>>From San Francisco. It's the cube covering PagerDuty summit 2019 brought to you by PagerDuty. >>Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff, Rick here with the cube. We're in downtown San Francisco at PagerDuty summit, the fourth year, the show third year. The cube being here. I think they finally outgrown the Western st Francis. We've got to have a better, a bigger venue but we're really excited to have our next guest doing super, super important work. We learned about this company a couple of weeks back at AWS. Imagine non profit, the Polaris company and we are happy to have Nancy Maguire. She's the CEO. >>Oh Nancy, great to see you Jeff. It's fantastic to be here. Thanks so much for having me and it's great to be back at the PagerDuty summit a second year in a row. Last year I was here last year. I'm on the big stage, is it? I've grown the venue. Are we ready to move to a larger, possibly a larger venue next year? They're doing incredible work. So really a really fortunate to interview Brad a couple of weeks ago. So for people that didn't see that, don't know players. Give us kind of the overview about what you guys are up to. What's your mission? Absolutely. So Polaris is an organization dedicated to ending human trafficking and restoring freedom to survivors. So for those that may not know what we're talking about when we talk about human trafficking is three main categories. Anybody who is forced to work against their will by means of force, fraud or coercion. >>Any adult in the commercial sex trade by means of force, fraud or coercion, and any minor, anyone 17 or younger in the commercial sex trade. And the way we think about this issue is in two halves that are complimentary. One is on the response side, we've got 25 million people around the world who fit that definition that I just described. And so it's about individual case management and helping to get them out of those situations. The way Polaris works on the response side of the issue is by operating to U S national human trafficking hotline. This is the nerve center for the anti-trafficking movement in the United States where we work 24 seven to connect to victims and survivors to the services they need to get help, stay safe, and began to rebuild their lives. So that's half of the story. The other half of the story is we recognize that the response side, while absolutely invaluable, doesn't get at solutions to the problems. >>So we work on longer term solutions to the issue of human trafficking. And the way we do that is through data and technology. So we haven't asked one of the largest data sets on human trafficking in the U S and we've mined that data for insight about how trafficking works. So we've learned there are 25 distinct types in the U S alone. We've then dug deeper to understand what are the legitimate businesses and industries that traffickers are using for their crimes. And those include social media, hotels, motels, transportation, financial services among others. And then we take those insights. We work with private sector companies, public sector, and law enforcement to get to upstream strategies to prevent and disrupt this issue at scale. So, unfortunately we don't have three days to dig through the that good list. But let's, let's unpack some of it cause it's super, super important on the, uh, on the data side, cause we're here at PG. >>So what are the types of data that you guys are looking at? The buildings mall and it was fascinating, Brad's conversation about the multiple kind of business models that you guys have have defined as was, was it lightning for sure. So what types of data are you looking at? Where are you getting the data? What are you doing with it? Yeah, absolutely. So I think the first thing to know is that this is a clandestine issue. And for so long the field has been data poor and it's been really hard to unpack what we mean by sex trafficking and labor trafficking to wrap our arms around the problem. And so we've had these really significant breakthroughs just in the last few years with a, by understanding that there are these 25 types. And that was through mining over 35,000 cases that we worked on on the national hotline over the years. >>And that our second major research initiative was to augment that with surveys and focus groups with survivors. So those with lived experience have now informed the data set and some examples of what we've learned, how our traffickers using hotels and motels for their operations, how do they use credit cards, how do they use buses and planes and trains and rideshares and how are victims recruited on social media. And conversely, how can they reach out for help, including through our hotline. Um, and so we're starting to really get granular about the nature of this problem. And then where are those key intersection points? Where do we have leverage? And a big part of the answer is, is the private sector, right? Right. So, uh, you know, the kind of the intersection from the clandestine in the dark and secret, you know, to, to the public, as you said, were things like credit cards or they need to get on planes. >>So they need hotels. It's a pretty interesting way to address the problem because there are these little, little, little points where they pop up into the light. Absolutely. So when you're doing that in your building, the longer term strategy one, it's to get the other, the people out of there. But are you trying to change the business models? I mean, how, what are some of these kind of longer term reservoirs? Absolutely. So right now the equation that traffickers perceive is this is the financial crime, right? It's not just a human rights abuse, right? Right. The equation they perceive is that this is high profit, low risk. We've flipped that equation. For instance, when financial institutions are tuned into, I have the built in red flag indicators for all the different types of trafficking that they might see. So it makes it simply too difficult for, or too risky for traffickers to bank and move their money. >>So that's one example. Another is in the realm of social media. So we've understood how traffickers are exploiting victims on social media. It can look like anything from grooming and recruitment on in sex trafficking to um, fake, uh, job ads on social media as well. So as we can help to inform social media companies, again working in tandem with victims and survivors to put those lived experiences into and leverage those insights into solutions, we can make change that equation for traffickers to it is simply too difficult and too risky to recruit online and push them to sort of more old school systems of recruitment that those are the sorts of upstream things that we believe are really going to change. Change the game, right? So it's recruiting, it's taking their money away, it's making it expensive for them to operate a lot of those types of, exactly. >>And the real focus is on these six systems and industries that we've identified. And tech is really a crucial, obviously social media companies, hotels, motels, transportation. Um, and for instance, one of the, one of our partners is Delta airlines and so they have been, I think one of the exemplars and really looking at this issue holistically and being all in from the CEO on down and leveraging again, why we think the private sector is so crucial is they've got the resources, the customer base, the engaged employees. Um, they've got the brand. And so for instance, what Delta does is they've trained all 60 plus thousand employees on how to, how to spot and detect human trafficking and what to do. They engage their customer base through PSA is and people can donate miles including that ended up, um, helping victims and survivors on our hotline to get flights to get out of their situations, um, and resources to, to support the hotline to scale. >>Um, and so it really takes that, we think the private sector is a huge piece of, of the puzzle and sort of bringing it back to the tech industry. The tech industry is uniquely position again with the tools, the resources that know how to actually supercharge this movement because it's going to be data in technology that's going to get us to scale. Right? Yeah. The, the Delta story is amazing. If for people that haven't seen it, um, you know, the CEO got completely behind this, basically train the entire company and other passengers to look for these anomalies. And, and what came up, some of the conversations in Seattle is it's really not that hard because you've got your business travelers and you got your families and you got these things that don't really fit. And that's, I don't know what percentage of the total flights, but it's a lot. >>So these things, if you're paying attention, it should be a lot easier to identify. So PagerDuty specifically, what are you guys doing with PagerDuty? Absolutely. Polaris and the broader anti-trafficking movement is engaged in a digital transformation. And so for us, that's on the response side, both on our hotline and on our data side so we can supercharge that learning and insight development. PagerDuty is central to our ability to, um, increase our efficiency on the hotline. It's, it's uh, uh, the hotline itself is composed of a number of different technologies. We cannot have any of those technologies go down because minutes and seconds matter on a crisis hotline. So PagerDuty helps us be as efficient as we can be in escalating urgent issues so they can immediately begin being worked on by our technical team. We don't lose those seconds and minutes and hours, um, as in sort of the, the old school model. >>So it's, it's part of our broader strategy and we've already been able to identify significant efficiency gains as a result when, when it's a response situation that someone's, someone got the number, they've got it, they got an opportunity to try to get out. What's the total time? Usually between they pick, picking up the phone and you giving them some action, which I don't know what the action is, runaway or somebody coming to get you or you know, it really depends on the situation. Um, of course if we're talking about a minor or a situation with imminent harm, um, but we can be talking about something, you know, an extraction or somebody getting to help within a matter of minutes. In other instances, safety planning at the victim and survivors wishes takes place over a period of calls over a period of contact. Sometimes it takes, it can take months or years to work up the courage to get to that point. >>So we do have ongoing communications with victims and survivors over time to support them, uh, to, to leave when they're, when they're ready. Right. Well, Nancy, it's such, it's such important, important work, not necessarily the most positive thing, but I'm sure there's a lot of great positive stories when you're helping these, these people get out of these crazy stories. Well, absolutely. And I think, you know, there was so much reason to be optimistic. This is a really unique moment in time and it's part of why I joined Polaris and joined this anti-trafficking movement is we're seeing, we're seeing unprecedented engagement from the private sector that I mentioned I think is absolutely critical to solving this issue when we've had real breakthroughs with the data so that we can get so much more granular and understanding how it works. So there's now really, as the time, I mean as, as as Jennifer said, she talking about digital transformation this morning, being a team sport, we think the anti-trafficking movement needs to be a team sport, right? >>We want to draw that circle a much bigger stick. Who's in that? Then we invite private sector technology companies and all of you out there to join us. Good. Well, hopefully we're helping get the word out and um, and again, you know, thank you for, for, for what you're doing. It's super important and it's much more pervasive and broad than, than I had ever imagined, perhaps some of these conversations. So thanks a lot. Thank you so much. All right. She's Nancy. I'm Jeff. You're watching the cube. We're a PagerDuty summit in downtown San Francisco. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

>> Announcer: From Seattle, Washington, it's theCUBE! Covering AWS IMAGINE Nonprofit. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in the waterfront in Seattle, Washington, it's absolutely gorgeous here the last couple of days. We're here for the AWS IMAGINE Nonprofit event. We were here a couple weeks ago for the education event, now they have a whole separate track for nonprofits, and what's really cool about nonprofits is these people, these companies are attacking very, very big, ugly problems. It's not advertising, it's not click here and get something, these are big things, and one of the biggest issues is human trafficking. You probably hear a lot about it, it's way bigger than I ever thought it was, and we're really excited to have an expert in the field that, again, is using the power of AWS technology as well as their organization to help fight this cause. And we're excited to have Brad Myles, he is the CEO of Polaris and just coming off a keynote, we're hearing all about your keynote. So Brad, first off, welcome. >> Yeah, well thank you, thank you for having me. >> Absolutely, so Polaris, give us a little bit about kind of what's the mission for people that aren't familiar with the company. >> Yeah, so Polaris, we are a nonprofit that works full-time on this issue. We both combat the issue and try to get to long-term solutions, and respond to the issue and restore freedom to survivors by operating the National Human Trafficking Hotline for the United States, so, it's part kind of big data and long-term solutions, and it's part responding to day-to-day cases that break across the country every day. >> Right, in preparing for this interview and spending some time on the site there was just some amazing things that just jump right off the page. 24.9 million people are involved in this. Is that just domestically here in the States, or is that globally? >> That's a global number. So when you're thinking about human trafficking, think about three buckets. The first bucket is any child, 17 or younger, being exploited in the commercial sex trade. The second bucket is any adult, 18 or over, who's in the sex trade by force, fraud, or coercion. And the third bucket is anyone forced to work in some sort of other labor or service industry by force, fraud, or coercion. So you've got the child sex trafficking bucket, you've got the adult sex trafficking bucket, and then you've got all the labor trafficking bucket, right? You add up those three buckets globally, that's the number that the International Labour Organization came out and said 25 million around the world are those three buckets in a given year. >> Right, and I think again, going through the website, some of the just crazy discoveries, it's the child sex trafficking you can kind of understand that that's part of the problem, the adult sex trafficking. But you had like 25 different human trafficking business models, I forget the term that was used, for a whole host of things well beyond just the sex trade. It's a very big and unfortunately mature industry. >> Totally, yeah, so we, so the first thing that we do that we're kind of known for is operating the National Human Trafficking Hotline. The National Human Trafficking Hotline leads to having a giant data set on trafficking, it's 50,000 cases of trafficking that we've worked on. So then we analyzed that data set and came to the breakthrough conclusion that there are these 25 major forms, and almost any single call that we get in to the National Hotline is going to be one of those 25 types. And once you know that then the problem doesn't seem so overwhelming, it's not, you know, thousands of different types, it's these 25 things, so, it's 18 labor trafficking types and seven sex trafficking types. And it enables a little bit more granular analysis than just saying sex trafficking or labor trafficking which is kind of too broad and general. Let's get really specific about it, we're talking about these late night janitors, or we're talking about these people in agriculture, or we're talking about these women in illicit massage businesses. It enables the conversation to get more focused. >> Right, it's so interesting right, that's such a big piece of the big data trend that we see all over the place, right? It used to be, you know, you had old data, a sample of old data that you took an aggregate of and worked off the averages. And now, because of big data, and the other tools that we have today, now actually you can work on individual cases. So as you look at it from a kind of a big data point of view, what are some of the things that you're able to do? And that lead directly to, everyone's talking about the presentation that you just got off of, in terms of training people to look for specific behaviors that fit the patterns, so you can start to break some of these cases. >> Exactly, so, I think that the human trafficking field risks being too generic. So if you're just saying to the populace, "Look for trafficking, look for someone who's scared." People are like, that's not enough, that's too vague, it's kind of slipping through my fingers. But if you say, "In this particular type of trafficking, "with traveling magazine sales crews, "if someone comes to your door "trying to sell you a magazine with these specific signs." So now instead of talking about general red flag indicators across all 25 types, we're coming up with red flag indicators for each of the 25 types. So instead of speaking in aggregate we're getting really specific, it's almost like specific gene therapy. And the data analysis on our data set is enabling that to happen, which makes the trafficking field smarter, we could get smarter about where victims are recruited from, we could get smarter about intervention points, and we could get smarter about where survivors might have a moment to kind of get help and get out. >> Right, so I got to dig into the magazine salesperson, 'cause I think we've all had the kid-- >> Brad: Have you had a kid come to you yet? >> Absolutely, and you know, you think first they're hustlin' but their papers are kind of torn up, and they've got their little certificate, certification. How does that business model work? >> Yeah, so that's one of the 25 types, they're called mag crews. There was a New York Times article written by a journalist named Ian Urbina who really studied this and it came out a number of years ago. Then they made a movie about it called "American Honey," if you watch with a number of stars. But essentially this is a very long-standing business model, it goes back 30 or 40 years of like the door-to-door salesperson, and like trying to win sympathy from people going to door-to-door sales. And then these kind of predatory groups decided to prey on disaffected U.S. citizen youth that are kind of bored, or are kind of working a low-wage job. And so they go up to these kids and they say, "Tired of working at the Waffle House? "Well why don't you join our crew and travel the country, "and party every night, and you'll be outdoors every day, "and it's coed, you get to hang out with girls, "you get to hang out with guys, "we'll drink every night and all you have to do "is sell magazines during the day." And it's kind of this alluring pitch, and then the crews turn violent, and there's sometimes quotas on the crew, there's sometimes coercion on the crew. We get a lot of calls from kids who are abandoned by the crew. Where the crew says, "If you act up "or if you don't adhere to our rules, "we'll just drive away and leave you in this city." >> Wherever. >> Is the crews are very mobile they have this whole language, they call it kind of jumping territory. So they'll drive from like Kansas City to a nearby state, and we'll get this call from this kid, they're like, "I'm totally homeless, my crew just left me behind "because I kind of didn't obey one of the rules." So a lot of people, when they think of human trafficking they're not thinking of like U.S. citizen kids knocking on your door. And we're not saying that every single magazine crew is human trafficking, but we are saying that if there's force, and coercion, and fraud, and lies, and people feel like they can't leave, and people feel like they're being coerced to work, this is actually a form of human trafficking of U.S. citizen youth which is not very well-known but we hear about it on the Hotline quite a lot. >> Right, so then I wonder if you could tell us more about the Delta story 'cause most of the people that are going to be watching this interview weren't here today to hear your keynote. So I wonder if you can explain kind of that whole process where you identified a specific situation, you train people that are in a position to make a difference and in fact they're making a big difference. >> Yeah. So the first big report that we released based on the Hotline data was the 25 types, right? We decided to do a followup to that called Intersections, where we reached out to survivors of trafficking and we said, "Can you tell us about "the legitimate businesses that your trafficker used "while you were being trafficked?" And all these survivors were like, "Yeah, sure, "we'll tell you about social media, "we'll tell you about transportation, "we'll tell you about banks, "we'll tell you about hotels." And so we then identified these six major industries that traffickers use that are using legitimate companies, like rental car companies, and airlines, and ridesharing companies. So then we reached out to a number of those corporate partners and said, "You don't want this stuff on your services, right?" And Delta really just jumped at this, they were just like, "We take this incredibly seriously. "We want our whole workforce trained. "We don't want any trafficker to feel like "they can kind of get away with it on our flights. "We want to be a leader in transportation." And then they began taking all these steps. Their CEO, Ed Bastian, took it very seriously. They launched a whole corporate-wide taskforce across departments, they hosted listening sessions with survivor leaders so survivors could coach them, and then they started launching this whole strategy around training their flight attendants, and then training their whole workforce, and then supporting the National Human Trafficking Hotline, they made some monetary donations to Polaris. We get situations on the Hotline where someone is in a dangerous situation and needs to be flown across the country, like an escape flight almost, and Delta donated SkyMiles for us to give to survivors who are trying to flee a situation, who needs a flight. They can go to an airport and get on a flight for free that will fly them across the country. So it's almost like a modern day Underground Railroad, kind of flying people on planes. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> So they've just been an amazing partner, and they even then took the bold step of saying, "Well let's air a PSA on our flights "so the customer base can see this." So when you're on a Delta flight you'll see this PSA about human trafficking. And it just kept going and going and going. So it's now been about a five-year partnership and lots of great work together. >> And catching bad guys. >> Yeah, I mean, their publicity of the National Human Trafficking Hotline has led to a major increase in calls. Airport signage, more employees looking for it, and I actually do believe that the notion of flying, if you're going to be a trafficker, flying on a Delta flight is now a much more harrowing experience because everyone's kind of trained, and eyes and ears are looking. So you're going to pivot towards another airline that hasn't done that training yet, which now speaks to the need that once one member of an industry steps up, all different members of the industry need to follow suit. So we're encouraging a lot of the other airlines to do similar training and we're seeing some others do that, which is great. >> Yeah, and how much of it was from the CEO, or did he kind of come on after the fact, or was there kind of a champion catalyst that was pushing this through the organization, or is that often the case, or what do you find in terms of adoption of a company to help you on your mission? >> That's a great question. I mean, the bigger picture here is trafficking is a $150 billion industry, right? A group of small nonprofits and cops are not going to solve it on their own. We need the big businesses to enter the fight, because the big businesses have the resources, they have the brand, they have the customer base, they have the scale to make it a fair fight, right? So in the past few years we're seeing big businesses really enter the fight against trafficking, whether or not that's big data companies like AWS, whether or not that's social media companies, Facebook, whether or not that's hotel companies, like Wyndham and Marriott, airlines like Delta. And that's great because now the big hitters are joining the trafficking fight, and it happens in different ways, sometimes it's CEO-led, I think in the case of Delta, Ed Bastian really does take this issue very seriously, he was hosting events on this at his home, he's hosted roundtables of other CEOs in the Atlanta area like UPS, and Chick-fil-A, and Home Depot, and Coca-Cola, all those Atlanta-based CEOs know each other well, he'll host roundtables about that, and I think it was kind of CEO-led. But in other corporations it's one die hard champion who might be like a mid-level employee, or a director, who just says, "We really got to do this," and then they drive more CEO attention. So we've seen it happen both ways, whether or not it's top-down, or kind of middle-driven-up. But the big picture is if we could get some of the biggest corporations in the world to take this issue seriously, to ask questions about who they contract with, to ask questions about what's in their supply chain, to educate their workforce, to talk about this in front of their millions of customers, it just puts the fight against trafficking on steroids than a group of nonprofits would be able to do alone. So I think we're in a whole different realm of the fight now that business is at the table. >> And is that pretty much your strategy in terms of where you get the leverage, do you think? Is to execute via a lot of these well-resourced companies that are at this intersection point, I think that's a really interesting way to address the problem. >> Yeah, well, it's back to the 25 types, right? So the strategies depend on type. Like, I don't think big businesses being at the table are necessarily going to solve magazine sales crews, right? They're not necessarily going to solve begging on the street. But they can solve late night janitors that sometimes are trafficked, where lots of big companies are contracting with late night janitorial crews, and they come at 2:00 a.m., and they buff the floors, and they kind of change out the trash, and no one's there in the office building to see those workers, right? And so asking different questions of who you procure contracts with, to say, "Hey, before we contract with you guys, "we're going to need to ask you a couple questions "about where these workers got here, "and what these workers thought they were coming to do, "and we need to ID these workers." The person holding the purse strings, who's buying that contract, has the power to demand the conditions of that contract. Especially in agriculture and large retail buyers. So I think that big corporations, it's definitely part of the strategy for certain types, it's not going to solve other types of trafficking. But let's say banks and financial institutions, if they start asking different questions of who's banking with them, just like they've done with terrorism financing they could wipe out trafficking financing, could actually play a gigantic role in changing the course of how that type of trafficking exists. >> So we could talk all day, I'm sure, but we don't have time, but I'm just curious, what should people do, A, if they just see something suspicious, you know, reach out to one of these kids selling magazines, or begging on the street, or looking suspicious at an airport, so, A, that's the question. And then two, if people want to get involved more generically, whether in their company, or personally, how do they get involved? >> Yeah, so there are thousands of nonprofit groups across the country, Polaris is in touch with 3,000 of them. We're one of thousands. I would say find an organization in your area that you care about and volunteer, get involved, donate, figure out what they need. Our website is polarisproject.org, we have a national Referral Directory of organizations across the country, and so that's one way. The other way is the National Human Trafficking Hotline, the number, 1-888-373-7888. The Hotline depends on either survivors calling in directly as a lifeline, or community members calling in who saw something suspicious. So we get lots of calls from people who were getting their nails done, and the woman was crying and talking about how she's not being paid, or people who are out to eat as a family and they see something in the restaurant, or people who are traveling and they see something that doesn't make, kind of, quite sense in a hotel or an airport. So we need an army of eyes and ears calling tips into the National Human Trafficking Hotline and identifying these cases, and we need survivors to know the number themselves too so that they can call in on their own behalf. We need to respond to the problem in the short-term, help get these people connected to help, and then we need to do the long-term solutions which involves data, and business, and changing business practice, and all of that. But I do think that if people want to kind of educate themselves, polarisproject.org, there are some kind of meta-organizations, there's a group called Freedom United that's kind of starting a grassroots movement against trafficking, freedomunited.org. So lots of great organizations to look into, and this is a bipartisan issue, this is an issue that most people care about, it's one of the top headlines in the newspapers every day these days. And it's something that I think people in this country naturally care about because it references kind of the history of chattel slavery, and some of those forms of slavery that morphed but never really went away, and we're still fighting that same fight today. >> In terms of, you know, we're here at AWS IMAGINE, and they're obviously putting a lot of resources behind this, Teresa Carlson and the team. How are you using them, have you always been on AWS? Has that platform enabled you to accomplish your mission better? >> Yeah, oh for sure, I mean, Polaris crunches over 60 terabytes of data per day, of just like the computing that we're doing, right? >> Jeff: And what types of data are you crunching? >> It's the data associated with Hotline calls, we collect up to 150 variables on each Hotline call. The Hotline calls come in, we have this data set of 50,000 cases of trafficking with very sensitive data, and the protections of that data, the cybersecurity associated with that data, the storage of that data. So since 2017, Polaris has been in existence since 2002, so we're in our 17th year now, but starting three years ago in 2017 we started really partnering with AWS, where we're migrating more of our data onto AWS, building some AI tools with AWS to help us process Hotline calls more efficiently. And then talking about potentially moving our, all of our data storage onto AWS so that we don't have our own server racks in our office, we still need to go through a number of steps to get there. But having AWS at the table, and then talking about the Impact Computing team and this, like, real big data crunching of like millions of trafficking cases globally, we haven't even started talking about that yet but I think that's like a next stage. So for now, it's getting our data stronger, more secure, building some of those AI bots to help us with our work, and then potentially considering us moving completely serverless, and all of those things are conversations we're having with AWS, and thrilled that AWS is making this an issue to the point that it was prioritized and featured at this conference, which was a big deal, to get in front of the whole audience and do a keynote, and we're very, very grateful for that. >> And you mentioned there's so many organizations involved, are you guys doing data aggregation, data consolidation, sharing, I mean there must be with so many organizations, that adds a lot of complexity, and a lot of data silos, to steal classic kind of IT terms. Are you working towards some kind of unification around that, or how does that look in the future? >> We would love to get to the point where different organizations are sharing their data set. We'd love to get to the point where different organizations are using, like, a shared case management tool, and collecting the same data so it's apples to apples. There are different organizations, like, Thorn is doing some amazing big data-- >> Jeff: Right, we've had Thorn on a couple of times. >> How do we merge Polaris's data set with Thorn's data set? We're not doing that yet, right? I think we're only doing baby steps. But I think the AWS platform could enable potentially a merger of Thorn's data with Polaris's data in some sort of data lake, right? So that's a great idea, we would love to get to that. I think the field isn't there yet. The field has kind of been, like, tech-starved for a number of years, but in the past five years has made a lot of progress. The field is mostly kind of small shelters and groups responding to survivors, and so this notion of like infusing the trafficking field with data is somewhat of a new concept, but it's enabling us to think much bigger about what's possible. >> Well Brad, again, we could go on all day, you know, really thankful for what you're doing for a whole lot of people that we don't see, or maybe we see and we're not noticing, so thank you for that, and uh. >> Absolutely. >> Look forward to catching up when you move the ball a little bit further down the field. >> Yeah, thank you for having me on. It's a pleasure to be here. >> All right, my pleasure. He's Brad, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're at AWS IMAGINE Nonprofits, thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (futuristic music)

(soothing music) >> Hey everyone, welcome to this event, "Build Your Cloud Center of Excellence." I'm your host, Lisa Martin. In the next 15 minutes or so my guest and I are going to be talking about redefining cloud operations, an application modernization for customers, and specifically how partners are helping to speed up that process. As you saw on our first two segments, we talked about problems enterprises are facing with cloud operations. We talked about redefining cloud operations as well to solve these problems. This segment is going to be focusing on how Hitachi Vantara's partners are really helping to speed up that process. We've got Johnson Controls here to talk about their partnership with Hitachi Vantara. Please welcome both of my guests, Prem Balasubramanian is with us, SVP and CTO Digital Solutions at Hitachi Vantara. And Suresh Mothikuru, SVP Customer Success Platform Engineering and Reliability Engineering from Johnson Controls. Gentlemen, welcome to the program, great to have you. >> Thank. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> First question is to both of you and Suresh, we'll start with you. We want to understand, you know, the cloud operations landscape is increasingly complex. We've talked a lot about that in this program. Talk to us, Suresh, about some of the biggest challenges and pin points that you faced with respect to that. >> Thank you. I think it's a great question. I mean, cloud has evolved a lot in the last 10 years. You know, when we were talking about a single cloud whether it's Azure or AWS and GCP, and that was complex enough. Now we are talking about multi-cloud and hybrid and you look at Johnson Controls, we have Azure we have AWS, we have GCP, we have Alibaba and we also support on-prem. So the architecture has become very, very complex and the complexity has grown so much that we are now thinking about whether we should be cloud native or cloud agnostic. So I think, I mean, sometimes it's hard to even explain the complexity because people think, oh, "When you go to cloud, everything is simplified." Cloud does give you a lot of simplicity, but it also really brings a lot more complexity along with it. So, and then next one is pretty important is, you know, generally when you look at cloud services, you have plenty of services that are offered within a cloud, 100, 150 services, 200 services. Even within those companies, you take AWS they might not know, an individual resource might not know about all the services we see. That's a big challenge for us as a customer to really understand each of the service that is provided in these, you know, clouds, well, doesn't matter which one that is. And the third one is pretty big, at least at the CTO the CIO, and the senior leadership level, is cost. Cost is a major factor because cloud, you know, will eat you up if you cannot manage it. If you don't have a good cloud governance process it because every minute you are in it, it's burning cash. So I think if you ask me, these are the three major things that I am facing day to day and that's where I use my partners, which I'll touch base down the line. >> Perfect, we'll talk about that. So Prem, I imagine that these problems are not unique to Johnson Controls or JCI, as you may hear us refer to it. Talk to me Prem about some of the other challenges that you're seeing within the customer landscape. >> So, yeah, I agree, Lisa, these are not very specific to JCI, but there are specific issues in JCI, right? So the way we think about these are, there is a common issue when people go to the cloud and there are very specific and unique issues for businesses, right? So JCI, and we will talk about this in the episode as we move forward. I think Suresh and his team have done some phenomenal step around how to manage this complexity. But there are customers who have a lesser complex cloud which is, they don't go to Alibaba, they don't have footprint in all three clouds. So their multi-cloud footprint could be a bit more manageable, but still struggle with a lot of the same problems around cost, around security, around talent. Talent is a big thing, right? And in Suresh's case I think it's slightly more exasperated because every cloud provider Be it AWS, JCP, or Azure brings in hundreds of services and there is nobody, including many of us, right? We learn every day, nowadays, right? It's not that there is one service integrator who knows all, while technically people can claim as a part of sales. But in reality all of us are continuing to learn in this landscape. And if you put all of this equation together with multiple clouds the complexity just starts to exponentially grow. And that's exactly what I think JCI is experiencing and Suresh's team has been experiencing, and we've been working together. But the common problems are around security talent and cost management of this, right? Those are my three things. And one last thing that I would love to say before we move away from this question is, if you think about cloud operations as a concept that's evolving over the last few years, and I have touched upon this in the previous episode as well, Lisa, right? If you take architectures, we've gone into microservices, we've gone into all these server-less architectures all the fancy things that we want. That helps us go to market faster, be more competent to as a business. But that's not simplified stuff, right? That's complicated stuff. It's a lot more distributed. Second, again, we've advanced and created more modern infrastructure because all of what we are talking is platform as a service, services on the cloud that we are consuming, right? In the same case with development we've moved into a DevOps model. We kind of click a button put some code in a repository, the code starts to run in production within a minute, everything else is automated. But then when we get to operations we are still stuck in a very old way of looking at cloud as an infrastructure, right? So you've got an infra team, you've got an app team, you've got an incident management team, you've got a soft knock, everything. But again, so Suresh can talk about this more because they are making significant strides in thinking about this as a single workload, and how do I apply engineering to go manage this? Because a lot of it is codified, right? So automation. Anyway, so that's kind of where the complexity is and how we are thinking, including JCI as a partner thinking about taming that complexity as we move forward. >> Suresh, let's talk about that taming the complexity. You guys have both done a great job of articulating the ostensible challenges that are there with cloud, especially multi-cloud environments that you're living in. But Suresh, talk about the partnership with Hitachi Vantara. How is it helping to dial down some of those inherent complexities? >> I mean, I always, you know, I think I've said this to Prem multiple times. I treat my partners as my internal, you know, employees. I look at Prem as my coworker or my peers. So the reason for that is I want Prem to have the same vested interest as a partner in my success or JCI success and vice versa, isn't it? I think that's how we operate and that's how we have been operating. And I think I would like to thank Prem and Hitachi Vantara for that really been an amazing partnership. And as he was saying, we have taken a completely holistic approach to how we want to really be in the market and play in the market to our customers. So if you look at my jacket it talks about OpenBlue platform. This is what JCI is building, that we are building this OpenBlue digital platform. And within that, my team, along with Prem's or Hitachi's, we have built what we call as Polaris. It's a technical platform where our apps can run. And this platform is automated end-to-end from a platform engineering standpoint. We stood up a platform engineering organization, a reliability engineering organization, as well as a support organization where Hitachi played a role. As I said previously, you know, for me to scale I'm not going to really have the talent and the knowledge of every function that I'm looking at. And Hitachi, not only they brought the talent but they also brought what he was talking about, Harc. You know, they have set up a lot and now we can leverage it. And they also came up with some really interesting concepts. I went and met them in India. They came up with this concept called IPL. Okay, what is that? They really challenged all their employees that's working for GCI to come up with innovative ideas to solve problems proactively, which is self-healing. You know, how you do that? So I think partners, you know, if they become really vested in your interests, they can do wonders for you. And I think in this case Hitachi is really working very well for us and in many aspects. And I'm leveraging them... You started with support, now I'm leveraging them in the automation, the platform engineering, as well as in the reliability engineering and then in even in the engineering spaces. And that like, they are my end-to-end partner right now? >> So you're really taking that holistic approach that you talked about and it sounds like it's a very collaborative two-way street partnership. Prem, I want to go back to, Suresh mentioned Harc. Talk a little bit about what Harc is and then how partners fit into Hitachi's Harc strategy. >> Great, so let me spend like a few seconds on what Harc is. Lisa, again, I know we've been using the term. Harc stands for Hitachi application reliability sectors. Now the reason we thought about Harc was, like I said in the beginning of this segment, there is an illusion from an architecture standpoint to be more modern, microservices, server-less, reactive architecture, so on and so forth. There is an illusion in your development methodology from Waterfall to agile, to DevOps to lean, agile to path program, whatever, right? Extreme program, so on and so forth. There is an evolution in the space of infrastructure from a point where you were buying these huge humongous servers and putting it in your data center to a point where people don't even see servers anymore, right? You buy it, by a click of a button you don't know the size of it. All you know is a, it's (indistinct) whatever that name means. Let's go provision it on the fly, get go, get your work done, right? When all of this is advanced when you think about operations people have been solving the problem the way they've been solving it 20 years back, right? That's the issue. And Harc was conceived exactly to fix that particular problem, to think about a modern way of operating a modern workload, right? That's exactly what Harc. So it brings together finest engineering talent. So the teams are trained in specific ways of working. We've invested and implemented some of the IP, we work with the best of the breed partner ecosystem, and I'll talk about that in a minute. And we've got these facilities in Dallas and I am talking from my office in Dallas, which is a Harc facility in the US from where we deliver for our customers. And then back in Hyderabad, we've got one more that we opened and these are facilities from where we deliver Harc services for our customers as well, right? And then we are expanding it in Japan and Portugal as we move into 23. That's kind of the plan that we are thinking through. However, that's what Harc is, Lisa, right? That's our solution to this cloud complexity problem. Right? >> Got it, and it sounds like it's going quite global, which is fantastic. So Suresh, I want to have you expand a bit on the partnership, the partner ecosystem and the role that it plays. You talked about it a little bit but what role does the partner ecosystem play in really helping JCI to dial down some of those challenges and the inherent complexities that we talked about? >> Yeah, sure. I think partners play a major role and JCI is very, very good at it. I mean, I've joined JCI 18 months ago, JCI leverages partners pretty extensively. As I said, I leverage Hitachi for my, you know, A group and the (indistinct) space and the cloud operations space, and they're my primary partner. But at the same time, we leverage many other partners. Well, you know, Accenture, SCL, and even on the tooling side we use Datadog and (indistinct). All these guys are major partners of our because the way we like to pick partners is based on our vision and where we want to go. And pick the right partner who's going to really, you know make you successful by investing their resources in you. And what I mean by that is when you have a partner, partner knows exactly what kind of skillset is needed for this customer, for them to really be successful. As I said earlier, we cannot really get all the skillset that we need, we rely on the partners and partners bring the the right skillset, they can scale. I can tell Prem tomorrow, "Hey, I need two parts by next week", and I guarantee it he's going to bring two parts to me. So they let you scale, they let you move fast. And I'm a big believer, in today's day and age, to get things done fast and be more agile. I'm not worried about failure, but for me moving fast is very, very important. And partners really do a very good job bringing that. But I think then they also really make you think, isn't it? Because one thing I like about partners they make you innovate whether they know it or not but they do because, you know, they will come and ask you questions about, "Hey, tell me why you are doing this. Can I review your architecture?" You know, and then they will try to really say I don't think this is going to work. Because they work with so many different clients, not JCI, they bring all that expertise and that's what I look from them, you know, just not, you know, do a T&M job for me. I ask you to do this go... They just bring more than that. That's how I pick my partners. And that's how, you know, Hitachi's Vantara is definitely one of a good partner from that sense because they bring a lot more innovation to the table and I appreciate about that. >> It sounds like, it sounds like a flywheel of innovation. >> Yeah. >> I love that. Last question for both of you, which we're almost out of time here, Prem, I want to go back to you. So I'm a partner, I'm planning on redefining CloudOps at my company. What are the two things you want me to remember from Hitachi Vantara's perspective? >> So before I get to that question, Lisa, the partners that we work with are slightly different from from the partners that, again, there are some similar partners. There are some different partners, right? For example, we pick and choose especially in the Harc space, we pick and choose partners that are more future focused, right? We don't care if they are huge companies or small companies. We go after companies that are future focused that are really, really nimble and can change for our customers need because it's not our need, right? When I pick partners for Harc my ultimate endeavor is to ensure, in this case because we've got (indistinct) GCI on, we are able to operate (indistinct) with the level of satisfaction above and beyond that they're expecting from us. And whatever I don't have I need to get from my partners so that I bring this solution to Suresh. As opposed to bringing a whole lot of people and making them stand in front of Suresh. So that's how I think about partners. What do I want them to do from, and we've always done this so we do workshops with our partners. We just don't go by tools. When we say we are partnering with X, Y, Z, we do workshops with them and we say, this is how we are thinking. Either you build it in your roadmap that helps us leverage you, continue to leverage you. And we do have minimal investments where we fix gaps. We're building some utilities for us to deliver the best service to our customers. And our intention is not to build a product to compete with our partner. Our intention is to just fill the wide space until they go build it into their product suite that we can then leverage it for our customers. So always think about end customers and how can we make it easy for them? Because for all the tool vendors out there seeing this and wanting to partner with Hitachi the biggest thing is tools sprawl, especially on the cloud is very real. For every problem on the cloud. I have a billion tools that are being thrown at me as Suresh if I'm putting my installation and it's not easy at all. It's so confusing. >> Yeah. >> So that's what we want. We want people to simplify that landscape for our end customers, and we are looking at partners that are thinking through the simplification not just making money. >> That makes perfect sense. There really is a very strong symbiosis it sounds like, in the partner ecosystem. And there's a lot of enablement that goes on back and forth it sounds like as well, which is really, to your point it's all about the end customers and what they're expecting. Suresh, last question for you is which is the same one, if I'm a partner what are the things that you want me to consider as I'm planning to redefine CloudOps at my company? >> I'll keep it simple. In my view, I mean, we've touched upon it in multiple facets in this interview about that, the three things. First and foremost, reliability. You know, in today's day and age my products has to be reliable, available and, you know, make sure that the customer's happy with what they're really dealing with, number one. Number two, my product has to be secure. Security is super, super important, okay? And number three, I need to really make sure my customers are getting the value so I keep my cost low. So these three is what I would focus and what I expect from my partners. >> Great advice, guys. Thank you so much for talking through this with me and really showing the audience how strong the partnership is between Hitachi Vantara and JCI. What you're doing together, we'll have to talk to you again to see where things go but we really appreciate your insights and your perspectives. Thank you. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> Thanks Lisa, thanks for having us. >> My pleasure. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. Thank you so much for watching. (soothing music)

(soothing music) >> Hey everyone, welcome to this event, "Build Your Cloud Center of Excellence." I'm your host, Lisa Martin. In the next 15 minutes or so my guest and I are going to be talking about redefining cloud operations, an application modernization for customers, and specifically how partners are helping to speed up that process. As you saw on our first two segments, we talked about problems enterprises are facing with cloud operations. We talked about redefining cloud operations as well to solve these problems. This segment is going to be focusing on how Hitachi Vantara's partners are really helping to speed up that process. We've got Johnson Controls here to talk about their partnership with Hitachi Vantara. Please welcome both of my guests, Prem Balasubramanian is with us, SVP and CTO Digital Solutions at Hitachi Vantara. And Suresh Mothikuru, SVP Customer Success Platform Engineering and Reliability Engineering from Johnson Controls. Gentlemen, welcome to the program, great to have you. >> Thank. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> First question is to both of you and Suresh, we'll start with you. We want to understand, you know, the cloud operations landscape is increasingly complex. We've talked a lot about that in this program. Talk to us, Suresh, about some of the biggest challenges and pin points that you faced with respect to that. >> Thank you. I think it's a great question. I mean, cloud has evolved a lot in the last 10 years. You know, when we were talking about a single cloud whether it's Azure or AWS and GCP, and that was complex enough. Now we are talking about multi-cloud and hybrid and you look at Johnson Controls, we have Azure we have AWS, we have GCP, we have Alibaba and we also support on-prem. So the architecture has become very, very complex and the complexity has grown so much that we are now thinking about whether we should be cloud native or cloud agnostic. So I think, I mean, sometimes it's hard to even explain the complexity because people think, oh, "When you go to cloud, everything is simplified." Cloud does give you a lot of simplicity, but it also really brings a lot more complexity along with it. So, and then next one is pretty important is, you know, generally when you look at cloud services, you have plenty of services that are offered within a cloud, 100, 150 services, 200 services. Even within those companies, you take AWS they might not know, an individual resource might not know about all the services we see. That's a big challenge for us as a customer to really understand each of the service that is provided in these, you know, clouds, well, doesn't matter which one that is. And the third one is pretty big, at least at the CTO the CIO, and the senior leadership level, is cost. Cost is a major factor because cloud, you know, will eat you up if you cannot manage it. If you don't have a good cloud governance process it because every minute you are in it, it's burning cash. So I think if you ask me, these are the three major things that I am facing day to day and that's where I use my partners, which I'll touch base down the line. >> Perfect, we'll talk about that. So Prem, I imagine that these problems are not unique to Johnson Controls or JCI, as you may hear us refer to it. Talk to me Prem about some of the other challenges that you're seeing within the customer landscape. >> So, yeah, I agree, Lisa, these are not very specific to JCI, but there are specific issues in JCI, right? So the way we think about these are, there is a common issue when people go to the cloud and there are very specific and unique issues for businesses, right? So JCI, and we will talk about this in the episode as we move forward. I think Suresh and his team have done some phenomenal step around how to manage this complexity. But there are customers who have a lesser complex cloud which is, they don't go to Alibaba, they don't have footprint in all three clouds. So their multi-cloud footprint could be a bit more manageable, but still struggle with a lot of the same problems around cost, around security, around talent. Talent is a big thing, right? And in Suresh's case I think it's slightly more exasperated because every cloud provider Be it AWS, JCP, or Azure brings in hundreds of services and there is nobody, including many of us, right? We learn every day, nowadays, right? It's not that there is one service integrator who knows all, while technically people can claim as a part of sales. But in reality all of us are continuing to learn in this landscape. And if you put all of this equation together with multiple clouds the complexity just starts to exponentially grow. And that's exactly what I think JCI is experiencing and Suresh's team has been experiencing, and we've been working together. But the common problems are around security talent and cost management of this, right? Those are my three things. And one last thing that I would love to say before we move away from this question is, if you think about cloud operations as a concept that's evolving over the last few years, and I have touched upon this in the previous episode as well, Lisa, right? If you take architectures, we've gone into microservices, we've gone into all these server-less architectures all the fancy things that we want. That helps us go to market faster, be more competent to as a business. But that's not simplified stuff, right? That's complicated stuff. It's a lot more distributed. Second, again, we've advanced and created more modern infrastructure because all of what we are talking is platform as a service, services on the cloud that we are consuming, right? In the same case with development we've moved into a DevOps model. We kind of click a button put some code in a repository, the code starts to run in production within a minute, everything else is automated. But then when we get to operations we are still stuck in a very old way of looking at cloud as an infrastructure, right? So you've got an infra team, you've got an app team, you've got an incident management team, you've got a soft knock, everything. But again, so Suresh can talk about this more because they are making significant strides in thinking about this as a single workload, and how do I apply engineering to go manage this? Because a lot of it is codified, right? So automation. Anyway, so that's kind of where the complexity is and how we are thinking, including JCI as a partner thinking about taming that complexity as we move forward. >> Suresh, let's talk about that taming the complexity. You guys have both done a great job of articulating the ostensible challenges that are there with cloud, especially multi-cloud environments that you're living in. But Suresh, talk about the partnership with Hitachi Vantara. How is it helping to dial down some of those inherent complexities? >> I mean, I always, you know, I think I've said this to Prem multiple times. I treat my partners as my internal, you know, employees. I look at Prem as my coworker or my peers. So the reason for that is I want Prem to have the same vested interest as a partner in my success or JCI success and vice versa, isn't it? I think that's how we operate and that's how we have been operating. And I think I would like to thank Prem and Hitachi Vantara for that really been an amazing partnership. And as he was saying, we have taken a completely holistic approach to how we want to really be in the market and play in the market to our customers. So if you look at my jacket it talks about OpenBlue platform. This is what JCI is building, that we are building this OpenBlue digital platform. And within that, my team, along with Prem's or Hitachi's, we have built what we call as Polaris. It's a technical platform where our apps can run. And this platform is automated end-to-end from a platform engineering standpoint. We stood up a platform engineering organization, a reliability engineering organization, as well as a support organization where Hitachi played a role. As I said previously, you know, for me to scale I'm not going to really have the talent and the knowledge of every function that I'm looking at. And Hitachi, not only they brought the talent but they also brought what he was talking about, Harc. You know, they have set up a lot and now we can leverage it. And they also came up with some really interesting concepts. I went and met them in India. They came up with this concept called IPL. Okay, what is that? They really challenged all their employees that's working for GCI to come up with innovative ideas to solve problems proactively, which is self-healing. You know, how you do that? So I think partners, you know, if they become really vested in your interests, they can do wonders for you. And I think in this case Hitachi is really working very well for us and in many aspects. And I'm leveraging them... You started with support, now I'm leveraging them in the automation, the platform engineering, as well as in the reliability engineering and then in even in the engineering spaces. And that like, they are my end-to-end partner right now? >> So you're really taking that holistic approach that you talked about and it sounds like it's a very collaborative two-way street partnership. Prem, I want to go back to, Suresh mentioned Harc. Talk a little bit about what Harc is and then how partners fit into Hitachi's Harc strategy. >> Great, so let me spend like a few seconds on what Harc is. Lisa, again, I know we've been using the term. Harc stands for Hitachi application reliability sectors. Now the reason we thought about Harc was, like I said in the beginning of this segment, there is an illusion from an architecture standpoint to be more modern, microservices, server-less, reactive architecture, so on and so forth. There is an illusion in your development methodology from Waterfall to agile, to DevOps to lean, agile to path program, whatever, right? Extreme program, so on and so forth. There is an evolution in the space of infrastructure from a point where you were buying these huge humongous servers and putting it in your data center to a point where people don't even see servers anymore, right? You buy it, by a click of a button you don't know the size of it. All you know is a, it's (indistinct) whatever that name means. Let's go provision it on the fly, get go, get your work done, right? When all of this is advanced when you think about operations people have been solving the problem the way they've been solving it 20 years back, right? That's the issue. And Harc was conceived exactly to fix that particular problem, to think about a modern way of operating a modern workload, right? That's exactly what Harc. So it brings together finest engineering talent. So the teams are trained in specific ways of working. We've invested and implemented some of the IP, we work with the best of the breed partner ecosystem, and I'll talk about that in a minute. And we've got these facilities in Dallas and I am talking from my office in Dallas, which is a Harc facility in the US from where we deliver for our customers. And then back in Hyderabad, we've got one more that we opened and these are facilities from where we deliver Harc services for our customers as well, right? And then we are expanding it in Japan and Portugal as we move into 23. That's kind of the plan that we are thinking through. However, that's what Harc is, Lisa, right? That's our solution to this cloud complexity problem. Right? >> Got it, and it sounds like it's going quite global, which is fantastic. So Suresh, I want to have you expand a bit on the partnership, the partner ecosystem and the role that it plays. You talked about it a little bit but what role does the partner ecosystem play in really helping JCI to dial down some of those challenges and the inherent complexities that we talked about? >> Yeah, sure. I think partners play a major role and JCI is very, very good at it. I mean, I've joined JCI 18 months ago, JCI leverages partners pretty extensively. As I said, I leverage Hitachi for my, you know, A group and the (indistinct) space and the cloud operations space, and they're my primary partner. But at the same time, we leverage many other partners. Well, you know, Accenture, SCL, and even on the tooling side we use Datadog and (indistinct). All these guys are major partners of our because the way we like to pick partners is based on our vision and where we want to go. And pick the right partner who's going to really, you know make you successful by investing their resources in you. And what I mean by that is when you have a partner, partner knows exactly what kind of skillset is needed for this customer, for them to really be successful. As I said earlier, we cannot really get all the skillset that we need, we rely on the partners and partners bring the the right skillset, they can scale. I can tell Prem tomorrow, "Hey, I need two parts by next week", and I guarantee it he's going to bring two parts to me. So they let you scale, they let you move fast. And I'm a big believer, in today's day and age, to get things done fast and be more agile. I'm not worried about failure, but for me moving fast is very, very important. And partners really do a very good job bringing that. But I think then they also really make you think, isn't it? Because one thing I like about partners they make you innovate whether they know it or not but they do because, you know, they will come and ask you questions about, "Hey, tell me why you are doing this. Can I review your architecture?" You know, and then they will try to really say I don't think this is going to work. Because they work with so many different clients, not JCI, they bring all that expertise and that's what I look from them, you know, just not, you know, do a T&M job for me. I ask you to do this go... They just bring more than that. That's how I pick my partners. And that's how, you know, Hitachi's Vantara is definitely one of a good partner from that sense because they bring a lot more innovation to the table and I appreciate about that. >> It sounds like, it sounds like a flywheel of innovation. >> Yeah. >> I love that. Last question for both of you, which we're almost out of time here, Prem, I want to go back to you. So I'm a partner, I'm planning on redefining CloudOps at my company. What are the two things you want me to remember from Hitachi Vantara's perspective? >> So before I get to that question, Lisa, the partners that we work with are slightly different from from the partners that, again, there are some similar partners. There are some different partners, right? For example, we pick and choose especially in the Harc space, we pick and choose partners that are more future focused, right? We don't care if they are huge companies or small companies. We go after companies that are future focused that are really, really nimble and can change for our customers need because it's not our need, right? When I pick partners for Harc my ultimate endeavor is to ensure, in this case because we've got (indistinct) GCI on, we are able to operate (indistinct) with the level of satisfaction above and beyond that they're expecting from us. And whatever I don't have I need to get from my partners so that I bring this solution to Suresh. As opposed to bringing a whole lot of people and making them stand in front of Suresh. So that's how I think about partners. What do I want them to do from, and we've always done this so we do workshops with our partners. We just don't go by tools. When we say we are partnering with X, Y, Z, we do workshops with them and we say, this is how we are thinking. Either you build it in your roadmap that helps us leverage you, continue to leverage you. And we do have minimal investments where we fix gaps. We're building some utilities for us to deliver the best service to our customers. And our intention is not to build a product to compete with our partner. Our intention is to just fill the wide space until they go build it into their product suite that we can then leverage it for our customers. So always think about end customers and how can we make it easy for them? Because for all the tool vendors out there seeing this and wanting to partner with Hitachi the biggest thing is tools sprawl, especially on the cloud is very real. For every problem on the cloud. I have a billion tools that are being thrown at me as Suresh if I'm putting my installation and it's not easy at all. It's so confusing. >> Yeah. >> So that's what we want. We want people to simplify that landscape for our end customers, and we are looking at partners that are thinking through the simplification not just making money. >> That makes perfect sense. There really is a very strong symbiosis it sounds like, in the partner ecosystem. And there's a lot of enablement that goes on back and forth it sounds like as well, which is really, to your point it's all about the end customers and what they're expecting. Suresh, last question for you is which is the same one, if I'm a partner what are the things that you want me to consider as I'm planning to redefine CloudOps at my company? >> I'll keep it simple. In my view, I mean, we've touched upon it in multiple facets in this interview about that, the three things. First and foremost, reliability. You know, in today's day and age my products has to be reliable, available and, you know, make sure that the customer's happy with what they're really dealing with, number one. Number two, my product has to be secure. Security is super, super important, okay? And number three, I need to really make sure my customers are getting the value so I keep my cost low. So these three is what I would focus and what I expect from my partners. >> Great advice, guys. Thank you so much for talking through this with me and really showing the audience how strong the partnership is between Hitachi Vantara and JCI. What you're doing together, we'll have to talk to you again to see where things go but we really appreciate your insights and your perspectives. Thank you. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> Thanks Lisa, thanks for having us. >> My pleasure. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. Thank you so much for watching. (soothing music)

(soothing music) >> Hey everyone, welcome to this event, "Build Your Cloud Center of Excellence." I'm your host, Lisa Martin. In the next 15 minutes or so my guest and I are going to be talking about redefining cloud operations, an application modernization for customers, and specifically how partners are helping to speed up that process. As you saw on our first two segments, we talked about problems enterprises are facing with cloud operations. We talked about redefining cloud operations as well to solve these problems. This segment is going to be focusing on how Hitachi Vantara's partners are really helping to speed up that process. We've got Johnson Controls here to talk about their partnership with Hitachi Vantara. Please welcome both of my guests, Prem Balasubramanian is with us, SVP and CTO Digital Solutions at Hitachi Vantara. And Suresh Mothikuru, SVP Customer Success Platform Engineering and Reliability Engineering from Johnson Controls. Gentlemen, welcome to the program, great to have you. >> Thank. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> First question is to both of you and Suresh, we'll start with you. We want to understand, you know, the cloud operations landscape is increasingly complex. We've talked a lot about that in this program. Talk to us, Suresh, about some of the biggest challenges and pin points that you faced with respect to that. >> Thank you. I think it's a great question. I mean, cloud has evolved a lot in the last 10 years. You know, when we were talking about a single cloud whether it's Azure or AWS and GCP, and that was complex enough. Now we are talking about multi-cloud and hybrid and you look at Johnson Controls, we have Azure we have AWS, we have GCP, we have Alibaba and we also support on-prem. So the architecture has become very, very complex and the complexity has grown so much that we are now thinking about whether we should be cloud native or cloud agnostic. So I think, I mean, sometimes it's hard to even explain the complexity because people think, oh, "When you go to cloud, everything is simplified." Cloud does give you a lot of simplicity, but it also really brings a lot more complexity along with it. So, and then next one is pretty important is, you know, generally when you look at cloud services, you have plenty of services that are offered within a cloud, 100, 150 services, 200 services. Even within those companies, you take AWS they might not know, an individual resource might not know about all the services we see. That's a big challenge for us as a customer to really understand each of the service that is provided in these, you know, clouds, well, doesn't matter which one that is. And the third one is pretty big, at least at the CTO the CIO, and the senior leadership level, is cost. Cost is a major factor because cloud, you know, will eat you up if you cannot manage it. If you don't have a good cloud governance process it because every minute you are in it, it's burning cash. So I think if you ask me, these are the three major things that I am facing day to day and that's where I use my partners, which I'll touch base down the line. >> Perfect, we'll talk about that. So Prem, I imagine that these problems are not unique to Johnson Controls or JCI, as you may hear us refer to it. Talk to me Prem about some of the other challenges that you're seeing within the customer landscape. >> So, yeah, I agree, Lisa, these are not very specific to JCI, but there are specific issues in JCI, right? So the way we think about these are, there is a common issue when people go to the cloud and there are very specific and unique issues for businesses, right? So JCI, and we will talk about this in the episode as we move forward. I think Suresh and his team have done some phenomenal step around how to manage this complexity. But there are customers who have a lesser complex cloud which is, they don't go to Alibaba, they don't have footprint in all three clouds. So their multi-cloud footprint could be a bit more manageable, but still struggle with a lot of the same problems around cost, around security, around talent. Talent is a big thing, right? And in Suresh's case I think it's slightly more exasperated because every cloud provider Be it AWS, JCP, or Azure brings in hundreds of services and there is nobody, including many of us, right? We learn every day, nowadays, right? It's not that there is one service integrator who knows all, while technically people can claim as a part of sales. But in reality all of us are continuing to learn in this landscape. And if you put all of this equation together with multiple clouds the complexity just starts to exponentially grow. And that's exactly what I think JCI is experiencing and Suresh's team has been experiencing, and we've been working together. But the common problems are around security talent and cost management of this, right? Those are my three things. And one last thing that I would love to say before we move away from this question is, if you think about cloud operations as a concept that's evolving over the last few years, and I have touched upon this in the previous episode as well, Lisa, right? If you take architectures, we've gone into microservices, we've gone into all these server-less architectures all the fancy things that we want. That helps us go to market faster, be more competent to as a business. But that's not simplified stuff, right? That's complicated stuff. It's a lot more distributed. Second, again, we've advanced and created more modern infrastructure because all of what we are talking is platform as a service, services on the cloud that we are consuming, right? In the same case with development we've moved into a DevOps model. We kind of click a button put some code in a repository, the code starts to run in production within a minute, everything else is automated. But then when we get to operations we are still stuck in a very old way of looking at cloud as an infrastructure, right? So you've got an infra team, you've got an app team, you've got an incident management team, you've got a soft knock, everything. But again, so Suresh can talk about this more because they are making significant strides in thinking about this as a single workload, and how do I apply engineering to go manage this? Because a lot of it is codified, right? So automation. Anyway, so that's kind of where the complexity is and how we are thinking, including JCI as a partner thinking about taming that complexity as we move forward. >> Suresh, let's talk about that taming the complexity. You guys have both done a great job of articulating the ostensible challenges that are there with cloud, especially multi-cloud environments that you're living in. But Suresh, talk about the partnership with Hitachi Vantara. How is it helping to dial down some of those inherent complexities? >> I mean, I always, you know, I think I've said this to Prem multiple times. I treat my partners as my internal, you know, employees. I look at Prem as my coworker or my peers. So the reason for that is I want Prem to have the same vested interest as a partner in my success or JCI success and vice versa, isn't it? I think that's how we operate and that's how we have been operating. And I think I would like to thank Prem and Hitachi Vantara for that really been an amazing partnership. And as he was saying, we have taken a completely holistic approach to how we want to really be in the market and play in the market to our customers. So if you look at my jacket it talks about OpenBlue platform. This is what JCI is building, that we are building this OpenBlue digital platform. And within that, my team, along with Prem's or Hitachi's, we have built what we call as Polaris. It's a technical platform where our apps can run. And this platform is automated end-to-end from a platform engineering standpoint. We stood up a platform engineering organization, a reliability engineering organization, as well as a support organization where Hitachi played a role. As I said previously, you know, for me to scale I'm not going to really have the talent and the knowledge of every function that I'm looking at. And Hitachi, not only they brought the talent but they also brought what he was talking about, Harc. You know, they have set up a lot and now we can leverage it. And they also came up with some really interesting concepts. I went and met them in India. They came up with this concept called IPL. Okay, what is that? They really challenged all their employees that's working for GCI to come up with innovative ideas to solve problems proactively, which is self-healing. You know, how you do that? So I think partners, you know, if they become really vested in your interests, they can do wonders for you. And I think in this case Hitachi is really working very well for us and in many aspects. And I'm leveraging them... You started with support, now I'm leveraging them in the automation, the platform engineering, as well as in the reliability engineering and then in even in the engineering spaces. And that like, they are my end-to-end partner right now? >> So you're really taking that holistic approach that you talked about and it sounds like it's a very collaborative two-way street partnership. Prem, I want to go back to, Suresh mentioned Harc. Talk a little bit about what Harc is and then how partners fit into Hitachi's Harc strategy. >> Great, so let me spend like a few seconds on what Harc is. Lisa, again, I know we've been using the term. Harc stands for Hitachi application reliability sectors. Now the reason we thought about Harc was, like I said in the beginning of this segment, there is an illusion from an architecture standpoint to be more modern, microservices, server-less, reactive architecture, so on and so forth. There is an illusion in your development methodology from Waterfall to agile, to DevOps to lean, agile to path program, whatever, right? Extreme program, so on and so forth. There is an evolution in the space of infrastructure from a point where you were buying these huge humongous servers and putting it in your data center to a point where people don't even see servers anymore, right? You buy it, by a click of a button you don't know the size of it. All you know is a, it's (indistinct) whatever that name means. Let's go provision it on the fly, get go, get your work done, right? When all of this is advanced when you think about operations people have been solving the problem the way they've been solving it 20 years back, right? That's the issue. And Harc was conceived exactly to fix that particular problem, to think about a modern way of operating a modern workload, right? That's exactly what Harc. So it brings together finest engineering talent. So the teams are trained in specific ways of working. We've invested and implemented some of the IP, we work with the best of the breed partner ecosystem, and I'll talk about that in a minute. And we've got these facilities in Dallas and I am talking from my office in Dallas, which is a Harc facility in the US from where we deliver for our customers. And then back in Hyderabad, we've got one more that we opened and these are facilities from where we deliver Harc services for our customers as well, right? And then we are expanding it in Japan and Portugal as we move into 23. That's kind of the plan that we are thinking through. However, that's what Harc is, Lisa, right? That's our solution to this cloud complexity problem. Right? >> Got it, and it sounds like it's going quite global, which is fantastic. So Suresh, I want to have you expand a bit on the partnership, the partner ecosystem and the role that it plays. You talked about it a little bit but what role does the partner ecosystem play in really helping JCI to dial down some of those challenges and the inherent complexities that we talked about? >> Yeah, sure. I think partners play a major role and JCI is very, very good at it. I mean, I've joined JCI 18 months ago, JCI leverages partners pretty extensively. As I said, I leverage Hitachi for my, you know, A group and the (indistinct) space and the cloud operations space, and they're my primary partner. But at the same time, we leverage many other partners. Well, you know, Accenture, SCL, and even on the tooling side we use Datadog and (indistinct). All these guys are major partners of our because the way we like to pick partners is based on our vision and where we want to go. And pick the right partner who's going to really, you know make you successful by investing their resources in you. And what I mean by that is when you have a partner, partner knows exactly what kind of skillset is needed for this customer, for them to really be successful. As I said earlier, we cannot really get all the skillset that we need, we rely on the partners and partners bring the the right skillset, they can scale. I can tell Prem tomorrow, "Hey, I need two parts by next week", and I guarantee it he's going to bring two parts to me. So they let you scale, they let you move fast. And I'm a big believer, in today's day and age, to get things done fast and be more agile. I'm not worried about failure, but for me moving fast is very, very important. And partners really do a very good job bringing that. But I think then they also really make you think, isn't it? Because one thing I like about partners they make you innovate whether they know it or not but they do because, you know, they will come and ask you questions about, "Hey, tell me why you are doing this. Can I review your architecture?" You know, and then they will try to really say I don't think this is going to work. Because they work with so many different clients, not JCI, they bring all that expertise and that's what I look from them, you know, just not, you know, do a T&M job for me. I ask you to do this go... They just bring more than that. That's how I pick my partners. And that's how, you know, Hitachi's Vantara is definitely one of a good partner from that sense because they bring a lot more innovation to the table and I appreciate about that. >> It sounds like, it sounds like a flywheel of innovation. >> Yeah. >> I love that. Last question for both of you, which we're almost out of time here, Prem, I want to go back to you. So I'm a partner, I'm planning on redefining CloudOps at my company. What are the two things you want me to remember from Hitachi Vantara's perspective? >> So before I get to that question, Lisa, the partners that we work with are slightly different from from the partners that, again, there are some similar partners. There are some different partners, right? For example, we pick and choose especially in the Harc space, we pick and choose partners that are more future focused, right? We don't care if they are huge companies or small companies. We go after companies that are future focused that are really, really nimble and can change for our customers need because it's not our need, right? When I pick partners for Harc my ultimate endeavor is to ensure, in this case because we've got (indistinct) GCI on, we are able to operate (indistinct) with the level of satisfaction above and beyond that they're expecting from us. And whatever I don't have I need to get from my partners so that I bring this solution to Suresh. As opposed to bringing a whole lot of people and making them stand in front of Suresh. So that's how I think about partners. What do I want them to do from, and we've always done this so we do workshops with our partners. We just don't go by tools. When we say we are partnering with X, Y, Z, we do workshops with them and we say, this is how we are thinking. Either you build it in your roadmap that helps us leverage you, continue to leverage you. And we do have minimal investments where we fix gaps. We're building some utilities for us to deliver the best service to our customers. And our intention is not to build a product to compete with our partner. Our intention is to just fill the wide space until they go build it into their product suite that we can then leverage it for our customers. So always think about end customers and how can we make it easy for them? Because for all the tool vendors out there seeing this and wanting to partner with Hitachi the biggest thing is tools sprawl, especially on the cloud is very real. For every problem on the cloud. I have a billion tools that are being thrown at me as Suresh if I'm putting my installation and it's not easy at all. It's so confusing. >> Yeah. >> So that's what we want. We want people to simplify that landscape for our end customers, and we are looking at partners that are thinking through the simplification not just making money. >> That makes perfect sense. There really is a very strong symbiosis it sounds like, in the partner ecosystem. And there's a lot of enablement that goes on back and forth it sounds like as well, which is really, to your point it's all about the end customers and what they're expecting. Suresh, last question for you is which is the same one, if I'm a partner what are the things that you want me to consider as I'm planning to redefine CloudOps at my company? >> I'll keep it simple. In my view, I mean, we've touched upon it in multiple facets in this interview about that, the three things. First and foremost, reliability. You know, in today's day and age my products has to be reliable, available and, you know, make sure that the customer's happy with what they're really dealing with, number one. Number two, my product has to be secure. Security is super, super important, okay? And number three, I need to really make sure my customers are getting the value so I keep my cost low. So these three is what I would focus and what I expect from my partners. >> Great advice, guys. Thank you so much for talking through this with me and really showing the audience how strong the partnership is between Hitachi Vantara and JCI. What you're doing together, we'll have to talk to you again to see where things go but we really appreciate your insights and your perspectives. Thank you. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> Thanks Lisa, thanks for having us. >> My pleasure. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. Thank you so much for watching. (soothing music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, and welcome to theCUBE's presentation of the AWS Startup Showcase: Data as Code. This is Season 2, Episode 2 of the ongoing SaaS covering exciting startups from the AWS ecosystem and we're going to talk about the future of enterprise data analytics. I'm your host, John Furrier and today we're joined by Gian Merlino CTO and co-founder of Imply.io. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Hey, thanks for having me. >> Building analytics apps with Apache Druid and Imply is what the focus of this talk is and your company being showcased today. So thanks for coming on. You guys have been in the streaming data large scale for many, many years of pioneer going back. This past decade has been the key focus. Druid's unique position in that market has been key, you guys been empowering it. Take a minute to explain what you guys are doing over there at Imply. >> Yeah, for sure. So I guess to talk about Imply, I'll talk about Druid first. Imply is a open source based company and Apache Druid is the open source project that the Imply product's built around. So what Druid's all about is it's a database to power analytical applications. And there's a couple things I want to talk about there. The first off is, is why do we need that? And the second is why are we good at, and I'll just a little flavor of both. So why do we need database to power analytical apps? It's the same reason we need databases to power transactional apps. I mean, the requirements of these applications are different analytical applications, apps where you have tons of data coming in, you have lots of different people wanting to interact with that data, see what's happening both real time and historical. The requirements of that kind of application have sort of given rise to a new kind of database that Druid is one example of. There's others, of course, out there in both the open source and non open source world. And what makes Druid really good at it is, people often say what is Druid's big secret? How is it so good? Why is it so fast? And I never know what to say to that. I always sort of go to, well it's just getting all the little details right. It's a lot of pieces that individually need to be engineered, you build up software in layers, you build up a database in layers, just like any other piece of software. And to have really high performance and to do really well at a specific purpose, you kind of have to get each layer right and have each layer have as little overhead as possible. And so just a lot of kind of nitty gritty engineering work. >> What's interesting about the trends over the past 10 years in particular, maybe you can go back 10, 15 years is state of the art database was, stream a bunch of data put it into a pile, index it, interrogate it, get some reports, pretty basic stuff and then all of a sudden now you have with cloud, thousands of databases out there, potentially hundreds of databases living in the wild. So now data with Kafka and Kinesis, these kinds of technologies streaming data's happening in real time so you don't have time to put it in a pile or index it. You want real time analytics. And so perhaps whether they're mobile app, Instagrams of the world, this is now what people want in the enterprise. You guys are the heart of this. Can you talk about that dynamic of getting data quickly at scale? >> So our thinking is that actually both things matter. Realtime data matters but also historical context matters. And the best way to get historical context out of data is to put it in a pile, index it, so to speak, and then the best way to get realtime context to what's happening right now is to be able to operate on these streams. And so one of the things that we do in Druid, I wish I had more time to talk about it but one of the things that we do in Druid is we kind of integrate this real time processing and this historical processing. So we actually have a system that we call the historical system that does what you're saying, take all this data, put in a pile, index it for all your historical data. And we have a system that we call the realtime system that is pulling data in from things like Kafka, Kinesis, getting data pushed into it as the case may be. And this system is responsible for all the data that's recent, maybe the last hour or two of data will be handled by this system and then the older stuff handled by historical system. And our query layer blends these two together seamlessly so a user never needs to think about whether they're querying realtime data or historical data. It's presented as a blended view. >> It's interesting and you know a lot of the people just say, Hey, I don't really have the expertise, and now they're trying to learn it so their default was throw into a data lake. So that brings back that historical. So the rise of the data lake, you're seeing Databricks and others out there doing very well with the data lakes. How do you guys fit into that 'cause that makes it a lot of sense too cause that looks like historical information? >> So data lakes are great technology. We love that kind of stuff. I would say that a really popular pattern, with Druid there's actually two very popular patterns. One is, I would say streaming forward. So stream focus where you connect up to something like Kafka and you load data to stream and then we will actually take that data, we'll store all the historical data that came from the stream and instead of blend those two together. And another other pattern that's also very common is the data lake pattern. So you have a data lake and then you're sort of mirroring that data from the data lake into Druid. This is really common when you have a data lake that you want to be able to build an application on top of, you want to say I have this data in the data lake, I have my table, I want to build an application that has hundreds of people using it, that has really fast response time, that is always online. And so when I mirror that data into Druid and then build my app on top of that. >> Gian take me through the progression of the maturity cycle here. As you look back even a few years, the pioneers and the hardcore streaming data using data analytics at scale that you guys are doing with Druid was really a few percentage of the population doing that. And then as the hyperscale became mainstream, it's now in the enterprise, how stable is it? What's the current state of the art relative to the stability and adoption of the techniques that you guys are seeing? >> I think what we're seeing right now at this stage in the game, and this is something that we kind of see at the commercial side of Imply, what we're seeing at this stage of the game is that these kinds of realization that you actually can get a lot of value out of data by building interactive apps around it and by allowing people to kind of slice and dice it and play with it and just kind of getting out there to everybody, that there is a lot of value here and that it is actually very feasible to do with current technology. So I've been working on this problem, just in my own career for the past decade, 10 years ago where we were is even the most high tech of tech companies were like, well, I could sort of see the value. It seems like it might be difficult. And we're kind of getting from there to the high tech companies realizing that it is valuable and it is very doable. And I think that was something there was a tipping point that I saw a few years ago when these Druid and database like really started to blow up. And I think now we're seeing that beyond sort of the high tech companies, which is great to see. >> And a lot of people see the value of the data and they see the application as data as code means the application developers really want to have that functionality. Can you share the roadmap for the next 12 months for you guys on what's coming next? What's coming around the corner? >> Yeah, for sure. I mentioned during the Apache open source community, different products we're one member of that community, very prominent one but one member so I'll talk a bit about what we're doing for the Druid project as part of our effort to make Druid better and take it to the next level. And then I'll talk about some of the stuff we're doing on the, I guess, the Druid sort of commercial side. So on the Druid side, stuff that we're doing to make Druid better, take it to the next level, the big thing is something that we really started writing about a few weeks ago, the multi-stage query engine that we're working on, a new multi-stage query engine. If you're interested, the full details are on blog on our website and also on GitHub on Apache Druid GitHub, but short version is Druid's. We're sort of extending Druid's Query engine to support more and varied kinds of queries with a focus on sort of reporting queries, more complex queries. Druid's core query engine has classically been extremely good at doing rapid fire queries very quickly, so think thousands of queries per second where each query is maybe something that involves a filter in a group eye like a relatively straightforward query but we're just doing thousands of them constantly. Historically folks have not reached for technologies like Druid is, really complex and a thousand line sequel queries, complex supporting needs. Although people really do need to do both interactive stuff and complex stuff on the same dataset and so that's why we're building out these capabilities in Druid. And then on the implied commercial side, the big effort for this year is Polaris which is our cloud based Druid offering. >> Talk about the relationship between Druid and Imply? Share with the folks out there how that works. >> So Druid is, like I mentioned before, it's Apache Druid so it's a community based project. It's not a project that is owned by Imply, some open source projects are sort of owned or sponsored by a particular organization. Druid is not, Druid is an independent project. Imply is the biggest contributor to Druid. So the imply engineering team is contributing tons of stuff constantly and we're really putting a lot of the work in to improve Druid although it is a community effort. >> You guys are launching a new SaaS service on AWS. Can you tell me about what that's happening there, what it's all about? >> Yeah, so we actually launched that a couple weeks ago. It's called Polaris. It's very cool. So historically there's been two ways, you can either get started with Apache Druid, it's open source, you install it yourself, or you can get started with Imply Enterprise which is our enterprise offering. And these are the two ways you can get started historically. One of the issues of getting started with Apache Druid is that it is a very complicated distributed database. It's simple enough to run on a single server but once you want to scale things out, once you get all these things set up, you may want someone to take some of that operational burden off your hands. And on the Imply Enterprise side, it says right there in the name, it's enterprise product. It's something that may take a little bit of time to get started with. It's not something you can just roll up with a credit card and sign up for. So Polaris is really about of having a cloud product that's sort of designed to be really easy to get started with, really self-service that kind of stuff. So kind of providing a really nice getting started experience that does take that maintenance burden and operational burden away from you but is also sort of as easy to get started with as something that's database would be. >> So a more developer friendly than from an onboarding standpoint, classic. >> Exactly. Much more developer friendly is what we're going for with that product. >> So take me through the state of the art data as code in your mind 'cause infrastructure is code, DevOps has been awesome, that's cloud scale, we've seen that. Data as Code is a term we coined but means data's in the developer process. How do you see data being integrated into the workflow for developers in the future? >> Great question. I mean all kinds of ways. Part of the reason that, I kind of alluded to this earlier, building analytical applications, building applications based on data and based on letting people do analysis, how valuable it is and I guess to develop in that context there's kind of two big ways that we sort of see these things getting pushed out. One is developers building apps for other people to use. So think like, I want to build something like Google analytics, I want to build something that clicks my web traffic and then lets the marketing team slice and dice through it and make decisions about how well the marketing's doing. You can build something like that with databases like Druid and products like what we're having in Imply. I guess the other way is things that are actually helping developers do their own job. So kind of like use your own product or use it for yourself. And in this world, you kind of have things like... So going beyond what I think my favorite use case, I'll just talk about one. My favorite use case is so I'm really into performance, I spend the last 10 years of my life working on high performance database so obviously I'm into this kind of stuff. I love when people use our product to help make their own products faster. So this concept of performance monitoring and performance management for applications. One thing that I've seen some of our customers do and some of our users do that I really love is when you kind of take that performance data of your own app, as far as it can possibly go take it to the next level. I think the basic level of using performance data is I collect performance data from my application deployed out there in the world and I can just use it for monitoring. I can say, okay my response times are getting high in this region, maybe there's something wrong with that region. One of the very original use cases for Druid was that Netflix doing performance analysis, performance analysis more exciting than monitoring because you're not just understanding that there's a performance, is good or bad in whatever region sort of getting very fine grain. You're saying in this region, on this server rack for these devices, I'm seeing a degradation or I'm seeing a increase. You can see things like Apple just rolled out a new version of iOS and on that new version of iOS, my app is performing worse than the older version. And even though not many devices are on that new version yet I can kind of see that because I have the ability to get really deep in the data and then I can start slicing nice that more. I can say for those new iOS people, is it all iOS devices? Is it just the iPhone? Is it just the iPad? And that kind of stuff is just one example but it's an example that I really like. >> It's kind of like the data about the data was always good to have context, you're like data analytics for data analytics to see how it's working at scale. This is interesting because now you're bringing up the classic finding the needle in the haystack of needles, so to speak where you have so much data out there like edge cases, edge computing, for instance, you have devices sending data off. There's so much data coming in, the scale is a big issue. This is kind of where you guys seem to be a nice fit for, large scale data ingestion, large scaled data management, large scale data insights kind of all rolled in to one. Is that kind of-? >> Yeah, for sure. One of the things that we knew we had to do with Druid was we were building it for the sort of internet age and so we knew it had to scale well. So the original use case for Druid, the very first one that we ended up building for, the reason we build in the first place is because that original use case had massive scale and we struggled finding something, we were literally trying to do what we see people doing now which is we're trying to build an app on a massive data set and we're struggling to do it. And so we knew it had to scale to massive data sets. And so that's a little flavor of kind know how that works is, like I was mentioning earlier this, this realtime system and historical system, the realtime system is scalable, it's scalable out if you're reading from Kafka, we scale out just like any other Kafka consumer. And then the historical system is all based on what we call segments which are these files that has a few million rows per file. And a cluster is really big, might have thousands of servers, millions of segments, but it's a design that is kind of, it's a design that does scale to these multi-trillion road tables. >> It's interesting, you go back when you probably started, you had Twitter, Netflix, Facebook, I mean a handful of companies that were at the scale. Now, the trend is you're on this wave where those hyperscalers and, or these unique huge scale app companies are now mainstream enterprise. So as you guys roll out the enterprise version of building analytics and applications, which Druid and Imply, they got to going to get religion on this. And I think it's not hard because it's distributed computing which they're used to. So how is that enterprise transition going because I can imagine people would want it and are just kicking the tires or learning and then trying to put it into action. How are you seeing the adoption of the enterprise piece of it? >> The thing that's driving the interest is for sure doing more and more stuff on the internet because anything that happens on the internet whether it's apps or web based, there's more and more happening there and anything that is connected to the internet, anything that's serving customers on the internet, it's going to generate an absolute mountain of data. And the only question is not if you're going to have that much data, you do if you're doing anything on the internet, the only question is what are you going to do with it? So that's I think what drives the interest, is people want to try to get value out of this. And then what drives the actual adoption is I think, I don't want to necessarily talk about specific folks but within every industry I would say there's people that are leaders, there's organizations that are leaders, teams that are leaders, what drives a lot of interest is seeing someone in your own industry that has adopted new technology and has gotten a lot of value out of it. So a big part of what we do at Imply is that identify those leaders, work with them and then you can talk about how it's helped them in their business. And then also I guess the classic enterprise thing, what they're looking for is a sense of stability, a sense of supportability, a sense of robustness and this is something that comes with maturity. I think that the super high tech companies are comfortable using some open source software that's rolled off the presses a few months ago; he big enterprises are looking for something that has corporate backing, they're looking for something that's been around for a while and I think that Druid technologies like it are breaching that little maturity right now. >> It's interesting that supply chain has come up in the software side. That conversation is a lot now, you're hearing about open source being great, but in the cloud scale, you can get the data in there to identify opportunities and also potentially vulnerabilities is big discussion. Question for you on the cloud native side, how do you see cloud native, cloud scale with services like serverless Lambda, edge merging, it's easier to get into the cloud scale. How do you see the enterprise being hardened out with Druid and Imply? >> I think the cloud stuff is great, we love using it to build all of our own stuff, our product is of course built on other cloud technologies and I think these technologies built on each other, you sort of have like I mentioned earlier, all software is built in layers and cloud architecture is the same thing. What we see ourselves as doing is we're building the next layer of that stack. So we're building the analytics database layer. You saw when people first started doing these in public cloud, the very first two services that came out you can get a virtual machine and you can store some data and you can retrieve that data but there's no real analytics on it, there's just kind of storage and retrieval. And then as time goes on higher and higher levels get built out delivering more and more value and then the levels mature as they go up. And so the the bottom of layers are incredibly mature, the top most layers are cutting edge and there's a kind of a maturity gradient between those two. And so what we're doing is we're building out one of those layers. >> Awesome extraction layers, faster performance, great stuff. Final question for you, Gian, what's your vision for the future? How do you Imply and Druid it going? What's it look like five years from now? >> I think that for sure it seems like that there's two big trends that are happening in the world and it's going to sound a little bit self serving for me to say it but I believe what we're doing here says, I'm here 'cause I believe it, I believe in open source and I believe in cloud stuff. That's why I'm really excited that what we're doing is we're building a great cloud product based on a great open source project. I think that's the kind of company that I would want to buy from if I wasn't at this company and I was just building something, I would want to buy a great cloud product that's backed by a great open source project. So I think the kind of the way I see the industry going, the way I see us going and I think would be a great place to end up just kind of as an engineering world, as an industry is a lot of these really great open source projects doing things like what Kubernetes doing containers, we're doing with analytics et cetera. And then really first class really well done cloud versions of each one of them and so you can kind of choose, do you want to get down and dirty with the open source or do you want to choose just kind of have the abstraction of the cloud. >> That's awesome. Cloud scale, cloud flexibility, community getting down and dirty open source, the best of both worlds. Great solution. Goin, thanks for coming on and thanks for sharing here in the Showcase. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you too. >> Okay, this is theCUBE Showcase Season 2, Episode 2. I'm John Furrier, your host. Data as Code is the theme of this episode. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>from around the globe. It's the cube with coverage of Kublai >>Khan and Cloud Native Con, Europe 2021 >>virtual brought to you by red hat. The cloud Native >>computing foundation >>and ecosystem partners. >>Welcome back to the cubes coverage everyone of Coop Con 2021 Cloud Native Con 21 virtual europe. I'm john for your host of the cube. We've got two great guests here, James Labaki, senior Director of Product management, Red Hat and Richer Puree. IBM fellow and chief scientist at IBM Gentlemen, thanks for coming on the cube, appreciate it. >>Thank you for having us. >>So, um, got an IBM fellow and Chief scientist, Senior Director Product management. You guys have the keys to the kingdom on cloud Native. All right, it's gonna be fun. So let's just jump into it. So I want to ask you before we get into some of the questions around the projects, what you guys take of cube con this year, in terms of the vibe, I know it's virtual in europe north America, we looked like we might be in person but this year with the pandemic cloud native just seems to have a spring to its step, it's got more traction. I've seen the cloud native piece even more than kubernetes in a way. So scott cooper diseases continues to have traction, but it's always about kubernetes now. It's more cloud native. I what do you guys think about that? >>Yeah, I'm sure you have thoughts and I could add on >>Yes, I I think well I would really think of it as almost sequential in some ways. Community is too cold now there's a layer which comes above it which is where all our, you know, clients and enterprises realize the value, which is when the applications really move. It's about the applications and what they can deliver to their end customers. And the game now is really about moving those applications and making them cloud native. That's when the value of that software infrastructure will get realized and that's why you are seeing that vibe in the, in the clients and enterprises and at two corners. Well, >>yeah, I mean, I think it's exciting. I've been covering this community since the beginning as you guys know the cube. This is the enablement moment where the fruit is coming off the tree is starting to see that first wave of you mentioned that enablement, it's happening and you can see it in the project. So I want to get into the news here, the conveyor community. What is this about? Can you take a minute to explain what is the conveyor community? >>Yeah, yeah. I think uh, you know, uh, what, what we discovered is we were starting to work with a lot of end users and practitioners. Is that what we're finding is that they kind of get tired of hearing about digital transformation and from multiple vendors and and from sales folks and these sorts of things. And when you speak to the practitioners, they just want to know what are the practical implications of moving towards a more collaborative architecture. And so, um, you know, when you start talking to them at levels beyond, uh, just generic kind of, you know, I would say marketing speak and even the business cases, the developers and sys admins need to know what it is they need to do to their application architecture is the ways they're working for to successfully modernize their applications. And so the idea behind the conveyor community was really kind of two fold. One was to help with knowledge sharing. So we started running meetups where people can come and share their knowledge of what they've done around specific topics like strangling monoliths or carving offside containers or things that sidecar containers are things that they've done successfully uh to help uh kind of move things forward. So it's really about knowledge sharing. And then the second piece we discovered was that there's really no place where you can find open source tools to help you re host re platform and re factor your applications to kubernetes. And so that's really where we're trying to fill that void is provide open source options in that space and kind of inviting everybody else to collaborate with us on that. >>Can you give an example of something uh some use cases of people doing this, why the need the drivers? It makes sense. Right. As a growing, you've got, you have to move applications. People want to have um applications moved to communities. I get that. But what are some of the use cases that were forcing this? >>Yeah, absolutely, for sure. I don't know if you have any you want to touch on um specifically I could add on as well. >>Yeah, I think some of the key use cases, I would really say it will be. So let let me just, I think James just talked about re host, re hosting, re platform ng and re factoring, I'm gonna put some numbers on it and then they talk about the use case a little bit as well. I would really say 30 virtual machines movement. That's it. That's the first one to happen. Easy, easier one, relatively speaking. But that's the first one to happen. The re platform in one where you are now really sort of changing the stack as well but not changing the application in any major way yet. And the hardest one happened around re factoring, which is, you are, you know, this is when we start talking about cloud native, you take a monolithic application which you know legacy applications which have been running for a long time and try to re factor them so that you can build microservices out of them. The very first, I would say set of clients that we are seeing at the leading edge around this will be around banking and insurance. Legacy applications, banking is obviously finances a large industry and that's the first movement you start seeing which is where the complexity of the application in terms of some of the legacy code that you are seeing more onto the, into the cloud. That for a cloud native implementation as well as their as well as a diversity of scenarios from a re hosting and re platform ng point of view. And we'll talk about some of the tools that we are putting in the community uh to help the users and uh and the developer community in many of these enterprises uh move into a cloud native implementation lot of their applications. And also from the point of view of helping them in terms of practice, is what I describe as best practices. It is not just about tools, it's about the community coming together. How do I do this? How do I do that? Actually, there are best practices that we as a community have gathered. It's about that sharing as well, James. >>Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head. Right. So you re hosting like for example, you might have uh an application that was delivered, you buy an SV that is not available containerized yet. You need to bring that over as a VM. So you can bring that into Q Bert, you know, and actually bring that and just re hosted. You can, you might have some things that you've already containerized but they're sitting on a container orchestration layer that is no longer growing, right? So the innovation has kind of left that platform and kind of kubernetes has become kind of that standard one, the container orchestration layer, if you want become the de facto standard. And so you want to re platform that that takes massaging and transforming metadata to do that to create the right objects and so on and so forth. So there's a bunch of different use cases around that that kind of fall into that re host tree platform all the way up to re factoring >>So just explain for the audience and I know I love I love the three things re hosting re platform in and re factoring what's the difference between re platform NG and re factoring specifically, what's the nuance there? >>Yeah, yeah, so so a lot of times I think people have a lot of people, you know, I think obviously amazon kind of popularized the six hours framework years ago, you know, with, with, with, with that. And so if you look at what they kind of what they popularize it was replied corn is really kind of like a lift tinker and shift. So maybe it's, I, I'm not just taking my VM and putting it on new infrastructure, I'm gonna take my VM, maybe put on new infrastructure, but I'm gonna switch my observer until like a lighter weight observer or something like that at the same time. So that would fall into like a re platform or in the case, you know, one of the things we're seeing pretty heavily right now is the move from cloud foundry to kubernetes for example, where people are looking to take their application and actually transform it and run it on kubernetes, which requires you to really kind of re platform as well. And re factoring >>is what specific I get the >>report re factoring is, I think just following on to what James said re factoring is really about um the complexity of the application, which was mainly a monolithic large application, many of these legacy applications which have so many times, actually hundreds of millions of dollars of assets for these uh these enterprises, it's about taking the code and re factoring it in terms of dividing it into uh huh different pieces of court which can themselves be spun as microservices. So then it becomes true, it takes starting advantage of agility or development in a cloud native environment as well. It's not just about either lift and shift of the VM or or lift tinker and shift from a, from a staff point of view. It's really about not taking applications and dividing them so that we can spin microservices and it has the identity of the development of a cloud. >>I totally got a great clarification, really want to get that out there because re platform ng is really a good thing to go to the cloud. Hey, I got reticent open source, I'll use that, I can do this over here and then if we use that vendor over there, use open source over there. Really good way to look at it. I like the factory, it's like a complete re architecture or re factoring if you will. So thank you for the clarification. Great, great topic. Uh, this is what practitioners think about. So I gotta ask the next question, what projects are involved in in the community that you guys are working? It seems like a really valuable service uh and group. Um can you give an overview and what's going on in the community specifically? >>Yeah, so there's really right now, there's kind of five projects that are in the community and they're all in different, I would say different stages of maturity as well. So, um there's uh when you look at re hosting, there's two kind of primary projects focused on that. One is called forklift, which is about migrating your virtual machines into cuba. So covert is a way that you can run virtual machines orchestrated by kubernetes. We're seeing kind of a growth in demand there where people want to have a common orchestration for both their VMS and containers running on bare metal. And so forklift helps you actually mass migrate VMS into that environment. Um The second one on the re hosting side is called Crane. So Crane is really a tool that helps you migrate applications between kubernetes clusters. So you imagine you have all your you know, you might have persistent data and one kubernetes cluster and you want to migrate a name space from one cluster to another. Um That's where Crane comes in and actually helps you migrate between those um on the re platforms that we have moved to cube, which actually came from the IBM research team. So they actually open source that uh you sure you want to speak about uh moved to >>cube. Yeah, so so moved to cuba is really as we discuss the re platform scenario already, it is about, you know, if you are in a docker environment or hungry environment uh and you know, kubernetes has become a de facto standard now you are containerized already, but you really are actually moving into the communities based environment as the name implies, It's about moved to cuba back to me and this is one of the things we were looking at and as we were looking, talking to a lot of, a lot of users, it became evident to us that they are adapting now the de facto standard. Uh and it's a tool that helps you enable your applications in that new environment and and move to the new stuff. >>Yeah. And then the the the only other to our tackle which is uh probably like the one of the newest projects which is focused on kind of assessment and analysis of applications for container reservation. So actually looking at and understanding what the suitability is of an application for being containerized and start to be like being re factored into containers. Um and that's that's uh, you know, we have kind of engineers across both uh Red hat IBM research as well as uh some folks externally that are starting to become interested in that project as well. Um and the last, the last project is called Polaris, which is a tool to help you measure your software delivery performance. So this might seem a little odd to have in the community. But when you think about re hosting re platform and re factoring, the idea is that you want to measure your software delivery performance on top of kubernetes and that's what this does. It kind of measures the door metrics. If you're familiar with devops realization metrics. Um so things like, you know, uh you know, your change failure rate and other things on top of their to see are you actually improving as you're making these changes? >>Great. Let me ask the question for the folks watching or anyone interested, how do they get involved? Who can contribute, explain how people get involved? Is our site, is there up location slack channel? What's out there? >>Yeah, yeah, all of the above. So we have a, we have, we have a slack channel, we're on slack dot kubernetes dot io on town conveyor, but if you go to www dot conveyor dot io conveyor with a K. Uh, not like the cube with a C. Uh, but like cube with a K. Uh, they can go to a conveyor to Ohio and um, there they can find everything they need. So, um, we have a, you know, a governance model that's getting put in place, contributor ladder, all the things you'd expect. We're kind of talking into the C N C F around the gap delivery groups to kind of understand if we can um, how we can align ourselves so that in the future of these projects take off, they can become kind of sandbox projects. Um and uh yeah, we would welcome any and all kind of contribution and collaboration >>for sure. I don't know if you have >>anything to add on that, I >>think you covered it at the point has already um, just to put a plug in for uh we have already been having meetups, so on the best practices you will find the community, um, not just on convert or die. Oh, but as you start joining the community and those of meet ups and the help you can get whether on the slack channel, very helpful on the day to day problems that you are encountering as you are taking your applications to a cloud native environment. >>So, and I can see this being a big interest enterprises as they have a mix and match environment and with container as you can bring and integrate old legacy. And that's the beautiful thing about hybrid cloud that I find fascinating right now is that with all the goodness of stade Coubertin and cloud native, if you've got a legacy environments, great fit now. So you don't have to kill the old to bring in the news. So this is gonna be everything a real popular project for, you know, the class, what I call the classic enterprise, So what you guys both have your companies participated in. So with that is that the goal is that the gulf of this community is to reach out to the classic enterprise or open source because certainly and users are coming in like, like, like you read about, I mean they're coming in fast into the community. >>What's the goal for the community really is to provide assistant and help and guidance to the users from a community point of view. It's not just from us whether it is red hat or are ideal research, but it's really enterprises start participating and we're already seeing that interest from the enterprises because there was a big gap in this area, a lot of vendor. Exactly when you start on this journey, there will be 100 people who will be telling you all you have to do is this Yeah, that's easy. All you have to do. I know there is a red flag goes up, >>it's easy just go cloud native all the way everything is a service. It's just so easy. Just you know, just now I was going to brian gracefully, you get right on that. I want to just quickly town tangent here, brian grazer whose product strategist at red hat, you're gonna like this because he's like, look at the cloud native pieces expanding because um, the enterprises now are, are in there and they're doing good work before you saw projects like envoy come from the hyper scales like lift and you know, the big companies who are building their own stuff, so you start to see that transition, it's no longer the debate on open source and kubernetes and cloud native. It's the discussion is integration legacy. So this is the big discussion this week. Do you guys agree with that? And what would, what would be your reaction? >>Yeah, no, I, I agree with you. Right. I mean, I think, you know, I think that the stat you always here is that the 1st 20 of kind of cloud happened and now there's all the rest of it. Right? And, and modernization is going to be the big piece right? You have to be able to modernize those applications and those workloads and you know, they're, I think they're gonna fall in three key buckets, right? Re host free platform re factor and dependent on your business justification and you know, your needs, you're going to choose one of those paths and we just want to be able to provide open tools and a community based approach to those folks too to help that certainly will have and just, you know, just like it always does, you know, upstream first and then we'll have enterprise versions of these migration tool kits based on these projects, but you know, we really do want to kind of build them, you know, and make sure we have the best solution to the problem, which we believe community is the way to do that. >>And I think just to add to what James said, typically we are talking about enterprises, these enterprises will have thousands of applications, so we're not talking about 10 40 number. We're talking thousands or 20% is not a small number is still 233 400. But man, the work is remaining and that's why they are getting excited about cloud negative now, okay, now we have seen the benefit but this little bit here, but now, let's get, you know serious about about that transformation and this is about helping them in a cloud native uh in an open source way, which is what red hat. XL Sad. Let's bring the community together. >>I'm actually doing a story on that. You brought that up with thousands of applications because I think it's, it's under underestimate, I think it's going to be 1000s and thousands more because businesses now, software driven everywhere and observe ability has pointed this out. And I was talking to the founder of uh Ravana project and it's like, how many thousands of dashboards you're gonna need? Roads are So so this is again, this is the problems and the opportunities are coming together, the abstraction will get you to move up the stack in terms of automation. So it's kind of fascinating when you start thinking about the impact as this goes the next level. And so I have to ask your roaches since you're an IBM fellow and chief scientist, which by the way, is a huge distinction. Congratulations. Being an IBM fellow is is a big deal. Uh IBM takes that very seriously. Only a few of them. You've seen many waves and cycles of innovation. How would you categorize this one now? Because maybe I'm getting old and and loving this right now. But this seems like everything kind of coming together in one flash 10.1 major inflection point. All the other waves combined seemed to be like in this one movement very fast. What's your what's your take on this wave that we're in? >>Yes, I would really say there is a lot of technology has been developed but that technology needs to have its value unleashed and that's exactly where the intersection of those applications and that technology occurs. Um I'm gonna put in yet another. You talked about everything becoming software. This was Anderson I think uh Jack Lee said the software is eating the world another you know, another wave that has started as a i eating software as well. And I do believe these two will go inside uh to uh like let me just give you a brief example re factoring how you take your application and smart ways of using ai to be able to recommend the right microservices for you is another one that we've been working towards and some of those capabilities will actually come in this community as well. So when we talk about innovations in this area, We are we are bringing together the best of IBM research as well. As we are hoping the community actually uh joints as well and enterprises are already starting to join to bring together the latest of the innovations bringing their applications and the best practices together to unleash that value of the technology in moving the rest of that 80%. And to be able to seamlessly bridge from my legacy environment to the cloud native environment. >>Yeah. And hybrid cloud is gonna be multi cloud really is the backbone and operating system of business and life society. So as these apps start to come on a P i is an integration, all of these things are coming together. So um yeah, this conveyor project and conveyor community looks like a really strong approach. Congratulations. Good >>job bob. >>Yeah, great stuff. Kubernetes, enabling companies is enabling all kinds of value here in the cube. We're bringing it to you with two experts. Uh, James Richard, thanks for coming on the Cuban sharing. Thank you. >>Thank you. >>Okay, cube con and cloud native coverage. I'm john furry with the cube. Thanks for watching. Yeah.

(upbeat fast paced techno music) >> Narrator: Live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage, it's The Cube. Covering VMworld 2019. Brought to you buy VMware and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone. Cube, the coverage here VMworld 2019. I'm John Furrier. Dave Vellante. Dave 10 years covering The Cube. Lots changed. The game is still the same when it comes to storage back in recovery. Got some new stuff too, some great news. Two great guests. Cube Alumni Shay Mowlem who's the Senior Vice President of Product Strategy Rubrik. Chris Wahl, Chief Technologist at Rubrik. Guys, welcome back to The Cube. >> Thanks. >> Good to be here. >> The game always is getting better in terms of modernization, that's the big trend. Digital transformation their are talks about that, but cloud impact has been something that you guys been riding the wave like I said, great success. I don't think you guys have been classified as a startup anymore, you're more in high growth mode. Let's cover the news. What's happening with the announcements here at Vmworld? What's the big news? >> We announced our new release of Andy's 5.1 and really breaking new ground and expanding our position into new markets around data governance, disaster recovery and we're also bringing in continuous data protection as a core capability of our product. Really excited about it. These are areas that have generally been addressed through sort of separate siloed approaches, and we see a lot of synergy with backup recovery and brought it all together as part of this offering. >> How's the news going over? >> Oh it's been great. I mean if you look at data governance, everyone is struggling today with privacy. How do you discover personally identifiable information in your backup archives? Very hard problem to solve. Generally people do spot audits and checks. We've just made that really easy. Streamline with a backup process. It sort of naturally fits there in some ways 'cause I'm backing it up, why not process that data to discover? Sends that information and classify it and our customers are really excited about that. >> Chris, talk about the architectural shift. 'Cause one of the things that we were observing in our opening day analysis is storage is still a hot startup sector. I mean, storage is not storage anymore. It's evolved. We were even joking this morning with Nvidia and Dalium C guy around H, VDI. That's not VDI anymore, it's user experience. Storage specifically with cloud has certainly changed on premises. Everyone now recognizes hybrid finally as standard, not going away. But the operating model is requiring a new architect, 'cause you can't just take the old and recycle it into the new. We'll talk about what that is specifically and why it's important. >> Yeah and I'll kind of tie that back to what we're talking here with cloud data management. It's kind of this acknowledgement that the way we did IT back in the day, where the storage food group was completely isolated, things went into it, things came out of it, but it wasn't part of that kind of overall architecture. Especially when you start talking public cloud and whatnot, that was just to kind of acknowledge that this model of IT just isn't going to carry us forward, and that's similar to the process of let's take all this backup data with Rubrik, let's index it, inventory it, really start to understand what's going on and use that as like the jet fuel that actually powers our Polaris platform and all of our data management applications. I think that all starts with storage. We had to have that data, add a primary into some secondary location, keep it very efficient, figure out how it's going to get from one place to the next. That used to be data centers, now it's clouds and back and forth. >> It's funny, these sacred cloud categories, backup recovery idea. It's data. I mean, this is a data problem. It's data, it's value is in data. You're seeing platform kind of thinking coming in. We talked about this in Palo Alto in our studio when you came in. >> Yes we did. It's a platform thing, it's not just this tool or siloed approach. >> Absolutely. That was when we spoke last, I had recently joined Rubrik back then. Our vision had always been, this is high value data. Yes, we're going to build back up in a way that is quite revolutionary, but how do we create more leverage out of that data? We're starting to see actual execution to that, both with our radar product ransom where recovery, sonar for data governance, orchestrated DR, exposing more and more value out of that data and it's really connecting. >> I'd love to come back to the announcement, the Andys announcement. >> Shay: Yes. >> You talk about governance, DR, and CDP. You're right, these often times would be point products, but explain to people sort of the before and the after. >> Shay: Sure. >> That you try to, when you walk into an account, you might see like I say, different point products. How are they transitioning? Maybe you could add some color there. >> Yeah absolutely. With data governance, everybody's, everyone's got deal with it today at some level. I use privacy as an example, but truly we all are impacted if you're in health care you've got HIPPA. If you're dealing with financial data, you've got PCI. Generally, the backup data has been somewhat of a black box. The only way to really check it, is to do sort of a spot audit check. It's labor intensive and hard. We're streamlining that process for our customers and incorporating it as a value add on top of what they're doing with backup and I think that's solving a major pain point. On DR, same thing. Separate silo today, generally different product lines, but backing up core objects, VM's, databases and application stacks, which is what you're really trying to do with a DR solution, you know there's a lot of synergy there. We're helping to just bring that synergy together into this integrated platform approach. >> You guys are doing some machine learning. I saw in the news around classification you mentioned it, index. It sounds like a search engine, but again to my point about these categories kind of being broken down, this platform, you guys are using machine learning to do some classification around protecting against breach. Is that right? Could you guys just drill down on that a little bit? What's that all about? >> Yes, so we use machine learning in a variety of ways. In our radar product, our ransomware recovery product, we us it for not only detection of changed patterns in the data. Ransomware techs generally involve people coming in, updating, deleting, encrypting your data. We look at the changing profile of the data, and alert allonomous behavior, and then recover it back to the last stable state. With our data governance product, we're also learning machine learning to discover that PII information and trying to really help find a very rich accurate way of detecting that data. >> So, to killer apps, one Ransomware which, big problem. I mean, you just, you can't look a day without seeing major ransomware. The Texas thing to me jumps out. Coordinated attacks. I even speculate, that's cybersecurity related. Some would say there's some stayed actors on that or sanctioned groups doing that, but that's, again I'm with conspiracy theory on this one, but that's Ransomware. Killer app. Compliance, kind of a boring category, but super important because of the penalties. I mean, compliance is an issue. Huge. >> Absolutely. I mean, you look at GDPR in Europe, compliance bossies here in this country across various verticals. Everyone's dealing with it in some form or another, and there's no reason why that should be a separate sort of process. Why not leverage the data management, like what is being provided by Rubrik to deliver on that? >> Here's another question on DR. One of the complaints that you hear, maybe not complaints, but observations when you talk to practitioners, is they can't test their DR. They can test the fair load, but they can't test the fail back 'cause it's too risky. >> Shay: That's spot on, yes. How do you address that problem? You're all about your modern data management, simplicity cloud. Describe how you solve that problem. >> That's a very, very powerful question Dave and it's so true. Traditionally, customers that are using on prem DR systems need to set up the infrastructure, the people, the processes. It's very labor intensive and expensive, so you can only do it a few times a year max and that's how you know that your DR system is operational. You don't want to discover that there's a problem when there's an actual DR happening. Our approach basically takes the full application stack that you want to protect, we convert it for you into a cloud native format and we can instantiate any one of those snapshots that we're taking that full application at any point in time, in the cloud for you to verify and test and we streamline that process, fully orchestrated. If you choose to keep it in the cloud, we have a cloud native approach to protect it and then you can fail back to your on prem system. We've just streamlined this process in a way that really helps our customers do DR test in a much more frequent basis without that operation burden and challenge that they're dealing with today. >> Talk about, Chris, this Rubrik build open source initiative. Because I want, it's interesting. First explain what is Rubrik build, what's it all about. What's the philosophy behind it? >> I'll take you back a few years, when I was interested in joining Rubrik. The one major defining characteristic of the product that really tugged my heart strings, was a restful set of API end points for everything. Doesn't matter what the product does. Anything you click it's always calling a restful API. That goes to a pain point that I had a a customer, was automating, we'll say any kind of backup product, but a lot of things in the infrastructure space was like smashing my face against a hot iron. (chuckles) >> Chris: You know, it's just not pleasant. >> Bad visual too. >> Chris: Exactly, so I'm thinking- >> I've never tried that. (laughs) >> Do not do that at home. >> The analogies, that's my one gift to the world. >> You need restful API is what you need. (laughs) >> Cute. So, finding a product that not only had them, but wanted you to consume them, made them available across every feature, click whatever existed, was very, very powerful for me and a lot of other people that I work with. Fast forward a few years, we developed quite the library of different source projects for integrating with things like ServiceNow and vRealize and anything that does things from configuration management, all the way to infrastructures code, and we would go talk to customers about these things. You had two camps of people. Either, I need the 100 level stuff. I've never dealt with CIDC Pipelines, automation, unit tests, pull requests, what is GitHub? All the way through, I know all that stuff, give me the use cases. What can I do with your API? We wanted to develop Rubrik Build as kind of a teach you how to make the champagne, and teach you how to drink the champagne. The idea is, all of our software development kits, our eco integrations and our use cases, are bundled into this very friendly ecosystem where it's all open source, we have quick start guides, educational materials, and a number of folks that are on the engineering and marketing teams that are engaging with people that either don't care much about cloud data management and just want to learn kind of the automation dev ops world of things, or are very keep to learn more about CDP >>and stuff like that. So Rubrik employees donating the code for open source. Did you guys create the project? Was it community driven or how was that structured? >> It was kind of three slices. It could be from Rubrik. We built this thing like an SDK. We obviously own and support that. It could be someone found our SDK, and wanted to write a third party integration. Heck, even Microsoft wrote a system center ops manager plugin and hosted on their GitHub site. Or it kind of something in the middle where working with like a red hat on their Ansible integrations is an example. >> What other kind of innovations have come out of that? You mentioned Microsoft doing the GitHub. Are there sort of things that have come out of it, or things that you're hoping to come out of it? It's hard to predict, I know. >> We've had the predecessor of the DR product that we released or announced, was actually born in open source. Many years ago, I had a customer saying, I'd really like to automatically do DR tests like every night, for the se five critical apps. We have the API's, we have the ability to live mount work loads, we tie into the cloud, I was like, there's no reason we can't do this. We had that kind of bit more, manual process, but it does the job years ago that we developed as a use case doing Helper Different Languages, fast forward now it's a product. You can kind of get to see that evolution from idea to sort of hacking on things to get them to work, to now it's a full product and you can just push the button and everyone's going to love that. That's one example. >> Very cool. >> Talk about the Vmware relationship. What's the status? How long have you guys been working with VMware and the ecosystem, and what are some of the new things that are developing in the relationship? >> Yeah I mean, this is a deep relationship. It's been a critical one from the beginning of the company. We integrate and support, and are certified across a variety of solutions. Obviously V Center and in this latest release with our continuous data protection, we've done that in a way that is a certified, approved approach and I think that helps us really build a confidence and deliver this sort of excellent overall experience that our customers are looking for. >> They got that open source aspect too, that's pretty hot right now with the cloud native stuff going on, that's pretty relevant. >> Shay: Absolutely. (chuckles) >> All right well we got to ask, with multi-cloud everything here. What's your guys point of view on multi-cloud? Real? BS? Somewhere in the middle? Time will tell? What's your thoughts? >> Definitely real. I'll add color. I mean, I think- >> Dave: Yeah, thank you. >> Absolutely. (laughs) we used to talk about hybrid just a few years ago and that's still real too, but we see a lot of customer looking at leveraging best in class for different work loads and different services across multiple clouds, and our vision it to be the data management platform of choice across all of that. Enabling that choice, and giving the excellent sort of cloud native experience that they're looking for as they deploy different work loads in these different environments. >> Just share with us. We've been talking at The Cube a lot. There's a lot of us who believe this, that certain parts of the multi-cloud are on the BS side. Now there's that vision that any app can run anywhere without recompiling, without retesting. That's aspirational. Then you're going to need a lot of homogenous infrastructure to do that. The one area that I do think that you can standardize on, is what you guys call a data management, or backup, that you can actually say, okay we're going to mandate that this is the platform that we're going to use across all clouds, and that actually will work technically. >> Chris: Yes. Some of this other stuff, I'm not so sure. >> If you have a control plane, if you will, with data management entities that live on prem as well as localities that are available across public cloud, then it's really just a choice of why do you want to put the data there. We're driving that through our serviceable agreement domains or isolated domains where you can say, this data needs to live in Germany. It needs to be in this particular data center forever, where this one needs to replicate to between France and London, something like that. You can make those choices based on what you're trying to achieve, more around non technical decision making, than actual technical decision making. Which I think has really been kind of, you call the BS versus no BS. It's like, are we trying to do this because we can or because we need to do something? That's to me, the decision between BS or not. >> Well, it's customer driven too. The use cases will drive it. For instance, a security requirement might be build our own stack, I want to be on this cloud, have a backup cloud or the work load might have certain requirements, but again I think the data question's a good one. That's going to be independent of- >> I want to test it with the technologist because if you have, let's say you have outposts and you got Azure Stack, Cloud Customer, whatever, and you think you're going to run apps anywhere and that's not going to happen anytime soon anyway. However, if I want a data management solution across all those, actually that can work. Right? There's not reason it can't because you'll write to their API's, you'll take care of that. >> You're saying that today with like Kubernetes deployments. They're not all the same, but they, everybody's got an offering in there and everyone has a full suite of API's that you can plug into. I do agree that things like data management not only can, but should be ubiquitous across localities. It shouldn't matter where you're at, the experience should be roughly the same. >> It's not that disruptive to say, okay rogue division, we're going to swap out and you're going to go standardize that. >> That's usually where the multi-cloud comes from. (chuckles) it's kind of involuntary. You got two teams, just chose different things. >> Right, right. >> While we got the brain trust on the key here, I want to pose another question for you that I mean, we're going to relive the video tape five years from now when we're going to see it, how it all turns out. (laughs) one of the things we've been kind of talking about here on The Cube, but also leading up to Vmworld this year is Cloud 2.0. Mainly around the following premise. Cloud 1.0 with being defined as AWS, DevOps, Agile, Lean Startup, all that stuff that was we all love in DevOps, compute, storage, scale, all the goodness that came from that. Cloud 2.0 is more of an enterprise cloud kind of configurations, so with that kind of, where networking and security and data are now kind of in the architecture. I want to ask you guys, if that's the premise of Cloud 1.0 was DevOps pure cloud native, born in the cloud, what's your definition of Cloud 2.0? Because a lot of people are looking at it from that simple lens, just trying to simplify that the requirements are changing, the architectures are different, the backup can work multi-cloud but this can't, so there's a lot of moving parts now in this enterprise hybrid world, so what's your definition guys on Cloud 2.0? >> I think increasingly you're seeing the landscape of the infrastructures you pointed out evolving the use of different services across clouds evolving. What's really important is that solutions like data protection don't limit your ability to capitalize on that in our minds, and so we want to build this ubiquitous sort of policy, engine and governance around how to protect my assets and enable whether it's containerized, application stacks that are being delivered or new private cloud deployments that we are not getting in the way of that in any way at all and allowing our customers to sort of broaden and leverage best in class services. >> Chris, what's your definition of Cloud 2.0? >> I'll take us back I mean, we saw this with virtualization. We saw everybody go, oh my gosh! I can get all this capacity used, and all these new services and just going bonkers, and that's where we had like zombie virtual machines and all these other terms that we don't really throw about anymore, but it was the Wild West. Everyone was just land and expand, and we kind of did that with cloud in a lot of cases. You're like, oh look at these new shiny's that I can play with, and now you're absolutely right. It's what about rollback status control and user security? My S3 bucket got hijacked. Ransomware is tearing through. You can now ransomware video cameras and things like that. It's a pretty terrifying world and I think this is that moment, where we take a look back and say, well is it highly available? Is it secure? How do I know that? How am I able to recover from availability or even external threat issues? To me, that's where most of the conversations we have are hard. >> Yeah it's the transformative opportunities is all intoxicating. Oh, this is great, but the reality is, it's not as clean as going to the cloud. >> Chris: Give me something that you know will work. >> I got to build the system out. It's an operating environment. >> Yes. >> Yeah. >> Totally agree. You guys are doing great. Thanks for the commentary and insight on Cloud 2.0 and multi-cloud, >> Pleasure guys. and congratulation on your success at Rubrik. Thanks for coming on sharing the insight. It's Cube coverage here at Vmworld 2019. More after this short break. (light techno music)

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media office, in Boston, Massachusetts, it's the CUBE. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to a special presentation of CUBE Conversation here from our Boston area studio. Welcome back to the program from ClearSky Data, Ellen Rubin the CEO and Laz Vekiarides who is the CTO. Laz and Ellen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Us too, nice to be back. >> Hi, thanks for having us. >> All right, so, always good to talk to a local company, we talked about technology, I was actually in the Seaport district earlier, recently, and you know there's a lot happening in this space, as we know, it doesn't all happen, in Seattle for the cloud, Silicon Valley for all the VCs, so Ellen I've been speaking with your company since its early days-- >> Stealth mode, yeah. >> Stealth mode. First time I met you in person was at the Amazon reinvent shows, so still one of the focal points of the cloud and everything that happening there. But give us the update, you've got some new fundings, some new partnerships, tell us what's happening with ClearSky. >> Absolutely, I'm really happy to be back. So yeah, we've been, last night been building this company together, we started in 2013 with the, you know, sitting in a room with a white board but the company has really been actively funded and kind of building customers and our service offering since 2014. And we've just seen a tremendous amount of growth especially in the last year. So we're excited to be able to share that we are raising a 20 million funding round, and it includes some new investors, strategic investors as well as some of our existing investors from General Catalyst and Highland and Polaris. So it's very important for us but it's also great for our customers because it gives us a chance now to be in more places and have more people on our team to really grow and add to the support the operation of what we're doing. So that's kind of part A. And we're really looking forward to doing that. We've added a head of our sales organization, our chief revenue officer, Roger Cummings, and so we've really kind of filled out our team and our growing as a company overall. So that's kind of part A. >> So yeah congratulations on the numbers. The other piece, I think back to the first discussions we had when you talked about living in lots of environments and how do you help customers, there was somebody that you're partnering with now that I believe came up in that first discussion because they've got one of the largest global foot print on the planet that I'm aware of. >> Indeed, so yeah, also today we're announcing our partnership with Equinex and we've actually been working, we've been talking with Equinex since we were in stealth mode and we've been working with them over the past several years already in a couple of locations. And we can talk in a lot of detail about sort of where the great alignment fit is, but the news for us is that we're now gonna be able to really expand the reach of our service across the rest of the United States. So we're gonna triple the number of locations, and we're gonna be basically anywhere our customers need us to be, as you know we are a metro-based service so it's very important from a latency and access that we be in more locations. And we see it as basically a great jumping off for filling out the initial vision of being across United States and now it's starting to expand that side. >> Yes that's great. Laz, let's pull you in here. If you look at the data piece of it, we understand that latency is clearly important. That's the conversation we've had back in the storage world for a long time. Data has gravity, it's tough to move it, and having some locality is super important. So what are your, for people who aren't as familiar with the company, just give us the thumbnail, architecturally, and tell us what you've been seeing update wise, from a technology standpoint. >> Sure, so, our technology is really metro-based network, so we deliver caching services on the edge to make all of the resources, specifically the data management resources that are far away appear as if they're nearby. Now one of the problem is, as you know with the cloud, is that they are only in certain locations. So unless your nation is in Virginia or you happen to be in the Pacific Northwest, you have a latency problem. And so as a result, some certain types of applications aren't gonna work well. What we've built is really an edge-based data management network. We provide high performance file and block services. To systems at the edge that leverage the cloud for their back ends. And so as a result, you get all of the economics of the cloud and the flexibility that you get with those type of services. But you get the experience of enterprise class functionality and capability's and it's nearby. So you don't miss any of the things that you are kind of used to. >> All right, Laz I want you to help explain something, when you say edge, what does that mean to you and your customers because there are server providers edges, there are kind of the IO key end devices edges, there are some things in between there, so what specifically are you helping with? >> So this is true it's actually really interesting. So we have a very specific definition of edge, we call it the data center edge. And hence our alignment with Equinix, they are in this metro facilities when you look at our architecture we're either putting an edge appliance either in an Equinix facility or in a customer's facility and then tethering that into the Equinix facility. So that last hundred or so miles around an Equinix facility is our edge and that is gonna be our definition now. That could change over time, just like everything else in the cloud changes, because we basically have built software that can run in any type of Linux environment with some monocom activity but in our current market push, our edge is really the data center edge. >> Okay, Ellen I love that that really fit in into the discussions I've been having a lot over the last year or so. People talk about hybrid cloud when they talk about multicloud. It's, they're using lots of SAS, they're usually using more than one public cloud provider and then they have their own resources, and their data center often times has a rack in Equinix and leveraging things like direct connect from Amazon, the equivalent for Google and Microsoft, or expanding those definitions. Bring us inside what are you hearing from customers. I love to hear what you can share about specific customers or in general what's the need that they have and where you fit in into all of it. >> Yeah, no, you're totally on point for what we see everyday which is we deal with medium and large enterprises. So our customers are in health care, they're in financial services, they're in legal services and also in managed service providers now as a newer market for us. So we have customers that include companies like Partners HealthCare, Mass General Hospital, Nuance Communications. We've just added Unitas Global as a managed service provider. Special Olympics is a customer and some regional hedge firms and law services, like Miles and Stockbridge. So what you can kind of see is that we have this really nice set of experiences that are not just what is Facebook doing or what is Stage3 doing but we kind of have a broad range of what CIO and heads of IT are really struggling with. And it's exactly what you're saying which is the edge to a customer very much depends on how they're thinking about where their application are gonna run, and our philosophy is don't worry about it, we've got you covered, your data is gonna be high performance, low latency, you're totally protected and you can access it from wherever you need to. But for a lot of customers honestly we've seen everything. I won't embarrass anybody specifically but there are still some kind of scary, old data centers out there. There are server closets that are acting as data centers. People still have things in their buildings. And then you've got everything to like world class, Equinix, Colo, that is in Ashburn, or whatever. And then people are obviously trying to adapt multiple shades and flavors of public clouds. And I was just out at a customer's yesterday where the CIO was talking to us about the fact that they have grown through a tremendous amount of acquisition. So they've got one of everything. And then the cloud for them was a bunch of people did a bunch of things in Amazon five years ago. Then they decided to standardize on Azure. They don't really know why they standardize on Azure. And they realized that that was not actually answer for all their problems and then they started to think about how Google might actually be a much better fit because of some of the analytics works they're trying to do, and by the way they've got data centers all over the world. That is a very typical scenario that we see everyday and for the customers hedging their bets and not being locked into anything is really, really important to them, because the application keep evolving and new things are getting in some ways built for the cloud, but sometimes the edge actually is still critical, right? In terms of where the actual physical source systems are. >> Yeah, so, I would say the elephant in the room is that kind of how do I get my arms around this multi cloud environment and there's not one company that's gonna solve all of these issues. I've had everything-- >> And even if they did, would you really put everything in one cloud? Probably you wouldn't? >> Right, but it's the, okay, I've got all of these clouds out there and all of these things, I have licensing issues I have to worry about, I have identity management I have to worry about, there's the overall management of it. And it seems primarily it's the networking piece that you're helping with, maybe explain a little bit more, Laz it probably comes to you as to that elephant there, it's ClearSky data, we solve your networking challenge for multicloud and it's more than just that. >> Right, so, it's sometimes embarrassingly I actually started my career in the networking space and so a lot-- >> It's okay, I did, too, it's a training. >> So when Ellen and I started talking about what we wanted to do, we were really focused on networking. Maybe I had enough of storage. And so a lot of what we discovered was that the network is an extremely sort of undersold part of the overall cloud strategy of any company. If you really want to go to the cloud this is really about moving huge amount of data back and forth from these locations. And so we've built a very, very high performance one-hub network from our pops right to all of the various regions of the public clouds. So what this basically means for our customers is that they don't have to worry about the internet, they don't have to worry about the security that they need to set up in order to get into the cloud, and the amount of throughput that we can get through is really astonishing. So we've really built a system that can maximize this network pipes. So even our smallest customers can move in excess of 20 terabytes a day back and forward from the cloud. So this becomes a really really interesting solution if you have a lot of source system or you have a lot of data to move. We can outrun that Amazon truck. >> So I want you to, I think back five years ago, I heard Equinix, some of the other large data centers, they were like, "Oh we're just gonna give you "a cloud market place and there'll be all these services "and if you need to access something, we'll just be able to "throw a 10 gig wire between somebody's connections." It sounded really good but it sounds like you're helping fill a gap. Maybe explain what that is. >> Well so most of the networking pieces are actually very expensive, very complicated to set up, first of all. So you also have port charges and all sorts of high availability issues that you need to resolve with each one of the clouds. Additionally, although they are sort of on demand, you're not using all those bandwidths all the time and you don't know when you're gonna need it. What we've done on the network is to make it possible for you to utilize 40 gigabytes of throughput, our 40 gigabytes of throughput, into the clouds pretty much whenever you need it. So for example, latency from Boston to Amazon niche, for us 11 milliseconds. For most people if they don't have direct connect at some exuberant price they're gonna end up experiencing in the hundreds of milliseconds if they're going over the internet. So that and the bandwidth guarantee is you think you have a one gigabyte internet connection but that's not really what all the elements along your path are gonna provide you. So there's a lot of variability and we make that all go away we make the management go away, the security issues go away, and so it's totally seamless. You just need to connect into our network with our edge, it's as if the cloud really isn't there. And if you need to access your resources in the cloud, we can bring your data to EC2 and you can connect instances to it. So the whole process of moving things back and forth is so seamless and transparent, you don't just manage it. It's all sort of a byproduct of the architecture. >> I was just gonna add, Equinix invested early and bet early on becoming a cloud hub. This idea of having a cloud exchange and a lot of the other services that are plugged in, is a tremendous value to customers. But what we do see is that there is still a lot of customers out there and I'm sure this will persist for a while where there's still even yet further distributed last mile issues, and customers are moving into Equinix and Colocation sites for all the benefits that they bring and we take full advantage of that and help drive that from our side. But we also see that there are things that are just not moving and need to stay put and it's either because of legacy reasons, compliance reasons, they don't want to invest to re-platform things. There are a lot of reasons that are out there and because we both come from the enterprise infrastructure world, that does not scare us. So we understand that what you have to do is you have to meet the customers where they live, right? And you have to make it easy and accessible and as Laz has described in kind of a turn key situation where however your application wants to run and be best situated, we're gonna make sure that your data is available to you. >> Yeah you bring out some great points there. A line I used many times recently is there was the promise that cloud was going to be simple and cheap and it turned out to be neither of those. What do you see some of the biggest challenges, Ellen, we start with you maybe, what are your customers facing, what do you excited about that's actually made progress the last few years, and what do we still need to do as an industry as a whole? >> Well I always have to say this and of course it makes me just feel completely so old but I've been in the clouds since 2008, right? My last company's cloud switch was kind of that early, okay, there's a thing it's called the cloud, it happens to be Amazon but there'll be other clouds too. So you have to say fast-forwarding 10 years, a lot of really good progress has been made and it is for sure the case that now when you talk to enterprise customers and to the CIOs they're in the cloud, they've adopted the cloud, the cloud is in their mental picture of where things are gonna be, they've accepted the fact that they have developer groups are already in the cloud and have been for a very long time and it's part of their portfolio now, to make sure it's protected and highly available and compliant. So I think that is progress. The best thing that ever happened was, I don't have to convince people the cloud is more secure than what they're doing on Prem, because everybody kinda knows that, so that's good news. We don't have to have that conversation 20 times again et cetera. But what I do see that's surprising to me is that still some of the fundamental problems are still problems. Getting my data into the cloud. You think, c'mon we've got lots of solutions, tools, and toolkits and stuff like that. But it's still a very major problem. Networking of course still being a key issue for customers. I don't want to rollout a bunch of new lines, I don't want to have to hire a snowmobile, I don't want to- you know, rebuild everything form scratch. So that is still I think shows up more than I would have guessed. Right now what we see is there's a lot of focus on operational things, in terms of how to optimize what turned out to be the high cost of the cloud. Every one of our customers knows if that pull data back from the cloud that's not good. So they've learned that, they've found that out and they were kind of a little surprised the first time the bill came in and it was really high. So this idea of having tools that allow optimization of using the cloud more cost-effectively and figuring out which cloud is going to be more cost-effective based on the access patterns. There's more awareness of it but there's still a lot of struggling with that. >> Laz, would love your comments on that. >> Well there are, the whole notion of cost-optimization is deeply embedded in our technology. Every time we have a conversation with a customer the first thing they ask, they ask about egress fees, is it really just the same price no matter how much I use it? And they think about all these different, like things about IOPS for example. Because the cloud providers have sort of indoctrinated the market to think about what their IOPS needs are. In order to get them to the appropriate price point. So there's a lot of optimization there, that I still don't think that the customers really got. How many people really understand how many IOPS a particular application really needs? And how many should I buy and if I buy the wrong number oh my god everything is messed up. So the ability to solve those types of problems for people. In a way that it becomes a non-issue is still. Certainly we're doing it for storage but there are all sorts of issues just like that for compute, there are all sorts of issues like that for networking as well. So anyone who's trying to build an application on top of this platform really needs to think about those things. Thankfully our customers don't have to worry about a whole slew of things because we've actually arbitrized out all of the unusual aspects of terrace of network providers versus cloud providers, access fees and transaction fees et cetera. Anyone whose doing this need to think about this in a very analytical way, which I don't think IT has been used to up until now. They overbuy as you know, and they continue to overbuy and as long as there's no complaints about performance, and there's no complaints about excesses in cost everything is fine. That's not how the cloud works. I think we're getting to the point now where any serious move to the cloud now is going to require a lot more thinking and a lot more analysis. There's still a mentality that the cloud is cheaper, and then when people try it, they quickly realize "Oh my god look at this bill." And it's forever, it's not like you can just shut everything off. It's every month. It's not just like you spent forty thousand dollars in a month and you can shut it off. So it's a difficult problem and I don't think IT's prepared, in general. >> I think one of the things we've seen at ClearSky over the last several years is the willingness that customers have to use the cloud for data protection. I think when we started it was sort of, you know, everything's going to the cloud, the whole thing. Damn the torpedoes full speed ahead, right? I think a lot of what people are actually doing is archival back-up DR, those are comfortable, state of the industry is sort of there should be a connection between the, wherever the Prem is for the customer and then out to the cloud for things that are longer tail kinds of things. The problem is, what if you have to pull the data back? So these are thing we think about everyday. >> Right, Ellen want to give me the final word, 20 million dollar phrase, the partnership with Equinex that's going to increase availability. What's this mean to your customers and to the company ClearSky as we look forward. >> Well I think one of the things that's true about the fact that we are a network centric kind of company is that the power of the network is in how many access points you have. So what this means is that customers who are national, and then global will have more opportunity now to be able to access things with ClearSky. And to grow and expand with us, which is great. We've seen tremendous expansion business this year. Really like a huge percentage has already expanded at least once if not multiple times with us. And that begs a lot of questions, well that's great you're here with us in this metro how do we get across the rest of our locations. So I think that's very valuable and also obviously from our side making sure we can handle the care and support that our customers are expecting. We're fully managed 24 by 7. So the bar is high, right? This is not the, here's a toolkit in the cloud go figure it out, this is we take care of everything we're SLAU and that's it. And obviously the customer wants to see that scale. >> Well Ellen and Laz, congratulations on all the progress you've made and always great to catch up with you on all the updates. >> Great to see you. >> Yeah, great to see you. >> Alright and thank you so much for watching and be sure to check out The Cube .net for all of our coverage including. We're at all the cloud shows. Huge show at Amazon Reinvent at the end of November be sure to tune into that and everything else. Feel free to reach out if you've got questions for our team or teams that you'd like us to cover other events we should be at. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching the CUBE.

>> Hello everyone, welcome to a special CUBE conversation. We're here in our Palo Alto studios. I'm John Furrier host of theCUBE and we're here with Bipul Sinha, Co-Founder and CEO of Rubrik, one of the hottest startups in Silicon Valley. Great to have you here in the cube. Thank you so much for this opportunity. So thanks for coming in. You guys have $292 million in funding led the Series A with Lightspeed, Series B with Greylock Series C with Khosla, Series D with IVP. You've got celebrities like Kevin Durant, Frank Slootman, rockstar investors. Great momentum. John Thompson. Just join your board recently. He's on the board of Microsoft as well.  All since 2014, like short time. Congratulations. >> Thank you so much. And we have been very fortunate to have the market traction and demand for Rubrik's for what is now cloud data management product. When we started the company we saw a market need around simplification, cloud enablement and really automating, orchestrating, backup recovery, recovery archive and DR across on-premises and the cloud. >> You guys. Had it been pretty good run here. You've got a new CFO. Talk about that. News, I want to get that out. There was the new CFO, we have >> Our new CFO is Murray Demo. We hired him out of Atlassian where he, he joined the company and took the company public and then the company next two years become like a very fast growing, very successful public company. Our goal is to build Rubrik into the next 30-, 40-years iconic company and we're building a management team that, that will have the firepower and the and the talent to take this company to really become the standard for data management. >> Yeah. I want to get to that. That's I think the big story for you guys is that you've now come out of nowhere, but it's just, you know, the classic startup story, great investors, but you know, we'd go to all the events. We see you guys out there just all of a sudden, just a massive runs. You put the foundation together. Um, you've publicly said you, you're on a $300 million run rate. Great numbers. So great growth. What's take us inside Rubrik. I mean, how is this all working when you guys got good funding? You've got a great management team. What's the core strategy? How it. Why is it working for you guys? >> The core of Rubrik is our culture because technology evolves product. What is invariant is Rubrik's, culture, our culture of transparency, the culture of velocity. The culture of relentlessness is actually drives Rubrik. When we bring new employees into Rubrik, we tell them that it's not about what makes your boss happy or what makes the CEO of this company happy. What moves the agenda of this company? Always think about how do we make or give Rubrik the best opportunity that company can get and we'd drive on that basis so there is no ego, there is no superiority that sales is better than or engineering is a 'know-it-all' and Gods. It's all about how do we collectively build the foundation of a long lasting large public company. >> So that early DNA about that DNA. Where's that come from? The come from the product side engineering side. What? Where's that core DNA of that teamwork come from. >> The core DNA of the team is Google, Facebook, Oracle software. Essentially folks who built the largest scale distributed system, very strong industrial strength enterprise product that powers most of the large enterprises in the world, so we took these two thoughts, of Oracle-like industrial product and Google, Facebook, Amazon- like a scale-out distributed infrastructure and brought together in a single product. >> It's interesting. Lightspeed does it. A lot of interesting deals that were once poo-pooed by many in the industry. Nutanix was one and you mentioned Facebook, Google, these are not, I won't say cloud native. They basically built the cloud. They had to build their own hyperscale or they build their own infrastructure all on open source so you have that generational DNA with it from the tech standpoint and and market standpoint. And Nutanix is a great example because they, you know, they brought all this together. This is a new new kind of view. This is a modern perspective that you guys are taking. I want to ask you as you look at the cloud, and a lot of people were poo-pooing Amazon in the early days and look at them, they've run the table, the number one by miles and public cloud. No one's even close in my opinion, but you know, this is a whole new seat change, so you've got Facebook, you've got the Google's got the Nutanixs is of the world out there who were doing things different. Now are the standard. What are you guys doing that someone might say, I don't really get that yet. Or poo-pooing it that you think is a modern approach and that's different. >> See, the issue really is that how do enterprises take advantage of public cloud simplicity, agility, scale, without being bothered by it because the word, because the cloud is a programmatic paradigm, enterprise previously has been a declarative paradigm. How do you bring these two worlds together and really create a seamless platform where enterprises can automate, orchestrate and secure their data, and that has been the vision of Rubrik. The vision of Rubrik is simplicity at the scale with cloud-enabled a single software fabric across on premises and public cloud. That has been the vision of the company and we have been delivering our product from the very beginning. On this vision, we are just adding one blade after the next, after the next blade to really go be a single software platform across multiple clouds and data centers. >> That's great. Again, sounds like data's at the center of the value proposition from your. From your good discussion. Clearly Facebook status center, their value proposition, although under a lot of criticism today, Google as a data company, as companies realize that data is critical for their business, how do they transform it from what used to be because the old way was fenced-off data warehouse or some sort of batch siloed software stack and now that with all kinds of new things like GDPR for instance, and it's coming around the corner, all these headaches are emerging where it's like, wow, this is really painful, but they want to get to a seamless way, so what's going on there? Can you explain in simple way that that transition from the old data modeling where you had siloed stacks or you know, old fenced out data warehouses to something that's really agile somewhere data's a part of the intellectual property, part of the software fabric. >> This is a really insightful question because you have a dichotomy here. The dichotomy is on one side, data is the biggest strengths and biggest asset for all enterprises. On the other side there is a. there is a risk of a bad uses of that data and and and companies private or people's private information getting out. So how do enterprises or businesses create a platform where they can secure their data, they can provide access to the data, to the relevant people or applications in a very controlled and secure way and at the same time protect this strategy asset from tech, from ransomware, from just proliferating or losing, so, so the traditional industry focused on really building a storage platforms for it, but our view is that the storage platform is just the keeper of the data, but the real issue is that how do you automate, orchestrate and secure access to the data because data can be on premises, data can be public clouds, but really this data control plane that actually manages and secures and provides access to this data is the critical piece and that's the Rubrik's focus. >> All right, let's get into. I want to get into the new product announcement before we get there. I want to get your thoughts on architecture because a lot of people have been enamored and using successfully Amazon web services and some are saying that, oh, Amazon is the roach motel. Why don't you check in, you can check out with respect to your data center saying data portability is coming around the corner, but to move data around the cloud is not that easy. Um, so customers are building on Amazon but they also might have azure. So multi-cloud is out there and you can also. Google's got some great stuff going on with Tensorflow and other things that they'd got rolling out, but there's not a one cloud fits all for all workloads. Certainly in the enterprise. And then you've got the on premise, a dynamic. How do, how do you view that? Because now that's an opportunity for you guys, but also a challenge for the customers where they start using the public cloud for business benefits and then realize, well we got a lot of data in there and then it becomes a data opportunity and problem. What's your view of that landscape? >> So the VC, the whole data management, it is Rubrik is creating a whole new better diamond platform because architects really. We thought about this as something where you combine the data and metadata together so that you data becomes self describing. This is a very architectural thing that Rubrik debt because when data understand where it came from and who he he or she is, then you can take this data from on premises to the cloud and powered it on or go from cloud to cloud and power it on some other place, so this core fundamental vision and architecture of data plus deeply connected together and mobile is what really powers Rubrik and that is the fundamental platform and fundamental architecture of Rubrik and that is our view in the future. Saying that once you create the self describing data and this will see a data from the underlying infrastructure, then you give the true power of the data back to the customer because data knows where it came from, which application it is associated with, who has access to it and who can use it. That's where you see the real power of multi-cloud, multi data center, independence of data and application from the infrastructure. >> So you believe data should be friction-less with respect to where it should go at any given time. >> Absolutely. I mean that's where the power, the enterprises and businesses can realize from their data because they can actually collaborate, they can give more access to their data, to their own users without worrying about the wrong data falling into the wrong hands. Can they actually transcreate transport of the data? Can they not stuck in one infrastructure versus take the data wherever they find data to be most applicable, easiest to use and more secure. >> That's great. So we don't want to jump into a new announcement. Before we get there. I want you to just take a minute to explain, um, Rubriks, target customer that you guys are serving today. You get 900 employees, you've got over $300 million run rate in business. Who's buying the product? Why was it a physician? Who's the buyer? What's the value proposition of the offering? >> So we sell into a enterprises. So we are not an SMB product. We sell into the enterprise, I would buy it as our cloud architects, our buyers, our infrastructure architects are buyers are virtualizing architects, uh, folks who are thinking about automation, orchestration, security of the data, recoverability of the data, protection from ransomware, things like that. And that's our core technical and economic buyers and, uh, and, and the core businesses or people who have, um, who have employees more than. So, cloud transformation is classic. Absolutely functional guys are involved in. That's the big driver for Rubrik. Rubin's growth is indexed on the cloud, about has it on their agenda. >> All right, so let's get into the hard news. You guys are launching Rubrik's Polaris, the industry's first SaaS platform for data management applications. I'm smiling because whenever I see first I want to know what that means. I've seen data application platforms out there. I've seen SaaS. So SaaS is not new. What makes you guys first talk about this dynamic, about polaris? What, what is it? Why is it first? >> So the way we see our customers use multiple clouds and multiple data centers is they have some applications running on premises. Some applications running in the cloud, they're building a lot of new applications in the cloud, so essentially cloud is is fragmenting their data and applications and we have Rubrik core product or cloud data management product, wherever they run their application, so Rubrik product runs on premises. Rubrik product runs in the cloud to protect the application. >> Was that the first dynamic that it's on-prem? It's oncloud, >> Yeah, that's our first product and then what we will working with our customers was that once we have this setup, how do you bring all of your applications and all of your data under the single system of record and that is the Rubrik Polaris Platform which is complimentary to our first hybrid cloud product were to the single system of record, which is a global catalog of all the applicants and data content as well as workflows as well as security as well as orchestration, and we expose this to open apis for Rubrik as well as other third party vendors to really build applications no matter where application runs. >> So these applications, the data management application that people or Rubrik will build on top of politics is for compliance, for governance, for auditing, for search across all the infrastructure. So you guys are offering also an ecosystem play with the Polaris. You're enabling others to build on top of it. Absolutely. This is kind of like force.com platform for all your data management. >> So we started salesforce, a Mulesoft had an announcement and that got a lot of attraction. What does that mean to you guys? Because that's. You see sap, salesforce has been very successful for a SaaS platform as well as Mulesoft. What does that acquisition mean to the marketplace and how do you guys fit into that dynamic vis-a-vis that trend? >> Salesforce did a great strategic acquisition or Mulesoft because they realize that if they combine applications on premises as well as in the cloud, then they create a single platform for all the structure data applications, but our view is that this is just half of the problem are that half of the problem is on a structured data across many applications and all the Meta data Rubrik. Polaris is our SaaS platform across on-premise cloud. A single system of record with Apis were Rubrik will deliver data management applications for control, for governance, for compliance, for security across all applications that enterprises are managing, whether they're. Are these applications run on premises or in the cloud, >> And the unstructured data too is that metadata you're talking about, it's critical data. >> It's metadata is application data is is all your unstructured data, >> So bottom line is announced that why would you put this in a single sound byte for customers? What does it mean for me if I'm a customer? For you guys, what's the value proposition of this new product? >> If you want to manage your business with compliance, with governance, with security and access Rubrik delivers a single platform for all your data management needs, >> Platform Polaris from Rubrik enabling an ecosystem first time, bringing all that data together from the data center people. Thanks for coming on the cube. Great to see you. Congratulations on all your success. Thank you so much for the opportunity and thanks for stopping by. I'm job here for cube conversation. Exclusive News here with Rubrik at theCUBE in Palo Alto. Thanks for watching.