>> Narrator: Live from Austin, Texas, it's theCUBE, covering DockerCon 2017, brought to you by Docker and support from it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, I'm Stu Miniman, we're here at DockerCon 2017 in beautiful Austin, Texas, had a great party down on Rainy Street last night, 5500 people and many of them, a good majority of them made it to keynote this morning, but we're checking in with a lot of guests here, happy to welcome onto the program. I've got a returning guest in a new role and I have a new guest, so both of you from Puppet, Deepak Giridharagopal, who's the CTO and Omari Gazitt, who's the Chief Product Officer. We caught up with you at a previous cloud role that you had had. Deepak, since it's your first time on the program, you've been with Puppet for awhile now, can you give our audience a little bit about your background and your role? >> Sure, so, I've, software guy, I've been programming forever, done a bunch of different start-ups, actually lived in Austin and was part of the Austin start-up scene for quite some time, so I went to school here. So, I've been here for maybe 15 years, something like that. >> Is that a Hook'em Horns or is that a? >> It's Hook'em Horns, yeah, absolutely. So, UT computer science and also, fellow Texan, not UT but from Rice so, there you go. >> That's right. >> Owl's are okay too. But yeah, I've been working here for awhile, previous start-up I was at did a lot of email archival and stuff like that, so I was an early engineer there. We ended up getting acquired by Dell, but that was during an era where we charged people based on storage, so the more we could store, the more money we could make, but that was really early on into how you use software to scale out a bunch of systems and things like that, so that's how I got involved with Puppet the project before I actually joined the company, so I ended up using a lot of that stuff to build out all the systems that we had, maintained a lot of relationships with the community, have a lot of patches inside of Puppet core, so eventually joined the company. So now I've been there for about six years, I'm CTO and Chief Architect, so I'm responsible for all the ones and zeros, I guess and overall technical strategy. >> Alright, so Omri, how long ago did you find Puppet and tell us about your role. >> Absolutely, seven weeks ago, so, you know, fresh, brand new but very excited about this new role, as Deepak said, I'm also a fellow Texan. I went to school at the cross-town rival, maybe the different city rival at Rice but, I don't think we've ever beat UT in football, maybe once. So, I don't even know what the Rice equivalent of Hook'em Horns is. I spent many years at bit companies like Microsoft where I helped start .NET and was really deeply involved in Azure as well as well as HP where I ended up being the General Manager and Vice President for the Helium platform. For that I did a number of start-ups, including one here in Texas, in Houston that ended up going public and the fun thing about coming back to Texas. The last time I was here was Open Stack Summit in Austin. It's always going to get great Tex Mex, so really enjoyed that last night as well. >> Alright, so Deepak, you've been with Puppet long enough that you know, there was no Docker in there. >> That's true. >> Containers did exist, can you walk us through, you have an architect role, how does containers impact your product and how your customers are using you? >> I mean, I think it's, there's a lot of interest, I think. There's almost, I don't think there's a single customer or really user that I go and talk to and I talk to a lot of them that are unaware of containerization. They know it's a thing. I do think though that a lot of them are trying to fit it into their brains and I think that's kind of the main role that we kind of play because the products that we build and all the projects that we have, the open source or commercial stuff, it's all about helping people automate, deploy, manage all the software that they've got, no matter what kind of software it is. So containerization to a lot of these folks, they come to us kind of asking, okay, well, I've heard a lot about it or I'm getting a lot of pressure from development teams to start deploying stuff using it, how do we adopt that kind of technology in a way that comports with all the rest of our practices for managing our software, which for a lot of customers, they're still in the process of evolving because a lot of the people we talk to, they come to us to kind of move from more of the older way of managing deploying and automating their stuff into more of a DevOps kind of mindset where rapid iteration, continuous delivery, so the technology is definitely a big part of it, the processes are also a big part of it, but ultimately I think they come to us saying, this is really cool, it seems very different than virtualization, you know, so how do we actually deal with that? How do we enforce security policies on all these things? How do we deploy it? Can we share code? How do we stand up the container infrastructure itself? I don't know anything about software defined networking, now I have to. How do I get that expertise and how do I configure that, manage it and the applications themselves that are containerized now, they're just architected and built, and in many cases, fundamentally different ways than software of previous generations and that requires a lot of uplift of the rest of an organization in order to make that stuff possible. So it's happening, but I think there's definitely a gulf between the, you know, kind of leading edge and a lot of the stuff that we've seen here in the keynotes today, which have been awesome, there's a ton of great stuff they've announced for systems builders and things like that. I can build custom kernels and all kinds of stuff, that's great, but there's a huge gulf between the leading edge tech like that and that tool chain and what I think most enterprises can fit into their heads. What they understand, what they have established practices around and you know, we have to meet in the middle. Obviously we can't bring all the new tech and make it snap to this line of how we used to do things, 'cause that's not going to work, but simultaneously, we can't just shift everybody over to doing absolutely everything brand new because they have this thing called paying customers and revenue generating software that's already running, so, how do you bridge that gap and that's where I view our role is, being that bridge to the future. >> Actually one of the things I liked in the keynote, they said it would be great if we just had this kind of easy button, that we do things but I think, as you said, you help customers take what they have, move them forward, help make it easier. You joined the company, why is it exciting at Puppet these days, how do things like containerization fit into your thoughts going forward? >> Absolutely, I'm super excited to be at the company. I've worked most of my career really serving the developer customer, the developer constinuency, and one of the things that I saw working in the container ecostystem over the last few years is that there really is a lot of excitement from development in organizations around effectively packaging microservices in a new way and the advantages here are real. There is a lot of acceleration that you get but the larger movement of DevOps is actually how you get that agility, that velocity, that Ben was talking about in his keynote today. There's only one mode and that is quick, right, and that resonated strongly with me because we saw, we saw that exactly in large companies like HP and obviously at Puppet now where, at the core of the value that we bring to our customers is helping them transform, helping them do things in a more cross-functional way, in a way where they can accelerate delivery from taking months to taking days or even hours and Puppet's point of view largely comes from the Ops part of DevOps and our customers are asking us, what's our role, what's our evolving role in this new world and that's exactly why it's so exciting to be part of a company that is actually bringing that unique point of view and most of our customers are asking, great, containers, now what? What about all the things that we have to worry about? What about security? What about compliance? What about reporting? What about kind of having visibility into my entire estate of things? That doesn't change just because you go from running things on bare metal to running things in VM's, with containers, we have another order of magnitude increase of the number of things you're managing and so, the management challenges just become larger and our job, the way that we see our job is to really help our customers transition, employ these accelerate technologies like Docker, like containerization, and the container platforms, but do it in a way that, make sure that these operators continue to be able to their jobs, to get the visibility and the control they need to make sure that they deliver on the Dev of the business as well. >> Yeah, I had an interesting conversation with Soloman Hikes earlier on theCUBE here and he said his background was actually on the operations side and when they built Docker it was the developers as their customer, want to throw it out to the both of you, is to kind of that, that developer operator and then kind of your enterprise buyer, how's that dynamic changing? We've watched the whole DevOps discussion for many years as to kind of, who do you sell to, who's actually got budget, who makes decisions? Is it some c-level management that said, oh, I read about this and do it or the developers bubbling things up? Where are things today, what are you seeing? >> Well, I definitely think the sort of, the era of, you have one of two really high level buyers that make all these decisions about everything is going to be architected. It's all going to be built in this way, it's all going to work in this way, this is how, operationally, it's going to work, security is going to be enforced this way mostly by just saying no to things, the way we make things stable in production is to say no to making changes. If IT of the late '90's was a political party or the 2000's was a political party, it would be no, we can't, which doesn't make any sense anymore. So I think in 2017, I view, especially with respect to containerization, I think the big change is around empowerment and I think the DevOps movement, in many ways is about fostering collaboration and empowerment, so you don't want to have a separate security function that just puts, I'm going to secure this application at the very end of the assembly line, that doesn't work, just like it never worked for quality assurance or anything like that. We'll make it work, we'll put QA in at the very end, ideally you want all of that baked in as early as possible and I think stuff like containers, I think the rise of containerization has enabled developers to feel more empowered over a large swath of the staff then they previously maybe had the ability to be. So, if you believe in the idea of a container as being the unit of delivery of software in the future, I mean, that's a pretty powerful abstraction. So if I'm a developer at my laptop, I could put all kinds of stuff into this black box and the power is, I have all the autonomy inside that box. I can do whatever I want with it and that's very empowering, that's a lot of responsibility. I think the flip side though and I think something that we learned as part of the DevOps movement as well is that it can just be about developer empowerment. It has to also be about operation empowerment. It has to be about security empowerment. If you think about it, I think there's a future, I hope this isn't the one that we actually get, but I think there's a future where, for example, all developers are building everything with containers are like great, I can put all the stuff I want in this black box and then, here you go, here you go operations team, here's this black box that you can do anything you want with it, I mean, that's kind of a 2017 tech version of throwing it over the wall, right, because the people with the pager still have to care about what's inside that black box and now, if you have a hundred development teams doing thousands of containers all the time, that's way more black boxes that you have to manage. So if you're an IT director or a CIO or something like that and you have to deal with your entire estate of stuff, that's a pretty gnarly problem and then you have to combine that with all the previous generations of software that you still have and you still have to maintain. So, I understand why our customers come to us a lot of times and ask us, is there a unified way that we can kind of model and manage all the stuff that we've got? How do we see inside a lot of these things that are opaque and they are black boxes so, I'm aiming more for a future where the containers uses that unit of delivery for software but it's used as a coordination point where it's not just developers putting whatever they want in a Docker file, it's developers and Op staff coordinating to figure out, how do we stitch these containers together into a proper application? How do we secure it? Does it meet all of our standards and things like that and that's pretty great. I'm very optimistic about that. That's a place I want to be in. >> I, just to amplify a little bit, it's great to be at a company where the users love the software. Our selling motion typically is a bunch of practitioners at a company really love using our software and then we get a call from the CIO saying, hey, we have thousands of nodes under management, we would like to have a deeper relationship with you, let's go have a conversation about that, so that's a fantastic validation of the value of the product as a tool of empowerment and I would say that, just to echo Deepak's point, it's all about end to end velocity. If you're just making the dev's go faster, you're not necessarily relieving the right bottlenecks and we've seen that, even in our own development. As I've come up to speed on how Puppet does things, some of the impressive pieces of focus really are on our own value steam, how the technology, value stream, in terms of how we get ideas to our customers. We always think about inserting operations folks, security folks, QA, development, product management, project management altogether and collaborating from the beginning of a project or beginning of a sprint and that, in effect, speeds up everything. Again, to echo Deepak's point, if you just make the life of the dev better or faster, you may not actually be solving for total velocity. >> Great point about why you guys are sticky, why your customers love you. Omri, I'm sure you've got great viewpoint, but Deepak, feel free to chime in, the cloud providers themselves, I look at the platforms out there. I mean Docker is a platform provider, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, others out there, some of your previous employers build platforms and they're trying to simplify and add automation and do this thing, why are you guys, is this a big opportunity for you guys, where do you guys become relevant or even more relevant as time goes on with these platforms? You want to start, Omri? >> Absolutely, so, the cloud is the big platform disruption of our time, in our industry and you're either going to ride it or get washed over by it and the most important thing that brought me to a company like Puppet is just this huge opportunity as our customers are moving to cloud platforms with more and more of their workloads, the ability to manage a more heterogeneous set of things becomes even more imperative, right? The more complexity you have, the more you need tools to help you manage through that complexity and so, as we see our customers start managing those in the cloud, our job is to make that friction free for them, so, make it as easy as possible to adopt Puppet in AWS of in Azure or in any of these cloud platforms and on top of that, I would say, we are also moving our entire portfolio to the cloud, to become cloud native. To deliver in a way that again, takes a lot of the burden off of our customer's hands because if you see the move to cloud, one of the most attractive pieces of it for enterprises is that they can give up some or perhaps most of even all of the operations burden to another vendor and that's an incredible kind of efficiency gainer for these enterprises. They don't want to run software anymore. Now, the vast majority of our customers still run software and not just our software, a whole bunch of other software, but their aspiration long term is to be able to hand some of that or maybe most of that management burden to their vendors and that's exactly the journey that we're also on, so that's why it's super exciting to be at a company that sees that opportunity, that vision and the expansion of market that gives us. >> I agree 100%. I think the big change for people that build applications or manage applications if they want to put them on the cloud is like at the amusement park, they have the sign where you have to be this tall to ride, if you want to have your stuff work in the cloud, you have to be this automated to ride. You just have to because otherwise there's no point, I mean, what's the point of putting your stuff on EC2 and I can elastically bring up a zillion instances of something if I have to provision them by hand or if I have to reconfigure them by hand. It just becomes a really expensive, absurdly expensive way to run a traditional workload that isn't ready for something like the cloud so that's way I'm really optimistic about our role and our customers are really, we have a huge amount of coordination and involvement with them trying to get them that automated so that they can take advantage of a lot of this technology. I also think that just the idea of being able to, for a lot of our customers and users, moving stuff onto the cloud itself, that's challenging. I don't think it's as easy. I know there are plenty of people that have tools that do these kinds of things but I just don't find it that easy to simply say, yep, you can just forklift your thing and now it's a cloud app. There's more stuff you've got to do and, in my mind, I think step one, if you have an app and if you have a workload and you want to move it to somewhere else, step one is you got to model what that workload actually looks, how that works. You have to have an understanding of how that's supposed to behave. That way, after you move it, ideally automation helps you move it, that's where our software comes in, but at a minimum, if you've got an understanding of how it worked before, now after you've transplanted it, you can actually validate it works the way that you want it to work. So I think automation is, it's non-negotiable. You have to have that and if you're not using a platform that lets you do that, then, I don't know, you're going to have a really hard time and unless you're planning on having all over infrastructure, 100% of your estate with a single vendor in the cloud, you're going to need a platform that works across everything that you've got, from your mainframe processing all your trillions of dollars of currency transactions or something like that, all the way to the app you built a year ago that you thought was oh current, maybe before you picked up a book on containers and the stuff that you're going to build tomorrow that's going to be cloud native and you don't want 18 different tools for 18 different vendors managing stuff in 18 different ways 'cause that's not really, I don't see that as a path to scaling out what you can do. >> Yeah, it reminds me of another quote that Ben used in a keynote is you need to be past and future proof, so yeah, we're going to have to leave it there, Deepak and Omri, thank you so much for joining us and thank you for watching theCUBE. >> Omri: Thanks. >> Deepak: Thank you very much. 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>> From The Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data driven insights from The Cube at ETR. This is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante. >> The reverse momentum in tech stocks caused by rising interest rates, less attractive discounted cash flow models, and more tepid forward guidance, can be easily measured by public market valuations. And while there's lots of discussion about the impact on private companies and cash runway and 409A valuations, measuring the performance of non-public companies isn't as easy. IPOs have dried up and public statements by private companies, of course, they accentuate the good and they kind of hide the bad. Real data, unless you're an insider, is hard to find. Hello and welcome to this week's "Wikibon Cube Insights" powered by ETR. In this "Breaking Analysis", we unlock some of the secrets that non-public, emerging tech companies may or may not be sharing. And we do this by introducing you to a capability from ETR that we've not exposed you to over the past couple of years, it's called the Emerging Technologies Survey, and it is packed with sentiment data and performance data based on surveys of more than a thousand CIOs and IT buyers covering more than 400 companies. And we've invited back our colleague, Erik Bradley of ETR to help explain the survey and the data that we're going to cover today. Erik, this survey is something that I've not personally spent much time on, but I'm blown away at the data. It's really unique and detailed. First of all, welcome. Good to see you again. >> Great to see you too, Dave, and I'm really happy to be talking about the ETS or the Emerging Technology Survey. Even our own clients of constituents probably don't spend as much time in here as they should. >> Yeah, because there's so much in the mainstream, but let's pull up a slide to bring out the survey composition. Tell us about the study. How often do you run it? What's the background and the methodology? >> Yeah, you were just spot on the way you were talking about the private tech companies out there. So what we did is we decided to take all the vendors that we track that are not yet public and move 'em over to the ETS. And there isn't a lot of information out there. If you're not in Silicon (indistinct), you're not going to get this stuff. So PitchBook and Tech Crunch are two out there that gives some data on these guys. But what we really wanted to do was go out to our community. We have 6,000, ITDMs in our community. We wanted to ask them, "Are you aware of these companies? And if so, are you allocating any resources to them? Are you planning to evaluate them," and really just kind of figure out what we can do. So this particular survey, as you can see, 1000 plus responses, over 450 vendors that we track. And essentially what we're trying to do here is talk about your evaluation and awareness of these companies and also your utilization. And also if you're not utilizing 'em, then we can also figure out your sales conversion or churn. So this is interesting, not only for the ITDMs themselves to figure out what their peers are evaluating and what they should put in POCs against the big guys when contracts come up. But it's also really interesting for the tech vendors themselves to see how they're performing. >> And you can see 2/3 of the respondents are director level of above. You got 28% is C-suite. There is of course a North America bias, 70, 75% is North America. But these smaller companies, you know, that's when they start doing business. So, okay. We're going to do a couple of things here today. First, we're going to give you the big picture across the sectors that ETR covers within the ETS survey. And then we're going to look at the high and low sentiment for the larger private companies. And then we're going to do the same for the smaller private companies, the ones that don't have as much mindshare. And then I'm going to put those two groups together and we're going to look at two dimensions, actually three dimensions, which companies are being evaluated the most. Second, companies are getting the most usage and adoption of their offerings. And then third, which companies are seeing the highest churn rates, which of course is a silent killer of companies. And then finally, we're going to look at the sentiment and mindshare for two key areas that we like to cover often here on "Breaking Analysis", security and data. And data comprises database, including data warehousing, and then big data analytics is the second part of data. And then machine learning and AI is the third section within data that we're going to look at. Now, one other thing before we get into it, ETR very often will include open source offerings in the mix, even though they're not companies like TensorFlow or Kubernetes, for example. And we'll call that out during this discussion. The reason this is done is for context, because everyone is using open source. It is the heart of innovation and many business models are super glued to an open source offering, like take MariaDB, for example. There's the foundation and then there's with the open source code and then there, of course, the company that sells services around the offering. Okay, so let's first look at the highest and lowest sentiment among these private firms, the ones that have the highest mindshare. So they're naturally going to be somewhat larger. And we do this on two dimensions, sentiment on the vertical axis and mindshare on the horizontal axis and note the open source tool, see Kubernetes, Postgres, Kafka, TensorFlow, Jenkins, Grafana, et cetera. So Erik, please explain what we're looking at here, how it's derived and what the data tells us. >> Certainly, so there is a lot here, so we're going to break it down first of all by explaining just what mindshare and net sentiment is. You explain the axis. We have so many evaluation metrics, but we need to aggregate them into one so that way we can rank against each other. Net sentiment is really the aggregation of all the positive and subtracting out the negative. So the net sentiment is a very quick way of looking at where these companies stand versus their peers in their sectors and sub sectors. Mindshare is basically the awareness of them, which is good for very early stage companies. And you'll see some names on here that are obviously been around for a very long time. And they're clearly be the bigger on the axis on the outside. Kubernetes, for instance, as you mentioned, is open source. This de facto standard for all container orchestration, and it should be that far up into the right, because that's what everyone's using. In fact, the open source leaders are so prevalent in the emerging technology survey that we break them out later in our analysis, 'cause it's really not fair to include them and compare them to the actual companies that are providing the support and the security around that open source technology. But no survey, no analysis, no research would be complete without including these open source tech. So what we're looking at here, if I can just get away from the open source names, we see other things like Databricks and OneTrust . They're repeating as top net sentiment performers here. And then also the design vendors. People don't spend a lot of time on 'em, but Miro and Figma. This is their third survey in a row where they're just dominating that sentiment overall. And Adobe should probably take note of that because they're really coming after them. But Databricks, we all know probably would've been a public company by now if the market hadn't turned, but you can see just how dominant they are in a survey of nothing but private companies. And we'll see that again when we talk about the database later. >> And I'll just add, so you see automation anywhere on there, the big UiPath competitor company that was not able to get to the public markets. They've been trying. Snyk, Peter McKay's company, they've raised a bunch of money, big security player. They're doing some really interesting things in developer security, helping developers secure the data flow, H2O.ai, Dataiku AI company. We saw them at the Snowflake Summit. Redis Labs, Netskope and security. So a lot of names that we know that ultimately we think are probably going to be hitting the public market. Okay, here's the same view for private companies with less mindshare, Erik. Take us through this one. >> On the previous slide too real quickly, I wanted to pull that security scorecard and we'll get back into it. But this is a newcomer, that I couldn't believe how strong their data was, but we'll bring that up in a second. Now, when we go to the ones of lower mindshare, it's interesting to talk about open source, right? Kubernetes was all the way on the top right. Everyone uses containers. Here we see Istio up there. Not everyone is using service mesh as much. And that's why Istio is in the smaller breakout. But still when you talk about net sentiment, it's about the leader, it's the highest one there is. So really interesting to point out. Then we see other names like Collibra in the data side really performing well. And again, as always security, very well represented here. We have Aqua, Wiz, Armis, which is a standout in this survey this time around. They do IoT security. I hadn't even heard of them until I started digging into the data here. And I couldn't believe how well they were doing. And then of course you have AnyScale, which is doing a second best in this and the best name in the survey Hugging Face, which is a machine learning AI tool. Also doing really well on a net sentiment, but they're not as far along on that access of mindshare just yet. So these are again, emerging companies that might not be as well represented in the enterprise as they will be in a couple of years. >> Hugging Face sounds like something you do with your two year old. Like you said, you see high performers, AnyScale do machine learning and you mentioned them. They came out of Berkeley. Collibra Governance, InfluxData is on there. InfluxDB's a time series database. And yeah, of course, Alex, if you bring that back up, you get a big group of red dots, right? That's the bad zone, I guess, which Sisense does vis, Yellowbrick Data is a NPP database. How should we interpret the red dots, Erik? I mean, is it necessarily a bad thing? Could it be misinterpreted? What's your take on that? >> Sure, well, let me just explain the definition of it first from a data science perspective, right? We're a data company first. So the gray dots that you're seeing that aren't named, that's the mean that's the average. So in order for you to be on this chart, you have to be at least one standard deviation above or below that average. So that gray is where we're saying, "Hey, this is where the lump of average comes in. This is where everyone normally stands." So you either have to be an outperformer or an underperformer to even show up in this analysis. So by definition, yes, the red dots are bad. You're at least one standard deviation below the average of your peers. It's not where you want to be. And if you're on the lower left, not only are you not performing well from a utilization or an actual usage rate, but people don't even know who you are. So that's a problem, obviously. And the VCs and the PEs out there that are backing these companies, they're the ones who mostly are interested in this data. >> Yeah. Oh, that's great explanation. Thank you for that. No, nice benchmarking there and yeah, you don't want to be in the red. All right, let's get into the next segment here. Here going to look at evaluation rates, adoption and the all important churn. First new evaluations. Let's bring up that slide. And Erik, take us through this. >> So essentially I just want to explain what evaluation means is that people will cite that they either plan to evaluate the company or they're currently evaluating. So that means we're aware of 'em and we are choosing to do a POC of them. And then we'll see later how that turns into utilization, which is what a company wants to see, awareness, evaluation, and then actually utilizing them. That's sort of the life cycle for these emerging companies. So what we're seeing here, again, with very high evaluation rates. H2O, we mentioned. SecurityScorecard jumped up again. Chargebee, Snyk, Salt Security, Armis. A lot of security names are up here, Aqua, Netskope, which God has been around forever. I still can't believe it's in an Emerging Technology Survey But so many of these names fall in data and security again, which is why we decided to pick those out Dave. And on the lower side, Vena, Acton, those unfortunately took the dubious award of the lowest evaluations in our survey, but I prefer to focus on the positive. So SecurityScorecard, again, real standout in this one, they're in a security assessment space, basically. They'll come in and assess for you how your security hygiene is. And it's an area of a real interest right now amongst our ITDM community. >> Yeah, I mean, I think those, and then Arctic Wolf is up there too. They're doing managed services. You had mentioned Netskope. Yeah, okay. All right, let's look at now adoption. These are the companies whose offerings are being used the most and are above that standard deviation in the green. Take us through this, Erik. >> Sure, yet again, what we're looking at is, okay, we went from awareness, we went to evaluation. Now it's about utilization, which means a survey respondent's going to state "Yes, we evaluated and we plan to utilize it" or "It's already in our enterprise and we're actually allocating further resources to it." Not surprising, again, a lot of open source, the reason why, it's free. So it's really easy to grow your utilization on something that's free. But as you and I both know, as Red Hat proved, there's a lot of money to be made once the open source is adopted, right? You need the governance, you need the security, you need the support wrapped around it. So here we're seeing Kubernetes, Postgres, Apache Kafka, Jenkins, Grafana. These are all open source based names. But if we're looking at names that are non open source, we're going to see Databricks, Automation Anywhere, Rubrik all have the highest mindshare. So these are the names, not surprisingly, all names that probably should have been public by now. Everyone's expecting an IPO imminently. These are the names that have the highest mindshare. If we talk about the highest utilization rates, again, Miro and Figma pop up, and I know they're not household names, but they are just dominant in this survey. These are applications that are meant for design software and, again, they're going after an Autodesk or a CAD or Adobe type of thing. It is just dominant how high the utilization rates are here, which again is something Adobe should be paying attention to. And then you'll see a little bit lower, but also interesting, we see Collibra again, we see Hugging Face again. And these are names that are obviously in the data governance, ML, AI side. So we're seeing a ton of data, a ton of security and Rubrik was interesting in this one, too, high utilization and high mindshare. We know how pervasive they are in the enterprise already. >> Erik, Alex, keep that up for a second, if you would. So yeah, you mentioned Rubrik. Cohesity's not on there. They're sort of the big one. We're going to talk about them in a moment. Puppet is interesting to me because you remember the early days of that sort of space, you had Puppet and Chef and then you had Ansible. Red Hat bought Ansible and then Ansible really took off. So it's interesting to see Puppet on there as well. Okay. So now let's look at the churn because this one is where you don't want to be. It's, of course, all red 'cause churn is bad. Take us through this, Erik. >> Yeah, definitely don't want to be here and I don't love to dwell on the negative. So we won't spend as much time. But to your point, there's one thing I want to point out that think it's important. So you see Rubrik in the same spot, but Rubrik has so many citations in our survey that it actually would make sense that they're both being high utilization and churn just because they're so well represented. They have such a high overall representation in our survey. And the reason I call that out is Cohesity. Cohesity has an extremely high churn rate here about 17% and unlike Rubrik, they were not on the utilization side. So Rubrik is seeing both, Cohesity is not. It's not being utilized, but it's seeing a high churn. So that's the way you can look at this data and say, "Hm." Same thing with Puppet. You noticed that it was on the other slide. It's also on this one. So basically what it means is a lot of people are giving Puppet a shot, but it's starting to churn, which means it's not as sticky as we would like. One that was surprising on here for me was Tanium. It's kind of jumbled in there. It's hard to see in the middle, but Tanium, I was very surprised to see as high of a churn because what I do hear from our end user community is that people that use it, like it. It really kind of spreads into not only vulnerability management, but also that endpoint detection and response side. So I was surprised by that one, mostly to see Tanium in here. Mural, again, was another one of those application design softwares that's seeing a very high churn as well. >> So you're saying if you're in both... Alex, bring that back up if you would. So if you're in both like MariaDB is for example, I think, yeah, they're in both. They're both green in the previous one and red here, that's not as bad. You mentioned Rubrik is going to be in both. Cohesity is a bit of a concern. Cohesity just brought on Sanjay Poonen. So this could be a go to market issue, right? I mean, 'cause Cohesity has got a great product and they got really happy customers. So they're just maybe having to figure out, okay, what's the right ideal customer profile and Sanjay Poonen, I guarantee, is going to have that company cranking. I mean they had been doing very well on the surveys and had fallen off of a bit. The other interesting things wondering the previous survey I saw Cvent, which is an event platform. My only reason I pay attention to that is 'cause we actually have an event platform. We don't sell it separately. We bundle it as part of our offerings. And you see Hopin on here. Hopin raised a billion dollars during the pandemic. And we were like, "Wow, that's going to blow up." And so you see Hopin on the churn and you didn't see 'em in the previous chart, but that's sort of interesting. Like you said, let's not kind of dwell on the negative, but you really don't. You know, churn is a real big concern. Okay, now we're going to drill down into two sectors, security and data. Where data comprises three areas, database and data warehousing, machine learning and AI and big data analytics. So first let's take a look at the security sector. Now this is interesting because not only is it a sector drill down, but also gives an indicator of how much money the firm has raised, which is the size of that bubble. And to tell us if a company is punching above its weight and efficiently using its venture capital. Erik, take us through this slide. Explain the dots, the size of the dots. Set this up please. >> Yeah. So again, the axis is still the same, net sentiment and mindshare, but what we've done this time is we've taken publicly available information on how much capital company is raised and that'll be the size of the circle you see around the name. And then whether it's green or red is basically saying relative to the amount of money they've raised, how are they doing in our data? So when you see a Netskope, which has been around forever, raised a lot of money, that's why you're going to see them more leading towards red, 'cause it's just been around forever and kind of would expect it. Versus a name like SecurityScorecard, which is only raised a little bit of money and it's actually performing just as well, if not better than a name, like a Netskope. OneTrust doing absolutely incredible right now. BeyondTrust. We've seen the issues with Okta, right. So those are two names that play in that space that obviously are probably getting some looks about what's going on right now. Wiz, we've all heard about right? So raised a ton of money. It's doing well on net sentiment, but the mindshare isn't as well as you'd want, which is why you're going to see a little bit of that red versus a name like Aqua, which is doing container and application security. And hasn't raised as much money, but is really neck and neck with a name like Wiz. So that is why on a relative basis, you'll see that more green. As we all know, information security is never going away. But as we'll get to later in the program, Dave, I'm not sure in this current market environment, if people are as willing to do POCs and switch away from their security provider, right. There's a little bit of tepidness out there, a little trepidation. So right now we're seeing overall a slight pause, a slight cooling in overall evaluations on the security side versus historical levels a year ago. >> Now let's stay on here for a second. So a couple things I want to point out. So it's interesting. Now Snyk has raised over, I think $800 million but you can see them, they're high on the vertical and the horizontal, but now compare that to Lacework. It's hard to see, but they're kind of buried in the middle there. That's the biggest dot in this whole thing. I think I'm interpreting this correctly. They've raised over a billion dollars. It's a Mike Speiser company. He was the founding investor in Snowflake. So people watch that very closely, but that's an example of where they're not punching above their weight. They recently had a layoff and they got to fine tune things, but I'm still confident they they're going to do well. 'Cause they're approaching security as a data problem, which is probably people having trouble getting their arms around that. And then again, I see Arctic Wolf. They're not red, they're not green, but they've raised fair amount of money, but it's showing up to the right and decent level there. And a couple of the other ones that you mentioned, Netskope. Yeah, they've raised a lot of money, but they're actually performing where you want. What you don't want is where Lacework is, right. They've got some work to do to really take advantage of the money that they raised last November and prior to that. >> Yeah, if you're seeing that more neutral color, like you're calling out with an Arctic Wolf, like that means relative to their peers, this is where they should be. It's when you're seeing that red on a Lacework where we all know, wow, you raised a ton of money and your mindshare isn't where it should be. Your net sentiment is not where it should be comparatively. And then you see these great standouts, like Salt Security and SecurityScorecard and Abnormal. You know they haven't raised that much money yet, but their net sentiment's higher and their mindshare's doing well. So those basically in a nutshell, if you're a PE or a VC and you see a small green circle, then you're doing well, then it means you made a good investment. >> Some of these guys, I don't know, but you see these small green circles. Those are the ones you want to start digging into and maybe help them catch a wave. Okay, let's get into the data discussion. And again, three areas, database slash data warehousing, big data analytics and ML AI. First, we're going to look at the database sector. So Alex, thank you for bringing that up. Alright, take us through this, Erik. Actually, let me just say Postgres SQL. I got to ask you about this. It shows some funding, but that actually could be a mix of EDB, the company that commercializes Postgres and Postgres the open source database, which is a transaction system and kind of an open source Oracle. You see MariaDB is a database, but open source database. But the companies they've raised over $200 million and they filed an S-4. So Erik looks like this might be a little bit of mashup of companies and open source products. Help us understand this. >> Yeah, it's tough when you start dealing with the open source side and I'll be honest with you, there is a little bit of a mashup here. There are certain names here that are a hundred percent for profit companies. And then there are others that are obviously open source based like Redis is open source, but Redis Labs is the one trying to monetize the support around it. So you're a hundred percent accurate on this slide. I think one of the things here that's important to note though, is just how important open source is to data. If you're going to be going to any of these areas, it's going to be open source based to begin with. And Neo4j is one I want to call out here. It's not one everyone's familiar with, but it's basically geographical charting database, which is a name that we're seeing on a net sentiment side actually really, really high. When you think about it's the third overall net sentiment for a niche database play. It's not as big on the mindshare 'cause it's use cases aren't as often, but third biggest play on net sentiment. I found really interesting on this slide. >> And again, so MariaDB, as I said, they filed an S-4 I think $50 million in revenue, that might even be ARR. So they're not huge, but they're getting there. And by the way, MariaDB, if you don't know, was the company that was formed the day that Oracle bought Sun in which they got MySQL and MariaDB has done a really good job of replacing a lot of MySQL instances. Oracle has responded with MySQL HeatWave, which was kind of the Oracle version of MySQL. So there's some interesting battles going on there. If you think about the LAMP stack, the M in the LAMP stack was MySQL. And so now it's all MariaDB replacing that MySQL for a large part. And then you see again, the red, you know, you got to have some concerns about there. Aerospike's been around for a long time. SingleStore changed their name a couple years ago, last year. Yellowbrick Data, Fire Bolt was kind of going after Snowflake for a while, but yeah, you want to get out of that red zone. So they got some work to do. >> And Dave, real quick for the people that aren't aware, I just want to let them know that we can cut this data with the public company data as well. So we can cross over this with that because some of these names are competing with the larger public company names as well. So we can go ahead and cross reference like a MariaDB with a Mongo, for instance, or of something of that nature. So it's not in this slide, but at another point we can certainly explain on a relative basis how these private names are doing compared to the other ones as well. >> All right, let's take a quick look at analytics. Alex, bring that up if you would. Go ahead, Erik. >> Yeah, I mean, essentially here, I can't see it on my screen, my apologies. I just kind of went to blank on that. So gimme one second to catch up. >> So I could set it up while you're doing that. You got Grafana up and to the right. I mean, this is huge right. >> Got it thank you. I lost my screen there for a second. Yep. Again, open source name Grafana, absolutely up and to the right. But as we know, Grafana Labs is actually picking up a lot of speed based on Grafana, of course. And I think we might actually hear some noise from them coming this year. The names that are actually a little bit more disappointing than I want to call out are names like ThoughtSpot. It's been around forever. Their mindshare of course is second best here but based on the amount of time they've been around and the amount of money they've raised, it's not actually outperforming the way it should be. We're seeing Moogsoft obviously make some waves. That's very high net sentiment for that company. It's, you know, what, third, fourth position overall in this entire area, Another name like Fivetran, Matillion is doing well. Fivetran, even though it's got a high net sentiment, again, it's raised so much money that we would've expected a little bit more at this point. I know you know this space extremely well, but basically what we're looking at here and to the bottom left, you're going to see some names with a lot of red, large circles that really just aren't performing that well. InfluxData, however, second highest net sentiment. And it's really pretty early on in this stage and the feedback we're getting on this name is the use cases are great, the efficacy's great. And I think it's one to watch out for. >> InfluxData, time series database. The other interesting things I just noticed here, you got Tamer on here, which is that little small green. Those are the ones we were saying before, look for those guys. They might be some of the interesting companies out there and then observe Jeremy Burton's company. They do observability on top of Snowflake, not green, but kind of in that gray. So that's kind of cool. Monte Carlo is another one, they're sort of slightly green. They are doing some really interesting things in data and data mesh. So yeah, okay. So I can spend all day on this stuff, Erik, phenomenal data. I got to get back and really dig in. Let's end with machine learning and AI. Now this chart it's similar in its dimensions, of course, except for the money raised. We're not showing that size of the bubble, but AI is so hot. We wanted to cover that here, Erik, explain this please. Why TensorFlow is highlighted and walk us through this chart. >> Yeah, it's funny yet again, right? Another open source name, TensorFlow being up there. And I just want to explain, we do break out machine learning, AI is its own sector. A lot of this of course really is intertwined with the data side, but it is on its own area. And one of the things I think that's most important here to break out is Databricks. We started to cover Databricks in machine learning, AI. That company has grown into much, much more than that. So I do want to state to you Dave, and also the audience out there that moving forward, we're going to be moving Databricks out of only the MA/AI into other sectors. So we can kind of value them against their peers a little bit better. But in this instance, you could just see how dominant they are in this area. And one thing that's not here, but I do want to point out is that we have the ability to break this down by industry vertical, organization size. And when I break this down into Fortune 500 and Fortune 1000, both Databricks and Tensorflow are even better than you see here. So it's quite interesting to see that the names that are succeeding are also succeeding with the largest organizations in the world. And as we know, large organizations means large budgets. So this is one area that I just thought was really interesting to point out that as we break it down, the data by vertical, these two names still are the outstanding players. >> I just also want to call it H2O.ai. They're getting a lot of buzz in the marketplace and I'm seeing them a lot more. Anaconda, another one. Dataiku consistently popping up. DataRobot is also interesting because all the kerfuffle that's going on there. The Cube guy, Cube alum, Chris Lynch stepped down as executive chairman. All this stuff came out about how the executives were taking money off the table and didn't allow the employees to participate in that money raising deal. So that's pissed a lot of people off. And so they're now going through some kind of uncomfortable things, which is unfortunate because DataRobot, I noticed, we haven't covered them that much in "Breaking Analysis", but I've noticed them oftentimes, Erik, in the surveys doing really well. So you would think that company has a lot of potential. But yeah, it's an important space that we're going to continue to watch. Let me ask you Erik, can you contextualize this from a time series standpoint? I mean, how is this changed over time? >> Yeah, again, not show here, but in the data. I'm sorry, go ahead. >> No, I'm sorry. What I meant, I should have interjected. In other words, you would think in a downturn that these emerging companies would be less interesting to buyers 'cause they're more risky. What have you seen? >> Yeah, and it was interesting before we went live, you and I were having this conversation about "Is the downturn stopping people from evaluating these private companies or not," right. In a larger sense, that's really what we're doing here. How are these private companies doing when it comes down to the actual practitioners? The people with the budget, the people with the decision making. And so what I did is, we have historical data as you know, I went back to the Emerging Technology Survey we did in November of 21, right at the crest right before the market started to really fall and everything kind of started to fall apart there. And what I noticed is on the security side, very much so, we're seeing less evaluations than we were in November 21. So I broke it down. On cloud security, net sentiment went from 21% to 16% from November '21. That's a pretty big drop. And again, that sentiment is our one aggregate metric for overall positivity, meaning utilization and actual evaluation of the name. Again in database, we saw it drop a little bit from 19% to 13%. However, in analytics we actually saw it stay steady. So it's pretty interesting that yes, cloud security and security in general is always going to be important. But right now we're seeing less overall net sentiment in that space. But within analytics, we're seeing steady with growing mindshare. And also to your point earlier in machine learning, AI, we're seeing steady net sentiment and mindshare has grown a whopping 25% to 30%. So despite the downturn, we're seeing more awareness of these companies in analytics and machine learning and a steady, actual utilization of them. I can't say the same in security and database. They're actually shrinking a little bit since the end of last year. >> You know it's interesting, we were on a round table, Erik does these round tables with CISOs and CIOs, and I remember one time you had asked the question, "How do you think about some of these emerging tech companies?" And one of the executives said, "I always include somebody in the bottom left of the Gartner Magic Quadrant in my RFPs. I think he said, "That's how I found," I don't know, it was Zscaler or something like that years before anybody ever knew of them "Because they're going to help me get to the next level." So it's interesting to see Erik in these sectors, how they're holding up in many cases. >> Yeah. It's a very important part for the actual IT practitioners themselves. There's always contracts coming up and you always have to worry about your next round of negotiations. And that's one of the roles these guys play. You have to do a POC when contracts come up, but it's also their job to stay on top of the new technology. You can't fall behind. Like everyone's a software company. Now everyone's a tech company, no matter what you're doing. So these guys have to stay in on top of it. And that's what this ETS can do. You can go in here and look and say, "All right, I'm going to evaluate their technology," and it could be twofold. It might be that you're ready to upgrade your technology and they're actually pushing the envelope or it simply might be I'm using them as a negotiation ploy. So when I go back to the big guy who I have full intentions of writing that contract to, at least I have some negotiation leverage. >> Erik, we got to leave it there. I could spend all day. I'm going to definitely dig into this on my own time. Thank you for introducing this, really appreciate your time today. >> I always enjoy it, Dave and I hope everyone out there has a great holiday weekend. Enjoy the rest of the summer. And, you know, I love to talk data. So anytime you want, just point the camera on me and I'll start talking data. >> You got it. I also want to thank the team at ETR, not only Erik, but Darren Bramen who's a data scientist, really helped prepare this data, the entire team over at ETR. I cannot tell you how much additional data there is. We are just scratching the surface in this "Breaking Analysis". So great job guys. I want to thank Alex Myerson. Who's on production and he manages the podcast. Ken Shifman as well, who's just coming back from VMware Explore. Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight help get the word out on social media and in our newsletters. And Rob Hof is our editor in chief over at SiliconANGLE. Does some great editing for us. Thank you. All of you guys. Remember these episodes, they're all available as podcast, wherever you listen. All you got to do is just search "Breaking Analysis" podcast. I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. Or you can email me to get in touch david.vellante@siliconangle.com. You can DM me at dvellante or comment on my LinkedIn posts and please do check out etr.ai for the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for Erik Bradley and The Cube Insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching. Be well. And we'll see you next time on "Breaking Analysis". (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Commvault Future Ready 2020 brought to you by Commvault. >> Hi and welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Commvault Future Ready. I'm Stu Miniman and I'm joined by David Vellante here. Of course, we just had the keynote for Commvault Future Ready, Sanjay Mirchandani, CEO. Dave, he's been there a little bit over a year. We've been watching the transformation of Commvault as they are trying to go much deeper in the cloud. Of course, the space, data protection overall, backup and recovery, been a super hot one. Especially, if you talk about everybody accelerating what they're doing with the cloud, Dave, from an end user standpoint, as well as for Commvault. So why don't we start with the company first, as I said, the move to subscription, the move to cloud, a lot of change needed, and that's one of the reasons they brought Sanjay into the company. Of course, he'd been at Puppet before that, he was the CIO of EMC before that. So Dave, tell us your thoughts lately on Commvault. >> Okay, so Commvault, obviously Stu, has been around for a long, long time, and it's kind of a diversified player in the data protection space. I've always felt like they've had a more diversified sort of vision and portfolio. Sanjay took over, what was it February last year, right? So he kind of came in and inherited a company in transition. And transitioning from what has largely been a legacy sort of on-prem, perpetual software licensed business to now one that's transferring into a subscription based model, obviously a large maintenance base. I think about 60% of their revenues comes from services, and most of that is maintenance, okay? So he's inherited that, and then they're going into a subscription model. So that's going to hit the income statement, and then boom COVID hits. So Sanjay is getting it all from all sides, but Commvault is a 670, roughly, million dollar company on a trailing 12 month basis. And the market cap's in the 1.7, 1.8 range, so they trade at about 2.7 times revenue. So that's much better than a hardware company, but it should be better than that as a software company. So the challenge that he has is, okay, how do we get the company growing again? How do we transition to that subscription based model? The good news on Commvault is their balance sheet is tremendous. I mean, they have no debt, no debt. I mean, several hundred million dollars in cash, over 300 million and zero debt, which kind of interesting to me, Stu. Because many companies during this COVID pandemic have tapped the credit markets, Commvault has chosen not to. Maybe they should right now with such low interest rates, and maybe that can help get the growth engine going. But I think they're very conservative in that standpoint and obviously very proud of their balance sheet, but with the likes of Cohesity and Rubrik, and I know we're going to talk about that pouring money into the market, trying to attack them, and we'll talk more about their position relative to those guys, you might like to see 'em raise a little bit of money or take on some debt and really go after some of those opportunities that you referred to upfront, it is a hot market. >> Yeah, well, Dave, you talk about some of the newer entrants raised just insane amounts of money when you talk about that space. Not only Cohesity and Rubrik, but also talked about Veem. Of course, we've watched Veem go from a change in ownership and how much money they have. And from a revenue standpoint, Veem actually might be bigger than Commvault at this point, I believe, right? >> Yeah, I think so. I mean, they're billion dollar bookings, they say. I mean, I believe it, but they're a privately held company. Commvault, we can tell actually what their numbers are. Guaranteed Cohesity and Rubrik are losing money. So their cost of acquiring a customer is huge. Commvault is, let's face it, it's servicing its install base, and it's mining that. And that's why it's, it's cashflow positive. I mean, it's a very healthy company financially. The challenge that, again, Sanjay has is how do you get growth? They're a company, as I said earlier, in transition. Let me share with you, if I may, some data from our friends at ETR. What we're showing here is the fundamental methodology of ETR, which is that net score, Stu. We talk about that all the time, ETR is, as I say, our data partner, Enterprise Technology Research. Every quarter, they go out and they say, "Based for each company and their various segments, "are you adopting new?" That's the lime green, that's the 2%. "Are you increasing spending?" That's the 30%, and this is from the July survey so this is relative to the first half. "Are you flat?" You can see that fat middle 56%, and then you can see decrease is 7% and that's in the pink, and then 5% replacing. So good news here is more people are spending more, more customers spending more, than are spending less. Net score's the red subtracted from the green, so it comes out at roughly 20%, which is that's certainly not terrible. It's a legacy company that's been around a long time. So you would see a company that's a newbie, that's hot. We'd always talked about UI path automation anywhere, Snowflake, they're in the 70% range, but they're much, much smaller companies but they're growing very, very rapidly. So this is respectable and very common for a company that has been around as long as Commvault. >> Yeah, thanks so much for sharing that data, Dave. Of course, as you said, huge customer base, they've been around for awhile. I remember when we first did Commvault GO two years ago, very excited, very engaged user base. There was a good strategy discussion and an understanding for what Commvault needed to do to get to the cloud, but there was an understanding that they couldn't keep doing with the same team what had brought them to the place before. You always say, Dave, what got you to where you were isn't going to get you to where you need to go. Talk a little bit about the keynote. Last year at Commvault there were a couple of big pieces. Number one, is they really had their first SaaS offering with Metallic. And what the momentum has been on Metallic is, first of all, they made a big partnership announcement with Microsoft ahead of this event. Multi-year, Metallic has a few different solutions. One of them, of course, is to work on Office 365, so when we go to SaaS and we go to the cloud, we understand that data protection isn't something that just comes inherently. Some people thought, "Oh hey, I did it "in my own data center, but once I go to the cloud, well, "I'm sure it just takes care of things "like data protection and security." The answer is I still need to think about it, and the ecosystem has helped filling that gap. So Metallic was the first step and what we saw, Dave, really looks like a holistic refresh of the product line. Commvault back in recovery, Commvault disaster recovery, Commvault complete data protection, all aligning themselves to be more to what you were talking about, going to that full ratable model, and the other piece was Hedvig. So Hedvig software company, helping them to be in more cloud-native environments. And they launched a Hedvig X, so it's the full integration of that solution. Less than a year from the acquisition to fully integrating it and making it an offering that's ready for what they're doing. >> Is that they're cloud play? Actually Hedvig is sort of in that space, right? As with cloud you think subscription, but also Commvault is basically putting its stack in the cloud, right? And taking advantage of cloud services, right? >> Yeah, absolutely, Dave. Metallic, specifically is built for the cloud. >> So let's talk a little bit about cloud, I have some other data here. And the cloud, if you pull up that next slide, the cloud has been eating away at on-prem vendors. We know it's been growing at 2000, 3000 basis points higher than the on-prem business. But what this slide shows is that same net score methodology that we talked about before, but it's filtering, you can see in the left hand side here, it's filtering on AWS, Google and Microsoft. So there's 585, AWS, Google and Microsoft customers in the ETR dataset. There's like about 1200 in the overall survey this quarter. And this shows the over time the net score of Commvault in those accounts, so you can see, as I was saying, go back to 2018, you can see prior to Sanjay taking over this thing was dipping and dipping, losing momentum coming into kind of the April survey and then July survey of 2019, and it's kind of bouncing off the bottom now. So it seems like they're making some progress there, and what we want to see is that momentum continue to grow. Again, net score is a measure of spending velocity. So what you want to see is as that transition occurs more sort of a net score increases over each quarter. >> Yeah, well, Dave as you mentioned earlier, there absolutely are some headwinds potentially there, but it looks like Sanjay, at least, has stopped some of the bleeding on this and, stated goal of course, to return to growth. And so we would want to see that go from just up one or 2% to be able to track with the cloud. Probably a good time for us to talk a little bit about the competition, Dave, because if you talk just in cloud markets, are you tracking along with the cloud? So the hyperscales themselves, of course, growing at very huge percent. A company that's been around as long as Veritas isn't necessarily going to be doing 35 to 70% growth as you would see from AWS or Azure. But what do you see out there for some of the competition in general, who were some of the key players that we need to look at? >> Yeah, so I mean, think about the backup guys. I mean, the traditional space, you've mentioned Veritas. Veritas, by the way, in the ETR survey data is not playing well, they're in the red. They've been losing share, the share donors, as they say, you've got some big players, Dell EMC, obviously, kind of living off the data domain base. Remember Dell EMC fell behind, prior to the Dell acquisition, they weren't investing heavily in the data protection business. They were kind of living milking off that data domain base. Back when you were there, they had the networker and they had Avamar, and so there was a bifurcated thing. Frank Slootman came and he tried to clean some of that up, but then he was onto his next big thing, of course, it was ServiceNow. And so, you know, Dell is a big footprint, obviously, but they're very hardware centric, as you know, so they have a big hardware agenda. IBM with Spectrum Protect, Veem was hurting them. They did the deal with Catalogic to kind of stop the bleeding, he kind of did. Again, big install base, and then you got the sort of newcomers. Veem is not really a newcomer anymore. I think they've been around for 15 years, big acquisition. Decent momentum in the market, especially started the Microsoft base, and they're kind of everywhere, so you see them. And of course you see Cohesity and Rubrik spend a lot of money, as you said. And it's interesting, let me pull up this next data point. In the ETR data set this past quarter you saw Cohesity actually overtake Rubrik. Rubrik was very, very strong earlier on. They're kind of neck and neck in this chart, what this chart shows is not net score, it's now market share. Now market shares, not real market shares, Stu. I have to be cautious here because it's not like IDC tracks market share. What it is is pervasiveness in the dataset. So in other words, within this segment, the number of mentions of the vendor divided by the total mentions in the segment, okay? So it's really pervasiveness or presence in the data set. And what this shows is you can see we've got 65 Commvault customers in the survey, and it shows the impact of Veem, Rubrik and Cohesity in the Commvault base. And you can see up through, let's see, that's the recent surveys is you see the increases up to the increasing red line is Veem, and then you got the Rubrik line and then the Cohesity line, but they're all recently, since the October 19th survey, down, trending down. So that says to me that Commvault is holding serve within its own base and actually doing better as these guys are declining in this base. You can see the comment that ETR made, "Rubrik, Cohesity and Veeam are all seeing "market share declines in shared accounts with Commvault," so that's good news. I think this is very important, Stu, and here's why. Is Commvault has got to hunker down and maintain those customers. It does not want to be a share donor much in the same way that Veritas has been. So that's a quick scan of the competitive marketplace. And again, from my standpoint, I'd like to see Sanjay maybe get a little bit more aggressive. I liked the acquisitions. Hedvig, it's great, deal with actually some more subscription, but I'd like to see them go hard after a cloud native. I have to dig into that, maybe you can comment, but really cloud native and multicloud across clouds being able to have that same experience on-prem as I do in the clouds at very high performance, very low latency. >> Yeah. Well, Dave, first of all, one thing, talk about the competitive win rate. That's something you always look at is how are you doing against the competitors? Not only did Sanjay come in, but you saw changes along how the channel chief, I believe, and the salespeople. So definitely reinvigorating that piece of it, as well as, Dave we saw, in the keynote. So the portfolio is updated, an aggressive engineering investment, some through acquisition, some through changing the code and moving in these environments, leveraging partnerships, great to see the Microsoft one, love to see something along the lines of Google. We understand Amazon, you play in that ecosystem, it is challenging to necessarily partner deeply with AWS, unless you're one of a few strong players in the marketplace, but working closer in cloud. And Dave, one thing I'd point out, last year, one of the things that really impressed me at Commvault GO is they did have some good developer actions. So when you talk about cloud native, of course, enabling developers is one of the key things. Like many companies out there, inside the company you've got developers, so how are you unleashing that? So Hedvig, a good acquisition along those lines, but you know, in the middle of the show floor, they had people that you set up with whiteboards and just go at it. So, you know, reminds me of days past when you used to have these engineering-driven shows where you could go in and really understand that. So helping to developers, enable them, backup and recovery just needs to tie into all my DevOps and IT Ops and all my other environments to make things just more automated because also you talk cloud native, Dave, automation has to be a big piece of it. And to your point, we actually have really good guests coming on the program. Not only will we have Sanjay, relatively fresh off the keynote, I've got a panel with the product people to really dig in and understand that. We'll poke and prod at some of the cloud native pieces and understand where that's going, got their head of strategy also on the program. >> Yes, I think you're making a great point about automation. Just speaking about M&A for a moment, I like M&A, I like growth through M&A, I'm comfortable with that as long as it fits into the portfolio. Your point about automation, I see opportunities there for M&A, things like visibility, observability, obviously hot analytics, automated operations, IT Ops, anything that sort of removes labor and complexity and gives me visibility across clouds. That I think is something that could be interesting, again, as long as it fits into the portfolio. I'll say this, I mean, Sanjay was at EMC and knows M&A because I've no doubt they were bringing all their M&A candidates to Sanjay and saying, "Okay, what do you think of this tech, do you use it?" Probably kick the tires a little bit, so he, I'm sure, was a part of those. I'm sure he saw the good, the bad, and the ugly. You were there, EMC was pretty good at acquisitions, but then it got a little out of control. >> And Dave, talk automation, Sanjay came from Puppet. Puppet was one of the early companies along helping people move along from those manual tasks to how can we automate those? So, absolutely, Sanjay now a little over a year in there, starting to see from the product standpoint, and expect to see some of the trailing results as to how that moves forward. >> And then again, blending that, if it's a tuck in or whatever, maybe there's some big chess move out there. I would just suspect given Commvault's conservative nature you wouldn't see that. Although, they could do it. I mean, at their revenue level, their balance sheet would allow them to raise some debt, if they wanted to do that now would be the time to do it. But it's interesting, everybody's doing it and they're not. So I kind of liked the contrarian play. Given the opportunity in the market, given the TAM expansion through, beyond backup into data management, and it's a cloud and multicloud, I do think there's maybe an opportunity for them to be a little bit more aggressive. >> All right, well, Dave, thanks so much for helping us dig in and kick off our coverage. >> You're welcome, Stu. >> All right, stay with us. We have a bunch of interviews here for Commvault Future Ready. I'm Stu Miniman, and thank you for watching theCUBE. (gentle music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> As you may recall, coming into the second part of 2019 we reported, based on ETR Survey data, that there was a narrowing of spending on emerging tech and an unplugging of a lot of legacy systems. This was really because people were going from experimentation into operationalizing their digital initiatives. When COVID hit, conventional wisdom suggested that there would be a flight to safety. Now, interestingly, we reported with Eric Bradley, based on one of the Venns, that a lot of CIOs were still experimenting with emerging vendors. But this was very anecdotal. Today, we have more data, fresh data, from the ETR Emerging Technology Study on private companies, which really does suggest that there's a notable decline in experimentation, and that's affecting emerging technology vendors. Hi, everybody, this is Dave Vellante, and welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube Insights, powered by ETR. Once again, Sagar Kadakia is joining us. Sagar is the Director of Research at ETR. Sagar, good to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Good to see you again. Thanks for having me, Dave. >> So, it's really important to point out, this Emerging Tech Study that you guys do, it's different from your quarterly Technology Spending Intention Survey. Take us through the methodology. Guys, maybe you could bring up the first chart. And, Sagar, walk us through how you guys approach this. >> No problem. So, a lot of the viewers are used to seeing a lot of the results from the Technology Spending Intention Survey, or the TSIS, as we call it. That study, as the title says, it really tracks spending intentions on more pervasive vendors, right, Microsoft, AWS, as an example. What we're going to look at today is our Emerging Technology Study, which we conduct biannually, in May and November. This study is a little bit different. We ask CIOs around evaluations, awareness, planned evaluations, so think of this as pre-spend, right. So that's a major differentiator from the TSIS. That, and this study, really focuses on private emerging providers. We're really only focused on those really emerging private companies, say, like your Series B to Series G or H, whatever it may be, so, two big differences within those studies. And then today what we're really going to look at is the results from the Emerging Technology Study. Just a couple of quick things here. We had 811 CIOs participate, which represents about 380 billion in annual IT spend, so the results from this study matter. We had almost 75 Fortune 100s take it. So, again, we're really measuring how private emerging providers are doing in the largest organizations. And so today we're going to be reviewing notable sectors, but largely this survey tracks roughly 356 private technologies and frameworks. >> All right, guys, bring up the pie chart, the next slide. Now, Sagar, this is sort of a snapshot here, and it basically says that 44% of CIOs agree that COVID has decreased the organization's evaluation and utilization of emerging tech, despite what I mentioned, Eric Bradley's Venn, which suggested one CIO in particular said, "Hey, I always pick somebody in the lower left "of the magic quadrant." But, again, this is a static view. I know we have some other data, but take us through this, and how this compares to other surveys that you've done. >> No problem. So let's start with the high level takeaways. And I'll actually kind of get into to the point that Eric was debating, 'cause that point is true. It's just really how you kind of slice and dice the data to get to that. So, what you're looking at here, and what the overall takeaway from the Emerging Technology Study was, is, you know, you are going to see notable declines in POCs, of proof-of-concepts, any valuations because of COVID-19. Even though we had been communicating for quite some time, you know, the last few months, that there's increasing pressure for companies to further digitize with COVID-19, there are IT budget constraints. There is a huge pivot in IT resources towards supporting remote employees, a decrease in risk tolerance, and so that's why what you're seeing here is a rather notable number of CIOs, 44%, that said that they are decreasing their organization's evaluation and utilization of private emerging providers. So that is notable. >> Now, as you pointed out, you guys run this survey a couple of times a year. So now let's look at the time series. Guys, if you bring up the next chart. We can see how the sentiment has changed since last year. And, of course, we're isolating here on some of larger companies. So, take us through what this data means. >> No problem. So, how do we quantify what we just saw in the prior slide? We saw 44% of CIOs indicating that they are going to be decreasing their evaluations. But what exactly does that mean? We can pretty much determine that by looking at a lot of the data that we captured through our Emerging Technology Study. There's a lot going on in this slide, but I'll walk you through it. What you're looking at here is Fortune 1000 organizations, so we've really isolated the data to those organizations that matter. So, let's start with the teal, kind of green line first, because I think it's a little bit easier to understand. What you're looking at, Fortune 1000 evaluations, both planned and current, okay? And you're looking at a time series, one year ago and six months ago. So, two of the answer options that we provide CIOs in this survey, right, think about the survey as a grid, where you have seven answer options going horizontally, and then 300-plus vendors and technologies going vertically. For any given vendor, they can essentially indicate one of these options, two of them being on currently evaluating them or I plan to evaluate them in six months. So what you're looking at here is effectively the aggregate number, or the average number of Fortune 1000 evaluations. So if you look into May 2019, all the way on the left of that chart, that 24% roughly means that a quarter of selections made by Fortune 1000 of the survey, they selected plan to evaluate or currently evaluating. If you fast-forward six months, to the middle of the chart, November '19, it's roughly the same, one in four technologies that are Fortune 1000 selected, they indicated that I plan or am currently evaluating them. But now look at that big drop off going into May 2020, the 17%, right? So now one out of every six technologies, or one out of every selections that they made was an evaluation. So a very notable drop. And then if you look at the blue line, this is another answer option that we provided CIOs: I'm aware of the technology but I have no plans to evaluate. So this answer option essentially tracks awareness levels. If you look at the last six months, look at that big uptick from 44% to over 50%, right? So now, essentially one out of every two technologies, or private technologies that a CIO is aware of, they have no plans to evaluate. So this is going to have an impact on the general landscape, when we think about those private emerging providers. But there is one caveat, and, Dave, this is what you mentioned earlier, this is what Eric was talking about. The providers that are doing well are the ones that are work-from-home aligned. And so, just like a few years ago, we were really analyzing results based on are you cloud-native or are you Cloud-aligned, because those technologies are going to do the best, what we're seeing in the emerging space is now the same thing. Those emerging providers that enable organizations to maintain productivity for their employees, essentially allowing their employees to work remotely, those emerging providers are still doing well. And that is probably the second biggest takeaway from this study. >> So now what we're seeing here is this flight to perceive safety, which, to your point, Sagar, doesn't necessarily mean good news for all enterprise tech vendors, but certainly for those that are positioned for the work-from-home pivot. So now let's take a look at a couple of sectors. We'll start with information security. We've reported for years about how the perimeter's been broken down, and that more spend was going to shift from inside the moat to a distributed network, and that's clearly what's happened as a result of COVID. Guys, if you bring up the next chart. Sagar, you take us through this. >> No problem. And as you imagine, I think that the big theme here is zero trust. So, a couple of things here. And let me just explain this chart a little bit, because we're going to be going through a couple of these. What you're seeing on the X-axis here, is this is effectively what we're classifying as near term growth opportunity from all customers. The way we measure that effectively is we look at all the evaluations, current evaluations, planned evaluations, we look at people who are evaluated and plan to utilize these vendors. The more indications you get on that the more to the top right you're going to be. The more indications you get around I'm aware of but I don't plan to evaluate, or I'm replacing this early-stage vendor, the further down and on the left you're going to be. So, on the X-axis you have near term growth opportunity from all customers, and on the Y-axis you have near term growth opportunity from, really, the biggest shops in the world, your Global 2000, your Forbes Private 225, like Cargill, as an example, and then, of course, your federal agencies. So you really want to be positioned up and to the right here. So, the big takeaway here is zero trust. So, just a couple of things on this slide when we think about zero trust. As organizations accelerate their Cloud and Saas spend because of COVID-19, and, you know, what we were talking about earlier, Dave, remote work becomes the new normal, that perimeter security approach is losing appeal, because the perimeter's less defined, right? Apps and data are increasingly being stored in the Cloud. That, and employees are working remotely from everywhere, and they're accessing all of these items. And so what we're seeing now is a big move into zero trust. So, if we look at that chart again, what you're going to see in that upper right quadrant are a lot of identity and access management players. And look at the bifurcation in general. This is what we were talking about earlier in terms of the landscape not doing well. Most security vendors are in that red area, you know, in the middle to the bottom. But if you look at the top right, what are you seeing here? Unify ID, Auth0, WSO2, right, all identity and access management players. These are critical in your zero trust approach, and this is one of the few area where we are seeing upticks. You also see here BitSight, Lucideus. So that's going to be security assessment. You're seeing VECTRA and Netskope and Darktrace, and a few others here. And Cloud Security and IDPS, Intrusion Detection and Prevention System. So, very few sectors are seeing an uptick, very few security sectors actually look pretty good, based on opportunities that are coming. But, essentially, all of them are in that work-from-home aligned security stack, so to speak. >> Right, and of course, as we know, as we've been reporting, buyers have options, from both established companies and these emerging companies that are public, Okta, CrowdStrike, Zscaler. We've seen the work-from-home pivot benefit those guys, but even Palo Alto Networks, even CISCO, I asked (other speaker drowns out speech) last week, I said, "Hey, what about this pivot to work from home? "What about this zero trust?" And he said, "Look, the reality is, yes, "a big part of our portfolio is exposed "to that traditional infrastructure, "but we have options for zero trust as well." So, from a buyer's standpoint, that perceived flight to safety, you have a lot of established vendors, and that clearly is showing up in your data. Now, the other sector that we want to talk about is database. We've been reporting a lot on database, data warehouse. So, why don't you take us through the next graphic here, if you would. >> Sagar: No problem. So, our theme here is that Snowflake is really separating itself from the pack, and, again, you can see that here. Private database and data warehousing vendors really continue to impact a lot of their public peers, and Snowflake is leading the way. We expect Snowflake to gain momentum in the next few years. And, look, there's some rumors that IPOing soon. And so when we think about that set-up, we like it, because as organizations transition away from hybrid Cloud architectures to 100% or near-100% public Cloud, Snowflake is really going to benefit. So they look good, their data stacks look pretty good, right, that's resiliency, redundancy across data centers. So we kind of like them as well. Redis Labs bring a DB and they look pretty good here on the opportunity side, but we are seeing a little bit of churn, so I think probably Snowflake and DataStax are probably our two favorites here. And again, when you think about Snowflake, we continue to think more pervasive vendors, like Paradata and Cloudera, and some of the other larger database firms, they're going to continue seeing wallet and market share losses due to some of these emerging providers. >> Yeah. If you could just keep that slide up for a second, I would point out, in many ways Snowflake is kind of a safer bet, you know, we talk about flight to safety, because they're well-funded, they're established. You can go from zero to Snowflake very quickly, that's sort of their mantra, if you will. But I want to point out and recognize that it is somewhat oranges and tangerines here, Snowflake being an analytical database. You take MariaDB, for instance, I look at that, anyway, as relational and operational. And then you mentioned DataStax. I would say Couchbase, Redis Labs, Aerospike. Cockroach is really a... EValue Store. You've got some non-relational databases in there. But we're looking at the entire sector of databases, which has become a really interesting market. But again, some of those established players are going to do very well, and I would put Snowflake on that cusp. As you pointed out, Bloomberg broke the story, I think last week, that they were contemplating an IPO, which we've known for a while. >> Yeah. And just one last thing on that. We do like some of the more pervasive players, right. Obviously, AWS, all their products, Redshift and DynamoDB. Microsoft looks really good. It's just really some of the other legacy ones, like the Teradatas, the Oracles, the Hadoops, right, that we are going to be impacted. And so the claw providers look really good. >> So, the last decade has really brought forth this whole notion of DevOps, infrastructure as code, the whole API economy. And that's the piece we want to jump into now. And there are some real stand-outs here, you know, despite the early data that we showed you, where CIOs are less prone to look at emerging vendors. There are some, for instance, if you bring up the next chart, guys, like Hashi, that really are standing out, aren't they? >> That's right, Dave. So, again, what you're seeing here is you're seeing that bifurcation that we were talking about earlier. There are a lot of infrastructure software vendors that are not positioned well, but if you look at the ones at the top right that are positioned well... We have two kind of things on here, starting with infrastructure automation. We think a winner here is emerging with Terraform. Look all the way up to the right, how well-positioned they are, how many opportunities they're getting. And for the second straight survey now, Terraform is leading along their peers, Chef, Puppet, SaltStack. And they're leading their peers in so many different categories, notably on allocating more spend, which is obviously very important. For Chef, Puppet and SaltStack, which you can see a little bit below, probably a little bit higher than the middle, we are seeing some elevator churn levels. And so, really, Terraform looks like they're kind of separating themselves. And we've got this great quote from the CIO just a few months ago, on why Terraform is likely pulling away, and I'll read it out here quickly. "The Terraform tool creates "an entire infrastructure in a box. "Unlike vendors that use procedural languages, "like Ants, Bull and Chef, "it will show you the infrastructure "in the way you want it to be. "You don't have to worry about "the things that happen underneath." I know some companies where you can put your entire Amazon infrastructure through Terraform. If Amazon disappears, if your availability drops, load balancers, RDS, everything, you just run Terraform and everything will be created in 10 to 15 minutes. So that shows you the power of Terraform and why we think it's ranked better than some of the other vendors. >> Yeah, I think that really does sum it up. And, actually, guys, if you don't mind bringing that chart back up again. So, a point out, so, Mitchell Hashimoto, Hashi, really, I believe I'm correct, talking to Stu about this a little bit, he sort of led the Terraform project, which is an Open Source project, and, to your point, very easy to deploy. Chef, Puppet, Salt, they were largely disrupted by Cloud, because they're designed to automate deployment largely on-prem and DevOps, and now Terraform sort of packages everything up into a platform. So, Hashi actually makes money, and you'll see it on this slide, and things, Vault, which is kind of their security play. You see GitLab on here. That's really application tooling to deploy code. You see Docker containers, you know, Docker, really all about open source, and they've had great adoption, Docker's challenge has always been monetization. You see Turbonomic on here, which is application resource management. You can't go too deep on these things, but it's pretty deep within this sector. But we are comparing different types of companies, but just to give you a sense as to where the momentum is. All right, let's wrap here. So maybe some final thoughts, Sagar, on the Emerging Technology Study, and then what we can expect in the coming month here, on the update in the Technology Spending Intention Study, please. >> Yeah, no problem. One last thing on the zero trust side that has been a big issue that we didn't get to cover, is VPN spend. Our data is pointing that, yes, even though VPN spend did increase the last few months because of remote work, we actually think that people are going to move away from that as they move onto zero trust. So just one last point on that, just in terms of overall thoughts, you know, again, as we cover it, you can see how bifurcated all these spaces are. Really, if we were to go sector by sector by sector, right, storage and block chain and MLAI and all that stuff, you would see there's a few or maybe one or two vendors doing well, and the majority of vendors are not seeing as many opportunities. And so, again, are you work-from-home aligned? Are you the best vendor of all the other emerging providers? And if you fit those two criteria then you will continue seeing POCs and evaluations. And if you don't fit that criteria, unfortunately, you're going to see less opportunities. So think that's really the big takeaway on that. And then, just in terms of next steps, we're already transitioning now to our next Technology Spending Intention Survey. That launched last week. And so, again, we're going to start getting a feel for how CIOs are spending in 2H-20, right, so, for the back half of the year. And our question changes a little bit. We ask them, "How do you plan on spending in the back half year "versus how you actually spent "in the first half of the year, or 1H-20?" So, we're kind of, tighten the screw, so to speak, and really getting an idea of what's spend going to look like in the back half, and we're also going to get some updates as it relates to budget impacts from COVID-19, as well as how vendor-relationships have changed, as well as business impacts, like layoffs and furloughs, and all that stuff. So we have a tremendous amount of data that's going to be coming in the next few weeks, and it should really prepare us for what to see over the summer and into the fall. >> Yeah, very excited, Sagar, to see that. I just wanted to double down on what you said about changes in networking. We've reported with you guys on NPLS networks, shifting to SD-WAN. But even VPN and SD-WAN are being called into question as the internet becomes the new private network. And so lots of changes there. And again, very excited to see updated data, return of post-COVID, as we exit this isolation economy. Really want to point out to folks that this is not a snapshot survey, right? This is an ongoing exercise that ETR runs, and grateful for our partnership with you guys. Check out ETR.plus, that's the ETR website. I publish weekly on Wikibon.com and SiliconANGLE.com. Sagar, thanks so much for coming on. Once again, great to have you. >> Thank you so much, for having me, Dave. I really appreciate it, as always. >> And thank you for watching this episode of theCube Insights, powered by ETR. This Dave Vellante. We'll see you next time. (gentle music)

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hello everyone and welcome to this week's episode of theCUBE Insights, powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis I want to lay out my 2020 predictions using insights gleaned from theCUBE blended with ETR spending data. You know, 2019 marked our 10th year of doing theCUBE. Over that time we've had the pleasure of covering nearly 1000 events and milestones, including the exit from the great softness of 2008 and 2009. You know theCUBE has extensively tracked a 10 year bull market. We've covered the era of data. We saw the rise and profitless prosperity of the big data and opensource Hadoop movement, where we predicted the practitioners, not vendors, would benefit the most from big data. We've covered many dozens of acquisitions including the 60 billion dollar chess move made by Michael Dell acquiring EMC, and a launch of hundreds of startups in flash, hyper-converged, big data, AI, blockchain, crypto, security and SaaS. There'll be other days to talk about theCUBE and review that, today's all about predicting the future, using spending data and insights from the thousands of interviews we've done on theCUBE. So let's get right into the ETR data and start with the high-level spending. Remember in October, ETR released its survey results and stated that we're coming out of a multiyear investment cycle in digital transformation. Enterprise IT buyers have learned what works, and on which technologies they're going to double down. They're now narrowing their investments on emerging technologies, picking those winners for the next gen tech, and at the same time, they're cutting redundancies from legacy players that they were keeping on as a hedge. Buyers are picking bundled suites from a handful of mega vendors, and solidifying their investments. We're seeing a multi-generational dynamic repeat itself, where buyers are creating a balance between the convenience of packaged offerings, i.e. bundles, and leveraging best of breed technologies to drive innovation. So on balance, the ETR data shows that a contraction in spending and tepid CIO sentiment is impacting both emerging vendors as well as traditional players, and these trends are most pronounced in the very largest organizations, which have always been the best bellwether in ETR's data sets. Let me share with you what one IT executive said recently that I think really sums up the situation quite well. He said, "ETR's findings mirror what we're doing today, "in that we spend most of 2018 bringing in "a lot of the new, core technology. "I believe what you're seeing now is not a lull in spend, "but an operationalization of what we've already purchased. "We're not spending on what's next yet, "because we're still rolling out what we just bought." This is from a VP of global IT at a large public manufacturing company, I said he, it could be a she as well. I think that she's summing it up correctly, and it reflects many of what customers on theCUBE tell us. Now, let's take a look at the macroeconomy. GDP growth is going to come in at about 2.3% this year, give or take. It's not going to hit the Trump administration's goal of 3% plus, but consumers are clearly powering steady growth. At least for now. IT spending should grow at about a point or two above GDP, so let's put that at, say, 4%. We're right in the middle of a Santa Claus rally, and the S&P is above 3200 today. Tech has been a powerful tailwind for stocks, and I think stocks, tech stock's going to take a breath in early 2020, but I expect continued strong growth in the economy and tech spending after a Q1 pause. I could see the S&P flirting with 3700 or even higher in 2020, and I think the tech sector will be a benefactor of that momentum, providing an impetus for continued growth. Here's my thinking on that. So much of 2020 is going to be about the election, and to me the election is going to be really about the economy. And I predict the economy is going to remain steady. And as the IT leader I quoted earlier said, customers will be operationalizing what's been previously purchased. Here's what's different in 2020. Tech projects have historically been very risky investments, and have required higher internal rates of return, IRRs, to get approved by CFOs. But the cloud has altered two factors. One, is that it's allowed more experimentation for way less money. The second is cloud, by shifting CAPEX to OPEX, allows for much more incremental, lower risk investments. So I think you'll see continued steady growth, powered by the cloud, which allows experimentation, and importantly higher hit rates of success. These successful projects will throw off cash for companies, and CFOs are getting on board because they realize it's driving innovation. They also realize that IT does matter, maybe not in the form that Nick Carr envisioned, but a new generation of IT that creates competitive advantage. This brings me to my first main prediction, which is the growth of cloud computing is going to moderate, but the cloud will continue to steal significant share from on-prem spending. Now the narrative that the pendulum is swinging back in my view, is a false narrative. Rather, the pendulum has swung, and the cloud is the underpinning of innovation. Now having said that, I do think we're seeing a bit of an equilibrium in spending, where buyers have identified those workloads that are going to remain on-prem, which is why you see, for example, AWS, Azure, and Google making moves in hybrid. Hybrid slash on-prem offerings. What this chart here shows from ETR, so from 2010 through October '19 survey on cloud spending, I had to block out the 2020 survey as it's currently in the field, I'm not allowed to show that data. The yellow line is market share, which in ETR parlance, as you remember, is pervasiveness, or mentions in their survey. The blue line is spending momentum, measured as net score, which essentially subtracts the percent of customers spending less from those spending more. The long, steady march of cloud, as you can see, continues, and there's no indication that it's going to abate. That said, the penetration of cloud has become much more meaningful, so share gains will be more hard-fought for the cloud guys. Now, you may see this as a non-prediction, or a hedge. It's not, let me be clear. Cloud will continue to steal share from on-prem, but share gains for the cloud vendors will be more difficult. Which brings me to part B of this prediction. What I'm showing in this chart is market share from ETR's January 2016 survey through October '19. And I'm showing spending for three on-prem vendors within AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud accounts. And I'm picking on Oracle, IBM, and Dell EMC as three prominent on-prem proxies, and you can see the steady decline in market share for these companies. And even though there's a bit of an uptick in October, I don't see this as a reversal. What's going to happen is that traditional on-prem vendors are going to step up their cloud strategies. Specifically with multicloud management. This is going to be the case with Dell, who's going to leverage VMware, and in the case of IBM, they'll try to take advantage of Red Hat in that multicloud game. Now both IBM and Oracle, who each have public clouds are going to dig their heels in, they're going to get customers in a headlock, and provide big financial incentives for them to use their captive clouds. All right, so with the high-level spending comments that I made earlier, and that cloud discussion that we just had as a backdrop, the question is, which companies will do well in the coming year? I'm going to call out five companies, that I want to highlight where the ETR data intersects what we're seeing on theCUBE. The prediction is these five players will do well in 2020, they're going to power through any downturn in spending, and they're going to thrive in the face of the cloud share shift. So the chart here shows data from the ETR October 2019 survey, and it lays out net score or spending momentum for these companies, that I am predicting will be winners in 2020 and beyond. And the five companies are UIPath, Snowflake, Databricks, HashiCorp, and Rubrik. Let me start with UIPath. They are the leader in robotic process automation. I think RPA is going to do well even in a downturn, because more companies will be looking to automate and save money, even in a softer climate. Automation Anywhere is another player in this space, they're doing pretty well, and I predict that UIPath will come out on top of this space, but both UIPath and Automation Anywhere can thrive. Next company is Snowflake, they are changing the analytic database market, and I've covered them before in previous Breaking Analysis segments. They are going to continue to grow nicely in my view. They are 100% cloud-based, and they participate in all popular cloud platforms. Now ironically, they compete with AWS RedShift, who continues to copy some of the innovations that Snowflake has popularized. But AWS and Snowflake are strong partners, so there's room for both companies to thrive. Snowflake especially, as they play in clouds other than just AWS. Which brings me to Databricks. We're seeing a new type of workload emerge in the cloud for modern analytic databases, where organizations are taking all this data that they have, lots of it in the cloud, and they're structuring it within a Snowflake database, or RedShift, and they're bringing Databricks tooling to the equation to be able to query and visualize the data in near real time. Now of course, as I say, AWS plays here with RedShift, and they're selling a lot of EC2, so they love Snowflake. All major cloud players are seeing this type of workload enter the mix, and it's going to be a strong area of growth in 2020 and beyond. Next thing I want to talk about is HashiCorp. HashiCorp is capitalizing on this trend toward cloud-native computing. The company provides opensource tooling for developers, and is all about simplifying application deployment independent of the underlying platform, whether it's virtual, container, or cloud. Five years ago, the players in the space that got all the attention on theCUBE were Chef, Puppet, Ansible and Salt, and today, especially again on theCUBE, you hear the most about Hashi and Ansible, and in fact we were at AnsibleFest with theCUBE, and we heard lots about HashiCorp, so they both complement and compete with the older players. To me, this reminds me of Spark within the Hadoop ecosystem. Hashi has raised about 174 million in VC, and as you can see they have very strong spending momentum in the ETR dataset, with a net score, as shown, of 63%. Now finally, I want to talk about Rubrik, which has been a consistent performer in the ETR dataset. They're trying to transform backup into data management as a discipline. They compete with established players in the data protection space, guys like Veritas, Dell EMC, IBM and CommVault. Now Rubrik is not the only new or newish player here, that's doing very well, Cohesity, who's relatively new, Veeam, which has been around for a decade, both doing very well and showing up strong in ETR surveys, especially Veeam, but Rubrik has been a consistently strong performer and has been outpacing the others, so I want to call them out. Look for these five to do very well in 2020, and into the next decade. So that brings me to my next prediction, I want to talk about Kubernetes. This prediction is twofold. Kubernetes is going to continue its strong showing as this data from ETR shows. This is Kubernetes' market share in the October 2019 survey, so Kubernetes spend had a 76% net score. So very very strong. But the other part of the prediction is that Kubernetes will become embedded into virtually every platform, and people will stop thinking about it as a separate market. Already today, there's little discussion of the idea of a Kubernetes distro, I mean Anthos is an example of a Kubernetes stack, but it can be run in the cloud, it can be run on-prem, anywhere. VMware Tanzu, Microsoft Azure Arc are other examples, they're really not stacks, but they're management platforms that can manage anyone's Kubernetes instances. I like to think of this as kind of like flash. You remember when everyone looked at flash storage as a separate market, well today it's just embedded everywhere. And that's kind of what's happening with Kubernetes. So spending momentum is going to continue to be strong, but by 2023, Kubernetes will be ubiquitous, and not really thought of as a separate entity. All right, for my next prediction, I want to talk about cybersecurity. I did a Breaking Analysis earlier this year on security, and I showed this slide. And as you can see, I've added a little something in the red stars for my prediction. So what this chart shows is two views of net score, the left-hand side shows the ranking by net score, and you can see CrowdStrike, Okta, Shape Security, which was just, by the way, bought by F5, that was an announcement. Twistlock, which is now Palo Alto Networks, and you can see the others down that list. On the right-hand side is net score, but it's ranked by shared N, which is a measure of pervasiveness in the ETR dataset. What I've added is the four star companies, that is those companies that have both spending momentum and are pervasive in the ETR survey. So the prediction is 2020 we'll see the four star companies maintain their position and gain strength in 2020. These include established players with portfolios where they can bundle like Microsoft, Cisco, Palo Alto Networks, Splunk, Proofpoint, Fortinet, and CyberArk Software. And then the newer companies like Okta and CrowdStrike are going to continue to gain share faster than the larger players. Now you also may see companies like SailPoint, Illumio, and SentinelOne emerge as four star companies over the next 24 months. Now the one company that's not on this list that is a major player in security is AWS. AWS is the cloud security leader, and is in a category all by itself in many ways. As I said in my security segment earlier this year, the market is incredibly fragmented, and it's going to stay that way. Each year we look back and say "Did we spend more on security?" and "Are we more safe?" And every year the answer is yes, and no. And 2020 will be no different. Now if you look at the various data sources, we spend approximately 120 billion dollars annually on cybersecurity. The worldwide economy is about 85 trillion in dollar terms, so on balance, we spend about .14% on securing our economy, so we're barely scratching the surface. The market is going to remain highly fragmented, the rich will get richer if they have four stars, new players will continue to enter the space, and M&A will continue to be robust. Now if you exclude my long shot that the S&P will break through 3700 next year, that makes nine predictions. For my 10th and final prediction, I don't have hard data from ETR, but I have a strong opinion on this, and that is that the edge will be won by developers, you've heard me talk about this before. Specifically, platforms like Outposts, which are essentially programmable infrastructure which bring a cloud development platform to the edge, is how that space will evolve. It won't be won by shoving traditional servers and storage boxes out to the edge. Rather, it will grow by coders being able to build new applications and workloads on top of infrastructure as code. Okay, that wraps up my 2020 predictions. I'd very much like to hear your opinion, so you can leave your thoughts or your own predictions in the comments sections of this video, or go to my LinkedIn posts. You can reach me @DVellante on Twitter, love to hear your thoughts. And don't forget, this series is available on iTunes, Spotify, and other podcast platforms for your listening pleasure. I'd like to wish everyone a safe and restful holiday season and a prosperous, healthy 2020. Enjoy your families, enjoy this time, this is Dave Vellante, signing out from the latest episode of theCUBE Insights powered by ETR, thanks for watching, everybody. We'll see you next time. (techno music)

(upbeat music) >> Hi, and welcome to another CUBEConversation where we go in-depth into the topics that are most important to the technology industry with the thought leaders who are actually getting the work done. I'm Peter Burris, and we've got a great conversation today, and it all starts with the idea of how do you get smart people outside of your organization, in-service organizations to help you achieve your outcomes? It's a challenge because as we become more dependent upon services, we discover that service companies are often trying to sell us bills of goods or visions that aren't solving our exact problem. There's a new breed of service company that's really fascinated by your problem, and wants to sell it. Starts with engineering, starts with value add, and then leads to other types of potential relationships and activities. So what do those service companies look like? Well, to have that conversation, we've got Greg Tinker, who is the CTO and founder of Serene IT. Greg, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thank you very much Peter, glad to be here. >> So tell us a little bit about Serene IT. >> So Serene IT is a, well we call it a next generation bar. So what do I mean by that? We mean that we are an engineering-first firm, so our staff is big, we're across the U.S., we have multiple branches and we just went international into Canada, with Serene IT Canada. We have other international branches that we coming online next year. So with that being said though, the key to our growth, the key to our success is the fact that we're an engineering firm first. We have very few sales staff. Our sales staff are more of an account management style, more of a nurturer or a farmer, we would call it, versus a hunter that means someone going out, because the customers are coming to us with their problems because they need a smart engineering bench to help them. They're not looking for somebody else's to bring them askew, or resell them a product. That can be easily done by some of the large conglomerates that are already out there, not to mention, spend 30 seconds on Google, you can pretty much buy anything you want. >> Yeah, and you know Fred Brookes said a million years ago, when I was, even before I got into computer science, wrote "The Mythical Man Month", and made the observation that the solution to a hard problem typically, is not more people, >> Right. >> It's working smarter, and working more with the right people. So tell a little about how you're able to find the right people from the industry, and bring them together to turn them into the right team. >> It's a great question, Peter, so I've been very fortunate. I loved my career at Hewlett Packard. I left on good terms because I saw a problem in the industry that I wanted to go and tackle head-on. It's easy for people to sit back and talk about it, it's more difficult to actually go and try to solve the problem, and I'm trying to solve the problem. The problem is, there's a lot of orders out there that bring very low value today, they bring a lot of resale. And that's great for those clients that just know what they want. The vast majority of customers don't know what they want today because the technologies are so advanced, they need help to get from where they were, a legacy model, to a more modern software-defined ecosystem. >> And the business problems are so complex. >> Yes. >> It's that combination of complex business problems, 'cause your competitions and your customers are pushing you, and now advanced technologies that have to be marshaled to solve those problems. >> That's exactly right, so with that being said, I set out build an engineering firm and resale would be something later, but we sell through the engineering consulting firms to solve those business problems for our clients. And so our engineering bench is comprised of engineers from Cisco, from Dell, from HPE, from a lot of big conglomerates that everybody all knows. But when you work in this industry, in the labs of these big conglomerates, me coming from HPE, when you do that, you get a lot of friends across the pillars. >> Sure. >> You build networks. >> You build networks. And quite frankly, it's the Marvel lab guys that own today Q-Logic. We all know each other, and with that being said, some of these guys want to go out and try to solve these big problems with companies like myself, and so with that being said, that's how we're building Serene IT, is engineering-first, and we have a very large technical bench today. Just think about it, the company came online in 2017 with just two, so today, we are significantly bigger than that. We're approaching a 50-plus headcount, and we continue to expand with multiple branches, and our growth rate is almost double every six months. And it's something I'm having a great deal of fun doing. The key thing here though is solving business problems and helping customers. >> Well let's talk about that, because every IT organization faces the challenge that they've been so focused on the hardware assets for so long, or the application assets. Now they're trying to focus on the data assets, but they find themselves often in conflict with the business They're not doing a particularly good job of translating a business opportunity into a technology solution still. >> True. >> You've got these great engineers. How are you getting them to also speak business, so that you facilitate that domain expertise about the business so it can be turned into a technology-reliable solution? >> Like any good engineering firm, you have to have levels right? So we have a knock all the way to level four, and our level four engineers are our master technologists that are usually patent published or some varied nature thereof, with usually a multitude of master ASC certification structures to be able to state the fact that they are level four. We also have some college kids that are coming up that are wanting to learn with us, which is good. But I want to tell you on that same point though, is we only allow those elite, the level three, the level four guys, to be in front of our clients, because they've been in this industry a long time. Like myself, we can understand the business problems, as well as the technology problems, and help a client go from zero to hero. That's what we do well. >> So you're bringing in people who have been business people, but have strong engineering backgrounds >> Correct. >> In product domains, in service domains, in the industry, and you're bringing them together and saying, let's go back to being engineers, that can still talk business. >> That's exactly it, that's the key differentiator with us, is the fact that we're not talking just essays, a lot of ours, in our mindsets have essays they call engineers. We don't hire anyone that can't put fingers on a keyboard. If they can't make magic happen on a keyboard, they're of no value to us, they're of no value to our clients, which is what they need help with. So if we're not able to sit down and have a conversation and pull out a laptop and make some some magic happen with, name it, Ansible, Puppet, Shell, Saltstack, that's just in automation CodeLogics, C-code we've got all the cool stuff in that space. But if we can't sit down and write Python, Ruby on Rails and whatnot, and make something tangible to a client in very short order, we didn't do our job. >> So a lot of companies that I've experienced, a lot of customers I've talked to, have what I would call the "goldilocks" problem with their service providers. By that I mean, some of their service providers don't have the technical chops to just throw numbers at it, so they're too cold. Some of their service providers are too smart, or pushing too hard and they get suspicious of them. How do you be that just right, stay focused on the problem bringing the other team, the engineers or the IT folks that you're working with along with you, so you get that natural technology transfer so the business gets the capability that it can run and you can go do something else? >> So that's a good point, Peter. I mean, we're still working out some of those details, I'll tell you, to be honest with you on that stuff. >> Everybody is. >> Yeah. We're getting better at it, you know customers. If we get to aggressive, and tell the customers this is what's wrong with your problem, this is where you need to go, we call their baby ugly, it puts a lot of contention right on the onset, so it causes problems. So we have to be very cognitive of what they have, and where they want to go, and show them where we're going and why we're doing it, and not just focus on "You did it the wrong way". We don't want to focus on that. That's already done, that ship's already sailed, why bash it? I tell my engineers don't talk negative, there's no good going to come of it. Focus on what you have, and where you need to go with it, and how we're going to get there. Keep it a positive message, and you'll find it'd be more receptive, and it's working for our team. >> Well I'll tell you, one of the things I've heard about Serene IT is that you guys especially developed competencies in technologies that have worked in the past. >> You can say that. >> It seems as though one of the things you're able to do is you're able not to make something so new and so distinct that the client can't see how they can possibly operate it without you. You're taking a lot of open-source, a lot of established tried-and-true technologies and using your smarts to put them together in new and interesting ways so the customer says, "Oh that was smart, that was smart. "I can do that, oh yes, now I get it". Is that, am I mis-characterizing your guys? >> No, you're not, you're actually spot-on. We actually have one of the largest ZFS file systems on the planet right now with 142 million users hitting it and-- >> ZFS? >> Yeah, it's old school. >> With 142 million, okay. >> Yeah, it's old-school But if what's old is new again, we're just putting a new wrapper around it. It worked great in its day, but you put that old technology, the file system itself that's been around for a long time, one of the biggest file systems at 128 bit. You take that file system and you put that on today's Red Hat, Caldera, SUSE, name your favorite. You put that on a big machine, a Linux machine today, a large scale like an HPDL380 with NVME drives with a back-end data store, like a 3PAR or Primäre, or name whatever you want on the back end with a big fiber channel, you'd be surprised what we can do with that thing. So we're able to keep customers' costs down by showing them we can take a old-school technology and make it far bigger than you ever imagined, and give you more horsepower and at less cost, and customers are really receptive to that. Now is that perfect for every footprint? No, that was a unique situation. Not everybody's got 142 million users.(chuckles) >> Well, that's true. And so let me build on that, because the other thing that the CIOs I talk to and senior IT people and also business people, increasingly, is they want to make sure that the solution works now, but that it's not going to end-of-life options for them. >> Yeah. >> How do you do this using tried-and-true technologies combined into new and interesting ways, in a way that still nonetheless gives customers future growth options or future application options? >> I'm not a fan of vendor-locking, I'm not a fan of Franken-monsters. Our team of engineers, we have a mandate that they do not build anything like that, I won't approve it. Because I don't want to have a customer locked in to Serene IT. That was never the intent. We want them to choose us, we want them to come to our team and get our value, so we can show them how to grow their business, and do it in a nice, sustainable way, so we can show their staff how to support it. That takes us into our managed services component. Most of the big things we design and do, we're what we call an adaptive managed services, an AMS model. What do I mean by that statement? We're not a WITO. What's a WITO, you ask? It's a "Walk In, Take Over". That's the big boys, that's the DXEs of the world, that's the Assentras, that's what they do. And they do that well. We're not here to compete with that. But what we're here to do is say, to a company or business, whoever they might be, you probably don't need us to take over everything in your IT shop, and really, we're not going to be the best at that, nor are they in some cases, the other vendors. I'll tell you, you know your business the best. We know infrastructure the best, and we can show you where you can build your skillsets up and get better at it. We can automate a lot of it and show you how to manage the automation, and there'll be certain key points that maybe you guys don't want to own for various reasons, and we will manage just that key component, and we do that today with a lot of our big clients. >> Greg Tinker, CTO and founder of Serene IT, thanks very much for being on theCUBE. >> Thank you, Peter. >> And once again, I want to thank you for participating in this CUBEConversation. Until next time. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live from Denver, Colorado, it's theCUBE. Covering Commvault GO 2019, brought to you by Commvault. >> Hey, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Commvault GO 19, from Colorado. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman. Stu and I are pleased to welcome somebody new to theCUBE and to Commvault. We've got Tom Broderick, VP of Strategy and Chief of Staff to the CEO of Commvault. Tom, welcome to the program. >> Thanks for having me. >> So, I like you're on brand, the new Commvault venture, >> Yeah, I got to sport the colors, right? >> Metallic, very nice. >> That's right, I had the big jacket on yesterday, so. >> Oh wow, all right. So lots of change at Commvault. You're new as well, you've worked with Sanjay, now this is your third different company working with Sanjay Mirchandani, the CEO. Talk to us a little bit about your short time here at Commvault. There's been so much change that he's driving, cultural change, Metallic was something that was conceived, designed, built in a very short time period, a lot of acceleration. Your first few months here, what's it's been like? >> It's been, obviously, a ton of activity. And, one of the things that we know, and I think it's obvious, Commvault as a company has been in this state of transition. You bring a new CEO on, and we've got a new leadership team, that is merging well with the core leadership team of people that have a lot experience at the company and it's working really well. From the beginning we knew that we needed to focus on three areas, inside the company and outside. It's really around, as we talk to folks, around simplifying our business. And when we say that, normally in an event like this it goes towards how do we simplify working with our partners, how do we simplify working with our customers, how do we simplify our products, that kind of thing. But, from my perspective, one of the things that I focus on, is also, how we focus on simplifying ourselves on the inside, because this is an area where we can be much more efficient in how we bring our technology to the marketplace. So I'm focused on breaking down silos, I'm focused on driving effective communication in the business, so that we can deliver that technology to our partners and our customers. So, simplifying the business. Innovation is the next big key. So, obviously, our technology, and this is one of the things before coming on, I did a lot of research on Commvault technology, I've been out of this part of the market for quite some time, and the core technology is super solid. But we needed to innovate further, and shoulder out into different areas, and that's where you see things like Metallic come into play, the acquisition of Hedvig, where we're using our balance sheet, in a way that's very different for the company. This is our first acquisition as a company. And then of course all the new features and functions that we put into SP17, which was just released in the core product. And then lastly, it's around execution. So, simplify, innovate, execute. And when we talk about execution, a lot of that falls on the go-to-market side so this feeds right into some of those leadership changes that we announced this week, and that we announced earlier, bringing folks like Riccardo Di Blasio on, and that's how we think about things. So that's been a structure that's allowed us to do so much change in such a little amount of time. >> So Tom, I'd love to dig into that a little bit, so we've talked of Commvault traditionally has done a decent job of trying to move a little faster, so if you talk about the core product, it's on a 90 day release cycle, it's not the nine to 18 months train that many of us that have been in the industry a long time was like, okay, we got to get on the train, jam everything into it, hope we go and when we get to the end that we actually release something that we're happy with and it's supported and it works. Your last stop with Sanjay was at Puppet. Very different mindset, I'm curious what you learned there, and how that is really permeating the whole industry and what changes need to happen in Commvault to live in this new sass role like Metallic's going to offer, you know, if you're not delivering code, what are you doing. >> Yeah, it's a great question Stu, and the thing is, obviously we're living a different world than what we were 20 years ago, agile methodologies have sped everything up, and people are used to faster release cycles, how do we get new features out to customers in a much more expeditious way. The challenge though, and I'll bet if folks are watching this, the challenge internally is how you do that effectively. So one of the things that we did at Puppet was we had to get better at bringing the technology to the market, end to end across the business, so inside the business. It's not enough for the developers to say, "Okay, code's ready", and just throw it out there. Is the field enabled, is the pricing right, is the packaging right, is the documentation right, is marketing activated, all those elements of it. So again, this is a little bit inside baseball, from a Commvault perspective we're institutionalizing this as one of the core processes that helps us operate the business. I talk a lot about inside, I talk about how sometimes you have to go slow to go fast, and what I mean by that is the cross-functional elements of the business need to get together sooner in the process to make sure that everybody's on the same page, aligned, they know the key dependencies and they know when they can make their deliverables, so that when we're ready to go to market with the new technology, or new product, or a new service pack release, that everybody is ready to go with that because it does nobody any good if the code's ready, you throw it over the wall and then it just kind of falls down because people outside weren't ready. >> But operational simplification, as you describe it, that's really challenging to do, number one. Number two, doing it at a company that's been in business for 20 years, where you have different functions, you probably have some incumbent folks in there. Lot of change, how have you been able to accomplish that in such a short time period, it seems like, one of the things that Stu and I've been hearing is that there was a lot of receptiveness, within the incumbency internally at Commvault, but operational simplification it's no simple feat. >> No, it's really easy when you write it down on a piece of paper, it's hard once you get the humans involved. But the thing is, and this is one of the things that I've noticed at Commvault, it's been tremendously refreshing to me, is that, you know we have about 2,500 people in the organization and if I was going to give a massive generalization, we have 2,500 people that want to do the right thing, and they truly want to do the right thing for our customers. The issue in the past is that they haven't been aligned in all the same direction, or set of directions. So we were a little bit haphazard in certain ways. But people want to do the right thing, and once I started talking about these concepts and once we started implementing them, and now that we're actually seeing results, it's amazing, I have so many people coming up to me saying, "Wow, I didn't really get it at first, but now that we're actually implementing these kind of processes inside the company, it's amazing, the transformation that we're seeing, and we're so glad that we're doing it." >> Can you talk to us about the decisions for the Commvault ventures, that's one of the things that struck me when I saw some of the press releases earlier in the week, Metallic, a Commvault venture. The Hedvig acquisition, a Commvault venture. Some of the conversations that Stu and I have had this week, it's like a startup mentality within Commvault. Talk to us about the strategic decision to go that venture inside Commvault route. >> Yeah sure, absolutely. So obviously, Hedvig is indeed a venture, I mean, via acquiring a company that were a startup. But as we looked at bringing them into the Commvault folds, internally, inside the company, we had some guiding principles that we created straight away. And the number one guiding principle was don't break the business. Meaning, we're not going to come in and overwhelm them with Commvault. Because they created a successful entity amongst themselves, and a great technology that we think fits really well into our portfolio. But we do want to create some degree of separation because, we might be talking to different customers, this I why, I think I saw David Wigglesworth on a little bit earlier, and he's setting up the emerging technologies sales unit because they're going to be taking this to market a little bit different way. The development team is not being merged right into our core development team, they're remaining a unit amongst themselves reporting to Sanjay, right directly to Sanjay. On the Metallic side we did take the startup approach from the beginning, and we said look, it's easy for organizations to say, hey, we want to build this new thing to serve this new part of the market, and we're going to invest resources into it, let's put the plans together and go get it done. But especially for public companies too, it's easy on your 90 day cycles, to all of a sudden say, you know what, we have to rebound, or take those funds that we were going to put there, and move them elsewhere. And we said, no, we can't do this, this is super strategic to us, we have to ring fence it, and we have to let them build this product in a different way. So, I was talking about business readiness before, in terms of the process that we institute, they were actually the first group to implement it within their small team, and it created a great proof point for the rest of the organization to see how it works. >> So Tom, we've had some great conversations with a lot of the new leadership this week, you mentioned we had the conversation with Wiggs, he's starting to hire some of those sales people. We know there's always change going on in an environment, but is Commvault mostly through with the strategic leadership hires and now it's down to the next layer as to things like the overlays in some of the new initiatives, or is there still more work to be done on the structural piece of things? >> Good question Stu. You know, our work is never done. I think it's the same with any organization. I think most of the major parts and pieces are put in place, like where we want them. One of the things that you mentioned earlier, that this is my third tour of duty with Sanjay, and I say one of the really powerful things that he brings to an organization is the ability to build a strong, well-functioning leadership team. And I say well-functioning. And he did it at EMC, he did it at Puppet, and he's doing it here. And now we've got that senior leadership team in place, that is going to be continuing down this path of positive momentum that we've got. >> One of the challenges making through this big move, we said that the team definitely was receptive, we know that they're ready, but clear communication, just without getting into too many proprietary things that you've done, what tips can you have to make sure that an organization of this experience and this size isn't just going to get like, "Oh my God, whiplash, "they're changing management, I don't know where I fit." Or anything like that, how do we make sure that you get everybody pointing towards the true north, and, ready is I think the word we've heard over and over, so making sure that everybody in Commvault is ready to move forward? >> It's hard and it takes a lot of discipline. I do think you need to be as transparent as you can be, with the workforce and with your employees. They need to understand where we're going with this because if it's just a bunch of change for change's sake, that's difficult environment to live in. And we're certainly not that, we have objectives and goals, and we know what we want to get to. Obviously there are strategic elements of it that we can't necessarily discuss all the time, but at least directionally we have to be able to explain the moves that we're making in such a way that makes sense to people. If we believe it, and we've done our diligence, then it should be transferrable and we should be able to make it so that it's clear to everybody on the Commvault team. And we are focused on making that happen. Internally we do a lot of communication. Sanjay writes a lot of blogs internally. Sandy Hamilton writes a lot of blogs, Riccardo is constantly talking to the teams, and that just permeates down. We need to continue to get better at it, it's hard, organizational communications are hard. But we need to lead from the top as well, make sure that as we demonstrate what it means to communicate that all throughout the organization, we're creating that sort of culture. >> In the last few seconds here Tom, I would love to get your perspectives. What's the biggest thing that you're going to take away of the last three days of your first Commvault GO? >> Tom: Wow. >> Too many to count? >> (laughs) It's exciting, I'll say that, very specifically, walking through the Metallic booth and the Hedvig booth is inspiring to me, the amount of traffic going through those two booths, that's exactly-- >> That's probably what that applause is for right now, in fact it is, I see it. >> That is, they invited me over at 4 o'clock, I said I couldn't make it. It's been truly inspiring, and I think people are excited. And for me it's, obviously you want your customers excited, you want your partners to be excited, but for me too, it's just as important to have our employees excited, and that's a major takeaway that I'm bringing from this conference. >> I think we would echo that we've heard a lot of excited folks. Well Tom, thank you for joining Stu and me on the program, we look forward to Commvault GO 2020 already. >> Thank you, thank you very much. >> Excellent. For Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE from Commvault GO 19. (upbeat music)

>> Live, from Barcelona, Spain it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live! Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Barcelona everybody, this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-hosts. Stu Miniman, John Furrier has been here all week. Day three coverage of Cisco Live!, Barcelona. Cisco Live EMEA, and R. We learned the other day, add R for Russia. Kaustubh Das is back. KD is the vice president of product management for data center at Cisco and he's joined by Kevin Egan who is the director of the computer systems group for data center. Also from Cisco, gents, good to see you, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Great to be here. >> Thanks for having us. >> KD, Data center was a real focus of the announcements this week. The data center is exploding to a lot of different places. What's going on in the group? >> It's been a terrific weekend, you're right. Data center was a core of a lot of the announcements this week, and as we kicked off the key note with this concept that the data center is no longer centered. It's really, the data moves to the edges, the data center is moving to the edges. We had a lot of announcements around Hyperflex, Hyperflex anywhere, this product that we've been innovating on like monsters. Within a very short time, gone from a brand-new product on the market to a magic quarter liter with Gartner, and really kind of doing a lot of industry firsts with that. That's been a big focus. We had a lot of announcements with our technology partners, because we not only innovate within Cisco, but we work with Pure and NetApp and Citrix and Intel Optane and Nvidia to bring products to the market that get the richness of their innovation and our innovation together. The other big focus has been all about programmability. As the world becomes much more programmable, focus devops automation, it's been around Intersight and programmability and taking that to the next level. >> Interesting. So of course we always talk about shipping five megabytes of code as opposed to shipping petabytes through a straw into the god box. But so Kevin, programmability's a key theme here, of course we're in the devnet zone. We had Susie Wee on yesterday and she was just talking about the evolution of Cisco infrastructure and how early on you guys made the decision. Let's make all this stuff programmable. And that was sort of a game changer, your thoughts. >> Yeah, no it's been amazing. The growth of just Cisco devnet right? We've got half a million developers now developing against our SDKs, our devops, our opportunities all across our Cisco platforms. We've got thousands of Cisco resources doing work on that, producing those libraries, producing that, those sample sets of code and contributing to the communities. And today our customers are using it in a way that they've never really done. Previously it was a sort of a fix because vendor tools weren't getting it done. And now they're using these automation tools to really do every day tasks out to the mass, to reduce the complexity for their teams and reduce the burden. And then of course to have that repeatability and that security and that compliance aspect and it's been amazing the explosion. >> Yeah. The simplicity reminds me back you know the earliest days of UCS, you know UCS was built for that wave of virtualization and as KD has talked with us this week already about some of the partnerships that you've built. The wave of converged infrastructure, UCS really dominated in that marketplace, but here now we talk about AI with some of your partners, you talk about programmability, it's like that's not the Cisco UCS that I remember launching. So maybe give us the updates specifically that was announced this week. Where the platform has gone in more recent days. >> So I can start maybe, >> Yeah, absolutely. >> UCS came up with this concept of everything needs to be programmable, everything needs to be an API. And maybe we were a little ahead of our time, we conceived of this in 2007, got the product out in 09 and really from the very genesis of the program, of the UCS program, it's been a programmable platform, it's been everything's an API. The UI makes calls to the API, our SDKs make calls to the APIs. So that's been the core platform and in some ways it feels like the industry is coming to where we thought it would come to a little bit earlier. So they, this whole concept of infrastructure's code, softly defined what do we want to call it, this was core and germane to the product itself. What we've done lately is, it's taken that policy that we're encapsulated and taken out all of the silver into the fabric for scalability, we've taken that now into the cloud. And what that does is it leads to that velocity of innovation becoming even higher, the ability to create new and unique use cases becomes higher, the ability to conceive it becomes higher. And all of that coupled with where IT is going, which is becoming much more devops, much more around automation. I think those forces are coupling together to create some really unique use cases. >> You said, you gestured take it into the cloud, which is interesting, pointing. What does that mean? Taking it into the cloud? >> So let's speed back a little bit. So what we start off with was listen, a silver's a box, we need to abstract the silver, the personality of the silver out of that box into policy, put it in the fabric. And that allows us to really scale that and give the box different personalities depending upon the workload. What we've done is, we've launched a product called Intersight. Intersight takes that policy and makes it a SAS service, management of the service we want to call it. So now as data moves everywhere, as data centers move everywhere, as our applications no longer become monolithic but become these combinations of little applications communicating across data centers, it allows us to have a centralized dashboard for our infrastructure that we can access, because it's in the cloud, from anywhere. And because it's in the cloud it can kind of get, get that innovation wheel turning much faster. It's just been game changing, and obviously there's other things that can happen once you do that. You can have proactive guidance coming down from the cloud, you can have golden images come down from the cloud, you can do workload specific settings. So there's a lot of new areas that it opens up once you, >> Analytics, right? >> Analytics. >> Machine intelligence. >> So we've got the takeover happening in the devnet zone right now, so focus on the data center, everybody's got t shirts and I think it says Hyperflex on them, big announcement this week about Hyperflex anywhere. Kevin you know I think that when people heard HCI, they often picture a box, or it's a group of boxes it's in a rack, it's all that and everything, and the thing is as an analyst I was poking at it, it's like "well we virtualized a lot of the stuff "and we put it in a new form factor." That's great to modernize the platform but how do we make it cloud native, how does it fit into a hybrid and multi cloud world, and it feels like we're reaching that point now. So help us connect the dots as to how, what HCI was fits into this hybrid and multi cloud world today. >> Absolutely. I mean, HCI when it came out was an alternative to SAN, I mean it was an alternative and it was touting simplicity, touting you know grow with your applications. But really now, with the multi cloud instances that our customers are looking at, they have to have a way to deploy those, a way to connect to those remotely, manage those, monitor those, actually connect that back to the core so that you can take advantage of the analytics that are running at the core and make real time recommendations, make real time adjustments for services and those type of, you know that connectivity is really what we mean by Hyperflex anywhere. It's the evolution of how you deploy, how you manage, and then of course that day two, day five, day one hundred where you're actually making that experience simple for the customers. >> Help us understand exactly, is this, do I just have the backup image in a public cloud, do I actually have similar software stacks, what's the expanse? >> Let me try to unpack that a little bit. I think it's three different vectors that we're doing. So we want as we modernize, and as our customers modernize, they're looking for a much more cloud-like limber, elastic platform. That's the first vector, that's what HCI has done, that's what we've done. And we've actually done it on steroids because we've taken that code-designed hardware and software much like the public cloud guys are doing, but we control that and we can give that to our enterprise customers and our enterprise grade resilient infrastructure. The first thing is that, the second piece of it is what our customers and really our developers and the customers are wanting to do, is to create in one place and deploy in another. So create on the private cloud, deploy in the public cloud, or create in the public cloud, deploy in the private cloud, or actually have an application that bridges the two. So having a homogenous development environment whether it's, and a lot of this is around the container frameworks, whether it's on the public cloud, private cloud. That's key, and what we've done with Hyperflex, and the integrations we've got with our container platform, with open shift, with cloud center, which was again a big announcement this week. That's that second vector, is being able to port applications, develop one place, deploy any place. And the third piece is what we've been talking about all through this segment, which is the ability to now have the cloud drive your infrastructure. Everything's connected, everything's analyzed in the cloud, there's telemetry, there's proactive guidance, there's a common dashboard there's centralized monitoring, there's the ability to deploy, like we did in the key note demonstrating in the key note, multiple different sides spread out across the world, from a cental location. I think that's game changing. >> I'd like to get your take on differentiation. Obviously you guys are biased. Cisco's different, it's better. But I want to hear why. So relative to other infrastructure players, are you, in your words, however you want to describe it more cloud like more programmable, where's the differentiation? >> Go ahead and I'll later on. >> Yeah sure. So basically we started with a foundation of UCS and that foundation, virtualize compute bare metal compute, and of course now hyper-converge, and the reason that it allows us to do things, allows us to Hyperflex anywhere, allows us to have that cloud-based model is because we built that infrastructure around the API from day one. When we started this, that programmatic infrastructure, we were talking to customers, it was stateless it was desired state config, they didn't know what we were talking about. I mean, they had no idea when this came out. But that's the foundation that really allows us to drive the API integrations to our app layers, which is what KD was talking about, and then of course from there to our multi cloud integrations and that's really the foundation that laid, that we laid early on. And that's why all of our UCS platform really enables this cloud integration. >> Yeah, I mean the way I look at it is nobody else has a fully API driven infrastructure. Everything's an API for us, we don't expose APIs after the fact, it is built around, it's an API first infrastructure. And everything is built around them. Whether it's our STKs, our integrations with you know Pop and then Ansible, and those kind of tool sets, our integration with other tool sets that people use. It's all driven through that. The second thing that is different is, we have an emulator, so we can allow our customers to really time travel through the whole process of deployment. I mean, our customers can deploy the infrastructure before the infrastructure hits the loading dock because they can download the UCS emulator. They can actually configure, deploy, build the whole policy on our management platform, test it out, do the what ifs on the emulator. When the equipment shows up, we're ready to go, we are in business, nobody else can do that. And the final thing which is, aside from all of the cloud connected pieces I've talked about, the breadth of Cisco's portfolio spanning from all of our networking assets, our SD WAN assets, our security assets, our collaboration assets, our cloud assets, that breadth gets us to implement use cases for our customers that are just, it's just impossible for anybody else to do. >> We've heard lots of proof points here in the devnote zone specifically from programmability and the automation. I've talked to some service providers here at the show, we've also heard about the journey that enterprise customers are going through to kind of understand that space and learn places here like this. Kevin, I'm sure you're talking to a lot of customers here, maybe if you have examples as to you know the exemplars of who're doing this well, and what people can learn from customers like that. >> Yeah, I mean it's amazing right. In just devnet alone we've got sessions on UCS with Python, STKs, UCS with Powertool, how to integrate with Ansible, these are just becoming common terms, common household terms for our customers. As you go up to enterprise customers, service provider customers, they're using these tools in a day to day manner to do the automation on top of, to really deploy and manage their apps, right, and the way that, I mean, it's exciting, we have customers from all segments of all industry, and they really they use these programmatic, KD's simple example of platform emulator, you don't realize how powerful that is, where you can set that same exact state machine that's in your UCS, you can put it on your laptop, set up all your policies, and then when that gear hits the dock, you are up in hours. Literally we have very large e-commerce sites, they do this, thousands of servers hit it, and in a matter of hours, they've applied those policies and they're up and running. Python, we've got Python, Ruby, Powertool, software developer kits, we've got devops that sit on those, and Ansible, Puppet, Chef, and these are just the automation so if you want to do it yourself, we've got the world class API, nobody else gives you that programmatic API. That's how we built our foundation. If you want Cisco to call those APIs, we have Intersight and we'll make those calls for you. If you just want to do some simple scripting, Powertool. You can automate certain processes, it doesn't have to be the whole end to end. You know you can use all these, it's basically choice to really, what your applications are demanding and what your customers are demanding. >> That's a strong story, one of breadth and depth. We're out of time, but KD I wonder if you could sort of put a bow on Cisco Live! Europe this year, big takeaways from your point of view. >> Listen, we've been innovating like monsters and it's such a terrific week for us to come here, to really touch and feel and listen to our customers and see the delight on their faces as we show them what we've been doing. And this part of the show, day three the devnet takeover, this is where it gets really really real, because now we get to go down to the depths of looking at those APIs, looking at those use cases, getting people to play around with them. So it's just been terrific, I love it. >> I love it too, we're the interview monsters this week. So guys thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having us. >> You're welcome. Alright keep it right there everybody, we'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE from Cicso Live! In Barcelona. Be right back. (upbeat electronic outro)

>> Live, from Barcelona Spain, it's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live! Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, here at Cisco Live! 2019 in Barcelona, Spain, I'm Stu Miniman, happy to welcome to the program a first-time guest, but someone I've known for many years, Jason Edelman, who is the founder of Network to Code. Jason, great to see you, and thanks for joining us. >> Thank you for having me, Stu. >> Alright, Jason, let's first, for our audiences, this is your first time on the program, give us a little bit about your background, and what led to you being the founder of Network to Code. >> Right, so my background is that of a traditional network engineer. I've spent 10+ years managing networks, deploying networks, and really, acting in a pre-sales capacity, supporting Cisco infrastructure. And it was probably around 2012 or 13, working for a large Cisco VAR, that we had access to something called Cisco onePK, and we kind of dove into that as the first SDK to control network devices. We have today iPhone SDKs, SDKs for Android, to program for phone apps, this was one of the first SDKs to program against a router and a switch. And that, for me, was just eye-opening, this is kind of back in 2013 or so, to see what could be done to write code in Python, Seer, Java, against network devices. Now, when this was going on, I didn't know how to code, so I kind of used that as the entrance to ramp up, but that was, for me, the pivot point. And then, the same six-week period, I had a demo of Puppet and Ansible automated networking devices, and so that was the pivot point where it was like, wow, realizing I've spent a career architecture and designing networks, and realizing there's a challenge in operating networks day to day. >> Yeah, Jason, dial back. You've some Cisco certifications in your background? >> Sure, yes, CCIE, yeah. >> Yeah, so I think back, when this all, OpenFlow, and before we even called it Software-Defined Networking, you were blogging about this type of stuff. But, as you said, you weren't a coder. It wasn't your background, you were a network guy, and I think the Network to Code, a lot of the things we've been looking at, career-wise, it's like, does everyone need to become coders? How will the tools mature? Give us a little bit about that journey, as how you got into coding and let's go from there. >> Yeah, it was interesting. In 2010, I started blogging OpenFlow-related, I thought it was going to change the world, saw what NICRO was doing at the time, and then Big Switch at the time, and I just speculated and blogged and really just envisioned this world where networks were different in some capacity. And it took a couple years to really shed light on management and operations of networking, and I made some career shifts. And I remember going back to onePK, at the time, my manager then, who is now our CEO at Network to Code, he actually asked, well, why don't you do it? And it was just like, me? Me, automate our program? What do you mean? And so it was kind of like a moment for me to kind of reflect on what I can do. Now, I will say I don't believe every network engineer should know how to code. That was my on-ramp because of partnership with Cisco at the time, and learning onePK and programming languages, but that was for me, I guess, what I needed as that kick in the butt to say, you know what? I am going to do this. I do believe in the shift that's going to happen in the next couple years, and that was where I kind of just jumped in feet first, and now we are where we are. >> Yeah, Jason, some great points there. I know for myself, I look at, Cisco's gone through so much change. A year ago, up on stage, Cisco's talking about their future is as a software company. You might not even think of us as networking first, you will talk to us about software first. So that initial shift that you saw back in 2010, it's happening. It's a different form than we might have thought originally, and it's not necessarily a product, but we're going through that shift. And I like what you said about how not everybody needs to code, but it's this change in paradigms and what we need to do are different. You've got some connections, we're here in the DevNet Zone. I saw, at the US show in Orlando last year, Network to Code had a small booth, there were a whole bunch of startups in that space. Tell us how you got involved into DevNet, really since the earliest days. >> Yes, since the early days, it was really pre-DevNet. So the emergence of DevNet, I've seen it grow into, the last couple years, Cisco Live! And for us, given what we do at Network to Code, as a network-automation-focused company, we see DevNet in use by our clients, by DevNet solutions and products, things like, mentioned yesterday on a panel, but DevNet has always-on sandboxes, too. One of the biggest barriers we've seen with our clients is getting access to the right lab gear on getting started to automate. So DevNet has these sandboxes always on to hit Nexus API or Catalyst API, right? Things like that. And there's really a very good, structured learning path to get started through DevNet, which usually, where we intersect in our client engagement, so it's kind of like post-DevNet, you're kind of really showing what's possible, and then we'll kind of get in and craft some solutions for our clients. >> Yeah, take us inside some of your clients, if you can. Are most of them hitting the API instead of the COI now when they're engaging? >> Yeah, it's actually a good question. Not usually talked about, but the reality is, APIs are still very new. And so we actively test a lot of the newer APIs from Cisco, as an example. IOS XE has some of the best APIs that exist around RESTCONF, NETCONF, modeled from the same YANG models, and great APIs. But the truth is that a lot of our clients, large enterprises that've been around for 20+ years, the install base is still largely not API-enabled. So a lot of the automation that we do is definitely SSH-based. And when you look at what's possible with platforms, if it is something like a custom in Python, or even an ANSEL off the shelf, a lot of the integrations are hidden from the user, so as long as we're able to accomplish the goal, it's the most important thing right now. And our clients' leaderships sometimes care, and it's true, right? You want the outcome. And initially, it's okay if we're not using the API, but once we do flip that switch, it does provide a bit more structure and safety for automating. But the install base is so large right now that, to automate, you have to use SSH, and we don't believe in waiting 'til every device is API-enabled because it'll just take a while to turn that base. >> Alright, Jason, a major focus of the conference this year has been around multi-cloud. How's that impacting your business and your customers? >> So, it's in our path as a company. Right now, there's a lot of focus around multi-cloud and data center, and the truth is, we're doing a lot of automation in the Campus networking space. Right, automating networks to get deployed in wiring closets and firewalls and load balancers and things like that. So from our standpoint, as we start planning with our clients, we see the services that we offer really port over to multi-cloud and making sure that with whatever automation is being deployed today, regardless of toolset, and look at a tool chain to deploy, if it's a CI/CD Pipeline for networking, be able to do that if you're managing a network in the Campus, a data center network, or multi-cloud network, to make sure we have a uniform-looking field to operations, and doing that. >> Alright, so Jason, you're not only founder of your company, you're also an author. Maybe tell us about the, I believe it's an update, or is it a new book, that recently got out. >> Yes, I'm a co-author of a book with Matt Oswalt and Scott Lowe, and it's an O'Reilly book that was published last year. And look, I'm a believer in education, and to really make a change and change an industry, we have to educate, and I think the book, the goal was to play a small part in really bringing concepts to light. As a network engineer by trade, there's fundamental concepts that network engineers should be aware of, and it could be basics and a lot of these, it could be Python or Jinja templating in YAML and Git and Linux, for that matter. It's just kind of providing that baseline of skills as an entrance into automation. And once you have the baseline, it kind of really uncovers what's possible. So writing the book was great. Great opportunity, and thank you to Matt and Scott for getting involved there. It really took a lot of the work effort and collaborated with them on it. >> Want to get your perception on the show, also. Education, always a key feature of what happens at the show. Not far from us is the Cisco bookshop. I see people getting a lot of the big Cisco books, but I think ten years ago, it was like, everybody, get my CCIE, all my different certifications updated, here. Here in the DevNet Zone, a lot of people, they're building stuff, they're building new pieces, they're playing in the labs, and they're doing some of these environments. What's your experience here at the show? Anything in particular that catches your eye? >> So, I do believe in education. I think to do anything well, you have to be educated on it. And I've read Cisco Press books over the years, probably a dozen of them, for the CCIE and beyond. I think when we look at what's in DevNet, when we look at what's in the bookstore, people have to immerse themselves into the technology, and reading books, like the learning labs that are here in the DevNet Zone, the design sessions that are right behind us. Just amazing for me to have seen the DevNet Zone grow to be what it is today. And really the goal of educating the market of what's possible. See, even from the start, Network to Code, we started as doing a lot of training, because you really can't change the methodology of network operations without being aware of what's possible, and it really does kind of come back to training. Whatever it is, on-demand, streaming, instructor-led, reading a book. Just glad to see this happen here, and a lot more to do around the industry, in the space around community involvement and development, but training, a huge part of it. >> Alright, Jason, want to give you the final word, love the story of network engineer gone entrepreneurial, out of your comfort zone, coding, helping to build a business. So tell us what you see, going forward. >> So, we've grown quite a bit in the past couple years. Right now, we're over 20 engineers strong, and starting from essentially just one a couple years ago, was a huge transformation, and seeing this happen. I believe in bringing on A-players to help make that happen. I think for us as a business, we're continuing to grow and accelerating what we do in this network automation space, but I just think, one thought to throw out there is, oftentimes we talk about lower-level tools, Python, Git, YAML, a lot of new acronyms and buzzwords for network engineers, but also, the flip side is true, too. As our client base evolves, and a lot of them are in the Fortune 100, so large clients, looking at consumption models of technology's super-important, meaning is there ITSM tools deployed today, like a ServiceNow, or Webex teams, or Slack for chat integration. To really think through early on how the internal customers of automation will consume automation, 'cause it really does us no good, Cisco, vendors, or clients no good, if we deploy a great network automation platform, and no one uses it, because it doesn't fit the culture of the brand of the organization. So it's just, as we continue to grow, that's really what's top of mind for us right now. >> Alright, well Jason, congratulations on everything that you've done so far, wish you the best of luck going forward, and thank you so much, of course, for watching. We'll have more coverage, three day, wall-to-wall, here at Cisco Live! 2019 in Barcelona. I'm Stu Miniman, and thanks for watching theCUBE. (electronic music)

>> Live from London, England, it's theCUBE. Covering .NEXT Conference Europe, 2018. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, my cohost Joep Piscaer, and you're watching theCUBE here at Nutanix .NEXT, London, 2018. Happy to welcome back to the program the co-founder, CEO, and chairman of Nutanix, Dheeraj Pandey. Dheeraj, thanks so much. Congratulations on 3500 people here at the third annual European show, and thanks so much for having theCUBE. >> Thank you, my pleasure. >> All right. So, Dheeraj, first of all, you got a lot going on. Big company event here, last night you announced the Q1 2019 earnings. I guess, step back for a second. Nutanix is now, nine years since the founding, you've been public now for a little while, you got to be feeling good. The company's reached a certain size, very respected in the marketplace. So how are you and the team feeling? >> Yeah, well, I tell people that it's actually fun to be a public company. And obviously there is a cost to being a public company, because you're on a quarterly treadmill, in some sense. But Wall Street also keeps you honest. Just like Main Street keeps you honest on quality of product and customer service, Wall Street keeps you honest on spend and what does it really mean to grow at scale. So I like the fact that there is two good streets that are keeping the company honest. And it's really fun to think about capital allocation, one of the big things as you grow. I mean, you're going to spend more than a billion dollars this year alone. How do you allocate capital wisely is something that I think a lot about in (mumbles). >> Yeah. So, at this show, you kind of change some of the positioning of the portfolio. It's the Core, Essentials, and Enterprise, and right, that asset allocation, when I look at Essential, Xi Cloud, there's all these different pieces, some of them through acquisition, some of them created internally. You need to be careful that you don't over-commit, but when do you decide to kill stuff or keep it going, so you got a lot of plates to spin now, a lot more than you did a year or two ago. >> Yeah, absolutely, and it's not just product development. It's also marketing and sales and G&A. I mean, there's other departments we need to think hard about. Like, how do you create brand awareness for these new things? How do you do demand generation? How do you have a specialty sales force? All those things have to be considered, so, nine years, it's been a journey, but it still looks like it's nothing. And we're still a very small company, and we need to think hard about the next five years, in some sense. >> Yeah. So, one of the metrics you gave Wall Street to be able to look at is, what percentage of customers are using more than just the Core? So the Essentials or the Enterprise. And if I got it right, it's up to 19% from 15%, the quarter before. I wonder, is the packaging, how much of that is for Wall Street? Somebody cynically might look and be like, hey, is the Core market slowing down? And therefore you need to expand. We've all seen public companies that need to go into adjacencies, and shouldn't you stick to your knitting? You've got a great solid product with leadership in the marketplace. >> Yep, absolutely. Also, look, we are not bundling them in SKUs so we cannot force customers to actually buy them. We're not doing financial engineering of dollars, because these not SKUs or bundles. This is a journey which is mostly advisory, in some sense. This is how you should start, this is how you should go, and this is advisory for our sellers and our buyers and our channel people. Everybody needs to say, look, have the customer go through the journey. If you had to do what he just said, probably would've bundled them in SKUs and then allocated capital to one or the other. I think, to your other comment about just sticking to the core, Juniper stuck to the core. And many companies out there which just stayed as a single-box company, they stayed at the core. And eventually you realize the market has moved faster than your core itself. So there's this business school thinking, they call it the Icarus Effect. The Icarus Effect is all about, I'm so good at what I do that I can fly to the sun and nothing will happen. But you don't realize that Icarus, the wings were actually pasted using wax. And you go to the sun, and the sun actually melts the wax. So companies like FGI and SUN, Norca, many companies just stuck to one thing. And they couldn't evolve, actually. >> Obviously you're not sticking to the core alone, right? You're expanding the portfolio, I mean, you're not just an infrastructure company anymore. You do so much on top of the infrastructure on-prem. You have so many SAP services, so how do you manage the portfolio in terms of the customer journey? Because there's so much to tell to a customer. How do you sell it? How do you convince a customer to go from Core to Essentials to Enterprise? >> The most important thing is leverage. Is Essentials going to leverage Core, and is the Enterprise going to leverage Essentials and Core itself? Case in point, Files is completely built on top of Core. So every time somebody's using Files, they're also using Core. If you think about Flow, it uses AHV underneath. Frame, and case in point. When it's going to deliver desktops, it's going to use Files because every desktop needs a filer as well. And then when Frame delivers desktops on-prem, it's going to use all the Core. So the important thing is how they don't become disparate things, like they're all going in their own direction, is there a level of progressiveness where you say, well, if you're using the Enterprise features, a lot of them actually go in and drag in the Core as well as Essentials. So how do we build that progressive experience for the customer, where each of these layers are actually being utilized, is the important piece. >> Dheeraj, so, we're talking a lot about the expansion beyond the Core. But there was a pretty significant activity that your team did on Core itself. So the first time I heard about it, it basically said, we're doing an entire file system rewrite. Think of it almost as AoS 2.0. Now, from a product name, I believe it's 5.10, so I might have trouble remembering which release it was, but talk about what went involved in that. Obviously a lot has changed in the nine years since you created it, so. >> Absolutely. Yeah, yesterday in the earnings call I talked about it too, that people scoff at Core infrastructure. Like, oh, it's going to be a commodity because it's good enough infrastructure. But then I argue that there's no such thing as good enough infrastructure. And companies struggle when they don't focus on infrastructure itself. It's like food, shelter, clothing in the Maslow's hierarchy of needs. If you don't get that, then there's no point self-actualizing it. So, Core infrastructure completely destroys network insecurity. You got to get it right. I mean, look at Oracle, how it's struggling with IaaS. And look at Google, they're trying to figure out how to make it relevant for the Enterprise. Azure has like three or four different stacks for infrastructure. One for old 265, one for Azure DB, one for Azure, and now they're rewriting it for Azure itself. VMware has three different infrastructure stacks. One for three tier, where they are very happily, they're saying, look, let EMC, their NetApps actually are underneath, and Cisco's, and stuff like that. And then they have this software-defined infrastructure with commodity servers. And finally, they have VMware-enabled AWS which is going to use AWS services. So now you have three different forks of your core base, in some sense. And for us, what's important is how we use a single core base for everything. So architecture matters. I was arguing yesterday in the earnings call that good enough infrastructure is an oxymoron. You need to get core right before you can go and try to live the other layers of the Maslow's hierarchy of needs, actually. And that's why we went back and thought about, as the workloads were growing and increasing, and we had mission-critical stuff in memory databases, what do we need to really do about the way we lay out the data and lay out the metadata? So as you know, metadata is at the core of anything in systems, and especially storage systems. And the metadata of our erstwhile system was actually very completely distributed. And then we realized that some things can be local, and some things can be distributed, and that's better scale. Again, going back to this understanding of what things can be represented locally for a certain disk versus what things need to be global so that you can go and say, okay, where is this data really located? What drive? But once you go to the drive, you can actually get more metadata. So, again, you're getting more progressive scanning. So at the end of the day, our engineers are constantly thinking about performance and scalability, and how do you change the wings of the plane at 35,000 feet? It's a very big challenge. >> So that's one of the issues, right? So you're still focusing on your own infrastructure layer, right? But many customers do already have presence in a different hardware stack, or the public cloud, or some service provider. So not everything runs on your platform. So how are you planning to deliver the services ensemble to customers that don't necessarily run on AoS? >> So that's the multi-cloud journey, which is basically the enterprise journey of our customers. I said this yesterday in the earnings call as well, that all our services should be available both on-prem and off-prem. This idea of a VPC, that is multi-location, is what hybrid cloud is all about. So how do you get a virtual private cloud to really span multiple clouds in multiple locations? I think you saw from the demos today of how you're really running all of AoS on top of GCP virtual infrastructure. And in the course of the coming year or two, you'll see us do the same thing, BEM at Amazon, BEM at Azure. Because they deliver servers in their data centers and that's leverage for them because they've already gone and spent so much money on data centers that it's easy for them to deliver a physical server that our software can run on top of. And if people are not using AoS, they'll still want to use things like Frame and Beam and COM and other such things like that. >> Yep, Dheeraj, what are you hearing from customers and how do you think of hybrid, as it were? You know, a lot of attention gets played to things like Azure Stack from Microsoft from VMware on AWS, I know you've got some view points on this. >> Yeah, no, in fact, so if you go back five years, hyperconvergence had become a buzz word maybe three, four years ago. And there were a lot of companies doing hyperconvergence. And only one or two have survived and it's us and VMware, basically have survived that. Everybody else has a checkbox because the customers said well, what about that? Will we have a check box? But, it's really about operating system sort of hyperconvergence. And it has to be honest. And it has to really blur the lines between compute and storage and networking and security. I think hybrid needs to be honest and one of the killer things that hybrid needs is blurring the lines between networks, blurring the lines on storage so you can do one click replication and one click fail over. So a lot of those things have required a lot of innovations from us. That's why we were delayed in Xi. We didn't want to just put up data centers and just like that. I mean, if you go back in time to many hardware companies were putting open stack data centers and calling it their new cloud in response to Amazon. And VMware tried vCloud Air. And they had a charter to go spend money. They weren't going to spend a ton of money on hardware. Without even knowing that the cloud is not about data centers. Cloud is about an experience. It's about eCommerce and computing coming together. And you have to be passionate about a catalog. You know, the marketplace, the catalog so that people can really go and consume things from a catalog. I think that's what our experience has been that. Look, if you don't think of it like a retail giant or retail customer, which is what Amazon has done such a good job of. You know, they've thought about computing as an eCommerce problem as opposed to as a compute storage networking problem itself. And those are the lessons that we have learned about hybrid just as much >> Alright, you did a nice job on the keynote, laying out that Nutanix, like your customers, you're going through a journey. The crawl-walk-run, if you will. We got a tease in the keynote this morning about something cloud native. Where you're going. Final question for you is as you look at the company, you said it's still young, where are your customers going, where are some of the things they need to work on, and that Nutanix will mature with them as we look to move forward? >> Well, I mean, look. I think everybody knows where customers are headed. They're questioning who fulfills the promise because the requirements are all the same. They all want to go and use next generation infrastructure, they want to modernize their data centers, the infrastructure. They want to use some things that they want to own, some things they want to rent. The question is, where is the best experience possible? And by that, I mean not just systems experience of hybrid clouds but also customer service and having an ever-growing catalog and being able to deliver things for developers and devops. And technology will come and go. Two, three years ago, the Puppet and Chef were the hottest thing on, now today, it's Kubernetes. Tomorrow, it's going to be something else. It's the fact that what you see is what you do. And what you do is what you say. In our business, it's about integrity. I was arguing about this yesterday in the earnings call, as well, that building business software is a little bit easier. I shouldn't trivialize it as much but if people use business software, they can work around weaknesses of business software. But if you are in the business of infrastructure, applications cannot work around weaknesses of infrastructure. So integrity matters a lot in our space, actually, and that is about great products, great customer service, fast innovation, recovering fast, being resilient. Those are the things that we focus a lot on. >> Alright, well, Dheeraj, thanks again, always. We didn't even get to talk about the width part, the fourth H that you've been talking about for the honest, humble, and hungry. So, thank you. Congratulations to the team and always appreciate you having on our program. >> My pleasure. >> Alright, for Joep Piscaer, I'm Stu Miniman. Stay with us. Two days live of wall to wall coverage. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (light music) >> I have been in the software and technology industry for over 12 years now. And so I've had the opportunity as a marketer.

>> Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back. This is theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2018 here in Las Vegas. I'm Stu Miniman joined by my two guest hosts that have spent a bunch of time with us this week. John Mark Troyer and Justin Warren. Thank you, gentlemen for joining us for the wrap. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thanks for having us. >> We get to have a lot of fun. We get to hang out with community people, geek out on a lot of stuff. This is also a really good checkpoint for a lot of the IT industry. VMware, 800-pound gorilla in the data center. I put out one tweet that was like the 800-pound gorilla in the data center or the 800-pound gorilla in the cloud. The partnerships matured quite a bit, in my mind, for the last year. That was one of the big things that I've seen. RDS on-premises is definitely the thing that sticks out to me the most. John, let's start with you as to, checkpoint from last year. What impressed you? What are they making progress with? Let's start there. >> I think the RDS announcement was maybe even undersold here. We'll see in the coming months what actually happens and if everything works the way it's supposed to work. I think a lot of people who are putting chips down on various outcomes and scenarios in cloud world did not cover that one space in the roulette wheel. Cause that's actually pretty interesting. Stu, I kind of see this as a year of promises kept. Some promises that were made in years past are starting to come out. This multi-cloud world seems more real. VMware's relationships with various clouds and the hints that were thrown are there's more to come. It seems real. The cloud starting to come back on-prem. Both EBS on-prem and now Project Dimension with VMware being a service provider. I've talked to a number of vendors and you and I, Stu. Some are here on theCUBE. People starting to do more managed services from the cloud back into your data center. I see the multi-cloud world working and then this kind of blurring of on-prem and cloud even more. That's kind of what I'm seeing. >> Yeah, I've got to agree. It's that idea that cloud is a state of mind. It's not a location. >> We say it's an operating model at it's core, right? >> Right, yeah, and I think we're seeing a lot of those ideas come to fruition now that you can operate like a cloud on-site. It's how you run things, it's not where exactly you put it. With the multi-cloud world, like you said, we can have, some of it can be on-site, some of it can be in one cloud, another cloud, lots of different clouds. Some of it will be at the edge. We're seeing a lot of growth in edge computing, which is essentially just another way of doing on-site. Being able to use the same tools, and that, for me, is the idea around the RDS announcement. It's the same thing that you're used to in public cloud. Now I can do that on-site. We're seeing a real cross-pollination. You can take VMware and run that in cloud. You can take things from the cloud and now run it back on site. It's pretty exciting. >> This is awesome. We have an easy button. Customers just push a button. Any data, anywhere, moves all over the place. Laws of physics, throw them out. Come on, guys. I need some critical analysis here. The trope that I would have, always, when I became an analyst an eight years ago was like well, if it wasn't for management and security we would have this all sorted out. The multi-cloud world is made progress, but when I still look at it. RDS, super exciting. The thing that's most exciting about it? That's on-premises, it's doesn't have connection to Amazon, but I'm doing cool things with the exact same kind of bits there so I can do it here or there. Doesn't mean, necessarily here and there, or spread between there, because petabytes of data don't just float across the ether. We're still using things like the AWS Snowballs when we have to move a lot of data. Yes, it's matured, but when I look at the management of multi-cloud and how simple, there was a great comment from a company that's been around for a couple of decades on theCUBE and he said look, the new companies all say we're going to make this super easy. It's like well, because you don't have the trusted brand to set beside, simple would be nice but cloud isn't simple. Multi-cloud sure isn't simple. >> There was, probably, a surfeit of single panes of glass here at the show. Any app, any cloud, any whatever. Single pane of glass. We'll blueprint it, we'll manage it, we'll do it. That does seem like that probably isn't that real world. >> Multiple single panes of glass. >> Please, Justin, give me a touchpoint. When you talk to an administrator, how do they spell single pane of glass? >> Oh yes, P-A-I-N, yes, a single glass of pain. That's generally what it is. I think that the manageability and the operational side of things, that is where there's a lot more development required. Cloud is, yes it's a state of mind. It's a very different way of operating and a lot of the tools, particularly in the VMware community, a lot of what people are used to here is very much point and click. It's not really as automated as it would be in, say, developer land. I spend a lot of time with developers and a lot of what they're used to is all programmatic, it's driven from the API. We're seeing movement with things like PowerShell and VMware administrators are getting more comfortable with the idea of scripting and so on. But they're not programmers. They still need GUI tools. They still need things that are able to do point and click. Some things are better in that environment. I think we still have a long way to go with things around automation. The other thing that still has a long way to go, I think, is security. Security particularly around the networking of how you inter-connect with all of these things and do so securely at scale. There is a lot of invasion and work that's required to actually make that happen. >> Absolutely. John, do you have some comment there? >> I was going to say I think you're right. Especially on all those points. The community booth back here behind us this year had a VMware code section, which was jam-packed the whole time. For the first time. VMware's been trying to speak to developers for 10 years and not quite connecting. Now, these weren't developers back there, these were admins, and they're not going to ever be programmers, but they're going to start to learn more programmatic paradigms, automation, things like that. It was super popular this year. >> Luckily, we don't actually need programmers anymore, John, cause it's coding, which means you're really just coping, pasting, and modifying things and everything. Heck, I've even interviewed marketing people that are like oh, server-less, I can build with that stuff. Super easy. I don't think we need everybody to learn to even code, as it were. We bridged that gap. It's matured, it's become easier. They pulled over some of the, it was the EMC code team. It's half that team over there. They had some good gamification. >> Stu, I am an optimist and I think the glass is half full or 40% full at least. We've done some CUBE stuff, theCUBE's been all over the world here this spring, all through 2018. I've done a couple shows with you. The difference that I saw this year was that the use cases were real and the time to value was real. People are implementing cloud projects, multi-cloud projects, and they're getting to a good milestone within weeks or months. Admittedly, these are big, multi-national companies, so it's really at the top level where they have the army of people to do it, but sometimes these projects were very small and they were real. They weren't just marketing hokum up on stage. Of course, they're not the full enterprise in a couple of weeks, but that's the difference this year, I see, Stu. I'm 40% full. >> Absolutely, I'd say look. Energy level was up. Two years ago it kind of hit a nadir. It was doom and gloom. We were all over at the eye candy bar saluting the great run that VMware had and wondering who the next CEO was been. Now, energy level's back up. Investment in the ecosystem, oh my gosh. I don't think I've seen this many parties ever at a VMworld. We got to talk about something other than cloud so give me your non-cloud takeaways from the show. Areas that people should learn more about, things you saw in the ecosystem or from VMware or the community. >> I think that's one of the things I've noticed here at the show. Wandering around the show floor, unlike some of the other shows where it's we will have a storage show or we'll have a backup show. There's a lot more balance this year. There seems to be a good mix of some of everything. I think that it shows that in order to run a successful IT shop, you actually need to have a balance of, you need some backup, you need some data recovery, you need to have some software, you need some monitoring, you need to have security options. Go and have a look at all of the different vendors that are at a show like this to be able to make sure you have a portfolio approach to how you run things. >> Totally. I remember there were a couple of years, four or five years ago, it was like oh, it's VM storage world. >> Yeah. >> OK, yeah. John? >> There is a lot of storage here, but the storage is all connected to the cloud now. I think if you look at some of the big booths and some of the start-ups who have gotten funding recently. Large rounds. Cohesity, Datrium, Rubrik, folks like that, they're delivering on promises made in earlier years. Not particularly like oh wow, I never thought of, but this was the vision that we laid out and now we're delivering it this year. Big rounds of funding, big customer movement, connection to the cloud and solid, interesting DR as a service and data, as opposed to storage, ideas. I thought that was one of the more interesting aisles this year over there in the booths. >> To riff on what you said about developers and the bridge to the code idea, we see Puppet is here at the show, HashiCorp is here for the first time. >> Docker's there, of course. >> Docker's here. >> C & CF had a booth. >> Yep, C & CF had a booth. These are people that you wouldn't have expected to see at a VMware show in years past. >> One thing that struck me is companies with a mission for good. Pat Gelsinger kind of sets the bar. Talked about it in his keynote. Do better, do good, sets that example. He climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro for charity earlier this year. They had Malala up on stage with Sanjay Poonen. I did a couple of interviews here which were inspiring. Mission-driven companies and great to see the infrastructure in software companies being like hey, we're enabling and helping it. That was one to me. Takeaways from the community? Other things as we get to our wrap? >> I do wonder about that point. Just to add a little, slightly critical note on that. I think that there has been a bit of a tech lash, a bit of a backlash against tech companies. I wonder whether, I would like to see more from tech companies to show that this is real. That that social conscience is a real thing and it isn't just a bit of marketing that they've spray painted on to the front of the company. The fact that we had Malala here giving a keynote indicates that there is a commitment to it. I would want to see that carry through for the next couple of years, at least, to show that that sort of thing is real. And certainly, from the rest of the ecosystem, I expect that we're going to see a lot more. >> Diversity in the community, absolutely. I do realize we have three white guys of a certain age sitting here. We try to add diversity. I had my first European host on the program. Lisa's been on a lot this week. We're building out our bench, we're looking to add diversity. John, yeah, the community. >> Community, again, yeah, community was good this year. A lot of old faces have stayed around, which is really interesting but also people have left and come back. You saw people who have gone into the AWS and Microsoft ecosystems coming back in here. Again, some of those old faces. Also, new faces. Global diversity from the southern hemisphere and from other countries that you wouldn't expect are here today. That was super interesting. I do see a lot of energy, a lot of excitement about their careers going forward. I do see that tech needs to be, there was some symbolic do-good things here. But I mean, Justin is a little bit involved in your own home country about how the government has the power with technology to do good or bad. I think that may be an emerging thing that we see here now as you get a layer down of not only charity work but the impacts of technology. I bet we'll end up talking about that next year, Stu. >> Guys, we could start talking for a lot longer. The good news is I know how to get in touch with you. For our audience, by the way, you can hit us all up on Twitter, through various social channels. Jtroyer, jpwarren, I'm of course @stu. That's just S-T-U. Blue Cow is on Instagram. Follow the adventures of Blue Cow, showing where Justin's going all over the place. Thanks so much for joining us. Great coverage here. This community's where I get a lot of my guest hosts and still, it's like homecoming coming to this place. Thank you for watching theCUBE. (electronic tones)

>> Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back. This is theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2018 here in Las Vegas. I'm Stu Miniman joined by my two guest hosts that have spent a bunch of time with us this week. John Mark Troyer and Justin Warren. Thank you, gentlemen for joining us for the wrap. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thanks for having us. >> We get to have a lot of fun. We get to hang out with community people, geek out on a lot of stuff. This is also a really good checkpoint for a lot of the IT industry. VMware, 800-pound gorilla in the data center. I put out one tweet that was like the 800-pound gorilla in the data center or the 800-pound gorilla in the cloud. The partnerships matured quite a bit, in my mind, for the last year. That was one of the big things that I've seen. RDS on-premises is definitely the thing that sticks out to me the most. John, let's start with you as to, checkpoint from last year. What impressed you? What are they making progress with? Let's start there. >> I think the RDS announcement was maybe even undersold here. We'll see in the coming months what actually happens and if everything works the way it's supposed to work. I think a lot of people who are putting chips down on various outcomes and scenarios in cloud world did not cover that one space in the roulette wheel. Cause that's actually pretty interesting. Stu, I kind of see this as a year of promises kept. Some promises that were made in years past are starting to come out. This multi-cloud world seems more real. VMware's relationships with various clouds and the hints that were thrown are there's more to come. It seems real. The cloud starting to come back on-prem. Both EBS on-prem and now Project Dimension with VMware being a service provider. I've talked to a number of vendors and you and I, Stu. Some are here on theCUBE. People starting to do more managed services from the cloud back into your data center. I see the multi-cloud world working and then this kind of blurring of on-prem and cloud even more. That's kind of what I'm seeing. >> Yeah, I've got to agree. It's that idea that cloud is a state of mind. It's not a location. >> We say it's an operating model at it's core, right? >> Right, yeah, and I think we're seeing a lot of those ideas come to fruition now that you can operate like a cloud on-site. It's how you run things, it's not where exactly you put it. With the multi-cloud world, like you said, we can have, some of it can be on-site, some of it can be in one cloud, another cloud, lots of different clouds. Some of it will be at the edge. We're seeing a lot of growth in edge computing, which is essentially just another way of doing on-site. Being able to use the same tools, and that, for me, is the idea around the RDS announcement. It's the same thing that you're used to in public cloud. Now I can do that on-site. We're seeing a real cross-pollination. You can take VMware and run that in cloud. You can take things from the cloud and now run it back on site. It's pretty exciting. >> This is awesome. We have an easy button. Customers just push a button. Any data, anywhere, moves all over the place. Laws of physics, throw them out. Come on, guys. I need some critical analysis here. The trope that I would have, always, when I became an analyst an eight years ago was like well, if it wasn't for management and security we would have this all sorted out. The multi-cloud world is made progress, but when I still look at it. RDS, super exciting. The thing that's most exciting about it? That's on-premises, it's doesn't have connection to Amazon, but I'm doing cool things with the exact same kind of bits there so I can do it here or there. Doesn't mean, necessarily here and there, or spread between there, because petabytes of data don't just float across the ether. We're still using things like the AWS Snowballs when we have to move a lot of data. Yes, it's matured, but when I look at the management of multi-cloud and how simple, there was a great comment from a company that's been around for a couple of decades on theCUBE and he said look, the new companies all say we're going to make this super easy. It's like well, because you don't have the trusted brand to set beside, simple would be nice but cloud isn't simple. Multi-cloud sure isn't simple. >> There was, probably, a surfeit of single panes of glass here at the show. Any app, any cloud, any whatever. Single pane of glass. We'll blueprint it, we'll manage it, we'll do it. That does seem like that probably isn't that real world. >> Multiple single panes of glass. >> Please, Justin, give me a touchpoint. When you talk to an administrator, how do they spell single pane of glass? >> Oh yes, P-A-I-N, yes, a single glass of pain. That's generally what it is. I think that the manageability and the operational side of things, that is where there's a lot more development required. Cloud is, yes it's a state of mind. It's a very different way of operating and a lot of the tools, particularly in the VMware community, a lot of what people are used to here is very much point and click. It's not really as automated as it would be in, say, developer land. I spend a lot of time with developers and a lot of what they're used to is all programmatic, it's driven from the API. We're seeing movement with things like PowerShell and VMware administrators are getting more comfortable with the idea of scripting and so on. But they're not programmers. They still need GUI tools. They still need things that are able to do point and click. Some things are better in that environment. I think we still have a long way to go with things around automation. The other thing that still has a long way to go, I think, is security. Security particularly around the networking of how you inter-connect with all of these things and do so securely at scale. There is a lot of invasion and work that's required to actually make that happen. >> Absolutely. John, do you have some comment there? >> I was going to say I think you're right. Especially on all those points. The community booth back here behind us this year had a VMware code section, which was jam-packed the whole time. For the first time. VMware's been trying to speak to developers for 10 years and not quite connecting. Now, these weren't developers back there, these were admins, and they're not going to ever be programmers, but they're going to start to learn more programmatic paradigms, automation, things like that. It was super popular this year. >> Luckily, we don't actually need programmers anymore, John, cause it's coding, which means you're really just coping, pasting, and modifying things and everything. Heck, I've even interviewed marketing people that are like oh, server-less, I can build with that stuff. Super easy. I don't think we need everybody to learn to even code, as it were. We bridged that gap. It's matured, it's become easier. They pulled over some of the, it was the EMC code team. It's half that team over there. They had some good gamification. >> Stu, I am an optimist and I think the glass is half full or 40% full at least. We've done some CUBE stuff, theCUBE's been all over the world here this spring, all through 2018. I've done a couple shows with you. The difference that I saw this year was that the use cases were real and the time to value was real. People are implementing cloud projects, multi-cloud projects, and they're getting to a good milestone within weeks or months. Admittedly, these are big, multi-national companies, so it's really at the top level where they have the army of people to do it, but sometimes these projects were very small and they were real. They weren't just marketing hokum up on stage. Of course, they're not the full enterprise in a couple of weeks, but that's the difference this year, I see, Stu. I'm 40% full. >> Absolutely, I'd say look. Energy level was up. Two years ago it kind of hit a nadir. It was doom and gloom. We were all over at the eye candy bar saluting the great run that VMware had and wondering who the next CEO was been. Now, energy level's back up. Investment in the ecosystem, oh my gosh. I don't think I've seen this many parties ever at a VMworld. We got to talk about something other than cloud so give me your non-cloud takeaways from the show. Areas that people should learn more about, things you saw in the ecosystem or from VMware or the community. >> I think that's one of the things I've noticed here at the show. Wandering around the show floor, unlike some of the other shows where it's we will have a storage show or we'll have a backup show. There's a lot more balance this year. There seems to be a good mix of some of everything. I think that it shows that in order to run a successful IT shop, you actually need to have a balance of, you need some backup, you need some data recovery, you need to have some software, you need some monitoring, you need to have security options. Go and have a look at all of the different vendors that are at a show like this to be able to make sure you have a portfolio approach to how you run things. >> Totally. I remember there were a couple of years, four or five years ago, it was like oh, it's VM storage world. >> Yeah. >> OK, yeah. John? >> There is a lot of storage here, but the storage is all connected to the cloud now. I think if you look at some of the big booths and some of the start-ups who have gotten funding recently. Large rounds. Cohesity, Datrium, Rubrik, folks like that, they're delivering on promises made in earlier years. Not particularly like oh wow, I never thought of, but this was the vision that we laid out and now we're delivering it this year. Big rounds of funding, big customer movement, connection to the cloud and solid, interesting DR as a service and data, as opposed to storage, ideas. I thought that was one of the more interesting aisles this year over there in the booths. >> To riff on what you said about developers and the bridge to the code idea, we see Puppet is here at the show, HashiCorp is here for the first time. >> Docker's there, of course. >> Docker's here. >> C & CF had a booth. >> Yep, C & CF had a booth. These are people that you wouldn't have expected to see at a VMware show in years past. >> One thing that struck me is companies with a mission for good. Pat Gelsinger kind of sets the bar. Talked about it in his keynote. Do better, do good, sets that example. He climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro for charity earlier this year. They had Malala up on stage with Sanjay Poonen. I did a couple of interviews here which were inspiring. Mission-driven companies and great to see the infrastructure in software companies being like hey, we're enabling and helping it. That was one to me. Takeaways from the community? Other things as we get to our wrap? >> I do wonder about that point. Just to add a little, slightly critical note on that. I think that there has been a bit of a tech lash, a bit of a backlash against tech companies. I wonder whether, I would like to see more from tech companies to show that this is real. That that social conscience is a real thing and it isn't just a bit of marketing that they've spray painted on to the front of the company. The fact that we had Malala here giving a keynote indicates that there is a commitment to it. I would want to see that carry through for the next couple of years, at least, to show that that sort of thing is real. And certainly, from the rest of the ecosystem, I expect that we're going to see a lot more. >> Diversity in the community, absolutely. I do realize we have three white guys of a certain age sitting here. We try to add diversity. I had my first European host on the program. Lisa's been on a lot this week. We're building out our bench, we're looking to add diversity. John, yeah, the community. >> Community, again, yeah, community was good this year. A lot of old faces have stayed around, which is really interesting but also people have left and come back. You saw people who have gone into the AWS and Microsoft ecosystems coming back in here. Again, some of those old faces. Also, new faces. Global diversity from the southern hemisphere and from other countries that you wouldn't expect are here today. That was super interesting. I do see a lot of energy, a lot of excitement about their careers going forward. I do see that tech needs to be, there was some symbolic do-good things here. But I mean, Justin is a little bit involved in your own home country about how the government has the power with technology to do good or bad. I think that may be an emerging thing that we see here now as you get a layer down of not only charity work but the impacts of technology. I bet we'll end up talking about that next year, Stu. >> Guys, we could start talking for a lot longer. The good news is I know how to get in touch with you. For our audience, by the way, you can hit us all up on Twitter, through various social channels. Jtroyer, jpwarren, I'm of course @stu. That's just S-T-U. Blue Cow is on Instagram. Follow the adventures of Blue Cow, showing where Justin's going all over the place. Thanks so much for joining us. Great coverage here. This community's where I get a lot of my guest hosts and still, it's like homecoming coming to this place. Thank you for watching theCUBE. (electronic tones)

>> Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE covering DockerCon '18, brought to you by Docker and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, we are live at DockerCon 2018 on a stunning day in San Francisco at Moscone West. I'm Lisa Martin with John Troyer and we're excited to welcome two new folks to theCUBE from Skytap. We've got Lucas Welch, the senior director of communications and Hamish Hill, technical product marketing manager. Hey, guys. >> Great to be here, thanks for having us. >> And thanks for adding a lot of color, Lucas, to our set. >> Well, I just wanted to bring enough flair that you could realize I might have something interesting to say. >> Awesome, so speaking of interesting things, tell us about Skytap, what do you guys do, who are you, where are you based? >> Great, so Skytap. Founded in 2006, so relatively old by start-up standards but it's allowed us to learn a lot about where clouded option has been going. And what we've seen is there really is an overlooked challenge that enterprises are facing today, right? So, cloud native development, growing rapidly, gonna continue to develop, but what do you do with all your old stuff, your existing applications? And so Skytap is a cloud purpose-built for modernizing those traditional applications and we do that through a process we call IPA, although we don't advocate that you drink on the job. It's Infrastructure, Process, and Architecture. And the idea is to really get yourself to true modernization and making the most of cloud, and containers, and all of the modern technologies we can see on the show floor behind us, you first need to modernize the infrastructure, get yourself out of the data center. From there, in eliminating that barrier, you're gonna be able to modernize the processes. How do you develop, how do you change your applications? And by getting better in that regard, adopting things like DevOps and agile methodologies, finally you can start to make changes to the application themselves. So, in short order, we are the cloud for modernizing traditional applications and we like to see ourselves as complementary to the folks at AWS behind us and others who are best for that cloud native web scale development of new applications. >> Great conversation this morning at the Key Note about modernizing applications. I think it's on everybody's mind because the world does not start fresh and new every day, right? We all are working with things that we've been carrying, for some cases, for years and decades. So Docker is talking about, in fact we modernized a .NET application, I think, this morning so they showed a little bit of a demo with that and kubernetes. Can you talk a little bit about how you work with Docker and, you know, some of the challenges that you work with in terms of modernizing applications? >> Yeah, Docker has a great framework with what they have with their MTA. Actually, our VP of Product, Dan Jones, presented yesterday on making modernization magical and really looking at how Skytap complements what Docker has with their MTA framework. And I think Skytap provides, with our IPA approach, a great platform for enterprises to execute the Docker MTA approach and beyond that, sort of what Skytap provides is the abilities, sort of, to move out of the data center and get away from the hardware side of things, and start to leverage some of the scale that you can get out of the cloud. >> What are some of the things that an enterprise, that a legacy application expects that it's not gonna have if you just lift and shift it. You know, why do we need Skytap? >> Yeah, I think what's important to remember is often, even just lifting and shifting it is very difficult because if you want a monolithic or traditional application that's very much wed to the infrastructure it was built on five, 10, 15 years ago, taking that and putting it in a hyper scale provider often means you gotta rewrite from scratch and that's a really arduous process, often one that creates a skills challenge in and of itself because not only do you need people to manage the existing application, you need a whole set of new skills to take a cloud-like approach to that development. So that can create a lot of challenges and so what we see here at DockerCon, really the reason we're here, is both Docker and Skytap see the next wave of cloud, the next wave of modern development, is gonna be, "How do we bring all these benefits we've seen "in Cloud Native development "to those existing applications?" and what we see ourselves doing is eliminating that infrastructure barrier so then you can really start using containers to their full benefit, whether it's in Skytap cloud, in another cloud, or both. >> So, just to follow up a little bit. So it's not just some services like, I don't know, you've gotta have authentication, and you've gotta have storage, and you've gotta have all the things that an old legacy application, sitting in a data center, expects. But it sounds like, also, there's operational services as well and being able to operate with that kind of cloud-level agility? >> Yeah, what we provide with Skytap is, you know, we have a concept of a Skytap environment and so within that environment, you can have your traditional X86, sort of, VMware-based workloads. We also support IBM power systems. So we're the only cloud that can run AIX workloads and Linux on power and so alongside that, what we get is sort of the combination of being able to bring in containers as well and so as organizations go through that modernization journey, being able to receive or see value in the hybrid applications, sort of, along the way. >> We saw a lot of stats, thanks Lucas, this morning I think one of the first ones that I saw was in the press release that Docker released which was, this morning, 85% of enterprise organizations are running a multi-cloud strategy, so that's pretty pervasive. We're also seeing stats like, up to 90%, we had Scott Johnston on earlier, their Chief Product Officer, up to 90% of enterprises are spending, sorry. Enterprises are spending up to 90% of their IT budgets just keeping the lights on for traditional applications. As you said, lift and shift isn't practical for a number of reasons. You also talked about, you know, skill-set changes there. So I'm curious, what are some of the, kind of, common challenges you're seeing in the customer environment where they might be trepidatious to go to the container journey and how specifically does Skytap and Docker knock those out of the park? >> Yeah, well those stats, I think, are really indicative of the challenge and then the new approaches that companies are trying to take to solve that challenge which is, you have so much invested in what's made your company successful, and if you're a long-standing enterprise doing well on your market, you've been doing this for 10, 15, 20, maybe more, years and you've done very well to get yourself to where you are. You've invested millions, if not billions in your infrastructure, your talent, and the people that build the systems that run your business so to burn that all to the ground and start from scratch doesn't make a lot of sense and so, I think, one challenge you run into is inertia, right. It's like "Hey, we did well to get here, "why do we need to suddenly change everything we're doing?" And Skytap's recommendation is you don't need to change everything, but you do need to prepare to be able to change much more rapidly as our economy continues to be more driven by digital technique. So you have inertia as a challenge. I think you also have that idea that if you're spending 90%, as you said, right, of what you just got with the lights on, where's the money and where's the time gonna come for net new and how can you bring those two together? And so that's really where I think Skytap would play a big role is bridging that gap from where you are today, allowing you to leverage the people that you have, the skills that they have, the technology that you have invested in. So you don't have to throw that all out overnight. And instead you can get more and more value out of it as you bring it into the cloud, gain incremental agility, and then, over time, make the modernization and evolutionary changes you want to make based on business needs, not having technology drive what your business does. >> How much of that is a cultural change that you guys can help companies understand is essential? Because culture, change in culture is obviously, especially with large enterprises, they can't pivot that quickly, but culture is essential for a company to successfully undergo digital transformation. I'm just wondering, what kind of conversations are you seeing with that inertia? How much of it is culture needs to change and mindsets to embrace, you know, moving forward? >> Yeah, I mean, we see a lot of this in the conversations we have with customers. We see a lot of it comes out of the market from what analysts sort of have to say as well and I think reasons out of an analyst article that was shared sort of publicly so it talks about, actually, enterprises who have adopted DivOps first are actually more successful in the move to containerization and that's what we see, sort of, with the customers that come to us. And what we're able to provide and what the customers see in Skytap is, actually, the simplicity of the UI that we provide is, actually, a good step from what they currently have without sort of needing to get into what can often be multiple UI's and screens in some of the hyper scale cloud providers. And then on top of that, sort of, the on-demand access to environment so you're taking away, sort of, what is typically a reactive approach from corporate IT when they need to reach out and go, "Hey, I need "another environment or I need another BM like this." And these organizations, it's often taking maybe six to eight weeks to get those environments turned around. We can provision a complex environment in less than, sort of, 30 seconds in Skytap. So it enables those teams to be a lot more productive in what they're doing. And there's sort of the first phase of deciding to sort of adopt the changing culture before sort of even getting into that move from, sort of, after linking in with legacy applications, you've gotta waterfall SDLC, and so actually moving from there into, sort of, more agile approaches and looking at how you can increase release cadence and what, sort of, comes into that from a people aspect, and a process change, and a methodology, and how Skytap, sort of, supports that along with integration with other third party's automation tools as well. >> Yeah, I think you nailed it on the culture point and I just wanted to not forget about people as being a big part of culture, right? And you have, fear is a very real thing, right? Fear of change, fear of net new. And so in our own adoption of Docker, and containers, and kubernetes internally. SO our cloud runs on a very large kubernetes cluster of containerized services so internally, over the last few years, we went through our own modernization journey. And I think that, paired with some research we've seen, we recently did a study with 451 Research looking at what enterprise tech leaders are experiencing. The fear of change, the reticence to change, and then just the lack of knowledge of, "Okay, what is required of me?" Like, "You're asking me to change overnight. "All of a sudden I have to take classes at night "while I do my day job." I think these are really, very realistic and human questions to ask and I think you need to take that into account when you're looking at digital transformation, modernization, so thinking about, "Hey, how do we communicate, "with transparency, what we expect and the time frame?" Let's be upfront about the challenges we expect to run into and where we're gonna have problems and how we'll deal with those together. And make sure the communication is crisp, and clear, and consistent, so that people at least know what's going on, even if they may not like it upfront. >> Well, Lucas, you brought up kubernetes and containers, right? We're here at DockerCon, so, obviously, containers on the tip of everybody's tongue. But you also work with legacy apps, which traditionally, I suppose at this point, traditional means a VM. So how does that go together? What are you looking at your customers? Are they able to transition to more containerized infrastructure? Are they sticking with VMs? I mean, how do modern containers fit into the Skytap platform here? >> Yeah, I think we're seeing a lot of adoption with our customers who are moving into Skytap with their traditional applications and we continue to, sort of, learn and observe what they're doing. For us, there's two types of customers that move to Skytap. The first of those are really looking to migrate their whole data center or evacuate the data centers going, "Where can I put these legacy applications?" You know, there's not many places they can sort of go and so they move them into Skytap, get them up and running in there, and sort of see some benefits in that. And then, almost organically, start to look at going, well how else can I make, or get my team to be sort of more cloud-native or cloud reading. It's sort of an evolution of the people component we were talking about before and sort of going, all right, well as I get my teams more ready for cloud native, they start to sort of move towards containers and cloud native services. For our, sort of, other organizations that come in are those who already know and probably have already experienced, you know, other cloud, sort of, modernizations and are looking at what have they been able to achieve and what do they learn from that. And seen the value in actually Skytap and actually come to us with the approach of going, "Right, we want to come in here. "We want to move to more agile sort of methods. "We want to, sort of, start to take our traditional "monolithic applications, break it down "into into microservices, and move it into containers." >> I'm curious. One of the things that Steve Singh, the CEO of Docker, said this morning during his keynote was, about half the room, there's about five to six thousand people here at DockerCon, their fifth conference, that only about half of them are already on this containerization journey. I'm curious, and I know there's no one-size-fits-all, but when you're talking to customers who are at the preface of going, "All right, we've gotta do this. "This is really an essential component "of our transformation." What's the time frame that they could look to see measurable business impact once they start working with Skytap and Docker on this container journey? >> Yeah, well, I think we've gotta move away collectively as an industry from the idea that there's a Big Bang or silver bullet approach to change, right? I spent the five previous years before joining Skytap last year at a company called Chef Software, competes with Puppet, who's here on the show floor. Automation software. And what I saw there in terms of both DevOps adoption, adoption of automation, and the transition to the cloud, is that if you think you can get everybody full sale on the same amount of change at the same time, to do that effectively in a relatively reasonable amount of time, you're going to not only fail, but by failing, you actually set yourself further back than had you taken a more iterative approach. So I think from a time perspective, I think the first answer is you'll never be done so presume that the journey will continue into perpetuity because continuing to gain agility, continuing to get better at delivering software, to deliver value to customers, I don't see an end to that in any sort of near-term in our economy so I think that's gonna go on for a long time. So digital transformation, modernization, whatever buzz word people may want to use, the idea of evolving and changing is an ongoing process. I think, then, business leaders will say, "Well, that's baloney, I need change now. "I want results." I think, start with a project that has a deadline associated with it, alright? We need to be able to deliver our customer banking app online, via mobile, by January. Okay, well, bite that off singularly and so that you focus on that first, you learn from how you do that process, and then you can take those learnings, communicate them, and pick another project and another project. So we recommend kind of an iterative, progressive approach that will put time and measurable goals around a specific project, meet those deadlines, hopefully, if you're successful, and then give you a lot to learn and operate off of the next time. >> That's great. I'm really kind of curious about looking forward and economic models. You know, everything is as a service at this point. You have a lot of traditional providers, the Dells and HPEs of the world who sell a lot of hardware still and sell a lot of things upfront and they, the analysts and everyone else scratching their heads about how they get to sell more services along with that. Skytap's already there. You're selling your cloud provider, you're selling a service, in some ways you're replacing some of the infrastructure or, you know, an adjunct to it. I'm just kind of curious, going forward, I mean, is this the future of cloud? As a service provider, how do you see the economic model of the DNA of Skytap partnering with people? We've ended up talking about process and people more than we've ended up talking about technology today. Which is kind of fascinating. But is that, project us into the future, what do you all see? >> Yeah, I think what we see today with cloud, and the microservices and container model is really the evolution of what was sort of the virtual data center and developing in sort of VMs. And so sort of going a step beyond that, we're seeing the container model grow and as you rightly pointed out, we talked a lot about people and process and I think that sort of was what's holding back a little of the enterprise adoption today and I think as organizations get into this sort of process and mindset, almost and sort of going, "Hey, things are gonna continue to evolve over time "and our organizations need to be "ready to adopt a lot of these." And this isn't just sort of your development level as well as looking at right, well how does your corporate IT teams, how do your security teams and other parts of the business realize this is gonna continue to evolve really quickly? And I think that's what we're gonna continue to see, sort of up front and it's gonna drive a lot of the adoption of the cloud native services and containers but it's gonna take a bit of time for some organizations to get there. >> Yeah, I have a soapbox, I want to stand on it real quickly. I think cloud is the way forward, right? So no one wants to be in the infrastructure business long-term. So I think regardless of what your deployment model will be, most businesses, five, 10, 15, 20 years from now, I don't see them owning a lot of data center real estate, right? So make the infrastructure someone else's problem. Whether that's Skytap, whether that's AWS, whether that's Azure, or, frankly, whether that's all of us, to your multi-cloud statistic, right? We see the same thing. It's much like the data center was today and has been for a long time. Use the right tool for the right job. You've got a mix of technologies so you're not locked in to any single vendor and you're able to fit technology to your business needs so I think, one, we're going cloud and that's gonna be the way it is. I think, two, is open source, right? I mean, that's where containers gained all their momentum where Docker did a fantastic job of really giving a vibrant community of developers an opportunity to do their work much more easy, much easier and much faster. And so I think you'll continue to see open source play a much larger component in how, even very large, long-standing businesses, develop what they're doing. And then you bring those two together, right? You look at, how can the cloud ecosystem best support open source tools to deliver and develop software that's gonna add value at the end of the day. >> Guys, I wish we had more time. Thank you so much for stopping by and sharing with us what Skytap is doing and how you're enabling customers to not just evolve from a technology standpoint but, I think, as we've all talked about here, really, what might even be more important is evolve the people and the processes. So thanks Lucas, thanks Hamish. Thanks for your time. >> Thank you so much for having us. >> We wanna thank you for watching theCUBE. Again, I'm Lisa Martin with John Troyer from DockerCon 2018. Stick around, we'll be right back with our next guest. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube. Covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC, and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to SiliconANGLE media's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2018. I'm Stu Miniman here with my cohost Keith Townsend, happy to welcome back to the program Tom Burns, who's the SVP of Networking and Solutions at Dell EMC. Tom, great to see ya. >> Great to see you guys as well. Good to see you again. >> All right, so I feel like one of those CNBC guys. It's like, Tom, I remember back when Force10 was acquired by Dell and all the various pieces that have gone on and converged in infrastructure, but of course with the merger, you've gotten some new pieces to your toy chest. >> Tom: That's correct. >> So maybe give us the update first as to what's under your purview. >> Right, right, so I continue to support and manage the entire global networking business on behalf of Dell EMC, and then recently I picked up what we called our converged infrastructure business or the VxBlock, Vscale business. And I continue also to manage what we call Enterprise Infrastructure, which is basically any time our customers want to extend the life of their infrastructure around memory, storage, optics, and so forth. We support them with Dell EMC certified parts, and then we add to that some third-party componentry around rack power and cooling, software, Cumulus, Big Switch, things like that. Riverbed, Silver Peak, others. And so with that particular portfolio we also cover what we call the Dell EMC Ready Solutions, both for the service provider, but then also for traditional enterprises as well. >> Yeah, well luckily there's no change in any of those environments. >> Tom: No, no. >> Networking's been static for decades. I mean they threw a product line that I mean last I checked was somewhere in the three to four billion dollar range. With the VxBlock under what you're talking there. >> Yeah it's a so, yeah-- >> Maybe you could talk, what does this mean? 'Cause if I give you your networking guy. >> Right. >> Keith and I are networking guys by background, obviously networking's a piece of this, but give us a little bit of how the sausage is made inside to-- >> Tom: Sure. >> Get to this stuff. >> Well I think when you talk about all these solutions, Cloud, Hybrid Cloud, Public Cloud, when you think about software-defined X, the network is still pretty darn important, right? I often say that if the network's not working, it's going to be a pretty cloudy day. It's not going to connect. And so the fabric continues to remain one of the most critical parts of the solution. So the thought around the VxBlock and moving that in towards the networking team is the importance of the fabric and the capability to scale out and scale up with our customers' workloads and applications. So that's probably the reason primarily the reason. And then we can also look at how we can work very closely with our storage division 'cause that's the key IP component coming from Dell EMC on the block side. And see how we can continue to help our customers solve their problems when it comes to this not your do-it-yourself but do-it-for-me environment. >> All right, I know Keith wants to jump in, but one just kind of high-level question for you. I look at networking, we've really been talking about disaggregation of what's going on. It's really about disaggregated systems. And then you've got convergence, and there's other parts of the group that have hyper convergence. How do you square the circle on those two trends and how do those go together? >> Well, I think it's pretty similar on whether you go hyper converge, converge, or do-it-yourself, you build your own block so to speak. There's a set of buyers that want everything to be done for them. They want to buy the entire stack, they want it pre-tested, they want it certified, they want it supported. And then there's a set of customers that want to do it themselves. And that's where we see this opportunity around disaggregation. So we see it primarily in hyperscale and Cloud, but we're seeing it more and more in large enterprise, medium enterprise, particular verticals where customers are in essence looking for some level of agility or capability to interchange their solutions by a particular vendor or solutions that are coming from the same vendor but might be a different IP as an example. And I'm really proud of the fact that Dell EMC really kicked off this disaggregation of the hardware and software and networking. Some 4 1/2 years ago. Now you see some of the, let's say, larger industry players starting to follow suit. And they're starting to disaggregate their software as well. >> Yeah, I would have said just the commonality between those two seemingly opposed trends it's scale. >> Right. >> It's how do customers really help scale these environments? >> Exactly, exactly. It depends a lot around the customer environment and what kind of skill sets do they have. Are they willing to help go through some of that do-it-yourself type of process. Obviously Dell EMC services is there to help them in those particular cases. But we kind of have this buying conundrum of build versus buy. I think my old friend, Chad Sakac, used to say, there's different types of customers that want a VxRail or build-it-themselves, or they want a VxBlock. We see the same thing happen in a networking. There's those customers that want disaggregated hardware and software, and in some cases even disaggregated software. Putting those protocols and features on the switch that they actually use in the data center. Rather than buying a full proprietary stack, well we continue to build the full stack for a select number of customers as well because that's important to that particular sector. >> So again, Tom, two very different ends of the spectrum. I was at ONS a couple of months ago, talked to the team. Dell is a huge sponsor of the Open Source community. And I don't think many people know that. Can you talk about the Open Source relationship or the relationship that Dell Networking has with the Open Source community? >> Absolutely, we first made our venture in Open Source actually with Microsoft in their SONiC work. So they're creating their own network operating software, and we made a joint contribution around the switch abstraction interface, or side. So that was put into the Open Compute Project probably around 3 1/2, maybe four years ago. And that's right after we announced this disaggregation. We then built basically an entire layer of what we call our OS10 base, or what's known in the Linux foundation as OPX. And we contributed that to the OPX or to the Linux foundation, where basically that gives the customer the capability through the software that takes care of all the hardware, creates this switch subtraction interface to gather the intelligence from the ASIC and the silicon, and bringing it to a control plane, which allows APIs to be connected for all your north-bound applications or your general analysis that you want to use, or a disaggregated analysis, what you want to do. So we've been very active in Linux. We've been very active in OCP as well. We're seeing more and more of embracing this opportunity. You've probably seen recently AT&T announced a rather large endeavor to replace tens of thousands of routers with basically white box switches and Open Source software. We really think that this trend is moving, and I'm pretty proud that Dell EMC was a part of getting that all started. >> So that was an awful lot of provider talk. You covered both the provider's base and the enterprise space. Talk to us about where the two kind of meet. You know the provider space, they're creating software, they're embracing OpenStack, they're creating plug-ins for disaggregated networking. And then there's the enterprise. There's opportunity there. Where do you see the enterprise leveraging disaggregation versus the service provider? >> Well, I think it's this move towards software-defined. If you heard in Michael's keynote today, and you'll hear more tomorrow from Jeff Clarke. The whole world is moving to software-defined. It's no longer if, it's when. And I think the opportunity for enterprises that are kind of in that transformation stage, and moving from traditional software-defined, or excuse me, traditional data centers to the software-defined, they could look at disaggregation as an opportunity to give them that agility and capability. In a manner of which they can kind of continue to manage the old world, but move forward into the new world of disaggregation software-defined with the same infrastructure. You know it's not well-known that Dell EMC, we've made our switching now capable of running five different operating softwares. That's dependent upon workloads and use cases, and the customer environment. So, traditional enterprise, they want to look at traditional protocols, traditional features. We give them that capability through our own OS. We can reduce that with OS partners, software coming from some of our OS partners, giving them just the protocols and features that they need for the data center or even out to the edge. And it gives them that flexibility and change. So I think it really comes at this point of when are they going to move towards moving from traditional networking to the next generation of networking. And I'm very happy, I think Dell Technologies is leading the way. >> So I'm wondering if you could expand a little bit about that. When I think about Dell and this show, I mean it is a huge ecosystem. We're sitting right near the Solutions Expo, which will be opening in a little bit, but on the networking side, you've got everything from all the SD-WAN pieces, to all the network operating systems that can sit on top. Maybe, give us kind of the update on the overview, the ecosystem, where Dell wins. >> Yeah, yeah I mean, if you think about 30-something years ago when Michael started the company and Dell started, what was it about. It was really about transforming personal computing, right? It was about taking something that was kind of a traditional proprietary architecture and commoditizing it, making sure it's scalable and supportable. You think of the changes that's occurred now between the mainframe and x86. This is what we think's happening in networking. And at Dell Technologies in the networking area whether it's Dell EMC or to VMware, we're really geared towards this SDX type of market. Virtualization, Layer two, day or three disaggregated switching in the data center. Now SD-WAN with the acquisition of Velocloud by VMware. We're really hoping customers transform at the way networking is being managed, operated, supported to give them much more flexibility and agility in a software-defined market. That being said, we continue to support a multitude of other partners. We have Cumulus, Big Switch, IP infusion, and Pluribus as network operating software alternatives. We have our own, and then we have them as partners. On the SD-WAN area while we lead with Velocloud, we have Silver Peak and we also have Versa Technology, which is getting a lot of upkick in the area. Both in the service provider and in the enterprise space. Huge area of opportunity for enterprises to really lower their cost of connectivity and their branch offices. So, again, we at Dell, we want to have an opinion. We have some leading technologies that we own, but we also partner with some very good, best-of-breed solutions. But being that we're open, and we're disaggregated, and we have an incredible scaling and service department or organization, we have this capability to bring it together for our customers and support them as they go through their IT transformation. >> So, Dell EMC is learning a lot of lessons as you guys start to embrace software-defined. Couple of Dell EMC World's ago, big announcement Chad talked about, ScaleIO, and abstracting, and giving away basically, ScaleIO as a basic solution for free. Then you guys pulled back. And you said, you know what, that's not quite what customers want. They want a packaged solution. So we're talking on one end, total disaggregation and another end, you know what, in a different area of IT, customers seem to want packaged solutions. >> Tom: Yeah. >> Can you talk to the importance of software-defined and packaged solutions? >> Right, it's kind of this theory of appliances, right? Or how is that software going to be packaged? And we give that flexibility in either way. If you think of VxRail or even our vSAN operating or vSAN ready node, it gives that customer the capability to know that we put that software and hardware together, and we tested it, we certified it, most importantly we can support it with kind of one throat to choke, one single call. And so I think the importance for customers are again, am I building it myself or do I want to buy a stack. If I'm somewhere in the middle maybe I'm doing a hybrid or perhaps a Rail type of solution, where it's just compute and storage for the most part. Maybe I'm looking for something different on my networking or connectivity standpoint. But Dell EMC, having the entire portfolio, can help them at any point of the venture or at any part of the solution. So I think that you're absolutely right. The customer buying is varied. You've got those that want everything from a single point, and you got others that are saying I want decision points. I think a lot of the opportunity around the cost savings, mostly from an Opex standpoint are those that are moving towards disaggregated. It doesn't lock 'em in to a single solution. It doesn't get 'em into that long life cycle of when you're going to do changes and upgrades and so forth. This gives them a lot more flexibility and capability. >> Tom, sometimes we have the tendency to get down in the weeds on these products. Especially in the networking space. One of my complaints was, the whole SDN wave, didn't seem to connect necessarily to some of the big businesses' challenges. Heard in the keynote this morning a lot of talk about digital transformation. Bring us up to speed as to how networking plays into that overall story. What you're hearing from customers and if you have any examples we'd love to hear. >> Yeah, no so, I think networking plays a critical part of the IT transformation. I think if you think of the first move in virtualization around compute, then you have the software-defined storage, the networking component was kind of the lagger. It was kind of holding back. And in fact today, I think some analysts say that even when certain software-defined storage implementations occur, interruptions or issues happen in the network. Because the network has then been built and architected for that type of environment. So the companies end up going back and re-looking at how that's done. And companies overall are I think are frustrated with this. They're frustrated with the fact that the network is holding them back from enabling new services, new capabilities, new workloads, moving towards a software-defined environment. And so I think this area again, of disaggregation, of software-defined, of offering choice around software, I think it's doing well, and it's really starting to see an uptick. And the customer experiences as follows. One is, open networking where it's based upon standard commodity-based hardware. It's simply less expensive than proprietary hardware. So they're going to have a little bit of savings from the CapEx standpoint. But because they moved towards this disaggregated model where perhaps they're using one of our third-party software partners that happens to be based in Linux, or even our own OS10 is now based in Linux. Look at that, the tools around configuration and automation are the same as compute. And the same as storage. And so therefore I'm saving on this configuration and automation and so forth. So we have examples such as Verizon that literally not only saves about 30% cost savings on their CapEx, they're saving anywhere between 40 and 50% on their Opex. Why? They can roll out applications much faster. They can make changes to their network much faster. I mean that's the benefit of virtualization and NSX as well, right? Instead of having this decisions of sending a network engineer to a closet to do CLI, down in the dirt as you would say, and reconfigure the switch, a lot of that now has been attracted to a software lever, and getting the company much more capability to make the changes across the fabric, or to segregate it using NSX micro segmentation to make the changes to those users or to that particular environment that needs those changes. So, just the incredible amount of flexibility. I think SDN let's say six, seven years ago, everyone thought it was going to be CapEx. You know, cheaper hardware, cheaper ASICs, et cetera. It's all about Opex. It's around flexibility, agility, common tool sets, better configuration, faster automation. >> So we all have this nirvana idea that we can take our traditional stacks, whether it's pre-packaged CI configurations that's pre-engineered, HCI, SDN, disaggregated networking. Add to that a software layer this magical automation. Can you unpack that for us a little bit? What are you seeing practically whether it's in the server provider perspective or on the enterprise. What are those crucial relationships that Dell EMC is forming with the software industry to bring forth that automation? >> Well obviously we have a very strong relationship with VMware. >> Keith: Right. >> And so you have vRealize and vROps and so forth, and in fact in the new VxBlock 1000, you're going to see a lot of us gearings, a lot of our development towards the vRealize suite, so that helps those customers that are in a VMware environment. We also have a very strong relationship with Red Hat and OpenStack, where we've seen very successful implementations in the service provider space. Those that want to go a little bit more, a little bit more disaggregated, a little bit more open, even it from the storage participation like SAP and so forth. But then obviously we're doing a lot of work with Ansible, Chef, and Puppet, for those that are looking for more of a common open source set of tools across server, compute, networking storage and so forth. So I think the real benefit is kind of looking at it at that 25,000-foot view on how we want to automate. Do you want to go towards containers, do you want to go traditional? What are the tool sets that you've been using in your compute environment, and can those be brought down to the entire stack? >> All right, well Tom Burns, really appreciate catching up with you. I know Keith will be spending a little time at Interop this week too. I know, I'm excited that we have a lot more networking here at this end of the strip also this week. >> Appreciate it. Listen to Pat's talk this afternoon. I think we're going to be hearing even more about Dell Technology's networking. >> All right. Tom Burns, SVP of Networking and Solutions at Dell EMC. I'm Stu Miniman and this is Keith Townsend. Thanks for watching The Cube. (upbeat music)

(upbeat digital music) >> Hi, welcome to a CUBE conversation with Wikibon. I'm Peter Burris, the chief research officer of Wikibon and our goal with these CUBE conversations is try to bring you some of the finest minds in the technology industry to try to talk about some of the most pressing problems facing digital businesses as they transform in an increasingly chaotic world. We're very lucky today to have a couple of great thinkers, both from IBM. Ed Walsh is the general manager of storage at IBM and Eric Herzog runs product management for the storage group at IBM. Welcome to the CUBE conversation today. >> It's always nice, thank you for having us. >> So, guys you've been running around Silicon Valley today telling your story, we've got a couple of questions. Wikibon likes to talk about the relationship between data and digital business. A lot of people will wonder what digital business is. We say that the difference between digital business and business is how do you use your data assets. Now, that's a stance that I think is becoming a little bit more vogue in the market place today, but that means that storage has a slightly different role to play when we think about how we protect, secure, sustain those data assets. Do you subscribe to this? Is that how you're looking at it? And is that relevant to the conversation that you're having with customers? >> I haven't heard of that way, but it actually makes a lot of sense and you can jump in as well Eric, but I would say, however you look at your data, if a digital business is leveraging their data it makes a lot of sense. We use different, I would say metaphors, one would be your data assets are your oil, he who refines it gets value, so if you get insights from it. So, if you're not using that, you are kind of putting yourself at a disadvantage. We also see a lot of what I'll say is established companies getting disrupted by you know, true disrupters using the technology and insights of data to disrupt incumbency. You know, we'll call the Uber of my business, it's almost like a verb these days, is disrupting me, they're using technology against me, so, the key thing, the best defense is actually using technology, getting insights and then driving new business. But data alone, you need the right infrastructure, either on prem or in the cloud and put the right analytics and insight to it. So, I would agree completely and I would also say, you know, well, think about it, eighty per cent of data is behind your data, you know, it's not searchable by the web, it's how to leverage your data assets in combination with other things to get true insights. Outside data, different things on AI and really get true insights then map them into your business. So, I would agree with that, I haven't heard that way but I would agree with that, it's a good definition of digital business. >> Well, what we're seeing is for companies that are really leveraging the data, it's their life blood and the issue is data is not small anymore, it's oceans of data. Whether that be things from the Internet of Things, grabbing things, for example, all the tell-cos have sensors all over all of their assets and they're trying to keep the tell-co up and going. And it doesn't just have to be a giant tell-co, small companies have reams and reams of data, it's an ocean and if they're not mining that ocean, if they're not swimming through that ocean correctly, the next thing you know, the competitor disrupts them and that is their power, it's the ability to harness these oceans of data and use that data in a way that allows them to get competitive advantage. So, people thing of storage as just a way to sort of place your data but storage can be an active part of how you increase the value of that data and gain insights as Ed was pointing out. >> Well, I think, well we totally agree with you by the way, I think it's an important point. In fact, the observation that we've made is the difference between data as fuel, or the reason why it sometimes falls down, or the way I understand it, I don't think it's a decent enough metaphor, is that unlike fuel, data can be reused multiple times. >> Ed: Good point. >> And it makes the whole point that you're bringing up Eric, about the idea that you combine insights from a lot of different places with your data and storage has to play an active role in that process. But it also says something about, the idea of storage as kind of something you put over there, it's standalone, I mean, it used to be we worried about systems integration a lot, now, open systems kind of changed that, we just presumed that it was all going to come together. Now, IBM has been around for a long time and has lived in both worlds. What do you think the role of systems integration is going to be as we think about storage, the need to do a better job at protecting and sustaining our data assets, especially given the speed and uncertainty with which the world is changing and the dependency it has on data these days. >> Ed: You want to take that first? >> Well, let me give you a real time example. One of the things IBM just introduced last week, was a very powerful new mainframe, one of the key tenants of that mainframe, is the ability to secure data end to end, from the day the transaction starts, with no impacts, so, while they're doing transactions, millions and billions of transactions on the server farm, it's encrypted from day one but it eventually ends up on storage and storage has to extend that encryption, so that when you put the data at rest while you're analyzing the data, you've got it encrypted, when you're putting it at rest, it's encrypted, when you pull it back because you've run analytics multiple times, the data is encrypted. Eventually, certain data sets, like take finance, healthcare, does end up on archive. But guess what, it still needs to be encrypted. So, that's an example of how the complete systems integration, from the server, through to primary storage, through the archive, is just one example of how storage plays a critical role in extending everything across this entire matrix of systems integration, not just one point thing, but across an integrated solution and of course in this case, it's secure transactions, it's analysis of incredible amounts of insight and of course with the IBM Z mainframe, is incredible power and speed, yet at the same time, keeping that data safe, while it's doing all the analytics. So, that's a very strong story, but that's just one example of how storage plays a critical role in this complete integration of data, with a full systems infrastructure. >> And maybe I could add to that. So, that's a good example of on prem that also can be hosted in the cloud, but if you think of system integration, you're data is critical, you need access to it to actually do the analytic workload, the cognitive workloads on top of it. It can be on prem or in the cloud or actually split between, so, you do need to know you're relying on your cloud infrastructure to give you that enterprise class, not only performance but availability. But it also matters, but it's no longer you as an individual company putting that together. But it does matter, the infrastructure does matter how they get that performance. Also, you mentioned security and protection, which is where IBM's cloud comes in. >> Well, it's interesting to us that, it's almost natural to expect that the proper cloud companies are going to do deep integration. I mean their talking about going all the way down to FPGAs. As long as they are able to handle or provide, you know, a set of interfaces that are natural and reasonable from an overall workload standpoint. I would expect that we'd see the same type of thing happen in a lot of different on premise systems too. So, the notion of integration, I think you guys agree, is an important trend where it's appropriate and where it's adding value and should not be discounted just because it doesn't comply with some definition of open this, that or the other thing as it has in the past. >> Oh, agreed, yeah, in end systems, especially when you're looking at availability, performance, which you're talking about your asset as being your data and getting insights. If it's just sitting there, it's not very valuable, in fact you could say it's actually exposure, but if you're leveraging it, getting insights and driving your business, it's very valuable, right. So, you just need to make sure the infrastructure has either hyper cloud or in the cloud that allows you to do that, right. But security is becoming more and more a big issue. So, I would agree. >> Well, that raises the next question, so, again, as long as we're focused on the data as the asset and not the underlying hardware as the asset then I think we're in good shape. But it does raise the next question. As we think about converged infrastructure and hyper converge infrastructure and storage, compute, network and other elements coming together successfully, what will be the role of storage in the future? I mean, storage is not just that thing that sits over in there with the data on it. It is playing a much more active role in encryption, in compression, in duplication, in how it prepares data to be used by any number of different applications. How do you foresee the role of storage evolving over the next few years? >> I'm sure I can jump in, do you want to take a shot? >> Well, yeah, I think one of the key things you've got to realize is the role of storage is to sort of offload somethings from the primary CPU. So, for example, if you've got oceans of data, what if we can track all that metadata for you, so when the system or the cloud looked for data, it could search everything whether that was 20 million lung cancer pictures, whether that be MRI, whether that be the old style X-ray. Go back 20 years, if all that metadata is attached then the CPU from a server perspective to run the analytics workloads is offloaded and the storage is performing a valuable function of tracking all of that metadata, so that when the server does its analytics and then has to reiterate several times for example, Watson, IBM Watson, is a very intuitive element that analyzes, learns, analyzes, learns, analyzes and keeps going to get, and it's used in oncology, Watson is used in financial services and so if you could offload that metadata analysis to the storage where it's actually acting almost as if it's a sub compute element and handling that offloading the CPU, then more time is spent with Watson, looking at the financial data, looking at that medical data and storage can become a very valuable resource in this future world of this intense data analytics, the machine learning, the artificial intelligence, that systems are going to provide on premises through a cloud infrastructure storage. That's just one example how storage as an intelligent storage vehicle is offloading things from the CPU or from the cloud onto the storage and helping it become more productive and the data be more valuable that much faster. >> I would agree and I think storage has always been evolving, right. So, storage has gravity, it has value. If you think of storage as where you store data, it's going to change architecturally. You mentioned a hyper converge, you mentioned converge, you mentioned cloud, we talked about what we can do with the mainframe, it's all about how do you get the right accessibility and performance, but it will change. It will change rather dramatically, just think of what's going to go on with, we'll say the traditional, modernizing traditional workload, what you do with VMware, and the arrays are getting much more complex, you can also do software defined arrays which allows you to have just more flexibility and deployment but in the new workloads, where you're looking at high performance data analytics or doing things that you can actually expand out and leverage the cloud, that becomes much more of a software only play, it's still storage. The bits and bytes might be on, it's going to be typically on Flash in my opinion, both on prem or off prem, but how do you move that data? How do you keep accessibility? How do you secure that data? So, how do you make sure you have it in the right place where you can actually get the right performance? And that's where storage is always going to evolve. So, it doesn't matter if it's in this array, in a file system, in what we call a big storage ray, or it's in the cloud, it's about how do you monitor it and manage that through its full life cycle. >> So, it sounds like you're suggesting, and again, I think we agree, is that storage used to be the place where you put stuff, and it's becoming increasingly where you run data related services. Whether those services are associated with security or prepping data or protecting data or moving data as effectively as possible, increasingly the storage resources are becoming the mechanism by which we are handling these strategic data services, is that right? >> Yeah, so, think of it this way, in the old model, storage was somewhat passive, it's a place where you store the data, in the new world model, storage is actually active, it's active in moving the data, in helping analyzing the data like for example in that metadata example I just gave, so, storage is not a passive device any more. Storage is an active element of the entire analytic, machine learning, artificial intelligence process, so you can get real insights. If you just relied on the CPU to do that, not going to happen, so the storage is now an active participant in this end to end solution that extends from on premise into the cloud, as you guys have called it, the true private cloud, >> Right. >> Right, from Wikibon. The storage is active in that versus being just a passive tool, now it's very active and the intelligence, and some of the things we've done with cognitive storage at the IBM site allows the data, like our spectrum scale product, which is heavily involved in giant, hundreds of petabyte analytic workloads today in production in major enterprises across the globe as well as in high performance computer environments, extend from on premise onto cloud, but that storage is active not passive as it was in the old days. >> So, you mentioned cloud, so, we're pretty strong believers in this notion of true private cloud, which is the idea that instead of thinking ultimately about, in the industry that the architecture is going to remove all the data to the cloud, that increasingly, it's going to be moved cloud services down to the data and do things differently and that seems to be, people seem to be, that seems to be resonating with folks. The question that I have then is, when we think about that, where is the data going to be located, that's going to have a major effect on where the workloads actually run? I've had three conversations with three different CIOs in the last six weeks, and they all said, I'm thinking differently and instead of thinking about moving data up to the cloud, I'm now thinking about how do I ensure that I always have control over my data, even if it's running in the cloud because I'm afraid that if I move everything into the cloud, when I do have to bring it back, it's going to be such a huge capital expense, that everybody is going to say no and I can't do it. So, it's almost like, maybe I'll do some stuff in the cloud, but I'll do backup, restore, or have protection on site. What do you think the role of storage is going to be as we think about multi-cloud and being able to do end to end, developing and putting various applications in various places. >> So, you brought up a couple of topics there right, so, your concept and your research on true private cloud actually, I find resonates amazingly well with clients. In fact, a lot of clients are trying to figure out how to leverage cloud, if they have a lot of data on premises and they want to leverage that, so, the way I explain to clients, everyone wants to do everything they can do in the public cloud, all the agility, all the consumption model, all the dev ops models and they just want to do that on premises, so, it's really an agility statement, but then extend to have the right workloads working the right hyper cloud on their demand. But that brings a whole bunch of things. So, the best use case, and now I'll get into the multi-cloud but, the one use case that all of these companies, why did you end up going to Amazon or what not, and then what it gets down to, developers. Developers were able to swipe a credit card or whatever, put their credentials in, swipe a credit card, do one line of code, spin up an environment, one line of code, spin down an environment or they'd boot Chef and Puppet and that would do the API calls, but they are able to do things very quickly. Try that in the enterprise. I mean literally, they would have to go, do a ticket, talk to Joe IT, which they don't want to do, it takes a lot of time, it takes best case about a week, four to five days, and worse case up to three weeks to provision that environment. If you're doing agile development, it literally breaks the process of doing anything agile. So, you're not going to do it, you're forced, you're absolutely forced to go away. So, what we're doing is, we're doing an investment on prem to do exactly, bring the agility, for example, the idea of a swipe our credit card, we have a process, oh, sorry, a software product across, it's an API automation layer, across all of our storage, that gives you the last mile. How do you literally give API templates to your developers that they can literally one line of code, spin it up, one line of code, spin it down, and that works across all our storage devices? But it took investment, and another layer in API automation that the storage team sets up tablets enabled to hey, gold, silver, bronze, provision your own storage, but in the enterprise way, or like a developer, or a gold DBA, hey spin up an environment for a test dev, but what we're able to do is a simple line of code will spin up a system, which could be, let's say, four, five servers, last good snapshot from production that's been data masked the way you need to do it. 'Cause you don't just give developers the whole database. But then literally, that becomes a template that with roll base access again credentials, the developer or Chef or Puppet natively can literally, one line of code, spin up an environment, and one line of code, spin it down. The benefit is, on premises you actually have your data. So, unlike on the, in Amazon, you're spinning things up, spinning things down but it's not really running on what your production data looks like, you're literally able to keep that up to the last night's data or the weekend before, but again with all the data masking. But you can literally show, so, our investment thesis is we need to work on the next level of automation to allow people to truly do everything they can do in the public cloud on private and we're making a lot of investment to do that. So, it's actually one of our biggest investment thesis and it really plays out well as far as clientele. You mentioned the next thing, and you can jump in on both of these, but you also mentioned the next thing is, well, now, a true private cloud allows you to easily extend to these different clouds, well, then how do you keep track of where that is? How do you have, each one of the different clouds will have their own SLAs but how do you manage it? How do you think through security? How do you know you're getting the right SLAs? And where do you put the right things for the right places? And there's management stacks that do that, with software defined storage which all of our products allow you to do, we can run an extension of your device in any of the major public clouds and manage that securely. And I can add a couple more but do you want to jump in. >> Yeah. I think the key thing here is you've got to be able, in a true private cloud, the enterprise is mimicking what an Amazon or IBM cloud division does, right? Except they're doing it in their own walls, on their own premises, now that maybe spread across the world if it's a global enterprise, but it's v will, it's there version of IBM cloud. But they want to be able to burst out. So, all of our software defined storage and even our array storage is designed so that, if they need to move data from on premise to IBM cloud, from on premise to Azure, from on premise to Amazon, they can transparently move that data. In fact, we can set up that they can automatically tier the data, when the data gets cold, boom, they dump it off to IBM cloud. Now, with the data that's in the private cloud on premises if you will, but, a private cloud that they configure, is there for them to use and they take their access out for those, and by the way, talking to the chief security officer and the chief legal officer, they figure out what work loads is it okay to put out there in IBM cloud. And that way they have total control but they have the flexibility of going out to the cloud all done with the storage in an automated fashion. I think the key thing from a true private cloud perspective is storage as well as network and server infrastructure, they want it to be as automated as possible. They had the big town turn at 2008, yes, IT spend is back up, head count is back up, but when you look inside the envelope of head count, there aren't forty storage guys at XYZ Global Enterprise, there is twenty, they are now hired forty people, so, they got forty people back, but the other twenty went to test and dev. They are not doing storage now. So, those twenty guys need to be fully automated to support all these extra developers in a global enterprise and even smaller counts now need that, so the true private cloud, mimics IBM cloud, mimics Azure, mimics Amazon and all those public cloud providers will tell you, they make their business by making sure it's automated, although why is it so, they won't make any money. So, the private cloud does the same thing. >> And those twenty guys are now, as you said earlier, managing oceans of data where the business has no specific visibility in how that data is going to create value in the future. It's an extremely complex arena. So, with that in mind, you guys have been invited to speak to the board of directors of one of the large enterprise clients about the value that storage will play in a digital business, what are some of the things that you tell them? >> So, let me take that one first. >> Sure. >> I think a couple of things. First of all, storage is not passive the way it used to be, you need to think of it as an active element in your cloud strategy to keep your data whole, to keep your data secure and most importantly, to make sure your data offers value. So, for example, you need to use All Flash, why? Well, because it needs to be instantaneous. It needs to connect right into that CPU as fast as possible to suck the data in so you can analyze it and the guys who analyze the data faster, for example, in dark trading and financials, if you're slower, you lose ten million dollars, or a hundred million dollars, so storage is critical in that, so you want to A, let the board of directors know that storage is a critical component, because it's not just passive, you know, like we said before, it's active. So, storage is an intelligence not dumb and people view storage historically as dumb, so, storage is active, storage is intelligent, storage is a critical element of your infrastructure, both in your private club, but also, for what you do to cut costs, when you do go to public club for certain workloads, and so you need to view storage as a more holistic part of how you handle your data, how you harvest the values of the oceans, okay, if you're going to be fishing, you better make sure you get a lot of fish, if you're going to feed the populous, and the more you do, I think of course, you've got to be all that you protected, and you want to be able to secure everything, you can't do that if storage is just dumb and passive. So, the board of directors, they need to see as data is your life blood, data is your gold, you have to mine that data and storage helps you do that. It's not just a place you stick it. It's not a vault to stick the gold in later. It's helping you mine the gold, refine the gold, get the value out of that gold. How do you do 24 karat versus 18 or versus 14? What do you charge for that? Storage can actually help you do all that analysis. Because it's an active element. >> Peter: What would you say Ed? >> I would agree with everything you said and I would actually play it back to how you started this conversation, which is, you know, that digital business is he who uses his data right. So, I'd probably start there and I used the classic metaphor of your data is oil and he who refines it gets the value of it and I agree it's not a perfect metaphor but it's really about getting insight and leveraging that insight and that does translate to a couple of things, right, so, it does matter that you have it secure but it also matters that you have the right performance either on premises or in the cloud and get the right insights. Typically, the right insights is leveraging the data behind your firewall, which is your proprietary data, which is eighty per cent of data in the world is just not available to a public search engine, it's behind the firewall, and by the way, when you're looking at your business, you might want to combine it with different things, like we talk a lot about our Watson, our ability to do, you know, let's say, your in healthcare and then you could bring up oncology, so, Watson and oncology can help you with your data, or the weather channel, we can bring the weather into a lot of different applications. So, you want to leverage other data sets that are publicly available, but also your private data scenarios and get unique insights to it and you want to work with someone that those insights are actually yours, which is really where IBM differentiates their cloud from everything else, so, you want to bring in AI or cognitive, but we actually have cognitive based upon industry, we've actually trained, the thing between cognitive and AI is actually you have to train cognitive, it actually has to learn. But once it learns, it's able to give you very interesting, you know, insights to your data. We do it by industry, which is a very compelling way to deal with data, and the other thing is, you want to protect your data, either on prem, it's not only protection as far as, if you have a failure or you come back up and running, so, recovery, resiliency, but as much also in security, so, you need to secure it throughout. And then the other thing I'd kind of highlight is, more compliance and everyone doesn't want to talk about compliance but the price of compliance is nothing compared to the price of if you get audited and you have to get compliance back, and prove that, just do it right from day one, and you need to be looking data that you're doing on premises or in the cloud, especially multi-cloud, you need to keep compliance and ownership of the data, because it is a high regulated environment and you're seeing new things coming out in Europe. >> Peter: Absolutely. >> You really need to be on top of it, because the cost of that compliance, it might seem, jeez, that seems like a lot, but it's nothing compared to if you, after a law suit or something, you have to come back from it. That's what I would normally talk to a board about. >> So, Ed, you been back at IBM or at IBM now for a while, it's about a year. >> Sure, yeah. >> About five quarters or so, something like that? >> Four quarters. >> Four quarters. And you've had a chance to look at the assets that IBM has. Now, IBM has obviously been a leader in the tech industry and is going to remain so for a long time. But what will IBM be as a leader in the storage industry? What does leadership mean to IBM? It's kind of the one IBM specific question I'm asking but I think it's important, what is IBM leadership going to be in storage? >> So I think, and maybe it gets to the hypothesis of why I came to IBM, you know, to be honest I think IBM helps people get from where they are to where they want to get to and it helps them do that in what I'll say is risk reduced steps. But very few companies have the breadth of portfolio or capabilities like what we have in cloud and cognitive than IBM. I also think storage as an industry, is going through a major change. It might be the next era is about data, but as far as the storage industry, it's in a lot of changes, so, I think it's a, I use the term big boy game, because it's not about doing the next array which we do, it's as much applying the right analytics and understanding the true flow of data and the right security to do it effectively. When I looked at coming to IBM, I kind of did four things. I think it does play to where our vision is, right. I actually think it is changing and our clients are being disrupted and they are looking for a partner to help them. And it's not just disruption of technology or consolidation or price pressures, but they're being disrupted by these, you know, the Uber of my business is XYZ, it's a verb, so, I keep on saying that, but clients in every industry getting disrupted, so, if they're hesitant, if they are on their heels, they're not able to lean in and technology is the worst thing they could do. So, what they need is a partner that knows, and kind of has the right vision and capabilities to lean forward and with confidence, move forward. IBM has a history of going era to era with clients, that's the first thing, and we calmly do it and clients trust that we know where we're going. And that's a lot to do with our primary research, looking out there. Second thing, I think we have the right vision, the cloud and cognitive vision, no one argues with me, how do you get the insight to your data and that matters. You're definition of a digital business is right on. He who uses their data to their advantage is really a digital business, and is at an advantage by that. Three, it's broad portfolio, so, storage with the broadest portfolio in the industry, and you need that because as we help clients, it's not helping them with the next storage array, it's helping them, here's your business, and it's different for everyone, here's where you want to go to as far as your infrastructure and transformation and I help you get there over time. That takes a broad portfolio, not only in storage, but also overall, the right services, the right software. Analytics becomes a big thing, we're the number one company in analytics and that comes to bear for all our clients, but also have the right services, capabilities going forward. And then, I actually think where IBM storage allows you to lean in is really the biggest thing. We're going to help you simplify so you can lean in, with confidence, because that's what everyone is looking for. A partner to allow you to get there. And very few companies are positioned as well as IBM storage to do that. And I know I'm taking credit for a lot of IBM pieces, but that's a strength, because that's leverage of using an overall company to help you industry by industry, with industry vertical knowledge, really help you lean in, with confidence, so you can grow your business and transform. >> Well, let me build on that, because, at the end of the day, your ability to make these kind of commitments to your customers is a function of your ability to make these commitments to IBM and other IBMers history of keeping the commitments that they make to each other. So, IBM as a culture, and I've been around for a long time, worked with a lot of clients with these things, up and down, good and bad at a product level, but your absolutely right, IBM has a track record of saying here's where we're going, if you want to come with us, we're going to get you there and during periods of significant disruption, that's not a bad type of partner to have. >> I'd use the term people kind of say sometimes it's trust. They trust us to get there, and I think their trust is well placed, again I came from the outside a year ago. We're the last company with primary research, right, and so you have to say, where is it going. We actually do primary research to, there's a reason we've been able to go era to era as a company for a hundred plus years, it's because we actually do that and allow people to go era to era. I know we, sometimes IBM downplays it, I actually think it's a strength. >> Well, the Watson Research Center in many respects is creating the new eras and has for many years and is doing so today too. >> Help clients through those eras without leaving you behind, which is something that's rare, you don't see it, our competitors don't have that and I think that's a big thing. >> Alright, so I'm going to close it here. Ed Walsh, GM of storage at IBM. Eric Herzog, runs product marketing for the storage group at IBM, I want to thank you very much for being part of this CUBE conversation. >> Yeah, thank you. >> As we try to bring the experts that matter and they're going to have a consequential impact on how the industry evolves. Thank you very much for joining us for this Wikibon CUBE conversation. I'm Peter Burris, until we talk again. (upbeat digital music)