>>Welcome back to Vegas guys, Lisa Martin and Dave Lanta here wrapping up our coverage of day two of snowflake summit. We have given you a lot of content in the last couple of days. We've had a lot of great conversations with snowflake folks with their customers and with partners. And we have an alumni back with us. Please. Welcome back to the queue. Mike Palmer, CEO of Sigma computing. Mike. It's great to see you. >>Thanks for having me. And I guess again >>Exactly. >>It's fantastic me. >>So talk to the audience about Sigma before we get into the snowflake partnership and what you guys are doing from a technical perspective, give us that overview of the vision and some of the differentiators. >>Sure. You know, you've over the last 12 years, companies have benefited from enormous investments and improvements in technology in particular, starting with cloud technologies, obviously going through companies like snowflake, but in terms of the normal user, the one that makes the business decision in the marketing department and the finance team, you know, in the works in the back room of the supply chain, doing inventory very little has changed for those people. And the time had come where the data availability, the ability to organize it, the ability to secure it was all there, but the ability to access it for those people was not. And so what Sigma's all about is taking great technology, finding the skillset they have, which happens to be spreadsheets. There are billion license spreadsheet users in the world and connecting that skillset with all of the power of the cloud. >>And how do you work with snowflake? What are some of the, the what's the joint value proposition? >>How are they as an investor? That's what I wanna know. Ah, >>Quiet, which is the way we like them. No, I'm just kidding. Snowflake is, well, first of all, investment is great, but partnership is even better. Right. You know, and I think snowflake themselves are going through some evolution, but let's start with the basics of technology where this all starts because you know, all of the rest doesn't matter if the product is not great, we work directly on snowflake. And what that means is as an end user, when I, when I sit on that marketing team and I want to understand and, and connect, how did I get a, a customer where I had a pay to add? And they showed up on my website and from my website, they went to a trial. And from there, they touched a piece of syndicated contents. All of that data sits in snowflake and I, as a marketer, understand what it means to me. >>So for the first time, I want to be able to see that data in one place. And I want to understand conversion rates. I want to understand how I can impact those conversion rates. I can make predictions. What that user is doing is going to, to Sigma accessing live data in snowflake, they're able to ask ad hoc questions, questions that were never asked questions, that they don't exist in a filter that were never prepped by a data engineer. So they could truly do something creative and novel in a very independent sort of way. And the connection with Snowflake's live data, the performance, the security and governance that we inherit. These are all facilitators to really expand that access across the enterprise. So at, at a product level, we were built by a team of people, frankly, that also were the original investors in snowflake by two amazing engineers and founders, Rob will and Jason France, they understood how snowflake worked and that shows up in the product for our end customers. >>So, but if I may just to follow up on that, I mean, you could do that without snowflake, but what, it would be harder, more expensive. Describe what you'd have to go through to accomplish that outcome. >>And I think snowflake does a good job of enabling the ecosystem at large. Right. But you know, you always appreciate seeing early access to understand what the architecture's going to look like. You know, some of the things that I will, you know, leaning forward that we've heard here that we're very excited about is snowflake going to attack the TP market, right? The transactional market, one of the transactional database market. I, yeah. Right. You know, one of the things that we see coming, and, and one of the bigger things that we'll be talking about in Sigma is not just that you can do analytics out of snowflake. I think that's something that we do exceptionally well on an ad hoc basis, but we're gonna be the first that allow you to write into snowflake and to do that with good performance. And to do that reliably, we go away from OAP, which is the terminology for data warehousing. >>And we go toward transactional databases. And in that world, understanding snowflake and working collaboratively with them creates again, a much better experience for the end customer. So they, they allow us into those programs, even coming to these conferences, we talk to folks that run the industry teams, trying to up level that message and not just talk database and, and analytics, but talk about inventory management. How do we cut down the gap that exists between POS systems and inventory ordering, right? So that we get fewer stockouts, but also that we don't overorder. So that's another benefit, >>Strong business use cases. >>That's correct. >>And you're enabling those business users to have access to that data. I presume in near real time or near real time, so that they can make decisions that drive marketing forward or finance forward or legal >>Forward. Exactly. We had a customer panel yesterday. An example of that go puff is hopefully most of the viewers are familiar with, as a delivery company. This is a complicated business to run. It's run on the fringes. When we think about how to make money at it, which means that the decisions need to be accurate. They need to be real time. You can't have a batch upload for delivery when they're people are on the street, and then there's an issue. They need to understand the exact order at that time, not in 10 minutes, not from five minutes ago, right. Then they need to understand, do I have inventory in the warehouse when the order comes in? If they don't, what's a replacement product. We had a Mike came in from go puff and walked us through all of the complexity of that and how they're using Sigma to really just shorten those decision cycles and make them more accurate. You know, that's where the business actually benefits and, >>And actually create a viable business model. Cuz you think back to the early, think back to the.com days and you had pets.com, right? They couldn't make any money. Yeah. Without chewy. Okay. They appears to be a viable business model. Right? Part of that is just the efficiencies. And it's sort of a, I dunno if those are customers that they may or may not be, but they should be if they're not >>Chewy is, but okay. You know, and that's another example, but I'll even pivot to the various REI and other retailers. What do they care about cohorts? I'm trying to understand who's buying my product. What can I sell to them next? That, that idea of again, I'm sitting in a department, that's not data engineering, that's not BI now working collaboratively where they can get addend engineer, putting data sets together. They have a BI person that can help in the analytics process. But now it's in a spreadsheet where I understand it as a marketer. So I can think about new hierarchies. I wanna know it by customer, by region, by product type. I wanna see it by all of those things. I want to be able to do that on the fly because then it creates new questions that sort of flow. If you' ever worked in development, we use the word flow constantly, right? And as people that flow is when we have a question, we get an answer that generates a question. We have, we just keep doing that iteratively. That that is where Sigma really shines for them. >>What does a company have to do to really take advantage of, of this? I, if they're kind of starting from a company that's somewhat immature, what are the sort of expectations, maybe even outta scope expectations so they can move faster, accelerate analytics, a lot of the themes that we've heard today, >>What does an immature company is actually even a question in, in and of itself? You know, I think a lot of companies consider themselves to be immature simply because for various constraint reasons, they haven't leveraged the data in the way that they thought possible. Good, >>Good, good definition. Okay. So not, not, >>Not, I use this definition for digital transformation. It very simple. It is. Do you make better decisions, faster McKenzie calls this corporate metabolism, right? Can you speed up the metabolism of, of an enterprise and for me and for the Sigma customer base, there's really not much you have to do once. You've adopted snowflake because for the first time the barriers and the silos that existed in terms of accessing data are gone. So I think the biggest barrier that customers have is curiosity. Because once you have curiosity and you have access, you can start building artifacts and assets and asking questions. Our customers are up and running in the product in hours. And I mean that literally in hours, we are a user in snowflake, that's a direct live connection. They are able to explore tables, raw. They can do joins themselves if they want to. They can obviously work with their data engineering team to, to create data sets. If that's the preferred method. And once they're there and they've ever built a pivot table, they can be working in Sigma. So our customers are getting insights in the first one to two days, you referenced some, those of us are old enough to remember pest.com. Also old enough to remember shelfware that we would buy. We are very good at showing customers that within hours they're getting value from their investment in Sigma. And that, that just creates momentum, right? Oh, >>Tremendous momentum and >>Trust and trust and expansion opportunities for Sigma. Because when you're in one of those departments, someone else says, well, you know, why do you get access to that data? But I don't, how are you doing this? Yeah. So we're, you know, I think that there's a big movement here. People, I often compare data to communication. If you go back a hundred years, our communication was not limited. As it turns out by our desire to communicate, it was limited by the infrastructure. We had the typewriter, a letter and the us postal service and a telephone that was wired. And now we have walk around here. We, everything is, is enabled for us. And we send, you know, hundreds and thousands of messages a day and probably could do more. You will find that is true. And we're seeing it in our product is true of data. If you give people access, they have 10 times as many questions as they thought they had. And that's the change that we're gonna see in business over the next few years, >>Frank Salman's first book, what he was was CEO of snowflake was rise of the data cloud. And he talked about network effects. Basically what he described was Metcalf's law. Again, go back to the.com days, right? And he, Bob Metcalf used the phone system. You know, if there's two people in the phone system, it's not that valuable, right. >>You know, exactly, >>You know, grow it. And that's where the value is. And that's what we're seeing now applied to data. >>And even more than that, I think that's a great analogy. In fact, the direct comparison to what Sigma is doing actually goes one step beyond everything that I've been talking about, which is great at the individual level, but now the finance team and the marketing team can collaborate in the platform. They can see data lineage. In fact, one of our, our big emphasis points here is to eliminate the sweet products. You know, the ones where, you know, you think you're buying something, but you really have a spreadsheet product here and a document product there and a slide product over there. And they, you know, you can do all of that in Sigma. You can write a narrative. You can real time live, edit on numbers. You, you know, if you want to, you could put a picture in it. But you know, at Sigma we present everything out of our product. Every meeting is live data. Every question is answered on the spot. And that's when, you know, you know, to your point about met cap's law. Now everybody's involved in the decision making. They're doing it real time. Your meetings are more productive. You have fewer of them because they're no action items, right. We're answering our questions there and we're, and we're moving forward. >>You know, view were meeting sounds good. Productivity is, is weird now with the, the pandemic. But you know, if you go back to the nineties here am I'm, I'm dating myself again, but that's okay. You know, you, you didn't see much productivity going on when the PC boom started in the eighties, but the nineties, it kicked in and pre pandemic, you know, productivity in the us and Europe anyway has been going down. But I feel like Mike, listen to what you just described. I, how many meetings have we been in where people are arguing about them numbers, what are the assumptions on the numbers wasting so much time? And then nothing gets done and they, then they, they bolt cut that away and you drive in productivity. So I feel like we're on a Renaissance of productivity and a lot of that's gonna be driven by, by data. Yeah. And obviously communications the whole 5g thing. We'll see how that builds out. But data is really the main spring of, I think, a new, new Renaissance in productivity. >>Well, first of all, if you could find an enterprise where you ask the question, would you rather use your data better? And they say, no, like, you know, show me, tell me that I'll short their stock immediately. But I do agree. And I, unfortunately I have a career history in that meeting that you just described where someone doesn't like, what you're showing them. And their first reaction is to say, where'd you get that data? You know, I don't trust it. You know? So they just undermined your entire argument with an invalid way of doing so. Right. When you walk into a meeting with Sigma where'd, where'd you get that data? I was like, that's the live data right now? What question do you want answer >>Lineage, right. Yeah. And you know, it's a Sen's book about, you know, gotta move faster. I mean, this is an example of just cutting through making decisions faster because you're right. Mike and the P the P and L manager in a meeting can, can kill the entire conversation, you know, throw FUD at it. Yeah. You know, protect his or her agenda. >>True. But now to be fair to the person, who's tended to do that. Part of the reason they've done that is that they haven't had access to that data before the meeting and they're getting blindsided. Right. So going back to the collaboration point. Yes. Right. The fact we're coming to this discussion more informed in and of itself takes care of some of that problem. Yeah. >>For sure. And if, and if everybody then agrees, we can move on and now talk about the really important stuff. Yeah. That's good. It >>Seems to me that Sigma is an enabler of that curiosity that you mentioned that that's been lacking. People need to be able to hire for that, but you've got a platform that's going here. You go ask >>Away. That's right in the we're very good. You know, we love being a SaaS platform. There's a lot of telemetry. We can watch what we call our mouse to Dows, you know, which is our monthly average users to our daily average users. We can see what level of user they are, what type of artifacts they build. Are they, you know, someone that creates things from scratch, are they people that tend to increment them, which by the way, is helpful to our customers because we can then advise them, Hey, here's, what's really going on. You might wanna work with this team over here. They could probably be a little better of us using the data, but look at this team over here, you know, they've originated five workbooks in the last, you know, six days they're really on it. There's, there's, you know, that ability to even train for the curiosity that you're referring to is now there, >>Where are your customer conversations? Are they at the lines of business? Are they with the chief data officer? What does that look like these days? >>Great question. So stepping back a bit, what, what is Sigma here to do? And, and our first phase is really to replace spreadsheets, right? And so one of the interesting things about the company is that there isn't a department where a spreadsheet isn't used. So Sigma has an enormous Tam, but also isn't necessarily associated with any particular department or any particular vertical. So when we tend to have conversations, it really depends on, you know, either what kind of investment are you making? A lot of mid-market companies are making best technology investments. They're on a public cloud, they're buying snowflake and they wanna understand what's, what's built to really make this work best over the next number of years. And those are very short sales for us because we, we prove that, you know, in, in minutes to hours, if you're working at a large enterprise and you have three or four other tools, you're asking a different question. >>And often you're asking a question of what I call exploration. We have a product that has dashboards and they've been working for us and we don't wanna replace the dashboard. But when we have a question about the data in the dashboard, we're stuck, how do we get to the raw data? How do we get to the example that we can actually manage? You can't manage a dashboard. You can't manage a trend line, but if you get into the data behind the trend line, you can make decisions to change business process, to change quality, accuracy, to change speed of execution. That is what we're trying to enable. Those conversations happen between the it team who runs technology and the business teams who are responsible for the decisions. So we are, you know, we have a cross departmental sale, but across every department, >>One of the things we're not talking about at this event, which is kind of interesting, cause it's all we've been talking about is the macro supply chain challenges, Ukraine, blah, blah, blah, and the stock market. But, but how are you thinking about that? Macro? The impacts you're seeing, you know, a lot of private companies being, you know, recapped, et cetera, you guys obviously very well funded. Yeah. But how do you think about, I mean, I asked Frank a similar question. He's like, look, it's a marathon. We don't worry about it. We, you know, they made the public market, they get 5 billion in cash. Yeah. Yeah. How are you thinking about it? >>You know, first of all, what's the expression, right? You never, never waste a good, you know, in this case recession, no, we don't have one yet, but the impetus is there, right. People are worried. And when they're worried, they're thinking about their bottom lines, they're thinking about where they're going to get efficiency and their costs. They're already dealing with the supply chain issues of inventory. We all have it in our personal lives. If you've ordered anything in the last six months, you're used to getting it in, you know, days to weeks. And now you're getting in months, you know, we had customers like us foods as a good example, like they're constantly trying to align inventory. They have with transportation that gets that inventory to their end customers, right? And they do that with better data accuracy at the end point, working with us on what we are launching. >>And I mentioned earlier, having more people be able to update that data creates more data, accuracy creates better decisions. We align that then with them and better collaboration with the folks that then coordinate the trucks with Prologis and the panel yesterday, they're the only commercial public company that reports their, their valuations on a quarterly basis. They work with Sigma to trim the amount of time it takes their finance team to produce that data that creates investor confidence that holds up your stock price. So I mean the, the importance of data relative to all the stakeholders in enterprise cannot be overstated. Supply chain is a great example. And yes, it's a marathon because a lot of the technology that drives supply chain is old, but you don't have to rip out those systems to put your data into snowflake, to get better access through Sigma, to enable the people in your environment to make better decisions. And that's the good news. So for me, while I agree, there's a marathon. I think that most of the, I dunno if I could continue this metaphor, but I think we could run quite far down that marathon without an awful lot of energy by just making those couple of changes. >>Awesome. Mike, this has been fantastic. Last question. I, I can tell, I know a lot of growth for Sigma. I can feel it in your energy alone. What are some of the key priorities that you're gonna be focusing on for the rest of the year? >>Our number one priority, our number two priority and number three priority are always build the best product on the market, right? We, we want customers to increase usage. We want them to be delighted. You know, we want them to be RA. Like we have customers at our booth that walk up and it's like, you're building a great company. We love your product. I, if you want to show up happy at work, have customers come up proactively and tell you how your products changed their life. And that is, that is the absolute, most important thing because the real marathon here is that enablement over the long term, right? It is being a great provider to a bunch of great companies under that. We are growing, you know, we've been tripling the company for the fast few years, every year, that takes a lot of hiring. So I would've alongside product is building a great culture with bringing the best people to the company that I guess have my energy level. >>You know, if you could get paid in energy, we would've more than tripled it, you know, but that's always gonna be number two, where we're focused on the segment side, you know, is really the large enterprise customer. At this point, we are doing a great job in the mid-market. We have customer, we have hundreds of customers in our free trial on a constant basis. I think that without wanting to seem over confident or arrogant, I think our technology speaks for itself and the product experience for those users, making a great ROI case to a large enterprise takes effort. It's a different motion. We're, we're very committed to building that motion. We're very committed to building out the partner ecosystem that has been doing that for years. And that is now coming around to the, the snowflake and all of the ecosystem changes around snowflake because they've learned these customers for decades and now have a new opportunity to bring to them. How do we enable them? That is where you're gonna see Sigma going over the next couple of years. >>Wow, fantastic. Good stuff. And a lot of momentum, Mike, thank you so much for joining Dave and me talking about Sigma, the momentum, the flywheel of what you're doing with snowflake and what you're enabling customers to achieve the massive business outcomes. Really cool stuff. >>Thank you. And thank you for continuing to give us a platform to do this and glad to be back in conferences, doing it face to face. It's fantastic. >>It it's the best. Awesome. Mike, thank you for Mike Palmer and Dave ante. I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching the cube hopefully all day. We've been here since eight o'clock this morning, Pacific time giving you wall the wall coverage of snowflake summit 22 signing off for today. Dave and I will see you right bright and early tomorrow morning. I will take care guys.

>> from Cambridge, Massachusetts. It's the Cube covering M. I. T. Chief Data officer and Information Quality Symposium 2019 Brought to you by Silicon Angle Media >> Welcome back to M I. T. Everybody watching the Cube. The leader in live tech coverage we hear a Day two of the M I t chief data officer information Quality Conference Day Volonte with Paul Dillon. Andy Palmer's here. He's the co founder and CEO of Tamer. Good to see again. It's great to see it actually coming out. So I didn't ask this to Mike. I could kind of infirm from someone's dances. But why did you guys start >> Tamer? >> Well, it really started with an academic project that Mike was doing over at M. I. T. And I was over in of artists at the time. Is the chief get officer over there? And what we really found was that there were a lot of companies really suffering from data mastering as the primary bottleneck in their company did used great new tech like the vertical system that we've built and, you know, automated a lot of their warehousing and such. But the real bottleneck was getting lots of data integrated and mastered really, really >> quickly. Yeah, He took us through the sort of problems with obviously the d. W. In terms of scaling master data management and the scanning problems was Was that really the problem that you were trying to solve? >> Yeah, it really was. And when we started, I mean, it was like, seven years ago, eight years ago, now that we started the company and maybe almost 10 when we started working on the academic project, and at that time, people weren't really thinking are worried about that. They were still kind of digesting big data. A zit was called, but I think what Mike and I kind of felt was going on was that people were gonna get over the big data, Um, and the volume of data. And we're going to start worrying about the variety of the data and how to make the data cleaner and more organized. And, uh, I think I think way called that one pretty much right. Maybe >> we're a little >> bit early, but but I think now variety is the big problem >> with the other thing about your big day. Big data's oftentimes associated with Duke, which was a batch and then you sort of saw the shifter real time and spark was gonna fix all that. And so what are you seeing in terms of the trends in terms of how data is being used to drive almost near real time business decisions. >> You know, Mike and I came out really specifically back in 2007 and declared that we thought, uh, Hadoop and H D f s was going to be far less impactful than other people. >> 07 >> Yeah, Yeah. And Mike Mike actually was really aggressive and saying it was gonna be a disaster. And I think we've finally seen that actually play out of it now that the bloom is off the rose, so to speak. And so they're They're these fundamental things that big companies struggle with in terms of their data and, you know, cleaning it up and organizing it and making it, Iike want. Anybody that's worked at one of these big companies can tell you that the data that they get from most of their internal system sucks plain and simple, and so cleaning up that data, turning it into something it's an asset rather than liability is really what what tamers all about? And it's kind of our mission. We're out there to do this and it sort of pails and compare. Do you think about the amount of money that some of these companies have spent on systems like ASAP on you're like, Yeah, but all the data inside of the systems so bad and so, uh, ugly and unuseful like we're gonna fix that problem. >> So you're you're you're special sauce and machine learning. Where are you applying machine learning most most effectively when >> we apply machine learning to probably the least sexy problem on the planet. There are a lot of companies out there that use machine learning and a I t o do predictive algorithms and all kinds of cool stuff. All we do with machine learning is actually use it to clean up data and organize data. Get it ready for people to use a I I I started in the eye industry back in the late 19 eighties on, you know, really, I learned from the sky. Marvin Minsky and Mark Marvin taught me two things. First was garbage in garbage out. There's no algorithm that's worth anything unless you've got great data, and the 2nd 1 is it's always about the human in the machine working together. And I've really been working on those two same principles most of my career, and Tamer really brings both of those together. Our goal is to prepare data so that it can be used analytically inside of these companies, that it's actually high quality and useful. And the way we do that involves bringing together the machine, mostly these advanced machine learning algorithms with humans, subject matter experts inside of these companies that actually know all the ins and outs and all the intricacies of the data inside of their company. >> So say garbage in garbage out. If you don't have good training data course you're not going good ML model. How much how much upfront work is required. G. I know it was one of your customers and how much time is required to put together on ML model that can deal with 20,000,000 records like that? >> Well, you know, the amazing thing that this happened for us in the last five years, especially is that now we've got we've built enough models from scratch inside of these large global 2000 companies that very rarely do we go into a place where there we don't already have a model that's pre built. That they can use is a starting point. And I think that's the same thing that's happening in modeling in general. If you look a great companies like data robot Andi and even in in the Python community ml live that the accessibility of these modeling tools and the models themselves are actually so they're commoditized. And so most of our models and most of the projects we work on, we've already got a model. That's a starting point. We don't really have to start from scratch. >> You mentioned gonna ta I in the eighties Is that is the notion of a I Is it same as it was in the eighties and now we've just got the tooling, the horsepower, the data to take advantage of it is the concept changed? The >> math is all the same, like, you know, absolutely full stop, like there's really no new math. The two things I think that have changed our first. There's a lot more data that's available now, and, you know, uh, neural nets are a great example, right? in Marvin's things that, you know when you look at Google translate and how aggressively they used neural nets, it was the quantity of data that was available that actually made neural nets work. The second thing that that's that's changed is the cheap availability of Compute that Now the largest supercomputer in the world is available to rent by the minute. And so we've got all this data. You've got all this really cheap compute. And then third thing is what you alluded to earlier. The accessibility of all the math that now it's becoming so simple and easy to apply these math techniques, and they're becoming you know, it's It's almost to the point where the average data scientists not the advance With the average data, scientists can do a practice. Aye, aye. Techniques that 20 years ago required five PhDs. >> It's not surprising that Google, with its new neural net technology, all the search data that it has has been so successful. It's a surprise you that that Amazon with Alexa was able to compete so effectively. >> Oh, I think that I would never underestimate Amazon and their ability to, you know, build great tact. They've done some amazing work. One of my favorite Mike and I actually, one of our favorite examples in the last, uh, three years, they took their red shift system, you know, that competed with with Veronica and they they re implemented it and, you know, as a compiled system and it really runs incredibly fast. I mean, that that feat of engineering, what was truly exceptional >> to hear you say that Because it wasn't Red Shift originally Park. So yeah, that's right, Larry Ellison craps all over Red Shift because it's just open source offer that they just took and repackage. But you're saying they did some major engineering to Oh >> my gosh, yeah, It's like Mike and I both way Never. You know, we always compared par, excelled over tika, and, you know, we always knew we were better in a whole bunch of ways. But this this latest rewrite that they've done this compiled version like it's really good. >> So as a guy has been doing a eye for 30 years now, and it's really seeing it come into its own, a lot of a I project seems right now are sort of low hanging fruit is it's small scale stuff where you see a I in five years what kind of projects are going our bar company's gonna be undertaking and what kind of new applications are gonna come out of this? But >> I think we're at the very beginning of this cycle, and actually there's a lot more potential than has been realized. So I think we are in the pick the low hanging fruit kind of a thing. But some of the potential applications of A I are so much more impactful, especially as we modernize core infrastructure in the enterprise. So the enterprise is sort of living with this huge legacy burden. And we always air encouraging a tamer our customers to think of all their existing legacy systems is just dated generating machines and the faster they can get that data into a state where they can start doing state of the art A. I work on top of it, the better. And so really, you know, you gotta put the legacy burden aside and kind of draw this line in the sand so that as you really get, build their muscles on the A. I side that you can take advantage of that with all the data that they're generating every single day. >> Everything about these data repose. He's Enterprise Data Warehouse. You guys built better with MPP technology. Better data warehouses, the master data management stuff, the top down, you know, Enterprise data models, Dupin in big data, none of them really lived up to their promise, you know? Yeah, it's kind of somewhat unfair toe toe like the MPP guys because you said, Hey, we're just gonna run faster. And you did. But you didn't say you're gonna change the world and all that stuff, right? Where's e d? W? Did Do you feel like this next wave is actually gonna live up to the promise? >> I think the next phase is it's very logical. Like, you know, I know you're talking to Chris Lynch here in a minute, and you know what? They're doing it at scale and at scale and tamer. These companies are all in the same general area. That's kind of related to how do you take all this data and actually prepare it and turn it into something that's consumable really quickly and easily for all of these new data consumers in the enterprise and like so that that's the next logical phase in this process. Now, will this phase be the one that finally sort of meets the high expectations that were set 2030 years ago with enterprise data warehousing? I don't know, but we're certainly getting closer >> to I kind of hoped knockers, and we'll have less to do any other cool stuff that you see out there. That was a technology just >> I'm huge. I'm fanatical right now about health care. I think that the opportunity for health care to be transformed with technology is, you know, almost makes everything else look like chump change. What aspect of health care? Well, I think that the most obvious thing is that now, with the consumer sort of in the driver seat in healthcare, that technology companies that come in and provide consumer driven solutions that meet the needs of patients, regardless of how dysfunctional the health care system is, that's killer stuff. We had a great company here in Boston called Pill Pack was a great example of that where they just build something better for consumers, and it was so popular and so, you know, broadly adopted again again. Eventually, Amazon bought it for $1,000,000,000. But those kinds of things and health care Pill pack is just the beginning. There's lots and lots of those kinds of opportunities. >> Well, it's right. Healthcare's ripe for disruption on, and it hasn't been hit with the digital destruction. And neither is financialservices. Really? Certainly, defenses has not yet another. They're high risk industry, so Absolutely takes longer. Well, Andy, thanks so much for making the time. You know, You gotta run. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. All right, keep it right. Everybody move back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching the Cube from M I T c B O Q. Right back.

>> from Seattle WASHINGTON. It's the Q covering AWS Imagine brought to you by Amazon Web service is >> Hey, welcome back already. Jeffrey. Here with the Cube. We're in downtown Seattle at the AWS. Imagine e do you conference? It's the second year of the conference, part of the public sector. Kind of a carve out with Andrew Coast Group. Really all about education on an education from K through 12 to higher education, community, college education, retraining of people coming out of the military. It's a huge segment, and we're really excited to have our next guest. He's going to give a keynote later this afternoon on a new pay for that he just published. So we welcome Richard Palmer, the practice leader for public sector for Open Richard, Great to see you. >> Good to be here. >> So tell us it's called reaching for the clouds. >> Yes. Look, what we found is that for many universities are moving into the cloud has proved to be difficult, that there are lots of barriers in the way and they get a part of the way along, and all of a sudden they hit a wall and it takes time. The big number that we keep looking at is only 30% of application workloads or in the cloud at this point. And after 67 years off the public cloud being available, it really suggests that there are various significant barriers. >> So what are some of those driving again? As you said, we were kind of well down this path. So whether it's just legacy stuff that's not worth moving. But I would imagine most of the new workloads are coming in. I mean, they've got to be getting with this program. >> Purchasing sess is an obvious ploy. It gets you right out of all of the problems that you had before. Look, the first thing that that bury that people find is the clouds different. So the skills that you've got in your team, the way that you were finances, your project methodologies everything is different to engage with cloud properly and the way that you design and build applications is different in the cloud. So taking a traditional organization trying to go cloud has everybody involved from the CFO with funding cycles to governance board, which are the most wonderful thing ever in higher education. Great away through to staff skills end the way that start. Think about applications. And if there's one thing in my time in hired that I saw it time and time again, it's the instant legacy problem. So somebody creates something and does it a special way because they know better than the vendor. And we had this infrastructure anyway. So why not reuse it? And they create an orphan that is neither manageable by the vendor nor manageable by the organization requires that individual to remain with the organization. We're well past their expiry date. Let's put it that way because they put things in that just unique to this single installation. And that's the transformation you see in the cloud. It's software as a service. That's it's a native thing. You don't look at how it's hosted. You don't care about anything but using it. But the danger point is in moving to infrastructure service or platforms. The service that you carry over that customization thinking right, which creates if you're like instant legacy, right s so so that that's one of the barriers that we say. >> I'm just curious because you have to really big things, you know, just the whole financing and the way you buy it, the way you budget is completely different than a big capital expenditure that you're appreciating over time. And then, as you said, the skill set. So in the enterprise space, right? Everyone's got big piles of money, and they hired the biggest size right to come help him. They have incident skills. They can bust him in by the many dozens and help them with some of that financial. How is the system integrator or the service is kind of industry evolving an education to help them make this transition. >> So they're there >> two ways and education bigger public sector enterprise has that awful problem that if you provide advice, often you can't provide. Service is we tend to beginning over that a little bit now. But the obvious way is most higher. Education institutions who have moved through that process have engaged a strategic partner to help them to plan right. That's the first piece on dhe there. There are lots of them around, and often they're very good at it, moderately expensive. But the thing that they don't tend to do as well is to find the right partners for the actual transition. So often engineers are trying thio, learn cloud technologies and apply them on and get it right the first time around. And, of course, we all know that in the experimentation you want tohave learn fast and then re learn when you you've come to something that you shouldn't have done. Great. But if engineers thrown into a life production style project, there's no time for that relearn re platform. You learn as you go, right. So having it not so much in a sigh about an implementation partners really important. And luckily, many of the the vendors or their networks are really quite good at doing those mid level implementation projects. Now it's a matter of finding the right one great, but certainly in my home Australian context for almost a LL moves the cloud. There's somebody who's who has done it several times before in education and has a good reputation. So I suspect in the U. S. That's multiplied 10 times. Larger economy is probably 10 times as many people who have done it well before, >> right? So the other piece of I'm curious if this came out right, so there's the cloud as a more efficient way to run to your infrastructure and in all that that means and cost savings. But much more importantly, in some of the things we're doing today is really to enable innovation to enable you to develop stuff faster, whether it's Alexa or some of these other things we're hearing about. I mean, how does that play in people, you know, kind of getting through the pain of getting through this process, because if you don't innovate and we just had just had somebody on before, he said. They're worried about competing with online and really having a good experience for the students on campus. Is that the driver? Is it the cost savings? Is it? How do you How do you see that kind of slicing? >> We've seen several drivers. Mum. That's most common is student success and retention that is ubiquitous in higher education to bring the cost down and to make sure that every intervention that the college or school does is meaningful and produces a positive outcome. So that's kind of the core business. And so things like analytics play into that, and now machine learning more and more the motivator. Yes, this competitive motivator but it actually works. The same for their up there on campus is their online that if you can help every student to be successful, you gain reputation. If you could do it efficiently, you drive down costs, so that's beneficial rate. But then, then you're asking about innovation. That's a step after you've put away pieces together to do core business well, right? And the key elements in doing core business well is shifting from traditional too agile. Because EJ, our projects have benefits on the business side as well as the technical side. One of the most important things is to be able in the edge. I'll space is to be able to interact quickly, and that is just a CZ. Important on the academic side is is on the technical side, because usually the academic or the administration, I don't know what they need until they've actually experienced it. Most times, when you're replacing the system, you ask the people on the front line what they want, and they answer exactly what the last system did, but better so that innovation cycle you do then measure and cycle through is part of the edge. I'll pace and the second part of it is being out to differentiate between what is actually going to make a difference for your students and what is just pure women. You know what we think might be better, but is actually gonna cost cost money, create legacy, move us away from state of practice and actually is gonna bring the benefit so really important to attach riel KP eyes to differentiating practices on get away from customization, which produces no benefit the Third Elements platforms. Once upon a time, we used to build their special systems from the code up way shouldn't do that anymore. We shouldn't be caring about what databases underneath application platforms are faster, more effective and require listen, Herr Skills to maintain a lifetime. So that's that's the third element. >> So one of the things that the Enterprise has been able to benefit from is, you know, we just leave the AARP alone, right? Just a lot of stuff. It's just not worth lifting and shifting. But, you know, it's it's kind of customer interaction applications, and there's a whole kind of class of applications that opened up the opportunity to leverage all this kind of platforms and fast, fast development, et cetera. How is that playing out on the public sector side? Because it before turning the cameras, you talked about just the pain of lift and shift, and you run into all kinds of issues. You don't get that that good, easy win that good fast win are our date. Are they thinking in terms of, you know, setting aside kind of an innovation development team that's working on some of these kind of new age things that that aren't kind of the core systems, that maybe he he don't necessarily want a lift and shift anytime soon? >> I'm a big fan of innovation teams when you're working directly with research. I'm not sure that that's the best model for mainstream innovation. It's much more useful to leverage the folks who are actually working directly with the business people like business analysts, and to shift those into thinking beyond the Monday because the business analyst usually has a very intimate relationship in the nice way with the business partner, and they can engage with what would make life better. What would make things more productive and then to quickly bring resources in behind that idea and a quick, quick proof of concept. But you've hit on another whole issue there that the idea of a ubiquitous engagement layer that both delivers a really high quality online digital student experience but also provides a whole lot of information that can be then analyzed to work out what was the best thing to do with student is really transformative, and we're seeing the best vendors move into that space, even with traditional systems and what they're doing on I'll use a couple student management system vendors is an example, without naming them but their traditional systems, they will either host them for you or you could do it on premises. But their new analysis engagement systems are cloud based, so it doesn't melt away. Your implementation is you can buy New software is a service that gives you really good analytics and a new communications collaboration. Engagement layer, often with Syria, and collaboration tools mixed in in a brand new platform, and that's really transformed it, so it allows you to keep your transactional system in place, but risk in it with the new engagement layer. And if you can clip your university service's into that engagement layer Then you get that 360 degrees view of the student with actually out having to shift major systems, right? And, as you said, that's just money spent to lift and shift the system because there's no strategic benefit except if it will lead you to upgrade for so many universities. They're stuck with an old version of the system, either because they're customized it, or they haven't got the infrastructure to host the new version or whatever it happens to be gay. So there is a strategic benefit to be able to stay with the latest version, particularly as most good vendors are providing new features pretty regularly on the most up to date. And are any doing maintenance releases for the previous version? >> It's pretty interesting that Andrew pulled out of the of the three themes for the show. You know, tomorrow's workforce roll of the melon innovation transformation that Bell got its own its own bullet point because it is such a kind of an underlying infrastructure that drives so much value across lots of applications. And and I just found it interesting that you get kind of to retrain academic institutions in the ways of big data because it's very different than maybe the way that they you grew up thinking about data, the quantity and the way that you deal with it and how much do you have and sampling of old data versus versus all the real time flow. >> So, yes, that the next generation is autonomous and whether it's self driving cars or student advisement, we're seeing the leading edge providers provide in the education space pretty much autonomous student advising there except to the point where you go out of the mainstream. But that rep erred Good advice from bots, basically. But when you get to the real world in autonomous systems, we're going to see a real shift in even the university sector off that interact with people and the environment. If you're doing self driving cars, you're talking sub millisecond responses. So that whole world of I O. T. Plus sensing technology plus Courts Campus all coming together in the next iteration and being paralleled in the service is and maybe even the academic world, that'll probably be a bit slower, but taking the same autonomous kind of thinking and moving beyond just supplementing human human transactions. >> All right, Well, Richard Thank you for taking a few minutes. Good luck on your keynote this afternoon and we'll look forward to dig it into the paper. >> It's been a pleasure. Thank you. >> Alright, He's Richard. I'm Jeff. You're watching the cube. Where? Aws. Imagine CTU in downtown Seattle. Thanks for watching. See you next time.

(upbeat electronic music) >> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering AWS re:Invent 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, and their ecosystem partners. >> Hi everyone, welcome back to theCUBE, we're live in Las Vegas for AWS Amazon Web Services re:Invent 2018. It's the sixth year of theCUBE coverage. Two sets wall-to-wall. Day two of day four, day one of our broadcast, two more days, wall-to-wall coverage. I'm John Furrier, your host. Our next two guests are from Druva. We've got Jaspreet Singh, CUBE alumni, founder and CEO, and Mike Palmer, chief product officer from Druva. You guys are in the middle of it, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks very much. >> Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Good to see you guys. I want to get into it because I just had another guest on earlier. We talked about the holy trinity of infrastructure has been compute, networking, and storage, right? Those things are not, those are evolving, now they're coming together and they're changing. You get a lot of compute here, you can do more storage there, you got networking. We're expecting to hear a lot of announcements about connectivity. But the new dynamics of the infrastructure really encapsulates why cloud's been so successful. Okay great, cloud's great, DevOps, microservices. Check check check. We all love that, we believe it. But the big thing that people, I won't say be blindsided by, but aren't talking as much about is just the impact of data. Okay, you guys were out early on it, you saw the architecture in the cloud. Are people finally getting it? The cloud and data are coming together architecturally, thinking-wise, impact to customer. You guys started attacking that problem early on. What's your vibe here at re:Invent about the role of data and cloudification? >> Sure, I think if you look back and understand why cloud happened in the first place, right? So if you look at Amazon itself or AWS, it's Amazon's retail API is applied to everything IP. Where you could, we could buy and consume services on a price point across the globe as APIs. And now if you fast-forward, the right decide the compute, network is all coming together, the new realm of self serverless computing, all these turns are pioneering more and more increased data creation. Either in the data center, at the edge, or in the cloud. And unless you do something more holistic, sort of manage it, to protect it, to manage it, it's getting harder and harder to put your arms around the data growth. And cloud is a great answer to the whole data management, or the whole creation and management of data, given that the traditional systems are not very, very defined in the way data is going. Data used to be in Oracle, and VMware, and Siebel Systems, and everything else, now it's more image sensor, media text, apps which have been created. The new realm of data is very hard to put arms around with traditional routes of putting in the box in the middle of data. That's why the cloud is key to it. >> On the product side, you guys have been attacking the data. Amazon's expecting to announce here, they've done some pre-announcements, the role of consistency. It's something that we've talked about on theCUBE in our studio and at events. You guys have been on this from day one. Cloud operations on-premises, and the cloud should look the same, has to be consistent. Andy Jassy is going to be banging that drum tomorrow in his keynote. You guys have been part of AWS for a long time, your relationship. Are they getting that messaging from you guys? (chuckles) I mean, Andy, they all be in the public cloud now that he's back on-premise. So he's listening to the customers. I mean, Andy's very straight up about it. He's like, hey, I'm a big guy. I can handle the criticism. Customers want it on-premise. I'd love her when it come to the cloud, but that's what they want. >> It certainly would be flattery that they took messaging from Druva. (John laughing) And I'm not sure that-- >> But you guys have been, cover the relationship with Amazon first. How long have you guys been working with Amazon? >> We work five years now. Very good relationship with Amazon. >> And the product side is impacted in their ecosystem. How are you guys doing relative to the architecture of Amazon? >> I think we're the only natively architected solution in the market today. And so, if you saw this morning, we were right there on the board with some of the companies that have been around for decades, primarily because if you think about the generations of data protection solutions where you started with tape on mainframe, and you moved to one of the four legacy providers in the client's server space, you had another one that really popped up with VMware. Druva really owns the cloud space. And that requires, as you mentioned, a different architecture, adoption of more of an object storage model, the ability to natively store data in a file system in the cloud. That's different than what anyone has built in the past, and I think that's what the relationship with AWS is built on. >> So you think that Jassy's going on his on-premise mess-ee-mah consistently validates what you guys do? >> Without a doubt. He's gotten a lot of customers moving to AWS over the years, and some of them have some real barriers. I think AWS is doing what they always have done well. Listen to their customers, create solutions for those customers, and in the case of Druva, for example, being able to be integrated in a Snowball Edge which is unique to Druva, serving those customers, moving data to the cloud but allowing 'em local restore? Give 'em-- >> Andy Jassy announces AWS on-premise which is what we're expecting to see tomorrow. It's maybe some sort of appliance or something along those lines. We'll see what it comes out as. That's essentially the Azure stack model done right. From their premier perspective. Amazon on Amazon, Amazon on-premise, you can run it in the cloud. This sounds like a tailwind for you guys. How will that impact your business? How is Druva going to be impacted? To me, it would seem like it's just, you don't miss a beat. Sounds like it's going to be a good thing. Your thoughts. >> I think as Mike mentioned when he joined the company as well, right? The beauty of, what I didn't even realize, is that every time Amazon improves the platform, Druva is almost automatically benefited, given they're so, they really build on them. So when Amazon announced Snowball Edge, we were a launch partner with them, and third-party apps should be provision on Snowball Edge. I have a different take on the on-premise word than what the world think of. I think ultimately cloud or no cloud, it's all about helping the customer. If my understanding is correct, what Amazon is trying to do is to create a better way for customers to adapt more to public cloud, which is going deep in data center. There's a difference between doing enough on the edge to make the way for the cloud versus trying to do the legacy of going on-premise. So as Amazon creates that corridor for the option, Druva's naturally a good fit for it and part of it. >> Yeah, certainly that being cloud native with AWS is going to give you guys a good lift. Kind of a lay up question there. Let's get into the customer latency question, 'cause this has come up, expect to hear this a lot as well. Latency matters, latency certainly is a key criteria. Why the on-premise strategy? I would say Snowball, they're kickin' the tires. They did the VMware RDS deal on-premise, then so, this was not like an awakening for Amazon, they were going down that road. A little bit more deeper. What is the impact to customers, in you guys' opinion, of the move from Amazon? What's your thoughts? How deep in the enterprise does it go? How will this impact cloud migration? Is it going to change lift-and-shift to be more of a container strategy where you containerize it, then shift it? Some will not shift? What's your thoughts on the impact of cloud on-premise? >> So, I think there's three kinds of clouds. One is where you're trying to build any new applications in cloud which is where mostly Amazon comes in. Second is you can build a pre-made SaaS application. And third is the lift-and-shift. They're trying to still keep it tied to the data center, and putting some local in the cloud. And the third category is where latency matters. And just like virtualization, the last critical app to be virtualized was Exchange and SQL, right? When Exchange got virtualized, the data center opened the door, right? >> Yeah. >> The last critical app left in the way for major clouded option is, seems like Oracle. So which is where our RDS on-premise announced, which is where latency becomes key if you have to adopt some of those financial applications being built in the cloud where hyper-critical latency or uptime is needed. So that's a last hinge for some of the large enterprises to see more clouded option. >> Mike, talk about the product innovations. So people that don't know Druva, they see a lot of hype out there in this market. A lot of advertising, a lot of funding, venture-backed funding, you guys are startup. Pretty competitive. Where are you guys winning? What are the key innovations in the product that you guys have? Take a minute to explain your key value for your customers. >> Well, the first thing I think we want our customers to remember is if you're moving your workloads into an Amazon environment, or you're adopting cloud, we're the only natively architected solution. So just like you would have bought, a competitor for example in the VMware space, you're going to buy Druva because of its advantages to scale with Amazon in terms of its compute, to be able to allow you to tier into the various storage options that they create almost on a quarterly basis for you. But beyond all the infrastructure basics, we are converging services that otherwise were separate silos on-premises. So if you are a customer of one of the legacy providers, and you needed eDiscovery, you bought an eDiscovery product. You needed archive? You bought an archive product. You got backup, you bought backup product. The beauty of having a file system in the cloud is you can buy all of those operations against a single object store. So the definition's changing, we're offering that advantage. >> And one more point to it is also the go-to-market strategy. You saw David McCann this morning talk about Marketplace and how it's going to reshape the selling motion for them. And he mentioned Druva as the key Marketplace partner. With also tooling, or retooling the go-to-market motion of how customers wants to best buy a SaaS service and not a hardware, software model, impacting the real agility and time to market for businesses. >> Are you guys in the Marketplace? >> Absolutely. >> Yeah. >> You guys are on to something really big here and I think it's not well understood, the industry yet. I want to just think out loud for a minute. You mentioned that I got to buy eDiscovery, siloed app. 'Cause that's the old way. I mean, cloud's kind of a horizontally scalable fabric. Some of the best solutions aren't pure plays. So you guys are I think the first company of its kind that kind of is not in a category. I mean, I see how you want to be in a category. Gartner has the Magic Quadrant, backup and recovery, okay. You got to be in some and you win that one, you get some good marks on that. But cloud is more, it helps, maybe it could be leading backup and recovery, but it's not a solution for that. Just delivers value that happens to be for backup and recovery, powered by software. >> That's right. >> So this is the cloud dynamic of having the kind of scale. This is a whole new paradigm of software development. Your reaction to that, do you agree? >> Tell-- >> I totally agree. And I think you hit on two very important points. You know, one is data is a platform in the cloud, now it's a surface that you can operate on. You can add services, you can integrate with ecosystem services. Not everything is going to come from Druva. But unlike competitors, when you are with Druva, we are going to enable you to work with those providers. I think the second one, and the one, personally having come from an ISV environment, is this. If I have a great idea today, 65% of my customers wouldn't be in production with my idea for 2 1/2 years. >> Yeah, the time. >> That model's gone. If Amazon announces a service today as Jaspreet mentions, we want our customers to be taking advantage of that with their data today. >> Talk about the impact of the ecosystem that you guys are seeing, just thoughts on the industry. Jaspreet, you seem to have been around them. You've seen the movie a few times. What's coming? Because if these net-new workloads, again, you're going to hear Andy Jassy talk about this on the keynote tomorrow, new net-new workloads. AI's being powered, ML is being powered by compute availability. So that changes that industry. Kind of a slow, stuck in the mud for 20 years AI. You see Lumi's been around for not new science. But with compute, new magic happens. This the dynamic. What's your thoughts on the ecosystem. Those old solutions are going to die. There's going to be winners and losers. Who are the winners and who are the loser? >> I think the time will say how people take on the challenges. We believe that three core changes coming to cloud. One is serverless computing. In a big way. To drive the cost down of computing dramatically. And also converge the whole networking storage compute in a single mine center. Second is machine learning, or what in Druva we call AI of Things. How machine learning will be like mobility of 10 years ago to impact almost every single piece of software to make it smarter. >> Machine learning first is going to be a new trend. >> Exactly. >> We just called it right now on theCube. ML first. (Mike chuckling) >> And then the third trend is going to be around the nature of enterprise to analyze content. The whole Spark, or Kafka, or, the entire availability of metadata on your fingertips to sort of mine information, the available data, data on the platform, is going to be a predominant thing in the future. So put them together, the possibilities are limitless. You have a data platform which you can mine more cost effectively to the serverless, and be a lot more effective through machine learning. >> I think you guys are a data platform without a doubt. You're not backup and recovery. It's just one of the things you happen to do. And you need a category to start with. I mean, this is a data platform. And you're seeing that all over the place. I just saw a presentation from the FBI, counter-terrorism, they just can't put the puzzles together fast enough on these investigations 'cause the databases are everywhere. So just latency, talk about time to value, just ridiculous. Bad guys are winning. IT is going through the same thing. >> I think software in general has moved away from proprietary and more toward open standards, and so you're going to look for solutions that enable an ecosystem, that don't lock you into a container for one purpose, and we're taking a hold of that trend. >> Alright, guys, real quick, we going to end this segment. What's going on with Druva? Quick plug. How many people? What's on the roadmap? Where's the new innovation, where's the disruption coming? >> You take that? >> Roadmap, 600 people and growing. And the company was just an exciting place to be. Jaspreet mentions one of the most important things. Customer's think about three things. How much does it cost me? It it reducing my risk, or making me more agile? And we're focused on all three. You'll see us, serverless architecture's going to continue to reduce costs. Adopting Amazon storage tiers is going to help our customers reduce costs. From the making them better point of view, you're going to see more eDiscovery, legal hold, performance is going to improve, integration with premises, we got a lot going on at Druva. >> Lambda is so much faster than spitting up an instance, that's for sure. >> That's right, that's right. >> Your thoughts, final word. >> I think data science and machine learning is a big core focus of Druva. I think we have over 100 petabyte in management today. About, as he said, about 600 employees and growing very, very rapidly. How we monetize this 100 petabyte with the cloud through us, with customers, know how our knowledge is a big focus area for us. And also the data born in the cloud. The focus has shifted to your point of newer clouds. How do we tackle the new world clouds? Born in the cloud, born outside the core center of data center, and tackling those. A big focus for us going into next year. >> Congratulations, guys. Jaspreet, I know as founder it's always hard to stand up a company. You guys are doing well, congratulations. You got the right architecture, you got the right product roadmap. Congratulations, I'm looking forward to hearing more. Cloudification, new workloads, scale. This is the new buzzwords around competitive advantage and value. It's theCUBE bringing you all the coverage here from re:Invent. Stay with us for more after this short break. 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>> Announcer: Live, from Las Vegas, it's The Cube! Covering Veritas Vision 2017. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back to the Aria Hotel in Las Vegas, everybody. We are covering Veritas Vision 2017, and this is The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, with Stu Miniman and Mike Palmer is here, he's the Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer at Veritas. Mike, thanks for coming to The Cube. >> Thank you for having me here. >> Great keynote, yesterday. We see hundreds, if not thousands of these discussions, and talking head presentations, and yours was hilarious. Let's set up for the people who didn't see it, yesterday. Mike gets up there, and he's talking about the, there's a video that's playing about the end of the world. And the basic theme is that you didn't take care of your data, and now the world's coming to an end. Las Vegas was in shambles, and there were waterfalls running through the hotels, drones attacking people, and then you picked it up from there and then took it into, just a really funny soliloquy. But, where'd you come up with that idea? And, how do you think, I thought it went great, but how did you feel afterwards? >> Well, I can take only partial credit. I have an amazing creative team, and when you work at a company that's been doing, you know, large-scale enterprise data-center stuff, we know that part of our obligation for our audience is kind of making it more palpable for them, making it feel a little bit more, bringing the emotion to it. So we want to have a little bit of excitement in there. But at the same time, we have a real message, you know, and hopefully that came across, too. >> It did, and then, you know, but again, a lot of good humor, the megabytes, gigabytes, you know, up to zetabytes, yadabytes, Mike Tyson-bytes, on and on and on. (laughing) Very clever, so congratulations on that... >> Mike: Oh, thanks! >> We really enjoyed it. Mixed things up a little bit. So, and again, very transparent. We talked about the UX, not the best. You're not happy with it. >> Mike: Right. >> And again, very transparent about that, I think that's a theme of many successful companies, today. But, so, let's start with, sort of, what does it take as the Chief Product Officer, to transform a company from somebody who's been around since 1983, into a modern, you know, cloud-like, hyper-scale, you know, set of service and software offerings. >> That's a big question, but I can tell you the first thing that it takes, the most important thing that it takes, is the best engineering team in the world. You can do a lot of things around the outside, we need to fix our UX, we know that, often considered that to be the kitchens and bathrooms of our house remodel. But if your foundation's broken, if your framing isn't there, you really don't have much of an asset to put on the market. We have a great engineering team, we are releasing products at a velocity that is incomparable in the enterprise ISV space, and we're super proud of that. So I think that's the number one thing. I think number two is the other thing, that we're the envy of the industry, for, and that is, an amazing install-base of customers. Very hard to name a fortune 2000 company that isn't a significant customer of Veritas, so we have a great basis to collaborate and innovate. You know, the rest, we know we have some work to do as we bring it into the modern age. You know, we talked a lot about the fact that workloads are changing in data centers, architectures are changing, we're establishing new partnerships with some of the sponsors that you see here today, like Microsoft, like Google, like IBM, and Oracle, and others. And, you know, it takes a village and they're helping us move into the next 10 years. >> Stu: You know, Mike, talk a little bit about the transition from, you know, software that lived on servers, to now, well, cloud is just isn't somebody else's servers, I think, is the word for that. >> Mike: Right. >> You know, it definitely, we've talked many times this week, you know, Veritas was software-defined before there was such a thing, used to be the FUD from the traditional players, that it was like, oh, you can't trust stuff like that, and now, of course, they're all software-defined and, you know, talking about that, too, so, what does that mean, going to kind of, being completely agnostic, for where things lived, and some of the intricacies of trying to work with, you know, some of the big and small cloud-players? >> A lot of questions in there, and I think David Noy, who I know you guys are going to talk to later, is going to talk a bit more specifically about this, but one of the first things you have to keep in mind, is if you're building software to be software-defined, then you have to build it without considering the hardware platform that you may deliver it on. And I think that's where some of our competitors get it wrong, they can say that they're software-defined, but the litmus test is, can I really pick up this software without modification, and go run it in one of those hyper-scalers? Or put it on one of the white boxes that I went into the market and procured and integrated myself? Veritas has been doing that for a long time. In fact, if you really look at Veritas's core, we're an integrator. We've been an integrator of applications, through the protection space, in our file-system and our info-scale technologies, we are integrators of operating systems, when you look at hyper-scalers, they're just the next operating system. Someone else's hardware, as you said. So we look to protect our customers in terms of their choices, make flexibility a real part of the multi-cloud architecture they're putting together, still doing the things we do well with protection, and ultimately layer on that last little bit when we're talking software-defined and that is not just focus on the infrastructure, but really aspire to this, how do I better manage data and get value from data? >> You know, Mike, I want to dig one level deeper on that. So, the cloud providers, it's all well and good to say, yeah, I'm agnostic, but each of them have their own little nuances. It's, at least today, it's not like, oh, I choose today to wake up and this one has cheaper prices, and it's not a commodity, it's not a utility, and each one of them have services that they want you to integrate with, have to have deeper, how do you balance that, you know, integration, how much work's done, where the customers are pulling you, how does that product portfolio get put together? >> That's an excellent question and I will be fully honest, that a year ago we thought about the answer to that question very differently than we do today. You know, a year ago, I think we were somewhat naive, and thought, hey, we're going to throw a thin layer of capability on top of the clouds, and in effect commoditize them ourselves, and hope our customers just move around as if there were no underlying services. And obviously if you're a cloud-provider, that is not an approach that you're a big fan of. (laughing) And frankly, it's a disservice to the customers, because they are building some really valuable services, and they are differentiating themselves. Our approach has changed, our approach today is a very deep-level integration with each cloud provider, and the specialization they're bringing to the market, without sacrificing the portability, without sacrificing the built-in protections that the cloud providers aren't putting on their platforms and don't want to put on their platforms. And again going back to this idea of data, ultimately, if it's someone else's hardware, in effect, in some cases, someone else's application, it's always your data, and how we are servicing that data is really the key. >> So, that's really hard work. In a lot of cases, you have to interface with very low-level, primitive APIs from the cloud service providers. How do you, sort of, balance your resources, or a portion of your resources, between doing that, because you guys, I call it the compatibility matrix, all kinds of data stores, all kinds of clouds, every one of those is engineering resources. And it seems that's a key part of your strategy, but you got to be sacrificing something, which is maybe, you know, the next widget on your existing products. How do you think about proportioning those? >> You know, at Veritas, in a way, the emergence of the cloud ecosystem actually improves that situation for us. We're carrying 30 years of operating systems that have come and gone, that have incremented versions, and our customers often strand or isolate single examples of those boxes, from 20 years ago that they expect us to test all of our software against, on their behalf. (laughing) For example, right, and so when you look at where we are today, there are five or 10 cloud providers, versus hundreds of operating system versions, and application, we have no problem supporting the proliferation in cloud, we actually welcome the ability to support those... >> Stu: You're much happier with the one version of AJUR, as opposed to the old Patch Monday. >> Exactly right, and you know, they upgrade the whole thing at once... >> Yeah. >> They issue a couple new services, and we adapt 'em, no problem. >> Am I thinking about it the wrong way? Because, while that's true, and I understand that, but within an individual cloud, you could have 15 data services. I think about AWS data services, their data pipeline is increasingly complex, so. Doesn't that complexity scale in a different direction? >> Mike: It scales differently for sure, but I would give a lot of credit to the cloud providers, because they're taking a lot of the regression testing that we used to have to do, for example, with application providers and operating system providers who didn't think about us when they were building their products. The cloud providers take accountability for regression testing all of the things that they release to their customers. So when we adopt an API, we're fully confident that that API works in the context of that cloud environment. So that's off our plate. It really isolates the need for us to simply test that API against our environment. >> Dave: OK, so much more stable and predictable environment for you. I want to ask you, I've heard the term modern data protection a lot, what is modern data protection? Everyone wants to be next-gen, how do you define modern data protection? >> Mike: And this is something we're super passionate about, because our industry has been around for quite a long time, and you get terms thrown out there, like legacy or modern, and everyone's fighting for brand recognition, and kind of, end of the growth spaces in the market. For us, it actually is very simple. We recognize that there are a lot of different techniques to protect data, we think of these protection schemes like lots of different insurance policies, and lots of different tools in your toolbox. Where Veritas is going to win, and continues to win, is that we can offer our customers all of those techniques. We're not trying to convince them that one technique is so much more special than another one, that they need to diversify and create complexity in their environment, so we talk about modern data protection as the ability to choose snapshots, or back-ups, or copy data management, or workload migration, in the future there will be other ways to do this: continuous data protection, or scale-out platforms for cloud providers. These are just techniques inside of a Veritas portfolio, as opposed to stand-alone companies that create complexity for our customers. So, modernization is choice. >> Dave: OK, so you have this awesome install-base. Bill Coleman said to us yesterday, in response to a similar but related question, that it's ours to lose. And the question that we have is, as you look at that install base, you got to get them onto this modern data platform. How do you do that? Do you write some abstraction layer? You talked about that thin layer in the cloud, you must have thought about doing that. Is that what you're doing? How is that going? What does that journey look like? >> Mike: You know, that is one of the most fundamental strategy questions for Veritas. And one of the things we recognized early on, is that while we do have an amazing install base of customers, and those customers are hyper-scaled themselves, you're talking about customers with tens of thousands of servers running our software, both on the storage and the protection site, so the thing that we cannot ask them to do is continuously upgrade their environment to take advantage of new features. We will put out one-to-two major releases of our software, particularly on a protection side, annually. But we're innovating at a far greater pace than that, so we've made some conscious choices to create new architectures for our customer that are workload-specific, so Cloud Point, being a great example, coming out in July, our Object Store announcements, underpinning our next generation protection solutions. So they have modern storage capabilities, our second example. But pulling them together is where only Veritas can offer a customer a complete catalog of that data. So, combining your net back-up catalog with Cloud Point, for example, with your storage, with what you've put into cloud, provides a customer, for the first time, kind of a complete view of the secondary estate. And so, as long as we get that right, we don't have to upgrade, we don't have to seed, what we have to do is enable our customers, through simple adoption of new tools, provide that visibility over the top, and I think that they'll be good to go. >> So that's kind of like a, I think of a term, backward compatibility, is essentially what you're providing for your install base, is that right? >> Mike: That's exactly right. Providing, and this is where API-based infrastructure and service-driven architectures help us a lot. We don't have to fully instantiate a code-base every time that we want to offer a service to a customer. >> Dave: There aren't many independent, in fact there aren't any independent, is one, two-and-a-half billion dollar software companies in your space, but there are many emerging guys, who are getting a lot of attention, well-funded, some, you know, hitting that kind of, 100 million dollar revenue mark, at least it appears that way. How do you look at those guys? What do you learn from them? You know, Branson said today, you know, you learn by listening and watching, in this case. You're watching the market, obviously, what are you seeing there, it's the hottest space in the infrastructure market right now, is your space and security. Are the two, you know, smoking hot spaces. What are you observing, and what are you learning? >> And I think the direct answer to your question is probably the user. You know, and I think that's the lesson of the industry even over the last 15 years, is that when a new workload arises, it's creating a new user inside the enterprise IT department. And that user often gets to determine all of the services that they need to make themselves successful. If that is a cloud workload, and they need availability services, or they need protection services, they want that to integrate in the same place that they buy in provision their cloud workload. If it's a container workload it's the same. We saw the rise of some of our competitors that got to multi-hundred million dollar revenue streams, by focusing on a single user, and a single type of transaction, with a single type of interface. And Veritas kind of lost its way, I think, a little bit, back in that time. So what we are watching today, is who are our users? What workloads are emerging? What sort of interfaces do we need to develop for those users? Which is why we made our UX statements as strongly as we did. We're committed to those. That is going to be the future of Veritas, it's serving the broadening user-base inside of enterprise. >> Dave: You're seeing a lot of discussion in the industry around design thinking, I know we're out of time, here, but, you know, you see companies, like, for instance, Charles Phillips's company, Infor, bought a company called Hook and Loop, and they're all about design, and, how is design thinking fitting into your, sort of, UX/UI plans? >> I mean, the parlance that we use internally is jobs to be done. Right, we clearly want to create a very consistent user experience, and look and feel, we want our customers to be proud to be Veritas customers. But we have to be super cognizant of, what is the job they're trying to get accomplished? And allow the system to be designed around accommodating that. If that is, I want three workflows in three steps or less, can I do that? It could be, I have a very complicated job and I want the ability to control very granular things, do I have an interface to do that? So, if we know the user and the job to be done, we can create a consistent look and feel, I think that we are, we're going to not only ride the wave, of change inside of our particular industry, but I think we're going to wind up in a consolidation space where we're a big winner. >> All right, last question, the bumper sticker on Vision 2017, as the trucks are pulling away from the area, what's the bumper sticker? >> Mike: Secondary data is your most under-utilized asset, and a platform provider is what you need to take advantage of it. >> Dave: All right, Mike, thanks very much for coming to The Cube. Congratulations, and good luck. >> Thank you for having me. >> All right, you're welcome, keep right there, buddy, Stu and I will be back with our next guest. The Cube, live we're live from Veritas Vision 2017. Be right back.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering VMworld 2017 brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Hi, welcome back to theCUBE live from VMworld day one, really exciting day that we're having so far. I'm Lisa Martin with my co-host Dave Vellante and we're joined by a CUBE alumni and a new CUBE guest. Welcome back to theCUBE Ruya Barrett, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Dell EMC. >> Thank you, thanks for having me. >> Good to have you here and we also want to welcome Mark Wiseley, the CIO of Palmer Chiropractic College, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, it's great to be here. >> It's great to have you guys. So one of the things we were talking about before we went live is backup. Is backup back? Is backup sexy again? It's hot, why is backup so hot, Ruya? >> Oh my god, yeah, it is. I started years ago and I was in data protection and got forward 20 years, it's back in data protection. It's hotter than ever. In the last six years, I think there's been over 5 billion dollars invested in this space whether from venture capital or big companies and it's hot because of what's happening in the customer's environment. We see a huge restructuring of data centers. So before data used to be in a couple of locations that we called data center and now it's really much more about centers of data, data is moving out of the four walls, moving closer to where decision making is which is with the business, out in the geos so it's moving to the edge and also just cloud. Cloud is really - and cloud deployments are really reshaping where customer's data is so now that data's no longer in a building. How do you secure it? How do you protect it? Where is it? Who owns it? Those are becoming more and more prevalent questions. So that's why backup is sexier than ever. >> So is that what's - What are the drivers for you in terms of your backup? I mean, what keeps you up at night? You wake up in the morning, what are you thinking about in the backup context? >> Well, for us, you know, it's really about not having to think about it, you know, making sure you've got a solid solution that's there to backup that data and make sure it's available when you need it and where you need it and the Dell EMC product we put in place gave us that opportunity where we can backup our servers, our desktops, our laptops, it doesn't matter whether they're offsite or onsite. They can be anywhere, it gets backed up quickly and it doesn't interfere with what they're doing. Users don't want to be interrupted with a backup and have to sit there and wait for it so it's been a great solution for us. >> So Mark, you've been - You've got over 20 years experience in the industry. You've been a CIO at Palmer for nearly two years now. One of the things that I read about you is that you're attracted to neglected IT systems. I imagine you saw a tremendous amount of opportunity but we talked about kind of bringing sexy back with state of protection but you were instrumental in kind of changing the IT direction at Palmer back to Dell EMC, tell us a little about that and why that was so important to you as the leader of IT there. >> Well, when I came into Palmer, we had a number of different issues. Everything from performance to backup windows that we couldn't hit. We were still using tape backup. There was a number of different issues and so we really needed a platform that would be able to come in and solve all those issues and also do it as quickly as possible so we put in a Dell EMC VxBlock which allowed us to, I kind of look at it as a data center in a box type of thing, I mean it solved our networking issues and our backup issues and then because we have multiple sites, we were able to actually back up our data and replicate it to some of our other data centers across the US so it was just a perfect solution for us and then one of the real nice things is when we actually put that product in Dell EMC came in and helped us to implement it and within three days of them arriving we were actually running production workloads on that system so it worked out great for us. >> You know, that reminds me, so Ruya, I've asked this of some of your colleagues, backup forever has been a bolt on and the VxBlock triggered something in my mind, I remember the original Vblock. I remember it said, oh no, Serves up 5,000 vms and my first thought was how do you back that up? And there wasn't and integrated answer. This is a long, long time ago. There is today. >> Ruya: Yeah, absolutely. >> Maybe talk about the philosophy of backup as a core component of a deployment and what you guys specifically have done there. >> Absolutely, we actually today had a really exciting announcement that would really be under what I would call more of a transformational approach to data protection and really the move that we see is it used to be that backup used to be kind of an afterthought, something that you roll out your applications and you're like oh yeah, we have to protect them and figure out what you're going to do and implement what you need from an infrastructure standpoint. We're really seeing a much more of a move to a source-based data protection so we're building data protection capabilities in directly to the applications so today we announced data protection suite for applications and a whole new version of it which really enables the native UIs that the database administrators are using to protect their own workloads and this source-based data protection is going to be more and more critical especially as data is moving closer and closer to where it's getting created so you need to protect it at the source not in the background, not as an afterthought. We also are seeing convergence which is your question around the VxRail. We have integrated data protection now built into VxRail deployments and we've had it for a couple of years now and this year at Dell EMC World, we introduced IDPA, Integrated Data Protection Appliance. Again, bringing all the components that a customer would need, integrated data protection storage, integrated data protection software, into an appliance model so it's all about simplicity, just making it easier for customers to be able to deploy. >> So Mark, you're obviously a VMware customer and as a VMware customer, your backup has sort of been subservient to the VMware momentum. You remember the ascendancy of VMware totally changed your backup requirement. You get less physical servers, backup was very consumptive of resources so you had to think about that. Fast forward, now this whole cloud world, what are you doing in cloud? How is it effecting your backup strategy, specifically? >> So we're looking at, you know, the cloud is one of the areas where obviously we're exploring opportunities. One of the reasons that we put in the VxBlock and the data domain and the data protection suite was really to set us up to be able to make that transition into the cloud simpler. You know, now we have the tools in place so we can decide when we need to move it to the cloud, what data do you need to move in the cloud, where do we need that data to be and it just gives us lots of opportunities and lots of options so >> So let me take that one step further, let's define cloud a little differently, not just as a place you put data but as I want to bring a model to the data wherever the data lives so it's self-service and it's automation and all those things you associated with cloud maybe bringing that on prem or putting it in the cloud. Is that something that as an IT practitioner, you see as viable or is the cloud no, no, it's in Amazon or Google or some other external location? Are you trying to bring that cloud model to the business? >> Yeah, I think as we look at the cloud, I think a lot of it is just options. Figuring out which option or which model or which provider you're going to utilize both from a cost perspective as well as regulatory compliance pieces come into play so you know as we look at cloud, we look at kind of what we've put on site as kind of a private cloud or a cloud in a box type thing and it just opens up lots of different opportunities for utilizing Amazon or Azure or whatever that is. >> So one of the things that I wanted to ask you Mark is really about, you know, Palmer School of Chiropractor was chartered in 1907. >> Mark: 1897. >> Right and then I think I saw that it was chartered, maybe a different name in the early 1900's. >> Mark: Yep. >> It's been around for a very long time so you know, as we see people moving from virtualization to cloud, we're seeing certifications change, you've seen a lot of evolution in data protection Ruya. What's the evolution from an education perspective or maybe even a cultural perspective at Palmer, an organization that's been around for well over 100 years. What's the shift that you have maybe driven within your IT experts to improve their education to remain at Palmer and to help you attract new talent as technologies evolve? >> Well, I think, you know, one of the reasons that Palmer decided to really look at IT, we're kind of the trusted leader in Chiropractic, the founder of Chiropractic and they really wanted to up their game. We're a higher ed institution so most of our students come from large universities and they're used to a lot of technology and instant on and all these different things and so we really wanted to make sure that we could provide an experience for them that gave them that instant on as well as there's a lot of online experiences after you graduate, you know, there's a lot of CEUs and things that they need to come back for and so we're starting to build some of our online programs to give them the opportunities without them having to come on site for everything so it just opens up a whole world of opportunity. >> I had one last question for you Mark, it's the why Dell EMC question, I mean, you've got a lot of options out there, we've talked about all this investment going in, why Dell EMC? What's attractive to them? And a two part question. What's on their to-do list in your view? >> Well I think the thing with the Dell EMC is it really was the one company that gave us everything that we needed. You know, it gave us that full solution, covered all of our issues, everything from performance with the servers and network and data backups and recovery. It just gave us everything that we needed and it was one solution from one vendor so if we do have support issues, we have one vendor to reach out to. We don't have three different vendors or having vendors fighting with each other. It's one solution, one vendor for support, and it just gave us everything that we needed. >> Excellent. Well, Ruya, I heard you say that at Dell EMC World on theCUBE moving from data centers to centers of data. Pat Gelsinger may have gotten that from you, he said that on stage this morning. >> Ruya: I don't know, you heard it first. >> As things are evolving, we thank you for sharing your insights. It sounds like there's a lot of opportunity. Same thing at Palmer, congratulations on the evolution that you have helped >> Thank you. >> To charter there and we want to thank you both taking the time to chat with Dave and myself this afternoon. >> Ruya: Thank you so much. Nice seeing you guys. >> And for our guests and my co-host Dave Vellante, you're watching theCUBE live from VMworld 2017 day one. Stick around, we'll be right back.

>> I'm Stu Miniman With The Cube. Joined here by Ed Palmer who's the COO of Winslow Technology Group. We're at their Dell EMC User Group. Ed Thanks so much for joining me. >> Thank you. >> Alright so Ed, we talked to Scott earlier and Scott gave us a lot on the history of the company. You recently joined Winslow Technology Group, >> I did >> but you have history with Scott. So, tell us a little bit about your background and what brought you over to WTG. >> Sure, so as Scott may have told you we worked together earlier in our career and I was a System Engineer. He was the Account Exec. We worked very effectively together. And we've reunited later in our careers. >> Alright and tell us a little bit about your role as a COO. You were an SE, I believe that's a part of what you have in your work. >> Yes So, the way we've defined my role. I have responsibility for sales operations, for professional services, solutions architecture, and marketing. >> Alright, so luckily things aren't changin' that much in the industry at all. Wait do you know, do the companies you're working with they haven't open acquired since you came on board right? So what is this, the pace of change and the breadth and depth of what's happening in the industry, how does that impact your organization? >> Great question. So Obviously the industry is changing all the time. It's a very dynamic industry. And obviously that has an impact on our operational effectiveness. So one of the things I'm interested in is how do we streamline operations? How do we work more effectively with our partners? How do we fully maximize the partner programs and fully leverage all of the eccentrics? >> Yeah, gosh, I have to think. We were talking to Jeremy Burton earlier and said you know you don't want to do five year planning. You can maybe do two year planning. And really it needs to be much more on a granular level. Every company they're dealing with they have different financial years. Their incentive plans change all the time. What's kind of the north star for your team? How do they make sure they kind of have a steady push on things but are flexible and can act with the changes that happen? >> Sure. So let me start by saying the Winslow Team has experienced phenomenal growth over the past three to five years. And we're looking to continuing to extend that growth over the next three to five years. What we do is we put together business plans and we put together plans by partner. And to your point, those plans are forward looking, but they're also broken out by quarter. So we're actually quarterly driven and we drive our demand generation activities around those plans. >> Alright Ed, talk about the skill set and how do you keep up with training for the organization? >> That's a great question. So as a Dell EMC Titanium Partner, it is quite a challenge to keep up with all of the training certification requirements. We actually got a jump on it earlier this year and we've defined our entire training plan for the year. In fact, I would say we're about 80% complete with those plans. They do require a lot of time, but they're important to maintaining titanium level. >> Yeah, So, there's the requirements that you have from your partners, but then, Winslow Technology Group usually is pretty early on a lot of technologies. Scott in his opening remarks this morning, talked about Compellent, Hyper-Converged, Hybrid Cloud, being some of the early edges. How does your organization play a part of that and how do you kind of do the communication with the field and the customers to know not only what to jump on but how to get your whole team embracing and pushing those items? >> Sure. So what we like to say is we are not trying to be all things to all customers. And I would say we are differentiated with our approach. So what we look to do is define game-changing technologies. You may have heard Scott talk about that. And what we look to do is provide deep expertise in those technologies. So that drives our training certification plan and we're looking to fully develop our Pre-sales Solution Architects and Post-Sales Professional Services Consultants to be experts in those technologies. >> Alright and I'm curious Ed, What's your hiring plan like? Where do you find good people? How do you maintain and keep some great people? >> Sure. Most of it, quite frankly, is through word of mouth through our employees. And I would say the majority of our employee base are through referrals. So that's typically how we're finding great people. >> Alright. We've talked earlier about how there's no shortage of change going on there. What's exciting you about what's happening in the industry and anything that concerns you about what's happening? >> Well we've talked about the dynamic nature of the industry, the constant change. I think what's really exciting is the whole move to Hyper-Converged. We've seen a lot of interest in Hyper-Converged Solutions. The move to Cloud obviously. We've seen a lot of interest in point technologies like software-defined data center, software-defined networking, and I think what's exciting for us is working with our breadth of partners to really understand how those technologies and solutions address the business needs of our customers. >> Alright, Ed want to give you the final word. What were you hoping to gain and when you come into this event and as you look at the customers, what are you hoping that they take away from this event? >> Sure, for me personally, this is my first Winslow Users Group Event. I think it's phenomenal. And I think for our customers it's an opportunity to be exposed to the technology, to ask questions of our subject matter experts, and I think come away from the event thinking about how the technology can be implemented in their environment to maximize their business. >> Alright, well, Ed Palmer, welcome to your first event. It's our first time here. Thank you so much for having us. We'll be back with more coverage here from the WTG Dell EMC User Group. You're watching The Cube.

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live from Washington D.C. It's the Cube. Covering .NEXT Conference. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to .NEXT in D.C. everybody. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm with my co-host Stewart Miniman. This is the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events and extract a signal from the know as we hear it. .NEXT, Nutanix's customer event. Two days of wall to wall coverage. Julia Palmer is here. She's a research director at Gartner. My new best friend. (laughs) Great to see you again. We had a great dinner last night. I really enjoyed the conversation. Thanks for coming on the Cube. >> Oh, my pleasure. >> So, it's a good little event here. Lot of excitement. But what's your take? You are a former practitioner, now an analyist. You were in the heart of technology at GoDaddy. You really know the market, the products. What do you make of what's going on here at .NEXT? >> You know when hyper convergence first emerged it was all about saving money. It was all about going from infrastructure that was maybe too complex and too expensive to something that maybe, based on commodity will bring lower acquisition costs. But this not the story today at all. That's what, I think my IT leaders are telling me. They're not going after acquisition costs. They're not looking at things and just comparing by the capex. They're looking at the bigger picture and how will this technology will help them to enable business. So that's I think a the biggest difference now. Going from something as simple as, is it going to to be more expensive? Less expensive? To how will it move the needle to my enterprise, to my organization? >> Dave: So that's certainly the messaging that you're hearing from, from Nutanix. As a practitioner, do you buy that? Do you believe that they're more than just an infrastructure company? That they are a transformative force in the industry. >> Julia: Yeah, I hear a lot, you know. I moderated a panel today with three customers and one of them said, you know, I'm in the health care business. I'm here to save lives. I'm not here to reinvent my own hyper converge infrastructures. So, he wants to focus on what's important for his end users. And he wants to stop manage (mumbles). That's just not a focus. And I hear it over and over again from different types of customers. >> Dave: Hmm, now you were not a Nutanix customer previously, correct? >> No. But you did see a lot of different infrastructure products? >> Julia: Absolutely. >> As a practitioner what bothered you about what the vendor community did. What were your likes and dislikes? >> Julia: Everything. Everything bothered me. >> Everything bothered you. I was part of pretty large organization and when you have a big footprint you have big problems. And one of them, for example, was that we would have an outage and we reach out to the vendor and they would tell us, you know, you hit a bug and we have a fix and we will give you the fix and you will be good to go tomorrow. Nevermind the outage that you had and impacted end users. So now a lot of vendors are using predictive analytics. Cloud based analytics, >> Right. to see if there's anything in your existing environment that's susceptible to existing bugs and proactively reach out to you to provide a fix. So I was just thinking, looking back, how many outages I could have prevented if this technology was available when I was running it. >> Stewart: Yeah, Julia, I mean we know that companies for so long, you know, infrastructure, they spent so much of their time, you know, running around, patching it, fixing it, worrying about that. Hyper converge now is trying to talk about, you know, where it fits into the whole cloud picture, which is mostly about an operational model. Where do you see along those trends. Do you believe that hyper converge really fits into a cloud strategy or is it cloud washing from a bunch of infrastructure people? You know? >> I think it has a potential. I don't think it's there today. But I think it has a great potential because when I talked to Gartner end users about, like, why hyper converge? And I actually did some total cost of ownership research, what they all told me that looking back they realized how much OpEx it saved them. And they say it was very difficult. You kind of had to take our chance on it because upfront you can't predict the outcome. Is it really going to be more simple? What does simple mean? What's key performance indicator and simple you can put. So, but looking back, the guys that implemented, they all told me that 60 percent of OpEx they saved. Meaning they didn't last with infrastructure (mumbles). How do they do this? They stop manage components. They start managing VM's. So next step is stop manage VM's, start managing applications and that's what cloud management is all about. Getting out of infrastructure management all together and deliver a business what they want. And usually, they want support for their applications. >> Dave: So, my understanding is that Gartner has analysts that service the vendor community, the executive community, and the practitioner community. You are a direct practitioner, >> Yes. Advisor. >> I deal with IT leaders. Okay, your peeps. (laughs) I think you mentioned to me last night that you've had hundreds of conversations and you've only been at Gartner, what, six months? >> Two years. >> Oh, two years, sorry. I apologize for that. Okay, so in the two years, hundreds of conversations. Is that fair? What kinds of conversations are you having with clients around infrastructure? What are the challenges that they're having? And what are you advising them? I know there are many, many, but maybe you can summarize the top ones. >> That's a very good question. I actually want to write research about it. Top five questions about hyper converse people asking so I've been thinking about it for a while. So, different types of customers, new customers are asking questions about, is it ready? Should I go for it? Why would I go for it? Why can't I keep my (mumbles) infrastructure design? What should I look for as a new key performance indicators? It's not the same way, how would you judge it here. Then existing hyper converge customer are looking for what's next step in hyper convergence. Is it ready for prime time? Is it ready for mission critical applications? Because they're looking at the boxes and they look at the commodity hardware and they still feel uncertain. Can it really run something that they're a proprietary hardware used to run. So we explore the advantages of software defined, software defined storage. Value is in the software. You know, being backed up by software defined storage, my favorite subject, is a, is a, you know abstracting and distributing data that you don't worry about us anymore. So scale out storage replacing proprietary architecture can provide you same level of uptime and performance especially with new, you know, flash options. So that's a popular question. Number three is just the, you know, we leave it to in the age of a compressed differentiation I believe my colleague Dave Russell calls it, and there's a small differences between the vendors and end users are not aware of this. And they can be critical for particular use case. So they always ask strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats on each and every one them. Because we have a lot of solutions on hyper converge now. A lot of vendors, prominent vendors now join the market. So end users are a little bit confused. How do I navigate through this ocean of different hyper converge solutions. >> Stewart: Yeah, so Julia, Nutanix helped really drive a lot of this awareness for the hyper converge market. Now, every company, you know, all the big players have at least one, if not multiple solutions out there. How do you see Nutanix? Are they differentiating themselves? Are they, I know they're trying move beyond kind of the hyper converge label, ya know. What are the doing good? What would you like to see them do more? >> Julia: Yeah, Nutanix is a, you know, was one of the leaders from the very beginning. And, you know, remains the leader. They obviously succeed in at least in a lot a features. And a very fast release cycle of new features. It's easy when you have one focus, you know. Other companies have so many different areas they need to focus or protect and Nutanix doesn't have this problem. And also being able to mix different hardware, I think it's an advantage, you know. Being able, the customer needs to make a choice, you know. I think the structure of the future is going to be all about choice. It's less about, ya know, this is a lock in. I want to pick my hyper visor. I want to pick my hardware and move on. >> Stewart: So one of the things I think Nutanix does best when they're not positioning themselves as a storage solution, however, cause the storage market is tremendously competitive and there's always the, you know, there's the next technology, the next wave. There's so many competitors out there. I mean, do you think things like NVMe over Fabric are going to just, you know, have the potential to disrupt everything that Nutanix is doing? You know, what are some of the big threats to, ya know, their current position? >> Actually, I just wrote a research about how NVMe and NVMe over Fabrics is going to disrupt and improve integrated and hyper converge systems. I think those technologies and it's like NVMe without NVMe over Fabric. It's like, I call it, it's like barbecue without barbecue sauce, right? So the NVMe and NVMe over Fabric has potential to boost performance of hyper converge systems on par with what a solid state, erase today do. So I think a, and it's commodity hardware, right? We're not talking about anything proprietary. So when a we going to move towards this territory when NVMe and NVME over Fabrics become mainstream maybe two years from now, three maybe years from now. I think everybody can enjoy shared distributed storage performance. And, but honestly, your question about storage, like do you need to position yourself as a storage company or not, the major difference about different hyper converge products, in my opinion, is how they do storage. Other than this, it's the same flavors of hyper visor, it's the same commodity hardware. So what do we have different? The ways you did data services. The ways you position your storage. You, you deliver the storage services. >> Stewart: So, you know what, I'm curious. When I read Wall Street stuff about Nutanix they seem to overreact to every bit of news so, you know, the Dell relationship, ya know, is challenging there for that to head win. Oh wait, the Google announcement seems to be a great tailwind, ya know, the big bump in the stock today. Do you see those partnerships as critically important or is it the vision and execution of Nutanix and what they're doing with their customers? >> I think so. I think we live in the age when a ecosystem support is everything, ya know. People not necessarily today go to the public cloud to save money. They go for ecosystem support. To expand their services and their capabilities. That's why, ya know, embracing the cloud and not trying to position yourself against is the right way to go. I think we all need to embrace cloud and find the way that will benefit the end users. >> Dave: Um hmm, so you were sharing with, you spend a fair amount of time, all Gartner analysts who do these things do on magic quadrants. They, we put a lot of effort into them. A lot of people criticize magic quadrants. I think they're unfairly criticized. I know how much work goes into them. >> Thank you. And they are fact based opinions if I could categorize them like that, right? Is that fair? So, do you do one on hyper converged infrastructure or converged? Do you separate converged from hyper converged? How do you look at the market? >> Julia: So last year magic quadrant was integrated systems, which is converged and hyper converged. But what Gartner does is actually, every year we look at the market and we adjust our inclusion criteria. We adjust market definition. So, I don't think it's a big secret that hyper conversion is leading this market right now. And, honestly, in conversion infrastructure, if you look at conversion infrastructure, it's very similar. The only difference in conversion infrastructure is how you do storage. Which storage area you are using. So it becomes less strategic to even analyze conversion infrastructure. So you will see this year, I cannot break all of the news here, but much more emphasis on software driven, hyper converged infrastructure. Not services. Not the appliances, but more software. >> Stewart: I love to hear that cause at Wikimon when we called the category "server sand" so like VM ware, major player both as a partner in Nutanix. A competitor in Nutanix. Ya know, I know there like, they don't show up on the Gartner magic quadrant because they don't fit into that environment. Also the lines between converge, hyper converge, and software defined storage seem to be blurring a lot. I mean, in some ways they're just different ways of packaging. Some of the others, they, hyper converged is a, ya know, delivery option for what they're doing, so. >> Julia: Exactly. >> Where do you see it going, ya know, it's, ya know, obviously beyond the appliance but, ya know. Say there's the Google announcement today. Where do you see, ya know, a company like Nutanix fitting into this hybrid or multi-cloud world? >> Differentiating on software, this is the name of the game, right? So, if you can have a portable software you can run on any hardware, you obviously can continue and run on any cloud as well. And this is an idea. You said it absolutely right. Like software defines storage. It's not a technology. It's a delivery option. So customer needs to be in charge of their options. Do I want to deploy on premises? Do I want to go on cloud? Do I want to have an appliance? Do I want to buy a software, bring your own hardware? All of those choices need to be given to the end user. They need to decide which way they want to go. >> Dave: So, we're going to have Chad Saccage on tomorrow and it's obviously interesting, we see Nutanix selling through Dell. We were there two years ago when that announcement was made. Great, ya know, business. Terrific. But as you were saying, converged and hyper converged and software defined, they're all coming together now. What do you expect is going to happen with EMC and Nutanix? Do you have any... I don't want to use the prediction, but any scenarios that you can see developing there? >> I think, you know I hate to speculate, but I think both of those companies are extremely user oriented. So, if there will be demand for Nutanix that will continue to support Nutanix because they will do it right by the customers. And same with Nutanix, ya know, they never want to turn someone down saying it's not their problem. Both support them in parallel as long as demand is there. >> Dave: So let me ask the question differently, cause I agree with you. EMC, customer centric. Michael Dell, there's nobody more customer centric on the planet. Clearly Nutanix is customer focused. Having said that, if the three of us were advising Dell, EMC on what to do, we would say keep doing what the customers want. Great, check. But from a product roadmap standpoint, I don't know about you Stew, but I know I would push them to look at doing more of a hyper converge, software defined, like roadmap, as opposed to kind of bolted on V-blocks. Which got it all started. Would you agree with that? Or, do you think that's a waste of R&D? Just outsource it or OEM it? >> Software defined storage is hard to do. It's hard to do it from the ground up, ya know. Products need to mature, ya know, VMware, VSEN. It's a mature product. It's a good foundation for software defined storage and for hyper converged. Building something from the ground up, just to separated from VMware, it will be very difficult. >> Dave: Okay, well okay, right. Well then double down on VMware maybe is the advice there. Or maybe they're not really inquisitive right now because they have the debt service but over time maybe bring in startups to innovate there. Or maybe not because when you look at the Dell EMC deal from previous generations, there's a very successful deal. One of the most, probably the most successful storage deal in the history >> Stewart: Talking about the partnership? >> of storage. The partnership. >> Sure. Before Dell bought Compellent, then remember, Dell buys Compellent. I would look back on that and say Dell probably would have been better off just staying with EMC. Reselling EMC. I mean you were there during those days. I don't know. Was Compellent and EqualLogic, >> EqualLogic were those successful acquisitions in your view? In retrospect. >> Stewart: In retrospect they did pretty well but you're right Dave, the EMC partnership was way more money. I think by the time Dell bought EMC the internal Dell storage, ya know, revenue had grown to almost, or a, ya know, order of magnitude, the same size of EMC and they had to put a lot more emphasis into it. So, you know, better margins, ya know, just if they continue to partner. >> Dave: So maybe it's better for Dell to continue to partner is kind of your point. >> Stewart: Yeah. >> Julia: Absolutely. >> Uh huh, okay. Very diplomatic. (laughs) >> Julia: Would you expect anything else? (laughs) >> Julia, thanks so much for coming on the Cube >> Oh, thank you guys it was a pleasure having you. >> it was my pleasure >> Julia: Thank you for having me. >> You're welcome. Alright, keep it right there everybody. We'll be back to wrap right after this short break. This is the Cube. We're live from D.C. at Nutanix .NEXT. Be right back. (electronic music) >> Narrator: Robert Hershev.

(light music) >> Welcome back to Supercloud 22. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here Palo Alto for a big event. Supercloud 22, we've got a great ecosystem conversation here. Ramesh Prabagaran, who's the co-founder and CEO, Prosimo. Ramesh, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having me, John. >> So, I wanted to bring you in because we've had previous CUBE conversations around cloud networking, latency, you also have some, some pedigree, Viptela. The folks in the industry know that's been a deep tech company. >> Yep. >> You have been around the block. You've seen the movie before. You've seen the tech trends. You've seen the hype. You've seen the fluff. Where's the meat on the bone with Supercloud in your opinion? >> So it, it starts with what enterprises are struggling with, right? And if you take a very simple example, it's actually quite fresh in my mind because I was just having this conversation this morning. A large bank has an application sitting in AWS, right? And they have to provide the application access to the treasury, to their suppliers, to ticker feeds, to all their downstream partners, and so on and so forth. Guess what? They don't control, where all those things are. They're in very different regions and very different clouds. And so you, whether you like it or not, you have a problem here, right? And so it starts with, for the particular bank, what are the capabilities that they need, right? And so AWS provides a whole host of native capabilities, but they still need to build a few more things on top. So going by, essentially the definition of Supercloud, even within a single cloud you need to build a few more capabilities on top. That gets worsened by the fact that now you need to provide access to various other clouds, various other regions and, and so forth. So, whether we like it or not, this movie is here to stay. >> What's the difference between Supercloud and multi-cloud? Because multi-cloud, I've been saying, is not necessarily a market yet. >> Correct, yes. So, Supercloud is essentially the cloud native capabilities provided by the hyperscalers, get you probably 30, 40% of the way, right? But then, in order to deliver on a care about, right? In our case, from a cloud networking standpoint, that is experience, that's performance, reliability, zero trust access, and then so forth. You have to take that a little bit further, and so we have vendors, like us, that actually build capabilities on top of the hyperscalers, right? Now, even if you think of a single cloud, how you build that is different on AWS than it's on Azure, than on GCP. But do the customers care? No, they want to be able to consume it in exactly the same way across all of them. So, whether it's multi-cloud or a single cloud, you have a problem that is white space on top of the hyperscalers capabilities that you just need to build. >> And what problems is it solving today? Because again, I, again, multi-cloud, I've yet seen the problem. I kind of get what's happening. Multiple clouds do exist. Use cases matter, maybe best debri, but they're standalone. They're not really interoperating, so to speak. So people have been successful on, on public cloud. >> That's correct, yes. >> For use cases? >> Absolutely. So even if you take a single cloud, for example, right? You have multiple problems to, to address. So let's take the example of, I have users coming from various different regions, around the globe, and I have apps that are spread, maybe not across like all clouds, but single cloud, maybe multiple regions, right? Now, I have a reach problem, which is, I need to go from where the user is to where the application is sitting. I have an experience problem because if my spinning wheel shows up, I'm going to go crazy. I have a security problem because I want to make sure it's only me that have access to it, right? But does the cloud provider solve for this entirely? No, they give you the nuts, the bolts, or what we call ours essentially, what you need is a, is a latte. They give you really nice coffee beans, not just one flavor, 20 flavors of those. They give you raw sugar and a few other things. They give you five different flavors of milk, but you got to make your own latte. So, that's what we do. >> And this is where the infrastructure transformation's happening. >> Exactly. >> And the super paz layer, as Dave Vellante and I have talked about in cloud, is you have to integrate a native cloud. >> Correct. >> Which is beautiful. It's integrated, everything works together, there's a lot of lattes to be made or espressos. >> Exactly. >> I mean, tons of great things there. So, big check marks, double check, gold star for AWS. >> Correct. >> All good. Now, on premises, we've found that hybrid is a steady state. >> Exactly. >> Okay, that's cloud operations. Now, you got the edge. Where does the Supercloud strategy come in? For the folks watching there, it's like, "Hey, okay, I get that." "But I don't want to just buy into another vendor's hype." >> Absolutely. >> "I got to build my own cloud," to your point about the lattes. >> Correct. >> They have to make their own infrastructure an application environment to power the developer. >> Exactly. And, and hybrid is here to stay as, as you pointed out, right, John? So, I have my data center and let's say when most folks start out they start to like a single region of a single cloud, right? And what are you most concerned about there? Hey, can I migrate? Can I start to build applications in the public cloud, right? And all you care about is can you talk back into my data center? Like, as long as some basic hygiene is there that's all they care about, right? The problem happens when you go from, kind of, the first five EC2 instances to 50 to a hundred, then you have a few other things that you need to care about, right? That's really kind of where the, the Supercloud capabilities start to come in, right? Because you have the cloud native things you can make that work for the first few days, but then after that you need augmented capabilities. >> So Ramesh, some people will say, "Hey, John, Supercloud okay, it's funny, ha ha ha." But isn't it just SAS? >> No, SAS is a delivery mechanism, right? And so, so there is the capability and that is how do you want to consume, right? And so capabilities or cloud native capabilities or piece of software capabilities or (unintelligible) cluster form factor and so forth. How do you want to consume? Maybe it's a package form factor, it is a size, it could even be passive if it's sitting in the, in the element, and then so forth, right? And so you really want to distinguish those two. And, and, and that's how we see the, the industry evolve. >> Can Superclouds be specialty clouds? Like is Snowflake a Supercloud? Is Goldman Sachs financial cloud a Supercloud? >> Absolutely, right. So Supercloud is not like a, a conglomeration of multiple capabilities, right? It can be for a specific use case, it can be for a specific functionality. So we, we consider our capabilities by the definition as a Supercloud in, in networking, right? In cloud networking, in Prosimo. So, does that solve the entirety of what I want to do in the cloud? No, absolutely not. There's data, there's computers, a whole bunch of other things, but for a specialty you do have some Supercloud. >> Yeah, in fact, I had a note here. I was going to ask you will, when will there be specialty clouds, apps, identity, data, security, nteworking, we will see those? >> Absolutely, yeah. And, and those are slowly starting to brew, right? So you have, you have identity as one, you have networking as one, you have the zero trust piece as, as another one, you have data as a, as another one. So when all these things come together, absolutely. That's what, that's what enterprise customers care about. >> So I love infrastructure as code, that drove a lot of the evolution and revolution of DevOps. When are we going to see security as code and network as code? Or is it there? >> No networkers code, for sure. It's already, it's already there. It's probably in its early innings, I would say, but we are starting to see that already. The reason for that is really simple. Enough CIOs have yelled at their networking teams to say, "my app guys can get this done three," "four times a day, you get this done once a week." Right? And so, that has actually driven quite a bit of innovation, >> It's slow, >> It's slow, right? And so that's driven quite a bit of innovation. It all starts with, hey, can I build a Terraform provider and then just integrate into Terraform? But it doesn't, it doesn't stop there, right? There's a whole bunch of additional capabilities, a day in troubleshooting, a whole bunch of things that need to come together. But I would say networkers code has already started to, to, to take ship. >> Which, that's a great point about specialty clouds. What about vertical clouds too? 'Cause you got insurance, oil and gas, FinTech. Both sides of the stack can have specialty clouds. >> Absolutely, yeah. So, it, what's driving specialty clouds, right? Some of it is compliance, mainly because you just have to shard the data, and when you shard the data, the entirety gets, gets sharded, right? Some of it driven by use case, because some are a little more serverless, service mesh and intelligence focused, some are a little more infrastructure focused. So you do see that taking off. I would say we've seen a whole lot more, kind of, on the horizontal side, less on the vertical side, but that's really happening, right? >> Yeah, I think that, to me, indicates a Supercloud. The fact that the diversity of the application on the clouds themselves, someone could be spending, say, Liberty Mutual or Goldman Sachs. They were once spending that as CapEx. >> Exactly. >> Now it's OPEX, so they become a service provider. So, if you have scale with data and expertise, you become a Supercloud by default. And you don't have to pay for the CapEx, >> Yeah. You're already paying in. >> Exactly, yeah. >> And that's what snowflake basically did with data warehouse. >> That's right, yeah. >> I mean they're basically a data warehouse. Refactored on the cloud and then go, "whoa, let's go to Azure." >> Yeah. And, and where does that data decide do you ask that question? No, right? You just assume that, hey, retrospective of it's a single cloud, multiple regions, it's there. If it's stretched to multiple clouds, yes, it's just there, but you, you talk about like that. >> In our cloud already panel earlier, we talked about how companies are going fast on one native cloud, 'cause they don't want to have multiple development teams and different ops teams. They go all in say, hey, mostly AWS wins this, unless it's specially Azure productivity software or SQL database, go hard in on Amazon, get speed and velocity, get that flywheel, win, get scale, get value. Then go to Azure, provide that same value to that marketplace and other clouds. Then the next dot to connect is, can the customer have the same experience across the clouds? That's where it gets interesting. What's your thoughts on that? >> Actually, it gets interesting even when they go from a single cloud in a single region to multiple regions, right? And the, the more spread out the regions are, you have requirements around application performance, application experience and so forth. So, suddenly the networking conversation starts to become an experience and a performance conversation. The security conversation starts to become a zero trust conversation and so forth. And so you, you do see that, that interesting shift that's happening. >> Of course. >> Exactly. And then that gets worsened by the fact that now you have multiple clouds, multiple regions, and then... >> So you got regions, clouds, >> and then you have edge locations now. >> And edge. >> You mentioned edge. >> This, this is why I think multi-cloud is BS, because this is all coming so fast. You got to get your Supercloud first. >> Exactly. >> Then you extend into, what it looks like a multi-vendor or multifaceted environment that should be automated by that time. >> Exactly. >> So it's evolutionary, we're not there yet. >> Exactly. >> So you agree, no market yet? >> That's right, yes. So unless it's like the super large enterprises where we have seen a really good mix of multiple different clouds or super large enterprises where each business unit is free to choose the cloud of their choice for the application developers because they just like a certain cloud, right? >> Or negotiations. >> Or negotiations, right? Exactly, so there you find yourself in a healthy mix. It's not like you're 80, 10, 10. It's, it's a healthy mix of three different clouds, right? But vast majority of the enterprises, they have a concerted strategy, I have a primary cloud 'cause that's where two, two big CEOs shake hands and assign multi billion dollar deals, right? >> It's just a song with Howie Shute, who's now a Zscaler, former VMware. Probably know Howie, he's a legend in the community as well. We were talking about the old days of the data center and you remember that? We'll go back to our, into our, you know, historical views of experience. Back when the data center became popular this was the glass house. Mainframes to mini computers. It became a complex environment. You had to have pretty much a PhD or serious networking or some sort of technical background. And then IT was born, the local area networks, the mini computers, and the PCs change that dynamic. IT was born. Okay, and let's just say it, most IT guys aren't PhDs. >> Exactly. >> So what's happened there is democratization and the operations side of that wave. We're kind of going th&rough it now, don't ya think, with cloud? Like, you got to be super smart to wrangle the data. I mean, some of the data pipelining stuff is super complex, after Snowflake and data bricks. >> Absolutely. And largely depends on the maturity, right? Like, so once you pass a certain scale in the cloud the care abouts start to be very different. The care abouts are, how can I operate this at scale? Because I might have started off with a relatively inefficient infrastructure, right? But now if I start to operate that at scale with like thousands of VPCs and so forth, somebody is looking at an AWS bill there and going, "ah, no, no, no, we're not going to do that." >> We're getting to the good part now. So, so here's where I wanted to get to, 'Cause we're kind of getting there, The proof points of Supercloud is IT like operations, >> Correct. >> Easy. >> Yep. >> Not overstaffed and maybe an SRE model one too many. >> Yeah, exactly. >> What are the proof points do you see that would be evidence that Supercloud is working? >> So in a well functional model where we have seen enterprises take the applications that they care about and then move that into the public cloud or build it organically. If they have staffed their team, I think a good leading indicator is that they have staffed the team so that there are a bunch of guys who understand what it means for cloud native capabilities. There are a bunch of guys who then put it together and then you look at the care abouts, right? Ultimately at the end of the day, the goal, if you go higher up in the layers, is it about application experience? Is it about kind of reducing the blast radius of my security? Is it about my data cleanliness and, and hygiene? You don't care about kind of how the pipelining works underneath the covers or how do I put a transit gateway and this and that together? No, that's not what you care about. You care about kind of the outcomes and, and- >> Palmer (unintelligible) that VMware, when he was there. You just say the hardened top, no one talks about what's in an Intel processor. I mean it's just works. >> Exactly, yeah. And it's what applications you build on top of that Intel processor that actually makes it more powerful, right? And so the first evidence I would say is kind of how is the team structured? The second evidence would be kind of what, what are the care abouts for the guys that are building these applications, right? Because even the application developers more than the application, they care about kind of, is it helping? Is it delivering on the experience? Is it being used the way it's supposed to? >> Is it value? >> Exactly, right? And those are not areas that the cloud providers are solely focused on, right? Like you don't see an AWS or an Azure dashboard show that particular thing for the entirety of the application, they'll tell you for the ATR services that you, that you use, here's the SLA for each one of these services. >> And that's where the customer has to build it. >> Exactly right. Now, does that give you the full picture? No, it doesn't. Somebody has to pull this together. Somebody has to aggregate this together and then make sense as to whether this is working or not, right? So whether you call it Supercloud, or whether you call it kind of the care abouts on top of the cloud native stuff, they're all the same. I'm glad you guys came up with a, with a name for this. And I think it's going to be here to stay. >> Well, thank you for sharing your expertise. You got a great background in this area and you got, I think you guys are right on the front wave of this new change. I think a little bit early, but that's good, but don't be too early. >> Yeah, exactly. No, and, and, and that's really important, right, John? So, you don't want to be too early. You certainly don't want to be too late, but at the same time, the pace at which things are evolving are fast enough that you, you will see. I think when, if we have this conversation even three months from now, it might be a very different conversation. >> Yeah, people want to go fast and they don't want to get stuck with a vendor. They made a bad choice that slows 'em down 'cause they got problems to solve, things to build. >> Yeah, exactly. >> Ramesh, thanks for coming on, Supercloud 22, we're breaking it all down. We're exposing it out to everyone. We're discussing it. We're going to challenge it. But ultimately it is a thing. Supercloud 22. Thanks for watching. >> Wonderful, thanks John. (light music)

>>welcome back everyone to the cube con cloud, David Kahn coverage. I'm john for a host of the cube, we're here in person, 2020 20 a real event, it's a hybrid event, we're streaming live to you with all the great coverage and guests coming on next three days. Clayton Coleman's chief Hybrid cloud architect for Red Hat is joining me here to go over viewers talk but also talk about hybrid cloud. Multi cloud where it's all going road red hats doing great to see you thanks coming on. It's a pleasure to be >>back. It's a pleasure to be back in cuba con. >>Uh it's an honor to have you on as a chief architect at Red Hat on hybrid cloud. It is the hottest area in the market right now. The biggest story we were back in person. That's the biggest story here. The second biggest story, that's the most important story is hybrid cloud. And what does it mean for multi cloud, this is a key trend. You just gave a talk here. What's your take on it? You >>know, I, I like to summarize hybrid cloud as the answer to. It's really the summarization of yes please more of everything, which is, we don't have one of anything. Nobody has got any kind of real footprint is single cloud. They're not single framework, they're not single language, they're not single application server, they're not single container platform, they're not single VM technology. And so, um, and then, you know, looking around here in this, uh, partner space where eight years into kubernetes and there is an enormous ecosystem of tools, technologies, capabilities, add ons, plug ins components that make our applications better. Um the modern application landscape is so huge that I think that's what hybrid really is is it's we've got all these places to run stuff more than ever and we've got all this stuff to run more than ever and it doesn't slow down. So how do we bring sanity to that? How do we understand it? Bring it together and companies has been a big part of that, like it unlocked some of that. What's the next step? >>Yeah, that's a great, great commentary. I want to take into the kubernetes piece but you know, as we've been reporting the digital transformation at all time, high speed is the number one request. People want to go faster, not just speeds and feeds, but like ship code fast to build apps faster. Make it all run faster and secure. Okay, check, get that. Look what we were 15, 15 years ago, 10 years ago, five years ago, 2016. The first coupe con in Seattle we were there for small events kubernetes, we gotta sell it, figure it out. Right convince people >>that it's a it's worth >>it. Yeah. So what's your take on that? Well, I mean, it's mature, it's kind of de facto standard at this point. What's missing. Where is it? >>So I think Kubernetes has succeeded at the core mission which is helping us stop worrying about all the problems that we spent endless amounts of time arguing about, how do I deploy software, How do I roll it out? But in the meantime we've added more types of software. You know, the rise of ai ml um you know, the whole the whole ecosystem around training software models like what is a what is an Ai model? Is it look like an application, does it look like a job? It's part batch, part service. Um It's spread out to the edge. We've added mobile devices. The explosion in mobile computing over the last 10 years has co evolved. And so kubernetes succeeded at that kind of set a floor for what everybody thought was an application. And in the meantime we've added all these other parts of the application. >>It's funny, you know, David Anthony, we're talking about what's to minimum and networks at red hat will be on later. Back in the first two cubicles were like, you know, this is like a TCP I P moment, the Os I model that was a killer part of the stack. Now it was all standardized below TCP I. P. Company feels like a similar kind of construct where it's unifying, is creating some enablement, It's enabling some innovation and it kind of brought everyone together at the same time everyone realized that that's real, >>the whole >>cloud native is real. And now we're in an era now where people are talking about doing things that are completely different. You mentioned as a batch job house ai new software paradigm development paradigms, not to suffer during the lifecycle, but just like software development in general is impacted. >>Absolutely. And you know, the components like, you know, we spent a lot of time talking about how to test and build application, but those are things that we all kind of internalized now we we have seen the processes is critical because it's going to be in lots of places, people are looking to standardize. But sometimes the new technology comes up alongside the side, the thing we're trying to standardize, we're like, well let's just use the new technology instead function as a service is kind of uh it came up, you know, kubernetes group K Native. And then you see, you know, the proliferation of functions as a service choices, what do people use? So there's a lot of choice and we're all building on those common layers, but everybody kind of has their own opinions, everybody's doing something subtly different. >>Let me ask you your opinion on on more under the Hood kind of complexity challenge. There's general consensus in the industry that does a lot of complexity. Okay, you don't mean debate that, but that's in a way, a good thing in the sense if you solve that, that's where innovation comes in. So the goal is to solve complexity, abstract out of the heavy lifting under heavy living in Sandy Jackson. And I would say, or abstract away complexity make things easier to use >>Well and an open source and this ecosystem is an amazing um it's one of the most effective methods we've ever found for trying every possible solution and keeping the five or six most successful and that's a little bit like developers, developers flow downhill, developers are going to do, it's easy if it's easier to put a credit card in and go to the public cloud, you're gonna do it if you can take control away from the teams at your organization that are there to protect you, but maybe aren't as responsive as you like. People will, people will go around those. And so I think a little bit of what we're trying to do is what are the commonalities that we could pick out of this ecosystem that everybody agrees on and make those the downhill path that people follow, not putting a credit card into a cloud, but offering a way for you not to think about what clouds are on until you need to write, because you want to go to the fridge is a developer, you wanna go the fridge, pull out your favorite brand of soda, that favorite band Isoda might have an AWS label also >>talk about the open shift and the Kubernetes relationship, you guys push the boundaries. Um Den is being controlled playing and nodes, these are things that you talked about in your talk, talk about because you guys made some good bets on open shift, we've been covering that, how's that playing out now? It's a relationship now >>is interesting coming into kubernetes, we came in from the platform as a service angle, right, Platform as a service was the first iteration of trying to make the lowest cost path for developers to flow to business value um and so we added things on top of kubernetes, we knew that we were going to complex, so we built in a little bit um in our structure and our way of thinking about cube that it was never going to be just that basic bare bones package that you're gonna have to make choices for people that made sense. Ah obviously as the ecosystems grown, we've tried to grow with it, we've tried to be a layer above kubernetes, we've tried to be a layer in between kubernetes, we've tried to be a layer underneath kubernetes and all of these are valid places to be. Um I think that next step is we're all kind of asking, you know, we've got all this stuff, are there any ways that we can be more efficient? So I like to think about practical benefits, what is a practical benefit That a little bit of opinion nation could bring to this ecosystem and I think it's around applications, it's being application centric, it's what is a team, 90% of the time need to be successful, they need a way to get their code out, they need to get it to the places that they wanted to be, and that place is everywhere. It's not one cloud or on premises or a data center, it's the edge, it's running as a lambda. It's running inside devices that might be being designed in this very room today. >>It's interesting. You know, you're an architect, but also the computer science industry is the people who were trained in the area are learning. It's pretty fascinating and almost intoxicating right now in this this market because you have an operating system, dynamic systems kind of programming model with distributed cloud, edge on fire, that's only gonna get more complicated with 5G and high density data applications. Um and then you've got this changing modal mode of operations were programming with bots and Ai and machine learning to new things, but it's kind of the same distributed computing paradigm. Yeah. What's your reaction to that? >>Well, and it's it's interesting. I was kind of described like layers. We've gone from Lenox replaced proprietary UNIX or mainframe to virtualization, which, and then we had a lot of Lennox, we had some windows too. And then we moved to public cloud and private cloud. We brought config management and moved to kubernetes, um we still got that. Os at the heart of what we do. We've got, uh application libraries and we've shared services and common services. I think it's interesting like to learn from Lennox's lesson, which is we want to build an open expansive ecosystem, You're kind of like kind of like what's going on. We want to pick enough opinion nation that it just works because I think just works is what, let's be honest, like we could come up with all the great theories of what the right way computers should be done, but it's gonna be what's easy, what gets people help them get their jobs done, trying to time to take that from where people are today on cube in cloud, on multiple clouds, give them just a little bit more consolidation. And I think it's a trick people or convince people by showing them how much easier it could be. >>You know, what's interesting around um, what you guys have done a red hat is that you guys have real customers are demanding, you have enterprise customers. So you have your eye on the front edge of the, of the bleeding edge, making things easier. And I think that's good enough is a good angle, but let's, let's face it, people are just lifting and shifting to the cloud now. They haven't yet re factored and re factoring is a concept of taking what you're doing in the cloud of taking advantage of new services to change the operating dynamic and value proposition of say the application. So the smart money is all going there, seeing the funding come into applications that are leveraging the new platform? Re platform and then re factoring what's your take on that because you got the edge, you have other things happening. >>There are so many more types of applications today. And it's interesting because almost all of them start with real practical problems that enterprises or growing tech companies or companies that aren't tech companies but have a very strong tech component. Right? That's the biggest transformation the last 15 years is that you can be a tech company without ever calling yourself a tech company because you have a website and you have an upset and your entire business model flows like that. So there is, I think pragmatically people are, they're okay with their footprint where it is. They're looking to consolidate their very interested in taking advantage of the scale that modern cloud offers them and they're trying to figure out how to bring all the advantages that they have in these modern technologies to these new footprints and these new form factors that they're trying to fit into, whether that's an application running on the edge next to their load bouncer in a gateway, in telco five Gs happening right now. Red hat's been really heavily involved in a telco ecosystem and it's kubernetes through and through its building on those kinds of principles. What are the concepts that help make a hybrid application, an application that spans the data flowing from a device back to the cloud, out to a Gateway processed by a big data system in a private region, someplace where computers cheap can't >>be asylum? No, absolutely not has to be distributed non siloed based >>and how do we do that and keep security? How do we help you track where your data is and who's talking to whom? Um there's a lot of, there's a lot of people here today who are helping people connect. I think that next step that contact connectivity, the knowing who's talking and how they're connecting, that'll be a fundamental part of what emerges as >>that's why I think the observe ability to me is the data is really about a data funding a new data sector of the market that's going to be addressable. I think data address ability is critical. Clayton really appreciate you coming on. And giving a perspective an expert in the field. I gotta ask you, you know, I gotta say from a personal standpoint how open source has truly been a real enabler. You look at how fast new things could come in and be adopted and vetted and things get kicked around people try stuff that fails, but it's they they build on each other. Right? So a I for example, it's just a great example of look at what machine learning and AI is going on, how fast that's been adopted. Absolutely. I don't think that would be done in open source. I have to ask you guys at red hat as you continue your mission and with IBM with that partnership, how do you see people participating with you guys? You're here, you're part of the ecosystem, big player, how you guys continue to work with the community? Take a minute to share what you're working on. >>So uh first off, it's impossible to get anything done I think in this ecosystem without being open first. Um and that's something the red at and IBM are both committed to. A lot of what I try to do is I try to map from the very complex problems that people bring to us because every problem in applications is complex at some later and you've got to have the expertise but there's so much expertise. So you got to be able to blend the experts in a particular technology, the experts in a particular problem domain like the folks who consult or contract or helped design some of these architectures or have that experience at large companies and then move on to advise others and how to proceed. And then you have to be able to take those lessons put them in technology and the technology has to go back and take that feedback. I would say my primary goal is to come to these sorts of events and to share what everyone is facing because if we as a group aren't all working at some level, there won't be the ability of those organizations to react because none of us know the whole stack, none of us know the whole set of details >>And this text changing too. I mean you got to get a reference to a side while it's more than 80s metaphor. But you know, but that changed the game on proprietary and that was like >>getting it allows us to think and to separate. You know, you want to have nice thin layers that the world on top doesn't worry about below except when you need to and below program you can make things more efficient and public cloud, open source kubernetes and the proliferation of applications on top That's happening today. I >>mean Palmer gets used to talk about the hardened top when he was the VM ware Ceo Back in 2010. Remember him saying that he says she predicted >>the whole, we >>call it the mainframe in the cloud at the time because it was a funny thing to say, but it was really a computer. I mean essentially distributed nature of the cloud. It happened. Absolutely. Clayton, thanks for coming on the Cuban sharing your insights appreciate. It was a pleasure. Thank you. Right click here on the Cuban john furry. You're here live in L A for coupon cloud native in person. It's a hybrid event was streaming Also going to the cube platform as well. Check us out there all the interviews. Three days of coverage, we'll be right back Yeah. Mm mm mm I have

>> Unleash The Power of Data. On May 4th at 11:00 AM Eastern, 8:00 AM Pacific, HPE is hosting a broadcast and we're here with Sandeep Singh, who's the Vice President of Storage Marketing at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Sandeep, what's this event all about, who should attend and why? >> Dave, in the world of enterprise storage, there hasn't been a moment like this in decades. A point at which everything is changing for data and infrastructure and is powered by the nexus of data, cloud and AI. And the opportunity for our customers to accelerate their data-driven transformation is unfolding. HPE is excited to invite everyone to join us for a virtual event that, as Dave mentioned, Unleash the Power of Data on May 4th at 8:00 AM Pacific. And if you're an organization like most today, data is at the heart of what you do. And you're looking to accelerate data driven transformation. We hear you and we're thrilled to invite you to join us on May 4th, as we unveil a new vision for data that accelerates data driven transformation from edge to cloud. This promises to be a pivotal event and one that IT Admins, Cloud Architects, Virtualization Architects, Vice-Presidents, Directors of IT, and CIOs (indistinct) the event is hosted by a business and a tech journalist Shabani Joshi and it will feature a market in panel with a focus on the crucial data that data is playing in the transformation for customers. Antonio Neri CEO of HPE and Tom black senior vice president and general manager of HPE storage as well as industry experts, including Julia Palmer vice president at Gartner will be part of the event. We will unveil game-changing HPE innovations that will make it possible for organizations across industries to unleash the power of data. >> Sounds awesome. Okay. Go to hpe.com. Mark your calendar, and we'll see you there.

(smooth music) >> Hi, everybody. This is Dave Vellante, and with me is Sandeep Singh. He's the vice president of storage marketing at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and we're going to riff on some of the trends in the industry, what we're seeing, and we got a little treat for you, Sandeep. Great to see you, man. >> Dave, it's a pleasure to be here. >> You and I have known each other for a long time. We've had some great discussions, some debates, (chuckles) some intriguing mind benders. What are you seeing out there in storage? So much has changed. What are the key trends you're seeing? And let's get into it. >> Yeah. Across the board, as you said, so much has changed. When you reflect back at the underlying transformation that's taking place with data, cloud, and AI across the board, first of all, for our customers, they're seeing this massive data explosion that literally now spans edge to core to cloud. They're also seeing a diversity of the application workloads across the board. The emphasis that it's placing is on the complexity that underlies overall infrastructure and data management. Across the board, we're hearing a lot from customers about just the underlying infrastructure and complexity, and the infrastructure sprawl. And then the second element of that is really extending into the complexity of data management. >> So it's interesting to talk about data management. You remember you and I were in... Well, you were in Andover. I don't know. It was probably like five years ago. And all we were talking about was media, flash this and flash that, and at the time that was kind of the hot storage topic. Well, flash came in, addressed some of the clicks that we historically talked about. Now the problem statement is really kind of, quote unquote, metaphorically moving up the stack, if you will. You mentioned management. But let's dig into that a little bit. I mean, what is management? I mean, a lot of people... That means different things to different people. You talk to a database person or a backup person. How do you look at management? What does that mean to you? >> Yeah, Dave. You mentioned that flash came in, and it actually accelerated the overall speed and latency that storage was delivering to the application workloads. But fundamentally, when you look back at storage over a couple of decades, the underlying way of how you're managing storage hasn't fundamentally changed. There's still an incredible amount of complexity for ITs. It's still a manual admin-driven experience for customers. And what that's translating to is, more often than not, IT is in the world of firefighting, and it leaves them unable to help with the more strategic projects to innovate for the business. And basically IT has that pressure point of moving beyond that, and helping bring greater levels of agility that line of business owners are asking for, and to be able to deliver on more of the strategic projects. So that's one element of it. The second element that we're hearing from customers about is as more and more data just continues to explode from edge to core to cloud, and as basically the infrastructure has grown from just being on-prem, to being at the edge, to being in the cloud, now that complexity is expanding from just being on-prem to across multiple different clouds. So when you look across the data life cycle, how do you store it? How do you secure it? How do you basically protect it, and archive it, and analyze that data? That end to end life cycle management of data, today resides on just a fragmented set of overall infrastructure, and tools, and processes, and administrative boundaries. That's creating a massive challenge for customers. And the impact of that, ultimately, is essentially comes at a cost to agility, to innovation, and ultimately business risk. >> Yeah, so we've seen obviously the cloud has addressed a lot of these problems, but the problem is the cloud is in the cloud. And much of my stuff, most of my stuff, isn't in the cloud. (chuckles) So I have all these other workloads that are either on-prem, and now you've got this emerging edge. And so I wonder if we could just talk a little vision here for a minute. I mean, what I've been envisioning is this abstraction layer that cuts across all, whether... It doesn't really matter where it is. If it's on-prem, if it's across cloud, if it's in the cloud, on the edge. We could talk about what that all means. But if customers that I talk to, they're sort of done with the complexity of that underlying infrastructure. They want technology to take care of that. They want automation. They want AI brought into that equation. And it seems like we're on the cusp of the decade where that might happen. What's your take? >> Well, yeah. Certainly, I mentioned that data cloud and AI are really the disruptive forces that are propelling the digital transformation for customers. Cloud has set the standard for agility, and AI-driven insights and intelligence are really helping to make the underlying infrastructure invisible. And yet a lot of their application workloads and data is on-prem and is increasingly growing at the edge. So they want that same experience to be able to truly bring that agility to wherever their data and apps load. And that's one of the things that we're continuing to hear from customers. >> And this problem's just going to get worse. I mean, we... For decades we marched to the cadence of Moore's law, and everybody's kind of forgets about Moore's law. And they'll say, "Ah, it's dying," or whatever. But actually, when you look at the processing power that's coming out now, it's not... It's more than doubling every two years, quadrupling every two years. So now you've got this capability in your hands, and application designers, storage companies, networking companies, they're going to have all this power to now bring in AI and do things that we've never even imagined before. So it's not about the box, and the speeds and feeds of the box. It's really more about this abstraction layer that I was talking about, the management, if you will, that you were discussing, and what we can do in terms of being able to power new workloads, machine intelligence. It's this kind of ubiquitous... Call it the cloud, but it's expanding pretty much everywhere in every part of our lives, (chuckles) even to the edge. You think about autonomous vehicles, you think about factories. It's actually quite mind boggling where we're headed. >> It is, and you touched upon AI, and certainly when you look at infrastructure, for example, there's been a ton of complexity in infrastructure management. One of the studies that was done, actually by IDC, indicated that over 90% of the challenges that arise, for example, ultimately down at the storage infrastructure layer that's powering the apps, ultimately, arises from way above the stack all the way from the server layer on down, or even the virtual machine layer. And there, for example, AI ops for infrastructure has become a game changer for customers to be able to bring the power of AI, and machine learning, and multi-variate analysis to be able to predict and prevent issues. Dave, you also touched upon edge, and across the board, what we're seeing is the enterprise edge is becoming that frontier for customer experiences, and the opportunity to reimagine customer experiences, as well as just the frontier for commerce that's happening when you look at retail, and manufacturing, and/or financial services. So across the board, with the data growth that's happening, and this edge becoming the strategic frontier for delivering the customer experiences, how you power your application workloads there, how you deliver that data, and protect that data, and be able to seamlessly manage that overall infrastructure, as you mentioned, abstracted away at a higher level, becomes incredibly important for our customers. >> It's so interesting to hear how the conversation's changing, I'd like to say. I go back to whatever it was, five years ago, we're talking about flash, storage class memory, and NVMe, and those things are still there, but your emphasis now, you're talking about machine learning, AI, math around deep learning. It's really software is really what you're focusing on these days. >> Very much so. Certainly, this notion of software and services that are delivering and unlocking a whole new experience for customers, that's really the game changer going forward for customers, and that's what we're focused on. >> Well, I said we had a little surprise for you. So you guys are having an event on May 4th. It's called Unleash the Power of Data. What's that event all about, Sandeep? >> Yeah. We are very much excited about our May 4th event. As you mentioned, it's called Unleash the Power of Data. And as most organizations today are data driven, and data is at the heart of what they're doing, we're excited to invite everyone to join this event. And through this event, we're unveiling a new vision for data that accelerates the data-driven transformation from edge to cloud. This event promises to be a pivotal event, and one that IT admins, cloud architects, virtual machine admins, vice-presidents, directors of IT, and CIOs really won't want to miss. Across the board, this event is just bringing a new way of articulating the overall problem statement, and a market-in focused the articulation of the trends that we were just discussing. It's an event that's going to be hosted by business and technology journalist, Shibani Joshi. It will feature a market-in panel with a focus on the crucial role that data is playing in customers' digital transformation. It will also include and feature Antonio Neri, CEO of HPE, and Tom Black, senior vice president and general manager of HPE storage business, and industry experts, including Julia Palmer, research vice president at Gartner. We will unveil game-changing HPE innovations that will make it possible for organizations across edge to cloud to unleash the power of data. >> Sounds like a great event. I presume I can go to hpe.com. And what? Get information. Is it a registered event? How does that all work? >> Yeah, we invite everyone to visit hpe.com, and by visiting there, you can click and save the date of May 4th at 8:00 AM Pacific. We invite everyone to join us. We couldn't be more excited to get to this event, and be able to share the vision and game-changing HPE innovations. >> Awesome. So it's... So I don't have to register, right? I don't have to give up my three children's name, and my social security number to attend your event, is that right? (chuckles) >> No registration required. Come by, click on hpe.com. Save the date on your calendar. And we very much look forward to having everyone join us for this event. >> I love it. It's pure content event. I'm not going to get a phone call afterwards saying, "Hey, buy some stuff from me." That could come other channels, so that's good. (chuckles) Thank you for that. Thanks for providing that service to the industry. I'm excited to see what you guys are going to be announcing that day. And look, Sandeep, I mean, like I said, we've known each other a while. We've seen a lot of trends, but the next 10 years, it ain't going to look like the last 10, is it? >> It's going to be very different, and we couldn't be more excited. >> Well, Sandeep, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE, and riffing with me on the industry, and giving us a preview for your event. Good luck with that, and always great to see you. >> Thanks a lot, Dave. Always great to see you as well. >> All right, and thank you, everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, and we'll see you next time. (smooth music)

>> Unleash the Power of Data. On May 4th at 11:00 am Eastern, 8:00 am Pacific HPE is hosting a broadcast. And we're here with Sandeep Singh who's the vice president of Storage Marketing at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Sandeep, what's this event all about? Who should attend, and why? >> Dave, in the world of enterprise storage, there hasn't been a moment like this in decades. A point at which everything is changing for data and infrastructure, and is powered by the nexus of data cloud and AI. And the opportunity for our customers to accelerate their data-driven transformation is unfolding. HPE is excited to invite everyone to join us for a virtual event, that as Dave mentioned, Unleash the Power of Data on May 4th at 8:00 am Pacific. And if you're an organization like most today, data is at the heart of what you do. And you're looking to accelerate data-driven transformation. We hear you, and we're thrilled to invite you to join us on May 4th as we unveil a new vision for data that accelerates data-driven transformation from edge to cloud. This promises to be a pivotal event, and one that IT admins, cloud architects, virtualization architects, vice presidents, directors of IT, and CIOs won't want to miss. The event is hosted by business and a tech journalist Shabani Joshi, and it will feature a market end panel with a focus on the crucial data that data is playing in the transformation for customers. Antonio Neri, CEO of HPE, and Tom Black, senior vice president and general manager of HPE Storage, as well as industry experts, including Julia Palmer, vice president at Gartner, will be part of the event. We will unveil game-changing HPE innovations that will make it possible for organizations across industries to unleash the power of data. >> Sounds awesome! Okay, go to hpe.com. Mark your calendar, and we'll see you there.

(upbeat music) >> Hi everybody, this is Dave Volante. And with me is Sandeep Singh, he is the vice president of Storage Marketing at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. And we're going to riff on some of the trends in the industry, what we're seeing. And we got a little treat for you. Sandeep, great to see you man. >> Dave, it's a pleasure to be here. >> You and I've known each other for a long time. We've had some great discussions, some debates, some intriguing mind benders. What are you seeing out there in Storage? So much has changed. What are the key trends you're seeing and let's get into it. >> Yeah, across the board, as you said, so much has changed. When you reflect back at the underlying transformation that's taken place with data, cloud and AI across the board. First of all, for our customers they're seeing this massive data explosion that literally now spans edge to core to cloud. They're also seeing a diversity of the application workloads across the board. And the emphasis that it's placing is on the complexity that underlies overall infrastructure and data management. Across the board, we're hearing a lot from customers about just the underlying infrastructure complexity and the infrastructure sprawl. And then the second element of that is really extending into the complexity of data management. >> So it's interesting you're talking about data management. You remember you and I, we were in Andover. It was probably like five years ago and all we were talking about was media. Flash this and flash that, and at the time that was kind of the hot storage topic. Well, flash came in addressing some of the mics that we historically talked about it. Now the problem statement is really kind of quote unquote metaphorically moving up the stack if you will, you mentioned management but let's dig into that a little bit. I mean, what is management? I mean, a lot of people that means different things to different people. You talk to a database person or a backup person. How do you look at management? What does that mean to you? >> Yeah, Dave, you mentioned that the flash came in and it actually accelerated the overall speed and latency that storage was delivering to the application workloads. But fundamentally when you look back at storage over a couple of decades the underlying way of how you're managing storage hasn't fundamentally changed. There's still an incredible amount of complexity for IT. It's still a manual admin driven experience for customers. And what that's translating to is more often than not IT is in the world of firefighting and it's leaves them unable to help with them more strategic projects to innovate for the business. And basically IT has that pressure point of moving beyond that and helping bring greater levels of agility that line of business owners are asking for and to be able to deliver on more of the strategic projects. So that's one element of it. The second element that we're hearing from customers about is as more and more data just continues to explode from edge to core to cloud. And as basically the infrastructure has grown from just being on-Prem to being at the Edge to being in the cloud. Now that complexity is expanding from just being on-Prem to across multiple different clouds. So when you look across the date data life cycle how do you store it? How do you secure it? How do you basically protect it and archive it and analyze that data. That end to end life cycle management of data today resides on just a fragmented set of overall infrastructure and tools and processes and administrative boundaries. That's creating a massive challenge for customers. And the impact of that ultimately is essentially comes at a cost to agility, to innovation and ultimately business risk. >> Yeah, so we've seen obviously the cloud has addressed a lot of these problems but the problem is the cloud is in the cloud and much of my stuff, most of my stuff, isn't in the cloud. So I have all these other workloads that are either on-Prem and now you've got this emerging Edge. And so I wonder if we could just talk a little vision here for a minute. I mean what I've been envisioning is this abstraction layer that cuts across all weather. It doesn't really matter where it is. If it's on-Prem, if it's across cloud, if it's in the cloud, on the edge, we could talk about what that all means. But if customers that I talked to they're sort of done with the complexity of that underlying infrastructure. They want technology to take care of that. They want automation they want AI brought in to that equation. And it seems like we're from the cusp of the decade where that might happen. What's your take? >> Well, yeah, certainly I mentioned that data cloud and AI are really the disruptive forces, better propelling. The digital transformation for customers. Cloud has set the standard for agility and AI driven insights and intelligence are really helping to make the underlying infrastructure invisible and customers are looking for this notion of being able to get that cloud operational agility pretty much everywhere because they're discovering that that's a game changer. And yet a lot of their application workloads and data is on-Prem and is increasingly growing at the edge. So they want same experience to be able to truly bring that agility to wherever their data in absolute. And that's one of the things that we're continuing to hear from customers. >> And this problem is just going to get worse. I mean for decades we marched to the cadence of Moore's Law and everybody's going to forgets about Moore's Law. And say, "Ah, it's dying or whatever." But actually when you look at the processing power that's coming out now, it's more than doubling every two years, quadrupling every two years. So now you've got this capability in your hands and application design minors, storage companies, networking companies. They're going to have all this power to now bring in AI and do things that we've never even imagined before. So it's not about the box and the speeds and feeds of the box. It's really more about this abstraction layer that I was talking about. The management if you will that you were discussing and what we can do in terms of being able to power new workloads in machine intelligence, it's this kind of ubiquitous, call it the cloud but it's expanding pretty much everywhere in every part of our lives even to the edge you think about autonomous vehicles, you think about factories it's actually quite mind boggling where we're headed. >> It is and you touched upon AI. And certainly when you look at infrastructure, for example there's been a ton of complexity in infrastructure management. One of the studies that was done actually by IDC indicated that over 90% of the challenges that arise, for example ultimately down at the storage infrastructure layer that's powering the apps ultimately arises from way above the stack all the way from the server layer on down where even the virtual machine layer. And there, for example, AIOps for infrastructure has become a game changer for customers to be able to bring the power of AI and machine learning and multi-variate analysis to be able to predict and prevent issues. Dave, you also touched upon Edge and across the board. What we're seeing is the Enterprise Edge is becoming that frontier for customer experiences and the opportunity to reimagine customer experiences as well as just the frontier for commerce that's happening. When you look at retail and manufacturing and or financial services. So across the board with the data growth that's happening and this Edge becoming the strategic frontier for delivering the customer experiences how you power your application workloads there and how you deliver that data and protect that data and be able to seamlessly manage that overall infrastructure. As you mentioned abstracted away at a higher level becomes incredibly important for customers. >> So interesting to hear how the conversations changed. I'd like to say, I go back to whatever it was five years ago, we're talking about flash storage class memory, NVMe and those things are still there but your emphasis now you're talking about machine learning, AI, math around deep learning. It's really software is really what you're focusing on these days. >> Very much so. Certainly this notion of software and services that are delivering and unlocking a whole new experience for customers that's really the game changer going forward for customers. And that's what we're focused on. >> Well, I said we had a little surprise for you. So you guys are having an event on May 4th. It's called Unleash The Power of Data. What's that event all about Sandeep? >> Yeah. We are very much excited about our May 4th event. As you mentioned, it's called Unleash The Power of Data. And as most organizations today are data driven and data is at the heart of what they're doing. We're excited to invite everyone to join this event. And through this event we're unveiling a new vision for data that accelerates the data driven transformation from Edge to cloud. This event promises to be a pivotal event and one that IT admins, cloud architects, virtual machine admins, vice presidents, directors of IT and CIO really won't want to mess. Across the board this event is just bringing a new way of articulating the overall problem statement and in market in focused the articulation of the trends that we were just discussing. It's an event that's going to be hosted by a Business and Technology Journalist, Shabani Joshi. It will feature a market in panel with a focus on the crucial role that data is playing in customers digital transformation. It will also include and feature Antonio Neary, CEO of HPE and Tom black, senior vice president and general manager of HPE Storage Business and industry experts including Julia Palmer, research vice president at Gartner. We will unveil game changing HPE innovations that will make it possible for organizations across Edge to cloud to unleash the power of data. >> Sounds like great event. I presume I can go to hpe.com and get information, is it a registered event? How does that all work? Yeah, we invite everyone to visit hpe.com and by visiting there you can click and save the date of May 4th at 8:00 AM Pacific. We invite everyone to join us. We couldn't be more excited to get to this event and be able to share the vision and game-changing HPE innovations. >> Awesome. So I don't have to register, right? I don't have to give up my three children's name and my social security number to attend your event. Is that right? >> No registration required, come by, click on hpe.com. Save the date on your calendar. And we very much look forward to having everyone join us for this event. >> I love it, it's pure content event. I'm not going to get a phone call afterwards saying, "Hey, buy some stuff from me." That could come other channels but so that's good. Thank you for that. Thanks for providing that service to the industry. I'm excited to see what you guys are going to be announcing that day and look Sandeep. I mean, like I said, we've known each other a while. We've seen a lot of trends but the next 10 years it ain't going to look like the last 10 is it? >> It's going to be very different and we couldn't be more excited. >> Well, Sandeep, thanks so much for coming to theCube and riffing with me on the industry and giving us a preview for your event. Good luck with that. And always great to see you. >> Thanks a lot, Dave. Always great to see you as well. >> All right. And thank you everybody. This is Dave Volante for theCube and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>>from the >>Cube Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders around the globe. >>These are cloud native insights. Hi, I'm stupid, man. And welcome to Episode one of Cloud Native Insights. So this is a new program brought to you by Silicon Angle Media's The Cube. I am your host stew minimum, and we're going to be digging in to cloud native and, of course, cloud native like cloud before kind of a generic term. If you look at it online, there's a lot of buzzwords. There's a lot of jargon out there, and so we want to help. Understand what? This is what This isn't on And really happy to welcome back to the program to help me kick it off you piss car. He is an industry analyst. His company is T l A Tech. You. Thanks so much for joining us. >>Thanks, Dave. Glad we're >>all right. And one of the reasons I wanted you to help me kick this off. Not only have you been on the Cube, you know your background. I met you when you were the cto of a service provider over there in Europe, where you're Netherlands based. You were did strategy for a very large ah, supermarket chain also. And you've been on the program that shows like docker con in the past. You work in the cloud native space you've done consulting for. Some of the companies will be talking about today. But you help me kick this off a little bit. When you heard here the term cloud native. Does that mean anything to you? Did that mean anything back in your previous roles? You know, help us tee that up. >>So, you know, it kind of gives off a certain direction and where people are going. Right. Um so to me, Cloud native is more about the way you use cloud, not necessarily about the cloud services themselves. So, you know, for instance, I'll take the example of the supermarket. They had a big e commerce presence. And so we were come getting them to a place where they could, in smaller teams, deploy software in a faster, more often and in a safer way so that teams could work independently of each other, work on, you know, adding business value, whatever that may be for any kind of different company. That's a cloud native to me, Connie means using that to the fullest extent, using those services available to you in a way organizationally and culturally. That makes sense to you, you know, Go wherever you need to go. Be that release every hour or, you know, transform your s AP environment to something that is more nimble, more flexible, literally more agile. So what cloud native means so many things to so many people? Because it's immediately is not directly about the technology, but how you actually use it. >>Um, and u Pua and I are in, you know, strong agreement on this thing. One is you've noticed we haven't said kubernetes yet. We haven't talked about containers because cloud native is not about the tooling. We're, you know, strong participants in you know, the CN CF activities. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation, cube con and cloud native is a huge show. Great momentum one. We're big fans of too often people would conflate and they'd say, Oh, cloud native equals. I'm doing containers and I've, you know, deployed kubernetes one of the challenges out there. You talk about companies, you know? Well, you know, I had a cloud first initiative and I'm using multi cloud and all this stuff. It's like, Well, are you actually leveraging these capabilities, or did I shove things in something I'd railed about for the last couple of years? You talk about repatriation, and repatriation is often I went to go do cloud. I didn't really understand what I was doing. I didn't understand how to leverage that stuff. And I crawled back to what I was doing before because I knew how to do that. Well, so, you know, I think you said it really well. Cloud native means I'm taking advantage of the services. I'm doing things in a much more modern way. The thing I've loved talking to practitioners and one of things I want to do on this program absolutely is talk to practitioners is how have you gone through things organizationally, there are lots of things right now. Talk about like, thin ops. And, of course, all the spin off from Dev Ops and Dev SEC ops. And, like, how are we breaking through silos? How we're modernizing our environments, how we're taking advantage of new ways of doing things and new services. So yeah, I guess you You know, there are some really cool tools out there. Those are awesome things. But, you know, I love your viewpoint. Your perspective on often people in tech are like, Hey, I have this really cool new tool that I can use, you know? Can I take advantage of that? You know, do I do things in a new way, or do I just kind of take my old way and just make things maybe a little incrementally better? Hopefully with some new tooling. >>Oh, yeah. I mean, I totally agree. Um, you know, tooling is cool. Let me let me start by saying that I You know, I'm an engineer by heart, so I love tinkering with new new stuff. So I love communities I love. Um, you know that a new terra form released, for instance, I love seeing competition in the container orchestration space. I love driving into K native server lists. You know, all those technologies I like, But it is a matter of, you know, what can you do with them, right. So, for instance, has she corporate line of mine? I work on their hashtag off. Even they offer kind of Ah, not necessarily an alternative, but kind of adjacent approach to you what the CNC F is doing, and even in those cases, and I'm up specifically calling out Hashi Corp. But I'm kind of giving. The broader overview is, um, it doesn't actually matter what to use, Even though it'll help me. It'll make me happy just to play around with them. But those new tools have to mean something. They have to solve a particular problem. You have either in speed of delivery or consistency of delivery or quality of service, the thing you are building for your customers. So it has to mean something. So back in the day when I started out in engineering 15 years ago, a lot of the engineering loss for the sake of engineering just because, you know you could create a piece of infrastructure a little faster, but there was no actual business value to be out there. That's a lot of the engineering kind of was stuck inside of its own realm, or as what you see now is, if you can use terraform and actually get all of you know the potential out of you, it allow you to release offer more quickly because you're able to stand up infrastructure for that software more quickly. And so you know, we've kind of shifted from back in the in the attic or in the basement doing I t. Stuff that no one really understands. The one kind of perceives the business value of it into the realm of okay, If we can deploy this faster or we don't even need to use a server, we can use server lists. Then we have an advantage in the marketplace. You know, whatever marketplace that is, whatever application we're talking about. And so that's the difference to me. And that was that. You know, that's what CN CF is doing to me. That is what has she Corpus is helping build. That is what you know. A lot of companies that built, for instance, a managed kubernetes service. But from nine spectral crowd, all those kinds of companies, they will help, you know, a given customer to speed up their delivery, to not care about the underlying infrastructure anymore. And that's what this is all about to me. And that is what cloud native means use it in a way that I don't actually have to do the toil off the engineering anymore. There's loads of smart people working for, you know, the Big Three cloud vendors. There's loads of people working for those manage service providers, but he's used them so that you can speed up your delivery, create better software created faster, make customers happy. >>Yeah, it's a lot to unpack there. I want to talk a little bit about that landscape, right When you talk about, you know, cloud native, maybe a little compare contrast I think about, you know, the wave of Dev ops and for often people like, you know, Dev Ops. You know, that's a cultural movement. But there's also tooling that I could buy to help me along that weighs automation, you know, going agile methodology. See, I CD are all things that you're like. Well, is this part of Dev Ops, isn't it? There's lots of companies out there that we saw rows rode that wave of Dev ops. And if you talk about cloud native, you know the first thing you know, you start with the cloud providers. So when I hear you talking about, how do we get rid of things that we don't need to worry about? Well, for years, we heard Amazon Web services talk about getting rid of undifferentiated heavy lifting. And it's something that we're huge fans off you talk about. What is the business outcome? It's not. Hey, I went from, you know, a stand alone server to I did virtualized environments. And now I'm looking container ization or serverless. What can I get rid of? How do I take advantage of native services and all of those cloud platforms? One of the huge values there is, it isn't Hey, I deployed this and maybe it's a little bit cheaper and maybe a little better. But there's that that is really the center of where innovation is happening not only from the platform providers they're setting themselves, but from that ecosystem. And I guess I'll put it out there. One of the things I would like to see from Cloud Native should be that I should be able to take care of take advantage of innovation wherever it is. So Cloud Native does not mean it must live in the public cloud. It does not necessarily mean that I'm going, you know, full bore, multi cloud everywhere. I've had some great debates with Corey Quinn, on the Cube Online and the like, because if you look at customer environments today, you know, yes, they absolutely have their data centers. They're leveraging, typically more than one public cloud. SAS is a big part of the picture and then edge computing and pulls everything away into a much more distributed architecture. So, you know, I'm glad you brought up. You know, Hashi, a company you're working with really interesting. And if you talk about cloud native, it's there. They're not trying to get people to, oh, use multiple clouds because it's good for us. It's they. Hey, the reality is that you're probably using multiple clouds, and whether it's one cloud or many clouds or even in your data center, we have a set of tools that we can offer you. So you know, Hashi, you mentioned, you know, terra form vault. You know, the various tooling is that they have open source, you know, big play in this environment, both under the CN CF umbrella and beyond. Give us a little bit as to, you know, where are the interesting places where you see either vendors and technology today, or opportunity to make these solutions better for users. >>So that's an interesting question, because I literally don't know where to begin. The spectrum is so so broad, it's all start off with a joke on this, right? You cannot buy that helps. But the vendors were sure try and sell it to you. So it's kind of where you know, the battle is is raging on its getting foothold into an organization. Um, and you see that? You know, you see companies like, how is she doing that? Um, they started out with open source tooling that kind of move into the enterprise realm. Um, you solve the issues that enterprises usually have, and that's what the club defenders will trying to you as although you know, the kind of kick start you with a free service and then move you up into their their stack. And that's you know, that's where Cloud native is kind of risky because the landscape is so fragmented, it is really hard to figure out. Okay, this tool, it actually solves my use case versus this one doesn't. But again, it's in the ecosystem in this ecosystem already, so let's let's still use it just because it's easier. Um, but it does boil the disk a lot of the discussion down into. Basically, it's a friction. How much effort does it take to start using something? Because that's where and that's basically the issues enterprises are trying to solve. It's around friction, and it used to be friction around, you know, buying servers and then kind of being stuck with him for 4 to 5 years. But now it is the vendor lock in where people in organizations have to make tough decisions. You know, what ecosystems am I going to buy into it? It's It's also where a lot of the multi cloud marketing comes from on the way down to get you into a specific ecosystem on your end companies kind of filling that gap, helping you manage that complexity and how she corpus is one of those examples in my book that help you manage that multi cloud ah challenge. So but yeah, But it is all part of that discussion around friction. >>Yeah, and I guess I would start if you say, as you said, it is such a broad spectrum out there. If you look in the developer tooling marketplace is, there's lots of people that have, you know, landscapes out there. So CN cf even has a great landscape. And you know, things like Security, you no matter wherever I am and everywhere that I am. And there's a lot of effort to try to make sure that I can have something that spans across the environment. Of course, Security, you know, huge issue in general. And right now, Cohen, 19. The global pandemic coming on has been, you know, putting a spotlight on it even more. We know shared responsibility models where security needs to be. Data is at the center of what we're talking about when we've been talking for years about companies going through their transformation, I hadn't talked about, you know, digital transformation. What that means is, at the end of the day, you need to be data driven. So there's lots of companies, you know, big movement and things like ml ops. How can I actually harness my data? I said one of the things I think we got out of the whole big data wave. It was that bit flip from, Oh my God, their data everywhere. And maybe that's a challenge for me. It now becomes an opportunity and often times somewhere that I can have new value or even new business models that we can create around data. So, you know, data security on and everyone is modernizing. So, you know, worry a bit that there is sometimes, you know, cloud native washing. You know, just like everything else. It's, you know, cloud enabled. You know, ai ready from an infrastructure standpoint, you know, how much are you actually leveraging Cloud native? The bar, we always said, is, you know, if you're putting something in your data center, how does that compare against what I could get if I'm doing aws azure or Google type of environment? So I have seen good progress over the last couple of years in what we used to call it Private Cloud. And now it's more Ah, hybrid environment or multi cloud. And it looks and acts and is managed much more like the public cloud at a lot of that. Is that driver for developers? So you know Palmer, you know, developers, developers, developers, you know, absolutely. He was right as to how important that is. And one of the things I've been a little bit hardened at is it used to be. You talked about the enterprise and while the developers were off in the corner and, you know, we need to think about them and help enable them. But now, like the Dev Ops movement, we're trying to break down those silos. You know, developers are much more in the workflow. When I look at tools out there not only get hub, you know, you talked about Hashi, you know, get lab answerable and others. Often they have ways to have nothing to developers. The product owners and others all get visibility into it. Because if you can get, you know, people in the organization all accessing the same work stream the way that they need to have it there. There's goodness there. So I guess final question I have for you is you know, what advice do we have for practitioners themselves? Often, the question is, how do I get from where I've been? So where I'm going, This whole discussion of Cloud native is you know, we spent more than a decade talking about cloud, and it was often the kind of where in the movement and the like So what? I want to tee up with cloud native is discussion, really for the next decade. And you know, if I'm, you know, a c i o If I'm in, i t how do I make sure that I'm ready for these next opportunities while still managing? You know what I have in my own environment. >>So that kind of circles back to where we started this discussion, right? Cloud native and Dev ops and a couple of those methodologies they're not actually about the tooling. They are about what to do with them. Can you leverage them to achieve a goal? And so my biggest advice is Look for that goal. First, have something toward towards because if you have a problem, the solution will present itself. Um, and I'm not saying go look for a problem. The problems, they're already It's a matter of, um, you know, articulating that problem in a way that your developers will actually understand what to do. And then they will go and find the tools that are needed to solve that particular problem. And so we turn this around in a sense that so finally, we are at a point where we can have business problems. Actually, solved by I t in a way that doesn't require, you know, millions of upfront investment or, you know, consultants from an outside company. Your developers are now able to start solving those problems, and it will maybe take a while. They may need some outside help Teoh to figure some stuff out, But the point is, we can now use you know, these cloud resource is these cloud native services in such a small, practical way that we can actually start solving these business problems in a real way. >>Yeah, you actually, earlier this year I've done a series of interviews getting ready for this type of environment. You know, one of the areas I spent a bunch of time trying to dig in. And to be frank, understand has been server lists. So, you know, people very excited about server lists. You know, one of the dynamics always is, You know, everything we're talking about with containers and kubernetes driving them to think about that. I always looked as container ization was kind of moving up the stack in making infrastructure easier. The work for applications, but something like serverless it comes, top down. It's it's more of not the tooling, but how do I build those applications in those environments and not need to think at least as much about the infrastructure? So server lists Absolutely something we will cover, you know, containers, kubernetes what I'm looking for. Always love practitioners love to somebody. You you've been, you know, in that end, user it before startups. Absolutely. We'll be talking to as well as other people you know, in the ecosystem that you want to help, have discussions, have debates. You know, we don't have, you know, a strong. You know, this is the agenda that we have for cloud native, but I really want to help facilitate the dialogue. So I'll give you a final word here. Anything You know, what's exciting you these days when you talk to your peers out there, you know, in general, you know, it can be some tools, even though we understand tools are only a piece of it or any other final tips that you have in this market >>space. Well, I want to kind of go go forward on on your statement earlier about server lists without calling, You know, any specific serverless technology out there specifically, but you're looking at those technologies you'll see, But we're now able to solve those business problems. Um, without actually even needing I t right. So no code low code platforms are very adjacent to you to do serverless movement. Um, and that's where you know, that's what really excites me of this at this point, simply because, you know, we no longer need actual hardcore engineering as a trait Teoh use i t to move the needle forward. And that's what I love about the cloud native movement that it used to be hard. And it's getting simpler in a way also more complex in a way. What we're paying someone else Teoh to solve those issues. So I'm excited to see where you know, no code low code survivalism those the kinds of technologies will take us in the next decade. >>Absolutely wonderful. When you have technology that makes it more globally accessible There, obviously, you know, large generational shifts happening in the workforce. You Thank you so much for joining us, >>actually, Sue. >>All right. And I guess the final call to action really is We are looking for those guests out there, so, you know, practitioners, startups people that have a strong viewpoint. You can reach out to me. My emails just stew Stu at silicon angle dot com where you can hit me up on the twitters. I'm just at stew on there. Also. Eso thank you so much for joining us. Planning to do these in General Weekly cadence. You'll find the articles that go along with these on silicon angle dot com. Of course. All the video on the cube dot net I'm stew minimum in and love to hear more about your cloud Native insights >>Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

>>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of Veem on 2020 brought to you by beam. >>Hi buddy. Welcome back to the cubes. Ongoing coverage of Veem on 2020s Veem online 2020 I'm Dave Volante and Rick van overs here as a senior director of product strategy at Veem. Rick, it's always a great pleasure to see you. I wish we could see each other face to face. >>Yeah. You know, it's different this year, but, uh, yeah, it is always great to be on the cube. I think, uh, uh, in 2018 had an eight year gap and it's a N a couple of times we've been back since and yeah, happy to be back on the cube. >>So how's it going with you guys with the online format? I mean, breakouts are big for you cause you're, you're profiling some new products that we're going to get into, how's it all working for you? >>Well, it's been different. It's a good way to explain it in one word different, but the reality is I have a, uh, pardon, the language, a side hustle here, where at Veeam, I've worked with the event team to kind of bring the best content. And for the breakouts, that's an area that I've been working a lot with our speakers and our, some of our partners, external experts, users, and people who have, you know, beaten ransomware and stuff like that. But I've worked really hard to aggregate the content and get the best blend of content. And we kind of have taken an interesting approach where the breakouts are that library of content that we think organizations and the people who attend the event really take away the most. So we've got this full spectrum from R and D deep level stuff to just getting started type of stuff, and really all types of levels in between. And yeah, we want the breakouts to focus on generally available products, right? So I've worked pretty diligently to bring a good spread across the, uh, different products. And then a little secret trick we're doing is that into the summer, we're going to open up new content. So there's this broadcast agenda that we've got publicized, but then beyond that, we're going to sneak in some new content into the summer. >>Well, I'm glad you're thinking that way, because you know, a lot of what a lot of people are doing. There's a church trying to take their physical events and mirror it to the, to the digital or the virtual. And I think so often with physical events, people forget about the afterglow. And so I'm glad you guys are thinking about it upfront. >>Yeah. It has to be a mechanism that we've used it a couple of different ways, one to match how things are going to be released. Right? Cause being, we're always releasing products across the different set. I mean, we have one flagship product, but then the other products have their own cycles. So if something works well for that, we'll put it into the summer library. And then it's also a great opportunity for us to reach deep and get some content from people that we might not have been able to get before. In fact, we had one of our engineers who's based in Australia and great resource, great region, strong market for us, but I can't w if we were to have the in person event, I can't bring somebody from Australia for one session, but this was a great way to bring her expertise to the event without, you know, having the travel burden and different variety of speakers and different varieties of content. So there's ways that we've been able to build on it. But again, the top level word is definitely different, but I feel like it's working for sure. >>So Rick, give us the helicopter view of some of the product areas that we should be really be aware of as it relates to what you guys are doing at Veem on 2020. And then we'll, we'll drill in give us the high level though. >>Yeah. So for people attending the event and online, my advice really is that we're spread across about 75 to 80% of the content is for technical people. 20% of the content in the breakouts is going to be for decision makers or executives, that type. And then within that, the context of the technical content, we want to have probably 10 to 15% being like presenters from our R and D group. So very technical, uh, low level type discussions, highest level architect type stuff, kind of after that generic use cases, a nice and in the middle area, because we have a lot of people that are getting started with our products, like maybe they're new to the office three 65 backup, or they're new to backing up natively in the cloud. We have a lot of contexts around the virtual machine backup and storage integration, all those other great things, but the platform is kind of spread out at Veeam. There's a lot to take in. So the thought is wherever anyone is on their journey with any of the products and not some, that's a hard task to do with a certain number of slots. We want to provide something for everyone at every level. So that's the, that's the helicopter view. >>So let me ask you a couple of follow ups on that. So let's start with office three 65. Now you guys have shared data at this event, uh, talking about that most customers just say, Oh yeah, well, I trust Microsoft to do my backup. Well, of course, as we, well, well know it, backup is one thing, but recovery is everything. And so explain why, uh, what will explain the value that you guys bring? Why can't I just rely on the SAS vendor, uh, to, to do my backup and recovery? >>Well, there's a lot to that question, Dave, the number one thing I'll say is that at Veeam, we have partnerships with Microsoft. You have where HPE, all the household brands of it. And in many of these situations, we've always come into the market with the platform itself, providing a basic backup. I'll give windows, for example, anti backup, right? Yeah. Those, you know, it's there, but there's always a market for more capabilities, more functionality, more portability. So we've taken office three 65 is a different angle for backup. And we lead with the shared responsibility model, Microsoft as well as the other clouds, make it very clear that data classification and that responsibility of data that actually sits 100% with the customer. And so, yes, you can add things to the platform, but if we have organizations where we have things like I need to retain my content forever, or I need a discovery use case. >>And then if you think about broader use cases like one drive for business data, especially with the rapid shift of work from home organizations may not be not so much using the file server, but using things like one drive for business, for file exchanges, right? So having a control plane over that data is, is very important. So we really base it on the shared responsibility and Microsoft is one of our strongest partners. So they are very keen for us to provide solutions that are going to consume and move data around to, to meet customer needs in the cloud and in the SAS environment. For sure. So, you know, it's been a very easy conversation for our customers and it's our fastest growing product as well. So, uh, this, this product is doing great. Uh, I don't have the quarterly numbers, but we just released the mid part of Q4. We just released the newest release, which implemented object storage support. So that's been the big ask for our customers, right? So it's a, it's that product's doing great. >>Yeah. So, you know, that notion of shared responsibility, you hear that a lot in cloud security, you're applying it to cloud data protection, which, you know, security and data protection are now, you know, there's a lot of gray area between them now. Uh, and I think it's, you know, security is a, or data protection is a fundamental part of your security strategy, but that notion of shared responsibility is very important. And one that's oftentimes misunderstood because people hear, Oh, it's in the cloud. Okay. My cloud vendor has got to cover it, but what does, what does that shared responsibility mean? Ultimately, isn't it up to the customer to own the end end result. >>It is. And I look at, especially Microsoft, they classify their software for different ways on prem software, uh, software as a service, the infrastructure as a service. Uh, I forget what the third one is, but they have so many different ways that you can package their software, but in all of them, they put the data classification for the customer and it same for other clouds as well. And when, if I'm an organization today, if I'm running data in a SAS platform, if I am running systems in iOS platforms, in the hyperscale public clouds, that is an opportunity for me to really think about that control plane of the data and the backup and restore responsibility, because it has to be easy to use. It has to be very consumable so that customers can avoid that data loss or be in a situation where the complexity to do a restore is so miserable that they may not even want to go do it. I've actually had conversations with organizations as they come to Veeam. That was their alternative. Oh, it's just too painful to do. Like, why would you even do that? You know, so that, that shared responsibility model across the different data types in the cloud and on-premise well, and SAS models, that's really where we find the conversations go pretty nicely. >>Right. And if it's too complicated, you won't even bother testing it. So I want to ask you something about cloud native. You mentioned cloud native, your cloud native capabilities, um, and I'm, I'm inferring from that, that you basically are not just taking your on prem stack and shoving it into the cloud. You're actually taking advantage of the native cloud services. Can you, can you explain what's going on there and maybe some product specifics? >>Sure. So, you know, Veeam has this reputation of number one, VM backup, you know, here in my office, I have posters from all over the years and somewhere down here is number one, VM backup. And that's where we cut our teeth and got our name out there. But now if you're an Azure, if you're an Amazon, we have cloud native backup products available. In fact, the last time you and I spoke was that an Amazon reinvent where we launched the Amazon product. And then last month we launched the Azure product, which provides cloud native backup for Azure. And so now we have this cloud feature parody and those products are going to move very quickly as well. We've had the software as a service product for office three 65, where we keep adding services. And we saw in the general session, we're going to add protection for a new service in office three 65. >>So we're going to continue to innovate around these different areas. And there's also another cloud that we announced a capability for as well. So, you know, the platform at Veem it's growing, and it's amazing to see this happen cause you know, customers are making cloud investments and there's no cloud for all right. So some organizations like this cloud that cloud are a little bit of these two clouds combined. So we have to really go into the cloud with customer needs in mind because there's no one size fits all approach to the cloud, but their data, everybody knows how important that is. >>So to that end though, each, each cloud is going to have a set of native services and you've got to develop specific to that cloud, right? So that you can have the most, the lowest, highest performance, the most efficient, the lowest cost data protection solution backup and recovery possible is that, I mean, taking advantage of those native cloud services is going to be unique for each cloud, right? Because AWS has cloud and Azure cloud. Those are, those are different, you know, technically underneath, is that, is that right? >>You're absolutely right. And the cost models, they have different behaviors across the clouds. In fact, the breakout that I did here at the event with Melissa Palmer, those who are interested in the economics of the cloud should check that out because the cloud is all about consuming those resources. When I look at backup, I don't want backup to be a cost prohibitive insurance policy. Basically I want backup to be a cost effective yet resilient technology that when we're using the cloud, we can kind of balance all these needs. And one of the ways that beam's done that is we've put in cost estimators, which it's not that big of a like flashy part of the user interface, but it's so powerful to customers. The thought is if I want to consume infrastructure as a service in the cloud, and I want to back up via API calls, snapshots to ECE, two instances only nice and high performance, nice and fast. >>But the cost profile of that if I kept them for a year is completely different than if I used object storage. And what we're doing with the Veeam backup for Azure and Amazon products is we're putting those numbers right there in the wizard. So you could say, Hey, I want to keep two years of data. And I have snapshots and I have object storage, totally different cost profiles. And I'll put those costs testaments in there. And you can make egregious examples where it'll be like 10 and 20 X the price, but it really allows customers to get it fast, to get it cost efficient. And more importantly, at the end of the day, have that protection that they need. And that's, you know, that's something that I've been trying to evangelize at this cost. Estimator is a really big deal. >>Yeah. Provides transparency so that you can let the business, you know, drive sort of what the, what the data protection level is as opposed to sort of either, whether it's a one size fit all or you're under protected or overprotected and spending too much, I asked Anton is going to kind of, how do you prioritize it? Because basically his answer was we look at the economics and then ultimately you're giving tools to allow the customer to decide, >>Yeah, you don't want to have that surprise cloud bill at the end of the month. You don't want to have, um, you know, waste in the cloud and Anton's right. The economics are very important. The modeling process that we use is interesting. I had a chat with one of the product managers who is basically in charge of our cloud economic modeling and to the organizations out there. This is a really practical bit is, think about modeling, think about cloud economics, because here's the very important part. If you've already implemented something it's too late and what I mean by that, the economics, if they're not right when you implement it, so you're not modeling ahead of time. Once you implement, you can monitor it all you want, but you're just going to monitor it off the model. So the thought is, this is all a backwards process. You have to go backwards with the economics, with the modeling, and that will lead you to no surprises down the road. For sure. >>I want to ask you about the COVID impact generally, but specifically as it relates to ransomware, I mean, we've had a lot more inquiries regarding ransomware. There's certainly a lot more talk about it in the press. What have you seen, uh, specifically with respect to ransomware since the pandemic and since the lockdown. >>So that's something that's near and dear to my heart on the technology team here at product strategy, everyone has like a little specialization industry specialization. Ransomware's mine. So good ask. So the one thing that sticks out to me a lot is identifying where ransomware comes in and around. I have one data point that indicated around 58 or so percent of ransomware comes in through remote desktop. And the thought here is if we have shifted to remote access and new working models, what really worries me, Dave is when people hustle, when people hurry and the thought here is you can have it right. Or you can have it right now in mid March, we needed to make a move right now. So I worry about UN UN incomplete security models, right? People hurrying to, um, implement and maybe not taking their security, right. Especially when you think about most ransomware can come in through remote desktop. >>I thought fish attacks were the main attack vector, but I had some data points that told me this. So I have been, and I just completed a great white paper that those watching this can go to dot com and download. But the thought here is I just completed a great white paper on tips to beat ransomware and yes, Veeam has capabilities, but here's the logic. Dave. I like to explain it this way, beating ransomware. And we had a breakout that I recorded here at the event, encourage everyone to watch that I had two users share their story of how they beat ransomware with Veem. Two very different ways too. Any product is, or is not necessarily ransomware resilient. It's like going through an audit. And what I mean by that is people ask me all the time is being compliant to this standard or that standard it's 100% dictated how the product's implemented, how the product's audited, same with ransomware. >>It's 100% dictated on how Veem is implemented. And then what's the nature of the exploit. And so I break it down to three simple things. We have to educate. We have to know what threats are out there. We have to know who is accessing, what data. And then the big part of it is the implementation. How have we implemented Veeam? Are we keeping data in immutable buckets in the cloud? Are we keeping data with an air gap? And then three, the remediation when something does happen, how do we go about solving that problem? I talked to our tech support team who deals with it every day and they have very good insights, very good feedback on this phenomena. And that they've helped me shape some of the recommendations I put in the paper. But, uh, yeah, it's a 30 page paper. I don't know if I can summarize it here. That's a long one for me, but, uh, the threats real, and this is something we'll never be done with. Right. I have, I've done two other papers on it and I'm going to have another one soon after that, but we're building stuff into the product. We're educating the market. And, um, you know, we're winning, we're seeing like I had the two customers, um, beat ransomware, great stories. I think I learned so much hearing from someone who's gone through it and that you can find that in the, in the Vermont broadcast for those attending here. >>Well, you've touched on a couple of having them take advantage of the cloud guys who have these immutable mutable buckets that you can, you can leverage. Um, a lot of people don't even don't even know about that. Um, and then, like you say, create an air gap and presumably there's best practice around how often you write to that bucket and how often you create, you know, that air gap you may be, you may be change up the patterns. I don't know other, other thoughts on that. >>Well, I collectively put, I've created a term and uh, nobody's questioning me on it yet, so that's good, but I'm calling it ultra resilient storage. And what I'm referring to is that immutable backup in the cloud. And if we, it becomes a math calculation, you know, if you have one data point in there, that's good. But if you had a week's worth of data points, that's better. If you had a month's worth of data points, that's even better. But of course those cost profiles are going to change. Same thing with tape tapes, a an air gap, removable media, and I go back and forth on this, but some of the more resilient storage snapshot engines can do ultra resilient techniques as well, such as like, uh, pure storage, safe mode and NetApp snap fall. And then the last thing is actually a Veeam technology. It's been out for three, four years now, insider protection. >>It's a completely out of band copy of backup data that that Veeam cloud connect offers. So my thought here is that these ultra resilient types, those are best defense in these situations. And, you know, it's, it's a, it becomes a calculated risk of how much of it do I want to keep, because I want to have the most restore options available. I want to have no data loss, but I also don't want it old. Right. You know, there's a huge decline in value taking your business back a year ago, because that's the last tape you had, for example, I want today's or yesterday's backup if I'm in that type of situation. So I go through a lot of those points in my paper, but I hope that, um, those out there fighting the war on ransomware have the tools. I know they have the tools to win with them. >>Well, it's like we were talking about before and ransomware is a really good example of the, the blurring lines between security and backup and recovery. Of course. Uh, what role do analytics play in terms of providing transparency and identifying anomalous behavior in the whole ransomware equation? >>Well, the analytics are very important and I have to be really kind of be transparent, you know, VMs, backup company, right? We're not a security tool, but this is it's getting awfully close. And the, I don't want to say the long form historical definition of it. Security was something around this thing called a CIA triad, maintaining confidentiality, integrity, and availability of data. So security tools are really big on the confidentiality and integrity side of it. But on the availability side, that's ravine can come in. So the analytics come in to our play pretty naturally, right? We have, the Veem has had for years now, uh, an alarm that detects abnormal behavior in regards to CPU rights or CPU usage and disk, right IO. Like if there's both of those or abnormally high, that this is what we call possible ransomware activity. Or if we have a incremental backup, that is like 100% change rate, that's a bad sign, right. >>Things like that. And then the other angle is even on PCs desktops like this computer, I'm talking to you now on w we have just simple logic of, once you take a backup eject the drive. So it's offline, right? So analyzing where the threats come from, what kind of behavior they're going to have when we apply it to backup. Veem can have these built in analytic engines that are just transparently there for our customers. There's no deep reeducation necessary to use these, but the thought is we want a very flexible model. That's going to just provide simple ease of use, and then allow that protection with the threatscape to help it help the customers where we can, because no two ransomware threats are the same. That's the other thing. They are so varied in what they do everything from application specific to files. And now there's these new ones that upload data. The ransom is actually a data leak. They're not encrypting the data. They're just the ransom is to take down potentially huge amounts of data leakage, right? So, um, all kinds of threat actors out there for sure. >>You know, it's a last kind of line of questioning here. Rick is, as I've said, a number of times, it's just, it's ironic that we're entering this new decade in this pandemic hits. And everybody talks about the acceleration of certain trends. But if you think about the trends, you know, last decade, it's always performance and costs. We talked a lot about granularity. We talked about, you know, simplicity, you guys expanded your number of use cases. Uh, the, the support, the compatibility matrix, if you will, all those things are sort of things that you've executed on. As you look forward to this coming decade, we talked about cloud. I mean, we were talking about cloud, you know, back in the, in 2008, 2009 time frame, but it was a relatively small portion of the business. Now everybody's talking cloud. So cloud cloud, native DePaul discussion on ransomware and maybe even broader business resiliency, digital transformation, we've been, we've been given lip service in a lot of cases to digital transformation. All of a sudden that's changed. So as you put on, you pull out the telescope and look forward to the trends that are going to drive your thinking in themes, decision making. What do you look toward? >>Well, I think that laser focused on four things, backup solutions for cloud workloads, and there's incredible opportunity there, right? So yes, we have a great Azure story, great Amazon story. And in the keynote, we indicated the next cloud capability, but there's still more, there's more services in the cloud that we need to go after. There's also the sass pocket. We have a great office, three 65 story, but there's other SAS products that we could provide a story for. And then the physical and virtual platforms. I mean, I feel really confident there we've got really good capabilities, but there's always the 1%. And you know, what's in the corner. What's the 1% of the 1%, right? And those are workloads we can continue to go after. But my thought is, as long as we attack those four areas, we're going to be on a good trajectory to deliver on that promise of being that most trusted provider of cloud data management for backup solutions. >>So my thought here is that we're going to just keep adding products. And it's very important to make it sometimes a new product. We don't want to just bolt it on to backup and replication via 11 or be 10 for that, for that matter, because it'll slow it down, right? The cloud native products are going to have to have their own cadence, their own independent, um, development cycles. And they're going to move faster, right? Because they'll need to, so you'll, you'll see us continuing to add new products, new capabilities, and sometimes it'll, it'll intermix, you know, and that's, that's, that's the whole definition of a platform when one product is talking to another, from a management side, a control plane, given customer portability, all that stuff. So we're going to just go after a cloud, virtual, physical SAS, and new products and new capabilities to do it. >>Well, Rick, it's always a pleasure talking to you. Your home studio looks great. You look good. And, but, but nonetheless, hopefully we'll be able to see each other face to face here shortly. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you, Dave. >>All right. And thank you for watching. Everybody's Dave Vellante and our continuous coverage of the Mon 2020, the online version of right back, right after this short break.

>> From around the globe, it's theCUBE, with digital coverage of VeeamON 2020, brought to you by Veeam. >> Hi, everybody, welcome back to theCUBE's ongoing coverage of VeeamON 2020, it's Veeam online 2020. I'm Dave Vellante. And Rick Vanover's here, he's the senior director of product strategy at Veeam. Rick, it's always a great pleasure to see you. I wish we could see each other face-to-face. >> Yeah, you know it's different this year, but yeah, it is always great to be on theCUBE. I think in 2018, it had a eight-year gap and a couple of times we've been back since, and yeah, happy to be back on theCUBE. >> So how's it going with you guys with the online format? Breakouts are big for you 'cause you're profiling some new products that we're going to get into. How's it all working for you? Well, it's been different. It's a good way to explain it in one word, different. But the reality is, I have a, pardon the language, a side hustle here where at Veeam, I've worked with the event team to bring the best content, and for the breakouts, it's an area that I've been working a lot with our speakers and some of our partners and external experts, users, and people who have beaten ransomware and stuff like that. But I've worked really hard to aggregate the content and get the best blend of content. And we kind of have taken an interesting approach where the breakouts are that library of content that we think organizations and the people who attend the event really take away the most. So, we've got this full spectrum from R&D deep level stuff to just getting started type of stuff, and really all types of levels in between. We want the breakouts to focus on generally available products, right? So I've worked pretty diligently to bring a good spread across the different products. And then a little secret trick we're doing is that into the summer, we're going to open up new content. So there's this broadcast agenda that we've got publicized, but then beyond that we're going to sneak in some new content into the summer. >> Well, I'm glad you're thinking that way, because what a lot of people are doing, they're just trying to take their physical events and mirror it to the digital or the virtual, and I think so often with physical events, people forget about the afterglow, so I'm glad you guys are thinking about it upfront. >> Yeah, it has to be a mechanism, that we've used it a couple of different ways. One to match how things are going to be released, right? 'Cause Veeam, we're always releasing products across the different set. We have one flagship product, but then the other products have their own cycles. So if something works well for that, we'll put it into the summer library. And then it's also a great opportunity for us to reach deep and get some content from people that we might not have been able to get before. In fact, we had one of our engineers who's based in Australia, and great resource, great region, strong market for us, but if we were to have the in-person at that, I can't bring somebody from Australia for one session. But this was a great way to bring her expertise to the event without having the travel burden and different variety of speakers and different varieties of content. So there's ways that we've been able to build on it, but again, the top level word is definitely different. But I feel like it's working for sure. >> So, Rick, give us the helicopter view of some of the product areas that we should really be aware of as it relates to what you guys are doing at VeeamON 2020, and then we'll drill in. Give us the high level though. >> So for people attending the event online, my advice really is that we're spread across about 75 to 80% of the content is for technical people. 20% of the content in the breakouts is going to be for decision-makers or executives, that type. And then within the context of the technical content, we want to have probably 10 to 15% be presenters from our R&D group, so very technical low-level type discussions, highest level architect type stuff after that. Generic use case is a nice in-the-middle area, because we have a lot of people that are getting started with our products, so like maybe they're new to the Office 365 backup or they're new to backing up natively in the cloud. We have a lot of context around the virtual machine backup and storage integration and all those other great things, but when the platform is kind of spread out at Veeam, there's a lot to take in. So the thought is wherever anyone is on their journey with any of the products, and that's a hard task to do with a certain number of slots, we want to provide something for everyone at every level. So that's the helicopter view. >> So let me ask you a couple of followups on that. So let's start with Office 365. Now, you guys have shared data at this event, talking about most customers just say, "Oh, yeah, well, I trust Microsoft to do my backup." Well, of course, as we well know, backup is one thing (chuckles) but recovery is everything. Explain the value that you guys bring. Why can't I just rely on the SaaS vendor to do my backup and recovery? >> Well, there's a lot to that question, Dave. The number one thing I'll say is that at Veeam, we have partnerships with Microsoft, VMware, HPE, all the household brands of IT, and in many of these situations, we've always come into the market with the platform itself providing a basic backup. I'll give Windows, for example, anti-backup. It's there, but there's always a market for more capabilities, more functionality, more portability. So we've taken Office 365 as a different angle for backup, and we lead with the shared responsibility model. Microsoft as well as the other clouds make it very clear that data classification and that responsibility of data, that actually sits 100% with the customer. And so, yes, you can add things to the platform, but if we have organizations where we have things like, I need to retain my content forever, or I need a discovery use case, and then if you think about broader use cases, like OneDrive for business data, especially with the rapid shift of work from home, organizations may now be not so much using the file server, but using things like OneDrive for Business for file exchanges. So, having the control plane open that data is very important, so we really base it on the shared responsibility. And Microsoft is one of our strongest partners, so they are very keen for us to provide solutions that are going to consume and move data around to meet customer needs in the cloud and in the SaaS environment for sure. So, it's been a very easy conversation for our customers and it's our fastest growing product as well. So this product is doing great. I don't have the quarterly numbers but we just released in the mid part or the Q4, we just released the newest release, which implemented object storage support, so that's been the big ask for customers, right? So that product's doing great. >> Yeah, so that notion of shared responsibility, you hear that a lot in cloud security. You're applying it to cloud data protection, which you know security and data protection are now, there's a lot of gray area between them now. And I think security or data protection is a fundamental part of your security strategy. But that notion of shared responsibility is very important and one that's oftentimes misunderstood because people hear, oh, it's in the cloud, okay, my cloud vendor's got it covered. But what does that shared responsibility mean? Ultimately, isn't it up to the customer to own the end result? >> It is, and I look at especially Microsoft. They classify their software four different ways, on-prem software, software as a service, infrastructure as a service, and I forget whatever the third one is, but they have so many different ways that you can package their software, but in all of them, they put the data classification for the customer. And it's the same for other clouds as well. And if I'm an organization today, if I'm running data in a SaaS platform, if I am running systems in IAS platforms, in the hyperscale public clouds, that is an opportunity for me to really think about that control plane of the data, and the backup and restore responsibility, because it has to be easy to use. It has to be very consumable so that customers can avoid that data loss or be in a situation where the complexity to do a restore is so miserable that they may not even want to go do it. I've actually had conversations with organizations as they come to Veeam, that was their alternative. Oh, it's just too painful to do, like, why would you even do that? So that shared responsibility model across the different data types in the cloud and on-prem as well and SaaS models, that's really where we find the conversations go pretty nicely. >> Right, and if it's too complicated, you won't even bother testing it. So, I want to ask you something about cloud data. You mentioned cloud native capabilities, and I'm inferring from that, that you basically are not just taking your on-prem stack and shoving it into the cloud. You're actually taking advantage of the native cloud services. Can you explain what's going on there, and maybe some product specifics? >> Sure, so Veeam has this reputation of number one VM backup. I'm here in my office, I have posters from all over the years, and somewhere down here is number one VM backup. And that's where we cut our teeth and got our name out there. But now if you're in Azure, if you're in Amazon, we have cloud native backup products available. In fact, the last time you and I spoke was at Amazon re:Invent where we launched the Amazon product. And then last month, we launched the Azure product, which provides cloud native backup for Azure, and so now we have this cloud feature parody, and those products are going to move very quickly. As well, we've had this software as a service product for Office 365 where we keep adding services. And we saw in the general session, we're going to add protection for a new service in Office 365. So we're going to continue to innovate around these different areas, and there's also another cloud that we announced a capability for as well. So the platform at Veeam, it's growing, and it's amazing to see this happen, 'cause customers are making cloud investments and there's no cloud for all. So some organizations like this cloud, that cloud, or a little bit of these two clouds combined. So we have to really go into the cloud with customer needs in mind, because there's no one size fits all approach to the cloud, but the data, everybody knows how important that is. >> To that end though, each cloud is going to have a set of native services, and you've got to develop specific to that cloud, right, so that you can have the highest performance, the most efficient, the lowest cost data protection solution backup and recovery possible. Taking advantage of those native cloud services is going to be unique for each cloud, right? 'Cause AWS' cloud and Azure cloud, those are different technically underneath. Is that right? >> You're absolutely right, and the cost models have different behaviors across the clouds. In fact, the breakout that I did here at the event with Melissa Palmer, those who are interested in the economics of the cloud should check that out, because the cloud is all about consuming those resources. When I look at backup, I don't want backup to be a cost-prohibitive insurance policy, basically. I want backup to be a cost-effective, yet resilient technology that when we're using the cloud, we can kind of balance all these needs. And one of the ways that Veeam's done that is we've put in cost estimators, which it's not that big of a flashy part of the user interface, but it's so powerful to customers. The thought is if I want to consume infrastructure as a service in the cloud, and I want to back up via API call snapshots to EC2 instances only, nice and high performance, nice and fast, but the cost profile of that if I kept them for a year is completely different than if I used object storage. And what we're doing with the Veeam backup for Azure and Amazon products is we're putting those numbers right there in the wizard. So you could say, "Hey, I want to keep two years of data, "and I have snapshots and I have object storage," totally different cost profiles, and I'll put those cost estimates in there. You could make egregious examples where it'll be like 10 and 20 x the price, but it really allows customers to get it fast, to get it cost-efficient, and more importantly at the end of the day, have that protection that they need. And that's something I've been trying to evangelize that this cost estimator is a really big deal. >> It provides transparency so that you're going to let the business drive sort of what the data protection level is, as opposed to sort of whether it's a one-size-fit-all or you're under-protected or over-protected and spending too much. I ask Anton, "How do you prioritize?" Basically his answer was we look at the economics. And then ultimately you're giving tools to allow the customer to decide. >> Yeah, you don't want to have that surprise cloud bill at the end of the month. You don't want to have waste in the cloud, and Anton's right, the economics are very important. The modeling process that we use is interesting. I had a chat with one of the product managers who is basically in charge of our cloud economic modeling, and to the organizations out there, this is a really practical bit, is think about modeling, think about cloud economics, because here's the very important part. If you've already implemented something, it's too late. And what I mean by that, the economics, if they're not right when you implement it so you're not modeling it ahead of time, once you implement, you can monitor it all you want, but you're just going to monitor it off the model. So the thought is this is all a backwards process. You have to go backwards with the economics, with the model, and then that will lead you to no surprises down the road. >> I want to ask you about the COVID impact generally, but specifically as it relates to ransomware, we've had a lot more inquiries regarding ransomware. There's certainly a lot more talk about it in the press. What have you seen specifically with respect to ransomware since the pandemic and since the lockdown? >> So that's something that's near and dear to my heart. On the technology team here at product strategy, everyone has a little specialization, industry specialization. ransomware is mine, so good ask. Whew, so the one thing that sticks out to me a lot is identifying where ransomware comes in, and I have one data point that indicated around 58 or so percent of ransomware comes in through remote desktop. And the thought here is if we have shifted to remote access and new working models, what really worries me, Dave, is when people hustle, when people hurry. And the thought here is you can have it right or you can have it right now. In mid-March, we needed to make a move right now. So, I worry about incomplete security models, people hurrying to implement and maybe not taking their security right, especially when you think about most ransomware can come in through remote desktop. I though phish attacks were the main attack vector, but I had some data points that told me this. So I have been, and I just completed a great white paper that those watching this can go to veeam.com and download, but the thought here is I just completed a great white paper on tips to beat ransomware, and yes, Veeam has capabilities, but here's the logic, Dave. I like to explain it this way. Beating ransomware, and we had a breakout that I recorded here at the event and encourage everyone to watch that, I had two users share their story of how they beat ransomware with Veeam, two very different ways, too. Any product is or is not necessarily ransomware-resilient. It's like going through an audit. What I mean by that is people ask me all the time, is Veeam compliant to this standard or that standard? It's 100% dictated how the product's implemented, how the product's audited. Same with ransomware. It's 100% dictated on how Veeam is implemented and then what's the nature of the exploit. And so I break it down into three simple things. We have to educate. We have to know what threats are out there, we have to know who is accessing what data, and then the big part of it is the implementation. How have we implemented Veeam? Are we keeping data in immutable buckets in the cloud? Are we keeping data with an air gap? And then three, the remediation. When something does happen, how do we go about solving that problem? I talked to our tech support team who deals with it every day, and they have very good insights, very good feedback on this phenomena, and that they've helped me shape some of the recommendations I put in the paper. But yeah, it's a 30-page paper. I don't know if I can summarize it here. It's a long one for me, but the threat's real, and this is something we'll never be done with, right? I've done two other papers on it, and I'm going to have another one soon after that. But we're building stuff into the product, we're educating the market, and we're winning. We're seeing like I had the two customers beat ransomware, great stories. I think I learn so much hearing from someone who's gone through it, and that you can find that in the VeeamON broadcast for those attending here. >> Well, you touched on a couple. Take advantage of the cloud guys who have these immutable buckets that you can leverage. A lot of people don't even know about that. And then, like you say, create an air gap, and presumably there's best practice around how often you write to that bucket and how often you create that air gap. You maybe change up the patterns, I don't know, other thoughts on that. >> Well, I collectively put, I've created a term, and nobody's questioning me on it yet, so that's good, but I'm calling it ultra-resilient storage. And what I'm referring to is that immutable backup in the cloud. It becomes a math calculation. If you have one data point in there, that's good, but if you had a week's worth of data points, that's better. If you had a month's worth of data points, that's even better. But of course, those cost profiles are going to change. Same thing with tape, tape's an air gap, removable media, and I go back and forth on this, but some of the more resilient storage snapshot engines can do ultra-resilient techniques as well, such as like Pure Storage SafeMode and NetApp SnapVault. And then the last thing is actually a Veeam technology that's been out for, I don't know, three or four years now, insider protection, it's a completely out-of-band copy of backup data that Veeam Cloud Connect offers. So my thought here is that these ultra-resilient types, those are the best defense in these situations. It becomes a calculated risk of how much of it do I want to keep, because I want to have the most restore options available, I want to have no data loss. But I also don't want it old. There's a huge decline in value of taking your business back a year ago, because that's the last tape you had, for example. I want today's or yesterday's backup if I'm in that type of situation. So, I go through a lot of those points in my paper, but I hope that those out there fighting the war on ransomware have the tools. I know they have the tools to win with Veeam. >> Well, it's like we were talking about before, and ransomware is a really good example of the blurring lines between security and backup and recovery, of course. What role do analytics play in terms of providing transparency and identifying anomalous behavior in the whole ransomware equation? >> Well, the analytics are very important, and I have to be really kind of, be completely transparent. Veeam is a backup company. We're not a security tool. But it's getting awfully close. I don't want to say, the long form historical definition of IT security was something around this thing called a CIA triad, maintaining confidentiality, integrity, and availability of data. So, security tools are really big on the confidentiality and integrity side of it, but on the availability side, that's where Veeam can come in. So the analytics come in to our play pretty naturally. Veeam has had for years now an alarm that detects abnormal behavior in regards to CPU usage and disk write IO. If there's both of those are abnormally high, that is what we call possible ransomware activity. Or if we have a incremental backup that is like 100% change rate, that's a bad sign, things like that. And then the other angle is, even on PC's desktops, like this computer I'm talking to you now on, we have just simple logic of once you take a backup, eject the drive so it's offline, right? So analyzing where the threats come from, what kind of behavior they're going to have, when we apply it to backup, Veeam can have these builtin analytic engines that are just transparently there for our customers. There's no deep re-education necessary to use these, but the thought is we want a very flexible model that's just going to provide simple ease of use and then allow that protection with the threatscape to help the customers where we can, because no two ransomware threats are the same. That's the other thing. They are so varied in what they do, everything from application specific to files, and now there's these new ones that upload data. The ransom is actually a data leak. They're not encrypting the data, the ransom is take down potentially huge amounts of data leakage. So all kinds of threat actors out there, for sure. >> You know, the last line of questioning here, Rick, is I've said a number of times, it's ironic that we're entering this new decade and this pandemic hits. Everybody talks about the acceleration of certain trends, but if you think about the trends, last decade, it's always performance and cost, we talked a lot of granularity, we talked about simplicity, you guys expanded your number of use cases, the support, the compatibility matrix if you will. All those things are sort of things that you've executed on. As you look forward to this coming decade, we talked about cloud. I mean, we were talking about cloud back in 2008, 2009 timeframe, but it was a relatively small portion of the business. Now everybody's talking cloud, so cloud, cloud native, the whole discussion on ransomware, and being broad, our business resiliency. Digital transformation, we've been given lip service in a lot of cases to digital transformation. All of a sudden, that's changed. So as you pull out the telescope and look forward to the trends that are going to drive your thinking and Veeam's decision making, what do you look toward? >> Well, I think that Veeam is laser-focused on four things. Backup solutions for cloud, workloads, and there's incredible opportunity there, right? So yes, we have a great Azure story, great Amazon story, and in the keynote we indicated the next cloud capability, but there's still more, there's more services in the cloud that we need to go after. There's also the SaaS market. We have a great Office 365 story, but there's other SaaS products that we could provide a story for. And then the physical and virtual platforms, I mean, I feel really confident there. We've got really good capabilities, but there's always the 1% and what's in the corner, and what's the 1% of the 1%? And those are workloads we can continue to go after. But my thought is, as long as we attack those four areas, we're going to be on a good trajectory to deliver on that promise of being that most trusted provider of cloud data management for backup solutions. So, my thought here is that we're going to just keep adding projects, and it's very important to make it sometimes a new product. We don't want to just bolt it on to Backup and Replication V11 or V10 for that matter, because it'll slow it down. The cloud native products are going to have to have their own cadence, their own independent development cycles, and they're going to move faster, 'cause they'll need to. So you'll see us continue to add new products, new capabilities, and sometimes it'll intermix, and that's the whole definition of a platform, when one product is talking to another, from a management side, a control plane, giving customer portability, all that stuff. So we're just going to go after cloud virtual/physical SaaS and new products and new capabilities to do it. >> Well, Rick, it's always a pleasure talking to you. Your home studio looks great, you look good, but nonetheless, hopefully we'll be able to see each other face-to-face here shortly. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, Dave. >> All right, and thank you for watching, everybody. It's Dave Vellante and our continuous coverage of VeeamON 2020, the online version. We'll be right back right after this short break. (upbeat music)