(upbeat music) >> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's the CUBE. Covering Cisco Live 2018, brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and the CUBE's ecosystem partnership. >> Hello there, and welcome back to the CUBE's exclusive live coverage of Cisco Live 2018. I'm John Furrier with cohost Stu Miniman. This is the third day of three days of live interviews. Go to thecube.net, siliconangle.com for all the great stories. Of course it'll be on YouTube after as well. Our next guest is Christine Heckart, head of global marketing for all Cisco's business units in a really great role, focusing on the outcomes. Christine, great to see you again. >> Thank you. >> You're wearing the DevNet hat that says DevNet Social Club which is very interesting, because they had a huge party last night celebrating with 500,000 developers. Quite a social party. >> Right. >> And they had the hats, looking good. >> Unbelievable, unbelievable milestone. Really changes the nature of the industry, you know. The network is becoming an open platform for business innovation. It's time. It's high-impact. We're very excited. >> It's a new Cisco you're seeing. You have a new role. You're trying to get a holistic view across all the business units which have marketing, but the interesting thing about the DevNet success is in only four years, the success on the numbers is really kind of amazing to see that kind of growth of, you know, real, active developers. This points to the digital transformation. Cloud native companies like Airbnb, these are proven case studies. Now the enterprise is moving there. What's your view of that? How do you look at the digital transformation? >> Everybody's talking digital transformation. You know, it's like, I've been in the industry 30 years. To me, the digital transformation happened in the '90's when we truly went from analog to digital. This is wave two, maybe three, and it's not so much that we are digitally transforming. It's more that we are now learning to harness networks in new ways. And I don't just mean like technology networks, but networks of customers and partners and developers and allowing them to co-create value for each other. And when that happens, you know, more usage creates more value, creates more usage. You get this virtuous cycle, this network effect that's happening. That's the big network. And of course, if you're going to do that as a business, you need a different kind of architecture, small n. You need a new business architecture to build that new business model on. And that to me is the really big transformation that's happening. It's what makes it fun to be in this industry again. Very exciting. >> Yeah, Christine, I love that. I say most of my career is like I talk about networks of networks because I'm a networking guy by back ground, but, you know, at the CUBE, we're about community. Talking about that network effect, we've had on some of the research from MIT talk about this second machine age and how you're gonna be able to leverage some of these things, so just speak a little more of some of the cultural changes we see, and, you know, how the different networking and networking play together. >> Yes, I love the network of networks, 'cause that's another way to say network effect. There's a guy in MIT, in the MIT media lab, named David Rose. He wrote this book called Enchanted Objects, and I just love that concept of, you know, living in an enchanted world. That sounds amazing. But he talks about kind of a ladder of enchantment or a ladder of connected value, and the way I internalize it is when you connect an object, you change its nature. But we're not just connecting things back to a central data center anymore. David Goeckeler kinda talked about this. Chuck in his keynote referenced it. The whole world has changed. It's now about connecting things to each other, and it's creating the context and the socializing of things, the network of networks. And then how do you let those things and let people interacting with those things co-create value for each other? And DevNet comes in there, opening up the API's, opening up the data, allowing people to create new applications that have never been thought of before. But this, to me, is the big opportunity that we all have together, and we're. This is the age of networks. Joshua Cooper Ramo wrote that book Seventh Sense, which I think should be the bible of everybody in this industry, and it says we are truly in the golden age of networks and probably just at the beginning of it. There's a lot of change to happen. >> We love network effect, so we totally love where you're going with this because our business has got a network effect dynamic in how we do our media, but I think, more importantly, you're talking about value creation with networks. This is a fundamental, new trend that's now taking the connected world to another level. So we're all connected. >> Right. >> Audiences are out there. People are out there. So people who are building the networks are the ones that are creating the value. >> Right. >> The question that we're looking at and trying to understand is where is the value capture? We see open source as a great example of co-creation. How do you view that in your mind? Is network effect capture, is it collaboration? What's your thoughts and what's your reaction to the notion of if we're connected, how do we come together and how do we capture it? >> So, the way I've been thinking about it recently. I don't know if this is the right way, but companies are at different stages of this. You've got companies that are very traditional. You've got companies like Cisco and Microsoft that are transitional, and then you've got companies that have transformed. And for any of those companies, you can create. You can harness that value of network effect. You can do it at the infrastructure level. So we talked about that a lot in the keynotes, like with security, where one person gets sick, everybody gets inoculated because of what we did with Talos, and that's a network effect, but it's captured inside your infrastructure. When you're using AINML or you're automating things, that's a network effect inside your business infrastructure. You can do it at the product and service level. Just a single product. You can do it at the internal people level. How do I get my people collaborating in new ways and creating better value, co-creation of value, network effects among the people? You can transform the company, and your business model can be based on that. Or you can transform the whole industry. You know, if you look at what all the normal examples, Airbnb and Uber, they didn't digitize. They created network effects by having a network of drivers and riders or a network of people who own houses and people who want to rent houses. It's the capital N, right, that's at the business level, and ultimately it's transforming whole industries. >> I got to get your thoughts 'cause this is right in line with Chuck Robbins's keynote around an open new, modern era. >> Right. >> He put the classic network architecture slide up. Hey, firewall, old way. Let's go look at the new way. This is really kind of a thought leadership point that's super important because as we engage with intent networking changes, the outcomes are driving a lot of the architectures. It used to be the other way around. >> Right, exactly. >> Here's what you've got and here's what you can do with it. Now it's what do you want to do? >> Right. >> How does that affecting change? Obviously DevNet is a great example. That's a freight train. It's gonna go another inflection point, we believe, but this new mindset is changing how people are organizing, and the future of work is involved. Your thoughts on that? >> Yeah, you know, it's so many layers, but ultimately it's about harnessing the wonder and taming the chaos of this hyper-connected world, and I don't think you can build a new business on an old architecture. If your business infrastructure was built 30, 20, even 10 years ago, it's just not built for the modern age. And it's about mindset shifts and architectural shifts, but going from hardware to software because you need that realtime agility. Going from closed to open. Going from CLI to API, right? The DevNet orientation. There are these big shifts that we have to make in the way we fundamentally think about architecture, and then there are shifts we have to make in the way we architect networks, in the way we build applications, and all of that is what we have to do together as an industry. >> So Christine, you know, we've been in the networking world for awhile. One of the challenges we saw for businesses many times is the network was slow to change, and, you know, enterprises would be like, oh no, I can't do that because, you know, it's a bottleneck for innovation. So we've been excited to see Cisco moving up the stack. The DevNet momentum here, explain how we can flip that bit and make sure that, you know, networking is now a driver for innovation rather than an anchor? >> Right, it should be the driver. We say the network is now open for business. The network needs to be the platform for business innovation so I could answer in a technical level, but where I'm gonna go is higher level. You think about Cisco's logo as a bridge, and what bridges do in the physical world, is bridges collapse space and time. Right? If I live in the bay area, to get from San Francisco to Pleasanton, you used to have to go all the way around the bay. And you built a bridge, and you gain time. You collapse space, and you accelerate things. And that's what technical bridges do, too. It doesn't matter if we're collaborating with people around the world, we're collapsing space. It doesn't matter if we're trying to accelerate the pace at which we bring something to market, we're accelerating time, time to market. Technology bridges collapse space and time, and you get that acceleration effect, that small world effect, as a result. Now ultimately, that's what these technologies have to do. We do it through automation. We've gotta simplify things. We've gotta make it possible to program a network in the language of business, which is what intent-based networking is about. And you take an API, and you say what you want to do, and it automatically calls up those resources from the network and makes it happen. >> Talk about Cisco's role in that vision. By the way, it's a beautiful vision. We see it the same way, but the language of business is changing. You mentioned outcomes. These are new things. You mentioned API's, intent-based. What are some of the things Cisco's playing in the role of that future innovation? What's the role for Cisco? >> Well, Cisco has to play a couple of roles. Well, two of them at the same time. One, we're transforming our own business, and while we do that, we have to help all of our customers transform their businesses. And to me, we play two really important roles. One is as technology leaders and visionaries and evangelists. That's what this whole show is about. Like, the smartest people in the world are doing this stuff. How do you bring them all together, and how do you collectively move forward, collectively make each other smarter? We've got a network effect just here, right? Because we all make each other smarter. We learn from each other, and we learn how to take things forward. So Cisco with its R&D engine, and, you know, everything we do to automate and automate business and kind of create that hidden magic that makes the modern world possible, we gotta be doing that. But at the same time, companies and cities and governments look to Cisco as somebody to help show the way at the business level, at the human level, at the impact on the world, and, you know, that's where all of our social responsibility stuff comes in. We talk about everything from connected rhinos that help to preserve the ecosystem in Africa and make sure that there's not as much poaching going on with the rhinos, all the way to how we change education or change health care, and we have to play a role in all of that. >> It's interesting you bring that up, because, you know, the statistics we look at, certainly it's been well-documented that millennials want to work for a mission-driven organization, but you're bringing up something where a mission-driven organization actually impacts network effect. >> Yes. >> So it's more than ever now having a mission. Not only do you attract people who want to work for a mission-driven company, there's actually a benefit and impact through that. Can you expand on that? Because I think you're really off to something with network effect. I think network effect is a new dynamic that isn't just a paper exercise to think about, and looking at it as a formula or gamification kind of growth hack. It's actually a real business dynamic. Talk about that. >> It is. Well first of all, network effects are timeless, and frankly, they don't even need people. Bees and flowers create a network effect. It just means more usage creates more value for all users. It's been cities, language. Network effects tend towards kind of natural monopolies. You tend to get oligopolies, smaller numbers with big impact, and, you know, it does go to mission, because what I see happening is every industry right now is being transformed. Just like we saw back in the 90's, the Internet kind of went through every industry, and it changed it drastically and ultimately changed the whole world. And we see that happening now, but where we see it is at the whole ecosystem level because you're seeing network effects happening in entire industries. And our mission is to help every company in the world find its relevance, and really every person in the world, certainly every person in our industry, find their relevance. People are searching for how to become relevant in this very hyper-connected, changing time, and Cisco can help people in this industry find their relevance. We can help each company and each industry find their way and find their relevance, and when you do that, goodness is created. And when you fail to do that, a lot of people, jobs get impacted, companies get impacted, communities get impacted. And we want to see the positive impact, not the negative. >> It's so interesting. Cisco's core competency. I'm just seeing some of the signs around here, 25 years of CCIE. It's a networking company, but you're bringing network effects at a whole nother level. It's a business architecture. >> It's a capital N, not just a small n. >> You're bridging the network effects of technical with business network effects, and that's where the secret sauce is. >> That's where the magic happens. >> Christine, great to have you on. Great to see you. >> Thank you for having me. >> See you supporting DevNet with the hat there. Thanks for coming on the CUBE. Good to see you. Great stuff here. Network effect is a business dynamic influenced by actual technical network. Cisco's at the center of it. So CUBE with our network effect is bringing the data to you in realtime. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. Be back with more after this short break. Stay with us. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from the Bill Graham Auditorium in San Francisco, it's The Cube, covering PureStorage Accelerate 2018. Brought to you by PureStorage. (upbeat electronic music) >> Man: Graduated ASU. >> Welcome back to PureStorage Accelerate 2018. I am Lisa Martin with The Cube, sporting the clong of Prince, formerly known as, today because we are at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, a really cool concert venue that's been here since 1950 and I'm joined by Dave The Who Vellante today. >> Play the toast and tea. (laughs) >> Pretty groovy T-shirt there. And we're joined by a couple of guys, next we've got Axel Streichart, the senior director of business application solutions from Pure and John Meng, senior director of IT operations at Simpson Strong-Tie. Hi guys! >> Hi. >> Lisa: Welcome to The Cube! >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> So John, first question to you. Tell us about Simpson Strong-Tie. Who are you guys, obviously you're a Pure customer, but give us a little bit of an orientation to the business. >> Sure, so Simpson Strong-Tie, we're a public company based out of Pleasanton, California. We've been in business since about 1956, if I've got my history right, so we've been around for quite a long time. We're a manufacturing organization. Basically, if you're building a home or a deck or if you're needing to put two by fours together, our niche is that little connector, that bracket that connects those two by fours and we do pretty well in that business. Overall our revenue is just shy of a billion dollars, so a pretty decent sized organization. >> Dave: So Pure passed you. >> Yes, last year, you know. >> You okay with that or? >> I'm okay with that. (all laugh) >> So tell us about, from a business perspective, the need for PureStorage specifically with respect to your SAP journey. >> So a couple of years ago when I came on board, the business had made a decision that they were going to get off of their old ERP system onto a new ERP system. When I say old ERP system, I'm being a little respectful there. It's a homegrown application running on SQL which is basically, they lovingly called it Blue Screen because you go to fileshare and you double click on the executable that you need, for example, if you're doing accounts payable or accounts receivables or purchase orders or what have you, you double click on the executable you want, opens up a nice little blue screen and it's a DOS based blue screen and you tab around and enter all your information. They had been running on that application for about 30 years. >> Lisa: Is that all? (laughs) >> Yeah, so quite a while. >> Dave: It works. >> It works, right. If it ain't broke don't fix it, but it was developed by a single person and it was time that the company put on some bootstraps and hitched them up, so they went to market to decide on what ERP application they were going to move to and SAP won out. They had actually been running for a year on a test system hosted by SAP when I came on board, so the decision had already been made, the application wise from an ERP perspective, but the next step in our journey for Simpson, and my challenge, was how do we host this environment? Do we host it in a cloud, do we host it on-prem? And so as I took a, looking at our environment, a very distributed environment, I said, alright, well first and foremost, SAP is a centralized solution. Is there a way for us to create a single environment that our entire company could run on, not only for SAP but everything else, a mixed use environment? And I started having conversations with Pure. They actually let me talk to a couple of their existing customers who were very happy about their mixed use workload including ServiceNow who talked today, so definitely a shout out to them on the conversations we had back a couple of years ago. Anyways, Pure ended up being our foundation for currently our core tenant, which is SAP, but also the future tenant for everything else that we're going to throw on there. And it's been an incredible journey over these last couple of years with them. >> And why the decision to stay on-prem, versus go to the cloud? Was it a function of SAP really not being there in the cloud or your data, you didn't just want to shove your business into the public cloud? >> So there was definitely a lot of analysis that went into that. Just from a financial perspective, I worked with the CFO and we put together a 12 year ROI on cloud versus on-prem and just to kind of really give ourselves some understanding over time what the impact would be of renting versus owning and it was very clear that on-prem financially made sense. Then we had to talk about the business, what was the best for the business. We looked at it from a, when I came there, there was some, the project team looking at SAP had really already made their mind up. They wanted it off of IT. They wanted it in an environment that they trusted, so when I came on board I said, look this is something I've done before. We have experience, we have the in-house expertise, you just trust me that this is the right thing and let me show you how and that's where, honestly, a lot of the information that I was able to pull off of FlashStack, off of SAP, it's a certified solution, talking to ServiceNow I was able to prove to the business that look, hosting it internally made the most sense financially as well as for our business and what we were trying to achieve. >> Made you happy. >> Yeah and it's not just that, but this is a story we're hearing more often now. So customers actually trying this out in the cloud and realizing, number one, the cost, it's not that cost-efficient and effective as they were planning for and seeing, especially when you're making multiple copies of this SAP environments. The costs go through the roof and the other thing is also what a lot of customers then realize is how do you actually get your data and get your communication from your data center back to the cloud provider? You need a big pipe and this communication cost just to get the data out is huge, is sometimes huge. The other thing is SLAs. It sounds like a good thing, but in many cases, SLA's because they're not flexible, you're ending up quarter end you need help and they're saying, nope, talk to you in four days. It's not really acceptable. And the third one is, there's this whole concept around I don't really have to invest now into the knowledge, into the skill set, because I put it all in the cloud. It's not the reality. The reality, you still have to invest into the skills. Isn't that? >> Everything he has said is actually the conversations that we had in-house, absolutely. If you want to do a data migration from QA to Dev or Dev to Production or whatever your landscape is and how you want to move the data, oh, well, that's going to be a charge. Oh well, okay, well I need to spin up this extra project. Oh, well there's another charge. I mean, it's just constant nickel and diming and another key component that you hit on that I failed to mention was hosting it internally allowed us to control the end to end experience for our end users. When you're talking about hosting it in the cloud, your data is somewhere else and you can not control end to end. You can control it up to a certain extent, but then from there all you can rely on is the SLAs and, to his point, the SLAs are only what's on paper, they're not very flexible at all. >> So the business case didn't pan out for the cloud. >> Correct. >> But there's certainly attributes of the cloud that are attractive, so what are those attributes and how are you bringing those on-prem? >> So flexibility. Flexibility is huge for us, the ability to just quickly be able to spin things up and scale them back as needed. I kind of look of it as, look, there's a water line that you're going to use on a day in and day out basis for your organization. Maximize your investment there. On the peaks and valleys that you're going to have, that's where the cloud can really help and so, is cloud completely off the table for us? No, that's where we're going to be able to burst into that sort of scenario. If we need more compute, we need more spin cycles, whatever we need from the cloud, we can throw it up there and then bring it back down, so have much more controllable costs in our mind. >> So a major change in the application environment, migration, from an old platform. You had to freeze the app. Does that freeze the code? >> John: Yep. >> How long did you have to freeze the code for? >> So, when we're talking about, just making sure I understand your question. >> Your home-grown ERP, blue screen, C prompt to the SAP environment. >> Yeah, so the landscape as we have it today, we actually just went live on SAP early February and it's not company wide. It's only a certain branch. In its strength, the beauty of that previous application, it was very de-centralized and each branch where we have a high consolidation of users and workers, each branch had their own data center hosting their own ERP for their branch, so we could freeze their environment just during their time window. >> I see. >> Now the challenge for us today is as we start consolidating, those windows start to overlap, but that's honestly why we've invested in technologies like FlashStack and so forth that come with the redundancy built in so we can work on the environment without having to freeze it or bring it down. >> So you need the speed to compress those discontinuities. >> Yes, yes. >> Dave: In data. >> Absolutely. >> What about data protection? How do you, I know that's an area of expertise of yours. How do you approach data protection in this new environment? Are you doing anything differently? Where does Pure fit? >> It's actually a huge shift for us on how we do things. From a data protection standpoint, we're talking about disaster recovery, business continuity and so we have active passive data centers. We're utilizing what Pure has under the hood to be able to replicate in multiple ways. And that's the beauty of our setup that we've designed is the ability to replicate in multiple ways, because in a multi-tenant environment, yes, there are certain parts of the stack that one shoe will fit all sizes. I would say that PureStorage is that, but when you start getting to the details of each of the applications, they don't all play the same way when it comes to DR or it comes to replication or data protection and we will need to look at each one of those applications and design a data protection strategy around it as we import it in, so for SAP, we do have differencing of how we're going to protect that versus when we bring in our web servers, versus when we bring in SharePoint and other core applications to the business. >> So Axel, you mentioned, well actually it was John, you mentioned that you had the opportunity to talk to ServiceNow and maybe another customer of Pure as well when you were in this decision making process. I imagine ServiceNow's business is probably quite different from Simpson Strong-Tie, so what, Axel, I guess both of you, help us understand, what were some of the similar changes that, say, a ServiceNow faced that you were facing and then Axel, to your point, tell us a little bit about the SAP alliance that you have with Pure and how customers as big as ServiceNow and Simpson Strong-Tie are helping to evolve that relationship? >> Me first? >> Go for it. >> Alright, so one of the biggest strategies, the focus that I had when I was making the decision around hosting SAP, I really wanted to make sure I understood, did I have to go a siloed approach? Was I buying architecture specifically for SAP or could I do a multi-use workload? Multi-purpose was huge for me. I was really, I couldn't understand how, in 2016 when I was looking at this, I'm like, look, it's 2016, I know there's a solution out there that can solve this problem and so that's what I was challenging Pure and they're like, who do you want to talk to? And I said, "Well I want to talk to somebody "who's running SAP and I want to talk to somebody "who's running SAP in a mixed-workload environment." And that's where ServiceNow came into play. And when I was having conversations with them, I said, alright, so you're running mixed workload. Yes, okay, when you have an SAP performance problem, do you have to, is there a lot of effort to show that there's, where the problem in the performance is? And there was a pause on the phone and the guy actually giggled over the phone. I don't know how else to say it. And he's like, "Performance problems? "We don't have any." And so, when you hear that, especially when you're talking about SAP, which is a known beast of an application inside any environment and it will use whatever resource you throw at it and it won't play nice with other apps, when I heard that, I was like, okay, where do I sign? So it was basically that conversation that really said, alright, let's give this a try. The other thing, honestly, for us is SAP is our first tenant and as we start applying other applications to it, we already have our baseline established and we can watch as the other applications are thrown in and it's not impacting anything, SAP, or on their own. >> So FlashStack is going to be able to give you a foundation to not only scale your SAP infrastructure-- >> Absolutely. >> But also to expand to multiple workloads. >> Yeah, for example, some of our public web facing applications, we've already moved them in-house. We used to use a public service provider, a public cloud offering for this web service that I'm talking about. It would take, so you'd go out there and you'd say, you know what, I want a product catalog of all Simpson products and you hit the button. 45 minutes later, it's downloaded, 45 minutes. I took that workload and I put it in our data center. Three minutes. 45 minutes to three minutes. >> Lisa: Wow. >> And then another test was a web crawler, so we did a web crawler across that same web application to confirm when we moved it from one location to the other we didn't miss anything. In the old environment, running on a public cloud infrastructure, it took 20 minutes. 17 seconds on our own. And it was run from the same PC. There was no, it was pretty clear and honestly, when marketing felt that increase in performance and saw it and realized it, they bragged to the CFO and now the CFO's like, okay, when are we going to get this out of SAP? Well we have to get the whole company on SAP before we can really realize this investment, but they're very excited about the opportunities. >> And how long have you had the Pure infrastructure? >> We installed it probably about year and a half ago, because we had to get it prepared. We installed it about a year and a half ago. >> So you haven't had to do any upgrades yet. >> No, not major ones. We actually have our first major one this week. We're actually scheduling it, but one of the questions I was asked on an earlier panel was how due you handle outages with Pure and how has your experience been with support. Well, I'm sorry we haven't had to call support yet. I've heard great stories about it (Lisa laughs) and I know that our guys that are working with support right now to get our upgrades done, they've had nothing but praise, but honestly we haven't had a lot of interaction yet with their support, just because we haven't needed it yet. >> And you have an in-house development staff, application development team? >> Yes. >> Has their work flow changed at all in terms of being able to share data, share copies of data, are you there yet or? >> We're not there yet, but one of the goals of our environment, so we have two data centers and we have load balancers in front of the two data centers. When it comes to hosting our public web side of things, the goal is to have a green and a red environment where you develop on the red, green is your production and when it comes time, you just flip the switch and your development becomes your active. And so, basically, a lot of the nuances and strategies that you get out of public cloud, we're going to attain those using our private cloud infrastructure. >> Essentially use live data of the test environment-- >> Absolutely, absolutely. >> And then cutting over immediately. You couldn't have done that three, four, five years ago. >> Absolutely, absolutely. >> So Axel, we're just about out of time, but how common is John's story with Simpson Strong-Tie in terms of, we haven't had to call support yet. Are you hearing this resonate pretty pervasively in your SAP install base across industries? >> This is a very typical environment. I would call it almost green field, but most of the environments that we are dealing with are brown field, so customers are long-time SAP users and customers and they're going from, let's say, the Oracle environment into a HANA environment and the nice thing about this is that we are actually providing a platform that can help customers no matter where they are in their journey. If they are still in Oracle, they're already on HANA, they're moving onto AI, whatever it might be, they don't have to change anything on the infrastructure, per se, because there is no configuration or tuning necessary, whether it's Oracle, whether it's HANA, whether it's AI, so you're running it off the same platform. The other thing is that I want to mention is, because you asked me about our relationship with SAP. It's a very strong relationship, so we're actually working with SAP worldwide in their core innovation labs, so they have labs around the world where they develop new solutions together with hardware and software partners and they love to work with PureStorage because it is so simple and they're coming from a functional side. They don't care about the infrastructure at all. They're saying as long as it's simple and you can imagine they are pretty much the Switzerland of ERP. We actually recently published a white paper together with SAP around how to actually save license cost, SAP license cost, of up to 75%. Now you would ask yourself, why would SAP do that? Why would they promote something, push something, that actually cuts into their revenue? But for SAP it is more important to increase the adoption rate of HANA rather than the revenue that's behind it, so that's why we are publishing, and it's on the SAP website that you can download and you can see, together with PureStorage. It's an amazing story that we have. >> Let-- >> And honestly, that was part of why we chose Pure in the beginning, they're certified and now I didn't have to go to the business and try to convince them. It was all on paper for us. >> I can't help but notice that you brought a little kitty cat to the set, Axel. Tell us about this little stuffed animal. >> Maybe you heard it in the keynote this morning. We were talking about PureStorage is actually moving from their solution development towards engineered solutions. We want to actually put more application specific functionality and embed it directly into the array and one of the big challenges that a lot of customers have is how do I create copies, clones, and refreshes of my SAP environment? And we have customers it takes them sometimes nine days just for one copy, nine days. Why? Because it's a very complex and complicated end to end process, so we thought about why don't we take this entire process, automate this entire process, and embed it into our array, and we call this tool that we developed and that's available for everybody that, it's included in the maintenance. We call it Copy Automation Tool, CAT. >> The cat! >> That's the cat. (all laugh) >> And that's what we are, and so if people are asking, why is a cat, Copy Automation Tool. >> That's good. >> Very nice. >> I was like, where is this going? >> I like it. >> Brought it home, brought it home. >> Like you said. >> Do I get to keep this cat? Is this, oh. >> You can. >> Ah, very nice. >> This is pretty cool swag. Well Axel and John, thank you so much for stopping by and sharing with us the innovations that Pure and SAP are doing, how you are being successful, and now you are a reference customer for what you guys are achieving. >> Great story. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thanks guys, appreciate your time. >> Thank you. >> Yep. >> We want to thank you for watching The Cube. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante and cat. We are live from PureStorage Accelerate 2018. Stick around. Dave and I will be right back with our next guest. (upbeat electronic music)