>> Hi, I'm Peter Burris and welcome to another Wikibon Action Item Quick Take. David Floyer, you were at OCP, the Open Compute Platform this past week and saw some really interesting things. A couple companies stood out for you including- >> Liqid. They are a very very interesting company. They went GA with a PCIE switch. That's the very very high speed switch that all the systems work off. And what this does is essentially enable virtualization of CPU storage, GPU, systems network, anything that can connect to a PCI bus without the software overhead, without the VMware overhead, without the KVM overhead. This is very exciting that you can have Bare-metal virtualization of the product and put together your own architecture of systems. And one particular example that struck me as being very useful. If you're doing benchmarks and you're trying to do benchmarks with one GPU, two GPU's or more storage or whatever it is you want. This seems to be an ideal way of being able to do that so quickly. I think this is a very exciting product. It's a competitor with Intel's RSD, Rack Scale Design. That's obviously another thing that they seem to have beaten them to, GA to something that works. There's a 30,000 developer kit- >> Mark: 30,000 dollar. >> 30,000 dollar developer kit. I would recommend that that's a best buy for enterprising Cloud provider data centers. >> Excellent. >> So David Floyer at OCP this week, Liqid's new bus technology. Check it out. This has been a Wikibon Action Item Quick Take with Peter Burris and David Floyer. (techno music)

>> Hi I'm Peter Burris, and welcome once again to another Wikibon Action Item Quick Take. David Floyer you were at OCP, the Open Compute Platform show, or summit this week, wandered the floor, talked to a lot of people, one company in particular stood out, Nimbus Data, what'd you hear? >> Well they had a very interesting announcement of their 100 terrabyte three and a half inch SSD, called the ExaData. That's a lot of storage in a very small space. It's high capacity SSDs, in my opinion, are going to be very important. They are denser, much less power, much less space, not as much performance, but fit in very nicely between the lowest level of disc, hard disc storage and the upper level. So they are going to be very useful in lower tier two applications. Very low friction for adoption there. They're going to be useful in tier three, but they're not direct replacement for disc. They work in a slightly different way. So the friction is going to be a little bit higher there. And then in tier four, there's again very interesting of putting all of the metadata about large amounts of data and put the metadata on high capacity SSD to enable much faster access at a tier four level. So action item for me is have a look at my research, and have a look at the general pricing: it's about half of what a standard SSD is. >> Excellent so this is once again a Wikibon Action Item Quick Take. David Floyer talking about Nimbus Data and their new high capacity, slightly lower performance, cost effective SSD. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, welcome to theCUBE's coverage of AnsibleFest 2021 virtual; I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We've got a great power panel here from Kyndryl whose great company has spun out of IBM. IT services great, technology, great conversation. Scott Kinane, director of worldwide automation, Anand Gopalakrishnan, chief automation architect, love the title, from Kyndryl, and Lisa Chavez, automations architect from Kyndryl. Guys, thanks for coming on. Appreciate the conversation. Looking forward to it. >> Thanks John glad to be here. >> Thank you. >> Scott, we covered you guys at IBM Think 2021, the new name, everything's happening. The extreme focus, the tactical execution has been pretty much on cloud, cloud native automation. This is the conversation. Knowing how much has gone behind the new name, can you just take a minute to share, give us an update on who Kyndryl is and how that's going? >> Yeah, I'd love to. You know, as Kyndryl, we really have the privilege of being responsible for designing, building, managing, and modernizing, you know, the mission critical systems that the world depends on every day, you know? When our thousands of clients span every industry and are leaders in their industries, right? You run the mission critical application environments for, you know, seven of the 10 largest airlines, 28 of the top 50 banks, right? All the largest mobile providers. You know, most of the largest retailers out there, and so on and so forth, right? That these companies really trust us to ensure that their business operations are really flawlessly being run. And operating our scale, and with the quality that these clients demand, is only possible by doing enterprise strength automation. Right? It's only, you know, it's not only about reactive automation, but using intelligent automation so we can predict and prevent issues before they really become a problem. Right? And because of our intelligent approach to automation, our clients have a... you know, they get tremendous business benefits for it, right? Retailers can open stores faster because systems and services are deployed more efficiently, right? Banks ATM's right, we all depend on those day to day, you know. They're working when you need them with our automation behind the scenes. You know, healthcare systems are more robust and responsive because we monitor for potential breaks and prevent them before they occur, right. Data processing systems, right. We hear about breaches all the time, right? Our clients are more secure because their environments are checked into, are checked to ensure that security exposures are quickly discovered and intermediated, right? So like automation, orchestration, intelligence, driving the world's digital economy, right. If you ask what Kyndryl is it, you know, that's our DNA. And it's really what we do well. >> Yeah, what's interesting, I want to get you to just quick followup on that because the name implies kind of a fresh perspective, working together. There's a lot of shared experiences and that. And the new normal now is honestly with hybrid and virtual continuing, people are doing things differently. And I would like you, if you don't mind taking a minute to share about the automation environment that you guys are operating in, because it's a different approach, but the game is still the same. Right? (John and Scott laugh) You got to make sure that these things are scaling and people are working again. So it's a combination of people and technology, in a new equation. Take a minute to talk about that. >> Yeah, I'd love to. You know, and you're right, right; the game is really changing. And automation is really ingrained into, needs to be ingrained in the way everybody's approaching what they do day to day. And if you talk about automation, in a way it's really included in what we do in our BAU delivery operations, right. And we do it at a tremendous scale, right. Where we have, you know, millions of infrastructure components and applications managed with automation, right. We're going to talk a little bit about CACF here in a few minutes, right? We've got over half a million devices themselves boarded onto that, and we're running over 11 million automations on a month to month basis through that, through the, the Red Hat technology that that's built on, right. We've got RPA as a key part of our environment, running millions of transactions through that on a yearly basis, right. And our automation's really covering the entire stack, right? It's not just about traditional IT, but we cover public cloud, private cloud, hybrid, you know, network components, applications and business processes, right? You talked about people, right. Help desk, right. We cover automation to automate a lot of the help desk processes are happening behind the scenes; security and resiliency. And it's really about driving all that through, you know, not just prescriptive reactions, but you know, us using our experience; insights we have from our data lakes, and intel, and AI ops technologies, and really making proactive based decisions based on that to really help drive the value back for our clients and to ensure that they're operating the way they need to. >> Yeah, that systems mindset, outcome driven focus is unique. That's awesome, congratulations. And onto Lisa, we're going to get into the architect side of it, because you're seeing more and more automation at the center of all the conversation. Reminds me of the machine learning AI vibe a couple of years ago. It's like, oh yeah, everything's MLAI. Automation, now everything's automation. Anand, your title is chief automation architect, love that title. What do you do? Like, I mean, you're architecting more automation, are you? Could you take a minute to explain your role? I love the title. And automation is really the technology driving a lot of the change. What do you do? >> Thank you, John. So let me first thank you for allowing us to come and speak to you and inform here about what we have done using Ansible and the other Red Hat products. So Ansible is one of the many products that we have used within Red Hat to support the solution that we have deployed, Paul, as our automation community framework, right? So, Scott touched upon it a few minutes earlier in terms of what are we doing for our clients? How do we make sure that our client's environment is secure? How do we make sure that our client environment is available all the time? So that... Are the infrastructure services that we're providing for our clients has a direct impact for their clients. So this is where the implementation of automation using the products that we have from Red Hat has helped us achieve. And we'll continue, we will continue to expand on supporting that, right. So let me break this into two parts. One is from an infrastructure standpoint, how we have implemented the solution and scaled it in such a way that we can support the number of devices that Scott was referring to earlier, And also the number of clients that we have touched on. And the second part, I'll let my colleague Lisa talk about the application architecture and the application scalability that we have, right? So firstly, we touch on infrastructure. So if you look at the way we needed to establish a capability to provide support for our clients, we wanted to make sure our infrastructure is available all the time, right? That's very important. So, before we even basically say, hey, we're going to make sure that our client's infrastructure is available all the time or our client's infrastructure is secure. And also we provide, we are able to provide the automation services for the infrastructure service that we're providing, right? So the stack that we built was to support our solution to be truly cloud native. So we began with of course, using OCP, which is the OpenShift cloud platform that we have. We relied on Red Hat CoreOS, which is basically enabling the automation platform to be deployed as a true cloud native application; that can be scalable to not just within one country, but multiple countries. Supporting data privacy that we need to have, supporting the compliance parts of that we need to support, and scalable to support the half a billion devices that we are supporting today. Right? So essentially, if you look at what we have, is a capability enabled on the entire stack of the Red Hat products that we have. And we are able to focus on ensuring that we are able to provide the automation by gaining efficiencies, right? If you look at a lot of automations that we have it's about biggest in complexities, right? So just think about the amount of risk that we are removing, and the quality that we are assuring from the qualified and standardized changes that we are basically implementing. Or, just, the amount of risk that we are able to eliminate by removing thousands of manual labor hours as well. So if you look at the automation need, it's not just about efficiency of the removal of labor hours, but efficiency of providing standards and efficiency of providing the capabilities that support our clients, who their needs; i.e. making sure that their infrastructure is compliant, their infrastructure is secure, and their infrastructure is highly available all the time. So it just basically making sure that we are able to address what we call as day one and day two activities, while we are able to support their day two infrastructure services activities; i.e. right from ground up. Building the server, which is provisioning, doing some provisioning activities, and deploying applications, and basically supporting the applications once they are deployed. So look at the scale, we have quite a bit there. >> So, you got the cloud native platform... >> Hey, careful Anand... >> You've got the cloud native platform, right? Let me just summarize that; cloud native platform for scale. So that means you're aligning, and targeting, and working with people who will want to do cloud native applications. >> Absolutely. >> And they want fast speed. (John laughing) >> Yes, and they want... >> They want everything to go faster. And by the way, the compliance piece is super important because if you can take that away from them, for waiting for the answers from the compliance department or security department, then that's the flywheel. Is that what you're getting at? This is the trend? >> Absolutely. So I'm going to turn it over to Lisa, who's going to help us. >> Yeah >> Go ahead Lisa >> Lisa, weigh in on the flywheel here. (Lisa chuckles) >> Yeah. Sure, sure. Yeah. So, so one of the things that CACF allows us to do, right, and it's again, as Anand described, `it's a very robust, powerful infrastructure. Supports many, many clients as we run a lot of applications through this infrastructure. And we do things like run security health checks on all our client's servers, and process the data real time and get that data out to our teams to address issues almost immediately, right? Scott touched on the fact that we are monitoring incident data real time and taking automated actions to correct problems in the environment. These are just really, really powerful capabilities that we're able to offer. We also have other use cases, we do a lot of identity management, primary and secondary controls through the CACF infrastructure. So we're able to have one point of connectivity into our client's environments. It's agentless, right, so you set up one connection to their servers and we can do a whole lot of management of various things through this single automation platform. So... >> So I, so that just to call this up, this is actually very powerful. And first of all, you mentioned the CACF that's the cloud automation community framework. >> Yes, correct. >> Right. >> Okay, so that's the platform. (Lisa chuckles) >> Yes >> Okay, so now the platforms' there; and now talk about the advantages. Because the power here is this truly highlights the transformation of DevOps, infrastructure as code, and microservices, coming around the corner where the developer; And I know developers want to build security into the applications from day one and take advantage of new services as they come online. That is now one. That puts the pressure on the old IT teams, the old security teams, who have been the NoOps. No, you can't do or slow, are slower. This is a trend, this is actually happening. And this culture shift is happening. Could you guys weigh in on that because this is a really important part of this story. >> Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, if you go back, circa 2019 or so, right. You know, we were back then and we were recognized as a leader in the automation space by a lot of the analysts. But we kind of look at that culture change you were just talking about and look at, you know, how do we become more agile? How do we go faster and what we're doing, right. And then I'm working with Jason McKerr and the Red Hat's Ansible automation platform team. We kind of define this platform that Lisa and Anand are talking to, right. Wrapping together, the OpenShift and Ansible, and 3scale with, you know, our services platform with Watson, and, and, you know, it really gave us the ability to leverage two of our core capabilities, right? The first, you know, in order for us to go faster, was our community model, right? Our community experience, right? So we've got a large delivery community that's out there really experts in a lot of, experts in a lot of technologies and industries. And, and by putting this in place, it gave us a way to really leverage them more in that community model development, so they could create, and we can harvest more of the automation playbooks. A lot of the different use cases that Lisa was talking incident remediation, patch scanning and deployment, security compliance, checking and enforcement. You know, basically anything that needs to get done as part of our what we'd call day one or day two operations we do for a client, right. And Steve's approach really to, to do a lot of high quality automation and get to the point where we could get thousands of automation modules that our clients could, that we could use as a part of our, a part of our services we delivered to the client environments. And, you know, that type of speed and agility, and being able to kind of leverage that was something that wasn't there previously. It also gave us a way to leverage, I guess they are one of our other core capabilities, right; which is a systems integrator, right? So we were able to focus more, by having that core engine in place, we were able to form focus more on our integrator experience and integrate, you know, IBM technologies, ServiceNow, ScienceLogic, VMware, and many more, right to the engine itself. So you know, basically, you know, all the applications out there that the, the clients then depend on for their business environments integrate directly with them; so we could more seamlessly bring the automation to their, to their environments, right. So it really gave us both the, the ability to change our culture, have a community model in place that we didn't before and really leveraged that services integrator expertise that we bring to the table, and act really fast on behalf of our clients out there. >> That's great stuff. Lisa, Lisa if you don't mind, could you share your thoughts on what's different about the community platform, and because automation has been around for a while, you do a couple of times, you do something repetitive, you automate it. Automate it out of way, and that's efficiency. Anand was the one saying that. >> Yeah but within Kyndryl, we have a very strong community and we have very strong security guidelines around what the community produces and what we deliver to our clients, right? So, we give our teams a lot of flexibility, but we also make sure that the content is very secure; we do a lot of testing. We have very strong security teams that do actual physical, penetration testing, right. They actually could try and come in and break things. So, you know, we really feel good about, you know, not only do we give our teams the flexibility, but we also, you know, make sure that it's safe for our clients. >> How's the relationship with Ansible evolving? Because as Ansible continues to do well with automation; automations now, like in automation as code, if things are discoverable, reuse is a big topic in the community model. How is Ansible factoring into your success? >> So... So firstly, I want to break this again into two discussions, right? One is the product itself. And second is how we have collaborated very closely with our colleagues at Red Hat, right? So essentially it's the feedback that we get from our clients, which is then fed into our solution, and then from our solution, we basically say, does it meet what our client's requirements are? If it doesn't, then we work with our Red Hat colleagues and say, hey, you know, we need some enhancements to be made. And we've been, we've been lucky enough to work with our colleagues at Red Hat, very closely, where we have been able to make some core product changes to support our clients requirements, right. And that's very, very important in terms of the collaboration from, with Red Hat, from a, you know, from a client standpoint. That's number one. Number two, from a product standpoint, Ansible, and the use of Ansible itself, right? Or Ansible Tower as the automation hub that we've been using. So we began this with a very base product capability, which was through what we call event automation. That was our first. Then we said, no, I think we can certainly look at expanding this to beyond event automation. I.e. can we do, when we say event that is very typically BAU activities, day two activities. But then we said, can we, can we do day one, day two infrastructure services automation? We said yes, why not? And then we worked again with our colleagues at Red Hat, identifying opportunities to improve on those. And we basically enhanced the framework to support those additional use cases that we basically identified. And as a matter of fact, we are continually looking at improving as well. In terms of not just hey, using the base product as is, but also receiving that feedback, giving that feedback to our Red Hat colleagues, and then implementing it as we go. So that's the, that's the approach we have taken. >> And what's the other half of the subject? Split it in two, What's the other half? >> Yep. But the other half is the actual implementation itself. So we like, which is basically expanding the use cases to go from beyond event automation to back from building the server, to also patching compliance. And now we're actually looking at even what we call service requests automation. By this is we basically want to be able to say hey user, we want a specific action to be performed on a particular end point. Can we take it to that next level as well? So that's where we are basically looking at as we progress. So we're not done. I would say we're still at the beginning of expansion. >> Yeah. >> Well no, I totally agree. I think it's early days, and I think a lot of it's, you mentioned day two operations; I love that. Day zero, day one, day two. Does anyone want to take a stab at defining what day two operations is? (John laughing) >> Do you want to go? >> Well, I got the experts here. It's good to get the definitions out there. >> Absolutely. >> 'Cause day one you're provisioned, right? >> Day zero, you provision. >> Day zero you provision. >> So day zero they look at... Yeah, so day zero you look at what is the infrastructure, what's the hardware that's there. And then day one you do what we call post provisioning activities, configuring everything that we need to do, like deploying the middleware applications, making sure the applications are configured properly, making sure that our, you know, the operating systems that we need to have. Whether it is a base operating system or operating systems for supporting the containers that are basically going to be enabled, all those will need to be looked at, right? So that's day one. Then day two is business as usual. >> Everything breaks on day two. (everyone laughs) >> Although I... >> Day one's fun, everything's good, we got everything up and running. We stood it up, and day two it breaks; And like, you know it's his fault. >> Exactly. >> Who's fault is it? (everyone laughing) So if you look at the approach that we took was, we said, let's start with the day two, then get to day zero, right. So which time where we have lots of lessons learned as we go through. And that's the expansion of how we are looking at Ansible. >> Well this is, all fun aside. First of all, it's all fun to have, to have to have jokes like that; but the reality is that the hardened operational discipline required to go beyond day one is critical, right? So this is where we start getting into the ops side where security downtime, disruptive operations, it's got to be programmable. And by the way, automation is in there too. So which means that it's not humans it's software running. Right? So, edge is going to complicate the hell out of that too. So, day two becomes super important from an architecture standpoint. You guys are the architects; what's the strategy, what should people be doing? What, what, how should, because day one is fun. You get it up, stand it up. But then it starts getting benefit; people start paying attention. >> Yep. _ And then you need to scale it and harden it. What's the strategy? What should people do? >> Yeah. I mean, if you think about automation, right? It's not... oh, I should, I meant to say John, you know, if it breaks, it's always Anand's fault, always Anand's. (John, Lisa, and Anand laugh) Don't ask any of that. >> I agree. >> Exactly. Thank you, Lisa. (everyone laughing) But, but automate, you know, you know, automation in a lot of conversations, people talk about it as gaining efficiency. And you know, it's not just that, you know, Automation is about de-risking complexities. Right? Think about all the risk that's removed, you know, and quality assured from the codified and standardized changes, right. Think about all the risk removed from eliminating, you know, tens of thousands of manual labor hours that have to be done. And those various things, right, that get done. So, for, we talk about day two operations, what we're doing, getting more automation in there, you know, our focus is definitely how do we de-risk changes? How do we make it safer for the clients? How do we make it more secure for the clients? And how do we ensure that their business operations, you know, are operating at their peak efficiencies? >> Yeah. And as I mentioned, we really go above and beyond on the security. We have much, much, much automated testing. And we also have the penetration testing I was talking about, so. We take security very seriously. Yeah. >> Yeah. >> I think what's interesting about what you guys are doing with the platform is, it's cloud native. You start to see not just the replatforming, but the fun parts. When you start thinking about refactoring applications and benefits start to come out of nowhere; I go new benefits, new net, new use cases. So I think the outcomes side of this is interesting. A lot of people talk about, okay let's focus on the cost, but there's now net new positive, potentially revenue impact for your customers. This is kind of where the game changes a lot. What do you guys think about that; 'cuz that's, you know, you always have this argument with folks who are very cost centric, repatriated for getting off the cloud, or let's look at the net new opportunities that are going to be enabled by rapid programming, identifying new workflows, automating them, and creating value. >> Yeah. I mean, this is, you know, you're talking about the future where we're going, things that we do, you know, obviously getting more closer to, and being directly aligned with the DevSecOps teams that are out there. You talk about day two, you know, the closer we are to those guys, the better for, for us and everybody else that's going there, going forward. You know, and as you know, businesses keep returning to their pre COVID level levels, you know, automation gives the possibility and that ones that we were doing gives possibility for hopefully the clients to do more of that revenue capture, right. Being able to, you know, be ahead a little bit earlier, being able to stand up retail stores faster, right. Being able to deploy business-based applications that are, generating revenue for the clients at a you know, you know, at a moment's notice. Things like that are really possible with automation, and possible with the way we've done this solution with Red Hat and our clients, right. And I think we've got tons of benefits there. We're seeing, you know, we've got almost 900 clients supported on it today, right. You know Anand hit on, we've got half a million plus devices that are connected to this, right. And we're seeing things where, you know, the clients are, are, that are on this are, are getting results, you know, Something such as 61% of all tickets being resolved with no human intervention, you know, 84% of their entire service base server base is being checked automatically for security and compliance daily. And, and, you know, we could go through lots of those different metrics, but the, you know, the fact we can do that for our clients gives, gives through automation, gives, you know, our engineers, our delivery community, the ability to closely more closely work with the client to do those revenue generation activities; to help them capture more, more revenue in the market. >> We'll just put that in context, the scale and speed of what's happening with those numbers; I mean, it's significant. It's not like it's a small little test. That's like large scale. Scale's the advantage of cloud. Cloud is a scale game. The advantage is scaling and handling that scale. What's your thoughts? >> Absolutely. So if you basically, again, when we started this, we started small, right. In terms of the use cases that we wanted to tackle, the number of devices that we said we could basically handle, right. But then once we saw the benefits, the initial benefits of how quickly we were able to fix some of the problems from a day one day, two standpoint; or address some of the compliance and patching issues that we needed to look at, right. We, we quickly saw opportunities and said, how fast can we go? And in terms of, well, it's not just how fast can we go in terms of setting up our own infrastructure by you know, saying, hey, we are cloud native. I can just spin up another container and, you know, make sure that I can have another a hundred servers onboarded to support, or a hundred that network devices to be onboarded to support and so on, right. So it was also the scale from a automation standpoint, where we needed to make sure that our resources were skilled, to develop the automations as well. So the scale is not in terms of just the infrastructure, but the scale is also in terms of people that can do the automation in terms of, you know, providing the services for our infrastructure, right. So that's how we approached it. People and then an application and infrastructure. So that included providing education in, in Kyndryl today rose to about 11,000 people that we have trained on Ansible, the use of Ansible, and the use of Ansible Tower, and just even doing development of the playbooks using Ansible. That's a theme. if you look at, if you look at, it's not just infrastructure scale. It's infrastructure scale, application to be able to scale to that infrastructure, and people to be able to scale to what we're trying to do to support our clients as well. >> I think the people think is huge because you have a side benefit here as harmony, and the teams. You got cohesiveness that breeds peace, not war. (everyone laughs) >> Absolutely. >> That's between teams. >> If you look at the, you know, the words that we said; cloud automation, community framework. If you really break it down, right, it's a framework, but for who? It's for the community. >> Yeah. >> But, what are they doing? They're building automation. >> Yeah >> And that is what >> The Security team wants to, >> the cloud is about, right? >> The security team wants to, make the apps go faster, The apps want to be fast, they don't want to be waiting. Everything's about going faster; Pass, shoot, score, as they say in sports. But, but, okay, I love this conversation. I think it's going to be the beginning of a big wave. How do people engage and how do I get involved if I want to use the cloud automation community framework? What's the consumption side for, how do you guys push this out there, and how do people engage with you? >> Scott do you want to take that one? >> Yeah. I mean the, the easiest way is, you know, Kyndryl, you know, we're, we're out there. We're, coming forward with our company, a spin off from IBM, come engage with our sales reps, come engage with our, our outsourcing, our social risk management service delivery organizations, and, and, you know, happy to get them engaged, get them on board, and get them using the automation framework we've got in place. >> That's awesome. Great. Well, great stuff. Love the automation conversation. Automation and hybrid are the big, big trends that are never going to stop. It's going to be a hybrid world we live in. And the edge is exciting. It's got, you mentioned the edge; it's just more and more action. It's a distributed computing paradigm. I mean, it really the same. We've seen this movie before Anand. Yeah, in tech. So now it's automation. So great stuff. Lisa, thank you for coming on; I appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Thanks. >> Thank you, John. >> Thank you, John. We have coverage for Ansible Fest 2021. Power panel breaking down automation with Kyndryl. The importance of community, the importance of cohesiveness with teams, but more importantly, the outcome, the speed of development and security. I'm John for theCUBE, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Ansible Fest 2020 brought to you by Red Hat. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage, Cube virtual's coverage of Ansible Fest 2020 virtual. We're not face to face this year. I'm your host John Furrier with theCube. We're virtual, this theCube virtual and we're doing our part, getting the remote interviews with all the best thought leaders experts and of course the Red Hat experts. We've got Walter Bentley, Senior Manager of Automation practice with Red Hat and Jason Smith, Vice President of North American services, back on theCube. We were in Atlanta last year in person. Guys, thanks for coming on virtually. Good morning to you. Thanks for coming on. >> Good morning John. Good morning, good morning. >> So since Ansible Fest last year a lot's happened where she's living in seems to be an unbelievable 2020. Depending on who you talk to it's been the craziest year of all time. Fires in California, crazy presidential election, COVID whole nine yards, but the scale of Cloud has just unbelievably moved some faster. I was commenting with some of your colleagues around the snowflake IBO it's built on Amazon, right? So value is changed, people are shifting, you starting to clear visibility on what these modern apps are looking like, it's Cloud native, it's legacy integrations, it's beyond lift and shift as we've been seeing in the business. So I'd love to get, Jason we'll start with you, your key points you would like people to know about Ansible Fest 2020 this year because there's a lot going on this year because there's a lot to build on and there's a tailwind for Cloud native and customers have to move fast. What's your thoughts? >> Yeah so, a lot has happened since last year and customers are looking to be a lot more selective around their automation technologies. So they're not just looking for another tool. They're really looking for an automation platform, a platform that they can leverage more of an enterprise strategy and really be able to make sure that they have something that's secure, scalable, and they can use across the enterprise to be able to bring teams together and really drive value and productivity out of their automation platform. >> What's the key points in the customers and our audience around the conversations around the learning, that's the new stuff happening in using Ansible this year? What are the key top things, Jason? Can you comment on what you're seeing the big takeaway for our audience watching? >> Yeah, so a lots change like you said, since last year. We worked with a lot of customers around the world to implement Ansible and automation at scale. So we're using our automation journeys as we talked about last year and really helping customers lay out a more prescriptive approach on how they're going to deliver automation across their enterprise. So customers are really working with us because we're working with the largest customers in the world to implement their strategies. And when we work with new customers we can bring those learnings and that experience to them. So they're not having to learn that for the first time and figure it out on their own, but they're really able to learn and leverage the experience we have through hundreds of customers and at enterprise scale and can take the value that we can bring in and help them through those types of projects much more quickly than they could on their own. >> It's interesting. We were looking at the research numbers and look at the adoption of what Ansible's doing and you guys are with Red Hat it's pretty strong. Could you share on the services side because there's a lot of services going on here? Not just network services and software services, just traditional services. What are the one or two reasons why customer engaged with Red Hat services? What would that be? >> Yeah so, like I said, I mean, we bring that experience. So customers that typically might have to spend weeks troubleshooting and making decisions on how they're going to deliver their implementations, they can work with us and we can bring those best practices in and allow them to make those decisions and implement those best practices within hours instead of weeks, and really be able to accelerate their projects. Another thing is we're a services company as part of a product company. So we're not there just to deliver services. We're really focused on the success of the customer, leveraging our technologies. So we're there to really train and mentor them through the process so that they're really getting up to speed quickly. They're taking advantage of all of the expertise that we have to be able to build their own experience and expertise. So they can really take over once we're gone and be able to support and advance that technology on their own. So they're really looking to us to not only implement those technologies for them, but really with them and be able to train and mentor them. Like I said, and take advantage of those learnings. We also help them. We don't just focus on the technologies but really look at the people in process side of things. So we're bringing in a lot of principles from DevOps and Agile on open practices and helping customers really transform and be able to do things in a new way, to be much more efficient, a lot more agile, be able to drive a lot more value out of our technology. >> Walter, I got to ask you, last year we were chatting about this, but I want to get the update. And I'd like you to just give us a quick refresh definition about the automation adoption journey because this is a real big deal. I mean, we're looking at the trends. Everyone realizes automation is super important at scale, as you think about whether it's software data, anything's about automation it's super important, but it's hard. I mean, the marketplace we were looking at the numbers. I was talking to IDC for you guys at this festival and of Ansible Fest, and they said about five to 10% of enterprises are containerized, which means this huge wave coming of containerization. This is about the automation adoption journey because you start containerizing, (laughs) right? You start looking at the workflows on the pipelinig and how the codes being released and everything. This is important stuff. Give us the update on the automation adoption journey and where it is in the portfolio. >> Well, yeah, just as you called it out, last year on main stage and Ansible fest, almost every customer expressed the need and desire to have to have a strategy as to how they drive their adoption of automation inside their enterprise. And as we've gone over the past few months of splitting this in place with many customers, what we've learned is that many customers have matured into a place where they are now looking at the end to end workflow. Instead of just looking at the tactical thing that they want to automate, they are actually looking at the full ribbon, the full workflow and determining are there changes that need to be made and adjusted to be more efficient when it comes to dealing with automation. And then the other piece as we alluded to already is the contagious nature of that adoption. We're finding that there are organizations that are picking up the automation adoption journey, and because of the momentum it creates inside of that organization we're finding other municipalities that are associated with them are now also looking to be able to take on the journey because of that contagious nature. So we can see that how it's spreading in a positive way. And we're really looking forward to being able to do more of it as the next quarter and the next year comes up. >> Yeah, and that whole sharing thing is a big part of the content theme and the community thing. So great reference on that, good thing is word of mouth and community and collaboration is a good call out there. A quick question for you, you guys recently had a big win with NTT DoCoMo and their engagement with you guys on the automation, adoption journey. Walter, what were some of the key takeaways? Jason you can chime in too I'd like to get some specifics around where it's been successful >> To me, that customer experience was one that really was really exciting, primarily because we learned very early on that they were completely embodying that open source culture and they were very excited to jump right in and even went about creating their own community of practice. We call them communities of practice. You may know them as centers of excellence. They wanted to create that very early in increment, way before we were even ready to introduce it. And that's primarily because they saw how being able to have that community of practice in place created an environment of inclusion across the organization. They had legacy tools in place already, actually, there was a home grown legacy tool in place. And they very quickly realized that it didn't need to remove that tool, they just needed to figure out a way of being able to how to optimize and streamline how they leverage it and also be able to integrate it into the Ansible automation platform. Another thing I wanted to very quickly note is that they very quickly jumped onto the idea of being able to take those large workflows that they had and breaking them up into smaller chunks. And as you already know, from last year when we spoke about it, that's a pivotal part of what the automation adoption journey brings to our organization. So to sum it all up, they were all in, automation first mindset is what that was driving them. And all of those personas, all of those personal and cultural behaviors are what really helped drive that engagement to be very successful. >> Jason, we'll get your thoughts on this because again, Walter brought up last year's reference to breaking things up into modules. We look at this year's key news it's all about collections. You're seeing content is a big focus, content being not like a blog post or a media asset. Like this is content, but code is content. It's sharing. If it's being consumed by other people, there's now community. You're seeing the steam of enabling. I mean, you're looking at successes, like you guys are having with NTT DoCoMo and others. Once people realize there's a better way and success is contagious, as Walter was saying, you are now enabling new ways to do things faster at scale and all that good stuff has been go check out the keynotes. You guys talk about it all day long with the execs. But I want to learn, right? So when you enable success, people want to be a part of it. And I could imagine there's a thirst and demand for training and the playbooks and all the business models, innovations that's going on. What are you seeing for people that want to learn? Is there training? Is there certifications? Because once you get the magic formula as Walter pointed out, and we all know once people see what success looks like, they're going to want to duplicate it. So as this wave comes, it's like having the new surfboard. I want to surf that wave. So what's the update on Ansible's training, the tools, how do I learn, it's a certification of all. Just take a minute to explain what's going on. >> Yeah, so it's been a crazy world as we've talked about over the last six, seven months here, and we've really had to adapt ourselves and our training and consulting offerings to be able to support our remote delivery models. So we very, very quickly back in the March timeframe, we're able to move our consultants to a remote work force and really implement the tools and technologies to be able to still provide the same value to customers remotely as we have in person historically. And so it's actually been really great. We've been able to make a really seamless transition and actually our C-SAT net promoter scores have actually gone up over the last six months or so. So I think we've done a great job being able to still offer the same consulting capabilities remotely as we have onsite. And so that's obviously with a real personal touch working hand in hand with our customers to deliver these solutions. But from a training perspective, we've actually had to do the same thing because customers aren't onsite, they can't do in person training. We've been able to move our training offerings to completely virtual. So we're continuing to train our customers on Ansible and our other technologies through a virtual modality. And we've also been able to take all of our certifications and now offer those remotely. So as, whereas customers historically, would have had to gone into a center and get those certifications in person, they can now do those certifications remotely. So all of our training offerings and consulting offerings are now available remotely as well as they were in person in the past and will be hopefully soon enough, but it's really not-- >> You would adopt to virtual. >> Excuse me. >> You had to adopt to the virtual model quickly for trainings. >> Exactly. >> What about the community role? What's the role of the community? You guys have a very strong community. Walter pointed out the sharing aspect. Well, I pointed out he talked about the contagious people are talking. You guys have a very robust community. What's the role of community in all of this? >> Yeah, so as Walter said, we have our communities a practice that we use internally we work with customers to build communities of practice, which are very much like a centers of excellence, where people can really come together and share ideas and share best practices and be able to then leverage them more broadly. So, whereas in the past knowledge was really kept in silos, we're really helping customers to build those communities and leverage those communities to share ideas and be able to leverage the best practices that are being adopted more broadly. >> That's awesome. Yeah, break down those silos of course. Open up the data, good things will happen, a thousand flowers bloom, as we always say. Walter, I want to get your thoughts on this collection, what that enables back to learning and integrations. So if collections are going to be more pervasive and more common place the ability to integrate, we were covering for VMware world, there's a VMware module collection, I should say. What are customers doing when you integrate in cross technology parties because now obviously customers are going to have a lot of choice and options. If I'm an integration partner, it's all about Cloud native and the kinds of things we're talking about, you're going to have a lot of integration touch points. What's the most effective way for customers integrating other technology partners into Ansible? >> And this is one of the major benefits that came out of the announcement last year with the Ansible automation platform. The Anible automation platform really enables our customers to not just be able to do automation, but also be able to connect the dots or be able to connect other tools, such as other ITM SM tools or be able to connect into other parts of their workflows. And what we're finding in breaking down really quickly is two things. Collections obviously, is a huge aspect. And not just necessarily the collections but the automation service catalog is really where the value is because that's where we're placing all of these certified collections and certified content that's certified by Red Hat now that we create alongside with these vendors and they're unavailable to customers who are consuming the automation platform. And then the other component is the fact that we're now moved into a place where we now have something called the automation hub. which is very similar to galaxy, which is the online version of it. But the automation hub now is a focus area that's dedicated to a customer, where they can store their content and store those collections, not just the ones that they pull down that are certified by Red hat, but the ones that they create themselves. And the availability of this tool, not only just as a SaaS product, but now being able to have a local copy of it, which is brand new out of the press, out of the truck, feature is huge. That's something that customers have been asking for a very long time and I'm very happy that we're finally able to supply it. >> Okay, so backup for a second, rewind, fell off the truck. What does that mean? It's downloadable. You're saying that the automation hub is available locally. Is that what-- >> Yes, Sir. >> So what does that mean for the customer? What's the impact for them? >> So what that means is that previously, customers would have to connect into the internet. And the automation hub was a SaaS product, meaning it was available via the internet. You can go there, you can sync up and pull down content. And some customers prefer to have it in house. They prefer to have it inside of their firewall, within their control, not accessible through the internet. And that's just their preferences obviously for sometimes it's for compliance or business risk reasons. And now, because of that, we were able to meet that ask and be able to make a local version of it. Whereas you can actually have automation hub locally your environment, you can still sync up data that's out on the SaaS version of automation hub, but be able to bring it down locally and have it available with inside of your firewall, as well as be able to add your content and collections that you create internally to it as well. So it creates a centralized place for you to store all of your automation goodness. >> Jason, I know you got a hard stop and I want to get to you on the IBM question. Have you guys started any joint service engages with IBM? >> Yeah, so we've been delivering a lot of engagements jointly through IBM. We have a lot of joint customers and they're really looking for us to bring the best of both Red Hat services, Red Hat products, and IBM all together to deliver joint solutions. We've actually also worked with IBM global technology services to integrate Ansible into their service offerings. So they're now really leveraging the power of Ansible to drive lower cost and more innovation with our customers and our joint customers. >> I think that's going to be a nice lift for you guys. We'll get into the IBM machinery. I mean, you guys got a great offering, you always had great reviews, great community. I mean, IBM's is just going to be moving this pretty quickly through the system, I can imagine. What's some of the the feedback so far? >> Yeah, it's been great. I mean, we have so many, a large joint customers and they're helping us to get to a lot of customers that we were never able to reach before with their scale around the world. So it's been great to be able to leverage the IBM scale with the great products and services that Red Hat offers to really be able to take that more broadly and continue to drive that across customers in an accelerated pace. >> Well, Jason, I know you've got to go. We're going to stay with Walter while you drop off, but I want to ask you one final question. For the folks watching or asynchronously coming in and out of Ansible Fest 2020 this year. What is the big takeaway that you'd like to share? What is the most important thing people should pay attention to? Well, a couple things it don't have to be one thing, do top three things. what should people be paying attention to this year? And what's the most important stories that you should highlight? >> Yeah, I think there's a lot going on, this technology is moving very quickly. So I think there's a lot of great stories. I definitely take advantage of the customer use cases and hearing how other customers are leveraging Ansible for automation. And again really looking to not use it just as a tool, but really in an enterprise strategy that can really change their business and really drive cost down and increase revenues by leveraging the innovation that Ansible and automation provides. >> Jason, thank you for taking the time. Great insight. Really appreciate the commentary and hopefully we'll see you next year in person Walter. (all talking simultaneously) Walter, let's get back to you. I want to get into this use case and some of the customer feedback, love the stories. And we look, we'd love to get the new data, we'd love to hear about the new products, but again, success is contagious, you mentioned that I want to hear the use cases. So a lot of people have their ear to the ground, they look up the virtual environments, they're learning through new ways, they're looking for signals of success. So I got to ask you what are the things that you're hearing over and over again, as you guys are spinning up engagements? What are some of the patterns that are emerging that are becoming a trend in terms of what customers are consistently doing to overcome some of their challenges around automation? >> Okay, absolutely. So what we're finding is that over time that customers are raising the bar on us. And what I mean by that is that their expectations out of being able to take on tools now has completely changed and specifically when we're talking around automation. Our customers are now leading with the questions of trying to find out, well, how do we reduce our operational costs with this automation tool? Are we able to increase revenue? Are we able to really truly drive productivity and efficiency within our organization by leveraging it? And then they dovetail into, "Well, are we able to mitigate business risk, "even associated with leveraging this automation tool?" So as I mentioned, customers are up leveling what their expectations are out of the automation tools. And what I feel very confident about is that with the launch of the Ansible automation platform we're really able to be able to deliver and show our customers how they're able to get a return on their investment, how by taking part and looking at re-working their workflows how we're able to bring productivity, drive that efficiency. And by leveraging it to be able to mitigate risks you do get the benefits that they're looking for. And so that's something that I'm very happy that we were able to rise to the occasion and so far so good. >> Last year I was very motivated and very inspired by the Ansible vision and content product progress. Just the overall vibe was good, community of the product it's always been solid, but one of the things that's happening I want to get your commentary and reaction to this is that, and we've been riffing on this on theCube and inside the community is certainly automation, no brainer, machine learning automation, I mean, you can't go wrong. Who doesn't want automation? That's like saying, "I want to watch more football "and have good food and good wifi. I mean, it's good things, right? Automation is a good thing. So get that. But the business model issues you brought up ROI from the top of the ivory tower and these companies, certainly with COVID, we need to make money and have modern apps. And if you try to make that sound simple, right? X as a service, SaaS everything is a service. That's easy to say, "Hey, Walter, make everything as a service." "Got it, boss." Well, what the hell do you do? I mean, how do you make that happen? You got Amazon, you got Multicloud, you got legacy apps. You're talking about going in and re-architecting the application development process. So you need automation for the business model of everything as a service. What's your reaction to that? Because it's very complicated. It's doable. People are getting there but the Nirvana is, everything is a service. This is a huge conversation. I mean, it's really big, but what's your reaction to that when I bring that up. >> Right. And you're right, it is a huge undertaking. And you would think that with the delivery of COVID into our worlds that many organizations would probably shy away from making changes. Actually, they're doing the opposite. Like you mentioned, they're running towards automation and trying to figure out how do they optimize and be able to scale, based on this new demand that they're having, specifically new virtual demand. I'm happy you mentioned that we actually added something to the automation adoption journey to be able to combat or be able to solve for that change. And being able to take on that large ask of everything as a service, so to speak. And increment zero at the very beginning of the automation adoption journey we added something called navigate. And what navigate is, is it's a framework where we would come in and not just evaluate what they want to automate and bring that into a new workflow, but we evaluate what they already have in place, what automation they have in place, as well as the manual tasks and we go through, and we try to figure out how do you take that very complex, large thing and stream it down into something that can be first off determined as a service and made available for your organization to consume, and as well as be able to drive the business risks or be able to drive your business objectives forward. And so that exercise that we're now stepping our customers through makes a huge difference and puts it all out in front of you so that you can make decisions and decide which way you want to go taking one step at a time. >> And you know it's interesting, great insight, great comment. I think this is really where the dots are going to connect over the next few years. Everything is as a service. You got to lay the foundation. But if you really want to get this done I got to ask you the question around Ansible's ability to integrate and implement with other products. So could you give an examples of how Ansible has integrated and implemented with other Red Hat products or other types of technology vendors products? >> Right. So one example that always pops to the top of my head and I have to give a lot of credit to one of my managing architects who was leading this effort. Was the simple fact that you when you think about a mainframe, right? So now IBM is our new family member. When you think about mainframes, you think about IBM and it just so happens that there's a huge ask and demand and push around being able to automate ZOS mainframe. And IBM had already embarked on the path of determining, well, can this be done with Ansible? And as I mentioned before, my managing architect partnered up with the folks on IBM's side, so the we're bringing in Red Hat consulting, and now we have IBM and we're working together to move that idea forward of saying, "Hey, you can automate things with the mainframe." So think about it. We're in 2020 now in the midst of a new normal. And now we're thinking about and talking about automating mainframes. So that just shows how things have evolved in such a great way. And I think that that story is a very interesting one. >> It's so funny the evolution. I'm old enough to remember. I came out of college in the 80s and I would look at the old mainframe guys who were like "You guys are going to be dinosaurs." They're still around. I mean, some of the banking apps, I mean some of them are not multi threaded and all the good stuff, but they are powering, they are managing a workload, but this is the beautiful thing about Cloud. And some of the Cloud activities is that you can essentially integrate, you don't have to replace the old to bring in the new. This has been a common pattern. This is where containers, microservices, and Cloud has been a dream state because you can essentially re layer and glue it together. This is a big deal. What's your reaction to that? >> No, it's a huge deal. And the reality is, is that we need all of it. We need the legacy behaviors around infrastructure. So we need the mainframe still because they has a distinct purpose. And like you mentioned, a lot of our FSI customers that is the core of where a lot of their data and performance comes out of. And so it's not definitely not a pull out and replace. It's more of how they integrate and how can you streamline them working together to create your end to end workflow. And as you mentioned, making it available to your organizations to consume as a service. So definitely a fan of being able to integrate and add to and everything has a purpose. Is what we're coming to learn. >> Agility, the modern application, horizontal scalability, Cloud is the new data center. Walter great insights, always great to chat with you. You always got some good commentary. I want to ask you one final question. I asked Jason before he dropped off. Jason Smith, who was our guest here and hit a hard stop. What is the most important story that people should pay attention to this year at Ansible Fest? Remember it's virtual, so there's going to be a lot of content around there, people are busy, it's asynchronous consumption. What should they pay attention to from a content standpoint, maybe some community sizes or a discord group? I mean, what should people look at in this year? What should they walk away with as a key message? Take a minute to share your thoughts. >> Absolutely. Absolutely key messages is that, kind of similar to the message that we have when it comes down to the other circumstances going on in the world right now, is that we're all in this together. As an Ansible community, we need to work together, come together to be able to share what we're doing and break down those silos. So that's the overall theme. I believe we're doing that with the new. So definitely pay attention to the new features that are coming out with the Ansible automation platform. I alluded to the on-prem automation hub, that's huge. Definitely pay attention to the new content that is being released in the service catalog. There's tons of new content that focus on the ITSM and a tool. So being able to integrate and leverage those tools then the easier math model, there's a bunch of network automation advances that have been made, so definitely pay attention to that. And the last teaser, and I won't go into too much of it, 'cause I don't want to steal the thunder. But there is some distinct integrations that are going to go on with OpenShift around containers and the SQL automation platform that you definitely are going to want to pay attention to. If anyone is running OCP in their environment they definitely going to want to pay attention to this. Cause it's going to be huge. >> Private cloud is back, OpenStack is back, OCP. You got OpenShift has done really well. I mean, again, Cloud has been just a great enabler and bringing all this together for developers and certainly creating more glue, more abstractions, more automation, infrastructure is code is here. We're excited for it Walter, great insight. Great conversation. Thank you for sharing. >> No, it's my pleasure. And thank you for having me. >> I'm John Furrier with theCube, your host for theCube virtual's, part of Ansible Fest, virtual 2020 coverage. Thanks for watching. (gentle upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, it's theCUBE, covering IBM Think. Brought to you by IBM. >> All right everybody welcome back to theCUBE's continuous coverage of IBM Think 2020. It's digital event experience, my name is Dave Vellante, Aki Duvvur's here, he's the vice president of the IBM public cloud. Aki great to see you, thanks for coming on, hope you're safe and-- >> Hey Dave, Thanks for having us on. We're as safe as can be, appreciate it. >> Yeah, so your background is really interesting, your heading IBM cloud now, you got a CTO background, you been in sales, that's interesting to me because it gave you an opportunity to really try to understand the product market fit, if you will, from the customers point of view. But how did that shape your thinking about cloud generally and specifically where you're at today. >> Hey, great question Dave. So I'll tell you from my technology background it really gave me a good appreciation for how applications get built, from everything from the infrastructure all the way up and through the application itself. To all of the criticality around how those applications need to be built, how they need to be made highly available. With business continuance in mind, which is exactly what we're trying to do at scale right now from a public crown perspective, out from an architectural first principles perspective. And then I would say from a sales perspective it gave me a sense of speed and clarity of vision. In terms of just how you have to be very net in terms of the value proposition that you bring forward to a client and how you position the public cloud at large. So those two items or backgrounds have brought me full circle into my product role today and allow me to work with a sense of urgency for our clients and their journeys and their complex transformation as we build a cloud that is very enterprise centric to support their mission critical workload. >> I want to follow up with that. So I mean the traditional approach to developing enterprise apps, you walk inside any large financial institution and a healthcare, pharma, et cetera and you would have very much a waterfall approach. Understand the requirements, you'd have a development team, you'd have an operations team, they'd throw the code over the fence, they'd throw it back. Ah your code doesn't work, well it did when I sent it to you. And the cloud has really changed all that, hasn't it? And so now you're moving much faster, you're doing agile, how do you see that applying to sort of the traditional IBM base, is it being embraced? How is it being embraced? Is it different from other approaches? I wonder if you could address that. >> I think it's a transformation for the entire company, and when I say journey to cloud it really is around not just the public cloud as a destination but it's the entire hybrid approach that we have to take in delivering those applications you just alluded to. They're pretty much the mission critical heart of the enterprise, so it's a transformation from a public cloud perspective, it's a transformation from how our services schemes engage with our clients, how we migrate, how we modernize, how we take that middleware stack and we convert it into containerized software that we can actually leverage and deploy in the public cloud as part of this transformation,. So really it's a reinvention of not just the way our customers interact with the public cloud, but the way that we as a public cloud provider and a services provider can react and give our clients the best value across that entire hybrid transformation. >> So one of the things that of course IBM executives stresses, we've heard Ginni talk about it, we hear Arvind talk about it, across the whole company you guys are aligned on this topic, only 20% of the workloads have moved to the cloud, it's the hard stuff that hasn't moved, IBM has stated you want to be the preferred supplier for all the really challenging, hybrid, workloads et cetera. So what I want to get to is how you're approaching that, is it a combination of using open technologies and it's going to, blending those with your very large software state, what's your kind of secret sauce around succeeding with that vision? >> That's a really good question, so they're kind of three pillars to our strategy. Number one is around open technologies, embracing open technologies and one of the things that we did very early on in our transformation, in fact back in 2017, before any other cloud provider focused on this, we re-based our entire public cloud on Kubernetes as the base. Not only for the way we deliver up-stack services, whether it's Watson, our IOT or other service, but also in the way that we deliver our IaaS. So our entire control plane is built on Kubernetes. That was a big bet that we made probably two years before everybody else in the industry sort of followed suit. And we are the only cloud provider today that has their entire cloud based on Kube. That was one pillar, the second pillar was around pervasive security, so it's ensuring that our client have the controls required to be able to deliver pervasive security, whether it's encryption and flight at rest or in motion, but also ensuring that they're the only one's that have access to their keys. So nobody else, not even the provider can decrypt their data in the public cloud. And then finally it's around enterprise capabilities, so as you talked about this other 80% of workloads, a lot of those apps are brittle workloads, so they have upstream and downstream connectivity that creates a lot of complexity and chatter in the application itself. So you've got to be able to support those workloads from a public cloud perspective so that there is none of that chattiness and you can actually deliver those applications in a way that they can, one, be moved into the public cloud and then later transformed into microservices and or into microservices directly as part of that transformation, so that middleware content et cetera, delivered as containers allows for a lot of that transformation of different aspects of the cloud. >> Know what, take us back to that bet that you made, So Kubernetes obviously for portability, the decision had to be made strategically that, yeah, just going to try to lock everybody into the IBM cloud. You're going to support multiple clouds, and in all fairness you kind of were later to the cloud game so that became part of your strategy, hybrid is obviously a piece of that, but you embraced that. Many cloud providers out there were late to embracing that or flat-out don't embrace that sort of multicloud approach. Security's kind of table stakes and we're going to get into that later but that enterprise apps piece is critical. Take us back to that Kubernetes decision. What was that, was that the strategy of being open cloud and multicloud, was it sort of a Red Hat angle, pre-Red Hat acquisition where you had affinity towards not only Linux but OCP, maybe you can talk about that. >> I think it's a combination of many things, in fact it predates Red Hat too in that, this was back in 2017, and fundamentally after Google open-sourced Kubernetes, one of the big, if you look at the way that the virtual server platforms back in the late 90s, early 2000s, one of the big challenges was around management of those BM's at scale. So very similarly we saw containers as being a very rapid approach to application deployment and really sort of merging that DevOps transformation that many of our clients were going through. So we said that this was a perfect vehicle to not only deliver applications at scale but also ensure all of the attributes of a public cloud, which are higher levels of availability, self-healing and scale-up, scale-downing, able to turn on more storage, more memory so you weren't tied into the physical boundaries of a typical virtual machine. That really allowed us to sort of break the paradigm a little bit in terms of our approach. And the bet paid off, because we have a significant, almost 20,000 production clusters running across our enterprise clients today, so pretty significant footprint just on Kube alone. >> Well I can say and it gives clients the opportunity to have portability, hedges their bets, gives them an exit strategy if in fact they want one, and it just seems like good business. What about Open Shift, how does that fit in there in regards to OCP? >> Well I think Open Shift is a perfect complement right now. So as we talk about the fact that we have a cloud built on Kubernetes. Open Shift becomes the engine that runs all of our capabilities now. So as we think about how we deliver our services, how we deliver common sources whether it's logging or monitoring identity and access, all of the governance and orchestration required around a Kube environment, Open Shift is a terrific solution to be able to provide that at scale. Not just for our clients as a first class deployment in the public cloud but also as a look and deploy on prem so that they have multi-model deployments here with perhaps their applications that are very sensitive, that have PHI data, that they want to control on prem, they have that approach and they have the ability to be able to support it. They also have the ability to take advantage of strangler patterns, so parts of the application that sit, run perhaps in an Open Shift environment in the on prem environment with other aspects of it being controlled, orchestrated and run in the public cloud on our Red Hate Open Shift Kubernetes service. So we've got all of those attributes and capabilities to support that hybrid and even multicloud deployment. >> What if we get, sort of dive into security. You've seen this sort of interesting divergent narrative in the industry. On the one hand you've had executives like Pat Gelsinger come out and say security is broken. On the other hand you had, for instance, the CISO of AWS, say no security in the clouds great. So if you're a customer who do you believe? And you talk to CISO's and they say look it, it's on us, this problem will never be solved, it's an ongoing challenge. But I wonder if you could give us IBM's point of view on security, cause you're on both sides. You got the cloud, you got on prem, you got a deep history in security going back to Rack-F on the mainframes and so I wonder if you can share with us your thoughts on that. >> Well I think security is table stake, and always been table stakes and now more so than ever, especially as we look at that other 80% that we talked about. These are revenue generating applications, they're mission critical and they have significant impact if they're down in any way, shape or form, especially if there's a security attack of some kind and there's a breach. You're talking about businesses completely going out, I mean they're basically bankrupt at that point. So it is table stakes. We have taken a very long strategic look at how we build security, from the chip all the way up into the security architecture and into memory as well. Ensuring that every sort of attack vector is locked down. We have our dedicated HSM's with the highest FIPS, compliance FIPS 140-2 level four. As I mentioned before, we allow for keep your own key and bring your own key, everybody does bring your own key but keep your own key is a clients ability to bring and mange their own key in the public cloud. So if anybody tries to tamper with it, that just gets locked down and there's no access that even the provider could have in terms of decrypting. We have to get rid of that dedicated HSM at that point. So it really puts the control on our clients and ensures that every aspect of their environment from profiles to templates, you had mentioned CICD pipeline before, it's ensuring that we have a shift-left strategy which is really Sec DevOps because it really allows for us to focus on security in every interaction from the start of how code gets integrated and deployed into the cloud. So ensuring that we have that entire end to end approach nailed down is pretty important to us. >> One thing that's key if you're a CISO you don't want to have different security protocols for on prem and the cloud, you want that sort of end to end approach. Now maybe that doesn't happen overnight but presumably that's kind of the vision is that kind of consistency because every CISO will tell you the lack of skills is our biggest challenge. So the last thing we need to do is learn just a whole 'nother environment, all new processes. How have you made progress in terms of that end to end experience? >> Well we've tried to make it completely cloud native. We've tried to make it very API orientated. So it's basically really simple for them to integrate into the cloud and take advantage of the CICD pipeline as I mentioned. So if you look at how we deliver our code from a tekton perspective and if you look at how we can do signed images in the registry, so ensuring that developers are only authorized to run the appropriate applications that they have permission for and that they can't leverage other assets or pools that they're not. So ensuring that role-based access control is very tightly knit, ensuring least privileged access as opposed to opening up and ensuring that everybody has all access all the time and then working your way down into least privileged access is critical. So it's those core first principles that you would leverage in an on prem environment and extending it into the public cloud so that it becomes a very translatable experience for our client. >> Okay, I want to push you a little bit. We started out with openness and you sort of laid down the gauntlet as we made the decision early on to be open. What if I'm a security practitioner, I say hey I like Cloud Stripe or I like Okta or I want to use Zscaler. Can I use those in your environment? How open are you to that type of approach? >> You absolutely can and you can integrate into our security dashboard. So the nice thing about it is you can leverage our capabilities that we have in the cloud, or you can leverage your third-party tools and you can integrate them so you have a single plane of glass and you always know who's accessing your systems, where they're accessing them from, did they succeed or did they fail. This is table stakes allowing integration for best of class and best of breed security technology is core. >> So you're obviously cloud guy, the more cloud, better for you personally, your group, whatever. But what's the business case for moving those mission critical workloads in the cloud. Former CTO, I'm sure you've had a lot of discussions with customers, hey, why not just leave it there put a brick wall around it. It ain't broke, why fix it? What's the business case that you're seeing for putting those workloads in the cloud. >> I think the current healthcare crisis we're in is probably proving out a lot of the challenges of managing a data center in traditional sense, number one. And I think if you think about just the innovation agenda that many of our clients have, they're kind of hand strung by all of the legacy technologies and sometimes monolithic architectures that they've got deployed. They're unable to break out of that because of the amount of cost and the amount of resource it takes to manage those environments today and keep a lot of end of life infrastructure running. And really the move to public cloud and being able to transform and modernize your workloads frees up a lot of that budget in innovation that you can start to infuse into driving new revenue streams from a company perspective. I think that is the critical aspect to it and I think the current crisis just proves out that clients that have built for scale, who've kind of gone in with a cloud first set of principles are actually well setup to be able to navigate some of the current challenges a little bit better than others. >> Yeah and I think, listening to you talk reminds me of a conversation I had probably 10 years ago with a former IBMer legend, Steve Mills who said to me, look we spend way too much money on IT labor and it's just not productive so automation is key, you can't scale without it. I talked earlier about the skills gap, automation is at least one part of that answer. Because people just, to your point, if you're spending money on, wasting it on labor that's not giving you differentiation, that's stealing from the innovation budget. >> Yeah, totally agree Dave. >> So give me the final word, what's your vision for the IBM public cloud, where do you see all this in three to five years? >> Well I think we're just at the tip of the iceberg right now when it comes to a lot of the complex (murmurs) applications that we talked about before, ERP applications, mission critical back office apps that haven't moved and I think we are very, very early in that journey. And I think we're positioned really well to capture and win that marketplace. I think we have the right solutions, we have the right sort of core principles. As I mentioned open and secure and enterprise grade, having a multi-platform approach to support our clients applications, being able to modernize and kind of walk them through this crawl, walk, run approach to how they transform into the public cloud. And having all of the service expertise, so we're not just this CSP but we're also an MSP and we have sense around handling complex workload. We've done that all through our existence and we feel like this is where this starts to get interesting for our clients now as they take these next steps and as you probably heard last year with our announcement of the FFS ready public cloud with Bank of America. We're trying to bring all that together in terms of how we meet our client and ensure that we can take care of their regulatory requirements, which continue to change as well regardless of industry. >> Well it's a multi-trillion dollar, trillion plus dollar opportunity that you guys are after. And you're in the cloud game, a lot of people tried and failed, IBM made it through that knot hole and now you're in a position to really compete and participate in that modernization of those workloads. We've done research that shows that a lot of this, especially for the hard to move workloads is about risk, and to the extent that you can maintain that compatibility if you will, between what's on prem and what's in the cloud. You dramatically de-risk the cloud move and the decision, so yeah, I think you're in a good spot. And I really appreciate you coming on theCUBE. >> Hey Dave, thanks for having me. Appreciate it. >> All right, our please Aki. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, this is our continuous coverage of IBM Think 2020, the digital event experience. We'll be right back right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE. (calming music)

(upbeat music) >> From our studios, in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at our Palo Alto studios having a CUBE Conversation, we're just about ready for the madness of the conference season to start in a few months, so it's nice to have some time to have things a little calmer in the studio, and we're excited to have a new company, I guess they're not that new, but they're relatively new, they've been working on a really interesting technology around infrastructure, and we welcome to the studio, first time, I think, Sumit Puri, CEO and co-founder of Liqid, welcome. >> Thank you guys, very very happy to be here. >> And joined by our big brain, David Floyer, of course, the CTO and co-founder of Wikibon and knows all things infrastructure. Dave, always good to see you. >> It's so good to see you. >> All right, so let's jump into this, Sumit, give us the basic overview of Liqid, what are you guys all about, little bit of the company background, how long you've been around. No, absolutely, absolutely, Liqid is a software-defined infrastructure company, the technology that we've developed is referred to as composable infrastructure, think, dynamic infrastructure, and what we do, is we go and we turn data center resources from statically-configured boxes to dynamic, agile infrastructure. Our core technology is two-part. Number 1, we have a fabric layer, that allows you to interconnect off-the-shelf hardware, but more importantly, we have a software layer, that allows you to orchestrate, or dynamically configure servers, at the bare metal. >> So, who are you selling these solutions to? What's your market, what's the business case for this solution? >> Absolutely, so first, I guess, let me explain a little bit about what we mean by composable infrastructure. Rather than building servers by plugging devices into the sockets of the motherboard, with composability it's all about pools, or trays, of resources. A tray of CPUs, a tray of SSDs, a tray of GPUs, a tray of networking devices, instead of plugging those into a motherboard, we connect those into a fabric switch, and then we come in with our software, and we orchestrate, or recompose, at the bare metal. Grab this CPU, grab those four SSDs, these eight GPUs, and build me a server, just like you were plugging devices into the motherboard, except you're defining it in software, on the other side, you're getting delivered infrastructure of any size, shape, or ratio that you want. Except that infrastructure is dynamic, when we need another GPU in our server, we don't send a guy with a cart to plug the device in, we reprogram the fabric and add or remove devices as required by the application. We give you all the flexibility that you would get from public cloud, on the infrastructure that you are forced to own. And now, to answer your question of where we find a natural fit for our solution, one primary area is obviously cloud. If you're building a cloud environment, whether you're providing cloud as a service or whether you're providing cloud to your internal customers, building a more dynamic, agile cloud is what we enable. >> So, is the use case more just to use your available resources and reconfigure it to set something that basically runs that way for a while, or are customers more using it to dynamically reconfigure those resources based on, say, a temporary workload, is kind of a classic cloud example, where you need a bunch of something now, but not necessarily forever. >> Sure. The way we look at the world is very much around resource utilization. I'm buying this very expensive hardware, I'm deploying it into my data center, typical resource utilization is very low, below 20%, right? So what we enable is the ability to get better resource utilization out of the hardware that you're deploying inside your data center. If we can take a resource that's utilized 20% of the time because it's deployed as a static element inside of a box and we can raise the utilization to 40%, does that mean we are buying less hardware inside of our data center? Our argument is yes, if we can take rack scale efficiency from 20% to 40%, our belief is we can do the same amount of work with less hardware. >> So it's a fairly simple business case, then. To do that. So who are your competition in this area? Is it people like HP or Intel, or, >> That's a great question, I think both of those are interesting companies, I think HPE is the 800-pound gorilla in this term called composability and we find ourselves a slightly different approach than the way that those guys take it, I think first and foremost, the way that we're different is because we're disaggregated, right? When we sell you trays of resources, we'll sell you a tray of SSD or a tray of GPUs, where HP takes a converged solution, right? Every time I'm buying resources for my composable rack, I'm paying for CPUs, SSDs, GPUs, all of those devices as a converged resource, so they are converged, we are disaggregated. We are bare metal, we have a PCIe-based fabric up and down the rack, they are an ethernet-based fabric, there are no ethernet SSDs, there are no ethernet GPUs, at least today, so by using ethernet as your fabric, they're forced to do virtualization protocol translation, so they are not truly bare metal. We are bare metal, we view of them more as a virtualized solution. We're an open ecosystem, we're hardware-agnostic, right? We allow our customers to use whatever hardware that they're using in their environment today. Once you've kind of gone down that HP route, it's very much a closed environment. >> So what about some of the customers that you've got? Which sort of industries, which sort of customers, I presume this is for the larger types of customers, in general, but say a little bit about where you're making a difference. >> No, absolutely, right? So, obviously at scale, composability has even more benefit than in smaller deployments, I'll give you just a couple of use case examples. Number one, we're working with a transportation company, and what happens with them at 5 p.m. is actually very different than what happens at 2 a.m., and the model that they have today is a bunch of static boxes and they're playing a game of workload matching. If the workload that comes in fits the appropriate box, then the world is good. If the workload that comes in ends up on a machine that's oversized, then resources are being wasted, and what they said was, "We want to take a new approach. "We want to study the workload as it comes in, "dynamically spin up small, medium, large, "depending on what that workload requires, "and as soon as that workload is done, "free the resources back into the general pool." Right, so that's one customer, by taking a dynamic approach, they're changing the TCO argument inside of their environment. And for them, it's not a matter of am I going dynamic or am I going static, everyone knows dynamic infrastructure is better, no one says, "Give me the static stuff." For them, it's am I going public cloud, or am I going on prem. That's really the question, so what we provide is public cloud is very easy, but when you start thinking about next-generation workloads, things that leverage GPUs and FPGAs, those instantiations on public cloud are just not very cheap. So we give you all of that flexibility that you're getting on public cloud, but we save you money by giving you that capability on prem. So that's use case number one. Another use case is very exciting for us, we're working with a studio down in southern California, and they leverage these NVIDIA V100 GPUs. During the daytime, they give those GPUs to their AI engineers, when the AI engineers go home at night, they reprogram the fabric and they use those same GPUs for rendering workloads. They've taken $50,000 worth of hardware and they've doubled the utilization of that hardware. >> The other use case we talked about before we turned the cameras on there, was pretty interesting, was kind of multiple workloads against the same data set, over a series of time where you want to apply different resources. I wonder if you can unpack that a little bit because I think that's a really interesting one that we don't hear a lot about. So, we would say about 60 plus to 70% of our deployments in one way or another touch the realm of AI. AI is actually not an event, AI is a workflow, what do we do? First we ingest data, that's very networking-centric. Then we scrub and we clean the data, that's actually CPU-centric. Then we're running inference, and then we're running training, that's GPU-centric. Data has gravity, right? It's very difficult to move petabytes of data around, so what we enable is the composable AI platform, leave data at the center of the universe, reorchestrate your compute, networking, GPU resources around the data. That's the way that we believe that AI is approached. >> So we're looking forward in the future. What are you seeing where you can make a difference in this? I mean, a lot of changes happening, there's Gen 4 coming out in PCIe, there's GPUs which are moving down to the edge, how do see, where do you see you're going to make a difference, over the next few years. >> That's a great question. So I think there's 2 parts to look at, right? Number one is the physical layer, right? Today we build or we compose based upon PCIe Gen 3 because for the first time in the data center, everything is speaking a common language. When SSDs moved to NVMe, you had SSDs, network cards, GPUs, CPUs, all speaking a common language which was PCIe. So that's why we've chosen to build our fabric on this common interconnect, because that's how we enable bare metal orchestration without translation and virtualization, right? Today, it's PCIe Gen 3, as the industry moves forward, Gen 4 is coming. Gen 4 is here. We've actually announced our first PCIe Gen 4 products already, and by the end of this year, Gen 4 will become extremely relevant into the market. Our software has been architected from the beginning to be physical layer-agnostic, so whether we're talking PCIe Gen 3, PCIe Gen 4, in the future something referred to as Gen Z, (laughing) it doesn't matter for us, we will support all of those physical layers. For us it's about the software orchestration. >> I would imagine, too, like TPUs and other physical units that are going to be introduced in the system, too, you're architected to be able to take those, new-- >> Today, today we're doing CPUs, GPUs, NVMe devices and we're doing NICs. We just made an announcement, now we're orchestrating Optane memory with Intel. We've made an announcement with Xilinx where we're orchestrating FPGAs with Xilinx. So this will continue, we'll continue to find more and more of the resources that we'll be able to orchestrate for a very simple reason, everything has a common interconnect, and that common interconnect is PCIe. >> So this is an exciting time in your existence. Where are you? I mean, how far along are you to becoming the standard in this industry? >> Yeah, no, that's a great question, and I think, we get asked a lot is what company are you most similar to or are you most like at the early stage. And what we say is we, a lot of time, compare ourselves to VMware, right? VMware is the hypervisor for the virtualization layer. We view ourselves as that physical hypervisor, right? We do for physical infrastructure what VMware is doing for virtualized environments. And just like VMware has enabled many of the market players to get virtualized, our hope is we're going to enable many of the market players to become composable. We're very excited about our partnership with Inspur, just recently we've announced, they're the number three server vendor in the world, we've announced an AI-centric rack, which leverages the servers and the storage solutions from Inspur tied to our fabric to deliver a composable AI platform. >> That's great. >> Yeah, and it seems like the market for cloud service providers, 'cause we always talk about the big ones, but there's a lot of them, all over the world, is a perfect use case for you, because now they can actually offer the benefits of cloud flexibility by leveraging your infrastructure to get more miles out of their investments into their backend. >> Absolutely, cloud, cloud service providers, and private cloud, that's a big market and opportunity for us, and we're not necessarily chasing the big seven hyperscalers, right? We'd love to partner with them, but for us, there's 300 other companies out there that can use the benefit of our technology. So they necessarily don't have the R&D dollars available that some of the big guys have, so we come in with our technology and we enable those cloud service providers to be more agile, to be more competitive. >> All right, Sumit, before we let you go, season's coming up, we were just at RSA yesterday, big shows comin' up in May, where you guys, are we going to cross paths over the next several weeks or months? >> No, absolutely, we got a handful of shows coming up, very exciting season for us, we're going to be at the OCP, the Open Compute Project conference, actually next week, and then right after that, we're going to be at the NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference, we're going to have a booth at both of those shows, and we're going to be doing live demos of our composable platform, and then at the end of April, we're going to be at the Dell Technology World conference in Las Vegas, where we're going to have a large booth and we're going to be doing some very exciting demos with the Dell team. >> Sumit, thanks for taking a few minutes out of your day to tell us a story, it's pretty exciting stuff, 'cause this whole flexibility is such an important piece of the whole cloud value proposition, and you guys are delivering it all over the place. >> Well, thank you guys for making the time today, I was excited to be here, thank you. >> All right, David, always good to see you, >> Good to see you. >> Smart man, alright, I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE from theCUBE studios in Palo Alto, thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. 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>> Live from New York City, it's theCUBE, covering Lenovo Transform 2.0 brought to you by Lenovo. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Lenovo Transform here in New York City. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my co-host Stu Miniman. We're joined by Melissa Massa. She is the Executive Director of Hyperscale Sales. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you, thank you for having me. It's quite exciting. >> It is, it is very exciting. You're a cube newbie. >> I'm a cube newbie, yes. >> So this is very exciting. I'm sure it's the first of many visits. So Melissa we're at this real inflection point in technology and in AI as AI is ushering in this new wave with increasing use of big data and analytics and machine learning. All this means hyperscale is increasingly important. Can you just set the stage for our viewers a little bit about where we are in this-- >> Absolutely, yeah the transformation is really taking place in this industry that we know and love. And it's really amazing at how fast rapid the change is coming so if you look at in the past traditional one U two U type compute were the standard requirements right and today it's much more complex. It's becoming a much faster paced and you look at some of the big guys out there right from the top ten space. They're really helping to evolve AI and machine learning much faster as it's part of the cloud now and it's centric from the cloud space. So it's making things whether it's for personal use, for play, for business or for good humanity type areas. It's really helping involve and change the space altogether. >> One of the themes we've talked about in our kickoff there is Lenovo has a global presence, but it's also through a lot of partnerships. So Intel, Nvidia of course has to be very important in the AI space, you know, people like Microsoft and VMware. That's very much you know, some of those last ones especially look like Microsoft and VMware very much on the enterprise side. The cloud, the hyperscale, you mentioned the top 10 providers. What are the pieces, what are they looking for? What's the expertise that Lenovo brings that helps you fight in this very competitive real tight margin and very demanding ever-changing marketplace? >> You know this marketplace well? You sum it up very well, but in this in this marketplace, when you look at what the big guys are doing right and then you talk about partnerships, in our space, we don't come in and we don't have predisposition in terms of what we're going to. It's really through understanding what they're trying to do with technology and the direction they're going and it's interesting because at Lenovo we have several hundred engineers now dedicated just in our hyperscale organization, but we have 2000 engineers across the globe. So this really allows us to tap into this expertise in our organization, everything from even HPC aspects to multi socket boxes to different types of platforms, you look at ARM, you can look at AMD, look at Intel. So we don't really try to be one provider. We try to be the provider for our customers, and what their needs and where their requirements are going. >> So where have you seen the most success and we're looking forward do you see the growth coming from? >> Yeah we've started out a little bit different in this space. I think a lot of companies take a while getting their name out and getting traction, trying to grow up in what I'll call more that tier two that tier three space. Lenovo really has come into the tier one space. We're very fortunate in that aspect that we kind of are doing more of a top-down trajectory, so we've been very successful. I think you've heard Kirk talk about and you'll hear us continue to talk about the partnerships we have today with ten of the largest, truth be known, I've got pilots going on with the others. I think in a very short period of time we'll be talking about what we're doing across all of the top ten that is really unique to Lenovo, but again I think one of the reasons there's been success there is there's an availability of an engineer to engineer relationship we bring to the table that is really unique and allows our customers as they're going through this evolution with this change in the cloud space, they're realizing that there's not always the expertise they need in house. They've got to go outside and external and look for help in certain areas. One of the areas is we have an eight socket box and it's a great box with an incredibly high memory footprint and there's not a reference architecture on that box in the marketplace. Lenovo really helped develop it. So that's been a great platform for us to be able to have conversations with clients around for SAP hosting, HANA hosting and whatnot. >> Can you talk a little bit about this kind of the scale and investment Lenovo needs to have to be successful in this space? For those of us that track the hyperscales it's like you know there's tens of billions of dollars a year that they're investing in people, plant, and infrastructure. Kirk mentioned in the keynote, what was it? 42 soccer field size manufacturing facility. Is that only for hyperscale? Is it used for some of the other businesses? Help us unpack that a little yeah. >> So that's great, great question. To be in this business, you have to be incredibly committed into this business right, and I can say from YY on down through our entire leadership organization, there is a passion around this space from a hyperscale compute perspective in ensuring our success. In order to do that it really comes with making those right investments, so we can take care of these customers both near-term and long-term. This is not a short-term thing. This is an incredibly long-term plan for us and I will tell you the growth numbers they've given me over the course of the next years so that we have to make these types of investments right, so not only do we leverage our own manufacturing plants, but fortunately for Lenovo, we own. So it really helps minimize margin stacking but I've got great manufacturing facilities around the world and also now as you heard today, and the 42 football fields, we have started our own motherboard lines in our Hefei China Factory. So we'll be producing over 40,000 boards there a year with the two lines we have and then we're going to continue to grow well beyond that. >> So you are a tech veteran. You've been, at this is not your first rodeo here at Lenovo. How would you describe, I mean talking about YY's vision and the commitment he has made to hyperscale, what do you think it is that differentiates Lenovo in this very crowded and competitive tech world? >> I came from a couple of different places before Lenovo. So I had seen the OEM, I had seen the ODM aspect. And I was nervous when we launched this out of Lenovo as to how well is the market going to receive it. It's a crowded place and then you've started to see some of the other players that have been there, have faded off right. So what's really interesting about Lenovo when people ask us about what is your strategy, it's really we call it our ODM plus model and what does that mean? Well it means I'm taking the best parts of an OEM from a size, the global perspective of the markets I can get into for my clients are incredible and for an export of record, being able to get them into markets that are very challenging for others, I have a global services organization. So if you do need me to happen to come into your data center and help with other things, we have that capability too. And then also, but because I own my own manufacturing and I don't outsource anything, I keep relatively low costs to do business with. I can compete with more of that traditional ODM size and now you take the full vertical integration we have and you bring that to the table with being able to we manufacture all of our own motherboards, all the way up through our systems, it's a pretty powerful story, and I think from what we've seen the clients have really resonated with this story. They like what they're seeing from the benefits. >> Yeah it's so much we can learn, maybe you talk so much about scale, I think first of all the customer base that you talk about, 5000 servers or more is kind of the entry level for that, and just the speed that they're changing. A question we get all the time is how do people keep up with this? Give us a little bit of insight as to what you're hearing from your customers in the hyperscale market? How are they keeping to innovate, keeping to grow and how can everybody deal with kind of the pace of change today? >> It's unbelievable, I mean you look around it's immersive data. It's the network you got all this data now and you've got to get it through a pipe right and so there's all these different aspects coming. I've always told our customers look if there are areas that I can't help you with in, I'm going to tell you. I'm going to be more what's right up the middle for you guys, so we really focus on where are you going, where are you evolving, where do you need help from, how can we help to get you? I don't know if Kirk or anybody at the team has talked about it, but really breaking news for you guys because I was going to announce it in pitch today is that we are actually going to build our own white box networking products, and we're going to leave them open source from an OS perspective for our customers too, because we feel this is going to be a very key area for them. We've got the in-house talent. We've actually moved a number of engineers on our networking team directly into our hyperscale organization to get this started. >> Okay is this announcement which, congratulations by the way, is this, are you hearing that demand from the hyperscalers? Some of the hyperscalers have-- >> Absolutely. >> Kind of dipped their toe in there. I know you've been at the OCP events where we see some of the big players like Microsoft and Google. How do they fit, how does that compete against Cisco, so yeah how much of that is kind of a requirement to the customers? >> It is a requirement. I think if you're going to be all-in with these customers because we happen to have a great investment in the networking space already. Also you see Lenovo I think we're a company that we don't come with 50 years of habits right? We come as a fresh company. I never hear inside the company oh we tried that 10 years ago, and we don't want to do it again. We come with a fresh perspective and approach to building our business. We've got the networking organization inside of our company. Why not proliferate it in the next generation and why does that matter? Open matters right? Everything look at what's coming today. Open BMC, open OS. I have major customers coming into Raleigh and sitting down and talking to us about where we going from a security perspective, and how we're going to bring open security standards into this market? >> The other thing when I think about you know, YY mentioned it. Cloud network and device kind of things like IOT and the global device because everybody, AI and IOT everybody's going there. How does that play in your space? >> It just continues, the data just continues to double in massive size and scale, and there are new technologies out. People are learning to use things like the FPGA is a lot smarter and you look at like what they're able to do today from that technology and deliver one server that can take the compute power of four now. So all of that is helping to evolve this rapid pace and where we're going. >> Finally what we'll be talking about next year? I mean perhaps inked deals with the remaining four players that you are in pilot programs with. What other things are most exciting to you? >> Yeah so I think in what you're going to find is I'm launching a team that's going to go after the tier II and tier III market. And we're going to really start to invest in this space. We're going to really start to proliferate. Paul and I, you saw up on the screen. We have 33 custom boards in design today. We have a factory that we need to fill right, so we're going to continue to really push the envelope on everything we're going to be developing from a custom perspective. I think you're going to see it evolve with quite a number of products, maybe even more so beyond just your traditional server approach. We're there to help clients in other areas where they also need to manufacture maybe a part or what could be a commodity for them. And they need special attention in that particular space. We're going to continue to work with them, but I would say the biggest thing. When I'm sitting here next year is going to be the sheer size of where this hyperscale team is going and the revenue and the growth that's bringing in to Lenovo overall. >> Great well thank you so much for coming into theCUBE Melissa. >> It was nice talking to you. >> I appreciate it. Thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will have more from theCUBE live at Lenovo Transform in just a little bit. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube. Covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC, and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to SiliconANGLE media's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2018. I'm Stu Miniman here with my cohost Keith Townsend, happy to welcome back to the program Tom Burns, who's the SVP of Networking and Solutions at Dell EMC. Tom, great to see ya. >> Great to see you guys as well. Good to see you again. >> All right, so I feel like one of those CNBC guys. It's like, Tom, I remember back when Force10 was acquired by Dell and all the various pieces that have gone on and converged in infrastructure, but of course with the merger, you've gotten some new pieces to your toy chest. >> Tom: That's correct. >> So maybe give us the update first as to what's under your purview. >> Right, right, so I continue to support and manage the entire global networking business on behalf of Dell EMC, and then recently I picked up what we called our converged infrastructure business or the VxBlock, Vscale business. And I continue also to manage what we call Enterprise Infrastructure, which is basically any time our customers want to extend the life of their infrastructure around memory, storage, optics, and so forth. We support them with Dell EMC certified parts, and then we add to that some third-party componentry around rack power and cooling, software, Cumulus, Big Switch, things like that. Riverbed, Silver Peak, others. And so with that particular portfolio we also cover what we call the Dell EMC Ready Solutions, both for the service provider, but then also for traditional enterprises as well. >> Yeah, well luckily there's no change in any of those environments. >> Tom: No, no. >> Networking's been static for decades. I mean they threw a product line that I mean last I checked was somewhere in the three to four billion dollar range. With the VxBlock under what you're talking there. >> Yeah it's a so, yeah-- >> Maybe you could talk, what does this mean? 'Cause if I give you your networking guy. >> Right. >> Keith and I are networking guys by background, obviously networking's a piece of this, but give us a little bit of how the sausage is made inside to-- >> Tom: Sure. >> Get to this stuff. >> Well I think when you talk about all these solutions, Cloud, Hybrid Cloud, Public Cloud, when you think about software-defined X, the network is still pretty darn important, right? I often say that if the network's not working, it's going to be a pretty cloudy day. It's not going to connect. And so the fabric continues to remain one of the most critical parts of the solution. So the thought around the VxBlock and moving that in towards the networking team is the importance of the fabric and the capability to scale out and scale up with our customers' workloads and applications. So that's probably the reason primarily the reason. And then we can also look at how we can work very closely with our storage division 'cause that's the key IP component coming from Dell EMC on the block side. And see how we can continue to help our customers solve their problems when it comes to this not your do-it-yourself but do-it-for-me environment. >> All right, I know Keith wants to jump in, but one just kind of high-level question for you. I look at networking, we've really been talking about disaggregation of what's going on. It's really about disaggregated systems. And then you've got convergence, and there's other parts of the group that have hyper convergence. How do you square the circle on those two trends and how do those go together? >> Well, I think it's pretty similar on whether you go hyper converge, converge, or do-it-yourself, you build your own block so to speak. There's a set of buyers that want everything to be done for them. They want to buy the entire stack, they want it pre-tested, they want it certified, they want it supported. And then there's a set of customers that want to do it themselves. And that's where we see this opportunity around disaggregation. So we see it primarily in hyperscale and Cloud, but we're seeing it more and more in large enterprise, medium enterprise, particular verticals where customers are in essence looking for some level of agility or capability to interchange their solutions by a particular vendor or solutions that are coming from the same vendor but might be a different IP as an example. And I'm really proud of the fact that Dell EMC really kicked off this disaggregation of the hardware and software and networking. Some 4 1/2 years ago. Now you see some of the, let's say, larger industry players starting to follow suit. And they're starting to disaggregate their software as well. >> Yeah, I would have said just the commonality between those two seemingly opposed trends it's scale. >> Right. >> It's how do customers really help scale these environments? >> Exactly, exactly. It depends a lot around the customer environment and what kind of skill sets do they have. Are they willing to help go through some of that do-it-yourself type of process. Obviously Dell EMC services is there to help them in those particular cases. But we kind of have this buying conundrum of build versus buy. I think my old friend, Chad Sakac, used to say, there's different types of customers that want a VxRail or build-it-themselves, or they want a VxBlock. We see the same thing happen in a networking. There's those customers that want disaggregated hardware and software, and in some cases even disaggregated software. Putting those protocols and features on the switch that they actually use in the data center. Rather than buying a full proprietary stack, well we continue to build the full stack for a select number of customers as well because that's important to that particular sector. >> So again, Tom, two very different ends of the spectrum. I was at ONS a couple of months ago, talked to the team. Dell is a huge sponsor of the Open Source community. And I don't think many people know that. Can you talk about the Open Source relationship or the relationship that Dell Networking has with the Open Source community? >> Absolutely, we first made our venture in Open Source actually with Microsoft in their SONiC work. So they're creating their own network operating software, and we made a joint contribution around the switch abstraction interface, or side. So that was put into the Open Compute Project probably around 3 1/2, maybe four years ago. And that's right after we announced this disaggregation. We then built basically an entire layer of what we call our OS10 base, or what's known in the Linux foundation as OPX. And we contributed that to the OPX or to the Linux foundation, where basically that gives the customer the capability through the software that takes care of all the hardware, creates this switch subtraction interface to gather the intelligence from the ASIC and the silicon, and bringing it to a control plane, which allows APIs to be connected for all your north-bound applications or your general analysis that you want to use, or a disaggregated analysis, what you want to do. So we've been very active in Linux. We've been very active in OCP as well. We're seeing more and more of embracing this opportunity. You've probably seen recently AT&T announced a rather large endeavor to replace tens of thousands of routers with basically white box switches and Open Source software. We really think that this trend is moving, and I'm pretty proud that Dell EMC was a part of getting that all started. >> So that was an awful lot of provider talk. You covered both the provider's base and the enterprise space. Talk to us about where the two kind of meet. You know the provider space, they're creating software, they're embracing OpenStack, they're creating plug-ins for disaggregated networking. And then there's the enterprise. There's opportunity there. Where do you see the enterprise leveraging disaggregation versus the service provider? >> Well, I think it's this move towards software-defined. If you heard in Michael's keynote today, and you'll hear more tomorrow from Jeff Clarke. The whole world is moving to software-defined. It's no longer if, it's when. And I think the opportunity for enterprises that are kind of in that transformation stage, and moving from traditional software-defined, or excuse me, traditional data centers to the software-defined, they could look at disaggregation as an opportunity to give them that agility and capability. In a manner of which they can kind of continue to manage the old world, but move forward into the new world of disaggregation software-defined with the same infrastructure. You know it's not well-known that Dell EMC, we've made our switching now capable of running five different operating softwares. That's dependent upon workloads and use cases, and the customer environment. So, traditional enterprise, they want to look at traditional protocols, traditional features. We give them that capability through our own OS. We can reduce that with OS partners, software coming from some of our OS partners, giving them just the protocols and features that they need for the data center or even out to the edge. And it gives them that flexibility and change. So I think it really comes at this point of when are they going to move towards moving from traditional networking to the next generation of networking. And I'm very happy, I think Dell Technologies is leading the way. >> So I'm wondering if you could expand a little bit about that. When I think about Dell and this show, I mean it is a huge ecosystem. We're sitting right near the Solutions Expo, which will be opening in a little bit, but on the networking side, you've got everything from all the SD-WAN pieces, to all the network operating systems that can sit on top. Maybe, give us kind of the update on the overview, the ecosystem, where Dell wins. >> Yeah, yeah I mean, if you think about 30-something years ago when Michael started the company and Dell started, what was it about. It was really about transforming personal computing, right? It was about taking something that was kind of a traditional proprietary architecture and commoditizing it, making sure it's scalable and supportable. You think of the changes that's occurred now between the mainframe and x86. This is what we think's happening in networking. And at Dell Technologies in the networking area whether it's Dell EMC or to VMware, we're really geared towards this SDX type of market. Virtualization, Layer two, day or three disaggregated switching in the data center. Now SD-WAN with the acquisition of Velocloud by VMware. We're really hoping customers transform at the way networking is being managed, operated, supported to give them much more flexibility and agility in a software-defined market. That being said, we continue to support a multitude of other partners. We have Cumulus, Big Switch, IP infusion, and Pluribus as network operating software alternatives. We have our own, and then we have them as partners. On the SD-WAN area while we lead with Velocloud, we have Silver Peak and we also have Versa Technology, which is getting a lot of upkick in the area. Both in the service provider and in the enterprise space. Huge area of opportunity for enterprises to really lower their cost of connectivity and their branch offices. So, again, we at Dell, we want to have an opinion. We have some leading technologies that we own, but we also partner with some very good, best-of-breed solutions. But being that we're open, and we're disaggregated, and we have an incredible scaling and service department or organization, we have this capability to bring it together for our customers and support them as they go through their IT transformation. >> So, Dell EMC is learning a lot of lessons as you guys start to embrace software-defined. Couple of Dell EMC World's ago, big announcement Chad talked about, ScaleIO, and abstracting, and giving away basically, ScaleIO as a basic solution for free. Then you guys pulled back. And you said, you know what, that's not quite what customers want. They want a packaged solution. So we're talking on one end, total disaggregation and another end, you know what, in a different area of IT, customers seem to want packaged solutions. >> Tom: Yeah. >> Can you talk to the importance of software-defined and packaged solutions? >> Right, it's kind of this theory of appliances, right? Or how is that software going to be packaged? And we give that flexibility in either way. If you think of VxRail or even our vSAN operating or vSAN ready node, it gives that customer the capability to know that we put that software and hardware together, and we tested it, we certified it, most importantly we can support it with kind of one throat to choke, one single call. And so I think the importance for customers are again, am I building it myself or do I want to buy a stack. If I'm somewhere in the middle maybe I'm doing a hybrid or perhaps a Rail type of solution, where it's just compute and storage for the most part. Maybe I'm looking for something different on my networking or connectivity standpoint. But Dell EMC, having the entire portfolio, can help them at any point of the venture or at any part of the solution. So I think that you're absolutely right. The customer buying is varied. You've got those that want everything from a single point, and you got others that are saying I want decision points. I think a lot of the opportunity around the cost savings, mostly from an Opex standpoint are those that are moving towards disaggregated. It doesn't lock 'em in to a single solution. It doesn't get 'em into that long life cycle of when you're going to do changes and upgrades and so forth. This gives them a lot more flexibility and capability. >> Tom, sometimes we have the tendency to get down in the weeds on these products. Especially in the networking space. One of my complaints was, the whole SDN wave, didn't seem to connect necessarily to some of the big businesses' challenges. Heard in the keynote this morning a lot of talk about digital transformation. Bring us up to speed as to how networking plays into that overall story. What you're hearing from customers and if you have any examples we'd love to hear. >> Yeah, no so, I think networking plays a critical part of the IT transformation. I think if you think of the first move in virtualization around compute, then you have the software-defined storage, the networking component was kind of the lagger. It was kind of holding back. And in fact today, I think some analysts say that even when certain software-defined storage implementations occur, interruptions or issues happen in the network. Because the network has then been built and architected for that type of environment. So the companies end up going back and re-looking at how that's done. And companies overall are I think are frustrated with this. They're frustrated with the fact that the network is holding them back from enabling new services, new capabilities, new workloads, moving towards a software-defined environment. And so I think this area again, of disaggregation, of software-defined, of offering choice around software, I think it's doing well, and it's really starting to see an uptick. And the customer experiences as follows. One is, open networking where it's based upon standard commodity-based hardware. It's simply less expensive than proprietary hardware. So they're going to have a little bit of savings from the CapEx standpoint. But because they moved towards this disaggregated model where perhaps they're using one of our third-party software partners that happens to be based in Linux, or even our own OS10 is now based in Linux. Look at that, the tools around configuration and automation are the same as compute. And the same as storage. And so therefore I'm saving on this configuration and automation and so forth. So we have examples such as Verizon that literally not only saves about 30% cost savings on their CapEx, they're saving anywhere between 40 and 50% on their Opex. Why? They can roll out applications much faster. They can make changes to their network much faster. I mean that's the benefit of virtualization and NSX as well, right? Instead of having this decisions of sending a network engineer to a closet to do CLI, down in the dirt as you would say, and reconfigure the switch, a lot of that now has been attracted to a software lever, and getting the company much more capability to make the changes across the fabric, or to segregate it using NSX micro segmentation to make the changes to those users or to that particular environment that needs those changes. So, just the incredible amount of flexibility. I think SDN let's say six, seven years ago, everyone thought it was going to be CapEx. You know, cheaper hardware, cheaper ASICs, et cetera. It's all about Opex. It's around flexibility, agility, common tool sets, better configuration, faster automation. >> So we all have this nirvana idea that we can take our traditional stacks, whether it's pre-packaged CI configurations that's pre-engineered, HCI, SDN, disaggregated networking. Add to that a software layer this magical automation. Can you unpack that for us a little bit? What are you seeing practically whether it's in the server provider perspective or on the enterprise. What are those crucial relationships that Dell EMC is forming with the software industry to bring forth that automation? >> Well obviously we have a very strong relationship with VMware. >> Keith: Right. >> And so you have vRealize and vROps and so forth, and in fact in the new VxBlock 1000, you're going to see a lot of us gearings, a lot of our development towards the vRealize suite, so that helps those customers that are in a VMware environment. We also have a very strong relationship with Red Hat and OpenStack, where we've seen very successful implementations in the service provider space. Those that want to go a little bit more, a little bit more disaggregated, a little bit more open, even it from the storage participation like SAP and so forth. But then obviously we're doing a lot of work with Ansible, Chef, and Puppet, for those that are looking for more of a common open source set of tools across server, compute, networking storage and so forth. So I think the real benefit is kind of looking at it at that 25,000-foot view on how we want to automate. Do you want to go towards containers, do you want to go traditional? What are the tool sets that you've been using in your compute environment, and can those be brought down to the entire stack? >> All right, well Tom Burns, really appreciate catching up with you. I know Keith will be spending a little time at Interop this week too. I know, I'm excited that we have a lot more networking here at this end of the strip also this week. >> Appreciate it. Listen to Pat's talk this afternoon. I think we're going to be hearing even more about Dell Technology's networking. >> All right. Tom Burns, SVP of Networking and Solutions at Dell EMC. I'm Stu Miniman and this is Keith Townsend. Thanks for watching The Cube. (upbeat music)

(gentle music) >> Announcer: Live, from Los Angeles, it's theCUBE, covering Open Source Summit, North America, 2017, brought to you by the Linux Foundation and Red Hat. >> Okay welcome back, and we're live here in Los Angeles, this is theCUBE's exclusive coverage of the Linux Foundation's Open Source Summit North America. I'm John Furrier, your host with my co-host Stu Miniman. Our next guest is Chris Aniszczyk, who's the COO, Chief Operating Officer of the CNCF, the Cloud Native Compute Foundation, formerly Cube-Con, Cloud Native Foundation, all rolled into the most popular Linux Foundation project right now, very fashionable, cloud native, running on native clouds, Chris welcome back to theCUBE, good to see you. >> Awesome, it's been a while, great to be back. >> So you are the Chief Operating Officer of the hottest project, to me at least, in the Foundation. Not the most important, because there's a lot of really important, everything's important, you don't pick a favorite child, but, if one's trending, the CNCF is certainly trending, it's got the most sponsors, it's got the most participants, there's so much action going on, there's so much change and opportunity, around Kubernetes, around containers, around writing cloud-native applications. You've guys have really put together a nice foundation around that, nice group, congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Take a step back and explain to us, what the hell is the CNCF? We know what it is, we were there present at creation, but it's super-important, it's growing in relevance every day. Take a minute to explain. >> So I mean, you know, CNCF is all about providing a neutral home for cloud-native technology, and it's been about almost two years since our first board meeting and the idea was, there's a certain set of technology out there that are essentially micro-service-based, that live in containers that are centrally orchestrated by some process, right, that's essentially what we mean when we say cloud-native, right, and CNCF was seeded with Kubernetes as its first project, and as we've seen over the last couple of years, Kubernetes has grown quite well, they have a large community, diverse contributor base, and have done kind of extremely well. They're one of actually the fastest, highest velocity open source projects out there, maybe only, compared to the kernel is maybe a little bit faster but it's just great to kind of see it growing. >> Why is it so hot right now? What's the catalyst? >> So I think if we kind of step back and we look at the trends in industry, right, more and more companies are becoming software companies, you know, folks like John Deere, building IoT platforms. You need some type of infrastructure to run this stuff, and especially at scale. You know, imagine sensors in every tractor, farm or in every vehicle, you're going to need serious infrastructure and cloud native really is a way to scale those type of infrastructure needs and so this is kind of I think why you're seeing a lot of interest being piqued in CNCF-related technology. >> A lot of prototypes too. >> Chris, see you know, it's interesting, I look back you know, a year or two ago, and it was like, oh, it was like the orchestration wars, it was Swarm versus Mesos, and now I look at it in the last year it's like, wait, Mesos fully embracing it, MesosCon they're going to be talking about how Mesos is the best place to you know, Kubernetes on DCOS, containerd now part of the container wars, so the container wars, we're going to talk about OCI, you know, Amazon, Microsoft, of course Google, out there at the beginning. Is there anybody that's not on board that Kubernetes... >> I mean we really have the top five cloud providers in the world, depending on what metrics you look at, part of CNCF, you know there's some others out there that still aren't fully part of the family. Hopefully if you stay tuned over the next week or so you may hear some announcements coming from CNCF of other large cloudy-type companies joining the family. >> Every week there's a new platinum sponsor (Chris laughs) and you guys are getting a check every week it seems. >> To me it's great to see companies stepping up to the play and actually sustaining open source foundations that are critical to the actual business, and I think that it's great to see this involvement. So to me I'm personally thrilled, 'cause otherwise we'd be in a situation where if the top five cloud providers in the world weren't part of CNCF, maybe they'd be trying to do their own initiative, so it's great that we have these companies at the table, and all trying to build, you know, find their own pathway to cloud-native. >> You guys are hyper-growth right now, and you're new too, you're still kind of you know, >> Chris: Less than two years old! >> I mean it's amazing. So I want to put a little Jim Zemlin test to you, (Chris laughs) which is, in his keynote today he talked about, this is the big kind of event for the whole community of open source to come together, and again, you're talking 64 million libraries out there now. He projected by 2026, 400 million, it literally is a hockey stick growth, so you got growth there, so he talked about four things, my summary. Project health, so healthiness, sustainability, secure code, training, new members. What's your strategy re those four things? Keeping the CNCF healthy, you don't eat too much and choke on all of that growth... >> Yeah, so in terms of projects, we have a very unique governance structure in place when we designed CNCF. So we kind of have this independent technical operating committee, we kind of jokingly refer to them as a technical supreme court, but they are made up of people from, kind of luminaries in the container cloud-native space, they're from competing companies too, but they try to really wear an independent hat and make sure that we're, projects that we're accepting are high quality, are a good fit for the foundation, and so it's actually fairly hard to get a project in CNCF, 'cause it really requires the blessing of this TOC. So, even though we have 10 projects now in about two years, I think that's about a project every two months, which is an okay pace. The other unique thing that we're doing is we have different levels of projects, we have inception, incubation and graduation. Right now, we have no graduated projects in CNCF, believe it or not, Kubernetes has not graduated yet because they're still finalizing their governance for the project and they're almost there. Once they do that, they'll most likely graduate. >> They'll walk cap and gown all nine yards, eh? >> Exactly, it'll be great. December we'll have the cap and gown ceremony. But the other unique thing is we're not, we do annual kind of reviews for some of our projects, certain levels will be annually reviewed, and if they're not longer healthy or a good fit, we're okay archiving them, or telling, you know, telling them you know, maybe you're not a good fit anymore for the foundation, or you know. And so I think you have to have a process in place where sometimes you do have to move things to the attic. >> Do you have a high bar on the projects >> The initial bar is extremely, extremely high, and I think over time, we may see some projects that get recycled or moved to the attic, or maybe they maybe merged together, we'll see, so we're thinking about this already, so... >> John: Okay, security? >> Security, so we, all projects in CNCF that graduate have to partake in the core infrastructures best practices badging program, so if the CII has this great effort that is basically helping to ensure projects meet a minimal level of best practices that make their projects secure. You know, it doesn't give you like full-blown guarantee, but these are good practices. >> So you were leveraging pre-existing work, classic, open-source ethos. >> Exactly, and they have like a set of domain experts completely focused on security building out these practices and you'll notice Kubernetes recently merged in the CII Best Practices badge, so if you go to the readme, you'll actually see it, and you'll click through and you'll see all the things that they've had to sign off and check on that they participate in, and so all of our projects are kind of going >> Training. >> Training, yeah, we just recently announced couple things. One is we have a >> Looking good so far, you get an A plus. >> Yeah, so as of today we've launched the Certified Kubernetes Administrator Program or CKA for short. So we have folks that are getting trained on, and are having official stamps that they are certified Kubernetes administrators, and to me that's huge, given like how hot the space is, having some stamp of approval that they are really certified in the space is huge. So we also offer free training through edX, so we launched some training courses earlier, and to be honest, if you look at our member companies, lots of great folks out there providing training material. >> So one of the keynotes that Christine Corbett Moran was talking about in her keynote was, more inclusion so there's no ruling class. Now I know you really have a ruling class going on with your high bar, I get that. How are you getting new members in, what's the strategy, who are the new members, how are you going to manage the perception possibly that a few people control the swing votes at potentially big projects? >> So here what's interesting is, people joining CNCF, like I mentioned before, we have a TOC, right? So there's kind of this separation of, I don't say church and state, but like, so the governing board, people who pay to join CNCF, they pay to sustain our open source projects, and so essentially they help with, they pay for marketing, staff, events and so on. They actually don't have technical influence over the projects. You don't have to be a member to have technical influence over our projects. People join CNCF because they want to have a say in the overall budget of how marketing, events and stuff, and just overall support the organization. But on the technical side, there's this kind of firewall, there's an independent TOC, they make the technical decisions. You can't really pay to join that at all, you have to actually be heavily participating in that community. >> John: How does someone get in that group? Is there a code? >> They have to just be like a luminary, we have a kind of election process that happens every two or three years, depending on how things are structured, and it's independently elected by the CNCF member community, essentially, is the simplest way I can explain it. >> The other announcement you talked about, kind of the individual certification, but the KCSP sort of programs >> Correct, exactly. >> Maybe you can tell us a little bit about that. >> Yes, so we had a program set up so it's Kubernetes Certified Service Provider, KCSP, that basically >> rolls right off the tongue >> I know, right, exactly. Herbal space program, whatever, I think of sometimes video games when we say it, but essentially, the program was put in place that a lot of end users out there in companies that are new to cloud native, and they're new to Kubernetes, essentially want to find a trusted set of partners that they can rely on, services and other things, so we created KCSP as a way to vet a certain set of companies that have at least a minimum of three people that have passed the Kubernetes certification exam that I talked about, and are essentially participating upstream in some way actively in the Kubernetes community. So we got a couple handfuls of companies that have launched, which is great, and so now, given that we're growing so fast, companies out there that are early end users that are exploring the space now have a trusted set of companies that go look at, and we're hoping to grow that program over time too. So this is just phase one. >> All right, so Chris, the other thing that I want to make sure we talk about, the Open Container Initiative, so I think it was originally OCP, which of course is, >> Open Container Project which when OCP was announced, it was like, okay, the cold war of Docker versus CoreOS versus everybody else, (Chris laughs) trying to figure out what that container format was, we all shook hands, I took a nice selfie with Ben who was CEO at the time, and everybody. So 1.0 is out. So, container's fully mature, ready to be rolled out right? But what does it mean? >> So I mean it's funny 'cause I basically joined the Linux Foundation, to help both start CNCF and OCI around the same time, right, and OCI was very narrowly scoped to only care about a small set of container-specific issues. One around how do you actually really run containers, start, stop, all that kind of life cycle bit, and how are containers laid out on disk, we call that the image specification. So you have the runtime spec and the image spec, and those are just very limited core pieces, like that OCI was not opinionated on networking or storage or any of, those are all left to other initiatives. And so after almost two years, we shipped 1.0, we got basically all the major container players to agree that this is 1.0 and we're going to build off from this, and so if you look at Docker with it's containerd project, or you know, fully adopting OCI, the Mesos community is, Cloud Foundry, even AWS announced their container register's supporting OCI, so we got the 1.0 out there, now we're going to see an abundance of people building tools and other things. I think you'll see more end users out there exploring containers. I've talked to a lot of companies that I can't necessarily name, but there's a lot of folks out there that may not dive into container technology until there is actually a mature standard and they feel like this technology is just not going to go away or they're going to get locked into some specific platforms. So, with 1.0 out the door, you'll see over the next six to 12 months, more tools being built. We're actually working to roll out a certification program so you get that nice little, you know, hey, this product is OCI-certified and supports the spec, so you'll see that happen over the next... >> Okay, so you've got the runtime spec and the image format spec, >> Yep, those are the two big ones. >> All 1.0, we're ready to roll, what's the roadmap >> Yeah, what's next. So there are early discussions about what other mature areas are out there kind of in container land right now. There are some discussions around distribution, so having a standard API to basically fetch and push container images out there. If you look at it, each container registry has basically a different set of APIs, and wouldn't it be nice if we could all kind of easily work together and have maybe one set, a way to kind of distribute these things. So there are some early discussions around potentially building out a distribution specification, but that's something that the technical community has to decide within OCI to do, and so over the next couple of months we're having some meetings, we're doing a bigger meeting at DockerCon Europe coming up in October to basically try to figure out what's really next. So I think after we shipped 1.0 a lot of people took a little bit of a breather, a break, and say like, congratulate themselves, take some vacation over the summer, and now we're going to get back into the full swing of things over the next couple of months. >> Say, what's the big conversation here, obviously at your event in Austin, it's got a plug for, theCUBE will be live covering it as well. >> I know, I'm excited. >> What's the uptake, what's the conversation in the hallways, any meetings, give us some >> Yeah, so we're doing >> I know there's some big announcement coming on Wednesday, there's some stuff happening >> Yeah, so, you know, first coming Wednesday, so like I mentioned, we have 10 projects right now in CNCF. We have two projects currently out for vote. So one of them is Envoy. There's a company you've probably heard of, Lyft, ride-sharing company, but Envoy essentially is their fancy service mesh that powers the Lyft platform, and many other companies out there are actually taking advantage of Envoy. Google's playing around with it, integrating into the Istio project, which is pretty powerful, but Envoy is currently, it was invited by the TOC for a formal vote, the voting period started last week, so we're collecting votes from the nine TOC members, and once that voting period is hopefully we can announce whether the project was accepted or not. The other project in the pipeline is a project called Jaeger, which is from Uber, you know, nice to have Uber >> John: Jaegermeister. >> Yeah, Jaegermeister, a bit like it. It's nice to have a product from Uber, another product from Lyft, kind of it's nice to see >> And if you have too much Jaeger, you have to take the Lyft to get home, right? >> Exactly, correct. So you know, just like Envoy, Jaeger is, you know, was formally invited by the TOC, it's out for vote, and hopefully we'll count the votes soon and figure out if it gets accepted or not. So Jaeger is focused on distributed tracing, so one problem in micro-services land is once you kind of like refactor your application to kind of be micro-services-based, actually tracing and figuring out what happens when things go wrong is hard, and you need a really good set of distributed tracing tools, 'cause otherwise it's like the worst murder mystery, you have like no idea what's happened, so having solid distributed tracing solution like Jaeger is great, 'cause in CNCF we're going to have a project called OpenTracing, but that's just kind of like the spec of how you do things, there's no full-blown client-server distributed >> For instance you usually need it for manageability >> Exactly, and that's what Jaeger provides, and I'm excited to kind of have these two projects under consideration in CNCF. >> Is manageability the hottest thing going on right now in terms of conversations? (Chris sighs) Or is it more stability and getting projects graduating? >> Yeah, so like our big focus is like, we want to see projects graduate, kind of meet the minimum bar that the TOC set up for graduated projects. In terms of other hot areas that are under discussion in CNCF are storage, so for example we have a storage working group that's been working hard to kind of bring in all the vendors and different storage folks together, and there's some early work called the container storage interface, we call it CSI for short, and so you know there's another project at CNCF called CNI, which basically tried to build a standard around how networking is done in container land. CSI is doing the same thing because, you know, it's no fun rewriting your storage drivers for all the different orchestration systems out there, and so why not get together and build out a standard that is used by Kubernetes, by Mesos, by Cloud Foundry, by Docker, and just have it so they all work across these things. So that's what's happening, and it's still early days, but there's a lot of excitement in that. >> Okay, the event in Austin, what can people expect? Cube-Con. >> You're literally going to have the biggest gathering of Kubernetes and cloud-native talent. It's actually going to be one of our biggest events probably for the Linux Foundation at all. We're probably going to get 3-4,000 people minimum out there, and I'm stoked, we're going to have some... Schedule's not fully announced yet. I do secretly know some of the keynotes potentially, but just wait for that announcement, I promise you it's going to be great. >> And one question I get, just I thought I'd bring it up since you're here in the hot seat, lot of people coming in with, supporting you guys on the governing side, not even cyclical. How are you going to service them, how are you going to scale up, do you have confidence that you have the ability to execute against those sponsorships, support the members, what's your plan, can you share some insights, clarify that? >> You know, pressure makes diamonds, right? We have a lot of people at the right table, and we are doing some hiring, so we have a couple spots open for developer advocacy, technical writing, you know additive things that help our project overall. We're also trying to hire a head of marketing. So like, we are in the process of expanding the organization. >> Do you feel comfortable... >> I feel comfortable, like things are growing, things are moving at a fast clip, but we're doing the best we can to hire and don't be surprised if you hear some announcements soon about some fun hires. >> Well it's been great for us covering, we've been present and creating, if you will, this movement, which has been kind of cool, because it kind of a confluence of a couple of things coming together. >> Chris: Yeah, absolutely. >> It's just been really fun to watch, just the momentum from the cloud really early days, 2009 timeframe to now, it's been a real nice ride and congratulations to the entire community. >> Thank you, like for me it's just exciting to have all these companies sitting together at the same table, having Amazon join, and the other top fighters, all basically committing to saying, we are in the cloud-native, we may have different ways of getting there, but we're all committed working together at some level. So I'm stoked. >> Great momentum, and you guys doing some great work, congratulations. >> Thank you very much. >> And you know it's working when I get focused, hey can you, so and so, I'm like, oh yeah, no problem, oh wow, they're big time now, you guys are big time. Congratulations. >> Thank you, it's in phase one now, like we have the right people at the table >> Don't screw it up! (John and Chris laugh) As they say. It's on yours. Chris Aniszczyk, who's the COO of the Cloud Native Compute Foundation, the hottest area of Linux Foundation right now, a lot of action on cloud, cloud-native developers where DevOps is meeting, lot of progress in application development. Still, they're really only two years old, get involved, more inclusion the better. It's theCUBE, Cube coverage of CNCF. We'll be in Austin in December. >> Chris: Yep, six to eight. >> December 6 to 8, we'll be there live. More live coverage coming back in Los Angeles here for the Open Source Summit North America after this short break.

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering HPE Discover 2017. Brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. >> Welcome back everyone. We are here live in Las Vegas for SiliconANGLE Cube's exclusive coverage of HPE Discover 2017. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Dave Vellante. Our next guest is Justin Hotard, Vice President and General Manager of the Service Provider and OEM Solutions for HPE, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Curt Belusar, Senior Director of Service Provider Engineering. We got the trends, we got the market leader, the go-to market leader, as well as the engineering. Guys, welcome to the CUBE. >> Thanks, great to be here. >> Thank you. >> So, obviously the service providers is an interesting marketplace. We've been covering it for a long time and we know how hot NFV is and all the great stuff going on with the network moving up the stack, applications over the cloud. You name it, it's a crazy world. But you look at the trends around smart cities, autonomous vehicles, and movie and media entertainment, smart home, Apple announcing a home pod. Internet of things. This is a right market for service providers, so my first question is, with 5G over the top, these kinds of trends, to power these transformative use cases. Is it really putting even more pressure on the service providers? So, what's the deal? Where are they at? What are you guys doing with the business? Give us a quick taste of the landscape and some of the forcing functions that are helping your business. >> Yeah absolutely, and I think you hit on a lot of the trends driving the growth in service providers. What we see is a very dynamic market where everybody is trying to figure out their business model and build their services and respond to all these changes. What we see is a lot of customers, our customers as service providers, need a lot of flexibility. They need to be able to respond to these changes. They also need to be able to scale. Globalization is a huge trend because I launched something in the U.S. and Uber or Lyft is a good example. I launch in the U.S. Everybody expects to have that service everywhere else in the world. >> And guess what, they say "Whoa, hold on." >> Exactly, exactly. Then you've got issues with data sovereignty, and security, and privacy, and you have to factor all of those things in. These businesses, our service provider customers, don't have time to wait. So, they really see us as a core partner to them, to enable speed and delivery. Curt, you probably can add a few points cause you've seen this market evolve over the last, almost decade. >> I think what we're seeing is a transition to where there's more data out at the edge, and so you're growing both edge data centers and you're growing central data centers at the same time. The percentage of operating expense that these customers are spending on their IT gear is just a very large percent, and so they are all trying to optimize their spend in that space. That means that they're looking at ways to optimize the gear. They're looking at ways to optimize how they deliver the gear out to the data centers. They're looking at reducing servicibility costs and trying to attack it across the board. >> Let's talk consolidation for a bit because early on everybody said "It's just going "consolidate to a few providers," and the exact opposite has happened. >> Yep. >> It's logical. Services have always been decentralized and local and that's exactly what you're describing. How do you look at the market? How do you segment it, and what's you're thinking in terms of the explosion or contraction of this market, in terms of number of players? >> A lot of what we see in the press or what's discussed is, we talk a lot about the infrastructure of service providers, and the largest service providers. The reality is that the market is fragmenting because more and more businesses are moving to an as-a-service model. There's business as a service, software as a service, and each of these customers has a unique business model. How they make money, where they extract value, how they respond to their customers. We really see that trend, and I don't think it's going to change. That's not to say that the largest players in the market won't continue to grow in scale. As we've seen, they've been doing that pretty consistently, but we're still going to see those different services and different values because it is local, it's customized. You think about autonomous driving. There's going to be, you brought that up earlier, right? There's the people that are going to provide autonomous vehicles for consumers. There's going to be people that provide it as a service. There's going to be people that provide services into those vehicles. >> Data services? >> Data services. Content services. We think all of those models will continue, and the economics of one-size-fits-all just don't work. When you look at our product strategy, our solution strategy, including point next and how we go to market. It's recognizing that. We have customers in Europe, for example, that buy what we might consider more traditional data infrastructure gear. A lot of the core products we have in market today. We have customers that want customized, we talk about white-box a lot, but customized solutions, the latest technology. Integrated, optimized for their workload, for their scale, and we run the gamut. A lot of that is because one size just doesn't fit all in this environment. Let alone what Curt was talking about with where they're deploying their technology. >> Yeah, I see the same trends. I think that both the large, public cloud providers are going to continue to grow, and then you're going to see the next tier down is also going to continue to grow. It's everything as-a-service is starting to explode. >> How are the requirements, are they dramatically different? I mean the large guys, they've got massive scale and gimme the stuff and get out of my way sort of attitude. But the second and third tier, there's a lot of customization required. Where do you see HPE being able to add value in that space? >> We're going to see customization at both ends. It's just going to be more customization with the top-tier customers. It's interesting, what you've seen is a lot of the IT skill-sets and people have migrated from some of the top-tier providers down to the second tier and so you see them wanting to employ a lot of the same techniques to go save cost and optimize their environment. When we say customize, there's a very good reason why they customize. They will customize to the extent that it allows them to go lower their total cost of ownership. >> Well that's a great point. Dave mentioned in an earlier segment that all companies are becoming technology companies. Jim Jackson was talking about the digital technology issues, so you have a power law going on. You're going to have it at the head and the long tail of the service providers. Some enterprises, you say enterprise market. You can almost say, okay there's a line. You guys are now the service providers, and the rest are traditional enterprises. In a way, they're SMBs from that old classical definition. The point is, the definition's changing. >> Yeah. >> How does that impact your business and your product offering? >> It's really interesting. I think your point is every company is a service provider, and so we also see this even within our Enterprise customers. They have workloads that are running on Enterprise. They run mission critical workloads, and then they run service provider platforms, and they're looking for that flexibility. They don't want to be bucketized. In order to compete, in order to have a service that might deliver content into their products or provide conductivity into their products for intelligence or AI, they need to have the same cost advantages, the same technology advantages, the same forward planning. Because a big thing we see in the service provider's space, is they buy ahead on technology because they're trying to run the life cycle of what they might need and get that return on investment. We see those same behaviors across our Enterprise customers that are buying as service providers. So there is a bit of a blending of the business. >> Is there a pattern that you can talk to in the marketplace? This is interesting cause if you believe that, which I do, and I think you guys would agree, that everyone's becoming a service provider. But service providers have had a legacy business that had completely different dimensions than say, a classic enterprise. A lot of online. A lot of hyper-scaler's upfront. Now you have data tsunami coming, so are there patterns that this is a little service provider like, that now the enterprises have to deal with. Can you share insight into some of the things that you guys are doing to solve that, and I mean I know the flexibility thing is a key message. Composability, I get that. What are the core customer problems that now look like service provider problems? >> Well, there are a lot of Enterprise customers that are going and starting to stand up environments that look like service provider environments. There's different reasons why they do that. They could need an internal cloud for some reason. They could actually be standing up a service now that they're offering out to the public. The answer is they are all looking for some of the same things in their cloud-like environment. They want consistency in the way that they want to go and deploy and talk to the servers. They want to have lowest cost, total cost of ownership, and that's both on a capital expense side, in terms of what they pay to go buy the actual equipment, but also on the operating expense side. The more that they can make their cloud or their grid look uniform, it becomes easier to service, it becomes easier to maintain. You're starting to see them on a smaller scale perhaps, but employ a lot of the same techniques that are used in the large clouds. >> The business model question too comes up. In the old days, the ones who were online, highly big procurers of gear, servers and storage. Financial services, healthcare, I mean, these are highly online, transactional businesses, and service providers also fell in that bucket, but now as everyone sassifies. Hello! Your revenue model is tied to those services. >> Yep, and it's interesting too because we put a lot of emphasis, I mean by virtue of being a technology company, we've put a lot of emphasis on the tech and making sure we've got the right systems and configurations we're delivering to the customer. The other thing is, it turns out that there's some laws around physics. So power matters, real estate matters, footprint matters. >> Distance? >> Distance. All those things for latency and proximity, and we talked about some of the other elements. But those are actually huge operating costs, huge value points for our customers. So, helping them make sure that they're balancing all those choice points. Because if we get the operating expense right on the tech, but then they can't handle the power, they can't handle the footprint, they've got a different issue. >> Scale's a huge issue. >> They can't scale, exactly. That actually puts a limit on their growth, so there's all these different things that we balance and where we bring value, and it's not just the technology, but that total solution. >> The service provider space has always been a harbinger for what's going to happen in the Enterprise. If you looked 10 years back it was virtualization, and then DevOps and containers, and all that stuff that's hitting the Enterprise now was being done years ago. What are the tech trends that are driving the service provider space now? What are you seeing there that might show us a glimpse as to what's coming in the future? Where are they focused? >> I think that we're seeing continuation and furthering of some of the technologies that we've seen the public clouds rolling out starting to happen with the Enterprise, but when I think from a technology trend standpoint, things that folks are looking at today. We're seeing alternate processors become available this year. ARM 64, we're getting into the second generation of that. We're seeing trends coming like NVMe drives, the ability to pull data off of a drive much quicker. If you're a financial services industry company that wants to transact data real quick, that's helping out there. We're seeing NVDIMM technology that's coming into play, and that's shifting everything. Storage and memory is starting to come together, and so the way that they move around and cache data is something that's going to change. Applications are going to have to change. >> John: Architectures are changing, big time. >> Absolutely. >> What are the drivers behind that? Because you brought up data and memory, and then also, we just had talking to the server, options, lead, and this is a big deal. Memory used to be a constraint that you have to program around. Swapping out, back in the old days, but now it's almost limitless, with the persistent SSDs, speed, and that gives app developers huge flexibility, so this should change the game on the service providers. >> It's all about the data. There is just more and more and more data being stored for different reasons, and the data sets that people want to operate on are just getting larger and larger. And to the extent that we can pull those in and operate on them in a faster way in memory, it helps. >> You guys have a very dynamic market, so I've got to ask the question, what is the biggest way that you guys are riding on the go-to market? And from a technology standpoint because if you believe this conversation we're having, what is happening is, a service provider, of a service provider, of a service provider, is going on because someone may be a specialist in say big data analytics service provider for cars. Or I am a healthcare service provider that's out of scale, so scale becomes now the new differentiation. >> Yep. >> That's the locked-in aspect, but I mean it's not really locked in, it's just they have scale. You can almost envision this channel of service providers. How would that play out, I mean, that would be certainly game-changing. How do you guys rationalize that trend? What is the wave that you're riding? >> I think it all goes back to our customers, and we're doing a few different things. So one is deep-direct engagement with these customers, especially the ones on the cutting edge. To have a early dialogue with them, make sure we're delivering the right solutions. The other thing is actually bringing value, so we do some things through it. We have a program called Partner Ready Service Provider. We bring in, actually from our service provider customers, and this is a global program. We actually then deliver those services cause we have certain customers that might, again back to that mix in a CIO's environment, they might look like an enterprise, they might look like a hyper-scale service provider customer, they may also look like they're a consumer of service providers. >> All three? >> Exactly. Actually being able to do all of that is really important, and we think when we wrap all of that with our service delivery, our global footprint, our supply chain, the ability to deliver products anywhere in the world. Those are all things that give us a solution advantage for our customers. >> Curt, talk about open, the cloud line server portfolio, fast grow in the cloud age is here, open infrastructure. I was just talking to some of the guys in the labs. You've seen some of the stuff at the network layer becoming open-source projects. You almost take the network stack and say, "Oh wow, there's like six open-source projects "that make up HP, Arista, Juniper, and Cisco." Core technologies, yet you have to build your own proprietary stuff around that to differentiate. How does open fit into all of this because at the end of the day, it's going to be an open-source driven software world with the cloud? >> I think there's open-source software pieces, and I think we will get to the point where we have more open standards around hardware too. You've seen OCP, you've seen Open19 launch a couple weeks ago and you're starting to see standards around the hardware as well. I think the open's critical. I think that it is the way of the future. In this space, I think that we, again back to the comment about what the large grids or large service provider customers need. They need uniformity in their data center to a certain extent. It makes it easier to manage and easier to operate. If you just start with that principle, that implies that we're going to have open standards. They're going to want open standards around the rack, they're going to want open standards around the gear, open standards around some of the options that go in the gear. There's going to be open standards from a software standpoint, and it's going to be the companies that go and sell that gear responsibility to make those bullet proof, to make them to the point where they're secure, to make them on the hardware side to the point where you can distribute it worldwide and service it. Open is here to stay. >> We've been predicting on the theCube, I know Dave's got a question, but I want to get this point out. We've been predicting, it hasn't yet come true, and most of our predictions come true, so we're kind of waiting for the signals. Since open compute, we're seeing a maker culture going on, where we believe there's going to be a hardware renaissance, and when I say open hardware, there's really a driver on that. Thoughts on that? Because, this certainly would change the game. You see people trying to do their own servers, but yet they can't get a fab plan opened up, they can't do this. Interesting trend. If software's eating the world, then data's going to eat software, which we believe. Then you might see a really big shift to soft, I mean the hardware. We had Microsoft's Ballmer say at the conference last week, we should have got in the hardware business earlier. I mean, what is that all about? So again, this points to a renaissance. Do you agree? >> Totally. I think you hit it dead on. We see the same thing, and it's a business model shift. It's a different business model than where we're been, but the opportunity to deliver value in open, around platforms, around making sure there's inter-operability, quality, security, exposing performance. Those are all things that are enabled through hardware, and they make a difference, and Curt talked earlier about some of these technology trends. They're very hardware centric because that's actually what delivers the difference in software and data. >> And systems too, and having systems experience is now the new IP. Not necessarily having the fastest board. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, that's right. Having that ability to integrate it and deliver an experience and performance. Those are things that make the difference. >> Curt, your thoughts. >> Like I said, I think that we are going to see more and more open standards around it, and I think it's going to help people scale. It's about putting the systems together, in a open-scalable way. It's also about getting more work done out of the systems. It's kind of a, if you think about through Capex and Opex, there's going to be a work per watt per dollar done. How can I get that best done in the most standard way? And standards are going to have to be there, to enable all these pieces to go together and come together with a uniform look in the data center, which is what anybody who's deploying the cloud needs. >> So Justin, put a bow on this segment. Summarize from your perspective Hewlett Packard Enterprise's cloud service provider strategy. Where can you add the most value? Where's the sweet spot, and where you going to make the money? >> I think what we add the most value in is being able to be a comprehensive provider for all of our customer's solutions, and that's not just the product. It's being able to deliver the specific product or that specific workload or application. Being able to provide that global footprint and supply chain, the services on top of it. So that a customer, when a customer makes a decision that they need help, they've got one partner to go to, and I think ultimately that's where we'll make the value. >> Justin Hotard, who's the VP GM Service Provider, of OEM Solutions, and Curt Belusar, Senior Director of Service Provider Engineering. Guys, thanks for this insight. Great conversation. We love it, we love hardware. We all love software too. All that machine learning out there, there's going to be more and more power available. This is theCUBE, bringing you all the action here at HPE Discover, doing our job delivering a bunch of great services around data and video. Of course, bringing you live stream here. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We'll be right back after this short break. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Coverage DataWorks Summit Europe 2017 brought to you by Hortonworks. >> Welcome back everyone. Live here in Munich, Germany for theCUBE'S special presentation of Hortonworks Hadoop Summit now called DataWorks 2017. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Dave Vellante, our next guest is Shaun Connolly, Vice President of Corporate Strategy, Chief Strategy Officer. Shaun great to see you again. >> Thanks for having me guys. Always a pleasure. >> Super exciting. Obviously we always pontificating on the status of Hadoop and Hadoop is dead, long live Hadoop, but runs in demise is greatly over-exaggerated, but reality is is that no major shifts in the trends other than the fact that the amplification with AI and machine learning has upleveled the narrative to mainstream around data, big data has been written on on gen one on Hadoop, DevOps, culture, open-source. Starting with Hadoop you guys certainly have been way out in front of all the trends. How you guys have been rolling out the products. But it's now with IoT and AI as that sizzle, the future self driving cars, smart cities, you're starting to really see demand for comprehensive solutions that involve data-centric thinking. Okay, said one. Two, open-source continues to dominate MuleSoft went public, you guys went public years ago, Cloudera filed their S-1. A crop of public companies that are open-source, haven't seen that since Red Hat. >> Exactly. 99 is when Red Hat went public. >> Data-centric, big megatrend with open-source powering it, you couldn't be happier for the stars lining up. >> Yeah, well we definitely placed our bets on that. We went public in 2014 and it's nice to see that graduating class of Taal and MuleSoft, Cloudera coming out. That just I think helps socializes movement that enterprise open-source, whether it's for on-prem or powering cloud solutions pushed out to the edge, and technologies that are relevant in IoT. That's the wave. We had a panel earlier today where Dahl Jeppe from Centric of British Gas, was talking about his ... The digitization of energy and virtual power plant notions. He can't achieve that without open-source powering and fueling that. >> And the thing about it is is just kind of ... For me personally being my age in this generation of computer industry since I was 19, to see the open-source go mainstream the way it is, is even gets better every time, but it really is the thousandth flower bloom strategy. Throwing the seeds out there of innovation. I want to ask you as a strategy question, you guys from a performance standpoint, I would say kind of got hammered in the public market. Cloudera's valuation privately is 4.1 billion, you guys are close to 700 million. Certainly Cloudera's going to get a haircut looks like. The public market is based on the multiples from Dave and I's intro, but there's so much value being created. Where's the value for you guys as you look at the horizon? You're talking about white spaces that are really developing with use cases that are creating value. The practitioners in the field creating value, real value for customers. >> So you covered some of the trends, but I'll translate em into how the customers are deploying. Cloud computing and IoT are somewhat related. One is a centralization, the other is decentralization, so it actually calls for a connected data architecture as we refer to it. We're working with a variety of IoT-related use cases. Coca-Cola, East Japan spoke at Tokyo Summit about beverage replenishment analytics. Getting vending machine analytics from vending machines even on Mount Fuji. And optimizing their flow-through of inventory in just-in-time delivery. That's an IoT-related to run on Azure. It's a cloud-related story and it's a big data analytics story that's actually driving better margins for the business and actually better revenues cuz they're getting the inventory where it needs to be so people can buy it. Those are really interesting use cases that we're seeing being deployed and it's at this convergence of IoT cloud and big data. Ultimately that leads to AI, but I think that's what we're seeing the rise of. >> Can you help us understand that sort of value chain. You've got the edge, you got the cloud, you need something in-between, you're calling it connected data platform. How do you guys participate in that value chain? >> When we went public our primary workhorse platform was Hortonworks Data Platform. We had first class cloud services with Azure HDInsight and Hortonworks Data Cloud for AWS, curated cloud services pay-as-you-go, and Hortonworks DataFlow, I call as our connective tissue, it manages all of your data motion, it's a data logistics platform, it's like FedEx for data delivery. It goes all the way out to the edge. There's a little component called Minify, mini and ify, which does secure intelligent analytics at the edge and transmission. These smart manufacturing lines, you're gathering the data, you're doing analytics on the manufacturing lines, and then you're bringing the historical stuff into the data center where you can do historical analytics across manufacturing lines. Those are the use cases that are connect the data archives-- >> Dave: A subset of that data comes back, right? >> A subset of the data, yep. The key events of that data it may not be full of-- >> 10%, half, 90%? >> It depends if you have operational events that you want to store, sometimes you may want to bring full fidelity of that data so you can do ... As you manufacture stuff and when it got deployed and you're seeing issues in the field, like Western Digital Hard Drives, that failure's in the field, they want that data full fidelity to connect the data architecture and analytics around that data. You need to ... One of the terms I use is in the new world, you need to play it where it lies. If it's out at the edge, you need to play it there. If it makes a stop in the cloud, you need to play it there. If it comes into the data center, you also need to play it there. >> So a couple years ago, you and I were doing a panel at our Big Data NYC event and I used the term "profitless prosperity," I got the hairy eyeball from you, but nonetheless, we talked about you guys as a steward of the industry, you have to invest in open-source projects. And it's expensive. I mean HDFS itself, YARN, Tez, you guys lead a lot of those initiatives. >> Shaun: With the community, yeah, but we-- >> With the community yeah, but you provided contributions and co-leadership let's say. You're there at the front of the pack. How do we project it forward without making forward-looking statements, but how does this industry become a cashflow positive industry? >> Public companies since end of 2014, the markets turned beginning at 2016 towards, prior to that high growth with some losses was palatable, losses were not palatable. That his us, Splunk, Tableau most of the IT sector. That's just the nature of the public markets. As more public open-source, data-driven companies will come in I think it will better educate the market of the value. There's only so much I can do to control the stock price. What I can from a business perspective is hit key measures from a path to profitability. The end of Q4 2016, we hit what we call the just-to-even or breakeven, which is a stepping stone. On our earnings call at the end of 2016 we ended with 185 million in revenue for the year. Only five years into this journey, so that's a hard revenue growth pace and we basically stated in Q3 or Q4 of 17, we will hit operating cashflow neutrality. So we are operating business-- >> John: But you guys also hit a 100 million at record pace too, I believe. >> Yeah, in four years. So revenue is one thing, but operating margins, like if you look at our margins on our subscription business for instance, we've got 84% margin on that. It's a really nice margin business. We can make that better margins, but that's a software margin. >> You know what's ironic, we were talking about Red Hat off camera. Here's Red Hat kicking butt, really hitting all cylinders, three billion dollars in bookings, one would think, okay hey I can maybe project forth some of these open-source companies. Maybe the flip side of this, oh wow we want it now. To your point, the market kind of flipped, but you would think that Red Hat is an indicator of how an open-source model can work. >> By the way Red Hat went public in 99, so it was a different trajectory, like you know I charted their trajectory out. Oracle's trajectory was different. They didn't even in inflation adjusted dollars they didn't hit a 100 million in four years, I think it was seven or eight years or what have you. Salesforce did it in five. So these SaaS models and these subscription models and the cloud services, which is an area that's near and dear to my heart. >> John: Goes faster. >> You get multiple revenue streams across different products. We're a multi-products cloud service company. Not just a single platform. >> So we were actually teasing this out on our-- >> And that's how you grow the business, and that's how Red Hat did it. >> Well I want to get your thoughts on this while we're just kind of ripping live here because Dave and I were talking on our intro segment about the business model and how there's some camouflage out there, at least from my standpoint. One of the main areas that I was kind of pointing at and trying to poke at and want to get your reaction to is in the classic enterprise go-to-market, you have sales force expansive, you guys pay handsomely for that today. Incubating that market, getting the profitability for it is a good thing, but there's also channels, VARs, ISVs, and so on. You guys have an open-source channel that kind of not as a VAR or an ISV, these are entrepreneurs and or businesses themselves. There's got to be a monetization shift there for you guys in the subscription business certainly. When you look at these partners, they're co-developing, they're in open-source, you can almost see the dots connecting. Is this new ecosystem, there's always been an ecosystem, but now that you have kind of a monetization inherently in a pure open distribution model. >> It forces you to collaborate. IBM was on stage talking about our system certified on the Power Systems. Many may look at IBM as competitive, we view them as a partner. Amazon, some may view them as a competitor with us, they've been a great partner in our for AWS. So it forces you to think about how do you collaborate around deeply engineered systems and value and we get great revenue streams that are pulled through that they can sell into the market to their ecosystems. >> How do you vision monetizing the partners? Let's just say Dave and I start this epic idea and we create some connective tissue with your orchestrator called the Data Platform you have and we start making some serious bang. We make a billion dollars. Do you get paid on that if it's open-source? I mean would we be more subscriptions? I'm trying to see how the tide comes in, whose boats float on the rising tide of the innovation in these white spaces. >> Platform thinking is you provide the platform. You provide the platform for 10x value that rides atop that platform. That's how the model works. So if you're riding atop the platform, I expect you and that ecosystem to drive at least 10x above and beyond what I would make as a platform provider in that space. >> So you expect some contributions? >> That's how it works. You need a thousand flowers to be running on the platform. >> You saw that with VMware. They hit 10x and ultimately got to 15 or 16, 17x. >> Shaun: Exactly. >> I think they don't talk about it anymore. I think it's probably trading the other way. >> You know my days at JBoss Red Hat it was somewhere between 15 to 20x. That was the value that was created on top of the platforms. >> What about the ... I want to ask you about the forking of the Hadoop distros. I mean there was a time when everybody was announcing Hadoop distros. John Furrier announced SiliconANGLE was announcing Hadoop distro. So we saw consolidation, and then you guys announced the ODP, then the ODPI initiative, but there seems to be a bit of a forking in Hadoop distros. Is that a fair statement? Unfair? >> I think if you look at how the Linux market played out. You have clearly Red Hat, you had Conicho Ubuntu, you had SUSE. You're always going to have curated platforms for different purposes. We have a strong opinion and a strong focus in the area of IoT, fast analytic data from the edge, and a centralized platform with HDP in the cloud and on-prem. Others in the market Cloudera is running sort of a different play where they're curating different elements and investing in different elements. Doesn't make either one bad or good, we are just going after the markets slightly differently. The other point I'll make there is in 2014 if you looked at the then chart diagrams, there was a lot of overlap. Now if you draw the areas of focus, there's a lot of white space that we're going after that they aren't going after, and they're going after other places and other new vendors are going after others. With the market dynamics of IoT, cloud and AI, you're going to see folks chase the market opportunities. >> Is that dispersity not a problem for customers now or is it challenging? >> There has to be a core level of interoperability and that's one of the reasons why we're collaborating with folks in the ODPI, as an example. There's still when it comes to some of the core components, there has to be a level of predictability, because if you're an ISV riding atop, you're slowed down by death by infinite certification and choices. So ultimately it has to come down to just a much more sane approach to what you can rely on. >> When you guys announced ODP, then ODPI, the extension, Mike Olson wrote a blog saying it's not necessary, people came out against it. Now we're three years in looking back. Was he right or not? >> I think ODPI take away this year, there's more than we can do above and beyond the Hadoop platform. It's expanded to include SQL and other things recently, so there's been some movement on this spec, but frankly you talk to John Mertic at ODPI, you talk to SAS and others, I think we want to be a bit more aggressive in the areas that we go after and try and drive there from a standardization perspective. >> We had Wei Wang on earlier-- >> Shaun: There's more we can do and there's more we should do. >> We had Wei on with Microsoft at our Big Data SV event a couple weeks ago. Talk about the Microsoft relationship with you guys. It seems to be doing very well. Comments on that. >> Microsoft was one of the two companies we chose to partner with early on, so and 2011, 2012 Microsoft and Teradata were the two. Microsoft was how do I democratize and make this technology easy for people. That's manifest itself as Azure Cloud Service, Azure HDInsight-- >> Which is growing like crazy. >> Which is globally deployed and we just had another update. It's fundamentally changed our engineering and delivering model. This latest release was a cloud first delivery model, so one of the things that we're proud of is the interactive SQL and the LLAP technology that's in HDP, that went out through Azure HDInsight what works data cloud first. Then it certified in HDP 2.6 and it went power at the same time. It's that cadence of delivery and cloud first delivery model. We couldn't do it without a partnership with Microsoft. I think we've really learned what it takes-- >> If you look at Microsoft at that time. I remember interviewing you on theCUBE. Microsoft was trading something like $26 a share at that time, around their low point. Now the stock is performing really well. Stockinnetel very cloud oriented-- >> Shaun: They're very open-source. >> They're very open-source and friendly they've been donating a lot to the OCP, to the data center piece. Extremely different Microsoft, so you slipped into that beautiful spot, reacted on that growth. >> I think as one of the stalwarts of enterprise software providers, I think they've done a really great job of bending the curve towards cloud and still having a mixed portfolio, but in sending a field, and sending a channel, and selling cloud and growing that revenue stream, that's nontrivial, that's hard. >> They know the enterprise sales motions too. I want to ask you how that's going over all within Hortonworks. What are some of the conversations that you're involved in with customers today? Again we were saying in our opening segment, it's on YouTube if you're not watching, but the customers is the forcing function right now. They're really putting the pressure one the suppliers, you're one of them, to get tight, reduce friction, lower costs of ownership, get into the cloud, flywheel. And so you see a lot-- >> I'll throw in another aspect some of the more late majority adopters traditionally, over and over right here by 2025 they want to power down the data center and have more things running in the public cloud, if not most everything. That's another eight years or what have you, so it's still a journey, but this journey to making that an imperative because of the operational, because of the agility, because of better predictability, ease of use. That's fundamental. >> As you get into the connected tissue, I love that example, with Kubernetes containers, you've got developers, a big open-source participant and you got all the stuff you have, you just start to see some coalescing around the cloud native. How do you guys look at that conversation? >> I view container platforms, whether they're container services that are running one on cloud or what have you, as the new lightweight rail that everything will ride atop. The cloud currently plays a key role in that, I think that's going to be the defacto way. In particularly if you go cloud first models, particularly for delivery. You need that packaging notion and you need the agility of updates that that's going to provide. I think Red Hat as a partner has been doing great things on hardening that, making it secure. There's others in the ecosystem as well as the cloud providers. All three cloud providers actually are investing in it. >> John: So it's good for your business? >> It removes friction of deployment ... And I ride atop that new rail. It can't get here soon enough from my perspective. >> So I want to ask about clouds. You were talking about the Microsoft shift, personally I think Microsoft realized holy cow, we could actaully make a lot of money if we're selling hardware services. We can make more money if we're selling the full stack. It was sort of an epiphany and so Amazon seems to be doing the same thing. You mentioned earlier you know Amazon is a great partner, even though a lot of people look at them as a competitor, it seems like Amazon, Azure etc., they're building out their own big data stack and offering it as a service. People say that's a threat to you guys, is it a threat or is it a tailwind, is it it is what it is? >> This is why I bring up industry-wide we always have waves of centralization, decentralization. They're playing out simultaneously right now with cloud and IoT. The fact of the matter is that you're going to have multiple clouds on-prem data and data at the edge. That's the problem I am looking to facilitate and solve. I don't view them as competitors, I view them as partners because we need to collaborate because there's a value chain of the flow of the data and some of it's going to be running through and on those platforms. >> The cloud's not going to solve the edge problem. Too expensive. It's just physics. >> So I think that's where things need to go. I think that's why we talk about this notion of connected data. I don't talk hybrid cloud computing, that's for compute. I talk about how do you connect to your data, how do you know where your data is and are you getting the right value out of the data by playing it where it lies. >> I think IoT has been a great sweet trend for the big data industry. It really accelerates the value proposition of the cloud too because now you have a connected network, you can have your cake and eat it too. Central and distributed. >> There's different dynamics in the US versus Europe, as an example. US definitely we're seeing a cloud adoption that's independent of IoT. Here in Europe, I would argue the smart mobility initiatives, the smart manufacturing initiatives, and the connected grid initiatives are bringing cloud in, so it's IoT and cloud and that's opening up the cloud opportunity here. >> Interesting. So on a prospects for Hortonworks cashflow positive Q4 you guys have made a public statement, any other thoughts you want to share. >> Just continue to grow the business, focus on these customer use cases, get them to talk about them at things like DataWorks Summit, and then the more the merrier, the more data-oriented open-source driven companies that can graduate in the public markets, I think is awesome. I think it will just help the industry. >> Operating in the open, with full transparency-- >> Shaun: On the business and the code. (laughter) >> Welcome to the party baby. This is theCUBE here at DataWorks 2017 in Munich, Germany. Live coverage, I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Stay with us. More great coverage coming after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Santa Clara, California it's theCUBE. Covering Open Networking Summit 2017. Brought to you by the Linux Foundation. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in Santa Clara at the Open Networking Summit 2017. We haven't been here for a couple years. Obviously Open is everywhere. It's in hardware, it's in compute, it's in store, and it's certainly in networking as well. And we're excited to be joined first off by Scott Raynovich who will be co-hosting for the next couple of days. Good to see you again Scott. >> Good to see you. >> And our next guest is Ihab Tarazi. He's the EVP and CTO of Equinix. Last time we saw Ihab was at Open Compute Project last year, so great to see you again. >> Yeah, thank you very much, good to be here. I really enjoyed the interview last year so thanks for having me again. >> Now you set it at the high bar, so hopefully we can pull it off again. >> We can do it. >> So first off for folks that aren't familiar with Equinix, give them kind of an overview. Because you don't have quite the profile of Amazon and Google and the other cloud providers, but you're a pretty important piece of the infrastructure. >> Ihab: Yeah absolutely. While we're nowhere close to the size of those players, the place we play in the universe is very significant. We are the edge of the cloud, I would say. We enable all these players, they're all our biggest customers. As well all the networks are our biggest customers. We have over 2,000 clouds in our data centers and over 1,400 networks. We have one of the largest global data center networks. We have 150 data centers and four eMarkets around the world. And that number is going to get a little bigger. Now we announce the acquisition of Verizon data center assets. So we'll have more data centers and a few more markets. >> I heard about the Verizon acquisition, so congratulations, just adding more infrastructure. But let's unpack it a little bit. Two things I want to dig into. One is you said you have clouds in your data centers. So what do you mean by that? >> Yeah the way the cloud architecture is deployed is that the big cloud providers will have these big data centers where they build them themselves and it hosts the applications. And then they work with an edge for the cloud. Either a caching edge or compute edge, or even a network edge in data centers like ours where they connect to all their enterprise customers and all the networks. So we have a significant number of edges, we have 21 markets around the world. We have just about the big list of names, edges, that you can connect to automatically. From AWS, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce.com, Oracle, anybody else you think of. >> So this is kind of an extension of what we heard back a long time ago with you guys and like Amazon specifically on this direct connect. So you are the edge between somebody else's data center and these giant cloud providers. >> Absolutely. And since the last time we talked, we've added a lot more density. More edge nodes and more markets and more new cloud providers. Everywhere from the assess to the infrastructure as a service provider. >> And why should customers care? What's the benefit to your customers for that? >> Yeah the benefit is really significant. These guys want direct access to the cloud for high performance and security. So everybody wants to build the hybrid cloud. Now it's very clear the hybrid cloud is the architecture of choice. You want to build a hybrid cloud, then you want to deploy in a data center and connect to the cloud. And the second thing that's happening, nobody's using just one cloud. Everybody's doing a multi-cloud. So if you want 40, 50 clouds like most companies do, most CIOs, then you're going to want to be in a data center that has as many as possible. If you're going to go global, connect to multi-cloud and have that proximity, you're going to have a hard time finding somebody like Equinix out there. >> Yeah but I've got a question. You mentioned the Verizon deal. There was a trend for a while where all these big service providers were buying data centers, including AT&T, CenturyLink, and now the trend appears to have reversed. Now they're selling the data centers that they bought. I'd love your insight on that. Why that just wasn't their core competency? Why are the selling them back to people like Equinix. >> Yeah that's a good question. What's happened over time as the cloud materialized, is the data canters are much more valuable if they're neutral. If you can come in and connect to all the clouds and all the networks, customers are much more likely to come in. And therefore if a data center is owned by a single network, customers are not as likely to want to use it because they want to use all the networks and all the clouds. And our model of neutrality and how we set up exchanges, and how we provide interconnection, and the whole way we do customer service, is the kind of things people are looking for. >> So you're the Switzerland of the cloud. >> And so the same assets become much more valuable in this new model. >> And I don't know if people understand quite how much direct connection and peer-to-peer, and how much of that's going on, especially in a business-to-business context to provide a much better experience. Versus you know the wild wooly internet of days of old where you're hopping all over the place, Lord knows how many hops you're taking. A lot of that's really been locked down. >> I think the most important step people can think about is by 2020 90% of all the internet, or at least 80 to 90, will be home to the top 10 clouds. Therefore the days of the wild internet, while that continues to be significant, the cloud access and interconnection is very critical, and continues to be even bigger. >> Go ahead. >> So tell us what the logistics are of managing the growth, like you opening how many data centers a year, and how much equipment are you moving into these data centers. We spend over a billion dollars a year on upgrading, adding capacity, and building new data centers. We usually announce five, six, new ones a year. We usually have 20 plus projects, if not more, active at any time. So we have a very focused process and people across the globe manage this thing. We don't want to go dark in any of our key matters like Washington DC, the D.C. market, or let's say the San Jose, Silicon Valley, etc. Because customers want to come in and continue to add and continue to bring people. And that means not only expanding the existing data centers, but buying land and building more data centers beside it, and continue to expand where we need to. And then every year or so we go into one or two more emerging markets. We went into Dubai a while ago and we continue to develop it. And those become long term investments to continue to build our global infrastructure. The last few years we've made massive acquisitions between Telecity in Europe, Bit-isle in Japan, and now the Verizon assents that expanded our footprint significantly into new markets, Eastern Europe, give us bigger markets in places like Tokyo which helped us get to where we are today. >> One of the themes in networking and cloud in general is that the speed of light is just too damn slow. At the end of the day, stuff's got to travel and it actually takes longer than you would think. So does having all these, increased presence, increased egos, increased physical locations, help you address some of that? Because you've got so many more points kind of into this private network if you will. >> Oh yeah absolutely. The content has become more and more localized by market. And the more you have things like IOT and devices pulling in more data, not all the data needs to go all over the globe. And also there is now jurisdiction and laws that require some of the content to stay. So the market approach that we have is becoming the center of mass for where the data resides. And once the data gets into our data center, the value of the data is how you exchange it with other pieces of information, and increasingly how you make immediate decisions on it, you know with automation and machine learning. So when you go to that environment you need massive capacity, very low latency, to many data warehouses or data lakes, and you want to connect that to the software that can make decisions. So that's how we see the world is evolving now. One thing we see though is that complementing that will be a new edge that will form. A lot of people in this conference were talking about that. A lot of the discussion about the open networks here is how we support the 5G, all the explosion of devices, and what we see that connecting to that dense market approach that we have where the data is housed. >> That's interesting you just mentioned all the devices which was going to be my next question. So the internet of things, how will this change the data center edge, as you refer to it? >> Yeah that's the biggest question in the industry, especially for networks. And the same discussion happened at Mobile Work Congress here a little while ago. People now believe that there'll be this compute edge, that the network will be a compute edge. Because you want to be able to put compute, keep pushing it out all the way to the edge. And that edge needs to support today's technologies but also all the open wireless spectrum, all the low powered networks, open R which is one of the frequencies for the millimeter frequencies, and also the 5G as you know. So when you add all that up you're going to need this edge to support. So all the different wireless options plus some amount of compute, and that problem is very hard to solve without an open source model, which is where a lot of people are here looking for solutions. >> It's interesting because your definition of the edge feels like it's kind of closer to the cloud where's there's a lot of converstion, we do a lot of stuff with GE about the edge, which is you know right out there on the device and the sensor. Because as you said depending on the application, depending on the optimization, depending on what you're trying to do, the device is some level of compute and store that's going to be done locally, and some of it will go upstream and get processed and come downstream. But you're talking about a different edge. Or you know of see you guys extending all the way down to that edge. >> We don't see ourselves extending at this time but definitely it's something we're spending a lot of time analyzing to see what happens. I would say a couple of big stats is that today our edge is maybe 100 milliseconds from devices in a market or a lot less in some cases. The new technology will make that even shorter. So with the new technology like you said, you can't beat the speed of light, but with more direct connections you'll get to 40, 50 milliseconds, which is fantastic for the vast majority of applications people want. There'll be very few applications that need much slower latency all the way down to the sub-10 millisecond. For those somebody like a network would need to put compute at the edge to do some of it. So that world of both types will continue. But even the ones that need the very low latency, for some of the data it still needs to compare it to other sources of data and connect to clouds and networks but some of the data will still come back to our data centers. So I think this is how we see the world evolving but it's early days and a lot of brain power will be spent on that. >> So as you look forward to 2017, what are some of the big items on your plate that you're trying to take down for this calendar year? >> The biggest thing I want on our list is that we have an explosion of software model. Everybody who was a software now has a software platform. When we were at OCP for example you saw NetApp, they showed their software as an open source. Every single company from security to storage, even networking, are now creating their platform available as a software. Well those platforms have no place to go today. They have no deployment model. So one of the things we are working on is how we create a deployment model for this as a service model. And most of them is open source, so it needs decoupling of software and hardware. So we are really actively working with all these to create an open source software and just software in general, ecosystem plus this whole open source hardware. >> So do you guys have a pretty aggressive software division inside Equinix, especially in these open source projects? Or how do you kind of interact with them? >> Our model is to enable the industry. So we have some of our tools but mostly for enabling customers and customer service, as well as some of the basic interconnection we do. The vast majority of all the stuff is our partners, and these are our customers. So our model is to enable them and to connect them to everybody else they need at ecosystem to succeed and help them set up as a service model. And as the enterprise customers come to our data center, how to they connect to them. So I would say that's one of the most sought after missions when we go to conferences like this. Everybody who announced today is talking to us about how they enable the announcements they make and given our place in the universe, we would be a very key player in enabling that ecosystem. >> Do you have like a special lab where you test these new technologies? Or how do you do that? >> Yeah that's the plan. And we connect this effort to also what we're doing with OCP and Telecom Infrastructure Project where we have a leadership position and highly engaged. We are creating a lab environment where people can come in and test not only the hardware from TIP and OCP, but also the software from open network, but many other open source software in general under the Linux Foundation or others. In our situation not only can they test it against each other, but they can test the performance against the entire world. How does this work with the internet, the cloud? And that leading us to deployment and go to market models that people are looking for. >> Alright sounds pretty exciting. Equinix, a company that probably handles more of your internet traffic than you ever thought. >> Ihab: That's very true. >> Well thanks again for stopping by. We'll look for you at our next open source show. >> Thank you very much. >> Ihab Tarazi from Equinix. He's Scott Raynovich, I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCube from Open Networking Summit 2017, see you next time after this short break. (techno music)

>> Hey welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE, we are on the ground in downtown San Francisco at the Google Next 17 Conference. It's this crazy conference week, and arguably this is the center of all the action. Cloud is big, Google Cloud Platform is really coming out with a major enterprise shift and focus, which they've always had, but now they're really getting behind it. And I think this conference is over 14,000 people, has grown quite a bit from a few years back, and we're really excited to have one of the powerhouse partners with Google, who's driving to the enterprise, and that's Intel, and I'm really excited to be joined by Raejeanne Skillern, she's the VP and GM of the Cloud Platform Group, Raejeanne, great to see you. >> Thank you, thanks for having me. >> Yeah absolutely. So when we got this scheduled, I was thinking, wow, last time I saw you was at the Open Compute Project 2015, and we were just down there yesterday. >> Yesterday. And we missed each other yesterday, but here we are today. >> So it's interesting, there's kind of the guts of the cloud, because cloud is somebody else's computer that they're running, but there is actually a computer back there. Here, it's really kind of the front end and the business delivery to people to have the elastic capability of the cloud, the dynamic flexibility of cloud, and you guys are a big part of this. So first off, give us a quick update, I'm sure you had some good announcements here at the show, what's going on with Intel and Google Cloud Platform? >> We did, and we love it all, from the silicon ingredients up to the services and solutions, this is where we invest, so it's great to be a part of yesterday and today. I was on stage earlier today with Urs Holzle talking about the Google and Intel Strategic Alliance, we actually announced this alliance last November, between Diane Green and Diane Bryant of Intel. And we had a history, a decade plus long of collaborating on CPU level optimization and technology optimization for Google's infrastructure. We've actually expanded that collaboration to cover hybrid cloud orchestration, security, IOT edge to cloud, and of course, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning. So we still do a lot of custom work with Google, making sure our technologies run their infrastructure the best, and we're working beyond the infrastructure to the software and solutions with them to make sure that those software and solutions run best on our architecture. >> Right cause it's a very interesting play, with Google and Facebook and a lot of the big cloud providers, they custom built their solutions based on their application needs and so I would presume that the microprocessor needs are very specific versus say, a typical PC microprocessor, which has a more kind of generic across the board type of demand. So what are some of the special demands that cloud demands from the microprocessor specifically? >> So what we've seen, right now, about half the volume we ship in the public cloud segment is customized in some way. And really the driving force is always performance per dollar TCO improvement. How to get the best performance and the lowest cost to pay for that performance. And what we've found is that by working with the top, not just the Super Seven, we call them, but the Top 100, closely, understanding their infrastructure at scale, is that they benefit from more powerful servers, with performance efficiency, more capability, more richly configured platforms. So a lot of what we've done, these cloud service providers have actually in some cases pushed us off of our roadmap in terms of what we can provide in terms of performance and scalability and agility in their infrastructure. So we do a lot of tweaks around that. And then of course, as I mentioned, it's not just the CPU ingredients, we have to optimize in the software level, so we do a lot of co-engineering work to make sure that every ounce of performance and efficiency is seen in their infrastructure. And that's how they, their data center is their cost to sales, they can't afford to have anything inefficient. So we really try to partner to make sure that it is completely tailor-optimized for that environment. >> Right, and the hyperscale, like you said, the infrastructure there is so different than kind of classic enterprise infrastructure, and then you have other things like energy consumption, which, again, at scale, itty bitty little improvements >> It's expensive. >> Make a huge impact. And then application far beyond the cloud service providers, so many of the applications that we interact with now today on a day to day basis are cloud-based applications, whether it is the G Suite for documents or this or that, or whether it's Salesforce, or whether we just put in Asana for task tracking, and Slack, and so many of these things are now cloud-based applications, which is really the way we work more and more and more on our desktops. >> Absolutely. And one of the things we look at is, applications really have kind of a gravity. Some applications are going to have a high affinity to public cloud. You see Tustin Dove, you see email and office collaboration already moving into the public cloud. There are some legacy applications, complex, some of the heavier modeling and simulation type apps, or big huge super computers that might stay on premise, and then you have this middle ground of applications, that, for various reasons, performance, security, data governance, data gravity, business need or IP, could go between the public cloud or stay on premise. And that's why we think it's so important that the world recognizes that this really is about a hybrid cloud. And it's really nice to partner with Google because they see that hybrid cloud as the end state, or they call it the Multi Cloud. And their Kubernetes Orchestration Platform is really designed to help that, to seamlessly move those apps from on a customer's premise into the Google environment and have that flow. So it's a very dynamic environment, we expect to see a lot of workloads kind of continue to be invested and move into the public cloud, and people really optimizing end-to-end. >> So you've been in the data center space, we talked a little bit before we went live, you've been in the data center space for a long, long time. >> Long time. >> We won't tell you how long. (laughing) >> Both: Long time. >> So it must be really exciting for you to see this shift in computing. There's still a lot of computing power at the edge, and there's still a lot of computing power now in our mobile devices and our PCs, but so much more of the heavy lift in the application infrastructure itself is now contained in the data center, so much more than just your typical old-school corporate data centers that we used to see. Really fun evolution of the industry, for you. >> Absolutely, and the public cloud is now one of the fastest growing segments in the enterprise space, in the data center space, I should say. We still have a very strong enterprise business. But what I love is it's not just about the fact that the public cloud is growing, this hybrid really connects our two segments, so I'm really learning a lot. It's also, I've been at Intel 23 years, most of it in the data center, and last year, we reorganized our company, we completely restructured Intel to be a cloud and IoT company. And from a company that for multiple decades was a PC or consumer-based client device company, it is just amazing to have data center be so front and center and so core to the type of infrastructure and capability expansion that we're going to see across the industry. We were talking about, there isn't going to be an industry left untouched by technology. Whether it's agriculture, or industrial, or healthcare, or retail, or logistics. Technology is going to transform them, and it all comes back to a data center and a cloud-based infrastructure that can handle the data and the scale and the processing. >> So one of the new themes that's really coming on board, next week will it be a Big Data SV, which has grown out of Hadoop and the old big data conversation. But it's really now morphing into the next stage of that, which is machine learning, deep learning, artificial intelligence, augmented reality, virtual reality, so this whole 'nother round that's going to eat up a whole bunch of CPU capacity. But those are really good cloud-based applications that are now delivering a completely new level of value and application sophistication that's driven by power back at the data center. >> Right. We see, artificial intelligence has been a topic since the 50s. But the reality is, the technology is there today to both capture and create the data, and compute on the data. And that's really unlocking this capabilities. And from us as a company, we see it as really something that is going to not just transform us as a business but transform the many use cases and industries we talked about. Today, you or I generate about a gig and a half of data, through our devices and our PC and tablet. A smart factory or smart plane or smart car, autonomous car, is going to generate terabytes of data. Right, and that is going to need to be stored. Today it's estimated only about 5% of the data captured is used for business insight. The rest just sits. We need to capture the data, store the data efficiently, use the data for insights, and then drive that back into the continuous learning. And that's why these technologies are so amazing, what they're going to be able to do, because we have the technology and the opportunity in the business space, whether it's AI for play or for good or for business, AI is going to transform the industry. >> It's interesting, Moore's Law comes up all the time. People, is Moore's Law done, is Moore's Law done? And you know, Moore's Law is so much more than the physics of what he was describing when he first said that in the first place, about number of transistors on a chip. It's really about an attitude, about this unbelievable drive to continue to innovate and iterate and get these order of magnitude of increase. We talked to David Floyer at OCP yesterday, and he's talking about it's not only the microprocessors and the compute power, but it's the IO, it's the networking, it's storage, it's flash storage, it's the interconnect, it's the cabling, it's all these things. And he was really excited that we're getting to this massive tipping point, of course in five years we'll look back and think it's archaic, of these things really coming together to deliver low latency almost magical capabilities because of this combination of factors across all those different, kind of the three horseman of computing, if you will, to deliver these really magical, new applications, like autonomous vehicles. >> Absolutely. And we, you'll hear Intel talk about Jevons Paradox, which is really about, if you take something and make it cheaper and easier to consume, people will consume more of it. We saw that with virtualization. People predicted oh everything's going to slow down cause you're going to get higher utilization rates. Actually it just unlocked new capabilities and the market grew because of it. We see the same thing with data. Our CEO will talk about, data is the new oil. It is going to transform, it's going to unlock business opportunity, revenue growth, cost savings in environment, and that will cause people to create more services, build new businesses, reach more people in the industry, transform traditional brick and mortar businesses to the digital economy. So we think we're just on the cusp of this transformation, and the next five to 10 years is going to be amazing. >> So before we let you go, again, you've been doing this for 20 plus years, I wasn't going to say anything, she said it, I didn't say it, and I worked at Intel the same time, so that's good. As you look forward, what are some of your priorities for 2017, what are some of the things that you're working on, that if we get together, hopefully not in a couple years at OCP, but next year, that you'll be able to report back that this is what we worked on and these are some of the new accomplishments that are important to me? >> So I'm really, there's a number of things we're doing. You heard me mention artificial intelligence many, many times. In 2016, Intel made a number of significant acquisitions and investments to really ensure we have the right technology road map for artificial intelligence. Machine learning, deep learning, training and inference. And we've really shored up that product portfolio, and you're going to see these products come to market and you're going to see user adoption, not just in my segment, but transforming multiple segments. So I'm really excited about those capabilities. And a lot of what we'll do, too, will be very vertical-based. So you're going to see the power of the technology, solving the health care problem, solving the retail problem, solving manufacturing, logistics, industrial problems. So I like that, I like to see tangible results from our technology. The other thing is the cloud is just growing. Everybody predicted, can it continue to grow? It does. Companies like Google and our other partners, they keep growing and we grow with them, and I love to help figure out where they're going to be two or three years from now, and get our products ready for that challenge. >> Alright, well I look forward to our next visit. Raejeanne, thanks for taking a few minutes out of your time and speaking to us. >> It was nice to see you again. >> You too. Alright, she's Raejeanne Skillern and I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE, we're at the Google Cloud Next Show 2017, thanks for watching. (electronic sounds)

(mellow electronic music) >> Welcome back, we're here live in Las Vegas. This is SiliconANGLE and Wikibon's theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events, extract the signal from the noise. We are live in Las Vegas at Amazon Web Services re:Invent conference, about developers, large-scale cloud, big data, the future. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. I'm joined by co-host, Dave Vellante, co-founder of Wikibon.org, and our guest is James Hamilton, VP and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon Web Services. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Well thank you very much. >> You're a tech athlete, certainly in our book, is a term we coined, because we love to use sports analogies You're kind of the cutting edge. You've been the business and technology innovating for many years going back to the database days at IBM, Microsoft, and now Amazon. You gave a great presentation at the analyst briefing. Very impressive. So I got to ask you the first question, when did you first get addicted to the notion of what Amazon could be? When did you first taste the Cool-Aide? >> Super good question. Couple different instances. One is I was general manager of exchange hosts and services and we were doing a decent job, but what I noticed was customers were loving it, we're expanding like mad, and I saw opportunity to improve by at least a factor of two I'm sorry, 10, it's just amazing. So that was a first hint that this is really important for customers. The second one was S3 was announced, and the storage price pretty much froze the whole industry. I've worked in storage all my life, I think I know what's possible in storage, and S3 was not possible. It was just like, what is this? And so, I started writing apps against it, I was just blown away. Super reliable. Unbelievably priced. I wrote a fairly substantial app, I got a bill for $7. Wow. So that's really the beginnings of where I knew this was going to change the world, and I've been, as you said, addicted to it since. >> So you also mentioned some stats there. We'll break it down, 'cause we love to talk about the software defined data center, which is basically not even at the hype stage yet. It's just like, it's still undefined, but software virtualization, network virtualization really is pushing that movement of the software focus, and that's essentially you guys are doing. You're talking about notifications and basically it's a large-scale systems problem. That you guys are building a global operating system as Andy Jassy would say. Well, he didn't say that directly, he said internet operating system, but if you believe that APIs are critical services. So I got to ask you that question around this notion of a data center, I mean come on, nobody's really going to give up their data center. It might change significantly, but you pointed out the data center costs are in the top three order, servers, power circulation systems, or cooling circulation, and then actual power itself. Is that right, did I get that right? >> Pretty close, pretty close. Servers dominate, and then after servers if you look at data centers together, that's power, cooling, and the building and facility itself. That is the number two cost, and the actual power itself is number three. >> So that's a huge issue. When we talk like CIOs, it's like can you please take the facility's budget off my back? For many reasons, one, it's going to be written off soon maybe. All kinds of financial issues around-- >> A lot of them don't see it, though, which is a problem. >> That is a problem, that is a problem. Real estate season, and then, yes. >> And then they go, "Ah, it's not my problem" so money just flies out the window. >> So it's obviously a cost improvement for you. So what are you guys doing in that area and what's your big ah-ha for the customers that you walk in the door and say, look, we have this cloud, we have this system and all those headaches can be, not shifted, or relieved if you will, some big asprin for them. What's the communication like? What do you talk to them about? >> Really it depends an awful lot on who it is. I mean, different people care about different things. What gets me excited is I know that this is the dominate cost of offering a service is all of this muck. It's all of this complexity, it's all of this high, high capital cost up front. Facility will run 200 million before there's servers in it. This is big money, and so from my perspective, taking that way from most companies is one contribution. Second contribution is, if you build a lot of data centers you get good at it, and so as a consequence of that I think we're building very good facilities. They're very reliable, and the costs are plummeting fast. That's a second contribution. Third contribution is because... because we're making capacity available to customers it means they don't have to predict two years in advance what they're going to need, and that means there's less wastage, and that's just good for the industry as a whole. >> So we're getting some questions on our crowd chat application. If you want to ask a question, ask him anything. It's kind of like Reddit. Go to crowdchat.net/reinvent. The first question came in was, "James, when do you think ARM will be in the data center?" >> Ah ha, that's a great question. Well, many people know that I'm super excited about ARM. It's early days, the reason why I'm excited is partly because I love seeing lots of players. I love seeing lots of innovation. I think that's what's making our industry so exciting right now. So that's one contribution that ARM brings. Another is if you look at the history of server-side computing, most of the innovation comes from the volume-driven, usually on clients first. The reason why X86 ended up in such a strong position is so many desktops we running X86 processors and as a consequence it became a great server processor. High R&D flow into it. ARM is in just about every device that everyone's carrying around. It's almost every disk drive, it's just super broadly deployed. And whenever you see a broadly deployed processor it means there's an opportunity to do something special for customers. I think it's good for the industry. But in a precise answer to your question, I really don't have one right now. It's something that we're deeply interested in and investigating deeply, but at this point it hasn't happened yet, but I'm excited by it. >> Do you think that... Two lines of questioning here. One is things that are applicable to AWS, other's just your knowledge of the industry and what you think. We talked about that yesterday with OCP, right? >> Yep. >> Not a right fit for us, but you applaud the effort. We should talk about that, too, but does splitting workloads up into little itty, bitty processors change the utilization factor and change the need for things like virtualization, you know? What do you think? >> Yeah, it's a good question. I first got excited about the price performance of micro-servers back in 2007. And at that time it was pretty easy to produce a win by going to a lower-powered processor. At that point memory bandwidth wasn't as good as it could be. It was actually hard on some workloads to fully use a processor. Intel's a very smart company, they've done great work on improving the memory bandwidth, and so today it's actually harder to produce a win, and so you kind of have workloads in classes. At the very, very high end we've got database workloads. They really love single-threaded performance, and performance really is king, but there are lots of highly parallel workloads where there's an opportunity for a big gain. I still think virtualization is probably something where the industry's going to want to be there, just because it brings so many operational advantages. >> So I got to ask the question. Yesterday we had Jason Stowe on, CEO of Cycle Computing, and he had an amazing thing that he did, sorry, trumping it out kids say, but it's not new to you, but it's new to us. He basically created a supercomputer and spun up hundreds of thousands of cores in 30 minutes, which is like insane, but he did it for like 30 grand. Which would've cost, if you try to provision it to the TUCO calculator or whatever your model, it'd be months and years, maybe, and years. But the thing that he said I want to get your point on and I'm going to ask you questions specifically on is, Spot instances were critical for him to do that, and the creativity of his solutions, so I got to ask you, did you see Spot pricing instances being a big deal, and what impact has that done to AWS' vision of large scale? >> I'm super excited by Spot. In fact, it's one of the reasons I joined Amazon. I went through a day of interviews, I met a bunch of really smart people doing interesting work. Someone probably shouldn't have talked to me about Spot because it hadn't been announced yet, and I just went, "This is brilliant! "This is absolutely brilliant!" It's taking the ideas from financial markets, where you've got high-value assets, and saying why don't we actually sell it off, make a market on the basis of that and sell it off? So two things happen that make Spot interesting. The first is an observation up front that poor utilization is basically the elephant in the room. Most folks can't use more than 12% to 15% of their overall server capacity, and so all the rest ends up being wasted. >> You said yesterday 30% is outstanding. It's like have a party. >> 30% probably means you're not measuring it well. >> Yeah, you're lying. >> It's real good, yeah, basically. So that means 70% or more is wasted, it's a crime. And so the first thing that says is, that one of the most powerful advertisements for cloud computing is if you bring a large number of non-correlated workloads together, what happens is when you're supporting a workload you've got to have enough capacity to support the peak, but you only get to monetize the average. And so as the peak to average gets further apart, you're wasting more. So when you bring a large number of non-correlated workloads together what happens is it flattens out just by itself. Without doing anything it flattens out, but there's still some ups and downs. And the Spot market is a way of filling in those ups and downs so we get as close to 100%. >> Is there certain workloads that fit the spot, obviously certain workloads might fit it, but what workloads don't fit the Spot price, because, I mean, it makes total sense and it's an arbitrage opportunity for excess capacity laying around, and it's price based on usage. So is there a workload, 'cause it'll be torrent up, torrent down, I mean, what's the use cases there? >> Workloads that don't operate well in an interrupted environment, that are very time-critical, those workloads shouldn't be run in Spot. It's just not what the resource is designed for. But workloads like the one that we were talking to with Cycle Computing are awesome, where you need large numbers of resources. If the workload needs to restart, that's absolutely fine, and price is really the focus. >> Okay, and question from crowd chat. "Ask James what are his thoughts "on commodity networking and merchant silicon." >> I think an awful lot about that. >> This guy knows you. (both laughing) >> Who's that from? >> It's your family. >> Yeah, exactly! >> They're watching. >> No, network commoditization is a phenomenal thing that the whole industry's needed that for 15 years. We've got a vertical ecosystem that's kind of frozen in time. Vertically-integrated ecosystem kind of frozen in time. Costs everywhere are falling except in networking. We just got to do something, and so it's happening. I'm real excited by that. It's really changing the Amazon business and what we can do for customers. >> Let's talk a little bit about server design, because I was fascinated yesterday listening to you talk how you've come full circle. Over the last decade, right, you started with what's got to be stripped down, basic commodity and now you're of a different mindset. So describe that, and then I have some follow-up questions for you. >> Yeah, I know what you're alluding to. Is years ago I used to argue you don't want hardware specialization, it's crazy. It's the magic's in software. You want to specialize software running on general-purpose processors, and that's because there was a very small number of servers out there, and I felt like it was the most nimble way to run. However today, in AWS when we're running ten of thousands of copies of a single type of server, hardware optimizations are absolutely vital. You end up getting a power-performance advantage at 10X. You can get a price-performance advantage that's substantial and so I've kind of gone full circle where now we're pulling more and more down into the hardware, and starting to do hardware optimizations for our customers. >> So heat density is a huge problem in data centers and server design. You showed a picture of a Quanta package yesterday. You didn't show us your server, said "I can't you ours," but you said, "but we blow this away, "and this is really good." But you describe that you're able to get around a lot of those problems because of the way you design data centers. >> Yep. >> Could you talk about that a little bit? >> Sure, sure, sure. One of the problems when you're building a server it could end up anywhere. It could end up in a beautiful data center that's super well engineered. It could end up on the end of a row on a very badly run data center. >> Or in a closet. >> Or in a closet. The air is recirculating, and so the servers have to be designed with huge headroom on cooling requirements, and they have to be able to operate in any of those environments without driving warranty costs for the vendors. We take a different approach. We say we're not going to build terrible data centers. We're going to build really good data centers and we're going to build servers that exploit the fact those data centers are good, and what happens is more value. We don't have to waste as much because we know that we don't have to operate in the closet. >> We got some more questions coming here by the way. This is awesome. This ask me anything crowd chat thing is going great. We got someone, he's from Nutanix, so he's a geek. He's been following your career for many years. I got to ask you about kind of the future of large-scale. So Spot, in his comment, David's comment, Spot instances prove that solutions like WMare's distributed power management are not valuable. Don't power off the most expensive asset. So, okay, that brings up an interesting point. I don't want to slam on BMWare right now, but I just wanted to bring to the next logical question which is this is a paradigm shift. That's a buzz word, but really a lot's happening that's new and innovative. And you guys are doing it and leading. What's next in the large-scale paradigm of computing and computer science? On the science-side you mentioned merchant silicon. Obviously that's, the genie's out of the bottle there, but what's around the corner? Is it the notifications at the scheduling? Was it virtualization, is it compiler design? What are some of the things that you see out on the horizon that you got your eyes on? >> That's interesting, I mean. I've got, if you name your area, and I'll you some interesting things happening in the area, and it's one of the cool things of being in the industry right now. Is that 10 years ago we had a relatively static, kind of slow-pace. You really didn't have to look that far ahead, because of anything was coming you'd see it coming for five years. Now if you ask me about power distribution, we've got tons of work going on in power distribution. We're researching different power distribution topologies. We're researching higher voltage distribution, direct current distribution. Haven't taken any of those steps yet, but we're were working in that. We've got a ton going on in networking. You'll see an announcement tomorrow of a new instance type that is got some interesting characteristics from a networking perspective. There's a lot going on. >> Let's pre-announce, no. >> Gary's over there like-- >> How 'about database, how 'about database? I mean, 10 years ago, John always says database was kind of boring. You go to a party say, oh welcome to database business, oh yeah, see ya. 25 years ago it was really interesting. >> Now you go to a party is like, hey ah! Have a drink! >> It a whole new ballgame, you guys are participating. Google Spanner is this crazy thing, right? So what are your thoughts on the state of the database business today, in memory, I mean. >> No, it's beautiful. I did a keynote at SIGMOD a few years ago and what I said is that 10 years ago Bruce Linsey, I used to work with him in the database world, Bruce Linsey called it polishing the round ball. It's just we're making everything a little, tiny bit better, and now it's fundamentally different. I mean what's happening right now is the database world, every year, if you stepped out for a year, you wouldn't recognize it. It's just, yeah, it's amazing. >> And DynamoDB has had rapid success. You know, we're big users of that. We actually built this app, crowd chat app that people are using on Hadoop and Hbase, and we immediately moved that to DynamoDB and your stack was just so much faster and scalable. So I got to ask you the-- >> And less labor. >> Yeah, yeah. So it's just been very reliable and all the other goodness of the elastic B socket and SQS, all that other good stuff we're working with node, et cetera So I got to ask you, the area that I want your opinion around the corner is versioning control. So at large-scale one of the challenges that we have is as we're pushin' new code, making sure that the integrated stack is completely updated and synchronized with open-source projects. So where does that fit into the scaling up? 'Cause at large scale, versioning control used to be easy to manage, but downloading software and putting in patches, but now you guys handle all that at scale. So that, I'm assuming there's some automation involved, some real tech involved, but how are you guys handling the future of making sure the code is all updated in the stack? >> It's a great question. It's super important from a security perspective that the code be up to date and current. It's super important from a customer perspective and you need to make sure that these upgrades are just non-disruptive. One customer, best answer I heard was yesterday from a customer was on a panel, they were asked how did they deal with Amazon's upgrades, and what she said is, "I didn't even know when they were happening. "I can't tell when they're happening." Exactly the right answer. That's exactly our goal. We monitor the heck out of all of our systems, and our goal, and boy we take it seriously, is we need to know any issue before a customer knows it. And if you fail on that promise, you'll meet Andy really quick. >> So some other paradigm questions coming in. Floyd asks, "Ask James what his opinion of cloud brokerage "companies such as Jamcracker or Graviton. "Do they have a place, or is it wrong thinking?" (James laughs) >> From my perspective, the bigger and richer the ecosystem, the happier our customers all are. It's all goodness. >> It's Darwinism, that's the answer. You know, the fit shall survive. No, but I think that brings up this new marketplace that Spot pricing came out of the woodwork. It's a paradigm that exists in other industries, apply it to cloud. So brokering of cloud might be something, especially with regional and geographical focuses. You can imagine a world of brokering. I mean, I don't know, I'm not qualified to answer that. >> Our goal, honestly, is to provide enough diversity of services that we completely satisfy customer's requirements, and that's what we intend to do. >> How do you guys think about the make versus buy? Are you at a point now where you say, you know what, we can make this stuff for our specific requirements better than we can get it off the shelf, or is that not the case? >> It changes every few minutes. It really does. >> So what are the parameters? >> Years ago when I joined the company we were buying servers from OEM suppliers, and they were doing some tailoring for our uses. It's gotten to the point now where that's not the right model and we have our own custom designs that are being built. We've now gotten to the point where some of the components in servers are being customized for us, partly because we're driving sufficient volume that it's justified, and partly because the partners that the component suppliers are happy to work with us directly and they want input from us. And so it's every year it's a little bit more specialized and that line's moving, so it's shifting towards specialization pretty quickly. >> So now I'm going to be replaced by the crowd, gettin' great questions, I'm going to be obsolete! No earbud, I got it right here. So the question's more of a fun one probably for you to answer, or just kind of lean back and kind of pull your hair out, but how the heck does AWS add so much infrastructure per day? How do you do it? >> It's a really interesting question. I kind of know how much infrastructure, I know abstractly how much infrastructure we put out every day, but when you actually think about this number in context, it's mind boggling. So here's the number. Here's the number. Every day, we deploy enough servers to support Amazon when it was a seven billion dollar company. You think of how many servers a seven billion dollar e-commerce company would actually require? Every day we deploy that many servers, and it's just shocking to me to think that the servers are in the logistics chain, they're being built, they're delivered to the appropriate data centers, there's back positions there, there's networking there, there's power there. I'm actually, every day I'm amazed to be quite honest with you. >> It's mind-boggling. And then for a while I was there, okay, wait a minute. Would that be Moors' Law? Uh no, not even in particular. 'Cause you said every day. Not every year, every day. >> Yeah, it really is. It's a shocking number and one, my definition of scale changes almost every day, where if you look at the number of customers that are trusting with their workloads today, that's what's driving that growth, it's phenomenal! >> We got to get wrapped up, but I got to ask the Hadoob World SQL over Hadoob question solutions. Obviously Hadoob is great, great for storing stuff, but now you're seeing hybrids come out. Again this comes back down to the, you can recognize the database world anymore if you were asleep for a year. So what's your take on that ecosystem? You guys have a lasting map or a decent a bunch of other things. There's some big data stuff going on. How do you, from a database perspective, how do you look at Hadoob and SQL over Hadoob? >> I personally love 'em both, and I love the diversity that's happening in the database world. There's some people that kind of have a religion and think it's crazy to do anything else. I think it's a good thing. Map reduce is particularly, I think, is a good thing, because it takes... First time I saw map reduce being used was actually a Google advertising engineer. And what I loved about his, I was actually talking to him about it, and what I loved is he had no idea how many servers he was using. If you ask me or anyone in the technology how many servers they're using, they know. And the beautiful thing is he's running multi-thousand node applications and he doesn't know. He doesn't care, he's solving advertising problems. And so I think it's good. I think there's a place for everything. >> Well my final question is asking guests this show. Put the bumper sticker on the car leaving re:Invent this year. What's it say? What does the bumper sticker say on the car? Summarize for the folks, what is the tagline this year? The vibe, and the focus? >> Yeah, for me this was the year. I mean, the business has been growing but this is the year where suddenly I'm seeing huge companies 100% dependent upon AWS or on track to be 100% dependent upon AWS. This is no longer an experiment, something people want to learn about. This is real, and this is happening. This is running real businesses. So it's real, baby! >> It's real baby, I like, that's the best bumper... James, distinguished guest now CUBE alum for us, thanks for coming on, you're a tech athlete. Great to have you, great success. Sounds like you got a lot of exciting things you're working on and that's always fun. And obviously Amazon is killing it, as we say in Silicon Valley. You guys are doing great, we love the product. We've been using it for crowd chats. Great stuff, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break. This is live, exclusive coverage with siliconANGLE theCUBE. We'll be right back.