(upbeat music) >> Hi everyone. Welcome back to this Cube conversation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, host of "theCUBE." Got a great conversation around Cloud Native, Cloud Native Journey, how enterprises are looking at Cloud Native and putting it all together. And it comes down to operations, developer productivity, and security. It's the hottest topic in technology. We got Chris Jones here in the studio, director of Product Management for Platform9. Chris, thanks for coming in. >> Hey, thanks. >> So when we always chat about, when we're at KubeCon. KubeConEU is coming up and in a few, in a few months, the number one conversation is developer productivity. And the developers are driving all the standards. It's interesting to see how they just throw everything out there and whatever gets adopted ends up becoming the standard, not the old school way of kind of getting stuff done. So that's cool. Security Kubernetes and Containers are all kind of now that next level. So you're starting to see the early adopters moving to the mainstream. Enterprises, a variety of different approaches. You guys are at the center of this. We've had a couple conversations with your CEO and your tech team over there. What are you seeing? You're building the products. What's the core product focus right now for Platform9? What are you guys aiming for? >> The core is that blend of enabling your infrastructure and PlatformOps or DevOps teams to be able to go fast and run in a stable environment, but at the same time enable developers. We don't want people going back to what I've been calling Shadow IT 2.0. It's, hey, I've been told to do something. I kicked off this Container initiative. I need to run my software somewhere. I'm just going to go figure it out. We want to keep those people productive. At the same time we want to enable velocity for our operations teams, be it PlatformOps or DevOps. >> Take us through in your mind and how you see the industry rolling out this Cloud Native journey. Where do you see customers out there? Because DevOps have been around, DevSecOps is rocking, you're seeing AI, hot trend now. Developers are still in charge. Is there a change to the infrastructure of how developers get their coding done and the infrastructure, setting up the DevOps is key, but when you add the Cloud Native journey for an enterprise, what changes? What is the, what is the, I guess what is the Cloud Native journey for an enterprise these days? >> The Cloud Native journey or the change? When- >> Let's start with the, let's start with what they want to do. What's the goal and then how does that happen? >> I think the goal is that promise land. Increased resiliency, better scalability, and overall reduced costs. I've gone from physical to virtual that gave me a higher level of density, packing of resources. I'm moving to Containers. I'm removing that OS layer again. I'm getting a better density again, but all of a sudden I'm running Kubernetes. What does that, what does that fundamentally do to my operations? Does it magically give me scalability and resiliency? Or do I need to change what I'm running and how it's running so it fits that infrastructure? And that's the reality, is you can't just take a Container and drop it into Kubernetes and say, hey, I'm now Cloud Native. I've got reduced cost, or I've got better resiliency. There's things that your engineering teams need to do to make sure that application is a Cloud Native. And then there's what I think is one of the largest shifts of virtual machines to containers. When I was in the world of application performance monitoring, we would see customers saying, well, my engineering team have this Java app, and they said it needs a VM with 12 gig of RAM and eight cores, and that's what we gave it. But it's running slow. I'm working with the application team and you can see it's running slow. And they're like, well, it's got all of its resources. One of those nice features of virtualization is over provisioning. So the infrastructure team would say, well, we gave it, we gave it all a RAM it needed. And what's wrong with that being over provisioned? It's like, well, Java expects that RAM to be there. Now all of a sudden, when you move to the world of containers, what we've got is that's not a set resource limit, really is like it used to be in a VM, right? When you set it for a container, your application teams really need to be paying attention to your resource limits and constraints within the world of Kubernetes. So instead of just being able to say, hey, I'm throwing over the fence and now it's just going to run on a VM, and that VMs got everything it needs. It's now really running on more, much more of a shared infrastructure where limits and constraints are going to impact the neighbors. They are going to impact who's making that decision around resourcing. Because that Kubernetes concept of over provisioning and the virtualization concept of over provisioning are not the same. So when I look at this problem, it's like, well, what changed? Well, I'll do my scale tests as an application developer and tester, and I'd see what resources it needs. I asked for that in the VM, that sets the high watermark, job's done. Well, Kubernetes, it's no longer a VM, it's a Kubernetes manifest. And well, who owns that? Who's writing it? Who's setting those limits? To me, that should be the application team. But then when it goes into operations world, they're like, well, that's now us. Can we change those? So it's that amalgamation of the two that is saying, I'm a developer. I used to pay attention, but now I need to pay attention. And an infrastructure person saying, I used to just give 'em what they wanted, but now I really need to know what they've wanted, because it's going to potentially have a catastrophic impact on what I'm running. >> So what's the impact for the developer? Because, infrastructure's code is what everybody wants. The developer just wants to get the code going and they got to pay attention to all these things, or don't they? Is that where you guys come in? How do you guys see the problem? Actually scope the problem that you guys solve? 'Cause I think you're getting at I think the core issue here, which is, I've got Kubernetes, I've got containers, I've got developer productivity that I want to focus on. What's the problem that you guys solve? >> Platform operation teams that are adopting Cloud Native in their environment, they've got that steep learning curve of Kubernetes plus this fundamental change of how an app runs. What we're doing is taking away the burden of needing to operate and run Kubernetes and giving them the choice of the flexibility of infrastructure and location. Be that an air gap environment like a, let's say a telco provider that needs to run a containerized network function and containerized workloads for 5G. That's one thing that we can deploy and achieve in a completely inaccessible environment all the way through to Platform9 running traditionally as SaaS, as we were born, that's remotely managing and controlling your Kubernetes environments on-premise AWS. That hybrid cloud experience that could be also Bare Metal, but it's our platform running your environments with our support there, 24 by seven, that's proactively reaching out. So it's removing a lot of that burden and the complications that come along with operating the environment and standing it up, which means all of a sudden your DevOps and platform operations teams can go and work with your engineers and application developers and say, hey, let's get, let's focus on the stuff that, that we need to be focused on, which is running our business and providing a service to our customers. Not figuring out how to upgrade a Kubernetes cluster, add new nodes, and configure all of the low level. >> I mean there are, that's operations that just needs to work. And sounds like as they get into the Cloud Native kind of ops, there's a lot of stuff that kind of goes wrong. Or you go, oops, what do we buy into? Because the CIOs, let's go, let's go Cloud Native. We want to, we got to get set up for the future. We're going to be Cloud Native, not just lift and shift and we're going to actually build it out right. Okay, that sounds good. And when we have to actually get done. >> Chris: Yeah. >> You got to spin things up and stand up the infrastructure. What specifically use case do you guys see that emerges for Platform9 when people call you up and you go talk to customers and prospects? What's the one thing or use case or cases that you guys see that you guys solve the best? >> So I think one of the, one of the, I guess new use cases that are coming up now, everyone's talking about economic pressures. I think the, the tap blows open, just get it done. CIO is saying let's modernize, let's use the cloud. Now all of a sudden they're recognizing, well wait, we're spending a lot of money now. We've opened that tap all the way, what do we do? So now they're looking at ways to control that spend. So we're seeing that as a big emerging trend. What we're also sort of seeing is people looking at their data centers and saying, well, I've got this huge legacy environment that's running a hypervisor. It's running VMs. Can we still actually do what we need to do? Can we modernize? Can we start this Cloud Native journey without leaving our data centers, our co-locations? Or if I do want to reduce costs, is that that thing that says maybe I'm repatriating or doing a reverse migration? Do I have to go back to my data center or are there other alternatives? And we're seeing that trend a lot. And our roadmap and what we have in the product today was specifically built to handle those, those occurrences. So we brought in KubeVirt in terms of virtualization. We have a long legacy doing OpenStack and private clouds. And we've worked with a lot of those users and customers that we have and asked the questions, what's important? And today, when we look at the world of Cloud Native, you can run virtualization within Kubernetes. So you can, instead of running two separate platforms, you can have one. So all of a sudden, if you're looking to modernize, you can start on that new infrastructure stack that can run anywhere, Kubernetes, and you can start bringing VMs over there as you are containerizing at the same time. So now you can keep your application operations in one environment. And this also helps if you're trying to reduce costs. If you really are saying, we put that Dev environment in AWS, we've got a huge amount of velocity out of it now, can we do that elsewhere? Is there a co-location we can go to? Is there a provider that we can go to where we can run that infrastructure or run the Kubernetes, but not have to run the infrastructure? >> It's going to be interesting too, when you see the Edge come online, you start, we've got Mobile World Congress coming up, KubeCon events we're going to be at, the conversation is not just about public cloud. And you guys obviously solve a lot of do-it-yourself implementation hassles that emerge when people try to kind of stand up their own environment. And we hear from developers consistency between code, managing new updates, making sure everything is all solid so they can go fast. That's the goal. And that, and then people can get standardized on that. But as you get public cloud and do it yourself, kind of brings up like, okay, there's some gaps there as the architecture changes to be more distributed computing, Edge, on-premises cloud, it's cloud operations. So that's cool for DevOps and Cloud Native. How do you guys differentiate from say, some the public cloud opportunities and the folks who are doing it themselves? How do you guys fit in that world and what's the pitch or what's the story? >> The fit that we look at is that third alternative. Let's get your team focused on what's high value to your business and let us deliver that public cloud experience on your infrastructure or in the public cloud, which gives you that ability to still be flexible if you want to make choices to run consistently for your developers in two different locations. So as I touched on earlier, instead of saying go figure out Kubernetes, how do you upgrade a hundred worker nodes in place upgrade. We've solved that problem. That's what we do every single day of the week. Don't go and try to figure out how to upgrade a cluster and then upgrade all of the, what I call Kubernetes friends, your core DNSs, your metrics server, your Kubernetes dashboard. These are all things that we package, we test, we version. So when you click upgrade, we've already handled that entire process. So it's saying don't have your team focused on that lower level piece of work. Get them focused on what is important, which is your business services. >> Yeah, the infrastructure and getting that stood up. I mean, I think the thing that's interesting, if you look at the market right now, you mentioned cost savings and recovery, obviously kind of a recession. I mean, people are tightening their belts for sure. I don't think the digital transformation and Cloud Native spend is going to plummet. It's going to probably be on hold and be squeezed a little bit. But to your point, people are refactoring looking at how to get the best out of what they got. It's not just open the tap of spend the cash like it used to be. Yeah, a couple months, even a couple years ago. So okay, I get that. But then you look at the what's coming, AI. You're seeing all the new data infrastructure that's coming. The containers, Kubernetes stuff, got to get stood up pretty quickly and it's got to be reliable. So to your point, the teams need to get done with this and move on to the next thing. >> Chris: Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> 'Cause there's more coming. I mean, there's a lot coming for the apps that are building in Data Native, AI-Native, Cloud Native. So it seems that this Kubernetes thing needs to get solved. Is that kind of what you guys are focused on right now? >> So, I mean to use a customer, we have a customer that's in AI/ML and they run their platform at customer sites and that's hardware bound. You can't run AI machine learning on anything anywhere. Well, with Platform9 they can. So we're enabling them to deliver services into their customers that's running their AI/ML platform in their customer's data centers anywhere in the world on hardware that is purpose-built for running that workload. They're not Kubernetes experts. That's what we are. We're bringing them that ability to focus on what's important and just delivering their business services whilst they're enabling our team. And our 24 by seven proactive management are always on assurance to keep that up and running for them. So when something goes bump at the night at 2:00am, our guys get woken up. They're the ones that are reaching out to the customer saying, your environments have a problem, we're taking these actions to fix it. Obviously sometimes, especially if it is running on Bare Metal, there's things you can't do remotely. So you might need someone to go and do that. But even when that happens, you're not by yourself. You're not sitting there like I did when I worked for a bank in one of my first jobs, three o'clock in the morning saying, wow, our end of day processing is stuck. Who else am I waking up? Right? >> Exactly, yeah. Got to get that cash going. But this is a great use case. I want to get to the customer. What do some of the successful customers say to you for the folks watching that aren't yet a customer of Platform9, what are some of the accolades and comments or anecdotes that you guys hear from customers that you have? >> It just works, which I think is probably one of the best ones you can get. Customers coming back and being able to show to their business that they've delivered growth, like business growth and productivity growth and keeping their organization size the same. So we started on our containerization journey. We went to Kubernetes. We've deployed all these new workloads and our operations team is still six people. We're doing way more with growth less, and I think that's also talking to the strength that we're bringing, 'cause we're, we're augmenting that team. They're spending less time on the really low level stuff and automating a lot of the growth activity that's involved. So when it comes to being able to grow their business, they can just focus on that, not- >> Well you guys do the heavy lifting, keep on top of the Kubernetes, make sure that all the versions are all done. Everything's stable and consistent so they can go on and do the build out and provide their services. That seems to be what you guys are best at. >> Correct, correct. >> And so what's on the roadmap? You have the product, direct product management, you get the keys to the kingdom. What is, what is the focus? What's your focus right now? Obviously Kubernetes is growing up, Containers. We've been hearing a lot at the last KubeCon about the security containers is getting better. You've seen verification, a lot more standards around some things. What are you focused on right now for at a product over there? >> Edge is a really big focus for us. And I think in Edge you can look at it in two ways. The mantra that I drive is Edge must be remote. If you can't do something remotely at the Edge, you are using a human being, that's not Edge. Our Edge management capabilities and being in the market for over two years are a hundred percent remote. You want to stand up a store, you just ship the server in there, it gets racked, the rest of it's remote. Imagine a store manager in, I don't know, KFC, just plugging in the server, putting in the ethernet cable, pressing the power button. The rest of all that provisioning for that Cloud Native stack, Kubernetes, KubeVirt for virtualization is done remotely. So we're continuing to focus on that. The next piece that is related to that is allowing people to run Platform9 SaaS in their data centers. So we do ag app today and we've had a really strong focus on telecommunications and the containerized network functions that come along with that. So this next piece is saying, we're bringing what we run as SaaS into your data center, so then you can run it. 'Cause there are many people out there that are saying, we want these capabilities and we want everything that the Platform9 control plane brings and simplifies. But unfortunately, regulatory compliance reasons means that we can't leverage SaaS. So they might be using a cloud, but they're saying that's still our infrastructure. We're still closed that network down, or they're still on-prem. So they're two big priorities for us this year. And that on-premise experiences is paramount, even to the point that we will be delivering a way that when you run an on-premise, you can still say, wait a second, well I can send outbound alerts to Platform9. So their support team can still be proactively helping me as much as they could, even though I'm running Platform9s control plane. So it's sort of giving that blend of two experiences. They're big, they're big priorities. And the third pillar is all around virtualization. It's saying if you have economic pressures, then I think it's important to look at what you're spending today and realistically say, can that be reduced? And I think hypervisors and virtualization is something that should be looked at, because if you can actually reduce that spend, you can bring in some modernization at the same time. Let's take some of those nos that exist that are two years into their five year hardware life cycle. Let's turn that into a Cloud Native environment, which is enabling your modernization in place. It's giving your engineers and application developers the new toys, the new experiences, and then you can start running some of those virtualized workloads with KubeVirt, there. So you're reducing cost and you're modernizing at the same time with your existing infrastructure. >> You know Chris, the topic of this content series that we're doing with you guys is finding the right path, trusting the right path to Cloud Native. What does that mean? I mean, if you had to kind of summarize that phrase, trusting the right path to Cloud Native, what does that mean? It mean in terms of architecture, is it deployment? Is it operations? What's the underlying main theme of that quote? What's the, what's? How would you talk to a customer and say, what does that mean if someone said, "Hey, what does that right path mean?" >> I think the right path means focusing on what you should be focusing on. I know I've said it a hundred times, but if your entire operations team is trying to figure out the nuts and bolts of Kubernetes and getting three months into a journey and discovering, ah, I need Metrics Server to make something function. I want to use Horizontal Pod Autoscaler or Vertical Pod Autoscaler and I need this other thing, now I need to manage that. That's not the right path. That's literally learning what other people have been learning for the last five, seven years that have been focused on Kubernetes solely. So the why- >> There's been a lot of grind. People have been grinding it out. I mean, that's what you're talking about here. They've been standing up the, when Kubernetes started, it was all the promise. >> Chris: Yep. >> And essentially manually kind of getting in in the weeds and configuring it. Now it's matured up. They want stability. >> Chris: Yeah. >> Not everyone can get down and dirty with Kubernetes. It's not something that people want to generally do unless you're totally into it, right? Like I mean, I mean ops teams, I mean, yeah. You know what I mean? It's not like it's heavy lifting. Yeah, it's important. Just got to get it going. >> Yeah, I mean if you're deploying with Platform9, your Ops teams can tinker to their hearts content. We're completely compliant upstream Kubernetes. You can go and change an API server flag, let's go and mess with the scheduler, because we want to. You can still do that, but don't, don't have your team investing in all this time to figure it out. It's been figured out. >> John: Got it. >> Get them focused on enabling velocity for your business. >> So it's not build, but run. >> Chris: Correct? >> Or run Kubernetes, not necessarily figure out how to kind of get it all, consume it out. >> You know we've talked to a lot of customers out there that are saying, "I want to be able to deliver a service to my users." Our response is, "Cool, let us run it. You consume it, therefore deliver it." And we're solving that in one hit versus figuring out how to first run it, then operate it, then turn that into a consumable service. >> So the alternative Platform9 is what? They got to do it themselves or use the Cloud or what's the, what's the alternative for the customer for not using Platform9? Hiring more people to kind of work on it? What's the? >> People, building that kind of PaaS experience? Something that I've been very passionate about for the past year is looking at that world of sort of GitOps and what that means. And if you go out there and you sort of start asking the question what's happening? Just generally with Kubernetes as well and GitOps in that scope, then you'll hear some people saying, well, I'm making it PaaS, because Kubernetes is too complicated for my developers and we need to give them something. There's some great material out there from the likes of Intuit and Adobe where for two big contributors to Argo and the Argo projects, they almost have, well they do have, different experiences. One is saying, we went down the PaaS route and it failed. The other one is saying, well we've built a really stable PaaS and it's working. What are they trying to do? They're trying to deliver an outcome to make it easy to use and consume Kubernetes. So you could go out there and say, hey, I'm going to build a Kubernetes cluster. Sounds like Argo CD is a great way to expose that to my developers so they can use Kubernetes without having to use Kubernetes and start automating things. That is an approach, but you're going to be going completely open source and you're going to have to bring in all the individual components, or you could just lay that, lay it down, and consume it as a service and not have to- >> And mentioned to it. They were the ones who kind of brought that into the open. >> They did. Inuit is the primary contributor to the Argo set of products. >> How has that been received in the market? I mean, they had the event at the Computer History Museum last fall. What's the momentum there? What's the big takeaway from that project? >> Growth. To me, growth. I mean go and track the stars on that one. It's just, it's growth. It's unlocking machine learning. Argo workflows can do more than just make things happen. Argo CD I think the approach they're taking is, hey let's make this simple to use, which I think can be lost. And I think credit where credit's due, they're really pushing to bring in a lot of capabilities to make it easier to work with applications and microservices on Kubernetes. It's not just that, hey, here's a GitOps tool. It can take something from a Git repo and deploy it and maybe prioritize it and help you scale your operations from that perspective. It's taking a step back and saying, well how did we get to production in the first place? And what can be done down there to help as well? I think it's growth expansion of features. They had a huge release just come out in, I think it was 2.6, that brought in things that as a product manager that I don't often look at like really deep technical things and say wow, that's powerful. But they have, they've got some great features in that release that really do solve real problems. >> And as the product, as the product person, who's the target buyer for you? Who's the customer? Who's making that? And you got decision maker, influencer, and recommender. Take us through the customer persona for you guys. >> So that Platform Ops, DevOps space, right, the people that need to be delivering Containers as a service out to their organization. But then it's also important to say, well who else are our primary users? And that's developers, engineers, right? They shouldn't have to say, oh well I have access to a Kubernetes cluster. Do I have to use kubectl or do I need to go find some other tool? No, they can just log to Platform9. It's integrated with your enterprise id. >> They're the end customer at the end of the day, they're the user. >> Yeah, yeah. They can log in. And they can see the clusters you've given them access to as a Platform Ops Administrator. >> So job well done for you guys. And your mind is the developers are moving 'em fast, coding and happy. >> Chris: Yeah, yeah. >> And and from a customer standpoint, you reduce the maintenance cost, because you keep the Ops smoother, so you got efficiency and maintenance costs kind of reduced or is that kind of the benefits? >> Yeah, yep, yeah. And at two o'clock in the morning when things go inevitably wrong, they're not there by themselves, and we're proactively working with them. >> And that's the uptime issue. >> That is the uptime issue. And Cloud doesn't solve that, right? Everyone experienced that Clouds can go down, entire regions can go offline. That's happened to all Cloud providers. And what do you do then? Kubernetes isn't your recovery plan. It's part of it, right, but it's that piece. >> You know Chris, to wrap up this interview, I will say that "theCUBE" is 12 years old now. We've been to OpenStack early days. We had you guys on when we were covering OpenStack and now Cloud has just been booming. You got AI around the corner, AI Ops, now you got all this new data infrastructure, it's just amazing Cloud growth, Cloud Native, Security Native, Cloud Native, Data Native, AI Native. It's going to be all, this is the new app environment, but there's also existing infrastructure. So going back to OpenStack, rolling our own cloud, building your own cloud, building infrastructure cloud, in a cloud way, is what the pioneers have done. I mean this is what we're at. Now we're at this scale next level, abstracted away and make it operational. It seems to be the key focus. We look at CNCF at KubeCon and what they're doing with the cloud SecurityCon, it's all about operations. >> Chris: Yep, right. >> Ops and you know, that's going to sound counterintuitive 'cause it's a developer open source environment, but you're starting to see that Ops focus in a good way. >> Chris: Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> Infrastructure as code way. >> Chris: Yep. >> What's your reaction to that? How would you summarize where we are in the industry relative to, am I getting, am I getting it right there? Is that the right view? What am I missing? What's the current state of the next level, NextGen infrastructure? >> It's a good question. When I think back to sort of late 2019, I sort of had this aha moment as I saw what really truly is delivering infrastructure as code happening at Platform9. There's an open source project Ironic, which is now also available within Kubernetes that is Metal Kubed that automates Bare Metal as code, which means you can go from an empty server, lay down your operating system, lay down Kubernetes, and you've just done everything delivered to your customer as code with a Cloud Native platform. That to me was sort of the biggest realization that I had as I was moving into this industry was, wait, it's there. This can be done. And the evolution of tooling and operations is getting to the point where that can be achieved and it's focused on by a number of different open source projects. Not just Ironic and and Metal Kubed, but that's a huge win. That is truly getting your infrastructure. >> John: That's an inflection point, really. >> Yeah. >> If you think about it, 'cause that's one of the problems. We had with the Bare Metal piece was the automation and also making it Cloud Ops, cloud operations. >> Right, yeah. I mean, one of the things that I think Ironic did really well was saying let's just treat that piece of Bare Metal like a Cloud VM or an instance. If you got a problem with it, just give the person using it or whatever's using it, a new one and reimage it. Just tell it to reimage itself and it'll just (snaps fingers) go. You can do self-service with it. In Platform9, if you log in to our SaaS Ironic, you can go and say, I want that physical server to myself, because I've got a giant workload, or let's turn it into a Kubernetes cluster. That whole thing is automated. To me that's infrastructure as code. I think one of the other important things that's happening at the same time is we're seeing GitOps, we're seeing things like Terraform. I think it's important for organizations to look at what they have and ask, am I using tools that are fit for tomorrow or am I using tools that are yesterday's tools to solve tomorrow's problems? And when especially it comes to modernizing infrastructure as code, I think that's a big piece to look at. >> Do you see Terraform as old or new? >> I see Terraform as old. It's a fantastic tool, capable of many great things and it can work with basically every single provider out there on the planet. It is able to do things. Is it best fit to run in a GitOps methodology? I don't think it is quite at that point. In fact, if you went and looked at Flux, Flux has ways that make Terraform GitOps compliant, which is absolutely fantastic. It's using two tools, the best of breeds, which is solving that tomorrow problem with tomorrow solutions. >> Is the new solutions old versus new. I like this old way, new way. I mean, Terraform is not that old and it's been around for about eight years or so, whatever. But HashiCorp is doing a great job with that. I mean, so okay with Terraform, what's the new address? Is it more complex environments? Because Terraform made sense when you had basic DevOps, but now it sounds like there's a whole another level of complexity. >> I got to say. >> New tools. >> That kind of amalgamation of that application into infrastructure. Now my app team is paying way more attention to that manifest file, which is what GitOps is trying to solve. Let's templatize things. Let's version control our manifest, be it helm, customize, or just a straight up Kubernetes manifest file, plain and boring. Let's get that version controlled. Let's make sure that we know what is there, why it was changed. Let's get some auditability and things like that. And then let's get that deployment all automated. So that's predicated on the cluster existing. Well why can't we do the same thing with the cluster, the inception problem. So even if you're in public cloud, the question is like, well what's calling that API to call that thing to happen? Where is that file living? How well can I manage that in a large team? Oh my God, something just changed. Who changed it? Where is that file? And I think that's one of big, the big pieces to be sold. >> Yeah, and you talk about Edge too and on-premises. I think one of the things I'm observing and certainly when DevOps was rocking and rolling and infrastructures code was like the real push, it was pretty much the public cloud, right? >> Chris: Yep. >> And you did Cloud Native and you had stuff on-premises. Yeah you did some lifting and shifting in the cloud, but the cool stuff was going in the public cloud and you ran DevOps. Okay, now you got on-premise cloud operation and Edge. Is that the new DevOps? I mean 'cause what you're kind of getting at with old new, old new Terraform example is an interesting point, because you're pointing out potentially that that was good DevOps back in the day or it still is. >> Chris: It is, I was going to say. >> But depending on how you define what DevOps is. So if you say, I got the new DevOps with public on-premise and Edge, that's just not all public cloud, that's essentially distributed Cloud Native. >> Correct. Is that the new DevOps in your mind or is that? How would you, or is that oversimplifying it? >> Or is that that term where everyone's saying Platform Ops, right? Has it shifted? >> Well you bring up a good point about Terraform. I mean Terraform is well proven. People love it. It's got great use cases and now there seems to be new things happening. We call things like super cloud emerging, which is multicloud and abstraction layers. So you're starting to see stuff being abstracted away for the benefits of moving to the next level, so teams don't get stuck doing the same old thing. They can move on. Like what you guys are doing with Platform9 is providing a service so that teams don't have to do it. >> Correct, yeah. >> That makes a lot of sense, So you just, now it's running and then they move on to the next thing. >> Chris: Yeah, right. >> So what is that next thing? >> I think Edge is a big part of that next thing. The propensity for someone to put up with a delay, I think it's gone. For some reason, we've all become fairly short-tempered, Short fused. You know, I click the button, it should happen now, type people. And for better or worse, hopefully it gets better and we all become a bit more patient. But how do I get more effective and efficient at delivering that to that really demanding- >> I think you bring up a great point. I mean, it's not just people are getting short-tempered. I think it's more of applications are being deployed faster, security is more exposed if they don't see things quicker. You got data now infrastructure scaling up massively. So, there's a double-edged swords to scale. >> Chris: Yeah, yeah. I mean, maintenance, downtime, uptime, security. So yeah, I think there's a tension around, and one hand enthusiasm around pushing a lot of code and new apps. But is the confidence truly there? It's interesting one little, (snaps finger) supply chain software, look at Container Security for instance. >> Yeah, yeah. It's big. I mean it was codified. >> Do you agree that people, that's kind of an issue right now. >> Yeah, and it was, I mean even the supply chain has been codified by the US federal government saying there's things we need to improve. We don't want to see software being a point of vulnerability, and software includes that whole process of getting it to a running point. >> It's funny you mentioned remote and one of the thing things that you're passionate about, certainly Edge has to be remote. You don't want to roll a truck or labor at the Edge. But I was doing a conversation with, at Rebars last year about space. It's hard to do brake fix on space. It's hard to do a, to roll a someone to configure satellite, right? Right? >> Chris: Yeah. >> So Kubernetes is in space. We're seeing a lot of Cloud Native stuff in apps, in space, so just an example. This highlights the fact that it's got to be automated. Is there a machine learning AI angle with all this ChatGPT talk going on? You see all the AI going the next level. Some pretty cool stuff and it's only, I know it's the beginning, but I've heard people using some of the new machine learning, large language models, large foundational models in areas I've never heard of. Machine learning and data centers, machine learning and configuration management, a lot of different ways. How do you see as the product person, you incorporating the AI piece into the products for Platform9? >> I think that's a lot about looking at the telemetry and the information that we get back and to use one of those like old idle terms, that continuous improvement loop to feed it back in. And I think that's really where machine learning to start with comes into effect. As we run across all these customers, our system that helps at two o'clock in the morning has that telemetry, it's got that data. We can see what's changing and what's happening. So it's writing the right algorithms, creating the right machine learning to- >> So training will work for you guys. You have enough data and the telemetry to do get that training data. >> Yeah, obviously there's a lot of investment required to get there, but that is something that ultimately that could be achieved with what we see in operating people's environments. >> Great. Chris, great to have you here in the studio. Going wide ranging conversation on Kubernetes and Platform9. I guess my final question would be how do you look at the next five years out there? Because you got to run the product management, you got to have that 20 mile steer, you got to look at the customers, you got to look at what's going on in the engineering and you got to kind of have that arc. This is the right path kind of view. What's the five year arc look like for you guys? How do you see this playing out? 'Cause KubeCon is coming up and we're you seeing Kubernetes kind of break away with security? They had, they didn't call it KubeCon Security, they call it CloudNativeSecurityCon, they just had in Seattle inaugural events seemed to go well. So security is kind of breaking out and you got Kubernetes. It's getting bigger. Certainly not going away, but what's your five year arc of of how Platform9 and Kubernetes and Ops evolve? >> It's to stay on that theme, it's focusing on what is most important to our users and getting them to a point where they can just consume it, so they're not having to operate it. So it's finding those big items and bringing that into our platform. It's something that's consumable, that's just taken care of, that's tested with each release. So it's simplifying operations more and more. We've always said freedom in cloud computing. Well we started on, we started on OpenStack and made that simple. Stable, easy, you just have it, it works. We're doing that with Kubernetes. We're expanding out that user, right, we're saying bring your developers in, they can download their Kube conflict. They can see those Containers that are running there. They can access the events, the log files. They can log in and build a VM using KubeVirt. They're self servicing. So it's alleviating pressures off of the Ops team, removing the help desk systems that people still seem to rely on. So it's like what comes into that field that is the next biggest issue? Is it things like CI/CD? Is it simplifying GitOps? Is it bringing in security capabilities to talk to that? Or is that a piece that is a best of breed? Is there a reason that it's been spun out to its own conference? Is this something that deserves a focus that should be a specialized capability instead of tooling and vendors that we work with, that we partner with, that could be brought in as a service. I think it's looking at those trends and making sure that what we bring in has the biggest impact to our users. >> That's awesome. Thanks for coming in. I'll give you the last word. Put a plug in for Platform9 for the people who are watching. What should they know about Platform9 that they might not know about it or what should? When should they call you guys and when should they engage? Take a take a minute to give the plug. >> The plug. I think it's, if your operations team is focused on building Kubernetes, stop. That shouldn't be the cloud. That shouldn't be in the Edge, that shouldn't be at the data center. They should be consuming it. If your engineering teams are all trying different ways and doing different things to use and consume Cloud Native services and Kubernetes, they shouldn't be. You want consistency. That's how you get economies of scale. Provide them with a simple platform that's integrated with all of your enterprise identity where they can just start consuming instead of having to solve these problems themselves. It's those, it's those two personas, right? Where the problems manifest. What are my operations teams doing, and are they delivering to my company or are they building infrastructure again? And are my engineers sprinting or crawling? 'Cause if they're not sprinting, you should be asked the question, do I have the right Cloud Native tooling in my environment and how can I get them back? >> I think it's developer productivity, uptime, security are the tell signs. You get that done. That's the goal of what you guys are doing, your mission. >> Chris: Yep. >> Great to have you on, Chris. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. >> Chris: Thanks very much. 0 Okay, this is "theCUBE" here, finding the right path to Cloud Native. I'm John Furrier, host of "theCUBE." Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>Hi everyone. Welcome to our event, pure Storage, the Path to Sustainable It. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. Very pleased to welcome back one of our cube alumni. AJ Singh joins me, the Chief Product Officer at Peer Storage. Aj, it's great to have you back on the program. >>Great to be back on, Lisa. Good morning. >>Good morning. And sustainability is such an important topic to talk about. So we're gonna really unpack what PI's doing. We're gonna get your viewpoints on what you're saying, and you're gonna leave the audience with some recommendations on how they can get started on our ESG journey. First question, we've been hearing a lot from pure RJ about the role that technology plays in organizations achieving sustainability goals. What's been the biggest environmental impact associated with, with customers achieving that given the massive volumes of data that keep being generated? >>Absolutely. Lisa, you can imagine that the data is only growing and exploding and, and, and, and there's a good reason for it. You know, data is the new currency. Some people call it the new oil. And the opportunity to go process this data gain insights is really helping customers drive an edge in the digital transformation. It's gonna make a difference between them being on the leaderboard a decade from now, when the digital transformation kind of pans out versus, you know, being kind of somebody that, you know, quite missed the boat. So data is super critical and, and obviously as part of that, we see all these big benefits, but it has to be stored. And, and, and that means it's gonna consume a lot of resources and, and the, and therefore data center usage has only accelerated, right? You can imagine the amount of data being generated, you know, a recent study pointed to roughly by twenty twenty five, a hundred and seventy five zetabytes, which where each zettabyte is a billion terabytes. So just think of that size and scale data. That's huge. And, and they also say that, you know, pretty soon, today, in fact, in the developed world, every person is having an interaction with the data center literally every 18 seconds. So whether it's on Facebook or Twitter or you know, your email, people are constantly interacting with data. So you can imagine this data is only exploding. It has to be stored and it consumes a lot of energy. In fact, >>It out, oh, go ahead. Sorry. >>No, I was saying in fact, you know, there was some studies have shown that data center usage literally consumes one to 2% of global energy consumption. So if there's one place we could really help climate change and, and all those aspects, if you can kind of really, you know, tamp down the data center, energy consumption, sorry, you were saying, >>I was just gonna say, it's, it's an incredibly important topic and the, the, the stats on data that you provided. And also I, I like how you talked about, you know, every 18 seconds we're interacting with a data center, whether we know it or not, we think about the long term implications, the fact that data is growing massively. As you shared with the stats that you mentioned, if we think about though the responsibility that companies have, every company in today's world needs to be a data company, right? And we consumers expect it. We expect that you are gonna deliver these relevant, personalized experiences, whether we're doing a transaction in our personal lives or in business. But what is the, what requirements do technology companies have to really start billing down their carbon footprints? >>No, absolutely. If you gonna think about it, just to kind of finish up the data story a little bit, the explosion is to the point where, in fact, if you just recently was in the news that Ireland went up and said, sorry, we can't have any more data centers here. We just don't have the power to supply them. That was big in the news. And you know, all the hyperscale that's crashing the head, I know they've come around that and figured out a way around it, but it's getting there. Some, some organizations and areas jurisdictions are saying pretty much no data center the law, you know, we're, we just can't do it. And so, as you said, so companies like Pure, I mean, our view is that it has an opportunity here to really do our bit for climate change and be able to, you know, drive a sustainable environment. >>And, and at Pure we believe that, you know, today's data success really ultimately hinges on energy efficiency, you know, so to to really be energy efficient means you are gonna be successful long term with data. Because if you think of classic data infrastructures, the legacy infrastructures, you know, we've got disc infrastructures, hybrid infrastructures, flash infrastructures, low end systems, medium end systems, high end systems. So a lot of silos, you know, a lot of inefficiency across the silos. Cause the data doesn't get used across that. In fact, you know, today a lot of data centers are not really built with kind of the efficiency and environmental mindsets. So they're the big opportunity there. >>So aj, talk to me about some of the steps that Pure is implementing as its chief product officer. Would love to get your your thoughts, what steps is it implementing to help Pures customers become more sustainable? >>No, absolutely. So essentially we're all inherently motivated, like pure and, and, and, and everybody else to solve problems for customers and really forward the status quo, right? You know, innovation, you know, that's what we were all about. And while we are doing that, the challenge is to how do you make technology and the data we feed into it faster, smarter, scalable obviously, but more importantly sustainable. But you can do all of that. But if you miss the sustainability bit, you're kind of missing the boat. And I also feel from an ethical perspective, that's really important for us, not only to do all the other things, but also kind of make it sustainable. In fact, today 80% of the companies, the companies are realizing this, 80% today are in fact report out on sustainability, which is, is great. And in fact, 80% of leadership at companies, you know, CEOs and senior executives say they've been impacted by some climate change event. >>You know, whether it's a fire in the place they had to evacuate or floods or storms or hurricanes, you, you name it, right? So mitigating the carbon impact can in fact today be a competitive advantage for companies because that's where the puck is going and everybody's, you know, is skating, wanting to skate towards the buck. And it's good, it's good business too, to be sustainable and, and, and meet these, you know, customer requirements. In fact, the the recent survey that we released today is saying that more and more organizations are kickstarting, their sustainability initiatives and many take are aiming to make a significant progress against that over the next decade. So that's, that's really, you know, part of the big, the relief. So our view is that that IT infrastructure, you know, can really make a big push towards greener it and not just gonna greenwash it, but actually, you know, you know, make things more greener and, and, and really take the, the lead in, in esg. And so it's important that organizations can reach alignment with their IT teams and challenge their IT teams to continue to lead, you know, for the organization, the sustainability aspects. >>I'm curious, aj, when you're in customer conversations, are you seeing that it's really the C-suite plus it coming together and, and how does peer help facilitate that? To your point, it needs to be able to deliver this, but it's, it's a board level objective these days. >>Absolutely. We're seeing increasingly, especially in Europe with the, you know, the war in Ukraine and the energy crisis that, you know, that's, that's, you know, unleashed we definitely see is becoming a bigger and bigger board level objective for, for a lot of companies. And we definitely see customers in starting to do that. So, so in particular, I do want to touch briefly on what steps we are taking as a company, you know, to to to make it sustainable. And obviously customers are doing all the things we talked about and, and, and we're also helping them become smarter with data. But the key difference is, you know, we have a big focus on efficiency, which is really optimizing performance for what with unmatched storage entities. So you can reduce the footprint and dramatically lower the power required. And and how efficient is that? You know, compared to other old flash systems, we tend to be one fifth, we tend to take one fifth the power compared to other flash systems and substantially lower compared to spinning dis. >>So you can imagine, you know, cutting your, if data center consumption is say 2% of global consumption, roughly 40% of that tends to be storage cause of all the spinning disc. So you at about, you know, 0.8% of global consumption and if you can cut that by four fifths, you know, you can already start to make an impact. So, so we feel we can do that. And also we're quite a bit more denser, 10 times more denser. So imagine one fifth the power, one 10th the density, but then we take it a step further because okay, you've got the storage system in the data center, but what about the end of life aspect? What about the waste and reclamation? So we also have something called non-disruptive upgrades where using our AI technology in pure one, we can start to sense when a particular part is going to fail and just before it goes through failure, we actually replace it in a non-disruptive fashion. So customers data is not impacted and then we recycle that so you get a full end to end life cycle, you know, from all the way from the time you deploy much lower power, much lower density, but then also at the back end in a reduction in e-waste and those kind of things. >>That's a great point you that you bring up in terms of the reclamation process. It sounds like Pure does that on its own. The customer doesn't have to be involved in that. >>That's right. And we do that, it's a part of our evergreen, you know, service that we offer. A lot of customers sign up for the service and in fact they don't even, we tell them, Hey, you know, that part's about to go, we're gonna come in, we're gonna swap it out and, and then we actually recycle that part. >>The power of ai. I love that. What are some of the, the things that companies can do if they're, if they're early in this journey on sustainability, what are some of the specific steps companies can take to get started and maybe accelerate that journey as it's becoming climate change and things are becoming just more and more of a, of a daily topic on the news? >>No, absolutely. There's a lot of things companies can do. In fact, the four four item that we're gonna highlight, the first one is, you know, they can just start by doing a materiality assessment and a materiality assessment essentially engages all the stakeholders to find out which specific issues are important for the business, right? So you identify your key priorities that intersect with what the stakeholders want, you know, your different groups from sales, customers, partners, you know, different departments in the organization. And for example, for us, when we conducted our materiality assessment, for us, our product we felt was the biggest area of focus that could contribute a lot towards, you know, making an impact in, in, in, from a sustainability standpoint. That's number one. I think number two companies will also think about taking an Azure service approach. The beauty of the Azure service approach is that you are buying a cardio customer, they're buying outcomes with SLAs and, and when you are starting to buy outcomes with SLAs, you can start small and then grow as you consume more. >>So that way you don't have systems sitting idle waiting for you to consume more, right? And that's the beauty of the Azure service approach. And so for example, for us, you know, we have something called Evergreen one, which is our as a service offer, where essentially customers are able to only use and have systems thrown onto as much as they're consuming. So, so that reduces the waste associated with underutilized systems, right? That's number two. Number three is also you can optimize your supply chains end to end, right? Basically by making sure you're moving, recycling, packaging and eliminating waste in that thing so you can recycle it back to your suppliers. And you can also choose a sustainable supplier network that's following sort of good practices, you know, you know, across the globe and such. Supply chains that are responsive and diverse can really help you also the business benefit that you can also handle surge in demand, for example, for us during the pandemic with these global supply chain shortages, you know, whereas most of our competitors, you know, lead time went to 40, 50 weeks, our lead times went from three to six weeks cuz you know, we had this sustainable, you know, supply chain. >>And so all of these things, you know, the three things are important, but the four thing I say is more cultural and, and the cultural thing is how do you actually begin to have sustainability become a core part of your ethos as a company, you know, across all the departments, you know, and we've at Pure, definitely it's big for us, you know, you know, around sustainability starting with a product design, but all other the areas as well. So if you follow those four items, they, they're the great place to start. >>That's great advice, great recommendations. You talk about the, the, the supply chain, sustainable supply chain optimization. We've been having a lot of conversations with businesses and vendors alike about that and how important it is. You bring up a great point too on supplier diversity. We could have a whole conversation on that. Yes. But I'm also glad Oji, that you brought up culture that's huge to, for organizations to adopt an ESG strategy and really drive sustainability in their business and has to become, to your point, part of their ethos. It's challenging. Cultural change management is challenging. Although I think with climate change and the things that are so public, it's, it's more on, on the top mindset folks. But it's a great point that the organization really as a whole needs to embrace the sustainability mindset so that it as a, as an organization lives and breathes that. Yes. My last question for you is advice. So you, you outlined the four Steps organizations can take. I look how you made that quite simple. What advice would you give organizations who are on that journey to adopting those, those actions, as you said, as they look to really build and deploy and execute an ESG strategy? >>No, absolutely. And so obviously, you know, the advice is gonna come from, you know, a company like Pure, you know, our background kind of, of being a supplier of products. And so, you know, our advice is for companies that have products, usually they tend to be the biggest generator, the products that you sell to your customers, especially if they've got hardware components in it. But, you know, the biggest generator of e-waste and, and and, and, and, and kind of from a sustainability standpoint. So it's really important to have an intentional design approach towards your products with sustainability in mind. So it's not something that's, that you kinda handle at the very back end. You design it upfront in the product and so that sustainable design becomes very intentional. So for us, for example, doing these non-disruptive upgrades had to be designed upfront so that, you know, a, you know, one of our repair person could go into a customer shop and be able to pull out a card and put in a new card without any change in the customer system. >>That non-disruptive approach, it has to be designed into the hardware software systems to be able to pull that on. And that intentional design enabled you to recover pieces just when they're about to fail and then putting them through a recovery, you know, waste recovery process. So that, that's kind of the one thing I would say that philosophy, again, it comes down to if that is, you know, seeping into the culture, into your core ethos, you will start to do, you know, the, you know, that type of work. So, so I mean it's an important thing, you know, look, this year, you know, with the spike in energy prices, you know, you know, gas prices going up, it's super important that all of us, you know, do our bit in there and start to drive products that are fundamentally sustainable, not just at the initial, you know, install point, but from an end to end full life cycle standpoint. >>Absolutely. And I love that you brought up intention that is everything that PI's doing is with, with such thought and intention and really for organizations and any industry to become more sustainable, to develop an ESG strategy. To your point, it all needs to start with intention. And of course that that cultural adoption, aj, it's been so great to have you on the program talking about what PEER is doing to help organizations really navigate that path to sustainable it. We appreciate your insights on your time. >>Thank you, Lisa. Pleasure being on board. >>Great to have you. For AJ saying, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching this special event, peer Storage, the Path to Sustainable It.

>>Hi everyone. Welcome to this special event, pure Storage, the Path to Sustainable it. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. Very pleased to be joined by Nicole Johnson, the head of Social Impact and Sustainability at Pure Storage. Nicole, welcome to the >>Cube. Thanks for having me, Lisa. >>Sustainability is such an important topic to talk about, and I understand that Pure just announced a report today about sustainability. What can you tell me what nuggets are in this report? >>Well, actually quite a few really interesting nuggets, at least for us. And I, I think probably for you and your viewers as well. So we actually commissioned about a thousand sustainability leaders across the globe to understand, you know, what are their sustainability goals, what are they working on, and what are the impacts of buying decisions, particularly around infrastructure when it comes to sustainable goals. I think one of the things that was really interesting for us was the fact that around the world we did not see a significant variation in terms of sustainability being a top priority. You've, I'm sure you've heard about the energy crisis that's happening across Europe. And so, you know, there was some thought that perhaps that might play into AMEA being a larger, you know, having sustainability goals that were more significant. But we actually did not find that we found sustainability to be really important no matter where the respondents were located. >>So, very interesting at pure sustainability is really at the heart of what we do and has been since our founding. It's interesting because we set out to make storage really simple, but it turns out really simple, is also really sustainable and the products and services that we bring to our customers have really powerful outcomes when it comes to decreasing their, their own carbon footprints. And so, you know, we often hear from customers that we've actually really helped them to significantly improve their storage performance, but also allow them to save on space power and cooling costs and, and their footprint. So really significant findings. One example of that is a company called Cengage, which is a global education technology company. They recently shared with us that they have actually been able to reduce their overall storage footprint by 80% while doubling to tripling the performance of their storage systems. So it's really critical for, for companies who are thinking about their sustainability goals, to consider the dynamic between their sustainability program and their IT teams who are making these buying decisions. >>Right? Those two teams need to be really inextricably linked these days. You talked about the fact that there was really consistency across the regions in terms of sustainability being of high priority for organizations. You had a great customer story that you shared that showed significant impact can be made there by bringing the sustainability both together with it. But I'm wondering why are we seeing that so much of the vendor selection process still isn't revolving around sustainability or it's overlooked? What are some of the things that you see despite so many people saying sustainability huge priority? >>Well, in this survey, the most commonly cited challenge was really around the fact that there was a lack of management buy-in. 40% of respondents told us this was the top roadblock. So getting, I think getting that out of the way. And then we also just heard that sustainability teams were not brought into tech purchasing processes until after it's already rolling, right? So they're not even looped in. And that, that being said, you know, we know that it has been identified as one of the key departments to supporting a company's sustainability goals. So we, we really want to ensure that these two teams are talking more to each other. When we look even closer at the data from the respondents, we see some really positive correlations. We see that 65% of respondents reported that they're on track to meet their sustainability goals, and that it, of those 65%, it is significantly engaged with reporting data for those sustainability initiatives. We saw that, that for those who did report, the sustainability is a top priority for vendor selection. They were twice as likely to be on track with their goals and their sustainability directors said that they were getting involved at the beginning of the tech purchasing program. Our process, I'm sorry, rather than towards the end. And so, you know, we know that to curb the impact of climate crisis, we really need to embrace sustainability from a cross-functional viewpoint. >>Definitely has to be cross-functional. So, so strong correlations there in the report that organizations that had closer alignment between the sustainability folks and the IT folks were farther along in their sustainability program development, execution, et cetera, those CO was correlations, were they a surprise? >>Not entirely. You know, when we look at some of the statistics that come from the, you know, places like the World Economic Forum, they say that digitization generated 4% of greenhouse gas emissions in 2020. So, and that, you know, that's now almost three years ago, digital data only accelerates and by 2025, we expect that number could be almost double. And so we know that that communication and that correlation is gonna be really important because data centers are taking up such a huge footprint of when companies are looking at their emissions. And it's, I mean, quite frankly, a really interesting opportunity for it to be a trailblazer in the sustainability journey. And, you know, perhaps people that are in IT haven't thought about how they can make an impact in this area, but there really is some incredible ways to help us work on cutting carbon emissions, both from your company's perspective and from the world's perspective, right? >>Like we are, we're all doing this because it's something that we know we have to do to drive down climate change. So I think when you, when you think about how to be a trailblazer, how to do things differently, how to differentiate your own department, it's a really interesting connection that IT and sustainability work together. I would also say, you know, I'll just note that of the respondents to the survey we were discussing, we do over half of those respondents expect to see closer alignment between the organization's IT and sustainability teams as they move forward. >>And that's really a tip the, to those organizations embracing cultural change. That's always hard to do, but for those two, for sustainability and IT to come together as part of really the overall ethos of an organization, that's huge. And it's great to see the data demonstrating that, that those, that alignment, that close alignment is really on its way to helping organizations across industries make a big impact. And wanna dig in a little bit to peers, ESG goals. What can you share with us about >>That? Absolutely. So as I mentioned, peers kind of at the beginning of our formal ESG journey, but really has been working on the, on the sustainability front for a long time. I would, I, it's funny as we're, as we're doing a lot of this work and, and kind of building our own profile around this, we're coming back to some of the things that we have done in the past that consumers weren't necessarily interested in then, but are now because the world has changed, becoming more and more invested in. So that's exciting. So we did a baseline scope one, two, and three analysis and discovered, interestingly enough that 70% of our emissions comes from use of sold products. So our customers work running our products in their data centers. So we know that we, we've made some ambitious goals around our Scope one and two emissions, which is our own office, our utilities, you know, those, they only account for 6% of our emissions. So we know that to really address the issue of climate change, we need to work on the use of sold products. So we've also made a, a really ambitious commitment to decrease our carbon emissions by 66% per bed per petabyte by 2030 in our products. So decreasing our own carbon footprint, but also affecting our customers as well. And we've also committed to a science based target initiative and our road mapping how to achieve the ambitious goals set out in the Paris agreement. >>That's fantastic. It sounds like you really dialed in on where is the biggest opportunity for us as peer storage to make the biggest impact across our organization, across our customers' organizations. There lofty goals that pure set, but knowing what I know about Pure, you guys are probably well on track to, to accomplish those goals in record time. >>I hope So. >>Talk a little bit about advice that you would give to viewers who might be at the very beginning of their sustainability journey and really wondering what are the core elements besides it, sustainability, team alignment that I need to bring into this program to make it actually successful? >>Yeah, so I think, you know, understanding that you don't have to pick between really powerful technology and sustainable technology. There are opportunities to get both and not just in storage, right in, in your entire IT port portfolio. We know that, you know, we're in a place in the world where we have to look at things from the bigger picture. We have to solve new challenges and we have to approach business a little bit differently. So adopting solutions and services that are environmentally efficient can actually help to scale and deliver more effective and efficient IT solutions over time. So I think that that's something that we need to, to really remind ourselves, right? We have to go about business a little bit differently and that's okay. We also know that data centers utilize an incredible amount of, of energy and, and carbon. And so everything that we can do to drive that down is going to address the sustainability goals for us individually as well as, again, drive down that climate change. So we, we need to get out of the mindset that data centers are, are about reliability, your cost, et cetera. And really think about efficiency and carbon footprint when you're making those business decisions. I'll also say that, you know, the earlier that we can get sustainability teams into the conversation, the more impactful your business decisions are going to be and helping you to guide sustainable decision making. >>So shifting sustainability and it left almost together really shows that the correlation between those folks getting together in the beginning with intention, the report shows and the successes that peers had, demonstrate that that's very impactful for organizations to actually be able to implement even the cultural change that's needed for sustainability programs to be successful. My last question for you goes back to that report. You mentioned in there that the data show a lot of organizations are hampered by management buy-in, where sustainability is concerned. How can pure help its customers navigate around those barriers so that they get that management buy and they understand that the value in it for >>Them? Yeah, so I mean, I think that for me, my advice is always to speak to hearts and minds, right? And help the management to understand, first of all, the impact right on climate change. So I think that's the kind of hearts piece on the mind piece. I think it's addressing the sustainability goals that these companies have set for themselves and helping management understand how to, you know, how their IT buying decisions can actually really help them to reach these goals. We also, you know, we always run kind of TCOs for customers to understand what is the actual cost of, of the equipment. And so, you know, especially if you're in a, in a location in which energy costs are rising, I mean, I think we're seeing that around the world right now with inflation. Better understanding your energy costs can really help your management to understand the, again, the bigger picture and what that total cost is gonna be. Often we see, you know, that maybe the, the person who's buying the IT equipment isn't the same person who's purchasing, who's paying the, the electricity bills, right? And so sometimes even those two teams aren't talking. And there's a great opportunity there, I think, to just to just, you know, look at it from a more high level lens to better understand what total cost of ownership is. >>That's a great point. Great advice. Nicole. Thank you so much for joining me on the program today, talking about the new report that on sustainability that Pure put out some really compelling nuggets in there, but really also some great successes that you've already achieved internally on your own ESG goals and what you're helping customers to achieve in terms of driving down their carbon footprint and emissions. We so appreciate your insights and your thoughts. >>Thank you, Lisa. It's been great speaking with you. >>Pleasure speaking with you as well. We wanna thank you so much for watching. This is Pure Storage, the path to sustainable it. I'm Lisa Martin, we'll see you next time.

(upbeat music) >> We're back talking about the path to sustainable IT and now we're going to get the perspective from Mattia Ballerio who is with Elmec Informatica, an IT services firm in the beautiful Lombardi region, of Italy, north of Milano. Mattia, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks so much for coming on. >> Thank you very much, Dave. Thank you. >> All right, before we jump in, tell us a little bit more about Elmec Informatica. What's your focus? Talk about your unique value add to customers. >> Yeah! So basically Elmec Informatica is middle company from the north part of Italy. And is managed service provider in the IT area. Okay, so the, the main focus area of Elmec is, rich digital transformation, and innovation to our clients with the focus on infrastructure services, workplace services, and also cybersecurity services, okay. And we try to follow the path of our clients to the digital transformation and innovation through technology and sustainability. >> Yeah, obviously very hot topics right now. Sustainability, environmental impact, they're growing areas of focus among leaders across all industries, particularly acute right now in, in Europe, with the, you know, the energy challenges. You've talked about things like sustainable business. What does that mean? What does that term, you know, speak to, and, and what can others learn from it? >> Yeah, at Elmec, our approach to sustainability is grounded in science and, and values. And also in a customer territory, but also employee centered. I mean, we conduct regular assessments to understand the most significant environment and social issues for our business with, with the goal of prioritizing what we do for a sustainability future. Our service delivery methodology, employee care, relationship with the local supplier, and local area and institution are a major factor for us to, to build a such a responsibility strategy. Specifically during the past year, we have been particularly focused on define sustainability governance in the company based on stakeholder engagement, defining material issues, establishing quantitative indicators, to monitor and setting medium to long term goals. >> Okay, so you have a lot of data. You can go into a customer, you can do an assessment, you can set a baseline, and then you have other data by which you can compare that and, and understand what's achievable. So what's your vision for sustainable business? You know, that strategy, you know, how has it affected your business in terms of the evolution? 'Cause this was, hasn't always been as hot a topic as it is today, and, and is it a competitive advantage for you? >> Yeah, yeah. For, for all intense and proposed sustainability is a competitive advantage for Elmec. I mean, it's so, because at the time of profound transformation in the work, in the world of work, CSR issues make a company more attractive when searching for new talent to enter in the workforce of our company. In addition, efforts to ensure people's proper work life balance are a strong retention factor. And, regarding our business proposition, Elmec's attempts is to meet high standard of sustainability and reliability. Our green data center, you said is a prime example of this approach, as at the same time, is there a conditioning activity that is done to give a second life to technology devices that come from, back from rental? I mean, our customer inquiries with respect to Elmec sustainability are increasingly frequent, and in depth. And which is why we monitor our performance, and invest in certification, such as, EcoVadis or ISO 14,001. Okay? >> Got it! So in a previous life, I actually did some work with, with power companies, and there were two big factors in IT, that affected the power consumption. Obviously virtualization was a big one, if you could consolidate servers, you know, that was huge. But the other was the advent of flash storage, and that was all we used to actually go in with the, the engineers and the power company put in alligator clips to measure of, of of an all flash array versus, you know, the spinning disk and it was a big impact. So, you want to talk about, your, your experience with Pure Storage. You use Flash Array, and the Evergreen architecture. Can you talk about your experience there? Why did you make that decision to select Pure Storage? How does that help you meet sustainability and operational requirements? Do those benefits scale as your customers grow? What's your experience been? >> Yeah! It was basically, an easy, an easy answer to our, to our business needs. Okay, because you said before that, in Elmec, we manage a lot of data, okay. And in the past we, we, we see, we see that, the constraints of managing so many, many data was very, very difficult to manage in terms of power consumption or simply for the, the space of storing the data. And, when, when Pure came to us and share our, their products, their vision, to the data management journey for Elmec Informatica, it was very easy to choose Pure, why? With values and the numbers, we, we create a business case and, we said, we see that our power consumption usage was much less, more than 90% of previous technology that we used in the past. Okay? And so of course you have to manage a gradual deploy of flash technology storage, but it was a good target. So we have tried to monitoring the adoption of flash technology, and monitor, monitoring also the power consumption, and the efficiency that the pure technology bring to our, to our IT systems, and of course the IT systems of our clients. And so this is one, the first part, the first good part of our trip with, with Pure. And after that, we approach also the sustainability in long term of choosing Pure technology storage. You mentioned the evergreen models of Pure, and of course this was, a game challenge for us because it allows, it allow us to extend the life cycle management of our data centers, but also the, it allows us to improve the facility, of the facilities of using technology from our technical side, okay. So we are much more efficient than in the past with the choose of Pure Storage Technologies, okay. Of course, this easy users, easy usage mode, let me say, it allow us to bring this value to our, to all our clients that put their data in our data centers. >> So, you talked about how you've seen, 90% improvement relative to previous technologies. I always, I haven't put you on the spot. Because I, I, I was on Pure's website, and I saw in their ESG report some com, you know, it was a comparison with a generic competitor. I'm presuming that competitor was not, you know 2010 spinning disk system. But, but, so I'm curious, as to the results that you're seeing with Pure, in terms of footprint and power usage. You, you're referencing some of that. We heard some metrics from Nicole and Ajay earlier in the program. Do you think, again I'm going to put you in the spot, do you think that Pure's architecture, and the way they've applied, whether it's machine intelligence or the Evergreen model, et cetera, is more competitive than other platforms, that you've seen? >> Yeah, of course. Is more competitor, more competitive. Because basically it allows to service provider to do much more efficient value proposition and offer services that are more that brings more values to, to the customers. Okay, so the customer is always at the center of a proposition of service provider. And the trying to adopt the methodology and also the, the value that Pure as inside, by design in the technology is, is for us very, very important and very, very strategic. Because, because, with like a glass, we can ourself transfer, try to transfer the values of Pure, Pure technologies to our service provider client. >> Okay Mattia, let's wrap and talk about sort of near term 2023 and then longer term. It looks like sustainability is a topic that's here to stay. Unlike when we were putting alligator clips on storage arrays, trying to help customers get rebates, that just didn't have legs. It was too complicated. Now it's a, a topic that everybody's measuring. What's next for Elmec, in its sustainability journey? What advice would you might have for sustainability leaders that want to make a meaningful impact on the environment but also on the bottom line? >> Okay. So, sustainability is fortunately a widely spread concept. And our role in, in this great game is to define a strategy, align with the common and fundamentals goals for the future of planet, and capable of expressing our inclination, and the particularities. Elmec sustainability goals in the near future, I can say that are will be basically free. One define sustainability plan, okay. It's fundamentals to define a sustainability plan. Then it's very important to monitor the, its emissions and we will calculate our carbon footprint, okay. And list, button list, produce a certifiable and comprehensive sustainability report, with respect to the demands of customers, suppliers, and also partners. Okay, so I can say that, this three target will be our direction in the, in the future. Okay? >> Yeah, so I mean, pretty straightforward. Make a plan. You got to monitor and measure. You can't improve what you can't measure. So you going to set a baseline, you're going to report on that. You're going to analyze the data and you're going to make continuous improvement. >> Yep. >> Mattia, thanks so much for joining us today and sharing your perspectives from the, the northern part of Italy. Really appreciate it. >> Yep. Thank you for having me on board. Thank you very much. >> It was really our pleasure. Okay, in a moment, I'm going to be back to wrap up the program, and share some resources , that could be valuable in your sustainability journey. Keep it right there. (upbeat music)

>>In the early part of this century, we're talking about the 2005 to 2007 timeframe. There was a lot of talk about so-called green it. And at that time there was some organizational friction. Like for example, the line was that the CIO never saw the power bill, so he or she didn't care, or that the facilities folks, they rarely talked to the IT department. So it was kind of that split brain. And, and then the oh 7 0 8 financial crisis really created an inflection point in a couple of ways. First, it caused organizations to kind of pump the brakes on it spending, and then they took their eye off the sustainability ball. And the second big trend, of course, was the cloud model, you know, kind of became a benchmark for it. Simplicity and automation and efficiency, the ability to dial down and dial up capacity as needed. >>And the third was by the end of the first decade of the, the two thousands, the technology of virtualization was really hitting its best stride. And then you had innovations like flash storage, which largely eliminated the need for these massive farms of spinning mechanical devices that sucked up a lot of power. And so really these technologies began their march to mainstream adoption. And as we progressed through the 2020s, the effect of climate change really come into focus as a critical component of esg. Environmental, social, and governance. Shareholders have come to demand metrics around sustainability. Employees are often choosing employers based on their ESG posture. And most importantly, companies are finding that savings on power cooling and footprint, it has a bottom line impact on the income statement. Now you add to that the energy challenges around the world, particularly facing Europe right now, the effects of global inflation and even more advanced technologies like machine intelligence. >>And you've got a perfect storm where technology can really provide some relief to organizations. Hello and welcome to the Path to Sustainable It Made Possible by Pure Storage and Collaboration with the Cube. My name is Dave Valante and I'm one of the host of the program, along with my colleague Lisa Martin. Now, today we're gonna hear from three leaders on the sustainability topic. First up, Lisa will talk to Nicole Johnson. She's the head of Social Impact and Sustainability at Pure Storage. Nicole will talk about the results from a study of around a thousand sustainability leaders worldwide, and she'll share some metrics from that study. And then next, Lisa will speak to AJ Singh. He's the Chief Product Officer at Pure Storage. We've had had him on the cube before, and not only will he share some useful stats in the market, I'll also talk about some of the technology innovations that customers can tap to address their energy consumption, not the least of which is ai, which is is entering every aspect of our lives, including how we deal with energy consumption. And then we'll bring it back to our Boston studio and go north of Italy with Mattia Ballero of Elec Informatica, a services provider with deep expertise on the topic of sustainability. We hope you enjoyed the program today. Thanks for watching. Let's get started >>At Pure Storage, the opportunity for change and our commitment to a sustainable future are a direct reflection of the way we've always operated and the values we live by every day. We are making significant and immediate impact worldwide through our environmental sustainability efforts. The milestones of change can be seen everywhere in everything we do. Pure's Evergreen Storage architecture delivers two key environmental benefits to customers, the reduction of wasted energy and the reduction of e-waste. Additionally, Pure's implemented a series of product packaging redesigns, promoting recycled and reuse in order to reduce waste that will not only benefit our customers, but also the environment. Pure is committed to doing what is right and leading the way with innovation. That has always been the pure difference, making a difference by enabling our customers to drive out energy usage and their data storage systems by up to 80%. Today, more than 97% of pure arrays purchased six years ago are still in service. And tomorrow our goal for the future is to reduce Scope three. Emissions Pure is committing to further reducing our sold products emissions by 66% per petabyte by 2030. All of this means what we said at the beginning, change that is simple and that is what it has always been about. Pure has a vision for the future today, tomorrow, forever. >>Hi everyone, welcome to this special event, pure Storage, the Path to Sustainable it. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. Very pleased to be joined by Nicole Johnson, the head of Social Impact and Sustainability at Pure Storage. Nicole, welcome to the Cube. Thanks >>For having me, Lisa. >>Sustainability is such an important topic to talk about and I understand that Pure just announced a report today about sustainability. What can you tell me what nuggets are in this report? >>Well, actually quite a few really interesting nuggets, at least for us. And I, I think probably for you and your viewers as well. So we actually commissioned about a thousand sustainability leaders across the globe to understand, you know, what are their sustainability goals, what are they working on, and what are the impacts of buying decisions, particularly around infrastructure when it comes to sustainable goals. I think one of the things that was really interesting for us was the fact that around the world we did not see a significant variation in terms of sustainability being a top priority. You've, I'm sure you've heard about the energy crisis that's happening across Europe. And so, you know, there was some thought that perhaps that might play into AMEA being a larger, you know, having sustainability goals that were more significant. But we actually did not find that we found sustainability to be really important no matter where the respondents were located. >>So very interesting at Pure sustainability is really at the heart of what we do and has been since our founding. It's interesting because we set out to make storage really simple, but it turns out really simple is also really sustainable. And the products and services that we bring to our customers have really powerful outcomes when it comes to decreasing their, their own carbon footprints. And so, you know, we often hear from customers that we've actually really helped them to significantly improve their storage performance, but also allow them to save on space power and cooling costs and, and their footprint. So really significant findings. One example of that is a company called Cengage, which is a global education technology company. They recently shared with us that they have actually been able to reduce their overall storage footprint by 80% while doubling to tripling the performance of their storage systems. So it's really critical for, for companies who are thinking about their sustainability goals, to consider the dynamic between their sustainability program and their IT teams who are making these buying decisions, >>Right? Those two teams need to be really inextricably linked these days. You talked about the fact that there was really consistency across the regions in terms of sustainability being of high priority for organizations. You had a great customer story that you shared that showed significant impact can be made there by bringing the sustainability both together with it. But I'm wondering why are we seeing that so much of the vendor selection process still isn't revolving around sustainability or it's overlooked? What are some of the things that you received despite so many people saying sustainability, huge priority? >>Well, in this survey, the most commonly cited challenge was really around the fact that there was a lack of management buy-in. 40% of respondents told us this was the top roadblock. So getting, I think getting that out of the way. And then we also just heard that sustainability teams were not brought into tech purchasing processes until after it's already rolling, right? So they're not even looped in. And that being said, you know, we know that it has been identified as one of the key departments to supporting a company sustainability goals. So we, we really want to ensure that these two teams are talking more to each other. When we look even closer at the data from the respondents, we see some really positive correlations. We see that 65% of respondents reported that they're on track to meet their sustainability goals. And the IT of those 65%, it is significantly engaged with reporting data for those sustainability initiatives. We saw that, that for those who did report, the sustainability is a top priority for vendor selection. They were twice as likely to be on track with their goals and their sustainability directors said that they were getting involved at the beginning of the tech purchasing program. Our process, I'm sorry, rather than towards the end. And so, you know, we know that to curb the impact of climate crisis, we really need to embrace sustainability from a cross-functional viewpoint. >>Definitely has to be cross-functional. So, so strong correlations there in the report that organizations that had closer alignment between the sustainability folks and the IT folks were farther along in their sustainability program development, execution, et cetera, those co was correlations, were they a surprise? >>Not entirely. You know, when we look at some of the statistics that come from the, you know, places like the World Economic Forum, they say that digitization generated 4% of greenhouse gas emissions in 2020. So, and that, you know, that's now almost three years ago, digital data only accelerates, and by 2025, we expect that number could be almost double. And so we know that that communication and that correlation is gonna be really important because data centers are taking up such a huge footprint of when companies are looking at their emissions. And it's, I mean, quite frankly, a really interesting opportunity for it to be a trailblazer in the sustainability journey. And, you know, perhaps people that are in IT haven't thought about how they can make an impact in this area, but there really is some incredible ways to help us work on cutting carbon emissions, both from your company's perspective and from the world's perspective, right? >>Like we are, we're all doing this because it's something that we know we have to do to drive down climate change. So I think when you, when you think about how to be a trailblazer, how to do things differently, how to differentiate your own department, it's a really interesting connection that IT and sustainability work together. I would also say, you know, I'll just note that of the respondents to the survey we were discussing, we do over half of those respondents expect to see closer alignment between the organization's IT and sustainability teams as they move forward. >>And that's really a, a tip a hat to those organizations embracing cultural change. That's always hard to do, but for those two, for sustainability in IT to come together as part of really the overall ethos of an organization, that's huge. And it's great to see the data demonstrating that, that those, that alignment, that close alignment is really on its way to helping organizations across industries make a big impact. I wanna dig in a little bit to here's ESG goals. What can you share with us about >>That? Absolutely. So as I mentioned peers kind of at the beginning of our formal ESG journey, but really has been working on the, on the sustainability front for a long time. I would, it's funny as we're, as we're doing a lot of this work and, and kind of building our own profile around this, we're coming back to some of the things that we have done in the past that consumers weren't necessarily interested in then but are now because the world has changed, becoming more and more invested in. So that's exciting. So we did a baseline scope one, two, and three analysis and discovered, interestingly enough that 70% of our emissions comes from use of sold products. So our customers work running our products in their data centers. So we know that we, we've made some ambitious goals around our Scope one and two emissions, which is our own office, our utilities, you know, those, they only account for 6% of our emissions. So we know that to really address the issue of climate change, we need to work on the use of sold products. So we've also made a, a really ambitious commitment to decrease our carbon emissions by 66% per bed per petabyte by 2030 in our product. So decreasing our own carbon footprint, but also affecting our customers as well. And we've also committed to a science-based target initiative and our road mapping how to achieve the ambitious goals set out in the Paris agreement. >>That's fantastic. It sounds like you really dialed in on where is the biggest opportunity for us as Pure Storage to make the biggest impact across our organization, across our customers organizations. There lofty goals that pure set, but knowing what I know about Pure, you guys are probably well on track to, to accomplish those goals in record time, >>I hope So. >>Talk a little bit about advice that you would give to viewers who might be at the very beginning of their sustainability journey and really wondering what are the core elements besides it, sustainability, team alignment that I need to bring into this program to make it actually successful? >>Yeah, so I think, you know, understanding that you don't have to pick between really powerful technology and sustainable technology. There are opportunities to get both and not just in storage right in, in your entire IT portfolio. We know that, you know, we're in a place in the world where we have to look at things from the bigger picture. We have to solve new challenges and we have to approach business a little bit differently. So adopting solutions and services that are environmentally efficient can actually help to scale and deliver more effective and efficient IT solutions over time. So I think that that's something that we need to, to really remind ourselves, right? We have to go about business a little bit differently and that's okay. We also know that data centers utilize an incredible amount of, of energy and, and carbon. And so everything that we can do to drive that down is going to address the sustainability goals for us individually as well as, again, drive down that climate change. So we, we need to get out of the mindset that data centers are, are about reliability or cost, et cetera, and really think about efficiency and carbon footprint when you're making those business decisions. I'll also say that, you know, the earlier that we can get sustainability teams into the conversation, the more impactful your business decisions are going to be and helping you to guide sustainable decision making. >>So shifting sustainability and IT left almost together really shows that the correlation between those folks getting together in the beginning with intention, the report shows and the successes that peers had demonstrate that that's very impactful for organizations to actually be able to implement even the cultural change that's needed for sustainability programs to be successful. My last question for you goes back to that report. You mentioned in there that the data show a lot of organizations are hampered by management buy-in, where sustainability is concerned. How can pure help its customers navigate around those barriers so that they get that management buy-in and they understand that the value in it for >>Them? Yeah, so I mean, I think that for me, my advice is always to speak to hearts and minds, right? And help the management to understand, first of all, the impact right on climate change. So I think that's the kind of hearts piece on the mind piece. I think it's addressing the sustainability goals that these companies have set for themselves and helping management understand how to, you know, how their IT buying decisions can actually really help them to reach these goals. We also, you know, we always run kind of TCOs for customers to understand what is the actual cost of, of the equipment. And so, you know, especially if you're in a, in a location in which energy costs are rising, I mean, I think we're seeing that around the world right now with inflation. Better understanding your energy costs can really help your management to understand the, again, the bigger picture and what that total cost is gonna be. Often we see, you know, that maybe the I the person who's buying the IT equipment isn't the same person who's purchasing, who's paying the, the electricity bills, right? And so sometimes even those two teams aren't talking. And there's a great opportunity there, I think, to just to just, you know, look at it from a more high level lens to better understand what total cost of ownership is. >>That's a great point. Great advice. Nicole, thank you so much for joining me on the program today, talking about the new report that on sustainability that Pure put out some really compelling nuggets in there, but really also some great successes that you've already achieved internally on your own ESG goals and what you're helping customers to achieve in terms of driving down their carbon footprint and emissions. We so appreciate your insights and your thoughts. >>Thank you, Lisa. It's been great speaking with you. >>AJ Singh joins me, the Chief Product Officer at Peer Storage. Aj, it's great to have you back on the program. >>Great to be back on, Lisa, good morning. >>Good morning. And sustainability is such an important topic to talk about. So we're gonna really unpack what PEER is doing, we're gonna get your viewpoints on what you're seeing and you're gonna leave the audience with some recommendations on how they can get started on their ESG journey. First question, we've been hearing a lot from pure AJ about the role that technology plays in organizations achieving sustainability goals. What's been the biggest environmental impact associated with, with customers achieving that given the massive volumes of data that keep being generated? >>Absolutely, Lisa, you can imagine that the data is only growing and exploding and, and, and, and there's a good reason for it. You know, data is the new currency. Some people call it the new oil. And the opportunity to go process this data gain insights is really helping customers drive an edge in the digital transformation. It's gonna make a difference between them being on the leaderboard a decade from now when the digital transformation kind of pans out versus, you know, being kind of somebody that, you know, quite missed the boat. So data is super critical and and obviously as part of that we see all these big benefits, but it has to be stored and, and, and that means it's gonna consume a lot of resources and, and the, and therefore data center usage has only accelerated, right? You can imagine the amount of data being generated, you know, recent study pointed to roughly by twenty twenty five, a hundred and seventy five zetabytes, which where each zettabyte is a billion terabytes. So just think of that size and scale of data. That's huge. And, and they also say that, you know, pretty soon, today, in fact in the developed world, every person is having an interaction with the data center literally every 18 seconds. So whether it's on Facebook or Twitter or you know, your email, people are constantly interacting with data. So you can imagine this data is only exploding. It has to be stored and it consumes a lot of energy. In fact, >>It, oh, go ahead. Sorry. >>No, I was saying in fact, you know, there's some studies have shown that data center usage literally consumes one to 2% of global energy consumption. So if there's one place we could really help climate change and, and all those aspects, if you can kind of really, you know, tamp down the data center, energy consumption, sorry, you were saying, >>I was just gonna say, it's, it's an incredibly important topic and the, the, the stats on data that you provided and also I, I like how you talked about, you know, every 18 seconds we're interacting with a data center, whether we know it or not, we think about the long term implications, the fact that data is growing massively. As you shared with the stats that you mentioned. If we think about though the responsibility that companies have, every company in today's world needs to be a data company, right? And we consumers expect it. We expect that you are gonna deliver these relevant, personalized experiences whether we're doing a transaction in our personal lives or in business. But what is the, what requirements do technology companies have to really start billing down their carbon footprints? >>No, absolutely. If you can think about it, just to kind of finish up the data story a little bit, the explosion is to the point where, in fact, if you just recently was in the news that Ireland went up and said, sorry, we can't have any more data centers here. We just don't have the power to supply them. That was big in the news and you know, all the hyperscale that was crashing the head. I know they've come around that and figured out a way around it, but it's getting there. Some, some organizations and and areas jurisdictions are saying pretty much no data center the law, you know, we're, we just can't do it. And so as you said, so companies like Pure, I mean, our view is that it has an opportunity here to really do our bit for climate change and be able to, you know, drive a sustainable environment. >>And, and at Pure we believe that, you know, today's data success really ultimately hinges on energy efficiency, you know, so to to really be energy efficient means you are gonna be successful long term with data. Because if you think of classic data infrastructures, the legacy infrastructures, you know, we've got disk infrastructures, hybrid infrastructures, flash infrastructures, low end systems, medium end systems, high end systems. So a lot of silos, you know, a lot of inefficiency across the silos. Cause the data doesn't get used across that. In fact, you know, today a lot of data centers are not really built with kind of the efficiency and environmental mindset. So there's a big opportunity there. >>So aj, talk to me about some of the steps that Pure is implementing as its chief product officer. Would love to get your your thoughts, what steps is it implementing to help Pures customers become more sustainable? >>No, absolutely. So essentially we are all inherently motivated, like pure and, and, and, and everybody else to solve problems for customers and really forward the status quo, right? You know, innovation, you know, that's what we are all about. And while we are doing that, the challenge is to how do you make technology and the data we feed into it faster, smarter, scalable obviously, but more importantly sustainable. And you can do all of that, but if you miss the sustainability bit, you're kind of missing the boat. And I also feel from an ethical perspective, that's really important for us. Not only you do all the other things, but also kind of make it sustainable. In fact, today 80% of the companies, the companies are realizing this, 80% today are in fact report out on sustainability, which is great. In fact, 80% of leadership at companies, you know, CEOs and senior executives say they've been impacted by some climate change event, you know, where it's a fire in the place they had to evacuate or floods or storms or hurricanes, you, you name it, right? >>So mitigating the carbon impact can in fact today be a competitive advantage for companies because that's where the puck is going and everybody's, you know, it's skating, wanting to skate towards the, and it's good, it's good business too to be sustainable and, and, and meet these, you know, customer requirements. In fact, the the recent survey that we released today is saying that more and more organizations are kickstarting, their sustainability initiatives and many take are aiming to make a significant progress against that over the next decade. So that's, that's really, you know, part of the big, the really, so our view is that that IT infrastructure, you know, can really make a big push towards greener it and not just kind of greenwash it, but actually, you know, you know, make things more greener and, and, and really take the, the lead in, in esg. And so it's important that organizations can reach alignment with their IT teams and challenge their IT teams to continue to lead, you know, for the organization, the sustainability aspects. >>I'm curious, aj, when you're in customer conversations, are you seeing that it's really the C-suite plus it coming together and, and how does peer help facilitate that? To your point, it needs to be able to deliver this, but it's, it's a board level objective these days. >>Absolutely. We're seeing increasingly, especially in Europe with the, you know, the war in Ukraine and the energy crisis that, you know, that's, that's, you know, unleashed. We definitely see it's becoming a bigger and bigger board level objective for, for a lot of companies. And we definitely see customers in starting to do that. So, so in particular, I do want to touch briefly on what steps we are taking as a company, you know, to to to make it sustainable. And obviously customers are doing all the things we talked about and, and we're also helping them become smarter with data. But the key difference is, you know, we have a big focus on efficiency, which is really optimizing performance per wat with unmatched storage density. So you can reduce the footprint and dramatically lower the power required. And and how efficient is that? You know, compared to other old flash systems, we tend to be one fifth, we tend to take one fifth the power compared to other flash systems and substantially lower compared to spinning this. >>So you can imagine, you know, cutting your, if data center consumption is a 2% of global consumption, roughly 40% of that tends to be storage cause of all the spinning disc. So you add about, you know, 0.8% to global consumption and if you can cut that by four fifths, you know, you can already start to make an impact. So, so we feel we can do that. And also we're quite a bit more denser, 10 times more denser. So imagine one fifth the power, one 10th the density, but then we take it a step further because okay, you've got the storage system in the data center, but what about the end of life aspect? What about the waste and reclamation? So we also have something called non-disruptive upgrades. We, using our AI technology in pure one, we can start to sense when a particular part is going to fail and just before it goes to failure, we actually replace it in a non-disruptive fashion. So customer's data is not impacted and then we recycle that so you get a full end to end life cycle, you know, from all the way from the time you deploy much lower power, much lower density, but then also at the back end, you know, reduction in e-waste and those kind of things. >>That's a great point you, that you bring up in terms of the reclamation process. It sounds like Pure does that on its own, the customer doesn't have to be involved in that. >>That's right. And we do that, it's a part of our evergreen, you know, service that we offer. A lot of customers sign up for that service and in fact they don't even, we tell them, Hey, you know, that part's about to go, we're gonna come in, we're gonna swap it out and, and then we actually recycle that part, >>The power of ai. Love that. What are some of the, the things that companies can do if they're, if they're early in this journey on sustainability, what are some of the specific steps companies can take to get started and maybe accelerate that journey as it's becoming climate change and things are becoming just more and more of a, of a daily topic on the news? >>No, absolutely. There's a lot of things companies can do. In fact, the four four item that we're gonna highlight, the first one is, you know, they can just start by doing a materiality assessment and a materiality assessment essentially engages all the stakeholders to find out which specific issues are important for the business, right? So you identify your key priorities that intersect with what the stakeholders want, you know, your different groups from sales, customers, partners, you know, different departments in the organization. And for example, for us, when we conducted our materiality assessment, for us, our product we felt was the biggest area of focus that could contribute a lot towards, you know, making an impact in, in, in from a sustainability standpoint. That's number one. I think number two companies can also think about taking an Azure service approach. The beauty of the Azure service approach is that you are buying a, your customer, they're buying outcomes with SLAs and, and when you are starting to buy outcomes with SLAs, you can start small and then grow as you consume more. >>So that way you don't have systems sitting idle waiting for you to consume more, right? And that's the beauty of the as service approach. And so for example, for us, you know, we have something called Evergreen one, which is our as service offer, where essentially customers are able to only use and have systems turned onto as much as they're consuming. So, so that reduces the waste associated with underutilized systems, right? That's number two. Number three is also you can optimize your supply chains end to end, right? Basically by making sure you're moving, recycling, packaging and eliminating waste in that thing so you can recycle it back to your suppliers. And you can also choose a sustainable supplier network that following sort of good practices, you know, you know, across the globe and such supply chains that are responsive and diverse can really help you. Also, the big business benefit benefited. >>You can also handle surges and demand, for example, for us during the pandemic with this global supply chain shortages, you know, whereas most of our competitors, you know, lead times went to 40, 50 weeks, our lead times went from three to six weeks cuz you know, we had this sustainable, you know, supply chain. And so all of these things, you know, the three things important, but the fourth thing I say more cultural and, and the cultural thing is how do you actually begin to have sustainability become a core part of your ethos at the company, you know, across all the departments, you know, and we've at Pure, definitely it's big for us, you know, you know, around sustainability starting with a product design, but all of the areas as well, if you follow those four items, they'll do the great place to start. >>That's great advice, great recommendations. You talk about the, the, the supply chain, sustainable supply chain optimization. We've been having a lot of conversations with businesses and vendors alike about that and how important it is. You bring up a great point too on supplier diversity, if we could have a whole conversation on that. Yes. But I'm also glad that you brought up culture that's huge to, for organizations to adopt an ESG strategy and really drive sustainability in their business. It has to become, to your point, part of their ethos. Yes. It's challenging. Cultural change management is challenging. Although I think with climate change and the things that are so public, it's, it's more on, on the top mindset folks. But it's a great point that the organization really as a whole needs to embrace the sustainability mindset so that it as a, as an organization lives and breathes that. Yes. And last question for you is advice. So you, you outlined the Four Steps organizations can take. I look how you made that quite simple. What advice would you give organizations who are on that journey to adopting those, those actions, as you said, as they look to really build and deploy and execute an ESG strategy? >>No, absolutely. And so obviously, you know, the advice is gonna come from, you know, a company like Pure, you know, our background kind of being a supplier of products. And so, you know, our advice is for companies that have products, usually they tend to be the biggest generator, the products that you sell to your, your customers, especially if they've got hardware components in it. But, you know, the biggest generator of e-waste and, and and, and, and, and kind of from a sustainability standpoint. So it's really important to have an intentional design approach towards your products with sustainability in mind. So it's not something that's, that you can handle at the very back end. You design it front in the product and so that sustainable design becomes very intentional. So for us, for example, doing these non-disruptive upgrades had to be designed up front so that, you know, a, you know, one of our repair person could go into a customer shop and be able to pull out a card and put in a new card without any change in the customer system. >>That non-receptive approach, it has to be designed into the hardware software systems to be able to pull that on. And that intentional design enables you to recover pieces just when they're about to fail and then putting them through a recovery, you know, waste recovery process. So that, that's kind of the one thing I would say that philosophy, again, it comes down to if that is, you know, seeping into the culture, into your core ethos, you will start to do, you know, you know, that type of work. So, so I mean it's important thing, you know, look, this year, you know, with the spike in energy prices, you know, you know, gas prices going up, it's super important that all of us, you know, do our bit in there and start to drive products that are fundamentally sustainable, not just at the initial, you know, install point, but from an end to end full life cycle standpoint. >>Absolutely. And I love that you brought up intention that is everything that peers doing is with, with such thought and intention and really for organizations and any industry to become more sustainable, to develop an ESG strategy. To your point, it all needs to start with intention. And of course that that cultural adoption, aj, it's been so great to have you on the program talking about what PEER is doing to help organizations really navigate that path to sustainable it. We appreciate your insights on your time. >>Thank you, Lisa. Pleasure being on board >>At Pure Storage. The opportunity for change and our commitment to a sustainable future are a direct reflection of the way we've always operated and the values we live by every day. We are making significant and immediate impact worldwide through our environmental sustainability efforts. The milestones of change can be seen everywhere in everything we do. Pures Evergreen storage architecture delivers two key environmental benefits to customers, the reduction of wasted energy and the reduction of e-waste. Additionally, pures implemented a series of product packaging redesigns, promoting recycle and reuse in order to reduce waste that will not only benefit our customers, but also the environment. Pure is committed to doing what is right and leading the way with innovation. That has always been the pure difference, making a difference by enabling our customers to drive out energy usage and their data storage systems by up to 80% today, more than 97% of Pure Array purchased six years ago are still in service. And tomorrow our goal for the future is to reduce Scope three emissions Pure is committing to further reducing our sold products emissions by 66% per petabyte by 2030. All of this means what we said at the beginning, change that is simple and that is what it has always been about. Pure has a vision for the future today, tomorrow, forever. >>We're back talking about the path to sustainable it and now we're gonna get the perspective from Mattia Valerio, who is with Elec Informatica and IT services firm and the beautiful Lombardi region of Italy north of Milano. Mattia, welcome to the Cube. Thanks so much for coming on. >>Thank you very much, Dave. Thank you. >>All right, before we jump in, tell us a little bit more about Elec Informatica. What's your focus, talk about your unique value add to customers. >>Yeah, so basically Alma Informatica is middle company from the north part of Italy and is managed service provider in the IT area. Okay. So the, the main focus area of Al Meca is reach digital transformation innovation to our clients with focus on infrastructure services, workplace services, and also cybersecurity services. Okay. And we try to follow the path of our clients to the digital transformation and the innovation through technology and sustainability. >>Yeah. Obviously very hot topics right now. Sustainability, environmental impact, they're growing areas of focus among leaders across all industries. A particularly acute right now in, in Europe with the, you know, the energy challenges you've talked about things like sustainable business. What does that mean? What does that term Yeah. You know, speak to and, and what can others learn from it? >>Yeah. At at, at our approach to sustainability is grounded in science and, and values and also in customer territory, but also employee centered. I mean, we conduct regular assessments to understand the most significant environment and social issues for our business with, with the goal of prioritizing what we do for a sustainability future. Our service delivery methodology, employee care relationship with the local supplier and local area and institution are a major factor for us to, to build a such a responsibility strategy. Specifically during the past year, we have been particularly focused on define sustainability governance in the company based on stakeholder engagement, defining material issues, establishing quantitative indicators to monitor and setting medium to long-term goals. >>Okay, so you have a lot of data. You can go into a customer, you can do an assessment, you can set a baseline, and then you have other data by which you can compare that and, and understand what's achievable. So what's your vision for sustainable business? You know, that strategy, you know, how has it affected your business in terms of the evolution? Cuz this wasn't, hasn't always been as hot a topic as it is today. And and is it a competitive advantage for you? >>Yeah, yeah. For, for, for all intense and proposed sustainability is a competitive advantage for elec. I mean, it's so, because at the time of profound transformation in the work, in the world of work, CSR issues make a company more attractive when searching for new talent to enter in the workforce of our company. In addition, efforts to ensure people's proper work life balance are a strong retention factor. And regarding our business proposition, ELEX attempts is to meet high standard of sustainability and reliability. Our green data center, you said is a prime example of this approach as at the same time, is there a conditioning activity that is done to give a second life to technology devices that come from back from rental? I mean, our customer inquiries with respect to sustainability are increasingly frequent and in depth and which is why we monitor our performance and invest in certification such as EcoVadis or ISO 14,001. Okay, >>Got it. So in a previous life I actually did some work with, with, with power companies and there were two big factors in it that affected the power consumption. Obviously virtualization was a big one, if you could consolidate servers, you know, that was huge. But the other was the advent of flash storage and that was, we used to actually go in with the, the engineers and the power company put in alligator clips to measure of, of, of an all flash array versus, you know, the spinning disc and it was a big impact. So you, I wanna talk about your, your experience with Pure Storage. You use Flash Array and the Evergreen architecture. Can you talk about what your experience there, why did you make that decision to select Pure Storage? How does that help you meet sustainability and operational requirements? Do those benefits scale as your customers grow? What's your experience been? >>Yeah, it was basically an easy and easy answer to our, to our business needs. Okay. Because you said before that in Elec we, we manage a lot of data, okay? And in the past we, we, we see it, we see that the constraints of managing so many, many data was very, very difficult to manage in terms of power consumption or simply for the, the space of storing the data. And when, when Pure came to us and share our products, their vision to the data management journey for Element Informatica, it was very easy to choose pure why with values and numbers. We, we create a business case and we said that we, we see that our power consumption usage was much less, more than 90% of previous technology that we used in the past. Okay. And so of course you have to manage a grade oil deploy of flash technology storage, but it was a good target. >>So we have tried to monitoring the adoption of flash technology and monitor monitoring also the power consumption and the efficiency that the pure technology bring to our, to our IT systems and of course the IT systems of our clients. And so this is one, the first part, the first good part of our trip with, with Pure. And after that we approach also the sustainability in long term of choosing pure technology storage. You mentioned the Evergreen models of Pure, and of course this was, again, challenge for us because it allows, it allow us to extend the life cycle management of our data centers, but also the, IT allows us to improve the facility of the facilities of using technology from our technical side. Okay. So we are much more efficient than in the past with the choose of Pure storage technologies. Okay. Of course, this easy users, easy usage mode, let me say it, allow us to bring this value to our, to all our clients that put their data in our data centers. >>So you talked about how you've seen a 90% improvement relative to previous technologies. I always, I haven't put you in the spot. Yeah, because I, I, I was on Pure's website and I saw in their ESG report some com, you know, it was a comparison with a generic competitor presuming that competitor was not, you know, a 2010 spinning disc system. But, but, so I'm curious as to the results that you're seeing with Pure in terms of footprint and power usage. You, you're referencing some of that. We heard some metrics from Nicole and AJ earlier in the program. Do you think, again, I'm gonna put you in the spot, do you think that Pure's architecture and the way they've applied, whether it's machine intelligence or the Evergreen model, et cetera, is more competitive than other platforms that you've seen? >>Yeah, of course. Is more competitor improve competitive because basically it allows to service provider to do much more efficient value proposition and offer services that are more, that brings more values to, to the customers. Okay. So the customer is always at the center of a proposition of a service provider and trying to adopt the methodology and also the, the value that pure as inside by design in the technology is, is for us very, very, very important and very, very strategic because, because with like a glass, we can, our self transfer try to transfer the values of pure, pure technologies to our service provider client. >>Okay. Matta, let's wrap and talk about sort of near term 2023 and then longer term it looks like sustainability is a topic that's here to stay. Unlike when we were putting alligator clips on storage arrays, trying to help customers get rebates that just didn't have legs. It was too complicated. Now it's a, a topic that everybody's measuring. What's next for elec in its sustainability journey? What advice would you might have? Sustainability leaders that wanna make a meaningful impact on the environment, but also on the bottom line. >>Okay, so sustainability is fortunately a widely spread concept. And our role in, in this great game is to define a strategy, align with the common and fundamentals goals for the future of planet and capable of expressing our inclination and the, and the particularities and accessibility goals in the near future. I, I say, I can say that are will be basically free one define sustainability plan. Okay? It's fundamentals to define a sustainability plan. Then it's very important to monitor the its emissions and we will calculate our carbon footprint. Okay? And least button list produces certifiable and comprehensive sustainability report with respect to the demands of customers, suppliers, and also partners. Okay. So I can say that this three target will be our direction in the, in the future. Okay. >>Yeah. So I mean, pretty straightforward. Make a plan. You gotta monitor and measure, you can't improve what you can't measure. So you gonna set a baseline, you're gonna report on that. Yep. You're gonna analyze the data and you're gonna make continuous improvement. >>Yep. >>Matea, thanks so much for joining us today in sharing your perspectives from the, the northern part of Italy. Really appreciate it. >>Yeah, thank you for having aboard. Thank you very >>Much. It was really our pleasure. Okay, in a moment, I'm gonna be back to wrap up the program and share some resources that could be valuable in your sustainability journey. Keep it right there. >>Sustainability is becoming increasingly important and is hitting more RFPs than ever before as a critical decision point for customers. Environmental benefits are not the only impetus. Rather bottom line cost savings are proving that sustainability actually means better business. You can make a strong business case around sustainability and you should, many more organizations are setting mid and long-term goals for sustainability and putting forth published metrics for shareholders and customers. Whereas early green IT initiatives at the beginning of this century, were met with skepticism and somewhat disappointing results. Today, vendor r and d is driving innovation in system design, semiconductor advancements, automation in machine intelligence that's really beginning to show tangible results. Thankfully. Now remember, all these videos are available on demand@thecube.net. So check them out at your convenience and don't forget to go to silicon angle.com for all the enterprise tech news of the day. You also want to check out pure storage.com. >>There are a ton of resources there. As an aside, pure is the only company I can recall to allow you to access resources like a Gartner Magic Quadrant without forcing you to fill out a lead gen form. So thank you for that. Pure storage, I love that. There's no squeeze page on that. No friction. It's kind of on brand there for pure well done. But to the topic today, sustainability, there's some really good information on the site around esg, Pure's Environmental, social and Governance mission. So there's more in there than just sustainability. You'll see some transparent statistics on things like gender and ethnic diversity, and of course you'll see that Pure has some work to do there. But kudos for publishing those stats transparently and setting goals so we can track your progress. And there's plenty on the sustainability topic as well, including some competitive benchmarks, which are interesting to look at and may give you some other things to think about. We hope you've enjoyed the path to Sustainable it made possible by Pure Storage produced with the Cube, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech, tech coverage.

(bright upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCube's coverage of HPE's Green Lake announcement. We've been following the caves of Green Lake's announcement for several quarters now, and even years. And we're going to look at cloud adoption and frameworks to help facilitate cloud adoptions. You know, in 2020, the world was on a forced march to digital and there was a lot that they didn't know. Big part of that was how to automate, how to reduce your reliance on physically, manually and plugging things in. And so, customers need an adoption framework to better understand and how to de-risk that journey to the cloud. And with me to talk about that are Alexia Clements, who's the Vice President at Worldwide go to market for GreenLake cloud services at HPE and Alexei Gerasimov who's the vice president of Hybrid Cloud Delivery advisory and professional services at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Folks, welcome to theCube. >> Alexia: Thanks so much for having us. >> You're very welcome. So, Alexei, what is a cloud adoption framework? How does that all work? >> Gerasimov: Yeah, thanks Dave. So the framework is a structured approach to elevate the conversation, to help our customers get outcomes. So we've been helping customers adopt the benefits in the most of IT for a decade. And we've noticed that they basically focus on eight key areas as they transform to cloud-like capabilities. It's a strategy and governance, it's innovation, people, a dev ops applications, operations security, and data. So we've structured our framework around those core components to help our customers get value. Because end of the day, it's all about changing the way they operate. To get the advantage of all of it. >> Yes. So you can't just pave the cow path and kind of plug your existing process. There's a lot that's unknown, as I said up front. So, so Alexia, maybe you could talk a little bit more about some of the real problems that you're solving with customers that you see in the field. >> Alexey: Yeah, absolutely. So most customers are going through some form of digital transformation and these transformations are difficult and they need a structured approach to help them through that journey. I kind of like to think of it as a recipe to make a meal. So you need to know what ingredients to buy and what are the steps to perform to make that meal. >> Okay. So when you talk to customers, what do you, what do you tell them? That's in it for them after the, after you've actually successfully helped them deploy? What are they telling you? >> Yeah, well, they're telling they now have reached their business outcomes and they're, you know, they're a more agile organization. >> What's the experience look like when you, when you go through one of these journeys and you, you apply the adoption framework, can you sort of paint a picture for us? >> Yeah, absolutely. So every customer is in some sort of transformation, like Alexia said, that transformation implies you've got to know where you start and again, know where you're going. So the experience traditionally is customers need to understand what are my current hybrid cloud capabilities? What do I have, what am I missing? What's lacking and then determine where do you want to go? And in order to get from point A to point B, they have to get a prescriptive approach. So the framework sort of breaks down their path from where they are to their desired maturity. And it takes them in the very prescriptive path to get there. >> So you start with an assessment, you do a gap analysis based on their skill sets. I presume you identify what's possible, help them understand, you know, best practice, which they may not achieve, but this is kind of their north star. Right? And then do you help? How do you help them fill those gaps? Because are skills gaps. Everybody talks about that today. You guys presumably can provide additional services to do that, but so can you add a little bit color to that scope? >> Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And so to your point, the first is a maturity level. So once you figure out the maturity level, you understand what needs to be done. So if you look at our domain, the eight domains that I mentioned and the framework, people is a big one, right? Most of the folks are struggling with people's skills and organizational capabilities. And it's so because it's an operating model change, right? And people are the key component to this operating model change. So we help our customers figure out how do we achieve that optimal operating level and operating a model maturity. And that could be on-prem that could be on public cloud. That could be hybrid. That could be at the edge. And yeah, we, if we can HP, the framework, by the way is pretty, pretty open and pretty objective. If we can help our customers address and achieve their sales gaps great. If we can not directly, then we can have a partner that can help them, you know, plug in something that we don't have. >> Are you finding that, that in terms of the maturity that most people have some kind of experience with, with cloud, but they're struggling to bring that cloud experience to their on-premise state. They don't want to just shove everything into the cloud. Right. So, what does that kind of typical journey look like for folks? I know there's--it's a wide spectrum, or you've got people that are maybe more mature. Maybe some of the folks in financial services got more resources, but can you sort of give us a sense as to what the typical, the average. >> Oh yeah yeah yeah, absolutely. By the way. So that give you a customer example, perfect example of a large North American integrated energy company. They decided to go cloud fresh, like a lot of companies. that wants to do cloud first. And why? The reason was agility. So they started going to the cloud and they realized in order to get agility, you can't just go to you, pick your public CSP, you got to change the way to operate. So they brought us in and they asked, could you help me figure out how we can change the organization? So we actually operate on the proper level of maturity. So we brought our team in. We help them figure out what do we need to look at? We need to look at operations. We need to look at people. We need to look at applications, and we need to figure out what gives you the best value. So when all said and done, they realized that their initial desire of, you know, public first or cloud first, wasn't really public cloud first. It's a way to operate. So now the customer is in three different public CSPs. They're on-prem, there are at edge and everywhere. So that's the focus. Yeah. >> Is the scope predominantly the technical organization. How deep does it go into the, to the business? Is it obviously the application development team is involved, but how deep into the business does this go? The framework. >> Right, and it's absolutely not a technology focused, the whole concept areas, it's outcomes based, and it's a results based. So if you look at the framework, there's really not a single element of the framework that says tech, like storage or compute. No, it's its people, its data, it's business value, strategy and governance, because the goal for us is being objective is we're just trying to help them address the outcomes. Not necessarily to give them more tech. >> So Alexia, I like that answer because it's a wider scope as, I mean, if we just focused on the tech and that's the swim lane, it'd be a lot easier. But as we all know, it's the people in the process that are really the hard part. So that, that makes the challenge for customers greater. You're hurting more cats. So what are the, some of the obstacles that potentially you help customers before they dive in understand. >> Yeah. So we're giving them a roadmap on where they need to go. So we're like I mentioned that recipe, so we're really trying to identify what is their strategy and where do they, what are the outcomes that they're trying to drive and help them on a street, you know, with that path to meet those outcomes. So some of those, I mean, every customer's a little bit different. I mean, we had one customer, which was a, one of the largest hospitals in north America and they, they would needed to, they wanted to go to the cloud, but they realized they couldn't put all of their patient data on the cloud. So what we did was we helped them in changing their operating model and really look to see how does that, how do they need to what's that end game for them, and actually help redo their operating model to have some in the cloud and some on-prem and, and really identify, you know, where they needed to go for their roadmap. So that was an obstacle that they had, hey, we can't put all this stuff out there. How does that now need to work in this new world? >> I would think the data model is a big deal here. I mean, you just gave an example where there's a, there's a, there's a governance and compliance aspect to it. So thinking about that example, did they have to change the way in which they provided federated governance was that presumably identify whose whose responsibility that was to adjudicate, but also had to get the, the implementers to follow that's the, how does that all work? Is it just the deep conversations? And then you figure out how to codify it or. >> No. So what so we have, so through those eight domains that Alexia mentioned, we go through, step-by-step how they need to think about it. And within mind, what are their business outcomes and goals that they're trying to achieve? So really identifying how they need to change that operating model to meet those business outcomes. >> So what's the output, it's a plan, right. That's tailored to the customer. Is that, is that correct? And, and then sort of assistance in implementing downstream or what do they get? >> Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Just to piggyback to what Alexia said, the alignment, the early alignment, the strategy and governance, as you mentioned, this is probably the most important thing, because everybody says we want to be cloud first, but what does that mean? Cloud first means different things to everyone. So we said, give him a plan. The first we'll help with figure out is what does that mean for you? Because at the end of the day, you're not going to the cloud for the sake of cloud, or anywhere you go into the cloud to get some sort of value. So what's that alignment. So the plan is supposed to help you on your road to that value, right? So we'll help them figure out what I want to do, why, for what purpose, what's going to actually address my business value. So yes, they will get a plan as part of it. But more importantly, they get, they get a set of activities, communication plans, which by the way, another block that you got to address. >> Dave: Huge. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. I mean, a lot of executives tell me, look, if you don't change your operating model and go to the cloud, yeah. You're talking, you know, nickels and dimes. If you want to get telephone numbers, you know, big companies, you want to get into bees with billions, you have to change the operating model. And the problem that they tell me is a lot of times the corner offices, okay, we're doing this, but everybody in the fat middle says, what are we doing? >> Right. And now more than ever, I mean, customers need to look at that model like a more modern operating model to realize the benefits of cloud capabilities, whether that be at the edge, their data centers, their colos cloud. So they really need to look at that. And what we've seen is with our framework, we're really helping customers accelerate their business outcomes. De-risk their transformation, and really optimize that cloud operating model. >> It's that alignment you reducing friction within the organization, confusing confusion. When people don't know which direction they're going, they'll just going to go wherever they're pointed. Right. Right. >> And you back to the alignment. So you've got alignment and you mentioned communication. You have to communicate up and down and left and right across the organization because that's one of the most probably ignored elements of any transformation lots of people don't know. So you got to communicate. And then you have to actually measure and report on how they, you know, how the transformation is happening. So we can help in all three of those. >> Especially when everybody's remote. Yeah. Right. And then I said, hey, these digital transformations, there's so much, that's unknown. >> Alexia: Right. It's difficult. >> It's a lot of new. And so you also have to, I presume part of the plan is, Hey, you're not, it's not going to be a hundred percent perfect. So you have to have. >> Alexia: Right. And you're constantly iterating on that plan. >> What does this have to do with GreenLake? >> Alexia: Yeah. So, I mean, GreenLake is HPE's you know, cloud everywhere. And what we're really doing is this framework is helping customers with that path to get that cloud-like experience and as a service model. And so the framework is really helping clients understand where do they need to go and what GreenLake solutions can help them get there. >> So the fundamental assumption of not every cloud player necessarily bad, I would say most hyperscalers is, hey, ultimately, all the data and the workloads are going to go to the cloud, that's their operating premise. So they all have an operating framework to facilitate that. >> Alexia: Right. >> It's, it's tongue in cheek, but it's true. So, but everybody has one of these. How was yours different? >> Yeah. So like, like you said, there's lots of different, you know, frameworks out there, but what we're really focused on is meeting those business goals and outcomes for clients. So we didn't focus on the technology. Like we mentioned what we were really focusing around. I mean, we kind of learned early on that every customer has technical capabilities, applications, data in multiple clouds, on-prem in colos and at the edge. So we didn't focus on like just the technology. So it's really driving business outcomes and their goals and, and the tech, all those frameworks that we just mentioned, they're really specifically driving a particular technology tool or vendor implementing a particular technology or vendor. >> So we've talked about outcomes a lot, but I wonder if we could peel the onion on that. So, you know, the highest level outcome is I want to increase revenue, cut costs, drop to the bottom line, increase shareholder value, improve employee experiences and retention, make customers happier, grow my business. I mean, those are, I mean, I, I don't know a lot of businesses that don't... >> Alexia: Right. >> want to do that, So. Okay. That's cool. But then I'm imagining you really start to peel the layers and say, okay, this is how we're going to get there. And you get down to specific objectives as to the, how is that sort of how this works? >> Right, and that's due to echo at Alexia. So that's exactly why ours is different. We're not focusing on how to adopt Microsoft or AWS or Alibaba with focusing on how we can deliver the customer experience or a better revenue, you know, or, you know, increase the value for the consumer for whatever the company will help him. So the framework we'll look at that and figure out how do we actually address it, whether it's on public cloud, whether it's on prem, whether it's at the edge. >> You mentioned Alexia, that something, hey, if we don't have the skills, we can get a partner who does, a big company. You got a huge partner network. So for example, if you might not have necessarily a deep industry expertise, that's where you might lean on a partner or is that, is that a good example or is there a better one? >> Yes and we know. We're not going to just like you mentioned AWS or Microsoft, Alibaba thing that everything will go to public cloud. I don't believe so, but at the same time we know not everything will stay on-prem. So the combination of on-prem, the edge, you know, private cloud and public cloud is what the customers are after. So our partners could be either third party, system integrator that can help us implement something or even the public CSPs, because we know our customers have capabilities everywhere. So the question becomes, how can we holistically address their needs, whether it's on-prem, whether it's in public cloud. >> Great. Guys, thanks so much. >> Alexia: Thank you. Thanks for having us. Appreciate it. >> My pleasure and thank you for watching everybody's as theCube's continuous coverage of HPE's GreenLake announcement, keep it right there for more great content. (bright upbeat music)

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> UiPath has had a long, strange trip to IPO. How so you ask? Well, the company was started in 2005. But it's culture, is akin to a frenetic startup. The firm shunned conventions and instead of focusing on a narrow geographic area to prove its product market fit before it started to grow, it aggressively launched international operations prior to reaching unicorn status. Well prior, when it had very little revenue, around a million dollars. Today, more than 60% of UiPath business is outside of the United States. Despite its headquarters being in New York city. There's more, according to recent SEC filings, UiPath total revenue grew 81% last year. But it's free cash flow, is actually positive, modestly. Wait, there's more. The company raised $750 million in a Series F in early February, at a whopping $35 billion valuation. Yet, the implied back of napkin valuation, based on the number of shares outstanding after the offering multiplied by the proposed maximum offering price per share yields evaluation of just under 26 billion. (Dave chuckling) And there's even more to this crazy story. Hello everyone, and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights, Powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis we'll share our learnings, from sifting through hundreds of pages (paper rustling) of UiPath's red herring. So you didn't have to, we'll share our thoughts on its market, its competitive position and its outlook. Let's start with a question. Mark Roberge, is a venture capitalist. He's a managing director at Stage 2 Capital and he's also a teacher, a professor at the B-School in Harvard. One of his favorite questions that he asks his students and others, is what's the best way to grow a company? And he uses this chart to answer that question. On the vertical axis is customer retention and the horizontal axis is growth to growth rate and you can see he's got modest and awesome and so forth. Now, so I want to let you look at it for a second. What's the best path to growth? Of course you want to be in that green circle. Awesome retention of more than 90% and awesome growth but what's the best way to get there? Should you blitz scale and go for the double double, triple, triple blow it out and grow your go to market team on the horizontal axis or should be more careful and focus on nailing retention and then, and only then go for growth? What do you think? What do you think most VCs would say? What would you say? When you want to maybe run the table, capture the flag before your competitors could get there or would you want to take a more conservative approach? What would Daniel Dines say the CEO of UiPath? Again, I'll let you think about that for a second. Let's talk about UiPath. What did they do? Well, I shared at the top that the company shunned conventions and expanded internationally, very rapidly. Well before it hit escape velocity and they grew like crazy and it got out of control and he had to reign it in, plug some holes, but the growth didn't stop, go. So very clearly based on it's performance and reading through the S1, the company has great retention. It uses a metric called gross retention rate which is at 96 or 97%, very high. Says customers are sticking with it. So maybe that's the right formula go for growth and grow like crazy. Let chaos reign, then reign in the chaos as Andy Grove would say. Go fast horizontally, and you can go vertically. Let me tell you what I think Mark Roberge would say, he told me you can do that. But churn is the silent killer of SaaS companies and perhaps the better path is to nail product market fit. And then your retention metrics, before you go into hyperbolic growth mode. There's all science behind this, which may be antithetical to the way many investors want to roll the dice and go for super growth, like go fast or die. Well, it worked for UiPath you might say, right. Well, no. And this is where the story gets even more interesting and long and strange for UiPath. As we shared earlier, UiPath was founded in 2005 out of Bucharest Romania. The company actually started as a software outsourcing startup. It called the company, DeskOver and it built automation libraries and SDKs for companies like Microsoft, IBM and Google and others. It also built automation scripts and developed importantly computer vision technology which became part of its secret sauce. In December 2015, DeskOver changed its name to UiPath and became a Delaware Corp and moved its headquarters to New York City a couple of years later. So our belief is that UiPath actually took the preferred path of Mark Roberge, five ticks North, then five more East. They slow-cooked for the better part of 10 years trying to figure out what market to serve. And they spent that decade figuring out their product market fit. And then they threw gas in the fire. Pretty crazy. All right, let's take a peak (chuckling) at the takeaways from the UiPath S1 the numbers are impressive. 580 million ARR with 65% growth. That asterisk is there because like you, we thought ARR stood for annual recurring revenue. It really stands for annualized renewal run rate. annualized renewal run rate is a metric that is one of UiPath's internal KPIs and are likely communicate that publicly over time. We'll explain that further in a moment. UiPath has a very solid customer base. Nearly 8,000, I've interviewed many of them. They're extremely happy. They have very high retention. They get great penetration into the fortune 500, around 63% of the fortune 500 has UiPath. Most of UiPath business around 70% comes from existing customers. I always say you're going to get more money out of existing customers than new customers but everybody's trying to go out and get new customers. But UiPath I think is taking a really interesting approach. It's their land and expand and they didn't invent that term but I'll come back to that. It kind of reminds me of the early days of Tableau. Actually I think Tableau is an interesting example. Like UiPath, Tableau started out as pretty much a point tool and it had, but it had very passionate customers. It was solving problems. It was simplifying things. And it would have bid into a company and grow and grow. Now the market fundamentals for UiPath are very good. Automation is super hot right now. And the pandemic has created an automation mandate to date and I'll share some data there as well. UiPath is a leader. I'm going to show you the Gartner Magic Quadrant for RPA. That's kind of a good little snapshot. UiPath pegs it's TAM at 60 billion dollars based on some bottoms up calculations and some data from Bain. Pre-pandemic, we pegged it at over 30 billion and we felt that was conservative. Post-pandemic, we think the TAM is definitely higher because of that automation mandate, it's been accelerated. Now, according to the S1, UiPath is going to raise around 1.2 billion. And as we said, if that's an implied valuation that is lower than the Series F, so we suspect the Series F investors have some kind of ratchet in there. UiPath needed the cash from its Series F investors. So it took in 750 million in February and its balance sheet in the S1 shows about 474 million in cash and equivalent. So as I say, it needed that cash. UiPath has had significant expense reductions that we'll show you in some detail. And it's brought in some fresh talent to provide some adult supervision around 70% of its executive leadership team and outside directors came to the company after 2019 and the company's S1, it disclosed that it's independent accounting firm identified last year what it called the "material weakness in our internal controls over financial report relating to revenue recognition for the fiscal year ending 2018, caused by a lack of oversight and technical competence within the finance department". Now the company outlined the steps it took to remediate the problem, including hiring new talent. However, we said that last year, we felt UiPath wasn't quite ready to go public. So it really had to get its act together. It was not as we said at the time, the well-oiled machine, that we said was Snowflake under Mike Scarpelli's firm operating guidance. The guy's the operational guru, but we suspect the company wants to take advantage of this mock market. It's a good time to go public. It needs the cash to bolster its balance sheet. And the public offering is going to give it cache in a stronger competitive posture relative to its main new competitor, autumn newbie competitor Automation Anywhere and the big whales like Microsoft and others that aspire and are watching what UiPath is doing and saying, hey we want a piece of that action. Now, one other note, UiPath's CEO Daniel Dines owns 100% of the class B shares of the company and has a 35 to one voting power. So he controls the company, subject of course to his fiduciary responsibilities but if UiPath, let's say it gets in trouble financially, he has more latitude to do secondary offerings. And at the same time, it's insulated from activist shareholders taking over his company. So lots of detail in the S1 and we just wanted to give you some of those highlights. Here are the pretty graphs. If whoever wrote this F1 was a genius. It's just beautiful. As we said, ARR, annualized renewal run rate all it does is it annualizes the invoice amount from subscriptions in the maintenance portion of the revenue. In other words, the parts that are recurring revenue, it excludes revenue from support and perpetual license. Like one-time licenses and services is just kind of the UiPath's and maybe that's some sort of legacy there. It's future is that recurring revenue. So it's pretty similar to what we think of as ARR, but it's not exact. Lots of customers with a growing number of six and seven figure accounts and a dollar-based net retention of 145%. This figure represents the rate of net expansion of the UiPath ARR, from existing listing customers over a 12 month period. Translation. This says UiPath's existing customers are spending more with the company, land and expand and we'll share some data from ETR on that. And as you can see, the growth of 86% CAGR over the past nine quarters, very impressive. Let's talk about some of the fundamentals of UiPath's business. Here's some data from the Brookings Institute and the OECD that shows productivity statistics for the US. The smaller charts in the right are for Germany and Japan. And I've shared some similar data before the US showed in the middle there. Showed productivity improvements with the personal productivity boom in the mid to late 90s. And it spilled into the early 2000s. But since then you can see it's dropped off quite significantly. Germany and Japan are also under pressure as are most developed countries. China's labor productivity might show declines but it's level, is at level significantly higher than these countries, April 16th headline of the Wall Street Journal says that China's GDP grew 18% this quarter. So, we've talked about the snapback in post-COVID and the post-isolation economy, but these are kind of one time bounces. But anyway, the point is we're reaching the limits of what humans can do alone to solve some of the world's most pressing challenges. And automation is one key to shifting labor away from these more mundane tasks toward more productive and more important activities that can deliver lasting benefits. This according to UiPath, is its stated purpose to accelerate human achievement, big. And the market is ready to be automated, for the most part. Now the post-isolation economy is increasingly going to focus on automation to drive toward activity as we've discussed extensively, I got to share the RPA Magic Quadrant where nearly everyone's a winner, many people are of course happy. Many companies are happy, just to get into the Magic Quadrant. You can't just, you have to have certain criteria. So that's good. That's what I mean by everybody wins. We've reported extensively on UiPath and Automation Anywhere. Yeah, we think we might shuffle the deck a little bit on this picture. Maybe creating more separation between UiPath and Automation Anywhere and the rest. And from our advantage point, UiPath's IPO is going to either force Automation Anywhere to respond. And I don't know what its numbers are. I don't know if it's ready. I suspect it's not, we'd see that already but I bet you it's trying to get there. Or if they don't, UiPath is going to extend its lead even further, that would be our prediction. Now personally, I would have Pegasystems higher on the vertical. Of course they're not an IPO, RPA specialist, so I kind of get what Gartner is doing there but I think they're executing well. And I'd probably, in a broader context I'd probably maybe drop blue prism down a little bit, even though last year was a pretty good year for the company. And I would definitely have Microsoft looming larger up in the upper left as a challenger more than a visionary in my opinion, but look, Gartner does good work and its analysts are very deep into this stuff, deeper than I am. So I don't want to discount that. It's just how I see it. Let's bring in the ETR data and show some of the backup here. This is a candlestick chart that shows the components of net score, which is spending momentum, however, ETR goes out every quarter. Says you're spending more, you're spending less. They subtract the lesses from the mores and that's net score. It's more complicated than that, but that's that blue line that you see in the top and yes it's trending downward but it's still highly elevated. We'll talk about that. The market share is in the yellow line at the bottom there. That green represents the percentage of customers that are spending more and the reds are spending less or replacing. That gray is flat. And again, even though UiPath's net score is declining, it's that 61%, that's a very elevated score. Anything over 40% in our view is impressive. So it's, UiPath's been holding in the 60s and 70s percents over the past several years. That's very good. Now that yellow line market share, yes it dips a bit, but again it's nuanced. And this is because Microsoft is so pervasive in the data stat. It's got so many mentions that it tends to somewhat overwhelm and skew these curves. So let's break down net score a little bit. Here's another way to look at this data. This is a wheel chart we show this often it shows the components of net score and what's happening here is that bright red is defection. So look at it, it's very small that wouldn't be churn. It's tiny. Remember that it's churn is the killer for software companies. And so that forest green is existing customers spending more at 49%, that's big. That lime green is new customers. So again, it's from the S1, 70% of UiPath's revenue comes from existing customers. And this really kind of underscores that. Now here's more evidence in the ETR data in terms of land and expand. This is a snapshot from the January survey and it lines up UiPath next to its competitors. And it cuts the data just on those companies that are increasing spending. It's so that forest green that we saw earlier. So what we saw in Q1 was the pace of new customer acquisition for UiPath was decelerating from previous highs. But UiPath, it shows here is outpacing its competition in terms of increasing spend from existing customers. So we think that's really important. UiPath gets very high scores in terms of customer satisfaction. There's, I've talked to many in theCUBE. There's places on the web where we have customer ratings. And so you want to check that out, but it'll confirm that the churn is low, satisfaction is high. Yeah, they get dinged sometimes on pricing. They get dinged sometimes, lately on service cause they're growing so fast. So, maybe they've taken the eye off the ball in a couple of counts, but generally speaking clients are leaning in, they're investing heavily. They're creating centers of excellence around RPA and automation, and UiPath is very focused on that. Again, land and expand. Now here's further evidence that UiPath has a strong account presence, even in accounts where its competitors are presence. In the 149 shared accounts from the Q1 survey where UiPath, Automation Anywhere and Microsoft have a presence, UiPath's net score or spending velocity is not only highly elevated, it's relative momentum, is accelerating compared to last year. So there's some really good news in the numbers but some other things stood out in the S1 that are concerning or at least worth paying attention to. So we want to talk about that. Here is the income statement and look at the growth. The company was doing like 1 million dollars in 2015 like I said before. And when it started to expand internationally it surpassed 600 million last year. It's insane growth. And look at the gross profit. Gross margin is almost 90% because revenue grew so rapidly. And last year, its cost went down in some areas like its services, less travel was part of that. Now jump down to the net loss line. And normally you would expect a company growing at this rate to show a loss. The street wants growth and UiPath is losing money, but it's net loss went from 519 million, half a billion down to only 92 million. And that's because the operating expenses went way down. Now, again, typically a company growing at this rate would show corresponding increases in sales and marketing expense, R&D and even G&A but all three declined in the past 12 months. Now reading the notes, there was definitely some meaningful savings from no travel and canceled events. UiPath has great events around the world. In fact theCUBE, Knock Wood is going to be at its event in October, in Las Vegas at the Bellagio . So we're stoked for that. But, to drop expenses that precipitously with such high growth, is kind of strange. Go look at Snowflake's income statement. They're in hyper-growth as well. We like to compare it to Snowflake is a very well-run company and it's in hyper-growth mode, but it's sales and marketing and R&D and G&A expense lines. They're all growing along with that revenue. Now, perhaps they're growing at a slower rate. Perhaps the percent of revenue is declining as it should as they achieve operating leverage but they're not shrinking in absolute dollar terms as shown in the UiPath S1. So either UiPath has applied some magic automation mojo to it's business (chuckling). Like magic beans or magic grits with my cousin Vinny. Maybe it has found the Holy grail of operating leverage. It's a company that's all about automation or the company was running way too hot on the expense side and had a cut and clean up its income statement for the IPO and conserve some cash. Our guess is the latter but maybe there's a combination there. We'll give him the benefit of the doubt. And just to add a bit more to this long, strange trip. When have you seen an explosive growth company just about to go public, show positive cashflow? Maybe it's happened, but it's rare in the tech and software business these days. Again, go look at companies like Snowflake. They're not showing positive cashflow, not yet anyway. They're growing and trying to run the table. So you have to ask why is UiPath operating this way? And we think it's because they were so hot and burning cash that they had to reel things in a little bit and get ready to IPO. It's going to be really interesting to see how this stock reacts when it does IPO. So here's some things that we want you to pay attention to. We have to ask. Is this IPO, is it window dressing? Or did UiPath again uncover some new productivity and operating leverage model. I doubt there's anything radically new here. This company doesn't want to miss the window. So I think it said, okay, let's do this. Let's get ready for IPO. We got to cut expenses. It had a lot of good advisors. It surrounded itself with a new board. Extended that board, new management, and really want to take advantage of this because it needs the cash. In addition, it really does want to maintain its lead. It's got Automation Anywhere competing with it. It's got Microsoft looming large. And so it wants to continue to lead. It's made some really interesting acquisitions. It's got very strong vision as you saw in the Gartner Magic Quadrant and obviously it's executing well but it's really had to tighten things up. So we think it's used the IPO as a fortune forcing function to really get its house in order. Now, will the automation mandate sustain? We think it will. The forced match to digital worked, it was effective. It wasn't pleasant, but even in a downturn we think it will confer advantage to automation players and particularly companies like UiPath that have simplified automation in a big way and have done a great job of putting in training, great freemium model and has a culture that is really committed to the future of humankind. It sounds ambitious and crazy but talk to these people, you'll see it's true. Pricing, UiPath had to dramatically expand or did dramatically expand its portfolio and had to reprice everything. And I'm not so worried about that. I think it'll figure that pricing out for that portfolio expansion. My bigger concern is for SaaS companies in general. I don't like SaaS pricing that has been popularized by Workday and ServiceNow, and Salesforce and DocuSign and all these companies that essentially lock you in for a year or two and basically charge you upfront. It's really is a one-way street. You can't dial down. You can only dial up. It's not true Cloud pricing. You look at companies like Stripe and Datadog and Snowflake. It is true Cloud pricing. It's consumption pricing. I think the traditional SaaS pricing model is flawed. It's very unfairly weighted toward the vendors and I think it's going to change. Now, the reason we put cloud on the chart is because we think Cloud pricing is the right way to price. Let people dial up and dial down, let them cancel anytime and compete on the basis of your product excellence. And yeah, give them a price concession if they do lock in. But the starting point we think should be that flexibility, pay by the drink. Cancel anytime. I mentioned some companies that are doing that as well. If you look at the modern SaaS startups and the forward-thinking VCs they're really pushing their startups to this model. So we think over time that the term lock-in model is going to give way to true consumption-based pricing and at the clients option, allow them to lock-in for a better price, way better model. And UiPath's Cloud revenue today is minimal but over time, we think it's going to continue to grow that cloud. And we think it will force a rethink in pricing and in revenue recognition. So watch for that. How is the street going to react to Daniel Dines having basically full control of the company? Generally, we feel that that solid execution if UiPath can execute is going to outweigh those concerns. In fact, I'm very confident that it will. We'll see, I kind of like what the CEO says has enough mojo to say (chuckling) you know what, I'm not going to let what happened to for instance, EMC happen to me. You saw Michael Dell do that. You saw just this week they're spinning out VMware, he's maintaining his control. VMware Dell shareholders get get 40.44 shares for every Dell share they're holding. And who's the biggest shareholder? Michael Dell. So he's, you got two companies, one chairman. He's controlling the table. Michael Dell beat the great Icahn. Who beats Carl Icahn? Well, Michael Dell beats Carl Icahn. So Daniel Dines has looked at that and says, you know what? I'm not just going to give up my company. And the reason I like that with an if, is that we think will allow the company to focus more on the long-term. The if is, it's got to execute otherwise it's so much pressure and look, the bottom line is that UiPath has really favorable market momentum and fundamentals. But it is signing up for the 90 day short clock. The fact that the CEO has control again means they can look more long term and invest accordingly. Oftentimes that's easier said than done. It does come down to execution. So it is going to be fun to watch (chuckling). That's it for now, thanks to the community for your comments and insights and really always appreciate your feedback. Remember, I publish each week on Wikibon.com and siliconangle.com and these episodes are all available as podcasts. All you got to do is search for the Breaking Analysis podcast. You can always connect with me on Twitter @dvellante or email me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com or comment on my LinkedIn posts. And we'll see you in clubhouse. Follow me and get notified when we start a room, which we've been doing with John Furrier and Sarbjeet Johal and others. And we love to riff on these topics and don't forget, please check out etr.plus for all the survey action. This is Dave Vellante, for theCUBE Insights Powered by ETR. Be well everybody. And we'll see you next time. (gentle upbeat music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube presenting Cuban cloud brought to you by Silicon Angle. Hi, this is David Linton. You're watching the Cubes coverage of the Cube on Cloud, our own virtual event where we're trying to understand the future of cloud, where we've come from and where we're going. And we're bringing in visionaries to really have that detailed conversation. Daniel Jones is here. He's the CEO of automation specialist. You. I path Daniel. Thanks for coming on and sharing your insights here. >>Thank you so much for inviting me. They've appreciated. >>That's always a pleasure to get together with folks that have started companies with a seed of a vision and have exploded in tow. You know, great success. And when I wanna go back to the the the founding days of you, I path 2005. It was a pre cloud. There's certainly pre cloud as we know it today. A w s came out in 2006. Aw, and then we saw the clouds Ascendancy. But but your original founding premise there was no cloud, you know, it wasn't like a startup could just spend up stuff in the cloud. But what you've seen that evolution. So when you first started to see cloud evolved, What did you think? Did you think Oh, well, we'll see what happens. Or did you? Did you know at the time that this was gonna be a bigas? It actually has become. What were your thoughts back then? >>Well, I honestly, I thought that we are kind of agent. And maybe it's stupid to not to pie foot in tow, The new trends in technology like Cloud Mobile social and I we kept, you know, working on this computer vision technology that 15 years ago, war was not really hot. But with the evolution of self driving cars and the latest development in AI, we we've been able to capture our investments in the domain that was not hot. But suddenly, you know, became the word the of the greatest minds in I t. And we definitely we specialize Our computer vision toe a narrow use case, but still, it's the It's the key of what we've done in, uh, in the end, the robots are powered by computer vision technology. This kind of a robot emulate how human user work. So obviously we use vision a lot in our day by day work and having the best technology that allows our robots to interact with the computer screen more like human user is quintessential and, uh, making our business reliable and easy to use. So we were lucky. But I always felt that maybe I should change it. And we were feeling I remember you know, many discussions with my, you know, initial developers because we like what you're doing. What we felt a bit left outside my door. What way? Got lucky in the end. >>So So I have a premise here and that when you go back to the early days of cloud, what they got right was they were attacking the human labor problem and they automate it was storage. It was it was networking. It was compute. But really the automation that they brought toe i t. And the quality that that drove and the flexibility was, you know, a game changer. Of course, we know that now. And you know, many of us at the time were very excited about Cloud. I'm not sure we predicted the impact that it had, but my premise is that there's a parallel in your business with the automation that you're driving into the business. We've talked toe people, for instance, that some of your customers have said, You know I can't do Six Sigma. I can't afford to do six Sigma before things like R P. A. For business process. I do that for Mission critical things, but now I can apply six Sigma thinking across my entire business that drives quality. It takes costs out of my business. So what do you think about that premise? That there's a parallel between the early days of cloud taking human labor out of the equation and driving quality and flexibility, cost saving speed and revenue, etcetera and what you're doing on the business side, >>it is clearly a parallel. I can tell that the cloud was built by looking at ICTY Automation use cases first of all, because this is all software engineers understand the most software engineers. Let's be you little on this. They don't understand the business work. They don't understand all how the rial work is performing a big enterprise and they don't care. Sometimes when in my own discussions with our CFO, he is surprised that I don't know all the use cases in the world. Yes, of course. I don't know exactly how an insurance company work All the processes in a health care, all the banking processes. I have intellectual curiosity how they were. But what interests me the most is our computer vision technology that works uniformly well across different. That was the same from the cloud. So initially they built and they build a cow cloud one toe, help them when what they know the best. And now, for we were put in the face of having great technology, this computer region technology, but without having a great use case in the I t world that we understood. And when we when I'm speaking about our early days like 12, 13, 14, I believe this technology has a lot less applicable bility in the real world. Because again, we were thinking of some sorts of small I T automation gigs that were not possible just doing the AP ice. But when I discovered the messy world of business processes and how important is to emulate people when you think automation, that was a big ah ha moment. So I believe that we can do for business processes what the cloud has done for I t processes on. We are really patient now about this business processes on helping people toe eliminate all the repetitive work that is their delegate. This work two robots and have the people that are required to do this work do do better. A smaller number of tasks every day. Everyone has own, as on her or him played today like, let's say, 10, 20 different activities. Some of them can be completely delegated to rob to robots, and they are the low value type of activities, while they can focus on the high value activities like interaction with people, creativity, decision making and this type of human like things that we as humans really love. >>I love that you shared that story, but you thought it was a very narrow, sort of set of use cases when you first started and then, you know, that's that's just an awesome founders, you know, really ization. I love it when we've often said in the Cube that, you know, for decades we've marched to the tune of Moore's Law. That was the innovation engine. No longer is that case. It's a combination of of data, applied machine intelligence and cloud for scale. And I guess the computer vision pieces How you in just the data you've you've made some investments in a I and there's many more to come the industry in general and the cloud is sort of the piece of that equation that we see for scale. So I wonder how you see those pieces fitting to your business. Uh, and how important is the cloud for your scale? At last? Uh, at last year, I path forward. There was a lot of talk amongst your customers about scaling. Is the cloud critical for that scale? >>Yeah, I believe so. And we are thinking of clouds in tow. Distinct ways number one. We're offering Onda manage automation service in our own close, using where we host everything by ourselves, including our orchestrator, and then be next to have the plans to include our the robots that execute the automation And people simply can't connect to our cloud building automation and just scheduled to run without any maintainers. And they will have access to oh, great analytics, Everything integrated. So this is a major force to us, and the way we launching G a. This cloud offering in April this year, and I can tell you that until now, 20% of our customers already are in a shape or another in this type of offering, not 20% dollar amount, but 20% of our customers. And it's clear that at this point this has mawr applicability into the long tail, a smaller customers than in the on our biggest customers. But the second, this thing type of cloud offering that we focus on is toe have best in class support and best in class multi cloud support for the cloud of choice of our customers. For instance, if you go in if you go in a w, g, c, p usher and you buy a subscription there, you wear buildings. Specialized editions were with one click. You will be able to install our technology in those clouds and you'll be ableto scale up and down your robots. You can connect your robots to our many service were within your tenant, but basically the angle is toe lesson. Ah lot the administration, the maintainers footprint of your installation, either on our own cloud, even on your cloud of choice. I'm a strong believer that we will see an accelerated transition from the completely on Prem Workloads into these two source of cloud workloads. >>I wanna ask you, is a a technologist if you see. So you mentioned that you're gonna take your products and your support. Multiple clouds will run on any cloud in A lot of companies are talking about that, you know, for their respective whether it's a database or, you know, whatever storage device, etcetera. Do you see the day where you'll actually start? You're collaborating across clouds. Where the user, uh, maybe maybe the user today doesn't know, but maybe a developer does know which cloud it's running on. But do you see any value in actual, you know, connecting across clouds where the data and one cloud is relevant for the data? Another cloud is I know there are latent see issues. Is that you know, technically feasible. And is it it? Will it drive business value? What do you think about that cross cloud connection? >>I believe it is already happening. There is a mesh between between various services and who knows in which cloud they are awful. Already. I feel the Leighton see is less and less of a problem as much as the biggest cloud provider have have a very distributed geographically president. So as long as I can playing AWS in East Coast, on on Asia in East Coast, it's not such a big Leighton see issue. Uh huh. Frankly, in the past, our customers at least start telling us they seen how it is to be completely looking toe one technology on people would like Toa have optionality. It's not necessarily that I will use three clothes, but I would like to use the vendor that gives me optionally even. And this is what we're trying to offer. >>Do you, when you think about the future of work? I mean, e said before the cloud one dato was infrastructure storage, networking, computing Uh, it seems like to Dato we're bringing in more ai new workloads. We're seeing, you know, analytics and machine intelligence applied to the data and then, you know, distributed at scale self serve to the business. How do you see the future of work specifically as it relates toe automation affecting that, uh on you know what role does cloud play there? What's your vision? >>So as the workloads will move to cloud. It's absolutely critical that the processes will move to cloud, so there is no way back. I think, that moving in tow, moving from home for and software into cloud will make even easier toe automate this type of workloads into the cloud. It's gonna be less maintain us. You will deal less with legacy applications that require some special care. It's kind of a bit more easier to automate modern Onley, Web based type of application so that Z we'll see an acceleration on the moving to cloud. But again, there will be different sorts of cloud from a completely manage automation service from us toe managing yourself the automation in your cloud tenant, but not on prayer. I'm not a big believer that we will accept unless very few critical sectors I don't think that we will see home Primor roads in the past five years. >>I mean, I agree in this case, the business case for on Prem just gets, you know, less and less. I mean, it'll be a certain applications for sure. My last question is, when thinking about from a software developer standpoint, you obviously you're gonna wanna run in a W S and G, C P and Azure. Uh, perhaps Alibaba, Uh, do you look at other clouds? Whether their regional clouds, of course. You got your own cloud. Maybe Oracle. IBM. How do you think about those? Do you just sort of evaluated on a case by case basis? You let customers, you know, tell you where you need to be. >>Yeah, way focus on the on the three big clouds today, but we're building on the top off Q Burnett is most of our way. We have a big shift in tow building que Burnett is micro services. And my guess is that all mother clouds would offer fantastic support for kubernetes. So what What it takes when you create a new edition for another cloud is toe is toe have the underlying services. Like if we plan to use snowflake, for instance in our analytics offering, you better have snowflake in another cloud. Otherwise, probably the the analytics will will have toe be delayed or use a less of one part technology. So it's not only about what we are building, but it's also, you know, the vast availability of other set of technologies that we try toe use when you choose a technology. Now, first of all, we are looking. We need to choose something that is multi cloud. There's who's dedicated from one cloud vendor. That's that's our first priority. This is why I've mentioned snowflake and then when when we moved into a cloud. We are limited by the offerings that are there, but I my belief is in the main clouds, probably in the US I don't know one of the region's what's gonna happen, but in the main crowds in the U. S. In I believe that they will. In the end, they will catch up in terms off offering and convincing of other defenders toe have kind of kind of similar offering on their own. I don't know if, besides, the Big Three, or you'll see someone and that is able to compete could be too much fragmented. Maybe they will be dedicated clouds for certain services. But for General Cloud, I think three is more than enough. >>Yeah, and so, you know, in the early days of cloud, people talked about dial tone, and essentially, that's what's becoming. It's the it's the value that's running on top of the cloud from software companies like ey Path and others that is really driving. So the cloud to Dato the next generation Daniel Dennett is thanks so much for sharing your vision on participating in the Cuban cloud. Really appreciate it. >>My pleasure, Dave. Thank you so much for inviting. >>You're welcome. You always great to talk to you. And thank you for watching everybody keep it right there. We'll be back with our next guest right into this short break. This is Dave Volonte for the Cube. Yeah.

>>This is Dave Volante, and I want to tell you about an event we're holding this week with support from you. I path. As you know, we've been reporting on the automation space and the impact of Cove it. Earlier this month, you I path had a big launch, and we're able to get some of their execs to come on the Cube and talk about the future of automation. So on Thursday, May 21st 12 noon, Eastern time, we're running a program on the cube dot net. It's going to start with my independent breaking analysis, talking about some of the r p a challenges and updating you on the market. And we'll be looking at the latest CTR spending data at commenting on the competition with a particular focus on your path, but also automation anywhere, Blue Prism and even some thoughts on Pegasystems. We then have four U i path exact execs that we've interviewed, including CMO, Bobby Patrick, Ted Kumar, who's their new head of products talking about software architectures. We also interviewed Erik Madkour about R p a in the cloud, and we close with Brendan not well, I'm gonna ask to defend you I pass vision of a robot for every person. Very ambitious. And I'm gonna push Brendan a little bit on how much? Israel versus marketing hype. So go the cube dot net. Look for the U I path event that you can add to your calendar. Thanks, everybody, and we'll see you there.

hello everybody and thank you for joining us today for the virtual verdict of BBC 2020 today's breakout session is entitled the shortest path to Vertica best practices for data warehouse migration ETL I'm Jeff Healey I'll leave verdict and marketing I'll be your host for this breakout session joining me today are Marco guesser and Mauricio lychee vertical product engineer is joining us from yume region but before we begin I encourage you to submit questions or comments or in the virtual session don't have to wait just type question in a comment in the question box below the slides that click Submit as always there will be a Q&A session the end of the presentation will answer as many questions were able to during that time any questions we don't address we'll do our best to answer them offline alternatively visit Vertica forums that formed at vertical comm to post your questions there after the session our engineering team is planning to join the forums to keep the conversation going also reminder that you can maximize your screen by clicking the double arrow button and lower right corner of the sides and yes this virtual session is being recorded be available to view on demand this week send you a notification as soon as it's ready now let's get started over to you mark marco andretti oh hello everybody this is Marco speaking a sales engineer from Amir said I'll just get going ah this is the agenda part one will be done by me part two will be done by Mauricio the agenda is as you can see big bang or piece by piece and the migration of the DTL migration of the physical data model migration of et I saw VTL + bi functionality what to do with store procedures what to do with any possible existing user defined functions and migration of the data doctor will be by Maurice it you want to talk about emeritus Rider yeah hello everybody my name is Mauricio Felicia and I'm a birth record pre-sales like Marco I'm going to talk about how to optimize that were always using some specific vertical techniques like table flattening live aggregated projections so let me start with be a quick overview of the data browser migration process we are going to talk about today and normally we often suggest to start migrating the current that allows the older disease with limited or minimal changes in the overall architecture and yeah clearly we will have to port the DDL or to redirect the data access tool and we will platform but we should minimizing the initial phase the amount of changes in order to go go live as soon as possible this is something that we also suggest in the second phase we can start optimizing Bill arouse and which again with no or minimal changes in the architecture as such and during this optimization phase we can create for example dog projections or for some specific query or optimize encoding or change some of the visual spools this is something that we normally do if and when needed and finally and again if and when needed we go through the architectural design for these operations using full vertical techniques in order to take advantage of all the features we have in vertical and this is normally an iterative approach so we go back to name some of the specific feature before moving back to the architecture and science we are going through this process in the next few slides ok instead in order to encourage everyone to keep using their common sense when migrating to a new database management system people are you often afraid of it it's just often useful to use the analogy of how smooth in your old home you might have developed solutions for your everyday life that make perfect sense there for example if your old cent burner dog can't walk anymore you might be using a fork lifter to heap in through your window in the old home well in the new home consider the elevator and don't complain that the window is too small to fit the dog through this is very much in the same way as Narita but starting to make the transition gentle again I love to remain in my analogy with the house move picture your new house as your new holiday home begin to install everything you miss and everything you like from your old home once you have everything you need in your new house you can shut down themselves the old one so move each by feet and go for quick wins to make your audience happy you do bigbang only if they are going to retire the platform you are sitting on where you're really on a sinking ship otherwise again identify quick wings implement published and quickly in Vertica reap the benefits enjoy the applause use the gained reputation for further funding and if you find that nobody's using the old platform anymore you can shut it down if you really have to migrate you can still go to really go to big battle in one go only if you absolutely have to otherwise migrate by subject area use the group all similar clear divisions right having said that ah you start off by migrating objects objects in the database that's one of the very first steps it consists of migrating verbs the places where you can put the other objects into that is owners locations which is usually schemers then what do you have that you extract tables news then you convert the object definition deploy them to Vertica and think that you shouldn't do it manually never type what you can generate ultimate whatever you can use it enrolls usually there is a system tables in the old database that contains all the roads you can export those to a file reformat them and then you have a create role and create user scripts that you can apply to Vertica if LDAP Active Directory was used for the authentication the old database vertical supports anything within the l dubs standard catalogued schemas should be relatively straightforward with maybe sometimes the difference Vertica does not restrict you by defining a schema as a collection of all objects owned by a user but it supports it emulates it for old times sake Vertica does not need the catalog or if you absolutely need the catalog from the old tools that you use it it usually said it is always set to the name of the database in case of vertical having had now the schemas the catalogs the users and roles in place move the take the definition language of Jesus thought if you are allowed to it's best to use a tool that translates to date types in the PTL generated you might see as a mention of old idea to listen by memory to by the way several times in this presentation we are very happy to have it it actually can export the old database table definition because they got it works with the odbc it gets what the old database ODBC driver translates to ODBC and then it has internal translation tables to several target schema to several target DBMS flavors the most important which is obviously vertical if they force you to use something else there are always tubes like sequel plots in Oracle the show table command in Tara data etc H each DBMS should have a set of tools to extract the object definitions to be deployed in the other instance of the same DBMS ah if I talk about youth views usually a very new definition also in the old database catalog one thing that you might you you use special a bit of special care synonyms is something that were to get emulated different ways depending on the specific needs I said I stop you on the view or table to be referred to or something that is really neat but other databases don't have the search path in particular that works that works very much like the path environment variable in Windows or Linux where you specify in a table an object name without the schema name and then it searched it first in the first entry of the search path then in a second then in third which makes synonym hugely completely unneeded when you generate uvl we remained in the analogy of moving house dust and clean your stuff before placing it in the new house if you see a table like the one here at the bottom this is usually corpse of a bad migration in the past already an ID is usually an integer and not an almost floating-point data type a first name hardly ever has 256 characters and that if it's called higher DT it's not necessarily needed to store the second when somebody was hired so take good care in using while you are moving dust off your stuff and use better data types the same applies especially could string how many bytes does a string container contains for eurozone's it's not for it's actually 12 euros in utf-8 in the way that Vertica encodes strings and ASCII characters one died but the Euro sign thinks three that means that you have to very often you have when you have a single byte character set up a source you have to pay attention oversize it first because otherwise it gets rejected or truncated and then you you will have to very carefully check what their best science is the best promising is the most promising approach is to initially dimension strings in multiples of very initial length and again ODP with the command you see there would be - I you 2 comma 4 will double the lengths of what otherwise will single byte character and multiply that for the length of characters that are wide characters in traditional databases and then load the representative sample of your cells data and profile using the tools that we personally use to find the actually longest datatype and then make them shorter notice you might be talking about the issues of having too long and too big data types on projection design are we live and die with our projects you might know remember the rules on how default projects has come to exist the way that we do initially would be just like for the profiling load a representative sample of the data collector representative set of already known queries from the Vertica database designer and you don't have to decide immediately you can always amend things and otherwise follow the laws of physics avoid moving data back and forth across nodes avoid heavy iOS if you can design your your projections initially by hand encoding matters you know that the database designer is a very tight fisted thing it would optimize to use as little space as possible you will have to think of the fact that if you compress very well you might end up using more time in reading it this is the testimony to run once using several encoding types and you see that they are l e is the wrong length encoded if sorted is not even visible while the others are considerably slower you can get those nights and look it in look at them in detail I will go in detail you now hear about it VI migrations move usually you can expect 80% of everything to work to be able to live to be lifted and shifted you don't need most of the pre aggregated tables because we have live like regain projections many BI tools have specialized query objects for the dimensions and the facts and we have the possibility to use flatten tables that are going to be talked about later you might have to ride those by hand you will be able to switch off casting because vertical speeds of everything with laps Lyle aggregate projections and you have worked with molap cubes before you very probably won't meet them at all ETL tools what you will have to do is if you do it row by row in the old database consider changing everything to very big transactions and if you use in search statements with parameter markers consider writing to make pipes and using verticals copy command mouse inserts yeah copy c'mon that's what I have here ask you custom functionality you can see on this slide the verticals the biggest number of functions in the database we compare them regularly by far compared to any other database you might find that many of them that you have written won't be needed on the new database so look at the vertical catalog instead of trying to look to migrate a function that you don't need stored procedures are very often used in the old database to overcome their shortcomings that Vertica doesn't have very rarely you will have to actually write a procedure that involves a loop but it's really in our experience very very rarely usually you can just switch to standard scripting and this is basically repeating what Mauricio said in the interest of time I will skip this look at this one here the most of the database data warehouse migration talks should be automatic you can use you can automate GDL migration using ODB which is crucial data profiling it's not crucial but game-changing the encoding is the same thing you can automate at you using our database designer the physical data model optimization in general is game-changing you have the database designer use the provisioning use the old platforms tools to generate the SQL you have no objects without their onus is crucial and asking functions and procedures they are only crucial if they depict the company's intellectual property otherwise you can almost always replace them with something else that's it from me for now Thank You Marco Thank You Marco so we will now point our presentation talking about some of the Vertica that overall the presentation techniques that we can implement in order to improve the general efficiency of the dot arouse and let me start with a few simple messages well the first one is that you are supposed to optimize only if and when this is needed in most of the cases just a little shift from the old that allows to birth will provide you exhaust the person as if you were looking for or even better so in this case probably is not really needed to to optimize anything in case you want optimize or you need to optimize then keep in mind some of the vertical peculiarities for example implement delete and updates in the vertical way use live aggregate projections in order to avoid or better in order to limit the goodbye executions at one time used for flattening in order to avoid or limit joint and and then you can also implement invert have some specific birth extensions life for example time series analysis or machine learning on top of your data we will now start by reviewing the first of these ballots optimize if and when needed well if this is okay I mean if you get when you migrate from the old data where else to birth without any optimization if the first four month level is okay then probably you only took my jacketing but this is not the case one very easier to dispute in session technique that you can ask is to ask basket cells to optimize the physical data model using the birth ticket of a designer how well DB deal which is the vertical database designer has several interfaces here I'm going to use what we call the DB DB programmatic API so basically sequel functions and using other databases you might need to hire experts looking at your data your data browser your table definition creating indexes or whatever in vertical all you need is to run something like these are simple as six single sequel statement to get a very well optimized physical base model you see that we start creating a new design then we had to be redesigned tables and queries the queries that we want to optimize we set our target in this case we are tuning the physical data model in order to maximize query performances this is why we are using my design query and in our statement another possible journal tip would be to tune in order to reduce storage or a mix between during storage and cheering queries and finally we asked Vertica to produce and deploy these optimized design in a matter of literally it's a matter of minutes and in a few minutes what you can get is a fully optimized fiscal data model okay this is something very very easy to implement keep in mind some of the vertical peculiarities Vaska is very well tuned for load and query operations aunt Berta bright rose container to biscuits hi the Pharos container is a group of files we will never ever change the content of this file the fact that the Rose containers files are never modified is one of the political peculiarities and these approach led us to use minimal locks we can add multiple load operations in parallel against the very same table assuming we don't have a primary or unique constraint on the target table in parallel as a sage because they will end up in two different growth containers salad in read committed requires in not rocket fuel and can run concurrently with insert selected because the Select will work on a snapshot of the catalog when the transaction start this is what we call snapshot isolation the kappa recovery because we never change our rows files are very simple and robust so we have a huge amount of bandages due to the fact that we never change the content of B rows files contain indiarose containers but on the other side believes and updates require a little attention so what about delete first when you believe in the ethica you basically create a new object able it back so it appeared a bit later in the Rose or in memory and this vector will point to the data being deleted so that when the feed is executed Vertica will just ignore the rules listed in B delete records and it's not just about the leak and updating vertical consists of two operations delete and insert merge consists of either insert or update which interim is made of the little insert so basically if we tuned how the delete work we will also have tune the update in the merge so what should we do in order to optimize delete well remember what we said that every time we please actually we create a new object a delete vector so avoid committing believe and update too often we reduce work the work for the merge out for the removal method out activities that are run afterwards and be sure that all the interested projections will contain the column views in the dedicate this will let workers directly after access the projection without having to go through the super projection in order to create the vector and the delete will be much much faster and finally another very interesting optimization technique is trying to segregate the update and delete operation from Pyrenean third workload in order to reduce lock contention beliefs something we are going to discuss and these contain using partition partition operation this is exactly what I want to talk about now here you have a typical that arouse architecture so we have data arriving in a landing zone where the data is loaded that is from the data sources then we have a transformation a year writing into a staging area that in turn will feed the partitions block of data in the green data structure we have at the end those green data structure we have at the end are the ones used by the data access tools when they run their queries sometimes we might need to change old data for example because we have late records or maybe because we want to fix some errors that have been originated in the facilities so what we do in this case is we just copied back the partition we want to change or we want to adjust from the green interior a the end to the stage in the area we have a very fast operation which is Tokyo Station then we run our updates or our adjustment procedure or whatever we need in order to fix the errors in the data in the staging area and at the very same time people continues to you with green data structures that are at the end so we will never have contention between the two operations when we updating the staging area is completed what we have to do is just to run a swap partition between tables in order to swap the data that we just finished to adjust in be staging zone to the query area that is the green one at the end this swap partition is very fast is an atomic operation and basically what will happens is just that well exchange the pointer to the data this is a very very effective techniques and lot of customer useless so why flops on table and live aggregate for injections well basically we use slot in table and live aggregate objection to minimize or avoid joint this is what flatten table are used for or goodbye and this is what live aggregate projections are used for now compared to traditional data warehouses better can store and process and aggregate and join order of magnitudes more data that is a true columnar database joint and goodbye normally are not a problem at all they run faster than any traditional data browse that page there are still scenarios were deficits are so big and we are talking about petabytes of data and so quickly going that would mean be something in order to boost drop by and join performances and this is why you can't reduce live aggregate projections to perform aggregations hard loading time and limit the need for global appear on time and flux and tables to combine information from different entity uploading time and again avoid running joint has query undefined okay so live aggregate projections at this point in time we can use live aggregate projections using for built in aggregate functions which are some min Max and count okay let's see how this works suppose that you have a normal table in this case we have a table unit sold with three columns PIB their time and quantity which has been segmented in a given way and on top of this base table we call it uncle table we create a projection you see that we create the projection using the salad that will aggregate the data we get the PID we get the date portion of the time and we get the sum of quantity from from the base table grouping on the first two columns so PID and the date portion of day time okay what happens in this case when we load data into the base table all we have to do with load data into the base table when we load data into the base table we will feel of course big injections that assuming we are running with k61 we will have to projection to projections and we will know the data in those two projection with all the detail in data we are going to load into the table so PAB playtime and quantity but at the very same time at the very same time and without having to do nothing any any particular operation or without having to run any any ETL procedure we will also get automatically in the live aggregate projection for the data pre aggregated with be a big day portion of day time and the sum of quantity into the table name total quantity you see is something that we get for free without having to run any specific procedure and this is very very efficient so the key concept is that during the loading operation from VDL point of view is executed again the base table we do not explicitly aggregate data or we don't have any any plc do the aggregation is automatic and we'll bring the pizza to be live aggregate projection every time we go into the base table you see the two selection that we have we have on in this line on the left side and you see that those two selects will produce exactly the same result so running select PA did they trying some quantity from the base table or running the select star from the live aggregate projection will result exactly in the same data you know this is of course very useful but is much more useful result that if we and we can observe this if we run an explained if we run the select against the base table asking for this group data what happens behind the scene is that basically vertical itself that is a live aggregate projection with the data that has been already aggregating loading phase and rewrite your query using polite aggregate projection this happens automatically you see this is a query that ran a group by against unit sold and vertical decided to rewrite this clearly as something that has to be collected against the light aggregates projection because if I decrease this will save a huge amount of time and effort during the ETL cycle okay and is not just limited to be information you want to aggregate for example another query like select count this thing you might note that can't be seen better basically our goodbyes will also take advantage of the live aggregate injection and again this is something that happens automatically you don't have to do anything to get this okay one thing that we have to keep very very clear in mind Brassica what what we store in the live aggregate for injection are basically partially aggregated beta so in this example we have two inserts okay you see that we have the first insert that is entered in four volts and the second insert which is inserting five rules well in for each of these insert we will have a partial aggregation you will never know that after the first insert you will have a second one so better will calculate the aggregation of the data every time irin be insert it is a key concept and be also means that you can imagine lies the effectiveness of bees technique by inserting large chunk of data ok if you insert data row by row this technique live aggregate rejection is not very useful because for every goal that you insert you will have an aggregation so basically they'll live aggregate injection will end up containing the same number of rows that you have in the base table but if you everytime insert a large chunk of data the number of the aggregations that you will have in the library get from structure is much less than B base data so this is this is a key concept you can see how these works by counting the number of rows that you have in alive aggregate injection you see that if you run the select count star from the solved live aggregate rejection the query on the left side you will get four rules but actually if you explain this query you will see that he was reading six rows so this was because every of those two inserts that we're actively interested a few rows in three rows in India in the live aggregate projection so this is a key concept live aggregate projection keep partially aggregated data this final aggregation will always happen at runtime okay another which is very similar to be live aggregate projection or what we call top K projection we actually do not aggregate anything in the top case injection we just keep the last or limit the amount of rows that we collect using the limit over partition by all the by clothes and this again in this case we create on top of the base stable to top gay projection want to keep the last quantity that has been sold and the other one to keep the max quantity in both cases is just a matter of ordering the data in the first case using the B time column in the second page using quantity in both cases we fill projection with just the last roof and again this is something that we do when we insert data into the base table and this is something that happens automatically okay if we now run after the insert our select against either the max quantity okay or be lost wanted it okay we will get the very last you see that we have much less rows in the top k projections okay we told at the beginning that basically we can use for built-in function you might remember me max sum and count what if I want to create my own specific aggregation on top of the lid and customer sum up because our customers have very specific needs in terms of live aggregate projections well in this case you can code your own live aggregate production user-defined functions so you can create the user-defined transport function to implement any sort of complex aggregation while loading data basically after you implemented miss VPS you can deploy using a be pre pass approach that basically means the data is aggregated as loading time during the data ingestion or the batch approach that means that the data is when that woman is running on top which things to remember on live a granade projections they are limited to be built in function again some max min and count but you can call your own you DTF so you can do whatever you want they can reference only one table and for bass cab version before 9.3 it was impossible to update or delete on the uncle table this limit has been removed in 9.3 so you now can update and delete data from the uncle table okay live aggregate projection will follow the segmentation of the group by expression and in some cases the best optimizer can decide to pick the live aggregates objection or not depending on if depending on the fact that the aggregation is a consistent or not remember that if we insert and commit every single role to be uncoachable then we will end up with a live aggregate indirection that contains exactly the same number of rows in this case living block or using the base table it would be the same okay so this is one of the two fantastic techniques that we can implement in Burtka this live aggregate projection is basically to avoid or limit goodbyes the other which we are going to talk about is cutting table and be reused in order to avoid the means for joins remember that K is very fast running joints but when we scale up to petabytes of beta we need to boost and this is what we have in order to have is problem fixed regardless the amount of data we are dealing with so how what about suction table let me start with normalized schemas everybody knows what is a normalized scheme under is no but related stuff in this slide the main scope of an normalized schema is to reduce data redundancies so and the fact that we reduce data analysis is a good thing because we will obtain fast and more brides we will have to write into a database small chunks of data into the right table the problem with these normalized schemas is that when you run your queries you have to put together the information that arrives from different table and be required to run joint again jointly that again normally is very good to run joint but sometimes the amount of data makes not easy to deal with joints and joints sometimes are not easy to tune what happens in in the normal let's say traditional data browser is that we D normalize the schemas normally either manually or using an ETL so basically we have on one side in this light on the left side the normalized schemas where we can get very fast right on the other side on the left we have the wider table where we run all the three joints and pre aggregation in order to prepare the data for the queries and so we will have fast bribes on the left fast reads on the Left sorry fast bra on the right and fast read on the left side of these slides the probability in the middle because we will push all the complexity in the middle in the ETL that will have to transform be normalized schema into the water table and the way we normally implement these either manually using procedures that we call the door using ETL this is what happens in traditional data warehouse is that we will have to coach in ETL layer in order to round the insert select that will feed from the normalized schema and right into the widest table at the end the one that is used by the data access tools we we are going to to view store to run our theories so this approach is costly because of course someone will have to code this ETL and is slow because someone will have to execute those batches normally overnight after loading the data and maybe someone will have to check the following morning that everything was ok with the batch and is resource intensive of course and is also human being intensive because of the people that will have to code and check the results it ever thrown because it can fail and introduce a latency because there is a get in the time axis between the time t0 when you load the data into be normalized schema and the time t1 when we get the data finally ready to be to be queried so what would be inverter to facilitate this process is to create this flatten table with the flattened T work first you avoid data redundancy because you don't need the wide table on the normalized schema on the left side second is fully automatic you don't have to do anything you just have to insert the data into the water table and the ETL that you have coded is transformed into an insert select by vatika automatically you don't have to do anything it's robust and this Latin c0 is a single fast as soon as you load the data into the water table you will get all the joints executed for you so let's have a look on how it works in this case we have the table we are going to flatten and basically we have to focus on two different clauses the first one is you see that there is one table here I mentioned value 1 which can be defined as default and then the Select or set using okay the difference between the fold and set using is when the data is populated if we use default data is populated as soon as we know the data into the base table if we use set using Google Earth to refresh but everything is there I mean you don't need them ETL you don't need to code any transformation because everything is in the table definition itself and it's for free and of course is in latency zero so as soon as you load the other columns you will have the dimension value valued as well okay let's see an example here suppose here we have a dimension table customer dimension that is on the left side and we have a fact table on on the right you see that the fact table uses columns like o underscore name or Oh the score city which are basically the result of the salad on top of the customer dimension so Beezus were the join is executed as soon as a remote data into the fact table directly into the fact table without of course loading data that arise from the dimension all the data from the dimension will be populated automatically so let's have an example here suppose that we are running this insert as you can see we are running be inserted directly into the fact table and we are loading o ID customer ID and total we are not loading made a major name no city those name and city will be automatically populated by Vertica for you because of the definition of the flood table okay you see behave well all you need in order to have your widest tables built for you your flattened table and this means that at runtime you won't need any join between base fuck table and the customer dimension that we have used in order to calculate name and city because the data is already there this was using default the other option was is using set using the concept is absolutely the same you see that in this case on the on the right side we have we have basically replaced this all on the school name default with all underscore name set using and same is true for city the concept that I said is the same but in this case which we set using then we will have to refresh you see that we have to run these select trash columns and then the name of the table in this case all columns will be fresh or you can specify only certain columns and this will bring the values for name and city reading from the customer dimension so this technique this technique is extremely useful the difference between default and said choosing just to summarize the most important differences remember you just have to remember that default will relate your target when you load set using when you refresh end and in some cases you might need to use them both so in some cases you might want to use both default end set using in this example here we'll see that we define the underscore name using both default and securing and this means that we love the data populated either when we load the data into the base table or when we run the Refresh this is summary of the technique that we can implement in birth in order to make our and other browsers even more efficient and well basically this is the end of our presentation thank you for listening and now we are ready for the Q&A session you

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube. Covering IBM Think 2018. Brought to you by IBM. >> Hello everyone and welcome to The Cube here at IBM Think in Las Vegas, the Mandalay Bay. I'm John Furrier, the host of The Cube. We're here in this Cube studio as a set for IBM Think. My next guest is Jennifer Shiin who's the founder of 8 Path Solutions. Twitter handle Jenn, J-S-H-I-N. Great to see you. Thanks for joining me. >> Yeah, happy to be here. >> I'm glad you stopped by. I wanted to get your thoughts. You're thought leader in the industry. You've been on multiple Cube panels. Thank you very much. And also Cube alumni. You know, IBM with the data center of the value proposition. The CEO's up on the stage today saying you got data, you got blockchain and you got AI, which is such the infrastructure of the future. And AI is the software of the future, data's at the middle. Dave and I were talking about that as the innovation sandwich. The data is being sandwiched between blockchain and AI, two super important things. And she also mentioned Moore's law. Faster, smaller, cheaper. Every 6 months doubling in speed and performance. And then Metcalfe's law, which is more of a network effect. Kind of teasing out token economics. You see kind of where the world's going. This is an interesting position from IBM. I like it. Is it real? >> Well it sounds very data sciency, right? You have the economics part, you have the networking. You have all these things in your plane. So I think it's very much in line with what you would expect if data science actually sustains (mumbles), which thankfully it has. >> Yeah. >> And I think the reality is you know, we like to boil things down into nice, simple concepts but in the real world when you're actually figuring it all out its going to be multiple effects. It's going to be, you know a lot of different things that interact. >> And they kind of really tease out their cloud strategy in a very elegant way. I mean they essentially said, 'Look we're into the cloud and we're not going to try to.' They didn't say it directly, but they basically said it. We're not going to compete with Amazon head-to-head. We're going to let our offerings to do the talking. We're going to use data and give customers choice with multi cloud. How does that jive for you? How does that work because at the end of the day I got to have business logics. I need applications. >> Yes. >> You know whether its blockchains, cryptocurrency or apps. The killer app's now money. >> Yep. >> If no one's making any money. >> Sure. >> No commerce is being done. >> Right. I mean I think it makes sense. You know, Amazon has such a strong hold in the infrastructure part, right? Being able to store your data elsewhere and have it be cloud. I don't think that was really IBM's core business. You know, a lot of I think their business model was built around business and business relationships and these days, one of the great things about all these data technologies is that one company doesn't have to do all of it, right? You have partnerships and actually partners so that you know, one company does AI. You partner with another company that has data. And that way you can actually both make money, right? There's more than enough work to go around and that much you can say having worked in data science teams right? If I can offload some of my work to different divisions, fantastic. That'd be great. Saves us time. You get to market faster. You can build things quicker. So I think that's one of the great things about what's happening with data these days, right? There's enough work to get around. >> And it's beautiful too because if you think about the concept that made cloud great is DevOps. Blockchain is an opportunity to use desensualization to take away a lot of inefficiencies. AI is also an automation opportunity to create value. So you got inefficiencies on block chains side and AI to create value, your thoughts and reaction to where that's going to go. You know, in light of the first death on a Uber self-driving car. Again, historic yesterday right? And so you know, the reality is right there. We're not perfect. >> Yeah. >> But there's a path. >> Well so most of its inefficiency out there. It's not the technology. It's all the people using technology, right? You broke the logic by putting in something you shouldn't have put in that data set, you know? The data's now dirty because you put in things that you know, the developer didn't think you'd put in there. So the reality is we're going to keep making mistakes and there will be more and more opportunities for new technologies to help you know, cheer that up. >> So I was talking to Rob Thomas, GM of the analytics team. You know Rob, great guy. He's smart. He's also an executive but he knows the tech. He and I were talking about this notion of data containers. So with Kubernetes now front and center as an orchestration layer for cloud and application workloads, IBM has an interesting announcement with this cloud private approach. Where data is the central thing in this. Because you've got things like GDPR out there and the regulatory environment not going to get any easier. You got blockchain crypto. That's a regulatory nightmare. We know a GDBR. That's a total nightmare. So this is happening, right? So what should customers be doing, in your experience? Customers are scratching their head. They don't want to make a wrong bet, but they need good data, good strategy. They need to do things differently. How do they get the best out of their data architecture knowing that there's hurdles and potential blockers in front of them? >> Well so I think you want to be careful of what you select. and how much are you going to be indebted to that one service that you selected, right? So if you're not sure yet maybe you don't want to invest all of your budget into this one thing you're not sure is going to be what you really want to be paying for a year or two, right? So I think being really open to how you're going to plan for things long term and thinking about where you can have some flexibility, whereas certain things you can't. For instance, if you're going to be in an industry that is going to be you know, strict on regulatory requirements right? Then you have less wiggle room than let's say an industry where that's not going to be an absolute necessary part of your technology. >> Let me ask you a question and being kind of a historian you know, what say one year is seven dog years or whatever the expression is in the data space. It just seems like yesterday that Hadoop was going to save the world. So that as kind of context, what is some technologies that just didn't pan out? Is the data link working? You know, what didn't work and what replaced it if you can make an observation? >> Well, so I think that's hard because I think the way I understood technology is probably not the way everyone else did right? I mean, you know at the end of the day it just is being a way to store data right? And just being able to use you know, more information store faster, but I'll tell you what I think is hilarious. I've seen people using Hadoop and then writing sequel queries the same way we did like ten plus years ago, same inefficiencies and they're not leveling the fact that it's Hadoop. Right? They're treating it like I want to create eight million tables and then use joins. So they're not really using the technology. I think that's probably the biggest disappointment is that without that knowledge sharing, without education you have people making the same mistakes you made when technology wasn't as efficient. >> I mean if you're a hammer, everything else is like a nail I guess if that's the expression. >> Right. >> On the exciting side, what are you excited about in technology right now? What are you looking at that's a you know, next 20 mile stare of potential goodness that could be coming out of the industry? >> So I think anytime you have better science, better measurements. So measurement's huge, right? If you think about media industry, right? Everyone's trying to measure. I think there was an article that came out about some of YouTube's failure about measurement, right? And I think in general like Facebook is you know, very well known for measurement. That's going to be really interesting to see, right? What methodologies come out in terms of how well can we measure? I think another one will be say, target advertising right? That's another huge market that you know, a lot of companies are going after. I think what's really going to be cool in the next few years is to see what people come up with, right? It's really the human ingenuity of it, right? We have the technology now. We have data engineers. What can we actually build? And how are we going to be able to partner to be able to do that? >> And there's new stacks that are developing. You think about the ecommerce stack. It's a 30 year old stack. AdTech and DNS and cookiing, now you've got social and network effects going on. You mentioned you know, the Metcalfe's law. So with all that, I want to get just your personal thoughts on blockchain. Beyond blockchain, token economics because there are a lot people who are doing stuff with crypto. But what's really kind of pointing as a mega trands standpoint is a new class of desensualized application developers are coming in. >> Right. >> Okay. They're dealing with data now on a desensualized basis. At the heart of that is the token economics, which is changing some of the business model dynamics. Have you seen anything? Your thoughts on token economics? >> So I haven't seen it from the economics standpoint. I've seen it from more of the algorithms and that standpoint. I actually have a good friend of mine, she's at Yale. And she actually runs the, she's executive director of their corporate law center. So I hear some from her on the legal side. I think what's really interesting is there's all these different arenas. Legal being a very important component in blockchain. As well as, from the mathematical standpoint. You know when I was in school way back when, we studied things like hash keys and you know, RSA keys and so from a math standpoint that's also a really cool aspect of it. So I think it's probably too early to say for sure what the economics part is going to actually look like. I think that's going to be a little more longterm. But what is exciting about this, is you actually see different parts of businesses, right? Not just the financial sector but also the legal sector and then you know say, the math and algorithms and you know. Having that integration of being able to build cooler things for that reason. >> Yeah the math's certainly exciting. Machine learning, obviously that's well documented. The growth and success of what, and certainly the interests are there. You seeing Amazon celebrating all the time. I just saw Werner Vogels, the CTO. Talking about another SageMaker, a success. They're looking at machine learning that way. You got Google with TensorFlow. You've got this goodness in these libraries now that are in the community. It's kind of a perfect storm of innovation. What's new in the ML world that developers are getting excited about that companies are harnessing for value? You seeing anything there? Can you share some commentary on the current machine learning trends? >> So I think a lot of companies have gotten a little more adjusted to the idea of ML. At the beginning everyone was like, 'Oh this is all new.' They loved the idea of it but they didn't really know what they were doing, right? Right now they know a little bit more. I think in general everyone thinks deep learning is really cool, neural networks. I think what's interesting though is everyone's trying to figure out where's the line. What's the different between AI versus machine learning versus deep learning versus neural networks. I think it's a little bit fun for me just to see everyone kind of struggle a little bit and actually even know the terminology so we can have a conversation. So I think all of that, right? Just anything related to that you know, when do you TensorFlow? What do you use it for? And then also say, from Google right? Which parts do you actually send through an API? I mean that's some of the conversations I've been having with people in the business industry, like which parts do you send through an API. Which parts do you actually have in house versus you know, having to outsource out? >> And that's really kind of your thinking there is what, around core competencies where people need to kind of own it and really build a core competency and then outsource where its more a femoral invalue. Is there a formula, I guess to know when to bring it in house and build around? >> Right. >> What's your thoughts there? >> Well part of it, I think is scalability. If you don't have the resources or the time, right? Sometimes time. If you don't have the time to build it in house, it does make sense actually to outsource it out. Also if you don't think that's part of your core business, developing that within house do you're spending all that money and resources to hire the best data scientists, may not be worth it because in fact the majority of your actual sales is with the sale department. I mean they're the ones that actually bring in that revenue. So I think it's finding a balance of what investment's actually worth it. >> And sometimes personnel could leave and you could be a big problem, you know. Someone walks about the door, gets another job because its a hot commodity to be. >> That's actually one of the big complaints I've heard is that we spend all this time investing in certain young people and then they leave. I think part of this is actually that human factor. How do you encourage them to stay? >> Let's talk about you. How did you get here? School? Interests? Did you go off the path? Did you come in from another vector? How did you get into what you're doing now and share a little bit about who you are? >> Yeah so I studied economics, mathematics, creative writing as an undergrad and statistics as a grad student. So you know, kind of perfect storm. >> Natural math, bring it all together. >> Yeah but you know its funny because I actually wrote about and talked about how data is going to be this big thing. This is like 2009, 2010 and people didn't think it was that important, you know? I was like next three to five years mathematicians are going to be a hot hire. No one believed me. So I ended up going, 'Okay well, the economy crashed.' I was in management consulting in finance, private equity hedge funds. Everyone swore like, if you do this you're going to be set for life, right? You're on the path. You'll make money and then the economy crashed. All the jobs went away. And I went, 'Maybe not the best career choice for me.' So I did what I did at companies. I looked at the market and I went, 'Where's their growth?' I saw tech had growth and decided I'm going to pick up some skills I've never had before, learn to develop more. I mean in the beginning I had no idea what an application development process was, right? I'm like, 'What does that mean to actually develop an application?' So the last few years I've really just been spending, just learning these things. What's really cool though is last year when my patents went through and I was able to actually able to launch something with Box at their keynote. That was really awesome. >> Awesome. >> So I became a long way from I think, have the academic knowledge to being able to apply it and then learn the technologies and then developing the technologies, which is a cool thing. >> Yeah and that's a good path because you came in with a clean sheet of paper. You didn't have any dogma of waterfall and all the technologies. So you kind of jumped in. Did you use like a cloud to build on? Was it Amazon? Was it? >> Oh that's funny too. Actually I do know Legacy's technology quite well because I was in corporate America before. Yeah, so like Sequel. For instance like when I started working data science, funny enough we didn't call it data science. We just called it like whatever you call it, you know. There was no data science term at that point. You know we didn't have that idea of whether to use R or Python. I mean I've used R over ten years, but it was for statistics. It was never for like actual data science work. And then we used Sequel in corporate America. When I was taking data it was like in 2012. Around then, everyone swore that no, no. They're going to programmers. Got to know programming. To which, I'm like really? In corporate America, we're going to have programmers? I mean think about how long it's going to take to get someone to learn any language and of course, now everyone's learning. It's on Sequel again right? So. >> Isn't it fun to like, when you see someone on Facebook or Linkdin, 'Oh man data's a new oil.' And then you say, 'Yeah here's a blog post I wrote in 2009.' >> Right. Yeah, exactly. Well so funny enough Ginni Rometty today was saying about exponential versus linear and that's one of the things I've been saying over the last year about because you know, you want exponential growth. Because linear anyone can do. That's a tweet. That's not really growth. >> Well we value your opinion. You've been great on The Cube. Great to help us out on those panels, got a great view. What's going on with your company? What are you working on now? What's exciting you these days? >> Yeah so one of the cool things we worked on, it's very much in line with what the IBM announcement was, so being smarter, right? So I developed some technology in the photo industry, digital assent management as well as being able to automate the renaming of files, right? So you think you probably a picture on your digital camera you never moved over because you, I remember the process. You open it, you rename it, you saved it. You open the next one. Takes forever. >> Sometimes its the same number. I got same version files. It's a nightmare. >> Exactly. So I basically automated that process of having all of that automatically renamed. So the demo that I did I had 120 photos renamed in less than two minutes, right? Just making it faster and smarter. So really developing technologies that you can actually use every day and leverage for things like photography and some cooler stuff with OCR, which is the long term goal. To be able to allow photographers to never touch the computer and have all of their clients photos automatically uploaded, renamed and sent to the right locations instantly. >> How did you get to start that app? Are you into photography or? >> No >> More of, I got a picture problem and I got to fix it? >> Well actually its funny. I had a photographer taking my picture and she showed me what she does, the process. And I went, 'This is not okay. You can do better than this.' So I can code so I basically went to Python and went, 'Alright I think this could work,' built a proof of concept and then decided to patent it. >> Awesome. Well congratulations on the patent. Final thoughts here about IBM Think? Overall sentiment of the show? Ginni's keynote. Did you get a chance to check anything out? What's the hallway conversations like? What are some of the things that you're hearing? >> So I think there's a general excitement about what might be coming, right? So a lot of the people who are here are actually here to, I think share notes. They want to know what everyone else is doing, so that's actually great. You get to see more people here who are actually interested in this technology. I think there's probably some questions about alignment, about where does everything fit. That seems to be a lot of the conversation here. It's much bigger this year as I'm sure you've noticed, right? It's a lot bigger so that's probably the biggest thing I've heard like there's so many more people than we expected there to be so. >> I like the big tent events. I'm a big fan of it. I think if I was going to be critical I would say, they should do a business event and do a technical one under the same kind of theme and bring more alpha geeks to the technical one and make this much more of a business conversation because the business transformation seems to be the hottest thing here but I want to get down in the weeds, you know? Get down and dirty so I would like to see two. That's my take. >> I think its really hard to cater to both. Like whenever I give a talk, I don't give a really nerdy talk to say a business crowd. I don't give a really business talk to a nerdy crowd, you know? >> It's hard. >> You just have to know, right? I think they both have a very different sensibility, so really if you want to have a successful talk. Generally you want both. >> Jennifer thanks so much for coming by and spending some time with The Cube. Great to see you. Thanks for sharing your insights. Jennifer Shin here inside The Cube at IBM Think 2018. I'm John Furrier, host of The Cube. We'll be back with more coverage after this short break.

>>Good evening everyone and welcome back to Sparkly Sin City, Las Vegas, Nevada, where we are here with the cube covering AWS Reinvent for the 10th year in a row. John Furrier has been here for all 10. John, we are in our last session of day one. How does it compare? >>I just graduated high school 10 years ago. It's exciting to be, here's been a long time. We've gotten a lot older. My >>Got your brain is complex. You've been a lot in there. So fast. >>Graduated eight in high school. You know how it's No. All good. This is what's going on. This next segment, wrapping up day one, which is like the the kickoff. The Mondays great year. I mean Tuesdays coming tomorrow big days. The announcements are all around the kind of next gen and you're starting to see partnering and integration is a huge part of this next wave cuz API's at the cloud, next gen cloud's gonna be deep engineering integration and you're gonna start to see business relationships and business transformation scale a horizontally, not only across applications but companies. This has been going on for a while, covering it. This next segment is gonna be one of those things that we're gonna look at as something that's gonna happen more and more on >>Yeah, I think so. It's what we've been talking about all day. Without further ado, I would like to welcome our very exciting guest for this final segment, trust from single store. Thank you for being here. And we also have him on from IBM Data and ai. Y'all are partners. Been partners for about a year. I'm gonna go out on a limb only because their legacy and suspect that a few people, a few more people might know what IBM does versus what a single store does. So why don't you just give us a little bit of background so everybody knows what's going on. >>Yeah, so single store is a relational database. It's a foundational relational systems, but the thing that we do the best is what we call us realtime analytics. So we have these systems that are legacy, which which do operations or analytics. And if you wanted to bring them together, like most of the applications want to, it's really a big hassle. You have to build an ETL pipeline, you'd have to duplicate the data. It's really faulty systems all over the place and you won't get the insights really quickly. Single store is trying to solve that problem elegantly by having an architecture that brings both operational and analytics in one place. >>Brilliant. >>You guys had a big funding now expanding men. Sequel, single store databases, 46 billion again, databases. We've been saying this in the queue for 12 years have been great and recently not one database will rule the world. We know that. That's, everyone knows that databases, data code, cloud scale, this is the convergence now of all that coming together where data, this reinvent is the theme. Everyone will be talking about end to end data, new kinds of specialized services, faster performance, new kinds of application development. This is the big part of why you guys are working together. Explain the relationship, how you guys are partnering and engineering together. >>Yeah, absolutely. I think so ibm, right? I think we are mainly into hybrid cloud and ai and one of the things we are looking at is expanding our ecosystem, right? Because we have gaps and as opposed to building everything organically, we want to partner with the likes of single store, which have unique capabilities that complement what we have. Because at the end of the day, customers are looking for an end to end solution that's also business problems. And they are very good at real time data analytics and hit staff, right? Because we have transactional databases, analytical databases, data lakes, but head staff is a gap that we currently have. And by partnering with them we can essentially address the needs of our customers and also what we plan to do is try to integrate our products and solutions with that so that when we can deliver a solution to our customers, >>This is why I was saying earlier, I think this is a a tell sign of what's coming from a lot of use cases where people are partnering right now you got the clouds, a bunch of building blocks. If you put it together yourself, you can build a durable system, very stable if you want out of the box solution, you can get that pre-built, but you really can't optimize. It breaks, you gotta replace it. High level engineering systems together is a little bit different, not just buying something out of the box. You guys are working together. This is kind of an end to end dynamic that we're gonna hear a lot more about at reinvent from the CEO ofs. But you guys are doing it across companies, not just with aws. Can you guys share this new engineering business model use case? Do you agree with what I'm saying? Do you think that's No, exactly. Do you think John's crazy, crazy? I mean I all discourse, you got out of the box, engineer it yourself, but then now you're, when people do joint engineering project, right? They're different. Yeah, >>Yeah. No, I mean, you know, I think our partnership is a, is a testament to what you just said, right? When you think about how to achieve realtime insights, the data comes into the system and, and the customers and new applications want insights as soon as the data comes into the system. So what we have done is basically build an architecture that enables that we have our own storage and query engine indexing, et cetera. And so we've innovated in our indexing in our database engine, but we wanna go further than that. We wanna be able to exploit the innovation that's happening at ibm. A very good example is, for instance, we have a native connector with Cognos, their BI dashboards right? To reason data very natively. So we build a hyper efficient system that moves the data very efficiently. A very other good example is embedded ai. >>So IBM of course has built AI chip and they have basically advanced quite a bit into the embedded ai, custom ai. So what we have done is, is as a true marriage between the engineering teams here, we make sure that the data in single store can natively exploit that kind of goodness. So we have taken their libraries. So if you have have data in single store, like let's imagine if you have Twitter data, if you wanna do sentiment analysis, you don't have to move the data out model, drain the model outside, et cetera. We just have the pre-built embedded AI libraries already. So it's a, it's a pure engineering manage there that kind of opens up a lot more insights than just simple analytics and >>Cost by the way too. Moving data around >>Another big theme. Yeah. >>And latency and speed is everything about single store and you know, it couldn't have happened without this kind of a partnership. >>So you've been at IBM for almost two decades, don't look it, but at nearly 17 years in how has, and maybe it hasn't, so feel free to educate us. How has, how has IBM's approach to AI and ML evolved as well as looking to involve partnerships in the ecosystem as a, as a collaborative raise the water level together force? >>Yeah, absolutely. So I think when we initially started ai, right? I think we are, if you recollect Watson was the forefront of ai. We started the whole journey. I think our focus was more on end solutions, both horizontal and vertical. Watson Health, which is more vertically focused. We were also looking at Watson Assistant and Watson Discovery, which were more horizontally focused. I think it it, that whole strategy of the world period of time. Now we are trying to be more open. For example, this whole embedable AI that CICE was talking about. Yeah, it's essentially making the guts of our AI libraries, making them available for partners and ISVs to build their own applications and solutions. We've been using it historically within our own products the past few years, but now we are making it available. So that, how >>Big of a shift is that? Do, do you think we're seeing a more open and collaborative ecosystem in the space in general? >>Absolutely. Because I mean if you think about it, in my opinion, everybody is moving towards AI and that's the future. And you have two option. Either you build it on your own, which is gonna require significant amount of time, effort, investment, research, or you partner with the likes of ibm, which has been doing it for a while, right? And it has the ability to scale to the requirements of all the enterprises and partners. So you have that option and some companies are picking to do it on their own, but I believe that there's a huge amount of opportunity where people are looking to partner and source what's already available as opposed to investing from the scratch >>Classic buy versus build analysis for them to figure out, yeah, to get into the game >>And, and, and why reinvent the wheel when we're all trying to do things at, at not just scale but orders of magnitude faster and and more efficiently than we were before. It, it makes sense to share, but it's, it is, it does feel like a bit of a shift almost paradigm shift in, in the culture of competition versus how we're gonna creatively solve these problems. There's room for a lot of players here, I think. And yeah, it's, I don't >>Know, it's really, I wanted to ask if you don't mind me jumping in on that. So, okay, I get that people buy a bill I'm gonna use existing or build my own. The decision point on that is, to your point about the path of getting the path of AI is do I have the core competency skills, gap's a big issue. So, okay, the cube, if you had ai, we'd take it cuz we don't have any AI engineers around yet to build out on all the linguistic data we have. So we might use your ai but I might say this to then and we want to have a core competency. How do companies get that core competency going while using and partnering with, with ai? What you guys, what do you guys see as a way for them to get going? Because I think some people probably want to have core competency of >>Ai. Yeah, so I think, again, I think I, I wanna distinguish between a solution which requires core competency. You need expertise on the use case and you need expertise on your industry vertical and your customers versus the foundational components of ai, which are like, which are agnostic to the core competency, right? Because you take the foundational piece and then you further train it and define it for your specific use case. So we are not saying that we are experts in all the industry verticals. What we are good at is like foundational components, which is what we wanna provide. Got it. >>Yeah, that's the hard deep yes. Heavy lift. >>Yeah. And I can, I can give a color to that question from our perspective, right? When we think about what is our core competency, it's about databases, right? But there's a, some biotic relationship between data and ai, you know, they sort of like really move each other, right? You >>Need, they kind of can't have one without the other. You can, >>Right? And so the, the question is how do we make sure that we expand that, that that relationship where our customers can operationalize their AI applications closer to the data, not move the data somewhere else and do the modeling and then training somewhere else and dealing with multiple systems, et cetera. And this is where this kind of a cross engineering relationship helps. >>Awesome. Awesome. Great. And then I think companies are gonna want to have that baseline foundation and then start hiring in learning. It's like driving the car. You get the keys when you're ready to go. >>Yeah, >>Yeah. Think I'll give you a simple example, right? >>I want that turnkey lifestyle. We all do. Yeah, >>Yeah. Let me, let me just give you a quick analogy, right? For example, you can, you can basically make the engines and the car on your own or you can source the engine and you can make the car. So it's, it's basically an option that you can decide. The same thing with airplanes as well, right? Whether you wanna make the whole thing or whether you wanna source from someone who is already good at doing that piece, right? So that's, >>Or even create a new alloy for that matter. I mean you can take it all the way down in that analogy, >>Right? Is there a structural change and how companies are laying out their architecture in this modern era as we start to see this next let gen cloud emerge, teams, security teams becoming much more focused data teams. Its building into the DevOps into the developer pipeline, seeing that trend. What do you guys see in the modern data stack kind of evolution? Is there a data solutions architect coming? Do they exist yet? Is that what we're gonna see? Is it data as code automation? How do you guys see this landscape of the evolving persona? >>I mean if you look at the modern data stack as it is defined today, it is too detailed, it's too OSes and there are way too many layers, right? There are at least five different layers. You gotta have like a storage you replicate to do real time insights and then there's a query layer, visualization and then ai, right? So you have too many ETL pipelines in between, too many services, too many choke points, too many failures, >>Right? Etl, that's the dirty three letter word. >>Say no to ETL >>Adam Celeste, that's his quote, not mine. We hear that. >>Yeah. I mean there are different names to it. They don't call it etl, we call it replication, whatnot. But the point is hassle >>Data is getting more hassle. More >>Hassle. Yeah. The data is ultimately getting replicated in the modern data stack, right? And that's kind of one of our thesis at single store, which is that you'd have to converge not hyper specialize and conversation and convergence is possible in certain areas, right? When you think about operational analytics as two different aspects of the data pipeline, it is possible to bring them together. And we have done it, we have a lot of proof points to it, our customer stories speak to it and that is one area of convergence. We need to see more of it. The relationship with IBM is sort of another step of convergence wherein the, the final phases, the operation analytics is coming together and can we take analytics visualization with reports and dashboards and AI together. This is where Cognos and embedded AI comes into together, right? So we believe in single store, which is really conversions >>One single path. >>A shocking, a shocking tie >>Back there. So, so obviously, you know one of the things we love to joke about in the cube cuz we like to goof on the old enterprise is they solve complexity by adding more complexity. That's old. Old thinking. The new thinking is put it under the covers, abstract the way the complexities and make it easier. That's right. So how do you guys see that? Because this end to end story is not getting less complicated. It's actually, I believe increasing and complication complexity. However there's opportunities doing >>It >>More faster to put it under the covers or put it under the hood. What do you guys think about the how, how this new complexity gets managed or in this new data world we're gonna be coming in? >>Yeah, so I think you're absolutely right. It's the world is becoming more complex, technology is becoming more complex and I think there is a real need and it's not just from coming from us, it's also coming from the customers to simplify things. So our approach around AI is exactly that because we are essentially providing libraries, just like you have Python libraries, there are libraries now you have AI libraries that you can go infuse and embed deeply within applications and solutions. So it becomes integrated and simplistic for the customer point of view. From a user point of view, it's, it's very simple to consume, right? So that's what we are doing and I think single store is doing that with data, simplifying data and we are trying to do that with the rest of the portfolio, specifically ai. >>It's no wonder there's a lot of synergy between the two companies. John, do you think they're ready for the Instagram >>Challenge? Yes, they're ready. Uhoh >>Think they're ready. So we're doing a bit of a challenge. A little 32nd off the cuff. What's the most important takeaway? This could be your, think of it as your thought leadership sound bite from AWS >>2023 on Instagram reel. I'm scrolling. That's the Instagram, it's >>Your moment to stand out. Yeah, exactly. Stress. You look like you're ready to rock. Let's go for it. You've got that smile, I'm gonna let you go. Oh >>Goodness. You know, there is, there's this quote from astrophysics, space moves matter, a matter tells space how to curve. They have that kind of a relationship. I see the same between AI and data, right? They need to move together. And so AI is possible only with right data and, and data is meaningless without good insights through ai. They really have that kind of relationship and you would see a lot more of that happening in the future. The future of data and AI are combined and that's gonna happen. Accelerate a lot faster. >>Sures, well done. Wow. Thank you. I am very impressed. It's tough hacks to follow. You ready for it though? Let's go. Absolutely. >>Yeah. So just, just to add what is said, right, I think there's a quote from Rob Thomas, one of our leaders at ibm. There's no AI without ia. Essentially there's no AI without information architecture, which essentially data. But I wanna add one more thing. There's a lot of buzz around ai. I mean we are talking about simplicity here. AI in my opinion is three things and three things only. Either you use AI to predict future for forecasting, use AI to automate things. It could be simple, mundane task, it would be complex tasks depending on how exactly you want to use it. And third is to optimize. So predict, automate, optimize. Anything else is buzz. >>Okay. >>Brilliantly said. Honestly, I think you both probably hit the 32nd time mark that we gave you there. And the enthusiasm loved your hunger on that. You were born ready for that kind of pitch. I think they both nailed it for the, >>They nailed it. Nailed it. Well done. >>I I think that about sums it up for us. One last closing note and opportunity for you. You have a V 8.0 product coming out soon, December 13th if I'm not mistaken. You wanna give us a quick 15 second preview of that? >>Super excited about this. This is one of the, one of our major releases. So we are evolving the system on multiple dimensions on enterprise and governance and programmability. So there are certain features that some of our customers are aware of. We have made huge performance gains in our JSON access. We made it easy for people to consume, blossom on OnPrem and hybrid architectures. There are multiple other things that we're gonna put out on, on our site. So it's coming out on December 13th. It's, it's a major next phase of our >>System. And real quick, wasm is the web assembly moment. Correct. And the new >>About, we have pioneers in that we, we be wasm inside the engine. So you could run complex modules that are written in, could be C, could be rushed, could be Python. Instead of writing the the sequel and SQL as a store procedure, you could now run those modules inside. I >>Wanted to get that out there because at coupon we covered that >>Savannah Bay hot topic. Like, >>Like a blanket. We covered it like a blanket. >>Wow. >>On that glowing note, Dre, thank you so much for being here with us on the show. We hope to have both single store and IBM back on plenty more times in the future. Thank all of you for tuning in to our coverage here from Las Vegas in Nevada at AWS Reinvent 2022 with John Furrier. My name is Savannah Peterson. You're watching the Cube, the leader in high tech coverage. We'll see you tomorrow.

(upbeat music) >> We are back, approaching the finish line here at Supercomputing 22, our last interview of the day, our last interview of the show. And I have to say Dave Nicholson, my co-host, My name is Paul Gillin. I've been attending trade shows for 40 years Dave, I've never been to one like this. The type of people who are here, the type of problems they're solving, what they talk about, the trade shows are typically, they're so speeds and feeds. They're so financial, they're so ROI, they all sound the same after a while. This is truly a different event. Do you get that sense? >> A hundred percent. Now, I've been attending trade shows for 10 years since I was 19, in other words, so I don't have necessarily your depth. No, but seriously, Paul, totally, completely, completely different than any other conference. First of all, there's the absolute allure of looking at the latest and greatest, coolest stuff. I mean, when you have NASA lecturing on things when you have Lawrence Livermore Labs that we're going to be talking to here in a second it's a completely different story. You have all of the academics you have students who are in competition and also interviewing with organizations. It's phenomenal. I've had chills a lot this week. >> And I guess our last two guests sort of represent that cross section. Armando Acosta, director of HPC Solutions, High Performance Solutions at Dell. And Matt Leininger, who is the HPC Strategist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Now, there is perhaps, I don't know you can correct me on this, but perhaps no institution in the world that uses more computing cycles than Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and is always on the leading edge of what's going on in Supercomputing. And so we want to talk to both of you about that. Thank you. Thank you for joining us today. >> Sure, glad to be here. >> For having us. >> Let's start with you, Armando. Well, let's talk about the juxtaposition of the two of you. I would not have thought of LLNL as being a Dell reference account in the past. Tell us about the background of your relationship and what you're providing to the laboratory. >> Yeah, so we're really excited to be working with Lawrence Livermore, working with Matt. But actually this process started about two years ago. So we started looking at essentially what was coming down the pipeline. You know, what were the customer requirements. What did we need in order to make Matt successful. And so the beauty of this project is that we've been talking about this for two years, and now it's finally coming to fruition. And now we're actually delivering systems and delivering racks of systems. But what I really appreciate is Matt coming to us, us working together for two years and really trying to understand what are the requirements, what's the schedule, what do we need to hit in order to make them successful >> At Lawrence Livermore, what drives your computing requirements I guess? You're working on some very, very big problems but a lot of very complex problems. How do you decide what you need to procure to address them? >> Well, that's a difficult challenge. I mean, our mission is a national security mission dealing with making sure that we do our part to provide the high performance computing capabilities to the US Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration. We do that through the Advanced Simulation computing program. Its goal is to provide that computing power to make sure that the US nuclear rep of the stockpile is safe, secure, and effective. So how we go about doing that? There's a lot of work involved. We have multiple platform lines that we accomplish that goal with. One of them is the advanced technology systems. Those are the ones you've heard about a lot, they're pushing towards exit scale, the GPU technologies incorporated into those. We also have a second line, a platform line, called the Commodity Technology Systems. That's where right now we're partnering with Dell on the latest generation of those. Those systems are a little more conservative, they're right now CPU only driven but they're also intended to be the everyday work horses. So those are the first systems our users get on. It's very easy for them to get their applications up and running. They're the first things they use usually on a day to day basis. They run a lot of small to medium size jobs that you need to do to figure out how to most effectively use what workloads you need to move to the even larger systems to accomplish our mission goals. >> The workhorses. >> Yeah. >> What have you seen here these last few days of the show, what excites you? What are the most interesting things you've seen? >> There's all kinds of things that are interesting. Probably most interesting ones I can't talk about in public, unfortunately, 'cause of NDA agreements, of course. But it's always exciting to be here at Supercomputing. It's always exciting to see the products that we've been working with industry and co-designing with them on for, you know, several years before the public actually sees them. That's always an exciting part of the conference as well specifically with CTS-2, it's exciting. As was mentioned before, I've been working with Dell for nearly two years on this, but the systems first started being delivered this past August. And so we're just taking the initial deliveries of those. We've deployed, you know, roughly about 1600 nodes now but that'll ramp up to over 6,000 nodes over the next three or four months. >> So how does this work intersect with Sandia and Los Alamos? Explain to us the relationship there. >> Right, so those three laboratories are the laboratories under the National Nuclear Security Administration. We partner together on CTS. So the architectures, as you were asking, how do we define these things, it's the labs coming together. Those three laboratories we define what we need for that architecture. We have a joint procurement that is run out of Livermore but then the systems are deployed at all three laboratories. And then they serve the programs that I mentioned for each laboratory as well. >> I've worked in this space for a very long time you know I've worked with agencies where the closest I got to anything they were actually doing was the sort of guest suite outside the secure area. And sometimes there are challenges when you're communicating, it's like you have a partner like Dell who has all of these things to offer, all of these ideas. You have requirements, but maybe you can't share 100% of what you need to do. How do you navigate that? Who makes the decision about what can be revealed in these conversations? You talk about NDA in terms of what's been shared with you, you may be limited in terms of what you can share with vendors. Does that cause inefficiency? >> To some degree. I mean, we do a good job within the NSA of understanding what our applications need and then mapping that to technical requirements that we can talk about with vendors. We also have kind of in between that we've done this for many years. A recent example is of course with the exit scale computing program and some things it's doing creating proxy apps or mini apps that are smaller versions of some of the things that we are important to us. Some application areas are important to us, hydrodynamics, material science, things like that. And so we can collaborate with vendors on those proxy apps to co-design systems and tweak the architectures. In fact, we've done a little bit that with CTS-2, not as much in CTS as maybe in the ATS platforms but that kind of general idea of how we collaborate through these proxy applications is something we've used across platforms. >> Now is Dell one of your co-design partners? >> In CTS-2 absolutely, yep. >> And how, what aspects of CTS-2 are you working on with Dell? >> Well, the architecture itself was the first, you know thing we worked with them on, we had a procurement come out, you know they bid an architecture on that. We had worked with them, you know but previously on our requirements, understanding what our requirements are. But that architecture today is based on the fourth generation Intel Xeon that you've heard a lot about at the conference. We are one of the first customers to get those systems in. All the systems are interconnected together with the Cornell Network's Omni-Path Network that we've used before and are very excited about as well. And we build up from there. The systems get integrated in by the operations teams at the laboratory. They get integrated into our production computing environment. Dell is really responsible, you know for designing these systems and delivering to the laboratories. The laboratories then work with Dell. We have a software stack that we provide on top of that called TOSS, for Tri-Lab Operating System. It's based on Redhead Enterprise Linux. But the goal there is that it allows us, a common user environment, a common simulation environment across not only CTS-2, but maybe older systems we have and even the larger systems that we'll be deploying as well. So from a user perspective they see a common user interface, a common environment across all the different platforms that they use at Livermore and the other laboratories. >> And Armando, what does Dell get out of the co-design arrangement with the lab? >> Well, we get to make sure that they're successful. But the other big thing that we want to do, is typically when you think about Dell and HPC, a lot of people don't make that connection together. And so what we're trying to do is make sure that, you know they know that, hey, whether you're a work group customer at the smallest end or a super computer customer at the highest end, Dell wants to make sure that we have the right setup portfolio to match any needs across this. But what we were really excited about this, this is kind of our, you know big CTS-2 first thing we've done together. And so, you know, hopefully this has been successful. We've made Matt happy and we look forward to the future what we can do with bigger and bigger things. >> So will the labs be okay with Dell coming up with a marketing campaign that said something like, "We can't confirm that alien technology is being reverse engineered." >> Yeah, that would fly. >> I mean that would be right, right? And I have to ask you the question directly and the way you can answer it is by smiling like you're thinking, what a stupid question. Are you reverse engineering alien technology at the labs? >> Yeah, you'd have to suck the PR office. >> Okay, okay. (all laughing) >> Good answer. >> No, but it is fascinating because to a degree it's like you could say, yeah, we're working together but if you really want to dig into it, it's like, "Well I kind of can't tell you exactly how some of this stuff is." Do you consider anything that you do from a technology perspective, not what you're doing with it, but the actual stack, do you try to design proprietary things into the stack or do you say, "No, no, no, we're going to go with standards and then what we do with it is proprietary and secret."? >> Yeah, it's more the latter. >> Is the latter? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you're not going to try to reverse engineer the industry? >> No, no. We want the solutions that we develop to enhance the industry to be able to apply to a broader market so that we can, you know, gain from the volume of that market, the lower cost that they would enable, right? If we go off and develop more and more customized solutions that can be extraordinarily expensive. And so we we're really looking to leverage the wider market, but do what we can to influence that, to develop key technologies that we and others need that can enable us in the high forms computing space. >> We were talking with Satish Iyer from Dell earlier about validated designs, Dell's reference designs for for pharma and for manufacturing, in HPC are you seeing that HPC, Armando, and is coming together traditionally and more of an academic research discipline beginning to come together with commercial applications? And are these two markets beginning to blend? >> Yeah, I mean so here's what's happening, is you have this convergence of HPC, AI and data analytics. And so when you have that combination of those three workloads they're applicable across many vertical markets, right? Whether it's financial services, whether it's life science, government and research. But what's interesting, and Matt won't brag about, but a lot of stuff that happens in the DoE labs trickles down to the enterprise space, trickles down to the commercial space because these guys know how to do it at scale, they know how to do it efficiently and they know how to hit the mark. And so a lot of customers say, "Hey we want what CTS-2 does," right? And so it's very interesting. The way I love it is their process the way they do the RFP process. Matt talked about the benchmarks and helping us understand, hey here's kind of the mark you have to hit. And then at the same time, you know if we make them successful then obviously it's better for all of us, right? You know, I want to secure nuclear stock pile so I hope everybody else does as well. >> The software stack you mentioned, I think Tia? >> TOSS. >> TOSS. >> Yeah. >> How did that come about? Why did you feel the need to develop your own software stack? >> It originated back, you know, even 20 years ago when we first started building Linux clusters when that was a crazy idea. Livermore and other laboratories were really the first to start doing that and then push them to larger and larger scales. And it was key to have Linux running on that at the time. And so we had the. >> So 20 years ago you knew you wanted to run on Linux? >> Was 20 years ago, yeah, yeah. And we started doing that but we needed a way to have a version of Linux that we could partner with someone on that would do, you know, the support, you know, just like you get from an EoS vendor, right? Security support and other things. But then layer on top of that, all the HPC stuff you need either to run the system, to set up the system, to support our user base. And that evolved into to TOSS which is the Tri-Lab Operating System. Now it's based on the latest version of Redhead Enterprise Linux, as I mentioned before, with all the other HPC magic, so to speak and all that HPC magic is open source things. It's not stuff, it may be things that we develop but it's nothing closed source. So all that's there we run it across all these different environments as I mentioned before. And it really originated back in the early days of, you know, Beowulf clusters, Linux clusters, as just needing something that we can use to run on multiple systems and start creating that common environment at Livermore and then eventually the other laboratories. >> How is a company like Dell, able to benefit from the open source work that's coming out of the labs? >> Well, when you look at the open source, I mean open source is good for everybody, right? Because if you make a open source tool available then people start essentially using that tool. And so if we can make that open source tool more robust and get more people using it, it gets more enterprise ready. And so with that, you know, we're all about open source we're all about standards and really about raising all boats 'cause that's what open source is all about. >> And with that, we are out of time. This is our 28th interview of SC22 and you're taking us out on a high note. Armando Acosta, director of HPC Solutions at Dell. Matt Leininger, HPC Strategist, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories. Great discussion. Hopefully it was a good show for you. Fascinating show for us and thanks for being with us today. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you for having us >> Dave it's been a pleasure. >> Absolutely. >> Hope we'll be back next year. >> Can't believe, went by fast. Absolutely at SC23. >> We hope you'll be back next year. This is Paul Gillin. That's a wrap, with Dave Nicholson for theCUBE. See here in next time. (soft upbear music)

(upbeat music) (logo swooshing) >> Good morning and welcome back to Dallas, ladies and gentlemen, we are here with theCUBE Live from Supercomputing 2022. David, my cohost, how are you doing? Exciting, day two, feeling good? >> Very exciting. Ready to start off the day. >> Very excited. We have two fascinating guests joining us to kick us off. Please welcome Pete and Armando. Gentlemen, thank you for being here with us. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you for having us. >> I'm excited that you're starting off the day because we've been hearing a lot of rumors about Ethernet as the fabric for HPC, but we really haven't done a deep dive yet during the show. You all seem all in on Ethernet. Tell us about that. Armando, why don't you start? >> Yeah, I mean, when you look at Ethernet, customers are asking for flexibility and choice. So when you look at HPC, InfiniBand's always been around, right? But when you look at where Ethernet's coming in, it's really our commercial in their enterprise customers. And not everybody wants to be in the top 500, what they want to do is improve their job time and improve their latency over the network. And when you look at Ethernet, you kind of look at the sweet spot between 8, 12, 16, 32 nodes, that's a perfect fit for Ethernet in that space and those types of jobs. >> I love that. Pete, you want to elaborate? >> Yeah, sure. I mean, I think one of the biggest things you find with Ethernet for HPC is that, if you look at where the different technologies have gone over time, you've had old technologies like, ATM, Sonic, Fifty, and pretty much everything is now kind of converged toward Ethernet. I mean, there's still some technologies such as InfiniBand, Omni-Path, that are out there. But basically, they're single source at this point. So what you see is that there is a huge ecosystem behind Ethernet. And you see that also the fact that Ethernet is used in the rest of the enterprise, is used in the cloud data centers, that is very easy to integrate HPC based systems into those systems. So as you move HPC out of academia into enterprise, into cloud service providers, it's much easier to integrate it with the same technology you're already using in those data centers, in those networks. >> So what's the state of the art for Ethernet right now? What's the leading edge? what's shipping now and what's in the near future? You're with Broadcom, you guys designed this stuff. >> Pete: Yeah. >> Savannah: Right. >> Yeah, so leading edge right now, got a couple things-- >> Savannah: We love good stage prop here on the theCUBE. >> Yeah, so this is Tomahawk 4. So this is what is in production, it's shipping in large data centers worldwide. We started sampling this in 2019, started going into data centers in 2020. And this is 25.6 terabytes per second. >> David: Okay. >> Which matches any other technology out there. Like if you look at say, InfinBand, highest they have right now that's just starting to get into production is 25.6 T. So state of the art right now is what we introduced, We announced this in August, This is Tomahawk 5, so this is 51.2 terabytes per second. So double the bandwidth, out of any other technology that's out there. And the important thing about networking technology is when you double the bandwidth, you don't just double the efficiency, actually, winds up being a factor of six efficiency. >> Savannah: Wow. >> 'Cause if you want, I can go into that, but... >> Why not? >> Well, what I want to know, please tell me that in your labs, you have a poster on the wall that says T five, with some like Terminator kind of character. (all laughs) 'Cause that would be cool. If it's not true, just don't say anything. I'll just... >> Pete: This can actually shift into a terminator. >> Well, so this is from a switching perspective. >> Yeah. >> When we talk about the end nodes, when we talk about creating a fabric, what's the latest in terms of, well, the nicks that are going in there, what speed are we talking about today? >> So as far as 30 speeds, it tends to be 50 gigabits per second. >> David: Okay. >> Moving to a hundred gig PAM-4. >> David: Okay. >> And we do see a lot of nicks in the 200 gig Ethernet port speed. So that would be four lanes, 50 gig. But we do see that advancing to 400 gig fairly soon, 800 gig in the future. But say state of the art right now, we're seeing for the end node tends to be 200 gig E based on 50 gig PAM-4. >> Wow. >> Yeah, that's crazy. >> Yeah, that is great. My mind is act actively blown. I want to circle back to something that you brought up a second ago, which I think is really astute. When you talked about HPC moving from academia into enterprise, you're both seeing this happen, where do you think we are on the adoption curve and sort of in that cycle? Armando, do you want to go? >> Yeah, well, if you look at the market research, they're actually telling you it's 50/50 now. So Ethernet is at the level of 50%, InfinBand's at 50%, right? >> Savannah: Interesting. >> Yeah, and so what's interesting to us, customers are coming to us and say, hey, we want to see flexibility and choice and, hey, let's look at Ethernet and let's look at InfiniBand. But what is interesting about this is that we're working with Broadcom, we have their chips in our lab, we their have switches in our lab. And really what we're trying to do is make it easy to simple and configure the network for essentially MPI. And so the goal here with our validated designs is really to simplify this. So if you have a customer that, hey, I've been InfiniBand but now I want to go Ethernet, there's going to be some learning curves there. And so what we want to do is really simplify that so that we can make it easy to install, get the cluster up and running and they can actually get some value out the cluster. >> Yeah, Pete, talk about that partnership. what does that look like? I mean, are you working with Dell before the T six comes out? Or you just say what would be cool is we'll put this in the T six? >> No, we've had a very long partnership both on the hardware and the software side. Dell's been an early adopter of our silicon. We've worked very closely on SI and Sonic on the operating system, and they provide very valuable feedback for us on our roadmap. So before we put out a new chip, and we have actually three different product lines within the switching group, within Broadcom, we've then gotten very valuable feedback on the hardware and on the APIs, on the operating system that goes on top of those chips. So that way when it comes to market, Dell can take it and deliver the exact features that they have in the current generation to their customers to have that continuity. And also they give us feedback on the next gen features they'd like to see again, in both the hardware and the software. >> So I'm fascinated by... I always like to know like what, yeah, exactly. Look, you start talking about the largest supercomputers, most powerful supercomputers that exist today, and you start looking at the specs and there might be two million CPUs, 2 million CPU cores. Exoflap of performance. What are the outward limits of T five in switches, building out a fabric, what does that look like? What are the increments in terms of how many... And I know it's a depends answer, but how many nodes can you support in a scale out cluster before you need another switch? Or what does that increment of scale look like today? >> Yeah, so this is 51.2 terabytes per second. Where we see the most common implementation based on this would be with 400 gig Ethernet ports. >> David: Okay. >> So that would be 128, 400 gig E ports connected to one chip. Now, if you went to 200 gig, which is kind of the state of the art for the nicks, you can have double that. So in a single hop, you can have 256 end nodes connected through one switch. >> Okay, so this T five, that thing right there, (all laughing) inside a sheet metal box, obviously you've got a bunch of ports coming out of that. So what's the form factor look like for where that T five sits? Is there just one in a chassis or you have.. What does that look like? >> It tends to be pizza boxes these days. What you've seen overall is that the industry's moved away from chassis for these high end systems more towardS pizza boxes. And you can have composable systems where, in the past you would have line cards, either the fabric cards that the line cards are plug into or interfaced to. These days what tends to happen is you'd have a pizza box and if you wanted to build up like a virtual chassis, what you would do is use one of those pizza boxes as the fabric card, one of them as the line card. >> David: Okay. >> So what we see, the most common form factor for this is they tend to be two, I'd say for North America, most common would be a 2RU, with 64 OSFP ports. And often each of those OSFP, which is an 800 gig E or 800 gig port, we've broken out into two 400 gig ports. >> So yeah, in 2RU, and this is all air cooled, in 2RU, you've got 51.2 T. We do see some cases where customers would like to have different optics and they'll actually deploy 4RU, just so that way they have the phase-space density. So they can plug in 128, say QSFP 112. But yeah, it really depends on which optics, if you want to have DAK connectivity combined with optics. But those are the two most common form factors. >> And Armando, Ethernet isn't necessarily Ethernet in the sense that many protocols can be run over it. >> Right. >> I think I have a projector at home that's actually using Ethernet physical connections. But, so what are we talking about here in terms of the actual protocol that's running over this? Is this exactly the same as what you think of as data center Ethernet, or is this RDMA over converged Ethernet? What Are we talking about? >> Yeah, so RDMA, right? So when you look at running, essentially HPC workloads, you have the NPI protocol, so message passing interface, right? And so what you need to do is you may need to make sure that that NPI message passing interface runs efficiently on Ethernet. And so this is why we want to test and validate all these different things to make sure that that protocol runs really, really fast on Ethernet. If you look at NPIs officially, built to, hey, it was designed to run on InfiniBand but now what you see with Broadcom, with the great work they're doing, now we can make that work on Ethernet and get same performance, so that's huge for customers. >> Both of you get to see a lot of different types of customers. I kind of feel like you're a little bit of a looking into the crystal ball type because you essentially get to see the future knowing what people are trying to achieve moving forward. Talk to us about the future of Ethernet in HPC in terms of AI and ML, where do you think we're going to be next year or 10 years from now? >> You want to go first or you want me to go first? >> I can start, yeah. >> Savannah: Pete feels ready. >> So I mean, what I see, I mean, Ethernet, what we've seen is that as far as on, starting off of the switch side, is that we've consistently doubled the bandwidth every 18 to 24 months. >> That's impressive. >> Pete: Yeah. >> Nicely done, casual, humble brag there. That was great, I love that. I'm here for you. >> I mean, I think that's one of the benefits of Ethernet, is the ecosystem, is the trajectory the roadmap we've had, I mean, you don't see that in any of the networking technology. >> David: More who? (all laughing) >> So I see that, that trajectory is going to continue as far as the switches doubling in bandwidth, I think that they're evolving protocols, especially again, as you're moving away from academia into the enterprise, into cloud data centers, you need to have a combination of protocols. So you'll probably focus still on RDMA, for the supercomputing, the AI/ML workloads. But we do see that as you have a mix of the applications running on these end nodes, maybe they're interfacing to the CPUs for some processing, you might use a different mix of protocols. So I'd say it's going to be doubling a bandwidth over time, evolution of the protocols. I mean, I expect that Rocky is probably going to evolve over time depending on the AI/ML and the HPC workloads. I think also there's a big change coming as far as the physical connectivity within the data center. Like one thing we've been focusing on is co-packed optics. So right now, this chip is, all the balls in the back here, there's electrical connections. >> How many are there, by the way? 9,000 plus on the back of that-- >> 9,352. >> I love how specific it is. It's brilliant. >> Yeah, so right now, all the SERDES, all the signals are coming out electrically based, but we've actually shown, we actually we have a version of Tomahawk 4 at 25.6 T that has co-packed optics. So instead of having electrical output, you actually have optics directly out of the package. And if you look at, we'll have a version of Tomahawk 5. >> Nice. >> Where it's actually even a smaller form factor than this, where instead of having the electrical output from the bottom, you actually have fibers that plug directly into the sides. >> Wow. Cool. >> So I see there's the bandwidth, there's radix's increasing, protocols, different physical connectivity. So I think there's a lot of things throughout, and the protocol stack's also evolving. So a lot of excitement, a lot of new technology coming to bear. >> Okay, You just threw a carrot down the rabbit hole. I'm only going to chase this one, okay? >> Peter: All right. >> So I think of individual discreet physical connections to the back of those balls. >> Yeah. >> So if there's 9,000, fill in the blank, that's how many connections there are. How do you do that many optical connections? What's the mapping there? What does that look like? >> So what we've announced for Tomahawk 5 is it would have FR4 optics coming out. So you'd actually have 512 fiber pairs coming out. So basically on all four sides, you'd have these fiber ribbons that come in and connect. There's actually fibers coming out of the sides there. We wind up having, actually, I think in this case, we would actually have 512 channels and it would wind up being on 128 actual fiber pairs because-- >> It's miraculous, essentially. >> Savannah: I know. >> Yeah. So a lot of people are going to be looking at this and thinking in terms of InfiniBand versus Ethernet, I think you've highlighted some of the benefits of specifically running Ethernet moving forward as HPC which sort of just trails slightly behind super computing as we define it, becomes more pervasive AI/ML. What are some of the other things that maybe people might not immediately think about when they think about the advantages of running Ethernet in that environment? Is it about connecting the HPC part of their business into the rest of it? What are the advantages? >> Yeah, I mean, that's a big thing. I think, and one of the biggest things that Ethernet has again, is that the data centers, the networks within enterprises, within clouds right now are run on Ethernet. So now, if you want to add services for your customers, the easiest thing for you to do is the drop in clusters that are connected with the same networking technology. So I think one of the biggest things there is that if you look at what's happening with some of the other proprietary technologies, I mean, in some cases they'll have two different types of networking technologies before they interface to Ethernet. So now you've got to train your technicians, you train your assist admins on two different network technologies. You need to have all the debug technology, all the interconnect for that. So here, the easiest thing is you can use Ethernet, it's going to give you the same performance and actually, in some cases, we've seen better performance than we've seen with Omni-Path, better than in InfiniBand. >> That's awesome. Armando, we didn't get to you, so I want to make sure we get your future hot take. Where do you see the future of Ethernet here in HPC? >> Well, Pete hit on a big thing is bandwidth, right? So when you look at, train a model, okay? So when you go and train a model in AI, you need to have a lot of data in order to train that model, right? So what you do is essentially, you build a model, you choose whatever neural network you want to utilize. But if you don't have a good data set that's trained over that model, you can't essentially train the model. So if you have bandwidth, you want big pipes because you have to move that data set from the storage to the CPU. And essentially, if you're going to do it maybe on CPU only, but if you do it on accelerators, well, guess what? You need a big pipe in order to get all that data through. And here's the deal, the bigger the pipe you have, the more data, the faster you can train that model. So the faster you can train that model, guess what? The faster you get to some new insight, maybe it's a new competitive advantage, maybe it's some new way you design a product, but that's a benefit of speed, you want faster, faster, faster. >> It's all about making it faster and easier-- for the users. >> Armando: It is. >> I love that. Last question for you, Pete, just because you've said Tomahawk seven times, and I'm thinking we're in Texas, stakes, there's a lot going on with that. >> Making me hungry. >> I know, exactly. I'm sitting out here thinking, man, I did not have big enough breakfast. How did you come up with the name Tomahawk? >> So Tomahawk, I think it just came from a list. So we have a tried end product line. >> Savannah: Ah, yes. >> Which is a missile product line. And Tomahawk is being kind of like the bigger and batter missile, so. >> Savannah: Love this. Yeah, I mean-- >> So do you like your engineers? You get to name it. >> Had to ask. >> It's collaborative. >> Okay. >> We want to make sure everyone's in sync with it. >> So just it's not the Aquaman tried. >> Right. >> It's the steak Tomahawk. I think we're good now. >> Now that we've cleared that-- >> Now we've cleared that up. >> Armando, Pete, it was really nice to have both you. Thank you for teaching us about the future of Ethernet and HCP. David Nicholson, always a pleasure to share the stage with you. And thank you all for tuning in to theCUBE live from Dallas. We're here talking all things HPC and supercomputing all day long. We hope you'll continue to tune in. My name's Savannah Peterson, thanks for joining us. (soft music)

from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston bringing you data-driven insights from the cube and ETR this is breaking analysis with Dave vellante over the past decade cloudflare has built a Global Network that has the potential to become the fourth us-based hyperscale class cloud in our view the company is building a durable Revenue model with hooks into many important markets these include the more mature DDOS protection space to other growth sectors such as zero trust a serverless platform for application development and an increasing number of services such as database and object storage and other network services in essence cloudflare could be thought of as a giant distributed supercomputer that can connect multiple clouds and act as a highly efficient scheduling engine at scale its disruptive DNA is increasingly attracting novel startups and established Global firms alike looking for Reliable secure high performance low latency and more cost-effective alternatives to AWS and Legacy infrastructure Solutions hello and welcome to this week's wikibon Cube insights powered by ETR in this breaking analysis we initiate our deeper coverage of cloudflare we'll briefly explain our take on the company and its unique business model we'll then share some peer comparisons with both the financial snapshot and some fresh ETR survey data finally we'll share some examples of how we think cloudflare could be a disruptive force with a super cloud-like offering that in many respects is what multi-cloud should have been cloudflare has been on our peripheral radar Ben Thompson and many others have written about their disruptive business model and recently a breaking analysis follower who will remain anonymous emailed with some excellent insights on cloudflare that prompted us to initiate more detailed coverage let's first take a look at how cloudflare seize the world in terms of its view of a modern stack this is a graphic from cloudflare that shows a simple three-layer Stack comprising Storage and compute the lower level and application layer and the network and their key message is basically that the big four hyperscalers have replaced the on-prem leaders apps have been satisfied and that mess of network that you see and Security in the upper left can now be handled all by cloudflare and the stack can be rented via Opex versus requiring heavy capex investment so okay somewhat of a simplified view is those companies on the the left are you know not standing still and we're going to come back to that but cloudflare has done something quite amazing I mean it's been a while since we've invoked Russ hanneman of Silicon Valley Fame on breaking analysis but remember when he was in a meeting one of his first meetings if not the first with Richard Hendricks it was the whiz kid on the show Silicon Valley and hanneman said something like if you had a blank check and you could build anything in the world what would it be and Richard's answer was basically a new internet and that led to Pied Piper this peer-to-peer Network powered by decentralized devices and and iPhones and this amazing compression algorithm that enabled high-speed data movement and low latency uh up to no low latency access across the network well in a way that's what cloudflare has built its founding premise reimagined how the internet should be built with a consistent set of server infrastructure where each server had lots of cores lots of dram lots of cash fast ssds and plenty of network connectivity and bandwidth and well this picture makes it look like a bunch of dots and points of presence on a map which of course it is there's a software layer that enables cloudflare to efficiently allocate resources across this Global Network the company claims that it's Network utilization is in the 70 percent range and it has used its build out to enter the technology space from the bottoms up offering for example free tiers of services to users with multiple entry points on different services and selling then more services over time to a customer which of course drives up its average contract value and its lifetime value at the same time the company continues to innovate and add new services at a very rapid cloud-like Pace you can think of cloudflare's initial Market entry as like a lightweight Cisco as a service the company's CFO actually he uses that term he calls it that which really must tick off Cisco who of course has a massive portfolio and a dominant Market position now because it owns the network cloudflare is a marginal cost of adding new Services is very small and goes towards zero so it's able to get software like economics at scale despite all this infrastructure that's building out so it doesn't have to constantly face the increasing infrastructure tax snowflake for example doesn't own its own network infrastructure as it grows it relies on AWS or Azure gcp and and while it gives the company obvious advantages it doesn't have to build out its own network it also requires them to constantly pay the tax and negotiate with hyperscalers for better rental rates now as previously mentioned Cloud Fair cloudflare claims that its utilization is very high probably higher than the hyperscalers who can spin up servers that they can charge for underutilized customer capacity cloudflare also has excellent Network traffic data that it can use to its Advantage with its Analytics the company has been rapidly innovating Beyond its original Core Business adding as I said before serverless zero trust offerings it has announced a database it calls its database D1 that's pretty creative and it's announced an object store called R2 that is S3 minus one both from the alphabet and the numeric I.E minus the egress cost saying no egress cost that's their big claim to fame and they've made a lot of marketing noise around about that and of course they've promised in our a D2 database which of course is R2D2 RR they've launched a developer platform cloudflare can be thought of kind of like first of all a modern CDN they've got a simpler security model that's how they compete for example with z-scaler that brings uh they also bring VPN sd-wan and DDOS protection services that are that are part of the network and they're less expensive than AWS that's kind of their sort of go to market and messaging and value proposition and they're positioning themselves as a neutral Network that can connect across multiple clouds now to be clear unlike AWS in particular cloudflare is not well suited to lift and shift your traditional apps like for instance sap Hana you're not going to run that in on cloudflare's platform rather the company started by making websites more secure and faster and it flew under the radar and much in the same way that clay Christensen described the disruption in the steel industry if you've seen that where new entrants picked off the low margin rebar business then moved up the stack we've used that analogy in the semiconductor business with arm and and even China cloudflare is running a similar playbook in the cloud and in the network so in the early part of the last decade as aws's ascendancy was becoming more clear many of us started thinking about how and where firms could compete and add value as AWS is becoming so dominant so for instance take an industry Focus you could do things like data sharing with snowflake eventually you know uh popularized you could build on top of clouds again snowflake is doing that as are others you could build private clouds and of course connect to hybrid clouds but not many had the wherewithal and or the hutzpah to build out a Global Network that could serve as a connecting platform for cloud services cloudflare has traction in the market as it adds new services like zero trust and object store or database its Tam continues to grow here's a quick snapshot of cloudflare's financials relative to Z scalar which is both a competitor and a customer fastly which is a smaller CDN and Akamai a more mature CDN slash Edge platform cloudflare and fastly both reported earnings this past week Cloud Fair Cloud flare surpassed a billion dollar Revenue run rate but they gave tepid guidance and the stock got absolutely crushed today which is Friday but the company's business model is sound it's growing close to 50 annually it has sas-like gross margins in the mid to high 70s and it's it it's got a very strong balance sheet and a 13x revenue run rate multiple in fact it's Financial snapshot is quite close to that of z-scaler which is kind of interesting which zinc sailor of course doesn't own its own network that's a pure play software company fastly is much smaller and growing more slowly than cloudflare hence its lower multiple well Akamai as you can see is a more mature company but it's got a nice business now on its earnings call this week cloudflare announced that its head of sales was stepping down and the company has brought in a new leader to take the firm to five billion dollars in sales I think actually its current sales leader felt like hey you know my work is done here bring on somebody else to take it to the next level the company is promising to be free cash flow positive by the end of the year and is working hard toward its long-term financial model or so working towards sorry it's a long-term financial model with gross margin Targets in the mid 70s it's targeting 20 non-gaap operating margins so so solid you know very solid not like completely off the charts but you know very good and to our knowledge it has not committed to a long-term growth rate but at that sort of operating profit level you would like to see growth be consistently at least in the 20 range so they could at least be a rule of 40 company or perhaps even even five even higher if they're going to continue to command a premium valuation okay let's take a look at the ETR data ETR is very positive on cloudflare and has recently published a report on the company like many companies cloudflare is seeing an across the board slowdown in spending velocity we've reported on this quite extensively using the ETR data to quantify the degree to that Slowdown and on the data set with ETR we see that many customers they're shifting their spend to Flat spend you know plus or minus let's say you know single digits you know two three percent or even zero or in the market we're seeing a shift from paid to free tiers remember cloudflare offers a lot of free services as you're seeing customers maybe turn off the pay for a while and going with the freebie but we're also seeing some larger customers in the data and the fortune 1000 specifically they're actually spending more which was confirmed on cloudflare's earnings call they did say everything across the board was softer but they did also indicate that some of their larger customers are actually growing faster than their smaller customers and their churn is very very low here's a two-dimensional graphic we'd like to share this view a lot it's got Net score or spending momentum on the vertical axis and overlap or pervasiveness in the survey on the horizontal axis and this cut isolates three segments in the etrs taxonomy that cloudflare plays in Cloud security and networking now the table inserted in that upper left there shows the raw data which informs the position of each company in the dots with Net score in the ends listed in that rightmost column the red dotted line indicates a highly elevated Net score and finally we posted the breakdown those colors in the bottom right of cloudflare's Net score the lime green that's new adoptions the forest green is we're spending more six percent or more the gray is flat plus or minus uh five percent and you can see that the majority of customers you can see that's the majority of the customers that gray area the pink is we're spending Less in other words down six percent or worse and the bright red is churn which is minimal one percent very good indicator for for cloudflare what you do to get etr's proprietary Net score and they've done this for many many quarters so we have that time series data you subtract the Reds from the greens and that's Net score cloudflare is at 39 just under that magic red line now note that cloudflare and zscaler are right on top of each other Cisco has a dominant position on the x-axis that cloudflare and others are eyeing AWS is also dominant but note that its Net score is well above the red dotted line it's incredible Palo Alto networks is also very impressive it's got both a strong presence on the horizontal axis and it's got a Net score that's pretty comparable to cloudflare and z-scaler to much smaller companies Akamai is actually well positioned for a reasonably mature company and you can see fastly ATT Juniper and F5 have far less spending momentum on their platforms than does cloudflare but at least they are in positive Net score territory so what's going to be really interesting to see is whether cloudflare can continue to hold this momentum or even accelerate it as we've seen with some other clouds as it scales its Network and keeps adding more and more services cloudflare has a couple of potential strategic vectors that we want to talk about and it'll be going to be interesting to see how that plays out Now One path is to compete more directly as a Cloud Player offering secure access Edge services like firewall as a service and zero Trust Services like data loss prevention email security from its area one acquisition and other zero trust offerings as well as Network Services like routing and network connectivity this is The Sweet Spot of the company load balancing many others and then add in things like Object Store and database Services more Edge services in the future it might be telecom like services such as Network switching for offices so that's one route and cloudflare is clearly on that path more services more cohorts at innovating and and growing the company and bringing in more Revenue increasing acvs and and increasing long-term value and keeping retention high now the other Vector is what we're just going to refer to as super cloud as an enabler of cross-cloud infrastructure this is new value uh relative to the former Vector that we were just talking about now the title of this episode is what multi-cloud should have been meaning cloudflare could be the control plane providing a consistent experience across clouds one that is fast and secure at global scale now to give you Insight on this let's take a look at some of the comments made by Matthew Prince the CEO and co-founder of cloudflare cloudflare put its R2 Object Store into public beta this past May and I believe it's storing around a petabyte of data today I think that's what they said in their call here's what Prince said about that quote we are talking to very large companies about moving more and more of their stored objects to where we can store that with R2 and one of the benefits is not only can we help them save money on the egress fees but it allows them to then use those object stores or objects across any of the different Cloud platforms they're that they're using so by being that neutral third party we can let people adopt a little bit of Amazon a little bit of Microsoft a little bit of Google a little bit of SAS vendors and share that data across all those different places so what's interesting about this in the super cloud context is it suggests that customers could take the best of each Cloud to power their digital businesses I might like AWS for in redshift for my analytic database or I love Google's machine learning Microsoft's collaboration and I'd like a consistent way to connect those resources but of course he's strongly hinting and has made many public statements that aws's egress fees are a blocker to that vision now at a recent investor event Matthew Prince added some color to this concept when he talked about one metric of success being how much R2 capacity was consumed and how much they sold but perhaps a more interesting Benchmark is highlighted by the following statement that he made he said a completely different measure of success for R2 is Andy jassy says I'm sick and tired of these guys meaning cloudflare taking our objects away we're dropping our egress fees to zero I would be so excited because we've then unlocked the ability to be the network that interconnects the cloud together now of course it would be Adam solipski who would be saying that or maybe Andy Jesse you know still watching over AWS and I think it's highly unlikely that that's going to happen anytime soon and that of course but but in theory gets us closer to the super cloud value proposition and to further drive that point home and we're paraphrasing a little bit his comments here he said something the effect of quote customers need one consistent control plane across clouds and we are the neutral Network that can be consistent no matter which Cloud you're using interesting right that Prince sees the world that's similar to if not nearly identical to the concepts that the cube Community has been putting forth around supercloud now this vision is a ways off let's be real Prince even suggested that his initial vision of an application running across multiple clouds you know that's like super cloud Nirvana isn't what customers are doing today that's that's really hard to do and perhaps you know it's never going to happen but there's a little doubt that cloudflare could be and is positioning itself as that cross-cloud control plane it has the network economics and the business model levers to pull it's got an edge up on the competition at the edge pun intended cloudflare is the definition of Edge and it's distributed platform it's decentralized platform is much better suited for Edge workloads than these giant data centers that are you know set up to to try and handle that today the the hyperscalers are building out you know their Edge networks things like outposts you know going out to the edge and other local zones Etc now cloudflare is increasingly competitive to the hyperscalers and those traditional Stacks that it depositioned on an earlier slide that we showed but you know the likes of AWS and Dell and hpe and Cisco and those others they're not sitting in their hands they have a huge huge customer install bases and they are definitely a moving Target they're investing and they're building out their own Super clouds with really robust stacks as well let's face it it's going to take a decade or more for Enterprises to adopt a developer platform or a new database Cloud plus cloudflare's capabilities when compared to incumbent stacks and the hyperscalers is much less robust in these areas and even in storage you know despite all the great conversation that R2 generated and the buzz you take a specialist like Wasabi they're more mature they're more functional and they're way cheaper even than cloudflare so you know it's not a fake a complete that cloudflare is going to win in those markets but we love the disruption and if cloudflare wants to be the fourth us-based hyperscaler or join the the big four as the as the fifth if we put Alibaba in the mix it's got a lot of work to do in the ecosystem by its own admission as much to learn and is part of the value by the way that it sees in its area one acquisition it's email security company that it bought but even in that case much of the emphasis has been on reseller channels compare that to the AWS ecosystem which is not only a channel play but is as much an innovation flywheel filling gaps where companies like snowflake Thrive side by side with aws's data stores as well all the on-prem stacks are building hybrid connections to AWS and other clouds as a means of providing consistent experiences across clouds indeed many of them see what they call cross-cloud services or what we call super cloud hyper cloud or whatever you know Mega Cloud you want to call it we use super cloud they are really eyeing that opportunity so very few companies frankly are not going after that space but we're going to close with this cloudflare is one of those companies that's in a position to wake up each morning and ask who can we disrupt today and very few companies are in a position to disrupt the hyperscalers to the degree that cloudflare is and that my friends is going to be fascinating to watch unfold all right let's call it a wrap I want to thank Alex Meyerson who's on production and manages the podcast as well as Ken schiffman who's our newest addition to the Boston Studio Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight help us get the word out on social media and in our newsletters and Rob Hof is our editor-in-chief over at silicon angle thank you to all remember all these episodes are available as podcasts wherever you listen all you're going to do is search breaking analysis podcasts I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com you can email me at david.velante at siliconangle.com or DM me at divalante if you comment on my LinkedIn posts and please do check out etr.ai they got the best survey data in the Enterprise Tech business this is Dave vellante for the cube insights powered by ETR thank you very much for watching and we'll see you next time on breaking analysis

>>The Cube Presents UI Path Forward five. Brought to you by UI Path. >>Hi everybody. We're back. David Ante with David Nicholson. This is UiPath Forward five from Las Vegas. We're live, you know, the customers here, they're automating all the time, sucking work and the cube. We're sucking all the information out of the experts and the customers. A bar Toban is here. He's the global business, Shared services, leading automation and AI at PepsiCo. And Para Colan is back is the chief, He's the chief product officer, UiPath longtime Cube alum. Great to see you guys. Thanks for coming on. Great to see us all day. So you guys keynote today, you know, excited to have PepsiCo on. I'm not sure I've ever interviewed PepsiCo in the Cube, but tell us about your role there. >>Absolutely. So I'm part of a PepsiCo global business shared services team. I lead automation and AI capabilities. GBS has, you know, we started GBS portfolio back about three and a half years ago, and we have a six hubs across PepsiCo. And as, as a part of my role, we deliver transformational capability across the PepsiCo. >>When did it all start? >>About three and a half years ago, 2019. So >>Prior to the pandemic. Yeah. You know, versus the pandemic was a catalyst for this. Yeah. But it was at the catalyst, but maybe it sped it up a bit. Yeah. >>PepsiCo journey started with, if, if you look at the PepsiCo, you know, the automation journey, it started back in 2017, but the GBS portfolio took shape back in 2019. So prior to that, you know, PepsiCo was definitely, you know, working on lot of, you know, the automation capabilities and automation product across, you know, PepsiCo. But with the introduction of PepsiCo global business shared services team, we are, you know, centralizing a lot of transformation capability, you know, across the functions that, that we support within the >>PepsiCo and, and UI path. Was going to part of that journey all along? Or was there sort of other activities beforehand or how >>No, no, absolutely. Starting from 2017, if I, you know, remembered, you know, with the vision of our, you know, some of our senior leadership team and recognizing the value of, you know, automation in the core, you know, capability as a transformation at that time, you know, we started with just like anybody else, right? We started with, you know, proof of concept, showed some, you know, early wins and the value back to the business, start setting up some, you know, business processes and capabilities, stood up the platform, build a complete, you know, ecosystem around that, you know, platform and partnership with, you know, UI bot team. And you know, from there, here we are five years. I mean, it's, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a very critical component to our digital transformation capability and, and yes, leverage across >>Let's talk platform. So you, you guys have made some announcements this week. You talk about the business automation platform. I remember our first forward was, you know, RPA tool. Okay. Yeah. And then you guys made acquisitions. I was there for that. So the process process cold and then people started to really expand it and it's really come in amazingly long way in a short time. So what did you guys announce today? What'd you talk about on stage 20, 22, 10? Tell us more about it. >>Absolutely, Dave. So you've seen the journey, you've been with us since the early days. You know, we were in 2017 and RPA tool that could automate a representative task that happened over and over again in the environment. And then three years ago you were here when we announced the automation platform, we said, it's not just about a task, it's about involving humans in bots to manage end to end processes. It's about discovering what automation opportunities exist. It's about using ai. Pepsi Co was actually the pioneer of using AI along with automation. You know, we were in stage together with them in, in 2019. And where we are now is we're essentially seeing people want to take the next step with automation. They're saying that it's no longer just an automation tool, It's the way we operate. It's the way we innovate in the organization. So they're really making sure that it becomes a part of their digital transformation journey that they're on. >>And they're saying that we can do the digital transformation by consolidating multiple DRP systems and CRM systems. And that'll take us seven years to do, or we can go with UI path and we can leverage the core that we can leverage the GL system that exists today. We can leverage inventory tracking system that exists today and start to build processes on top of that that can adapt to what customers are trying to do in this digital age. And that's where, you know, we've made announcements today is, is really pivot the platform to be a business automation platform. And there's sort of three layers, you know, unique but you know, connected layers of the platform. The first one is discover. And Discover is all about finding your processes, identifying the opportunities, making sure that you are managing the return on investment. What is the process? You know, how are you getting ROI on it? >>The second one is automated, and that is really where we're applying semantic automation to identify the digital building blocks of an enterprise, which is your data, your document, your screens and communication. Like putting all of that together and saying you can automate our processes, leveraging a lot of intelligence that exist in how business processes are done. And the last one is operate, which is if you're trying to execute a business process at scale, you're processing not just, you know, a task thousand times, but you are fulfilling millions of transactions. You're, you know, you're looking at trillions of records to identify what processes you need. A scalable enterprise platform that's able to ingest a lot of data, report on metrics, reporting efficiency. So that's what we've announced today is an automation platform that companies can use to put at the center of the digital transformation >>Journey. So I about the interesting thing about PepsiCo, you guys started in 2017. Yeah. So kind of early, early on. Yeah. Yeah. And you kind of been there with the progression platform. So my question to you is end up, it was, you know, we've seen the e from primarily on-prem, now it's cloud first. Yeah. How disruptive or non disruptive was that for you? Did you have to rip and replace? Did you have to sort of retool or migrate? What was that like? >>No, I mean, significant disruption, right? I mean, I mean, as, as we started our journey back in 2017, just like, you know, PRM mentioned, right? With simple rule based, you know, the automation from then now to our journey where our continue to, you know, infuse, you know, AI capability, document understanding, conversation ai, right? As a part of our end to end portfolio. At the same time, I think the cloud is providing a fantastic opportunity for us to continue to scale, right? You know, scale at, at a large. So that I think is a fantastic, you know, fantastic platform and fantastic, you know, the opportunity that we are looking forward >>To know. So how do you affect adoption inside of the organization? Can you talk about that? What's working? What's, >>It's always value driven as you know, right? I mean, the business business has to see the value. It it, it was, I mean, I would, you know, admit it was not as easy as before, but as the mindsets have started to shift, right? As the people have started to realize the value that, you know, the automation brings to, you know, the, I mean, you know, not just the, the value for the business, but actually transforming the entire portfolio, right? And, and people have started to see now that not every automation project is going to be transformation product, but for every transformation project you will find the automation at the heart and the core of it. So I, I, I think that's what has started to shift the mindset of, of uniforms. >>So how do you know when you have end to end? What are you wake up one day and say, Wow, we've achieved it. You know, is it pieces that come together? Yeah. What do you say? >>Yeah, You know, we wanna look at customers from, you know, from an end to end perspective. It's not just about piecemealing mealing finding a problem, solving it, really what does it deliver from, from an end to end perspective. Did you actually, you know, because a lot of times companies will say, we wanna automate X number of processes, and, and they do that and they're like, Well, we've automated a lot of processes. We're not sure what value we're getting out of it. It's the ability to measure like, what impact is this automation having on your business from an operational metric, but from a business metric as built. But then going back and saying, Well, where is the biggest pain point? Where do we have the largest value that we can give to the business back? So one of the things we actually announced today is the ability to take at an look at an idea and look at what was the estimated benefits of that idea, and then map it all the way through execution to say, what are we getting? >>We estimated we were gonna save a million dollars by doing those automation, or what have we achieved till now? Have we achieved a million dollars? Have we achieved half a million dollars by having achieved? That's true. That never happens. That, and, and, and, and it's hard to do that, like the data existed, but it's really hard for people to pull that data out. So we build out the box dashboards that give you the ROI bag, and that's why it's really important to, to make sure that, you know, you look at it not just as a technology project, but more as a investment from a business side. And so you can making a business more efficient. Yeah, >>That's, I just, I know you were jumping in, but that's super important. Cause you know, you run a lot of projects. Yeah, absolutely. And each of those projects has zone roi, then you jam it into the application portfolio. Exactly. And then everybody sort of forgets about it. You can't really track what impact it had because there's always, you know, some things that are benefit, some things are sometimes a negative. And so it's that holistic picture that you >>Trying to achieve, extremely critical point, what you hit on, right? From it's measuring the benefit and measuring the continuous benefit across, and not just from start and end, Okay, what I promised I delivered or not, but, but you have to have this continuous mindset. And so I think Yeah, definitely that that's a very, very critical to our finance team and our cfo, >>They organic mechanisms. It's constantly >>Evidence. Absolutely. Yeah. So abar, yeah. Global business shared services. Yeah. When you think of PepsiCo, yeah, of course people immediately think of Sure, Pepsi. But PepsiCo is a multi tentacled absolutely beast of a company. Absolutely. In a good way. Yeah. For organizations that are in that same category, holding companies, companies that have all sorts of different entities that are working together under one umbrella, how shareable is this idea of automation and business automation process moving forward? How, how shareable is that on the share oter? Yeah. Yeah. As far as, as far as, as far as you're concerned, are you, are you talking to some people where you're saying, Hey, I'm here, I'm here from GBS and I'm here to help, and they look at you like you're crazy because you don't understand their business? Or is this something that relatively easily applies across businesses >>That No, to your point, I mean, very valid point, right? I mean, it's, that's, that's the gbs, global business shared services mindset, right? As you move the functional areas into the Pepsi, into the Pepsi, gbs, like hr, procurement, commercial sales, supply chain, right? That's where you wanna start to find those, you know, the optimization, you know, opportunity. You wanna start to ize your processes, and that's where you will, you know, as you transition this processes within the gbs, that's what create those, you know, opportunities for you. So >>What, >>What about automation opportunities? Not in the sh I know you're in the shared arena. Yeah, yeah. But each of those business units has processes that could probably be optimized and automated. Sure. Is that something that's under your purview? We've heard, we've heard a lot about citizen developers. Yeah. I don't know if that, if that >>Applies to No, that definitely. I mean, you cannot just have focus on end to end, you know, automation. I mean, that's, that's a huge portfolio for gps at the same time supporting, you know, automation through the citizen development capability. That that's where, once again, you know, you have not provided a lot of capability and solution tools that we use, right? To continue to empower the folks who are part of our, you know, GBS team inside or outside gbs, right? It, it, it's, I think it's very, very critical. It, it, it helps people transform their career even in one ways, right? And, and, and, and you have that muscle, you have that resource, and you have the power. You definitely want to utilize that. >>So let's talk about metrics for a minute. So more data, the better. Usually I like data. Yeah. But, but if you're trying to optimize for 15 metrics, I feel like you're not gonna optimize on any, So how do you deal with that from both, as par was saying, an operational standpoint and a business standpoint? What are the things about how do you sort of get the, the teams focused on the right things? >>B business, functional leadership team drive those alignment for us as a part of a global business, shared services, we, we are hip to have connected with our business, you know, functions, right? They, they have to help us prioritize those. And to your point, I mean, yeah, you cannot attack 15 metrics at once. You have to prioritize, you have to make sure that you bring the focus to the product, you know, project, right? So, so definitely, I mean, it's, it's, it's not often 15 metrics, but top three metrics, let's, let's focus, let's zoom in and ensure we are driving it. But, >>And if you think about the system, I mean, at the end of the day, the p and l manager, he or she cares about ebit, let's say. Sure, okay. But there are so many factors, you know, in that complicated organization that are gonna affect ebitda and they're gonna be different. But somebody's gotta figure out, okay, how do they fit together in a system? And can, can UiPath help me understand that, those relationships and those dependencies? >>Absolutely. I mean, I think there's a, there's an aspect of human relationships and, and making sure that you get the right level of sponsorship from the business and, and there's a business stakeholder and, and looking at every investment and, and outcomes that you're driving based on that. But, but that is something that we, from a tools perspective, we're trying to make sure that you can measure the value throughout the entire value chain. But then getting the business sponsorship, like where we've seen automation scale is always because there's a business sponsor that's essentially saying, Here's what I'm trying to achieve and here's the, here's my goal, here's a North star and go get it and let me know how you're tracking against it. And, and our job is to make sure that we can provide the visibility, the people that are operating the, the programs to make sure they get that level of visibility. >>What's the scope of automations in your, you know, organization? Is it dozens, hundreds, >>Huge. >>That is thousands. >>We are getting there. Okay. No, definitely. I mean, we have definitely, you know, realized that it's, it's a core component to our digital transformation, right? So, so there is no, there's no stopping on it. There, there, there, there's plenty of support from top down and you know, it's a fantastic time to be at PepsiCo. Right? Especially at the PepsiCo gbs. Right, >>Right. Thanks for sharing your story. Congratulations on all the progress you guys have made. It's actually quite remarkable to see where you guys have come from. So I really appreciate it. Thank you, Dave. Thanks. Thank you Dave. Okay. Thank you for watching. This is Dave Ante for Dave Nicholson. We are right middle of day two at forward five from Las Vegas. We're live, we're right back.