>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AI ops. Virtual forum Brought to you by Broadcom >>Welcome today, I Office Virtual Forum Finally So Martin, excited to be talking with Rich Lane now senior analyst serving infrastructure and operations professionals at Forrester Rich, it's great to have you today. >>Hey, thank you for having me. I think it's gonna be a really fun conversation at today. >>It is. We're gonna be setting the stage for with Richard for the I T operations challenges and the need for a I ops. That's kind of our objective here in the next 15 minutes. So which talk to us about some of the problems that enterprise I T operations are facing now, in this year, that is 2020 that are gonna be continuing into the next year. >>Yeah. I mean, I think we've been on this path for a while. It's certainly that the last eight months has has accelerated this problem and and brought a lot of things toe light that people are, you know, they were going through the day to day firefighting as their goal way of life. It's just not sustainable anymore. New highly distributed environment or in the need for digital services. And, you know, one of them has been building for a while, really, is in the digital age. You know, we're providing so many of the interactions with customers online. We've added these layers of complexity, um, toe applications to infrastructure. You know, we're in the in the cloud where hybrid were multi cloud. You know, you name it using cloud native technologies, reason legacy stuff. We still have mainframe out there. Uh, you know, just the vast amount of things we have to keep track of now in process and look at the data and signals from It's just it's really untenable for humans to do that in silos now, Andi. And when you add to that, you know, when cos air so heavily invested in going on the digital transformation path, and it's accelerated so much the last year so that, you know, we're getting so much for our business in revenue drive from the services that they become core to the business. They're not afterthoughts anymore. It's not just about having a website presence, it's it's about to arrive in core business value from the services you're providing to York through your customers and a lot of cases customers you're never gonna meet or see at that. So it is even more important to be vigilant on top of the quality of that service that you're giving them. And then when you think about just the staffing issues we have, there's just not enough bodies to go around in operations anymore. Um, you know, we're not gonna be able to hire, you know, like we did 10 years ago. Even eso That's where we need the systems to be able to bring those operational efficiencies to bear. When we say operational insufficiencies, we don't mean, you know, lessening headcount because we can't do the other be foolish. What we mean is getting the headcount we have back to broking on higher level things, you know, working on technology refreshes and project work that that brings better digital services to customers and get them out of doing these sort of low complexity, high volume task that they're spending a tely east 20% if not more on of their day each day. So I think the more we could bring intelligence to bear on automation to take those things out of their hands, the better off we are going forward. >>And I'm sure those workers are wanting to be able to have the time to deliver more value, more strategic value to the organization, to their role. And as you're saying you know, is the demand for digital services this spiking, it's not going to go down. And its consumers, If we have another option on, we're not satisfied, we're gonna go somewhere else. So So it's really about not just surviving this time right now. It's about how do I become a business distance Gonna thrive going forward and exceeding expectations that are now just growing and growing. So let's talk about AI ops as a facilitator. Collaboration across business folks. I t folks, developers, operations. How can it facilitate collaboration, which is even more important these days? >>Yeah, So one of the great things about it is now, you know, years ago, bygone years, as they say, we would buy a tool to fit each situation and, you know, somebody that worked in networking out their school. Somebody infrastructure from a, you know, Linux standpoint have their tools. Somebody is from stores would have their tool. What we found Waas, we would have an incident overy high impacting incident occur. Everybody would get on the phone 2030 people. I'll be looking at their siloed tool. They're silent pieces of data and then we would still have to try a like link point A to B to C together, you know, just to institutional knowledge. And there was just ended up being a lot of gaps there because we couldn't understand that a certain thing happening over here was related to an event over here. Now, when we bring all that data under one umbrella one Data Lake where we wanna call it a lot of smart analytics to that data on normalize that data in a way we can contextualize it from, you know, point a to point B all the way through the application infrastructure stack. Now the conversation changes. Now the conversation changes to here is the problem. How are we going to fix it? We're getting there immediately versus 345 hours of hunting and pecking and looking at things and trying toe trying to extrapolate what we're seeing across the spirit systems. Andi, that's really valuable. And what that does is now we can change the conversation for measuring things in corrupt time and data center performance metrics is to How >>are we >>performing as a business? How are we overall in in real time? How is a business be impacted by hey, service disruption. We know how much money we're losing per minute hour. What have you on what that translates lights into brand damage and things along those lines that people are very interested in that. And you know, what is the effect of making decisions either from a product change side, You know, if we're always changing the mobile app So we're always changing the website. But do we understand what value that brings us or what negative impact that has? We could measure that now And also sales marketing, Um, they run a campaign. Here's your, you know, coupon for 12% off today only. What does that drive to us with user engagement? We can measure that now in real time. We don't know. Wait for those answers anymore, E, I think you know having all this data and understand the cause and effect of things increases and enhances thes feedback loops of we're making decisions as a business as a whole to make bring better value to our customers. You know? How does that tie into Office and Dev initiatives? How does everything that we do if I make a change, the underlying architectures that help move the needle forward is that hinder things? All these things factor into it in factor into customer experience, which is what we're trying to do with the end of the day, whether operations people like it or not. We are all in the customer experience business now, and we have to realize that and work closer than ever with our business and Dev partners to make sure we're delivering the highest level of customer experience we can >>now. Customer experience is absolutely critical for a number of reasons, always kind of think it's it's inextricably linked with employee experience. But let's talk about long term value because as organizations and every industry have pivoted multiple times this year and will probably continue to do so for the foreseeable future, for them to be able to get immediate value that let's let's not just stop the bleeding, but let's allow them to get, you know, a competitive advantage and we really become resilient. What are some of the applications that AI ops can deliver with respect to long term value for an organization? >>Yeah, I think that it's, you know, and you touched upon this very important point that there is a set of short term goals you want to achieve. But they're really gonna be looking towards 12, 18 months down the road. What is it gonna have done for you? And I think this helps framing out for you. What's most important? Because it be different for every enterprise. Um, and it also shows the arrow I of doing this because there is some, you know, change is gonna be involved in things you're gonna have to do. But when you look at the longer time horizon, what it brings to your business is the whole, uh to me, at least it all seems it seems like a no brainer to not do it. Um, you're thinking about the basic things, like, you know, faster re mediation of client impacting incidents, or maybe maybe even predictive, sort of detection of these incidents that will affect clients. So now you're getting, you know, at scale, you know, it's very hard to do when you have hundreds of thousands of objects on the management that relate to each other. But now you're having letting the machines and intelligence layer find out where that problem is. You know, it's it's not the red thing, it's the yellow thing. Go look at that. Um, it's reducing the amount of finger pointing. And what have you like? It was on between teens. Now everybody's looking at the same day to the same sort of symptoms and like, Oh, yeah, okay, this is telling us, you know, here's the root cause you should investigate this huge, huge thing on. Does something we never thought we'd get. Thio, where decisions. We smart enough to tell us these things, But this again, this is the power of having all the data under one umbrella and smart analytics. Andi, I think, really, You know, it's about if you look at where infrastructure in operations people are today and especially, you know, eight months and nine months, whatever it is into the pandemic. Ah, lot of them getting really burnt out with doing the same repetitive tasks over and over again. Just trying to keep the lights on, you know, we need we need to extract those things for those people just because it just makes no sense to do something over and over again. The same remediation step. Just we should automate those things. So getting that sort of, you know, drudgery off their hands, if you will, and get them into into other important things they should be doing, you know, they're really hard to solve problems. That's where the human shine on. And that's where you know, having ah, you know, really high level engineers. That's what they should be doing, you know, and just being able to do things I think in a much faster, in more efficient manner. When you think about an incident occurring right in a level, one technician picks that up and he goes in triage that maybe run some tests. He has a script or she, uh and you know, they over a ticket. They enrich the ticket, they call some lock files, they go look up for the service on you're in an hour and a half into an incident before anyone's even looked at it. If we could automate all of that, why wouldn't we? That makes it easier for everyone on guy. And I really think that's where the future is. Is bringing this intelligent automation to bear to take knocked down all the little things that consume the really the most amount of time when you think about it? If you aggregated over the course of, like, a quarter or year Ah, great deal of your time is spent just doing that menu Sha again. Why don't we automate that? We should So I really think that's that's where you gonna look long term, I think also the sense of we're going to be able to measure everything in the sense of business. KP eyes versus just I t Central KP eyes. That's really where we gonna get to in a digital age. And I think we waited too long to do that. I think our operations models were all voted. I think, uh, you know, a lot of ah, a lot of the KPs we look at today are completely outmoded. They don't really change if you think about it. We look at the monthly reports over the course of a year s, so let's do something different. And now, having all this data and a smart analytics. We can do something different. >>Absolutely. I'm glad that you brought up kind of looking at the impact that AI ops can make on on minutia and burn up. That's a really huge problem that so many of us are facing in any industry, and we know that there's some amount of this that's going to continue for a while longer. So let's get our let's let leverage intelligent automation present your point because we can to be able to allow our people to not just be more efficient but to be making a bigger impact. And there's that mental component there that I think is absolutely critical. I do want to ask you, what are some of these? So for those folks going all right, we've We've got to do this. It makes sense. We see some short term things that we need. We need short term value. We need long term value, as you've just walked us through. What are some of the obstacles that you to hate be on the lookout for this toe? Wipe it out of >>the way? Yeah, I think there's, You know, when you think about the obstacles I think people don't think about what are big. Changes this for their organization, right? You know, they're they're going to change process. They're gonna change the way teams interact there. They're going to change a lot of things, but the off of the better. So what were traditionally really bad in infrastructure operations is communication marketing a new initiative, right? We don't go out and get our peers agreement to it over the product owner is, you know, and say Okay, this is what gets you. This is what it changes. People just here. I'm losing something. I'm losing control over something. You're going to get rid of the tools that I have, but I love I've spent years building out perfecting Andi That's threatening to people, and understandably so, because people think if I start losing tools, I start losing head count. Then where's my department at that point? But that's not what this is all about. This this isn't a replacement for people. This is a replacement for teams. This is an augmentation. This is getting them back to doing the things they should be doing in less of the stuff they shouldn't be doing. And frankly, it's a it's about providing better services. So when they in the end it's counterintuitive, be against it because it's gonna make I t operations look better. He's gonna make a show us that we are the thought leaders and delivering digital services that we can constantly being perfected the way we're doing it. And, oh, by the way, we can help the business be better. Also, at the same time, I think some of the mistakes people really don't make really do make, uh is not looking at their processes today, trying to figure out what they're gonna look like tomorrow when we bring in advanced automation and intelligence, but also being prepared, prepared for what the future state is, you know, in talking toe one company they were like, Yeah, we're so excited for this. We we got rid of our 15 year old monitoring system on the same day we step the new system. One problem we had So it waas We weren't ready for the amount of incidents that had generated on day one, and it wasn't because we did anything wrong or the system was wrong or what have you? It did the right thing actually almost too well. What it did is it uncovered a lot of really small incidents through advanced correlations. We didn't know we had. So there was things lying out there. They're always like how that's where the system acts strange sometimes that we could never pin it down. We found all those things, which is good, because but it kind of made us all kind of sit back and think. And then our readership, these guys doing their job right Then we had to go through evolution of just explaining. We were 15 years behind from invisibility standpoint into our environment. But technologies that we deployed applications had moved ahead, modernized. So this is like a cautionary tale of falling too far behind from a sort of monitoring and intelligence and automation standpoint. Eso I thought that was a really good story for something like think about as you go to deploy these modern systems. But I think if you really you know the marketing to people, so they're not threatened, I think thinking about your process and then what's what's your day one and then look like And then what's your six and 12 months after that looks like I think settling all that stuff up front just sets you up for success. >>Alright, Rich. Take us home here. Let's summarize. How can clients build a business case for AI ops? What do you recommend? >>Yeah, you know, I actually get that question a lot. It's usually almost always the number one question and you know, webinars like this and conversations that that the audience puts in. So I wouldn't be surprised if that was true going forward from this one. Um, yeah. People are like, you know, Hey, we're all in. We want to do this. We know this is the way forward. But the guy who writes the checks, the CEO, the VP of ops is like, you know, I've signed lots of checks over the years for tools wise is different on, but I got people to do is to sit back and start doing some hard math, right? One of the things that that resonates with the leadership is dollars and cents. It's not percentages. So saying, you know, it's brings us a 63% reduction and empty TR is not going to resonate. Oh, even though it's a really good number, you know. I think what it is you have to put it in terms of of if we could avoid that 63% right? You know, what does that mean for our digital services as faras revenue? Right. We know that every our system down, I think, you know, typically in the market, you see, is about $500,000 an hour for enterprise. We'll add that up over the course of the year. What are you losing in revenue? Add to that brand damage loss of customers. You know, Forrester puts out a really big casino, uh, customer experience in next every year. That measures that if you're delivering digital services, bad digital services, if you could raise that up, what is that return to you in revenue on? That's a key thing. And then you just look at the hours of lost productivity. I call it I call it something else. I think it's catching name meaning if if a core internal system is down, say, you know, you have ah customer service desk of 1000 customer service people and they can't do that, look up or fix that problem for clients for an hour. How much money. Does that lose you and you multiply it? Oh, you know, average customer service desk. You know, person makes X amount in our times, this amount of time, this many times it happens. Then you start seeing the rial sort of power of a layoffs for this, this incident avoidance or be least lowering the impact of these incidents. And people have put out in graphs and spreadsheets and all this. And then I'm doing some research around this, actually to toe put out something that people can use to say The project funds itself in 6 to 12 months. It's paid for itself. And then after that, it's returning money to the business. Why would you not do that? And we start framing of the conversation that way, little lightbulbs turned on for the people who signed the checks For sure. >>That's great advice for folks to be thinking about. I love how you talked about 63% reduction in something you think that's great. What is it? Impact. How does it impact the revenue for the organization? If we're avoiding costs here, how do we drive up revenue? So having that laser focus on revenue is great advice for folks in any industry looking to build a business case for AI ops. I think you set the stage for that rich beautifully. And you are right. This was a fun conversation. Thank you for your time. Thank you. And thanks for watching.

>>From around the globe. It's the cube with coverage of coop con and cloud native con North America, 2020 virtual brought to you by red hat, the cloud native computing foundation and ecosystem partners. >>Hey, welcome back, everybody Jeffrey here with the cube coming to you from our Palo Alto studios today with our ongoing coverage of coupon cloud native con North America, 2020. It's not really North America, it's virtual like everything else, but you know that the European show earlier in the summer, and this is the, this is the late fall show. So we're excited to welcome in our very next two guests. Uh, first joining us from Madrid. Spain is Miguel Perez, Kaleena. He is a principal product manager from red hat, Miguel. Great to see you. >>Good to see you happy to be in the cube. >>Yes. Great. Well welcome. And joining us from North Carolina is rich Sharples. He is a senior director, product management of red hat. Rich. Great to see you. >>Yeah, likewise, thanks for inviting me again. >>So we're talking about Java today and before we kind of jump into it, you know, in preparing for this rich, I saw an interview that you did, I think earlier about halfway through the year, uh, celebrating the 25th anniversary of Java and talking about the 25th anniversary Java. And before we kind of get into the future, I think it's worthwhile to take a look back at, you know, kind of where Java came from and how it's lasted for 25 years of such an important enterprise, you know, kind of application framework, because we always hear jokes about people looking for COBOL programmers or, you know, all these old language programmers, because they have some old system that's that needs a little assist. What's special about Java. Why are we 25 years into it? And you guys are still excited about Java yesterday, today and in the future. >>Yeah. And I should add that, um, in terms of languages, uh, twenty-five is actually still pretty young. Java's, uh, kind of middle aged, I guess. Um, you know, things like CC plus bus rrr you're 45, 50 years old Python, I think is about the same as Java in terms of years. So, you know, the languages do tend to move at a, um, at a, they do tend to stick around, uh, uh, a bit, well what's made Java really, really important for enterprises building business critical applications is it started off with a very large ecosystem of big vendors supporting it. Um, it was open in a sense from the very start and it's remained open as in open source and an open community as well. So that's really, really helped, um, you know, keep the language innovating and moving along and attracting new developers. And, um, it's, it's still a fairly modern language in terms of some of the new features it's advancing with the industry taking on new kinds of workloads and new kinds of per program paradigms as well. So, you know, it's, it's evolved very well and has a huge base out somewhere between 11 and 13 million developers still use it as a primary development language in professional settings. Yeah. >>What struck me about what you said though in that interview was kind of the evolution and how Java has been able to continue to adapt based on kind of what the new frameworks are. So whether it was early days in a machine, like you talked about being in a set top box, or, you know, kind of really lightweight kind of almost IOT applications then to be calming, you know, this really a great application to deliver enterprise applications via a web browser and that, you know, and it continues to morph and change and adapt over time. I thought that was pretty interesting given the vast change in the way applications are delivered today versus what they were 25 years ago. >>Yeah, absolutely. It's, you know, the very early days were around embedded devices, uh, intelligent toasters and, you know, whatever. Um, and, and then where it really, really took off was, but the building supporting big backend systems, big transactional workloads, whether you're a bank or an airline you're running both the scale, but also running really, really complex transactional systems that were business critical. And that's that's for the last, you know, 15 years has been, um, where it's, it's really shown building backend, um, systems. Now, as we kind of move forward, you know, the idea of, uh, um, like server side, uh, server side application versus a front end is kind of changed. You know, now we're talking microservices, we're talking about running in containers. So really the focus of where we run Java and the kinds of applications we're building with Java as this has radically changed. And as such the language has to change as well, which is, you know, one, I'm pretty excited to talk about caucus today. >>So let's, let's jump into it and talk about corcus cause the other big trend, you know, along with, with, with obviously, uh, uh, browsers being great enterprise applications, delivery vehicles is this thing called containers, right? And, and specifically more recently Kubernetes is the one that's grabbing all the attention and grabbing all the, all the momentum. Um, so I wonder Miguel, if you could talk about, you know, kind of as, as the popularity of containerized applications and containerized to everything right, containerized storage, or you even talked about containerizing networking, troll, how that's impacted, uh, what you guys are doing and the impact of Java, uh, and making it work with kind of a containerized Kubernetes world. >>Well, what we found is that the paradigm of development has teeth. So we have this top up, uh, uh, paradigm that the people are following to be able to do the best with containers, to the best with Kubernetes on the, this has worked quite fine in Greenfield on for, for many cases has been a way to develop applications faster, to be able to obtain variably salts. And the thing is that for many, uh, users, for many companies that we work with, uh, they also want to bring some of their stuff that the applications that are currently are running into this world. And, uh, I mean, we, we walk especially a lot in helping these customers be able to adopt those obligations, but we try to do it, uh, as we say, the N pixie dust, you know, we really dig into the code, we'll review the code with modernize. The application will help their customer with that application. We provide the tools are open for anyone to be able to review it and to be able to take it. So we are moving away from Greenfield into brownfield and not a way we are evolving together to say we more precise, you know, all these Greenfield applications keep coming, but also the current applications want to be more organized. >>Right. Right. So it's pretty interesting. Cause that's always the big conversation. There's, it's, it's all fine. And good if you're just building something new, uh, to use the latest tools. But as you mentioned, there's a whole lot of conversation about application modernization and this is really an opportunity to apply some of these techniques to do that. So quirky. So I wonder if you just give, let's just jump into it. What is it at the highest level? Uh, what's it all about? What should people know? >>Yeah. So, so Corker says I'm reading an attempt by red hat to ensure Java is a first-class citizen in containerized environments, but building reactive applications, uh, cloud native applications, uh, functions, Java is an incredible piece of engineering. It does some incredible things. It sudden can self optimize. As it's running in line code, it can do some really amazing things the longer it runs, but in a containerized environment, you're likely not going to be running huge amounts of code. You'd likely be running microservices and your, your services are likely to have a kind of limited life cycle as we you're able to deploy more frequently or in a function environment where, you know, you've been bought once and then you're done, um, you know, during all those long, um, kind of, um, those optimizations over time, don't really, um, make a lot of sense. So what we can do is remove a lot of the, um, the weights of Java, a lot of the complexity of Java, and we can optimize for an environment where your code is maybe just running for a few microseconds as in the case of the function or something running in native, cause you scale up and scale down. >>So we move a lot of the op side. We move a lot of the, um, the, the efforts within the application, uh, to compile time, we pre compile all of your, of your config and initialization, so that doesn't have to happen in your, um, your, your, your runtime or your production environment. Um, and then we can optimize the code week. We can, we can remove that code. We can remove, you know, whole, uh, trees and class libraries and really slimmed down the memory footprint and radically, um, slim, the Maddie memory footprint, um, increase the startup time as well. So, you know, you have less downtime in your applications. Um, and we've recently done a S a study with ADC that shows some pretty stunning results compared to, you know, some existing frameworks. And, you know, we get, um, you know, sort of like, you know, overall cost savings of, you know, 60, 64%. >>Um, we can get eight times better density. You're running more in a, in a, in a cluster and, um, you know, reduction in memory up to 90% as well. So it's, these are significant changes now. That's all good, you know, saving, saving 60, 60% on your operational costs is significant. But what we find is that most organizations, they come for the performance and the optimizations, but what actually stay for is the speed of development. So I think, I think caucus real silver bullets is, um, the developer productivity, you know, for organizations, the cost of development is still one of the major costs. I mean, the operational costs, the hosting costs a significant, but development costs, time to market will always be top of mind for organizations that are trying to move faster than the competition. And I think that's really where, um, um, caucus special and coupled in, uh, in, uh, OpenShift or Coobernetti's environment really, really does shine. Yeah, >>It's pretty interesting. So people can go to corcus.io and see a lot of the statistics that you just referenced in terms of memory usage and speed and, and whole bunch of stuff. But what struck me when I went to the site was that was this big, uh, uh, two words that jumped out developer joy. And it's funny that you talked on that just now about really, um, the benefits that come to the developer directly to make them happier. I mean, really calling out their joy. So they're more productive and ultimately that's what you said. That's where the great value is in terms of speed of deployment, happy developers, and productive developers. You know, Miguel, you get your, you get down into the weeds of this stuff. Again, the presentations on your LinkedIn, everyone needs to go look and you talk a lot about at migration and you lot talk a lot about app modernization. So without going through all 120 some odd slides that I think you have, which is good, phenomenal information, what are some of the top things that people need to think about and consider both for app modernization as well as at migration? >>Um, that's, that's, that's an interesting question. Uh, the thing is that, um, the tolling is important on the current code is, and the thing is that normally when, when we started migration project, we tried to find architects in the applications to be able to find patterns. You know, you find parents is much easier because, uh, once you solve one part on the same part on can be solved in a very similar way. So this is one of the parts of that. We focus a lot, but before getting to that point, it's very important how you stop, you know, so the assessment phase is, is very important to be able to review well, what is the status of the applications, the context of the applications. And with that, I mean, things like, for example, the requirements that they have, there's the maintenance that they take in their resiliency and so on. >>So you have to prepare very well, the project by starting with a good assessment, you have to check which applications makes more, make more sense to start with and see which, how to group them together by similarities. And then you can start with the project that saying, okay, let's go for these set of applications that make more sense that are more likely to be containerized because of the way we are developing them because of the dependencies that they have because of the resiliency that is already embedded into them and so on. So that, that the methodology is important. And we normally, for example, when we, when we help partners do a application migration, one of the things that we stress is that this is the methodology that we follow and in the website for my vision, totally for application, you can find also, um, methodology, uh, part that, uh, could help, uh, people understand, okay, these, these are the stages that we normally follow to be successful with migrating applications. >>Yeah. Let go. You don't, we're not friends. We don't hang out a lot, but if we did, you would know I never ever recommend PowerPoint for anything. So, so the fact that I'm calling out your PowerPoint actually means something. Cause I think it's the worst application ever built, but you got some tremendous, tremendous information in there and people do need to go in and look, and again, it's all from your LinkedIn work, but I wanted to shift gears a little bit, right? We're at CubeCon cloud native con. Um, obviously it's virtual is 2020. That's the way the world today. But I just curious to get your guys' take on, on what does this, uh, event mean for you obviously really active, open source community, you know, red hat has a long open-source history. Um, what does CubeCon cloud native con mean for you guys? What do you hope to get out of it? What should people hope to, uh, to learn from red hat? >>Yeah, we, um, yeah, we're, we're buying your DNA. We're very, very collaborative. Uh, we, we love to learn from our customers, users of the technologies, um, in the communities that we support. Um, speaking as a, you know, we're both product guys, there's nothing better than getting with, um, people that actually use the products, um, in anger, in real life, whether they're products are upstream technologies, learning, learning, what they're doing, understanding where, um, some of the gaps are there's. Um, yeah, we just couldn't do our jobs without engaging with developers, users in these kind of conferences. Yeah. A lot of the, um, love interest we've seen with coworkers is, is in the community, you know, um, like I'd been part of many, many successful open source projects, um, um, over red hat. And it's great when your customers, you know, like, uh, Vodafone, Greece or Carrefour in Spain are openly publicly talking about how good your technology is, what they're using it for. And that's really good. So it's just nothing, there's no alternative that, you know, whether it be virtual virtually or physically sitting down with, uh, with users of your technology, >>How about you, Miguel? What are you hoping to get out of, uh, out of the show this year? >>Um, we are working a lot with, on Kubernetes in red hat, on, uh, as part of the community, of course. And, um, I mean, there are so many new stuff that is coming around, Kubernetes that, uh, it's mostly about it, about all the capabilities that were arming, especially for example, several lists, you know, several lessons, there is an important topic with crackers, because for example, as you make the application stopped so much faster and react so much faster, you could have known of them running and just waiting for an event to happen, which saves a lot of resources and makes us super efficient. So this is one of the topics, for example, that we wanted to cover in this edition, you know, how we are implementing serverless with Kubernetes and OpenShift and many other things like pipelines. Like, I don't know, we just had quite a visit in the, uh, uh, video, uh, life of what is coming up. I see for the six. And I recommend people to take a look at it, to get everything that's new because there's a lot. Yeah, >>Yeah. You guys are technical people. You've been doing this for a long time. Why is Kubernetes so special? W Y Y you know, there's been containers in the past, right. And we've seen other kind of branded open source projects that got a lot of momentum, but Kubernetes just seems to be blowing everybody out of the out of its path. Why, what should people know about Kubernetes that aren't necessarily developers? >>Yeah, there's really nothing interesting about a single container or a single microservice, right? That's not, that's not the kind of environment that, um, real organizations live in. They live in organizations where they're going to have hundreds of services, um, who just containers and you need a technology to orchestrate and manage that in that complex environment. And Kubernete's has just quickly become the, the district per standard. Um, yeah, folks are red hat jumped on my very, very early, um, I mean, one of the advantages around her have is where we're embedded with developers and open source communities. We often have a pretty good, it gives us a pretty good crystal ball. So we're often quick to jump on the emerging technologies that are coming out of open source. And that's exactly what happened with Cubanetis. It was clear. It was, um, you're going to be sophisticated for our, you know, most, um, most sophisticated customers running at scale. Um, but, but also, you know, great for development environments as well. So it really a good fit for, uh, where we were headed and, you know, just very, very quickly became the fact that standard. And you, you just gotta go with the de facto standard. Right, right. >>Right. Well, the another thing that you mentioned rich in that other interview that I was watching is it came up the conversation in terms of managing open source projects. And at some point, you know, they kind of start, and then, you know, I think this one, if I go to corcus and look at the bottom of the page sponsored by red hat, but you talked about, you know, at some point, do you move it over to a foundation, um, you know, and kind of what are the things that kind of drive that process, that decision, um, and, you know, I would imagine that part of it has to do with popularity and scale, is that something, you know, potentially down the road, how do you think that you said you've been in lots of open source projects, when does it move from, you know, kind of single point of origin to more of a foundational support? >>Yeah. I mean, in fact the foundation's owner was necessary. Um, you know, when you have a, yeah. If you, if you have a, an open, very open project with, um, um, clear, clear rules for collaboration and kind of the encouragement or others to collaborate and be able to, you know, um, move the project and, you know, the foundation as low as necessarily what we've seen, I've been part of the no GS world where, you know, the, the community reached Belden to keep no GS moving forward. Um, we had to go from a, what we call a benevolent dictator for life, somebody who's well-intentioned, but, um, yeah, we're on stone, the technology, so a foundation, which is much more inclusive and, um, you know, greater collaboration and you can move even quicker. So, you know, um, I think what's required is, is open governance for open source projects and where that doesn't happen. You know, maybe a foundation is, is the right way forward. Right, right now with, with caucus, um, you know, the, the non red hat developers seem pretty happy with the way they can get, uh, get engaged and contribute. Um, but if we get to a point where the community is demanding a foundation and we'll absolutely consider it, that's the best project we'll do. >>So, so we're, we're coming to the end of our time. I want to give you each the last word, really with two questions, one again, you know, just kind of a summary of, of, uh, of CubeCon cloud, native con, you know, what should people be looking for, uh, find you, and, and, and I don't know if you guys are sponsoring any sessions, I'm sure there's a lot of great content. If you want to highlight one or two things. And then most importantly, as we turn the calendars, we come to the end of 2020, uh, thankfully, um, as you look ahead to 2021, you know, what are some of your priorities, uh, as, as we get ready to turn the turn, the calendar, and Miguel let's start with you. >>So, um, I mean, we have been working very hard this year on the migration, took it for applications to help her every user that is using Java to bring the two containers. You know, whether it is data IE or these crackers, but we're putting like a lot of effort in crackers. And now we are bringing in new rules. And, uh, by the, by December, we expect to have the new version of the migration looking for applications that is going to include the, all the bulls to help developers bring their, their code to the Java code, to, to carcass. And, uh, on this, this is the main goal for us right now. We are moving forward to the next year to include more, more capabilities in that project. Everything's up on site. You can go to the conveyor, uh, project and ticket on, uh, on the up capabilities for the assessment phase. So whenever any partner, any, any of our consultants are working on, on migration or anyone that would like to go and try it themselves on adopted, would like to do these migrations to the cloud native world, uh, will feel comfortable with, with this tool. So that is our main goal in, in my, in my team. >>All right. And how about you rich? >>Yeah, I think we're going to see this, um, um, kind of syllabus solidification kind of web of, um, microservices. Um, you know, if you like hate that, I'm sorry, but I'm just going to next generation microservice. There's going to be, as Miguel mentioned, is gonna be based around, um, uh, native, um, advancing, um, serverless functions. I think that's really the, the, the ideal architecture, the building March services, um, on, on Coobernetti's and caucus plays really, really well there. Um, I think there's, there's a, there's a kind of backlog of projects, um, within organizations that, um, you know, hopefully next year, everything really does start to crank up. And I think, um, yeah, I think a lot of the migration that Miguel has talked about is going to be, is going to rise in terms of importance. So app modernization, taking those existing applications, maybe taking aspects of those and, you know, doing some kind of decomposition in some microservices using caucus and a native, I think we'll see a lot of that. So I think we'll see a real drive around both the kind of Greenfield, um, applications, uh, you know, this next generation of microservices, as well as pulling those existing applications forward into these new environments, don't give an answers. So it's going to be excellent. >>Awesome. Well, thank you both for taking a few minutes with us and sharing the story of corcus, uh, and have a great show. Great to see you and a really good the conversation. All right. He's Miguel, he's rich. I'm Jeff. You're watching the cubes ongoing coverage of CubeCon cloud native con 2020 North America. Virtual. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios (upbeat music) in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hi, and welcome to a special CUBE conversation. I'm Stu Miniman, coming to you from our Boston area studio, and really happy to welcome to the program to dig into some of the latest on what's going on in the multi-cloud ecosystem. First of all, coming back to the program, not too far from where I'm sitting, Joe CaraDonna. He is the Vice President of Engineering Technologies, with Dell Technologies, and joining him, someone he knows quite well, is Rich Sanzi, who's Vice President of Engineering at Google Cloud. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining. >> Great to be here, Stu. >> Thank you. >> All right, so Joe, we've been watching Dell Technologies, how the cloud portfolio and solution has been maturing, and working with the ecosystem. Maybe set the table for us, what's Dell doing with cloud? Why are we sitting here with the ? >> Well, we're here to talk about our OneFS for Google Cloud offering. We did something really special with Google here. We brought together the power and scale of our OneFS file system, along with the economics and the simplicity of public cloud, and together, I think, what we did is define a new standard for scalable file in public cloud, where we have a game-changing performance and capacity. We have a full range of enterprise-grade data management capabilities, and we enable real hybrid cloud, and open up new use cases for our customers. >> Excellent, thanks Joe for setting the table on that. Rich, let's pull you into the conversation. Before we go into the Google thing, give us a little bit about your background. You've been in storage, as I hinted at. You worked with Joe before, and tell us about your role inside of Google. >> Yeah, so I actually joined Google a few years ago, responsible for storage, and storage for all of Google, in addition to Google Cloud. And then, you know, big company things. We've been growing rapidly, and an opportunity opened up where I could be much more engaged on the Compute side, and so I'm responsible for Compute, the IaaS infrastructure for Google Cloud Engine. So it's my pleasure to be here and support Joe and Dell Technologies in the launch of OneFS on Google Cloud. >> Yeah, Rich, I'd like to come back to you on something, 'cause when you look at cloud, for many years it was cloud versus, you know, taking over the world, destroying everything before it. And especially, you look at Compute, or storage specifically, people have a little bit of a hard time wrapping their heads around, where my application lives. Does it just live one place? Are my applications going a little bit hybrid there? I look back, you know the disclosure, I worked at EMP for years. You know that storage is complicated and diverse, that's why we have file, block, and object. We have lots of different types of solutions out there. There's never been a silver bullet that says, "Okay, 90% of the people can use this one thing "for everything." So Rich, let's start with you. Cloud definitely has changed the discussion of storage, but I feel like I've seen the enterprise solutions looking more like the hyperscalers, and the hyperscale solution blurring the lines with what was traditionally happening in the data center. Do you agree with some of that? >> Oh yeah, absolutely. I think it's really nice when you control the horizontal and the vertical, and you can adapt your application stack, but that's just not the reality where we are today. The reality is that a cloud vendor, working with customers who bring their workloads in the cloud, have to be able to support all of the best-in-class types of storage that people are using. You're absolutely right, we're using cloud, or sorry, we're using objects, we're using block, we're using file. One of the great pieces of this, is that in the file space, you really need scalable file to go along with your scalable compute. >> Excellent, so-- >> Yeah, and I'll just add-- >> Please, go ahead Joe. >> Yeah, I mean, our customers, for a long time, have been asking, our Isilon customers in particular, asking for a long time to bring this type of capability to the cloud. They want the scalability of the elastic compute in the GPUs. They also want the OpEx model, right? And they want to be able to bring the high performance compute workloads to the cloud, but they need a scalable file system that can keep up with the demand, and that's what we set out to solve for. >> Excellent, so Joe you mentioned that the Isilon piece. You know, we've watched what has happened with that. You know, Isilon has always been software at the core and highly scalable, so we'd like you both, Joe you teed it up there, but Rich, why is this important for Google Cloud customers, and how's it different from, maybe, how they were doing things in the past? >> Well, I think one of the things that I think I'm really excited about, is that this enables customers to leverage the cloud, and not make a ton of changes on their server side. So it really allows them to preserve their investment, and their applications, and the way that they think about storage, and the way they think about how that scales and performs. So that, for me, is a, let's make it easy for customers to consume cloud, rather than make it a hurdle, and that's my view. >> Yeah, and Joe, help frame this for us a bit. You know, we watched Dell Technologies recently had the Power Store announcement. A lot of discussion about cloud native architectures, moving to micro-services. Google's one of the earliest and most prominent examples of innerized architectures out there. So, where does the file solution fit in this whole discussion that customers have about modernization of their applications, and the journey that they're going on? >> Yeah, well, not all applications lend themselves well to object. They need file semantics, as well as the performance characteristics that come along with that, in terms of throughput and latencies. But even beyond that, what our customer's looking for is the data management capability, right? Whether it's snapshots, or the multi-protocol data access for NFS, or SMB, or even HDFS. And they're looking for replication, native replication, so they can have their Isilon systems in the data center, replicate their data directly into the file service of the cloud so they can actually operate on that data, and then there's things that we take for granted now, at least in the data center, of that high availability and that high durability, that storage arrays deliver. So, it's a combination of things that make it attractive for customers, that open up these new workloads, especially in terms of a high performance compute. >> Excellent, you talked a bit about some of the reasons why customers wouldn't want file. Of course, scale is one of those things we've been talking about for many years. Scale means different things to many people. There's few companies that know scale better than Google, so Rich, talk a little bit about scalability, performance, what these types of evolutions mean, and what you're hearing from customers. >> Certainly from a scale perspective, things like objects and object store is super scalable. It's also, you know, requires application changes, to really make use of. Customers are really looking for scalable solutions that enable them to bring their existing applications to cloud, and not have to make a ton of changes to it. That's one of the things I think is great about the Dell offering, is that it is a full-fidelity solution that has the performance and scale of what customers are expecting from their on-premise, and then when we wire that up with the Google network into our Google Cloud compute regions, we get very high performance, and very high fidelity, low latency as a result. We think that that removes potential headaches that customers may have when they bring big applications in the HBC space, and related high performance computing space in the cloud. >> Great, and Joe, is all this available now? Tell us a little bit about availability. What do you expect the demand to be for this solution? >> Well, I expect the demand to be great, right? The kind of workloads we're talking about here cut across a wide range of verticals. So everything from whether it's like sciences for genomics research, oil and gas for seismic data processing, media and entertainment for video editing and rendering, or even finishing, automotive telemetry data that requires processing and scale, and EDA. So, I think it hits upon a wide variety of use cases and verticals, and we've even structured our pricing and our tiers to make it more accessible for use cases from high performance, all the way down to even archival. >> So, maybe just to clarify, this is GA today? >> Yeah, yes, it is GA. (laughs) >> Okay, excellent. >> Beta is behind 'em. >> Appreciate that, and how does, you mentioned flexibility on pricing. How much of this is what's available from Google, what's available from Dell? How does that relationship and go-to-market work together? >> Yeah, well it's a native service in Google. You can provision directly from the Google Portal. You can manage your file systems directly from the Google Portal, and the billing is integrated. So you get one bill from Google, whether it's for our OneFS file service, or any of Google's native services. >> Excellent, Rich, we'd love to hear, talk about from the Google side, the ecosystem. I know last year, I was at the Google Next event, really saw strong demand from the partner community. They're looking to work with Google, many have worked with Google for many years. What kind of feedback have you been getting and how this fits into the overall solution? >> So, from a partner perspective, one of the things that we really want to enable our partners, is to bring their services onto our platform, and to integrate them tightly as if they were a Google offering, and that's so things like the integrated billing, the provisioning from the Google Portal, things like that are core tenets for us for helping our customers and our partners' customers easily consume services in the cloud. So, sort of one of the P-zero requirements, from my perspective, for our product offering here, was that in fact it was just integrated into the Google Cloud platform, and that it would be discoverable and easily usable by customers. So I think that enables partners to deliver a first-class service on our platform. >> Yeah, I mean, Rich, absolutely. Some of the feedback I've gotten from the ecosystem, is, how do they put it? They say, "Google kind of puts you through the ringer. "By the time you get through that, "it is going to work." And of course, we know, Google's doing that to make sure that there are good, reliable, strong services by the time the end customer gets them. All right, Joe-- >> Yes, and-- >> (laughs) Go ahead, yeah. >> I was going to say, you know, delivering these services, and delivering them reliably, it's a multi-company partnership, but we understand that at the end of the day, the customer wants to be assured that there is, they have one contact for problems with the service, and so that's where Google very much wants to be that primary contact, 'cause who knows where the issues could be. Are they in the data center, or are they in the network, or are they on the customer side? We feel responsibility to front (audio distorts). >> Yeah, absolutely. So, Joe, I guess, final thing for you. Talk about the Dell Technologies Google Cloud relationship, why that's important, what differentiates it from some of the many other partnerships that Dell has. >> Yeah, sure, before I touch on that, I want to talk about, you mentioned scale, and scale means different things to different people. And when we're talking about scale here, capacity's one element of that, and we certainly scale that way, but performance is the other way. And ESG did a performance study on the OneFS file service that we're offering, and they fired up the biozone benchmark, which fired up over 1000 cores in Google, running NFS load to the file system. They sized the file system at 2 petabytes, which seems large, and it is, but you can scale much larger than that with our service, and their results on throughput was 200 gigabytes per second on the read, and 100 gigabytes per second on the write. Now, these are game changing numbers, right? It's numbers like that that enable compute-intensive, high performance workloads in Google Cloud, and we're opening that up. And it's also important to note that this is a scalable file system, so if you want to double those throughput numbers, you just double the capacity of your file system. So that's the power of scale that we're delivering here. And our file system can scale up to 50 petabytes, so a lot of runway there. As far as the partnership with Google goes, I mean, Google's been great. Their infrastructure is amazing. In order to hit those kind of performance numbers, your head goes to compute and the file system, but there's also a network in there, and to hit those kind of numbers, Google had to supply a two terabyte per second network, and they were able to supply the compute and the network with ease, and without hiccup. So it's together that we're solving for the compute, network, and storage equation, and that we can deliver a holistic solution. And lastly, I would just point out, the engineering teams work great bringing that cloud native experience into that Google Portal, really simplifying user experience. So, they can provision and manage the systems directly from the Portal, as well as unifying the billing. So I think the partnership's been great, and it's going to be interesting to see how our customers use the service to accelerate their cloud journey. >> Well, Joe and Rich, thank you so much for the updates. Congratulations on GA of this, and definitely look forward to hearing the customer journeys as they go on. >> Thank you, Stu. >> All right, thank you. And Rich, thank you for your partnership. >> Yeah, your welcome, Joe. Thank you, as well. >> All right, be sure to check out thecube.net for all the coverage, the virtual events that we're participating, as well as the back catalog of interviews that we've done. I'm Stu Miniman, and as always, thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> From around the globe, it's The Cube, with digital coverage of Red Hat Summit 2020, brought to you by Red Hat. >> Hi, and welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, this is The Cube's coverage of the Red Hat 2020, bringing you guests from Red Hat and their partner ecosystem, practitioners, where they are around the globe, bringing to them this digital event, and while we wish we could all be together in person, we'll just be together apart for 2020. Happy to welcome to the program, a longtime Red Hatter, but first time, on The Cube, Rich Sharples, who's the senior director of product management inside Red Hat, Rich, thank you so much for joining us. >> Yeah, thanks for the invitation, great to be here. >> All right, so the topic we're going to talk about today is something you've got a long background of the middleware space. But in, Quarkus so, I personally was not familiar with Quarkus. Obviously we know, god, I believe someone told me once that there's like, 2 million open source projects out there, so I believe I can be forgiven for not having every one of them memorized there, but of course anybody in our community is going to know Java. What a huge impact that has had on the industry. Linux and Java are two of the, you know, major movers of how we, you know, build an, you know, deal with application today, so give us a little bit of a framework as to what Quarkus is, you know, why it was created. >> Yeah, so it's no secret that as organizations and developers move to this kind of new styled cloud native development, developing applications running in containers or in a kind of serverless environment that Java is not necessarily the best fit. Java does many incredible things, it's an amazing field of engineering. But many of the coolest things it does, assumes that it's going to be a long running application, it can do this cool dynamic class loading and dynamic optimization as the application runs. Those things are pretty impressive, but they're also fairly, very heavyweight. And in our kind of ephemeral environments, whether containers or functions of service, you don't have long running applications. And you can't make use of those things, so in a Java environment you pay for those radical features that you don't necessarily get any benefit from them. So, you know, where we're really trying to lay focus is ensure developers to continue to use Quarkus, it's still the, you know, the dominant language for enterprise development. You still get the benefits of these new architectures, so ensuring that Java continues to be you know, performant and efficient in these new you know, constrained environments. >> Okay, excellent, so we're not calling it cloud native Java though, right Rich? But we are bringing, if I heard right, Java for things like containers Kubernetes, I even heard functions as a service so, we're talking to server lists of you know, open shift server lists something that's being talked about this week. So help us understand you know, if Java was long in the tooth. You know, what stays the same, what's different, how have people been managing and you know building applications in this environment, because obviously you know, we've been dealing with containers for a number of years now, so what have they been doing so far and, you know, why is Quarkus different from some of the alternatives that are out there. >> Really, the goal is to introduce those that stayed the same. It's not a different language, it's not a fork. It is Java, you're writing Java applications, essentially in the same way you used to write them. And you may be using Microsoft still functions so slight difference in terms of design, but it's, you know, we want to ensure that you can bring your favorite frameworks and wipers with you as well. When you're accessing databases or message brokers. We want to ensure you can still use those technologies so we're trying to bring the whole ecosystem with us, with Quarkus, so those things can run well, in a you know, container or service environment as well. And that's super important because the real benefit here is any organizations face the choice of I want to develop cloud native, I want to develop functions, but I've got this huge investment in Java in terms of skills and you know, tools and tool trains and I don't want to go learn a new language, just because I need to you know, take advantage of things new environments so we're essentially giving developers their cake and allowing them to eat it. We are trying to provide the best of both worlds. Stick with the language you already know and you know, have lots of experience with, and still be able to get the benefits of running in our containerized environment. >> Okay. what are some of the challenges here, so you know from an infrastructure standpoint. My background is, you know, virtualization broke a lot of pieces and containerization does the same thing. As you mentioned, things you know, spin up really fast and they don't stay on nearly as long. You know, god, you mentioned functions as a service, often we're measuring things in milliseconds, so everything genomes, understand what's up how do I manage it, how do I monitor it all of those pieces so, you know, I understand you're saying we take the skill set and what we know. But, you know, there's got to be some on ramp here and some considerations >> Yes, so, yeah, absolutely so, Red has taken on the ramp and ensuring that this ecosystem moves with us. We do a lot of hard work within Quarkus, so developers don't have to. We do some very, very clever stuff that very few organizations, would be able to do because they don't have the depth of knowledge of the Java virtual machine that we do. We're able to take a lot of things that you'd normally start off once only, like loading classes and you know, building kind of memory data around, all the kind of reading configurations all of the things applications do once and only once. Why do it another time? Why not build that into the component time, you're going to do it once but take it out of your runtime environment completely, so there are many ways where we're having to kind of rethink the way you know, applications run. We have to do a reset on what job was built for this environment of long running applications where, if the application took 10 minutes to load up all the stage area and classes and config, it didn't really matter, because it's not going to run for 36 months. You got to do a resale on those design decisions and think very very differently and given with our deep experience with containers and you know, working on things like native, serverless and on deep, deep roots in Java, we were able to do that and really think differently. So, Quarkus takes a lot of that kind of work away from developers they don't have to think too much about it. And by and large, what they can do is focus on their applications and their micro services and read all of that wiring and optimization for them. And hopefully deliver some you know, real significant improvements both in development productivity, but also the kind of runtime resource utilization as well to really lower costs. >> Okay, and Rich, what's is great that's been really the nirvana when you talk about developers is they don't want to have to think about some of that underlying you know, gobbledygook. That was why you know, the term serverless is so polarizing is because from a developer standpoint I don't think about this but everybody screams, but there are servers and there is networking and there's you know, things underneath that I need to think about. So, what is the underlying assumption here. We talked about you know, containers, Kubernetes, functions as a service, what integration is done there? Does this live across? Is it kind of like, you know, does it sit just just on RHEL and therefore everywhere the RHEL lives it's there? Or, help me understand kind of what that underlying you know, substrate is. >> Yeah, right now our focus is RHEL x86, 'cause that's kind of the dominant platform in a cloud. It is just Java, some have that natural kind of portability and you know, as other architectures become important, we can certainly look at those as well. The reason why the underlying machine architecture is important, is because one of the options you have with Quarkus is actually the ability to compile everything down to a binary executable, right? That may give you some additional footprint reduction and performance enhancements. And also if we compile down to native, we do need to think about the underlying operating system and the architecture. But by and large, as a developer you really don't have to care. Just like to you don't have to care with Java today. You also have the option with Quarkus, to run on conventional JVM, open JDK is our preference and if you can run on open JDK, then you can pretty much run anywhere. Under you know, different reasons for compiling down a native, this is running on a traditional JDK, different optimizations, different trade-offs that you'd like to make. >> All right, so Rich, an open source project here, can you tell us a little bit about you know, who's contributed to this, you know, what general adoption is this, and, you know, where are we with the solution today. Is it today ready for production environments? >> Yeah, it's getting close to production ready, yeah, we'll be making this Germany available and during Summit and many of the components we use are tried and tested, again we're not reinventing everything from the ground up. We leverage things like REHL VM, we leverage open JDK, we leverage all our frameworks and library, the developer that are familiar with, we just have to optimize them for Quarkus, so, yeah, much of this is not brand new technology. The existing technology that has that kind of maturity and tolling support. So yeah, we're confident it's production ready. One of the early stages of the development of Quarkus, was to use some of Red Hats own products as goody picks. Actually, you know, optimize those products for containerized environments by rebuilding them on top of Quarkus and that gave us obviously a lot of insight into the general readiness, yeah, the whole kind of eating around and dog food principle. In terms of the organizations in investing Quarkus, you know, we have this kind of have old addedge, we often use at Red Hat, which is you know, if you want to, if you want to move quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, then go with others. We're at a stage, where we've been developing Quarkus very, very rapidly and that's mostly been a Red Hat effort. We've certainly got some help from the mothership IBM and I expect that to be an increase overtime and we're now in a point where we have a Germany available product coming up and we're ready to really kind of expand the ecosystem. So, we're looking for you, whether you're a framework provider, you've written a framework for Java and you want to have that Quarkus provider, ensure that runs really well and partly the kind of growing ecosystem around Quarkus, we're looking for that, we're for, you know, cloud providers to you know, take this technology and see how it runs in other environments and give us feedback. So, yeah, definitely looking to expand that ecosystem of contributors, so we can really turn this into kind of the facto technology for the cloud. >> So, Richard, stop back for us for a second, you've got a long history with Java. You know, why in 2020 is you know, Java still, I believe it's like number two on the language list there. Why is it so important today and why is moving forward to all of these cloud solutions so important for that ecosystem. >> Yeah, I think it comes down to you know, organizations are faced with a tough choice. That they stick with the language that they know and love, which is Java, the language, the relevant applications for the last decade and not be able to take the best advantage of cloud and native or serverless environment. Whereas if they go and learn a new language, Datalog or No.js and you know, kind of hunt around and trying to see if that has the same kind of ecosystem and support. So, we want give organizations a better choice, which is you can stick with a language you already know and love and you have skills and the resources, yeah, you can still take advantage of these new environments and that's you know, I'm mean, fundaments the problem we're trying to solve for your customers. That twice open source projects are, they live or die, depending on, they really do scratch an itch, you know, fulfill a need with real developments. I'm going to think we've certainly from the adoption and interest we've seen with Quarkus, we really do think we've found a very real problem to solve. >> Yeah, Rich, before we wrap up, I just want to give you the opportunity, you know, how is your teams doing, I think you know, Red Hat's making a real concerted effort to make you know, an appropriate tone for the event this week. Trying to make sure it's not you know, some of the usual glam that we normally expect to see, full on the community all together, but, you know, the community is so important and you know, the network of people that, you know, built not only you know, technologies but also careers and you know, relationships, so, give us a insight as to how your teams doing, everybody in these challenging times. >> I think this is another good example of where open source really does show it's resilience. Open source projects are simply very, very distributed. No open source projects rely on an office being open, so your word distributed team all used to work using distributed tools across the world, different time zones. It's kind of natural for us, so we're kind of plugging on, you know, just as we have them in the task, you have a few more dogs in the background and crying babies and you know, we're all humans, we all tolerate that. We have great support from our leaderships, that's Red Hat and IMB. They're very clear that they've got people and families before revenue and that's good to know. Everybody's you know continuing as they can to you know, ensure that we have you know, great technology out there 'cause like I said there's real demand here that needs to filled and we're going to continue doing that. So, yeah, everybody's kind of holding up pretty well, so, let's just see how long this thing goes but again, I do think it is a valuable kind of lesson on the resilience of distributed teams and open source in particular. So, yeah. >> All right, well thank you for that Rich. Just to bring it on home, as you said, the general availability of Quarkus you know, is in front of us here, really expecting the ecosystem in costumers move. Give us a little bit of what we should be looking at going forward, what are some of the kind of maturity steps and what should we expect to see, through the remainder of 2020. >> Yeah, it's going to be a pretty exciting year, I mean, given the changes we were all going through we are going to try and come meet developers, where they are, which is you know, on their laptops and in front of their computers, so, we're going to do, we're playing through a bunch of you know, kind of very quick webinars, you know, quick bye what it takes, you know, interesting features, we're going to do some virtual hackathons as well, so you can actually get people with time and talk with some experts. We have platform for doing that. So, we're pretty excited, we, you know, again with the incident, we can reach a lot of developers very easily. Actually far more than we could at a live even like Summit, so, we're going to make the best of it and try to get at to as many developers as we can with Quarkus and you know, hopefully they'll repay us by investing a little bit of time into it and giving us some feedback and you know, trying some applications and you know, see how it goes. >> All right and you know, final, final question for your Rich, you know, Quarkus, I have to imagine that the Quark, the subatomic particle, you know, came into the naming there. Is there some connection with that? I guess why the name to the project? >> Yeah, I mean that's pretty much it, you know, the Quarkus you know, kind of. (mumbles) Arguably the smallest fundamental particle. >> And can we find something smaller? >> Well, there potentially is something smaller but that's kind of in the realm of quantum mechanics and physics, which I'm not an expert on, so, but yeah, it's meant to mean small and the us bit, the US bit. I'd like to think there was a really good big meaning around that. The meaning is that we understand, that trying to do any kind of brand leadership or trademark protection on a well know server like Quark, is it possible? So, we had to add something to Quark and Quarkus kind of sounded cool. >> All right, Rich Sharples, pleasure to catch up with you, congrats on the progress for Quarkus, definitely looking forward to watching it's progression in the future. >> Thanks, great talking to you. >> All right, I'm Stu Minneman. Lot's more coverage here at Red Hat Summit 2020. Thank you as always for watching The Cube. (gentle music)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: It's theCUBE covering the virtual Vertica Big Data Conference 2020 brought to you by Vertica. >> Welcome back to the Vertica Virtual Big Data Conference, BDC 2020. You know, it was supposed to be a physical event in Boston at the Encore. Vertica pivoted to a digital event, and we're pleased that The Cube could participate because we've participated in every BDC since the inception. Rich Gaston this year is the global solutions architect for security risk and governance at Micro Focus. Rich, thanks for coming on, good to see you. >> Hey, thank you very much for having me. >> So you got a chewy title, man. You got a lot of stuff, a lot of hairy things in there. But maybe you can talk about your role as an architect in those spaces. >> Sure, absolutely. We handle a lot of different requests from the global 2000 type of organization that will try to move various business processes, various application systems, databases, into new realms. Whether they're looking at opening up new business opportunities, whether they're looking at sharing data with partners securely, they might be migrating it to cloud applications, and doing migration into a Hybrid IT architecture. So we will take those large organizations and their existing installed base of technical platforms and data, users, and try to chart a course to the future, using Micro Focus technologies, but also partnering with other third parties out there in the ecosystem. So we have large, solid relationships with the big cloud vendors, with also a lot of the big database spenders. Vertica's our in-house solution for big data and analytics, and we are one of the first integrated data security solutions with Vertica. We've had great success out in the customer base with Vertica as organizations have tried to add another layer of security around their data. So what we will try to emphasize is an enterprise wide data security approach, where you're taking a look at data as it flows throughout the enterprise from its inception, where it's created, where it's ingested, all the way through the utilization of that data. And then to the other uses where we might be doing shared analytics with third parties. How do we do that in a secure way that maintains regulatory compliance, and that also keeps our company safe against data breach. >> A lot has changed since the early days of big data, certainly since the inception of Vertica. You know, it used to be big data, everyone was rushing to figure it out. You had a lot of skunkworks going on, and it was just like, figure out data. And then as organizations began to figure it out, they realized, wow, who's governing this stuff? A lot of shadow IT was going on, and then the CIO was called to sort of reign that back in. As well, you know, with all kinds of whatever, fake news, the hacking of elections, and so forth, the sense of heightened security has gone up dramatically. So I wonder if you can talk about the changes that have occurred in the last several years, and how you guys are responding. >> You know, it's a great question, and it's been an amazing journey because I was walking down the street here in my hometown of San Francisco at Christmastime years ago and I got a call from my bank, and they said, we want to inform you your card has been breached by Target, a hack at Target Corporation and they got your card, and they also got your pin. And so you're going to need to get a new card, we're going to cancel this. Do you need some cash? I said, yeah, it's Christmastime so I need to do some shopping. And so they worked with me to make sure that I could get that cash, and then get the new card and the new pin. And being a professional in the inside of the industry, I really questioned, how did they get the pin? Tell me more about this. And they said, well, we don't know the details, but you know, I'm sure you'll find out. And in fact, we did find out a lot about that breach and what it did to Target. The impact that $250 million immediate impact, CIO gone, CEO gone. This was a big one in the industry, and it really woke a lot of people up to the different types of threats on the data that we're facing with our largest organizations. Not just financial data; medical data, personal data of all kinds. Flash forward to the Cambridge Analytica scandal that occurred where Facebook is handing off data, they're making a partnership agreement --think they can trust, and then that is misused. And who's going to end up paying the cost of that? Well, it's going to be Facebook at a tune of about five billion on that, plus some other finds that'll come along, and other costs that they're facing. So what we've seen over the course of the past several years has been an evolution from data breach making the headlines, and how do my customers come to us and say, help us neutralize the threat of this breach. Help us mitigate this risk, and manage this risk. What do we need to be doing, what are the best practices in the industry? Clearly what we're doing on the perimeter security, the application security and the platform security is not enough. We continue to have breaches, and we are the experts at that answer. The follow on fascinating piece has been the regulators jumping in now. First in Europe, but now we see California enacting a law just this year. They came into a place that is very stringent, and has a lot of deep protections that are really far-reaching around personal data of consumers. Look at jurisdictions like Australia, where fiduciary responsibility now goes to the Board of Directors. That's getting attention. For a regulated entity in Australia, if you're on the Board of Directors, you better have a plan for data security. And if there is a breach, you need to follow protocols, or you personally will be liable. And that is a sea change that we're seeing out in the industry. So we're getting a lot of attention on both, how do we neutralize the risk of breach, but also how can we use software tools to maintain and support our regulatory compliance efforts as we work with, say, the largest money center bank out of New York. I've watched their audit year after year, and it's gotten more and more stringent, more and more specific, tell me more about this aspect of data security, tell me more about encryption, tell me more about money management. The auditors are getting better. And we're supporting our customers in that journey to provide better security for the data, to provide a better operational environment for them to be able to roll new services out with confidence that they're not going to get breached. With that confidence, they're not going to have a regulatory compliance fine or a nightmare in the press. And these are the major drivers that help us with Vertica sell together into large organizations to say, let's add some defense in depth to your data. And that's really a key concept in the security field, this concept of defense in depth. We apply that to the data itself by changing the actual data element of Rich Gaston, I will change that name into Ciphertext, and that then yields a whole bunch of benefits throughout the organization as we deal with the lifecycle of that data. >> Okay, so a couple things I want to mention there. So first of all, totally board level topic, every board of directors should really have cyber and security as part of its agenda, and it does for the reasons that you mentioned. The other is, GDPR got it all started. I guess it was May 2018 that the penalties went into effect, and that just created a whole Domino effect. You mentioned California enacting its own laws, which, you know, in some cases are even more stringent. And you're seeing this all over the world. So I think one of the questions I have is, how do you approach all this variability? It seems to me, you can't just take a narrow approach. You have to have an end to end perspective on governance and risk and security, and the like. So are you able to do that? And if so, how so? >> Absolutely, I think one of the key areas in big data in particular, has been the concern that we have a schema, we have database tables, we have CALMS, and we have data, but we're not exactly sure what's in there. We have application developers that have been given sandbox space in our clusters, and what are they putting in there? So can we discover that data? We have those tools within Micro Focus to discover sensitive data within in your data stores, but we can also protect that data, and then we'll track it. And what we really find is that when you protect, let's say, five billion rows of a customer database, we can now know what is being done with that data on a very fine grain and granular basis, to say that this business process has a justified need to see the data in the clear, we're going to give them that authorization, they can decrypt the data. Secure data, my product, knows about that and tracks that, and can report on that and say at this date and time, Rich Gaston did the following thing to be able to pull data in the clear. And that could be then used to support the regulatory compliance responses and then audit to say, who really has access to this, and what really is that data? Then in GDPR, we're getting down into much more fine grained decisions around who can get access to the data, and who cannot. And organizations are scrambling. One of the funny conversations that I had a couple years ago as GDPR came into place was, it seemed a couple of customers were taking these sort of brute force approach of, we're going to move our analytics and all of our data to Europe, to European data centers because we believe that if we do this in the U.S., we're going to violate their law. But if we do it all in Europe, we'll be okay. And that simply was a short-term way of thinking about it. You really can't be moving your data around the globe to try to satisfy a particular jurisdiction. You have to apply the controls and the policies and put the software layers in place to make sure that anywhere that someone wants to get that data, that we have the ability to look at that transaction and say it is or is not authorized, and that we have a rock solid way of approaching that for audit and for compliance and risk management. And once you do that, then you really open up the organization to go back and use those tools the way they were meant to be used. We can use Vertica for AI, we can use Vertica for machine learning, and for all kinds of really cool use cases that are being done with IOT, with other kinds of cases that we're seeing that require data being managed at scale, but with security. And that's the challenge, I think, in the current era, is how do we do this in an elegant way? How do we do it in a way that's future proof when CCPA comes in? How can I lay this on as another layer of audit responsibility and control around my data so that I can satisfy those regulators as well as the folks over in Europe and Singapore and China and Turkey and Australia. It goes on and on. Each jurisdiction out there is now requiring audit. And like I mentioned, the audits are getting tougher. And if you read the news, the GDPR example I think is classic. They told us in 2016, it's coming. They told us in 2018, it's here. They're telling us in 2020, we're serious about this, and here's the finds, and you better be aware that we're coming to audit you. And when we audit you, we're going to be asking some tough questions. If you can't answer those in a timely manner, then you're going to be facing some serious consequences, and I think that's what's getting attention. >> Yeah, so the whole big data thing started with Hadoop, and Hadoop is open, it's distributed, and it just created a real governance challenge. I want to talk about your solutions in this space. Can you tell us more about Micro Focus voltage? I want to understand what it is, and then get into sort of how it works, and then I really want to understand how it's applied to Vertica. >> Yeah, absolutely, that's a great question. First of all, we were the originators of format preserving encryption, we developed some of the core basic research out of Stanford University that then became the company of Voltage; that build-a-brand name that we apply even though we're part of Micro Focus. So the lineage still goes back to Dr. Benet down at Stanford, one of my buddies there, and he's still at it doing amazing work in cryptography and keeping moving the industry forward, and the science forward of cryptography. It's a very deep science, and we all want to have it peer-reviewed, we all want to be attacked, we all want it to be proved secure, that we're not selling something to a major money center bank that is potentially risky because it's obscure and we're private. So we have an open standard. For six years, we worked with the Department of Commerce to get our standard approved by NIST; The National Institute of Science and Technology. They initially said, well, AES256 is going to be fine. And we said, well, it's fine for certain use cases, but for your database, you don't want to change your schema, you don't want to have this increase in storage costs. What we want is format preserving encryption. And what that does is turns my name, Rich, into a four-letter ciphertext. It can be reversed. The mathematics of that are fascinating, and really deep and amazing. But we really make that very simple for the end customer because we produce APIs. So these application programming interfaces can be accessed by applications in C or Java, C sharp, other languages. But they can also be accessed in Microservice Manor via rest and web service APIs. And that's the core of our technical platform. We have an appliance-based approach, so we take a secure data appliance, we'll put it on Prim, we'll make 50 of them if you're a big company like Verizon and you need to have these co-located around the globe, no problem; we can scale to the largest enterprise needs. But our typical customer will install several appliances and get going with a couple of environments like QA and Prod to be able to start getting encryption going inside their organization. Once the appliances are set up and installed, it takes just a couple of days of work for a typical technical staff to get done. Then you're up and running to be able to plug in the clients. Now what are the clients? Vertica's a huge one. Vertica's one of our most powerful client endpoints because you're able to now take that API, put it inside Vertica, it's all open on the internet. We can go and look at Vertica.com/secure data. You get all of our documentation on it. You understand how to use it very quickly. The APIs are super simple; they require three parameter inputs. It's a really basic approach to being able to protect and access data. And then it gets very deep from there because you have data like credit card numbers. Very different from a street address and we want to take a different approach to that. We have data like birthdate, and we want to be able to do analytics on dates. We have deep approaches on managing analytics on protected data like Date without having to put it in the clear. So we've maintained a lead in the industry in terms of being an innovator of the FF1 standard, what we call FF1 is format preserving encryption. We license that to others in the industry, per our NIST agreement. So we're the owner, we're the operator of it, and others use our technology. And we're the original founders of that, and so we continue to sort of lead the industry by adding additional capabilities on top of FF1 that really differentiate us from our competitors. Then you look at our API presence. We can definitely run as a dup, but we also run in open systems. We run on main frame, we run on mobile. So anywhere in the enterprise or one in the cloud, anywhere you want to be able to put secure data, and be able to access the protect data, we're going to be there and be able to support you there. >> Okay so, let's say I've talked to a lot of customers this week, and let's say I'm running in Eon mode. And I got some workload running in AWS, I've got some on Prim. I'm going to take an appliance or multiple appliances, I'm going to put it on Prim, but that will also secure my cloud workloads as part of a sort of shared responsibility model, for example? Or how does that work? >> No, that's absolutely correct. We're really flexible that we can run on Prim or in the cloud as far as our crypto engine, the key management is really hard stuff. Cryptography is really hard stuff, and we take care of all that, so we've all baked that in, and we can run that for you as a service either in the cloud or on Prim on your small Vms. So really the lightweight footprint for me running my infrastructure. When I look at the organization like you just described, it's a classic example of where we fit because we will be able to protect that data. Let's say you're ingesting it from a third party, or from an operational system, you have a website that collects customer data. Someone has now registered as a new customer, and they're going to do E-commerce with you. We'll take that data, and we'll protect it right at the point of capture. And we can now flow that through the organization and decrypt it at will on any platform that you have that you need us to be able to operate on. So let's say you wanted to pick that customer data from the operational transaction system, let's throw it into Eon, let's throw it into the cloud, let's do analytics there on that data, and we may need some decryption. We can place secure data wherever you want to be able to service that use case. In most cases, what you're doing is a simple, tiny little atomic efetch across a protected tunnel, your typical TLS pipe tunnel. And once that key is then cashed within our client, we maintain all that technology for you. You don't have to know about key management or dashing. We're good at that; that's our job. And then you'll be able to make those API calls to access or protect the data, and apply the authorization authentication controls that you need to be able to service your security requirements. So you might have third parties having access to your Vertica clusters. That is a special need, and we can have that ability to say employees can get X, and the third party can get Y, and that's a really interesting use case we're seeing for shared analytics in the internet now. >> Yeah for sure, so you can set the policy how we want. You know, I have to ask you, in a perfect world, I would encrypt everything. But part of the reason why people don't is because of performance concerns. Can you talk about, and you touched upon it I think recently with your sort of atomic access, but can you talk about, and I know it's Vertica, it's Ferrari, etc, but anything that slows it down, I'm going to be a concern. Are customers concerned about that? What are the performance implications of running encryption on Vertica? >> Great question there as well, and what we see is that we want to be able to apply scale where it's needed. And so if you look at ingest platforms that we find, Vertica is commonly connected up to something like Kafka. Maybe streamsets, maybe NiFi, there are a variety of different technologies that can route that data, pipe that data into Vertica at scale. Secured data is architected to go along with that architecture at the node or at the executor or at the lowest level operator level. And what I mean by that is that we don't have a bottleneck that everything has to go through one process or one box or one channel to be able to operate. We don't put an interceptor in between your data and coming and going. That's not our approach because those approaches are fragile and they're slow. So we typically want to focus on integrating our APIs natively within those pipeline processes that come into Vertica within the Vertica ingestion process itself, you can simply apply our protection when you do the copy command in Vertica. So really basic simple use case that everybody is typically familiar with in Vertica land; be able to copy the data and put it into Vertica, and you simply say protect as part of the data. So my first name is coming in as part of this ingestion. I'll simply put the protect keyword in the Syntax right in SQL; it's nothing other than just an extension SQL. Very very simple, the developer, easy to read, easy to write. And then you're going to provide the parameters that you need to say, oh the name is protected with this kind of a format. To differentiate it between a credit card number and an alphanumeric stream, for example. So once you do that, you then have the ability to decrypt. Now, on decrypt, let's look at a couple different use cases. First within Vertica, we might be doing select statements within Vertica, we might be doing all kinds of jobs within Vertica that just operate at the SQL layer. Again, just insert the word "access" into the Vertica select string and provide us with the data that you want to access, that's our word for decryption, that's our lingo. And we will then, at the Vertica level, harness the power of its CPU, its RAM, its horsepower at the node to be able to operate on that operator, the decryption request, if you will. So that gives us the speed and the ability to scale out. So if you start with two nodes of Vertica, we're going to operate at X number of hundreds of thousands of transactions a second, depending on what you're doing. Long strings are a little bit more intensive in terms of performance, but short strings like social security number are our sweet spot. So we operate very very high speed on that, and you won't notice the overhead with Vertica, perse, at the node level. When you scale Vertica up and you have 50 nodes, and you have large clusters of Vertica resources, then we scale with you. And we're not a bottleneck and at any particular point. Everybody's operating independently, but they're all copies of each other, all doing the same operation. Fetch a key, do the work, go to sleep. >> Yeah, you know, I think this is, a lot of the customers have said to us this week that one of the reasons why they like Vertica is it's very mature, it's been around, it's got a lot of functionality, and of course, you know, look, security, I understand is it's kind of table sticks, but it's also can be a differentiator. You know, big enterprises that you sell to, they're asking for security assessments, SOC 2 reports, penetration testing, and I think I'm hearing, with the partnership here, you're sort of passing those with flying colors. Are you able to make security a differentiator, or is it just sort of everybody's kind of got to have good security? What are your thoughts on that? >> Well, there's good security, and then there's great security. And what I found with one of my money center bank customers here in San Francisco was based here, was the concern around the insider access, when they had a large data store. And the concern that a DBA, a database administrator who has privilege to everything, could potentially exfil data out of the organization, and in one fell swoop, create havoc for them because of the amount of data that was present in that data store, and the sensitivity of that data in the data store. So when you put voltage encryption on top of Vertica, what you're doing now is that you're putting a layer in place that would prevent that kind of a breach. So you're looking at insider threats, you're looking at external threats, you're looking at also being able to pass your audit with flying colors. The audits are getting tougher. And when they say, tell me about your encryption, tell me about your authentication scheme, show me the access control list that says that this person can or cannot get access to something. They're asking tougher questions. That's where secure data can come in and give you that quick answer of it's encrypted at rest. It's encrypted and protected while it's in use, and we can show you exactly who's had access to that data because it's tracked via a different layer, a different appliance. And I would even draw the analogy, many of our customers use a device called a hardware security module, an HSM. Now, these are fairly expensive devices that are invented for military applications and adopted by banks. And now they're really spreading out, and people say, do I need an HSM? Well, with secure data, we certainly protect your crypto very very well. We have very very solid engineering. I'll stand on that any day of the week, but your auditor is going to want to ask a checkbox question. Do you have HSM? Yes or no. Because the auditor understands, it's another layer of protection. And it provides me another tamper evident layer of protection around your key management and your crypto. And we, as professionals in the industry, nod and say, that is worth it. That's an expensive option that you're going to add on, but your auditor's going to want it. If you're in financial services, you're dealing with PCI data, you're going to enjoy the checkbox that says, yes, I have HSMs and not get into some arcane conversation around, well no, but it's good enough. That's kind of the argument then conversation we get into when folks want to say, Vertica has great security, Vertica's fantastic on security. Why would I want secure data as well? It's another layer of protection, and it's defense in depth for you data. When you believe in that, when you take security really seriously, and you're really paranoid, like a person like myself, then you're going to invest in those kinds of solutions that get you best in-class results. >> So I'm hearing a data-centric approach to security. Security experts will tell you, you got to layer it. I often say, we live in a new world. The green used to just build a moat around the queen, but the queen, she's leaving her castle in this world of distributed data. Rich, incredibly knowlegable guest, and really appreciate you being on the front lines and sharing with us your knowledge about this important topic. So thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Hey, thank you very much. >> You're welcome, and thanks for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, we're covering wall-to-wall coverage of the Virtual Vertica BDC, Big Data Conference. Remotely, digitally, thanks for watching. Keep it right there. We'll be right back right after this short break. 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>> Announcer: From Santa Clara in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, covering the Churchills 2019. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in Santa Clara, California at the ninth annual Churchills. It's an awards banquet put on by the Churchill Club and this year's theme is all about leadership and we're excited to have with us today the MC, he's Rich Karlgaard, the co-founder of the Churchill Club and also a publisher at Forbes. Rich, thanks for stopping by. >> Oh, it's an honor to be here, Jeff. >> So, busy night tonight. The theme is leadership, but we've been suffering a little bit of a black eye on leadership lately in the tech scene in Silicon Valley. >> Well, I really think we have. I travel the world a lot and around the United States and I have to say that large parts of the world and the United States are falling out of love with Silicon Valley. And I think that's directly attributable to some of the companies and some of the leaders who are maybe moving so fast that they're forgetting to do the right things for customers, for employees, and for their community at large. >> Yeah, I'm wondering, get your take, a lot of these guys and gals become successful for a whole bunch of reasons, right? and they happen to be at the top of a company. I'll just pick on Zuckerberg 'cause he's easy to pick on. But you know, he had an application, it was about getting people together, and suddenly these platforms get so big and so ubiquitous, you know, is he the right guy? He never signed up to be the leader of the platform world, and yet he's kind of put in that position. We see that kind of with YouTube, because again, the platform is so big and I think it almost feels like it grows beyond the tentacles of the control. >> Well, it remains to be seen if Mark Zuckerberg is the right guy. I think of somebody from more my era, Bill Gates. And Bill Gates was a fabulous leader of Microsoft, but they ran too fast, they ran too hard, they got in trouble with the U.S. Department of Justice, and Bill Gates ended up resigning from Microsoft. And he served as a great board member of Microsoft ever since, was instrumental, along with John Thompson, the board chairman who will be honored tonight, in bringing in the person I think is the best CEO in the world today, Satya Nadella of Microsoft. Sometimes you have to hand the baton. >> Right, right. But are there some lessons that people should be thinking about when they're maybe thrust into this position that they weren't necessarily ready for? I mean, one thing about Gates is he gave up his CEO job pretty early to Ballmer, arguably whether that was super successful or not. But some of them kind of get out of the way and some of them don't. And they don't necessarily have the skills to take on some of these huge kind of geopolitical, socioeconomic issues. >> Well I think that's right. Another example, Larry Ellison led the brilliant early days of Oracle but when he got in trouble with the Securities and Exchange Commission, he had to really make way for a strong number two, Ray Lane, and that turned out to be the perfect complement, you see. You had Ellison's vision and drive but you had Lane's ability to run really good operations. Steve Jobs never got into trouble but having a really solid number two like Tim Cook was very valuable. So some of these brilliant entrepreneurs need solid number two's, so I think they have lieutenants but I don't think they have really solid number two's. >> So what are you excited about tonight? We got some really great people, you already mentioned John W. Thompson, we've had him on a ton of times, great leader. Who are some of the people you're excited to see tonight? >> Well, we have three great companies, we have Slack, Zoom, and my personal favorite, Peloton. I'm kind of lusting for a Peloton bike in my garage. I hope it arrives under the Christmas tree this year. >> (laughs) All right, Rich. Well, thanks for taking a few minutes and good luck tonight on the MC duties. >> Yeah, well, thank you Jeff. >> All right, he's Rich, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE, we're at the Churchills, the ninth annual awards banquet here with the Churchill Club. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (upbeat electronic music)

from our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley Palo Alto California this is a cute conversation hey welcome back everybody Jeffrey here with the cube we're in our Palo Alto Studios here today for a cute conversation it's a little bit of a dog days of summer conference seasons a little bit slow so we're excited we can kind of take a step back and we're gonna look back actually in time we're excited to have a very special guest rich Kolbert he is the field CTO at Dell EMC but really what we're talking about today is this data domain is 10-year anniversary of the date domain acquisition so rich first off welcome to the to the cube thanks Jeff excited to be here thanks for the invitation appreciate it I can't believe we're talking before we turned the cameras on that you join in 2006 and yet it's been 10 years I'm like wait 2006 was more than 10 can that be we're just getting old I don't know things are changing too fast no it's like a trip down memory lane and it just seems so long ago and yes in a way it also seems like yesterday I think things have gone so quickly so we're also joined in this segment by our top data analyst also the founder of wiki bond and co-ceo of Silicon angle media and founder of that as well so Dave Villante is joining us all the way from Boston Dave good to see ya hey Jeff hi rich to talk to you guys hey Dave so let's take a quick trip back 10 years ago actually maybe 11 years ago things were starting to heat up there was a lot of different vendors out there a lot of different players and things started to consolidate so I wonder if you can give us a little bit of your perspective what what's going on rich and then we'll get Dave's perspective yeah it was an interesting time right before the data domain acquisition we actually went through some economic times in 2008 and the markets are changing and and and some companies are becoming more successful some companies were struggling through that time customers were also looking for ways to to you know save money and do some interesting things there so it was a mixed feeling set of you know through that times data domain had IPO in 2007 and we were kind of going through this this explosive period of growth but you know across the board we just saw so many things change all at once and we really were surprised I think when initially was NetApp that an that they had intentions to bias and I think that was due to some of the economic factors of play and then of course EMC stepped in and and started a bidding contest with NetApp for for the company right so I Dave wonder if you could share your perspective you're sitting as an analyst you got Jo TG The Godfather of storage back in Boston what were you seeing in terms of the kind of the market dynamics and was it a surprise wouldn't that app decided to make a move well if you know first first of all I had left the storage industry for quite some time and when I started wiki bond we looked at storage and nothing had changed except one thing which was David deduplication that was new until a new tape was finally I always hated the tape the tape was finally being attacked so it was it was amazing time and EMC at the time we had some obviously great management yet Frank Sluman running data domain yo Joe Tucci who always balanced out acquisitions with organic you know in how to R&D and when Tom Georgians and NetApp said they were gonna go by David domain emt's walk right in and said no way so it was somewhat of a defensive move but at the same time when you talk to the M&A guys they said no no it's not just defense we can actually make this a growth play and that's exactly what happened Dayna domain I think at the time rich was probably a couple of hundred million dollar company and then they they popped that at the EMC and scaled that to you know well over a billion dollars and it'll maintain the the franchise and then grew it quite dramatically beyond where all the expectations were for the market the market team at the time was probably around a billion and I think ID seen rich as a over three billion today yeah one of the things that's so don't quote me on all the numbers because I'm not like you know watching the market caps and stocks but I think we'd gotten up to about a 500 million dollar run rate in terms of sales and prior to the crash I think our market cap was actually significantly higher so so our price came down you know which is one of the things I think that attracted NetApp to the game so the interesting dynamic inside the company was that the NetApp offer was was kind of the first one so they were working with the data domain leadership and they were speaking with us EMC was more of a kind of unsolicited offer so there was less communication and I remember there was a morning I was at San Francisco Airport going out to meet a customer and Joe to Chi put out a full-page ad in a local newspaper and we were reading that and that was his way of communicating to the to the people a data domain saying he wants to welcome us into the family it was quite a moment well it sure was and of course you guys were fierce competitors data domain was fierce competitors with with EMC you know fighting for for the install base and then all of a sudden you know the cultures it's somehow work EMC was was very good at acquisitions and he made it work and they not active it was an outside observer but you were there you know Frank Sluman came in did it's kind of running the the data protection organization but a lot has changed since then hasn't it I mean back then you stored you know a little bit of data I think accounting of terabytes today we live in a petabyte scale world I could talk about what's changed well you know the scales and performance certainly has changed I think the data domain platform today is about a thousand times larger than it was when it first came to market and in fact when we were being bid on by NetApp and EMC we had a flagship product is the DD 690 you know behind the scenes we had a system that was coming out that was double that size and EMC nor Netta knew about that so once the deal closed they got to find out that our size had just doubled in our performance and doubled at the same time but you're right you kind of talked about the dynamics inside of EMC EMC had a very large data protection you know division they had avemar networker santaros v TLS they also had an OEM arrangement for a competing product with the data domain platform so it was really like you know I compared to going to Hogwarts right where you have all of these different houses and we came in with with data domain and and I think the thing that really the glue that really helped it come to get was Joe Tucci you know tapping Frank's Luqman on the shoulder as the leader to bring this together and taking what was the borough division and and reforming it as the BRS division and I think we came together very quickly as a team even though people came from all of these different backgrounds you know standing for these different products rich let me follow up on that because there's a lot of M&A activity going on right now and and not very many big M&A deals are ultimately successful it turns out so what you said a little bit about you know Joe and Frank you know coming together but what are some of the other attributes that you would say that made it work it actually did what everybody hopes on an acquisition which is take great technology put it into a big sales machine and watch it grow and grow I think part of it you know quite frankly just comes down to the product and being differentiated because there are a lot of products out there and and if you take a step back they have good things that they're doing but it's very hard to find a product that says hey you're doing something that even if you put the blueprints out there it's very hard for other people to follow in those footsteps and create a similar value proposition and I think I think in this case it was a differentiated product and it had a lot of energy of its own and and I think from an EMC perspective they just stood back and said let's take this momentum and and play it out and see how how far it can take itself unfortunately I think a lot of times they don't do that right a lot of times acquiring companies don't just take this great thing and kind of get out of the way and add the juice where they can but you try to to try to change it so that's a really nice statement on Joe to G and what he was able to accomplish yeah no he was fantastic for us and and his support was tremendous but also his you know delegation and and kind of seeing how this but you know kind of having a vision of how this business unit should be formed right I think what was was very prison and then now you're part of Dell so obviously Michael Dell big personality as well the Dell technology stories he's doing a great job of pulling all these pieces together and you know kind of reinvigorating the brand coming back out of the little little side bar you know make it private for a while and come back so I wonder if you can talk about that integration how's that going as you've gone now a couple of times well I think it's been very exciting for us because the one piece that EMC had always been lacking had been the the compute part of the picture and now we have really the ability to go in and talk about the entire stack with our customers and that's that's a lot more powerful than saying here is an element of it and then if you want to go and add compute to that perhaps you know put in your virtual or physical servers then you're gonna we're going to need to partner with somebody and you know it's it's just a much cleaner story from end to end right right so the big big change obviously that wasn't around ten years ago that is around today is public cloud right huge impact not only directly in in taking workloads to the public cloud but also I think much more importantly changing the way people think about provisioning thinking about the way people think about elastic capacity so as as the market has evolved the rise of AWS and any other public clouds how has that changed what you guys are doing how are you reacting to that house at a new opportunity you know to kind of grow the maturity of the core product yeah well the thing is we have taken a lot of approach you know that's been learning and evolving as well right so so you know developers and applications really figured out AWS and the public cloud early I think data protection has has followed along with a couple years of lag in terms of doing that so you know our perspective is we learned as well right so so 2015 2016 I think there was some resistance and I think ultimately when we started to follow those workloads into the cloud there was a little bit of a lift and shift what we've learned is that the architecture really matters when you get to the cloud so the efficient use of resources the ability to do things in a cloud like way to use for example object storage instead of block storage when when the case presents itself so we took our products and virtualize them and followed them into the cloud but we realized that just taking the on-premise version of the product and putting it in the cloud itself isn't enough right because at the end of the day the customer is paying for all the underlying resources and so if your architecture is an efficient from a cost perspective as well as a performance perspective it's not going to be a viable solution and so 2017-2018 we've really seen a big acceleration in our adoption in the cloud because we have adapted our architecture to be more cloud friendly and more cost-effective for our customers to deploy but it was a learning experience for sure you know and and I think we're continuing to learn and continue to develop in that space and there's a lot of opportunity ahead of us the other big change I think that's come that we see over and over and over is really data as an asset only as an asset but as a huge valuable asset that drives your business drives real lytx but then becomes actually something that drives your company value and I think we see that and the Facebook's of the world and the googles of the world of why they have these crazy high valuations relative to here to their revenue and their profits because they're getting value for the data alright great news for you right it used to be a sample the day of the day was a pain it was expensive to store I didn't want to keep it all now everyone wants all the data they want to analyze it in real time and they want to put it in a place where they can actually put multiple applications across that same data set to do all kinds of new analytics so again super opportunity for you guys people aren't storing any less data no absolutely yeah no the data amount being stored is definitely growing one of the things that we're seeing that that's this kind of pervasive is this idea of of really using the right data the right place the right time so accessibility to whether it is a data Lake or it is your protection copies or you know an instant access of your protection copies there's a lot of different thing customers are doing with data but it's no longer a one-size-fits-all proposition like it was back in the tape automation days where I'm just throwing all of this stuff into a box and and never accessing it again right so the dynamics are changing and continue to evolve I expect that if we have this conversation two or three years down the road we're going to see some amazing things happen in the next couple of years that and some of it we were not predicting now we're gonna find out as customer demand and as innovation guides us along right because then the other big piece is the media right we've talked about tapes and the original data domain was was in response to some issues with tape and we get spinning rust as everybody likes to call it and now of course flash so yeah again see change in terms of capability the cost is coming down it's no longer the super high-end thing just for super high value applications so very transfer transformative opportunity on the on the media side as well on the flashlight as well you hit on a couple of really key things data domain was very successful because it became viable and practical to displace tape automation and nobody was a fan of their tape automation environments and now I think we're gonna see that's that same shift you know spinning disk is right now being relegated to archival and backup purposes but we're gonna hit an inflection point very soon I think we're where every instance of spinning disk probably can be questioned and so we are actually doing the you know kind of getting ahead of that curve and coming out with all flash products as a choice for a customer so we'll still have spinning disk for some backup use cases but we'll also have you know be able to offer customers a choice of the data domain technology on an all flash set of platforms and that will give customers a chance to get out of the yeah that spinning disk business as well right good I wonder if I get what if I get chime in here I you guys were talking about the the technologies and the cloud and the architecture it's interesting it David the main really started out don't hate me for saying this but as a feature product and the key feature was data deduplication data domain had the best you had a lot of guys doing post process you had you know some guys trying to do server-side avemar itself for example but they domain really killed it with regard to data David II do and if this feature product became a platform and had an architecture people became as you know unicorn times 2 plus plus and so I wanted to ask you rich about that architecture and aware it can go you're talking about different media now beyond spinning disk you know it used to be just a kind of a dumb target you've now got integrated appliances you've got software that's integrated there so it's you know you talked about the scale and the capacity where do you see this architecture going I wonder if you could comment on yeah well I think a lot of that belongs in in the realm of the data management software that speaks to it and and by having a distributed ecosystem and having things like you know distributed segment processing so we can take data domains technology and extend it out into those data management activities because a lot of the what's happening in the market is as new workloads are coming into the market they're having their own methods and native tools built-in for data protection and to be able to leverage those and have a highly consolidated affect on the backend is still extremely valuable to our customers and you're right it was a differentiated product from a deduplication standpoint but really the feature was that I can keep my 30 60 or 90 days worth of copies that are separate from my primary copies so I putting them somewhere safe I can even put them under different governance from my primary storage or my primary application owners right and it's practical and feasible and and prior to that the only real way to do that was with tape automation deduplication has become more of a broader word itself and it goes beyond what data domain does so there's deduplication and primary storage but if you look at primary storage deduplication it's good but it's designed to help you reduce the use of primary storage by 2 or 3 times it doesn't touch on the 30 60 90 days of retention that data domain does so there the similar technologies and a common use of the word but but they're two different use cases that the the remains separate I think yeah and you know as a former practitioner the other you are I think a former customer the genius part of the genius of data domain was its ability to just plug in to existing processes yes you didn't have to change things up and so it was an easy in but but it's impressive that you've been able to keep that that architecture going I wanted to ask you about market share you aided them in has always had a sixty plus percent market share I think it's at sixty now but it's it's like the Cisco of purpose-built backhaul appliances you're able to sort of dominate that little segment of the market which keeps getting bigger what but now you've got a lot of new entrants you know on VC money pouring in a lot of noise in the marketplace I feel like you guys maybe a couple years ago took your eye off the wall and now you've got this renewed sense of a vigor you know maybe it was parked partly the acquisition but you know we've talked to Beth Phelan about this a number of times you've really refreshed the portfolio so so wonder if you can talk about that and my question is what gives you confidence that you can continue to maintain your dominance yeah that's a great question and things have really changed I think starting around 2014 we were having some internal conversations about things like simplification the consumerization of IT and and all of those those dollars that you're talking about are really being poured into companies that are trying to take a different approach they're going into the white space that we had kind of left open which was simplicity right if you if you look back 10 or 15 years and you look at the the data management and enterprise backup software space enterprise backup software has been complicated and as you add more use cases it has become even more complicated and the customer base is no longer tolerant of that that's something that that maybe 10 or 15 years ago that was kind of a badge of honor to be working with complex and people just don't have the time for that there's a lot of IT generalists and folks that are out there that don't want to go to training class you know you know five days or ten days out of the year to learn how to use a product so that was a really good thing that we're seeing in the marketplace in terms of making products simpler easier to use and more approachable with things like discoverable functionality we certainly have the you know put a lot of effort into going in that direction because we think that's the right direction but what gives me confidence is the underlying storage value proposition about efficiency and performance and scale is something that we've still think that we have a strong upper hand on and when it comes down to that you know we take cloud as an example our data reduction in the cloud we think allows a much lower cost to serve and you know the customer is going to pay for that cloud storage or that cloud compute regardless of which vendor they're trusting in terms of their their solutions so simple only goes so far we think we can get there with simple but we don't necessarily see our competition having the efficiencies scalability and and so forth that we've already had so that that's good that gives me a lot of confidence so when you talk to customers what's the big problem the big hairy problem that they're trying to solve in your space and how are you guys helping so I one of the two big problems I see is is really a lot of IT teams are confronted with they've got a digital transformation going on they've got a cloud strategy going on an IT isn't necessarily being invited to the table early enough or often enough to go ahead and help with that process so what you have is you a cloud team building applications bringing things online and then the data protection the backups the snapshots whatever they're doing to make sure that that data is safe is is a bit of an afterthought and it you know I think of DevOps and I think about the ops part and I've never really come across an application team that wanted to own the business responsibility for the risk of you know backups recovery replication and all of that and I think IT has a lot of established practices that would be good to inform how those things should be built so the number one thing that I'm talking to with my customers when we're talking about this whole you know tectonic shift and in the way things are being done is that IT and the digital transformation or the cloud team do need to speak early and often and proactively about how they approach data protection because they continue to need to have a strategy that evolves and make sure they keep themselves protected as they start moving these critical workloads into the cloud it's an age-old problem with backup and data protection people think of it as a back as a bolt-on is an afterthought and your point is right on it's got to be a fundamental part of any transformation it's just like security you can't bolt it on earth just doesn't scale yeah and it's very much like you know back in the day when open systems was just coming of age there was a lot of operational discipline that the mainframe teams had and the mid-range teams had but the open systems was the Wild West and eventually open systems learned and and and a lot of that you know was knowledge sharing about best practices and you know Mis became IT now IT is becoming you know DevOps and digital transformation we're seeing a lot of that same dynamic happening again and and you know my main point is just you know start those conversations and if you're on the IT side start those conversations proactively you might not be getting invited to the digital transformation party invite yourself rich has been quite a 10 years and and as I was just watching an Andy Jazzy interview if you think the last 10 years have been crazy you ain't seen nothing yet so you guys are in a great position to stay agile and I'm gonna steal your line that it's no longer an honor to work on complicated systems that's great yeah it's been great being here thanks for having me and looking forward to maybe coming back in ten years and seeing what changed so hopefully we won't wait 10 years so rich thanks for stopping by Dave thanks for checking in from Boston and it's great to see you as well thanks you guys thanks Dave thanks Jeff [Music]

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2019, brought to you by Dell Technologies and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone. So CUBE's live coverage here in Vegas, day three as we wind down three days of deep coverage, two sets, a lot of content flowing on siliconangle.com and theCUBE.net. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. Day Three's still got a lot of action to it. Rick, Rich Steeves, Senior Director, Worldwide Partner Programs welcome to theCUBE. We just talked about people calling you Rick. >> It's going to happen. >> Rich, welcome to theCUBE. >> It's been an, I'm really honored to be on with you guys. >> Worldwide Partner Programs. Obviously, VMware is hot. Revenue's up, Pat Gelsing was on yesterday. >> That's right. >> Everything's going up and to the right. Lot of things that the bets that VMware made paying off. Still great customer base growing. Cloudified, multiple partnerships. So you guys are in a good market position. >> Clearly. >> Now with the Dell Technologies integration you got touchpoints with Azure. VCF, the VMware Cloud Foundation. >> That's right. >> You have a foundational bedrock now to integrate into multiple environments. Really puts the software-defined data centers in play for everybody. >> That's correct. >> Now you're bringing it out to the partners for money-making opportunities where they can deliver value. >> Exactly. >> And get paid for it. Make a lot of profit. >> Win, win, win. >> This is the equation of partnering. >> Correct. >> Where are you guys at right now? Again, a lot of now, partnering, you do joint programs. It seems complex to me. Break if down for us. >> Yeah, well clearly we're at a great moment right now. Where the portfolios coming together. The market opportunities coming together. And we're really looking to help drive a change in the vision in the way that we partner together in the marketplace. To win together with our customers. You know, we feel like our responsibility is if we're going to have the opportunity to win the business with our partners for the foreseeable future and to become that essential, ubiquitous digital platform to help drive innovation together with our partners for our customers during their digital transformation. We fundamentally have to change the way that we look at the business and the way that we engage in the marketplace. We have to make it radically simple. Simple to engage, drive profitability and drive growth. And spend less time focused on, maybe, some of the traditional motions that have been aligned in the channel programs of the past. Around traditional routes to market or silos of complexity within the program. >> Rick, what's an example of old versus new? Give us a couple of them. >> You know, I've had the opportunity to lead and drive some of the changes and transformations. Some of the larger vendor programs in the marketplace. I think there are some pitfalls and traps we've all fell into in the past. And a lot of that has come into really siloing our partners based on traditional routes to market. Here's the bar program. Here's the distributor program. Here's the OEM program. But what we're seeing in this cloud, hybrid cloud, mobile first world, is that our partners are delivering value across the spectrum. And yet, many vendors are continuing to look at their partners as individual segments and silos. We've got to do better, right? And that's really the business proposition and some of the exciting announcements we've had recently. >> Well, I would just add just some complexity standpoint. Because of data and AI and, now, scalable infrastructure, you now have every vertical industry with specialty capabilities apps. >> Quite right. >> So, in a way, your service area for partnering is increased. So not only do you have to simplify the programs, you've got a bigger landscape to take territory on. >> Clearly. As we look at building on the foundation that we've built. Through the compute layer and b-sphere, and the ecosystem of incredibly valuable partnerships that we've built. As we take that across and hyperfocus on accelerating the cloud journey, but also transforming networking and security, or also empowering digital workspace. We've got to look at that broad base of partners and how they're delivering value to their customers. >> So what is the segmentation if it's not by the old traditional buckets? What are the new buckets or seams, really? >> It's a great question. I think we're coming to the market with a simpler proposition that says we want to offer our partners greater flexibility and choice to choose the business model that makes sense for how they want to go to market to solve their customers most pressing IT needs and priorities. Whether I'm a reseller or a cloud-service provider or an OEM. I want to have one engagement model. A consistent experience as I engage with VMware. And I want you to recognize the total value I'm bringing to the customer relationship, rather than the individual piece parts. So, one agreement, any business model, one single program. >> So, let's take some friction out of the complexity, make it simpler. What about specific programs? What are you guys launching? What are some of the news that you're rolling out to get these guys up and running quickly? >> We're really excited. We've had the opportunity over the last few weeks to change what has been in the past the tradition of over a decade the VMware Partner Network evolving to become the VMware Partner Connect Program. So we announced three weeks ago to our most strategic partners the introduction of that one-program framework, offering simplicity and choice. To focus on their customers rather than how we've asked them to engage based on how we're aligned often internally by business unit or route to market. And the reception's really just been incredible. >> The other thing that partners want, and I hear this a lot from my friends that are in the business, own a bunch of firms. Hey, what's in it for me? I need to make some cash. I would need simplicity. I don't need a lot of high cost of sales. And I want to have high margins on what we're doing. But also want to wrap services around it. >> Clearly. >> How are you guys helping that scenario? >> Really in multiple ways. I think for VMware, as we look at the opportunity, and I know you guys had a chance to catch up with Pat. We've got some really bold statements of where we want to grow the business in the coming years, together with our partners. I mean, it's a pretty powerful position to say, we want to double the business together with you in the next three-to-five years. We want to go from 5% of revenue, delivered through SAS and subscription to 20% together with our partners. And that's going to come through a vibrant and committed partner ecosystem. And that vibrancy as we go forward is really going to be in the way that partners differentiate, based on their skill sets and capabilities. Rather than program tiers, names and brands. I'll give you an example. We've had the opportunity in this last year to introduce our Master Services Competencies. Really industry best-of-breed recognition of where partners are unlocking value for their customers. So whether they're driving data-center virtualization, network virtualization or desktop and mobility. We now have the ability to say to our fields, to our services organization, and most importantly, to customers, here is the partner that is going to drive and deliver on the transformation. Through, for the partner, margin-rich services opportunities. And, again, in a lot of these conversations with our partners, as they're making that change and transition many of them from traditional resale business models to cloud. A lot of the services opportunity is really delivering most of the profitability. >> So part of that transition, you just mentioned it, is quadrupling the subscription component. How are you dealing with the obvious challenge of how you compensate for that? What a lot of SAS companies will do is say, "Yeah, SAS, pay by the drink. "But you got to sign up for three years." (laughter) So, it's really not cloud. So how are you dealing with that challenge and how is the channel absorbing it? >> It's a great question. If we look at the economics of the relationship in the past, it's been really focused on the initial transaction. But that transaction in the cloud world, it is an important milestone along the customer journey, but it's only the initial step, right? In this try, buy, proof-of-concept life cycle, we've got to do a better job of taking our investment envelope and wallet and spreading that across the customer journey. Looking at monthly recurring revenue. Looking at the ways that our partners are unlocking value and driving consumption. So, moving it from the initial transaction to deployment, consumption and expand opportunities with our customers. It's going to add tremendous value to the equation. >> So you've got a new playbook, things are changing. >> That's right. >> How you got here is not how you're going to move forward. Whole new ball game. What kinds of mechanisms you guys going to put in place? 'Cause you guys had, Tranel has tried and trued programs. Soft dollars, training. You got to get the word out. >> That's right. >> You got to watch the journey, so you got to instrument that. >> That's right. >> What are some of the things you guys doing to be new and be fast and be relevant? >> It's a great question. I mean, a lot of it comes down to the evangelism, and I'd say frankly, doing a better job of listening to our partners. We've had the advantage through VMware Partner Connect, through our partner advisory boards and councils. Doing the listening along the way to say that this is a program that not only is VMware building, but this is the co-investment and co-building together with our partners. So, from inception to design and concept and, ultimately, to the announcement and rollout. We've had our partners hip-to-hip with us in this rollout. We'll certainly look to leverage opportunities, like VMworld, hopefully we'll see you guys there. >> We'll definitely be there. >> We'll see you guys there. To amplify that message. But the key piece, and this is what our partners tell us, is help me leverage the investments I've made in my VMware relationship today, but position me for the opportunities ahead. Give me a sense of, where do I need to invest. Sometimes ahead of the curve to make sure I'm taking advantage of the program. >> And are you guys funded for that right now? Is Pat getting behind this with actual cash to prime the pump here? What's the update there? >> This is from Pat and e-staff on down. A commitment for the organization. Brandon Sweeney, Maurizio Carli, everyone's really rallied around us. It's one of our top priorities. Pat wants to ensure that we've got that vibrant, committed partner ecosystem that is bringing incremental value to our customer relationships and we're putting the money behind the commitment. >> You got to get the community action going, got to get some content. Doing a great job right here. Question on the customer piece, I want to just shift gears, because end of the day you're, it's an indirect channel ultimately for VMware, but you've got to get deep in it and enable your partners to be successful. They, then, have to think about your customer, too. Their customer, the joint customer. How has that world changed? 'Cause we were talking before we came on camera that with the VMware Cloud Foundation and all the, now, bundling that going on and all the integration. You've got a tight relationship with Dell Technologies, as well as other partners. There's a lot of cross-wired programs. Who gets credit for what, there's some complexity there. But, ultimately, it's an opportunity for the partner, your customers and then their customer, to actually be a cloud-service provider. >> That's right. >> A whole new generation. Take away the system integration challenges that customers want to get rid of. >> That's right. For us, it really comes down to being disruptive by being radically simple, right? Really boiling it down. And you talk about the relationship. There's some great announcements this week around the Dell Technologies Partner Program, change and evolution. And one of our partners, as well as our customers, frankly, have been asking us is, make it easier for us to do business across the full Dell Technologies family, right? All of the strategically-aligned businesses. Whether you look at our VMware cloud, on Dell EMC, VXrail, any number of the engineered solutions that we're bringing to market. It's about adding value to the customer, simplifying the engagement and, really again, driving the profitability for our partners. >> I think being agile, Rich, is going to be key for success for you. And making sure that it's funded, and that the money's going into the partners, >> That's right. >> In the gas tank to get then go faster >> Clearly. And we feel like we have one of the richest programs in the industry that's really driving incremental value for our partners. And I think what you'll see us do is, again, a better job of differentiating of partners that are, certainly, co-investing in VMware. But most importantly, and this is what we hear from our customers, is invest in the partners that have demonstrated the ability to unlock value in this engagement. >> Well, thanks for sharing the insight. We love this topic. I know it's kind of like a channel thing, but it's becoming a very key part for creating value, and also delivering a simple solution for customers. Give a quick plug for what's going on at VMworld, you mentioned VMworld. How do you guys run your partner programs, events? What's on the schedule? Take a quick minute to give a quick plug. >> We've got a few opportunities ahead of us. We're really excited to continue the success around our VMware Empower events. Where we bring both sales and technical enablement conversations to our partners. Certainly, VMworld to be able to-- >> What is that event? The one... >> Empower coming up in Lisbon. We're really excited towards the end of May. VMworld in the U.S., as well as in Amia, >> Do you co-locate an event within VMworld? >> Yes. We also do our Distribution Advisory Board, our Partner Advisory Board. Trying to add as much value, but also, again, do a good job of listening to our partners. >> Great. Rich, thanks for coming on, appreciate it. We'll be following all, we'll be following the money. That's at the end of the day, success is where people exchange of value. You guys doing a great job. We're bringing you all theCUBE content here. Day three, wall-to-wall coverage. I'm John with Dave Vellante. Stay with us for more after this short break. (synth music)

>> Announcer: From the SiliconANGLE Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and after many travels around the globe with theCUBE, really happy to be back in the Boston area studio, and happy to welcome to the program first time guest and first time we've had OpenLink on the program, Rich Grossi who's the CEO. Coming up from Long Island, appreciate you joining me up here and looking forward to discussing with you. >> Understood. >> So, first OpenLink, as I said, company, first time we've had on theCUBE. Why don't you give the audience a little bit of background, how long the company's been existing and what the focus is. >> Well, we're celebrating this year our 25th anniversary. So we serve the energy, financial, trading and treasury markets. We're based in Long Island with offices around the world serving about 500 clients or so in those different markets. I'm happy to be here today to talk about some of the innovation that we have going on. >> Great. Before we get into the OpenLink, Rich, give us a little bit about your background. You've been with OpenLink for a good part of the journey. >> I have. I've been with the company for 21 years in a variety of different roles. I've spent some time in operations, in development. Prior to the CEO position I spent some time in operations and prior to this role I was the CTO of the company. >> Okay, well congrats on the new role, Rich. So tell me, what is OpenLink today? You talked about kind of the industries you focus on. How do you fit in the markets today? >> So we are the market leader for the categories I mentioned. So we'll play in the energy and the commodity space. I will plan the financial services, banking, treasury space. We're well-known for our risk management capabilities and we serve top-tier clients in all those markets around the globe. >> Yeah, Rich, it's interesting. I think there's not a single segment in the market that's not going through some significant change. Disruption is on everyone's mind. What's changing for your customers and how is OpenLink really kind of adjusting to meet those needs? >> Yeah, it's always been a high degree of sensitivity towards risk. That's been our strong point as a company for a long time, and we serve the clients through kind of advanced analytics that provide them with that capability. But more frequently, we're seeing total cost of ownership driving a lot of the decisions made by our clients, right. So in markets that have some head wounds coming in and just kind of steady-state markets, looking for how to use technology to benefit them but also reduce the total cost of ownership. >> Okay, and so explain what that means. You say things like risk, things like analytics, you know, data, super important to all customers. How do we make sure they have the right data, how do they make sure that they're not getting a tax on what they have. Where does OpenLink help their-- what do the products look like? >> Yes, I mean, so we have a pretty advanced trading and risk-management platform. We also provide treasury and cash management solutions. And in those spaces what we're doing is we're providing our clients with the ability to manage their risk, manage their positions, take a peek ahead to see what's coming in the markets. Do sensitivity analysis to ensure that as they trade and as they train dex, and to your point, as they manage to the logistics. It's all done with a system capture from front to back, and it's all done with a view towards the risk of the application and a risk of the markets that they're in. >> Okay, you had a recent launch that was OpenCloud. Maybe explain what that is, how that fits with the broader discussion of Cloud. >> Sure, OpenLink's been in the private Cloudspace now for about 11 years. So this was our hosting application. And through those years, we built up the technology to support more of the, kind of, online, so predominantly we're a perpetual-based company, on-prem. And now our clients are looking for a little bit more ownership. A little bit more security. And they're looking for that single vendor to manage their applications within the could. So there's a big transformation in our markets where many of our large tier one energy financial services clients are looking for that reduction of total cost, and they're looking for OpenLink to be the provider that can offer them that service within the could environments. >> Okay, so is this a SAS offering? Is it living on some of the public Clouds? Help us, kind of, get our weeds a little bit. You're a former CTO. >> Sure, so, I mean, it's a similar technology to what we've built over the years. So, we're still managing scaleability and performance. We still have created security in the application. Still managing a lot of the monitoring and logging in application security within that. But it is in the Microsoft Azure environment, so we're working with Microsoft, partnered with them to build up a Cloud environment for our customers, such as they can manage this remotely as you would in any Cloud environment, and then provide all the advantages of Microsoft Azure on top of the technology that OpenLinks built over time. >> Okay, so it sounds, you know, similar to what you were doing before, but a lot of changes. How organizationally do you have to change for this, and maybe walk us through a customer, why would they choose one versus the other? What are the big advantages of the new way? >> Sure, so organizationally, we do have Cloud-dedicated teams now, right? So a lot of knowledge required to take your product, not only Cloud-enable it, but make it feature functionality-rich for the clients within the could. So we've built Cloud operations teams, we built SOx and NOx. We leverage our employee base around the world. We put a lot of technology advantages into the new software that is Cloud enabled. So, things like performance is just a big topic for us. So, allowing our clients to drive greater performance through scaleability and dynamic scaleability within the could. That's a big advantage to our clients. >> Yeah, you think back a couple of years ago if you talked about Microsoft and Google, and the Amazons of the world, it's like, 'Well, I'm worried about the security, the government is challenging.' I was just at one of the bigger Cloud shows and they said security is actually opportunity. You get to kind of get a re-do on security. Government seems to be something that we're sort of doing-- what's your customer's experiences? Is there still hesitancy, or are people, you know, kind of jumping in the waters nice? >> Well, I think there's still the question, and I think it's changing very rapidly for our client base. So, a couple years ago our clients were interested in the could but not necessarily moving to the could. And I think you're absolutely right in the sense that some of them were concerned about the security of their trading data being out in something like Microsoft Azure. Many of them recognize today that the security benefits of a Microsoft Azure, as an example, could be far greater than what they're doing in-house today. And as you look at the technology of OpenLink we've built layers of security on top of everything we used to have within the core application, encryption and the like. And now using some of the key vault technologies and some of the scaleability technologies of Microsoft Azure, we feel like we're able to provide a higher level of security than they even have on-prem using the could up close. >> Yeah, one of the other big advantages if you plug into, kind of, that ecosystem and platform of the public Cloud, what opportunities there-- Microsoft, you think of, like, you know, active directory, all of the business functionality. What do you gain today and maybe give us a little roadmap as to what this looks like down the road? >> Yeah, so our clients are looking for a handful of things. So they're looking for that reductioning of ownership. We've been able to save them on average about 30 per cent, just coming from them their on-prem or their data centers today. They're also looking for that single source of support. So today, we're working with their network engineers and they're DBAs. In the could version we're able to provide them with those same services, coupled with our support applications so that we're providing single line of visibility into their overall trading and risk-management application. And they're also looking for performances, I mentioned before, and security. So with the could application, we're not only able to provide them with the feature functionality of our application, but also the could technology that sits around it. >> One of the other things if you look at, kind of managing the environment versus going to the public Cloud, usually the public Cloud, you know the joke I have is: What version of Azure are you running on? Well, Microsoft takes care of it. A similar thing in your environment? >> Very similar. So, the ability to upgrade, the ability to leverage the scaleability of Microsoft Azure, the new technology coming out in Microsoft Azure. All the could feature functionality, that all comes with it for free. And to your point, providing our clients with a manage service so that we can manage not only their day-to-day environment, but we can also manage the infrastructure and the business needs that they have in using our application. So, all that combined has provided our clients with a great leg up in terms of how they use our software and how they manage it moving forward. >> Yeah, I'm curious: do the customers have to choose one over the other? The on-prem or the could? Do you have some customers that may be migrating, being to the Hybrid Multi-Cloud is kind of a big issue for a lot of customers these days. >> Yeah. So we have a large number of clients today that are still on-prem, and they're probably staying on-prem for awhile. But the evolution of the could as it relates to our client-base is quite rapid. So, a couple years ago we would talk to our clients and they were interested. Last year we announced our proof of concept coming and what we were building. We launched our public Cloud just in quarter three of this year. And the feedback from our client-base was dramatic. So now they're all looking to migrate over. We respond to ROPs quite often and I would estimate maybe about nine per cent of those coming have some interest in the public cloud moving forward. >> Okay, Rich, what do you want your clients to really know about OpenLink? And, the two pieces, just kind of today, and if they knew OpenLink, say, five years ago. You know, what's the big change? >> Yeah, well I think, well we have a tagline that says we like to solve the complex, right? And make it simple. You'll see many of our clients, the bigger names, avengers that are out there using our software to solve really complicated problems, right? So our software is pretty configurable and also addresses some of the larger challenges that we have within the spaces that OpenLink sits in. So, our clients are well-known in that area, and OpenLink is well-known in there, and our ability to solve those problems. When you take that, and you take the total cost of ownership, and you take the public Cloud capabilities and you build all that technology that we've advanced over the past, you know, 25 years, it's a pretty compelling application and company that we work for. >> Alright, well, Rich, appreciate the updates on everything happening at OpenLink. Wish you the best of luck with the could offering. We'll be back with more coverage here. Always check out thecube.net for all the coverage, and thanks for watching this, theCUBE. (upbeat techno music)

(clicking) >> Hey welcome back everybody. Jeff Freck here with theCUBE. We're in Palo Alto, California at the Chertoff Event. It's called Security in the Boardroom and it's really about elevating the security conversation beyond the IT folks and the security folks out in the application space and out on the edge and really, what's the conversation going on at the boardroom, 'cause it's an important conversation. And one you want to have before your name shows up in the Wall Street journal on a Monday morning for not all the right reasons. So we're excited to have a real practitioner, Rich Baich. He's a chief information security officer for Wells Fargo. Welcome Rich. And in the company of Jason Cook who's the managing director with the Chertoff group. Great to see you Jason. So we talked a little bit off camera Rich. You've been in a lot of different seats in this game from consulting to now you're at Wells Fargo, and a few more that you ripped on this, but I can't remember them all. From your perspective, integrating this multi-dimensional approach. How do you see this conversation changing at the boardroom? >> Well I think most importantly, the board is a topic of discussion, one of the top discussions over the last couple of years. There's been a lot of guidance recently that's been put out to board directors through the National Association for Corporate Directors, as well as various consulting firms providing guidance. Board members need to be able to take this complex topic and simplify it down so that they can do their jobs. It's expected of them, and sometimes that can be a language barrier. So I think what I see happening is boards are beginning to hire individuals with some cybersecurity expertise. My example at Wells Fargo, we hired a retired general Suzanne Vautrino to come in as one of our cybersecurity, obviously experts in the board. And it's great having her in that board seat because often times, she can help me translate some of the issues and gain a different perspective from the board. >> So that's a pretty interesting statement. So they're actually putting security expertise in a formal board seat. >> Yes. >> That's a pretty significant investment in the space. >> But if you think about this. I mean why? >> Right. >> Right. >> Well most institutions today when you break them down are really technology companies that's just a business platform rolls on. So security is becoming part of not only the institution today but the institution of the future as organizations move towards digitalization. So having that ability to have someone who understands risk management side of cybersecurity as well as the practitioner side will only make, I think a boardroom that much stronger. So what's your experience in terms of trying to communicate the issues to a board? Just down and dirty. Where do you find the balance as to what they can absorb? What can they not absorb? How do you outlay the risks if you will and how they should think about driving investment in these areas? >> Well great points, the first and most important thing with boards is gaining trust. Did you have the expertise and you had the information. By no means could I bring all my data to a board meeting because it's just not digestible. So there's a little bit of an art of taking that down and building the trust and focusing on certain areas. But a point you made I think it's really important is one you have to help them understand what are the top risks and why. But when you're talking to a board, you have to be able to say, and this is what we're doing to address them and here is the time frame and here is the risk associated with this. Because in their minds, they're thinking what can I do to help you? And then secondly, Stu point was the decisioning regarding prioritization. in this particular space, there's always going to be risks but it's really the art of deciding which ones are more important. I'll talk to the board and I'll highlight things like probability of occurrence. So the higher the probability of occurrence of something happening really drives our prioritization. >> Then Jason from your perspective. You're coming in from outside the board trying to help out. How have you seen the security conversation and priority change over time, especially in the context of this other hot topic that everybody is jumping on, which is probably the agenda item, just before Rich comes in the room, which is digital transformation. We got to go, we got to go, we got to go. Everybody is evolving. We got to go, we're getting left behind, and then oh by the way. We're just going to come on afterwards and tell us what some of these risks are. >> Yeah and I think actually Rich started to touch on it. All organizations especially when you're looking at the Fortune 500 and around that shape and size are global. And they're all on a digital journey, whether they acknowledge they're actually a digital product company. All of them now, digitizing is happening. So as a result of that security is an absolute critical component of anything linked to that for all of the reasons that you can just read the headlines around. And actually at the boardroom level, it's more now, hopefully becoming a conversation that's about how do we as board members take responsibility and accountability for how to protect our organization. And it's framed now more and more so in a risk management conversation. Rather than just saying security 'cause security is like outside. But actually the reality is security and cyber activity because you're a digital organization. It's embedded into everything whether you realize it or not so the board needs to be education to what that means. How do you take risks in the context of digital activity and assign it to a risk management program approach rather than just saying it's the security guy that's got to come in and do that. And the security guy is most probably going to be the guy that absolutely has to understand that boardroom issue, and then execute upon it and bring options to the table every time in and around that space. But the main message I would say is take this from a risk management perspective and start using the language like that. And that's probability the other point that we were discussing just earlier in the security series today, that actually it's about risk management, and educating everyone very clearly as to what do we mean. What are we actually protecting. How are we protecting it and what are we doing as a set of board members, and as a leadership team to actually take forward enablement of the business. From a security perspective, understanding it but then also protecting the business. >> Right, so are you building models then for them to help them assign a value to that risk, so now they know how much that they have to invest. 'Cause the crazy thing about security, I'm sure you could always invest more right. You can always use a little bit more budget. There's a little bit more that you can do to make yourself a little bit more secure than you were without that investment. But nobody has infinite resources so as you said bad things can happen, it's really risk mitigation and knowing the profile and what to do about it. So how do help them model that? >> I can answer that and I know Rich can jump in, so what you're seeing is a brand new leader role emerging from the traditional IT security guy to now, the guy that isn't or person should I say more accurately that's engaged at the boardroom. That's there to talk about risks in the context of how the board sees it. And so what does that means? It means that absolutely, you need to know what you've got from a digital perspective. Everything from the traditional network to all of the IT assets and everything there. The key thing is you need to know what you've got, but you have then contextualize all of that against business risks. And pulling those two things together is the challenge that you see across the industry today 'cause there have been silos. And usually underneath that silos and many other silos so bringing that together is really important. And I think if you look at how we're going to see disrupt it is and how things are managed in the risk management perspective. Actually, that's what you're going to see come together. How do you bring those models together to give actionable intelligence that the board can react to or predict against, and that's not an easy thing to pull together. >> Yeah, and to take it more down to a tactical arena so you know at some point, like you said, you can't asking for more money. Because you're not practicing good business attributes because everybody can ask for more money. So I think as organizations mature their security programs, they're going to go to the board with issues like this. Endpoint security, there's so many different Endpoints security products out there that you could buy. But if you're practicing good risk management. You're starting off by saying what is the risk. Let's just talk about malware. So malware is the risk, well how much malware gets to your Endpoint. Unless just say in this particular instance, you're here. You go into a program where you're enhancing your tools, your techniques, you're shutting down USB ports. You're not allowing people to connect to the internet unless they go through the VPN. You're buying endpoint solutions to put on there. You're encrypting the endpoint, you're doing all these things and you suddenly see your monthly average of malware go from here to here. And then when you do that and you walk into a boardroom, and you can show them that and you say this is kind of our risk appetite. 'Cause we're never going to be able to reduce it but I could go spend some more money. I could go spend five million more dollars that I'm going to move it this much. I'd rather take that five million move it over to this risk which is right here to reduce it to that area. So I think that goes hand in hand with what Jason's saying but when you can get to that level to the board to help them understand their decision. They have a greater comfort level that the money is being spent and prioritization is occurring. >> Yeah, so if I may so that one of the things that you just touch on, I think is really useful for us kind of expand upon more. One of the advise points Chertoff Group had in our series session was around bringing cybersecurity experts to the boardroom. I know obviously, you're very active in the whole finance sector, providing advice and direction in that space. Can you tell us more about that? >> Sure so, what's particular in my world also as the chair or the financial services sector coordinating council. What we do is we work closely with the government, with policy and doctrine and then the FSI sector, financial services sector, analysis center is the group that really goes out, and kind of operationalize it through information sharing and that sort. But what we've seen is a desire to have, honestly more security professionals on boards. So CISOs potentially being asked to sit on public and private company boards to provide that expertise back to the company. So that the boardroom can help understand and transcend what is going on. Again from my standpoint, I feel very privileged to have one of them on my board today. And she's been just a wonderful addition, not only does she bring cyber expertise, but being a retired general brings a lot it to other additional. So I would predict, we'll see more and more CISOs being asked to sit on public and private boards. They bring that perspective as the business models move to digitalization. >> We can go on forever, forever and ever but we can't unfortunately, but I have one more question for you Rich. Is kind of this change in attitude amongst the CISO community and other people ideal security in terms sharing information. You mentioned on this group and you use to be, we didn't want to share if we got attacked for a lot of different reasons, but there's a real benefit to sharing information even across industries about the profile of some of these things that are happening. How are we seeing that kind of change and how much more valuable is it to have some other input from some other peers, than just kind of you with you're jewels that they're trying to protect. >> Sure so in general, from an industry standpoint, the financial services are much further ahead than a lot of the other industries 'cause we've been doing it along time. So sharing occurs officially through the FSI site but also you'll pick you phone up and call a friend right a way, and say hey, I've just seen some of you're IP space associated with so and so. So that informal sharing is there. It's a very tight community, in particularly from the financial services. You don't think of security as a differentiator necessarily because the reality of it is when an adversary chooses to point their direction at you. It's just a matter of time before they get around to your institution. So sharing occurs and secondly, the government been doing a great job of trying to break down those barriers. Work through all the issues that are related with sharing of classified, unclassified information. So there exists a model today, it seems to be working pretty well. Formal as well as informal and if you look at some of the past history. That sharing has really helped a lot of organizations. I see they only getting better and better as time goes by. >> And the point, I'd add to that is the financial services I said for example is one of the most mature out there. In fact, it is probably the most mature or global even out there. But that's taken time to establish the trust and the collaboration there. And the one recommendation that we would all give out to the industry as a whole is you need to be getting those types of things stood up. And you have to invest time into them to generate the collaboration and trust. You're not going to get it over night but you have to start somewhere in doing the same. Because really what good work is happening here, needs to be happening across the global industry as a whole. >> Right, alright Rich and Jason, we'll have to leave it there unfortunately. Really great insight and thanks for sharing your insight with us. >> Rich: And thank you. >> Alright, I'm Jeff Freck. You're watching theCUBE. We're at Security in the Boardroom at the Chertoff event, Palo Alto. Thanks for watching. (clicking)

>> Announcer: Live from Washington DC, it's theCUBE covering .NEXT conference. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to DC everybody. Welcome back to Nutanix NEXTConf. This is the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with Stu Miniman. Rich Napolitano is here as the CEO of Plexxi. Good friend, long time CUBE alum. Great to see you. >> Great to see you guys. Pleasure to be here with you again. >> Yeah, so you know, I love the fact that you're back in startup land. I mean, you did unbelievable things at EMC, but really this is your real love, alright, runnin' startups, you know, eating glass as we call it. So, when we first heard about Plexxi, I have to admit, Rich, we were down at Strada that time and it was kind of heavy and really geeky. I'm not a networky guy. You've really done a great job of sort of transforming the messaging and the company's vision. Share with us what's up with Plexxi. >> Yeah, I know, again thank you for inviting me here and it's a pleasure. It's an exciting time for the company. You know, we're actually breaking out, right and so it's great to see the momentum. And, the team has done a fabulous job. The challenge in the early days is, you know, you have the technology and you're trying to establish your product market fit and we've done that now. And so, it's exciting to be at this important inflection point, you know, tremendous revenue growth this year. You know, we could probably be profitable if we want to be this year which there's not many startups that can say that. And, what's happened is fundamentally we really connected now what we have built, our technology to the ping points in the marketplace and we have, you know, deep deep clarity and understanding of that now. >> So, talk a little bit more about the sort of value proposition and kind of why you guys, why Dave started the company and why you joined, what you're all about. >> Yeah, so we're building the next generation networks. We're not building additional networks and so we're very focused on the next era of computing, you know, third platform, you know, and scaled down infrastructure, cloud, where the requirements on the infrastructure are very different. You need to just build a much more agile and flexible infrastructure. You know, the choice the public cloud is there and it's going to be there forever, but how do you build an agile infrastructure for private and for hybrid infrastructure? And, what we've realized, and Dave realized this early on, is that the networking architectures haven't fundamentally changed in a very, very long time. And, you know, there's an emergence now, and this is what we've really learned in the last two years, there's an emergence of this other data center network. You know, Sysco has been dominant and done a phenomenal job in traditional data sending networking, but there's this emergence of this other network and we now we call it by a name, which is the Hyper Converge Network, HCN. And so, in very simple terms, what is Plexxi? Plexxi builds the HCN for the HEI infrastructure. >> Okay, Rich, you're just going to have to unpack this a little bit so, you know, people in the networking world will be said, we understand that it was a lot of the east, west traffic, the traffic between those, but you know, architecturally you know, we kind of got rid of the sand and now we've got this distributed software model that I've got these nodes, so where was the gap that you were lookin' to fill and you know, does Nutanix understand that this was a challenge? >> Those are all great questions and very relevant to the challenge. So, when you really look at the problems we solved, we start, we pull it up to the top for a second and we've learned a lot about this the last couple of years. What people want is simplicity. They don't want complexity. And, we built a lot of complexity into every layer of the infrastructure. Everything from the applications to the operating environments, to compute, to the storage and to the network. And so, what we really bring to the marketplace is a much simpler approach to deploy infrastructure and we do that by simplifying the network dramatically. So, and we do that by having a software definable network that's built out of industry standard components. So, Plexxi really brings three things to the table. We figured out how to build this very elastic and agile fabric to allow you to compute storage, allow you to connect storaging a few things together. And, we do that on white box switches and that's dramatically reduced our cost point and is tremendously simple to deploy, but on top of that, we built our software abstractions. And, it really is the key to us is really our software control and our integrations into operating environments. So, what we bring to market is an integrated solution with a set of switches that build this fabric, but our software controller allows you to provision this network seamlessly in the same way that Nutanix talks about being the invisible infrastructure, we're the invisible network. >> So, when Nutanix first started they were like, we're going to kill that sand 'cause you don't need some of that complexity, so when do I need this you know, fabric as you call it, as that interconnected tissue, you know, what size customer, you know, what kind of challenges does that, you know, really knock down. And So, if you're living within a rack you don't have any of these problems really. Right, I mean our integration into Nutanix is so sophisticated now that even within the rack we dramatically simplify your network provisioning so even within a rack our value proposition of simplicity and ease of use is compelling. We make the network invisible in that context. So, as you provision your VM's or your storage in a Nutanix environment, the network comes along. The value proposition just is most compelling as you go to second, third or more racks. Some of our biggest customers deploy us in tremendous configurations, you know, 10 racks in 10 rows, thousands of servers. But, we can start as small as you know, one or two switches. And so, the value proposition really is, how seamlessly can you build your infrastructure, in other words, can you make the network invisible in these infrastructures? And, that's exactly what we do. >> You have this picture in your booth, these things that you're handing out, and it's really simple. You got the old way which is storage, server and networking all that complexity. Nutanix, really kind of attacked the server and storage piece, brought those together, connect to the network. What you guys are doing is collapsing that complexity even further. Is that right, so what does that mean for a customer from a scaling standpoint? >> So, if you look at the three tier architecture as you talked about, then we're maxing multiple networks. And, the first thing anyone does whey they deploy converged infrastructure, hyperconversions in particular, is they eliminate the SAD. So, that was another network, we just never really thought about it that way. And so, effectively what we do is we allow you to have the properties of a SAD on your network. So, for a storage guy, notions of like Fibre Channel zoning are inherent now in our IP oriented network. Our network is very low latency because of our architecture. So, as you scale your latency is constant as you would things like NVME, our latency is extremely low. It's not a multi tiered network, so you don't have the complexity of building a multi tiered network as you scale your converged infrastructure. The benefit of hyperconversion is that you can deploy these racks of infrastructure and easily deploy them. The challenge is that if you don't attack the networking problem you still bump into that as you deploy this infrastructure. >> That becomes your new bottleneck. >> It's your new bottleneck for performance, but it's really for administration. And so, our integration layer ties into Nutanix and makes us aware of Nutanix operating environment, its file system, when nodes are being added or removed, when you're doing STApps or backups, et cetera and the network is shaped in the context of that application called Nutanix. It'll do the same thing for VMware. >> And, when you say it's tied into Nutanix, is that you know, the Nutanix the kind of the software between nodes is also things like AHV. Do you have awareness of that? >> So, AHV or VMware and PRISM, so you know, our management console can be launched from PRISM now so you can seamlessly have an experience. You can't tell when you're really in Nutanix or when you're in Plexxi's management domain. But, more importantly, we're aware of when nodes are added. We understand if you're rebuilding your underlying file systems, et cetera, as the requirements on the network shift, as you add more workloads, as workloads move, as applications move on the infrastructure and you need more compute over here or more storage there, our network adapts to that. >> So, explain how this is different than, just say, Nutanix bringing its platform and partnering up with UCS, for example. What's different about what you're doing? >> So, we're, for one thing, we're only the network, right. And so, the compute infrastructure, we don't do that. We don't do storage. We don't compute. And so, we're just a network that is really, think about it as the fabric for compute and storage as opposed to a data center network where you connect, you know, your printers and your desktops and your infrastructure for your, you know, multiple sites, et cetera. That's the kind of Sysco, if you will, network. We're this embedded network in these hyperconvert solutions. Put one or two switches in your rack and as you pump out this converged infrastructure you just scale that fabric seamlessly. And, it's so well integrated inside of Nutanix you don't even realize it's another network. It's just embedded in the infrastructure. >> So, sorry Stu. From a buyer's standpoint, do I get to eliminate some other or limit my growth of my traditional network or do I have to throw that out and bring this in? >> So, we're totally compatible with existing networks. So, what you do is you do two or three things. We can insert into existing networks without modifying them, but you don't need to keep adding top rack switches and spines to your existing network because our, most of the traffic stays on this other network. The Nutanix guy, sales teams, are actually starting to call this the Nutanix Network or the Nutanix Fabric because it's embedded in their solution. So, most of the traffic between Nutanix and those goes on that network which minimizes your northbound traffic to your existing network which just frankly, removes a headache from traditional network admins to deal with this other stuff. And, that same way the network admin in the past didn't worry about sand traffic. You shouldn't have to worry about this other problems too. >> So, Rich, it's interesting, talking to Nutanix customers you're right, smaller customers don't have networking issues, some larger customers it depends on how good their network is. The thing coming on the horizon that's going to dramatically change this embedded network thing is got to be NVME over fabrics, so what does that mean for Nutanix standalone and you know, I got to think that that's a huge tie to bring you into a lot of accounts. >> I mean, it is clear that the next tsunami, I mean you know, we were all involved in the early days of Flash and we saw that coming when we were at EMC, you know, I probably saw more Flash than anybody in the world actually, in terms of petabytes actually. And, NVME is that next wave, right. So, whether it's embedded in Nutanix or it's standalone bricks, you know, it's going to elevate the, this east, west, this need for this other network and you know, to pitch Plexxi a little bit, there's no better network that's tuned for this. The nature of our network is it's flat, it's extremely low latency, so we're actually awaiting the day that, you know, NVME hits the market in a big way because it will blow apart every other network, every hierarchal network will just be blown apart because the latency characteristics of a multi tiered network are just, are just clear. You can measure it. Also, we're doing a lot of stuff like that. >> Are any of your solutions ready for this today? >> We're ready for it. >> And, when you simplify the network like that, the entire infrastructure, and you provide that infrastructure with virtually no latency impact, now you can start to see the way in which application development changes and, you know, everybody's talking about digital disruption and how they going to pay for it. They're going to pay for it by, I would think, shifting labor resource from non-differentiated infrastructure to some of these more exciting areas. We've just heard that from two CIOs. >> We see this a lot. Telecom Italia is here with us. Sparkle, one of our bigger customers, we have a session this afternoon at 3 o'clock and Sparkle's going to be in the session with us and I just met a good hour with them here. And, it's all about the operating expense. It's like, Nutanix plus Plexxi reduces my operating expense and he's going to repeatedly say that. And, it's just clear that people cannot afford the complexity associated with traditional networks anymore. They can't hire programmers to build out, you know, not to pick on ACI, but complicated scripts for ACI, they can't afford to build those programs. Our integration layer makes that seamless, it takes it away. >> So, what's your relationship with Nutanix? You're obviously doing some hardcore integration. How do you describe the partnership and do you have other partnerships that you can talk about? >> So, right now we have a number of large scale, service provider customers we sell through distribution and other partners. We're partnering a lot with Nutanix now, a little bit with SimpliVity, but we're going to go after all of the HCI vendors ultimately. But, pretty clearly Nutanix is the leader and we've been developing a relationship at the top and in the field and parallel we've been recruiting Nutanix partners. AERO's our master distributor, so we're recruiting AERO partners that sell Nutanix and we're building a set of solutions. We announce our reference architecture this week with Nutanix, so we're very focused on Nutanix. They're clearly the leader in this space and they get our value proposition. Invisible infrastructure meets the invisible network. I mean, it's perfect. >> You mentioned before you could be profitable if you wanted to be. It's kind of, it's not in vogue to be profitable, Rich. People want growth, but you know, hey, this booming market's not going to last forever. >> Timing's different, timing is different. I think, actually I think it plays to our strength that you know, I looked at our financials a couple of weeks ago and I realized some about 80% of all that we've spent has been in R and D, and that's not common. Most starters at this stage have invested a lot more in the go to market and now's our time to go do that, but we have, now we have the advantage that we have such tremendous revenue growth that we can fund a bunch of it ourselves and the capital markets are different than they were two or three years ago when Nutanix was growing. So, I think it's prudent for CEOs now to be just more, more capital efficient because the markets are different and I think we're in a unique position now given all of our growth. >> Well, Rich, congratulations on the early success. We know what you're capable of. We'll be watching. I really wish you the best. >> My pleasure, thank you. >> Alright, keep it right there everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE. We're live from Nutanix, NEXTConf. Be right back.

>>Hey, welcome back everyone. Day three of eight of us Reinvent 2022. I'm John Farmer with Dave Volante, co-host the q Dave. 10 years for us, the leader in high tech coverage is our slogan. Now 10 years of reinvent day. We've been to every single one except with the original, which we would've come to if Amazon actually marketed the event, but they didn't. It's more of a customer event. This is day three. Is the machine learning ai keynote sws up there. A lot of announcements. We're gonna break this down. We got, we got Andy Thra here, vice President, prince Constellation Research. Andy, great to see you've been on the cube before one of our analysts bringing the, bringing the, the analysis, commentary to the keynote. This is your wheelhouse. Ai. What do you think about Swami up there? I mean, he's awesome. We love him. Big fan Oh yeah. Of of the Cuban we're fans of him, but he got 13 announcements. >>A lot. A lot, >>A lot. >>So, well some of them are, first of all, thanks for having me here and I'm glad to have both of you on the same show attacking me. I'm just kidding. But some of the announcement really sort of like a game changer announcements and some of them are like, meh, you know, just to plug in the holes what they have and a lot of golf claps. Yeah. Meeting today. And you could have also noticed that by, when he was making the announcements, you know, the, the, the clapping volume difference, you could say, which is better, right? But some of the announcements are, are really, really good. You know, particularly we talked about, one of that was Microsoft took that out of, you know, having the open AI in there, doing the large language models. And then they were going after that, you know, having the transformer available to them. And Amazon was a little bit weak in the area, so they couldn't, they don't have a large language model. So, you know, they, they are taking a different route saying that, you know what, I'll help you train the large language model by yourself, customized models. So I can provide the necessary instance. I can provide the instant volume, memory, the whole thing. Yeah. So you can train the model by yourself without depending on them kind >>Of thing. So Dave and Andy, I wanna get your thoughts cuz first of all, we've been following Amazon's deep bench on the, on the infrastructure pass. They've been doing a lot of machine learning and ai, a lot of data. It just seems that the sentiment is that there's other competitors doing a good job too. Like Google, Dave. And I've heard folks in the hallway, even here, ex Amazonians saying, Hey, they're train their models on Google than they bring up the SageMaker cuz it's better interface. So you got, Google's making a play for being that data cloud. Microsoft's obviously putting in a, a great kind of package to kind of make it turnkey. How do they really stand versus the competition guys? >>Good question. So they, you know, each have their own uniqueness and the we variation that take it to the field, right? So for example, if you were to look at it, Microsoft is known for as industry or later things that they are been going after, you know, industry verticals and whatnot. So that's one of the things I looked here, you know, they, they had this omic announcement, particularly towards that healthcare genomics space. That's a huge space for hpz related AIML applications. And they have put a lot of things in together in here in the SageMaker and in the, in their models saying that, you know, how do you, how do you use this transmit to do things like that? Like for example, drug discovery, for genomics analysis, for cancer treatment, the whole, right? That's a few volumes of data do. So they're going in that healthcare area. Google has taken a different route. I mean they want to make everything simple. All I have to do is I gotta call an api, give what I need and then get it done. But Amazon wants to go at a much deeper level saying that, you know what? I wanna provide everything you need. You can customize the whole thing for what you need. >>So to me, the big picture here is, and and Swami references, Hey, we are a data company. We started, he talked about books and how that informed them as to, you know, what books to place front and center. Here's the, here's the big picture. In my view, companies need to put data at the core of their business and they haven't, they've generally put humans at the core of their business and data. And now machine learning are at the, at the outside and the periphery. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook have put data at their core. So the question is how do incumbent companies, and you mentioned some Toyota Capital One, Bristol Myers Squibb, I don't know, are those data companies, you know, we'll see, but the challenge is most companies don't have the resources as you well know, Andy, to actually implement what Google and Facebook and others have. >>So how are they gonna do that? Well, they're gonna buy it, right? So are they gonna build it with tools that's kind of like you said the Amazon approach or are they gonna buy it from Microsoft and Google, I pulled some ETR data to say, okay, who are the top companies that are showing up in terms of spending? Who's spending with whom? AWS number one, Microsoft number two, Google number three, data bricks. Number four, just in terms of, you know, presence. And then it falls down DataRobot, Anaconda data icu, Oracle popped up actually cuz they're embedding a lot of AI into their products and, and of course IBM and then a lot of smaller companies. But do companies generally customers have the resources to do what it takes to implement AI into applications and into workflows? >>So a couple of things on that. One is when it comes to, I mean it's, it's no surprise that the, the top three or the hyperscalers, because they all want to bring their business to them to run the specific workloads on the next biggest workload. As you was saying, his keynote are two things. One is the A AIML workloads and the other one is the, the heavy unstructured workloads that he was talking about. 80%, 90% of the data that's coming off is unstructured. So how do you analyze that? Such as the geospatial data. He was talking about the volumes of data you need to analyze the, the neural deep neural net drug you ought to use, only hyperscale can do it, right? So that's no wonder all of them on top for the data, one of the things they announced, which not many people paid attention, there was a zero eight L that that they talked about. >>What that does is a little bit of a game changing moment in a sense that you don't have to, for example, if you were to train the data, data, if the data is distributed everywhere, if you have to bring them all together to integrate it, to do that, it's a lot of work to doing the dl. So by taking Amazon, Aurora, and then Rich combine them as zero or no ETL and then have Apaches Apaches Spark applications run on top of analytical applications, ML workloads. That's huge. So you don't have to move around the data, use the data where it is, >>I, I think you said it, they're basically filling holes, right? Yeah. They created this, you know, suite of tools, let's call it. You might say it's a mess. It's not a mess because it's, they're really powerful but they're not well integrated and now they're starting to take the seams as I say. >>Well yeah, it's a great point. And I would double down and say, look it, I think that boring is good. You know, we had that phase in Kubernetes hype cycle where it got boring and that was kind of like, boring is good. Boring means we're getting better, we're invisible. That's infrastructure that's in the weeds, that's in between the toes details. It's the stuff that, you know, people we have to get done. So, you know, you look at their 40 new data sources with data Wrangler 50, new app flow connectors, Redshift Auto Cog, this is boring. Good important shit Dave. The governance, you gotta get it and the governance is gonna be key. So, so to me, this may not jump off the page. Adam's keynote also felt a little bit of, we gotta get these gaps done in a good way. So I think that's a very positive sign. >>Now going back to the bigger picture, I think the real question is can there be another independent cloud data cloud? And that's the, to me, what I try to get at my story and you're breaking analysis kind of hit a home run on this, is there's interesting opportunity for an independent data cloud. Meaning something that isn't aws, that isn't, Google isn't one of the big three that could sit in. And so let me give you an example. I had a conversation last night with a bunch of ex Amazonian engineering teams that left the conversation was interesting, Dave. They were like talking, well data bricks and Snowflake are basically batch, okay, not transactional. And you look at Aerospike, I can see their booth here. Transactional data bases are hot right now. Streaming data is different. Confluence different than data bricks. Is data bricks good at hosting? >>No, Amazon's better. So you start to see these kinds of questions come up where, you know, data bricks is great, but maybe not good for this, that and the other thing. So you start to see the formation of swim lanes or visibility into where people might sit in the ecosystem, but what came out was transactional. Yep. And batch the relationship there and streaming real time and versus you know, the transactional data. So you're starting to see these new things emerge. Andy, what do you, what's your take on this? You're following this closely. This seems to be the alpha nerd conversation and it all points to who's gonna have the best data cloud, say data, super clouds, I call it. What's your take? >>Yes, data cloud is important as well. But also the computational that goes on top of it too, right? Because when, when the data is like unstructured data, it's that much of a huge data, it's going to be hard to do that with a low model, you know, compute power. But going back to your data point, the training of the AIML models required the batch data, right? That's when you need all the, the historical data to train your models. And then after that, when you do inference of it, that's where you need the streaming real time data that's available to you too. You can make an inference. One of the things, what, what they also announced, which is somewhat interesting, is you saw that they have like 700 different instances geared towards every single workload. And there are some of them very specifically run on the Amazon's new chip. The, the inference in two and theran tr one chips that basically not only has a specific instances but also is run on a high powered chip. And then if you have that data to support that, both the training as well as towards the inference, the efficiency, again, those numbers have to be proven. They claim that it could be anywhere between 40 to 60% faster. >>Well, so a couple things. You're definitely right. I mean Snowflake started out as a data warehouse that was simpler and it's not architected, you know, in and it's first wave to do real time inference, which is not now how, how could they, the other second point is snowflake's two or three years ahead when it comes to governance, data sharing. I mean, Amazon's doing what always does. It's copying, you know, it's customer driven. Cuz they probably walk into an account and they say, Hey look, what's Snowflake's doing for us? This stuff's kicking ass. And they go, oh, that's a good idea, let's do that too. You saw that with separating compute from storage, which is their tiering. You saw it today with extending data, sharing Redshift, data sharing. So how does Snowflake and data bricks approach this? They deal with ecosystem. They bring in ecosystem partners, they bring in open source tooling and that's how they compete. I think there's unquestionably an opportunity for a data cloud. >>Yeah, I think, I think the super cloud conversation and then, you know, sky Cloud with Berkeley Paper and other folks talking about this kind of pre, multi-cloud era. I mean that's what I would call us right now. We are, we're kind of in the pre era of multi-cloud, which by the way is not even yet defined. I think people use that term, Dave, to say, you know, some sort of magical thing that's happening. Yeah. People have multiple clouds. They got, they, they end up by default, not by design as Dell likes to say. Right? And they gotta deal with it. So it's more of they're inheriting multiple cloud environments. It's not necessarily what they want in the situation. So to me that is a big, big issue. >>Yeah, I mean, again, going back to your snowflake and data breaks announcements, they're a data company. So they, that's how they made their mark in the market saying that, you know, I do all those things, therefore you have, I had to have your data because it's a seamless data. And, and Amazon is catching up with that with a lot of that announcements they made, how far it's gonna get traction, you know, to change when I to say, >>Yeah, I mean to me, to me there's no doubt about Dave. I think, I think what Swamee is doing, if Amazon can get corner the market on out of the box ML and AI capabilities so that people can make it easier, that's gonna be the end of the day tell sign can they fill in the gaps. Again, boring is good competition. I don't know mean, mean I'm not following the competition. Andy, this is a real question mark for me. I don't know where they stand. Are they more comprehensive? Are they more deeper? Are they have deeper services? I mean, obviously shows to all the, the different, you know, capabilities. Where, where, where does Amazon stand? What's the process? >>So what, particularly when it comes to the models. So they're going at, at a different angle that, you know, I will help you create the models we talked about the zero and the whole data. We'll get the data sources in, we'll create the model. We'll move the, the whole model. We are talking about the ML ops teams here, right? And they have the whole functionality that, that they built ind over the year. So essentially they want to become the platform that I, when you come in, I'm the only platform you would use from the model training to deployment to inference, to model versioning to management, the old s and that's angle they're trying to take. So it's, it's a one source platform. >>What about this idea of technical debt? Adrian Carro was on yesterday. John, I know you talked to him as well. He said, look, Amazon's Legos, you wanna buy a toy for Christmas, you can go out and buy a toy or do you wanna build a, to, if you buy a toy in a couple years, you could break and what are you gonna do? You're gonna throw it out. But if you, if you, if part of your Lego needs to be extended, you extend it. So, you know, George Gilbert was saying, well, there's a lot of technical debt. Adrian was countering that. Does Amazon have technical debt or is that Lego blocks analogy the right one? >>Well, I talked to him about the debt and one of the things we talked about was what do you optimize for E two APIs or Kubernetes APIs? It depends on what team you're on. If you're on the runtime gene, you're gonna optimize for Kubernetes, but E two is the resources you want to use. So I think the idea of the 15 years of technical debt, I, I don't believe that. I think the APIs are still hardened. The issue that he brings up that I think is relevant is it's an end situation, not an or. You can have the bag of Legos, which is the primitives and build a durable application platform, monitor it, customize it, work with it, build it. It's harder, but the outcome is durability and sustainability. Building a toy, having a toy with those Legos glued together for you, you can get the play with, but it'll break over time. Then you gotta replace it. So there's gonna be a toy business and there's gonna be a Legos business. Make your own. >>So who, who are the toys in ai? >>Well, out of >>The box and who's outta Legos? >>The, so you asking about what what toys Amazon building >>Or, yeah, I mean Amazon clearly is Lego blocks. >>If people gonna have out the box, >>What about Google? What about Microsoft? Are they basically more, more building toys, more solutions? >>So Google is more of, you know, building solutions angle like, you know, I give you an API kind of thing. But, but if it comes to vertical industry solutions, Microsoft is, is is ahead, right? Because they have, they have had years of indu industry experience. I mean there are other smaller cloud are trying to do that too. IBM being an example, but you know, the, now they are starting to go after the specific industry use cases. They think that through, for example, you know the medical one we talked about, right? So they want to build the, the health lake, security health lake that they're trying to build, which will HIPPA and it'll provide all the, the European regulations, the whole line yard, and it'll help you, you know, personalize things as you need as well. For example, you know, if you go for a certain treatment, it could analyze you based on your genome profile saying that, you know, the treatment for this particular person has to be individualized this way, but doing that requires a anomalous power, right? So if you do applications like that, you could bring in a lot of the, whether healthcare, finance or what have you, and then easy for them to use. >>What's the biggest mistake customers make when it comes to machine intelligence, ai, machine learning, >>So many things, right? I could start out with even the, the model. Basically when you build a model, you, you should be able to figure out how long that model is effective. Because as good as creating a model and, and going to the business and doing things the right way, there are people that they leave the model much longer than it's needed. It's hurting your business more than it is, you know, it could be things like that. Or you are, you are not building a responsibly or later things. You are, you are having a bias and you model and are so many issues. I, I don't know if I can pinpoint one, but there are many, many issues. Responsible ai, ethical ai. All >>Right, well, we'll leave it there. You're watching the cube, the leader in high tech coverage here at J three at reinvent. I'm Jeff, Dave Ante. Andy joining us here for the critical analysis and breaking down the commentary. We'll be right back with more coverage after this short break.

>>Good afternoon everyone, and welcome back to the Cube. I am Savannah Peterson here, coming to you from Detroit, Michigan. We're at Cuban Day three. Such a series of exciting interviews. We've done over 30, but this conversation is gonna be extra special, don't you think, John? >>Yeah, this is gonna be a good one. Griffon Labs is here with us. We're getting the conversation of what's going on in the industry management, watching the Kubernetes clusters. This is large scale conversations this week. It's gonna be a good one. >>Yeah. Yeah. I'm very excited. He's also got a fantastic Twitter handle, twitchy. H Please welcome Richie Hartman, who is the director of community here at Griffon. Richie, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks >>For having me. >>How's the show been for you? >>Busy. I, I mean, I, I, >>In >>A word, I have a ton of talks at at like maintain a thing and like the covering board searches at the TLC panel. I run forme day. So it's, it's been busy. It, yeah. Monday, I didn't have to run anything. That was quite nice. But there >>You, you have your hands in a lot. I'm not even gonna cover it. Looking at your bio, there's, there's so many different things that you're working on. I know that Grafana specifically had some announcements this week. Yeah, >>Yeah, yeah. We had quite a few, like the, the two largest ones is a, we now have a field Kubernetes integration on Grafana Cloud. So our, our approach is generally extremely open source first. So we try to push stuff into the exporters, like into the open source exporters, into mixes into things which are out there as open source for anyone to use. But that's little bit like a tool set, not a ready made solution. So when we talk integrations, we actually talk about things where you get this like one click experience, You log into your Grafana cloud, you click, I have a Kubernetes, which probably most of us have, and things just work like you in just the data. You have to write dashboards, you have to write alerts, you have to write everything to just get started with extremely opinionated dashboards, SLOs, alerts, again, all those things made by experts, so anyone can use them. And you don't have to reinvent the view for every single user. So that's the one. The other is, >>It's a big deal. >>Oh yeah, it is. Yeah. It is. It, we, we has, its heavily in integrations course. While, I mean, I don't have to convince anyone that perme is a DD factor standard in everything. Cloudnative. But again, it's, it's, it's sometimes a little bit hard to handle or a little bit not easy to get into. So, so smoothing this, this, this path onto onboarding yourself onto this stack and onto those types of solutions. Yes. Is what a lot of people need. Course, if you, if you look at the statistics from coupon, and we just heard this in the governing board session yesterday. Yeah. Like 60% of the people here are first time attendees. So there's a lot of people who just come into this thing and who need, like, this is your path. This is where you should be going. Or at least if you want to go, go there. This is how to get there. >>Here's your runway for takeoff. Yes. Yeah. I think that's a really good point. And I love that you, you had those numbers. I was curious. I, I had seen on Twitter, speaking of Twitter, I had seen, I had seen that, that there were a lot of people here coming for the first time. You're a community guy. Are we at an inflection point where this community is about to continue to scale? >>That's a very good question. Which I can't really answer. So I mean, >>Obviously I bet you're gonna try. >>I covid changed a few things. Yeah. Probably most people, >>A couple things. I mean, you know, casually, it's like such a gentle way of putting that, that was >>Beautiful. I'm gonna say yes, just to explode. All these new ERs are gonna learn Prometheus. They're gonna roll in with a open, open metrics, open telemetry. I love it, >>You know, But, but at the same time, like Cuban is, is ramping back up. But if you look at the, if you look at the registration numbers between Valencia Andro, it was more or less the same. Interesting. Which, so it didn't go onto this, onto this flu trajectory, which it was on like, up to, up to 2019. I expect this to take up again. But also with the economic situation, everything, I, I don't think >>It's, I think the jury's still out on hybrid. I think there's a lot, lot more hybrid. Let's see how the projects are gonna go. That's what I think it's gonna be the tell sign. How many people are in participating? How are the project's advancing? Some of the momentum, >>I mean, from the project level, Most of this is online anyway. Of course. That's how open source, right. I've been working for >>Ages. That's >>Cause you don't have any trouble budget or, or any office or, It's >>Always been that way. >>Yeah, precisely. So the projects are arguably spearheading this, this development and the, the online numbers. I I, I have some numbers in my head, but I'm, I'm not a hundred percent certain to, but they're higher for this time in Detroit than in volunteer as far somewhere. Cool. So that is growing and it's grown in parallel, which also is great. Cause it's much more accessible, much more inclusive. You don't have to have a budget of at least, let's say, I don't know, two to five k to, to fly over the pond and, and attend this thing. You can just do it from your home. So that is, that's a lot more inclusive. And I expect this to, to basically be a second more or less orthogonal growth, growth path. But the best thing about coupon is the hallway track. I'm just meeting people, talking to people and that kind of thing is not really possible with, >>It's, it's great to see people >>In person. No, and it makes such a difference. I mean, yeah. Even and interviewing people in person too. I mean, it does a, it's, it's, and, and this, this whole, I mean cncf, this whole community, every company here is community first. It's how these projects come to be. I think it's awesome. I feel like you got something you're saying to say, Johnny. >>Yeah. And I love some of the advancements. Rich Richie, we talked last time about, you know, open telemetry, open metrics. You're involved in dashboards. Yeah. One of the themes here is ease of use, simplicity, developer productivity. Where do you see the ease of use going from a project standpoint? For me, as you mentions everywhere, it's pretty much, it is, it's almost all corners of the world. Yep. And new people coming in. How, how are you making it easier? What's going on? Give us the update on that. >>So we also, funnily enough at precisely this topic in the TC panel just a few hours ago, about ease of use and about how to, how to make things easier to, to handle how developers currently, like if they just want to get into the cloud native seen, they have like, like we, we did some neck and math, like maybe 10 tools at least, which you have to be somewhat proficient in to just get started, which is honestly horrendous. Yeah. Course. Like with a server, I just had my survey install my thing and it runs, maybe I need a database, but that's roughly it. And this needs to change again. Like it's, it's nice that everything is, is un unraveled. And you have, you, you, you, you don't have those service boundaries which you had before. You can do all the horizontal scaling, you can do all the automatic scaling, all those things that they're super nice. But at the same time, this complexity, which used to be nicely compartmentalized, was deliberately broken up. And so it's becoming a lot harder to, to, like, we, we need to find new ways to compartmentalize this complexity back to, to human understandable levels again, in particular, as we keep onboarding new and new and new, new people, of course it's just not good use of anyone's time to, to just like learn the basics again and again and again. This is something which should be just compartmentalized and automated away. We're >>The three, We were talking to Matt Klein earlier and he was talking about as projects become mature and all over the place and have reach and and usage, you gotta work on the boring stuff. Yes. And when it's boring, that means you have success. Yes. But then you gotta work on the plumbing. What are some of the things that you guys are working on? Because people are relying on the product. >>Oh yeah. So for with my premises head on, the highlight feature is exponential or native or spars. Histograms. There's like three different names for one single concept. If you know Prometheus, you ha you currently have hard bucket boundaries where I say my latency is lower equal two seconds, one second, a hundred milliseconds, what have you. And I can put stuff into those histogram buckets accordingly to those predefined levels, which is extremely efficient, but like on the, on the code level. But it's not very nice for the humans course you need to understand your system before you're able to, to, to choose good cutoff points. And if you, if you, if you add new ones, that's completely fine. But if you want to actually change them, course you, you figured out that you made a fundamental mistake, you're going to have a break in the continue continuity of your observability data. And you cannot undo this in, into the past. So this is just gone native histograms. On the other hand, allow me to, to, okay, I'm not going to get get into the math, but basically you define a single formula, which there comes a good default. If you have good reasons, then you can change it. But if you don't, just don't talk, >>The people are in the math, Hit him up on Twitter. Twitter, h you'll get you that math. >>So the, >>The thing is people want the math, believe me. >>Oh >>Yeah. I mean we don't have time, but hit him up. Yeah. >>There's ProCon in two weeks in Munich and there will be whole talk about like the, the dirty details of all of the stuff. But the, the high level answer is it just does what people would expect it to do. And with very little overhead, you become, you get highly, highly or high resolution histograms, which is really important for a lot of use cases. But this is not just Prometheus with my open metrics head on the 2.0 feature, like the breaking highlight feature of Open Metrics 2.0 will be you guested precisely the same with my open telemetry head on. Low and behold the same underlying technology is being put or has been put into open telemetry. And we've worked for month and month and month and even longer between all different projects to, to assert that we have one single standard which is actually compatible with each other course. One of the worst things which you can have in the cloud ecosystem is if you have soly different things and they break in subtly wrong ways, like it's much better to just not work than to break in a way, which is just a little bit wrong. Of course you won't figure this out until it's too late. So we spent, like with all three hats, we spent insane amounts of time on making this happen and, and making this nice. >>Savannah, one of the things we have so much going on at Cube Con. I mean just you're unpacking like probably another day of cube. We can't go four days, but open time. >>I know, I know. I'm the same >>Open telemetry >>Challenge acceptance open. >>Sorry, we're gonna stay here. All the, They >>Shut the lights off on us last night. >>They literally gonna pull the plug on us. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They've done that before. It's not the first time we go until they kick us out. We love, love doing this. But Open telemetry is got a lot of news too. So that's, We haven't really talked much about that. >>We haven't at >>All. So there's a lot of stuff going on that, I won't call it boring. That's like code word's. That's cube talk for, for it's working. Yeah. So it's not bad, but there's a lot of stuff going on. Like open telemetry, open metrics, This is the stuff that matters cuz when you go in large scale, that's key. It's just what, missing all the, all the stuff. >>No, >>What are we missing? What are people missing? What's going on in the show that you think that's not actually being reported on? I mean it's a lot of high web assembly for instance got a lot >>Of high. Oh yeah, I was gonna say, I'm glad you're asking this because you, you've already mentioned about seven different hats that you wear. I can only imagine how many hats are actually in your hat cabinet. But you, you are someone with your, with your fingers in a lot of different things. So you can kind of give us a state of the union. Yeah. So go ahead. Let's talk about >>It. So I think you already hit a few good points. Ease of use is definitely one of them. And, and improving the developer experience and not having this like a value of pain. Yeah. That is one of the really big ones. It's going to be interesting cause it is boring. It is janitorial and it needs a different type of persona. A lot of, or maybe not most, but a large fraction of developers like the shiny stuff. And we could see this in Prometheus where like initially the people who contributed this the most where like those restless people who need to fix that one thing, this is impossible, are going to do it. Which changed over the years where the people who now contribute the most are off the janitorial. Like keep things boring, keep things running, still have substantial changes. But but not like more on the maintenance level. >>Yeah. The maintainers. I was just gonna bring that >>Up. Yeah. On the, on the keep things boring while still pushing 'em forward. Yeah. And the thing about ease of use is a lot of this is boring. A lot of this is strategy. A lot of this is toil. A lot of this takes lots of research also in areas where developers are not really good at, like UX for example, and ui like most software developers are really bad at those cause they just think differently from normal humans, I guess. >>So that's an interesting observation that you just made. I we could unpack that on a whole nother show as well. >>So the, the thing is this is going to be interesting for the open source scene course. This needs deliberate investment by companies who assign people to those projects and say, okay, fix that one thing or make it easier to use what have you. That is a lot easier with, with first party products and projects from companies cuz they can invest directly into the thing and they see much more of a value prop. It's, it's kind of normal by now to, to allow developers or even assigned developers onto open source projects. That's not so much the case for the tpms, for the architects, for the UX and your I people like for the documentation people that there's not as much awareness of that this is also driving value for everyone. Yes. And also there's not much as much. >>Yeah, that's a great point. This whole workflow production system of open source, which has grown and keeps growing and we'll keep growing. These be funded. And one of the things we were talking earlier in another session about is about the recession potentially we're hitting and the global issues, macroeconomics that might force some of these projects or companies not to get VC >>Funding. It's such a theme at the show. So, >>So to me, I said it's just not about VC funding. There's other funding mechanisms that's community oriented. There's companies participating, there's other meccas. Richie, if you could have your wishlist of how things could progress an open source, what would you want to see happen in terms of how it's, how things are funded, how things are executed. Cuz developers are going to run businesses. Cuz ultimately if you follow digital transformation to completion, it and developers aren't a department serving the business. They are the business. And that's coming fast. You know, what has to happen in your opinion, if you had the wish magic wand, what would you, what would you snap your fingers to make happen? >>If I had a magic wand that's very different from, from what is achievable. But let, let's >>Go with, Okay, go with the magic wand first. Cause we'll, we'll, we'll we'll riff on that. So >>I'm here for dreams. Yeah, yeah, >>Yeah. I mean I, I've been in open source for more than two, two decades, but now, and most of the open source is being driven forward by people who are not being paid for those. So for example, Gana is the first time I'm actually paid by a company to do my com community work. It's always been on the side. Of course I believe in it and I like doing it. I'm also not bad at it. And so I just kept doing it. But it was like at night on the weekends and everything. And to be honest, it's still at night and in the weekends, but the majority of it is during paid company time, which is awesome. Yeah. Most of the people who have driven this space forward are not in this position. They're doing it at night, they're doing it on the weekends. They're doing it out of dedication to a cause. Yeah. >>The commitment is insane. >>Yeah. At the same time you have companies mostly hyperscalers and either they have really big cloud offerings or they have really big advertisement business or both. And they're extracting a huge amount of value, which has been created in large part elsewhere. Like yes, they employ a ton of developers, but a lot of the technologies they built on and the shoulders of the giants they stand upon it are really poorly paid. And there are some efforts to like, I think the core foundation like which redistribute a little bit of money and such. But if I had my magic wand, everyone who is an open source and actually drives things forwards, get, I don't know, 20% of the value which they create just magically somehow. Yeah. >>Or, or other companies don't extract as much value and, and redistribute more like put more full-time engineers onto projects or whichever, like that would be the ideal state where the people who actually make the thing out of dedication are not more or less left on the sideline. Of course they're too dedicated to just say, Okay, I'm, I'm not doing this anymore. You figure this stuff out and let things tremble and falter. So I mean, it's like with nurses and such who, who just like, they, they know they have something which is important and they keep doing it. Of course they believe in it. >>I think this, I think this is an opportunity to start messaging this narrative because yeah, absolutely. Now we're at an inflection point where there's a big community, there is a shared responsibility in my opinion, to not spread the wealth, but make sure that it's equally balanced and, and the, and I think there's a way to do that. I don't know how yet, but I see that more than ever, it's not just come in, raid the kingdom, steal all the jewels, monetize it, and throw some token token money around. >>Well, in the burnout. Yeah, I mean I, the other thing that I'm thinking about too is it's, you know, it's, it's the, it's the financial aspect of this. It's the cognitive load. And I'm curious actually, when I ask you this question, how do you avoid burnout? You do a million different things and we're, you know, I'm sure the open source community that passion the >>Coach. Yeah. So it's just write code, >>It's, oh, my, my, my software engineering days are firmly over. I'm, I'm, I'm like, I'm the cat herer and the janitor and like this type of thing. I, I don't really write code anymore. >>It's how do you avoid burnout? >>So a i I didn't curse ahead burnout a few years ago. I was not nice, but that was still when I had like a full day job and that day job was super intense and on top I did all the things. Part of being honest, a lot of the people who do this are really dedicated and are really bad at setting boundaries between work >>And process. That's why I bring it up. Yeah. Literally why I bring it up. Yeah. >>I I I'm firmly in that area and I'm, I'm, I don't claim I have this fully figured out yet. It's also even more risky to some extent per like, it's, it's good if you're paid for this and you can do it during your work time. But on the other hand, if it's so nice and like if your hobby and your job are almost completely intersectional, it >>Becomes really, the lines are blurry. >>Yeah. And then yeah, like have work from home. You, you don't even commute anything or anymore. You just sit down at your computer and you just have fun doing your stuff and all of a sudden it's deep at night and you're still like, I want to keep going. >>Sounds like God, something cute. I >>Know. I was gonna say, I was like, passion is something we all have in common here on this. >>That's the key. That is the key point There is a, the, the passion project becomes the job. But now the contribution is interesting because now yeah, this ecosystem is, is has a commercial aspect. Again, this is the, this is the balance between commercialization and keeping that organic production system that's called open source. I mean, it's so fascinating and this is amazing. I want to continue that conversation. It's >>Awesome. Yeah. Yeah. This is, this is great. Richard, this entire conversation has been excellent. Thank you so much for joining us. How can people find you? I mean, I give em your Twitter handle, but if they wanna find out more about Grafana Prometheus and the 1700 things you do >>For grafana grafana.com, for Prometheus, promeus.io for my own stuff, GitHub slash richie age slash talks. Of course I track all my talks in there and like, I don't, I currently don't have a personal website cause I stop bothering, but my, like that repository is, is very, you find what I do over, like for example, the recording link will be uploaded to this GitHub. >>Yeah. Great. Follow. You also run a lot of events and a lot of community activity. Congratulations for you. Also, I talked about this last time, the largest IRC network on earth. You ran, built a data center from scratch. What happened? You done >>That? >>Haven't done a, he even built a cloud hyperscale compete with Amazon. That's the next one. Why don't you put that on the >>Plate? We'll be sure to feature whatever Richie does next year on the cube. >>I'm game. Yeah. >>Fantastic. On that note, Richie, again, thank you so much for being here, John, always a pleasure. Thank you. And thank you for tuning in to us here live from Detroit, Michigan on the cube. My name is Savannah Peterson and here's to hoping that you find balance in your life this weekend.

(upbeat music) >> We're back with Charley Dublin. He's the Vice President of Product Management at Acquia. Great to see you, Charley welcome to theCUBE. >> Nice to meet you Dave. >> Acquia, tell us about the company. >> Sure, so Acquia is the largest and best provider of Drupal hosting capabilities. We rank number two in the digital experience platform space, just behind Adobe. Very strong business growing well and innovating every day. >> Drupal open source, super deep high quality content management system. And more experience, you call it an experience platform. >> An experience platform, open, flexible. We want our customers to have choice the ability to solve their problems how they want leveraging the power of the open source community. >> What were the big challenges? Just describe your, kind of the business drivers. We're going to talk about StormForge but the things that you were facing some of the challenges that's kind of led you to StormForge. >> Sure, so our objective first is to provide the best experience with Drupal. So that entails lots of capabilities around ease of use for Drupal itself. But that has to run on a world class platform. It has to be the most performance. It has to be the most secure. It needs to be flexible to enable customers to run Drupal however they want to run Drupal. And so that involves the ability to support thousands of different kinds of modules that come out of the community. We want our customers to have choice with Drupal and to be able to support those choices on our platform. >> So optionality is key. Sometimes that creates other challenges. Like you've got one of everything. How do you deal with that challenge? >> That's a great question. Every strength is a form of weakness. And so our objective is really first to provide that choice but to do it in a cost efficient way. So we try to provide reference architectures for customers, opinionation for our customers to standardize take out some of the complexity that they might have if everything were a snowflake. But our objective is really to support their needs and err on the side of that flexibility. >> So you guys had to go through a major replatforming effort around containers and Kubernetes can you talk about that and what role StormForge played? >> Sure, so tied to the last point, our objective is to provide customers the highest performance, most secure platform. The entire industry of course is moving to Kubernetes and leveraging containers. We are a large consumer of AWS Services and are undergoing a major replatforming away from Legacy AWS towards Kubernetes and containers. And so that major replatforming effort is intending to enable customers to run applications how they want to and the power of Kubernetes and containers is to support that. And so we looked at StormForge as a way for us to right size resource capacity to support our customer's applications. >> I love it, AWS is now Legacy. But Andy Jassy one time said that if they had to redo Amazon they'd it in Lambda using serverless and so, it's been around a long time now. Okay so what were the outcomes that you were seeking? Was it, better management, cost reduction and how'd that go? >> Our customers run a wide range of applications. We support customers leveraging Drupal in every industry. Globally we do business in 30 different countries. And so what you have is a very wide range of applications and consumer and consumption models. And so we felt that leveraging StormForge would put us in a position where we'd be able to right size resource to those different kinds of applications. Essentially let the platform align to how customers wanted to operate their applications. And so StormForge's capability in conjunction with Kubernetes and containers really puts us in a position where customers are able to get the performance that they want, and when they need it on demand. A lot of the auto scaling capabilities that you get from Kubernetes and containers supports that. And so it really enables customers to run their applications how they want to functionally, as well as from a performance perspective. >> So this move toward containers and microservices sort of modern application development coincides with a modern platform like StormForge. And so there are, I'm sure there are alternatives out there, why StormForge? Maybe you could explain a little bit more about why, from your perspective what it does and why you chose them. >> So we leverage AWS in many respects in terms of the underlying platform, but we are a very strong DIY for how that platform supports Drupal applications. We view our expertise as being the best of Drupal. And so we felt like for us to true really maximize Kubernetes and containers and the power of those underlying technologies. On the one hand allows us to automate more and do more for customers. On the other side of it, it puts a tremendous burden on the level of expertise in order to do that well for every customer every day at scale. And so that at scale part of that was the challenge. And so we leverage StormForge to enable us to rightsize applications for performance, provide us cost benefits, allocate what you need when you need it for our customers. And that at scale piece is a critical part. We could do elements of it internally. We tried to do elements of that internally, but as you start getting to scale from, a few apps to hundreds of apps to certainly across our fleet of tens of thousands of applications, you really need something that leverages machine learning. You really need a technology that's integrated well within AWS and StormForge provided that solution. >> Make sure I got this right. So it sounds like you sort of from a skill standpoint transitioned or applied your skills from turning knobs if you will, to automation and scale. >> Correct. >> And what was that like? Was the team leaning into that, loving it? Was it a, a challenging thing for you guys to get there? >> That's a good question. The benefit in the way that StormForge applies it. So they leverage machine learning to enable us to make better decisions. So we still have the control elements, but we have much greater insight into what that would mean ahead of time before customers would be affected. So we still have the knobs we need, but we're able to do it at scale. And then from the automation point, it allows us to focus our deep expertise on making Drupal and the core hosting platform capabilities awesome. Sort of the stuff and resource allocation resource consumption. That's an enabler we can outsource that to StormForge >> This is not batch it's, you're basically doing this in sort of near realtime Optimize Live, is the capability, maybe you can describe what it is. >> So Optimize Live is new, we're in testing with that. We've done extensive testing with StormForge on the core call it decision making logic that allows for the right sizing of consumption and resources for our customer application. So that has already been tested. So the core engine's been tested. Optimize Live allows us to do that in real time to make policy decisions across our fleet on what's the right trade off between performance cost, other parameters. Again, it informs our decision making and our management of our platform. That would be very, very difficult otherwise. Without StormForge we'd have to do massive data aggregation. We'd have to have machine learning and additional infrastructure to manage to derive this information, and, and, and. And that is not our core business. We don't want to be doing that. We want insights to manage our platform to enable customers and StormForge for provides that. >> So it's kind of human in the loop thing. Hey, here's what like our recommendation or here's some options that you might want to, here's a path that you want to go down, but it's not taking that action for you necessarily. You don't want that. You want to make sure that the experts are have a hand in it still, is that correct? >> Correct, you still want the experts to have a hand in it but you don't want them to have a hand in it on each individual app. You need that, that machine learning capability that insight that allows you to do that at scale. >> So if you had to step back and think about your relationship with StormForge what was the business impact of bringing them in? >> First, from a time to market perspective we're able to get to market with a higher performing more cost effective solution earlier. So there's that benefit. Second benefit to the earlier point is that we're able to make resource allocation decisions focused on where our core competency is, not into the guts of Kubernetes containers and the like. Third is that the machine learning talent that StormForge brings to the table is world class. I've run machine learning teams, data science teams and would put them in the top 1% of any team that I've worked with in terms of their expertise. The logic and decision making and insights is outstanding. So we can get to the best decision, the optimal decision much more quickly. And then when you accompany that with the newer product in Optimize Live with that automation component you mentioned, all the better. So we're able to make decisions quicker, get it implemented in our platform and realize the benefits. What customers get from that is much better performance of their applications. More real time, higher, able to scale more dynamically. What we get is resource efficiency and our network and platform efficiency. We're not over allocating a capacity that costs us more money than we should. We're under allocating capacity that could have a lower performance solution for our customers. >> So that puts money in your pocket and your customers are happier. So there are higher renewal rates, less churn, high air prices over time as you add more capabilities. >> That's correct. >> What's it like, new application approach, Kubernetes containers, fine. Okay I need a modern platform but it's a relatively new company StormForge. What's it like working with them? >> Their talent level is world class. I wasn't familiar with them when I joined Acquia came to know them and been very impressed. There's many other providers in the market that will speak to some similar capabilities and will make many claims. But from our assessment our view is that they're the right partner for us, they're the right size, they're flexible, excellent team. They've evolved their technology roadmap very quickly. They deliver on their promises and commits a very good team to work with. So I've been very impressed for such an early stage company to deliver and to support our business so rapidly. So I think that's a strength. And then I think again the quality that people that's been manifested in the product itself, it's a high quality product. I think it's unique to the market. >> So Napoleon Hill famous writer, thinker, he wrote "Think and Grow Rich." If you haven't read it, check it out. One of his concepts is this a lever, small lever can move a big rock. It can be very powerful. Do you see StormForge as having that kind of effect on your business that change on your business? >> I do. Like I said, I think the engagement with them has proven, and this isn't, debatable based on the results that we've had with them. We ran that team through the ringer to validate the technology. Again, we'd heard lots of promises from other companies. Ran that team through the ringer with extensive testing across many customers, large and small, many use cases, to really stress test their capabilities. And they came out well ahead of any metric we put forth even well ahead of claims that they had coming into the engagement. They exceeded that. And so that's why I'm here. Why I'm an advocate. Why I think they're an outstanding company with a tremendous amount of potential. >> Thinking about, what can you tell us about where you want to take the company and the partnership with StormForge. >> I think the main next step is for us to engage with StormForge to drive automation drive decisioning, as we expand and move more and more customers over to our new platform. We're going to uncover use cases, different challenges as we go. So I think the, it's a learning process for both both sides, but I think the it's been successful so far and has a lot potential. >> Sounds like you had a great business and a great new partnership. So thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, appreciate it. >> Thank you very much, appreciate your time. >> My pleasure. And thank you for watching theCUBE, you're global leader in enterprise tech coverage. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> We're back with Charley Dublin. He's the Vice President of Product Management at Acquia. Great to see you, Charley welcome to theCUBE. >> Nice to meet you Dave. >> Acquia, tell us about the company. >> Sure, so Acquia is the largest and best provider of Drupal hosting capabilities. We rank number two in the digital experience platform space, just behind Adobe. Very strong business growing well and innovating every day. >> Drupal open source, super deep high quality content management system. And more experience, you call it an experience platform. >> An experience platform, open, flexible. We want our customers to have choice the ability to solve their problems how they want leveraging the power of the open source community. >> What were the big challenges? Just describe your, kind of the business drivers. We're going to talk about StormForge but the things that you were facing some of the challenges that's kind of led you to StormForge. >> Sure, so our objective first is to provide the best experience with Drupal. So that entails lots of capabilities around ease of use for Drupal itself. But that has to run on a world class platform. It has to be the most performance. It has to be the most secure. It needs to be flexible to enable customers to run Drupal however they want to run Drupal. And so that involves the ability to support thousands of different kinds of modules that come out of the community. We want our customers to have choice with Drupal and to be able to support those choices on our platform. >> So optionality is key. Sometimes that creates other challenges. Like you've got one of everything. How do you deal with that challenge? >> That's a great question. Every strength is a form of weakness. And so our objective is really first to provide that choice but to do it in a cost efficient way. So we try to provide reference architectures for customers, opinionation for our customers to standardize take out some of the complexity that they might have if everything were a snowflake. But our objective is really to support their needs and err on the side of that flexibility. >> So you guys had to go through a major replatforming effort around containers and Kubernetes can you talk about that and what role StormForge played? >> Sure, so tied to the last point, our objective is to provide customers the highest performance, most secure platform. The entire industry of course is moving to Kubernetes and leveraging containers. We are a large consumer of AWS Services and are undergoing a major replatforming away from Legacy AWS towards Kubernetes and containers. And so that major replatforming effort is intending to enable customers to run applications how they want to and the power of Kubernetes and containers is to support that. And so we looked at StormForge as a way for us to right size resource capacity to support our customer's applications. >> I love it, AWS is now Legacy. But Andy Jassy one time said that if they had to redo Amazon they'd it in Lambda using serverless and so, it's been around a long time now. Okay so what were the outcomes that you were seeking? Was it, better management, cost reduction and how'd that go? >> Our customers run a wide range of applications. We support customers leveraging Drupal in every industry. Globally we do business in 30 different countries. And so what you have is a very wide range of applications and consumer and consumption models. And so we felt that leveraging StormForge would put us in a position where we'd be able to right size resource to those different kinds of applications. Essentially let the platform align to how customers wanted to operate their applications. And so StormForge's capability in conjunction with Kubernetes and containers really puts us in a position where customers are able to get the performance that they want, and when they need it on demand. A lot of the auto scaling capabilities that you get from Kubernetes and containers supports that. And so it really enables customers to run their applications how they want to functionally, as well as from a performance perspective. >> So this move toward containers and microservices sort of modern application development coincides with a modern platform like StormForge. And so there are, I'm sure there are alternatives out there, why StormForge? Maybe you could explain a little bit more about why, from your perspective what it does and why you chose them. >> So we leverage AWS in many respects in terms of the underlying platform, but we are a very strong DIY for how that platform supports Drupal applications. We view our expertise as being the best of Drupal. And so we felt like for us to true really maximize Kubernetes and containers and the power of those underlying technologies. On the one hand allows us to automate more and do more for customers. On the other side of it, it puts a tremendous burden on the level of expertise in order to do that well for every customer every day at scale. And so that at scale part of that was the challenge. And so we leverage StormForge to enable us to rightsize applications for performance, provide us cost benefits, allocate what you need when you need it for our customers. And that at scale piece is a critical part. We could do elements of it internally. We tried to do elements of that internally, but as you start getting to scale from, a few apps to hundreds of apps to certainly across our fleet of tens of thousands of applications, you really need something that leverages machine learning. You really need a technology that's integrated well within AWS and StormForge provided that solution. >> Make sure I got this right. So it sounds like you sort of from a skill standpoint transitioned or applied your skills from turning knobs if you will, to automation and scale. >> Correct. >> And what was that like? Was the team leaning into that, loving it? Was it a, a challenging thing for you guys to get there? >> That's a good question. The benefit in the way that StormForge applies it. So they leverage machine learning to enable us to make better decisions. So we still have the control elements, but we have much greater insight into what that would mean ahead of time before customers would be affected. So we still have the knobs we need, but we're able to do it at scale. And then from the automation point, it allows us to focus our deep expertise on making Drupal and the core hosting platform capabilities awesome. Sort of the stuff and resource allocation resource consumption. That's an enabler we can outsource that to StormForge >> This is not batch it's, you're basically doing this in sort of near realtime Optimize Live, is the capability, maybe you can describe what it is. >> So Optimize Live is new, we're in testing with that. We've done extensive testing with StormForge on the core call it decision making logic that allows for the right sizing of consumption and resources for our customer application. So that has already been tested. So the core engine's been tested. Optimize Live allows us to do that in real time to make policy decisions across our fleet on what's the right trade off between performance cost, other parameters. Again, it informs our decision making and our management of our platform. That would be very, very difficult otherwise. Without StormForge we'd have to do massive data aggregation. We'd have to have machine learning and additional infrastructure to manage to derive this information, and, and, and. And that is not our core business. We don't want to be doing that. We want insights to manage our platform to enable customers and StormForge for provides that. >> So it's kind of human in the loop thing. Hey, here's what like our recommendation or here's some options that you might want to, here's a path that you want to go down, but it's not taking that action for you necessarily. You don't want that. You want to make sure that the experts are have a hand in it still, is that correct? >> Correct, you still want the experts to have a hand in it but you don't want them to have a hand in it on each individual app. You need that, that machine learning capability that insight that allows you to do that at scale. >> So if you had to step back and think about your relationship with StormForge what was the business impact of bringing them in? >> First, from a time to market perspective we're able to get to market with a higher performing more cost effective solution earlier. So there's that benefit. Second benefit to the earlier point is that we're able to make resource allocation decisions focused on where our core competency is, not into the guts of Kubernetes containers and the like. Third is that the machine learning talent that StormForge brings to the table is world class. I've run machine learning teams, data science teams and would put them in the top 1% of any team that I've worked with in terms of their expertise. The logic and decision making and insights is outstanding. So we can get to the best decision, the optimal decision much more quickly. And then when you accompany that with the newer product in Optimize Live with that automation component you mentioned, all the better. So we're able to make decisions quicker, get it implemented in our platform and realize the benefits. What customers get from that is much better performance of their applications. More real time, higher, able to scale more dynamically. What we get is resource efficiency and our network and platform efficiency. We're not over allocating a capacity that costs us more money than we should. We're under allocating capacity that could have a lower performance solution for our customers. >> So that puts money in your pocket and your customers are happier. So there are higher renewal rates, less churn, high air prices over time as you add more capabilities. >> That's correct. >> What's it like, new application approach, Kubernetes containers, fine. Okay I need a modern platform but it's a relatively new company StormForge. What's it like working with them? >> Their talent level is world class. I wasn't familiar with them when I joined Acquia came to know them and been very impressed. There's many other providers in the market that will speak to some similar capabilities and will make many claims. But from our assessment our view is that they're the right partner for us, they're the right size, they're flexible, excellent team. They've evolved their technology roadmap very quickly. They deliver on their promises and commits a very good team to work with. So I've been very impressed for such an early stage company to deliver and to support our business so rapidly. So I think that's a strength. And then I think again the quality that people that's been manifested in the product itself, it's a high quality product. I think it's unique to the market. >> So Napoleon Hill famous writer, thinker, he wrote "Think and Grow Rich." If you haven't read it, check it out. One of his concepts is this a lever, small lever can move a big rock. It can be very powerful. Do you see StormForge as having that kind of effect on your business that change on your business? >> I do. Like I said, I think the engagement with them has proven, and this isn't, debatable based on the results that we've had with them. We ran that team through the ringer to validate the technology. Again, we'd heard lots of promises from other companies. Ran that team through the ringer with extensive testing across many customers, large and small, many use cases, to really stress test their capabilities. And they came out well ahead of any metric we put forth even well ahead of claims that they had coming into the engagement. They exceeded that. And so that's why I'm here. Why I'm an advocate. Why I think they're an outstanding company with a tremendous amount of potential. >> Thinking about, what can you tell us about where you want to take the company and the partnership with StormForge. >> I think the main next step is for us to engage with StormForge to drive automation drive decisioning, as we expand and move more and more customers over to our new platform. We're going to uncover use cases, different challenges as we go. So I think the, it's a learning process for both both sides, but I think the it's been successful so far and has a lot potential. >> Sounds like you had a great business and a great new partnership. So thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, appreciate it. >> Thank you very much, appreciate your time. >> My pleasure. And thank you for watching theCUBE, you're global leader in enterprise tech coverage. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to AnsibleFest, 2021, the virtual version. This is The Cube and my name is Dave Volante. We're going to dig into automation and its continuing evolution. Tom Anderson is here. He's the vice president of Red Hat Ansible, the automation platform. And Richard Henshall is also here, Senior Manager of Ansible Product Management, of course, at Red Hat. Guys, welcome to the cube. Good to see you. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you for having us Dave. You're welcome, so Rich with this latest release of the Ansible Automation Platform, AAP, we'll get the acronyms out of the way. The focus seems to be an expanding the reach of automation and its potential use cases. I mean, I'll say automation everywhere, not to be confused with the RPA vendor, but the point is, you're trying to make it easier to automate things like provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, throw in orchestration and all these other IT processes. Now, you've talked about this theme in previous releases of AAP. So what's new in this release? What can customers do now that they couldn't do before? >> Yeah, it's a good question thank you. So, we look at this in two dimensions. So, the first dimension we have is like where automation can happen, right? So, you know, we always have traditional data center, clouds being been very prevalent for us for the last, you know, sort of five, 10 years in most people's view. But now we have the Edge, right? So now we have Edge computing, which is sometimes a lot more of the same, but also it comes with a different dynamic of how it has to be sort of used and utilized by different use cases, different industry segments. But then, while you expand the use cases to make sure that people can do automation where they need to do it and make sure if we don't close to the Edge or close to the data center, based on where the technology needs to be run, you also have to think about who's now using automation. So, the second dimension is making sure that different users can take access. You mentioned like application deployment, or infrastructure, or network configuration. We expand the number of different users we have that are starting to take advantage of Ansible. So how do we get more developers? How do we get into the developer workflow, into the development workflow, for how Ansible is created, as well as how we help with the operational, the posts deployment stage that people do operating automation, as well as then the running of Ansible Automation Platform itself. >> Excellent, okay. So, in thinking about some of those various roles or personas, I mean, I think about product leads. I would see developers, obviously you're going to be in there. Managers I would think want that view. You know the thrust seems to be, you're trying to continue to enhance the experience, for these personas and others, I suppose, with new tooling. Maybe you could add some color to that and what's happening in the market Tom if you take this and Rich chime in, what's happening in the market that makes this so important? Who are the key roles and personas that you're targeting? >> Yeah. So, there's a couple of things happening here. I mean, traditionally the people that had been using Ansible to automate their subsystems were the domain expert for that subsystem, right? I'm the storage operations team. I'm the network operations team. I'm using this tool to automate the tasks that I do day to day to operate my piece of the sub system. Now, what they're being asked to do is to expose that subsystem to other constituencies in the organization, right? So they had not, they're not waiting for a call to come in to say, can I have a network segment? Can I have this storage allocated to me? Can I deploy these servers so I can start testing or building or deploying my application. Those subsystems need to be exposed to those different audiences. And so the type of automation that is required is different. Now, we need to expose those subsystems in a way that makes those domain owners comfortable. So they're okay with another audience having access to their subsystem. But at the same time, they're able to ensure the governance and compliance around that, and then give that third-party that developer, that QE person, that man, that business, that line of business manager, whoever it might be, that's accessing that resource, a interface that is friendly and easy enough for them to do. It's kind of the democratization. I know it's a cliche, but the democratization of automated automation within organizations, giving them roles, specific experiences, of how they can access these different subsystems and speed their access to these systems and deploy applications. >> So if we could stay on that for a second, cause that's a complicated situation. You're now opening this up. You Richard mentioned the Edge. So you got to make sure that the person that's getting access has access, but then you also have to make sure that that individual can't screw it up, do things that you don't want that individual to do. And it's probably a whole other set of compliance issues and policy things that you have to bake in. Is that, am I getting that right? >> Yeah. And then that's the aspect of it. When you start to think, you know, Tom listed off there, you know, 10, you can just keep adding different sort of personas that individuals that work in roles, identify with as themselves. I'm a network person, I'm a storage person. To us they're all just Ansible users, right? There may be using a slightly different way, maybe using it slightly different places, but they're just an Ansible user, right? And so as you have, like those people that just like become organically, you've now got thousands potentially of Ansible users inside a large enterprise organization, or if you know, a couple of hundred if your smaller. But you're then go, well, what do I do with Ansible, right? And so at that point, you then start to say, now we try to look at it as what's their use of Ansible itself, because it's not just a command line tool. It's got a management interface, it's got analytics, we've got content management, we've got operational runtime, we've got responsiveness to, you know, disaster recovery scenarios for when, you know, when you need to be able to do certain actions, you may use it in different ways at different places. So we start, try and break out, what is the person doing with Ansible Automation Platform at this part of their workflow? Are they creating content, right? Are they consuming content, or are they operating that automation content for those other constituent users that Tom referred to. >> Yeah, that's really helpful because there's context, there are different roles, different personas need different contexts, you know, trying to do different things. Sometimes somebody just wants to see the analytics to make sure it's, you know, hey, everything's green, Oh, we got a yellow, versus, hey actually want to make some changes and I'm authorized to do so. Let's shift gears a little bit and talk about containers. I want to understand how containers are driving change for customers. Maybe what new tools you're providing to support this space? What about the Edge? Yeah, how real is that in terms of tangible pockets or patterns that you can identify that require new types of capabilities that you're delivering? Maybe you can help us unpack that a little bit. >> Okay so, I think there's two ways to look at containers, right? So the first is how are we utilizing the container technology itself, right? So containers are a package, right? So the amount of work we've been doing as Ansible's become more successful in the last couple of years, separating content out with Ansible collections. The ability to bring back manage, control a containerized runtime of Ansible so that you can lifecycle it, you can deploy it, it becomes portable. Edge is important there. How do I make sure I have the same automation running in the data center as the same automation running out on the Edge, if I'm looking at something that needs to be identical. The portability that the packaging of the container gives us, is a fantastic advantage, given you need to bring together just that automation you want. Smaller footprint, more refined footprint, lifecycle manage footprint. But at the same time, containers are also a very useful way of scaling the operation, right? And so as red hat puts things like Open Shift out in all these different locations, how can we leverage those platforms, to push the runtime of Ansible, the execution component, the execution plane of Ansible. How into anywhere that's hospitable for it to run? And as you move out towards Edge, as you move further away from the data center, you need a more ubiquitous sort of like run-time plane that you can put these things on. So they can just spin up when as, and when you need to. Potentially even at the end, actually being on the device, because at the same time with Edge, you also have different limits around how Edge works. It's not just about, hey I'm wifi points in an NFL stadium, actually, you're talking about I'm at the end of a 2000 mile, you know, piece of cable on an oil pipeline or potentially I'm a refinery out in the Gulf of Mexico. You know, you've got a very different dynamic to how you interact with that end point, than you do when it's a nice big controlled network, you know, powered location, which is well-governed and well-orchestrated. >> That's good. Thank you Rich. So Tom, think about automation, you know, back in the day, seems like a long time ago, but it really wasn't, automation used to scare some IT folks, because you know, sometimes it created unintended consequences or maybe it was a cultural thing and that you didn't want to automate themselves out of a job, but regardless. The cloud has changed that mindset, you know, showing us what's possible. You guys obviously had a big role in that, and the pandemic and digital initiatives, they really have made I call it the automation mandate. It was like the fourth March to digital, at least that's how I see it. I wonder if you could talk about, how you see your users approaching automation in as it relates to their business goals. Do you think automation is still being treated sometimes with trepidation or as a side project for some organizations or is it really continuing to evolve as a mainstream business imperative? >> Yes, so Dave we see it continuing to evolve as a strategic imperative for our customers. I mean, you'll, hear some of the keynote folks that are speaking here today. I've done an interview or doing an interview with Joe Mills from Discover, talking about extreme automation throughout Discovers organization. You'll hear representatives from JPMC talk about 22,000 JPMC employees contributing automation content in their environment, across 20 or 22 countries. I mean, just think about that scale, and the number of people that are involved in automation now and their tasks. So I think it's, I think we are, we have moved beyond or are moving beyond that idea that automation is just there to replace people's jobs. And it's much more about automation replacing the mundane, increasing consistency, increasing security, increasing agility, and giving people an opportunity to do more and more interesting stuff. So that's what we hear from our customers, this idea of them building. And it's not just the technology piece, but it's the cultural piece inside organizations where they're building these guilds or communities of practice, bringing people together to share best practices and experience with automation, so that they can feel comfortable learning from others and sharing with others and driving the organization forward. So we see a lot of that, and you'll hear a lot of that, at some of the Ansible Fest sessions this week. >> Well, I mean though I think that's a really important point. The last point you made about the skills, because I think you're right. I think we have moved beyond it's just job replacement. I don't know anybody who loves provisioning LUNs and say, oh, I'm the best in the world at that. It's just kind of something that was maybe important 10, 15, 20 years ago, but today, he should let the machines do that. So that's the whole skills transformation, is obviously a big part of digital transformation. Isn't it? >> It absolutely is. And frankly, we still hear, it's an impediment, that skills shortages are still an impediment to our customer success. They are still skilling up. I mean, honestly, that's one of the differentiators, for Ansible, as a language, a human readable language, that is easy to learn, easy to use, easy to share across an organization. So that's why you see job boards, and whatnot with so many opportunities that require or, or ask for Ansible skills out there. It's just a, it's become sort of a ubiquitous automation language in organizations, because it can be shared across lots of different roles. You don't have to be a Ruby software developer or a Python software developer to create automation with Ansible. You can be Tom Anderson or Rich Henshall. You don't have to, you don't have to be the, you know, the, the sharpest software developer in the world to take advantage of it. So anyway, that's one of the things that kind of overcoming some of the skills apprehension and bringing people into this, into the kind of new environment, of thinking about automation as code, not software code, but thinking of it like code. >> Got it. Guys we've got to leave it there, but Rich, how about you bring us home. We'll give you the last word. >> I mean, I think, you know what Tom just said there I think, about the skills side of things, is I think that the part that made it resonates the most. I mean I was a customer before I joined Red Hat, and trying to get large numbers of people, onto a same path, to try and achieve that outbound objective, that an organization has. The objective of an organization is not to automate, it's to achieve what is needed by what the automation facilitates. So how do we get those different groups to go from, Hey, this is about me, to this is actually about what we're trying to achieve as a business what we're trying to facilitate as a business, and how do we get those people easier access, a reduced barrier of entry to the skills they need to help make that successful, that compliments what they do, in their primary role, with a really strong secondary skill set that helps them do all the bits and pieces they need to do to make that job work. >> That's great, I mean you guys have done a great job, I mean it wasn't clear, you know, decade ago, or maybe half a decade ago, who was going to win this battle. Ansible clearly has market momentum and has become the leader. So guys congratulations on that and good job. Keep it going. I really appreciate your time. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. Thanks. >> Okay. This is the cubes, continuous coverage of Ansible Fest, 2021. Keep it right there for more content that educates and inspires. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of an AI ops virtual forum brought to you by Broadcom. >>Welcome to this preview of Broadcom's AI ops virtual forum on your host, Lisa Martin. And joining me to give you a sneak peek of this event. That's on December 3rd is streaming of Boston Rajagopal or Raj, the head of AI ops at Broadcom. Raj. This has meant it's coming up in a couple of weeks. Excited, >>Good to be here. I am excited, Lisa, uh, you know, um, customers are poised for growth, uh, in 2021. And, uh, they, uh, we believe they all, they will also come out of the pandemic to grow their business and serve, uh, their customers. Uh, you know, well, they have two key challenges. How do you grow at the same time, operate with efficiency, right? These two challenges are decision-makers are struggling with every day at scale. That is why they do digital transformation at scale. And our key influencers like it, operators and SRE personas are helping our decision-makers in our customers to drive the efficiency. They are trying to, uh, focus on converting outputs to outcomes. That's what AI ops is all about. And you're going to hear from us. >>Yeah. And we've got a panel of experts here. Rich lane, senior research analyst for Forrester is going to be joining us as well as nastier, the global product management at Verizon. And of course, Raj, you're going to be hearing some of the latest trends for AI ops. Why now is the time Raj, what are some of the key takeaways that you think those key influencers and those decision makers are going to walk away from this event? >>So the, you know, our decision makers and key influencers have a single question in mind when they deal with enterprise large enterprise scenarios, the questions that they get asked by their skill level execs are, are you ready? Are you ready? When remote work is the norm, are you ready when you have to optimize your investments? And are you ready when you have to accelerate your transformation at scale to operate as a digital enterprise, all of this requires them to think and act differently from people process technology. And how do you bring all of this together? Under the ages of what we call AI ops is what they're going to learn about. >>Another thing too, is you're going to hear the latest industry trends on AI ops from Raj and the panel of experts that mentioned a minute ago, how organizations like yours are finding value from AI ops and something that Raj talked about a minute ago is understanding why now is the time to be ready for AI ops. So Raj and I look forward to you joining us along with our other panelists, December 3rd, register for the Broadcom AI ops virtual forum today.