(upbeat music) >> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a Cube conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and I'm talking to you out of our Boston area studio, and we have been doing a CXO leadership series, talking with leaders across the IT industry about how they're managing during this global pandemic. I'm really happy to welcome back to the program, he's a Cube alumni. He was a Racker, and he is now with Stacker. We'll get into the company in a bit, but Prashanth Chandrasekar, the CEO of Stack Overflows, thanks so much for joining. >> Thank you for having me again Stu. Really a pleasure, and always a fan of the Cube, so great to be here. >> Alright, and we note that you sporting the quarantine, you know beard, you know, grown since the last time we had you on the program. Prasthanth, you were named CEO of Stack Overflow at the end of 2019. Obviously, certain plans that you have you're a Harvard Business School alum, you've worked in, you know, the enterprise and cloud communities for a while. Take us back to, you know, what your team has been doing, really to react and lead in this global pandemic. >> Ya, no happy to, Stu, and obviously this is a very, you know, trying time for, you know, just the world in general right. So, companies small and large are having to kind of grapple with the reality, but I would say in general, I started October 1st, 2019 at, you know, at this amazing company, and it's just, been a real joy to see us really adapt very quickly based on just you know, just kind of challenging environment that we're in, and primarily if you think about Stack Overflow, you know, we were blessed that our, you know, our company has an ethos, an ethos perspective. We've been you know, highly remote in nature for years, for over a decade so you know, 80% of our team, product engineering team has been remote. 60% of our marketing team was remote, and then 40% of our company was remote all around the world. So, moving from that 40% to 100%, which we did very proactively in March, early March of 2020, has been a huge boon for our company in just our Stackers as you pointed out, they've just been very, I would say grateful that we've done that very, very quickly. Secondly, I would say the just the notion of, you know, being able to think about our business, and you know, our community, and how do we help each other. We've done a lot, you know, we meet with you know, we come together as a team, you know, three times a week, and we've already had sort of this Covid stand up as a leadership team, as a newly formed leadership team mind you, which I've just helped form over the past six months, and we've all really gone, you know, really to the extremes to make sure that our Stackers are their health and safety are taken care of. How do we serve our community in this environment? How do we make sure our customers are being, you know, really are getting the maximum value of our products, which are all focused on collaboration, so very relevant in this remote world. So, it's really been, I would say, all around, people have really rallied we had sort of a, I would say, somewhat of an advantage just having you know, adopting remote work at this point. >> But Prasthanth, maybe it makes sense if actually step back for a second. I'm sure most people are familiar with Stack Overflow, but give us, the kind of, the high level view of, you know, what the company is, and what drew you into the leadership role there. >> Yeah, no absolutely. You know I think Stack Overflow extremely well known obviously, with every developer and technologist in the world. So, in a nutshell, you know, we are the world's most trusted and largest community for developers and technologists. We have something like 120 million unique visitors that come to our websites every month, and talking 180,000 sign ups on a monthly basis. So, just say we do say a dramatic amount of impact to help ultimately, these folks solve their most complex problems on a variety of topics, whether that is cloud related topics, security related topics, full stack engineering related topics like Python or Rust, or you name it. All those, you know, those areas are covered in very much and very a lot of detail for our community we effectively share. Solutions to common questions, and code, and really be able to accelerate the development of software around the world. So, ultimately, it comes down to our mission, which our mission what we like to say is we help write the script of the future by serving developers and technologists, and so, that's our company in a nutshell. On top of that, ecosystem of communities that we've built. We have a great set of products, SaaS products that we've also built to help with real time collaboration within companies in a very, very similar format to our public community format. So, that's been very compelling. So, the two reasons why I joined the company beyond obviously the mission, number 1 is just the global impact, you know, there are only a few companies that have the level of impact that this company has around the world and helping everybody sort of accelerate their software development. Whatever apps you're building, and obviously we know, that we're sort of in this beautiful, Goldilocks zone of digital transformation, where everything is accelerating, even given the current environment. That's the first reason, just given the vast reach of this company, and then secondly, you know, is the fact that we are really trying to transform the company and accelerate the transformation into a SaaS company. So, our Stack Overflow for teams product, which is again the knowledge sharing SaaS squad that we have internally, is really a phenomenal way to share evergreen knowledge, and non-ephemeral type information within companies so that your most important questions are answered. They're answered once, and your not, you know, constantly having to, you know, tap people on the shoulder to answer a common question. So, those are the two primary reasons. One is the impact to the community, and secondly acceleration of our SaaS business. >> Excellent, Prasthanth. So wonder if you could help us drill in, and understand the business little bit. There's private repository, there's teams there. You know, it's interesting, if you look on the outside you say wait, is this kind of like a Reddit? Or when I hear you describe it, sure reminds me a little bit of say GitHub, who obviously got taken off the table for a rather large number so, I'll let you bring us inside a little bit of you know, how does the company you know, make money, and what are the plans that both, you know, support, you know, those broad communities and diverse things, but also, you know built that business. >> Ya, no absolutely, you know I think for us you know, we really believe it's a common, our mission statement like I mentioned is really our core driver for us, and so the ecosystem of communities that we've built for developers, as well as technologists, again just a very, very vast number, and we create developers right, on a daily basis through our community. So, it's very powerful in that people are learning about new technologies, or frameworks, or you know, cloud technologies through our websites, and so they are you know, that's a bit of a huge accelerant to this creation of jobs, and you know, people's capabilities. On the foundation of that, which is obviously, you know, accessible to everybody, and you know, it's free in fact, we had this ecosystem of products, and the first one in the primary Saas product is Stack Overflow for teams, which is this knowledge sharing and collaboration product that allows companies within, or teams within companies to use the same format that they absolutely love in the public community that they use to, you know, learn up on those subjects that I mentioned, but now share internal priority information to accelerate their development internally. To breakdown walls between teams, like product, and engineering, and developers, and operations, and also go to market teams, like product marketing teams, and sales teams, and so we have you know, a tremendous number of enterprises that have joined our program, over the past several quarters including Microsoft, who is a very happy customer that uses, you know, they have something like 70,000 developers and technologists, and go to market folks within Microsoft that are using our product platform to breakdown walls, and to be able to move very quickly with launching their products, and staying collaborative internally. In addition to that, we have what we call our Reach and Relevance business which is all around helping, just based on the fact that we have such massive reach in 120 million people from around the world showing up on our websites. Being able to help companies you know, showcase their capabilities and products in our platform, and also engage with the community, and for obviously the community to then learn about many of the latest and greatest of what's being launched by these phenomenal companies that are innovating very rapidly. >> Ya, so Prasthanth, we started off the conversation, you talked a little bit about the impact of the global pandemic. I'm curious, are you seeing any, you know, changes in trends? Are there new things that are trending on your site? Are there things that are either on the website, or they're coming to your team to learn more about? >> Ya, no definitely I think there are two places that I can point to. One would be on the community side we've definitely seen a spike in traffic in places like our meta-academia website, you know, as an example. Online learning became a huge topic of interest when people went remote, and obviously, you have families around the world that are trying to figure out not only how to school their kids but we have teachers all around in schools trying to figure out what are the best set of resources. So, we have, you know, all sorts of, like I said, about 40 million questions and answers across all sorts of topics, including you know, next generation E-learning sort of capabilities in our communities, and so, we've seen a spike in traffic in places like that. We've seen a spike in our medical communities, and our biology communities obviously, because of you know, people's curiosity, and these are, you know fairly advanced, you know academics, and people who are in the scientific community that spend a lot of time thinking about, you know the what's really behind Covid-19. What are the details of, you know, if you think about all sorts of topics around genetics, and obviously, the pharmaceutical implications so, we've seen a tremendous uptake in those sites, and in addition of course, overall to our overall websites, because people are spending time, you know, just at home. In addition, we've seen a very material uptake in our Stack Overflow for teams product where we know we just closed, you know our company's like largest deal in our company's history this past week for about 30,000 seats, you know, at a very large financial services institution, a global services financial institution. There's more and more companies that are thinking about business continuity. They're thinking about how do they stay, how do they collaborate across their distributed teams, their remote teams, and we have, obviously a very significant solution in that space. >> Excellent, well congratulations on that deal. It brings up, I guess, what are some of the key KPI's that you're tracking for to really assure the growth and the health of your business. >> Ya, I think both in terms of, you know , if you think about two sides of the coin right. From the community standpoint, obviously we care about our active users, and our engaged users, and the number of sign-ups, and on that front, that first part of that, you know, we've seen just a dramatic increase, you know, in all those stats, including, you know this year, just as a result of Covid, on average last year, in 2019, you know, the number of sign-ups per month was something like, 150,000 sign-ups per month, unique sign ups from around the world. People signing up for Stack Overflow accounts. This year, on average, it's gone up, and March was our highest sign-up month ever with 180,000 sign-ups for the month. So, we're seeing so that's important. In addition to sign-ups of course, when they come on to our websites we want them to get the answers to their most pressing questions, to be able to engage them with content that is useful to them. So, engagement, you know in terms of monthly engaged users very important, monthly active users is very important for us, and obviously our sign-up numbers. So, those are kind of the community oriented stats that we'd, and KPI's that we'd really track, and those look, you know look very promising, and then, finally on the business side, which is the other side of the coin, in our teams business primarily, and our Reach and Relevance business. Our teams business is all about our customers getting value from the collaboration SaaS platform that we have that they've signed up for right. So, are they using the various features? We've integrated that teams product with all the other popular tools that people use for things like real time collaborations. We integrate with Slack. We integrate with Microsoft Teams. We've integrated with, you know Okta. We've integrated with, you know Okta. We've integrated even with Enterprise, because really the idea is to be a part of that developer and technologist workflow so, folks can really look to Stackflow for Teams as the place where they get common answers, get great answers to their common questions that are constantly being asked within companies, but it's not very effective to ask the same questions again and again. So, the idea is to integrate with these tools to make sure that you are able to have an evergreen place where you can keep that knowledge. So, that's, you know we track usage of those integrations. We talk about how many of those questions and answers are being, you know, being exchanged within companies, and how much ultimately the outcome of saving time and money for our clients so that they are being very effective in their product development cycles, and people are not being tapped on the shoulder for every single item that might comes across for an individual company. So, that's really, there's an economic study that we performed with Forrester that captures a lot of this. So that's, you know, that's and then region relevance is all around engagement on our websites. Some people already looking and seeing, finding value in the content that our companies are posting, and force companies to be effectively translating their knowledge to the audience. >> Awesome. Well, Prasthanth congratulations on the progress, and definitely look forward to cracking the how the Stack Overflow Team is doing going forward. >> Thanks so much Stu, really appreciate the chat, and great to see you again as usual. >> Alright, make sure to check out theCUBE.net for all the coverage. I'm Stu Miniman. Thank you for watching. (gentle music) (gentle music) (gentle music) (gentle music) (gentle music) (gentle music)

>>Ply from Barcelona, Spain. It's the cube covering Cisco live 2020 route to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >>Hi buddy. Welcome back to the queue, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Volante with cohost Humanum and John furriers. Here we go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise and of course this is day one of Cisco live Barcelona. Very excited to have Presant Shanola. He's the vice president of marketing enterprise networks for IOT and the developer platform at Cisco for sounds good to see you. Good to see you folks too. So right now we're in the middle of the the DNA center takeover in the dev net zone network's getting more complex. You need a command center to understand what's going on. >>Yeah, give us the update Y DNA. Yeah. So this has been a journey for Cisco and for our customers for the last three years or so. Right. So a few things happened in the last decade, like mobile, IOT, cloud, and the world of security. All of those came together in one place. And if you look at it, these are very network centric technologies, right? There'd be no cloud without networking or mobile or IOT. So when our customers started investing heavily in the world of applications in the cloud environment, mobile and IOT, the network was slightly left behind. The network that they had created and built was meant for the internet era, not for this multicloud mobile and IOT era. So we had to rethink networking fundamentally from the ground up to how do you help our customers design, build, scale, manage and deploy networks for this new era of digital transformation driven by mobile and cloud. >>And that was the Genesis of our intent based networking strategy, right? So that was like three years back. Then we designed a networking architecture that focuses on the business intent and lets you figure out the how part of it. Then NATO figures it out. So the DNS center was the command center as Dave, you put it to help manage design and build this network from the ground up. And it's been a journey for us and it's been a very, very exciting journey for us where we are getting a lot of positive feedback from the customer, whether it's to deploy their access infrastructure, wired wireless are more into the wide area network extending into data center and public cloud environment. >>So when we went from internet to the cloud, yoga talks about the flattening of the network and now I know we're going to talk about it. >>Yeah, yeah. Are we going to need a new DNA center for that next wave or no, it's the pendulum swing, right? Like it's all this meaning interesting mainframes, centralized and decentralized edges. Then again, centralized in the cloud and now cloud moving to the edge. So this is always going to be an interesting phenomenon and it's mainly because the world around both sides of the networking has become highly hyper connected and highly dynamic, right? Like users are mobile devices are everywhere, applications are everywhere. A single application is split into 500 different pieces run in containers and microservices across four different public clouds and three different data centers, right? Like, how do you manage this dynamic environment? How do you set the policy? How do you guarantee an application experience? So this has been a very challenging environment. So the idea of DNS entry is to provide you that single command center, right? >>No matter whether you want to deploy it as a Wachtel service, a physical service in the cloud, in a hardware platform, doesn't matter. Right? So how do you get all of your data? How do you get a single place to provision the system? Well, I'm glad you've mentioned scale quite a few times talking about this for the longest time it was how do we get the network people to get off of their CLI and go to the gooey? Well, I don't care if you've got the best goo in the world, the, the hyper connectivity, the amount of changes going on, people can't do this alone. So talk to us a little bit about know tooling, the automation, the API APIs, connect all these things and make sure that our people don't become the bottleneck for innovation. >> Frankly, the complexity has exceeded human scale. It's just impossible. >>It's funny because I was talking to the CIO for a pretty large global bank. I can't tell the name who was saying like, Hey, a few years back I had one it person to manage around thousand devices, all the devices. Right? And then that year when I was talking, and this was 2016 he had one is to 10,000 device, one it for 10,000 devices to manage. And he said, I'm looking in 2020 to be one it for 250,000 devices going up to a million devices. I'm like, dude, you're doing some funky Matthew. It's like, that looks like that hockey stick curve. Right? And I'm like, he was right. Now I don't even know what's on my network, what's connected to my network. I have, I'm flying blind. And that opens up a lot of security issues. That opens up a lot of operational challenges. In fact, for every dollar our customer spends on cap X for buying the network, they spend $3 on opics managing the network, monitoring and troubleshooting the network. >>So that's the key point saying that you can hire a hundred more it staff, you're just not going to be able to manage the complexity. So there has to be an automation world, right? We live in a world where repetitive tasks should be done by machines and not human beings. It's happened and the rest of the lives and networks, operations is just one part of that. So the concept of controller led architectures, which was the Genesis of SDN is now being applied to this world of intern based networking. But we also get the data to provide you insight on how things are behaving and how to take actions before it happens. >> Well, yeah, you brought up, are you used to, how many devices the enterprise can manage was something we measured for the longest time and used to compare to the hyperscalers and I said, well, here's the myth there. >>It's not that they're managing two of magnitude more equipment. They architect completely different Zack. They build the applications with the expectation that everything underneath is going to change. It's going to fail, it's going to be upgraded. So you don't have somebody inside of Yahoo in Google and all these hyperscalers running around patching and updating things. They build a data center and they keep adding environments and they throw things in the woodchipper when they're done and they break things down. So it's a completely different mindset. And part of SDN was the promise of it was to take some of those hyperscaler methodologies and bring it to Massell enterprise. So tell us how your software today is delivering kind of that, that hyperscale architecture and that's a little bit of a culture change for the enterprise. It's been a huge culture change, right? Like the concept of like abstracting the underlay complexity of all the network physical connections and giving an oral a, what we call a fabric. >>So underlying network works as a single integrated system, right? It's not like switches, routers, controllers, access point. All of that complexity is taken out. So you're programming a single fabric, putting the right policy and the controller will figure out how do I enforce that policy in this switch, that place, this controller, this access point? Right? So that was the complexity the Netflix operators of yesteryears we're dealing with. Right? They had to go and configure Mitzi Elias and now API, since we are in dev net is the new CLI. Right? Like, and that becomes a culture shift for network operators. Like I've been in the networking space for like 20 years. I was born on CLI, right? Like, and even when I created systems like access control lists, QRS and I had to system test my own code is fricking nightmare. It is tough. It is tough to manage that as a single system. >>Right? And that's why the role of controller to abstract the complexity of a, to program the infrastructure and then expose this intelligence to other systems, whether it's it systems, but it's business applications goes a long way. So that's why this journey is really exciting for us. So it sounds like we're entering the era of self-driving networks that, I mean you've got to even visualize this virtually possible unless it's at that abstraction layer. Yeah, absolutely. I mean there are new technologies that a lot of consumer markets and other places I've used like machine learning right? Like we have so much data within the network, the network sees everything, right? Because the connection point from mobile IOT to applications and cloud, right? But we haven't really leveraged the power of the data and the intelligence, right? And now that we have all of the data and now we have things like machine learning, it can identify traffic patterns and provide you more insights around your business, around your it and security, right? >>So that really takes the guesswork away. And the good part is with machine learning, the more data you feed it, the more it's learning from the data, not just your own local networks but the net folks across the world. And that makes it constantly adapting to changing conditions and constantly learning based on the traffic patterns and your environment. And that's a pretty exciting field, right? Because we've implemented that in the security field to predict threats before they happen. We've implemented that in parts of application performance and now you're bringing it to the wall of networking at cost access branch ran and campus to like help it move from a reactive world to more of a proactive world. To a predictive world, right? So they can spend less time looking for the needle in a haystack and focus more on solving strategic >>problems. So when you get into discussions about machine intelligence, oftentimes there's discussions about Oh, replacing jobs and you know, blah blah blah. And so it'll, it'll turn to a discussion of augmented intelligence, which very reasonable thing, what you just described as removing mundane tasks. Nobody wants to do those anymore. Here's my question. You talked about your CLI experience over the last 20 years. Is that CLI sort of tribal knowledge still vital as part, you know, part of the art of networking or does the machine essentially >>take over and humans you'll go on to other things? Yeah, I think that's a great question Dave. Like I call these next generation of network operators, the unicorns. So you do need to have the tribal knowledge of networking, not necessarily CLI, but the concept of networking. How do these protocols work? Right? Like this is not easy. It's, there are very, very few network engineers compared to application developers and software engineers in the world. So this is always going to be critical. But now if you marry this knowledge and compliment this knowledge with programmability and automation and application, you got yourself a unicorn that is going to be very, very strategic to the business because now the world of infrastructure and applications are coming together so he can truly focus on your business, which is run on applications, right? How can you, our applications run Foster's mater better with the network and how can your network understand how the applications are behaving becomes a whole new world. So you seek a new roles of network practitioners emerging. I feel like the data scientist after network, like the security defender of the network, the wall of security ops and networks are coming together. So that's what is exciting for us because you get bored in your life if you're doing just repetitive tasks and not learning new. And this provides a new way of ruining. So for me it's not taking jobs away. It's like upgrading your skillset to a whole new level. That's a lot more, >>well this is the secret of Cisco still. We've talked about this. All these hundreds of thousands of network engineers with growth path, income develop. What >>I've found fascinating is really unlocking that data because for the last decade we've talked about, well there's the network flows and there's analytics in the network streams, but what had been missing and what I think is starting to be there, as you said, that connectivity between the application and the actual data for the business, it isn't just some arcane dark art of networking and we're making that run better, faster, better, cheaper. But it's what that enables for the business, the data and the applications that there is a tighter, relevant they are today. That's the key thing, right? I mean everybody has been talking about data now, I dunno for 1520 years. It's the new crude aisle if you will. Right? But everybody has access to data and nobody knows what to do with it, right? Like this philosophical thing of data to knowledge to wisdom is like what we are all striving towards. >>Right? And now that we have access to this data and we have this intelligence system, which is a multi software that ingest data from not just networking but devices connected to the network, the security trends that we are seeing, the application data that you're seeing and provides this context and provide two very key insights around how does that impact your business, how does that impact your ID? How does that impact your security is a very powerful thing. Um, and you don't find that and you need to have that breadth of portfolio and system to be able to get all of the data and consume that at a hyperscale level, if you will. We often say in the cubit that data is plentiful insights or not, and you need insights in order to be able to take action. And that's where automation comes in for shot. Great segment. Thank you very much for coming on the cube. Really appreciate it. Thank you today. Thanks to pleasure. Awesome. All right. Thank you for watching. This is the cube live from Barcelona, Cisco live 2020 Dave Volante for stupid event and John furrier, we'll be right back.

>> live from London, England. It's the queue covering a ws summat London twenty nineteen, brought to you by Amazon Web services >> Hello and welcome to the A W s summit here in London's Excel Center. This is the Cube. Is my co host a Dilantin also. Now we're joined by present Chandrasekhar, who is the senior vice president and general manager act rack space and everything. If you're here to talk about really the next generation of cloud services, what are they on? What do you communicating to you? Partners here at the >> conference? Absolutely. Thank you, Susanna and day, for having me back on the show. Big fan of the Cube. Eso No, >> really, I >> think Rackspace next generation Cloud services absolutely foundational to what we do for our customers. And so, you know, ultimately what we're trying to deliver is a utility based model of service is very similar to how Amazon thinks about the cloud and what you know, they were effectively lead over the mass passed many years. So I think that the world we believe the world of traditional I t services of large, monolithic contracts where you got traditional size that are going and working with companies to say, Let us transform you with little transformation and you know, what about so services? I think those days are effectively gone and they're dead. So from our perspective, customers are on this journey from one platform to another. They're moving from traditional workloads through the public cloud. There's that hybrid journey that's underway, and we've talked about how Amazon has, you know, really acknowledged that through its working outposts, etcetera. But the idea is for us to say Listen, customers are in a very bespoke journey. Everyone's in a different journey. Individual journey. Let's feed them exactly where they are in that journey. Whether that's you know, right now moving, uh, traditional I t work loads to the public cloud. So let's go on architect and deploy them and migrate them based on best practices that we've gained from thousands of these engagements. Or, you know, if they're further along and they're actually did need to manage and operate these in a very you know, container centric or Cuban Eddie centric world, we can help them. They're too, or if they're already know several years in and there you see, the costs are getting hard to control because they've got sprawl within the organization. We can help them with cast optimization and governance. And all this is enabled through what we call a service walks model attract space, which really stitches together various of the's no peace part, if you will, of services across the infrastructure, security applications across the whole stack. And so that's the idea. So how would you categorize first? Not the rackspace strategy people remember. Of course. You guys catalyzed in incubated the open stack movement, which was kind of a Hail Mary against eight of us. And then others chimed in. And then you realize that Wow, we're going to step away. Yeah, it was great. Open source project. Amazing on DH. Now you partnering on Amazon? What's the strategy? How would you describe that? Yes. You know, I think if you've learned anything over the past, you know, ten, twenty years and that practice has been around for now, twenty one years, you know that it's an extremely dynamic market and is driven by customers ultimately and their pace of change and so on. So when we started as a company, you know, twenty years ago, we started manage hosting business and services is the foundation element of what we do and support and expertise for customers enabled by technology. And so that really helped us, you know, take us to the first ten years of our journey. And then the cloud movement enabled a lot by Amazon really took off and where it was really a mainstream consideration or an early consideration to say its more mainstream now, obviously. But back then, So we competed with the open stack from the cloud business on. Then, very soon we realised our customers were all also operating in Amazon, and so that really said, Listen, we've always historically said, Lets go where customers want to go and we've always been a services technology serves this company at heart, so it doesn't make a lot of sense for us to do move away from that DNA and that ethos. So it's no different from fasten it, saying, uh at a high level, you know, Windows O. R. Lennox. We can have a very kind of, you know, dogmatic view about one of the other. We just have to say this and what the customers want to work on based on what their various various factors that the take in consideration so no different. Here. Platforms are just platforms, their choices that customers have. And so we started saying, You know what? If customers want help on Amazon, there's still asking us for it. Lets go in partners with Amazon to do exactly that. So that's exactly what we did in twenty fifteen. >> So where do you fit in that value change? How do you help customers and weirdos? Rackspace add unique value. >> Yeah, so I think ultimately, you know there's various elements of value along the way, and I sort of describe the service rocks model is the way in which we really bring it together. So customers are either looking for help to get to the cloud. And they're asking us, You know, what is the best way for me to get there, given my current state. And so there's a deep, you know, assessment that's done from a kind of way, have a lot of expertise, and Laxmi is over a thousand data be a certified experts on certification. So we bring those experts to the customer, talk about you know why they're trying to go. Hey, they're trying to really reduce your meantime to recovery. You're trying to increase your release cycles on a kind of, you know, per you know, a certain rate that's very aggressive operate with the devil's principle and mindset. You know all those things are the object of the customers has and then be then enable them to go and say Okay, given all that here, the workloads we'd would enable you to kind of, like move or to kind of like build from scratch, bring an entire set of services with their infrastructure, security or applications services, start with the value added set of workloads, and then build from that effectively prove the case and then move on. To >> date, the very fact that Amazon websites its growth has bean so rapid. And there are so many new services coming online. You know, every bump that's actually helping you because people need help to navigate. >> Indeed. I mean, that's a that's a phenomenal point. I mean that ultimately, you know, bar the reason why customers in our install base we're reaching out to us and saying, Hey racked with you, done a phenomenal job helping us in our first evolution of our journey. Can you help us now in this new world where it's actually quite complicated? You know, that's sixteen hundred features on average of forty hundred features on average are being launched by Amazon on a yearly basis. And that's just, you know, despite what we hear in the headlines where cloud first companies and us, the startups of today are absolutely leveraging. You know, Lambda out of the gate or containers out of the gate, you know. But there there's a whole host of companies that are going through this massive digital disruption, trying to compete with these startups that >> need >> a lot of help to re skill their workforce, to change the way they think about process within the within their organization, between their business development and technology and operations teams. And then, ultimately, you know, how do they actually build out much more agile? We have respond to customers so that work requires a company like Rackspace to come and help them navigate through that. Really, really, you know, large, you know, set of features. >> I suppose that it's a space that you certainly didn't forsee ten years ago. >> Oh, absolutely, No. That's what's so dynamic about the space where I think that nobody, I think, could have predicted, You know, even today we're seeing this's a ton of kind of like, you know, momentum with concepts that were very nascent only a few years ago. The Cuban Eddie's There's a concept, you know, almost every one of our eight of us customers at Rackspace, what we call fanatical A W s eyes absolutely looking for help on communities. And so, you know, when we think about Doctor A few years ago on Doc Enterprise on, we think about communities and there was that, you know, battle today, you know, the battle has been won Carbonetti XYZ pretty much pretty much the defacto orchestration engine. So nobody could have predicted that a couple years ago tomorrow. Somebody else. Exactly. So it's fascinating, And that's why customers need help navigating. >> You know, all those guys are. The experts carried people through the journey. It's mentioned hybrid before customers want choice. You know, even the Amazon wants everybody to put their data. Their cloud. Yeah, customers sometimes have multi clouds and absolutely as a hybrid. And Marty, I think, >> is a is becoming a lot more. I think even Amazon is very much acknowledging that the big opportunity is high. Isn't hybrid Cloud Because if you think about where we are and the technology adoption curve and the trillion dollars have spent that ultimately going to move, there's no doubt that it's a class for cloud First World. Their destination is the cloud, but the vast majority. The workloads exists in traditional i t. And so how do we take that hybrid moment? You know, and outposts? It's a great acknowledgement of that on. So they're very aggressively investing. We're investing with them and helping our customers along that money effectively. >> Okay, Present for a second. Thank you very much for talking to us from Iraq Space. And my co host, David Lynch has been helping us. Navigator, What's happening here had the A W s Web something. I'm Susanna Street. Thanks for watching the Cube.

(techno music) >> Live from Mountain View California, it's the Cube covering DEVNET CREATE 2019, brought to you by CISCO. >> Hey, welcome back to the Cube. Lisa Martin with John Furrier covering, day two covering I should say, CISCO DEVNET CREATE 2019, at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View California. We're please to welcome Prashanth Shenoy, the VP of Product Marketing, Enterprise Networks and DEVNET at CISCO. Prashanth it's great to have you join John and me this afternoon. >> Great to be here. >> So, this event is growing year after year. John and I have been talking about this very strong sense of collaboration and community with the attendees that are here in person. One of the big things yesterday that Susie was talking about was this, What's coming in Wi-Fi? Talk to us about this next-gen Wi-Fi and how it's going to be so impactful to everyone. >> Yeah it's, it's a phenomenal technology inflection point this year, I feel. We can't believe it, but you know, when was the first Wi-Fi that got started? >> 2001. >> Pretty close, 1999. So this is the 20th Anniversary of Wi-Fi. It's come to be life, right? so it's now in its fourteenth. >> I'm off by two years. >> Right, so yeah, I know. (laughter) But, 802.11A was the first Wi-Fi technology, and the speeds were ... promised speeds were 54-megabits, okay? Ah, but the real speeds were, like, 6-mega or something, right? And now, this is the sixth generation of Wi-Fi, so we've come a long way and we take it for granted in our daily life. >> Absolutely, we do. >> I don't think I can think a day without having Wi-Fi. >> Everyone talks about Wi-Fi. The kids, What's the Wi-Fi password? (laughter) I change it all the time, kids, this ... parents, pro tip. Change the password. >> Yes. You got to listen. They'll call you, your kids will call you back. It's an important tip. >> Full-on security, yeah. >> But distance is been an issue, distance, and >> Yeah. >> Radio Frequency has certain >> Yeah propagation technique so, >> Yeah. >> Are you close to the router? That room doesn't have, this doesn't have it. So there's always been distance. And throughput. >> latency, throughput, capacity. >> Most people say who's streaming Netflix, Wi-Fi is down, so again people know this they experience it everyday. >> Exactly. >> What's the big hubbub about Wi-Fi 6? What's different? I got a little preview from Todd so I'll let you explain it but >> Yeah. >> What is the notable bullet points of why it's different? >> Yeah. >> And, Why it's a game changer? >> So it's, as with every technology, three things that it always brings up, better experiences, better capacity, increase capacity, and better battery savings, which I think is very important for users but more importantly useful for IOT applications, which is ... I'm very very excited on what its going to unleash when it comes to IOT. It's been in the fringe side of IOT, like oil and gas mining utilities is what we think when we think of IOT. And now we're going to think IOT in corporate space like this, right? Each one these devices are IOT devices now, like your HVAC systems, your lighting system, air conditioning systems, physical surveillance cameras. Everything with the Wi-Fi is IOT. And because of this increased capacity, an increase density, high density environment where this capacity becomes really critical, imagine 20 devices simultaneously using Wi-Fi to communicate high Bandwidth intensive application. That's when Wi-Fi 6 becomes really critical and powerful and that opens up a huge - >> So more coverage area. >> Yeah. >> With the Antenna. It's MIMO Antenna. >> Yeah. >> And Bandwidth, right? >> Capacity and Bandwidth, like compare to .11A, and even .11AX, right it's up to 4X better capacity, 4X better battery savings and the promised throughput of like six gigabits, right, so, But the key part here is simultaneously talking to multiple devices at the same time. And that is very very crucial because of technologies ... I don't want to geek out here, like OFDMA and all this etc. >> Well let's all ... architectural because one thing Susie brought up was, architectural shifts are going to be the big game, One of the game changes you brought up and you know Wi-Fi ... and I have seen it grow from the beginning, I remember when they first came out was a revelation and you know the battery power was an issue but it always was viewed as a peripheral to the network. >> Yeah. >> You bolt on Wi-Fi and just basically extend your land - >> Yeah. >> To use network parlance and now you're seeing people working on making it much more Core 1 Network. >> Absolutely. And Meraki kind of shows the benefit of having wireless and wired - >> Yeah. work together as one. >> Yeah, absolutely >> This seems to be the thesis behind Wi-Fi six. One core thing. >> Yeah. >> Not a bolt-on extension. >> No, absolutely. I think there's a saying which is the reality, behind every wireless there are tons of wires, right. So, 'cause everything that's connected to the wire infrastructure, and with the Wi-Fi 6 now having increased capacity and increased density, it's causing a cascading effect into the rest of the network infrastructure so it becomes highly, highly crucial when you architect your network infrastructure not just to think about wireless but what happens to the access switch, to the core, to the distribution, to the aggregation. And that has a compounding effect, like multi gig speeds in the access to 10 gig to 40 gig in the core going all the way to 100 gig, right, so, the whole performance and reliability to have that immersive experience that Wi-Fi six needs to bring in, needs to be there. >> so for developers and entrepreneurs out there who always look for the white space, CISCO is a big Multi-Billion dollar company. You guys got big market share, whenever there's big moves like this it causes a new change in the order, the pecking order - >> Yeah >> of companies, it changes the landscape. This is going to be a game changer because it's going to create the new opportunities to create new things. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> What are some of the things that you see out there you could share for people watching who are you know hacking around creating things who say, I want to create something big. What's the enablement? What are some of the things that you see happening that are going to be emerging out of this? >> Yeah, a lot of Fringe technologies that are fringe right now are going to be mainstream, like imagine 2006, When iPhone came in, right so and we were just having the discussion, like, that came in at the heels of major shift in connectivity, that's when 3G came in, right, at that point and multi-megabit capacity, and you saw new applications come in. Now Uber, Lyft, all these kind of applications were possible because of the connectivity. And now, Wi-Fi 6 along with 5G will unleash the next wave of applications. So, first thing is immersive applications, things that are VR, AR, it's used for gaming right now, and kids use this, you're going to see that come in hospitals, where surgeons can do remote surgeries, they can have high-density imagery of your brain, for example, as you're operating, being sent to a remote expert and on the fly, make decisions, right? Like, that is going to be pretty normal and standard, in fact, quite a few of our customers are testing this out, right? VR learning, for students, like, if I were to go ... Like, imagine if you are at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, August 1963, right, listening to MLK "I Have A Dream" speech, and you're in the crowd, immersed in the VR, like, which student wouldn't have more recollection and really connect with that, right? >> I'm sorry, wait - >> You're going to see more and more of these, so it's a better way of learning, and really getting that learning sticking in your brain, you're going to see more of that happening. And the same goes with retail experience, you're shopping, it's going to completely change the way, because of all these immersive experiences. And then, because of the higher density, you're going to see entertainment venues like stadiums where everybody now wants to share their experience to the outside world, and livestream it, right? And I was talking to Carnival Cruise Line, who's one of our customers, and they call themselves City On The Sea, which means, a cruise ship is nothing but it has entertainment, casinos, hotels - >> Lots of food. (laughs) >> Lots of food, swimming pools Concerts happening, and when people took vacation they just wanted to disconnect from everything in the world, right? Now, it's completely reversed. They want to connect full-on, and share their experience in the land, right? And they want to stream it live, 4K. And, these cruise ships are transforming themselves to provide this always-on, fully-on immersive digital experience, and they're creating things like a mobile app to order pizza no matter where you are on the ship. Within five minutes they're going to find the exact location of where you are on the ship and deliver pizza to you, right? These kind of experiences will happen! >> And you know, the perfect storm in all this too, is that the Cloud earnings are coming out, we saw Microsoft's earnings yesterday, Amazon Web Series' earning >> Yeah. do proud of Amazon today, the Cloud stocks are up, the Clouds are growing at a massive scale, they're a power source for these application developers. >> Yeah. >> As well as the on-premise business. So you have, you now have the perfect developer environment - >> A hundred percent. >> To create these new wacky ideas that will be standard. I mean, what was once ... what we take as standard as you mentioned, was a wacky idea in 2006. >> Yeah. >> Location services, checking into a hotel with my phone and having - >> Yeah. >> Cars being delivered to me, what? Who does that? >> And this, this becomes a reality, and Cloud really increased the pace of innovation, right? Now it's kind of cheaper, you don't need to get your own server, you can kind of swipe your credit card, get a bunch of VM, start building applications, and now you have the required bandwidth capacity and density in your infrastructure, and you have the right devices right now to bring that experiences to you, right? So, now it's this trifecta of things, awesome devices, the network ready to deliver those experiences, and Cloud being able to scale out to build those experiences. >> Prashanth, I know you've got a big announcement coming up on the 29th, it's a virtual event, I think Cisco.com, they can probably find out with the URL where the event is, without revealing all the secret sauce, I know you guys had Wi-Fi 6 inside Cisco, >> Yeah. >> testing it out, I heard people in the hallway here, >> Yeah. >> Talking about it, um, and they're pretty animated in their commentary. Can you share the vibe and what's it like when the engineers look at the data, when they say, we just deployed the Wi-Fi 6, what was the reactions, um - >> Yeah. >> Were they blown away, was it mediocre, was it - >> Yeah. >> What were some of the things that they were saying, what was the feedback? >> We were piloting that, and the best way to look at it is, if you go to the wireless dev center on DevNet, you're going to see that we compared a 4K video running with Wi-Fi 6 and without Wi-Fi 6. I think the results speak for themselves. Like, the kind of experience that you're going to see, it's going to be beautiful, and when employees look at those things, and I talked about a few experiences, last week we had a thing called Cisco Beat which is internal employees that we rally around and talk about technology, but more importantly, what it means to us as human beings in a personal way, and what it means to our customers, and they were blown away with some of the applications that are going to be mainstream in all of the industries that I talked about, right? Like Healthcare, hospitality, education, entertainment venues, et cetera. >> What's the low-hanging fruit use cases? What's the things that are going to be right obvious, right out of the gate for companies to implement, in terms of deploying Wi-Fi 6 and seeing immediate benefits? >> Immediate benefits is high-density environment, period. Like student lecture halls, convention centers, areas like this, where everybody wants, like, understand what's going on, but be digitally and visually connected, right? It's not only about email checking anymore, That happens automatically. But if you're here and you want to watch Susie's keynote livestream right now, with high density, and 20 other people want to watch with you, on their devices, it's possible, without a hitch. So that seamless, always-on experience becomes a reality that people can easily test out in small environments, right? Not in their entire environment, where there are high-density of people, accessing multi-media applications or high-bandwidth applications, so I feel that's a low-hanging fruit. And then it's going to go more and more towards IOT applications where sensors are getting connected, like some of our customers are brewers, have hundreds and thousands of sensors in their farms, in brewing machines, and they want all of their data to come and look at that simultaneously for quality control, right? Beer, no matter where it's made, should taste consistent, right? So you can see that coming to life, because now all of these can be connected, and because of better density and better capacity and better battery savings for these IOT devices that Wi-Fi 6 provides, you make these applications possible. So you're going to see very vertical-specific applications coming more and more with Wi-Fi 6. >> Vertical-specific, because you mentioned a number of different customer examples, you know, ranging from retailer, to - >> Yeah. >> Carnival Cruise Line, it's now this connected city - >> Yeah. >> Are there any verticals you see where, when you're talking with customers they're not quite there yet? >> Yeah, that's an interesting thing, it's ... for a change, you always have these early adopters but there is a lot of laggers who are just watching, waiting on the sidelines saying, mm, that's not for me. With Wi-Fi 6, there's been a lot of industry excitement, I would say, like manufacturing full-on, right, just coming on board. Retail, higher education, are always in the early-adopter phase, because for them, and there has been studies shown to say this directly impacts their brand - >> Yes. >> like customer experience defines brand. >> Oh, absolutely. >> And Wi-Fi, equals customer experience these days, right? So, you're going to see all of these industries really, I think I haven't seen much in maybe financial services, if you will, I think that's the only thing that I can remember, transportation, big on, like, machine to machine communication, autonomous driving is possible now because of 5G and Wi-Fi 6, right? So, and you are seeing more and more of this industry - >> This is right in your wheelhouse, and you guys have been pushing the edge for a long time, SD Wind, campus networking This is not new to Cisco. >> Yeah. >> But now with Wi-Fi 6, it literally lights that up. >> Yeah. Yup. >> Pun intended. >> I mean, you can now enable those environments to be completely robust, fully addressable, data-driven - >> Yeah. I think data that you mentioned becomes very, very crucial in this, because, especially now when you have so many more users, so many more devices, so many more applications getting on the network, people are really trying to figure out, what do I do with this? How do I get visibility into ... am I delivering the right experience? Am I providing the right security, et cetera, right? So, data becomes extremely crucial, and you'll see emergence of ML and AI technology because it's going to be humanly impossible to look at all of the data and make sense. So you've got to do machines, do their job, figure out patterns, air on dwell time, foot traffic, predictive ways of saying things may break, the experience may change, and predicting that even before they happen, and giving the right insight to the IT in the line of business, so Wi-Fi 6 is going to open up a whole new slew of ML and AI-driven operations and management capability too, so that's pretty exciting. >> When are they going to pull up a GPU on the Wi-Fi 6 devices? >> (laughs) Oh, it's happening. >> It's ready? >> It is going to happen, because you can run Edge computing applications right on Wi-Fi 6 devices, so you're going to see all of that, so, application hosting capabilities with GPU powered applications are going to be there. >> Just a network connection, right? >> Yeah. So you are going to see that, and frankly even I don't know what some of the Edge computing applications with Wi-Fi 6 will be, but we are seeing more and more of these coming ... DevNet buying tech, yeah. >> Well we did some research, we keep on a part of our SiliconANGLES team, where we prove that it's easier and more cost-effective, rather than moving data around, you move compute to the Edge - >> Edge. >> And then you use the backhaul, 'cause it costs money to send data around the network. It's costly. >> Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and the autonomous cars was one great example, right? Like, it's a life-and-death situation when you are letting the car drive itself, right? So, you can't send all the data to the Cloud and say, analyze it for me. There are instantaneous decisions to be made, in milli-micro- nanoseconds, that need to be done on the Edge. So I think autonomous cars are a great example of Edge computing that needs to happen right on the Edge. The learning can then start happening in the Cloud, right? As in when these things get more and more smarter, you send all this data, you correlate all the intelligence there, you send it back to the machines. So you're going to see these kind of Edge computing applications. >> So you're excited by Wi-Fi 6? >> Nah. >> (laughter) >> Wi-Fi 6, so that's an even number, is that to be odd numbers, or lucky, I mean, the naming convention? >> No! >> Is there a - >> We want to be better than 5G. (laughter) So 5G is fifth generation of cellular, >> Okay. >> Wi-Fi 6 is sixth generation of Wi-Fi, right? I mean it's - >> So you're going to trump the 5G with the 6, >> Yeah. >> Kind of get ahead of it. >> Because it is truly the sixth generation of Wi-Fi. >> Okay, that's what it is. >> If we were to go back in time we would call 802.11ac, Wi-Fi 5. Right? It's kind of not that easy to say, but yeah, so Wi-Fi 5 happened like three or four years back, and now it's Wi-Fi sixth gen, so. >> We'll have to do a deep dive in the studio sometime, >> Oh, absolutely. >> on getting into all the spectrum issues, you know, the channels - >> Yeah. >> And the antennas and chains and all that good stuff. >> Yeah. There's a lot to geek out on that. (laughs) >> Yeah, it's going to be fun. >> So you talked about, kind of before we wrap up here, you talked about, you know, everything really kind of being related to, or how this can help companies with brand, and brand is everything to any type of company - >> Yeah. >> We talk at every event we go to about how it's all about customer experience. >> Yeah. >> So my last question for you is, how is Wi-Fi 6 and some of these new technologies that clearly you're excited about, how do you think that's going to change the experience for your internal customers, and from being able to get things out faster, to your external Cisco customers? >> Yeah, when you say internal, our own employees - >> Yes. >> Our R and D? >> Yes, exactly. >> Absolutely. So I think, and one of the examples was shown right here, right, so, and I'm connecting the two answers that you had, like, there's a lot of technology details behind what we do, right, we spend tons of money doing R and D, but we wanted to expose that to our own customers, to our channel partners, and to our developers, right? So, this is something that Wi-Fi 6 brings a lot to our customers. So, all the goodness, the intelligence that we have hidden in our network, now gets exposed, through these APIs, to our developers, and to our own customers. So the internal customers of ours, which are engineers, Cisco IT, are tremendously excited to see what that unveils to us, right? And DevNet provides that platform where you can expose this through APIs, whether it's for security, whether it's for application experience, whether it's for better operations, and have new co-creation of applications that we haven't envisioned, new ways of ecosystem partners coming up and building new applications that we haven't envisioned. So, for our own R and D teams, it's pretty exciting. Because - >> Big catalyst. >> Yeah, just, exactly. You're just providing the platform, it's the catalyst for innovations, and that's what the internet was when we created that, right? We didn't know the internet of 20 years back is going to be the internet of today, and we didn't envision that, but here we are. >> Well the ETI's going to open up your market, because you're going to create an enablement to pass that forward, the opportunities to other developers to come up with the ideas. >> Yeah, absolutely. And that's the whole idea, is to provide them a platform to come up with innovations and ideas, and help share these ideas to other folks, right, because when the minds meld, it gets better and better. >> Build some good apps, make ... get it distributed on Wi-Fi 6, make some money, build a business, create a great app - >> Runs on your feet. It's step by step. >> It's a big inflection point. >> That's a pretty good motto. >> It's an inflection point. >> It is. It is truly, I believe, an inflection point. Mainly because, frankly, Wi-Fi 6 and 5G coming together, truly, because me and you as a user really don't care whether I'm on Wi-Fi or cellular, and we shouldn't, right, all I expect is no matter what I do, where I go, and I use my device, I should get the same consistent seamless experience. >> It works. >> Well I don't have the unlimited plan, so I'd love to have it - >> You would with that. on the Wi-Fi. (laughter) >> So you've got this virtual event next week on the 29th - >> Yeah. >> Is that going to tee up anything, any exciting things we're going to hear at Cisco Live a few weeks later? >> Oh yeah. Big time. Big time. (laughs) >> Any teasers you can give us? >> Without getting fired? Yeah, it's going to be tough. (laughter) No, yeah, I think things that we talked today are what we're going to explain more, and we're going to give more flavor on what Cisco's actually is actually doing from our products perspective, solutions, partnership perspective, to bring it to life, right? So, that's really exciting, so I highly encourage the folks that are watching this to register for this on Cisco.com Go Wired For Wireless event, so it's fun, because we've got a lot of industry experts, customers because that's where rubber meets the road - >> Absolutely. >> And that's where the top good applications, how far along they are, what are they testing, what are they trying out, and then we can geek out on all the technology, right? But it always starts with why, and why does it matter. So ... and that's why I'm excited, yeah. >> It sounds exciting. My cheeks are hurting from smiling. Prashanth, thank you so much ... right? ... for sharing your enthusiasm, your energy and expertise, it's been fun. We look forward to, uh, the virtual event next week, and hearing more about what's going on at Cisco Live. >> Thanks Lisa, thanks John. >> Well, our pleasure. For John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching The Cube live from day two of our coverage, of Cisco DevNet Create 2019. Thanks for watching. (techno music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS re:Invent 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, and their ecosystem partners. >> And welcome back once again here, to Hall D in the Sands Expo. We're at AWS re:Invent for the third day of our three days of coverage here on theCUBE, of this fantastic show. Justin Warren, John Walls. We're now joined by Prashanth Chandrasekar, who is the SVP and GM of managed public cloud at Rackspace. Prashanth, good to see you this morning. >> Absolutely, thank you for having me. >> You bet, and Ajay Patel who is the SVP and GM of cloud provider services at VMware. Good morning, to you as well >> Glad to be here, good morning. >> Alright, first off, let's just talk about Rackspace, a little bit, if we can Prashanth. You're kind of going through this metamorphosis, right? This transformation of sorts. So kind of get us up to speed a little bit about your journey, about where you've been and where you're going. >> Yeah absolutely, I'd love to. I think Rackspace has been been on a phenomenal journey over the past 20 years. This is our 20th year anniversary as a company. So obviously we've been know historically for our managed hosting DNA and we came from that, a long time ago. But over the years, we very much are very, very focused on customers, just like Amazon is and VMware is and we really thought about, how do we make sure that we're at where our customers want to go. And so we evolved effectively to support the leading technologies in either the public cloud space, like an Amazon, Microsoft Azure, Google, Alibaba or in the private cloud space with VMware and even our own OpenStack Private Cloud deployments, along with our traditional managed hosting business. So over the years, and also with a very, very phenomenal new owner in Apollo, we've been transforming as a company that's truly a next generation IT services company, looking to take enterprises into the future, at their pace by the way, meeting them where they are and really making sure that we bring to bare, really, best of read services, cloud services, to really kind of manage their transition into the cloud and to make the most of that investment. >> Yeah, use that carrot approach, right? Not the-- >> That's right, that's right. >> Bring them along gently which many people need. Alright, so each of you has your expertise. I'm talking about the companies here. But now this partnership, this synergy that you have, it's kind of like peanut butter and chocolate in a way, right? Great combination! Everybody's going to love it! Talk about that partnership and how it's come together and how that's playing out right now. >> Yeah-- >> So from a philosophy perspective, we're both goal aligned, right? We're starting to see this world being a multi-cloud world and more importantly, it's all about the customer on their journey. They're going to have existing assets, existing data centers, for a long time. They're going to need support in terms of the legacy applications but also they replatform, rehost, and modernize the application. And they need a strategic partner, so Rackspace sees the same way. Starting to provide that set of choice and help the customer on their journey, at their own pace, enabled by a common technology platform. And so us as a company, we've also transformed ourself from we're going to be a vSphere-only company, to starting to embrace public clouds. Whether it's VMware cloud on AWS or our recent CloudHealth acquisition, which allows us to start managing native public cloud. So in this journey, we're seeing ourself as peanut butter and chocolate, as you said, working together, hand-in-hand for the benefit of our customers. >> Yeah, I really love that analogy and thank you for it, because in some ways, VMware and Rackspace, are very much, our philosophies are exactly the same in terms of where the customer journey is, but we approach the problem with two different angles. One, we come from it from a technology-services angle, 'cause we're a service company at heart, right? We're fanatical experience and we're known for that, and VMware is obviously a phenomenal, technology platform company. But we both believe in a multi-cloud and a hyper-cloud world where we see that, hey, the journey to the cloud is a very, very, long-standing one. We're in the early innings of this, where customer workloads are actually moving and this is, you can talk about the projections, you're literally probably over a trillion dollars spent over the next decade or so that's going to move >> in the cloud, exactly. >> with this very form factor, so it's a really exciting time and we're really, really aligned with our partners with VMware and of course AWS and the other public cloud partners. >> Yeah so, you mentioned that we are at the beginning. This is just the start of how things are working, So with customers who are looking at this transformation journey and trying to make this decision about, what do I keep onsite, what do I transform, what do I re-platform, what do I just completely replace with something new and let the old one die. How do you help customers make those decisions? >> Yes, absolutely, so this is the heart of what Rackspace is doing for our customers today, right? We are very much a company that's basically taking a very unbiased approach upfront. We're taking about literally, thinking about the planning stage and assessing their workloads, going through an application assessment and doing all the work that's required to understand, you know what, which workloads need to go on each of the public clouds? Which one runs well on Amazon? Which ones actually should be better leveraged on a VMware on AWS sort of scenario and so on, right? So there's a very deep assessment that's done upfront and then we go through the process of architecting and deploying, based on best practices that we've gained from, by the way, thousands of these customers that we've actually moved and then actually managing and operating in these environments, which we've been talking about at Rackspace, that's our DNA, and optimizing those environments, for cost and the greatest and latest of features that any of these providers provide. So that's the journey and the way we do that is, using a true next-generation cloud services set of capabilities which we announced a couple weeks ago in a press release and that includes something with a notion of service blocks, as we call at Rackspace, service blocks where you're literally able to mix and match all the things that I just mentioned along the journey, dependent on where the customer is on their journey. So we could say, let's focus just on architecting, deploying and migrating apps and that's it. That's what the enterprise wants, because they want to enable an internal, focused motion to manage these, and they want to skill up their internal people to do that. Or you might encounter a company that actually wants us to actually manage the whole thing, and that's fine too. And then maybe, by the way, nine months into their experience that they realize that or later down the line, they want us to help 'em with cost optimization or Kubernetes expertise to actually move into the container world. So that whole curve and the transitioning through that process, is our job to make sure, meet the customer where they are and make sure we deliver value very specifically at that point in time, for them, and not be, not put customers into some long-term, monolithic sort of contract. So really being agile around us. >> You know it's funny, it's very interesting, because as you see the complexity has only gone up. It hasn't gone down. That's when you talk about cloud benefits, the amount of services being launched, the complexity of all the different technologies. Rackspace is uniquely set up, they're going to have their VMware expertise and the AWS certified partners, that we can start to bring the value together. So we're excited about kind of mixing and matching and kind of this modular set of services and capability, that you can bring to bare for the customers. So I think, it actually puts us in a unique position in some ways, right? To be that trusted partner as we move on this journey. >> And to put some numbers around that, very specifically, that Ajay said, we have over a thousand, no, eleven hundred Amazon certified certifications at Rackspace. We have probably a very similar number of VMware, right? Over a thousand VMware people that actually service customers and that's all-- >> With Enterprise DNN Enterprise support, right? >> That's correct, that's right, and then ultimately we know that combination of expertise is very material in that scale for our customers to be able to leverage. >> So Ajay, you've got a long history with the Enterprise customers. The people have been using VMware for a long, long, time. What are you seeing from your existing customer base? What kind of technologies are they interested in? What are they moving to? Where is the momentum? >> So, clearly the excitement hype is around containers, Kubernetes, serverless, et cetera. But their bread and butter workloads, are existing applications. They're looking to optimize their data center costs, some trying to eliminate data centers, they're looking to lift and shift entire landscapes of application, move them to cloud. They're looking for expertise, building a center of excellence. Start up a prominent operation model or on a multi-cloud world So they're now starting to hit, what I call, real-world problems, where the experiments are working, they need to now create operational model around it and it's starting to go back to the trusted partners, VMware is a platform provider, Rackspace is a trusted managed services provider. Whether it's up front and design or to help operate. So we're starting to see this maturities coming in place and cost is not really the driver. They're starting to find that public out cost is actually an issue. So cost management too. If you just walk around the shop floor, it's all about cost management, security, visibility. These are all signs of a maturing market. >> And because of that, and you talk about a maturing market, if I'm just now making my entry, alright? I've decided, hey we're running our company, it's time to jump into the public cloud. Is there benefit to us being maybe a bit-- >> A bit more lore? >> more reticent yeah, than others, because there've been other growing pains, you've already kind of, you've found where the wrinkles were and so we will benefit by those past experiences? >> Absolutely, yeah. >> So I'm giving you a chance, I mean talk to somebody who hasn't made that commitment yet, and they're thinking I'm so far behind >> Yes. >> But they're not. >> Yeah, I mean I think this is a spot-on point, right? So when we work with enterprises, what we're really seeing is that, let's say a company has got 10 divisions within the company and you know, generally speaking, you've got maybe a couple divisions that have gone ahead of the pack. They've already done it, because they actually went with the cloud curve. They're leading the world internally. They're being the internal sponsors and the champions for the movement and you've got some laggards along the way as well. So Rackspace, our job is to really bring true up, if you will, the level of capability with the groups that are actually lagging. And also, not to do it in an artificial way, but actually do it on their terms, to say, you know what, you may not be ready for, a containerized world tomorrow. Maybe you actually start leveraging basic, easy to, and that's the way to get started. Which is fewer and fewer number of companies that are not there already, but the ability for you to move along and use advanced services, that's our job, to keep moving them and encouraging them to do it, bu enabling them through our tooling that we built and leveraging through partners like VMware or even on the top of each of the public clouds that we built, proprietary tooling, or through the expertise that we bring up to bat. So that's the combination. >> It's never to late to get started, so for customers who might've just decided that, actually I've decided, yes, it's time to go to cloud, I'm ready. How do they begin? How should they start on this journey? How would they start to engage with you? >> Yeah, I think for us, it's a what we've noticed, is that it's very important to just make sure that you take a success-based and phase-based approach. And so, starting with a place in the organization, where it actually makes a difference, there's a differentiated set of applications that are going to make a difference for the customer that they're trying to serve. Or it could be, listen, they have actually a problem where they have 27 DC's, as a customer that I was talking to yesterday that is about to join us, they're trying to consolidate down to six data centers over the next two years. So how do you go about that problem of doing DC consolidation and how do you figure out which workloads go on which platform, et cetera. So starting with some very specific problems, could be as big as a DC problem, or it could be as specific as, let's go work on this very specific differentiated critical application on the cloud et cetera, and that really creates a mushrooming effect, 'cause you notice the difference it makes in terms of developer productivity, your agility, your ability to deploy coded production multiple times and that just drives, you know, it gains the attention of, what we've seen is, that finally gets the attention of the CIO in the company and then the CIO is like, listen I better get control of this, because in some situations we have hundreds and thousands of Amazon accounts within these organizations, that they ultimately now want governance and visibility, and so that's when it starts creating a more holistic, enterprise-wide strategy around cloud and adoption and one of the various form factors they should use, to actually to keep moving on. So really it's mushrooming with a center of excellence and a sponsor or a line of business that's really starting and that's really where we've seen success. >> You know one other thing I'll add to that is, the guys who are fast followers now, are getting the benefit of hindsight of other partners, as you just said. And couple things I'm starting to see in the market. They're starting to make some strategic bets. They're picking a strategic technology partner from a technology platform perspective. They're looking for a strategic service provider partner, a managed service partner. And they're starting to look at them as trusted partners. The conversations are moving away from being transactional, to more success oriented. Now even Andy talk about that. It's really about outcomes and in this journey, I think you're starting to find the right partners, building the core competency within your organization and finding those sustaining technology platform choices that guide you through this hybrid world. That's what the world went with, the battlefield now is all about hybrid. It's no longer about private or public. Everyone's just, even Amazon finally recognized, the world is a hybrid with their outpost announcement, right? And starting to look at how do I work in this hybrid world and what's the right operating model. So it's a really interesting time to kind of make, say look, the world is going to be public and private, how do I operate in this? >> Cloud all the things >> Makes sense. I do want to say, before we say goodbye, that when Prashanth was talking about laggards, he was really looking at us (all laughing) an awful lot, but I don't know, I don't know what to make of that, but we won't take it too personally >> Might be the beard maybe. >> Thanks for being with us. >> Absolutely. >> Thank you for having us, >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you gentlemen. Back with more from AWS re:Invent. We're live in Las Vegas and you're watching the Cube. (relaxing music)