>>The Cube Presents UI Path Forward five. Brought to you by UI Path, >>Everybody. We're back in Las Vegas. The cube's coverage we're day one at UI Path forward. Five. Pascal Borne is here. He's an expert and bestselling author in the topic of AI and automation and the book Intelligent Automation. Welcome to the world of Hyper Automation, the first book on the topic. And of course, Ray Wong is back on the cube. He's the founder, chairman and principal analyst, Constellation Reese, also bestselling author of Everybody Wants To Rule the World. Guys, thanks so much for coming on The Cubes. Always a pleasure. Ray Pascal, First time on the Cube, I believe. >>Yes, thank you. Thanks for the invitation. Thank you. >>So what is artificial about artificial intelligence, >>For sure, not people. >>So, okay, so you guys are both speaking at the conference, Ray today. I think you're interviewing the co CEOs. What do you make of that? What's, what are you gonna, what are you gonna probe with these guys? Like, how they're gonna divide their divide and conquer, and why do you think the, the company Danielle in particular, decided to bring in Rob Sland? >>Well, you know what I mean, Like, you know, these companies are now at a different stage of growth, right? There's that early battle between RPA vendors. Now we're actually talking something different, right? We're talking about where does automation go? How do we get the decisioning? What's the next best action? That's gonna be the next step. And to take where UI path is today to somewhere else, You really want someone with that enterprise cred and experience the sales motions, the packages, the partnership capabilities, and who else better than Roblin? He, that's, he's done, he can do that in his sleep, but now he's gotta do that in a new space, taking whole category to another level. Now, Daniel on the other hand, right, I mean, he's the visionary founder. He put this thing from nothing to where he is today, right? I mean, at that point you want your founder thinking about the next set of ideas, right? So you get this interesting dynamic that we've seen for a while with co CEOs, those that are doing the operations, getting the stuff out the door, and then letting the founders get a chance to go back and rethink, take a look at the perspective, and hopefully get a chance to build the next idea or take the next idea back into the organization. >>Right? Very well said. Pascal, why did you write your book on intelligent automation and, and hyper automation, and what's changed since you've written that book? >>So, I, I wrote this book, An Intelligent Automation, two years ago. At that time, it was really a new topic. It was really about the key, the, the key, the key content of the, of the book is really about combining different technologies to automate the most complex end to end business processes in companies. And when I say capabilities, it's, we, we hear a lot about up here, especially here, robotic process automation. But up here alone, if you just trying to transform a company with only up here, you just fall short. Okay? A lot of those processes need more than execution. They need language, they need the capacity to view, to see, they need the capacity to understand and to, and to create insights. So by combining process automation with ai, natural language processing, computer vision, you give this capability to create impact by automating end to end processes in companies. >>I, I like the test, what I hear in the keynote with independent experts like yourself. So we're hearing that that intelligent automation or automation is a fundamental component of digital transformation. Is it? Or is it more sort of a back office sort of hidden in inside plumbing Ray? What do you think? >>Well, you start by understanding what's going on in the process phase. And that's where you see discover become very important in that keynote, right? And that's where process mining's playing a role. Then you gotta automate stuff. But when you get to operations, that's really where the change is going to happen, right? We actually think that, you know, when you're doing the digital transformation pieces, right? Analytics, automation and AI are coming together to create a concept we call decision velocity. You and I make a quick decision, boom, how long does it take to get out? Management committee could free forever, right? A week, two months, never. But if you're thinking about competing with the automation, right? These decisions are actually being done a hundred times per second by machine, even a thousand times per second. That asymmetry is really what people are facing at the moment. >>And the companies that are gonna be able to do that and start automating decisions are gonna be operating at another level. Back to what Pascal's book talking about, right? And there are four questions everyone has to ask you, like, when do you fully intelligently automate? And that happens right in the background when you augment the machine with a human. So we can find why did you make an exception? Why did you break a roll? Why didn't you follow this protocol so we can get it down to a higher level confidence? When do you augment the human with the machine so we can give you the information so you can act quickly. And the last one is, when do you wanna insert a human in the process? That's gonna be the biggest question. Order to cash, incident or resolution, Hire to retire, procure to pay. It doesn't matter. When do you want to put a human in the process? When do you want a man in the middle, person in the middle? And more importantly, when do you want insert friction? >>So Pascal, you wrote your book in the middle of the, the pandemic. Yes. And, and so, you know, pre pandemic digital transformation was kind of a buzzword. A lot of people gave it lip service, eh, not on my watch, I don't have to worry about that. But then it became sort of, you're not a digital business, you're out of business. So, so what have you seen as the catalyst for adoption of automation? Was it the, the pandemic? Was it sort of good runway before that? What's changed? You know, pre isolation, post isolation economy. >>You, you make me think about a joke. Who, who did your best digital transformation over the last years? The ceo, C H R O, the Covid. >>It's a big record ball, right? Yeah. >>Right. And that's exactly true. You know, before pandemic digital transformation was a competitive advantage. >>Companies that went into it had an opportunity to get a bit better than their, their competitors during the pandemic. Things have changed completely. Companies that were not digitalized and automated could not survive. And we've seen so many companies just burning out and, and, and those companies that have been able to capitalize on intelligent automation, digital transformations during the pandemic have been able not only to survive, but to, to thrive, to really create their place on the market. So that's, that has been a catalyst, definitely a catalyst for that. That explains the success of the book, basically. Yeah. >>Okay. Okay. >>So you're familiar with the concept of Stew the food, right? So Stew by definition is something that's delicious to eat. Stew isn't simply taking one of every ingredient from the pantry and throwing it in the pot and stirring it around. When we start talking about intelligent automation, artificial intelligence, augmented intelligence, it starts getting a bit overwhelming. My spy sense goes off and I start thinking, this sounds like mush. It doesn't sound like Stew. So I wanna hear from each of you, what is the methodical process that, that people need to go through when they're going through digital trans transmission, digital transformation, so that you get delicious stew instead of a mush that's just confused everything in your business. So you, Ray, you want, you want to, you wanna answer that first? >>Yeah. You know, I mean, we've been talking about digital transformation since 2010, right? And part of it was really getting the business model, right? What are you trying to achieve? Is that a new type of offering? Are you changing the way you monetize something? Are you taking existing process and applying it to a new set of technologies? And what do you wanna accomplish, right? Once you start there, then it becomes a whole lot of operational stuff. And it's more than st right? I mean, it, it could be like, well, I can't use those words there. But the point being is it could be a complete like, operational exercise. It could be a complete revenue exercise, it could be a regulatory exercise, it could be something about where you want to take growth into the next level. And each one of those processes, some of it is automation, right? There's a big component of it today. But most of it is really rethinking about what you want things to do, right? How do you actually make things to be successful, right? Do I reorganize a process? Do I insert a place to do monetization? Where do I put engagement in place? How do I collect data along the way so I can build better feedback loop? What can I do to build the business graph so that I have that knowledge for the future so I can go forward doing that so I can be successful. >>The Pascal should, should, should the directive be first ia, then ai? Or are these, are these things going to happen in parallel naturally? What's your position on that? Is it first, >>So it, so, >>So AI is part of IA because that's, it's, it's part of the big umbrella. And very often I got the question. So how do you differentiate AI in, I a, I like to say that AI is only the brain. So think of ai cuz I'm consider, I consider AI as machine learning, Okay? Think of AI in a, like a brain near jar that only can think, create, insight, learn, but doesn't do anything, doesn't have any arms, doesn't have any eyes, doesn't not have any mouth and ears can't talk, can't understand with ia, you, you give those capabilities to ai. You, you basically, you create a cap, the capability, technological capability that is able to do more than just thinking, learning and, and create insight, but also acting, speaking, understanding the environment, viewing it, interacting with it. So basically performing these, those end to end processes that are performed currently by people in companies. >>Yeah, we're gonna get to a point where we get to what we call a dynamic scenario generation. You're talking to me, you get excited, well, I changed the story because something else shows up, or you're talking to me and you're really upset. We're gonna have to actually ch, you know, address that issue right away. Well, we want the ability to have that sense and respond capability so that the next best action is served. So your data, your process, the journey, all the analytics on the top end, that's all gonna be served up and changed along the way. As we go from 2D journeys to 3D scenarios in the metaverse, if we think about what happens from a decentralized world to decentralized, and we think about what's happening from web two to web three, we're gonna make those types of shifts so that things are moving along. Everything's a choose your end venture journey. >>So I hope I remember this correctly from your book. You talked about disruption scenarios within industries and within companies. And I go back to the early days of, of our industry and East coast Prime, Wang, dg, they're all gone. And then, but, but you look at companies like Microsoft, you know, they were, they were able to, you know, get through that novel. Yeah. Ibm, you know, I call it survived. Intel is now going through their, you know, their challenge. So, so maybe it's inevitable, but how do you see the future in terms of disruption with an industry, Forget our industry for a second, all industry across, whether it's healthcare, financial services, manufacturing, automobiles, et cetera. How do you see the disruption scenario? I'm pretty sure you talked about this in your book, it's been a while since I read it, but I wonder if you could talk about that disruption scenario and, and the role that automation is going to play, either as the disruptor or as the protector of the incumbents. >>Let's take healthcare and auto as an example. Healthcare is a great example. If we think about what's going on, not enough nurses, massive shortage, right? What are we doing at the moment? We're setting five foot nine robots to do non-patient care. We're trying to capture enough information off, you know, patient analytics like this watch is gonna capture vitals from a going forward. We're doing a lot what we can do in the ambient level so that information and data is automatically captured and decisions are being rendered against that. Maybe you're gonna change your diet along the way, maybe you're gonna walk an extra 10 minutes. All those things are gonna be provided in that level of automation. Take the car business. It's not about selling cars. Tesla's a great example. We talk about this all the time. What Tesla's doing, they're basically gonna be an insurance company with all the data they have. They have better data than the insurance companies. They can do better underwriting, they've got better mapping information and insights they can actually suggest next best action do collision avoidance, right? Those are all the things that are actually happening today. And automation plays a big role, not just in the collection of that, that information insight, but also in the ability to make recommendations, to do predictions and to help you prevent things from going wrong. >>So, you know, it's interesting. It's like you talk about Tesla as the, the disrupting the insurance companies. It's almost like the over the top vendors have all the data relative to the telcos and mopped them up for lunch. Pascal, I wanna ask you, you know, the topic of future of work kind of was a bromide before, but, but now I feel like, you know, post pandemic, it, it actually has substance. How do you see the future of work? Can you even summarize what it's gonna look like? It's, it's, Or are we here? >>It's, yeah, it's, and definitely it's, it's more and more important topic currently. And you, you all heard about the great resignation and how employee experience is more and more important for companies according to have a business review. The companies that take care of their employee experience are four times more profitable that those that don't. So it's a, it's a, it's an issue for CEOs and, and shareholders. Now, how do we get there? How, how do we, how do we improve the, the quality of the employee experience, understanding the people, getting information from them, educating them. I'm talking about educating them on those new technologies and how they can benefit from those empowering them. And, and I think we've talked a lot about this, about the democratization local type of, of technologies that democratize the access to those technologies. Everyone can be empowered today to change their work, improve their work, and finally, incentivization. I think it's a very important point where companies that, yeah, I >>Give that. What's gonna be the key message of your talk tomorrow. Give us the bumper sticker, >>If you will. Oh, I'm gonna talk, It's a little bit different. I'm gonna talk for the IT community in this, in the context of the IT summit. And I'm gonna talk about the future of intelligent automation. So basically how new technologies will impact beyond what we see today, The future of work. >>Well, I always love having you on the cube, so articulate and, and and crisp. What's, what's exciting you these days, you know, in your world, I know you're traveling around a lot, but what's, what's hot? >>Yeah, I think one of the coolest thing that's going on right now is the fact that we're trying to figure out do we go to work or do we not go to work? Back to your other point, I mean, I don't know, work, work is, I mean, for me, work has been everywhere, right? And we're starting to figure out what that means. I think the second thing though is this notion around mission and purpose. And everyone's trying to figure out what does that mean for themselves? And that's really, I don't know if it's a great, great resignation. We call it great refactoring, right? Where you work, when you work, how we work, why you work, that's changing. But more importantly, the business models are changing. The monetization models are changing macro dynamics that are happening. Us versus China, G seven versus bricks, right? War on the dollar. All these things are happening around us at this moment and, and I think it's gonna really reshape us the way that we came out of the seventies into the eighties. >>Guys, always a pleasure having folks like yourself on, Thank you, Pascal. Been great to see you again. All right, Dave Nicholson, Dave Ante, keep it right there. Forward five from Las Vegas. You're watching the cue.

>> Announcer: Live, from Copenhagen, Denmark, it's theCUBE! Covering Nutanix.NEXT 2019. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix.NEXT. We are at the Bella Center in Copenhagen, Denmark. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, alongside of Stu Miniman, of course. We are joined by a good friend of theCUBE, Ray Wang, principal analyst and CEO of Constellation Research. Thank you so much for returning to theCUBE. >> Hey, how you doing? Good morning! >> Good morning, good morning! >> Good morning! (laughing) >> Good morning! >> I don't know. I get all my accents wrong out here. >> (laughing) So, you got a shout out on the main stage this morning, from Monica Kumar, congratulations on that. She talked about you and your research on the infinite role of computing. You also do a lot with the future of work. I know that that is really right in your wheelhouse right now. What are you hearing, what are you seeing, what kinds of conversations are you having that are interesting you? >> Yeah, so, this infinite computing option, it's one of the that we're talking about, the fact that you can scale out forever, right? And the problem that's holding us back has been technical debt, right? So all that legacy that everyone's got to figure out. It's like, my connections, my server, my disk-rack recovery, my disaster recovery, my backup, everything. It's a pain in the butt. And I'm still trying to get onto the cloud. So on that end, we're like, okay, all this stuff is holding us back, how do we get there? Now, the future of work is a little bit different. We're seeing a very very different set of work. People have talked about where we are the gig economy, but that's just one aspect of it. Everything is being decomposed into microservices. Large processes are becoming smaller and smaller microservices, they're being reusable, well our work and tasks are following the same way. We're getting smaller and smaller tasks, some are more repetitive, some are going to be automated, and it's really about where we actually find the difference between augmentation of humanity, and full automation, and that's where the next battle's going to be. >> Yeah, Ray, some of the discussions we've been having this week, is how do we really simplify the environment? The balance I hear from customers, on the one hand, they're always like, I don't have enough money, I don't have enough personnel, on the other hand, oh my gosh, that full automation sounds like you're going to put me out of a job. We know we're not putting everybody out of work in the next couple of years. There are challenges; we worry about the hollowing out of the center of the economy, but here, what Nutanix is trying to do, of course, is, I don't want to have to thrive in that complexity anymore, I want to be able to drive innovation, keep up with that, take advantage of that unlimited resources out there, so, where do you see, you've been here at the show, what are you hearing from the customers here? Anything different in Europe versus back in North America that you'd share about that journey onto the changing roles? >> Oh it's a great point. It's about simplifying everything where you can, it's about areas of automation where they make sense. Here in Europe it's slightly different because a lot of the focus in Europe has been about cost and efficiency, followed by of course regulatory. Those have been the two drivers. And they've been battling that in order to be, even they will look at some level of innovation. Where in the US, people are head on doing innovation, regulatory and operational efficiency at the same time. So that creates a very very different environment. But what we have noticed are some patterns, especially when we look at automation and AI; there are four areas out of seven where we see a lot more automation that's happening. The first one is massively repetitive tasks, those are things, yeah, got to get that out of the way, we don't do this very very well. The second one is really thinking about massive nodes of interaction. When you're connected to multiple places, multiple organizations, multiple instances, that's something where we start to get overwhelmed, and then of course, there's lots of volume. If you've got lots of volume or requests that are coming through, you can't possibly handle that, and that's a place where we see a lot of machine scale. And the last piece is really when you have to scale, humans don't scale very well. However, it's actually not a hollowing out of the middle; it's actually a hollowing out of the ends in a very, very real end, because really really simple tasks go away, super complex tasks go away, and the middle actually remains, and the middle is things that are complex that cannot be recreated by math, they're also areas that require a lot of creativity, humans make the rules, we break the rules, and then the last part is really fine motor skills and presence, the machines still aren't as good. So we still have some hope. So the middle stays, it's the hollowing out of the ends, the high end jobs and the low end jobs are the ones where we're going to see a lot of risk. >> So what does that mean? So we have, leaving the middle there, and as you said, the high end jobs and the low end jobs go away, but what does that mean in terms of the skills? In terms of what employers are looking for, in terms of what they need in their prospective applicants and hirees. >> That's a great point. Soft skills are important; it's the qualitative skills that become even more important, it's also being able to manage and orchestrate the hard skills; because you don't necessarily have to know how to do the calculation, you have to just know which algorithm to apply. >> Okay, and then also, these soft skills of managing people, I'm assuming too? Because computers are not so good at that either. >> Yes. Soft skills are managing people, but also manage the human and machine equation that's going to happen. Because we have to train the machines, the machines aren't going to know that level of intuition, and there's a large amount of training that's going to happen over time. >> All right. So, Ray, one of the things Nutanix is doing is, as they've been transforming to not only subscription, software's always been at their core, but they're starting to do not just infrastructure software, but application software. I know you live in that world quite a lot, so when you hear Nutanix talking about building databases, delivering these services, it's something that I look at, Amazon does some of that, but for the most part they're infrastructure and build on top of us. How do you think, how is Nutanix doing, what are some of the challenges for them, going up against some of the bellwethers out there in tech, and all the open source projects that are out there. >> So the challenge is always going to be, there is a one dominant player in every market. And what they're providing is an alternative to allow the orchestration of not having that, not only that dominant player, but a choice. So in every single market, they're focused on giving users choice, and giving the ability to aggregate, and bring everything into one single plane. That is tough to do, right? And the fact that they see that as their big hairy audacious goal, that's impressive. If you said they were going to do this three years ago, I wouldn't have believed them. >> Well yeah, I think back to, remember almost 10 years ago, VMware tried to get into applications, they bought Zimbra, they bought a few others. Cisco did like 26 adjacencies, they were going to take over video and do all these things, and we've seen lots of failures over the years. They refocused on their core, was a big thing that I heard, that the users seem to be excited about. Are there areas that you're find especially interesting as to where Nutanix is poking? >> So, I would say that Nutanix three years ago was a little bit sleepy. They got comfortable, they did the stuff that they did really well, and it feels like, maybe about 12 months ago, Dheeraj had a different vision. Like something snapped, something hit, he said this isn't working, we're going to change things, and we've seen a whole bunch of new talent come into play. We've also seen a huge expansion of what they're trying to do, and a cleanup of all those side projects that were all going on before. So I think they've actually honed in on, okay, if we can simplify this piece, this is a money-winning business for some time, and they're talking about 80% margins last quarter, I mean that's huge, and that's just trying to save customers money, and make their lives simpler. >> Do you think that they have the messaging right? Because, I mean, they're going to this Thoreauvian/Emersonian idea of simplify, simplify, simplify, and it does resonate, of course! What customer doesn't want a simpler computing experience? But do you think that they are reaching the right people, and they have obviously very passionate customers, but are they getting into new businesses. >> I think they're getting to the businesses that their customers are asking them to, those adjacencies are huge, I think and when you think about cleaning up technical debt, all that legacy debt that you actually have to fix, I mean, this is where you begin. It's so hard to make that cloud journey to begin with, it's even harder to carry all that legacy with you. And we're going to see a lot more of this going forward. >> All right. So, Ray, talk a little bit about, I loved an event you did last year, the people's centered digital future. Help explain to our audience what this is about, and where you're taking it again this year. >> So that event was a one-time event. We were celebrating the 70th anniversary of the United Nations founding, we were celebrating almost 50 years of the internet, and 50% of the world being connected to the internet. And part of the reason that was an important event was, we really felt that there was a need to get back to the roots of where the internet had begun, and more importantly, talk about where we are today in the world of privacy. One of the biggest challenges we have in the a digital world is that your personal data, your genomics, all this information about you is being brokered for free. And what we have to do is take that back. And by taking that back, what I mean is, we've got to make all these rights, property right. If we can make that a property right, we can leverage the existing rules and legislation that's there, and we can actually start paying people for that data through consent, and giving people that ability, on consent to data, could create lots of things, from universal basic income, to a brand new set of data economy that equalizes the playing field, while keeping the large tech giants. >> There's some of those big journeys that we went on, you talk about the internet, this year's 50th anniversary of the first walking on the moon, and you look at how entire countries rallied together, so much technology was-- >> Yeah, look at India. >> Spun off of what they've done there, it's like we need some rallying cries in today's day and age to solve some of these big day and age. Is that AI? Where are some of the big areas that you see tech needing to drive forward in the next decade? >> I think the big area's going to be around decentralization, giving individuals more empowerment. We've got large, big tech companies, that are, I'd say, imbalanced. We start companies right away, building monopolies on day one, and we don't open up those markets. And the question is, how do we create a level playing field for the individual to be to compete, to bring a new idea, and to innovate, if that's continuously stifled by big technology companies without an opportunity, we're in trouble. And so that starts by making data a property right, to the personal data. It starts by also creating marketplaces for that data, and those marketplaces have to have regulations, similar to capital market flows. The way treat exchanges, we treat marketplaces, we need to do the same thing with the way we do with data, and then the third piece, there has to be some level of a tax, that goes to all these data economies, so that they can fund the infrastructure and the watch dogs that are there. Now this is coming from a free market, I'm a free market capitalist, okay? I can't stand regulation, but I also realize that it's so important that we have a fair market. >> But do you, we know so much about how Americans are so much more cavalier about their privacy than even Europeans, what will it take to galvanize Americans to care about those little crumbs that they're leaving on the internet, that is the data that you say should be a property right, that we should be paid for? >> I think it's going to start with companies actually take, and do the right thing, where they actually give them that opportunity to monetize that information. >> Will they do that? >> I think the new set of startups are starting to do that, because they're looking at the risk that's being posed, at Facebook and Google and Amazon, on the anti-trust, DOJ, FCC, they're all coming in at the same time, the FTC, they're all wondering, do we break these companies up or not? The short answer is, I don't think they're going to, because we're competing with China, and when you're looking at that scale of data, where Amazon's transactions are only 1/10 of Ali Baba's? That's huge. So the consolidation has to happen, but we need to create a layer that actually democratizes and creates a fair trading play. >> And those startups, you think, can compete with established players? >> I think once we set the roles, and the ground rules, I think people are going to be able to do that, but once you free that data, what are we competing on now? You have to pay for my consent, you have to earn my business, you can't trade it for free, or just say, "Hey look, you are the product." That changes everything. >> Rebecca: Yeah, that's a good point. >> Ray, I know you spend a lot of time talking to, and giving advice to some of the leaders in technology, you're welcome to get into some specifics about Nutanix, or some of the cloud players, but what are some of the key themes, what are people getting right, and what are they still doing wrong? >> Okay, so theme number one, this is going to be a multicloud hybrid world for a long time. Anybody that's bucking the multicloud trend, they've missed the point, right? Because we want portability in data, there's only two or three players in every single market, if I can't move my data, my workloads, and my IO in and out, then you've actually created vendor lock-in from hell. And I think customers are going to protest against that. The second one, and you guys are probably following this trend a lot, is really about AI ethics and design principles for AI. So what is ethical AI? We've got five things that are important: The first one is make sure it's transparent. See the algorithms, see what they write. Second one, make sure it's explainable. Hey, bias is not a bad thing, so if I'm discriminating against redheads, with, left-handed, and that happened to like, I don't know, Oracle, fine. But, if that was unintended, and you're discriminating against that, then we have to get rid of that, right? And so we have to figure out how to reduce that kind of bias, if it's unwanted bias. If you discover that you're discriminating, and not being inclusive, you've got to make sure that you address that. So then the next part is, it's got to be reversible. And once you have that reversibility, we also make sure that we can train these systems over time. And then the last piece is, Musk could be right! Musk could be right, the machines might take over, but if you insert a human at the beginning of the process, and at the end of the process, you won't get taken over. >> I want to hear about what the future of work looks like for Ray Wang. You are on the road constantly, you are (laughs) you are moving your data from one place, you are everywhere, all the time. So what do you have on next, what's exciting you about your professional life? >> I think the challenge's that we are living in a world where there's too much information, too much content. And you guys say this all the time, right? Separating the signal from the noise. And people are willing to pay for that signal. But that is a very very tough job, right? It's about the analysis, the insights, and when you have that, people don't want to read through your reports. They don't want to watch through the videos. They just want to call you up and say, "Hey, what's going on?" And get the short version of it. And that's what's making it very interesting, because you would expect this would be in a chat bot, it'd be in a robo advisor, doesn't work that way. People still want the human connection, especially given all that data out there, they want the analysis and insights that you guys provide, that's very very important, but even more important right now, it's really about getting back to those relationships. I think people are very careful about the relationships they're keeping, they're also curating those relationships, and coming back to spending more time. And so we're seeing a lot more of in-person meetings, in-person events, very very small, curated conversations, and I think that's coming back. I mean that's why we do our conference every year, as well, we try to keep 200 to 300 people intimately together. >> Those human connections, not going away. (laughs) >> Nope, not going away, in an automated, AI, digital world! This is our post-digital future. >> That's excellent. Well Ray, thanks you so much for coming on theCUBE, it's always so much fun to talk to you. >> Hey, thanks a lot. >> High energy guy (laughs). >> Low energy. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman, we will have more from the Bella Center at Nutanix.NEXT coming up in just a little bit. (upbeat music)

>> from Santa Clara in the heart of Silicon Valley. It's the Q covering the Churchills 2019 brought to you by Silicon Angle Media. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jefe Rick here with the Cube. We're in Santa Clara, California At the Churchills. It's the ninth annual kind of awards banquet at the Church O Club. It's on, and the theme this year is all about leadership. And we're excited to have not one of the winners, but one of the newest board members of the church, Oh, club. And someone is going to be interviewing some of the winners at a very many time. Cuba LEM Ray Wong, You know, from Constellation Research of founder, chief analyst >> and also >> a new board member for the Churchill Club Brigade, is >> also being back here. I love this event. There's one my favorite ones. You get to see all the cool interviews, >> right? So you're interviewing Grandstand from Pallet on for the life changer award. >> Yeah, so this is really incredible. I mean, this company has pretty much converge right. We're talking, It's media, It's sports, It's fitness. It's like social at the same time. And it's completely changed. So many people they've got more writers than soul cycle. Can you believe that? >> Yeah. I like to ride my bike outside, so I'm just not part of this whole thing. But I guess I guess on those bikes you can write anywhere >> you can write anywhere, anywhere with anyone. But it's not that. It's the classes, right? You basically hop on. You see the classes. People are actually pumping you up there. Okay, Go, go, go. You can see all the other riders are in the space. It's kind >> of >> addictive. Let's let's shift gears. Talk about leadership more generally, because things were a little rough right here in the Valley right now. And people are taking some hits and black eyes. You talk to a lot of leaders. She go to a tonic, shows you got more shows. A. We go to talk to a lot of CEOs when you kind of take a step back about what makes a good leader, what doesn't make a good leader? What are some of the things that jump into your head? >> You know, we really think about a dynamic leadership model. It's something conceit on my Twitter handle. It's basically the fact that you got a balance. All these different traits. Leaders have to perform in different ways in different situation. Something like Oh, wow, that's a general. They've done a great job commanding leadership. Other times we had individuals, a wonderful, empathetic leader, right? There's a balance between those types of traits that have to happen, and they curve like seven different dimensions and each of these dimensions. It's like sometimes you're gonna have to be more empathetic. Sometimes you got to be more realistic. Sometimes you're going to be harder. And I think right now we have this challenge because there's a certain style that's being imposed on all the leaders that might not be correct >> theater thing. The hypothesis for you to think about is, you know, when a lot of these people start the Silicon Valley companies the classic. It's not like they went to P and G and work their way up through the ranks. You know, they started a company, it was cool. And suddenly boom. You know, they get hundreds of millions of dollars, the I po and now you've got platforms that are impacting geopolitical things all over the world. They didn't necessarily sign up for that. That's not necessarily what they wanted to do, and they might not be qualified. So, you know, Is it? Is it fair to expect the leader of a tech company that just built some cool app that suddenly grew into, ah, ubiquitous platform over the world that many, many types of people are using for good and bad to suddenly be responsible? That's really interesting situation for these people. >> Well, that's what we talked about the need for responsive and responsible leadership. Those are two different types of traits. Look, the founding individual might not be the right person to do that, but they can surround themselves with team members that can do that. That could make sure that they're being responsive or responsible, depending on what's required for each of those traits. You know, great examples like that Black Mirror episode where you see the guru of, like, some slasher meet a guy. Some guys like Colin is like, you know, he wants to make sure that you know someone's paying attention to him. Well, the thing is like a lot of times, at least folks are surrounded by people that don't have that empathetic You might not have had what a founder is looking at, or it could be the flip side. The founder might not be empathetic. They're just gung ho, right, ready to build out the next set of features and capabilities that they wanted to d'oh! And they need that empathy that's around there. So I think we're going to start to see that mix and blend. But it's hard, right? I mean, going through a start up as a CEO and founder is very, very different than coming in through the corporate ranks. There's a >> very good running a company, you know. It's funny again. You go to a lot of shows. We get a lot of shows, a lot of key, knows a lot of CEO keynotes, and it's just interesting. Some people just seem to have that It factor one that jumps off the top is Dobie. You know, some people just seemed >> like the have it >> where they can get people to follow, and it's it's really weird. We just said John W. Thompson, on talking about Sathya changing the culture at Microsoft, with hundreds and hundreds of thousands of employees distributed all over the world. What a creative and amazing job to be able to turn that ship. >> Oh, it is. I mean, I can turn on the charm and just, like, get your view Lee excited about something just like that, right? And it's also about making sure you bring in the input and make people feel that they're inclusive. But you gotta make decisions at some point, too. Sometimes you have to make the tough choices. You cut out products, you cut out certain types of policies, or sometimes you gotta be much more responsive to customers. Right? Might look like you're eating crow. But you know what? At the inn today, cos they're really built around customers or state Kohler's stay close air bigger today than just shareholders. >> Right. Last question. Churchill Club. How'd you get involved? What makes you excited to jump on board? >> You know, this is like an institution for the valley, right? This is you know, if you think about like the top interviews, right? If you think about the top conversations, the interesting moments in the Valley, they've all happened here. And it's really about making sure that you know, the people that I know the people that you know there's an opportunity to re create that for the next set of generations. I remember coming here when it's like I go back, I think give Hey, just I don't hear anybody in 96 right? And just thinking like, Hey, what were the cool activities? What were the interesting conversations and the church? The club was definitely one of those, and it's time to give back. >> Very good. All right, well, congrats on that on that new assignment. And good luck with the interview tonight. Hey, thanks a lot. All right. He's Ray. I'm Jeff. You wanted the Cube with that? Churchill's in Santa Clara, California. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

>> From the SiliconANGLE media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host Dave Vellante. >> Hi everybody, welcome to this CUBE conversation. I'm Dave Vellante.\ We're going to talk about unified communications and its role in digital transformations. Ray Krug is here. He's a solutions architect at NETSCOUT. Ray, good to see you, thanks for coming on. >> Hi Dave, good to be here. >> So talk a little bit about NETSCOUT. You guys are into a lot of different things, but give us the overview. >> Yeah, NETSCOUT, what they're primarily focused on is providing the visibility to assure digital business initiatives, to provide availability assurance, performance assurance, as well as security assurance as well and we do this using our smart data and smart analytics platform. We kind of do this for, okay, got a huge customer base, we do this for over 90% of the Fortune 500, 95% of the carrier service providers, so we scale to these large enterprises, sophisticated service providers, providing the visibility they need to assure their services. >> So as a solution architect what specifically is your role? >> Probably worthwhile giving a bit of history because I know we're talking about unified communications. So I have been with NETSCOUT now for about eight years it's been and I came from an acquisition. The acquisition was from a British company, a spin-out of British telecom called Psytechnics and we specialized, this is eight years, well 10 years ago, in analyzing the IP network for voice and video traffic and actually being able to understand how we can take impoundments in the network and how that translates to impoundments in voice quality over a voiceover IP. So that was the original data transformation project, the so-called digital transformation from TDM networks to IP. So yeah, we took those analytics and basically figured out how to do that. >> So deep understanding of actually what's going on in the network? >> Yeah absolutely, and what was exciting, and back to NETSCOUT, is when they acquired Psytechnics, they took this technology and put that into their pro-technology, they did that within three or four months. Our technology was in their probe monitoring the voice, both voiceover IP networks, and then what was interesting, within 12 months, all our workflows that we created for insured performance of voiceover IP networks got embedded into the NETSCOUT portfolio of products. And since then, eight years, winding on forward, we've been embedding more and more technology into our InGenuis One platform to give you better and better voice, video, and unified communication analytics. >> I love that story, Ray, because the vast majority of mergers and acquisitions fail to meet their original objectives, they take too long to integrate so some companies are good at it, some not so good at it, so it must've been pleasing to see that happen, and see your baby actually scale like that. All right, lets talk about big picture. What are the big trends that you see sort of driving unified communications today? >> Yeah, unified communications is getting more and more complex, and perhaps on one accord, sophisticated, but you kind of think, okay, most common used case for us is to be a contact center because at the end of the day, contact center, the customers are demanding more and more ways to interact with the business, traditionally it was voice but now they want web, web chats, video, whatever it might be, so contact centers a big consumer of unified communications. And then there's the different technology trends like, of course, Microsoft Skype for business, evolving into Microsoft Teams, or Cisco Jabber, unified communications and all that sort of thing. A whole bunch of other topics going on, again, part of digital transformation initiatives, SIP trunking, we're still seeing that going on. So I was talking about TDM to IP, so that was back in my day in Psytechnics, now it's taking those and transferring IP to SIP trunking to save costs, that's the main thing, but it is a change and it is more, not instrumentation, but more appliances on a network, like session border controllers in order to add your SIP trunking, and of course there's also other technology, migration to the cloud as well, which ends up, from our perspective what we're seeing is in very hybrid environments. So now you've got a lot of on-prem stuff and some cloud stuff, it's all going to work together in order to make voice, video, unified communications successful. >> Isn't another sort of challenge, I'll call it give the people what they want, you talk about contact centers being a primary source, people want to communicate in different ways. Young people maybe want to use chat, some people like me want to pick up and talk to a human. Is that part of the challenge, is bringing all those together to service all these different constituents? >> Yeah, absolutely, because at the end of the day, it's a contact center, you want to make sure you provide an engaging experience to your customers, however that might be. Omnichannel or whatever word you want to do it. The longer and happier the customer is dealing with your business, perhaps the more money they'll spend with your business, perhaps the better brand awareness they have of your business as well. >> So double click into some of the challenges of actually bringing this stuff together, making it work, is it cost, you mentioned complexity before, is it understanding the analytics, who's using what, predicting, double click on that. >> That's a big topic, but we talked about new features and immersive experience from unified communications, so that's all brilliant. The trouble is, high quality is key. You got to make sure that it's successful, so any migration project, you need to be successful to make sure that you've succeeded. Okay, so that's number one. Quality is key, but also in terms of cost, sometimes these initiatives about cost savings, so SIP trunking is a good example of that. I want to make my service the same as it was before, have some sort of future upgrade capability, but kind of make it cheaper, that's what SIP trunking does for you as well. So those are some of the reasons for doing it, but then that introduces more components in your infrastructure to make all that stuff work and it's not just about voice and video, it's all about the other backend servers as well to make it all happen whether that's mail or chat or presence or whatever it might be. Lots of components now that have to work together, stuff that you control but also stuff that you don't control like SIP trunks is a good example, or gateways out to the PSTs, things that you don't control, and that makes it kind of really tricky to deal with. There's a bunch of other stuff as well that's important, network convergence, you've got all these applications converging onto that one network infrastructure, how do you manage that? >> Quick tangent. So you mentioned SIP trunking, explain what that is for our audience so they don't have to google it. (Ray laughs) >> Yeah, so SIP trunking, basically, if you think about gatewaying out to the PSTN in terms of making your plain old telephone calls, dialing a number and sending out, SIP trunking does that all from an IP perspective. So the idea is, you don't necessarily do a conversion to TDM, traditional phone systems, it all goes IP. So basically, you then send everything out, IP, over the network, it gets to the other end, and the whole purpose of that, it's a service that you buy from your service provider and it's cheap. >> Okay, you talked about these challenges. Generally, how does the industry approach solving these problems and specifically how does NETSCOUT solve them? >> Great question. So traditionally, let's sort of rewind a little bit, I talked about a lot of components that need to work together to make your unified communications experience. Lots of servers, lots of network infrastructure, firewalls, session boarder controllers and all that. Traditionally, what you do is monitor each of those devices. Take a look at their CPU utilization, or take a look at how the servers are performing, and often, very little is taken into account about the network and how that's behaving, because again, I've said it's a converged network. So you end up with a picture saying, all my servers are working fine, but then you end up with the problem, but users are complaining because they can't dial, users are complaining because the quality is bad. So that's kind of the problem with trying to bring all those together using the different metrics and coming up with some sort of conclusion. >> And then it's finger pointing, right? >> Oh yeah, classic. >> Which mole to whack. >> Yeah, in constant use cases, war rooms, okay, all my lights are green for every person in that war room but the people are still complaining, absolutely. >> Okay, so talk more about how NETSCOUT approaches this. >> So, the name gives it away, really. We always focus on what's going on in the network, wherever that network may be, so we're taking a look at that, we call it Y data, it's packet data, and we're able to translate that. Whatever's going over the wires, whether it be an application going over the wires or whether it be unified communications going over the wire like voiceover IP, RTP, or signaling, SIP as an example of those. So we're able to get that picture of how everything is communicating with each other, and we're being able to raise that level. So packets are notoriously hard to interpret, but we've cracked it, we've got a sort of technology, it's a patented technology called ASI, adaptive service intelligence, we call it smart data, but it's converting that Y data into meaningful keeper points metrics. So you name it, you name the application, we've got performance metrics. So whether that be voice, voice quality, mean opinion score, we're taking that from the Y data. Whether it be application performance from a database that might be running, or a mail server that might be running, we have performance. Whether it's this signaling that goes on to get data and all that, we have performance metrics about that. So we're using the same data set, the Y data, bringing it up to our analytics, our ASI layer, and then we have an understanding of what component's failing. Is it the voice that's failing? Is it this part of the network that's failing? And then, for voice, there's a whole topic on how we understand that, remembering my background and the analytics behind that. >> So, your secret sauce is you've got this deep probe into the network, you've got this ASI, this patented technology, and you've got an architecture to leverage that capability, and that is really your big differentiator from a technical perspective? Is that right? >> Well, from a technical perspective, absolutely. And from an obvious perspective, we solve, in the easiest way, the most complex problems. It's kind of where it's coming, 'cause these are tricky problems to do, they sometimes go unseen for ages, but because we've got that overall visibility, we get to that root cause very quickly. >> Okay, let's talk about the business impact. Maybe you can give us some examples, customer examples, and how it affected their business? >> Yeah, so that's important. A couple of things, let's imagine you're contact center, a service company, so I've got one in mind, and the one that I have in mind, six contact centers, they take up to about 100,000 calls in a day. So it's important. They're a service company so people phone them up to have their service. If you can't make contact with your service company, maybe the impact of that is, okay, that service is rubbish, I'm going to go to a competitor, as an example. Or you don't get your service that you require. So there's huge implications. In this example, we've found that calls were dropping, as an example, so people are connecting with their agent, calls are dropping, okay, hopeless. It's really problematic. And it's interesting that you pointed out about war rooms and finger pointing, and that's exactly what happened. What they'd done, they'd engaged in a SIP trunking project to deploy SIP trunking they were going to save a million dollars a month by implementing this SIP trunk. So that's huge, okay yet, when they deployed this, they were having a bad experience, so that's critical, so they needed to achieve that successful migration, so they had tours but nothing that could spot what was going on with these calls dropping. So along come NETSCOUT, we deployed our probe, and very quickly, it's just amazing, very quickly we were to able to analyze the reason for the call dropping. Turned out it was a firewall issue, complex network so it's kind of difficult to know where the traffic is routing. We were able to figure that out, give it the evidence to say the signaling, the SIP, was dropping, and we were able to pinpoint that and they got that fixed very quickly. >> Which meant that they were able to realize that million dollar a month savings. >> Precisely, yes exactly. Let alone that any business that might've been affected by the fact that people couldn't call in. >> Any other examples you can share? >> Yeah, I've got a really great one, probably closer to a lot of people's hearts, and relates to a hospital, and they were going through a digital migration project. It's as simple as changing their phone handsets from one vendor to another in some respect, about 2,000 phones that they were replacing, so it's kind of interesting. So I've now got a nice new shiny phone on my desk, when I pick up the phone I get very bad quality and stuff like that, and just blame the phone and all that sort of thing. Sometimes that's change, people don't like change, they like all the buttons on their old phone, and sometimes it's real, but in a way, the business impact for that one is, if I'm a customer, a patient, I'm phoning up my doctor for some records, and the phone quality is bad, then I'm not going to have that much confidence that the doctor's going to be able to cope with my ailment that I might have. So it's really important to have quality, and when it's about your health, then it's really important that it's there. >> Awesome. Let's end on some advice that you would give to customers. So you got people trying to do digital transformations, they're trying to pull all these different communication systems together, trying to understand where the exposures are, the performance issues. What advice would you give to people that are struggling with these problems, where should they start, and what should their journey look like? >> In some respects, I think visibility is key, both before pre-migration, during migration and afterwards. So in my example before, having visibility of the performance of the phones before, in this migration issue, and then as I go through the migration, being able to just check that when they deployed the new phones, everything's working. And then of course, once, if there were any problems, so in my example, it was QOS problem. QOS, quality of service, so that's a networking problem and it goes back to, because we're in the network, we're looking at the network, as much as that's the most complex problem to solve, and it's everywhere, QOS problems are everywhere, it's the simplest thing for us to fix. So monitoring during migration, seeing what the behavior of the phones are, during that process, correcting everything quickly, so that the migration project is successful, and then post-migration, business as usual, monitoring, so if there are any problems you can quickly react to it. >> Got it, okay, so you're going to through a business case, you're going to make this part of your digital transformation, you're going to bring together all the stakeholders but I think your point is, if you don't have visibility on what's going on in the network, there are going to be some blind spots that you potentially run into. If you have visibility in the network, you're going to be able to remediate those, and the example you gave of the services company, you're going to be able to achieve your expectations and your ROI results and have confidence that you're going to be around for the next project. So Ray, thanks very much for coming on and sharing with us. And thank you for watching everybody, we'll see you next time. This is Dave Vellante with theCUBE. (bright synth music)

from the silicon angle media office in Boston Massachusetts it's the queue now here's your host David on tape hi everybody welcome to this cube conversation I'm Dave Volante and you're cloud and cloud migrations are a major challenge for customers they move things into the cloud and variably they've got things that they want to maintain on Prem they've got to figure out what to move how to move it how to maintain performance and how to maintain the experience from on Prem into the cloud rate Krueger's here is a solution architect at net scout rate thanks for coming on nice to be here thank you so tell us a little bit about nesco yeah I mean net sky I mean primarily it helps you provide the visibility required to protect your digital digital business transformation we give you availability information performance information and security insights into what's going on in your environment we do this for 90% of the fortune 500 we do this for 95% of service provider so we're kind of Carrio class service provider and enterprise sophistication and we basically give you that visibility without borders and the visibility without borders is all about saying wherever you deploy your application whether it's being on Prem in your private data center software-defined data center or West en or whatever it might be or whether you migrate some or all of that into the public cloud AWS or as your we give you that same visibility same metrics wherever you host your application even in this hybrid world or this multi cloud world of today okay so top level one of those discussions like you heard my sort of intro and some of the challenges but what a customer is telling you about their cloud migrations well ok that's interesting so so that's kind of been around for eight years we're in like as I said thousands of customers and and these guys have been tasked they've been tasked with going to the cloud for business agility reasons and the idea of business agility is can you sort of create new services quicker new business initiatives new projects new application new ways that customers can we communicate with the business and they it's all about wrapping this and delivering these applications very quickly so the guys that we're talking to us said are being our task to move it to the cloud for various reasons it's not necessarily cost reasons as well it's LT and the the view is of the businesses the cloud will give them that agility maybe easier to manage maybe it's quicker to deploy applications quickly and all that sort of thing so they mean tasks to do that and that's a challenge because you know providing that visibility on premon in the cloud has been historically true well the other thing about the cloud is it's it's easy to test you know you test things you experiment you fail fast try the next one and it's relatively inexpensive to do that versus you know buying infrastructure but now so you see that but so talk a little bit more about some of the the real challenges that customers are facing you know when they start that migration as I said before they've got on-prem they've got workloads in the cloud they want a consistent experience but what are some of the problems yeah I mean yeah yeah yeah that's that shadow IT if you thought it has been a big problem but that's business utility isn't it okay because it's taken so long to deploy stuff on Prem ok to take four days before I have a new host ready for you to do that application so no wonder they've done that shadow whitey right but but anyway okay so on task to migrate this application so okay so I got to understand what that application looks like what are the components what it's what is it talking to because if I miss something right if I don't migrate all the components and don't forget these application it's not just one server or one component of the application it's maybe ten components might be whatever it is I need to know what that is and I can't just go to the documentation team to actually see all the protocols it's talking to all the dependencies whether it's one app tier talking to a database tier or whatever it might be the documentation just doesn't exist and the developers who developed that application no longer are part of the company they've long gone if ever they wrote any documentation so to understand right what you need to migrate is one of the biggest challenges and as it happens it's one of the challenges that we can help in netscape well this is a huge problem because you mentioned dependencies so if as you say an application talking to a database and maybe an ancillary application downstream those are going to affect business processes and unless you understand those dependencies if you effect one it's going to have a ripple effect on others and it could affect the business process so so that is a critical problem okay well so how do you nets go solve that problem I mean I have a question how does the industry generally solve it and I want to understand how you're different yeah okay so there's a couple of problems there is what one is understanding the components the dependencies and then one is understanding the performance so you can migrate successfully and all that sort of thing yeah so the industry typically will actually try and use some rudimentary network data to try and take a look at one application communicating to another and trying to get that from some devices various devices around the network because what they'll try to do to do that looking for connections is ok looking for connections and how they're doing that and in terms of performance they're they're resorting to looking at the different logs or the different infrastructure information like CPU utilization or those sort of things or developers are looking at instrumenting code into the applications which give them that performance information trouble with those they only see what the developers put into them rather than the whole picture of all those dependencies so while a bespoke data a lot of bespoke data trying to bring that together and come up with a conclusion that they this is all the components and this is how it's performing it is it's tricky ok so how do you guys do so yeah ok so as you know we use the network the wire data in order to understand what's going on so think about it if an application if I'm talking to my CRM application I might have a web browser it's talking to a web server talking to an app server to talking to a micro survey database or whatever it might be but all of those are interactions in a network different protocols HTTP HWS database Active Directory DNS so because we look at the network we can see it all so we can see all the traffic on the network we can see how things are communicating in reality so you don't necessarily need the documentation because we're documenting what's going on right now and that's kind of where we really score big in terms of understanding those dependencies and it's the it's the secret sauce that we've always known about the that that net Scout has your ability to to probe the network your your layer that analyzes that data the architecture that you've created right that's your IT yeah that's our secret sauce so we translate why data trauma is why data there's a lot of it and it's hard to interpret so that's one thing so we we've cured that problem by creating a patented technology called ASI adaptive service intelligent which translates that wire data into meaningful key performance metrics so you name the application it's all the applications going on your network translate them into performance metrics let's say application performance metrics and then differentiating that's a application latency from Network latency so we can see whether it was a network problem slowing things down or the application server slowing things down but also errors we can see all of that in that that wire data so that's that next layer up and then we have the analytics platform which we call ingenious one which actually takes that metadata and then allows us to display okay it's service dependency map so this is how your application is communicating all the nooks and cranny's the things that you didn't expect and not only does it do the dependency it does the performance as well the metadata oh it always comes back to the metadata one of the challenges that customers tell us they have is just creating the experience between on Prem and cloud you know the so called hybrid a lot of times it's it's different and they want to take that cloud experience and bring it to wherever they are cloud a cloud be on Prem are you able to maintain that experience in in this hybrid model yeah so to multi cloud or or not to multi class yeah no that's the beauty of number one why data and what we do why data is everywhere ok so if your applications communicate communicating in the cloud it's still communicating over IP and so we can actually instrument into the cloud collecting that wire data and then doing the same analytics asi in the same taking the same meta data and actually bring together a view of now the dependencies across the multi-cloud so whatever the cloud were able to get at that wire data and translate it into a si all uniform it's the same metrics okay so let's say we're out in a bar and you meet me and I'm an IT guy and I start chatting and I say hey I got this I'm doing this big project I'm really you know get this important it's got visibility at the board level and we're moving to the cloud and it gets your attention say whoo that's interesting and you start asking me to what advice would you would you give me I'm open to that okay obviously it's a talk to Nets character but the important thing is is this is that the question is that I've got a migrate this to the cloud and all that something and it's like sort of quite scary because I don't necessarily understand the cloud I don't realize that it's either the same or it's it's it's it's different or how its performing and it's I'm losing that visibility so you want to give that guy confidence you also want to give that guy the ability to say okay I understand the cloud and when things aren't the cloud I can continue to monitor it because that's after all the important thing so we've given them that confidence by saying hey we can instrument that application when it goes to the cloud and we can instrument beforehand so it goes it goes in the view understand what you're going to migrate all the components because you don't want to miss something migrate it and still have that visibility when it goes into the cloud we can give you that we give you this is interesting we give you access to that wire data when there are no wires that's to say the magic of nets carrots because we can instrument inside the workloads and get access to the traffic that's going in and out of those virtual machines those ec2 instances those virtual machines in in different clouds get access to that wire data and translate it into those key performance metrics and that's unique to Nets code like how do you do that well okay so the ASI is unique and the our agent technology is also unique to us to actually translate in the virtual machine in the cloud that wire data into metrics and then doing that all on the workload itself is very powerful if we can't instrument in the workload then there's another solution as well to get access to that wire data and that's what recently people like Amazon web services and as you I have announced the ability to tap in to that traffic so as you offer V tap which allows you to copy packets from VM to a destination which would be one of our probe technologies in the cloud Amazon have V PC traffic mirroring to actually get access to that data as well and we do the same thing the point is whether their workloads in the cloud workloads in the private cloud or the data center it's the same metrics and we get that visibility end-to-end visibility is the key ray thanks so much for coming on the cube and explaining so that your approach to a cloud and multi clouds great have you thank you very much you're welcome Eric thanks for watching everybody this is Dave Volante thanks for watching this cubed conversation [Music]

>> Narrator: From San Francisco, its theCUBE. Covering VMware Radio 2019. Brought to you by VMware. >> Welcome to theCUBE, from San Francisco at the VMware Radio 2019 Event. I am Lisa Martin with John Furrier, welcoming back one of our distinguished CUBE alumni, VMware CTO Ray O'Farrell. Ray, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thank you, very happy to be here. >> This is the fifteenth annual Radio R and D. >> Yes >> Innovation offsite. >> Correct. >> Really competitive there's about eighteen-hundred engineers here, Over a thousand different projects submitted. >> Yes. >> Only about 15 to 20 percent may be selected to be featured here. >> Correct. >> This is the third day or so, talk to us about some of the projects that really caught your attention as really innovative, that really kind of embody the VMware culture of innovation. >> Okay, so the event is an internal event, and, so, but are treated very much in the same way as you would, you know, a more formal, people submitting papers, being peer reviewed and then as you say. A small number of them make it through to the poster sessions or the presentations here. If you look at the broad swat that come in initially, they are very broad, covering everything from technologies that VMware has a lot of focus on whether that's kubernetes virtualization and so on, but also some that are, you know, for the field like virtual reality, augmented reality. You also get quite a few projects which are, fall into how can we be better as a company, So better ways of, if we developed our software using this technology or this approach we'd see better efficiency or ways of testing in new and interesting ways. And I also, for the first time, I think saw a few projects which were more around, less around the technology and more around ways of working together. How can we build teams that work better globally. There's quite a few poster sessions around here about even how to manage and increase the inclusiveness of your team, right? So you're seeing it beyond the technology and instead, how do we as a company become more successful. >> I think that Virtual first is an interesting dynamic, we call it Virtual first because no one has actually built technology for fully virtual teams. >> Yes. >> It's always been kind of collaboration bolted onto pre-existing on premise activity. >> Yeah yeah its a, so our R&D teams, as most R&D teams you're going to see these days are going to be pretty distributed, you are going to have people working from home, you're going to have people in remote sites, you're going to have many project teams, where the actual project itself, right down to the smallest team of ten to fifteen people may well be distributed, so what you got is very core pieces of code being done by teams who are acting remotely. Now, when you think about it, as we work with more and more open source, you're seeing the exact same thing and like the open source community has worked very well in terms of how do you run those projects and so we get to learn from that and we've actually created an office for open source, open source program office, and a lot of what we're trying to figure is how do we make sure to be able to build and leverage that innovation across multiple teams. >> Well Ray, we want to thank you because I know Ray has been around for a while but this is the second year where presses select presses. >> Correct. >> To be invited to get access to some of the projects so we really appreciate that. >> Great idea. >> As CTO of VMware you got to look at the landscape and just look at the organic innovation inside, bring the acquisitions in, and then bring it through to the company architecture. What's, Where's the intersection point on the organic to the CTO, architecture map because you got a lot of great business model going on now, the cloud's looking good. Cloud foundation, yet the Telco business booming, where is the action on the business side, where is this come in, where's the action happening? on the technical business side. >> Yeah on the technical side, what we're seeing is well you've mentioned two questions in there, one is about the innovation and what we will do, how do we fit acquisitions and so on into that mix, we have a fairly formal, I guess, innovation program if I could put it that way. Which basically focuses on what do we do to make sure that we have a really strong culture of innovation as the company, and this event is one of those things. It's not just a few days event, that lead up to it, the lead off from it and so on, that really is focus on make sure we have a culture of innovation in the company. We can create new products, new features as needed, from that. But we also recognize that some of those innovations are going to come from partnerships and from acquisitions, either from partnerships with an Open-source community or in the case of, you saw yesterday, we made an acquisition of a company, Bitnami, which is part of the broader story of us being focused on cloud native applications, what is the best way to be able to, you know, manage that new type of development, container based, kubernetes based and so on. So we're open to wherever that innovation comes from, In fact, that's one of the things I really like about the company. You know, we will look at all the possibilities. And sometimes, you know, as you saw with even some of the partnerships we struck in the last year, you got to be creative. >> So I got to ask you about 5G, one of the things that we're seeing is a lot of hype around 5G, I mean, I was in Vegas, they said 5G LTAE. (laughs) >> Yes. >> E 5GE evolution it wasn't even real 5G. So there's some skepticism, but certainly it's a catalyst. How is 5G impacting your business opportunity in the industry? >> So the Telco industry in general was not particularly virtualized if you go back you know, about two years or three years ago. So one of the key things as people as Telco's are building out, you know, to deal with the 5G infrastructure, there're also saying okay what do I need to build, do I use the way I used to do it? And more and more are saying hey, I should be able to use virtualization, why can I not leverage that same technology which revolutionized Cloud in the data center. So we're seeing some very good business in that space, much of it is what you call the Telco Core, the you know, core infrastructure before you get to the radio networks themselves, but we're also beginning to see even some of that beginning to move out to the radio networks. >> John: Virtualization or software, or both? >> Well virtualization even in fact, that MobileWorld Congress in February I guess, we did some demos of some pretty advanced technologies around network slicing where you're essentially beginning to virtualize the network all the way from the radio network back into the data center itself. >> And the Telco's are certainly from a business that already have been struggling for decades, trying to figure out what that over the top, what their business model could be, will this help them? >> Yeah, well any time, our experience is that anytime you turn something into a flexible software model within that agility within that flexibility you get to do a whole ton of advantages, because you're able to update, you're able to modify, so it's all around flexibility. And everybody talks about you know, how agile you need to be, well, virtualization software, moving into a more software defined model really helps with that. >> Let's talk about, back to Radio 2019, the R and D innovation offsite Radio. Let's talk about customers, how do customer influence projects say from last year to what some of the engineers put together, are these engineers that are having a lot of interactions with customers, what is that influence that customers deliver to VMware's culture of innovation? >> Yeah, it's rather interesting, with more and more we have customers who come to us and actually are asking the question, not necessarily about products, but about the culture of innovation, a question around how do they repeat that or can they learn something from us, and we learn from them too, but it's interesting that the question that has begin to come up more and more as these customers realize we must be agile, we must innovate or else someone is going to get them, from a competitive point of view. They're trying to understand what we do in that space, so that's one aspect of it. In terms of the projects, and what you see here, we do have our professional services organization here, we do have our customer support organization, we do have a lot of our CTO's, a lot of these projects come from offices of the CTO, they all spend a ton of time with customers. We also do make sure for the most part that we get our senior engineers to have an opportunity to go out and visit customers or when customers come on site, that we will have those discussions. So there's a lot of customer input into the mix, where you actually see it showing out or where you should see it begin to appearing more and more, there's a lot of projects here that are deeply systems projects. You'll also find a lot though around pretty basic customer satisfaction things, like user interfaces, ease of licensing all those types of things. So there's a good balance between the two. >> You know one of the things you guys are really doing well in the market place, obviously with the cloud decision with AWS that was a great message to both your field, customer base, how cloud is going to evolve, then cloud foundation, now you got the edge of the network developing, but the software defined data center NSX is doing well. As you start to get into the networking side because the pitch we heard at Dell technologies world was, don't look down, look up the stack. That's where kubernetes is and where the action is on the abstraction layer. There's still a lot of work to do with the networking and security piece of it. >> Correct. >> Where's the innovation angle there, what are the dots to connect on the networking and security side. >> I think probably the biggest focus is on security, almost every customer as they're becoming completely dependent on digital infrastructure just to get there work done. You know like, everything from a farmer to a hospital, they're all digital now, right? Security pops up over and over again. The key products we have in that space are things like, obviously NSX has a large security component to it, but also app defense and some of the projects we do there. So I think security is probably one of the key areas we see that focus. In some ways, what we're seeing is customers coming to us and saying, I want to be able to worry about my applications, can you somehow figure out how to make the IS and the virtualized infrastructure and the security as policy-driven, as automated as possible. And that's where we're focusing. >> You know, one of the things I see as a trend, obviously a student would love, any man would love to be also talking about is the hyper-converged HDI (mumbles) infrastructure really was a tell sign to what customers want, they want to converge everything into an abstraction. >> Correct. >> Into software model, Cloud's hyper-converging. Cloud's is also another. >> Correct. >> Multi-cloud kind of objective. So this notion of consolidating. >> Yeah. >> And kind of creating abstraction is a trend. >> It is, I actually think its really a decision by most customers to say where do I need to focus all of my bandwidth to be successful, and they're saying I want to focus on the layer which is specific to my company. The applications, my customer relations, please somebody help me with all the other stuff. And that's cloud hyper-converge infrastructure VMware. >> John: Do you feel you got like VMware's positioned well in that area? >> I do, I think that in the end, I think we have an interesting blend of what I sometimes use the word agnost or enterprise pragmatic innovation, we know you want to leverage the latest technologies, we know you want to be able to advance in those spaces, but we also know in the end, you know, you are a bank or a hospital, and you need to manage that transition in a fashion which allows you to keep your business going, I think we've been very good at helping companies do that-- >> If I took you on a sales call and I was say, a VMware sales rep or a competitor, obviously the competitors will try to counter what you guys are doing, as we know, we see Cisco out there and others where there's competition, this industry is evolving but you guys have an advantage, what is that pitch to the customer, why VMware over the competition, because they're certainly saying that they can do things better than you guys (mumbles) and vice versa. >> Yeah, I think there's a few advantages, one of them is our enterprise history, our enterprise readiness, some of our competitors obviously have that as well, but you know we are very very strong across all the global, the worlds global enterprises. The other part that you are going to see of course is in some ways we've got the ability to be a little bit of a Switzerland in many cases, our job is effectively to say abstract virtualize your infrastructure, make it easy to manage and optimize and we don't necessarily care what that infrastructure is, is it a public cloud, is it a private cloud, is it a hyper converge infrastructure. So we're able to offer that unified or essential kind of digital infrastructure that goes across all of those things. And within that you're giving choice and flexibility. If you want to move that work load because you think you'll get a better deal on a different cloud, we will help you to do that, or at least make that easier to do. >> Along the spirit of competitive advantage, besides innovation, which we talked about, this very rich history, twenty plus years of innovation at VMware. What are some of the other elements in your opinion that companies like VMware need to have, to be disruptors, couple that come to mind when I think of VMware are partnerships and diversity, what are some of those core elements that really are essential to drive disruption. >> So I often use the phrase which sounds maybe a little bit opposite to disruption, which is resilience, right? Is your company in a position to be able to take either blows from an economy, from competition, and so on. And actually take advantage of those in some ways. And the other part of that is leveraging that innovation as you're trying to say I want to be able to grow and be successful can I do so in a way which that innovation is, I use that word again, pragmatic it fits well with everything you do. I think VMware in my view has a very strong culture, which leads to that, and sometimes we use the phrase of VMware, as a bit of a why culture, people ask why all the time, right? So if I say we're going to do something with project X, some senior engineer is going to say why, now what's even more important, is that often becomes a why not, so you look at some of the partnerships we've done, some of these, where we get into those conversations and you know, the natural thing, well we're not going to partner there, but then somebody says why not, we could partner there, and after that you get some very interesting-- >> We can integrate this into theCUBE Q and A, so right, why block chain? >> Right. (John laughs) Yeah so, the key area where we look at block chain is what actually part has, made some comments on block chain around it being this key almost like the IP story for the future of financial services, right, IP networking so from networking point of view. So what we see is that this is essentially a foundation layer for applications to be built on, not just for financial services, but we see it also showing up more and more in things like supply chain. That's a hard problem, its a distributed problem, its a problem where you get a bunch of customers saying we want to operate as some sort of a group together but one wants to go on prem, the other wants to go on cloud. And that's what, where we've got a unique-- >> The IP metaphor is interesting, I mean, if you look at what IP networking did. >> This is pre-web, this is internet. >> Correct yeah. >> I mean what happened after that was just an amazing shift in our world. So you guys see block chain as a similar paradigm? >> We do see that, well we see, its a layer for which it's be, kind of somewhat ubiquitous layer that then you build these trust applications on top of, right. And so its almost like a platform layer at that stage. That's why when we look at it, its almost becoming kind of a software infrastructure story. >> Well, you know we'd love block chain. We (mumbles) time We're going to talk more in depth. >> You do I saw some of your stuff on block chain online. >> Yeah, great Thanks. >> Yeah. >> So I saw a tweet from you the other day, that of all these poster presentations behind us you were really trying, with all these stickers and things. How is you sticker collection coming along? >> It's coming pretty well, its kind of funny, what you're, me seeing here is a bunch of engineers who are really passionate about the thing they are presenting. So when I find someone and built little LEGO characters, there's little stickers that they build and so on all trying to push to some degree their passion about what they're doing, right? So yesterday I come in here at 7a.m, thought the place would be empty but there was actually a bunch of engineers here. But I was getting all these stickers, right, it was just surprising to me, wow, people put a lot of even artwork into these projects as they try and describe them. >> Well, and what I think about that is it shows creativity and its one of those, you might call it a softer skill, which I don't know why its called softer skills, but thats essential is, is the ability to express that creativity. And also some of the other skills like collaboration and learning how to present even better, which are also elements that the folks that attend Radio get to work on. >> Correct, many of the engineers who present here, this will be their first maybe or their second time presenting to a large group, now they are presenting in front of two thousand people, and in many cases, two thousand of their peers, who know exactly what technology they're talking about, so you can't just give some high-level, oh it might be better kind of thing. Someone will say, where will it be better, how fast will I be, and so on. So, we make sure that if any engineers are looking for training, or want to get some help to do those presentations, we spend quite a bit of time making sure they can get that because that's part of growing them as engineers and as future professionals or business leaders. >> Absolutely, well Ray thank you so much for joining John and me on theCUBE at Radio 2019, great to talk to you, and excited to hear some exciting things to come out of VMworld 2019 which is just around the corner. >> That's right just coming up, Thank you. >> Absolutely. For John Furrier I am Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE from VMware Radio 2019 from San Francisco. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Live, from San Francisco. It's theCUBE. Covering IBM Think 2019. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2019. Here in Moscone, we're talking so much multi clouds. It's been raining all day, really windy. To help us wrap up our third day, what we call theCUBE Insights, I have our co-CEO, Dave Vellante. I'm Stu Miniman and happy to welcome back to the program. It's been at least 15 times on the program, I think our counter is breaking as to how many you've been on, Ray Wang, who is the founder, chairman and analyst with Constellation Research, also the host of dDsrupTV who was gracious enough to have me on the podcast earlier this year, Ray. >> Little reciprocity there, Stu. >> Hey, we got to get you back on, this is awesome! Day three is wrap-up and this is going to be fun. >> Ray, as we say, theCUBE is everywhere, except it's really a subset of what you and the Constellation Research team do, we see you all over the place so thanks for taking time to join us. Alright, so tell us what's going on in your world, Ray. >> So what we're seeing here is actually really interesting, we've got a set of data-driven business models that are being lit up, and you see IBM everywhere in that network. And it's not about Cloud, it's not about AI, it's not about security, it's not about Blockchain. It's really about companies are actually building these digital networks, these business models, and they're lighting them up. IBM-Maersk, we saw things with insurance companies, you see it with food trust, you see it with healthcare. It's happening, and it's the top customers that are doing this. And so it's like we see a flicker of hope here at IBM that they're turning around, they're not just selling services, they're not just selling software, they're actually delivering these business models to executives and companies, and the early adopters are getting it. >> Ray that was one of the questions we had, is what's the theme of the show and-- >> There is no theme! >> You're giving us the theme here of what it should be because we talk digital, we talk cognitive, we talk all these other big thought-y words because we need to think while we're here, right? >> We need to think, we need to think! No, but the thing is this is a theme-less show, people can't figure it out but the main thing is, look, I've got a problem, this digital disruption is happening, my business models are changing. Help me be part of that shift, or I may go away! And people realize that and that's what they're starting to get, and you see that in all the reference customers the people that were on stage. The science slams were also really great. I don't know if you had a chance to catch those but the science slams were kind of a flicker into research, IBM research which is the heart of IBM, is coming up. They're going from concept to commercialization so much faster than they used to be, used to be research would do a project people are like, that's kind of cool, maybe I'll adopt it. They're now saying hey, let's get this into the market, let's get into academia, let's get early adopters on board. >> So Ray, what do you make of the Red Hat deal? What does it say about IBM's strategy? Do you like the deal? What does it say about the industry at large? >> It's a great question. The Red Hat deal to me was overpaid, however, at 20x multiples, that's what PE firms are paying. So every vendor is now competing with PE firms for assets. Red Hat, at about 9x, 10x? Makes a lot of sense, at 20x? It's kind of like, okay, is this the Hail Mary or is this the future strategy or is this basically what the new company is? I would have rather taken that money and put it into venture funds to continue what they're doing with these network models. That would have been a better strategy to me but Red Hat's a great company, you get a great team, you get great COs you get great tooling. >> So you would've rather seen tuck-ins to actually build that network effect that you've been alluding to. Of course that would have taken longer you know, wouldn't have solidified Ginni's legacy. So, it's a big move, a big move on the chessboard. >> Well the legacy's interesting, last year the stock was down some 20-some percent, it's up 20% since January so we're going to see what happens, but it's a doubt component. >> Well I've always said she inherited a bag of rocks from Palmisano at the peak of 2012 and then it got hit hard and she had to architect the transformation. It took, I don't know, five years plus, so, you know, she was dealt a tough hand, in my opinion. >> She had a bad hand, but we've had seven years to play this. I think that's what the market's saying. >> So it's on her, is what you're saying. >> It's now on her. She's got to turn this around, finish the legacy, but you've got a great CEO in waiting with the Red Hat guy. >> Jim Whitehurst you're saying? >> Yeah, he's good >> So she's what, Ginni is 60, 61? Is that about right? >> She's past the retirement age. Normally IBM CEOs would have gone through. >> 61 to 63 I think, is that range maybe, hey, women live longer so maybe they live longer as the CEO of IBM, I don't know. >> She did get a bad hand, but I think when you execute the strategy that money, here's the tough part. Investors are saying, hey, we'd rather take your money, back away from you through stock buybacks, dividends and mergers and acquisitions, and we don't trust you to do the innovation. That's happening to every company, including all of IBM's customers. The problem is if you do that, they're hedging against those companies too. The same investors are taking 50, 100 million, giving it to three kids in a start-up anywhere in the world and saying, hey, go disrupt these guys, so they're betting against their own investments and hedging. So that's the challenge she's up against. >> We talked about in our open for the show here. It's developers, though, that's the business model. We saw IBM struggle for years to get any real traction there, there's little pockets there, they've got great legacy in open source, but Red Hat's got developers. Ray, you go and see a lot of shows, who's doing well with developers out there? >> Microsoft redid their developer network by going younger with GitHub, whole bunch of other acquisitions, this is a great developer buy in that percent. But the other piece that we noticed here was it's the partner developers that are coming in in force. It's not your average developer. I'm going to build a coding and do a mobile app, it's people that work for large system integrators, large networks, small midsize VARs, those are where the developers are coming from and now they have a reason, right? Now they have a reason to build and I think that's been a good turnaround. >> How about Salesforce with the developer angle, what's your radar say there? >> It's not about the developer angle on the Salesforce side, what's interesting about the Salesforce side is Trailhead. This is, like, learning management meets gamification meets a whole LinkedIn training program in the back end. This is the way to actually take out LinkedIn without going after LinkedIn, by giving everyone a badge. There's a couple of million people actually on this thing. Think about this, all getting badges, all training each other, all doing customer support and experience, that's amazing! They crowd-source customer experience and learning right there. And they're building a community and they're building a movement. That's the thing, Salesforce is about a movement. >> Couple of others, SAP and Oracle, give us your update there. >> I think SAP's in the middle of trying to figure out what they have to do to make those investments. We see a lot of partnerships with Microsoft and IBM as they're doing the Cloud upgrades, that's an area. The acquisition of Qualtrics is another great example, 20x. 20x is the number people are now paying for for acquisitions and for assets on that end. And Oracle's going to be interesting to watch, post-Kurian to see how they come at it. They have a lot of the assets, they've got to put them together to get there, and then we've got all these interesting things like ServiceNow and Adobe on the other end. Like, ServiceNow is like, great platform! Awesome, people are building and extending the Cloud in ServiceNow, but no leadership! Right? I mean, you've got a consumer CEO trying to figure out enterprise, a consumer CMO trying to figure out enterprise, and they don't know if am I a platform or am I an app? You've got to figure that out now! People want to work with you! >> Well it is a company in transition at the top, for sure. >> But they can do nothing and still make a ton of money on the way out. >> And they've kicked butt since Donahoe came on, I mean just from a performance standpoint, amazing. >> Oh yeah, performance? You can do nothing and I think it's still going to coast but the thing is at some point it's going to come bite you, you got to figure that out. >> How do you think that Kurian will fit at Google, what's your take there? >> You know, early reactions on Kurian at Google is good, right? The developers are embracing him, he understands what the problems are. Let's be honest, I've said this many times to you guys in private and also in public, you know. It was a mess, it was a cluster before. I mean, you had three years, and you lost traction in the market, right? And it's because you didn't get enterprise, you couldn't figure out partners and, I mean, you paid sales people on consumption! Who does that? You're a sales rep, you're like, I'm not going to do this on consumption! Makes no sense! >> Ray, Kurian had been quoted that no acquisition is off the table, you know, they didn't buy GitHub, they didn't buy Red Hat, do you see them making a 10, 20 million dollar acquisition to get them into the enterprise space? >> Billion. >> Yeah, sorry, 20 billion. >> I think there's a lot that they go after. I know there's rumors about ServiceNow, there's a couple of other things. I think the first acquisition, if I were to make it would be Looker. I mean I love that thing that's on there and buy Snowflake too while you're at it. But we'll see what they do. I think the strategy is they've got to win back the trust of enterprises. People need to know, I'm buying your relationship, I have a relationship, I can count on you to be successful as opposed to, hey, you know, you can get this feature for less and if you do this on a sustained unit or, I want to know I can trust you and build that relationship and I think that's what they're going to focus on. >> Well, come on, isn't Google's business still ads? I mean, that's still where all their revenue is. >> It is, but the other category is $10 billion. That other category of devices and Cloud and all that? That's still a big category and that's where all the growth is. I mean look at this, it's a full frontal assault between Amazon and Google, Amazon Alexa versus Google Home, right? Amazon in ads, $10 billion in ads, going after Google's ad business. Amazon doing an AWS versus Google Cloud. Google's under assault right now! >> Give us the update on Constellation, your conference is really taking off, you've got great buzz in the industry, and congratulations on getting that off the ground. >> And the Tech for Good stuff, loved it. >> Thank you. We had great event, December 10th, talking about the future of the Internet. What it means in terms of, you know, digital rights, human rights in a digital age, was really that conference. Our big flagship conference is November 4th through 7th, it's at Half Moon Bay. We get about 250 CXOs together, about 100 vendors and tech folks that are visionaries and bring them together, that's doing well, and we do our healthcare summits. We brought on a new analyst, David Chou. David Chou, and if you've seen him before, he's like one of the top analysts for CIOs and chief data officers in the healthcare space, he's at HIMSS right now. >> He's awesome, we know him from Twitter. He's been on, he's great. >> Yeah, so we do healthcare summits twice a year and that's been picking up, some of the top thinkers in healthcare. We bring them in to Las Vegas, we do a brainstorming session, we work with them. They think about ideas and then we meet again, so. >> Alright, Ray, we want to give you the final word. We're halfway through IBM Think, what have you been thinking about this and any final musings on the industry? >> So I was very upset last year at how it was run. And I think this has run much better than last year. I think they did a good job. February in San Francisco? Never again, don't do that. I know it's May next year, is when this event's going to be. But I think the main thing is IBM's got to do more events than once a year. If you get enterprise marketing you realize it's at the beginning of the year, it's still sales kick-off and partners. March? March is like closing the quarter, so you do an event in April or May, and you do it in April or May but you have multiple events that are more targeted. This theme-less approach is not working. Right, partners are a little confused but they're here because it's once a year. But more importantly, build that pipeline over the quarters, don't just stop at a certain set of events, and I think they'll get very successful if they do that. >> Alright well, Ray, next time you come on the program, can you please bring a little bit of energy? We'll try to get you on early in the show when you're not so worn down. >> I know. >> Thanks as always. >> Appreciate you coming back on, man. >> Hey thanks, man, it's theCUBE! I love being on this thing.. >> Always a pleasure. >> Alright and, yeah, we always love helping you extract the signal from the noise. We're Dave Vellante, John Furrier, Lisa Martin. I'm Stu Miniman. Thanks for watching day three of theCUBE at IBM Think. Join us tomorrow, thanks for watching. (light music)

(upbeat music) >> Live from Barcelona, Spain. It's theCUBE covering Cisco Live Europe, brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Hello everyone welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage here in Barcelona, Spain for Cisco Live Europe 2019. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, with Stu Miniman and Dave Alonte also here doing interviews. Our next guests, two guests from the DNA center platform, Cisco, the agent platform team, Prakash Rajamani, director of product management, Cisco and Ronnie Ray, vice president of product management, Cisco, the DNA center platform growing 70% of the use cases, software distractions, API automation. Congratulations. Great success. Thanks for joining us. >> Thanks John. >> Big Fan of the DNA center. You guys have made great progress. Take a step through us. The positioning, how things are rolling, what's some of the feedback? Where's the DNA center platform at right now for Cisco? >> Yup. >> So DNA center was launched about 80 months back and it's probably one of the products in Cisco that has completely started to transform how we do the selling motions. So this is one of the key drivers of Cisco moving into light sensing mode switch, more software like. Now as part of how we do management Typically and traditionally it has been very much a manual driven process there's some reporting but it is a lot of expert light capabilities that you need to have to do management of the infrastructure then it's kind of moving that access to where you can now do machine-lift management. Of course it doesn't solve all the use cases absolutely as you mentioned, more than 70% but there's a whole host of new capabilities that you have to put on top and that's where developers come in because this is a platform that's built for developers to be able to extend it's capabilities to really look at solving problems for our customers. >> I think you know, after listening to all the announcements in temp based networking, ACI anywhere, hyperflex anywhere, data at the center of the value, data centered as you guys say, it's clever but I think it highlights what you guys are doing because you're talking about programmability of the network as two worlds collide actually three worlds collide, Cloud, On Premises and Edge into one network, you have a network, the network is key it's getting bigger, to cross domains is a big theme here, these are hard problems that are being solved by Cisco more complex cause there's more moving parts but it still has to operate as one network. This is essentially highlights the success of the DNA platform, am I kind of getting it right or is that kind of in line with how you guys see it? >> Sure, I mean I think Cisco DNA centered I mean if you look at the evolution we started in the network domain. You're absolutely right we have kind of extended to the brand change, there's nine integrations that are happening with the data center integrations, happening with the cloud, so yeah absolutely looking at the fabric that we launched about 18 months back now extending and stretching to all of those domains and wherever users connect and wherever users go to and that's of Cisco data center but think about that as we kind of do that, yes there is a change that also required not just in the product but also in the IT process because earlier companies had silos of things and now those silos will be forced to work together and CI was one that our network folks that support us because really they want to see cross domain bring power to the organizations but we are the enabler of making that happen. >> No brainer. >> Prakash, I'd love for you to take us inside ya know, we love looking at the product management piece here because you've had a lot of constituencies. You've got the internal product teams that all I'm sure want to get in and mature and expand their used cases. You've got all your partners that are building the platform. You've got the customers asking for feedback You've got a - ya know, a lot of options to choose from which is a good thing but you've obviously got limited resources. So take us inside that, what you've learned over the last year and how you helped prioritize and move this product forward so fast over the last 18 months. >> So one of the main things we did when we started with Data Center is to start thinking and having the vision to get a data center platform. With that in mind, every feature, every capability that we built in the product was built API first before we built a UI around it. Right? That has helped us immensely in the last couple releases we've started delivering features as APIs even before it had a face to it, and I think that has helped us prioritize and make sure that we are able to meet the demands going demands of customer or partner we had a customer who was like "I need this feature now" and we were hands strapped, we had a big back log, we couldn't get things done but the fact that we were able to get the APIs we were able to work with the customer and say "Hey here you can wire these three APIs and you can get what you're looking for" and he was like "Wow, that's so simple and I'm on my own" he was happy, we are happy we are able to manage our back log better. So I think the main strategy for us that's working is going API first on a pragmatic basis. This is us moving completely software driven as Ronnie was highlighting earlier in that relevant process that is helping us get there and that's part of it >> Well, it's customers a lot I mean they get to roll their own if you will without having be customized, it's still standardized with the APIs >> That's right, right? I mean the benefit is as you start getting into the 30% used case where "Hey, what's coming out of the box is not meeting exactly what I do today" we provide very grander APIs to very business driven, simplified interned APIs. The grander APIs allows the customer who wants to say I want A, B and then D and E to move forward compared to intern based API who is using the pride in the simplicity in driving that formula. >> Yeah, Ronnie I'm wondering if we can up level for a second here cause feedback I've gotten over the last year. Ya know, a year ago we heard Cisco is moving heavily towards software. When I talked to a lot of the partners both technology partners and channel partners they said this had a ripple effect inside Cisco it's not so much okay here's the skews and here's the new boards and here's the products but I need to sell a solution and therefore that's platforms that I have to have and therefore everything needs to work together and I have to think API first and like it does significant changes to how Cisco is, the joke I used to have is Cisco is like 100 companies and some people were like "Well, maybe it's 100, maybe it's 200." But today it's now something like platform is a unifying place, is that what is your solution set part of that drive and is that something you're seeing more broadly inside Cisco? >> Certainly, I think you're absolutely right that is does have a unifying effect if I might put it that way. >> Yeah Right? Because there's so many different capabilities that existed in different tools that are coalescing on Cisco data central and which is becoming part of the platform which is now customizable by our entire development community but think how fast that happens in a now within the sales force, within Cisco as a company there is no more cross domain knowledge that'll be required because now it operates different parts it can tune different things, that also means that is supposed to change the business model because going into software and kind of bringing it together and is increasing Cisco is obviously ya know foyering into softer subscriptions, this is a key product that's kind of supporting that, so in many ways it's not just the technology, it's not just APIs but also as a business process that's changing Cisco just like it'll change customers. >> One of the things we're seeing is a lot of design thinking principles this year. Love the new positioning bridged to the future bridged to tomorrow, wherever it goes but it's clean. Connecting the worlds are connecting together through the network get that. What has been some of the challenges and opportunities you guys are seeing around simplicity? Love this API, exposing API allows for customization, I love the broader intent based templates are great but it's hard to make things simple. Can you just elaborate on how you guys are thinking about the product short, medium, long term in terms of continuing to work the back log, I'm sure the feature list is growing like crazy but you got a challenge to make it simpler. >> Absolutely >> How hard is it? What does it entail? Share some insight there. >> So lets take the question in two parts and Prakash can talk to the product simplicity because that is a certainly something that we've got to manage very very carefully but think about also when simple doesn't just mean usable product, it also means a product that can fit into the ecosystem and make the process simpler. So there's a lot of deeper understanding that we are developing through the learning as we work with customers and how do we embed how do we make customers life easier how do we make the process easier and then after goal is how do we make their operational expenses lower? Because we want them to go faster, we want them to go faster at a lower cost and so there's a certainly both learning and investment that's happening there and the product side Prakash. >> On the product side it's about how we used to build to how we are building right now the way we used to do was a new feature comes in it goes to the device layer first the device team builds it puts CLI around it ships it off, sends it to the management team and the management team says "Oh, I got to support this feature" They go, they wrap a UI around it to support the feature, ships. Now we have flipped it turn completely around we start with like what is a customer's work field? What do they need to do and how can we do it in the minimal steps? Once we identify that we push that down to saying "Here is what the user interface looks like here are the three steps that they need to do. That trickles down to saying what we need as an APA on the device layer to develop the feature so we've gone down from going a bottom up way to build a product to a top down, customer driven, used case driven way to build a product. That means we are addressing the customer head on from a simplicity perspective and that's basically what has made us successful in moving the ball forward on this one. >> What has been some of the customer feedback? Can you share some anecdotes around some of the early customers you started rolling this out and what are the ones receiving on the receiving end today saying? >> So when you see from a simplicity feedback perspective I have a large retail store rolling out like maybe 60 APs in a single store over night and they've gone from having that be done over three nights to one person spending 20 minutes putting all the APs up going to the tool and the tool recognizing everything that's come up and deployed. So it's a night and day transformation on how it used to be to how it is right now. So the simplicity >> Sounds like the old way was >> Sounds like you saved a night in a day >> Manually configure, go put a wireless ping to it >> Yep, the old way was yeah you go you plugged the AP, you come back you look at the tool, the AP is there >> Check the channel, stuff is there. >> Map it to the right controller, do all the mappings Now you don't have to do anything just plug the APs and upload preloaded to say these APs are going to the store. The tool takes care of the rest of the stuff that's how simple it is become >> It's almost like old way new way What why are we doing that? And it's good when they have consistent environments with policies there's definitely more expansion. I get that, what about other used cases? Wireless is one hot one, I could see that branch off it's deployments what are some of the popular used cases that you're seeing in the customer base I know you got a broad base but what are the ones what are the patterns that are emerging out of this? >> So let me start another then have Ronnie chime in on the used cases he's seen. Some of the ones that are probably very transformational is that on the policy based used case, we have companies turning around and creating small subdivisions within their organizations. We have a large government in Yasha who is deploying that, they have 20 divisions. Earlier to do that it's extremely complex. They have to go in, they have to understand what division, who is using on which device, which ports mapped to them, just planning that it says it's so huge. For the new policy different approach that we have going, they don't have to know about anything they just need to know Prakash works for division A, Ronnie works for division B assign me to respective divisions, as I come in my policy gets right over to the network. I deploy the network as is, as I speak that is basically the level of simplicity that has changed and that all ties back to doing your network from a policy perspective not a networking from a feature perspective. >> Got it, Ronnie any comments on used case on your end? >> Yeah absolutely so think about we've talked about assurance we launched segmentation that's doing very very well of course even with when all of the public acknowledgement that goes with it but an interesting used case that's come up which is in fact in the keynote this week at Cisco live is about IUT extensions. So Data seto owa is extending to the factory floor, the production equipment and transportation and these are tremendous neo opportunities that are both for companies to kind of look at IT and OT and how this comes together, again going back to the unification simplification theme that do many more things at the same time they try to make it in a rationally much more operable. >> Okay so lot of progress in 18 months give us the road map going forward. We're at the beginning of 2019 what you'll be looking for, can a high level show show us what we should expect to see down the road >> K so from a road map perspective it's in a think about that we've been very focused on getting the customer value. Now the lens is kind of shifting to how do we deal with large enterprise capabilities? So both the hardening of the system itself, how do we look at, for example multiple clusters opening up in diverse locations will give us geo diversity and support there from that perspective and high availability. So these are enterprise class features every large customer requires it and as they move from smaller deployments to full scale deployments that is something that the labs look to need >> Yeah, Prakash when I heard you talking about things I need to think a little bit differently. It's like okay I'm used to going into the deploy and it's going to take me three days wait how do I learn about the fact that I can do it now in a couple of hours? What kind of training or retraining or education is that part of what you're doing in your team or where does that happen? >> It's part of the education, part of the videos we double up and publish to customers so that they don't think about this as I'm going to approach my same 20 steps and think that I'm going do that through data center except that I'm going to do that through a user interface. The first thing that we tell them is like "You're going to do 20" You're going to do two. Right? So the immediate feedback is oh does it address everything I want to do? And so that's the 70% used case more would rather say yes it addresses only thing is we have simplified it, we have compressed it so you don't have to go and go through all these 20 steps but instead get it done in two, so the watts have helped some of the trainings that you have done has helped even talking to from a sales process the customer to know "Hey this is what I'm embracing" so when they come in they don't come in with I'm going to run my network the same way but no no I'm going to run it differently has helped us immensely to make the transition >> Well guys, congratulations on a great successful product, big fan I love that thing, I think it's going to be the future there's a lot more head room there that's cause we're looking at automations the devnet zone we're in is showing massive growth. The appetite for automation the appetite for configuration and scale and managing the complexity is a sweet spot I think that you guys had a nice formally hear looking forward to it. Final question for these guys Ronnie and Prakash are going to both answer it. Say something about DNA center platform that people should pay attention to that they might not hear in the mainstream chatter that's important that they should maybe want to kick the tires or understand it further, an area that they should know about that they might not hear about or they should know about what's the most important feature. Share some, share some insight. >> So again just looking at a little bit into the future of Cisco data center platform, right now we're kind of talking of APIs, there's capability that's coming in the future that will also deal with work flows and the work flows will be built on something which is machine built so there will be a lot of analytics in fact in a data center not only does automation but also extends data analytics so a lot of cool stuff that'll come there and again we'll talk about it more as we get to the next Cisco live. >> Prakash anything? >> I'm going to go a little more ground level people tend to talk about simplicity, talk about how we can do things way differently with data center and people tend to forget that we have not forgotten the network engineer who has been managing the network. We have APIs for you to do the same things you've done all along, create articles create re-lance, do some of the basic networking stuff so that it's not about this just as simple we also have the more detailed breakdown of the API so that you can still continue to know the nuts and the bolts and other things as well as much as the simple stuff so it's the >> It's an empowering all personas in the network from network engineer low level getting down and dirty to large scale automations, whatever the use case is you got the empowerment. >> Yep that's basically what I would like to >> That's awesome, well congratulations Again big fan, DNA center takeover here in the Devnet zone I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman Cube coverage day two of three days stay with us for more after this short break. (electronic music plays)

(soft music) - [Narrator] Live CUBE coverage at VMworld 2018 continues in a moment. Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. - Hello everyone, and welcome to back to theCUBE, live coverage here in Las Vegas with VMworld 2018. This is our three days of exclusive wall-to-wall coverage, two sets, it's our ninth year covering VMworld, when Dave and I started theCUBE nine years ago, Paul Maritz was the CEO, he actually got referenced on stage by Pat Gelsinger. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, our next guest Ray O'Farrel, CTO, Chief Technology Officer at VMware, keynote today on stage with Pat; great to see you again, thanks for coming on. - Really good to see you guys again. - So, reaction from the keynote was very positive. Probably, from a content standpoint, probably one of the most meatiest content pieces I've seen, mega news, serious announcement with Amazon, with Andy Jassy coming on stage releasing the Relational Database Service, RDS, on VMware, on-premises. Monster news. That is like, I don't think the world has yet felt the reverb for this thing yet. - But that was only one of the many stories. - [John] That was just one, that was just like (makes explosion noise). And then the CloudHealth acquisition, and you had tons of demos, pretty intense. - [Ray] Well, it's been- - Summarize what you did (laughs) in ten seconds. - Summarize all of that. So, you know, the key thing that we wanted to achieve with the keynote was obviously to make sure Pat drives the the vision that VMware has and, a lot of focus on that was focused on multi-cloud, this view of the world that you've now got multiple clouds emerging. And you know one of our key rules is to make sure that enterprises are able to work across all of those, networking, how we do management, how we work across all of these, and CloudHealth is a key part of that, making it easier to use cloud, in particular multi-cloud. You know as the CTO I get the fun part of tryna you know let our customers know all the cool work that the engineering teams are doing, so one of the things we want to do is make sure we put a lot of good demos in there. The feedback we get from our customers at VMworld over and over again is they want to see demos, they want to know that stuff is real. You can take a look for instance at the hands on labs. I came in here on Saturday night, walked down there about 6:30 am on Sunday morning, and there was people lining up to go in there and use those labs. So what did we talk through? Broadly speaking we spoke to how you can use VMC on AWS, and the easy way it is to migrate vSphere applications onto vSphere on AWS; we had some new features there around live migration. The next thing we spoke about was around RDS itself and what this project is about. Broadly speaking, at its most basic, it allows you to take the RDS components from Amazon but run them in your data center. With all of the implications of that in terms of how your developers work and they build those applications. We spoke about Project Dimension, which is also around a now delivery as a service, a cloud experience, but again, at your infrastructure, whether it's at the edge or whether it's your data center. And, you know we spoke about what we're doing in blockchain, some opensource components that we're doing over there. New features of Workspace ONE, particularly around the relationship with Dell, and how that will now be combined with some of their laptops And, oh and of course, what we did with some of the Nvidia GPUs, demonstrating the ability to be able to run the most sophisticated AI workloads on a vSphere environment. And I suspect I forgot something in that list, but- - [John] You're going to have to hit the pillow tonight and have a good nap, and crash. - [Dave] Project Magma. - [Ray] Project Magma which is a very future looking concept around basically where we think AI and ML is going to be used to drive a lot of the automation moving forward. - [Dave] Self-driving data center, - Self-driving data center. - [Dave] I think you'd call it (John laughs) Are they coinin' a new term there? - No it's great, we can reuse an old term, and you know rebrand it. - Auto pilot. Put your data center on auto pilot. I want to just drill down on one, on the Amazon relationship, because that was obviously the height, big news in there what you're talking about is the depth of the relationship is deep on the partnership side. I want to, and you guys, you pointed that out, I want to amplify that, but I also want to ask you around the RDS demand. You know, talkin' to some of the Amazon sources, they tell me that the demand for this was very strong, over multiple years. So, first on the RDS, the demand, some of the customer feedback, this is not just you guys in a room goin' hey, let's just do this; it makes sense, but it's customer driven. - Yeah, when you look at what VMC on AWS actually is, it's creating this bridge between the on-prem and the private cloud, sorry, and the public cloud on Amazon. But, initially most of that is really an I as relationship, yes we can move workloads, yes we can move VMs, yes we can manage networking, but one of the key things you want from a public cloud or from cloud in general is access to services. So, as we went down that first part of saying we'll give you this basic infrastructure, very quickly customers began to ask for some other things, some other aspects of that, and that of course was services. So after lots of discussions around what are services, one, that are appropriate to be able to put into this new type environment, but which had to demand RDS certainly rode very quickly to the top of that. In the end almost everybody has some form of database in their application, and so it's a very likely start for us to make them. - So I remember when customers first started wanting to run, to virtualize Oracle, with of course VMware; and Oracle, didn't really embrace that early on. They would say things, their sales guys would scare the customers, we're not going to certify it, but then some of the customers said "Dam the torpedoes, we're going to do it." it actually worked great. - [Ray] Right. - Now, I don't know if that's 'cause, just that's the inherent nature of VMware, or you guys had to do some work, so my question is: two fold, was that just the inherent nature of VMware, and what did you have to do or will you have to do to get RDS running the way that customers want it, trust it on AWS, I mean on VMware? - So, in the case of the Oracle situation, we didn't have to do a whole lot to make that happen, we were virtualizing in x86, Oracle runs on x86, and so you got that basic pattern and mix. In the case of RDS, the actual database that you're running on your VMware infrastructure, our database is such as my SQL, we run an enormous amount of those databases already, so that core aspect of getting the database running is not something that's fundamentally difficult for us to do The challenging part is, how do bridge all the management aspects of that? The RDS components, the APIs, that a developer wants to use, and which are used to using over on, with RDS on AWS, so that's where the work is involved. Now by the way, you're implying that maybe this is a future thing, right? A lot of that work has already occurred, in fact, you know the demo you're seeing is not based on this is what we could do at some possible time in the future, it is actually tied to some very close future releases. - [Dave] So recovery, I'm going to be co-, that's future release of recovery and all the things, if something goes wrong, I'm going to be comfortable as a customer that - [Ray] Correct, correct. - You're going to be backed. - Some of those things we still need to work true, because there's tons of features that you can begin to add onto this, disaster recovery, backup, all of those sort of things, and they're not all going to be there on day one, but you can expect us to continue to add all of that. - [Dave] And you'll have all of those? - Correct. - Now the other question I got to ask you is about migration. When I hear the term migration I go, ugh, you know IT practitioners they tighten up, but what I heard on stage today is we're going to make this really easy. But moving data, help me square that circle, Ray, because, you know data, people say data has gravity, speed of light, network bandwidth, proximity. What's the secret sauce that enables you guys to solve those problems? - So the core secret sauce there is if you're virtualized on VMware on-premise, and you're using VMC on AWS, the basic unit of execution is still that virtual machine, and that virtual machine encapsulates the storage, the networking, everything associated with that box, right? So virtual machines have that very core strength of encapsulating not just the application, or some aspect of the, even some aspect of a minimal piece of the operating system, it encapsulates everything which is tied into that box almost on a physical level. So when you say I'm going to move a virtual machine, you're moving the disk, you're moving the storage, you're doing all of those things. So now think of a database running in a virtual machine, it might not even be the applications, just the database, we're able to capture that and represent that as we moved the virtual machine, you're moving all of that as well. Now there's two aspects of that, one of them is moving the underlying storage, the disk, which might well be even a a virtual disk on NFS or something like that, that's slower task, and that's why we leverage vSphere replication for that. And then the final live part which is, it's always the cool part, but is in fact in this stage maybe not the most difficult part, and what we're describing here is moving the actual memory contents of a given VM and flipping it over to VMC on AWS. - [Dave] Okay, so the key there, you've got the replication piece, and then you just unhook the original and then you're up and running. - Correct. Traditional vMotion relies that both servers access the same disk, so I don't need to move the disk, in this case I need to actually move the disk, and that's what the replication does. - [John] Ray, I want to ask you about something that Pat Gelsinger kind of cheesed out on the keynote. You could tell he had so much confidence, he wanted to expand on this one section but he got a couple digs in on it but, he did point out that the telco piece was very big; and only, he had a percent, I think 10% or 20% is virtualized when enterprises are like 80, I forget what now, I forget the exact numbers but his point was: huge opportunity in telco. What was he referring to there? - So, broadly speaking, if you look across most of you know where workloads run, you look at your IT infrastructure, you look at most of the public clouds and private clouds, they're virtualized to an enormous extent. Now when you go into the telco side of things and begin to look at what's happening at the edge, what's happening in the large telco infrastructure, both, a little bit from a cloud point of view, but also from everything to do from all the services and so on that the run; much of that is not virtualized. Now we actually made a very distinct focus on that over the last few years, we created a, basically a product line and a mini business unit, focused on telco, and that's where you see products like the virtual network functions, all of those technologies coming from. But actually the key product from that area is actually VIO, VMware Incubated Openstack, that's because the telco providers, to a large degree, attempted to leverage Openstack, had some challenges of getting the reliability, the stability you need on that, so what we did was merged the hypervisor, the infrastructure of VMware, with the Openstack management APIs, produced VMware Incubated Openstack, and the telco providers are very aggressively taking that on - [Dave] Now, I got to ask ya, whaddya got against capex? (Dave and Ray laugh) Pat said "You should never spend capex for DR again." it was basically- - [Ray] Yep. So I mean, I think the key part of that solution is it is now so, I will use the word easy, the technology behind it is not easy, but it easy for an end user to be able to say: "I can connect my application from a private infrastructure to a public infrastructure, in a way which is very highly connected using NSX, which is easily replicated, which is easily moved; therefore, I now have a ready ability to be able to create DR scenarios leveraging the public cloud." It is easier than it's ever been before, so instead of building another data center to do that, leverage VMC on AWS, leverage those type of technologies to be able to do that. - Ray, can you clarify, or amplify the VMware Cloud Foundations, how does, trials and tribulations over the years has evolved, it's now front and center in the conversation. How has that evolved from a product standpoint, tech, is it integration layer, how are you guys looking at that, what is the role of VMware Cloud Foundation, and what does it mean for your partners and customers? - Yeah, so I think that, your comments about it having a a kind of an early mixed reaction or so on is actually partially because a naming challenge that we called right? VMware Cloud Foundation is a unified story where we basically take the core elements of the SDDC and we combine in management infrastructure with that, which is actually called SDDC Manager, we don't necessarily spell that out but it's combined into that. But that's the key aspect of this, and then we build architectures based on that; so VxRack is based on VMware Cloud Foundation. The infrastructure which runs in Amazon which we manage as part of the VMC on AWS is built on VMware Cloud Foundation. So it's an architectural and, it's an architectural statement as opposed to a product statement. Where the confusion arises, we also have products that people call VMware Cloud Foundation. One of the ones they're with now as an instance of that is for instance VxRack, right? Which is basically a rack of infrastructure, think of it as a really big VxRail, but it's got all of this management software combined with it as well. And actually, you know your comment about that having some mixed reaction, some of that is because of our renaming that - [John] Renaming. - we've done along the way. But that is actually growing, and quite successful product at this stage, so. - It's been getting a lot of good buzz. - It's getting a lot of good buzz, yes. - [John] And the value is what? Times in market on, on solution building, or pull out, what's the main value? - In some way it goes back to the core value of hyper-converged infrastructure, somebody else is taking care of making sure that the software components all blend together; somebody else is making sure that there's any easy way to update and manage all of these things together, and in many cases, making sure it's well integrated with underlying hardware. So it's all around making it easy to get that basic SDDC up and running. - [Dave] So I got to question on your architecture, and I honestly don't even know how to ask it, but, maybe you can help me as a technologist; you've got, you know the VMware architecture which was developed initially decades ago, and now you've got all this microservices, and Kubernetes, and containers comin' into the fore, and you see the quote unquote modern architectures, speed of deployment, software release is much faster, much more cloud-like, cloud first. How do you go from you know the historical architecture to that level, how do you bridge the two worlds? - So, as with any company, as these transitions have taken place, we've had to be able to make sure we invest in those new techniques and new technologies as well. So you see for instance VMC on AWS, you see for instance Project Tango the cloud-based VR realms product. All of those are cloud-based infrastructure using, you know those more, well I guess they're described new or modern ways of developing applications, microservices, containerized, leveraging Kubernetes and so on in the mix. So just like the rest of the industry, we've been doing the same as part of that broader sorry, that broader industry momentum. There isn't a conflict that you, I think might think is there. The bottom line is our primary purpose is to deliver enterprise software which is solid, stable, secure, easily connected to the rest of the infrastructure. And that might sound a little bit boring, but it is the thing that keeps most of the data centers running and safe. VMware's ESX architecture, VMware's VC architecture has been at the very heart of that. And while they've matured over the years, right, they're still at the very heart of that virtualization part of what we do, but all of these other things we do, what we do in terms of cloud monitoring, what we do in terms of Wavefront, what we do in terms of VMC on AWS, they're new code, new architectures, broadly expanding that story, leveraging microservices and the things you would expect in that space. - Well, and VMware has proven to the gold standard in that regard. Maybe it is boring, but it's super important. - [John] So you got some compliments on theCUBE today, for the work you guys are doing, Andy Bechtolsheim was on earlier, a well-documented career he's had he knows a thing or two about networks. He said "VMware as NSX is ..." this is a quote from today, "... is the best solution that's available today that I can use for a use case of the large numbers I have between smooth connection between on-premise and off-premise public cloud, into the future, to edge, and telco, and all other things cloud." - Yeah, I'm not going to argue with that quote. (laughs) - [John] So, instant testimonial. Okay, NSX has become really this, and Pat was giddy about this last year, he's all like, you watch more NSX, you know more goodness coming; it seems to be the center piece to the a lot of the VMware's connection strategies to cloud and other things including manageability. What's the big thing about NSX, what should people know about NSX? - I think the single biggest thing is software-defined networking had a promise, and the promise is this highly flexible, easily configured, and in many ways, automated, or policy-driven in some cases; networking infrastructure. So it's all around that flexibility and fluidity of software-defined networking. The key strength that NSX does, it delivers on that promise, so it's easy to say software-defined networking, it's not easy to build it, right? And that's where I think NSX is proving all of its strength, it is a very strong implementation; I would argue, obviously, the best implementation of software-defined networking. So that testimonial is an echo of that, it's delivering on all the things you expect from a software-defined network. - [John] And what is NSX enabling? - In terms of the cloud connectivity story which you just described a second ago, what it enables is, really in some ways, because it is not tied to a specific infrastructure, I'm able to run NSX on a public cloud infrastructure and on a private cloud infrastructure, or on a hyper-converged infrastructure, but it's essentially the same NSX. It's the same control plane, it's managed in the same way, all of those different instances know how to interoperate with each other. So what it's enabling is this massive ability to have these networks very quickly brought up, connect to each other, and reliably communicate with each other, and be managed in a unified fashion. - [John] And it's targeting one of the hardest things people are working on which is interoperability. - [Ray] Correct, it's also targeting security. I mean one of the things when we think about networking that you should never forget is this key aspect of security, and NSX is clearly targeting that as well. So some of the things, even the features you see around app defense, a combination of app defense and NSX gives you enormous power. Pat's made a good presentation today where he was talkin' about the adaptive micro-segmentation. You can only do that because you have a great NSX underlying that network. - What's interesting about the NSX, just want to get your reaction to is that that the people are talking about here on theCUBE and also in the industry is that by having the security at the application portion of it, when NSX plays, takes the pressure of the network teams; security teams can have comfort in their piece, and then, (laughs) you don't intertwine them. Is that true, or is that ...? - So I'm reluctant to say it's true because the bottom line is, everybody needs to be paranoid, right? (John laughs) So- - Well from a segmentation standpoint, form a cohesiveness, not this finger pointings, there's not a lot of, it's not thorny. - [Ray] Because it moves the networking layer up a level, and that level is closer to the application. But, when I really I looked at, I think the key strength there is because it's software-defined, because it's flexible, where you get a lot of the problems is when applications change, there's a new version of the application, or we're now popping up a new instance of the application; now because NSX is this software layer beneath that, it is able to react to that. So instead of, you know the finger pointing back to the security or networking person saying you didn't reconfigure the network to deal with my new application; instead, the application and the network are intimately bound together. Actually Pat used some phrase today where he said "I think the app is the network" and so, or something like that, he was talking a little bit differently about it, but broadly speaking that's what's going on there. It's all around the flexibility and the fluidity that you get from NSX. - [John] The application is a network! - [Ray] Correct, that's what he said, yes. - Was his word. - [Ray] Yep, yep. - Which I love, to think he's right on the money. Complex and if some services evolve, the service measure are right around the corner. - [Ray] Yeah, highly interconnected, you know what app, think of any application on your iPhone or your Android device, which doesn't rely on about 20 other applications or databases or cloud services. - [John] Well, Ray, we'll have to get you on a white board sometime, and have you do a deeper dive, love this conversation, congratulations. Final word I'm going to ask you, what is this VMworld all about on stage, if you could knot down the technical engineering successes that you've had this year, what's it about this year, what's the scene from your perspective? - So I think one of the key things is, we've got a lot of products, a lot of technologies under development for the last few years, a lot of them are now starting to see fruition and the light of day; you know, you know you spoke about NSX, NSX is now reaching a real strength right? But that's work we've had to start two and three and four years ago. So to me, that's probably the strongest thing here, products, ideas, research that we've done over the years, development we've done over the years is now becoming real, is getting out and making available to customers; and in the end, that's what we're about, tryna get those technologies to hand to customers. - [John] And we're going to do our job to share that, and we're going to be tracking the successes; and also thank you for inviting us to your radio event where you had your top scientists. - Oh yeah it was great, very good to see you guys there, thank you. - [John] Great to see the energy, and the engineering prowess of VMware continuing strong, technical team, community, and customer base. This is theCUBE, bringing you our hardcore tech coverage here at VMworld 2018, three days, we're in day one, stay with us for more after this short break. (bubbly music)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live 2018 brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone. This is theCUBE's live coverage here in Orlando, Florida, for Cisco Live 2018. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Stu Miniman, my co-host, for the next two more days. We're in three days of coverage. Our next two guests here from Cisco Ronnie Ray, Vice President of Cisco, and Prakash Rajamani, Director of Project Management at Cisco. Guys, welcome to theCube. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, John. >> So all the buzz is about the DevNet developer aspect, the rise of the network engineer moving up to the stack while taking care of business in the software-defined data center, software-defined service provider. Everything is software-defined. You guys are involved in the DNA Center Platform. We talked about the DNA Center, the product. This is a real innovation environment for you guys, so take a minute to explain, what is the DNA Center Platform? And how does that compare from the DNA Center? How should customers think about this? What is it? what's the offering? >> Absolutely. So if we just walk back about a year. A year ago we launched DNA Center. DNA Center is the product, and that supported things, like SD-Access, which is absolutely a new innovation about Software-Defined campuses. Through the year, we've launched showrooms, through the year we've launched Enterprise Network Functions Virtualization, we have capabilities in automation, and these are all product capabilities that DNA Center has. What we're doing today and this week in Cisco live and in the DevNet area right now is that we have launched DNA Center platform, which is the ability to open up and expose all of the APIs and the STKs that now makes DNA Center a product that our customers, our partners and developers out there can now work on and create new value. It could be apps, it could be integrations, it could be new devices, third-party devices that Cisco's never supported before, but they can now make that supportable in DNA Center because we're giving them the tools to do that. >> So this is not so much a customer thing, it's more of a partner or app, is that kind of how this goes? So if I'm a partner, makes sense. is this kind of where it's different? I mean, where's the line here, or is it open for everybody? >> It is for everybody. If you are a networking expert and you've done CLI in the past, what we are doing is making API simpler, we are making them intent-based, which means that they can achieve a lot more and this is open to you as a networking expert, you as an application developer, you as a partner that is providing, creating your services for your end customer or client. All of you can now use DNA Center platform to create new value. >> This is great, it's for everyone. So this is where, if I get this right, we love this notion of DevOps on cloud, Susie and you guys have been talking about network programmability. Is this kind of where it is? We're talking about network programmability, is this where the APIs shine, and what's our vision? >> This is truly network programmability, in fact in the past what we've talked about is device programmability, but now what you're doing in DNA Center platform is really expressing intent and using APIs that apply across the whole network. Prakash can probably give you some examples of what these intent APIs look like. >> I think as Ronnie said, we like to call it Network DevOps, I think Susie calls it that too. And this is the way in which Network DevOps is conductible. There are two kinds of target market that we look at. One is the network engineer who understands everything network-centric, who knows all the nuances, and are very comfortable with those, but then being able to achieve those through a programmable API, that's one market. The way we want to go with the intent API is for the software engineers who want to be able to say, I want to prioritize YouTube traffic less than my network, and I want to prioritize my custom-built app as the most critical for my enterprise, as the most critical on my network. And I want to express that as an intent through an API, and then let the DNA Center platform take care of making that real on the network without having to worry about all the technologies and all the, >> How to provision it, what's going on under the hood, essentially to them it's a call. >> To them it's a call, and it's taken care of. >> That is actually seamless to the software developer, by the way, who doesn't want to get in the weeds of networking. The networking guys who are under the hood, what does it mean for them? They get to provide services to the developers, so it sounds like everyone's winning here. What's the benefit to the network engineers? They get scalability? I see the benefits to the software developer, that's awesome, but where's the network engineer, what are they getting out of it? >> They can achieve more things faster, they can get deeper, and this is absolutely making it simpler for them operationally to run their network. So they can basically free up time to do other tasks, like design and architecture that typically is, very hard to explain. >> Cooler tasks. (laughs) Not boring, mundane, cut and paste the scripts, CLI scripts, to another device. >> Absolutely and that's one part. The other part is about the cool new apps that they can create because there are use cases, even if you look at all the show floor, the companies that are here in Cisco Live and that they come every year, there are use cases out there that even collectively as an industry we cannot solve, that needs to be solved in the context of the company and the environment that you're in and so the network expert that's sitting in a customer environment can say, "Okay, I have this problem, let me solve it, "let me go build-" >> But they're gettable problems to solve now. Because now you're taking off more time, but also cloud and some of the software-defined things are now at the disposal to create that creativity. Is that what you're getting at, this is the new opportunity. Is that what Chuck was kind of referring to in his keynote around getting at these new use cases? >> Certainly, this opens up a new use case because this is a new way to program across the entire network in a much more simpler fashion than it's ever been done before. >> So when I hear a new way to program, I want to understand, what's the learning curve for this? If somebody understands the rocky APIs, is this a short learning curve, if they don't, is it a longer learning curve? >> So what we have done from a learning curve perspective, we have worked with a development team, we have learning labs where somebody who's not familiar with programming completely can start with the basics of, okay, how do I get started with DNA Center platform APIs and get started and go through a sequence of learning labs to get them completely familiarized with everything. Somebody like what you said, like a Meraki person, who's already using the Meraki API, for them, anybody who understands REST XML APIs can just turn around and there's a bunch of new APIs available that they can understand, program, try within the product, and then get sample codes and then build on top of that. So it's that easy as that. >> It was interesting, I was walking through the show floor, talking to some of the customers here, and for some of them, what's off the shelf is good, but I hear them griping about, not about Cisco, some of the partners, like "I can't customize what I need." One of the challenges we've always had in IT is, it's great if you can take the off the shelf, but everybody needs to tweak and adjust what they have. How's that addressed with this solution? >> From a customer's perspective, because we provide in our product we provide a specific set of capabilities, but when it comes to API, we make it much, much, much richer and granular so that people can create any workflow that they want. The workflows that we create in the API context is in three formats. We have what we call as tasks, which are individual operations that we perform, and then we group the tasks and offer them as workflows. And we group the workflows and offer them as an intent. So as a user, based on what level of granular they need, you can go to the lowest level task, or you can go all the way up to the intent based on your skillset and then use them and customize them as it fits your needs. >> So they can get up and running pretty quickly, sounds like, and if you know APIs then it's just JSON, it's all the same XML, all the great stuff, but I gotta ask where this goes from here because one of the things we were talking about before we came on camera is, we've been covering all the Linux Foundation, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, CNCF, you've got Docker Containers, and containers now have been a great thing. Pretty much check, standard, everyone's using containers. And it's great, put a container around it, a lot of great things could happen. Kubernetes and then microservices around Service Meshes, Diane Greene mentioned in her keynote with Chuck Robbins, Istio was a big hot, one of the hottest projects in the Linux foundation, so that's kind of microservices, this sounds like it's got a lot of levels of granularity. I love that word because now when you get to that point, you can really make the software targeted and strong and bullet-proof. How is that on the road map, where does someone who's actually looking at microservices as a North Star, what does your offering mean for them? Is it right in line? What's the progression, what's the road map? >> So, from a microservice perspective, DNA Center as a product itself is completely microservice-based architecture. There's 110 microservices today that make up what is DNA Center. This gives us a flexibility to really update every single service, every single capability, and make it almost like giving customers ability to do this every two weeks or every four weeks, new changes, new announcements, in a very simple fashion. That's kind of how the part is being built. What we eventually want to do is extend the platform as an ability for partners and others to build microservices that can be built and deployed within DNA Center over time. That's further down the road, but given that solution and given the strategy where we are as a product architecture that lends us to extend that to them. >> It's natural extension, so basically you're cloudified. You've got all the APIs, so if a customer wants to sling APIs, customers want to integrate in, like you mentioned, ServiceNow, they can do that easily today, and then you've got some extensibility in the road map to be kind of Cloud Native when things start growing. Timing's everything, it's kind of evolving right now heavily at the Cloud Native. >> I mean that's the benefit of this architecture, that you can really pick and choose where you want to run over time. We are right now on a box, an appliance that helps us solve the solution, but there's nothing that stops us from going anywhere. >> So Ronnie, I want you to talk about the significance, this is an open platform. I've watched Cisco my entire career, and always Cisco's been heavily involved in standards, but takes arrows from people as to how they do this. This is open, what does that mean? And what's that mean to your customers? >> Absolutely, this is basically opening up Cisco to industry-wide innovation. So until now, if you look at everything that we've done on DNA Center and on some of the other Cisco platforms that Cisco developed, but we are now getting to a point where with DevNet, now with 500,000 developers registered, we have the critical mass to basically say the industry can come and develop on top of Cisco platforms. And so this is completely new kinds of innovation that we will see, use cases that we've never thought of, and this will happen. And of course we will continue to contribute to all whether it's IETF or whether it's OpenConfig, all of these in with the YANG models that we are doing across the industry, those will continue, the open source confirmations that we do, but this is really saying, okay, let's provide our best customers and our partners and of course the individual developer that's out there a way to today build new creations and maybe tomorrow there's a part to monetize that. >> It's interesting you bring that up, I love the open. We love open, we're open content. You guys are now open networking, for lack of a better description. Chuck Robbins talked about in his keynote, one of the things I was really impressed on, he highlighted something that we've been talking about, is that the geo-political, the geo-technical world, is a huge factor, you look at just cloud computing, you've got Regis, you've got GDPR, I mean all these things going on, you mentioned assurances off camera, this is like a huge deal, right. You've got a global tech landscape, you've got global tech compliance issues, so you got this now open source and it's whatever fourth generation where it's part of the entrepreneurial fabric. So Ronnie, I've got to ask you, you've been an entrepreneur before. With bringing entrepreneurship into networking, what's the guiding principles, what's your inspirational view on this because this is really, not only save time for engineers, it makes them part of an open collaborative culture, like open source which you're used to, bringing an entrepreneurial vibe to it. >> Absolutely. >> This is a big dynamic, what's your view on this? >> It's a huge dynamic and I can talk from personal experience, you know when I've done start-ups and I've raised money or put my own money into it, 70% of your calories go in building a platform. So you're just looking at how do I store data, how do I process data, how to I look at availability of systems, and 30% of it really goes into building a use case. What we are doing with DNA Center platform is basically saying forget about the 70%. We will give you normalized data, whether it's for Cisco equipment or whether it's for third-party equipment. So the STK will allow you to bring in Juniper or Huawei or Aruba or whoever that's out there and you can bring that into DNA Center, so now you have a view of the entire network, Cisco and Non-Cisco. You have normalized data for all of those and you can configure all of those, you can image update all of those. It's very very powerful. Just from an ISV standpoint, individual available standpoint now you are kind of unlocking, making this almost democratic. >> You've done the heavy-lifting. >> Yep, absolutely. >> That's what Cloud is all about, but talk about the creativity because you mentioned that entrepreneurial, a lot of the energy goes into trying to find the fatal flaw, is the product gonna be product-market fit, you do all that heavy-lifting and bootstrap it, right now it's simply, okay, I can sling some APIs together, get a prototype, then the creativity starts. Talk about the creativity impact. How do you see that impacting some of these new use cases, these hard problems. This is gonna come from, not some guy coming out of business school saying, "Hey, I'm gonna go hire "some engineers and solve that big, hard problem." It's gonna come organically, this is a huge deal. >> This is a huge deal, and because we're making it simpler it can come from any quarters, it doesn't have to be an established company, it can be an individual person that can't solve any use case, and then we ask Cisco, not only do we have, and of course the majority share in the market, but will also we have the platforms, like DevNet, and DevNet now has an equal system exchange, so if something that's cool can float up in the exchange can be voted on, can become something that becomes an absolutely easy part to monetization for somebody, that basically saying, "Okay, how do I marry business "and how do I take network and bring them together." >> This is awesome and it's also external to Cisco, but talk about the global impact. Just outside North America, massive growth, you're seeing things going on in Europe, but really in the Asia and China, huge growth markets going on. When you go to China, talk about mobility, they have mobility nailed down. India is absolutely on fire, growing like crazy. The talent, this is a melting pot of tech talent. How do you make all that work from a Cisco standpoint because what you want to do is bring the goods to everybody, that's open source. >> Absolutely, so think about any of the logical place that people go to with, given the way that the platform is already built, which is, it is Cloud Native. We've not in the cloud yet, but at some point the platform will go to cloud. And we are looking at harnessing the creative talent worldwide, whether it be in Asia or whether it be in Europe, or whether it be in the Americas, really doing that new value creation and taking that to the masses. And Cisco has the right to claim this market, we are absolutely in support of folks that want to do that. That's why DevNet has all of the learning labs and the sandboxes and everything else that's there in support, these are free to use. We want people to come and learn and co-create on the platform. >> And making it open and collaborative, the community aspect of it. >> Absolutely. >> Alright, final question while you guys are here, obviously you're at the Cisco perspective, but put your industry landscape hat on, people who couldn't make Cisco Live this year here in Orlando, they might be watching this video either live or on demand when it goes up to YouTube. What's the big story, I mean obviously what you guys are doing, across the whole show, what's the most important stories that are developing here this week that people should pay attention to deeply? >> So in terms of looking at the openness of the platform, Cisco is an open platform, API is really the new CLI because that's the way that you'll talk to the network. And think about what Chuck said at the opening keynote, this starts from the user, the things that you want to do to the applications, wherever they live, whether it be in a cloud, in a multi-cloud environment, Cisco is bringing all of that together. >> Prakash, what's your thoughts? >> Adding on to Ronnie's point, the openness and something that new that we are doing, not just from campus perspective, but campus, branch, data center, and making it open across everything, which is what Dave Goeckeler covered today in his keynote, I think that's something that Cisco is not just looking at one infrastructure, but across all of his portfolio and making it unique is really something that people should take away from this one. >> That's awesome. Great stuff, well guys, thanks for sharing. Thanks for co-sharing, co-developing content with us. I gotta say just from the hallway conversations, people are impressed that you guys are taking a very practical approach, not trying to boil over the ocean here with all these capabilities and announcements, focusing on the network value, where it fits in, and being Cloud Native from day one with microservices is a good start, so congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for sharing. Live coverage here in theCUBER. Day two of Cisco Live, I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. More live coverage, stay with us here at day two as we start winding down day two here at Cisco Live in Orlando, Florida, be right back.

>> From San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Radio 2018. Brought to you by VMware. (lively electronic music) Hello everyone and welcome to special Cube coverage here in San Francisco, California. We're at VMware's Radio 2018 event. This is their annual R&D event where all the best people, smartest people, come together to collaborate on new projects, new innovations. Not imitation, innovation. Had great speakers up there. They had Steve Herrick, Cube alumni, now a venture capitalist, formerly CTO of VMware. And our first guest here today is Ray O'Farrell, executive vice president and CTO of VMware, been on theCUBE before. Great to see you, thanks for joining us. >> Great to see you, good morning. >> So I love this event 'cause it's, like you mentioned before we came on camera, Steve Herrick said it's like a sales kick-off for engineers. >> Correct yeah, yep. >> Which is like a rah, rah but also, you know, really motivating, but also putting out the north star. >> [Ray] Yep. >> Which is the innovation message. >> [Ray] Correct. >> So take minute to talk about what this event is. Explain to the folks, what is Radio 2018? There's a lot of history involved here. >> [Ray] Yep. >> Behind us is a t-shirt row of, you know, key milestones of VMware history. You know, think inside the box, now it's, think inside the cloud. What's this event about? >> So, um, the event has quite a few years. This is like the 14th year we've done this, right? And when it started, what it was really focused on was, in some ways, a recognition that, as the company begins to grow, as you begin to build new products and engage in new partnerships, In order to keep innovation alive, you almost need to manage it. The problem is you can't manage innovation. Almost by, you know, by definition it's something chaotic. It's an inspirational idea. It's something that was not expected. That's what makes it innovation. But what you can do, is you can create a culture which promotes that innovation or creates opportunities for those ideas to emerge. Or when those ideas do emerge, make sure there's a place for them to be heard and there's an opportunity for a network to build around them. And Radio is a part of that. We have lots of other programs in VMware to help keep driving that culture of innovation, but Radio is probably the primary one. >> Talk about some of the history from this event. What has come out of these events? 'Cause I wanna get into some of the specific questions around how R&D works these days vis-a-vis how it used to work. But, specifically, what has come out of these events? Can you point to any things that kind of popped out? Because R&D, I won't say hit or miss, but it's the idea is to experiment and try new things and nail it. What has come out of VMware's Radio years of history? >> Yeah, so, very practically, we get a lot of patents out of Radio. That's just a very practical sense. As people are building up the papers, as they're looking at the ideas they want to drive, as they work with different teams to build prototypes. Quite a few times people do that at Radio when they're making a presentation. They'll generate ideas, invention disclosures, which generate new patents. This show alone, even though we just actually entering the show at this stage, has already generated about nearly 240 IDFs. A lot of those have the potential to become patents. So it's very, very practical and pragmatic about the generation of patents and new ideas. When you look at the products side of things, quite often what you see at Radio is not necessarily a new product in a whole new area. What you tend to see is, we have existing technologies bubbling in different spaces and now, because you're able to bring these teams together, somebody gets an idea that says, Oh, I can combine machine learning with what we're doing in terms of logging and now I've got an interesting product to help support our customers, you know, deal with real world problems. >> So, it's not take that hill, build me a blockchain product, it's more of, take a step back, zoom back, look at the big picture, understand the fusion of where things are coming together, look at architecture. Is that kind of the-- >> Yeah, actually, sometimes there is the, take that hill, take the blockchain product, but quite often, it starts as something small. You have a Radio event where somebody will say blockchain is cool and interesting. Here's how you run it in a more efficient fashion on vSphere, something like that. And that would be a poster session. And it's only then when somebody sees that that says, I can really run blockchain on vSphere? Can I do it better even now it's physical in some way? And that's when the story emerges. So you don't necessarily see the product announcement coming from Radio itself. What you see is the core of that idea and then a few months later, or the next major VMWorld, or two VMWorlds out, you begin to see these things emerging. >> It's like you're creating sparks of innovation, throw onto the fire, create some action. >> That's exactly the way it works. You know, things like, a lot of stuff what we do in containers. You know, the VMware integrated containers, the combination of containers and VMs from a security point of view. You can trace a lot of that back to ideas that were generated for Radio. And it's pretty rigorous. People have to go through, submit papers, there's a submit ideas. And, you know, our most senior engineers crawl all over those and critique them and so, you know-- >> So it's competitive? >> Oh, it's very competitive. That it is, in many ways, it's a mark of honor to be invited to Radio or to present a paper and so people fight very hard to do so. >> Built in gamifications called just be smart and show some good papers. >> Yes, it's a little bit tougher today. >> How much goes into the prep for this? Because obviously that's a great bar. You guys set a high bar, high is great. And it's a great place here for people to stretch and flex their technical muscle. >> Yep. >> What's the process? How do people get to that bar? Do they collaborate? Is there meet-ups? Is there organic processes of top-down? How do you guys handle it? >> So we've a lot of different processes or programs around driving innovation, but when you look at Radio itself, and it leverages some of those others, but when you look at Radio itself, basically we create a Radio committee. The one for next year will be starting somewhere in the next couple of weeks, right? We create a Radio committee. It is typically driven by members of the office of the CTO, but works and pulls in our fellows, our principle engineers, and we form a committee which really splits into two different directions. One of which is all around the technical papers, the presentations which are gonna be presented later here today. And another one which focuses around how do you do the keynotes? How do you get invited speakers? How do you create this inspirational, you know pervasive sense of innovation. And so you have those two groups working, while cooperating somewhat independently of each other. And it takes a long time. So for instance, only about 15% of the papers which are actually submitted are presented here. So there's a lot of work going through, scanning those, combining those. One of the most exciting things you can do at VMware is, if you go back somewhere in around the February timeframe, all of our most senior engineers sit in one of our largest conference rooms with a bunch of engineers submitting papers and so on, and there is a lively debate working through paper after paper, idea after idea, and saying is this a good thing for Radio? Is this original? Hey, nobody else thought of that. What we gonna be able to do to do that? Or, in some cases, saying these two people, one from Bangalore, one from Bulgaria, we've earned these sites all over the world, these ideas look similar. Can we get those guys to talk to each other? And see what comes out of that. >> So it's kind of a team-building exercise. At the same time, pre-innovation, but it's interesting. You've mentioned you've got the challenge of the papers, which is, you know, get the accuracy on the facts, original content, original ideas. >> [Ray] Correct. >> And then the content program for the event has to be inspiring and motivating at the same time Two different things, but two design standards for you guys. >> Yeah. And, you know, we need to combine them both and, 80% to 90% of the people who are here are hardcore R&D engineers. Their day job is to write code, produce product, archetype product, right? And, you know, if you haven't worked with a group of senior engineers, they are not going to be tolerant of presentations which, oh, we saw that before-- >> [John] Or fluff. >> Or fluff, right. They want to get hardcore into the meat. In fact, the presentations that you see that get some of the highest ratings, tend to be those that are deeply technical in nature. You know VMware's software base is primarily systems software, systems engineering. They expect to see deeply technical solutions to how to attack some real world problems. >> You guys do have some smart people. It's great to have you on theCUBE. This is our ninth year doing VMWorld. Great to start coming in to the more technical events. It's fantastic. The question I gotta ask for you is, Pat Gelsinger always says on theCUBE, he's says on theCUBE a few times, but consistent theme, you gotta get out in front of that next wave or you're driftwood. To the point of, don't just take that point product at view, jump on the wave. And the wave is all about the next 10 years or 20 years. What is the wave that you guys are, that you would categorize, obviously Cloud is key, but as you have the hyper-convergence and the on-premise private cloud boom and VSAN's great. We've seen great results from that. The cloud's right there. You've got Amazon, you got Microsoft, kicking butt on the numbers. As the R&D tries not to get caught up into the fashionable day to day, you can have the long view. >> [Ray] Yeah. >> What's the wave for the long view? >> So I think there's two waves we're looking at. One of them is you need to spend a lot of time with customers and understand what their agenda is. What their innovation agenda is. You look at that, you see, you know, products popping up. How will I leverage AI in a new and interesting way? How will I do something with Blockchain? You know, I want to run AI algorithms, I need different hardware and different management software to do that. So we focus on those and make sure we're doing that. But perhaps, more importantly, I think when you begin to look at what's happening with the industry right now, you know, you saw private cloud, you saw public cloud, you see how you connect these together. It's actually that connectivity is going to be important. You know, I believe you're going to see the emergence of Edge infrastructure, but isolated? That's not powerful. Now combine that Edge infrastructure with how you can leverage what's going into the public cloud or how you're going to be able to secure all these in a way that falls back into, you know, even Teleco in some way. You're now beginning to see this synergy across all of those things. And I think, you know, that's where our sweet spot is. We know how to deal with those hard, how do I connect things together? How do I manage complex different piece of systems software? So that's where we're gonna see it. >> Well, it's great stuff. One of the benefits of being so close to VMware over the past nine years, and I was showing you some of our online data analysis. When I look at the VMware ecosystem, the interesting see the evolution and kind of the journey, 14 years. And looking at the milestones. Clearly, infrastructure, on-premise data center. And then you saw that emergence of clouds. You start to see these markets emerge. Cloud, big data comes on the scene. Data warehouse in the infrastructure. Now, that's AI, cloud is bigger. All kind of taking a little bit off the infrastructure, kind of squeezing that down, but it moves up into the Cloud. And now you've got that, over the top, Blockchain, cryptocurrency, decentralized applications. In the middle of these circles, is security, IOT, and data. >> Correct. >> You guys are right there, so I have to ask you, because they're all, the confluence of all of those are coming together. You're not up here playing Blockchain, although there's some stuff we can get into. You got some AI influencing. So, in the center of infrastructure, Cloud, AI, and Blockchain, etc. is security data, IOT. How is that coming together? What's the R&D task? >> So, actually, I think the key word you used there was confluence. You cannot really look at these as independent things. And, you know, so our focus is what does it mean to be, essentially, the infrastructure. The infrastructure management story for that new form of multi-Cloud, Edge, IOT type of narrative. So our role there is, we believe security is one of the key things to focus on. And we believe that, in that new world, connectivity is a key part of what goes on. The Edge was taught to the Cloud. The Cloud was taught to the Teleco. The Teleco was taught to the IOT. >> [John] They need power. >> Right. They need power, they need communication. They need those things. So a lot of the time, a lot of where we focus comes back to intersects. We do believe that software-defined networking is a key way of being able to deliver a new fluidity of when you get that confluence. And intersects very quickly brings you into security. That's how you begin to understand how you isolate those components, understand what you need to do to detect. When that Edge IOT device is not even the device you think it is. Somebody might have replaced it. That's where you begin to be able to see the communications as a result sort of from that. So security is key, interconnectivity is key, and you know, when we speak about IOT itself, I've got kind of a dual role at VMware. While I'm the CTO at VMware, I also focus on IOT for Dell Technologies. And when we look at that, you know, today many of the examples of IOT are very narrow, almost point, solutions. The real power will come when you begin to combine across those solutions. You know, the thing that tells you the weather, the thing that tells you the traffic, and then the thing that tells you, you know, what's the best way to get there in your car, or whatever it is. Combine those things, now you gotta secure all that. 'Cause you're sharing information. >> [John] It's super exciting. It's probably the best time to be doing R&D because Dave Vellante and I always talk about on theCUBE all the time, that, you know, if everything was Cloud operations, because the confluence is happening, what is IOT? >> [Ray] Yep. >> You have a thin Edge, could be a windfarm, traffic signal, sensor network, or it could be a data center. The data center could be an Edge. I mean, you could look at it any way, it depends on how you look at it. >> One of the biggest questions that comes up all the time is what exactly is the edge, right? And I think, you know, it means different things within different industries. It's very clear on the extreme edge. That's a device, it's a windfarm, it's measuring the behavior of a robot, or something like that. And it's very clear on the other side. That's a Cloud, I run a bunch of analytics over there. It's the interesting piece in the middle where it is both, you know, a lot of opportunity and a lot of, you know, difficulty defining it. Is the SD1 server inside of an office, is that edge? Yeah, that looks like edge, it's at the edge of the network. But it's not controlling something physical. But that SD1 server inside in a retail store, may well also be doing something with the refrigerators or the cold chain or something in that store. And now you begin to see it more as kind of an IOT device. >> That's awesome, and it's great conversation. Certainly fodder for more R&D and more innovation and the management site's key. And, I think the holy grail on all this is programmable networks, right? Come on, we've been waiting. How fast is that coming, pedal harder, come on. I know you've got to go thanks for coming on. >> But I do wanna ask you, you guys are, I wanna give you some props and just get your thoughts on obviously Blockchain. We see things like Filecoin had a very huge ICO on the IPFs side, but, you know, they didn't really have a product, but they're promising, hey, store using decentralized, we have them in the Blockchain. Obviously, it's a network storage infrastructure, it's not so much selling tokens with token economics, although it does have a piece of it. That's gonna impact you guys on the horizon. What's the current state of you guys view, your view, the team's view of Blockchain-- >> Of Blockchain? Obviously, a lot of the hype and even some of the valuations and things you see are tied to what's happening on the financial side. Bitcoin, and so on. We're not focused on that at all. What we're saying is Blockchain, or more specifically, a distributed hyper-ledger, forms the basis of a community of companies or organizations being able to, essentially, look at trust as a service. I've got a contract with you, we're now able to look across a group of companies and say we all agree, that contract is valid because of our leverage of this blockchain. That then becomes an application story. How do I run it more efficiently? How do I make sure I run it securely? How do I make sure that that community is able to leverage that service in a shared fashion? And that's what we're focused on. In fact, one of the more interesting things is when you look at things like Blockchain, when it's used in the context of something like Bitcoin, there's a degree what people value is an anonymity. We don't know who bought it, but somebody bought it. But when you look at it from a trust point of view, we actually want to be able to see who exactly did the contract. I agree that you put the contract, we worked the contract together, and we're all agreeing with that. So you see these changes when you begin to bring these technologies into enterprise. >> Efficiencies come, big time-- >> Correct. >> On supply chain. >> Exactly. Actually, we've put a lot of focus on efficiencies. We've got a research team whose job has been very focused on, given Blockchain, how do I improve the core algorithms? How do I make them more applicable to something that'd be run by a typical enterprise, or by a group of enterprises? And, you know, that's a little bit unusual for us because we're entering a kind of an application space, but what's good about this application space, it is hard systems engineering. And that's what we know how to do and that's why we think this is a great application space for us to be able to deliver real value. >> And the key word is engineering, you also mentioned earlier, community. Open Source has brought this community dynamic together where there's no middle men. This is the beautiful thing of the future infrastructure. How do you manage it? How do you make it secure trust as a service. >> Yes. >> You guys are doing a great job. Based on our data, you are on the ecosystem. You guys have all the waves covered. >> Okay. >> Ray thanks for coming on. >> Great, thank you very much. >> I appreciate the conversation. I'm John Furrier, here in San Francisco for VMware's Radio 2018. 14th year of their annual engineering kick-off, motivation, hardcore engineering critique, and also collaboration where the sparks of innovation are happening. Be right back with more. Thanks for watching. (lively electronic music)

>> Narrator: Live from Washington D.C., it's theCUBE covering .conf2017 Brought to you by Splunk. (techno music) >> Well, welcome back to Washington D.C. We're at the Walter Washington Convention Center as we wrap up our coverage here of .conf2017. As Dave Vellante joins me, I'm John Walls here at theCUBE, coming to you live from our nation's capital. Joined by Team AWS here. With us we have rather, Ray Zhu rather, who is a senior product manager at AWS. And Roger Barga, who is the general manager of Amazon Kinesis Services. So gentlemen, thanks for being with us, we appreciate the time. >> Absolutely, thank you for the invitation. >> Dave: Oh, you're welcome. >> You bet. Alright, so let's just jump in. The streaming data thing, right? It's just blowing up. What's inspiring that popularity of the Cloud? What's kind of lit that fire and what's going to keep it burning? >> Yeah, I think over time, I think customers really do realize the value that you can get out of by collecting, analyzing, and reacting to data in real time. Cause that really provides a very differentiated experience to their customers, you know, for example you're able to analyze your user behavior data in real time, provide them with a much more engaging experience, much more relevant content. You're able to diagnosis your service, understand your law of data issues in real time, so that when you have an issue, you can fix that right away. So that really provides a very different customer experience. So I think our customers are realizing the value of real time processing, which is why we think streaming data is gaining more and more popularity. And this is why Cloud is all the good stuff that Cloud can offer and tell the customers. It's highly scalable, so you don't need to worry about if it's going to scale later on when I scale my business. It's a matter of sort of like click of a button. We scale the infrastructure for you and we got all the resource ready for you to go on streaming data. We got super, it's very cost effective, right? So that cause we price at very low. As we keep improving the efficiency of running the service, we reduce our cost structure, we return that back to our customers as a price cut. The third thing which I think is super important is agility, right cause you don't need to set up an infrastructure, install any software, make all the configurations. Starting up a Kinesis Stream is like 15 seconds on the average console, you're done. And it really allows the developers, the customers, to move fast and purely focus their resources and effort on the things that really differentiate their customer experience. >> So very AWS like, we love AWS, we're a customer, it's our favorite Cloud. We'll go on record of saying that, you know? (laughs) We're loyal to you guys. Crowd, our Crowd Chat App runs on it, basically run our whole company on Amazon, where we can. >> Roger: Great. >> In 2013, we got the preview of Kinesis. It was a lot of buzz. It was kind of before the whole streaming meme took over. We were talkin' about real time at the time, but so maybe you can take us through the evolution of Kinesis and where we are today. >> I'd be happy to. You know, when we first built Kinesis Stream, what the company was trying to do, is we had all of the AWS billing and metering records coming from all of our services, our EC2 incidences. This was a lot of data that had to be captured. And the way we were doing it was in batch. We were storing this data in S3 buckets. We were starting large EMR jobs up at the end of day actually to aggregate them by the customer account. So say this was your bill for the end of the day. But we had customers that said actually I'd like to know what I'm spending every hour, every few minutes. And frankly that batch processing wasn't scaling. So we had to innovate and create Kinesis Streams as a real time system that was constantly aggregating all of the billing and metering records that were coming in from our customer's accounts. Totalling them in near real time and we presented our customers with a new experience of billing and insights into their billing and even forecasts of what they were spending at any given time. But we had other teams that immediately looked at Kinesis and said hey, we're dealing with real time streaming data and our customers want it delivered and aggregated and provided, so Cloud watch logs and Cloud watch metrics built on top of us. And this was the start of something which continues to this day. Other services are looking at, and even customers, are looking at a Kinesis Stream and saying, that's a really useful abstraction that we can build a new service, a new experience for our customers. And today we have over a dozen AWS and Amazon retail services that build on top of Kinesis Streams as a fundamental abstraction to offer new experiences and new insights as three events. Cloud watch events, there's a host of services, which underneath Kinesis is running, but they're offering unique value building on top of it. Which is why Kinesis today is considered a foundational service and we can't build an AWS region without Kinesis being there for all these other services to build on top of. So that's been exciting to see that kind of adoption, different uses for this fundamental abstraction called a Kinesis Stream. And you know, it's also, and we can talk later about how it's transforming analytics, which is really exciting as well. >> Well, that's a great topic. I mean, why don't we talk about that. And one of the things that we've noted about AWS, and other Cloud providers, is obviously simplicity and delivering as a service is critical. We all know about the complexity of, for instance, the Hadoop Ecosystem And the challenges that a lot of customers have. Delivering that as a service has dramatically simplified their lives. That's why you see so many people going to the Cloud. We've always predicted that is what happened. Maybe talk about that a little bit. And then we can get into the analytics discussion. >> Yeah, so again, customers are always looking at ways to actually get insights into their data to better support their customers, to better understand what's going on in their business. And of course, Hadoop had managed EMR, had been a great benefit, cause customers could move their developers into the analytics that they want to do and not worry about this undifferentiated heavy lifting of operating these services. And the same is true for Kinesis Streams. But we're seeing customers, and if you stop for a moment and think about this, data never loses it's value. It always has it's historical value for machine learning, for understanding trends over time, but the insights that data has are actually very, very perishable and they can actually turn to zero within an hour if you can't extract those insights. That's the unique area where Kinesis Streams has kept adding value to our customers. Giving 'em the ability to get instant insights into what's going on in their business, their customers, their business processes, so they can take action and improve a customer experience, or capitalize on an opportunity. So what we're seeing and the role, I believe, that streaming data, at large, plays is about giving customers real time insights and then business opportunity to improve how they run their business. >> So. >> Go ahead, please. So who's using it? I mean or what's the if there's a sweet spot or a sweet spot for an industry or vertical to use that, I mean, in terms of whether it's in a minute, an hour, or whatever, what would that be? >> Yeah, so today, I'm really pleased to see, because we have watched this evolution since 2014, but today in virtually every market segment, where data is being continuously generated, we have customers that are actually taking advantage of the real time insights that they can get out of that data virtually every market segment. I'll pick a couple of examples which are kind of fun. One is Amazon Game Studios, near and dear to our heart. Now typically games are written, they're completely developed end to end. They're shipped in a box, made available to customers, and they hope that game and the engagement has the outcome that they want. Amazon Games Studios is actually writing that game in near real time ahead of their customers, so they release a new level of the game. They will actually watch the engagement. They'll look at how customers are dying, surviving, how long they're playing. And is it traveling in the direction they want? They stream all of the multi, all of the game data from their players in real time. And they build dashboards so they can see exactly how game play is going. And if they don't like it or they think they can make an improvement, they'll get right online, change the game itself, and re-deploy the game, so the customer experience is actually, within minutes it's being evolved. Another customer I like to talk about is Hertz Publishing. We all like to read. When Hertz started making the transition of their magazines, Cosmopolitan, Car and Driver, from print to digital form, they instrumented it so they could actually watch how long was a customer reading an article, how were their comments trending in Twitter and in Facebook. So they could actually get a sense of engagement with an article. Whether the article should be rebroadcast to other digital channels, other magazines. Should they change the article? Double down and write a new one. So again, they're engagement and then the business metrics by which they measure engagement and readers, readership have all increased because they have that intimate understanding of what's happening in real time. So again, every market segment, where there's data continuously generated, customers are using this to provide a better experience. >> That phrase undifferentiated heavy lifting we first heard it widely in the tech community in 2012 in Andy Jassy's keynote at Reinvent and it's become sort of a mantra. It probably was one well before that inside of AWS. And often times AWS doesn't talk about TCL but it's not the main reason why people go to the Cloud. You emphasized that a lot. And there's all this debate. Oh a cheaper on prem, oh no, Cloud is cheaper. But this idea of essentially eliminating labor that is doing that non-differentiated heavy lifting is something that you guys have really lived and popularized. We see that labor cost shifting from provisioning luns into other areas, up the stack, if you will. Application, digital business, analytics, et cetera. What are you guys seeing, in terms of how organizations, I mean, there's two types of organizations, right, the Cloud native guys who obviously didn't have the resources, but then enterprises that are bringing their business to the Cloud. Where are they shifting that undifferentiated heavy lifting labor towards? >> To. And they are in fact moving it up stream. We think about it very abstractly. You know, operating servers doesn't really bring any special IP that that company possesses to bear. It is about, you know, just managing servers, managing the software on it, figuring our how to scale. These are problems which we are able to take away. And we've often worked with customers and showed them the value of moving to our managed servers. And the excitement from the leadership, from their customers, is like wonderful. That project we couldn't, we aren't able to fund, if we can just onboard here, onto Kinesis for example, or any one of our managed services, then we can immediately move and get that fund project that we really wanted to fund, it would actually be unique value as move them over to that. So they're actually moving upstream as you said. And they're actually leveraging their unique understanding of their industry, their customer, to go ahead and add value there. So it is a distribution and I think in a very productive way. >> I want to ask about the data pipeline. So one of the values that AWS brings is simplification. When I look, however, at the data pipeline, it's very rich. If I look at the number of data services, Kinesis, Aurora, DYNAMO dv, EBS, S3, Glacier, each of these has a programming interface that is, I use the word primitive not in pejorative way but >> Roger: Yes, yes. >> But a deep level, low level. And so the data pipeline gets increasingly complex. There's probably a benefit of that, because I get access to the primitives, but it increases complexity. First of all, is that a fair assertion on my part? And how are your customers dealing with that? >> Be happy to take that one, yeah? >> Sure. >> Okay. >> Yep, so I think from our perspective all these different capabilities and technologies by customer choice. We build these services because our customers ask for them. And we order a wide variety so that people can choose for the developers who want to have full control over the entire staff, they have access to these lower level services. You know as you mentioned a few, DYNAMO dv, Kinesis Stream, S3, but we also build an abstraction layer on top of these different services. We also have a different set of customers asking for simplicity, just doing a specific type of things. I want you guys to take care of all the complexities, I just want that functionality. The example would be services like Kinesis Files, Kinesis Analytics, which is the abstraction layer we put on top. So for customers who are looking for simplicity, we also have these kind of capability for them. So I think at the end of the day, it's customer choice and demand. That's why we have this rich functionality and capabilities at AWS. >> So you guys have already solved that problem essentially, the one that I was sort of putting forth. >> So I won't say, I like Ray's answer. It's about listening to the customer. Cause in many cases if we would have, if we said, hey, we're going to go build a monolithic service that simplifies this, we would potentially disappoint many other customers. Say actually I really do want to have that low level control. >> Right. >> I'm used to having that. But when we hear customers asking for something which we can then translate to a service, we'll build a new service. And we will actually up level it and actually build a simpler abstraction for a targeted audience. So for us it's all about listening to the customers, build what they want, and if it means that we're going to actually bring two or three of our services together to work in concert for our customer, we'd do that in a heartbeat. >> Yeah that low level control also allows you to be presumably maybe not more agile but more responsive to the market demand. Because if you did build that monolithic service, you would essentially be locking yourselves in to a fossilized set of functions and services that you can't easily respond to market conditions. Is that a fair way to think about it? >> That is a fair statement, because basically our customers can look at these API's and together for these various services, realize how to use these API's in concert to get an end and done. And should we have precise feedback on a specific service, we can add a new API or tailor it over time. So it does give us a great deal of agility in working on these individual services. >> So Ray, you're a product guy and you're talking about listening to customers, right? And coming up with products, it's what you do. What are you hearing now? Where do people want to go now? Because I assume you've been in the market place for four years now with this, evolution is (clears throat), excuse me, perpetual, constant, so where do you want to take it? What's the next level or what's percolating in the back of your mind right now? >> Yeah, I think people always looking for different type of tools that they're familiar with or they want to use to analyze these data in real time and provide a differentiated customer experience. A concrete example I want to give is actually why we're here. At the Splunk Conference is at Kinesis we have a service called Kinesis Firehose. Based on customer demand when we launched Kinesis Streams, customers wanted to make sure they had access to data sooner than they used to do, but they want to use the tools they're familiar with. And apparently there's a diverse set of tools different customers want to use. We started with S3 for data lay, kind of storage, we used Reshift as a data warehouse. And overtime we heard from customers say, hey, we want you to use Splunk analyze the data. But we would like to use Kinesis Firehose and suggest a solution. Can you guys do something about it? So actually the two teams got together. We thought it's a strong customer value proposition, great capability for other customers. So we start this partnership. We're here actually earlier this day, today, we made the announcement actually, Kinesis Firehose is going to support Splunk as data of redestinations. And this integration is not in beta program. It's open for public sign up. Just go to the Kinesis Files website. You can sign up, get early access. So basically from today, you can use Kinesis Firehose in real time streaming (mumbles) service to get real data into your Splunk cluster. We're super excited about it. >> And okay, and I can access those Splunk services through the market place or what's the way in which I bring Splunk to? >> Good question. For this integration actually we're just a different version of Splunk. You can run Splunk on AWS using ECT extensions. You can access through the market place. You can have your, you can use native Splunk Cloud, which manage all the servers for you. You can also use Splunk on print in that regard. >> Okay. What have you guys learned since the orig, the first reinvent? I mean, I think, and again, I don't mean this as a pejorative but AWS is pretty dogmatic in its view of the world as you you are very strict (laughs) about your philosophy. But at the same time, as you learn about the enterprise, you've evolved. What have you learned about enterprise customers in that five, seven year journey of really getting intense with the enterprise? >> Yeah, that's a good question. But again, we're dogmatic about we always listen to our customers. We will never deviate from that. It's part of our culture. And the customers need to tell us where they want to go. And I'll tell you when we first started with Kinesis, just to answer your question, it was about low latency. We want to get that answer really fast, cause our ad tech customers are some of our very early customers, so it really was about that that extremely low latency response. As even our customers have started to look at Kinesis as a fundamental abstraction on which to put all of their business data in and now they're telling their customers well you should, if their IT customers within their company, if you want any business data, attach to the stream and pull it out. So now we're seeing less emphasis on low latency and to end processing, but increase request I want to be able to attach a dozen consumers, because this stream is actually supporting my entire enterprise. I want to have security. So we recently released encryption at rest. Our customers are asking for support for a VPC flow logs, which we hope to be talking with you about very soon. So now it's becoming actually very mainstream to actually, for the enterprise, and they want all the enterprise ready features, all the certifications, Fed Rep, Hippa, et cetera. So now we're actually seeing the Kinesis Stream itself being put into the enterprise as a fundamental building block for how they're going to run their business and how they're going to build their applications within the business. >> So that philosophy, I mean, you are customer driven first and there's a lot a, Andy Jassy says, there's a lot of ways to compete. You can be competitive oriented, but we're customer oriented. And I, it's clear, you guys do that. At the same time, customers sometimes don't know what they want, so you have to be good at decoding. >> Roger: Yes. >> If you listen to all your customers, you know, five years ago, they say, well we're not going to put any data in there. Sensitive data in the Cloud. Now everybody has sort of gotten over that. You said, alright, well we have to make it more secure. We have to get, you know, whatever certified, et cetera, et cetera. There's an art to this, listening to customers, isn't there? >> It gets back to one of our leadership principles of we always work customer backwards. We need to understand what they want, what experience they'd like to have. We have to anchor everything on that. But there is this element of invent and simplify. Because our customers may guess at what a solution is, but let's make sure we really understand what they want, what they need, the constraints under which that solution must offer. Then we go back to our engineering teams and other teams and we invent and simplify on their behalf. And we're not done there. We actually then bring these back to customers and in fact, why we're here today, we've spent two days talking to customers but even before this collaboration with Splunk began, we actually brought customers in and it turned out, their customers were often our customers. So we started talking, what is the problem? And we started with the very clear problem stain. And once both of our teams, we've loved working with Splunk, they work very customer backwards, like we do. And together once we understood this is the problem we are trying to address, and we had no preconception about how we're going to do it, but we worked backwards on what it would take to actually get that experience for our customers. And we're actually here beta testing it. And we're going to have a very aggressive two or three month beta test with customers, did we get it right? And we'll refine as well before we actually release it to the customer. So again, that working with the customer, work customer backwards. But invent and simplify on their behalf. Because many Splunk customers weren't aware of Firehose until we explained it to them as a potential solution. They're like ah, that will do it, thank you. >> So very outcome driven. I mean, I know you guys write press releases before you sometimes launch products. Sort of as you say, that's what you mean by working backwards, right? >> Roger: Yes, yes it is. It really is. >> Ray: You're good listeners. >> So far it's worked. (laughter) >> It's always fun at the company, when somebody says I have a customer, the entire room gets quiet and we all start listening. It's actually fun to see that, because that's the magic word. I have a customer and we all want to listen. What do they want? What are they challenged with? Cause that's where the innovation starts from which is exciting to be part of that. >> It's been a great formula, no doubt about that. >> It has, it has. >> Thank you both for being here. Didn't realize it was a big day. So congratulations >> Thank you. >> on your announcement as well. >> Absolutely. >> Ray, Roger, good to see you. >> It's great talking with you. >> Alright, you're watching theCUBE live here from Washington D.C. .conf2017. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco it's The Cube covering Pure Accelerate 2017. Brought to you by Pure Storage. >> Welcome back to Pier 70 in San Francisco everybody. This is The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Vellante with my cohost Stu Miniman. Ray Smith is here. He is the Assistant Director for Technology at the Mississippi Community College Board. Ray, thanks for coming to The Cube, it's good to see you. >> Glad to be here. >> We were having a good conversation off camera. Tell us a little bit about the college board. >> Well, Mississippi Community College Board is... We are the board that coordinates with the 15 community colleges in the state of Mississippi. Part of our job is to make sure that enrollment figures are taken care of. We look at budgets, we work with the legislature, and more importantly we work with the community colleges in helping to develop good outcomes for our students. >> Okay, so it's obviously a public institution, public funded, you've got a responsibility to report to the public. Do you also have responsibility for, well what services do you have responsibility for? You said enrollment, but.. >> I am, for instance, I'm responsible for a statewide network. The community colleges are a little different than some entities in that we have a shared network. In which all 15 community colleges they are connected back to the board office. We act as the ISP for the colleges. The colleges submit data to us. We also have in place a longitudinal data system in the state of Mississippi in which we collect information and we report that information up the line for our longitudinal data. But more importantly what we do is that we count students and we pay based upon enrollment. >> Community colleges play such a critical role today in education. Which we all know, anybody who has kids know how expensive it is to educate. And the colleges are way more open these days about accepting community college student transfers, allowing students to take summer classes at community colleges. My son, for instance, goes to GW, he's taking some math classes at community college. It really helps address the cost. It helps people who aren't ready to go to college. Talk a little bit about the mission and the role that your college plays. >> Our system, or the board office, what we do again is that we coordinate each community college as a separate entity amongst themselves, governed by a local board. But from the state level, we administer the payment based upon students. And one of the things that we do is we're heavily involved in the workforce. That's a real big issue in our system right now. To train more people for the jobs that we're trying to bring in to Mississippi. In addition to that, we have strong academics in which our students take two year academic courses that transfer to our universities. But more than anything our purpose is to try to make a better Mississippi, in providing our services, education and training to the people of Mississippi. >> You're a feeder system, in essence. It's a fast turnover, it's a two year cycle. So your job of enrollment has a lot of pressure on it. Now what kind of pressure does that put on the technology infrastructure. >> Well, a couple of things. Number one, community colleges are education based institutions but at the same time, people come there because of the lifestyle. Because coming out of high school, a lot of students aren't quite ready for the big universities. So, they come to the community colleges looking for a lot of the things that they have at home. Internet, fast internet, for instance, and also the ability to.. (laughs) that's the big one, and also the ability to have online classes where they don't have to come on campus or so forth. But our students want everything that the major universities have and they want everything they're used to as home as well as within coming out of K-12. >> Okay, so, let's get into the relationship with Pure Accelerate, let's talk about it. What led you to them? Talk about your journey, give us the before and after. >> Well, first of all, I have a real small staff at our agency, and we have a lot of big things to do. >> Dave: What's small? >> Small, three people including myself. >> Oh wow, for 15 colleges? >> 15 colleges for a statewide network, etc, etc. What we were looking for was a system that would allow us to bring all of our technical resources into a smaller unit. We looked at the converge systems of some other competitors to Pure early on. And what we were really wanting to see and what we needed help with was more of a technical infrastructure more than anything. But what we found, it was way too complex. And it actually required all of the additional services that you received in terms of technical support. When we moved to Pure, we looked at the Pure Storage, and one of the main reasons we did that was our current system was coming up for renewal. The renewal itself was triple what it was the year before. >> Dave: The maintenance renewal? >> The maintenance renewal. And it was the traditional forklift. We weren't ready to forklift. So looking at Pure, what we were looking for was number one, simplicity, we were looking for more speed, we were looking for all of those things that would make life easier for us. What we ended up getting was a situation where we were able to purchase the Pure array for the cost of maintenance of what we were looking at before. >> Dave: Wow. >> The cost of mainenance. We got the Pure array with three year maintenance on it. So it was a no brainer from our standpoint. >> And let me just put a point on that. When you say simplicity a lot of people what they say, "Oh well, give you more time to work, "but you're going to pay for it more upfront." But you're saying from a capital expense standpoint this was now a savings for you compared to keeping your old gear. >> Understand this, the Pure array is the first piece of technology equipment that I've ever purchased that would not be classified as an expense. It's an investment, simple as that. Because what we purchased, we will not have to throw it out when we upgrade. We simply, as we saw today in the presentation, we upgrade our software, we get same pieces and parts in place. It is, it's an investment. >> Can you walk us through that a little bit? Because you've got the full converged infrastructure solution. Were you using Cisco before or was that something you added? >> I was using Cisco from a UCS standpoint. But I was using another manufacturer's storage. We actually, we moved to the flat stack on our first conversion we kept our UCS, but we removed the storage and our converted it all to a flat stack. Then we subsequently purchased an additional flat stack. But what it has bought us is exactly what you mentioned earlier. We now have time to do things as opposed to just being a technology person. >> Ray, one thing when you talk about upgrades. You've got your computer, your storage, and your network. Storage sounds like you can upgrade it and move there, with converge you can upgrade it. Your network, too? Because network tends to be install it and don't breathe on it because I don't want to mess it up. So, does the full solution get upgraded or how do you manage it? Do you manage it as a stack or as the individual components? >> We manage our stack itself. Now from the infrastructure standpoint of what we do with internet service, that's handled with another piece of equipment. But we were able to number one, shut down two full racks of storage equipment down to four U, roughly. And it's changed our whole costing structure inside of our data center. The data center is much cooler. And of course, the whole support piece of it is just unbelievable. There's no one coming in to replace blades every other week. >> I was going to say, too. It had to have an IT labor impact. So what would you have done? You've got a small staff. It's yourself plus three individuals, correct? >> Ray: That's correct. >> What would you have done if you didn't get there? Would you just have to work more nights and weekends? >> That's what we would have done. We would have continued to do that. >> Dave: And you were doing that? >> That's what we were doing. >> Is it fair to say you got a lot of your nights and weekends back? >> Absolutely. >> So, presumably, people are more productive during the day. They're happier because they have more time with their families. >> Absolutely, and access to our data is a lot quicker than it was before. >> So, working less, you get more done. >> Correct. >> That's a good do more with less story, right? Because usually do more with less means you figure out how to work nights and weekends. I mean you remember that cycle of 20, ten, 15 years of hell after the dot come burst. It was like do more with less, do more with less, do more with less. And all it meant was more hours for IT people. I guess we hit the breaking point, and now technology's got us into this problem. Is technology finally getting us out of this problem? >> From our standpoint, it is solved. At least 50% of man hours that we have been using just to keep our systems up and running. Now I work it all from one pane of glass or from my cell phone. >> And here's the thing. What value did that really provide, that extra nights and weekends, to the organization? I guess the value was, if it didn't get done, IT would fail, was the value. But it wasn't incremental value, right? >> Well, what we've been able to do is move more into the job responsibilities that are actually there more along with the technical side. >> Dave: So the strategic stuff? >> Absolutely, I have a developer now that can spend his whole time developing as opposed to responding to some error message on a hard drive or whatever. >> I'll make a prediction. I think it was, it might have been Greenspan, but he said during the 80's, we all went to PC's, they said you see the productivity numbers aren't up ticking. But we're spending all of this money on technology, but you don't see it in the productivity numbers. And of course in the 90's we had this productivity boom. You're kind of seeing some flatness in productivity, but the stories that we get like this, I think we're going to have another boom. Do you feel that way as a technology practitioner? >> Absolutely. Even myself, I deal more with the infrastructure so far as our servers and so forth. I have time to do a whole bunch of things. We're redesigning, for instance, our websites. We're doing a lot of other things now that honestly we didn't have time to do. >> And I think that's a big factor in the flash. It's not just speed. >> Yeah, and Dave, it's something we've been talking about for years, some of the MIT guys. As automation and tools and platforms are actually going to free us up to do more. Stories like your developer wasn't developing and now they are. So, yeah, what are you seeing that's going to enable you to do even more? Is there anything you're asking for from the community that, either some announcements you've seen this week or other things you're looking for? >> Believe it or not, the announcement that I just heard today about the active active scenario, that's it. I have two data centers. >> The multi site replication? >> Absolutely. >> You used to work at EMC in the heyday and they referenced it today. SRDF was kind of the gold standard, expensive, complicated... >> Stu: In 1994 >> Dave: But it changed the business. What I heard, and maybe you alpha geeks can help me, but what I heard is that we're going to dramatically simplify that whole process. So, that's what you heard, but add some color to that. What does that mean for you? >> What that means for me is now my two sites will operate as one. And that I actually have a real active active configuration that I'm not afraid if something goes down that the other one's not going to be there. I don't have to go through the process of rebuilding on the other side because it's all automatic. There are a number of things that were said that if you understood what we have gone through in the past couple of years in working, trying to get together an active active environment, it was just like the creation of fire, as far as I'm concerned. >> It's something we've had in storage forever. The reason we over provision and get such low utilization is because if I have a failure or something goes wrong. If something's a little slow, I have trouble. If I go down, I'm out of a job. >> The traditional vendors weren't able to solve this problem for you. I mean they've been trying for a while, right? But you didn't see anything from those guys. >> If you attempted to do that using hardware base, using software base, it's more than just a notion. I have reasonable assurances, based on what I've seen with Pure that it is going to be as straightforward and as simple as they have described. >> That's great. Alright, Ray, give you the last word. Pure Accelerate, where you here last year? >> Ray: I was not here last year. >> So this is your first year? >> This is my first year, and it's great, it's wonderful. >> Are there things you are seeing that are interesting to you? >> Absolutely, everything, everything. >> Why do you come to these shows? >> Well, number one, I come to learn something new. I like to hear about the announcements number one. And I like to be able to have the opportunity to meet some of the people who actually building, designing, writing the source code for this stuff. It's amazing. >> I got to ask you a personal question. You shared with me you like to funkify, you're a bass player, do you play in a band? >> My band is getting back together for kind of a short reunion here. We have some roots that go back to hip-hop. And it'll be interesting to see Snoop tomorrow night. >> That's awesome, fantastic. Well, Ray, thank you so much for coming to The Cube. >> Appreciate it, appreciate it. >> Alright, keep right there and we'll be back with our next guest. Right after this short break, this is The Cube, we're live from Pure Accelerate 2017 in San Francisco. We'll be right back. (exciting music)

>> Hey, welcome back everybody! Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at Zuora Subscribe at downtown San Francisco, and every time we go out to conferences, there's a pretty high probability we're going to run into this Cube alumni. Sure enough, here he is, Ray Wang. He's the founder and principal of Constellation Research. Ray, always great to see you. >> Hey Jeff, this is awesome, thanks for having me. >> And close to your hometown, what a thrill! >> This is, it's a local conference! What else can I ask for? >> So what do you think? Subscription economy, these guys have been at it for a while, 1200 people here, I'm a big Spotify fan, Amazon Prime, go back to Costco if you want to go back that far. But it seems to really be taking off. >> It is. About three years ago, digital transformation became a hot topic. And because it became a hot topic, it's really about how do I get products to be more like services. How do I get services to get into insights, and how do I make insights more like experiences and outcomes? And that natural transition as companies make a shift in business models is what's driving and fueling the subscription economy. >> It's interesting. Do you think they had to put the two and two together, that once the products become services now you can tap into that service, you can pull all kinds of data after that thing, you can have analytics, as opposed to shipping that product out the door it goes and maybe you see it every 15,000 miles for a checkup? >> You know what it is? It's basically, about three years ago, people started to realize this. Tien's been talking about this for ages, right? He's been talking about everything's a subscription economy, everything is going to be SAS-ified. And in tech world, everybody got that. But it was when companies like GE, which we saw together, a Caterpillar or a Ford, started to realize, "Hey we can do remote monitoring and sensing "with IOT on our cars, "and I can now figure out what's going on "and monitor them or give an upgrade, "or give a company an upgrade on their appliance, "or give an upgrade on their vehicle, "or do safety and compliance." Then people started realizing, "Oh, wow. "We're not just selling products. "We're in the services business." >> Right. It's funny, if you read the Elon Musk book, how the model years of Teslas, there's no such thing as a model year. It's what firmware version are you on, and then they upgrade. >> Oh, no, that's what we do all the time. You click on a little T, and it's like, boom, firmware. Oh, I get a new upgrade. Only the other day, you touch your head seat, there's like a lumbar support thing, the software popped up for headrest! I never knew I could change the headrest! It literally showed up two months ago. It's unbelievable. >> So, the cool thing, I think, that doesn't get enough play is the difference in the relationship when now you have a subscription-based relationship. That's a monthly recurring or annual recurring, you got to keep delivering value. You got to keep surprising you every morning, when you come out and get in your car, as opposed to that one time purchase. "Adios, we'll see you in however many years "until you get your next vehicle." >> Oh, that's a great example. And the Tesla, we got the Easter eggs over Christmas, right? So the Christmas holiday thing with the Model X that actually did Trans-Siberian Express to the Bellagio fountains with the doors that popped up. You're like, "Hey, what is this thing?" It's just an upgrade that shows up. You're like, "Okay." But you do. You do have to delight customers, you're always capturing their attention, and the fact is, hey, I might buy a toaster. And in that toaster, I might get an upgrade two to three years out. Or maybe, I just buy toasters, and I subscribe to them. And every three years, I get a new toaster. And I can choose between a model L or I can go upsell, get a different color, or I can change out a different set of features, but we're starting to see that. Or maybe, I get a hotel room or a vacation. And that hotel room is at level X, and if I get a couple more members of my family, I get to level Z, and I get to another level, where I lose all the kids, I go back to level A. But the point being is I'm buying a subscription to having an awesome vacation. And that is the type of things that we're talking about here. It's that freedom that Tien was talking about. >> Because he talked about the freedom from obsolescence, freedom from maintenance. There's a whole bunch of benefits that aren't necessarily surfaced when you consume stuff as a service versus consuming it as a product. >> It does. And sometimes it may cost more, but you're trading the convenience, you're trading the velocity of innovation, right? For some people, they just want to own the same thing, they're not going to make the move, but for other people, it's about getting the newest thing, getting delighted, having a new feature. And in some cases, it's about safety, right? This is regulatory compliant or I'm actually doing rev rec correctly, as they were talking about, ASC606. >> Alright, so you're getting out on the road a lot, it's June 6, and I won't tell anyone on air how many miles you already have, because Tamara is probably watching, and she'll be jealous, but biggest surprise is you see here or recently as this digital transformation just continues to gain speed. I'm doing a little research now, and maybe you can help me out. Looking back at digital photography, because it's like, "No, no, no, no, no." for the film, and then it's like, boom. I think these really steep inflection points, or up if you're on the right side, are coming. >> Let's stick to digital photography, that was a great one. There was the point, remember, where we actually had all those disposable cameras at parties that'd get developed, one hour developing. Then we get to back to the point where you just showed up at Costco, dropped something off, you'd get the disk and the photo. Then we had O-Photo, and now we have nothing. Everything just went away because of the phones. These things changed everything, right? I mean, they changed the way we look at photography to the point where, do we even have an album? I was breaking out albums basically three weeks ago, showing my kids, like "Hey, this is what a photo album looks like." And they were completely mystified. "Oh, you print these, how do they get printed?" I mean, they're asking the basic questions. That transformation is what we're having right now. "You own a car?" "You actually buy a PC?" I'm buying compute power. Kilowatts per hour for artificial intelligence in the next year. It's not going to be, I bought the server, I loaded it up, I got it tuned, I got it ready. So yeah, we are in the middle of that shift. But it's the fact that companies are willing to change their business models, and they're willing to break free in the post ERP era. A lot of this is just, my old ERP does not do billing, it doesn't understand the smallest unit of something I sell, and I've got to fix that. And more importantly, my customers, they want to buy it today. The want to buy it in pieces. They want to buy it even smaller pieces. They might buy it every other week, they might buy it-- we have no idea. Yeah, I've got to make sure I can do that. >> It's just interesting too that this is happening now. We're talking about autonomous cars. We see the Waymo cars all the time. The guy from Caterpillar, he's got to a whole autonomous fleet of mining vehicles that are operating today. >> 500,000! He's got 500,000 little trucks. Well, they're not little trucks, they can't fit in this building. >> They're big trucks. Apparently, they tried. >> But they're trying to get these trucks in. We used to think about, like "Hey, these are agricultural vehicles that can be remotely controlled by GPS, they also work for tanks." These are things that are actually doing runs. Now, it's a great reason. Think Australia. Out in Perth, it's about $150,000 to hire a driver. Just to go back and forth. So they figured, "This is just getting ridiculous. "We don't have enough people out here. "We can't convince enough people "to come drive these trucks. "Let's go automate that." That's a lot of the story of where a lot of this came from. >> Or he had a bad night, or broke up with his girlfriend, or distracted about this or that. The whole autonomous vehicle versus regular people driver-- all you've got to do is ride around on your bicycle in your neighborhood, and watch how many people stop at stop signs. Should we answer that question real fast? >> Oh, I do that in California. That's kind of bad, actually. >> Alright Ray. Well, thanks for taking a few minutes. I'm glad you get a weekend at home. Where you off to next, I should ask? >> Oh, it's going to be a crazy next few weeks. I'm going to be in London and Paris and Boston all next week. >> Oh, you're going to eat well. >> I'll try. >> Alright, he's Ray Wang. I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching the Cube from Zuora Subscribe. Thanks for watching.

>> Good Live from Las Vegas. It's the cute covering knowledge sixteen Brought to you by service. Now carry your host David, Dante and Jeffrey. >> Oh, >> welcome back to knowledge. Sixteen everybody, this is the cubicle wall to wall coverage. We got the events. We extract the signal from the noise. This is Day one for us will be going Three days of knowledge extraction from knowledge. Sixteen. Ray Wong is here. He's the founder and principal analyst and chairman of Consolation Research. Up and coming Smoking Hot research company. Ray, Always a pleasure to see you. Thanks for coming >> on. Excited to be here, man. It's been a world one week of events, so >> I'LL say So you were You were down. It's Sapphire, right? You were over it on Tampa Amplify And >> I'm Austin s Wait after this race, a >> normal week for you >> It's a normal week for all of us. >> So impressed You were telling us off camera that you were at one of the earlier knowledge events down in San Diego. So you've got a lot of experience with this company, >> you know, it was in a tent. It was outside they had detected. I think it's like a park. I'm not even sure what it was. I just But remember, there's one one hundred fifty people next. There's like five hundred people. Three years later, it's pretty wild. >> So they've come out of the blue and really, you know, escalated a lot of momentum. The latest billion dollar software company with a plan to get to four billion. So stepping back a second just looking at the software landscape, one has to be impressed with the progress that service now is made. What's your take on the industry and service now in particular? >> Well, I think what people don't understand this service now is a platform, right? There's a business model platform or the way that we used to look at paga or the way we used to look at a lot of those companies that were actually sit in the middle. That orchestration what's changes? Because everything's in the cloud. What we now have the ability to abstract orchestrating doing away that we've never seen before, right so you can take specific business problems. Take the heart of what's actually happened on the idle piece. Use it to not just manage the process, but also do the analytics and the monitoring. So when we get the things like Coyote coyotes really about having a set of smart services and being well. To put that in the construct is a lot of the opportunity that we see going forward >> so high. So I said three years ago in the Cube after I saw the platform capabilities and said, Wow, this is a collision course with sales force Investor's Business Daily wrote a article today. Collision course of sales for so glad they caught up with Theo. But But, I mean, it's you could kind of see it coming together. And now you Frank lays out this vision this morning. Have you got the AARP estate, the C R M estate and tea or a service management Rather kind of bridging those two. How do you see it? >> No, we definitely see this as a platform play. Now here's what's interesting is the lots of the developments, and you see this all the time has been happening in the APP to have side of the House package. APS have kind of been at a standstill for innovation compared to what's going on on the customs side. And so every so often we see that flip on platforms. This is the beginning of that flip, more than one person said. I it is going to be the end of the affair, right, because we're going to put all the intelligence into the interaction. You don't have to go to the specific app. No. And the fact is, what becomes important is the ability, the orchestration, the intelligence, the recommendation and what you want to build to get to the part where I'm making the right set of recommendations to augment the next set of processes. That's what gets really powerful and these platforms that are emerging on, What's the next set of clouds? That's going to be where we're going to see a lot of this advancement. >> So the FBI essentially becomes the product. Is that kind of? >> It's the orchestration of the AP eyes, the way the context was delivered against those AP eyes and more importantly, how we actually pulled together those journeys, like a couple things that we talk about time mass personalization of scale, lots of context, right, so rolls relationship, identity weather, location, time, all important, Then choose your own adventure journeys the ability to actually abstract different processes from different places and bring them together, and the more importantly, we call intention driven design, which is. I'm gonna give you three or four choices. Learn over time. Take that machine learning. Then apply that the next set of recommendations and then start building against that. And that power sits on the network. That power sits in these new platforms. >> So you're here speaking to the service now customers about customer experience, right? It's something we hear a lot about. Your an expert in that in that space. What did you say? What was the reaction? What was the feedback? >> Well, I think the important thing is we're seeing new business models and you hear me say this before it's we're in a post sale on demand, attention, economy. And what that means is everything after the sale is what's happening right now. That's the service. That's the experience. Peace. The on demand pieces were accessing smaller, smaller slices of a product. Maybe not even a product, a service, maybe not even a service, and incite maybe not even insight and experience. And then, more importantly, it's an attention to come. If you're not capturing my time and attention, which is mind share, or if you're not saving me time and money, I don't care. And That's what we're in. We're in. These business moms are built around. This is interesting. Came out of the Oracle Marketing cloud shows Well, same thing. Just smaller and smaller slices of attention based on the way you interact with all the other applications you have. You don't have time to give somebody the big story. You've got to get him when you can. They could be standing in line. They look at their phones, are in the middle of their kids, switching innings at the baseball game. And you got to get in that little tiny video that in between time is so important because you don't close there. You lose him, right? And it's not for something really big. It's move them along the needle down. The journal. Correct. >> What do you make of this, Dave? Dave Wright was just not talking about the new state of work. IBM has been talking about a new way to work in. He is kind of running the collaboration, you know, group. Now you you talk about millennials and how they work. What are you seeing in state of work? >> Well, a lot of the research we're looking on the future of work is by one of my colleagues, Alain Le Pastilles, and what he's been really looking as this shift in terms of conversations as a service. He's been looking at the shift in terms of intelligent collaboration. Right, and all this stuff is actually leading the point where we're actually using technology to augment ability. Teo do decisions had a lot more automation than we had him before. But then cognitive assistance pop up right and they help make a smarter. And they learned from our different our actions and all that's starting to come into the workplace, which is exciting and a little bit creepy and scary at the same time. >> So what's the What's the What's new with Constellation? You guys are growing. Bring it on. New analyst Cranking out Want to research? Your event keeps growing? Give us the update on Constellation. >> You know, I think the big thing is this digital transformation story we've been talking about for the last five to six years is huge. The next set is really not about transformation. It's about finding growth in times where there is no growth. That's where we're going to talk about the next five years at our conference. Really? Talking about what are those factors, right? We gotta jump start growth. Global GDP is growing two to three percent at best. Every company has a target of like five to ten. Someone's gonna lose, and it's gonna be very interesting. >> So you think that growth is going to come through productivity improvements or investments in technology? Actually, Dr sort of new productivity levels were taking away from >> someone else. I think we're taking me for someone else. That's what I'm really scared about, that they're smart growth that's sustainable and helps people with the jobs and the job transitions. And there's what we've been doing, which a lot of destructive Cross, which is actually limiting all of the jobs and actually making it harder to grow in the long run. >> Well, so yeah, we've talked about this on the Cuba lot machines replacing humans, which they've always replaced humans. But it seems to be now happening at the cognitive level. That's scary. I know you guys to the valley, wags. You know the seasonal nervous right now, You guys, you more sanguine? Then the VCs air >> well with these three big areas where we see a lot of investment. Deep learning happens to be one of them, right? We see a lot of medicine going off. Some of the smartest people I know are all focused and on deep learning. Very interesting thing. If you look at that university, California, Irvine there's a whole department around. This artificial intelligence that just lifted itself up became a private corporation. So there's very unfeeling things there. There's nanotech, which is also some erasers, things on the material science piece that's also playing a big role. And then, of course, there's stem cells in the biotech piece. Those three things are converging, and you know it's more than just building out the Star Trek roadmap that Apple's been doing. It's a lot bigger than that. There's some big societal shift that are happening. >> What, what's next for you? You say you're heading Teo. That's sweet, but we're So we work. We find Ray Juan. I'm >> off this sweet world, Max. There's a monetary it next week. There's a whole bunch of other events picking up in June as well as you. You're going to be at them, but I think we do our retreat every year at the end of the year. May June, we're going to be at Stanford, the faculty club. All the constellation folks get together on. Then we go back out into the field and it's a crazy summer as well. I don't know when this stops making, so yeah, you could always find him on Twitter That that's but I looked for you guys when I'm where you're at is where the events are. >> Well, hopefully our past will continue to cross. We love having you in the Cube was a great guests. Really appreciate your time. Thanks for coming on. >> You know, Thanks for having have a >> great conference. All right. They've travelled, right, everybody. We'LL be back after this short break. This's the Cube or live from knowledge. Sixteen, right? >> Service now is the