(gentle music) >> Narrator: "TheCUBE's" live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Hello everybody, welcome back to day four of "theCUBE's" coverage of MWC '23. We're here live at the Fira in Barcelona. Wall-to-wall coverage, John Furrier is in our Palo Alto studio, banging out all the news. Really, the whole week we've been talking about the disaggregation of the telco network, the new opportunities in telco. We're really excited to have AT&T and Snowflake here. Dave Whittington is the AVP, at the Chief Data Office at AT&T. Roddy Tranum is the Assistant Vice President, for Channel Performance Data and Tools at AT&T. And Phil Kippen, the Global Head Of Industry-Telecom at Snowflake, Snowflake's new telecom business. Snowflake just announced earnings last night. Typical Scarpelli, they beat earnings, very conservative guidance, stocks down today, but we like Snowflake long term, they're on that path to 10 billion. Guys, welcome to "theCUBE." Thanks so much >> Phil: Thank you. >> for coming on. >> Dave and Roddy: Thanks Dave. >> Dave, let's start with you. The data culture inside of telco, We've had this, we've been talking all week about this monolithic system. Super reliable. You guys did a great job during the pandemic. Everything shifting to landlines. We didn't even notice, you guys didn't miss a beat. Saved us. But the data culture's changing inside telco. Explain that. >> Well, absolutely. So, first of all IoT and edge processing is bringing forth new and exciting opportunities all the time. So, we're bridging the world between a lot of the OSS stuff that we can do with edge processing. But bringing that back, and now we're talking about working, and I would say traditionally, we talk data warehouse. Data warehouse and big data are now becoming a single mesh, all right? And the use cases and the way you can use those, especially I'm taking that edge data and bringing it back over, now I'm running AI and ML models on it, and I'm pushing back to the edge, and I'm combining that with my relational data. So that mesh there is making all the difference. We're getting new use cases that we can do with that. And it's just, and the volume of data is immense. >> Now, I love ChatGPT, but I'm hoping your data models are more accurate than ChatGPT. I never know. Sometimes it's really good, sometimes it's really bad. But enterprise, you got to be clean with your AI, don't you? >> Not only you have to be clean, you have to monitor it for bias and be ethical about it. We're really good about that. First of all with AT&T, our brand is Platinum. We take care of that. So, we may not be as cutting-edge risk takers as others, but when we go to market with an AI or an ML or a product, it's solid. >> Well hey, as telcos go, you guys are leaning into the Cloud. So I mean, that's a good starting point. Roddy, explain your role. You got an interesting title, Channel Performance Data and Tools, what's that all about? >> So literally anything with our consumer, retail, concenters' channels, all of our channels, from a data perspective and metrics perspective, what it takes to run reps, agents, all the way to leadership levels, scorecards, how you rank in the business, how you're driving the business, from sales, service, customer experience, all that data infrastructure with our great partners on the CDO side, as well as Snowflake, that comes from my team. >> And that's traditionally been done in a, I don't mean the pejorative, but we're talking about legacy, monolithic, sort of data warehouse technologies. >> Absolutely. >> We have a love-hate relationship with them. It's what we had. It's what we used, right? And now that's evolving. And you guys are leaning into the Cloud. >> Dramatic evolution. And what Snowflake's enabled for us is impeccable. We've talked about having, people have dreamed of one data warehouse for the longest time and everything in one system. Really, this is the only way that becomes a reality. The more you get in Snowflake, we can have golden source data, and instead of duplicating that 50 times across AT&T, it's in one place, we just share it, everybody leverages it, and now it's not duplicated, and the process efficiency is just incredible. >> But it really hinges on that separation of storage and compute. And we talk about the monolithic warehouse, and one of the nightmares I've lived with, is having a monolithic warehouse. And let's just go with some of my primary, traditional customers, sales, marketing and finance. They are leveraging BSS OSS data all the time. For me to coordinate a deployment, I have to make sure that each one of these units can take an outage, if it's going to be a long deployment. With the separation of storage, compute, they own their own compute cluster. So I can move faster for these people. 'Cause if finance, I can implement his code without impacting finance or marketing. This brings in CI/CD to more reality. It brings us faster to market with more features. So if he wants to implement a new comp plan for the field reps, or we're reacting to the marketplace, where one of our competitors has done something, we can do that in days, versus waiting weeks or months. >> And we've reported on this a lot. This is the brilliance of Snowflake's founders, that whole separation >> Yep. >> from compute and data. I like Dave, that you're starting with sort of the business flexibility, 'cause there's a cost element of this too. You can dial down, you can turn off compute, and then of course the whole world said, "Hey, that's a good idea." And a VC started throwing money at Amazon, but Redshift said, "Oh, we can do that too, sort of, can't turn off the compute." But I want to ask you Phil, so, >> Sure. >> it looks from my vantage point, like you're taking your Data Cloud message which was originally separate compute from storage simplification, now data sharing, automated governance, security, ultimately the marketplace. >> Phil: Right. >> Taking that same model, break down the silos into telecom, right? It's that same, >> Mm-hmm. >> sorry to use the term playbook, Frank Slootman tells me he doesn't use playbooks, but he's not a pattern matcher, but he's a situational CEO, he says. But the situation in telco calls for that type of strategy. So explain what you guys are doing in telco. >> I think there's, so, what we're launching, we launched last week, and it really was three components, right? So we had our platform as you mentioned, >> Dave: Mm-hmm. >> and that platform is being utilized by a number of different companies today. We also are adding, for telecom very specifically, we're adding capabilities in marketplace, so that service providers can not only use some of the data and apps that are in marketplace, but as well service providers can go and sell applications or sell data that they had built. And then as well, we're adding our ecosystem, it's telecom-specific. So, we're bringing partners in, technology partners, and consulting and services partners, that are very much focused on telecoms and what they do internally, but also helping them monetize new services. >> Okay, so it's not just sort of generic Snowflake into telco? You have specific value there. >> We're purposing the platform specifically for- >> Are you a telco guy? >> I am. You are, okay. >> Total telco guy absolutely. >> So there you go. You see that Snowflake is actually an interesting organizational structure, 'cause you're going after verticals, which is kind of rare for a company of your sort of inventory, I'll say, >> Absolutely. >> I don't mean that as a negative. (Dave laughs) So Dave, take us through the data journey at AT&T. It's a long history. You don't have to go back to the 1800s, but- (Dave laughs) >> Thank you for pointing out, we're a 149-year-old company. So, Jesse James was one of the original customers, (Dave laughs) and we have no longer got his data. So, I'll go back. I've been 17 years singular AT&T, and I've watched it through the whole journey of, where the monolithics were growing, when the consolidation of small, wireless carriers, and we went through that boom. And then we've gone through mergers and acquisitions. But, Hadoop came out, and it was going to solve all world hunger. And we had all the aspects of, we're going to monetize and do AI and ML, and some of the things we learned with Hadoop was, we had this monolithic warehouse, we had this file-based-structured Hadoop, but we really didn't know how to bring this all together. And we were bringing items over to the relational, and we were taking the relational and bringing it over to the warehouse, and trying to, and it was a struggle. Let's just go there. And I don't think we were the only company to struggle with that, but we learned a lot. And so now as tech is finally emerging, with the cloud, companies like Snowflake, and others that can handle that, where we can create, we were discussing earlier, but it becomes more of a conducive mesh that's interoperable. So now we're able to simplify that environment. And the cloud is a big thing on that. 'Cause you could not do this on-prem with on-prem technologies. It would be just too cost prohibitive, and too heavy of lifting, going back and forth, and managing the data. The simplicity the cloud brings with a smaller set of tools, and I'll say in the data space specifically, really allows us, maybe not a single instance of data for all use cases, but a greatly reduced ecosystem. And when you simplify your ecosystem, you simplify speed to market and data management. >> So I'm going to ask you, I know it's kind of internal organizational plumbing, but it'll inform my next question. So, Dave, you're with the Chief Data Office, and Roddy, you're kind of, you all serve in the business, but you're really serving the, you're closer to those guys, they're banging on your door for- >> Absolutely. I try to keep the 130,000 users who may or may not have issues sometimes with our data and metrics, away from Dave. And he just gets a call from me. >> And he only calls when he has a problem. He's never wished me happy birthday. (Dave and Phil laugh) >> So the reason I asked that is because, you describe Dave, some of the Hadoop days, and again love-hate with that, but we had hyper-specialized roles. We still do. You've got data engineers, data scientists, data analysts, and you've got this sort of this pipeline, and it had to be this sequential pipeline. I know Snowflake and others have come to simplify that. My question to you is, how is that those roles, how are those roles changing? How is data getting closer to the business? Everybody talks about democratizing business. Are you doing that? What's a real use example? >> From our perspective, those roles, a lot of those roles on my team for years, because we're all about efficiency, >> Dave: Mm-hmm. >> we cut across those areas, and always have cut across those areas. So now we're into a space where things have been simplified, data processes and copying, we've gone from 40 data processes down to five steps now. We've gone from five steps to one step. We've gone from days, now take hours, hours to minutes, minutes to seconds. Literally we're seeing that time in and time out with Snowflake. So these resources that have spent all their time on data engineering and moving data around, are now freed up more on what they have skills for and always have, the data analytics area of the business, and driving the business forward, and new metrics and new analysis. That's some of the great operational value that we've seen here. As this simplification happens, it frees up brain power. >> So, you're pumping data from the OSS, the BSS, the OKRs everywhere >> Everywhere. >> into Snowflake? >> Scheduling systems, you name it. If you can think of what drives our retail and centers and online, all that data, scheduling system, chat data, call center data, call detail data, all of that enters into this common infrastructure to manage the business on a day in and day out basis. >> How are the roles and the skill sets changing? 'Cause you're doing a lot less ETL, you're doing a lot less moving of data around. There were guys that were probably really good at that. I used to joke in the, when I was in the storage world, like if your job is bandaging lungs, you need to look for a new job, right? So, and they did and people move on. So, are you able to sort of redeploy those assets, and those people, those human resources? >> These folks are highly skilled. And we were talking about earlier, SQL hasn't gone away. Relational databases are not going away. And that's one thing that's made this migration excellent, they're just transitioning their skills. Experts in legacy systems are now rapidly becoming experts on the Snowflake side. And it has not been that hard a transition. There are certainly nuances, things that don't operate as well in the cloud environment that we have to learn and optimize. But we're making that transition. >> Dave: So just, >> Please. >> within the Chief Data Office we have a couple of missions, and Roddy is a great partner and an example of how it works. We try to bring the data for democratization, so that we have one interface, now hopefully know we just have a logical connection back to these Snowflake instances that we connect. But we're providing that governance and cleansing, and if there's a business rule at the enterprise level, we provide it. But the goal at CDO is to make sure that business units like Roddy or marketing or finance, that they can come to a platform that's reliable, robust, and self-service. I don't want to be in his way. So I feel like I'm providing a sub-level of platform, that he can come to and anybody can come to, and utilize, that they're not having to go back and undo what's in Salesforce, or ServiceNow, or in our billers. So, I'm sort of that layer. And then making sure that that ecosystem is robust enough for him to use. >> And that self-service infrastructure is predominantly through the Azure Cloud, correct? >> Dave: Absolutely. >> And you work on other clouds, but it's predominantly through Azure? >> We're predominantly in Azure, yeah. >> Dave: That's the first-party citizen? >> Yeah. >> Okay, I like to think in terms sometimes of data products, and I know you've mentioned upfront, you're Gold standard or Platinum standard, you're very careful about personal information. >> Dave: Yeah. >> So you're not trying to sell, I'm an AT&T customer, you're not trying to sell my data, and make money off of my data. So the value prop and the business case for Snowflake is it's simpler. You do things faster, you're in the cloud, lower cost, et cetera. But I presume you're also in the business, AT&T, of making offers and creating packages for customers. I look at those as data products, 'cause it's not a, I mean, yeah, there's a physical phone, but there's data products behind it. So- >> It ultimately is, but not everybody always sees it that way. Data reporting often can be an afterthought. And we're making it more on the forefront now. >> Yeah, so I like to think in terms of data products, I mean even if the financial services business, it's a data business. So, if we can think about that sort of metaphor, do you see yourselves as data product builders? Do you have that, do you think about building products in that regard? >> Within the Chief Data Office, we have a data product team, >> Mm-hmm. >> and by the way, I wouldn't be disingenuous if I said, oh, we're very mature in this, but no, it's where we're going, and it's somewhat of a journey, but I've got a peer, and their whole job is to go from, especially as we migrate from cloud, if Roddy or some other group was using tables three, four and five and joining them together, it's like, "Well look, this is an offer for data product, so let's combine these and put it up in the cloud, and here's the offer data set product, or here's the opportunity data product," and it's a journey. We're on the way, but we have dedicated staff and time to do this. >> I think one of the hardest parts about that is the organizational aspects of it. Like who owns the data now, right? It used to be owned by the techies, and increasingly the business lines want to have access, you're providing self-service. So there's a discussion about, "Okay, what is a data product? Who's responsible for that data product? Is it in my P&L or your P&L? Somebody's got to sign up for that number." So, it sounds like those discussions are taking place. >> They are. And, we feel like we're more the, and CDO at least, we feel more, we're like the guardians, and the shepherds, but not the owners. I mean, we have a role in it all, but he owns his metrics. >> Yeah, and even from our perspective, we see ourselves as an enabler of making whatever AT&T wants to make happen in terms of the key products and officers' trade-in offers, trade-in programs, all that requires this data infrastructure, and managing reps and agents, and what they do from a channel performance perspective. We still ourselves see ourselves as key enablers of that. And we've got to be flexible, and respond quickly to the business. >> I always had empathy for the data engineer, and he or she had to service all these different lines of business with no business context. >> Yeah. >> Like the business knows good data from bad data, and then they just pound that poor individual, and they're like, "Okay, I'm doing my best. It's just ones and zeros to me." So, it sounds like that's, you're on that path. >> Yeah absolutely, and I think, we do have refined, getting more and more refined owners of, since Snowflake enables these golden source data, everybody sees me and my organization, channel performance data, go to Roddy's team, we have a great team, and we go to Dave in terms of making it all happen from a data infrastructure perspective. So we, do have a lot more refined, "This is where you go for the golden source, this is where it is, this is who owns it. If you want to launch this product and services, and you want to manage reps with it, that's the place you-" >> It's a strong story. So Chief Data Office doesn't own the data per se, but it's your responsibility to provide the self-service infrastructure, and make sure it's governed properly, and in as automated way as possible. >> Well, yeah, absolutely. And let me tell you more, everybody talks about single version of the truth, one instance of the data, but there's context to that, that we are taking, trying to take advantage of that as we do data products is, what's the use case here? So we may have an entity of Roddy as a prospective customer, and we may have a entity of Roddy as a customer, high-value customer over here, which may have a different set of mix of data and all, but as a data product, we can then create those for those specific use cases. Still point to the same data, but build it in different constructs. One for marketing, one for sales, one for finance. By the way, that's where your data engineers are struggling. >> Yeah, yeah, of course. So how do I serve all these folks, and really have the context-common story in telco, >> Absolutely. >> or are these guys ahead of the curve a little bit? Or where would you put them? >> I think they're definitely moving a lot faster than the industry is generally. I think the enabling technologies, like for instance, having that single copy of data that everybody sees, a single pane of glass, right, that's definitely something that everybody wants to get to. Not many people are there. I think, what AT&T's doing, is most definitely a little bit further ahead than the industry generally. And I think the successes that are coming out of that, and the learning experiences are starting to generate momentum within AT&T. So I think, it's not just about the product, and having a product now that gives you a single copy of data. It's about the experiences, right? And now, how the teams are getting trained, domains like network engineering for instance. They typically haven't been a part of data discussions, because they've got a lot of data, but they're focused on the infrastructure. >> Mm. >> So, by going ahead and deploying this platform, for platform's purpose, right, and the business value, that's one thing, but also to start bringing, getting that experience, and bringing new experience in to help other groups that traditionally hadn't been data-centric, that's also a huge step ahead, right? So you need to enable those groups. >> A big complaint of course we hear at MWC from carriers is, "The over-the-top guys are killing us. They're riding on our networks, et cetera, et cetera. They have all the data, they have all the client relationships." Do you see your client relationships changing as a result of sort of your data culture evolving? >> Yes, I'm not sure I can- >> It's a loaded question, I know. >> Yeah, and then I, so, we want to start embedding as much into our network on the proprietary value that we have, so we can start getting into that OTT play, us as any other carrier, we have distinct advantages of what we can do at the edge, and we just need to start exploiting those. But you know, 'cause whether it's location or whatnot, so we got to eat into that. Historically, the network is where we make our money in, and we stack the services on top of it. It used to be *69. >> Dave: Yeah. >> If anybody remembers that. >> Dave: Yeah, of course. (Dave laughs) >> But you know, it was stacked on top of our network. Then we stack another product on top of it. It'll be in the edge where we start providing distinct values to other partners as we- >> I mean, it's a great business that you're in. I mean, if they're really good at connectivity. >> Dave: Yeah. >> And so, it sounds like it's still to be determined >> Dave: Yeah. >> where you can go with this. You have to be super careful with private and for personal information. >> Dave: Yep. >> Yeah, but the opportunities are enormous. >> There's a lot. >> Yeah, particularly at the edge, looking at, private networks are just an amazing opportunity. Factories and name it, hospital, remote hospitals, remote locations. I mean- >> Dave: Connected cars. >> Connected cars are really interesting, right? I mean, if you start communicating car to car, and actually drive that, (Dave laughs) I mean that's, now we're getting to visit Xen Fault Tolerance people. This is it. >> Dave: That's not, let's hold the traffic. >> Doesn't scare me as much as we actually learn. (all laugh) >> So how's the show been for you guys? >> Dave: Awesome. >> What're your big takeaways from- >> Tremendous experience. I mean, someone who doesn't go outside the United States much, I'm a homebody. The whole experience, the whole trip, city, Mobile World Congress, the technologies that are out here, it's been a blast. >> Anything, top two things you learned, advice you'd give to others, your colleagues out in general? >> In general, we talked a lot about technologies today, and we talked a lot about data, but I'm going to tell you what, the accelerator that you cannot change, is the relationship that we have. So when the tech and the business can work together toward a common goal, and it's a partnership, you get things done. So, I don't know how many CDOs or CIOs or CEOs are out there, but this connection is what accelerates and makes it work. >> And that is our audience Dave. I mean, it's all about that alignment. So guys, I really appreciate you coming in and sharing your story in "theCUBE." Great stuff. >> Thank you. >> Thanks a lot. >> All right, thanks everybody. Thank you for watching. I'll be right back with Dave Nicholson. Day four SiliconANGLE's coverage of MWC '23. You're watching "theCUBE." (gentle music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, this is Dave Vellante, and we're here to talk about the massive $61 billion planned acquisition of VMware by Broadcom. And I'm here with Phil Brotherton of NetApp to discuss the implications for customers, for the industry, and NetApp's particular point of view. Phil, welcome. Good to see you again. >> It's great to see you, Dave. >> So this topic has garnered a lot of conversation. What's your take on this epic event? What does it mean for the industry generally, and customers specifically? >> You know, I think time will tell a little bit, Dave. We're in the early days. We've, you know, so we heard the original announcements and then it's evolved a little bit, as we're going now. I think overall it'll be good for the ecosystem in the end. There's a lot you can do when you start combining what VMware can do with compute and some of the hardware assets of Broadcom. There's a lot of security things that can be brought, for example, to the infrastructure, that are very high-end and cool, and then integrated, so it's easy to do. So I think there's a lot of upside for it. There's obviously a lot of concern about what it means for vendor consolidation and pricing and things like that. So time will tell. >> You know, when this announcement first came out, I wrote a piece, you know, how "Broadcom will tame the VMware beast," I called it. And, you know, looked at Broadcom's history and said they're going to cut, they're going to raise prices, et cetera, et cetera. But I've seen a different tone, certainly, as Broadcom has got into the details. And I'm sure I and others maybe scared a lot of customers, but I think everybody's kind of calming down now. What are you hearing from customers about this acquisition? How are they thinking about it? >> You know, I think it varies. There's, I'd say generally we have like half our installed base, Dave, runs ESX Server, so the bulk of our customers use VMware, and generally they love VMware. And I'm talking mainly on-prem. We're just extending to the cloud now, really, at scale. And there's a lot of interest in continuing to do that, and that's really strong. The piece that's careful is this vendor, the cost issues that have come up. The things that were in your piece, actually. And what does that mean to me, and how do I balance that out? Those are the questions people are dealing with right now. >> Yeah, so there's obviously a lot of talk about the macro, the macro headwinds. Everybody's being a little cautious. The CIOs are tapping the brakes. We all sort of know that story. But we have some data from our partner ETR that ask, they go out every quarter and they survey, you know, 1500 or so IT practitioners, and they ask the ones that are planning to spend less, that are cutting, "How are you going to approach that? What's your primary methodology in terms of achieving, you know, cost optimization?" The number one, by far, answer was to consolidate redundant vendors. It was like, it's now up to about 40%. The second, distant second, was, "We're going to, you know, optimize cloud costs." You know, still significant, but it was really that consolidating the redundant vendors. Do you see that? How does NetApp fit into that? >> Yeah, that is an interesting, that's a very interesting bit of research, Dave. I think it's very right. One thing I would say is, because I've been in the infrastructure business in Silicon Valley now for 30 years. So these ups and downs are, that's a consistent thing in our industry, and I always think people should think of their infrastructure and cost management. That's always an issue, with infrastructure as cost management. What I've told customers forever is that when you look at cost management, our best customers at cost management are typically service providers. There's another aspect to cost management, is you want to automate as much as possible. And automation goes along with vendor consolidation, because how you automate different products, you don't want to have too many vendors in your layers. And what I mean by the layers of ecosystem, there's a storage layer, the network layer, the compute layer, like, the security layer, database layer, et cetera. When you think like that, everybody should pick their partners very carefully, per layer. And one last thought on this is, it's not like people are dumb, and not trying to do this. It's, when you look at what happens in the real world, acquisitions happen, things change as you go. And in these big customers, that's just normal, that things change. But you always have to have this push towards consolidating and picking your vendors very carefully. >> Also, just to follow up on that, I mean, you know, when you think about multi-cloud, and you mentioned, you know, you've got some big customers, they do a lot of M & A, it's kind of been multi-cloud by accident. "Oh, we got all these other tools and storage platforms and whatever it is." So where does NetApp fit in that whole consolidation equation? I'm thinking about, you know, cross-cloud services, which is a big VMware theme, thinking about a consistent experience, on-prem, hybrid, across the three big clouds, out to the edge. Where do you fit? >> So our view has been, and it was this view, and we extend it to the cloud, is that the data layer, so in our software, is called ONTAP, the data layer is a really important layer that provides a lot of efficiency. It only gets bigger, how you do compliance, how you do backup, DR, blah blah blah. All that data layer services needs to operate on-prem and on the clouds. So when you look at what we've done over the years, we've extended to all the clouds, our data layer. We've put controls, management tools, over the top, so that you can manage the entire data layer, on-prem and cloud, as one layer. And we're continuing to head down that path, 'cause we think that data layer is obviously the path to maximum ability to do compliance, maximum cost advantages, et cetera. So we've really been the company that set our sights on managing the data layer. Now, if you look at VMware, go up into the network layer, the compute layer, VMware is a great partner, and that's why we work with them so closely, is they're so perfect a fit for us, and they've been a great partner for 20 years for us, connecting those infrastructural data layers: compute, network, and storage. >> Well, just to stay on that for a second. I've seen recently, you kind of doubled down on your VMware alliance. You've got stuff at re:Invent I saw, with AWS, you're close to Azure, and I'm really talking about ONTAP, which is sort of an extension of what you were just talking about, Phil, which is, you know, it's kind of NetApp's storage operating system, if you will. It's a world class. But so, maybe talk about that relationship a little bit, and how you see it evolving. >> Well, so what we've been seeing consistently is, customers want to use the advantages of the cloud. So, point one. And when you have to completely refactor apps and all this stuff, it limits, it's friction. It limits what you can do, it raises costs. And what we did with VMware, VMware is this great platform for being able to run basically client-server apps on-prem and cloud, the exact same way. The problem is, when you have large data sets in the VMs, there's some cost issues and things, especially on the cloud. That drove us to work together, and do what we did. We GA-ed, we're the, so NetApp is the only independent storage, independent storage, say this right, independent storage platform certified to run with VMware cloud on Amazon. We GA-ed that last summer. We GA-ed with Azure, the Azure VMware service, a couple months ago. And you'll see news coming with GCP soon. And so the idea was, make it easy for customers to basically run in a hybrid model. And then if you back out and go, "What does that mean for you as a customer?", it's not saying you should go to the cloud, necessarily, or stay on-prem, or whatever. But it's giving you the flexibility to cost-optimize where you want to be. And from a data management point of view, ONTAP gives you the consistent data management, whichever way you decide to go. >> Yeah, so I've been following NetApp for decades, when you were Network Appliance, and I saw you go from kind of the workstation space into the enterprise. I saw you lean into virtualization really early on, and you've been a great VMware partner ever since. And you were early in cloud, so, sort of talking about, you know, that cross-cloud, what we call supercloud. I'm interested in what you're seeing in terms of specific actions that customers are taking. Like, I think about ELAs, and I think it's a two-edged sword. You know, should customers, you know, lean into ELAs right now? You know, what are you seeing there? You talked about, you know, sort of modernizing apps with things like Kubernetes, you know, cloud migration. What are some of the techniques that you're advising customers to take in the context of this acquisition? >> You know, so the basics of this are pretty easy. One is, and I think even Raghu, the CEO of VMware, has talked about this. Extending your ELA is probably a good idea. Like I said, customers love VMware, so having a commitment for a time, consistent cost management for a time is a good strategy. And I think that's why you're hearing ELA extensions being discussed. It's a good idea. The second part, and I think it goes to your surveys, that cost optimization point on the cloud is, moving to the cloud has huge advantages, but if you just kind of lift and shift, oftentimes the costs aren't realized the way you'd want. And the term "modernization," changing your app to use more Kubernetes, more cloud-native services, is often a consideration that goes into that. But that requires time. And you know, most companies have hundreds of apps, or thousands of apps, they have to consider modernizing. So you want to then think through the journey, what apps are going to move, what gets modernized, what gets lifted-shifted, how many data centers are you compressing? There's a lot of data center, the term I've been hearing is "data center evacuations," but data center consolidation. So that there's some even energy savings advantages sometimes with that. But the whole point, I mean, back up to my whole point, the whole point is having the infrastructure that gives you the flexibility to make the journey on your cost advantages and your business requirements. Not being forced to it. Like, it's not really a philosophy, it's more of a business optimization strategy. >> When you think about application modernization and Kubernetes, how does NetApp, you know, fit into that, as a data layer? >> Well, so if you kind of think, you said, like our journey, Dave, was, when we started our life, we were doing basically virtualization of volumes and things for technical customers. And the servers were always bare metal servers that we got involved with back then. This is, like, going back 20 years. Then everyone moved to VMs, and, like, it's probably, today, I mean, getting to your question in a second, but today, loosely, 20% bare metal servers, 80% virtual machines today. And containers is growing, now a big growing piece. So, if you will, sort of another level of virtual machines in containers. And containers were historically stateless, meaning the storage didn't have anything to do. Storage is always the stateful area in the architectures. But as containers are getting used more, stateful containers have become a big deal. So we've put a lot of emphasis into a product line we call Astra that is the world's best data management for containers. And that's both a cloud service and used on-prem in a lot of my customers. It's a big growth area. So that's what, when I say, like, one partner that can do data management, just, that's what we have to do. We have to keep moving with our customers to the type of data they want to store, and how do you store it most efficiently? Hey, one last thought on this is, where I really see this happening, there's a booming business right now in artificial intelligence, and we call it modern data analytics, but people combining big data lakes with AI, and that's where some of this, a lot of the container work comes in. We've extended objects, we have a thing we call file-object duality, to make it easy to bridge the old world of files to the new world of objects. Those all go hand in hand with app modernization. >> Yeah, it's a great thing about this industry. It never sits still. And you're right, it's- >> It's why I'm in it. >> Me too. Yeah, it's so much fun. There's always something. >> It is an abstraction layer. There's always going to be another abstraction layer. Serverless is another example. It's, you know, primarily stateless, that's probably going to, you know, change over time. All right, last question. In thinking about this Broadcom acquisition of VMware, in the macro climate, put a sort of bow on where NetApp fits into this equation. What's the value you bring in this context? >> Oh yeah, well it's like I said earlier, I think it's the data layer of, it's being the data layer that gives you what you guys call the supercloud, that gives you the ability to choose which cloud. Another thing, all customers are running at least two clouds, and you want to be able to pick and choose, and do it your way. So being the data layer, VMware is going to be in our infrastructures for at least as long as I'm in the computer business, Dave. I'm getting a little old. So maybe, you know, but "decades" I think is an easy prediction, and we plan to work with VMware very closely, along with our customers, as they extend from on-prem to hybrid cloud operations. That's where I think this will go. >> Yeah, and I think you're absolutely right. Look at the business case for migrating off of VMware. It just doesn't make sense. It works, it's world class, it recover... They've done so much amazing, you know, they used to be called, Moritz called it the software mainframe, right? And that's kind of what it is. I mean, it means it doesn't go down, right? And it supports virtually any application, you know, around the world, so. >> And I think getting back to your original point about your article, from the very beginning, is, I think Broadcom's really getting a sense of what they've bought, and it's going to be, hopefully, I think it'll be really a fun, another fun era in our business. >> Well, and you can drive EBIT a couple of ways. You can cut, okay, fine. And I'm sure there's some redundancies that they'll find. But there's also, you can drive top-line revenue. And you know, we've seen how, you know, EMC and then Dell used that growth from VMware to throw off free cash flow, and it was just, you know, funded so much, you know, innovation. So innovation is the key. Hock Tan has talked about that a lot. I think there's a perception that Broadcom, you know, doesn't invest in R & D. That's not true. I think they just get very focused with that investment. So, Phil, I really appreciate your time. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks a lot, Dave. It's fun being here. >> Yeah, our pleasure. And thank you for watching theCUBE, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (upbeat music)

(soft upbeat music) >> The past two and a half years have seen a dramatic change in the security posture of virtually all organizations. By accelerating the digital business mandate, the isolation economy catalyzed a move toward cloud computing to support remote workers. This, we know. This had several ripple effects on CISO and CIO strategies that were highly visible at the board of directors level. Now, the first major change was to recognize that the perimeter had suddenly been vaporized. Protection, as a result, moved away from things like perimeter-based firewalls toward more distributed endpoints, cloud security, and modern identity management. The second major change was a heightened awareness of the realities of ransomware. Ransomware as a service, for example, emerged as a major threat where virtually anyone with access to critical data and criminal intentions could monetize corporate security exposures. The third major change was a much more acute understanding of how data protection needed to become a fundamental component of cyber security strategies. And more specifically, CIOs quickly realized that their business resilient strategies were too narrowly DR-focused, that their DR approach was not cost efficient and needed to be modernized, and that new approaches to operational resilience were needed to reflect the architectural and business realities of this new environment. Hello and welcome to Why Ransomware isn't your Only Problem, a service of theCUBE made possible by Druva, and in collaboration with IDC. I'm your host, Dave Vellante, and today we're presenting a three-part program. We'll start with the data. IDC recently conducted a global survey of 500 business technology practitioners across 20 industries to understand the degree to which organizations are aware of and prepared for the threats they face in today's new world. IDC Research Vice President, Phil Goodwin is here to share the highlights of the study and summarize the findings from a recent research report on the topic. After that, we're going to hear from Curtis Preston, who's the Chief Technical Evangelist at Druva. I've known Curtis for decades. He's one of the world's foremost experts on backup and recovery, specifically in data protection generally. Curtis will help us understand how the survey data presented by IDC aligns with the real world findings from the field, from his point of view. And he'll discuss why so many organizations have failed to successfully recover from an attack without major pains and big costs, and how to avoid such operational disruptions and disasters. And then finally, we'll hear from the technical experts at Druva, Stephen Manley and Anjan Srinivas. Stephen is a 10-time (indistinct) and chief technology officer at Druva. And Anjan is vice president and general manager of product management at the company. And these individuals will specifically address how Druva is closing the gaps presented in the IDC survey through their product innovation. Right now I'm going to toss it to Lisa Martin, another one of the hosts, for today's program. Lisa, over to you. (soft upbeat music) >> Phil Goodwin joins me next, the VP of research at IDC. We're going to be breaking down what's going on in the threat landscape. Phil, welcome to the program. It's great to have you back on theCUBE. >> Hey, Lisa, it's great to be here with you. >> So talk to me about the state of the global IT landscape as we see cyber attacks massively increasing, the threat landscape changing so much, what is IDC seeing? >> You really hit the top topic that we find from IT organizations as well as business organizations. And really it's that digital resilience that ransomware that has everybody's attention. And it has the attention not just of the IT people, but of the business people alike, because it really does have profound effects across the organization. The other thing that we're seeing, Lisa, is really a move towards cloud. And I think part of that is driven by the economics of cloud, which fundamentally changed the way that we can approach disaster recovery, but also was accelerated during the pandemic for all the reasons that people have talked about in terms of work from home and so on. And then really the third thing is the economic uncertainty. And this is relatively new for 2022. But within IDC we've been doing a lot of research around what are those impacts going to be. And what we find people doing is they want greater flexibility, they want more cost certainty, and they really want to be able to leverage those cloud economics to be have the scale up or scale down on demand nature of cloud. So those are in a nutshell kind of the three things that people are looking at. >> You mentioned ransomware. It's a topic we've been talking about a lot. It's a household word these days. It's now, Phil, no longer if we're going to get attacked, it's when, it's how often, it's the severity. Talk about ransomware as a priority all the way up the stack to the C-suite. And what are they trying to do to become resilient against it? >> Well, what some of the research that we did is we found that about 77% of organizations have digital resilience as a top priority within their organization. And so what you're seeing is organizations trying to leverage things to become more resilient, more digitally resilient, and to be able to really hone in on those kinds of issues that are keeping them awake at night, quite honestly. If you think about digital resilience, it really is foundational to the organization, whether it's through digital transformation or whether it's simply data availability, whatever it might happen to be. Digital resilience is really a large umbrella term that we use to describe that function that is aimed at avoiding data loss, assuring data availability, and helping the organization to extract value from their data. >> And digital resilience, data resilience, as every company these days has to be a data company to be competitive. Digital resilience, data resilience, are you using those terms interchangeably or is data resilience defined as something a little bit different? >> Well, sometimes yeah, that we do get caught using them when one is the other. But data resilience is really a part of digital resilience, if you think about the data itself in the context of of IT computing. So it really is a subset of that. But it is foundational to IT resilience. You can't have it resilience without data resilience. So that's where we're coming from on it >> Inextricably linked. And it's becoming a corporate initiative, but there's some factors that can complicate digital resilience, data resilience, for organizations. What are some of those complications that organizations need to be aware of? >> Well, one of the biggest is what you mentioned at the top of the segment, and that is the area of ransomware. The research that we found is about 46% of organizations have been hit within the last three years. It's kind of interesting how it's changed over the years. Originally, being hit by ransomware had a real stigma attached to it. Organizations didn't want to admit it, and they really avoided confronting that. Nowadays, so many people have been hit by it, that that stigma has gone. And so really it is becoming more of a community kind of effort as people try to defend against these ransomwares. The other thing about it is, it's really a lot like Whack-A-Mole. They attack us in one area, and we defend against it, so they attack us in another area, and we defend against it. And in fact, I had an individual come up to me at a show not long ago and said, "You know, one of these days we're going to get pretty well defended against ransomware and it's going to go away." And I responded, "I don't think so, because we're constantly introducing new systems, new software, and introducing new vulnerabilities. And the fact is ransomware is so profitable the bad guys aren't going to just fade into the night without giving it a lot of fight." So I really think that ransomware is one of those things that is here for the long term, and something that we have to address and have to get proactive about. >> You mentioned some stats there, and recently IDC and Druva did a white paper together that really revealed some quite shocking results. Talk to me about some of the things. Let's talk a little bit about the demographics of the survey and then talk about what was the biggest finding there, especially where it's concerning ransomware. >> Yeah, this was in a worldwide study, it was sponsored by Druva and conducted by IDC as an independent study. And what we did, we surveyed 500, is a little over 500 different individuals across the globe, in North America, select countries in Western Europe as well as several in Asia-Pacific. And we did it across industries where 20 different industries represented. They're all evenly represented. We had surveys that included IT practitioners, primarily CIOs, CTOs, VP of infrastructure, managers of data centers, things like that. And the biggest finding that we had in this, Lisa, was really finding that there is a huge disconnect, I believe, between how people think they are ready and what the actual results are when they get attacked. Some of the statistics that we learned from this, Lisa, include 83% of organizations believe, or told us that they have a playbook that they have for ransomware. I think 93% said that they have a high degree, or a high or very high degree of confidence in their recovery tools and are fully automated. And yet when you look at the actual results, I told you a moment ago, 46% have been attack successfully. I can also tell you that in separate research, fewer than a third of organizations were able to fully recover their data without paying the ransom. And some two thirds actually had to pay the ransom. And even when they did, they didn't necessarily achieve their full recovery. The bad guys aren't necessarily to be trusted. And so the software that they provide sometimes is fully recovered, sometimes it's not. So you look at that and you go, "Wow." On the one hand, people think they're really prepared, and on the other hand, the results are absolutely horrible. Two thirds of people having to pay the ransom. So you start to ask yourself, "Well, what's going on there?" And I believe that a lot of it comes down to... kind of reminds me of the old quote from Mike Tyson. "Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth." And I think that's kind of what happens with ransomware. You think you know what you're doing, you think you're ready, based on the information you have, and these people are smart people and they're professionals, but oftentimes you don't know what you don't know. And like I say, the bad guys are always dreaming up new ways to attack us. And so I think for that reason a lot of these have been successful. So that was kind of the key finding to me in kind of the "aha" moment, really, in this whole thing, Lisa. >> That's a massive disconnect, with the vast majority saying, "We have a cyber recovery playbook," yet, nearly half being the victims of ransomware in the last three years, and then half of them experiencing data loss. What is it then that organizations in this situation across any industry can do to truly enable cyber resilience, data resilience, as we said, this is a matter of this is going to happen, just a matter of when and how often? >> It is a matter, yeah, as you said, it's not if when or how often, it's really how badly. So I think what organizations are really doing now is starting to turn more to cloud-based services. Finding professionals who know what they're doing, who have that breadth of experience, and who have seen the kinds of necessary steps that it takes to do a recovery. And the fact of the matter is a disaster recovery and a cyber recovery are really not the same thing. And so organizations need to be able to plan the kinds of recovery associated with cyber recovery in terms of forensics, in terms of scanning, in terms of analysis, and so forth. So they're turning to professionals in the cloud much more in order to get that breadth of experience and to take advantage of cloud-based services that are out there. >> Talk to me about some of the key advantages of cloud-based services for data resilience versus traditional legacy on-prem equipment. What are some of the advantages? Why is IDC seeing this big shift to cloud where data resilience is concerned? >> Well, the first and foremost is the economics of it. You can have on-demand resources. And in the old days when we had disaster recoveries where there we had two different data centers and a failover and so forth, you had double the infrastructure if your financial services, it might even be triple the infrastructure. It was very complicated, very difficult. By going to the cloud, organizations can subscribe to disaster recovery as a service. And increasingly what we see is a new market of cyber recovery as a service. So being able to leverage those resources to be able to have the forensic analysis available to them, to be able to have the other resources available that are on-demand, and to have that plan in place to have those resources in place. I think what happens in a number of situations, Lisa, is that organizations think they're ready, but then all of a sudden they get hit, and all of a sudden they have to engage with outside consultants, or they have to bring in other experts. And that extends the time to recover that they have, and it also complicates it. So if they have those resources in place, then they can simply turn them on, engage them, and get that recover going as quickly as possible. >> So what do you think the big issue here is? Is it that these IT practitioners, over 500 that you surveyed across 20 industries, this a global survey, do they not know what they don't know? What's the overlying issue here? >> Yeah, I think that's right. It's you don't know what you don't know and until you get into a specific attack... there are so many different ways that organizations can be attacked. And in fact, from this research that we found, is that in many cases, data exfiltration exceeds data corruption by about 50%. And when you think about that, the issue is, once I have your data, what are you going to do? I mean, there's no amount of recovery that is going to help. So organizations are either faced with paying the ransom to keep the data from perhaps being used on the dark web or whatever, or simply saying no and taking their chances. So best practice things like encryption, immutability, things like that that organizations can put into place. Certainly air gaps, having a solid backup foundation to where data is, you have a high probability of recovery, things like that, those are the kinds of things that organizations have to put into place, really is a baseline to assure that they can recover as fast as possible and not lose data in the event of a ransomware attack. >> Given some of the disconnect that you articulated, the stats that show so many think, "We are prepared, we've got a playbook," yet so many are are being attacked, the vulnerabilities as the landscape, threat landscape, just gets more and more amorphous, what do you recommend organizations? Do you talk to the IT practitioners, but does this go all the way up to the board level in terms of, "Hey guys, across every industry we are vulnerable, this is going to happen, we've got to make sure that we are truly resilient and proactive"? >> Yes, and in fact, what we found from this research is in more than half of cases, the CEO is directly involved in the recovery. So this is very much a C-suite issue. And if you look at the the consequences of ransomware it's not just the ransom, it's the lost productivity, it's the loss of revenue, it's the loss of customer faith and goodwill. And organizations that have been attacked have suffered those consequences, and many of them are permanent. So people at the board level, whether it's the CEO, the CFO, the CIO, the CISO, whoever it is, they're extremely concerned about this. And I can tell you they are fully engaged in addressing these issues within their organization. >> So all the way at the top critically important, business critical for any industry. I imagine some industries may be a little bit more vulnerable than others, financial services, healthcare, education, we've just seen big attack in Los Angeles County. But in terms of establishing data resilience, you mentioned ransomware isn't going anywhere, it's a big business, it's very profitable, but what is IDC's prediction where ransomware is concerned? Do you think that organizations, if they truly adopt cloud and status-based technologies, can they get to a place where the C-suite doesn't have to be involved to the point where they really actually have a functioning playbook? >> I don't know if we'll ever get to the point where the C-suite is not involved. It's probably very important to have that level of executive sponsorship. But what we are seeing is, in fact, we predict predict that by 2025, 55% of organizations will have shifted to a cloud-centric strategy for their data resilience. And the reason we say that is workloads on premises aren't going away, so that's the core. We have an increasing number of workloads in the cloud and at the edge, and that's really where the growth is. So being able to take that cloud-centric model and take advantage of cloud resources, like immutable storage, being able to move data from region to region inexpensively and easily, and to be able to take that cloud-centric perspective and apply it on premises as well as in the cloud and at the edge, is really where we believe that organizations are shifting their focus. >> Got it. We're just cracking the surface here, Phil. I wish we had more time. But I had a chance to read the Druva-sponsored IDC white paper. Fascinating finds. I encourage all of you to download that. Take a read. You're going to learn some very interesting statistics and recommendations for how you can really truly deploy data resilience in your organization. Phil, it's been a pleasure to have you on the program. Thank you for joining me. >> No problem. Thank you, Lisa. (gentle music)

>>The past two and a half years have seen a dramatic change in the security posture of virtually all organizations. By accelerating the digital business mandate, the isolation economy catalyzed a move toward cloud computing to support remote workers. This, we know this had several ripple effects on CISO and CIO strategies that were highly visible at the board of directors level. Now, the first major change was to recognize that the perimeter had suddenly been vaporized protection. As a result moved away from things like perimeter based firewalls toward more distributed endpoints, cloud security, and modern identity management. The second major change was a heightened awareness of the realities of ransomware. Ransomware as a service, for example, emerges a major threat where virtually anyone with access to critical data and criminal intentions could monetize corporate security exposures. The third major change was a much more acute understanding of how data protection needed to become a fundamental component of cybersecurity strategies. >>And more specifically, CIOs quickly realized that their business resilient strategies were too narrowly DR focused that their DR approach was not cost efficient and needed to be modernized. And that new approaches to operational resilience were needed to reflect the architectural and business realities of this new environment. Hello and welcome to Why Ransomware isn't your Only Problem, a service of the Cube made possible by dva. And in collaboration with idc. I'm your host, Dave Ante, and today we're present a three part program. We'll start with the data. IDC recently conducted a global survey of 500 business technology practitioners across 20 industries to understand the degree to which organizations are aware of and prepared for the threats they face. In today's new world, IDC Research Vice President Phil Goodwin is here to share the highlights of the study and summarize the findings from a recent research report on the topic. >>After that, we're gonna hear from Curtis Preston, who's the Chief Technical Evangelist at Druva. I've known Curtis for decades. He's one of the world's foremost experts on backup and recovery, specifically in data protection. Generally. Curtis will help us understand how the survey data presented by IDC aligns with the real world findings from the field, from his point of view. And he'll discuss why so many organizations have failed to successfully recover from an attack without major pains and big costs, and how to avoid such operational disruptions and disasters. And then finally, we'll hear from the technical experts at dva, Steven Manly and Anja Serenas. Steven is a 10 time cubo and Chief technology officer at dva, and Anjan is vice president and general manager of product management at the company. And these individuals will specifically address how DVA is closing the gaps presented in the IDC survey through their product innovation. Or right now I'm gonna toss it to Lisa Martin, another one of the hosts for today's program. Lisa, over to you. >>Bill Goodwin joins me next, the VP of research at idc. We're gonna be breaking down what's going on in the threat landscape. Phil, welcome to the program. It's great to have you back on the cube. >>Hey, Lisa, it's great to be here with you. >>So talk to me about the state of the global IT landscape as we see cyber attacks massively increasing, the threat landscape changing so much, what is IDC seeing? >>You know, you, you really hit the, the top topic that we find from IT organizations as well as business organizations. And really it's that digital resilience that that ransomware that has everybody's attention and it has the attention not just of the IT people, but of the business people alike, because it really does have profound effects across the organization. The other thing that we're seeing, Lisa, is really a move towards cloud. And I think part of that is driven by the economics of cloud, which fundamentally changed the way that we can approach disaster recovery, but also is accelerated during the pandemic for all the reasons that people have talked about in terms of work from home and so on. And then really the third thing is the economic uncertainty. And this is relatively new for 2022, but within idc we've been doing a lot of research around what are those impacts going to be. And what we find people doing is they want greater flexibility, they want more cost certainty, and they really want to be able to leverage those cloud economics to be, have the scale, upper scale, down on demand nature of cloud. So those are in a nutshell, kind of the three things that people are looking at. >>You mentioned ransomware, it's a topic we've been talking about a lot. It's a household word these days. It's now Phil, no longer if we're gonna get attacked. It's when it's how often it's the severity. Talk about ransomware as a priority all the way up the stack to the C-suite. And what are they trying to do to become resilient against it? >>Well, what, what some of the research that we did is we found that about 77% of organizations have digital resilience as a, as a top priority within their organization. And so what you're seeing is organizations trying to leverage things to become more, more resilient, more digitally resilient, and to be able to really hone in on those kinds of issues that are keeping keeping them awake at night. Quite honestly, if you think about digital resilience, it really is foundational to the organization, whether it's through digital transformation or whether it's simply data availability, whatever it might happen to be. Digital resilience is really a, a large umbrella term that we use to describe that function that is aimed at avoiding data loss, assuring data availability, and helping the organization to extract value from their data >>And digital resilience, data resilience as every company these days has to be a data company to be competitive, digital resilience, data resilience. Are you using those terms interchangeably or data resilience to find as something a little bit different? >>Well, sometimes yeah, that we do get caught using them when, when one is the other. But data resilience is really a part of digital resilience, if you think about the data itself and the context of of IT computing. So it really is a subset of that, but it is foundational to IT resilience. You, you really, you can't have it resilience about data resilience. So that, that's where we're coming from on it >>Inextricably linked and it's becoming a corporate initiative, but there's some factors that can complicate digital resilience, data resilience for organizations. What are some of those complications that organizations need to be aware of? >>Well, one of the biggest is what, what you mentioned at the, at the top of the segment and, and that is the, the area of ransomware, the research that we found is about 46% of organizations have been hit within the last three years. You know, it's kind of interesting how it's changed over the years. Originally being hit by ransomware had a real stigma attached to it. Organizations didn't want to admit it, and they really avoided confronting that. Nowadays, so many people have been hit by it, that that stigma has gone. And so really it is becoming more of a community kind of effort as people try to, to defend against these ransoms. The other thing about it is it's really a lot like whackamole. You know, they attack us in one area and and, and we defend against it. They, so they attack us in another area and we defend against it. >>And in fact, I had a, an individual come up to me at a show not long ago and said, You know, one of these days we're gonna get pretty well defended against ransomware and it's gonna go away. And I responded, I don't think so because we're constantly introducing new systems, new software, and introducing new vulnerabilities. And the fact is ransomware is so profitable, the bad guys aren't gonna just fade into the night without giving it a a lot of fight. So I really think that ransomware is one of those things that here is here for the long term and something that we, we have to address and have to get proactive about. >>You mentioned some stats there and, and recently IDC and DVA did a white paper together that really revealed some quite shocking results. Talk to me about some of the things. Let, let's talk a little bit about the demographics of the survey and then talk about what was the biggest finding there, especially where it's concern concerning ransomware. >>Yeah, this, this was a worldwide study. It was sponsored by DVA and conducted by IDC as an independent study. And what we did, we surveyed 500 is a little over 500 different individuals across the globe in North America select countries in in western Europe, as well as several in, in Asia Pacific. And we did it across industries with our 20 different industries represented. They're all evenly represented. We had surveys that included IT practitioners, primarily CIOs, CTOs, VP of of infrastructure, you know, managers of data centers, things like that. And the, and the biggest finding that we had in this, Lisa, was really finding that there is a huge disconnect, I believe, between how people think they are ready and what the actual results are when they, when they get attacked. Some of the, some of the statistics that we learned from this, Lisa, include 83% of organizations believe or tell, told us that they have a, a playbook that, that they have for ransomware. >>I think 93% said that they have a high degree or a high or very high degree of confidence in their recovery tools and, and are fully automated. And yet when you look at the actual results, you know, I told you a moment ago, 46% have been attacked successfully. I can also tell you that in separate research, fewer than a third of organizations were able to fully recover their data without paying the ransom. And some two thirds actually had to pay the ransom. And even when they did, they didn't necessarily achieve their full recovery. You know, the bad guys aren't, aren't necessarily to be trusted. And, and so the software that they provide sometimes is, is fully recovered, sometimes it's not. So you look at that and you go, Wow. On, on the one hand people think they're really, really prepared and on the other hand the results are, are absolutely horrible. >>You know, two thirds of people having, having to pay their ransom. So you start to ask yourself, well, well, what is, what's going on there? And I believe that a lot of it comes down to, kind of reminds me of the old quote from Mike Tyson. Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. And I think that's kind of what happens with ransomware. You, you think you know what you're, you're doing, you think you're ready based on the information you have. And these people are smart people and, and they're professionals, but oftentimes you don't know what you don't know. And like I say, the bad guys are always dreaming up new ways to attack us. And so I think for that reason, a lot of these have been successful. So that was kind of the key finding to me in kind of the aha moment really in this whole thing. Lisa, >>That's a massive disconnect with the vast majority saying we have a cyber recovery playbook, yet nearly half being the victims of ransomware in the last three years and then half of them experiencing data loss. What is it then that organizations in this situation across any industry can do to truly enable cyber resilience data resilience as it's, as we said, this is a matter of this is gonna happen just a matter of when and how often >>It it is a matter, Yeah, as you said, it's not if when or, or how often. It's really how badly. So I think what organizations are really do doing now is starting to turn more to cloud-based services. You know, finding professionals who know what they're doing, who have that breadth of experience and who have seen the kinds of, of necessary steps that it takes to do a recovery. And the fact of the matter is a disaster recovery and a cyber recovery are really not the same thing. And so organizations need to be able to, to plan the kinds of recovery associated with cyber recovery in terms of forensics, in terms of, of scanning, in terms of analysis and so forth. So they're, they're turning to professionals in the cloud much more in order to get that breadth of experience and, and to take advantage of cloud based services that are out there. >>Talk to me about some of the key advantages of cloud-based services for data resilience versus traditional legacy on-prem equipment. What are some of the advantages? Why are is IDC seeing this big shift to cloud where, where data resilience is concerned? >>Well, the first and foremost is the economics of it. You know, you can, you can have on demand resources. And in the old days when we had disaster recoveries where there we had two different data centers and a failover and so forth, you know, you had double the infrastructure. If your financial services, it might even be triple, the infrastructure is very complicated, very difficult by going to the cloud. Organizations can subscribe to disaster recovery as a service. It increasingly what we see is a new market of cyber recovery as a service. So being able to leverage those resources to be able to have the forensic analysis available to them, to be able to have the other resources available that are on demand, and to have that plan in place to have those resources in place. I think what happens in a number of situations, Lisa, is that that organizations think they're ready, but then all of a sudden they get hit and all of a sudden they have to engage with outside consultants or they have to bring in other experts and that, and that extends the time to recover that they have and it also complicates it. >>So if they have those resources in place, then they can simply turn them on, engage them, and get that recover going as quickly as possible. >>So what do you think the big issue here is, is it that these, these I p T practitioners over 500 that you surveyed across 20 industries is a global survey? Do they not know what they don't know? What's the the overlying issue here? >>Yeah, I think that's right. It's, you don't know what you don't know and until you get into a specific attack, you know, there, there are so many different ways that, that organizations can be attacked. And in fact, from this research that we found is that in many cases, data exfiltration exceeds data corruption by about 50%. And when you think about that, the, the issue is, once I have your data, what are you gonna do? I mean, there's no amount of recovery that is gonna help. So organizations are either faced with paying the ransom to keep the data from perhaps being used on the dark web or whatever, or simply saying no and, and taking their chances. So best practice things like encryption, immutability, you know, things like that that organizations can put into place. Certainly air gaps. Having a, a solid backup foundation to, to where data is you have a high recovery, high probability of recovery, things like that. Those are the kinds of things that organizations have to put into place really is a baseline to assure that they can recover as fast as possible and not lose data in the event of a ransomware attack. >>Given some of the, the, the disconnect that you articulated, the, the stats that show so many think we are prepared, we've got a playbook, yet so many are being, are being attacked. The vulnerabilities and the, and the, as the, the landscape threat landscape just gets more and more amorphous. Why, what do you recommend organizations? Do you talk to the IT practitioners, but does this go all the way up to the board level in terms of, hey guys, across every industry we are vulnerable, this is gonna happen, we've gotta make sure that we are truly resilient and proactive? >>Yes, and in fact, what we found from this research is in more than half of cases, the CEO is directly involved in the recovery. So this is very much a C-suite issue. And if you look at the, the, the consequences of ransom where it's not just the ransom, it's the loss productivity, it's, it's the loss of, of revenue, it's, it's the loss of, of customer faith and, and, and goodwill and organizations that have been attacked have, have suffered those consequences. And, and many of them are permanent. So people at the board level where it's, whether it's the ceo, the cfo, the cio, the c cso, you know, whoever it is, they're extremely concerned about these. And I can tell you they are fully engaged in addressing these issues within their organization. >>So all the way at the top critically important, business critical for any industry. I imagine some industries may be a little bit more vulnerable than others, financial services, healthcare, education, we've just seen big attack in Los Angeles County. But in terms of establishing data resilience, you mentioned ransomware isn't going anywhere, it's a big business business, it's very profitable. But what is IDCs prediction where ransomware is concerned? Do you think that organizations, if they truly adopt cloud and status based technologies, can they get to a place where the C-suite doesn't have to be involved to the point where they're, they really actually have i i functioning playbook? >>I i, I don't know if we'll ever get to the point where the CCC C suite is not involved. It's probably very important to have that, that level of executive sponsorship. But, but what we are seeing is, in fact we predicted by 20 25, 50 5% of organizations we'll have shifted to a cloud centric strategy for their data resilience. And the reason we say that is, you know, workloads on premises aren't going away. So that's the core. We have an increasing number of workloads in the cloud and, and at the edge, and that's really where the growth is. So being able to take that cloud centric model and take advantage of, of cloud resources like immutable storage, being able to move data from region to region inexpensively and easily and, and to be able to take that cloud centric perspective and apply it on premises as well as in the cloud and at the edge is really where we believe that organizations are shifting their focus. >>Got it. We're just cracking the surface here. Phil, I wish we had more time, but I had a chance to read the Juba sponsored IDC White paper. Fascinating finds. I encourage all of you to download that. Take a read, you're gonna learn some very interesting statistics and recommendations for how you can really truly deploy data resilience in your organization. Phil, it's been a pleasure to have you on the program. Thank you for joining >>Me. No problem. Thank you, Lisa. >>In a moment, John Furrier will be here with his next guest. For right now, I'm Lisa Martin and you are watching The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage.

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone, Lisa Martin for theCUBE here. Phil Goodwin joins me next, the VP of research at IDC. We're going to be breaking down what's going on in the threat landscape. Phil, welcome to the program. It's great to have you back on theCUBE. >> Hey, Lisa, it's great to be here with you. >> So talk to me about the state of the global IT landscape, as we see cyber attacks massively increasing, the threat landscape changing so much, what is IDC seeing? >> You really hit the top topic that we find from IT organizations, as well as business organizations, and really it's that digital resilience, that ransomware that has everybody's attention. And it has the attention, not just of the IT people, but of the business people alike, because it really does have profound effects across the organization. The other thing that we're seeing, Lisa, is really a move towards cloud. And I think part of that is driven by the economics of cloud, which fundamentally changed the way that we can approach disaster recovery, but also is accelerated during the pandemic for all the reasons that people have talked about in terms of work from home and so on. And then really the third thing is the economic uncertainty. And this is relatively new for 2022. But within IDC, we've been doing a lot of research around what are those impacts going to be? And what we find people doing is they want greater flexibility, they want more cost certainty, and they really want to be able to leverage those cloud economics to be have the scale up or scale down on demand nature of cloud. So those are in a nutshell kind of the three things that people are looking at. >> You mentioned ransomware, it's a topic we've been talking about a lot. It's a household word these days. It's now, Phil, no longer if we're going to get attacked, it's when, it's how often, it's the severity. Talk about ransomware as a priority all the way up the stack to the C-suite, and what are they trying to do to become resilient against it? >> Well, what some of the research that we did is what we found that about 77% of organizations have digital resilience as a top priority within their organization. And so what you're seeing is organizations trying to leverage things to become more resilient, more digitally resilient. And to be able to really hone in on those kinds of issues that are keeping them awake at night, quite honestly. If you think about digital resilience, it really is foundational to the organization. Whether it's through digital transformation, or whether it's simply data availability, whatever it might happen to be, digital resilience is really a large umbrella term that we use to describe that function that is aimed at avoiding data loss, assuring data availability, and helping the organization to extract value from their data. >> And digital resilience, data resilience, as every company These days has to be a data company to be competitive. Digital resilience, data resilience, are you using those terms interchangeably? Or is data resilience to find as something a little bit different? >> Well, sometimes, yeah, that we do get caught using them when one as the other, but data resilience is really a part of digital resilience if you think about the data itself and the context of IT computing. So it really is a subset of that. But it is foundational to IT resilience. You can't have it resilience without data resilience. So that's where we're coming from on it. >> Inextricably linked. And it's becoming a corporate initiative. But there's some factors that can complicate digital resilience, data resilience for organizations. What are some of those complications that organizations need to be aware of? >> Well, one of the biggest is what you mentioned at the top of the segment, and that is the area of ransomware. The research that we found is about 46% of organizations have been hit within the last three years. It's kind of interesting how it's changed over the years. Originally, being hit by ransomware had a real stigma attached to it. Organizations didn't want to admit it. And they really avoided confronting that. Nowadays, so many people have been hit by it, that stigma has gone. And so really it is becoming more of a community kind of effort, as people try to defend against these ransomwares. The other thing about it is it's really a lot like Whac-A-Mole. They attack us in one area and we defend against it, so they attack us in another area and we defend against it. And in fact, I had an individual come up to me at a show not long ago and said, "One of these days, we're going to get pretty well defended against ransomware, and it's going to go away." And I responded, "I don't think so because we're constantly introducing new systems, new software, and introducing new vulnerabilities." And the fact is ransomware is so profitable, the bad guys aren't going to just fade into the night without giving it a lot of fight. So I really think that ransomware is one of those things that is here for the long-term, and something that we we have to address and have to get proactive about. >> You mentioned some stats there. And recently, IDC and Druva did a white paper together that really revealed some quite shocking results. Talk to me about some of the things, let's talk a little bit about the demographics of the survey, and then talk about what was the biggest finding there, especially where it's concerning ransomware. >> Yeah, this was a worldwide study. It was sponsored by Druva and conducted by IDC as an independent study. And what we did, we surveyed 500, it's a little over 500 different individuals across the globe, in North America, select countries in Western Europe, as well as several in Asia Pacific. And we did it across industries where 20 different industries represented. They're all evenly represented. We had surveys that included IT practitioners, primarily CIOs, CTOs, BPO of infrastructure, managers of data centers, things like that. And the biggest finding that we had in this, Lisa, was really finding that there is a huge disconnect, I believe, between how people think they are ready and what the actual results are when they get attacked. Some of the statistics that we learned from this, Lisa, include 83% of organizations believe or told us that they have a playbook that they have for ransomware. I think 93% said that they have a high degree, or a high, or very high degree of confidence in their recovery tools, and are fully automated. And yet when you look at the actual results, I told you a moment ago, 46% have been attacked successfully. I can also tell you that in separate research, fewer than a 1/3 of organizations were able to fully recover their data without paying the ransom. And some 2/3 actually had to pay the ransom. And even when they did, they didn't necessarily achieve their full recovery. The bad guys aren't aren't necessarily to be trusted. And so the software that they provide, sometimes is fully recovered, sometimes it's not. So you look at that and you go, "Wow." On the one hand, people think they're really prepared. And on the other hand, the results are absolutely horrible. 2/3 of people having to pay the ransom. So you start to ask yourself, "Well, what's going on there?" And I believe that a lot of it comes down to, kind of reminds me of the old quote from Mike Tyson, "Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth." And I think that's kind of what happens with ransomware. You think you know what you're doing, you think you're ready based on the information you have. And these people are smart people, and they're professionals. But oftentimes, you don't know what you don't know. And like I say, the bad guys are always dreaming up new ways to attack us. And so I think for that reason, a lot of these have been successful. So that was kind of the key finding to me, and kind of the aha moment, really, in this whole thing, Lisa. >> That's a massive disconnect with the vast majority saying, "We have a cyber recovery playbook," yet nearly half being the victims of ransomware in the last three years. And then half of them experiencing data loss. What is it then that organizations in this situation across any industry can do to truly enable cyber resilience, data resilience? As we said, this is a matter of this is going to happen. Just a matter of when and how often. >> It is a matter. Yeah, as you said, it's not if when or how often, it's really how badly. So I think what organizations are really doing now is starting to turn more to cloud based services. Finding professionals who know what they're doing, who have that breadth of experience, and who have seen the kinds of of necessary steps that it takes to do a recovery. And the fact of the matter is a disaster recovery and a cyber recovery are really not the same thing. And so organizations need to be able to plan the kinds of recovery associated with cyber recovery in terms of forensics, in terms of scanning, in terms of analysis, and so forth. So they're turning to professionals in the cloud much more in order to get that breadth of experience, and to take advantage of cloud-based services that are out there. >> Talk to me about some of the key advantages of cloud-based services for data resilience versus traditional legacy on-prem equipment. What are some of the advantages? Why is IDC seeing this big shift to cloud, where data resilience is concerned? >> Well, the first and foremost is the economics of it. You can have on demand resources. And in the old days when we had disaster recoveries, where there we had two different data centers and the failover and so forth, you have double the infrastructure. If your financial services, it might even be triple the infrastructure. It's very complicated, very difficult. By going to the cloud, organizations can subscribe to disaster recovery as a service. And increasingly, what we see is a new market of cyber recovery as a service. So being able to leverage those resources, to be able to have the forensic analysis available to them, to be able to have the other resources available that are on demand, and to have that plan in place, to have those resources in place. I think what happens in a number of situations, Lisa, is that that organizations think they're ready, but then all of a sudden they get hit. And all of a sudden, they have to engage with outside consultants, or they have to bring in other experts. And that extends the time to recover that they have. And it also complicates it. So if they have those resources in place, then they can simply turn them on, engage them, and get that recovery going as quickly as possible. >> So what do you think the big issue here? Is it that these IT practitioners over 500 that you surveyed across 20 industries, as a global survey, do they not know what they don't know? What's the overlying issue here? >> Yeah, I think that's right. It's you don't know what you don't know. And until you get into a specific attack, there are so many different ways that organizations can be attacked. And in fact, from this research that we found is that in many cases, data exfiltration exceeds data corruption by about 50%. And when you think about that, the issue is, once I have your data, what are you going to do? I mean, there's no amount of recovery that is going to help. So organizations are either faced with paying the ransom to keep the data from perhaps being used on the dark web, or whatever, or simply saying no, and taking their chances. So best practice, things like encryption, immutability, things like that that organizations can put into place. Certainly, air gaps, having a solid backup foundation to where data is, you have a high probability recovery, things like that. Those are the kinds of things that organizations have to put into place, really, is a baseline to assure that they can recover as fast as possible, and not lose data in the event of our ransomware attack. >> Given some of the disconnect that you articulated, the stats that show so many think we are prepared, we've got a playbook, yet so many are being attacked, the vulnerabilities, and as the threat landscape just gets more and more amorphous, what do you recommend organizations? Do you talk to the IT practitioners? But does this go all the way up to the board level in terms of, " Hey guys across every industry, we are vulnerable. This is going to happen. We've got to make sure that we are truly resilient and proactive." >> Yes, and in fact, what we found from this research is in more than half of cases, the CEO is directly involved in the recovery. So this is very much a C-suite issue. And if you look at the consequences of ransomware, it's not just the ransom, it's the loss productivity, it's the loss of revenue, it's the loss of customer faith and goodwill. And organizations that have been attacked have suffered those consequences, and many of them are permanent. So people at the board level, whether it's the CEO, the CFO, the CIO, the CSO, whoever it is, they're extremely concerned about these. And I can tell you, they are fully engaged in addressing these issues within their organization. >> So all the way at the top, business critical for any industry. I imagine some industries may be a little bit more vulnerable than others, financial services, healthcare, education. We've just seen big attack in Los Angeles County. But in terms of establishing data resilience, you mentioned, ransomware isn't going anywhere, it's a big business, it's very profitable, but what is IDC's prediction where ransomware is concerned? Do you think that organizations, if they truly adopt cloud and SaaS-based technologies, can they get to a place where the C-suite doesn't have to be involved? To the point where they really actually have a functioning playbook? >> I don't know if we'll ever get to the point where the C-suite is not involved. It's probably very important to have that level of executive sponsorship. But what we are seeing is, in fact, we predict that by 2025, 55% of organizations will have shifted to a cloud-centric strategy for their data resilience. And the reason we say that is workloads on-premises aren't going away. So that's the core. We have an increasing number of workloads in the cloud and at the edge, and that's really where the growth is. So being able to take that cloud-centric model and take advantage of cloud resources, like immutable storage, being able to move data from region to region inexpensively and easily, and and to be able to take that cloud-centric perspective and apply it on-premises, as well as in the cloud and at the edge is really where we believe that organizations are shifting their focus. >> Got it. We're just cracking the surface here. Phil, I wish we had more time, but I had a chance to read the Druva sponsored IDC white paper, fascinating finds. I encourage all of you to download that. Take a read. You're going to learn some very interesting statistics and recommendations for how you can really truly deploy data resilience in your organization. Phil, it's been a pleasure to have you on the program. Thank you for joining me. >> No problem. Thank you, Lisa. >> I'm, Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. (upbeat music)

>>Hey everyone. Welcome back to the Cube's day one coverage of VMware Explorer, 2022 live from San Francisco. I'm Lisa Martin, and I'm basically sitting with the cloud. I got a power panel here with me. You are not gonna wanna miss the segment, please. Welcome, nor Barage I probably did. I do. Okay on that. Great, thank you. VP and GM of cloud solutions at VMware. Thanks for joining us. Field brother tune is back our alumni VP solutions and alliances at NetApp bill. Great to see you in person. Thank you. And Steve Jones, GM SAP, and VMware cloud at Amazon. Welcome guys. Thank you. Pleasure. So we got VMware, NetApp and Amazon. I was telling Phil before we went live, I was snooping around on the NetApp website the other day. And I saw a tagline that said two is the company three is a cloud, but I get to sit with the cloud. This is fantastic. Nora, talk to us about the big news that came out just about 24 hours ago. These three powerhouse, we >>Were super excited. We are celebrating five years of VMware cloud this week. And with three powerhouses here, we're announcing the general availability of VMware cloud and AWS with NetApp on tap. We have AWS FSX. And so this solution is now generally available across all global regions. We are super excited with all our joint customers and partners to bring this to the market. >>So Steve, give us your perspective as AWS as the biggest hyperscaler. Talk about the importance of the partnership and the longstanding partnerships that you've had with both NetApp and VMware. >>Yeah, you bet. So first all, maybe I'll start with Ryan and VMware. So we've had a very long standing partnership with VMware for over five years now. One thing that we've heard consistently from customers is they, they want help in reducing the heavy lifting or the, the friction that typically comes with cloud adoption. And VMware's been right in the trenches with us and helping with that over the years with the VMware cloud on AWS offering. And, and now that we've got NetApp, right, the FSX on tap solution, a managed storage solution that is, is been known and trusted in the on-premises world. Now available since September on AWS, but now available for use with VMware cloud is just amazing for customers who are looking for that agility, >>Right? Phil talk about NetApp has done a phenomenal job in its own digital transformation journey. Talk about that as an enabler for what you announced yesterday and the, and the capabilities that NetApp is able to bring to its customers with VMware and with AWS. >>Yeah. You know, it started, it's interesting because we NetApp's always been a company that works very closely with our partners. VMware has been a huge partner of ours since gosh, 2005 probably, or sometime like that. I started working with Amazon back in about 20 13, 20 14, when we first took on tap and brought it to the Amazon platform in the marketplace ahead of what's. Now FSX ends like a dream to bring a fully managed ONAP onto the world's biggest cloud. So that work you you're really looking at about. I mean, it depends how you look at it, 15 years of work. And then as Ryan was saying that VMware was working in parallel with us on being a first party service on Amazon, we came together and, or Ryan and I came together and VMware and NetApp came together about probably about two years ago now with this vision of what we're announcing today and to have so to have GA of this combination for meaning global availability, anybody can try it today. It's just an amazing day. It's really a great day. >>Yeah. It's unbelievable how we have sort of partnered together and hard engineering problems to create a very simple outcome for customers and partners. One of the things, you know, VMware cloud is a very successful service offering with a lot of great consumption and different verticals. Things like cloud migration, you know, transforming your entire, you know, data center and moving to the cloud. Things like, you know, modernizing our apps, disaster recovery now ransomware this week. So really, really exciting uptake and innovation in that whole service. One thing customers always told us that they want more options for storage decouple from compute. And so that really helped customers to lower their total cost of ownership and get to, you know, get even more workloads into VMware cloud. And this partnership really creates that opportunity for us to provide customers with those options. >>Let me give you an example, just I was walking over here just before I walked over here. We were with a customer talking about exactly what Orion's talking about. We were modeling using a TCO calculator that we all put together as well on what we call data intensive workloads, which is in this case, it was a 500 gigabytes per VM. So not a huge amount of data per VM. The, the case study modeled out of 38% cost savings or reduction in total cost, which in the case was like 1.2 million per year of total cost down to 700 million. And just, you could do the, just depends on how many VMs you have and how big odes you have, but that's the kind of cost savings we're talking about. So the, this is a really easy value to talk about. You save a lot of money in it's exactly as nor Ryan said, because we can separate the compute and the storage. Yep. >>Yep. I was just gonna say the reason for that is it used to be with VMware cloud on AWS. If you wanted more storage for your workload, you would have to add another node. So with another node, you would get another compute node. You would get the compute, you'd get the memory and the storage, but now we've actually decoupled the ability to expand the storage footprint from the compute, allowing customers to really expand as their needs grow. And so it's, it's just a lot more flexibility. Yep. That customers had. Yeah. >>Flexibility is key. Every customer needs that they need to be agile. There's always a competitor waiting in the rear view mirror behind any business, waiting to take over. If, if they can't innovate fast enough, if they can't partner with the best of the best to deliver the infrastructure that's needed to enable those business outcomes, I wanna get your perspective, Steve, what are some of the outcomes that when you're talking to customers, you talked about fill the TCO. Those are huge numbers, very compelling. What are some of the other outcomes that customers can expect to achieve from this solution? >>That's a great question. I think customers want the flexibility. We talked about customers absolutely wanna be able to move fast. They're also very demanding customers who have had an experience with solutions like NetApp on tap on premises, right? So they've come to expect enterprise features like thin provisioning, snapshoting cloning, rapid cloning, right? And even replication of data given that customers now can leverage this type of functionality as well through the NetApp solution with VMC, they're getting all those enterprise class features from, from the storage in combination with what they already had with vs a and, and VMC. >>Steve earlier mentioned the word we used, we kind of took it from VMware or from Amazon was friction is so many workloads run in VMware VMs today to be able to just simply pick them up as is move them to Amazon makes cloud adoption. Just, I mean, frictionless is an extreme word, but it's really lowers the friction to cloud adoption. And as Steve said, then you've get all these enterprise features wherever you need to run. >>Just brings speed. >>I was just about to say, it's gotta be the speed. It has to be a huge factor here. Yep, >>Yep. Yeah. >>Sure. One of the things that we've seen with VMware cloud is operational consistency as, as a customer value because when customers are thinking about, you know, complex enterprise apps, moving that to the cloud, they need that operational consistency, which drives down their costs. They don't have to relearn new skills. They're used to VMware, they're used to NetApp. And so this partnership really fosters that operational consistency as a big customer value, and they can reuse those skills and really reapply them in this cloud model. The other thing is the cloud model here is super completely managed. If you think about that, right, customers have to do less VMware, AWS and NetApp is doing more for them. That's true in this model. >>So you're able to really deliver a lot of workforce efficiency, workforce productivity across the stack. >>Absolutely. >>And that's definitely true that it just, as it gets more complex, how do you manage it? Just continue, hear everybody talking about this, right. So when a completely managed service by VMware and Amazon is such a savings in com in management complexity, which then gets back to speed. How do I grow my plant faster? >>I mean, and really at the end of the day, customers are actually able to focus on what differentiate differentiates them, obviously versus the management of the underlying infrastructure and storage and all those, those things that are still critical, but exactly, but >>For, for the customer to be able to have to abstract the underlying underlying technology layer and focus on what differentiates them from the competition. That's like I said, right back here, right. That's especially if there's anything we've learned in the last couple of years, it's that it, that is critical for businesses across every industry, no industry exempt from this. >>None. One other thing, just an example of what you're talking about is we all work a lot on modernization techniques like using Kubernetes and container technologies. So with this, if you think about this, you, this solution, you can move an app as is modernize on the cloud. You can modernize, you can modernize and then move. You can, the flexibility that this enables like. So it's sort of like move to the cloud at your rate is a really big benefit. >>And we've seen so many customer examples of migrating modernize is how we like to summarize it, where customers are, you know, migrating, modernizing at their own pace. Yep. And the good, good thing about the platform and the service is that it is the home for all applications, virtual machines containers with Kubernetes backed by local storage, external storage options. The level of flexibility for all applications is really immense. And that drives down your TCO even more. >>What, from a target customer perspective, Noran, talk about that. Who, who is the target? Obviously I imagine VMware customers, it's NetApp customers, it's AWS, but is there, are there any targets kind of within that, that are really prime candidates for this solution? >>Yeah. A great question. First of all, the, the easy sort of overlap between all of us is our shared customer pool. And so VMware and NetApp have been partners for what, 20 years, something like that. And we have thousands of customers using our joint solutions in the data center. And so that's a very clear target for this solution, as they're considering use cases such as, you know, cloud migration, disaster recovery, virtual desktops, application modernization. So that's a very clear target and we see this day in and day out, obviously there are many other customers that would be interested in this solution, as well as they're considering, you know, AWS and we provide a whole range of consumption options for them. Right. And I think that's one of the, sort of the, the good things about our partnership, including with AWS, where customers can purchase this from VMware can purchase this from AWS and all of these different options, including from our partners really makes it very, very compelling. >>Talk a little bit about from each of your perspectives about the what's in it. For me as a partner of these companies, Steve, we'll start with you. >>I mean, what's in it for me is that it's what my customers have been asking for. And we, we have a long history, I think of providing managed services again, to remove that heavy lifting that customers often just don't want to have to do. Having seen the, the adoption of managed storage offerings, including the, the NetApp solution here and now being able to bring that into the VMware space where they're already using it in an on-premises world, and now they're moving those, those workloads being able to satisfy that need that a customer's asking for is awesome. >>We, every time we're at an AWS event, we are always talking about it's absolute customer obsession, and I know NetApp and VMware well, and know that that is a shared obsession across the three companies. >>Hey, Lisa, let me add one more thing. It's interesting, not everybody sees this, but it's really obvious that the NetApp on-prem installed base with VMware, which is tens of thousands of customers. This is an awesome solution. Not quite as obvious is that every on-prem VMware customer gets that TCO benefit. I mentioned that's not limited to the NetApp on-prem installed base. So we're really excited to be able to expose all the market that hasn't used our products on-prem to this cloud solution. And, and it's really clear customers are adopting the cloud, right? So we're, that's one of the reasons we're so excited about this is it opens up a huge new opportunity to work with new customers for us. Talk >>About those customer conversations, Phil, how, where are they happening at? What level are you talking with customers about migration to cloud? Has it changed in the last couple >>Of years? Oh yeah. You know, I've been working on this for years and a lot of the on-prem conversation, it's been a little bifurcated that on-prem is on-prem and cloud developers or cloud developers. And Amazon's done a huge amount to break that down. VMware getting in the game, a lot of it's networking complexities, those have gone down. A lot of people are cross connected and set up today, which that wasn't so true five years ago. So now it's a lot of conversations about, I hear carbon footprint reduction. I hear data all in around data center reduction. The cloud guys are super efficient operators of data center infrastructure. We were talking about different use cases like disaster recovery. It's it's everybody though. It's small companies, it's big companies. They're all sort of moving into this, it call it at least hybrid world. And that's why when I say we're get really excited about this, because it does get rid of a lot of friction for moving loads in those directions, at the rate, the customer wants to do it. >>And that one last really quick thing is I was using NetApp as an example, we have about 300 enterprise workloads. We wanna move to the cloud two, right? And so they're all running VMware, like most, most of the world. And so this solution is, looks really good to us and we're gonna do the exact, I was just out with our CIO. We're going, looking at those 300, which do we just lift and move? Which do we refactor? And how do we do that? In fact, that Ryan was out to dinner with us last night, talking about >>This it's more and more it's being driven top down. So in the early days, and I've been with Amazon for 10 years now. Yep. Early days, it was kind of developer oriented, often initiated projects. Now it's top level CIOs. Exactly. I >>Are two mandates today talking to customers. >>I think of reinvent as an it conference. Now in the way, some of these top down mandates are driven, but listen, I mean, we got great customer interest. We have been in preview for three to six months now, and we've seen a lot of customers were not able to drag their entire data center workloads because of different reasons of PCO data, intensive workloads, et cetera. And we've seen tremendous amounts of interest from them. And we're also seeing a lot of new customers in the pipeline that want to consider VMware cloud now that we have these great storage options. >>So there's a pretty healthy Tam I'm hearing. >>Absolutely. >>I think so. Yeah. It's interesting. Another, just both like WWT and Presidio, channel partners, big, huge channel partners. It takes no selling to explain. We, we just say, Hey, we're doing this. And they start building services. Presidio is here with us talking about a customer win that they got. So this is it. It's easy for people to see why this is a cool, a cool solution. >>The value prop is there >>Definitely >>There's no having appeal the onion to >>Find it. No, the money savings. It's just in what or Ryan said, a lot of people have seen the, the seen an obstacle of cost. Yeah. So the TCO benefit, I mentioned removes that obstacle. And then that opens the door to all the features Steve was talking about of the advanced storage features and things on the platform. >>So is there a customer that's been in beta on this solution that you can talk about in, in terms of what they were looking for, the challenges that you helped them erase and the outcomes they're achieving? >>Yeah, sure. I can. I can provide one example. A large financial customer was looking at this during the preview phase and you know, for, for, for reasons before that were already a customer, but they were not able to attract a lot of their other workloads from other business units. And with this solution, now the service is a much better candidate for those workloads and those business units that had not considered VMware cloud. So we're really excited to see new workloads coming from that particular customer, given this particular solution and the whole TCO math for them was very, very straightforward and simple. And this became a more attractive option for that particular customer. >>Is there a shadow it elimination factor here in this technology and who you're selling to? >>Not real, I, don't not intent. Wouldn't intentionally. I wouldn't say yeah, not intentionally. I, it was funny with the customers I was thinking is yes. The question, the customers that are in the preview are seeing the benefits that we're talking about. The, one of the reasons we started the project on our side a number of years ago was this very large cement company was looking for carbon CO2 reduction. Part of that was moving disaster recovery to the cloud. There was a lot of friction in the solution prior to this, the, the customers have done some of the things we're talking about, but there's a, it takes a lot of skill. And we were looking at working with that customer going, how could we simplify this? And that was from our point of NetApp's point of view, it, it drove us to VMware and to AWS saying, can't we pull some of the friction of this out. And I think that that's what we've seen in the, in the previews. And it's, that's what I meant. It's so exciting to go from having say, I know we have about 20 previews right now, going to the globe today is the, is the exciting news today. >>And is the solution here in booze that it can be demoed and folks can kind of get their hands on it. >>Yeah. Yeah. They can go to the VMware cloud booth at the expo and they can get their hands on their demo and they can take it for a test drive. >>Excellent. >>You can run TCO calculators and do your own math and see what you're gonna all this, the all that's integrated today. We >>Also have pilots where we can help walk customers through a scenario of their own. >>Yep. Excellent. Is there, is there a, a joint website that you guys have, we should drive folks to? >>Yeah, it's >>Actually talk about the press release. It's >>It's yours. So >>It's it's prominently on our website. Okay. VMware cloud. It is onc.vmware.com where we also have the other, you know, our corporate marketing websites that have this vmware.com is a great starting point. Yeah. And we feature the solution. Prominently customers can get started today and they can even participate in the hands on labs here and take the solution for a test drive. >>All right. Last question, nor Ryan, we'll start with you on this. Here we are. I love the theme of this event, the center of the multicloud universe. Does it not sound like a Marvel movie? I feel like there should be some, is there any superheroes running around? Cause I really feel like there should be, how is this solution an enabler of allowing customers to really extract the most of value from their multi-cloud world that they're living in? >>Yeah. I mean, look, I mean, our mission is to build, run, managed, secure applications in any cloud, right. And regu has been talking about this with the keynote this morning as well. You know, at least with NetApp, we share a very good joint vision of enabling customers to, you know, place applications with really good TCO across clouds. And so it's really good story I feel. And I think this is a really good step in that direction where customers have choice and flexibility in terms of where they put their applications in the TCO value that they get. >>Awesome. Guys, you gotta come back next with a customer would love to dig. Maybe at reinvent sounds, we can dig into more and to see a great story of how a customer came together and is really leveraging that the power that is sitting next to me here. Thank you all so much for joining me and having this great conversation. Congratulations on the announcement and it being GA. >>Thank you. Awesome. >>Thank you. Thanks Lisa. All right. Fun conversation. I told you power panel for my guests. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube, keep it right here for more live coverage of VMware Explorer, 2022 from downtown San Francisco. We'll be right back with our next guest.

>>The cube presents HPE discover 2022 brought to you by HPE. >>Welcome back to the Venetian convention center. You're watching the Cube's coverage of HPE discover 2022. The first discover live discover in three years, 2019 was the last one. The cube we were just talking about. This has been at H HP discover. Now HPE since 2011, my co-host John furrier. We're pleased to welcome Phil Maru. Who's the executive vice president and general manager of HPE Aruba. And he's joined by David Hughes, the chief product and technology officer at HPE Aruba gentleman. Welcome to the cube. Good to see you. Thank you. Thank >>You. >>Okay, so you guys talk a lot, Phil, about the intelligent edge. Yep. Okay. What do you, what do you mean by that? >>Yeah, so we, well, we're kind of focused on, is providing technology to customers that sits out at the edge and typically the edge would be, uh, any location out of the data center or out of the cloud. So for the most part, our customers would deploy our technology either in their office premises or maybe retail premises shops, uh, maybe deploying out of the home where their employees are on a factory floor. And we're really talking about technology to connect both people and devices back to, um, systems and technology throughout an organization. So, but >>I, I, you know, sometimes I call it the near edge and the far edge yeah. Near, near edge. Maybe as we saw home Depot up on the stage yesterday far, Edge's like space. Right. You're including all of that. Right. That's >>Edge. >>Yeah. And actually we, we, we, you know, we've got a broad range of technology that actually works within the data center as well. So, you know, what we are focused on is providing, uh, network technology, software and services. And, you know, for the most part, our heritage is at the edge, but it's more pervasive than that. So >>If you have the edge, you got connectivity and power, that's an edge. How much, um, is the physical world being connected now you're seeing robotics automation. Yeah. Ex and with machine learning specifically in compute, really driving a new acceleration at the edge. What you, how do you guys view that? What's your reaction? Yeah. >>I think, look, it, I think as connectivity is improving and that's both in terms of wifi connectivity, so, you know, wifi technology continues to, uh, advance and also you've got this new kind of private 5g area, just generally connectivity is becoming more pervasive and that's helping some industries that haven't previously embraced it. And I think industrial is, is one of the big ones. So, you know, historically it was difficult for kind of car manufacturers to really enable a factory floor. But now the connectivity is connectivity is better. That gives them the opportunity to be able to really change how they do things. So >>David, if you do take an outside in view, mm-hmm <affirmative>, uh, and, and, and when you talk to customers, what are they telling you and how is that informing your product strategy? >>Yeah, well, you >>Know, I think there's, there's several themes we hear. One is, you know, it's really important, better work from anywhere they wanna enable their employees, um, to get the same experience, whether they're at home or on the road or in their branch office or at headquarters. Um, you know, people are also concerned that as they deploy, deploy all of this IOT and pursuit of digital transformation, they don't want those devices to be a weak point where someone breaks into one device and moves naturally, um, across the network. So they want to have this great experience for their customers and their users, but they wanna make sure that they're not compromising security, um, in any way. And so it's about getting that balance between ease of use and, and security. That's one of the primary things we hear, >>You know, Dave, one of the things we talked about many, many years ago was when hybrid and was starting to come out multi-cloud was on the, on the table early on. Uh, we were, we were saying, Hey, the data center is just a big edge, right? I mean, if you have cloud operations and you see what's going on with GreenLake here now, the momentum hybrid cloud is cloud operations, right? An edge off data centers to a big edge on premises. And you got the edge as you have cloud operations, like say GreenLake, plugging in partners and diverse environments. You're connecting, not just branch offices that are per perimeter based. You have no perimeter and you have now other companies connecting mm-hmm <affirmative> so you got data and you got network. How do you guys see that transition as GreenLake has a very big ecosystem part of it, partners and whatnot. >>Yeah. So, you know, I think for us, um, the ecosystem of partners that we have is critical in terms of delivering what our customers need. And, you know, I think one of the really important areas is around verticals. So, um, you know, when you think about different verticals, they have similar problems, but you need to tailor the solutions. Um, to each of those, you know, we are talking a bit about devices and people. When you look at say a healthcare environment, there can be 30 devices there for each patient. And, um, so there's connecting all those devices securely, but we have partners that will help pull all of that together that may be focused on, um, you know, medical environment that may focused on stadiums. They may be focused on industrial. Um, so having partners that understand those verticals and working closely with them to deliver solutions is important in our go to market. >>So another kind of product question and related to what you just said, David, I got connectivity, speed, reliability, cost security, or maybe a missing something. But you, you said earlier, you gonna gotta balance those. How do you do that? And do you do that for the specific use cases? Like for instance, you just mentioned stadiums and 81 and how do you balance those and, and do you tailor those for the use cases? >>Yeah, well, I think it depends on the customer and different people have different views about where they need to be. So some people are, are so afraid about security. They wanna be air gapped and completely separate than the internet. That would be one extreme mm-hmm <affirmative> other people, you know, look at it and see what's happening with COVID with everyone working from home with people being able to work from Starbucks or the airport. And they're beginning to think, well, why is the branch that much different? And so what I think we are seeing is, you know, a reevaluation of how people connect to, um, the apps they're using and, uh, you know, you, you, you've probably for sure heard people talking about zero trust, talking about micro segmentation. You know, I think what we we see is that people wanna be able to build a network in a way where rather than any device being able to talk to any device or any person, which is where the internet started, we wanna build to build networks where people or devices can only talk to the destinations that are necessary for them to do their job. >>And so a lot of the technology that we are building into the network is really about making security intrinsic by limiting what can talk to what that's >>Actually micro, micro segmentations, zero trust, um, these all point to a modern, the modern network, as you say, Antonio Neri was just on the cube, talking about programmability, substrate, the words like that come to mind, what is the modern network look like? I mean, you have to be agile. You have to be programmable. You have to have security. Can you describe in your words, what does the modern network these days need to look like? How should customers think about architecting them? What are some of the table stakes and what are some of the differentiators that customers need to do to have a modern network? >>Yeah, well, you covered off a coup a few quarter, one there with clarity and so on. So let me pick one that you didn't mention. And, and I, you know, I think we are seeing, you know, a lot of interest around network as a service. And, you know, when we think about network as a service, we think about it broadly, um, you know, for consumers, we're getting more and more used to buying things as a service versus buying a thing. When you, when you get Alexa, you care about how well she answers your questions, you don't care about what CPU is or how much Ram Alexa has. And likewise with networking, people are caring about the outcomes of keeping their employees connected, keeping their, their devices and systems running. And so what for us, what NASA is all about is that shift of thinking about a network as being a collection of devices that get managed to being a framework for connectivity and running it from the point of view of those outcomes. >>And so whether, you know, it's about CapEx versus OPEX or about do it yourself, managing the network yourself versus outsourcing that, um, or it's about the, you know, Greenfield versus brownfield, each of our customers has got a different starting point, but they're all getting heading towards this destination of being able to treat their network as a service. And so that is, you know, a key area of innovation for us and whether it's big customers like home Depot that you heard about yesterday, um, where we kind of manage everything for them on a, as on a store basis, um, for connectivity, um, or, you know, the recent, um, skew based nest that we launched, which is a really scalable foundation for our partners to build nest offerings around. Um, we see this as a key part of network modernization. Yeah. >>And one of the things, again, that's great stuff. Uh, infrastructure is code, which was really kind of pioneer the DevOps movement in cloud kind of as platform level. And you got data ops now and AI at the top of the stack, we were always wondering when network as code was gonna come, uh, and where you actually have it, where it's programmable. I mean, we all know what policies do do. They're good. That's all great network as code. >>Yeah. >>And that's the concept that's like DevOps, it's like, make it work just seamlessly, just be always on. And >>Yeah. And smart, you know, people are always looking for the, for the easy button. Um, and so they want, they want things to operate easily. They want it to be easy to manage. And, you know, I actually think there's a little bit of a, um, a conflict between networkers code and the easy button, right? So it depends on the class of customers. Some customers like financials, for instance, have a huge software development organizations that are extremely capable that could, that can go with program ability that want things as code. But the majority of the, of, of the verticals that we deal with, um, don't have those big captive software organizations. And so they're really looking for automation and simplicity and they wanna outsource that problem. So in Aruba central, we have invested a lot to make it really easy for our customers to, um, get what they need, you know, is that movement of zero code. It's more like zero code. They want, they want something packaged now >>The headless networks. Yeah. Low code, no code >>Kind of thing. Yeah, that's right. And, you know, obviously for people that have the sophistication that want to, um, do the most advanced things, we have APIs. And so we support that kind of programmable way of doing things. But I'd say that that's that's, those are more specialized customers. So >>Phil, yeah. Uh, is that the strategy? I mean, David listed off a number of, of factors here is that Aruba's strategy to modernize networks to actually create the easy button through network as a service is as simple as dial tone. Is that how we >>Should think? I mean, the way I think about the strategy is I think about it as a triangle, really, along the bottom, we've got the products and services that we offer and we continue to add more products and services. We either buy companies such as silver peak a couple of years ago, or we build, uh, additional products and by, and by the way, that's in response to customers who are frustrated with some other suppliers and wanna move on mass over to, uh, companies like ourselves. So at the bottom layer of the product and services, and then the other side of the triangle one would be NAS, which we talked about, which is kind of move to buying network and as a service. And then the other side of the triangle is the platform, which for us is river central, which is part of HP GreenLake. And that's really all about, you know, kind of making it easy for customers to manage networks and Aruba central right now has got about 120,000 live customers on it. It connects to about 2 million devices and it's collecting a lot of data as well. So we anonymously collect data from all of our customers. We've got one and a half billion data points in the platform. And what we do is we let that data kind of look for anomalies and spot problems on the network before they happen for customers. >>So Aruba central predated, uh, uh, GreenLake GreenLake. Yeah. And, and so did you write to GreenLake through GreenLake APIs? How, what was the engineering work to accomplish that? >>Yeah, so really, um, Aruba central is kind of the Genesis of the GreenLake platform. So we took Aruba central and made it more generic okay. To build the GreenLake cloud platform. And you know, what we've done very recently is bring, bring Aruba into that unified infrastructure, along with storage and compute. So the same sign-on applies across all of HP's, um, products, the same way of managing licenses, managing devices. And so it provides us, uh, great foundation going forwards to, um, solve more comprehensively. Our customers automation requires. >>So, so just a quick follow. So Aruba actually was the main spring of GreenLake from the standpoint of okay. Sing, like you said, single sign on a platform that could evolve and become more, more generic. Yes. So, okay. So that was a nice little, um, bonus of the acquisition, you know, it's now the whole company >><laugh> Aruba taking over. >>Yeah. There's been a lot of work to, to, uh, you know, make it generic and, and widely applicable. Right. Yeah. Um, so, but >>You were purpose >>Built for yeah. Well it's foundational. Yes. So foundational for GreenLake, they built on top of it. Yeah. So you mentioned the data points, billions of data points. So I gotta ask you, cuz we're seeing this, um, copy more and more with machine learning, driving a lot of acceleration, cuz you can do simulations with machine learning and compute. We had Neil McDonal done earlier. He's a compute guy, you got networking. So with all this, um, these services and devices being put on and off the network humans, can't actually figure this out. You can discover what's on the network. How are you guys viewing the discovery and monitoring because there's no perimeter okay. On the network anymore. So I want to know what's out there. Um, how do you get through it? How does machine learning and AI play into this? >>Yeah. I mean, what we are trying to do is obviously flag trends for customers and say, Hey look, you know, we can either see something happening with your network. So there's a particular issue over here and we need to, I dunno, free up more capacity to solve that. Or we're looking at how their network is running and then comparing that with anonymized data from all of our other customers as well. So we're just helping find those problems. But yeah, you're right. I mean, I think it is becoming more of an issue for organizations, you know, how do you manage the network, >>But you see machine learning and AI playing a big part. >>Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I think, uh, AI massively and, and other technology advances as well that we make. So recently we, uh, also announced the availability of location awareness within our access points. And that might sound like a simple thing. But when network, when companies build out their networks, they often lose or they potentially could lose the records as to, well, where were the access points that we laid out and actually where are they not within, you know, 20 feet, but where actually are they? So we introduced kind of location, finding technology as well into our, uh, access points to make it easy for >>Customers. So Aruba one of the best, if not the best acquisition. I think that HP E has made, um, it's made by three par was, you know, good. It saved the storage business. Okay. That was more of a defensive play. Uh, but to see Aruba, it's a growth business. You guys report on it every quarter. Yeah. It's obviously a key ingredient to enable uh, uh, GreenLake and, and a that's another example, nimble was similar. We're much smaller sort of more narrow, but taking the AI ops piece and bringing it over. So it's, it was great to see HPE executing on some of its M and a as opposed to just leaving them alone and not really leveraging 'em. So guys, yeah. Congratulations really appreciate you guys coming on and explaining that. Congratulations on all the, all the great work and thanks for coming on the cube. Okay. >>Thank you guys. Yeah. Thanks for having us. >>All right, John, and I'll be back right after this short break. You're watching the cube, the leader in enterprise tech coverage from HPE Las Vegas, 2022. We'll be right back.

(soft upbeat music) >> Narrator: theCUBE presents HPE Discover 2022 brought to you by HPE. >> Hey everyone. Welcome back to Las Vegas. theCUBE is live. We love saying that. theCUBE is live at HPE Discover '22. It's about 8,000 HP folks here, customers, partners, leadership. It's been an awesome day one. We're looking forward to a great conversation next. Lisa Martin, Dave Vellante, two guests join us. We're going to be talking about the power of the channel. Mike Beltrano joins us, Worldwide Channel Sales Leader at AMD, and Phil Soper is here, the North America Head of Channel Sales at HPE. Guys, great to have you. >> Thanks for having us. >> Great to be here. >> So we're talking a lot today about the ecosystem. It's evolved tremendously. Talk to us about the partnership. Mike, we'll start with you. Phil, we'll go to you. What's new with HPE and AMD Better Together? >> It's more than a partnership. It's actually a relationship. We are really tied at the hip, not just in X86 servers but we're really starting to get more diverse in HP's portfolio. We're in their hyper-converged solutions, we're in their storage solutions, we're in GreenLake. It's pretty hard to get away from AMD within the HP portfolio so the relationship is really good. It's gone beyond just a partnership so starting to transition now down into the channel, and we're really excited about it. >> Phil, talk about that more. Talk about the evolution of the partnership and that kind of really that pull-down. >> I think there's an impression sometimes that AMD is kind of the processor that's in our computers and it's so much more, the relationship is so much more than the inclusion of the technology. We co-develop solutions. Interesting news today at Antonio's presentation of the first Exascale supercomputer. We're solving health problems with the supercomputer that was co-developed between AMD and HPE. The other thing I would add is from a channel perspective, it's way more than just what's in the technology. It's how we engage and how we go to market together. And we're very active in working together to offer our solutions to customers and to be competitive and to win. >> Describe that go-to-market model that you guys have, specifically in the channel. >> So, there is a, his organization and mine, we develop joint go-to-market channel programs. We work through the same channel ecosystem of partners. We engage on specific opportunities. We work together to make sure we have the right creative solution pricing to be aggressive in the marketplace and to compete. >> It's a great question because we're in a supply chain crisis right now, right? And you look at the different ways that HP can go to market through the channel. There's probably about four or five ways that channel partners can provide solutions, but it's also route to purchase for the customers. So, we're in a supply chain crisis right now, but we have HP AMD servers in stock in distribution right now. That's a real big competitive advantage, okay? And if those aren't exactly what you need, HP can do custom solutions with AMD platforms all day, across the board. And if you want to go ahead and do it through the cloud, you've got AMD technology in GreenLake. So, it's pretty much have it your way for the customers through the channel and it's really great for the customers too because there's multiple ways for them to procure the equipment through the channel so we really love the way that HP allows us to kind of integrate into their products, but then integrate into their procurement model down through the channel for the end user to make the right choice. So, it's fantastic. >> You mentioned that AMD's in HCI, in storage, in GreenLake and in the channel. What are the different requirements within those areas? How does the channel influence those requirements and what you guys actually go to market with? >> Well, it comes down to awareness. Awareness is our biggest enemy and the channel's just huge for us because AMD's competitive advantage in our technology is much different. And when you think about price and performance and security and sustainability, that's what we're delivering. And really the channel kind of plugs that in and educates their customers through their marketing and demand gen, kind of influences when they hear from their customers or if they're proactively touching them, influences the route to purchase based on their situation, if they want to pay for it as a service, if they want to finance it, if it does happen to be in stock and speed of delivery is important to them, the channel partner influences that through the relationships and distribution or they can go ahead and place it as a custom to order. So, it's just really based on where they're at in their purchasing cycle and also, it's not about the hardware as much as it's about the software and the applications and the high-value workloads that they're running and that kind of just dictates the platform. >> Does hardware matter? >> Yes, it sure does. It does, man. We're just kind of, it's kind of like the vessel at this point and our processors and our GPS are in the HP vessel, but it is about the application. >> I love that analogy. I would say, absolutely does, workloads matter more and then what's the hardware to run those workloads is really critical. >> And to your point though, it's not just about the CPU anymore. It's about, you guys have made some acquisitions to sort of diversify. It's about all the other supporting sort of actors, if you will, that support those new workloads. >> Let me give you an example that's being showcased at this show, okay? Our extreme search solution with being driven by Splunk, okay? And it's a cybersecurity solution that the industry is going to have to be able to handle in regards to response to any sort of breach and when you think about, they have to search through the data and how they have to get through it and do it in a timely fashion. What we've done is developed a DL385 solution where we have a epic processor from AMD, we have a Xilinx which who we own now, they're FGPA, and Samsung SSDs which are four terabytes per drive packed in a DL385. Now you add the Splunk solution on top of that and if there ever is a breach, it would normally take about days to go ahead and access that breach. Now it can be done in 25 minutes and we have that solution here right now so it's not like we acquire Xilinx and we're waiting to integrate it. We hit the ground running and it's fantastic 'cause the solution's being driven by one of our top partners, WWT, and it's live in their booth here today so we're kind of showing that integration of what AMD is doing with our acquisitions in HP servers and being able to show that today with a workload on top of it is real deal. >> Purpose-built to scan through all those log files and actually surface the inside. >> Exactly what it is, and it's on public sector right now, that's a requirement to be able to do that and to not have it take weeks and be able to do it in 25 minutes is pretty impressive. >> Those are the outcomes customers are demanding? >> That's it. People are, if you're purchasing an outcome, HP can deliver it with AMD and if you're looking to build your own, we can give it to you that way too so, it's flexibility. >> Absolutely critical. Mike, from your perspective on the partnership we've seen and obviously a lot of transformation at HPE over the last couple of years, Antonio stood on this stage three years ago and said, "By 2022, we're going to deliver the entire portfolio as a service." How influential has AMD been from a relationship perspective on what he said three years ago and where they are today? >> Oh my gosh! We've been with them all the way through. I mean, HP is just such a great partner, and right now, we're the VDI solution on GreenLake so it's HP GreenLake, VDI solutions powered by AMD. We love that brand recognition as a service, okay? Same with high-performance computing powered by AMD, offered on HP GreenLake so it's really changed it a lot because as a service, it's just a different way for a customer to procure it and they don't have to worry about that hardware and the stack and anything like that. It's more about them going into that GreenLake portal and being able to understand that they're paying it just like they pay their phone bill or anything else so it's really Antonio's been spot-on with that because that's a reality today and it's being delivered through the channel and AMD's proud to be a part of it and it's much different 'cause we don't need to be as evolved as we have to be from a hardware sale perspective when it's going through GreenLake and it makes it much easier for us. >> Phil, you talked about workloads, really kind of what matter, how are they evolving? How is that affecting? What are customers grabbing you and saying, "We need this." What do you and from a workload standpoint and how are you delivering that? >> Well, the edge to the cloud platform or GreenLake is very much as a service offering, aimed at workloads. And so, if HPE is building and focusing its solutions on addressing specific workload needs, it's not about necessarily the performance you mentioned, or you're asking the question about hardware. It's not necessarily about that. It's, what is the workload, should the workload be, or could the workload be in public cloud or is it a workload that needs to be on premise and customers are making those choices and we're working with those customers to help them drive those strategies and then we adapt depending on where the customer wants the workload. >> Well, it's interesting, because Antonio in his keynote today said, "That's the wrong question," and my reaction was that's the question everybody's asking. It may be the wrong question, but that's what so, your challenge is to, I guess, get them to stop asking that question and just run the right tool for the right job kind of thing. >> That's exactly what it's about because you take high-value workloads, okay? And that can mean a lot of different things and if you just pick one of them, let's say like VDI or hyper-converged. HP's the only game in town where they can kind of go into a gun, a battle with four different guns. They give you a lot of choices and they offer them on an AMD platform and they're not locking you in. They give you a lot of flexibility and choice. So, if you were doing hyper-converged through HPE and you were looking to do it on AMD platform, they can offer to you with VMware vSAN ReadyNodes. They can offer it to you with SimpliVity. They can offer it to you with Nutanix. They can offer it to you with Microsoft, all on an AMD stack. And if you want to bring your own VMware and go bare metal, HP will just give you the notes. If you want to go factory integrated or if you want to purchase it via OEM through HP and have them support it, they just deliver it any way you want to get it. It's just a fantastic story. >> I'll just say, look, others could do that, but they don't want to, okay? That's the fact. Sometimes it happens, sometimes the channel cobbles it together in the field, but it's like they do it grinding their teeth so I mean, I think that is a differentiator of HPE. You're agnostic to that. In fact, by design. >> They can bring your own, you can bring your own software. I mean, it's like, you just bring your own. I mean, if you have it, why would we make a customer buy it again? And HP gives them that flexibility and if it's multiple hypervisors and it's brand agnostic, it's more about, let's deliver you the nodes, purpose-built, for the application that you're going to run in that workload and then HP goes ahead and does that across their portfolio on a custom to order. It's just beautiful for us to fit the need for the customer. >> Well, you're meeting customers where they are. >> Yes. >> Which in today's world is critical. There's no, really no other option for companies. Customers are demanding. Demands are not going to go. We're not going to see a decrease after the pandemic's over of demand, right? And the expectations on businesses. So meeting the customers where they are, giving them that choice, that flexibility is table stakes. >> How has those, you've mentioned supply chain constraints, it sounds like you guys are managing that pretty well. It's I think it's a lot of these hard to get supporting components, maybe not the most expensive component, but they just don't have it. So you can't ship the car or you can't ship the server, whatever it is, how is that affecting the channel? How are they dealing with that? Maybe you could give us an update. >> Oh, the channel's just, we love them, they're the front line, that's who the customers call in, who's been waiting to get their technology and we're wading through it, thank goodness that we have GreenLake because if you wanted to buy it traditionally, because HP is supplying supply-to-purchase through distribution in stock, but it's very limited. And then if you go customer order, that's where the long lead times come into place because it's not just the hard drives and memory and the traditional things that are constrained now. Now it's like the clips and the intangibles and things like that and when you get to that point, you got to just do the best you can and HP supply chain has just been fantastic, super informative, AMD, we're not the problem. We got HP, plenty of processors and plenty of accelerators and GPUs and we're standing with them because that back to the relationship, we're facing the customer with them and managing their expectations to the best we can and trying to give them options to keep their business floating. >> So is that going to be, is this a supply chain constraints could be an accelerant for GreenLake because that capacity is in place for you to service your customers with GreenLake presumably. You're planning for that. There's headroom there in terms of being able to deliver that. If you can't deliver GreenLake, all this promise. >> I would say I would be careful not to position GreenLake as an answer to supply chain challenges, right? I think there's a greater value proposition to a client, and keep in mind, you still have technology at the heart of it, right? And so, and to your question though about our partners, honestly in a lot of ways, it's heartbreaking given the challenges that they face, not just with HPE, but other vendors that they sell and support and without our partners and managing those, we'd be in a world of hurt, frankly and we're working on options. We work with our partners really closely. We work with AMD where we have constraints to move to other potential configurations. >> Does GreenLake make it harder or easier for you to forecast? Because on the one hand, it's as a service and on the other hand, I can dial it down as a customer or dial it up and spike it up if I need to. Do you have enough experience to know at this point, whether it's easier or harder to forecast? >> I think intuitively it's probably harder because you have that variable component that you can't forecast, right? It's with GreenLake, you have your baseline so you know what that baseline is going to be, the baseline commitment and you build in that variable component which is as a service, you pay for what you consume. So that variable component is the one thing that is we can estimate but we don't know exactly what the customer is going to use. >> When you do a GreenLake deal, how does it work? Let's say it's a two-year deal or a three-year deal, whatever and you negotiate a price with a customer for price per X. Do you know like what that contract value is going to be over the life or do you only know that that baseline and then everything else is upside for you and extra additional cost? So how does that work? >> It's a good question. So you know both, you know the baseline and you know what the variable capacity is, what the limits are. So at the beginning of the contract, that's what you know, whether or not a customer determines that they have to expand or do a change order to add another workload into the configuration is the one thing that we hope happens. You don't know. >> But you know with certainty that over the life of that contract, the amount of that contract that's booked, you're going to recognize at some point that. You just don't know when. >> Yes, and so that, and that's to your question, you know that element, the fluctuation in terms of usage is depending on what's happening in the world, right? The pandemic, as an example, with GreenLake customers, probably initially at the beginning of the pandemic, their usage went down for obvious reasons and then it fluctuates up. >> I think a lot of people don't understand that. That's an interesting nuance. Cool, thank you. >> Guys, thanks so much for joining us on the program, talking about the relationship that AMD and HPE have together, the benefits for customers on the outcomes that it's achieving. We appreciate your insights and your time. >> Thanks for having us, guys. >> Appreciate it. >> Our pleasure. >> Phil: Thank you. >> For our guests and Dave Vellante. I'm Lisa Martin live in Las Vegas at HPE Discover '22. Stick around. Our keynote analysis is up next. (soft upbeat music)

>>10 years ago, a group of industry storage veterans formed a company called Infinidat. The DNA of the company was steeped in the heritage of its founder, Moshe Yanai, who had a reputation for relentlessly innovating on three main areas, the highest performance, rock solid availability, and the lowest possible cost. Now these elements have historically represented the superpower triumvirate of a successful storage platform. Now, as Infinidat evolved, landed on a fourth vector, that has been a key differentiator and its value proposition, and that is petabyte scale. Hello everyone. And welcome to this Qube conversation. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm pleased to welcome in two longtime friends of theCube. Phil Bullinger is newly minted CEO of Infinidat and of course, Lee Caswell, VMware's VP of Marketing for the cloud platform business unit. Gents, welcome. >>Great to be here. Always good to see you guys. Phil, so you're joining at the 10 year anniversary mark. Congratulations on the appointment. What attracted you to the company? >>You know I spent a long time in my career at enterprise storage and, and enjoying many of the opportunities, you know, through a number of companies. Last fall when I became aware of the Infinidat opportunity and it immediately captured my attention because of frankly my respect for the product through several opportunities I've had with enterprise customers in selling cycles of different products, if they happened to be customers of Infinidat, , they were not bashful about talking about their satisfaction with the product, their level of delight with it. And so I think from, from the sidelines, I've always had a lot of respect for the Infinidat platform, the implementation of the product quality and reliability that it's kind of legendary for. And so when the opportunity came along, it really captured my interest in of course behind a great product is almost always a great team. >>And as I got to know the company and the board, and, you know, some of the leaders, and learned about the momentum and the business, it was just a very, very compelling opportunity for me. And I'll have to say just, you know, 60 days into the job. Everything I hoped for is here, not only a warm welcome to the company, but an exciting opportunity with respect to where Infinidat is at today with the growth of the business. The company has achieved a level of consistent growth through 2020, cashflow positive, EBITDA positive. And now it's a matter of scaling, scaling the business and it's something that I have had success with several times in my career and really, really enjoying the opportunity here at Infinidat to do that. >>That's great. Thanks for that. Now, of course, Lee, VMware was founded nearly a quarter century ago and carved out a major piece of the enterprise pie and predominantly that's been on prem, but the data center's evolving the cloud is evolving, and this universe is expanding. How do you see the future of that on-prem data center? >>No, I think Satya recently said, right, that, that we've reached max consolidation almost right. You pointed that out earlier. I thought that was really interesting, right. You know, we believe in the distributed hybrid cloud and you know, the reasons for that actually turn out to be storage led in there and in, in the real thinking about it, because we're going to have distributed environments and, you know, one of the things that we're doing with Infinidat here today, right, is we're showing how customers can invest intelligently and responsibly on prem and have bridges in across the hybrid cloud. We do that through something called the VMware Cloud Foundation. That's a full stack offering that, uh, an interesting here, right? It started off with a HCI element, but it's expanded into storage and storage at scale, you know, because storage is going to exist... We have very powerful storage value propositions, and you're seeing customers go and deploy both. We're really excited about seeing Infinidat lean into the VMware Cloud Foundation and vVols actually as a way to match the pace of change in today's application world. >>These trends, I mean, building bridges is what we called it. And so that takes a lot of hard work, especially when you're doing from on-prem into hybrid, across clouds, eventually the edge, you know, that's a, that's a non-trivial task. How do you see this playing out in market trends? >>Yeah. You know, we're, we're in the middle of this every day as, as you know, Dave, uh, and certainly Lee, uh, data center architectures ebb and flow from centralized to decentralized, but clearly data locality, I think, is driving a lot of the growth of the distributed data center architecture, the edge data centers, but core is still very significant for, for most enterprise. Uh, and it's, it's, it has, it has a lot to do with the fact that most enterprises want to own their own cloud. You know, when a Fortune 15 or a Fortune 50 or Fortune 100 customer, when they talk about their cloud, they don't want to talk about, you know, the AWS cloud or the GCP cloud or the Azure cloud. They want to talk about their cloud. And almost always, these are hybrid architectures with a large on-prem or colo footprint. >>Uh, the reason for that number of reasons, right? Data sovereignty is a big deal, uh, among the highest priorities for enterprise today. The control of the security, the, the ability to recover quickly from ransomware attacks, et cetera. These, these are the things that are just fundamentally important, uh, to the business continuity and enterprise risk management plan for these companies. But I think one thing that has changed the on prem data center is the fact that it's the core operating characteristics have to take on kind of that public cloud characteristic. It has to be a transparent, seamless scalability. I think the days of, of CIO's  you know, even tolerating people showing up in their data centers with, with disk trays under their arms to add capacity is, is over. Um, they want to seamlessly add capacity. They want nonstop operation, a hundred percent uptime is the bar. >>Now it has to be a consolidation. Massive consolidation is clearly the play for TCO and efficiency. They don't want to have any compromises between scale and availability and performance. You know, the, the very characteristics that you talked about upfront, Dave, that make Infinidat unique, I think are fundamentally the characteristics that enterprises are looking for when they build their cloud on prem. Uh, I, I think our architecture also really does provide a, a set it and forget it, uh, kind of experience. Um, when we install a new Infinidat frame in an enterprise data center, our intentions are we're, we're not going to come back. We don't intend to come back, uh, to, to help fiddle with the bits or, uh, you know, tweak the configuration as applications and, and multitenant users are added. And then of course, flexible economic models. I mean, everybody takes this for granted, but you really, really do have to be completely flexible between the two rails, the CapEx rail and the OpEx rail and every, uh, every step in between. And importantly, when a customer, when an enterprise customer needs to add capacity, they don't have a sales conversation. They just want to have it right. They're already running in their data center. And that's the experience that we provide. >>Yeah. You guys are aligned in that vision, that layer, that abstracts the complexity from the underlying wherever cloud on prem, et cetera. Right. Let's talk about the VMware and Infinidat relationship. I mean, every, every year at VMworld, up until last year, thank you COVID, Infinidat would host this awesome dinner. You'd have the top customers there. Very nice Vegas steak restaurant. I, of course, I always made a point to stop by not just for the food. I mean, I was able to meet some customers and I've talked to many dozens over the years, Phil, and I can echo that sentiment, but, you know, why is the VMware ecosystem so important to Infinidat? And I guess the question there is, is, is petabyte scale that really that prominent in the VMware customer base? >>It's a, it's a very, very important point. VMware is the longest standing Alliance partner of Infinidat. It goes back to really, almost the foundation of the company, certainly starting with the release one, the very first commercial release of Infinidat VMware and a very tight integration with the VMware was a core part of that. Uh, we, we have a capability. We call the Host PowerTools, which drives a consistent best practices implementation around our, our VMware, uh, integration and, and how it's actually used in the data center. And we built on that through the years through just a deep level of integration. And, um, our customers typically are, are at scale petabyte scale or average deployment as a petabyte and up, um, and over 90% of our customers use VMware. So you would say, I, I think I can safely say we're we serve the VMware environment for some of VMware's largest enterprise footprints, uh, in the market. >>I know it's like children, you got, you love all your partners, but is there anything about Infinidat that, that stands out to you a particular area where, where they shine that from your perspective? >>Yeah, I think so. You know, the, the best partnerships, one are ones that are customer driven. It turns out right. And the idea that we have joint customers at large scale and listen storage is a tough business to get, right, right. It takes time to go and mature to harden a code base. Right. And particularly when you're talking about petabyte scale, right now, you've basically got customers buying in for the largest systems. And what we're seeing overall is customers are trying to do more things with fewer component elements, makes sense, right? And so the scale here is important because it's not just scale in terms of like capacity, right. It's scale in terms of performance as well. And so, as you see customers trying to expand the number of different types of applications, this is one of the things we're seeing, right. Is new applications, which could be container-based Kubernetes orchestrated our Tanzu portfolio helps with that. >>Right. If you see what we're doing with Nvidia, for example, we announced some AI work, right. Uh, this week with vSphere. And so what you're starting to see is like the changing nature of applications and the fast pace of applications is really helping customers save us. And I want to go and find solutions that can meet the majority of my needs. And that's one of the things that we're seeing. And particularly with the vVols integration at scale, that we just haven't seen before, uh, and Infinidat has set the bar and is really setting a new, a new record for that. >>Yeah. Let me, let me comment on that a little bit, Dave, we've been a core part of the VMware Cloud Solutions Lab, which is a very, very exciting engaging, investment that VMware has made. A lot of people have contributed to in the industry, but in the, in the VMware Cloud Solutions Lab, we recently demonstrated on a single Infinidat frame over 200,000 vVols on a single system. And I think that not only edges up the bar, I think it completely redefines what, what scale means when you're talking about a vVols implementation. >>So not to geek out here, but vVols, they're kind of a game changer because instead of admins, having to manually allocate storage to performance tiers. An array, that is VASA certified, VASA is VMware, or actually vStorage API for, for storage awareness, VASA, anyway, with vVols, you can dynamically provision storage that matches the way I say it as a match as device attributes to the data and the application requirements of the VM. So Phil,  it seems like so much in VMware land hearkens back to the way mainframes used to solve problems in a modern way. Right. And vVols is a real breakthrough in that regard in terms of storage. So, so how do you guys see it? I, I presume you're, you're sort of vVols certified based on what you just said in the lab. >>Yeah. We recently announced our vVols release and we're not the first to market with the vVols, but from, from the start of the engineering project, we wanted to do it. We wanted to do it the way we think. We think at scale in everything we do, and our customers were very prescriptive about the kind of scale and performance and availability that they wanted to experience in vVols. And we're now seeing quite a bit of customer interest with traction in it. Uh, as I said, we, we redefined the bar for vVols scalability. We support on a single array now, um, a thousand storage containers. Uh, and I think most of our competition is like at one or maybe 10 or 13 or something like that. So, uh, our customers are, again at scale, they said, if you're going to do vVols, we want it... We want it at scale. We want it to embody the characteristics of your, of your platform. We really liked vVols because it, it helps, it helps separate kind of the roles and responsibilities between the VI administrator and the storage system administrator. If you're going to put a majority of your most critical bits on Infinidat in your data center, you're going to want to, you're going to want to have control over how that resource is used, but yet the vVols mplementation and the tools that we provide with that deep level of integration, give the VI, the VI administrator, all of the flexibility they need to manage applications. And vVols of course gives the VI administrator the native use of our snapshot technology. And so it makes it incredibly easy for them to administrate the platform without having to worry about the physical infrastructure, but yet the people worried about the physical infrastructure still have control over that resource. So it's, it's a game changer as far as we're concerned. >>Yeah. Storage has come a long way. Hasn't it, Lee? I'm wondering if you could add some color here, it seems in talking to ... Uh, so that's interesting. You've had, you had a hand in the growth of vSAN and it was very successful product, but he chose Infinidat for that higher end application. It seems like vVols are a key innovation in that regard. How's the vVols uptake going from your perspective. >>Yeah, I think we you know, we're in the second phase of vVols adoption, right? First phase was, Hey, technically interesting, intriguing. Um, but adoption was relatively low, I think because, you know, up until five years ago, um, applications, weren't actually changing that fast. I mean, think about it, right? The applications, ERP systems, CRM systems, you weren't changing those at the pace of what we're doing today. Now what's happening is every business is a software business. Every business, when you work, when you interact with your healthcare provider right now, it's about the apps. Like, can you go and get your schedules online? Can you email your doctors? Right? Can you go and get your labs? Right? The pace of new application development, we have some data showing that there will be more apps developed in the next five years, and then the past 40 years of computing combined. >>And so when you think about that, what's changed now is trying to manage that all from the kind of storage hardware side was just actually getting in the way you want to organize around the fastest beat rate in your infrastructure today. That's the application. So what vVols has helped you do is it allows the vSphere administrator, who's managing VMs and looking at the apps and the changing pace, and be able to basically select storage attributes, including QoS, capacity, IOPS, and do that from the vCenter console, and then be able to rectify things and manage them right from the console right next to the apps. And that provides a really integrated way. So when you have a close interaction, like what we're talking about today, or, you know, integration, um, that the Infinidat has provided now, you've got this ability to have a faster moving activity. And, you know, consolidation is one of the themes you've heard from time to time from VMware, we're consolidating the management so that the vSphere administrator can now go and manage more things. What traditional VMs yes. VMs across HCI. Sure. Plus now, plus storage and into the hybrid cloud and into like containers. It's that consolidated management, which is getting us speed and basically a consumer like experience for infrastructure deployments. >>Yeah. Now Phil mentioned the solutions lab. We've got a huge ecosystem. Several years ago, you launched this, this via the VMware. I think it's called the VMware Cloud Solutions Lab is the official name. What, explain what it does for collaboration and joint solutions development. And then Phil, I want you to go into more detail about what your participation is, but Lee, why don't you explain it? >>Yeah. You know, we don't take just any products that, because listen, there's a mixing. What we take is things that really expand that innovation frontier. And that's what we saw with Infinidat was expanding the frontier on like large capacity for many, many different mixed workloads and a commitment, right. To go and bring in, not just vVols support, of course, all the things we do for just a normal interaction with vSphere. But, uh, bringing vVols in was certainly important in showing how we operate at scale. And then importantly, as we expanded the VCF, VMware Cloud Foundation, to include storagee systems for a customer, for example, right, who has storage and HCI, right? And it looks for how to go and use them. And that's an individual choice at a customer level. We think this is strategically important. Now, as we expand a multicloud experience, that's different from the hyperscalers. Hyperscalers are coming in with two kind of issues, maybe, right? So one is it's single cloud. And the other one is there's a potential competitive aspect or from some right around the ongoing, underlying business and a hyperscaler business model. And so what VMware uniquely is doing is extending a common control plane across storage systems and HCI, and doing that in a way that basically gives customers choice. And we love that the cloud lab is really designed to go and make that a reality for customers strip out perceived and real risk. >>Yeah. To Lee's point of, it's not like there's not dozens and dozens and dozens of logos on the slide for the lab. I think there's like, you know, 10 or 12 from what I saw and Infinidat is one of them. Maybe you could talk a little bit more about your participation in the program and what it does for customers. >>Yeah, absolutely. And I would agree it's I, we liked the lab because it's not just supposed to be one of everything eye candy it's a purpose-built lab to do real things. And we like it because we can really explore, you know, some of the most contemporary, workloads in that environment, as well as solutions to what I considered some of the most contemporary industry problems. We're participating in a couple of ways. I believe we're the only petabyte scale storage solution in the Cloud Solutions Lab at VMware. One of the projects we're working on with VMware is their machine learning platform.  That's one of the first cloud solutions lab projects that we worked on at Infinidat. And we're also a core part of, of what VMware is driving from a data for good initiative. This was inspired by the idea that that tech can be used as a force for good in the world. And right now it's focused on the technology needs of nonprofits. And so we're closely working in, in the cloud solutions lab with, the VMware cloud foundation layers, as well as, their Tanzu and Kubernetes environments and learning a lot and proving a lot. And it's also a great way to demonstrate the capabilities of our platform. >>Yeah. So, yeah, it was just the other day I was on the VMware analyst meeting virtually of course in Zane and Sanjay and a number of other execs were giving the update. And, and just to sort of emphasize what we've been talking about here, this expansion of on-prem the cloud experience, the data from, especially from our survey data, we have a partner UTR that did great surveys on a regular quarterly basis, the VMware cloud on AWS, doing great for sure, but the VMware Cloud Foundation, the on-prem cloud, the hybrid cloud is really exploding and resonating with customers. And that's a good example of this sort of equilibrium that we're seeing between the public and private coming together >>Well on the VMware Cloud Foundation right now with, uh, you know, over a thousand customers, but importantly over 400 of the global 2000, it's the largest customers. And that's actually where the Venn diagram between the work that VMware Cloud Foundation is doing and Infinidat right, you know, this large scale, actually the, you know, interesting crossover, right. And, you know, listen for customers to go and take on a new store system. We always know that it's a high bar, right. So they have to see some really unique value, like how is this going to help? Right. And today that value is I want to spend less time looking down at the storage and more time looking up at the apps, that's how we're working together. Right. And how vVols fits into that, you know, with the VMware Cloud Foundation, it's the hype that hybrid cloud offering really gives customers that future-proofing right. And the degrees of freedom they're most likely to exercise. >>Right. Well, let's close with a, kind of a glimpse of the future. What do you see as the future of the data center specifically, and also your, your collaborations Lee? Why don't you start? >>I think what we hope to be true is turning out to be true. So, you know, if you've looked at the, you know, what's happening in the cloud, not everything is migrating in the cloud, but the public cloud, for example, and I'm talking about public cloud there. The public cloud offers some really interesting, unique value and VMware is doing really interesting things about like DR as a service and other things, right? So we're helping customers tap into that at the same time. Right. We're seeing that the on-prem investment is not stalling at all because of data sovereignty because of bandwidth limitations. Right. And because of really the economics of what it means to rent versus buy. And so, you know, partnering with  leaders on, in storage, right, is a core part of our strategy going forward. And we're looking forward to doing more right with Infinidat, as we see VCF evolve, as we see new applications, including container based applications running on our platform, lots of futures, right. As the pace of application change, you know, doesn't slow down. >>So what do you see for the next 10 years for Infinidat? >>Yeah, well, um, we, I appreciated your introduction because of this speak to sort of the core characteristics of Infinidat. And I think a company like us and at our, at our juncture of evolution, it's important to know exactly who you are. And we clearly are focused in that on-prem hybrid data center environment. We want to be the storage tier that companies use to build their clouds. And, uh, the partnership with VMware, uh, we talked about the Venn diagram. I think it just could not be more complimentary. And so we're certainly going to continue to focus on VMware as our largest and most consequential Alliance partner for our business going forward. Um, I'm excited about, about the data center landscape going forward. I think it's going to continue to ebb and flow. We'll see growth in distributed architectures. We'll see growth at the edge in the core data center. >>I think the, the old, the old days where customers would buy a storage system for a application environment, um, those days are over, it's all about consolidating multiple apps and thousands of users on a single platform. And to do that, you have to be really good at, uh, at a lot of things that we are very good at. Our, our strategy going forward is to evolve as media evolves, but never stray far from what has made Infinidat unique and special and highly differentiated in the marketplace. I think the work that VMware is doing and in Kubernetes >>Is very exciting. We're starting to see that really pick up in our business as well. So as we think about, um, uh, you know, not only staying relevant, but keeping very contemporary with application workloads, you know, we have some very small amount of customers that still do some bare metal, but predominantly as I said, 90% or above is VMware infrastructure. Uh, but we also see, uh, Kubernetes, our CSI driver works well with the VMware suite above it. Uh, so that, that complimentary relationship we see extending forward as, as the application environment evolves. Great, thank you. You know, many years ago when I attended my first, uh, VMworld, the practitioners that were there, you talked to them, half the conversations, they were complaining about storage and how it was so complicated and you needed guys in lab coats to solve problems. And, you know, VMware really has done a great job, publishing the APIs and encouraging the ecosystem. And so if you're a practitioner you're interested in how vVols and Infinidat and VMware were kind of raising the bar and on petabyte scale, there's some good blogs out there. Check out the Virtual Blocks blog for more information, guys. Thanks so much great to have you in the program. Really appreciate it. Thanks so much. Thank you for watching this Cube conversation, Dave Vellante. We'll see you next time.

(upbeat music) >> 10 years ago, a group of industry storage veterans formed a company called INFINIDAT. The DNA of the company was steeped in the heritage of its founder, Moshe Yanai who had a reputation for relentlessly innovating on three main areas, the highest performance, rock solid availability and the lowest possible cost. Now these elements have historically represented the superpower triumvirate of a successful storage platform. Now as INFINIDAT evolved it landed on a fourth vector that has been a key differentiator in its value proposition and that is petabyte scale. Hello everyone and welcome to this Cube Conversation. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm pleased to welcome in two long time friends of the cube, Phil Bullinger is newly minted CEO of INFINIDAT and of course, Lee Caswell, VMware's VP of marketing for the cloud platform business unit. Gents welcome. >> Thank you so much. Yeah. Great to be here Dave. >> Yeah. Great to be here Dave. Thanks. >> Always good to see you guys. Phil, so you're joining at the 10 year anniversary, Mark, congratulations on the appointment. What attracted you to the company? >> Yeah that's a great question Dave. I spent a long time in my career at enterprise storage and enjoyed many of the opportunities through a number of companies. Last fall when I became aware of the INFINIDAT opportunity and immediately captured my attention because of frankly my respect for the product. Through several opportunities I've had with enterprise customers in selling cycles of different products, if they happen to be customers of INFINIDAT they were not bashful about talking about their satisfaction with the product, their level of delight with it. And so I think from the sidelines I have always had a lot of respect for the INFINIDAT platform, the implementation of the product quality and reliability that it's kind of legendary for. And so when the opportunity came along it really captured my interest and of course behind a great product is almost always a great team and as I got to know the company and the board and some of the leaders and learned about the momentum and the business it was just a very, very compelling opportunity for me. And I'll have to say just 60 days into the job everything I hoped for is here not only a warm welcome to the company but an exciting opportunity with respect to where INFINIDAT is at today with growth of the business, the company has achieved a level of consistent growth through 2020 cashflow, positive, even thought positive and now it's a matter of scaling the business and it's something that I have had success with at several times in my career and I'm really, really enjoying the opportunity here at INFINIDAT to do that. >> That's great. Thanks for that. Now, of course Lee, VMware was founded nearly a quarter century ago and carved out a major piece of the enterprise pie and predominantly that's been on prem but the data centers evolving, the cloud is evolving and this universe is expanding. How do you see the future of that on-prem data center? >> I think Satya recently said, right? That we've reached max consolidation almost right. You pointed that out earlier. I thought that was really interesting, right? We believe in the distributed hybrid cloud and the reasons for that actually turn out to be storage led in there and in the real thinking about it because we're going to have distributed environments. And one of the things that we're doing with INFINIDAT here today, right? Is we're showing how customers can invest intelligently and responsibly on prem and have bridges in across the hybrid cloud. We do that through something called the VMware Cloud Foundation. That's a full stack offering that... And interesting here, right? It started off with a HCI element but it's expanded into storage and storage at scale. Because storage is going to exist we have very powerful storage value propositions and you're seeing customers go and deploy both. We're really excited about seeing INFINIDAT lean into the VMware Cloud Foundation and VVol has actually a way to match the pace of change in today's application world. >> Yes, so Phil you see these trends, I mean building bridges is what we called it. And so that takes a lot of hard work especially when you're doing from on-prem into hybrid, across clouds, eventually the edge, that's a non-trivial task. How do you see this playing out in market trends? >> We're in the middle of this every day and as you know Dave and certainly Lee, data center architecture is urban flow from centralized to decentralized but clearly data locality I think is driving a lot of the growth of the distributed data center architecture, the edge data centers but core is still very significant for most enterprise. And it has a lot to do with the fact that most enterprises want to own their own cloud when a Fortune 15 or a Fortune 50 or a Fortune 100 customer, when they talk about their cloud they don't want to talk about the AWS cloud or the GCP cloud or the Azure cloud. They want to talk about their cloud and almost always these are hybrid architectures with a large on-prem or colo footprint. The reason for that number of reasons, right? Data sovereignty is a big deal among the highest priorities for enterprise today. The control, the security, the ability to recover quickly from ransomware attacks, et cetera. These are the things that are just fundamentally important to the business continuity and enterprise risk management plan for these companies. But I think one thing that has changed the on-prem data center is the fact that it's the core operating characteristics have to take on kind of that public cloud characteristic, it has to be a transparent seamless scalability. I think the days of CIOs even tolerating people showing up in their data centers with disk trays under their arms to add capacity is over. They want to seamlessly add capacity, they want nonstop operation, a hundred percent uptime is the bar now it has to be a consolidation, massive consolidation, is clearly the play for TCO and efficiency. They don't want to have any compromises between scale and availability and performance. The very characteristics that you talked about upfront Dave, that make INFINIDAT unique I think are fundamentally the characteristics that enterprises are looking for when they build their cloud on prem. I think our architecture also really does provide a set it and forget it kind of experience when we install a new INFINIDAT frame in an enterprise data center, our intentions are we're not going to come back. We don't intend to come back to help fiddle with the bits or tweak the configuration and as applications and multi tenant users are added. And then of course, flexible economic models. I mean, everybody takes this for granted but you really really do have to be completely flexible between the two rails, the cap X rail and the objects rail and every step in between. And importantly when an enterprise customer needs to add capacity they don't have a sales conversation. They just want to have it right there already running in their data center. And that's the experience that we provide. >> Yeah. You guys are aligned in that vision, that layer that abstracts the complexity from the underlying wherever cloud on prem, et cetera. >> Right? >> Let's talk about VMware and INFINIDAT their relationship, I mean, every year at VMworld up until last year, thank you COVID, INFINIDAT would host this awesome dinner, you'd have his top customers there, very nice Vegas steak restaurant. I of course, I always made a point to stop by not just for the food. I mean, I was able to meet some customers and I've talked to many dozens over the years Phil, and I can echo that sentiment, why is the VMware ecosystem so important to INFINIDAT? And I guess the question there is, is petabyte scale really that prominent in the VMware customer base? >> It's a very, very important point. VMware is the longest standing alliance partner of INFINIDAT. It goes back to really almost the foundation of the company certainly starting with the release one, the very first commercial release of INFINIDAT, VMware and a very tight integration where VMware was a core part of that. We have a capability we call the host power tools which drives a consistent best practices implementation around our VMware integration and how it's actually used in the data center. And we built on that through the years through just a deep level of integration and our customers typically are at scale, petabyte scale or average deployment as a petabyte and up and over 90% of our customers use VMware. I think I can safely say we serve the VMware environment for some of VMware's largest enterprise footprints in the market. >> So Lee It's like children, you love all your partners but is there anything about INFINIDAT that stands out to you, a particular area where they shine from your perspective? >> Yeah, I think so. The best partnerships won are ones that are customer driven it turns out, right? And the idea that we have joint customers at large-scale, I must say storage is a tough business to go, right? Right, it takes time to go and mature to harden a code base, right? And particularly when you talk about petabyte scale right now, you've basically got customers buying in for the largest systems. And what we're seeing overall is customers are trying to do more things with fewer component elements. Makes sense, right? And so the scale here is important because it's not just scale in terms of like capacity, right? It's scale in terms of performance as well. And so, as you see customers trying to expand the number of different types of applications and this is one of the things we're seeing, right? Is new applications which could be container-based, Kubernetes orchestrated, our Tansu portfolio helps with that, right? If you see what we're doing with Nvidia, for example we announced some AI work, right? This week with vSphere. And so what you're starting to see is like the changing nature of applications and the fast pace of applications is really helping customers say, listen I want to go and find solutions that can meet the majority of my needs. And that's one of the things that we're seeing and particularly with the VVol'sintegration at scale that we just haven't seen before, INFINIDAT is setting the bar and really setting a new record for that. >> Yeah. Let me comment on that a little bit, Dave. We've been a core part of the VMware Cloud Solutions Lab, which is a very very exciting engaging investment that VMware has made. A lot of people have contributed to in the industry but in the VMware Cloud Solutions Lab we recently demonstrated on a single INFINIDAT frame over 200,000 VVols on a single system. And I think that not only edges up the bar I think it completely redefines what scale means when you're talking about a VVol implementation >> So lets talk about both those things. Not to geek out here but VVols they're kind of a game changer because instead of admins having to manually allocate storage to performance tiers, an array that is VASA certified, VASA is VMware or actually the storage API for storage awareness, VASA, anyway with VVols you can dynamically provision storage that matches, the way I say it as matches device attributes to the data and the application requirements of the VM. So Phil, it seems like so much in VMware land harkens back to the way mainframes used to solve problems in a modern way, right? And VVol is a real breakthrough in that regard in terms of simplifying storage. So how do you guys see it? I presume you're sort of VVol certified based on what you just said in the lab. >> Yeah. We recently announced our VVols release and we're not the first to market with VVols but from the start of the engineering project we wanted to do it. We wanted to do it the way we think. We think at scale in everything we do and our customers were very prescriptive and the kind of scale and performance and availability that they wanted to experience in VVols. And we're now seeing quite a bit of customer interest with traction in it. As I said, we redefined the bar for VVol scalability. We support on a single array now a thousand storage containers. And I think most of our competition is like at one or maybe 10 or 13 or something like that. So our customers are again at scale, they said if you're going to do VVols we want it at scale. We want it to embody the characteristics of your platform. We really liked VVols because it helps separate kind of the roles and responsibilities between the BI administrator and the storage system administrator. If you're going to put the majority of your most critical bits on INFINIDAT in your data center you're going to want to have control over how that resource is used, the at the VVols in rotation and the tools that we provide with that deep level of integration give the BI administrator all of the flexibility they need to manage applications and VVols of course gives the BI administrator the native use of our in minute snapshot technology. And so it makes it incredibly easy for them to administrate the platform without having to worry about the physical infrastructure but yet the people worried about the physical infrastructure still have control over that resource. So it's a game changer as far as we're concerned. >> Yeah. Storage has come a long way hasn't it Lee? If you could add some color here it seems in talking needs so VASA that's interesting you had a hand in the growth of VASA and very successful product but he chose INFINIDAT for that higher end application. It seemed like VVols are a key innovation in that regard. How's the VVol uptake going from your perspective. >> Yeah, I think we're in the second phase of VVol adoption, right? First phase was, hey, it technically interesting, intriguing but adoption was relatively low I think because you know up until five years ago applications weren't actually changing that fast. I mean, think about it, right? The applications, ERP systems, CRM systems, you weren't changing those at the pace of what we're doing today. Now what's happening is every business is a software business. Every business when you work, when you interact with your healthcare provider right now it's about the apps. Like, can you go and get your schedules online? Can you email your doctors, right? Can you go and get your labs, right? The pace of new application development, we have some data showing that there will be more apps developed in the next five years and then the past 40 years of computing combined. And so when you think about that what's changed now is trying to manage that all from the kind of storage hardware side was just actually getting in the way you want to organize around the fastest beat rate in your infrastructure, today that's the application. So what VVOls helps you do is it allows the vSphere administrator who's managing VMs and looking at the apps and the changing pace and be able to basically select storage attributes including QoS, capacity, IOPS and do that from the V center console and then be able to rectify things and manage them, right? From the console right next to the apps. And that provides a really integrated way. So when you have a close interaction like what we're talking about today or integration that the INFINIDAT has provided now you've got this ability to have a faster moving activity. And consolidation is one of the themes you've heard from time to time from VMware, we're consolidating the management so that the vSphere administrator can now go and manage more things. What traditional VMs, yes, VMs across HI sure put now plus storage and into the hybrid cloud and into like containers, it's that consolidated management which is getting us speed and basically a consumer like experience for infrastructure deployments. >> Yeah. Now Phil mentioned the solutions lab. We've got a huge ecosystem. Several years ago you launched this, the VMware, I think it's called the VMware Cloud Solutions Lab is the official name. Explain what it does for collaboration and joint solutions development. And then Phil, I want you to go in more detail about what your participation has been but Lee why don't you explain it? >> Yeah. We don't take just any products that because listen there's a mixing, what we take is things that really expand that innovation frontier. And that's what we saw with INFINIDAT was expanding the frontier on like large capacity for many many different mixed workloads and a commitment, right? To go and bring in not just VVol support, of course all the things we do for just normal interaction with vSphere but bringing VVOls in was certainly important in showing how we operate at scale. And then importantly as we expanded the vSphere or cloud foundation to include store systems, fair customer for example, right? Who has storage and HCI, right? And it looks for how to go and use them. And that's an individual choice at a customer level. We think this is strategically important now as we expand a multi-cloud experience that's different from the hyperscalers, right? Hyperscalers are coming in with two kind of issues, maybe, right? So one is it's single cloud. And the other one is there's a potential competitive aspect from some right around the ongoing underlying business and a hyperscaler business model. And so what VMware uniquely is doing is extending a common control plane across storage systems and HCI and doing that in a way that basically gives customers choice. And we love that the cloud lab is really designed to go and make that a reality for customers strip out perceived and real risk. >> Yeah. Phil to Lee's point, it's not dozens and dozens and dozens of logos on the slide for the lab. I think there's like 10 or 12 from what I saw and INFINIDAT is one of them. Maybe you could talk a little bit more about your participation in the program and what it does for customers. >> Yeah, absolutely. And I would agree it's, we like the lab because it's not just supposed to be one of everything I can do it, it's a purpose-built lab to do real things. And we like it because we can really explore some of the most contemporary workloads in that environment as well as solutions to what I centered as some of the most contemporary industry problems we're participating in a couple of ways. I believe we're the only petabyte scale storage solution in the cloud solutions lab at VMware. One of the projects we're working on with VMware is their machine learning platform. That's one of the first cloud solutions lab projects that we worked on with INFINIDAT. And we're also a core part of what VMware is driving from at but we call it data for good initiative. This was inspired by the idea that tech can be used as a force for good in the world. And right now it's focused on the technology needs of nonprofits. And so we're closely working in the cloud solutions lab with the VMware Cloud Foundation layers as well as the Tansu and Kubernetes environments and learning a lot and proving a lot. And it's also a great way to demonstrate the capabilities of our platform. >> Yeah. So Lee, I was just the other day I was under VMware analyst meeting virtually of course and Zane and Sanjay and a number of other execs were given the update. And just to sort of emphasize what we've been talking about here this expansion of on-prem, the cloud experience, the data especially from our survey data we have a partner at ETR they do great surveys on quarterly basis. The VMware cloud on AWS do great for sure but the VMware Cloud Foundation, the on-prem cloud, the hybrid cloud is really exploding and resonating with customers. And that's a good example of this sort of equilibrium that we're seeing between the public and private coming together. >> Well, VMware Cloud Foundation right now with over a thousand customers but importantly over 400 of the global 2000, right? It's the largest customers. And that's actually where the Venn diagram between the work that VMware Cloud Foundation is doing and INFINIDAT, right? This large scale actually the interesting crossover, right? And listen for customers to go and take on a new storage system we always know that it's a high bar, right? So they have to see some really unique value, like how is this going to help, right? And today that value is I want to spend less time looking down at the storage and more time looking up at the apps, that's how we're working together, right? And how VVols fits into that with the VMware Cloud Foundation, it's that hybrid cloud offering really gives customers that future-proofing, right? And the degrees of freedom they're most likely to exercise. >> Right. Well, let's close with a kind of a glimpse of the future. What do you two see as the future of the data center specifically and also your collaborations Lee? Why don't you start? >> So I think what we hope to be true is turning out to be true. So, if you've looked at what's happening in the cloud not everything is migrating in the cloud but the public cloud for example and I'm talking about public cloud there, the public cloud offers some really interesting unique value. And VMware is doing really interesting things about like Dr as a service and other things, right? So we're helping customers tap into that at the same time, right? We're seeing that the on-prem investment is not stalling at all because of data sovereignty because of bandwidth limitations, right? And because of really the economics of what it means to rent versus buy. And so partnering with leaders in storage, right? Is a core part of our strategy going forward. And we're looking forward to doing more, right? With INFINIDAT as we see VCF evolve, as we see new applications including container-based applications running on our platform, lots of futures, right? As the pace of application change doesn't slow down. >> So Phil, what do you see for the next 10 years for INFINIDAT? >> Yeah, well, I appreciated your introduction because it does speak to sort of the core characteristics of INFINIDAT. And I think a company like us and at our juncture of evolution it's important to know exactly who you are. And we clearly are focused in that on-prem hybrid data center environment. We want to be the storage tier that companies use to build their clouds. The partnership with VMware we talked about the Venn diagram, I think it just could not be more complimentary. And so we're certainly going to continue to focus on VMware as our largest and most consequential alliance partner for our business going forward. I'm excited about the data center landscape going forward. I think it's going to continue to ebb and flow. We'll see growth and distributed architectures, we'll see growth at the edge. In the core data center I think the old days where customers would buy a storage system for a application environment, those days are over it's all about consolidating multiple apps and thousands of users on a single platform. And to do that you have to be really good at a lot of things that we are very good at. Our strategy going forward is to evolve as media evolves but never stray far from what has made INFINIDAT unique and special and highly differentiated in the marketplace. I think the work that VMware is doing in Kubernetes is very exciting. We're starting to see that really pick up in our business as well. So as we think about not only staying relevant but keeping very contemporary with application workloads, we have some very small amount of customers that still do some bare metal but predominantly as I said 90% or above is a VMware infrastructure. But we also see Kubernetes, our CSI driver works well with the VMware suite above it. So that that complimentary relationship we see extending forward as the application environment evolves. >> It's great. Thank you. Many years ago when I attended my first VMworld the practitioners that were there you talked to them, half the conversations they were complaining about storage and how it was so complicated and you needed guys in lab coats to solve problems. And VMware really has done a great job publishing the APIs and encouraging the ecosystem. And so if you're a practitioner you're interested in in how VVols and INFINIDAT and VMware, we're kind of raising the bar and on petabyte scale there's some good blogs out there. Check out the virtual blocks blog for more information. Guys thanks so much. Great to have you in the program. Really appreciate it. >> Thanks so much, Dave. >> All right. Thank you for watching this cute conversation, Dave Vellante, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a Cube conversation. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are in our Palo Alto studios, COVID is still going on, so all of the interviews continue to be remote, but we're excited to have a Cube alumni, he hasn't been on for a long time, and this guy has been in the weeds of the storage industry for a very very long time and we're happy to have him on and get an update because there continues to be a lot of exciting developments. He's Phil Bullinger, he is the SVP and general manager, data center business unit from Western Digital joining us, I think for Colorado, so Phil, great to see you, how's the weather in Colorado today? >> Hi Jeff, it's great to be here. Well, it's a hot, dry summer here, I'm sure like a lot of places. But yeah, enjoying the summer through these unusual times. >> It is unusual times, but fortunately there's great things like the internet and heavy duty compute and store out there so we can get together this way. So let's jump into it. You've been in the he business a long time, you've been at Western Digital, you were at EMC, you worked on Isilon, and you were at storage companies before that. And you've seen kind of this never-ending up and to the right slope that we see kind of ad nauseum in terms of the amount of storage demands. It's not going anywhere but up, and please increase complexity in terms of unstructure data, sources of data, speed of data, you know the kind of classic big V's of big data. So I wonder, before we jump into specifics, if you can kind of share your perspective 'cause you've been kind of sitting in the Catford seat, and Western Digital's a really unique company; you not only have solutions, but you also have media that feeds other people solutions. So you guys are really seeing and ultimately all this compute's got to put this data somewhere, and a whole lot of it's sitting on Western Digital. >> Yeah, it's a great intro there. Yeah, it's been interesting, through my career, I've seen a lot of advances in storage technology. Speeds and feeds like we often say, but the advancement through mechanical innovation, electrical innovation, chemistry, physics, just the relentless growth of data has been driven in many ways by the relentless acceleration and innovation of our ability to store that data, and that's been a very virtuous cycle through what, for me, has been 30 years in enterprise storage. There are some really interesting changes going on though I think. If you think about it, in a relatively short amount of time, data has gone from this artifact of our digital lives to the very engine that's driving the global economy. Our jobs, our relationships, our health, our security, they all kind of depend on data now, and for most companies, kind of irrespective of size, how you use data, how you store it, how you monetize it, how you use it to make better decisions to improve products and services, it becomes not just a matter of whether your company's going to thrive or not, but in many industries, it's almost an existential question; is your company going to be around in the future, and it depends on how well you're using data. So this drive to capitalize on the value of data is pretty significant. >> It's a really interesting topic, we've had a number of conversations around trying to get a book value of data, if you will, and I think there's a lot of conversations, whether it's accounting kind of way, or finance, or kind of good will of how do you value this data? But I think we see it intrinsically in a lot of the big companies that are really data based, like the Facebooks and the Amazons and the Netflixes and the Googles, and those types of companies where it's really easy to see, and if you see the valuation that they have, compared to their book value of assets, it's really baked into there. So it's fundamental to going forward, and then we have this thing called COVID hit, which I'm sure you've seen all the memes on social media. What drove your digital transformation, the CEO, the CMO, the board, or COVID-19? And it became this light switch moment where your opportunities to think about it are no more; you've got to jump in with both feet, and it's really interesting to your point that it's the ability to store this and think about it now differently as an asset driving business value versus a cost that IT has to accommodate to put this stuff somewhere, so it's a really different kind of a mind shift and really changes the investment equation for companies like Western Digital about how people should invest in higher performance and higher capacity and more unified and kind of democratizing the accessibility that data, to a much greater set of people with tools that can now start making much more business line and in-line decisions than just the data scientist kind of on Mahogany Row. >> Yeah, as you mentioned, Jeff, here at Western Digital, we have such a unique kind of perch in the industry to see all the dynamics in the OEM space and the hyperscale space and the channel, really across all the global economies about this growth of data. I have worked at several companies and have been familiar with what I would have called big data projects and fleets in the past. But at Western Digital, you have to move the decimal point quite a few digits to the right to get the perspective that we have on just the volume of data that the world has just relentless insatiably consuming. Just a couple examples, for our drive projects we're working on now, our capacity enterprise drive projects, you know, we used to do business case analysis and look at their lifecycle capacities and we measured them in exabytes, and not anymore, now we're talking about zettabyte, we're actually measuring capacity enterprise drive families in terms of how many zettabyte they're going to ship in their lifecycle. If we look at just the consumption of this data, the last 12 months of industry TAM for capacity enterprise compared to the 12 months prior to that, that annual growth rate was north of 60%. And so it's rare to see industries that are growing at that pace. And so the world is just consuming immense amounts of data, and as you mentioned, the COVID dynamics have been both an accelerant in some areas, as well as headwinds in others, but it's certainly accelerated digital transformation. I think a lot of companies we're talking about, digital transformation and hybrid models and COVID has really accelerated that, and it's certainly driving, continues to drive just this relentless need to store and access and take advantage of data. >> Yeah, well Phil, in advance of this interview, I pulled up the old chart with all the different bytes, kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes, terabytes, petabytes, exabytes, and zettabytes, and just per the Wikipedia page, what is a zettabyte? It's as much information as there are grains of sand in all the world's beaches. For one zettabyte. You're talking about thinking in terms of those units, I mean, that is just mind boggling to think that that is the scale in which we're operating. >> It's really hard to get your head wrapped around a zettabyte of storage, and I think a lot of the industry thinks when we say zettabyte scale era, that it's just a buzz word, but I'm here to say it's a real thing. We're measuring projects in terms of zettabytes now. >> That's amazing. Well, let's jump into some of the technology. So I've been fortunate enough here at theCUBE to be there at a couple of major announcements along the way. We talked before we turned the cameras on, the helium announcement and having the hard drive sit in the fish bowl to get all types of interesting benefits from this less dense air that is helium versus oxygen. I was down at the Mammer and Hammer announcement, which was pretty interesting; big heavy technology moves there, to again, increase the capacity of the hard drive's base systems. You guys are doing a lot of stuff on RISC-V I know is an Open source project, so you guys have a lot of things happening, but now there's this new thing, this new thing called zonedd storage. So first off, before we get into it, why do we need zoned storage, and really what does it now bring to the table in terms of a capability? >> Yeah, great question, Jeff. So why now, right? Because I mentioned storage, I've been in storage for quite some time. In the last, let's just say in the last decade, we've seen the advent of the hyperscale model and certainly a whole nother explosion level of data and just the veracity with which they hyperscalers can create and consume and process and monetize data. And of course with that, has also come a lot of innovation, frankly, in the compute space around how to process that data and moving from what was just a general purpose CPU model to GPU's and DPU's and so we've seen a lot of innovation on that side, but frankly, in the storage side, we haven't seen much change at all in terms of how operating systems, applications, file systems, how they actually use the storage or communicate with the storage. And sure, we've seen advances in storage capacities; hard drives have gone from two to four, to eight, to 10 to 14, 16, and now our leading 18 and 20 terabyte hard drives. And similarly, on the SSD side, now we're dealing with the capacities of seven, and 15, and 30 terabytes. So things have gotten larger, as you expect. And some interfaces have improved, I think NVME, which we'll talk about, has been a nice advance in the industry; it's really now brought a very modern scalable low latency multi-threaded interface to a NAM flash to take advantage of the inherent performance of transistor based persistent storage. But really when you think about it, it hasn't changed a lot. But what has changed is workloads. One thing that definitely has evolved in the space of the last decade or so is this, the thing that's driving a lot of this explosion of data in the industry is around workloads that I would characterize as sequential in nature, they're serial, you can capture it in written. They also have a very consistent life cycle, so you would write them in a big chunk, you would read them maybe in smaller pieces, but the lifecycle of that data, we can treat more as a chunk of data, but the problem is applications, operating systems, vial systems continue to interface with storage using paradigms that are many decades old. The old 512 byte or even Forte, Sector size constructs were developed in the hard drive industry just as convenient paradigms to structure what is an unstructured sea of magnetic grains into something structured that can be used to store and access data. But the reality is when we talk about SSDs, structure really matters, and so what has changed in the industry is the workloads are driving very very fresh looks at how more intelligence can be applied to that application OS storage device interface to drive much greater efficiency. >> Right, so there's two things going on here that I want to drill down on. On one hand, you talked about kind of the introduction of NAND and flash, and treating it like you did, generically you did a regular hard drive. But you could get away and you could do some things because the interface wasn't taking full advantage of the speed that was capable in the NAND. But NVME has changed that, and now forced kind of getting rid of some of those inefficient processes that you could live with, so it's just kind of classic next level step up and capabilities. One is you get the better media, you just kind of plug it into the old way. Now actually you're starting to put in processes that take full advantage of the speed that that flash has. And I think obviously prices have come down dramatically since the first introduction, where before it was always kind of a clustered off or super high end, super low latency, super high value apps, it just continues to spread and proliferate throughout the data center. So what did NVME force you to think about in terms of maximizing the return on the NAND and flash? >> Yeah, NVME, which we've been involved in the standardization, I think it's been a very successful effort, but we have to remember NVME is about a decade old, or even more when the original work started around defining this interface, but it's been very successful. The NVME standard's body is very productive cross company effort, it's really driven a significant change, and what we see now is the rapid adoption of NVME in all of data center architectures, whether it's very large hyperscale to classic on prem enterprise to even smaller applications, it's just a very efficient interface mechanism for connecting SSDs into a server. So we continue to see evolution at NVME, which is great, and we'll talk about ZNS today as one of those evolutions. We're also very keenly interested in NVME protocol over fabrics, and so one of the things that Western Digital has been talking about a lot lately is incorporating NVME over fabrics as a mechanism for now connecting shared storage into multiple post architectures. We think this is a very attractive way to build shared storage architectures of the future that are scalable, that are composable, that really have a lot more agility with respect to rack level infrastructure and applying that infrastructure to applications. >> Right, now one thing that might strike some people as kind of counterintuitive is within the zoned storage in zoning off parts of the media, to think of the data also kind of in these big chunks, is it feels contrary to kind of atomization that we're seeing in the rest of the data center, right? So smaller units of compute, smaller units of store, so that you can assemble and disassemble them in different quantities as needed. So what was the special attribute that you had to think about and actually come back and provide a benefit in actually kind of re-chunking, if you will, in these zones versus trying to get as atomic as possible? >> Yeah, it's a great question, Jeff, and I think it's maybe not intuitive in terms of why zoned storage actually creates a more efficient storage paradigm when you're storing stuff essentially in larger blocks of data, but this is really where the intersection of structure and workload and sort of the nature of the data all come together. If you turn back the clock maybe four or five years when SMR hard drives host managers SMR hard drives first emerged on the scene. This was really taking advantage of the fact that the right head on a hard disk drive is larger than the read head, or the read head can be much smaller, and so the notion of overlapping or shingling the data on the drive, giving the read head a smaller target to read, but the writer a larger write pad to write the data could actually, what we found was it increases aerial density significantly. And so that was really the emergence of this notion of sequentially written larger blocks of data being actually much more efficiently stored when you think about physically how it's being stored. What's very new now and really gaining a lot of traction is the SSD corollary to SMR on the hard drive, on the SSD side, we had the ZNS specification, which is, very similarly where you'd divide up the name space of an SSD into fixed size zones, and those zones are written sequentially, but now those zones are intimately tied to the underlying physical architecture of the NAND itself; the dyes, the planes, the read pages, the erase pages. So that, in treating data as a block, you're actually eliminating a lot of the complexity and the work that an SSD has to do to emulate a legacy hard drive, and in doing so, you're increasing performance and endurance and the predictable performance of the device. >> I just love the way that you kind of twist the lens on the problem, and on one hand, by rule, just looking at my notes here, the zoned storage device is the ZSD's introduce a number of restrictions and limitations and rules that are outside the full capabilities of what you might do. But in doing so, an aggregate, the efficiency, and the performance of the system in the whole is much much better, even though when you first look at it, you think it's more of a limiter, but it's actually opens up. I wonder if there's any kind of performance stats you can share or any kind of empirical data just to give people kind of a feel for what that comes out as. >> So if you think about the potential of zoned storage in general and again, when I talk about zoned storage, there's two components; there's an HDD component of zoned storage that we refer to as SMR, and there's an SSD version of that that we call ZNS. So we think about SMR, the value proposition there is additional capacity. So effectively in the same drive architecture, with roughly the same bill of material used to build the drive, we can overlap or shingle the data on the drive. And generally for the customer, additional capacity. Today with our 18, 20 terabyte offerings that's on the order of just over 10%, but that delta is going to increase significantly going forward to 20% or more. And when you think about a hyperscale customer that has not hundreds or thousands of racks, but tens of thousands of racks. A 10 or 20% improvement in effective capacity is a tremendous TCO benefit, and the reason we do that is obvious. I mean, the economic paradigm that drives large at-scale data centers is total custom ownership, both acquisition costs and operating costs. And if you can put more storage in a square tile of data center space, you're going to generally use less power, you're going to run it more efficiently, you're actually, from an acquisition cost, you're getting a more efficient purchase of that capacity. And in doing that, our innovation, we benefit from it and our customers benefit from it. So the value proposition for zoned storage in capacity enterprise HDV is very clear, it's additional capacity. The exciting thing is, in the SSD side of things, or ZNS, it actually opens up even more value proposition for the customer. Because SSDs have had to emulate hard drives, there's been a lot of inefficiency and complexity inside an enterprise SSD dealing with things like garbage collection and right amplification reducing the endurance of the device. You have to over-provision, you have to insert as much as 20, 25, even 28% additional man bits inside the device just to allow for that extra space, that working space to deal with delete of data that are smaller than the block erase that the device supports. So you have to do a lot of reading and writing of data and cleaning up. It creates for a very complex environment. ZNS by mapping the zoned size with the physical structure of the SSD essentially eliminates garbage collection, it reduces over-provisioning by as much as 10x. And so if you were over provisioning by 20 or 25% on an enterprise SSD, and a ZNS SSD, that can be one or two percent. The other thing I have to keep in mind is enterprise SSD is typically incorporate D RAM and that D RAM is used to help manage all those dynamics that I just mentioned, but with a much simpler structure where the pointers to the data can be managed without all the D RAM. We can actually reduce the amount of D RAM in an enterprise SSD by as much as eight X. And if you think about the MILA material of an enterprise SSD, D RAM is number two on the list in terms of the most expensive bomb components. So ZNS and SSDs actually have a significant customer total cost of ownership impact. It's an exciting standard, and now that we have the standard ratified through the NVME working group, it can really accelerate the development of the software ecosystem around. >> Right, so let's shift gears and talk a little bit about less about the tech and more about the customers and the implementation of this. So you talked kind of generally, but are there certain types of workloads that you're seeing in the marketplace where this is a better fit or is it just really the big heavy lifts where they just need more and this is better? And then secondly, within these hyperscale companies, as well as just regular enterprises that are also seeing their data demands grow dramatically, are you seeing that this is a solution that they want to bring in for kind of the marginal kind of next data center, extension of their data center, or their next cloud region? Or are they doing lift and shift and ripping stuff out? Or do they enough data growth organically that there's plenty of new stuff that they can put in these new systems? >> Yeah, I love that. The large customers don't rip and shift; they ride their assets for a long lifecycle, 'cause with the relentless growth of data, you're primarily investing to handle what's coming in over the transom. But we're seeing solid adoption. And in SMRS you know we've been working on that for a number of years. We've got significant interest and investment, co-investment, our engineering, and our customer's engineering adapting the application environment's to take advantage of SMR. The great thing is now that we've got the NVME, the ZNS standard gratified now in the NVME working group, we've got a very similar, and all approved now, situation where we've got SMR standards that have been approved for some time, and the SATA and SCSI standards. Now we've got the same thing in the NVME standard, and the great thing is once a company goes through the lift, so to speak, to adapt an application, file system, operating system, ecosystem, to zoned storage, it pretty much works seamlessly between HDD and SSD, and so it's not an incremental investment when you're switching technologies. Obviously the early adopters of these technologies are going to be the large companies who design their own infrastructure, who have mega fleets of racks of infrastructure where these efficiencies really really make a difference in terms of how they can monetize that data, how they compete against the landscape of competitors they have. For companies that are totally reliant on kind of off the shelf standard applications, that adoption curve is going to be longer, of course, because there are some software changes that you need to adapt to enable zoned storage. One of the things Western Digital has done and taken the lead on is creating a landing page for the industry with zoned storage.io. It's a webpage that's actually an area where many companies can contribute Open source tools, code, validation environments, technical documentation. It's not a marketeering website, it's really a website built to land actual Open source content that companies can use and leverage and contribute to to accelerate the engineering work to adapt software stacks to zoned storage devices, and to share those things. >> Let me just follow up on that 'cause, again, you've been around for a while, and get your perspective on the power of Open source. And it used to be the best secrets, the best IP were closely guarded and held inside, and now really we're in an age where it's not necessarily. And the brilliant minds and use cases and people out there, just by definition, it's more groups of engineers, more engineers outside your building than inside your building, and how that's really changed kind of a strategy in terms of development when you can leverage Open source. >> Yeah, Open source clearly has accelerated innovation across the industry in so many ways, and it's the paradigm around which companies have built business models and innovated on top of it, I think it's always important as a company to understand what value ad you're bringing, and what value ad the customers want to pay for. What unmet needs in your customers are you trying to solve for, and what's the best mechanism to do that? And do you want to spend your RND recreating things, or leveraging what's available and innovating on top of it? It's all about ecosystem. I mean, the days where a single company could vertically integrate top to bottom a complete end solution, you know, those are fewer and far between. I think it's about collaboration and building ecosystems and operating within those. >> Yeah, it's such an interesting change, and one more thing, again, to get your perspective, you run the data center group, but there's this little thing happening out there that we see growing, IOT, in the industrial internet of things, and edge computing as we try to move more compute and store and power kind of outside the pristine world of the data center and out towards where this data is being collected and processed when you've got latency issues and all kinds of reasons to start to shift the balance of where the compute is and where the store and relies on the network. So when you look back from the storage perspective in your history in this industry and you start to see basically everything is now going to be connected, generating data, and a lot of it is even Opensource. I talked to somebody the other day doing kind of Opensource computer vision on surveillance video. So the amount of stuff coming off of these machines is growing in crazy ways. At the same time, it can't all be processed at the data center, it can't all be kind of shipped back and then have a decision and then ship that information back out to. So when you sit back and look at Edge from your kind of historical perspective, what goes through your mind, what gets you excited, what are some opportunities that you see that maybe the laymen is not paying close enough attention to? >> Yeah, it's really an exciting time in storage. I get asked that question from time to time, having been in storage for more than 30 years, you know, what was the most interesting time? And there's been a lot of them, but I wouldn't trade today's environment for any other in terms of just the velocity with which data is evolving and how it's being used and where it's being used. A TCO equation may describe what a data center looks like, but data locality will determine where it's located, and we're excited about the Edge opportunity. We see that as a pretty significant, meaningful part of the TAM as we look three to five years. Certainly 5G is driving much of that, I think just any time you speed up the speed of the connected fabric, you're going to increase storage and increase the processing the data. So the Edge opportunity is very interesting to us. We think a lot of it is driven by low latency work loads, so the concept of NVME is very appropriate for that, we think, in general SSDs deployed and Edge data centers defined as anywhere from a meter to a few kilometers from the source of the data. We think that's going to be a very strong paradigm. The workloads you mentioned, especially IOT, just machine-generated data in general, now I believe, has eclipsed human generated data, in terms of just the amount of data stored, and so we think that curve is just going to keep going in terms of machine generated data. Much of that data is so well suited for zoned storage because it's sequential, it's sequentially written, it's captured, and it has a very consistent and homogenous lifecycle associated with it. So we think what's going on with zoned storage in general and ZNS and SMR specifically are well suited for where a lot of the data growth is happening. And certainly we're going to see a lot of that at the Edge. >> Well, Phil, it's always great to talk to somebody who's been in the same industry for 30 years and is excited about today and the future. And as excited as they have been throughout their whole careers. So that really bodes well for you, bodes well for Western Digital, and we'll just keep hoping the smart people that you guys have over there, keep working on the software and the physics, and the mechanical engineering and keep moving this stuff along. It's really just amazing and just relentless. >> Yeah, it is relentless. What's exciting to me in particular, Jeff, is we've driven storage advancements largely through, as I said, a number of engineering disciplines, and those are still going to be important going forward, the chemistry, the physics, the electrical, the hardware capabilities. But I think as widely recognized in the industry, it's a diminishing curve. I mean, the amount of energy, the amount of engineering effort, investment, that cost and complexity of these products to get to that next capacity step is getting more difficult, not less. And so things like zoned storage, where we now bring intelligent data placement to this paradigm, is what I think makes this current juncture that we're at very exciting. >> Right, right, well, it's applied AI, right? Ultimately you're going to have more and more compute power driving the storage process and how that stuff is managed. As more cycles become available and they're cheaper, and ultimately compute gets cheaper and cheaper, as you said, you guys just keep finding new ways to move the curve in. And we didn't even get into the totally new material science, which is also coming down the pike at some point in time. >> Yeah, very exciting times. >> It's been great to catch up with you, I really enjoy the Western Digital story; I've been fortunate to sit in on a couple chapters, so again, congrats to you and we'll continue to watch and look forward to our next update. Hopefully it won't be another four years. >> Okay, thanks Jeff, I really appreciate the time. >> All right, thanks a lot. All right, he's Phil, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time.

>>from the Cube Studios in >>Palo Alto and Boston connecting with thought >>leaders all around the world. This is a cube conversation. >>Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with the Cube. We're in our Palo Alto Studios Cove. It is still going on. So, uh, all of our all of the interviews continue to be remote, but we're excited to have Ah, Cube alumni hasn't been on for a long time, but this guy has been in the weeds of the storage industry for a very, very long time, and we're happy to, uh, I have a mon and get an update because there continues to be a lot of exciting developments. He's Phill Bollinger. Ah, he is the SVP and general manager Data center business unit from Western Digital. Joining us, I think from Colorado. So, Phil, great to see you. How is the weather in Colorado today? >>Hi, Jeff. It's great to be here. Well, it's It's a hot, dry summer here. I'm sure like a lot of places. Yeah, enjoying enjoying this summer through these unusual times it >>is. It is unusual times, but fortunately, there's great things like the Internet and heavy duty. Ah, compute and store out there so we can we can get together this way. So let's jump into it. You've been in the business a long time. You've been a Western digital, your DMC you worked on I salon and you were at storage companies before that. And you've seen kind of this never ending up into the right slope that we see, you know, kind of ad nauseam. In terms of the amount of storage demands. It's not going anywhere but up in police. Increased complexity in terms of unstructured data, sources of data, speed of data, you know, the kind of classic big V's of big data. So I wonder before we jump into specifics if you can kind of share your perspective because you've been kind of sitting in the catbird seat. And Western Digital's a really unique company. You not only have solutions, but you also have media that feeds other people solutions. So you guys are really, you know, seeing. And ultimately all this computes gotta put this data somewhere, and a whole lot of it's in our western digital. >>Yeah, it's It's a great a great intro there. Yeah, it's been interesting, you know, through my career. I've seen a lot of advances in storage technology. Uh, you know, speeds and feeds like we often say, But you know, the advancement through mechanical innovation, electrical innovation, chemistry, physics, you know, just the relentless growth of data has been, has been driven in many ways by the relentless acceleration and innovation of our ability to store that data. And that's that's been a very virtuous cycle through you know what for me has been more than 30 years and in enterprise storage there are some really interesting changes going on that I think if you think about it in a relatively short amount of time, data has gone from, you know, just kind of this artifact of our digital lives, um, to the very engine that's driving the global economy, um, our jobs, our relationships, our health, our security. They all depend on data on for most companies, kind of irrespective of size. How you use data, how you how you store it, how you monetize it, how you use it to make better decisions to improve products and services. You know, it becomes not just a matter of whether your company's going to thrive and I bet in many industries it's it's almost an existential question. Is, is your company going to be around in the future? And it and it depends on how well you're using data. So this this drive toe capitalize on the value of data is is pretty significant. >>It's Ah, it's a really interesting topic. We've had a number of conversations around trying to get, like a book value of data, if you will. And I think there's a lot of conversations, whether it's accounting, kind of way or finance or kind of of good will of how do you value this data? But I think we see it intrinsically in a lot of the big companies that are really database, like the Facebooks and the Amazons and the Netflix and the Googles and those >>types >>of companies where it's really easy to see. And if you see you know the valuation that they have compared to their book value of assets, right, it's really baked into there. So it's it's it's fundamental to going forward. And then we have this thing called Covet Hit, which, you know, >>you've >>seen on the media on social media, right? What drove your digital transformation. The CEO CIO, the CMO, the board Rick over 19. And it became this light switch moment where your opportunities to think about it or no more, you've got to jump in with both feet. And it's really interesting to your point that it's the ability to store this and think about it differently as an asset driving business value versus a cost that I t has >>to >>accommodate to put this stuff somewhere. So it's a really different kind of a mind shift and really changes the investment equation for companies like Western Digital about how people should invest in higher performance and higher capacity and more unified it in kind of democratizing the accessibility that data to a much greater set of people with tools that can now start making much more business line and in line decisions than just the data scientists you know, kind of on mahogany row. >>Yeah, like as you mentioned Jeff Inherit Western Digital. We have such a unique kind of perch in the industry to see all the dynamics in the ODM space and the hyper scale space and the channel really across all the global economy's about this this growth of data. I have worked at several companies and have been familiar with what I would have called big data projects and and, ah, fleets in the past. But the Western digital you have to move the decimal point, you know, quite a few digits to the right to get to get the perspective that that we have on just the volume of data, that the world is just relentlessly, insatiably consuming. Just a couple examples for for our Dr Projects we're working on now, our capacity enterprise Dr. Projects. You know, we used to do business case analyses and look at their life cycle. Pass it ease and we measure them and exabytes and not anymore. Now we're talking about Zeta Bytes were actually measuring capacity Enterprise drive families in terms of how many's petabytes they're gonna ship in their life cycle. And if we look at just the consumption of this data the last 12 months of Industry tam for capacity enterprise, compared to the 12 months prior to that, that annual growth rate was north of 60%. So it's it's rare to see industries that are that are growing at that pace. And so the world is just consuming immense amounts of data. And as you mentioned, the dynamics have been both an accelerant in some areas as well as headwinds and others. But it's certainly accelerated digital transformation. I think a lot of companies were talking about digital transformation and and, um, hybrid models. And Covert has really accelerated that. And it's certainly driving continues to drive just this relentless need toe to store and access and take advantage of data. Yeah, >>well, filling In advance of this interview, I pulled up the old chart right with with the all the different bytes, right, kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes, terabytes, petabytes, exabytes and petabytes. And just just for the Wikipedia page. What is is that a byte, a zoo? Much information as there are grains of sand in all the world's beaches. For one fight, you're talking about thinking in terms of those units. I mean, that is just mind boggling to think that that is the scale in which we're operating. >>It's really hard to get your head wrapped around a set amount of storage. And, you know, I think a lot of the industry thinks when we say that a byte scale era that It's just a buzzword. But I'm here to say it's a real thing where we're measuring projects and in terms of petabytes, that's >>amazing. Let's jump into some of the technology. So I've been fortunate enough here at the Cube toe to be there at a couple of major announcements along the way. We talked before we turned the cameras on the helium announcement and having the hard drive sit in the in the fish bowl, um, to get off types of interesting benefits from this less dense air that is helium versus oxygen. I was down at the mammary and hammer announcement, which was pretty interesting. Big, big, heavy technology moves there to again increase the capacity of the hard drive based systems. You guys are doing a lot of stuff on. This five I know is an open source projects. You guys have a lot of things happening, but now there's this new thing, this new thing called zoned storage. So first off before we get into, why do we need zone storage? And really, what does it now bring to the table in terms of ah, capability? >>Yeah, Great question, Jeff. So why now, right. I as I mentioned, you know, storage. I've been in storage for quite some time in the last. Let's just say, in the last decade we've seen the advent of the hyper scale model and certainly the, you know, a whole another explosion, level of, of data and just the veracity with which the hyper scaler is can create and consume and process and monetize data. And, of course, with that has also come a lot of innovation, frankly, in the compute space around had a process that data and moving from, you know, what was just a general purpose CPU model to GP use and DP use. And so we've seen a lot of innovation on that. But you know, frankly, in the storage side, we haven't seen much change at all in terms of how operating systems applications, final systems, how they actually use the storage or communicate with the storage. And sure we've seen, you know, advances in storage capacities. Hard drives have gone from 2 to 4 to 8 to 10 to 14 16 and now are leading 18 and 20 terabyte hard drives and similarly on the SSD side, you know, now we're dealing with the complexities of seven and 15 and 30 terabytes. So things have gotten larger, as you would expect, but and and some interfaces have improved, I think Envy Me, which we'll talk about, has been nice advance in the industry. It's really now brought a very modern, scalable, low latency, multi threaded interface to a NAND flash to take advantage of the inherent performance of transistor based, persistent storage. But really, when you think about it hasn't changed a lot and so but what has changed his workloads? One thing that definitely has evolved in the space of the last decade or so is this. The thing that's driving a lot of this explosion of data and industry is around workloads that I would characterize as a sequential in nature there, see, really captured and written. They also have a very consistent lifecycle, so you would write them in a big chunk. You would read them, uh, maybe in smaller pieces, but the lifecycle of that data we can treat more as a chunk of data, but the problem is applications. Operating systems. File systems continue to interface with storage, using paradigms that are, you know, many decades old, they'll find 12 bite or even four K sectors. Size constructs were developed in, you know, in the hard drive industry, just as convenient paradigms to structure what is unstructured sea of magnetic grains into something structured that can be used to store and access data. But the reality is, you know, when we talk about SSD is structured really matters. And so these what has changed in the industry as the workloads are driving very, very fresh looks at how more intelligence could be applied to that application OS storage device interface to drive much greater officials. >>Right? So there's there's two things going on here that I want to drill down on one hand. You know, you talked about kind of the introduction of NAND flash Ah, and treating it like you did generically. You did a regular hard drive, but but you could get away and you could do some things because the interface wasn't taking full advantage of the speed that was capable in the nan. But envy me has changed that and forced kind of getting getting rid of some of those inefficient processes that you could live with. So it's just kind of classic. Next next level step up and capabilities. One is you got the better media. You just kind of plug it into the old way. Now, actually, you're starting to put in processes that take full advantage of the speed that that flash has. And I think you know, obviously, prices have come down dramatically since the first introduction. And for before, we always kind of clustered offer super high end, super low latency, super high value APS. You know, it just continues to Teoh to spread and proliferate throughout the data center. So, you know what did envy me force you to think about in terms of maximizing, you know, kind of the return on the NAND and flash? >>Yeah, yeah, in envy me, which, you know, we've been involved in the standardization after I think it's been a very successful effort, but we have to remember Envy me is is about a decade old, you know, or even more When the original work started around defining this this interface and but it's been very successful, you know, the envy, any standards, bodies, very productive, you know, across company effort, it's really driven a significant change. And what we see now is the rapid adoption of Envy Me in all data center architectures. Whether it's a very large hyper scale to, you know, classic on prim enterprise to even, you know, smaller applications. It's just a very efficient interface mechanism for connecting SSD, ease and Teoh into a server, you know, So the we continue to see evolution and envy me, which is great, and we'll talk about Z and s. Today is one of those evolutions. We're also very keenly interested in VM e protocol over fabrics. And so one of the things that Western Digital has been talking about a lot lately is incorporating Envy me over fabrics as a mechanism for now connecting shared storage into multiple post architectures. We think this is a very attractive way to build shared storage architectures in the future that are scalable, that air compose herbal that really are more have a lot more agility with respect two rack level infrastructure and applying that infrastructure to applications. Right >>now, one thing that might strike some people it's kind of counterintuitive is is within the zone, um, storage and zoning off parts of the media to think of the data also kind of in these big chunks, is it? It feels contrary to kind of optimization that we're seeing in the rest of the data center. Right? So smaller units of compute smaller units of store so that you can assemble and disassemble them in different quantities as needed. So what was the special attributes that you had to think about and and actually come back and provide a benefit in actually kind of re chunking, if you will in the zones versus trying to get as atomic as possible? >>Yeah, It's a great question, Jeff, and I think it's maybe not intuitive in terms of why zone storage actually creates a more efficient storage paradigm when you're storing stuff essentially in larger blocks of data. But if this is really where the intersection of structure and workload and sort of the nature of the data all come together, uh, if you turn back the clock, maybe 45 years when SMR hard drives host managers from our hard drives first emerged on the scene, this was really taking advantage of the fact that the right head on a hard describe is larger than the reader can't reach. It could be much smaller, and so then the notion of overlapping or singling the data on the drive giving the read had a smaller target to read. But the writer a larger right pad to write the data I could. Actually, what we found was it increases areal density significantly, Um, and so that was really the emergence of this notion of sequentially written larger blocks of data being actually much more efficiently stored. When you think about physically how it's being stored, what is very new now and really gaining a lot of traction is is the the SSD corollary to tomorrow in the hard drive. On the SSD side, we have the CNS specification, which is very similarly where you divide up a name space of an SSD and two fixed size zones, and those zones are written sequentially. But now those zones are are intimately tied to the underlying physical architecture of the NAND itself. The dies, the planes, the the three pages, the the race pages so that in treating data as a black, you're actually eliminating a lot of the complexity and the work that an SSD has to do to emulate a legacy hard drive. And in doing so, you're increasing performance and endurance and and the predictable performance of the device. >>I just love the way that that, you know, you kind of twist the lens on the problem and and on one hand, you know, by rule just looking at my notes of his own storage devices, the CS DS introduced a number of restrictions and limitations and and rules that are outside the full capabilities of what you might do. But in doing so in aggregate, the efficiency and the performance of the system in the hole is much, much better, even though when you first look at you think it's more of a limiter, but it's actually opens up. I wonder if there's any kind of performance stats you can share or any kind of empirical data, just to >>get people kind >>of a feel for what? That what that comes out as >>so if you think about the potential of zone storage in general, when again, When I talk about zone storage, there's two components. There's an HDD component of zone storage that we that we refer to as S. Some are, and there's an SSD version of that that we call Z and s So you think about SMR. The value proposition. There is additional capacity so effectively in the same Dr architecture with with, you know, roughly the same bill of material used to build the drive. We can overlap or single the data on the drive and generate for the customer additional capacity. Today with our 18 20 terabyte offerings, that's on the order of just over 10% but that Delta is going to increase significantly, going forward 20% or more. And when you think about ah, hyper scale customer that has not hundreds or thousands of racks but tens of thousands of racks, a 10 or 20% improvement and effective capacity is a tremendous TCO benefit, and the reason we do that is obvious. I mean, the the the the economic paradigm that drives large scale data centers is total cost of ownership, the acquisition costs and operating costs. And if you can put more storage in a square, you know, style of data center space, you're going to generally use less power. You're gonna run it more efficiently. You're actually from an acquisition cost. You're getting a more efficient purchase of that capacity. And in doing that, our innovation, you know, we benefit from it and our customers benefit from it so that the value proposition pours. Don't storage in in capacity. Enterprise HDD is very clear. It's it's additional capacity. The exciting thing is in the SSD side of things for Z and as it actually opens up even more value proposition for the customer. Um, because SSD is have had to emulate hard drives. There's been a lot of inefficiency in complexity inside an enterprise. SSD dealing with things like garbage collection and write amplification, reducing the endurance of the device. You have to over provision. You have to insert as much as 2025 28% additional NAND bits inside the device just too allow for that extra space, that working space to deal with with delete of the you know that that are smaller than the the a block of race that that device supports. And so you have to do a lot of reading and writing of data and cleaning up it creates for a very complex environment. Z and S by mapping the zone size with the physical structure of the SSD, essentially eliminates garbage collection. It reduces over provisioning by as much as 10% are 10 x And so if you were over provisioning by 20 or 25% in an enterprise SSD and Xeon SSD, that could be, you know, one or 2%. The other thing we have to keep in mind is enterprise. SSD is typically incorporate D RAM and that D RAM is used to help manage all those dynamics that I that I just mentioned, but with a very much simpler structure where the pointers to the data can be managed without all that d ram, we can actually reduce the amount of D ram in an enterprise SSD by as much as eight X. And if you think about the bill of material of an enterprise, SSD d ram is number two on the list in terms of the most expensive bomb components. So Z and S and SSD is actually have a significant customer. Total cost of ownership impact. Um, it's it's an exciting it's an exciting standard. And now that we have the standard ratified through the Envy me working group, um, you can really accelerate the development of the software ecosystem around >>right. So let's shift gears and talk a little bit about less about the tech and more about the customers and the implementation of this. So, you know, are there you talked to kind of generally, but are there certain certain types of workloads that you're seeing in the marketplace where this is, you know, a better fit? Or is it just really the big heavy lifts? Um, where they just need more and this is better. And then secondly, within you know, these both hyper scale companies, um, as well as just regular enterprises that are also seeing their data demands grow dramatically. Are you seeing you know, that this is a solution that they want to bring in for kind of the marginal kind of next data center extension data center or their next ah, cloud region? Or are they doing you know, lift and shift and ripping stuff out? Or do they have enough? Do they have enough data growth organically? >>Then >>there's plenty of new stuff that they can. They can put in these new systems. >>Yeah, well, the large customers don't don't rip and shift. They they write their assets for a long life cycle because with the relentless growth of data. You're primarily investing to handle what's what's coming in over the transom, but we're seeing we're seeing solid adoption in SMR. As you know, we've been working on that for a number of years. We've we've got, you know, significant interest in investment co investment, our engineering and our customers engineering, adapting the the application environments. Let's take advantage of SMR. The great thing is, now that we've got the envy me, the Xeon s standard ratified now, in the envy of the working group, um, we've got a very similar and all approved now situation where we've got SMR standards that have been approved for some time in the sand and scuzzy standards. Now we've got the same thing in the envy, any standard. And that's the great thing is once a company goes through the lifts, so it's B to adapt an application file system, operating system, ecosystem to zone storage. It pretty much works seamlessly between HDD and SSD. And so it's not. It's not an incremental investment when you're switching technologies and for obviously the early adopters of these technologies are going to be the large companies who designed their own infrastructure. You have you know, mega fleets of racks of infrastructure where these efficiencies really, really make a difference in terms of how they can monetize that data, how they compete against, you know, the landscape of competitors They have, um, for companies that are totally reliant on kind of off the shelf standard applications. That adoption curve is gonna be longer, of course, because there are there are some software changes that you need to adapt to to enable zone storage. One of the things Western Digital is has done, and taking the lead on is creating a landing page for the industry with zone storage. Not Iot. It's a Web page that's actually an area where, where many companies can contribute open source tools, code validation environments, technical documentation it's not. It's not a marketeering website. It's really a website bill toe land, actual open source content that companies can and use and leverage and contribute to. To accelerate the engineering work to adapt software stacks his own storage devices on to share those things. >>Let me just follow up on that, because again you've been around for a while and get your perspective on the power of open source and you know, it used to be, you know, the the best secrets, the best I p were closely guarded and held inside. And now really, we're in an age where it's not necessarily and you know, the the brilliant minds and use cases and people out there. You know, just by definition, it's a It's a more groups of engineers, more engineers outside your building than inside your building and how that's really changed. You know, kind of the strategy in terms of development when you can leverage open source. >>Yeah, Open source clearly has has accelerated innovation across the industry in so many ways. Um, and it's ah, you know, it's the paradigm around which, you know companies have built business models and innovated on top of it. I think it's always important as a company to understand what value add, you're bringing on what value add that customers want to pay for what unmet needs and your customers are you trying to solve for and what's the best mechanism to do that? And do you want to spend your R and D recreating things or leveraging what's available and and innovating on top of it? It's all about ecosystems in the days where the single company can vertically integrate. I talked about him a complete end solution. You know those air few and far between. I think it's It's about collaboration and building ecosystems and operating within those. >>Yeah, it's it's It's such an interesting change. And one more thing again, to get your perspective, you run the data center group. But there's this little thing happening out there that we see growing in I o T Internet of things and the industrial Internet of things and edge computing. As we, you know, try to move more, compute and store and power, you know, kind of outside the pristine world of the data center and out towards where this data is being collected and processed when you've got latency issues and and in all kinds of reasons to start to shift the balance of where the computers aware that store Ah, and the reliance on the network. So when you look back from a storage perspective in your history in this industry and you start to see that basically everything is now going to be connected, generating data and and and a lot of it is even open source. I talked to somebody the other day doing, you know, kind of open source, computer vision on surveillance, you know, video. So, you know, the amount of stuff coming off of these machines is growing like crazy ways at the same time, you know, it can't all be processed at the data center. It can all be kind of shift back and then have you have a decision and then ship that information back out to. So when you sit back and look at the edge from your kind of historical perspective, what goes through your mind? What gets you excited? You know, what are some of the opportunities that you see that maybe the Lehman is not paying close enough attention to? >>Yeah, it's It's really an exciting time in storage. I get asked that question from time to time, having been in storage for more than 30 years, you know what was the most interesting time, and there's been a lot of them, but I wouldn't trade today's environment for any other in terms of just the velocity with which data is is evolving and how it's being used and where it's being used. You know that the TCO equation made describe what a data center looks like. But data locality will determine where it's located and we're excited about the edge opportunity. We see that as a pretty significant, meaningful part of the TAM. As we look out 3 to 5 years, certainly five G is driving much of that. I think just anytime you speed up the speed of the connected fabric, you're going to increase storage and increase the processing of the data. So the edge opportunity is very interesting to us. We think a lot of it is driven by low latency workloads. So the concept of envy any, um is very appropriate for that. We think in general SSD is deployed in in edge data centers defined as anywhere from a meter to a few kilometres from the source of the data. We think that's going to be a very strong paradigm. Um, the workloads you mentioned especially I O. T just machine generated data in general now I believe, has eclipse human generated data in terms of just the amount of data stored, and so we think that curve is just going to keep going in terms of machine generated data, much of that data is so well suited for zone story because it's sequential, it's sequentially written, it's captured, it's it has a very consistent and homogeneous lifecycle associated with it. So we think what's going on with with Zone storage in general and and Z and S and SMR specifically are well suited for where a lot of the data growth is happening. And certainly we're going to see a lot of that at the edge. >>Well, Phil, it's always great to talk to somebody who's been in the same industry for 30 years and is excited about today and the future on as excited as they have been throughout the whole careers. That really bodes well for you both. Well, for for Western Digital. And we'll just keep hoping the smart people that you guys have over there keep working on the software and the physics, Um, and then in the mechanical engineering to keep moving this stuff along. It's really ah, it's just amazing and just relentless. >>Yeah, it is. It is relentless. What's what's exciting to me in particular, Jeff is we've we've we've driven storage advancements, you know, largely through. As I said, a you know a number of engineering disciplines, and those are still going to be important going forward the chemistry of the physics, the electrical, the hardware capabilities. But I think, as you know, is widely recognized in the industry that it's a diminishing curve. I mean, the amount of energy, the amount of engineering, effort, investment, the cost and complexity of these products to get to that next capacity step, um, is getting more difficult, not less. And so things like zone storage where we now bring intelligent data placement to this paradigm is what I think makes this current juncture that we're at a very exciting >>right, Right. Well, it is applied ai, right. Ultimately, you're gonna have, you know, more more compute, you know, compute power. You know, driving the storage process and how that stuff is managed. And, you know, as more cycles become available and they're cheaper and ultimately compute, um gets cheaper and cheaper. You know, as you said, you guys just keep finding new ways to ah, to move the curve. And we didn't even get into the totally new material science, which is also, you know, come down the pike at some point in time. Well, >>very exciting. >>It's been great to catch up with you. I really enjoy the Western Digital story. I've been fortunate to to sit in on a couple chapters. So again, congrats to you. And, uh, we'll continue to watch and look forward to our next update. Hopefully, it won't be another four years. >>Okay. Thanks, Jeff. I really appreciate the time. All >>right. Thanks a lot. Alright. He's Phill. I'm Jeff. You're watching the Cube. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah.

from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation hello and welcome to the cube conversation here in the Palo Alto studio I'm John four host of the cube we are here at the quarantine crew of the cube having the conversations that matter the most now and sharing that with you got a great guest here Phil Quaid was the chief information security officer of Fortinet also the author of book digital bing-bang which I just found out he wrote talking about the difference cybersecurity and the physical worlds coming together and we're living that now with kovat 19 crisis were all sheltering in place Phil thank you for joining me on this cube conversation so I want to get in this quickly that I think the main top thing is that we're all sheltering in place anxiety is high but people are now becoming mainstream aware of what we all in the industry have been known for a long time role of data cybersecurity access to remote tools and we're seeing the work at home the remote situation really putting a lot of pressure on as I've been reporting what I call at scale problems and one of them is security right one of them is bandwidth we're starting to see you know the throttling of the packets people are now living with the reality like wow this is really a different environment but it's been kind of a disruption and has created crimes of opportunity for bad guys so this has been a real thing everyone's aware of it across the world this is something that's now aware on everyone's mind what's your take on this because you guys are fighting the battle and providing solutions and we're doing for a long time around security this highlights a lot of the things in the surface area called the world with what's your take on this carbon 19 orton s been advocating for architectures and strategies that allow you to defend anywhere from the edge through the core all the way up to the cloud boom so with you know high speed and integration and so all the sudden what we're seeing not just you know in the US but the world as well is that that edge is being extended in places that we just hadn't thought about or our CV that people just hadn't planned for before so many people or telecommunication able to move that edge securely out to people's homes and more remote locations and do so providing the right type of security of privacy if those communications that are coming out of those delicate ears I noticed you have a flag in the background and for the folks that might not know you spent a lot of time at the NSA government agency doing a lot of cutting-edge work I mean going back to you know really you know post 9/11 - now you're in the private sector with Fortinet so you don't really speak with the agency but you did live through a time of major transformation around Homeland Security looking at data again different physical thing you know terrorist attacks but it did bring rise to large-scale data to bring to those things so I wanted to kind of point out I saw the flag there nice nice touch there but now that you're in the private sector it's another transformation it's not a transition we're seeing a transformation and people want to do it fast and they don't want to have disruption this is a big problem what's your reaction to that yeah I think what you're reporting out that sometimes sometimes there's catalysts that cause major changes in the way you do things I think we're in one of those right now that we're already in the midst of an evolutionary trend towards more distributed workforces and as I mentioned earlier doing so with the right type of security privacy but I would think what I think the global camp in debt endemic is showing is that we're all going to be accelerating that that thing is like it's gonna be a lot less evolutionary and a little bit more faster that's what happens when you have major world events like this being 911 fortunate tragedies it causes people to think outside the box or accelerate what they're already doing I think wearing that in that world today yeah it pulls forward a lot of things that are usually on the planning side and it makes them reality I want to get your thoughts because not only are CEOs and their employees all thinking about the new work environment but the chief information security officer is people in your role have to be more aware as more things happening what's on the minds of CISOs around the world these days obviously the pandemics there what are you seeing what are some of the conversations what are some of the thought processes what specifically is going on in the of the chief information security officer yeah I think there's probably a there's probably two different two different things there's the there's the emotional side and there's the analytic side on the emotional side you might say that some Caesars are saying finally I get to show how cyber security can be in an abler of business right I can allow you to to to maintain business continuity by allowing your workers to work from home and trying sustain business and allow you to keep paying their salary is very very important to society there's a very important time to step up as the seaso and do what's helpful to sustain mission in on the practical side you say oh my goodness my job's gotten a whole lot harder because I can rely less and less on someone's physical controls that use some of the physical benefits you get from people coming inside the headquarters facility through locked doors and there's personal congress's and personal identification authentication you need to move those those same security strategies and policies and you need to move it out to this broad eggs it's gotten a lot bigger and a lot more distributed so I want to ask you around some of the things they're on cyber screws that have been elevated to the top of the list obviously with the disruption of working at home it's not like an earthquake or a tornado or hurricane or flood you know this backup and recovery for that you know kind of disaster recovery this has been an unmitigated disaster in the sense of it's been unfor casted I was talking to an IT guy he was saying well we provisioned rvv lands to be your VPNs to be 30% and now they need a hundred percent so that disruption is causing I was an under forecast so in cyber as you guys are always planning in and protecting has there been some things that have emerged that are now top of mind that are 100 percent mindshare base or new solutions or new challenges why keep quite done what we're referring to earlier is that yep any good see so or company executive is going to prepare for unexpected things to a certain degree you need it whether it be spare capacity or the ability to recover from something an act of God as you mentioned maybe a flood or tornado or hurricane stuff like that what's different now is that we have a disruption who which doesn't have an end date meaning there's a new temporal component that's been introduced that most companies just can't plan for right even the best of companies that let's say Ronald very large data centers they have backup plans where they have spare fuel to run backup generators to provide electricity to their data centers but the amount of fuel they have might only be limited to 30 days or so it's stored on-site we might think well that's pretty that's a lot of for thinking by storing that much fuel on site for to allow you to sort of work your way through a hurricane or other natural disaster what we have now is a is a worldwide crisis that doesn't have a 30-day window on it right we don't know if it's gonna be 30 days or 120 days or or you know even worse than that so what's different now is that it's not just a matter of surging in doing something with band-aids and twine or an extra 30 days what we need to do is as a community is to prepare solutions that can be enduring solutions you know I have some things that if the absent I might like to provide a little color what those types of solutions are but that that would be my main message that this isn't just a surge for 30 days this is a surge or being agile with no end in sight take a minute explain some of those solutions what are you seeing whatever specific examples and solutions that you can go deeper on there yeah so I talked earlier about the the edge meaning the place where users interact with machines and company data that edge is no longer at the desktop down the hallway it could be 10 miles 450 miles away to where anyone where I'm telling you I'm commuting crumb that means we need to push the data confidentiality things out between the headquarters and the edge you do that with things like a secure secured tunnel it's called VPNs you also need to make sure that the user identification authentication this much is a very very secure very authentic and with high integrity so you do that with multi-factor authentication there's other things that we like that that are very very practical that you do to support this new architecture and the good news is that they're available today in the good news at least with some companies there already had one foot in that world but as I mentioned earlier not all companies had yet embraced the idea of where you're going to have a large percentage of your workforce - until a community so they're not quite so they're there they're reacting quickly to to make sure this edge is better protected by identification and authentication and begins I want to get to some of those edge issues that now translate to kind of physical digital virtualization of of life but first I want to ask you around operational technology and IT OT IT these are kind of examples where you're seeing at scale problem with the pandemic being highlighted so cloud providers etc are all kind of impacted and bring solutions to the table you guys at Foot are doing large scale security is there anything around the automation side of it then you've seen emerge because all the people that are taking care of being a supplier in this new normal or this crisis certainly not normal has leveraged automation and data so this has been a fundamental value proposition that highlights what we call the DevOps movement in the cloud world but automation has become hugely available and a benefit to this can you share your insights into how automation is changing with cyber I think you up a nice question for me is it allowed me to talk about not only automation but convergence so it's let's hit automation first right we all even even pre-crisis we need to be better at leveraging automation to do things that machines do best allow people to do higher-order things whether it's unique analysis or something else with a with a more distributed workforce and perhaps fewer resources automation is more important ever to automatically detect bad things that are about to happen automatically mitigating them before they get or they get to bad you know in the cybersecurity world you use things like agile segmentation and you use like techniques called soar it's a type of security orchestration and you want to eat leverage those things very very highly in order to leverage automation to have machines circum amount of human services but you also brought up on my favorite topics which is ot graceful technology though OTS you know are the things that are used to control for the past almost a hundred years now things in the physical world like electric generators and pipes and valves and things like that often used in our critical infrastructures in my company fort net we provide solutions that secure both the IT world the traditional cyber domain but also the OT systems of the world today where safety and reliability are about most important so what we're seeing with the co19 crisis is that supply chains transportation research things like that a lot of things that depend on OT solutions for safety and reliability are much more forefront of mine so from a cybersecurity strategy perspective what you want to do of course is make sure your solutions in the IT space are well integrated with you solutions in the OT space to the so an adversary or a mistake in cause a working to the crack in causing destruction that convergence is interesting you know we were talking before you came on camera around the fact that all these events are being canceled but that really highlights the fact that the physical spaces are no longer available the so-called ot operational technologies of events is the plumbing the face-to-face conversations but everyone's trying to move to digital or virtual eyes that it's not as easy as just saying we did it here we do it there there is a convergence and some sort of translation this new there's a new roles there's new responsibilities new kinds of behaviors and decision making that goes on in the physical and digital worlds that have to then come together and get reimagined and so what's your take on all this because this is not so much about events but although that's kind of prime time problem zooming it is not the answer that's a streaming video how do you replicate the value of physical into the business value in digital it's not a one-to-one so it's quite possible that that we might look back on this event to cover 19 experience we might look back at it in five or ten years and say that was simply a foreshadowing of our of the importance of making sure that our physical environment is appropriate in private what I mean is that with the with the rapid introduction of Internet of Things technologies into the physical world we're going to have a whole lot of dependencies on the thing inconveniences tendencies inconveniences on things an instrument our physical space our door locks or automobiles paths our temperatures color height lots of things to instrument the physical space and so there's gonna be a whole lot of data that's generated in that cyber in a physical domain increasingly in the future and we're going to become dependent upon it well what happens if for whatever reason in the in the future that's massively disruptive so all of a sudden we have a massive disruption in the physical space just like we're experiencing now with open 19 so again that's why it makes sense now to start your planning now with making sure that your safety and reliability controls in the physical domain are up to the same level security and privacy as the things in your IT delete and it highlights what's the where the value is to and it's a transformation I was just reading an article around spatial economics around distance not being together it's interesting on those points you wrote a book about this I want to get your thoughts because in this cyber internet or digital or virtualization of physical to digital whether it's events or actual equipment is causing people to rethink architectures you mentioned a few of them what's the state of the art thinking around someone who has the plan for this again is in its complex it's not just creating a gateway or a physical abstraction layer of software between two worlds there's almost a blending or convergence here what's your what's your thoughts on what's the state of the art thinking on this area yeah the book that I number of a very esteemed colleagues contribute to what we said is that it's time to start treating cybersecurity like a science let's not pretend it's a dark art that we have to relearn every couple years and what what we said in the in the digital Big Bang is that humankind started flourishing once we admitted our ignorance in ultimately our ignorance in the physical world and discovered or invented you can right word the disciplines of physics and chemistry and once we recognize that our physical world was driven by those scientific disciplines we started flourishing right the scientific age led to lots of things whether it would be transportation health care or lots of other things to improve our quality of life well if you fast forward 14 billion years after that cosmic Big Bang which was driven by physics 50 years ago or so we had a digital Big Bang where there was a massive explosion of bits with the invention of the internet and what we argue in the book is that let's start treating cybersecurity like a science or the scientific principle is that we ought to write down and follow a Rousseau's with you so we can thrive in the in the in a digital Big Bang in the digital age and one more point if you don't mind what we what we noted is that the internet was invented to do two things one connect more people or machines than ever imagined in to do so in speeds that were never imagined so the in the Internet is is optimized around speed in connectivity so if that's the case it may be a fundamental premise of cybersecurity science is make sure that your cyber security solutions are optimized around those same two things that the cyber domains are optimized around speed in integration continue from there you can you can build on more and more complex scientific principles if you focus on those fundamental things and speed and integration yeah that's awesome great insight they're awesome I wanted to throw in while you had the internet history lesson down there also was interesting was a very decentralization concept how does that factor in your opinion to some of the security paradigms is that helped or hurt or is it create opportunities for more secure or does it give the act as an advantage yeah I love your questions is your it's a very informed question and you're in a give me good segue to answer the way you know it should be answer yeah the by definition the distributed nature of the Internet means it's an inherently survivable system which is a wonderful thing to have for a critical infrastructure like that if one piece goes down the hole doesn't go down it's kind of like the power grid the u.s. the u.s. electrical power grid there's too many people who say the grid will go down well that's that's just not a practical thing it's not a reality thing the grades broken up into three major grades and there's AB ulis strategies and implementations of diversification to allow the grid to fail safely so it's not catastrophic Internet's the same thing so like my nipple like I was saying before we ought to de cyber security around a similar principle that a catastrophic failure in one partner to start cybersecurity architecture should result in cascading across your whole architecture so again we need to borrow some lessons from history and I think he bring up a good one that the internet was built on survivability so our cybersecurity strategies need to be the same one of the ways you do that so that's all great theory but one of the ways you do that of course is by making your cybersecurity solutions so that they're very well integrated they connect with each other so that you know speaking in cartoon language you know if one unit can say I'm about to fail help me out and another part of your architecture can pick up a slack and give you some more robust security in that that's what a connected the integrated cyber security architecture do for you yeah it's really fascinating insight and I think resiliency and scale are two things I think are going to be a big wave is going to be added into the transformations that going on now it's it's very interesting you know Phil great conversation I could do a whole hour with you and do a fish lead a virtual panel virtualize that our own event here keynote speech thanks so much for your insight one of things I want to get your thoughts on is something that I've been really thinking a lot lately and gathering perspectives and that is on biosecurity and I say biosecurity I'm referring to covet 19 as a virus because biology involves starting a lab or some people debate all that whether it's true or not but but that's what people work on in the biology world but it spreads virally like malware and has a similar metaphor to cybersecurity so we're seeing conversation starting to happen in Washington DC in Silicon Valley and some of my circles around if biology weapon or it's a tool like open-source software could be a tool for spreading cybersecurity Trojans or other things and techniques like malware spear phishing phishing all these things are techniques that could be deployed metaphorically to viral distribution a biohazard or bio warfare if you will will it look the same and how do you defend against the next covet 19 this is what you know average Americans are seeing the impact of the economy with the shelter in place is that what happens again and how do we prevent it and so a lot of people are thinking about this what is your thoughts because it kind of feels the same way as cybersecurity you got to see it early you got to know what's going on you got to identify it you got to respond to it time to close your contain similar concepts what's your thoughts on with BIOS we don't look with all due respect to the the the bio community let me make a quick analogy to the cyber security strategy right cyber security strategy starts with we start as an attacker so I parts of my previous career I'm an authorized had the opportunity to help develop tools that are very very precisely targeted against foreign adversaries and that's a harder job than you think I mean I think the same is true of anyone of a natural-born or a custom a buyer buyer is that not just any virus has the capability to do a lot of harm to a lot of people selling it so it's it's if that doesn't mean though you can sit back and say since it's hard it'll never happen you need to take proactive measures to look for evidence of a compromise of something whether it's a cyber cyber virus or otherwise you have to actively look for that you have to harm yourself to make sure you're not susceptible to it and once you detect one you need to make sure you have a the ability to do segmentation or quarantine very rapidly very very effectively right so in the cyber security community of course the fundamental strategy is about segmentation you keep different types of things separate that don't need to interact and then if you do have a compromise not everything is compromised and then lastly if you want to gradually say bring things back up to recover you can do some with small chunks I think it's a great analogy segmentation is a good analogy to I think what the nation is trying to do right now by warranty kneeing and gradually reopening up things in in segments in actually mention earlier that some of the other techniques are very very similar you want to have good visibility of where you're at risk and then you can automatically detect and then implement some some mitigations based on that good visibility so I agree with you that it turns out that the cyber security strategies might have a whole lot in common with biohazard I address it's interesting site reliability engineers which is a term that Google coined when they built out their large-scale cloud has become a practice that kind of mindset combined with some of the things that you're saying the cyber security mindset seemed to fit this at scale problem space and I might be an alarmist but I personally believe that we've been having a digital war for many many years now and I think that you know troops aren't landing but it's certainly digital troops and I think that we as a country and a global state and global society have to start thinking about you know these kinds of things where a virus could impact the United States shut down the economy devastating impact so I think Wars can be digital and so I may be an alarmist and a conspirators but I think that you know thinking about it and talking about it might be a good thing so appreciate your insights there Phil appreciated what one other point that might be interesting a few years back I was doing some research with the National Lab and we're looking for novel of cybersecurity analytics and we hired some folks who worked in the biology the bio the biomedical community who were studying a biome fires at the time and it was in recognition that there's a lot of commonality between those who are doing cybersecurity analytics and those reviewing bio biology or biomedical type analytics in you know there was a lot of good cross fertilization between our teams and it kind of helps you bring up one more there's one more point which is what we need to do in cybersecurity in general is have more diversity of workforces right now I don't mean just the traditional but important diversities of sex or color but diversity of experiences right some of the best people I've worked with in the cyber analytics field weren't computer science trained people and that's because they came in problems differently with a different background so one of the things that's really important to our field at large and of course the company my company fort net is to massively increase the amount of cyber security training that's available to people not just the computer scientists the world and the engineers but people in other areas as well the other degree to non-greek people and with that a you know higher level of cyber security training available to a more diverse community not only can we solve the problem of numbers we don't have enough cybersecurity people but we can actually increase our ability to defend against these things I have more greater diversity of thought experience you know that's such a great point I think I just put an exclamation point on that I get that question all the time and the skills gap is should I study computer science and like actually if you can solve problems that's a good thing but really diversity about diversity is a wonderful thing in the age of unlimited compute power because traditionally diversity whether it was protocol diversity or technical diversity or you know human you know makeup that's tend to slow things down but you get higher quality so that's a generalization but you get the point diversity does bring quality and if you're doing a data science you don't want have a blind spot I'm not have enough data so yeah I think a good diverse data set is a wonderful thing you're going to a whole nother level saying bringing diversely skill sets to the table because the problems are diverse is that what you're getting at it is it's one of our I'll say our platforms that we're talking about during the during the covered nineteen crisis which is perhaps there's perhaps we could all make ourselves a little bit better by taking some time out since we're not competing taking some time out and doing a little bit more online training where you can where you can either improve your current set of cybersecurity skills of knowledge or be introduced to them for the first time and so there's one or some wonderful Fortinet training available that can allow both the brand-new folks the field or or the the intermediate level folks with you become higher level experts it's an opportunity for all of us to get better rather than spending that extra hour on the road every day why don't we take at least you know 30 of those 60 minutes or former commute time and usually do some online soccer security treaty feel final question for you great insight great conversation as the world and your friends my friends people we don't know other members of society as they start to realize that the virtualization of life is happening just in your section it's convergence what general advice would you have for someone just from a mental model or mindset standpoint to alleviate any anxiety or change it certainly will be happening so how they can better themselves in their life was it is it thinking more about the the the experiences is it more learning how would you give advice to folks out there who are gonna come out of this post pandemic certainly it's gonna be a different world we're gonna be heightened to digital and virtual but as things become virtualized how can someone take this and make a positive outcome out of all this I I think that the future the future remains bright earlier we talked about sci-fi the integration of the cyber world in the physical world that's gonna provide great opportunities to make us more efficient gives us more free time detect bad things from happening earlier and hopefully mitigating those bad things from happening earlier so a lot of things that some people might use as scare tactics right convergence and Skynet in in robotics and things like that I believe these are things that will make our lives better not worse our responsibilities though is talking about those things making sure people understand that they're coming why they're important and make sure we're putting the right security and privacy to those things as these worlds this physical world and the soccer worlds converged I think the future is bright but we still have some work to do in terms of um making sure we're doing things at very high speeds there's no delay in the cybersecurity we put on top of these applications and make sure we have very very well integrated solutions that don't cause things to become more complex make make things easier to do certainly the winds of change in the big waves with the transformations happening I guess just summarize by saying just make it a head win I mean tailwind not a headwind make it work for you at the time not against it Phil thank you so much for your insights I really appreciate this cube conversation remote interview I'm John Ford with the cube talking about cybersecurity and the fundamentals of understanding what's going on in this new virtual world that we're living in to being virtualized as we get back to work and as things start to to evolve further back to normal the at scale problems and opportunities are there and of course the key was bringing it to you here remotely from our studio I'm John Ferrier thanks for watching [Music]

>> Narrator: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston. Connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a CUBE conversation. >> Hi and welcome to a special CUBE conversation. I'm Stu Miniman and we're digging into VMware's Vsphere 7 announcement. We've had conversations with some of the executives, some of the technical people. But we know that there's no better way to really understand a technology than to talk to some of the practitioners that are using it. So really happy to have join me for the program, I have Phil Buckley-Mellor. Who is an Infrastructure Designer with British Telecom. Joining me digitally from across the pond, Phil, thanks so much for joining us. >> Hi Stu. >> All right so, Phil, let's start of course British Telecom, I think most people know you know what BT is and you know it's a really sprawling company. Tell us a little bit about your group, your role, and what's your mandate? >> Okay so my group is called Service Platforms. It's the bit of BT that services all the multimillions of our customers. So we have broadband, we have TV, we have mobile. We have DNS and email systems. It's all about our customers. It's not a B2B part of BT, you with me? We specifically focus on those kind of multimillion customers that we've got in those various services. And in particular my group is for, we do infrastructure. So we do data center all the way up to really about boot time or so or just past boot time. And the application developers look after that stage and above. >> Okay great we are definitely going to want to dig in and talk about that. That boundary between the infrastructure teams and the application teams. But let's talk a little bit first, you know we're talking about VMware. So you know, how long has your organization been doing VMware? And tell us what you see with the announcement that VMware is making for vSphere 7? >> Sure well I mean we've had a really great relationship with VMware for about 12, 13 years. Something like that. And it's an absolutely key part of our infrastructure it's written throughout BT really. In every part of our operations design, development, and the whole ethos of the company is based around a lot of VMware products. And so one of the challenges that we've got right now, is application architecture's are changing quite significantly at the moment and as you know. In particular with Serverless and with containers and a whole bunch of other things like that. We're very comfortable with our ability to manage VMs and have been for a while. We currently use, extensively we use vSphere, NSX T, Vrops, login site, networking site, and a whole bunch of other VMware constellation applications. And our operations team they know how to use that. They know how to optimize. They know how to PaaS on-prem and troubleshoot. So that's great and that's been like that for a half a decade a least. We've been really, really confident with our ability to work with VMware environments. And along came containers and like I said multicloud as well. And what we were struggling with was the inability to have a single pane of glass. really on all that. And to use the same people and the same processes to manage a different kind of technology. So we've been working pretty closely with VMware on number of different containerization products for several years now. I've worked really closely with the vSphere Integrated Containers guys in particular and now with the pacific guys. With really the idea that when we bring in version 7, and the containerization aspect of version 7 we'll be in a position to have that single pane of glass. To allow our operations team to really barely differentiate between what's a VM and what's a container. That's really the holy grail, right? >> Yeah >> So we'll be able to allow our developers to develop, our operations team to deploy and to operate, and our designers to see the same infrastructure, whether that's on-premises, cloud, or off premises. And be able to manage the whole piece in that respect. >> Okay so, Phil, really interesting things you've walked through here. You've been using containers in a virtualized environment for a number of years. Want to understand in the organizational piece just a little bit because it sounds great. I managed all the environment but you know containers are a little bit different than VMs, you know? If I think back you know, from an applications standpoint, it was you know let's stick in in a VM. I don't need to change it. And once I spin up a VM, often that's going to sit there for months, if not years. As opposed to you know, I think about a containerization environment. I really want to pull the resources. I'm going to create and destroy things all the time. So you know, bring us inside that organizational piece. You know how much will there need to be interaction, and more interaction or change in policies, between your infrastructure team and your App Dev team? >> Well yes I mean you're absolutely right. The nature and the time scales that we're talking about between VMs and containers is wildly different. As you say we probably almost certainly have VMs in place now that were in place in 2018 certainly I imagine. Haven't really been touched. Where as you say VMs, a lot of people talk about spinning them all up all the time. There are parts of our architecture that require that. In particular the very client facing bursty stuff. You know it does require spinning up and spinning down pretty quickly. But some of our other containers do sit around for weeks if not months. It would really just depend on the development cycle aspects of that. But the hard bit that we've really had was just the visualizing it. There are a number of different products out there that will allow you see the behavior of your containers and understand the resource requirements that they are having at any given moment, allow you to troubleshoot on some of them. But they are not... They're new products. They are new things that we would have to get used to. And also it seems like there's an awful lot of competing products. Quite a Venn diagram in terms of functionality and user abilities to do that. So again coming back to being able to manage through vSphere To be able to have a list of VMs and along side it is a list of containers. And to be able to use policies to define how they behave. In terms of the networking, to be able to essentially put our deployments on rails, by using in particular TAC based policies. Means that we can take the owners of security we can take the owners of performance management and capacity management away from the developers. Who don't really care about that a lot of the time. And they can just get on with their job. Which is to develop new functionality and help our customers. So that then means that then we have to be really responsible about defining those policies and making sure that they're adhered to. But again we know how to do that with VMs through vSphere. So the fact that we can actually apply that straight away just with slightly different compute unit, which is really all we're talking about here, is ideal. And then to be able to extend that into multiple clouds as well. Because we do use multiple clouds where Asia, the US, and Azure customers. And we're between them is an opportunity that we can't do anything other than be excited about to take up. >> Phil, I really like how you described really the changing roles that are happening there in your organization need to understand right there's things that developers care about you know they want to move fast they want to be able to build new things. and there's things that they shouldn't have to worry about and you know we talk about some of the new world and you know can the platform underneath this take care of it. Well there's somethings platforms take care of, there's somethings that the software or you know your team is going to need to understand So maybe if you could dig in a little bit to some of those what are the drivers from your application portfolio? What is the business asking of your organization that's driving this change and being one of those you know tailwinds pushing you towards you know Kubernetes and the vSphere 7 technologies. >> Well it all comes down to the customers, right. Our customers want new functionality. They want new integrations. They want new content. They want better stability and better performance. And our ability to extend or contract in capacity as needed as well. So they are the real, ultimate challenges that we want to give our customers the best possible experience of our products and services. So we have to address that, really from a development perspective. It's our developers that have the responsibility to design and deploy those. So we have to, in infrastructure we have to act as a firm foundation really underneath all of that that. That allows them to know that what they spend their time to develop and want to push out to our customers is something that can be trusted is performance. We understand where their capacity requirements are coming from in the short term and in the long term for that. And is secure as well, obviously as well is a big aspect to it. So really we're just providing our developers with the best possible chance of giving our customers what will hopefully make them delighted. >> Great Phil, you've mentioned a couple of times that you're using public clouds as well as your VMware farm I want to make sure if you can explain a little bit a couple of things. Number one is when it comes to your team, especially your infrastructure team. How much are they involved with setting up some of the basic pieces or managing things like performance in the public cloud? And secondly when you look at your applications are some of your clouds, some of your applications hybrid going between the data center and the public cloud and I haven't talked to too many customers that are doing applications that just live in any cloud and move things around but maybe if you could clarify those pieces as to what cloud really means to your organization and your applications? >> Sure well I mean to us clouds allows us to accelerate development. Which is nice because it means we don't have to do on premises capacity uplifts for new pieces of functionality or so. We can initially build in cloud and test in the cloud. But very often applications really make better sense especially in the TV environment, where people watch TV all the time I mean yes there are peak hours and lighter hours of TV watching. The same goes for broadband really. But we generally we're more than an a tower application profile so what that allows us to do then is to have applications that when it makes sense we run them inside, our organization when we have to run them in our organization for you know data protection reasons or whatever. Then we can do that as well but then where say for instance we have a boxing match up. And we're going to see an enormous spike in the amount of customers that want to sign up into our order journey to allow them to view that to gain access to that. Well why would you spend a lot of money on service just for that level of additional capacity? So we do absolutely have hybrid applications. Not necessarily hybrid blocks. We have blocks of sub-applications. You know dozens of them really to support our whole platform. And what you would see is that if you were to look at our full application structure. For one of the platforms I mentioned that some of the some of those application blocks have to run inside some can run outside. And what we want to be able to do is let our operations team to define that again by policy As to where they run. And to have a system that allows us to transparently see where they're running, how they're running, and the implications of those decisions. So that we can trim those maybe in the future as well. And that way we best serve our customers. We get to, get our customers yeah what they need. >> All right great, Phil. Final question I have for you, You've been through a few iterations of looking at Vms, containers, public cloud. What advice would you give your peers with the announcement of vSphere 7 and how they can look at things today in 2020 versus what they might have looked at say a year or two ago? >> Well I'll be honest, I was a little bit surprised by vSphere 7. We knew that VMware were working on trying to make containers on the same level both from a management deployment perspective as VMs. I mean they're called VMware after all, right. And we knew that they were looking at that. But I was surprised by just quite how quickly they have managed to almost completely reinvent their application really. It's you know if you look at the whole Tanzu stuff and the mission control stuff. I think a lot of people were blown away by just quite how happy VMware were to reinvent themselves, from an application perspective you know. And to really leap forward. And this is between version 6 and 7. I've been following these since version 3 at least. And it's an absolutely revolutionary change in terms of the overall architecture. The aims to what they want to achieve with the application. And luckily the nice thing is that if you're used to version 6 it's not that big a deal. It's really not that big a deal to move forward at all. It's not such a big change to process and the training and things like that. But my word there's an awful lot of work underneath that. Underneath the covers. And I'm really excited and I think other people in my position should just take it as an opportunity to revisit what they can achieve in particular with vSphere and with in combination with AdeXT. It's quite hard to put into place unless you've seen the slides about it and unless you've seen the products. Just how revolutionary version 7 is compared to previous versions. Which have kind of evolved for a couple of years. So yeah I think I'm really excited about it. I know a lot of my peers at other companies that I speak with quite often are very excited about 7 as well. So yeah I'm really excited about the whole piece. >> Well, Phil thank you so much. Absolutely no doubt this is a huge move for VMware. The entire company and their ecosystem rallying around help move to the next phase of where application developers and infrastructure need to go. Phil Buckley, joining us from British Telecom. I'm Stu Miniman thank you so much for watching theCUBE. (Instrumental music)

>> Narrator: From Sand Hill Road, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, presenting the People First Network, insights from entrepreneurs and tech leaders. >> Hello and welcome to a special Cube conversation, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. We're here at Mayfield Fund on Sand Hill Road, Venture Cap for investing here for the People First co-created production by theCube and Mayfield. Next to us, Phil Finucane who's the former CTO of Express Scripts as well as a variety of other roles. Went to Stanford, Stanford alum. >> Mm hmm. >> Good to see you, thanks for joining me for this interview. >> Thank you, thank you for having me. >> So, before we get into some of the specifics, talk about your career, you're a former CTO of Express Scripts >> Yep. >> What are some of the other journeys that you've had? Talk about your roles. >> Yeah, I've had sort of a varied career. I started off as just a computer coder for a contract coder in the mid-90s. I sort of stumbled into it, not because I had a computer science background, but because when you start coding, sort of for fun in Silicon Valley in the mid-90s, there are just lots of jobs and I was lucky to have great mentors along the way. In 2003, I joined Yahoo and came in as the lead engineer, sort of the ops guy and the build and release guy for the log in and registration team at Yahoo, so I learned how to, went from being just a coder to being somebody who know how to run and build big systems and manage them all around the world. That was in the day when everything was bare metal and I could go to a data center and actually look at my machine and say, "Wow, that one's mine," right? And you know, sort of progressed from there to being the architect by the time that I left for some of the big social initiatives at Yahoo. On my way out, the YOS, the initiative to try to build Facebook in I think 2007, 2008 to try to take them on. That didn't work out too well, but it was definitely a formative experience in my career. From there I went to Zynga, where I was the CTO for Farmville. Was really, really good at getting middle-aged women in the Midwest to come play our game, and you know, was there for >> And it was highly, >> About three years >> high growth, Farmville >> Huge growth >> Took off like a rocket ship. >> Yeah, you know, over the 10 quarters I worked on the game we had over a billion dollars in revenue and that was, you know, the Zynga IPO'd on the back of that, right? And we weren't the only game, but we were certainly >> That was one of the big games >> The big whale, us and poker were the two that really drove the value in Zynga at that point. After that, I went to American Express, where I worked in a division that sort of sat off on the side of American Express focusing on stored value products. I was the chief architect for that division. Stored value products and international currency exchange. So, you know, at one point, I was in charge of both a pre-paid platform and American Express's traveler's checks platform, believe it or not, a thing that still exists. Although it's not heavily used any more. And you know, finally, I went to Express Scripts, where I spent the last three years as the CTO for that org. >> It's interesting, you've got a very unique background, because you know, you've seen the web scale, talk about bare metal Yahoo days, I mean, I remember those days vividly, you know, dealing with database schemas, I mean certainly the scale of Yahoo front page, never mind the different services that they had, which by the way, silo-like, they had databases >> Very, oh totally >> So building a registration and identity system must've been like, really stitching together a core part of Yahoo, I mean, what a Herculean task that must've been. >> Yeah, it was a lot of fun. I learned a lot, you know, we, it was my first experience in figuring out how to deal with security around the web. You know, we had, at the beginning, some vulnerabilities here and there, as time went on, our standards around interacting around the web got better and better. Obviously, Yahoo has run into trouble around that in subsequent years, but it was definitely a big learning experience, being involved in you know, the development of the OAuth 2.0 spec and all of that, I was sort of sitting there advising the folks who were, you know, in the middle of that, doing all the work. >> And that became such a standard as we know, tokens, dealing with tokens and SAS. Really drove a lot of the SAS mobile generation that did cloud, which becomes kind of that next generation so you had, you know Web 1.0, Web 2.0, then you had the cloud era, cloud 2.0, now they're goin' DevOps and apps. I want to get your thought, and you throw crypto in there just for fun, of dealing with blockchain and then token economics and new kinds of paradigms are coming online >> It's amazing how far we've come in those years, right? I mean I look at the database that was built inside of Yahoo and this predated me, you know, this was back to circa 1996, I think, but you know, big massively scalable databases that were needed just because the traditional relational database just wouldn't work at that scale, and Yahoo was one of the first to sort of discover that. And now you look at the database technologies that are out there today that take some of those core concepts and just extend them so much further and they're so much easier to access, to use, to run, operate, all of those things than back in the days of Yahoozle, UDB, and it's amazing just to see how far we've come. >> Phil, I want to get your thoughts, because you know, talking about Yahoo and just your experiences and even today, at that time it was like changing the airplane's engine at 35,000 feet, it's really difficult. A lot of corporate enterprises right nhow are having that same kind of feeling with digital, and digital transformation, I'd say it's a cliche, but it is true this impact, the role of data that's playing and the just for value creation but also cybersecurity could put a company out of business, so there's all kinds of looming things that are opportunities and challenges, that are sizable, huge tasks that was once regulated to the full stack developers and the full web scalers, now the lonely CIO with the anemic enterprise staff has to turn around on a dime. Staff up, build a stack, build commodity, scale out, this is pretty massive, and not a lot of people are talking about this. What's your view on this? Because this is super important. >> Yeah it is, and you know, so I had kind of a shock, moving from working my whole career here on Silicon Valley and then going to American Express, which you know, is very similar in a lot of ways to Express Scripts, and the sort of corporate mindset around, "What is technology?" There is this notion that everything is IT and here in the valley, IT is you know, internal networks and laptops and those sorts of things, the stuff that's required to make your enterprise run internally. Their IT is all of your infrastructure, right? And IT is a service organization, it's not the competitive advantage in your industry, right? And so both of the places that I've gone have had really forward-thinking leaders that have wanted to change the way that their enterprise operates around technology, and move away from IT but, to technology, to thinking about engineering as a core competency. And that's a huge change, not only for the CIO >> You're saying they did have that vision >> They had the vision, but they didn't know how to get there, so my charter coming in and you know, others who were on the teams around me, our charter was to come in and help build a real engineering organization as opposed to an IT org that's very vendor-oriented, you know, that's dependent on third parties to tell you the right thing or the wrong thing, you know that hires consultants to come in and help set up architecture standards, because we couldn't do that on our own, we're not the experts on this side. You know, that's sort of the mindset in many old school companies, right? That needs, that I think needs to change. This notion that software is eating the world is still not something that people have gotten their heads around in many companies, right? >> And data's washing out old business models, so if software's eating the world, data's the tsunami that's coming in and going to take out the beach and the people there. >> Right. And so it's like, all of these things, it's one thing for, you know, a forward-thinking CEO like Tim Wentworth at Express Scripts, who was responsible for bringing me and the group in, you know, those kinds of folks, it's one thing to know that you have to make that transition it's another thing to have a sense of what that means for an engineering team, and all the more for the rest of the organization to be able to get behind it. I mean, people you know, I don't know any number of business partners who've been used to, just sort of taking a spec, throwing it over the wall, and saying, "Come back to me in two years when you're done." That's not how effective organizations work around technology. >> Let's drill into that, because one of the things that's cultural, I mean I do some of the interviews of theCUBE, I talk to leaders all the time like yourself, the theme keeps coming back, it's culture, it's process, technology, all those things you talk about, but culture is the number one issue people point to, saying, "That's the reason why "something did or didn't happen." >> Correct. >> So, you talk about throwing it over the fence, that's waterfall, so you think about the old waterfall methodology, agile, well documented, but the mindset of product thinking is a really novel concept to corporate America Not to Silicon Valley, and entrepreneurs, they got to launch a product, not roll out SAP over two years, right, or something they used to be doing. So that's a cultural mindset shift. >> It's difficult for folks, even if they want to get on board to come along some of the time. One of the real big successes we had early on at Express Scripts was, you know, transitioning our teams to Agile wasn't difficult, what was difficult was getting business partners to sort of come along and be actively engaged in that product development mindset and lifecycle and all those sorts of things. And you know, we had one partner in particular, we were migrating from a really old, really clunky customer care application that you know had taken years and years to build, took on average, a new agent took six weeks to get trained on it because it was so complex and it's Oracle Forms and you know, every field in the database was a field on this thing, and there were green screens to do the stuff that you couldn't do in Oracle Forms, so and we wanted to rebuild the application. We tried to get them to come along and say, "Okay, we're going to do it in really small chunks," but business partners were like, "No, we can't afford "to have our agents swiveling between two applications." And so finally after we got our first sort of full-feature complete, we begged to go into a call center, you know with our business partners, and sit down with a few agents and just have them use it and see if it looked like it worked, if it did the right thing, and it was amazing seeing the business partner go, over the course of an hour, from "I can't be engaged in this, "I don't want an agent swiveling, "I don't want to be, you know, delivering partial applications "I want the whole thing." to, "Oh my god, it works way better, "the design is much nicer, the agents seem to like it," you know, "Here are the next things we should work on, "These are the things we got wrong." They immediately pivoted, and it wasn't, it was because they're the experts, they know how to run their business, they know what's important in their call centers, they know what their agents need, and they had just never seen the movie before, they just had no concept you could work that way. >> So this is actually interesting, 'cause what you're saying is, a new thing, foreign to the business partners, the tech team's on board, being Agile, building product, they have to, they can't just hear the feature benefits, they got to feel it. >> Yeah, they have to see it >> This seems to be the experience of success before they can move. Is that a success you think culturally, something that people have to be mindful of? >> It's absolutely something you have to be mindful of. And that was just the first step down the path. I mean, that team made a number of mistakes that folks here I think in the valley wouldn't normally make, you know. Over-committing and getting themselves into deep water by trying to get too much done and actually getting less accomplished in the process because of it and you know, the engagement around using data to actually figure out what's the next feature that we build. When you've got this enormous application to migrate, you should probably have some insight as to you know, feature by feature, what are you going to work on next? And that was a real challenge, 'cause there's a culture of expertise-driven, you know being subject-matter driven, expertise driven as opposed to being data driven about how do you >> Let's talk about data-driven. We had an interview earlier this morning with another luminary here at the Mayfield 50th conference celebration that they're having, and he said, "Data is the new feedback mechanism." and his point was, is that if you treat the Agile as an R&D exercise from a data standpoint. Not from a product but get it out there, get the data circulating in, it's critical in formulation of the next >> It is, yeah, it's absolutely critical. That was the eye opener for me going to Zynga. Zynga had an incredible, probably still does have, an incredible product culture that every single thing gets rolled out behind an experiment. And so you know, that's great from an operational perspective, because it allows you to, you know, move quickly and roll things out in small increments and when it doesn't work, you can just shut it off but it's not some huge catastrophe. But it's also critical because it allows you to see what's working and what's not and the flip side of that is, some humility of the people developing the products that their ideas are not going to work sometimes just because you know this domain well doesn't mean that you're necessarily going to be the expert on exactly how everything is going to play out. And so you have to have this ability to go out, try stuff, let it fail, use that, hopefully you fail quickly, you learn what's not working and use that to inform what's the next step down the path that you take, right? And Agile plays into it, but that's for me, that's the big transition that corporations really have to struggle with, and it's hard. >> You know you're, been there done that, seen multiple waves of innovation, want to bring up something to kind of get you going here. You see this classically in the old school 90s, 80s day. Product management, product people and sales people. They're always buttin' heads, you know? Product marketing, marketing people want this sales and marketing want this, product people buttin' heads, but now with Agile, the engineering focus has been the front lines. People are building engineering teams in house. They're building custom stacks for whatever reasons, the apps are getting smarter. The engineers are getting closer to the edge, the customer if you will. How do you help companies, or how do you advise companies to think about the relationship between a product-centric culture and a sales-centric culture? Because sometimes you have companies that are all about the customer-centric, customer-centric customer-centric, product-centric and sometimes if you try to put 'em together there's always going to be an alpha-beta kind of thing there and that's the balance in this. What's your take on this? Seems to be a cutting edge topic >> Yeah, well, so you know, one of the last big initiatives that I worked on at Express Scripts. Express Scripts has the, to my knowledge, the largest automated home delivery pharmacy in the world. It's amazing if you walk into one of our pharmacies where automation is packaging and filling prescriptions and packaging and shipping and doing all of that stuff. And we've built so much efficiency into the process that we've started getting slack in the system. Every year, you're trying to figure out how to make something work better and you know, have better automation around it. And so, you know, what do you do with all of that slack? The sales team can't sign up enough new customers for Express Scripts to actually fill that capacity. And so they create a division of commoditizing this, basically white labeling your pharmacy. We called it Pharmacy as a Platform, exposing APIs to third parties who might want to come along and hey, Phil's pharmacy can now fill branded prescriptions to get sent to you in your home, right? And so that's a fantastic vision, but there's a real struggle between engineering who had all these legacy stacks that we needed to figure out how to move to be able to really live up to this, you know the core of Express Scripts was our members and not somebody else's members. And so there's a lot of rewiring at the core that needs to be done. An operations team, a product team that's, you know, running these home delivery pharmacies, and a sales team that wants to go off and sell all over the place, right? And so, you know, early on, we started off and the sales team tried to sell, like six different deals that all required different parts of the vision, but you know, they weren't really, there was no real roadmap to figure out how do you get from where we're at to the end, and we could've done any of those things, but trying to do them all at once was going to be a trainwreck. And so, you know, we stubbed our toes a couple of times along the way, but I think it just came down to having a conversation and trying to be as transparent as possible on all sides, in all sides. To you know, try to get to a place where we could be effective in delivering on the vision. The vision was right. Everybody was doing all of the right things. But if you haven't actually, with so much of this stuff, if you haven't seen the movie, if you haven't worked this way before, there's nothing I can tell you that's going to make it work magically for you tomorrow. You have to just get this together and work in small increments to figure out how to get there. >> You got to go through spring training, you got to do the reps. >> Yep, absolutely. >> All right, so on your career, as you look at what you've done in your career, and what people outside are looking at right now, you got startups trying to compete and get a market position. You have other existing suppliers who could be the old guard, retooling and replatforming, refactoring, whatever the buzz word you want to use. And then the ultimate customer who wants to consume and have the ability of having custom personalization, data analytics, unlimited elastic capability with resources for their solution. How, what advice would you give to the startup, to the supplier, and to the customer to survive this next transition of cloud 2.0, you know and data tsunami, and all the opportunities that are coming? Because if they don't, they'll be challenged a startup goes out of business, a supplier gets displaced. >> Right, I mean, well, so the startup, I don't know if I have good advice for the startup. Startups in general have to find a market that actually works for them. And so, you know, I don't know that I've got some secret key that allows startups to be effective other than don't run out of money, try to figure out how to build effectively to get you to the point where you're, you know, where you're going to win. One of my earliest, one of the earliest jobs I had in my career, I came into a startup, and I tried, one of the founders had written the initial version of the code base. I, as a headstrong engineer, was convinced that he had done horrible work, and so I sort of holed up for like, six to eight weeks doing a hundred hours a week trying to rewrite the entire code base while getting nothing done for the startup. You know, in the end, that was the one job I've ever been fired from, and I should've been fired, because, you know, honestly as a startup, you shouldn't worry about perfection from an engineering perspective. You should figure out how to try to find your marketplace. Everybody has tech debt, you can fix that as time goes on, the startup needs to figure out how to be viable more than anything else. As far as suppliers go, you know, I don't know it's interesting the, you know, I sort of look at corporate America and there are many many companies that really rely heavily on their vendors to tell them how to do things. They don't trust in their own internal engineering ability. And then there are the ones, like the teams I have built at AmEx and Express Scripts that really do want to learn it all and be independent. I would say, identify when you walk into somebody's shop which they are and sell to them appropriately. You know, I've been a Splunk customer for a long time, I love Splunk. But the Splunk sales team early on at Express Scripts tried to come in and sell me on a whole bunch of stuff that Splunk was just not good at, right? >> And you knew that. >> And I knew that, because I've been a hands-on customer every since Zynga, right? I know what it's good at, and I love it as a tool, but you know, it's not the Swiss Army knife. It can't do everything. >> Well now you got Signal FX, so now you can get the observability you need. >> Exactly, right? So yeah, I, you know, I would say, you know, for those kinds of companies, it's important to go in and understand what your customer is, you know, what your customer is asking for and respond to them appropriately. And in some cases, they're going to need your expertise, either because they're building towards it or they haven't gotten there yet, and some cases, one of the things that I have done with teams of mine in the past, was it with AppDynamics at Express Scripts, excuse me at AmEx, five or six years ago, they were sold on, you know, bringing in AppDynamics as a monitoring tool, I actually made them not bring it in, because they didn't know what they didn't know. I made them go build some basic monitoring, you know, using some open source tools, just to get some background, and then, you know, once they did, we ended up bringing AppDynamics in, but doing it in a way that they were accretive to what we were trying to accomplish and not just this thing that was going to solve all of our problems. >> And so that brings up the whole off-the-shelf general purpose software model that you were referring to. The old model was lean on your vendors. They're supplying you, and because you don't have the staff to do it yourself. That's changing, do you think that's changing? >> It is, it's changing, but again, I think there's a lot of places where people nominally want to go there, but don't know how to get there, and so, you know, people are stubbing their toes left and right. If you're doing it with this mindset of, we're constantly getting better and we're learning and it's okay to make mistakes as long as we move forward, >> It's okay to stub your toe as long as you don't cut an artery open. >> Yeah, that's true, yeah exactly >> You don't want to bleed out, that's a cybersecurity hack >> That's true, that's true. But for me a lot of the time that just comes down to how long are you waiting before you stub your toe? If you're, you know, if you wait two years before you actually try to launch something, the odds of you cutting your leg off are much higher than >> Well I want to get into the failure thing, so I think stubbing your toe brings up this notion of risk management, learning what to try, what not to do, take experiments to try to your, which is a great example. Before you get there, you mentioned suppliers. One of the things we hear and I want to get your thoughts on, is that, a lot of CIOs and C-sos, and CBOs, or whatever title is the acronym, they're trying to reduce the number of suppliers. They don't want more tools, right? They don't necessarily want another tool for the tool's sake or they might want to replatform, what does that even mean? So, we're hearing in our interviews and our discussions with partitioners, "Hey, I want to get my suppliers down, "and by the way, I want to be API driven, "so I want to start getting to a mode "where I'm dictating the relationship to suppliers." How do you respond to that? Do you see that as aspirational, real dynamic, or fiction? >> It's a good goal to give motivation, I believe it. For me, I approach the problem a little differently. I'm a big believer, well, so, because I've seen this pattern of this next tool is going to be the one that consolidates three things and it's going to be the right answer and instead of eliminating three and getting down to one, you have four, because you're, you need to unwire this new thing, there's a lot of time and effort required to get rid of, you know, your old technology stack, and move to the new one, right? I've seen that especially coming from the C-Sec for Express Scripts is an amazing guy, and you know, was definitely trying to head down that path but we stubbed our toes, we ran into problems in trying to figure out, you know, how do you move from one set of networking gear to the next set? How do you deal with, you know, all of the virus protection and all the other, there's a huge variety of tools. >> So it's not just technical debt, it's disruption >> It's disruption to the existing stack, and you've got to move from old to new, so my philosophy has always been, with technical debt, when you're in debt, and I think technical debt really does operate in a lot of ways like real debt, right? Probably good to have some of it. If you're completely debt-free, that's I've never been in that place before. >> You're comfortable. You might not be moving, >> Exactly, right? But with that technical debt, you know, there's two ways to pay down your debt. You can scrimp and save and put more money into debt principal payments as opposed to spending on other new things, or, well and/or, build productive capacity. So a huge focus for me for the engineering teams that we've built, and this is not anything new to the folks in this area, but, you know, always think about an arms race, where you're getting 1% better every day. The aggregation of marginal gains and investing in internal improvements so that your team is doubling productivity every year, which is something that's really possible for, you know, some of these engineering organizations, is the way that you deal with that, right? If you get to the point where your team is really, really productive, they can go through and eliminate all the old legacy technology. >> That's actually great advice, and it's interesting, because a lot of people just get hung up on one thing. Operating something, and then growing something, and you can have different management styles and different techniques for both, the growth team, the operating team. You're kind of bringing in and saying, we can do both. Operate with growth in mind, to 1% better approach. >> Right, you know, and for me, it's been an interesting journey, you know. I started off as the engineer and then the architect, who was always focused on just the technology, the design of the system in production. Sort of learned from there that you had to be good at the you know, all the systems that get code from a developer's desktop into production, that's a whole interrelated system that's not isolated from your production system. And then from there, it has to be the engineering team that you build has to be effective as well. And so, I've moved from being very technology-centric to somebody who says, "Okay, I have to start "with getting the team right "and getting the culture right if we're ever going to "be able to get the technology to a good place." Mind you, I still love the technology. I'm still an architect at my core, but I've come to this realization that good technology and bad teams will get crushed by bad technologies and good teams. Because now I've seen that a couple of places, where you have old but evolving technology stacks that have gone from low availability and poor performance and low ability to get new features into production to a place where you're fixing all of that at a high rate. It starts with the team. >> You're bringing us some core Silicon Valley ethos to the IT conversation, because what you're talking about is "I'll fund an A team with a B plan any day "over a B team with an A plan." >> Right. >> And where this makes sense, I think is true, is that to your point about debt, A teams know how to manage it. >> Yeah. >> So this is kind of what you're getting at here. >> Right. >> You can take that same ethos, so it's the Agile enterprise. >> Yeah, it is >> That's what we're talking about. Okay, so hypothetical final point I want to chat with you about. Let's just say you and I were startin' a company. We're chief architects, you're the chief architect, I'm a coder, what are we doing? Do I code from horizontally scalable cloud, certainly cloud native, how would you think about building, we have an app in mind, all of our requirements defined, it's going to be data-centric, it's going to be game change and have community, it might have some crypto in there, who knows, but it's going to be fun. How do we scale this out to be really fast? How would you architect this? >> Yeah, well, you know, I do start in the cloud. I go to AWS or Azure or any of the offerings that are out there, and you know, leverage everything that they have that's already wired up already for you. I mean the thing that we've seen in the evolution of software and production systems over the last, well, forever, is you get more and more leverage every day, every year, right? And so, if you and I are startin' a new company, let's go use the tools that are there to do the things that we shouldn't be wasting our time on. Let's focus on the value for our company as much as we can. Don't over-architect. I think premature optimization is a thing that you know, I learned early on is a real problem. You should, you know >> Give an example, what that would look like. >> I've seen >> Database scale decisions done with no scale >> Correct, yeah, you know? You go off >> Let's pick this! It's the most scalable database, well we have no users yet. >> Right, you know you build the super complicated caching architecture or you know, you go design the most critical part of the system out of the gate, you know, using Assembly. You use C++ or, you use a low level language when a high level language with your three users would be just fine, right? You can get the work done in a fraction of the time. >> And get the business logic down, the IP, >> Solve the problem when it becomes a problem. Like, it's, you know, I've, any number of times, I've run into systems, I've built systems where you have some issue that you run into, and you have to go back and redesign some chunk of the system. In my experience, I'm really bad at predicting, and I think engineers are really bad at predicting what are going to be the problem areas until you run into them, so just go as simple as you can out of the gate, you know. Use as many tools as you can to solve problems that, you know, maybe as an engineer, I want to go rebuild every thing from scratch every time. I get the inclination. But it's >> It's a knee-jerk reaction to do that but you stay your course. Don't over-provision, overthink it, thus start taking steps toward the destination, the vision you want to go to, and get better, operate >> Solve the problem you have when it shows up. >> So growth mindset, execute, solve the problems when they're there. >> Right, and initially the problem that you have is finding a market, you know, not building the greatest platform in the world, right? >> Find a market, exactly. >> Right? >> Phil, thanks for taking the time >> Thank you very much, appreciate it. >> Appreciate the insights. Hey, we're here for the People First, Mayfield's 50th celebration, 50 years in business. It's a CUBE co-production, I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching >> Thanks John. (outro music)

(upbeat music) >> Female: From our studios, in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a Cube conversation. >> Hey welcome back everybody. Jeffrey here with The Cube. We're in our Palo Alto studios today for a Cube conversation. Again, it's a little bit of a let down in the crazy conference season, so it gives us an opportunity to do more studio work, and check in with some folks. So we're really excited to have our next guest. We'd love to talk to practitioners, people out on the front lines that are really living this digital transformation experience. So we'd like to welcome in, all the way from Toronto, the NBA champion, Toronto, home of the Raptors, he's Phillip Armstrong, global C.I.O., and E.V.P. from Great-West Lifeco. Philip, great to see you. >> Thanks, Jeff, good afternoon. >> And I got to say congrats, you know, you took the title away from us this year, but a job well done, and we all rejoiced in Canada's happy celebration. I'm sure it was a lot of fun. >> Lots of excitement here in Toronto for sure. >> Great, so let's jump into it. A lot of conversations about digital transformations. You're right in the heart of it, you're running a big company that's complicated, it's old. So first off, give us a little bit of a background just for people that aren't familiar with Great-West Lifeco in terms of how long you've been around, the scale and size, and then we can get into some of the challenges and the opportunities that you're facing. >> Sure, I'd love to. Actually, one of probably the world's best kept secrets. So Great-West Lifeco is a holding company, and underneath that company, we have a number of companies. So for example in the U.S., you may have heard of Putnam Mutual Funds out of Boston, or Empower Retirement Services, the second largest pension administration company in the United States out of Denver. We have companies called Canada Life and Irish Life. We operate in Europe, the U.S., and Canada. We were formed in 1847, so we're 170 odd years old. Very old, established company, in fact, the first life insurance company to get its charter in Canada. So we were certainly not born digital, we were not born in the cloud. In fact, we weren't even born analog. I think our history goes back to parchment, green ink, and "I" shares. So this has been quite the digital transformation for our company. >> So when you think about digital transformation, insurance companies are always interesting, right? Because insurance companies, by their very nature, they created actuarials, and you guys have always been doing math, and you've always been forecasting, and building models. What does digital transformation mean for you, and that core business in the way you look at insurance and the products that you offer your customers? >> It's been massive, it's had a massive impact right across our company. We have 30 million customers around the globe. Customers' expectations are rising every single day. They want online access to their information. We're an insurance company, but we're also a wealth management company, so we're open to market timing and exposures to the market. Our pace in our business has accelerated dramatically. So just the expectation, the other companies, digitally-native companies are setting with our customers, has forced us to completely re-examine our traditional business models that have served us so well, almost to the point where you have to take a hand grenade and just blow it up and start again. This is very, very difficult when you've got actuarial tables that are working, that are built on hundreds of years of experience. We're moving into a completely new world now. We've come from a world where security has always been very important to us. We manage 1.4 trillion dollars of other people's money. We have traditional business models and traditional data centers, and we operate at a certain level, a certain pace, and all of that, all of that, now has to change. We have skill sets and people who are very, very technical in nature, in their jobs, and have we got the right skills to take us into the future? Can we future-proof our business? This has been, not just a technology transformation, but a massive cultural transformation for our company. A reinvention of all of our business models, the way we look at our customers. A lot of our business is done through advisors. We have half a million advisors around the world that give financial planning and advice to people, and allow them to have some financial security. Our relationship with them has to change, and their expectations in using technology has to change. So this digital transformation is only a thin sliver of the transformation that our company has been going through globally over the last few years. >> That's interesting, you talked on so many topics there I want to kind of break it down into three. One is the consumerization of IT that we've talked about over and over and over, and people's experience with Yahoo and Amazon, and shopping with Google and Google Maps, really drives their expectations of the way they want to interact with every application on their phone when they want to, how they want to. So that's interesting in terms of your customer engagement. The other piece I want to go in a little bit is your own employees. You've been around since 1847, the expectations of the kids that you're hiring out of college today, and what they expect in their work environment, also driven in a big part by the phones that they carry in their pockets. And then the third leg of the stool are these, I forget the word that you used, but your partners or associates, or these advisors that you are enabling with your technology stack, but they're, I assume, independent folks out there just like you see at the local insurance office, that you need to enable them in a very different way. You're sitting in the middle. How do you break down the problems across those three groups of people, or contingencies, or constituencies? That's the word I'm looking for. >> Let's start with our advisors. We have many relationships with advisors. We have a relationship with an advisory force that is almost like a tied sales force that is positioned just to sell our products. We have advisors who are quite independent, and yet they sell our products. And then we have advisors that occasionally sell our products, and everything in between. Companies that are advisors, sort of managing general agents. We have bank assurance arrangements. We have all kinds of distribution arrangements around the globe, with our company to distribute our products. But the heart of what we do is an advice-based channel with many variants. So what do those advisors want? The want tools, online tools, they want safe connectivity, they want fast access to the internet, they want to be able to pull in advice, they want video conferencing, they want to be able to be reachable by their customers, and really leverage technology to allow them to provide that timely advice and be responsive to market changes. Almost delivering a bespoke service to each individual, in yet a mass way that's simple and timely. When you look at our employees, our employees pretty much want the same thing. They want safe access to the internet, they want safe access to the cloud and our applications. We've had to go through massive amounts of cultural change and training and education to bring our employees into the new world with new skills and equip them, just ways of working. Video, introducing video into our company, upgrading our networks. The change behind all of this different way of working has been phenomenal. I wish you could see the building we're sitting in today, that I'm coming to you from today. It's a stone building that was built in the early 1930s, a prominent landmark here in Toronto. And from the outside, it looks archaic. When you walk into the lobby, it's all art deco and beautiful. They can't make buildings like this today. But in many ways, it epitomizes our company, because then you go up the elevators and walk onto the floors, and it's all open plan, all digitally enabled. We have Microsoft Teams in every meeting room. The floors are all modern and newly decorated and designed to allow us to collaborate and create new solutions for our customers. It's a real juxtaposition . And that, I feel, is a good analogy for our company right now, and what we're going through. >> So let's talk about how it's changed in terms of the infrastructure. Your job is to both provide tools to all these different constituents you talked about as well as protect it. So it's this interesting dynamic where before, you could build a moat, and keep everybody inside the brick building. But you can't do that anymore, and security has changed dramatically both with the cloud as well as all these hybrid business relationships that you described. So how did you address that? How have you seen that evolve over the last several years, and what are some of the top of mind issues that you have when you're thinking about I've got to give access to all these people. They want fast, efficient tools, they want really a great way for them to execute their job. At the same time, I've got to keep that $1.4 trillion and all that that represents secure. Not an easy challenge. >> Not easy at all. A few years ago, it was pretty trendy to say we're going to move everything to the cloud. I think now, especially for large, complex companies like ours, a hybrid cloud is the way to go. I think we're starting to see a lot more CIOs like myself say, yes I'd love to take advantage of the cloud, and I'm certainly moving a lot of my footprint to the cloud. To start with it was because of cost, but now I think it's because of agility and access to new technologies as well. But when you move things to the cloud, you have to be very cautious around how you do that. We have in-house data centers that we have systems, administration systems that are obfuscated from our clients by fancy front ends and easy-to-use experiences. And they're running on pennies on the dollar, and you can't make a business case to move that to the cloud. So a hybrid cloud is the way to go for us. But what we realized very quickly is that we need to push our Cyrus security and defenses out to the intelligent edge, out to the edge of the internet. Stop bad things happening, stop malware, stop infections coming into our organization before they even come into our organization. The cloud has complicated that. We're reducing our surface areas. I heard just the other day a colleague of mine said yeah the cloud is fabulous, it's a faster way to deliver your mistakes to your customers and in many ways, it is, if you're not careful with what you're doing. We've deployed technology like Zscaler and other types of sand-boxing technology. But it's always a cat and mouse game. The bad guys are putting artificial intelligence into their malware. We saw the other day a piece of malware coming into our organization through email, and when it was exploded, the first thing it did was try to check signatures to see if it was in a virtualized environment. And if it was, it just went back to sleep again and didn't activate. The nice thing about Zscaler and some of the technologies that I'm deploying is that they're proprietary. They don't have these signatures. And so we can screen out, we literally get hundreds of thousands, close to millions, of malware attempts coming into our organization on a daily basis. It is a constant fight. What we've also found is that organizations like ours are big targets. What companies are trying to do is not steal our data, because they know that we won't pay ransoms. What we'd like to do is spend that money protecting our customers with credit monitoring, or changing their passwords and helping them deal with if there is a breach. So the bad guys have changed their tactics. Instead of stealing our data, they'd like to try and penetrate our networks and our systems and cripple us. They would really like to bring us down. And that determines a different strategy and protection. >> You touch on so many things there, Philip. We could go for like three hours I think just on follow-ups to that answer. Let me drill in on a couple. One of them, I'm just curious to get your perspective on how you finance insurance. You made an interesting comment, you don't pay ransom, and you have a budget that you spend on security within all the other priorities you have on your plate. But you can't spend everything on insurance, you can't get ultimate 100% protection. So when you think about your trade-offs, when you think about security almost from like an insurance or business mindset, what's the right amount to spend? How do you think about the right amount to spend for security versus everything else that you have to spend on? >> That's a great question, and I've been talking to my peers around what is the right amount of money? You could spend tons and tons of money on Cyber and still be breached. You can do everything right and again, still be breached. You just have to be very pragmatic about where you direct your resources. For us, it was hardening the perimeter was the start. We wanted to stop things getting in as best we could, so we went out to the cloud and put defenses right at the edge, right at the intelligent edge, and extended our network out. Then we went and said, what is our weakest link, and through social engineering and through dropping things onto people's desktops and them trying to breach into our network, we got some pretty sophisticated technology in end point detection. We monitor our devices using our SIM, we have a dedicated monitoring center that is global, that is in-house and staffed. We've built up a lot of capabilities around that. So then it becomes prioritizing your crown jewels, your most sensitive data, trying to put that most sensitive data into protected zones on your network, and clustering even more defenses around that most sensitive data. I'm a big believer in a defense in depth strategy, so I would have multiple layers of cyber security that overlap. So if you can manage to circumvent some, you might get caught by others. And really that's about it. It's been a struggle. We have a lot of people who specialize in risk-management in our company. So everyone's got an opinion, but I think this is a common challenge for global CIOs. >> I'll share you a pro-tip in a couple of the security shows. It seems HVAC systems are ripe for attack, and the funniest one I've every heard was the automated thermometer in a lobby fish tank at a casino that was the access point. So IOT adds a different challenge. >> Or vending machines. >> Yeah, but HVAC came up like five times out of ten, so watch our for those HVAC systems. But, we're here as part of the Zscaler program, and you've already mentioned them before, their name is on this screen. You've talked before about leveraging partners, and Zscaler specifically, but you mentioned a whole host of really the top names in tech. I wonder if you could give us a bit more color on how do you partner? It's a very different way to look at people in a relationship with a company and the reps that you deal with, versus just buying a product and putting in their product. You really talk about partnering with these companies to help you take on this ever-evolving challenge that is security. >> That's a fabulous question. I know that I cannot match the research and development budgets of some of these very large tech companies. And I don't have the expertise. They're specialists, this is what they do. We were the first company I think to install Zscaler in Canada. We have a great relationship with that company, and Jay's onto something here. He's a thought leader in this space. We've been very pleased with our cooperation and support we got from Zscaler in helping us with our perimeter. When we look inside our company, the network played a big part of delivering cyber security and protection for our customers. We placed a phone call over to Cisco and said come on in and help us with this. We need to completely revamp our network, build a leaf and spine architecture, software-defined network, state of the art, we really want the best and the brightest to come in and help us design this network globally for us. So Cisco has been a superb partner. Cisco has one North American lab, where they try out their new technologies and they advance their technologies. It's just down the street here in Toronto, so we've been able to avail ourselves with some pretty decent thought-leadership in the space. And then also FireEye has been absolutely superb working with them, and we developed pretty close relationships with them. We support their activities, they come in and help us with ours. We've used their consulting agency, Mandiant, quite a bit, to give us advice and help us protect our organization. And I think aligning yourself with these quality companies, Microsoft, I have to call out Microsoft, have been superb, starting from the desktop and moving us through, vertically aligned into the cloud, and providing cyber security every step of the way. You can't rely on one vendor, you have to make sure that these suppliers are partners. You turn vendors into partners and you make sure that they play well together, and that they understand what your priorities are and where you want to go. We've been very transparent with them around what we like and what we don't like, and what we think is working well and what isn't working well. We just build this ecosystem that has to work well in this day and age. >> Well Phillip I think that's a great summary, that it's really important to have partners, and really have a deeper business relationship than simply exchanging money for services. The only way, in this really rapidly evolving world, to get by, because nobody can do it by themselves. I think you summarized that very, very well. So final question before I let you go back to the open floor plan, and all the hard working people over there at Great-West Lifeco. What are you priorities for the balance of the year? I can't believe it's July already, this year is just zooming by. What are some of the things, as you look down the road, that you've got your eye on? >> Well we're certainly watching some of the geo-political activities. We have large operations in Europe, from my accent you can probably tell I'm a Brit. So we're watching Brexit and how that plays out. We're certainly trying to develop new and innovative products for our customers, and certain segments are interesting. The millennial segment, the transference of wealth from people in the later generations into earlier generations, passing wealth down to their kids. Retirement is a really big category for us, and making sure that people have good retirement options and retirement products. And of course, we're always kicking tires, and we're looking out for any opportunities in the M&A market as well, as our industry consolidates and costs rise. So that's kind of what's keeping us busy, and of course rolling out really cool technology. >> All right well thanks for taking a few minutes in your very busy day to spend it with us, and give us your story on the global transformation, the digital transformation and Great-West Life Company. >> You're very welcome, Jeff. Nice chatting with you. >> You too, thanks again. So he's Phil, I'm Jeff, you're watching The Cube. Just had a Cube Conversation out of Palo Alto studios. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)