(upbeat music) >> For years on the queue, we've talked about the benefits of the cloud going beyond IT cost savings. Sure. You can move your workloads into the cloud and minimize the so-called undifferentiated heavy lifting of IT equipment and deployment and management. And of course increased agility is often the number one benefit customers site from the cloud. But increasingly, the value of the cloud is being seen as applying that agility to change an organization's operating model. This drives business value that can be orders of magnitude greater than savings on tech labor costs. And one of the more interesting examples we found, is using the cloud, data and software technology to find, and flexibly source distributed energy resources so that clean energy, can be delivered efficiently. Hello, and welcome to the startup showcase on the cube brought to you by AWS. We're very excited to have two exacts on from AutoGrid. Wait until you hear about the innovations that they're driving and the problems that they're solving around, some of the world's most pressing problems. Amit Narayan is here. He's the CEO of auto-graded Rajeev Singh is the chief technology officer gentlemen, welcome to the program. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for having us. >> You're very welcome. >> Okay, so heard my summary Amit. Maybe you could add some color about AutoGrid. What's your story? >> Yeah, I mean, undoubtedly climate change is one of the defining challenges of our time, and we're already seeing extreme weather events whether these are wildfires in California, are extreme cold events in Texas, last two weeks. As we tackle the climate change through renewables, this whole volatility challenge that we are seeing is only going to become even more pressing. So we at AutoGrid provide software that creates, a virtualization layer, just like you doing in the cloud world, with hardware around all kinds of energy assets, whether these are your EVs in the homes, our batteries are distributed solar panels. And then we apply intelligence from software, to coordinate and orchestrate all of these assets. So you can think of us as a autopilot for the grid, and our technology is called virtual power plants. Which allows us to harness, the power from all these distributed energy resources. >> Yeah. I was going to say you're essentially creating, a virtual power plant. That's amazing of aggregating these distributed resources. I mean, it sounds very logical but it also sounds non-trivial, its a transformative idea. What exactly is a virtual power plant? I mean, how does that all work? >> Yeah. Well, I mean, if you think about how the grid was designed by Edison and Tesla, they really never envisioned a world where you will have a two way flow of power, not just from generator to the consumers, but potentially from the consumers back to the generators. And certainly they didn't really design the grid to incorporate this amount of renewables, which can be intermittent and volatile. So as we are now transitioning to this new energy world, we have to rethink the entire grid architecture, and reinvent how this control system works. But fortunately for us, unlike Edison and Tesla we have some really powerful tools at our disposal namely the internet and the cloud, and these tools do allow us to rethink how we connect all these different assets and we optimize them. And in a way, we are now rebuilding the grid outside in where if you have a battery in your home, not only can it power your own home when power is out, it can actually provide power back to the grid or to your neighbors. And so with this onslaught of DES, we think that we are living in the most exciting times, since Edison and Tesla in terms of how we are going to transition to a sustainable grid. And we think that our software, can play a foundational role in accelerating that transition. >> Lets stick here the bi-directional flow. It's so simple, but genius. Rajeev, maybe you could talk about the tech behind AutoGrid. I mean the secret sauce, lies I think in that whole flexibility management system but there's data involved, probably a fair amount of computer science. Maybe you could explain it more detail. >> Yeah. just as Amit mentioned now, when we started AutoGrid, we had the luxury of, cloud computing a massive scale, at that massive scale and AutoGrid, what we've been able to do is pull together a cloud native computing. They lost the city, the scale, with cutting edge AI and machine learning, as well as all of the dispatch, and command and control technologies, that are all in one platform. And all of them have to come together, to be able to manage and orchestrate, these a massively distributed energy resources. I mean, these could be small, you know batteries or solar panels, et cetera. So gone are the days of large generators that could be managed with smaller compute now because the sheer number of DER's, you need a new paradigm to be able to manage this. And this is really what is under the hood, that constitutes our virtual power plant. >> Rajeev Can you talk a little bit more about your scale model? I mean, how are you able to do this effectively without imploding, or hitting walls? >> Yeah, so obviously, we've been on AWS for about ten years now. And even prior to that, we had the previous company loaded with AWS. So that kind of gave us a glimpse off the sheer scale of compute, that is available to us on tap, if required. So that was quite comforting, because when we did back one of the calculations on the amount of data, that's coming in through IOT industrial IOT from all the distributed energy resources, the amount of processing required for real-time computing as well as, the sheer variety of the other, we have to tackle in in various geographies around the world. AWS made it happen just because having regions, across the globe, we done in, I believe six or seven different AWS regions. We cover a four continents, twelve plus countries. So just because cloud computing was there, we were able to ramp up the solution, very quickly. Now, one thing we are a big believers in is that you only learn by doing, and the only way to learn, is to run production systems. And when we started, of course we didn't do everything right. But we quickly learned we adapted, we scaled, and we kept on scaling. And this is where we are right now. >> Interesting. That's like Andy Jassy says there's no compression algorithm for experience. We know it well. One more for Rajeev, and I want to come back. With AutoGrid tapping, all these energy sources, you got a pretty major threat surface. How are you dealing with security? >> Yeah, we don't talk a lot about our security posture for obvious reasons. Some of the underlying principles are in reducing the blast radius. It should be quite familiar to people who work in security. The use of wide variety of best of the breed security tools, including, and or the past few years. In fact, past five, six years, AWS itself has rolled out a number of security managed services, which are included. But on top of that views, other solutions as well. And it's all designed in layers, with proper segregation, and we have variety of security certifications. One of the most, the one that we're proud of is we are one of the few if not the only NERC solution SAS solution in this domain on AWS. And it's just a culmination of using security by layers. And reducing the blast radius. >> Yeah. Makes sense. And let's turn to some customer use cases. What are some of the main problems, that your customers come to you to solve? How are you approaching them? Maybe you could address that and add some color. >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, as Rajeev mentioned. There is a lot of deep tech in the platform, and the optimization complexity, grows exponentially with the number of assets. And as you go from a gigawatt scale power plant and you want to get the same power from Tesla power walls. let's say, for every generator you're replacing it with more than two hundred thousand mini generators. And if the complexity grows exponentially. it's far beyond what the current algorithms can handle. So a lot of customers come to us solve their technical challenges. But even beyond that, the whole complexity of transacting, with small generators is very high, and that our business model issues that we help our customers solve. So the whole energy industry, has been designed to have transactions, between very large generators and utilities, but very few of these transactions. And now when you are talking about DER's, you're having millions of transactions with very small entities and maybe even homeowners, back to the utilities. So neither the utilities, have the capability today, to have these transactions, nor the asset owners, and operators, have the capability to go back and have the transactions of the utilities. So we sort of act as an intermediary, and we provide a one-stop shop, for fleet owners and operators. And we say that if you work with us, we will help you monetize your assets, and get more value from these assets, by interfacing with utilities by interfacing with energy markets which can get very complex. >> I love this. I mean, everybody's winning here. Rajeev. I want to come back to the to the cloud a little bit. You talked about, you've been able to AWS for ten years and then even before that, you've got deep experience. I mean. I can't imagine, how you would do this without the cloud. I mean, maybe it could be a really heavy complicated list lift. I mean, you've seen the AWS cloud evolve over time. It's gone way beyond, of course, compute and storage brought in a lot of machine learning capabilities on and on. And I mean, how are you leveraging that evolution? Those zillion features that AWS puts out every year at reinvent. I mean, maybe you could talk about that a little bit. >> Yeah. So of course, when we started, we used it as an infrastructure provider, you know provided us compute networking, security firewalls, et cetera, just on tap. There's very good. Got us started. Then we started leveraging a lot more managed services, that AWS offered, that allowed us to run. For example, variety of databases right to data stores, in a managed fashion, with a very small startup. You're always, running lean. So that helped us with a small team, of system engineers and engineers, back from engineers to be able to put together and run these systems around the globe, just because enablers was responsible, for managing the services. We always keep an eye on. And one thing we love about AWS is the amount of innovation, that they quickly put into production. So, we're always keeping an eye on, what's coming out. And over the years, it has been quite nice to us in some ways, we directly talk to the solution architects, they tell us what's coming, what should be used, what we should not use in what's in production ready What's not. So that level of kind of deep engagement, really helps us. Kind of keep abreast of the innovations that are constantly being rolled out on AWS. And we keep kind of incorporating those into our platform and making it more and more capable. The one thing I also would like to say, is that to be able to aggregate capacity, from all these DER's, it has to be done in a cost effective fashion. So, this is where AWS helps us with running, last a city at the service level. All the microservices can scale independently. So we don't have to have this massive monolith, and across the globe, we don't need to have, fifty of those to be running. And that's going to add up to a massive cost. So we are able to scale, just the portions of the infrastructure just in time when we need it. And that also helps us greatly, in having a cost effective solution, for our customers. >> That's actually great. That's great. So that granularity is important, for you to have fine grain control of your costs. A lot of people sometimes question that granularity that AWS provides, because it does add a level of complexity, but you guys can deal with complexity. You know, one of the things that we haven't talked about I wonder if we could touch, on it is data. I mean, this is the data flow. I'm imagining the data flow, and the metadata and the decisions that you have to make are are quite complex. Can you address that a little bit? I mean, you guys got to be pretty, sharp data walks. >> Yeah. So the people that we have at the company, including myself have come from a billing lodge, high performance and high large enterprise systems, previously from airlines, Ford motor company or pharmaceuticals. In any system, where we are making a lot of decisions. The first thing you have to do is data integration. And again this is something that you just learn by doing and having done it across the globe with a variety of the DER, systems UVS, you name it. We have to pretty much done one of everything, and of course, and be very quickly abstract and learn, if you do something twice, we abstract it and make it into a library. So that the next time around it's just a simple turn-on switch. So it's no secret sauce there you just learn by doing and you kind of constantly abstract and you expand the solution. >> That's great. let's close. The other thing. We really haven't talked much about your company. Maybe you could, add some. whatever you want to to share, metrics. I mean you must be growing, head count, or whatever you're comfortable sharing. If you could just give us, a little glimpse of of the company. >> Yeah, absolutely. We have been around for close to ten years now. We are based in Silicon Valley. We have multiple locations. Our second primary location is in India. Today We are operating in over twelve countries. We have close to five thousand megawatts of distributed energy acids, that we actively control manage. This includes, everything from a thermostat in the home, to very large scale, wind and solar farms, as well as large scale batteries. EVs as a new emerging category. And, we work with a variety of partners. AWS has been one of our founding partners, on day one, you talked about data. We were the first ones to realize how much data we were going to get from all of these assets. And the current systems will not scale. So we made the decision on day one to be on cloud. And that was foundational year. I just want to say that over the last year or so, we have I think collectively as a society realized how individual actions, impact the overall society. And I think we are really at a great inflection point right now, where if we can harness this newly developed consciousness and awareness to accelerate, our transition to new energy, away from fossil fuel, we can really solve what I think is the biggest challenge that we face as a society going forward. >> Yeah. Micro actions that actually have a huge impact. And so I guess, that's kind of of where you see this heading in the future both the general market, your business. I mean presumably, you've been around a while, maybe you'd welcome competition to really solve this problem. Right? >> I think we are in the same fight. We are all working towards the same goal, of having a clean cheap reliable energy. And we would welcome as much support as we get to build momentum for this absolutely >> Its like the Pharma companies cheering each other on for the, for the vaccine. Again, guys super interesting business solving real problems really thanks gentlemen for coming on the program and we wish you well in the years ahead. >> Thank you for having us. >> It's really been our pleasure. Thank you for watching the AWS startup showcase on the cube. I'm Dave Volante.

>> Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE. Covering Informatica World 2019, brought to you by Informatica. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Informatica World. I am your host, Rebecca Knight, along with co-host, John Furrier. We have two guests for this segment. We have Abhiman Matlapudi. He is the Product Master at Deloitte. Welcome. >> Thanks for having us. >> And we have Kubalahm Rajeev Krishnan, Specialist Leader at Deloitte. Thank you both so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks Rebecca, John. It's always good to be back on theCUBE. >> Love the new logos here, what's the pins? What's the new take on those? >> It looks like a honeycomb! >> Yeah, so interesting that you ask, so this is our joined Deloitte- Informatica label pin. You can see the Deloitte green colors, >> Nice! They're beautiful. >> And the Informatica colors. This shows the collaboration, the great collaboration that we've had over, you know, the past few years and plans, for the future as well. Well that's what we're here to talk about. So why don't you start the conversation by telling us a little bit about the history of the collaboration, and what you're planning ahead for the future. Yeah. So, you know, if we go like you know, ten years back the collaboration between Deloitte and Informatica has not always been that, that strong and specifically because Deloitte is a huge place to navigate, and you know, in order to have those meaningful collaborations. But over the past few years, we've... built solid relationships with Informatica and vise versa. I think we seek great value. The clear leaders in the Data Management Space. It's easy for us to kind of advise clients in terms of different facets of data management. You know, because no other company actually pulls together you know, the whole ecosystem this well. >> Well you're being polite. In reality, you know where it's weak and where it's real. I mean, the reality is there's a lot of fun out there, a lot of noise, and so, I got to ask you, cause this is the real question, because there's no one environment that's the same. Customers want to get to the truth faster, like, where's the deal? What's the real deal with data? What's gettable? What's attainable? What's aspirational? Because you could say "Hey, well I make data, data-driven organization, Sass apps everywhere." >> Yeah. Yeah absolutely. I mean every, every company wants to be more agile. Business agility is what's driving companies to kind of move all of their business apps to the Cloud. The uh, problem with that is that, is that people don't realize that you also need to have your data management governance house in order, right, so according to a recent Gartner study, they say by next year, 75% of companies who have moved their business apps to the Cloud, is going to, you know, unless they have their data management and data assets under control, they have some kind of information governance, that has, you know, context, or purview over all of these business apps, 50% of their data assets are going to erode in value. So, absolutely the need of the hour. So we've seen that great demand from our clients as well, and that's what we've been advising them as well. >> What's a modern MDM approach? Because this is really the heart of the conversation, we're here at Informatica World. What's- What does it look like? What is it? >> So I mean, there are different facets or functionalities within MDM that actually make up what is the holistic modern MDM, right. In the past, we've seen companies doing MDM to get to that 360-degree view. Somewhere along the line, the ball gets dropped. That 360 view doesn't get combined with your data warehouse and all of the transaction information, right, and, you know, your business uses don't get the value that they were looking for while they invested in that MDM platform. So in today's world, MDM needs to provide front office users with the agility that they need. It's not about someone at the back office doing some data stewardship. It's all about empowering the front office users as well. There's an aspect of AIML from a data stewardship perspective. I mean everyone wants cost take out, right, I mean there's fewer resources and more data coming in. So how how do you manage all of the data? Absolutely you need to have AIML. So Informatica's CLAIRE product helps with suggestions and recommendations for algorithms, matching those algorithms. Deloitte has our own MDM elevate solution that embeds AIML for data stewardship. So it learns from human data inputs, and you know, cuts through the mass of data records that have to be managed. >> You know Rajeev, it was interesting, last year we were talking, the big conversation was moving data around is really hard. Now there's solutions for that. Move the data integrity on premise, on Cloud. Give us an update on what's going on there, because there seems to be a lot of movement, positive movement, around that. In terms of, you know, quality, end to end. We heard Google up here earlier saying "Look, we can go into end to end all you want". This has been a big thing. How are you guys handling this? >> Yeah absolutely, so in today's key note you heard Anil Chakravarthy and Thomas Green up on the stage and Anil announced MDM on GCP, so that's an offering that Deloitte is hosting and managing. So it's going to be an absolutely white-glove service that gives you everything from advice to implement to operate, all hosted on GCP. So it's a three-way ecosystem offering between Deloitte, Informatica, and GCP. >> Well just something about GCP, just as a side note before you get there, is that they are really clever. They're using Sequel as a way to abstract all the under the hood kind of configuration stuff. Smart move, because there's a ton of Sequel people out there! >> Exactly. >> I mean, it's not structured query language for structured data. It's lingua franca for data. They've been changing the game on that. >> Exactly, it should be part of their Cloud journey. So organizations, when they start thinking about Cloud, first of all, what they need to do is they have to understand where all the data assets are and they read the data feeds coming in, where are the data lakes, and once they understand where their datas are, it's not always wise, or necessary to move all their data to the Cloud. So, Deloitte's approach or recommendation is to have a hybrid approach. So that they can keep some of their legacy datas, data assets, in the on premise and some in the Cloud applications. So, Informatica, MDM, and GCP, powered by Deloitte, so it acts as an MDM nimble hub. In respect of where your data assets are, it can give you the quick access to the data and it can enrich the data, it can do the master data, and also it can protect your data. And it's all done by Informatica. >> Describe what a nimble hub is real quick. What does a nimble hub mean? What does that mean? >> So it means that, in respect of wherever your data is coming in and going out, so it gives you a very light feeling that the client wouldn't know. All we- Informatica, MDM, on GCP powered by Deloitte, what we are saying is we are asking clients to just give the data. And everything, as Rajeev said, it's a white-glove approach. It's that from engagement, to the operation, they will just feel a seamless support from Deloitte. >> Yeah, and just to address the nimbleness factor right, so we see clients that suddenly need to get into new market, or they want to say, introduce a new product, so they need the nimbleness from a business perspective. Which means that, well suddenly you've got to like scale up and down your data workloads as well, right? And that's not just transactional data, but master data as well. And that's where the Cloud approach, you know, gives them a positive advantage. >> I want to get back to something Abhiman said about how it's not always wise or necessary to move to the Cloud. And this is a debate about where do you keep stuff. Should it be on on prem, and you said that Deloitte recommends a hybrid approach and I'm sure that's a data-driven recommendation. I'm wondering what evidence you have and what- why that recommendation? >> So, especially when it depends on the applications you're putting on for MDM, and the sources and data is what you are trying to get, for the Informatica MDM to work. So, it's not- some of your social systems are already tied up with so many other applications within your on premise, and they don't want to give every other data. And some might have concerns of sending this data to the Cloud. So that's when you want to keep those old world legacy systems, who doesn't want to get upgrades, to your on premise, and who are all Cloud-savy and they can all starting new. So they can think of what, and which, need a lot of compute power, and storage. And so those are the systems we want to recommend to the Cloud. So that's why we say, think where you want to move your data bases. >> And some of it is also driven by regulation, right, like GDPR, and where, you know, which providers offer in what countries. And there's also companies that want to say "Oh well my product strategy and my pricing around products, I don't want to give that away to someone." Especially in the high tech field, right. Your provider is going to be a confidere. >> Rajeev, one of the things I'm seeing here in this show, is clearly that the importance of the Cloud should not be understated. You see, and you guys, you mentioned you get the servers at Google. This is changing not just the customers opportunity, but your ability to service them. You got a white-glove service, I'm sure there's a ton more head room. Where do you guys see the Cloud going next? Obviously it's not going away, and the on premise isn't going away. But certainly, the importance of the Cloud should not be understated. That's what I'm hearing clearly. You see Amazon, Azure, Google, all big names with Informatica. But with respect to you guys, as you guys go out and do your services. This is good for business. For you guys, helping customers. >> Yeah absolutely, I think there's value for us, there's value for our clients. You know, it's not just the apps that are kind of going to the Cloud, right? I mean you see all data platforms that are going to the Cloud. For example, Cloudera. They just launched CDP. Being GA by July- August. You know, Snowflake's on the Cloud doing great, getting good traction in the market. So eventually what were seeing is, whether it's business applications or data platforms, they're all moving to the Cloud. Now the key things to look out for in the future is, how do we help our clients navigate a multi Cloud environment, for example, because sooner or later, they wouldn't want to have all of their eggs invested in one basket, right? So, how do we help navigate that? How do we make that seamless to the business user? Those are the challenges that we're thinking about. >> What's interesting about Databricks and Snowflake, you mentioned them, is that it really is a tell sign that start-ups can break through and crack the enterprise with Cloud and the ecosystem. And you're starting to see companies that have a Sass-like mindset with technology. Coming into an enterprise marketed with these ecosystems, it's a tough crowd believe me, you know the enterprise. It's not easy to break into the enterprise, so for Databricks and Snowflake, that's a huge tell sign. What's your reaction to that because it's great for Informatica because it's validation for them, but also the start-ups are now growing very fast. I mean, I wouldn't call Snowflake 3 billion dollar start-up their unicorn but, times three. But it's a tell sign. It's just something new we haven't seen. We've seen Cloudera break in. They kind of ramped their way in there with a lot of raise and they had a big field sales force. But Data Bear and Snowflake, they don't have a huge set in the sales force. >> Yeah, I think it's all about clients and understanding, what is the true value that someone provides. Is it someone that we can rely on to keep our data safe? Do they have the capacity to scale? If you can crack those things, then you'll be in the market. >> Who are you attracting to the MDM on Google Cloud? What's the early data look like? You don't have to name names, but whats some of the huge cases that get the white glove service from Deloitte on the Google Cloud? Tell us about that. Give us more data on that. >> So we've just announced that, here at Informatica World, we've got about three to four mid to large enterprises. One large enterprise and about three mid-size companies that are interested in it. So we've been in talks with them in terms of- and that how we want to do it. We don't want to open the flood gates. We'd like to make sure it's all stable, you know, clients are happy and there's word of mouth around. >> I'm sure the end to end management piece of it, that's probably attractive. The end to end... >> Exactly. I mean, Deloitte's clearly the leader in the data analytics space, according to Gartner Reports. Informatica is the leader in their space. GCP has great growth plans, so the three of them coming together is going to be a winner. >> One of the most pressing challenges facing the technology industry is the skills gap and the difficulty in finding talent. Surveys show that I.T. managers can't find qualified candidates for open Cloud roles. What are Deloitte's thought on this and also, what are you doing as a company to address it? >> I mean, this is absolutely a good problem to have, for us. Right, which means that there is a demand. But unless we beat that demand, it's a problem. So we've been taking some creative ways, in terms of addressing that. An example would be our analytics foundry offering, where we provide a pod of people that go from data engineers you know, with Python and Sparks skills, to, you know, Java associates, to front end developers. So a whole stack of developers, a full stack, we provide that full pod so that they can go and address a particular business analytics problem or some kind of visualization issues, in terms of what they want to get from the data. So, we teach Leverate that pod, across multiple clients, I think that's been helping us. >> If you could get an automated, full time employee, that would be great. >> Yeah, and this digital FD concept is something that we'd be looking at, as well. >> I would like to add on that, as well. So, earlier- with the data disruption, Informatica's so busy and Informatica's so busy that Deloitte is so busy. Now, earlier we used plain Informatica folks and then, later on because of the Cloud disruption, so we are training them on the Cloud concepts. Now what the organizations have to think, or the universities to think is that having the curriculum, the Cloud concepts in their universities and their curriculum so that they get all their Cloud skills and after, once they have their Cloud skills, we can train them on the Informatica skills. And Informatica has full training on that. >> I think it's a great opportunity for you guys. We were talking with Sally Jenkins to the team earlier, and the CEO. I was saying that it reminds me of early days of VMware, with virtualization you saw the shift. Certainly the economics. You replaced servers, do a virtual change to the economics. With the data, although not directly, it's a similar concept where there's new operational opportunities, whether it's using leverage in Google Cloud for say, high-end, modern data warehousing to whatever. The community is going to respond. That's going to be a great ecosystem money making opportunity. The ability to add new services, give you guys more capabilities with customers to really move the needle on creating value. >> Yeah, and it's interesting you mention VMware because I actually helped, as VMware stood up there, VMCA, AW's and NSA's offerings on the Cloud. We actually helped them get ready for that GA and their data strategy, in terms of support, both for data and analytics friendliness. So we see a lot of such tech companies who are moving to a flexible consumption service. I mean, the challenges are different and we've got a whole practice around that flex consumption. >> I'm sure Informatica would love the VMware valuation. Maybe not worry for Dell technology. >> We all would love that. >> Rajeem, Abhiman, thank you so much for joining us on theCube today. >> Thank you very much. Good talking to you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. We will have more from Informatica World tomorrow.

>> From the Aria resort in Las Vegas. It's the Cube! (upbeat music) Covering AWS Marketplace. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with the Cube. We're at AWS Reinvent 2018. I don't know how many people are here, 60 000, 70 000, your guess is as good as mine. I'm sure we'll get an official number shortly. We're kicking things of here. Three days of coverage. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, that's four days. We're at the AWS Marketplace and Service Catalog Experience here at the Aria. We're excited to be kicking stuff of with Rajeev Dutt. He is making AI that makes AI. We're going to get into it. He is the CEO president and co-founder of DimensionalMechanics. Rajeev, great to see you. >> It's great to meet ya. >> How many Reinvents have you been to? >> This would actually be my second. >> You're second? >> My second. Yeah, it's like- it's- I always feel really energized after coming here. It's like- last year was like heavy AI centered. >> Right, right. >> It was just really all these sessions in AI was really exciting. >> Let's get in to it for the folks that aren't familiar with DimensionalMechanics. What are you guys all about? >> So DimensionalMechanics is about lowering the bar for entry like to most people. So that's kind of our first focus. Our second focus is to make sure that deployment strategies allow you to deploy across any end device. So it's basically intended to be a complete end-to-end capability. >> Around AI? >> Around AI. >> The Artificial Intelligence. >> The Artificial Intelligence. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> Most important part. >> Okay. >> Yeah, so, it's about reducing the bar for entry for Artificial Intelligence so that anybody without even a machine learning background can build very sophisticated models on our platform. In sometimes as little as 14 lines of code. It's just incredibly easy. We've had high school students use us, we've had university professors, who have nothing to do with AI, use us without any problems. And, really the way we do that is that we have an AI that we call the Oracle. We are all Matrix fans. (Jeff laughs) And so what this- the Oracle does is it has a vast knowledge base, has a lot of additional machine learning components and things like that. That essentially allow it adapt and learn based on the kind of problem you're trying to solve. So, every time it solves the same problem, it gets better and better at what it's doing. >> So, so, um... Is it, is it libraries, is it pre-configured, are there specific type of application that it works better on? What's kind of your go to market? >> So basically, think about AI studio as a full server application. So it, what you essentially do- we created our own language called the NeoPulse Modeling language. And the NeoPulse Modeling language, think about it as sort of the SQL for Artificial Intelligence. It does a lot of very complicated things in just a couple of lines. So essentially what you do is you compile it on the machine so when you write the NML code, the NeoPulse Modeling language code. You compile it on the machine, it looks at your data which is sitting in a bucket. It starts training the model. Once the model is ready, you can export the model as a PIM object, so Portable Inference Model object which is one of our creations. And that allows you then to deploy it on to any end target as long as it's running on runtime. And on runtime can be basically sitting in the cloud or on a device. Sometimes we're also looking at right down to FPGA kind of device levels as well. So, extremely low power devices as well as cloud computing, but gives you that flexibility, but it also, which is really important, it makes AI accessible. So anybody without like any background in it- My wife is a radiologist and she's actually looking at using it for her own internal usage... >> And how much do you have to learn? You have to learn the NeoPulse language, right? >> The NML language is really easy to learn. So we had a high school student who spent about a week learning it and so a week later she was ready to start coding and she has built her first models using that. And the way it does that is that you actually, we have a keyword auto inside NML which is context aware, and so when the compiler sees auto it goes out to the Oracle and says hey, I've seen- this person needs help building an architecture or figuring out what function to use or what hyperparameters to use and so on and so on. And the Oracle will come back and say hey, use this architecture, use these hyperparameters, use these settings or functions or these optimizations in your model and... >> So is that doin' that when I'm setting up the model in the first place to give me directions or is looking at the model once I've spun it a couple times and saying wait, this looks like one of these, maybe you should do some of this. >> So what it will look at is your data. So it will actually look in to your data, the type of data, how much data you have, the kind of problem you're trying to solve, how many, for example, if it's a classification problem, how many classes you have, and all of that basically determines the kind of model that it will use. You can also specify the level of complexity that you're interested in, like, are you interested in a very simple model, a complex model, is over fitting a risk at all It will determine all these things behind the scenes >> Right, right. >> based on the kind of problem that you're trying to solve. And the first time it solves it, it will give you a pretty good answer. It's usually very good, but then the second time you solve it or a third time you solve it, it gets better and better and better, because it's able to learn from its mistakes. So, and eventually it gets really good at its job so. >> But it's still, but it's a still a model that I built for that application. You're not drawing kind of pre-configured models down from the Oracle. >> No no, you're basically training it from scratch. >> Right. >> It's entirely intended for custom models. So companies that are- have highly customized data, like radiology or for example, looking at wind stress patterns like in polarized light and stuff like that. So things that are not normally covered by the standard image recognition and so, using things like transfer learning or fine tuning doesn't help in this particular case because if you've trained a model in dogs and cats then like, training it to recognize stress patterns, is just not- >> It's not going to work. >> It's not going to work. >> So you got to prepare for your interviews, looking through your website. You list a really dramatic example of where using your guys technology was like, I don't know, a tenth of the price >> Yes, yeah. >> And I think one month versus six. >> Yeah. >> I wonder if you could share some couple examples that, you know, people are putting this to use. >> Okay, so, we have actually a few. So one of them is with a company. They're focused on kind of a resume matching, so we built them- they were initially quoted by another company at around 450 000 and they were warned that they would not be able to exceed 40% accuracy given the data that they had. We managed to get to about 83/84% accuracy for about under 10 000. So that was like a huge huge reduction. Then the second one was just recently, another company had been spending quite a bit of time and resources on building out a technology to measure heart rate. We were able to look at that and produce, instead of spending like their 20 000 a month or so, we could bring it down to 4000 in total. So these are the kind of sort dramatic reductions in cost that our platform can offer. Stanford University, another great example. These are physicians that we're working with. None of them have any engineering background like, for them, Linux is in itself- That was the hardest thing for them to do was to get used to Linux and so once they start building on our platform it was like they actually built a model that was good enough that they were able to publish at the RSNA, which is like one of the biggest radiology conferences in the world. In this case it was for Pet CT, which is a three-dimensional model because there's a three-dimensional image if you will >> Okay. >> of the human body and so was able to determine whether somebody had a tumor or not and I think they mananged to get, with a very limited data set, about 74/75% accuracy and this was actually at Stanford, so it's a pretty, pretty big name. >> Right. So, Rajeev we're here at AWS Marketplace Experience. You're still a relatively small company. I think you said you had a good size C round, gettin' ready to go out and get a decent A round. >> Right. >> What does it mean to work with a company like Amazon? I mean, as a small company, just to get, just to get an approved vendor set up at Stanford, probably not an easy thing, right. There's all kinds of legal Ts and Cs. >> Exactly. >> As a startup their always worried about whether you're going to be around tomorrow. >> Exactly. >> So your part doin' AWS, so how's that been workin' with AWS and the Marketplace . >> Well firstly, it's definitely given us the Amazon backing in a way, so when people see you're on AWS, they see that connected to you, that automatically gives them a little bit more confidence. >> They vetted you so you must be good. >> Exactly, exactly. And the second is that it gives access to a market that we otherwise wouldn't have had like, if I'm thinking about like producing software that you have to download on our website, that's a very very limited market. You have to attract people to your website and so on and so on. Now it's like we're on the Amazon- there's a machine learning hub on AWS. We're on that, so which means that when people search for machine learning, our name does come up. >> Right, right >> It means it's very easy to launch. You don't have to worry about setting up a machine, worrying about how to configure it. Everything is done automatically, makes life really easy. >> Right. >> On top of that, the AWS team has been- the Marketplace team has been really extremely helpful connecting us with end customers. So very often they will refer people to us. In fact, one of our largest customers came through an AWS referral, so for us it's been nothing but a win-win. >> Right. What about the potential downside? Not to rain on the parade but the old joke used to be if you're a start-up makin' widgets, you know, you just got your first order with Walmart the good news. Bad news is you just got your first order with Walmart. That's opening up a huge global distribution opportunity, I mean in theory, you know, say you got a 1000 customers tomorrow, that might be a little bit of a challenge. >> Yeah, so we actually are starting to hit that. So, we- so our version two was really our go to market version and- which came out earlier this year, and so we've been trying to like wrap up the sales on that side and literally in the last three months. It's like I have not been home for six weeks now because I've been in the far East and traveling and, it' like- because of this heavy customer interaction at this point. So we have a very good story to tell the investors now, like, this has also helped with the investments rounds that we're actually looking at. So we have a very good story to tell the investors that you know, our like invoice list and so on is huge at this point so we need help now. It's actually more about raising, like building up a team now than it is about can we get orders. >> Right. It's really delivering more than sales. >> Exactly. >> I see what you're saying. And so we need to build up a delivery team, we need to- I mean, it's fairly intuitive, but at the same time it's a new technology which means, as with any platform, you're building up a team of evangelist, support individuals and so on. And there's going to be a marketing component as well, so we haven't really driven marketing that much. AWS has been great in kind of doing some of that for us, but we need to of course very actively go out and market. We haven't had that capacity yet. >> All right. We look forward to watching the story unfold and thanks for spending a few minutes with us. >> My pleasure. Thanks, thank you very much. All right, he's Rajeev Dutt, I'm Jeff. Thank you for watching the Cube. We're at the AWS Marketplace and Service Catalog Experience at the Aria, come on by. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>live from Las Vegas. It's the Cube covering. Inform Attica World 2018 Not you. Buy. Inform Attica. >>Welcome back and run. Live here in Las Vegas at the Venetian Cubes coverage of In From Attica, World 2018. I'm John for the coast to queue with by host the next two days. Peter Barrister, head of research for Wicked Bonds with an Angle and the Cube. Our next two guests from Deloitte. Leo Cabrera, who's senior manager. And Rajeev Krishna, who's the specialist leader on the engineering side. CDO side guys, Thanks for joining us. Thank you, John. Thank you, Lloyd. The leader in a lot of areas, absolutely doing a lot of cutting edge stuff from c'mon, the Blockchain crypto side tax side also in the I t side. You guys have been in a great top customers here in data in from Atticus, leading the charge, looking good with the trends. But the cloud is here. Cloud scale ecosystems developing. How do you guys see in from Attica? Evolving. Going forward, Mostly great messaging. But they still got customers out there that have sold stuff. They want to bring in cloud native new data. What's what's the prospects were in from Attica. >>Foreign Formica, Saudi lawyer. We have this nuanced article data advantage and basically would consider the inflection point between what we call in just 3.0, industry for point. And it's basically now we want to get value out of the data and our data advantage strategy Focus on three pillars. They have engineering wilderness and enable men for as Informatica Isa great component and a great supporter in each of these areas. Right, So, through these study we offer video service is we offer data governance. Studio chief did offer sheet state all of it. Yeah, on. And we partner with Informatica to profile the data to understand what will be the points in which we can find value over the data on off course with the new enterprise catalog to tool to do better governance for our clients. >>I want to get under the hood. I see the catalog is getting a lot of great reviews. Some people think that this is the next big wave in data management, similar to what we've seen in other ways like well, what? Relational databases and every way that comes on cap this catalogue New kind of catalogs emerging. What's your view on this? Is it away? Visit like recycled catalog, is it? >>So get a cataloguing and data. Curation has bean going on for decades, right? But it's never gained traction on, and it's never given Klein's the value because it was so manual takes tons of effort to get it right, right. So what inform Attica is done, which is absolute breakthrough? This embed a i into their enterprise data can log into which kind of accelerates the whole data. Cataloging on basically gives them gives climbs. The value in terms of cutting down on there are packed in terms of how many people, how many data students you need to put together >>So they modernize that. Basically, they exactly all the manual stuff put automation around and put some software to find around at machine learning. Is that kind of the secret to their success? >>Absolutely. And Down Delight has been partnering with Informatica for quite a while. In fact, we are one of the few companies that have a seat on the product advice report s o what we see from the marketplace we cannot feed into in from Attica to say, Hey, here's what you need to build into your products, right? So we be doing that with their MDM solution. For example, we have what we have. Articles indium, elevate. So we build machine learning into their MP and platform and offer. That's a solution similarly, and for America has built the clear platform into their E. D. C s. Oh, that's absolutely driving Valley for clients. And we have a lot of clients that are already leveraging >>a lot of risk and platforms tools, right? I see a lot of data stuff out there that's like like a feature, not a platform, that these guys got a platform, right? So But now the world's changing the cloud. How do you guys take that data advantage program or go to a CDO and saying, Look, you gotta think differently around the data, protect you explain your view on that. >>For us, data is now the center of everything, right? So any business who want to remain competitive in the future needs to get into entire end twin management of the data, getting the value of off data and also understanding what is the data coming from and what is the day they're going to write off course is studded with all the regulations. And now GDP are coming on Friday. It is a big, you know, pusher for companies to realize that over. If >>you have a big party on Friday, a big party or is this what you Katie was a big part. Nothing happened. So you're never mean GDP. Are you guys have a lot going on there? I mean, this is the center of the conversation. >>Yeah. I mean, we do have a lot of clients who need to be compliant on GDP are on informatica is one of the tools that have already pre established the policies, so you can quickly determine where is the data that GPR is gonna be monitoring and looking for compliance on So rather than doing it from a scratch, right? So it takes a lot of it >>for Let's build on this a little bit. So when we talk about different as John was saying, different generations of data management technology, we're coming out of a generation was focused on extract, transform and load where every single application or every single new analytics application wasn't you identify the source is uniquely you build extractions unique. You'd build transformations, you build load scripts. Uniquely all that stuff was done uniquely. Now what we're saying is catalog allows us to think to move into a re use world. We've been reusing code fragments and gets and all these other things for years. In many respects, what we're talking about is the ability to bring a reuse orientation inside the enterprise to data. Have I got that right? You got it >>right. Two minutes. But the most important parties how to get value out of that, right? Because they did >>manage to get value out of using >>it more exactly And understanding, You know, how can improve your operations or you know, the bottom line, or reduce the risk that you have in your data, which is basically CPR is about, >>and one other Salin point is on very scene for America bringing values their completeness of mission. Right. So when you talk about gdp are you need different aspects, right? You need your data integration. Whether it be through cloud around. Promise you need get a governor on top of what you're cataloging, right? You need security data security. Right? So it all comes together in the hole in dramatic solutions. And I think that's very see value is supposed to like pocket pockets >>of guys. I gotta ask you a question. We've seen many ways. I think it's a big way this whole date away. But you guys, you have a term called industry four point. Oh, is what is industry but the Deloitte term. But what is that? What is industry four point? Oh, me. Can you define that? >>You wanna take that door? >>Yeah, sure. So we've seen, you know, revolutions in terms off technology and data on. We've seen people going from kind of the industrial revolution to the dark. Amira, What? Three terms in the street? Four point off where data is annoying, right? So data is an acid that needs to be completely leverage. Not just you look a reactively and retrospectively like How did we do? Right? And not even just for predictive analytics. We've seen that for a few years now. It's also about using data to drive. This is value, right? So are there new ways to monetize data? Are there new ways to leverage data and grow your business? Right? So that's what Industry four. No, no is about. >>That's awesome. Well, we got a lot of things going on here. Thanks for coming on. The Cube had a couple of questions. Got a lot of dishes going on. That preparing for the big opening of the Solutions Expo Hall. We're in the middle of all the action. You're out in the open, accused. What we do. We go out in the open final question, eyes around the CDO. Who should the chief date officer report to the C I O board? What >>do you >>guys seeing? Because the CDO now picking a strategic role if Davis the new oil. That data is the fourth wave of innovation that we've seen over centuries. What does that mean? For the chief Data Officer? More power? Why'd you report to the C i o? Why is the CEO reported the Chief Data officer? What's your take? >>Traditionally our clients in the past, where the mandate for the studios were more in the data governess, right? As of today, it is going more into enablement the data, right? So more than Analytics case. Still, service is so well seen clients going from the studio moving from under the CEO in tow, the CEO and into the CMO in some cases, more about marketing. However, at the lawyer, our proposition is that companies should do a big shift and funded the new data function as a totally new vertical next to H. R next to finance right, which have his own funding and the CDO being the leader of that function, reporting directly to the CEO or >>enablement side CEO handling much of three things engineering, governance and enablement correct. So the CEO will handle Engineering Dept. Which not just its engineering, full stack developers, possibly our cloud native developers. Governance could come into policy, normal stuff. We've seen enablement more tooling, democratization of things. >>Yeah, yeah, >>yeah. I mean, what we've been seeing right in the real world, Liss, you have, for example, finance transformation that CIA full heads, right? So there's a lot of traction at that point to kind of bring the company together. But then that soon fizzles out. Sometimes you have, ah, the CMO bringing on and marketing campaign and, you know, analytics initiative, right? There's a lot of traction. Then it fizzes out. So you need somebody at the chief data officer of the C suite level to maintain that traction that moment, Um, in order freed value. >>But it seems the key issue is someone who is focused on data as an asset generating competitive returns on data as an asset because and the reason why it could be the CEO, it could be somebody else. Historically, an i t. The asset was the hardware on the argument here is that the asset is no longer the hardware now the data data. So whoever whatever you call it, someone and a group who's focused on generating returns out of data, >>Yes. But it has to have that executive level and that new talent mortal that we're proposing right where everybody knows a little bit of data in a sense. >>And the other thing is that I mean, think about this role that's dedicated to creating value of data, right? So you can understand you know how you create value in one function. Take it to the other function and tell them Hey, here's have helped finance right, get more value and then use the same thing marketing our sales. So it's also the cross pollination of ideas across different functions in an organization. S O n roll like that is helpful in terms of >>just to say, the data could very well become the next shared service's organization. That's because you don't want your salespeople to be great with data and your marketing people to be lousy with data. >>Correct. You're totally right on that. That's what we're proposing, right? So data being another vertical in entire business, >>the Lloyd bring all the action here on the Q. With all the data they're sharing here to you. It's the Cuban John for With Peter Burst, more live cover. Stay with us. We're here in Las Vegas. Live for in from Attica, World 2018 day. One of two days of wall to wall comes here out in the open. Bringing you all the data is Thank you. Stay with us.

>> Female Voice: From San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering VMware RADIO 2019, brought to you by VMware. >> Welcome to theCUBE's exclusive coverage of VMware RADIO 2019, Lisa Martin with John Furrier in San Francisco, talking all sorts of innovation in this innovation long history culture at VMware, welcoming back to theCUBE, Mornay Van Der Walt, VP of R&D in the Explorer Group. Mornay, thank you for joining John and me on theCUBE today. >> Thank you for having me. >> So, I got to start with Explorer Group. Super cool name. >> Yeah. >> What is that within R&D? >> So the origins of the Explorer Group. I've had many roles at VMware, and I've been fortunate enough to do a little bit of everything. Technical marketing; product development; business development; one of the big things I did before the Explorer group was created was actually EVO:RAIL. I was the founder of that, pitched that idea. Raghu and Ray and Pat were very supportive. We took that to market, took it to (inaudible), handed that off to Dell EMC, the rest is history, right? And then was, "what's next?" So Ray and me look at some special projects, go and look at IoT, go and look at Telemetry, and did some orders for them, and then said "Alright, why don't you look at all our innovation programs." Because beyond RADIO, we actually have four other programs. And everyone, was -- RADIO gets a lot of airtime and press, but it's really the collective. It's the power of those other four programs that support RADIO that allow us to take an idea from inception to an impactful outcome. So hence the name, the Explorer Group. We're going out there, we're exploring for new ideas, new technologies, what's happening in the market. >> Talk about the R&D management style. You've actually got all these-- RADIO's one-- kind of a celebration, it's kind of the best of the best come together, with papers and submissions. Kind of a symposium meets kind of a, you know, successive end for all the top engineers. There's more, as you've mentioned. How does all of it work? Because, in this modern era of distributed teams, decentralization, decisions around business, decisions on allocating to the portfolio, what gets invested, money, spend, how do you organize? Give a quick minute to explain how R&D is structured. >> So, obviously, we have the BUs structured-- well there's PCS, Raghu and Rajeev head that up. And then we've got the OCTO organization, which Ray O'Farrell heads up. And the business, you know, it's innovating every day to get products out the door, right, and that's something that we've got to be mindful of because, I mean, that's ultimately what's allowing us to get products into the hands of our customers, solving tough problems. But then in addition to that, we want to give our engineers an avenue to go and explore, and, you know, tinker on something that's maybe related to their day job, or completely off, unrelated to their day job. The other thing that's important is, we also want to give, because we're such a global R&D, you know, our setup globally, we want to give teams the opportunity to work together, collaborate together, get that diversity of thought going, and so a lot of times, if we do a Hackathon, which we call a Borathon, we actually give bonus points if teams pull from outside of their business units. So you've got an idea, well, let's make it a diverse idea in terms of thought and perspective. If you're from the storage business unit, bring in folks from the network business unit. Bring in folks from the cloud business unit. Maybe you've partnered with some folks that are in IT. It's very, you know, sometimes engineers will go, "Ah, it's just R&D that's innovating." But in reality, there's great innovation coming out of our IT department. There's great innovation coming out of our global support organization. Our SEs that are on the front lines, sometimes are seeing the customers' pain points firsthand, and then they bring that back, and some of that makes it into the product. >> How much of R&D is applied R&D, which is kind of business unit aligned, or somewhat aligned, versus the wacky, crazy ideas: "Go solve a big, hairy problem", that's out there, that's not, kind of, related to the current product sets? >> Ah, that's tough to put an actual number on it, >> John: Well ballpark, I mean. >> But if I just say, like, if I had to just think about budgets and that, it's probably ten to fifteen percent is the wacky stuff, that's, you know, not tied to a roadmap, that's why we call it "off-road innovation", and the five programs that my Explorer Group ultimately leads is all about driving that off-road innovation. And eventually you want to find an on-ramp, >> Yeah. >> to a roadmap, you know, that's aligned to a business unit, or a new emerging, you know, technology. >> How does someone come up with an idea and say, "Hey, you know, I want to do this"? Do they submit, like, a form? Is there a proposal? Who approves it? I mean, do you get involved? How does that process work? >> So that's a good question. It really depends on the engineer, right? You take someone who's just a new college grad, straight out of, you know, college. That's why we have these five programs. Because some of these folks, they've got a good idea, but they don't really know how to frame it, pitch it. And so if you've got a good idea, and let's say, this is your first rodeo, so to speak, We have a program called TechTalks where it allows you to actually go and pitch your idea; get some feedback. And that's sometimes where you get the best feedback, because you go and, you know, present your idea, and somebody will come back and say, "Well, you know, have you met, you know, Johnny and Sue over there, in this group? They're actually working on something similar. You should go and talk to them, maybe you guys can bring your ideas together." Folks that are, you know, more seasoned, you know, longer tenure, sometimes they just come up, and-- "I'm going to pitch an idea to xLabs," and for xLabs, for example --that's an internal incubator-- there is, like, a submissions process. We want to obviously make sure, that, you know, your idea's timing in the market's correct, we've got limited funding there so we're going to make sure we're really investing on the right, you know, type of ideas. But if you don't want to go and pitch your idea and get feedback, go and do a Borathon. Turn an idea into a little prototype. And we see a lot of that happening, and some of the greatest ideas are coming from our Borathons, you know? And it's also about tracking the journey. So, we have RADIO here today, we have mentioned xLabs, TechTalks, we have another program called Flings. Some of our engineers are shipping product, and they've got an idea to augment the product. They put it out as a Fling, and our customers and the ecosystem download these, and it augments the product. And then we get great feedback. And then that makes it back into the product roadmap. So there's a lot of different ways to do it, and RADIO, the process for RADIO, there's a lot of rigor in it. It's, like, it's run as a research program. >> Lisa: It's a call for papers, right? >> Call for papers, you know, there's a strict format, it's got to be, you know, this many pages; if you go over about one line, you're sort of, disqualified, so to speak. And then once you've got those papers, like this year we had 560 papers be submitted, out of those 560, 31 made it onto mainstage, and another 61 made it as posters, as you can see in the room we're sitting in. >> I have an idea. Machine learning should get all those papers. (laughs) I mean, that's-- >> Funny you say that. We actually have, one of our engineers, Josh Simons, is actually using machine learning to go back in time and look at all the submissions. So idea harvesting is something we're paying a lot of attention to, because you submit an idea, >> Interesting. >> the market may not be right for it, or reality is, I just don't have a budget to fund it if it's an xLab. >> John: So it's like a Google search for your, kind of, the indexing all those workers. >> Internally, yeah, and sometimes it's-- there's a great idea here, you merge that with another idea from another group or another geo, and then you can actually go and fund something. >> Well, that's important because timing is critical, in these early-- most stuff can be early in just incubation, gestation period for that tech or concept, could be in play because the computer-- all the new things, right? >> Correct. And, do you actually have the time? You're an engineer working on a release, the priority is getting that release out the door, right? >> (laughs) >> So, put the idea on the back burner, come off the release, and then, you know, get a couple of colleagues together and maybe there's a Borathon being held and you go and move that idea forward that way. Or, it's time for RADIO submissions, get a couple of colleagues together and submit a RADIO paper. So we want to have different platforms for our engineers to submit ideas outside of their day job. >> And it sounds like, the different programs that you're talking about: Flings, xLab, Borathon, RADIO, what it sounds like is, there isn't necessarily a hierarchy that ideas have to go through. It really depends on the teams that have the ideas, that are collaborating, and they can put them forward to any of these programs, >> Correct, yeah. >> and one might get, say, rejected for RADIO, but might be great for a Borathon or a Fling? >> Correct. >> So they've got options there, and there's multiple committees, I imagine? Is that spearheaded out of Ray's OCTO group, >> Yep. >> that's helping to make the selections? Tell us a little bit about that process. >> Sure, so. That's a great point, right? To get an idea out the door, you don't always have to take the same pathway. And so one thing we started tracking was these innovation journeys that all take different pathways. We just published an impact report on innovation for FY19, and we've got the vSAN story in there, right? It was an idea. A group of engineers had an idea, like, in 2009, and they worked on their idea a little bit-- it first made it to RADIO in 2011. And then they came back in 2013, and, sort of, the rest is history, you know. vSAN launched in 2014. We had a press release this week for Carbon Avoidance Meter. It was an idea that actually started as a calculator many years ago. Was used, and then sort of died on the vine, so to speak? One of our SEs said, "You know, this is a good idea. I want to evolve this a little bit further." Came and pitched an xLabs idea, and we said, "Alright, we're going to fund this as an xLabs Lite. Three to six months project, limited funding, work on one objective --you're still doing your day job-- move the project forward a little bit." Then Nicola Acutt, our Sustainability VP, got involved, wanted to move the idea a little bit further along, came back for another round of funding through an xLabs Lite, and then GSS, with their Skyline platform, picked it up, and that's going to be integrated in the coming months into Skyline, and we're going to be able to give our customers a carbon, sort of, readout of their data center. And then they'll be able to, you know, map that, and get a bigger picture, because obviously, it's not just the servers that are virtualized, there's cooling in the data center plants, and all these other factors that you've got to, you know, take into account when you want to look at your carbon footprint for your facility. So, we have lots of examples of how these innovation pathways take different turns, and sometimes it's Team A starting with an idea, Team B joins in, and then there's this convergence at a particular point, and then it goes nowhere for a couple of months, and then, a business unit picks it up. >> One of the things that's come out-- Pat Gelsinger mentioned that a theme outside of the normal product stuff is how people do work. There's been some actual R&D around it, because you guys have a lot of distributed, decentralized operations in R&D because of the global nature. >> Yeah. >> How should companies and R&D be run when the reality is that developers could be anywhere? They could be at a coffee shop, they could be overseas, they could be in any geography, how do you create an environment where you have that kind of innovation? Can you just share some of the best practices that you guys have found? >> I'm not sure if there's 'best practices', per se, but to make sure that the programs are open and inclusive to everybody on the planet. So, I'll give you some stats. For example, when RADIO started in the early days, we were founded in Palo Alto. It was a very Palo Alto-centric company. And for the first few years, if you looked at the percentage of attendees, it was probably over 75% were coming from Palo Alto. We've now over the years shifted that, to where Palo Alto probably represents about 44%, 16% is the rest of North America, and then the balance is from across the globe. And so that shift has been deliberate, obviously that impacts the budget a little bit, but in our programs, like a Borathon, you can hack from anywhere. We've got a lot of folks that are remote office workers, using, you know, collaborative tools, they can be part of a team. If the Borathon's happening in China, it doesn't stop somebody in Palo Alto or in Israel or in Bulgaria, participating. And, you know, that's the beautiful nature of being global, right? If you think about how products get out of the door, sometimes you've got teams and you are literally following the sun, and you're doing handoff, you know, from Team A to B to C, but at the end of the day you're delivering one product. And so that's just part of our culture, I mean, everybody's open to that, we don't say, "Oh, we can't work with those guys because they're in that geo-location." It's pretty open. >> This is also, really, an essential driver, and I think I saw last year's RADIO, there were participants from 25+ countries. But this is an essential-- not only is VMware a global company, but many of your customers are as well, and they have very similar operating models. So that thought diversity, to be able to build that into the R&D process is critical. >> Absolutely. And also, think about, you know, when you're going to Europe. Smaller borders, countries, you deploy technology differently. And so, you want to have that diversity in thought as well, because you don't just want to be thinking, "Alright, we're going to deploy a disaster recovery product in North America where they can fail over from, you know, East Coast to West Coast. You go to Europe, and typically you're failing over from, you know, site A to site B, and they're literally three or four miles apart. And so, just having that perspective as well, is very important. And we see that, you know, when we release certain products, you'll get, you know, better uptick in a certain geo, and then, "Why is it stalling over here?" well it's, sometimes it's cultural, right? How do you deploy that technology? Just because it works in the US, doesn't mean it's going to work in Europe or in APJ. >> How was your team involved in the commercialization? You mentioned vSAN and the history of that, but I'm just wondering, looking at it from an investment standpoint of deciding which projects to invest in, and then there's also the-- if they're ready to go to market, the balance of "How much do we need to invest in sales and marketing to be able to get this great idea-- because if we can't market it and sell it, you know, then there's obviously no point." So what's that balance like, within your organization, about, "how do we commercialize this effectively, at scale"? >> So that is ultimately not the responsibility of my group. We'll incubate ideas, like, for example, through an xLabs project. And, you know, sometimes we'll get to a point and we'll work, collaborate with a business unit, and we'll say, "Alright, we feel this project's probably a 24 months project", if it's an xLabs Full. So these folks are truly giving up their day job. But at the end of the day, you want to have an exit and when we say exit, what does that exit mean? Is that an exit into a business unit? Are you exiting the xLabs project because we're now out of funding? You know, think about a VC, I'm going to fund you to, you know, to a particular point; if there is no market traction, >> Right. >> we may, you know, sunset the project. And, you know, so our goal is to get these ideas, select which ones we want to invest in, and then find a sort of off-ramp into a business unit. And sometimes there'll be an off-ramp into a business unit, and the project goes on for a couple of months, and then we make a decision, right? And it's not a personal decision, it's like, "Well we funded that as an xLabs; we're now going to shut it down because, you know, we're going to go and make an acquisition in this space. And with the talent that's going to come onboard, the talent that was working on this xLab project, we can push the agenda forward." >> John: You have a lot of action going on so you move people around. >> Exactly. >> Kind of like the cloud, elastic resource, yeah? (laughs) >> So, then, some of these things, because xLabs is only a two-year-old, you know, we haven't had things exit yet that are, you know, running within a business unit that we're seeing this material impact. You know, from a revenue point of view. So that's why tracking the journeys is very important. And, you know, stay tuned, maybe in about three or four years we'll have this, similar, you know, interview, and I'll be able to say, "Yeah, you know, that started as an xLab, and now it's three years into the market, and look at the run rate. >> So there's 31-- last question for you-- there's 31 projects that were presented on mainstage. Are there any that you could kind of see, early on, "ooh", you know, those top five? Anything that really kind of sticks out-- you don't have to explain it in detail, but I'm just curious, can you see some of that opportunity in advance? >> Absolutely. There's been some great papers up on mainstage. And covering, you know, things on the networking side, there's a lot of innovation going in on the storage side. If you think about data, right, the explosion of data because of edge computing, how are you going to manage that data? How are you going to take, you know, make informed decisions on that data? How can you manipulate that data? What are you going to have to do from a dedupe point of view, or a replication point of view, because you want to get that to many locations, quickly? So, I saw some really good papers on data orchestration, manipulation, get it out to many places, it can take an informed decision. I saw great-- there was a great paper on, you know, you want to go and put something in AWS. There's a bull that you get at the end of the month, right? Sometimes those bulls can be a little bit frightening, right? You know, what can you do to make sure that you manage those bulls correctly? And sometimes, the innovation has got nothing to do with the product per se, but it has to do with how we're going to develop. So we have some innovation on the floor here where an engineer has looked at a different way of, basically, creating an application. And so, there's a ton of these ideas, so after RADIO, it doesn't stop there. Now the idea harvesting starts, right? So yes, there were 31 papers that made it onto mainstage, 61 that are posters here. During that review process, and you asked that question earlier and I apologize, I didn't answer it-- you know, when we look at the papers, there's a team of over 100 folks from across the globe that are reviewing these papers. During that review process, they'll flag things like "This is not going to make it onto mainstage, but the idea here is very novel; we should send this off to our IP team," you know. So this year at RADIO, there were 250 papers that were flagged for further followup with our IP team, so, do we go and then file an IDF, Invention Disclosure Form, do those then become patents, you know? So if we look at the data last year, it was 210. Out of those 210, 74 patents were filed. So there's a lot of work that now will happen post-RADIO. Some of these papers come in, they don't make it onto mainstage; they might become a poster. But at the same time they're getting flagged for a business unit. So from last year, there were 39 ideas that were submitted that are now being mapped to roadmap across the BUs. Some of these papers are great for academic research programs, so David Tennenhouse's research group will take these papers and then, you know, evolve them a little bit more, and then go and present them at academic conferences around the world. So there's a lot of, like, the "what's next?" aspect of RADIO has become a really big deal for us. >> The potential is massive. Well, Mornay, thank you so much for joining John and me, >> Thank you. >> and I've got to follow xLabs, there's just a lot of >> (laughs) >> really, really, innovative things that are so collaborative, coming forward. We thank you for your time. >> Thank you. >> For John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin; you're watching theCUBE, exclusive coverage of VMware RADIO 2019, from San Francisco. Thanks for watching.

(funky music) >> From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Rick here with theCUBE, we're having a CUBE conversation in the studio, we're just about ready to hit the crazy wave that is the conference season, so it's great to still have some time to do some studio stuff before we hit the road. We're excited to have a new guest who's never been on theCUBE before, he's Danial Hazariki, the CMO of Reflektive. Danial, great to meet you. >> Great to meet you. >> So you guys are working in a cool space, kind of the new age HR management for lack of a better term. We've had Patty Mccord on before, who obviously was seminal in kind of the Netflix culture, which I think was pretty early days in kind of saying throw out traditional annual reviews, kind of throw out regulations around expense reports, throw out a lot of these traditional mechanisms to manage people and really say what are we managing people to? And we should be giving them feedback on a regular basis and we really need to kind of bring this into the modern era. And that's smack in the middle of what you guys do. >> Absolutely yeah, a big part of what we do is managing employees to be high-performing, and that's the big tagline for her, is high-performance culture. I think it's critical to have, as part of that, a more active and ongoing role with your employees. That's why they can do things like remove expense report guidelines, because they know we're on the pulse of whether this person is actually performing or not, and by knowing that, we can have faith that we trust them, that they'll do the right thing when it comes to deciding on what they spend on. So, I think we sit right at the center of this, and we're really excited to be a part of it. >> So let's back up a little bit and just give everyone kind of the 411 on Reflektive. >> Absolutely. >> How many people are you, how long you been around, some of the basics. >> Yeah, so we were founded in late 2014, we have three co-founders, Rajeev Behera, Erick Tai, and Jimmie Tyrell. They more or less were actually people managers themselves, they realized that this was a gap in managing workforces, and, you know, classic model of technical founder, and then more of a product percent, and they got together and built this really cool tool. >> So what was the big hole? 'Cause there's a ton of HR applications out there. There's big ones like WorkDay, you know, who's been very successful on the SAAS model. What did they see that was the big hole, even though there's all these huge traditional HR applications? >> Absolutely, yeah, so what happened was there's a five-ish year old burst into framework, they talk about this. Systems and engagement, and systems of record. And so these tools that you mention, they were great at helping catalog what happens in a business, and do all the compliance processes required. But what happened was the world changed, things in terms of social media, the way people were getting information, the pace of things accelerated quite a bit, and these tools struggled to handle the day to day and didn't live where people worked, and those are big gaps. So they saw this and said okay well, there's something here where we can go and insert ourselves in the flow of people's work and help them actually get the information they need to be high-performing. >> So, was the entry point the annual review? What was kind of the entry point to get people to think about HR in a different way and to adopt the technology? >> Yeah, I think that ultimately, there is some form of review that happens, and they built that functionality. What was really interesting to the market was actually their concept of realtime feedback, and building the mechanisms by which you could actually bring that into that platform, and actually factor that in when you're doing interviews. This eliminates things like recency bias, things that, hey, a review is happening at the end of the year, I'm going to remember what happened the last three months. I'm not going to remember that you killed it in March of that year. So we're helping solve for that, and they saw great results doing that. >> Right, so you've got all types of little apps, is the right word, solutions, or kind of activities that enable people both as the employee as well as the manager as well as the HR people, to have kind of this ongoing back and forth relationship. So I wondered if you could dive into some of those applications and what's working really well that's different than things used to be? >> Yeah, so the modern kind of version of what we do, 'cause things have changed much over the past few years, we have a core kind of performance management offering, we also have an engagement offering, and we also have a people intelligence offering, and these are the three pillars by which we kind of enable all of those people that you just talked about. And so when we go back to the performance piece, there's many different components, but we believe that employees need feedback in the moment, they need a way to also do annual reviews. They need a way to set goals and be clear with their manager in what those are and what progress is. And we also believe that those things have to exist in the flow of day to day work, and that's why we do things like have a Slack integration, integrate with Gmail, Outlook, all these different kind of places where people actually live day to day. Then, you know, the other layers that I spoke about are engagement. We like to be able to do broad surveys to companies and get a pulse on high level, what is the emotion out there, how are people feeling about management? How are people feeling about even the snacks in the kitchen? Simple stuff like that. >> Right. >> And then, last but not least, all of that information has to feed into somewhere so that the management of an organization can get the insights they need to make decisions, and that's where the people intelligence comes in. >> Okay, so there's a lot of different layers to the story. But the one when I was first preparing for this interview, I'm like, oh my goodness, you were right, another tool, another desktop app, I forget what the statistics are of all the tabs that we have open with our sales force and Outlook and all these things are open. But you guys took an interesting approach, 'cause you actually integrated with some of the apps that you presume I have open like Slack, as opposed to kind of forcing me to have that one more tab. How does that work, and how has that kind of impacted adoption? >> Totally, yeah, I mean this is where the foundations of our company kind of come into play. So, our founders came from mobile applications, and games specifically. So they know how to optimize for things like active users daily, monthly, all that, right? And taking that lends to what they said. Okay, we really do need to encourage adoption, how do we make that happen? To your point, too many tools are open. Some are required to do your job, like email. Others are kind of optional. We're honest with ourselves, we say, hey, we're in the optional category, how do we solve for that? How do we still get people to use this? So we said okay, we're going to plug ourselves into Slack, where people actually communicate day to day. We're going to show up in Gmail, we're going to show up in Outlook, we're going to go to all these different places where people are already working. We actually even integrate with Jira, the engineering tool. And we said that's the way we'll actually get the information into our system that we need, and then we can service all those insights I talked about. >> Is it a popup, is it some encouragement when I do some activity, say, with you on a project? Oh Jeff, by the way, do you have any feedback for Danial? Oh Jeff, by the way, somebody's looking for feedback on Danial, how does the mechanics work, and then what have you seen in terms of adoption? What works and what doesn't work? >> Yeah, I mean it definitely gets traction, because I think specifically Slack, we're a Silicon Valley company, a lot of our earlier customers were Silicon Valley companies, and they all use Slack. >> It's as the way you said, very familiar. >> There you go right, so I think from that perspective, it's really easy to use. You can see all the active recognition, for example, happening in your company and in channel, you can also go and input recognition for other people, write there at mention, and just kind of invoke that. >> So are they kind of channels then within Slack around- >> Recognition can be a channel, but the actual input of feedback, it can do that right from the beginning of our, yeah. >> So interesting to talk about feedback versus recognition. How does that play out in the real world? 'Cause those are two very different words and two very different motivations. >> You bring up a great, great point, and it's an ongoing debate, how do you name these two different things? Frankly, recognition to the broader market ends up being, more or less, positive feedback that you feel like you want to put a public stamp on. But there's an important distinction here, because there's also negative feedback, and there's also just feedback that people want to give that's positive, but they don't necessarily want to share that with the entire world, or with a broader organization. So we wanted to create a safe space for them to be able to do that in every single use case, and so that's where the delineation between recognition and feedback comes in, is that you can go public, private, public and also broadcast to the whole company, and we wanted to give people the avenue to do all those things. >> Right, so I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about goals and goal management, and how does that kind of module work and or how does that tie back to some of the corporate goals and corporate initiatives? Can you tie it back to your Jira project and are these things integrated, or is it kind of a stand alone, and does it operate like an annual goal or a quarterly goal? How does that piece of it work? >> So the way we find the highest performance cultures doing this is they do kind of adjust goals on an ongoing basis. Ideally quarterly, I think that's kind of the favored happy medium right now. And that does start with company level goals. Then it goes to departmental, then it goes to individual, or sub team goals. And all of these people have, you can do smart goals, you can do objectives and key results, you can do whatever format you want, and it's pretty flexible as a platform. But all of that cascades down, and you can coordinate between people, and get visibility of public goals, private goals, and that's part of our whole commitment to transparency on the platform. >> And in terms of your customers and their adoption at a corporate level, not necessarily an individual, is it more of a stick or is it more of a carrot? Are people figuring out that they need to change, and yours is a tool to give them an avenue to the new way, or is it kind of new and provocative, and we've been doing annual reviews since my dad's dad's dad, I'm not quite sure about this ongoing thing. What's kind of the reception, and how is the market changing? >> Totally, like with anything, either tech adoption life cycle, a lot of our early adopters have just picked up on the fact that the market for talent is extremely competitive now, and some have gotten to different maturity levels in understanding what they need to do to deal with that. Our earliest adopters, they just got it right away. They said our workforce is asking for more in the moment feedback, they want to know what their goals are clearly, and be able to measure against them and be able to go and point back, hey, I actually achieved that, or I did not. And so that has helped us a lot with the earlier adopters, just saying we built something that's ideally suited to the way you need to evolve. Part of the task of any innovative technology is we have to go educate the market, too. We know that universally, people are struggling to attain talent, what we do to educate them is inform them of here's actually what the workforce is looking for. We've done a ton of research, HBR articles, we've seen gallop research, we've signed all sorts of stuff that tells you the world has changed, the workforce is expecting certain things, and we've built something around those needs. And so the more we do our job as marketing to make sure the market understands that, I think the more reflective we'll see success. >> That's funny, in one of Patty's recent medium posts, she talks about foosball tables, and billiard tables, it's like that's not what drives employee happiness and satisfaction. They look good, I guess, on the tour before you take the job, but a lot of other things, that drive, happiness and retention in the super competitive market that's not the ping pong table. >> Absolutely, especially in the case of Patty Mccord, I mean, she's indexing everything, again, around, you want to have the highest-performing people stay, and you don't necessarily care to actively manage the ones who are not. And what she has espoused many times is that the highest performing people actually love this. They love that there's transparency around the business value they're driving. They love to know exactly where they stand, they love to have feedback so they can improve and be better, and so you can see how there's a lot of parallels here about what she's talking about that high performing cultures do, and what the platform that we've built enables. >> Right, what about the pesky lawyers that are always saying there's always compliance issues, and we're still operating off of laws that were established before, and this is a little bit funky and we're not really sure how to deal with it. >> Yeah, what I've actually found is, there are specific customers, even of a size of Air BnB who will highlight that we helped them combat bias, and the way we do this, and evidence that they are not biased in the way they do reviews. And the way we do this, is I think ultimately, the concept of real time feedback. Because this stuff is being logged as it's happening, no one can say it's the end of the year now, and you just remember what happened in the past few months. You're ignoring all my great work that happened before that. This is not fair, that recency bias they call is eliminated. And that actually, in the end, helps with the lawyers, because we can say this was all cataloged in the moment as opposed to way later. >> Right, we have to train among contract year concept, you're supposed to turn it up the last month so they forget about the crappy stuff you did earlier in the year and do well. So Dan, before I let you go, you've been around a little while, you've been in the valley, you've been at a number of startups, you've been here for about a year, I'm just curious kind of as you've come to Reflektive and been there now. What was the biggest surprise entering this company that you didn't necessarily expect now that you've been there for a little bit? >> Yeah, I think what was most interesting and actually kind of exciting was to observe how similar the transformation that HR is going through right now is to the transformation that marketing went through 10 years ago. I'm seeing the movement to being more data driven to getting active information on how campaigns are running, all this stuff. That evolution is happening in HR right now, I'm seeing more and more people scientists, I'm seeing more and more people who are turning people management into a science, and I think a lot of it has to do with record low unemployment. The market for labor got so competitive that people have really started paying attention to this as a problem and trying to understand better outside of just simple compliance things. How can we actually actively manage our workforce into being high performing and happier? And that's really interesting for me. >> Awesome, well thanks for taking a few minutes out of your day and sharing the story. >> Absolutely. >> All right. He's Danial, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're having a CUBE conversation in our Palo Alto studios, we'll see you next time, thanks for watching. (funky music)

(upbeat bright music) >> From our studios, in the heart of Silicone Valley, Palo Alto, California. This is a Cube Conversation. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with The Cube. We are having a Cube Conversation here in the studio. We're just about ready to hit the crazy wave that is the conference season. So, it's great to still have some time to do some studio stuff before we hit the road. And we're excited to have a new guest that's never been on the cube before. He is Daniel Hazarika, the CMO of Reflektive. Daniel, great to meet you. >> Great to meet you. >> So, you guys are working in the cool space. Kind of the new age, HR management for lack of a better term. We've had Patty Mccord on before, who obviously was seminal in kind of the Netflix culture. Which was, I think, pretty early days and kind of saying throw out, throw out traditional annual reviews. Kind of, throw out regulations around expense reports. Throw out, kind of, a lot of these traditional mechanisms to manage people and really say, you know, what are we managing people to? And we should be giving them feedback on a regular basis, and we really need to, kind of, bring this into the modern era. And that's smack in the middle of what you guys do. >> Absolutely, yeah. I mean a big part of what we do is managing employees to be high performing. And that's the big tagline for her, is high performance culture. >> Right. >> It's critical to have, as part of that, a more active and ongoing role with your employees. That's why they can do things like remove expense report guidelines. Because they know we're on the pulse of whether this person is actually performing or not. And, by knowing that, we can have faith that they're, we trust them. That they'll do the right thing when it comes to deciding on what they spend on. >> Right. >> So, I think we sit right at the center of this and we're really excited to be a part of it. >> So, let's back up a little bit and just give everyone kind of the 411 on Reflektive. >> Absolutely. >> How many people are you? How long you've been around? >> Yeah. >> Some of the basics. >> Yeah. So, we were founded in late 2014. We have 3 co-founders; Rajeev Behera, Erick Tai, and Jimmy Tyrrell. They more or less were actually people managers themselves. They realized this was a gap in, you know, in managing work forces and, you know, classic model of technical founder and then more of a product person and then they got together and built this really cool tool. >> So what was the big hole? Cause there's are a ton of HR applications out there. >> Absolutely. >> There's big ones likes Workday, you know, whose done been very successful on the SaaS Model. What did they see that was the big hole even though there's all these huge traditional kind of HR applications? >> Absolutely, yeah. So, what happened was, there is a fivish year-old Berson framework, they talk about this systems of engagement and systems of record, right? >> Right. >> And so these tools that you mention that were great at helping catalogue what happens in a business, and do all the compliance processes required, right? But what happened was the world changed. Things, in terms of social media, the way people were getting information, the pace of things accelerated quite a bit and these tools struggled to handle the day to day. And didn't live where people worked. And, those are big gaps. So, they saw this and said, okay, well there is something here where we can go in and insert ourselves in the flow of people's work and help them actually get the information they need to be high performing. >> So, was the entry point the annual review? What was kind of the entry point >> Yeah. >> To get people to think about HR in a different way and to adopt the technology? >> Yeah. >> I think, I think that ultimately there is some form of review that happens and they built that functionality. But, what was really interesting to the market was that actually the concept of real time feedback and the mechanisms, building the mechanisms, by which you could actually bring that into that platform. And actually factor that in when you're doing reviews, right? There's, this eliminates things like recency bias things that, hey a review is happening at the end of the year, I'm going to remember what happened the last 3 months. I'm not going to remember that you killed it, you know, in March of that year. So, we're helping solve for that. And they've saw great results doing that. >> Right. So, you've got all types of kind of little, I don't know apps is the right word >> Sure. >> Solutions. Or, you know, kind of activities that enable people both as the employee as well as the manager as well as the HR people to have kind of this ongoing back and forth relationship. So, I was wondering if you could dive into some of those applications and what's, what's working really well that's different than things used to be? >> Yeah. So, the modern kind of version of what we do, cause things have changed much over the past few years, we have a core kind of performance management offering. We also have an engagement offering and we also have a people intelligence offering. And these are the three pillars by which we kind of enable all those people that you just talked about. And so, when we go back to the performance piece, there's many different components, but, we believe that employees need feedback in the moment. They need a way to also do annual reviews. They need a way to set goals and be clear with their manager on what those are and what progress is. And we also believe that those things have to exist in the flow of day to day work and that's why do things like have a Slack integration, integrate with Gmail, Outlook, all these different kind of places where people actually live day to day. >> Right. >> Then, you know, the other layers that I spoke about are engagement. We like to be able to do broad surveys to companies and, you know, get a pulse on high level, what is the emotion out there? How are people feeling about management? How are people feeling about, you know, even the snacks in the kitchen? Simple stuff like that. >> Right. >> And, then last but not least, all of that information has to feed into somewhere so that the management of an organization can get the insights they need to make decisions. And that's where the people intelligence comes in. >> Okay, this is a lot of different layers to the story. But the one that, when I was first preparing for this interview, and like, oh my goodness, another tool, right? >> Right, yeah. >> Another desktop app. I forget what the statistics are of all the tabs that we have open >> Yeah. >> With our Salesforce and Outlook and all these things are open. But, you guys took an interesting approach, 'cause you actually integrated with some of the apps that you presume I have open like Slack as opposed to, you know, kind of forcing me to have that one more tab. How does that work and how has that, you know, kind of impacted adoption? >> Totally yeah. This is where the foundations of our company kind of come into play. So, our founders came from Mobile Applications. They knew, and games specifically, so they know how to optimize for things like active users daily, monthly, all that, right? And, taking that lens to it, they said, okay, we really do need to encourage adoption. How do we make that happen? To your point, too many tools are open. Some are required to do your job like email. Others are kind of optional. We're, we're, you know, honest with ourselves. We say, hey, we're in the optional category. How do we solve for that? How do we still get people to use this? So, we said, we're going to plug ourselves into Slack where people actually communicate day to day. We're going to show up in Gmail. We're going to show up in Outlook. We're going to go to all these different places where people are already working. We actually even integrate with Jira, the engineering tool. And we said, that's the way we'll actually get the information into our system that we need, and then we can service all those insights that we talked about. >> Is it like a, is it a pop-up? Is it some encouragement when I do some activity say, say with you on a project, you know, oh Jeff, by the way, do you have any feedback for Daniel? Or, oh Jeff, by the way, somebody's looking for feedback on Daniel. Or, I mean, how does the mechanics work and, then, what have you seen in terms of adoption what works, what doesn't work? >> Yeah. I mean, it definitely gets traction. Because, I think, specifically Slack, and, you know, we're a Silicon Valley company, a lot of our earlier customers were Silicon Valley companies, and they all use Slack. It's pretty >> As do we. >> Yeah. There you go, right? So, I think from that perspective it's really easy to use. You can see all the active recognition, for example, happening in your company. And, in channel, you can also go in and input recognition for other people right there just at mention and, kind of, invoke that. >> So, are they kind of channels then within Slack, around? >> Recognition can be a channel but the actual input of feedback you can do that right from the keyboard, yeah. >> So, interesting, talk about feedback versus recognition. How does that play out in the real world? Cause those are two very different words and two different, very different motivations. >> You bring up a great, great point and it's in an ongoing debate, like how do you, kind of, name these two different things? Frankly, recognition, to the broader market, ends up being more or less positive feedback, right? That you feel like you want to put a public stamp on. >> Right. >> But, there's an important distinction here because there's also negative feedback and there's also just feedback that people want to give that's positive but they don't necessarily want to share that with the entire world, or with the broader organization. So, we wanted to create a safe space for them to be able to do that at every single, in every single use case. And, so, that's what, that's where the delineation between recognition and feedback comes in is that you can go public, private, you know, public and also broadcast to the whole company. And we wanted to give people the avenue to do all those things. >> Right. So, I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about goals and goal management. How does that kind of module work and/or how does that tie back to, kind of, some of the corporate goals and corporate initiatives? Can you tie it back to your project and are these things integrated or is it, kind of, a stand-alone? Does it operate like an annual goal or a quarterly goal or, you know, how does that piece of it work? >> Yeah. So, the way that we find, you know, the highest performance cultures doing this, they do, kind of, adjust goals on an ongoing basis. Ideally quarterly. I think that's probably the favored, kind of, happy medium right now. >> Okay. >> And, that does start with company level goals, then it goes to departmental, then it goes to individual or team, sub-team, goals. And, all of these people have, you know, we can call, you can do SMART goals, you know, you can do objectives and key results. You can do whatever format you want and it's pretty flexible as a platform but all of that cascades down and you can go work, you know, coordinate between people and get visibility. You can have public goals, private goals and that's part of our whole commitment to transparency in the platform. >> In terms of your customers, and their adoption at a corporate level, not necessarily the individual, is it more of a stick or is it more of carrot? Are people figuring out that they need to change and yours is the tool to give them an avenue to the new way? Or, is it kind of new and provocative and, we've been doing annual reviews since, since my dad's dad's dad, you know, I'm not quite sure about this ongoing thing. What's kind of the reception and how's the market changing? >> Totally. Like with anything, you know, either tech adoption or lifecycle, a lot of our early adopters have just picked up on the fact that the market for talent is extremely competitive now. And some have got to different maturity levels in understanding what they need to do to deal with that, right? Our earliest adopters, they just got it right away. They said, like, we, our workforce is asking for more in the moment feedback. They want to know what their goals are clearly and be able to measure against them and be able to go and point back, hey, I actually achieved that, or I did not. And, so, that has helped us a lot with the earlier adopters. Just saying, like, we built something that's ideally suited to what you need, they way you need to evolve. >> Right. >> Part of, I mean, the task of any kind of innovative technology is we have to go educate the market too. We know that universally people are struggling to retain talent. What we do to educate them is to inform them of, here's actually what the workforce is looking for. We've done a ton of research. HBR articles, we've seen Gallup Research, we've seen all sorts of stuff that tells you the world has changed, the workforce is expecting certain things, and we've built something around those needs. >> Right. >> And, so, the more we do our job as marketing, you know, to make sure the market understands that, I think the more Reflektive will see success. >> It's funny in one of Patty's recent media posts, she talks about foosball tables and billiard tables, like, that's not what drives employee happiness and satisfaction. I mean, they look good, I guess, on the tour before you take the job but, I don't know, there's a lot of other things that drive happiness and retention in this super competitive market. That's not the ping pong table. >> Absolutely. Especially in the case of Patty McCord, I mean, she's indexing everything around, you want to have the highest performing people stay and you don't necessarily care to actively manage the ones who are not. And what she has, you know, espoused many times is that, when, the highest performing people actually love this. They love that there's transparency around the business value they're driving. They love to know exactly where they stand. They love to have feedback so they can improve and be better. And, so, you can see how there's a lot of, like, parallels here between what's she's talking about that high performing cultures do and what the platform that we've built enables. >> Right. What about the pesky lawyers that are saying there are all these compliance issues and we're still, we're still operating off of laws that were established before and this is a little bit funky and we're not really sure how to deal with it? >> Yeah. I mean, what we've actually found is, so, there's specific customers, even of the size of Airbnb, who will highlight that we helped them combat bias. And the way we do this, and evidence that they are not biased in the way they do reviews, and the way we do this is, I think the concept, is ultimately the concept of real time feedback. Because this stuff is being logged as it's happening, no one can say, oh, it's the end of the year now and you just remember what happened in the past few months, you're ignoring all my great, you know, all my great work that happened before that. This is not fair, You know, that recency bias they call it, is eliminated. >> And that actually, in the end, helps with the lawyers because we can say, this was all cataloged in the moment as opposed to way later. >> Right. We have to train among contract to your concept. You're supposed to turn it up the last month. So, they forget about the crappy stuff that you did earlier in the year. >> Exactly. >> And do well. So, Dan, before I let you go, just, you've been around a little while, you've been in the Valley, you've been at a number of startups, you've been here for about a year, I'm just curious, kind of, as you've come to Reflektive and been there now, what was the biggest surprise, kind of, entering this space, entering this company that you didn't necessarily expect now that you've been there for a little bit? >> Yeah. I think what was most interesting, actually kind of exciting, was to observe how similar the transformation that HR is going through right now is to the transformation that marketing went through ten years ago. I'm seeing the movement to being more data driven, to getting active information on how campaigns are running, all this stuff. That evolution is happening in HR right now. I'm seeing, you know, more and more people scientists. I'm seeing more and more people who are turning people management into a science. And, I think that a lot it has to do with record low unemployment. The market for labor got so competitive that people have started really paying attention to this as a problem and trying to understand better outside of just simple compliance things. How can we actually actively manage our workforce into being high performing and happier. That's really interesting for me. >> Awesome. Well, thanks for taking a few minutes out of your day and sharing your story. >> Absolutely. >> Alright. He's Daniel, I'm Jeff. You're watching the Cube. We're having a Cube Conversation at our Palo Alto studios. We'll see you next time. Thanks for watching. (exciting music)

live from London England it's the cube covering dot next conference Europe 2018 brought to you by Nutanix hi and welcome back on with you pissed car and I'm Stu Mittleman and welcome to the CTO segment at Nutanix next 2018 welcome back to the program to my right is Vinnie Gill who's the CTO of cloud services and to his right is Rajeev Murray ani not very honest I mean you know the CTO of cloud platforms a gentleman thanks so much for joining us again thanks dude for having us being back all right rajiv and Binny mechanics it's been kind of busy since last time we've chatted AOS got really a file system rewrite there's been some M&A integration going on as well as organic activity so you know I love talking the CTO is just if you can bring us inside a little bit you know what's been happening what your team's been working on some of the hard challenges I mean things like page be nested hypervisor on top of DCP you know these are some hard challenge getting ready for nvme over fabric you know so some real you know massive things that happen underneath the cover as well as some new products so didn't want to start with you it's tough yeah you know what I'm keeping you to your team busy oh the teams have been quite busy especially you know once you have you know more than 10,000 customers and a product that's earning a lot of revenue coming in and at the same time you have to change the dark surfer preparing for the next generation so it's a lot of work I mean if you're starting from scratch it's much easier whether you know we've had a lot of experience bringing in new capabilities making it transparent to the customer one-click upgrade is really important for us so learning from the past we have been able to rewrite the engine the storage in a way that customers wouldn't notice but it's gonna run just faster you know kudos to the team that they've pulled it off and it goes across the board when we are acquiring new companies that come into the fold of the Nutanix family the whole idea is to make it look seamless to the customer because that's one thing that you know customers know us for like hey is the willit have neutronic simplicity so a lot of learnings we have created some thumb rules to guide people coming in and those are working fine for us and there's you know a method to the madness over here there is in the end one vision that we want to provide a true hybrid cloud experience to our users do that we feel you're the first start by building the best private cloud you can't have hybrid without private and to do that we need to have an infrastructure that actually works for private cloud so we start with HCI as an initial platform we build on top of that with private cloud features and not just still a networking compute and storage like in the past but more platform services like era and carbon and so on and then once we have that we can then layer on the new hybrid cloud services so even though it looks like getting a lot of things it's all guided by that one region so tell me you know that hybrid that hybrid cloud vision you know where doesn't lead us doesn't lead us to you know the public cloud in the end does it lead us to a new 10x cloud where where does that help customers go towards well the way I look at it is that it doesn't lead to any one place it leads to multiple clouds there'll be private clouds of the edge clouds distributed clouds big central public clouds the important thing is can you move applications and data between between flowers and analogy I use is you know 20 years ago if you if you were writing applications to Solaris you were pretty much locked into Sun if you go by writing applications for hp-ux you were pretty much locked into into HP once Linux came along and made it possible to write applications for any x86 everywhere got independence from from from underlying hardware and the same thing will happen with cloud today you have to write applications for Amazon for GCP for Asha who can build an operating system that actually commoditize is all that that makes it possible for you to run on any cloud with the same set of applications so that kind of sounds to me like you're you know doing V motion and H a India res but then you know for a new generation of technologies well not be motion across clouds is of course the goal it is the goal but it's not just enough to move the applications around data around you have to move the management plan has to be the same so the lot more to it than just simply copying by it's across maybe you want to add to it yeah I mean basically adding to what Rajeev said if you ask where will hybrid cloud lead I think it leads to a dispersed cloud you know some of it was also mentioned by readers in the keynote which is you know this big monolithic cloud concept has to atomize into much smaller pieces and distributed and that's what's going to happen but you start with solving it at the hybrid and at least solve it for two and from two you go to many and that's what's really exciting yeah it's a really good point then I want you to help expand on that a little I I think back to companies that don't portfolios and you look at it and say okay well I product a B and C and boy I I don't know how to use those together because they for an inner basis and how do I work them together today you know I think micro-services architecture I think about api's pulling everything together what are those guiding principles that you give internally to teams to make sure that I can use the pieces that I want they work all together they work with you know there's really broad ecosystem you have and all these multi cloud environments so you know as much effort we put in building architecture for the product design I mean we have to put the same amount in terms of how is it going to be consumed by the customer in just having a long portfolio is no longer what customers are looking for looking for simplicity so to your point one of the things we are really careful about is especially when we are acquiring technology in organically is how do you make sure identity and billing is it's the same right that's the most important thing so you don't have to login once in this product once natural basic stuff but if you get it you know right it's just delightful the other thing is about experience developer experience and user experiences these are the two other out of the four factors user experiences around like do I have to learn this again like if you look at companies like Apple I mean if I've used the Mac use they try to make it very similar such that even a two-year-old can figure out how to use it and we would like to say that if you have been an IT industry for two years you should be able to use any Nutanix product and developer experience is around api's we have a standard that we have Jade version three intent full api is and that is creating a standardization across you saw a little bit of the opening the demo today there you know I went through calm and epoch and flow and prison throw all from one pane of glass it didn't look like four different products in fact why not mentioned there were four different products it probably wouldn't have been obvious that they were and that's important to us keeping that experience seamless is very important and that comes at a cost I mean it's we could have released it as soon as we acquired some of these things and punted it on to the customer to figure out how these pieces come together but we know our customers have a higher expectation from us so we take the time and from from that perspective you know as a as a user you know I'm used to working with different types of clouds public private I wrote anything in between and the amount of interfaces I have to touch to get you know something working to get a series of products to to align to do what I wanted to do that's becoming such a difficult task that you know having a single interface or having a familiar interface would actually help in that so maybe you can talk a little while use that UI to go into the public clamor into the hybrid cloud as well to make you know that experience easier as well talk about a couple of things one whenever there's a proliferation of technologies and you're trying to glue it together I mean single pane of glass is one thing that people talk about I think that's not the most important thing I mean obviously it's a requirement it's a necessary condition not a sufficient one to make it sufficient you also have to bring in opinion into the design and the opinion is where we are taking some decisions for the customer where you know the customer would care about learning about those things and that's where no tonics will come in and through our best practices we put our opinion in the design of the product so that the number of decision points where the customer is minimize and that's how you basically start consuming this diversity out there at the end of the day for the business the only two things matter that business logic and business data infrastructure is sitting in the middle lights it's like a necessary evil so you know if we can hide it and make it seamless you know customers really happy about it can you talk about that the feedback loop you have with customers things are changing very fast you know it's hard for anybody to keep up you know this week even you know hoot anacs has a lot of announcements that I'm sure will take people all the time to there how do you get the feedback loop to customers to make sure your your they're getting what they need from to understand your products and your understanding where they are in their journey and you know mature the product line yeah I mean we have a whole bunch of channels we have we just had a customer advisory board yesterday you know invite customers and have a really deep intimate conversation and frank conversation you know what's working for you what's not working we have our engineering team on slack channels and whatsapp channels with our customers especially the customers who are really you know they complain about a product and they have opinions amenity so we just try to short-circuit this thing and then it's all about empathy so getting a team note here the customers just absolutely retrieve I definitely want your pin but just feedback actually I talked to a few customers and they said I don't know how Nutanix does it but for a company their size I feel like I get personal attention in touch points so congratulations it's good the stuff you saw today is a direct result of the feedback the grouping of products into core essentials and enterprise kind of also reflects the customer journey a lot of customers start with us for with the core once they get used to that get their sense as far as build a true private cloud and only then they started looking at multi cloud so right products for the right customer it's something that we are taking very very seriously at this point so I want to dive into that you know right product right customer so one of the announcements you made is carbon had kubernetes as as a manager platform so what customers do you do you service with that product how do you go into customers like that and how do you help them kubernetes is one of the most fastest growing technologies in the IT space that we have seen in the in the recent years and a lot of our customers I would say especially this year we have seen they have developers using containers and they are at a point where they're trying to decide how can I put it in production a production has a many requirements their carbon is being used by our customers who are trying to see how they'll put containers into production and what we are doing with carbon is we providing native kubernetes api Zsasz is there an open source but we're solving the heart problems of upgrades scale out high availability troubleshooting these mundane things that you know usually people don't want to do and that's where we come in and help so I've seen customers use our storage volumes for even databases containerized to stateless things it's all across the board but still early years I mean for this kind of ecosystem but it's headed into you know it's going to be the future you know one of the things I found really interesting to watch is over the last two decades we've talked about intelligence and automation in infrastructure but really things are happening fast now when you talk about you know whether a I or ml there's really things that are creating some intelligence that it's not like oh I created some script and it does something but you know it's working well I know there's a number of places that that fits into your portfolio maybe maybe prism X play it would seem to get some good resonance and cheers from the audience because maybe they've all played with you know the you know if TTT so start from there and how do you think about the AI in ml space yeah so we we look at you know computing evolving from manual mostly manual in the past to more automated but really you want to get to this autonomous computing that that sort of talked about so you know think of it as you know causes to be really difficult to drive in the past it used to require knowing how the carburetors work and cleaning them out once in a while to the point where maybe 15 years ago pretty much didn't know anything about the internals of a car but you could drive it was reliable it would work which is probably where we are today in IT but the real goal is to get as an autonomous computing the self-driving cars at Tesla Google now where you don't even have to be paying attention at the car will just drive itself yeah I have TTT and the x-play stuff that we have as a step in that direction it's obviously very early but it's the beginning of a journey where you can then start taking feedback loops learning what works modeling that out and extending capabilities on your own and that is something we'll be looking at over the next few years and you know it's something where I don't think it's it's not cute and that's why it needs to be done it's actually required you know if you look at Moore's law it applies to machines so every year you will have double the number of course and you know the same dollar can buy more if you look at humans that's not true I mean ever here then you're only getting more expensive in fact lower for customers here say talent is scarce so just by that definition you see machines are growing and the people who manage the machines are shrinking or you know static so you have to put in a layer of the machine which is smart in the in the between in between of the human and the large form of machines and that if you don't do it there is no data center so it's inevitable and you'll see this happen more and more so that kind of sounds like you're you know positioning your portfolio in a way that you enable the IT of people to not care about infrastructure as much anymore but help you know the their employer their customer do other stuff so how does your portfolio relate to the freeing up of time for those employees for those jobs personnel people some of it is just goes back to the poor design principle I would go to them basic you know how do we how do we start as a company we're looking at storage and they were dual controller a and B a ties B is running but guess what I'm worried that B will also die is the same age so I have to run to fix a run to fix a is my weekend and the night wasted if I had n one dies fine of it's a capacity problem so that goes to the core like how do we design things that are scale out and web scale we talked about so everything that we do including now prism central scale out I have to rush to go fix things hardware will always fail right and that's you know it permeates in the entire organization in terms of how we design things and then on top of that you can add automation and machine intelligence and all that but fundamentally it goes to engineering when you talk about we talked about earlier in the discussion kind of the rewrite that went on for emerging applications and emerging technologies I guess what's exciting you these days you know the industry of the Hall containers you know we looked at you know Flash technology containerization you know I looked at Nutanix when it first came out as was you know some of these waves coming together hyper scale and software-defined and flash all kind of with a perfect storm for the original generation what what are what are those next waves coming together that that you think will you know have a massive impact on the industry a lot of innovation going on on every layer of the stack I mean if we start with the hardware it's been coming for a while but it's almost here now the whole concept of having persistent memory essentially dims blocks having memory that can persist across reboots and we byte addressable so this is a big difference for the storage market right we've always had block addressable story let's become flight addressable paradigms of computing will change and Wharton's will change how we write programs will change so there's a whole big wave coming and getting prepared for that was very important for you yeah and if I control into that a little bit cuz you know what I thought about you know before it was I had you know like like pull of storage and my full of compute and I had my networking and well you know what your solution is I just have a pool of infrastructure but I need specific data in specific places and latency is really important you know Amazon just announced do you know a new compute instance with hundred gigabit networking for you know the same type of application we're talking about Hana and persistent memory and the like so do we not think of it as a pool anymore it's a here you know metadata and data are gonna get more localized so how should we think of your infrastructure going forward you should think of it as a fool we should worry about making it all all work well and that's that that is essentially our job if we can succeed at that then you would never have to think about it as well this particular you know storage is allocated with this particular application at this current time it's up to us to make that happen as applications are running from your direction you feel you know absolutely another thing that's happening in IT in the in the space of compute is the upper limit of this pool is being hidden right so for example in the old days those discs then there was a virtual disc but it had a capacity and you would format it when you look at s3 doesn't have a capacity you don't format it that's what's and that's more to application design when you don't think about the capacity of the pool that you're using that's the direction where we need to go and hide all this right Amina so just-in-time purchase of the next hardware that you need to get but the developer does not see the upper limit well retrieving Binnie thank you so much for sharing all that this Congrats on all the progress and look forward to what were you gonna bring on down lives down the road thanks to you for you piss car I'm Stu minimun lot more coverage here and Nutanix dot next London 2018 thanks for watching

>> Announcer: Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering Informatica World 2018. Brought to you by Informatica. >> Hello everyone welcome back, this is theCUBE's exclusive coverage at Informatica World 2018 here live, in Las Vegas at The Venetian Ballroom. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE, with Peter Burris, my co-host this week, Analyist at Wikibon, Chief Analyst at SiliconANGLE and theCUBE. Our next guest is Sanjeev Vohra, Group Technology Officer at Accenture, in charge of incubating new businesses, growing new businesses, handling the talent. Great to have you on thanks for spending the time coming on. >> Pleasure, it's my pleasure to be here. >> So we have a lot of Accenture interviews, go to thecube.net, type in Accenture, you'll see all the experts. And one of the things we love about talking with Accenture, is you guys are in the front lines of all the action. You have all the customer deployments, global system integrator, but you've got to be on top of the new technology, you've got really smart people, so thanks for spending the time. So I got to ask you, looking at the landscape, of the timing of Informatica's opportunity, you've got data, which is not a surprise for some people, but you've got GDPR happening on, this Friday, you've got cloud scale on the horizon, a lot of interesting things are going on right now around data and the impact of customers, which is now pretty much front and center. What're you guys doing with Informatica, what are some of the things that you guys are engaging with them on, and what's important to you? >> We have a very deep relationship with Informatica for many years and, we have many, many, joint clients in the market, and we are helping them sustain their businesses, and also grow their businesses future. Right? In future. And I think, I think there's a lot going on, there's a lot going on sustaining the core of the business, and improving it on a continuous basis, by using new technologies, and, you know, like today's keynote went on a little, talked about the new stuff and it's, there's a lot of things, actually, clients require, or our customers require for, just sustaining their core. But then I caught something in the middle, which is basically: how are you building your new business models, how are you disrupting the market your industry, what's new around that? And, in that piece, I think that's where, we are now starting working with Informatica to see what other pieces we need to bring together to the market, so we can generate, so we can help clients or customers to really leverage the power of technology. And I'll tell you, there are four areas of discussion priorities, that are, you know, you get a sense, and we get a deep dive depending on what you want to see. The first one is, I think the customers now have data warehouses, which are Data 2.0, as is what's told in the morning, so these are still 15 years old data warehouses, they are not in the new. So a lot of customers, and a lot of organizations, large organizations, including some organizations like ours, they're investing right now to make sure that they get to Data 3.0, which is what Anil was saying in the morning, which is around the new data supply chain, because without that, you cannot actually get real data analytics. Right? So you can't generate insight on analytics unless you actually work on your data's infrastructure layer below, so that's one area where we are working with them, that's where the cloud comes in, that's where the flexibility of cloud comes in. The second piece is around, around data compliance and governance because, guess what, there're regulations which are coming up now, which are towards data privacy and data protection. And the data infrastructures which were built 15 years back, actually do not handle that so effectively. >> In being polite, yeah. I mean, it wasn't built for it, they didn't have to think about it. >> Sanjeev: It was not built for that, exactly. So now, now, the point there is that, now there is a regulation coming in, one of them is GDPR, Global Data Protection Regulation, it impacts all the global companies who deal with your EU residents. And now they are looking at how they can address that regulation, and be compliant with that regulation. And we believe that's a great opportunity for them to actually invest. And see how, not only comply with regulation, but actually make this a benefit for them. And make the next leap towards building a next level of infrastructure for them, their data, right? >> And that is doing a lot of the data engineering, actually getting data right. >> And that's the third piece. So the first two are this: one is infrastructure, second is compliance, and the third reason, they're all interrelated finally, but I'm just saying, it depends on, from where do you want to begin your journey, right? And the third piece is around, I think you got it right, is about quality of data, but actually it is not quality, we call it data voracity, it's much beyond quality. We talk about more completeness, and also things like provenance, integrity, and security along with it, so if we, and it's very much business contextual element, because what's happening is, you may have heard the story is that, clients have invested in data lakes, for years now, it's been there for like, eight, nine years, data lake concepts, and everybody talks about it-- >> John: Throw everything into the lake. >> And everybody says throw everything into the lake, and then they become a data swamp. (John laughing) - That was last years theme. >> That was last years theme, and the reason is because, because it's not IT's failure, IT is actually pretty advanced, the technology is very advanced. If the business is not as involved as it should be, and is not able to trust the data, and that's where your point comes in, whether you have the right data, and trusted data with you. >> Though, well we had Toyota on earlier and they said, one of the customers said, we had this 2008 post crisis thing and then, they had all this stuff channeled, they had product in channel, and they had the data! They actually had the data, they didn't have access to it! So again, this is like the new data center, data first, get it right, and so with GDPR we're seeing people saying okay, we've got to get this right. So that's, investing engineering involved, governance, application integration, this is all, now, a new thing. How do you guys advise you clients? 'Cause this is super important and you guys are, again, on the front edge. As a CTO group, you got to look at the new tech and say, okay, that's baked, that's not baked, that's new, that's old, throw a container around it, you know. (laughing) How are you sorting through the tools, the platforms? 'Cause there's a lot of, there's a lot of stuff out there. >> Oh yes, absolutely, and there's a lot of stuff, and there's a lot of unproven things as well, in the market. So, the first and foremost thing is that, we should understand what the context in the market right now is. The first question is, mine is, is everybody ready for GDPR? The answer is no. (John laughs) Are they, have they started into the journey, have they started getting on the racetrack, right, on the road? >> Yes? Yeah? It depends on a majority of that organization, some people have just started building a small strategy around GDPR, some people have actually started doing assessments to understand how complex is this beast, and regulation, and some people have just moved further in the journey of doing assessment, but they're now putting up changes in their infrastructure to handle remediation, right? Things like, for example, consent management, thinks about things like dilation, like, it's going to be a very big deal to do, right? And so they are making advantageous changes to the infrastructure that they have, or the IT systems to manage it effectively. But I don't think there's any company which properly can claim that have got it right fully, from end-to-end, right? So I think that's happening. Now, how are we addressing? I think the first and foremost thing, first of all we need to assess the majority of the customers, or the organization. Like BHD, because we talk to them first and understand, we understand, right? Usually we have various ways of doing it, we can have a chit-chat, and meet the person responsible in that company, it could be a Chief Data Officer of a company, it could be a CIO of a company, it could Chief Operating Officer of a company, it could be a CSO of a company, depending on who has a baton in the sea of suites, to kind of handle this problem. >> So it's different per company, right, so every company has their own hierarchy or need, or entry point? >> Data companies have different entry points, but we are seeing more of the CSOs and CIOs playing a role in many of the large organizations, and our, you know our clientele is very large companies, as you know. But we see most of these players playing that role, and asking for help, and asking for having a meeting, and starting with that. In some cases, they have not invested initially, we talked to them, we assess them very quickly, very easy, quick as it's in, you know, probably in a couple of days or day, and tell them that, let's get into a, what we call is, assessment as step one, and that takes four to six weeks, or eight weeks, depending on the size of their application suite, and the organization. And we do it quite fast, I mean initially, we were also learning. If you were to have asked me this question 12 months back, we had an approach. We've changed that approach and evolved that approach now. We invested hugely in that approach itself, by using a lot of machine learning to do assessment itself. So we have now a concept called data discovery, another concept called knowledge graph. >> And that's software driven, both with, it's all machine learning or? >> Sanjeev: It's largely computer driven. But obviously human and computer work together, but it's not only human. A traditional approach would happen to do only with humans. >> John: Yeah, and that've been takin' a long time. >> And that has changed, that has changed with the new era, and technology advancement, that even for, things which are like assessment, could now be done by machines as well, machines are smart enough to do that work, so we are using that right now. But that's a step one, and after that, once we get there, we build a roadmap for them, we ensure that they're stakeholders are agreeing with the roadmap, they actually embrace the roadmap! (laughing) And once that's done, then we talk about remediation to their systems. >> So, you mention voracity, one of the, and you also mentioned, for example, the idea of the, because of GDPR, deletion, which is in itself a voracity thing, so you, it's also having a verifiable actions on data. So, the challenge that you face, I think, when you talk to large customers, John mentioned Toyota, is, the data's there, but sometimes it's not organized for new classes of problems, so, and that's an executive issue 'cause, a lot of executives don't think in terms of new problem, new data, new organization. You guys are speaking to the top executives, CSOs, CIOs often but, how are you encouraging your clients, your customers, to think differently, so that they become data-first? Which is, kind of a predicate for digital business transformation anyway. >> So I think it's a great question. I think it depends again on, who you're talking to in the organization. I have a very strong perspective, my personal view is that data is an intersection of business and technology, it is not a technology, it's not a business, right? It's an intersection of both, especially this topic, it has to be done in collaboration within business and technology. Very closely in terms of how, what is the, how you can drive metadata out of your data, how can you drive advantage out of your data? And, having said that, I think the important thing to note down is that: for every, when you talk about data voracity, the single comment I will make that it is very, very, very contextual to business. Data voracity is very, very contextual to the business that you're running. >> Well, but problems, right? Because, for example, going to Toyota, so, when the Toyota gentleman came on, and this is really important, >> Absolutely. >> the manufacturing people are doing a great job of using data, lean is very data-driven. The marketing people were doing a great job of using data, the sales people were making a great job of using data, the problem was, the problems that Toyota faced in 2008, when the credit crunch hit, were not limited. They were not manufacturing problems, or marketing problems, or sales problems, they were a wholistic set of problems. And he discovered, Toyota discovered, they needed to say, what's the problem, recast the problem, and what can we do to get the data necessary to answer some of these crucial questions that we have? >> So, I think you hit the nail, I can tell, I mean, I think you're spot on, and the one way we are doing right now, addressing that is through, what we call our liquid studios, >> John: I'm just going to-- >> Peter: I'm sorry what? >> Liquid studios. >> Peter: Liquid studios. >> We have this concept called liquid studios. >> John: Yeah, yeah. >> And actually, this concept we started, I don't know if you heard about this from Accenture before? we started this thing couple of years back-- >> John: Well take a minute to explain that, that's important, explain liquid studios. >> Okay, so liquid studios, so what, when we were thinking about these things where, we talked to multiple clients, they called us, exactly the point, they may be working in silence, and they may be doing a great job in their department, or their function, but they are talking across enterprise. As to how they can, if you are doing great work, can I use your work for my advantage, and vice versa, right, because it's all sharing data, even inside enterprise, forget outside enterprise, and you will be amazed to know how much sharing happens today, within enterprise, right? And you're smiling, right, so? So what we did was, we came to this concept, and the technologies are very new and very advanced, and many of the technologies we are not using beyond experimentation, we are still in the COE concept, well that's different than enterprise ready deployment. Like, if we talk about ERP today, that's not a COE, that's an enterprise ready deployment, in most of the companies, it's all there, like, you run your finance on ERPs right, most of the companies, big companies. So we felt that, technology's advancing, the business and technology IOs, they all have to still agree on a concept, and define a problem together. And that's where the studio comes in, so what we do is, it's actually a central facility, very innovative and creative space, it's unlike an office, it's very much like, new, new thing, it's like very, differently organized structure to generate creativity and good discussion. And we bring in core customers there, we have a workshop with them, we talk about the problem for one or two days, we use design thinking for that, a very effective way. Because one thing we've learned, the one thing that brings our table to agreement on a problem. (laughing) (John and Peter laugh) In a very nice manner, without confronting, in a very subtle manner. So we, through this timeframe, we get to a good problem situation, a good problem definition and then, the studio can actually help you do the POC itself. Because many times people say, well I understand the problem, I think I kind of get your solution, or what your proposing, my people also tell me something else, they have a different option to propose. Can we do it together? Can I get the confidence that, I don't want to go in enterprise ready deployment and put my money, unless I see some proof of pudding, but proof of pudding is not a power point. It's the actual working mark. >> Peter: It's not?! >> It's not! (all laughing) and that's where the studio comes in picture because, you wouldn't believe that we do these two days of workshop without any Powerpoint, like we aren't on a single slide. >> So it's creative, it's very agile, very? >> It's more white boarding, come and talk, it's more visitation, more visitation now, more human interaction, and that's where you open up everybody saying: what is your view, what is your view? We use a lot of post-it stickies to kind of get the-- >> I think the business angle's super important, I want to get your thoughts. 'Cause there's a lot of problems that can be solved once you identify them. But we're hearing terms like competitive advantage, 'cause when you solve some of these problems, these wholistic problems, that have a lot of interplay, where data's shared, or where there's internal, and or external with APIs and cloud-native, you start thinking about competitive advantages, being the data-first company, we've heard these terms. What does that mean to you guys? When you walk into an executive briefing, and they say look, you know, we've done all this work, we've done this engineering, here's where we're at, we need help, but ultimately we want to drive top-line results, be more competitive, really kind of move with the shift. This is a, this is more of a business discussion, what do you guys talk about when you have those conversations? >> I think we, so first of all, data was always a technical topic, do you agree? Like if you just go back, 10 years back, data was always a CIO discussion. >> Well, >> Unless you're in a regulated industry like financial services or, >> Or I guess I'd say this, that the, that the notion of getting data out of a system, or getting data into a system, was a technical discussion. But there was, you know, we've always used data, from market share growth, etc. But that was relatively simple, straight-forward data, and what you're talking about, I think, is, getting into considerably greater detail about how the business is really operating, how the business is really working. Am I right? >> You're right, considering data as an asset, in a discussion in terms of, how can you leverage it effectively, that's what I was saying and, so it is, it's definitely gone up one more level upstaged or into the discussion that is, into the companies and organizations. And what we're saying is, that's where the business comes in effectively and say that, helping them understand, and by the way, the reason I was making that comment is because, if you have ever seen people expending data 10 years back, it is very complex explanation. >> Schemas, this, that, and the other thing. >> You got it, yeah. And it's very hard for a business guy to understand that, like if I'm a supply action lead, I don't get it, it's too complex for me. So what we did, I'm just letting you know how we started the discussion. The first and foremost thing is, we tell them, we're going to solve the business problem, to your point, that's what we think, right? And, every company now-a-days, they want to lead in their industry, and the leadership position is to be more intelligent. >> Yeah, and it's got to hit the mark, I mean, we had Graeme Thompson on, who's the CIO, here at Informatica, and he was saying that if you go to a CFO and ask them hey where's the money, they'll go oh, it's over here, they get your stuff, they know where it's stored, at risk management, they say, where's they data? You mentioned asset, this is now becoming a conversation, where it's like, certainly GDPR is one shot across the bow that people are standing up, taking notice, it's happening now. This data as a asset is a very interesting concept. When I'm a customer of yours, say, and I say hey Sanjeer, I have a need, I got to move my organization to be data-first but, I got to do some more work. What's my journey? I know it's different per customer, depending on whether it's top-down, or bottom-up, we see that a lot but. How do you guys take them through the journey? Is it the workshop, as you mentioned, the assessment, take us through the journey of how you help customers, because I'm sure a lot of them are sittin' out there goin' now, they're going to be exposed with GDPR, saying wow, were we really setup for this? >> Yeah, so I think in the journey, it's a very good question that you asked. The journey can start depending on the real, the biggest pain they have, and the pains could be different on the majority of that particular organization, right? But I can tell you what client position we are having, in a very simplified manner, so that you understand the journey, but yes, when we engage with them, there's a process we follow, we have a discovery process, we have a studio process, together have a workshop, get into a POC, get into a large-scale deployment solution en route. That's a simple thing, that's more sequential in nature, but the condition is around four areas. The first and foremost area is, many companies actually don't have any particular data strategy. They have a very well articulated IT strategy, and when you go to a section of IT strategy, there's a data component in that, but that's all technology. About how do you load, how do you extract those things. It talks about data architectures, and talks about data integration, but it doesn't talk about data as a business, right? That's where it's not there, right? In some companies they do have, to your point, yes, some companies were always there in data, because of regulatory concerns and requirements, so they always had a data organization, a function, which thought of data as different from other industries. And those industries have more better strategy documents or, or they're more organized in that space. But, guess what, now companies are actually investing. They're actually asking for doing help in data strategies, that's one entry point which happens, which means, hey, I understand this, I understand governance is required, I understand privacy's required, and I understand this is required, I also understand that I need to move to new infrastructure, but I can't just make an investment in one or two areas, can you help my build my strategy and road map as to what should be my journey from now til next three years, right, how does it look like? How much money is required, how much investment is required, how do I save from something and invest here, help me save internal wealth, right? That's a new concept. Right, because I don't have so much that you're asking for, so help me gain some savings somewhere else. That's where cloud comes in. (laughs) So, that's one entry point, the second entry point is totally on, where the customers are very clear, they actually have thought through the process, in terms of where they want to go, they actually are asking, very specifically saying, I do have a problem in our infrastructure, help me move to cloud. Help me, that's a big decision right, help me move to cloud, right? But that's one, which I call is, new data supply chain, that's my language. Which means that-- >> John: I like that word actually. >> Yeah? I'm making your supply chain and my supply chain in business terms, if I have to explain business, it's different, technically it's different. Technology, I can explain all the things that you just mentioned, in business I explain that there are three Cs to a supply chain, capture it, curate it, consume it, and they so, oh I get it now, that's easy! >> Well, the data supply chain is interesting too, when you think about new data coming in, the system has to be reactive and handle new data, so you have to have this catalog thing. And that was something that we saw a lot of buzz here at the show, this enterprise catalog. What's your take on that, what's your assessment of the catalog, impact to customers, purpose at this point in time? >> I think it's very important, especially with the customers and large companies, who actually have data all over the place. I can share, as an example, we were talking to one of the customers who had 2600 applications, and they want to go for GDPR, we had a chat with them, and we said look, they were more comfortable saying, no, no, let's no use any machine. Because when you talk about machine, then you have to expose yourself a bit, right? And I said look, the machine is not going to be in my place, it's going to be in yours, your boundaries of firewall. But they were a little more concerned, they said let's go with a manual approach, let's do that, I said fair enough, it's your call, we can do that as well. But guess what? 2600 applications, you can't discover manually, it's just not possible. >> John: Yeah, you need help. A lot of data streaming and-- >> I guess I'm just letting you know it's very, I'm just answering your question. The data catalog is extremely important, if you really want to get a sense of where the data is residing, because data is not in one or two applications, it's all over the place. >> Well I'm impressed by the data catalog positioning, but then also, when you look at the Azure announcement they had, that Informatica had. You're essentially seeing hybrid cloud playing out as a real product. So that's an easy migration, of bringing in some of those BI tools, bringing some democratization into the data discovery. Rajeev, thanks for coming on theCUBE, really appreciate it, love the work you do, and I just want you to take a minute, just to end the segment out. Explain the work that you do, you have two roles, real quick, explain your two primary roles. You've got the, you incubate new stuff, which is hard to do, but, I'm an entrepreneur, I love the hard problems, but also you're doing talent. Take a minute to kind of explain, real quickly, those two roles, for, super important. >> well, the first one is basically that I, my role, I look at any ideas that are, that we can incubate as a business, and we can work within Accenture, different entities within Accenture to make sure that we go to clients in a much more quiescent manner, and see how we can have an impact to our top line. And that's a big thing, because our, we are a service as a business and, we have to be very innovative to come to know how do we increase our business. >> Any examples that you can share, of that stuff that you worked on? >> So, one is, right now, I'm spending a lot of my time in, on fueling our data business itself. We just recently launched our data business group, right? We have our market way in this position, is called applied intendance, which you may be aware, which includes data, analytics, advanced analytics, and then artificial intelligence, all put together, then we can solve these problems. >> And you guys got a zillion data scientists, I know that, you guys have been hiring really, really strong people. >> It's a very strong team. But on that, what I feel is that, the data is a critical foundation, really critical foundation for an intelligent enterprise. You can become and intelligent enterprise unless you have right data, to your point. And right data means curated data, in the set, in the fashion that can help you become, draw more insights from your enterprise. And that's possible if you invest in data strongly, and selection of data so strongly, but that's why we are fueling that, so I'm just letting you know that I'm spending most of my time right now to enhance our capability, you know, enhance our power in on that, and go to market with that. The second thing which I am investing right now, which is, there is a few more ideas, but one more, which could be very useful for you to know, is, while companies are moving to the new, they have to also, they have to rely on their people. Ultimately the companies are made of people. Like us, right? And if you can, if you are not retooling yourself, you cannot reimagine the future of your organization as well. >> You're talking about the peoples, their own skills, their job functions, okay-- >> So I'm working on a concept called workforce of the future right, how can 44 companies, large companies, how can they transform their talent, and their, even leadership as well, so that they are ready for the future and they can be more relevant. >> Yeah, and this is the argument we always see on theCUBE, oh, automation's going to take jobs away, well, I mean certainly automating repetitive tasks, no one wants to do those, (laughing) but the value is going to shift, that's where the opportunities are, is that how you see that future workforce? >> Absolutely, it's one of the complimentary, we have Paul Daugherty, whom you know, who's the Chief Technology Officer of Accenture Technology. Accenture, Accenture as a firm, he, he's a Chief Technology and Innovation Officer for Accenture He has recently written a book called Human + Machine, exactly talked about the same concept that, we actually all believe, very, very strongly that, the future is all about augmenting humans together. So there are tasks which machines should be doing, and there are tasks where humans should be doing, and there are tasks which both of them do collaboratively, and that's what we are trying to boast. >> Cloud world, we're doing it here in theCUBE, here at Informatica World. Rajeev, thanks so much for spending time-- >> Sajeev. (laughing) Sajeev, I mean, thanks for coming on. Sorry my bad, a little late in the day. But we're bringing it out here at Informatica World, this is theCUBE, I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris, here with Accenture inside theCUBE, here at Informatica World in Las Vegas. Be right back with more coverage, after this short break. Thank you. (bubbly music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's The CUBE, covering VMworld 2017, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Hey welcome back everyone, we're live here in Las Vegas. Behind me is the VM Village, this is The CUBE on the ground live at VMworld, I'm John Furrier, with Dave Vellante. Excited to have Sanjay Poonen, Cube VIP new badge that's going out. Five or more times you get a special badge on the website Chief Operating Officer, Chief Customer Operations as well at VMware, Sanjay. >> I think I won one of your hoop madness what do you call those Cube >> John: Yeah, that's right. You did get one of those. >> One of them, so add that to the smallest. >> Came in second to the bot, next year you won. We're going to have to check the algorithm on it that's before we had machine learning, so... Sanjay, great to see you. >> Always a pleasure, John and Dave, thank you for having me here. >> So, you know, in fairness to the VMware management team I got to say, great content program. Usually you can see, kind of, maybe some things that are kind of a little futuristic on the spot big time, on the content. True private cloud, data that Wikibon reported on, you guys are right in line with that. Hybrid-cloud is where its going from multi-cloud. You talk multi-cloud, the Kubernetes orchestration vision for Cloud Native, and even you were doing some interviewing on stage. >> Trying to be Anderson Cooper. >> So, tell us, what's your perspective because you got to balance here you got the reality of the Amazon relationship front and center, delivered big time there, shipping, western region, VMware on-prem, and on-cloud and this new cloud native vector of orchestration and simplicity. >> Yeah, I think, at least from our perspective as I describe in sort of that one chart where I try to put it in Sesame Street simple terms as I like to describe. VMware is one of the most fundamental companies that had a incredible impact in the data center, taking more costs and complexity. We are the defacto backbone of almost everybody's data center, but as the data center moves to the cloud you got to ask yourself, what's the relevance, and we've now shown, same way with the desktop going to mobile, and that's the end-user stuff that we've talked about the last few shows. But let's focus on that cloud part. We really felt as people extended to the public cloud we had to change our strategy to not seek to be a public cloud ourselves, and that's the reason we divested VCloud Air, and focused on significant things we could do with the leading public cloud vendors. As you know, Andy Jassy is a classmate of mine, Pat, Raghu, myself, began the discussions with Andy two years ago, and we announced the deal last year in October. This year having him on stage was, for me, personally a dream come true, and really nice to see that announcement, but we wanted to make sure we were also relevant to some of the other clouds. So earlier this year, in February, we announced Horizon Cloud, the VDI product manager. Today, we announced Kubernetes VMware, Pivotal and Google Form in Kubernetes, IBM Cloud. So all of the top four clouds, AWS, Azure, Google, and IBM have something going with VMware being with Pivotal. That's a big statement to our multi-cloud vision. >> And what a changeover from just two years ago when the ecosystem was, kind of, like a deer in the headlights, not knowing which way to zig or zag, do they cross the street. Where are we going with this? Now the clarity's very clear, cloud, and IoT, and edge with Amazon right there, a lot of the workloads there with multi-cloud. So the question I got to have you is that, as we just talked to the Google guys, is VMware turning into an arms dealer? Because that's a nice position to be at, because you're now driving VMware into multiple clouds. >> I think, you know, when I was on your show last time I described this continent called VMware, and then bridges into them. (John laughs) Let me try another and see if this works. That was good, but it had its 12-month shelf life. Think about the top four public clouds as sort of Mount Rushmore type figures. Each at different heights, AWS, Azure, Google, IBM Cloud, in market share they're the top four. If you want to build a house on top of Mount Rushmore, okay, it could work, but you're going to have to build it on top of one president's head. The moment you want to build it, you need some concrete infrastructure that fills in all the holes between them. That's VMware. It's the infrastructure platform that can sit on top of those varied disparate levels of Mount Rushmore, and make yourself relevant from on. So that's why we fell, whether you want to call that a quintessential platform, an arms provider, whatever it is, for the 4,400 cloud providers, plus the top four or five public cloud players today, VMware has to be relevant. We weren't two or three years ago. Now, for the top three, we're very relevant. >> I call it a binding agent. You're the binding agent across clouds, that's what you're really trying to become. But I wonder if, you know, you're talking about the clarity. I mean, VMware, things are good right now. Two years ago, was looking kind of hmmm, maybe not so good, with license growth down, and now it's up, stock prices double digits, >> Stock prices almost highest >> Okay, so I want to understand the factors behind that. You mentioned the clarity around vCloud Air and the AWS agreement, clearly. The second I want to attest is, the customer reality of cloud, that I can't just ship my business to the cloud, ship my data to the cloud. I got to bring the cloud model to the data. Did that in your conversation with customers, those two factors lead to customers being more comfortable, signing longer term agreements with you guys. Is that a bit part of the tailwind? I wonder if you could discuss that. >> Yeah, Dave I think that's absolutely right. One of the things I've learned in my 25 years of IT is, you want to keep being strategic to your customers. You never want to be in a place where you're in a cul-de-sac. And I started to sense, right, not definitively, but perhaps two years ago, there was a little it of that cul-de-sac perception as our license revenue was growing, particularly on this cloud strategy. Are you trying to be a public cloud, are you not, what's your stance versus AWS as one example, and with vCloud Air, there was a little bit of that hesitation. And if you asked our sales teams, the clarifying of our cloud strategy, which last year was okay but didn't have the substance or the punch. Now you've got an AWS coming on stage, and the other cloud providers where we have substance. I think that clarifying the cloud strategy game the ability for customers to say, even while they were waiting for AWS to be shipped, the last year, three or four quarters are spending of on-premise VMware stuff has gone up, 'cause they see us as strategic. The second aspect I think is our products are now a lot more mature than they were before outside of B sphere. VMware cloud foundation, which consists of storage, networking, VSAN, NSX, and you've talked to those people on your stage, workspace one, end user computing. These have really, really helped, and I think the third factor is, we've really focused on building a very strong team, from Pat, myself, to Raghu, Rajeev, Ray, Mauricio, Robin, I think it's a world-class infrastructure, so we just added Claire Dixon as our Chief Comms Officer on eBay. This is for us now, and everyone in the rest of the organization, we want to continue building a world-class sort of warrior-style strength in numbers. >> Quick follow-up if I may, just a little Jim Kramer moment. And the financial's looking good, you just raised four billion of cheap debt, right the operating cash flow, three billion dollars, and the nice thing about the clarity around vCloud Air is, the capital expenditure, it's just a very capital-efficient model that you guys have now, and I've been saying, you can't say it, but to me the stock's undervalued. When you do the ratios and the multiples on those factors, it looks like a cheap stock to me. >> John: I would love to see you buy it because we have to disclose it, the big position in VMware. >> No, no, no. >> We don't have any stock >> I wish we did. >> We just want to keep growing and the market will fairly value us over time. >> Yeah, it will. >> Well you guys had a good team at VMware, so let's just go back and unpack that. So there was a transformation. Peter Burrows was talking about IBM over the years, had a massive transformation, so really kind of a critical moment for VMware as you're pointing out. We had this great discipline, great technology, great community folks, still there now, as you mentioned, but that transition from saying, we got to post a position, are we in cloud or not, let's make a decision and move on, and as Dave said, it's good economics behind not having a cloud, but I saw a slide that said VMware Cloud, you can still have a cloud strategy using Amazon. Okay, I get that. So the question for you is this. This is the debate that we've been having. Just like in the cryptocurrency market, you're seeing native tokens in cryptography, and then secondary tokens, just one went crazy today. With cloud, we see native cloud, and then new clouds that are going to be specialty clouds. You're seeing a huge increase the long-tail power law of cloud providers that are sitting on other clouds. We think this is a trend. How does VMware help those potential ascensior clouds, the Deloitte clouds, the farming drone cloud that's going to have unique applications? So if applications become clouds, how does VMware help that? >> That's a really good question. So first off, we have 4,400 cloud providers that built their stacks on VMware. And it could be some of these sourced. Probably the best example are companies like Rackspace, OVH, T-Systems. And we're going to continue to empower them, and I think many of them that are in country-specific areas, France, Germany, China, Asia, have laws that require data to be there, and I think they quite frankly have a long existence, and some of them like Rackspace have adapted their model to be partnering with AWS, so we're going to continue to help them, and that's our VMware cloud provider program, that's going to be great. The other phenomenon we see happening is these mini data centers starting to form at what's called the edge. So edge computing is really almost like this mobile device becoming bigger and bigger, it becomes like a refrigerator, it becomes like a mini data center, and it's not sitting in the cloud, it's actually sitting in a branch someplace or somewhere external. VMware Stack could actually become the software that powers that whole thing. So if you believe that basically cloud providers are going to be three or four or five big public clouds, a bunch of cloud providers are country-specific, or vertical-specific, again in these edge computings, VMware becomes quintessentially important to all of those, and we become, whether you call it a platform, a glue, or whatever have you, and our goal is to make sure we're pervasive in all of those. I think it's going to, world is go, going to go from mobile cloud to cloud edge, I mean the whole word of cloud and edge computing is the future. >> So you believe that there potentially could be another second coming of more CSPs exploding big time. >> Especially with edge computing, and country-specific rules. There's some countries that just won't do business with a US public cloud because of whatever reason. >> Well, many of those 4,400 would say, hey, we have to have a niche so we can compete with AWS, so we don't get AWS-ized. So what's your message to those guys now that you're sort of partnered up with AWS? >> Listen, OVH is a good example. Virtuastream's another, I'll give you two good examples. OVH, we sold vCloud Air to them. We are helping those customers be successful. I go to some of those calls jointly with them, they are based in France expending some of their presence to the US, and have got some very specific IP that makes their data centers efficient. We want to help then be successful. Some of the technology that we've built in vCloud Air, we're now licensing to them so we can them be successful. Virtustream, you know Rodney Rogers being on your show. Mission-critical apps is tough for some of the public clouds to get right. They've perfected the art, and I've known them from my SAP days. So there's going to be some of these other clouds that are going to be enormously successful in their niche, and their niche are going to get bigger and bigger. We want to make sure every one of them are successful. And I think there's a big opportunity for multiple vendors to be successful. It won't be just the top three or four public clouds. There will be some boutique usage by country or some horizontal or vertical use case. >> Good for an arms dealer. Well this is my whole point, this is what we've been getting at. We're kind of riffing in real time, little competitive strategy, we got the Harvard MBA and I'm the Babson guy, we'll arm wrestle it out here, maybe do some car karaoke together. But this brings up the question, and I've been saying for a long time on The Cube, and Dave and I have been talking about, we see a long tail, torso neck expanding, where right now it's a knife-edge, long tail, top native clouds and then nobody else. So I think we're going to see this expand out where specialty clouds are going to come out for your reasons. So that is going to open up the door, and those guys they're not going to want their own cloud. >> Sanjay: I agree. >> And that's a channel, an app, who knows? >> You look at an example, one, two other examples of specialty clouds, these are SAS vendors. If you look at two vertical companies, Viva and Guidewire. These are SAS companies that are in the life sciences and insurance space. They've been enormously successful in a space that you're probably maybe a Zapier Salesforce would have done, but they have been focused in a vertical market, insurance and life sciences. And I think there's going to be many providers the same way at the IS level or the PAS level, to also be successful and we welcome, this is going to be a large multi-cloud world. >> Edge cloud. You guys talking about the edge before. Pat had the slide of the pendulum swinging. >> Sanjay: Exactly. >> What is that edge cloud do to the existing business? Is it disruptive or is it evolutionary in your opinion? >> It's disruptive in the sense that, if you've taken a hardware-centric view of that, I think you're going to be disrupted. You take things like software-defined WAN, software-defined networking. So I think the beauty of software is that we're not depending on the size of the hardware that sits underneath it, whether it's a big data center or small edge of the cloud. We're building this to be an all-form factors, and I agree with Marc Andreessen in the sense the software's eating up the world. So given the fact that VMware >> And the edge. >> Yeah, our premise is if there's more computing that's moving to the edge, more software define happening at the edge, we should benefit from that. The hardware vendors will have to adapt, and that's good. But software becomes quintessential. Now I think the edge is showing a little bit of, like, you know, Peter Levine had a story about how cloud computing might be extinct if edge computing takes off. Because what's happening is this machine starts to get bigger and bigger and sits in a branch or in some local place, and it's away from the cloud. So I think it actually is a beautiful world where if you're willing to adapt quickly, which software lets you do, adapt quickly, I think there's a bright future as world moves cloud, mobile, and edge. >> Great stuff, Sanjay, and I was referencing car karaoke, you have on your Twitter >> Oh the carpool karaoke. >> The carpool karaoke. >> It was a fun little thing. Maybe we could do it together, three of us some time. (John laughs) >> I don't do karaoke. Final... >> Just sing, man Just be out there doing your thing. >> I embarrass myself on The Cube enough, I don't need karaoke to help there. >> David: I'm in. (laughs) >> All right, I'll do it. All right, final question for you. >> That's a deal. Let's do it. >> Final question, Michael Dell and we're talking, the world's upside down right now, the computer industry has been thrown up in the air, it's going to be upside down, reconfiguration. You've been in the business for a long time, you've seen many waves. Actually the waves now are pretty clear. What's the fallout going to be from this for customers, for the vendors, for how people buy and build relationships in this new world? >> I think there's a couple of fundamental principles. I talked about one, software, let's not repeat that. I think ecosystems rule. It's really important that you don't look at yourself as having to own the full stack, you know VMware's chosen to be hardware-dependent. Yes, we're owned by Dell, but you've seen us announce a HP partnership here, right? You've seen us do deals with Fujitsu. We had AWS Cloud and Google Cloud. So when you view the world, I love this line by Isaac Newton, he said, "I see clearly because I stand on the shoulders of giants." And to me, that's a very informed strategy to actually guide our ecosystem strategy. Who are the giants in our space? It's the companies that are relevant, with the biggest market caps. Apple, Google, Microsoft, you know, AWS is part of Amazon, and then you know, HP, EMC, Dell, so and so, we list them, by my SAP. If we're relevant to all of them, I'd love to see the momentum of VMworld and the momentum to reinvent start coalescing. Collectively there's probably a hundred thousand people who come to all of our VMware vForums. Andy Jassy told me he expects 40,000 at re:Invent, and maybe across all of his AWS summits, he has a hundred thousand. I was sharing with him an idea. Why don't we have these two amoebas of growing conferences start to coalesce where we mingle, maybe 20% goes to both conferences, but we'll come to your show and be the best software vendor, that hijacks your show, so to speak, (John laughs) I didn't use that word. But we become the best vendor, and we'll roll out the red carpet to you. Now we've got a collection of 200,000, we couldn't have done that on our own. That's an example of AWS and VMware partnering. Now it doesn't have to be exclusively AWS, we could do it with another partner too. Microsoft doesn't show up at the AWS re:Invent conference, we do. Similarly we could maybe do something very specific with Azure and VDI at the Microsoft event, or Kubernetes and Google. So for VMware, our strategy needs to be highly relevant to the power players in the ecosystem, and the guiding our software-defined strategy to make that work, and I think if we do that, you know, you could see this be a 10 billion and bigger company. >> Well it says it's not a zero sum game, >> Sanjay: No, everybody wins. >> And if you can stay in the game, everybody wins, right. >> And I think in the software-defined infrastructure space, we like our odds. We feel we could be the leading player in that software-defined area. >> And it changes and reimagines that relationship between how people consume or procure technology, because the cloud's a mosaic, as Sam Ramji was telling me earlier. >> Oh you had Sam on your show? Wonderful. >> I had him on earlier, and he sees the cloud as a mosaic. >> He's a fantastic thought leader in open source, we were deeply grateful to have him at our event today. >> Andy Jassy, your classmate and friend, collaborator, he was onstage, great performance that he gave. Really talking to your crowd, saying, "We got your back," basically. Not a barney deals, not a optical deal, we are in on it, we're investing, and we got your back. That's interesting. >> We want to be with all of the key leaders that are driving significant parts of the ecosystem, we want to be friends, our tent is large. If everybody. Provided there's, like you said, not a barney announcement, so provided there's value to the customer. If there is, our tent is large, right? We will have point competitors, you know, here and there, and you know me, I'm very competitive. >> John: (laughs) No! >> I've not named competitors too much in this show. >> Really, really. >> But, if anything now, my mind's a lot more focused on the ecosystem, and I want to make this tent large for as many, many players to come here and have a big presence at VMworld. >> And the ecosystem is reforming around this new cloud reality, and the edge is going to change that shape even further. >> Competing on value, competing in a new ecosystem requires a new way to think about relationships. >> If I could give you one other example, then. In the world of mobile, who would have thought that the most important company to mobile security and enterprise to Apple is VMware now, thanks to AirWatch, or to Samsung, whatever it might be, right. This is the world we live in, and we have to constantly adapt ourselves. So maybe next year we'll be talking about IoT or something different, and their ecosystem. >> Sanjay Poonen, COO of VMware, good friend inside The Cube, always candid. Thanks for sharing your commentary and color on the industry, VMware and your personal perspective. I'm John Furrier, Cube coverage live in Las Vegas, here on the ground floor in the VM Village. We'll be right back with more live coverage after this short break.