stronger human fabric when we're done with this, We shall absolutely overcome. >> Sanjay, give us a quick update to end the segment on your thoughts around VMworld. It's one of the biggest events, we look forward to it. It's the only even left standing that theCUBE's been to every year of theCUBE's existence, we're looking forward to being part of theCUBE virtual. It's been announced it's virtual. What are some of the thinking going on at the highest levels within the VMware community around how you're going to handle VMworld this year? >> Listen, when we began to think about it, we had to obviously give our customers and folks enough notice, so we didn't want to just spring that sometime this summer. So we decided to think through it carefully. I asked Robin, our CMO, to talk to many of the other CMOs in the industry. Good news is all of these are friends of ours, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, Adobe, and even some smaller companies, IBM did theirs. And if they were in the first half of the year, they had to go virtual 'cause we're sheltered in place, and IBM did theirs, Okta did theirs, and we began to watch how they were doing this. We're kind of in the second half, because we were August, September, and we just sensed a lot of hesitancy from our customers that wanted to get on a plane to come here, and even if we got just 500, 1,000, a few thousand, it wasn't going to be the same and there would always be that sort of, even if we were getting back to that, some worry, so we figured we'd do something that might be semi-digital, and we may have some people that roam, but the bulk of it is going to be digital, and we changed the dates to be a little later. I think it's September 20th to 29th. Right now it's all public now, we announced that, and we're going to make it a great program. In some senses like we're becoming TV producer. I told our team we got to be like Disney or ESPN or whoever your favorite show is, YouTube, and produce a really good several-hour program that has got a different way in which digital content is provided, smaller snippets, very interesting speakers, great brand names, make the content clear, crisp and compelling. And if we do that, this will be, I don't know, maybe it's the new norm for some period of time, or it might be forever, I don't know. >> John: We're all learning. >> In the past we had huge conferences that were busting 50, 70, 100,000 and then after the dot-com era, those all shrunk, they're like smaller conferences, and now with advent of companies like Amazon and Salesforce, we have huge events that, like VMworld, are big events. We may move to a environment that's a lot more digital, I don't know what the future of in-presence physical conferences are, but we, like others, we're working with AWS in terms of their future with Reinvent, what Microsoft's doing with Ignite, what Google's doing with Next, what Salesforce's going to do with Dreamforce, all those four companies are good partners of ours. We'll study theirs, we'll work together as a community, the CMOs of all those companies, and we'll come together with something that's a very good digital experience for our customers, that's really what counts. Today I did a webinar with a partner. Typically when we did a briefing in our briefing center, 20 people came. There're 100 people attending this, I got a lot more participation in this QBR that I did with this SI partner, one of the top SIs in the world, in an online session with them, than would I have gotten if they'd all come to Palo Alto. That's goodness. Should we take the best of that world and some physical presence? Maybe in the future, we'll see how it goes. >> Content quality. You know, you know content. Content quality drives everything online, good engagement creates community, that's a nice flywheel. I think you guys will figure it out, you've got a lot of great minds there, and of course, theCUBE virtual will be helping out as we can, and we're rethinking things too-- >> We count on that, John-- >> We're going to be open minded to new ideas, and, hey, whatever's the best content we can deliver, whether it's CUBE, or with you guys, or whoever, we're looking forward to it. Sanjay, thanks for spending the time on this CUBE Keynote coverage of AWS Summit. Since it's digital we can do longer programs, we can do more diverse content. We got great customer practitioners coming up, talking about their journey, their innovation strategies. Sanjay Poonen, COO of VMware, thank you for taking your precious time out of your day today. >> Thank you, John, always a pleasure. >> Thank you. Okay, more CUBE, virtual CUBE digital coverage of AWS Summit 2020, theCUBE.net is we're streaming, and of course, tons of videos on innovation, DevOps, and more, scaling cloud, scaling on-premise hybrid cloud, and more. We got great interviews coming up, stay with us our all-day coverage. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (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)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hello everyone, welcome to this CUBE conversation here in the Palo Alto studios for theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, the host. We're here during this time where everyone's sheltering in place during the COVID-19 crisis. We're getting the interviews out and getting the stories that matter for you. It's theCUBE's mission just to share and extract the data from, signal from the noise, and share that with you. Of course the conversation here is about how the data analytics are being used. We have a great friend and CUBE alum, Bruno Kurtic, VP, founding VP of Product and Strategy for Sumo Logic, a leader in analytics. We've been following you guys, kind of going back I think many, many years, around big data, now with AI and machine learning. You guys are an industry leader. Bruno, thanks for spending the time to come on theCUBE, I know you're sheltering in place. Thanks for coming on. >> You're welcome, pleasure. >> Obviously with the crisis, the work at home has really highlighted the at-scale problem, right? We've been having many conversations on theCUBE of cybersecurity at scale, because now the endpoint protection business has been exploding, literally, a lot of pressure of malware. A convenient crime time for those hackers. You're starting to see cloud failure. Google had 18 hours of downtime. Azure's got some downtime. I think Amazon's the only one that haven't had any downtime. But everything is being at scale now, because the new work environment is actually putting pressure on the industry, not only just the financial pressure of people losing their jobs or the hiring freezes, but now the focus is staying in business and getting through this. But the pressure points of scale are starting to show. And working at home is one of them. Analytics has become a big part of it. Can you share your perspective of how people using analytics to get through this, because now the scale of the problem-solving is there with analytics. It's in charts on the virus, exponential curves, people want to know the impact of their business in all this. What's your view on this situation? >> Yeah. The world has changed so quickly. Analytics has always been important. But there are really two aspects of analytics that are important right now. A lot of our enterprises today, obviously, as you said, are switching to this sort of remote workforce. Everybody who was local is now remote, so, people are working from home. That is putting stress on the systems that support that working from home. It's putting stress on infrastructure, things like VPNs and networks and things like that because they're carrying more bits and bytes. It's putting stress on productivity tools, things like cloud provider tools, things like Office 365, and Google Drive, and Salesforce, and other things that are now being leveraged more and more as people are remote. Enterprises are leveraging analytics to optimize and to ensure that they can facilitate course of business, understand where their issues are, understand where their failures are, internal and external, route traffic appropriately to make sure that they can actually do the business they need. But that's only half of the problem. In fact, I think the other half of the problem is maybe even bigger. We as humans are no longer able to go out. We're not supposed to, and able to go shopping and doing things as we normally do, so all of these enterprises are not only working remotely, leveraging productivity tools and quote-unquote "digital technologies" to do work. They're also serving more customers through their digital properties. And so their sites, their apps, their retail stores online, and all of the digital aspects of enterprises today are under more load because consumers and customers are leveraging those channels more. People are getting groceries delivered at home, pharmaceuticals delivered at home. Everything is going through online systems rather than us going to Walgreens and other places to pick things up. Both of those aspects of scale and security are important. Analytics is important in both figuring out how do you serve your customers effectively, and how do you secure those sites. Because now that there's more load, there's more people, and it's a bigger honeypot. And then also, how do you actually do your own business to support that in a digital world? >> Bruno, that's a great point. I just want to reiterate that the role of data in all this is really fundamental and clear, the value that you can get out of the data. Now, you and I, we've had many conversations with you guys over the years. For all of us insiders, we all know this already. Data analytics, everyone's instrumenting their business. But now when you see real-life examples of death and destruction, I mean, I was reporting yesterday that leaked emails from the CDC in the United States showed that in January, they saw that people didn't have fevers with COVID-19. The system was lagging. There was no real-time notifications. This is our world. We've been living in this for this past decade, in the big data world. This is highlighting a global problem, that with notifications, with the right use of data, is a real game-changer. You couldn't get any more clear. I have to ask you, with all this kind of revelations, and I don't mean to be all gloom-and-doom, but that's the reality, highlights the fact that instrumenting and having the data analytics is a must-have. Can you share your reaction to that? >> Yeah, absolutely. You're right. Like you said, we are insiders here, and we've been espousing this world of what we internally in Sumo call the continuous intelligence, which essentially means to us and to our customers, that you collect and process all signals that are available to you as a business, as a government, as a whatever entity that is dealing with critical things. You need to process all of that data as quickly as you can. You need to mine it for insights. You need to, in an agile fashion, just like software development, you need to consume those insights, build them into your processes to improve, to react, to respond quickly, and then deliver better outcomes. The sooner you understand what the data is telling you, the sooner you can actually respond to whatever that data is telling you, and actually avoid bad outcomes, improve good outcomes, and overall, react to whatever is forcing you to react. >> I was just talking with Dave Vellante last week about this, my co-host, and also Jeff Frick, my general manager, who interviewed you in the past on theCUBE, about the transition and transformation that's happening. I want to just get your reaction to what we're seeing, and I wanted to get your thoughts on it. There's transitions and there's transformations. Yeah, we've been kind of in this data transition around analytics. You pointed out, as insiders, we've been pointing this out for years. But I think now there's more of a transformative component to this. I think it's becoming clear to everyone the role of data, and you've laid out some good things there. Now I want to ask you, on this transformation. Do you agree with it, and if you do, how does that change the roles? Because if I'm going to react to this as a business, whether small, medium, and large business, large enterprise or government, I now realize that the old world's over. I need to get to the new way. That means new roles, new responsibilities, new outcomes, new ways to measure. Can you share your thoughts on that? Do you agree with the transformation, and two, what are some of those new role changes? How should a business manager or technologist make that transformation? >> Yeah. If it was ever more clear, getting a switch, or a transformation as you say, from the old way we did business and we did technology to the new way, is only being highlighted by this crisis. If you are an enterprise, and you are trying to do everything yourself, running your own IT stacks and all of that, it is clear today that it is much more difficult to do that than if you were leveraging next generation technologies: clouds, SaaS, PaaS, and other things, because it is hard to get people even to work. I think if we have ever been in a place where this sort of transformation is a must, not a slow choice or an evolution, it is now. Because enterprises who have done that, who have done that already, are now at an advantage. I think this is a critical moment in time for us all as we all wake up to this new reality. It is not to say that enterprises are going to be switched over after this specific crisis, but what's going to happen, I believe, is that, I think the philosophies are going to change, enterprises are going to think of this as the new normal. They're going to think about, "Hey, if I don't have the data "about my business, about my customers, "about my infrastructure, about my systems, "I won't be able to respond to the next one." Because right now there's a lot of plugging the holes in the dam with fingers and toes, but we are going to need to be ready for this, because if you think about what this particular pandemic means, this isn't going to end in April or May. Because without a treatment, or without a vaccination, it's going to continue to resurface. Unless we eradicate the entire population of the virus, any new incident is going to start up like a small flare-up, and that is going to continue to bring us back into the situation. Over this time, we're going to have to continue to respond to this crisis as we are, and we need to plan for the future ones like this. That might not be a pandemic type of crisis. It could be a change in the business. It could be other types of world events, whatever it might be. But I think this is the time when enterprises are going to start adopting these types of procedures and technologies to be able to respond. >> It's interesting, Bruno, you bring up some good points. I think about all the conversations that I've had over the years with pros around "disaster recovery" and continuous operations. This is a different vector of what that means, because when you highlighted earlier, IT, it's not like a hurricane or a power outage. This is a different kind of disruption. We talked about scale. What are some of the things that you're seeing right now that businesses are being faced with, that you guys are seeing in the analytics, or use cases that have emerged from this new normal that is facing today's business with this crisis. What's changed? What is this new challenge? When you think about the business continuity and how continuous operations need to be sustained because, again, it's a different vector. It's not a blackout, it's not a hurricane. It's a different kind of disruption. It's one where the business needs to stay on more than ever. >> Yep. Correct. True. What's really interesting, and there are some relatively straightforward use cases that we're seeing. People are dealing with their authentication, VPN network issues, because everybody is low on bandwidth. Everybody is, all of these systems are at their breaking point because they're carrying more than they ever did. These are use cases that existed all along. The problem with the use cases that existed all along is that they've been slowly picking up and growing. This is the discontinuity right now. What's happened right now, all of a sudden you've got double, triple, quadruple the load, and you need to both scale up your infrastructure, scale up your monitoring, be much more vigilant about that monitoring, speed up your recovery because more is at stake, and all of those things. That's the generic use case that existed all along, but have not been in this disruptive type of operating environment. Second is, enterprises are now learning very quickly what they need to do in terms of scaling and monitoring their production, customer-facing infrastructure, what used to be in the data center, the three-tier world, adding a few notes to an application, to your website over time, worked. Right now everybody is realizing that this whole bent on building our microservices, building for scale, rearchitecting and all that stuff, so that you can respond to an instantaneous burst of traffic on your site. You want to capture that traffic, because it means revenue. If you don't capture it, you miss out on it, and then customers go elsewhere, and never come back, and all that stuff. A lot of the work loads are to ensure that the systems, the mission-critical systems, are up and running. It's all about monitoring real-time telemetry, accelerating root cause analysis across systems that are cloud systems, and so on. >> It's a great point. You actually were leading into my next question I wanted to ask you. You know, the old saying goes, "Preparation meets opportunity. Those are the lucky ones." Luck is never really there. You're prepared, and opportunity. Can you talk about those people that have been prepared, that are doing it right now, or who are actually getting through this? What does preparation look like? What's that opportunity? Who's not prepared? Who's hurting the most? Who's suffering, and what could they do differently? Are you seeing any patterns out there, that people, they did their work, they're cloud native, they're scaled out, or they have auto-scaling. What are some of the things where people were prepared, and could you describe that, and on the other side where people weren't prepared, and they're hurting. Can you describe those two environments? >> Sure. Yeah. You think about the spectrum of companies that are going through digital transformation. There are companies who are on the left side. I don't know whether I'm mirroring or not. Basically, on the left side are people who are just making that transformation and moving to serving customers digitally, and on the right side are the ones that are basically all in, already there, and have been building modern architectures to support that type of transformation. The ones that are already all the way on the right, companies like us, right? We've been in this business forever. We serve customers who are early adopters of digital, so we've had to deal with things like November 6th, primary elections, and all of our media and entertainment customers who were spiking. Or we have to deal with companies that do sporting events like World Cup or Super Bowl and things like that. We knew that our business was going to always demand of us to be able to respond to both scheduled and unscheduled disruptions, and we needed to build systems that can scale to that without many human interactions. And there are many of our customers, and companies who are in that position today, who are actually able to do business and are now thriving, because they are the ones capturing market share at this point in time. The people who are struggling are people who have not yet made it to that full transformation, people who, essentially, assume business as normal, who are maybe beginning that transformation, but don't have the know-how, or the architecture, or the technology yet to support it. Their customers are coming to them through their new digital channels, but those digital channels struggle. You'll see this, more often than not you're going to find these still running in a traditional data center than in the cloud. Sometimes they're running in the cloud where they've done just a regular lift-and-shift instead of rearchitecting and things like that. There's really a spectrum, and it's really funny and amazing how much it maps to the journey in digital transformation, and how this specific thing is essentially, what's happening right now, it looks like the business environment demands everybody to be fully digital, but not everybody is. Effectively, the ones that are not are struggling more than the ones that are. >> Yeah. Certainly, we're seeing with theCUBE, with the digital events happening on our side, all events are canceled, so they've got to move online. You can't just take a physical, old way of doing something, where there's content value, and moving it to digital. It's a whole different ball game. There's different roles, there's different responsibilities. It's a completely different set of things. That's putting pressure on all these teams, and that's just one use case. You're seeing it in IT, you're seeing it happen in marketing and sales, how people are doing business. This is going to be very, very key for these companies. The data will be, ultimately, the key. You guys are doing a great job. I do want to get to the news, and I want to get the plug in for Sumo Logic. I want to say congratulations to you guys. A press release went out today from Sumo Logic. You guys are offering free cloud-based data analytics to support work from home and online classroom environments. That's great news. Can you just share and give a plug for that, PSA? >> Sure! We basically have a lot of customers who, just like us, are now starting to work from home. As soon as this began, we got inbound demands saying, "Oh, could you get, do you have an application for this, "do you have some analytics for that, "things that support our work from home." We thought hey, why don't we just make this as a package, and actually build out-of-the-box solutions that can support people who have common working from home technologies that they used to use for 10% of their workforce, and now work for 100% of their workforce. Let's package those, let's push those out. Let's support educational institutions who are now struggling. I have two kids in here who are learning. Everything is online, right? We had to get another computer for them and all this stuff. They're younger, they're in fourth grade. They are doing this, I can see personally how the schools are struggling, how they're trying to learn this whole new model. They need to have their systems be reliable and resilient, and this is not just elementaries, but middle school, high schools, colleges have all expanded their on-premise teaching. So we said, "Okay. Let's do something to help the community "with what we do best." Which is, we can help them make sure that the things that they do, that they need to do for this remote workforce, remote learning, whatever it might be, is efficient, working, and secure. We packaged several bundles of these solutions and offered those for free for a while, so that both our customers, and non-customers, and educational institutions have something they can go and reach for when they are struggling to keep their systems up and running. >> Yeah, it's also a mindset change, too. They want comfort. They want to have a partner. I think that's great that you guys are doing for the community. Can you just give some color commentary on how this all went down? Did you guys have a huddle in your room, said, "Hey, this is a part of our business. "We could really package this up "and really push it out and help people." Is that how it all came together? Can you share some inside commentary on how this all went down and what happened? >> Yeah. Basically, we had a discussion, literally, I think, the first or the second day when we all were sent home. We got on our online meeting and sat down, and essentially learned about this inbound demand from our customers, and what they were looking to do. We were like, "Okay, why don't we, "why don't we just offer this? "Why don't we package it?" It was a cross-functional team that just sat there. It was a no-brainer. Nobody was agonizing over doing this for free or anything like that. We were just sitting there thinking, "What can we do? "Right now is the time for us to all "pull each other up and help each other. "It'll all sort itself out afterwards." >> You know, during the bubonic plague, Shakespeare wrote Macbeth during that time. You guys are being creative during this time, as the coronavirus, so props to you guys at Sumo Logic. Congratulations, and thanks for taking the time. Can you give some parting thoughts on it, for the folks who are working at home? Just some motivational inspiration from you guys? What's going to come next for you guys? >> Sure. And thank you for having me on this video. I would say that we have been making slow transition towards remote workforce as it is. In a lot of places around the world, it's not that easy to make it to an office. Traffic is getting worse, big centers are getting populated, real estate is getting more expensive, all of this stuff. I think, actually, this is an opportunity for enterprises, for companies, and for people to figure out how this is done. We can actually practice now. We're forced to practice. It might actually have positive impact on all industries. We are going to probably figure out how to travel less, probably figure out how to actually do this more effectively, the cost of doing business is going to go down, ability to actually find new jobs might broaden, because you might be able to actually find jobs at companies who never thought they could do this remotely, and now are willing to hire remote workforces and people. I think this is going to be all good for us in the end. Right now it feels painful, and everybody's scared, and all that stuff, but I think long term, both the transformation into digitally serving our customers and the transformation towards remote workforce is going to be good for business. >> Yeah. It takes a community, and we really appreciate the effort you guys make, making that free for people, the classrooms. Remember, Isaac Newton discovered gravity and calculus while sheltering in place. A lot of interesting, new things are going to happen. I appreciate it. >> Bruno: Absolutely. >> Bruno, thank you for taking the time and sharing your insights from your place, sheltering. I made a visit into the studio to get this interview and a variety of other interviews we're doing digitally here. Thanks for sharing. Appreciate your time. >> Thank you. Appreciate you as well. >> I'm John Furrier with theCUBE here. CUBE conversation with Bruno from Sumo Logic sharing his perspective on the COVID-19. The impact, the disruption and path to the future out of this, and the new normal that is going to change our lives. Thanks for watching.

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCube! (funky electronic music) Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante! >> Welcome, everybody, to this Cube conversation here in our Marlborough offices. I am very excited today, I spent a number of years at IDC, which, of course, is owned by IDG. And there's a new book out, relatively new, called Future Forward: Leadership Lessons from Patrick McGovern, the Visionary Who Circled the Globe and Built a Technology Media Empire. And it's a great book, lotta stories that I didn't know, many that I did know, and the author of that book, Glenn Rifkin, is here to talk about not only Pat McGovern but also some of the lessons that he put forth to help us as entrepreneurs and leaders apply to create better businesses and change the world. Glenn, thanks so much for comin' on theCube. >> Thank you, Dave, great to see ya. >> So let me start with, why did you write this book? >> Well, a couple reasons. The main reason was Patrick McGovern III, Pat's son, came to me at the end of 2016 and said, "My father had died in 2014 and I feel like his legacy deserves a book, and many people told me you were the guy to do it." So the background on that I, myself, worked at IDG back in the 1980s, I was an editor at Computerworld, got to know Pat during that time, did some work for him after I left Computerworld, on a one-on-one basis. Then I would see him over the years, interview him for the New York Times or other magazines, and every time I'd see Pat, I'd end our conversation by saying, "Pat, when are we gonna do your book?" And he would laugh, and he would say, "I'm not ready to do that yet, there's just still too much to do." And so it became sort of an inside joke for us, but I always really did wanna write this book about him because I felt he deserved a book. He was just one of these game-changing pioneers in the tech industry. >> He really was, of course, the book was even more meaningful for me, we, you and I started right in the same time, 1983-- >> Yeah. >> And by that time, IDG was almost 20 years old and it was quite a powerhouse then, but boy, we saw, really the ascendancy of IDG as a brand and, you know, the book reviews on, you know, the back covers are tech elite: Benioff wrote the forward, Mark Benioff, you had Bill Gates in there, Walter Isaacson was in there, Guy Kawasaki, Bob Metcalfe, George Colony-- >> Right. >> Who actually worked for a little stint at IDC for a while. John Markoff of The New York Times, so, you know, the elite of tech really sort of blessed this book and it was really a lot to do with Pat McGovern, right? >> Oh, absolutely, I think that the people on the inside understood how important he was to the history of the tech industry. He was not, you know, a household name, first of all, you didn't think of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and then Pat McGovern, however, those who are in the know realize that he was as important in his own way as they were. Because somebody had to chronicle this story, somebody had to share the story of the evolution of this amazing information technology and how it changed the world. And Pat was never a front-of-the-TV-camera guy-- >> Right. >> He was a guy who put his people forward, he put his products forward, for sure, which is why IDG, as a corporate name, you know, most people don't know what that means, but people did know Macworld, people did know PCWorld, they knew IDC, they knew Computerworld for sure. So that was Pat's view of the world, he didn't care whether he had the spotlight on him or not. >> When you listen to leaders like Reed Hoffman or Eric Schmidt talk about, you know, great companies and how to build great companies, they always come back to culture. >> Yup. >> The book opens with a scene of, and we all, that I usually remember this, well, we're just hangin' around, waitin' for Pat to come in and hand out what was then called the Christmas bonus-- >> Right. >> Back when that wasn't politically incorrect to say. Now, of course, it's the holiday bonus. But it was, it was the Christmas bonus time and Pat was coming around and he was gonna personally hand a bonus, which was a substantial bonus, to every single employee at the company. I mean, and he did that, really, literally, forever. >> Forever, yeah. >> Throughout his career. >> Yeah, it was unheard of, CEOs just didn't do that and still don't do that, you were lucky, you got a message on the, you know, in the lunchroom from the CEO, "Good work, troops! Keep up the good work!" Pat just had a really different view of the culture of this company, as you know from having been there, and I know. It was very familial, there was a sense that we were all in this together, and it really was important for him to let every employee know that. The idea that he went to every desk in every office for IDG around the United States, when we were there in the '80s there were probably 5,000 employees in the US, he had to devote substantial amount-- >> Weeks and weeks! >> Weeks at a time to come to every building and do this, but year after year he insisted on doing it, his assistant at the time, Mary Dolaher told me she wanted to sign the cards, the Christmas cards, and he insisted that he ensign every one of them personally. This was the kind of view he had of how you keep employees happy, if your employees are happy, the customers are gonna be happy, and you're gonna make a lot of money. And that's what he did. >> And it wasn't just that. He had this awesome holiday party that you described, which was epic, and during the party, they would actually take pictures of every single person at the party and then they would load the carousel, you remember the 35-mm. carousel, and then, you know, toward the end of the evening, they would play that and everybody was transfixed 'cause they wanted to see their, the picture of themselves! >> Yeah, yeah. (laughs) >> I mean, it was ge-- and to actually pull that off in the 1980s was not trivial! Today, it would be a piece of cake. And then there was the IDG update, you know, the Good News memos, there was the 10-year lunch, the 20-year trips around the world, there were a lot of really rich benefits that, you know, in and of themselves maybe not a huge deal, but that was the culture that he set. >> Yeah, there was no question that if you talked to anybody who worked in this company over, say, the last 50 years, you were gonna get the same kind of stories. I've been kind of amazed, I'm going around, you know, marketing the book, talking about the book at various events, and the deep affection for this guy that still holds five years after he died, it's just remarkable. You don't really see that with the CEO class, there's a couple, you know, Steve Jobs left a great legacy of creativity, he was not a wonderful guy to his employees, but Pat McGovern, people loved this guy, and they st-- I would be signing books and somebody'd say, "Oh, I've been at IDG for 27 years and I remember all of this," and "I've been there 33 years," and there's a real longevity to this impact that he had on people. >> Now, the book was just, it was not just sort of a biography on McGovern, it was really about lessons from a leader and an entrepreneur and a media mogul who grew this great company in this culture that we can apply, you know, as business people and business leaders. Just to give you a sense of what Pat McGovern did, he really didn't take any outside capital, he did a little bit of, you know, public offering with IDG Books, but, really, you know, no outside capital, it was completely self-funded. He built a $3.8 billion empire, 300 publications, 280 million readers, and I think it was almost 100 or maybe even more, 100 countries. And so, that's an-- like you were, used the word remarkable, that is a remarkable achievement for a self-funded company. >> Yeah, Pat had a very clear vision of how, first of all, Pat had a photographic memory and if you were a manager in the company, you got a chance to sit in meetings with Pat and if you didn't know the numbers better than he did, which was a tough challenge, you were in trouble! 'Cause he knew everything, and so, he was really a numbers-focused guy and he understood that, you know, his best way to make profit was to not be looking for outside funding, not to have to share the wealth with investors, that you could do this yourself if you ran it tightly, you know, I called it in the book a 'loose-tight organization,' loose meaning he was a deep believer in decentralization, that every market needed its own leadership because they knew the market, you know, in Austria or in Russia or wherever, better than you would know it from a headquarters in Boston, but you also needed that tightness, a firm grip on the finances, you needed to know what was going on with each of the budgets or you were gonna end up in big trouble, which a lot of companies find themselves in. >> Well, and, you know, having worked there, I mean, essentially, if you made your numbers and did so ethically, and if you just kind of followed some of the corporate rules, which we'll talk about, he kind of left you alone. You know, you could, you could pretty much do whatever you wanted, you could stay in any hotel, you really couldn't fly first class, and we'll maybe talk about that-- >> Right. >> But he was a complex man, I mean, he was obviously wealthy, he was a billionaire, he was very generous, but at the same time he was frugal, you know, he drove, you know, a little, a car that was, you know, unremarkable, and we had buy him a car. He flew coach, and I remember one time, I was at a United flight, and I was, I had upgraded, you know, using my miles, and I sat down and right there was Lore McGovern, and we both looked at each other and said right at the same time, "I upgraded!" (laughs) Because Pat never flew up front, but he would always fly with a stack of newspapers in the seat next to him. >> Yeah, well, woe to, you were lucky he wasn't on the plane and spotted you as he was walking past you into coach, because he was not real forgiving when he saw people, people would hide and, you know, try to avoid him at all cost. And, I mean, he was a big man, Pat was 6'3", you know, 250 lbs. at least, built like a linebacker, so he didn't fit into coach that well, and he wasn't flying, you know, the shuttle to New York, he was flyin' to Beijing, he was flyin' to Moscow, he was going all over the world, squeezing himself into these seats. Now, you know, full disclosure, as he got older and had, like, probably 10 million air miles at his disposal, he would upgrade too, occasionally, for those long-haul flights, just 'cause he wanted to be fresh when he would get off the plane. But, yeah, these are legends about Pat that his frugality was just pure legend in the company, he owned this, you know, several versions of that dark blue suit, and that's what you would see him in. He would never deviate from that. And, but, he had his patterns, but he understood the impact those patterns had on his employees and on his customers. >> I wanna get into some of the lessons, because, really, this is what the book is all about, the heart of it. And you mentioned, you know, one, and we're gonna tell from others, but you really gotta stay close to the customer, that was one of the 10 corporate values, and you remember, he used to go to the meetings and he'd sometimes randomly ask people to recite, "What's number eight?" (laughs) And you'd be like, oh, you'd have your cheat sheet there. And so, so, just to give you a sense, this man was an entrepreneur, he started the company in 1964 with a database that he kind of pre-sold, he was kind of the sell, design, build type of mentality, he would pre-sold this thing, and then he started Computerworld in 1967, so it was really only a few years after he launched the company that he started the Computerworld, and other than Data Nation, there was nothing there, huge pent-up demand for that type of publication, and he caught lightning in a bottle, and that's really how he funded, you know, the growth. >> Yeah, oh, no question. Computerworld became, you know, the bible of the industry, it became a cash cow for IDG, you know, but at the time, it's so easy to look in hindsight and say, oh, well, obviously. But when Pat was doing this, one little-known fact is he was an editor at a publication called Computers and Automation that was based in Newton, Massachusetts and he kept that job even after he started IDC, which was the original company in 1964. It was gonna be a research company, and it was doing great, he was seeing the build-up, but it wasn't 'til '67 when he started Computerworld, that he said, "Okay, now this is gonna be a full-time gig for me," and he left the other publication for good. But, you know, he was sorta hedging his bets there for a little while. >> And that's where he really gained respect for what we'll call the 'Chinese Wallet,' the, you know, editorial versus advertising. We're gonna talk about that some more. So I mentioned, 1967, Computerworld. So he launched in 1964, by 1971, he was goin' to Japan, we're gonna talk about the China Stories as well, so, he named the company International Data Corp, where he was at a little spot in Newton, Mass.-- >> Right, right. >> So, he had a vision. You said in your book, you mention, how did this gentleman get it so right for so long? And that really leads to some of the leadership lessons, and one of them in the book was, sort of, have a mission, have a vision, and really, Pat was always talking about information, about information technology, in fact, when Wine for Dummies came out, it kind of created a little friction, that was really off the center. >> Or Wine for Dummies, or Sex for Dummies! >> Yeah, Sex for Dummies, boy, yeah! >> With, that's right, Ruth Westheimer-- >> Dr. Ruth Westheimer. >> But generally speaking, Glenn, he was on that mark, he really didn't deviate from that vision. >> Yeah, no, it was very crucial to the development of the company that he got people to, you know, buy into that mission, because the mission was everything. And he understood, you know, he had the numbers, but he also saw what was happening out there, from the 1960s, when IBM mainframes filled a room, and, you know, only the high priests of data centers could touch them. He had a vision for, you know, what was coming next and he started to understand that there would be many facets to this information about information technology, it wasn't gonna be boring, if anything, it was gonna be the story of our age and he was gonna stick to it and sell it. >> And, you know, timing is everything, but so is, you know, Pat was a workaholic and had an amazing mind, but one of the things I learned from the book, and you said this, Pat Kenealy mentioned it, all American industrial and social revolutions have had a media company linked to them, Crane and automobiles, Penton and energy, McGraw-Hill and aerospace, Annenberg, of course, and TV, and in technology, it was IDG. >> Yeah, he, like I said earlier, he really was a key figure in the development of this industry and it was, you know, one of the key things about that, a lot publications that came and went made the mistake of being platform or, you know, vertical market specific. And if that market changed, and it was inevitably gonna change in high tech, you were done. He never, you know, he never married himself to some specific technology cycle. His idea was the audience was not gonna change, the audience was gonna have to roll with this, so, the company, IDG, would produce publications that got that, you know, Computerworld was actually a little bit late to the PC game, but eventually got into it and we tracked the different cycles, you know, things in tech move in sine waves, they come and go. And Pat never was, you know, flustered by that, he could handle any kind of changes from the mainframes down to the smartphone when it came. And so, that kind of flexibility, and ability to adjust to markets, really was unprecedented in that particular part of the market. >> One of the other lessons in the book, I call it 'nation-building,' and Pat shared with you that, look, that you shared, actually, with your readers, if you wanna do it right, you've gotta be on the ground, you've gotta be there. And the China story is one that I didn't know about how Pat kind of talked his way into China, tell us, give us a little summary of that story. >> Sure, I love that story because it's so Pat. It was 1978, Pat was in Tokyo on a business trip, one of his many business trips, and he was gonna be flying to Moscow for a trade show. And he got a flight that was gonna make a stopover in Beijing, which in those days was called Peking, and was not open to Americans. There were no US and China diplomatic relations then. But Pat had it in mind that he was going to get off that plane in Beijing and see what he could see. So that meant that he had to leave the flight when it landed in Beijing and talk his way through the customs as they were in China at the time with folks in the, wherever, the Quonset hut that served for the airport, speaking no English, and him speaking no Chinese, he somehow convinced these folks to give him a day pass, 'cause he kept saying to them, "I'm only in transit, it's okay!" (laughs) Like, he wasn't coming, you know, to spy on them on them or anything. So here's this massive American businessman in his dark suit, and he somehow gets into downtown Beijing, which at the time was mostly bicycles, very few cars, there were camels walking down the street, they'd come with traders from Mongolia. The people were still wearing the drab outfits from the Mao era, and Pat just spent the whole day wandering around the city, just soaking it in. He was that kind of a world traveler. He loved different cultures, mostly eastern cultures, and he would pop his head into bookstores. And what he saw were people just clamoring to get their hands on anything, a newspaper, a magazine, and it just, it didn't take long for the light bulb to go on and said, this is a market we need to play in. >> He was fascinated with China, I, you know, as an employee and a business P&L manager, I never understood it, I said, you know, the per capita spending on IT in China was like a dollar, you know? >> Right. >> And I remember my lunch with him, my 10-year lunch, he said, "Yeah, but, you know, there's gonna be a huge opportunity there, and yeah, I don't know how we're gonna get the money out, maybe we'll buy a bunch of tea and ship it over, but I'm not worried about that." And, of course, he meets Hugo Shong, which is a huge player in the book, and the home run out of China was, of course, the venture capital, which he started before there was even a stock market, really, to exit in China. >> Right, yeah. No, he was really a visionary, I mean, that word gets tossed around maybe more than it should, but Pat was a bonafide visionary and he saw things in China that were developing that others didn't see, including, for example, his own board, who told him he was crazy because in 1980, he went back to China without telling them and within days he had a meeting with the ministry of technology and set up a joint venture, cost IDG $250,000, and six months later, the first issue of China Computerworld was being published and within a couple of years it was the biggest publication in China. He said, told me at some point that $250,0000 investment turned into $85 million and when he got home, that first trip, the board was furious, they said, "How can you do business with the commies? You're gonna ruin our brand!" And Pat said, "Just, you know, stick with me on this one, you're gonna see." And the venture capital story was just an offshoot, he saw the opportunity in the early '90s, that venture in China could in fact be a huge market, why not help build it? And that's what he did. >> What's your take on, so, IDG sold to, basically, Chinese investors. >> Yeah. >> It's kind of bittersweet, but in the same time, it's symbolic given Pat's love for China and the Chinese people. There's been a little bit of criticism about that, I know that the US government required IDC to spin out its supercomputer division because of concerns there. I'm always teasing Michael Dow that at the next IDG board meeting, those Lenovo numbers, they're gonna look kinda law. (laughs) But what are your, what's your, what are your thoughts on that, in terms of, you know, people criticize China in terms of IP protections, etc. What would Pat have said to that, do you think? >> You know, Pat made 130 trips to China in his life, that's, we calculated at some point that just the air time in planes would have been something like three and a half to four years of his life on planes going to China and back. I think Pat would, today, acknowledge, as he did then, that China has issues, there's not, you can't be that naive. He got that. But he also understood that these were people, at the end of the day, who were thirsty and hungry for information and that they were gonna be a player in the world economy at some point, and that it was crucial for IDG to be at the forefront of that, not just play later, but let's get in early, let's lead the parade. And I think that, you know, some part of him would have been okay with the sale of the company to this conglomerate there, called China Oceanwide. Clearly controversial, I mean, but once Pat died, everyone knew that the company was never gonna be the same with the leader who had been at the helm for 50 years, it was gonna be a tough transition for whoever took over. And I think, you know, it's hard to say, certainly there's criticism of things going on with China. China's gonna be the hot topic page one of the New York Times almost every single day for a long time to come. I think Pat would have said, this was appropriate given my love of China, the kind of return on investment he got from China, I think he would have been okay with it. >> Yeah, and to invoke the Ben Franklin maxim, "Trading partners seldom wage war," and so, you know, I think Pat would have probably looked at it that way, but, huge home run, I mean, I think he was early on into Baidu and Alibaba and Tencent and amazing story. I wanna talk about decentralization because that was always something that was just on our minds as employees of IDG, it was keep the corporate staff lean, have a flat organization, if you had eight, 10, 12 direct reports, that was okay, Pat really meant it when he said, "You're the CEO of your own business!" Whether that business was, you know, IDC, big company, or a manager at IDC, where you might have, you know, done tens of millions of dollars, but you felt like a CEO, you were encouraged to try new things, you were encouraged to fail, and fail fast. Their arch nemesis of IDG was Ziff Davis, they were a command and control, sort of Bill Ziff, CMP to a certain extent was kind of the same way out of Manhasset, totally different philosophies and I think Pat never, ever even came close to wavering from that decentralization philosophy, did he? >> No, no, I mean, I think that the story that he told me that I found fascinating was, he didn't have an epiphany that decentralization would be the mechanism for success, it was more that he had started traveling, and when he'd come back to his office, the memos and requests and papers to sign were stacked up two feet high. And he realized that he was holding up the company because he wasn't there to do this and that at some point, he couldn't do it all, it was gonna be too big for that, and that's when the light came on and said this decentralization concept really makes sense for us, if we're gonna be an international company, which clearly was his mission from the beginning, we have to say the people on the ground in those markets are the people who are gonna make the decisions because we can't make 'em from Boston. And I talked to many people who, were, you know, did a trip to Europe, met the folks in London, met the folks in Munich, and they said to a person, you know, it was so ahead of its time, today it just seems obvious, but in the 1960s, early '70s, it was really not a, you know, a regular leadership tenet in most companies. The command and control that you talked about was the way that you did business. >> And, you know, they both worked, but, you know, from a cultural standpoint, clearly IDG and IDC have had staying power, and he had the three-quarter rule, you talked about it in your book, if you missed your numbers three quarters in a row, you were in trouble. >> Right. >> You know, one quarter, hey, let's talk, two quarters, we maybe make some changes, three quarters, you're gone. >> Right. >> And so, as I said, if you were makin' your numbers, you had wide latitude. One of the things you didn't have latitude on was I'll call it 'pay to play,' you know, crossing that line between editorial and advertising. And Pat would, I remember I was at a meeting one time, I'm sorry to tell these stories, but-- >> That's okay. (laughs) >> But we were at an offsite meeting at a woods meeting and, you know, they give you a exercise, go off and tell us what the customer wants. Bill Laberis, who's the editor-in-chief at Computerworld at the time, said, "Who's the customer?" And Pat said, "That's a great question! To the publisher, it's the advertiser. To you, Bill, and the editorial staff, it's the reader. And both are equally important." And Pat would never allow the editorial to be compromised by the advertiser. >> Yeah, no, he, there was a clear barrier between church and state in that company and he, you know, consistently backed editorial on that issue because, you know, keep in mind when we started then, and I was, you know, a journalist hoping to, you know, change the world, the trade press then was considered, like, a little below the mainstream business press. The trade press had a reputation for being a little too cozy with the advertisers, so, and Pat said early on, "We can't do that, because everything we have, our product is built, the brand is built on integrity. And if the reader doesn't believe that what we're reporting is actually true and factual and unbiased, we're gonna lose to the advertisers in the long run anyway." So he was clear that that had to be the case and time and again, there would be conflict that would come up, it was just, as you just described it, the publishers, the sales guys, they wanted to bring in money, and if it, you know, occasionally, hey, we could nudge the editor of this particular publication, "Take it a little bit easier on this vendor because they're gonna advertise big with us," Pat just would always back the editor and say, "That's not gonna happen." And it caused, you know, friction for sure, but he was unwavering in his support. >> Well, it's interesting because, you know, Macworld, I think, is an interesting case study because there were sort of some backroom dealings and Pat maneuvered to be able to get the Macworld, you know, brand, the license for that. >> Right. >> But it caused friction between Steve Jobs and the writers of Macworld, they would write something that Steve Jobs, who was a control freak, couldn't control! >> Yeah. (laughs) >> And he regretted giving IDG the license. >> Yeah, yeah, he once said that was the worst decision he ever made was to give the license to Pat to, you know, Macworlld was published on the day that Mac was introduced in 1984, that was the deal that they had and it was, what Jobs forgot was how important it was to the development of that product to have a whole magazine devoted to it on day one, and a really good magazine that, you know, a lot of people still lament the glory days of Macworld. But yeah, he was, he and Steve Jobs did not get along, and I think that almost says a lot more about Jobs because Pat pretty much got along with everybody. >> That church and state dynamic seems to be changing, across the industry, I mean, in tech journalism, there aren't any more tech journalists in the United States, I mean, I'm overstating that, but there are far fewer than there were when we were at IDG. You're seeing all kinds of publications and media companies struggling, you know, Kara Swisher, who's the greatest journalist, and Walt Mossberg, in the tech industry, try to make it, you know, on their own, and they couldn't. So, those lines are somewhat blurring, not that Kara Swisher is blurring those lines, she's, you know, I think, very, very solid in that regard, but it seems like the business model is changing. As an observer of the markets, what do you think's happening in the publishing world? >> Well, I, you know, as a journalist, I'm sort of aghast at what's goin' on these days, a lot of my, I've been around a long time, and seeing former colleagues who are no longer in journalism because the jobs just started drying up is, it's a scary prospect, you know, unlike being the enemy of the people, the first amendment is pretty important to the future of the democracy, so to see these, you know, cutbacks and newspapers going out of business is difficult. At the same time, the internet was inevitable and it was going to change that dynamic dramatically, so how does that play out? Well, the problem is, anybody can post anything they want on social media and call it news, and the challenge is to maintain some level of integrity in the kind of reporting that you do, and it's more important now than ever, so I think that, you know, somebody like Pat would be an important figure if he was still around, in trying to keep that going. >> Well, Facebook and Google have cut the heart out of, you know, a lot of the business models of many media companies, and you're seeing sort of a pendulum swing back to nonprofits, which, I understand, speaking of folks back in the mid to early 1900s, nonprofits were the way in which, you know, journalism got funded, you know, maybe it's billionaires buying things like the Washington Post that help fund it, but clearly the model's shifting and it's somewhat unclear, you know, what's happening there. I wanted to talk about another lesson, which, Pat was the head cheerleader. So, I remember, it was kind of just after we started, the Computerworld's 20th anniversary, and they hired the marching band and they walked Pat and Mary Dolaher walked from 5 Speen Street, you know, IDG headquarters, they walked to Computerworld, which was up Old, I guess Old Connecticut Path, or maybe it was-- >> It was actually on Route 30-- >> Route 30 at the time, yeah. And Pat was dressed up as the drum major and Mary as well, (laughs) and he would do crazy things like that, he'd jump out of a plane with IDG is number one again, he'd post a, you know, a flag in Antarctica, IDG is number one again! It was just a, it was an amazing dynamic that he had, always cheering people on. >> Yeah, he was, he was, when he called himself the CEO, the Chief Encouragement Officer, you mentioned earlier the Good News notes. Everyone who worked there, at some point received this 8x10" piece of paper with a rainbow logo on it and it said, "Good News!" And there was a personal note from Pat McGovern, out of the blue, totally unexpected, to thank you and congratulate you on some bit of work, whatever it was, if you were a reporter, some article you wrote, if you were a sales guy, a sale that you made, and people all over the world would get these from him and put them up in their cubicles because it was like a badge of honor to have them, and people, I still have 'em, (laughs) you know, in a folder somewhere. And he was just unrelenting in supporting the people who worked there, and it was, the impact of that is something you can't put a price tag on, it's just, it stays with people for all their lives, people who have left there and gone on to four or five different jobs always think fondly back to the days at IDG and having, knowing that the CEO had your back in that manner. >> The legend of, and the legacy of Patrick J. McGovern is not just in IDG and IDC, which you were interested in in your book, I mean, you weren't at IDC, I was, and I was started when I saw the sort of downturn and then now it's very, very successful company, you know, whatever, $3-400 million, throwin' off a lot of profits, just to decide, I worked for every single CEO at IDC with the exception of Pat McGovern, and now, Kirk Campbell, the current CEO, is moving on Crawford del Prete's moving into the role of president, it's just a matter of time before he gets CEO, so I will, and I hired Crawford-- >> Oh, you did? (laughs) >> So, I've worked for and/or hired every CEO of IDC except for Pat McGovern, so, but, the legacy goes beyond IDG and IDC, great brands. The McGovern Brain Institute, 350 million, is that right? >> That's right. >> He dedicated to studying, you know, the human brain, he and Lore, very much involved. >> Yup. >> Typical of Pat, he wasn't just, "Hey, here's the check," and disappear. He was goin' in, "Hey, I have some ideas"-- >> Oh yeah. >> Talk about that a little. >> Yeah, well, this was a guy who spent his whole life fascinated by the human brain and the impact technology would have on the human brain, so when he had enough money, he and Lore, in 2000, gave a $350 million gift to MIT to create the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. At the time, the largest academic gift ever given to any university. And, as you said, Pat wasn't a guy who was gonna write a check and leave and wave goodbye. Pat was involved from day one. He and Lore would come and sit in day-long seminars listening to researchers talk about about the most esoteric research going on, and he would take notes, and he wasn't a brain scientist, but he wanted to know more, and he would talk to researchers, he would send Good News notes to them, just like he did with IDG, and it had same impact. People said, "This guy is a serious supporter here, he's not just showin' up with a checkbook." Bob Desimone, who's the director of the Brain Institute, just marveled at this guy's energy level, that he would come in and for days, just sit there and listen and take it all in. And it just, it was an indicator of what kind of person he was, this insatiable curiosity to learn more and more about the world. And he wanted his legacy to be this intersection of technology and brain research, he felt that this institute could cure all sorts of brain-related diseases, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, etc. And it would then just make a better future for mankind, and as corny as that might sound, that was really the motivator for Pat McGovern. >> Well, it's funny that you mention the word corny, 'cause a lot of people saw Pat as somewhat corny, but, as you got to know him, you're like, wow, he really means this, he loves his company, the company was his extended family. When Pat met his untimely demise, we held a crowd chat, crowdchat.net/thankspat, and there's a voting mechanism in there, and the number one vote was from Paul Gillen, who posted, "Leo Durocher said that nice guys finish last, Pat McGovern proved that wrong." >> Yeah. >> And I think that's very true and, again, awesome legacy. What number book is this for you? You've written a lot of books. >> This is number 13. >> 13, well, congratulations, lucky 13. >> Thank you. >> The book is Fast Forward-- >> Future Forward. >> I'm sorry, Future Forward! (laughs) Future Forward by Glenn Rifkin. Check out, there's a link in the YouTube down below, check that out and there's some additional information there. Glenn, congratulations on getting the book done, and thanks so much for-- >> Thank you for having me, this is great, really enjoyed it. It's always good to chat with another former IDGer who gets it. (laughs) >> Brought back a lot of memories, so, again, thanks for writing the book. All right, thanks for watching, everybody, we'll see you next time. This is Dave Vellante. You're watchin' theCube. (electronic music)

Oh from Las Vegas it's the cube covering AWS reinvents 2018 brought to you by Amazon Web Services Intel and their ecosystem partners well good morning welcome back to AWS reinvent this is day three of our coverage here on the cube we made it we have survived the show here that been a great show and still a lot of energy out here on the show floor Justin Morin John wall's we're with loose Ernie who is the CEO and founder of New Relic and and Luffy look just over your left shoulder there's that really impressive New Relic Pavillion you've got there we've been admiring it all week so that's a great show for us and you know our our theme this yours is billed fast and break nothing because that's really the objective of moving to the cloud is building software that customers value as rapidly as possible when you're building stuff fast there's risk and so how do you build fast with breaking nothing it's measuring everything in real time everything in that environment seeing exactly what's going on so you can make sure the stuff you're building works for your customers and that's what we do for so many people were adopting the Amazon Cloud kind of reminds me of John Wooden yield UCLA basketball coach had said be quick but don't hurry that's all right so that's right so it was all about pace and I understand putting that culture in the team so how do you put that culture and into with your well I you know it's it's one of the great truths how can you manage what you can't measure so we're a company that makes it trivially easy to measure software infrastructure digital customer experience our customers come to us every day and say what I love about New Relic is within seconds of setting up my account and and deploying the agent all of a sudden production is lit up I can see what's going on that measurement helps our customers have more confidence moving to the cloud faster deploying more frequently delivering customer value more rapidly now one of the themes that we've had over the last couple of days and John and I were talking just before we came on this morning that complexity yeah we've been hearing that time and time the amount of change it's happening so quickly and we've got all of these different systems we got micro services we've got containers we've got serverless it's a really complicated environment yeah how do you help the humans understand how how do you get them to understand what's going on in this really complex environment that's moving so fast you're you're absolutely hitting on the key challenge and what we're great at what our customers tell us they love about us is we simplify that complexity and and there's how do we simplify it well we have a deep understanding of how these systems work and we've fought very hard about how do you surface the interesting information that's most relevant to understanding the health and application and really in that moment when there's a problem how do you make it as easy as possible to understand the cause that problem as rapidly as possible this is like our customers they're right in the you know right in the pit of the most high pressure situations when there's a production issue every second counts every second counts you got to find that issue as rapidly as possible and what our customers tell us is they're sick of having to juggle around between three four five many of our customers have dozens of tools that are intended to watch production they turned a new rally platform cause it's all in one platform and when seconds matter you don't want to be switching between tools and context to understand what the nature the problem is and that's that's super important it's kind of like we all become pack rats in a way right yeah we save things we just keep putting them in this room and this room in this room and it comes time to kind of clean up or yeah get our act together and that's what you're doing for people is helping them get their act together absolutely and once you've got an understanding of how the system provides you go from overly cautious and timid to confident and with that confidence you can start playing offense with software we talk about all the time 15 20 years ago IT leaders thought of software as a defensive mechanism when I say defense I mean it's a way to reduce costs how do I reduce the cost of billing how do I reduce the cost of handling a support call now it's offense it's the growth engine for these companies right the digital customer experience is driving top-line growth and so when you're confident your ability to move fast with your software you're actually participating to growth your company that's why it's so strategic that's why the cloud is growing so rapidly so if you've got a customer who's not with you really clearly you want them to they should be going with you what if what does it feel like to go from not having New Relic in there and dealing with this complexity and having those struggles and then as you've put in New Relic for the first time what's what's that onboarding experience feel like I once was blind and now I see John Newton America it's truly that our customers tell us that before I discovered new relic I had no idea was going on production and it was opinions that we're telling us what was going on and when you've got a bunch of teams working on a complex system and there's a problem and it's like the loudest opinions gonna determine how you go forward that results in chaos and it results in organizational misalignment and with data all of a sudden people are lying on how you move forward yeah so with all that data that's there I mean that that can actually be complex itself if I'm trying to see everything all at once that that can be overwhelming so how do you help customers dial in on what's actually important within this this sea of information that they can now now look at well you know we have a variety of ways in which we approach that problem um the first is an opinionated user interface okay we have more experience in the realm you know my first company I founded in 1998 created the category of application performance management and so I've been thinking about this problem might ease the think about this problem for a long time we come to our customers with an opinion on what matters in the application environment but even then beyond that we're layering on well AI but we call it applied intelligence because artificial intelligence people overuse the term and honestly our customers don't care whether we're using a collaborative filter or good old-fashioned algorithms but they want to split more smarts in our platform to tell them what's anomalous tell them what's abnormal tell them what to pay attention to in this sea of data you really collects about 15 million data points every second off of our customers applications and infrastructure and digital customer experiences 15 million data points every second coming to the New Relic Cloud and we analyze all of it in real time to service to our customers what's important what's anomalous and what's interesting yeah so let's get into that let's go about what's anomalous and what's interesting yeah how do you differentiate that because as you said out of 15 million data points every second yeah I mean you're gonna develop trends but but it's by the time you evaluate it seems like one set of data you're off to a completely different set of data and you're right this is a very dynamic environment well the combination of an understanding of how applications work in general but then the flexibility to recognize you know how an e-commerce application might be very different from a Content application like USA Today networks is a big New Relic customer and so we need to provide enough of a platform that our customers can give New Relic some guidance on the nature of their application and and and we can discover its architecture and we can discover things about it but we we really can't discover its business purpose and so there's a combination of what we do out of the box with the customizability that that get our customers the point where the software's doing the work for them you're on so having been in the show now for three four days what have you seen around here what a customer's looking at that they're gonna bring it bring it on to their environment next what are some of the things I think you know lambda is coming mainstream right right and so when we think about where where the world is going you know micro services are going to be here for a while just like all the other technologies you said like the packrat analogy is true but future in the future when someone starts a brand new project they won't even think about infrastructure they'll just think about their code and new relics philosophy on visibility is you start with the software because the software is that the whole the business logic the whole point of all this infrastructure is to run software and so our most important starting point for visibility is the software itself we just made an announcement this week about delivering the first product that automatically instrument lambda to tell you if your lambda function is misbehaving exactly how is it doing that and so as the world continually moves from the old IT used to obsess on infrastructure and and and and new ideas is obsesses on how do we deliver more software faster and that that aligns very well with what we're great what our philosophy is on delivering his ability it starts and ends with the software and it feels like people are going into lambda really quite quickly because absolutely moving with some meetings this morning that they were saying that there's enterprises in particular may not have actually jumped onto the container bandwagon yet but they've looking at laminate is going you know what we're just gonna skip leapfrog to that yeah I'm seeing quite a bit of that containers still have an awful lot of value there they're wonderful lightweight ways to host what used to be on you know in a virtualized environment and get that isolation all that benefit kubernetes is also a big deal we made an acquisition of a company called coast scale that we announced last quarter that accelerates our capability to do work in kubernetes environments we're always inspired by what our customers are doing to accelerate how they build their software and that inspires us to make sure our platforms continually their tool a choice to make sure they can see the entire environment so you're getting as much for them as they're getting from you absolutely it's a great partnership we have with our customers we learn from them and then we provide them with thought leadership on how do you think about making sure you're seeing the entire environment so you can spend more time delivering great software and less time debugging it excellent well let's get back to that great booth of your awesome great for being with us we're sharing our a relic story and success on the the last day of the show all right well mate ok all right excellent right loser T joining us you from New Relic back with more here with AWS reinvent you're watching the cube from Las Vegas