>>Fly from Barcelona, Spain. It's the cube covering Cisco live 2020s brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >>Welcome back everyone cubes live coverage from Barcelona, Spain. We are here for Cisco live 20 twists to keeps coverage. I'm Chomper with myself. It goes to minimum. This has been four days of coverage. We got another day tomorrow. A lot of action around application developers and programmable infrastructure and really at the heart of this is hybrid cloud and multi-cloud, which is the future of where the enterprises are going. And really it's at the center of it is the suppliers, the cloud service providers. I say Cisco power. They've got two great guests and cube alumni. David cope, senior director of cloud business development, Cisco, Benjamin MacLean, EMIA chief product officer for three D S outscale. Guys, welcome back. Good to see you again. Thanks for coming. Benjamin. We talked to two years ago here I think was what the early days when we started publicly riffing on the notion of cloud service providers going to start to be really more instrumental in how enterprises will deploy and manage workloads and applications. So we were right, it turns out we were right. We >>went actually even even further than that is. Um, so now I'll scale is not only a primary care provider or now we also have a, an on prem solution. So you can uh, we can deploy all stacks, uh, on your prem with hardware, software and services. And we actually, uh, start building locally compliance, uh, stacks. So in France we actually got the second class certification for the French government and we are also working for the ITI FedRAMP certification for the U S >>great. Take a minute to give an update of the busy. You just had an acquisition, you're now part of a different company. Explain that and the relationship to the bigger company. >>So, um, I'll scale was actually founded in 2010 and we actually started to provide to be called services starting 2012, something like this. And a decile system was always one of the big customers. Um, they were actually transforming themselves from being a software vendor to a software as a service company, which is a huge move for a company this size. And we are actually supporting them going this direction and they felt that they needed, uh, to intern to have an internal support, uh, phone call services, uh, within the group so that we actually part of the family now. >>Well congratulations. But I think this trust of the larger trend, David, we talked about how cloud service right are going to be merged emerging as more of a focal point. The global system integrators are already doing it. This is a tell sign for how enterprises, large enterprises, they start to be thinking they need people to support them with multiple, their own stacks, their own in house teams supporting these new workloads. What's your thoughts on, >>well, I mean I think these guys are a great example of sort of the evolution we've seen with the cloud. I think came out of beta in 2008 or something like that. And, and since then we've seen cloud go through sort of skepticism, >>experimentation, debate about private versus public. But today I think both desires and also tools have enabled companies to start focusing just on their business and realize now they can place and manage workloads wherever their business priorities drive them, not it constraints. And so you can get the best of both worlds. You can support this agility and yeah, you can also start to manage governance and policies across these very different private and public environments. Benjamin, bring us a little bit inside your really hybrid solution. You're helping with customers. Uh, we've had many years looking at this. I've seen some providers say, Oh, we're going to help put a stack on your environment, but if you let it touch it, Oh well I need to adjust something or make a change. And then you know, if you're helping manage it, Oh wait, you're, you're out of compliance. You've done something different from an application standpoint. We have seen, I, I might have my monolith in my data center, I have microservices in the public cloud or you know, in your service provider there. It makes sense to do that. But help us understand kind of what goes where, who manages what and what's really happening for your customers. So, >>uh, we try to come in with a very simple approach where basically the perimeter of responsibility is the same everywhere you go. So whether you're on prem or into the cloud, you should see your focus on your application and your area of expertise as a company and being able to deliver to your customers. And um, so we just want to make sure that's focused for our customers. Very easy to say, okay, it's not because I'm on prem, then I need to do it jobs. I'm still need to manage the application. And um, since Oscar is actually providing both public cloud and on premise solution, we want to provide it with as much as solution isolation as possible. And that's one of the reasons why else get actually, uh, was integrated within Cisco cloud center. So we can actually live rate, uh, the governance across the board, the, the immersion 80 of of deploy, application, deployment, whatever, wherever you are. And it's exactly the same thing for the customer. You don't have to sacrifice anything because you're on frame or you want it to be out. >>What specifically about Cisco is driving that? Because you said a couple of things that caught my attention. One is you're providing a platform so the apps could work anywhere. I heard you kind of tease that that is that one of the things that Cisco is bringing to the table. What's the, what's the Cisco value there? >>For me it's um, we, I mean it's been like 40 years that this goes around and they always, uh, worked, uh, to actually bring bridges between platforms, between solutions, between companies. And I feel that the, exactly why we're actually using the solution. So it's different for each. It's not a network bridge for this one, it's more an application ratio. Uh, I would say a pipeline application bridge and that's where we actually find the value for us. Your >>thoughts real quick, go off on tangent a little bit on the operating model of cloud, cause we were riffing on this two years ago. This is now the big conversation here. Hybrid really is all about having that operating model, whether it's on public or on premises. How do you guys serving your customers when they have an app? Hey I got a dad, I just want to build my app. I don't care where it is and I have my operation gotta be seamless across. How are you implementing that? >>To be honest, I don't feel like it's like it's a, we are still, we are not there yet. I feel companies still struggle to actually uh, build an app, being able to deploy whatever the tenants they choose, whether it's going to be a to be cloud provider or an American one. They under your plan one or even a Chinese one now. And uh, all on trend. And since the stacks are always different, they always have to pay for the difference within this platform on their side. And I feel like the tools are actually helping these companies. So it's not actually the cloud providers making the Fort is usually the tools and the ecosystem around these providers are actually providing more tools and more solutions. So it's easier for the companies that actually manage the application at the end. >>David, maybe you can help us dig in a little bit to the management and the software that Cisco's uh, working on and delivering here to help with these type of environments. You know, the way I look at the world is is businesses have applications, applications run on infrastructure in the state of the industry today is you should no longer care about where that application is running. It's just infrastructure. It's in my data center. It's in somebody else's data center called the cloud. So the state of the business today is how do I create sort of a declarative model which describes my application independent of having to know the nuances of each of the end points and then be able to manage the entire life cycle from optimizing cost, performance placement and then the ongoing policy based governance. And for us, that management platform is cloud center, which is a cloud management platform. There's others in the industry that take a similar approach. But that really is where this blurring of data centers and clouds supporting any apps, uh, is, is occurring because your, what's some of the workloads that you guys work on? Give some anecdotal feedback on some of the day to day things you're working on. Is it on premise driving the action? Is that the app developers, your customers, but you have, you're serving multiple, a big company, right? >>Yeah. Um, from what I seen is, uh, we have a lot of traction on OnPrem solution because historically it's been, uh, usual stacks, which are usually lack of usability for the customers. Um, they are now used to use it to the public cloud, the features, the capabilities, the agility, and then where you'll go by, you're going back on frame. You, you, you feel like you're traveling time, bike and backwards. And that's, that's usually an issue, uh, with our solution where we don't change the level of responsibility of the customer. So it doesn't have to have a data center, people, operation people. It's still the same guys that were actually working into the public out and they are going to operate exactly the same way on prem. So that's a huge premise for this for these companies right now. Yeah. Yeah. Actually. Great. So we deployed a one like the beginning of this year to last year and it's gonna continue to grow. Uh, especially if you're a dental assistant company, uh, as a, >>I forgot to ask you as an expert then Nirvana, the Holy grail or whatever word we want to use is to have applications just completely have programmable infrastructure. That's the dev ops, you know, Holy grail, which we're getting there. Yeah. Where are we in your mind, how far do we have to go to get the app developers just coding away in the progress of innovation? What's your thoughts on where the industry is and what we're dealing with here? >>I think you can already do it. If you sacrifice a part of your freedom or your part or part of your possibility. We can find tools that actually working pretty well with each other. But once you're in, you're going to be in for at once. The issue is more always going to become a more standardized way to actually work for this company. And that means also for us providers to provide kind of assemble level of interface and the same which works. So the company, and I mean so apart from code center, like the application actually being able to work across infrastructure platforms, whatever they are, I be cloud center for the cross platform work. Yeah. So customer is one of these tools that actually kind of, uh, leverage different platforms and don't really care. And as a user, you don't really care all the difference you can deploy, whether it's going to be on VMware, on to the cloud, and you don't expect the same level of capability in terms of infrastructure. But still you still deploy exactly the same pipelines and some workloads exactly the same way. >>What do I have to think about it? Whether it's, whether it's so managing all of its operating divisions or whether it's it ops trying to manage its developers is there's this sort of natural, some usually unspoken tension where it ops wants to support the agility that developers are looking for in business units are looking for, but at the same time it ops is torn because they have to ensure governance and security and all that. So today I think with these new platforms you do a little bit of judo frankly, is you are allowed developers or operating units to use the environment or tools of choice, but you still have these new cloud management platforms that allow you to apply and enforce governance. And those policies can either be exposed to them or it can be hidden from them. You get to choose, well that's the choice is key in the policy. >>It means automation. Yes, the policies nailed down the business logic. Get automation exactly as the Holy wishes even better, which I'm psyched to see more of that. But I got to ask you guys, I stopped at your Cisco booth, your multi-cloud with this. By the way, I love the demos over there. You get all the Cisco servers, provide everything else, but you guys got a multi cloud section. Of course there's a lot of Kubernetes being discussed there. So Benjamin, I got to get your take on this because Stu and I always joke, the joke is just broke containers around it. You can do anything. You're dealing with a lot of on premises legacy and enterprise stuff Coubernetties and as service meshes come down the pike and micro services, that seems to be really a great way to deal with it. How were you looking at that? What's your vision and how, what are some of the practitioner tools that are out there? What's your view on that? >>For me, the appeal of communities for, for the customers is, uh, less, uh, a way to work than the fact that it's actually is, is a standout. So we are talking about the fact that wherever you are, you're always a, I think different APA calls a different way to educate yourself differently. Policy management. And I feel that the appeal of communities is that you can use it over any cloud platform in the world. And he's always failed to send me, they always behave the same way and he's kind of the promise. The same is that you can get with containers, but you get it on the orchestration layer of these containers. Uh, and I feel that that's why people are quite rushing into it because they feel that if it doesn't work there, then it might work somewhere else. >>So are you dealing with some of these enterprise applications? What do you guys do? >>Um, so the interest for se, so we just, we provide, uh, the control plane or the master nodes and usually customers see or manage the resources or the, the resource pool, uh, on which they're going to deploy containers in whatever we S we still manage mostly VMs and block storage. So the, the basic breaks of any, uh, infrastructure as a service provider and um, and the customers start from there and actually build on the application and they can even reuse things that have been done somewhere else. Uh, in any other cloud platform. >>David, talk about the Cisco vision here because I think you guys have been seeing this now. I used the multi-cloud is kind of a future state that's out. See everyone has multicloud now, but hybrid is where the action is and this by getting this common operating model with you've got these Kubernetes trends and things coming down the pipe with micro services that really is impacting the momentum. How do you guys see that? What's your position on this? >> I think you're right. I mean when you look at Kubernetes specifically, I think it's obviously maturing from just developer centric activities now into production. Most Kubernetes today, it has been deployed on prem or in the cloud, but now that's the foundation that's going to enable the future of hybrid workloads where I can start again. Blurring the boundaries between data centers and clouds develop on the cloud, prod on prem, develop on prem, access to service on the cloud. >>So we're just starting to see sort of these hybrid Coobernetti's workflows. And Cisco has a container platform that's native Kubernetes but we've also, it runs on prem but it's also optimized to work with public clouds that support Kubernetes. And so it really becomes a single environment, a pool of resources for the application. >> I think it sets the table nicely for the app developers, the future because end of the day students just develop your app and yeah, things go and happen. Benjamin, final question while you're here. I want to get your expert opinion on this because I want to kind of go back to our 2018 and modernized our chat a little bit around cloud service providers because I think this is still going to be the hottest area because I think you are, you're a unique, you got acquired and you're still servicing a big customer base, but you're now part of the mother I guess. Um, which is good. You got a lot of work to do, but cloud service providers will still serve as a lot of customers and this is going to be a fast growing market. What's your advice for other cloud service providers out there that are really trying to understand how do I build my infrastructure? How do I deal with the clouds? Do I just go all in on one, do I build my own? How do I serve as the on premises? What's your advice? >>I think like if your company, a main area of expertise is not it, you shouldn't actually invest, uh, in house. Its, I think nowadays we, you, we have like, and I'm not talking only about our scale, but we have like a lot of different solution, a lot of, uh, technological partners such as Cisco and NetApp, uh, that have a great solution that actually proven, uh, there is solution as ourselves. So at scale. Um, so I feel like anything that you do try to be or from the ground, uh, would have a huge advantage in terms of, of time of technology. Um, and again, for any other cloud provider. I think also we're going to see kind of the separation we're talking about in 2018 is still going to continue to exist and I think it's going to even increase where we're going to see, um, local compliance or great regulation. I actually for the past two years, uh, dramatically increased in terms of of strengths and numbers and uh, and that, and I feel like the approach of Muti local cloud as we've been pushing for the past 10 years within our scale, it makes even more sense. >>Do you see specialty clouds emerging fast or are building on say Amazon, Google or other clouds or what do you see? >>Yeah, to be honest, I even think that the, the big three in the U S are even starting to find their own place, which is not the same. And I feel we're going to see the same thing with the Chinese and reopen actors as well. >>Awesome. Benjamin's great to have you on. Great to have your insight from the field. Appreciate David. Thanks for coming on. I appreciate that insight from Cisco as well. It's the cube coverage day. Three of our four days of coverage on shofar is do men and men stay with us for more coverage from Barcelona after this short break?

>> Announcer: Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE! Covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, Veem, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Hey everyone, welcome back to the live CUBE coverage here in Barcelona, Spain for theCUBE's coverage of Cisco Live Europe 2018, kicking off the new year with the big event. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE, cohost of theCUBE. Our next two guests, Alfred Manhart is a Senior Director Channel and System Integrators for NetApp, EMEA of Europe, Middle East and Africa, and Benjamin Laplane, EMEA Chief Sales and Solutions Officer with Outscale. You guys, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Hi. >> Love this partner segment. NetApp, you have a customer on, partner, and you guys have an interesting relationship. Would one of you like to talk about your relationship with Outscale, and why are you guys here? >> I think engaging not only with the typical resellers and distributors is pretty key for us. We engage with service providers and cloud providers from 2012, 2013 ongoing. It's mainly to be the foundation for the services they are going to market with, and Outscale is out of France, one of our predominant service providers we engage with on a local level. >> How has the channel changed, because as the cloud service providers, and cloud creates such great agility and speed. You can get products out faster, MVPs and those things can be very specialized. How has your go-to-market changed with the cloud, accelerated it, changed the makeup, what's NetApp- >> First of all, the market is demanding it, so some of our traditional players go the services way and some service providers go the typical, traditional way so engaging and broaden up the ecosystem was pretty critical for us. Different engagement models are needed because the customers require different kind of consumption models. >> Good leverage, sales model, always a good business. Benjamin, talk about what you guys do. I want to ask you some specific questions about your business, on how you guys are advising and implementing solutions with customers, but first, take a minute to explain your business. >> Outscale is a cloud service provider. We built the company in 2010 and we've been providing public cloud solution for worldwide, so implementing in the U.S., in Europe, and in Asia for the past five years now. The objective is to be able to provide sovereignty and reliable cloud solutions for our customers worldwide. It's based on NetApp and Cisco FlexPod architecture. >> So you guys actually have a cloud yourselves? >> Yeah, exactly. >> And you bring that to customers? >> Yeah for the past five years, what we've been doing is developing our own orchestration layer that allow us to actually use the whole FlexPod architecture to provide infrastructure as a service for our customers. What we've been doing for the past year is actually package all the technology that we've been developing for the past years into a unique solution, which is TINA On-Prem, which is a private cloud solution ready to be deployed wherever you need to. >> I'll get back to the FlexPod in a minute, but I want to drill down on this notion of serving the customers, because there's a thirst for customization and specialization, whether it's an application, or some regional challenge on the data, certainly you see that with GDPR, it's coming down like a freight train, like a ton of bricks on everybody. So there's design challenges that are now upon the customers. How are you guys bringing the customers' solutions to them? Is it rapid engagements, is it ongoing? What's your relationship with your customers? >> So if we talk specifically about GDPR, but I think it's true for most regulation that comes out, Outscale had the chance to be able to develop their software with security design first. That means that it's designed for security, but also for privacy, so that's kind of give us the edge when talking about regulation enforcement and also all the process that we put in place around infrastructure management that allows for us to provide the best services for our customer, always aligned with the regulation that comes out. >> What are the biggest challenges your customers face with the cloud? >> I think most of them, so things improved a lot for the past years, but the first thing was everyone wanted to do it because that was kind of the name, the thing that you want to go into, now it's more big data or AI. The idea behind this is a company knows that the cloud is not an option, they will go to the cloud, the question is how, and why and when and how. So we try to help all these companies to decide what's the best for public cloud or private cloud. >> Alfred and Benjamin, I want you guys both to answer this next question. We've been observing and reporting on theCUBE, and certainly Cisco's validated it, that everyone kind of has some cloud thing going on. Yeah I put an app in there, it might be low-hanging fruit, test dev, or something non-critical, but all the work and energy and money being spent is kind of getting their act together on-premise, because they got to get cloud operations going, move from the old operating model to cloud-ready on-premises, and then do some hybrid cloud. Do you guys see it the same way, and if so, what specifically are they doing on, is it DevOps, is it pure operational, what are your thoughts? Start with Benjamin. >> So from where I stand, what I can see is we've seen companies for the past year that went full public cloud, and then other company that always stay back and say, no, we won't go to the cloud and we kind of things going into a balance point where basically all companies now realize that they need to have a part of their infrastructure, such as private cloud, for security, politics, regulation sometimes. The other places to decide what's going to be the perimeter, they going to be allowed to put into the public cloud. That's why now we are more talking about hybrid between public and private cloud, and that's one of the first major design of the solution that we developed. >> Are you saying that you're seeing some customers move completely from on-premises to cloud, full migrations? >> No, I think what I've seen is people that have, so the cloud was not made for them, finally decided that maybe it could have been useful for some of their operations, so I don't think it's always like an all-in move. You need to decide where's it's going to be good, depending on the perimeter, the context, the data, the cre-dee-city of the data. >> Alfred, on-premise activity. >> Heavy on the one side. (laughing) On the other side, I think you talked about test dev. A lot of people play around with test dev, this is mainly on a local level, behind the scenes, but if it then goes to backup or a disaster recovery, it goes up the productive stack. They are more interested if it's really going well, if the data resides in their country, if all the legislations are held. We currently see getting out of the test dev, and on the other side we of course see a trend that the customers are forced by the software Windows to go to the cloud. So Microsoft is going cloud. SAP is also going cloud, so it's not only a market trend, it's also a trend from the software end that they are forced to do something, and they want to keep control of their data. That's why data's a little bit different from going to the cloud, it's computing with the apps. >> Data's a huge issue. So how are you guys using NetApp? Talk about the FlexPod, you mentioned that earlier. >> Outscale, we've been using NetApp for the past six years, something like that, which is a pretty long time compared to the lifetime of a company. The thing as far as the most important thing was to be able to provide the bridge services for our customers. Even if we abstract some of the features, some of the value of the NetApp that we buy, we just keep the value for ourself to be able to deliver more services, more value to the end customer. That's how we've been doing things. The second thing is also when you want to deploy private, on-prem solution, it's always better and it's more reassuring for the customer when you use and you partner with one of the leaders on the market, such as NetApp. >> So when I hear people use the term enterprise class architecture, what does that mean? Does that mean certain maybe arrays? Is it configuration, is it network? What is enterprise class architecture mean to you? >> For me it's two things. So the first thing you have the architecture, and you also have the hardware that you're going to use to apply to this architecture. The thing is, I was talking about reliability. I think that's one of the major things is how much maintenance is it going to require, how it's going to impact your permissions for the user or for the end customer, and when you see the architecture that we've deployed, it's everything is redundant, it's not fail-safe, it's failure-proof, which is even better because that means that you know things are going to fail at some point, and you can't even allow yourself to have a failure where you can't serve the service to your customer. >> What's the biggest thing that you've learned in doing the cloud migration, cloud service provider, with customers over the past two years? What's the big aha moment that you've had? >> I think that's when you realize that even if you have some pattern that you can recognize for a specific customer, or for a certain type of customer, you have no magic recipe. That means that you always need to take a step back, look at the problem of your customers and try to think what's the best for my customer, and how can I bring the right services to him so he can add value to his market and his business? >> Alfred, you mentioned regulation, so the question to Benjamin is how does the role of storage play in a world where data and sovereignty issues come into play? Does it change the strategy? What's goes on for the folks that are really trying to solve this problem? >> I think we see more and more movement where basically even the customer want more managed services. I think it's always important to give the customer the hands so he can do whatever he want with his data. We are here to support him, to give him the best advices, the best practices about data management, but at the end is he accountable and responsible for these data. So at the end I think it's just we need to give the right tools to our customers so they do exactly what they want to do with the data and they don't have hidden policies apply to their own data. For example, replication of your data for safety measures. Maybe they don't want it to be replicated abroad, they want it to stay on the territory, so that's kind of a thing that you need to rethink about and give the right tools to your customers. >> Alfred, what are the top use cases that you guys have seen at NetApp for cloud services providers, and just in general the partners, because they're on the front lines serving customers. They need to have low cost, high performance gear, great software, we heard reliability. What are the use cases now that you're seeing? Are they broader use cases, are they more narrow? What's your- >> So of course, when you come from a storage perspective, you mainly aim for the infrastructure and for the storage-related services, which we are not where we are stopping, because we are working with Cisco on this validated designs going up the stack, so if you are not going up the stack regarding different workloads, going after the IOT, going after the analytics, going after the application layer, we will fail. So having a fair balance of partner that can offer the services from bottom to the top, that's very important. Of course, use cases like intelligent business analytics, going after SAP, going after SAP HANA, going after Microsoft, this is obvious that the partners and the customers are going that way. >> Benjamin, talk about what it's like working with NetApp. You happy with them? Some things that they've done that you think other suppliers should adopt? What's the mode of support from NetApp, what's the overall experience like? >> I think I would describe it as a strong partnerships. They are our exclusive partner for the storage as Cisco can be on the other brinks of technology that we are using. We have a strong relationship, we have a booth on the on-stand today so that's one of the reason why we're here. We also pushing with them with the whole, we were talking about analytics, we are talking talking about big data also. We have a lot of use cases, pretty amazing use case in resales in Europe, and also we give them a lot of feedback about how we use the hardware, what could be improved, and I think that's the kind of communication that makes a strong partnerships and bring value to both sides. >> NetApp's a very engineering-oriented company, I know them very well living in Silicon Valley, so I give 'em props for that. Question for you is when you hear someone say data-driven storage, or data-driven analytics, what does that mean to you as a partner of a storage supplier? >> For us, it's another way to look at the way we're going to provide service to our customers in the years to come. I think that customers is going to expect more and more services, more and more value, from the service that we're going to provide them, whether it's going to be storage, computer network, or even security. I think that's always a good thing for us to have more tools to build new technology for tomorrow. >> Great, and NetApp's channels and partners, what's the message from NetApp these days to the partners? You're enabling them, obviously you help them make money obviously, but- >> I think the biggest challenge is that we drive the ecosystem in the right direction. If we just stick to the traditional players, we will not be successful, so we have to expand the ecosystem. Going up to different player that are currently probably not in our radar, going up to ISVs that help us to really embrace the data from a value perspective, so our biggest, let's say, message to the channel is don't stay where you currently are, develop the channel with ourself. >> And certainly the relationship with Cisco is blooming for NetApp. >> It is, it's probably since six years, we have now around 8,700 joint customers. We go up the stack, we talk about strategic engagements on a IT SP perspective, so it's going in the right direction. Very important. >> As your competitors get distracted, and do things or doing things, you guys eating their lunch? Is that, (laughs) you smiling? >> Eating their lunch is probably not the word. >> Maybe a little croissant. Breakfast, or was it dinner, what's going on? Are you eating the breakfast, lunch, or dinner of the competitors? >> Currently I would say in French, I think we are jointly engaging on a croissant perspective. (laughing) So we're heading in the right way. So these partnerships are very important. >> It's always a great, fun time. It's been fun watching the storage, been watching NetApp for many years, I remember when they went public back in the dot com A days, they still keep their roots. Great to see you having some great success. Congratulations on a great partnership. It's theCUBE live coverage, here with NetApp and their partner inside theCUBE here at Barcelona at Cisco Live 2018 in Europe. I'm John Furrier. We'll be back with more live coverage after this short break. (digital music)