>>Live from Washington, D C it's the cube covering Boomi world 19 how to bide booming. >>Welcome to the cube at Lisa Martin at Boomi world 19 in Washington DC and with John furrier and John and I are pleased to welcome to the cube Jason Maynard, the SVP of global field operations from NetSuite. Jason, welcome. Thanks for having me. It's great to be in D C and on the cube. It is. We were just talking about baseball, so we'll have to park that for a second and talk about some other sexy stuff besides baseball, ERP. So nets we, I saw you on stage this morning. You guys have been a partner of the first Alliance partner with Boomi for about 12 years. Thousands of joint customers. candy.com is one of them. Yep. They're going to be on later today. So I'm excited to have my afternoon sugar rush. Make sure he brings a big bag. You got it. So talk to us about you guys. We're also, I noticed Boomie's 2019 Alliance partner of the year. Lots of innovations going on. Give our audience a little bit of an overview of what NetSuite is doing with Boomi. >>Great. So Boomi is, has been one of our longest partners. I said I think we, we first inked the partnership in 2007 so it goes back 12, 13 years. Um, we, we, when we sell ERP, you always end up having to connect to a legacy on prem system, right? Or you may have to connect to new marketplaces to sell and so there's always need for integration. And so from day one, Boomi wanted to really kind of push the envelope work with cloud players. You know, when we started NetSuite 20 years ago, it was kinda crazy to put business applications on the internet and they'd been there from day one with us really on this journey. And so they've been a great partner to sort of help all those customers migrate and move their business to the cloud. >> You guys had success with Boomi on the customer front. >>Can you unpack that a little bit? Because the customer equation around data is interesting. You guys have turned this into an opportunity with nets. We talk about how that works. Yeah, I mean look EV every customer needs to get more insight out of their data. And you know, the ERP system is one of the major hubs in any organization, right? You've got a handful of system of records, right? And core financials is one of the main systems of record and inevitably every customer will have probably 1520 legacy data sources, right? That are going to be necessary for an ERP. And so for us, working with Boomi across not just the U S but across the globe with a lot of different international customers, it's a natural fit because we're not obviously going to be connecting with all of the systems that they're touching today. It brings a lot more value of data into NetSuite, which obviously then helps our customer out. >>So you guys were at, you said an early partner of Boomi back in 2007 when they were founded. We got to speak with Rick Nucci yesterday. So one of the interesting things that we talk about, and John even pointed out yesterday is you know, they took a big bet, Boomi dead way back then with building this architecture that's pretty unique to this day. This single instance, multi-tenant cloud application. Take us back to, because obviously NetSuite's been around longer, you a lot of choice, there are more iPods vendors out there. What is it about the way that Boomi is architected that is enabling your customers to achieve so much success but also really that you buy saw back in Oh seven I think this is something that's going to be a real big opportunity for NetSuite. >>You know, it's, it's, it's been an interesting ride because if you go back even to Oh seven and didn't even maybe eight or nine years ago, it was not a foregone conclusion with a lot of technology vendors that the world was going to shift to the cloud. Yeah, right. There were a lot of server huggers out there. There still are. They still want to hug this, they still want to hug the machine. Right. And so it's important, I think that we work with partners who have the same true North in terms of where we think that the technology is going. And I think that alignment, which is, you know, we're 100% in the cloud, always have been, always will be. Boomi shared that vision early on. So it was easier to make a bet then right, with a vendor who was going to have that commitment. >>And so that's been, to their credit, the vision that they've had for obviously years now. And I think that's what's helped them grow so quickly. And one of the things that you observed obviously is that the customers have choices, but the world software's changing, right? I mean cloud has changed the software development life cycle. I mean just in the past decade alone, the business of change, you still going to have the system of records. Okay. But with containers and Kubernetes and some of these cloud native opportunities, there's more flexibility in how people are deploying legacy and or core apps. Yeah. So they're not getting thrown away as everyone had predicted. So, I mean, there was some funded saying, well, everyone's going to move to the cloud and not really. Yeah, well I look at it, it's a good point because there's no packaged applications. They're not the entirety of the application market as you know. >>Right? Custom application development will never go away. You will always have, you know, things that are custom. People build apps on NetSuite, right? Things that are very close to ERP you'll build on the NetSuite platform. But there are things that are not, you know, native to our platform that need to connect to NetSuite. And there are customers that we share who are, have legacy COBOL applications for example. Right? And they may need to put a wrapper around that and get certain forms into NetSuite. So it really does run the gamut. And so it'll never be one thing, right? We just sort of, in the technology industry, we never go from, you know, 100 to zero in terms of what's deployed in the legacy. We sort of layer in compost technology. And I think that's what's happening. And so, you know, we'll replace certain systems. We go in and we pretty much always replace a an on prem system but there are a lot of on-prem technologies that a will never, never go away. >> I was digging around about Boomi and you guys net suite looking at some of the use cases. One thing that caught my eye was, you know, the growth startup for instance, might be born in the cloud. Yup. Never have an it department. Um, they have kind of a um, hacked together system of record at HR and ERP kind of things, but at some point they've got to grow and they hit a growth spurt and they just become rapid growth. Eventually goes public. You guys have had good success with Boomi in these kinds of startups. It's pretty normal. You've seen this before. Can you talk about that dynamic because at some point people got to start establishing formal, is this the systems applications? You're gonna need payroll, you're gonna need HR. I mean this is blocking and tackling. You guys have been successful there. >> Well, you know, we, we like to think about we can be the first system that you'll ever need and hopefully we'll be the last system that you'll ever need. Right? And what ends up happening is we've architected NetSuite to let you start small and then add more functionality as you grow. So you may start with just basic financials. You may add order management, move into full fledged ERP, maybe you're going to use our HR system down the road. And so we kind of, we kind of stairway a customer through their journey. Boomi does the same thing. Maybe you start with two connectors, right? You're just connecting two basic applications and, and that's sweet. And then you evolve into something more sophisticated, right? Where as you saw today and some of the technology demos where, you know, they're tapping into all sorts of different systems that are not even ERP or CRM, it's, you know, IOT and just all sorts of different insights that they can bring from the different technologies. >>Better together message is legit and this works. Yeah. You know, we look at, technology is all about coopertition these days, right? Is every vendor, right? In some way we overlap, you know, Boomie's owned by Dell, NetSuite's owned by Oracle, right? We're, we're all sort of inner inner locked in one way or another. But ultimately we have to work together because we share so many customers and so customers don't have the patience and nor should they for any of the sort of the, the vendor warfare. And I think that's the cool thing that's evolved with technology standards. It's easy for us to work together and we have to do it and we want to do it because it's what's the right thing for the customer. >>Let's talk about net suite as a launching pad for a lot of tech IPOs in the last few years. Give us your perspectives on what you guys started to recognize as a lot of these tech companies have kind of, that's why it just seems to me like net suite has been this sort of launchpad for that. Talk to us about what you've achieved there. >>Yeah, no, it's, we're, we're really humbled by the fact that more companies go, Poe tech companies go public on NetSuite than frankly you need any other ERP system. Um, you know, we help invent the industry. Early on, 20 years ago, Evan Goldberg and Larry had the famous four minute phone call to, you know, kind of crazily idea to put business apps on the web. Um, and so we've been, you know, at the forefront of this, but it's not just technology. It's, you know, we, we're a subscription business right from day one. Like we didn't sell a license with maintenance. We sold a subscription. So I think a lot of customers look at us and say, okay, they've been through the journey that we have. You know, we went public 12 years ago, you know, we past $1 billion in sales, you know, we got acquired. So the journey that we've been on, most of our customers are going to be on that journey in one form or another. >>We're going to, we've made acquisitions. Our customers make acquisitions, right? So we tried it and this was sort of the genius of what Evan and the team built is a system that can handle any business model. So whether you're selling time as a service, whether you're selling time or you're selling a subscription, you're selling a widget, maybe you're going to sell a widget as a service in the future. We can kind of handle any of the business models and most of the IPS are innovative companies that innovate not just with what they sell, but in how they sell it. >> Show about some stories from the field that you've seen out there. Anecdotally, share some turn situation. What are customers going through right now? Enterprises as they go through their journeys, they realize cloud's there. They got some stuff on premise is going to keep there. >>There's obviously certain reasons you're gonna run payroll in the cloud. You're going to have to have multitenancy is allows it news cases and clouds, not that straightforward. When you start thinking about having an enterprise and the hybrid mode of operations, what are some of the customers feeling? What's a, what's the mindset? What's their architecture look like? What are some of the examples? Can you share? Yeah. You know, I'd say three things come to mind. So first off, it's this business model innovation, right? The, the on prem systems tend to lock you into a model, right? And there's nothing, and when they were built, they were innovative 1520, 30 years ago. Most companies, business models have outgrown that legacy system. So they need to move off that to enable some new thing that they want to do. So that's a big driver. I think the other thing is, is globalization is here to stay. >>Um, you know, whether you're in the United States or you're in the UK or you're in Asia, right? We're one interconnected global economy. And so you may, you know, source from Asia, you may design in California, you may do nearshore assembly in Mexico and then you do omni-channel distribution. So you have to be global. And I would say the thing that's changed in the last 10 years is companies are being global from day one. It's not just something you add on five, seven, eight years down the road. You see companies designed for being global. And that I think those two things, business model, innovation global are our big catalyst right now. I mean we had, Oh one more thing real quick. So we have a Cuba alumni set on the cube data's the new software. Yeah. So if you've got a global business, data's critical as the data needs to be acted upon, you've got policy, you got regulations, regulatory issues, personal privacy stuff, company policy. >>As you have this global layer of data, making it available, addressable across multiple systems is a huge task. What's your view on that? Well it's, it's, it's an interesting question cause we think of it and kind of three pillars. It's we give you visibility, we give you control and then we give you the agility, right? So you've got to, first off, you've got to have visibility into the data, right? You need to know what's happening. Like how much did we sell in the Australian subsidiary yesterday, right? You need to have controls. If your CFO, you need to have global financial controls. You may have sold a lot in Australia. You've got to make sure you're spending too much. Right? How do you manage that? And then ultimately the agility is how do you make a decision on that? Right. And so that's those three things I think all play into it. >>And how does the consumerization effect impact it? Visibility, control, agility. Because as consumers we have this expectation whether you know in our personal lives we can get anything that we want within a couple of clicks. So when you're talking to a tech, whether it's a young tech company or even not a tech company like candy.com which is seems like a mixture. You and I were talking before of a number of different industries, all, all in one. How does, has NetSuite evolved to enable that consumer to go from their personal life to being able to interact with ERP next, struck the value from it in the ways that they want? Anywhere, anytime. >>Let's, let's be honest, for a second, ERP kinda got a dirty reputation. You know, in the nineties nobody loved their ERP implementations. Books had been written on this, right? ERP was like, it was like going like a bad trip to the dentist office in the 90s and that was sort of the catalyst for our company. But that's not enough just to be in the cloud. It's you have to make your user experience consumer grade, right? We always talk about enterprise grade. It's all the, reliability, scalability, all that kind of stuff. That's sort of a given, like you have to do that, but I think you have to, you have to adopt the consumer grade. So we spent a lot of time and we're doing a lot more and we're going to be rolling out some new stuff around user interface and just how easy is it to have a dashboard on your phone so that you can run your business from your smartphone versus actually having to be tethered to the desktop because we're all mobile, we're all traveling. You're a business owner, you're a CFO, you're CEO. You need to be connected. Maybe you're too connected. Maybe that's part, maybe we have screen-time problems. We do business. If we, if we can give our customers Screentime addiction to watch their business in real time, I guess that's a good thing. Right? And so we want to be able to make sure that they can have all that insight at their fingertips, whether they're in the office or at the beach. >>And speaking of insight, talk to us about brain yard. What that is, why you developed it and what it's enabling. >>Yeah. Thank you. That's like my, I was hoping you were gonna ask me. It's my secret, but not so secret anymore. Pet project. So one of the things being in the cloud, we have 18,000 customers, right? We have a single instance of NetSuite and so we've had the unique seat at the table to see all of these different companies grow in all these different industries. We evolved into selling by industry. So we have a retail version of software version of manufacturing, nonprofit, 1213 different industries. What we had in that is we had all these insights by industry. What is the right DSO number for a software company, right? What is the thing that a nonprofit needs to look at? And so we had trapped inside of NetSuite, all these brains sitting in all this information and PowerPoint and word docs and just everywhere. And so we decided to crack the hood open and literally open source that information and put it on the website. >>And so there's a subtle message here is that we have to do more than just sell bits. We, we're ultimately selling customer success or a business outcome, whatever you want to call it. So we need to transfer that knowledge to our customers so they can run their business better. So it's our investment back into the customer saying, Hey, you know what, if you're a software company and your DSO is at this level, you know, best in class is actually, you know, five days lower on a day sale, outstanding. How do you get your business to close that gap? And that's where we can really add value comms. People love comparables and best practices. You're essentially taking that heavy lifting work. It's giving it up there. It's benchmarking, it's analysis. You know, I was a former wall street analyst, so this one's near and dear to my heart, which is comparison, you know, how is this company doing versus that company? >>And so we have lots of data, um, that we've gleaned over the years. Lots of insights. So we kind of know what those best practices are. This is just the first phase of what we're doing. We're working with a lot of partners across the industry to give us some of their industry data so we kind of mash it up and come up with the insights. So it wasn't as an analyst, I'd love to get your thoughts real quick and take the, take the net suite hat off, put your industry participants hat on. Lot of wall street challenges around we worked, pulled their IPO, their GP gross profit was down. Other SAS businesses have huge margins. Their successful zooms public. There's a new formula developing in this cloud 2.0 world software world where the dynamic between classic software and software economics in the cloud are changing. What's your thoughts on this? >>If a startups out there and growing companies that are really looking to crack the code by at all costs and then monetize, get the margins that would, what's your, what's your analysis? No, it's, I, this is an area that I think a lot of companies raise too much, too much capital. Right? And they, we've been in this very unique environment over the last kind of eight or nine years where I'd argue a lot of startups who've been overfunded and when you have overfunding you chase growth at really no, you know, at without any limit on terms of the cost and what you see as you sort of distort the reality of what's happening in the business. And so I would argue that we've had, you know, zero in basically free money in terms of access to capital and we've lost track of some of the basics that you need to build a profitable, sustainable business. >>So, you know, when I was working on wall street, you couldn't go public, you know, if you were within say four quarters of cashflow break even, right? Those are some of the things that we used to have. But you've seen, you know, business fundamentals. Yeah, I need, and so what's happening right now? It's just a little bit of her. I think it's mean reversion. Honestly. I think you're seeing, you know, the public markets, you know, if you will veto some of the frothiness that's been in the private markets. And so this is, I think companies, some marketplaces do. That's what they, that's there. It's fantastic. It's a self correcting mechanism, right? I mean it's, you know, just cause you marked up your last round when you were private to a good Jillian dollars doesn't mean that the buy side on, you know, the pension fund is going to want to pay that and we work so you can't be high and run a business. You know, as we were saying, you know, trying, you know, God bless them, they're trying, but it's probably not the best practice I would not have. I would not recommend that. It's not a good look for wall street. How a good luck, you know, you can get on the Joe Rogan show there, knock yourself out. If you're a Ilan, you can do it. But you know, he's the, he's the only one we're going to let, don't know. >>Probably shouldn't be publicly. Air's too much unless you want something to laugh at and you know what, in this economy, I think we all need that. Jason, thank you for sharing with us what you're doing at NetSuite with Boomi, the insights that you guys are opening up with brain yard. So from brain yard, let's go back to the other yard that I promised. The baseball yard, your Dodger fan giants fan. Hats off. You guys are there. We are not. So I will say good luck to your team. We appreciate your time and what can I say, Bri? I'll give it to ya. All right, well it's been a pleasure talking to you and thank you for your time. Thanks for John furrier. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube from booby world 19 thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high-tech coverage, it's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2019. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. Two sets, wall-to-wall coverage, our 10th year. We actually call this one the Valley set, over on the other side, it's in the middle of a meadow, and this was in the valley. I'm Stu Miniman. My cohost for this segment is, of course, John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. And joining us, the quintessential Valley guest that we have, Jerry Chen. Long time participant in the program, climbing up the leaderboard here of theCUBE Times at VMworld. Jerry, thank you so much for joining us. >> Stu, John, thanks for having me back. >> All right, so we knew you back when you worked for VMware. >> Jerry: Right. >> You're now a partner at Greylock. We watched some of your amazing startups, we've had many of them on our program. Just a little bit going on in your world this day, maybe we'll start there. >> Sure, it amazes me, both being at VMworld 10 years since you guys started covering. For me, I joined VMware back in 2003. So I was at the first Vmworld, through every single one of them, and seeing this ecosystem reinvent itself, and juxtapose that with every other conference at Moscone. So Dreamforce, Oracle OpenWorld, VMworld. And I would say five years ago, no one would have thought Dreamforce itself, or Salesforce as an ecosystem big enough for investors. But yes, now they can invest in startups. All they do is sell to the Salesforce ecosystem. You can always invest in a startup. All they sell to is the VMware ecosystem. And for sure, when, you and I, three of us go to Amazon or an event, that ecosystem just continues to grow exponentially year over year. >> And this some of the highlights of Datadog, we were talking before we came on camera. They always had a big booth, they bet on the AWS ecosystem, not a lot of Datadog here, but monitoring turns into observability, a key component, which basically was a white space. I mean, monitoring was boring. A little sector, but because of the nature of the data security auditing, this has become kind of a killer category. >> I think last week you saw SignalFX get acquired by Splunk, which is another huge enterprise company, and Datadog filed their S-1. No one thought monitoring would be a big enough market to support multiple billion plus companies, and what we've learned is making a bet on just cloud-native companies like Datadog did, purely in the Amazon Ecosystem, was a great bet because they've grown super fast, and that market turned out to be very big. In addition, it could be Splunk, and they could bet on logging for mostly on-premise companies. That turned out to be a large market. So I think five, 10 years ago, no one thought that these markets would be so big and so gigantic. The cloud itself, you can have a multi-billion dollar company like Datadog purely on a cloud-native application and cloud-native companies, if you will. >> You know, it's interesting, you're a VC and the enterprise specialist at Greylock. Consumer used to be all the rage in venture. "Oh, we're going to consumer against Facebook," Facebook breaks democracy, all kinds of problems. Being regulated. But enterprise became really hot with the cloud, and then you have an interesting dynamic. Now a thousand flowers are blooming on the startup side, so yes, there's a lot of action in startups, but the buyers of startups and the IPO markets is where the liquidity happens, which you care about, right? So now you have liquidity options for IPO for fast-growing flit scalers as you guys call it, and then the M and A market are buying the companies. So I got to ask you, with seeing Splunk as a great example, where they own the log market, log files, bring SignalFX in, former VMware guys and Facebook guys, comes in, they add some servability piece to it. Splunk's got more power now because of the acquisition. It's not just token acquisition. This is the market, product market slash M and A market. What's your thoughts on that? Because that's a key exit opportunity, and the numbers are pretty sizable when you think about it. >> I think just going back to the opportunity, the market's so big that you have multiple multi-billion dollar companies, so like Splunk's a huge company, great company. We're investors in a company called Sumo Logic. That's going to also be a successful company, and also a big-- >> John: And filed for IPO. >> And a big company that's OZA, Amazon, and Vmworld. So I think what you have here is each of these markets are monitoring, APM, the log, infrastructure, are turning out to be multi multi-billion, and larger than we anticipated. So I think before, to your analogy in the consumer, we always knew consumer markets had huge TAMs. Like how many billion in people are on Facebook? How many billion people are on Twitter? What we're learning now is the market and the TAM for these enterprise software companies, be it SAAS, be it LOG, be it Metrics, be it security, those TAMs are actually bigger than we thought beforehand as well. >> And the driver of that is what? Cloud, transformation, just replatforming, modernization? The businesses are businesses still. >> I think the move to cloud is accelerate, I think your last line, "businesses are businesses," is what's key. Like every business now is being touched by software. They all got to go cloud so I'm an investor in a company called Blend that does mortgage software. So the entire financial services industry, from mortgages to car loans and consumer lending, that's all going digital. That's all going online. Jobs that were like mortgage brokers are going to be an app on your phone now. So finance, retail, healthcare, construction, so all these markets now are going to the cloud, going digital, so these TAMs are expanding exponentially. >> Yeah, Jerry, want to get your take on the ecosystem. You know, we look at VMware, they built a big ecosystem, the end user computing space, you know. You've coined the term Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, from that environment there was an ecosystem around there. I see VMware at a lot of shows, and they have a good presence there, and there's some overlap between the public cloud space. Like when I go to this show, and I walk through the expo hall, oh my gosh. Data protection is everywhere, and all of those companies are at a all of the cloud environment, but do you see a transition from, you know, where VMware is in kind of the cloud-native space? Is there a lot of overlap, or what's your thinking on those kind of dynamics? >> I think all above. I think VMware at Vwworld, and like all these tech companies are constantly reinventing themselves and expanding. So you have, as a VC, say it's this company I'm looking at, when it's two individuals, and a dog, and PowerPoint. Is it a feature, is it a product, or is it a company? It's a feature, it's okay. You know, it's probably not worth the investment, but it's worthwhile. It'll get acquired for something. Is it a product? Some companies are just one killer product, right? And you can ride that product for the arc of the company. But then some startups turn out be companies, multi-product companies. And there always have one or two great products, and then you start adding new things as the market evolves, and VMware has done that. And so, as a result of adding server virtualization, desktop virtualization, Cloud Foundry which I helped build, out in the Kubernetes stuff. So they're adding multiple products to their company. I think the great companies can do that. Look at Amazon. They keep launching 10 new products every single month. Microsoft has done a great job reinventing themselves. So I think the great companies can reinvent, but not transform, they just add to what they have, and just to be a multi-product family. >> Stu: All right, so you mentioned Cloud Foundry. >> Yeah. >> Pivotal, of course, is now back in the mothership where it started there. When Cloud Foundry first started it was, "Well, we're not going to take the hypervisor "and put it all of these places." We needed a slightly different footprint. Well, five years later, we're talking about Kubernetes is going to be baked into Vsphere, and Vsphere is going to be a main piece of VMware's cloud-native strategy. Has the market changed or some of those technology pieces, you know, still a challenge? What's your take there? >> You know, it's a great question because I think what we're seeing is there's never ever in technology as you guys know, on platforms, it's a zero-sum game. It's never always going to all mainframe, all client server, all VMs, all microservers, all Serverless, right? And I think we're seeing is it's also never going to be all Amazon, it's never going to be all Google, it's never going to be all Azure, right? I think we talked about early days, it's not a winner take all. It may be, you know, what one-third, two-thirds, or something, 25-40% market share, but it's not going to be all or nothing. And so we're seeing companies now have architectures on multiple clouds, multiple technologies, and so just like 10 years ago, you had a mainframe team, you had a Windows team, you had a Solaris team. Remember Sun and Spark? And a Linux team. Now you have a Google team, and Azure team, an Amazon team, and an on-prem team. And so you just had these different stacks evolve, and I think what's interesting to see is like, we've kind of had this swing of momentum around Docker, Containers, Kubernetes, Serverless, but at the same time you see a bunch of folks realize, okay, what's happening is I'm choosing how much I want to consume. Like an API, a container, or a whole VM, right? And people realizing, yes, maybe consuming the APIs is our right level of consumption, but quite frankly, Stu, John, buying whole VMs also what I want. So you see a bunch of companies say, I'm just going to build better monolithic applications around VMware, I'm going to build better microservices around Docker and Kubernetes, and then we'll use Serverless where I think I need to use Serverless. >> Yeah, that's a good point. One of the things we hear from customers we talk to, and there's two types of enterprise customers, at least in the enterprise infrastructure side, classic CIOs and then CISOs. Two different spectrums. CIOs, old, traditional, multi-vendor means a good thing, no lock in, I know how to deal with that world. CISOs, they want to build their own stacks, manage their own technology, then push APIs out to the suppliers, and rechange the supplier relationship because security is so important they're forced to the cutting edge. So I look at that a kind of canary in the coal mine, and want to get your thought on that, because we're seeing a trend where enterprises are building software. They're saying, hey, you know, I want a stack internally that we're going to do for a variety of different reasons, security or whatever, and that doesn't really blend well for the multi-cloud team approach, because not everyone can have three killer teams building stacks, so you're seeing some people saying, you know, I'm going to pick a cloud here and go all in on certain things, build the stack, and then have a backup cloud there. And then some CIOs say, hey, you know what? I want all the cloud guys in there negotiating their best price maybe, or whatever. >> I think it's great nuance you pointed out. Even just like we had a Windows team and a Linux team, you still had a single database team that ran across both, or storage teams are ran across both. So I think the nuance here is certain parts of the stack should be Azure, Amazon, VMware. Certain parts of the stack should be, I think that the ultimate expression is just an API with service errors. So one of the companies you guys are familiar with, Roxette, it's a search and Serverless analytics company. It's basically an API in the cloud, multi-cloud, to do search and analytics. And just like you had a database team that's independent across all these stacks, for certain parts of the architecture, you're going to want something like Roxette, that's going to be independent of the architecture stacks. And so it's not all isolated, it's not siloed, it's not all horizontal, depending on the part of the stack, you're going to either want a horizontal cross-cloud solution, or a team that's going to go deep on one. >> So it's really a contextual decision based on what the environment looks like, or business. >> And there's certain areas of technology that we know from history that lends themself to either full stacks versus horizontals. Just like I said, there was a storage team and a database team, right? That's Oracle, or something that ran across Windows and Linux and Sun, you're going to see someone like Roxette become this search and Serverless analytics team across multiple cloud stacks. >> This is why the investment is such a great opportunity for the enterprise VCs right now because, I mean, there's so many dimensions of opportunities for companies to grow and become pretty large, and the markets are shifting so the TAM is pretty big. Michael Dell was just on the other side, I interviewed him. He says, you know, he was getting kind of in Dave's grill saying, "Well, the TAM for enterprise is bigger than cloud TAM." I go, "Well that TAM is going to be replatformized, so like that's going away and moving, shifting, so the numbers are big but they're shifting so tons of opportunities. >> It depends if you're a big company like Dell versus a small startup. Oftentimes, this true that the TAM for enterprise is still much larger than cloud, but your point is what's shifting were the dollars growing fast. >> The TAM for horses was huge at one point, and then, you know, cars came along, right? So you know. >> Every startup, what you want to do, you want to attach to a growing budget. You don't want to attach to a flat to shrinking budget. And so right now, if you're a founder, and say, "Okay, where are the budget dollars flowing to?" Everyone's got a kind of a cloud strategy, just like they had a VMware virtualization strategy, so if I'm like a startup G, metrics, or data analytics, I'm going to try to attach to where the dollars are flowing. That's a cloud strategy, that's an AI application strategy, security strategy. >> So let me ask you one question. So if I'm going to start up, this is a hypothetical startup, startups got an opportunity. It's a SaaS-based startup, they say, "You know what? "This is a feature in the market "that's part of a bigger system, "but I'm going to innovate on that." I think that with the markets shifting, that could evolve into a large TAM to your point about Datadog. What's the strategy, from an investment standpoint, that you would take? Would you say go all in on the single product? Do you want to have one or two features? What's the makeup of that approach, because you want to have some maybe defensibility, is it go all in on the one thing and hope that you return into like a Salesforce, then you bolt stuff on, or do you go in and try to do a little platform play underneath? >> It depends where you are in the startup world. We're in lifecycle. Look, startups succeed because they do one thing better, right? And so focus, focus, focus. And you have to have something that's like 10 times faster, 10 times better, 10 times cheaper, or something different. Something the world hasn't seen before. But if you do that one thing well, either A, you're taking budget dollars from incumbents, or B, you're something net new, the world hasn't seen, people will come to you when they see utility. As an investor I like to see that focus, I like to see, you know, some founders you get say, hey, Stu, think bigger. Some founders like John think smaller. Like what's your wedge? What's that initial entry point to the customer you're going to hit? Because once you land that, you get the right to do the next product, the next feature. >> That's the land, adopt, expand, like Xoom did. Or they picked video, >> Correct, voice, et cetera. >> I mean who the hell thought that was going to be a big market? It's a legacy market but they innovated with the cloud. >> Absolutely. I have all these sayings that I try to say like, "You don't get to play the late innings, "if you don't make it out the early innings," right? You know, and so if you want and have this strategy for this large platform, that's great, and every VC wants to see a path there. But they want to see execute from we're going to land, and we're expand. Now, startups fail because either where they land, they picked incorrectly. Like you decided to storm the wrong beach, right? Or it's either to small, or it's too big. The initial landing spot is too big, and they can't hold that ground. And so part of the art of navigating from Point A to Point B, or where I say, Act one, Act two, Act three of a lifecycle is make sure that you land correctly, earn your keep, show a lot of value, win that first battle, if you will, Act one, and then they move to Act two, Act three, and you can see a company like VMware clearly on their second, third act, right? And they've done a nice job of owning one product category, server virtualization, desktop virtualization, now expanding to other adjacent categories, buying companies like Carbon Black, right? In terms of security. So it doesn't happen overnight. I mean, VMware started in 1998. I was there when there was about 200 employees. People forget Amazon's been, gosh 27, 1998, when Bezos started selling books. Now they're selling books, movies, food, groceries, video, right? >> When did you first use AWS? Was it when the EC2 launched? I mean, everyone kicked the tires on that puppy. >> We all kicked the tires. I was at VMware as a Product Manager, I think it was '06 when they launched, right? And we all kind of kicked the tires on it. And it was a classic innoverse dilemna. We saw this thing that you thought was small and a very narrow surface area. Amazon started with an EC2, >> Two building blocks, storage and EC2. >> S-3, right, that's it. And then they said, "Okay, we're going to give a focus, focus on basic compute and basic object storage," and people were like, "What can you do with S-3? "Nothing," right? It's not a Sand, it's an availability. It's going to fail all the time, but people just started innovating and working their way through it. >> All right, so Jerry, when you look at the overall marketscape out there today, it seems like you still feel pretty confident that it's a good time for startups. Would you say that's true? >> Absolutely. >> All right, I want to get your final word here. 10 years in theCUBE at Vmworld, you know, you've known John for a long time. Did you think we'd make it? Any big memories as to what you've seen as we've changed over the years. >> I've plenty, let's go back to, >> John: Okay, now you can embarrass us. >> 10 year anniversary of VMworld. For your first Vmworld 10 years ago, I was like a Product Manager, and John Furrier, I think I met at a Press dinner, and he's like, "Hey, Chen," walking by, "come here, sit down," and they turn the camera on, and we had no idea what was going on, and he just started asking a bunch of random questions. I'm like, sure, I haven't cleared this with marketing or anyone else, but why not? >> John: Hijack interview, we call that. >> Hijack interview, and then it's been amazing to watch the two of you, Dave, John, everybody, grow SiliconANGLE and theCUBE in particular, and to this, the immediate franchise, in terms of both having a presence at all these shows, like Amazon, Oracle World, DreamForce, Vmworld, etc. But also the content you guys have, right? So now you have 10 years of deep content, and embarrassingly enough, 10 years, I guess, of videos of yours truly, which is always painful to watch, like either what I was saying, or you know, what my hair looked like back then. >> Stu: Jerry, you still have hair though, so. (laughing) >> Well, the beautiful thing is that we can look at the reputation trajectory of what people say and what actually happens. You always had good picks, loved the post you did on MOATs. That turned out to be very timeless content, and yeah, sometimes you miss it, we sometimes cringe. >> We miss a bunch. >> I remember starting one time with no headset on. Lot of great memories, Jerry. Great to have you in the community. Thanks for all your contribution. >> I look forward to the next 10 years of theCUBE, so I got to be here for the 20th anniversary, and now if I walk away, come back on right away, do I get another notch on my CUBE attending list so I can go up and catch Hared in the best? >> If you come on the other set, that counts as another interview. >> Perfect, so I got to catch up with Steve and the rest of the guys. >> Steve just lost it to Eric Herzog just a minute ago. We had a ceremony. It was like a walk through the supermarket, the doors thing, and the confetti came down. 11th time so you got to get to 11 now. So 12 is the high water mark. >> Done, we need t-shirts. (laughing) >> Well Jerry, thanks so much for joining us again. For John Furrier, I'm Stu Miniman, and you can go to theCUBE.net, if you search for Jerry Chen, there's over 16 interviews on there. I know I've gone back and watched some of them. Some great discussions we've had over the years. Thanks so much, and stay tuned for lots more coverage here at Vmworld 2019. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Vancouver, Canada. It's theCUBE covering OpenStack Summit North America 2018, brought to you by Red Hat, the OpenStack Foundation and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and my cohost John Troyer and you're watching theCUBE, the worldwide leader in tech coverage and this is exclusive coverage from OpenStack Summit 2018 in Vancouver. Usually this time of year it is a little bit overcast, but for the second time the OpenStack Summit has been here, the sun is shining. It has been gorgeous weather but we are in here really digging in and understanding it One of the people I have gotten to know through this community especially, is our wrap up guest today, Sean Michael Kerner, who is a senior editor with eWeek, amongst other bi-lines that you have. Pleasure to see you. >> Great, good seeing you too Stu. >> Alright, so we let you keep on the Toronto Bluejays hat >> Thank you, there we go. >> We have had quite a few Canadians on our program here. >> Well, seeing as how you're here in Canada, it's not all that surprising. >> It's lovely. They have you working on Victoria Day. >> Yeah, that's unfortunate but I will take Memorial Day off in a week, so it works out. >> Excellent. So Sean, for our audience that might not know you, give us a little bit about your background. You've been to umpteen of these shows. >> Sure. I have been with the same publication roughly, I guess 15-16 years at this point. I've been writing before there was cloud, core living and Opensource stuff, networking. And then through the magic of technology, I shifted a little bit to security, which is a core focus for me. I have been to every OpenStack Summit since the San Diego Summit, I guess, 2011. Somebody can correct me afterwards. I did miss the Sydney Summit for various reasons, but yeah, I've been to a bunch of these things, so interesting to see how things have shifted over the years from nothing to certain heights to where we are now. >> Alright, so bring us up to that, as to where we are now. Attendance is down a little bit. They haven't been talking a lot about it but quality I guess is here. Sessions, they've broadened down a bit of the scope. We have been digging into it, but want to get your take so far. >> Yeah, well it's like anything else, there are standard hype cycles, as it were and there's a trough of disillusionment. I wouldn't call this a trough of disillusionment, but when you get to a certain plateau, people just, there'sn't as much interest. In the early days, I remember the San Diego Summit I went to. They didn't schedule it properly. They didn't know how many people they were going to have, and they had to line up around the corner and stuff. That was six years ago, but that is when OpenStack was new. There was no such thing as the Foundation, and everyone was trying to figure out what was what. And, there was no clue at this point. Cloud is a well understood thing. There are competitive efforts or complimentary efforts, as the Foundation would probably like to put it; whether it's CNCF, there's the public cloud and it's different. There is, with all respect to the OpenStack Foundation and its member projects, there's not as much excitement. This in now a stable, mature ecosystem and because of that, I don't think there's as much of a draw. When something is brand new and shiny, you get more of a draw. If they would have put the name Blockchain somewhere, maybe, maybe they would have had a few more. They put Kubernetes in there, which is fine, but no machine learning or artificial intelligence quite yet, though that's a topic somewhere in there too. >> Yeah, John, you've been making a lot of comments this week talking about we've matured and the lower layer pieces just work a bit more. Give us your take about that. >> Sure. That's the way it seems. There wasn't a whole lot of talk about the release, news release, and all the different components, even the keynotes. But, the people we have talked to, both on the vendor and the customer side, they have working production OpenStack environments. They're very large. They require very few admins. They work. They're embedded in telecom and banking, et cetera. It's here and it's working. >> Yeah, that's so something that happened, maybe three cycles ago at this point, because they used to have the release the same time as the Summit and the Design Summit. It was together, so, there was essentially a celebration of the release. People would talk about the release and then they desegrigated that. I think that took a lot of steam out of the reason why you got developers to attend. So, when you don't have the Design Summit, there's this separate open endeavor, there's the forum, I don't quite understand how that works here now. There isn't as much momentum. Yeah, I agree with you. There has been very little talk about Queens. In each of the project update sessions I have been to, and I have been to a couple, there has always been a slight on Rocky, what's coming. I think we are on the second milestone of Rocky, at this point, so there's some development, but at this point it is incremental featurettes. There is no whiz bang. OK, we're going to have flying cars, you know send a Tesla to outer space kind of Earth shattering kind of news, literally, because that's not where it's at. It's just incremental tuck in features in stability and that kind of thing. >> Alright, you talk space and thinks like that and it brings to mind a certain attendee of the program that has actually been to outer space and maybe one of the more notable moments of the show so far. Give us your take on Mr. Shuttleworth. >> Well, I'm a big fan of Mr. Shuttleworth, top to bottom. Hey Mark. Big fan, always have been. He has his own opinion on things of course. Usually in a keynote you don't tend to take direct aim at competitors and he chose to do that. It made some people a little uncomfortable. I happened to be sitting in the front row, where I like to sit, and there was some Red Hat people, and there were some frantic emails going back and forth. And people were trying to see what was going on et cetera. I think, for me, a little bit of drama is okay. You guys go to more shows than I do, and sometimes you get these kind of sales kind of things. But in an open community, there's almost an unwritten rule, which perhaps will be written after this conference, that whether or not everybody is a business competitor or not, is that this is neutral territory as it were and everybody is kind of friendly. In the exhibit hall, you can say this and that, we are better, whatever, but on the stage you don't necessarily do that, so there was some drama there. Some of my peers wrote about that and I will be writing about it as well. It's a, I prefer to write about technology and not necessarily drama. Whether somebody is faster, better, stronger than others, you let the number prove them out. When we talk about Opensource, Opensource Innovation without Canonical, there probably wouldn't have been an OpenStack. All the initial OpenStack reference and limitations are on Canonical. They got a number of large public clouds, as does Red Hat. I think they both have their tactical merits and I'm sure on some respects Red Hat's better and on some respects Canonical is better, but him standing up there and beating on the competition was something that across the 13 summits I have been I have never seen before. One guy I talked to my first OpenStack Summit was in San Diego and the CTO of VMware at the time came up to, VMware was not an OpenStack contributor at the time, they were thinking about it, and he was fielding questions about how it was competitive or not and he was still complimentary. So there has always been that kind of thing. So, a little bit of an interesting shift, a little bit of drama, and gives this show something memorable, because you and I and others will be able to talk about this five years from now, et cetera. >> You talked about something you would write up. I mean part of your job is to take things back to the readers at eWeek. >> Yeah. >> What are the things, highlights you're going to be covering? >> The highlights for me, Stu and I talked about this at one point off the camera, this is not an OpenStack Summit necessarily, they're calling it Open Infrastructure. I almost thought that they would change, we almost thought that they would change the name of the entire organization to the Open Infrastructure Foundation. That whole shift, and I know the foundation has been talking about that since Sydney last year, that they're going to shift to that, but, that's the take away. The platform itself is not the only thing. Enabling the open infrastructure is nice. They're going to try and play well and where it fits within the whole stack. That gets very confusing because talking about collaboration is all fine and nice, but that is not necessarily news. That is how the hot dog is made and that's nice. But, people want to know what's in that dog and how it is going to work. I think it's a tougher show for me to cover than it has been in past years, because there has been less news. There's no new release. There was Kata 1.0 release and there was the Zuul project coming out on its own. Zuul project, they said it was 3.0, it was actually March was Zuul 3.03. Kata Container project, okay, interesting, we'll see how it goes. But a tougher project, tougher event for me to cover for that reason. Collaboration is all fine and nice. But, the CNCF CloudNativeCon KubeCon event two weeks ago, or three weeks ago, had a little bit more news and a lot it's same kind of issues come up here. So, long winded answer, tough to come up with lessons learned out of this, other than everyone wants to be friends, well some people want to be. And, collaboration is the way forward. But that is not necessarily a new message. >> When I think about Kubernetes, we are talking about the multi cloud world and that's still, the last few years, where it's been. Where does OpenStack really fit in that multi cloud world? One of the things I have been a little disappointed actually, is most of the time, when I'm having a conversation, it's almost the, yeah, there's public cloud, but we are going to claw things back and I need it for governments, and I need all of these other things. When I talk to customers, it is I'm going to choose what I put in my data center. I'm going to choose how I use probably multiple public cloud finders. It is not an anti-public cloud message, and it feels a little bit on the anti-public cloud mass. I want to work with what you're hearing when you >> talk to users? >> When I talk to users, vast majority of people, unless it's something, where there's regulatory issues or certain legacy issues or private cloud, public cloud period. The private cloud idea is gone or mostly gone. When I think about private clouds, it's really VmWare. We have virtualized instances that sitting there. >> What's OpenStack? >> OpenStack is fine, but how many are running OpenStack as a private cloud premise? >> Yeah, so what's OpenStack then? >> When I think of OpenStack, Oracles public cloud. Oracle is not here surprisingly. Oracle's public cloud, Larry Ellison, who I know you guys have spoken to more than once on theCUBE at various points on Oracle World and other things. Oracle's public cloud, they want to compete against AWS. That's all. OpenStack IBM cloud, all OpenStack. The various big providers out of China are OpenStack based. OEH is here. So that's where it fits in is that underlying infrastructure layer. Walmart uses it. Bestbuy, all these other places, Comcast, et cetera; ATT. But individual enterprises, not so much. I have a hard time finding individual enterprises that will tell me we are running our own private cloud as OpenStack. They will tell me they're running VmWare, they will tell me they're running REV or even some flavor of Citrix end server, but not a private cloud. They may have some kind of instances and they will burst out, but it's not, I don't think private cloud for mid tier enterprises ever took off the way some people thought five years ago. >> That's interesting. Let's go meta for a second. You talked about things you do and don't write about, you don't necessarily write the VC's are not here necessarily, but you don't write about necessarily financial stuff. >> Sometimes. There was actually at the Portland summit, I did a panel with press and analysts at the time and afterwards there might have been four different VC's that came up to me and asked me what I thought about different companies. They were looking at different things where they would invest. And I remember, we looked at the board and one VC who shall remain nameless, and I said you know what, we'll look at this board with all these companies and five years from now, three quarters of them will not be here. I think I was probably wrong because it is more than that. There are so many. I wrote a story, I don't remember the exact name of it, but I wrote a story not that long ago about OpenStack deadpool. There are so, multiple companies that raised funding that disappeared. In the networking space, there were things like Plumgrid, they mminorly acquired for assets by Vmware, if I'm not mistaken. There was Pivotal, Joshua McKenzie, one of the co-founders of OpenStack itself, got acquired by Cisco. But they would have collapsed perhaps otherwise. Nebula Computing is perhaps, it still shocks me. They raised whatever it was 50 odd million, someone will correct me afterward. Chris Kemp, CTO of NASA who helped start it. Gone. So, there has been tremendous consolidation. I think when VC's lose money, they lose interest really fast. The other thing you have to think about, from the VC side, they don't write too much on the financial. My good friend Fredrick, who didn't make it, Where are you, Fredrick, where are you? Does more on that funding side. But has there been a big exit for an OpenStack company? Not really, not really. And without that kind of thing, without that precedence it's a tough thing, especially for a market that is now eight years old, give or take. >> Even the exits that had a decent exit, you know that got bought into the say IBM's, Cisco's of the world, and when you look a couple of years later, there's not much left of those organizations. >> Yeah. It's also really hard. People really don't want to compete against, well, some people want to compete against AWS. But, if you're going to try to go toe to toe with them, it's a challenge. >> Okay, so what brings you back here every year? You're speaking at the show. You're talking to people. >> What brings me back here is regardless of the fact that momentum has probably shifted, it's not in that really hype stage, OpenStack's core infrastructure, literally, core infrastructure that runs important assets. Internet assets, whether it certain public cloud vendors, large Fortune 500 companies, or otherwise. So it's an important piece of the stack, whether it's in the hype cycle or not, so that brings me back, because it's important. It brings me back because I have a vested interest. I have written so much about it so I'm curious to see how it continues to evolve. Specifically, I'm speaking here on Thursday doing a panel on defending Cloud Counsel Security as a core competence, a core interest for me. With all these OpenStack assets out there, how they're defended or not is a critical interest. In the modern world, cyber attacks are a given. Everybody should assume they're always under a constant state of attack and how that security works is a core area of interest and why I will keep coming back. I will also keep coming back because I expect there to be another shift. I don't think we have heard the end of the OpenStack story yet. I think the shift towards open infrastructure will evolve a little bit and will come to an interesting conclusion. >> Alright, last thing is what's your favorite question you're asking at this show. Any final things you want to ask us as we wrap? >> Yeah, my favorite, well, I want to ask you guys, what the most interesting answer you got from all the great people you interviewed because I'm sure some of it was negative and you got mostly positive as well. >> Well, we aren't used to answering the questions Stu. >> I'm used to being on the other side here, right. >> Well, I do say we got a lot of stuff about some interesting and juicy cases, like I say, the practitioners I talked to were real. I was always impressed by how few administrators it takes to run a huge OpenStack based cloud once it's set up. I think that's something interesting to me. You asked some folks about a public cloud a lot. >> Yeah, so it has been interesting. For me, it's, we've reached that certain maturity level. I was looking at technology. What's kind of the watermark that this is going to come to? We had said years ago, I don't think you're going to have somebody selling a billion dollars worth of distribution on OpenStack. So, that story with how Kubernetes and Containers and everything fits in, OpenStack is part of the picture, and it might not be the most exciting thing, but then again, if you watch Linux as long as most of us have, Red Hat took a really long time to get a billion dollars and it was much more than just Linux that got them there. This still has the opportunity to be tooling inside the environment. We have talked to a number of users that use it. It's in there. It's not that the flagpole, we're an OpenStack company anymore because there really aren't many companies saying that that is the core of their mission, but that is still an important piece of the overall fabric of what we are covering. >> Exactly right. >> Alright, we on that note, Sean Michael Kerner, we really appreciate you joining us. Please support good technology journalism because it is people like him that help us understand the technology. I read his stuff all the time and always love chatting with him off the record and dragged him on here and Fredrick from Techron Show we are disappointed you could not join us, but we'll get you next time. For Jon Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman, be sure to join us for the third day tomorrow of three days of wall to wall live coverage here from OpenStack Summit 2018 in Vancouver. And once again, thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering IBM Think 2018. (upbeat music) Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to IBM Think 2018 everybody. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm with my co-host Peter Burris. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. This is day three of our wall to wall coverage of IBM Think. The inaugural Think conference. Good friend Eric Herzog is here. He runs marketing for IBM storage. They're kicking butt. You've been in three years, making a difference, looking great, new Hawaiian shirt. (laughter) Welcome back my friend. >> Thank you, thank you. >> Good to see you. >> Always love being on theCUBE. >> So this is crazy. I mean, I miss Edge, I loved that show, but you know, one stop shopping. >> Well, a couple things. One when you look at other shows in the tech industry, they tend to be for the whole company so we had a lot of small shows and that was great and it allowed focus, but the one thing it didn't do is every division, including storage, we have all kinds of IBM customers who are not IBM storage customers. So this allows us to do some cross pollination and go and talk to those IBM customers who are not IBM storage customers which we can always do at a third party show like a VM World or Oracle World, but you know those guys tend to have a show that's focused on every division they have. So it could be a real advantage for IBM to do it that way, give us more mass. And it also, you know, helps us spend more on third party shows to go after a whole bunch of new prospects and new clients in other venues. >> You, you've attracted some good storage DNA. Yourself and some others, Ed Walsh was on yesterday. He said Joe Tucci made a comment years ago Somebody asked him what's your biggest fear. If IBM wakes up and figures it out in storage. Looks like you guys are figuring it out. >> Whipping it up and figuring it out. >> Four quarters of consistent growth, you know redefining your portfolio towards software defined. One of the things we've talked about a lot, and I know you brought this was the discipline around you know communicating, getting products to market, faster cycles, because people buy products and solutions right? So you guys have really done a good job there, but what's your perspective on how you guys have been winning in the last year or so? >> Well I think there's a couple of things. One is pure accident, okay. Which is not just us, is one of the leaders in the industry, where I used to work and Ed used to work has clearly stubbed its toe and has lost its way and that has benefited not only IBM but actually even some of our other competitors have grown at the expense of, you know, EMC. And they're not doing as well as they used to do and they've been cutting head count and you know, there's a big difference in the engineering spend of what EMC does versus what Michael Dell likes to spend on engineering. We have been continuing to invest. Sales resources, marketing resources, tech support resources in the field, technical resources from a development perspective. The other thing we did as Ed came back was rationalize the portfolio. Make sure that you don't have 27 products that overlap, you have one. And maybe it has a slight overlap with the product next to it, but you don't have to have three things that do the same thing and quite honestly, IBM, before I showed up, we did have that. So that's benefited us and then I think the third thing is we've gone to a solution-oriented focus. So can we talk about, as nerdy as tracks per sector and TPI and BPI and, I mean all the way down to the hard drive or to the flash layer? Sure we can. You know what, have you ever... You guys have been doing this forever. Ever met a CIO who was a storage guy? >> No, no. CIOs don't care about storage. >> Exactly, so you've got to... >> We've had quite a couple of ex-CIOs who were storage guys. (laughter) >> So you've really got to talk about applications, workloads, and use cases. How you solve the business problems. We've created a whole set of sales tools that we call the conversations available to the IBM sales team and our business partners which is how to talk to a CIO, how to talk to a line of business owner, how to talk to the VP of software development in a global enterprise who doesn't care at all, and also to get people to understand that it's not... Storage is a critical foundation for cloud, for AI, for other workloads, but if you talk latency right off the top, especially with a CIO or the senior executive, it's like what are you talking about? What you have to say is we can make your cloud sing, we can make your cloud never go down. We can make sure that the response time on the web browser is in a second. Whereas you know Google did that test about if you click and it takes more than two and a half seconds, they go away. Well even if that's your own private cloud, guess what they do the same thing. So you've got to be able to show them how the storage enables cloud and AI and other workloads. >> Let's talk about that for a second. Because I was having a thought here. It's maybe my only interesting thought here at Think, being pretty much overwhelmed. But the thought that I had was if you think about all the things that IBM is talking about, block chain, analytics, cloud, go on down the list, none of them would have been possible if we were still working at 10, 20, 30 milliseconds of wait time on a disc head. The fundamental change that made all of this possible is the move from disc to flash. >> Eric: Right. >> Storage is the fundamental change in this industry that has made all of this possible. What do you think about that? >> So I would agree with that. There is no doubt and that's part of the reason I had said storage is a critical foundation for cloud or AI workloads. Whether you're talking not just pure performance but availability and reliability. So we have a public reference Medicat. They deliver healthcare services as a service, so it's a software as a service model. Well guess what? They provide patient records into hospitals and clinics that tend to be focused at the university level like the University of California Health Center for the students. Well guess what? If not only does it need to be fast, if it's not available then you can't get the healthcare records can you? So, and while it's a cloud model, you have to be able to have that availability characteristic, reliability. So storage is, again, that critical foundation. If you build a building in a major city and the foundation isn't very good, the building falls over. And storage is that critical foundation for any cloud, any AI, and even for the older workloads like an SAP Hana or a Oracle workload, right? If, again if the storage is not resilient, oh well you can't access the shipping database or the payroll database or the accounts receivable database cause the storage is down and then obviously if it's not fast, it takes forever to get Dave Vellante's bill, right. And that's a waste of time. >> So it's plumbing, but the plumbing's getting more intelligent isn't it? >> Well that's the other thing we've done is we are automating everything. We are imbuing our software, and we announced this, that our range are going to be having an intelligent infrastructure software plane if you will that is going to help do diagnostics. For example, in one of the coming releases, if a customer allows access, if a power supply is going bad, we will tell them it's going bad and it'll automatically send a PO to IBM with a serial number, the address, and say please send me a new power supply before the power supply actually fails. But it also means they don't have to stock a power supply on their shelf which means they have a higher cost of cap ex. And for a big shop there's a bunch of power supplies, a bunch of flash modules, maybe hard drives if they're still dinosauric in how they behave. And they have those things and they buy them from us and our competitors. So imbuing it with intelligence, automating everything we can automate. So automatically tiering data, moving data around from tier to tier, moving it out to the cloud, what we do with the reuse of backup sets. Instead of doing it the old way of back up. And I know you've got Sam Warner coming on later today and he'll talk about modern data protection, how that is revolutionizing what dev ops and other guys can do with their, essentially, what we would've called in the old days back up data. >> Let's talk about your spectrum launch. Spectrum NAS, give us some plugs for that. What's the update there? >> So we announced on the 20th of February a whole set of changes regarding the Spectrum family. We have things around Spectrum PROTECT, with GDPR, Spectrum PROTECT Plus as a service as well as some additional granularity features and I know Sam Warner's going to come on later today. Spectrum NAS software defined network attached storage. Okay, we're not going to sell any infrastructure with it. We have for big data analytics our Spectrum scale, but think of Spectrum NAS as traditional network attached storage workloads. Home directories. Things like that. Small file service where Spectrum scale has one of our public references, and they were here actually at Edge a couple of years ago, one of the largest banks in the world, their entire fraud detection system is based on Spectrum scale. That's not what you would use Spectrum NAS for. So, and it's often common as you know in the file world to have sort of a traditional file system and then a big one that does big data, analytics and AI and is very focused on that and so that's what we've done. Spectrum NAS is a software only, software defined, rounds out our block, now gives a traditional file. We had scale out file already and IBM cloud object storage is also software defined. >> Well how about the get put world. What's happening there? I mean we've been waiting for it to explode. >> Ah so the get put world is all about NVME. NVME, new storage protocol as you know it's been scuzzy forever. Scuzzy and/or SATA. And it's been that way for years and years and years and years, but now you've got flash. As Peter pointed out spinning disc is really slow. Flash is really fast and the protocol of Scuzzy was not keeping up with the performance so NVME is coming out. We announced an NVME over InfiniBand Fabric solution. We announced that we will be adding a fiber channel. NVME fabric based and also in ethernet. Those will come and one of the key things we're doing is our hardware, our infrastructure's all ready to go so all you have to do is a non-disruptive software upgrade and for anyone who's bought today, it'll be free. So you can start off with fiber channel or ethernet fabrics today or InfiniBand fabric now that we can ship, but on the ethernet and fiber channel side, they buy the array today and then later this year in the second half software upgrade and then they'll have NVME over fiber channel or NVME over ethernet. >> Explain why NVME and NVME over fabric is so important generally but in particular for this sort of new class of applications that's emerging. >> Well the key thing with the new class of applications is they're incredibly performance and latency sensitive. So we're trying to do real artificial intelligence and they're trying to, for example, I just did a presentation and one of our partners, Mark III has created a manufacturing system using AI and Watson. So you use cameras all over, which has been common, but it actually will learn. So it'll tell you whether cans are bad. Another one of our customers is in the healthcare space and they're working on a genomic process for breast cancer along with radiology and they've collected over 20 million radiological samples of breast cancer analysis. So guess what, how are you going to sort through that? Are you or I could sort through 20 million images? Well guess what, AI can do that, narrow it down, and say whether it's this type of breast cancer or that type of breast cancer. And then the doctor can decide what to do about it. And that's all empowered by AI and that requires incredible performance which is what NVME delivers. Again, that underlying foundation of AI, in this case going from flash with Scuzzy, flash to NVME, increasing the power that AI can deliver because of its storage foundation. >> But even those are human time transactions. What about when we start taking the output of that AI and put it directly into operational transactions that have to run like a bat out of hell. >> Which is where NVME will come in as well. You cannot have the performance that we've had these last almost 30 years with Scuzzy and even slower when you talk about SATA. That's just not going to cut it with flash. And by the way, you know there's going to be things beyond flash that will be faster than flash. So flash two, flash three, it's just the way it was with the hard drive world, right? It was 2400 RPM then 36 then 54 then 72 then 10k then 15/5. >> More size, more speed, lower energy. >> Which is what NVME will help you do and you can do it as a fabric infrastructure or you can do it in the array itself. You dual in box and out of box connectivity with NVME increasing the performance within your array and increasing the performance outside of the array as you go out to your host and out into your switching infrastructure. >> So I'm loving Think. It's too many people to count, I've been joking all week. 30,000 40,000. We're still tallying up. I'm going to miss Edge for sure. I'm going to miss the updates in the you know, late spring. But so let's get 'em now. What can we expect? What are you trying to accomplish in the next six to nine months? What should we be looking for without giving any confidential information. >> Well we've already publicly announced that we'll be fleshing out NVME across the board. >> Dave: Right. >> So we already publicly announced that. That will be a big to-do. The other thing we're looking at is continuing to imbue what we do with additional solution sets. So that's something we have a wide set of software. For example, we publicly announced this week that the Versa stack, all flash array will be available with IBM cloud private with a CYSCO validated design in May. So again, in this case taking a very powerful system, the Versa Stack all flash, which already delivers ROI and TCO, but still is if you will a box. Now that box is a converge box with compute with switching with all flash array and with a virtual environment. But now we're putting, again as a bundle, IBM cloud private on there. So you'll see more and more of those types of solutions both with the rest of IBM but also from third parties. So if that offers the right solution set to cut capx/opx, automate processes, and again, for the cloud workloads, AI workloads and any workloads, storage is that foundation. The critical foundation. So we will make sure that we'll have solutions wrapped around that throughout the rest of this year. >> So it's great to see the performance in the storage division. Great people. We're under counting it. We're not even counting all the cloud storage that goes and counts somewhere else. You guys are doing a great job. You know, best of luck and really keep it up Eric, thanks very much for coming back on theCUBE. >> Great thank you very much. >> We really appreciate it. >> Thanks again Peter. >> Alright keep it right there everybody we'll be back with our next segment right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE live from Think 2018. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube. Covering AWS re:Invent, 2017. Presented by AWS, Intel, and our ecosystem of partners. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas. We are live here on The Cube continuing our coverage of re:Invent. The AWS, the big tent. As we were just talking about with our guest, Justin Moore and John Walls here. Your hosts here on The Cube and we're joined by Kiran Bhageshpur, who's the CEO of Igneous Systems and Kiran, thanks for being with us here on the Cube. Good to see you. >> Great to be here. >> Now we were talking about, you know, this is the big tent now. Didn't used to be that way, right? >> Nope, nope. >> It wasn't that long ago this was, I wouldn't say a specialty show, but you said this has certainly taken on a very different vibe, a very different feel. I mean, explain that a little bit before we get into Igneous and what you're doing here. >> Absolutely. I was first here in 2012, I believe it was the first year they had AWS at re:Invent and it was a very different feel, much smaller, maybe about 6,000 or so people. Mostly engineers, hardcore engineers who were discovering this new cool set of toys, if you will, or tools that was quite revolutionary and niche at that time. Fast forward now. It's much more of a mainstream show. It's much more corporate IT, lots and lots of large enterprises are present out here. There still is a lot of developers, but it's more the devops, more people who are operationalizing this rather than building on it for the very first time. So big change from early stage to very mainstream right now. >> And Justin, you made a comment. I mean, to the extent of a jacket, I've got a suit and tie, a jacket. We've all been to shows where maybe the wardrobe was maybe a little different, but this is illustrative of, again, of the maturation of the marketplace and expansion of the marketplace. >> Yeah, you go to some of the developer conferences and you see a lot more people with spiked purple hair and then utilikilts. I've yet to see a single utilikilt here at the show so it does feel, unlike at previous years where there's been, again, a lot more engineers and people are still here in hoodies and casual clothes, but there are a lot more suits. There's clearly a lot more money here and it's become a little more corporate. It'd be interesting to see how it transitions over the next couple of years whether Amazon or AWS is able to maintain that kind of developer vibe as all of these other companies come in and start to see actually, this is a pretty robust and mature ecosystem now. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. And obviously, the expansion reflects that. You're here exhibiting for the first time. >> Yes we are. >> Your booth back at K37 if you're here at the show. Kudos to Igneous. Let's talk a little bit about what you do and why are you here? Who are you trying to talk to this weekend and why does this week matter? >> That's great. So what we do, Igneous is an early stage company. We have launched our company a year ago. We have a bunch of customers right now sort of growing very nicely at this stage and what we do is enable businesses, enterprises with lots and lots of file data on premises as well as in the public cloud to better manage and have a handle on this. So our customers tend to be businesses with sort of literally billions of files, hundreds of petabyte or dozens of petabytes spread across a lot of systems traditional, legacy that hook, attach to a system on premises and what they are seeing in their growth is they're going from one data center to multiple data centers within their own infrastructure and now to multiple clouds and as this core asset, data continues to grow. They look to folks like us to help manage that better. So the very first thing we do is we enable them to back up and protect all this data on premises into public clouds like AWS so we literally have scalable solutions which go into their data center, talk to all of their filers as they're called, interrogate all of that data, and create a copy of that into AWS S30 glacier. >> Yeah. There's a lot of companies who are struggling with the idea. Two things really. One is being able to manage data everywhere because data has gravity as people like to say, but also this multi-cloud idea and being able to manage my data in multiple physical locations. Some of it will be on my own site. Some of it will be in Collo. Some of it will be in one or as you say multiple clouds. That really hybrid IT way of things. What are you seeing as the driver behind that need to have this data in multiple locations? >> Yeah, that's a great question. For the things that we see is, look, things have remained on premises. It's not gone away and things continue to grow on premises and Amazon recognizes that. That's why you see starting last year into this year a lot more push into hybrid clouds, if you will. You saw that with the big partnership with Vmware and so on. So that's continuing to grow, but in the same time, they're having new applications being born in the cloud or leveraging the cloud. So one thing which is very common for a lot of our customers is they have infrastructure on premises which is already paid for and continues to grow, but they want to leverage the public clouds, AWS, for its elasticity and its agility to be able to burst into it and use it as they see fit. Now to do that, you require agility of applications and data between on premises and the public clouds and say AWS. So that's kind of where, you know, we come in to go help them in that and the other thing we're also seeing is customers are not in a single cloud. Even if they started in one place, they're starting to exist in multiple different locations. Good example will be in, you know, most of our customers tell us that, say, a Google cloud has the advantage for things like AI and machine learning whereas Amazon has the more mature infrastructure. So they might quite have a lot of infrastructure and data on premises as well as on Amazon, but they might be running a bunch of new applications which are leveraging the machine-learning APIs and Google Cloud. But then how do you get the data from on premises Amazon cloud into Google Cloud, use it but not leave it around and triple pay for it all around so that's really the management challenge. >> Yeah so you mentioned a particular use case there that happened to use Google. So AI and machine learning is something and I'm hearing that in talking to customers myself that they like to use different cloud for different reasons. So what are some of the workloads that you're seeing from customers who are needing to put their data not just on site, but they say, you know what, I want to burst into the cloud, I want to use some of that elasticity that cloud is so great at. What are some of the workloads that you're seeing them use your product for? >> Yeah, I'll give you a great example. Let's take the word of the movie world, right? So lots of it is all digital right now. The data is created and you're gonna go create heavily CGI or computer generated effects using lots and lots of computer cores. What you come to is at the end of the movie, there's a crunch time where they need way more compute than they have available within their data centers. In fact, in the past, there used to be a vibrant side business where little boutique companies would rent you servers and they would literally carve that into your data center for six weeks and take it away again so now that's gone and you'd rather use the public cloud, you use Amazon and EC2 instances for that workload. That's a good example which everybody can relate to. Hey, it's crunch time, movie's coming up for release. I have a lot more work to do, but that pattern exists in pretty much every industry whether it's drug discovery or electronic design. Everywhere, there is a need to grow burst beyond what you have available and that kind of drives the adoption for workflows which already exist on premise to also adopt a cloud. >> Yeah. >> You got it. >> What manageability. I mean, talking about multi-cloud. >> Kiran: Yeah. >> And obviously as you parcel out your assets, you decide what data's gonna reside in what environment managing all that and then managing the cost of all that. I mean how do you keep up corale on that and also help your clients get a handle on where their data's going, 'cause yeah. I don't know, right? >> So that's what we exist to do which is help customers manage this data asset that they have across multiple locations no matter where it lives. The first thing we do in our journey with our customer is just back that stuff up which is all on premises into the cloud so it gets a copy of the dat into the public cloud. Now that enables workflows like being able to use the cloud for disaster recovery or use the clouds for burst computing very well. But it's just beyond that. It's also how do you get the data, where it lives, which could be on premise, on a T01 filer to where it ends to be. Perhaps the public cloud for a back-up deal or a burst-use case or perhaps into a separate cloud for using machine learning and when you do this, how do you ensure you have one copy, one protected copy of the data, not three or four every place? In fact, if you look at the world today on premises, already customers will tell us they have hundreds of systems that it's not infrequent that hey, they have infrastructure say in Santa Clara as well as Israel and it's a same copy which exists in both places because they have no way of globally looking at this in one single way. >> That's kind of what we do is hey, what are your data assets, where do they live, how do we ensure you have one copy of it or n copies as you desire but not a proliferation of that dataset, three how do we get the data from where it lives to where it's needed in a programatic, systematic way that your end user can sort of you know, help themselves too rather than requiring an IT trouble ticket and somebody going through a manual process. So those are sort of good sets of early things we are helping customers out with. The other thing that goes into here and this is where the cloud comes in again is we had targeted customers who are looking at literally billions, tens of billions of files, hundreds of petabytes, tens of petabytes to 100 of petabytes of data spread across many locations and many hundreds of systems. How do you get your hand, your head around that? It's beyond human scale and it's only possible with software and sort of machine learning if you want to use the buzzword and that's the sort of next place where you come in and provide a human comprehensible structure for the sort of data which continues to grow and it's important because this is core assets for businesses today. >> Yeah we were discussing this earlier, both of us, actually. It's that idea of automation because humans don't scale. >> Yeah. >> So when you have these billions of files as you're talking about, that's just not trackable for humans to deal with. So what are some of the automation and autonomous systems capabilities that Igneous has? >> So the first thing we do is go ahead and ensure your automatically and at scale, being able to discover all of that data, right? So think of, you know, if you look in the consumer world, really what the web is goes and crawls every website and indexes all of the data. Well we do that except within the enterprise for the unstructured file data, which happens to live on a net app filer or a Dell cluster or maybe it's living in AWS inside S3 where we go crawl all over that, index, all of that and give you a view into that. That's the first level, simple way of doing that. But then the next level beyond that is if you can give a level of structure on that because it's not useful to just find it. You wanna know what you have or where you have it, how it's changing, who is accessing it, what applications are accessing your data? What applications are modifying your data? Today, that is an extremely manual process within businesses. >> Yeah. In order to make sense of that, again, you're trying to appeal to developers. What APIs and sort of programmatic aspect do you have for that rather than having to employ 1,900 humans who would all have to sit there and drive around with, going through interfaces? >> So since our customers tend to be sort of more on the business side of IT today who are trying to go understand about this data, the interfaces we provide them is clearly the higher level abstraction of what the data looks like of how they want to interact with that, but everything you do in the modern world is API enabled and the vision is clearly to go expose all of this through API such that customers, developers within their organization can go consume it. >> So before we let you go, I want to talk about your presence here, the decision to exhibit. It's not a light one, I know that. At the end of the day, when you walk out of here on Thursday, what do you want to accomplish and I guess from the, in terms of the kinds of audience that you're hoping to be exposed to, who would that be? >> So the customers, the prospects we talk to are typically businesses, enterprises with lots and lots of unstructured data so people in the media world, in the design world, any form of design that is electronic and automated to. You know, geospatial imagining. All of these folks and they are all present here this year. This is the show to be, you know. In the past, it used to be Microsoft PDC, it was RealWorld, it was Oracle World. Today it is AWS re:Invent and they're all here and for us, it's success if we walk out of this being exposed to a whole bunch of people. We as a smaller organization could not have had immediate access to without coming to this show and that's what I think we get out of here. >> Well, good luck on the next three days. It sounds like you're off to a great start in the right place at the right time. >> Yes, indeed. >> And we wish you all the best down the road. >> Thank you. >> Kiran thank you for being here. >> Thank you very much. >> Live on the Cube, you're watching us here at re:Invent where it's AWS's big show here in Las Vegas back with more live coverage in just a moment. (energetic music)