>>Good afternoon, friends. My name is Savannah Peterson here in the Cube Studios live from Detroit, Michigan, where we're at Cuban and Cloud Native Foundation, Cloud Native Con all week. Our last interview of the day served me a real treat and one that I wasn't expecting. It turns out that I am in the presence of two caddies. It's a literal episode of Caddy Shack up here on Cube. John Furrier. I don't think the audience knows that you were a caddy. Tell us about your caddy days. >>I used to caddy when I was a kid at the local country club every weekend. This is amazing. Double loops every weekend. Make some bang, two bags on each shoulder. Caddying for the members where you're going. Now I'm >>On show. Just, just really impressive >>Now. Now I'm caddying for the cube where I caddy all this great content out to the audience. >>He's carrying the story of emerging brands and established companies on their cloud journey. I love it. John, well played. I don't wanna waste any more of this really wonderful individual's time, but since we now have a new trend of talking about everyone's Twitter handle here on the cube, this may be my favorite one of the day, if not Q4 so far. Drew, not reply. AKA Drew ne Drew Nielsen, excuse me, there is here with us from Teleport. Drew, thanks so much for being here. >>Oh, thanks for having me. It's great to be here. >>And so you were a caddy on a whole different level. Can you tell us >>About that? Yeah, so I was in university and I got tired after two years and didn't have a car in LA and met a pro golfer at a golf course and took two years off and traveled around caddying for him and tried to get 'em through Q School. >>This is, this is fantastic. So if you're in school and your parents are telling you to continue going to school, know that you can drop out and be a caddy and still be a very successful television personality. Like both of the gentlemen at some point. >>Well, I never said my parents like >>That decision, but we'll keep our day jobs. Yeah, exactly. And one of them is Cloud Native Security. The hottest topic here at the show. Yep. I want to get into it. You guys are doing some really cool things. Are we? We hear Zero Trust, you know, ransomware and we even, I even talked with the CEO of Dockets morning about container security issues. Sure. There's a lot going on. So you guys are in the middle of teleport. You guys have a unique solution. Tell us what you guys got going on. What do you guys do? What's the solution and what's the problem you solve? >>So Teleport is the first and only identity native infrastructure access solution in the market. So breaking that down, what that really means is identity native being the combination of secret list, getting rid of passwords, Pam Vaults, Key Vaults, Yeah. Passwords written down. Basically the number one source of breach. And 50 to 80% of breaches, depending on whose numbers you want to believe are how organizations get hacked. >>But it's not password 1 23 isn't protecting >>Cisco >>Right >>Now. Well, if you think about when you're securing infrastructure and the second component being zero trust, which assumes the network is completely insecure, right? But everything is validated. Resource to resource security is validated, You know, it assumes work from anywhere. It assumes the security comes back to that resource. And we take the combination of those two into identity, native access where we cryptographically ev, validate identity, but more importantly, we make an absolutely frictionless experience. So engineers can access infrastructure from anywhere at any time. >>I'm just flashing on my roommates, checking their little code, changing Bob login, you know, dongle essentially, and how frustrating that always was. I mean, talk about interrupting workflow was something that's obviously necessary, but >>Well, I mean, talk about frustration if I'm an engineer. Yeah, absolutely. You know, back in the day when you had these three tier monolithic applications, it was kind of simple. But now as you've got modern application development environments Yeah, multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, whatever marketing term around how you talk about this, expanding sort of disparate infrastructure. Engineers are sitting there going from system to system to machine to database to application. I mean, not even a conversation on Kubernetes yet. Yeah. And it's just, you know, every time you pull an engineer or a developer to go to a vault to pull something out, you're pulling them out for 10 minutes. Now, applications today have hundreds of systems, hundreds of microservices. I mean 30 of these a day and nine minutes, 270 minutes times 60. And they also >>Do the math. Well, there's not only that, there's also the breach from manual error. I forgot to change the password. What is that password? I left it open, I left it on >>Cognitive load. >>I mean, it's the manual piece. But even think about it, TR security has to be transparent and engineers are really smart people. And I've talked to a number of organizations who are like, yeah, we've tried to implement security solutions and they fail. Why? They're too disruptive. They're not transparent. And engineers will work their way around them. They'll write it down, they'll do a workaround, they'll backdoor it something. >>All right. So talk about how it works. But I, I mean, I'm getting the big picture here. I love this. Breaking down the silos, making engineers lives easier, more productive. Clearly the theme, everyone they want, they be gonna need. Whoever does that will win it all. How's it work? I mean, you deploying something, is it code, is it in line? It's, >>It's two binaries that you download and really it starts with the core being the identity native access proxy. Okay. So that proxy, I mean, if you look at like the zero trust principles, it all starts with a proxy. Everything connects into that proxy where all the access is gated, it's validated. And you know, from there we have an authorization engine. So we will be the single source of truth for all access across your entire infrastructure. So we bring machines, engineers, databases, applications, Kubernetes, Linux, Windows, we don't care. And we basically take that into a single architecture and single access platform that essentially secures your entire infrastructure. But more importantly, you can do audit. So for all of the organizations that are dealing with FedRAMP, pci, hipaa, we have a complete audit trail down to a YouTube style playback. >>Oh, interesting. We're we're California and ccpa. >>Oh, gdpr. >>Yeah, exactly. It, it, it's, it's a whole shebang. So I, I love, and John, maybe you've heard this term a lot more than I have, but identity native is relatively new to me as as a term. And I suspect you have a very distinct way of defining identity. How do you guys define identity internally? >>So identity is something that is cryptographically validated. It is something you have. So it's not enough. If you look at, you know, credentials today, everyone's like, Oh, I log into my computer, but that's my identity. No, it's not. Right. Those are attributes. Those are something that is secret for a period of time until you write it down. But I can't change my fingerprint. Right. And now I >>Was just >>Thinking of, well no, perfect case in point with touch ID on your meth there. Yeah. It's like when we deliver that cryptographically validated identity, we use these secure modules in like modern laptops or servers. Yeah. To store that identity so that even if you're sitting in front of your computer, you can't get to it. But more importantly, if somebody were to take that and try to be you and try to log in with your fingerprint, it's >>Not, I'm not gonna lie, I love the apple finger thing, you know, it's like, you know, space recognition, like it's really awesome. >>It save me a lot of time. I mean, even when you go through customs and they do the face scan now it actually knows who you are, which is pretty wild in the last time you wanna provide ones. But it just shifted over like maybe three months ago. Well, >>As long as no one chops your finger off like they do in the James Bond movies. >>I mean, we try and keep it a light and fluffy here on the queue, but you know, do a finger teams, we can talk about that >>Too. >>Gabby, I was thinking more minority report, >>But you >>Knows that's exactly what I, what I think of >>Hit that one outta bounds. So I gotta ask, because you said you're targeting engineers, not IT departments. What's, is that, because I in your mind it is now the engineers or what's the, is always the solution more >>Targeted? Well, if you really look at who's dealing with infrastructure on a day-to-day basis, those are DevOps individuals. Those are infrastructure teams, Those are site reliability engineering. And when it, they're the ones who are not only managing the infrastructure, but they're also dealing with the code on it and everything else. And for us, that is who is our primary customer and that's who's doing >>It. What's the biggest problem that you're solving in this use case? Because you guys are nailing it. What's the problem that your identity native solution solves? >>You know, right out of the backs we remove the number one source of breach. And that is taking passwords, secrets and, and keys off the board. That deals with most of the problem right there. But there are really two problems that organizations face. One is scaling. So as you scale, you get more secrets, you get more keys, you get all these things that is all increasing your attack vector in real time. Oh >>Yeah. Across teams locations. I can't even >>Take your pick. Yeah, it's across clouds, right? Any of it >>On-prem doesn't. >>Yeah. Any of it. We, and we allow you to scale, but do it securely and the security is transparent and your engineers will absolutely love it. What's the most important thing about this product Engineers. Absolutely. >>What are they saying? What are some of those examples? Anecdotally, pull boats out from engineering. >>You're too, we should have invent, we should have invented this ourselves. Or you know, we have run into a lot of customers who have tried to home brew this and they're like, you know, we spend an in nor not of hours on it >>And IT or they got legacy from like Microsoft or other solutions. >>Sure, yeah. Any, but a lot of 'em is just like, I wish I had done it myself. Or you know, this is what security should be. >>It makes so much sense and it gives that the team such a peace of mind. I mean, you never know when a breach is gonna come, especially >>It's peace of mind. But I think for engineers, a lot of times it deals with the security problem. Yeah. Takes it off the table so they can do their jobs. Yeah. With zero friction. Yeah. And you know, it's all about speed. It's all about velocity. You know, go fast, go fast, go fast. And that's what we enable >>Some of the benefits to them is they get to save time, focus more on, on task that they need to work on. >>Exactly. >>And get the >>Job done. And on top of it, they answer the audit and compliance mail every time it comes. >>Yeah. Why are people huge? Honestly, why are people doing this? Because, I mean, identity is just such an hard nut to crack. Everyone's got their silos, Vendors having clouds have 'em. Identity is the most fragmented thing on >>The planet. And it has been fragmented ever since my first RSA conference. >>I know. So will we ever get this do over? Is there a driver? Is there a market force? Is this the time? >>I think the move to modern applications and to multi-cloud is driving this because as those application stacks get more verticalized, you just, you cannot deal with the productivity >>Here. And of course the next big thing is super cloud and that's coming fast. Savannah, you know, You know that's Rocket. >>John is gonna be the thought leader and keyword leader of the word super cloud. >>Super Cloud is enabling super services as the cloud cast. Brian Gracely pointed out on his Sunday podcast of which if that happens, Super Cloud will enable super apps in a new architectural >>List. Please don't, and it'll be super, just don't. >>Okay. Right. So what are you guys up to next? What's the big hot spot for the company? What are you guys doing? What are you guys, What's the idea guys hiring? You put the plug in. >>You know, right now we are focused on delivering the best identity, native access platform that we can. And we will continue to support our customers that want to use Kubernetes, that want to use any different type of infrastructure. Whether that's Linux, Windows applications or databases. Wherever they are. >>Are, are your customers all of a similar DNA or are you >>No, they're all over the map. They range everything from tech companies to financial services to, you know, fractional property. >>You seem like someone everyone would need. >>Absolutely. >>And I'm not just saying that to be a really clean endorsement from the Cube, but >>If you were doing DevOps Yeah. And any type of forward-leaning shift, left engineering, you need us because we are basically making security as code a reality across your entire infrastructure. >>Love this. What about the team dna? Are you in a scale growth stage right now? What's going on? Absolutely. Sounds I was gonna say, but I feel like you would have >>To be. Yeah, we're doing, we're, we have a very positive outlook and you know, even though the economic time is what it is, we're doing very well meeting. >>How's the location? Where's the location of the headquarters now? With remote work is pretty much virtual. >>Probably. We're based in downtown Oakland, California. >>Woohoo. Bay area representing on this stage right now. >>Nice. Yeah, we have a beautiful office right in downtown Oakland and yeah, it's been great. Awesome. >>Love that. And are you hiring right now? I bet people might be. I feel like some of our cube watchers are here waiting to figure out their next big play. So love to hear that. Absolutely love to hear that. Besides Drew, not reply, if people want to join your team or say hello to you and tell you how brilliant you looked up here, or ask about your caddy days and maybe venture a guest to who that golfer may have been that you were CAD Inc. For, what are the best ways for them to get in touch with you? >>You can find me on LinkedIn. >>Great. Fantastic. John, anything else >>From you? Yeah, I mean, I just think security is paramount. This is just another example of where the innovation has to kind of break through without good identity, everything could cripple. Then you start getting into the silos and you can start getting into, you know, tracking it. You got error user errors, you got, you know, one of the biggest security risks. People just leave systems open, they don't even know it's there. So like, I mean this is just, just identity is the critical linchpin to, to solve for in security to me. And that's totally >>Agree. We even have a lot of customers who use us just to access basic cloud consoles. Yeah. >>So I was actually just gonna drive there a little bit because I think that, I'm curious, it feels like a solution for obviously complex systems and stacks, but given the utility and what sounds like an extreme ease of use, I would imagine people use this for day-to-day stuff within their, >>We have customers who use it to access their AWS consoles. We have customers who use it to access Grafana dashboards. You know, for, since we're sitting here at coupon accessing a Lens Rancher, all of the amazing DevOps tools that are out there. >>Well, I mean true. I mean, you think about all the reasons why people don't adopt this new federated approach or is because the IT guys did it and the world we're moving into, the developers are in charge. And so we're seeing the trend where developers are taking the DevOps and the data and the security teams are now starting to reset the guardrails. What's your >>Reaction to that? Well, you know, I would say that >>Over the top, >>Well I would say that you know, your DevOps teams and your infrastructure teams and your engineers, they are the new king makers. Yeah. Straight up. Full stop. >>You heard it first folks. >>And that's >>A headline right >>There. That is a headline. I mean, they are the new king makers and, but they are being forced to do it as securely as possible. And our job is really to make that as easy and as frictionless as possible. >>Awesome. >>And it sounds like you're absolutely nailing it. Drew, thank you so much for being on the show. Thanks for having today. This has been an absolute pleasure, John, as usual a joy. And thank all of you for tuning in to the Cube Live here at CU Con from Detroit, Michigan. We look forward to catching you for day two tomorrow.

welcome back to vmworld live 2010 live at the cube in san francisco california Moscone Center at vmworld 2010 please welcome this morning's press conference with VM ware compelling technologies and their customers Heineken from the Netherlands speaking today our Todd is Todd Nielsen's chief operating officer of VMware Phil sore and CEO of Compellent technologies and from Heineken the Netherlands microbrews virtualization team lead lucien de konak project manager and now please welcome Todd Nielsen the chief operating officer of VMware it's a it's great to be here we'd like to welcome you to the Compellent vmware operands and i want to say a couple words about compelling technologies in our partnership with them as vmware they've been a great storage partner of ours have a number of customers together a number and we really like work with them to drive value to our overall customer the solution said the that we did announced yesterday at vmware at vm for every dollar of license revenue that vmware cells we are partners or our ecosystem is able to add on or to drag with that fifteen dollars of ecosystem revenue and the compellent folks are a great example of a partnership with vmware where our solutions work well together and we do some exciting things we're going to hear from for the president and CEO of compellent and one of their customers but before we do one of my favorites twist of this press conference is a differentiation of compellent is the fluid data architecture and I think it's somewhat ironic after last night's beer crawls at vmworld 2010 that Heineken happens to be the customer on stage so I'm sure there's a story there and I would like to introduce Phil Soren the president and CEO of compellent to tell us about the company and about the Heineken beer crawls great Todd thanks a lot we're just thrilled to be up here on stage with you being participated in the fantastic show you have in operation here at moscone in San Francisco and we're thrilled to have a joint announcement our customer heineken here and to have them for from the Netherlands to share the excitement with us but let me tell you a little about Compellent we're a data storage company with the fluid data architecture we've been really the innovator if you look at primary storage innovation over the last decade things like thin provisioning sub lund automated tiered storage tiering disk platters flexible volumes portable volumes then provision you look at all those types of innovations over the last decade that storages come out and compellent has been the leader in that whole space and I think we'd be able to get ahead of some of the incumbent vendors with our innovation and we're in really fast growing we grew about thirty eight percent year-over-year last year we're the one of the fastest growing sandbenders in the world and we're hoping to keep that growing about 2,100 customers in 34 countries Heineken being a good example in the Netherlands of those customers there they're running their mission-critical enterprise applications on us for their worldwide operations and I would say of the 2100 about 2090 of them are also running some form of VMware so this partnership with vmware is very very important to us and we're real excited about it talk a little bit about our patented technology we call it the fluid data architecture and we thought no better customer to do a joint press conference with on our fluid data architecture than Heineken so the ultimate fluid data architecture is the combination of heineken and compellent and our system is so easy to use that you can actually enjoy a Heineken while you're about storage administrator so we like that they're so Heineken Nell lenders are our customer we have microbrews in Lushan nakonec and we're real excited to hear about their story they're part of a global enterprise of customers we talked about we have customers in all industries verticals geographic areas we're announcing actually this week we're announcing our expansion of our Australian operations where we have dozens of customers already but we're now seeing the expanse of our Australian operations and now let's take it back to the Netherlands and let's hear a real customer story about how vmware Compellent can really cut the the total cost of ownership in a data center by more than fifty percent with the combination of our two efforts and also improve the operational efficiency of those data centers and let's hear Mike and Lucien to tell us a little bit about it okay thank you very much feel I guess I don't have to introduce any cancer company itself because we all know with the core business or for companies brewing beer not only the beer we grade to brew great beers and great brands and that makes us the number one brewer in Europe and the number three in volume in the complete worldwide we have over 200 regional and local beers and ciders in total and when we look at our breweries we have almost in every country we have a brewery or its Hank is deliverable when we look at the International Anakin international we're very large company almost in every country as I just said before and we have 130 140 breweries in more than 70 countries which is good for a group beer volume of 200 million hectoliters of beer a year as includes insiders when we look at the the Netherlands we have only three breweries that's where it all started we have 18 million hectoliters of total supply but we're not drinking at all ourselves the domestic market is only about five million hectoliters and the rest of the volume is going to USA so as all export for us and that's where all your beers coming from and I strategies that we've introduced a Heineken Light several years ago is especially made for the USA market because we don't drink it okay when we take a look at the virtualization roadmap for hanukkah we started about six years ago in 2004 VMware was the only real player in the market at the moment we introduced it when we were consolidating our data centers in our main location suit about we came from about 12 server rooms to one major data center which we used storage from HP at the moment and we used HP blades infrastructure and we decided to go for it with VMware for our DTI environments or the test and acceptance environment after several years it we grew outgrew our storage capacity and we needed to upgrade so we we change te va with a forklift upgrade some to another EPA and we also introduced a new version of vmware again we're later we thought everybody was ready to go to use protection so everyone used the dta and i was confident it should work on production also so we start with the bronze service that our servers are not mission critical for us those are great success and last year we start a new project to virtualize every gold and silver system we have that means every mission critical and priority system we use for brewing packaging and distribution just the latest news is that last weekend we migrated one of the last warehouse management systems there's also virtualized now and is running perfectly where are we going we are looking at the end of the year we're going to vsphere for of course the main thing and last year we decided to choose for another storage storage solution we chose component well this is something where elution comes in you can tell about the choice you ate and why we did it okay thank you well well tell you something about the project itself the migration and why we choose component in the first place well we really needed to look for other solutions because especially in the two main sites suta wild and divorce we had some serious problems especially the support costs because after three years you pay an enormous amount of money for support from HB also we had our capacity problems and also experienced severe performance issues in suit about us so that meant that we had to take action fast also we had we were stuck on the AEV a 5000 which didn't allow us to upgrade to a newer version of vmware and also we couldn't use windows server 2008 which was very high on us on our priority list furthermore business continuity is on a plan for early next year so we wanted to have a solution which could provide us that and also because heineken is as called a new but it's not really a project but Sequoia the hunt for cash within itn Anakin element meant that we we want to you reduce IT costs as much as possible so in another point problem was that we had a major issue with reporting from our currents and infrastructure why did you choose for component well it opera it operates with every operating system it is very very important it's one for the solution that fits really everything that's what we experience as well during the migration we could start with replication early next year that's also very important and we needed a high high performance solution but it eventually meant why we choose chose for a component that it's excellent value for money the fluid data concept we really was consecrated what we can can use and give us high flexibility and one of the major pros is that the accident reporting facilities is I've never seen a better reporting functionality inside a project such as propellant and what is also very important that we got 24 7 proactive support and that's something you will never get for free so okay well as a result we have at least certain sixty percent virtualized and actually like my except last week we went to 61 percent because we virtualize to more FM machines and the speed we are going now it it really looks that we are in 2012 we are going to for ninety percent and I think it's a really feasible the number of disks we significantly reduced which meant lowers I decided lower on the power lower on low on the rec space for example the evi 5000 cost us one and a half 19-inch rack and right now it's about 12 views so it's a real big difference the performance we see on all layers not only on the only windows servers also on ax systems we see an enormous improvement regarding performance with yet we did have to do some optimization but with the support of copilot in the in the last month we had a excellent result and we even have a much better performance that we ever had so and because yeah we are finally using solar state drives because we really needed that for a sequel a reporting server which is very business critical and indio on the old evi we reached performance for about twenty thirty five minutes for a report which needed to be ready before a certain time and now we even cut times under 20 minutes so you see how fast it really is so we are next week actually the final and virtual machine will be migrated from the OTV a two component and that will finalize our migration on both breweries and so far no disruption whatsoever so we're very pleased perfect so that's a that's our part of the presentation thank you somebody talks out of the sky now right any questions uh well the question the question was with all the savings he's gotten his data center can you lower the cost of heineken beer for everyone I knew a new kind of heineken light right yeah how we go do that let us not up to me we really want to thank you guys for sharing that story I mean it just hit all our bullets about you know the future built in performance flexibility fluid data VMware compellent working together and we're just really really excited and we appreciate you sharing your story with our viewers and our customers and our prospects out in the audience here okay thank you guys yeah okay

>>mhm. >>Good morning. Live from Las Vegas. That snowflake Summit 22. Lisa Martin With Day Volonte David's Great. We have three wall to wall days of coverage at Snowflake Summit 22 this year. >>Yeah, it's all about data and bringing data to applications. And we've got some big announcements coming this week. Super exciting >>collaboration around data. We are excited to welcome our first two guests before the keynote. We have seen Nielsen in S V. P of data and Analytics Service offering head at emphasis. And Chris Dignan alumni is back with us to chief revenue officer at stuff like guys. Great to have you on the programme. Thanks for having us. Thank you very much. So he'll tell us what's going on with emphasis and snowflake and the partnership. Give us all that good stuff. >>Yeah, No, I think with the convergence of, uh, data digital and computing economy, um, you know that convergence is creating so much possibilities for for customers, uh, snowflake and emphases working together to help our customers realise the vision and these possibilities that are getting driven. We share a very strategic partnership where we are thinking ahead for our customers in terms of what, uh, we can do together in order to build solutions in order to bring out the expertise that is needed for such transformations and also influencing the thinking, Um, and the and the point of view in the market together so that, you know there is there is cohesive approach to doing this transformation and getting to those business outcomes. So it's a It's a partnership that's very successful and its strategic for for our customers, and we continue to invest for the market. >>Got some great customer. Some of my favourite CVS, Nike, William Sanoma. Gotta love that one. Chris talked to us about the snowflake data cloud. What makes it so unique and compelling in the market? >>Well, I think our customers, really they are going through digital transformation today, and they're moving from on premise to the cloud and historically speaking, there just hasn't been the right tool set to help them do that. I think snowflake brings to the table an opportunity for them to take all of their data and take it and and allow it to go from one cloud to the other so they can sit on a W s it can sit on Azure can sit on G, C, P and I can move around from cloud to cloud, and they can do analytics on top of that. >>So data has been traditionally really hard. And we saw that in the big data movement. But we learned a lot. Uh, and AI has been, you know, challenging. So what are you seeing with with customers? What are they struggling with? And how are you guys helping them? >>Yeah. So if you look at the customer journey, they have invested in a number of technologies in the past and are now at a juncture where they need to transform that landscape. They have the challenges of legacy debt that they need to, you know, get rid of or transform. They have the challenges of really bringing, you know, a cohesive understanding within the enterprise as to what these possibilities are for their business. Given the strategy that they are pursuing, um, business and I t cycles are not necessarily aligned. Um, you have the challenge of very fragmented data landscape that they have created over a period of time. How do you, you know, put all these together and work with a specific outcome in mind so that you're not doing transformation for the purpose of transformation. But to be able to actually drive new business models, new data driven products and services ability for you to collaborate with your partners and create unique competitive advantage in the market. And how do you bring those purposes together with the transformation that that's really happening? And and that's where you know our our customers, um, you know, grapple with the challenges of bringing it together. So, >>Chris, how do you see? Because it was talking about, uh, legacy that I think technical debt. Um, you kind of started out making the data warehouse easier. Then this data cloud thing comes out. You're like, Oh, that's an interesting vision and all of a sudden it's way more than vision. You get this huge ecosystem you're extending, we're gonna hear the announcements this morning. We won't. We won't spill the beans, but but really expanding the data cloud. So it's hard to keep up with with where you're at. So I think modernisation, right? So how do you think about modernisation? How are your customers thinking about it? And what's the scope of Snowflake. >>Well, you know, I think historically, you asked about AI and Ml and, you know, in the A I world historically, they've lacked data, and I think because we're the data cloud, we're bringing data, you know, and making it available and democratising it for everybody. And then, you know, partners like emphasis are actually helping us bring, you know, applications and new business models to to the table to our customers and their innovating on top of the data that we already have in the Snowflake Data Club. >>Chris, can you talk about some of the verticals where you guys are successful with emphasis that the three that I mentioned are retailers, But I know that finance, healthcare and life sciences are are huge for smooth, like talk to me, give us a perspective of the verticals that are coming to you. Guys saying help us out with transport. >>You know, I'll give you just an example. So So in the in the retail space, for example, Kraft Heinz is a is a joint customer of ours. And, you know, they've been all in on on snowflakes, Data Cloud and one of our big customers as well it is is Albertsons, and Albertans realises, Oh my gosh, I have all this information around the consumer in in the grocery stores and Kraft Heinz. They want access to that, and they actually can make supply chain decisions a lot faster if they have access to it. So with snowflakes data sharing, we can actually allow them to share data. Albertans share data directly with Kraft, Heinz and Kraft. Heinz can actually make supply chain decisions in real time so that these are some of the stuff that emphasis and stuff like help our customers self. >>So traditionally, the data pipeline goes through some very highly specialised individuals, whether the data engineer, the data scientists and data analyst. So that example that you just gave our organisation you mentioned before democratisation. So democratisation needs to be as a businessperson, I actually can get access to the data. So in that example that you gave between Kraft, Heinz and and and Albertson, is it the the highly hyper specialised teams sharing that data? Or is it actually extending into the line of business focus? >>That's so that's the interesting part for us is I think, snowflake, we just recently reorganise my sales team this year into verticals, and the reason we did that is customers no longer want to talk to us about speeds and feeds of how fast my database goes. They want to actually talk about business outcomes. How do I solve for demand forecasting? How do I supply fix my supply chain issues? Those are things. Those are the. That's how we're aligning with emphasis. So well is they've been doing this for a long time, Can only we haven't. And so we need their help on getting us to the next level of of the sales motion and talking to our customers on solving these business challenges in >>terms of that next level. So no question for you. Where are the customer conversations happening? At what level? I mean, we've seen such dramatic changes in the market in the last couple of years. Now we're dealing with inflation rising interest rates. Ukraine. Are you seeing the conversations in terms of building data platforms rising up the C suite? As every company recognises, we're going to be a data company. We're not gonna be a business. >>Absolutely. And I think all the macroeconomic forces that you talked about that's working on the enterprises globally is actually leading them to think about how to future proof their business models. Right? And there are tonnes of learning that they've hired in the last two or three years and digitising in embracing more digital models. The conversation with the customers have really pivoted towards business outcome. It is a C suite conversation. It is no longer just an incremental change for the for the companies they recognise. That data has been touted as a strategic asset for a long time, but I think it's taking a purpose and a meaning as to what it does for for the customers, the conversations are around industry verticals. You know, what are the specific challenges and opportunities that the the enterprises have, uh, and how you realise those and these cuts across multiple different layers. You know, we're talking about how your democratised data, which in our point of view, is absolute, must in terms of putting a foundation that doesn't take super specialised people to be able to run every operation and every bit of data that you process we have invested in building autonomous data and a state that can process data as it comes in without any manual intervention and take it all the way to consumption but also investing in those industry solutions. Along with snowflake, we launched the healthcare and life Sciences solution. We launched the only channel for retail and CPG. And these are great examples of how Snowflake Foundation enables democratisation on one side but also help solve business problems. In fact, with Snowflake, we have a very, uh, special partnership because our point of view on data economy is about how you connect with the network partners externally, and snowflake brings native capabilities. On this, we leverage that to Dr Exchanges for our customers and one of the services company in the recycling business. Uh, we're actually building and in exchange, which will allow the data points from multiple different sources and partners to come together. So they have a better understanding of their customers, their operations, the field operations and things >>like building a data ecosystem. Yes. Alright, They they Is it a two sided market place where you guys are observers and providing the the technology and the process, you know, guidance. What's your role in that? >>Yeah. So, um, we were seeing their revolution coming? Uh, two stages. Maybe even more. Um, customers are comfortable building an ecosystem. That's kind of private for them. Which means that they know who they are sharing data with. They know what the data is getting used for. And how do you really put governance on this? So that on one side you can trust it on the other side. There is a good use of that data, Uh, and not, uh, you know, compromise on their quality or privacy and some of the other regulations. But we do see this opening up to the two sided market places as well. Uh, some of the industry's lend themselves extremely well for that kind of play. We have seen that happening in trading area. We've seen that happen. And, uh, you know, the credit checks and things like that which are usually open for, you know, those kind of ecosystem. But the conversations and the and the programmes are really leading towards towards that in the market. >>You know, Lisa, one of things I wrote about this weekend is I was decided to come to stuff like summit and and see one of the, you know, thesis I have is that we're going to move not just beyond analytics, including analytics, but also building data products that can be monetised and and I'm hoping we're going to see some of that here. Are you seeing that Christian in the customer? It's It's >>a great question, David. So So we have You know, I just thought of it as as he was talking about. We have a customer who's a very large customer of ours who's in the financial services space, and they handle roughly 40% of the credit card transactions that happen in the US and they're coming to us and saying they want to go from zero in data business today to a $2 billion business over the next five years, and they're leaning on us to help them do that. And one of the things that's exciting for me is they're coming to us not saying Hey, how do you do it? You know, they're saying, Hey, we want to build a consumption model on top of snowflake and we want to use you as the delivery mechanism and the billing mechanism to help us actually monetise that data. So yes, the answer is. You know, I I used to sell to, you know, chief Data Officers and and see IOS. Now I'm talking to VPs of sales and I'm talking to chief operating officers and I'm talking to CEOs about how do we actually create a new revenue stream? And that's just I mean, it's exhilarating to have those conversations. That's >>data products. They don't have to worry about the infrastructure that comes from the cloud. They don't have to worry about the governance, as Senior was saying, Just put >>it in stuff like Just >>put stuff like that. So I call it The super cloud is kind of a, you know, a funny little tongue in cheek. But it's happening. It's this layer. It's not just multiple clouds. You see a lot of your critical competitors adjacent competitors saying, Hey, we're now running in in Google or we're running in Azure. We've been running on AWS. This is different. This is different, isn't it? It's a cloud that floats above the The infrastructure of the hyper scale is, and that's that's a new era. I think >>it's a new error. I think they're you know, I think the hyper scholars want to, you know, keep us as a as a data warehouse and and we're not. The customers are not letting them so So I think that's you know where emphasis kind of saw the light early on. And they were our innovation partner of the year, uh, this past year and they're helping us in our customers innovate, >>but you're uniquely qualified to do that where? I don't think it's the hyper scholars agenda. At least I never say never with the hyper scale is, but yeah, they have focused on providing infrastructure. And, yeah, they have databases and other tools. But that that cross cloud that continuum to your point, talking to VPs of sales and how do you generate revenue? That maybe, is a conversation that they have, but not explicitly as to how to actually do it in a data >>cloud. That's right. I mean, those and those are the Those are the fun conversations because you're you're saying, Hey, we can actually create a new revenue stream. And how can we actually help you solve our joint customers problems? So, yes, it is. Well, >>that's competitive differentiation for businesses. I mean, this is, as I mentioned Every company has to be a data company. If they're not, they're probably not going to be around much longer. They've got to be able to to leverage a data platform like snowflake, to find insights, be able to act on them and create value new services, new products to stay competitive, to stay ahead of the competition. That's no longer nice to have >>100%. I mean, I think they're they're all scared. I mean, you know, like if you look in the financial services space, they look at some of the fintech, as you know, the giant £800 gorillas look at the small fintech has huge threats to the business, and they're coming to us and say, How can we innovate our business now? And they're looking at us as the the innovator, and they're looking at emphasis to help them do that. So I think these are These are incredible times. >>So the narrative on Wall Street, of course, this past earnings season was consumption and who has best visibility and and they they were able to snowflake had a couple of large customers dial down consumption, some consumer facing. Here's the thing. If you're selling a data product for more than it costs you to make. If you dial down consumption in the future, you're gonna dial down revenue. So that's it's going to become less and less discretionary over time. And that, to me, is the next error. That's really exciting. >>The key, The key there is understanding the unit of measure. I think that's the number. One question that we get from customers is what is the unit of measure that we care about, that we want to monetise because to your point, it costs you more to make the product. You're not going to sell it right? And so I think that those are the things that the energy that we're spending with customers today is advising them, jointly advising them on how to actually monetise the specific, you know, unit of measure that they care >>about because when they get the Amazon bill or the snowflake bill, the CFO starts knocking the door. The answer has to be well, look at all the revenue that we generated and all the operating profit and the free cash flow that we drove, and then it's like, Oh, I get it. Keep doing it well, if I'm >>if I'm going on sales calls with the VP of sales and his their sales team, fantastic, right generated helping them generate revenue, right? That's a great conversation >>dynamic. And I think the adoption is really driven through the value, uh, that they can drive in their ecosystem. Their products are similar to products and services that these companies sell. And if you're embedding data inside Syria into your products services, that makes you that much more competitive in the market and drive value for your stakeholders. And that's essentially the future business model that we're talking about. On one side, the other one is the agility. Things aren't remaining constant, they are constantly changing, and we talked about some of those forces earlier. All of this is changing. The landscape is changing the the needs in the economy and things like that, and how you adapt to those kind of models in the future and pivoted on data capabilities that lets you identify new opportunities and and create new value. >>Speaking of creating new value last question guys, before we wrap, what's the go to market approach here between the two companies working customers go to get engaged. I imagine both sides. >>Yeah. I mean, the way that partnership looks good to me is is sell with co selling. So So I think, you know, we look at developing joint solutions with emphasis. They've done a wonderful job of leading into our partnership. So, you know, Sue Neill and I have a regular cadence where we talked every quarter, and our sales teams and our partner teams are are all leaning in and co selling. I don't know if you >>have Absolutely, um, you know, we we proactively identify, you know, the opportunities for our customers. And we work together at all levels within, you know, between the two companies to be able to bring a cohesive solution and a proposition for the customers. Really help them understand how to, you know, what is it that they can, um, get to and how you get that journey actually executed. And it's a partnership that works very seamlessly through that entire process, not just upstream when we're selling, but also downstream and we're executing. And we've had tremendous success together and look forward to more. >>Congratulations on that success, guys. Thank you so much for coming on talking about new possibilities with data and AI and sharing some of the impact that the technologies are making. We appreciate your insights. >>Thank you. Thank >>you. Thank you So much >>for our guests and a Volonte. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube live in Las Vegas from Snowflake Summit 22 back after the keynote with more breaking news. Mhm, mhm.

>>Okay. And welcome back to the cubes live coverage here in San Francisco, California for 80 us summit 2022 Amazon web services summit 2020 New York city is coming up in the summer will be there. Check us out the cube.net. Our next guest here is Jim long. The CEO of dig also known as local. BTV a very interesting AWS customer doing some really progressive things around video and, uh, challenging the status quo in code cutting and all kinds of broadcast models. Jim, welcome to the cube. Great to see you. >>Thank you, John. Great to be here. Okay. >>So first of all, before we get into some of the disrupt option, take a minute to explain what is dig and local BTV. >>Uh, dig is all about, uh, providing, uh, edge video networking for broadcast television, basically modernizing local television and hopefully extending it to hyper local content like high schools and community government and community channels and things like that. So essentially free bringing, using the internet as an antenna to bring broadcast television to your phone, your laptop you're connected TVs. >>So if I understand it correctly, if I UN and I look at the, the materials of your site, you basically go into each market, Metro areas like New York Philly bay area, grab the tee signal out of the air. >>Yep. >>Local TV, and then open that up to everyone. Who's got, um, an >>Correct. And, uh, what, we've, where we're essentially building a hybrid network with AWS. Uh, I like to say we got all the smart and account stuff, you know, in the cloud at AWS. And we have all the dumb, fast stuff in the actual TV market. We have servers and transcoding there we work with, uh, of course, um, uh, AWS on that centrally as well. But basically that hybrid cloud allows us to be the fastest simplest and lowest cost way to get a local video. Any type could be an antenna or an IP stream to a local house. So we're, so are the local pickup and delivery people. We're not building a brand, we're not building content. We're delivering the local content to the local views. You >>Like the pipes. >>We are, we're essentially an infrastructure company. Um, we're right at that wonderful intersection of the, uh, the infrastructure and the content where I always like to play. >>I like, I love the store. I think the cost of that nature, how you're using Amazon, it's really impressive. Um, what are some of the cool things you're doing on AWS that you think's notable? >>Well, of course the, the standard issue stuff where you want to store all your data in the cloud. Right? So we, uh, and we use a quick site to, to get to that. And obviously we're using S3 and we're using media tailor, which we really like, which is cuz we first actual company on the planet. I believe that's inserting digital ads, impression based ads into local broadcast streams. So that's, that's fun because the advertisers, they like the fact that they could still do traditional TV buys and they could spice it up with digital impressions based, but ads on us. Yeah. And, and we're adding to it a real fun thing called clip it, which is user clipping. It's an app that's been running on AWS for years. It's had over half a million plays in social media. Yeah. We're combining those together and, and AWS makes it very simple to do that. >>Well, I've been using your app on my Firestick and uh, download local BTV on the app store. Um, I gotta say the calendar's awesome. And the performance is 10 times better than, than some of the other streaming apps because the other performance they crash all the time. The calendar's weird. So congratulations. Clearly you're running the cloud technology. I gotta ask you what's going on in the market? Netflix missed their earnings. The stock was down big time. Um, obviously competition what's up going on with Netflix? >>Well, what's, it's a big shift. >>What does it mean for the streaming market? >>Well, what it means is, is, is a consumer choice. It's really the golden age of consumer choice. Uh, originally back when I was a kid, it was all antenna TV. We didn't even have DBRS right. And then, uh, the cable companies and the satellite companies, the phone companies came in and took over and all of a sudden everyone started paying for TV for just linear TV. Right? And then the next thing, you know, streaming comes around, uh, Netflix shows up for, for VOD or, or SVOD, they call it cuz it's payt TV and uh, and the whole, uh, that ecosystem starts to melt down. And now you have a consumer choice market where you can pay, pay for VAD or pay for, for linear. And everyone does linear and everyone does VAD or you can use free TV. Now we correctly guessed that free TV was gonna have a huge comeback. You know, know what is it about free even obviously gen Z smarter than us boomers. They love free too. Uh, targeted advertising makes the ads less, uh, painful or less of a distraction. Uh, so we knew that free ad supported TV was gonna happen. Lots of stuff happened. And then, then the, uh, major media companies started doing their own subscription apps. Right? They're all cool. >>We like paramount plus >>Paramount plus Disney pluses, PN peacock, uh, time Warner's doing something. I mean, it's all cool, but you know, people only have so much of a big pocketbook. So what it's doing is pay TV has now become much more complicated, but also you, you know, you gotta trade off. So you saw it with Netflix, right? Yeah. Netflix is suffering from there's too much pay TV. So where are you gonna put your money on Comcast? On YouTube TV paramount plus Netflix. >>Yeah. I mean, I love the free thing. I gotta bring up something. I wanna get your reaction to a company called low cast went under, they got sued out of their deal. They were the free TV. Are you guys have issues like them? What's the cast most people don't know got was, was >>Doing same. So we started before low cast and we're uh, what we would call a permissions based system, legal system. The broadcast Mar industry, uh, is, uh, is the wild wild west. I mean, I like to say antenna TV is a direct to consumer. The antenna is a direct to consumer device and it's controlled by the channel. People it's not controlled by a platform like Comcast, right? It's not controlled by a stick. >>When you say channel, do you mean like CBS or >>Yeah, CBS or the local Korean religious cooking channel or, uh, Spanish channels or local independent to television, which is really a national treasure for us. The United States really should be making sure that local content, local channels, uh, do well local businesses, you know, with targeted advertising, Janes nail salon can, can now advertise just in San Jose and not the entire San Francisco TV market. Um, so you ha you have, have all that going on and we recognize, you know, that, that local content, but you have to have permission from the channel stuff. It's not easy because you got channels on stations. You have syndicators, it's hard to keep track of. And sometimes you, you, uh, you, you know, you have to shift things around, but, uh, low cast, uh, like another kind before it just went hog wild, illegal, trying to use a loophole, uh, didn't quite work out for 'em and, uh, >>You see, they have put out of business by the networks, the names, the big names. Yes. Content people, >>Correct. I mean the big, the big guys, but I mean, because they weren't following the rules, um, >>The rules, meaning license, the content, right. >>Well correct. Or yes, >>Basically they, they were stealing the content in the eyes of the, >>Well, there is, there is, it is a little of, a bit of a gray area between the FCC and the copyright laws that Congress made. So, um, there are people certainly out there that think there is a path there, low cast, didn't find it. We're not trying to find it. Uh, we just want to get all the free TV, uh, the bottom line. And you've seen fast channels explode recently, Pluto, uh, Samsung TV. >>And what does that all mean? >>Well, what it means is people love free TV and the best free TV out there is your local TV. So putting that on the internet and those comp, but the media companies, they have trouble with this new stuff. What's, >>What's your >>They're overthinking it. What's >>Some of this CBS, NBC, all these big guys. >>Well, those guys have a little less trouble than the people that actually, uh, they're affiliates, right? So there's 210 TV markets and the, uh, your major networks, you know, they have their own stations. And in a bit, you know, in about 39% of the population, which is about 15 to 20, is it >>Cultural or is a system system problem? >>No, it's a, it's a problem of all the, the media companies are just having trouble moving towards the new technology and, and they're, I think they're siloing it. >>So why not? You gonna let 'em die. Are you trying to do deals with em? >>Oh no, no, absolutely. For us, if we don't make money, unless stations make money, we want local TV to, to flourish. It is local TV is Neilson, just report yesterday, you know, uh, that, uh, local TV is growing. We're taking advantage of that. And I think the station groups are having a little trouble realizing that they have the original, fast channels before Pluto, before Tubi did it in movies. And, and, and what >>Are people understanding in the, in the industry? I know NA's coming up a show. Yeah, >>That's right. >>National associated of broadcasters. What's going on in that industry right now. And you're, if you get to put it down the top three problems that are opportunities to be solved, what would they be? >>Well, I think, you know, I think the, the, the, the last, the, the best one that's left is what we're doing. I have to say it, uh, I think it's worth billions. >>You free TV over the air free and stream >>O TV. Oh yeah. Over the air TV that also works with the internet, right. Public internet connected to public television stations so that everybody, including homeless people, et cetera, that, you know, they don't have a TV, they don't have an antenna, they can't afford comp. They got an >>IPhone though. >>They an iPhone. For sure. And, and so it's, it's, uh, it's a wonderful thing. It's, you know, our national broadcasting and I don't think the station groups or the major networks are taking advantage of it they're as much as they should. Yeah. And, and I don't think, you know, obviously NBC and CBS with their new apps, they're sort of done with that. They did mergers, they got, they got the virtual pay guys. I mean, YouTube TV off the ground, the only thing left is suck another shitload of good, uh, eyeballs and, and advertising. >>Well, I mean, yeah, I think that, that, and what you said earlier around subscription fatigue, I mean, nobody wants to have 20 subscriptions. >>Well, that brings up a whole new other war. That's going on that, thank goodness. We're not part of it's the platforms versus the cable companies. Right. Versus whatever. Right. Everyone's trying to be your open garden or your closed garden. They're trying to get your subscriptions in bundle self bundling it's. But I mean, it's wonderful for consumers, if you can navigate through it. Uh, we wanna, we think we'll have one of the gems in any of that everyone's want local TV. And so we'll supply that we're already doing that. We're supplying it to a couple companies, uh, free cast as a company, uh, app, a universal streaming, you know, manager, your all, all your, uh, streaming, a streaming aggregation, put your paid stuff in, put your free stuff in. They do that. And, and as, as does Roku try trying to do that fire TV, Xfinity's trying to do it. So it's all, it's a new war for the platform and hopefully we'll be on everyone. >>Well, you've been in this industry for a long time, you know, the streaming market, you know, the TV market. Um, so it's, it's good. I think it's a new battle, the shift's happening. Um, what should people know about dig local? BTV what are some of your goals for the next year or two? What are you trying to do? >>Well, what we're really trying to do is make sure that local, uh, local television thrives so that it can support wider communities. It could support hyper local content. So if you're, if you're, and we love the old paradigm and channel change, right? Forget, you know, every other app has all these boxes going by on different rows and stuff. And, and yeah, you can search and find stuff, but there's nothing like just changing channels, whether a commercial's on or, or you, you wanna see what else is on. You know, you're gonna go from local television and maybe all of a sudden, you'll see the local high school play over on another part of the, of the spectrum. And, and what we're trying to do is get those communities together. And the local high school people come over and find the local, you know, uh, Spanish, uh, Nova channel or something like that. >>So local is the new hot. >>It is. Absolutely. And by the way, it's where this high CPMs are gonna go. And the more targeted you get >>Ad revenue, >>I mean, that's for us is, is, is our number one, re we have a number of revenue streams, but targeted ads are really great for local, right? And, and so we're, we're gonna make an announce. We've >>Lost that we've lost that local, I've seen local things that local Palo Alto paper, for instance, just shut down this local sports high school coverage, our youth sports, because they don't budget, right? There's no TV community channels, like some Comcast throwaway channel. Um, we lost, we, we lo we're losing >>Local. No, I think that's a real national shame. And so I think if we can strengthen local television, I think it'll strengthen all local media. So we expect to help local radio and local newspapers. That's a bigger part of the vision. Uh, but I it's gonna happen. There's >>An education angle here too. >>There is an education angle because the bottom line is you can use linear television as a way to augment. Uh, we have a really exciting project going on in New York, uh, uh, with, uh, some of the housing, uh, projects, uh, in Harlem and, and, and the Bronx, uh, their I idea is to have the, the homework channel and they can, and literally when you have a, and both swiping and everything you can have, I mean, literally you can have a hundred schools that, that have things well, >>We know zoom schooling sucks. I mean, that didn't work. So I think you're gonna see a lot of augmentation, right. >>Amazon. >>I was just talking to some people here, AI training, machine learning, training, all here could be online in linear format. >>Yeah. And exactly. And then I think about the linear format is it's discovery television, and you can also, um, you know, you can also record it. Yeah. Right. If you see a program and you want to record it, you sit >>Record. So final minute we have left. I want to just get your thoughts on this one thing and, and ask your question. Are you looking for content? Are you, I outreach at the content providers who, >>Well, we're, we're PRI our primary mission is to get more channel local channels on which really means station groups and independence. We have a number, I mean, basically 50% of the channels in any market. When we move into it are like, this is a no-brainer. I want more eyeballs. We're Nielsen, uh, RA, uh, rated mean we support. And so we, >>How many markets are you in right now? >>We're in 21 now. And we hope to be in, uh, over 50 by the end of the year, covering more than half the United States. >>So, all right, Jim, thanks for coming on the queue. Really appreciate it. >>My pleasure. Good luck >>Recognition. Very disruptive disrupting media, um, combination of over the air TV, local with I internet. Obviously we love that with a cube. We want a cube channel anywhere possible. I'm John furry host of the queue here at AWS summit. Highing all the big trends and technologies in cloud and media back with more coverage after this short break,

>>And welcome back to the cubes coverage of alias reinvent 2021. I'm Jon furrier, your host of the cube we're onsite we're hybrid. It's a hybrid event. We've got Odile, Shara Dean vice president of north America solution engineering at Salesforce. We deal SIM thank you for coming on the cube >>You John, excited to be >>Here. So w you know, Salesforce obviously, um, being in Palo Alto in the bay area, they've got the Salesforce tower, great business cloud before cloud great innovation. A lot of growth has been very successful at SAS and platform. So you take that to the government, uh, an area public sector where public sector and other areas around this have been exploding with the pandemic with new use cases and just kind of a refactoring and replatforming of L all aspects of digital. It's been a big digital transformation surge, and rightfully so you guys are in the mix here. Um, talk about the Salesforce is positioned as you guys innovate and scale your platform and rethink this architecture with AWS in the public sector. >>Yeah. Thank you, John. So you're spot on Salesforce defines SAS as a delivery of services to customers, and that's really the precursor to where we are with cloud here. So let's talk about public sector and what that means. I'm very proud to work in and around public sector for many years. And I'll Salesforce, public sector group supports any number of use cases, different missions, anywhere from state and local, all the way through to federal use cases on, on a global scale. But what that means, and I mean, right back to your question is how do we deliver those in the cloud in a scalable, responsive way? You mentioned the pandemic and throughout the pandemic, we were instrumental in trying to deliver these services and getting states and localities towns, countries up and running to deliver the critical things that we all learned about in a hurry contact pricing. >>COVID testing all these ideas around vaccine management, what it takes to get vaccines to populations, but many of our customers, many of our governments just weren't well positioned to do that. So what they were relying on was a secure, scalable, flexible environment that allowed them to define their workflows or their business models in a very, very rapid pace as we were dealing with the surge and the constantly changing landscape of the pandemic. So from our perspective, we've spent years investing in public sector to make sure that we need the compliance requirements, whether that's FedRAMP or, or CMMC, or protected being Canada, how do we do that reliably quickly so that our government customers can rely on us for situations like the pandemic to be able to respond? >>Yeah, one of the things we've been doing a lot of reporting around is the idea that the pandemic has kind of forced, and it was a forcing function around digital transformation. Uh, so I have to ask you knowing the history of Salesforce and the greatness of the company that you guys have had over the years, uh, when you get into the public sector, I'm sure you get all kinds of questions. We don't have sales forces, and we don't have sales managers. Um, we don't need a CRM. Um, and we have industry regulations. We're not a commercial thing. How do you answer those? Because you guys have infrastructure, you are a hyperscale, uh, what's your take on that and how do you answer those direct questions when they come up? >>All great questions and yes, we get them all the time. Uh, so how do we answer them? Well, first and foremost, the idea of a CRM is around putting your customer at the center of your view of them. So that customer relationship management means you, you have a view into the services your customer needs and how they're engaging with you, digitally engagement, in-person engagement, et cetera. I would intend that that's no different for a government entity than it is for a consumer. Very sensitive government entity wants to treat their constituents around the services they need and getting that full 360 view of what, what are the services available to them? How do they access them, et cetera, actually fits really well into that CRM model, but it does take some explaining and reinvisioning it, but it plays really well into the digital transformation imperatives that these agencies have, because what you want to do in a digital transformation is also re-imagined all these old systems and legacy systems, how you're going to make them more accessible. >>But also to your point, how do you bring them to this level of expectation that our consumers have? I'm now accustomed to having mobile apps and on-demand, uh, applications and websites for ordering products for ordering needs, et cetera, for booking a restaurant reservation, I've developed the exact same requirements and expectations of my government services and our government customers are clearly aware of this. So they want to bring this capability to the fore and offer their constituents a better experience as well. When you asked about government regulations, this is absolutely critical to how we think about delivering that service, the value of the cloud. Isn't just, you can go get access to a service and not have to worry about that service. It's also, how do we unencumber agencies from these compliance requirements from audits, from privacy checks and needs in a constantly evolving landscape. There's always a legislative imperative to change something, add more constraints, more privacy requirements, compliance requirements, et cetera. So what we want to do is free our customers up from having to worry about that. That's what we undertake. We provide them that level of assurance, and they focus once again, on that higher value of the business flows, the mission, the constituency context, and how to make that constituent experience better. >>I have to ask you, I had a chance to sit down one-on-one with Adam. Slupski the new CEO of AWS recently prior to re-invent. And he said something to me. I want to get your reaction to, he said with scale, you can get visibility on some new use cases. So this applies to Salesforce. You guys are a hyperscaler, you have this new architecture named hyper force. What is this all about? And how does that tie into celebrities comment? Okay. >>Yeah. Uh, excellent question. And we'll talk a little about that history that brings us to two hype before. So just like many of our customers, we realize that having the ability to scale across the globe and be able to offer our services in different regions, different compliance requirements meant that our investments in first party data centers needed to be reconstructed a little bit. And that posed a bit of a rearchitecture for us as well. But that's what gave us the flexibility then to essentially decouple our architecture from the physical infrastructure layer, but it afforded us then the ability to deploy very quickly and very scaleably on AWS in regions that we previously weren't operating in. So it allows us to move along quicker, allows us to bring that flexibility and that scale to the customer where they are. And then we can meet once again, coming back to compliance and regulations. >>We can meet requirements around data residency and data privacy requirements in different regions that we were somewhat constrained in doing earlier. And that also then gives us the ability, I think, to what Adam might've been alluding to now that we're able to bring that service to the customer, they can say, well, actually here's another use case that I would like Salesforce to deliver on. And it gives us that flexibility. We do a lot in terms of expanding across use cases. And if I can point to the pandemic again, just as a great frame of reference that we're all thrust into. Initially, if you cast your mind back to may of last year, we were all worried about contact tracing, right? No side effects scenes, yet we didn't even have pelvic testing. Well, shortly thereafter, COVID testing became available and states were offering those well that from contact tracing to COVID testing is a massive shift. If you think about the use case for technology. So we enable our customers to move very quickly from contact tracing, to COVID, testing them to vaccine management. They're actually entirely different use cases, even though they all apply to solving for the pandemic where we had so many others, digital outreach, helping with loans and grants and management through the PPP programs, through unemployment programs, all different use cases that we helped our customers extend to, which you can't do that if you're not flexible enough to move quickly and scale effectively to support those. >>I think that value proposition and that notion of having that regional global support is going to really come into the whole data programmability trend. I call data as dev ops kind of vibe where data as code becomes more, more agile, right? You're going to see that. I think that's going to be, that's a big theme at a reinvent this year. So, so I have to ask you now, now we're sitting in this global scale, you've got geopolitics, you got public sector. How does Salesforce government cloud plus, and hyper force help your help governments and their partners because their ecosystems too, right? So it's not a commercial. Now it's looking a lot like a commercial lines between commercial and government looking the same. How do you guys help governments and their partners? >>So having been in this, this, uh, area for so long, I, I like to position this tonight. I use this actually as a good selling point, even in selling the value propositions for investment internally, I think of the government regulations and requirements around privacy compliance as a minimum barrier of entry. So I'll, uh, you mentioned our government cloud, plus that's really more in the U S and it's a FedRAMP, uh, tested at a federal and PI level. We've got privacy of lays. We've got our DOD out for, uh, PA in there we've got HIPAA and PCI compliance bank 10. Those are efforts that if a company or a government customer were to go run through individually, it's going to take them a lot of time, effort, and investment to support those. And you end up creating an operations business that just does that for 24 7. >>That's the only reason for them to exist is to manage those. But then we have the government adjacent industries that you're referring to. What about the parkers that service government, they have their own set of regulations. more recently CMMC coming out, et cetera. We provide all of those as a baseline for our government cloud plus. So that level of assurance is assumed by customers and consumers of the service. And again, they're worried about what type of beta and what type of business workflows they're gonna enable and not, can they meet the basic regulations to stand up the service? >>Yeah, I think that highly of the workflows piece is critical because workflows is the new integration layer, right? So these seeing a lot of that, and again, that's a big theme at a re-invent this year. I'll see the performance is key graviton to all the processor stuff and, and, you know, it's lambed and old serverless, but as you move up to the stack where there's actual agility and modern applications that need to be built, whatever they are, you need to have this programmable cloud scale, but the customization on workflows and machine learning and AI. So this is all beautiful for everyone to think about, but now they have to implement it. So how might your customers and prospects consider expanding their offerings with Salesforce in the cloud? Is there, is there a certain playbook that you see, is there a situational awareness that's needed? How would you advise your customers will want to consider expanding, uh, their portfolio in their, their apps and workflows with Salesforce? >>Yeah, that's a fantastic question. So, John, and I'm going to start with, again, going back a little bit to what is Salesforce and who are we as a company? So in as much as we started talking about Salesforce as the number one CRM platform was SAS, we've also acquired some companies and invested in a lot of different, uh, elements of businesses, uh, Tableau NeoSoft and velocity more recently, the slack acquisition, and they're all slightly outside of our platform in terms of capabilities and what we intend for those to deliver. So our customers have a lot more options in terms of what it means to partner with and invest with Salesforce. Uh, slack is a great example of where that becomes a communications mesh and infrastructure that allows them to integrate, uh, technologies, applications, workflows, et cetera. So you want to rethink almost what is Salesforce and what does it mean in your enterprise? >>And then coming back to, to the core of what we do, a lot of how we enable our customers is here's an environment. We enable these very quickly a customer's access to the environment right away. They can set up testing environments, sandboxes, start playing with workflows and really reimagine what that environment is going to look like for their internal users and their engagement with these applications. So yes, we have runbooks we have playbooks, but we've also got enablers in the form of applications. We have a huge application market, if you will, where customers can download different accelerators and try those. We've got a huge network of partners that have delivered rich value added applications. So in most cases, our customers are going to find someone's already created the use case or the application or the workflow they needed. And maybe it's a case of just announcing that a little bit or updating it a little bit, or creating the integration to an in-house system already. So it makes it very exciting, but also makes it a very quick start to solve a problem. >>Oh, Nielsen, you guys have a great opportunity with the cloud and cloud scale. Obviously, companies successful Salesforce is well-known, but as data and governance has to be more agile, more secure often, that sounds counter-intuitive, but this is the big deal that's happening right now, where you need the leverage, the scale you need to have it secure, which you'd think needs to be protective, but making it more permissive is agility. This is the core theme, your, your reaction to wrap up, >>Uh, all great points and yes, to be the data isn't useful if it's entirely locked up. So at Todd, you bring the user to the data they have access to, and that data to provide them value. But especially in a, we'll put a government lens on this. On the government side, the data is ultimately what our government entities are stewarding. So yes services, but that data is imperative. So our customers understand the value of that data and then also how to not just extract value from it, but how to shepherd and steward the security of that data very well. So for us, it's the ability to get that data to the right users, allow them to construct their business omission flow on that data. But the data has to persist has to add value, has to be available for analytics and so on >>Nielsen. Jardeen vice president of north America solutions engineering at Salesforce. Thanks for coming on the cube and, and sharing your story and congratulate a big opportunity ahead for you guys. Congratulations. >>Absolutely. John, thank you so much. Enjoy the rest of the week. Okay. >>It was coverage of eight of us reinvent 2021. Um, John for a, your host. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Okay, we're back. We're here in the main stage in Cloud City. I'm John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Normally, we're over there on theCUBE set, but here we've got a special presentation. We'll talk about Totogi and the new CEO of Totogi is Danielle, who is also the CEO of TelcoDR, Digital Revolution. Great to see you. And of course, Robin Langley, we interviewed you in theCUBE, CTO of Totogi. This is a main stage conversation because this is the big news. >> Yeah. >> You guys launched there with a hundred million dollar investment. We covered that news a couple weeks ago and you as the CEO. What's the story. Tell us what is happening with Totogi? Why such a big focus? What's the big push? >> Yeah, I'm really excited about Totogi because I really think this team is working to build public cloud tools for Telco the right way. It's everything I've been talking about. I talked about it yesterday in my keynote and this is really the execution of that vision. So, I'm super excited about that. A couple of days ago, Rob and I were talking about the charging system, but there's another product that Totogi introduced to the world and that's the webscale BSS system. So I think we're going to talk about that today. It's going to be great. >> Let's get into actually the charging system, which was great processing here. What is this focus? What is BSS about with cloud? How does the public cloud innovation change the game with this? >> Well, a little bit like charging. I mean, there are maybe, you know, a hundred plus BSS systems out there, why does the world need yet another BSS? And I think one thing is we're coupling up with public cloud, which gives it that webscale element. Right? We can have a platform. Never do another upgrade again, which I think is really exciting. But I think the really key thing that we're working on is we're building on top of an open API standard. And a lot of vendors talk about their APIs, why is this different? These are standards developed by TM forum, right? It's an independent body in our industry. They've been working on these, sorry, open APIs, and all the different vendors signed a manifesto that say, "I pledge. I pledge to support the open API", but if you look at the leaderboard and everyone is Sub10, Sub5, right? And so it's kind of like, going through the actions and not falling, you know, saying it, but not following it up and we're doing it. >> Wow, so... >> Yeah. >> Dave: Robin, you guys just popped up on the leaderboard. You went from a standing start to, I think more than 10. >> Yeah. >> I don't think that's ever been done before, has it? >> No, so we were out there. We published 12 APIs and we've got a quote from, you know, TM forums saying, essentially I've never seen anyone move so fast and to publish. And it's our intent to publish, you know, 50 plus, all of their APIs by the end of the year. >> So, how were you able to do that? I mean, like, were you holding them back? Just kind of dumping them on one day? This is the nature of the new business, isn't it? >> Yeah, absolutely and then you think about BSS. It's just, you know, been known for years to be a spaghetti of, you know, applications, you know, disparate data, data being duplicated, systems not talking to each other, lots of different interface types. And it was crying out to be just, you know, sold properly in the cloud. And the public cloud is perfect for this. You know, we can build a model and start, rather than looking at the applications first, you know, let's look at the model, the unified model and build on those open APIs and then start to, you know, allow people to come in and create an ecosystem of applications all using that same model. >> If you don't mind me asking you, if you can explain. 'Cause we talked before we weren't on camera, but we talked about the cloud and you were explaining to me how this is perfect for the challenges that you guys are trying to solve. What about the public cloud dynamic or innovation component that you guys are leveraging? Take us through a little bit on that, because I think that's a big story here that's under the covers is... >> Yeah. >> What you're capable of doing here. Do you mind explaining? >> Yeah, no, absolutely. So the cloud gives us this true scalability across everything. You know, we can scale to billions of records. So we can hook in, you know, to suck in data from, you know, our on-premise systems anywhere. We have, you know, a product called Devflow, so we used to do that. And it can really allow us to bring that data in, scale-out, use standard term cloud innovations, like Lambda functions and AWS, you know, DynamoDB, and present that, you know, through that open API. So we can use, you know graphQL, you know, present that with rest on top. And so you can then build on top of that. You can take any low code, no code application building tool you like, put that on top and then start building your own ecosystem. You can build inventory systems, CRM, anything you like. >> Well one thing that's really interesting about these projects is they usually take months, years to deploy, right? And what we're doing is we're providing, almost BSS as a service, right? It's an API layer that anyone can go to. Maybe you need to use it for five minutes, five months, five years, right? With the open standard and your own developers can learn how to use this text stack and code to it doesn't require us. And so we're really trying to get away from being an SI, you know, systems integrator or heavy services revenue, and instead build the product that enables the telcos to use their own people, to build the applications that they, they know what they want, and so, here you go. >> It's a platform. >> Yeah. >> It's a platform. >> So, how do you connect to systems on the ground? Like what's the modern approach to doing that? >> Yeah, go for it. >> Yeah so, telcos have, you know, a huge amount of data on premise. They have difficulties you can get to it. So, as I mentioned before, we had this Devflows product and it has connectors. We have like 30 plus connectors to all the standard sort of, billing systems, CRM systems, you know, we can hook into things like Salesforce. And we can create either, you know, couple of a real-time interface in there, or we can start to suck data into the cloud and then make it available. So, if they want to start with a nice, easy step and just build slowly, we can just hook in and pull that information out. If there may be, you know, an attribute that you want to, you know, use in some of that application, you can easily get to it. And then, you know, over time you start to build your data into the cloud and then you've got the scale, you know, and all the innovations of that brings with it. >> So is Devflow an on-ramp, if you will, for the public cloud, is that the way you were thinking about it? >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I call it the slurper. (group chuckles) Right. I mean, these telcos have, like Robin was saying, spaghetti systems that have been, you know, customized and connected and integrated. I mean, it is a jungle out there of data. They're not going to be able to move this in one step. We just think of like a pile of spaghetti, like the whole bowl. >> Overcooked spaghetti. >> Right overcooked, the whole bowl comes out and it's really hard to just pull out one noodle and the rest is there and what are you going to do? And so the slurper, right, Devflows, allows you to select which data you want to pull out. It could be one time, you could have it sync. You don't have to do the whole thing and it doesn't disrupt the production environment that's on-premise. But now you're starting to move your data into the public cloud and then like Robin was saying, you can throw it up against quick sites. You can throw it up against different Amazon services. You can create new applications. And so it's not this like, you know, big bang kind of approach. You can start to do it in pieces and I think that's what the industry needs. >> I'm talking about this the other day, when we're talk about charging. What a lot of vendors will do is they'll put a wrapper around it, containerize it and then shove it into the public cloud and say, "Okay". >> Check mark. >> Yeah a checkbox. And it affects how they price, if they price the same way. But we talked a lot about pricing the other day, really pricing like cloud, consumption pricing. How are you pricing in this case? >> Same with the charging system. The BSS system is paid by the use, paid by the API call. So, really excited to introduce yet, again, a free tier. We think we're doing 500 million API calls per month for free. We think this is great for a smaller telco where like, you're experimenting and just getting to know the system and before you like, go all in and buy. And I think that API pricing is going to go right at the heart of some of these vendors that love to charge by the subscriber or a perpetual license agreement, right? They're not quite moving as a service. And so, yeah. >> Are you saying, they're going to be disruptive in the pricing in terms of lower cost or more, consumable. >> And I think it's also an easier on ramp, right? It's easier to start paying by the use and experimenting. And it's really easy, just like I was talking about with charging, where you're going to get the same great product that you would sell to a tier one at a price that you can afford. And now those smaller two or three guys aren't having to make a trade off between great technology, but I'm paying through the nose or sacrifice on the tech, but I can afford it. And so, I think you're going to see this ecosystem of people starting to learn how to code and think in this way. Telcos have already decided that they want to adopt the TM forum, open APIs. They're on all the RFPs. Do you support it? Everyone says they support it, but we don't see anyone really doing it. They're not on the leaderboard. >> And there's transparency, because you're pricing by API call, right? Versus the spaghetti, you guys call it, the hairball of what am I paying for? >> Right, you're getting, all of this. It's by the subscriber. It's millions and millions of dollars. Oh, and you know, you're going to need to buy a bunch of consulting revenue to make it all work and talk to each other. Pay up, right? And that's what we're living in today. And I'm taking us to the, you know, public cloud future by the API. >> This is the big cloud revolution. It's unbundling has been a really big part of the consumption of technology paid by the usage, get in, get some value, get some data, understand what it is, double down on it, iterate. >> Put it up with different services that are available that we don't have, but Amazon uses, right? They have call centers up there, they have ML that you may want to use like, start using it, start coding, start learning about the AWS tech stack. >> So is it available now? >> Yeah. >> Yeah. No, it's available now. We've already published the swagger for the BSS APIs. So, you know, they can come on board, they can go to access to all the API straight away and start using it. They can load up their favorite REST clients and then start developing. >> So you got a dozen APIs today. Where are we headed? What can we expect? >> All by the end of the year. There's over 50 APIs. You know, the number one guy on the board is at like 22, 21, 22 APIs covered. We'll be 50 plus by the end of the year. And we're just going to blow doors. >> The API economy has come to telco. >> Yeah, I mean, it's really BSS' Lego pieces, right. Assembling these different components and really opening it up. And I think there's been a lot of power by the vendors to keep it locked down, keep it close. Yes, we have an API, but you got to use our people to do it. Here's the hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars that you're going to pay us and keep us in business, and fat and happy, and I'm coming right in on the low end. Right, dropping that price, opening it up. I think telcos are going to love it. >> Well, Mike, you said too, you'll allow the smaller telcos to have the same, actually, better capabilities than the larger telcos, right? Maybe the stack's not as mature or whatever, but they'll get there and they'll get there with a simpler, easier to understand pricing model and way, way faster. >> Yeah. >> All right and that's where the disruption comes. >> And I Think this is where AWS has really done well as a hyper scaler against their competition, is that they've really gotten to market very quickly with their services. Maybe they're not perfect, but they ship 'em. And they get them out there and they get people using them. They use them internally and they get them out. And I think this is where maybe some of the other hyperscalers, they hold them back and they wait until they're a little bit more mature. And AWS is one because they've been fast. And I want to sort of copy that feat. >> I think your idea of subscriber love in your keynote, and I think applies here because Amazon web services has done such a great job of working backwards from the customer. So they'd ship it fast on used cases that they know have been proven through customer interactions. >> Yep. >> They don't just make up new features. And then they iterate. They go, "Okay". >> Start simple, grow on that, learn from the market. What are people using? What are they not using? Iterate, iterate, iterate. >> Okay, so with that in mind, working backwards from your customer, how do you see the feature set evolving for this functionality? How do you see it evolving as a product? >> Yeah, I mean, I think all of the BSS systems today have been designed with manual people on the other side of the screen, right? And we've seen chat bots take off, we've seen, you know, using chat as support. I think we need to start getting into more automation right? Which is really going to change up telco, right? They have thousands of customer support agents and you're like, "Dude, I just want a SIM, that's all I need". >> Yeah. >> Just like, where do I push a button and send an Uber to my house and drop it off or eSim. And so, speeding up business, empowering the subscriber. We know how to interact, we just went through COVID where we learned about different apps that overnight, you can like order all of your groceries and order all of your food and there it is, and it was contactless and... >> It's funny, you said future of work, which we love that term, "work". Workloads, work force, you got all these kind of new dynamics going on with cloud enablement and the changes is radical. And the value is there. There's value opportunities. >> I mean like, you know, where are the ARVR applications, right? Where your agent pops. I saw the demo. There's a strife in Austin and they're going to kill me 'cause I can't remember their name. But they had a little on your mobile phone, a little holographic customer support. Like, "How can I help you"? Right. And I'm like, "Where's that", like, imagine you're like, ATT, you're not like on the phone for like an hour and a half trying to like, figure out what's wrong. And it's like, you know, it knows what's wrong. It understands my needs and so, no one's working on that. We're still working on, keyboards. >> Right, that and chat bot is a great example because it's all AI, and where's the best AI? It's in the cloud because that's where the data is. That's where the best of modeling has been. (chuckles) >> I think your point, it's the scale of data. >> Absolutely. >> And machine learning and AI needs a lot of data points to get really good. I mean, I'm old, I'm 50. I graduated in 1993. I took an AI class from Niels Nielsen, like the godfather of AI, right? Okay, like that AI, even 10 years ago AI, it's just moving so quickly and it's now super affordable. >> Well, I really want to thank you guys for coming up and sharing that knowledge and insight, congratulations on the product and open APIs. Love open API's open source with some new revolution. Danielle and Robin. Thank you so much. >> Thanks so much. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Congratulations. Thank you everyone for coming. (crowd applauding) (people whooping) Okay, back to you in the studio at Cloud City.

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's The Cube, with digital coverage of VMworld 2020, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Okay, welcome back everyone to The Cube's coverage of VMworld 2020 virtual. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, and Stu Miniman, who's covering VMworld virtually from our Cube virtual studios, where we've been doing The Cube coverage for the past six months virtually. Guys, let's wrap up VMworld virtual this year, different, not in person, still packed with content. Again, they tried to replicate and they did a good job of bringing that site together. They didn't overdrive the platform. They have content, but still a big gap in not having it in person. A lot of action on Twitter. Certainly, we've been commenting on cube.net site, and getting all these videos out. But guys, let's wrap up VMworld this year. Great show. Again, content's virtual. So a lot of asynchronous content. The cloud city, lot of solution demos of obviously, Cube commentary on our side. But Dave, what's your reaction to the past few days? >> Well I thought, you know, as always, VMware has some highlight folks show up to their keynotes. John Donahoe, who knows a little bit about the enterprise 'cause he did a couple of years stinted service now, then he jumped to back to his consumer roots, went to Nike. Interestingly, the service now, the company left is, they're approaching $100 billion evaluation now. They're zoning in on Nike. Of course, and then, you had the Nvidia CEO. Everybody does business with Nvidia. And so, that's kind of a check box, but they actually get the CEO to come to your event. I think it's a big deal. So as always, people want to do business with VMware 'cause they got half a million customers, and I thought that was a pretty impressive gets. >> And the CEO from Nvidia, Jensen Huang. I mean, you couldn't ask for a timely guest because of the news with them buying Arm. >> Huge. >> Nvidia just is a key player in the chip game right now. >> Yeah, and I think too, you know, some of the announcements VMware made around Edge and even Telco, Nvidia is going to be huge there in Arm. You know, we think that that is going to be a really new and interesting AI inferencing at the edge. There were some AI announcements, so very strategic. Again, you know, VMware does a great job of identifying those waves and driving engineering to drive customer value. >> Stu, I want to get your take on the announcements, and Dave, you can chime in too 'cause as we saw the Snowflake IPO, to me, this is, this basically rings the bell for the worldwide global computer industry around cloud native. This, to me, puts the full stake in the ground, cloud native. VMware made some bets, Stu. We go back and look at Gelsinger's moves, and Sanjay's move, and the team's moves. Your thoughts on the announcement there, networking, a lot of multicloud, but it's all about operational cloud native, your thoughts. >> Yeah, well John, cloud's so important, you know? Let me make an analogy here. We all talked about, if this pandemic had happened, enter 15 years ago and we were stuck at home without our Netflix, without our Zoom, without our connectivity, where would we be? John, when we started coming to the VMworld show in 2010, it was a huge amount of gear sitting in Moscone and the amount of trucks that needed to deliver all of that. Of course today, it's all built in the cloud, doing those labs are so much easier, and learning and enabling these technologies can be done so much easier. So I think that that really puts a highlight on where we are with the technology and you know, that was one of the key things that we saw in that announcement. So we're VM, we're fit with the big HyperCloud players, how they're hoping to extend, what they have in a hybrid environment from a management standpoint, starting to push out to Edge Solutions, VMware has strong strength with service providers. So there's a lot of things there to dig into, and that we wouldn't have had if we were talking about this five years ago. >> I just love the glam of the Nvidia 'cause the AI angle there is super important, but I'm, you know, I love the Project Monterey, Stu because it kind of digs out VMware trying to set the agenda on Architecture. This is the end-to-end, you know, whether it's the edge of the network from a work perspective person. Even in space, a purpose-built devices at the edge still need to be updated by software. This is a huge architectural shift. Do you think VMware's got the right moves here? >> Well John, VMware's got some great strength in the service provider environment, and of course, you know, great strength in data center. They've been growing their cloud capabilities. So Edge is still a little bit of a jump ball, as we'd like to say. Absolutely like some of the things that they're doing, strong partnerships. We talked about Nvidia, absolutely one of the companies you want to be closely working to to be successful at the edge. So I like what I'm seeing, but as with anything with VMware, until they have thousands of customer doing it, it's still a little bit early for me to have any final say. >> Stu, 30 seconds left. >> Yeah- >> Tanzu portfolio and partnerships. >> Yeah, so the critique I'd have, John, is VMware have been trying for years to go deeper with developers and they've made some progress, but they haven't done enough. They have moved doing more with open source, they've made a number of acquisitions in the space, but it's all about developers, it's about building those apps. If you talk about a hybrid message, you know, Microsoft, nothing about bit but building new apps. VMware is starting to get there, but they still have work to do. >> Guys, great job, 2020 is in the books. The Cube is via virtually. And again, 10 years ago, John Troyer, Eric Nielsen, Robin Matlock was our partners. Now, we're going with the next generation with VMware the next 10 years. Unpredictable, we'll see how it goes. Thanks for joining us today, appreciate it. Okay, thanks everyone for watching. Cube coverage of VMworld 2020. I'm John Furrier, with Stu Miniman, and Dave Vellante. Thanks for watching.

>> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE Conversation. >> Hi I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, we're here for a special CUBE Conversation. Obviously we're remote, we're in the studio most of the time but on the weekends I get an opportunity to talk to friends and experts. And here I wanted to really dig in with an awesome case study around AWS Cloud in a use case that I think is game changing for local communities, especially in this time of COVID. You have local communities where local journalism is suffering, but also connectedness. And connected experience is what's going to make the difference as we come out of this pandemic as a societal impact. But there's a real tech story here I want to dig into. We're here with Dan Drew who is the vice president of engineering for Clinical Didja, they make an app called Local BTV which basically takes over the air television and streams it to an app in your local area, enabling access to linear TV and on demand as well for local communities. It's a phenomenal project and it's unique. Somewhat misunderstood right now, but I think it's going to be something that's going to be very important. Dan, thank you for coming on and chatting with me. >> Thanks for having me, appreciate it. >> Okay so I'm a big fan, I've been using the app in San Francisco. I know New York's on the docket, it might even be deployed. You guys have a unique infrastructure capability that's powering this new app location, and this is the focus of this conversation in this CUBE Talk. Amazon is a big part of this. Talk about your local BTV that you are protecting, this platform for broadcast television, it has a unique hybrid cloud architecture. Can you tell us about that? >> Yeah certainly, I mean, one of our challenges, as you know, is that we are local television. So unlike a lot of products on the market, you know like your Hulus or other VMPV products, which primarily service sort of national feeds and things like that. We have to be able to receive over-the-air signals in each market. Many channels that serve local content are still over the air. And that is why you don't see a lot of them on those types of services. They tend to get ignored and unavailable to many users. So that's part of our value proposition is to not only allow more people to get access to these stations, but allow the stations themselves to reach more people. So that means that we have to have a local presence in each market in order to receive those signals. So that sort of forces us to have this hybrid model where we have local data centers, but then we also want to be able to effectively manage those in a central way, and we do that in our cloud platform which is hosted on Amazon and using Amazon services. >> All right let me take a breath here. You have a hybrid architecture on Amazon so since you're using a lot of the plumbing, take us through what the architecture of this ram is on using a variety of their services. Can you unpack that? >> Yeah, so obviously it starts with some of the core services like EC2, S3, RDS, which everybody on the planet uses. We're also very focused on using ECS; we're completely containerized which allows us to more effectively deploy our services and scale them. And one of the benefits on that front that Amazon provides is that because their container service is wired into all the other services like cloudwatch metrics, auto-scaling policies, IM policies, things like that. It means it allows us to manage those things in a much more effective way, and use those services to much more effectively make those things reliable and scalable. We also use a lot of their technologies, for example, for collecting metrics. So we use Kinesis and Redshift to collect realtime metrics from all of our markets across the U.S. That allows us to do that reliably and at scale without having to manage complex ETL systems like Kafka and other things. As well as store it in a large data lake like Redshift and Corid for analytics and things like that. We also use technologies like Media Tailor, so for example, one of the big features that most stations do not have access to is realtime targeted advertising. In the broadcast space, many ads are sold and placed weeks in advance, and not personalized obviously for that reason. Whereas one of the big features we can bring to the table using our system and technologies like Media Tailor is we can provide realtime targeted advertising which is a huge win for these stations. >> What are some of the unique capabilities that you guys can offer broadcast station partners 'cause you're basically going in and partnering with broadcast stations as well. But also you're enabling new broadcasters to jump in as well. What are some of the unique capabilities that you're delivering, what is Amazon bringing to the table there and what are you doing that's unique? >> Well again, it allows us, because we can do things centrally as well as the local reception, it allows us to do some interesting things like if we have channels that are allowed to broadcast even outside their market, then we can easily put them in other markets and get them even more viewers that way. We have the ability to even do hyper local or community channels that are not necessarily broadcasting all of the standard antennas, but can get us a feed from whatever zip code in whatever market, and we can give them a way to reach viewers in the entire market, in other markets, or even just in their local area. So consider the case where maybe a high school or a college wants to show games or local content, we provide a platform where they can now do that, and reach more people using our app and our platform very very easily. So that's another area that we want to help expand is not just your typical view of local of what's available in Phoenix, but what's available in a particular city in that area or a local community where they want to reach their community more effectively or even have content that might be interesting to other communities in Phoenix or one of the other markets. >> Now I think, just going on a side tangent here, I talked with your partner, Jim Long, who's the CEO, you guys have an amazing business opportunity. Again, I think it's kind of misunderstood, but it's very clear to me that someone who follows and has huge passion about local journalism, you know you see awesome efforts out there like Charlie Sennott from the Ground Truth Project Report for America, they take a journalism kind of print view, but if you add that Didja business model onto this local journalism, you can enable more video locally. I mean, that's really the killer app, video. And now COVID more than ever, I really want to know things like there's a mural in downtown Palo Alto, Black lives matter, I want to know what's going on with the local summer restaurants, putting people out on the sidewalks. Right now I'm limited to like next door or very laggy media, whether it's the website, so again, I think this is an opportunity for that, plus education. I mean, Amazon educate for instance, you can get a degree on computing by sitting on the couch. So again, this is a paradigm shift from an application standpoint that you're providing essentially linear TV to that. >> Exactly. >> In the local economy. So I just want to give you a shout-out for that because I think it's super important. I think people should get behind this, so congratulations. Okay I'm off on my little rant there. Let's get back down to some of that cloud stuff 'cause I think what's super interesting to me is you guys can stand up infrastructure very quickly, and what you've done here, you've leveraged the benefits of Amazon and the goodness of cloud, you essentially can stand up a metro region pretty quickly and pretty impressive. So I got to ask you, what Amazon services are most important for your business? >> Well like I said, I think for us, it's managing the central services so we sort of talked about managing the software, the APIs, and those are kind of the glue, so for us standing up a new metro is obviously getting the data center contracts and all the other messy stuff you have to deal with, just to have a footprint. But essentially once we have that in place, we can spin up the software in the data center and have it hooked into our central service within hours. And we can be starting channels literally within half a day. So that's the real win for us is having all that central glue and that central management system and the scalability where we can just add another 10, 20, 50, 100 markets and the system is set up to scale centrally where we can start collecting metrics through Cloud watch from those data centers, we're collecting logs and diagnostic information so we can detect health and everything else centrally and monitor and operate all of these things centrally in a way that is sane and not crazy. We don't need a 24/7 knock of a thousand people to do this, you know, and do that in a way that we, as a relatively small company, can still scale and do that in a sensible way, and a cost-effective way, which is obviously very important for us at our size, but at any size, you want to make sure if you're going to go into 200 plus markets that you have a really good cost model and that's one of the things where Amazon has really really helped us is allow us to do some really complex things, and in an efficient, scalable, reliable, and cost-effective way. The cost for us to go into a new metro now is so small relatively speaking that that's really what allows us to do as a business and now we just opened up New York and we're going to keep expanding on that model so that's been a huge win for us is evaluating what Amazon can bring to the table versus other third parties or building our own obviously-- >> So Amazon gives you the knock basically leverage and scale. The data center you're referring to, that's pretty much just to get an origination point in the territory. >> Dan: Exactly, that's right. >> So it's not like it's a super complex data center. You can just go in, making sure that they got all the normal path to recovery and the normal stuff, it's not like a heavy duty buildup. Can you explain that? >> Yeah, so one thing we do do in our data centers is because we are local, we have sort of primary data centers where we do do transcoding and origination of the video so we receive the video locally and then we want to transcode and deliver it locally and that way we're not sending video across the country and back type of thing. So that is sort of the hybrid part of our model. So we stand that up, but then that is all managed by the central service. So we essentially have another container cluster using Kubernetes in this case. But that Kubernetes cluster is essentially told what to do by everything that's running in Amazon. So we essentially stand up the Kubernetes cluster, we wire it up to the central service, and then from then on, we just go into the central service and say stand up these channels and it all pops up. >> Well my final question on the Amazon piece is really about the future capability besides having a CUBE channel which we'd love to have on there, I told my guys we'll get there. But we're just too busy working around the clock as you guys are with COVID-19. (overlapping chatter) I could almost see a slew of new services coming out, just on the Amazon side. If I'm on the Amazon side I'm thinking, okay I'll post this as an opportunity for me. I can see sage making and machine learning coming in and adding value for the user experience. And also enabling their own stuff. They've got a ton of stuff with Prime and moving people around and delivering things. I mean the headroom for Amazon in this thing is off the charts. But that being said, that's Amazon, I could see them winning with this. I know certainly I know you're using Elemental as well, but for you guys on the consumer side, what features and what new things do you see on the roadmap or what you might envision the future looking like? >> Well, I think part of it I think there's two parts. One of it is what are we going to deliver ourselves so we talked about adding community content and continuing to evolve the local BTV product. But we also see ourselves primarily as a local TV platform. For example, you mentioned Prime and a lot of people are now realizing, especially with COVID and what's going on, the importance of local television and so we're in discussions on a lot of fronts with people to see how we can be the provider of that local TV content. And that's really a lot of stations are super excited about that too 'cause you know, again, looking to expand their own footprint and their own reach, we're basically the way that we can join those two things together between the stations, the other video platforms, and distribution mechanisms, and the viewers obviously at the end of the day, we want to make sure local viewers can get more local content and stuff that's interesting to them. Like you said with the news, it is not uncommon that you may have your Bay area stations but the news is still maybe very focused on LA or San Francisco or whatever. And so being able to enable the smaller regional outlets to reach people in that area in a more local fashion is definitely a big way that we can facilitate that from the platform and viewer perspective. So we're hoping to do that in any way we can. Our main focus is make local great and get the broadcast world out there and that's not going anywhere especially with things like HSE3 on the front, and we just want to make sure those people are successful and enrich people and make revenue. >> Yeah, you got a lot of (mumbles) but I think one of the things that's interesting about your project that I find is a classic case of people who focus in on just current market value investing, versus kind of the game-changing shifts is that you guys are horizontally enabling in the sense that there's so many different use cases I was pointing out from my perspective, journalism, and I look at that and I'm like, okay that's a huge opportunity just there, changing the game on societal impact on journalism, huge education opportunity for court cutters. You're talking about a whole nother thing around TV so I got to ask ya, pretend I'm an idiot for a minute. Pretend, let's make it, I am an idiot. I don't understand, isn't this just TV? What are you doing different because it's only local. I can't watch San Francisco if I'm in Chicago and I can't watch Chicago if I'm in San Francisco, I get that. But why is this important? Isn't this just TV? Can't I just get it on YouTube, TikTok, what is this? >> Yes and no. There's TV and then there's TV as you know. If you look at the TV landscape, it's pretty fractured but typically when you're talking about YouTube or Hulu, you're talking about sort of cable TV channels. You know, you're going to get your A&E, you're going to get some of your local through ABC and whatnot, but you're not really getting local content. So for example, in our Los Angeles market, there are about 100 and something over-the-air channels. If you look at the cross section of which of those channels you can get on your other big name products like your Hulus or your YouTube TV, you're talking about maybe half a dozen or a dozen. So we're talking about 90 plus channels that are local to LA that you can only get through an antenna. And those are hitting the type of demographics that, quite frankly, some of these other players just don't see as important. >> Under different minorities or immigrants, the each entrepreneurs of our country. >> Yes exactly, so we might see a lot of Korean channels or Spanish channels or other minority channels that you just won't get over your cable channels or your typical online video providers. So that's, again, why we feel like we've got something that is really unique and that is really under-served as far as on a television standpoint. The other side that we bring to the table is that a lot of these broadcast channels are under served themselves in terms of technology. If you look at ad insertion and a lot of the technical discussions about how to do live TV and how to get live TV out there, it's very focused on the OTT market, so again, going back to the Hulus and the YouTubes. >> OTT, over-the-top you mean. >> Over the top, yeah. And so this broadcast market basically had no real evolution on that front in a while and I sort of mentioned the way ad buying works. It's still sort of the traditional ad buying that happens a couple weeks in front, not a lot of targeted or anything ability. And even when we get to HSE3, you're now relying on having an HES3 TV and you're still tied to an antenna, etc, etc, which is, again, a good move forward, but still not covering the spectrum of what these guys really want to reach and do. So that's where we kind of fill in the gaps using technology and filling in the gap of receiving a signal and bringing these technologies to not only the ad insertion and the stuff we can do for the livestream, but providing analytics and other tools to the stations that they really don't have right now unless you're willing to shell out a lot of money for Nielsen, which a lot of local small stations don't do. So we can provide a lot of analytics on viewership and targeting and things like that that they're really looking forward to and really excited about. >> All right, I got to ask you, put you on the spot here, 'cause I always see Andy Jassy at (mumbles) hopefully I'll see him this year if they do an in-person event. He's really dynamic and you should send him an email; he tends to read his emails a lot, and if you're a customer and I know you are, but I've got to ask you, if you bumped into Andy Jassy on the elevator and he's like, hey why should I pay attention to Didja? Why is it important for Amazon and why is it important for the world? How does it raise the bar on society? >> Well I think part of what Amazon's goal, especially if you get into their work in public sector and education, that's really where we see we're focusing with the community and local television and enabling new types of local television. So I think there's a lot of advantage and I hate the word synergy, but I'm going to use the word synergy. As far as our goals in those areas around really helping, one of the terms flying around now is the double bottom line where it's not just about revenue, it's about how do we help people in communities be better as well? So there's a bottom line in terms of people, benefit, and revenue in that way, not just financial revenue. And that's very important to us as a business as well is that's why we're focused on local TV and we're not just doing another Fubo where it's really easy to get an IP national fee. It's really important to us to enable the local community and the local broadcasters and the local channels and the local viewers to get the content that they're missing out on right now. So I think there's a, I hate it but I'm going to use it, synergy on that front as far as-- >> Synergy and the new normal. >> Synergy and the new normal? I think COVID and some of the other things that have been happening in the news with the Black Lives Matter and a lot of the things going around where local and community has been in the spotlight and getting the word out and having really local things versus I'm just seeing this thing from three counties away which I don't really care about and it's not telling me what's happening down the street like you said. And that's really what we want to help improve and support. >> Yeah it's a great mission, and it's one we care a lot about theCUBE. We've seen the data: content drives community engagement, and community's where the truth is. So in an era when we need more transparency and more truth, you get more cameras on the street, you're going to start to see things. That's what we're seeing a lot of things. And as more data's exposed, as you turn the lights on, so to speak, that kind of data will only help communities grow, heal, and thrive. So to me, big believer in what you guys are doing. Local BTV has a great mission. I wish you guys well and thanks for explaining the infrastructure on Amazon. I think you guys have a really killer use case technically. I mean to me, I think the technical superiority of what you've done give ability to stand up to these kinds of network with massive number of potential reach out of the gate, that's pretty impressive, congratulations. >> Great, thank you very much and thanks for taking the time. (upbeat music)

>>from the Keep studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cube conversation. Hi, I'm John Furry with the Cube. We're here for a special Q conversation, housing with remote, where in studio most of the time. But on the weekends, I get an opportunity to talk to friends and experts, and he I wanted to really dig in with an awesome case study around AWS Cloud in a use case that I think is game changing for local community, especially this time of Cove. It you have local community work, local journalism suffering, but also connected this and connected experiences was gonna make. The difference is we come out of this pandemic a societal impact. But there's a real tech story here I want to dig into. We're here with Dan. True is the vice president of engineering for Chemical. Did you? They make a nap coat local be TV, which basically takes over the air television and streams it to an app in your local area, enabling access to many your TV and on demand as well. For local communities, it's a phenomenal project and its unique, somewhat misunderstood right now, but I think it's gonna be something that's going to really put Dan, thank you for coming along and chatting. Thanks >>for having me appreciate it. >>Okay, so I'm a big fan. I've been using the APP in San Francisco. I know New York's on the docket. I might be deployed. You guys have a unique infrastructure capability that's powering this new application, and this is the focus of the conversations. Q. Talk Amazon is a big part of this. Talk about your local be TV that you are protected. This platform for broadcast television has a unique hybrid cloud. Architecture. Can you tell us about that? >>Certainly. I mean, one of our challenges, as you know, is that we are local television eso unlike a lot of products on the markets, you know, like your Hulu's or other VM PV products, which primarily service sort of national feeds and things like that. Ah, we have to be able to receive, um, over the air signals in each market. Um, many channels that serve local content are still over the air, and that is why you don't see a lot of them on those types of services. They tend to get ignored and unavailable to many users. So that's part of our value. Proposition is to not only allow more people to get access to these stations, but, uh, allow the station's themselves to reach more people. So that means that we have to have a local presence in each market in order to receive those signals. Eso that's sort of forces us to have this hybrid model where we have local data centers. But then we also want to be able to effectively manage those in a central way. On. We do that in our cloud platform, which is hosted on Amazon and using Amazon service. >>Let me take take a breath. Here. You have a hybrid architecture on Amazon. So such a using a lot of the plumbing take us through what the architectures ram is on using a variety of their services. Can you unpack that? >>Yeah. So, um, obviously starts with some of the core services, like easy to s three already us, which everybody on planet uses. Um, we're also very focused on using PCs were completely containerized, which allows us to more effectively deploy our services and scale them. Um, and one of the benefits on that front that Amazon provides is that because they're container services wired into all the other services, like cloud, What metrics? Auto scaling policies. I am policies. Things like that. It means it allows us to manage those things in a much more effective way. Um, and use those services too much more effectively make those things reliable and scalable. Um, we also use a lot of their technologies, for example, for collecting metrics. So we use kinesis and red shift to collect real time metrics from all of our markets across the U. S. Uh, that allows us to do that reliably and at scale without having to manage complex each l systems like Kafka and other things. Um, as well a stored in a, uh, large data lake like red shift in Korea for analytics. And you know, things like that. Um, we also use, um, technologies like media Taylor s O, for example, one of the big features that, uh, most stations do not have access to Israel. Time targeted advertising in the broadcast space. Many ads are sold and placed weeks in advance. Um, and not personalized, obviously. You know, for that reason. Where is one of the big features we can bring to the table? Using our system and technologies like Media Taylor is we can provide real time targeted advertising, which is a huge win for these stations. >>What are some of the unique capabilities that you guys are? Offer broadcast station partners because you're basically going in and partnering with broadcast ages as well, but also your enabling new broadcasters to jump. And it's well, what are some of the unique capability that you're delivering? What is that? It's on the table there. What are you doing? This You >>well again. It allows us because we can do things centrally. You know as well as the local reception allows us to do some interesting things. Like if we have channels that, um, are allowed to broadcast even outside their market, Um, then we can easily put them in other markets and get them even more of years. That way we have the ability to even do, like hyper local or community channels, you know that are not necessarily broadcasting over the standard antennas, um, but could get us a feed from, you know, whatever. Zip code in whatever market and we can give them away toe reach viewers in the entire market and other markets, or even just in their local area. So, you know, consider the case where maybe a high school or a college you know, wants to show games or local content. Um, we provide a platform where they can now do that and reach more people, Um, using our app in our platform very, very easily. So that's another area that we want toe help Expand is not just your typical view of local of what's available in Phoenix, Um, but what's available in a particular city in that area or a local community where they want toe, um, reach their community more effectively, or even have content that might be interesting to other communities in Phoenix or one of the other markets? >>No, I think just is not going to side tension here. I talked with your partner. Jim longs to see you guys have an amazing business opportunity again. I think it's kind of misunderstood, but it's very clear to me that follows in. It has huge passion of local journalism. You see awesome efforts out there by Charlie Senate from the ground Truth project report for America. They take a journalism kind of friend few. But if you add like that, did you business model ought to This local journalism you can enable more video locally. I mean, that's really the killer app of video. And now it Koven. More than ever. I really want to know things like this. A mural with downtown Palo Alto Black lives matters. I want to know what's going on. Local summer restaurants, putting people out of sidewalks. Right now I'm limited to, like, next door or very Laghi media, whether it's the website. So again, I think this is an opportunity to that plus education. I mean Amazon educated Prince, that you can get a degree cloud computing by sitting on the couch. So, you know, this is again. This is a paradigm shift from an application standpoint, but you're providing essentially linear TV toe because in the local economy, So I just want to give you a shout out for that because I think it's super important. I think you know, people should get behind this. Eso congratulates. Okay, I'm often my little rant there. Let's get back down to some of that cloud steps. I think what super interesting to me is you guys can stand up infrastructure very quickly and what you've done here, you delivery of the benefits of Amazon of the goodness of cloud you, especially in stand up a metro region pretty quickly try it. And it pretty impressive. So I gotta ask you what? Amazon services are most important for your business. >>Um, well, like I said, I think for us it's matching the central services. So we sort of talked about, uh, managing the software, the AP eyes, um, and those kind of the glue. So, you know, for us standing up a new metro is obviously, you know, getting the data center contracts and all the other you know, >>and >>ask yourself, you have to deal with just have a footprint. But essentially, once we have that in place, we can spin up the software in the data center and have it hooked into our central service within hours. Right? And we could be starting channels >>literate >>literally within half a day. Um, so that's the rial win for us is, um, having all that central blue and the central management system and the scalability where You know, we can just add another 10 20 5100 markets. And the system is set up to scale centrally, um, where we can start collecting metrics their cloudwatch from those data centers. We're collecting logs and diagnostic information. Eso weaken the type health and everything else centrally and monitor and operate all of these things centrally in a way that is saying and not crazy. We don't need a 24 7 knock of 1000 people to do this. Um, you know, and do that in a way that, you know, we, as a relatively small company can still scale and do that in a sensible way, a cost effective way, which is obviously very important for us at our size. But at any size, um, you want to make sure if you're gonna go into 200 plus markets, that you have a really good cost model. Um and that's one of the things that where Amazon has really really helped us is allow us to do some really complex things and an efficient, scalable, reliable and cost effective way. You know, the cost for us to go into the New Metro now is so small, you know, relatively speaking. Um, but that's really allows. What allows us to do is a business of now. We just opened up New York, you know, and we're going to keep expanding on that model. So that's been a huge win for us. Is evaluating what Amazon could bring to the table versus other third parties and or building our own? You know, obviously which >>So Amazon gives you the knock, basically leverage and scale the data center you're referring to. That's pretty much just to get an origination point in the derrick. Exactly. That's right. It's not like it's a super complex data center. You can just go in making sure they got all the normal commute back of recovery in the North stuff. It's not like a heavy duty buildup. Can you explain that? >>Yeah. So one thing we do do in our data centres is because we are local. Um, we have sort of primary data centers. Ah, where we do do trance coating and origination of the video eso we receive the video locally, and then we want to transport and deliver it locally. And that way we're not sending video across the country and back trying to think so that that is sort of the hybrid part of our model. Right? So we stand that up, but then that is all managed by the central service. Right? So we essentially have another container cluster using kubernetes in this case. But that kubernetes cluster is essentially told what to do by everything that's running in Amazon. So we essentially stand up the kubernetes cluster, we wire it up to the Central Service, and then from then on, it just we just go into the Central Service and say, Stand up these channels. Um and it all pops up >>with my final question on the Amazon pieces is really about future capabilities Besides having a cube channel, which I would love to head on there. And I told my guys, We'll get there. But what is this too busy working around the clock is You guys are with Kobe tonight? Yeah, sand. I can almost see a slew of new services coming out just on the Amazon site if I'm on the Amazon. So I'm thinking, OK, outposts. The opportunity from a I got stage maker machine learning coming in any value for user experience and also, you know, enabling in their own stuff. They got a ton of stuff with prime the moving people around and delivering the head room for Amazon. This thing is off the charts. But that being said, that's Amazon could see them winning with this. I'm certainly I know using elemental as well. But for you guys on the consumer side, what features and what new things do you see on the road map or what? You might envision the future looking like, >>Well, I think part of it. I think there's two parts. One is what are we gonna deliver ourselves, you know? So we sort of talked about adding community content and continuing to evolve the local beauty product. Um, but we also see ourselves primarily as a local TV platform. Um, and you know, for example, you mentioned prime. And a lot of people are now realizing, especially with Cove, it and what's going on the importance of local television. Ah, and so we're in discussions on a lot of fronts with people to see how how we can be the provider of that local TV content, you know, um and that's really a lot of stationed are super psyched about that to just, you know, again looking to expand their own footprint and their own reach. You know, we're basically the way that we conjoined those two things together between the station's the other video platforms and distribution mechanisms and the viewers. Obviously, at the end of the day, um, you know, we want to make sure local viewers can get more local content and stuff this interesting to them. You know, like you said with the news, it is not uncommon that you may have your Bay area stations, but the news is still may be very focused on L. A or San Francisco or whatever. Um and so being able to enable, uh, you know, the smaller regional outlets to reach people in that area in a more local fashion, uh, is definitely a big way that we can facilitate that from the platform. And, you know, if you were perspective, so we're hoping to do that in any way we can. You know, our main focus is make local great, you know, uh, get the broadcast world out there, and that's not going anywhere, especially with things like HSC tree. Uh, you know on the front. Um, and you know, we just want to make sure that those people are successful, um, and can reach people and make revenue. And, you know, >>you got a lot of it and search number two. But I think one of the things that's just think about your project that I find is a classic case of people who focus in on that Just, you know, current market value investing versus kind of game changing shifts is that you guys air horizontally, enabling in the sense that there's so many different use cases. I was pointing out from my perspective journalism, you know, I'm like, I look at that and I'm like, OK, that's a huge opportunity. Just they're changing the game on, you know, societal impact on journalism, huge education, opportunity for cord cutters. You're talking about a whole nother thing around TV. I gotta ask you, you know, pretend I'm an idiot for a minute by our pretending that this person from this making I amenity after I don't understand is it Isn't this just TV? What are you doing? Different? Because it's only local. I can't watch San Francisco. I'm in Chicago and I can't watch Chicago in San Francisco. I get that. You know why? Why is this important? Isn't this just TV? Can I just get on YouTube? Mean Tic tac? Well, talk about the yes >>or no. I mean, there's TV, and then there's TV, You know, as you know, um and, you know, if you look at the TV landscape just pretty fracture. But typically, when you're talking about YouTube or who you're talking about, sort of cable TV channels, you know, you're gonna get your Annie, you're going to get some of your local to ABC and what not? Um, but you're not really getting local contact. And So, for example, in our Los Angeles market, um, we there are There are about 100 something over the air channels. If you look at the cross section of which of those channels you can get on your other big name products like you lose your YouTube TV, you're talking about maybe 1/2 a dozen or a dozen, right? So there's like 90 plus channels that are local to L. A. That you can only get through an antenna, right? And those air hitting the type of demographics. You know, quite frankly, some of these other players or just, you know, don't see is important >>under other minorities. Back with immigrants, you know, hit the launch printers of our country. Yes, >>exactly. You know, So, you know, we might see a lot of Korean channels or Spanish channels or other. You know, um, minority channels that you just won't get over your cable channels or your typical online video providers. So that's again Why, you know, we feel like we've got something that is really unique. Um, and that is really underserved, you know, as far as on a television sampling, Um, the other side that we bring to the table is that a lot of these broadcast channels are underserved themselves in terms of technology. Right? If you look at, you know, at insertion, um and you know, a lot of the technical discussions about how to do live TV and how to get live tv out there. It's very focused on the o t T market. So again, going back to who lose and >>the utility well, over the top of >>over the top. Yeah. Um and so this broadcast market basically had no real evolution on that front in a while, you know? And I sort of mentioned, like the way ad buying works. You know, it's still sort of the traditional and buying that happens a couple weeks in front. Not a lot of targeted or anything ability. Um, And even when we get to the HSC three, you're now relying on having an H s street TV and you're still tied to an antenna, etcetera, etcetera, which is again, a good move forward, but still not covering the spectrum of what these guys really want to reach and do. So that's where we kind of fill in the gaps, you know, using technology and filling in the gap of receiving a signal and bringing these technologies. So not only the ad insertion and stuff we can do for the life stream, Um, but providing analytics and other tools to the stations, uh, that they really don't have right now, unless you're willing to shell out a lot of money for Nielsen, which a lot of local small stations don't do s so we can provide a lot of analytics on viewership and targeting and things like that that they're really looking forward to and really excited >>about. I gotta ask you, put you on the spot. He'll because I don't see Andy Jassy. It reinvented might. Hopefully I'll see him this year. They do a person event. He's really dynamic. And you just said it made me think he tends to read his emails a lot. And if your customer and you are. But if you bumped into Andy Jassy on the elevators like, Hey, why should I pay attention to? Did you? What's why is it important for Amazon? And why is it important for the world? How does it raise the bar on society? >>Well, I think part of what Amazon's goal And you know, especially if you get into, you know, their work in the public sector on education. Um, you know, that's really where you know, we see we're focusing with the community on local television and enabling new types of local television eso. I think there's a lot of, uh, advantage, and, um, I hate the word synergy, but I'm going to use the word synergies, you know, um, this for us, You know, our goals in those areas around, you know, really helping, you know, Uh, you know, one of the terms flying around now is the dot double bottom line, where it's not just about revenue. It's about how do we help people and communities be better as well? Um, so there's a bottom line in terms of, uh, people benefit and revenue in that way, not just financial revenue, Right? And you know, that's very important to us as a business as well is, you know, that's why we're focused on local TV. And we're not just doing another food. Go where it's really easy to get a night. The national feed. You know, it's really important to us to enable the local, um, community and the local broadcasters and local channels and the local viewers to get that content, Um, that they're missing out on right now. Um, so I think there's a energy on that front A so >>far, synergy and the new normal to have energy in the near normal. You know, I think I think Kobe did. >>And you know, um, and some of the other, uh, things that have been happening in the news of the black lives matter and, um, you know, a lot of things going around where you know, local and community has been in the spotlight right and getting the word out and having really local things versus 100. Seeing this thing from, you know, three counties away, which I don't really care about, it's not telling me what's happening down the street, like you said, Um, and that's really what we want to help improve and support. >>Yeah, I know it's a great mission is one we care a lot of cute. We've seen the data content drives, community engagement and communities where the truth is so in an era where we need more transparency and more truth, you get more cameras on the street, you're gonna start to see things. That's what we're seeing, a lot of things. And as more data is exposed as you turn the lights on, so this week that kind of data will only help communities grow, heal and thrive. So, to me, big believer in what you guys are doing local be TV is a great mission. Wish you guys well and thanks for explaining the infrastructure on Amazon. I think you guys have a really killer use case. Technically, I mean to me. I think the technical superiority of what you've done. Abilities stand up. These kinds of networks with massive number potential reach out of the gate. It's just pretty impressive. Congratulations, >>Right. Thank you very much. And thanks for taking the time. >>Okay. Dan Drew, vice president of James. Did you start up? That's a lot of potential. Will. See. Let's go check out the comments on YouTube while we're here. Since we got you, let's see what's going on the YouTube front year. Yeah. The one question was from someone asked me, Was stiff from TV Cres that William Dan, Great to see you. Thanks for taking the time on Sunday and testing out this new zoom home recording my home studio, which I got to get cleaned up a little. Thank you for your time problem. Okay, take care.

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering UiPath Forward Americas 2019. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of UiPath Forward. I'm your host Rebecca Knight, co-hosting alongside of Dave Vellante. We're joined by Param Kahlon, he is the Chief Product Officer at UiPath, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you so much for having me here. >> So-- >> Big week! >> Yes. >> You've been busy! >> I have been busy. >> (Rebecca laughs) >> Thank you David. >> So this morning, you were up on the main stage, and you were sort of giving the audience a state of play of business today. And you were lamenting, saying, "Wasn't technology supposed to make our lives easier? "Wasn't it supposed to free us from the mundane, "and supposed to make us more efficient?" And yet, hasn't quite ended up that way. You had the quote, the famous quote, "We see computers everywhere "except in the productivity statistics," from Robert Solow, the Nobel winner. Can you refine that a little bit? And particularly within the context of the RPA market. >> Yeah, isn't it exciting? I mean, we really have so much technology that we live in today, yet we're busier, we're doing more mundane work than we've ever done before. We're more stressed than ever before. That just seems sort of paradoxical to me that, you know, all this stuff that was supposed to give us more time to do the things that we wanted to do, yet we keep doing the repetitive, robot type work that, you know, we thought technology will free us from. And I think that's fascinating that, you know, that's happening. And I think there's a few theories on why we think that's happening. I think it's happening because business has gotten a lot more complex. You know, companies are having to change business models on the fly. Digital transformation is effecting standard companies, regulated industries, in ways that they did not imagine, and companies don't know how to cope and manage all the technology well. And this where, I think, RPA is really, really useful, because it can help you change the processes, modernize the processes without having to go change, rip and replace those existing systems. You know, do the work that you were going to hire humans to do in moving data, moving processes from one system to another. Do that through robots. And that's what our robots can help free the humans, to be able to focus on the things that matter, the things that they care about, right? That's really what the beauty of the RPA is. >> So I wonder if you can help our audience, you know, understand UiPath a little bit better. You know, Daniel talks about, how is it that UiPath has ascended so quickly? And you appear to be achieving escape velocity. You kind of started out, you know, third, fourth, whatever it was, and now you're sort of number one in all these quadrants and waves. And so yesterday you talked about five pillars. And I want to unpack them a little bit. Open platform, rapid results, which I think is around ROI. Path to AI, scalability, and trust. So here's my question. Any one of your competitors could say the same thing. "Oh yes, we're open. "Oh, we get rapid ROI." So what makes UiPath different? >> I think actually not just saying those words, but making it happen, right? So anybody can say we've opened, we've done something, but do people actually have 400,000 community members that have actually using the platform on an active basis? Can you actually go to a website over the last two years and download the software and use it? How long does it take you to sign up for a cloud service that we have made available? What does it take for you to do that? I think all the things that we've invested in, in really enabling engagement with the community, right? Making it open, not just from a technology perspective, but from a people perspective as well, are the things that have differentiated ourselves. And those can be very generic terms, that you're right, other people can use as well, but I think we live those terms, right? We actually do everything in the product, from the business perspective, to make sure that openness is embraced. You know, when we look at building new capabilities, new products, we focus on, is it actually going to help our customers get quicker value, right? Is it going to help them reduce five clicks to be able to get that process done? And if so, then we should build this feature because it will make it easier, and engage more people in the audience, more people like the customer to be able to get work done. So we're super excited about bringing all those capabilities >> Okay, so the big part of that is the product. I mean if you have a great product, that always helps. It's not the sole condition, but it helps a lot. >> Param: Yeah. >> Many times we've seen leaders that don't have the best product, but I'm guessing you feel as though you have the best product. So architecturally, what is it about UiPath that's different, that differentiates you? >> Yeah, I think the core difference is, I'd say, fundamentally at a company level, is in our culture. This is a culture that's built around customers. This is a culture that's built around humility. This is a culture that's built around getting things done, and being fast about it, right? You saw a lot of product innovation that we did. If we told you a year ago, we're going to do all this, you would've laughed at our face, right? We're continue to do that pace, at the pace the market wants. And I think that is the fundamental difference in us, versus the rest of the companies out there. I'd also like to believe that we are, from a technology perspective, we have an edge, because we didn't start with the legacy of doing RPA many, many years ago. We have a much more modern stack. You alluded to the fact that we came in from behind, and we've taken to the number one place very quickly. I think part of that is the architecture decisions that we've made are more modern, are not vetted in a lot of legacy, that are helping us bring more rapid innovation to the market. That are helping us build more resilient technology, that's helping our customers achieve those outcomes, the goals that they want to be able to do, more easily on our platform. We have a number of our customers that actually did not start with us. They started with one of our competitors, and they said, "We started, we thought it was going to work, "it didn't. We came to UiPath and we saw that "it actually works." And that's a testament to the technology that we built, that's actually helping deliver the results that our customers expect it to. >> Rebecca: So, >> Dave: You know, >> Sorry Rebecca, go ahead. >> I was just going to say that, one of the other things you said this morning, was that bots allow you to focus on you, focus on the more creative aspects of your job, and you brought up some customers, PepsiCo and Nielsen, too. Can you describe sort of, how you're helping customers focus on themselves, these employees who are now, you're taking away the tedium, and that's great, and they're giddy about that. But how are they, then, channeling that energy into strategy, innovation, and the sort of more value added things? >> Param: Yeah, you know I'll give you a really quick example of a customer, that I worked with, it's a bank. And in this bank, it's a retail bank, and what used to happen before we deployed UiPath, was the banker had to go to like six different applications, and pull reports of the customer they were about to go meet, print them all out, review the data, and be able to suggest what the customer's unique needs might be, right? So for that half an hour appointment with the customer, it used to take that banker another half an hour to get ready for that appointment. After the deployed UiPath robots, UiPath's robots now go pull up the data for the customer, from those six different core banking systems, and be able to feed that to a machine learning system, to suggest what their unique needs might be. So they need five minutes to get ready for that appointment. They're more ready for that appointment, and they deliver a better outcome. People want to help other people, right? They don't want to go to systems, and print reports, and read them, and understand what it might be. They really want to be able to go meet with the customer, and help solve their problems, that help the customer, but also help the business goals for the bank. And that's what makes the people that are using our technology more happier, right? It makes them free enough to say that, instead of now spending half an hour printing stuff, I now have that extra 25 minutes, because I still need five minutes to get ready, I have the extra 25 minutes, to think about, what else can I do to further more creative aspects of my job? Or maybe I don't have to work as hard as I did in the past. >> I wonder if I could ask you about, I've been drawing parallels today with another company, ServiceNow, that I've been tracking for a long time. And they started out in this kind of narrow, change management, ITSM space >> Param: ITSM, yeah. >> And then expanded their TAM dramatically. And you shared with us, yesterday and today in the keynote, You've got RPA for devs and testers, you know StudioT, that targets 2% of the market. and then you've got the citizen developers, that's StudioX, that expands up to 10%. Business analysts, which is Explorer and Insights, that gets you to 25%. And then apps, where automation is the apps, that was a little fuzzy to me, so I want to dig into it a little bit, but that's 100% of the market. That's your, whatever it is, 20, 40, 50 billion dollar TAM. My question is this, I was going to the event last night, and I ran into some business analysts. So you're already working with those folks. So it seems like you're learning from folks that are sort of using a product, that was maybe developed for testers and devs, but they're using it today as business analysts, and you're improving that. Can you help us just understand your product strategy, just in terms of what you've announced, and how it dove tails into those segments that we just talked about? >> Absolutely, so you know, our product strategy isn't tied to like, what are we going to do to grow our TAM, and other stuff. Our marketing organizers can get super excited about that, Bobby is all over that, but really everything we've done in the product today, is about listening to customers. Understanding what their needs are, what do they want us to grow into, and what capabilities they want us to go build, right? So we've expanded the StudioX, not because we thought everybody should have StudioX, but we actually had customers that took our product, the Studio product, and said, "We want to roll this out "to every single user within the enterprise." Because they thought that every person has unique needs and they should be able to build a bot for themselves. Well they came back and told us, well we wanted to do that, but this isn't really quite ready for all of our accountants. This isn't quite ready for all of our business analysts. Can you actually make it simple? All of these people use Excel, can you make it look like Excel? So we took all of that feedback, and that's what we focused on, building StudioX. So we can make sure we meet the needs of the market. And every single pillar of the investment that we've done, has focused around making sure that we're able to meet those requirements around those. Automation is the application, now I'm going to go to that. And that also came from, you know, there's different kinds of, if you look at, take a product like Analytics, right? Or Reporting. Different people within the organization have different kinds of needs. There's people that are like, "Hey I want to create my own reports, "I want to slice and dice, I want to understand the strands, "and I'm going to use it this way." Then there's somebody who says, "Oh, I want to bring more data into that, "and I want to do data joins, "and I really am going, I'm a data junky, "I'm going to build a data model around it." And then there's users that are like, "I just want to use the report, I want somebody else to build them, I just want this report every Monday morning." Those are more executives, they're like, I just want to look at the data, let me tell you my report, and I'm just going to use it, I'm just an end user. And that's what we're trying to do, is from an automation perspective, there's people that have different types of needs. There's going to be people that are true developers, RPA developers that we've targeted with Studio, then there's people that are business analysts that are like, I can do some stuff with it, I'm not going to spend 8 hours a day every day working on it, I may spend two hours, once a week, building something that's relevant for me. And that's what StudioX is targeted to. But then there's a whole lot of other users, that are like, I don't want to build anything myself, but I want to use it, things that are relevant for me. These are people, maybe like contact center agents, that are taking orders from customers. So, let's say, in a typical Fortune 500 company, if you hired a person to take orders today, you'd have to go train the person in at least 10 different applications to be able to take orders, right? You'd have to show them how it works, when a customer calls, if it's a material order take it in this SOP system, if it's a this order that came through an acquired company, take it in that system. That takes a lot of time. What is the call center agent, the order taking person, doing? They're essentially capturing some very basic information from the customer, that are saying, I am this customer, I want this, this, and this product to be shipped at this address, and tell me when you can ship it, and what is the price for that? What we're trying to do with that application, is give that order agent a very simple interface, where they can punch in the three things simply, and get the results back that the customer cares about, without having to learn how to jump hoops across these 15 different applications to be able to enter that. Because robots can learn those applications, and take what you have put into that interface, and do the work of putting in, cascading that data, and extracting information from those systems. That is the concept behind, automation is the application. >> Sounds like a killer app. >> Yeah, it is. Yeah I like to say it that way as well. >> I want to ask you about cloud. Cause you guys announced the ability, and I did it, I went and downloaded, not downloaded but I signed up, it took seconds. I mean it was simple, and now I got to invite other people, and start, you know, digging in. But we saw this with CRM. Email, Service Management, HR, now even analytic databases, all got SaSified. >> Param: Right. >> I'm curious as to why, not really it took so long, why didn't you start with SaS? Is there something unique about RPA? Is it cause Daniel was a Microsoft guy, pre-Azure? And will this industry eventually go all SaS? Or will it be hybrid, or? >> Param: I think it's like any other workload in the enterprise, there's some customers that are going to want to remain on premise, because that's who they are, that's what they do. >> Governance, compliance, all those, security, right. >> Governance, compliance, you know, we're special. And then there's other customers that are like, you know, we're going where the rest of the world is going. We're going to let this data center work in a cloud, that we believe is secure, has the governance and compliance. So I think we're meeting customers where they are. We're going to continue to support on premise deployments. We will continue to support deployments for customers that want to deploy on private cloud infrastructure. And we'll keep deploying customers that want to use in SaS. Your question was why did it take so long for this to go to that? I think, my theory behind that, is that a lot of the automations that are happening, are touching systems that are only available on premise. Some of these are affecting systems that haven't moved to the cloud, So companies are saying, well I've got to put my robot on premise, because it's got to touch this application that's on premise. I might as well deploy the whole infrastructure on premise. And what we've done with the cloud service, is we've given you the options. You will definitely run their infrastructure in the cloud. That manages and governs the robots. And you can decide to run the robots on premise, or you can decide to run the robots in the cloud, as VMs and machines in any data center. >> So if I can put it in my words, the data lives on prem. >> Param: Yes. >> So you're bringing the automation to where the data lives, independent of the cloud, so that's really why. So the latency issues, we mentioned the other ones, compliance, governance, you know, security, etc. But there's going to be performance implications as well. If you've got a lot of data on-prem, you want to be on prem. >> Again, yeah, it just depends upon, if you've got a lot of data on-prem, and more importantly the business applications that you're using, let's say you're trying to automate a process in a mainframe application that hasn't moved through any cloud yet, that's sitting on a server in the on-premise environment. And the robot can only access it if it's deployed on a machine that sits within the same network, then you've got to put the robot in there, that can access it there as well. >> Dave: It makes sense, it's not a standalone application. It's automating other apps, and touching others, it's got dependencies all over the place. >> Exactly, it's sort of like the lowest common denominator. If every application your touching is the cloud, there's no reason you want to put the robot on premise. You would want to put the robot in the cloud as well. But the reality is that people have moved some applications to the cloud, but not every application to the cloud, that the business process is touching. >> Dave: Well a lot of ERP, a lot of financials, I would imagine the folks I talked to last night were insurance industry, so. >> Yeah, those industries have a lot of homegrown systems, built a long time ago. >> Rebecca: So there's been a lot of exciting product announcements at this conference, but I want you to talk about what's coming up ahead. What are some of the things that you're working on, that are most exciting to you, as these bots become smarter, more durable, and more able to take on complex tasks? What are we going to be talking about at next year's UiPath? >> Yeah, I think that's a really interesting question, and I think you'll hear talk next year about a few things. One is, we started a lot of initiative this year, and we're going to release the version one of many of our products this time. We're going to keep focusing on making sure we make them enterprise ready, we take the feedback across the customers, and make it ready for what they're able to do. I think another key initiative that we're focused on, is contact center. We see mass adoption of our technology in contact centers, and today what we do, is we give our customers the components that we will deploy in call centers, but we don't actually have a finished solution for call centers. Call centers have a lot of automation opportunities, we'll build a more finished solution for contact centers. The other stuff that you'll hear us do more next year, is the concept of applications. We have some ways to build applications today, but I think we're going to grow that ability to create applications, compose applications, very quickly, and you'll hear us do a lot more next year there. >> Rebecca: Well we'll look forward to hearing about it. >> Param: I really look forward to telling you next year about it. >> Dave: Thanks for coming on. >> Rebecca: Thank you so much, Param >> Thank you so much. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante, that wraps up day one of UiPath Forward, come back tomorrow for more. >> [Electronic Music]

>> live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage. It's the Cube covering Veum World 2019. Brought to you by IBM Wear and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome to our live coverage here in Mosconi North Lobby, Of'em World 2019. I'm John for a Student and a Volante celebrating our 10th VM World or 10 years of covering the M world. Dave's stew. What a run been Go back across Mosconi South 10 years ago with the green set. This is 10 years later. 10:10 p.m. World BMC Rule No longer the show, so that kind of folds in the Dell Technologies Man, The world's changed. Pat Nelson had just delivered his keynote as CEO Sanjay Poon and a CEO came on talk to customers stew. A lot of acquisitions, a lot of cloud native, a lot of cloud. 2.0, this is turning into VM. Wear 2.0, where vm zehr kind of only one part of the equation. So let's jump into the analysis, Dave. I mean, you put out some killer research on silken angle dot com, and we keep on dot com around customer spend still, we put out a lot of analysis on all the key trends that Vienna was playing into. Cloud two point. Oh, is what we're calling it. It's enterprise Cloud of fresh scale Day. What? What? What? What do you want? Your analysis, Latino >> John, when you go back. 10 VM Worlds ago, it was all about virtualization, completely changing the deployment dynamics. When when I first saw a VM deployed, I went, Oh, my God, This is gonna change everything. And it did. But while compared to now what's happening with cloud and a I we heard so much about five g. It was also the big, big difference in the ecosystem. Back when e. M. C owned VM wearing 2010 there was that sort of Chinese wall stew. You were working there, you know, just before that. And there wasn't a lot of, you know, swapping of I P, if you will. They were sort of treating them as unequal player to net app and everybody else out there. Tod Nielsen used to say, for every dollar spent on of'em were licensed, 15 spent an ecosystem. You don't hear that kind of narrative anymore, you hear we're crushing the HC. I vendor where number one basically a sort of backhand to Nutanix We heard on the on the keynote Very tight integration VX rail project Dimension So much, much tighter integration since Pat Tell Singer joined VM. Where from the emcee lots has changed >> will be a lot of research on reporting leading up to the show around Cloud two point. Oh, I'll see Dev. Ops is willing to home of the dimension on enterprise scale, the number of acquisitions of'em wears made and then, boom. They dropped two monsters on the table or the 11th hour pivotal for 2.7 billion carbon black for 2.1 billion. Lot of stories in those AK was other acquisitions, your analysis and how that played out today on the >> Kino. As Dave said when we started coming to this event back in 2010 you know, the virtual machine was the center of the universe. What were these servers that it lived on, how to storage and network and get fixed to be ableto live in that environment And the keynote. It was a lot of cloud, you know, John, we brought in a lot of the Cloud camp people that first year and some people were like, Why are we talking about Cloud? This is VM World, and we're like, Well, this is the future. And today we're not talking about V EMS at the center we're talking about containers were talking about cloud native applications, that multi cloud world absolutely something that pack l singer did. Front center actually felt it almost glossed over a little bit of the H C, I and NSX and all these wonderful things. Sure, there was some big del pieces in there. The M word cloud on Delhi emcee the Del Di are, you know, data protection, power protect, you know, into the VM where peace something that you definitely would not have seen under the old emcee Federation model. So Michael Dell, absolutely having his strong footprint here. Dave's done a lot of analysis talking about things like Pivotal getting pulled in and like so many different acquisitions, Pivotal came out of'em wear and, you know, carbon black Boston based companies so many different pieces here to get them talking about applications and where Veum, where the company sits in this multi cloud world where they're trying to be, you know, maintain their relationship with us. >> Let's get into the analysis on the whole ecosystems. I really want to dig into the work. Dave, you didn't and the team did. But let's go through the keynote first. So my personal opinion was it felt like, um, I'll give him a C plus Pat because it just didn't have a lot of meat. In my opinion, it felt like it was too much tech for good, although super important to have that mission driven stuff I think is really valuable as the market tends to look >> at tech >> as bad actors. I thought that was addressing. That was a positive thing, but it felt too much. I didn't see a lot of specifics. It felt do is and David, if they were hiding something, they were putting a lot of it didn't seem like there's a lot of substance coming out specifically around how Kubernetes was going to be impacted. Specifically, how Cooper is going to sit within the VM where ecosystem products specifically I just didn't feel like the product side was there. >> Well, you know what? I'll say it, John and General, I agree with you because Day one usually is here is the company vision. And if the vision is kubernetes, well, we've been hearing kubernetes for a bunch of years. Kubernetes is not the answer. Kubernetes is an enable ionizing technology job. Ada, who we up on stage? You know, we had him on the Cuban. He's like, look committed. This is not a magic layer. It's this thin layer that's gonna help us go between clouds. Getting into some of their future projects is something I usually would expect on Day two, the vision of V. M. Whereas a company, it feels like we're in that transition from who do you want a big tech for? Good? That that's great stuff. You know, Pat has a long history of talking about, you know, that moral compass that he has and wants the company to live. That which is a good change from many of the Silicon Valley companies. But, you know, I didn't get a strong feel for their vision and it was not >> a conservative. They didn't want to actually put a position down there because I think everyone in the hallway that I talked to wants to know how Cooper is gonna impact the sphere for instance, is gonna change the makeup of the sphere. And what's the impact on the product side the head that stat about bare metal being 8%. I was like, a little bit biased. Maybe there, So are they. They tiptoeing. Dave, you think? I mean, the spend numbers show that if you could just hold the line for 24 months and the new trends won't take away from that license, I mean, is it a tactical thing? Or do you think that here's the >> thing? I want to go back? I do want to give'em where? Props on one thing and you've used this term to If you go back to 8 4009 Paul Maritz talked about. We're building the software mainframe and passed them pretty consistent about that they used, they said, Any workload, any app? What's different today than back then is, he said, any workload, any up any cloud. Really. Cloud wasn't as much of a factor back then, but that vision has been fairly consistent it to you. Answer your question, Veum. We're spending remains strong, you know they're spending data that we shared with the GT R on silicon angle yesterday and today is that 41% of the VM were installed. Base is going to spend Maurine the second half of 2019 and only 7% are going to spend less. Okay, that's a real positive. But at the same time, the data clearly shows that cloud is negatively impacting VM wear spend and so that's a real threat. So multi club Pat said today technologists who Master Master Multi Cloud will own the next decade. He's talking to his audience. I'm not sure I agree with that. How much you're mastering Multi Cloud is what's gonna be the determining factor to own the next decade. >> Well, I'm stumped. Stick with my position. That multi cloud is not a reality. I think it's really more overhyped, and our actually just started to be hyped and probably will be then over hypes. And then seven years from now we'll start seeing multiple clouds truly interoperable. But I think multi cloud is we find on the Cuba simply enterprises have multiple vendors and multiple environments that happen to be those vendors have cloud, so I don't think it actually is an operating model yet. But again, just like on the Cube 2012 stew. We talked about hybrid Cloud. I called. I asked, yes. When was it a halfway house of the weigh station? He had a connection. >> So gassy. So, John, here's what I say. Number one is customers today absolutely have multiple clouds. But for multi cloud, to be a reality multi cloud must be greater than the sum of just the piece is that it's made up today and absolutely were not there. Today. VM wear has a strong reason why it should be at the center of that discussion. But they're gonna be right at loggerheads with Red Hat and Microsoft and Google and Cisco in that kind of debate at the multi cloud >> and we had, we had a story on our special report on silicon angle dot com. Check it out. It's called Coping With Multi Cloud. Were coping was by design. Coping as a mechanism used to deal with uncertainty. Coping strategies is what CEOs are going to deal with. But read that post. But in it I kind of see. I mean, I kind of agree and disagree. We have two perspectives, Dave developing. You want to get your thoughts butts do on this C I ose that come from a traditional I t background tend to like multi vendor things because they know they don't want lock. And they're afraid if you then swing to the progressive side si SOS, for instance, who are have a gun to their head in terms of security, they're all saying no, we're betting on one cloud and we'll have backup clouds, but our development staff is gonna build stacks. Have AP eyes, and we'll share those AP ice to our suppliers. Cloud vendors are saying Support our specs. So to spectrums the old school I t. Guys saying Multi vendor equals multi cloud. And then then, on the other end, See says to say, I'm gonna build technology and build a stack, exposed FBI's and let the clouds support my my tooling that not the other way around your thoughts. I >> pulled a quote in my piece That's on Silicon angle as well. From David. If lawyer and he was defining a hybrid multi cloud, he said, any application of application service can run on any note of the hybrid cloud without rewriting re compiling a re testing. My argument would be you're never gonna have that North Star without a high degree of homogeneity. And there's three examples of high degrees of homogeneity in hybrid Cloud. Today it's azure stack. It's clouded customer, and it's outposts. You're so this idea that we're gonna have this diverse set of clouds and yet they're all gonna run is one to me. I ask, Is it technically feasible? And is it Is it practical? >> Well, Steve, Steve Harry was on his Hey had announced the signal. FX has come. Portfolio can be sold on a big deal to split when he was on The Cube with me last week and he said one of them looking back on the 10 years that 1 may be M where great was virtual ization allowed for massive efficiencies and improvements without rewriting the apse. The question today's point is, is that a reality? Can what's next? So that that next gain that's not gonna require people to rewrite their APs >> well and that actually not rewriting the axes where VM or has its strength. Because, you know, I I made a joke during the keynote. It was like you have a V M insert magic. Congratulations. You now have a cloud workload because I just did. VM were cloud and it's the same app. But on the other hand, that's actually been my biggest dig on V M. Where is the long pole? In the tent and modernization is modernizing wraps. And that is that Tom Zoo that Veum were announced. They're taking bit Nami and pivotal because we do need to modernize the application. If you have an application, you've been running long enough that your users are complaining about it. We need to modernize that. VM wear has not been much of enabler of that pivotal. Yes, absolutely. That's what the cloud Foundry Labs, the pivotal Labs has been doing for years. It is a tough thing to do. That's what the developers we hear it Amazon. They're building new abs. I don't hear modern building new app at VM where, but they are moving in that >> direct question for you guys and John you in particular, but also used to as well followed AWS probably more closely than any two people I know, Pat said. Strength, lies and differences, not similarities. I've noted many differences in philosophy between A. W S and V M. where they're both winning in the market place. We know a divorce is growing much faster, but a divorce doesn't believe in multi cloud. A Devil's doesn't believe security is broken. That's that's VM wears narrative VM where says it wants to be the best infrastructure and develop our software company. That's kind of like eight of us is the platform for that. They both want to be the security cloud, and and VM were said today they have 10,000 cloud data centers, and I'm guessing that Andy Jassy wouldn't think that many of those data centers are cloud data centers. Your thoughts on the differences between between A. W S s philosophy and VM wears narrative. And can they both? Is there enough market for them both to win? >> Well, it's strikingly different. I mean, AWS is just in a breed of its own. VM wears hedging and playing there their bets. They're kind of putting, you know, bets on each horse, right? Interesting enough in the cloud thing. There was no mention of Google Cloud. I didn't see that mentioned there. Andi was speculation. Wouldn't Oracle be great partnering with Google? That's not a rumor. I'm just kind of put it out there. That would be a good combination partnership, given the Oracle's cloud is failing miserably, I think v M. Where because of the operating leverage in the enterprise, has that operational layer down to me, Amazon is the model, the future, because they are clearly born with a dev ops mindset. They have an environment where developers can build applications and they could operate. It scale with all the efficiencies of operations. So I think cloud to foreigners were calling. It is all about having developers and operational excellence without a lot of disruption or re platforming. So I think that's where the differences are. You have company that have toe have to work with this world of legacy applications, and that requires first lift and shift, which doesn't become attractive. Then you add containers on the game changes. So I think container ization really was, I think, the seminal moment in the shift where where you got kubernetes and containers. So let the enterprise cloud. Native guys get in and have an operational framework that takes advantage of the horsepower of public cloud, which is computing storage, which is why we think networking and security will be the absolute focus areas for Cloud two point. Oh, and Amazon is just dominating the depth and the ops. And I don't think anyone is coming close. >> I'd love to hear your thoughts, too, but I just got caught. I don't think Oracles Cloud is failing miserably. I think it's I wouldn't say it that way. I think their infrastructures of service is irrelevant and the cloud is all about SAS. But just, you know, that's what I think. Waken debate that somebody >> has been great for the Oracle customers. But in terms of all metrics in terms of public and enterprise, cloud with multiple environments nonstarter. >> So there's a bit of a schism out there if you talk to customers. There are many customers when they deploy in Public Cloud, although uses, you know, compute storage and, like the identity management and that's it. And they'll stop and I talkto you con many customers that are using kubernetes so that if they want to hit the eject button, but they're all on Amazon today, so it's not like they're all fleeing Amazon or doing it. But we talked to lots of developers that are deep in aws they're using those service is they're using Lambda and they're building it. So how deep will they go? And that's where I look at this VM we're offering. And it's if I'm gonna take the sphere and extend that with kubernetes. I saw Cuba. Well, um, actually in the Twitter stream said it is, you know, cloud lock in to Dato is what we get if we do that. Because the whole reason VM were originally created called Foundry. So they didn't have to take that entire V's fear colonel and put it everywhere. So it's a nice bridge. That van, where has the partnership they have with AWS is a great strategy. But I still think it is a bridge to an ultimate solution where they'll still use the M where the embers not going anyway. But that shift of where my application live in what service is I do is going to change a lot over the next 3 to 5. >> Let's not lose sight, Dave, of where we are in the industry. I mean, we're at VM World 2019. We go to reinvents coming up. We kind of live in a tech bubble in the sense that all this stuff is all kind of great skating to where the puck is gonna be. But the reality is in most I tea shops, and again, I use ceases as a proxy in my mind, because they're in the cutting edge of all the real critical nature of security, of the impact that harm that could happen to a company. So I look at sea. So she's more of a canary in the coal mine for trends than the nutritional CEO. At this point, most enterprises are just trying to rationalize kubernetes, generally speaking like never mind, like making a centerpiece of their entire architecture. They're looking at their existing environment saying, Hey, I got V EMS that did great for me. Serve a consolidation enabled more efficiency, not rewriting code. Now what? I gotta do kubernetes and do all this other stuff. How do I suspect my VM with kubernetes? Is it on bare metal? So I think we're way ahead right now. In the narrative, I think the reality is that people catch up. That's where the proof is gonna come into. That's why the customer survey numbers are interesting. >> Keep keep. Townsend is set on the Cube VM, where moves at the speed of the CEO, so they're not moving too far ahead of them, but they are key heating up with them. >> Let me share some data to share some data so you could go to Silicon Angle. Look at the V M World 2019 90 spending survey containers, Cloud NSX and pivotal its data from Enterprise Technology Research that we analyzed. There's no evidence right now that Container's air hurting VM wear. But then that was the narrative that containers are gonna kill the M where but long term. There's real threats there. So that's what the pivotal acquisition, at least in part was about. I want to address the pivotal acquisition cause we haven't dug into it a little bit a cz, Much as I'd like to see. There's really three things there. One pivotal was struggling. You look at the stock price, you look at their buying patterns, you know the stock was down that not even close to their original AIPO price, so they wanted to get out of the public eye right now would not be on that 30 day shot clock. The second is it's a hedge on containers. And the third is it's a financial scheme. I mean, I'll call it that VM wears paying $800 million in cash for an asset that's worth $4 billion. How can that be? Well, they already owned 15% of pivotal there. Give. They're exchanging stock. So their trade trading paper to Adele in exchange for Dell's 70% ownership in Pivotal. So they pick up this asset, and it's basically a forced migration by Michael Del, who controls 96% of the voting shares. So there's all kinds of inside nuance going on there that nobody's really talked about it a >> great deal for Of'em. Where and Michael Dell? It's >> a very good deal for VM wear and Michael Dell. >> Let's unpack that are rapidly. >> Just did the one piece on that, right, because kubernetes it was the elephant, the room that was damaging what Pivotal was doing. VM were made a couple of acquisitions VM where needs to react at, so it made sense to pull out back in. Even if it does go against some of the original mission, that Cloud Foundry and Pivotal had to be able to be that cloud native without that full strong time, >> it's all about building apse, right? It's all about enabling developers. >> Let's on that note. Let's go around the horn and talk about what we expect from the emerald this year. And then we'll kick off three days of wall to wall coverage. I'll start, I expect. And I'm not looking for is how VM wear and its ecosystem and who's really deep in the ecosystem, who's kind of independent and neutral, what they're doing with their containers and kubernetes play. Because I think the container revolution that was started with Dr Absolutely is very relevant to the C i o and the Sea. So so and then how they're using data in that in their applications. So you know how VM Way wants to position themselves on the control plane, how that fits in the NSX. I think containers in the container ization is going to change. I think bare metal is gonna be a super important topic in the next couple of years. Dio I'm kind of swinging back to the my feeling that you know, hyper convergence what it did for server storage networking back when you were calling those those moves. I think that kind of hyper convergence mentality is coming up the stack, and I think Containers and the Kubernetes Chess Board will will play out. >> I think if you my feelings, if you don't own a public cloud, you better convince your customers in your ecosystem that the future is in our definition of cloud, which is multi cloud. And that's what this VM world to me is all about. >> Yeah, you know, Veum wears taking their software state and trying to live in all of those cloud world. So you know, V. Amar has 600,000 customers and they want to be the ones to educate them on the kubernetes containers. You know you're at modernization, but there's a lot of other places customers can learn about this. No one understand where VM wear really adds value beyond all of those pieces, because all the cloud platforms have their kubernetes. >> A lot of other places, like the public cloud. That's where all the action >> exactly comes back down the cloud 2.0 Dev and ops developers and operations all come together with software. Thank you. Breaking it down here for three days. Wall to wall coverage here in Moscow north to set celebrating our 10th year covering VM World. Thanks for watching stay with us from or action after this short break.

>> from the Silicon Angle Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts. It's the cue Now, here's your host. Day Volonte. >> Hi, buddy. This is David Lantz. Welcome to this cube. Conversation with Dr Rico is the CMO of infinite out. It's still I still have a hard time saying that doctor or an engineer and I love having you on because we could talk storage. We could go deep and we could talk trends and marketing trends, too. But so welcome. Thanks for coming on my sled. So tell me what's new since the scale to win launch that you guys had. Tell me what you know. Is everything shipping Now What's the uptake been like with customers? And the reaction? Yeah, >> they're the reaction has been phenomenal. This, as you may recall, you were there. It was biggest launch in our history, which was fantastic. And the reaction has just been overwhelmingly positive, with customers with partners with analysts. Human scum cases with competitors is an interesting you know, we had a lot of things that were already shipping. They were an early customer release. There were a few things that we had started shipping in December on the things that we said we'd be coming in three Q. We G eight on time. So there, there now all generally available except the stuff that we talked about that would be available in 2020 which right now looks like it's on track. It's doing very, very well. >> So VM wear VM world eyes coming up later on this month, things are obviously changing. There was announcement recently that that VM wears gonna choir pivotal. So a little bit of financial engineering going on stock stock rose 77% on the day when the Dow dropped 800. So okay, the funny money. But things are changing in the V m where ecosystem you certainly saw we we This is our 10th year the M world. We go back and you hear Tod Nielsen back in the day, talk about for every dollar spent on a V M where lice and 15 was spent a Negro system, you know, we're kinda del izing vm wear now, which is sort of interesting, but I'm curious as to what you're seeing what that all means to you. I mean, still half a million 600,000 customers, you've got to be there you guys have great success at that show. So your thoughts what's going on? But VM world this year? Yeah, I >> kind of kind of loaded their first of all congratulations on the milestone. That's great. 10 years is super. Remember, probably seeing you with the 1st 1 there. Of course we knew each other longer. Uh, you know, and sure I get the incestuous, you know, money changing of hand there, I think I think it's it's good in one respect. You certainly CBM where, you know, making big inroads with VM wear on AWS. And this isn't now with Pivotal will be a good launching platform for Della's well, a svm where to be a little bit more in control of their own destiny. And it's certainly the way a lot of people are going. We're doing a lot of that ourselves. Not so much, in a sense. We don't have a cloud platform that we sell is a total encompassing platform. But of course, with new tricks cloud on big players and then certainly a large portion of our our customer base, our cloud service providers, they love our stuff. It helps them compete. It actually gives them in some respects, a competitive advantage, but VM world itself. Lots going on there. We have amplified our presence once again because VM where does represent a large portion of our customer base? So we're we're very proud of that. We're very proud to be a technology alliance partner of the M wears Andi. We're expecting to see a really good show in a really good cloud. A cloud crowd has they return back to their home base in San Francisco for us this year, it's It's gonna be a different experience. Were tellingme or of the software story, more of the portfolio story more about how you scare scale the win. We have a virtual presence this year, which is going to be very helpful in telling that story. Customers can come in and they can see more than just a ah box that in our world is really not important because it's for us. It's all about the software and stuff we do. We even in Booth Theater, we have some private meeting spaces well, to take people into a bigger, deeper drill down. But the virtual experience will allow them to touch and feel stuff that maybe they didn't get to do before, and that's gonna be kind of exciting as well. >> So you mentioned C S P s. We had Michael Gray thrive on a while back, and you know, he was saying that Look, he likes your product because it allows him to do other things. And don't worry about, you know, the old sort of tuning and managing and ableto re shift labor. I felt like that was an interesting discussion, primarily because you've got all these cloud service providers that everybody thought aws was just gonna kill. And if anything, it's elevated them. What are you seeing in the CSP space? Yeah, you know, >> Michael had a lot of interesting things to say that definitely love the fact that we enable multiple workloads without them having to do lots of cautious planning and re planning and shifting and shuffling. And we are seeing C S P is becoming more value. Add to a lot of businesses, especially the mid market and the smaller enterprise where people may want more than just infrastructure. You know, they don't they need that application level support and companies like thrive in some of our other really good customer, US signal and you know they're all capable of Flex Central's. Another one they're all capable of providing service is beyond the hardware they're capable of providing that application support the guidance and, in the case of Thrive, the cybersecurity guidance especial Really, which is really, really critical. So they're growing, and they're also, by the way, working with eight of us and Google and Azure to provide that capabilities well, when necessary. >> Well, that leads me to the sort of multi cloud discussion in our industry. We tend to have this alphabet soup of acronyms like another reason I like talking to you because we can kind of cut through that. And, you know, I love the marketing. I think marketing helps people understand what's going on differentiate. It gives you an indication of where the industry is going, and multi cloud is one of those things that I mean. I've kind of said it's a symptom of multi vendor and more so than a strategy. But increasingly it seems like it's becoming a strategy with customers, and you just gave an example of thrive working with multiple cloud vendors. Clearly, VM where wants to be in that business. What your thoughts on multi cloud and and hybrid. What does it mean for for infinite at What's your strategy there? You know, it's it's interesting because I >> just read an article the other day about you know, the definition of multi cloud on whether it's being abused and, you know, I I look at it as someone just trying to tell their story and give it. Give it some favor. I think at the end of the day, uh, every business is going to be talking to multiple platforms whether they want to or not. You know, there are many customers and companies out there, businesses who are in our customers who have gone the way of the cloud and repatriated. Certain things is they've they found that it it may work. It may not work, and there are many cloud providers who were trying to do things to accelerate migration of applications because they see that certain applications don't work. You know, we got one of the cloud providers buying Ah, now as provider, another one buying very recently, you know, an envy me based flash company to try to pick up those loose workloads where they might struggle today. But the end of the day everybody's going to be multiple. And whether it's because they're using cloud service is from from a software perspective or whether they just need to basically broker and maintain sort of that that independence so that they can maintain some cost control, availability, control, security, control and in some cases it will remain on premises. And some of things will be off just so they could get the applications closer to their end users. So you know what is multi Cloud? Multi Cloud really is just one of those terms that literally means what it says. It's your business running in multiple places. It doesn't have to necessarily be simultaneously by the same application. >> A big part of your value proposition is the simplicity. We've heard that from your customers, and you guys obviously push that out there. I want to ask you because you mentioned repatriation and you know, Cloud keeps growing like crazy. Sure, and the on prem not so much. You guys are smaller company. You're growing your stealing share, So yep. So maybe is that simplicity thing. Here's my question. So it's around automation. The cloud providers, generally an Amazon specifically have have driven automation. They've attacked the IittIe labor problem and they're able to charge for that on Dhe. So my question is, are you seeing that you're able to attack that labor problem in a similar sense and bring forth the value proposition to customers is Look, we can create a cloud like experience on Prem if you want MacLeod. Great. But if you want to stay on Prem, you're gonna get the benefit of being able to shift. Resource is two more strategic things and not have to worry about all this heavy, heavy lifting. You You seeing tangible evidence of that? >> We're seeing significant tangible evidence of that on and, you know, a couple of things. You know, you talk about growth, right? And I think when we did the launch, you know, only a few months ago we were at about 4.6 exabytes of capacity shipped. We just passed 5.1. That's some significant growth in in just a few months. It's like a 33% growth just from the same time last year, which is which is fairly significant. And of course, if you're familiar with the way we talk, you know you have an engineer is the head of marketing. We like to tell the truth. You know, we don't like to mask, do many things and confuse people. We don't like talking about effective storage because effective capacity doesn't really mean much to some people. So that's, you know, this is what we This is what we shipped and it's growing rapidly. And a lot of that is growing, in part because of the significance of the message and in part because of this need to control costs, contain costs and really operate in a more modern way. So get back to your comments about cloud and cloud operation. That's really what people want. People like the consumption model of cloud. They don't always like the cost on hidden costs. So simplifying that, but giving them the flexibility Thio have either an op X or cap ex that allows him to grow and shrink as they move workloads around. Because everybody grows even on Prem is growing. It's just, you know, it's the law of numbers, right? Cloud is growing, absolutely. But on Prem really is growing. And then the other thing I want is they want the operational flexibility. And that's what we talked about in our elastic data fabric. They don't like constantly having to re jigger and re balance workloads. Infinite box by itself. The platform of infinite Box takes away a lot of that mystery and magic, because it it kind of hides all of the complexity of that workload. And it, you know, we take the randomness out of the I o. I think maybe Craig Hibbert mentioned in his video is he was describing in detail how that happens. Remember Michael Gray talking about that as well, you know, So those those things come out in a single infinite box. But even if you said well, I still want to move my workload from, uh, you know this data center to an adjacent data center or perhaps a data center in another facility. Um, excuse me, Another city. So that's closer to the end user. Making that transparent to the applications is critically important. >> Yes, he talked about growth in about 1/2 a PETA bite. Sorry, half an exabyte in just a few months. A couple months? Really Right. That's that's growth. But I want to ask you about petabytes. Petabytes scales. Kind of key of companies that don't do that in a year day, eh? Exactly. So that's a petabytes scale. Is big party of marketing two questions? Why is that relevant? Or is that relevant to VM? Where customers? Why so and then, does it scare some people owe you? Asked a great question. >> It absolutely scared some people. And I know that there are some pundits out their industry pundits who who basically don't agree with our messaging. But this is this is the business problem that we we targeted the solve rate. Um, there are a lot of people out there who don't think they're petabytes scale yet because maybe they're individual applications aren't petabytes scale. But when you add it up, they get there and a lot of our customers are existing. Customers didn't start with infinite at at petabytes scale. They started a couple 100 terabytes, perhaps, but they're petabytes skill now. In fact, over 80% of the customers and systems that we have out there today or above the petty bite. We have customers that are in the tens of petabytes. We have customers that are in the hundreds of petabytes. They grow, they grow rapidly on. Why is that? Well, to two factors. Really. Number one, if you go back to. Probably when I first met you back when I had your hair, at least in quantity, way had way. Were kind of crusting that terabyte mark. Right? Right. And what was the problem? The problem was nobody could figure out how to deal with the performance. Nobody wanted to put that much risk on a single platform, so they couldn't deal with the availability. And they really didn't know how to deal with even the serviceability of that scale. So terabyte was a problem solved No, 25 years ago, and then things were rapidly from there. Now we're at the same juncture, just three orders of magnitude later. Right? >> Well, that's interesting, because, you know, you're right. People didn't want to put all all that capacity under an actuator that cost performance problems. They were concerned about, you know, just availability. And then two things happen so simultaneously, flash comes along. And, you know, you would say was put sort of a Band aid to some of the performance problems. Sure. And you guys came up with, like, this magic sauce to actually use spinning disc and get the same performance or better performance you would argue with flash. And so as a result, you were now able to do a lot Maur with the data, the concerns about that much date under the actuator somewhat attenuated because, I mean, you've got now so much data, you've got to do something that's almost that's flywheel effective. You've got tons of data machine intelligence and a I. Now, coming into the picture, you've got Cloud, which has been this huge tail when for the industry and for data creation in general. And so I see. You know, you see, like the I. D. C numbers and for forecasting growth of data and storage could be low. I mean, the curve could be bending, you know, kind of more than exponentially your thoughts on that. >> Yeah, it's an interesting, interesting observation. I think what it really comes down to is our storyline is math is greater than media, all right? And when you when you look at the flash being, you know, the panacea to performance it was just a step in the evolution, right? You go back and and say, spinning disc was the same solution to the performance problem 20 years ago. 25 years ago, even it was 5400 rpm discs and then very rapidly. Servers got faster. The interconnects got a little bit faster. They were still mostly differential. Scuzzy. There was 7200 rpm discs. And I promise you, by the way, that if you're running 5400 rpm desk, you install 7200 rpm. All yours performance problems will go away until the day you install it. And then it was 10,000 rpm discs and I was 15,000 rpm disc, and it still wasn't getting fast enough because, you know, you went to Fibre Channel One Gig Fibre channel and then to Geek Fibre, Channel four, Gig fibre, Channel eight, gig fibre channel. The unified connects got faster. The servers got faster. That was more cash on the servers. Then this thing came along, cuts called solid state disc. Right. And then it was it was SLC single layer cell technology. But don't worry about it's very expensive. Not a problem. You only need 4% of your application, right? Jerry? No, no, I'm sorry. percent. No, I'm sorry. 30%. What the heck? You know, M l c is now a little bit more reliable, so let's just make make it all slash. Right? So that was the end of the story, right? No. Servers continue to get faster. Uh, the media continue to get faster and denser, right? So now the interconnect isn't fast enough, So envy me. Is that the answer to life? The universe and everything? Well, wait. I got a better answer for your test. CIA storage class memory in parallel with that. By the way, there are some vendors out there who said that's still not fast enough. We want to put more d ram and the servers and do things in memory. We went in memory databases. I guarantee whatever you do from a media perspective on my personal guarantee to you, it's obsolete by the time you're up and running. By the time you get your applications migrated, configured and running with business value, it's already obsolete. Some vendors got something better coming out. The right answers. This stuff you talked about, the right answer is everything that you're doing for your business. APs. It's a it's a Mel. It's solving the problems in software and, you know, you said we use disc and make it fast. It's not despite itself, of course, right? It's D Bram. It's a lot of the Ram, which, by the way, is orders of magnitude faster than flash the NAND flash. And even if its ECM and still orders of magnitude faster than that, what we use the disk for today in the architecture is the cost factor. We take the random ization out in the flash and we take the >> end and in the in the diagram >> and we used the SAS in the back end to manage costs. But we use it in a way that it performs well, which is highly sequential, massively parallel. And we take full advantage of that Beck and Ben with to do that with that massive dear am front end. Our cash ratios are unparalleled in the industry and and we use it even more effectively that way. But if architecture already evolves, so if if SCM becomes more stable and becomes more cost effective, we can replace that that S S D layer with the cm. And if you know, if the economics of Q L C or something beyond that. Come down will replace the back end with that, do you? Do >> you ever look at what you're doing today as sort of a modern day symmetric. So I mean, a lot of things you just said. I mean, you've got a lot of memory. You've got a massive back end. You know, those were two of the characteristics of symmetric snow. Of course. Fast forward. Whatever. 30 years, right. But a lot of it was sort of intelligence and understanding. Sure. So how data works, is it Is it a fair sort of, or is it radically different? Well, in terms of mindset, I mean, I know the implementation is >> right, right? >> Yeah. I mean, it's not an unfair comparison. I mean, tiered storage was around before some metrics. Right? So it's certainly existed existed then, too. It was just at the time. It was a significant innovation course to layer at the time, right? A big cash front, ending some slower media and then taking advantage of the media on the back end. The big difference today is that if you look at what some metrics became through its Evolution's DMX and V Max and now Power Max. It's still tiered storage, you know, you still have some cash. That's that's for unending some faster media with power. Max, you're you're dealing now with us with an SS a back end. But what happened with those types of architectures is the tearing became more automated. But you're still moving information around. You're still moving Information from one said it This to another set of this leader in the cycle. You're still trying to promote things you know, to to the cash up front. We're doing it in real time. We're >> doing it by analyzing >> the data on the way it comes in. We're reassembling it again, taking the random ization out we're reassembling it and storing it across multiple disks in a way that it it increases our probability of pulling that information associated information back when we need it later. So there's there's no movement. Once its place, we don't have to replace it. You know it's already associated with other data that makes sense, and that gives us a lot of value. >> And secret sauce is the outcome of the secret sauce is you're able to very efficiently. Well, historically, you haven't been able to do a lot of garbage collection, a lot of data movement, and that just kills performance. There's >> really no garbage collection necessary in our in our world way. Also use very modern data structures or patents. Ah, lot of them on our neural cash Deal with the fact that we use a try data structure. So we're not using old fashioned hash tables and you know, l are you algorithms, You know it Sze very, very rapid traverse a ll of these trees >> and you're taking advantage of machine intelligence inside the software architecture. That really is some of the new innovation that really wasn't around to be able to take advantage of that 20 years ago. Maybe it was it was just not cost effective. Do the math was there, put it that the math of the mouth was there and >> there there There's been lots of evolutions of that over the years, a swell, but we continue to evolve and innovate. And, you know, one of the one of the cool things I think about working infinite at is is the multiple multiple generations of engineer where you've got people who understand that math they understand the real nuances of what it means to operate in a world of storage, which is quite a bit different than operating, saying networks or proceed be used because data integrity is paramount. There's lots of lots of things that go on there as well. But we also have younger generations, generations who like new challenges and like to re invent things so they find newer and greater ways to do things. >> This is exciting. So systems, thinkers and I mean server thinkers. I mean, people who understand, you know, systems designed it all the way through and and, you know, newbies who are super smart like you say, wanna learn and solve problems? Go back to the petabytes scale discussion, >> solve problems at petabytes scale, right? Even if the customer doesn't need that necessarily to solve that problem is critically important because even if you look at Les, just take, you know NFS, for example, most NFS systems deal with thousands of objects. Hundreds to thousands of objects are an F s. Implementation deals with billions, right? Do you need billions? How many applications you know that have billions of objects, But being able to do that in a way where performance doesn't degrade over time and also do it in a way where we say our nlm implementation isn't impacted by any any type of service events, we can take a note out, and it doesn't impact in ln There's no no degradation and performance. There's no impact or outage in service. All that's important. Even when you're dealing with smaller application sizes because they add up, they really do add up. He also brought up the point about, you know, density and actually intensity. Great. You know, back 25 years ago, when we were dealing with, you know, the first terabyte storage system, you know, how much how much stories did you have on your laptop? How much you have today, right? You know, you're probably more than a terabyte. They were laughing about putting things terabyte on the floor. And now you get more than a terabyte on your laptop. Things changing? >> Yeah. Um, I wanna ask you where you see the competition. We talked about all flash. We've had a long conversation, long, many conversations in the past about this, But you really, you know, the all flashy kind of described it as a Band Aid, essentially my words, but it was sort of a step function. Okay, great. Um, you have one company, really us who achieve escape velocity in that business in terms of pure But is that where you see in competition and you're seeing it from, you know, the hyper scale er's where you Yeah, you know, >> it's interesting. You know, you look at companies like, you know, we admire what they dio, especially with regard to marketing. They do a really good job of that. They also, um I have some really interesting ideas innovating the media, which is which is great. It helps us in the long run as well. Um, we just look at it as a component of our system, not these system, which makes it different. We don't really see the A f a. You know, the small scale a FAA is are the majority of our competition. We do run into them, but typically it the lower end of the opportunity. Even within the bigger companies that have competitors to those products, we run into them and smaller opportunities, not bigger opportunities where we run into them where there's a significant performance advantage as long as you don't mind the scale out approach to solving the problem. Unfortunately, when you're using a phase two skill out, you know you're putting all of the intelligence requirements on some poor storage administrator or system administrator to figure out what those where right, we take all of that away. So once it starts to scale, that's where we come in a plan. We don't see tons of competition there. Certainly, we're seeing competition from the clouds. And the competition from the clouds is more born of customer mandates and company mandates. Sometimes they I'm not quite sure that everybody knows why there who think to the cloud and we're problem they're trying to solve. But once they start to see a story that says, Hey, if the reasons are and you do understand those reasons, if the reasons are agility and financial flexibility and operational agility not as well as his acquisition agility, you know, we have answers to that and it starts to become a little bit more interesting and compelling. >> All right. One of the highlights of the M world each year is your dinner. Your customer I crashed in a couple of years ago when there were no other analysts there. And then last year again, it was in Vegas. Shows a nice steak house. This year we're in San Francisco, but But I had some great conversations with customers. I remember speaking to one customer about juxtaposing the sand thio to infinite debts platform. And you know the difference. The Sands taken off doing really well, but But he helped me understand the thinking from their standpoint of how they're applying it to solve problems and why v san wasn't a good fit. Your system was, um that was just one of many conversations last year had again other great conversations with customers. What do you do in this year? You have a customer dinner. We are? Yeah. We love to have you in and gave the invitation there. Yeah, the invitation. Is that definitely there? You know, a couple of >> years ago we didn't invite analysts, and you know what it was? It was a mistake. We and we learned that lesson into a large part. We credit you for for showing us how wrong we are. Our customers are very loyal. They're some of the most loyal in the industry. Don't take my word for it going. The gardener Pierre Insights and and look at our numbers compared to everybody else's any pick. Pick a vendor. We're at the top of the list with regard to not only the ratings but, more importantly, the customers willingness to recommend in every category, too. By the way, it's It's not just product quality and performance, and it's it's service support. It's easy doing business. It's an entirely different experience. So we love having the customers there, and the customers love having you there, too. They love having you and your appears in the industry there because they love learning from you and they love answering the questions and getting new insights. And we'd love to have you there. We're gonna be in the Mint this year. San Francisco meant not the not the current one that that's pretty coins, but the original historical site on duh. You know we have. We have invitations out thio to about 130 people because there's only so much room we have it at the event, but we're looking forward to a great time and a great meal and good conversation. >> That's great. Well, VM World is obviously one of the marquee events in our industry. It's the It's the fat middle of where the IittIe pro goes on dhe We're excited. Used to be Labor Day started the fall season. Now it's VM world. Well, Doc will see you out there. Thanks very much for your good to see you. All right. Excellent. All right. Thank you for watching everybody. This is day Volonte in the Cube will see you next time we'll see you at the M World 2019.

>> From the Silicon Angle Media office in Boston Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now here's your host, Dave Vellante. (upbeat music) >> Hello everybody, this is Dave Vallante with Stu Miniman and we're going to take a look back at ten years of theCUBE at VMworld and look forward to see what's coming next. So, as I say, this is theCUBE's 10th year at VMworld, that's VMworld, of course 2019. And Stu, if you think about the VMware of 2010, when we first started, it's a dramatically different VMware today. Let's look back at 2010. Paul Maritz was running VMware, he set forth the vision of the software mainframe last decade, well, what does that mean, software mainframe? Highly integrated hardware and software that can run any workload, any application. That is the gauntlet that Tucci and Maritz laid down. A lot of people were skeptical. Fast forward 10 years, they've actually achieved that, I mean, essentially, it is the standard operating system, if you will, in the data center, but there's a lot more to the story. But you remember, at the time, Stu, it was a very complex environment. When something went wrong, you needed guys with lab coats to come in a figure out, you know, what was going on, the I/O blender problem, storage was a real bottleneck. So let's talk about that. >> Yeah, Dave, so much. First of all, hard to believe, 10 years, you know, think back to 2010, it was my first time being at VMworld, even though I started working with VMware back in 2002 when it was like, you know, 100, 150 person company. Remember when vMotion first launched. But that first show that we went to, Dave, was in San Francisco, and most people didn't know theCUBE, heck, we were still figuring out exactly what theCUBE will be, and we brought in a bunch of our friends that were doing the CloudCamps in Silicon Valley, and we were talking about cloud. And there was this gap that we saw between, as you said, the challenges we were solving with VMware, which was fixing infrastructure, storage and networking had been broken, and how were we going to make sure that that worked in a virtual environment even better? But there were the early thought leaders that were talking about that future of cloud computing, which, today in 2019, looks like we had a good prediction. And, of course, where VMware is today, we're talking all about cloud. So, so many different eras and pieces and research that we did, you know, hundreds and hundreds of interviews that we've done at that show, it's definitely been one of our flagship shows and one of our favorite for guests and ecosystems and so much that we got to dig into at that event. >> So Tod Nielsen, who was the President and probably COO at the time, talked about the ecosystem. For every dollar spent on a VMware license, $15 was spent on the ecosystem. VMware was a very, even though they were owned by EMC, they were very, sort of, neutral to the ecosystem. You had what we called the storage cartel. It was certainly EMC, you know, but NetApp was right there, IBM, HP, you know, Dell had purchased EqualLogic, HDS was kind of there as well. These companies were the first to get the APIs, you remember, the VASA VAAI. So, we pushed VMware at the time, saying, "Look, you guys got a storage problem." And they said, "Well, we don't have a lot of resources, "we're going to let the ecosystem solve the problem, "here's an API, you guys figure it out." Which they largely did, but it took a long time. The other big thing you had in that 2010 timeframe was storage consolidation. You had the bidding war between Dell and HP, which, ultimately, HP, under Donatelli's leadership, won that bidding war and acquired 3PAR >> Bought 3PAR >> for 2.4, 2.5 billion, it forced Dell to buy Compellent. Subsequently, Isilon was acquired, Data Domain was acquired by EMC. So you had this consolidation of the early 2000s storage startups and then, still, storage was a major problem back then. But the big sea change was, two things happened in 2012. Pat Gelsinger took over as CEO, and VMware acquired Nicira, beat Cisco to the punch. Why did that change everything? >> Yeah, Dave, we talked a lot about storage, and how, you know, the ecosystem was changing this. Nicira, we knew it was a big deal. When I, you know, I talked to my friends that were deep in networking and I talked with Nicira and was majorly impressed with what they were doing. But this heterogeneous, and what now is the multi-cloud environment, networking needs to play a critical role. You see, you know, Cisco has clearly targeted that environment and Nicira had some really smart people and some really fundamental technology underneath that would allow networking to go just beyond the virtual machine where it was before, the vSwitch. So, you know, that expansion, and actually, it took a little while for, you know, the Nicira acquisition to run into NSX and that product to gain maturity, and to gain adoption, but as Pat Gelsinger has said more recently, it is one of the key drivers for VMware, getting them beyond just the hypervisor itself. So, so much is happening, I mean, Dave, I look at the swings as, you know, you said, VMware didn't have enough resources, they were going to let the ecosystem do it. In the early days, it was, I chose a server provider, and, oh yeah, VMware kind of plays in it. So VMware really grew how much control and how much power they had in buying decisions, and we're going through more of that change now, as to, as they're partnering we're going to talk about AWS and Microsoft and Google as those pieces. And Pat driving that ship. The analogy we gave is, could Pat do for VMware what Intel had done for a long time, which is, you have a big ecosystem, and you slowly start eating away at some of that other functionality without alienating that ecosystem. And to Pat's credit, it's actually something that he's done quite well. There's been some ebbs and flows, there's pushback in the community. Those that remember things like the "vTax," when they rolled that out. You know, there's certain features that the rolled into the hypervisor that have had parts of the ecosystem gripe a little bit, but for the most part, VMware is still playing well with the ecosystem, even though, after the Dell acquisition of EMC, you know, we'll talk about this some more, that relationship between Dell and VMware is tighter than it ever was in the EMC days. >> So that led to the Software-Defined Data Center, which was the big, sort of, vision. VMware wanted to do to storage and networking what it had done to compute. And this started to set up the tension between with VMware and Cisco, which, you know, lives on today. The other big mega trend, of course, was flash storage, which was coming into play. In many ways, that whole API gymnastics was a Band-Aid. But the other big piece if it is Pat Gelsinger was much more willing to integrate, you know, some of the EMC technologies, and now Dell technologies, into the VMware sort of stack. >> Right, so Dave, you talked about all of those APIs, Vvols was a huge multi-year initiative that VMware worked on and all of the big storage players were talking about how that would allow them to deeply integrate and make it virtualization-aware storage your so tense we come out on their own and try to do that. But if you look at it, VVols was also what enabled VMware to do vSAN, and that is a little bit of how they can try to erode in some of the storage piece, because vSAN today has the most customers in the hyperconverged infrastructure space, and is keeping to grow, but they still have those storage partnerships. It didn't eliminate it, but it definitely adds some tension. >> Well it is important, because under EMC's ownership it was sort of a let 1,000 flowers bloom sort of strategy, and today you see Jeff Clarke coming in and consolidating the portfolios, saying, "Look, let's let VMware go hard with vSAN." So you're seeing a different type of governance structure, we'll talk about that. 2013 was a big year. That's the year they brought in Sanjay Poonen, they did the AirWatch acquisition, they took on what the industry called VDI, what VMware called EUC, End-User Computing. Citrix was the dominant player in that space, VMware was fumbling, frankly. Sanjay Poonen came in, the AirWatch acquisition, now, VMware is a leader in that space, so that was big. The other big thing in 2013 was, you know, the famous comment by Carl Eschenbach about, you know, if we lose to the book seller, we'll all lose. VMware came out with it's cloud strategy, vCloud Air. I was there with the Wall Street analyst that day listening to Pat explain that and we were talking afterwards to a number of the Wall Street analysts saying, "This really doesn't make a lot of sense." And then they sort of retreated on that, saying that it was going to be an accelerant, and it just was basically a failed cloud strategy. >> And Dave, that 2013 is also when they spun out Cloud Foundry and founded Pivital. So, you know, this is where they took some of the pieces from EMC, the Greenplum, and they took some of the pieces from VMware, Spring and the Cloud Foundation, and put those together. As we speak right now, there was just an SEC Filing that VMware might suck them back in. Where I look at that, back in 2013, there was a huge gap between what VMware was doing on the infrastructure side and what Cloud Foundry was doing on the application modernization standpoint, they had bought the Pivotal Labs piece to help people understand new programming models and everything along those lines. Today, in 2019, if you look at where VMware is going, the changes happening in containerization, the changes happening from the application down, they need to come together. The Achilles heel that I have seen from VMware for a long time is that VMware doesn't have enough a tie to or help build the applications. Microsoft owns the applications, Oracle owns the applications. You know, there are all the ISVs that own the applications, and Pivotal, if they bring that back into VMware it can help, but it made sense at the time to kind of spin that out because it wasn't synergies between them. >> It was what I called at the time a bunch of misfit toys. And so it was largely David Goulden's engineering of what they called The Federation. And now you're seeing some more engineering, financial engineering, of having VMware essentially buy another, you know, Dell Silver Lake asset, which, you know, drove the stock price up 77% in a day that the Dow dropped 800 points. So I guess that works, kind of funny money. The other big trend sort of in that mid-part of this decade, hyperconverged, you know, really hit. Nutanix, who was at one point a strong partner of both VMware and Dell, was sort of hitting its groove swing. Fast forward to 2019, different situation, Nutanix really doesn't have a presence there. You know, people are looking at going beyond hyperconverged. So there's sort of the VMware ecosystem, sort of friendly posture has changed, they point fingers at each other. VMware says, "Well, it's Nutanix's fault." Nutanix will say it's VMware's fault. >> Right, so Dave, I pointed out, the Achilles heel for VMware might be that they don't have the closest tie to the application, but their greatest strength is, really, they are really the data center operating system, if you will. When we wrote out our research on Server SAN was before vSAN had gotten launched. It was where Nutanix, Scale Computing, SimpliVity, you know, Pivot3, and a few others were early in that space, but we stated in our research, if Microsoft and VMware get serious about that space, they can dominate. And we've seen, VMware came in strong, they do work with their partnerships. Of course, Dell, with the VxRail is their largest solution, but all of the other server providers, you know, have offerings and can put those together. And Microsoft, just last year, they kind of rebranded some of the Azure Stack as HCI and they're going strong in that space. So, absolutely, you know, strong presence in the data center platform, and that's what they're extending into their hybrid and multi-cloud offering, the VMware Cloud Solutions. >> So I want to get to some of the trends today, but just real quick, let's go through some of this. So 2015 was the big announcement in the fall where Dell was acquiring EMC, so we entered, really, the Dell era of VMware ownership in 2016. And the other piece that happened, really 2016 in the fall, but it went GA 2017, was the announcement AWS and VMware as the preferred partnership. Yes, AWS had a partnership with IBM, they've subsequently >> VMware had a partnership >> Yeah, sorry, VMware has a partnership with IBM for their cloud, subsequently VMware has done deals with Google and Microsoft, so there's, we now have entered the multi-cloud hybrid world. VMware capitulated on cloud, smart move, cleaned up its cloud strategy, cleaned that AirWatch mess. AWS also capitulated on hybrid. It's a term that they would never use, they don't use it necessarily a lot today, but they recognize that On Prem is a viable portion of the marketplace. And so now we've entered this new era of cloud, hybrid cloud, containers is the other big trend. People said, "Containers are going to really hurt VMware." You know, the jury's still out on that, VMware sort of pushes back on that. >> And Dave, just to put a point on that, you know, everybody, including us, spent a lot of time looking at this VMware Cloud on AWS partnership, and what does it mean, especially, to the parent, you know, Dell? How do they make that environment? And you've pointed out, Dave, that while VMware gets in those environments and gives themselves a very strong cloud strategy, AWS is the key partner, but of course, as you said, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and all the server providers, we have a number of them including CenturyLink and Rackspace that they're partnering with, but we have to wait a little while before Amazon, when they announced their outpost solutions, VMware is a critical software piece, and you've got two flavors of the hardware. You can run the full AWS Stack, just like what they're running in their data center, but the alternative, of course, is VMware software running on Dell hardware. And we think that if VMware hadn't come in with a strong position with Amazon and their 600,000 customers, we're not sure that Amazon would have said, "Oh yeah, hey, you can run that same software stack "that you're running, but run some different hardware." So that's a good place for Dell to get in the environment, it helps kind of close out that story of VMware, Dell, and AWS and how the pieces fit together. >> Yeah, well so, by the way, earlier this week I privately mentioned to a Dell executive that one of the things I thought they should do was fold Pivotal into VMware. By the way, I think they should go further. I think they should look at RSA and Dell Boomi and SecureWorks, make VMware the mothership of software, and then really tie in Dell's hardware to VMware. That seems to me, Stu, the direction that they're going to try to gain an advantage on the balance of the ecosystem. I think VMware now is in a position of strength with, what, 5 or 600,000 customers. It feels like it's less ecosystem friendly than it used to be. >> Yeah, Dave, there's no doubt about it. HPE and IBM, who were two of the main companies that helped with VMware's ascendancy, do a lot of other things beyond VMware. Of course, IBM bought Red Hat, it is a key counterbalance to what VMware is doing in the multi-cloud. And Dave, to your point, absolutely, if you look at Dell's cloud strategy, they're number one offering is VMware, VMware cloud on Dell. Dell as the project dimension piece. All of these pieces do line up. I'll say, some of those pieces, absolutely, I would say, make sense to kind of pull in and shell together. I know one of the reasons they keep the security pieces at arm's length is just, you know, when something goes wrong in the security space, and it's not of the question of if, it's a question of when, they do have that arm's length to be able to keep that out and be able to remediate a little bit when something happens. >> So let's look at some of the things that we're following today. I think one of the big ones is, how will containers effect customer spending on VMware? We know people are concerned about the vTax. We also know that they're concerned about lock-in. And so, containers are this major force. Can VMware make containers a tailwind, or is it a headwind for them? >> So you look at all the acquisitions that they've made lately, Dave, CloudHealth is, from a management standpoint, in the public cloud. Heptio and Bitnami, targeting that cloud native space. Pair that with Cloud Foundry and you see, VMware and Pivotal together trying to go all-in on Kubernetes. So those 600,000 customers, VMware wants to be the group that educates you on containerization, Kubernetes, you know, how to build these new environments. For, you know, a lot of customers, it's attractive for them to just stay. "I have a relationship, "I have an enterprise licensing agreement, "I'm going to stay along with that." The question I would have is, if I want to do something in a modern way, is VMware really the best partner to choose from? Do they have the cost structure? A lot of these environments set up, you know, it's open source base, or I can work with my public cloud providers there, so why would I partner with VMware? Sure, they have a lot of smart people and they have expertise and we have a relationship, but what differentiates VMware, and is it worth paying for that licensing that they have, or will I look at alternatives? But as VMware grows their hybrid and multi-cloud deployments they absolutely are on the short list of, you know, strategic partners for most customers. >> The other big thing that we're watching is multi-cloud. I have said over and over that multi-cloud has largely been a symptom of multi-vendor. It's not necessarily, to date anyway, been a strategy of customers. Having said that, issues around security, governance, compliance have forced organizations and boards to say, "You know what, we need IT more involved, "let's make multi-cloud part of our strategy, "not only for governance and compliance "and making sure it adheres to the corporate edicts, "but also to put the right workload on the right cloud." So having some kind of strategy there is important. Who are the players there? Obviously VMware, I would say, right now, is the favorite because it's coming from a position of strength in the data center. Microsoft with it's software state, Cisco coming at it from a standpoint of network strength. Google, with Anthos, that announcement earlier this year, and, of course, Red Hat with IBM. Who's the company that I didn't mention in that list? >> Well, of course, you can't talk about cloud, Dave, without talking about AWS. So, as you stated before, they don't really want to talk about hybrid, hey, come on, multi-cloud, why would you do this? But any customer that has a multi-cloud environment, they've got AWS. And the VMware-AWS partnership is really interesting to watch. It will be, you know, where will Amazon grow in this environment as they find their customers are using multiple solutions? Amazon has lots of offerings to allow you leverage Kubernetes, but, for the most part, the messaging is still, "We are the best place for you, "if you do everything on us, "you're going to get better pricing "and all of these environments." But as you've said, Dave, we never get down to that homogeneous, you know, one vendor solution. It tends to be, you know, IT has always been this heterogeneous mess and you have different groups that purchase different things for different reasons, and we have not seen, yet, public cloud solving that for a lot of customers. If anything we often have many more silos in the clouds than we had in the data center before. >> Okay. Another big story that we're following, big trend, is the battle for networking. NSX, the software networking component, and then Cisco, who's got a combination of, obviously, hardware and software with ACI. You know, Stu, I got to say, Cisco a very impressive company. You know, 60+% market share, being able to hold that share for a long time. I've seen a lot of companies try to go up against Cisco. You know, the industry's littered with failures. It feels, however, like NSX is a disruptive force that's very hard for Cisco to deal with in a number of dimensions. We talked about multi-cloud, but networking in general. Cisco's still a major player, still, you know, owns the hardware infrastructure, obviously layering in its own software-defined strategy. But that seems to be a source of tension between the two companies. What's the customer perspective? >> Yeah, so first of all, Dave, Cisco, from a hardware perspective, is still going strong. There are some big competitors. Arista has been doing quite well into getting in, especially, a high performance, high speed environments, you know, Jayshree Ullal and that team, you know, very impressive public company that's doing quite well. >> Service providers that do really well there. >> Absolutely, but, absolutely, software is eating the world and it is impacting networking. Even when you look at Cisco's overall strategy, it is in the future. Cisco is not a networking company, they are a software company. The whole DevNet, you know, group that they have there is helping customers modernize, what we were talking about with Pivotal. Cisco is going there and helping customers create those new environments. But from a customer standpoint, they want simplicity. If my VMware is a big piece of my environment, I've probably started using NSX, NSX-T, some of these environments. As I go to my service providers, as I go to multi-cloud, that NSX piece inside my VMware cloud foundation starts to grow. I remember, Dave, a few years back, you know, Pat Gelsinger got up on a stage and was like, "This is the biggest collection of network administrators that we've ever seen!" And everybody's looking around and they're like, "Where? "We're virtualization people. "Oh, wait, just because we've got vNICs and vSwitches "and things like that." It still is a gap between kind of a hardcore networking people and the software state. But just like we see on storage, Dave, it's not like vSAN, despite it's thousands and thousands of customers, it is not the dominant player in storage. It's a big player, it's a great revenue stream, and it is expanding VMware beyond their core vSphere solutions. >> Back to Cisco real quickly. One of the things I'm very impressed with Cisco is the way in which they've developed infrastructures. Code with the DevNet group, how CCIEs are learning Python, and that's a very powerful sort of trend to watch. The other thing we're watching is VMware-AWS. How will it affect spending, you know, near-term, mid-term, long-term? Clearly it's been a momentum, you know, tailwind, for VMware today, but the questions remains, long-term, where will customers place their bets? Where will the spending be? We know that cloud is growing dramatically faster than On Prem, but it appears, at least in the near- to mid-term, for one, two, maybe three more cycles, maybe indefinitely, that the VMware-AWS relationship has been a real positive for VMware. >> Yeah, Dave, I think you stated it really well. When I talked to customers, they were a bit frozen a couple of years ago. "Ah, I know I need to do more in cloud, "but I have this environment, what do I do? "Do I stay with VMware, do I have to make a big change." And what VMware did, is they really opened things up and said, "Look, no, you can embrace cloud, and we're there for you. "We will be there to help be that bridge to the future, "if you will, so take your VMware environment, "do VMware cloud in lots of places, "and we will enable that." What we know today, the stat that we hear all the time, the old 80/20 we used to talk about was 80% keeping the lights on, now the 80% we hear about is, there's only 20% of workloads that are in public cloud today. It doesn't mean that that other 80% is going to flip overnight, but if you look over the next five to ten years, it could be a flip from 80/20 to 20/80. And as that shift happens, how much of that estate will stay under VMware licenses? Because the day after AWS made the announcement of VMware cloud on AWS, they offered some migration services. So if you just want to go on natively on the public cloud, you can do that. And Microsoft, Google, everybody has migration services, so use VMware for what I need to, but I might go more native cloud for some of those other environments. So we know it is going to continue to be a mix. Multi-cloud is what customers are doing today, and multi- and hybrid-cloud is what customers will be doing five years from now. >> The other big question we're watching is Outposts. Will VMware and Outposts get a larger share of wallet as a result of that partnership at the expense of other vendors? And so, remains to be seen, Outposts grabbed a lot of attention, that whole notion of same control plane, same hardware, same software, same data plane On Prem as in the Data Center, kind of like Oracle's same-same approach, but it's seemingly a logical one. Others are responding. Your thoughts on whether or not these two companies will dominate or the industry will respond or an equilibrium. >> Right, so first of all, right, that full same-same full stack has been something we've been talking about now, feels like for 10 years, Dave, with Oracle, IBM had a strategy on that, and you see that, but one of the things with VMware has strong strength. What they have over two decades of experiences on is making sure that I can have a software stack that can actually live in heterogeneous environments. So in the future, if we talk about if Kubernetes allows me to live in a multi-cloud environment, VMware might be able to give me some flexibility so that I can move from one hardware stack to another as I move from data centers to service providers to public clouds. So, absolutely, you know, one to watch. And VMware is smart. Amazon might be their number one partner, but they're lining up everywhere. When you see Sanjay Poonen up on stage with Thomas Kurian at Google Cloud talking about how Anthos in your data center very much requires VMware. You see Sachi Nodella up on stage talking about these kind of VMware partnerships. VMware is going to make sure that they live in all of these environments, just like they lived on all of the servers in the data center in the past. >> The other last two pieces that I want to touch on, and they're related is, as a result of Dell's ownership of VMware, are customers going to spend more with Dell? And it's clear that Dell is architecting a very tight relationship. You can see, first of all, Michael Dell putting Jeff Clarke in charge of everything Dell was brilliant, because, in a way, you know, Pat was kind of elevated as this superstar. And Michael Dell is the founder, and he's the leader of the company. So basically what he's created is this team of rivals. Now, you know, Jeff and Pat, they've worked together for decades, but very interesting. We saw them up on stage together, you know, last year, well I guess at Dell Technologies World, it was kind of awkward, but so, I love it. I love that tension of, It's very clear to me that Dell wants to integrate more tightly with VMware. It's the clear strategy, and they don't really care at this point if it's at the expense of the ecosystem. Let the ecosystem figure it out themselves. So that's one thing we're watching. Related to that is long-term, are customers going to spend more of their VMware dollars in the public cloud? Come back to Dell for a second. To me, AWS is by far the number one competitor of Dell, you know, that shift to the cloud. Clearly they've got other competitors, you know, NetApp, Huawei, you know, on and on and on, but AWS is the big one. How will cloud spending effect both Dell and AWS long-term? The numbers right now suggest that cloud's going to keep growing, $35, $40 billion run-rate company growing at 40% a year, whereas On Prem stuff's growing, you know, at best, single digits. So that trend really does favor the cloud guys. I talked to a Gartner analyst who tracks all this stuff. I said, "Can AWS continue to grow? It's so big." He said, "There's no reason, they can't stop. "The market's enormous." I tend to agree, what are your thoughts? >> Yeah, first of all, on the AWS, absolutely, I agree, Dave. They are still, if you look at the overall IT spend, AWS is still a small piece. They have, that lever that they have and the influence they have on the marketplace greatly outweighs the, you know, $30, $31 billion that they're at today, and absolutely they can keep growing. The one point, I think, what we've seen, the best success that Dell is having, it is the Dell and VMware really coming together, product development, go to market, the field is tightly, tightly, tightly alligned. The VxRail was the first real big push, and if they can do the same thing with the vCloud foundation, you know, VMware cloud on Dell hardware, that could be a real tailwind for Dell to try to grow faster as an infrastructure company, to grow more like the software companies or even the cloud companies will. Because we know, when we've run the numbers, Dave, private cloud is going to get a lot of dollars, even as public cloud continues its growth. >> I think the answer comes down to a couple things. Because right now we know that 80% of the spend and stall base is On Prem, 20% in the cloud. We're entering now the cloud 2.0, which introduces hybrid-cloud, On Prem, you know, connecting to clouds, multi-cloud, Kubernetes. So what it comes down to, to me Stu, is to what degree can Dell, VMware, and the ecosystem create that cloud experience in a hybrid world, number one? And number two, how will they be able to compete from a cost-structure standpoint? Dell's cost-structure is better than anybody else's in the On Prem world. I would argue that AWS's cost-structure is better, you know, relative to Dell, but remains to be seen. But really those two things, the cloud experience and the cost-structure, can they hold on, and how long can they hold on to that 80%? >> All right, so Dave here's the question I have for you. What are we talking about when we're talking about Dell plus VMware and even add in Pivotal? It's primarily hardware plus software. Who's the biggest in that multi-cloud space? It's IBM plus Red Hat, which you've stated emphatically, "This is a services play, and IBM has, you know, "just got, you know, services in their DNA, "and that could help supercharge where Red Hat's going "and the modernization." So is that a danger for Dell? If they bring in Pivotal, do they need to really ramp up that services? How do they do that? >> Yeah, I don't think it's a zero sum game, but I also don't think there's, it's five winners. I think that the leader, VMware right now would be my favorite, I think it's going to do very well. I think Red Hat has got, you know, a lot of good market momentum, I think they've got a captive install base, you know, with IBM and its large outsourcing business, and I think they can do pretty well, and I think number three could do okay. I think the other guys struggle. But it's so early, right now, in the hybrid-cloud world and the multi-cloud world, that if I were any one of those five I'd be going hard after it. We know Google's got the dollars, we know Microsoft has the software state, so I can see Microsoft actually doing quite well in that business, and could emerge as the, maybe they're not a long-shot right now, but they could be a, you know, three to one, four to one leader that comes out as the favorite. So, all right, we got to go. Stu, thanks very much for your insights. And thank you for watching and listening. We will be at VMworld 2019. Three days of coverage on theCUBE. Thanks for watching everybody, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Magento Imagine 2019, brought to you by Adobe. >> Welcome back to theCUBE Lisa Martin with Jeff Frick and we are here live at Magento Imagine 2019, our second time being back here with theCUBE and we're very excited to welcome Brittany Hodak to theCUBE, entrepreneur, customer engagement speaker, writer, co-founder of the Superfan Company. Brittany it's so exciting to have you on theCUBE. >> Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here. >> So, you have an incredibly impressive background and I'm like where do we start? >> Thank you. >> So, here we are talking about customer experiences and how Magento and Adobe empower a lot of customer experiences. But you've written a ton of articles, over 350, you've been published in the Huff Post, Wall Street Journal, talk to us about your experiences with customer engagement, some of the things that you as a co-founder of the Superfan have discovered working with a variety of brands from Walmart to Katy Perry? >> Well, thank you so much for saying that. I always say that the biggest problem brands and entertainers have is often one that's not even on their radar at all. I talked to a lot of small and medium sized business owners and they say, You know, my big problem is people don't know who I am. I've got an awareness problem. I'm struggling to let people know who I am. And I really think my business would change if more people knew. And I said, You know, that's not the problem. You can always fix awareness. You can always spend money to get your message out there. Your big problem is apathy. Your problem is there are people who know and don't care. And you've got to figure out how to make people care. You've got to figure out how to connect your story with their story in a way that's meaningful, and in a way that's going to mean something in their lives because that's how you really start the fan engagement process. That's how you lay the groundwork for creating a culture of super fandom amongst your customers, that's really going to help you grow not just the business but a brand. >> Is it about having a more relevant messages or is it just finding those people that have a propensity to be a fan to the services that you provide? >> Well, it's understanding your uniqueness in a way that really makes your value proposition different from anybody else is. Once you understand your uniqueness and you're able to turn it into service of others, that's when you really you position yourself to be able to make the kind of difference that makes somebody want to be a super fan. And I always say, we've had the fortune of working with tons of celebrities, some of the biggest recording artists and superstars on the planet, and a lot of times people say to me, Oh, you know, it's easy when you're talking about being a super fan of Taylor Swift or being a super fan of Katy Perry, but, you know, I'm a plumber or I'm an electrician, how can I have super fans? And I say, By providing people the kindness service that changes their lives. I have an exterminator who I am a super fan of. His name is Scott and the reason I am a super fan of him is because he makes sure there are no brown recluse spiders in my house and I am absolutely terrified about recluse spiders. They are super evil creatures if you're not familiar with them, I encourage you not to google it. They're like nastiest little bug in the world. But you know to me that's super important because he's not just killing bugs, he's helping me feel safe in my home. So that's absolutely a vital service and finding the right guy to do that and the right guy to put my mind at ease and let me know there aren't going to be brown recluse spiders in my house is invaluable and because of that, like there's no way I would ever switch exterminators because Scott's my guy. And I know you know, I can text him 50 different pictures of critters and say, Is this okay, Is this okay? And he's going to get back to me and let me know. So, it's all about points of connection and finding ways to make your audience feel really valued, and connecting your story with their story. >> So, if you look at an exterminator versus a Taylor Swift or Katy Perry or Walmart, are there similarities and what they need to do to deliver this service that's impacting lives? Or are there fundamental differences? >> There are some fundamental differences, but there's more overlap than you would think. And I always say, if you think about it like a Venn diagram, you've got your brand or your business, your service, your product, whatever it is that you're providing, and you've got your customers over here. Where the magic happens is that point of intersection, where your story overlaps with their story, that intersection, that's where super fandom happens. And I like to talk about something I call the four A's of super fandom. So, you can, I see a lot of people make the mistake of trying to talk to everybody the same way. So, whether somebody is encountering your brand for the very first time or has been your customer for a long time, using the same messaging for those people and that doesn't work. So, I talk a lot about the four A's. So, the first day is awareness. That's when somebody is first uncovering your brand, first interacting with your brand. The second a is action, that's when somebody is actually interacting with your brand for the first time. The third a is affinity. Those are the people who are fans of your brand. They've sort of bought into your why, these are the satisfied customers, I would say. And a lot of businesses stop there. They say, These are the people who are satisfied. These are the people who liked what I'm doing, they're buying from me. And that's a mistake that a lot of especially small and medium sized businesses make they sort of feel like, I've got these customers, I don't have to do anything else. They're not over delivering or over serving them which is a huge missed opportunity because if you do, you're able to convert people from that third A to the fourth a which is advocacy. And advocacy is where you want to get the majority of the people because those are your superfans so to speak, those are the ones who are out there sharing your story and your why with other people, helping refer new customers and new clients to you. So, I always say if you can get past the affinity, the people who are happy with you but not really talking about it and really make them feel valued. That's how you create advocates and advocacy is really the super secret sauce when you're talking about super fandom. >> So where should people get started to try to build super fandom within their client base? Is that really with the good customers that they already have, they try to get them to be advocates or I think most people spend so much time focusing on the fat end of the funnel as opposed to on the narrow end of the funnel and converting that transaction into a fan which is what it sounds like you're suggesting? >> Yeah, well, it's important to to focus on all parts of the funnel man, like I said that that awareness, that that fat of the top, you certainly need to be dealing with those people to get them further down. But the skinny part of the funnel is really where you want to make sure that people are continuing to drip out to the other side to make those referrals for you. So, absolutely focusing on everybody. One thing that I am always shocked I when I do consulting and work with small businesses and medium sized businesses, when I asked how much referral business they get, a lot of people don't know that number off the top of your head. So, if you're not tracking the amount of referrals, you absolutely need to know that as a metric, and the number one thing that you can do to increase the amount of referral business that you're getting is by asking your customers for referrals. It's so funny the amount of people who say, I hardly get any referral business at all. And I say, Well, when's the last time you asked? When's the last time that you went to one of your clients or your customers and said, I so appreciate your business. And I wonder if you know anybody in your network who could benefit from our product or service. And they say, oh I've never done that. But yeah, they wonder why they don't have any referrals so-- >> It seems like such an easy step but to your point, you're saying they're focusing on awareness, getting my brand, my service, my name out there, getting people to take action? >> Yes. >> And building that affinity and then I'm good, but that simply asking to make it a referral whether it's a yelp or something as simple as that seems like a pretty easy step. Strategically, how do you advise customers to get from that, take that if you look at it like a funnel like Jeff saying, take that group of affinity customers and convert some percentage to advocates, what's your strategy for helping a consumer brand or even a service provider, like an exterminator for actually making those conversions and then and then having that be a really kind of engine to drive referrals, to drive more leads to the top of that funnel? >> That's a great question. So, I like to talk about something I call the high five which is knowing the five most important people that have the potential to drive your business forward for the next quarter, the next year and the next five years. So, this is an actual list of five people. And any business owner hopefully can sit down and say, Here are the people that I need to really super serve in order to move my business forward. So knowing who those five people are, it could be an advisor, it could be an investor, it could be somebody you've never even met, maybe a thought leader whose thought that you really enjoy, that you think this person could really help me and open me up to a lot of people in their network if they knew who I was. Make a list of those five people, and then figure out how often you need to be doing something staying top of mind for those people. So for me, I like to make sure it's at least once every two weeks. So, sometimes it's as simple as sending an article and saying, Hey, I came across this article, I thought you would really love it, wanted to send it your way. Now and reality, did I just come across that article? No, I spent maybe an hour looking for the right article to forward that person. It's taking the time out to show them that they matter to you, so whether that's sending them a nice gift in the mail for no reason or a handwritten thank you note after they made an introduction for you. It's checking in on things, I always say, you should know what is important to the people who are important to you. You should know the teams that they follow, you should know their spouse, their children, the things that are happening in their lives so you can check in with them. And we live in an age where it's so easy to get information about anyone because all of us are putting content out there on the internet all the time about ourselves. So take the time to figure out what matters to those people who matter to you, and then stay top of mind, letting them know that they matter to you. So, like I said, for me, it's once every two weeks and I look at my list of five about every six months in terms of adding a couple of new people on maybe cycling some people off. But I've been doing this for four years. So, I have a list of 20 people. And I those are like my alums, some of the alumni of my high five, and I'm still extremely close with all of them. I still make sure that I'm trying to add value to them because having one person who's going to advocate for you could open the door for millions of dollars of revenue for you. So, it's just identifying who those people are, because to your point, it's impossible to sort of make everyone the most important person, it's impossible to take everyone at that third step and take them to the fourth step. So, rather than holistically thinking about it. I like to really drill in and say let's start with five. And if you've got 50 employees and you assign five people to each of those 50 employees to say make sure this vendor or make sure this customer, or make sure this partner feels very appreciated by you on a regular basis. You're going to, you really start to see the ROI very, very quickly in your business. >> So some of the trends, if we look at this we're all consumers of any kind of product service, we have this expectation, this growing expectation that we're going to be able to get whatever we want whenever we want it, have it delivered in an hour or a day, or so, we want to be able to have this experience on mobile, maybe started there, maybe finish it in the store, what are some of the trends that you're seeing that you recommend that the company with any product or service needs to get on board with, for example, this morning they were talking about progressive web apps and being able to deliver an experience where the person doesn't have to leave the app, or they can transact something like through Instagram. What are some of those top tools that you recommend to your broad client base. You got to get on board with like mobile, for example, right away. >> Yes, I was going to say the PWAs are absolutely critical, because I think we've all as consumers been in the situation of trying to load something on our phone, and it's five seconds goes by six seconds, I'm like forget about it. >> We're done. >> Yeah, I'm done, I'm over it. So PWAs is super important because it's all about putting your customer first and making things simple for them. The other thing is making sure that whatever system process you're using, everything needs to be connected. You can't be managing stuff across eight different platforms and expect for things not to fall through the cracks which is I'm learning so much here at Imagine and listening to all the best practices of people who are using Magento to manage every part of their business because something is seemingly minor as sending a confirmation email twice instead of once or having eight hours go by before the customer gets that, those types of things, say to a customer on a subliminal level, I'm not important, I don't matter, they're not putting me first. >> So just fan comes from fanatic. And there's great things about fans, and some times there's less great things about fans and we've seen a little bit of that here in terms of this really passionate community around Magento. And it was independent. And then it went to eBay and then it went back out of eBay. And now it's back in Adobe. And it's funny seeing the people that have been here for the whole journey. Part of that responsibility, if you're going to invite someone to be a fan is you have to let them participate, you have to let them contribute. And often which we're seeing, I guess, in Game of Thrones, I'm not a big fan, but if you get outside of kind of the realm of where the fans want things to go, it can also cause some conflict. So, how to people manage encouraging fans, really supporting fans, but at the same time not letting them completely knock their business off or hold the business back probably from places where the entrepreneur needs to still go? >> That's a great question. There was a really fascinating study that Viacom did a couple of years ago about fans. And especially in the under 35 sets, so millennials, gen Z. And the vast majority of people felt like fans have some ownership of the thing that they're a fan of. And that's a really interesting study in psychology to think about these people who feel the ownership. But you know, it's true. You mentioned Game of Thrones, that's a great example of seeing these fan bases who come up with names for themselves, and who are tweeting in real time about things that are happening. Magento a great example because open source has been such an important part of the culture and the history of the platform. These people feel in a very real sense this ownership. And you're right, I think sometimes that scares small business owners, medium sized business owners. They say, Well, we don't want to relinquish control. We don't want to put ourselves in a situation where we're upsetting people. And I would say, You're right, fan comes from the word fanatic. And that fanaticism, that passion is something you absolutely want. Because I would argue that a greater threat than that is what I was talking about earlier, which is apathy. You don't want people to be like, I don't care. And passion is of course, the opposite of apathy. And that's what you're looking for. So I would say, are you going to put yourself in a position where sometimes there could be a disagreement, you could upset somebody? Absolutely, but you those are the people, it's like if you're in a relationship with somebody and you have a fight that passion that's there is because there's care on both sides. You're both super engaged, you're both very passionate about your position. So, having a system in place to defuse that by saying, I hear you I understand where you're coming from, let's figure this out together, is part of the customer service staff that you've just got to prepare for. >> Can you using, sorry Brittany, using all this data that's available that Magento, Adobe et cetera can deliver and enable organizations to understand that and maybe even kind of marry those behaviors with apathy on one hand passion on the other and how do we get to that happy medium? >> Exactly, how do we get to the happy medium, what are the data points that matter? How are we, the idea of super fan means something different to every organization. So, part of it is uncovering what it is that really matters to you. I always say a super fan is somebody who over indexes and their affinity for a product, service, brand, entertainer, therefore increasing the chance that they're going to advocate on its behalf. So, thinking about, there could be people who are spending a lot of money with your brand who just aren't really that passionate about it. They're not going to tell people and that's fine. But those aren't the people who would be a quote unquote superfan, even though they may be spending a lot of money with you. So, it's figuring out what the markers are that are important to your brand or service. I work with a lot of brands on this because it really is different for everyone. But figuring out who those people are and then talking to them because this is something that, there's so much psychology around the why. Like why people behave the way we do that the consumer behavior, the internal and philosophical drives that are making us make the decisions that we make and the best way to uncover that is to talk to your customers because a lot of times you'll learn so much about your brand, you'll find so many things. I always love talking to recording artists about this, they put out a new song or a new album and in the fans find all these hidden messages >> Taylor is known for that. >> Always some-- >> Taylor is one of the best in the world. And a lot of times artists will say, Oh, yeah, like, I didn't do that on purpose but I'm totally going to take credit for it because these fans found it. And oh, yeah, of course, I meant to do that. So, you'll find that some of these customers understand your brand oftentimes better than you do which is a really fun thing. >> It's also just the ecosystem. You my favorite one always reference is Harley Davidson, guess how many brands get tattooed on people's arms, and just the whole ecosystem of other products that were built up around the motorcycle, and to support kind of that community they weren't getting any nickels necessarily if somebody sold a saddle bag or a leather jacket, or whatever but it was such and it still is, I think such a vibrant community again, and as evidence by you put a tattoo on your arm that it's something to strive for, not easy to get. >> Why we always say build a brand not a business because the brand are those things that people are connecting to. We were talking about NASA before we started filming. I'm a huge space geek and Lisa loves space having worked for NASA in the past and that's one of those things, I don't know this to be true but I got to believe NASA way outpaces like every other combined government agency in licensing. I mean, people walk around wearing NASA logos on everything >> I saw at least three of them this morning. >> Yeah, I mean, I bought in the last month, probably three different NASA licensed products. So I mean that's the passion that if you can connect to somebody on an emotional level and make your story part of their story. They want to represent it, they want to get that Harley tattooed on their arm. >> That emotional connection but also that personalization that's key? >> Yes. >> What's difference in from your perspective on a superfan versus an influencer? Are they one in the same? >> It's a great question. So, they a lot of times are one in the same and that same Viacom study that I mentioned earlier. Something like two thirds of people said that they consider themselves to be pop culture influencers which sounds like a lot. But if you think about it, pretty much everyone is an influencer and that's because for Nielsen, the most trusted recommendation is or the most trusted form advertising is a recommendation from a friend or a family member, 92% of people trust a recommendation from a friend or family member, which far outpaces every other form of advertising. So in a lot of ways, these micro influencers are the next wave of advertising. These advocates or these super fans are, I think in many ways an untapped well of resources for the fans who drill in and you mentioned Taylor Swift before. How many people listen to Taylor Swift for the first time because a friend suggested they listen to Taylor Swift. I would argue that lots and lots of people and Taylor said something to me years ago that like a former manager, or someone said to her, and that was, if you want to sell half a million albums, you're going to have to meet half a million people. That was said to her when she was like, 15, 16 years old and she thought, okay, yeah, I'm going to go meet half a million people. I'm going to be befriend them, I'm going to listen to their stories, I'm going to let them know what they say matters to me. And here we are, she sold, I don't know, 50, 60 million albums, however many she sold worldwide. And but that's really where it starts, that one to one connection. >> Seems to just kind of all go back to referral. And isn't that sort of the basic human connection? It's like, are we trying to over-complicate this with all these different tools that simply, even with hiring and tech or whatever industry, referrals are so much more important because you've got some sort of connection to a brand or a person or a product or service. >> You've got that connection, you've got somebody who's already very well qualified. And I like to talk about something that I call the wave method which the wave is a ritual hello, goodbye. How many times a day do you wave at people, countless. And virtually you say hello to tons of people everyday. People who are coming to one of your social pages, people who are engaging with your website. So I say, I encourage people to think about that hello and goodbye, that interaction. Think of a wave as an acronym and ask yourself, are you making everybody who's going to come into contact with you today feel welcomed? Is there something on your virtual site or in your real storefront. If you're a brick and mortar business that's going to make people feel welcomed? How are you making them feel like they belong? The A is appreciated, how are you letting those people know that they are appreciated by your business? I think I know I have often felt like I'm a number or I don't matter. Utility companies are notorious for this for making you feel like they don't really care if they have your business or not. Or they know perhaps that they're going to because there's not like a different water company you can you can use it your home. And that sucks, like we've all been made to feel like we weren't appreciated by somebody that we were doing a financial transaction with. So ask yourself, how can you make your potential and current customers feel appreciated? The V stands for validated, and one of the best quotes that I've ever come across is from Oprah. On her last episode, she was imparting some of the lessons that she had learned over the years of hosting her shows and she said she'd interviewed something like 30,000 people over the years, and they all wanted the same thing. And that was validation. They all want it to feel like they were important and their feelings mattered. I see you, I hear you what you're saying is important to me. So, validate your customers. One big mistake that I see people make all the time in customer service is when somebody has a complaint, having your rebuttal be like, Oh, I've never heard that before. Or it's 10,000 people haven't have had great experiences. That's absolutely the worst thing that you can ever say to somebody because you're bringing in other experiences that don't matter to them. It's a one to one conversation. It's a one to one relationship. So bringing in, that's like having a fight with your significant other and saying like, Well none of the women I dated before you ever had a problem with this, like how well is that going to go over? Like you don't want to bring in other experiences. So that V and wave validated >> And the E? >> and then the E is excited, making people feel excited because that passion, having people feel like you know you're excited that they're a customer of yours and you can bring something that's going to make their lives better is the most important key. >> Brittany, thank you so much. I could keep talking to ya. I wish we didn't end but we do, for sharing your experiences, your expertise, your recommendations on becoming any kind of brand with any product or service, generating the super fans. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you so much. It was so great speaking with you guys today. >> Ditto. >> Thanks. >> For Jeff Frick, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching this on theCUBE live from Magento Imagine 2019 from Vegas, thanks for watching.