>>The Cube is live with three different stages here at AW S Reinvent in fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. My name's Savannah Peterson, and I gotta tell you, even though the cube has been at AW w s reinvent for over a decade, this is my first year and wow, is it just buzzing in here? >>It's >>Busy, it's crowd, it's loud. >>So exciting to be here with you all. >>We're hearing north of 50,000 people, and I'm hearing hundreds of thousands online. >>No, it's going great. There's lots of buzz, lots of excitement this year, of course, three times a number of people, but it's fantastic. >>Everyone at the same place at the same time. Energy is just pretty special. So it's >>Fun. >>I mean, AWS is a friendly place for security companies and I'm excited to talk about that. >>Let's be here. We have a lot coming for you. We're super excited and if you think about it, it's price, performance, it's data, it's security, and it's solutions for purpose-built use cases. >>Great job. Congratulations. I love the mess. I love how you guys had the theme. I thought his keynote was great and it's great to see Amazon continue to innovate. >>My name is Savannah Peterson. We are the Cube and we are the leading source for high tech coverage.

>>Oh, here we go again. Yeah. Here we go again. >>Cube Coverage of AWS re invent continues in a moment.

(upbeat electronic music) >> Hey, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE, we got a great segment here on taming complexity. Niranjan Ramsunder and Raghu Bongula, Senior Vice President of Engineering TSYS, and Niranjan is the Chief Technology Officer of UST. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on. You've got a great use case here, taming complexity. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you, John, it's a pleasure to be here. >> So this is a great example of some of the major wave we're seeing coming in that were reporting this re:Invent is that this next generation of cloud scale powered by data and business value at the modern application layer, at the top of the new stack, if you will, going to call it that. This is the theme everyone's talking about, you've got Edge, all these things are happening, but at the heart of it is the complexity. So Niranjan, take us through what you guys are doing at UST with Raghu and his journey on the transformation. Set us up. >> Sure, John. Thanks, John, and Raghu, thanks for joining us. So when you look at AWS, John, you got it right. The situation has matured to a level where the real complex applications, the one which needs low latency, high throughput are now moving to the cloud, and concerns about data security, about privacy, about how to manage systems are not in my control are now getting resolved, and an important example of that is what TSYS and Raghu are doing in the sense of really taking their core functionalities, their fundamental business processes and moving it to the cloud. So it has been a great experience for us working with Raghu and the entire TSYS team on how a business function moves. What are the reasons why you would move? What considerations will you have? And then, you know, proving that it really is functional, that is critical because business has to see value. It's not just cloud because it's attractive, it is because cloud has a purpose. So we'd love to hear from Raghu as well on what are the motivations, but that is really what excites us, thanks. >> Raghu, before you get into your, the why on the transformation, I just want to set it up. You guys are running a very big business. You have a lot of business legacy systems built in place, your transforming to the cloud, you can't just kill the old to bring in the new, you got to work together, this is part of the benefit of the cloud. So with that said, take us through the journey, what's the purpose, what's the problem you're trying to solve? Take us through the highlights. >> Sure, John, thank you. Thank you for giving me an opportunity to talk here. So, you know, as I mentioned, I'm Raghu Bongula, I lead the delivery of platform analyzation and cloud migration programs at TSYS. TSYS, which is part of global payments, you know, is focused on payments and card processing for the issuer banks. We are the number one card issuer processor in the United States, and I think we lead in many countries across the world. So we run the most mission critical systems in the financial services. So our platforms are a combination of, you know, low latency workloads which span in thousands of transactions per second and also high-throughput workloads like a high throughput batch workloads, which, you know, which deal with the hundreds and thousands of, you know, transactions per second, you know, and, you know, in the current mainframes. So our challenge has been how to take this systems, you know, which have been so successful for so many years with the cloud, how do we kind of take that? You know, how do we kind of approach that? That has been our challenge. I think we have been, you know, in this journey along with UST to solve those. The motivations for us, you know, from my perspective, to take our platforms to the cloud, you know? There are many, but these are some of them, the first one being the business agility, you know? Right now, I think like any other company who is running on on-premise, they are bound by the infrastructure and you know, the rigid state of the data centers. So cloud provides us agility for us to take advantage of the infrastructure, you know, take advantage of the service (indistinct) build so that we don't have to build it ourself, we can use those Lego blocks to solve high-order problems for example. And so other, you know, advantage we have is the ability for us to offer the solutions across the world. Now today, if we go across the world and try to offer our solutions, you know, we are sometimes, I think, you know, are forced to look in to build a data center, which can be, you know, definitely expensive and also time taking, you know? And we lose the market opportunity in many of those cases. So what cloud does provide, in this case, AWS provides this, with this span of regions they have across the world, it provides us an opportunity for us to kind of quickly take our solution to any of these regions where we don't serve today, okay? And last but not least, the security. So I think security is, you know, is a foremost. The security of what we see in AWS, you know, is, you know, definitely meets our needs and our customers', and you know, we feel that to get that sophistication it's going to be more and more tougher in the on-premise environment. >> That's great stuff. I mean, Niranjan, we're talking about this all the time with cloud. This year and this kind of inflection point is where it goes the next level, you know? I mean, Raghu is running a very successful global payments system, a lot of transactions. So, you know, the metaphors range, you know? "Changing the airplane engine out at 30,000 feet," I've heard that one. That's kind of what's happening here, He's got to be successful. You can't just like put the pause button. >> Yes, and there are more than one, you know, allegory which fits your... One is of course is the airplane engine changing, the second, the pilot is changing as well. So it does, you know, it's not just enough to take care of technology moves and ensure business still runs, but at the same time, the people who are supporting it today work on older technologies, they need to move along with the change so that we don't lose the knowledge, they have the systems. And the one important part where we are contributing to this whole engagement is documenting their systems which have been written over a period of 30 years and ensuring that all the rules and subroutines and the nested loops within that get translated correctly and get tested correctly as they move to the cloud. So it is definitely in the engine, but you know, the entire transformation has to be seamless and business should not know better, it should be nothing happened except that now we're on the cloud, that is really where the fun part is. >> Raghu, I want to ask you, when you guys sit in the room and say, "Okay, we got to do this." What are the key business benefits are expected from this modernization program? I mean, I get the agility, that's, you know, check the box, yeah, we want to be more agile. What does that translate into from a benefits standpoint? >> Yeah, so build that agility for us means, you know, our ability to kind of adapt to the market needs as quickly as possible, which is, you know, we deal with different demographics, different regulatory environments across the world. So if a need arises to quickly build a payment product or a card product to serve a particular industry or a particular domain or a particular vertical, you know? Across the world, we want to be able to kind of quickly put together what we have in a, you know, a marketable solution, okay? So that's what it means for us and the business agility, and we want to be able to do across the world, so if we see an opportunity, you know, anywhere in the world, we want to be able to kind of quickly deploy our solution, tie our Lego pieces, build a product or, you know, configure a product which satisfies that particular vertical or that particular regulatory region across the world. >> All right, question for both of you guys. I would love to ask the same question if you don't mind answering it from the different perspectives that you're taking. What were the major challenges that you guys have anticipated and addressed in this program? Because you know, this is probably going to... I can almost guess how many times we bump up against something that's a little speed bump, it says, "Okay, whoa, okay, how do we do that?" 'Cause remember, it's all net new sometimes should be factoring your... not just re-platforming. So can you share some of the major challenges that you've anticipated and how you've addressed them with this modernization program? >> Sure, I can go first, and then, you know, Niranjan, feel free to add, you know, anything which I would have missed. From my perspective, I think, you know, when we run the most mission critical systems in the financial services, so a lot of customers depend on our systems to kind of perform their day-to-day financial leads, okay? So uptime, high availability are utmost important to us. At the same time, the ability to process through billions and billions of transactions we deal with everyday, you know, that is of utmost importance to us. So the solutions have been running for a long time in the mainframes, tuned for many years, performing at scale, as mentioned again, you know, very low latency with thousands of transactions per second, you know, in case of real time transactions or very high throughput, you know, workloads, then getting hundreds and thousands of transactions per second. So taking, and again, in most cases, are, you know, in our case, they're running as a monolith. Now, how do you take, you know, a system like this and break it down into microservices and apply it on the cloud? And how do you deal with data, for example? So the data is sitting at one place. Now you cannot... what you cannot do is come Monday and turn off everything on the on-premise and put everything on the cloud for something like this, so you need an iterating migration path. How do you build a iteration migration path when the plane is moving and make it happen? I think that has been the challenge. The way we address this, we have built various patterns, you know, to kind of take that right out to the cloud using, you know, a Securus pattern, okay? Using a CDC and a Securus pattern, so we build what we'll call... you know, a framework called data fabric, which allows us to kind of seamlessly migrate applications and where the applicants can live on both ends and successfully, you know, solve the traffic, for example. We build techniques, you know, like pilot testing using pilot testing framework which allows us to kind of do a A/B testing which is the application is running on the cloud, application is running on on-premise, but we run the transaction, we complete it at both locations and make sure that it behaves the way we have anticipated it to behave, for example. So this was some of the challenges we had and we've just gone over some of the techniques we have open in our case to solve that problem. >> Yes, to add to that, John, you know... >> Great by the way, great insight. Awesome, thank you for sharing. >> Sure. To add to that, I think what Raghu was saying and what we found with the project, what is happening is it has fundamental implications to people in their daily lives. You know, someone going to buy milk at the grocery store, I mean, they cannot have their transaction stopped, it is not like I can be 99% right, you have to be right. And therefore it's important that we capture the requirements in the right way and make sure that they are reflected correctly in the target, that's one part. The second part is that we are not, as you heard earlier from Raghu as well, not re-platforming, we are rewriting all of the critical activities because the paradigms have shifted, the way coding is done, the way you are, you know, composing code, and the way your writing functionalities have changed are therefore making sure that the principals have not changed, the functionalities have not changed, but the way of delivery is changing. That continuity of business functionality through the process has been a very interesting part of the project. As far as we are concerned, we're still a work in progress that's still going on and it is really exciting to see how Raghu and the team have got these huge volumes, and they've got a new way of working both happening together and that's what we are happy to participate in. >> Yeah, and just a quick highlight, I want to call out the fact that they are writing their own code, they're getting patents. This is the new normal, right? I mean you got to build it. And this is all software value, this is what cloud does. I do want to give you a chance to explain to the folks UST and what the benefits are for working with you guys as an Amazon implementation partner, what's the benefits that customers get? Obviously, you got migrations like this that are modernizations programs, taming complexity, obviously a key, on account here. What does other customers get from working with you? >> Yeah, so AWS provides all of the technology underpinnings in terms of the functionalities, the functions, which are available out of the box, and, you know, it's all in those category from AWS. You get a lot of capabilities in terms of their architecture and their support for their transformation. What we provide on top of it is a willingness to take ownership for outcomes, that we make sure that what AWS offers is actually working for the end client targeted, for example, TSYS, and make sure that we do it in a time and in a speed which meets business requirements, and taking that ownership for our outcomes is a very key add-on that UST provides towards what AWS provides. There are other minor benefits, for example, AWS will invest in something that'll partner with UST in terms of migration, in terms of, you know, some subsidy of the world required in the initial stages, but the real value comes because we make sure that AWS and TSYS are both successful, and it becomes our job to make sure that we are part of a successful rollout rather than just a roll out. >> Raghu, I got to ask you. Obviously, the fun part is writing code and when you have DevOps and DevSecOps fully operational, it's infrastructure as code, that's the dream scenario, right? So how close are you to that? And what's next on this modernization wave? >> Yeah, as part of this journey, I think what we have embarked is, I think, you know, in fact our code is kind of the base foundational element. I think everything, what we are doing, as part of this migration, we are taking advantage of how a large enterprise, you know, should operate. Like, you know, we operate across the world, we have teams across the world building a lot of solutions every day. So we have built, you know, in fact, our code using something called service catalog, it's an offering from AWS, to help with large enterprises converting to the... or migrating to the cloud. So we are using that as our foundational layer to help us build that, and I think we are looking forward to it. I think, you know, where we migrate all of our applications, and take advantage of the true power of the cloud, especially in the, you know, in the data space, in the ML space and in areas we are not necessarily are not able to as easily, you know, adapt on the on-premise. >> John: Niranjan and Raghu, thank you so much for coming onto theCUBE, sharing the UST story, TSYS, great customer example, really great use case, great insights into taming complexity, because that's what the now the opportunity is to do and to recast and reset and a refactor business innovation. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, John. Thank you for the opportunity. >> Thank you very much John and Raghu. >> Keeps coverage here at theCUBE AWS re:Invent 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE, thanks for watching. (relaxed atmospheric music)

(upbeat intro jingle) >> 'Kay, welcome back everyone to theCUBE's coverage of AWS re:Invent, 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE, with your Matt Morgan, Vice President of Cloud Infrastructure Business Group of VMware, CUBE alumni. Matt, great to see you. Can't wait to see you in person, but thanks for coming in remotely for the virtual now hybrid CUBE for re:Invent. >> It's good to see you too, John. Thanks for having us. You know, it's our ninth year covering re:Invented, Remember the first year we went there, it was all developers, right? >> Right. >> And reminds me of the story that you guys have with AWS, you know, VMware Cloud, and VMware with vSphere pioneered operations in IT, you know, vSphere workloads, but now you move that all in the cloud. I remember Ragu when he announced that deal with Pat Gelsinger and Andy Jassy, we covered it extensively. People were like "What are they doing here? This is interesting". Boy- >> Yeah, you- >> The pundits all get it wrong. Their relationship has been blossoming. It's been really powerful, take us through the history here. >> Thanks, John, I mean, you're absolutely right. We have a phenomenal relationship with Amazon Web Services. The value of our partnership has been realized by customers all over the world, in every industry, as they embrace the seamless hybrid cloud experience powered by VMware, vSphere, and of course VM-ware Cloud Stack. Of course, we've recently expanded our operations here, including Japan and the launch of the Soccer Regions. And we're fully open for business with the U.S. Federal Government with VMware Cloud on AWS Gov Cloud. There's strong alignment across the field with new go-to-market teams on both sides and a powerful resell agreement that enables AWS sellers to take VMware Cloud on AWS and all the associated VMware services, such as VMware cloud disaster recovery, NSX vRealize Cloud Management, to their enterprise customers. And we couldn't be doing better. >> Yeah, and you brought up a lot of things there. You mentioned Outpost, mentioned Gov Cloud, you mentioned Marketplace, which means you mentioned the acronym, which is basically, I think it's called EDP Credits, which essentially the enterprise, Amazon's Salesforce working together. So, essentially full business model and technical integrations with Amazon. So, success certainly being demonstrated there. So congratulations, that being said, there's still more to do. We got this whole big wave coming on, you see the edge, you seeing multicloud, you seeing hybrid becoming the operational model, both on premises and in the cloud. And so, customers really are asking themselves "Okay, I got VMware, I got AWS Cloud, I got to secure these clouds now. I got to start putting the business model together on top of the technical architecture". You know, microservices, Kubernetes, Tansu, all the things you guys are doing, but customers want to ask you "What about securing the cloud?", this is the number one question, what's your reaction to that? >> Yeah, it's a great topic, John, at the end of the day, this is about evolving the hybrid cloud. And if you think about it, originally, the hybrid cloud was about unifying both infrastructure and operations between the on-premises world, and the public cloud world. And now what's happening, is we are seeing people embrace that in spades, and as a result of that, their Tier 1 applications are running both on-premises and in the public cloud. And with our new announced local cloud capabilities with VMware Cloud on AWS Outpost, it's leading to this whole new enterprise architecture, which we call the distributed cloud. When you look at deploying enterprise applications in a distributed cloud environment, the conversation starts with consistent networking and importantly security. So, let's talk about that for a moment. Customers are asking us "How do we secure our data when we start having infrastructure in a variety of locations? Are our applications and networks... Are they really secure when they run in these completely different environments? And importantly, when we move an application, we take it from our on-premise data center, we move it to the public cloud are the security policies... Are they moving with it? Do I need to re-architect for that?". And the real question, all of this boils down to "Are we expanding that attack surface when we move to VMware Cloud on AWS?". And so we have to come back to what do we do here to really alleviate these concerns? With data security, it's all about encryption, universal insights. We have the super root capability within our platform to ensure that everything is measured, every message from an application, every data, it's great for Chain Of Custody, Audit. Of course we have backup DR Ransomware. On the application side, of course, segmentation is super important with application centric firewalls, VPNs, tunneling, EDR, IDS, IPS. And of course, none of that matters if you have to reset everything up every time an application moves. And this is a real unique value proposition for us, it's about portability. We deliver portable security. We can move an application, the APIs are standard. You can move it up to the public cloud, your policies, your integrations, even if it's third-party integrations, they're maintained. And that really delivers the ability to say "Look, we can make sure your attack surface is not expanding, it's a controlled environment for you". And that really shrinks the risk factors associated with moving to this distributed cloud environment. >> You know, that's the really, I think the key point, I think that you brought up this infrastructure, kind of, table stakes. Which keeps rising because security's, honestly is now there's no... There's a huge... There's no perimeter. It's huge surface area. Everything has to be secured and locked down. And the big theme at re:Invent this year is data, right? So, you know, data and security all go hand in hand. And so that brings up the aspect of the edge. The edge is now booming, you seeing 5G again, you're here hearing it here at reinvent again, more and more 5G. You mentioned local services, Outpost is evolving. This is kind of the new area, and certainly, attack factor as well. So, you mentioned this whole local services. Take me through that because this becomes interesting because this is an architectural issue for enterprises to figure out, "Okay, I got to distribute a computing architecture, it's called The Cloud and multiple clouds. Now, I've got this edge, whole 'nother opening opens up the case for the architecture conversation". What's the strategy? How do you guys view the case? How do you make the case for local services? >> So, we were super excited to announce VMware Cloud on AWS Outpost. This is a local cloud as a service offering. So, let me break that down a little bit. Of course, compute at the edge is nothing new, but the problem with traditional approaches is typically edge locations may lack IT excellence. Which means there's no one there to manage the service. VMware Cloud on AWS outposts is that local cloud as a service, meaning it's fully managed and at the edge, that's a perfect fit. It's hand in glove for those types of workloads that are out, pushed all the way out, whether it's part of an agricultural deployment or an energy production facility or retail store, where there isn't that typical IT excellence. VMware cloud on AWS outposts enables customers to deploy the same Cloud instance as they're running VMware Cloud on AWS, but be able to do it out at that edge environment. And when you look at the overall value of VMware Cloud on AWS Outpost, it's about delivering a simpler, cost effective, consistent cloud experience for those on-prem environments that matches the operating model of the public cloud. Think of the places that you really want to have cloud infrastructure, where it's critical. Going back to your point on data, getting real time insights on that data, to be able to process that, we call those perishable insights. The value is the immediacy understanding that value specific to the moment it's being captured. Think about the different types of sensor environments, where data's coming off expensive equipment, that's measuring temperature and speed. Understanding that value back to the operator - really, really important. You don't have time to pipe that data up to a cloud process and send the results back down. Edge environments require that real-time stuff. So, together with AWS, we jointly deliver a fully managed service right down to the AWS hardware on which we built the VMware cloud instance. We think about where we're seeing the most interest here. You can look across all kinds of industries and use cases, and we're seeing it specifically in healthcare, out of the hospital, manufacturing for equipment monitoring, government, higher education, where those end points are typically virtualized. There are others, but these are the big ones so far. >> You know, I was just talking to an AMD executive or product marketing person on the gaming side. And they're living this right now because they're putting all the virtual collaboration in the cloud, all the data, because they have so much data and they have so much need for these special instances, whether it's GPUs, and CPUs, a mix and match. So, as instances become more special purposed, that's going to enable them to have more productivity. But then, when you have that baseline in the cloud, the edge also has processing power. So, I think people are starting to see this notion of "Okay, I'm in the cloud, but I can also have that cloud edge without moving data back to the centralized cloud and processing it at the edge with software". >> Yeah, that's true. >> This is real. >> It's super real. And the one that really resonates with customers, is one that we all understand and that's healthcare. Anytime you're in a regional environment where you're at a hospital, think of an ICU, the criticality of that data being processed, providing the insights, this is more mission critical than any other environment, because we're dealing with human lives, think about the complex compute requirements of that environment. And then look at the beauty and elegance of this system, a cloud-based system on premises, doing that compute, providing those insights, giving reality back to the clinician, so they can make those decisions. Healthcare is super, super important. And we see customers across the spectrum, looking at what's happening at the edge and embracing it, whether it's healthcare or other industries. And again, it's a perfect fit for them. >> Yeah, real quick, before we move on to what's new, I'm want to get to that, the Tansu stuff as well. What other industries are popping out? Obviously, manufacturing. What can you talk with some industries and some verticals that are really primed for this local cloud service? >> So, let's talk about manufacturing for a moment. Manufacturing is another facility oriented compute requirement that is perfectly fit, from a system and solution way like VMware cloud on AWS Outposts. Within the manufacturing environment, there's tons of very critical machines. There's inventory management, there's a combination of time management, people management, bringing it all together to ensure that process lines are moving as required, that inventory is provided at the specific moment it's needed, and to make sure that everything, especially in today's supply chain world is provided when is required. This type of capability allows an organization to bring in that sensor data, bring in that inventory data, produce applications that manage that in real time, delivering that compute. And in the manufacturing floor, again, limited IT excellence. So, this provides that capability. Another one is energy production. Think about energy production that's out in the field in North Dakota, or out on an oil rig that might be in the Gulf of Mexico. Not only are you dealing with lack of IT excellence, you're also dealing with limited connectivity. This equipment needs to be monitored and censored and the data from those sensors help drive critical decisions. And with limited connectivity, I mean, you may not even have an LTE signal, the need to do that real time is paramount, local cloud provides that. >> Yeah, and I'd also just add, because we're going to move on, but higher ED is going to be completely transformed. Well, I think that's going to be kind of like a pleat revamp. Let's get into what's new on VMware Cloud on AWS give us the update on the new things that people should know about. That's important that they should review, take us through that, what's new? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, the first is the integration with the AWS console. This is a big thing that we're delivering because VMware Cloud on AWS is a native service of AWS. I have to kind of say that twice, it's a native service of AWS. And because of that, we get the same operational and commerce experience for VMware Cloud instances as customers do with traditional AWS services. This means customers now have a choice between AWS centric operating model, which is highly relevant to DevOps and developers, or VMware centric operating model, which is very relevant to traditional operators, and IT users. VMware Cloud on AWS Gov Cloud is expanded to the U.S., East Virginia Region, and achieved aisle five certification. This new region will make the service more relevant for the Eastern Seaboard where much of the Federal Government resides. And of course with aisle five, it opens up VMware Cloud on AWS to the U.S. military and defense contractors, which is huge because there's massive cloud transformation contracts currently in play. And of course, VMware Cloud on AWS Gov Cloud provides the most secure enterprise cloud for those DOD customers, especially when they focus on those critical Tier 1 workloads. >> It's been three years since the GA of the VMware cloud on AWS, has been earlier, since you announced it> You're pumping on all cylinders, as we had predicted, others didn't, just FYI for the folks watching. What's the final vibe? End the segment with your view of what's going on with VMware Cloud on AWS? What's the bumper sticker? >> So, at the end of the day, every customer is looking to migrate and modernize their workloads. And VMWare cloud gives them that capability to do it faster than anyone else. Customers take their applications, tier 1 applications, move it to that secure distributed cloud construct, that idea of having VMware Cloud on AWS, sharing all those security policies, all of that consistent infrastructure and operations. And then they can modernize those applications, using all of those cloud services and the ability to use Tansu to containerize where applicable. We're excited about these capabilities, and our customers are adopting it faster each and every year. And we're thrilled about the traction we're had. And we're thrilled about the partnership we have with Amazon Web Services. So, lots more to come in this space. >> Lot of great stuff, people moving up the stack on the cloud, you're seeing more refactoring in the cloud. Matt Morgan, great to see you. We've been talking 'about this for years on theCUBE. Great to come on and give some insights. All happening. Infrastructure is code. And everyone's winning with containers and microservices. So, great stuff. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks a lot, John, take care. >> Okay, Matt Morgan, the VP of Cloud Infrastructure Business Group of VMware. This theCUBE's coverage of AWS re:Invent, 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. 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(Upbeat intro music) >> Welcome to theCUBE's continuing coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. I'm Lisa Martin and we are running one of the industry's most important and largest hybrid tech events with AWS in this ecosystem partners this year. We have two live sets, two remote sets over 100 guests talking about the next decade in cloud innovation. And we're excited to be joined by Patrick Jean the CTO of OutSystems, Patrick welcome to the program. >> Thank you, I appreciate being one of those 100 guests. >> One of the 100, one of the elite 100, we'll say it like that, right? >> Yes. >> So OutSystems has some revolutionary news. You guys are saying, you know what, developer experience needs to change, tell us more. >> It does I mean, it needs to change. And I've been in the industry developing applications for too many years to mention, basically since I was 12 years old writing software and going over that time and thinking about it, doing the traditional software development route. So many applications that take too long was costly to build, so much risk involved in it. Eventually it didn't meet all the requirements. And if you look at the investment we make in software, which is important, I mean, software is a unique differentiator for businesses. That investment has such a high-risk and a high cost and that needs to change. And it needs to change just because of the complexity that is in that process inherent in it. That's and that is what we are doing in OutSystems is tackling that problem. And from a business standpoint, it must change. >> It must change that is strong words there. So talk to me about what you're announcing what were the gaps in the market, customer feedback, were there any catalysts from the pandemic going we've got to change this developer experience and this is the time. >> For sure. I mean, if you think about from the pandemic and I mean, we were on a journey for digital transformation. We've been on this journey for a number of years the pandemic really accelerated that the experiences that we have with each other, you and me are not in the same studio today. I mean, there reasons that we use this experience remotely. We have a technology that can do it. The pandemic accelerated that. And so, so much of the experiences we have are digital experiences. And if you think about it, there's a device in between us. There's going to be a device in between all the people viewing what we're looking at. That experience that they will have with us will be basically surfaced through an application on that device. And the pandemic has really accelerated that. And that's an area that we play in, obviously for what's considered low-code application development. And if you just think about application development in general, that's what powers all of these experiences. And going back to that statement about that it needs to change. If we need these experiences to be diverse, if we need these experiences to be meaningful, if we need them to make sure that when people engage as far as what that device is something that brings, delight and pleasure to them. We need developers across the board investing in that. Today there is a very constrained market for professional developers because of the inherent complexity in software development. And so if you think about how that's almost, almost here limiting access to the people who can create those experiences, that's not a good situation. There's about 25 million developers in the world that would consider themselves developers today, seven, eight, nine, 10 billion devices out there. Think of that disparity between those two numbers. And so we need a larger number of people to actually develop applications so that experience can be much more diverse. We need to expose development to many more people. That is the problem today with software development is that it is complex, it is too specialized. It's too inherent as far with failure when you get it together. And so either you shy away from that as an organization or as an individual. To do development are you going on these very long development as far as cycles to actually create these applications? What we do is we take the approach of let's make it very simple to get into. Sometimes we call it citizen developer, low-code, basically all they're saying is let's reduce the risk of development. Let's go into a process where we make it accessible to more and more people. You can go through and develop applications with the lower risk. You can build change into that process. You can get value into end users as rapidly as possible. So that is the value proposition, that is what needs to change. >> Strong value proposition well said, Patrick. Talking about reducing the complexity, the risk as well. So go ahead and crack open what you guys are actually announcing today. >> Yeah, for sure. So we've been doing this for many years. We have software development, we have 14 million plus as far as end-users using applications that have been developed with the Allo systems platform. What we're announcing is taking some of the great benefits that we have to what you'd consider as the first part of that low-code process. Where you have a developer that has an idea, and there's a canvas in front of you. You're an artist, right, with a canvas that's what you are as a developer. And so you go in and you create that application. We've been doing this for many years and it worked really well. The thing that we're improving upon now is the ability to do that and scale that out to millions of end-users, 10 millions of end-users. So if you think about that inherent speed of developing an application, using a platform like OutSystems, we're taking that same concept and rolling that into an internet scale application, hosting architecture. So any developer that uses OutSystems, basically like it would be comparable to a traditional development team that has application architects, cloud architects, security engineers, database engineers, a whole team of very smart individuals that generally the biggest technology companies in the world can put together. Most companies can't do that, you don't have access to that type of skillset. And so we're providing that with Project Neo, which is what we're announcing today in our, at our user conference and customer conference. Is this brand new as far as platform that allows you to build these applications at scale. And this is initially built on AWS using all the great AWS technologies. If you look at what AWS has done and provided to developers today, it's amazing. It is absolutely amazing. The amount of technologies that you can leverage. It's also daunting because as a traditional developer, you have to go in and choose what do you do? It's like, there's just massive cognitive load. As far as upfront when you go in to design an application. What's up in messaging, what's up at data store, well, how do I host my application? What type of network as far as security do I use? We're taking all that heavy lifting, all that undifferentiated heavy lifting off of the developers, putting it into the Project Neo platform. Allowing a single developer or a small group of developers to actually leverage that best in class architecture on AWS today. >> So when you're talking to developers, what are some of the things that you describe as the unique differentiators of Project Neo? It sounds like this was really apt and apt time for change. But when you're talking to those folks, what do you say you know, one, two three, these are the things that make Project Neo unique. >> Yeah, so the first is don't worry about the application architecture. Like I mentioned when you go in, the idea, the concept of that application and what it means to deliver some value, whether it's into a business or a hobby or whatever. I mean, however you're developing application, you're doing it for a reason. You want that value to come out as quick as possible. You want that experience. And so that first thing is, you don't have to worry about the architecture anymore. So in the past you'd have to think about if it's a very large application, it's millions and millions of end-users. How do you structure that? How do you put it together? That concern is removed from you in that process. The other thing is we solve the problem of software disintegration. So with traditional development, when you develop an application and you get it into the hands of end users it immediately starts to disintegrate. So there will be bugs that will appear. There will be as far as security flaws that will come up services that you use will become deprecated. We'll swap out cloud services by AWS or Azure or Google. swap out cloud services with different services behind the scenes. Version, there'll be new versions of those that is software disintegration. As soon as you develop software today and all of these beautiful cloud services that you use and components. Something will become outdated almost by the time you release it. A lot of times with software development projects, it literally is you start with some version or some component before you can get that out in a traditional mode, something becomes outdated. We solved that issue. What I like to call software disintegration. We, as far as OutSystems, ensure we invest in that platform. And so when we may need to change out those components, those services, those versions fix is for security flaws, fixed bugs, we do that and it's seamless. And so your application, you do not have to rewrite your application. You do not have to go through that process as a tradition, as a developer on OutSystems like you would, as your traditional developer. We solve that software disintegration issue. So it's very empowering to developers to not have to worry about that. There are many, you look at the numbers today about how much is invested in innovation versus maintenance. A lot of companies start out at 70% innovation, 30% as far as maintenance, and then overtime that flips. And you'll get to 30% of your time spent on innovations development, 70% maintenance, that burden, we remove that burden. >> Those were some really powerful statements Patrick that you made and I really liked the way that you described software disintegration. I've actually never heard that term before. And it kind of reminded me of when you buy a brand new car, you drive it off the lot, the value goes down right away then before you even get things out. And on the consumer side, we know that as soon as we buy the newest iPhone, the next one's going to be out, or there's some part of it, that's going to be outdated. In terms of technical debt, I was reading a stat that technical debt is expected to reach in costs of businesses, 5 trillion, US dollars over the next 10 years. How does OutSystems help customers address the challenges with technical debt and even reduce it? >> Yeah, I mean if you think about in the kind of the truest sense of technical debt, it's a decision that you make in the development process to basically load up the future with some work that you don't want to do right now. And so we're solving that issue where not only, you don't even have to make that decision. So you can go back to that concept of removing that cognitive load of, do I get the software out right now or do I get it out in the right way? And that's really what technical debt, technical debt is saying I need to get it out now. And there are some things I want to do that it'd be better if I did them now, but I'm going to go ahead and push that out into the future. You don't have to do that today with us. And so what happens with OutSystems is we invest in that platform. And this is hard. I mean, this is not an easy thing to do. This is why we have some of the best and brightest engineers focusing on this process at the heart of this, not to get too technical, but the heart of this is what we call the true change engine within our platform. We go through and we look at all of the changes that you need to make. So you think of that concept of technical debt of like, ah, I want to get this in the hands of end users, but I don't want to invest in the time to do something right. It's always done right, as far as with the OutSystems platform. So we take that, we look at the intent of your change. So it's like a process where you tell us the intent. When you as a application developer, you're designing an application, you tell us the intent of the application is to look and feel. It could be some business processes this could be some integrations. We determine what's the best way to do that and then once again, from a software disintegration standpoint, we continue to invest in all the right ways to do that the best way possible. And so, I mean, we have customers that have written applications that's 10, 15 years ago. They're still using our platform with those same applications they've added to them, but they have not rewritten those applications. And so if you think about the normal traditional development process, the technical debt incurred over that type of lifetime would be enormous. With us there's no technical debt. They're still using the same application they've simply added capabilities to it. We invest in that platform so they don't have to. >> So big business outcomes down, obviously from a developer productivity perspective, but from the company wide perspective, the ability to eliminate technical debt, some significant opportunities there. Talk to me about the existing OutSystems customers. When are they going to be able to take advantage of this? What is the migration or upgrade path that they can take and when? >> Yeah and so it is very important to me and the team as far as OutSystems to be able to integrate, to innovate as far as for customers, without disrupting customers. And we've probably all been through this path of great new technology is awesome. But then to actually utilize that technology when you're a current customer, it creates pain. And so we've invested heavily in making sure that the process is pain-free. So you can use Project Neo. So we are announcing it as in, it was in public preview as far as now, and then we will release it from GA as far as in the first quarter of next year. So over this timeframe, you'll be able to get in and try it out and all that. Continue to use your current version, which is OutSystems 11. So what we affectionately call O-11, as far as Allo systems. The Allo systems 11 version continue to use, and you can continue to use that today side-by-side and coexistence with the Project Neo. And Project Neo is a code name. So we will have an official product name as for as at launch but it's our affectionate it's kind of a unofficial mascot as Neo. So we call the Project Neo is a little bit of a fun name and you can use it side by side and then in the future, you'll be able to migrate applications over. Or you can just continue to co-exist. I mean, we see a very long lifetime for OutSystems 11, it's a different platform, different technology behind the scenes. Project Neo's Kubernetes-base Linux containers. Based once again, on the ability, we went in with the gist and looked at it and said, re-architect, re-imagine, how would you do this if you had the best and brightest as far as engineers, architects, we have, which we do. Various market and those people and we did that. And so we did that for our customers. And so Neo is that OutSystems 11 still a great choice. If you have applications on it, you can use it. And we have, we anticipate the customers will actually side by side develop on both in which we have some customers in preview today. And that's the process that they have. They will develop on 11, they will develop on Neo and they will continue to do that. And there's no, we are dedicated to making sure that there's no disruption and no pain in that process. And then when customers are ready to migrate over, if that's what they choose, we'll help them migrate over. >> You make it sound easy. And I was wondering if Project Neo had anything to do with the new matrix movie I just saw the trailer for it the other day, I wonder if this is related. >> It was a happy coincidence. It is not easy let me, let me be clear. It is something we have been working on for three years and really this last year really kicked into high gear. And a lot of behind the scenes work, obviously for us, but once again, that's our value proposition. It's we do the hard work. So developers and the customers don't have to do that hard work. But no relations to Neo, I love, I do love the matrix movies. So it's a nice coincidence. (Lisa laughs) >> It is a nice coincidence. Last question, Patrick, for you, as we wrap up the calendar year 2021, we heading into 2022. I think we're all very hopeful that 2022 will be a better year than the last two. What are some of the things that you see as absolutely critical for enterprises? What are they most concerned about right now? >> Yeah, I think it's, look I mean, it's obviously it has been a crazy a couple of years. And if you think about what enterprises want, I mean, they want to provide a great experiences for their customers, a great experience for their employees. Once again, digital transformation, where you don't even kind of talk about digital transformation more because we're in it. And I think that customers need to make sure that the experiences they provide these digital experiences are the best possible experiences. And these are differentiators. These are differentiators for employees. These are differentiators for customers. I believe that software is one of the big differentiators for businesses today and going forward. And that will continue to be so where businesses may be invested in supply chains, invested in certain types of technologies. Business will continue to invest in software because software is that differentiator. And if you look at where we fit, you can go, you can go buy, some great set of software, my software as a service off the shelf. In the end, you're just like every other business you bought the same thing that everybody else had bought. You can go the traditional development route, where you invest a bunch of money, it's a high risk, takes a long time. And once again, you may not get what you want. We believe what is most important to businesses. Get that unique software that fits like a glove that is great for employees, it's great for their customers. And it is a unique differentiator for them. And I really see that in 2022, that's going to be big and going forward. They're the legs for that type of investment that companies make and they return on that is huge. >> I agree with you on that in terms of software as a differentiator. Now we're seeing every company become a software company in every industry these days to be, first to survive in the last 20 months and now to be competitive, it's really kind of a must have. So, Patrick thank you for joining me on the program, talking about Project Neo, GA in the first quarter of calendar year 22. Exciting stuff we appreciate your feedback and your insights and congratulations on Project Neo. >> Thanks, Lisa, appreciate it. >> For Patrick Jean, I'm Lisa Martin, and you're watching theCUBEs continuous coverage of re:Invent 2021. (Outro music)

(bright music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We have Michael D´aniello, platform architect at VMware's Carbon Black. Michael, great to see you. We're here at re-Invent virtual hybrid in person. Great to have you on theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, thanks a lot. Glad to be here. >> So one of the big stories that we're tracking, obviously, is workloads. All cloud for all workloads. Obviously the data is a big part of things, but under the covers and optimizing cloud for the application developers, this modern application movement is more and more at the top of the stack. People just wanting to code. Infrastructure as code. You've seen DevSecOps is a big trend that's driving all new microservices, all new greatness for developers, but still, there's an optimization question. I want to get your thoughts on this, is what you do. Take a minute to explain what your role is at Carbon Black around this cloud optimization. >> Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so my name is Michael D'aniello. I am a platform architect of VMware Carbon Black. I work across all the different engineering teams. And our main objective is to develop scalable platform tools and that includes, yeah, cloud security, automation pieces, pipelines, cost optimization, like we'll be talking about today, developer enablement tooling and observability tooling. >> One of the big things about instances is that, you know, do I have enough instances? 'Cause honestly, the elastic cloud is amazing, all kinds of new resources there, but talk about the AMD portion of the instances. How do we identify these instances? How to developers understand it, what's in them, and what's the selection criteria? Take us through that whole process of the Amazon web service and the AMD instances. >> Yeah, sure. So essentially, we're leveraging a lot of our instances to run our EKS clusters, which is a managed service for me and for us to run our Kubernetes clusters. And we identify that we can take a bunch of those instances and gain some cost optimization benefits by selecting from Intel to AMD processors. And, you know, initially, we had measured out to be roughly a 10% reduction in cost just for selecting that instance type. But yeah, we actually learned we gained quite a bit more, so. >> John: You know, developers are always like, I want more power, and this is what, you know, the whole idea of Cloud is. Cloud scale has been a big competitive advantage, but also the cost aspect of it. What's the balance between maximizing performance and cost optimization? Because now, you know, people don't want to, you know, they want more power. They also don't want to have a lot of extra spend. And this is kind of one of those things they talk about in Cloud where it's been so successful, cost is important. >> Yeah, yeah, for sure. And it's got to be easy, too, to get that cost optimization benefit. Otherwise, you're spending all your cycles and burning that money there in the human capital and the team and the engineering effort. So luckily, this change is a one-line change. We use Terraform for our automated provisioning, a layer, and we were able to make that one line change and then developers didn't have to make any application changes, which was great. So it was a no-brainer for us to pursue this. >> Talk about the EC2 instances that leverage AMD based process for the EKS, you mentioned that earlier, what is that all about? What's the benefits, what's in it for you guys? >> Yeah, for sure. So essentially, the workloads that are running on these instance types are actual Carbon Black Cloud application. So, all the backend systems that support our customers. And so in that use case, we're, you know, we're spinning up all of our containers that are running our applications and essentially, that's our use case for those instance types. >> How did you come to use the AWS EC2 instances on the AMD? Did you have an evaluation process? Did you just go select it? I mean, take us through that migration aspect of it. >> Yeah, sure, yeah. So originally, we're looking across the board. How can we do better cost optimization, right? And that goes across every different AWS resource, but we targeted this one specifically. We worked alongside with their AWS TAMs and representatives to basically find out, "Hey, is this financially worth the effort?" And we did reach that conclusion with some analysis, basically targeting these instance types and doing some analysis on that cost optimization specifically. And it ended up, you know, being the right thing to target. >> What was the ease of use of the switch? Take us through that. Was it a heavy lift? Was it seamless? Take us through the impact, there, on the move over and what were the results of that? >> Yeah, so I mean, that's the greatest thing. Like I said before, I mean, we had to make just a single line change just to change that instance type in our config and then roll that out across our regions. We did slow roll that in order to make sure that those changes in our development environments didn't make any, you know, performance hits or we didn't run into any snags with the applications themselves. But yeah, I mean, that's the greatest part about the story from my perspective is the ease to migrate over and to switch to these instance types, and then you just immediately gain that cost optimization benefit. >> You know what I love about what your job is, platform architect, that word kind of had a lot of meaning even 10, 15 years ago, but now with the Cloud, it's almost like you're always finagling and managing and massaging and nurturing the infrastructure to enable it. More new things are coming online as well, more high level services. So you've got a fun job and it's always evolving. How do you stay on top of it? What's the impact been for your customers, too, as you start deploying some of these new instance capabilities? Take us through kind of a day in the life of what you do and then what's the impact of customers? >> Yeah, sure. So, you know, like you said, there's quite a bit now to look at. You know, you got to stay on top of different blogs and keep connected with your network to see what your other colleagues are doing across different companies. You know, you can go into conferences like AWS re:Invent, right, to keep on the cutting edge here. But yeah, that's essentially, you know, one of the key aspects is just trying to look at all the different aspects, all the new technologies that are coming out, making sure you're making the right choices there and trying to get the most bang for your buck while you're at it. >> What are some of the big factors that you see in cloud native as you start to look at what customers are doing? Obviously with Kubernetes, your starting to see that platform develop inside the industry as well as defacto, kind of orchestration layer. But now as customers start to look at it, they want to have more ease of use there, too. At the same time, they don't want to have to do a lot of front end work. They want to get instant benefits in the Cloud, obviously, whether it's from a security standpoint or just rolling out a modern application. Okay, so as having all this infrastructure under the covers, how do you look at that problem and how do you capture that opportunity? >> Yeah, and I think that's why we're seeing a movement here on platform teams. It's kind of a newer terminology, usually a band of developers and SREs come together and say, "Well, we've got a lot of different things to look at. We're onboarding applications to Kubernetes, and we need to make tools so that developers don't have to think much about the transition and the underlying platform." And so that's one of our success metrics on the platform engineering team is just to almost, you know, be non-existent, right? To just have everything flow through our systems and then have just a high ease of use to onboard the applications to the new platform. >> You know, it looks like you have some great success with the AMD based instances. Can I ask you a question? 'Cause I wanted figure this out. How do you identify an AMD based instance when you're making the selections? >> Yeah, sure. It's as easy as just the A after the name. So for us, it was the C5.4XL. And if you want the AMD one, it's just the C5A.4XL. So I guess technically, instead of a one line change, it's actually a one letter change. So, quite easy there. >> Yeah, it's almost like back in the old glory days of command line, one quick update. The customer aspect of this is also important, too. If you don't mind, while I got you here, what are some of the things that you're hearing from your customers, from a performance standpoint, that they're looking for? Obviously, the cost optimization is key, but as they look to deploy more power and more performance, what are some of the things that your customers are looking for from Carbon Black? >> Yeah, so I mean, we are a security company, but we're really a data company because we have, you know, 8,000 customers, we processed over a trillion events per day, we ingress over a hundred terabytes of data per day. And so, our customers need high level performance. And if we can't provide that with low latency, we're not successful. So that's why, you know, performance on the underlying systems that are running our applications is super critical. >> Yeah, you're looking at trailblazer over there. I mean, the work that you guys are doing with the data is amazing. And that's a big theme at re:Invent this year is that data is a huge part. We look at the success of the cloud growth on this, I call gen-two cloud, happening. This whole modern movement is all about how people handle the data at scale, 'cause cloud scales here and now you've got processing all that data, The trailblazing that's going on, there's like this new wave of, I almost called it first-generation trailblazers, but you guys are doing that. What advice would you have for other architects out there and kind of the mainstream enterprises who are like, "Hey, I want to take advantage of the path that you guys have plowed through." What's your advice? >> Yeah, I think one of the key things in a place where we've had a lot of success is creating standards, making sure that we're choosing technology wisely, and making sure that your company isn't building the same solution in silos. And you know, that's a huge pattern that I've seen in my career. And if you can negate that, you're going to be in a great place. So, you know, choose the right technology, container first, cloud native first, push forward, and then make sure that everybody's kind of on that same ship running in the same direction. >> Well, great case study on this AMD based instance migration. Was there any uplift and experience that you've seen on the switch and the performance? Can you just talk about that? What does it mean to upgrade? What benefits are you seeing on the performance you have? >> Yeah, so I didn't hit on this yet and I really wanted to. Yeah, so upfront, the instance itself is 10% cheaper. However, we found out that we had to run far less instances because of that performance increase. So we ended up saving roughly 30% and we've continued to scale out. So at first, it was a couple of hundred instances. Now we're in the thousands and we're going to keep ramping up to over 10 thousands, tens of that. >> John: Let me get this right. So single line change, letter change, instance change. So you get not as many instances, and you save money, so you get cost optimization and higher performance. >> Yep. They say, if it's too good to be true, it's not. But in this case, it actually is. >> So why is it so good in your opinion? What did you discover? What was the big revelation that went down this path? Because that's good value proposition. >> Yeah, for sure. I mean, so initially, we were just chasing that initial BC to 10% and then as we kind of push it forward, we're looking at the metrics, month to month costs and we're actually saying, well, as we kind of swap over from one instance type to another, we're actually paying less. And then once we fully swapped over, it took five or six months to get to the same amount of costs as we continued to scale upward. So it's been a great story. >> It is a great story. It's super nuanced, but it's super important to know these platform benefits. I got to ask you on a personal question, if you don't mind. We love covering Cloud. We've been covering Amazon, it's our ninth year at re:Invent. Just love covering all the action and tech as this just total awesomeness environment. Cloud scale, innovation, capabilities, it's like surfing a big wave. But there's a bigger wave coming and we're seeing it now. I want to get your thoughts on this. As you look to the next big wave, beyond Cloud now, Cloud scale, data, new architecture is rolling out with Edge, basically distributing computing at large scale, and tons of security challenges, right? How do you look at this next big wave coming? Are you staring at it saying, wow, this is going to be huge? And how do you ride that wave? What's your mindset and how do you look at that? >> Well first of all, I'm extremely excited about it. Just the further this thing grows out, there's definitely more complexity, but just a whole slew of fun problems to solve. But when we look at these different problems and solving them at scale across multiple regions, it gets pretty exciting, right? So I can say one example of this is our security of our Cloud, not the security product, and we've developed automation for prevention and auto-remediation in our pipelines. It's been such a success story. And these type of technologies did not exist even a couple of years ago and we've been able to take advantage of them. So, there's going to be a lot more of that where that came from. So, yeah. >> Michael, great work. And again, you're truly a trailblazer, and this is, again, you got to do it. You got to screw your own cloud and stay on the cutting edge and ride that wave. Congratulations on the CostOp cloud optimization and the success with AMD based instances. Congratulations. Thanks. >> Thanks. >> Okay, this is theCUBEs coverage of AWS's re:Invent 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (inspirational music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome everyone to this CUBE coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. We have a lot going on at this year's re:Invent with over 100 guests on the program, and I'm excited to welcome two of those guests here with me right now. We are joined by Ralph Munsen, the Chief Information Officer at Warner Music Group and Atif Khan, the CTO of Alkira and founder of Alkira as well. Gentlemen, welcome to the program. >> Thank you so much, Lisa. So glad to be here with you. >> Good to be here. >> Yeah. Good old fashioned Zoom is become our best friend in the last 22 months or so I'm losing count. Atif, I'd like to start with you. I know Alkira has been on the key before, but it's been a while and you guys are a relatively young company. Give the audience an overview of Alkira and what it is that you deliver. >> Absolutely, Lisa. So we started back in may of 2018, and the Cloud networking space, multicloud networking. And we came out of stealth mode back in April of 2020, and launched the company. In fact, one of our first events coming out of stealth mode was a Cuban interview back in April of 2020. So here at Telecare, what we are doing is we are building a Cloud platform, which allows customers to build a common network across multiple Clouds with built-in network and security services, with the policy and management layer on top full end to end visibility and governance capabilities. And all of this is delivered as a service and consumed as a service as well. And I'm very glad to be here with Ralph, who is from Warner Music Group and is one of our marquee customers. So I'll let Ralph introduce himself, and tell us a bit more about Alkira and WMTS Cloud journey. >> That sounds great. Ralph, why don't you start by giving the audience? I'm sure everyone knows Warner Music Group, but in case there's anyone out there that might not. Give us a little bit of a background. >> Yeah, so the Warner Music Group has been around since 1950 and 1940 even it had its roots at Hollywood and out of Warner Brothers Pictures, Today, say global company in 79 countries we operated. If the 100 employees and we have two major divisions, we have our era recorded music division, which has the labels people commonly turn to Atlantic records, Warner brothers records, and so forth. And then we have our publishing division, which is more a chapel, which is where our songwriters live. And of course we have some singer songwriters that are on both sides of our business. But now currently people may know our artists. We have ed Sheeran, Bruno Mars, Coldplay, Cardi B, Blake Shelton and I could go on and on. But exciting, great year, we're having one of our best years ever. And I'm so glad to be here and partnering with an Alkira. >> Excellent. I love all of those artists that you mentioned. Fantastic. So let's talk a little bit now Ralph about the backstory. Talk to me about the IT infrastructure at Warner Music Group, what you had there and some of the challenges that you had that you came to Alkira to solve. >> Yeah, well initially when I took over about five years ago now, we were very much a data center based business with traditional networking and IT functions. Additionally with our foreign affiliates, IT was sort of decentralized in the sense that a lot of the networking and data center components were left to regions. And so while we operated globally, we didn't really operate globally, at Warner among our affiliates. So one of the challenges was how do we get out of the data center? Cloud was new. One of the big things that were coming with big data, which is absolutely right for moving, going straight to the Cloud, especially if you don't have anything on-prem and how do we rationalize all of these different locations and conduct all the M&A work we've been doing? So it was quite a challenge, really. At the end, we wanted to have one view of the network, and now Alkira. I looked at many of companies and I'm curious in the best to provide that to us. So. >> Well, talk to me a little bit more about why Alkira, because as Atif was saying, they're very young. What came out of stealth mode during the pandemic Warner Music Group, being around since the 40s and 50s, the legacy institution, a great brand. What made you take a risk on such an early stage startup? >> Quite frankly, there was nothing in the space (chuckles) at the time you loved, there were companies that had components of it, of what Alkira does, which is basically network orchestration allowing us to use existing components. And nobody has the whole package, especially incorporating security. So, we figured why not take, take a chance? There's no, it won't hurt you no harm. And if anything is successful, it will give us a great ability to manage our network, much more efficiently taking things that took days down to hours and being able to do it much more efficiently with much fewer staff, as opposed to hiring a lot more because when you orchestrate all the components that are underneath, obviously it requires more bodies, more resources. >> Right. That efficiency and cost optimization is key there. Atif I have to ask you, talk to me about, this is only a few years ago, the gap in the market that you and your brothers saw a few years ago, when you founded the company, because as Rob was saying, there was nobody else in the market at the time that could do what you're doing. >> Yeah, absolutely. So Lisa, as you know, myself and Amir, we were also a part of the founding team of Viptela, which was the SD-WAN Company. So back in the day when we did SD-WAN, the requirement was to connect sites together. So if you go back like 5, 10, 5, 7, 10 years ago, networking was done to connect sites together, which could be remote sites, data centers, sites to data centers, all of that together. But fast forward, a few more years with the adoption of Cloud, requirements changed from the networking perspective. So now your network is not just connecting sites together, but most of the traffic now is from sites or users, which could be sitting anywhere. If you look at, what's going on? in the pandemic people are working from all across the globe. They are not just sitting in campuses or sites. So traffic patterns are from sites or users mostly to the Cloud or SaaS applications. So now networks also need to evolve and they need to be built inside the Cloud rather than from outside or connecting into the Cloud. So Cloud access is one capability, but building a network inside the Cloud becomes a requirement. And secondly, now it's not just only about connectivity because security becomes even more important because your security perimeter is changing as well. So securing all these Cloud networks becomes very, very complicated. And now as Ralph can tell you, majority of the enterprises have a multicloud strategy and each Cloud is done differently. So the moment you bring in multiple Clouds, multiple regions across the globe, it becomes so complicated for enterprises to build and manage. They need something, or a platform which makes it easy, gives them one way of doing networking, building a common network across whether you're connecting multiple Clouds or Clouds to your on-prem locations or Clouds to internet or sites to internet. So that's where we saw this gap and we decided to build Alkira to tackle this problem. >> Got it. So Rob, let's talk now about what you've implemented as a team was saying we live in this, in this work from anywhere hybrid multicloud world. Talk to us about Warner, what you implemented and maybe a little bit about your multicloud strategy, if you've got one. >> Ralph: Yeah. So over the last five years, Warner has migrated entirely into Cloud. And to this point before it's multicloud, we're mainly in AWS, but we do have some pleasure and some Google Cloud. And with that, I was telling Atif and Amir. It was interesting and they built a Cloud on site. They totally forgot about the networking aspect. So (laughs), you have ease of use for services and servers inside (indistinct) cloud, but networking is not really present, not to mention when it was built out, it wasn't made to go to competing Clouds. So most companies are facing this problem. How do you treat these environments as a single holistic environment? How do you turn things up, turn things down? How do you secure it, When every single one is different habits, selling unique ways of doing things? So that really was, how we ended up looking for an out Alkira, because I just kept looking at the costs and the profit print grow and grow and grow. And the complexity to a (indistinct) before is growing exponential. One change in one thing would lead to two changes to another. If you add another Cloud or you add another point on the network, you've got exponential growth and complexity, complexity, you have to deal with. So one stop shop. (chuckles) >> One stop shop and reducing that complexity. Talk to me about reducing complexity, and what you're accomplishing there. Especially, in the last year and a half as things have been so dynamic, shall we say? (chuckles) >> Yeah, well, I will say this. It was turnkey for the most part. It took a matter of months as opposed to years, because out of the box, there was a lot of integrations with the major network of players. So as of right now, you can buy firewalls, routing, VPC, things like this, they all exist, but they're not orchestrated together. Right? And then you have policies and security, again not orchestrating a different set of tools. So it really only took us two to three months to get it up and running, I acts, I just had a conversation (chuckles) with them when we were going to finish. So I think we'll be finishing this up completely in January and sometime. So, I was pretty sure. >> LISA: That's fantastic. So really, >> Yeah. >> Sorry Relaph fast time to market there with getting things implemented. Talk to me about from a business outcome perspective, you are CIO, what are some of the outcomes? That this technology is enabling you to deliver back to the business? >> Yeah, it really, the number 1, 2 big ones come to mind. One being able to provide them a secure enterprise. I know when there is the change it's made uniforms for our network without, some of older something's being forgotten about. So that's number one, security is big. You can imagine a company like more ever marquee brands, all brands, any company of marquee brands are targets today. That's number one. Number two is our time to market for eminent. So when we buy a company the time it takes us to get them to be completely part of Warner and therefore start realizing the business case and benefits sort of reasonably bought. Bought the company to begin with. So, we're buying a lot more and we're turning them up and turning those business cases up faster. But usually those cases would say things like six months to a year to integrate with us, and then we can unlock the set of benefits. Now it's more like, two to three months and you start to be able to lock the benefits sooner. And of course, those are different than a case by case basis, but that's. >> Sure, but significantly faster there, you're looking at a two to three X multiplier there, as you talked about. >> Ralph: right. >> Now, you mentioned multicloud Ralph. So here we are at re:Invent. I imagine part of your AWS as part of your Cloud infrastructure and they're a technology partner of ALkira's. >> Ralph: Correct. Yeah. So AWS is actually our biggest Cloud provider of the three, and yeah (laugh) they're their partner without cure. So Good. >> And Atif then you, Alkira's technology partner of AWS, correct? >> Yeas. Alkira is a technology partner of AWS, we are also available on AWS marketplace. So customers can consume, AlKira's platform from AWS marketplace as well. >> But given the fact that so many businesses in every industry are multicloud, I assume that you work with all the Cloud vendors. Atif Yeah? >> Absolutely. So our platform runs inside of the Cloud and runs in AWS is a Cloud as well. And from there it connects to multiple Clouds. So if customers need to connect to Azure or AWS from there or Oracle Cloud or any other Cloud, for that matter, they can connect from our platform and our platform is it scales horizontally. So as customers needs scale, it scales as well. And one of the key advantages is, it's consumed as a service. So there's no software to download or hardware to run for or to acquire for any of the customers. It's a software solution and it's consumed as a service. >> Got it. Ralph one on one more question for you before we wrap things up here, want to get your recommendations for IT Executives, CEOs, who might be in a similar situation to you, whether or not they are with a legacy organization, what are some of your recommendations that you say you need to be looking at a, B and C? >> Yeah, I would primarily say really need to be looking at some of these newer technologies that can help speed up, people, especially in this case to transition to the Cloud and that planning ahead of time, especially goal-setting, I find to be it's any of these places, providers is absolutely Paramount, because you can, if you don't make your own (indistinct) take that step forward and you can end up with shelter. So I make sure that it's very important that when you commit to that, you commit fully, you plan it out and you make sure you actually use it to get the benefits. One of my tech key is software. So. (chuckles) (Lisa Laughing) I'm a bit of it so. >> Well, you've been there and It costs a lot of money and it doesn't do any good. It doesn't move the business forward. And in this day and age, there is a competitor right behind the rear view mirror who might be smaller, more nimble, and more agile, who can take your place easily. >> Absolutely. >> If the organization isn't willing to take the risks and commit, as you said, Atif last question over for you, where are the customers go to learn more? I know you are at re:Invent your booth 1628, but what do you recommend folks go attendees of the event, as well as just other prospects to go to learn more about what you guys are delivering for companies like Warner Music Group. >> So if you're at re:Invent, please stop by our booth. And one of our Cloud specialists will give you a demo as well. So it's a very quick demo and you'll see, how we are reinventing networking for the Cloud narrow. You can also go to our website and you'll find a lot of information on our website. You can request a demo there as well. So look forward to seeing most of you at our booth and those who are not attending in person, please go visit our website. >> Lisa: Reinventing Networking. I like your play on words. They are Atif very appropriate. Gentlemen, thank you for joining me today talking about Alkira, Warner Music Group, what you guys are doing together and how this new early stage technology is really quite transformative. We appreciate your insights. >> Thank you. >> Thank you so much. >> For Ralph Munsen and Atif Khan, I'm Lisa Martin, and you're watching theCUBE's continuous coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. Thanks for watching. (soft techno music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's continuous coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We're here with James Watters, CTO of Modern Applications at VMware here to talk about the big Tanzu cloud native application wave, the modernization's here. James, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Hey John, great to have you back on. And really excited about re:Invent this year. And I've been watching your coverage of it. There's lots of exciting stuff going on in this space. >> Awesome. Well, James, you've been riding the wave of, I would call cloud 1.0, 2.0 what do you want to call it, the initial wave of cloud where the advent of replatforming is there. You know all these benefits and things are moving fast. Things are being developed. A lot of endeavors, things are tracking. Some are kicking, Kubernetes kicks in, and now the big story is over the past year and a half. Certainly the pandemic highlighted is this big wave that's hitting now, which is the real, the modernization of the enterprise, the modernization of software development. And even Amazon was saying that in one of our talks that the sovereign life cycles over it should be completely put away to bed. And that DevOps is truly here. And you add security, you got DevSecOps. So an entirely new, large scale, heavy use of data, new methodologies are all hitting right now. And if you're not on that wave your driftwood, what's your take? >> Oh, I think you're dead John, and you know, kind of the first 10 years of working on this for sort of proving that the microservices, the container, the declared of automation, the DevOps patterns were the future. And I think everyone's agreed now. And I think DevSecOps and the trends around app modernization are really around bringing that to scale for enterprises. So the conversations I tend to be having are, Hey, you've done a little Kubernetes. You've done some modern apps and APIs, but how do you really scale this across your enterprise? That's what I think is excited today. And that's what we're talking about. Some of the tools we're bringing to Amazon to help people achieve faster, consumption, better scale, more security. >> You know, one of the things about VMware that's been impressive over the years is that on the wave of IT, they already had great operational install base. They did a deal with Amazon Ragu did that. I think 2016, that kind of cleared the air. They're not going to do their own cloud or they have cloud efforts kind of solidifies that. And then incomes, Kubernetes, and then you saw a completely different cloud native wave coming in with the Tanzu, the Heptio acquisition. And since then a lot's been done. Can you just take us through the Tanzu evolution because I think this is a cornerstone of what's happening right now. >> Yeah, that's a great question, John. I think that the emergence of Kubernetes as a common set of APIs that every cloud and almost every infrastructure agrees on was a huge one. And the way I talked to our clients about is that VMware is doing a couple of things in this space. The first is that we're recognizing that as an infrastructure or baking Kubernetes into every vSphere, be it vSphere on-prem, be it BMC on Amazon. You're just going to find Kubernetes is a big part of each year. So that's kind of a big step one, but it's in some ways the same way that Amazon is doing with EKS and Azure EKS, but like every infrastructure provider is bringing Kubernetes everywhere. And then that kind of unleashes this really exciting moment where you've got this global control plane that you can program to be your DevSecOps platform. And Kubernetes has this incredible model of extensibility where you can add CRDs and program, right against the Kubernetes APIs with your additional features and functions you want your DevSecOps pipeline. And so it's created this opportunity for Tanzu to kind of have then a global control plan, which we call Tanzu Mission Control to bring all of those Kubernetes running in different clouds together. And then the last thing that we'll talk about a little bit more is this Tanzu Application Platform, which is bringing a developer experience to Kubernetes. So that you're not always starting with what I like to say, like, oh, I have Kubernetes, am I done? There's a lot more to the story than that. >> I want to get to this Tanzu Application Platform on EKS. I think that's a big story at VMware. We've seen that, but before we do that for the folks out there watching who are like, I'm now seeing this, whether they're young, new to the industry or enterprises who have replatforming or refactoring, trying to understand what is a modern application. So give us the definition in your words, what is a modern application? >> You know, John, it's a great question. And I tend to start with why and like, hey, how did we get here? And you, you and I both, I think, used to work for the bigger iron vendors back in the day. And we've seen the age of the big box Silicon Valley. I don't know, I worked at Sun just across the aisle here and basically we'd sell you a big box and then once or twice a year, you'd change the software on it. And so in a sense, like there was no chance to do user-oriented design or any of these things. Like you kind of got what you got and you hope to scale it. And then modern applications have been much more of the age of like what you might say, like Instagram or some of these modern apps that are very user-oriented and how you're changing that user interface that user design might change every week based on user feedback. And you're constantly using big data to adjust that modern app experience. And so modern apps to me are inherently iterative and inherently scalable and amenable to change. And that's where the 12 factor application manifesto was written, a blog was written a decade ago, basically saying here's how you can start to design apps to be constantly upgradable. So to me, modern apps, 12 of factors, one of them Kubernetes compatible, but the real point is that they should be flexible to be constantly iterated on maybe at least once a week at a minimum and designed and engineered to do that. And that takes them away from the old vertically scaled apps that kind of ran on 172 processors that you would infrequently update in the past. Those are what you might call like cloud apps. Is that helpful? >> Yeah, totally helpful. And by the way, those old iron vendors, they're now called the on-premise vendors and, you know, HPE, Dell and whatnot, IBM. But the thing about the cloud is, is that you have the true infrastructure as code happening. It's happened, it's happening, but faster and better and greater the goodness there. So you got DevSecOps, which is just DevOps with security. So DevSecOps is the standard now that everyone's shooting for. So what that means is I'm a developer, I just want to write code, the infrastructure got to work for me. So things like Lambda functions are all great things. So assuming that there's going to be this now programmable layer for developers just to do stuff. What is, in context to that need, what is the Tanzu Application Platform about and how does it work? >> Yeah, that's a great question, John. So once you have Kubernetes, you have this abundance of programmable, inner infrastructure resources. You can do almost anything with it, right? Like you can run machine learning workflows, you can run microservices, you can build APIs, you can import legacy apps to it, but it doesn't come out of the box with a set of application patterns and a set of controllers that are built for just, you know, modern apps. It comes with sort of a lot of flexibility and it expects you to understand a pretty broad surface area of APIs. So what we're doing is we're following in the footsteps of companies like Netflix and Uber, et cetera, all of which built kind of a developer platform on top of their Kubernetes infrastructure to say, here's your more templatized path to production. So you don't have to configure everything. You're just changing the right parts of the application. And we kind of go through three steps. The first is an application template that says, here's how to build a streaming app on Kubernetes, click here, and you'll get in your version control and we'll build a Kubernetes manifest for it. Two, is an automated containerization, which is we'll take your app and auto create a container for it so that we know it's secure and you can't make a mistake. And then three is that it will auto detect your application and build a Kubernetes deployment for it so that you can deploy it to Kubernetes in a reliable way. We're basically trying to reduce the burden on the developer from having to understand everything about Kubernetes, to really understanding their domain of the application. Does that make sense? >> Yeah, and this kind of is inline, you mentioned Netflix early on. They were one of the pioneers in inside AWS, but they had the full hyperscaler developers. They had those early hardcore devs that are like unicorns. No, you can't hire these people. They're just not many enough in the world. So the world's becoming, I won't say democratization, that's an overused word, but what we're getting to is if I get this right, you're saying you're going to eliminate the heavy lifting, the boring mundane stuff. >> Yeah, even at Netflix as is great of a developers they have, they still built kind of a microservices or an application platform on top of AWS. And I think that's true of Kubernetes today, which if you go to a Kubernetes conference, you'll often see, don't expose Kubernetes to developers. So tons of application platforms starts to really solve that question. What do you expose to a developer when they want to consume Kubernetes? >> So let's ask you, I know you do a lot of customer visits, that's one of the jobs that make you go out in the field which you like doing and working backwards on the customers has been in the DNA of VMware for years. What is the big narrative with the customers? What's their pain point? How else has the pandemics shown them projects that are working and not working, and they want to come out of it with a growth strategy. VMware is now an independent company. You guys got the platform, what are the customers doing with it? >> Well, I'll give you one example. You know, I went out and I was chatting with the retailer, had seen their online sales goes from one billion to like three billion during the pandemic. And they had been using kind of packaged shopping cart software before like a basic online store that they bought and configured. And they realized they needed to get great at modern apps to keep up with customer demand. And so I would say in general, we've seen the drive, the need for modern apps and digital transformation is just really skyrocketing and everyone's paying attention to it. And then I think they're looking for a trusted partner and they're debating, do we build it all in-house or do we turn to a partner that can help us build this above the cloud? And I think for the people that want an enterprise trusted brand, they'll have a lot of engineering talent behind it. There's been strong interest in Tanzu. And I think the big message we're trying to get out is that Tanzu can not only help you in your on-prem infrastructure, but it can also really help you on public cloud. And I think people are surprised by just how much. >> It's just in the common thread. I see that it's that point is right on is that these companies that don't digitize their business and build an application for their customer are going to get taken away by a startup. I mean, we've seen, it's so easy if you don't have an app for that, you're out of business. I mean, this is like, no, no, it's not like maybe we should do the cloud, let's get proactive. Pretty much it's critical path now for companies. So I'm sure you agree with that, but what's the progress of most of the enterprises? What percentage do you think are having this realization? >> I would say at least 70, 80%, if not more, are there now, and 10 years ago, I used to kind of have to tell stories, like, you know, some startups going to come along and they might disrupt you and people kind of give you that like, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, I get it. And now it's sort of like, hey, someone's already in our market with an API. Tell me how to build API first apps we need to compete. And that's the difference in the strategic conversation kind of post pandemic and post, you know, the last 10 years. >> All right, final question for you 'cause this is right great thread. I've seen having a web interface it's not good enough, to your point. You got to have an application that they're engaging with, with all the modern capabilities, because the needs there, the expectation for the customers there. What new things are you seeing beyond mobile that are coming around the pike for enterprises, obviously web to mobile, mobile to what? What's next? >> I think the thing that's interesting is there is a bigger push to say more and more of what we do should be an API both internally, like, hey, other teams might want to consume some of these services as a well-formed API. I call it kind of like Stripe MB. Like you look at all these companies, they're like, Hey, stripes worth a hundred billion dollars now because they built a great API. What about us? And so I've seen a lot of industries from automotive to of course financial services and others that are saying, what if we gave our developers internally great APIs? And what if we also expose those APIs externally, we could get a lot, a more rat, fast moving business than the traditional model we might've had in the past. >> It's interesting, you know, commoditizing and automating a way infrastructure or software or capable workflows is actually normal. And if you can unify that in a way that's just better I mean, you have a lower cost structure, but the value doesn't go away, right? So I think a lot of this comes down to, beauty's in the eye of the beholder. I mean, that's how DevSecOps works. I mean, it's agile, it's faster, but you still have to achieve the value of the net is lower cost. What's your take on that? >> Well, I think you're dead right, John. And I think this is what was surprising about Stripe is it was possible before Stripe to go out as a developer and kind of pulled together a backend that did payments, but boy, it was hard. And I think that's the same thing with kind of this tons of application platform and the developer experience focus is people are realizing they can't hire enough developers. So this is the other thing that's happened during the pandemic and the great resignation, if you will, the war for talent is on. And you know, when I talked to a customer, like we might be able to help you, even 30% with your developer productivity, there's like one out of four developers. You might not have to be able to have to recruit they're all in. And so I think that API first model and the developer experience model are the same thing, which is like, it doesn't have to just be possible. It should be excellent. >> Well, great insight learning a lot. Of course, we should move to theCube API and we'll plug into your applications. We're here in the studio with our API, James. Great to have you on. Final word, what's your take this, the big story for re:Invent. If you had to summarize this year's re:Invent going in to 2022, what would you say is happening in this industry right now? >> You know, I'm just super excited about the EKS market and how fast it's growing. We're seeing EKS in a lot of places. We're super excited about helping EKS customers scale. And I think it's great to see Amazon adopting that standard API from Kubernetes. And I think that's going to be, just awesome to watch the creativity the industry is going to have around it. >> Well, great insight, thanks for coming on. And again, we'll work on that Cube API for you. The virtualization of theCUBE is here. We're virtual, which we could be in-person and hope to see you in-person soon. Thanks for coming on. >> You too John, thank you. >> Okay, Cube's coverage of alias re:Invent 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host for theCUBE. In this segment, we're going to be talking about Red Hat and the AWS evolving partnership. A great segment, really talking about how Hybrid and the Enterprise are evolving, certainly multicloud and the horizon. But a lot of benefits in the cloud, we've been covering on theCUBE and on SiliconANGLE with Red Hat for the past year. Very relevant. We've got Gunnar Hellekson, GM of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, And Joe Fernandes, VP and GM of the Hybrid Platforms, both of Red Hat. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Yeah, thanks for having us. >> Thanks for having us John. >> So, you know, me, I'm a fan boy of Red Hat. So I always say, you guys made all the right investments, OpenShift, all these things that you guys made decisions years ago playing out beautifully. And I think, you know, with Amazon's re:Invent, you're seeing the themes all play out. Modern application stack, you're starting to see things at the top of the stack evolve, you've got 5G in the Edge, workloads being redefined and expanded on the cloud with Cloud Scale. So everything has been going down to Hybrid and Enterprise grade level discussions. This is in the Wheelhouse of Red Hat. So I want to congratulate you. But what's your reaction? What do you guys see this year at re:Invent? What's the top story? >> I can start. >> Who wants to start with first? >> Sure, I mean, clearly, AWS itself is huge. But as you mentioned, the world is Hybrid, right, so customers are running still in their data center, in the Amazon Public Cloud across multiple Public Clouds and out to the Edge and bring in more and more workloads. So it's not just the applications, analytics. It's AI, it's machine learning. And so, yeah, we can expect to see more discussion around that, more great examples of customer use cases. And as you mentioned, Red Hat has been right in the middle of this for some time John. >> You guys also had some success with the fully managed OpenShift service called ROSA, R-O-S-A, which is Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS, another acronym, but really this is about what the customers are looking for. Can you take us through an update on OpenShift on AWS, because the combination of managed services in the cloud, refactoring applications, but working on-premises is a big deal. Take us through why that's so important. >> Yeah, so, we've had customers running OpenShift on AWS for a long time, right? So whether it's our software-based offerings where customers deploy OpenShift themselves, or our fully managed cloud service. We've had cloud services on AWS for over five years. What ROSA brings or Red Hat OpenShift on AWS is a jointly managed service, right? So we're working in partnership with Amazon, with AWS to make OpenShift available as a jointly-managed service offering. It's a native AWS service offering. You can get it right through the AWS console. You can leverage your AWS committed spend. But, most importantly, you know, it's something that we're working on together. Bringing new customers to the table for both Red Hat and AWS. And we're really excited about it because it's really helping customers accelerate their move to the public cloud and really helping them drive that Hybrid strategy that we talked about. >> Gunnar, you know what I want to get your thoughts on this, because one of the things that I love about this market right now is open-source continues to be amazing, continues to drive more value, and there's new migration of talent coming in. The numbers are just continuing to grow and grow. But the importance of Red Hat's history with AWS is pretty significant. I mean, Red Hat pioneered Open-source and it's been involved with AWS from the early days. Can you take us through a little bit of history for the folks that may not know Red Hat's partnership with AWS? >> Yeah. I mean, we've been collaborating with AWS since 2008. So for over a decade we've been working together, and what's made the partnership work is that we have a common interest in making sure that customers have a consistent approachable experience. Whether they're going on-premise or in the cloud. Nobody wants to have to go through an entire retraining and retooling exercise just to take advantage of all the great advantages of the cloud. And, so being able to use something like Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a consistent substrate on which you can build your application platforms is really attractive. So, that's where the partnership started. And since then we've had the ability to better integrate with native AWS services. And one thing I want to point out is that, a lot of these integrations are kind of technical. It's not just about technical consistency across these platforms, it's also about operational consistency and business concerns. And when you're moving into an Open Hybrid Cloud kind of a situation, that's what becomes important, right? You don't want to have two completely different tool sets on two completely different platforms. You want as much consistency as possible as you move from one to the other. And I think a lot of customers see value in that, both for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux side of the business, and also on the OpenShift side of the business. >> Well that's interesting. I'd love to get your both perspective on this whole Enterprise focus, because the Enterprise is, as you know, guys you've been there from the beginning, they have requirements. And there're sometimes, they're different by Enterprise. So as you see cloud, and I remember early days of Amazon, it's the 15th year of AWS, 10th year of re:Invent as a conference. I mean, that seems like a lifetime ago. But that's not, not too far ago where, you know, it was like, well, Amazon might not make it, its only for developers. Enterprisers do their own thing. Now it's like, it's all about the Enterprise. How are Enterprise customers evolving with you guys? Because they're all seeing the benefit of replatforming. But as they refactor, how has Red Hat evolved with that trend and how have you helped Amazon? >> Yeah, so as we mentioned, Enterprisers really across the globe are adopting a Hybrid Cloud Strategy. But, Hybrid actually isn't just about the infrastructure. So, its certainly the infrastructure where these Enterprisers are running these applications is increasingly becoming Hybrid as you move from data center to multiple public clouds and out to the Edge. But the Enterprisers application portfolios are also Hybrid, right? It's a Hybrid mix of very traditional monolithic and tier type applications. But also new cloud native services that have either been built from scratch, or as you mentioned, existing applications have been refactored. And then they're moving beyond the applications, as I mentioned to make better use of data. Also evolving their processes for how they build, deploy, and manage, leveraging, CI/CD and GitOps and so forth. So really for us it's, how do you help Enterprises bring all that together, right? Manage this Hybrid infrastructure that's supporting this Hybrid portfolio of applications that really help them evolve their processes. We've been working with Enterprises on these types of challenges for a long time. And we're now partnering with Amazon to do the same in terms of our joint product and service offerings. >> Talking about the RHEL evolution. I mean, because that's the bread and butter for Red Hat. It has been there for a long time. OpenShift again, making argument earlier, I mentioned the bets you guys made with Kubernetes, for instance, and it's all been made with all the right moves. So I love ROSA. You got me sold on that. RHEL though has been the tried and true steady workhorse. How has that evolved with workloads? >> Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I think when customers were at the stage, when they were wondering, if well, can I use AWS to solve my problem, or should I use AWS to solve my problem? Our focus was largely on kind of technical enablement. Can we keep up with the pace of new hardware that Amazon is rolling up? Can we ensure that consistency with the on-premise and off-premise? And I think now we're starting to shift focus into really differentiating RHEL on the AWS platform. Again, integrating natively with AWS services, making it easier to operate in AWS. And a good example of this is using tools like Red Hat Insights, which we announced, I guess, about a year ago. Which is now included in every Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription. Using tools like Insights in order to give customers advice on maybe potential problems that are coming up, helping customer solve them. Can the customers identify problems before they happen? Helping them with performance problems. And again, having additional tools like that, additional cloud-based tools, makes RHEL as easy to use on the Cloud despite all the complexity of all the redeploying, refactoring, microservices, there is now a proliferation of infrastructure options, and to the extent that RHEL can be the thing that is consistent, solid, reliable, secure, just as customers are getting in, then we can make customer successful. >> You know, Joe, we talked about this last time we were chatting, I think Red Hat Summit or Ansible Fest, I forget which event it was, but we were talking about how modern application developers at the top of the stack just want to code. They want to write some code, and now they want the infrastructure's code, AKA DevOps, DevSecOps, but as this trend of moving up the stack continues to be a big theme at re:Invent, that requires automation. That requires a lot of stuff that happened under the covers. Red Hat is at the center of all this action from historical perspective, pre-existing Enterprises before Cloud now, during Cloud, and soon to be Cloud Scale, how do you see that evolving? Because how are customers shaping their architecture? Cause this is distributed computing in the cloud. It's essentially, we've seen this moving before, but now at such a scale where data, security, these are all new elements. How do you talk about that? >> Yeah, well, first of all, got to mention, Linux is a given right. Linux is going to be available in every environment, data center, Public Cloud, Edge. Linux combined with Linux containers and Kubernetes, that's the abstraction like abstracting the applications away from the infrastructure. And now it's all about how do you build on top of that to bring that automation that you mentioned. So, we're very focused on helping customers really build fully automated end to end deployment pipelines, so they can build their applications more efficiently. They can automate the continuous integration and deployment of those applications into whatever Cloud or Edge footprint they choose. And that they can promote across environments. Because again, it's not just about developing the applications, it's about moving them all the way through to production where their customers are relying on those services to do their work and so forth. And so that's what we're doing is, you know, obviously I think, Linux is a given, Linux, Containers, Kubernetes. Those decisions have been made and now it's a matter of how can we put that together with the automation that allows them to accelerate those deployments out to production so customers can take advantage of them? >> You know, Gunnar, we were joking in theCUBE. I was old enough to remember we used to install Linux on a server back in the day. Now a lot of these young developers never actually have to install the software and do some of those configurations 'cause it's all automated now. Again, the commoditization and automation trend, abstraction layers, some say, is a good thing. So how do you see the evolution of this DevOps movement with the partnership with AWS going forward? What types of things are you working on with Amazon Web Services and what kind of offerings can customers look forward to? >> Yeah, sure. So, I mean, it used to be that as you say, Linux was something that you managed with a mouse and keyboard. And I think it's been quite a few years since any significant amount of Linux has been managed with a mouse and a keyboard. A lot of it is scripts, automation tools, configuration management tools, things like this. And the investments we've made both in RHEL and in specifically RHEL on AWS is around enabling RHEL to be more manageable. And so, including things like something we call System Roles. So these are Ansible modules that kind of automate routine system's administration tasks. We've made investments in something called Image Builder. And so this is a tool that allows customers to kind of compose the operating system that they need, create a blueprint for it, and then kind of stamp out the same image, whether it's an ISO image, so you can install it on-premise or an AMI so we can deploy it in AWS. So again, the problem used to be helping customers package and manage dependencies and that kind of old world, three and a half-inch floppy disc kind of Linux problems. And now we've evolved towards making Linux easier to deploy and manage at a grand scale whether you're in AWS or whether you're On premise. >> Joe, take us through the Hybrid story. I know obviously success with OpenShifts Managed Service on AWS. What's the update there for you? What are customers expecting this re:Invent and what's the story for you guys? >> Yeah, so, you know, the OpenShift Managed Services business this is the fastest growing segment of our business. We're seeing lots of new customers. And again, bringing new customers, I think for both Red Hat and AWS through this service. So, we expected to hear from customers at re:Invent about what they're doing. Again, not only with OpenShift and our Red Hat solutions, but really with what they're building on top of those service offerings, of those solutions to sort of bring more value to their customers. To me, that's always the best part of re:Invent is really hearing from customers. And when we all start going there in person again, to actually be able to meet with them one-on-one, whether it's in person or virtual and so forth. So, looking forward to that. >> Well, great to have you guys on theCUBE. Congratulations on all success. The Enterprise continues to adopt more and more Cloud which benefits all the work you guys have done both on the RHEL side, and as you guys modernize with all these great services and managed services continues to be the center of all the action. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. >> Thanks John. >> Thank you. >> Okay, Red Hat's partnership with AWS evolving as Cloud scale Edge, all distributed computing, all happening at large scale. This is theCUBE with CUBE coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(bright upbeat music) >> Hello, and welcome back to theCUBE's continuous coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. I'm John Furrier your host of theCUBE wall-to-wall coverage, Sumit Dhawan president of VMware is joining me today. Sumit, welcome to theCUBE. >> Great to be here, John, good to see you. >> You know, I remember Raghu when we were talking to him when the original AWS deal, we covered it many, many years ago. It seems like yesterday, but since then, again, it was a lot of people who were kind of like looking at that deal, not understanding. We were very clear that we thought that that was going to create clarity. If you look at the success of VMware's cloud strategy, since that moment in time, it really has been an amazing run for VMware. And so congratulations and looking at that trajectory, we're going into what even a bigger wave now we're seeing, coming out of the pandemic with Edge, 5g, Cloud Native going mainstream. This is like another tipping point, another inflection. Well, how are we want to look at it? This is really big. Can you share your thoughts on how you see your customers and AWS customers coming together with the VMware. >> Yeah, we are excited about sort of this phase, era or whatever you want to call it, where customers are looking at just the power of cloud for all of their applications. And in fact, what we call multicloud, where they are looking at private cloud, public cloud, sometimes even multiple public clouds and Edge and how they are going to leverage all of this power of cloud across all their applications. And we're excited about the partnership, like you said, John, we did with AWS, customers have last two years, have had a hard time modernizing their infrastructure. And now they're looking at their tier one applications, which are oftentimes the lifeline of their businesses and they have not been, the infrastructure has not been modernized. And our partnership with AWS brings to the customers a fully modernized infrastructure as a service, which is optimized for their tier one application. So they can embrace the power of cloud, not just for new modern applications that they have built for running their new digital services, but also all of their tier one enterprise applications instantly modernize their infrastructure, secure it run their tier one applications through the power and the scale of public cloud. And then gradually start modernizing, like you mentioned, modernization of application is a key element and we have provided a rich stack for customers to be able to build their new SRE and DevOps practices and enable developers to have a fast journey to build these modern applications, leveraging the power of public cloud and in fact multiple public clouds seamlessly, and we're extending the same thing to the Edge. So it's actually exciting times in the industry. We call it the multicloud era and VMware is enabling our customers what we call smartest path to cloud. >> Well, congratulations, first of all, on the new independent company, VMware, that's great news. You guys now are on your own very valuable company in and of itself, under Dell Technologies now out on the open and we've been covering VMware, theCube's been to VMware every year. And looking at this year's VMware and looking at VMware for the old folks, the veterans VMware has been synonymous with operations, IT operations, running workloads in data centers to power business, enterprise classic innovation for business value. Now with the cloud, you see operations DevOps being discussed in security. You're talking about, and you mentioned SRE the workloads. The game is still the same, but it is shifting landscape wise. You got cloud scale, you mentioned on premises and multi-cloud. So with operations going to full scale, your customers are building and running their businesses on VMware and AWS and other clouds. This is the same game, but different world. Can you just share what's the current similarities and differences from where operations used to be from a workload standpoint. >> John, you're a hundred percent, right. The need for operational scale and discipline is always, there has always been there and now it's extended to potentially lot more complex world of what we call multicloud. In this new world, the whole aspect of operations is no longer the world of system admins, where you would have people pushing buttons to control the infrastructure and it's lot more where infrastructure is now designed to be managed as a code. There is a lot more of what is considered shift left, where more and more of power of orchestrating the infrastructure as given to the developers because they're oftentimes the sort of ones who understand the business logic and understand how the infrastructure is required to scale up and down the applications. And so along those two key trends, there is still a critical element of how a platform is needed for customers to operate that in Miami okay. You can sort of have operational discipline be lost just because you have the paradigm changed and that's what VMware is enabling now with VMware stack, you can manage your entire infrastructure, not just public cloud, but even private cloud as a code, you can create a platform where developers get this freedom and a great experience to leverage any public cloud, to build their services and work closely with DevOps and SRE functions, to make sure that the orchestration of all of their cloud environment in a multicloud environment is available and enabled seamlessly through Kubernetes. This doesn't have to be done through virtual machines anymore it could be virtual machines or Kubernetes orchestrated containers across all clouds. And so bottom line operations has always been critical, but it has been done in a certain way in the world of multicloud it's changed to where it's more and more of infrastructure as a service shift left to developers and cybersecurity is extremely important where it needs to be built into the platform. And that's what VMware solutions are now enabling for our customers. >> Yeah, and for all the young guns coming into the business that have developers, the DevOps is still the same game. You've got developers and you've got operations now at large scale. And I think this whole multi-cloud is really kind of the multi-vendor equation so I think clear synergies and congratulations on the trajectory. I think it's really relevant. Can you take us through on how this means for the businesses, because at VMWorld this year, you guys talked about cross-cloud services. Can you talk about what that is and what does it mean for the customers, and what's the focus at reInvent this year? >> Yeah, so VMware this year at VMworld announced our sort of portfolio for enabling customers to embrace the power of multicloud easily. We call it cross-cloud services and they fit into five major categories. First is our cloud infrastructure that is available through partnership with all major cloud providers. We started with AWS and we expanded with all major cloud providers, including Azure, Google, Ali in China, Oracle, IBM. Secondly, our cloud native platform, Cloud native platform is where it doesn't have to be traditional VM based applications, applications built using modern cloud native technologies container-based, or that can be orchestrated using Kubernetes that are operationalized using our platform where customers can get any Kubernetes on any public cloud and operate them in a consistent and scalable fashion and enable a great developer experience at the same time. Third is networking and security services, which are underlay across both the cloud infrastructure, as well as cloud native services for this cloud management, how infrastructure as a code and shift-left developer function can be enabled through our management technologies designed for both private and public cloud, both VM based or VMware based infrastructure, as well as native public cloud infrastructure. And then lastly, at workspace and Edge services, enabling customers to build today's requirements of people working from anywhere and anywhere workspace experience for a hybrid workforce. So these are our five cloud services, John, that we call collectively as cross-cloud services, which enable customers to embrace the power of multicloud easily. These are modular, easy to acquire services designed to run across all clouds. And obviously for customers looking at leveraging the power of AWS, these services enable you to embrace it AWS at the fastest speed. >> Yeah and I think anything cross-cloud, multi-cloud, the ease of use and choice is key, you have to have choice that's cool. Open source is driving a lot of that, which I want to get to with the Tanzu, but you guys have had a great partnership with AWS, both on a development level, as well as a business partnership. Take us through the evolution of the partnership between VMware and AWS, because I know Raghu was really into this with Pat Gelsinger and then Andy Jassy, we covered that. But if you look at what Amazon web services is doing under Adam's leadership now they're going to set the table for the next 15 years. And you've got Outpost is going to be a big part of that. You've got all of the cloud native high level services inside the cloud, inside AWS as well. So take us through your view of the evolution of the VMware AWS partnership. >> Yeah I mean, AWS and VMware started a partnership for those of you who don't know, we started our partnership about five years ago, where we announced the availability of VMware cloud on AWS, which is all of our fully sort of modernized software defined data centers infrastructure available for running tear one enterprise applications on top of AWS all of their data centers globally. So our software with AWS hardware together as a managed service means customers could get fully modern infrastructure without refactoring any of their applications. They can run on AWS. And that relationship has grown significantly. We have continued to enable more and more of sort of different sized sort of platform infrastructure that we have continually made available. And the business has led to great success. We have at this point in time thousands of customers, joint customers running all of their tier one business applications, whether it's banking to healthcare, to insurance on top of our infrastructure, and it's been great. We then gradually expanded that partnership to other industries. Now we have customers in telcos running major telco cloud on top of our platform, we've expanded our partnership to other solutions. We brought our Tanzu, which is our cloud native platform for managing native cloud services on AWS, in an enterprise fashion, connected to all of their enterprise requirements as well in the marketplace we have brought other offerings, including security services on AWS marketplace for customers to get so over time. >> Hold on Sumit if you don't mind me asking, so you saying that Tanzu Carbon Black and VMware cloud are all in AWS marketplace. >> They're all available in AWS marketplace and they're all available to be transacted through even just the AWS's EDP. So the commercial relationship with AWS has strengthened significantly over time. >> EDP is their sales channel that's their direct. >> EDP is their enterprise agreement that's right. >> So you go to market together with AWS under the marketplace. >> Joint support integration so their customers can get joint support with us. So over time, the technology integration that started has led to strong commercial integrations, helping making sure customers can get one commercial agreement and one support agreement with VMware and AWS together. And that's been great for customers, customers have loved it and we are continuing to build upon it. Your second question was, well, what happens when AWS has new modern native services? And what we have done is for example, at Tanzu Solution, it is integrated with AWS's EKS. So their Kubernetes distribution can be fully operationalized as well as a great developer experience can be created for AWS native services using VMware Tanzu solution. So we are embracing the power of more and more of AWS services for our enterprise solutions. >> You know I love following VMware, especially and AWS. I spoke to companies, both very technical, pragmatic, very smart companies So congratulations on success. I got to ask you from a customer perspective, as you look at the landscape of the commercial side, what are the customers saying? What's the big summary of where they're at? What's the vibe, where's their head, what are they thinking? Take us through some anecdotal customer sentiment or data. >> Yeah, our customers tell us three things consistently. Number one, they say that they have, at this point of time, just decided that they're going to have some kind of a black solution, which will span multiple clouds, which could have public cloud, private cloud and Edge or multiple public clouds. In fact, we just did a recent survey, John and we found that 74% of our customers are already using multiple clouds. And 90 plus percent said that they want that freedom and choice to be able to use cloud of their choice and not be encumbered by any particular sort of just choice that they make. So that's the first trend we see, secondly, customers want to modernize their infrastructure and modernize their applications. They haven't been able to do so over the course of last two years, and modernization is a key requirement and VMware and AWS gives them that ability to do so now at this point in time, very, very quickly. And then third thing we hear is that customers are looking for some solution where cybersecurity is built in it's something where they are standardizing their enterprise requirements via a platform, which has a great experience for the developers, great operational scale and cybersecurity. And these are the three trends John, that VMware is solely focused on as part of our services and solutions and our partnership with AWS. >> Sumit, always great to talk to you. One final point. I want to get your reaction to a VMware has made a couple of big bets in the past decade. One, the deal with Amazon, which opened the door for multicloud, that path is clear. Cloud-scale check the box well done. And the other one was cloud native technologies and Kubernetes specifically, two big bets that don't, that kind of no one kind of saw coming, turns out they turned out pretty well. What's your reaction to that? Would you agree? And how would you talk about those two events? >> Yeah, we at VMware always considered sort of how we are going to keep innovating and the way we see the world is follow where the applications are going. It's pretty simple. Okay we saw that a few years ago where cloud and container technologies are where the applications are going. And we innovated through both our organic investments, as well as inorganic investments to bring our VMware cloud Solutions and Tanzu Solutions. And similarly, John, we're looking at now the next generation of applications where we fast forward three years down the road, we envision a great degree of innovation is going to happen in the Edge. And that's the third sort of area of innovation for us. So that public cloud or multi-cloud cloud native applications, as well as Edge applications can all be orchestrated using VMware's cross-cloud services. >> Sumit Dhawan, president of VMware thanks for coming on theCUBE we appreciate it. Enjoy the rest of the event. I'm John Furrier host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (bright upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome everyone to theCUBE, continuing coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. I'm Lisa Martin. We are running one of the industry's most important and largest hybrid tech events this year, two live sets, two remote studios with AWS, and its ecosystem partners. We've got over a hundred guests on the program this year, going deep as we enter the next decade of cloud innovation. We are pleased to welcome for the first time to theCUBE, John Kodumal, the CTO and co-founder of LaunchDarkly. John is here to talk about modern DevOps with feature management. John, welcome to the program. >> Thanks for having me, Lisa. >> Great to have you on the program. Let's talk a little bit about LaunchDarkly. I know it's been on theCUBE a couple of times, but it's been awhile. Give the audience an overview of LaunchDarkly, what it is that you do and what's new. >> Yeah. LaunchDarkly is the leading platform for feature management. We allow developers, product managers, anyone in the practice of building software to leverage feature flags, to deliver better software faster, a better product experiences through the use of feature flags. >> One thing that I noticed on the website is you guys have some big customer names, Square, I also saw Adidas, NBC, at least you've got some pretty big organizations that are relying on LaunchDarkly to deliver and control their software. What can you tell us about it from a customer perspective? >> Yeah. You know, it's an amazing thing. We have over 30% of the Fortune 100 using the LaunchDarkly platform for feature management. And, you know, I think it's been incredible to see how basically anyone building software can leverage feature flags to deliver better customer experiences. So, the companies you named, I mean, they're all over the map in terms of the kinds of products they deliver to consumers from Square to Adidas. I mean, those are totally different companies, but I think the thing that they all have in common is that they're increasingly becoming... They're either already a software company or they're increasingly becoming a software company and that's where we help our customers, the customers that are delivering more digital experiences to their consumers. >> That is table stake these days, you mentioned all software, all companies rather becoming software companies. If they're not, they're probably not going to be around much longer and you're right. You mentioned that's a quite a variety, NBC to Adidas as I talked about there, but in terms of what they have in common, talk to me a little bit about feature management. What is it and how can it help to bridge the divide between the developer folks, the business side of the organization? >> Absolutely. I think the fundamental thing that feature management provides, the simplest thing, that the thing that people first utilize LaunchDarkly for is to separate the processes of deploying software from releasing software. So it used to be in a pre-LaunchDarkly world, when you deploy a new piece of software, you package the artifact up, you put it out on your servers, and then your entire customer base was experiencing that new version of the software. So, if things were going wrong, if there was a bug, something wasn't working right, your blast radius was enormous. Literally, your entire customer base was impacted. And one of the things that LaunchDarkly does, the first thing that we do, the first piece of value that we provide is we help you sort of reduce that risk. So when you release a change, you can deliver that change to a much more targeted, smaller, safer cohort of users, measure the impact of what's going on. Are there any bugs? Are there any performance problems? Or is everything's smooth sailing? And if it is, then you can use LaunchDarkly to rapidly, and with a lot of visibility control, scale that release and scale that roll-out out. And that's the most fundamental value that we provide. >> Big value there. Speaking of value, let's talk about the partnership with LaunchDarkly and AWS. I know you have a lot of experience working with AWS for many years back when you were at Atlassian, but give us an overview of the partnership and that shared developer audience that you're both working with. >> Yeah. I've got a number of years of experience working with AWS. So, you mentioned my time prior to starting LaunchDarkly, I was at Atlassian for many years, and I was at Atlassian and during that time period where Atlassian was switching from traditional hosting providers to public cloud, to AWS specifically, and the capabilities that an unlocked, not only for our operations teams, but for our developers were pretty incredible. One of the things that we launched almost immediately on my team was the ability to like preview environments through AWS hosting and have that experience not happen on the local developers desktop, but rather in the cloud. And that was incredibly helpful for improving our velocity and helping us preview changes. Since starting LaunchDarkly, I mean, we've leveraged cloud and AWS in particular from the earliest days, we started the platform on AWS and we've been consuming more and more services through AWS and seeing more and more value. From a partnership perspective, we're incredibly excited because we have a massive number of customers that are either just beginning their public cloud journey or are making significant migrations or significant infrastructure changes, and they're using the LaunchDarkly platform to control the release of those changes to mitigate risk. We have customers using us to do migrations from one cloud provider to another, or go through modernization efforts and push change out safely as they migrate to a provider like AWS. >> Talk to me about some of the things that you've seen in the last year and a half, 20 months or more probably. Since the pandemic started, we've seen so much acceleration to cloud, so much cloud migration, so many companies, not only becoming software companies because they need to be competitive but understanding it's not why move to the cloud, it's when. How have you helped organizations, you know, from the NBC, the media folks to the retailers, to undergo those migrations safely but quickly in a time of such dynamics? >> Yeah, I mean, that is exactly what we saw during the pandemic, a massive amount of change, not just in the move to digital and digital experiences, but also in the need to sort of adapt to rapidly changing conditions. We had customers in, for example, food delivery that needed to rapidly change the way their software behaved in response to changes in regulations or guidelines around things like COVID. And our platform really was transformative for many of those organizations as they sort of needed to become more flexible and adapt, not only to changing rules and regulations, but changing consumer behavior and changing end-user behavior. So, it was an incredible year. It was a year that was sort of fraught with uncertainty, but it was a year where LaunchDarkly, our platform really helped many of our customers sort of navigate the waters and figure out how to get the experiences they needed to and the change they needed to in front of their customers rapidly. >> Yeah. Rapid being a keyword of the last 20 years, it feels like 20 years, doesn't it? Two years, 40 and slipped there. But talk to me a little bit about some of the other trends that you're seeing from a cloud perspective. We talked about the acceleration of migration. What are some of the other trends that your customers are facing and how is LaunchDarkly helping them to address those trends? >> Yeah. One of the trends that we're seeing is the rapidity of change is forcing companies that even companies that were really software driven at their heart to iterate more rapidly. I think there's this story around modernization that is becoming more and more common where you normally think of modernization as sort of like legacy companies, sort of non software-driven companies, having to make that shift and modernize their software stacks, but the rapid pace of change is it's shifting things into a world where even companies like my own company, like LaunchDarkly are having to modernize our stack. Our company is seven years old. And some of the things that we were doing seven years ago, they've been eclipsed in terms of like processes, tools, technologies, and use. And so we've had to go through modernization as well to keep up with the times and to give our developers the quality of tools and processes that they expect. >> I think that's an important point, John, that you bring up is that modernization isn't just for legacy applications, legacy businesses, and I'll be honest, that's how I normally think about it. I don't think of a company as young as LaunchDarkly needing to modernize, but you bring up a point that really what it is is an ongoing process for businesses in any industry. >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you think about what the landscape looked like seven years ago and you fast forward to today, so many of the practices are different. So even companies like us, we're having to change. I mean, seven years ago, it wasn't really clear that Kubernetes was going to be a platform that was going to end up being the winner and sort of like the orchestration space. And so when we were starting out, none of our workloads were on Kubernetes. And even today, we're not really significantly using Kubernetes, we're sort of like legacy container-based. And that's just us, we're still a startup and we're still able to move pretty rapidly. But even for us, we're having to sort of like revisit the technologies and use and modernize our stack and kind of look around and see what's not working anymore and what we need to change. It's certainly a pace that is massively different from a company that is relying on a legacy software stack, I don't want to pretend like LaunchDarkly is, I would compare us to a company that's moving off of mainframes and COBOL or anything like that, but it's still something that we're cognizant of and something that we have to invest in. >> But you bring up a good point. And as we talk about this when we're talking with any vendor about, from the customer's perspective, it's a journey, it's the same thing that you're talking about here. It's evaluating what you have under the hood, what's working, what needs to be better as the markets change, as the dynamics change, as trends change. >> Yeah. That's exactly how I think about it and that's how a lot of these companies that are becoming more software-driven are thinking about it too. Just sort of like assessing the catalog of tools and technologies and saying what's working, what's not working. And I think one of the trends that we're seeing is that re-evaluation is happening more and more frequently and the frequency of new technologies and tools being adopted is increasing. And so, it's something that you have to spend an enormous amount of effort just to stay ahead of the game and stay ahead of what's modern. The practices that we've determined are really working for organizations. >> Right, exactly. So, I mentioned a few customers by name that work with LaunchDarkly, but can you tell me an example of one of your favorite customer stories that you think really articulate the value that LaunchDarkly is delivering to your customers across industries? >> Yeah. What comes to mind is TrueCar. TrueCar has been a LaunchDarkly customer for a long time. They're great partners of ours. We have a case study up with them. And one of the stories that they talked about was their own cloud migration. They shifted their workloads from one cloud provider to another and feature flags were instrumental in that. So, feature flags allowed them to sort of gate the flow of traffic from one cloud to another and to sort of in real-time assess whether things were working or not as they did that migration. It took a process that would have been incredibly risky and scary, and made it sort of business as usual for that organization. So, that's a company that I think of that really understands the value of LaunchDarkly and has really leveraged us to our full potential. >> Awesome. Something I want to ask you about as well, is this concept of release impact. Compare and contrast that to like the traditional optimization focused A/B Testing. What's the difference? What are the similarities? >> Yeah. You know, A/B Testing has been around for a long time and it's used in software, definitely in the past decade has grown tremendously as a piece of the software development experience. But when I think about the practice of building deep product experiences and contrast that to sort of like A/B testing on a marketing site, you know, testing out the layout of a page, we're testing out which call to action button color ends up creating more engagement. That's a very different world than I'm building a SaaS product and I'm building this a new feature within that SaaS product. Traditionally, you wouldn't really A/B test that. And part of the reason for that is it's really too expensive to build software. And it's not really a reality that most companies have where they can take a team and have them go build a feature for multiple weeks or months, pry it out in production and then say, "You know what, that didn't work. That million dollar expense that we just made. We're just going to roll that back and not use it." So, that's sort of the way I think about the difference between a traditional optimization focused A/B Testing, where it's sort of like smaller bets designed to move the needle on a metric where if it doesn't work, you can turn it off versus these deep product experiences where what you're more interested in is being more quantitative about the impact of that release, but you're not necessarily interested in sort of like A/B testing focused optimization, picking a winner in a short period of time. One of the things that we've realized at LaunchDarkly is those are two separate tasks, they're two separate processes, and they require different analysis and different tools under the hood. And so, we're really excited at LaunchDarkly to be innovating on sort of both fronts, not only just providing a platform for optimization focused A/B Testing, but providing a platform where product managers can be more quantitative about the capabilities that they're building and not thinking about it in terms of optimization, but just in terms of measuring the impact of the work that they're shipping to customers. >> The impact, and of course, it's all outcomes focus as we talk about with customers and vendors and at any industry. Last question, John, for you as we're coming up on re:Invent in-person, what are some of the things that attendees can learn and see at the LaunchDarkly booth? >> Yeah. You're going to learn a lot about, if you visit our booth, you're going to learn a lot about sort of like the direction that we're taking, which is I think the exciting thing about LaunchDarkly as a platform is we really provide two capabilities. For engineering teams, we help you mitigate risks. We help you move more efficiently. That gives you more at bats as a team. It lets you ship more product and see whether it's working. LaunchDarkly also though provide something on the flip side of that, which is the ability for product managers to measure whether the changes that they're making are the right changes for their customers. And when you combine those two things in one platform, you get the ability for the engineering team to have more at bats, to create more change in production and see whether it's working. And then you get product managers the ability to measure the impact on their customers. And you combine that together, and at the end of the day, what LaunchDarkly provides is the ability for you as an organization to deliver business value better, more quickly through the R&D investments that you're making, the software that you're producing. >> And that's critical. I love that baseball analogy, more at bats. Fantastic, John, thank you for joining me talking to the audience about LaunchDarkly, what you're doing, the trends that you're helping customers address, the partnership with AWS, and what folks can learn when they visit the LaunchDarkly booth at re:Invent. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you so much, Lisa. I really enjoyed our conversation. >> Me too, for John Kodumal, I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching theCUBE's continuous coverage of AWS re-Invent 2021. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome to theCUBE's coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. I'm Lisa Martin, and I'm pleased to be joined by Jessica Alexander, who is the VP of Cloud Solutions Sales and Alliances at CrowdStrike. Jessica, welcome to the program. >> Thank you, Lisa. It's great to be here. >> So we're going to unpack a lot today, some news, what's going on with the threat landscape, what you're seeing across industries, but I want to get started talking a little bit about your team. As I mentioned, VP of Cloud Solutions Sales and Alliances. Talk to me about your team because you have a unique GTM here that I'd like to get into. >> Sure. Thank you, Lisa. Well, we recently launched our new cloud security products, Cloud Workload Protection and Horizon earlier this year. So we wanted to make sure that we accelerated our entry into this new product market, this new addressable market, and so we established not only a cloud sales specialist team that helps our core sellers as well as our partners sell our new cloud security products but we also wanted to make sure it was tightly integrated and aligned with our Cloud Alliances so specifically our co-sell relationship and partnership that we have with AWS. >> Got it. Let's talk about some of the things you mentioned, Aksino acceleration entering into the market. We saw a lot of acceleration in the last 20 months and counting, especially with respect to cloud adoption, digital transformation, but also the threat landscape things have accelerated. Wanted to get some information from you on what you've seen. We've seen and talked to a lot of folks on ransomware stats, you know, it's up nearly 11x in the first half of '21, but you guys have some unique stats and insights on that. Talk to me about what CrowdStrike is seeing with respect to that threat landscape and who it's impacting. >> Sure. You know, we have a unique perspective. CrowdStrike has millions of sensors out in our customer environments, they're feeding trillions of events into the cloud and we're able to correlate this data in real time, so this gives us a very unique perspective into what's happening in adversary activity out in the world. We also get feeds from our incident response teams that are actively responding to issues, as well as our Intel operatives out in the world. So, you know, we correlate these three sources of data into our threat graph in the cloud powered by AWS, which gives us very good insights into activity that we're seeing from an adversary perspective. So we also have a group called the OverWatch team, they are 24 by seven, you know, humans monitoring our cloud and monitoring our customer's networks to detect or, you know, get pre-breach activity information. And what they're seeing is that, you know, over this last year, an adversary is able to enter a network and move laterally into that network within one hour and 32 minutes. Now, you know, this is really fast, especially when you consider that in 2020, that average was four hours and 37 minutes for a threat actor to move laterally, you know, infiltrate a network and then move laterally. So, you know, the themes that we're seeing are adversaries are getting a lot faster and a lot more efficient, and, you know, as more companies are moving to remote work environments, you know, setting up virtual infrastructure for employees to use for work and productivity, you know, that threat landscape becomes more critical. >> Right? It becomes more critical. It becomes bigger. And of course we are in this work from anywhere environment that's going to last or some amount of it will persist permanently. So what you're saying is you're seeing a 4x increase in the speed with which adversaries can get in and laterally move within a network, so dramatically faster in a year over year period, where, so there's been so much flux in every market and of course in our lives, what are some of the things that you're helping customers do to combat this growing challenge? >> Well, it really goes back to being predictive and having that real time snapshot of what's going on and being able to proactively reach out to customers before anything bad happens and, you know, we're also seeing that ransomware continues to be an issue for customers, so, you know, having the ability to prevent these attacks and ransomware from happening in the first place and really taking the advantage that an adversary may have from a speed or intelligence perspective, taking that advantage away by having the Falcon Platform actively monitoring our customer environments is a big advantage. >> So let's talk about, speaking of advantages, what are you guys announcing at re:Invent this year? >> Sure. Well, we have two new service integrations with Amazon EKS, AWS Outpost and AWS Firelands to talk about this year. The cool thing is that, you know, customers are going to get our wonderful breach protection that we have, you know, the gold standard of breach protection, they'll have that available on various cloud services. And what it does is it provides consistent security and simplified operational management across AWS services, as customers extend those from public cloud to the data center, to the edge. And you know, the other great benefit is that it accelerates threat hunting, so we were talking about, you know, being able to predict and see what adversaries are doing. You know, one of the great customer benefits is that they can do that with their own teams and be able to do that on a cloud infrastructure as well. >> And how much of the events of the last 20 months was a catalyst or were catalysts for these integrations that you just mentioned? I imagine the threat landscape growing ransomware becoming a 'when we get hit not if' would have been some of those catalysts. >> Well, you know, we're seeing that the adoption of cloud services, especially for end user computing is growing much faster than traditional on-prem desktops, laptops, as people continue to work remotely and customers need to be, or corporations need to be efficient at how they manage end user computing environments. So, you know, we are seeing that adversary activity is picking up, they're getting smarter about, you know, leveraging cloud services and potential misconfigurations, there're really four key areas that we see customers struggle with, whether it be, you know, the complexity of cloud services, whether it be shadow IT, and a lot of the security folks don't necessarily know where all the cloud services are being deployed, then you've got, you know, kind of the advanced techniques that adversaries are using to get into networks. And then, you know, last but certainly not least is skills shortage. We're finding that a lot of customers want a turnkey solution, where they don't have to have a team of cloud security specialists to respond or handle any misconfigurations or issues that come up. They want to have a turnkey solution, a team that's already watching and reaching out to them to say, "Hey, you may want to look into XYZ and update a policy, or, you know, activate this new, you know, this feature in the platform." >> Yeah. That real time, the ability to have something that's turnkey is critical in this day and age where things are moving so quickly, there's so much being accelerated, good stuff and bad stuff. But also you mentioned that cybersecurity skills gap, which is in its, I think it's in its fifth year now, which is a big challenge for organizations as this scattered, work from anywhere persists as does the growth of the threat landscape. Let's get into now, for, you mentioned the adoption of cloud services has gone up considerably in this interesting time period, how is CrowdStrike helping customers do that securely, migrate from on-prem to the cloud with that security and that confidence that their landscape is protected? >> Yeah, well, we find obviously in the shared responsibility model, the great thing is that, you know, CrowdStrike and AWS team up to help, you know, customers have a better together experience as they migrate to the cloud. AWS is obviously responsible for the security of the cloud and customers are responsible for the security in the cloud. And in speaking with our customers who are moving or have moved to cloud services, and they really want a trusted and simple platform to use when securing their data and applications. So what, you know, they also have hybrid environments that can get complex to support, and, you know, we want to be able to provide them with a unified platform, a unified experience, regardless of where the workload is running or what services that it's using. You know, they have that unified visibility and protection across all of the cloud workloads. We're also, you know, seeing that, especially the reason we're doing this great integration with Outpost and EKS Anywhere is that customers are, you know, taking their cloud services out to their data centers as well as to the edge locations and branch offices, so they want to be able to run EKS on their own infrastructure. So it's important that customers have that portability that regardless of whether it's a laptop or an EC2 instance or an EKS container, you know, they have that portability throughout the continuum of their cloud journey. >> That continuum is absolutely critical as we, you know, talk about cloud and application or continuum from the customer's perspective, the cloud continuum is something that is front and center for customers, I imagine in every industry. >> Oh, for sure, 'cause every industry is adopting cloud maybe at a different speed, maybe for different applications, but, you know, everybody's moving to the cloud. >> So talk to me about what you're announcing with AWS, let's get into a little bit about the partnership that CloudStrike and AWS have, let's unpack that a bit. >> Sure. You know, we've been an AWS advanced technology partner for over five years. We've had our products, we now have six of our CrowdStrike products listed on AWS Marketplace. We're an active co-sell partner and, you know, have our security competency and our well-architected certification. And really it's about building trust with our customers. You know, AWS has a lot of wonderful partner products for customers to use and it's really about building trust that, you know, we're validated, we're vetted, we have a lot of customers who are using our products with AWS, and, you know, I think it's that tight collaboration, for example, if you look at what we're doing with Humio, we've implemented a quick start program, which AWS has to get customers quickly deployed with an integration or a new capability with a partner product. And what this does is it spins up a quick cloud formation template, customer can integrate it very quickly with the AWS Firelands and then, you know, all that log information coming from the AWS containers is easily ingested into the Humio platform. And so, you know, it really reduces the time to get the integration up and running as well as pulling all that data into the Humio platform so that customers can, like we said earlier, go back and threat hunt across, you know, different cloud service components in a quick and easy way. >> Quick and easy is good as is faster time to value. You mentioned the word trust, and, you know, we talk about trust, we've been talking about it for years as it relates to technology, but I'm curious, Jessica, in the last year and a half, if your customer conversations have changed, is trust now even more important than ever as there are so many things in flux, have you noticed any sort of change there in your customer conversations? >> Well, you know, I think trust is extensible. And over the last 10 years, CrowdStrike's done a really great job of building customer trust. And, you know, we started out as, you know, kind of primarily EDR and we've moved into prevention and now we're moving into identity protection and XDR so, you know, I see a pattern that, you know, we've built this amazing core of trust across our existing customers, and as we offer more capabilities, whether it be, you know, cloud security or XDR, identity protection, you know, customers trust us and so they're very willing to say, "ah well, I want to try out these new capabilities that CrowdStrike has because we trust you guys, you know, you've done a lot to protect our brand and, you know, really make our internal teams a lot more efficient and a lot smarter." So, you know, I think while trust is important, it's also something that we get to carry forward as we enter new markets and continue to innovate and provide new capabilities for our customers. >> And really extending that trusted, valued partner relationship that you've already established with customers in every industry. So where can customers go? So the joint GTM customers, and you said products available in the AWS marketplace, but where do you recommend customers go to learn more about how they can work with these joint solutions that CrowdStrike and AWS have together? >> Absolutely. We have a landing page on AWS, if you Google AWS and CrowdStrike, whether it be marketplace or EKS Anywhere, Amazon outposts, we're on all the joint product pages with Amazon, as well as always going to crowdstrike.com and looking up our cloud security products. >> Got it. And last question for you, Jessica, summarize the announcement in terms of business outcomes that it's going to enable your joint customers to achieve. >> Absolutely. You know, I think it goes back to probably the primary reason is complexity. And, you know, with complexity comes risk and blind spots so being able to have a unified platform that no matter where the workload is, or the employee may be, they are protected and have, you know, a unified platform and experience to manage their security risk. >> Excellent. Jessica, thank you so much for coming on the program today, sharing with me, what's new with CrowdStrike, some of the things that you're seeing, and what you're helping customers to accomplish in a very dynamic environment, we appreciate your time and your insights. >> Thank you for having me, Lisa. >> For Jessica Alexander, I'm Lisa Martin, and you're watching theCUBE's coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. (gentle music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering AWS Executive Summit, brought to you by Accenture. >> Welcome back, everyone, we are wrapping up two days of wall to wall coverage at the Accenture Executive Summit. You are watching theCUBE. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, and co-hosting alongside of Donald Klein. We have two guests for this segment, we have Zafar Razzacki, he is the managing director Digital Industry X at AWS, welcome to the show. >> Thank you. >> Rebecca: And Jon Allen, global automotive professional services leader at AWS, thank you both for coming on the show! >> Thank you so much, thanks for having us. >> So, first, I'm going to start with you, Zafar, I want to hear both, what you do, what is Digital Industry X? It's so mysterious! (laughter) >> So, Industry X.0 is a fairly new practice inside of Accenture, we focus on all things smart and connected. There's a product segment that focuses on smart and connected products specifically, and then certainly we have to think about engineering, so how do you build those products and how do you automate and make the processes for developing those products smarter, and then processes and operations, how do you actually run those types of businesses? So, I'm new to the practice, I actually joined from a number of years at General Motors, where I worked on mobility and innovation there, and prior to that, spent a number of years at Google, working on innovation and new products there, so happy to be at the firm and excited to think about how we bring these types of skills to the mobility industry and change automotive. >> So, Jon, paint a picture for our viewers. The entire industry is being disrupted, we're changing the way we move around from city to city, we have Uber and Lyft, electric scooters, connected cars, just paint the picture for our viewers about the disruption taking place. >> Sure, I mean, I'll use a line from one of our CEOs in the auto industry, Mara Barra, said we'll see more disruption in the next five years than we've seen in the last twenty-five years, in the automotive industry, and it's really fascinating, seeing what's happening. I think the big disruption is that, automotive industry and automotive makers are no longer traditional metal benders. They see themselves as mobility companies. And they see that they need to integrate with this ecosystem, it's just not about driving your car to one spot to another, but it's a full customer experience, from the moment you get into your car, you get to your location, and then how do you actually get further, maybe, take a Lyft, a scooter, maybe you're not using your car, you're using Uber, so it's fascinating to see how the ecosystem is all integrated in. The auto industry also has shifted that, no longer do they think they should just do it alone. I think we're seeing a lot of partnerships, and they're bringing a lot of small businesses and they're bringing in more innovation, they realize that innovation isn't just happening within their four walls, but they're using a much larger ecosystem to really change and transform mobility across the world. >> So, maybe talk a little bit about how broad this ecosystem is, right, 'cause maybe, you know, in the old time, we had maybe sort of car manufacturers, right, and we had cities. You know, cities made the roads, car manufacturers built the vehicles, right? But now we've got a complicated ecosystem, right? We've got data companies that are playing a role in this, that are driving sort of ride hailing, et cetera, we've also got cities thinking about how they offer traffic services differently. Maybe just talk about some of the things you're seeing around the ecosystem. >> Yeah, I mean, certainly, OEMs are re-imagining their role in the ecosystem, suppliers are also thinking about how they can start to add new value and leverage the data off of their systems. We have to talk about startups in this space as well, I mean, the ecosystem with startups is just growing rapidly, we've talked about Uber and Lyft, they've been a great model for the way a startup can come in and disrupt and grow, but across all aspects, from supply chain, to retail, to in-vehicle technologies, you know, there are so many new entrants, and it's exciting. And it's leading to these types of partnerships where, traditionally, an OEM might have said, I'm going to do it all, now there's this comfort with, I'm going to partner with a startup, I might invest in them, I might put some project dollars into that relationship, and work on co-developing a solution together. >> Yeah, what's amazing, I think, is the customer has a lot more power, maybe than in the past, and so, automotive makers, this unique partnership that's happening, is they're really putting the customer in the center. Customers want a seamless experience, they want to be jumping between different apps or different capabilities, that's what's beautiful about what we're doing in AWS, is we're trying to help these OEMs take that full experience end-to-end. Think of your car as a personal assistant. Think of it as, it can help you get to your job, but it can also help with your personal life as well, and so I think it's fascinating that they're really starting to put the customer at the center to have a better customer experience, and it's no longer just horsepower, and how your car works, but it's really the connected ecosystem that extends, theoretically, beyond your car. So you can connect to your home, you can connect with the rest of your life through your vehicle these days, and I think that's the change. >> So, how will that work? Describe the connected car, what are we really talking about here? >> Wow, you want to take that one first? >> Sure, well, let's contrast it to the non-connected car. >> All right, fair enough! >> I mean, you know, literally, getting in, turning the engine on, and the car was a standalone part of your daily life. But to Jon's point, now, with it being really software-driven and having data able to flow from your vehicle to your home, and be able to automate, you know, turning on your thermostat as you're approaching the home, automatically opening the garage just based on proximity, those types of things. Being able to have the convenience of your favorite playlists and your phone book, bringing that digital life into the car, those weren't possible before the connected car and that technology architecture that we see now. But now, you know, that experience becomes much richer and much more personalized. >> Yeah, and I think, look at it latency, look at an IoT, looking at Edge, fascinating, especially with the introduction of 5G coming out, it's going to completely be a game changer for the rest of this. >> So let's build on that. So the roles of the players in the ecosystem are changing, right, so the role of the car manufacturer's changing, the role of the city is changing, the role of the startup's changing, but it seems like the kind of common theme among all of these is that they're leveraging data in different kinds of ways, I was just wondering, how does AWS help these stakeholders be able to leverage that kind of data? >> That's great. So, my role on professional services for AWS is we help our customers use the AWS services to make it real, whether it's from a proof of concepts all the way to operations. So we use our wonderful partner community like Accenture, and we come in together, and so, for example, say a customer wants to create a personal assistant through the vehicle, using Alexa, using other services, we would go in, maybe with a partner, and a lot of times we love to do it with the customer, with the auto maker, and together build. And again, it might be a concept. There is still a long lead time to create devices to be included in the vehicle, but the great thing about now, Cloud, and some other technologies, seven years was generally the design cycle for a vehicle, you can't do that anymore with new technologies. So we as AWS come in and really help, A, let's envision, let's work backwards from the customer, let's think about what we need to have, help them build, and then later on, actually implement and make it operational. >> Maybe I could just add to that real quick. One of the beauties of this partnership is that we see some of the new technologies that AWS is developing and what's in the pipeline, and our teams are actually working on building demos on top of this, so you know, one example of that is a trip planner that we actually have on display here at the show floor, where we can help a family plan a trip, what are all the things they need to take on that trip, because Alexa knows your shopping preferences, you know, we can recommend the snacks and things that you want to take, we can recommend stops along the way. In the future, when we're all driving electric vehicles, you know, how do you plan out your charging, and take the family to a restaurant while you're waiting thirty minutes for the vehicle to charge, so a lot of those things are realities that we can actually build today based on the technologies that AWS has to offer. >> What are some of the best in class auto makers in the sense of who are really at the cutting edge in terms of working with you both Accenture and AWS in terms of really thinking innovatively and creatively? >> Sure, well, I think everyone across the ecosystem is at that point in time where they recognize, it's time for that transformation to happen. So, you can pick any one of the major brands, and look at great examples of the way they're changing the experience inside of the vehicle. From the integration of different types of personalization offerings, to even, you know, some of the newer entrants, like at Tesla, that's really building vehicles from the ground up focused on software and that customer experience. So I think it's an exciting time across the industry, everyone's really making those changes and you guys are probably a seat at the table in all of those conversations. >> Yeah, I hate to point out one specific, but what I think I've seen a theme is that they recognize to draw talent, they can't do the old way of doing business, right, so they're creating these joint innovation centers with AWS, they have innovation centers kind of off campus of the main campus, they kind of have that Silicon feel, because it's a draw of talent, and they got to make it as exciting to get these new coders and developers in to want to join an automaker. They weren't really necessarily seen as that, the joint automaker, and that's completely transforming especially the rise of the digital, the CTO and the CDO, the chief digital officer, we're seeing that completely change and data science, these are themes maybe ten years ago that really weren't talked about in OEMs, and now they have a seat not only at the table, but they're at the board level. These are conversations at the board level now. >> Absolutely. >> So, one of the things we've all experienced, we all spend a lot of time sitting in traffic, right? Maybe talk a little bit about how are cities getting smarter about kind of using mobility in order to move people across cities and avoid traffic, some of the other problems we all experience. >> Well, I think there's cities as consumers of data, so cities are now having conversations with many of the automakers about leveraging vehicle data to make better decisions about the use of their roadways or how they manage traffic light phasing, so there's a lot of interesting things happening there, where manufacturers are able to share their data to cities, and you know, their city planner teams, the way they're building new roadways, are including a lot of that infrastructure now, where you see technologies like DSRC, that's able to talk to vehicles and help those traffic lights phase accordingly. I think cities are playing a really important role in making those new technologies come to bear. >> And I think it's amazing to see some of the investments in some of the smaller cities. So a few years ago, the Department of Transportation put out a challenge, a smart city challenge, and selected a city to actually be the incubator. But that created all these other cities, from Austin to Columbus to Ohio to you name it, to almost have these PMOs or these centers of excellence to create smart cities, and we talked about the ecosystem at the beginning of the conversation, and it's really enabling these cities to bring in maybe big ideas that weren't able to be brought in before. You know, the Cloud and the technologies we have are really leveling the playing field and giving access to maybe companies that didn't have that kind of compute power before, and that's what we're seeing with the smart cities initiatives, is it's not so expensive anymore, and you can bring in some really brilliant ideas of a small business that is maybe a three person shop that could actually transform. But I think we do need to fix the infrastructure, and we've talked about this as a nation for a while, and we continue to invest in our infrastructure to really enable smart cities. >> We've been talking about these smart cars and how they are going to serve as our personal assistants of the future, but what about safety, too? As an innovative USP? In the sense of, here we are using data to make these cars smarter, more connected, and also safer. >> Right, yeah, I mean I think there's a lot of debates right now on safe the autonomous vehicle and we're learning more as we go along that, I think as a couple use cases that I've seen is, you can sign up for apps to become a smarter driver, right? You see, you get your score, right, with my vehicle I get a report card every month to say how I've actually been doing, and as a parent, I can see how my kids are driving and all that, but I think at the end of the year, and it's kind of, I'll be bold here a little bit, we really don't remember the last time there was a major commercial airline crash in the United States. It makes the six o'clock news. By the time I retire, I make a bold prediction, I can be bold here, that a major car accident in the country, now I might be in a nursing home, could make the evening news. 'Cause we could get to that level of safety in the future, okay? >> Meaning, car accidents are so infrequent-- >> So rare. >> Could be so infrequent, rare, right. Now, I'm not saying it's going to happen near turn, I do have a prediction that if, what we're trying to design today, enables that for the future, I think it's pretty proud to be a part of that, right? Again, I think it's, years down the road, I might be at Shady Pines retirement community at that point, but I really, I mean, you think about how we've been able to do the aviation industry and make it safer, even with the challenges around that, I think in the future we could have that for safety in vehicles in my lifetime. >> I totally agree, and I think that's a big promise of autonomous vehicles, that's what so many people are excited about, you know, traffic accidents are one of the leading causes of death in our country, so to be able to address that through technology, I think, is an exciting promise. We see some of that even today, with all the technology that's being built into the vehicle, there are high standards for minimizing driver distraction, and just imagine that future where, you no longer have to worry about driver distraction. And now our relationship with the vehicle is one where we sit back, we live our lives, you know, there's a statistic that we estimate people will get back 4.5 years of their life that they're not spending behind the wheel locked on the road. You know, those types of things are really exciting to think about. >> Somebody out there will probably correct me on the numbers, but I think 39,000 fatality deaths in the United States was reported by Nets, I think that's the number, but I know that the number of distracted driving is going up, and that's a problem. I mean, people are using their phone, and it's not only phone, it's drinking, it's distracted driving, so anyway-- >> And distracted pedestrians, that's the thing, walking around Boston, everyone's just-- >> That's right, walking around here, you see people on their phone, absolutely. And I think that we are on a, it's amazing to see the changes that have happened around this the last couple years, and I think it's just opened new opportunities for companies that could never have really played in this space, are making a change for us. >> So one of the stories I love to hear about is how these kind of connected car and data capabilities are enabling us to use the infrastructure we've got today better. I mean, we'd all love to jump in a flying taxi and zoom over traffic, et cetera, but there's some concepts like smart carpool lanes, things like that, maybe you can talk a little bit about those and kind of how new business models are being allowed by that. >> Sure, yeah. So metering is one way, where it becomes a smart infrastructure, where you understand the traffic patterns, and it'd be HOV or you pay for it, so you can make the decision if you want to spend $30 to try to get into the city, or be stuck in traffic and take you an hour. And so it's interesting, with the smart infrastructure that's actually occurring, within cities right now that changes on how people will use metered lanes, and that's one thing we're seeing today. But there's also integrations with apps that we use every day to help us give us better insights, obviously, that we all use, to be able to have traffic, but it's the integration with that, imagine being able to have an application integrated with emergency management. So, you know, today people are hitting an app cause waves as a cop on the side of the road, well, we have customers, one customer particular, that wants to make sure that's integrated in a smart way, you know, that if a police car is on the side of the road, how is that really feeding the larger infrastructure? So, yes, there's a whole piece on metering and smart infrastructure, but I think that some of these other businesses are finding ways to integrate things like emergency management and some other pieces to really help reduce traffic flow and make it easier. >> Parking is another great example. >> Parking. >> There are a number of startups out there that have created technologies to help map open parking spaces, so how do you feed that data to the end user to help them make smarter decisions. I think there's another data point, we spend about 30% of our time in our vehicle, is spent just looking for parking. Right, so, how can we help to drive those things down, how can we help make it more efficient to find a parking spot, to even transact for that parking spot, and you might come to a situation where, again, when there's peak traffic, are we bidding for a parking spot? And will a parking spot go to the highest bidder? So these are all opportunities that technology really enables, when we connect the vehicle and are able to feed in that type of data around parking, infrastructure, roadway usage, et cetera. >> Well, Zafar and Jon, this has been a really cool conversation, you have great jobs. It's really neat, re-imagining mobility, yes. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you for having us. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Donald Klein, that wraps up our coverage of the Accenture Executive Summit for theCUBE, thank you so much, and we'll catch you next time.

>>Bach from Las Vegas. It's the Q covered AWS executive summit brought to you by extension. >>Welcome back everyone to the cubes live coverage of the Excenture executive summit here at AWS. Reinvent from Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We are joined by two guests for this segment. We have Greg sly, he is the SVP platform and infrastructure at Verizon. Thank you so much for coming on Greg. Thank you. Happy to be here and almost sad. K he is the managing director, Accenture global network services. Thank you so much. I'm all so Greg, I want to start with you wanting, everyone knows Verizon, it's a household brand. Tell our viewers a little bit just about how big you are, what countries you're in your reach. >>Okay. Well we're a global company. There's about 135 ish thousand employees in the company. The brands and they're, you know, they include Yahoo and AOL and HuffPost and riot and others. So we have a much more global reach with some of those brands overseas for is obviously very well known in the U S and overseas as well. And that's really where our big plays are. Now. We're big in Asia as well with our eCommerce sites and stuff. So it's, it's, it's global and it's everywhere. So, >>so give our viewers an overview of this current state of where you are in your journey to the cloud, the cloud effication of Verizon. >>Sure. So the last probably two years we've really put a lot of focus into moving out of our data centers and into the cloud. We focused primarily on workloads that are right for the cloud because we as during this journey we went, there's obviously huge data lakes and huge amounts of data equipped over two exabytes of data. And trying to move that to the cloud is obviously takes some time. But a lot of our front end apps from anything from, you know, where your order, your phone or where you order services to, whether you're on Yahoo fantasy sports or on finance page, those, those things tend to work well in the cloud and they're built for the cloud for very bursty type workflows. So we spend a lot of time moving a lot of our applications plus all the new Greenfield applications up into the cloud. So we're, we're considerable way down the path now on that. We're now getting to the tail end with these kind of massive data sets on what's our next step for those. And that's what we're working on now. >>Um, well I want to bring you into this conversation a little. What, what are you seeing right now across cross industry, the current state of deployments? >>Yeah, so I mean, just building on what Greg said it's almost a third wave of cloudification that we see now. So you know that we had the desegregation of hardware and software and most operators started to go globally towards cloud and then they sort of had the second way, which was really the own private cloud infrastructures. And now because we are here, you can see clearly the amount of public cloud infrastructure that's starting to come in and become relevant to this deployment. So it's almost a third wave where I see a lot of our clients globally looking at hybrid cloud type models for. And >>that really accelerates that cloudification journey because now you see a lot of workloads moving to a hybrid cloud environment. Just by the size of the ecosystem of suppliers and partners that are involved. We give you a sense of how accelerated this has become. I mean, the last three years I've seen in this event doubling of the number of partners who are just moving their workloads, whether it's compute, storage network to a hybrid cloud in one. So that acceleration has started and we expect in the next two to three years this will become mainstream. That I'm always right. We're been down that exact same journey where we've, we've done a lot of things up into the cloud like in AWS now, but we've also done a private cloud which enabled us as more like a development or a on-prem tool that allowed us to build, learn, and take applications that were not really ready for the cloud, are native for the cloud, build them on prem, wherever, a little bit more freedom to do some things and then learn and then move them up to the public cloud. So we've been down that exact same journey. >>So I also want to ask about a buzzword here, five G five G the arrival of five G. what it means to your industry and whether or not being in the cloud is ness is a necessary prerequisite to really capture all the benefits. >>I'm going to start on me. Sure, go ahead. No, I was just saying if you look at 5g, the reason it's so fundamentally different from previous generations is because 5g opens up a bunch of use cases that traditional TG for genetics did not and the size and skin of those use cases including like billions of devices and having really cool use cases like gaming and health and automotive and robotics in 10 places a huge burden on an infrastructure, which means cloudification does become a massive requisite. The level of skill size devices, latency profiles is something you only get when you are on a cloud infrastructure. So Greg, I agree 100% and this is going to drive new innovation that we've never seen before as we obviously being Verizon. 5g is one of our big, big bats. Obviously. That's one of the things that Andy and Hans talked about yesterday at the announcement here at reinvent and where we're seeing now with clarification, it's, it's literally I think one of the cornerstones of how it's going to work because we're going to have to put so much out to the far edge and out into as close to the customers as we can. >>The only way you're going to do that is through the cloud and using the cloud services like outpost and other services to push that out close to the, to our customers. So 5g and cloud are synonymous. They're going to go hand in hand. It's the only way it's going to work. And when, if I just save one last thing on what Greg said, cloudification was happening anyways and it was a great efficiency driver for all organizations. Five G's almost come in and lit a match and said, here's a lot of revenue opportunities that you can get on top and that has just accelerated >>the whole thing with distribution of five G and cloud. So that that's going to happen. >>Yeah, I think we're really only seeing the beginning. It's so early on in 5g and the journey to the cloud that I think next year's reinvent and the year after that I think we're going to look back and say this was really just the very beginning of what we're learning, what this technology can do for the world. >>I want to ask about innovation and this is something that Andy Jassy talked about in his fireside chat this morning is how AWS maintains its startup mentality even though it is of course a enormous company. How does, how do you think about innovation and approach innovation at Verizon? How do you make sure you are continuing to experiment and push boundaries even though you are a large and complex organization yourself? >>It's a good question. That's something we are always pushing. I think it starts from the top with Hans, he's, he's made one of his key pillars of innovation, of what we have to drive, listening to our customers and building on what they need, but we've spent a lot of time on redefining how we work to adapt to the cloud. So the days of in the past of, you know, we'll do one release every quarter, it's now how many releases a day can you do? And the only way you can do that innovation through bucket testing, through AB testing is literally embracing the cloud and doing small tests here and there on stuff. So it's really now learning from the internet startups, trying to keep that startup mentality in a company the size that's 137,000 employees. But it's building that culture and I think Hans has been a great leader to really drive that, that different way of working. So, >>um, well we've seen a dizzying number of announcements from AWS, new products and new services that are coming out. What are, what is most caught your attention and how are you thinking about how to help clients capture the benefits of what AWS is offering? >>You know, the thing that struck me yesterday when I was looking at the keynote was this is probably the first time there is a recognition in the industry that it's an ecosystem play. And what I mean by that is a lot of the challenges that were seen in the last couple of years around getting 5g mainstream, getting all these things in the market was who does it, who supports them and this whole ecosystem and yesterday's announcement where you know Andy enhance and other carriers like water, phone and so on are coming in and saying, you know what? Let's do this together. Let's collaborate. To me that really hit the Mark because as you start building specific use cases to make this real for a consumer like us, you will see that an ecosystem plays the only way to make this a reality. And that's what really struck me. If you look at Waveland, if you look at local zones, all the announcements that were done yesterday, all of them require app development communities, escalates session partnerships. It requires hardware partnerships, services firms. It requires of omic Accenture to come in and do this secret sauce. So there's lot of things that have to >>be done there. And I believe that's what really caught my eye, that it's an ecosystem. Now you have the amount of collaboration going forward. Is going to be unprecedented because no one company is going to be able to do all of it. >>So how do we, you're both technology veterans. I mean you're just babes. You're, you're just teenagers of course. But thinking about how different it is today versus when you were just beginning your careers in terms of, I mean we have this idea of this cutthroat competitive world of technology, but as you said, there is, these companies need each other. I mean they're there, they're competing of course, but they also desperately need each other to make sure their business models are successful. So can you just describe this landscape for, for our viewers in terms of what you've seen as changes and whether or not these changes are for the good? >>Well, starting in the mainframe days, which is where I started and then kind of went wound, don't, you know, windows NT and the distributed compute, you're right, it was very do it ourselves. We're the only ones that could do it. You have to hide everything from all your competitors because we're providing a solution and nobody sees anybody else a secret sauce. And obviously protecting IP was key. Now we've seen open source take a much broader stroke across the canvas and we've also now everyone's got what are we best at and how do we use that rather than trying to be all things to everybody and building partnerships. So you're right, we have partnerships with company that we compete with, but we also have relationships. We need to work together to make this happen. So it is completely different from what it was 10 years ago, 20 years ago on how you're collaborating on one part of a company who should come. >>Competing is one area, but you're actually collaborating to build a product to go to market together at another one. So it's really interesting. I mean the market forces have changed dramatically. I mean, I remember when I was in my telecom operator days with BT, we used to as great selling or love technology, we used to start in the labs and in the labs we use engineering was a sort of bread and butter. And then this focus on customer centricity in the last couple of years around so much choice, so much availability of solutions in the market. And as Greg said, the collaboration is a must do now. And that's why that focus changed for us. And I see now this customer centricity becoming so important that what does the end user really want? And then that comes with it and realization that says, okay, I am not able to provide this by myself, but I do know how to solve for it. >>And that's when you have to bring in others who can create a solution. You're absolutely right because you know, 10 years ago, 1520 years ago, technology was still so new. Most people weren't comfortable yet and really knew what it could do or what they wanted. And it was a room full of architects designing what it was going to be. Now it's a room full of customers telling you what they want and going out. So it's completely changed now where we'll build what the customer, what we think the customer needs. Now we're building what the customer tells us they want. So it's been a one 80 >>so Greg, I know before the cameras were rolling, you were talking about how you'd been to this conference years ago and now just the growth that it has experienced has really shocked your, your sphere system. Um, what kinds of conversations are you having? What are the messages that you're hearing, a particular letter that are particularly resonant to you right now? This idea of the fourth industrial revolution. Do you buy it? >>I absolutely buy it and it's not just drinking the Koolaid because I work at Verizon. It's actually seeing what's possible in health. What's possible in gaming, automotive industry. Like you were saying at the beginning, it's one thing that struck me in Pedder was through the conversation we were having of how many people I've met here and when I was walking through the expo downstairs I was like, Oh, we have a relationship with them now. We have relationship with them. There's like half the floor down there that we have some sort of relationship with that were other customer or a partner or providing services to that. It's, it's, it's changed where before you'd have a booth and you're like, how many people can we get over there? Now it's like how do we get a booth with our partners that we can talk about a common solution that we're providing back? >>So it's, it's been amazing from like it reinvent four or five years ago it was like one hotel was still pretty full up to like four or five hotels now with with 65,000 people or something. It's, it's amazing. But, but the conversations before too used to be, we can only talk if we go into a private room over here. It's now that there's so many people and so many conversations and they're like, Oh let me pull them all in. Let me pull Rebecca cause we're all talking about the same thing now. So it's become more open. There's still sure there's IP and things we have to protect and we all have our company strategies, but there's now there's so much collaboration, there's a lot more conversations going on now. I mean the focus will now move to how do we operationalize this industrial revolution because that's where a lot of engineering horsepower, a lot of scaling would have to happen in terms of, it would be great to launch health as a service or gaming as a service and all of these things. >>But you know when things go wrong, which Deville in the early years of adoption, somebody is going to have to take the call, somebody is going to have to manage the customers. Somebody who's going to have to, because that's where the test would happen in terms of okay this is going to stick and this is going to work. So to me the next two to three years of this event will be around how do I operationalize and scale what we've now started? Cause I think that's where the rubber is going to hit the road. And I think even at Accenture we see this with all our work. It's moving more and more towards how do I monetize the use cases, how do I now build on it? How do I implement at scale? So that's, that's really what I see happening >>coming up. We were, we're on, we're on the cusp of 2020 there's so many new emerging technologies and of course the old technologies which are still pretty new machine learning, AI, IOT. What are some of the exciting trends that you're looking at coming in next year and the next three to five years in terms of your business and an industry wide? Two ML? >>Well for me there's obviously the stuff that we're talking about with five G and waving, but one that really struck me at this conference was how we're going to be treating data differently or I should say storage of data differently. Where before it was like buy huge storage devices and you'd have petabytes and petabytes or exabytes of data in a data somewhere, data centers somewhere. It's now distributed out to the far edge. It's, it's going to be much more in the cloud, much more dispersed. Obviously that's going to bring challenges around, you know, with, with GDPR, with, with, you know, the, the California protection act, all of those that are coming as well of how we're going to deal with that. So absolutely the 5g and the announcements went on yesterday. But in my slice of the world, looking at how are we going to manage, transform, handle, distribute data and how we're going to protect user's privacy through all of that is really interesting. And I think a new field that we're, it's just changing so rapidly day to day >>and one that's really part of our national conversation too in terms of privacy and security. >>Well I think to me the key trend would be adjacencies. And what I mean by that is we've always been a little bit siloed traditionally in terms of, you know, there is a telco industry solution and then there is a mining solution and then there is a automotive solution, right? And the technology is blurring these lines. Now, you know, like as Greg said, I can have a intelligent 5g conversation with a gentleman, car manufacturing company that I wouldn't have dreamed of having a couple of years ago. So that trend is set to accelerate because 5g edge compute, all of these things are going to be more and more applicable to adjacent industries. And this is why I always believe the telecom sector has a pivotal role, almost a orchestrator role that says as these industries look for solutions we have those, we just haven't adapted and customized are social. That I think would be a big trend. I see other industries are going to cash in on what we've done. >>I'm all, Greg, thank you so much for coming on the cube. A really fascinating conversation. Oh, pleasure. I'm Rebecca Knight. Stay tuned for more of the cubes live coverage of the Accenture executive summit. Coming up in just a little bit.

(uplifting music) >> Narrator: Partners. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and Stu Miniman. >> US Amazon Web Services re:Invent 2016 their annual conference. 32,000 people, record setting number. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman co-host in theCUBE for three days of wall-to-wall coverage. Day two, day one of the conference our next guest is Kiran Bhageshpur, who's the CEO and co-founder of Igneous Systems. He was a hot startup in the, I don't want to say storage area, kind of disrupting storage in a new way. Kiran great to see you, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks a lot, glad to be here, John. >> So, you're living the dream the cloud dream, it's not a nightmare for you because you're one of the progressive new ways. I want to get your thoughts on Andy Jassy's Keynote because he really lays out the new mindset of the cloud. Your startup that you founded with your team is doing something kind of, I won't say contrarian, some might say contrarian, but contrarians usually become the big winners, like Amazon was a contrarian now they're obviously the winning. So, take a minute to explain what you guys are doing. You're funded by Madrona Ventures and NEA, New Enterprise Associates, great backers, smart. Your track record at Isilon, you know the business. Take a minute to describe what you guys are doing. >> Great, yes I will. So, Igneous Systems was founded to really deliver cloud services to the enterprise data center for data-centric workloads. So what to we mean by that? With cloud services, just like with Amazon, customers don't buy hardware, license software. They do not monitor or manage your infrastructure. They consume it across API and they pay for it by the drip rather than the drink. Similarly, the same case with us but we make that all available within a customer's data center itself. And we focus on sort of data-centric, data heavy workloads. I don't know whether you saw James Hamilton's-- >> Yeah. >> Speech yesterday, but he also talked about the same thing that Mary Meeker talked about earlier this year which is an overwhelming amount of data generated today is machine generated and machine consumed and that's growing really rapidly. And our view is the same techniques that have made Amazon so powerful and so valuable are needed out at the edge or on-premise, close to where users and machines are generating and using the data. So that's kind of what we do. Very much the cloud model taken out to the enterprise data center. So, think of it as a hybrid. >> Kiran, let's talk about storage and where it lives because I think something that many people miss is that cloud typically starts with very compute heavy types of applications and we know that data is tough to move. I mean, Amazon rolled out a truck to show how they move 100 petabyes. And not just to show it, this is a new product they had 'cause customers do want to be able to migrate data and that's really tough and takes a lot of time. You mentioned IoT at the edge, they announced kind of query services on your data up in S3, so what are you hearing from customers? You know, kind of large data from your previous jobs. Where's the data living, where's data being created, where does data need to be worked on and how does that play into what you're doing? >> That's a great question Stu. What we find with customers, especially the one's with large and growing data sets is there is still a challenge of not just how to go store it but how to go process that on the fly. On a camera today or a next generation microscope could produce tens of terabytes of data per hour and that is not stuff that you can move across the internet to the cloud. And so the ask and the call from customers is to be able to go ingest that, curate that, process that locally and the cloud still has a very compelling role to play as a distribution mechanism and for a sharing mechanism of that data. I found it pretty wild that a big part of Andy Jassy's Keynote was for the first time they talked about hybrid and acknowledged the fact that it is the cloud and cloud-like techniques out in the enterprise data center. So, I look at that as hugely validating what we have been talking about which is bringing cloud native paradigms into the enterprise data center. >> Let's talk about that operational model because what you're highlighting and what Jassy pointed out is an operational model now for IT. >> Kiran: Yep. >> How are you guys creating value for customers? And be specific, is it, 'cause the on-prem is not going away, we've talked about this before and certainly VMware sees the cloud but also on-prem too. What is the value for customers? Because now this operational model of on the cloud is there, one way-- >> Yes. >> But how do I get cloud inside my data center? >> The way we do that is, very similar to the cloud operating model, right? So, we sell customers essentially an annual subscription service and that service is delivered using appliances that are purpose-built. Think of it as, like snowball, if you will, that goes into the customers data centers fully managed by our software running in our cloud. So, for a customer point of view, it happens to live within their data center, but they are consuming it pretty much the same way that they would consume a cloud service. That's the value, it's the same tool chains, the same programming paradigms that they are used to with, say, a native OS. But within their data centers at lower latencies addressing the same things that Andy Jassy brought up, which is you need a truck to go move large amounts of data. >> Well, I want to also bring up James Hamilton's presentation. You mentioned that yesterday one of the key points he made was that scaling up for these peak loads like they have on the Friday's, their Prime Friday spikes, they do instantly and elastic is a big deal we know that. His point though was they would have to provision on bare metal or in the data center months in advance to even rationalize what that peak could be which still is an unknown number. So, the scale point and provisioning is a huge headache for customers, so that's why that's relevant. How do you guys answer that claim when you say, "Hey, I need stuff to be done fast, "I don't have time to provision"? How do you guys, do you address that at all? How do you talk to that specific point? >> We take care of the provisioning and the additional expansion and shrinking of capacity within the customer's data center, because just like Amazon monitors their infrastructure users in the data center, we do that for our infrastructure within the customer's data center, and therefore we can react to go scale up or scale down. But then there's another point to the whole thing, which is the interesting thing is the elasticity is much more important for compute as opposed to data. Data just linearly grows, you never throw that stuff away. The things that you captured, the processing is highly elastic and you might want to do some additional processing and burst out and so on. So, that's another aspect of hybrid we see with our customers which is, I want my work flow here, I want to be able to burst out to the public cloud for that peak capacity that I don't want to have infrastructure locally for. >> So Kiran, sorry. So James Hamilton's presentation talks a lot about, just that hyper scale. They claim they've got the most scale and therefore nobody else should do anything because oversimplifying a little bit, but we've got the best price, we've got the whole stack, give you all the solutions. You talk to enterprises. Scale means different things for different applications for what I need to get done, what I have. What does that really mean to you? How does that hybrid piece fit in to the whole scale discussion? >> So, a lot of what we do is really ride on the coattails of the Amazon and the Google and the Microsoft because everyone has access to the same raw components, hard drives and CPUs and so on and so forth. And then the question is how do you go assemble those in a form factor that is appropriate for that particular use case? If you're going to go build a data center that's one level of scale, but if you look at a vast majority of applications and enterprises, their scales are much smaller. So, we literally look at taking a rack of infrastructure which might have, say, 40 servers and a couple of switches in sheet metal and shrinking that to a 4U form factor which has got 60 of our nano servers which has got switches and has got sheet metal. So, it's shrinking the whole thing down. The economy's of scale are still quite compelling because we use the exact same raw materials from the same suppliers to the cloud guys, right? And the real difference in cost is how things are put together and how they are operationalized. In which case, we are much more like Amazon than not. >> The other thing that's really interesting to watch, if you look at Amazon's storage move, is storage is in a silo, they've now got all these services that I can start doing this. How does the enterprise look at that? How does the solution like yours enable us to be able to use our data more? >> I absolutely think there is a palpable need for and desire for those sorts of new paradigms in the enterprise data center too because what you can do with not just storage but with lambda and with a bunch of other advanced services on top of that, what that really does is allows enterprises and customers to just focus on what is differentiated to them. This is the whole low-code, no-code moment, if you will, right, movement, and that's a compelling trend. It is something that we've actively embraced. We've got our architecture enables that on day one and that's kind of the way you're going to go build applications now onwards. >> So will we see lambda functions calling things on your end? >> Stay tuned. I think my, yeah, stay tuned. >> That's a smile, that's a yes. (laughs) Talk about the drivers in your business, 'cause you guys are new, you're a startup. For the folks watching you're making some bets, big bets obviously funded by some pretty big venture capitalists out there. What is your big bet? Is it true private cloud is going to emerge on-premise? Is the bet that cloud adoption with scalable compute and storage is going to be unmanaged or manageless or serverless, what's the big bet? >> So our bet is the cloud is going to win and I mean the cloud paradigm, which means consuming infrastructure by the drip rather than the drink across APIs. Flexibility, agility is going to win. One answer which is very compelling is the public cloud today. We believe that similar patterns will exist on the on-premise world and we believe we are very well positioned to supply that thing. And the infrastructure which shrinks would be very traditional infrastructure and software technology stacks which has really existed in the enterprise data center for the last 20 years. That will shrink and everything will look similar as in highly flexible, highly scalable, very easy to go put things together and you're going to have very similar patterns in both the public cloud and within your data center. >> Our Wikibon research team is looking at the practitioner side of the market. One of the things they're observing is, among a lot of things, is that you're seeing AWS teams come together. We're seeing Accenture was on earlier talking about the same dynamic. That's the pattern that we're seeing is these teams are coming together, some handful of people, the pizza box teams-- >> Yep. >> As Jeff Bezos calls it, growing into fully functional bigger teams. So, depending upon that progression, what's your advice to practitioners? And how do you add value into this momentum of as they scratch their head go, "Okay, we're going to go to the cloud"? So they know that's the mandate. How do you help them and why should they look at your solution and where do you fit into that? >> So one of the things customers and partners tell us is we are a great on-ramp to the cloud if you will. Everybody wants to embrace the new programming patterns, new programming paradigms and many people have taken that big leap and done the full shift in one step. You've heard Finra, you've heard Capital One all of these guys talk, but not everyone is that far out there. So what we sort of become for these folks is a stepping stone. We are on-premise. It allows them to get used to it. They start using the same patterns that can scale there. There can decide what workflows remain local and why and what go there, and that's our view. We very much live in they hybrid world to burst out to the world, bring it back as appropriate. >> Kiran thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, we really appreciate it, we're getting the break but I do want to ask one personal question. You're back in the entrepreneurial zeal again, you've got the startup, you have some capital but you're not loaded with cash, a good amount to achieve what you need to do. What's it like for you right now? I mean, what do you believe in? What's your guiding principles and what's it like to get back on the entrepreneurial treadmill again? >> You know, it's actually quite exhilarating and liberating to be back in a startup environment because it forces you to focus on what is important what is urgent and important at all points in time, and a guiding principle for us is less is more. Let's be driven by customers and do what is required there and then slowly extend that out. And actually, being a startup and not having infinite money to throw like, large legacy players would frees you from trying to do too many things and focus on only what is important and that's really key to success. >> And how are you making the decisions as an executive like, product-wise? Is it more agile, are you guys doubling down? >> Very, very agile, we can move very quickly. Since we are delivering a service, we are continuously updating infrastructure just like Amazon does within their data center so we can turn around very, very quickly. So I'm very impressed the fact that the Amazon rolls out 1,000 new features this year, but I can see how that is possible at scale and that's what we're doing. >> At Isilon you were very successful scaling up that generation of web scale, we saw that with Facebook and the Apples of the world. What's different now than then? Just in the short years between the web scalers dominating to now full Multi-Cloud, Hybrid Cloud cloud. In your mind, what's different about the landscape out there? Share your thoughts. >> I think there's a couple of things. One of them is Isilon was incredible, was a very useful infrastructure, was something that was easy to deploy, but it was still that something you built, you managed, you owned, if you will. The big transition is away from that, from build to consume and not worry about that infrastructure at all. And that is not something that you can retrofit into an existing architecture, you have to start from scratch to go do that. So, that's the biggest number one. Two, second one is just the scale is bigger. You heard Andy Jassy talk about the exobyte moving problem and he commented on the fact that exobytes are not all that rare and he's true because you go back 10 years ago, maybe four companies had an exobyte problem. It's now a lot more than that. And so the scale is two or three orders of magnitude larger than when Isilon was growing up. >> Scales at table stakes and consumption of infrastructure, that's a dev-ops ethos gone mainstream. >> Yes. >> Thanks so much for sharing. We're live here in Las Vegas for Amazon re:Invent. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, we're back with more live coverage, three days of wall-to-wall coverage. theCUBE will be right back. (upbeat electronic music) (relaxing guitar music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello everyone. Welcome to theCube's presentation of the "AWS Startup Showcase." The topic this episode is AI and machine learning, top startups building foundational model infrastructure. This is season three, episode one of the ongoing series covering exciting startups from the AWS ecosystem. And this time we're talking about AI and machine learning. I'm your host, John Furrier. I'm excited I'm joined today by Robert Nishihara, who's the co-founder and CEO of a hot startup called Anyscale. He's here to talk about Ray, the open source project, Anyscale's infrastructure for foundation as well. Robert, thank you for joining us today. >> Yeah, thanks so much as well. >> I've been following your company since the founding pre pandemic and you guys really had a great vision scaled up and in a perfect position for this big wave that we all see with ChatGPT and OpenAI that's gone mainstream. Finally, AI has broken out through the ropes and now gone mainstream, so I think you guys are really well positioned. I'm looking forward to to talking with you today. But before we get into it, introduce the core mission for Anyscale. Why do you guys exist? What is the North Star for Anyscale? >> Yeah, like you mentioned, there's a tremendous amount of excitement about AI right now. You know, I think a lot of us believe that AI can transform just every different industry. So one of the things that was clear to us when we started this company was that the amount of compute needed to do AI was just exploding. Like to actually succeed with AI, companies like OpenAI or Google or you know, these companies getting a lot of value from AI, were not just running these machine learning models on their laptops or on a single machine. They were scaling these applications across hundreds or thousands or more machines and GPUs and other resources in the Cloud. And so to actually succeed with AI, and this has been one of the biggest trends in computing, maybe the biggest trend in computing in, you know, in recent history, the amount of compute has been exploding. And so to actually succeed with that AI, to actually build these scalable applications and scale the AI applications, there's a tremendous software engineering lift to build the infrastructure to actually run these scalable applications. And that's very hard to do. So one of the reasons many AI projects and initiatives fail is that, or don't make it to production, is the need for this scale, the infrastructure lift, to actually make it happen. So our goal here with Anyscale and Ray, is to make that easy, is to make scalable computing easy. So that as a developer or as a business, if you want to do AI, if you want to get value out of AI, all you need to know is how to program on your laptop. Like, all you need to know is how to program in Python. And if you can do that, then you're good to go. Then you can do what companies like OpenAI or Google do and get value out of machine learning. >> That programming example of how easy it is with Python reminds me of the early days of Cloud, when infrastructure as code was talked about was, it was just code the infrastructure programmable. That's super important. That's what AI people wanted, first program AI. That's the new trend. And I want to understand, if you don't mind explaining, the relationship that Anyscale has to these foundational models and particular the large language models, also called LLMs, was seen with like OpenAI and ChatGPT. Before you get into the relationship that you have with them, can you explain why the hype around foundational models? Why are people going crazy over foundational models? What is it and why is it so important? >> Yeah, so foundational models and foundation models are incredibly important because they enable businesses and developers to get value out of machine learning, to use machine learning off the shelf with these large models that have been trained on tons of data and that are useful out of the box. And then, of course, you know, as a business or as a developer, you can take those foundational models and repurpose them or fine tune them or adapt them to your specific use case and what you want to achieve. But it's much easier to do that than to train them from scratch. And I think there are three, for people to actually use foundation models, there are three main types of workloads or problems that need to be solved. One is training these foundation models in the first place, like actually creating them. The second is fine tuning them and adapting them to your use case. And the third is serving them and actually deploying them. Okay, so Ray and Anyscale are used for all of these three different workloads. Companies like OpenAI or Cohere that train large language models. Or open source versions like GPTJ are done on top of Ray. There are many startups and other businesses that fine tune, that, you know, don't want to train the large underlying foundation models, but that do want to fine tune them, do want to adapt them to their purposes, and build products around them and serve them, those are also using Ray and Anyscale for that fine tuning and that serving. And so the reason that Ray and Anyscale are important here is that, you know, building and using foundation models requires a huge scale. It requires a lot of data. It requires a lot of compute, GPUs, TPUs, other resources. And to actually take advantage of that and actually build these scalable applications, there's a lot of infrastructure that needs to happen under the hood. And so you can either use Ray and Anyscale to take care of that and manage the infrastructure and solve those infrastructure problems. Or you can build the infrastructure and manage the infrastructure yourself, which you can do, but it's going to slow your team down. It's going to, you know, many of the businesses we work with simply don't want to be in the business of managing infrastructure and building infrastructure. They want to focus on product development and move faster. >> I know you got a keynote presentation we're going to go to in a second, but I think you hit on something I think is the real tipping point, doing it yourself, hard to do. These are things where opportunities are and the Cloud did that with data centers. Turned a data center and made it an API. The heavy lifting went away and went to the Cloud so people could be more creative and build their product. In this case, build their creativity. Is that kind of what's the big deal? Is that kind of a big deal happening that you guys are taking the learnings and making that available so people don't have to do that? >> That's exactly right. So today, if you want to succeed with AI, if you want to use AI in your business, infrastructure work is on the critical path for doing that. To do AI, you have to build infrastructure. You have to figure out how to scale your applications. That's going to change. We're going to get to the point, and you know, with Ray and Anyscale, we're going to remove the infrastructure from the critical path so that as a developer or as a business, all you need to focus on is your application logic, what you want the the program to do, what you want your application to do, how you want the AI to actually interface with the rest of your product. Now the way that will happen is that Ray and Anyscale will still, the infrastructure work will still happen. It'll just be under the hood and taken care of by Ray in Anyscale. And so I think something like this is really necessary for AI to reach its potential, for AI to have the impact and the reach that we think it will, you have to make it easier to do. >> And just for clarification to point out, if you don't mind explaining the relationship of Ray and Anyscale real quick just before we get into the presentation. >> So Ray is an open source project. We created it. We were at Berkeley doing machine learning. We started Ray so that, in order to provide an easy, a simple open source tool for building and running scalable applications. And Anyscale is the managed version of Ray, basically we will run Ray for you in the Cloud, provide a lot of tools around the developer experience and managing the infrastructure and providing more performance and superior infrastructure. >> Awesome. I know you got a presentation on Ray and Anyscale and you guys are positioning as the infrastructure for foundational models. So I'll let you take it away and then when you're done presenting, we'll come back, I'll probably grill you with a few questions and then we'll close it out so take it away. >> Robert: Sounds great. So I'll say a little bit about how companies are using Ray and Anyscale for foundation models. The first thing I want to mention is just why we're doing this in the first place. And the underlying observation, the underlying trend here, and this is a plot from OpenAI, is that the amount of compute needed to do machine learning has been exploding. It's been growing at something like 35 times every 18 months. This is absolutely enormous. And other people have written papers measuring this trend and you get different numbers. But the point is, no matter how you slice and dice it, it' a astronomical rate. Now if you compare that to something we're all familiar with, like Moore's Law, which says that, you know, the processor performance doubles every roughly 18 months, you can see that there's just a tremendous gap between the needs, the compute needs of machine learning applications, and what you can do with a single chip, right. So even if Moore's Law were continuing strong and you know, doing what it used to be doing, even if that were the case, there would still be a tremendous gap between what you can do with the chip and what you need in order to do machine learning. And so given this graph, what we've seen, and what has been clear to us since we started this company, is that doing AI requires scaling. There's no way around it. It's not a nice to have, it's really a requirement. And so that led us to start Ray, which is the open source project that we started to make it easy to build these scalable Python applications and scalable machine learning applications. And since we started the project, it's been adopted by a tremendous number of companies. Companies like OpenAI, which use Ray to train their large models like ChatGPT, companies like Uber, which run all of their deep learning and classical machine learning on top of Ray, companies like Shopify or Spotify or Instacart or Lyft or Netflix, ByteDance, which use Ray for their machine learning infrastructure. Companies like Ant Group, which makes Alipay, you know, they use Ray across the board for fraud detection, for online learning, for detecting money laundering, you know, for graph processing, stream processing. Companies like Amazon, you know, run Ray at a tremendous scale and just petabytes of data every single day. And so the project has seen just enormous adoption since, over the past few years. And one of the most exciting use cases is really providing the infrastructure for building training, fine tuning, and serving foundation models. So I'll say a little bit about, you know, here are some examples of companies using Ray for foundation models. Cohere trains large language models. OpenAI also trains large language models. You can think about the workloads required there are things like supervised pre-training, also reinforcement learning from human feedback. So this is not only the regular supervised learning, but actually more complex reinforcement learning workloads that take human input about what response to a particular question, you know is better than a certain other response. And incorporating that into the learning. There's open source versions as well, like GPTJ also built on top of Ray as well as projects like Alpa coming out of UC Berkeley. So these are some of the examples of exciting projects in organizations, training and creating these large language models and serving them using Ray. Okay, so what actually is Ray? Well, there are two layers to Ray. At the lowest level, there's the core Ray system. This is essentially low level primitives for building scalable Python applications. Things like taking a Python function or a Python class and executing them in the cluster setting. So Ray core is extremely flexible and you can build arbitrary scalable applications on top of Ray. So on top of Ray, on top of the core system, what really gives Ray a lot of its power is this ecosystem of scalable libraries. So on top of the core system you have libraries, scalable libraries for ingesting and pre-processing data, for training your models, for fine tuning those models, for hyper parameter tuning, for doing batch processing and batch inference, for doing model serving and deployment, right. And a lot of the Ray users, the reason they like Ray is that they want to run multiple workloads. They want to train and serve their models, right. They want to load their data and feed that into training. And Ray provides common infrastructure for all of these different workloads. So this is a little overview of what Ray, the different components of Ray. So why do people choose to go with Ray? I think there are three main reasons. The first is the unified nature. The fact that it is common infrastructure for scaling arbitrary workloads, from data ingest to pre-processing to training to inference and serving, right. This also includes the fact that it's future proof. AI is incredibly fast moving. And so many people, many companies that have built their own machine learning infrastructure and standardized on particular workflows for doing machine learning have found that their workflows are too rigid to enable new capabilities. If they want to do reinforcement learning, if they want to use graph neural networks, they don't have a way of doing that with their standard tooling. And so Ray, being future proof and being flexible and general gives them that ability. Another reason people choose Ray in Anyscale is the scalability. This is really our bread and butter. This is the reason, the whole point of Ray, you know, making it easy to go from your laptop to running on thousands of GPUs, making it easy to scale your development workloads and run them in production, making it easy to scale, you know, training to scale data ingest, pre-processing and so on. So scalability and performance, you know, are critical for doing machine learning and that is something that Ray provides out of the box. And lastly, Ray is an open ecosystem. You can run it anywhere. You can run it on any Cloud provider. Google, you know, Google Cloud, AWS, Asure. You can run it on your Kubernetes cluster. You can run it on your laptop. It's extremely portable. And not only that, it's framework agnostic. You can use Ray to scale arbitrary Python workloads. You can use it to scale and it integrates with libraries like TensorFlow or PyTorch or JAX or XG Boost or Hugging Face or PyTorch Lightning, right, or Scikit-learn or just your own arbitrary Python code. It's open source. And in addition to integrating with the rest of the machine learning ecosystem and these machine learning frameworks, you can use Ray along with all of the other tooling in the machine learning ecosystem. That's things like weights and biases or ML flow, right. Or you know, different data platforms like Databricks, you know, Delta Lake or Snowflake or tools for model monitoring for feature stores, all of these integrate with Ray. And that's, you know, Ray provides that kind of flexibility so that you can integrate it into the rest of your workflow. And then Anyscale is the scalable compute platform that's built on top, you know, that provides Ray. So Anyscale is a managed Ray service that runs in the Cloud. And what Anyscale does is it offers the best way to run Ray. And if you think about what you get with Anyscale, there are fundamentally two things. One is about moving faster, accelerating the time to market. And you get that by having the managed service so that as a developer you don't have to worry about managing infrastructure, you don't have to worry about configuring infrastructure. You also, it provides, you know, optimized developer workflows. Things like easily moving from development to production, things like having the observability tooling, the debug ability to actually easily diagnose what's going wrong in a distributed application. So things like the dashboards and the other other kinds of tooling for collaboration, for monitoring and so on. And then on top of that, so that's the first bucket, developer productivity, moving faster, faster experimentation and iteration. The second reason that people choose Anyscale is superior infrastructure. So this is things like, you know, cost deficiency, being able to easily take advantage of spot instances, being able to get higher GPU utilization, things like faster cluster startup times and auto scaling. Things like just overall better performance and faster scheduling. And so these are the kinds of things that Anyscale provides on top of Ray. It's the managed infrastructure. It's fast, it's like the developer productivity and velocity as well as performance. So this is what I wanted to share about Ray in Anyscale. >> John: Awesome. >> Provide that context. But John, I'm curious what you think. >> I love it. I love the, so first of all, it's a platform because that's the platform architecture right there. So just to clarify, this is an Anyscale platform, not- >> That's right. >> Tools. So you got tools in the platform. Okay, that's key. Love that managed service. Just curious, you mentioned Python multiple times, is that because of PyTorch and TensorFlow or Python's the most friendly with machine learning or it's because it's very common amongst all developers? >> That's a great question. Python is the language that people are using to do machine learning. So it's the natural starting point. Now, of course, Ray is actually designed in a language agnostic way and there are companies out there that use Ray to build scalable Java applications. But for the most part right now we're focused on Python and being the best way to build these scalable Python and machine learning applications. But, of course, down the road there always is that potential. >> So if you're slinging Python code out there and you're watching that, you're watching this video, get on Anyscale bus quickly. Also, I just, while you were giving the presentation, I couldn't help, since you mentioned OpenAI, which by the way, congratulations 'cause they've had great scale, I've noticed in their rapid growth 'cause they were the fastest company to the number of users than anyone in the history of the computer industry, so major successor, OpenAI and ChatGPT, huge fan. I'm not a skeptic at all. I think it's just the beginning, so congratulations. But I actually typed into ChatGPT, what are the top three benefits of Anyscale and came up with scalability, flexibility, and ease of use. Obviously, scalability is what you guys are called. >> That's pretty good. >> So that's what they came up with. So they nailed it. Did you have an inside prompt training, buy it there? Only kidding. (Robert laughs) >> Yeah, we hard coded that one. >> But that's the kind of thing that came up really, really quickly if I asked it to write a sales document, it probably will, but this is the future interface. This is why people are getting excited about the foundational models and the large language models because it's allowing the interface with the user, the consumer, to be more human, more natural. And this is clearly will be in every application in the future. >> Absolutely. This is how people are going to interface with software, how they're going to interface with products in the future. It's not just something, you know, not just a chat bot that you talk to. This is going to be how you get things done, right. How you use your web browser or how you use, you know, how you use Photoshop or how you use other products. Like you're not going to spend hours learning all the APIs and how to use them. You're going to talk to it and tell it what you want it to do. And of course, you know, if it doesn't understand it, it's going to ask clarifying questions. You're going to have a conversation and then it'll figure it out. >> This is going to be one of those things, we're going to look back at this time Robert and saying, "Yeah, from that company, that was the beginning of that wave." And just like AWS and Cloud Computing, the folks who got in early really were in position when say the pandemic came. So getting in early is a good thing and that's what everyone's talking about is getting in early and playing around, maybe replatforming or even picking one or few apps to refactor with some staff and managed services. So people are definitely jumping in. So I have to ask you the ROI cost question. You mentioned some of those, Moore's Law versus what's going on in the industry. When you look at that kind of scale, the first thing that jumps out at people is, "Okay, I love it. Let's go play around." But what's it going to cost me? Am I going to be tied to certain GPUs? What's the landscape look like from an operational standpoint, from the customer? Are they locked in and the benefit was flexibility, are you flexible to handle any Cloud? What is the customers, what are they looking at? Basically, that's my question. What's the customer looking at? >> Cost is super important here and many of the companies, I mean, companies are spending a huge amount on their Cloud computing, on AWS, and on doing AI, right. And I think a lot of the advantage of Anyscale, what we can provide here is not only better performance, but cost efficiency. Because if we can run something faster and more efficiently, it can also use less resources and you can lower your Cloud spending, right. We've seen companies go from, you know, 20% GPU utilization with their current setup and the current tools they're using to running on Anyscale and getting more like 95, you know, 100% GPU utilization. That's something like a five x improvement right there. So depending on the kind of application you're running, you know, it's a significant cost savings. We've seen companies that have, you know, processing petabytes of data every single day with Ray going from, you know, getting order of magnitude cost savings by switching from what they were previously doing to running their application on Ray. And when you have applications that are spending, you know, potentially $100 million a year and getting a 10 X cost savings is just absolutely enormous. So these are some of the kinds of- >> Data infrastructure is super important. Again, if the customer, if you're a prospect to this and thinking about going in here, just like the Cloud, you got infrastructure, you got the platform, you got SaaS, same kind of thing's going to go on in AI. So I want to get into that, you know, ROI discussion and some of the impact with your customers that are leveraging the platform. But first I hear you got a demo. >> Robert: Yeah, so let me show you, let me give you a quick run through here. So what I have open here is the Anyscale UI. I've started a little Anyscale Workspace. So Workspaces are the Anyscale concept for interactive developments, right. So here, imagine I'm just, you want to have a familiar experience like you're developing on your laptop. And here I have a terminal. It's not on my laptop. It's actually in the cloud running on Anyscale. And I'm just going to kick this off. This is going to train a large language model, so OPT. And it's doing this on 32 GPUs. We've got a cluster here with a bunch of CPU cores, bunch of memory. And as that's running, and by the way, if I wanted to run this on instead of 32 GPUs, 64, 128, this is just a one line change when I launch the Workspace. And what I can do is I can pull up VS code, right. Remember this is the interactive development experience. I can look at the actual code. Here it's using Ray train to train the torch model. We've got the training loop and we're saying that each worker gets access to one GPU and four CPU cores. And, of course, as I make the model larger, this is using deep speed, as I make the model larger, I could increase the number of GPUs that each worker gets access to, right. And how that is distributed across the cluster. And if I wanted to run on CPUs instead of GPUs or a different, you know, accelerator type, again, this is just a one line change. And here we're using Ray train to train the models, just taking my vanilla PyTorch model using Hugging Face and then scaling that across a bunch of GPUs. And, of course, if I want to look at the dashboard, I can go to the Ray dashboard. There are a bunch of different visualizations I can look at. I can look at the GPU utilization. I can look at, you know, the CPU utilization here where I think we're currently loading the model and running that actual application to start the training. And some of the things that are really convenient here about Anyscale, both I can get that interactive development experience with VS code. You know, I can look at the dashboards. I can monitor what's going on. It feels, I have a terminal, it feels like my laptop, but it's actually running on a large cluster. And I can, with however many GPUs or other resources that I want. And so it's really trying to combine the best of having the familiar experience of programming on your laptop, but with the benefits, you know, being able to take advantage of all the resources in the Cloud to scale. And it's like when, you know, you're talking about cost efficiency. One of the biggest reasons that people waste money, one of the silly reasons for wasting money is just forgetting to turn off your GPUs. And what you can do here is, of course, things will auto terminate if they're idle. But imagine you go to sleep, I have this big cluster. You can turn it off, shut off the cluster, come back tomorrow, restart the Workspace, and you know, your big cluster is back up and all of your code changes are still there. All of your local file edits. It's like you just closed your laptop and came back and opened it up again. And so this is the kind of experience we want to provide for our users. So that's what I wanted to share with you. >> Well, I think that whole, couple of things, lines of code change, single line of code change, that's game changing. And then the cost thing, I mean human error is a big deal. People pass out at their computer. They've been coding all night or they just forget about it. I mean, and then it's just like leaving the lights on or your water running in your house. It's just, at the scale that it is, the numbers will add up. That's a huge deal. So I think, you know, compute back in the old days, there's no compute. Okay, it's just compute sitting there idle. But you know, data cranking the models is doing, that's a big point. >> Another thing I want to add there about cost efficiency is that we make it really easy to use, if you're running on Anyscale, to use spot instances and these preemptable instances that can just be significantly cheaper than the on-demand instances. And so when we see our customers go from what they're doing before to using Anyscale and they go from not using these spot instances 'cause they don't have the infrastructure around it, the fault tolerance to handle the preemption and things like that, to being able to just check a box and use spot instances and save a bunch of money. >> You know, this was my whole, my feature article at Reinvent last year when I met with Adam Selipsky, this next gen Cloud is here. I mean, it's not auto scale, it's infrastructure scale. It's agility. It's flexibility. I think this is where the world needs to go. Almost what DevOps did for Cloud and what you were showing me that demo had this whole SRE vibe. And remember Google had site reliability engines to manage all those servers. This is kind of like an SRE vibe for data at scale. I mean, a similar kind of order of magnitude. I mean, I might be a little bit off base there, but how would you explain it? >> It's a nice analogy. I mean, what we are trying to do here is get to the point where developers don't think about infrastructure. Where developers only think about their application logic. And where businesses can do AI, can succeed with AI, and build these scalable applications, but they don't have to build, you know, an infrastructure team. They don't have to develop that expertise. They don't have to invest years in building their internal machine learning infrastructure. They can just focus on the Python code, on their application logic, and run the stuff out of the box. >> Awesome. Well, I appreciate the time. Before we wrap up here, give a plug for the company. I know you got a couple websites. Again, go, Ray's got its own website. You got Anyscale. You got an event coming up. Give a plug for the company looking to hire. Put a plug in for the company. >> Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. So first of all, you know, we think AI is really going to transform every industry and the opportunity is there, right. We can be the infrastructure that enables all of that to happen, that makes it easy for companies to succeed with AI, and get value out of AI. Now we have, if you're interested in learning more about Ray, Ray has been emerging as the standard way to build scalable applications. Our adoption has been exploding. I mentioned companies like OpenAI using Ray to train their models. But really across the board companies like Netflix and Cruise and Instacart and Lyft and Uber, you know, just among tech companies. It's across every industry. You know, gaming companies, agriculture, you know, farming, robotics, drug discovery, you know, FinTech, we see it across the board. And all of these companies can get value out of AI, can really use AI to improve their businesses. So if you're interested in learning more about Ray and Anyscale, we have our Ray Summit coming up in September. This is going to highlight a lot of the most impressive use cases and stories across the industry. And if your business, if you want to use LLMs, you want to train these LLMs, these large language models, you want to fine tune them with your data, you want to deploy them, serve them, and build applications and products around them, give us a call, talk to us. You know, we can really take the infrastructure piece, you know, off the critical path and make that easy for you. So that's what I would say. And, you know, like you mentioned, we're hiring across the board, you know, engineering, product, go-to-market, and it's an exciting time. >> Robert Nishihara, co-founder and CEO of Anyscale, congratulations on a great company you've built and continuing to iterate on and you got growth ahead of you, you got a tailwind. I mean, the AI wave is here. I think OpenAI and ChatGPT, a customer of yours, have really opened up the mainstream visibility into this new generation of applications, user interface, roll of data, large scale, how to make that programmable so we're going to need that infrastructure. So thanks for coming on this season three, episode one of the ongoing series of the hot startups. In this case, this episode is the top startups building foundational model infrastructure for AI and ML. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music beginning) >> From the Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from the Cube and ETR, this is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante. >> Making predictions about the future of enterprise tech is more challenging if you strive to lay down forecasts that are measurable. In other words, if you make a prediction, you should be able to look back a year later and say, with some degree of certainty, whether the prediction came true or not, with evidence to back that up. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube Insights, powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we aim to do just that, with predictions about the macro IT spending environment, cost optimization, security, lots to talk about there, generative AI, cloud, and of course supercloud, blockchain adoption, data platforms, including commentary on Databricks, snowflake, and other key players, automation, events, and we may even have some bonus predictions around quantum computing, and perhaps some other areas. To make all this happen, we welcome back, for the third year in a row, my colleague and friend Eric Bradley from ETR. Eric, thanks for all you do for the community, and thanks for being part of this program. Again. >> I wouldn't miss it for the world. I always enjoy this one. Dave, good to see you. >> Yeah, so let me bring up this next slide and show you, actually come back to me if you would. I got to show the audience this. These are the inbounds that we got from PR firms starting in October around predictions. They know we do prediction posts. And so they'll send literally thousands and thousands of predictions from hundreds of experts in the industry, technologists, consultants, et cetera. And if you bring up the slide I can show you sort of the pattern that developed here. 40% of these thousands of predictions were from cyber. You had AI and data. If you combine those, it's still not close to cyber. Cost optimization was a big thing. Of course, cloud, some on DevOps, and software. Digital... Digital transformation got, you know, some lip service and SaaS. And then there was other, it's kind of around 2%. So quite remarkable, when you think about the focus on cyber, Eric. >> Yeah, there's two reasons why I think it makes sense, though. One, the cybersecurity companies have a lot of cash, so therefore the PR firms might be working a little bit harder for them than some of their other clients. (laughs) And then secondly, as you know, for multiple years now, when we do our macro survey, we ask, "What's your number one spending priority?" And again, it's security. It just isn't going anywhere. It just stays at the top. So I'm actually not that surprised by that little pie chart there, but I was shocked that SaaS was only 5%. You know, going back 10 years ago, that would've been the only thing anyone was talking about. >> Yeah. So true. All right, let's get into it. First prediction, we always start with kind of tech spending. Number one is tech spending increases between four and 5%. ETR has currently got it at 4.6% coming into 2023. This has been a consistently downward trend all year. We started, you know, much, much higher as we've been reporting. Bottom line is the fed is still in control. They're going to ease up on tightening, is the expectation, they're going to shoot for a soft landing. But you know, my feeling is this slingshot economy is going to continue, and it's going to continue to confound, whether it's supply chains or spending. The, the interesting thing about the ETR data, Eric, and I want you to comment on this, the largest companies are the most aggressive to cut. They're laying off, smaller firms are spending faster. They're actually growing at a much larger, faster rate as are companies in EMEA. And that's a surprise. That's outpacing the US and APAC. Chime in on this, Eric. >> Yeah, I was surprised on all of that. First on the higher level spending, we are definitely seeing it coming down, but the interesting thing here is headlines are making it worse. The huge research shop recently said 0% growth. We're coming in at 4.6%. And just so everyone knows, this is not us guessing, we asked 1,525 IT decision-makers what their budget growth will be, and they came in at 4.6%. Now there's a huge disparity, as you mentioned. The Fortune 500, global 2000, barely at 2% growth, but small, it's at 7%. So we're at a situation right now where the smaller companies are still playing a little bit of catch up on digital transformation, and they're spending money. The largest companies that have the most to lose from a recession are being more trepidatious, obviously. So they're playing a "Wait and see." And I hope we don't talk ourselves into a recession. Certainly the headlines and some of their research shops are helping it along. But another interesting comment here is, you know, energy and utilities used to be called an orphan and widow stock group, right? They are spending more than anyone, more than financials insurance, more than retail consumer. So right now it's being driven by mid, small, and energy and utilities. They're all spending like gangbusters, like nothing's happening. And it's the rest of everyone else that's being very cautious. >> Yeah, so very unpredictable right now. All right, let's go to number two. Cost optimization remains a major theme in 2023. We've been reporting on this. You've, we've shown a chart here. What's the primary method that your organization plans to use? You asked this question of those individuals that cited that they were going to reduce their spend and- >> Mhm. >> consolidating redundant vendors, you know, still leads the way, you know, far behind, cloud optimization is second, but it, but cloud continues to outpace legacy on-prem spending, no doubt. Somebody, it was, the guy's name was Alexander Feiglstorfer from Storyblok, sent in a prediction, said "All in one becomes extinct." Now, generally I would say I disagree with that because, you know, as we know over the years, suites tend to win out over, you know, individual, you know, point products. But I think what's going to happen is all in one is going to remain the norm for these larger companies that are cutting back. They want to consolidate redundant vendors, and the smaller companies are going to stick with that best of breed and be more aggressive and try to compete more effectively. What's your take on that? >> Yeah, I'm seeing much more consolidation in vendors, but also consolidation in functionality. We're seeing people building out new functionality, whether it's, we're going to talk about this later, so I don't want to steal too much of our thunder right now, but data and security also, we're seeing a functionality creep. So I think there's further consolidation happening here. I think niche solutions are going to be less likely, and platform solutions are going to be more likely in a spending environment where you want to reduce your vendors. You want to have one bill to pay, not 10. Another thing on this slide, real quick if I can before I move on, is we had a bunch of people write in and some of the answer options that aren't on this graph but did get cited a lot, unfortunately, is the obvious reduction in staff, hiring freezes, and delaying hardware, were three of the top write-ins. And another one was offshore outsourcing. So in addition to what we're seeing here, there were a lot of write-in options, and I just thought it would be important to state that, but essentially the cost optimization is by and far the highest one, and it's growing. So it's actually increased in our citations over the last year. >> And yeah, specifically consolidating redundant vendors. And so I actually thank you for bringing that other up, 'cause I had asked you, Eric, is there any evidence that repatriation is going on and we don't see it in the numbers, we don't see it even in the other, there was, I think very little or no mention of cloud repatriation, even though it might be happening in this in a smattering. >> Not a single mention, not one single mention. I went through it for you. Yep. Not one write-in. >> All right, let's move on. Number three, security leads M&A in 2023. Now you might say, "Oh, well that's a layup," but let me set this up Eric, because I didn't really do a great job with the slide. I hid the, what you've done, because you basically took, this is from the emerging technology survey with 1,181 responses from November. And what we did is we took Palo Alto and looked at the overlap in Palo Alto Networks accounts with these vendors that were showing on this chart. And Eric, I'm going to ask you to explain why we put a circle around OneTrust, but let me just set it up, and then have you comment on the slide and take, give us more detail. We're seeing private company valuations are off, you know, 10 to 40%. We saw a sneak, do a down round, but pretty good actually only down 12%. We've seen much higher down rounds. Palo Alto Networks we think is going to get busy. Again, they're an inquisitive company, they've been sort of quiet lately, and we think CrowdStrike, Cisco, Microsoft, Zscaler, we're predicting all of those will make some acquisitions and we're thinking that the targets are somewhere in this mess of security taxonomy. Other thing we're predicting AI meets cyber big time in 2023, we're going to probably going to see some acquisitions of those companies that are leaning into AI. We've seen some of that with Palo Alto. And then, you know, your comment to me, Eric, was "The RSA conference is going to be insane, hopping mad, "crazy this April," (Eric laughing) but give us your take on this data, and why the red circle around OneTrust? Take us back to that slide if you would, Alex. >> Sure. There's a few things here. First, let me explain what we're looking at. So because we separate the public companies and the private companies into two separate surveys, this allows us the ability to cross-reference that data. So what we're doing here is in our public survey, the tesis, everyone who cited some spending with Palo Alto, meaning they're a Palo Alto customer, we then cross-reference that with the private tech companies. Who also are they spending with? So what you're seeing here is an overlap. These companies that we have circled are doing the best in Palo Alto's accounts. Now, Palo Alto went and bought Twistlock a few years ago, which this data slide predicted, to be quite honest. And so I don't know if they necessarily are going to go after Snyk. Snyk, sorry. They already have something in that space. What they do need, however, is more on the authentication space. So I'm looking at OneTrust, with a 45% overlap in their overall net sentiment. That is a company that's already existing in their accounts and could be very synergistic to them. BeyondTrust as well, authentication identity. This is something that Palo needs to do to move more down that zero trust path. Now why did I pick Palo first? Because usually they're very inquisitive. They've been a little quiet lately. Secondly, if you look at the backdrop in the markets, the IPO freeze isn't going to last forever. Sooner or later, the IPO markets are going to open up, and some of these private companies are going to tap into public equity. In the meantime, however, cash funding on the private side is drying up. If they need another round, they're not going to get it, and they're certainly not going to get it at the valuations they were getting. So we're seeing valuations maybe come down where they're a touch more attractive, and Palo knows this isn't going to last forever. Cisco knows that, CrowdStrike, Zscaler, all these companies that are trying to make a push to become that vendor that you're consolidating in, around, they have a chance now, they have a window where they need to go make some acquisitions. And that's why I believe leading up to RSA, we're going to see some movement. I think it's going to pretty, a really exciting time in security right now. >> Awesome. Thank you. Great explanation. All right, let's go on the next one. Number four is, it relates to security. Let's stay there. Zero trust moves from hype to reality in 2023. Now again, you might say, "Oh yeah, that's a layup." A lot of these inbounds that we got are very, you know, kind of self-serving, but we always try to put some meat in the bone. So first thing we do is we pull out some commentary from, Eric, your roundtable, your insights roundtable. And we have a CISO from a global hospitality firm says, "For me that's the highest priority." He's talking about zero trust because it's the best ROI, it's the most forward-looking, and it enables a lot of the business transformation activities that we want to do. CISOs tell me that they actually can drive forward transformation projects that have zero trust, and because they can accelerate them, because they don't have to go through the hurdle of, you know, getting, making sure that it's secure. Second comment, zero trust closes that last mile where once you're authenticated, they open up the resource to you in a zero trust way. That's a CISO of a, and a managing director of a cyber risk services enterprise. Your thoughts on this? >> I can be here all day, so I'm going to try to be quick on this one. This is not a fluff piece on this one. There's a couple of other reasons this is happening. One, the board finally gets it. Zero trust at first was just a marketing hype term. Now the board understands it, and that's why CISOs are able to push through it. And what they finally did was redefine what it means. Zero trust simply means moving away from hardware security, moving towards software-defined security, with authentication as its base. The board finally gets that, and now they understand that this is necessary and it's being moved forward. The other reason it's happening now is hybrid work is here to stay. We weren't really sure at first, large companies were still trying to push people back to the office, and it's going to happen. The pendulum will swing back, but hybrid work's not going anywhere. By basically on our own data, we're seeing that 69% of companies expect remote and hybrid to be permanent, with only 30% permanent in office. Zero trust works for a hybrid environment. So all of that is the reason why this is happening right now. And going back to our previous prediction, this is why we're picking Palo, this is why we're picking Zscaler to make these acquisitions. Palo Alto needs to be better on the authentication side, and so does Zscaler. They're both fantastic on zero trust network access, but they need the authentication software defined aspect, and that's why we think this is going to happen. One last thing, in that CISO round table, I also had somebody say, "Listen, Zscaler is incredible. "They're doing incredibly well pervading the enterprise, "but their pricing's getting a little high," and they actually think Palo Alto is well-suited to start taking some of that share, if Palo can make one move. >> Yeah, Palo Alto's consolidation story is very strong. Here's my question and challenge. Do you and me, so I'm always hardcore about, okay, you've got to have evidence. I want to look back at these things a year from now and say, "Did we get it right? Yes or no?" If we got it wrong, we'll tell you we got it wrong. So how are we going to measure this? I'd say a couple things, and you can chime in. One is just the number of vendors talking about it. That's, but the marketing always leads the reality. So the second part of that is we got to get evidence from the buying community. Can you help us with that? >> (laughs) Luckily, that's what I do. I have a data company that asks thousands of IT decision-makers what they're adopting and what they're increasing spend on, as well as what they're decreasing spend on and what they're replacing. So I have snapshots in time over the last 11 years where I can go ahead and compare and contrast whether this adoption is happening or not. So come back to me in 12 months and I'll let you know. >> Now, you know, I will. Okay, let's bring up the next one. Number five, generative AI hits where the Metaverse missed. Of course everybody's talking about ChatGPT, we just wrote last week in a breaking analysis with John Furrier and Sarjeet Joha our take on that. We think 2023 does mark a pivot point as natural language processing really infiltrates enterprise tech just as Amazon turned the data center into an API. We think going forward, you're going to be interacting with technology through natural language, through English commands or other, you know, foreign language commands, and investors are lining up, all the VCs are getting excited about creating something competitive to ChatGPT, according to (indistinct) a hundred million dollars gets you a seat at the table, gets you into the game. (laughing) That's before you have to start doing promotion. But he thinks that's what it takes to actually create a clone or something equivalent. We've seen stuff from, you know, the head of Facebook's, you know, AI saying, "Oh, it's really not that sophisticated, ChatGPT, "it's kind of like IBM Watson, it's great engineering, "but you know, we've got more advanced technology." We know Google's working on some really interesting stuff. But here's the thing. ETR just launched this survey for the February survey. It's in the field now. We circle open AI in this category. They weren't even in the survey, Eric, last quarter. So 52% of the ETR survey respondents indicated a positive sentiment toward open AI. I added up all the sort of different bars, we could double click on that. And then I got this inbound from Scott Stevenson of Deep Graham. He said "AI is recession-proof." I don't know if that's the case, but it's a good quote. So bring this back up and take us through this. Explain this chart for us, if you would. >> First of all, I like Scott's quote better than the Facebook one. I think that's some sour grapes. Meta just spent an insane amount of money on the Metaverse and that's a dud. Microsoft just spent money on open AI and it is hot, undoubtedly hot. We've only been in the field with our current ETS survey for a week. So my caveat is it's preliminary data, but I don't care if it's preliminary data. (laughing) We're getting a sneak peek here at what is the number one net sentiment and mindshare leader in the entire machine-learning AI sector within a week. It's beating Data- >> 600. 600 in. >> It's beating Databricks. And we all know Databricks is a huge established enterprise company, not only in machine-learning AI, but it's in the top 10 in the entire survey. We have over 400 vendors in this survey. It's number eight overall, already. In a week. This is not hype. This is real. And I could go on the NLP stuff for a while. Not only here are we seeing it in open AI and machine-learning and AI, but we're seeing NLP in security. It's huge in email security. It's completely transforming that area. It's one of the reasons I thought Palo might take Abnormal out. They're doing such a great job with NLP in this email side, and also in the data prep tools. NLP is going to take out data prep tools. If we have time, I'll discuss that later. But yeah, this is, to me this is a no-brainer, and we're already seeing it in the data. >> Yeah, John Furrier called, you know, the ChatGPT introduction. He said it reminded him of the Netscape moment, when we all first saw Netscape Navigator and went, "Wow, it really could be transformative." All right, number six, the cloud expands to supercloud as edge computing accelerates and CloudFlare is a big winner in 2023. We've reported obviously on cloud, multi-cloud, supercloud and CloudFlare, basically saying what multi-cloud should have been. We pulled this quote from Atif Kahn, who is the founder and CTO of Alkira, thanks, one of the inbounds, thank you. "In 2023, highly distributed IT environments "will become more the norm "as organizations increasingly deploy hybrid cloud, "multi-cloud and edge settings..." Eric, from one of your round tables, "If my sources from edge computing are coming "from the cloud, that means I have my workloads "running in the cloud. "There is no one better than CloudFlare," That's a senior director of IT architecture at a huge financial firm. And then your analysis shows CloudFlare really growing in pervasion, that sort of market presence in the dataset, dramatically, to near 20%, leading, I think you had told me that they're even ahead of Google Cloud in terms of momentum right now. >> That was probably the biggest shock to me in our January 2023 tesis, which covers the public companies in the cloud computing sector. CloudFlare has now overtaken GCP in overall spending, and I was shocked by that. It's already extremely pervasive in networking, of course, for the edge networking side, and also in security. This is the number one leader in SaaSi, web access firewall, DDoS, bot protection, by your definition of supercloud, which we just did a couple of weeks ago, and I really enjoyed that by the way Dave, I think CloudFlare is the one that fits your definition best, because it's bringing all of these aspects together, and most importantly, it's cloud agnostic. It does not need to rely on Azure or AWS to do this. It has its own cloud. So I just think it's, when we look at your definition of supercloud, CloudFlare is the poster child. >> You know, what's interesting about that too, is a lot of people are poo-pooing CloudFlare, "Ah, it's, you know, really kind of not that sophisticated." "You don't have as many tools," but to your point, you're can have those tools in the cloud, Cloudflare's doing serverless on steroids, trying to keep things really simple, doing a phenomenal job at, you know, various locations around the world. And they're definitely one to watch. Somebody put them on my radar (laughing) a while ago and said, "Dave, you got to do a breaking analysis on CloudFlare." And so I want to thank that person. I can't really name them, 'cause they work inside of a giant hyperscaler. But- (Eric laughing) (Dave chuckling) >> Real quickly, if I can from a competitive perspective too, who else is there? They've already taken share from Akamai, and Fastly is their really only other direct comp, and they're not there. And these guys are in poll position and they're the only game in town right now. I just, I don't see it slowing down. >> I thought one of your comments from your roundtable I was reading, one of the folks said, you know, CloudFlare, if my workloads are in the cloud, they are, you know, dominant, they said not as strong with on-prem. And so Akamai is doing better there. I'm like, "Okay, where would you want to be?" (laughing) >> Yeah, which one of those two would you rather be? >> Right? Anyway, all right, let's move on. Number seven, blockchain continues to look for a home in the enterprise, but devs will slowly begin to adopt in 2023. You know, blockchains have got a lot of buzz, obviously crypto is, you know, the killer app for blockchain. Senior IT architect in financial services from your, one of your insight roundtables said quote, "For enterprises to adopt a new technology, "there have to be proven turnkey solutions. "My experience in talking with my peers are, "blockchain is still an open-source component "where you have to build around it." Now I want to thank Ravi Mayuram, who's the CTO of Couchbase sent in, you know, one of the predictions, he said, "DevOps will adopt blockchain, specifically Ethereum." And he referenced actually in his email to me, Solidity, which is the programming language for Ethereum, "will be in every DevOps pro's playbook, "mirroring the boom in machine-learning. "Newer programming languages like Solidity "will enter the toolkits of devs." His point there, you know, Solidity for those of you don't know, you know, Bitcoin is not programmable. Solidity, you know, came out and that was their whole shtick, and they've been improving that, and so forth. But it, Eric, it's true, it really hasn't found its home despite, you know, the potential for smart contracts. IBM's pushing it, VMware has had announcements, and others, really hasn't found its way in the enterprise yet. >> Yeah, and I got to be honest, I don't think it's going to, either. So when we did our top trends series, this was basically chosen as an anti-prediction, I would guess, that it just continues to not gain hold. And the reason why was that first comment, right? It's very much a niche solution that requires a ton of custom work around it. You can't just plug and play it. And at the end of the day, let's be very real what this technology is, it's a database ledger, and we already have database ledgers in the enterprise. So why is this a priority to move to a different database ledger? It's going to be very niche cases. I like the CTO comment from Couchbase about it being adopted by DevOps. I agree with that, but it has to be a DevOps in a very specific use case, and a very sophisticated use case in financial services, most likely. And that's not across the entire enterprise. So I just think it's still going to struggle to get its foothold for a little bit longer, if ever. >> Great, thanks. Okay, let's move on. Number eight, AWS Databricks, Google Snowflake lead the data charge with Microsoft. Keeping it simple. So let's unpack this a little bit. This is the shared accounts peer position for, I pulled data platforms in for analytics, machine-learning and AI and database. So I could grab all these accounts or these vendors and see how they compare in those three sectors. Analytics, machine-learning and database. Snowflake and Databricks, you know, they're on a crash course, as you and I have talked about. They're battling to be the single source of truth in analytics. They're, there's going to be a big focus. They're already started. It's going to be accelerated in 2023 on open formats. Iceberg, Python, you know, they're all the rage. We heard about Iceberg at Snowflake Summit, last summer or last June. Not a lot of people had heard of it, but of course the Databricks crowd, who knows it well. A lot of other open source tooling. There's a company called DBT Labs, which you're going to talk about in a minute. George Gilbert put them on our radar. We just had Tristan Handy, the CEO of DBT labs, on at supercloud last week. They are a new disruptor in data that's, they're essentially making, they're API-ifying, if you will, KPIs inside the data warehouse and dramatically simplifying that whole data pipeline. So really, you know, the ETL guys should be shaking in their boots with them. Coming back to the slide. Google really remains focused on BigQuery adoption. Customers have complained to me that they would like to use Snowflake with Google's AI tools, but they're being forced to go to BigQuery. I got to ask Google about that. AWS continues to stitch together its bespoke data stores, that's gone down that "Right tool for the right job" path. David Foyer two years ago said, "AWS absolutely is going to have to solve that problem." We saw them start to do it in, at Reinvent, bringing together NoETL between Aurora and Redshift, and really trying to simplify those worlds. There's going to be more of that. And then Microsoft, they're just making it cheap and easy to use their stuff, you know, despite some of the complaints that we hear in the community, you know, about things like Cosmos, but Eric, your take? >> Yeah, my concern here is that Snowflake and Databricks are fighting each other, and it's allowing AWS and Microsoft to kind of catch up against them, and I don't know if that's the right move for either of those two companies individually, Azure and AWS are building out functionality. Are they as good? No they're not. The other thing to remember too is that AWS and Azure get paid anyway, because both Databricks and Snowflake run on top of 'em. So (laughing) they're basically collecting their toll, while these two fight it out with each other, and they build out functionality. I think they need to stop focusing on each other, a little bit, and think about the overall strategy. Now for Databricks, we know they came out first as a machine-learning AI tool. They were known better for that spot, and now they're really trying to play catch-up on that data storage compute spot, and inversely for Snowflake, they were killing it with the compute separation from storage, and now they're trying to get into the MLAI spot. I actually wouldn't be surprised to see them make some sort of acquisition. Frank Slootman has been a little bit quiet, in my opinion there. The other thing to mention is your comment about DBT Labs. If we look at our emerging technology survey, last survey when this came out, DBT labs, number one leader in that data integration space, I'm going to just pull it up real quickly. It looks like they had a 33% overall net sentiment to lead data analytics integration. So they are clearly growing, it's fourth straight survey consecutively that they've grown. The other name we're seeing there a little bit is Cribl, but DBT labs is by far the number one player in this space. >> All right. Okay, cool. Moving on, let's go to number nine. With Automation mixer resurgence in 2023, we're showing again data. The x axis is overlap or presence in the dataset, and the vertical axis is shared net score. Net score is a measure of spending momentum. As always, you've seen UI path and Microsoft Power Automate up until the right, that red line, that 40% line is generally considered elevated. UI path is really separating, creating some distance from Automation Anywhere, they, you know, previous quarters they were much closer. Microsoft Power Automate came on the scene in a big way, they loom large with this "Good enough" approach. I will say this, I, somebody sent me a results of a (indistinct) survey, which showed UiPath actually had more mentions than Power Automate, which was surprising, but I think that's not been the case in the ETR data set. We're definitely seeing a shift from back office to front soft office kind of workloads. Having said that, software testing is emerging as a mainstream use case, we're seeing ML and AI become embedded in end-to-end automations, and low-code is serving the line of business. And so this, we think, is going to increasingly have appeal to organizations in the coming year, who want to automate as much as possible and not necessarily, we've seen a lot of layoffs in tech, and people... You're going to have to fill the gaps with automation. That's a trend that's going to continue. >> Yep, agreed. At first that comment about Microsoft Power Automate having less citations than UiPath, that's shocking to me. I'm looking at my chart right here where Microsoft Power Automate was cited by over 60% of our entire survey takers, and UiPath at around 38%. Now don't get me wrong, 38% pervasion's fantastic, but you know you're not going to beat an entrenched Microsoft. So I don't really know where that comment came from. So UiPath, looking at it alone, it's doing incredibly well. It had a huge rebound in its net score this last survey. It had dropped going through the back half of 2022, but we saw a big spike in the last one. So it's got a net score of over 55%. A lot of people citing adoption and increasing. So that's really what you want to see for a name like this. The problem is that just Microsoft is doing its playbook. At the end of the day, I'm going to do a POC, why am I going to pay more for UiPath, or even take on another separate bill, when we know everyone's consolidating vendors, if my license already includes Microsoft Power Automate? It might not be perfect, it might not be as good, but what I'm hearing all the time is it's good enough, and I really don't want another invoice. >> Right. So how does UiPath, you know, and Automation Anywhere, how do they compete with that? Well, the way they compete with it is they got to have a better product. They got a product that's 10 times better. You know, they- >> Right. >> they're not going to compete based on where the lowest cost, Microsoft's got that locked up, or where the easiest to, you know, Microsoft basically give it away for free, and that's their playbook. So that's, you know, up to UiPath. UiPath brought on Rob Ensslin, I've interviewed him. Very, very capable individual, is now Co-CEO. So he's kind of bringing that adult supervision in, and really tightening up the go to market. So, you know, we know this company has been a rocket ship, and so getting some control on that and really getting focused like a laser, you know, could be good things ahead there for that company. Okay. >> One of the problems, if I could real quick Dave, is what the use cases are. When we first came out with RPA, everyone was super excited about like, "No, UiPath is going to be great for super powerful "projects, use cases." That's not what RPA is being used for. As you mentioned, it's being used for mundane tasks, so it's not automating complex things, which I think UiPath was built for. So if you were going to get UiPath, and choose that over Microsoft, it's going to be 'cause you're doing it for more powerful use case, where it is better. But the problem is that's not where the enterprise is using it. The enterprise are using this for base rote tasks, and simply, Microsoft Power Automate can do that. >> Yeah, it's interesting. I've had people on theCube that are both Microsoft Power Automate customers and UiPath customers, and I've asked them, "Well you know, "how do you differentiate between the two?" And they've said to me, "Look, our users and personal productivity users, "they like Power Automate, "they can use it themselves, and you know, "it doesn't take a lot of, you know, support on our end." The flip side is you could do that with UiPath, but like you said, there's more of a focus now on end-to-end enterprise automation and building out those capabilities. So it's increasingly a value play, and that's going to be obviously the challenge going forward. Okay, my last one, and then I think you've got some bonus ones. Number 10, hybrid events are the new category. Look it, if I can get a thousand inbounds that are largely self-serving, I can do my own here, 'cause we're in the events business. (Eric chuckling) Here's the prediction though, and this is a trend we're seeing, the number of physical events is going to dramatically increase. That might surprise people, but most of the big giant events are going to get smaller. The exception is AWS with Reinvent, I think Snowflake's going to continue to grow. So there are examples of physical events that are growing, but generally, most of the big ones are getting smaller, and there's going to be many more smaller intimate regional events and road shows. These micro-events, they're going to be stitched together. Digital is becoming a first class citizen, so people really got to get their digital acts together, and brands are prioritizing earned media, and they're beginning to build their own news networks, going direct to their customers. And so that's a trend we see, and I, you know, we're right in the middle of it, Eric, so you know we're going to, you mentioned RSA, I think that's perhaps going to be one of those crazy ones that continues to grow. It's shrunk, and then it, you know, 'cause last year- >> Yeah, it did shrink. >> right, it was the last one before the pandemic, and then they sort of made another run at it last year. It was smaller but it was very vibrant, and I think this year's going to be huge. Global World Congress is another one, we're going to be there end of Feb. That's obviously a big big show, but in general, the brands and the technology vendors, even Oracle is going to scale down. I don't know about Salesforce. We'll see. You had a couple of bonus predictions. Quantum and maybe some others? Bring us home. >> Yeah, sure. I got a few more. I think we touched upon one, but I definitely think the data prep tools are facing extinction, unfortunately, you know, the Talons Informatica is some of those names. The problem there is that the BI tools are kind of including data prep into it already. You know, an example of that is Tableau Prep Builder, and then in addition, Advanced NLP is being worked in as well. ThoughtSpot, Intelius, both often say that as their selling point, Tableau has Ask Data, Click has Insight Bot, so you don't have to really be intelligent on data prep anymore. A regular business user can just self-query, using either the search bar, or even just speaking into what it needs, and these tools are kind of doing the data prep for it. I don't think that's a, you know, an out in left field type of prediction, but it's the time is nigh. The other one I would also state is that I think knowledge graphs are going to break through this year. Neo4j in our survey is growing in pervasion in Mindshare. So more and more people are citing it, AWS Neptune's getting its act together, and we're seeing that spending intentions are growing there. Tiger Graph is also growing in our survey sample. I just think that the time is now for knowledge graphs to break through, and if I had to do one more, I'd say real-time streaming analytics moves from the very, very rich big enterprises to downstream, to more people are actually going to be moving towards real-time streaming, again, because the data prep tools and the data pipelines have gotten easier to use, and I think the ROI on real-time streaming is obviously there. So those are three that didn't make the cut, but I thought deserved an honorable mention. >> Yeah, I'm glad you did. Several weeks ago, we did an analyst prediction roundtable, if you will, a cube session power panel with a number of data analysts and that, you know, streaming, real-time streaming was top of mind. So glad you brought that up. Eric, as always, thank you very much. I appreciate the time you put in beforehand. I know it's been crazy, because you guys are wrapping up, you know, the last quarter survey in- >> Been a nuts three weeks for us. (laughing) >> job. I love the fact that you're doing, you know, the ETS survey now, I think it's quarterly now, right? Is that right? >> Yep. >> Yep. So that's phenomenal. >> Four times a year. I'll be happy to jump on with you when we get that done. I know you were really impressed with that last time. >> It's unbelievable. This is so much data at ETR. Okay. Hey, that's a wrap. Thanks again. >> Take care Dave. Good seeing you. >> All right, many thanks to our team here, Alex Myerson as production, he manages the podcast force. Ken Schiffman as well is a critical component of our East Coast studio. Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight help get the word out on social media and in our newsletters. And Rob Hoof is our editor-in-chief. He's at siliconangle.com. He's just a great editing for us. Thank you all. Remember all these episodes that are available as podcasts, wherever you listen, podcast is doing great. Just search "Breaking analysis podcast." Really appreciate you guys listening. I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com, or you can email me directly if you want to get in touch, david.vellante@siliconangle.com. That's how I got all these. I really appreciate it. I went through every single one with a yellow highlighter. It took some time, (laughing) but I appreciate it. You could DM me at dvellante, or comment on our LinkedIn post and please check out etr.ai. Its data is amazing. Best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for theCube Insights, powered by ETR. Thanks for watching, and we'll see you next time on "Breaking Analysis." (upbeat music beginning) (upbeat music ending)