(upbeat music) >> Hello, and welcome to Supercloud2. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here. We're exploring all the new Supercloud trends around multiple clouds, hyper scale gaps in their systems, new innovations, new applications, new companies, new products, new brands emerging from this big inflection point. Got a great guest who's going to unpack it with me today, Ramesh Prabagaran, who's the co-founder and CEO of Prosimo, CUBE alumni. Ramesh, legend in the industry, you've been around. You've seen many cycles. Welcome to Supercloud2. >> Thank you. You're being too kind. >> Well, you know, you guys have been a technical, great technical founding team, multiple ventures, multiple times around the track as they say, but now we're seeing something completely different. This is our second event, kind of we're doing to start the the ball rolling around unpacking this idea of Supercloud which evolved from a riff with me and Dave to now a working group paper, multiple definitions. People are saying they're Supercloud. CloudFlare says this is their version. Someone says there over there. Fitzi over there in the blog is always, you know, challenging us on our definitions, but it's, the consensus is though something's happening. >> Ramesh: Absolutely. >> And what's your take on this kind of big inflection point? >> Absolutely, so if you just look at kind of this in layers right, so you have hyper scalers that are innovating really quickly on underlying capabilities, and then you have enterprises adopting these technologies, right, there is a layer in the middle that I would say is largely missing, right? And one that addresses the gaps introduced by these new capabilities, by the hyper scalers. At the same time, one that actually spans, let's say multiple regions, multiple clouds and so forth. So that to me is kind of the Supercloud layer of sorts. One that helps enterprises adopt the underlying hyper scaler capabilities a lot faster, and at the same time brings a certain level of consistency and homogeneity also. >> What do you think the big driver of Supercloud is? Is it the industry growing up or is it the demand for new kinds of capabilities or both? Or just evolution? What's your take? >> I would say largely it depends on kind of who the entity is that you're talking about, right? And so I would say both. So if you look at one cohort here, it's adoption, right? If I have a externally facing digital presence, for example, then I'm going to scale that up and get to as many subscribers and users no matter what, right? And at that time it's a different set of problems. If you're looking at kind of traditional enterprise inward that are bringing apps into the cloud and so forth, it's a different set of care abouts, right? So both are, I would say, equally important problems to solve for. >> Well, one reality that we're definitely tracking, and it's not really a debate anymore, is hybrid. >> Ramesh: Yep >> Hybrid happened. It happened faster than most people thought. But, you know, we were talking about this in 2015 when it first got kicked around, but now you see hybrid in the cloud, on premises and the edge. This kind of forms that distributed computing paradigm that we've always been predicting. And so if that continues to play out the way it is, you're now going to have a completely distributed, connected internet and sets of systems, intra and external within companies. So again, the world is connected 100%. Everything's changing, right? >> And that introduces. >> It wasn't your grandfather's networking anymore or storage. The game is still the same, but the play, the components are acting differently. What's your take on this? >> Absolutely. No, absolutely. That's a very key important point, and it's one that we always ask our customers right at the front end, right? Because your starting assumptions matter. If you have workloads of workloads in the cloud and data center is something that you want to connect into, then you'll make decisions kind of keeping cloud in the center and then kind of bolt on technologies for what that means to extend it to the data center. If your center of gravity is in the data center, and then cloud is let's say 10% right now, but you see that growing, then what choices do you have? Right, do you want to bring your data center technologies into the cloud because you want that consistency in operations? Or do you want to start off fresh, right? So this is a really key, important question, and one that many of our customers are actually are grappling with, right? They have this notion that going cloud native is the right approach, but at the same time that means I have a bifurcation in kind of how do I operate my data center versus my cloud, right? Two different operating models, and slowly it'll shift over to one. But you're going to have to deal with dual reality for a while. >> I was talking to an old friend of mine, CIO, very experienced CIO. Big time company, large deployment, a lot of IT. I said, so what's the big trend everyone's telling me about IT's going. He goes no, not really. IT's not going away for me. It's going everywhere in the company. >> Ramesh: Exactly. >> So I need to scale my IT-like capabilities everywhere and then make it invisible. >> Ramesh: Correct. >> Which is essentially code words for saying it's going to be completely cloud native everywhere. This is what is happening. Do you agree? >> Absolutely right, and so if you look at what do enterprises care about it? The reason to go to the cloud is to get speed of operations, and it's apps, apps, apps, right? Do you ever have a conversation on networking and infrastructure first? No, that kind of gets brought into the conversation because you want to deal with users, applications and services, right? And so the end goal is essentially how do users communicate with apps and get the right experience, security and whatnot, and how do apps talk to each other and make sure that you get all of the connectivity and security requirements? Underneath the covers, what does this mean for infrastructure, networking, security and whatnot? It's actually going to be someone else's job, right? And you shouldn't have to think too much about it. So this whole notion of kind of making that transparent is real actually, right? But at the same time, us and all the guys that we talk to on the customer side, that's their job, right? Like we have to work towards making that transparent. Some are going to be in the form of capability, some are going to be driven by data, but that's really where the two worlds are going to come together. >> Lots of debates going on. We just heard from Bob Muglia here on Supercloud2. He said Supercloud's a platform that provides programmatically consistent services hosted on heterogeneous cloud providers. So the question that's being debated is is Supercloud a platform or an architecture in your view? >> Okay, that's a tough one actually. I'm going to side on the side on kind of the platform side right, and the reason for that is architectural choices are things that you make ahead of time. And you, once you're in, there really isn't a fork in the road, right? Platforms continue to evolve. You can iterate, innovate and so on and so forth. And so I'm thinking Supercloud is more of a platform because you do have a choice. Hey, am I going AWS, Azure, GCP. You make that choice. What is my center of gravity? You make that choice. That's kind of an architectural decision, right? Once you make that, then how do I make things work consistently across like two or three clouds? That's a platform choice. >> So who's responsible for the architecture as the platform, the vendor serving the platform or is the platform vendor agnostic? >> You know, this is where you have to kind of peel the onion in layers, right? If you talk about applications, you can't go to a developer team or an app team and say I want you to operate on Google or AWS. They're like I'll pick the cloud that I want, right? Now who are we talking to? The infrastructure guys and the networking guys, right? They want to make sure that it's not bifurcated. It's like, hey, I want to make sure whatever I build for AWS I can equally use that on Azure. I can equally use that on GCP. So if you're talking to more of the application centric teams who really want infrastructure to be transparent, they'll say, okay, I want to make this choice of whether this is AWS, Azure, GCP, and stick to that. And if you come kind of down the layers of the stack into infrastructure, they are thinking a little more holistically, a little more Supercloud, a little more multicloud, and that. >> That's a good point. So that brings up the deployment question. >> Ramesh: Exactly! >> I want to ask you the next question, okay, what is the preferred deployment in your opinion for a Supercloud narrative? Is it single instance, spread it around everywhere? What's the, do you have a single global instance or do you have everything synchronized? >> So I would say first layer of that Supercloud really kind of fix the holes that have been introduced as a result of kind of adopting the hyper scaler technologies, right? So each, the hyper scalers have been really good at innovating and providing really massive scale elastic capabilities, right? But once you start to build capabilities on top of that to help serve the application, there's a few holes start to show up. So first job of Supercloud really is to plug those holes, right? Second is can I get to an operating model, so that I can replicate this not just in a single region, but across multiple regions, same cloud, and then across multiple clouds, right? And so both of those need to be solved for in order to be (cross talking). >> So is that multiple instantiations of the stack or? >> Yeah, so this again depends on kind of the capability, right? So if you take a more solution view, and so I can speak for kind of networking security combined right? There you always take a solution view. You don't ever look at, you know, what does this mean for a single instance in a single region. You take a macro view, and then you then break it down into what does this mean for region, what does it mean for instance, what does this mean for AZs? And so on and so forth. So you kind of have to go top to bottom. >> Okay, welcome you down into the trap now. Okay, synchronizing the data, latency, these are all questions. So what does the network Supercloud look like to you? Because networking is big here. >> Ramesh: Yes, absolutely. >> This is what you guys do. >> Exactly, yeah. So the different set of problems as you go up the stack, right? So if you have hundreds of workloads in a single region, the set of problems you're dealing with there are kind of app native connectivity, how do I go from kind of east/west, all of those fun things, right? Which are usually bound in terms of latency. You don't have those challenges as much, but can you build your entire enterprise application architecture in one region? No, you're going to have to create multiple instances, right? So my data lake is invariably going to be in one place. My business logic is going to be spread across a few places. What does that bring in? I need to go across regions. Am I going to put those two regions right next to each other? No, I'm not going to, right? I'm going to have places in Europe. I'm going to have APAC, and I'm going to have a North American presence, and I need to bring all these things together. So this is where, back to your point, latency really matters, right? Because I need to be able to find out not just best path but also how do I reduce the millisecond, microseconds that my application cares about, which brings in a layer of optimization and then so on and so on and so forth. So this is what we call kind of to borrow the Prosimo language full stack networking, right? Because I'm not just dealing with how do I go from one region to another because that's laws of physics. I can only control so much. But there are a few elements up the application stack in software that you can tweak to actually bring these things closer and closer. >> And on that point, you're seeing security being talked a lot more at the network layer. So how do you secure the Supercloud at the network layer? What's that look like? >> Yeah, we've been grappling with essentially is security kind of foundational, and then is the network on top. And then we had an alternative viewpoint which is kind of network and then security on top. And the answer is actually it's neither, right? It's almost like a meshed up sandwich of sorts. So you need to have networking security work really well together, right? Case in point, I mean we were talking to a customer yesterday. He said, hey, I have my data lake in one region that needs to talk to an analytics service in a completely different region of a different cloud. These two things just need to be able to talk to each other, which means I need to bring elements of networking. I need to bring elements of security, secure access, app segmentation, all of those things. Very simple, I have an analytics service that needs to contact a data lake. That's what he starts with, but then before you know it, it actually brings up a whole stack underneath, so that's. >> VMware calls that cloud chaos. >> Ramesh: Yes, exactly. >> And then that's the halfway point between cloud smart. Cloud first, cloud chaos, cloud smart, and the next thing, you can skip that whole step. But again, again, it's pick your strategy right? Again, this comes back down to your earlier point. I want to ask you from a customer standpoint, you got the hyper scalers doing very, very well. >> Ramesh: Yep, absolutely. >> And I love what their Amazon's doing. I think Microsoft again though they had a little bit of downgrade are catching up fast, and they have their installed base. So you got the land of the installed bases. >> Correct. >> First and greater, better cloud. Install base getting better, almost as good, almost as good is a gift, but close. Now you have them specializing. Silicon, special silicon. So there's gaps for other services. >> Ramesh: Correct. >> And Amazon Web Services, Adam Selipsky's a open book saying, hey, we want our ecosystem to pick up these gaps and build on them. Go ahead, go to town. >> So this is where I think choices are tough, right? Because if you had one choice, you would work with it, and you would work around it, right? Now I have five different choices. Now what do I do? Our viewpoint is there are a bunch of things that say AWS does really, really well. Use that as a foundational layer, right? Like don't reinvent the wheel on those things. Transit gateways, global accelerators and whatnot, they exist for a reason. Billions of dollars have gone into building those things. Use that foundational layer, right? But what you want to build on top of that is actually driven by the application. The requirements of a lambda application that's serverless, it's very different than a packaged application that's responding for transactions, right? Like it's just completely very, very different. And so bring in the right set of capabilities required for those set of applications, and then you go based on that. This is also where I think whether something is a regional construct versus an overall global construct really, really matters, right? Because if you start with the assumption that everything is going to be built regionally, then it's someone else's job to make sure that all of these things are connected. But if you start with kind of the global purview, then the rest of them start to (cross talking). >> What are some of the things that the enterprises might want that are gaps that are going to be filled by the, by startups like you guys and the ecosystem because we're seeing the ecosystem form into two big camps. >> Ramesh: Yep. >> ISVs, which is an old school definition of independent software vendor, aka someone who writes software. >> Ramesh: Exactly. >> SaaS app. >> Ramesh: Correct. >> And then ecosystem software players that were once ISVs now have people building on top of them. >> Ramesh: Correct. >> They're building on top of the cloud. So you have that new hyper scale effect going on. >> Ramesh: Exactly. >> You got ISVs, which is software developers, software vendors. >> Ramesh: Correct. >> And ecosystems. >> Yep. >> What's that impact of that? Cause it's a new dynamic. >> Exactly, so if you take kind of enterprises, want to make sure that that their apps and the data center migrate to the cloud, new apps are developed the right way in the cloud, right? So that's kind of table stakes. So now what choices do they have? They listen to AWS and say, okay, I have all these cloud native services. I want to be able to instantiate all that. Now comes the interesting choice that they have to make. Do I go hire a whole bunch of people and do it myself or do I go there on the platform route, right? Because I made an architectural choice. Now I have to decide whether I want to do this myself or the platform choice. DIY works great for some, but you don't know what you're getting into, and it's people involved, right? People, process, all those fun things involved, right? So we show up there and say, you don't know what you don't know, right? Like because that's the nature of it. Why don't you invest in a platform like what what we provide, and then you actually build on top of it. We will, it's our job to make sure that we keep up with the innovation happening underneath the covers. And at the same time, this is not a closed ended system. You can actually build on top of our platform, right? And so that actually gives you a good mix. Now the care abouts are interesting. Some apps care about experience. Some apps care about latency. Some apps are extremely charty and extremely data intensive, but nobody wants to pay for it, right? And so it's a interesting Jenga that you have to play between experience versus security versus cost, right? And that makes kind of head of infrastructure and cloud platform teams' life really, really, really interesting. >> And this is why I love your background, and Stu Miniman, when he was with theCUBE, and now he's at Red Hat, we used to riff about the network and how network folks are now, those concepts are now up the top of the stack because the cloud is one big network effect. >> Ramesh: Exactly, correct. >> It's a computer. >> Yep, absolutely. No, and case in point, right, like say we're in let's say in San Jose here or or Palo Alto here, and let's say my application is sitting in London, right? The cloud gives you different express lanes. I can go down to my closest pop location provided by AWS and then I can go ride that all the way up to up to London. It's going to give me better performance, low latency, but I'm going to have to incur some costs associated with it. Or I can go all the wild internet all the way from Palo Alta up to kind of the ingress point into London and then go access, but I'm spending time on the wild internet, which means all kinds of fun things happen, right? But I'm not paying much, but my experience is not going to be so great. So, and there are various degrees of shade in them, of gray in the middle, right? So how do you pick what? It all kind of is driven by the applications. >> Well, we certainly want you back for Supercloud3, our next version of this virtual/live event here in our Palo Alto studios. Really appreciate you coming on. >> Absolutely. >> While you're here, give a quick plug for the company. Next minute, we can take a minute to talk about the success of the company. >> Ramesh: Absolutely. >> I know you got a fresh financing this past year. Plenty of money in the bank, going to ride this new wave, Supercloud wave. Give us a quick plug. >> Absolutely, yeah. So three years going on to four this calendar year. So it's an interesting time for the company. We have proven that our technology, product and our initial customers are quite happy with it. Now comes essentially more of those and scale and so forth. That's kind of the interesting phase that we are in. Also heartened to see quite a few of kind of really large and dominant players in the market, partners, channels and so forth, invest in us to take this to the next set of customers. I would say there's been a dramatic shift in the conversation with our customers. The first couple of years or so of the company, we are about three years old right now, was really about us educating them. This is what you need. This is what you need. Now actually it's a lot of just pull, right? We've seen a good indication, as much as a hate RFIs, a good indication is the number of RFIs that show up at our door saying we want you to participate in this because we want to understand more, right? And so as a, I think we are at an interesting point of the, of that shift. >> RFIs always like do all this work and hope for the best. Pray for a deal. You know, you guys on the right side of history. If a customer asks with respect to Supercloud, multicloud, is that your focus? Is that the direction you guys are going into? >> Yeah, so I would say we are kind of both, right? Supercloud and multicloud because we, our customers are hybrid, multiple clouds, all of the above, right? Our main pitch and kind of value back to the customers is go embrace cloud native because that's the right approach, right? It doesn't make sense to go reinvent the wheel on that one, but then make a really good choice about whether you want to do this yourself or invest in a platform to make your life easy. Because we have seen this story play out with many many enterprises, right? They pick the right technologies. They do a simple POC overnight, and they say, yeah, I can make this work for two apps, right? And then they say, yes, I can make this work for 100. You go down a certain path. You hit a wall. You hit a wall, and it's a hard wall. It's like, no, there isn't a thing that you can go around it. >> A lot of dead bodies laying around. >> Ramesh: Exactly. >> Dead wall. >> And then they have to unravel around that, and then they come talk to us, and they say, okay, now what? Like help me, help me through this journey. So I would say to the extent that you can do this diligence ahead of time, do that, and then, and then pick the right platform. >> You've got to have the talent. And you got to be geared up. You got to know what you're getting into. >> Ramesh: Exactly. >> You got to have the staff to do this. >> And cloud talent and skillset in particular, I mean there's lots available but it's in pockets right? And if you look at kind of web three companies, they've gone and kind of amassed all those guys, right? So enterprises are not left with the cream of the crop. >> John: They might be coming back. >> Exactly, exactly, so. >> With this downturn. Ramesh, great to see you and thanks for contributing to Supercloud2, and again, love your team. Very technical team, and you're in the right side of history in this one. Congratulations. >> Ramesh: No, and thank you, thank you very much. >> Okay, this is Supercloud2. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We'll be back right after this short break. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: TheCUBE presents Ignite '22 brought to you by Palo Alto Networks. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas guys and girls. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. This is day one of the cube's two day coverage of Palo Alto Networks Ignite at the MGM Grand. Dave, we've been having some great conversations today, we have a great two day lineup execs from Palo Alto, it's partner network, customers, et cetera. Going to be talking about infrastructure as code. We talk about that a lot, how Palo is partnering with its partner ecosystem to really help customers deliver security across the organization. >> We do a predictions post every year. Hopefully you can hear me. So we do this predictions post every year. I've done it for a number of years, and I want to say it was either 2018 or 2019, we predicted that HashiCorp was one of these companies to watch. And then last August, on August 9th, we had supercloud event in Palo Alto. We had David McJannet in, who is the CEO of HashiCorp. And we really see Hashi as a key player in terms of affecting multicloud consistency. Sometimes we call it supercloud, you building on top of the hyperscale cloud. So super excited to have HashiCorp on. >> Really an important conversation. We've got an alumni back with us. Asvin Ramesh is here the senior director of Alliances at HashiCorp. Welcome back. >> Yeah, thank you. Good to be back. >> Great to have you. Talk to us a little bit about what's going on at HashiCorp, your relationship with Palo Alto Networks, and what's in it for customers. >> Yeah, no, no, great question. So, Palo Alto has been a fantastic partner of ours for many years now. We started way back in 2018, 2019 focusing on the basics, putting integrations in place that customers can be using together. And so it's been a great journey. Both are very synergistic. Palo Alto is focused on multicloud, so are we, we focus on cloud infrastructure automation, and ensuring that customers are able to bring in agility, reliability, security, and be able to deliver to their business. And then Palo Alto brings in great security components to that multicloud story. So it's a great story altogether. >> Some of the challenges that organizations have been facing. Palo Alto just released a survey, I think this morning if I can find it here what's next in cyber organizations facing massive headwinds ransomware becoming a household word, business email compromise being a challenge. But also in the last couple of years the massive shift to multi-club or organizations are living an operating need to do so securely. It's no longer nice to have anymore. It's absolutely table stakes for survival, and being able to thrive and grow for any business. >> Yeah, no, I think it's almost a sort of rethinking of how you would build your infrastructure up. So the more times you do it right the better you are built to scale. That's been one of the bedrocks of how we've been working with Palo Alto, which is rethinking how should IT be building their infrastructure in a multicloud world. And I think the market timing is right for both of us in terms of the progress that we've been able to make. >> So, I mean Terraform has really become sort of a key ingredient to the cloud operating model, especially across clouds. Kind of describe how partners, and customers are are implementing that cross-cloud capability. What's that journey look like? What's the level of maturity today? >> Yeah, great question, Dave. So we sort of see customers in three buckets. The first bucket is when customers are in the initial phases of their cloud journey. So they have disparate teams in their business units try out clouds themselves. Typically there is some event that occurs either some sort of a security scare or a a cloud cost event that triggers a rethinking of how they should be thinking about this in a scalable way. So that leads to where the cloud operating model which is a framework that HashiCorp has. And we use that successfully with customers to talk them through how they should be thinking about their process, about how they should be standardizing how people operate, and then the products they should be including, but then you come to that stage, and you start to think about a centralized platform team that is putting in golden workflows, that is putting in as a service mindset for their business units thinking through policies at a corporate level. And then that is a second stage. And then, but this is also in some customers more around public clouds. But then the third stage that we see is when they start embracing their private cloud or the on-prem data center, and have the same principles address across both public clouds, and the on-prem data center, and then Terraform scale for any infrastructure. So, once you start to put these practices in place not just from a technology standpoint, but from a process, and product standpoint, you're easily able to scale with that central platform organization. >> So, it's all about that consistency across your estate irrespective of whether it's on-prem in AWS, Azure, Google, the Edge, maybe. I mean, that's starting, right? >> Asvin: Yes. >> And so when you talk about the... Break it down a little bit process and product, where do you and Palo Alto sort of partner and add value? What's that experience like? >> Yeah, so, I think as I mentioned earlier the bedrock is having ways in which customers are able to use our products together, right? And then being able to evangelize the usage of that product. So one example I'll give you is with Prisma Cloud, and Terraform Cloud to your point about Terraform earlier. So customers can be using Prisma Cloud with Terraform Cloud in a way that you can get security context telemetry during an infrastructure run, and then use policies that you have in Prisma Cloud to be able to get or run or to implement or run or make sure essentially it is adhering to your security policy or any other audits that you want to create or any other cost that you want to be able to control. >> Where are your customer conversations these days? We know that security is a board level conversation. Interestingly, in that same survey that Palo Alto released this morning that I mentioned they found that there's a big lack of alignment between the board and the C-suite staff, the executive suite in terms of security. Where are your conversations, and how are you maybe facilitating that alignment that needs to be there? Because security it's not a nice to have. >> Yeah, I think in our experience, the alignment is there. I think especially with the macro environment it's more about where where do you allocate those resources. I think those are conversations that we're just starting to see happen, but I think it's the natural progression of how the environment is moving, and maybe another quarter or two, I think we'll see greater alignment there. >> So, and I saw some data that said I guess it was a study you guys did 90% of customer say multicloud is working for them. That surprised me 'cause you hear all this negativity around multicloud, I've been kind of negative about multicloud to be honest. Like that's a symptom of MNA, and a or multi-vendor. But how do you interpret that? When they say multicloud is working? How so? >> Yeah, I think the maturity of customers are varied as I mentioned through the stages, right? So, there are customers who even in the initial phases of their journey where they have different business units using different clouds, and from a C standpoint that might still look like multicloud, right? Though the way we think about it is you should be really in stage two, and stage three to real leverage the real power of multicloud. But I think it's that initial hump that you need to go through, and being able to get oriented towards it, have the right set of skillsets, the thought process, the product, the process in place. And once you have that then you'll start reaping the benefits over a period of time, especially when some other environments events happen, and you're able to easily adjust to that because you're leveraging this multicloud environment, and you have a clear policy of where you'll use which cloud. >> So I interpreted that data as, okay, multicloud is working from the standpoint of we are multicloud, okay? So, and our business is working, but when I talk to customers, they want more to your point, they want that consistent experience. And so it's been by, to use somebody else's term, by default. Chuck Whitten I think came up with that term versus by design. And now I think they have an objective of, okay, let's make multicloud work even better. Maybe I can say that. And so what does that experience look like? That means a common experience all the way through my stack, my infrastructure stack, which is that's going to be interesting to see how that goes down 'cause you got three separate clouds, and are doing their own APIs. But certainly from a security standpoint, the PaaS layer, even as I go up the stack, how do you see that outcome, and say the next two to five years? >> Yeah, so, we go back to our customers, and they're very successful ones who've used the cloud operating model. And for us the cloud operating model for us includes four layers. So on the infrastructure layer, we have Terraform and Packer, on the security layer we have Vault and Boundary, on the networking layer we have Consul, and then on applications we have Nomad and Waypoint. But then you really look at, from a people process, and product standpoint, for people it's how do you standardize the workflows that they're able to use, right? So if you have a central platform team in place that is looking at common use cases that multiple business units are using. and then creates a golden workflow, for example, right? For these various business units to be able to use or creates what we call a system of record for cloud adoption it helps multiple business units then latch onto this work that this central platform team is doing. And they need to have a product mindset, right? So not like a project that you just start and end with. You have this continuous improvement mindset within that platform team. And they build these processes, they build these golden workflows, they build these policies in place, and then they offer that as a service to the business units to be able to use. So that increases the adoption of multicloud. And also more importantly, you can then allow that multicloud usage to be governed in the way that aligns with your overall corporate objectives. And obviously in self-interest, you'd use Terraform or Vault because you can then use it across multiple clouds. >> Well, let's say I buy into that. Okay, great. So I want that common experience 'cause so when you talk about infrastructure, take us through an example. So when I hear infrastructure, I say, okay if I'm using an S3 bucket over here an Azure blob over there, they got different APIs, they got different primitives. I want you to abstract that away. Is that what you do? >> Yeah, so I think we've seen different use cases being used across different clouds too. So I don't think it's sort of as simple as, hey, should I use this or that? It is ensuring that the common tool that you use to be able to leverage safer provisioning, right? Is Terraform. So the central team is then trained in not only just usage of Terraform open source, but their Terraform cloud, which is our managed service, and Terraform enterprise which is the self-managed, but on-prem product, it's them being qualified to be able to build these consistent workflows using whatever tool that they have or whatever skew that they have from Terraform. And then applying business logic on top of that to your point about, hey, we'd like to use AWS for these kind of workloads. We'd like to use GCP, for example, on data or use Microsoft Azure for some other type of- >> Collaboration >> Right? But the common tooling, right? Remains around the usage of Terraform, and they've trained their teams there's a standard workflow, there's standard process around it. >> Asvin, I was looking at that survey the HashiCorp state of cloud strategy survey, and it talked about skill shortages as being the number one barrier to multicloud. We talk about the cyber skills gap all the time. It's huge. It's obviously a huge issue. I saw some numbers just the other day that there's 26 million developers but there's less than 3 million cybersecurity professionals. How does HashiCorp and Palo Alto Networks, how do you help customers address that skills gap so that they that they can leverage multicloud as a driver of the business? >> Yeah, another great question. So I think I'd say in two or three different ways. One is be able to provide greater documentation for our customers to be able to self use the product so that with the existing people, for example, you build out a known example, right? You're trying to achieve this goal here is how you use our products together. And so they'll be able to self-service, right? So that's one. Second is obviously both of us have great services partners, so we are always working with these services partners to get their teams trained and scaled up around these skill gaps. And I think I'd say the third which is where we see a lot of adoption is around usage of the managed services that we have. If you take Palo Alto's example in this Palo Alto will speak better to it, but they have SOC services, right? That you can consume. So, they're performing that service for you. Similarly, on our side we have a HashiCorp Cloud Platform, HCP, where you can consume Vault as a service, you can consume Consul as a service. Terraform cloud is a managed service, so you don't need as many people to be able to run that service. And we abstract all the complexity associated with that by ourselves, right? So I'd say these are the three ways that we address it. >> So Zero Trust across big buzzword. We heard this in this morning keynotes, AWS is always saying, well, we'll talk about it too, but, okay, customers are starting to talk about Zero Trust. You talk to CISOs, they're like, yes, we're adopting this mentality of unless you're trusted, we don't trust you. So, okay, cool. So you think about the cloud you've got the shared responsibility model, and then you've got the application developers are being asked to do more, secure the code. You got the CISO now has to deal with not only the shared responsibility model, but shared responsibility models across clouds, and got to bring his or her security ethos to the app dev team, and then you got to audit kind of making sure they're like the last line of defense. So my question is when you think about code security and Zero Trust in that new environment the problem with a lot of the clouds is they don't make the CISOs life any easier. So I got to believe that your objective with Palo Alto is to actually make the organization's lives easier. So, how do you deal with all that complexity in specifically in a Zero Trust multicloud environment? >> Yeah, so I'll give you a specific example. So, on code to cloud security which is one of Palo Alto's sort of key focus area is that Prisma Cloud and Terraform Cloud example that I gave, right? Where you'd be able to use what we call run tasks essentially, web hook integrations to be able to get a run or provide some telemetry back to Prisma Cloud for customers to be able to make a decision. On the Zero Trust side, we partner both on the Prisma Cloud side, and the Cortex XSOAR side around our products of Vault and and Consul. So what Vault does is it allows you to control secrets, it allows you to store secrets. So a Prisma Cloud or a Cortex customer can be using secrets from Vault familiarly for that particular transaction or workflow itself, right? Rather than, and so it's based on identity, and not on the basis of just the secret sort of lying around. Same thing with console helps you with discovery, and management of services. So, Cortex and you can automate, a lot of this work can get automated using the product that I talked about from Zero Trust. I think the key thing for Zero Trust in our view is it is a end destination, right? So it'll take certain time, depends on the enterprise, depends on where things are. It's a question of specifically focusing on value that Palo Alto and HashiCorp's products bring to solve specific use cases within that Zero Trust bucket, and solve one problem at a time rather than try to say that, hey, only Palo Alto, and only HashiCorp or whatever will solve everything in Zero Trust, right? Because that is not going to be- >> And to your point, it's never going to end, right? I mean you're talk about Cortex bringing a lot of automation. You guys bring a lot of automation now Palo Alto just bought Cider Security. Now we're getting into supply chain. I mean it going to hit it at the edge and IoT, the people don't want another IoT stove pipe. >> Lisa: No. >> Right? They want that to be part of the whole picture. So, you're never done. >> Yeah, no, but it is this continuous journey, right? And again, different companies are different parts of that journey, and then you go and rinse and repeat, you maybe acquire another company, and then they have a different maturity, so you get them on board on this. And so we see this as a multi-generational shift as Dave like to call it. And we're happy to be in the middle of it with Palo Alto Networks. >> It's definitely a multi-generational shift. Asvin, it's been great having you back on theCUBE. Thank you for giving us the update on what Hashi and Palo Alto are doing, the value in it for customers, the cloud operating model. And we should mention that HashiCorp yesterday just won a Technology Partner of the Year award. Congratulations. Yes. >> We're very, very thrilled with the recognition from Palo Alto Networks for the Technology Partner of the Year. >> Congrats. >> Thank you Keep up the great partnership. Thank you so much. We appreciate your insights. >> Thank you so much. >> For our guest, and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin, live in Las Vegas. You watching theCUBE, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (upbeat music)

(gentle music) >> Hello, beautiful humans and welcome back to fabulous Las Vegas, where we are combating the dry air of the desert and all giggling about the rasp of our voice at this stage. We're theCUBE and we are live from AWS reinvent. I am Savannah Peterson, joined by the fabulous Paul Gillin. Paul, how are you holding up? How are your feet doing? >> My feet are, I can't feel them anymore. (both laugh) >> We can't feel much after these feet. >> Two miles. Just to get from, just to get to to the keynotes this morning. >> Did you do your cross training to prepare >> For, >> Apparently not well enough. (Savannah laughs) Not well enough. >> Well, it's great to have you here >> likewise. and I'm very excited for our next conversation. We've got Ramesh from Prosimo. >> Thank you. >> Savannah: Welcome to the show. How is the show going for you? How's your voice? >> Oh my God. I woke up this morning and I could not hear my own voice. I'm like, this is not me. I think it's the dry air here, so if I cough, I apologize in advance. But no, the show has been great. It's been nonstop at the booth. It's wonderful to see all the customers in one place so you don't have to schedule lots of meetings spread across three, four weeks. So you get to >> Savannah: Right. I, yeah >> So yesterday was like eight to six, nonstop and it was awesome, right? Because you get to meet all these guys. The other important thing is the focus on the right layer, right? Like, I loved the keynote from Adam. It was about applications, services, data. Nowhere in there was there like infrastructure. Like we are infrastructure, right? I actually love that because that's where the focus should be and that's what customers are caring about right? So it's, it's been great so far. >> Yeah. I'm so happy to hear your booth's packed. I know exactly what you mean. I mean, we're going to be talking about optimization. It's a theme, but we also optimize our time here >> Ramesh: Yeah. >> on the show floor by getting to engage with our community. Prosimo's been around for three years just in case folks aren't familiar, give us the pitch. >> Sure. We are in the cloud networking space, solving for two problems. What happens within the cloud as you bring up VPCs, vnet and workloads, how are they able to talk to each other, secure each other, and how to use those access workloads? Those are the two problems that we solve for. It stemmed from really us seeing a complete diversion in what cloud wants versus what network really focuses on. Cloud has been always focused on applications and speed of operations and network has always been about reliability, scalability, and robust architecture. And we didn't really see these things come together. So that's when prosimo was born. >> So what are some of the surprises newcomers to the cloud may encounter with networking, with cloud networking that was not a factor when they were fully on-prem? >> So the first thing is in the cloud, you can't deal with the workload the same way you dealt with in the data center. In the data center, you usually had pools of service. They were all allocated some level of addressing. And it was not about the workload, it was more about the identity, IP addresses and so forth. In the cloud, those things have completely gotten demolished, right? You have to refer to a S3 service as an S3 service. It's not an IP endpoint. IP endpoint comes and goes, right? >> Savannah: Yeah. >> And so you have to completely shift around that, right? >> Now, this actually challenges almost 10 years, 12, 20 years maybe, of networking that we knew about, right? So that's why cloud networking is almost night and day difference compared to regular networking right? And, we're seeing that and that's what we are really helping customers with. >> What are some of the trends that you're seeing? I, well actually, let me ask you this question. Do you, is there an industry or vertical you work with specifically? I would imagine most people across, >> Ramesh: The Yeah, across. >> Yeah. >> Anybody that has workloads in the cloud right? >> Yeah, right. >> Ramesh: That's, >> I mean I can't imagine any companies that would have that. >> Exactly. (Savannah laughs) >> What are some of the trends that you're seeing? I know we talk about time to value. We talk about cost optimization. Is that the top priority for your customers? >> Yeah. Up until end of last year, a lot of the focus was about speed of operations. And so people would look at what are the type of workloads? How do I enable things? How do I empower my development team? So, if I'm the cloud platform team responsible for connecting, securing and making sure my applications can get deployed smooth and fast, that was the primary focus. Fast forward to this year, we started to see this a little bit at the beginning of the year. Now it's in full force. It's about cost control, right? It's about egress charges coming out of the cloud. Suddenly the cloud bill and every single line item on the cloud bill is in focus, right? And so that has a direct impact on what does this mean for networking. Cloud networking for many may not be familiar, it's about 14% of the cloud bill. And so anything that materially moves the needle on the cloud networking costs can actually have a have a big impact, right? And so we have seen the focus on the speed of operations are still there but cloud cost control has become a big part of it. >> So where are the excesses? I mean, it's, it's a big part of the bill. Where can company, where do companies typically waste money in networking costs? >> So, if you bring a person who understands networking and networking architecture really, really well, they'll can build a solid architecture, but they'll not focus on operations and automation. If you bring a 25 year old, they will automate the heck out of it. They know python day in and day out. And so they'll automate the heck out of it but it will not be with a robust architecture, right? And so you, on one hand, you end up wasting because you do things very suboptimally. It's a solid architecture, it's a really good design but it's really bad for operations. In the other hand, with push of a button you can get anything done but underneath the covers, underneath the hood, if you look at it, it's a mess, right? And so you have more competence than necessary. And so, what customers want is really a best of both, right? You need solid architecture that has all the right principles but also you need the automation so that you don't employ four, five people and a whole toolkit in order to make things work, right? And that's where we see most of the efficiencies come from >> You said you were you were super busy at your booth. Do customers understand that this is a problem now? >> So more so now than I would say last year. The last reinvent when we had a session. >> Yeah. >> We had to educate a lot of people on these are the requirements for cloud networking. Thanks to Gartner, thanks to many of the sessions you guys have been doing as well. The focus and the education for what cloud networking requires has started to come about. Now, this is where the savviness of the customer is important, right? Like there are customers in different stages of their journey. Those that have been operating in the cloud for three years plus, know that they've crossed that initial phase, right? Like you have basic hygiene, you have certain things and moving from hundreds of VPCs to maybe about thousand, right? And so at that time, the set of challenges I need to work with are very, very different, right? So now increasingly we are seeing at the booth the challenges are, "Hey, I know how to operate in the cloud". Right? Like, "Don't talk to me about that." Right? "But how do I get from hundred to a thousand?" Because I have a gun to my head. My CIO has said, I need to decommission my data centers in the next couple of years and I need to go all in on cloud. Help me with that, right? And so it's the, I wouldn't call it like massive scale it's the scale from kind of the trivial to the next stage that's actually causing a lot of these problems to surface. >> It's that layer of transformation. >> Ramesh: Yeah. It's when you've made the commitment and now we've got to catch everything up >> [Ramesh} exactly. >> across the company locations and probably a variety of different silos doing different things. >> Ramesh: Exactly. Yeah. >> Super complex. So, how do folks get started with you? >> Yeah, so typically we start with like, even if the customer says, "Here's what my blueprint looks like." We say, "Bring two regions." That's it, two regions, a few workloads. We'll help you set up the connectivity, set up the secure access required, set up the foundational things There's a certain level of automation, right? Let's get to that point because governance is different. The cloud privileges are different so let's work through all of that, right? Usually this takes about a week or so. The actual proof of concept, proof of value can be done in a day, but getting permissions and what not takes about, about a week, right? And once you show two regions then it's actually game on, right? Then you go from 10 VPCs to a hundred to a thousand and it's just like one to one thing after another. So that's usually how we see customers get started. We have a full stack that covers kind of what does this mean for the network to application services to kind of layer seven and so forth. We tell the customer, as much as we want you to focus on the entire stack, let's start with one, right? Start baby steps, start with one. Because for many, cloud itself is, I wouldn't say new but they're in a region that's not comfortable, right? So you wannna, you don't want to throw too much at them. >> Savannah: Right. >> So we help them kind of progressively move towards different types of workplace. >> Savannah: Yeah. >> And you have a multicloud story as well. >> Ramesh: That's correct. >> So when companies begin to cross clouds with workloads, move them between clouds, what kinds of issues emerge then? >> Yeah, so there are two parts for this, right? There is the AWS and data center and then there is the AWS plus other clouds. Two different set of problems, actually, >> Paul: Hm-hmm. Hm-hmm. The AWS plus connectivity, back into my data center almost every single enterprise. We deal with kind of the global 2000. Every single one of them has that, right? And so we kind of, we go through a series of steps, come up with an architecture, deploy a solution. After that, it's, Hey, I have BigQuery in Google that needs to talk back to an S3 bucket out here. Like, no networking solution can help you with that. Like, you need like cloud native principles in order to come into the picture. So increasingly we are seeing requests for, hey I have a distributed workload. It's not, it's not that one single application is spread across multiple clouds, but I have these islands of workloads that all need to talk to each other. >> Paul: Right. And what I don't want to do is actually build highways that actually connect all these things together because that's a waste of time. I actually want to make sure that only these applications that care about the talking to each other, are allowed to talk to each other. So that's kind of one foundational thing that we see. A few others are around compliance and governance. So we say, Hey, if I'm a retailer, I need to have some workloads in Azure some in the GCP and so forth. So it depends on kind of the industry compliance, regulatory requirements and so forth. >> So many different needs >> Ramesh: Exactly. for so many different types of companies. But also, you know, creating that efficiency is so great. >> Ramesh: Yup. >> And especially that time to value tune, cost reduction >> Ramesh: Yup. doing a lot of great things for your customers. There's a note on my run sheet here that you've seen some success with Topgolf and I suspect we have some golfers in the audience. John even used to be a caddy. We had a caddy segment with someone who was a pro caddy. Drew, when we were at Cape Con. Tell us about that story. >> So it was a really wild idea. We said, okay people are going to be walking around 22,000 steps right? >> Savannah: Yeah. >> And so >> Like Paul, >> And, they're going to be talking to people, listening to sessions. So we said, let's, what do most others do? You set up some time in a restaurant, you come, you have a social time, and what not. We said, let's give people something different. So we reserve the Topgolf here and we opened it up. We initially paid for a certain number of things. It's actually gone three x of that right now. So we had in the Topgolf, can you give us like the entire thing? I think people just want to go do something different, right? >> Savannah: Yeah. >> And of course the topic is important but equally important is like, I just want to have a good time, right? >> Yeah. And if you, hit a few And there you go. >> It doesn't have to relate back to network >> Cloud, network. >> Yeah, exactly. And so >> Well, it's all about building community. >> Exactly. >> And especially right now, we all, you know, we're stronger together. >> Ramesh: Yup. We're entering a unique time, we're coming out of a unique time. >> Ramesh: Exactly. >> And, no, I think that's great. And we actually do a swag segment here on theCUBE, differentiating on the show floor. I mean, it's clear because of how thoughtful you are >> Ramesh: Yeah. there's a reason that your, that your booth is so busy. >> Ramesh: That's right. >> So what's next? What can you, can you give us a little sneak preview? What's coming out for you? >> Yeah, so, I'm sensitive and sympathetic to all the macroeconomic conditions that are happening but there's been, we have not skipped a beat. So our business is growing really well. Thanks to all the things that are happening in the cloud. Increasingly, folks are looking at, you know, how how do I move in mass into the cloud? And so a few themes have come about as a result. One, certainly around cost control. How do I, how do I make, how do we make sure that we help our customers in that journey, right? So we have a few things around those lines. Modernization, especially after you go through the first few workloads, the next few that come about are invariably modern workloads. And modern workloads is this sensitive thing where I think the ultra savvy developers know what to do but the infrastructure guys don't know what to do in order to serve, right? And so we have actually developed a set of capabilities to help with that kind of modernization, right? Because it's not enough if your apps are modernized, your infrastructure that serves the apps also need to be modernized. And so those are the, those are the things and certainly, getting our customers less than us. We want to get our customers to talk. And so you'll see quite a bit of that as well. >> I want to ask you about a statement that was in the notes that we were reading, running up this interview. Zero Trust network access is the next solution that will be disrupted. What do you mean by that? >> So, when we started the company about three years ago, zero test network access was there. It was about maybe two, three years old at that time. And so we said, it needs to be done differently in the cloud. Why? Because you are a user. You're trying to access an application in the cloud. Do you care what's in the middle? You really don't, you just want to be able to open up your laptop, go to dub dub something.com and you should be able to access, right? But that's not how the experience is today. There's invariably something that comes, a middle mile solution that comes in the middle, right? And then the guy needs to operationalize all of that. And that now passes on to you. You need to launch a an agent on your thing, connect into something. It just brings a lot of complexity, right? So we looked at that problem and we said, cloud has done really really a few things really, really well, right? It's literally at your doorstep. Cloud presence is literally at your doorstep. So as you open up your browser, connect from your home, I don't need anything in the middle. I am jumping straight into the cloud. And so when you do that, then you actually have the luxury of bringing a few capabilities to the entry point of the cloud so that security can be done better, posture control can be done better and so on and so forth. So we developed those capabilities almost three years ago. We have quite a few large enterprises that have deployed this. And we fundamentally believe on building on top of the hyperscale network because billions of tens of billions of dollars go into the investment here. And we want to be building a layer of value on top, right? And so we've been working closely with our AWS buddies here and actually built capabilities so that the infrastructure presence, the massive reach and also the underlying capabilities for zero trust are provided. But what the customer regains in terms of value is through our platform, right? And so we'll see a whole lot more innovation along these lines. Probably bad news for the Middle Mile provider who sit in the, in the middle because hey AWS is literally at your doorstep, so you have to rethink your strategy. >> Going to be a lot of agility >> Ramesh: Yes, absolutely. >> In a very different context than we normally use it in Nerdland. And no, I think that's great. So we have, it's an exciting time for you as a company. We have a new challenge here at Reinvent. >> Okay. >> On theCUBE. I know you're a venerable alumni. >> Yep. >> You have been on theCUBE multiple times with multiple companies which is very impressive. Which says a lot about you. Although given how fun this interview's been, I'm not surprised. Give us your 30 second, Instagram real highlight, sound bite on the biggest or most important theme or takeaway from this year's show. >> From this show? Yeah, so if you look across the keynotes in all the sessions, the focus is on data, services and the applications. So the biggest takeaway I would offer anybody is focus on that first because that's where the outcome needs to shine. The rest of the stuff is a means to an end. I am an infrastructure guy through and through, I have been for the last 20 years. It hurts me to say infrastructure is a means to end but it is, right. Let the people dealing with the infrastructure deal with the infrastructure. If you are a customer or a client of the service, focus on the outcome, focus on the apps, focus on the services focus on on the data. That would be the biggest takeaway. >> Savannah: I appreciate your >> Paul: Words of wisdom >> Savannah: transparency. Yeah, no, exactly. Words of wisdom and very honest words of wisdom. Really great to talk to you about intelligent infrastructure. >> Absolutely. >> Savannah: Thank you so much for being on the show, Ramesh. >> Thank you. >> Savannah: It's been, it's been awesome. Paul, it's always a pleasure. >> Likewise. Thank you all for tuning in today here live from the show floor at AWS, reinvent in beautiful sin city, in the high desert and the high end dry desert with Paul Gillin. My name is Savannah Peterson and you're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech coverage. (gentle music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, welcome to this Cube Conversation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, host of theCube. We have a returning Cube alumni, Ramesh Prabagan, who is the co-founder and CEO of Prosimo.io. Great to see you, Ramesh. Thanks for coming in to our studio, and welcome to the new layout. >> Thanks for having me here, John. After a series of Zoom conversations, it's great to be live and in the flesh! >> Great to be in person. We also got a new stage for our Supercloud event, which we've been opening up to the community, looking forward to getting your perspective on that soon as well. But I want to keep the conversation really about you guys. I want to get the story down. You guys came out of stealth, Multicloud, Supercloud is right in your wheelhouse. >> Exactly. >> You got to love Supercloud. >> Yeah. As I walked in, I saw Supercloud all over the place, and it just gives you a jolt of energy. >> Well, you guys are in the middle of the action. Your company, I want you to explain this in a minute, is in the middle of this next wave. Because we had the structural change I called Cloud One. Amazon, use case, developers, no need to build a data center, all that goodness happens, higher level service of abstractions are happening, and then Azure comes in. More PaaS, and then more install base, now they're nipping at the heels. So full on hyperscale, Cap Backs growth, great for everybody. Now comes new use cases. Cloud to cloud, app to app, you see Databricks, Snowflake, MongoDB, all doing extremely well by leveraging the Cap Backs, now it's an ops problem. >> Exactly. >> Now ops and security. >> Yeah. It's speed of applications. >> How are you guys vectoring into that? Explain what you guys do. >> Absolutely. So let me take kind of the customer pain point first, right? Because it's always easier to explain that, and then we explain what is it that we do. So, it's no surprise. Applications are moving into the cloud, or people are building apps in the cloud in masses. The infrastructure that's sitting in front of these applications, cutting across networking, security, the operational piece associated with that, does not move at the same speed. The apps sometimes get upgraded two, three times a day, the infrastructure gets touched one time a week at best. And so increasingly, the cloud platform teams, the developers are all like, "Hey, why? Why? Why?" Right? "I thought things were supposed to move fast in the cloud." It doesn't. Now, if you double click on that, really, it's two reasons. One, those that won't have consistency across the stack that they hired in the data center, they bring a virtual form factor of that stack and line it up in the cloud, and before you know it, it's cost, it's operation complexity, there are multiple single panes of glass, all the fun stuff associated... >> Just to interject real quick. It is fast in the cloud if you're a developer. >> Exactly. >> So it's kind of like, hurry up, slow down, wait. >> Correct. >> So the developers are shifting left, open source is booming. Things are fine for developers right now. If you're a developer, things are good. >> But the guy sitting in front of that... >> The ops guys, they've got to deal with things like lock-in, choice, security. >> Exactly. And those are really the key challenges. We've seen some that actually said, "Hey, know what, I don't want to bring my data center stack into the cloud. Let me go cloud-native. And they start to build it up. 14 services from AWS, 15 from iGR, 14 more from GCP, even if you are in a single cloud. They just keep it to that. I need to know how to put this together. Because all these services are great, but how do I put this together. And enterprises don't have just one application, they have hundreds of these applications. So the requirements of a database is different than a service mesh, different than a serverless application, different than a web application. And before you know it, "How do I put all these things together?" And so we looked at this problem, and we said, "Okay. We subscribe to the fact that cloud-native is the way to go, right, but something needs to be there to make this simple." Right? And so, first thing that we did was bring all these cloud-native services together, we help orchestrate that, and we said, "okay, know what, Mr. Enterprise? We got you covered." Right? But now, it doesn't stop there. That's like, 10% of the value, right? What do you really need? What do you care about now? Because the apps are in the center of the universe, and who's talking to it? It's another application sitting either in the same cloud, or in a different cloud, or it's a user connecting into the application. So now, let's talk about what are the networking security operational requirements required for these apps to talk to each other, or the user to talk to the application. That's really what we focus on. >> Yeah. And I think one of the things that's driving this opportunity for you, and I want to get your reaction to this, is that the modern application movement is all about cloud-native. Okay, they're obviously doing great. Now, kind of the kumbaya moment in enterprise is that the security team and ops teams have to play ball and be friends with the developer, and vice versa. So harmony's coming there. So the little harmony. And two, the business is driving apps. IT is transforming over. This is why the Supercloud idea is interesting to Dave and I. Because when we coined that term, multi-cloud was not a market. Everyone has multiple clouds, 'cause they have Microsoft Office, that's now in the cloud, they got SQL Server, I mean it's really kind of Microsoft Cloud. >> Exactly. >> So you have a cloud. But do you have ops teams building on the stack? What about the network layer? This is where the rubber meets the road. >> Absolutely, yeah. And if you look at the challenges there, if you just focus on networking and security, right? When applications need to talk to each other, you have a whole bunch of underlying services, but somebody needs to put this thing on top. Because what you care about is "can these group of users talk to these class of applications." Or, "these group of applications, can they talk to each other," right? This whole notion of connectivity is just table stakes. Everybody just assumes it's there, right? It's the next layer up, which is, "how do I bring Zero Trust access? How do I get the observability?" And observability is not just a bunch of pretty donut chats. I have had people look to me in my previous company, the start-up, and said, "okay, give me all these nice donut chats, but so what? What do you want me to do with this?" And so you have to translate that into real actions, right? "How do I bring Zero Trust capabilities? How do I bring the observability capabilities? How do I understand cloud-native and networking and bring those things together so that you can help solve for the problem." >> It's interesting, one of the questions I had here to ask you was "what does it mean to be cloud-native, and why now?" And you brought up Zero Trust, trust and verify, these are security concepts. But if you look at what's going on at KubeKon and CNCF and Linux Foundation, software supply chain's a huge issue, where trust is the issue. They want trust there, so you got Zero Trust here. What is it? Zero Trust or trust? I mean, what's there? Is one hardware based, perimeter, networking? That kind of perimeter's dead, ton of... >> No, the whole- >> Trust or Zero Trust. >> The whole concept of Zero Trust is don't trust what is underlying, just trust what you're talking to. So if you and I talking to each other, John, you need to trust me, I need to trust you, and be able to have this conversation. >> You've been verified. >> Exactly, right? But in the application world, if you talk about two apps that are talking to each other, let's say there is a web application in one AWS region talking to a database in a different region, right? Now, do you want to make sure you are able to build that trust all the way from the application to the application? Or do you want to move the trust boundary to the two entities that are talking to each other so that irrespective of what they go on underneath the covers, you can be always sure that these two things are trusted. >> So, Ramesh, I was on LinkedIn yesterday, I wrote a comment, Dave Vallante wrote a post on Supercloud, we're talking about it, and I wrote, "Cloud as a commodity," question, and then a bunch of other stuff that we're going to talk about, and Keith Townsend jumped on that, and got on Twitter, put a poll, "Is cloud a commodity? Source: me." So, it started a big thread. And the reaction was interesting. And my point was to be provocative on "Cloud isn't commodity, but there's commodity elements." EC2 and S3, you can look at that and say, "that's commodity IaaS," but Amazon Web Services has done an amazing job for higher level services. Okay, so how does that translate into the use cases that you see that you guys are going after and solving, because it's the same kind of concept. IaaS and SaaS have to work together to solve problems, but that's in an integrated environment, say, in a native-cloud. How does that work across clouds? >> Yeah, no, you bring up a great point, John. So, let's take the simple use case, right? Let's keep the user to app thing to the side. Let us say two apps need to talk to each other, right? There are multiple ways in which you can solve this problem. You can build highways. That's what our customers call it. I'll build highways. I don't care what goes on those highways, I'll just build highways. You bring any kind of application workload on it, I just make sure that the highways are good, right? That's kind of the lowest common denominator. It's the path to least resistance. You can get stuff done, but it's not going to move the needle, right? Then you have really modern, kind of service networking, where, okay, I'm looking at every single HTTP, API, n:point, whatnot, and I'm optimizing for that. Right? Great if you know what you're doing, but, like, if you have thousands of these applications, it's not going to be really feasible to do that. And so, what we have seen customers do, actually, is employ a mixed approach, where they say, "I'm going to build these highways, the highways are going to make sure that I can go from one place to another, and maybe within regions, across clouds, whatnot, but then, I have specific requirements that my business needs, that actually needs tweaking, right? And so I'm going to tweak those things. That's why, what we call as like, full stack transit, is exactly that, right, which is, I'll build you the guts of it so that hey, you know what, if somebody screams at you, "Hey, why is my application not accessible?" You don't have that problem. It is always accessible. But then, the requirements for performance, the requirements for Zero Trust, the requirements for segmentation, and all of that are things that... >> That's a hard problem. >> That's a hard problem to solve. >> And you guys are solving that? >> Absolutely, exactly. >> So, let me throw this at you. So, okay, I get that. And by the way, that's exactly what we're seeing. Dave and I were also debating about multi-cloud as what it is. Now, the nirvana definition is, "Well, I have a workload, that's going to work the same, and just magically just shift to Azure." (Ramesh laughs) >> Like, 'cause there's better resources. >> There is no magic there. >> So, but this brings up the point of operations. Now, Databricks and Snowflake, they're building their software to run on multi-cloud seamlessly. Now they can do that, 'cause it's their application. What is the multi-cloud use case, so that's a Supercloud use case in your mind, because right now it's not yet there. What is the Supercloud use case that's going to allow this seamless management or workloads. What's your view? >> Yeah, so if you take enterprise, right? Large enterprise in particular. They invariably have some workloads that are on, let's say, if the primary cloud is AWS, there are some workloads in Azure. Maybe they have acquired a new company, maybe a start-up that uses GCP, whatnot. So they have sprinkles of workloads in other clouds. >> So that's the breed kind of thing. >> Yeah, exactly. That's not what causes anybody to wake up in the morning and say, "I need to have a Supercloud strategy." That's not the thing, right? But now, increasingly you're seeing "pick the right cloud for the appropriate workload." That is going to change quite a bit. Because I have my infrastructure heavy workloads in AWS. I have quite a bit of like, analytics and mining type of applications that are better on GCP. I have all of my package applications work well on Azure, right? How do I make sure all of this. And it's not apps of this kind. Even simple things like VDI. VDI always used to be, "I have this instance I run up" and whatnot. Now every single cloud provider is giving you their own flavor of virtual desktop. And so, how do you make sure all of these things work together, right? And once again, what we have seen customers do is they settle on one cloud as their primary, but then you always have sprinkles of workloads across all of the clouds. Now, you could also go down the path, and you're increasingly seeing this, you could go down the path of, "Hey, I'm using cloud as backbone," right? Cloud providers have invested massive amounts of dollars to make sure that the infrastructure reaches there. Literally almost to the extent that every user in a metro city is ten milliseconds from the public cloud. And so they have allowed for that. Now, you can actually use cloud backbones to get the availability, the liability and whatnot. So these are some new use cases that we have seen actually blew up in customers. I was just doing an interview, and the topic was the innovator's dilemma. And one of the panelists said, "It's not the innovator's dilemma, it's the integrator dilemma." Because if you have commodity, and you have choices on, say, backbones and whatnot for transit, the integration is the key glue now. What's your reaction to that? >> Absolutely. And we have seen, we used to spend quite a bit of time in kind of what is the day zero problem, right? Like, how do I put this together? Conversations are moved past that, because there are multiple ways in which you can do that right now, right? Conversations are moving to kind of, "this is more of an operational problem for me." It's not just operations in the form of "Hey, I need to find out where the problem is, troubleshoot it, and so forth. But I need to make like really high quality decisions." And those decisions are going to be guided by data. We have enterprise customers that acquire new companies. Or they have a new site that they open up. >> It's a mishmash. >> Yeah, exactly. It's a New York based company and they acquire a team out in Sidney, Australia, right? Does your cloud tell you today that you have new users, or new applications that are in Sidney, and naturally just extend? No, it doesn't. Somebody has to look at the macro problem, look at "Where are all my workloads?" Do a bunch of engineering to make that work, right? We took it upon ourselves to say "Hey, you know what, twenty-four hours later, you're going to get a recommendation in the platform that says, 'okay, you have new set of applications, a new set of users coming from Sidney, Australia, what have you done about it?' Click a button, and then you expand on it. >> It's kind of like how IT became the easy way to run the data center. Before IT you had to be a PhD, and roll out, I mean, you know how it was, right? So you're kind of taking that same approach. Okay, well, Ramesh, great stuff. I want to do a followup, certainly with you on this. 'Cause you're in the middle of where this wave is going, this structural change, and certainly can participate in that Supercloud conversation. But for your company, what's going on there? Give us an update, customer activity, what's it like, you guys came out of stealth, what's been the reaction, give a plug for the company, who you going to hire, take a minute to plug it. >> Oh, wonderful, thank you. So, primary use cases are really around cloud networking. How do you go within the cloud, and across clouds, and to the cloud, right? So those are really the key use cases. We go after large enterprises predominantly, but any kind of mid enterprise that is extremely cloud oriented, has lot of workloads in the cloud, equally applicable, applicable there. So we have about 60 of the Fortune 500s that we are engaged in right now. Many of them are paying customers as well. >> How are they buying, service? Is it... >> Yeah. So we provide software that actually sits inside the customer's own administrative control, delivered as a service, that they can use to go- >> So on-premise hosting or in the cloud? >> Entirely in the cloud, delivered as a service, so they didn't need to take care of the maintenance and whatnot, but they just consume it from the cloud directly, okay? And so, where we are right now is essentially, I have a branch of repeatable use cases that many customers are employing us for. So again, building highways, many different ways to build highways, at the same time take care of the micro-segmentation requirements, and then importantly, this whole NetDevOps, right? This whole NetDevOps is a cultural shift that we have seen. So if you are a network engineer, NetDevOps seems like it's a foreign term, right? But if you are an operational engineer, then NetDevOps, you know exactly what to do. So bringing all those principles together, making sure that the networking teams are empowered to essentially embrace the cloud that I created, the single biggest thing that we have done, I would say done well, is we have built very well on top of the cloud provider. So we don't go against cloud-native services. They have done that really, really well. It makes no sense to go say, "I have a better transit gateway than you." No. Hands down, an AWS transit gateway, or an Azure V1 and whatnot, are some of the best services that they have provided. But what does that mean? >> How do you build software into it? >> Exactly, right? And so how can you build a layer of software on top, so that when you attach that into the applications, right, that you can actually get the experience required, you can get the security requirements and so forth. So that's kind of where we are. We're also humbled by essentially some of the mega partners that have taken a bet on us, sometimes to the extent that, we're a 70% company, and some of the partners that we are talking to actually are quite humbling, right? >> Hey, lot more resource. >> Exactly, yeah. >> And how many rounds of financing have you done? >> So we have done two rounds of financing, we have raised about 55,000,000 in capital, again, really great set of investors backing us up, and a strong sense of conviction, on kind of where we are going. >> Do you think you're early, or not? 'Cause, that's always probably the biggest scary, I can see the smile, is that what keeps you up at night? >> So, yeah, exactly, I go through these phases internally in my head. >> The vision's right on the money, no doubt about it. >> So when you win an opportunity, and we have like, a few dozen of these, right, when you win an opportunity, you're like, "Yes, absolutely, this is where it is," right, and you go for a week and you don't win something, and you're like, "Hey man, why are we not seeing this?" Right, and so you go through these cycles, but I'll tell you with conviction, the fact that customers are moving workloads into the public cloud, not in dozens but in like, the hundreds and the thousands, essentially means that they need something like this. >> And the cloud-native wave is driving big time. >> Exactly, right. And so, when the customer as a conversation with AWS, Azure, GCP, and they are privy to all the services, and we go in after that and talk about, "How do I put this together and help you focus on your outcomes?" That mentally moves them. >> It's a day zero opportunity, and then you got headroom beyond that. >> Exactly. So that's the positive side of it, and enterprises certainly are sometimes a little cautious about when they're up new technologies and so forth. It's a natural cycle. Fortunately, again we are humbled by the fact that we have a few dozen of the pioneering customers that are using our platform. That gives you the legitimacy for a start-up. >> You got great pedigree on clients. Real quick, final question. 30 seconds. What's the pain point, for people watching, when do they call you in? What's their environment look like, what are some of the things that give the signals that you guys got to get the call? >> If you have more than, let's say five or ten VPCs in the cloud, and you have not invested in building a networking platform that gives you the connectivity, the security, the observability, and the performance requirements, you absolutely have to do that, right? Because we have seen many, many customers, it goes from 5 to 50 to 100 within a week, and so you don't want to be caught essentially in the midst of that. >> One more final final question. Since you're a seasoned entrepreneur, you've been there, done that previous times, >> Yeah, I've got scars. (laughs) >> Yes, we've all got scar tissue. We've been doing theCube for 12 years, we've seen a lot of stuff. What's the difference now in this market that's different than before? What's exciting you? What's the big change? What's, in your opinion, happening now that's really important that people should pay attention to? >> Absolutely. A lot of it is driven by one, the focus on the cloud itself, right? That's driving a sense of speed like never before. Because in the infrastructure world, yeah you do it today, oh, you do it six months from now, you had some leeway. Here, networking security teams are being yelled at almost every single day, by the cloud guy saying, "You guys are not moving fast enough, fast enough, fast enough." So that thing is different. So it helps, going to shrink the sale cycle for us. So second big one is, nobody knows, essentially, the new set of use cases that are coming about. We are seeing patterns emerge in terms of new use cases almost every single day. Some days it's like completely on the other end of the spectrum. Like, "I'm only serverless and service mesh." On the other end, it's like, "I have a package application, I'm moving it to the cloud." Right? And so, we're learning a lot as well. >> A great time for Supercloud. >> Exactly. >> Do the cloud really well, make it super, bring it to other use cases, stitch it all together, make it easy to use, reduce the complexity, it's just evolution. >> Yeah. And our goal is essentially, enterprise customers should not be focused so much on building infrastructure this way, right? They should focus on users, application services, let vendors like us worry about the nitty-gritty underneath. >> Ramesh, thank you for this conversation. It's a great Cube conversation. In the middle of all the action, Supercloud, multi-cloud, the future is going to be very much cloud-based, IaaS, SaaS, connecting environments. This is the cloud 2.0, Superclouds. And this is what people are going to be working on. I'm John Furrier with theCube, thanks for watching. (soft music)

(light music) >> Welcome back to Supercloud 22. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here Palo Alto for a big event. Supercloud 22, we've got a great ecosystem conversation here. Ramesh Prabagaran, who's the co-founder and CEO, Prosimo. Ramesh, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having me, John. >> So, I wanted to bring you in because we've had previous CUBE conversations around cloud networking, latency, you also have some, some pedigree, Viptela. The folks in the industry know that's been a deep tech company. >> Yep. >> You have been around the block. You've seen the movie before. You've seen the tech trends. You've seen the hype. You've seen the fluff. Where's the meat on the bone with Supercloud in your opinion? >> So it, it starts with what enterprises are struggling with, right? And if you take a very simple example, it's actually quite fresh in my mind because I was just having this conversation this morning. A large bank has an application sitting in AWS, right? And they have to provide the application access to the treasury, to their suppliers, to ticker feeds, to all their downstream partners, and so on and so forth. Guess what? They don't control, where all those things are. They're in very different regions and very different clouds. And so you, whether you like it or not, you have a problem here, right? And so it starts with, for the particular bank, what are the capabilities that they need, right? And so AWS provides a whole host of native capabilities, but they still need to build a few more things on top. So going by, essentially the definition of Supercloud, even within a single cloud you need to build a few more capabilities on top. That gets worsened by the fact that now you need to provide access to various other clouds, various other regions and, and so forth. So, whether we like it or not, this movie is here to stay. >> What's the difference between Supercloud and multi-cloud? Because multi-cloud, I've been saying, is not necessarily a market yet. >> Correct, yes. So, Supercloud is essentially the cloud native capabilities provided by the hyperscalers, get you probably 30, 40% of the way, right? But then, in order to deliver on a care about, right? In our case, from a cloud networking standpoint, that is experience, that's performance, reliability, zero trust access, and then so forth. You have to take that a little bit further, and so we have vendors, like us, that actually build capabilities on top of the hyperscalers, right? Now, even if you think of a single cloud, how you build that is different on AWS than it's on Azure, than on GCP. But do the customers care? No, they want to be able to consume it in exactly the same way across all of them. So, whether it's multi-cloud or a single cloud, you have a problem that is white space on top of the hyperscalers capabilities that you just need to build. >> And what problems is it solving today? Because again, I, again, multi-cloud, I've yet seen the problem. I kind of get what's happening. Multiple clouds do exist. Use cases matter, maybe best debri, but they're standalone. They're not really interoperating, so to speak. So people have been successful on, on public cloud. >> That's correct, yes. >> For use cases? >> Absolutely. So even if you take a single cloud, for example, right? You have multiple problems to, to address. So let's take the example of, I have users coming from various different regions, around the globe, and I have apps that are spread, maybe not across like all clouds, but single cloud, maybe multiple regions, right? Now, I have a reach problem, which is, I need to go from where the user is to where the application is sitting. I have an experience problem because if my spinning wheel shows up, I'm going to go crazy. I have a security problem because I want to make sure it's only me that have access to it, right? But does the cloud provider solve for this entirely? No, they give you the nuts, the bolts, or what we call ours essentially, what you need is a, is a latte. They give you really nice coffee beans, not just one flavor, 20 flavors of those. They give you raw sugar and a few other things. They give you five different flavors of milk, but you got to make your own latte. So, that's what we do. >> And this is where the infrastructure transformation's happening. >> Exactly. >> And the super paz layer, as Dave Vellante and I have talked about in cloud, is you have to integrate a native cloud. >> Correct. >> Which is beautiful. It's integrated, everything works together, there's a lot of lattes to be made or espressos. >> Exactly. >> I mean, tons of great things there. So, big check marks, double check, gold star for AWS. >> Correct. >> All good. Now, on premises, we've found that hybrid is a steady state. >> Exactly. >> Okay, that's cloud operations. Now, you got the edge. Where does the Supercloud strategy come in? For the folks watching there, it's like, "Hey, okay, I get that." "But I don't want to just buy into another vendor's hype." >> Absolutely. >> "I got to build my own cloud," to your point about the lattes. >> Correct. >> They have to make their own infrastructure an application environment to power the developer. >> Exactly. And, and hybrid is here to stay as, as you pointed out, right, John? So, I have my data center and let's say when most folks start out they start to like a single region of a single cloud, right? And what are you most concerned about there? Hey, can I migrate? Can I start to build applications in the public cloud, right? And all you care about is can you talk back into my data center? Like, as long as some basic hygiene is there that's all they care about, right? The problem happens when you go from, kind of, the first five EC2 instances to 50 to a hundred, then you have a few other things that you need to care about, right? That's really kind of where the, the Supercloud capabilities start to come in, right? Because you have the cloud native things you can make that work for the first few days, but then after that you need augmented capabilities. >> So Ramesh, some people will say, "Hey, John, Supercloud okay, it's funny, ha ha ha." But isn't it just SAS? >> No, SAS is a delivery mechanism, right? And so, so there is the capability and that is how do you want to consume, right? And so capabilities or cloud native capabilities or piece of software capabilities or (unintelligible) cluster form factor and so forth. How do you want to consume? Maybe it's a package form factor, it is a size, it could even be passive if it's sitting in the, in the element, and then so forth, right? And so you really want to distinguish those two. And, and, and that's how we see the, the industry evolve. >> Can Superclouds be specialty clouds? Like is Snowflake a Supercloud? Is Goldman Sachs financial cloud a Supercloud? >> Absolutely, right. So Supercloud is not like a, a conglomeration of multiple capabilities, right? It can be for a specific use case, it can be for a specific functionality. So we, we consider our capabilities by the definition as a Supercloud in, in networking, right? In cloud networking, in Prosimo. So, does that solve the entirety of what I want to do in the cloud? No, absolutely not. There's data, there's computers, a whole bunch of other things, but for a specialty you do have some Supercloud. >> Yeah, in fact, I had a note here. I was going to ask you will, when will there be specialty clouds, apps, identity, data, security, nteworking, we will see those? >> Absolutely, yeah. And, and those are slowly starting to brew, right? So you have, you have identity as one, you have networking as one, you have the zero trust piece as, as another one, you have data as a, as another one. So when all these things come together, absolutely. That's what, that's what enterprise customers care about. >> So I love infrastructure as code, that drove a lot of the evolution and revolution of DevOps. When are we going to see security as code and network as code? Or is it there? >> No networkers code, for sure. It's already, it's already there. It's probably in its early innings, I would say, but we are starting to see that already. The reason for that is really simple. Enough CIOs have yelled at their networking teams to say, "my app guys can get this done three," "four times a day, you get this done once a week." Right? And so, that has actually driven quite a bit of innovation, >> It's slow, >> It's slow, right? And so that's driven quite a bit of innovation. It all starts with, hey, can I build a Terraform provider and then just integrate into Terraform? But it doesn't, it doesn't stop there, right? There's a whole bunch of additional capabilities, a day in troubleshooting, a whole bunch of things that need to come together. But I would say networkers code has already started to, to, to take ship. >> Which, that's a great point about specialty clouds. What about vertical clouds too? 'Cause you got insurance, oil and gas, FinTech. Both sides of the stack can have specialty clouds. >> Absolutely, yeah. So, it, what's driving specialty clouds, right? Some of it is compliance, mainly because you just have to shard the data, and when you shard the data, the entirety gets, gets sharded, right? Some of it driven by use case, because some are a little more serverless, service mesh and intelligence focused, some are a little more infrastructure focused. So you do see that taking off. I would say we've seen a whole lot more, kind of, on the horizontal side, less on the vertical side, but that's really happening, right? >> Yeah, I think that, to me, indicates a Supercloud. The fact that the diversity of the application on the clouds themselves, someone could be spending, say, Liberty Mutual or Goldman Sachs. They were once spending that as CapEx. >> Exactly. >> Now it's OPEX, so they become a service provider. So, if you have scale with data and expertise, you become a Supercloud by default. And you don't have to pay for the CapEx, >> Yeah. You're already paying in. >> Exactly, yeah. >> And that's what snowflake basically did with data warehouse. >> That's right, yeah. >> I mean they're basically a data warehouse. Refactored on the cloud and then go, "whoa, let's go to Azure." >> Yeah. And, and where does that data decide do you ask that question? No, right? You just assume that, hey, retrospective of it's a single cloud, multiple regions, it's there. If it's stretched to multiple clouds, yes, it's just there, but you, you talk about like that. >> In our cloud already panel earlier, we talked about how companies are going fast on one native cloud, 'cause they don't want to have multiple development teams and different ops teams. They go all in say, hey, mostly AWS wins this, unless it's specially Azure productivity software or SQL database, go hard in on Amazon, get speed and velocity, get that flywheel, win, get scale, get value. Then go to Azure, provide that same value to that marketplace and other clouds. Then the next dot to connect is, can the customer have the same experience across the clouds? That's where it gets interesting. What's your thoughts on that? >> Actually, it gets interesting even when they go from a single cloud in a single region to multiple regions, right? And the, the more spread out the regions are, you have requirements around application performance, application experience and so forth. So, suddenly the networking conversation starts to become an experience and a performance conversation. The security conversation starts to become a zero trust conversation and so forth. And so you, you do see that, that interesting shift that's happening. >> Of course. >> Exactly. And then that gets worsened by the fact that now you have multiple clouds, multiple regions, and then... >> So you got regions, clouds, >> and then you have edge locations now. >> And edge. >> You mentioned edge. >> This, this is why I think multi-cloud is BS, because this is all coming so fast. You got to get your Supercloud first. >> Exactly. >> Then you extend into, what it looks like a multi-vendor or multifaceted environment that should be automated by that time. >> Exactly. >> So it's evolutionary, we're not there yet. >> Exactly. >> So you agree, no market yet? >> That's right, yes. So unless it's like the super large enterprises where we have seen a really good mix of multiple different clouds or super large enterprises where each business unit is free to choose the cloud of their choice for the application developers because they just like a certain cloud, right? >> Or negotiations. >> Or negotiations, right? Exactly, so there you find yourself in a healthy mix. It's not like you're 80, 10, 10. It's, it's a healthy mix of three different clouds, right? But vast majority of the enterprises, they have a concerted strategy, I have a primary cloud 'cause that's where two, two big CEOs shake hands and assign multi billion dollar deals, right? >> It's just a song with Howie Shute, who's now a Zscaler, former VMware. Probably know Howie, he's a legend in the community as well. We were talking about the old days of the data center and you remember that? We'll go back to our, into our, you know, historical views of experience. Back when the data center became popular this was the glass house. Mainframes to mini computers. It became a complex environment. You had to have pretty much a PhD or serious networking or some sort of technical background. And then IT was born, the local area networks, the mini computers, and the PCs change that dynamic. IT was born. Okay, and let's just say it, most IT guys aren't PhDs. >> Exactly. >> So what's happened there is democratization and the operations side of that wave. We're kind of going th&rough it now, don't ya think, with cloud? Like, you got to be super smart to wrangle the data. I mean, some of the data pipelining stuff is super complex, after Snowflake and data bricks. >> Absolutely. And largely depends on the maturity, right? Like, so once you pass a certain scale in the cloud the care abouts start to be very different. The care abouts are, how can I operate this at scale? Because I might have started off with a relatively inefficient infrastructure, right? But now if I start to operate that at scale with like thousands of VPCs and so forth, somebody is looking at an AWS bill there and going, "ah, no, no, no, we're not going to do that." >> We're getting to the good part now. So, so here's where I wanted to get to, 'Cause we're kind of getting there, The proof points of Supercloud is IT like operations, >> Correct. >> Easy. >> Yep. >> Not overstaffed and maybe an SRE model one too many. >> Yeah, exactly. >> What are the proof points do you see that would be evidence that Supercloud is working? >> So in a well functional model where we have seen enterprises take the applications that they care about and then move that into the public cloud or build it organically. If they have staffed their team, I think a good leading indicator is that they have staffed the team so that there are a bunch of guys who understand what it means for cloud native capabilities. There are a bunch of guys who then put it together and then you look at the care abouts, right? Ultimately at the end of the day, the goal, if you go higher up in the layers, is it about application experience? Is it about kind of reducing the blast radius of my security? Is it about my data cleanliness and, and hygiene? You don't care about kind of how the pipelining works underneath the covers or how do I put a transit gateway and this and that together? No, that's not what you care about. You care about kind of the outcomes and, and- >> Palmer (unintelligible) that VMware, when he was there. You just say the hardened top, no one talks about what's in an Intel processor. I mean it's just works. >> Exactly, yeah. And it's what applications you build on top of that Intel processor that actually makes it more powerful, right? And so the first evidence I would say is kind of how is the team structured? The second evidence would be kind of what, what are the care abouts for the guys that are building these applications, right? Because even the application developers more than the application, they care about kind of, is it helping? Is it delivering on the experience? Is it being used the way it's supposed to? >> Is it value? >> Exactly, right? And those are not areas that the cloud providers are solely focused on, right? Like you don't see an AWS or an Azure dashboard show that particular thing for the entirety of the application, they'll tell you for the ATR services that you, that you use, here's the SLA for each one of these services. >> And that's where the customer has to build it. >> Exactly right. Now, does that give you the full picture? No, it doesn't. Somebody has to pull this together. Somebody has to aggregate this together and then make sense as to whether this is working or not, right? So whether you call it Supercloud, or whether you call it kind of the care abouts on top of the cloud native stuff, they're all the same. I'm glad you guys came up with a, with a name for this. And I think it's going to be here to stay. >> Well, thank you for sharing your expertise. You got a great background in this area and you got, I think you guys are right on the front wave of this new change. I think a little bit early, but that's good, but don't be too early. >> Yeah, exactly. No, and, and, and that's really important, right, John? So, you don't want to be too early. You certainly don't want to be too late, but at the same time, the pace at which things are evolving are fast enough that you, you will see. I think when, if we have this conversation even three months from now, it might be a very different conversation. >> Yeah, people want to go fast and they don't want to get stuck with a vendor. They made a bad choice that slows 'em down 'cause they got problems to solve, things to build. >> Yeah, exactly. >> Ramesh, thanks for coming on, Supercloud 22, we're breaking it all down. We're exposing it out to everyone. We're discussing it. We're going to challenge it. But ultimately it is a thing. Supercloud 22. Thanks for watching. >> Wonderful, thanks John. (light music)

>> Live from Anaheim, California, it's the Cube! Covering Nutanix.next 2019. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back, everyone, to the Cube's live coverage of Nutanix.Next here in Anaheim. I'm Rebecca Knight, your host along with my cohost, John Furrier. We are the Cube. We are the ESPN of tech. We have two tech athletes on with us today. We have Asvin Ramesh, AVP marketing and alliances technology services at Cognizant. Welcome. And we have Inder Sidhu, EVP global customer success at Nutanix. Thanks so much for coming on the show, Inder. >> Thank you. >> So why don't I start with you. For viewers who are not familiar with Cognizant, why don't you tell us a little bit about what you do, what you're all about. >> Sure, so Cognizant is one of the world's leading professional services companies. We focus on transforming clients' business model, operating model and technology model. Naztech listed at 16 billion revenue last year. We are a Fortune 200 company. We work with about half of the Fortune 200 companies. And companies trust us to help transform the work that they're doing. >> Those are tall orders. (laughs) So what are you hearing from customers right now? What are their biggest challenges that they're facing? >> So, I think customers are basically in two buckets, as we see it, right? We see customers who are inherently excited about the challenges that they're facing, and there are other customers who are still grappling how to figure out the onslaught that's coming at them. And if I just abstract this beyond technology into the overall spectrum of how I look at it, it really transforms to what I call, are customers set or not? And that translates to social, economic and technology. There are a lot of social changes that are happening because of all the things that are going on. How well are companies able to adapt to those social changes? Really makes a difference in their ability to engage with the consumer. There are a lot of economic changes, economic martyrs that are being brought. How well are companies being able to adapt to those economic models? And more importantly from where Nutanix and Cognizant sit, technology is playing a huge role, both on the social and the economic angle. So how do companies leverage technology to be able to drive that change? And how well you do these three things really makes a difference in customers' lives. >> Talk about the relationship with Nutanix. What's the relationship? Obviously partner, you have customers. They got the software now and hardware before, all coming together. What's the relationship how you guys work together? >> It's fantastic. We've been a partner with Nutanix for more than three years. And, I think the critical piece and foundational elements of the partnership with Nutanix, more than the products that they bring out because they're constantly innovating all the time, I think is on a bedrock of transparency, flexibility, and specificity. So there's a lot of transparency in terms of their roadmap, and we get a sense of where they're headed. They get a sense of where we're headed and how we are focused and what our strategy is. That allows us to really lock into what the customer's demanding. Second is flexibility with the elements that I talked about around social, economic and technology. It's very important for a flexible combination, because I kind of look at this age of cooptition as a battle of ecosystems. So, we are locked in with Nutanix in this battle of ecosystems, so in my role, I build value chains, and Nutanix is a critical partner in that value chain and being able to adopt to what the customers are demanding of us, and we are very specific about what we do in the market place. Because all of us have choices, and it's very important to be specific to solving customers' issues. It's been a great partnership-- >> It's interesting, we always talk on the Cube around automation. DevOps has been a big driver with multi cloud now. If you have all these value activities strung together in a set of value chains, no one company can own it all. But automation requires end-to-end visibility, so the big trend we're seeing is who's going to enable that? Because I can imagine, your environment you can talk to the top customers. We do the Cube hundreds of events a year. The same theme comes back over and over again on the Cube. It's a refrain. It's the anthem of the customer which is, look, I need to innovate my business model. I got to move quickly to a new operating model cloud. 'Cause they all taste the cloud, and they want the cloud everywhere. And then they want to make sure they have a technology partner. So all three of those theaters are exploding in innovation, and all at the same time. This has been a big challenge. How do you guys work together to address the business model innovation, the operating model challenges, the skill gaps training or whatever? And then obviously technology selection? >> So I think the most important thing is to be able to sense and engage, right? I think that's where it starts. If you've built a ecosystem of the value chain, in our case with Nutanix, in a way that we stay close to the consumer changes, we build a method of engagement that allows us to sense and engage better. I think that addresses a big part of what you talked about. Then it's about figuring out what elements of technology and being able to advise the customer in the right way in their journey to what they want to achieve in introducing those technologies to the table. >> Inder, I want to bring you in here on this. You are the EVP of customer success at Nutanix. You have a lot of success. You have net supporter scores on 90 which is really unheard of in this industry. I think so many people out there watching this want to know what is your secret sauce. How do you get that? (laughs) >> I think it's a combination of things. I think the first and foremost is being extremely customer centric in everything that you do, not as a function within the company but across the company. Customer success isn't just a function. It's a philosophy; it's a cultural value. It's a mindset; it's everybody's job. You got to start there. Second, you hire people who have a great deal of empathy for the customer and a great deal of expertise in what the customer is looking for. So to bring empathy and they're deeply technical in terms of bringing that expertise and actually applying that towards the customer's problems. And then, maybe the third thing I'd say is always being focused on the customer's outcomes as opposed to your own desire to either sell more services or more products or whatever, because if you're customer-outcome centric, everything else follows from that. Keeping that as a north star, I think has been the primary factor that's driven that. There's one other thing that I'd add to that, and that is something, I think, John, you were referring to a little bit earlier which is this notion of automation. So in the past, people would drive customer success by throwing more and more bodies at the problem, more and more people at the problem. That's so yesterday, right? Now it's all about, you still need people, absolutely, but you need to empower them with a great deal of data, with a great deal of insight, with a great deal of automation. Do that in real time, be predictive, be proactive, and so on. That last element, that secret sauce is pretty important. >> That's interesting. We had a session earlier; I talked about the tech landscape. We talked it out from cloud to politics, and how technology without accountability and responsibility with people can be a bad outcome. Right? (laughs) You give the tools to the wrong people, or someone, say government, doesn't know what the technology can do, bad outcomes happen. Same with cloud selection. When you start to get in some of these new areas where this market shift's going on, where there's real lives on the line in terms of jobs, re-skilling training, you guys are on the cusp of this next shift. You're on the front lines, putting it all together as a global SI for all the top customers. So digital's transformation, although it sounds very buzz-wordy, is actually real in the sense that these are material changes to companies, how they're operating and their business model. So the impact's pretty high, so the role of people is super important. What's going on there? How's the progress, in your view? Are customers ready? Are they getting trained up? Are their IQs moving faster? Are they more accountable? >> Couple of observations over there, I think I would say that in the last 90 days, I've probably met 100 customers. I don't think there's probably, with the exception of maybe a couple, I don't think there's been any conversation where talent hasn't come up. Specifically, the shortage of talent. Which is why, by the way, it becomes hugely critical for us to have partners like Cognizant with whom we have a fantastic relationship. They are so complementary and so critically interwoven into our skill and their skill jointly. Every customer basically says, look, I used to have a virtualization admin, a security admin, a network admin, a database admin, and this, that and the other. And what you've done is you've hyper-converged, not only technology but you've hyper-converged the roles. Well, hyper-converging the roles means you need one person instead of 10 people, but that one is really hard one to find. So help me train them and work with your partners to bring that capability. So talent shortage, especially as you move away from the larger metropolitan areas, is a real issue. And we're working towards that. We're trying to address that by making products simpler. As you know, that's been a hallmark of Nutanix is simplicity and support and service. Those have been our hallmark. So making it simpler is very key, but no matter how simple you make it, you still need that element of human intelligence, human touch, and the automation. Those are the ways. >> And the risk, too, from the customers, love to get the integration standpoint, because, one, that's a lever for you guys. You get leverage out of that. When you take 10 to one or reduce down the roles, hyper-converge things, but the outcome is pretty positive. You're enabling new things, but it allows for people to be redeployed, as well. The existing roles, they're not really going away. They just get shifted. So, yes we need more people, need new people, but also, the dynamic of fear. Is my job going away? So there's leverage and you get efficiencies and potentially redeployment capabilities. How's that affecting your job at Cognizant? >> So, at Cognizant, people are extremely core to the way we operate, so, as I mentioned, we are a $16 billion organization, but we are almost 200,000 people. 185,000, just to be precise. So, for us, the retraining and re-skilling of people is ingrained in the way we've operated since our inception 25 years ago. And it's about two, three things. One is a basic understanding that while technology curves at exponential, the change management in people are linear. So that fundamental understanding of that shift is very important that we continue to invest into the training and change management of individuals to allow them to progress through the value curve as technology shifts happen. And for that, you need both a culture and a structure for that to happen. And because we have grown through this environment, we have Cognizant Academy, and we have few other systems and processes and communication elements that we have put in place that allow our employees to grow as the technology shifts happen. That's one. Second piece is, I think, a very important reason why customers work with us is because we understand their industry. So we serve almost 20 industries, but almost 70 to 80% of our revenue comes from a few industries. And customers really engage and continue to work with us because of our deep understanding of their business, right? So it's this ability to be able to understand technology and the progress of technology from companies like Nutanix. And then, be able to stitch that appropriately to the business of the customer, and put a structure in place that allows the shift to happen, that allows us to grow. >> But going back to what Inder said earlier, so many of the skills that are necessary today, I mean, yes of course, it's about keeping up with the shifts in technology, but so many of the reasons that Nutanix has been successful is that its employees are empathetic, that they listen, that they're paying attention, that they ask good follow-up questions. So when you're talking about Cognizant Academy and the re-skilling, are you also helping them learn these important skills? >> No, I think, I have a 10-year-old son, so as I think about what his future would look like, I definitely feel that the relevance of IQ, as a race is reducing, and empathy to the point that Inder made and your EQ is far more important. And we live in this world where the virtual world is almost taking over the physical world. We're on that cusp, right? Somewhere. >> You're talking John's language there. (laughs) >> You can take a guess on who's ahead and who's losing. So it becomes very important not only to build a sense of empathy in the real world but also a sense of empathy in the virtual world, in the way you communicate with customers, in the way you listen to customers, how you listen to customers and engage. So that is a very critical component of how we train our employees so that we're continuously staying ahead, in terms of even sensing and engaging with them. >> One of the things that brings up in conversation we had earlier with a customer, they love the efficiencies of how you guys can collapse with the hyper convergence which you've done in modern enterprise now and going to the cloud, you know, hyper-converged clouds, we get that strategy, and I think it's going to be bigger than you guys forecast in my opinion. But what that really points to is a cultural shift. And the cultural shift is, okay, I had this before, all this legacy stuff. Then it's the question of, okay, how do I get people on the right tune here? How do I organize internally? So it's not so much a technology decision. It's more of a cultural decision. And so I asked the CIO of a big consumer company who came in to transform this big conglomerate. You'd know their name if I said it. He said, when he walked in, the biggest problem that they had is they outsourced everything in the 90s to the point where in the 2000s, they were so efficient. They had the storage admin, and they had all these roles, and they were holding the gear down. They had perimeter base security; they were perfect. But they had lost their competencies during software. So as the world shifts to software, a lot of CIOs are being asked essentially to build software teams. So the new changeover combined with the new efficiencies is they have to boot up development teams, infrastructure all the way to the top of the stacks. It's challenging, so I know you guys do a lot of work there, in this area, in helping companies transform. This is a huge challenge. How do you go from being lean and nimble, operationally, to having fewer core competency in software development, automation, machine learning? There's not enough people to hire, so this seems to be a core challenge. >> Yeah, I think if I look at the core challenge, in terms of areas to focus, clearly, people focus historically on infrastructure technologies. They need to focus on two additional areas. Let me elaborate what they are. One of them is absolutely the new move towards DevOps, containerization, those kinds of newer technologies that play not in the CIO's shop but in the development side of the house. And there's clearly a focus within Nutanix on the product side and on the people side to emphasize that, and we work with customers on that. The second thing is actually a little bit related to what Asvin was saying. What we find when we engage with customers is again and again if there's an issue, it turns out nine times out of 10 it's not because of a technology. It's either because there was an operational deficiency in their processes, or there was an organizational lack of proficiency or just something financial. So, when I put customer success managers onto accounts, the biggest thing that they do is they create a customer success plan that actually focuses number one on operational practices. Do you have run books? Do you have controls? Do you have automation? Do you have monitoring? Do you have callback information? Do you have all of that so that your processes are robust? It's entirely customer centric. It's independent of technology or only mildly related. That's one. Second, do you have the organizational skills, the capabilities that these people need to have? Can you get them sandboxes or training? Can you get them certified, et cetera, et cetera? Can you move them up? And then, of course, the last thing is financial which is, can you look at it in a larger context, not just of a technology decision but of a financial decision relative to total cost of ownership, return on the investment, cloud versus private, et cetera, et cetera. >> And software seems to be the theme in all of this. >> Software, absolutely-- >> Software rules. >> Software rules. (all laugh) Well, everyone's a software company now. >> Yes. >> That's right. Especially the Cube. (laughs) Inder, Asvin, thank you both so much for coming on the Cube. This was a pleasure. >> Absolutely, thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. You are watching the Cube. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Las Vegas, it's The Cube covering Interconnect, 2017. Brought to you by, IBM. >> Hey welcome back everybody, live here in Las Vegas at the Mandalay Bay IMB Interconnect 2017, it's The Cube's exclusive coverage, I'm Jon Furrier, my co-host Dave Vellante, our next guest is Ramesh Gopinath who's the VP of Block Chain Solutions and Research, welcome to The Cube. >> Thank you. >> Block chain front and center, super exciting, it's been trending pretty much throughout the conference, really is an amazing story, big props from the CEO and (mumbles) and a variety of the executives. Watching is instrumental in the future of business, we had Don Tapscott on yesterday really talking about the revolution of what this is all about and he's the author of the book, The Blockchain Revolution, but if blockchain is a game changer shift to how the business will be operating in the future, so just to level step, just give us the one on one blochchain, versus bitcoin, and why IBM is going in this direction and where it came from. >> So blockchain is all about increasing a trust in business transactions. This is something we recognize about a couple of years ago when a small team of us started playing around with, you know, the technology behind bitcoin, right. And we look at it and said hey look, here's an opportunity for the first time for companies to share some information in a secure fashion with each other and, in addition, run some workflows or business processes on top. That was an eye opener for us, it immediately told us this could have applications in all industries, right. And so what do we do first? So we said let's play around with this a little bit. We looked at existing technologies out there for blockchain and to pick the platform you tried a few use cases and realize, oh my god, there is a whole lot to be done to get a blockchain for business, right. And that's how we started this journey, almost a year and a half, two years ago. And we decided to explore that. >> And the key distinction Ramesh, and we know from just highlighting it here for the folks, is bitcoin is a currency that has a blockchain, so it's powering bitcoin. You're talking about something more fundamental for business which is using the blockchain technology for businesses and what bitcoin is to blockchain, business is to blockchain from your standpoint. >> That's right, and also I think the blockchain is really, the inspiration for it comes from bitcoin perhaps, that's a good way of thinking about it. But today for example, the hyperledger version one that was announced earlier this week at this conference is dramatically different from the underlying blockchain and bitcoin in other platforms out there, right. Because it's really built primarily based on requirements that we have gathered by working with hundreds of clients in financial services and supply chain, in public sector, et cetera, and realizing what levels of confidentiality, what levels of privacy, what level of permissioning, you know, who participates in the transaction. All of that is what has led to, what we call the (mumbles)- >> John: Okay somebody's got a question. >> John: I got a follow up on that, but go ahead. >> Uh, just one more point on this but you can follow up on my point. Give us the status of blockchain today for IBM. Lay out the solution because you move from research now to the exclusions group, you have customer action going on, sales motions, solutions motions. What is the architecture, what does it look like, what is the solution today from a blockchain standpoint? >> So, just, you asked what are you doing at a high level, essentially we have three broad, big investments. One is everything to do with you know, opensource in a hyperledger project, I mentioned that. Then there is you package that into a platform, IBM blockchain, high security business network, that was also announced earlier this week. And the third layer is again what you asked about solutions. What we have been doing over the last year, year plus is, in fact, it's an interesting journey, we started out with what I call blockchain tourism, there were a whole bunch of POC's if you want to call it that, starting with financial services initially, but in gradually other areas, like supply chain, in healthcare, et cetera. Towards the middle of 2016 we saw a transition, at least on the financial service side people were started to talk about, hey now I understand this technology and what it's capable of, let's talk about production deployments, right now I'll give you a few examples as we go along. >> Dave: So, I want to go back if I can a little bit and just get somewhat didactic for a moment. My understanding is there's three attributes, I'm sure there are many more of blockchain which are really relevant, and especially as it relates to the security if I may, it's distributed obviously, and it's been said it's virtually unhackable unless 50% of the stakeholders agree to collude, and then there's no need for a trusted third party so it reduces the threat space. Are those sort of accurate statements and when somebody says, well it's virtually unhackable, you know you tweet that and somebody says, well everything's hackable, help us understand sort of those fundaments of blockchain and why they're relevant. >> That's right, so the way I think about it is a blockchain is a trusted database. Now why is it trusted? There are three properties, I'll get to it, kind of overlaps with what you mentioned. The first one is, any transaction you do onto the database, anything that goes in it basically is done in a nonreputiable fashion. If I do something I can't say, "I didn't do that," so that helps. What goes in, you know you have that property. The second piece is, whatever goes in goes in through a vetting process, we will call it the consensus. There is some sort of a chat between parties before something goes in. Therefore, I can't unilaterally do something onto the blockchain, right, I can't, somebody else vetted what I did, that increases trust. And the third piece is, once it gets in there it cannot be tampered with. We say it's immutable sometimes, and what is that based on? There's a whole lot of topographic math behind it, but at a high level there are two aspects to it. One is, there are multiple copies. So if I change something, if I hack into mine, I'm inconsistent with what others have, so that's one. The second is, the transactions are chained together, blocks of transactions are chained together where a fingerprint of one block is put into the next. What that means is, if I tamper with the block say 15, a long blockchain, all transactions after that are invalid, I have to do a lot of work to fix it, so it's very very hard to tamper with. Of course, as with security, there's no such thing as nothing that is hackable, right, so collusions et cetera, potentially can happen. But the key is, significant increase in the level of trust is the way I would put it. >> Dave: Great, okay, and so now if we can get into sort of how people are specifically applying this technology, you guys started with the hyperledger, you know, open project, but can we get more specific in terms of how say organizations are actually deploying blockchain? >> Ramesh: So we are still running a blockchain in productions since September 6th, right, so it's been only four months. In fact that blockchain is more than a half a million blocks today, so let me tell you what that solution is so you get a sense of, and it's very prototypical in terms of, you know, all solutions that I've dealt with so far across industries. The use case is a following, so you have a buyer, you have a seller and you have a financer, that's IBM. We basically finance, shotgun financing of, think of it as channel financing or inventory finance. What happens typically is, the buyer basically orders something and the seller essentially gets approval from us to say, okay, yeah we can basically send it to the buyer. A few days go by, IBM has already paid the seller basically, just like credit cards (mumbles) consumers. A month later basically we go in, say hey look, guys, time for you to pay up and they say, look, we didn't even receive the goods. So this entire process, what I just described you can think of as a workflow where these three parties are sending messages back and forth. The way we do it in a blockchain is, this entire workflow is captured as a sequence of transactions that are registered on the blockchain. Now how does this help us? Take the example I gave, proof of delivery. If when the logistics company delivers it at the buyer's site, it's recorded on the blockchain. There is no need for a dispute. And typically disputes, basically puts a lot of capital, you know, it holds up a lot of capital right. Capital inefficiency is the problem we're after. In fact, after six months of deployment I can tell you essentially a significant improvement in terms of the time savings as well as elimination of disputes. >> John: That's a great efficiency. Who's buying, who's actually implementing it customers-wise. Can you name names? >> Ramesh: Yeah, so, examples are the, let me give you a few in financial services. So we are working with Salus Bank which does, you now, five trillion dollars worth of foreign transactions every day. They are building a netting engine called Salusnet a solution called Salusnet, and we're working with them on that. Another example is the work that we are doing with Northern Trust, where basically they have a private equity administration blockchain. In fact, it's a very interesting one because it also involves the regulator as a part of the blockchain, so that's a second example. A third one is the one we announced in January with the Depository, Trading and Clearing Corporation DTCC, and that one is for credit debitors, life cycle management, in fact all the examples if you notice, there is a life cycle like I gave in that example earlier of buying till all your goods are delivered, payment is made, those life cycles, those processes are captured as trusted processes on a trusted data store. That's basically blockchain for you, right, that's financial services. Maybe I'll touch upon two more examples to complete the story. Supply chain. I walk into a store and buy some sliced mangos at Walmart, is it safe to eat? To answer that question you need to know the provinence. Which farm in Mexico did it come from, who all touched it, who washed it, who processed it, et cetera, all the way till it got to the store. That sort of information sharing does not happen today in the supply chain. We believe with the block chain that is possible, that allow us to get a good sense of where things came from, making consumers more comfortable. Similar story can deal with pharma too. I pop a pill, I want to be sure that it's safe to have. In fact, as you know the World Health Organization says in Africa, every year a hundred thousand kids die of counterfeit malaria drugs alone, right, so imagine if you could capture these sorts of supply chain flows on a blockchain you could make dramatic improvements. >> Dave: Diamonds provenience is another one, and it's not just blood diamonds. >> Ramesh: I'm more excited by the providence of food and pharma, but diamonds- >> But there's tons of fraud in the diamond supply chain. >> Ramesh: Absolutely. >> And that's really where they're, you know- >> John: Well this brings up the whole business model disruptions, so, what are you guys seeing for the kids of conversations? Because you're getting at the business model impact significantly one, you're reducing costs of transactional costs for new measurement systems, aka blockchain, and you have all the methodology behind it, but everything from music to art to content, I mean, payments, this is like a game changer. >> Absolutely, and I think from the point of view, you know, in all of the use cases I've seen, the sort of value to the ecosystem is clean and obvious, and so you can immediately say, aha, this is going to happen overnight. But the reality is basically, it's a complex ecosystem play though. So, for example, in the supply chain use case, food safety, you need to have the farmers, the entire value chain involved, participating in some fashion on the blockchain. That is not easy to do. So there is, how do you sort of set up ecosystems is a key part of- >> John: What's your strategy there? I'm going to ask Marie when she comes on, but what's the strategy with ecosystem? Because you want to jump start this, you got to prime the pump big time. >> Ramesh: Absolutely, so there are many ways to solve this, but one approach we have taken so far, and it's obvious in all the sort of partnerships that we're working on. Take for example food safety. One way to start with it is to start with a big retailer, like a Walmart. They bring in the suppliers, and the suppliers bring in the farmers. Take the case of what we are doing in container shipping. So basically, movement of containers from point A to point B, we're trying to completely digitize that process, this is a project that we're doing with Maersk. Why Maersk? They are 20% of the container shipping market, right? But in all of these cases I got to be very clear, we are not building a solution for Maersk or for Walmart. We're really building something for the industry, because food safety, you want to solve it for the industry. Just by helping Walmart along. >> John: That's why the open source thing is critical here. >> That's right. >> John: And the update on that, it's all open source on which components, or is it all open source? >> Ramesh: So the open source is all about at the platform layer. The solution itself, you know not everything in the solution is going to be open source. But the key point I was trying to make is that you go off the sort of significant anchor tenants in the ecosystem that draws others into the picture, but that's still not enough, you need to make sure there are economic incentives for others to join in. >> John: So to put it together, tie it together, the ecosystem strategy is, take an industry scope and try the rising tides floats all boats kind of approach. So adoption's critical. >> Absolutely correct, absolutely correct, and I think again I can use food safety to make that point. Think about it, right? So there is, let's say, a spinach problem, we had it in 2006. So you find a problem, you trace it back to a source. Let's say Walmart is the store in which somebody bought it and it was traced from there. That's not good enough. From the source it went to many other retailers. So you need to be able to track down and pull all of them off the shelves. Therefore you have to go for an industry solution. >> John: I can imagine the healthcare thing would be even more impactful too, I mean, financial services pretty obvious, transactional stuff there, but healthcare, so many different variations of supply chain and transactions. >> Ramesh: Absolutely, so in a way, the way I think about it is in a financial service everybody had a hunch this could be big, but supply chain, we've come a really long way, I think this is going to be the space which will have the most destruction, and its interesting considering when we started my first conversation with folks, whether it be a Walmart or Maersk, first question is, "what is blockchain?" We've come a long way in the last say eight, nine months. >> John: You guys get so excited where you're kind of pinching yourselves because you can get kind of euphoric about some of the disruption impact. It's just mind blowing to think when you're talking about food, the food industry and healthcare. You got to get tampered down a little bit in some realism, is there that IBM excitement internally share some color internally within IBM the excitement, and then you got to be getting realistic, a lot of the clients rolling it out to kind of got to walk before they can run. >> Ramesh: Yeah, so, the way I would state it is if you had asked me a year ago do you expect to be in the shape we are in today, I would have said no way. I've been shocked at the pace at which this has been moving both from the point of view of the technology itself, maturing of the technology, and in fact when we say blockchain is here now, so that's at the technology layer level, but in terms of use cases, think about it, there are a number of financial services institutions that are talking about production deployments late this year, early next year. In fact, when we did our own IBM Institute for Business Values survey, came back with fully 15% of those who were surveyed, there were like 400-odd banks plus capital market institutions are going to be in production by end of this year. When I heard that in September I still didn't believe it, but I am beginning to believe it now. >> Well it's interesting I think, the cultural shift is that technologists from computer scientists to practitioners that are technologists, they get it. They can see what blockchain does, so I think as people get more and more momentum, that's the fly wheel that you guys are open for and it's happening. >> That's right, in fact I'm also a techie at heart, but in terms of conversation (mumbles) I never talk about technology anymore because the thing is, there are only two concepts in blockchain. It's trusted data across companies, trusted business process. Everything else is detail. >> John: Got it, Ramesh, thanks so much for sharing, great conversation, formerly with IBM research, now Vice-President of Blockchain Solutions at IBM, great to interview, great insight, blockchain revolution is here, check out our interview yesterday with Dom Tapscott yesterday on YouTube, The Blockchain Revolution, his book really kind of lays out some of the big disruptive game changers. This is The Cube, doing our share of blockchain right now, bringing content in blocks and chunks, not yet blockchain enabled. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante, be back with more after this short break. (synthesized music)

(gentle upbeat music) >> Welcome back everyone, to "theCUBE"'s live stage performance here in Palo Alto, California at "theCUBE" Studios. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, kicking off our first inaugural Supercloud event. It's an editorial event, we wanted to bring together the best in the business, the smartest, the biggest, the up-and-coming startups, venture capitalists, everybody, to weigh in on this new Supercloud trend, this structural change in the cloud computing business. We're about to run the Ecosystem Speaks, which is a bunch of pre-recorded companies that wanted to get their voices on the record, so stay tuned for the rest of the day. We'll be replaying all that content and they're going to be having some really good commentary and hear what they have to say. I had a chance to interview and so did Dave. Dave, this is our closing segment where we kind of unpack everything or kind of digest and report. So much to kind of digest from the conversations today, a wide range of commentary from Supercloud operating system to developers who are in charge to maybe it's an ops problem or maybe Oracle's a Supercloud. I mean, that was debated. So so much discussion, lot to unpack. What was your favorite moments? >> Well, before I get to that, I think, I go back to something that happened at re:Invent last year. Nick Sturiale came up, Steve Mullaney from Aviatrix; we're going to hear from him shortly in the Ecosystem Speaks. Nick Sturiale's VC said "it's happening"! And what he was talking about is this ecosystem is exploding. They're building infrastructure or capabilities on top of the CapEx infrastructure. So, I think it is happening. I think we confirmed today that Supercloud is a thing. It's a very immature thing. And I think the other thing, John is that, it seems to me that the further you go up the stack, the weaker the business case gets for doing Supercloud. We heard from Marianna Tessel, it's like, "Eh, you know, we can- it was easier to just do it all on one cloud." This is a point that, Adrian Cockcroft just made on the panel and so I think that when you break out the pieces of the stack, I think very clearly the infrastructure layer, what we heard from Confluent and HashiCorp, and certainly VMware, there's a real problem there. There's a real need at the infrastructure layer and then even at the data layer, I think Benoit Dageville did a great job of- You know, I was peppering him with all my questions, which I basically was going through, the Supercloud definition and they ticked the box on pretty much every one of 'em as did, by the way Ali Ghodsi you know, the big difference there is the philosophy of Republicans and Democrats- got open versus closed, not to apply that to either one side, but you know what I mean! >> And the similarities are probably greater than differences. >> Berkely, I would probably put them on the- >> Yeah, we'll put them on the Democrat side we'll make Snowflake the Republicans. But so- but as we say there's a lot of similarities as well in terms of what their objectives are. So, I mean, I thought it was a great program and a really good start to, you know, an industry- You brought up the point about the industry consortium, asked Kit Colbert- >> Yep. >> If he thought that was something that was viable and what'd they say? That hyperscale should lead it? >> Yeah, they said hyperscale should lead it and there also should be an industry consortium to get the voices out there. And I think VMware is very humble in how they're putting out their white paper because I think they know that they can't do it all and that they do not have a great track record relative to cloud. And I think, but they have a great track record of loyal installed base ops people using VMware vSphere all the time. >> Yeah. >> So I think they need a catapult moment where they can catapult to the cloud native which they've been working on for years under Raghu and the team. So the question on VMware is in the light of Broadcom, okay, acquisition of VMware, this is an opportunity or it might not be an opportunity or it might be a spin-out or something, I just think VMware's got way too much engineering culture to be ignored, Dave. And I think- well, I'm going to watch this very closely because they can pull off some sort of rallying moment. I think they could. And then you hear the upstarts like Platform9, Rafay Systems and others they're all like, "Yes, we need to unify behind something. There needs to be some sort of standard". You know, we heard the argument of you know, more standards bodies type thing. So, it's interesting, maybe "theCUBE" could be that but we're going to certainly keep the conversation going. >> I thought one of the most memorable statements was Vittorio who said we- for VMware, we want our cake, we want to eat it too and we want to lose weight. So they have a lot of that aspirations there! (John laughs) >> And then I thought, Adrian Cockcroft said you know, the devs, they want to get married. They were marrying everybody, and then the ops team, they have to deal with the divorce. >> Yeah. >> And I thought that was poignant. It's like, they want consistency, they want standards, they got to be able to scale And Lori MacVittie, I'm not sure you agree with this, I'd have to think about it, but she was basically saying, all we've talked about is devs devs devs for the last 10 years, going forward we're going to be talking about ops. >> Yeah, and I think one of the things I learned from this day and looking back, and some kind of- I've been sauteing through all the interviews. If you zoom out, for me it was the epiphany of developers are still in charge. And I've said, you know, the developers are doing great, it's an ops security thing. Not sure I see that the way I was seeing before. I think what I learned was the refactoring pattern that's emerging, In Sik Rhee brought this up from Vertex Ventures with Marianna Tessel, it's a nuanced point but I think he's right on which is the pattern that's emerging is developers want ease-of-use tooling, they're driving the change and I think the developers in the devs ops ethos- it's never going to be separate. It's going to be DevOps. That means developers are driving operations and then security. So what I learned was it's not ops teams leveling up, it's devs redefining what ops is. >> Mm. And I think that to me is where Supercloud's going to be interesting- >> Forcing that. >> Yeah. >> Forcing the change because the structural change is open sources thriving, devs are still in charge and they still want more developers, Vittorio "we need more developers", right? So the developers are in charge and that's clear. Now, if that happens- if you believe that to be true the domino effect of that is going to be amazing because then everyone who gets on the wrong side of history, on the ops and security side, is going to be fighting a trend that may not be fight-able, you know, it might be inevitable. And so the winners are the ones that are refactoring their business like Snowflake. Snowflake is a data warehouse that had nothing to do with Amazon at first. It was the developers who said "I'm going to refactor data warehouse on AWS". That is a developer-driven refactorization and a business model. So I think that's the pattern I'm seeing is that this concept refactoring, patterns and the developer trajectory is critical. >> I thought there was another great comment. Maribel Lopez, her Lord of the Rings comment: "there will be no one ring to rule them all". Now at the same time, Kit Colbert, you know what we asked him straight out, "are you the- do you want to be the, the Supercloud OS?" and he basically said, "yeah, we do". Now, of course they're confined to their world, which is a pretty substantial world. I think, John, the reason why Maribel is so correct is security. I think security's a really hard problem to solve. You've got cloud as the first layer of defense and now you've got multiple clouds, multiple layers of defense, multiple shared responsibility models. You've got different tools for XDR, for identity, for governance, for privacy all within those different clouds. I mean, that really is a confusing picture. And I think the hardest- one of the hardest parts of Supercloud to solve. >> Yeah, and I thought the security founder Gee Rittenhouse, Piyush Sharrma from Accurics, which sold to Tenable, and Tony Kueh, former head of product at VMware. >> Right. >> Who's now an investor kind of looking for his next gig or what he is going to do next. He's obviously been extremely successful. They brought up the, the OS factor. Another point that they made I thought was interesting is that a lot of the things to do to solve the complexity is not doable. >> Yeah. >> It's too much work. So managed services might field the bit. So, and Chris Hoff mentioned on the Clouderati segment that the higher level services being a managed service and differentiating around the service could be the key competitive advantage for whoever does it. >> I think the other thing is Chris Hoff said "yeah, well, Web 3, metaverse, you know, DAO, Superclouds" you know, "Stupercloud" he called it and this bring up- It resonates because one of the criticisms that Charles Fitzgerald laid on us was, well, it doesn't help to throw out another term. I actually think it does help. And I think the reason it does help is because it's getting people to think. When you ask people about Supercloud, they automatically- it resonates with them. They play back what they think is the future of cloud. So Supercloud really talks to the future of cloud. There's a lot of aspects to it that need to be further defined, further thought out and we're getting to the point now where we- we can start- begin to say, okay that is Supercloud or that isn't Supercloud. >> I think that's really right on. I think Supercloud at the end of the day, for me from the simplest way to describe it is making sure that the developer experience is so good that the operations just happen. And Marianna Tessel said, she's investing in making their developer experience high velocity, very easy. So if you do that, you have to run on premise and on the cloud. So hybrid really is where Supercloud is going right now. It's not multi-cloud. Multi-cloud was- that was debunked on this session today. I thought that was clear. >> Yeah. Yeah, I mean I think- >> It's not about multi-cloud. It's about operationally seamless operations across environments, public cloud to on-premise, basically. >> I think we got consensus across the board that multi-cloud, you know, is a symptom Chuck Whitten's thing of multi-cloud by default versus multi- multi-cloud has not been a strategy, Kit Colbert said, up until the last couple of years. Yeah, because people said, "oh we got all these multiple clouds, what do we do with it?" and we got this mess that we have to solve. Whereas, I think Supercloud is something that is a strategy and then the other nuance that I keep bringing up is it's industries that are- as part of their digital transformation, are building clouds. Now, whether or not they become superclouds, I'm not convinced. I mean, what Goldman Sachs is doing, you know, with AWS, what Walmart's doing with Azure connecting their on-prem tools to those public clouds, you know, is that a supercloud? I mean, we're going to have to go back and really look at that definition. Or is it just kind of a SAS that spans on-prem and cloud. So, as I said, the further you go up the stack, the business case seems to wane a little bit but there's no question in my mind that from an infrastructure standpoint, to your point about operations, there's a real requirement for super- what we call Supercloud. >> Well, we're going to keep the conversation going, Dave. I want to put a shout out to our founding supporters of this initiative. Again, we put this together really fast kind of like a pilot series, an inaugural event. We want to have a face-to-face event as an industry event. Want to thank the founding supporters. These are the people who donated their time, their resource to contribute content, ideas and some cash, not everyone has committed some financial contribution but we want to recognize the names here. VMware, Intuit, Red Hat, Snowflake, Aisera, Alteryx, Confluent, Couchbase, Nutanix, Rafay Systems, Skyhigh Security, Aviatrix, Zscaler, Platform9, HashiCorp, F5 and all the media partners. Without their support, this wouldn't have happened. And there are more people that wanted to weigh in. There was more demand than we could pull off. We'll certainly continue the Supercloud conversation series here on "theCUBE" and we'll add more people in. And now, after this session, the Ecosystem Speaks session, we're going to run all the videos of the big name companies. We have the Nutanix CEOs weighing in, Aviatrix to name a few. >> Yeah. Let me, let me chime in, I mean you got Couchbase talking about Edge, Platform 9's going to be on, you know, everybody, you know Insig was poopoo-ing Oracle, but you know, Oracle and Azure, what they did, two technical guys, developers are coming on, we dig into what they did. Howie Xu from Zscaler, Paula Hansen is going to talk about going to market in the multi-cloud world. You mentioned Rajiv, the CEO of Nutanix, Ramesh is going to talk about multi-cloud infrastructure. So that's going to run now for, you know, quite some time here and some of the pre-record so super excited about that and I just want to thank the crew. I hope guys, I hope you have a list of credits there's too many of you to mention, but you know, awesome jobs really appreciate the work that you did in a very short amount of time. >> Well, I'm excited. I learned a lot and my takeaway was that Supercloud's a thing, there's a kind of sense that people want to talk about it and have real conversations, not BS or FUD. They want to have real substantive conversations and we're going to enable that on "theCUBE". Dave, final thoughts for you. >> Well, I mean, as I say, we put this together very quickly. It was really a phenomenal, you know, enlightening experience. I think it confirmed a lot of the concepts and the premises that we've put forth, that David Floyer helped evolve, that a lot of these analysts have helped evolve, that even Charles Fitzgerald with his antagonism helped to really sharpen our knives. So, you know, thank you Charles. And- >> I like his blog, by the I'm a reader- >> Yeah, absolutely. And it was great to be back in Palo Alto. It was my first time back since pre-COVID, so, you know, great job. >> All right. I want to thank all the crew and everyone. Thanks for watching this first, inaugural Supercloud event. We are definitely going to be doing more of these. So stay tuned, maybe face-to-face in person. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante now for the Ecosystem chiming in, and they're going to speak and share their thoughts here with "theCUBE" our first live stage performance event in our studio. Thanks for watching. (gentle upbeat music)

>>Yeah, yeah. >>Welcome back to session, too. Thoughts about everywhere. Unlock new revenue streams with embedded search and I Today we're joined by our senior director of Global Oh am Rick Dimel, along with speakers from our thoughts about customer Hayes to discuss how thought spot is open for everyone by unlocking unprecedented value through data search in A I, you'll see how thoughts about compound analytics in your applications and hear how industry leaders are creating new revenue streams with embedded search and a I. You'll also learn how to increase app stickiness on how to create an autonomous this experience for your end users. I'm delighted to introduce our senior director of Global OPM from Phillips Spot, Rick DeMARE on then British Ramesh, chief technology officer, and Leon Roof, director of product management, both from Hayes over to you. Rick, >>Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Hi, everybody. We're here to talk to you about Fox Spot everywhere are branded version of our embedded analytics application. It really our analytics application is all about user experience. And in today's world, user experience could mean a lot of things in ux design methodologies. We want to talk about the things that make our product different from an embedded perspective. If you take a look at what product managers and product design people and engineers are doing in this space, they're looking at a couple of key themes when they design applications for us to consume. One of the key things in the marketplace today is about product led growth, where the product is actually the best marketing tool for the business, not even the sales portion or the marketing department. The product, by the word of mouth, is expanding and getting more people onto the system. Why is that important? It's important because within the first few days of any application, regardless of what it is being used binding users, 70% of those users will lose. Interest will stop coming back. Why do they stop coming back? Because there's no ah ha moment through them. To get engaged within the technology, today's technologies need to create a direct relationship with the user. There can't be a gatekeeper between the user and the products, such as marketing or sales or information. In our case. Week to to make this work, we have toe leverage learning models in leverage learning as it's called Thio. Get the user is engaged, and what that means is we have to give them capabilities they already know how to use and understand. There are too many applications on the marketplace today for for users to figure out. So if we can leverage the best of what other APS have, we can increase the usage of our systems. Because in today's world, what we don't want to do from a product perspective is lead the user to a dead end or from a product methodology. Our perspective. It's called an empty state, and in our world we do that all the time. In the embedded market place. If you look at at the embedded marketplace, it's all visualizations and dashboards, or what I call check engine lights in your application's Well, guess what happens when you hit a check engine life. You've got to call the dealer to get more information about what just took place. The same thing happens in the analytic space where we provide visualizations to users. They get an indicator, but they have to go through your gatekeepers to get access to the real value of that data. What am I looking at? Why is it important the best user experiences out on the marketplace today? They are autonomous. If we wanna leverage the true value of digital transformation, we have to allow our developers to develop, not have them, the gatekeepers to the rial, content to users want. And in today's world, with data growing at much larger and faster levels than we've ever seen. And with that shelf life or value of that data being much shorter and that data itself being much more fragmented, there's no developer or analysts that can create enough visualizations or dashboards in the world to keep the consumption or desire for these users to get access to information up to speed. Clients today require the ability to sift through this information on their own to customize their own content. And if we don't support this methodology, our users are gonna end up feeling powerless and frustrated and coming back to us. The gatekeepers of that information for more information. Loyalty, conversely, can be created when we give the users the ability toe access this information on their own. That is what product like growth is all about in thought spot, as you know we're all about search. It's simple. It's guided as we type. It gives a super fast responses, but it's also smart on the back end handling complexities, and it's really safe from a governance and as well as who gets access to what perspective it's unknown learned environment. Equally important in that learned environment is this expectation that it's not just search on music. It's actually gonna recommend content to me on the fly instantly as I try content I might not even thought of before. Just the way Spotify recommends music to us or Netflix recommends a movie. This is a expected learned behavior, and we don't want to support that so that they can get benefit and get to the ah ha moments much quicker. In the end, which consumption layer do you want to use, the one that leads you to the Dead End Street or the one that gets you to the ah ha moment quickly and easily and does it in an autonomous fashion. Needless to say, the benefits of autonomous user access are well documented today. Natural language search is the wave of the future. It is today. By 2004 75% of organizations are going to be using it. The dashboard is dead. It's no longer going to be utilized through search today, I if we can improve customer satisfaction and customer productivity, we're going to increase pretensions of our retention of our applications. And if we do that just a little bit, it's gonna have a tremendous impact to our bottom line. The way we deploy hotspots. As you know, from today's conversations in the cloud, it could be a manage class, not offering or could be software that runs in your own VPC. We've talked about that at length at this conference. We've also talked about the transformation of application delivery from a Cloud Analytics perspective at length here it beyond. But we apply those same principles to your product development. The benefits are astronomical because not only do you get architectural flexibility to scale up and scale down and right size, but your engineers will increase their productivity because their offerings, because their time and effort is not going to be spent on delivering analytics but delivering their offerings. The speed of innovation isn't gonna be released twice a year or four times a year. It's gonna It can happen on a weekly basis, so your time to market in your margins should increase significantly. At this point, I want a hand. The microphone over to Revert. Tesche was going to tell you a little bit about what they're doing. It hes for cash. >>Thanks, Rick. I just want to introduce myself to the audience. My name is Rotational. Mention the CTO Europe ace. I'm joined my today by my colleague Gillian Ruffles or doctor of product management will be demoing what we have built with thoughts about, >>um but >>just to my introduction, I'm going to talk about five key things. Talk about what we do. What hes, uh we have Really, um what we went through the select that spot with other competitors What we have built with that spot very quickly and last but not least, some lessons learned during the implementation. So just to start with what we do, uh, we're age. We are health care compliance and revenue integrity platform were a saas platform voter on AWS were very short of l A. That's it. Use it on these around 1 50 customers across the U. S. On these include large academic Medical Insight on. We have been in the compliant space for the last 30 plus years, and we were traditionally consulting company. But very recently we have people did more towards software platform model, uh, in terms off why we chose that spot. There were three business problems that I faced when I took this job last year. At age number one is, uh, should be really rapidly deliver new functionality, nor platform, and he agile because some of our product development cycles are in weeks and not months. Hey had a lot of data, which we collected traditionally from the SAS platform, and all should be really create inside stretch experience for our customers. And then the third Big one is what we saw Waas large for customers but really demanding self service capabilities. But they were really not going for the static dash boats and and curated content, but instead they wanted to really use the cell service capabilities. Thio mind the data and get some interesting answers during their questions. So they elevated around three products around these problems statements, and there were 14 reasons why we just start spot number one wars off course. The performance and speed to insights. Uh, we had around 800 to a billion robot of data and we wanted to really kind of mind the data and set up the data in seconds on not minutes and hours. We had a lot of out of the box capabilities with that spot, be it natural language search, predictive algorithms. And also the interactive visualization, which, which was which, Which gave us the agility Thio deliver these products very quickly. And then, uh, the end user experience. We just wanted to make sure that I would users can use this interface s so that they can very quickly, um, do some discovery of data and get some insights very quickly. On last but not least, talksport add a lot of robust AP ice around the platform which helped us embed tot spot into are offering. But those are the four key reasons which we went for thoughts part which we thought was, uh, missing in in the other products we evaluated performance and search, uh, the interactive visualization, the end user experience, and last but not least flexible AP ice, which we could customize into our platform in terms of what we built. We were trying to solve to $50 billion problem in health care, which is around denials. Um so every year, around 2, 50 to $300 billion are denied by players thes air claims which are submitted by providers. And we built offering, which we called it US revenue optimizer. But in plain English, what revenue optimizer does is it gives the capability tow our customers to mind that denials data s so that they can really understand why the claims were being denied. And under what category? Recent reasons. We're all the providers and quarters who are responsible for these claims, Um, that were dryland denials, how they could really do some, uh, prediction off. It is trending based on their historical denial reasons. And then last but not least, we also build some functionality in the platform where we could close the loop between insights, action and outcome that Leon will be showing where we could detect some compliance and revenue risks in the platform. On more importantly, we could, uh, take those risks, put it in a I would say, shopping card and and push it to the stakeholders to take corrective action so the revenue optimizer is something which we built in three months from concept to lunch and and that that pretty much prove the value proposition of thoughts. But while we could kind of take it the market within a short period of time Next leopard >>in terms >>off lessons learned during the implementation thes air, some of the things that came to my mind asses, we're going through this journey. The first one is, uh, focus on the use case formulation, outcomes and wishful story boarding. And that is something that hot spot that's really balance. Now you can you can focus on your business problem formulation and not really focus on your custom dash boarding and technology track, etcetera. So I think it really helped our team to focus on the versus problem, to focus on the outcomes from the problem and more importantly, really spend some time on visualizing What story are we say? Are we trying to say to our customers through revenue optimizer The second lesson learned first When we started this implementation, we did not dualistic data volume and capacity planning exercise and we learned it our way. When we are we loaded a lot of our data sets into that spot. And then Aziz were doing performance optimization. XYZ. We figured out that we had to go back and shot the infrastructure because the data volumes are growing exponentially and we did not account for it. So the biggest lesson learned This is part of your architectural er planning, exercise, always future proof your infrastructure and make sure that you work very closely with the transport engineering team. Um, to make sure that the platform can scale. Uh, the last two points are passport as a robust set of AP Ice and we were able to plug into those AP ice to seamlessly ended the top spot software into a platform. And last but not least, one thing I would like to closest as we start these projects, it's very common that the solution design we run into a lot of surprises. The one thing I should say is, along those 12 weeks, we very closely work with the thoughts, part architecture and accounting, and they were a great partner to work with us to really understand our business problem, and they were along the way to kind of government suggested, recommends and workarounds and more importantly, also, helpers put some other features and functionality which you requested in their engineering roadmap. So it's been a very successful partnership. Um, So I think the biggest take of it is please make sure that you set up your project and operating model value ember thoughts what resources and your team to make sure that they can help you as you. It's some obstacles in the projects so that you can meet your time ones. Uh, those are the key lessons learned from the implementation. And with that, I would pass this to my colleague Leon Rough was going to show you a demo off what we go. >>Thanks for Tesh. So when we were looking Thio provide this to our customer base, we knew that not everyone needed do you access or have available to them the same types of information or at the same particular level of information. And we do have different roles within RMD auto Enterprise platform. So we did, uh, minimize some roles to certain information. We drew upon a persona centric approach because we knew that those different personas had different goals and different reasons for wanting to drive into these insights, and those different personas were on three different levels. So we're looking at the executive level, which is more on the C suite. Chief Compliance Officer. We have a denial trending analyses pin board, which is more for the upper, uh, managers and also exact relatives if they're interested. And then really, um, the targeted denial analysis is more for the day to day analysts, um, the usage so that they could go in and they can really see where the trends are going and how they need to take action and launch into the auditing workflow so within the executive or review, Um, and not to mention that we were integrating and implementing this when everyone was we were focused on co vid. So as you can imagine, just without covert in the picture, our customers are concentrated on denials, and that's why they utilize our platform so they could minimize those risks and then throw in the covert factor. Um, you know, those denial dollars increase substantially over the course of spring and the summer, and we wanted to be able to give them ah, good view of the denials in aggregate as well as's we focus some curated pin boards specific to those areas that were accounting for those high developed denials. So on the Executive Overview Board, we created some banner tiles. The banner tiles are pretty much a blast of information for executives thes air, particular areas where there concentrating and their look looking at those numbers consistently so it provides them away to take a good look at that and have that quick snapshot. Um, more importantly, we did offer as I mentioned some curated pin boards so that it would give customers this turnkey access. They wouldn't necessarily have to wonder, You know, what should I be doing now on Day one, but the day one that we're providing to them these curated insights leads the curiosity and increases that curiosity so that they can go in and start creating their own. But the base curated set is a good overview of their denial dollars and those risks, and we used, um, a subject matter expert within our organization who worked in the field. So it's important to know you know what you're targeting and why you're targeting it and what's important to these personas. Um, not everyone is necessarily interests in all the same information, and you want to really hit on those critical key point to draw them and, um, and allowed them that quick access and answer those questions they may have. So in this particular example, the curated insight that we created was a monthly denial amount by functional area. And as I was mentioning being uber focused on co vid, you know, a lot of scrutiny goes back to those organizations, especially those coding and H i M departments, um, to ensure that their coding correctly, making sure that players aren't sitting on, um, those payments or denying those payments. So if I were in executive and I came in here and this was interesting to me and I want to drill down a little bit, I might say, You know, let me focus more on the functional area than I know probably is our main concern. And that's coating and h i M. And because of it hit in about the early winter. I know that those claims came in and they weren't getting paid until springtime. So that's where I start to see a spike. And what's nice is that the executive can drill down, they may have a hunch, or they can utilize any of the data attributes we made available to them from the Remittance file. So all of these data, um, attributes are related to what's being sent on the 8 35 fear familiar with the anti 8 35 file. So in particular, if I was curious and had a suspicion that these were co vid related or just want to concentrate in that area, um, we have particular flag set up. So the confirmed and suspected cases are pulling in certain diagnosis and procedure codes. And I might say 1.27 million is pretty high. Um, toe look at for that particular month, and then they have the ability to drill down even further. Maybe they want to look at a facility level or where that where that's coming from. Furthermore, on the executive level, we did take advantage of Let me stop here where, um also provided some lagged a so leg. This is important to organizations in this area because they wanna know how long does it take before they re submit a claim that was originally denied before they get paid industry benchmark is about 10 days of 10 days is a fairly good, good, um, basis to look at. And then, obviously anything over that they're going to take a little bit more scrutiny on and want to drill in and understand why that is. And again, they have that capabilities in order to drill down and really get it. Those answers that they're looking for, we also for this particular pin board. And these users thought it would be helpful to utilize the time Siri's forecasting that's made available. So again, thes executives need thio need to keep track and forecast where they're trends were going or what those numbers may look like in the future. And we thought by providing the prediction pins and we have a few prediction pins, um would give them that capability to take a look at that and be able to drill down and use that within, um, certain reporting and such for their organization. Another person, a level that I will go to is, um, Mawr on the analyst side, where those folks are utilizing, um, are auditing workflow and being in our platform, creating audits, completing audits, we have it segregated by two different areas. And this is by claim types so professional or institutional, I'm going to jump in here. And then I am going to go to present mode. So in this particular, um, in this particular view or insight, we're providing that analysts view with something that's really key and critical in their organization is denials related Thio HCC s andi. That's a condition category that kind of forecast, the risk of treatment. And, you know, if that particular patient is probably going to be seen again and have more conditions and higher costs, higher health care spending. So in this example, we're looking at the top 15 attending providers that had those HCC denials. And this is, um, critical because at this point, it really peaks in analyst curiosity. Especially, You know, they'll see providers here and then see the top 15 on the top is generating Ah, hide denial rate. Hi, denial. The dollars for those HCC's and that's a that's a real risk to the organization, because if that behavior continues, um, then those those dollars won't go down. That number won't go down so that analysts then can go in and they can drill down um, I'm going to drill down on diagnosis and then look at the diagnosis name because I have a suspicion, but I'm not exactly sure. And what's great is that they can easily do this. Change the view. Um, you know, it's showing a lot of diagnoses, but what's important is the first one is sepsis and substance is a big one. Substances something that those organizations see a lot of. And if they hover, they can see that 49.57 million, um, is attributed to that. So they may want to look further into that. They'd probably be interested in closing that loop and creating an audit. And so what allowed us to be able to do that for them is we're launching directly into our auditing workflow. So they noticed something in the carried insight. It sparked some investigation, and then they don't have to leave that insight to be able to jump into the auditing workflow and complete that. Answer that question. Okay, so now they're at the point where we've pulled back all the cases that attributed to that dollar amount that we saw on the Insight and the users launching into their auditing workflow. They have the ability Thio select be selective about what cases they wanna pull into the audit or if they were looking, um, as we saw with sepsis, they could pull in their 1600 rose, but they could take a sampling size, which is primarily what they would do. They went audit all 1600 cases, and then from this point in they're into, they're auditing workflow and they'd continue down the path. Looking at those cases they just pulled in and being able Thio finalized the audit and determine, you know, if further, um, education with that provider is needed. So that concludes the demo of how we integrated thought spot into our platform. >>Thank you, LeAnn. And thank you. Re test for taking the time to walk us through. Not only your company, but how Thought spot is helping you Power analytics for your clients. At this point, we want to open this up for a little Q and A, but we want to leave you with the fact that thought spot everywhere. Specifically, it cannot only do this for Hayes, but could do it for any company anywhere they need. Analytical applications providing these applications for their customers, their partners, providers or anybody within their network for more about this, you can see that the website attached below >>Thanks, Rick and thanks for tests and Leon that I find it just fascinating hearing what our customers are doing with our technology. And I certainly have learned 100% more about sepsis than I ever knew before this session. So thank you so much for sharing that it's really is great to see how you're taking our software and putting it into your application. So that's it for this session. But do stay tuned for the next session, which is all about getting the most out of your data and amplifying your insights. With the help of A, I will be joined by two thought spot leaders who will share their first hand experiences. So take a quick breather and come right back

(orchestral music) >> Hi, I'm Peter Burris and welcome to another digital community event. As we do with all digital community events, we're gonna start off by having a series of conversations with real thought leaders about a topic that's pressing to today's enterprises as they try to achieve new classes of business outcomes with technology. At the end of that series of conversations, we're gonna go into a crowd chat and give you an opportunity to voice your opinions and ask your questions. So stay with us throughout. So, what are we going to be talking about today? We're going to be talking about the challenge that businesses face as they try to apply AI, ML, and new classes of analytics to their very challenging, very difficult, but nonetheless very value-producing outcomes associated with data. The challenge that all these businesses have is that often, you spend too much time in the infrastructure and not enough time solving the problem. And so what's required is new classes of technology and new classes of partnerships and business arrangements that allow for us to mask the underlying infrastructure complexity from data science practitioners, so that they can focus more time and attention on building out the outcomes that the business wants and a sustained business capability so that we can continue to do so. Once again, at the end of this series of conversations, stay with us, so that we can have that crowd chat and you can, again, ask your questions, provide your insights, and participate with the community to help all of us move faster in this crucial direction for better AI, better ML and better analytics. So, the first conversation we're going to have is with Anant Chintamaneni. Anant's the Vice President of Products at BlueData. Anant, welcome to theCUBE. >> Hi Peter, it's great to be here. I think the topic that you just outlined is a very fascinating and interesting one. Over the last 10 years, data and analytics have been used to create transformative experiences and drive a lot of business growth. You look at companies like Uber, AirBnB, and you know, Spotify, practically, every industry's being disrupted. And the reason why they're able to do this is because data is in their DNA; it's their key asset and they've leveraged it in every aspect of their product development to deliver amazing experiences and drive business growth. And the reason why they're able to do this is they've been able to leverage open-source technologies, data science techniques, and big data, fast data, all types of data to extract that business value and inject analytics into every part of their business process. Enterprises of all sizes want to take advantage of that same assets that the new digital companies are taking and drive digital transformation and innovation, in their organizations. But there's a number of challenges. First and foremost, if you look at the enterprises where data was not necessarily in their DNA and to inject that into their DNA, it is a big challenge. The executives, the executive branch, definitely wants to understand where they want to apply AI, how to kind of identify which huge cases to go after. There is some recognition coming in. They want faster time-to-value and they're willing to invest in that. >> And they want to focus more on the actual outcomes they seek as opposed to the technology selection that's required to achieve those outcomes. >> Absolutely. I think it's, you know, a boardroom mandate for them to drive new business outcomes, new business models, but I think there is still some level of misalignment between the executive branch and the data worker community which they're trying to upgrade with the new-age data scientists, the AI developer and then you have IT in the middle who has to basically bridge the gap and enable the digital transformation journey and provide the infrastructure, provide the capabilities. >> So we've got a situation where people readily acknowledge the potential of some of these new AI, ML, big data related technologies, but we've got a mismatch between the executives that are trying to do evidence-based management, drive new models, the IT organization who's struggling to deal with data-first technologies, and data scientists who are few and far between, and leave quickly if they don't get the tooling that they need. So, what's the way forward, that's the problem. How do we move forward? >> Yeah, so I think, you know, I think we have to double-click into some of the problems. So the data scientists, they want to build a tool chain that leverages the best in-class, open source technologies to solve the problem at hand and they don't want, they want to be able to compile these tool chains, they want to be able to apply and create new algorithms and operationalize and do it in a very iterative cycle. It's a continuous development, continuous improvement process which is at odds with what IT can deliver, which is they have to deliver data that is dispersed all over the place to these data scientists. They need to be able to provide infrastructure, which today, they're not, there's an impotence mismatch. It takes them months, if not years, to be able to make those available, make that infrastructure available. And last but not the least, security and control. It's just fundamentally not the way they've worked where they can make data and new tool chains available very quickly to the data scientists. And the executives, it's all about faster time-to-value so there's a little bit of an expectation mismatch as well there and so those are some of the fundamental problems. There's also reproducibility, like, once you've created an analytics model, to be able to reproduce that at scale, to be then able to govern that and make sure that it's producing the right results is fundamentally a challenge. >> Audibility of that process. >> Absolutely, audibility. And, in general, being able to apply this sort of model for many different business problems so you can drive outcomes in different parts of your business. So there's a huge number of problems here. And so what I believe, and what we've seen with some of these larger companies, the new digital companies that are driving business valley ways, they have invested in a unified platform where they've made the infrastructure invisible by leveraging cloud technologies or containers and essentially, made it such that the data scientists don't have to worry about the infrastructure, they can be a lot more agile, they can quickly create the tool chains that work for the specific business problem at hand, scale it up and down as needed, be able to access data where it lies, whether it's on-prem, whether it's in the cloud or whether it's a hybrid model. And so that's something that's required from a unified platform where you can do your rapid prototyping, you can do your development and ultimately, the business outcome and the value comes when you operationalize it and inject it into your business processes. So, I think fundamentally, this start, this kind of a unified platform, is critical. Which, I think, a lot of the new age companies have, but is missing with a lot of the enterprises. >> So, a big challenge for the enterprise over the next few years is to bring these three groups together; the business, data science world and infrastructure world or others to help with those problems and apply it successfully to some of the new business challenges that we have. >> Yeah, and I would add one last point is that we are on this continuous journey, as I mentioned, this is a world of open source technologies that are coming out from a lot of the large organizations out there. Whether it's your Googles and your Facebooks. And so there is an evolution in these technologies much like we've evolved from big data and data management to capture the data. The next sort of phase is around data exploitation with artificial intelligence and machine learning type techniques. And so, it's extremely important that this platform enables these organizations to future proof themselves. So as new technologies come in, they can leverage them >> Great point. >> for delivering exponential business value. >> Deliver value now, but show a path to delivery value in the future as all of these technologies and practices evolve. >> Absolutely. >> Excellent, all right, Anant Chintamaneni, thanks very much for giving us some insight into the nature of the problems that enterprises face and some of the way forward. We're gonna be right back, and we're gonna talk about how to actually do this in a second. (light techno music) >> Introducing, BlueData EPIC. The leading container-based software platform for distributed AI, machine learning, deep learning and analytics environments. Whether on-prem, in the cloud or in a hybrid model. Data scientists need to build models utilizing various stacks of AI, ML and DL applications and libraries. However, installing and validating these environments is time consuming and prone to errors. BlueData provides the ability to spin up these environments on demand. The BlueData EPIC app store includes, best of breed, ready to run docker based application images. Like TensorFlow and H2O driverless AI. Teams can also add their own images, to provide the latest tools that data scientists prefer. And ensure compliance with enterprise standards. They can use the quick launch button. which provides pre configured templates with the appropriate application image and resources. For example, they can instantly launch a new Sandbox environment using the template for TensorFlow with a Jupyter Notebook. Within just a few minutes, it'll be automatically configured with GPUs and easy access to their data. Users can launch experiments and make GPUs automatically available for analysis. In this case, the H2O environment was set up with one GPU. With BlueData EPIC, users can also deploy end points with the appropriate run time. And the inference run times can use CPUs or GPUs. With a container based BlueData Platform, you can deploy fully configured distributed environments within a matter of minutes. Whether on-prem, in the public cloud, or in a hybrid a architecture. BlueData was recently acquired by Hewlett Packward Enterprise. And now, HPE and BlueData are joining forces to help you on your AI journey. (light techno music) To learn more, visit www.BlueData.com >> And we're back. I'm Peter Burris and we're continuing to have this conversation about how businesses are turning experience with the problems of advance analytics and the solutions that they seek into actual systems that deliver continuous on going value and achieve the business capabilities required to make possible these advanced outcomes associated with analytics, AI and ML. And to do that, we've got two great guests with us. We've got Kumar Sreekanti, who is the co-founder and CEO of BlueData. Kumar, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thank you, it is nice to be here, back again. >> And Kumar, you're being joined by a customer. Ramesh Thyagarajan, is the executive director of the Advisory Board Company which is part of Optum now. Ramesh, welcome to theCUBE. >> Great to be here. >> Alright, so Kumar let's start with you. I mentioned up front, this notion of turning technology and understanding into actual business capabilities to deliver outcomes. What has been BlueData's journey along, to make that happen? >> Yeah, it all started six years ago, Peter. It was a bold vision and a big idea and no pun intended on big data which was an emerging market then. And as everybody knows, the data was enormous and there was a lot of innovation around the periphery. but nobody was paying attention to how to make the big data consumable in enterprise. And I saw an enormous opportunity to make this data more consumable in the enterprise and to give a cloud-like experience with the agility and elasticity. So, our vision was to build a software infrastructure platform like VMware, specially focused on data intensity distributed applications and this platform will allow enterprises to build cloud like experiences both on enterprise as well as on hybrid clouds. So that it pays the journey for their cloud experience. So I was very fortunate to put together a team and I found good partners like Intel. So that actually is the genesis for the BlueData. So, if you look back into the last six years, big data itself has went through a lot of evolution and so the marketplace and the enterprises have gone from offline analytics to AI, ML based work loads that are actually giving them predictive and descriptive analytics. What BlueData has done is by making the infrastructure invisible, by making the tool set completely available as the tool set itself is evolving and in the process, we actually created so many game changing software technologies. For example, we are the first end-to-end content-arised enterprise solution that gives you distributed applications. And we built a technology called DataTap, that provides computed data operation so that you don't have to actually copy the data, which is a boom for enterprises. We also actually built multitenancy so those enterprises can run multiple work loads on the same data and Ramesh will tell you in a second here, in the healthcare enterprise, the multitenancy is such a very important element. And finally, we also actually contributed to many open source technologies including, we have a project called KubeDirector which is actually is our own Kubernetes and how to run stateful workloads on Kubernetes. which we have actually very happy to see that people like, customers like Ramesh are using the BlueData. >> Sounds like quite a journey and obviously you've intercepted companies like the advisory board company. So Ramesh, a lot of enterprises have mastered or you know, gotten, understood how to create data lakes with a dupe but then found that they still weren't able to connect to some of the outcomes that they saw. Is that the experience that you had. >> Right, to be precise, that is one of the kind of problems we have. It's not just the data lake that we need to be able to do the workflows or other things, but we also, being a traditional company, being in the business for a long time, we have a lot of data assets that are not part of this data lake. We're finding it hard to, how do we get the data, getting them and putting them in a data lake is a duplication of work. We were looking for some kind of solutions that will help us to gather the benefits of leaving the data alone but still be able to get into it. >> This is where (mumbles). >> This is where we were looking for things and then I was lucky and fortunate to run into Kumar and his crew in one of the Hadoop conferences and then they demonstrated the way it can be done so immediately hit upon, it's a big hit with us and then we went back and then did a POC, very quickly adapt to the technology and that is also one of the benefits of corrupting this technology is the level of contrary memorization they are doing, it is helping me to address many needs. My data analyst, the data engineers and the data scientists so I'm able to serve all of them which otherwise wouldn't be possible for me with just this plain very (mumbles). >> So it sounds as though the partnership with BlueData has allowed you to focus on activities and problems and challenges above the technology so that you can actually start bringing data science, business objectives and infrastructure people together. Have I got that right? >> Absolutely. So BlueData is helping me to tie them all together and provide an excess value to my business. We being in the healthcare, the importance is we need to be able to look at the large data sets for a period of time in order to figure out how a patient's health journey is happening. That is very important so that we can figure out the ways and means in which we can lower the cost of health care and also provide insights to the physician, they can help get people better at health. >> So we're getting great outcomes today especially around, as you said that patient journey where all the constituents can get access to those insights without necessarily having to learn a whole bunch of new infrastructure stuff but presumably you need more. We're talking about a new world that you mentioned before upfront, talking about a new world, AI, ML, a lot of changes. A lot of our enterprise customers are telling us it's especially important that they find companies that not only deliver something today but demonstrate a commitment to sustain that value delivery process especially as the whole analytics world evolves. Are you experiencing that as well? >> Yes, we are experiencing and one of the great advantage of the platform, BlueData platform that gave me this ability to, I had the new functionality, be it the TensorFlow, be it the H2O, be it the heart studio, anything that I needed, I call them, they give me the images that are plug-and-play, just put them and all the prompting is practically transparent to nobody need to know how it is achieved. Now, in order to get to the next level of the predictive and prescriptive analytics, it is not just you having the data, you need to be able to have your curated data asset set process on top of a platform that will help you to get the data scientists to make you. One of the biggest challenges that are scientist is not able to get their hands on data. BlueData platform gives me the ability to do it and ensure all the security meets and all the compliances with the various other regulated compliances we need to make. >> Kamar, congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Sounds like you have a happy customer. >> Thank you. >> One of the challenges that every entrepreneur faces is how did you scale the business. So talk to us about where you are in the decisions that you made recently to achieve that. >> As an entrepreneur, when you start a company, odds are against you, right? You're always worried about it, right. You make so many sacrifices, yourself and your team and all that but the the customer is the king. The most important thing for us to find satisfied customers like Rameshan so we were very happy and BlueData was very successful in finding that customer because i think as you pointed out, as Ramesh pointed out, we provide that clean solution for the customer but as you go through this journey as a co-founder and CEO, you always worry about how do you scale to the next level. So we had partnerships with many companies including HPE and we found when this opportunity came in front of me with myself and my board, we saw this opportunity of combining the forces of BlueData satisfied customers and innovative technology and the team with the HPs brand name, their world-class service, their investment in R&D and they have a very long, large list of enterprise customers. We think putting these two things together provides that next journey in the BlueData's innovation and BlueData's customers. >> Excellent, so once again Kumar Sreekanti, co-founder and CEO of BlueData and Ramesh Thyagarajan who is the executive director of the advisory board company and part of Optum, I want to thank both of you for being on theCUBE. >> Thank you >> Thank you, great to be here. >> Now let's hear a little bit more about how this notion of bringing BlueData and HPE together is generating new classes of value that are making things happen today but are also gonna make things happen for customers in the future and to do that we've got Dave Velante who's with Silicon Angle Wiki Bond joined by Patrick Osbourne who's with HPE in our Marlborough studio so Dave over to you. >> Thanks Peter. We're here with Patrick Osbourne, the vice president and general manager of big data and analytics at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Patrick, thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having us. >> So we heard from Kumar, let's hear from you. Why did HPE purchase, acquire BlueData? >> So if you think about it from three angles. Platform, people and customers, right. Great platform, built for scale addressing a number of these new workloads and big data analytics and certainly AI, the people that they have are amazing, right, great engineering team, awesome customer success team, team of data scientists, right. So you know, all the folks that have some really, really great knowledge in this space so they're gonna be a great addition to HPE and also on the customer side, great logos, major fortune five customers in the financial services vertical, healthcare, pharma, manufacturing so a huge opportunity for us to scale that within HP context. >> Okay, so talk about how it fits into your strategy, specifically what are you gonna do with it? What are the priorities, can you share some roadmap? >> Yeah, so you take a look at HPE strategy. We talk about hybrid cloud and specifically edge to core to cloud and the common theme that runs through that is data, data-driven enterprises. So for us we see BlueData, Epic platform as a way to you know, help our customers quickly deploy these new mode to applications that are fueling their digital transformation. So we have some great plans. We're gonna certainly invest in all the functions, right. So we're gonna do a force multiplier on not only on product engineering and product delivery but also go to market and customer success. We're gonna come out in our business day one with some really good reference architectures, with some of our partners like Cloud Era, H2O, we've got some very scalable building block architectures to marry up the BlueData platform with our Apollo systems for those of you have seen that in the market, we've got our Elastic platform for analytics for customers who run these workloads, now you'd be able to virtualize those in containers and we'll have you know, we're gonna be building out a big services practice in this area. So a lot of customers often talk to us about, we don't have the people to do this, right. So we're gonna bring those people to you as HPE through Point Next, advisory services, implementation, ongoing help with customers. So it's going to be a really fantastic start. >> Apollo, as you mentioned Apollo. I think of Apollo sometimes as HPC high performance computing and we've had a lot of discussion about how that's sort of seeping in to mainstream, is that what you're seeing? >> Yeah absolutely, I mean we know that a lot of our customers have traditional workloads, you know, they're on the path to almost completely virtualizing those, right, but where a lot of the innovation is going on right now is in this mode two world, right. So your big data and analytics pipeline is getting longer, you're introducing new experiences on top of your product and that's fueling you know, essentially commercial HPC and now that folks are using techniques like AI and modeling inference to make those services more scalable, more automated, we're starting to bringing these more of these platforms, these scalable architectures like Apollo. >> So it sounds like your roadmap has a lot of integration plans across the HPE portfolio. We certainly saw that with Nimble, but BlueData was working with a lot of different companies, its software, is the plan to remain open or is this an HPE thing? >> Yeah, we absolutely want to be open. So we know that we have lots of customers that choose, so the HP is all about hybrid cloud, right and that has a couple different implications. We want to talk about your choice of on-prem versus off-prem so BlueData has a great capability to run some of these workloads. It essentially allows you to do separation of compute and storage, right in the world of AI and analytics we can run it off-prem as well in the public cloud but then we also have choice for customers, you know, any customer's private cloud. So that means they want to run on other infrastructure besides HPE, we're gonna support that, we have existing customers that do that. We're also gonna provide infrastructure that marries the software and the hardware together with frameworks like Info Site that we feel will be a you know, much better experience for the customers but we'll absolutely be open and absolutely have choice. >> All right, what about the business impact to take the customer perspective, what can they expect? >> So I think from a customer perspective, we're really just looking to accelerate deployment of AI in the enterprise, right and that has a lot of implications for us. We're gonna have very scalable infrastructure for them, we're gonna be really focused on this very dynamic AI and ML application ecosystems through partnerships and support within the BlueData platform. We want to provide a SAS experience, right. So whether that's GPUs or accelerators as a service, analytics as a service, we really want to fuel innovation as a service. We want to empower those data scientists there, those are they're really hard to find you know, they're really hard to retain within your organization so we want to unlock all that capability and really just we want to focus on innovation of the customers. >> Yeah, and they spend a lot of time wrangling data so you're really going to simplify that with the cloud (mumbles). Patrick thank you, I appreciate it. >> Thank you very much. >> Alright Peter, back to you in Palo Alto. >> And welcome back, I'm Peter Burris and we've been talking a lot in the industry about how new tooling, new processes can achieve new classes of analytics, AI and ML outcomes within a business but if you don't get the people side of that right, you're not going to achieve the full range of benefits that you might get out of your investments. Now to talk a little bit about how important the data science practitioner is in this equation, we've got two great guests with us. Nanda Vijaydev is the chief data scientists of BlueData. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you Peter, happy to be here. >> Ingrid Burton is the CMO and business leader at H2O.AI, Ingrid, welcome to the CUBE. >> Thank you so much for having us. >> So Nanda Vijaydev, let's start with you. Again, having a nice platform, very, very important but how does that turn into making the data science practitioner's life easier so they can deliver more business value. >> Yeah thank you, it's a great question. I think end of the day for a data scientist, what's most important is, did you understand the question that somebody asked you and what is expected of you when you deliver something and then you go about finding, what do I need for them, I need data, I need systems and you know, I need to work with people, the experts in the process to make sure that the hypothesis I'm doing is structured in a nice way where it is testable, it's modular and I have you know, a way for them to go back to show my results and keep doing this in an iterative manner. That's the biggest thing because the satisfaction for a data scientist is when you actually take this and make use of it, put it in production, right. To make this whole thing easier, we definitely need some way of bringing it all together. That's really where, especially compared to the traditional data science where everything was monolithic, it was one system, there was a very set way of doing things but now it is not so you know, with the growing types of data, with the growing types of computation algorithms that's available, there's a lot of opportunity and at the same time there is a lot of uncertainty. So it's really about putting that structure and it's really making sure you get the best of everything and still deliver the results, that is the focus that all data scientists strive for. >> And especially you wanted, the data scientists wants to operate in the world of uncertainty related to the business question and reducing uncertainty and not deal with the underlying some uncertainty associated with the infrastructure. >> Absolutely, absolutely you know, as a data scientist a lot of time used to spend in the past about where is the data, then the question was, what data do you want and give it to you because the data always came in a nice structured, row-column format, it had already lost a lot of context of what we had to look for. So it is really not about you know, getting the you know, it's really not about going back to systems that are pre-built or pre-processed, it's getting access to that real, raw data. It's getting access to the information as it came so you can actually make the best judgment of how to go forward with it. >> So you describe the world with business, technology and data science practitioners are working together but let's face it, there's an enormous amount of change in the industry and quite frankly, a deficit of expertise and I think that requires new types of partnerships, new types of collaboration, a real (mumbles) approach and Ingrid, I want to talk about what H2O.AI is doing as a partner of BlueData, HPE to ensure that you're complementing these skills in pursuit or in service to the customer's objectives. >> Absolutely, thank you for that. So as Nanda described, you know, data scientists want to get to answers and what we do at H2O.AI is we provide the algorithms, the platforms for data scientist to be successful. So when they want to try and solve a problem, they need to work with their business leaders, they need to work with IT and they actually don't want to do all the heavy lifting, they want to solve that problem. So what we do is we do automatic machine learning platforms, we do that with optimizing algorithms and doing all the kind of, a lot of the heavy lifting that novice data scientists need and help expert data scientists as well. I talk about it as algorithms to answers and actually solving business problems with predictions and that's what machine learning is really all about but really what we're seeing in the industry right now and BlueData is a great example of kind of taking away some of the hard stuff away from a data scientist and making them successful. So working with BlueData and HPE, making us together really solve the problems that businesses are looking for, it's really transformative and we've been through like the digital transformation journey, all of us have been through that. We are now what I would term an AI transformation of sorts and businesses are going to the next step. They had their data, they got their data, infrastructure is kind of seamlessly working together, the clusters and containerization that's very important. Now what we're trying to do is get to the answers and using automatic machine learning platforms is probably the best way forward. >> That's still hard stuff but we're trying to get rid of data science practitioners, focusing on hard stuff that doesn't directly deliver value. >> It doesn't deliver anything for them, right. They shouldn't have to worry about the infrastructure, they should worry about getting the answers to the business problems they've been asked to solve. >> So let's talk a little bit about some of the new business problems that are going to be able to be solved by these kinds of partnerships between BlueData and H2O.AI. Start, Nanda, what do you, what gets you excited when we think about the new types of business problems that customers are gonna be able to solve. >> Yeah, I think it is really you know, the question that comes to you is not filtered through someone else's lens, right. Someone is trying an optimization problem, someone is trying to do a new product discovery so all this is based on a combination of both data-driven and evidence-based, right. For us as a data scientist, what excites me is that I have the flexibility now that I can choose the best of the breed technologies. I should not be restricted to what is given to me by an IT organization or something like that but at the same time, in an organization, for things to work, there has to be some level of control. So it is really having this type of environments or having some platforms where some, there is a team that can work on the control aspect but as a data scientist, I don't have to worry about it. I have my flexibility of tools of choice that I can use. At the same time, when you talk about data, security is a big deal in companies and a lot of times data scientists don't get access to data because of the layers and layers of security that they have to go through, right. So the excitement of the opportunity for me is if someone else takes care of the problem you know, just tell me where is the source of data that I can go to, don't filter the data for me you know, don't already structure the data for me but just tell me it's an approved source, right then it gives me more flexibility to actually go and take that information and build. So the having those controls taken care of well before I get into the picture as a data scientist, it makes it extremely easy for us to focus on you know, to her point, focus on the problem, right, focus on accessing the best of the breed technology and you know, give back and have that interaction with the business users on an ongoing basis. >> So especially focus on, so speed to value so that you're not messing around with a bunch of underlying infrastructure, governance remaining in place so that you know what are the appropriate limits of using the data with security that is embedded within that entire model without removing fidelity out of the quality of data. >> Absolutely. >> Would you agree with those? >> I totally agree with all the points that she brought up and we have joint customers in the market today, they're solving very complex problems. We have customers in financial services, joint customers there. We have customers in healthcare that are really trying to solve today's business problems and these are everything from, how do I give new credit to somebody? How do I know what next product to give them? How do I know what customer recommendations can I make next? Why did that customer churn? How do I reach new people? How do I do drug discovery? How do I give a patient a better prescription? How do I pinpoint disease than when I couldn't have seen it before? Now we have all that data that's available and it's very rich and data is a team sport. It takes data scientists, it takes business leaders and it takes IT to make it all work together and together the two companies are really working to solve problems that our customers are facing, working with our customers because they have the intellectual knowledge of what their problems are. We are providing the tools to help them solve those problems. >> Fantastic conversation about what is necessary to ensure that the data science practitioner remains at the center and is the ultimate test of whether or not these systems and these capabilities are working for business. Nanda Vijaydev, chief data scientist of BlueData, Ingrid Burton CMO and business leader, H2O.AI, thank you very much for being on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Thank you so much. >> So let's now spend some time talking about how ultimately, all of this comes together and what you're going to do as you participate in the crowd chat. To do that let me throw it back to Dave Velante in our Marlborough studios. >> We're back with Patrick Osbourne, alright Patrick, let's wrap up here and summarize. We heard how you're gonna help data science teams, right. >> Yup, speed, agility, time to value. >> Alright and I know a bunch of folks at BlueData, the engineering team is very, very strong so you picked up a good asset there. >> Yeah, it means amazing technology, the founders have a long lineage of software development and adoption in the market so we're just gonna, we're gonna invested them and let them loose. >> And then we heard they're sort of better together story from you, you got a roadmap, you're making some investments here, as I heard. >> Yeah, I mean so if we're really focused on hybrid cloud and we want to have all these as a services experience, whether it's through Green Lake or providing innovation, AI, GPUs as a service is something that we're gonna be you know, continuing to provide our customers as we move along. >> Okay and then we heard the data science angle and the data science community and the partner angle, that's exciting. >> Yeah, I mean, I think it's two approaches as well too. We have data scientists, right. So we're gonna bring that capability to bear whether it's through the product experience or through a professional services organization and then number two, you know, this is a very dynamic ecosystem from an application standpoint. There's commercial applications, there's certainly open source and we're gonna bring a fully vetted, full stack experience for our customers that they can feel confident in this you know, it's a very dynamic space. >> Excellent, well thank you very much. >> Thank you. Alright, now it's your turn. Go into the crowd chat and start talking. Ask questions, we're gonna have polls, we've got experts in there so let's crouch chat.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering InterConnect 2017. Brought to you by, IBM. >> Hey, welcome back everyone. Live in Las Vegas, the Mandalay Bay. We're at the IBM Interconnect 2017. This is CUBE's exclusive coverage of three days of wall to wall. Day three winding down here at the event. Great show about cloud, data, and blockchain. Our next guest is Marie Wieck, who's the general manager of the Blockchain group within IBM, and Greg Wolfond, who's the chairman and CEO of SecureKey Technologies, announced a partnership with IBM. A lot of great success of blockchain. It's now a business unit in IBM. Marie, great to see you. Congratulations on the new role. >> Absolutely, we're really excited. We've seen so much momentum in blockchain that we really are investing heavily, created a new division, part of our Industry Platforms team, and we're off to the races. >> Exciting. >> So six weeks in the role now. >> Six weeks, I guess the business model is keeping running hard, (laughter) 'cause you guys have made great success. We had Ramesh, one of your workers in your division, on early, he came from the labs, or the research team, >> Marie: Right, research. >> and now he's in Solutions. The traction has been pretty amazing, so take us through, from a business standpoint, obviously you're now got the P&L applet running, you're going, engaging customers on use cases. Where'd this progress come from? Was it just, the internal coalesce of IBMers and customers coming together, give us why this is at its point today. >> I mean I think the most important point about blockchain, is that it really is a network effect. The whole idea of a shared distributed ledger, where everybody has visibility to the appropriate parts of data that they want, gives you some really interesting new business models, but you can't have a network effect, you can't have a community and an ecosystem if you don't have a common set of standards, and a way to drive interoperability. So just 15 months ago, we launched with 30 other people, the Hyperledger Project, in the Linux Foundation. It's been the fastest growing open source project since the Linux Foundation started, so really impressive momentum, and, you know if you think back just a year, at InterConnect last year in February, we had this little demo of trading marbles. This year, fast forward a year, we have a new division, we have 400 clients that we're working with on real production level use cases. We have eight networks in production. We've got now version one of the standard, which really brings a lot of the enterprise requirements, and we're seeing all kinds of new use cases. Supply chain, health care, government, financial services, all where we're really talking about being real now and trusted for business. >> And I would add that Ginni Rometty on stage, hammering home the focus, >> Exactly. >> like big time, at a Watsonesque level, >> Marie: Absolutely. >> so that must to mobilizing the IBMers new division. What's the buzz internally? (laughter) People want to come work for your division now, I mean what's happening? >> I do get an awful lot of emails from a lot of people who are very interested, but I always know when there's real momentum, when there are people who are doing it that we didn't tell to do it, you know, so we're starting with a pretty small team internally, my group itself Direct Line, is about 200 people. There's about 600 people in the extended team across the different functions across IBM, but when I do a search on our internal directory and search for blockchain, there's over a thousand people who have that name already in their title or in their description because they're working on it, and they see the power of it. >> Innovative people get intoxicated by blockchain, because they can just see the disruption elements. Greg, I want to ask you, because you're actually doing it, not only is it intoxicating to kind of grok what blockchain can be, this some real use cases right now, really jamming hard on blockchain with the ledger, can you just share quickly how that's playing out in context IBM and in the marketplace. >> Yeah, so SecureKey's a digital ID company. So we started in Canada years ago doing this login service for government. You show up, you want to see your taxes, your unemployment, your pension, any of 80 different departments, we made it easy for citizens to go there. You can redirect into a federated login with your TD login, or your Royal Bank login. We have millions of Canadians who use that, and we had hundreds of thousands a month, but it's really a login service, and it saved the federal government I think eight hundred million dollars to get that done, but we wanted to move to the next step, which is sharing identity, so digital identity and how do I share my attributes from TD Bank or Royal Bank or my data from Equifax or TransUnion in a trusted way with parties I want to, and not share it in other ways. And we couldn't do that without Hyperledger. So we can talk a little bit about why we went to it, but we have a network in Canada, we tested already phase one, we're launching later this year with Royal Bank, TD Bank, Bank of Montreal, Scotia. Where a citizen can show up at a Telco to create a new account. Is it okay to share my name and address and my credit score? Yes, done, account's open in seconds. FINTRAC changed the rules in Canada so you can open a bank account. Can I show up at a bank and share my attributes from the province and from a credit agency, and create my bank account in seconds. And we've all had this problem, right? I talk to my wife... >> I mean we live it everyday, I mean identity theft is I think front and center in mainstream life. Everyone has either someone close to them or themselves get the phone call, the credit score's dropping, or hey, someone's had my identity for a couple weeks, this is brutal, even the credit cards are gettin'... >> It's funny, when I started this business two of my friends had their identity taken over and someone put mortgages on their homes, and I said there had to be a better way to do it. With blockchain if we can take data from different sources, that the bank knows it's me and I can log in right now, that I possess this phone, that the province knows it's me and I can turn on the camera and check it's me, we can raise the ID validation score for everyone in the whole industry. For healthcare, to government, to banking, and we not only raise the ID validation we also raise the AuthScore, because I'm not just logging in with my bank, I must have this phone, with this SIM in it, and if it's canceled it's not me. And normally people would put that through brokers in the middle, but NIST in the U.S. said, we don't want brokers in the middle. They could peek, they could see your data. I have single points of failure. If this is identity for health here's how it goes down. I have honeypots of data. People are collecting all of my stuff in one place, it's encrypted, but the bad guy's going to get that, right? They could go after the person, and say I need the keys, I have a member of your family... >> I mean we're living in a world, in cloud, Marie knows, there's no perimeter anymore. >> Marie: Right right. The security experts that are state of the art right now, are saying, even saying theCUBE in day one here, data is the new perimeter. So there it is, right, this is fundamental, what you're saying, this is the new perimeter, the data, and you distribute it. >> So no broker right, means less of a threat matrix for people to hack. You don't need a trusted third party to arbitrate. >> You shouldn't have to get other credentials and things to go right, if I can login at my bank right now` and prove I've got the mobile device, can I release data from different sources? Ten percent of Americans move every year, if I show up at an apartment, can I share that I'm Greg and my bank says I'm me, that I have this device from my mobile company, can I share a background check to say that it's me? We're going to do that in about eight seconds, compared to the landlord having to go and pay a real estate agent one month's rent to vet you. And then when you do that, imagine the power now right? Would you like to sign up for internet? Share your data, yes, click. Would you like contents insurance, click. Totally taking friction out for consumers, but making sure that the parties who provide that data, whether it's my bank, whether it's my government, they can't track me. I don't want my government or my bank knowing if I go to mental health, or if I go to a cancer clinic. Really important that they don't know, right? >> Yeah, healthcare here, I don't know what it's like in Canada, but certainly in the United States you can't get information about yourself (laughter). >> And it's a perfect connection to blockchain, 'cause the whole notion of blockchain in our mind is about a trusted network, and how do you get trust if you don't know who the people are who are participating. So, we signed an agreement with the Food and Drug Administration in the United States, to focus on leveraging blockchain for exchange of information around patients, privately and securely for clinical drug trials. You know, it's just one example of now, you bring that trust element, that's built on a blockchain already, as a new interoperable component of these new supply chain networks. Whether it's around supply chain in global sourcing, whether it's the providence of food or diamonds, there's some really interesting aspects that you can now add on top. And we're now even connecting, you mentioned Cognitive, you know, now apply Watson on top of that. How do you increase the trust level in our new version one delivery of Hyperledger on the IBM cloud, we actually provide a trust score for the network, scale, a one to a hundred. What if Watson could actually look at your use case and hear the recommendations and suggestions for how to improve the trust level? Improving it means getting more members, so it's more distributed, and there's more sharing of information. But they're not going to want to share that information if there isn't a trust model. >> So give us a glimpse as to, sort of, your business. You got 200 people, but you've got thousands of people within IBM that you can tap, in addition to the huge portfolio of things like Cognitive. So you've got this startup (laughs), >> Marie: Right. >> inside of IBM. >> Marie: A startup in IBM. >> And you said it's inside the Industry Platform's team, so what is that, and what are you actually building out? >> So, we are building, we're taking, and contributing, we're investing really, in the Hyperledger project ourselves. We are one of now 122 members of the open source and open community project, and we're actually developing and contributing content there. >> Dave: Big committer there. >> Big committer, and we provide a support model for anybody who wants to use just Hyperledger, but we take Hyperledger back, and now we're delivering it as a secure platform on our high security network, that is production grade, you know enterprise strong, would be Ginni's word for that, right, and delivering that on our cloud, or letting you take a container and put it on your own enterprise if you really want your own private cloud. But we're also building industry solutions on top of that. So we announced a partnership with Maersk, for global shipping on global trade digitization to provide greater visibility. >> But on that deal, just to interrupt, that Ramesh was put in, that wasn't a solution specifically for them, that was an industry scope solution. >> Correct. So it's really a partnership. So in this case again, it's that network effect, it's that ecosystem, it's not Maersk, the customer, it's Maersk and IBM the partners, who are now bringing forward as the anchor tenants in this new network, the rest of our ecosystems, and we were interested 'cause we have a big supply chain business for all our hardware as well. >> And you're selling a SAS product, is that right? >> Correct. >> So it's a subscription based model? >> Correct. >> And then services on top of that? >> And services both to develop new blockchain applications, we've had a number of our clients here from the 20 thousand at InterConnect, that've come up with new ideas. We're going to help them build that, in a services kind of model, but many of these are going to be essentially SAS networks where either they're going to pay a membership fee or they're going to pay per transaction, a percentage of the price, or they're going to participate in the savings, because this is actually going to streamline the opportunity. In the case of SecureKey, the model we see customers willing to buy, the validation of an identity for an individual if they're participating in a critical transaction. A bank would certainly be willing to pay to increase the confidence that Greg is Greg, if he was applying for a mortgage online. >> And the consumption is through the IBM cloud, correct? >> Yeah, so there's a toolkit, we're big believers in open source. It's open at the ends, really easy using things like Bluemix to connect to the endpoints. And for us, it's just a magnificent coming together, because things like the high security network to turn banks on quickly, where they trust it, and they can put their data in a secure and trusted way, make this all go faster. >> Dave: But that's the only place in the world I can get this, correct? >> Marie: It is certainly the only place that you can get that level of security in a blockchain network. >> But from a competitive standpoint, somebody else has to build this out, and create as a competitive product as IBM has, and run it on somebody else's cloud, for them to compete, correct? >> That is correct. >> The strategy is not to spam the world's clouds, it's to say hey, we've got this solution, here's how you get it, here's how you consume it. >> And we really firmly believe that if this is an interoperable set of standards, there will be other networks, there will be other participants. We want them all to be interoperable. We want a global identity standard for interlocking networks, because that is actually the tide that raises all boats. So if they want to take Hyperledger and put it on their own private cloud or somebody else's cloud, we support that thoroughly. We think that the most enterprise grade cloud though, is with IBM. >> You just got thousands of people doing it, and you say, go for it. >> Exactly. >> Dave: Bring it on baby! >> First of all, you had me at blockchain beginning the interview. I love blockchain, and I think it's very intoxicating from a disruption standpoint. Any entrepreneur, any innovator... This is a bulldozer on existing business models, and of how people do things. So, I'm sure the organic growth that you guys see is proving it, internal IBM and external. How do people get involved? What's your plans on building the ecosystem now, because you got a tiger by the tail here as the GM of this division now. You got to run hard, you got to embrace people, you got to have events, what's your plan, and how do I get involved if I'm someone watching and we want to get involved? >> So, great simple ways to get involved, the developers, we want 'em to be involved directly through the cloud and through developerWorks. You get free access, you can get started quickly. In three clicks you can have a four peer Hyperledger network up and running on Bluemix, and you can start your own services and create. If you are a customer, what we're really suggesting is come and bring us your use case. Bring the participants in your network as well. Come into one of our IBM garages, and we'll work that out for you. And I think it's important that, we think blockchain has a huge potential or I wouldn't be in this new role, but we also think it's not for everything. It's not the panacea for every business problem. We want to make sure the people are using it in the right way for areas where it really makes the most impact, and then we'll help you implement that and develop it. And then we really see the whole ecosystem around our partners, you're going to onboard people into a blockchain network. You're going to have to integrate with your back ends. You're going to extend your mobile devices to provide these new services through apps. So our GSI community is really helping with the integration and the onboarding. Our ISVs are developing new services that run on those blockchain networks, and we just launched our new IBM Cloud for Financial Services, has a blockchain zone, for all those fintech startups to get access and reuse components, so that we can accelerate the effect. >> Alright, well, congratulations Marie, great to see you in the new role, congratulations, >> Marie: Thank you. >> We're super excited for you, and looking forward to getting the update soon at our new studio. We'll try to rope you into our new Palo Alto studio. Greg, great to hear your success. This is the nirvana, I mean, secure ID is like, the big, I mean easily, not like with some either token or engineered identity system, and this is a home run. >> It's privacy, and it's as we talked about before the broadcast. Facebook, would you trust Facebook to go see your medical records? Would you unlock your title using Facebook? You want things that are private, where people aren't tracking you and are more secure than that, so this is really... >> Don Tapscott called Facebook data fracker. (laughing) We provide all our data for Facebook, they've got billionaires on it. Thanks so much for spending the time. >> Thank you. >> Blockchain revolution here inside theCUBE, bringing you really trusted content here on theCUBE. Distribute it out around the world, I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante, thanks for watching. More great coverage coming up here, stay with us.