>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of VMworld 2020 brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, I'm Stuart Miniman and this is theCUBES's coverage of VMworld 2020. Our 11th year doing the show and happy to welcome back to the program one of our CUBE's alums. Somebody that's is going to VMworld longer than we have been doing it for theCUBE. So Vaughn Stewart he is the Vice President of Technology Alliances with Pure Storage Vaughn, nice to see you. How you doing? >> Hey, Stu. CUBE thanks for having me back. I miss you guys I wish we were doing this in person. >> Yeah, we all wish we were in person but as we've been saying all this year, we get to be together even while we're apart. So we look to you on little screens and things like that rather than bumping into each other at some of the after parties or the coffee shops all around San Francisco. So Vaughn, obviously you know Pure Storage long, long, long partnership with VMware. I think back the first time that I probably met with the Pure team, in person, it probably was around Moscone, having a breakfast having a lunch, having a briefing or the likes. So just give us the high level. I know we've got a lot of things to dig into. Pure and VMware, how's the partnership going these days? >> Partnership is growing fantastic Pure invests a lot of engineering resources in programs with VMware. Particularly the VMware design partner programs for vVols, Container-Native Storage et cetera. The relationship is healthy the business is growing strong. I'm very excited about the investments that VMware is making around VMware Cloud Foundation as a replatforming of what's going on MPREM to help better enable hybrid cloud and to support Tanzu and Kubernetes platforms. So a lot going on at the infrastructure level that ultimately helps customers of all to adopt cloud native workloads and applications. >> Wonderful. Well a lot of pieces to unpack that. Of course Tanzu big piece of what they're talking about. But let's start. You mentioned VCF. You know what is it on the infrastructure side, that is kind of driving your customer adoption these days, and the some of the latest integrations that you're doing? >> Yeah you know VCF has really caught the attention of our mid to large or mid to enterprise size customers. The focus around, as I use the phrase replatform is planning out with VMworld phrase. But the focus on simplifying the lifecycle management, giving you a greater means to connect to the public cloud. I don't know if you're aware, but all VMware public cloud offerings have the VCF framework in terms of architectural framework. So now bringing that back on-prem, allowing customers on a per workload domain basis to extend to a hybrid cloud capability. It's a really big advancement from kind of the base vSphere infrastructure, which architecturally hasn't had a significant advancement in a number of years. What's really big around VCF besides the hybrid connectivity, is the couple of new tools SDDC Manager and vSphere Lifecycle Manager. These tools can actually manage the infrastructure from bare metal up to workload domains and then from workload domains you're now handing off to considered like delegated vCenter Servers right? So that the owner of a workload if you will and then that person can go ahead and provision virtual machines or containers, based on whatever is required to run their workloads. So for us the big gain of this is the advancement in the VMware management. They are bringing their strength in providing simplicity, and end-to-end hardwared application management to disaggregated architectures. Where the focus of that capability has been with HCI over say the past five or six years. And so this really helps close that last gap, if you will, and completes a 360 degree view of providing simplified management across dissimilar architecture and it's consistent and it's standardized by VMware. So HCI, disaggregated architecture, public cloud, it all operates the same. >> So Vaughn, you made a comment about not a lot of changes. If I remember our friends at VMware they made a statement vSphere 7 was the biggest architectural change in over a decade. Of course bringing in Kubernetes it's a major piece of the Tanzu discussion. Pure. Your team's been pretty busy in the Kubernetes space too. Recent acquisition of Portwox to help accelerate that. Maybe let's talk a little bit about you know cloud native. What you're hearing from your customers. (chuckles) And yeah, like we've Dave Vellante had a nice interview with, Pure and Portwox CEOs. Give the VMworld audience a little bit of an update as you know where you all fit in the Kubernetes space. >> Yeah and actually, there was a lot that you shared there kind of in connecting the VCF piece through to vSphere 7 and a lot of changes there in driving into Tanzu and containers. So maybe we're going to jump around here a bit but look we're really excited. We've been working with VMware, but in addition to all of our application partners, you are seeing nearly every traditional enterprise application being replatformed to support containers. I'd love to share with you more details, but there's a lot of NDAs I'd be breaking in that. But the way for enterprise adoption of containers is right upon us. And so the timing for VMware Tanzu is ideal. Our focus has always been around providing a rich set of data services. One that provides faster provisioning, simplified fleet management, and the ability to move that container and those data services between different clouds and different cloud platforms, Be it on-prem, or in the public cloud space. We've had a lot of success doing that with the Pure Service Orchestrator Version 6.0 enables CSI compliant persistent storage capabilities. And it does support Tanzu today. The addition or I should say the acquisition of Portworx is really interesting. Because now we're bringing on an enhanced set of data services that not only run on a Pure Storage storage products, but runs universally regardless of the storage platform, or the Cloud architecture. The capabilities within Portworx are above and beyond what we had in PSO. So this is a great expansion of our capabilities. And ultimately we want to help customers. Whether they want to do containers solely on Tanzu, or if they're going to mix Tanzu with say Amazon EKS, or they've got some department that does development on OpenShift. Whatever it might be. You know that the focus of storage vendors is obviously to help customers make that data available on these platforms through a consistent control plane. >> Yeah. Vaughn it's a great acquisition. Think a nice fit. Anybody that's been talking to Pure the last year or so you've been. How do we take the storage make it more cloud native if you will. So you've got code. Obviously, you've got a great partnership with VMware, but as you said, in Amazon and some of the other hyper clouds those clouds, those storage services, no matter where a customer is, so that that core value, of course we know, is this the software underneath it. And that's what Portworx is. So you know not only Pure's, but other hardware, other clouds and the likes. So a really interesting space You know Vaughn, you and I've been covering this, since the early days of VMware. Hey this software is kind of a big deal and you know (chuckles) cloud in many ways is an extension of what we're doing. I know we used to joke how many years was it that VMworld was storage world? You know. >> Ooh yeah. >> There was talk about like big architectural changes, you know vVols When that finally came out, it was years of hard work by many of the big companies, including your previous and current you know employer. What's the latest? My understanding is that there are some updates there when it comes to the underlying vVols. What are the storage people need to know? >> Yeah. So great question and VMware is always been infrastructure world really Right? Like it is a showcase for storage. But it's also been a showcase for the compute vendors and every Intel partner. From a storage perspective, a lot is going on this year that should really excite both VMware admins and those who are storage centric in their day-to-day jobs. Let's start with the recent news. vVols has been promoted within VCF to being principal storage. For those of you who maybe are unfamiliar with this term 'principal storage' VMware Cloud Foundation supports any form of storage that's supported by vSphere. But SDDC manager tool that I was sharing with you earlier that really excites large scale organizations around it's end-to-end simplicity and management. It had a smaller, less robust support list when it comes to provisioning external storage. And so it had two tiers. Principal and secondary. Principal meant SDDC manager could provision and deprovision sub-tenants. So the recent news brings vVols both on Fiber Channel and iSCSI up to that principal tier. Pure Storage is a VMware design partner around vVols. We are one of the most adopted vVols storage platforms, and we are really leaning in on VCF. So we are very happy to see that come to fruition for our customers. Part of why VMware partners with Pure Storage around VCF, is they want VCF enabled on any Fabric. And you know some vendors only offer ethernet only forms of connectivity. But with Pure Storage, we don't care what your Fabric is right. We just want to provide the data services be it ethernet, fiber channel or next generation NVMe over Fabric. That last point segments into another recent announcement from from VMware. Which is the support for NVMe over Fabric within vSphere 7. This is key because NVMe over Fabric allows the IO path to move away from SCSI based form of communication one to a memory based form of communication. And this unleashes a new level of performance, a way to better support those business and mission critical applications. Or a way to drive greater density into a smaller form factor and footprint within your data center. Obviously Fabric upgrades tend to not happen in conjunction with hypervisor upgrades, but the ability to provide customers a roadmap and a means to be able to continually evolve their infrastructure non disruptively, is our key there. It would be remiss of me to not point out one kind of orthogonal element, which is the new vMotion capabilities that are in vSphere 7. Customers have been tried for a number of years, probably from vSphere 4 through six to virtualize more performance centric and resource intense applications. And they've had some challenges around scale, particularly with the non-disruptive. The ability to non disruptively move a workload. VMware rewrote vMotion for vSphere 7 so it can tackle these larger more performance centric workloads. And when you combine that along with the addition of like NVMe over Fabric support, I think you're truly at a time where you can say, almost every workload can run on a VMware platform, right? From your traditional two two consolidation where you started to looking at performance centric AI, in machine learning workloads. >> Yeah. A lot of pieces you just walked through Vaughn, I'm glad especially the NVMe over Fabric piece. Just want to drill down one level there. As you said, there's a lot of pieces to make sure that this is fully worked. The standards are done, the software is there, the hardware, the various interconnects there and then okay, when's does the customer actually ready to upgrade that? How much of that is just you know okay hitting the update button. How much of that is do I need to do a refresh? And we understand that the testing and purchasing cycles there. So how many customers are you talking to that are like, "Okay I've got all the pieces, "we're ready to roll, "we're implementing in 2020." And you know, what's that roadmap look like for kind of the typical enterprise, which I know is a bit of an oxymoron? (laughs) >> So we've got a handful. I think that's a fair way to give you a size without giving you an exact number. We had a handful of customers who have NVMe over Fabric deployments today. The deployments tend to be application or workload centric versus ubiquitous across the data center. Which I think does bear an opportunity for VMware adoption to be a little bit earlier than across the entire data center. Because most VMware architectures today are based on top of rack switching. Whether that switching is fiber channel or ethernet base, I think the ability to then upgrade that switch. Either you've got modern hardware and it just needs a firmware update, or you've got to replace that hardware and implement NVMe over Fabric. I think that's very attractive. Particularly that you can do so in a non disruptive manner with a flash array or with flash deck. We expect to see the adoption really start to take take hold in 2021. But you probably won't see large market gains until 2022 or 23. >> Well that's super helpful Vaughn especially Pure Storage you've got customers that have some of the most demanding performance environments out there. So they are some of the early adopters that you would expect go into adopting this new technology. All right. I guess last piece, listening to the keynote looking at all the announcements that they have you know, VMware obviously has a big push into the cloud native space they've made a whole lot of acquisitions. We touched on a little bit before but what's your take as to what you are hearing from your customers, where they are with adoption into really modernizing and accelerating their businesses today? >> I think for the majority of our customers and again I would consider more of a commercial or mid market centric up through enterprise. They've particularity enterprise, they've adapted cloud native technologies particularity in developing their own internal or customer facing applications. So I don't think the technology is new. I think where it's newer is this re platforming of enterprise applications and I think that what's driving the timeline for VMware. We have a number of Pivotal deployments that run up here. Very large scale Pivotal deployments that run on Pure. And hopefully as you audience knows Pivotal is what VMware Tanzu has been rebranded as. So we've had success there. We've have had success in the test and development and in the web facing application space. But now this is a broader initiative from VMware supporting enterprise apps along with you know the cloud native disaggregated applications that have been built over the last say five to 10 years. But to provide it though a single management plane. So I'm bullish, I'm really bullish I think they are in a unique position compared to the rest of our technology partners you know they own the enterprise virtualization real estate and as so their ability to successfully add cloud native application to that, I think it's a powerful mix . For us the opportunity is great. I want to thank you for focusing on the fact that we've been able to deliver performance. But performances found on any flash product. And it's not to demote our performance by any means, but when you look at our customers and what they purchase us in terms of the repeat purchases, it's around simplicity, it's around the native integration with VMware and the extending of that value prop through our capabilities whether it's through the end-to-end infrastructure management, through data protection extending in the hybrid cloud. That's where Pure Storage customers fall in love with Pure Storage. And so it's a combination of performance, simplicity and ultimately, you know, economics. As we know economics drive most technical decisions not the actual technology itself. >> Well, Vaughn Stewart thank you so much for the update, congratulation on all the new things that are being brought out in the partnership >> Thank you Stu appreciate being on theCUBE, big shout out to VMware congratulations on VMworld 2020, look forward to seeing everybody soon >> All right, stay tuned for more coverage VMworld 2020 I'm Stu Miniman and that you for watching theCUBE. (bright upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> From our studios, in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hello and welcome to the CUBE studio in Palo Alto, California for another CUBE Conversation. Where we go in-depth with thought leaders driving innovation across the tech industry. I'm your host, Peter Burris. Every business wants Cloud, every business wants digital transformation, but the challenge is, what do you do with the data? How do you ensure that your data is set up so that you can take greater advantage of it, create more classes of business options in a digital world, while at the same time having the flexibility, the agility that you need from a storage and infrastructure standpoint to not constrain the business as it tries to move forward. It's a big topic that a lot of customers are facing. To have that conversation, we are joined by Matt Kixmoeller, who is the Vice President of Strategy at Pure Storage. Matt, welcome back to the CUBE. >> Thanks, Peter. >> So lets dispense with the necessaries. Update from Pure. >> It's a fun time at Pure, we just hit our tenth birthday, and we're fresh off the heels of our Accelerate Conference down in Austin, where we had a lot of good product news and talked a lot about what the next decade's going to be all about. >> So, one of the things you mentioned down in Austin was the notion of the modern data experience. I want to really highlight that notion of experience because that's kind of the intersection with the Cloud experience. So, talk a little bit about how the experience word in modern data and cloud is coming together. >> Absolutely, so ya know the Cloud has forever changed IT's expectation of how tech needs to work, and I think the most archaic layer in a lot of ways right now is storage, and so we've done a lot within our platform to modernize for Cloud, link to the Cloud, deliver an all flash experience, but more interesting perhaps is also just reacting to the changing nature of how customers want to use storage and procure storage. >> And that means that they don't want to buy in advance of their needs. >> I think the key thing is as a service on demand right? And, ya know it's interesting when you consider both the usage and consumption as well as the purchase pattern, right? Um, if you think about the usage and consumption, it's all about on demand and automation, and perhaps one of the best examples I can give you is the transformation around containers. Um, ya know, we see all of our call home data from our customers, and how they use the arrays obviously, and your typical array has just a handful of management operations per day, where someone changes something, provision, storage, you name it. If you look at our container environment, ya know we have a tool called PSO, Pure Service Orchestrator that orchestrates our storage as part of a container environment, and a PSO based array does thousands of these operations a day. And so, it's very obvious that if you're having to deal with the fluidity of the container Cloud, there's no way you're going to have a human admin sitting there, clicking yes, yes, yes, or doing anything like that type of provision storage. You have to plumb for automation from the beginning. >> So that's a great example of the experience necessarily must be different, where you can't use a manual approach of doing things, you have to use more of an automated approach, so as you start to consider these issues, how is that informing the evolution of the modern data experience at Pure? >> I think it's an automated first world, and you have to really prepare yourself for plumbing everything for automation for APIs, for orchestration, as opposed to thinking about processes manually. Um, we've also seen as a vendor, it's changed how people want to consume, and you know, the concepts of more Opex-based on-demand consumption are also coming to storage, and so, last year, we introduced, um, ya know one of the first models in the industry in this regard that we called, at the time, ES2, and we broadened that and launched it again this year at Accelerate, expanding it to the entire Pure Business, and called it Pure as a service. >> So, what we now have is we now have, at least, from Pure, the option to think about how I'm going to match my storage consumption with my storage spend, which is especially important in a world where, by some aspect, storage or data is growing in volumes, from a volume perspective, at 35, 40% per anum. You don't want to have to buy four years of data out because you're growing that fast, and use it today. So as you think about this, what does Pure do next with the marriage of the Cloud experience and the modern date experience? >> Well, I think a key thing, particularly around this consumption world, is to give people flexibility between On-Prem and Cloud. Ya know, we did a lot in the show to announce news around how we're linking our On-Prem offerings with the Cloud with our Cloud Block Store offering to allow workloads to move back and forth, but what if I own On-Prem storage and I want to use the Cloud. And so another thing we did as part of Pure as a service is allow for that subscription to go either direction. You might be a customer that subscribes to 100 terabytes of Pure On-Prem, and then tomorrow you get the edict that says lets move half that to the Cloud. No problem, you can move 50 terabytes to the Cloud and not pay us another dime. The next day, you want to move back. You can do that again as well, and so we've thought about how we can really evolve those procurement processes such that they are just as agile and just as flexible as a Cloud model. >> Matt Kixmoeller, Pure Storage, thanks again for being on the CUBE. >> Thank you, Peter. >> And thank you for joining us for another CUBE conversation. I'm Peter Burris. See you next time. (upbeat music)

>>Live from San Diego, California at the cue covering to clock in cloud native con brought to you by red hat, the cloud native computing foundation and its ecosystem Marsh. >>Welcome back to the cube here in San Diego for cube con cloud native con 2019. It's our fourth year of doing the cube here. I'm Stu Miniman. It's my fourth time I've done this show. Joining me is Justin Warren. He's actually been to more of the coupons than the cube has, I think at least in North America. And welcome into the program to two veterans of these events from pure storage. Uh, sitting to my right is she'll be uh, Shrivastava who's a director of product marketing and sitting to her right is Anthony lay Ferrario who's a senior product manager, uh, both of you with pure storage. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having us. All right, so, so we, we were kind of joking about veterans here because we know that things are moving faster and faster. You both work for storage companies. Storage is not known to be the fastest moving industry. Um, it's been fascinating for me to watch kind of things picking up the pace of change, especially when you talk about, uh, you know, how developers and you know, software and a multicloud environment, a fit-out. So she'll be maybe, you know, give us a frame for, you know, you, you know, you're in a Cooper ladies tee shirt here pures at the show. How should we be thinking about pure in this ecosystem? >>Sure. Yeah. So, uh, you're, as, you know, we, we side off as all flash on brand storage company, uh, 10 years ago and, uh, we've kept pace with constantly innovating and making sure we're meeting our customer's needs. One of the areas of course that we see a lot of enterprises moving today is two words, microservices, two words, containerized applications. And our goal that you're really is to help customers modernize, modernize their applications while still keeping that store it's seamless and keeping that, uh, invisible to the application developers. >> I think it actually lines up really well if you're do just a pure sort of steam across time has been performance with simplicity. Right? And I think the simplicity argument starts to mean something different over time, but it's a place that we still want to really focus as our customers started to use, uh, try to containerize our applications. >>There are couple of challenges. We saw continued environments, of course, they're known for their, uh, agility, uh, how portable they are. They're lightweight and they're fast. And when they're fast, storage can sometimes be a bottleneck because your storage might not necessarily scale as fast. It might not be able to provision storage volumes as fast, your container environment. And that's the challenge that we at pure why to solve with our Cuban eighties integrations. Anthony, you mentioned simplicity there. So I'm going to challenge you a bit on that because Kubernetes is generally not perceived as being particularly simple and the storage interfaces as well, like stateful sets is kind of only really stabilized over the last 18 months. So how >>is pure actually helping to make the Cuban Eddie's experience simpler for developers? Yeah, and you know, you're totally right. I don't think I was necessarily saying that someone looking for the simplest thing that could ever find would adopt Kubernetes and expect to find that. But what I really meant was, you know, on one hand you have, you know, your more traditional enterprise infrastructure type folks who are trying to build out the underlying private cloud that you're going to deploy, you know, your infrastructure on. And on the other hand, you have your developers, you have your Kubernetes, you have your cloud native applications, right? And really the interface between those is where I'm looking at that simplicity argument because traditionally pure has focused on that simple interface to the end user. But the end user, as we were talking about before, the show has shifted from a person to being a machine, right? >>And the objective for pure and what we're building on the cognitive side is how do we take that simple sort of as a service consumption experience and present that on top of what looks like a traditional infrastructure platform. So I can get more into the, the details of that if you'd like, but really that that layer is where we're focused on the simplicity and really just asking the, the, uh, the end user as few questions as we can. Right. I just want to ask you, what do you need? I don't want to ask you, well, tell me about the, you know, IQN and blah, blah. They don't want that, right? That's the simplicity I'm talking about. Yeah. Well, you run developers generally, I mean, the idea of dev ops and I challenge people whenever they mentioned dev ops, and I'm hearing a pretty consistent message that developers really don't care about infrastructure and don't want to have anything to do with it at all. >>So if you can just bake it into the system and somehow make it easier to operate it, that kind of SRE level, that infrastructure level that, that Kubernetes as a platform. So once that's solved, then as a developer, I can just get on with, with writing some code. We definitely want stories to be invisible. Yeah. So if you want, but if they want stories to be invisible, that's not so great for your brand because you actually want them to know and care about having a particular storage platform. So how do you, how do you balance that idea that we want to show you that we can have to have innovative products that you care about the storage, but you also don't need to care about the storage at all because we'll make it invisible. How does that work? >>So Coupa storage for container environments has been a challenge. And what we are trying to educate the platform level users is that with the right kind of storage, it can actually be easy stores. For QA, these can be easy. And, uh, the way we make it simple or invisible is through the automation that we provide. So pure service orchestrator is our, uh, automation for storage delivery into the containerized environments. And so it's delivered to a CSI plugin, but we tried to do a little more than just develop a plugin into your Cubanetis environments. We tried to make your scalability seamless, so it's super easy to add new storage. And, um, so yeah, I think because a container environments were initially developed for States, less applications when became to staple applications, they still think about, Oh, why should I care about storage? But people are slowly realizing that we need care about it because we don't want to ultimately be bothered by it. Right. >>And if I can make, if I can make a point to just tag on to that I, the conversations I've had at the show this week, I've even helped me sort of crystallize the way I like to explain this to people, which is at first, you know, a lot of people will say, Oh, I don't, I don't do stateful application. I'm doing stateless applications and competitors. And my response is, okay, I understand that you've decided to externalize the state of your system from your Kubernetes deployment. But at some point you have to deal with state. Now, whether that's an Oracle database, you happen to be calling out to outside of your community's cluster, whether that's a service from a public cloud like S3 or whether that's deciding to internalize that state into Coobernetti's and manage it through the same management plane you have to have state. >>Now when we talk about, you know, what we're doing in PSO and why that's valuable and why, you know, to your point about the brand, I don't necessarily worry is because when we can give a seamless experience at the developer layer and we can give the SRE or the cluster manager layer a way where they can have a trusted high performance, high availability storage platform that their developers consume without knowing or worrying about it. And then as we look into the future, how do we handle cross cluster and multi-cloud stateful workloads, we can really add value there. >>Well, yeah, and I'm glad you brought up the multi-cloud piece of it because one of the more interesting things I saw from pure this year is how pure is putting in software cloud native. Um, so when I saw that one of the questions like, okay, when I come to a show like this, how does Kubernetes and containers fit into that old discussion? So how help us connect the dots as to what was announced and everything else that's happening. >>You've heard about cloud block store, which is our software running on the AWS cloud today. And uh, that's basically what we've done is we've people have loved flash array all these years for the simplicity it provides for the automation and performance. You want to give you something similar and something enterprise grade in the public cloud. The cloud, Luxor is basically, you can think of it as a virtual flash array and on the AWS cloud. So with that, you now have D duplication, 10 provisioning capabilities in the cloud. You can, um, be brought an active cluster, which is active, active, synchronous replication between availability zones. So really making your AWS environments ready for mission critical applications. Plus with our, you know, PSO just works the same way on prem as in the cloud. So it's just great for hybrid application mobility. You have the same APIs. >>Yeah, it's actually very cool. Right? One of the, one of the, you know, fun things for me as a software developer at pure, at a software side guy at pure, um, is that the API's that our arrays have are the same API. It's actually the same underlying software version even though it's a totally different hardware, hardware back end implementation. When we run in a cloud native form factor versus when we run in a physical appliance form factor, the replication engines work between the two snapshots, clones. Um, our ability to do instant, um, restores like everything that we do and that has brought value from our, our storage software stack, we still get access to in a cloud native environment and the transports as well. I guess trying to understand, is there Kubernetes involved here or is this just natively in AWS? And then then on premises itself is a, >> is a compute orchestration layer component. So when I look at Kubernetes, I'd say Kubernetes sits above both sides, right? Or potentially above and across both sides, um, depending on how you decide to structure your environment. But the nice part is if you've developed a cloud native application, right, and that's running on Kubernetes, the ability to support that with the same storage interfaces, the same SLS, move it efficiently, copy it efficiently and do that on whatever cloud you care to do. That's where it gets really cool. >>So we developed this really cool demo where you have a container application running on PSO, on flash array, on prem. We migrated that to cloud block store and on AWS and it just runs, you use the same yanno scripts in both places. There is no need to, you know, do a massive rearchitecture anything. Your application just runs when you move it. And we take care of all the data mobility with our asynchronous replications, you can take a snapshot on prem, you can snap it out into AWS, restore it back into cloud block store. So it really opens up a lot of new use cases and make them simple for customers >>that that idea of write once run anywhere. I said I'm, I'm old enough to remember when Java was a brand new thing and that was the promise. And it never quite got there because it turns out it's really, really hard to do that. Um, but we are seeing for from pure and from a lot of vendors here at the show that there's a lot of work and effort being put in into that difficult problem so that other people don't have to care about it. So you're building that abstraction in and, and working on how this particular, how the details of this work. And, uh, I was fortunate enough to get a deep dive into the end of the architecture of cloud Brock's door, just a recent accelerate conference and the way you've actually used cloud resources as if they were kind of infrastructure components and then built the abstraction on top of it, but in the same way that it runs on site, it, that's what gives you that ability to, to keep everything the same and make it simple, is doing a lot of hard work and hard engineering underneath so that no one has to care anymore. >>Yeah. And the way we've architected CloudLock store is that, you know, be as use the highest performance performing, uh, AWS infrastructure. And the highest durability it this infrastructure. So you're actually now able to buy performance and, and durability in one through one single virtual appliance as you would. >>Yeah. How's the adoption of the products going? I know it was, it was very early when it was announced just a few months ago. So what's the feedback from customers been so far about? >>It's been really positive and actually, you know, the one use case that I want to highlight really most is actually dev ops use cases, right? This, the value add of being able to have the same deployment for that application for a test or dev infrastructure in one cloud versus a production to point them in another cloud has been very exciting for folks. So, you know, when you think about that use case in particular, right? The ability to say, okay, I'm coming up to a major quarterly release or whatever I have for my product, I need to establish a bunch more test environments. I don't necessarily want to have bought that and we're not necessarily talking about, you know, bursting over the wire anymore. Right. We're talking about local, uh, local storage under the same interfaces in the cloud that you choose to spin up all of those test environments. So cases like that are pretty interesting for folks. >>Yeah. I think that's how people have started to realize that it's that operation side of things. It's not even day to day 90 and day 147 where I want to be operating this in the same place in the same way no matter where it is because it just saves me so much heartache and time of not having to re implement differently and I don't have to retrain my resources because it all looks the same. So, uh, yeah, Def does definitely have a big use case migration through verbose. That's another use case that we are seeing a lot of customers interested in and uh, disaster recovery, using it as a disaster recovery. How do you, so you can efficiently store backups on Amazon S three, but how do you do an easy fast restore to actually run your applications there? So with CloudLock store, it is now possible to do that, to do a fast, easy restore. Also a couple of weeks ago actually, we started taking registrations for a beta program for cloud Glocks or for Azure as well. Uh, yup. Customers are going multi-cloud. We are going multi-cloud with them. >>Great. I want to give you both a final word, uh, takeaways for a pure storage participation here at the show. >>I think the biggest thing that I, that I want people to understand, and I actually gave this talk at the cloud native storage day on day zero is that cloud native storage is an approach to storage. There's not a location for storage. And I think pure storage that really defines to me the way we're going about this, we're trying to be cloud native storage wherever you need it. So that's, that's really the takeaway I'd like people to have about pure >>and cute and storage for Cuban. It is, doesn't have to be hard. We are here all day today as well. So, um, I mean this is a challenge the industry seeing today and uh, we have a solution to solve that for you. >>All right, well that's a, that's a bold statement, uh, to help end us as Shilpi. Anthony, thank you so much for joining us for Justin Warren. I'm Stu Miniman back with more coverage here from cube con cloud native con 2019 stay classy, San Diego. And thanks for watching the queue.

>> Announcer: Live from Boston, Massachusetts. It's theCUBE, covering IFS World Conference 2019. Brought to you by IFS. >> We're back at IFS World 2019 from the Hynes Convention Center in Boston. I'm Dave Volonte, with my co-host, Paul Gillen. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise, get the best guest, Christian Peterson is here. He's the chief product officer at IFS. Christian, great to see you. >> All right, thank you very much. Happy to be here. >> Your first IFS World Conference, so ... >> It is mine ... >> Mine too, so ... >> Yeah, I'm happy to be here. It's just like getting an injection of customer input and feedback in a very short amount of time So, that's uh, that's awesome. I really love it. >> Yeah, these events are great to connect with customers its one to many conversations. But, give us a sense of your background and why you were attracted to IFS. Why did you join? >> Well from a background perspective, I've always been in the effects of business and technology and uh, you know my passion has always been what we can actually do with technology for businesses to innovate, to differentiate, to do new things to automate things. Really, really a strong believer in the promise of software. Because that's what software is all about. Um, so, um, I have a past with Starbucks, I've started ELP companies, I've been with Microsoft. Uh, for fifteen, sixteen years. Um, have been with SAP for a number of years. So I joined, I joined IFS last year, um, really because of the transformation and the uh, the journey I just was on and the passion that IFS has always had for the customers. And the outcomes we've created for customers. It's just a perfect environment to, to uh to realize the dream of providing value to customers, outcomes for customers, and leveraging technology in the process. >> Yeah, so see you're a challenger, hashtag for the challenger. A hashtag is started. >> Really, really I mean you were at the giant uh, SAP and going to a smaller, not much smaller, but a smaller company, What were they doing that you thought that excited you so much? >> Well the exciting thing again is the focus on the customer and the close proximity to customers in everything I.. >> Wouldn't SAP, sorry to interrupt, wouldn't SAP be the same thing though? >> Let me just, let me put it this way, I went to IFS because I (intelligible) really, really brilliantly. So, is that a, is that a nice way of saying it. (laughter) >> (laughing) Okay. >> So were here for your keynote today you sort of laid out a roadmap, a little vision uh, talked a little bit about digital transformation. But, I wanted to talk about, the, you made a big big emphasis on your API platform. Open API's, embracing that, uh its been somewhat a criticism of you guys in the past. And so, maybe it's a response to that or a response to customers, but why the platform, why, to explain it, its importance and how it fits into your roadmap going forward. >> Well the API enablement is important for many different perspectives. First of all, we use API's ourselves. To create user experiences and drive a lot of the innovation where they are merging technology and so forth. That's one aspect of it. So just for our own, our own level of innovation and the pace at which we can innovate with, going forward on the API platform, is, is, is is dramatic. The second area is really again back to the digital transformation that customers are really driving out there um, a lot of that involves, um, really most companies becoming software companies themselves. So now we have a lot of our customers that actually have developers, they're writing software they're driving new offerings to their customers. And to get value out of these offerings for their customers They really need to get access to a a lot of the capabilites that lives inside of the IFS models. They need to get access to data, to get access to processes because, on of the keys in digital transformation regardless in what shape or form it comes is, you need data, you need massive amounts of data. And you need data from within your firewall you need data from third party, and you need structure data all structure data. And participating in that world is absolutely essential that you have that open API philosophy where you expose yourself and your own data and API's. But, also so we can turn the other way and we can consume data and API's from others so we can create similar scenarios. So it's really about being apart of the ecosystem of, uh, of technologies and solutions that customers rely on. And that's why we joined also, the open API foundation. >> You also demonstrated this morning, uh Orena, your new customer experience platform. Talk about what that is and why it's important. >> Well, so it's, it's important of course again because we, um, um, we have this generational shift in people that are coming into the workforce that expect and want to work differently. And, um, if you think about how people actually work, to do and get things done today, or think about ourselves. Now, we're no spring chickens anymore, right, we've been around... >> Speak for yourself. >> We've seen DOS, we've seen DOS systems. >> Yeah my hand went up in the 3.1 question. >> When the three point, did you put the mouse on the screen as well? (laughing) I've literally seen that. So we've been through that, but the people we are getting into the workforce now they have a different mentality. They are not thinking about what they do. Like, we are thinking about, "how does the system work?" "Where do I click? Where do I go next?" The intuition that people now apply to the system when they start working with them, the systems just have to reflect that intuition. It has to be intuitive, it has to be immersive as well. And the immersive part is really based on what the users see, what they do. The contextual information, the contextual intelligence they get in the context of what they do should want them to do more. Because they can, so they get dragged in and the new type of users, they just have that natural intuition, because that's how you browse the web. You go to one place on the web, go to the next thing, You get inspired by this, you go there. And there's no reason why the systems that you get your work done, why they shouldn't be the exact same thing. Orena is a huge step in that direction, together with our mobile enablement on multiple form factors and devices. >> So you, you mentioned you know saw everybody's becoming a software company, every company is becoming, you've been in the software business for awhile you work for a software company now. You're talking about Orena, you're talking about API integration, I showed you our software. My point is, software is hard. (laughs) There's a talent war for employees, we talked about that off camera. Um, so, as you see these companies digitally transforming, becoming software companies, Mark Endrese's, "software is eating the world", Mark Beneoff, "Everybody is becoming a software company", How are they doing? And what role can you play, IFS, in terms of helping them become a software company. Because it's, it's so damn difficult. >> Yeah, I think that the role of being a software company I think the absolute differentiation they want to create through software and differentiate the offerings or other things that they really want to do, We can't really help them there, because they're differentiated. Like if you're differentiated, you can't find something standard and use for that. But we can enable it and um, as we're looking at it, a lot of the emerging technologies that we can enable them with to achieve it, that's a number of things we can do. And, we are introducing a notion of an application, of application services here, where we really, enable these emerging technologies in the context of what we do. So, while you hear about technologies or augmented realities, mixed realities, artificial intelligence and robotics and IOT and artificial intelligence, all the stuff that you have, we take that and put into context of the focus industries that we focus on and the solution categories that we focus on. So EAP, enterprise asset management, service management. And in that way our customers can focus on what they actually need to do with it, versus focus on the, on the technologies. >> And the API platform allows those customers to, whatever the build to integrate to their ERP system if in fact... >> That's correct, that's correct. And as I mentioned, we also use API's not only on the front end of what we provide and expose all we have, but we also consume on the back end. So the way we actually consume the application services and drag them in and embed them is through API, these application services. >> I understand you're working on an entirely new architecture that you will be debuting in the spring of 2020. How is that going to change the game? >> We don't really think about it as a new architecture. We think about it as a natural evolution that includes some of these things. Uh, so for instance, the introducing, uh the introduction of the application services layer that I mentioned, is more a new layer in our architecture that we introduced. So we don't think about it as a new architecture, we're just evolving what we have. And because of that evolution, that is something that our entire product portfolio will benefit from. Um, and, I already mentioned today how we are aligning the product portfolio from an experience perspective. We are bringing the arena experience through our FSM product to our um, PSO product, to our customer engagement product and so forth. So we are aligning that front end experience on the same design patterns, so forth, because you know, a good experience is a good user experience. >> You talk about Orena bot and this, this gentleman here, who's given us this talk, just through out a gardner status. That, that by, I don't know, by whatever year 2023, uh, more money will be spent on bots than mobile integration. Which is, you know, quite a prediction. Your thoughts. >> Well, I, you know, there's, there's always all kinds of interesting predictions. I think actually, um, I actually think, um, there, amount of money may go down but I think the number of bots will go up dramatically. And, I think we will actually get to a situation where, bots will be creating bots. (laughs) Right? So, That's when you get, when we talk about intelligent and autonomous systems, I really believe it. Because there is no reason why we should not begin to see autonomy in software. >> Dave: Right. >> Um, we see it, uh, I use the example this morning, that we put our lives in the hands of technology everyday, when you go in your car and you use adaptor to cruise to control, you're trusting technology. Like, when you are driving your Tesla. I mean there was an example in San Francisco, uh, I think, uh, in December last year, where the police had been following a driver for 17 miles. And the car wouldn't stop because it was driving itself, and the driver was sleeping. So, they had to, they had to, you know, call up Tesla and say like how can we manipulate this technology so the car actually stops, so the police gradually got the car to stop. And, uh, you know, finally the guy woke up and uh, he'd probably had one too many. But he claimed he wasn't driving, so they shouldn't charge him, but, they did. (laughter) >> Of course, yes. Well bots are getting better, but I still, I still often know when I'm talking to a bot, but it's getting better, wouldn't you say? >> Christian: Yeah, it's getting reallly good. >> Paul: I know, last year I was completely fooled by a fundraising bot. But, I got a phone call from a bot that I spoke to for ninety seconds before realizing it was a bot. (laughter) So it's, its getting pretty good. As you look at, at the technology that excites you, about what you're bringing with your product, you talked a lot this morning about different kinds of technology and how you want to be a leader. What technologies excite you the most about the markets you are serving? >> I tell you what excites me the most is to work through the different levels of, of, uh, digital transformation that I talked about. I'm excited about the reflection between businesses and technology. I'm excited about the reflections between people and experiences, and I'm excited about the reflections between automation and efficiency. We have a lot of technology at our hands, That can help us achieve these different things. But, at the end of the day, it's the outcomes that matter. The technologies are exciting and you know, I can get super geeky about a lot of different technologies. But if it doesn't relate to any, any, not technical vision of product, but any business vision you have on what you actually want to do with it as a business, then I think it becomes dangerous. But, of course we have our geek sessions, where we geek out on all these different things. But, we try to separate that from when we actually, uh, you know, designing and building things directly into the product. But we need the geek sessions to get inspired. And understand what is available, so we can put it in the context of what our customers need today and also what they'll be needing in the future. >> Since you have some decent observation space and digital transformation, I want to ask a question. Uh, uh, our partner ETR, they have a data platform. And I was down in New York last week just talking to them and, one of the theories is, is so spending is starting to slow down a little bit overall on the macro. One of the theories is that digital transformation in the last two years, there's been a lot of experimentation. So a lot of try and, you know, everything. And now they're going into the production with, with what they, what they feel will delivery business value. And two things are happening is their premise. One is, they're narrowing down the focus on new technologies and make, making bets for all the disruptive technologies. The other is, a lot of the legacy stuff, they are pulling out. Saying, "okay, we're moving on." Um, are you seeing that, are you seeing this sort of... That, the bell weathers anyway going heavy now into production with digital transformation. What are you seeing? >> I think its a progression. >> Dave: Uh huh. >> I think it's scenario based. I don't see, I don't see companies making like, an all out bet from one day to another. >> Dave: Just mixed. >> It's mixed and I think you need to take a cautious approach because, you know, you don't, you... When you're in the technology world, you don't always get it right in the first go, we certainly don't get it right, the first time all the time, right? So, often times its important to get something out there. Learn from it, innovate, fail fast sometimes. Um, the worst thing you can do is not acknowledge when you have mad a mistake, And I think that is a risk that some companies also, bear with digital transformation is... If you need to adjust what you, what you thought was the right thing to do, make the adjustment as quickly as possible. >> Dave: You talked in your keynote about tailoring solutions and I want to understand your philosophy. How dogmatic are you, uh, uh, about, uh, not making customizations versus allowing your customers to make those, those tailored? And, and how do you manage that from a, you know cloud and SaaS delivery, evergreen, I think you call it stand point? >> Christian: We, we, absolutely believe that customers should have solutions that match exactly what they need and so forth. We also heard from stage today that, a good philosophy, I really subscribe to that philosophy, that if you're doing things that, you know, is not really differentiating you as a company or something just use a standard process. Why do something custom if it doesn't mean anything. Then you can adjust your processes to that. But if you have things that really differentiate you as a company, you obviously want to have the technology that supports that. And since that is differentiated, you're not likely to have a standard package file. So in that process, what we need to enable is, we need to enable these scenarios where you can extend, uh, we call it extend on the inside, extend on the outside, but you can achieve what you want but, do it in a way where, you do it in a declarative way. Not by creating or modifying code. So instead we want to make sure that our, the code that we have, that is part of the standard product, can actually interpret declarative code. And that means when we have upgrades and all that stuff, we upgrade the core but the declarative code that the customer has that is, specific to them, remains there and stays there. >> Dave: And that's why the API platform is critical. >> Paul: Right. >> You said no product will be announced or shipped without API enablement, period the end. >> That's correct, We can not because, we can not create a use of front end to anything that doesn't, that isn't API enabled. So, it's very simple. >> Paul: That's a modern architecture. I am curious about you said that one of the reasons that you're at IFS is because it's so customer focused. What is it that this company does differently from companies you've worked at in the past, that exemplifies that customer focus? >> Christian: I think it goes deep um, not only into the culture but also how we actually have people in, all the way in to the individual development teams. Um, I've been in other software companies and the development teams you have developers, you have QA's, you have, you know...testers, you have, you know... Programming just to write the specifications, so forth. We actually have industry solution specialists embedded into the development teams. So, we are, we are, probably our own, you know, worst critic um, and of course then working hand and hand with customers in their processes is essential. But again, if we don't provide the out...if we don't provide the value and the output from what we create for our customers, then it's worth nothing. And that's really the philosophy. If we do not provide value, technology means nothing. >> Dave: So the intersection of domain expertise and software development. Uh Chris, the last question is sort of, what do you hope to get out of this event? Things that you hope to, to take away, or learn or convey to your customers? >> Well I always, I always, look to get feedback. I'm a sucker for feedback and input and learning. Uh, so first of all, I can't wait to walk the expo floor here and really see what all our partners are bringing to the table of innovation. Because they're doing amazing things, so I always enjoy spending a few hours on the, on the expo floor. In the process, get to meet a lot of people, uh and then during the sessions if we can or I'll always end any presentation with an email address. Any, anybody, any customer, any partner will always be able to email me, uh directly, and I, you know... Sometimes a little hard to keep up, but I will respond to every single request. >> Dave: Feedback is a gift. Christian, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, it was great to see ya. >> Thank you. >> Alright, thank you very much. >> Alright, thank you for watching everybody. Keep it right there, we'll be back with our next guest. We're at IFS World, Boston. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)