>>When AWS introduced the modern cloud in 2006, many people didn't realize the impact that it would have on the industry, but some did see the future of an as a service economy coming. I mean, SAS offerings came out several years before. And the idea of applying some of these concepts to infrastructure and simplifying deployment and management, you know, kinda looked enticing to a lot of customers and a subscription model, or, but yet a consumption model was seen as a valuable proposition by many customers. Why not apply it to infrastructure? And why should the hyperscalers have all the fun welcome to at your storage service? My name is Dave ante. And as an analyst at the time, I was excited about the, as a service trend early on. And one of the companies that caught my attention back in the beginning of last decade was pure storage. >>Pure not only was delivering cloud- simplicity, but it's no forklift approach to infrastructure was ahead of its time. And that's why we're here today to dig into what's happening with the, as a service trends that we see popping up all over the world today, we're gonna dig into three sessions with noted experts in the field. First pre Darie is the general manager of the digital experience business unit at pure storage. He's gonna join us. And then we bring in Steve McDowell, Steve's a senior analyst for data and storage at more insights and strategy, a well known consultancy and analyst firm. And finally, we close with Amil sta Emil is the chief commercial officer and chief marketing officer at open line, open lines, a managed service provider. They serve the mid-market and Emil's got a very wide observation space. He's gonna share what he's seeing with customers. So sit back and enjoy the show. >>The cloud has popularized many useful concepts in the past decade, working backwards from the customer two pizza teams, a DevOps mindset, the shared responsibility model in security. And of course the shift from CapEx to OPEX and as a service consumption models. The last item is what we're here to talk about today. Pay for consumption is attractive because you're not over provisioning. At least not the way you used to you'd have to buy for peak capacity events, but there are always two sides to every story and well pay for use more closely ties. It consumption to business value procurement teams. Don't always love the uncertainty of the cloud bill each month, but consumption pricing. And as a service models are here to stay in software and hardware. Hello, I'm Dave ante and welcome to at your storage service made possible by pure storage. And with me is Pash DJI. Who's the general manager of the digital experience business unit at pure Pash. Welcome to the program. >>Thanks Dave. Thanks for having me. >>You bet. Okay. We've seen this shift to, as a service, the, as a service economy, subscription models, and this as a service movement have gained real momentum. It's it's clear over the past several years, what's driving this shift. Is it pressure from investors and technology companies that are chasing the all important ARR, their annual recurring revenue stream? Is it customer driven? Give us your insights. >>Well, look, um, I think we'll do some definitional stuff first. I think we often mix the definition of a subscription and a service, but, you know, subscription is, Hey, I can go for pay up front or pay as I go. Service is more about how do I not buy something just by the outcome. So, you know, the concept of delivering storage as a service means, what do you want in storage performance, capacity availability? Like that's what you want. Well, how do you get that without having to worry about the labor of planning capacity management, those labor elements are what's driving it. So I think in the world where you have to do more with less and in a world where security becomes increasingly important, where standardization will allow you to secure your landscape against ransomware and those types of things, those trends are driving the ation of storage and the only way to deliver that is storage as a service. >>So that's, that's good. You maybe thinking about it differently than some of the other companies that I talked to, but so you, you, you've made inroads here pretty big inroads actually, and changed the thinking in enterprise data storage with a huge emphasis on simplicity. That's really pures rayon Detra. How does storage as a service fit into your innovation agenda overall? >>Well, our innovation agenda started, as you mentioned with the simplicity, you know, a decade ago with the evergreen architecture, that architecture was beyond the box. How do you go ahead and say, I can improve performance or capacity as I need it? Well, that's a foundational element to deliver a service because once you have that technology, you can say, oh, you know what? You've subscribed to this performance level. You want to raise your performance level and yes, that'll be a higher dollar per gig or dollar per terabyte. But how do you do that without a data migration? How do you do that with a non disruptive service change? How do you do that with a delivery via a software update, those elements of non disruptive updates. When you think SAS, Salesforce, you don't know when Salesforce doesn't update, you don't know when they're increasing something, adding a new capability just shows up. It's not a disruptive event. So to drive that standardization and sation and service delivery, you need to keep that simplicity of delivery first and foremost, and you can't allow, like, if the goal was, I want to change from this service tier to that service tier and a person needed to show up and do a day data migration, that's kind of useless. You've broken the experience of flexibility for a customer. >>Okay. So I like the Salesforce analogy, but I wanna jump out, do a little side for a second. So I I've gotta, I've gotta make some commitment to pure, right. Some baseline commitment. And if I do, then I can dial up and pay for what I use and I can dial it down. Correct? Correct. Okay. I can't do that with Salesforce. <laugh> right. I could dial up, but then I'm stuck with those licenses. So you have a better model in Salesforce. I would argue. Okay. Yeah, >>I would, I would agree with that. >>Okay. So, and I gotta pay for everything up front anyway. Um, let's go back. I was kind of pushing at you a little bit at my upfront, you know, about, you know, the ARR model, the, the all important, you know, financial metric, but let's talk from the customers standpoint. What are the benefits of consuming storage as a service from your customer's perspective? >>Well, one is when you start your storage journey, do you really know what you need? And I would argue most of the time people are guessing, right? It's like, well, I think I need this. This is the performance I think I need. Or this is the capacity I think I need. And, you know, with the scientific method, you actually deploy something and you're like, do I need more? Do I need less? You find out as you're deploying. So in a storage as a service world, when you have the ability to move up performance levels or move out capacity levels, and you have that flexibility, then you have the ability to just to meet demand as you deploy. And that's the most important element of meeting business needs today. The applications you deploy are not in your control when you're providing storage to your end consumers. >>Yeah. They're gonna want different levels of storage. They're gonna want different performance thresholds. That's kind of a pay, you know, pay for performance type culture, right? You can use HR analogies for it. You pay for performance. You want top talent, you pay for it. You want top storage performance, you pay for it. Um, you don't, you can pay less and you can actually get lower performance, tiers, not everything is a tier one application. And you need the ability to deploy it. But when you start, how do you know the way your end customers are gonna be consuming? Or do you need a dictated upfront? Cause that's infrastructure dictating business inflexibility, and you never want to be in that position. >>I, I got another analogy for you. It's like, you know, we do a lot of hosting at our home and you know, like Thanksgiving, right? And you go to the liquor store and say, okay, what should I get? Should we get red wine? We gotta go white wine. We gotta get some beer. Should I get bubbles? Yeah, I get some bubbles. Cause you don't know what people are gonna have. And so you over provision everything <laugh> and then there's a run on bubbles and you're like, ah, we run outta bubbles. So you just over buy, but there's a liquor store that actually will take it back. So I gotta do business with those guys every time. Cuz it's way more flexible. I can dial up capacity or can dial up performance and dial it back down if I don't use it >>Or you or you're gonna be drinking a lot more the next few weeks. >>Yeah, exactly. Which is the last thing you want. Okay. So let's talk about how pure kind of meets this as a service demand. You've touched upon your, your differentiators from others in the market. Um, you know, love to hear about the momentum. What, what are you seeing out there? >>Yeah. Look, our business is growing well, largely built on, you know, what customers need. Um, specifically where the market is at today is there's a set of folks that are interested in the financial transformation of CapEx to OPEX, where like that definitely exists in the industry around how do I get a pay use model? The next kind of more advanced customer is interested in how do I go ahead and remove labor to deliver storage? And a service gets you there on top of a subscription. The most sophisticated customer says, how do I separate storage production with consumption and production of storage. Being a storage producer should be about standardization. So I could do policy based management. Why is that important? You know, coming back to some of the things I said earlier in the world where ransomware attacks are common, you need the standardized security policies. >>Linux has new vulnerabilities every, every other day, like find 2, 2, 3 critical vulnerabilities a week. How do you stay on top of it? The complexity of staying on top of it should be, look, let's standardize and make it a vendor problem. And assume the vendor's gonna deliver this to me. So that standardization allows you to have business policies that allow you to stay current and modern. I would argue in, you know, the traditional storage and appliance world, you buy something and the day a, the day after you buy it, it's worthless. It's like driving a car off a lot, right? The very next day, the car's not worth what it was when you bought it. Storage is the same way. So how do you ensure that your storage stays current? How do you ensure that it gets like a fine line that gets better, better with age? Well, if you're not buying storage and you're buying a performance SLA, it's up to the vendor to meet that SLA. So it actually never gets worse over time. This is the way you modernize technology and avoid technology debt as a customer. >>Yeah. I mean, just even though words you're using in the way you're thinking about this precaution, I think are, are, are different. Uh, and I love the concept of essentially taking my labor cost and transferring them to pures R and D I mean, that's essentially what you're talking about here. Um, so let's, let's, let's stick with the, the, the tech for a minute. What do you see as new or emerging technologies that are helping accelerate this shift toward the, as a service economy? >>Well, the first thing is I always tell people, you can't deliver a service without monitoring, because if you can't monitor something, how you're gonna know what your, whether you're meeting your service level obligation, right? So everything starts with data monitoring. The next step layering on the technology. Differentiation is if you need to deliver a service level, OB obligation on top of that data monitoring, you need the ability to flexibly, meet whatever performance obligations you have in a tight time window. So supply chain and being able to deliver anywhere becomes important. So if you use the analogy today of how Tesla works or a IOT system works, you have a SaaS management that actually provides instructions that push pushes those instructions and policies to the edge. In Tesla's case, that happens to be the car it'll push software updates to the car. It'll push new map updates to the car, but the car is running independently. >>It's not like if the car becomes disconnected from the internet, it's gonna crash and drive you off the road in the same way. What if you think about storage as something that needs to be wherever your application is? So people think about cloud as a destination. I think that's a fallacy. You have to think about the world in the world in the view of an application, an application needs data, and that data needs to sit in storage wherever that application sits. So for us, the storage system is just an edge device. It can be sitting in your data center, it can be sitting in a Equinix. It can be sitting in hosted, an MSP can run. It can, can even be sitting in the public cloud, but how do you have central monitoring and central management where you can push policies to update all those devices? >>Very similar to an I IOT system. So the technology advantage of doing that means that you can operate anywhere and ensure you have a consistent set of policies, a consistent set of protection, a consistent set of, you know, prevention against ransomware attack, regardless of your application, regardless of, uh, you know, where it sits, regardless of what content in you're on that approach is very similar to the way the T industry has been updating and monitoring edge devices, nest, thermostats, you know, Tesla cars, those types of things. That's the thinking that needs to come to. And that's the foundation on which we built PI as a service. >>So that implies, or at least I infer that you've obviously got control of the experience on Preem, but you're extending that, uh, into AWS, Google Azure, which suggests to me that you have to hide the underlying complexity of the primitives and APIs in that world. And then eventually, actually today, cuz you're treating everything like the edge out to the edge, you know, maybe, maybe mini pure at some point in time. But so I call that super cloud that abstraction layer that floats above all the clouds on-prem and adds that layer of value. And is this singular experience? What you're talking about pushing, you know, policy throughout, is that the right way to think about it and how does this impact the ability to deliver true storage as a service? >>Oh, uh, that's absolutely the right way of thinking about it. The things that you think about from a, an abstraction kind of fall in three buckets, first, you need management. So how do you ensure a consistent management experience creating volumes, deleting volumes, creating buckets, creating files, creating directories, like management of objects and create a consistent API across the entire landscape. The second one is monitoring, how do you measure utilization and performance obligations or capacity obligations or uh, you know, policy violations, wherever you're at. And then the third one is more of a business one, which is procurement because you can't do it independent of procurement. Meaning what happens when you run out, you need to increase your reserve commits. Do you want to go on demand? How do you integrate it into company's procurement models, such that you can say, I can use what I need and any, it's not like every change order is a request of procurement. That's gonna break an as a service delivery model. So to get embedded in a customer's landscape where they don't have to worry about storage, you have to provide that consistency on management, monitoring and procurement across the tech. And yes, this is deep technology problems, whether it's running our storage on AWS or Azure or running it on prem or, you know, at some point in the future, maybe even, um, you know, pure mini at the edge. Right. <laugh> so, you know, tho all of those things are tied to our pure, a service delivery. >>Yeah, technically non-trivial but uh, Hey, you guys are on it. Well, we gotta leave it there. Pash. Thank you. Great stuff. Really appreciate your time. >>All right. Thanks for having me, man. >>You're very welcome. Okay. In a moment, Steve McDowell from more insights and strategies, it's gonna give us the analyst perspective on, as a service, you're watching the cube, the leader in high tech enterprise coverage. >>Why are customers making the change to pure as a service >>Other vendors, offering flexible consumption models will promise you the world on the surface. It's just what you need. But then you notice the asterisk that dreaded fine print. That turns just what you need into long-term commitments, disruptive upgrades and unpredictable costs, pure storage, launched pure as a service to provide the flexibility to respond to your ever changing needs. With clear per unit costs, no large upfront purchases and no asterisks. A usage based model should be simple, innovative, and adapt with the changing market. Unlike other vendors, pure is offering exactly that with options, for service tiers and short term contracts in a single unified subscription that allows you to improve your discounts over time. Pure makes sure you can grow and upgrade without ever taking your environment offline and without the constant worry of hidden costs with complete billing, transparency, unlike any other, you only pay for what you use and pure one helps track and predict demand from day to day, making sure you never outgrow your storage. So why are customers making the change to pure as a service convenient solutions with unlimited potential without the dreaded fine print? It's as simple as that, >>We're back with Steve McDowell, the principal analyst for data and storage at more insights and strategy. Hey Steve, great to have you on, tell us a little bit about yourself. You got a really interesting background and kind of a blend of engineering and strategy and what's your research focus? >>Yeah, so my research, my focus area is data and storage and all the things around that, right? Whether it's OnPrim or cloud or, or, or, you know, software as a service. Uh, my background, as you said, is a blend, right? I grew up as an engineer. I started off as an OS developer at IBM. Uh, came up through the ranks and, and shifted over into corporate strategy and product marketing and product management. Uh, and I've been doing, uh, working as an industry analyst now for about five years, more insights and strategy. >>Steve, how do you see this playing out in the next three to five years? I mean, cloud got it all started. It's gonna snowballing, you know, however you look at it, percent of spending on storage that you think is gonna land in as a service. How, how do you see the evolution here? >>I think it buyers are looking at as a service, a consumption based is, is, uh, uh, you know, a natural model. It extends the data center, brings all of the flexibility, all of the goodness that I get from public cloud, but without all of the downside and uncertainty around cost and security and things like that, right. That also come with a public cloud and it's delivered by technology providers that I trust and that I know, and that I've worked with, you know, for, in some cases, decades. So I don't know that we have hard data on how much, uh, adoption there is of the model, but we do know that it's trending up, uh, you know, and every infrastructure provider at this point has some flavor of offering in the space. So it's, it's clearly popular with CIOs and, and it practitioners alike. >>So Steve organizations are at a they're different levels of maturity in their, their transformation journeys. And of course, as a result, they're gonna have different storage needs that are aligned with their bottom line business objectives. From an it buyer perspective, you may have data on this, even if it's anecdotal, where does storage as a service actually fit in and can it be a growth lever >>Can absolutely be, uh, a growth leader. Uh, it, it gives me the flexibility as, as an it architect to scale my business over time, without worrying about how much money I have to invest in, in storage hardware. Right? So I, I get kind of, again, that cloudlike flexibility in terms of procurement and deployment. Uh, but it gives me that control by oftentimes being on site within my permit. And I manage it like a storage array that I own. Uh, so you know, it, it's, it's beautiful for, for organizations that are scaling and, and it's equally nice for organizations that just wanna manage and control cost over time. Um, so it's, it's a model that makes a lot of sense and fits and, and certainly growing in adoption and popularity. >>How about from a technology vendor perspective you've worked for in the, in the tech industry mm-hmm <affirmative> for, for companies? What do you think is gonna define the winners and losers in this space? If you were running strategy for, uh, storage company, what would you say? >>I, I think the days of, of a storage administrator managing, you know, rate levels and recovering and things of that sort are over, right, what would, what these organizations like pure delivering, but they're offerings is, is simplicity. It's a push button approach to deploying storage to the applications and workloads that need it, right. It becomes storage as a utility. So it's not just the, you know, the consumption based economic model of, of, uh, as a service. Uh, it, it's also the manageability that comes with that, or the flexibility of management that comes with that. I can push a button, deploy bites to, to, uh, you know, a workload that needs it. Um, and it just becomes very simple, right. For the storage administrator in a way that, you know, kind of old school OnPrim storage can't really deliver. >>You know, I wanna, I wanna ask you, I mean, I've been thinking about this because again, a lot of companies are, are, you know, moving, hopping on the, as a service bandwagon, I feel like, okay, in and of itself, that's not where the innovation lives, the innovation is gonna come from making that singular experience from on-prem to the clouds across clouds, maybe eventually out to the edge. Um, do you, do you, where do you see the innovation in as a service? >>Well, there there's two levels of innovation, right? One, one is business model innovation, right? I, I now have an organizational flexibility to build the infrastructure, to support my digital transformation efforts. Um, but on the product side and the offering side, it really is, as you said, it's about the integration of experience. Every enterprise today touches a cloud in some way, shape or form, right. I have data spread, not just in my data center, but at the edge, uh, oftentimes in a public cloud, maybe a private cloud, I don't know where my data is and it really lands on the storage providers to help me manage that and deliver that, uh, uh, manageability experience, uh, to, to the it administrators. So when I look at innovation in this space, you know, it's not just a storage array and rack that I'm leasing, right? This is not another lease model. It's really fully integrated, you know, end to end management of my data and, and, you know, and all of the things around that. >>Yeah. So you, to your point about a lease model is if you're doing a lease, you know, yeah. You can shift CapEx to OPEX, but you're still committed to, to, you have to over provision, whereas here, and I wanted to ask you about that. It's, it's, it's, it's an interesting model, right? Cuz you gotta read the fine print. Of course the fine print says you gotta commit to some level typically. And then if, you know, if you go over you, you charge for what you use and you can scale that back down and that's, that's gotta be very attractive for folks. I, I wonder if you will ever see like true cloud-like consumption pricing, that is two edges to it. Right. You see consumption based pricing in some of the software models and you know yeah. People like it, the lines of business maybe cuz they pay in by the drink, but then procurement hates it cuz they don't have predictability. How do you see the pricing models? Do you see that maturing or do you think we're sort of locked in on, on where we're at? >>No, I, I do. I do see that maturing. Right? And, and when you work with a company like pure to understand their consumption based and as a service offerings, uh, it, it really is sitting down and understanding where your data needs are going to scale, right? You, you buy in at a certain level, uh, you have capacity planning. You can expand if you need to, you can shrink if you need to. So it really does put more control in the hands of the it buyer than uh, well certainly then traditional CapEx based on-prem but also more control than you would get, you know, working with an Amazon or an Azure. >>Okay. Thanks Steve. We'll leave it there for now. I'd love to have you back. Keep it right there at your storage service continues in a moment. >>Some things are meant to last your storage should be one of them say hello to the evergreen storage program, say goodbye to refreshes and rebates. Forget planned downtime, performance impact and data migrations. Forget forklift upgrades. Evergreen storage starts with your agile storage architecture and covers the entire life cycle of the array from first purchase to ongoing use. And whenever it's time to modernize and grow, your satisfaction is covered with an evergreen subscription. You can get a full refund within 30 days for any reason, >>Our right size guarantee lets you buy just the storage you need never too much. Never not enough. Your array software is all inclusive. Even future releases and features maintenance and support costs remain constant throughout the life of your array. Proactive expert support is a true white glove experience. Evergreen maintenance ensures availability of any replacement components. Meet the demands of your business and protect your investment. Evergreen gold includes controller upgrades every three years. And if something unplanned comes up, evergreen gold provides upgrade flex the leading anytime upgrade feature to upgrade controllers whenever you need it. As you expand evergreen gold provides credits to consolidate storage with denser more modern flash. Evergreen is your subscription to continuous innovation for storage that lasts 10 years or more. Some things are meant to last make your storage. One of them >>We're back at your storage service. Emil Stan is here. He's the chief commercial officer and chief marketing officer of open line. Thank you Emil for coming on the cube. Appreciate your time. >>Thank you, David. Nice. Uh, glad to be here. >>Yes. Yeah. So tell us about open line. You're a managed service provider. What's your focus? >>Yeah, we're actually a cloud managed service provider and I do put cloud in front of the managed services because it's not just only the spheres that we manage. We have to manage the clouds as well nowadays. And then unfortunately, everybody only thinks there's one cloud, but it's always multiple layers in the cloud. So we have a lot of work in integrating it. We're a cloud manages provider in the Netherlands, focusing on, uh, companies who have head office in the Netherlands, mainly in the, uh, healthcare local government, social housing logistics department. And then in the midst size companies between say 250 to 10,000 office employees. Uh, and that's what we do. We provide 'em with excellent cloud managed services, uh, as it should be >>Interesting, you know, a lot early on in the cloud days, highly regulated industries like healthcare government were somewhat afraid of the cloud. So I'm sure that's one of the ways in which you provide value to your customers is helping them become cloud proficient. Maybe you could talk a little bit more about the value prop to customers. Why do they do business with you? >>And I think, uh, there are a number of reasons why they do business with us or choose to choose for our manage services provider that first of course are looking for stability and continuity. Uh, and, and from a cost perspective, predict predictable costs. But nowadays you also have a shortage in personnel and knowledge. So, and it's not always very easy for them to access, uh, those skill sets because most it, people just want to have, uh, a great variety in work, what they are doing, uh, towards, towards the local government, uh, healthcare, social housing. They actually, uh, a sector that, uh, that are really in between embracing the public cloud, but also have a lot of legacy and, and bringing together best of all, worlds is what we do. So we also bring them comfort. We do understand what legacy, uh, needs from a manager's perspective. We also know how to leverage the benefits in the public cloud. Uh, and, uh, I'd say from a marketing perspective, actually we focus on using an ideal cloud, being a mix of traditional and future based cloud. >>Thank you. I, you know, I'd like to get your perspective on this idea of as a service and the, as a service economy that we often talk about on the cube. I mean, you work with a lot of different companies. We talked about some of the industries and, and increasingly it seems like organizations are focused more on outcomes, continuous value delivery via, you know, suites of services and, and they're leaning into platforms versus one off product offerings, you know, do you see that? How do you see your customers reacting to this as a service trend? >>Yeah. Uh, to be honest, sometimes it makes it more complex because services like, look at your Android or iPhone, you can buy apps, uh, and download apps the way you want to. So they have a lot of apps about how do you integrate it into one excellent workflow, something that works for you, David or works for me. Uh, so the difficulty, some sometimes lies in, uh, the easy accessibility that you have to those solutions, but nobody takes into account that they're all part of a chain, a workflow supply chain, uh, and, and, uh, they're being hyped as well. So what we also have a lot of time in, in, in, in managing our customers is that the tremendous feature push feature push that there is from technology providers, SaaS providers. Whereas if you provide 10 features, you only need one or two, uh, but the other eight are very distracting from your prime core business. Uh, so there's a natural way in that people are embracing, uh, SA solutions, embracing cloud solutions. Uh, but what's not taken into account as much is that we love to see it is the way that you integrate all those solutions toward something that's workable for the person that's actually using them. And it's seldomly that somebody is only using one solution. There's always a chain of solutions. Um, so yeah, there are a lot of opportunities, but also a lot of challenges for us, but also for our customers, >>You see that trend toward, as a service continuing, or do you actually see based on what you're just saying that pendulum, you know, swinging back and forth, somebody comes out with a new sort of feature product and that, you know, changes the dynamic or do you see as a service really having legs? >>Ah, I, I think that's very, very good question, David, because that's something that's keeping our busy all the time. We do see a trend in a service looking at, uh, talk about pure later on. We also use pure as a service more or less. Yeah. And that really helps us. Uh, but you see, uh, um, that sometimes people make a step too, too fast, too quick, not well thought of, and then you see what they call sort of cloud repatriation, tend that people go back to what they're doing and then they stop innovating or stop leveraging. The possibilities are actually there. Uh, so from our consultancy, our guidance and architecture point of view, we try to help them as much as possible to think in a SA thought, but just don't use the, cloud's just another data center. Uh, and so it's all about managing the maturity on our side, but on our customer side as well. >>So I'm interested in how your sort of your philosophy and, and as relates, I think in, in, in terms of how you work with pure, but how do you stay tightly in lockstep with your customers so that you don't over rotate so that you don't and send them to over rotate, but then you're not also, you don't wanna be too late to the game. How, how do you manage all that? >>Oh, there's, there's, there's a world of interactions between us and our customers. And so I think a well known, uh, uh, thing that people is customer intimacy. That's very important for us to get to know our customers and get to predict which way they're moving. But the, the thing that we add to it is also the ecosystem intimacy. So no, the application and services landscape, our customers know the primary providers and work with them, uh, to, to, to create something that, that really fits the customers. They just not looked at from our own silo where a cloud managed service provider that we actually work in the ecosystem with, with, with, with the primary providers. And we have, I think with the average customers, I think we have, uh, uh, in a month we have so much interactions on our operational level and technical levels, strategic level. >>We do bring together our customers also, and to jointly think about what we can do together, what we independently can never reach. Uh, but we also involve our customers in, uh, defining our own strategy. So we have something we call a customer involvement board. So we present a strategy and say, does it make sense? Eh, this is actually what you need also. So we take a lot of our efforts into our customers and we do also, uh, understand the significant moments of truth. We are now in this, in this broadcast, David there. So you can imagine that at this moment, not thinking go wrong. Yeah. If, if, if the internet stops that we have a problem. And now, so we, we actually know that this broadcast is going on for our customers and we manage that. It's always on, uh, uh, where in the other moments in the week, we might have a little less attention, but this moment we should be there. And these moments of truth that we really embrace, we got them well described. Everybody working out line knows what the moment of truth is for our customers. Uh, uh, so we have a big logistics provider. For instance, you does not have to ask us to, uh, have, uh, a higher availability on black Friday or cyber Monday. We know that's the most important part in the year for him or her. Does it answer your question, David? >>Yes. We know as well. You know, when these big, the big game moments you have to be on your top, uh, top of your game, uh, you know, the other thing Emil about this as a service approach that I really like is, is it's a lot of it is consumption based and the data doesn't lie, you can see adoption, you know, daily, weekly, monthly. And so I wonder how you're leveraging pure as a service specifically in what kind of patterns you're seeing in, in, in the adoption. >>Uh, yeah, pure as a service for our customers is mainly never visible. Uh, we provide storage services to provide storage solutions, storage over is part of a bigger thing of a server of application. Uh, so the real benefits, to be honest, of course, towards our customer, it's all flash, uh, uh, and they have the fastest, fastest storage is available. But for ourself, we, uh, we use less resources to manage our storage. We have far more that we have a near to maintenance free storage solution now because we have it as a service and we work closely together with pure. Uh, so, uh, actually the way we treat our customers is that way pure treats us as well. And that's why there's a used click. So the real benefits, uh, uh, how we leverage is it normally we had a bunch of guys managing our storage. Now we only have one and knowing that's a shortage of it, personnel, the other persons can well be, uh, involved in other parts of our services or in other parts of an innovation. So, uh, that's simply great. >>You know, um, my takeaway the meal is that you've made infrastructure, at least, least the storage infrastructure, invisible to your customers, which is the way it should be. You didn't have to worry about it. And you've, you've also attacked the, the labor problem. You're not, you know, provisioning lungs anymore, or, you know, tuning the storage, you know, with, with arms and legs. So that's huge. So that gets me into the next topic, which is business transformation. That, that means that I can now start to attack the operational model. So I've got a different it model. Now I'm not managing infrastructure same way. So I have to shift those resources. And I'm presuming that it's a bus now becomes a business transformation discussion. How are you seeing your customers shift those resources and focus more on their business as a result of this sort of as a service trend? >>I think I do not know if they, they transform their business. Thanks to us. I think that they can more leverage their own business. They have less problems, less maintenance, et cetera, cetera, but we also add new, uh, certainties to it, like, uh, uh, the, the latest service we we released was imutable storage being the first in the Netherlands offering this thanks to, uh, thanks to the pure technology, but for customers, it takes them to give them a good night rest because, you know, we have some, uh, geopolitical issues in the world. Uh, there's a lot of hacking. People have a lot of ransomware attacks and, and we just give them a good night rest. So from a business transformation, does it transform their business? I think that gives them a comfort in running your business, knowing that certain things are well arranged. You don't have to worry about that. We will do that. We'll take it out of your hands and you just go ahead and run your business. Um, so to me, it's not really a transformation is just using the right opportunities at the right moment. >>The imutable piece is interesting because, because, but speaking of as a service, you know, anybody can go on the dark web and buy ransomware as a service. I mean, as it's seeing the, as a service economy hit, hit everywhere, the good and the, and the not so good. Um, and so I presume that your customers are, are looking at, I imutability as another service capability of the service offering and really rethinking, maybe because of the recent, you know, ransomware attacks, rethinking how they, they approach, uh, business continuance, business resilience, disaster recovery. Do you see that? >>Yep, definitely. Definitely. I tell not all of them yet. Imutable storage. So it's like an insurance as well, which you have when you have imutable storage and you have been, you have a ransomware attack at least have you part of data, which never, if data is corrupted, you cannot restore it. If your hardware is broken, you can order new hardware. Every data is corrupted. You cannot order new data. Now we got that safe and well. And so we offer them the possibility to, to do the forensics and free up their, uh, the data without tremendous loss of time. Uh, but you also see that you raise the new, uh, how do you say, uh, the new baseline for other providers as well? Eh, so there's security of the corporate information security officer, the CIO, they're all very happy with that. And they, they, they raise the baseline for us as well. So they can look at other security topics and look from say, security operation center. Cuz now we can really focus on our prime business risks because from a technical perspective, we got it covered. How can we manage the business risk, uh, which is a combination of people, processes and technology. >>Right. Makes sense. Okay. I'll give you the last word. Uh, talk about your relationship with pure, where you wanna see that that going in the future. >>Uh, I hope we've be working together for a long time. Uh, I, I ex experienced them very involved. Uh, it's not, we have done the sell and now it's all up to you now. We were closely working together. I know if I talk to my prime architect, Marcel height is very happy and it looks a little more or less if we work with pure, like we're working with colleagues, not with a supplier and a customer, uh, and uh, the whole pure concept is fascinating. Uh, I, uh, I had the opportunity to visit San Francisco head office and they told me to fish in how they launched, uh, pure being, if you want to implement it, it had to be on one credit card. The, the, the menu had to be on one credit card. Just a simple thought of put that as your big area, audacious goal to make the simplest, uh, implementable storage available. But for us, uh, it gives me the expectation that there will be a lot of more surprises with pur in the near future. Uh, and for us as a provider, what we, uh, literally really look forward to is that, that for us, these new developments will not be new migrations. It will be a gradual growth of our services or storage services. Uh, so that's what I expect. And that was what I, and we look forward to. >>Yeah, that's great. Uh, thank you so much, Emil, for coming on the, the cube and, and sharing your thoughts and best of luck to you in the future. >>Thank you. You're welcome. Thanks for having me. >>You're very welcome. Okay. In a moment, I'll be back to give you some closing thoughts on at your storage service. You're watching the cube, the leader in high tech enterprise coverage. >>Welcome to evergreen, a place where organizations grow and thrive rooted in the modern data experience in evergreen people find a seamless, simple way to leverage data through market leading sustainable technology, financial flexibility, and effortless management, allowing everyone to innovate with data confidently. Welcome to pure storage. >>Now, if you're interested in hearing more about Pure's growing portfolio of technology and services and how they're transforming the enterprise data experience, be sure to register for pure accelerate tech Fest. 22 digital event is also taking place as an in-person event. On June 8th, you can register at pure storage.com/accelerate, pure storage.com/accelerate. You're watching the cue, the leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage.

>> Voiceover: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Informatica World 2018, brought to you by Informatica. >> Hey, welcome back everyone, we're here live at the Venetian, we're at the Sands Convention Center, Venetian, the Palazzo, for Informatica World 2018. I'm John Furrier, with Peter Burris, my co-host with you. Our next guest, Arun Varadarajan, who's the VP of AI and Analytics at Cognizant. Great to see you. It's been awhile. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. Thank you John, it's wonderful meeting you again. >> So, last time you were on was 2015 in the queue. We were at the San Francisco, where the event was. You kind of nailed the real time piece; also, the disruption of data. Look ing forward, right now, we're kind of right at the spot you were talking about there. What's different? What's new for you? ASI data's at the center of the value preposition. >> Arun: Yep. People are now realizing, I need to have strategic data plan, not just store it, and go do analytics on it. GDPR is a signal; obviously we're seeing that. What's new? >> So, I think a couple of things, John. One is, I think the customers have realized that there is a need to have a very deliberate approach. Last time, when we spoke, we spoke about digital transformation; it was a cool thing. It had this nice feel to it. But I think what has happened in the last couple of years is that we've been able to help our clients understand what exactly is digital transformation, apart from it being a very simple comparative tactic to deal with the fact that digital natives are, you know, barking down your path. It also is an opportunity for you to really reimagine your business architecture. So, what we're telling our clients is that when you're thinking about digital transformation, think of it from a 3-layer standpoint, the first layer being your business model itself, right? Because, if you're a traditional taxi service, and you're dealing with the Uber war, you better reimagine your business model. It starts there. And then, if your business model has to change to compete in the digital world, your operating model has to be extremely aligned to that new business model paradigm that you've defined. And, to that, if you don't have a technology model that is adapting to that change, none of this is going to happen. So, we're telling our clients, when you think about digital transformation, think of it from these three dimensions. >> It's interesting, because back in the old days, your technology model dictated what you could do. It's almost flipped around, where the business model is dictating the direction. So, business model, operating model, technology model. Is that because technology is more versatile? Or, as Peter says, processes are known, and you can manage it? It used to be, hey, let's pick a technology decision. Which database, and we're off to the races. Now it seems to be flipped around. >> There are two reasons for that. One is, I think, technology itself has proliferated so much that there are so many choices to be made. And if you start looking at technology first, you get kind of burdened by the choices you need to make. Because, at the end of the day, the choice you make on technology has to have a very strong alignment and impact to business. So, what we're telling our clients is, choices are there; there are plenty of choices. There are compute strategies available that are out there. There's new analytical capabilities. There's a whole lot of that. But if you do not purpose and engineer your technology model to a specific business objective, it's lost. So, when we think about business architecture, and really competing in the digital space, it's really about you saying, how do I make sure that my business model is such that I can thwart the competition that is likely to come from digital natives? You saw Amazon the other day, right? They bought an insurance company. Who knows what they're going to buy next? My view is that Uber may buy one of the auto companies, and completely change the car industry. So, what does Ford do? What does General Motors do? And, if they're going to go about this in a very incremental fashion, my view is that they may not exist. >> So, we have been in our research arguing that digital transformation does mean something. We think that it's the difference between a business and a digital business is the role that data plays in a digital 6business, and whether or not a business treats data as an asset. Now, in every business, in every business strategy, the most simple, straightforward, bottom-line thing you can acknowledge is that businesses organize work around assets. >> John: Yep. >> So, does it comport with your observation that, to many respects, what we're talking about here is, how are we reinstitutionalizing work around data, and what impact does that have on our business model, our operating model, and our technology selection? Does that line up for you? >> Totally, totally. So, if you think about business model change, to me, it starts by re-imagining your engagement process with your customers. Re-imagining customer experience. Now, how are you going to be able to re-imagine customer experience and customer engagement if you don't know your customer? Right? So, the first building block in my mind is, do you have customer intelligence? So, when you're talking about data as an asset, to me, the asset is intelligence, right? So, customer intelligence, to me, is the first analytical building block for you to start re-imagining your business model. The second block, very clearly, is fantastic. I've re-imagined customer experience. I've re-imagined how I am going to engage with my customer. Is your product, and service, intelligent enough to develop that experience? Because, experience has to change with customers wanting new things. You know, today I was okay with buying that item online, and getting the shipment done to me in 4 days. But, that may change; I may need overnight shipping. How do you know that, right? Are you really aware of my preferences, and how quickly is your product and service aligning to that change? And, to your point, if I have customer intelligence, and product intelligence sorted out, I better make sure that my business processes are equally capable of institutionalizing intelligence. Right? So, my process orchestration, whether it's my supply chain, whether it's my auto management, whether it's my, you know, let's say fulfillment process; all of these must be equally intelligent. So, in my mind, these are three intelligent blocks: there's customer intelligence, product intelligence, and operations intelligence. If you have these three building blocks in place, then I think you can start thinking about what should your new data foundation look like. >> I want to take that and overlay kind of like, what's going on in the landscape of the industry. You have infrastructure world, which you buy some rack and stack the servers; clouds now on the scene, so there's overlapping there. We used to have a big data category. You know, ADO; but, that's now AI and machine learning, and data ware. It's kind of its own category, call it AI. And then, you have kind of emerging tech, whether you call, block chain, these kind of... confluence of all these things. But there's a data component that sits in the center of all these things. Security, data, IOT, traverse infrastructure, cloud, the classic data industry, analytics, AI, and emerging. You need data that traverses all these new environments. How does someone set up their architecture so that, because now I say, okay, I got a dat big data analytics package over here. I'm doing some analytics, next gen analytics. But, now I got to move data around for its cloud services, or for an application. So, you're seeing data as to being architected to be addressable across multiple industries. >> Great point John. In fact, that leads logically to the next thing that me and my team are working on. So we are calling it the Adaptive Data Foundation. Right? The reason why we chose the word adaptive is because in my mind it's all about adapting to change. I think Chal Salvan, or somebody said that the survival of the fittest is not, the survival is not of the survival of the fittest or the survival of the species that is intelligent, but it's the survival of those who can adapt to change, right? To me, your data foundation has to be super adaptive. So what we've done is, in fact, my notion, and I keep throwing this at you every time I meet you, in my opinion, big data is legacy. >> John: Yeah, I would agree with that. >> And its coming.. >> John: The debate. >> It's pretty much legacy in my mind. Today it's all about scale-out, responsive, compute. The data world. Now, if you looked at most of the architectures of the past of the data world, it was all about store and forward. Right? I would, it's a left to right architecture. To me it's become a multi-directional architecture. Therefore what we have done is, and this is where I think the industry is still struggling, and so are our customers. I understand I need to have a new modern data foundation, but what does that look like? What does it feel like? So with the Adaptive Data Foundation... >> They've never seen it before by the way. >> They have not seen it. >> This is new. >> They are not able to envision it. >> It is net new. >> Exactly. They're not able to envision it. So what I tell my clients is, if you really want to reimagine, just as you're reimagining your business model, your operating model, you better reimagine your data model. Is your data model capable of high velocity resolutions? Whether it's identity resolution of a client who's calling in. Whether it's the resolution of the right product and service to deliver to the client. Whether it's your process orchestration, they're able to quickly resolve that this data, this distribution center is better capable of servicing their customer need. You better have that kind of environment, right? So, somebody told me the other day that Amazon can identify an analytical opportunity and deliver a new experience and productionize it in 11.56 seconds. Today my customers, on average, the enterprise customers, barely get to have a reasonable release on a monthly basis. Forget about 11.56 seconds. So if they have to move at that kind of velocity, and that kind of responsiveness, they need to reimagine their data foundation. What we have done is, we have tried to break it down into three broad components. The first component that they're saying is that you need a highly responsive architecture. The question that you asked. And a highly responsive architecture, we've defined, we've got about seven to eight attributes that defines what a responsive architecture is. And in my mind, you'll hear a lot of, I've been hearing a lot of this that a friend, even in today's conference, people are saying, 'Oh, its going to be a hybrid world. There's going to be Onprim, there's going to be cloud, there's going to be multicloud. My view is, if you're going to have all of that mess, you're going to die, right? So I know I'm being a little harsh on this subject, but my view is you got to move to a very simplified responsive architecture right up front. >> Well you'd be prepared for any architecture. >> I've always said, we've debated this many times, I think it's a cloud world, public cloud, everything. Where the data center on premise is a huge edge. Right, so? If you think of the data center as an edge, you can say okay, it's a large edge. It's a big fat edge. >> Our fundamentalists, I don't think it exists. Our fundamental position is data increasingly, the physical realities of data, the legal realities of data, the intellectual property control realities of data, the cost realities of data are going to dictate where the processing actually takes place. There's going to be a tendency to try to move the activity as close to the data as possible so you don't have to move the data. It's not in opposition, but we think increasingly people are going to not move the data to the cloud, but move the cloud to the data. That's how we think. >> That's an interesting notion. My view is that the data has to be really close to the source of position and execution, right? >> Peter: Yeah. Data has got to be close to the activity. >> It has to be very close to the activity. >> The locality matters. >> Exactly, exactly, and my view is, if you can, I know it's tough, but a lot of our clients are struggling with that, I'm pushing them to move their data to the cloud, only for one purpose. It gives them that accessibility to a wide ranging of computer and analytical options. >> And also microservices. >> Oh yeah. >> We had a customer on earlier who's moved to the cloud. This is what we're saying about the edge being data centered. Hybrid cloud just means you're running cloud operations. Which just means you got to have a data architecture that supports cloud operations. Which means orchestration, not having siloed systems, but essentially having these kind of, data traversal, but workload management, and I think that seems to be the consistency there. This plays right into what you're saying. That adaptive platform has to enable that. >> Exactly. >> If it forecloses it, then you're missing an opportunity. I guess, how do you... Okay tell me about a customer where you had the opportunity to do the adaptive platform, and they say no, I want a silo inside my network. I got the cloud for that. I got the proprietary system here. Which is eventually foreclosing their future revenue. How do you handle that scenario? >> So the way we handle that scenario, is again, focusing on what the end objective, that the client has, from an analytical opportunity, respectfully. What I mean by that is that semi-customer says I need to be significantly more responsive in my service management, right? So if he says I want to get that achieved, then what we start thinking about is, what is that responsive data architecture that can tell us a better outcome because like you said, and you said, there's stuff on the data center, there's stuff all over the place, it's going to be difficult to take that all away. But can I create a purpose for change? Many times you need a purpose for change. So the purpose being if I can get to a much more intelligent service management framework, I will be able to either take cost out or I can increase my revenue through services. It has to be tied to an outcome. So then the conversation becomes very easy because you're building a business case for investing in change, resulting in a measurable, business outcome. So that engineer to purpose is the way I'm finding it easier to have that conversation. And I'm telling the plan, keep what you have so you've got all the speckety messes somebody said, right? You've got all of the speckety mess out there. Let us focus on, if there are 15 data sets, that we think are relevant for us to deliver service management intelligence, let's focus on those 15 data sets. Let's get that into a new scalable, hyper responsive modern architecture. Then it becomes easier. Then I can tell the customer, now we have created an equal system where we can truly get to the 11.56 seconds analytical opportunity getting productionized. Move to an experiment as a service. That's another concept. So all of that, in my opinion John, is if he can put a purpose around it, as opposed to saying let's rip and replay, let's do this large scale transformation program, those things cost a lot of money. >> Well the good news is containers and Cubernetties is stowing away to get those projects moving cloud natives as fast as possible. Love the architecture vision. Love to fault with you on that. Great conversation. I think that's a path, in my opinion. Now short-term, the house in on fire in many areas. I want to get your thoughts on this final question. GDPR, the house is on fire, it's kind of critical, it's kind of tactical. People don't like freaking out. Saying okay, saying what does this mean? Okay, it's a signal, it is important. I think it's a technical mess. I mean where's the data? What schema? John Furrier, am I J Furrier, or Furrier, John? There's data on me everywhere inside the company. It's hard. >> Arun: It is. >> So, how are you guys helping customers and navigate the landscape of GDPR? >> GDPR is a whole, it's actually a much bigger problem than we all thought it was. It is securing things at the source system because there's volatibilities of source system. Forget about it entering into any sort of mastering or data barrels. They're securing its source, that is so critical. Then, as you said, the same John Furrier, who was probably exposed to GDPR is defined in ten different ways. How do I make sure that those ten definitions are managed? >> Tells you, you need an adaptive data platform to understands. >> So right now most of our work, is just doing that impactive analysis, right? Whether it's at a source system level, it has data coverance issues, it has data security issues, it has mastering issues. So it's a fairly complex problem. I think customers are still grappling with it. They're barely, in my opinion, getting to the point of having that plan because May 18, 2018 May, was supposed to, for you to show evidence of a plan. So I think there... >> The plan is we have no plan. >> Right, the plan of the plan, I guess is what they're going to show. It may, as opposed to the plan. >> Well I'm sure it's keeping you guys super busy. I know it's on everyone's mind. We've been talking a lot about it. Great to have you on again. Great to see you. Live here at Informatica World. Day one of two days of coverage at theCUBE here. In Las Vegas, I'm John here with Peter Burris with more coverage after this short break. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, it's theCUBE covering DevNet Create 2018. Brought to you by Cisco. >> Hello everyone, and welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Cisco's DevNet Create here in Mountain View in the heart of Silicon Valley. I'm John Furrier, my co-cost, Lauren Cooney, our next guest is Susie Wee, is vice president and CTO of Cisco DevNet. This is her event, DevNet is a Cisco's developer team, conference, community, DevNet created a cloud native, much more dev ops oriented. Our second year covering it, it's only a year and a half old. The creator with her team, Susie, great to have you back. >> Great, it's great to be back. >> What a success, again. You guys are learning, we heard from the keynote that you made some changes, heard some feedback, you added more cooler elements. But this is about technology enablement tools, education, and then fun, and having people exchange information. How's it going? What's the upkeep? >> It's going great. So we're really excited to have our second DevNet Create, and what happened was last year, what we've always tried to do with DevNet overall is to make sure that we had hands-on material because people want to code, people want to learn about the newest technologies. We also made sure that the content of the first DevNet Create was from Cisco, but also from the leading players in the community. And so we got feedback from last year on how to improve it for this year, and basically they just wanted more hands on, and so we've actually expanded from having three parallel workshops to eight parallel workshops, where just folks can get hands-on and code. We continued to have both Cisco content as well as community content from leaders in the field. When we got feedback last year, what happened was we were collecting the feedback. The people who responded, we asked a few questions, and we said: Did you feel that this was useful for you? Did you feel that you were learning about modern tools and technologies that would help you in your career? Would you come back again? The strangest thing that happened is like 100% of people said that they were learning about topics that are modern and they need for their careers. And 100% of them said they would come back again. And I'm like, is it still 100%? 'Cause one person says no, it's not 100%. And so to everyone that responded, they wanted to come back, so we just gave them more of what they wanted. >> It's great, it feels great. You've got a good vibe, but I think there's some real interesting things. We talked last time about how the cloud native world connecting with the commercial liability of Cisco. Cisco is not a small company, they invented routing as we know it, they connect the Internet, and you had that kind of ops networking culture with this new programmable Internet kind of coming together, so there's some notable news you guys had here, why I was impressed by. One is these business exchange, or business ecosystem. Talk about some of the things that you guys are doing now as a result of these two worlds coming together. It's not just speeds that feed tech goodness, just like business value. Money making! >> (laughing) Just to go a little bit more into that, what happens is you kind of have your world of infrastructure, and you have developers who are writing cloud apps, it's so easy to deploy, and really get a lot of value out there. But then you have the world of real companies, real data, real existing infrastructure, enterprise data, smart cities that you want to bring online and everything there, and there's a new type of app that's come to play, and there's a new type of app that of course, needs to work in the cloud, but also needs to couple in with the real world and physical things, and enterprise data. And so that brings rise to a whole new set of applications and new ways to do business. So in terms of what we're doing with that, as someone writes this kind of an app, it's not easy, just like download it onto my phone. It's actually, how do I couple that with the location based infrastructure? How do I couple that with enterprise and hybrid cloud data? And so what we have now is a business exchange, an ecosystem exchange where we can bring those applications up, where if someone is using Cisco infrastructure, we have partners around the world who install and manage solutions that they put for their customers. And we want to show them these are the applications that work together with those products. These are the solutions that you can deliver, so we want to take the applications that our developers are writing and make it available to our partners, to let them use our go to market that we have around the world. >> We get the technical developer ecosystem, and you have the business ecosystem, so that's an indicator that there's some movement and growth. Where is it coming from? Where are you seeing the highlights here? >> Yeah, so in terms of the movement and growth, what happens is we're concentrated on technical enablement for the first few years of DevNet. But clearly, the reason to do the technical enablement is to do that business pull through. Where do we see the growth? So, what happens is everyone in the world wants to digitize, right? So people want to take their manufacturing lines, they want to digitize them. People who have cities want to offer newer experiences that are still kind of leveraging the old, but then providing a top-notch experience for that. So we have people that are in cities who want to use our infrastructure, but also have innovative applications to give to their folks. We have partners around the world who want to not only provide infrastructure, but to provide interesting solutions and experiences. So it's really interesting to see the hunger and the desire now for people to use applications in all different ways, and we're trying to really package it up for them. >> So you're actually stitching these applications together and then packaging them up for consumption for the solution? Is that what you're looking at? >> Yeah, because everybody's buying. Everybody needs a network, everybody has something that exists, but they want to go above it. That boundary between applications and infrastructure is kind of blurring, right? And what an application can do when it's really coupled in to an infrastructure with APIs is completely new, and they want to play, they want to innovate. They don't want to just do the same old thing, and they want to kind of unleash the power, get the value from all of the application development that's going on. >> I think that's great. One of the things I saw from the keynote was the numbers in terms of your exponential growth over the past four years and also the number of folks who continuously visit the site. I think that's awesome. Can you kind of give folks that are looking to build communities any tips or tricks? >> Yeah, and actually, Lauren, you were with us early on. You saw when I was begging for Cisco to have a developer community, and so we didn't have any members at that time. But yeah, we've grown to 480,000, actually 485,000 registered developers. We have 60,000 active monthly users. >> Lauren: That's great. >> So they are really doing stuff. But yeah, in terms of what it takes to grow that community, I think really the key is that my incentive, my goals, my mission, which I shared, is that we want to make developers successful. We want to make our partners in that broader ecosystem and our customers successful. It's not actually my job to sell products. Obviously any solution that's written around APIs for a product will sell products, but my job is to make the ecosystem successful. So I think the key is just constantly keeping their best interest at heart, and having a model where obviously it will pull through the right business for Cisco. >> You've got great self-awareness, and I think that's important to understand what they're trying to do, but also you bring a lot to the table. Cisco has massive presence and enterprises in businesses, whether it's service providers, down to the small medium enterprise to large enterprises. As you look across Cisco, you bring the goods to the party, so to speak. How do you balance that, and what's your approach? So you're taking more of the programmable net ops, which I love, by the way, we talked about that in Barcelona at Cisco Live. You can bring a lot to the table, but you don't want to firehose the developers with all this Cisco stuff. How are you blending that together? What's your approach? >> This is a great point. So what we have to do is we have to understand who our audience is, and we need to bring the right material and speak the language for that audience. And to give you an example, is that we've had you at DevNet Create, we've had you at the DevNet Zones at Cisco Live. When we go to Cisco Live and we have our developer conferences, that is the group in the audience that knows Cisco. They're getting certified, they know how to deploy infrastructure, it's a tremendous community. We have millions of people around the world who basically run, deploy, manage these solutions. >> John: Over years of experience, too. >> Oh, decades of experience, yes, and certification, mastery, expertise. >> They're the network nerds. >> They are the network nerds! (laughs) >> Moving packets around, but now it's changed. >> And the way that we talk to them is different, because what we present to them is how can you automate your infrastructure? How can you scale and use the newest tools? How can you get observability and insights from that infrastructure itself? And then, here's the software tools that you need to use, and here's the APIs you need to know about. Let us understand your problems, and let's work on this together. Now, the types of platforms that we expose and the APIs will be for networking, it'll be for security, it will be for compute, it'll be in many of these areas. Then we come over to DevNet Create, and what we had to do was create a separate venue to hit app developers, cloud native developers, they're not going to Cisco Live. They're actually going to developer conferences, they're in the Bay Area, they're all around the world. They don't think of Cisco or even of infrastructure in what they do, necessarily. >> It's a different culture. >> It's a different culture. And we actually had to re-jigger our vocabulary, we had to re-jigger what we present to them, because when they think of IOS, they don't think of a network operating system, Cisco's iOS operating system, they think of a mobile operating system. So we've actually had to even retrain ourselves to show this is the value that we provide to application developers, here's the platforms and the APIs that matter to you. Here's the right level of abstraction of what would be relevant to an app developer, and really speak to them. And DevNet Create is a separate venue created for that reason. >> And timing is everything, as we know. The wind's at your back because you've got Kubernetes, the container madness, the standardization of contains, which is not new, the Google guy was on earlier talking about containers. You've got micro services, you've got Istio, which is where you're partnering with Google, so this is a new, real emerging tech area that's a nice glue layer between the cultures. How are you handling that? Do you agree? >> Oh my goodness. >> What's your focus on? >> Yes, it's so amazing. So the whole world's in containers and micro services, is shifting how applications are developed. We actually used it within our own system, where we wanted to use the newest technologies, we saw the benefits of working in container and microservices based architecture, to not write monolithic apps but to really be able to compose and reuse services. So we had to go through that change, but what we saw is that when you're dealing with enterprise data, confidential data, customer data, and then public cloud data and everything there, there's a lot of thinking about how to write a cloud app that is a hybrid cloud app that uses OnPrim and public cloud and the best of both worlds. And the world of containers is interesting because suddenly it's the performance of your application, it depends even more on the network. Getting security of how your containers are built up, how they're connected, how they're spinning up in different places, you need that consistency. So having the whole tool of how do you now deploy containers on OnPrim resources as well as public cloud based resources is tricky, and you need to build in that security into the infrastructure itself, and then provide the right abstraction for the developers with tools like Istio. So we're partnered up with Google. It's been a fantastic collaboration where we start with Google's leadership in just cloud native development and what they have to do to scale, and then take together the problems and the opportunities of real enterprises, of real cities, and things there. And as Allen said this morning, it's complicated. It's not that easy. There's a whole new set of problems that we need to deal with, and this partnership is amazing at putting that together. >> Makes the network more important. >> Makes the network more important, yes. >> Awesome, so now talk about what you're doing for incentives. Obviously, you've got a great posture to the marketplace, love how you're doing it, you're bringing two worlds together, bringing a lot to the table, but now you've got to keep people motivated and keep them incentives. Couple things you announced on stage, DevNet Solutions Plus, which is much more curated set of approved rockstar developers or apps that can get on a price list. That's like a lottery ticket. It's like the golden ticket for a developer. There's real value there, right? You can't invite everybody, but you got to do some QAing, but talk about some of these incentive programs you have. >> Absolutely. So what happens is once again, a company like Cisco has an entire community and ecosystem of people and places of infrastructure around the world, and they're looking to differentiate, they're looking to have interesting offerings as well. They're very relevant, because an app developer today needs to figure out how can they make money, how can they take all of everything they've invested in software and bring it to a business value. And so what we're doing is actually coupling that app developer with the entire Cisco channel and the Cisco partners that are out there, and then letting their applications come forward. So when you get something onto... The way that it works is that Cisco has its price list, partners around the world can create solutions that they deliver with those products. But in addition to Cisco's products, what we can do is put on a software and ISV's products onto there, and we're adding it on to the Cisco price list. It's a whole new type of app store. (laughs) But it's another way to go to market to get into these places. >> You're seeing some early returns in terms of the types of ISVs that are coming into the tables, or pattern to the match, or see more network-centric? Who are some of the kinds of developers? What's the make up look like? >> Yeah, so it's really a combination. So what happens is there's the set of applications that are built on infrastructure, surprisingly. So it builds on a collaboration, or a unified communication infrastructure, things that are built on a UCS, like a compute infrastructure. Things that need the network in a mission critical way. So like trading applications, right? You need that network to work, the performance of the application needs to be coupled, so then people tend to buy a kit of here's the software, here's the hardware that makes it all work, I'm buying infrastructure, I want to buy these together. And so it's really kind of putting that bundle of value together and then letting that sell. And I talked to our partners around the world, it's an amazing ecosystem. And when they can actually connect to the world of software developers and this ecosystem in a way that it helps them differentiate their business, it helps bring the app developer money and a business opportunity. It's a whole new level of scale. It's incredible. >> You'll be pushing video apps on there, too. >> Susie: Absolutely. >> CUBE videos. >> CUBE videos, there we go. (laughing) Absolutely. >> Interesting times. Awesome. Anything you want to add? >> Yeah, definitely. One of the things I was wondering about is that with this whole app ecosystem and the partners and the things along those lines, what are the apps that you're seeing that you actually never expected to see? >> Well, some are ones that we actually did expect, or we hoped for them, but the fact that they're coming through is another case. There's a set of applications that are built, for example, around contact centers. Contact centers are customer care, it's the way that people are interacting, right? And there's a whole kind of communications infrastructure around that, it's how people are answering phones, offering services, knowing what to do, so how you build those solutions together. There's a set of healthcare applications, so when you're going into healthcare, your patient monitoring devices versus your guest Wi-Fi services are different, so the kinds of solutions that you can provide there are key. There's actually a great thing in terms of indoor location based services. So we have Meraki and CMX where your Wi-Fi infrastructure not only provides wireless connectivity but gives you indoor location proximity. There's actually a company here called Map Wise, which has built kind of a wayfinding application on top. When I was at Web Summit, then they had Cisco infrastructure for putting up the conference, then they had their application to help people navigate throughout the conference, and they came in, and I actually spoke to Matthew, who's here, and he was like yeah, I had to learn because I had to go in early. They had to set up the network, and then I'm a software guy, I had to get my app to work on that network. I hadn't really thought about how to do that before. Right, so you're starting to couple these apps into that. >> Stu: New use cases. >> These are new use cases, and so much value. >> Yeah, and it's good that you get the terminology, it's a language issue, right? So you got to get the languages nailed down. All right, final question for you. What's the bumper sticker here? What's the phrase? I heard you on stage, create, connect, secure. What's the current DevNet Create tagline? >> So it is: Connect to Create. And so in one port, it was about connecting the world, providing that connection, and that's what we've done over the last 25 years. And over the next 25, even more things will be connected, but it's really about the solutions that we can build together as a team, and there's an ecosystem now that you have APIs that are exposed. You can build machine learning, and artificial intelligence together with world leading connectivity, together with world leading cloud companies. And when you bring all those together, you can have entirely new types of experiences that we can do, so it's Connect to Create. Along with that, actually comes the need for security and protection, and so that fabric needs to not only connect to create, but also connect and protect to create. And we think that by building that into the infrastructure as well, we can help app developers to secure their customers' data and to secure their users themselves, access, and all sorts of things. >> I love the concept of co-creation, really great collaboration model, and you guys are doing a great job. Congratulations on driving this developer program, and programs now, from a handful of renegades, now to a big organization, or growing organization. >> We're still lean, but our pack is growing. (laughing) >> You don't got to be a rocket scientist to know they're going to be doubling down on this. Cisco, cracking the code on the developer forum about learning the languages, knowing how to lead into the right cultures and bring them together, and have the right technology, enablement, and Susie, the creator, a part of the team, member of Cisco team for DevNet. Thanks for coming on and sharing, appreciate it. >> Susie: Thank you so much. >> Be right back with more live coverage after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Voiceover: Live from New Orleans, it's the Cube covering VeeamON 2017 brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back to New Orleans everybody. This is the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with my cohost Stu Miniman. Frank Palumbo is here. He's the senior vice president at Cisco Systems. And Andy Vandeveld is the vice president of Global Alliances at Veeam Software. Gents, welcome to The Cube. >> How we doing? >> Thank you. >> It's great to be here. >> Good, Frank, hot off the keynote. It was great, Yankees fan, love it. The rivalry continues. Of course you guys know the Cube, Red Sox fans, some of us. Stu's not. >> Not all of us. >> So we love it. We love the action, and it's always fun. But Frank we had to cut out a little bit before your keynote because we had to get ready to do the Cube. But you put up a slide that was awesome. We could do an hour on The Cube on that, and it's all about the apps, I mean really. But you had this great slide with apps and microservices and virtualization and bare metal and OnPrim and really laying out the complexity today. And you guys are at the heart of that. Maybe give us a quick summary of how you guys see the world. >> When you're talking about the applications, the application profile, it's important, the network kind of brings this together because we do touch everything. Where people are in this kind of application history is some of them are on legacy, mainframe. Some of them are on RISC processors. But as a network provider, we have to bring those in too even with the more modern applications. So you look at what the platforms or workloads are on so move those in. And then you're looking at workload placement, on Prim or in the Cloud. Do we put data in a colo? Do we put the application in the Cloud? There's different hybrid mentalities to do that. Then you get into the systems management where there's just too much stuff out there. Humans can't manage it anymore so the machines and the software have to manage the machines and the software. We'd like to think we're right in the middle of that because of the way we bring things together with the network. >> So Andy, I look at the... Stu and I walked the floor before we come in here, the ecosystem is really quite impressive-- >> Andy: Thank you. >> for a relatively small company. I mean not that small anymore. It didn't just happen overnight. Maybe you could talk a little bit about themes and philosophy with partnerships and some of the things that you're doing with Alliances generally and specifically get into the Cisco partnership. >> Well I think partnerships have been in our DNA since the beginning of the company. We're a 100% channel-lead company. We don't have a direct sales force. That's an important piece of the company's philosophy. These alliances are really key for us because as we start to move into markets that are maybe a little bit higher than where we've been into the large enterprise and mid-enterprise and large enterprise, we really look at partnerships like the one with Cisco that are going to benefit Veeam and the customers by us being together doing joint developments. Some of the things that Frank talked about in his keynote speech, those are the sorts of things that create solutions for that level of customer where Cisco's been resident for many, many years. So we look at these partnerships as really central to where Veeam wants to go as a company and where we think customers want Veeam to participate with the partners. >> What's the specific nature of the partnership? Can you unpack that a little bit for us? >> From my side, certainly we have a robust go-to-market relationship in terms of when we're positioning UCS or Hyperflex, our server and hyper converged platforms, now we can bring to bear the Veeam value problem as we go forward with customers. And customers look to Cisco really to complete the story and offer an end-to-end solution. We weren't able to complete it without the Veeam technology. Then on the development side, some of the things that we're doing, we've integrated so now the Veeam software can work with our Snap technology and hyper converge. So you're starting to see it come together at the screen level with the bits and bytes in terms of the integration. >> Dave: So there's a greater degree of technical integration as well. >> Frank: Yes. >> It's not just go-to, I mean that's important because a lot of times back-up data protection is kind of an afterthought. It's a bolt-on. But if you're going to be a complete solution provider, that's fundamental and it's becoming more important. >> I think you know I was just mentioning to Frank back in the green room before we came out here I look at the start of this partnership as really being about 18 months ago. Although we'd had a partnership for a while, we really kind of started about 18 months ago in this meeting that we had at their partner conference in Maui. And Radmeer and I sat down with Frank and kind of explained why we thought data protection was a solution that Cisco could get behind particularly now that they were coming out with their S-Series devices. But that's just the start of it. It has to come with integration as well. Then we started with Hyperflex. It was a new product for them, 1.0 version. With the 2.0 version, we got integrated with snapshot technology like Frank mentioned. I look at this short runway of time in this relationship that kicked off with our meeting with Frank and he got it right away. We didn't have to explain it. >> Dave: It resignated. >> Frank: Oh, no question. We're very proud of our S-Series storage server. The hardware is nice. The infrastructure piece is nice, but it really doesn't come together unless you got the application on a run with it. That's where Veeam just jumps in and fills that gap perfectly for us. >> Frank, I think back to when virtualization really took off. Networking was one of the things that we had to fix. It put a lot of stress on the network. It's one of the reasons Cisco created UCS and backup also creates a lot of strain on the network. So it seems a natural fit. Can you talk about all the complexities that are coming and how you're going to be, what can we expect to see from jointly going forward? >> I think we've learned a lot from Veeam in terms of they've been able to really attack complex issues in a very simple fashion. Simplicity is the game with customers right now. Things are moving so fast. If you can't be simple, you're going to have a tough time out there. So I think that's where it's really come together for us in that vein. But when you look at the value of data and whether it's a second old or two years old or a year old, there's so many different more paradigms coming out about what you can do with this data. And customers and even customers of customers have now found ways to use this data either to make better decisions, monetize it, to stay away from things. So that's why this whole lifecycle for us is so important. This is where Veeam and us can really do some nice things for customers. >> Andy, can you build on that about the multi-Cloud position that Veeam has? How many of those, do you know, touch what Cisco's doing here and how does the partnership help drive that value of data type offering? >> For Veeam, our message is all about availability, availability of the data which makes the applications available and which basically makes the business stay up and running. One analogy we use is a cell phone. When you're cell phone dies, you can't get access to your email. You can't get access to your instant messages. >> Dave: You freak bascially. >> You feel like you're lost, right? >> Frank: It's getting kind of pathetic. >> Yeah. >> Dave: It is pretty bad. >> So think about not being able to get access to your data or access to your applications because of some outage, not being able to backup and recover. Your business could go out of business. Working with Cisco on solutions that are on premise, that are in the Cloud, that are multi-Cloud is really the value of the partnership that we have that we bring together. It's just at the beginning. We've got solutions that we're building now. We got solutions that are on the horizon. We've got a very strong go-to-market partnership in a very short period of time that are targeting enterprise customers, service providers, the whole gamut. It's really that sort of relationship that you find in an industry every so often. When it comes together like it has with us and Cisco, it's really a very strong, strong value prop. >> Well Veeam capitalized on the original virtualization trend with VMware that was a big transformation, the server infrastructure. You're seeing a huge network transformation now. There are so many forces affecting the network that I wonder, Frank, if you could comment on. You got ScaleOut. There's Flash. There's Cloud. There's Microservice. There's DevOps makes everything go faster. The flattening of the network. Describe what's happening and then maybe you can talk about how your ecosystem is going to take advantage of that. From what were the challenges the network has is exactly like you said. You have certainly the virtualized workloads now. The Microservices containerize workloads. I think the one people forget about is there's still a ton of bare metal out there, right? You look at the Hadoop workloads and such. A lot of these are bare metal oriented, right? Quite frankly, moving a VM around a fabric is actually pretty easy to do. But when you got to move a bare metal workload around a fabric, and that's something we can do with UCS the way we do it statelessly, that's much harder. That's why we have the extraction layer with what we call the fabric interconnection with UCS to do that kind of stuff. I think that's sometimes lost in the translation in terms of how you're going to handle all these different workloads. >> If I understand it, the link then to the opportunity for you guys, Andy, is that the stakes are just much higher now, right? You could do so much more around the networks. Stakes are so much higher. That increases the need for your products and services. Carry that through if you would. >> Well, it is. As we make our way up-market into the enterprise, the amount of data that businesses are spinning off of, their infrastructure and their data center or from robo offices or wherever, is growing immensely. Being able to have a partnership with an infrastructure provider like Cisco, where we can put solutions together that really give the customers the rock solid base for backing up their data and making sure that it's available is really critical for us as we move into those larger enterprise and larger environments. So this is an essential relationship I would say. >> I think, too, if I could mention, this is something our channel wanted to see, too. We're the same. We're at about 98% of our business goes through the channel. So they're selling our full line of infrastructure products. This completes the story for them. So we got a lot of guides to them say, "Hey, yes, Cisco. "We'd like to see you come together with Veeam "so we can start bundling offers out there in the market "and be that kind of end-end-to supplier, too." That was a big impetus especially from mid-market up to enterprise customers. >> Excellent, well, we got to wrap there. The partnerships give you huge leverage as a small, again not so small company anymore. The fact that you can get somebody like Frank to come down, talk about the partnership, is a testament to what you guys have built. So congratulations. Really appreciate you guys coming on The Cube. >> No, my pleasure, our pleasure. >> All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. This is The Cube. We're live from New Orleans, VeeamON 2017. We'll be right back. (tinkling music)