(upbeat music) >> Welcome back. We're here at Supercomputing 22 in Dallas. My name's Paul Gill, I'm your host. With me, Dave Nicholson, my co-host. And one thing that struck me about this conference arriving here, was the number of universities that are exhibiting here. I mean, big, big exhibits from universities. Never seen that at a conference before. And one of those universities is Indiana University. Our two guests, Dave Jent, who's the AVP of Networks at Indiana University, Aaron Neal, Deputy CIO at Indiana University. Welcome, thanks for joining us. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you. >> I've always thought that the CIO job at a university has got to be the toughest CIO job there is, because you're managing this sprawling network, people are doing all kinds of different things on it. You've got to secure it. You've got to make it performant. And it just seems to be a big challenge. Talk about the network at Indiana University and what you have done particularly since the pandemic, how that has affected the architecture of your network. And what you do to maintain the levels of performance and security that you need. >> On the network side one of the things we've done is, kept in close contact with what the incoming students are looking for. It's a different environment than it was then 10 years ago when a student would come, maybe they had a phone, maybe they had one laptop. Today they're coming with multiple phones, multiple laptops, gaming devices. And the expectation that they have to come on a campus and plug all that stuff in causes lots of problems for us, in managing just the security aspect of it, the capacity, the IP space required to manage six, seven devices per student when you have 35,000 students on campus, has always been a challenge. And keeping ahead of that knowing what students are going to come in with, has been interesting. During the pandemic the campus was closed for a bit of time. What we found was our biggest challenge was keeping up with the number of people who wanted to VPN to campus. We had to buy additional VPN licenses so they could do their work, authenticate to the network. We doubled, maybe even tripled our our VPN license count. And that has settled down now that we're back on campus. But again, they came back with a vengeance. More gaming devices, more things to be connected, and into an environment that was a couple years old, that we hadn't done much with. We had gone through a pretty good size network deployment of new hardware to try to get ready for them. And it's worked well, but it's always challenging to keep up with students. >> Aaron, I want to ask you about security because that really is one of your key areas of focus. And you're collaborating with counties, local municipalities, as well as other educational institutions. How's your security strategy evolving in light of some of the vulnerabilities of VPNs that became obvious during the pandemic, and this kind of perfusion of new devices that that Dave was talking about? >> Yeah, so one of the things that we we did several years ago was establish what we call OmniSOC, which is a shared security operations center in collaboration with other institutions as well as research centers across the United States and in Indiana. And really what that is, is we took the lessons that we've learned and the capabilities that we've had within the institution and looked to partner with those key institutions to bring that data in-house, utilize our staff such that we can look for security threats and share that information across the the other institutions so that we can give each of those areas a heads up and work with those institutions to address any kind of vulnerabilities that might be out there. One of the other things that you mentioned is, we're partnering with Purdue in the Indiana Office of Technology on a grant to actually work with municipalities, county governments, to really assess their posture as it relates to security in those areas. It's a great opportunity for us to work together as institutions as well as work with the state in general to increase our posture as it relates to security. >> Dave, what brings IU to Supercomputing 2022? >> We've been here for a long time. And I think one of the things that we're always interested in is, what's next? What's new? There's so many, there's network vendors, software vendors, hardware vendors, high performance computing suppliers. What is out there that we're interested in? IU runs a large Cray system in Indiana called Big Red 200. And with any system you procure it, you get it running, you operate it, and your next goal is to upgrade it. And what's out there that we might be interested? That I think why we come to IU. We also like to showcase what we do at IU. If you come by the booth you'll see the OmniSOC, there's some video on that. The GlobalNOC, which I manage, which supports a lot of the RNE institutions in the country. We talk about that. Being able to have a place for people to come and see us. If you stand by the booth long enough people come and find you, and want to talk about a project they have, or a collaboration they'd like to partner with. We had a guy come by a while ago wanting a job. Those are all good things having a big booth can do for you. >> Well, so on that subject, in each of your areas of expertise and your purview are you kind of interleaved with the academic side of things on campus? Do you include students? I mean, I would think it would be a great source of cheap labor for you at least. Or is there kind of a wall between what you guys are responsible for and what students? >> Absolutely we try to support faculty and students as much as we can. And just to go back a little bit on the OmniSOC discussion. One of the things that we provide is internships for each of the universities that we work with. They have to sponsor at least three students every year and make that financial commitment. We bring them on site for three weeks. They learn us alongside the other analysts, information security analysts and work in a real world environment and gain those skills to be able to go back to their institutions and do an additional work there. So it's a great program for us to work with students. I think the other thing that we do is we provide obviously the infrastructure that enable our faculty members to do the research that they need to do. Whether that's through Big Red 200, our Supercomputer or just kind of the everyday infrastructure that allows them to do what they need to do. We have an environment on premise called our Intelligent Infrastructure, that we provide managed access to hardware and storage resources in a way that we know it's secure and they can utilize that environment to do virtually anything that they need in a server environment. >> Dave, I want to get back to the GigaPOP, which you mentioned earlier you're the managing director of the Indiana GigaPOP. What exactly is it? >> Well, the GigaPOP and there are a number of GigaPOP around the country. It was really the aggregation facility for Indiana and all of the universities in Indiana to connect to outside resources. GigaPOP has connections to internet too, the commodity internet, Esnet, the Big Ten or the BTAA a network in Chicago. It's a way for all universities in Indiana to connect to a single source to allow them to connect nationally to research organizations. >> And what are the benefits of having this collaboration of university. >> If you could think of a researcher at Indiana wants to do something with a researcher in Wisconsin, they both connect to their research networks in Wisconsin and Indiana, and they have essentially direct connection. There's no commodity internet, there's no throttling of of capacity. Both networks and the interconnects because we use internet too, are essentially UNT throttled access for the researchers to do anything they need to do. It's secure, it's fast, easy to use, in fact, so easy they don't even know that they're using it. It just we manage the networks and organize the networks in a way configure them that's the path of least resistance and that's the path traffic will take. And that's nationally. There are lots of these that are interconnected in various ways. I do want to get back to the labor point, just for a moment. (laughs) Because... >> You're here to claim you're not violating any labor laws. Is that what you're going to be? >> I'm here to hopefully hire, get more people to be interested to coming to IU. >> Stop by the booth. >> It's a great place to work. >> Exactly. >> We hire lots of interns and in the network space hiring really experienced network engineers, really hard to do, hard to attract people. And these days when you can work from anywhere, you don't have to be any place to work for anybody. We try to attract as many students as we can. And really we're exposing 'em to an environment that exists in very few places. Tens of thousands of wireless access points, big fast networks, interconnections and national international networks. We support the Noah network which supports satellite systems and secure traffic. It really is a very unique experience and you can come to IU, spend lots of years there and never see the same thing twice. We think we have an environment that's really a good way for people to come out of college, graduate school, work for some number of years and hopefully stay at IU, but if not, leave and get a good job and talk well about IU. In fact, the wireless network today here at SC was installed and is managed by a person who manages our campus network wireless, James Dickerson. That's the kind of opportunity we can provide people at IU. >> Aaron, I'd like to ask, you hear a lot about everything moving to the cloud these days, but in the HPC world I don't think that move is happening as quickly as it is in some areas. In fact, there's a good argument some workloads should never move to the cloud. You're having to balance these decisions. Where are you on the thinking of what belongs in the data center and what belongs in the cloud? >> I think our approach has really been specific to what the needs are. As an institution, we've not pushed all our chips in on the cloud, whether it be for high performance computing or otherwise. It's really looking at what the specific need is and addressing it with the proper solution. We made an investment several years ago in a data center internally, and we're leveraging that through the intelligent infrastructure that I spoke about. But really it's addressing what the specific need is and finding the specific solution, rather than going all in in one direction or another. I dunno if Jet Stream is something that you would like to bring up as well. >> By having our own data center and having our own facilities we're able to compete for NSF grants and work on projects that provide shared resources for the research community. Just dream is a project that does that. Without a data center and without the ability to work on large projects, we don't have any of that. If you don't have that then you're dependent on someone else. We like to say that, what we are proud of is the people come to IU and ask us if they can partner on our projects. Without a data center and those resources we are the ones who have to go out and say can we partner on your project? We'd like to be the leaders of that in that space. >> I wanted to kind of double click on something you mentioned. Couple of things. Historically IU has been I'm sure closely associated with Chicago. You think of what are students thinking of doing when they graduate? Maybe they're going to go home, but the sort of center of gravity it's like Chicago. You mentioned talking about, especially post pandemic, the idea that you can live anywhere. Not everybody wants to live in Manhattan or Santa Clara. And of course, technology over decades has given us the ability to do things remotely and IU is plugged into the globe, doesn't matter where you are. But have you seen either during or post pandemic 'cause we're really in the early stages of this. Are you seeing that? Are you seeing people say, Hey, thinking about their family, where do I want to live? Where do I want to raise my family? I'm in academia and no, I don't want to live in Manhattan. Hey, we can go to IU and we're plugged into the globe. And then students in California we see this, there's some schools on the central coast where people loved living there when they were in college but there was no economic opportunity there. Are you seeing a shift, are basically houses in Bloomington becoming unaffordable because people are saying, you know what, I'm going to stay here. What does that look like? >> I mean, for our group there are a lot of people who do work from home, have chosen to stay in Bloomington. We have had some people who for various reasons want to leave. We want to retain them, so we allow them to work remotely. And that has turned into a tool for recruiting. The kid that graduates from Caltech. Doesn't want to stay in Caltech in California, we have an opportunity now he can move to wherever between here and there and we can hire him do work. We love to have people come to Indiana. We think it is a unique experience, Bloomington, Indianapolis are great places. But I think the reality is, we're not going to get everybody to come live, be a Hoosier, how do we get them to come and work at IU? In some ways disappointing when we don't have buildings full of people, but 40 paying Zoom or teams window, not kind the same thing. But I think this is what we're going to have to figure out, how do we make this kind of environment work. >> Last question here, give you a chance to put in a plug for Indiana University. For those those data scientists those researchers who may be open to working somewhere else, why would they come to Indiana University? What's different about what you do from what every other academic institution does, Aaron? >> Yeah, I think a lot of what we just talked about today in terms of from a network's perspective, that were plugged in globally. I think if you look beyond the networks I think there are tremendous opportunities for folks to come to Bloomington and experience some bleeding edge technology and to work with some very talented people. I've been amazed, I've been at IU for 20 years and as I look at our peers across higher ed, well, I don't want to say they're not doing as well I do want brag at how well we're doing in terms of organizationally addressing things like security in a centralized way that really puts us in a better position. We're just doing a lot of things that I think some of our peers are catching up to and have been catching up to over the last 10, 12 years. >> And I think to sure scale of IU goes unnoticed at times. IU has the largest medical school in the country. One of the largest nursing schools in the country. And people just kind of overlook some of that. Maybe we need to do a better job of talking about it. But for those who are aware there are a lot of opportunities in life sciences, healthcare, the social sciences. IU has the largest logistics program in the world. We teach more languages than anybody else in the world. The varying kinds of things you can get involved with at IU including networks, I think pretty unparalleled. >> Well, making the case for high performance computing in the Hoosier State. Aaron, Dave, thanks very much for joining you making a great case. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> We'll be back right after this short message. This is theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Thinking back over the past 15 years of the modern cloud computing era we were first told that cloud was only for startups. It was for experiments, entire kickers. No IT executive would ever move production workloads or strategic data into the cloud. No financial services firm is another example would ever move anything into the cloud. Multi-cloud then emerged as a symptom of multi-vendor or of mergers and acquisitions or both. Fast forward now to 2022 and customers clearly want to take advantage of the best services that each cloud offers. For example, Azure for Microsoft apps, Amazon for IS, Google cloud for AI, Oracle for database, et cetera. However, this approach requires expertise in each cloud's primitives, tools and APIs and it puts the burden on customers to integrate apps and workloads across clouds, which increases cost, it exposes security risks and it creates time to market friction. The future of cloud is no longer just on-prem to cloud or so-called hybrid, but cloud to cloud. What many call multi-cloud and at the cube, we like to think beyond the conventional view of multi-cloud, and it's why we use the term super cloud as a metaphor for cross cloud services that are purpose built to solve a specific problem. While at the same time leveraging the best that various cloud providers have to offer. Karan Batta is the vice president of product management at OCI for Oracle and Kris Rice is the vice president of software development at Oracle database, and both are joining me in this cube conversation to discuss how Oracle and Microsoft are helping customers address cross cloud integration issues, making it possible for customers to use popular Azure based tools and Oracle databases and what the firm's claim is a simplified, secure and more facile experience, effectively making two clouds appear as one to developers and, and users. Gentlemen, welcome. Thanks for coming on the cube. >> Thanks for having me, Dave >> Karan, let's start with the news. What are you announcing? Why is it important to each company and what does it mean for your customers? >> Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me, Dave. I think, you know, what, what I can tell you is Microsoft and Oracle actually share a massive enterprise customer base. The same customers that are using Office 365 are also the same customer that are storing their critical, mission critical data on Oracle database. So we have thousands of customers that we share jointly and many of them use all sorts of different products from both technology companies. And, you know, multi-cloud, as you, as you sort of rightly pointed out has become the right approach for a lot of our customers to be able to run applications across different cloud providers in a very simplistic manner. You know, that's why we're, you know, with this new announcement we're reducing the complexity of connecting these things together. You know, all of the platform level capabilities, the networking capabilities, the identity management of it, you know, we're calling this new service Oracle database service for Microsoft Azure, and it really brings together a, a cohesive Azure like experience for Oracle customers. It's, you know, it's, it's going to be a new way to actually deploy multi-cloud applications. >> How is this service different from what the Oracle interconnect for Azure partnership that you announced pre pandemic? I think it was 2019. >> Right, right, right. So almost two years ago, you know, we announced this partnership with Microsoft that essentially interconnects the two data center regions from, from Azure and from Oracle. And, you know, it, it provided a great opportunity for customers to, to start their multi-cloud journey by making things like data transfer fees free, et cetera. And now we're close to 11 regions globally, you know, for those interconnected regions. The feedback that we got from customers was, you know, it was a great step in the right direction, but they needed more. And so this experience essentially builds on top of that interconnect, the physical interconnect on the data center side by giving customers an Azure like experience that allows them to basically deploy Oracle databases in a, in a very cohesive fashion with their Azure applications. It also gives them things like, you know, joint support, it gives them things like, you know, joint billing data, et cetera. But it basically allows them to get a first class experience for Oracle database services, you know, across the two clouds. >> It's interesting. I mean, I think back to the history of the industry, you know, before Oracle acquired Sun it would work with every hardware company then of course, you know, had its own hardware. And now it's working with, with Microsoft, who's in essence is a platform, you know, infrastructure company. So it's, it's quite a, quite a journey. Chris, I wonder, wonder if we could bring you into the conversation. What Oracle databases can Azure customers access now? Where, where does autonomous fit? Is that part of the package? >> Yeah, absolutely. So the, the initial offering is going to have all flavors of the Oracle database cloud. So that includes what we call now, the base database, which is database in a VM, the workhorse of the excess CS. So if you truly need the the extra horsepower of the exit data machine and of course it's going to include autonomous right out of the gate. So for customers that want to kick the tires on an Oracle database link with Azure there's no faster path than using autonomous. >> Yeah, so a lot of integration that you guys have done. Well, how does this service compare to other, you know, customers like to compare, they're always talking about their, their choices. How does it compare to others? How, what is the cost associated with this? What can you tell us? >> So from a cost stance, there there's no extra cost. So the only cost is on the base service. So if you get the autonomous, the base database, the exit data, your cost is in that base service. And we include all this plumbing that we've done to make it work best with Azure. And that includes wiring the metrics the logs, the vent home, the audit records to the Azure side of the house. >> And, and, and what what other things are like this out there? Can you share with us? What should customers, you know, compare this to? >> So the majority of what customers have done so far is it, it is DIY. So multi-cloud to date has been very DIY. Anything could be done that we've done. However, customers that have to roll up their sleeves they'd have to learn both clouds, learn the nomenclature of both clouds, they'd have to learn the networking infrastructure and they'd really have to roll their sleeves up and DIY it. What we've done is we've, we've done all that work for them. So it's as simple as a few mouse clicks and the two clouds can be talking together. >> Thank you, okay. Karan, you, you ever see the movie good morning Vietnam and they redact out all the, all the, like the words in the news that they didn't want, want read on the news. And so we hear Microsoft and Oracle, they're talking about multi-cloud, Google sort of talks about unifying cross cloud developer experiences with, with Antos. But when you go, when you go to like reinvent the word multi-cloud is redacted, like the movie. Do you anticipate customers are going to push more from multi-cloud in the future? What are you hearing? >> Yeah, absolutely. I think, I think customers are going to demand this of their cloud providers in the future. I think these are going to be table stakes moving forward. You know, as, as you rightly pointed out, Dave, I think, you know, customers and, and and actually cloud providers are focused on mostly transition from on-prem to the cloud. And I think in the future, you know, once everybody's picked their first cloud provider it's going to be, you know, the focus is going to shift from that to the interoperability across these two clouds or, or multiple clouds. You know, customers will want to have leverage against other cloud providers. Customers will want to pick the best of breed, complimentary services, et cetera, and also have, you know, decisions based on economics, right? So I think, you know, there's going to be a massive acceleration of customers want the support from, from all of their cloud providers. You know, which is why we're basically simply listening to customer feedback. And, you know, as mentioned earlier, we share so many different customers together it totally made sense for Microsoft and Oracle to start investing in it. This is not the entire answer. I think it's start of this journey in, in the future. >> Yeah, it's going to be interesting to see how this plays out. You know, I never say never with, with the hyperscalers or any large technology company. I, I wonder Karan, if we could stay with you. Can you give us some practical examples of, of what this service means for customers? How it's going to help them do something that they couldn't do before? What should we be focused on? >> Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, I think it opens up a whole set of new possibilities. You know, I, I mentioned earlier kind of made a statement where, you know, the world's data kind of lives on Oracle databases. It's, it's the core of, of any mission critical data today. It's still the most popular database use in, in the world. And so, you know, customers want to be able to modify they want to be able to extract more information and and get more knowledge out of their data. And this opens up the possibility where you can use, you can have access to that Oracle database from Azure and you're able to connect it to all the complimentary services which allow you to extract more knowledge or, or insight out of that data. So whether you're moving it into, let's say Azure synapse analytics to do analytics workloads or whether you're moving it to the HUD cluster using Azure HD insight, or you're simply just looking at the data in different forms and factors through power BI. I think it opens up a whole new set of possibilities you just couldn't do it before. On the second hand, it also helps you modernize your existing on-premise estate of Oracle. So we have the largest backs, the largest financial services customers, the largest government customers running the largest exit data footprint on premise. It helps you modernize that into the cloud and then, and use complimentary services from Azure. >> Got it. Chris, what's the support model look like for this new service? You know, who do I, whose throat do I choke? >> I was going to say, so you brought us back to when we had multiple vendors in the vendors we've all lived through it, right. Vendors pointed fingers at each other. So, keeping that in mind, what we've done is we have a collaborative plan with Microsoft in place. So building on the, the interconnect from 2019 we have that collaborative support model. So right in this new console that we've built you can log a ticket and immediately both sides will be aware of the context and what's going on so that we can resolve those problems and avoid the finger pruning of vendor at vendor. >> Okay, great. So if somebody pick up a broom and, and start sweeping and fix the problem, I love it. To both of you guys, maybe you could kind of riff a little bit on the future. I, I mean, we use this term super cloud, which is, you know, cross multiple clouds so you're doing that. And we envision, you know, this this wonderful globally distributed system where you're not even thinking about the underlying infrastructure. Are you considering partnering with other major cloud providers to offer similar services? Or are you going to go sort of deeper with, with Azure? What's your feeling on that? >> I think, you know, I think the the capability here that we've built isn't specific to Azure, for sure. I think there's absolutely possibility of, of, you know, working with other clouds in the future. I think, you know, we'll continue to sort of listen to our feedback from the, from our largest customers. You know, and if the market demands, you know, it's, it's, it's going to be, as I said, table stakes. And, you know, as I said earlier, and and I think It'll be in the best interest of all the cloud providers to just work together in the future. >> And, and Dave, to go back on the other half of your question, are we going to go deeper? We are going to be going deeper. So today we've gone far enough that like I said, metrics logs, those things are flowing. We're also in progress of looking at the rest of the portfolio in Azure and seeing which things can and should integrate more tightly with OCI. So as Karan said broader, but also deeper at the same time. >> Great, thank you. But my last question is, you know, we, again, we use this term super cloud to, to, to me anyway and us multi-cloud has largely been running, you know, on different clouds, it's, it's sort of a symptom, just kind of the way things shook out. And maybe this, maybe super cloud is what multi-cloud should be, but, but what do you think are the key ingredients that make multi-cloud real, lots of people are talking about multi-cloud what, what makes it tangible? >> I think, you know, to, to begin with, I think it's, it's, it's removing the complexity of learning new clouds, right? I think that's the biggest challenge that customers have is you've you've already picked one cloud, you've, you've, you've trained your, your, your employees, you've trained your developers and your application, you know, engineers and learning a new cloud, onboarding a new cloud is an extensive challenge and, and, you know, requires a lot of time and effort. And I think, I think what the other cloud providers can do is actually make sure that they provide these experiences that office gate all of the guts and all of the plumbing under the covers so that the customer doesn't have to learn new things. I think they have, they can focus on their business value which is actually running the app and running the database. I think they can sort of leave the infrastructure component to the cloud providers to actually have the right interoperability, the right APIs, et cetera. So I think the experience is going to be critical moving forward. >> Kris, anything you'd add to that? Bring us home if you would. >> The things I would add is back to observability and manageability. So today a lot of customers consider themselves multi-cloud if they're leveraging two clouds. What we are truly talking about is a multi-cloud workload where a compute node on cloud A is talking to a database on Oracle, things like that. So then you get into the observability of the stack so that you can monitor and react to how the things are going. So I think it has to go a, a hair higher in that these, these layers of observing the entire multi-cloud experiences in one place. >> That's great guys. Thanks so much for coming to The Cube and, and share. Congratulations on the progress. I, I love that we have you guys back and we can see how you're moving forward, collaborating, you know, customers, it's a win-win win so appreciate your time. >> Absolutely. >> Absolutely. >> All right. And thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for The Cube. We'll see you next time.

>>Mm. >>Okay. Hello, and welcome to the Cubes Coverage of the International Women in Tech Showcase featuring National Women's Day. I'm John for a host of the Cube. We have a great guest here of any theory a PJ head of aerospace and satellite for A W S A P J s Asia Pacific in Japan. Great to have you on many thanks for joining us. Talk about Space and International Women's Day. Thanks for coming on. >>Thanks, John. It's such a pleasure to be here with you. >>So obviously, aerospace space satellite is an area that's growing. It's changing. AWS has made a lot of strides closure, and I had a conversation last year about this. Remember when Andy Jassy told me about this initiative to 2.5 years or so ago? It was like, Wow, that makes a lot of sense Ground station, etcetera. So it just makes a lot of sense, a lot of heavy lifting, as they say in the satellite aerospace business. So you're leading the charge over there in a p J. And you're leading women in space and beyond. Tell us what's the Storey? How did you get there? What's going on. >>Thanks, John. Uh, yes. So I need the Asia Pacific business for Clint, um, as part of Amazon Web services, you know, that we have in industry business vertical that's dedicated to looking after our space and space customers. Uh, my journey began really? Three or four years ago when I started with a W s. I was based out of Australia. Uh, and Australia had a space agency that was being literally being born. Um, and I had the great privilege of meeting the country's chief scientist. At that point. That was Dr Alan Finkel. Uh, and we're having a conversation. It was really actually an education conference. And it was focused on youth and inspiring the next generation of students. Uh, and we hit upon space. Um, and we had this conversation, and at that stage, we didn't have a dedicated industry business vertical at A W s well supported space customers as much as we did many other customers in the sector, innovative customers. And after the conversation with Dr Finkel, um, he offered to introduce me, uh, to Megan Clark, who was back back then the first CEO of the Australian Space Agency. So that's literally how my journey into space started. We had a conversation. We worked out how we could possibly support the Australian Space Agency's remit and roadmap as they started growing the industry. Uh, and then a whole industry whole vertical was set up, clinic came on board. I have now a global team of experts around me. Um, you know, they've pretty much got experience from everything creating building a satellite, launching a satellite, working out how to down link process all those amazing imagery that we see because, you know, um, contrary to what a lot of people think, Uh, space is not just technology for a galaxy far, far away. It is very much tackling complex issues on earth. Um, and transforming lives with information. Um, you know, arranges for everything from wildfire detection to saving lives. Um, smart, smart agriculture for for farmers. So the time of different things that we're doing, Um, and as part of the Asia Pacific sector, uh, my task here is really just to grow the ecosystem. Women are an important part of that. We've got some stellar women out here in region, both within the AWS team, but also in our customer and partner sectors. So it's a really interesting space to be. There's a lot of challenges. There's a lot of opportunities and there's an incredible amount of growth so specific, exciting space to be >>Well, I gotta say I'm super inspired by that. One of the things that we've been talking about the Cuban I was talking to my co host for many, many years has been the democratisation of digital transformation. Cloud computing and cloud scale has democratised and change and level the playing field for many. And now space, which was it's a very complex area is being I want kind of democratised. It's easier to get access. You can launch a satellite for very low cost compared to what it was before getting access to some of the technology and with open source and with software, you now have more space computing things going on that's not out of reach. So for the people watching, share your thoughts on on that dynamic and also how people can get involved because there are real world problems to solve that can be solved now. That might have been out of reach, but now it's cloud. Can you share your thoughts. >>That's right. So you're right, John. Satellites orbiting There's more and more satellites being launched every day. The sensors are becoming more sophisticated. So we're collecting huge amounts of data. Um, one of our customers to cut lab tell us that we're collecting today three million square kilometres a day. That's gonna increase to about three billion over the next five years. So we're already reaching a point where it's impossible to store, analyse and make sense of such massive amounts of data without cloud computing. So we have services which play a very critical role. You know, technologies like artificial intelligence machine learning. Help us help these customers build up products and solutions, which then allows us to generate intelligence that's serving a lot of other sectors. So it could be agriculture. It could be disaster response and recovery. Um, it could be military intelligence. I'll give you an example of something that's very relevant, and that's happening in the last couple of weeks. So we have some amazing customers. We have Max our technologies. They use a W S to store their 100 petabytes imagery library, and they have daily collection, so they're using our ground station to gather insight about a lot of changing conditions on Earth. Usually Earth observation. That's, you know, tracking water pollution, water levels of air pollution. But they're also just tracking, um, intelligence of things like military build up in certain areas. Capella space is another one of our customers who do that. So over the last couple of weeks, maybe a couple of months, uh, we've been watching, uh, images that have been collected by these commercial satellites, and they've been chronicling the build up, for instance, of Russian forces on Ukraine's borders and the ongoing invasion. They're providing intelligence that was previously only available from government sources. So when you talk about the democratisation of space, high resolution satellite images are becoming more and more ridiculous. Um, I saw the other day there was, uh, Anderson Cooper, CNN and then behind him, a screenshot from Capella, which is satellite imagery, which is very visible, high resolution transparency, which gives, um, respected journalists and media organisations regular contact with intelligence, direct intelligence which can help support media storytelling and help with the general public understanding of the crisis like what's happening in Ukraine. And >>I think on that point is, people can relate to it. And if you think about other things with computer vision, technology is getting so much stronger. Also, there's also metadata involved. So one of the things that's coming out of this Ukraine situation not only is tracking movements with the satellites in real time, but also misinformation and disinformation. Um, that's another big area because you can, uh, it's not just the pictures, it's what they mean. So it's well beyond just satellite >>well, beyond just satellite. Yeah, and you know, not to focus on just a crisis that's happening at the moment. There's 100 other use cases which were helping with customers around the globe. I want to give you a couple of other examples because I really want people to be inspired by what we're doing with space technology. So right here in Singapore, I have a company called Hero Factory. Um, now they use AI based on Earth observation. They have an analytics platform that basically help authorities around the region make key decisions to drive sustainable practises. So change detection for shipping Singapore is, you know, it's lots of traffic. And so if there's oil spills, that can be detected and remedy from space. Um, crop productivity, fruit picking, um, even just crop cover around urban areas. You know, climate change is an increasing and another increasing, uh, challenges global challenge that we need to tackle and space space technology actually makes it possible 15 50% of what they call e CVS. Essential climate variables can only be measured from space. So we have companies like satellite through, uh, one of our UK customers who are measuring, um, uh, carbon emissions. And so the you know, the range of opportunities that are out there, like you said previously untouched. We've just opened up doors for all sorts of innovations to become possible. >>It totally is intoxicating. Some of the fun things you can discuss with not only the future but solving today's problems. So it's definitely next level kind of things happening with space and space talent. So this is where you start to get into the conversation like I know some people in these major technical instance here in the US as sophomore second year is getting job offers. So there's a There's a there's a space race for talent if you will, um and women talent in particular is there on the table to So how How can you share that discussion? Because inspiration is one thing. But then people want to know what to do to get in. So how do you, um how do you handle the recruiting and motivating and or working with organisations to just pipeline interest? Because space is one of the things you get addicted to. >>Yeah. So I'm a huge advocate for science, technology, engineering, math. We you know, we highlights them as a pathway into space into technology. And I truly believe the next generation of talent will contribute to the grand challenges of our time. Whether that climate change or sustainability, Um, it's gonna come from them. I think I think that now we at Amazon Web services. We have several programmes that we're working on to engage kids and especially girls to be equipped with the latest cloud skills. So one of the programmes that we're delivering this year across Singapore Australia uh, we're partnering with an organisation called the Institute for Space Science, Exploration and Technology and we're launching a programme called Mission Discovery. It's basically students get together with an astronaut, NASA researcher, technology experts and they get an opportunity to work with these amazing characters, too. Create and design their own project and then the winning project will be launched will be taken up to the International space station. So it's a combination of technology skills, problem solving, confidence building. It's a it's a whole range and that's you know, we that's for kids from 14 to about 18. But actually it, in fact, because the pipeline build is so important not just for Amazon Web services but for industry sector for the growth of the overall industry sector. Uh, there's several programmes that were involved in and they range from sophomore is like you said all the way to to high school college a number of different programmes. So in Singapore, specifically, we have something called cloud Ready with Amazon Web services. It's a very holistic clouds killing programme that's curated for students from primary school, high school fresh graduates and then even earlier careers. So we're really determined to work together closely and it the lines really well with the Singapore government's economic national agenda, um so that that's one way and and then we have a tonne of other programmes specifically designed for women. So last year we launched a programme called She Does It's a Free online training learning programme, and the idea is really to inspire professional women to consider a career in the technology industry and show them pathways, support them through that learning process, bring them on board, help drive a community spirit. And, you know, we have a lot of affinity groups within Amazon, whether that's women in tech or a lot of affinity groups catering for a very specific niches. And all of those we find, uh, really working well to encourage that pipeline development that you talk about and bring me people that I can work with to develop and build these amazing solutions. >>Well, you've got so much passion. And by the way, if you have, if you're interested in a track on women in space, would be happy to to support that on our site, send us storeys, we'll we'll get We'll get them documented so super important to get the voices out there. Um and we really believe in it. So we love that. I have to ask you as the head of a PJ for a W S uh aerospace and satellite. You've you've seen You've been on a bunch of missions in the space programmes of the technologies. Are you seeing how that's trajectory coming to today and now you mentioned new generation. What problems do you see that need to be solved for this next generation? What opportunities are out there that are new? Because you've got the lens of the past? You're managing a big part of this new growing emerging business for us. But you clearly see the future. And you know, the younger generation is going to solve these problems and take the opportunities. What? What are they? >>Yes, Sometimes I think we're leaving a lot, uh, to solve. And then other times, I think, Well, we started some of those conversations. We started those discussions and it's a combination of policy technology. We do a lot of business coaching, so it's not just it's not just about the technology. We do think about the broader picture. Um, technology is transferring. We know that technology is transforming economies. We know that the future is digital and that diverse backgrounds, perspective, skills and experiences, particularly those of women minority, the youth must be part of the design creation and the management of the future roadmaps. Um, in terms of how do I see this going? Well, it's been sort of we've had under representation of women and perhaps youth. We we just haven't taken that into consideration for for a long time now. Now that gap is slowly becoming. It's getting closer and closer to being closed. Overall, we're still underrepresented. But I take heart from the fact that if we look at an agency like the US Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre, that's a relatively young space agency in your A. I think they've got about three or 400 people working for them at this point in time, and the average age of that cohort John, is 28. Some 40% of its engineers and scientists are women. Um, this year, NASA is looking to recruit more female astronauts. Um, they're looking to recruit more people with disabilities. So in terms of changing in terms of solving those problems, whatever those problems are, we started the I guess we started the right representation mix, so it doesn't matter. Bring it on, you know, whether it is climate change or this ongoing crisis, productive. Um, global crisis around the world is going to require a lot more than just a single shot answer. And I think having diversity and having that representation, we know that it makes a difference to innovation outputs. We know that it makes a difference to productivity, growth, profit. But it's also just the right thing to do for so long. We haven't got it right, and I think if we can get this right, we will be able to solve the majority of some of the biggest things that we're looking at today. >>And the diversity of problems in the diversity of talent are two different things. But they come together because you're right. It's not about technology. It's about all fields of study sociology. It could be political science. Obviously you mentioned from the situation we have now. It could be cybersecurity. Space is highly contested. We dated long chat about that on the Last Cube interview with AWS. There's all these new new problems and so problem solving skills. You don't need to have a pedigree from Ivy League school to get into space. This is a great opportunity for anyone who can solve problems because their new No one's seen them before. >>That's exactly right. And you know, every time we go out, we have sessions with students or we're at universities. We tell them, Raise your voices. Don't be afraid to use your voice. It doesn't matter what you're studying. If you think you have something of value to say, say it. You know, by pushing your own limits, you push other people's limits, and you may just introduce something that simply hasn't been part of before. So your voice is important, and we do a lot of lot of coaching encouraging, getting people just to >>talk. >>And that in itself is a great start. I think >>you're in a very complex sector, your senior leader at AWS Amazon Web services in a really fun, exciting area, aerospace and satellite. And for the young people watching out there or who may see this video, what advice would you have for the young people who are trying to navigate through the complexities of now? Third year covid. You know, seeing all the global changes, um, seeing that massive technology acceleration with digital transformation, digitisation it's here, digital world we're in. >>It could >>be confusing. It could be weird. And so how would you talk to that person and say, Hey, it's gonna be okay? And what advice would you give? >>It is absolutely going to be okay. Look, from what I know, the next general are far more fluent in digital than I am. I mean, they speak nerd. They were born speaking nerd, so I don't have any. I can't possibly tell them what to do as far as technology is concerned because they're so gung ho about it. But I would advise them to spend time with people, explore new perspectives, understand what the other is trying to do or achieve, and investing times in a time in new relationships, people with different backgrounds and experience, they almost always have something to teach you. I mean, I am constantly learning Space tech is, um it's so complicated. Um, I can't possibly learn everything I have to buy myself just by researching and studying. I am totally reliant on my community of experts to help me learn. So my advice to the next generation kids is always always in this time in relationships. And the second thing is, don't be disheartened, You know, Um this has happened for millennia. Yes, we go up, then we come down. But there's always hope. You know, there there is always that we shape the future that we want. So there's no failure. We just have to learn to be resilient. Um, yeah, it's all a learning experience. So stay positive and chin up, because we can. We can do it. >>That's awesome. You know, when you mentioned the Ukraine in the Russian situation, you know, one of the things they did they cut the Internet off and all telecommunications and Elon Musk launched a star linked and gives them access, sending them terminals again. Just another illustration. That space can help. Um, and these in any situation, whether it's conflict or peace and so Well, I have you here, I have to ask you, what is the most important? Uh uh, storeys that are being talked about or not being talked about are both that people should pay attention to. And they look at the future of what aerospace satellite these emerging technologies can do for the world. What's your How would you kind of what are the most important things to pay attention to that either known or maybe not being talked about. >>They have been talked about John, but I'd love to see more prominent. I'd love to see more conversations about stirring the amazing work that's being done in our research communities. The research communities, you know, they work in a vast area of areas and using satellite imagery, for instance, to look at climate change across the world is efforts that are going into understanding how we tackle such a global issue. But the commercialisation that comes from the research community that's pretty slow. And and the reason it's loads because one is academics, academics churning out research papers. The linkage back into industry and industry is very, um, I guess we're always looking for how fast can it be done? And what sort of marginal profit am I gonna make for it? So there's not a lot of patients there for research that has to mature, generate outputs that you get that have a meaningful value for both sides. So, um, supporting our research communities to output some of these essential pieces of research that can Dr Impact for society as a whole, Um, maybe for industry to partner even more, I mean, and we and we do that all the time. But even more focus even more. Focus on. And I'll give you a small example last last year and it culminated this earlier this month, we signed an agreement with the ministry of With the Space Office in Singapore. Uh, so it's an MOU between AWS and the Singapore government, and we are determined to help them aligned to their national agenda around space around building an ecosystem. How do we support their space builders? What can we do to create more training pathways? What credits can we give? How do we use open datasets to support Singaporeans issues? And that could be claimed? That could be kind of change. It could be, um, productivity. Farming could be a whole range of things, but there's a lot that's happening that is not highlighted because it's not sexy specific, right? It's not the Mars mission, and it's not the next lunar mission, But these things are just as important. They're just focused more on earth rather than out there. >>Yeah, and I just said everyone speaking nerd these days are born with it, the next generations here, A lot of use cases. A lot of exciting areas. You get the big headlines, you know, the space launches, but also a lot of great research. As you mentioned, that's, uh, that people are doing amazing work, and it's now available open source. Cloud computing. All this is bringing to bear great conversation. Great inspiration. Great chatting with you. Love your enthusiasm for for the opportunity. And thanks for sharing your storey. Appreciate it. >>It's a pleasure to be with you, John. Thank you for the opportunity. Okay. >>Thanks, Manny. The women in tech showcase here, the Cube is presenting International Women's Day celebration. I'm John Ferrier, host of the Cube. Thanks for watching. Mm mm.

(Upbeat Music) >> Commvault was an idea that incubated as a project inside of Bell Labs, one of the most prestigious research and development organizations in the world, back in the day. It became an official company in 1996, and Commvault just celebrated its 25th anniversary As such, Commvault has had to reinvent itself many times over the past two and a half decades from riding the waves of the very early PC networking era to supporting a rich set of solutions for the evolving enterprise. This includes things like cloud computing, ransomware, disaster recovery, security compliance, and pretty much all things data protection and data management. And with me to talk about the company, its vision for the future with also a voice of the customer are three great guests. Isabelle Guis is the Chief Marketing Officer of Commvault, Manoj Nair is the GM of Metallic, and Tim Carben is a Principal Systems Engineer with Mitchell International. Folks, welcome to the Commvault power panel. Come inside theCUBE. It's awesome to have you. [Isabelle] Great to be here today. >> All right. First of all, I got to congratulate you celebrating 25 years. That's a long time, not a lot of tech companies make it that far and are still successful and relevant. So Isabelle, maybe you could start off. What do you think has been the driving factor for your ability to kind of lead through the subsequent technological waves that I alluded to upfront? >> So well, 25 years is commendable but we are not counting success in number of years. We're really counting success in how many customers we've helped over those years. And I will say what has been the driving matter for us as who that, has been innovating with our customers. You know, we were there every step of the way when they migrate to hybrid cloud. And now as they go to multi-cloud in a post COVID world where they have to win gold you know, distributed workforce, different types of workloads and devices, we all there too. We assess workload as well. So the innovation keep coming in, thanks to us listening to our customer and then, adding needs that change over the last 25 years and probably for the next 25 as well. You know, we want to be here for customer was thinking that data is an asset, not a liability. And also making sure that we offer them a broad range of use cases to quote why things simple because the world is getting too complex for them. So let's take the complexity on us. >> Thank you for that. So Manoj, you've riffed on the cube before about, you know putting on the binoculars and looking at the future. So, let's talk about that. Where do you see the future for this industry? What are some of the key driving factors that matter? >> It's great to be back on theCUBE. You know, we see our industry no different than lots of other industries. The SaaS Model is rapidly being adopted. And the reason is, you know customers are looking for simplicity, simplicity not just in leveraging, you know the great technology that Commvault has built, but in the business model and the experience. So, you know, that's one of the fastest growing trends that started in consumer apps and other applications, other B to B apps. And now we're seeing it in core infrastructure like data management, data protection. They're also trying to leverage their data better. Make sure it's not fragmented. So how do you deliver more intelligent services? You know, securing the data, insights from the data, transforming the data, and that combination, you know, our ability to do that in a multi-cloud world like Isabelle said, now with increasing edge work loads. Sometimes, you know, our customers say their data centers has a new edge too. So you kind of have this, you know, data everywhere workloads everywhere, yet the desire to deliver that with a holistic experience, we call it the 'power of bank'; the ability to manage your data and leverage the data with the simple lesson without compromise. And that's really what we're seeing as part of the future. >> Okay. I don't know if all want to come back to you and double click on that, but I want to introduce Tim to the conversation here. You bring in the voice of the customer, as they say. Tim, my understanding is Mitchell has been a Commvault customer since the mid-2000s. So, tell us why Commvault, what has kept you with the company for more than 15 years? >> Yeah, we are, it was what, 2006 when we started. And really what it all boils down to it, it's just as Isabel said, innovation. At Mitchell, we're always looking to stay ahead of the trend. And, you know, just to like was mentioned earlier, data is the most important part here. Commvault provides us peace of mind to protect and manage our data. And they do data protection for all of our environments right now. We've been a partner to help in navel our digital transformation including SaaS and cloud adoption. When we start talking about the solutions we have, I mean we of course started in 2006. I mean, this was version version 6 if I remember right. This predates me at the company. Upgraded to seven, eight, nine, we brought in ten, brought in eleven, brought in HyperScale, and then moved on to bring in the Metallic. And Commvault provides the reason for this. I guess I should say is, Commvault provides a reliable backup but most importantly, recovery. Rapid recovery. That's what gives me confidence. That's what helps me sleep better at night. So when I started looking at SaaS as a differentiator to protect our 036 environments or 065 environments, Metallic was a natural choice. And the one thing I wanted to add to that is, it came out cheaper than us building it ourselves. When you take into account resources as well as compute and storage. So again, just a natural choice. >> Yeah. As the saying goes back up as one thing, recovery's everything. Isabelle. Yeah, we've seen the SaaSification of the enterprise. Particularly, you know from the app side. You came from Salesforce. So you, the company that is the poster child for SaaS. But my question is what's catalyzing this shift and why do you think data protection is ready to make the move? >> Well, there's so many good things and that's that. As you know, you remember when people started moving to the cloud and transforming their CAPEX into OPEX. Well SaaS bring yet another level of benefits. IT, we know always has to do more with less. And so SaaS allows you to, once you set up, you've got all the software upgrades automatically without you know, I think it's, why it works. You can better manage your cash flow, because you pay as you grow. And also you have a faster time to value. So all of this at help, the fast adoption and I will tell you today I don't think there is a single customer who doesn't have at least one SaaS application because they have things of value of this. Now, when it comes to backup and recovery everybody's at different stages. You still have On-Premises, you have cloud, there's SaaS, there's Workloads devices. And so what we think was the most important was to offer a broad choice of delivery model being able to support them if they want a software subscription, if they want an integrated appliance, or if they want SaaS as a service model, and also some of our partners actually delivering this in a more custom and managed way as well. So offering choice, because everybody is at a different stage on this journey. When it comes to data management and protection, I actually, you know, I think team is the example of taking full advantage of this bold choice. >> Well, you mentioned Tim that you leaned into Metallic. We have seen the SaaS everywhere. We used to have a email server, right? I mean, you know, On-Prem, that just doesn't happen anymore. But how was Mitchell International thinking about SaaS? Maybe you could share your, from your customer perch, what you're seeing. >> Well, what's interesting about this is, Mitchell is been providing SaaS for a long time. We are a technology company and we do provide solutions, SaaS solutions, to our customers. And this makes it so important to be able to embrace it because we know the value behind it. We're providing that to our customers. And when I look at what Commvault is doing I know that Commvault is doing the same thing. They're providing the SaaS Model as a value to their customers. And it's so important to go with this because we keep our environments cutting edge. As GDPR says, You need to have a cutting edge environment. And if you don't, if you cannot check that box you do not move forward. Commvault has that. And this is one less thing that I have to worry about when choosing Metallic to do my backup of O365. >> So thank you for that, Tim. So Manoj, thinking about what you just heard from Isabelle and Tim, you know, kind of fitting into a company's cloud or hybrid cloud, more importantly, strategy, you were talking before about this. "And", in other words, it's not an either or it's not a zero sum game. It's simpatico, if you will. I wonder if you could elaborate. >> Yeah, no The Power of And, Dave, I'm very proud of that. You know, when I think of The Power of And I think of actually folks like Tim, our customers and Commonwealth first, right. And, and really that, that need for choice. So for example, you know, customers on various different paths to the cloud we kind of homogenize it and say, they're on a cloud journey or they're on a digital transformation journey, but each journey looks different. And so part of that, "And", as Isabella was saying, is really the ability to meet them where they are in that journey. So for example, you know, do you, go in there and say, Hey, you know what, I'm going to be some customers 100% multi-cloud or single cloud even. And that includes SaaS applications and my infrastructure running as a service. So there's a natural fit there saying great all your data protection. You're not going to be running software appliances for that. So you've got to data protection, data management as a service that Metallic is the able to offer across the whole S state. And that's, you know, that's probably a small set of customers, but rapidly growing. Then you see a lot more customers were saying I'm going to do away as you're talking about but the emails are where I'm going to move to office 365, leverage the power of teams. And there's a Shared Responsibility Model there which is different than an On-Prem data protection use case. And so they're, they're able to just add on Metallic to the existing Commonwealth environment, whether it's a Commonwealth software or HyperScale, and connect the two. So it's a single integrated experience. And then you kind of go to the other end of the spectrum and say, great customers all in on a SaaS delivered data protection, as you know, and you hear a lot from a lot of your guests and we hear from our customers, there's still a lot of data sitting out there, you know, 90 plus percent of workloads and data centers increasing edge data workloads. And if you were to back up one of those data workloads and say that the only copy can be in the cloud, then that would take like a 10 day recovery isolation. You know, we have some competitors who say that then that's what they have. Our flexibility, our ability to kind of bring in the Hyper-Scale deployment and just, you know, dock it into Metallic, and have a local copy, instant recovery, SLA, remote, you know, backup copy in the cloud for ransomware, or your worst case scenario. That's the kind of flexibility. So all those are scenarios we're really seeing with our customers. And that's kind of really the power advantage. A very unique part of our portfolio, but, you know, companies can have portfolio products, but to have a single integrated offering with that flexibility, that kind of, depending on the use case, you can start here and grow into a different point. That's really the unique part of the power event. Yeah, 10 day RTO just doesn't cut it, but Timmy, maybe you could weigh in here. Why, What was the catalyst for you adopting Metallic and maybe you could share what was the business impact there? >> Well, the catalyst and impact, obviously two different things. The catalyst, when we look at it, there was a lot of what are we going to do with this? We have an environment, we need to back it up, and how are we going to approach this? So we looked at it from a few different standpoints, and of course, when it boils down to it, one of the major reasons was the financial. But when we started looking at everything else that we have available to us and the flexibility that Commvault has in rolling out new solutions, this really was a no brainer at this point. We are able to essentially back up new features and new products, as soon as they're available. Within our Metallic environment, we are running the activate. We are running the the self-service for the end users to where they can actually recover their own files. We are adding the teams into it to be able to recover and perform these backups for teams. And I want to step aside really quick and mentioned something about this because I'd been with, you know, Metallic for a long time and I'd been waiting for this. We've been waiting for an ability to do these backups and anyone I know Manoj knows that I've been waiting for it. And you know, Commvault came back to me a while back and they said, we just have to wait for the API. We have to wait for Microsoft releases. Well, I follow the news. I saw Microsoft released the API, and I think it may have been two days later. Good. Commvault reached out to me and said, Hey we got it available. Are you ready to do this? And that sort of turned around that sort of flexibility being on top of new applications with that, with Salesforce, that is, you know, just not necessarily the reason why I adopted Metallic but one of those things that puts a smile on my face because I adopted Metallic. >> Well, that's an interesting story. I mean, you get the SDKs and if you're a leader you get them, you know, you can put the resources on it and you're ready when, when the product, you know, comes to GA. Manoj, I wonder if we could talk about just the notion of backing up SaaS, part of the announcements today included within Metallic included backup and offerings for Dynamics 365. But my question is why support Dynamics specifically in SaaS apps generally? I mean, customers might say, doesn't my SaaS provider protect my data? Why do I need a third party? And, and the second part of that question is why Commvault? >> Dave a great question as always. I'll start with the second part of the question. It's really three words the Shared Responsibility Model. And, you know, a lot of times our customers as they go into the cloud model they really start understanding that there is something that you're getting a lot of advantages the certain things you don't have to do, but the Shared Responsibility Model is what every cloud and SaaS provider will indoctrinate in its S&As. And certainly the application data is owned by the customer. And the meaning of that is not something that, you know, some SaaS provider can understand. And so that requires specialized skills. And that's a partnership. We've done this now very successfully with Microsoft and LG 65, we've added support for Salesforce, and we see a rapid customer adoption because of that Shared Responsibility Model. If you have, some kind of, an admin issue as we have seen in the news somebody changed their team setting and then lost all their chat. And then that data is discoverable. And you, the customer is responsible for making sure that data is discoverable or ransomware attacks. Again, recovering that SaaS data is your responsibility because the attack could be coming in from your instance not from the SaaS provider. So those are the reasons. Dynamics is, you know, one of the fastest growing SaaS applications from a business applications perspective out there. And as we looked at our roadmap, and you look at at the right compliment, what is the right adjacency, we're seeing this part of Microsoft's Business Application Suite growing, you know, as millions of users out there and it's rapidly growing. And it's also integrated with the rest of the Microsoft family. So we're now, you know, proud to say that we support all three Microsoft clouds, Microsoft Azure, or 365, Dynamics. Those applications are increasingly integrated so we're seeing commonality in customer base and that's a business critical data. And so customers are looking to manage the data, have solutions that they can be sure they can leverage. It's not just protecting data from worst-case scenarios. In the case of some of the apps like Dynamics, we offer a support, like setting up the staging environment. So it's improving productivity of the application admins, and that's really kind of that the value we're bringing able to bring to the table. >> Yeah. You know, that Shared Responsibility Model. I'm glad you brought that up because I think it's oftentimes misunderstood but when you talk to CSOS, they understand it well. They'll tell you the shared responsibility is my responsibility. You know, maybe the cloud provider will secure the object storage bucket for the physical space, but it's on me. So that's really important. So thank you for that. Isabelle, last question, the roadmap, you know, how do you see Commvault's, Metallic SaaS portfolio evolving? What can you tell us? >> Oh, well, it's, it has a big strategic, you know, impact on Commvault for sure on the first portfolio first because of all of our existing customers as you mentioned earlier, 25 years, it's a lot of customers are somehow some workload as SaaS. And so the ability without, you know, adding more complexity without adding another vendor just to be able to protect them in one take, and as teams they bring a smile to his face is really important for us. The second is also a lot of customers come to Commvault for Metallic. This is the first time enter the Commvault community and Commvault family. And as they start protecting their assessed application they realize that they could leverage the same application to protect their own premised data as well. So back to The Power of And, and without writing off their past investments, you know, going to the cloud at the pace they want. So from that perspective, there is a big impact on our customer community the thing is that Metallic it brings I don't know Manoj is way too humble, but, you know, he don't go to this customer every quarter. And, you know, we have added 24 countries to the portfolio, to the product. So we see a rapid adoption. And so obviously back to your question, we see the impacts of Metallic growing and growing fast because of the market demand, because of the rapid innovation we can take the Commvault technology and put it in the SaaS model and our customers really like it. So I'm very excited. I think it's going to be, you know, a great innovation, a great positive impact for customers, and our new customers we're welcoming, which by the way I think half, Manoj correct me, but I think half of the Metallic customer at Commvault and the other half are new to our family. So, they're very bullish about this. And it's just the beginning, as you know, we are 25 years old, or sorry, 25 years young, and looking forward to the next 25. >> Well, I can confirm, you know, we have a data partner survey, partner ETR, Enterprise Technology Research, and I was looking at the Commvault data and it shows within the cloud segment, when you cut the data by cloud, you're actually accelerating, the spending momentum is accelerating. And I think it's a function of, you know, some of the acquisitions you've made, some of the moves you made in integration. So congratulations on 25 years and you know, you're riding the correct wave, Isabelle, Manoj, Tim, thanks so much for coming in theCUBE. It was great to have you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you Dave. >> I really appreciate it. >> And thank you everybody for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. We'll see you next time. (Upbeat Music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Dell Technologies World Digital Experience brought to you by Dell Technologies. >> Hi welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE coming to you from our Palo Alto studios, with our ongoing coverage of the Dell Technology World 2020, the digital experience, we can't be together this year, but we can still get together this way. And we're excited for our very next segment, really talking about one of the big leverage points that the Dell VMware relationship can result in, so we're excited. Joining us our next guest is Guy Bartram, he is the Director of Product Marketing for Cloud Director, for VMware. Guy great to see you, where are you coming in from? >> Thanks for having me on Jeff. >> Where are you coming in from today? (Guy chuckles) >> So this yeah, this London for me, this is from London. >> Excellent, great to see you. >> In the UK. >> And also joining us, Doug Lieberman, he is the Global Solutions Director for Dell Technology, Doug, great to see you, where are you coming in from today? >> Well, thanks for having me, I'm calling in from just outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in the United States. >> Excellent, love Philly's lived there for a couple of years and man, there's some terrific food in that part of the world, I tell yah. So let's get into--- >> You say--- >> Are you Pat's or Geno's. >> Actually I'll eat either one but I think I prefer Pat. >> Okay buddy, I used to get one of each and eat half and half and piss people off that were the purest, but that's a difference--- >> That's the right way to do it. (Jeff and Guy laughs) >> Right, so let's get into it, you know, before we turned on the cameras, you guys were talking about this exciting announcement that you've been working on for a really long time. So before we get kind of into the depths and the importance, why don't we just go ahead and tell us, what is the big announcement that we're sharing today? Go to you Guy. >> And so VMware and Dell really have worked together and we both have partner programs that are focused on service providers, Cloud Service providers, and systems integrators and strategic outsourcers. And what we've done is work together to build a solution that is really targeted towards them in the cloud arena, so taking our cloud capabilities and solutions and optimizing it for cloud providers and doing that through what we call, leveraging our Dell Technologies Cloud Platform and putting VMware Cloud Director on top of that. >> So that's pretty amazing, and really, to you Guy, what does that enable Cloud Service providers to do that they couldn't do so well before? >> It brings a whole lot of benefits to a Cloud Service provider, I mean, for cloud providers, historically they've had to have infrastructure services that've been, you know, quite heavy for them to build, taken a long time to get the market, and really had a high burn and operational costs and this solution VMware Cloud Director on Dell Technologies Cloud Platform is going to bring them the multitenancy aspects of cloud director and all of the speed and efficiencies in application and infrastructure delivery to enable them to address the common need now around hybrid cloud management and hybrid cloud operations. >> And you talked about before, I'm sorry, go ahead, Doug. >> No, I was saying, you know, I think that the big key piece is that, there're special requirements that cloud providers really need from their infrastructure, from their cloud, that makes it special to their business model, and what this aims to do, is to provide those capabilities in a easily consumable and rapid implementation format so that they can get to revenue faster and they can get to higher level services faster. >> It's funny, you talked about getting to revenue faster, back in the day I worked at Intel and Craig Barrett was famous for TTM. TTM, everyone used to think it was time to market bringing a new product to market, and he said, no, no, no, it's time to money, right, how fast can you get operational, so that you can basically get this thing to start generating revenue, I always think of that when you look at seven 37 sitting at a gate, you know, how do you get it operational? So Doug, what were some of those special challenges that they have in their market and how are you helping them solve them? >> So it's a great question, Jeff, as we work with service providers all over the world, they've given us a consistent message, that the days of the value in their service being, how they build the underlying cloud and how they do that orchestration automation are really behind us, right, they're expecting today, an end to end capability delivered as sort of an appliance for that underlying infrastructure for the cloud components, so that they can focus on the higher level services and the things that provide more value and more margin for them, and so, you know, the as a service offerings that run on top of the underlying cloud. And so what this joint solution does is really provide a validated design so that they can redirect their engineering resources from figuring out how to make that base cloud work in a service provider format, with multitenancy, chargeback, showback, portals, et cetera, and get that up and running faster and not have to worry about how to automate all that themselves, so they can focus their engineering efforts on those higher level services that provide greater value to their bottom line, to be honest, >> Great, that's great, and Guy, I want to go back to you, you know, the Cloud Service providers probably don't get as much of publicity as you know, we hear all the time about the big public Cloud Providers, you know, the big three or four or however you want to count them and we hear a lot about data centers and staff migrating between those two, we don't hear a lot of conversation in kind of the hybrid or the multicloud discussion about the role of the smaller Cloud Service providers. So I wonder if you can share a little bit about how they play in the market, you know why this is a really important segment for everyone's, you know, kind of architecture and ability to deliver applications. >> That's great common, I mean, one of the things we tend to call on our partners internally is the fall of mega cloud, that you know you really haven't heard of, there's 4,000 partners in our partner program and all of them are providing very valuable cloud services. They provide cloud services they've in all areas of cloud, so this could be into Azure, Google, AWS or in their own data centers, and many of them have come from infrastructure rich environments or what we call asset heavy environments and delivering services in these environments. The recent kind of drive to cloud adoption and digital transformation has meant that there's been a growing demand for Cloud Service providers to deliver valuable managed services and professional services to help customer do that digital transformation and really help the customer identify, where their customer's workloads, would be best apt and running. And, you know, cloud providers specialize in delivering these services like Doug was saying, they're looking at that higher value and they brought a lot of skills and capability in those areas. >> That's great, 'cause it's really good to keep in mind they pay a really important role in this whole thing. And Doug I want to go back to you in terms of working together with VMware in the solution space, right, so it's one thing to talk about a relationship between two companies, it's one thing to see Michael Dell and Pat Gelsinger on stage together, it's a whole nother deal to get together and put in the investment in these joint solutions. So I wonder if you could share a little bit more color on not only today's announcement, but what this really means for you guys going forward and more importantly, your customers, and ultimately your customer's customers. >> Absolutely, so Dell and VMware are both committed to really driving the success of our Cloud Provider partners all over the world, and to do that, we recognize that there's an additional level of capabilities that we need to bring together and jointly do that. And so we agreed to work together to go build a series of capabilities that are really targeted at going beyond just the basic HCI market and the basic cloud market and extending that for capabilities that are targeted specifically and built specifically for our service providers. And so this solution that we're announcing today is the first step on a journey, but we both committed to and made investments in, continuing that and adding more and more capabilities as we move forward and really addressing that very specific market. And working with our Cloud Service provider partners to figure out what is the next step, what do they need from us, at the end of the day, we're looking to jointly help them be more successful and accelerate their time to market and their go to market capabilities. >> Right, that's great, and Guy back to you, you actually had some numbers, some IDC numbers that you can share in terms of some of the real measurable benefits of this. >> That's right Jeff, yeah, we have, IDC did a recent analysis for us with about 12 partners interviewed across the globe, and some of the results that came back were pretty astounding actually, this pay-for is available on our VCE product page on vmware.com. But just as kind of summarize, you know, we talk about getting to revenue faster, they found that on average service providers were able to onboard customers, i.e migrate them, into their cloud environment around 72% faster, 57% faster delivery of new services and we all know that, you know, portfolio and construction of services takes a long time, but you get business units to buy in to give it support services, so 57% faster delivery of services is incredible. And then, you know, obviously getting to revenue 32% more revenue from VCD services than without VCD and 51% overall more growth with VCD from things like more efficient operations, which are also marked at like 31%. So, you know, significant advantages to having Cloud Director bringing those economies of scale, bringing that capability to migrate from a customer premise into service providers cloud, and then obviously be able to utilize multiple larger clouds across multiple regions. >> That's great, and Doug, I wonder if you could share, are there some specific applications that are driving this more than others, is there any particular kind of subset of the solutions that you can highlight where you're getting the most demand and where you see kind of the both short term opportunity as well as mid and longterm opportunity? >> A great question, I think it really evolves around a couple of different aspects. So one is from a pure security standpoint and things like data sovereignty, we're seeing an increased demand for the service providers that are our partners, as in the ecosystem of cloud, there will always be a role for the hyperscaler clouds as well as the role of these independent Cloud Service providers that are at the next tier down, both for the data sovereignty issues, things like GDPR, but as well as kind of that personal feel, that personal touch and specialty in applications, some of the specific areas we're seeing are things like business process management capabilities, database as a service, VDI as a service, but even more critically things like cyber recovery and backup as a service we're seeing, especially in the current situation that we're in, really an uptick in the cyber attacks and the ransomware, et cetera, and so solutions such as our cyber recovery are critical in those capabilities and those higher level services tied into and integrated with an overall service provider framework are key. And so in the area that we're really seeing uptake are really the business critical mission functions that enterprises are looking to run in a trusted partner's data center, and that's what we're seeing, where we're a lot of traction for this Dell Technologies Cloud Platform, combining VCD and VCF together to give you all those features and enterprise reliability. >> Right, and I didn't ask you Guy kind of the partnership question about having the opportunity to put your capability, you know, on the Dell Cloud Platform, opens up a whole new set of field resources, a whole new set of technical resources, you know, a whole different resources, not that VMware's short on resources by any stretch of the imagination, but it's certainly an additive, you know, kind of one plus one makes three opportunity. >> Yeah, I mean, it's great to be doing this and we've actually already been doing this on a couple of other initiatives, so from my perspective, I, you know, I manage Cloud Director Portfolio and we've already integrated Dell, Data Domain Dell, Avamar backup solutions, Data Protection Suite, into VCD as self service and we've already put in quite a bit of work, working together with Dell on that, as we go forward we're going to be putting more work into supporting VCD on the Dell Technologies Cloud Platform and integrating more services from Dell and from other vendors into the solution as well. So all we want to really provide is the capability for service provider to have the easy to consume hardware model, easy to consume subscription software model, with our program, and then the extensibility of services over and above just the infrastructure layer. So looking at things like object storage, and as Doug said, data protection, migration services, container cluster services, there's a myriad of services that VCD provides today out the box, and then there's the a whole extensibility framework, which we use when we work with partners, like we've done with Dell to deliver things like data protection. >> Yeah, I want to go back to you Doug, in terms of kind of a higher level, this whole transition to as a service, you've been in the business for a long time, you've been in the solutions a long time, but, you know, switching everything to as a service, as often as we can, and as frequently as we can, and as broadly across portfolio is really a terrific response to what the customers now, are looking for. So I'm wondering if you share some color on, you know, this philosophy of trying to get to, as a service, as much as you can, across the broadest solution set as you can. >> Yeah and if you look over the last decade, and decade and a half, there has been this increasing trend to moving to as a service offerings and the public clouds really drove a large part of that, than in tier two service providers around the globe. The key piece especially in the current business model, then going forward is how do you optimize, your CapEx versus OPEX and how do you really leverage the IT infrastructure to the maximum extent possible, based upon current business conditions, and that means the ability to grow and train and the ability to only consume what you need. In the past, when we had traditional data centers, you basically built for the worst case, and so the worst case was you had, an accounting run that happened at the end of the month that required a lot of processing power, then you built to that and that's what you use, and for the rest of the month, it really mostly idle. The cloud model really gives you the ability to A, improve their, or only use what you need and consume when you want to use it, but also adds in really shifting the responsibility for the management and the operations into someone, people who are experts in that area, so that again, you as a business can focus on your mission critical aspects of what you do whether that's developing a drug, building cars, making pizza, whatever it is, really as a service model enables your business to drive their core competency and not have to worry about the IT infrastructure that other people can do more efficiently and with better value than you could do it internally. And all that drive to that as a service model with the additional financial models that really aligned to the business paradigm that really companies are looking for. >> As you're saying that I'm thinking, wow, remember those days when our worst case scenario, was running a big batch load at the end of the month or the end of the quarter, and that would be re-missed, right, we are 2020, we're spread out all over the country and the world on both sides of the Atlantics. If I didn't say something about, you know, kind of the COVID impacts in terms of this accelerate, 'cause we hear it all the time in social media, right, who's driving your digital transformation, is it the CEO, the CIO, of COVID, and we've moved from this kind of light switch moment and then merged to, hey, this is an ongoing thing, and you know, kind of the new normal, is the new normal. And it's really shifted, a lot of people are talking about, you know, kind of shifts in the cloud infrastructure, the direction of the traffic, right, from going now from East to West and it's North to South, 'cause it's going to everybody's home. I wonder, I'll go back to you Guy, in terms of, the response that you've heard from some of your customers, in a response to, you know, kind of A, let's put a stop gap in early March that was interesting, and critical, and done, but now, kind of looking forward as to, you know, kind of a redistribution of workloads and architecture and users and I think Doug talked about security. How are you seeing any kind of ongoing effects and how is this impacting, you know, kind of you go to market and what you guys are bringing to market. >> Yeah, we're definitely seeing a lot of change in the way that service providers are trying to address this now. At the start of COVID, it was really a struggle, I think, for everyone to get the resources that they required to keep customers up from running, a lot of people started re-examining their disaster recovery contingency planning, and realizing that actually, what has happened in the last couple of years is, you know, workloads have exploded, a lot of patient workloads have completely gone through the roof and container workloads have grown drastically, and what's happened is the contingency plans behind all this stuff haven't changed and they just simply can't keep up the dynamic nature of the way we're doing business. Quite simply put technology is outpacing our weight, our ability to deal with that, so, you know, service providers need to provide a platform solution that enables them to be able to orchestrate at scale and enables them to orchestrate securely at scale, and really that means they've got to move away from this is hardware analog and move into virtual resourcing, cloud resource pooling elasticity, and particularly hypothesy. I know VMware we talk a lot about hybrid solutions and multicloud, but it's a reality when you look at where customers are today in their cloud journey, most of them have a footprint in their premise, have a footprint in a cloud provider premise and have multiple footprints in public cloud environments, so they need to have that consistent security model across that, they need to have data contingency and backup solutions, and someone needs to be in that to manage that, and that's where the service providers come in. They need to move away from the kind of infrastructure day to day operations that they were doing before and scale it out to now application protection and application development environments. >> Right, so Doug, I'm going to give you the last word as we wrap up this segment, you know, it's easy for us and pundits and people to write about multicloud and hybrid cloud and all these concepts, you guys actually have to make it work on the ground with real customers and real workloads. So I wonder if you could just kind of, you know, share your perspective, you've been working on this Dell Cloud Platform, you know, kind of how you see this evolving over time, and again, kind of what gets you up in the morning as you look forward as to what this journey is going to be over the next six months, one year, two year, three years down the road. >> Brought a lot of functionality capabilities to the world, right, the ability to consume things as you need them, the ability to really rely on a combined set of clouds and multicloud, and if you look at any enterprise that by any estimate, any company of any size, it's probably got 12, 15 clouds that contain their multicloud between using hyperscalers, tier two service providers, as well as cloud based services like Salesforce.com or Office 365, and you combine all those together and what that provides is a lot of flexibility, a lot of functionality, but also an extreme amount of complexity. And that complexity is really where Dell Technologies Cloud and Dell Technologies Cloud Platform is looking to help and to reduce that complexity, 'cause ultimately a successful enterprise is going to leverage the best from multiple clouds across multiple different implementations in order to provide the end to end IT experience that they need for both their external facing and internal IT operations. And with Dell Technologies Cloud Platform and working with our service providers, what we aim to do is to simplify the implementation of those multiple clouds and how they work together and make it as seamless as possible to shift workloads where they need to be, see your entire virtual enterprise IT environment, no matter where it's running, and to really optimize on your business to understand how you're using cloud, where you're using cloud, and how those clouds work together. And so the integration of all the different features with VMware and Dell bring together that end to end capability to significantly simplify the multicloud experience, and then ultimately our service provider partners, can help you on that journey to provide that management and orchestration across those different clouds and the data transformation, the digital transformation necessary in order to drive success. >> That's great, well, thank you Doug, for putting a nice big bow on it, and congratulations to you both for getting this release out, I know there's a lot of hard work and effort behind it, so it's always kind of good to finally get to expose it to the real world, so thanks for taking a few minutes with us. >> Great, thank you for having us. >> Absolutely. >> Yeah thanks Jeff, thank you. >> All right, he's Guy, he's Doug, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE's continuous coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020, the digital experience. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (soft upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE! Covering Space and Cybersecurity Symposium 2020. Hosted by Cal Poly. >> Hello everyone. Welcome to the Space and Cybersecurity Symposium 2020, put on by Cal Poly and hosted with SiliconANGLE theCUBE here in Palo Alto, California for a virtual conference. Couldn't happen in person this year, I'm John Furrier, your host. The intersection of space and cybersecurity, obviously critical topics, great conversations. We've got a great guest here to talk about the addressing the cybersecurity workforce gap. And we have a great guest, and a feature speaker, Stewart Knox, the undersecretary with California's Labor and Workforce Development Office. Stewart, thanks for joining us today. >> Thank you so much, John. I appreciate your time today and listening to a little bit of our quandaries with making sure that we have the security that's necessary for the state of California and making sure that we have the workforce that is necessary for cybersecurity in space. >> Great. I'd love to get started. I've got a couple of questions for you, but first take a few minutes for an opening statement to set the stage. >> Sure, realizing that in California, we lead the nation in much of cybersecurity based on Department of Defense contractors within the state of California, leading the nation with over 160 billion dollars within the industry just here in California alone and having over 800,000 plus workers full time employment in the state of California is paramount for us to make sure that we face defense manufacturers, approximately 700,000 jobs that are necessary to be filled. There's over 37,000 vacancies that we know of in California, just alone in cybersecurity. And so we look forward to making sure that California Workforce Development Agency is leading the charge to make sure that we have equity in those jobs and that we are also leading in a way that brings good jobs to California and to the people of California, a good education system that is developed in a way that those skills are necessarily met for the employers here in California, and the nation. >> One of the exciting things about California is obviously look at Silicon Valley, Hewlett Packard and the garage story, history, space, it's been a space state, many people recognize California. You mentioned defense contractors. It's well rooted with history, just breakthroughs, bases, technology companies in California. And now you've got technology. This is the cybersecurity angle. Take a minute to give some more commentary to that because that's really notable, and as the workforce changes, these two worlds are coming together and sometimes they're in the same place, sometimes they're not. This is super exciting and a new dynamic that's driving opportunities. Could you share some color commentary on that dynamic? >> Absolutely. And you're so correct. I think in California, we lead the nation in the way that we develop programs, that our companies lead in the nation in so many ways around cyberspace, cybersecurity in so many different areas, for which in the Silicon Valley is just such a leader and those companies are good, qualified companies to do so. Obviously one of the places we play a role is to make sure that those companies have a skilled workforce. And also that the security of those systems are in place for our defense contractors and for the feeder companies, those outlying entities that are providing such key resources to those companies are also leading on a cutting edge for the future. Also again, realizing that we need to expand our training and skills to make sure that those California companies continue to lead, is just such a great initiative. And I think through apprenticeship training programs, and looking at our community college systems, I think that we will continue to lead the nation as we move forward. >> You know, we've had many conversations here in this symposium virtually, certainly around the everyday life of a consumer is impacted by space. You know, we get our car service, Uber, Lyft, we have maps, we have all this technology that was born out of defense contracts and R and D that really changed generations and created a lot of great societal value. Okay, now with space kind of going to the next generation, it's easier to get stuff into space. The security of the systems is now going to be not only paramount for quality of life, but defending that, and the skills are needed in cybersecurity to defend that. And the gap is there. What can we do to highlight the opportunities for career paths? It used to be the day where you get a mechanical engineering degree or aerospace and you graduate and you go get a job, not anymore. There's a variety of paths, career-wise. What can we do to highlight this career path? >> Absolutely correct. And I think it starts, you know, K through 12 system. And I know a lot of the work that (indistinct) and other entities are doing currently. This is where we need to bring our youth into an age where they're teaching us, right, as we become older, on the uses of technology, but it's also teaching where the levels of those education can take them, K through 12, but it's also looking at how the community college system links to that. And then the university system links above and beyond, but it's also engaging our employers. You know, one of the key components, obviously as the employers play a role, for which we can start to develop strategies that best meet their needs quickly. I think that's one of the comments we hear the most, at Labor Agency is how we don't provide a change as fast as we should, especially in technology. You know, we buy computers today and they're outdated tomorrow. It's the same with the technology that's in those computers is that those students are going to be the leaders within that to really develop how those structures are in place. So K through 12 is probably our primary place to start, but also continuing that past the K-12 system. And I bring up the employers and I bring them up in a way, because many times when we've had conversations with employers around what their skills needs were and how do we develop those better? One of the pieces of that, that I think really should be recognized, many times they recognize that they wanted a four year degree, potentially, or a five year or six year degree. But then when we really looked at the skillsets, someone coming out of the community college system could meet those skillsets. And I think we need to have those conversations to make sure, not that they shouldn't be continuing their education. They absolutely should. But how do we get those skillsets built into this into a K-12 plus the two year plus the four year person? >> Yeah, I love the democratization of these new skills, because again, there's no pattern matching 'cause they weren't around before, right? So you got to look at the exposure, to your point, K through 12 exposure, but then there's an exploration piece of it, whether it's community college or whatever progression, and sometimes it's nonlinear, right? I mean, people are learning different ways, combining the exposure and the exploration. That's a big topic. Can you share your view on this? Because this now opens up more doors for people, choice, you got new avenues, you got online, I can get a cloud computing degree now from Amazon and walk in and help. I can be, you know, security clearance possibly in college. So, you know, you get exposure. Is there certain things you see, is it early on? Middle school? And then obviously the exploration, those are two important concepts. Can you unpack that a little bit, exposure and exploration of skills? >> Absolutely, and I think this takes place not only in the K-12 system, but it takes place in our community colleges and our four year universities is that, that connection with those employers is such a key component, that if there's a way we could build in internships, work experiences, what we call on the job training programs, apprenticeship training, pre-apprenticeship training programs, into a design where those students at all levels are getting an exposure to the opportunities within the space and cybersecurity avenue. I think that right there alone will start to solve a problem of having 37 plus thousand openings at any one time in California. Also, I get that there's a burden on employers to do that. And I think that's a piece that we have to acknowledge, and I think that's where education can play a larger role. That's a place we at Labor Workforce Development Agency play a role with our apprenticeship training programs, our pre-apprenticeship training programs. I could go on all day of all of our training programs that we have within the state of California. Many of the list of your partners on this endeavor are partners with Employment Training Panel, which I used to be the director of the Brown administration of. That program alone does incumbent worker training. And so that also is an exposure place where a worker may be, you know, I use the old adage of sweeping the floors one day and potentially writing a large portion of the business, within years. But it's that exposure that that employee gets through training programs, and acknowledging those skill sets and where their opportunities are, is what's valid and important. I think that's where our students, we need to play a larger role than the K-12 system, really, to get that pushed out there. >> It's funny, here in California, you were the robotics clubs in high school are like a varsity sport, you're seeing kids exposed early on with programming, but it's, you know, this whole topic of cybersecurity and space intersection around workforce, and the gaps in the skills, it's not just for the young, certainly the young generation's got to be exposed to what the careers could be and what the possible jobs and societal impact and contributions, what they could be, but also it's people who are already out there. You know, you have retraining, re-skilling, this plays an important role. I know you guys do a lot of thinking on this as the undersecretary, you have to look at this because you know, you don't want to have a label "old and antiquated" systems. And a lot of them are, and they're evolving and they're being modernized by digital transformation. So what does the role of retraining and skill development for these programs play? Can you share what you guys are working on and your vision for that? >> Absolutely. That's a great question. 'Cause I think that is where we play a large role, obviously in California and with COVID-19 is we are faced with today that we've never seen before. At least in my 27 years of running programs, similar to all workforce and economic development, we are having such a large number of people displaced currently that it's unprecedented, we've got employment rates to where we are. We're really looking at how do we take, and we're also going to see industries not return to the level for which they stood at one point in time, you know, entertainment industries, restaurants, all of the alike, really looking at how do we move people from those jobs that were middle skill jobs to upper skill jobs, but the pay points maybe weren't great, potentially. And there's an opportunity for us to skill people into jobs that are there today. It may take training, obviously, but we have dollars to do that, generally, especially within our K-12 and our K-14 systems and our universities. But we really want to look at where those skillsets are at, currently. And we want to take people from that point in time where they sit today, and try to give them that exposure to your point earlier question is how do we get them exposed to a system for which there are job with means that pay well, with benefit packages, with companies that care about their employees. 'Cause that's what our goal is. >> You know, I don't know if you have some visibility on this or an opinion, but one of the observations that I've had and talk to whether it's a commercial or public sector, is that with COVID, there's been a lot of awareness of the situation. We're adequately prepared. There's some readiness, but as everyone kind of deals with it, they're also starting to think about what to do post-COVID as we come out of it, a growth strategy for a company or someone's career. People are starting to have that on the top of their minds. So I have to ask you, is there anything that you see that they say, "Okay, certain areas, maybe not doubling down on other areas, we're going to double down on because we've seen some best practices on a trajectory of value for coming out of COVID with, you know, well-armed skills or certain things." 'Cause that's what a lot of people are thinking right now. And certainly cyber is, I mean, how many jobs are open? So you got "Well that that's kind of maybe not something to double down on, here are areas we see that are working." Can you share your current visibility into that dynamic? >> Absolutely. Another great question. One of the key components that we look at at Labor Workforce Development Agency is to look at the industries in growth modes and ones that are in decline modes. Now COVID has changed that greatly. We were in a growth mode for the last seven, eight years. We saw almost every industry, minus a few, that were all in growth in one way or another, but obviously that has changed. Our landscape is completely different than we saw six, seven months ago. So today we're looking at cybersecurity, obviously with 30 plus thousand job openings, we are looking at Defense Department contractors, obviously, with federal government contracts. We are looking at the supply chains within those. We are looking at healthcare, which has always been one of obviously our large, one of our large entities that has grown over the years. But it's also changed with COVID-19. We're looking at the way protective equipment is manufactured and the way that that will continue to grow over time, we're looking at the service industry. I mean, it will come back, but it won't come back the way we've seen it probably in the past, but where are the opportunities that we develop programs that we are making sure that the skill sets of those folks are transferable to other industries. We have one of the issues that we face constantly in Labor and Workforce Development programs is understanding that over the period of time, especially in today's world, again, with technology, that people's skillsets, we don't see as in my parents' day that you worked at a job for 45 years and you retired at one job potentially. That's been gone for 25 years, but now at the pace for which we are seeing systems change, this is going to continue to amp up, and I will say, youth of today, my 12 year old nephew is in the room next door to me, in a classroom right now online. And so, you know, it's a totally different atmosphere and he's enjoying actually being at home and learning from an all online system. I would not have been able to learn that way, but I think we do see through the K through 12 system, the way we're moving, people's interests will change. And I think that they will start to see things in a different way than we have in the past. They were forced systems. We are an old system, been around since the 30s. Some even we'll say prior to the 30s, came out of the Great Depression in some ways. And that system, we have to change the way we develop our programs. It should not be constant and it should be an evolving system. >> It's interesting. A lot of the conversations between the private and public partnerships and industry, you're seeing an agile mindset where it's a growth mindset, it's also a reality-based mindset and certainly space kind of forces this conversation with cybersecurity of being faster, faster, more relevant, more modern. And you mentioned some of those points, and with COVID impact, the workforce development is certainly going to put a lot of pressure on faster learning. And then you mentioned online learning. This has become a big thing. It's not just putting education online per se. There's new touchpoints. You know, you've got apps, you've got digital. This digital transformation is also accelerating. How do you guys view the workforce development? Because it's going to be open. It's going to be evolving. There's new data coming in and maybe kids don't want to stare at a video conference. Is there some game aspect to it? Is there, how do you integrate these new things that are coming really fast, and it's happening kind of in real time in front of our eyes. So I'd love to get your thoughts on how you guys see that because it'll certainly impact their ability to compete for jobs and/or to self-learn. >> Well, I think one of the key components of California is our innovation, right? And so I think one of the things that we pride ourselves in California is around that. That said, that is the piece that I think the Silicon Valley, and then there's many areas in California that have done the same, or tried to do the same, at least in their economy is to build in innovation. And I think that's part of the K through 12 system, with our state universities and our UCs is to be able to bridge that. I think that you, we see that within universities that really instill an innovative approach to teaching, but also instill innovation within their students. I'm not sure we're there yet fully, with our K-12 system, and I think that's a place that either our community colleges could be a bridge to as well. So that's one component of workforce development I think that we look at as being a key piece. You brought up something that's really interesting to me is when you talk about agile, and one of the things that even in state government, this is going to be shocking to you, but we have not been an agile system as well. I think one of the things that the Newsom administration, Governor Newsom's administration has brought is, and when I talk about agile systems, I actually mean agile systems. We've gone from COBOL systems, which are old and clunky, still operating, but at the same time, we're looking at upgrading all of our systems in a way that even in our technology, in the state of California should be matching, the technology that our great state has within our state. So therein lies, it's also challenges of finding the qualified staff that we need in the state of California for all of our systems and servers and everything that we have currently. So, you know, not only are we looking at external users of labor workforce development, but we're looking at internal users, that the way we redevelop our systems so that we are more agile in two different ways. >> You just got me triggered with COBOL. I programmed in the 80s with COBOL, only one credit lab in college. Never touched it again, thank God. But this is the benefit of cloud computing. I think this is at the heart and this is the undertone of the conference and symposium is cloud computing, you can actually leverage existing resources, whether they're legacy systems, because they are running, they're doing a great job and they do a certain workload extremely well. Doesn't make sense to replace if it does a job. You can integrate it and that's what cloud does. This is opening up more and more capabilities and workloads. This is kind of what the space industry is pointing to when they say "We need people that can code and that can solve data problems," not just the computer scientists, but a large range of people, creative, data, science, everything. How does California's workforce solve the needs of America's space industry? This is because it's a space state. How do you see the labor workforce meeting those needs? >> Yeah, I think it's an investment. Obviously it's an investment on our part. It's an investment with our college partners. It's an investment from our K-12 system to make sure that we are allocating dollars in a way through meeting the demand of industry. And we do look at industry-specific around their needs, obviously this is a large one. We want to be very receptive, and work with our employers and our employee groups to make sure that we meet that demand. I think it's putting our money where our mouth is and designing and working with employer groups to make sure that the training meets their needs. It's also working with our employer groups to make sure that the employees are taken care of and that equity is built within the systems, that we keep people employed in California, and they're able to afford a home and they're able to afford a life here in California, but it's also again and I brought up the innovation component. I think it's building an innovation within systems for which they are employers, but are also our incoming employees and our incumbent workers. And you brought those up earlier, people that are already employed and people that are unemployed currently with a skill set that might match up is how do we bridge those folks into employment that they maybe have not thought about? We have a whole career network of systems out throughout The City of California with the America's Job Centers of California, and they will be working, and they already are working with a lot of dislocated workers. And one of the key components of that is to really look at how do we take what their current skillset might be, and then expose them to a system for which we have 37 plus thousand job openings, too, and how do we actually get those folks employed? It's paid for potentially through that local Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act funding through our America's Job Centers, to pay for some on the job training. It's to be able to pay for work experiences, it's to be able to pay for internships for students to get that opportunity with our employers and also partnering with our employers that they're paying, obviously a percentage of that too. >> You know, one of the things I've observed over my career, 54 times around the sun is, you know, in the old days, when I was in college and school, you had career, people had the longer jobs, as you mentioned it's not like that anymore. But also I knew someone I'm going to to be in line to get that job, maybe nepotism or things of that nature. Now the jobs have no historical thing or someone worked longer in a job and has more seniority. A lot of these jobs, Stewart, don't have requirements, like no one's done them before. So the ability for someone who is jumping in, either from any college, there's no real, it's all level set, it's a complete upside down script here. It's not like, "Oh, I went to school, therefore I get the job." It can be, anyone can walk into these careers because the jobs are so new. So it's not where you came from or what school you went to or your nationality or gender. The jobs have been democratized. They're not discriminating against people with skills. This opens up more. How do you see that? Because this really is an opportunity for this next generation to be more diverse and to be more contributive because diversity brings expertise and different perspectives. Your thoughts on that. >> Absolutely, and that was one of the things we welcome, obviously. We want to make sure that that everybody is treated equally and that the employers view everyone as an employer of choice, but an employee of choice as well. We've also been looking at, as I mentioned before on the COVID situation, looking at ways that folks that are maybe stuck in jobs that don't have a huge career pathway, or they don't have a pathway out of poverty. I mean, we have a lot of working poor people in the state of California that may now due to COVID lost their employment. This, you know, let's turn back to the old adage, let's turn lemons into lemonade. How do we take those folks and get them employed into jobs that do have a good career pathway? And it's not about just who you knew, or who you might have an in with to get that job. It is based on skills. I think though, that said, we need to have a better way to actually match those jobs up with those employers. And I think those are the ongoing conversations with those employer groups to make sure that, one, that they see those skill sets as valid and important. They're helping design those career sets with us so that they do match up and that we're quickly matching up those close skillsets so that we're not training people for yesterday's skills. >> I think the employer angle's super important, but also the educators as well. One of the things that was asked in another question by the guest, they said, she said, the real question to ask is, how early do you start exposing the next generation? You mentioned K through 12, do you have any data or insight into or intuition or best practice of where that insertion point is, that exposure point? Is it middle school? Is it elementary, honestly, high school, once you're in high school, you got your training wheels are off, you're off to the races, but is there a best practice? What's your thoughts, Stewart, on exposure level to these kinds of new cyber and technical careers? >> Sure, absolutely. I would say kindergarten. We, San Bernardino has a program that they've been running for a little bit of time, and they're exposing students K through 12, but really starting in kindergarten. One is the exposure to what a job looks like. And then actually I've gone down to that local area and I've had the opportunity to see, you know, second graders in a healthcare facility, basically, that they have on campus built-in. And they're going from one workstation as a second grader, looking at what those skills would be and what that job would entail from a nurse to a doctor, to a physician's assistant, and really looking at what that is. You know, obviously they're not getting the training that a doctor gets, but they are getting the exposure of what that would be. And I think that is amazing. And I think it's the right place to start. It was really interesting 'cause as I left, this was pre-COVID, but as I jumped on the plane to come back up north, I was thinking to myself, "How do we get this to all school districts in California where we see that opportunity to expose jobs and skill sets to kids throughout the system and develop those skill sets so that they do understand that they have an opportunity?" >> We are here at Cal Poly Space and Cybersecurity Symposium. We have educators, we have students, we have industry and employers and government together. What's your advice to them all watching and listening about the future of work, this workforce, what can people do? What do you think you're enabling? What can maybe the private sector help with and what are you trying to do? Can you share your thoughts on that? Because we have a range from the dorm room to the boardroom here at this event. I'd love to get your thoughts on the workforce development view of this. >> Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's the mix. I mean, I think it's going to take industry to lead, in a lot of ways in terms of understanding what their needs are and what their needs are today and what they will be tomorrow. I think it takes education to listen, and to understand, and labor and workforce development to also listen and understand what those needs will look like. And then how do we move systems? How do we move systems quickly? How do we move systems in a way that meets those needs? How do we put money into systems where the most need is, but also looking at trends? What is that trend going to look like in two years? What is that trend going to look like in five years, (indistinct), again, listening to those employers, it's also listening to the community-based organizations. I think obviously some of our best students are also linked to CBOs in one way or another. It may be for services, it may be for faith-based, it may be anything, but I think we also need to bring in the CBOs as well. A lot of outreach goes through those systems in conjunction with, but I think that's the key component is to make sure that our employers are heard and that they sit at the table, like you said, to the boardroom of understanding, and I think bringing students into that so that they get a true understanding of what that looks like as well, is a key piece of this. >> Stu, one of the things I want to bring up with you is maybe a little bit more about the research side of it, but John Markoff, who was a former New York times reporter, but author of the book, "What the Dormouse Said," it was a book about the counterculture of the 60s and the computer revolution. And really it was about how government defense spending drove the computer revolution that we now saw with Apple and PC. And then the rest is history in California, has really participated, Stanford, the Berkeley, and the University of California school system, and all the education community colleges around it. That moment, the enablement, and now you're seeing space kind of bringing that, a lot of research coming in, need a lot of billionaires putting money in, you've got employers playing a role. You have this new focus, space systems, cybersecurity defending and making it open and, not congested and peaceful, is going to enable quickly, new inflection points for opportunities. I want to get your thoughts on that because California's participated and drove those revolutions, that's created massive value. This next wave seems to be coming upon us. >> Yeah, absolutely. And again, not to use COVID again as too much of a starting point to this, but I think that is also an opportunity to actually, 'cause I think one of the things that we were seeing seven months ago was a skill shortage, and we still see the skill shortage, obviously. But I think a key piece to that is we saw a people shortage. Not only was it skill shortage, but we didn't have enough people really to fill positions in addition, too, and I think that people also felt they were already paying the bills and they were making ends meet and they didn't have the opportunities to get additional skills. This again is where we're looking at, you know, our world has changed. It changed in the 60s based on what you're just expressing in terms of California leading the way. Let's let California lead the way again in developing a system for which labor workforce development with our universities, our amazing universities and community college system structure, of how do we get students back into school? You know, a lot of graduates may already have a degree, but how do they now take a skill set that they already have and develop that further with the idea that those jobs have changed? We also have a lot of folks that don't have a degree, and that's okay, but how do we make that connection to a system that may have failed a lot of our people over the years, and our students who didn't make it through the school system, how do we develop an adult training school? How do we develop contract education through our community college system with our employer sets, that we develop cohorts within the systems of workers that have amazing talents and abilities to start to fill these needs. And I think that's the key components that here at Labor Workforce Development Agency, we work with our community colleges, our UCs and our state universities to develop and figure that piece out. And I think it is our opportunity for the future. >> That's such a great point. I want to call that out, this whole opportunity to retrain people that are out there because these are new jobs. I think that's a huge opportunity and, I hope you keep building and investing in those programs. That's really worth calling out. Thank you for doing that. And yeah, it's a great opportunity to gain these jobs. They pay well, too, cybersecurity's a good job and you don't really need to have that classical degree. You can learn pretty quickly if you're smart. So again, great call out there. A question for you on geography. You mentioned COVID, we're talking about COVID, virtualization, we're virtual with this conference. We couldn't be in person. People are learning virtually, but people are starting to relocate virtually. And so one observation that I have is the space state that California is, there's space clusters of areas where space people hang out, or space spaces and whatnot. Then you got like the tech community, the cybersecurity market, you know, Silicon Valley, you know, the talent is in these hubs. And sometimes cyber's not always in the same hubs as space. Maybe Silicon Valley has some space here, and some cyber, but that's not generally the case. This is an opportunity potentially to intersect. What's your thoughts on this? Because this is something that we're seeing, where space has historical, you know, geographies. Now with borderless communication, the work mode is not so much "You have to move to this space area." You know what I'm saying? So what's your thoughts on this? How do you guys look at, this is on your radar, and how you're viewing this dynamic. >> It's absolutely on our radar. Like you said, you know, here we are, talking virtually, and you know, 75% of all of our staff currently, in some of our departments, it's 80% of our staff, are now virtual. Seven months ago, we were not. Government, again, being slow move, we quickly transitioned, obviously, to being able to have a telework capacity. We know employers moved probably even more quickly than we did, but we see that as an opportunity for our rural areas, our Central Valley, our Northstate, Inland Empire. That you're absolutely correct. I mean, if you didn't move to a city or to a location for which these jobs were really housed, you didn't have an opportunity like you do today. I think that's a piece that we really need to work with our education partners on, to be able to see how much this has changed. Labor Agency absolutely recognizes this. We are investing funding in the Central Valley. We're investing funding in the Northstate and Inland Empire to really look at youth populations, of how the new capacity that we have today is going to be utilized for the future for employers. But we also have to engage our universities around this as well, but mostly our employers. I know that they're already very well aware. I know that a lot of our large employers within Silicon Valley have already done it. They're doing almost 100% telework policies, but the affordability to live in rural areas in California, also enables us to have a way to make products more affordable as well, potentially in the future. But we want to keep California businesses healthy and whole in California, of course. And that's another way we can expand and keep California home to our 40 plus million people. >> Well Stewart, great work and congratulations for doing such a great job. Keep it up. I got to ask you about the governor. I've been following his career since he's been in office as a political figure. He's progressive, he's cutting edge. He likes to rock the boat a little bit here and there, but he's also pragmatic. You're starting to see government workers starting to get more of a tech vibe. Just curious from your perspective, how does the governor look at, I mean, the old, I won't say "old guard," but like, you know, it used to be, you become a lawyer, you become a lawmaker. Now a tech savvy lawmaker is a premium candidate, is a premium person in government. Knowing what COBOL is, is a start. I mean, these are the things that as we transform and evolve our society, we need thinkers who can figure out which side of the streets self driving cars go on. I mean, who does that? It's a whole nother generation of thinking. How does the governor, how do you see this developing? Because this is the challenge for society. How does California lead? How do you guys talk about the leadership vision of why California and how will you lead the future? >> Absolutely. No governor that I'm aware of, and I've been around for 26, 27 years of workforce development, has led with an innovation background as this governor has, especially around technology and the use of technology. You know, he's wrote a book about the use of technology when he was lieutenant governor. And I think it's really important for him that we, as his staff are also on the leading edge of technology. I brought up agile systems earlier. When I was under the Brown administration, we had moved to where I was at the time, Employment Training Panel, we moved to an agile system and deployed that. One of the first within the state to do that and coming off of an old legacy system that was an antique. I will say it is challenging. It's challenging on a lot of levels. Mostly the skill sets that our folks have, sometimes are not open to a new agile system, to an open source system is also an issue in government. But this governor absolutely, I mean, he has established the Office of Digital Innovation, which is part of California Department of Technology, in partnership with, and that just shows how much he wants to push our limits to make sure that we are meeting the needs of Californians. But it's also looking at, you know, Silicon Valley being at the heart of our state, how do we best utilize systems that are already there? How do we better utilize the talent from those folks as well? We don't always pay as well as they do in the state, but we do have great benefit packages, everybody knows. So if anybody's looking for a job, we're always looking for technology folks as well. And so I would say that this governor absolutely leads in terms of making sure that we will be on cutting edge technology for the nation. >> And, you know, talk about pay, I mean, I know it's expensive to live in some parts of California, but there's a huge young population that wants a mission-driven job, and serving the government for the government, it's awesome. A final parting question for you, Stewart, is as you look at the workforce, a lot of people are passionate about this and it's, you know, you can't go anywhere without people saying, you know, "We've got to do education this way, and that way," there's an opinion everywhere you go. Cybersecurity, obviously a little bit peaked and focused, but there are people who are paying attention to education. So I have to ask you what creative ways can people get involved and contribute to workforce development, whether it's STEM, underrepresented minorities, people are looking for new, innovative ways to contribute. What advice would you give these people who have the passion to contribute to the next cyber workforce? >> Yeah, I appreciate that question because I think it's one of the key components that my secretary, Julie Su, secretary of Labor and Workforce Development Agency, talks about often. And a couple of us always have these conversations around one is getting people with that passion to work in government, one, or, and I brought it up community-based organizations. I think so many times that we didn't work with our CBOs to the level that in government, we should, this administration is very big on working with CBOs and philanthropy groups to make sure that the engagement of those entities are at the highest level. So I would say, students have opportunities to also engage with local CBOs and be that mission, what their values really drives them towards. And that gives them a couple of things to do, right? One is to look at ways that we're helping society in one way or another through those organizations, but it also links them to their own mission and how they can develop those skills around that. But I think the other piece to that is in a lot of these companies that you are working with and that we work with, have their own foundations. So those foundations are amazing. We work with them now, especially in the Newsom administration, more than we ever have. These foundations are really starting to help develop our strategies. My secretary works with a large number of foundations already, and we do as well in terms of strategy, really looking at how do we develop young people's attitudes towards the future, but also skills towards the future? >> Well, you got a pressure cooker of a job. I know how hard it is. I know you're working hard and appreciate what you do. And, and we wish you the best of luck, thank you for sharing this great insight on workforce development. And you guys are working hard. Thank you for what you do. Appreciate it. >> Great. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. >> This is theCUBE coverage and co-production of the Space and Cybersecurity Symposium 2020 with Cal Poly. I'm John Furrier with siliconangle.com and theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (calm music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's The Cube, covering Space and Cybersecurity Symposium 2020, hosted by Cal Poly. >> Everyone, welcome to this special virtual conference, the Space and Cybersecurity Symposium 2020 put on by Cal Poly with support from The Cube. I'm John Furey, your host and master of ceremony's got a great topic today, and this session is really the intersection of space and cybersecurity. This topic, and this conversation is a cybersecurity workforce development through public and private partnerships. And we've got a great lineup, we've Jeff Armstrong is the president of California Polytechnic State University, also known as Cal Poly. Jeffrey, thanks for jumping on and Bong Gumahad. The second, Director of C4ISR Division, and he's joining us from the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for the acquisition and sustainment of Department of Defense, DOD, and of course Steve Jacques is Executive Director, founder National Security Space Association, and managing partner at Velos. Gentlemen, thank you for joining me for this session, we've got an hour of conversation, thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> So we've got a virtual event here, we've got an hour to have a great conversation, I'd love for you guys to do an opening statement on how you see the development through public and private partnerships around cybersecurity and space, Jeff, we'll start with you. >> Well, thanks very much, John, it's great to be on with all of you. On behalf of Cal Poly, welcome everyone. Educating the workforce of tomorrow is our mission at Cal Poly, whether that means traditional undergraduates, masters students, or increasingly, mid-career professionals looking to upskill or re-skill. Our signature pedagogy is learn by doing, which means that our graduates arrive at employers, ready day one with practical skills and experience. We have long thought of ourselves as lucky to be on California's beautiful central coast, but in recent years, as we've developed closer relationships with Vandenberg Air Force Base, hopefully the future permanent headquarters of the United States Space Command with Vandenberg and other regional partners, We have discovered that our location is even more advantageous than we thought. We're just 50 miles away from Vandenberg, a little closer than UC Santa Barbara and the base represents the Southern border of what we have come to think of as the central coast region. Cal Poly and Vandenberg Air Force Base have partnered to support regional economic development, to encourage the development of a commercial space port, to advocate for the space command headquarters coming to Vandenberg and other ventures. These partnerships have been possible because both parties stand to benefit. Vandenberg, by securing new streams of revenue, workforce, and local supply chain and Cal Poly by helping to grow local jobs for graduates, internship opportunities for students and research and entrepreneurship opportunities for faculty and staff. Crucially, what's good for Vandenberg Air Force Base and for Cal Poly is also good for the central coast and the U.S., creating new head of household jobs, infrastructure, and opportunity. Our goal is that these new jobs bring more diversity and sustainability for the region. This regional economic development has taken on a life of its own, spawning a new nonprofit called REACH which coordinates development efforts from Vandenberg Air Force Base in the South to Camp Roberts in the North. Another factor that has facilitated our relationship with Vandenberg Air Force Base is that we have some of the same friends. For example, Northrop Grumman has as long been an important defense contractor and an important partner to Cal Poly, funding scholarships in facilities that have allowed us to stay current with technology in it to attract highly qualified students for whom Cal Poly's costs would otherwise be prohibitive. For almost 20 years, Northrop Grumman has funded scholarships for Cal Poly students. This year, they're funding 64 scholarships, some directly in our College of Engineering and most through our Cal Poly Scholars Program. Cal Poly scholars support both incoming freshmen and transfer students. These are especially important, 'cause it allows us to provide additional support and opportunities to a group of students who are mostly first generation, low income and underrepresented, and who otherwise might not choose to attend Cal Poly. They also allow us to recruit from partner high schools with large populations of underrepresented minority students, including the Fortune High School in Elk Grove, which we developed a deep and lasting connection. We know that the best work is done by balanced teams that include multiple and diverse perspectives. These scholarships help us achieve that goal and I'm sure you know Northrop Grumman was recently awarded a very large contract to modernize the U.S. ICBM armory with some of the work being done at Vandenberg Air Force Base, thus supporting the local economy and protecting... Protecting our efforts in space requires partnerships in the digital realm. Cal Poly has partnered with many private companies such as AWS. Our partnerships with Amazon Web Services has enabled us to train our students with next generation cloud engineering skills, in part, through our jointly created digital transformation hub. Another partnership example is among Cal Poly's California Cyber Security Institute College of Engineering and the California National Guard. This partnership is focused on preparing a cyber-ready workforce, by providing faculty and students with a hands on research and learning environment side by side with military law enforcement professionals and cyber experts. We also have a long standing partnership with PG&E most recently focused on workforce development and redevelopment. Many of our graduates do indeed go on to careers in aerospace and defense industry. As a rough approximation, more than 4,500 Cal Poly graduates list aerospace or defense as their employment sector on LinkedIn. And it's not just our engineers in computer sciences. When I was speaking to our fellow panelists not too long ago, speaking to Bong, we learned that Rachel Sims, one of our liberal arts majors is working in his office, so shout out to you, Rachel. And then finally, of course, some of our graduates soar to extraordinary heights, such as Commander Victor Glover, who will be heading to the International Space Station later this year. As I close, all of which is to say that we're deeply committed to workforce development and redevelopment, that we understand the value of public-private partnerships, and that we're eager to find new ways in which to benefit everyone from this further cooperation. So we're committed to the region, the state and the nation, in our past efforts in space, cyber security and links to our partners at, as I indicated, aerospace industry and governmental partners provides a unique position for us to move forward in the interface of space and cyber security. Thank you so much, John. >> President Armstrong, thank you very much for the comments and congratulations to Cal Poly for being on the forefront of innovation and really taking a unique, progressive view and want to tip a hat to you guys over there, thank you very much for those comments, appreciate it. Bong, Department of Defense. Exciting, you've got to defend the nation, space is global, your opening statement. >> Yes, sir, thanks John, appreciate that. Thank you everybody, I'm honored to be in this panel along with Preston Armstrong of Cal Poly and my longtime friend and colleague Steve Jacques of the National Security Space Association to discuss a very important topic of a cybersecurity workforce development as President Armstrong alluded to. I'll tell you, both of these organizations, Cal Poly and the NSSA have done and continue to do an exceptional job at finding talent, recruiting them and training current and future leaders and technical professionals that we vitally need for our nation's growing space programs, as well as our collective national security. Earlier today, during session three, I, along with my colleague, Chris Samson discussed space cyber security and how the space domain is changing the landscape of future conflicts. I discussed the rapid emergence of commercial space with the proliferation of hundreds, if not thousands of satellites, providing a variety of services including communications, allowing for global internet connectivity, as one example. Within DOD, we continued to look at how we can leverage this opportunity. I'll tell you, one of the enabling technologies, is the use of small satellites, which are inherently cheaper and perhaps more flexible than the traditional bigger systems that we have historically used and employed for DOD. Certainly not lost on me is the fact that Cal Poly pioneered CubeSats 28, 27 years ago, and they set a standard for the use of these systems today. So they saw the value and benefit gained way ahead of everybody else it seems. And Cal Poly's focus on training and education is commendable. I'm especially impressed by the efforts of another of Steven's colleague, the current CIO, Mr. Bill Britton, with his high energy push to attract the next generation of innovators. Earlier this year, I had planned on participating in this year's cyber innovation challenge in June, Oops, Cal Poly hosts California middle, and high school students, and challenge them with situations to test their cyber knowledge. I tell you, I wish I had that kind of opportunity when I was a kid, unfortunately, the pandemic changed the plan, but I truly look forward to future events such as these, to participate in. Now, I want to recognize my good friend, Steve Jacques, whom I've known for perhaps too long of a time here, over two decades or so, who was an acknowledged space expert and personally I've truly applaud him for having the foresight a few years back to form the National Security Space Association to help the entire space enterprise navigate through not only technology, but policy issues and challenges and paved the way for operationalizing space. Space, it certainly was fortifying domain, it's not a secret anymore, and while it is a unique area, it shares a lot of common traits with the other domains, such as land, air, and sea, obviously all are strategically important to the defense of the United States. In conflict, they will all be contested and therefore they all need to be defended. One domain alone will not win future conflicts, and in a joint operation, we must succeed in all. So defending space is critical, as critical as to defending our other operational domains. Funny, space is the only sanctuary available only to the government. Increasingly as I discussed in a previous session, commercial space is taking the lead in a lot of different areas, including R&D, the so-called new space. So cybersecurity threat is even more demanding and even more challenging. The U.S. considers and futhered access to and freedom to operate in space, vital to advancing security, economic prosperity and scientific knowledge of the country, thus making cyberspace an inseparable component of America's financial, social government and political life. We stood up US Space Force a year ago or so as the newest military service. Like the other services, its mission is to organize, train and equip space forces in order to protect U.S. and allied interest in space and to provide spacecape builders who joined force. Imagine combining that U.S. Space Force with the U.S. Cyber Command to unify the direction of the space and cyberspace operation, strengthen DOD capabilities and integrate and bolster a DOD cyber experience. Now, of course, to enable all of this requires a trained and professional cadre of cyber security experts, combining a good mix of policy, as well as a high technical skill set. Much like we're seeing in STEM, we need to attract more people to this growing field. Now, the DOD has recognized the importance to the cybersecurity workforce, and we have implemented policies to encourage its growth. Back in 2013, the Deputy Secretary of Defense signed a DOD Cyberspace Workforce Strategy, to create a comprehensive, well-equipped cyber security team to respond to national security concerns. Now, this strategy also created a program that encourages collaboration between the DOD and private sector employees. We call this the Cyber Information Technology Exchange program, or CITE that it's an exchange program, which is very interesting in which a private sector employee can naturally work for the DOD in a cyber security position that spans across multiple mission critical areas, important to the DOD. A key responsibility of the cyber security community is military leaders, unrelated threats, and the cyber security actions we need to have to defeat these threats. We talked about rapid acquisition, agile business processes and practices to speed up innovation, likewise, cyber security must keep up with this challenge. So cyber security needs to be right there with the challenges and changes, and this requires exceptional personnel. We need to attract talent, invest in the people now to grow a robust cybersecurity workforce for the future. I look forward to the panel discussion, John, thank you. >> Thank you so much, Bob for those comments and, you know, new challenges or new opportunities and new possibilities and freedom to operate in space is critical, thank you for those comments, looking forward to chatting further. Steve Jacques, Executive Director of NSSA, you're up, opening statement. >> Thank you, John and echoing Bongs, thanks to Cal Poly for pulling this important event together and frankly, for allowing the National Security Space Association be a part of it. Likewise, on behalf of the association, I'm delighted and honored to be on this panel of President Armstrong, along with my friend and colleague, Bong Gumahad. Something for you all to know about Bong, he spent the first 20 years of his career in the Air Force doing space programs. He then went into industry for several years and then came back into government to serve, very few people do that. So Bong, on behalf of the space community, we thank you for your lifelong devotion to service to our nation, we really appreciate that. And I also echo a Bong shout out to that guy, Bill Britton. who's been a long time co-conspirator of ours for a long time, and you're doing great work there in the cyber program at Cal Poly, Bill, keep it up. But Professor Armstrong, keep a close eye on him. (laughter) I would like to offer a little extra context to the great comments made by President Armstrong and Bong. And in our view, the timing of this conference really could not be any better. We all recently reflected again on that tragic 9/11 surprise attack on our homeland and it's an appropriate time we think to take pause. While a percentage of you in the audience here weren't even born or were babies then, for the most of us, it still feels like yesterday. And moreover, a tragedy like 9/11 has taught us a lot to include, to be more vigilant, always keep our collective eyes and ears open, to include those "eyes and ears from space," making sure nothing like this ever happens again. So this conference is a key aspect, protecting our nation requires we work in a cyber secure environment at all times. But you know, the fascinating thing about space systems is we can't see 'em. Now sure, we see space launches, man, there's nothing more invigorating than that. But after launch they become invisible, so what are they really doing up there? What are they doing to enable our quality of life in the United States and in the world? Well to illustrate, I'd like to paraphrase elements of an article in Forbes magazine, by Bongs and my good friend, Chuck Beames, Chuck is a space guy, actually had Bongs job a few years in the Pentagon. He's now Chairman and Chief Strategy Officer at York Space Systems and in his spare time, he's Chairman of the Small Satellites. Chuck speaks in words that everyone can understand, so I'd like to give you some of his words out of his article, paraphrase somewhat, so these are Chuck's words. "Let's talk about average Joe and plain Jane. "Before heading to the airport for a business trip "to New York city, Joe checks the weather forecast, "informed by NOAA's weather satellites, "to see what to pack for the trip. "He then calls an Uber, that space app everybody uses, "it matches riders with drivers via GPS, "to take him to the airport. "So Joe has launched in the airport, "unbeknownst to him, his organic lunch is made "with the help of precision farming "made possible to optimize the irrigation and fertilization "with remote spectral sensing coming from space and GPS. "On the plane, the pilot navigates around weather, "aided by GPS and NOAA's weather satellites "and Joe makes his meeting on time "to join his New York colleagues in a video call "with a key customer in Singapore, "made possible by telecommunication satellites. "En route to his next meeting, "Joe receives notice changing the location of the meeting "to the other side of town. "So he calmly tells Siri to adjust the destination "and his satellite-guided Google maps redirect him "to the new location. "That evening, Joe watches the news broadcast via satellite, "report details of meeting among world leaders, "discussing the developing crisis in Syria. "As it turns out various forms of "'remotely sensed information' collected from satellites "indicate that yet another banned chemical weapon "may have been used on its own people. "Before going to bed, Joe decides to call his parents "and congratulate them for their wedding anniversary "as they cruise across the Atlantic, "made possible again by communication satellites "and Joe's parents can enjoy the call "without even wondering how it happened. "The next morning back home, "Joe's wife, Jane is involved in a car accident. "Her vehicle skids off the road, she's knocked unconscious, "but because of her satellite equipped OnStar system, "the crash is detected immediately, "and first responders show up on the scene in time. "Joe receives the news, books an early trip home, "sends flowers to his wife "as he orders another Uber to the airport. "Over that 24 hours, "Joe and Jane used space system applications "for nearly every part of their day. "Imagine the consequences if at any point "they were somehow denied these services, "whether they be by natural causes or a foreign hostility. "In each of these satellite applications used in this case, "were initially developed for military purposes "and continued to be, but also have remarkable application "on our way of life, just many people just don't know that." So ladies and gentlemen, now you know, thanks to Chuck Beames. Well, the United States has a proud heritage of being the world's leading space-faring nation. Dating back to the Eisenhower and Kennedy years, today, we have mature and robust systems operating from space, providing overhead reconnaissance to "watch and listen," provide missile warning, communications, positioning, navigation, and timing from our GPS system, much of which you heard in Lieutenant General JT Thomson's earlier speech. These systems are not only integral to our national security, but also to our quality of life. As Chuck told us, we simply no longer can live without these systems as a nation and for that matter, as a world. But over the years, adversaries like China, Russia and other countries have come to realize the value of space systems and are aggressively playing catch up while also pursuing capabilities that will challenge our systems. As many of you know, in 2007, China demonstrated its ASAT system by actually shooting down one of its own satellites and has been aggressively developing counterspace systems to disrupt ours. So in a heavily congested space environment, our systems are now being contested like never before and will continue to be. Well, as a Bong mentioned, the United States have responded to these changing threats. In addition to adding ways to protect our system, the administration and the Congress recently created the United States Space Force and the operational United States Space Command, the latter of which you heard President Armstrong and other Californians hope is going to be located at Vandenberg Air Force Base. Combined with our intelligence community, today we have focused military and civilian leadership now in space, and that's a very, very good thing. Commensurately on the industry side, we did create the National Security Space Association, devoted solely to supporting the National Security Space Enterprise. We're based here in the DC area, but we have arms and legs across the country and we are loaded with extraordinary talent in scores of former government executives. So NSSA is joined at the hip with our government customers to serve and to support. We're busy with a multitude of activities underway, ranging from a number of thought-provoking policy papers, our recurring spacetime webcasts, supporting Congress's space power caucus, and other main serious efforts. Check us out at nssaspace.org. One of our strategic priorities and central to today's events is to actively promote and nurture the workforce development, just like Cal-Poly. We will work with our U.S. government customers, industry leaders, and academia to attract and recruit students to join the space world, whether in government or industry, and to assist in mentoring and training as their careers progress. On that point, we're delighted to be working with Cal Poly as we hopefully will undertake a new pilot program with them very soon. So students stay tuned, something I can tell you, space is really cool. While our nation's satellite systems are technical and complex, our nation's government and industry workforce is highly diverse, with a combination of engineers, physicists and mathematicians, but also with a large non-technical expertise as well. Think about how government gets these systems designed, manufactured, launching into orbit and operating. They do this via contracts with our aerospace industry, requiring talents across the board, from cost estimating, cost analysis, budgeting, procurement, legal, and many other support tasks that are integral to the mission. Many thousands of people work in the space workforce, tens of billions of dollars every year. This is really cool stuff and no matter what your education background, a great career to be part of. In summary, as Bong had mentioned as well, there's a great deal of exciting challenges ahead. We will see a new renaissance in space in the years ahead and in some cases it's already begun. Billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Sir Richard Branson, are in the game, stimulating new ideas and business models. Other private investors and startup companies, space companies are now coming in from all angles. The exponential advancement of technology and micro electronics now allows a potential for a plethora of small sat systems to possibly replace older satellites, the size of a Greyhound bus. It's getting better by the day and central to this conference, cybersecurity is paramount to our nation's critical infrastructure in space. So once again, thanks very much and I look forward to the further conversation. >> Steve, thank you very much. Space is cool, it's relevant, but it's important as you pointed out in your awesome story about how it impacts our life every day so I really appreciate that great story I'm glad you took the time to share that. You forgot the part about the drone coming over in the crime scene and, you know, mapping it out for you, but we'll add that to the story later, great stuff. My first question is, let's get into the conversations, because I think this is super important. President Armstrong, I'd like you to talk about some of the points that was teased out by Bong and Steve. One in particular is the comment around how military research was important in developing all these capabilities, which is impacting all of our lives through that story. It was the military research that has enabled a generation and generation of value for consumers. This is kind of this workforce conversation, there are opportunities now with research and grants, and this is a funding of innovation that is highly accelerated, it's happening very quickly. Can you comment on how research and the partnerships to get that funding into the universities is critical? >> Yeah, I really appreciate that and appreciate the comments of my colleagues. And it really boils down to me to partnerships, public-private partnerships, you have mentioned Northrop Grumman, but we have partnerships with Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, Space X, JPL, also member of an organization called Business Higher Education Forum, which brings together university presidents and CEOs of companies. There's been focused on cybersecurity and data science and I hope that we can spill into cybersecurity and space. But those partnerships in the past have really brought a lot forward. At Cal Poly, as mentioned, we've been involved with CubeSat, we've have some secure work, and we want to plan to do more of that in the future. Those partnerships are essential, not only for getting the R&D done, but also the students, the faculty, whether they're master's or undergraduate can be involved with that work, they get that real life experience, whether it's on campus or virtually now during COVID or at the location with the partner, whether it may be governmental or industry, and then they're even better equipped to hit the ground running. And of course we'd love to see more of our students graduate with clearance so that they could do some of that secure work as well. So these partnerships are absolutely critical and it's also in the context of trying to bring the best and the brightest in all demographics of California and the U.S. into this field, to really be successful. So these partnerships are essential and our goal is to grow them just like I know our other colleagues in the CSU and the UC are planning to do. >> You know, just as my age I've seen, I grew up in the eighties and in college and they're in that system's generation and the generation before me, they really kind of pioneered the space that spawned the computer revolution. I mean, you look at these key inflection points in our lives, they were really funded through these kinds of real deep research. Bong, talk about that because, you know, we're living in an age of cloud and Bezos was mentioned, Elon Musk, Sir Richard Branson, you got new ideas coming in from the outside, you have an accelerated clock now in terms of the innovation cycles and so you got to react differently, you guys have programs to go outside of the defense department, how important is this because the workforce that are in schools and/or folks re-skilling are out there and you've been on both sides of the table, so share your thoughts. >> No, thanks Johnny, thanks for the opportunity to respond to, and that's what, you know, you hit on the nose back in the 80's, R&D and space especially was dominated by government funding, contracts and so on, but things have changed as Steve pointed out, allow these commercial entities funded by billionaires are coming out of the woodwork, funding R&D so they're taking the lead, so what we can do within the DOD in government is truly take advantage of the work they've done. And since they're, you know, paving the way to new approaches and new way of doing things and I think we can certainly learn from that and leverage off of that, saves us money from an R&D standpoint, while benefiting from the product that they deliver. You know, within DOD, talking about workforce development, you know, we have prioritized and we have policies now to attract and retain the talent we need. I had the folks do some research and it looks like from a cybersecurity or workforce standpoint, a recent study done, I think last year in 2019, found that the cyber security workforce gap in U.S. is nearing half a million people, even though it is a growing industry. So the pipeline needs to be strengthened, getting people through, you know, starting young and through college, like Professor Armstrong indicated because we're going to need them to be in place, you know, in a period of about maybe a decade or so. On top of that, of course, is the continuing issue we have with the gap with STEM students. We can't afford not have expertise in place to support all the things we're doing within DoD, not only DoD but the commercial side as well, thank you. >> How's the gap get filled, I mean, this is, again, you've got cybersecurity, I mean, with space it's a whole other kind of surface area if you will, it's not really surface area, but it is an IOT device if you think about it, but it does have the same challenges, that's kind of current and progressive with cybersecurity. Where's the gap get filled, Steve or President Armstrong, I mean, how do you solve the problem and address this gap in the workforce? What are some solutions and what approaches do we need to put in place? >> Steve, go ahead., I'll follow up. >> Okay, thanks, I'll let you correct me. (laughter) It's a really good question, and the way I would approach it is to focus on it holistically and to acknowledge it upfront and it comes with our teaching, et cetera, across the board. And from an industry perspective, I mean, we see it, we've got to have secure systems in everything we do, and promoting this and getting students at early ages and mentoring them and throwing internships at them is so paramount to the whole cycle. And that's kind of, it really takes a focused attention and we continue to use the word focus from an NSSA perspective. We know the challenges that are out there. There are such talented people in the workforce, on the government side, but not nearly enough of them and likewise on the industry side, we could use more as well, but when you get down to it, you know, we can connect dots, you know, the aspects that Professor Armstrong talked about earlier to where you continue to work partnerships as much as you possibly can. We hope to be a part of that network, that ecosystem if you will, of taking common objectives and working together to kind of make these things happen and to bring the power, not just of one or two companies, but of our entire membership thereabout. >> President Armstrong-- >> Yeah, I would also add it again, it's back to the partnerships that I talked about earlier, one of our partners is high schools and schools Fortune, Margaret Fortune, who worked in a couple of administrations in California across party lines and education, their fifth graders all visit Cal Poly, and visit our learned-by-doing lab. And you've got to get students interested in STEM at an early age. We also need the partnerships, the scholarships, the financial aid, so the students can graduate with minimal to no debt to really hit the ground running and that's exacerbated and really stress now with this COVID induced recession. California supports higher education at a higher rate than most states in the nation, but that has brought this year for reasons all understand due to COVID. And so our partnerships, our creativity, and making sure that we help those that need the most help financially, that's really key because the gaps are huge. As my colleagues indicated, you know, half a million jobs and I need you to look at the students that are in the pipeline, we've got to enhance that. And the placement rates are amazing once the students get to a place like Cal Poly or some of our other amazing CSU and UC campuses, placement rates are like 94%. Many of our engineers, they have jobs lined up a year before they graduate. So it's just going to take a key partnerships working together and that continued partnership with government local, of course, our state, the CSU, and partners like we have here today, both Steve and Bong so partnerships is the thing. >> You know, that's a great point-- >> I could add, >> Okay go ahead. >> All right, you know, the collaboration with universities is one that we put on lot of emphasis here, and it may not be well known fact, but just an example of national security, the AUC is a national centers of academic excellence in cyber defense works with over 270 colleges and universities across the United States to educate and certify future cyber first responders as an example. So that's vibrant and healthy and something that we ought to take advantage of. >> Well, I got the brain trust here on this topic. I want to get your thoughts on this one point, 'cause I'd like to define, you know, what is a public-private partnership because the theme that's coming out of the symposium is the script has been flipped, it's a modern era, things are accelerated, you've got security, so you've got all of these things kind of happenning it's a modern approach and you're seeing a digital transformation play out all over the world in business and in the public sector. So what is a modern public-private partnership and what does it look like today because people are learning differently. COVID has pointed out, which is that we're seeing right now, how people, the progressions of knowledge and learning, truth, it's all changing. How do you guys view the modern version of public-private partnership and some examples and some proof points, can you guys share that? We'll start with you, Professor Armstrong. >> Yeah, as I indicated earlier, we've had, and I could give other examples, but Northrop Grumman, they helped us with a cyber lab many years ago that is maintained directly, the software, the connection outside it's its own unit so the students can learn to hack, they can learn to penetrate defenses and I know that that has already had some considerations of space, but that's a benefit to both parties. So a good public-private partnership has benefits to both entities and the common factor for universities with a lot of these partnerships is the talent. The talent that is needed, what we've been working on for years of, you know, the undergraduate or master's or PhD programs, but now it's also spilling into upskilling and reskilling, as jobs, you know, folks who are in jobs today that didn't exist two years, three years, five years ago, but it also spills into other aspects that can expand even more. We're very fortunate we have land, there's opportunities, we have ONE Tech project. We are expanding our tech park, I think we'll see opportunities for that and it'll be adjusted due to the virtual world that we're all learning more and more about it, which we were in before COVID. But I also think that that person to person is going to be important, I want to make sure that I'm driving across a bridge or that satellite's being launched by the engineer that's had at least some in person training to do that in that experience, especially as a first time freshman coming on campus, getting that experience, expanding it as an adult, and we're going to need those public-private partnerships in order to continue to fund those at a level that is at the excellence we need for these STEM and engineering fields. >> It's interesting people and technology can work together and these partnerships are the new way. Bongs too with reaction to the modern version of what a public successful private partnership looks like. >> If I could jump in John, I think, you know, historically DOD's had a high bar to overcome if you will, in terms of getting rapid... pulling in new companies, miss the fall if you will, and not rely heavily on the usual suspects, of vendors and the like, and I think the DOD has done a good job over the last couple of years of trying to reduce that burden and working with us, you know, the Air Force, I think they're pioneering this idea around pitch days, where companies come in, do a two-hour pitch and immediately notified of, you know, of an a award, without having to wait a long time to get feedback on the quality of the product and so on. So I think we're trying to do our best to strengthen that partnership with companies outside of the main group of people that we typically use. >> Steve, any reaction, any comment to add? >> Yeah, I would add a couple and these are very excellent thoughts. It's about taking a little gamble by coming out of your comfort zone, you know, the world that Bong and I, Bong lives in and I used to live in the past, has been quite structured. It's really about, we know what the threat is, we need to go fix it, we'll design as if as we go make it happen, we'll fly it. Life is so much more complicated than that and so it's really, to me, I mean, you take an example of the pitch days of Bong talks about, I think taking a gamble by attempting to just do a lot of pilot programs, work the trust factor between government folks and the industry folks and academia, because we are all in this together in a lot of ways. For example, I mean, we just sent a paper to the white house at their request about, you know, what would we do from a workforce development perspective and we hope to embellish on this over time once the initiative matures, but we have a piece of it for example, is a thing we call "clear for success," getting back to president Armstrong's comments so at a collegiate level, you know, high, high, high quality folks are in high demand. So why don't we put together a program that grabs kids in their underclass years, identifies folks that are interested in doing something like this, get them scholarships, have a job waiting for them that they're contracted for before they graduate, and when they graduate, they walk with an SCI clearance. We believe that can be done, so that's an example of ways in which public-private partnerships can happen to where you now have a talented kid ready to go on day one. We think those kinds of things can happen, it just gets back down to being focused on specific initiatives, giving them a chance and run as many pilot programs as you can, like pitch days. >> That's a great point, it's a good segue. Go ahead, President Armstrong. >> I just want to jump in and echo both the Bong and Steve's comments, but Steve that, you know, your point of, you know our graduates, we consider them ready day one, well they need to be ready day one and ready to go secure. We totally support that and love to follow up offline with you on that. That's exciting and needed, very much needed more of it, some of it's happening, but we certainly have been thinking a lot about that and making some plans. >> And that's a great example, a good segue. My next question is kind of re-imagining these workflows is kind of breaking down the old way and bringing in kind of the new way, accelerate all kinds of new things. There are creative ways to address this workforce issue and this is the next topic, how can we employ new creative solutions because let's face it, you know, it's not the days of get your engineering degree and go interview for a job and then get slotted in and get the intern, you know, the programs and you'd matriculate through the system. This is multiple disciplines, cybersecurity points at that. You could be smart in math and have a degree in anthropology and be one of the best cyber talents on the planet. So this is a new, new world, what are some creative approaches that's going to work for you? >> Alright, good job, one of the things, I think that's a challenge to us is, you know, somehow we got me working for, with the government, sexy right? You know, part of the challenge we have is attracting the right level of skill sets and personnel but, you know, we're competing, oftentimes, with the commercial side, the gaming industry as examples is a big deal. And those are the same talents we need to support a lot of the programs that we have in DOD. So somehow we have do a better job to Steve's point about making the work within DOD, within the government, something that they would be interested early on. So attract them early, you know, I could not talk about Cal Poly's challenge program that they were going to have in June inviting high school kids really excited about the whole idea of space and cyber security and so on. Those are some of the things that I think we have to do and continue to do over the course of the next several years. >> Awesome, any other creative approaches that you guys see working or might be an idea, or just to kind of stoke the ideation out there? Internships, obviously internships are known, but like, there's got to be new ways. >> Alright, I think you can take what Steve was talking about earlier, getting students in high school and aligning them sometimes at first internship, not just between the freshman and sophomore year, but before they enter Cal Poly per se and they're involved. So I think that's absolutely key, getting them involved in many other ways. We have an example of upskilling or work redevelopment here in the central coast, PG&E Diablo nuclear plant that is going to decommission in around 2024. And so we have a ongoing partnership to work and reposition those employees for the future. So that's, you know, engineering and beyond but think about that just in the manner that you were talking about. So the upskilling and reskilling, and I think that's where, you know, we were talking about that Purdue University, other California universities have been dealing with online programs before COVID, and now with COVID so many more Faculty were pushed into that area, there's going to be a much more going and talk about workforce development in upskilling and reskilling, the amount of training and education of our faculty across the country in virtual and delivery has been huge. So there's always a silver linings in the cloud. >> I want to get your guys' thoughts on one final question as we end the segment, and we've seen on the commercial side with cloud computing on these highly accelerated environments where, you know, SAS business model subscription, and that's on the business side, but one of the things that's clear in this trend is technology and people work together and technology augments the people components. So I'd love to get your thoughts as we look at a world now, we're living in COVID, and Cal Poly, you guys have remote learning right now, it's at the infancy, it's a whole new disruption, if you will, but also an opportunity enable new ways to encollaborate, So if you look at people and technology, can you guys share your view and vision on how communities can be developed, how these digital technologies and people can work together faster to get to the truth or make a discovery, hire, develop the workforce, these are opportunities, how do you guys view this new digital transformation? >> Well, I think there's huge opportunities and just what we're doing with this symposium, we're filming this on Monday and it's going to stream live and then the three of us, the four of us can participate and chat with participants while it's going on. That's amazing and I appreciate you, John, you bringing that to this symposium. I think there's more and more that we can do. From a Cal Poly perspective, with our pedagogy so, you know, linked to learn by doing in-person will always be important to us, but we see virtual, we see partnerships like this, can expand and enhance our ability and minimize the in-person time, decrease the time to degree, enhance graduation rate, eliminate opportunity gaps for students that don't have the same advantages. So I think the technological aspect of this is tremendous. Then on the upskilling and reskilling, where employees are all over, they can re be reached virtually, and then maybe they come to a location or really advanced technology allows them to get hands on virtually, or they come to that location and get it in a hybrid format. So I'm very excited about the future and what we can do, and it's going to be different with every university, with every partnership. It's one size does not fit all, There's so many possibilities, Bong, I can almost imagine that social network that has a verified, you know, secure clearance. I can jump in, and have a little cloak of secrecy and collaborate with the DOD possibly in the future. But these are the kind of crazy ideas that are needed, your thoughts on this whole digital transformation cross-pollination. >> I think technology is going to be revolutionary here, John, you know, we're focusing lately on what we call visual engineering to quicken the pace of the delivery capability to warfighter as an example, I think AI, Machine Language, all that's going to have a major play in how we operate in the future. We're embracing 5G technologies, and the ability for zero latency, more IOT, more automation of the supply chain, that sort of thing, I think the future ahead of us is very encouraging, I think it's going to do a lot for national defense, and certainly the security of the country. >> Steve, your final thoughts, space systems are systems, and they're connected to other systems that are connected to people, your thoughts on this digital transformation opportunity. >> Such a great question and such a fun, great challenge ahead of us. Echoing my colleagues sentiments, I would add to it, you know, a lot of this has, I think we should do some focusing on campaigning so that people can feel comfortable to include the Congress to do things a little bit differently. You know, we're not attuned to doing things fast, but the dramatic, you know, the way technology is just going like crazy right now, I think it ties back to, hoping to convince some of our senior leaders and what I call both sides of the Potomac river, that it's worth taking this gamble, we do need to take some of these things you know, in a very proactive way. And I'm very confident and excited and comfortable that this is going to be a great time ahead and all for the better. >> You know, I always think of myself when I talk about DC 'cause I'm not a lawyer and I'm not a political person, but I always say less lawyers, more techies than in Congress and Senate, so (laughter)I always get in trouble when I say that. Sorry, President Armstrong, go ahead. >> Yeah, no, just one other point and Steve's alluded to this and Bong did as well, I mean, we've got to be less risk averse in these partnerships, that doesn't mean reckless, but we have to be less risk averse. And also, as you talk about technology, I have to reflect on something that happened and you both talked a bit about Bill Britton and his impact on Cal Poly and what we're doing. But we were faced a few years ago of replacing traditional data, a data warehouse, data storage, data center and we partnered with AWS and thank goodness, we had that in progress and it enhanced our bandwidth on our campus before COVID hit, and with this partnership with the digital transformation hub, so there's a great example where we had that going. That's not something we could have started, "Oh COVID hit, let's flip that switch." And so we have to be proactive and we also have to not be risk-averse and do some things differently. That has really salvaged the experience for our students right now, as things are flowing well. We only have about 12% of our courses in person, those essential courses and I'm just grateful for those partnerships that I have talked about today. >> And it's a shining example of how being agile, continuous operations, these are themes that expand the space and the next workforce needs to be built. Gentlemen, thank you very much for sharing your insights, I know Bong, you're going to go into the defense side of space in your other sessions. Thank you gentlemen, for your time, for a great session, I appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Thank you gentlemen. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, thank you all. I'm John Furey with The Cube here in Palo Alto, California covering and hosting with Cal Poly, the Space and Cybersecurity Symposium 2020, thanks for watching. (bright atmospheric music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Commvault Future Ready 2020 brought to you by Commvault. >> Hi and welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Commvault Future Ready. I'm Stu Miniman and I'm joined by David Vellante here. Of course, we just had the keynote for Commvault Future Ready, Sanjay Mirchandani, CEO. Dave, he's been there a little bit over a year. We've been watching the transformation of Commvault as they are trying to go much deeper in the cloud. Of course, the space, data protection overall, backup and recovery, been a super hot one. Especially, if you talk about everybody accelerating what they're doing with the cloud, Dave, from an end user standpoint, as well as for Commvault. So why don't we start with the company first, as I said, the move to subscription, the move to cloud, a lot of change needed, and that's one of the reasons they brought Sanjay into the company. Of course, he'd been at Puppet before that, he was the CIO of EMC before that. So Dave, tell us your thoughts lately on Commvault. >> Okay, so Commvault, obviously Stu, has been around for a long, long time, and it's kind of a diversified player in the data protection space. I've always felt like they've had a more diversified sort of vision and portfolio. Sanjay took over, what was it February last year, right? So he kind of came in and inherited a company in transition. And transitioning from what has largely been a legacy sort of on-prem, perpetual software licensed business to now one that's transferring into a subscription based model, obviously a large maintenance base. I think about 60% of their revenues comes from services, and most of that is maintenance, okay? So he's inherited that, and then they're going into a subscription model. So that's going to hit the income statement, and then boom COVID hits. So Sanjay is getting it all from all sides, but Commvault is a 670, roughly, million dollar company on a trailing 12 month basis. And the market cap's in the 1.7, 1.8 range, so they trade at about 2.7 times revenue. So that's much better than a hardware company, but it should be better than that as a software company. So the challenge that he has is, okay, how do we get the company growing again? How do we transition to that subscription based model? The good news on Commvault is their balance sheet is tremendous. I mean, they have no debt, no debt. I mean, several hundred million dollars in cash, over 300 million and zero debt, which kind of interesting to me, Stu. Because many companies during this COVID pandemic have tapped the credit markets, Commvault has chosen not to. Maybe they should right now with such low interest rates, and maybe that can help get the growth engine going. But I think they're very conservative in that standpoint and obviously very proud of their balance sheet, but with the likes of Cohesity and Rubrik, and I know we're going to talk about that pouring money into the market, trying to attack them, and we'll talk more about their position relative to those guys, you might like to see 'em raise a little bit of money or take on some debt and really go after some of those opportunities that you referred to upfront, it is a hot market. >> Yeah, well, Dave, you talk about some of the newer entrants raised just insane amounts of money when you talk about that space. Not only Cohesity and Rubrik, but also talked about Veem. Of course, we've watched Veem go from a change in ownership and how much money they have. And from a revenue standpoint, Veem actually might be bigger than Commvault at this point, I believe, right? >> Yeah, I think so. I mean, they're billion dollar bookings, they say. I mean, I believe it, but they're a privately held company. Commvault, we can tell actually what their numbers are. Guaranteed Cohesity and Rubrik are losing money. So their cost of acquiring a customer is huge. Commvault is, let's face it, it's servicing its install base, and it's mining that. And that's why it's, it's cashflow positive. I mean, it's a very healthy company financially. The challenge that, again, Sanjay has is how do you get growth? They're a company, as I said earlier, in transition. Let me share with you, if I may, some data from our friends at ETR. What we're showing here is the fundamental methodology of ETR, which is that net score, Stu. We talk about that all the time, ETR is, as I say, our data partner, Enterprise Technology Research. Every quarter, they go out and they say, "Based for each company and their various segments, "are you adopting new?" That's the lime green, that's the 2%. "Are you increasing spending?" That's the 30%, and this is from the July survey so this is relative to the first half. "Are you flat?" You can see that fat middle 56%, and then you can see decrease is 7% and that's in the pink, and then 5% replacing. So good news here is more people are spending more, more customers spending more, than are spending less. Net score's the red subtracted from the green, so it comes out at roughly 20%, which is that's certainly not terrible. It's a legacy company that's been around a long time. So you would see a company that's a newbie, that's hot. We'd always talked about UI path automation anywhere, Snowflake, they're in the 70% range, but they're much, much smaller companies but they're growing very, very rapidly. So this is respectable and very common for a company that has been around as long as Commvault. >> Yeah, thanks so much for sharing that data, Dave. Of course, as you said, huge customer base, they've been around for awhile. I remember when we first did Commvault GO two years ago, very excited, very engaged user base. There was a good strategy discussion and an understanding for what Commvault needed to do to get to the cloud, but there was an understanding that they couldn't keep doing with the same team what had brought them to the place before. You always say, Dave, what got you to where you were isn't going to get you to where you need to go. Talk a little bit about the keynote. Last year at Commvault there were a couple of big pieces. Number one, is they really had their first SaaS offering with Metallic. And what the momentum has been on Metallic is, first of all, they made a big partnership announcement with Microsoft ahead of this event. Multi-year, Metallic has a few different solutions. One of them, of course, is to work on Office 365, so when we go to SaaS and we go to the cloud, we understand that data protection isn't something that just comes inherently. Some people thought, "Oh hey, I did it "in my own data center, but once I go to the cloud, well, "I'm sure it just takes care of things "like data protection and security." The answer is I still need to think about it, and the ecosystem has helped filling that gap. So Metallic was the first step and what we saw, Dave, really looks like a holistic refresh of the product line. Commvault back in recovery, Commvault disaster recovery, Commvault complete data protection, all aligning themselves to be more to what you were talking about, going to that full ratable model, and the other piece was Hedvig. So Hedvig software company, helping them to be in more cloud-native environments. And they launched a Hedvig X, so it's the full integration of that solution. Less than a year from the acquisition to fully integrating it and making it an offering that's ready for what they're doing. >> Is that they're cloud play? Actually Hedvig is sort of in that space, right? As with cloud you think subscription, but also Commvault is basically putting its stack in the cloud, right? And taking advantage of cloud services, right? >> Yeah, absolutely, Dave. Metallic, specifically is built for the cloud. >> So let's talk a little bit about cloud, I have some other data here. And the cloud, if you pull up that next slide, the cloud has been eating away at on-prem vendors. We know it's been growing at 2000, 3000 basis points higher than the on-prem business. But what this slide shows is that same net score methodology that we talked about before, but it's filtering, you can see in the left hand side here, it's filtering on AWS, Google and Microsoft. So there's 585, AWS, Google and Microsoft customers in the ETR dataset. There's like about 1200 in the overall survey this quarter. And this shows the over time the net score of Commvault in those accounts, so you can see, as I was saying, go back to 2018, you can see prior to Sanjay taking over this thing was dipping and dipping, losing momentum coming into kind of the April survey and then July survey of 2019, and it's kind of bouncing off the bottom now. So it seems like they're making some progress there, and what we want to see is that momentum continue to grow. Again, net score is a measure of spending velocity. So what you want to see is as that transition occurs more sort of a net score increases over each quarter. >> Yeah, well, Dave as you mentioned earlier, there absolutely are some headwinds potentially there, but it looks like Sanjay, at least, has stopped some of the bleeding on this and, stated goal of course, to return to growth. And so we would want to see that go from just up one or 2% to be able to track with the cloud. Probably a good time for us to talk a little bit about the competition, Dave, because if you talk just in cloud markets, are you tracking along with the cloud? So the hyperscales themselves, of course, growing at very huge percent. A company that's been around as long as Veritas isn't necessarily going to be doing 35 to 70% growth as you would see from AWS or Azure. But what do you see out there for some of the competition in general, who were some of the key players that we need to look at? >> Yeah, so I mean, think about the backup guys. I mean, the traditional space, you've mentioned Veritas. Veritas, by the way, in the ETR survey data is not playing well, they're in the red. They've been losing share, the share donors, as they say, you've got some big players, Dell EMC, obviously, kind of living off the data domain base. Remember Dell EMC fell behind, prior to the Dell acquisition, they weren't investing heavily in the data protection business. They were kind of living milking off that data domain base. Back when you were there, they had the networker and they had Avamar, and so there was a bifurcated thing. Frank Slootman came and he tried to clean some of that up, but then he was onto his next big thing, of course, it was ServiceNow. And so, you know, Dell is a big footprint, obviously, but they're very hardware centric, as you know, so they have a big hardware agenda. IBM with Spectrum Protect, Veem was hurting them. They did the deal with Catalogic to kind of stop the bleeding, he kind of did. Again, big install base, and then you got the sort of newcomers. Veem is not really a newcomer anymore. I think they've been around for 15 years, big acquisition. Decent momentum in the market, especially started the Microsoft base, and they're kind of everywhere, so you see them. And of course you see Cohesity and Rubrik spend a lot of money, as you said. And it's interesting, let me pull up this next data point. In the ETR data set this past quarter you saw Cohesity actually overtake Rubrik. Rubrik was very, very strong earlier on. They're kind of neck and neck in this chart, what this chart shows is not net score, it's now market share. Now market shares, not real market shares, Stu. I have to be cautious here because it's not like IDC tracks market share. What it is is pervasiveness in the dataset. So in other words, within this segment, the number of mentions of the vendor divided by the total mentions in the segment, okay? So it's really pervasiveness or presence in the data set. And what this shows is you can see we've got 65 Commvault customers in the survey, and it shows the impact of Veem, Rubrik and Cohesity in the Commvault base. And you can see up through, let's see, that's the recent surveys is you see the increases up to the increasing red line is Veem, and then you got the Rubrik line and then the Cohesity line, but they're all recently, since the October 19th survey, down, trending down. So that says to me that Commvault is holding serve within its own base and actually doing better as these guys are declining in this base. You can see the comment that ETR made, "Rubrik, Cohesity and Veeam are all seeing "market share declines in shared accounts with Commvault," so that's good news. I think this is very important, Stu, and here's why. Is Commvault has got to hunker down and maintain those customers. It does not want to be a share donor much in the same way that Veritas has been. So that's a quick scan of the competitive marketplace. And again, from my standpoint, I'd like to see Sanjay maybe get a little bit more aggressive. I liked the acquisitions. Hedvig, it's great, deal with actually some more subscription, but I'd like to see them go hard after a cloud native. I have to dig into that, maybe you can comment, but really cloud native and multicloud across clouds being able to have that same experience on-prem as I do in the clouds at very high performance, very low latency. >> Yeah. Well, Dave, first of all, one thing, talk about the competitive win rate. That's something you always look at is how are you doing against the competitors? Not only did Sanjay come in, but you saw changes along how the channel chief, I believe, and the salespeople. So definitely reinvigorating that piece of it, as well as, Dave we saw, in the keynote. So the portfolio is updated, an aggressive engineering investment, some through acquisition, some through changing the code and moving in these environments, leveraging partnerships, great to see the Microsoft one, love to see something along the lines of Google. We understand Amazon, you play in that ecosystem, it is challenging to necessarily partner deeply with AWS, unless you're one of a few strong players in the marketplace, but working closer in cloud. And Dave, one thing I'd point out, last year, one of the things that really impressed me at Commvault GO is they did have some good developer actions. So when you talk about cloud native, of course, enabling developers is one of the key things. Like many companies out there, inside the company you've got developers, so how are you unleashing that? So Hedvig, a good acquisition along those lines, but you know, in the middle of the show floor, they had people that you set up with whiteboards and just go at it. So, you know, reminds me of days past when you used to have these engineering-driven shows where you could go in and really understand that. So helping to developers, enable them, backup and recovery just needs to tie into all my DevOps and IT Ops and all my other environments to make things just more automated because also you talk cloud native, Dave, automation has to be a big piece of it. And to your point, we actually have really good guests coming on the program. Not only will we have Sanjay, relatively fresh off the keynote, I've got a panel with the product people to really dig in and understand that. We'll poke and prod at some of the cloud native pieces and understand where that's going, got their head of strategy also on the program. >> Yes, I think you're making a great point about automation. Just speaking about M&A for a moment, I like M&A, I like growth through M&A, I'm comfortable with that as long as it fits into the portfolio. Your point about automation, I see opportunities there for M&A, things like visibility, observability, obviously hot analytics, automated operations, IT Ops, anything that sort of removes labor and complexity and gives me visibility across clouds. That I think is something that could be interesting, again, as long as it fits into the portfolio. I'll say this, I mean, Sanjay was at EMC and knows M&A because I've no doubt they were bringing all their M&A candidates to Sanjay and saying, "Okay, what do you think of this tech, do you use it?" Probably kick the tires a little bit, so he, I'm sure, was a part of those. I'm sure he saw the good, the bad, and the ugly. You were there, EMC was pretty good at acquisitions, but then it got a little out of control. >> And Dave, talk automation, Sanjay came from Puppet. Puppet was one of the early companies along helping people move along from those manual tasks to how can we automate those? So, absolutely, Sanjay now a little over a year in there, starting to see from the product standpoint, and expect to see some of the trailing results as to how that moves forward. >> And then again, blending that, if it's a tuck in or whatever, maybe there's some big chess move out there. I would just suspect given Commvault's conservative nature you wouldn't see that. Although, they could do it. I mean, at their revenue level, their balance sheet would allow them to raise some debt, if they wanted to do that now would be the time to do it. But it's interesting, everybody's doing it and they're not. So I kind of liked the contrarian play. Given the opportunity in the market, given the TAM expansion through, beyond backup into data management, and it's a cloud and multicloud, I do think there's maybe an opportunity for them to be a little bit more aggressive. >> All right, well, Dave, thanks so much for helping us dig in and kick off our coverage. >> You're welcome, Stu. >> All right, stay with us. We have a bunch of interviews here for Commvault Future Ready. I'm Stu Miniman, and thank you for watching theCUBE. (gentle music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Online brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Hi and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS Summit Online. I'm Stu Miniman your host for this segment. Always love when we get to talk to the practitioners in this space and of course at AWS Public Sector, broad diversity of backgrounds and areas, everything from government to education and the like, so really happy they were able to bring us Joshua Spence, he is the Chief Technology Officer, from West Virginia in the Office of Technology. Josh, thank you so much for joining us. >> I appreciate the invitation to be here. >> All right so, technology for an entire state, quite a broad mandate, when you talk about that, maybe give our audience a little bit of your background and the role of your organization for West Virginia. >> Yeah, absolutely so in the public sector space, especially at state government, we're involved in a myriad of services for government to the citizens and from a central IT perspective, we're seeking to provide those enterprise services and support structures to keep those costs controlled and efficient and be able to enable these agencies to service the citizens of the state. >> Excellent, maybe just to talk about the role of the state versus more local, from a technology standpoint, how many applications do you manage? How many people do you have? Is everything that you do in the Cloud, or do you also have some data centers? just give us a little thumbnail sketch if you would, of what what's under that umbrella. >> Sure, absolutely I think you'll see at the state level we have... We typically administer a lot of the federal programs that come down through funding, ranging from health and human resources to environmental protection, to public safety you've got, just a broad spectrum of services that are being provided at the state level and so the central office, the Office of Technology, Services approximately 22,000 state employees and their ability to carry out those services to the citizens. And then of course you have like local government, like in State of West Virginia with 55 counties, and then you're following municipalities. The interesting thing though in public sector is from the citizen's perspective, government is government, whether it's local, state or federal. >> Yeah, that's such a good point and right now of course there's a strain on everything. With the global pandemic, services from the public sector are needed more than ever, maybe help us understand a little bit things like work from home and unemployment, I expect, may require a shift and some reaction from your office. So tell us what's been happening in your space the last few months. >> Yeah absolutely, well, the first part you get the work from home piece rate, West Virginia, although the last state to have a confirmed test positive of COVID-19, we were in a little bit of in a position of advantage as we were watching what was happening across the world, across the country and so we didn't hesitate to react in West Virginia and through great leadership here, we shut down the state quickly, we put protections in place to help, show up and prevent the spread of COVID. And to do that though with the government facilities, government services, we had to be able to enable a remote workforce and do so very quickly, at a scale that no one ever anticipated having to do. Coop plans for the most part rejected just picking up from the location you're working at to go work at another centralized location. No one really ever thought, "Well, we wouldn't be able to all congregate to work." So that created our first challenge that we had to respond to. The second challenge was then how do we adjust government services to interface with citizens from a remote perspective and in addition to that a surge of need. And when you look at unemployment all across the country, the demand became exponentially larger than what was ever experienced. The systems were not equipped to take on that type of load. And we had to leverage technology to very quickly adapt to the situation. >> Yeah, I'd love you to drill in a little bit on that technology piece. Obviously you think about certain services, if I had them, just in a data center and I needed it all of a sudden ramp up, do I run into capacity issues? Can I actually get to that environment? How do I scale that up fast? The promise of Cloud always has been well, I should be able to react immediately, I have in theory infinite scale. So what has been your experience, are there certain services that you say, "Oh boy, I'm so glad I have them in the Cloud." and has there been any struggles with being able to react to what you're dealing with. >> Well yeah the struggles have absolutely been there and it's been a combination of not just on-premise infrastructure, but then legacy infrastructure. And that's what we saw when we were dealing with the unemployment surge here in West Virginia, just from a citizen contact perspective, being able to answer the phone calls that were coming in, it was overwhelming and what we found is we unfortunately had a number of phone systems all supporting whether it's the central office or the regional office, they were all disparate, some of which were legacy. We therefore had no visibility on the metrics, we didn't even know how many calls were actually coming in a day. When you compound that the citizen's just trying to find answers, well, they're not going to just call the numbers you provide, they're going to call any numbers. So then they're now also calling other agencies seeking assistance just 'cause they're wanting help and that's understandable. So we needed to make a change, we need to make change very quickly. And that's when we looked to see if a solution in the Cloud might be a better option. And would it enable us to not only correct the situation, get visibility and scale, what could we do so extremely quick because the time to value was what was real important. >> Excellent, so my understanding that you were not using any cloud-based contact center before this hit. >> We were in only... There were some other agencies that had some hosted contact center capabilities, but on a small scale. This was the first large project around a Cloud Contact Center, and needed to run the project from Go Live or decision to go forward on a Friday at one o'clock and to roll over the first call center on the following Monday at 6:00 p.m. was a speed that we had never seen before. >> Oh boy yeah, I think back, I worked in telecom back in the 90s and you talk about a typical deployment you used to measure months and you're talking more like hours for getting something up and running and there's not only the technology, there's the people, the training, all these sorts of things there, so, yeah tell us, how did you come to such a fast decision and deployment? So you walk us through a little bit of that. >> Sure, so we went out to the market and asked several providers to give us their solution proposals and to do so very quickly 'cause we knew we had to move quickly and then when upon evaluation of the options before us, we made our selection and indicate that selection and started working with both the Cloud provider and the integrator, to build out a phased approach deployment of the technology. Phase one was, hey, let's get everybody calling the same 800 number as best as we can. And then where we can't get the 800 number be that focal point, let's forward all other phone numbers to the same call center. Because before we were able to bring the technology and our only solution was to put more people on the phones and we had physical limitations there. So we went after, the Amazon contact center or our integrator a Smartronix and we were able to do so very quickly and get that phase one change in place, which then allowed us to decide what was phase two and what was going to be phase three. >> Josh, you've got some background in cybersecurity, I guess in general, there's been a raised awareness and need for security with the pandemic going on, bad actors are still going in there. I've talked to some when they're rolling out their call centers, they need to worry about... Sounds like you've got everything in your municipality. So might not need to worry about, government per se but, I guess if you could touch on security right now for what's happening in general and anything specific about the contact center that you need to make sure that people working from home were following policy, procedure, not breaking any regulation and guidelines. >> Yeah, absolutely I think the most important piece of the puzzle when you're looking at security is understanding, so it's always a question of risk, right? If you're seeking first and foremost, to put in security with the understanding that now, hey we've put it in we don't have to think about it anymore. That's not the answer 'cause you're not going to stop all risk, right? You have to weigh it and understand which risks you need to address so that's really important piece. The second part that we've looked at in the current situation with the response to COVID is not only do we see threat actors trying to take advantage of the circumstances, right? Because more people are working from home, there are less computers on the hard network, right? They're now either VPN-ing in or they are just simply outside the network and there may be limited visibility that central agency or the central entity has on those devices. So what do you do? We got to extend that protection out to the account and to the devices itself and not worry so much about the boundary, right? 'cause the boundary now is a lot in all and since it purposes the accounts, but then I think an additional piece of the puzzle right now is to look at how important technology is to your organization, look at the role it's performing in enabling your ability to continue to function remotely (indistinct) the risk associated with those devices becoming compromised or unavailable. So, we see that the most important aspects of our security changes were to extend that protection as best we could to push out education to the users on the changing threats that might be coming their way. >> Yeah, it's fascinating to think if this pandemic had hit 10 years ago, you wouldn't have the capability of this. I'm thinking back to like, well, we could forward numbers to a certain place and do some cascading, but the Cloud Contact Center, absolutely wasn't available. Have you had a chance to think about now that you have this capability, what this means as we progress down the road, do you think you'll be keeping a hybrid model or stay fully Cloud once people are moving back to the offices? >> Well, I definitely think that the near future is a hybrid model and we'll see where it goes from there. There's workloads without a doubt that are better served, putting them in the Cloud, giving you that on demand scalability. I mean, if we look at what a project like this would have required, had we had to procure equipment, install equipment, there was just no time to do that. So having the services, the capability, whether it's microservices or VMS or whatever, all available, just don't need be turned on and configure to be used, it's just there's a lot of power there. And as government seeks to develop digital government, right? How do we transition from providing services where citizens stand in line to doing it online? I think Cloud's going to continue to play a key piece in that. >> Yeah I'm wondering if you could speak a little bit to the financial impact of this. So typically you think about, I roll out a project, it's budgeted, we write it off over a certain number of years, Cloud of course by its nature is there's flexibility and I'm paying for what I'm using, but this was something that was unexpected. So how were you... Did you have oversight on this? Was there additional funding put out? How was that financial discussion happening? >> Yeah, so that's a big piece of the puzzle when a government entity like a state is under a state of emergency, the good thing is there's processes and procedures that we leverage regularly to understand how we're going to fund those response activities. And then the Federal Government plays a role also in responding to states of emergency that enable the state and local government to have additional funding to cover during the state of emergency. So that makes things a little easier to start in a sense, I think the bigger challenge is going to be what comes from the following years after COVID, because obviously tax revenues are going to take a hit across the board. And what does that mean to government budgets that then in turn are going to have to be adjusted? So the advantage of Cloud services and other type technology services where they're sold under that OPEX model, do give states flexibility in ways to scale services, scale solutions as needed and give us a little bit more flexibility in adjusting for budget challenges. >> Yeah, it's been fascinating to watch, we know how the speed of adoption in technology, tends to run at a certain pace. The last three months, there are definitely certain technologies that there's been massive acceleration like you've discussed. So, I'm wondering that you've had the modernization, things like the unemployment claims was the immediate requirement that you needed, but have there been other pieces, other use cases and applications that this modernization, leverage of cloud technologies is impacting you today or other things that you see a little bit down the path. >> Yeah, I think it's... We're going to see a modernization of government applications designed to interface directly with the citizen, right? So we're going to want to be able to give the citizen opportunity, whether it's on a smartphone, a tablet, or a computer to interface with government, whether it's communications to inquire about a service, or to get support around a service or to file paperwork around a service. We want to enable that digital interface and so that's going to be a big push, and it's going to be amplified. There was already a look towards that, right? With the smart cities, smart states and some of the initiatives there, but what's happened with COVID basically it's forced the issue of not being able to be physically together, well, how do you do it using technology? So if there was a silver lining in an awful situation that we have with COVID, one might be that, we've been able to stretch our use of technology to better serve the citizens. >> Well, great, really really impressive story. Josh, I want to give you the final word. Just what advice would you give your peers kind of dealing with things in a crisis, and any other advice you'd have in general about managing and leveraging the Cloud? >> I think in a closing comment, I think one of the most important aspects that can be considered is having that translation capability of talking to the business element, the government service component and understand what they're trying to achieve, what their purpose or their mission is and then being able to tie it back to the technology in a way to where all parties, all stakeholders understand their roles and responsibilities, to make that happen. Unfortunately I think what happens too often is on the business side or the non-technical side of the equation, they see the end state, but they don't truly understand their responsibilities to get to the end state. And it's definitely a partnership and the better that partnership's understood at the start, the more successful the project's going to have to get there under budget and on time. >> Well, thank you so much for joining us, best of luck with the project and please stay safe. >> Thank you for having me. >> All right, stay tuned for more coverage from AWS Public Sector Online. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE. (soft music)

(soft music) >> From around the globe, It's theCube with digital coverage of VeeamON 2020 brought to you by Veeam. Hi buddy. Welcome to the cubes coverage of VeeamON 2020, (laughs) the virtual version of VeeamON. and I'm here with Justin Warren who's the chief analyst and managing director of Pivot Nine. Justin, Good to see you. How are things down under? >> Not too bad. It was a bit of a rough start to the year. But things are looking a little bit better here in the middle of the year. It's tough times. >> And of course Justin, you may, you guys may know, as a many times you post and of course our other almost daily CUBE host these days, Stu Minivan joining us to unpack the Veeam keynotes, the trends in the marketplace. How you doing Stu? >> I'm doing great, Dave. Yeah. As you said, rather than us flying all around the country, we're in doing remote interviews every day, Its different, 2020.(laughs) >> So this has been quite a year, obviously. Because of course it was from Veeam's perspective, started out with that blockbuster exit $5 billion exit to private equity slash VC, insight capital, insight partners which was just an awesome thing for the founders. And some of the employees and actually going forward now, I think the balance of the employees really they'll have an opportunity to grow the valuation of the company even further. I think that's what we've seen with insight. I mean they want exits, so it's like they used to talk about, Ratmir Used to talk about Act Two (laughs) well now we're going to see it play out guys. So just some high level stats, a billion dollars last year in bookings. They're really shifting to an ARR model in a big way, 375,000 customers, 160 countries, 4,200 employees. Justin, do you remember when you first ran into Veeam at like some VMUG somewhere, who are these guys? Wow. They've certainly made it. >> They really have. And it's honest surprising but also not . They've feeling when I first encountered Veeam was that it's like well, who is this people? Yeah. What are they doing? It was very much SMB. It was very much practitioner, a very technical focus and people who used it just loved the product because back then the informal tagline was, it just were. And in those days it really was amazing. That there was a product that was simple and easy to use and worked on it, all of the things that they needed it to do. And I had a very, very VM focused back in that time. Hence the name of the entire company was go Veeam. And to see it grow from that one even then was quite a broad base but a very much an SMB market and see it grow across the entire industry. It's pretty remarkable. There is no really any ... Not many other companies who've pulled off this kind of growth momentum. >> Yeah. I mean Justin I think you nailed it there. I think back it's a company that hasn't stayed at a steady state still though. In the virtualization community, there were ripple effects. When Veeam went beyond just doing VMware and started to do Microsoft. Then a few years ago, I remember after we were doing the Q bed at the show, there was such a real push forward to extend the relationship with Microsoft, to the cloud. One of the things that we think we see loud and clear at this show is that VMware relationship early strong and as VMware goes to various cloud environment, Veeam can go along with that so that the relationship stays strong, but they're also in a lot of the public clouds and expanding beyond what they're doing. Yep. They're moving into the enterprising and I think one of the things we'll dig into is how enterprising is Veeam today. But absolutely it could company that very different than they were two or three years ago. And Dave, as you correctly pointed out now there's not the, who is this weird privately held company? Who's the ownership? I think there's a little bit of a more of a understanding as to, they're a big player in the space. And a little bit more a understanding as to where things go going forward. >> Well, I want to get your take on sort of their, we're going to go through a lot today, but the vision, that Danny Allan laid out in his keynote. And I think it's quite interesting. I mean, given the energy and the VC money coming into the market behind Cohesity and Rubrik the noise that they're making, what he put up as their vision is the most trusted provider of backup solutions, that deliver cloud data management. So as you guys well know, Cohesity and Rubrik really pushing this notion of data management, which means a lot of things to a lot of people. It's interesting to note that Veeam, first of all, new management, new CEO, Danny Allan, and now CTO, and obviously in a strategy role. So he's putting forth this kind of back to basics a mentality but then leapfrogging and trying to leapfrogging the data management narrative into the cloud, bringing cloud into it, super-gluing and cloud and data management which I think is really smart because when you think about multicloud data management for data protection It's got to be about cloud native and it's got to be somebody who's got no agenda around hardware or even necessarily a public cloud agenda. And Veeam wants to the be that Company. What do you think of that messaging Justin? >> I think broadly speaking, I think Veeam can pull it off. I do have some concerns around the whole data management thought. On the first thing of just being able to pull this off across the industry, I think vein is well-placed because it's always been about software. And it's always been about partnership. Though Veeam has been channel , It has been a hundred percent channel back in the day, very, very little direction. If any, at all, they are very strong on partnerships. They will partner with anybody because basically they don't really mind who else you deal with. They just want your backup to be done through Veeam. And the backup is very strong. That is what they are great at. So the risks they may own the data management side is it we've seen this play before pretty much ever backup company at some point just to talk about, Hey, we have a couple of your data. It's kind of sitting there and not really doing anything. What if we would attend this into something else and start using it for other purposes? But it's never really paid off for anybody. No, One's really done anything with their backup data in it in a true sense because we haven't seen anyone else become very good at that and be known throughout the industry of OES. Once you've backed up your data to the scene, you can then do all of these others stuff with it. I can't name anyone who's actually been quite successful at that but I can name plenty of people who've grown. >> Well Commvault is certainly tried actually guys, once you bring up the good competitive slide I want to that's a good lead in Justin. So what this data from our data partner, ETR Enterprise Technology Research, those whose watch our breaking analysis every week you see that we use this data extensively. And basically what we're showing here is the fundamental methodology that ETR uses is this thing called net score, which is kind of like net promoter score. It basically asks customers, are you buying? Are you increasing spending or decreasing spending takes the less subtracted from the more, and then you get a net score. That's the vertical axis. And it's an indicator of spending velocity, the horizontal axis it's labeled market share. It's not like IDC counts market share. It's a measure of mark pervasiveness within the survey. Then it's calculated by the mentions of the vendor divided by the total number of mentions within that sector. Now what we're showing here is a comparison of pure play data protection vendors and you can see there's no Dell EMC there's no IBM because they're not pure plays. I can't cut the data by data protection. So I got put fourth the pure plays. But let's walk through this so you could see here is you've got the pervasive company in the upper left. You can see the net scores and they could see the so the shared ends. This is 1,269 survey respondents. And you can see the shared end is the presence of these companies within that 1269, then CIOs and IT practitioners. So you can see Commvault very high presence but then interestingly and I guess not surprisingly Veeam right there. And then it drops off Veritas, Rubrik and Cohesity, and you can see where the heat map is on the vertical axis Rubrik, One of the highest net score is in the data set, and you've got Cohesity also very high, not as great of a presence in the data set. You can see Veeam very respectable. This was a 15 year old company with a relatively high net score. Really, really respectable, as I say in the solidly in the mid thirties and then Commvault getting into the pink zone and then Veritas in the red zone, low net score. And not as great as you're great at presence, which some concerns there for Veritas. So that's guys, that's the horses on the track. Anything there surprise you? Was it Veritas's position, it doesn't really surprise me, but it is remarkable just how our wife and the rest of the players that they are. And certainly that matches in the conversations the way having here with customers and others in industry. The nine Veritas just does not come out in the way that it used to. It used to be, I would have say that it would be, it used to be neck and neck with Commvault. Now we really don't hear the name Vera Tasman at all. Which is as a long time participant in the industry, Veritas was very much part of my career very early on. They were a stand by name. They were very well respected. But say seeing that sort of thing happened to it a great company, like Veritas it's a bit sad. Really? >> Well, you mean look at you're right. The Veritas was always the gold standard of a company with no hardware agenda. Who's going to be the Veritas of X? You would always use that sort of line or phrase. But now Stu, when I think about the opportunities here, It seems like multicloud is going to within the data protection space, is going to be run by somebody who can do cloud native. So in other words, running cloud native on, Azure, AWS and Google, maybe Alibaba, but cloud native, being able to take advantage of those native services on the cloud. Somebody who's got an on-prem presence who can bring that cloud experience on-prem. Who actually can do it also across clouds, a very, very high performance, low latency, very efficient, low cost. So in thinking about that multi-cloud landscapes, do how do you assess the horses on the track? >> Yeah, well, you know, Dave, first of all, one of the things Justin said, Veeam is partner-driven. One of the conversations I'm having for VeeamON is with the partner Alliance team, they are a hundred percent partner driven. And also for so many years, we talk about one of the negatives about Veeam is, Oh, well, most of their customer base is SMB, well, if you look at the cloud, one of the knocks against cloud for a long time was, Oh, it's just the really small companies that are doing a lot of clouds. Well, my data managers whether I'm a small company or a big company, so a lot of these pieces come together, Veeam has really been able to move into that cloud environment. What they're doing, sans across them . Data protection seems to be one of those areas when you talk about, the mantras, the industry like Amazon and say, okay when are they going to eat your business? Well, you know, Amazon's got a strong storage team. But data protection. They've got some very basic functionality in there but there's a robust ecosystem and companies like Veeam, I can capitalize on. >> Well, you mentioned the there in the enterprise, of course we all know the story of there a couple of years ago, there was a big enterprise, of course, they brought in some executives from VMware, some really high quality folks. They struck relationships with companies like HPE and Cisco. I think HPE in particular is it's paid off quite well but everybody wants to do business with Cisco cause they're very partner friendly and it's interesting. They kind of pull back from that not kind of. They pull back on that major initiative, the high price, direct sales people. And I remember doing a breaking analysis when Veeam got acquired or maybe it was even previous to that and making the comment to that yeah. They had to pull back on that, but I dug into the ETR data. Veeam actually has quite a presence in large companies. Maybe it's division of a large company, or maybe it's shadow IT, I don't know. People who just you don't want the simple backup but they're VMware customers. And it seems to me they really have an opportunity to go up market. Maybe kind of to reset that enterprise strategy. What do you guys think? >> Yeah, I think that's was what they were trying to do a couple of years ago. So I think hotly, they just didn't succeed quickly as they had hoped. There was also a little bit of an issue, which is something I remember speaking to the Retina Mayor about some years ago. About the challenge of being able to serve these different markets, because what SMB wants is quite different to what an enterprise want. And being able to fulfill both of those needs simultaneously from one company it's really challenging because things that you do for enterprise annoy SMB, the things that around ran complexity to be able to deal with the inherently complex environments that are enterprise. SMB just doesn't have that issue. Whereas if you can only do things in SMB type ways that annoys the enterprise, being able to satisfy both of those markets in a way that they both happy with. And so that no one else feels neglected that's pretty much what they wish that were struggling with nothing. So the hot pivot to enterprise they existing customer base, which then was rolling mostly SMB. They started to feel a little bit neglected. No, it was just a bit of a stumble. I think it feels like they've reset now and understood how to do these in a slightly more gentle fashion. But we can call it that. So rather than going for that really aggressive push into enterprise, they are just following the natural momentum, which is people who've come from SMB. And some of those medium companies grow into very large companies and bring them with them and others just that people as they move through their career will grow from a small company to maybe a medium company. And then they'll end up in a division of an enterprise scale and they used to Veeam and they want to bring what they they know in like they want to bring that experience to the company that they now work at. That is a sort of natural flow there I think for them that is only now showing the fruit of what was actually laid down a few years ago. >> Well, and I think there was something else going on there too, which is, we now know the company was positioning for an exit that was up for sale. So enterprise is very expensive, it's time consuming. The ROI is often times very long. That's why you see enterprise startups raising gobs of money and they just ,i think weren't getting the ROI. And when you think about insight, this is one of the more forward thinking, great PE or VC firms they'll live with rule of 40, right, where a rule of 35 or 80 rule of 50, where it's not just about growth, it's about growth plus EBIT. And if you add those up and it adds the 40 or 45 or 35 or whatever their target is, I don't know exactly what Insights looking forward but that's the combination that drives value. So my guess is they wanted to dial up EBIT and give it or the sale. And they might've had specific targets, who knows. That were being negotiated but i think that probably had something to do with it. And as well as you're pointing out, Justin, it takes time but us to If we look into some of the things that we're hearing from the messaging, some of the announcements and we'll get into that. Big, big discussion around digital transformation. One of the first, if not the first to do a backup for office 365, another a new version of Veeam backup for AWS. Oh. So there were some enterprisey types of things that they were there were talking about, a little glimpse at version 11.Any thoughts there, Stu. >> Yeah. Well, David, it's interesting, Justin put up a really good point there when you opt digital transformation Dave. Well, one of the things we've been saying for years, the difference between a company before and after that is you're leveraging the data. So, If I look at Veeam and say, do I protect the data absolutely? Do I secure your data? I'm involved with that. Actually one of the leadership changes, they just hired their first CSO. So bigger push for security, that'll help them a lot in what they do with it, public sector, that's where the CSO actually came from the public by that will help them. But what I didn't, haven't heard as much yet, is okay. I'm a piece of that data. And if you're going to the cloud, I can manage, I can protected and secure it. But how do I help connect people to get more value out of the data and leverage that data? So I think Justin nailed it with that. So many pieces that are important about data that Veeam does do. But that the discussion we always have in AI is be able to take that raw data and converting it into insights and out facts. >> Well, to Justin's point earlier about data management. And I want to to pick up on what you were saying about security, obviously everybody's talking about ransomware, but to me, you're talking about the CSO. The role of the CSO is obviously of course evolving it's Al board level topic. CSO, oftentimes was off as a peer, I say off, but as a peer to the CIO on purpose, they didn't want the CSO to report to the CIO cause it would have been like the Fox watching the hen house. But i think cause it was this sort of failure equals fire mentality and they wanted the truth. But I think now people have transparent discussions at the board about security. Hey, we know we're going to get penetrated. It's all about our response. Obviously we have to deal with the layers, but we're exposed, everybody's exposed. So I think increasingly organizations are realizing that it's a team sport, you've got to get everybody involved, the lines of business, the users being responsible. And of course IT, my point is that security and data protection are now becoming two sides of the same point. Almost like privacy. We've shared that before. So when you think about digital transformation, you think about data protection as part of your security portfolio? Not just something that you bolt on as an afterthought. And I think in many respects, Justin, that's maybe a bigger market opportunity for a lot of these data protection companies and backup companies, than the so-called opaque data management that you're referring to before. >> Yeah. I'd agree with that because what I'm saying from the security side of the market, particularly within large enterprise is a change in mindset from a prevention to a resilient, that kind of mindset around it and how to deal with it. Though previously there was a lot of either we'll just ignore it cause there's not really a problem and it's not going to happen to us. Then it became a kind of a fear response of just, we want to prevent it ever happening to us. Now it's kind of we've gone to an acceptance. And when going through the Kubler Ross. A framework for dealing with grief. People aren't understanding that sooner or later bad things are going to happen to us. What we need to figure out is how we deal with it when it does. And that's the mindset that you need to have when you're talking about data protection. So it's the same kind of mindset that you need for security. And now people are starting to look at, okay, how do we firstly detect if we've actually got a problem, if there's a breach or if there's a risk, how do we notice that we know that that's happening? And then once we noticed that, what do we do about it? So that's things like catching it early so that when you you'll recovery is small, which is the same general idea around software development of fail fast. You want to just pick the failures early so that you can correct them all. Basically if you find yourself in a hole stop digging and then once you've figured that out, okay now how do we recover from this in a way that is minimally disruptive to the business. And that could be like recovering from ransomware, having grilly solid backup. So you can restore weekly, that's the best protection against ransomware that you can have. Then you can start trying to figure out, okay, we know we can recover if it happens to us now let's just try to reduce the number of times that this does actually happen. That's the general idea that I'm seeing come through. More often with CSOs, with CIOs and with board level conversation. >> I want to come back to Justin and then Stu with your final thoughts. Justin, what do you take on this Veeam universal license? Was this a case of, hey we had so much complexity across our portfolio like that you're going to the Italian restaurant, you're just here you want everything in the menu or there's too much to figure out just the order for me. And they're trying to clean that up or do you see this as sort of a more innovative licensing approach? That's more cloud friendly. What do you make of that? >> I think it's a bit of both. think it's part of VeeamON thoughts as well again, from back in the very early parts of the company, the idea was that it just works. It should be simple and easy to use. So it's completely on brand for Veeam to have a simple and easy to use licensing model. There's a lot of criticism from enterprise and particularly from medium and small business, well overly complicated licensing models. We see people wrestling daily with the billing system within AWS. We see people frustrated with the licensing approach of Oracle. We see them seemingly frustrated when you not figuring out exactly what have I lost since then, what happened and what am I not licensed for in, Microsoft ecosystem. So for them to have a simple and easy to use licensing approach, it just fits right in with the rest of what the company is doing. It does also simplify the way that they organize and operate their company, as they have to deal with lots and lots of different partners, having a complicated licensing system on top of all of those other complicated licensing systems would just make their own job much, much harder. So this way it actually works for them as well as for their customers. >> Yeah. Simplicity is the watch word there Stu and I get, I mean, I get the sense in speaking to the customers, partners, that Veeam well has basically has the philosophy make it easy to and we'll sell more. We're not going to try to micromanage, to maximize revenue. You heard this certainly from some of their big partners who said that Veeam made it transparent. Our sales people for commissions and their salespeople and really make it easy to do business with. So Stu I'll give you the last word here. >> Yeah. So I think, as you mentioned, Veeam also listening and seeing what their partners are doing. So we've watched companies like AWS, trying to make a little bit simpler as to if I'm choosing compute, I don't have to be locked into one model a aisle, pay those across the environment or pure storage and other partner of Veeams. If I stay a customer, I make it easy to be able to move from one generation the next though, that cloud like model absolutely is what we expect. And when you talk to customers today, we know the only constant is change. I actually loved in the keynote. There was a I believe it was Satya Nadella that they quoted and said that, we've seen more change in the last two months that we normally would see in a decade. So Veeam being agile, moving, listening to their customers, learning with their partners and making sure that they've got things in the modern consumption model. >> Well, guys, thanks for helping us break down the VeeamON 2020, some of the trends in the market place.Some of the commentary and the keynote. Justin Warren Stu Minivan. Appreciate your time. >> Thank you very much. >> Thanks Dave. >> I thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for Stu and Justin and the entire cube team, people right there. We'll be back with our coverage of VeeamON 2020, right after this short break. (soft music)

>> From the Silicon Angle Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's The Cube. Now, here's your host Dave Vellante. >> Hi everybody. Welcome to this Cube Insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis we're going to look at recent spending data from the ETR Spending Intentions Survey. We believe tech spending is slowing down. Now, it's not falling off a cliff but it is reverting to pre-2018 spending levels. There's some concern in the bellwethers of specifically financial services and insurance accounts and large telcos. We're also seeing less redundancy. What we mean by that is in 2017 and 2018 you had a lot of experimentation going on. You had a lot of digital initiatives that were going into, not really production, but sort of proof of concept. And as a result you were seeing spending on both legacy infrastructure and emerging technologies. What we're seeing now is more replacements. In other words people saying, "Okay, we're now going into production. We've tried that. We're not going to go with A, we're going to double down on B." And we're seeing less experimentation with the emerging technology. So in other words people are pulling out, actually some of the legacy technologies. And they're not just spraying and praying across the entire emerging technology sector. So, as a result, spending is more focused. As they say, it's not a disaster, but it's definitely some cause for concern. So, what I'd like to do, Alex if you bring up the first slide. I want to give you some takeaways from the ETR, the Enterprise Technology Research Q4 Pulse Check Survey. ETR has a data platform of 4,500 practitioners that it surveys regularly. And the most recent spending intention survey will actually be made public on October 16th at the ETR Webcast. ETR is in its quiet period right now, but they've given me a little glimpse and allowed me to share with you, our Cube audience, some of the findings. So as I say, you know, overall tech spending is clearly slowing, but it's still healthy. There's a uniform slowdown, really, across the board. In virtually all sectors with very few exceptions, and I'll highlight some of the companies that are actually quite strong. Telco, large financial services, insurance. That's rippling through to AMIA, which is, as I've said, is over-weighted in banking. The Global 2000 is looking softer. And also the global public and private companies. GPP is what ETR calls it. They say this is one of the best indicators of spending intentions and is a harbinger for future growth or deceleration. So it's the largest public companies and the largest private companies. Think Mars, Deloitte, Cargo, Coke Industries. Big giant, private companies. We're also seeing a number of changes in responses from we're going to increase to more flat-ish. So, again, it's not a disaster. It's not falling off the cliff. And there are some clear winners and losers. So adoptions are really reverting back to 2018 levels. As I said, replacements are arising. You know, digital transformation is moving from test everything to okay, let's go, let's focus now and double-down on those technologies that we really think are winners. So this is hitting both legacy companies and the disrupters. One of the other key takeaways out of the ETR Survey is that Microsoft is getting very, very aggressive. It's extending and expanding its TAM further into cloud, into collaboration, into application performance management, into security. We saw the Surface announcement this past week. Microsoft is embracing Android. Windows is not the future of Microsoft. It's all these other markets that they're going after. They're essentially building out an API platform and focusing in on the user experience. And that's paying off because CIOs are clearly more comfortable with Microsoft. Okay, so now I'm going to take you through some themes. I'm going to make some specific vendor comments, particularly in Cloud, software, and infrastructure. And then we'll wrap. So here's some major themes that really we see going on. Investors still want growth. They're punishing misses on earnings and they're rewarding growth companies. And so you can see on this slide that it's really about growth metrics. What you're seeing is companies are focused on total revenue, total revenue growth, annual recurring revenue growth, billings growth. Companies that maybe aren't growing so fast, like Dell, are focused on share gains. Lately we've seen pullbacks in the software companies and their stock prices really due to higher valuations. So, there's some caution there. There's actually a somewhat surprising focus given the caution and all the discussion about, you know, slowing economy. There's some surprising lack of focus on key performance indicators like cash flow. A few years ago, Splunk actually stopped giving, for example, cash flow targets. You don't see as much focus on market capitalization or shareholders returns. You do see that from Oracle. You see that last week from the Dell Financial Analyst Meeting. I talked about that. But it's selective. You know these are the type of metrics that Oracle, Dell, VMware, IBM, HPE, you know generally HP Inc. as well will focus on. Another thing we see is the Global M&A across all industries is back to 2016 levels. It basically was down 16% in Q3. However, well and that's by the way due to trade wars and other uncertainties and other economic slowdowns and Brexit. But tech M&A has actually been pretty robust this year. I mean, you know take a look at some examples. I'll just name a few. Google with Looker, big acquisitions. Sales Force, huge acquisition. A $15 billion acquisition of Tableau. It also spent over a billion dollars on Click software. Facebook with CTRL-labs. NVIDIA, $7 billion acquisition of Mellanox. VMware just plunked down billion dollars for Carbon Black and its own, you know, sort of pivotal within the family. Splunk with a billion dollar plus acquisition of SignalFx. HP over a billion dollars with Cray. Amazon's been active. Uber's been active. Even nontraditional enterprise tech companies like McDonald's trying to automate some of the drive-through technology. Mastercard with Nets. And of course the stalwart M&A companies Apple, Intel, Microsoft have been pretty active as well as many others. You know but generally I think what's happening is valuations are high and companies are looking for exits. They've got some cool tech so they're putting it out there. That you know, hey now's the time to buy. They want to get out. That maybe IPO is not the best option. Maybe they don't feel like they've got, you know, a long-term, you know, plan that is going to really maximize shareholder value so they're, you know, putting forth themselves for M&A today. And so that's been pretty robust. And I would expect that's going to continue for a little bit here as there are, again, some good technology companies out there. Okay, now let's get into, Alex if you pull up the next slide of the Company Outlook. I want to start with Cloud. Cloud, as they say here, continues it's steady march. I'm going to focus on the Big 3. Microsoft, AWS, and Google. In the ETR Spending Surveys they're all very clearly strong. Microsoft is very strong. As I said it's expanding it's total available market. It's into collaboration now so it's going after Slack, Box, Dropbox, Atlassian. It's announced application performance management capabilities, so it's kind of going after new relic there. New SIM and security products. So IBM, Splunk, Elastic are some targets there. Microsoft is one of the companies that's gaining share overall. Let me talk about AWS. Microsoft is growing faster in Cloud than AWS, but AWS is much, much larger. And AWS's growth continues. So it's not as strong as 2018 but it's stronger, in fact, much stronger than its peers overall in the marketplace. AWS appears to be very well positioned according to the ETR Surveys in database and AI it continues to gain momentum there. The only sort of weak spot is the ECS, the container orchestration area. And that looks a little soft likely due to Kubernetes. Drop down to Google. Now Google, you know, there's some strength in Google's business but it's way behind in terms of market share, as you all know, Microsoft and AWS. You know, its AI and machine learning gains have stalled relative to Microsoft and AWS which continue to grow. Google's strength and strong suit has always been analytics. The ETR data shows that its holdings serve there. But there's deceleration in data warehousing, and even surprisingly in containers given, you know, its strength in contributing to the Kubernetes project. But the ETR 3 Year Outlook, when they do longer term outlook surveys, shows GCP, Google's Cloud platform, gaining. But there's really not a lot of evidence in the existing data, in the near-term data to show that. But the big three, you know, Cloud players, you know, continue to solidify their position. Particularly AWS and Microsoft. Now let's turn our attention to enterprise software. Just going to name a few. ETR will have an extensive at their webcast. We'll have an extensive review of these vendors, and I'll pick up on that. But I just want to pick out a few here. Some of the enterprise software winners. Workday continues to be very, very strong. Especially in healthcare and pharmaceutical. Salesforce, we're seeing a slight deceleration but it's pretty steady. Very strong in Fortune 100. And Einstein, its AI offering appears to be gaining as well. Some of the acquisitions Mulesoft and Tableu are also quite strong. Demandware is another acquisition that's also strong. The other one that's not so strong, ExactTarget is somewhat weakening. So Salesforce is a little bit mixed, but, you know, continues to be pretty steady. Splunk looks strong. Despite some anecdotal comments that point to pricing issues, and I know Splunk's been working on, you know, tweaking its pricing model. And maybe even some competition. There's no indication in the ETR data yet that Splunk's, you know, momentum is attenuating. Security as category generally is very, very strong. And it's lifting all ships. Splunk's analytics business is showing strength is particularly in healthcare and pharmaceuticals, as well as financial services. I like the healthcare and pharmaceuticals exposure because, you know, in a recession healthcare will, you know, continue to do pretty well. Financial services in general is down, so there's maybe some exposure there. UiPath, I did a segment on RPA a couple weeks ago. UiPath continues its rapid share expansion. The latest ETR Survey data shows that that momentum is continuing. And UiPath is distancing itself in the spending surveys from its broader competition as well. Another company we've been following and I did a segment on the analytics and enterprise data warehousing sector a couple weeks ago is Snowflake. Snowflake continues to expand its share. Its slightly slower than its previous highs, which were off the chart. We shared with you its Net Score. Snowflake and UiPath have some of the highest Net Scores in the ETR Survey data of 80+%. Net Score remembers. You take the we're adding the platform, we're spending more and you subtract we're leaving the platform or spending less and that gives you the Net Score. Snowflake and UiPath are two of the highest. So slightly slower than previous ties, but still very very strong. Especially in larger companies. So that's just some highlights in the software sector. The last sector I want to focus on is enterprise infrastructure. So Alex if you'd bring that up. I did a segment at the end of Q2, post Q2 looking at earning statements and also some ETR data on the storage spending segment. So I'll start with Pure Storage. They continue to have elevative spending intentions. Especially in that giant public and private, that leading indicator. There are some storage market headwinds. The storage market generally is still absorbing that all flash injection. I've talked about this before. There's still some competition from Cloud. When Pure came out with its earnings last quarter, the stock dropped. But then when everybody else announced, you know, negative growth or, in Dell's case, Dell's the leader, they were flat. Pure Storage bounced back because on a relative basis they're doing very well. The other indication is Pure storage is very strong in net app accounts. Net apps mix, they don't call them out here but we'll do some further analysis down the road of net apps. So I would expect Pure to continue to gain share and relative to the others in that space. But there are some headwinds overall in the market. VMware, let's talk about VMware. VMware's spending profile, according to ETR, looks like 2018. It's still very strong in Fortune 1000, or 100 rather, but weaker in Fortune 500 and the GPP, the global public and private companies. That's a bit of a concern because GPP is one of the leading indicators. VMware on Cloud on AWS looks very strong, so that continues. That's a strategic area for them. Pivotal looks weak. Carbon Black is not pacing with CrowdStrike. So clearly VMware has some work to do with some of its recent acquisitions. It hasn't completed them yet. But just like the AirWatch acquisition, where AirWatch wasn't the leader in that space, really Citrix was the leader. VMware brought that in, cleaned it up, really got focused. So that's what they're going to have to do with Carbon Black and Security, which is going to be a tougher road to hoe I would say than end user computing and Pivotal. So we'll see how that goes. Let's talk about Dell, Dell EMC, Dell Technologies. The client side of the business is holding strong. As I've said many times server and storage are decelerating. We're seeing market headwinds. People are spending less on server and storage relative to some of the overall initiatives. And so, that's got to bounce back at some point. People are going to still need compute, they're still going to need storage, as I say. Both are suffering from, you know, the Cloud overhang. As well, storage there was such a huge injection of flash it gave so much headroom in the marketplace that it somewhat tempered storage demand overall. Customers said, "Hey, I'm good for a while. Cause now I have performance headroom." Whereas before people would buy spinning discs, they buy the overprovision just to get more capacity. So, you know, that was kind of a funky value proposition. The other thing is VxRail is not as robust as previous years and that's something that Dell EMC talks about as, you know, one of the market share leaders. But it's showing a little bit of softness. So we'll keep an eye on that. Let's talk about Cisco. Networking spend is below a year ago. The overall networking market has been, you know, somewhat decelerating. Security is a bright spot for Cisco. Their security business has grown in double digits for the last couple of quarters. They've got work to do in multi-Cloud. Some bright spots Meraki and Duo are both showing strength. HP, talk about HPE it's mixed. Server and storage markets are soft, as I've said. But HPE remains strong in Fortune 500 and that critical GPP leading indicator. You know Nimble is growing, but maybe not as fast as it used to be and Simplivity is really not as strong as last year. So we'd like to see a little bit of an improvement there. On the bright side, Aruba is showing momentum. Particularly in Fortune 500. I'll make some comments about IBM, even though it's really, you know, this IBM enterprise infrastructure. It's really services, software, and yes some infrastructure. The Red Hat acquisition puts it firmly in infrastructure. But IBM is also mixed. It's bouncing back. IBM Classic, the core IBM is bouncing back in Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 and in that critical GPP indicator. It's showing strength, IBM, in Cloud and it's also showing strength in services. Which is over half of its business. So that's real positive. Its analytics and EDW software business are a little bit soft right now. So that's a bit of a concern that we're watching. The other concern we have is Red Hat has been significantly since the announcement of the merger and acquisition. Now what we don't know, is IBM able to inject Red Hat into its large service and outsourcing business? That might be hidden in some of the spending intention surveys. So we're going to have to look at income statement. And the public statements post earnings season to really dig into that. But we'll keep an eye on that. The last comment is Cloudera. Cloudera once was the high-flying darling. They are hitting all-time lows. They made the acquisition of Hortonworks, which created some consolidation. Our hope was that would allow them to focus and pick up. CEO left. Cloudera, again, hitting all-time lows. In particular, AWS and Snowflake are hurting Cloudera's business. They're particularly strong in Cloudera's shops. Okay, so let me wrap. Let's give some final thoughts. So buyers are planning for a slowdown in tech spending. That is clear, but the sky is not falling. Look we're in the tenth year of a major tech investment cycle, so slowdown, in my opinion, is healthy. Digital initiatives are really moving into higher gear. And that's causing some replacement on legacy technologies and some focus on bets. So we're not just going to bet on every new, emerging technology, were going to focus on those that we believe are going to drive business value. So we're moving from a try-everything mode to a more focused management style. At least for a period of time. We're going to absorb the spend, in my view, of the last two years and then double-down on the winners. So not withstanding the external factors, the trade wars, Brexit, other geopolitical concerns, I would expect that we're going to have a period of absorption. Obviously it's October, so the Stock Market is always nervous in October. You know, we'll see if we get Santa Claus rally going into the end of the year. But we'll keep an eye on that. This is Dave Vellante for Cube Insights powered by ETR. Thank you for watching this breaking analysis. We'll see you next time. (upbeat tech music)

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE! Now here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hi, everybody, welcome to this Cube Insights, powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis I want to talk to you about what I learned this week at Dell Technology's financial analyst meeting in New York. They gathered all the financial analysts, Rob Williams hosted it, he's the head of IR, Michael Dell of course was there. They had Dennis Hoffman who is the head of strategic planning, Jeff Clarke who basically runs the business and Tom Sweet, of course, who was the star of the show, the CFO, all the analysts want to see him. Dell laid out its longterm goals, it provided much clearer understanding of its strategic direction, basically focused on three areas. Dell believes that IT is getting more complex, we know that, they want to capitalize on that by simplifying IT. We'll talk about that. And then they want to position for the wave of digital transformations that are coming and they also believe, Dell believes, that it can capitalize on the consolidation trend, consolidating vendors, so I'll talk about each of those. And so let me bring up the first slide, Alex, if you would. The takeaways from the Dell financial analyst meeting. Let me share with you the overall framework that Tom Sweet laid out. And I have to say, the messaging was very consistent, these guys were very well-prepared. I think Dell is, from a management perspective, very well-run company. They're targeting three to 5% growth on what they're saying is a 4% GDP forecast. Or sorry, 4%, I have GDP here, it's really 4% industry growth. GDP's a little lower than that obviously. So this is IDC data, Gartner data, 4% industry growth. So that's an error on my part, I apologize. The strategies to grow relative to their competition. So grow share on a relative basis. So whatever the market does, again, not GDP, but whatever the market does, Dell wants to grow faster than the market. So it wants to gain share, that's its primary metric. From there they want to grow operating income and they want to grow that faster than revenue, that's going to throw off cash. And then they're going to also continue to delever the balance sheet. I think they paid down 17 billion in debt since the EMC acquisition. They want to get to a two X debt to EBITA ratio within 18 months. And what they're saying is, you know, they talked about, Tom Sweet talked about this consistent march toward investment-grade rating. They've been talkin' about that for awhile. He made the comment, we don't need to have a triple A rating but we want to get to the point where we can reduce our interest expense, and that will, 'cause they'll drop right into the bottom line. So they talked about these various levers that they can turn, some of them under the P and L, gaining share, some are their operating structure and their organizational structure, and one big one is obviously their debt structure. The other key issue here is will this cut the liquidity discount that Dell faces? What do I mean by that? Well, VMware has about a $60 billion valuation. Dell owns about 80% of VMware, which would equate to 48 billion. But if you look at Dell's market cap, it's only 37 billion. So it essentially says that Dell's core business is worth minus 11 billion. We used to talk about this when EMC owned VMware. Its core business only comprised about 40% of the overall value of the company, in this case because of the high debt, Dell has a negative value. And it's not just the high debt. Michael Dell has control over the voting shares, it's essentially a conglomerate structure, there's very high debt, and it's a relatively low margin business, notwithstanding VMware. And so as a result, Dell trades at a discount relative to what you would think it should trade at, given its prominence in the market, $92 billion company, the leader in every category under the sun. So that's the big question is can Dell turn these levers, drop EBITA or cash to the bottom line, affect operating income, and then ultimately pay down its debt and affect that discount that it trades at? Okay, bring up, if you would, Alex, the next slide. Now I want to share with you the takeaways from the Dell line of business focus. This really was Jeff Clarke's presentations that I'm going to draw from. Servers, we know, they're softer demand, but the key there is they're really faced tough compares. Last year, Dell's server business grew like crazy. So this year the comparisons are lessened. But there's less spending on servers. I'll share with you some of the ETR data. Storage, they call it holding serve, you saw last quarter I did an analysis, I took the ETR data and the income statement, it showed Pure was gaining share at like 22% growth from the income statement standpoint. Dell was 0% growth but is actually growing faster than its competitors. With the exception of Pure. It's growing faster than the market. So Dell actually gained share with 0% growth. Dell's really focused on consolidating the portfolio. They've cut the portfolio down from 80, I think actually the right number is 88 products, down to 20 by May of 2020. They've got some new mid-range coming, they've just refreshed their data protection portfolio, so again, by May of next year, by Dell Technologies World they'll have a much, much more simplified portfolio. And they're gaining back share. They've refocused on the storage business. You might recall after the acquisition, EMC was kind of a mess. It was losing share before the acquisition, it was so distracted with all the Elliott Management stuff goin' on. And kind of took its eye off the ball, and then after the acquisition it took awhile for them to get their act together. They gained back about 375 basis points in the last 18 months. Remember a basis point is 1/100th of 1%. So gaining share and their consistent focus on trying to do that. Their PC business, which is actually doin' quite well, is focused on the commercial segment and focused on higher margins. They made the statement that the PCs are kind of undersupply right now so it's helping margins. There's a big focus in Jeff Clarke's organization on VMware integration. To me this makes a lot of sense. To the extent that you can take the VMware platform and make Dell hardware run VMware better, that's something that is an advantage for Dell, obviously. And at the same time, VMware has to walk the fine line with the ecosystem. But certainly it's earned the presence in the market now that it can basically do what I just said, tightly integrate with Dell and at the same time serve the ecosystem, 'cause frankly, the ecosystem has no choice. It must serve VMware customers. The strategy, essentially, is to, as I say, capitalize on vendor consolidation, leverage value across the portfolio, so whether it's pivotal, VMware integration, the security portfolio, try to leverage that and then differentiate with scale. And Dell really has the number one supply chain in the tech business. Something that Dave Donatelli at HP, when he was at HP, used to talk about. HPE doesn't really talk about that supply chain advantage anymore 'cause essentially it doesn't have it. Dell does. So Jeff Clarke's reorganization, he came in, he streamlined the organization, really from the focus on R and D to product to collaboration across the organization and the VMware integration. I actually was quite impressed with when I first met Jeff Clarke I guess two years ago now, what he and the organization have accomplished since then. No BS kind of person. And you can see it's starting to take effect. So we'll keep an eye on that. The next slide I want to show you, I want to bring in the ETR data. We've been sharing with you the ETR spending intention surveys for the last couple of weeks and months. ETR, enterprise technology research, they have a data platform that comprises 4,500 practitioners that share spending data with them. CIOs, IT managers, et cetera. What I'm showing here is a cut off of the server sector. So I'm going to drill down into server and storage. So these are spending intentions from the July survey asking about the second half of 2019 relative to the first half of 2019. And this is a drill-down into the giant public and private firms. Why do I do that? Because in meeting the ETR, this is the best indicator. So it's big, big public companies and big private companies. Think Uber. Private companies that spend a ton of dough on IT. UPS before it went public, for example. So those companies are in here. And they're, according to ETR, the best indicators. What this chart shows, so the bars show, and I've shared this with you a number of times, the lime green is we're adding, we're new to this platform, we're new adoption. The evergreen is we're spending more, the gray is we're spending the same, the light red or pink is we're spending less, and the dark red is we're leaving the platform. So if you subtract the red from the green you get what's called a net score, and that's that blue line. And this is the overall server spending intentions from that July survey. The end is about 525 respondents out of the 4,500. And this is, again, those that just answered the question on server. So you can see the net score on server spend is dropping. And you can see the market share on server is dropping. The takeaway here is that servers, as a percentage of overall IT spend, are on a downward slope, and have been for quite some time. Back to the January '16 survey. Okay, so that's going to serve us. Let's take a look at the same data for storage. So if, Alex, if you bring up the storage sector slide, You can see kind of a similar trend. And I would argue what's happening here, a couple of things. You've got the CLOB effect, I'll talk about that some more, and you've also got, in this case, the flash, all-flash array effect. What happened was you had all-flash arrays and flash come into the data center, and that gave performance a huge headroom. Remember, spinning disk was the last bastion of mechanical movement and it was the main bottleneck in terms of overall application performance. IO was the problem. Well you put a bunch of flash into the system and it gives a lot of headroom. People used to over-provision capacity just for performance reasons. So flash has had the effect of customers saying, hey, my performance is good, I don't need to over-provision anymore, I don't need to buy so much. So that combined with cloud, I think, has put down the pressure on the storage business as well. Now the next slide, Alex, that I want you to bring up is the vendor net scores, the server spending intentions. And what I've done is I've highlighted Dell EMC. Now what's happening here in the slide, and I realize it's an eye chart, but basically where you want to be in this chart is in the left-hand side. What it shows is the spending intentions and the momentum from the October '18, which is the gray, the April '19, which is the blue, and then the July '19 which is the most recent one. Again, the end is 525 in the servers for the July '19 survey. And you can see Dell's kind of in the middle of the pack. You'd love to be in the left-hand side, you know, Docker, Microsoft, VMware, Intel, Ubuntu. And you don't want to be on the right-hand side, you know, Fujitsu, IBM, is sort of below the line. Dell's kind of in the middle there, Dell EMC. The next slide I want to show you is that same slide for storage. And again, you can see here is that on-- So this is vendor net scores, the storage spending intentions. On the left-hand side it's all the high growth companies. Rubrik, Cohesity, Nutanix, Pure, VMware with vSAN, Veeam. You see Dell EMC's VxRail. On the right-hand side, you see the guys that are losing momentum. Veritas, Iron Mountain, Barracuda, HitachiHDS, Fusion-io still comes up in the survey after the acquisition by Western Digital. Again, you see Dell EMC kind of holding serve in the middle there. Not great, not bad. Okay, so that's kind of just some other ETR data that I wanted to share. All right, next thing we're going to talk about is the macros market summary. And Alex, I've got some bullet points on this, so if you bring up that slide, let me talk about that a little bit. So five points here. First, cloud continues to eat away at on-prem, despite all this talk about repatriation, which I know does happen. People try to throw everything to the cloud and they go, whoa! Look at my Amazon bill, yeah, I get that. That's at the margin. The main trend is that cloud continues to grow. That whole repatriation thing is not moving the on-prem market. On-prem is kind of steady eddy. Storage is still working through that AFA injection. Got a lot of headroom from performance standpoint. So people don't need to buy as much as they used to because you had that step function in performance. Now eventually the market will catch up, all this digital transformation is happening, all this data is flowing through the system and it will catch up, and the storage market is elastic. As NAN prices fall, people will, I predict, will buy more storage. But there's been somewhat of a lull in the overall storage market. It's not a great market right now, frankly, at the macro level. Now ETR does these surveys on a quarterly basis. They're just about to release the October survey, and they put out a little glimpse on Friday about this survey. And I'll share some bullet points there. Overall IT spending clearly is softening. We kind of know that, everybody kind of realizes that. Here's the nuance. New adoptions are reverting to pre-2018 levels, and the replacements are rising. What does this mean? So the number of respondents that said, oh yes, we're adopting this platform for the first time is declining, and the replacements are actually accelerating. Why is that? Well I was at ETR last week and we were talking about this and one of the theories, and I think it's a good one, is that 2016, 2017 was kind of experimentation around digital transformation. 2018, people started to put things into production or closer to production, they were running systems in parallel, and now they're making their bets, they're saying, hey, this test worked, let's put this heavy into production in 2019, and now we're going to start replacing. So we're not going to adopt as much stuff 'cause we're not doing as much experimentation. We're going to now focus and narrow in on those things that are going to drive our business, and we're going to replace those things that aren't going to drive our business. We're going to start unplugging them. So that's some of what's happening. Another big trend is Microsoft. Microsoft is extending its presence throughout. They're goin' after collaboration, you saw the impact that they had on Slack and Slack stock recently. So Slack Box, Dropbox, are kind of exposed there. They're goin' after security, they've just announced a SIM product. So Splunk and IBM, they're kind of goin' after that base. The application performance management vendors. For instance, New Relic. Microsoft goin' after them. Obviously they got a huge presence in cloud. Their Windows 10 cycle is a little slower this time around, but they've got other businesses that are really starting to click. So Microsoft is one of the few vendors that really is showing accelerated spending momentum in the ETR data. Financial services and telcos, which are always leading spender indicators, are actually very weak right now. That's having a spillover effect into Europe, which is over-banked, if I can use that term. Banking heavy, if you will. So right now it's not a pretty picture, but it's not a disaster. I don't want to necessarily suggest this as like going back to 2007, 2008, it's not. It's really just a matter of things are softening and it's, you know, maybe taking a little breath. Okay, so let me summarize the meeting overall. Again, it was a very well-run meeting. Started at 9:00, ended at 12:00, bagged lunch, go home. Nice and crisp. So these guys are very well-prepared. I think, again, Dell is a extremely well-managed company. They laid out a much clearer vision for Wall Street of its strategy, where it's headed. As they say, they're going after IT complexity. I want to make a comment on this. You think about Legacy EMC. Legacy EMC was not the company that you would expect to deal with complexity. In fact, they were the culprit of complexity. One of the things that Jeff Clarke did when he came in, he said, this portfolio's too complex, needs to be simplified. Joe Tucci used to say, overlap is better than gaps. Jeff Clarke said we got too much overlap. We don't have a lot of gaps so let's streamline that portfolio. Taking advantage of vendor consolidation, this is an interesting one. Ever since I've been in this business, which has been quite a long time now, I've been hearing that buyers want to consolidate the number of vendors that they have. They've really not succeeded in doing that. Now can they do that now 'cause there are less vendors? Well, in a sense, yes, there are less sort of on-prem big vendors. EMC's no longer in the market, you don't have companies like Sun and Digital anymore, Compact is gone. HP split in two, but still. You're not seeing a huge number of new vendors, at scale, come into the market. Except you've got AWS and Google as new players there. So I think that injects sort of a new dynamic that a lot of people like to put cloud aside and kind of ignore it and talk about the old on-prem business, but I think that you're going to see a lot of experimentations and workload ins and outs, particularly with AWS and Google and of course Azure, which is in itself, their cloud is almost a separate force. So we'll see how that shakes up. As I say, servers right now, Dell's got a very tough compare. I think Dell will be fine in the server space. Storage, it's all about simplifying the portfolio, they've got a refreshed portfolio focused on regaining share. They've rebranded everything Power, so their whole line is going to be Power by, if it's not already, by May of next year, Dell Technologies World. It's a much more scalable portfolio. And I think Dell's got a lot of valuation levers. They're a $92 billion company, they've got their current operations, their current P and L, their share gains, their cross-company synergies, particularly with VMware, they can expand their TAM into cloud with partnerships like they're doing with AWS and others, Google, Microsoft. The Edge is a TAM expansion opportunity to them. And also corporate structure. You've seen them. VMware acquired Pivotal. They're cleaning that up. I'm sure they could potentially make some other moves. Secureworks is out there, for example. Maybe they'll do some things with RSA. So they got that knob to turn and they can delever. Paying down the debt to the extent that they can get back to investment grade, that will lower their interest rates, that'll drop right to the bottom line, and they'll be able to reinvest that. And Tom Sweet said, within 18 months, we'll be able to get there with that two X ratio relative to EBITA, and that's when they're going to start having conversations with the rating agencies to talk about you know, hey, maybe we can get a better rating and lower our interest expense. Bottom line, did Wall Street buy the story? Yes. But I don't think it's going to necessarily change anything in the near term. This is a show me from Missouri, prove it, execute, and then I think Dell will get rewarded. Okay, so this is Dave Vellante, thanks for watching this Cube Insights powered by ETR. We'll see ya next time. (electronic music)

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCube. (techno music) Now here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante and welcome to this special Cube Insights, powered by ETR. We've been running these Breaking Analysis Segments and today we're going to talk about some spending data that shows that there's continued interest in hyperconverged infrastructure. So we've been running these segments over the last several weeks with our partner ETR. They've got a database of about 4,500 IT Practitioners and CIOs. They go out quarterly and ask spending intentions. So we've been sharing that, along with our opinions. These are completely independent segments. I want to disclose that a number of the companies that we're talking about today: Nutanix, VMware, Dell EMC, Cisco, HPE. They sponsor theCube, but they have absolutely no input into editorial. They don't affect our opinion in any way, shape or form. So let's get into it. I'm here with Stu Miniman. Stu is an expert in this field. He's covered the space. Stu, let's look at some of the fundamentals. What do people need to know... Alex, if ya put up the slide, Stu, maybe you could talk to it. >> Yeah. Dave, thanks. I've been watching you have some fun with this. I enjoyed swimming in some of the data here and as you know, Dave, we've been watching since before hyperconverged infrastructure, or HCI, was a term that everybody talked about. We've been looking at how these hyperscale trends are going to impact the Enterprise. We put out our server SAN research years and years ago, so we know all these companies really well. And despite the latest AI and cloud and everything, the data shows, HCI, the simplification of the data center, building out what we would call True Private Cloud is important today. So right, we wanted to know when you look at the data, first of all, how are the vendors doing? Who are the leaders in this space here? There were a whole number of startups that came in this space. When we first analyzed the market it was companies like Microsoft and VMware that owned the operating system we thought would be hugely important. If you look in the big names this environment: Dell partnered with everyone, of course they bought Dell, bought EMC, which included a stake in VMware. What's that relationship with Nutanix? How is that shaping the market? As well as how is cloud impacting things? Both from a spending standpoint, has cloud sucked away revenue from HCI as that specter has overhung everybody in the IT space? And also, how does HCI fit into multicloud and how does that fit? >> Okay, great. So thanks for that setup, Stu, now let's get into some of the data. Alex, if you bring up the slide, the next slide. This is spending intentions for Nutanix, VMware and some other vendors. I'll go through that. But it's basically showing Nutanix and VMware are fighting it out. You know they're in this internecine battle and in social, and (chuckles) there's a war goin' on, because there's big money to be made here. So for those of you who are familiar with these segments, this is data from Enterprise Technology Research, from their July 2019 Spending Intentions Survey. So they're asking about spending intentions for the second half of 2019. The end of the survey, out of the 4,500 people in the panel, 1,068 responded to this survey. So on the left hand side you see the vendors: Nutanix, VMware with vSAN, Dell EMC with VxRail, specifically. Then SimpliVity, and then Springpath, or Cisco. So what the chart shows is what we call, Net Score. And net score is calculated by taking the red, on the bar, which is, we're going to leave the platform, that's the dark red. The lighter red, which is, we're going to spend less in the second half. The gray, which their spending's going to be flat. The dark green, or the evergreen, which says, we're going to increase spending. And the lime green, which I'm going to add to the platform. You take the green, minus the red, you get net score. Higher the net score, the better. You can see, Nutanix and VMware with vSAN are leading the pack. And then we'll go through that. But then you see, Shared Accounts. That's the number of indications for spending that they received out of those 1068. So Stu, what is this data telling you? >> So first of all, Dave, it confirmed kind of the general market share numbers that we hear out there. The vendors that track that on quarterly. VMware has the most customers, has the largest revenue, and their largest partner for that, of course, is Dell. VMware and Dell go to market, joint product development, joint engineering, joint go to market and it's the biggest piece of vSAN, so that's where we specifically wanted to look at the VxRail. And vSAN and VxRail, doing very well. They're adding new customers; was interesting to me that you saw VxRail kind of ramping up a little more on the, attracting new companies, but also looked to be losing some on the tail end of the dark red. As opposed to vSAN in general, is a little bit more stable. We know how many thousands of customers they have out there, and Vmware's a software story as opposed to VxRail is that full appliance. Nutanix is the second horse in this two-horse race that we're really talking about here, from HCI. There's some discussion in the marketplace after two quarters being down, is Nutanix showing weakness? What's happening there? The most recent quarter announcement was that Nutanix is doing well, seems to... They had a little bit of change as they're going through their move to a software model and sorting things out with sales and marketing in their channel. The data here shows that the second half of the year looks good for Nutanix. So to some of the questions I asked in the first slide, Dave, Nutanix and VMware, of course the clear leaders in this space. SimpliVity, which was of course bought be HP, Springpath which is the hyperflex from Cisco, are far behind those two out there. And it seems that even though Dell and VMware are fighting, very much with Nutanix, that is not heavily dampening Nutanix's from the respondents in this survey. >> Okay, and just a word on the data, so you see 184 shared accounts for Nutanix, 174 for VMware and down the line. Only 42 for SimpliVity and only 18 for Springpath, and Cisco. It's an indication of the size of the install base, obviously the more shared accounts, the more mentions, the larger the install base. Again, they're statistically significant; ETR does a very good job of that. Let's look Stu, at... Oh, actually I want to make another point here. So how are these net scores? Well let's put 'em in context. The hottest net scores we've seen recently are: Snowflake, and UiPath, with 80% plus, net score. Okay, so that's really, they're off the charts, they're growing like crazy. We saw Salesforce with 55%, so, and Workday sort of in there as well. Companies that are growing share. So SAP in the 30% range, and so you see the Dell EMC, VxRail, that's kind of holding serve. It's not like, dramatically gaining share, but they're growing a little bit and then-- >> And I think it's a lot, Dave, it shows to the maturity of this market. HCI is not new, both Nutanix and VMware have thousands of customers, specifically with V's then we're talking VMware. So it was more, when I saw some of your charts, Microsoft has a similar net score. >> Right >> Well liked, good install based, still growing and the like. And brings in the discussion of when we did some cross section of the analysis looking at cloud companies and how does this impact their public cloud spend; is this detracting if this customer's also doing public cloud? And the long and the short of it is VMware and Nutanix are pretty much the same if not actually a little bit better when you talk about a customer that's looking at their overall cloud spend. So to me that really signals that both VMware and Nutanix are doing a good job into how their solution fits into the customer's overall hybrid cloud strategy. >> All right, let's take a look at the next slide, which talks to time series. So this is hyperconverged infrastructure spending intentions again, for the second half of 2019, over time. So the July '19 Survey you can see is the most recent one. We go all the way back to January '17 and you can see Nutanix on the top, VMware or vSAN on the bottom. We just selected those two. We're just repeating the net score and the shared accounts. And you can see these things tend to bounce around a little bit. You can see Nutanix maintains a lead, but the market's startin' to converge. These two companies are coming together. We hear a lot about vSAN doing very well, it's kind of held on. You can see a slight downward pressure in July, in the July survey. It's unclear what that means. That could be an indication of just some uncertainty in the marketplace. Some economic macro concerns. Tariffs, potential headwinds there, so there could be some uncertainty there. But what do you takeaway from this slide, Stu? >> Yeah, first of all right. As you show, Dave, VMware is a bit more steady, Nutanix gone up for bit and come down. Both of them stayed relatively stable. Somewhere between kind of the 45 and 55 lately. A little bit, if you look at the overall trend, Nutanix is down. VMware could surpass them from the net score in the future, if this trend holds. But both of them doing quite well. When you looked at all the other vendors in there, of course the scale is just showing 40-70%, if you put all the others, which are down much lower, you can see once again, that kind of the clear leadership. These two companies, just strong lead. Does not look like there any challengers in this space that are ready to be a clear number three yet, in the market. >> But Nutanix at one point had no competition. >> Yeah. >> Okay, now vSAN comes in and of course-- >> Oh no, absolutely. So no, SimpliVity and Scale Computing, and there were a whole host of startups. There's all the brand new startups in the space. Everything from little companies like Diamante, Pivot3, who was around doing this before it came. So there's always been a lot there, but Nutanix is the one that separated from the pack. The only one in this space that's gone IPO. But VMware's there, Microsoft won that, they rebranded their Azure Stack HCI for what they put in the data center last year. So expect Microsoft partnering with all of the big server manufacturers to push farther into HCI, but really has not directly impacted this market too much, just yet. >> But there's definitely been some pressure on Nutanix from an earning standpoint, the stock's been hit. You've had some executive departures. There's some rumors about acquisition with Google. Your thoughts on-- >> Yeah, definitely. So John Furrier just had Dheeraj Pandey, the CEO of Nutanix, in our Palo Alto studio, leading up to the Copenhagen show for Nutanix that I will be at. Sure. Sunil Potti who was basically the number two at Nutanix, is now working for Thomas Kurian, TK, over at Google Cloud. My indication from what I hear, he is not over there to help broker a deal. Sunil had a great run at Nutanix, there was a clean break there, but there is a mostly new executive team at Nutanix. Now a couple of years past the IPO and the team at Nutanix, they have their platform. The have a bunch of SaaS offerings that they're doing there. Do they have a relationship with Google? Absolutely! They had Diane Greene at one of their events a couple of years ago. They did joint engineering. But I actually saw that engineering effort cool off a little bit in the last year or so since the new regime came on in Google Cloud. So does Nutanix have a lot of Enterprise accounts and know how to work with the Enterprise and could that be a boon to Google? Absolutely! But the personnel of a Nutanix executive over at Google, and Brian Stevens who's the CTO of Google Cloud being on the Board of Nutanix? I do not think that that is telegraphing that an acquisition is going to happen. It could. We see lots of big acquisitions. Nine or 10 billion dollars from Nutanix could be interesting for Nutanix and help them get in a lot of places and help Google. But Dave, I goin' on record say, I don't think it's going to happen. I don't think Cisco is going to buy Nutanix. Infrastructure's not the real push for Chuck Robbins and that team. And at the Google Cloud event, Dave, that we were at, we saw Sanjay Poonen from VMware up on stage touting how deeply VMware was going to partner. So both VMware and Nutanix are partnering with all of the clouds. VMware of course has a very deep relationship with VMware. They're going deeper with Google, they are even partnering with the old enemy of Microsoft, so I would give VMware definitely has a deeper and more public relationship with all the public cloud providers but Nutanix is also partnering and expanding their portfolio to give themselves good growth beyond just the core HCI market. >> HP's another one. So Nutanix and HPE are workin' together. Kind of the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Nutanix was not at VMworld this year; they're kind of booted out. So they belly up to HP. >> Yeah, HP loves having, they have their, "As a service offerings," and Nutanix is one of those as well as Nutanix can sell the HP. So as the, right, the Dell relationship is likely going to die down over time, as Michael Dell on the team, want to sell more Dell hardware with VMware software. HPE is another... And they also partner with Lenovo on the Nutanix side. >> All right, Stu, bring it home. What are the key takeaways on this cube Insights. >> Okay, so HCI, who is a two-horse race right now. There are interesting companies to look at beyond the two, but if you want to understand who the leaders are in the space it is: VMware, especially with their VxRail and Nutanix, are the two leaders in that space. Really looking and understanding how they're expanding into multicloud and hybrid cloud solutions. VMware very much with their VCF offering, which packages vSAN to go into the VMware cloud offerings. And Nutanix with an interesting strategy, both with how they really spread some of their services like what they're doing with Xi Cloud, as well as some SaaS offerings, which some of them really have a disconnect. Not in a bad way, but just are not tied directly to the hardware. What the infrastructure companies have tried to do for years. Both of them, VMware's done tons of acquisitions. Nutanix has done quite a few acquisitions too. >> So your second point here, what's the impact of Dell VMware versus the Nutanix battle? You say not a significant impact on spending intentions yet. I mean there's clearly some evidence that those two markets are comin' together, that VMware's pressuring Nutanix. But why do you say, yet? What do you expect? I mean is it the OEM deal with Dell? >> It's the OAM relationship. There is huge pipeline of Dell hardware with Nutanix software and they're at loggerheads. So absolutely, the Dell family: Dell, EMC and VMware are doing all they can to dial that down. So they put pressure on the channel. And even some of the most loyal Nutanix channel partners that work with Dell, have had pressure to do more and more VxRail. So I expect it to have impact, but just as, Dave, I'll dial back the clock. You probably remember when EMC had a relationship with HP and HP killed the OEM of EMC storage. EMC stormed back and got a lot of those accounts. Same thing happened when EMC and Dell broke up a couple of years before the acquisition. So Nutanix is storming to go with HPE as one of their server partners, and (mumbles). So can Nutanix keep their growth and momentum going as Dell is no longer their biggest partner? >> Well, they're fighting a two-front war. They've got one with Dell VMware and they're also fighting the war with the public cloud guys, even though they're partnering with the public cloud guys. All right, they're sort of taking that cloud model but of course it's on prim. So you say how this public cloud affects HCI spending; not a significant impact on spending intentions yet. Can I infer from that that you do expect there to be pressure on that second front? >> Yeah, so as I've talked about before Dave, when we look at VMware and VMware gives the VMware cloud in AWS. Some say, "Great, that gives me a nice path to be able to use public cloud. But maybe I don't need some of this VMware licensing and software in there." The question for Nutanix is very similar. What services do they have? How do they become more sticky in customer environments? And absolutely, they're driving a roadmap for that in working with their customers. >> Well the thing about Nutanix is that customer's really happy. The customer's really like Nutanix. They like the simplicity. I've talked to a number of Nutanix customers that are very happy in that regard. And they have a leading product in that regard. But they're aiming at the multicloud space and can they play there? >> And Dave, you make a really good point. The killer use case, what did HCI deliver? It delivered simplicity. Today, if you talk about public cloud in general or even hybrid or multicloud, (chuckles) simplicity is not how you would describe this. So can the customers, the companies that did HCI, so, VMware, Nutanix, HPE and Cisco, they're all fighting for that hybrid and multicloud environment. And if they can help deliver simplicity of management, simplicity of leveraging my data, they can be successful in that space. >> Okay, so you're sort of positive on the multicloud, their position in multicloud. Even though they're not one of the big five. >> Yeah, and the good news for a Nutanix is that they're growing off of a much smaller base then say VMware, when you say they have five or 600,000 customers. Hey, how big of an impact will public cloud have on them? >> All right, so we don't pick stocks. We're not making recommendations. (laughs) But, do you feel like it's overdone, that it's undervalued? Independent of the macro. Do you feel like the pressure on Nutanix is warranted, or do you feel like it's got legs? >> So I feel Wall Street tends to over adjust when they go through things. When I talk to my friends on the Wall Street stuff. Definitely Nutanix took more of a beating probably then they should have. But they had two quarters that weren't great. And some of that was the management changes, they blamed that they couldn't hire sales and marketing fast enough. Something we'd asked, if you're a company in the Valley and you've gone from a few hundred people to a few thousand people. How do you keep adding good quality people? That's challenging. So yes, I think we've actually seen Dave, in the last week, or so Nutanix has been one of the fastest growing stocks in the tech market. So they're adjusting some. So I still think Nutanix has plenty of room for growth. The question is, what's their path to say, two billion dollars? Or is it an exit for 9-10 billion dollars down the road? >> All right, Stu, some great stuff. Thank you for that analysis. And thank you for watching this episode of theCube Insights, powered by ETR. This is Dave Vellante, for Stu Miniman, we'll see ya next time. (techno music)

>> Hey, welcome back. Your body, Jefe Rick here from the Cube were high atop San Francisco in the century innovation hub. It's in the middle of the Salesforce Tower. It's a beautiful facility. They think you had it. The grand opening about six months ago. We're here for the grand opening. Very cool space. I got maker studios. They've got all kinds of crazy stuff going on. But we're here today to talk about Cloud in this continuing evolution about cloud in the enterprise and hybrid cloud and multi cloud in Public Cloud and Private Cloud. And we're really excited to have a couple of guys who really helping customers make this journey, cause it's really tough to do by yourself. CEOs are super busy. There were about security and all kinds of other things, so centers, often a trusted partner. We got two of the leaders from center joining us today's Prasad Sankaran. He's the senior managing director of Intelligent Cloud infrastructure for Center Welcome and Larry Soccer, the global managing director. Intelligent cloud infrastructure offering from central gentlemen. Welcome. I love it. It intelligent cloud. What is an intelligent cloud all about? Got it in your title. It must mean something pretty significant. >> Yeah, I think First of all, thank you for having us, but yeah, absolutely. Everything's around becoming more intelligent around using more automation. And the work that, you know we delivered to our clients and cloud, as you know, is the platform to reach. All of our clients are moving. So it's all about bringing the intelligence not only into infrastructure, but also into cloud generally. And it's all driven by software, >> right? It's just funny to think where we are in this journey. We talked a little bit before we turn the cameras on and there you made an interesting comment when I said, You know, when did this cloud for the Enterprise start? And you took it back to sass based applications, which, >> you know you were sitting in the sales force builder. >> That's true. It isn't just the tallest building in >> everyone's, you know, everyone's got a lot of focus on AWS is rise, etcetera. But the real start was really getting into sass. I mean, I remember we used to do a lot of Siebel deployments for CR M, and we started to pivot to sales, for some were moving from remedy into service now. I mean, we've went through on premise collaboration, email thio 3 65 So So we've actually been at it for quite a while in the particularly the SAS world. And it's only more recently that we started to see that kind of push to the, you know, the public pass, and it's starting to cloud native development. But But this journey started, you know, it was that 78 years ago that we really started. See some scale around it. >> And I think and tell me if you agree, I think really, what? The sales forces of the world and and the service now is of the world office 3 65 kind of broke down some of those initial beers, which are all really about security and security, security, security, Always to hear where now security is actually probably an attributes and loud can brink. >> Absolutely. In fact, I mean, those barriers took years to bring down. I still saw clients where they were forcing salesforce tor service Now to put, you know, instances on prime and I think I think they finally woke up toe. You know, these guys invested ton in their security organizations. You know there's a little of that needle in the haystack. You know, if you breach a data set, you know what you're getting after. But when Europe into sales force, it's a lot harder. And so you know. So I think that security problems have certainly gone away. We still have some compliance, regulatory things, data sovereignty. But I think security and not not that it sold by any means that you know, it's always giving an ongoing problem. But I think they're getting more comfortable with their data being up in the in the public domain, right? Not public. >> And I think it also helped them with their progress towards getting cloud native. So, you know, you pick certain applications which were obviously hosted by sales force and other companies, and you did some level of custom development around it. And now I think that's paved the way for more complex applications and different workloads now going into, you know, the public cloud and the private cloud. But that's the next part of the journey, >> right? So let's back up 1/2 a step, because then, as you said, a bunch of stuff then went into public cloud, right? Everyone's putting in AWS and Google. Um, IBM has got a public how there was a lot more. They're not quite so many as there used to be, Um, but then we ran into a whole new host of issues, right, which is kind of opened up this hybrid cloud. This multi cloud world, which is you just can't put everything into a public clouds. There's certain attributes is that you need to think about and yet from the application point of view before you decide where you deploy that. So I'm just curious. If you can share now, would you guys do with clients? How should they think about applications? How should they think about what to deploy where I think >> I'll start in? The military has a lot of expertise in this area. I think you know, we have to obviously start from an application centric perspective. You go to take a look at you know where your applications have to live water. What are some of the data implications on the applications, or do you have by way of regulatory and compliance issues, or do you have to do as faras performance because certain applications have to be in a high performance environment. Certain other applications don't think a lot of these factors will. Then Dr where these applications need to recite and then what we think in today's world is really accomplish. Complex, um, situation where you have a lot of legacy. But you also have private as well as public cloud. So you approach it from an application perspective. >> Yeah. I mean, if you really take a look at Army, you look at it centers clients, and we were totally focused on up into the market Global 2000 savory. You know how clients typically have application portfolios ranging from 520,000 applications? And really, I mean, if you think about the purpose of cloud or even infrastructure for that, they're there to serve the applications. No one cares if your cloud infrastructure is not performing the absolute. So we start off with an application monetization approach and ultimately looking, you know, you know, with our tech advisory guys coming in, there are intelligent engineering service is to do the cloud native and at mod work our platforms, guys, who do you know everything from sales forward through ASAP. They should drive a strategy on how those applications gonna evolve with its 520,000 and determined hey, and usually using some, like the six orders methodology. And I'm I am I going to retire this Am I going to retain it? And, you know, I'm gonna replace it with sass. Am I gonna re factor in format? And it's ultimately that strategy that's really gonna dictate a multi and, you know, every cloud story. So it's based on the applications data, gravity issues where they gonna reside on their requirements around regulatory, the requirements for performance, etcetera. That will then dictate the cloud strategies. I'm you know, not a big fan of going in there and just doing a multi hybrid cloud strategy without a really good up front application portfolio approach, right? How we gonna modernize that >> it had. And how do you segment? That's a lot of applications. And you know, how do you know the old thing? How do you know that one by that time, how do you help them pray or size where they should be focusing on us? >> So typically what we do is work with our clients to do a full application portfolio analysis, and then we're able to then segment the applications based on, you know, important to the business and some of the factors that both of us mentioned. And once we have that, then we come up with an approach where certain sets of applications he moved to sass certain other applications you move to pass. So you know, you're basically doing the re factoring and the modernization and then certain others you know, you can just, you know, lift and shift. So it's really a combination off both modernization as well as migration. It's a combination off that, but to do that, you have to initially look at the entire set of applications and come up with that approach. >> I'm just curious where within that application assessment, um, where is cost savings? Where is, uh, this is just old. And where is opportunities to innovate faster? Because we know a lot of lot of talk really. Days has cost savings, but what the real advantages is execution speed if you can get it. If >> you could go back through four years and we had there was a lot of CEO discussions around cost savings, I'm not really have seen our clients shift. It costs never goes away, obviously right. But there's a lot greater emphasis now on business agility. You know, howto innovate faster, get getting your capabilities to market faster, to change my customer experience. So So it's really I t is really trying to step up and, you know, enabled the business toe to compete in the marketplace. We're seeing a huge shift in emphasis or focus at least starting with, you know, how'd I get better business agility outta leverage to cloud and cloud native development to get their upper service levels? Actually, we started seeing increase on Hey, you know, these applications need to work. It's actress. So So Obviously, cost still remains a factor, but we seem much more for, you know, much more emphasis on agility, you know, enabling the business on, given the right service levels of right experience to the user, little customers. Big pivot there, >> Okay. And let's get the definitions out because you know a lot of lot of conversation about public clouds, easy private clouds, easy but hybrid cloud and multi cloud and confusion about what those are. How do you guys define him? How do you help your customers think about the definition? Yes, >> I think it's a really good point. So what we're starting to see is there were a lot of different definitions out there. But I think as I talked more clients and our partners, I think we're all starting to, you know, come to ah, you know, the same kind of definition on multi cloud. It's really about using more than one cloud. But hybrid, I think, is a very important concept because hybrid is really all about the placement off the workload or where your application is going to run on. And then again, it goes to all of these points that we talked about data, gravity and performance and other things. Other factors. But it's really all about where do you place the specific look >> if you look at that, so if you think about public, I mean obviously gives us the innovation of the public providers. You look at how fast Amazon comes out with new versions of Lambda etcetera. So that's the innovations there obviously agility. You could spend up environments very quickly, which is, you know, one of the big benefits of it. The consumption, economic models. So that is the number of drivers that are pushing in the direction of public. You know, on the private side, they're still it's quite a few benefits that don't get talked about as much. Um, so you know, if you look at it, um, performance if you think the public world, you know, Although they're scaling up larger T shirts, et cetera, they're still trying to do that for a large array of applications on the private side, you can really Taylor somethingto very high performance characteristics. Whether it's you know, 30 to 64 terabyte Hana, you can get a much more focused precision environment for business. Critical workloads like that article, article rack, the Duke clusters, everything about fraud analysis. So that's a big part of it. Related to that is the data gravity that Prasad just mentioned. You know, if I've got a 64 terabyte Hana database you know, sitting in my private cloud, it may not be that convenient to go and put get that data shared up in red shift or in Google's tensorflow. So So there's some data gravity out. Networks just aren't there. The laden sea of moving that stuff around is a big issue. And then a lot of people of investments in their data centers. I mean, the other piece, that's interesting. His legacy, you know, you know, as we start to look at the world a lot, there's a ton of code still living in, You know, whether it's you, nick system, just IBM mainframes. There's a lot of business value there, and sometimes the business cases aren't aren't necessarily there toe to replace them. Right? And in world of digital, the decoupling where I can start to use micro service is we're seeing a lot of trends. We worked with one hotel to take their reservation system. You know, Rapid and Micro Service is, um, we then didn't you know, open shift couch base, front end. And now, when you go against, you know, when you go and browsing properties, you're looking at rates you actually going into distributed database cash on, you know, in using the latest cloud native technologies that could be dropped every two weeks or everything three or four days for my mobile application. And it's only when it goes, you know, when the transaction goes back, to reserve the room that it goes back there. So we're seeing a lot of power with digital decoupling, But we still need to take advantage of, you know, we've got these legacy applications. So So the data centers air really were trying to evolve them. And really, just, you know, how do we learn everything from the world of public and struck to bring those saints similar type efficiencies to the to the world of private? And really, what we're seeing is this emerging approach where I can start to take advantage of the innovation cycles. The land is that, you know, the red shifts the functions of the public world, but then maybe keep some of my more business critical regulated workloads. You know, that's the other side of the private side, right? I've got G X p compliance. If I've got hip, a data that I need to worry about GDP are there, you know, the whole set of regular two requirements. Now, over time, we do anticipate the public guys will get much better and more compliant. In fact, they made great headway already, but they're still not a number of clients are still, you know, not 100% comfortable from my client's perspective. >> Gotta meet Teresa Carlson. She'll change him, runs that AWS public sector is doing amazing things, obviously with big government contracts. But but you raise real inching point later. You almost described what I would say is really a hybrid application in this in this hotel example that you use because it's is, you know, kind of breaking the application and leveraging micro service is to do things around the core that allowed to take advantage of some this agility and hyper fast development, yet still maintain that core stuff that either doesn't need to move. Works fine, be too expensive. Drea Factor. It's a real different weight. Even think about workloads and applications into breaking those things into bits. >> And we see that pattern all over the place. I'm gonna give you the hotel Example Where? But finance, you know, look at financial service. Is retail banking so open banking a lot. All those rito applications are on the mainframe. I'm insurance claims and and you look at it the business value of replicating a lot of like the regulatory stuff, the locality stuff. It doesn't make sense to write it. There's no rule inherent business values of I can wrap it, expose it and in a micro service's architecture now D'oh cloud native front end. That's gonna give me a 360 view a customer, Change the customer experience. You know, I've got a much you know, I can still get that agility. The innovation cycles by public. Bye bye. Wrapping my legacy environment >> and percent you raided, jump in and I'll give you something to react to, Which is which is the single planet glass right now? How do I How did I manage all this stuff now? Not only do I have distributed infrastructure now, I've got distributed applications in the and the thing that you just described and everyone wants to be that single pane of glass. Everybody wants to be the app that's upon everybody. Screen. How are you seeing people deal with the management complexity of these kind of distributed infrastructures? If you will Yeah, >> I think that that's that's an area that's, ah, actually very topical these days because, you know, you're starting to see more and more workers go to private cloud. And so you've got a hybrid infrastructure you're starting to see move movement from just using the EMS to, you know, cantinas and Cuba needs. And, you know, we talked about Serval s and so on. So all of our clients are looking for a way, and you have different types of users as well. Yeah, developers. You have data scientists. You have, you know, operators and so on. So they're all looking for that control plane that allows them access and a view toe everything that is out there that is being used in the enterprise. And that's where I think you know, a company like Accenture were able to use the best of breed toe provide that visibility to our clients, >> right? Yeah. I mean, you hit the nail on the head. It's becoming, you know, with all the promises, cloud and all the power. And these new architectures is becoming much more dynamic, ephemeral, with containers and kubernetes with service computing that that that one application for the hotel, they're actually started in. They've got some, actually, now running a native us of their containers and looking at surveillance. So you're gonna even a single application can span that. And one of things we've seen is is first, you know, a lot of our clients used to look at, you know, application management, you know, different from their their infrastructure. And the lines are now getting very blurry. You need to have very tight alignment. You take that single application, if any my public side goes down or my mid tier with my you know, you know, open shipped on VM, where it goes down on my back and mainframe goes down. Or the networks that connected to go down the devices that talk to it. It's a very well. Despite the power, it's a very complex environment. So what we've been doing is first we've been looking at, you know, how do we get better synergy across what we you know, Application Service's teams that do that Application manager, an optimization cloud infrastructure. How do we get better alignment that are embedded security, You know, how do you know what are managed to security service is bringing those together. And then what we did was we looked at, you know, we got very aggressive with cloud for a strategy and, you know, how do we manage the world of public? But when looking at the public providers of hyper scale, er's and how they hit Incredible degrees of automation. We really looked at, said and said, Hey, look, you gotta operate differently in this new world. What can we learn from how the public guys we're doing that We came up with this concept. We call it running different. You know, how do you operate differently in this new multi speed? You know, you know, hot, very hybrid world across public, private demon, legacy, environment, and start a look and say, OK, what is it that they do? You know, first they standardize, and that's one of the big challenges you know, going to almost all of our clients in this a sprawl. And you know, whether it's application sprawl, its infrastructure, sprawl >> and my business is so unique. The Larry no business out there has the same process that way. So >> we started make you know how to be standardized like center hybrid cloud solution important with hp envy And where we how do we that was an example of so we can get to you because you can't automate unless you standardise. So that was the first thing you know, standardizing our service catalog. Standardizing that, um you know, the next thing is the operating model. They obviously operate differently. So we've been putting a lot of time and energy and what I call a cloud and agile operating model. And also a big part of that is truly you hear a lot about Dev ops right now. But truly putting the security and and operations into Deb said cops are bringing, you know, the development in the operations much tied together. So spending a lot of time looking at that and transforming operations re Skilling the people you know, the operators of the future aren't eyes on glass there. Developers, they're writing the data ingestion, the analytic algorithms, you know, to do predictive operations. They're riding the automation script to take work, you know, test work out right. And over time they'll be tuning the aye aye engines to really optimize environment. And then finally, has Prasad alluded to Is that the platforms that control planes? That doing that? So, you know what we've been doing is we've had a significant investments in the eccentric cloud platform, our infrastructure automation platforms, and then the application teams with it with my wizard framework, and we started to bring that together you know, it's an integrated control plane that can plug into our clients environments to really manage seamlessly, you know, and provide. You know, it's automation. Analytics. Aye, aye. Across APS, cloud infrastructure and even security. Right. And that, you know, that really is a I ops, right? I mean, that's delivering on, you know, as the industry starts toe define and really coalesce around, eh? I ops. That's what we you A ups. >> So just so I'm clear that so it's really your layer your software layer kind of management layer that that integrates all these different systems and provides kind of a unified view. Control? Aye, aye. Reporting et cetera. Right? >> Exactly. Then can plug in and integrate, you know, third party tools to do straight functions. >> I'm just I'm just curious is one of the themes that we here out in the press right now is this is this kind of pull back of public cloud app, something we're coming back. Or maybe it was, you know, kind of a rush. Maybe a little bit too aggressively. What are some of the reasons why people are pulling stuff back out of public clouds that just with the wrong. It was just the wrong application. The costs were not what we anticipated to be. We find it, you know, what are some of the reasons that you see after coming back in house? Yeah, I think it's >> a variety of factors. I mean, it's certainly cost, I think is one. So as there are multiple private options and you know, we don't talk about this, but the hyper skills themselves are coming out with their own different private options like an tars and out pulls an actor stack and on. And Ali Baba has obsessed I and so on. So you see a proliferation of that, then you see many more options around around private cloud. So I think the cost is certainly a factor. The second is I think data gravity is, I think, a very important point because as you're starting to see how different applications have to work together, then that becomes a very important point. The third is just about compliance, and, you know, the regulatory environment. As we look across the globe, even outside the U. S. We look at Europe and other parts of Asia as clients and moving more to the cloud. You know that becomes an important factor. So as you start to balance these things, I think you have to take a very application centric view. You see some of those some some maps moving back, and and I think that's the part of the hybrid world is that you know, you can have a nap running on the private cloud and then tomorrow you can move this. Since it's been containerized to run on public and it's, you know, it's all managed. That left >> E. I mean, cost is a big factor if you actually look at it. Most of our clients, you know, they typically you were a big cap ex businesses, and all of a sudden they're using this consumption, you know, consumption model. And they went, really, they didn't have a function to go and look at be thousands or millions of lines of it, right? You know, as your statement Exactly. I think they misjudged, you know, some of the scale on Do you know e? I mean, that's one of the reasons we started. It's got to be an application led, you know, modernization, that really that will dictate that. And I think In many cases, people didn't. May not have thought Through which application. What data? There The data, gravity data. Gravity's a conversation I'm having just by with every client right now. And if I've got a 64 terabyte Hana and that's the core, my crown jewels that data, you know, how do I get that to tensorflow? How'd I get that? >> Right? But if Andy was here, though, and he would say we'll send down the stove, the snow came from which virgin snow plows? Snowball Snowball. Well, they're snowballs. But I have seen the whole truck killer that comes out and he'd say, Take that and stick it in the cloud. Because if you've got that data in a single source right now, you can apply multitude of applications across that thing. So they, you know, they're pushing. Get that date end in this single source. Of course. Then to move it, change it. You know, you run into all these micro lines of billing statement, take >> the hotel. I mean, their data stolen the mainframe, so if they anyone need to expose it, Yeah, they have a database cash, and they move it out, You know, particulars of data sets get larger, it becomes, you know, the data. Gravity becomes a big issue because no matter how much you know, while Moore's Law might be might have elongated from 18 to 24 months, the network will always be the bottle Mac. So ultimately, we're seeing, you know, a CZ. We proliferate more and more data, all data sets get bigger and better. The network becomes more of a bottleneck. And that's a It's a lot of times you gotta look at your applications. They have. I've got some legacy database I need to get Thio. I need this to be approximately somewhere where I don't have, you know, high bandwith. Oh, all right. Or, you know, highlight and see type. Also, egress costs a pretty big deals. My date is up in the cloud, and I'm gonna get charged for pulling it off. You know, that's being a big issue, >> you know, it's funny, I think, and I think a lot of the the issue, obviously complexity building. It's a totally from building model, but I think to a lot of people will put stuff in a public cloud and then operated as if they bought it and they're running in the data center in this kind of this. Turn it on, Turn it off when you need it. Everyone turns. Everyone loves to talk about the example turning it on when you need it. But nobody ever talks about turning it off when you don't. But it kind of close on our conversation. I won't talk about a I and applied a Iot because he has a lot of talk in the market place. But, hey, I'm machine learning. But as you guys know pride better than anybody, it's the application of a I and specific applications, which really on unlocks the value. And as we're sitting here talking about this complexity, I can't help but think that, you know, applied a I in a management layer like your run differently, set up to actually know when to turn things on, when to turn things off when you moved in but not moved, it's gonna have to be machines running that right cause the data sets and the complexity of these systems is going to be just overwhelming. Yeah, yeah, >> absolutely. Completely agree with you. In fact, attack sensual. We actually refer to this whole area as applied intelligence on That's our guy, right? And it is absolutely to add more and more automation move everything Maur toe where it's being run by the machine rather than you know, having people really working on these things >> yet, e I mean, if you think you hit the nail on the head, we're gonna a eyes e. I mean, given how things getting complex, more ephemeral, you think about kubernetes et cetera. We're gonna have to leverage a humans or not to be able to get, you know, manage this. The environments comported right. What's interesting way we've used quite effectively for quite some time. But it's good at some stuff, not good at others. So we find it's very good at, like, ticket triage, like ticket triage, chicken rounding et cetera. You know, any time we take over account, we tune our AI ai engines. We have ticket advisers, etcetera. That's what probably got the most, you know, most bang for the buck. We tried in the network space, less success to start even with, you know, commercial products that were out there. I think where a I ultimately bails us out of this is if you look at the problem. You know, a lot of times we talked about optimizing around cost, but then performance. I mean, and it's they they're somewhat, you know, you gotta weigh him off each other. So you've got a very multi dimensional problem on howto I optimize my workloads, particularly. I gotta kubernetes cluster and something on Amazon, you know, sums running on my private cloud, etcetera. So we're gonna get some very complex environment. And the only way you're gonna be ableto optimize across multi dimensions that cost performance service levels, you know, And then multiple options don't do it public private, You know, what's my network costs etcetera. Isn't a I engine tuning that ai ai engines? So ultimately, I mean, you heard me earlier on the operators. I think you know, they write the analytic albums, they do the automation scripts, but they're the ultimate one too. Then tune the aye aye engines that will manage our environment. And I think it kubernetes will be interesting because it becomes a link to the control plane optimize workload placement. You know, between >> when the best thing to you, then you have dynamic optimization. Could you might be optimizing eggs at us right now. But you might be optimizing for output the next day. So exists really a you know, kind of Ah, never ending when you got me. They got to see them >> together with you and multi dimension. Optimization is very difficult. So I mean, you know, humans can't get their head around. Machines can, but they need to be trained. >> Well, Prasad, Larry, Lots of great opportunities for for centuries bring that expertise to the tables. So thanks for taking a few minutes to walk through some of these things. Our pleasure. Thank you, Grace. Besides Larry, I'm Jeff. You're watching the Cube. We are high above San Francisco in the Salesforce Tower, Theis Center, Innovation hub in San Francisco. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

>> From the Silicon Angle Media Office, in Boston Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host Dave Vellante. >> Hi everybody, welcome to this breaking analysis where we try to provide you some insights on theCUBE. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with Jim Kobielus who was up today, and Jim we were just off of the VMworld 2019. Big show, lot of energy, lot of announcements. I specifically want to focus on containers and the impact that containers are having on VMware, specifically the broader ecosystem and the industry at large. So, first of all, what was you take on VMworld 2019? >> Well, my take was that VMware is growing fast, and they're investing in the future, which is fairly clearly cloud and native computing on containers with Kubernetes and all that. But really that's the future and so, what VMware is doing is they're making significant bets that containers will rule the roost in cloud computing and application infrastructures going forward. But in fact virtual machines, VMs hypervisors are hotter than ever and that was well established last week by the fact that the core predominate announcement last week was a VMware Tanzu, which is not yet a production solution, but is in a limited preview, which is the new platform for coexistence of containers and vSphere. A container run time embedded in vSphere, so that customers can run containers in a highly-iso workloads, in a highly isolated VM environment. In other words, VMware is saying, we're saying to their customers, "You don't have to migrate away from VMs "until you're good and ready. "You can continue to run whatever containers "you build on vShpere, "but we more than encourage you to continue to run VMs "until you're good and ready "to migrate, if ever." >> All right. So, I want to come back and unpack that a little bit, but does your data, does your analysis, when you're talking to customers and the industry at large, is there any evidence from what you see that containers are hurting VMware's business? >> I don't get any sense that containers are hurting VMware's business. I get the strong sense that containers, they've just of course acquired Pivotal, a very additive to the revenue mix at VMware. And VMware, most of their announcements last week were in fact all around Kubernetes, and containers, and products that are very much for those customers who are going deep down the container road. >> So that was a setup question. >> You've got lots of products for them. >> So that was a setup question. So I have some data on this. >> Go ahead >> Right answer. So, I want to show you this. So, Alex, if you wouldn't mind bringing up that slide. And we shared this with you last week when we were prepping for VMworld. This is data from Enterprise Technology Research ETR, and they have a panel of 4500 end user customers that they go out and do spending surveys with them. So, what this shows is, this is container customers spending on VMware. So, you can see it goes back to early January. Now it's a little deceiving here. You see that big spike, but what it shows it that, A, that big spike is the number of shared customers. So, you really didn't have many customers back then that were doing both containers and VMware that ETR found. But as the N gets bigger, 186, 248, 257, 361, across those 461 customers, those are the shared customers in the green. And you can see that it's kind of a flat line. It's holding very well in the high 30's percent range, which is their sort of proprietary metric. So, there's absolutely no evidence, Jim, that containers, thus far anyway, are hurting VMware's business. Which of course was the narrative, containers are going to kill VMware, no evidence of that. But then why would they acquire Pivotal? Are they concerned about the future, what's your-- >> Well, they're concerned about cross selling their existing customer base who are primarily on V's, fearing the hypervisors, cross selling them on the new world of Kubernetes base products for cloud computing, and so forth and so on. In other words it's all about how do they grow their revenue base? VMware's been around for more than 20 years now. They rule the roost on the hypervisors. Where do they go from here, in terms of their product mix? Well, Kubernetes and beyond that, things like serverless will clearly be in the range of the things that they could add on. Their customers could add on to their existing deploys. I mean, look at Pivotal. Pivotal has a really strong Kubernetes distribution, which of course VMware co-developed with them. Pivotal also has a strong functions as a service backplane, the Pivotal function service for, serverless environments. So, this acquisition of Pivotal very much positions VMware to capitalize on those opportunities to sell those products when that market actually develops. But I see some evidence that virtual machines are going like gang busters in terms of customer deployments. Last week on theCUBE at VMworld, Mark Lohmeyer who's an SVP at a VMware for one of their cloud business unit, said that in the last year, for example, customers who are using a VMware cloud on AWS, VMware grew the customer base by 400% last year, and grew the number of VMs running in VMware, cloud, and AWS by 900%, which would imply that on average each customer more than doubled the number of VMs they're running on that particular cloud service. That means VMs are very much relevant now, and probably will be going forward. And why is that? That's a good question, we can debate that. >> Well, so the naysayers at VMworld in the audience were tweeting that, "Oh, I though we started Pivotal. "We launched Pivotal so that we didn't have to run VMs on, "or run containers on VMs, "so we could run them on bare metal." Are people running containers on virtual machines? >> Well, they are, yes. In fact, there's a broad range of industry initiatives, not just Tanzu at VMware, to do just that. To run containers on VMs. I mean, there is the KubeVirt, open source project over at CNCF, that's been going for a couple years now. But also, Google has Gvisor, Intel has the Kata containers initiative, I believe that there are a few others. Oh yeah, AWS with Firecracker, last year's reinvent. All this would imply, strongly indicate that these large cloud and tech vendors wouldn't be investing heavily into convergence of containers and VMs and hypervisors, if there weren't a strong demand from customers for hybrid environments where they're going to run both stacks as it were in parallel, why? Well, one of the strong advantages of VMs is workload isolation at the hardware level, which is something that typically container run times don't offer. For example, the workload isolation seems to be one of the strong features that VMware's touting for Tanzu going forward. >> So, VMware is--the centerpiece of VMware's strategy is obviously multicloud, Kubernetes as a lynch pin to enable running applications on different platforms. Will, in your opinion, and of course VMware is hard core enterprise, right? Will VMware, two things, will they be able to attract the developers, number one. And number two, will those developers build on top of VMware's platform or are they going to look to their cloud? >> That's a very important question. Last week at VMworld, I didn't get a sense that VMware has a strong developer story. I think that's a really open issue going forward for them. Why would a developer turn to VMware as their core solution provider when they don't offer a strong workbench for building these hybridized VM, /container/serverless applications that seem to be springing up all over? AWS and Microsoft and Google are much stronger in that area with their respective portfolios. >> So, I guess the obvious answer there is Pivotal is their answer to the developer quandary. >> Yes. >> And so, let's talk about that. So, Pivotal was struggling. I talked last week in my analysis, you saw the IPO price and then it dipped down, it never made it back up. Essentially the price that VMware paid the public shareholders for Pivotal was about half of it's initial IPO price, so, okay. So, the stock was struggling, the company didn't have the kind of momentum that, I think, that it wanted, so VMware picks it up. Can VMware fold in Pivotal, and use its go-to-market, and its largess to really prop up Pivotal and make it a leader? >> Well, possibly because Cloud Foundry, Pivotal Cloud Foundry could be the lynch pin of VMware's emerging developer story, if they position in that and really invest in the product in that regard. So yeah, in other words this could very much make VMware a go-to-vendor for the developers who are building the new generation of applications that present serverless functional interfaces, but will have containers under the cover, but also have VMs under the cover providing strong workload isolation in a multi-tenant environment. That would be the promise. >> Now, a couple things. You mentioned Microsoft, of course as you're in the clouding, and Google. The ETR data that I dug into when I wanted to understand, better understand multicloud. Who's got the multicloud momentum? Well, guess who has the most multicloud momentum? It's the cloud guys. Now, AWS doesn't specifically say they participate in multicloud. Certainly their marketing suggest that multicloud is for somebody else, that really they want to have uni-cloud. Whereas Google, and as you're kind of embracing multicloud and Kubernetes specifically, now of course AWS has a Kubernetes offering, but I suspect it's not something that they want to promote hard in the market place because it makes it easier for people to get off of AWS. Your thoughts on multicloud generally, but specifically Kubernetes, and containers as it relates to the big cloud providers. >> Yeah, well my thoughts on multicloud generally is that multicloud is the strategy of the second tier cloud vendors, obviously. If they can't dominate the entire space, at least they can maintain a strong, provide a strong connective tissue for the clouds that actually are deployed in their customer's environments. So, in other words, the Ciscos of the world, the VMwares of the world, IBM. In other words, these are not among the top tier of the public cloud players, hence where do they go to remain relevant? Well, they provide the connective tissue, and they provide the virtualized networking backbones, and they provide the AI ops that enables end-to-end automated monitoring management of the entire mesh. The whole notion of a mesh architecture is something that grew up with IBM and Google for lots of reasons, especially due to the fact that they themselves, as vendors, didn't dominate the public cloud. >> Well, so I agree with you. The only issue I would take is I think Microsoft is a leader in public cloud, but because it has a big On-Prem presence, it's in its best interest to push containers and Kubernetes, and so forth. But you're right about the others. Cisco doesn't have a public cloud, VMware doesn't have a public cloud, IBM has a public cloud but it's really small market share, and so it's in those companies, and Google is behind, but it's in those companies best interest really to promote multicloud, try to use it as a bull work against AWS, who's got an obviously awesome market momentum. The other thing that's interesting in the ETR data when I poke in there, it seems like there are more people looking at Google. Now maybe that's 'cause they have such strong strength in data and analytics, maybe it's 'cause they're looking for a hedge on AWS, but the spending data suggests that more and more people are kicking the tires, and more than kicking the tires on Google. Who of course is obviously behind Kubernetes and that container movement, and open source, your thoughts? >> Yeah, well, many ways, you have to think, that Google has developed the key pieces of the new stack for application development in the multicloud. Clearly they developed Kubernetes, its open source, and also they developed TensorFlow open sources, it's the predominant AI workbench essentially for the new generation of AI driven applications, which is everything. But also, if you look at Google developed Node JS for web applications and so forth. So really, Google now is the go-to-vendor for the new generation of open source application development, and increasingly DevOps in a multicloud environment, running over Istio meshes and so forth. So, I think that's, so, look at one of the announcements last weekend at VMworld. VMware and NVIDIA, their announcement of their collaboration, their joint offering to enable AI workloads, training workloads to run in GPUs in an optimal high performance fashion within a distributive of VMware cloud end-to-end. So really, I think VMware recognizes that the new workloads in the multicloud are predominately, increasingly AI workloads. And in order to, as the market goes towards those kinds of workloads, VMware very much recognizes they need to have a strong developer play, and they do with NVIDIA in a sense. Very much so because NVIDIA with the rapid framework and so forth, and NVIDIA being the predominant GPU vendor, very much is a very strategic partner for VMware as they're going forward, as they hope to line up the AI developers. But Google still is the vendor to beat as regards to AI developers of the world, in that regard, so-- >> So we're entering a world we sometimes call the post-virtual machine world. John Furrier is kind of tongue and cheek on a play on web tudauto. He calls it cloud tudauto, which is a world of multiple clouds. As I've said many times, I'm not sure multicloud is necessarily a coherent strategy yet as opposed to sort of a multi-vendor situation, Shadow IT, >> Yes. >> Lines on business, et cetera. But Jim, thanks very much-- >> Sure. >> For coming on and breaking down the container market, and VMworld 2019. It was great to see you. >> Likewise. >> All right, thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante with Jim Kobielus. We'll see you next time on theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> from the Silicon Angle Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts. It's the cue now Here's your host Day Volonte. >> Hello, everyone, this is David lot. They fresh fresh off the red eye from VM World 2019. And what I wanted to do was share with you some analysis that I've done with our friends at E. T. R. Enterprise Technology Research. We've begun introducing you to some of their data. They have this awesome database 4500 panel, a panel of 4500 end users end customers, and they periodically go out and do spending surveys. They've given me access to that spending data and what I wanted to do because because you had a number of companies announced this this quarter, I wanted to do a storage drill down so pure. Announced in late July, Del just announced yesterday late August. Netapp was mid August. HP was last week again late August, and IBM was mid July. So you have all these companies, some of which are pure plays like pure netapp. Others of you know, big systems companies on DSO. But nonetheless, I wanted to squint through the data and share with you the storage spending snapshot for the second half of 2019. So let's start with the macro. >> What you heard on the conference calls was some concern about the economy. There's no question that the tariffs are on people's minds, particularly those with large exposure exposure in China. I mean, Del obviously sells a lot of PCs in China, so they're very much concerned about that. IBM does a lot of business there, pure, really. 70% appears business roughly is North America, so they're not as exposed so But the macro is probably looks like about 2% GDP growth for the quarter i. D. C. Has the overall tech market growing at two ex GDP. Interestingly, a Gartner analyst told me in May on the Cube that there is no correlation between GDP and I t spend, which surprised me. Some people disagree with that, but But that surprised me. But nonetheless, we we still look at GDP and look at that ratio. Sometimes the other macro is component costs for years. For the storage business the last several years, NAND pricing has been a headwind. Supply has been down, it's kept prices up. It has kept all flash arrays more expensive relative to some of the spinning disc spread the brethren something that we thought would attenuate sooner. It finally has. Nan pricing is now a tailwind, so prices air coming down. What that does is it opens up new workloads that we're really kind of the domain of spinning disk before big data kind of workloads is an example. Not exclusively big data, but it just opens up more workloads for storage companies, particularly Flash Cos The other big macro we're seeing is people shifting to subscription models. They want to bring that cloud like model to the data wherever two lives on Prem in ah, hybrid environment in a public cloud and company storage companies trying to be that that data management plane across clouds, whether on prime it. And that's a That's a big deal for a lot of these companies. I'll talk a little bit more about that, so you're seeing this vision of a massively parallel, scalable distributed system play out >> where >> data stays where it lives. Edge on Prem Public Cloud and storage is really a key part of that. Obviously, that's where the data lives, but you're not seeing data move across clouds so much. What you are seeing is metadata, move and compute. Move to the data so that type of architecture is being set up. It's supported by architecture's, not the least of which are all flash, and so I want to get into it. >> Now I want to share with you some data on this slide. If you wouldn't mind bringing it up. Alex on spending momentum. So the title size spending moment of pure leads, the storage packs and what this shows is the vendor on the left hand side. And it essentially looks at the breakdown of the spending survey where e t r ask the buyers of the different companies products. What percent of the spending is going to go toward replacing? They're gonna replace the vendor. Are they gonna decrease? Spend. That's the bright red is replace. The sort of pinkish is decreased, the spending. The gray is flat. The sort of evergreen forest green is increase in the lime. Green is ad, so if you take the lime green in the forest, green ad and the grow on you subtract the rest. You get the net score, so the higher the net score, the better. you can see here that pure storage has the highest net score by far 48%. I'll show you some data later. That correlates to that when we pull out some of the data from the income statements. >> So this is Ah, the >> July 2019 spending intention surveys specifically asking relative to the second half what the spending intentions are. So this looks good for pure on again. I'll show you Cem, Cem Cem Income State income statement data that really affirms this Hewlett Packard Enterprise actually was pretty strong in the spending survey. Particularly nimble is growing HP Overall, the storage business was was down a little bit, I think, three points, but nimble was up 28%. So you're seeing some spending activity there. Netapp did not have a great quarter. They were down substantially. I'll show you that in a minute. On dhe, it looks like they've got some work to do. Deli M. C. I had a flat quarter. Dell has a such a huge install base. They're everywhere on DSO. Everybody wants a piece of their pie. Del. After the merger of the acquisition of the emcee, their storage share declined. They then bounce back. They had a much, much stronger year last year, and now it's sort of a dogfight with the rest. IBM IBM is in a major cycle shift. IBM storage businesses is heavily tied to its mainframe businesses. Mainframe business was way, way down, its overall systems. Business was down, even though power was up a little bit. But the mainframe is what drives the systems business, and it drags along a lot of storage. IBM has got a new mainframe announcement that it's got to get out. It's got a new high end storage announcement that it's got to get out, and it's really relying on that. So you can see here from the E T. R data, you know, pure way out ahead of the pack continues to gain share about over 1000 respondents to this. So a lot of shared accounts by shared accounts mean the number of accounts that that actually have some combination of multiple storage vendors. And so they were able to answer this 1068 respondents pure the clear winner here. Now let's put this into context. So the next slide I want to show you some of the key performance indicators from the June quarter off the income statements. >> So again you see, I get the vendor. The revenue for the quarter of the year to year growth for that quarter relative to last year. The gross margin in the free cash flow, just some of the key performance indicators that I'd like to look at. So look at pure Let's go, Let's go to the third column Look at growth pure 28% growth. Del flat 0% for this is just for storage. There's a storage growth. NETAPP down 16% end up in a bad quarter, HP down 3%. IBM down 21% Do due to the cycle that I discussed, You see the revenue, um, pure, growing very, very fast. But you know, from a small base or at 396 million versus compared that to Dell's 4.2 billion net APs 1,000,000,000 plus H p e. Almost a billion in IBM not nearly as large. And then look at the gross margin line. Pure is the industry's leading gross margin. It's just slightly above 69%. Dell is a blended that Asterix is a blended gross margin, so it includes PCs, servers, service's of V M wear, everything and, of course, storage. So now, when dehl was a public company before it went private, it's gross. Margins were in the high teens. So Del is in gross margin heaven with with both E, M C and V M wear now as part of its portfolio NetApp high gross margins of 67%. But that gross margin is largely driven by its gross margins from software and maintenance. And so that's a screen considerable contributor. Their product gross margins air in the mid fifties, kind of where I think E. M. C. Probably is these days. And when the emcee was a public company, it's gross. Margins were in the mid sixties, but then, as it was before, went private. I think it was dipping into the high fifties as I recall you CHP again, that's a blended gross margin, just roughly around 34%. I don't have as much visibility on their their storage gross margins. I would I would say they are below, in my view, what DMC and net out well below what Netapp would be on then IBM. That's again blended gross margin includes hardware. Software service is 47.4% probably half or more of IBM businesses. Professional service is on. IBM has, of course, a large software business as well. So and then the free cash flow you can see pure crushing it from the standpoint of of gaining share, I mean way, way ahead of the other market players, but only 14 million in free cash flow. So coming from a much, much smaller base, however pure, is purely focused on storage. So there are Andy. All their R and D is going into that storage space. DEL. Free cash flow very large. 3.4 billion that again is across the entire company. Net App. You can see 278 million h p e 648 million great quarter for HP from a free cash flow standpoint, I think year to date they're probably 838 140 million. So big Big quarter. For them. An IBM A 2.4 billion again. Dell, HP, IBM. That's across the company, as is the gross margin. So the the spending data from E. T. R. Really shows us that pure, strong Aziz showed you that very high net score and the intentions look strong, so I would suspect pure is going to continue to lead in the market share game. I don't see that changing. Certainly there's no evidence in the data. I think I think everybody else is in a sort of a dogfight del holding firm, you know, 0%. You'd like to see a little bit of growth out of that, but I think Del is actually, you know, Dell's key metric is, Are we growing faster than the market? That's that's they're sort of a primary criterion in metric for Dell is to grow faster than the overall market because that means you're growing some share. I think Del is comfortable with that. Della's gross margins actually were helped this this quarter by the fact that Dell server business was down 12%. There was a higher storage mix, so it propped up the margin a little bit. But again, generally speaking, it looks like pure is the market share winner here, but much, much smaller than the other guys. HB limbo very strong, and it shows up in the survey data from E T. R. And an IBM just needs to get a new product cycle out. So we'll come back. >> We'll take a look at this in in in in January and see how you know what it looked like and will continue to fall. Obviously, the income statement and the public reporting pure accelerate is coming up next month. Justin in mid September. I have no doubt, you know, pure has been first in a lot of different areas, right? They were first really all flash Ray. The only all flash. You're a company that ever reached escape velocity. They were they in Nutanix for the first kind of new $1,000,000,000 companies that people said would never have a billion dollar company. Pure is a pure play storage company, you know? Well, over a billion. Now, you know, they were first with that evergreen model. They made a lot of play there. You know, the first with envy, Emmy and first with the Nvidia relationships with Superior likes to be first. I have no doubt and accelerate next month down in Austin, curious that they picked Austin in Dell's backyard. I have no doubt that they're gonna have some other firsts at that show. Cuba be there watching just off of the emerald, the other big player here. Of course, that I'm not showing his v. San visa is very, very strong. You know, the D. E. T. Our data shows that, and certainly the data from the income statement shows of'em were NSX, the networking products, their cell phone to find network in their self defined storage of the the the V San. Very, very strong Pat Girl singer on the Cube. We asked him last week, Thio, take us through. So if someone has big memories and one of them was sort of East san, Excuse me. One of them was V San, and the board meeting at with Joe Tucci was on the Vienna where board really put a lot of pressure on Pat's and you can't do this to me. It's funny. Emcee had the shackles on the M, where for a number of years, but the shackles are off and visa is very, very strong. So these are some of the things we're keeping an eye on. Thanks for watching everybody busy day Volante, Cuban sites. We'll see you next time

>> Hey, welcome back. Your body, Jefe Rick here from the Cube were high atop San Francisco in the century innovation hub. It's in the middle of the Salesforce Tower. It's a beautiful facility. They think you had it. The grand opening about six months ago. We're here for the grand opening. Very cool space. I got maker studios. They've got all kinds of crazy stuff going on. But we're here today to talk about Cloud in this continuing evolution about cloud in the enterprise and hybrid cloud and multi cloud in Public Cloud and Private Cloud. And we're really excited to have a couple of guys who really helping customers make this journey, cause it's really tough to do by yourself. CEOs are super busy. There were about security and all kinds of other things, so centers, often a trusted partner. We got two of the leaders from center joining us today's Prasad Sankaran. He's the senior managing director of Intelligent Cloud infrastructure for Center Welcome and Larry Soccer, the global managing director. Intelligent cloud infrastructure offering from central gentlemen. Welcome. I love it. It intelligent cloud. What is an intelligent cloud all about? Got it in your title. It must mean something pretty significant. >> Yeah, I think First of all, thank you for having us, but yeah, absolutely. Everything's around becoming more intelligent around using more automation. And the work that, you know we delivered to our clients and cloud, as you know, is the platform to reach. All of our clients are moving. So it's all about bringing the intelligence not only into infrastructure, but also into cloud generally. And it's all driven by software, >> right? It's just funny to think where we are in this journey. We talked a little bit before we turn the cameras on and there you made an interesting comment when I said, You know, when did this cloud for the Enterprise start? And you took it back to sass based applications, which, >> you know you were sitting in the sales force builder. >> That's true. It isn't just the tallest building in >> everyone's, you know, everyone's got a lot of focus on AWS is rise, etcetera. But the real start was really getting into sass. I mean, I remember we used to do a lot of Siebel deployments for CR M, and we started to pivot to sales, for some were moving from remedy into service now. I mean, we've went through on premise collaboration, email thio 3 65 So So we've actually been at it for quite a while in the particularly the SAS world. And it's only more recently that we started to see that kind of push to the, you know, the public pass, and it's starting to cloud native development. But But this journey started, you know, it was that 78 years ago that we really started. See some scale around it. >> And I think and tell me if you agree, I think really, what? The sales forces of the world and and the service now is of the world office 3 65 kind of broke down some of those initial beers, which are all really about security and security, security, security, Always to hear where now security is actually probably an attributes and loud can brink. >> Absolutely. In fact, I mean, those barriers took years to bring down. I still saw clients where they were forcing salesforce tor service Now to put, you know, instances on prime and I think I think they finally woke up toe. You know, these guys invested ton in their security organizations. You know there's a little of that needle in the haystack. You know, if you breach a data set, you know what you're getting after. But when Europe into sales force, it's a lot harder. And so you know. So I think that security problems have certainly gone away. We still have some compliance, regulatory things, data sovereignty. But I think security and not not that it sold by any means that you know, it's always giving an ongoing problem. But I think they're getting more comfortable with their data being up in the in the public domain, right? Not public. >> And I think it also helped them with their progress towards getting cloud native. So, you know, you pick certain applications which were obviously hosted by sales force and other companies, and you did some level of custom development around it. And now I think that's paved the way for more complex applications and different workloads now going into, you know, the public cloud and the private cloud. But that's the next part of the journey, >> right? So let's back up 1/2 a step, because then, as you said, a bunch of stuff then went into public cloud, right? Everyone's putting in AWS and Google. Um, IBM has got a public how there was a lot more. They're not quite so many as there used to be, Um, but then we ran into a whole new host of issues, right, which is kind of opened up this hybrid cloud. This multi cloud world, which is you just can't put everything into a public clouds. There's certain attributes is that you need to think about and yet from the application point of view before you decide where you deploy that. So I'm just curious. If you can share now, would you guys do with clients? How should they think about applications? How should they think about what to deploy where I >> think I'll start in? The military has a lot of expertise in this area. I think you know, we have to obviously start from an application centric perspective. You go to take a look at you know where your applications have to live water. What are some of the data implications on the applications, or do you have by way of regulatory and compliance issues, or do you have to do as faras performance because certain applications have to be in a high performance environment. Certain other applications don't think a lot of these factors will. Then Dr where these applications need to recite and then what we think in today's world is really accomplish. Complex, um, situation where you have a lot of legacy. But you also have private as well as public cloud. So you approach it from an application perspective. >> Yeah. I mean, if you really take a look at Army, you look at it centers clients, and we were totally focused on up into the market Global 2000 savory. You know how clients typically have application portfolios ranging from 520,000 applications? And really, I mean, if you think about the purpose of cloud or even infrastructure for that, they're there to serve the applications. No one cares if your cloud infrastructure is not performing the absolute. So we start off with an application monetization approach and ultimately looking, you know, you know, with our tech advisory guys coming in, there are intelligent engineering service is to do the cloud native and at mod work our platforms, guys, who do you know everything from sales forward through ASAP. They should drive a strategy on how those applications gonna evolve with its 520,000 and determined hey, and usually using some, like the six orders methodology. And I'm I am I going to retire this Am I going to retain it? And, you know, I'm gonna replace it with sass. Am I gonna re factor in format? And it's ultimately that strategy that's really gonna dictate a multi and, you know, every cloud story. So it's based on the applications data, gravity issues where they gonna reside on their requirements around regulatory, the requirements for performance, etcetera. That will then dictate the cloud strategies. I'm you know, not a big fan of going in there and just doing a multi hybrid cloud strategy without a really good up front application portfolio approach, right? How we gonna modernize that >> it had. And how do you segment? That's a lot of applications. And you know, how do you know the old thing? How do you know that one by that time, how do you help them pray or size where they should be focusing on us? >> So typically what we do is work with our clients to do a full application portfolio analysis, and then we're able to then segment the applications based on, you know, important to the business and some of the factors that both of us mentioned. And once we have that, then we come up with an approach where certain sets of applications he moved to sass certain other applications you move to pass. So you know, you're basically doing the re factoring and the modernization and then certain others you know, you can just, you know, lift and shift. So it's really a combination off both modernization as well as migration. It's a combination off that, but to do that, you have to initially look at the entire set of applications and come up with that approach. >> I'm just curious where within that application assessment, um, where is cost savings? Where is, uh, this is just old. And where is opportunities to innovate faster? Because we know a lot of lot of talk really. Days has cost savings, but what the real advantages is execution speed if you can get it. If >> you could go back through four years and we had there was a lot of CEO discussions around cost savings, I'm not really have seen our clients shift. It costs never goes away, obviously right. But there's a lot greater emphasis now on business agility. You know, howto innovate faster, get getting your capabilities to market faster, to change my customer experience. So So it's really I t is really trying to step up and, you know, enabled the business toe to compete in the marketplace. We're seeing a huge shift in emphasis or focus at least starting with, you know, how'd I get better business agility outta leverage to cloud and cloud native development to get their upper service levels? Actually, we started seeing increase on Hey, you know, these applications need to work. It's actress. So So Obviously, cost still remains a factor, but we seem much more for, you know, much more emphasis on agility, you know, enabling the business on, given the right service levels of right experience to the user, little customers. Big pivot there, >> Okay. And let's get the definitions out because you know a lot of lot of conversation about public clouds, easy private clouds, easy but hybrid cloud and multi cloud and confusion about what those are. How do you guys define him? How do you help your customers think about the definition? Yes, >> I think it's a really good point. So what we're starting to see is there were a lot of different definitions out there. But I think as I talked more clients and our partners, I think we're all starting to, you know, come to ah, you know, the same kind of definition on multi cloud. It's really about using more than one cloud. But hybrid, I think, is a very important concept because hybrid is really all about the placement off the workload or where your application is going to run on. And then again, it goes to all of these points that we talked about data, gravity and performance and other things. Other factors. But it's really all about where do you place the specific look >> if you look at that, so if you think about public, I mean obviously gives us the innovation of the public providers. You look at how fast Amazon comes out with new versions of Lambda etcetera. So that's the innovations there obviously agility. You could spend up environments very quickly, which is, you know, one of the big benefits of it. The consumption, economic models. So that is the number of drivers that are pushing in the direction of public. You know, on the private side, they're still it's quite a few benefits that don't get talked about as much. Um, so you know, if you look at it, um, performance if you think the public world, you know, Although they're scaling up larger T shirts, et cetera, they're still trying to do that for a large array of applications on the private side, you can really Taylor somethingto very high performance characteristics. Whether it's you know, 30 to 64 terabyte Hana, you can get a much more focused precision environment for business. Critical workloads like that article, article rack, the Duke clusters, everything about fraud analysis. So that's a big part of it. Related to that is the data gravity that Prasad just mentioned. You know, if I've got a 64 terabyte Hana database you know, sitting in my private cloud, it may not be that convenient to go and put get that data shared up in red shift or in Google's tensorflow. So So there's some data gravity out. Networks just aren't there. The laden sea of moving that stuff around is a big issue. And then a lot of people of investments in their data centers. I mean, the other piece, that's interesting. His legacy, you know, you know, as we start to look at the world a lot, there's a ton of code still living in, You know, whether it's you, nick system, just IBM mainframes. There's a lot of business value there, and sometimes the business cases aren't aren't necessarily there toe to replace them. Right? And in world of digital, the decoupling where I can start to use micro service is we're seeing a lot of trends. We worked with one hotel to take their reservation system. You know, Rapid and Micro Service is, um, we then didn't you know, open shift couch base, front end. And now, when you go against, you know, when you go and browsing properties, you're looking at rates you actually going into distributed database cash on, you know, in using the latest cloud native technologies that could be dropped every two weeks or everything three or four days for my mobile application. And it's only when it goes, you know, when the transaction goes back, to reserve the room that it goes back there. So we're seeing a lot of power with digital decoupling, But we still need to take advantage of, you know, we've got these legacy applications. So So the data centers air really were trying to evolve them. And really, just, you know, how do we learn everything from the world of public and struck to bring those saints similar type efficiencies to the to the world of private? And really, what we're seeing is this emerging approach where I can start to take advantage of the innovation cycles. The land is that, you know, the red shifts the functions of the public world, but then maybe keep some of my more business critical regulated workloads. You know, that's the other side of the private side, right? I've got G X p compliance. If I've got hip, a data that I need to worry about GDP are there, you know, the whole set of regular two requirements. Now, over time, we do anticipate the public guys will get much better and more compliant. In fact, they made great headway already, but they're still not a number of clients are still, you know, not 100% comfortable from my client's perspective. >> Gotta meet Teresa Carlson. She'll change him, runs that AWS public sector is doing amazing things, obviously with big government contracts. But but you raise real inching point later. You almost described what I would say is really a hybrid application in this in this hotel example that you use because it's is, you know, kind of breaking the application and leveraging micro service is to do things around the core that allowed to take advantage of some this agility and hyper fast development, yet still maintain that core stuff that either doesn't need to move. Works fine, be too expensive. Drea Factor. It's a real different weight. Even think about workloads and applications into breaking those things into bits. >> And we see that pattern all over the place. I'm gonna give you the hotel Example Where? But finance, you know, look at financial service. Is retail banking so open banking a lot. All those rito applications are on the mainframe. I'm insurance claims and and you look at it the business value of replicating a lot of like the regulatory stuff, the locality stuff. It doesn't make sense to write it. There's no rule inherent business values of I can wrap it, expose it and in a micro service's architecture now D'oh cloud native front end. That's gonna give me a 360 view a customer, Change the customer experience. You know, I've got a much you know, I can still get that agility. The innovation cycles by public. Bye bye. Wrapping my legacy environment >> and percent you raided, jump in and I'll give you something to react to, Which is which is the single planet glass right now? How do I How did I manage all this stuff now? Not only do I have distributed infrastructure now, I've got distributed applications in the and the thing that you just described and everyone wants to be that single pane of glass. Everybody wants to be the app that's upon everybody. Screen. How are you seeing people deal with the management complexity of these kind of distributed infrastructures? If you >> will Yeah, I think that that's that's an area that's, ah, actually very topical these days because, you know, you're starting to see more and more workers go to private cloud. And so you've got a hybrid infrastructure you're starting to see move movement from just using the EMS to, you know, cantinas and Cuba needs. And, you know, we talked about Serval s and so on. So all of our clients are looking for a way, and you have different types of users as well. Yeah, developers. You have data scientists. You have, you know, operators and so on. So they're all looking for that control plane that allows them access and a view toe everything that is out there that is being used in the enterprise. And that's where I think you know, a company like Accenture were able to use the best of breed toe provide that visibility to our clients, >> right? Yeah. I mean, you hit the nail on the head. It's becoming, you know, with all the promises, cloud and all the power. And these new architectures is becoming much more dynamic, ephemeral, with containers and kubernetes with service computing that that that one application for the hotel, they're actually started in. They've got some, actually, now running a native us of their containers and looking at surveillance. So you're gonna even a single application can span that. And one of things we've seen is is first, you know, a lot of our clients used to look at, you know, application management, you know, different from their their infrastructure. And the lines are now getting very blurry. You need to have very tight alignment. You take that single application, if any my public side goes down or my mid tier with my you know, you know, open shipped on VM, where it goes down on my back and mainframe goes down. Or the networks that connected to go down the devices that talk to it. It's a very well. Despite the power, it's a very complex environment. So what we've been doing is first we've been looking at, you know, how do we get better synergy across what we you know, Application Service's teams that do that Application manager, an optimization cloud infrastructure. How do we get better alignment that are embedded security, You know, how do you know what are managed to security service is bringing those together. And then what we did was we looked at, you know, we got very aggressive with cloud for a strategy and, you know, how do we manage the world of public? But when looking at the public providers of hyper scale, er's and how they hit Incredible degrees of automation. We really looked at, said and said, Hey, look, you gotta operate differently in this new world. What can we learn from how the public guys we're doing that We came up with this concept. We call it running different. You know, how do you operate differently in this new multi speed? You know, you know, hot, very hybrid world across public, private demon, legacy, environment, and start a look and say, OK, what is it that they do? You know, first they standardize, and that's one of the big challenges you know, going to almost all of our clients in this a sprawl. And you know, whether it's application sprawl, its infrastructure, sprawl >> and my business is so unique. The Larry no business out there has the same process that way. So >> we started make you know how to be standardized like center hybrid cloud solution important with hp envy And where we how do we that was an example of so we can get to you because you can't automate unless you standardise. So that was the first thing you know, standardizing our service catalog. Standardizing that, um you know, the next thing is the operating model. They obviously operate differently. So we've been putting a lot of time and energy and what I call a cloud and agile operating model. And also a big part of that is truly you hear a lot about Dev ops right now. But truly putting the security and and operations into Deb said cops are bringing, you know, the development in the operations much tied together. So spending a lot of time looking at that and transforming operations re Skilling the people you know, the operators of the future aren't eyes on glass there. Developers, they're writing the data ingestion, the analytic algorithms, you know, to do predictive operations. They're riding the automation script to take work, you know, test work out right. And over time they'll be tuning the aye aye engines to really optimize environment. And then finally, has Prasad alluded to Is that the platforms that control planes? That doing that? So, you know what we've been doing is we've had a significant investments in the eccentric cloud platform, our infrastructure automation platforms, and then the application teams with it with my wizard framework, and we started to bring that together you know, it's an integrated control plane that can plug into our clients environments to really manage seamlessly, you know, and provide. You know, it's automation. Analytics. Aye, aye. Across APS, cloud infrastructure and even security. Right. And that, you know, that really is a I ops, right? I mean, that's delivering on, you know, as the industry starts toe define and really coalesce around, eh? I ops. That's what we you A ups. >> So just so I'm clear that so it's really your layer your software layer kind of management layer that that integrates all these different systems and provides kind of a unified view. Control? Aye, aye. Reporting et cetera. Right? >> Exactly. Then can plug in and integrate, you know, third party tools to do straight functions. >> I'm just I'm just curious is one of the themes that we here out in the press right now is this is this kind of pull back of public cloud app, something we're coming back. Or maybe it was, you know, kind of a rush. Maybe a little bit too aggressively. What are some of the reasons why people are pulling stuff back out of public clouds that just with the wrong. It was just the wrong application. The costs were not what we anticipated to be. We find it, you know, what are some of the reasons that you see after coming back in house? Yeah, I think it's >> a variety of factors. I mean, it's certainly cost, I think is one. So as there are multiple private options and you know, we don't talk about this, but the hyper skills themselves are coming out with their own different private options like an tars and out pulls an actor stack and on. And Ali Baba has obsessed I and so on. So you see a proliferation of that, then you see many more options around around private cloud. So I think the cost is certainly a factor. The second is I think data gravity is, I think, a very important point because as you're starting to see how different applications have to work together, then that becomes a very important point. The third is just about compliance, and, you know, the regulatory environment. As we look across the globe, even outside the U. S. We look at Europe and other parts of Asia as clients and moving more to the cloud. You know that becomes an important factor. So as you start to balance these things, I think you have to take a very application centric view. You see some of those some some maps moving back, and and I think that's the part of the hybrid world is that you know, you can have a nap running on the private cloud and then tomorrow you can move this. Since it's been containerized to run on public and it's, you know, it's all managed. That >> left E. I mean, cost is a big factor if you actually look at it. Most of our clients, you know, they typically you were a big cap ex businesses, and all of a sudden they're using this consumption, you know, consumption model. And they went, really, they didn't have a function to go and look at be thousands or millions of lines of it, right? You know, as your statement Exactly. I think they misjudged, you know, some of the scale on Do you know e? I mean, that's one of the reasons we started. It's got to be an application led, you know, modernization, that really that will dictate that. And I think In many cases, people didn't. May not have thought Through which application. What data? There The data, gravity data. Gravity's a conversation I'm having just by with every client right now. And if I've got a 64 terabyte Hana and that's the core, my crown jewels that data, you know, how do I get that to tensorflow? How'd I get that? >> Right? But if Andy was here, though, and he would say we'll send down the stove, the snow came from which virgin snow plows? Snowball Snowball. Well, they're snowballs. But I have seen the whole truck killer that comes out and he'd say, Take that and stick it in the cloud. Because if you've got that data in a single source right now, you can apply multitude of applications across that thing. So they, you know, they're pushing. Get that date end in this single source. Of course. Then to move it, change it. You know, you run into all these micro lines of billing statement, take >> the hotel. I mean, their data stolen the mainframe, so if they anyone need to expose it, Yeah, they have a database cash, and they move it out, You know, particulars of data sets get larger, it becomes, you know, the data. Gravity becomes a big issue because no matter how much you know, while Moore's Law might be might have elongated from 18 to 24 months, the network will always be the bottle Mac. So ultimately, we're seeing, you know, a CZ. We proliferate more and more data, all data sets get bigger and better. The network becomes more of a bottleneck. And that's a It's a lot of times you gotta look at your applications. They have. I've got some legacy database I need to get Thio. I need this to be approximately somewhere where I don't have, you know, high bandwith. Oh, all right. Or, you know, highlight and see type. Also, egress costs a pretty big deals. My date is up in the cloud, and I'm gonna get charged for pulling it off. You know, that's being a big issue, >> you know, it's funny, I think, and I think a lot of the the issue, obviously complexity building. It's a totally from building model, but I think to a lot of people will put stuff in a public cloud and then operated as if they bought it and they're running in the data center in this kind of this. Turn it on, Turn it off when you need it. Everyone turns. Everyone loves to talk about the example turning it on when you need it. But nobody ever talks about turning it off when you don't. But it kind of close on our conversation. I won't talk about a I and applied a Iot because he has a lot of talk in the market place. But, hey, I'm machine learning. But as you guys know pride better than anybody, it's the application of a I and specific applications, which really on unlocks the value. And as we're sitting here talking about this complexity, I can't help but think that, you know, applied a I in a management layer like your run differently, set up to actually know when to turn things on, when to turn things off when you moved in but not moved, it's gonna have to be machines running that right cause the data sets and the complexity of these systems is going to be just overwhelming. >> Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Completely agree with you. In fact, attack sensual. We actually refer to this whole area as applied intelligence on That's our guy, right? And it is absolutely to add more and more automation move everything Maur toe where it's being run by the machine rather than you know, having people really working on these things >> yet, e I mean, if you think you hit the nail on the head, we're gonna a eyes e. I mean, given how things getting complex, more ephemeral, you think about kubernetes et cetera. We're gonna have to leverage a humans or not to be able to get, you know, manage this. The environments comported right. What's interesting way we've used quite effectively for quite some time. But it's good at some stuff, not good at others. So we find it's very good at, like, ticket triage, like ticket triage, chicken rounding et cetera. You know, any time we take over account, we tune our AI ai engines. We have ticket advisers, etcetera. That's what probably got the most, you know, most bang for the buck. We tried in the network space, less success to start even with, you know, commercial products that were out there. I think where a I ultimately bails us out of this is if you look at the problem. You know, a lot of times we talked about optimizing around cost, but then performance. I mean, and it's they they're somewhat, you know, you gotta weigh him off each other. So you've got a very multi dimensional problem on howto I optimize my workloads, particularly. I gotta kubernetes cluster and something on Amazon, you know, sums running on my private cloud, etcetera. So we're gonna get some very complex environment. And the only way you're gonna be ableto optimize across multi dimensions that cost performance service levels, you know, And then multiple options don't do it public private, You know, what's my network costs etcetera. Isn't a I engine tuning that ai ai engines? So ultimately, I mean, you heard me earlier on the operators. I think you know, they write the analytic albums, they do the automation scripts, but they're the ultimate one too. Then tune the aye aye engines that will manage our environment. And I think it kubernetes will be interesting because it becomes a link to the control plane optimize workload placement. You know, between >> when the best thing to you, then you have dynamic optimization. Could you might be optimizing eggs at us right now. But you might be optimizing for output the next day. So exists really a you know, kind of Ah, never ending when you got me. They got to see them >> together with you and multi dimension. Optimization is very difficult. So I mean, you know, humans can't get their head around. Machines can, but they need to be trained. >> Well, Prasad, Larry, Lots of great opportunities for for centuries bring that expertise to the tables. So thanks for taking a few minutes to walk through some of these things. Our pleasure. Thank you, Grace. Besides Larry, I'm Jeff. 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