>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is theCUBE conversation. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE, we're in our Palo Alto studios, the COVID crisis continues. Luckily we've got the ability to interview guests from remote and so we're excited to have this next guest. There's a lot of activity going on around equality and gender diversity, Black Lives Matter, and it feels like it really does feel like there's kind of a step function in moving this along. And there's a lot of groups out there that are trying to take a very active role, and one of the things they're trying to do is help women get on more corporate board seats, more representation, and we're really excited to have our next guest. Who's really taking a slightly different approach, a new approach to this, and we're happy to be joined by Rita Scroggin. She is the founder of FirstBoard.io, and she's also the Practice Director, Executive Group at Triad Group. So Rita, great to see you. >> Thank you very much, Jeff, for having me, I'm super excited to be here and to share the story about FirstBoard.io, what we're doing and how hopefully that will change the world just a little bit. >> That's great. Well, the way that this came about is I was on LinkedIn, I'm on LinkedIn all the time, and all of a sudden this big picture hit my feed and a ton of familiar faces. I think that's what it is four by eight. And I see Abby Kearns, Dao Jensen, Eve Maler, Wendy Perilli, Jocelyn is in there Syamla in there. And I thought, wow, I know a bunch of these women, and I'm always happy to promote the women in theCUBE alumni. And I reached out and I think it was Wendy said, "Hey, this is... She said, "I'm a founding member of this thing called FirstBoard.io. And I (indistinct) and she said, we got to talk to Rita. So it was great to meet you. And this is a new organization. I think you said you started at the very beginning of this year. >> Yeah. >> Why? Let's get kind of to the origin story. >> Yeah. >> What gave you the idea? Why did you think that this was something that needed to be done? And what caused you to actually take the leap of faith and start FirstBoard? >> Yeah, very good question. So in the fall of 2019, I did an event in partnership with K&L Gates and it was about how to get on board, and it wasn't gender specific, but I invited a lot of women from my network, and through K&L Gates, there was a speaker on the panel, Cheryl Bolton, who is now a supporter of FirstBoard.io. And we spoke after the panel discussion, so I was the moderator, and she said, "Do you place people or women specifically, "on private company boards? I said, I do now let's have a conversation about that. So we talked some more and we kind of felt like there's really a need for companies to diversify their boards, particularly private tech companies. And so then I thought about more about the idea. I reached out to a few women in my network and I said, hey, I have this idea. I'm thinking about starting an initiative around this topic, would you be interested in being part of it? And a lot of the women who I reached out to said, I'd love the idea, I would love to get involved. So that was really the origin, then we met, we had a little sort of social get together in, I think it was early December in Palo Alto. And then we said, let's launch officially in January, which we did. So in January we had our first and only in-person meeting, the idea initially was that we would meet every quarter in person. So it would be very localized to Silicon Valley and then COVID happened and everything changed. And we are now meeting via Zoom every six to eight weeks. We have members who are in different locations, most of our members are on Silicon Valley, but we also have a member in New York, in Seattle, in Dallas, and I might forget a location, but we're a little bit more distributed right now. And so that is where we are today. >> So you've done it a little bit different. You've got this group of women, there's 32 women in that picture, the founding members. And so you're taking almost like a cohort approach, a group approach. Why that approach? What did you see that wanted you to go that way, versus doing individual searches for individual companies, looking for individual kind of board members. Why the group approach? What type of dynamic does that introduce? How do the women leverage one another inside of this structure? >> Yeah, that's a good question. That's really the idea. The idea is that we work together collaboratively and that we leverage each other's networks. We raise each other's platform. I might know 10 or 15 or whatever, decision makers let's say VCs, CEOs, but the next member might know an equal number or more or less. So what I was thinking is if we leverage each other's network, we exponentially grow our network and we exponentially grow our visibility. So our focus right now is to really raise the profile of FirstBoard.io and the profile of each member of the group. So it it's fundamentally different, 'cause we're working together, kind of almost like a company that can accelerate where if we have a success, it's everybody's success. Because it raises the profile of everybody else. >> Right. >> So that's the idea, which is different than a networking organization, where you are an unknown member. And we're trying to make this in a different way. >> Right, right. And is the goal, within all the women that have joined, the founding members for all of them to get on a board, I mean, is that all of them are >> That's the goal. qualified people to be on a proper board. >> Yeah, that is the goal, that's the idea, we may not accomplish that in the first round because this is a problem that's been going on for a long time, but we're getting close to our first board placement. So that's I think initial great success. And we're working on a number of initiatives right now to raise the profile. We're doing a video interview with all our supporters. We are creating a campaign, how to reach out to CEOs and VCs. So we're working on a number of things right now behind the background to really target our audience, and our audience is specific to the tech world. So we're focusing really on private tech companies and we're focusing on our decision makers within those organizations. So whether it's the investor, the private equity, growth equity, or venture capital community, or the CEO or other board members for that matter, who may be aware that there's an opening and we're trying to tap into those as well. >> Right, right. So you've mentioned Silicon Valley, VCs and private equity a couple of times. So is the focus more in kind of that ecosystem that we're familiar with here in Silicon Valley with more private, kind of private and growth opportunities, or are you also just fully looking for large, regular public companies as well? >> We wouldn't turn down a public company opportunity, but none of our members have been on a board so far. And I think it's probably more realistic that, the first board position might be at a private tech company where the operating experience is particularly valuable. So that's our primary focus in terms of reaching out of the old But if a public company would come our way and say, we absolutely would love to talk to some of your members, of course we wouldn't turn that down. >> Jeff: Right. >> But actively we are going after private tech companies, and they can be located anywhere, so it's not specific this to Silicon Valley, of course a lot of tech companies are clustered there or here, but it could also be company in New York, or Boston, or wherever, but the focus is really on tech versus a broader focus of any kind of company. >> Right, right. So when you're working with these women who've never been on a board, what do you find is kind of the biggest gap that they need to fill, whether that's a real gap or perceived gap in their either skillsets or experience or whatever, to kind of make the jump and get into one of these board seats. Is it in any particular skill, any particular kind of point of view, what are the types of things that you do as a group to help them be better received, I guess, for the opportunities? >> Yeah. What we don't do is we don't really a training program or prep here. There are other organizations who do that, I think we do a very, very good job. Some of our members are part of other organizations as well. So what we're thinking more is the company oftentimes has, in a certain growth stage, has a gap in some form. And in looking at board opportunities, I think it's important to identify where's that gap, maybe it's go to market, or maybe it is a certain technical expertise, and match them up with the experience of our founding members. So we don't have a program to prepare women, we're more focused on... Okay, we're assuming you're prepared, that might be various degrees, and we're just trying to match kind of the operating expertise to the gap on a fully independent board member at any given company. >> Right, right I think we talked before we turned on the cameras, the three things you said you focus on really is, is operational expertise, skill experience, as well as domain expertise. >> Yeah. >> And so you're really trying to kind of map against a gap that the company has against a skillset that one of the members has. >> Yeah. So far I've sort of facilitated three different board opportunities and two of them, what they had in common, that the company was looking for somebody who really had domain expertise with the audience they were looking at, and who understood the buyer, and who had deep expertise in what to market strategies, developing them. So that's one example, right. And the other company, the third one was looking for somebody who had connections in the space who really understood that particular domain. And so it all depends, and I think it also depends on what stage the company's in. And I think the further along the company is, the more it's about governance and regulations. And earlier on, it's really filling a certain gap on the leadership team. >> Right. >> In the private equity world is also very interesting to us because oftentimes there's a timeline and there are certain growth objectives the company wants to reach. And that's a great opportunity, I think, for FirstBoard to bring in a founding member with that particular operating expertise. >> Right, right. So I'm curious, that's a great segue into kind of the customer side, if you will, the people that are looking for board members. Have you seen over the last several months or years, I'll open it up, kind of a shift in terms of people a, just kind of accepting that there are going to be more women and people of color on the board, but also more of kind of an active search and a more kind of progressive goal to make sure that they do increase the diversity on their boards, whether that be for women or people of color or whatever, just to bring more diversity. Have you seen a shift in your customer base, in terms of they're really focused on prioritization on that? >> Well, I think it's certainly on people's mind and I think now more so than ever with the recent changes and sort of uprising of Black Lives Matter, but I wouldn't say that has really transferred over into real meaningful diversity on boards. I think we still have a long, long way to go, and there's an organization, Him For Her, and I think it was the Calyx Management Institute, they did a study last year and they found that privately, heavily funded companies, 60% of those don't have a single woman on the board. And I think women in general held about 7% of board seats at these companies. So I think there's still a long way to go, but I think it's very important that in the future, a larger proportion of the population is reflected in the boards. Right? So whether it's women, women of color, people of color, so everybody should be part of the leadership team on the board level and on the leadership level. And I think that has become certainly more of a topic, I think, especially for large companies. And I think startups are now recognizing that it's important for them too, especially if they want to be perceived as a company, which has fair and equal values. >> Right. Right. So given that kind of landscape, if you will, what are kind of the expectations that you have with this founding member group? And I presume there'll be other groups in the future once these people all find a great board seat and are doing their thing, kind of, is it a really tough road ahead? Do you see that it's really not that tough on maybe in the macro level, but on the micro level there are some real opportunities, how are you as a group of 32 founding members trying to take this Hill, if you will, against pretty tough odds actually. >> But I think we're going to take it one step at a time. We already did a press release, we have a website, we have some visibility on LinkedIn and we already have been able to curate three different board conversations. So I think step by step, I think we will become more visible. I think we will be more known. We will have more opportunities to introduce founding members, this current cohort and future cohorts. And through that, I think we will make progress. So I'm very optimistic that we can make a difference, that we can get more women on boards. And once the founding members have joined a board, the plan is to launch a group where basically we create a peer group, which will then mentor and support the next cohort. And we also have an amazing group of supporters and partners already. We have Steve Singh from Madrona Ventures. We have Rohini from NGP Capital, and we're always looking for more partners and supporters. I'm not going list everybody right now, but I'm very proud about that we have partners and supporters who bought into the mission and who are helping us accomplish the mission. So I feel very optimistic that we will be able to move the needle. >> Jeff: Yeah. >> It might be at slower pace, but it was still the making a difference. >> Right. Right. Well, the hundredth anniversary of women getting the vote is coming up here in a couple of weeks. Right. And that took a long time to get done, So this stuff it does not happen easily. It does not happen overnight. But I would think certainly too with the increasing number of women in VC roles, as partners, and are also getting on board seats that hopefully that the things are starting to fall in the right direction. And hopefully with each progressive placement is a little bit easier than the one before. So Rita it's great to meet you, everyone I talked to you about you is so excited about the work that you're doing and what you're doing with FirstBoard. >> Thank you. >> I want to give you kind of the last word before we sign off, how should people learn more? How can people support the cause? How should people get involved, so that they can move the needle. >> That's great. Thank you. Get in touch with us on, if you go to the website FirstBoard.io, there is a way to partner with us, there's a link to partner with us, there's a link if you are interested in joining the future cohort. Please contact me and I will respond. And we would love to talk to companies, who are thinking about diversifying their board, we would love to talk to VCs for whom this is important. So please get in touch, and we'll figure out how to change the world together. >> Right And, oh by the way, most studies show you get better business outcomes, right. With diversity of opinion, diversity of points of view. So it's not only the right thing to do, it's also very good business. >> And I think the next decade we are ready for change. I think the society, I think is ready for change. And I think how companies run and are operated, I think people are ready for a change too. So I think the timing is really, really right. And I think we can make it happen. >> Great. Well, Rita, thank you again for taking a few minutes >> Thank you >> and telling your story and joining us on theCUBE. >> Thank you very much. It was pressure of Jeff and I look forward to talk again. >> Yeah. Maybe in person after we get through all this COVID madness. >> Maybe in person, yeah. >> All right. Well, thanks again, Rita. >> Rita: Thank you very much. >> All right She's Rita, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (soft music)

>> Narrator: Live from Boston, Massachusetts. It's the Cube, covering ZertoCON 2018. Brought to you by Zerto. >> This is the Cube, I'm Paul Gillin, we're on the ground here in Boston for ZertoCON 2018 and joining me is Bill Manning who's in infrastructure operations at Woodforest National Bank. Now I was not familiar with Woodforest National Bank but I understand that regular visitors to WalMart in the south probably are. You're the WalMart bank I understand. >> That's what a lot of people like to call us. >> Your many branches are located in WalMarts in other words. And based in Houston, which has been no stranger to disasters lately >> Correct. >> The topic of IT resilience very much fresh on your mind. What is IT resilience mean in terms of your operations at Woodforest? >> We need to be very resilient in terms of natural disasters, hurricanes mostly. So, in order to prepare ourselves for that we migrate, 70% of our infrastructure between data centers every six months. When hurricane season starts we migrate away from Houston. When it's done, we migrate back. >> Now, why the migration strategy? Why move between data centers? Why not just settle on one data center that's out of harm's way if you will. >> Well there's no one data center that's out of 100% harm's way, so you need to make sure that if one data center goes down, you can always come up at your backup, or your primary data center. >> Now how did you become a Zerto customer? I understand you were one of their first, their first customer? >> We were their first customer we had Kashya before them and then RecoverPoint. Kashya was the precursor to Zerto. And whenever we were having issues with our replication appliance, we decided to look into Zerto, and we bought, implemented, and turned on Zerto fairly quickly. So we were the first customer and then we were the first customer that was using it. We actively utilized it to run a migration. And so far everything's going great. We love the product. And it works very well for us. >> Now being the first customer of a product is typically thought of as a risky proposition. What pushed you over the tipping point? >> We had an appliance that kept failing on us and the last failure was the straw, that broke the back. So we already had Zerto in a, I believe it was an alpha, possibly a beta test implementation, and when that straw finally broke, we turned off the appliance and we turned on Zerto. And it was very seamless. And yes there were headaches. We had issues with it. But a lot of the support tickets, all of the enhancement requests, a lot of those have our name on it. Because we utilized it. >> So you're doing the cloud migration every six months. What are some of the operational issues that you have to take into account when you're moving that size of processing load a couple hundred miles away? Or maybe Austin, maybe 100 miles away. >> We do it so often it's kind of second nature to us now. But we know the pain points of if you do it regularly, you know what happened last time. Hopefully you documented it. And you know what can happen this time. And a lot of times it's Firewall rules, it's what did we do at our current data center that we forgot to do at our other data center, in preparation for migration. So our biggest pain point is making sure we don't forget, oh hey we did something here, let's make sure to replicate it over and do the same thing over at our other data center. >> How has the role of backup changed over the time you've been using Zerto? It's not really, you don't have the luxury of point in time backups anymore. It's a continuous process, isn't it? >> Well we don't utilize Zerto for backups. We utilize another product for our primary backup system and we are a bank. We have seven year retention policies. So there are certain things that we have to keep on tape or on disk for a certain number of years. And Zerto doesn't immediately offer that to us. However we do utilize Zerto in a kind of pseudo backup process. If we need to recover a file that got deleted accidentally, I can either spend an hour using our other process or 10 minutes using Zerto. So we just pop into Zerto, use the journal file level recovery and there you go. >> You had, being in Houston you had a number of major storms in recent years. Are there any stories you can share with us about how you have managed to stay up and running during those storms? >> Our first storm, our first big storm right after Katrina was Rita. And when Rita came through, we didn't have what we have today. We ended up powering down non-critical items and making sure our critical applications were up and running. And luckily we didn't lose much power. We didn't lose any networking. Where as, during Harvey, we lost some networking for a week or two. The difference was we already moved everything to our secondary data center well away from the hurricane. And sure, one of our redundant paths was down. Our other one was up. We still had connectivity and we were doing great. So in terms of where we progress, hurricane season is what we are mainly concerned with. So we utilize Zerto, we move everything over. So if our data center, our primary data center in Houston goes down, we're mildly affected and customers shouldn't even notice. >> How does this make your business more resilient? I mean is this actually, is there business benefits to your, for your customers? >> Of course. >> Of the business being this resilient? >> If we're a bank and our ATMs go down, and we can't get them back up for a few days, our customers notice. If we're a bank and our primary systems go down and you can't take money out of your account for I believe the timeframe is 72 hours, the Federal government comes in and they own us now. We are no longer a bank. Because we didn't, we failed at providing services for our customers, for an extended period of time. And that's unacceptable. So to mitigate that we use a DR strategy. We use a business continuity plan. And we make sure that if something were to happen, even if it were outside of hurricane season, or if we were during hurricane season, and we had an issue at our other data center, Zerto allows us to bring everything back up within minutes. And because we do it regularly, if we're not going to have as many headaches as someone that just says, "Oh, well we've implemented Zerto but we don't utilize it." We run a few test failovers to make sure that we can actually migrate, but we don't bring anything up and run production load. We run production load every six months using Zerto. So that's how we get around making sure that we're highly available and we don't get taken over by the government. >> I hear a lot of talk, Bill, these days about digital transformation. How real is that to what Woodforest is doing? How are you changing the way you do business? >> I think it's already hard for us. I mean we've already gone digital. When I first started, we had couriers picking up paperwork from the branches and taking them to centralized processing locations, and running everything manually. Now it's all digitally. And that was partially thanks to 9/11. There was proof work they couldn't run for weeks because airports were down. And because of that banks started already going digital. So we already have digital transactions. Now if you write a check at WalMart, instead of taking a few days or a week or two to clear, it clears that day or the next day. Because it's all digital. WalMart went digital, we went digital. Most banks are already going digital or have already gone digital. So we just kind of, people ask, we're mostly already there. We're already digital. >> How about cloud? What's your road map when it comes to using multiple cloud providers? >> We're definitely looking into it, they give us a lot of benefit. They give us a lot of service that we can... >> You got a lot of flexibility. >> Flexibility, sure. Flexibility in doing things that we can't necessarily do ourselves. Right now we're taking baby steps. We're not throwing full production load into the cloud. We're looking at, let's put our development environment up there and see what it can provide for our developers. And so far they're enjoying what the opportunities or the possibilities can be. So we're looking forward to hopefully this year getting them up and running and in the cloud and enjoying all of the benefits from there. And after that once we get some development done in there, then we'll probably start seeing some production applications being put into the cloud. Some sort of probably SAS server offering. >> Well hurricane season is coming up in just a couple of months. I wish you the best >> Thank you so much. >> this season. Bill Manning thanks very much for joining us. >> Thank you very much, I appreciate it. >> We'll be right back from ZertoCON, I'm Paul Gillin, this is the Cube. (upbeat tech beats)

live from the mandalay bay convention center in las vegas it's the cues covering vmworld 2016 rock you buy vmware and its ecosystem sponsors well welcome back inside mandalay bay as we continue our coverage at vmworld here on the cube along with peter burrows i'm john walls are now joined by David Cabrera Solutions Architect CDW and leek as well vice president product storage for the VMware storage and availability business unit gentlemen thanks for being here good to see you great to hear house show going so far for you oh it's on fire man did we give a tiger by the tail here that's been great don't let go don't let go even though this for a long time and we were just talking about your history your back i said yeah i first got into virtualization back at y2k wow I remember that how far we've come huh and yeah yeah again I did it why i use it for y2k testing and then from there i worked for a disaster recovery services company and we have these customers katrina rita in 911 they just came in with their stuff and i didn't have enough physical servers to you know in their contract to recover their businesses and they were taking out vmware evaluation licenses to get their businesses up and running and vmware was super supportive of that and they knew you know the licenses would come and wow yeah it was it was like rust in the esxi or ESX at the time I you know just it's actually you know easy and as we think about what's happening on hyper conversions now right yeah it's the same idea right I mean it was actually practicality you not a necessity right of using VMware because gosh I needed to do it for kind of TCO reasons and what happened was esxi started out at the fringe almost right and then came roaring into the you know into the core as people realize hey I really can run like mission-critical applications business collapse the same trajectory is happening now with VC an HCI right and our DCM writing notes we're starting off like outside startup VDI test and dev right you know all that you know to management clusters right but now what's happening the majority of applications mates business apps right yeah yeah it's it I firmly 1,000% believe that you know any application can run ova n no I say and it's we were talking about this i still have customers they they talk about running exchange or sequel on physical servers and I'm like why so now you take all those benefits of virtualization and you add v san on top of it and make everything totally portable on on just you know commodity based hardware and you know pretty soon our job as storage architects building figuring out sans and raid groups and you know how big my lund is supposed to be who cares throw some storage in the server adam as you need and keep going well to that point lee you're talking before we went on the air here about how people you know professionals company who's saying i want to get my attention from here to up here all right i want to be able to look at business and not so much about what's going on behind the scenes in the back office is this thing i was even at CDW recently right we're talking about how long it takes to train someone on enterprise storage versus you know the actually the less you know about storage that the more a hyper conversion system words to what you expect i add a note yeah of course it gets bigger right i mean why wouldn't it right so the idea that you can get people trained up not just using the product but actually selling the product I mean it's actually a very interesting dynamic one of the other interesting things we're seeing right now is just a overlap of flash right all flash right which first you know blue you know came blazing onto the scene for performance right for an application is now coming in because customers want to spend less time actually man is that looking down I want to look down anymore right and so the idea that the customer satisfy you arts because the risk of Miss configuring something actually really low right it is you know that nearly as much time and you don't worry about it right right so you have the performance you need you have the space you need you know you get the deduplication and and it just as you will you need more performance you need more space at another node and on top of that you get compute memory and everything else so their stores some challenges associated with applications and selecting the technology and there's a lot of transformation and transition there's a lot of new technologies coming online that's right even in the storage world so how is virtualization helping customers or helping protect customers for making bad choices with current products now one thing you want to look at is where do I manage this from right how many silos do I have right and so the extent that you can leverage the Center for example right as a common management domain not just for storage by the way right well we started off with compute right they get source we also have networking right so what we have today with NSX right integrating that together we've heard what we announced the show here there it is this VMware cloud foundation great way to go and integrate right all the rich functionality and now you've got it in one user interface right that simplifies the deployment and then the support right making everything easy so you know putting everything together plug it in run a wizard everything's set up for you and it and it's set up the way it should be yeah so it's not as dependent upon the underlying type or choice that you made about storage it's now more what does the application need and let's just point the application at the pool yeah so so there's still I still see you know there's going to be those needs where that super low latency super fast care that shared storage is going to be critical and is going to be needed for specific applications but all that other stuff all that normal day-to-day web servers applications email file shares all that stuff you can just throw it on there and it works you don't have to worry about all the silos and all the different management people that you need so going back to John's question the day on your point later the idea that getting people to raise up defectives Dave how much time are you now saving not doing the physical stuff actually starting to talk to developers the people are taking all of this day to all these assets and turning it into the business value are you able to spend more time and directly supporting them as you go into customers and design the it does seem like that that shadow IT or DevOps or you know the people that aren't depending or depend on IT the consumer is becoming more of the decision maker or at least the influencer and what what V San brings to the table for those kind of people especially with the automation and and and you know the whole private cloud piece of it it takes down that I call it the IT stop sign okay so you know why is DevOps going to the public cloud because it's easy so you have to be as easy as wherever they're going in order to bring them back and and keep that governance on your data and keep your IP where it belongs whether it's in that private cloud or off into a secure more secure public cloud or through a hybrid cloud or whatever v san kind of keeps everything contained for that so yeah and I think there seems to be a trend or at least a thread here that I'm hearing a different conversation here about simplicity right felicity just not keeping things simple for people letting them focus on their core competencies and the right there really what they're paid to do and not distract them away from having to learn like you said it up to speed in 15 minutes as opposed to hours or weeks of training week looks you having these three clicks yeah yes yeah I ask customers pretty routinely now you know what is your budget gonna be is it higher or lower this year the answer it's like it's lower right there like you do you have more people or less people and I call less people they're shrinking data centers right and all of a sudden and then you say well and how many projects do you have like all of every every project now as an IT component right so now it's the pace of change right and so if you don't have to worry about the underlying infrastructure as much now all of a sudden it just becomes easier to start worrying about hey how do I go in scale we had a customer this morning I was talking to Buddy that was talking about well you know the other thing it does is it gives me the opportunity to have kind of bite-size chunks right so the risk of making the wrong decision is actually low right up by a set of servers and as opposed to you know I buy something that's this big where I have to basically predict what's going to happen for the next five years this looks more like hey you know what I kind of have to know what's going to happen over the next six months and then we'll figure it out from there that's today's mentality so easier to change one piece instead of the whole puzzle that I died nobody the dance for that that's a great point it's it there's not that many IT shops that are refreshing their entire data set there are but that's not that many usually it's a silo so but there's always projects PDI some sort of new essay p application or you know we're migrating to a new version of exchange or whatever it is it's okay let's start there and and and and let's just slip it in try it out you'll see you like it it's like sorry it's like crack everybody needs more all right so Rach wait liberal lawyers yeah try it out and you'll see you like it and then from there it'll just roll and and and as the the old siloed equipment starts to age out they'll just easily transition it into visa it's wedding we just get emotional over at a new server shut that down we could we just finished a survey of 250 decent customers and you know one of the things that we were watching is so what about the applications right because when we started like it was hey I'm going to try this in test em I'll try it over here or dr is a good one right I try it and you know it's not i'm not running like my real stuff on it right you know now what we're finding it this year's switched right so we flipped into the majority are now business-critical applications right there an X equal exchange share with the whole Microsoft stack during Oracle databases right there make Percona right i mean of mice equal variance right it's really your singing so all of a sudden they're like that you know there's no real hesitation right and it's the economics that drive this right once you started looking to say you know here's how i can go and do this in more bite-sized chunks starts to become more you know but it's more cloud like i think from that standpoint it's also the risk because as you said you make a design decision today yeah it's not going to be the right design decision in 18 months to make a product decision today it's probably not going to be the right product decision in 18 months you make the right you know you want to your company decides to buy a new company or wants to diverse the vessel you don't want the infrastructure getting in the way of those business decisions so it's it's certainly economics but it's a lot of it has to do with the fact that as you said the pace of change is so great that the only way to ensure that you can keep up is to focus on where the change really needs to be and diminish I focus on where the change isn't as required that make sense it does make sense in you know one of the things that you know degrees of freedom that customers also want is we're finding you know they're pretty used to being able to configure servers and choose their own server all right so the idea that we give choice right running software on a server where you get to choose right i mean we have what 15 different partners right server partners building something called a vc n ready node right so you can take our software pre-configured right to strip out the integration risk if you will there's also some customers who just want like the simplest easiest fully integrated we're working with emc that VX rail product is an integrated CDW offers both of these right so for customers who want just to say I want a single point of support integrated backup I mean that's a world-class product right as an integrated appliance that's one way to buy right one way to deploy but on the other hand if I'm a ucs shop I can go and say hey here's how i get a ucs if I may HPE shop here's how I do it 100 right all works all precor oh oh ya habla del e course right exactly yeah yeah thank you for that by the way so no sway be back yeah value out of the right there we go exactly yeah you know last before your eyes therefore that's all good right right but this this choice right i mean it's interesting because certainly customers are looking at like what level of choice and flexibility do they want and this server choice right is a big one yeah yeah it there's the reason why people buy servers isn't because it's a specific brand I mean you know if you if you look at the open up servers and you look inside it's really it's Intel processors or maybe an AMD processor a bunch of ram and some disks the the software that the vendors offer to manage those or what's important and and it's funny since vcenter mm-hmm even before it was vcenter you know just I guess 20 was it being able to integrate the management of the servers into vcenter and having all those sensors and all that stuff kind of bubble up into vcenter is huge and be able to hook in and take like we realize automation or viewer orchestrator and make it to pull the physical hardware as well as a virtual it's it's big have that in with ES and it just kind of makes it easy so Dave's you working with a lot of customers every single day yep they are also starting to deploy cloud or at least procure plot proud as part of their core strategy talk a bit about about talk a little bit about the challenges associated with intercloud communication and a role that brutalization plays yeah yeah so it's it's still kind of the wild wild west out there with with that I know you know VMware with NSX trying to and that with the new announcements and I haven't fully digested all this stuff from yesterday but it was out just the idea of providing that that kind of peanut butter of policy you know for security and networking and all that from you know whatever you need to keep up button the other way that's a technical term I like that or Paula I like that I have more creative butter of policy in your private cloud and being able to kind of spark that up in in whatever public cloud you choose to use kind of brings that core via you know so vmware's message was always whatever Hardware you have your choice now it's whatever cloud you have your choice yeah it kind of makes sense now and and yet security and the networking is is the biggest piece of it and that if you look at the NIS T official version of hybrid cloud it's it's being able to move things back and forth seamlessly and that's what it brings his David a big part of this cross cloud message right and there's an obligation and it turns out I I'd argue that your most strategic engagement with the cloud is actually data alright VMS you can spin up spin down right there transitory it's on or off but you know the decision about where you place data is long-standing what do and what data sovereignty issues about you know it takes you know data is not quick to move anywhere right so it takes time and it takes you know from a cost standpoint right you all of a sudden lock yourself in on data to keeping it going right so those sort of issue didn't if you want to take it back by the way you know there's some egress fees and other things to go and manage so what we announced right in this cross cloud world about how we're running for example you know in IBM SoftLayer right and you can now spin up vcn and soft layer right and see the same policy based management right across the cloud now right I mean that extension right into the public clouds right is a really interesting way for us to go and talk about moving from just a storage you know provide into a data services data management right that becomes a key element how do you convince people to be early adopters then of that because now that they're making decisions that not that they they all matter that are those matter maybe a little more is it really early adoption though this far into the game I mean wow I mean everybody we came out a transitory element yeah you're saying ok I want you to take another step yeah I want you go a little further out and so that's what I was saying well here's here's where I'd let me out a little bit too that is what I'd say is that you said data management yes i would say data Asset Management's there that's so you know we were talking earlier digital business is about how you're going to apply data differently to retain and sustain your customers and so this point ocean of data as an asset you really elevates this conversation about what data where when all those other things and to the degree that virtualization simplifies those conversations it's going to have a major impact on business flexibility agility even designed so you guys agree so degree yes so think about that and and I have to credit a vmware se his name is Paul Rowan think of NSX as kind of a bodyguard okay and every chunk of data whatever it is as a bodyguard kind of leading them leading the way and protecting that piece of data from whatever it is that it needs to protect it wherever it goes and that's really a real simple analogy so it's not just I have to configure a firewall over here and make sure that if it goes into cloud that that firewall has the same rules it doesn't matter anymore because my bodyguards going with me and and and I'm that bodyguard is making sure that all the policies are applied no matter where I end it also opens up new areas you know when you talk about data asset management now I started thinking about well you know maybe I want to do some big data analytics I'm where my data is right where where do i locate it right and you could locate different places for sovereignty security local performance for example right back up any geolocation issues right and then I also started thinking of a policy base rate we call source policy based management and that sort now it says you know it's not just capacity right maybe want to be thinking of a performance right how do I think about allocating performance how do I think about managing performance across different assets for example right so lot I mean this is what's exciting i think is once you start where we've started from which is at the hypervisor level you're at a natural architectural injection point to go and say we could take all of these pieces in and very efficiently go and manage them provide new functionality right that's a really interesting way as customers trying an SS like my date it may not just be here anymore right may be out here may be out there how do i go and get a handle on that that's true once you hit that inflection point where in the industry starts coming to you right that's right VMware's clearly hit that point and then some yeah interesting well we've had peanut butter policy we've had bodyguards i wish made more time to do morals of wisdom okay the big IT stop sign I like that too are you good thanks for joining this guy's thank you have a great show all right our coverage on the cube vmworld continues in just a moment here from Las Vegas