>>Welcome back to The Cube's coverage of Supercomputing Conference 2022, otherwise known as SC 22 here in Dallas, Texas. This is day three of our coverage, the final day of coverage here on the exhibition floor. I'm Dave Nicholson, and I'm here with my co-host, tech journalist extraordinaire, Paul Gillum. How's it going, >>Paul? Hi, Dave. It's going good. >>And we have a wonderful guest with us this morning, Dr. Panda from the Ohio State University. Welcome Dr. Panda to the Cube. >>Thanks a lot. Thanks a lot to >>Paul. I know you're, you're chopping at >>The bit, you have incredible credentials, over 500 papers published. The, the impact that you've had on HPC is truly remarkable. But I wanted to talk to you specifically about a product project you've been working on for over 20 years now called mva, high Performance Computing platform that's used by more than 32 organ, 3,200 organizations across 90 countries. You've shepherded this from, its, its infancy. What is the vision for what MVA will be and and how is it a proof of concept that others can learn from? >>Yeah, Paul, that's a great question to start with. I mean, I, I started with this conference in 2001. That was the first time I came. It's very coincidental. If you remember the Finman Networking Technology, it was introduced in October of 2000. Okay. So in my group, we were working on NPI for Marinette Quadrics. Those are the old technology, if you can recollect when Finman was there, we were the very first one in the world to really jump in. Nobody knew how to use Infin van in an HPC system. So that's how the Happy Project was born. And in fact, in super computing 2002 on this exhibition floor in Baltimore, we had the first demonstration, the open source happy, actually is running on an eight node infinite van clusters, eight no zeros. And that was a big challenge. But now over the years, I means we have continuously worked with all infinite van vendors, MPI Forum. >>We are a member of the MPI Forum and also all other network interconnect. So we have steadily evolved this project over the last 21 years. I'm very proud of my team members working nonstop, continuously bringing not only performance, but scalability. If you see now INFIN event are being deployed in 8,000, 10,000 node clusters, and many of these clusters actually use our software, stack them rapid. So, so we have done a lot of, like our focuses, like we first do research because we are in academia. We come up with good designs, we publish, and in six to nine months, we actually bring it to the open source version and people can just download and then use it. And that's how currently it's been used by more than 3000 orange in 90 countries. And, but the interesting thing is happening, your second part of the question. Now, as you know, the field is moving into not just hvc, but ai, big data, and we have those support. This is where like we look at the vision for the next 20 years, we want to design this MPI library so that not only HPC but also all other workloads can take advantage of it. >>Oh, we have seen libraries that become a critical develop platform supporting ai, TensorFlow, and, and the pie torch and, and the emergence of, of, of some sort of default languages that are, that are driving the community. How, how important are these frameworks to the, the development of the progress making progress in the HPC world? >>Yeah, no, those are great. I mean, spite our stencil flow, I mean, those are the, the now the bread and butter of deep learning machine learning. Am I right? But the challenge is that people use these frameworks, but continuously models are becoming larger. You need very first turnaround time. So how do you train faster? How do you do influencing faster? So this is where HPC comes in and what exactly what we have done is actually we have linked floor fighters to our happy page because now you see the MPI library is running on a million core system. Now your fighters and tenor four clan also be scaled to to, to those number of, large number of course and gps. So we have actually done that kind of a tight coupling and that helps the research to really take advantage of hpc. >>So if, if a high school student is thinking in terms of interesting computer science, looking for a place, looking for a university, Ohio State University, bruns, world renowned, widely known, but talk about what that looks like from a day on a day to day basis in terms of the opportunity for undergrad and graduate students to participate in, in the kind of work that you do. What is, what does that look like? And is, and is that, and is that a good pitch to for, for people to consider the university? >>Yes. I mean, we continuously, from a university perspective, by the way, the Ohio State University is one of the largest single campus in, in us, one of the top three, top four. We have 65,000 students. Wow. It's one of the very largest campus. And especially within computer science where I am located, high performance computing is a very big focus. And we are one of the, again, the top schools all over the world for high performance computing. And we also have very strength in ai. So we always encourage, like the new students who like to really work on top of the art solutions, get exposed to the concepts, principles, and also practice. Okay. So, so we encourage those people that wish you can really bring you those kind of experience. And many of my past students, staff, they're all in top companies now, have become all big managers. >>How, how long, how long did you say you've been >>At 31 >>Years? 31 years. 31 years. So, so you, you've had people who weren't alive when you were already doing this stuff? That's correct. They then were born. Yes. They then grew up, yes. Went to university graduate school, and now they're on, >>Now they're in many top companies, national labs, all over the universities, all over the world. So they have been trained very well. Well, >>You've, you've touched a lot of lives, sir. >>Yes, thank you. Thank >>You. We've seen really a, a burgeoning of AI specific hardware emerge over the last five years or so. And, and architectures going beyond just CPUs and GPUs, but to Asics and f PGAs and, and accelerators, does this excite you? I mean, are there innovations that you're seeing in this area that you think have, have great promise? >>Yeah, there is a lot of promise. I think every time you see now supercomputing technology, you see there is sometime a big barrier comes barrier jump. Rather I'll say, new technology comes some disruptive technology, then you move to the next level. So that's what we are seeing now. A lot of these AI chips and AI systems are coming up, which takes you to the next level. But the bigger challenge is whether it is cost effective or not, can that be sustained longer? And this is where commodity technology comes in, which commodity technology tries to take you far longer. So we might see like all these likes, Gaudi, a lot of new chips are coming up, can they really bring down the cost? If that cost can be reduced, you will see a much more bigger push for AI solutions, which are cost effective. >>What, what about on the interconnect side of things, obvi, you, you, your, your start sort of coincided with the initial standards for Infin band, you know, Intel was very, very, was really big in that, in that architecture originally. Do you see interconnects like RDMA over converged ethernet playing a part in that sort of democratization or commoditization of things? Yes. Yes. What, what are your thoughts >>There for internet? No, this is a great thing. So, so we saw the infinite man coming. Of course, infinite Man is, commod is available. But then over the years people have been trying to see how those RDMA mechanisms can be used for ethernet. And then Rocky has been born. So Rocky has been also being deployed. But besides these, I mean now you talk about Slingshot, the gray slingshot, it is also an ethernet based systems. And a lot of those RMA principles are actually being used under the hood. Okay. So any modern networks you see, whether it is a Infin and Rocky Links art network, rock board network, you name any of these networks, they are using all the very latest principles. And of course everybody wants to make it commodity. And this is what you see on the, on the slow floor. Everybody's trying to compete against each other to give you the best performance with the lowest cost, and we'll see whoever wins over the years. >>Sort of a macroeconomic question, Japan, the US and China have been leapfrogging each other for a number of years in terms of the fastest supercomputer performance. How important do you think it is for the US to maintain leadership in this area? >>Big, big thing, significantly, right? We are saying that I think for the last five to seven years, I think we lost that lead. But now with the frontier being the number one, starting from the June ranking, I think we are getting that leadership back. And I think it is very critical not only for fundamental research, but for national security trying to really move the US to the leading edge. So I hope us will continue to lead the trend for the next few years until another new system comes out. >>And one of the gating factors, there is a shortage of people with data science skills. Obviously you're doing what you can at the university level. What do you think can change at the secondary school level to prepare students better to, for data science careers? >>Yeah, I mean that is also very important. I mean, we, we always call like a pipeline, you know, that means when PhD levels we are expecting like this even we want to students to get exposed to, to, to many of these concerts from the high school level. And, and things are actually changing. I mean, these days I see a lot of high school students, they, they know Python, how to program in Python, how to program in sea object oriented things. Even they're being exposed to AI at that level. So I think that is a very healthy sign. And in fact we, even from Ohio State side, we are always engaged with all this K to 12 in many different programs and then gradually trying to take them to the next level. And I think we need to accelerate also that in a very significant manner because we need those kind of a workforce. It is not just like a building a system number one, but how do we really utilize it? How do we utilize that science? How do we propagate that to the community? Then we need all these trained personal. So in fact in my group, we are also involved in a lot of cyber training activities for HPC professionals. So in fact, today there is a bar at 1 1 15 I, yeah, I think 1215 to one 15. We'll be talking more about that. >>About education. >>Yeah. Cyber training, how do we do for professionals? So we had a funding together with my co-pi, Dr. Karen Tom Cook from Ohio Super Center. We have a grant from NASA Science Foundation to really educate HPT professionals about cyber infrastructure and ai. Even though they work on some of these things, they don't have the complete knowledge. They don't get the time to, to learn. And the field is moving so fast. So this is how it has been. We got the initial funding, and in fact, the first time we advertised in 24 hours, we got 120 application, 24 hours. We couldn't even take all of them. So, so we are trying to offer that in multiple phases. So, so there is a big need for those kind of training sessions to take place. I also offer a lot of tutorials at all. Different conference. We had a high performance networking tutorial. Here we have a high performance deep learning tutorial, high performance, big data tutorial. So I've been offering tutorials at, even at this conference since 2001. Good. So, >>So in the last 31 years, the Ohio State University, as my friends remind me, it is properly >>Called, >>You've seen the world get a lot smaller. Yes. Because 31 years ago, Ohio, in this, you know, of roughly in the, in the middle of North America and the United States was not as connected as it was to everywhere else in the globe. So that's, that's pro that's, I i it kind of boggles the mind when you think of that progression over 31 years, but globally, and we talk about the world getting smaller, we're sort of in the thick of, of the celebratory seasons where, where many, many groups of people exchange gifts for varieties of reasons. If I were to offer you a holiday gift, that is the result of what AI can deliver the world. Yes. What would that be? What would, what would, what would the first thing be? This is, this is, this is like, it's, it's like the genie, but you only get one wish. >>I know, I know. >>So what would the first one be? >>Yeah, it's very hard to answer one way, but let me bring a little bit different context and I can answer this. I, I talked about the happy project and all, but recently last year actually we got awarded an S f I institute award. It's a 20 million award. I am the overall pi, but there are 14 universities involved. >>And who is that in that institute? >>What does that Oh, the I ici. C e. Okay. I cycle. You can just do I cycle.ai. Okay. And that lies with what exactly what you are trying to do, how to bring lot of AI for masses, democratizing ai. That's what is the overall goal of this, this institute, think of like a, we have three verticals we are working think of like one is digital agriculture. So I'll be, that will be my like the first ways. How do you take HPC and AI to agriculture the world as though we just crossed 8 billion people. Yeah, that's right. We need continuous food and food security. How do we grow food with the lowest cost and with the highest yield? >>Water >>Consumption. Water consumption. Can we minimize or minimize the water consumption or the fertilization? Don't do blindly. Technologies are out there. Like, let's say there is a weak field, A traditional farmer see that, yeah, there is some disease, they will just go and spray pesticides. It is not good for the environment. Now I can fly it drone, get images of the field in the real time, check it against the models, and then it'll tell that, okay, this part of the field has disease. One, this part of the field has disease. Two, I indicate to the, to the tractor or the sprayer saying, okay, spray only pesticide one, you have pesticide two here. That has a big impact. So this is what we are developing in that NSF A I institute I cycle ai. We also have, we have chosen two additional verticals. One is animal ecology, because that is very much related to wildlife conservation, climate change, how do you understand how the animals move? Can we learn from them? And then see how human beings need to act in future. And the third one is the food insecurity and logistics. Smart food distribution. So these are our three broad goals in that institute. How do we develop cyber infrastructure from below? Combining HP c AI security? We have, we have a large team, like as I said, there are 40 PIs there, 60 students. We are a hundred members team. We are working together. So, so that will be my wish. How do we really democratize ai? >>Fantastic. I think that's a great place to wrap the conversation here On day three at Supercomputing conference 2022 on the cube, it was an honor, Dr. Panda working tirelessly at the Ohio State University with his team for 31 years toiling in the field of computer science and the end result, improving the lives of everyone on Earth. That's not a stretch. If you're in high school thinking about a career in computer science, keep that in mind. It isn't just about the bits and the bobs and the speeds and the feeds. It's about serving humanity. Maybe, maybe a little, little, little too profound a statement, I would argue not even close. I'm Dave Nicholson with the Queue, with my cohost Paul Gillin. Thank you again, Dr. Panda. Stay tuned for more coverage from the Cube at Super Compute 2022 coming up shortly. >>Thanks a lot.

(Intro music) >> Welcome back. We're LIVE here from SuperComputing 22 in Dallas Paul Gillin, for Silicon Angle in theCUBE with my guest host Dave... excuse me. And our, our guest today, this segment is Kim Leyenaar who is a storage performance architect at Broadcom. And the topic of this conversation is, is is networking, it's connectivity. I guess, how does that relate to the work of a storage performance architect? >> Well, that's a really good question. So yeah, I have been focused on storage performance for about 22 years. But even, even if we're talking about just storage the entire, all the components have a really big impact on ultimately how quickly you can access your data. So, you know, the, the switches the memory bandwidth, the, the expanders the just the different protocols that you're using. And so, and the big part of is actually ethernet because as you know, data's not siloed anymore. You have to be able to access it from anywhere in the world. >> Dave: So wait, so you're telling me that we're just not living in a CPU centric world now? >> Ha ha ha >> Because it is it is sort of interesting. When we talk about supercomputing and high performance computing we're always talking about clustering systems. So how do you connect those systems? Isn't that, isn't that kind of your, your wheelhouse? >> Kim: It really is. >> Dave: At Broadcom. >> It's, it is, it is Broadcom's wheelhouse. We are all about interconnectivity and we own the interconnectivity. You know, you know, years ago it was, 'Hey, you know buy this new server because, you know, we we've added more cores or we've got better memory.' But now you've got all this siloed data and we've got you know, we've got this, this stuff or defined kind of environment now this composable environments where, hey if you need more networking, just plug this in or just go here and just allocate yourself more. So what we're seeing is these silos really of, 'hey here's our compute, here's your networking, here's your storage.' And so, how do you put those all together? The thing is interconnectivity. So, that's really what we specialize in. I'm really, you know, I'm really happy to be here to talk about some of the things that that we do to enable high performance computing. >> Paul: Now we're seeing, you know, new breed of AI computers being built with multiple GPUs very large amounts of data being transferred between them. And the internet really has become a, a bottleneck. The interconnect has become a bottle, a bottleneck. Is that something that Broadcom is working on alleviating? >> Kim: Absolutely. So we work with a lot of different, there's there's a lot of different standards that we work with to define so that we can make sure that we work everywhere. So even if you're just a dentist's office that's deploying one server, or we're talking about these hyperscalers that are, you know that have thousands or, you know tens of thousands of servers, you know, we're working on making sure that the next generation is able to outperform the previous generation. Not only that, but we found that, you know with these siloed things, if, if you add more storage but that means we're going to eat up six cores using that it's not really as useful. So Broadcom's really been focused on trying to offload the CPU. So we're offloading it from, you know data security, data protection, you know, we're we do packet sniffing ourselves and things like that. So no longer do we rely on the CPU to do that kind of processing for us but we become very smart devices all on our own so that they work very well in these kind of environments. >> Dave: So how about, give, give us an example. I know a lot of the discussion here has been around using ethernet as the connectivity layer. >> Yes. >> You know, in in, in the past, people would think about supercomputing as exclusively being InfiniBand based. >> Ha ha ha. >> But give, give us an idea of what Broadcom is doing in the ethernet space. What, you know, what's what are the advantages of using ethernet? >> Kim: So we've made two really big announcements. The first one is our Tomahawk five ethernet switch. So it's a 400 gigi ethernet switch. And the other thing we announced too was our Thor. So we have, these are our network controllers that also support up to 400 gigi each as well. So, those two alone, it just, it's amazing to me how much data we're able to transfer with those. But not only that, but they're super super intelligent controllers too. And then we realized, you know, hey, we're we're managing all this data, let's go ahead and offload the CPU. So we actually adopted the Rocky Standards. So that's one of the things that puts us above InfiniBand is that ethernet is ubiquitous, it's everywhere. And InfiniBand is primarily just owned by one or two companies. And, and so, and it's also a lot more expensive. So ethernet is just, it's everywhere. And now with the, with the Rocky standards, we're working along with, it's, it's, it does what you're talking about much better than, you know predecessors. >> Tell us about the Rocky Standards. I'm not familiar with it. I'm sure some of our listeners are not. What is the Rocky standard? >> Kim: Ha ha ha. So it's our DNA over converged to ethernet. I'm not a Rocky expert myself but I am an expert on how to offload the CPU. And so one of the things it does is instead of using the CPU to transfer the data from, you know the user space over to the next, you know server when you're transferring it we actually will do it ourselves. So we'll handle it ourselves. We will take it, we will move it across the wire and we will put it in that remote computer. And we don't have to ask the CPU to do anything to get involved in that. So big, you know, it's a big savings. >> Yeah, I mean in, in a nutshell, because there are parts of the InfiniBand protocol that are essentially embedded in RDMA over converged ethernet. So... >> Right. >> So if you can, if you can leverage kind of the best of both worlds, but have it in an ethernet environment which is already ubiquitous, it seems like it's, kind of democratizing supercomputing and, and HPC and I know you guys are big partners with Dell as an example, you guys work with all sorts of other people. >> Kim: Yeah. >> But let's say, let's say somebody is going to be doing ethernet for connectivity, you also offer switches? >> Kim: We do, actually. >> So is that, I mean that's another piece of the puzzle. >> That's a big piece of the puzzle. So we just released our, our Atlas 2 switch. It is a PCIE Gen Five switch. And... >> Dave: What does that mean? What does Gen five, what does that mean? >> Oh, Gen Five PCIE, it's it's a magic connectivity right now. So, you know, we talk about the Sapphire Rapids release as well as the GENUWA release. I know that those, you know those have been talked about a lot here. I've been walking around and everybody's talking about it. Well, those enable the Gen Five PCIE interfaces. So we've been able to double the bandwidth from the Gen Four up to the Gen Five. So, in order to, to support that we do now have our Atlas two PCIE Gen Five switch. And it allows you to connect especially around here we're talking about, you know artificial intelligence and machine learning. A lot of these are relying on the GPU and the DPU that you see, you know a lot of people talking about enabling. So by in, you know, putting these switches in the servers you can connect multitudes of not only NVME devices but also these GPUs and these, these CPUs. So besides that we also have the storage component of it too. So to support that, we we just recently have released our 9,500 series HBAs which support 24 gig SAS. And you know, this is kind of a, this is kind of a big deal for some of our hyperscalers that say, Hey, look our next generation, we're putting a hundred hard drives in. So we're like, you know, so a lot of it is maybe for cold storage, but by giving them that 24 gig bandwidth and by having these mass 24 gig SAS expanders that allows these hyperscalers to build up their systems. >> Paul: And how are you supporting the HPC community at large? And what are you doing that's exclusively for supercomputing? >> Kim: Exclusively for? So we're doing the interconnectivity really for them. You know, you can have as, as much compute power as you want, but these are very data hungry applications and a lot of that data is not sitting right in the box. A lot of that data is sitting in some other country or in some other city, or just the box next door. So to be able to move that data around, you know there's a new concept where they say, you know do the compute where the data is and then there's another kind of, you know the other way is move the data around which is a lot easier kind of sometimes, but so we're allowing us to move that data around. So for that, you know, we do have our our tomahawk switches, we've got our Thor NICS and of course we got, you know, the really wide pipe. So our, our new 9,500 series HBA and RAID controllers not only allow us to do, so we're doing 28 gigabytes a second that we can trans through the one controller, and that's on protected data. So we can actually have the high availability protected data of RAID 5 or RAID 6, or RAID 10 in the box giving in 27 gigabytes a second. So it's, it's unheard of the latency that we're seeing even off of this too, we have a right cash latency that is sub 8 microseconds that is lower than most of the NVME drives that you see, you know that are available today. So, so you know we're able to support these applications that require really low latency as well as data protection. >> Dave: So, so often when we talk about the underlying hardware, it's a it's a game of, you know, whack-a-mole chase the bottleneck. And so you've mentioned PCIE five, a lot of folks who will be implementing five, gen five PCIE five are coming off of three, not even four. >> Kim: I know. >> So make, so, so they're not just getting a last generation to this generation bump but they're getting a two generations, bump. >> Kim: They are. >> How does that, is it the case that it would never make sense to use a next gen or a current gen card in an older generation bus because of the mismatch and performance? Are these things all designed to work together? >> Uh... That's a really tough question. I want to say, no, it doesn't make sense. It, it really makes sense just to kind of move things forward and buy a card that's made for the bus it's in. However, that's not always the case. So for instance, our 9,500 controller is a Gen four PCIE but what we did, we doubled the PCIE so it's a by 16, even though it's a gen four, it's a by 16. So we're getting really, really good bandwidth out of it. As I said before, you know, we're getting 28, 27.8 or almost 28 gigabytes a second bandwidth out of that by doubling the PCIE bus. >> Dave: But they worked together, it all works together? >> All works together. You can put, you can put our Gen four and a Gen five all day long and they work beautifully. Yeah. We, we do work to validate that. >> We're almost out our time. But I, I want to ask you a more, nuts and bolts question, about storage. And we've heard for, you know, for years of the aerial density of hard disk has been reached and there's really no, no way to excel. There's no way to make the, the dish any denser. What is the future of the hard disk look like as a storage medium? >> Kim: Multi actuator actually, we're seeing a lot of multi-actuator. I was surprised to see it come across my desk, you know because our 9,500 actually does support multi-actuator. And, and, and so it was really neat after I've been working with hard drives for 22 years and I remember when they could do 30 megabytes a second, and that was amazing. That was like, wow, 30 megabytes a second. And then, about 15 years ago, they hit around 200 to 250 megabytes a second, and they stayed there. They haven't gone anywhere. What they have done is they've increased the density so that you can have more storage. So you can easily go out and buy 15 to 30 terabyte drive, but you're not going to get any more performance. So what they've done is they've added multiple actuators. So each one of these can do its own streaming and each one of these can actually do their own seeking. So you can get two and four. And I've even seen a talk about, you know eight actuator per disc. I, I don't think that, I think that's still theory, but but they could implement those. So that's one of the things that we're seeing. >> Paul: Old technology somehow finds a way to, to remain current. >> It does. >> Even it does even in the face of new alternatives. Kim Leyenaar, Storage Architect, Storage Performance Architect at Broadcom Thanks so much for being here with us today. Thank you so much for having me. >> This is Paul Gillin with Dave Nicholson here at SuperComputing 22. We'll be right back. (Outro music)

(upbeat music) (logo swooshing) >> Good morning and welcome back to Dallas, ladies and gentlemen, we are here with theCUBE Live from Supercomputing 2022. David, my cohost, how are you doing? Exciting, day two, feeling good? >> Very exciting. Ready to start off the day. >> Very excited. We have two fascinating guests joining us to kick us off. Please welcome Pete and Armando. Gentlemen, thank you for being here with us. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you for having us. >> I'm excited that you're starting off the day because we've been hearing a lot of rumors about Ethernet as the fabric for HPC, but we really haven't done a deep dive yet during the show. You all seem all in on Ethernet. Tell us about that. Armando, why don't you start? >> Yeah, I mean, when you look at Ethernet, customers are asking for flexibility and choice. So when you look at HPC, InfiniBand's always been around, right? But when you look at where Ethernet's coming in, it's really our commercial in their enterprise customers. And not everybody wants to be in the top 500, what they want to do is improve their job time and improve their latency over the network. And when you look at Ethernet, you kind of look at the sweet spot between 8, 12, 16, 32 nodes, that's a perfect fit for Ethernet in that space and those types of jobs. >> I love that. Pete, you want to elaborate? >> Yeah, sure. I mean, I think one of the biggest things you find with Ethernet for HPC is that, if you look at where the different technologies have gone over time, you've had old technologies like, ATM, Sonic, Fifty, and pretty much everything is now kind of converged toward Ethernet. I mean, there's still some technologies such as InfiniBand, Omni-Path, that are out there. But basically, they're single source at this point. So what you see is that there is a huge ecosystem behind Ethernet. And you see that also the fact that Ethernet is used in the rest of the enterprise, is used in the cloud data centers, that is very easy to integrate HPC based systems into those systems. So as you move HPC out of academia into enterprise, into cloud service providers, it's much easier to integrate it with the same technology you're already using in those data centers, in those networks. >> So what's the state of the art for Ethernet right now? What's the leading edge? what's shipping now and what's in the near future? You're with Broadcom, you guys designed this stuff. >> Pete: Yeah. >> Savannah: Right. >> Yeah, so leading edge right now, got a couple things-- >> Savannah: We love good stage prop here on the theCUBE. >> Yeah, so this is Tomahawk 4. So this is what is in production, it's shipping in large data centers worldwide. We started sampling this in 2019, started going into data centers in 2020. And this is 25.6 terabytes per second. >> David: Okay. >> Which matches any other technology out there. Like if you look at say, InfinBand, highest they have right now that's just starting to get into production is 25.6 T. So state of the art right now is what we introduced, We announced this in August, This is Tomahawk 5, so this is 51.2 terabytes per second. So double the bandwidth, out of any other technology that's out there. And the important thing about networking technology is when you double the bandwidth, you don't just double the efficiency, actually, winds up being a factor of six efficiency. >> Savannah: Wow. >> 'Cause if you want, I can go into that, but... >> Why not? >> Well, what I want to know, please tell me that in your labs, you have a poster on the wall that says T five, with some like Terminator kind of character. (all laughs) 'Cause that would be cool. If it's not true, just don't say anything. I'll just... >> Pete: This can actually shift into a terminator. >> Well, so this is from a switching perspective. >> Yeah. >> When we talk about the end nodes, when we talk about creating a fabric, what's the latest in terms of, well, the nicks that are going in there, what speed are we talking about today? >> So as far as 30 speeds, it tends to be 50 gigabits per second. >> David: Okay. >> Moving to a hundred gig PAM-4. >> David: Okay. >> And we do see a lot of nicks in the 200 gig Ethernet port speed. So that would be four lanes, 50 gig. But we do see that advancing to 400 gig fairly soon, 800 gig in the future. But say state of the art right now, we're seeing for the end node tends to be 200 gig E based on 50 gig PAM-4. >> Wow. >> Yeah, that's crazy. >> Yeah, that is great. My mind is act actively blown. I want to circle back to something that you brought up a second ago, which I think is really astute. When you talked about HPC moving from academia into enterprise, you're both seeing this happen, where do you think we are on the adoption curve and sort of in that cycle? Armando, do you want to go? >> Yeah, well, if you look at the market research, they're actually telling you it's 50/50 now. So Ethernet is at the level of 50%, InfinBand's at 50%, right? >> Savannah: Interesting. >> Yeah, and so what's interesting to us, customers are coming to us and say, hey, we want to see flexibility and choice and, hey, let's look at Ethernet and let's look at InfiniBand. But what is interesting about this is that we're working with Broadcom, we have their chips in our lab, we their have switches in our lab. And really what we're trying to do is make it easy to simple and configure the network for essentially MPI. And so the goal here with our validated designs is really to simplify this. So if you have a customer that, hey, I've been InfiniBand but now I want to go Ethernet, there's going to be some learning curves there. And so what we want to do is really simplify that so that we can make it easy to install, get the cluster up and running and they can actually get some value out the cluster. >> Yeah, Pete, talk about that partnership. what does that look like? I mean, are you working with Dell before the T six comes out? Or you just say what would be cool is we'll put this in the T six? >> No, we've had a very long partnership both on the hardware and the software side. Dell's been an early adopter of our silicon. We've worked very closely on SI and Sonic on the operating system, and they provide very valuable feedback for us on our roadmap. So before we put out a new chip, and we have actually three different product lines within the switching group, within Broadcom, we've then gotten very valuable feedback on the hardware and on the APIs, on the operating system that goes on top of those chips. So that way when it comes to market, Dell can take it and deliver the exact features that they have in the current generation to their customers to have that continuity. And also they give us feedback on the next gen features they'd like to see again, in both the hardware and the software. >> So I'm fascinated by... I always like to know like what, yeah, exactly. Look, you start talking about the largest supercomputers, most powerful supercomputers that exist today, and you start looking at the specs and there might be two million CPUs, 2 million CPU cores. Exoflap of performance. What are the outward limits of T five in switches, building out a fabric, what does that look like? What are the increments in terms of how many... And I know it's a depends answer, but how many nodes can you support in a scale out cluster before you need another switch? Or what does that increment of scale look like today? >> Yeah, so this is 51.2 terabytes per second. Where we see the most common implementation based on this would be with 400 gig Ethernet ports. >> David: Okay. >> So that would be 128, 400 gig E ports connected to one chip. Now, if you went to 200 gig, which is kind of the state of the art for the nicks, you can have double that. So in a single hop, you can have 256 end nodes connected through one switch. >> Okay, so this T five, that thing right there, (all laughing) inside a sheet metal box, obviously you've got a bunch of ports coming out of that. So what's the form factor look like for where that T five sits? Is there just one in a chassis or you have.. What does that look like? >> It tends to be pizza boxes these days. What you've seen overall is that the industry's moved away from chassis for these high end systems more towardS pizza boxes. And you can have composable systems where, in the past you would have line cards, either the fabric cards that the line cards are plug into or interfaced to. These days what tends to happen is you'd have a pizza box and if you wanted to build up like a virtual chassis, what you would do is use one of those pizza boxes as the fabric card, one of them as the line card. >> David: Okay. >> So what we see, the most common form factor for this is they tend to be two, I'd say for North America, most common would be a 2RU, with 64 OSFP ports. And often each of those OSFP, which is an 800 gig E or 800 gig port, we've broken out into two 400 gig ports. >> So yeah, in 2RU, and this is all air cooled, in 2RU, you've got 51.2 T. We do see some cases where customers would like to have different optics and they'll actually deploy 4RU, just so that way they have the phase-space density. So they can plug in 128, say QSFP 112. But yeah, it really depends on which optics, if you want to have DAK connectivity combined with optics. But those are the two most common form factors. >> And Armando, Ethernet isn't necessarily Ethernet in the sense that many protocols can be run over it. >> Right. >> I think I have a projector at home that's actually using Ethernet physical connections. But, so what are we talking about here in terms of the actual protocol that's running over this? Is this exactly the same as what you think of as data center Ethernet, or is this RDMA over converged Ethernet? What Are we talking about? >> Yeah, so RDMA, right? So when you look at running, essentially HPC workloads, you have the NPI protocol, so message passing interface, right? And so what you need to do is you may need to make sure that that NPI message passing interface runs efficiently on Ethernet. And so this is why we want to test and validate all these different things to make sure that that protocol runs really, really fast on Ethernet. If you look at NPIs officially, built to, hey, it was designed to run on InfiniBand but now what you see with Broadcom, with the great work they're doing, now we can make that work on Ethernet and get same performance, so that's huge for customers. >> Both of you get to see a lot of different types of customers. I kind of feel like you're a little bit of a looking into the crystal ball type because you essentially get to see the future knowing what people are trying to achieve moving forward. Talk to us about the future of Ethernet in HPC in terms of AI and ML, where do you think we're going to be next year or 10 years from now? >> You want to go first or you want me to go first? >> I can start, yeah. >> Savannah: Pete feels ready. >> So I mean, what I see, I mean, Ethernet, what we've seen is that as far as on, starting off of the switch side, is that we've consistently doubled the bandwidth every 18 to 24 months. >> That's impressive. >> Pete: Yeah. >> Nicely done, casual, humble brag there. That was great, I love that. I'm here for you. >> I mean, I think that's one of the benefits of Ethernet, is the ecosystem, is the trajectory the roadmap we've had, I mean, you don't see that in any of the networking technology. >> David: More who? (all laughing) >> So I see that, that trajectory is going to continue as far as the switches doubling in bandwidth, I think that they're evolving protocols, especially again, as you're moving away from academia into the enterprise, into cloud data centers, you need to have a combination of protocols. So you'll probably focus still on RDMA, for the supercomputing, the AI/ML workloads. But we do see that as you have a mix of the applications running on these end nodes, maybe they're interfacing to the CPUs for some processing, you might use a different mix of protocols. So I'd say it's going to be doubling a bandwidth over time, evolution of the protocols. I mean, I expect that Rocky is probably going to evolve over time depending on the AI/ML and the HPC workloads. I think also there's a big change coming as far as the physical connectivity within the data center. Like one thing we've been focusing on is co-packed optics. So right now, this chip is, all the balls in the back here, there's electrical connections. >> How many are there, by the way? 9,000 plus on the back of that-- >> 9,352. >> I love how specific it is. It's brilliant. >> Yeah, so right now, all the SERDES, all the signals are coming out electrically based, but we've actually shown, we actually we have a version of Tomahawk 4 at 25.6 T that has co-packed optics. So instead of having electrical output, you actually have optics directly out of the package. And if you look at, we'll have a version of Tomahawk 5. >> Nice. >> Where it's actually even a smaller form factor than this, where instead of having the electrical output from the bottom, you actually have fibers that plug directly into the sides. >> Wow. Cool. >> So I see there's the bandwidth, there's radix's increasing, protocols, different physical connectivity. So I think there's a lot of things throughout, and the protocol stack's also evolving. So a lot of excitement, a lot of new technology coming to bear. >> Okay, You just threw a carrot down the rabbit hole. I'm only going to chase this one, okay? >> Peter: All right. >> So I think of individual discreet physical connections to the back of those balls. >> Yeah. >> So if there's 9,000, fill in the blank, that's how many connections there are. How do you do that many optical connections? What's the mapping there? What does that look like? >> So what we've announced for Tomahawk 5 is it would have FR4 optics coming out. So you'd actually have 512 fiber pairs coming out. So basically on all four sides, you'd have these fiber ribbons that come in and connect. There's actually fibers coming out of the sides there. We wind up having, actually, I think in this case, we would actually have 512 channels and it would wind up being on 128 actual fiber pairs because-- >> It's miraculous, essentially. >> Savannah: I know. >> Yeah. So a lot of people are going to be looking at this and thinking in terms of InfiniBand versus Ethernet, I think you've highlighted some of the benefits of specifically running Ethernet moving forward as HPC which sort of just trails slightly behind super computing as we define it, becomes more pervasive AI/ML. What are some of the other things that maybe people might not immediately think about when they think about the advantages of running Ethernet in that environment? Is it about connecting the HPC part of their business into the rest of it? What are the advantages? >> Yeah, I mean, that's a big thing. I think, and one of the biggest things that Ethernet has again, is that the data centers, the networks within enterprises, within clouds right now are run on Ethernet. So now, if you want to add services for your customers, the easiest thing for you to do is the drop in clusters that are connected with the same networking technology. So I think one of the biggest things there is that if you look at what's happening with some of the other proprietary technologies, I mean, in some cases they'll have two different types of networking technologies before they interface to Ethernet. So now you've got to train your technicians, you train your assist admins on two different network technologies. You need to have all the debug technology, all the interconnect for that. So here, the easiest thing is you can use Ethernet, it's going to give you the same performance and actually, in some cases, we've seen better performance than we've seen with Omni-Path, better than in InfiniBand. >> That's awesome. Armando, we didn't get to you, so I want to make sure we get your future hot take. Where do you see the future of Ethernet here in HPC? >> Well, Pete hit on a big thing is bandwidth, right? So when you look at, train a model, okay? So when you go and train a model in AI, you need to have a lot of data in order to train that model, right? So what you do is essentially, you build a model, you choose whatever neural network you want to utilize. But if you don't have a good data set that's trained over that model, you can't essentially train the model. So if you have bandwidth, you want big pipes because you have to move that data set from the storage to the CPU. And essentially, if you're going to do it maybe on CPU only, but if you do it on accelerators, well, guess what? You need a big pipe in order to get all that data through. And here's the deal, the bigger the pipe you have, the more data, the faster you can train that model. So the faster you can train that model, guess what? The faster you get to some new insight, maybe it's a new competitive advantage, maybe it's some new way you design a product, but that's a benefit of speed, you want faster, faster, faster. >> It's all about making it faster and easier-- for the users. >> Armando: It is. >> I love that. Last question for you, Pete, just because you've said Tomahawk seven times, and I'm thinking we're in Texas, stakes, there's a lot going on with that. >> Making me hungry. >> I know, exactly. I'm sitting out here thinking, man, I did not have big enough breakfast. How did you come up with the name Tomahawk? >> So Tomahawk, I think it just came from a list. So we have a tried end product line. >> Savannah: Ah, yes. >> Which is a missile product line. And Tomahawk is being kind of like the bigger and batter missile, so. >> Savannah: Love this. Yeah, I mean-- >> So do you like your engineers? You get to name it. >> Had to ask. >> It's collaborative. >> Okay. >> We want to make sure everyone's in sync with it. >> So just it's not the Aquaman tried. >> Right. >> It's the steak Tomahawk. I think we're good now. >> Now that we've cleared that-- >> Now we've cleared that up. >> Armando, Pete, it was really nice to have both you. Thank you for teaching us about the future of Ethernet and HCP. David Nicholson, always a pleasure to share the stage with you. And thank you all for tuning in to theCUBE live from Dallas. We're here talking all things HPC and supercomputing all day long. We hope you'll continue to tune in. My name's Savannah Peterson, thanks for joining us. (soft music)

>>You can put this in a conference. >>Good morning and welcome back to Dallas. Ladies and gentlemen, we are here with the cube Live from, from Supercomputing 2022. David, my cohost, how you doing? Exciting. Day two. Feeling good. >>Very exciting. Ready to start off the >>Day. Very excited. We have two fascinating guests joining us to kick us off. Please welcome Pete and Armando. Gentlemen, thank you for being here with us. >>Having us, >>For having us. I'm excited that you're starting off the day because we've been hearing a lot of rumors about ethernet as the fabric for hpc, but we really haven't done a deep dive yet during the show. Y'all seem all in on ethernet. Tell us about that. Armando, why don't you start? >>Yeah. I mean, when you look at ethernet, customers are asking for flexibility and choice. So when you look at HPC and you know, infinite band's always been around, right? But when you look at where Ethernet's coming in, it's really our commercial and their enterprise customers. And not everybody wants to be in the top 500. What they want to do is improve their job time and improve their latency over the network. And when you look at ethernet, you kinda look at the sweet spot between 8, 12, 16, 32 nodes. That's a perfect fit for ethernet and that space and, and those types of jobs. >>I love that. Pete, you wanna elaborate? Yeah, yeah, >>Yeah, sure. I mean, I think, you know, one of the biggest things you find with internet for HPC is that, you know, if you look at where the different technologies have gone over time, you know, you've had old technologies like, you know, atm, Sonic, fitty, you know, and pretty much everything is now kind of converged toward ethernet. I mean, there's still some technologies such as, you know, InfiniBand, omnipath that are out there. Yeah. But basically there's single source at this point. So, you know, what you see is that there is a huge ecosystem behind ethernet. And you see that also, the fact that ethernet is used in the rest of the enterprise is using the cloud data centers that is very easy to integrate HPC based systems into those systems. So as you move HPC out of academia, you know, into, you know, into enterprise, into cloud service providers is much easier to integrate it with the same technology you're already using in those data centers, in those networks. >>So, so what's this, what is, what's the state of the art for ethernet right now? What, you know, what's, what's the leading edge, what's shipping now and what and what's in the near future? You, you were with Broadcom, you guys design this stuff. >>Yeah, yeah. Right. Yeah. So leading edge right now, I got a couple, you know, Wes stage >>Trough here on the cube. Yeah. >>So this is Tomahawk four. So this is what is in production is shipping in large data centers worldwide. We started sampling this in 2019, started going into data centers in 2020. And this is 25.6 tets per second. Okay. Which matches any other technology out there. Like if you look at say, infin band, highest they have right now that's just starting to get into production is 25 point sixt. So state of the art right now is what we introduced. We announced this in August. This is Tomahawk five. So this is 51.2 terabytes per second. So double the bandwidth have, you know, any other technology that's out there. And the important thing about networking technology is when you double the bandwidth, you don't just double the efficiency, it's actually winds up being a factor of six efficiency. Wow. Cause if you want, I can go into that, but why >>Not? Well, I, what I wanna know, please tell me that in your labs you have a poster on the wall that says T five with, with some like Terminator kind of character. Cause that would be cool if it's not true. Don't just don't say anything. I just want, I can actually shift visual >>It into a terminator. So. >>Well, but so what, what are the, what are the, so this is, this is from a switching perspective. Yeah. When we talk about the end nodes, when we talk about creating a fabric, what, what's, what's the latest in terms of, well, the kns that are, that are going in there, what's, what speed are we talking about today? >>So as far as 30 speeds, it tends to be 50 gigabits per second. Okay. Moving to a hundred gig pan four. Okay. And we do see a lot of Knicks in the 200 gig ethernet port speed. So that would be, you know, four lanes, 50 gig. But we do see that advancing to 400 gig fairly soon. 800 gig in the future. But say state of the art right now, we're seeing for the end nodes tends to be 200 gig E based on 50 gig pan four. Wow. >>Yeah. That's crazy. Yeah, >>That is, that is great. My mind is act actively blown. I wanna circle back to something that you brought up a second ago, which I think is really astute. When you talked about HPC moving from academia into enterprise, you're both seeing this happen. Where do you think we are on the adoption curve and sort of in that cycle? Armand, do you wanna go? >>Yeah, yeah. Well, if you look at the market research, they're actually telling it's 50 50 now. So ethernet is at the level of 50%. InfiniBand is at 50%. Right. Interesting. Yeah. And so what's interesting to us, customers are coming to us and say, Hey, we want to see, you know, flexibility and choice and hey, let's look at ethernet and let's look at InfiniBand. But what is interesting about this is that we're working with Broadcom, we have their chips in our lab, we have our switches in our lab. And really what we're trying to do is make it easy to simple and configure the network for essentially mpi. And so the goal here with our validated designs is really to simplify this. So if you have a customer that, Hey, I've been in fbe, but now I want to go ethernet, you know, there's gonna be some learning curves there. And so what we wanna do is really simplify that so that we can make it easy to install, get the cluster up and running, and they can actually get some value out of the cluster. >>Yeah. Peter, what, talk about that partnership. What, what, what does that look like? Is it, is it, I mean, are you, you working with Dell before the, you know, before the T six comes out? Or you just say, you know, what would be cool, what would be cool is we'll put this in the T six? >>No, we've had a very long partnership both on the hardware and the software side. You know, Dell has been an early adopter of our silicon. We've worked very closely on SI and Sonic on the operating system, you know, and they provide very valuable feedback for us on our roadmap. So before we put out a new chip, and we have actually three different product lines within the switching group within Broadcom, we've then gotten, you know, very valuable feedback on the hardware and on the APIs, on the operating system that goes on top of those chips. So that way when it comes to market, you know, Dell can take it and, you know, deliver the exact features that they have in the current generation to their customers to have that continuity. And also they give us feedback on the next gen features they'd like to see again in both the hardware and the software. >>So, so I, I'm, I'm just, I'm fascinated by, I I, I always like to know kind like what Yeah, exactly. Exactly right. Look, you, you start talking about the largest super supercomputers, most powerful supercomputers that exist today, and you start looking at the specs and there might be 2 million CPUs, 2 million CPU cores, yeah. Ex alop of, of, of, of performance. What are the, what are the outward limits of T five in switches, building out a fabric, what does that look like? What are the, what are the increments in terms of how many, and I know it, I know it's a depends answer, but, but, but how many nodes can you support in a, in a, in a scale out cluster before you need another switch? What does that increment of scale look like today? >>Yeah, so I think, so this is 51.2 terras per second. What we see the most common implementation based on this would be with 400 gig ethernet ports. Okay. So that would be 128, you know, 400 giggi ports connected to, to one chip. Okay. Now, if you went to 200 gig, which is kind of the state of the art for the Nicks, you can have double that. Okay. So, you know, in a single hop you can have 256 end nodes connected through one switch. >>So, okay, so this T five, that thing right there inside a sheet metal box, obviously you've got a bunch of ports coming out of that. So what is, what does that, what's the form factor look like for that, for where that T five sits? Is there just one in a chassis or you have, what does that look >>Like? It tends to be pizza boxes these days. Okay. What you've seen overall is that the industry's moved away from chassis for these high end systems more towards pizza, pizza boxes. And you can have composable systems where, you know, in the past you would have line cards, either the fabric cards that the line cards are plugged into or interface to these days, what tends to happen is you'd have a pizza box, and if you wanted to build up like a virtual chassis, what you would do is use one of those pizza boxes as the fabric card, one of them as the, the line card. >>Okay. >>So what we see, the most common form factor for this is they tend to be two, I'd say for North America, most common would be a two R U with 64 OSF P ports. And often each of those OSF p, which is an 800 gig e or 800 gig port, we've broken out into two 400 gig quarts. Okay. So yeah, in two r u you've got, and this is all air cooled, you know, in two re you've got 51.2 T. We do see some cases where customers would like to have different optics, and they'll actually deploy a four U just so that way they have the face place density, so they can plug in 128, say qsf P one 12. But yeah, it really depends on which optics, if you wanna have DAK connectivity combined with, with optics. But those are the two most common form factors. >>And, and Armando ethernet isn't, ethernet isn't necessarily ethernet in the sense that many protocols can be run over it. Right. I think I have a projector at home that's actually using ethernet physical connections. But what, so what are we talking about here in terms of the actual protocol that's running over this? Is this exactly the same as what you think of as data center ethernet, or, or is this, you know, RDMA over converged ethernet? What, what are >>We talking about? Yeah, so our rdma, right? So when you look at, you know, running, you know, essentially HPC workloads, you have the NPI protocol, so message passing interface, right? And so what you need to do is you may need to make sure that that NPI message passing interface runs efficiently on ethernet. And so this is why we want to test and validate all these different things to make sure that that protocol runs really, really fast on ethernet, if you look at NPI is officially, you know, built to, Hey, it was designed to run on InfiniBand, but now what you see with Broadcom and the great work they're doing now, we can make that work on ethernet and get, you know, it's same performance. So that's huge for customers. >>Both of you get to see a lot of different types of customers. I kind of feel like you're a little bit of a, a looking into the crystal ball type because you essentially get to see the future knowing what people are trying to achieve moving forward. Talk to us about the future of ethernet in hpc in terms of AI and ml. Where, where do you think we're gonna be next year or 10 years from now? >>You wanna go first or you want me to go first? I can start. >>Yeah. Pete feels ready. >>So I mean, what I see, I mean, ethernet, I mean, is what we've seen is that as far as on the starting off of the switch side, is that we've consistently doubled the bandwidth every 18 to 24 months. That's >>Impressive. >>Yeah. So nicely >>Done, casual, humble brag there. That was great. That was great. I love that. >>I'm here for you. I mean, I think that's one of the benefits of, of Ethan is like, is the ecosystem, is the trajectory, the roadmap we've had, I mean, you don't see that in any other networking technology >>More who, >>So, you know, I see that, you know, that trajectory is gonna continue as far as the switches, you know, doubling in bandwidth. I think that, you know, they're evolving protocols. You know, especially again, as you're moving away from academia into the enterprise, into cloud data centers, you need to have a combination of protocols. So you'll probably focus still on rdma, you know, for the supercomputing, the a AIML workloads. But we do see that, you know, as you have, you know, a mix of the applications running on these end nodes, maybe they're interfacing to the, the CPUs for some processing, you might use a different mix of protocols. So I'd say it's gonna be doubling a bandwidth over time evolution of the protocols. I mean, I expect that Rocky is probably gonna evolve over time depending on the a AIML and the HPC workloads. I think also there's a big change coming as far as the physical connectivity within the data center. Like one thing we've been focusing on is co-pack optics. So, you know, right now this chip is all, all the balls in the back here, there's electrical connections. How >>Many are there, by the way? 9,000 plus on the back of that >>352. >>I love how specific it is. It's brilliant. >>Yeah. So we get, so right now, you know, all the thirties, all the signals are coming out electrically based, but we've actually shown, we have this, actually, we have a version of Hawk four at 25 point sixt that has co-pack optics. So instead of having electrical output, you actually have optics directly out of the package. And if you look at, we'll have a version of Tomahawk five Nice. Where it's actually even a smaller form factor than this, where instead of having the electrical output from the bottom, you actually have fibers that plug directly into the sides. Wow. Cool. So I see, you know, there's, you know, the bandwidth, there's radis increasing protocols, different physical connectivity. So I think there's, you know, a lot of things throughout, and the protocol stack's also evolving. So, you know, a lot of excitement, a lot of new technology coming to bear. >>Okay. You just threw a carrot down the rabbit hole. I'm only gonna chase this one. Okay. >>All right. >>So I think of, I think of individual discreet physical connections to the back of those balls. Yeah. So if there's 9,000, fill in the blank, that's how many connections there are. How do you do that in many optical connections? What's, what's, what's the mapping there? What does that, what does that look like? >>So what we've announced for TAMA five is it would have fr four optics coming out. So you'd actually have, you know, 512 fiber pairs coming out. So you'd have, you know, basically on all four sides, you'd have these fiber ribbons that come in and connect. There's actually fibers coming out of the, the sides there. We wind up having, actually, I think in this case, we would actually have 512 channels and it would wind up being on 128 actual fiber pairs because >>It's, it's miraculous, essentially. It's, I know. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So, so, you know, a lot of people are gonna be looking at this and thinking in terms of InfiniBand versus versus ethernet. I think you've highlighted some of the benefits of specifically running ethernet moving forward as, as hpc, you know, which is sort of just trails slightly behind supercomputing as we define it, becomes more pervasive AI ml. What, what are some of the other things that maybe people might not immediately think about when they think about the advantages of running ethernet in that environment? Is it, is it connecting, is it about connecting the HPC part of their business into the rest of it? What, or what, what are the advantages? >>Yeah, I mean, that's a big thing. I think, and one of the biggest things that ethernet has again, is that, you know, the data centers, you know, the networks within enterprises within, you know, clouds right now are run on ethernet. So now if you want to add services for your customers, the easiest thing for you to do is, you know, the drop in clusters that are connected with the same networking technology, you know, so I think what, you know, one of the biggest things there is that if you look at what's happening with some of the other proprietary technologies, I mean, in some cases they'll have two different types of networking technologies before they interface to ethernet. So now you've got to train your technicians, you train your, your assist admins on two different network technologies. You need to have all the, the debug technology, all the interconnect for that. So here, the easiest thing is you can use ethernet, it's gonna give you the same performance. And actually in some cases we seen better performance than we've seen with omnipath than, you know, better than in InfiniBand. >>That's awesome. Armando, we didn't get to you, so I wanna make sure we get your future hot take. Where do you see the future of ethernet here in hpc? >>Well, Pete hit on a big thing is bandwidth, right? So when you look at train a model, okay, so when you go and train a model in ai, you need to have a lot of data in order to train that model, right? So what you do is essentially you build a model, you choose whatever neural network you wanna utilize, but if you don't have a good data set that's trained over that model, you can't essentially train the model. So if you have bandwidth, you want big pipes because you have to move that data set from the storage to the cpu. And essentially, if you're gonna do it maybe on CPU only, but if you do it on accelerators, well guess what? You need a big pipe in order to get all that data through. And here's the deal. The bigger the pipe you have, the more data, the faster you can train that model. So the faster you can train that model, guess what? The faster you get to some new insight, maybe it's a new competitive advantage. Maybe it's some new way you design a product, but that's a benefit of speed you want faster, faster, faster. >>It's all about making it faster and easier. It is for, for the users. I love that. Last question for you, Pete, just because you've said Tomahawk seven times, and I'm thinking we're in Texas Stakes, there's a lot going on with with that making >>Me hungry. >>I know exactly. I'm sitting up here thinking, man, I did not have a big enough breakfast. How do you come up with the name Tomahawk? >>So Tomahawk, I think you just came, came from a list. So we had, we have a tri end product line. Ah, a missile product line. And Tomahawk is being kinda like, you know, the bigger and batter missile, so, oh, okay. >>Love this. Yeah, I, well, I >>Mean, so you let your engineers, you get to name it >>Had to ask. It's >>Collaborative. Oh good. I wanna make sure everyone's in sync with it. >>So just so we, it's not the Aquaman tried. Right, >>Right. >>The steak Tomahawk. I >>Think we're, we're good now. Now that we've cleared that up. Now we've cleared >>That up. >>Armando P, it was really nice to have both you. Thank you for teaching us about the future of ethernet N hpc. David Nicholson, always a pleasure to share the stage with you. And thank you all for tuning in to the Cube Live from Dallas. We're here talking all things HPC and Supercomputing all day long. We hope you'll continue to tune in. My name's Savannah Peterson, thanks for joining us.

>>Hey everyone, welcome to this cube conversation. I'm your host Lisa Martin, and I have the pleasure of welcoming back our most prolific guest on the cube in its history, the CMO of Fin Ad, Eric Herzog. Eric, it's great to see you. Welcome back, >>Lisa. It's great to be here. Love being on the cube. I think this might be number 55 or 56. Been doing 'em a long time with the Cube. You guys are great. >>You, you have, and we always recognize you lately with the Hawaiian shirts. It's your brand that's, that's the Eric Hizo brand. We love it. But I like the pin, the infin nut pin on brand. Thank you. >>Yeah. Oh, gotta be on brand. >>Exactly. So talk about the current IT landscape. So much change we've seen in the last couple of years. Specifically, what are some of the big challenges that you are talking with enterprise customers and cloud service providers? About what, what are some of those major things on their minds? >>So there's a couple things. First of all is obviously with the Rocky economy and even before covid, just for storage in particular, CIOs hate storage. I've been doing this now since 1986. I have never, ever, ever met a CIO at any company I've bid with. And I've been with four of the biggest storage companies on this planet. Never met a cio. Used to be a storage guy. So they know they need it, but boy, they really don't like it. So the storage admins have to manage more and more storage. Exabytes, exabytes, it just ballooning for what a storage admin has to do. Then you then have the covid and is it recession? No. Is it a growth? And then clearly what's happened in the last year with what's going on in Europe and the, is it a recession, the inflation. So they're always looking to, how do we cut money on storage yet still get what we need for our applications, workloads, and use cases. So that's definitely the biggest, the first topic. >>So never met a CIO that was a storage admin or as a fan, but as you point out, they need it. And we've seen needs changing in customer landscapes, especially as the threat landscape has changed so dramatically the last couple of years. Ransomware, you've said it before, I say it too. It's no longer if it's when it's how often. It's the frequency. We've gotta be able to recover. Backups are being targeted. Talk to me about some of, in that landscape, some of the evolutions of customer challenges and maybe those CIOs going, We've gotta make sure that our, our storage data is protected. >>So it's starting to change. However, historically with the cio and then when they started hiring CISOs or security directors, whatever they had, depending on the company size, it was very much about protecting the edge. Okay, if you will, the moat and the wall of the castle. Then it was the network in between. So keep the streets inside the castle clean. Then it was tracking down the bad guy. So if they did get over, the issue is, if I remember correctly, the sheriff of Nottingham never really caught Robinhood. So the problem is the dwell time where the ransomware malware's hidden on storage could be as much as 200 days. So I think they're starting to realize at the security level now, forget, forget the guys on the storage side, the security guys, the cso, the CIO, are starting to realize that if you're gonna have a comprehensive cybersecurity strategy, must include storage. And that is new >>That, well, that's promising then. That's new. I mean obviously promising given the, the challenges and the circumstances. So then from a storage perspective, customers that are in this multi-cloud hybrid cloud environment, you talked about the the edge cloud on-prem. What are some of the key things from a storage perspective that customers have to achieve these days to be secure as data volumes continue to grow and spread? >>So what we've done is implement on both primary storage and secondary storage and technology called infin safe. So Infin Safe has the four legs of the storage cyber security stool. So first of all is creating an air gap. In this case, a logical air gap can be local or remote. We create an immutable snapshot, which means it can't be changed, it can't be altered, so you can't change it. We have a fenced forensic environment to check out the storage because you don't wanna recover. Again, malware and rans square can is hidden. So you could be making amenable snapshots of actually malware, ransomware, and never know you're doing it right. So you have to check it out. Then you need to do a rapid recovery. The most important thing if you have an attack is how fast can you be up and going with recovery? So we have actually instituted now a number of cyber storage security guarantees. >>We will guarantee the SLAs on a, the snapshot is absolutely immutable. So they know that what they're getting is what they were supposed to be getting. And then also we are guaranteeing recovery times on primary storage. We're guaranteeing recovery of under one minute. We'll make the snapshot available under one minute and on secondary storage under 20 minutes. So those are things you gotta look for from a security perspective. And then the other thing you gotta practice, in my world, ransomware, malware, cyber tech is basically a disaster. So yes, you got the hurricane, yes, you got the flood, yes, you got the earthquake. Yes, you got the fire in the building. Yes you got whatever it may be. But if you don't practice malware, ransomware, recoveries and protection, then it might as well be a hurricane or earthquake. It will take your data, >>It will take your data on the numbers of customers that pay ransom is pretty high, isn't it? And and not necessarily able to recover their data. So it's a huge risk. >>So if you think about it, the government documented that last year, roughly $6 trillion was spent either protecting against ransomware and malware or paying ransomware attacks. And there's been several famous ones. There was one in Korea, 72 million ransom. It was one of the Korea's largest companies. So, and those are only the ones that make the news. Most of 'em don't make the news. Right. >>So talk to me then, speaking and making the news. Nobody wants to do that. We, we know every industry is vulnerable to this. Some of the ones that might be more vulnerable, healthcare, government, public sector education. I think the Los Angeles Unified School district was just hit as well in September. They >>Were >>What, talk to me about how infin out is helping customers really dial down the risk when the threat actors are becoming more and more sophisticated? >>Well, there's a couple things. First of all, our infin safe software comes free on our main product. So we have a product called infin Guard for Secondary Storage and it comes for free on that. And then our primary storage product's called the Infin Box. It also comes for free. So they don't have to use it, but we embed it. And then we have reference architectures that we give them our ses, our solutions architects and our technical advisors all up to speed on why they should do it, how they should do it. We have a number of customers doing it. You know, we're heavily concentrated the global Fortune 2000, for example, we publicly announced that 26% of the Fortune 50 use our technology, even though we're a small company. So we go to extra lengths to a B, educated on our own front, our own teams, and then B, make sure they portray that to the end users and our channel partners. But the end users don't pay a dime for the software that does what I just described, it's free, it's included when you get you're Infin box or you're ingar, it's included at no charge. >>That's pretty differentiating from a competitive standpoint. I might, I would guess >>It is. And also the guarantee. So for example, on primary storage, okay, whether you'd put your Oracle or put your SAP or I Mongo or your sequel or your highly transactional workloads, right? Your business finance workload, all your business critical stuff. We are the first and only storage company that offers a primary guarantee on cyber storage resilience. And we offer two of them on primary storage. No other vendor offers a guarantee, which we do on primary storage. Whether you the first and right now as of here we are sitting in the middle of October. We are still the only vendor that offers anything on primary storage from a guaranteed SLA on primary storage for cyber storage resilience. >>Let's talk about those guarantees. Walk me through what you just announced. There's been a a very, a lot of productivity at Infin DAT in 2022. A lot of things that you've announced but on crack some of the things you're announcing. Sure. Talk to me specifically about those guarantees and what's in it for me as a customer. It sounds pretty obvious, but I'd love to hear it from you. >>Okay, so we've done really three different types of guarantees. The first one is we have a hundred percent availability guarantee on our primary storage. And we've actually had that for the last, since 2019. So it's a hundred percent availability. We're guaranteed no downtime, a hundred percent availability, which for our customer base being heavily concentrated, the global Fortune 2000 large government enterprises, big universities and even smaller companies, we do a lot of business with CSPs and MSPs. In fact, at the Flash Memory Summit are Infin Box ssa All Flash was named the best product for hyperscaler deployment. Hyperscaler basically means cloud servers provider. So they need a hundred percent availability. So we have a guarantee on that. Second guarantee we have is a performance guarantee. We'll do an analysis, we look at all their workloads and then we will guarantee in writing what the performance should be based on which, which of our products they want to buy are Infin Box or Infin Box ssa, which is all flash. >>Then we have the third one is all about cyber resilience. So we have two on our Infin box, our Infin box SSA for primary storage, which is a one the immutability of the snapshot and immediately means you can't erase the data. Right? Camp tamper with it. Second one is on the recovery time, which is under a minute. We just announced in the middle of October that we are doing a similar cyber storage resilience guarantee on our ARD secondary product, which is designed for backup recovery, et cetera. We will also offer the immutably snapshot guarantee and also one on the recoverability of that data in under 20 minutes. In fact, we just did a demo at our live launch earlier this week and we demoed 20 petabytes of Veeam backup data recovered in 12 minutes. 12 >>Minutes 2012. >>20 petabytes In >>12 bytes in 12 minutes. Yes. That's massive. That's massively differentiating. But that's essential for customers cuz you know, in terms of backups and protecting the data, it's all about recovery >>A and once they've had the attack, it's how fast you get back online, right? That that's what happens if they've, if they can't stop the attack, can't stop the threat and it happens. They need to get that back as fast as they can. So we have the speed of recovery on primary stores, the first in the industry and we have speed on the backup software and we'll do the same thing for a backup data set recovery as well. Talk >>To me about the, the what's in it for me, For the cloud service providers, they're obviously the ones that you work with are competing with the hyperscalers. How does the guarantees and the differentiators that Fin out is bringing to market? How do you help those cloud SPS dial up their competitiveness against the big cheeses? >>Well, what we do is we provide that underlying infrastructure. We, first of all, we only sell things that are petabyte in scale. That's like always sell. So for example, on our in fitter guard product, the raw capacity is over four petabytes. And the effective capacity, cuz you do data reduction is over 85 petabytes on our newest announced product, on our primary storage product, we now can do up to 17 petabytes of effective capacity in a single rack. So the value to the service rider is they can save on what slots? Power and floor. A greener data center. Yeah, right. Which by the way is not just about environmentals, but guess what? It also translate into operational expense. >>Exactly. CapEx office, >>With a lot of these very large systems that we offer, you can consolidate multiple products from our competitors. So for example, with one of the competitors, we had a deal that we did last quarter 18 competitive arrays into one of ours. So talk about saving, not just on all of the operational expense, including operational manpower, but actually dramatically on the CapEx. In fact, one of our Fortune 500 customers in the telco space over the last five years have told us on CapEx alone, we've saved them $104 million on CapEx by consolidating smaller technology into our larger systems. And one of the key things we do is everything is automated. So we call it autonomous automation use AI based technology. So once you install it, we've got several public references who said, I haven't touched this thing in three or four years. It automatically configures itself. It automatically adjusts to changes in performance and new apps. When I put in point a new app at it automatically. So in the old days the storage admin would optimize performance for a new application. We don't do that, we automatically do it and autonomously the admin doesn't even click a button. We just sense there's new applications and we automate ourselves and configure ourselves without the admin having to do anything. So that's about saving operational expense as well as operational manpower. >>Absolutely. I was, one of the things that was ringing in my ear was workforce productivity and obviously those storage admins being able to to focus on more strategic projects. Can't believe the CIOs aren't coming around yet. But you said there's, there's a change, there's a wave coming. But if we think about the the, the what's in it for me as a customer, the positive business outcomes that I'm hearing, lower tco, your greener it, which is key. So many customers that we talk to are so focused on sustainability and becoming greener, especially with an on-prem footprint, workforce productivity. Talk about some of the other key business outcomes that you're helping customers achieve and how it helps them to be more competitive. >>Sure. So we've got a, a couple different things. First of all, storage can't go down. When the storage goes down, everyone gets blamed. Mission. When an app goes down, no one really thinks about it. It's always the storage guy's fault. So you want to be a hundred percent available. And that's today's businesses, and I'd actually argue it's been this way for 20 years are 24 by seven by 365. So that's one thing that we deliver. Second thing is performance. So we have public references talk about their SAP workload that used to take two hours, now takes 20 minutes, okay? We have another customer that was doing SAP queries. They improved their performance three times, Not 3%, not 3%, three times. So 300% better performance just by using our storages. They didn't touch the sap, they didn't touch the servers. All they do is to put our storage in there. >>So performance relates basically to applications, workloads and use cases and productivity beyond it. So think the productivity of supply chain guys, logistics guys, the shipping guys, the finance guys, right? All these applications that run today's enterprises. So we can automate all that. And then clearly the cyber threat. Yeah, that is a huge issue. And every CIO is concerned about the cyber threat. And in fact, it was interesting, Fortune magazine did a survey of CEOs, and this was last May, the number one concern, 66% in that may survey was cyber security number one concern. So this is not just a CIO thing, this is a CEO thing and a board level >>Thing. I was gonna say it's at at the board level that the cyber security threats are so real, they're so common. No one wants to be the next headline, like the colonial pipeline, right? Or the school districts or whatnot. And everybody is at risk. So then what you're enabling with what you've just announced, the all the guarantees on the SLAs, the massively fast recovery times, which is critical in cyber recovery. Obviously resilience is is key there. Modern data protection it sounds like to me. How do you define that and and what are customers looking for with respect to modern cyber resilience versus data protection? >>Yeah, so we've got normal data protection because we work with all the backup vendors. Our in ARD is what's known as a purpose built backup appliance. So that allows you to back at a much faster rate. And we work all the big back backup vendors, IBM spectrum Protect, we work with veritas vem com vault, oracle arm, anybody who does backup. So that's more about the regular side, the traditional backup. But the other part of modern data protection is infusing that with the cyber resilience. Cuz cyber resilience is a new thing. Yes, from a storage guy perspective, it hasn't been around a long time. Many of our competitors have almost nothing. One or two of our competitors have a pretty robust, but they don't guarantee it the way we guarantee it. So they're pretty good at it. But the fact that we're willing to put our money where our mouth is, we think says we price stand above and then most of the other guys in the storage industry are just starting to get on the bandwagon of having cyber resilience. >>So that changes what you do from data protection, what would call modern data protection is a combination of traditional backup recovery, et cetera. Now with this influence and this infusion of cybersecurity cyber resilience into a storage environment. And then of course we've also happened to add it on primary storage as well. So whether it's primary storage or backup and archive storage, we make sure you have that right cyber resilience to make it, if you will, modern data protection and diff different from what it, you know, the old backup of your grandfather, father, son backup in tape or however you used to do it. We're well beyond that now we adding this cyber resilience aspect. Well, >>From a cyber resilience perspective, ransomware, malware, cyber attacks are, that's a disaster, right? But traditional disaster recovery tools aren't really built to be able to pull back that data as quickly as it sounds like in Trinidad is able to facilitate. >>Yeah. So one of the things we do is in our reference architectures and written documentation as well as when we do the training, we'd sell the customers you need to practice, if you practice when there's a fire, a flood, a hurricane, an earthquake or whatever is the natural disaster you're practicing that you need to practice malware and ran somewhere. And because our recovery is so rapid and the case of our ingar, our fenced environment to do the testing is actually embedded in it. Several of our competitors, if you want the fenced environment, you have to buy a second product with us. It's all embedded in the one item. So A, that makes it more effective from a CapEx and opex perspective, but it also makes it easier. So we recommend that they do the practice recoveries monthly. Now whether they do it or not separate issue, but at least that's what we're recommending and say, you should be doing this on a monthly basis just like you would practice a disaster, like a hurricane or fire or a flood or an earthquake. Need to be practicing. And I think people are starting to hear it, but they don't still think more about, you know, the flood. Yeah. Or about >>The H, the hurricane. >>Yeah. That's what they think about. They not yet thinking about cybersecurity as really a disaster model. And it is. >>Absolutely. It is. Is is the theme of cyber resilience, as you said, this is a new concept, A lot of folks are talking about it, applying it differently. Is that gonna help dial up those folks just really being much more prepared for that type of cyber disaster? >>Well, we've made it so it's automated. Once you set up the immutable snapshots, it just does its thing. You don't set it and forget it. We create the logical air back. Once you do it, same thing. Set it and forget it. The fence forensic environment, easy to deploy. You do have to just configure it once and then obviously the recovery is almost instantaneous. It's under a minute guaranteed on primary storage and under 20 minutes, like I told you when we did our launch this week, we did 20 petabytes of Veeam backup data in 12 minutes. So that's pretty incredible. That's a lot of data to have recovered in 12 minutes. So the more automated we make it, which is what our real forte is, is this autonomous automation and automating as much as possible and make it easy to configure when you do have to configure. That's what differentiates what we do from our perspective. But overall in the storage industry, it's the recognition finally by the CISOs and the CIOs that, wait a second, maybe storage might be an essential part of my corporate cybersecurity strategy. Yes. Which it has not been historically, >>But you're seeing that change. Yes. >>We're starting to see that change. >>Excellent. So talk to me a little bit before we wrap here about the go to market one. Can folks get their hands on the updates to in kindergar and Finn and Safe and Penta box? >>So all these are available right now. They're available now either through our teams or through our, our channel partners globally. We do about 80% of our business globally through the channel. So whether you talk to us or talk to our channel partners, we're there to help. And again, we put our money where your mouth is with those guarantees, make sure we stand behind our products. >>That's awesome. Eric, thank you so much for joining me on the program. Congratulations on the launch. The the year of productivity just continues for infinit out is basically what I'm hearing. But you're really going in the extra mile for customers to help them ensure that the inevitable cyber attacks, that they, that they're complete storage environment on prem will be protected and more importantly, recoverable Very quickly. We appreciate your insights and your input. >>Great. Absolutely love being on the cube. Thank you very much for having us. Of >>Course. It's great to have you back. We appreciate it. For Eric Herzog, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching this cube conversation live from Palo Alto.

>> Welcome back to Supercloud22, #Supercloud22. This is Dave Vellante. In 2019 Oracle and Microsoft announced a collaboration to bring interoperability between OCI, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Azure Clouds. It was Oracle's initial foray into so-called multi-cloud and we're joined by Karan Batta, who's the Vice President for Product Management at OCI. And Kris Rice is the Vice President of Software Development at Oracle Database. And we're going to talk about how this technology's evolving and whether it fits our view of what we call supercloud. Welcome gentlemen, thank you. >> Thanks for having us. >> So you recently just last month announced the new service. It extends on the initial partnership with Microsoft Oracle interconnect with Azure, and you refer to this as a secure private link between the two clouds, it cross 11 regions around the world, under two milliseconds data transmission sounds pretty cool. It enables customers to run Microsoft applications against data stored in Oracle databases without any loss in efficiency or presumably performance. So we use this term supercloud to describe a service or sets of services built on hyper scale infrastructure that leverages the core primitives and APIs of an individual cloud platform, but abstracts that underlying complexity to create a continuous experience across more than one cloud. Is that what you've done? >> Absolutely. I think it starts at the top layer in terms of just making things very simple for the customer, right. I think at the end of the day we want to enable true workloads running across two different clouds where you're potentially running maybe the app layer in one and the database layer or the back in another. And the integration I think starts with, you know, making it ease of use. Right. So you can start with things like, okay can you log into your second or your third cloud with the first cloud provider's credentials? Can you make calls against another cloud using another cloud's APIs? Can you peer the networks together? Can you make it seamless? I think those are all the components that are sort of, they're kind of the ingredients to making a multi-cloud or supercloud experience successful. >> Oh, thank you for that, Karan. So I guess there's a question for Chris is I'm trying to understand what you're really solving for? What specific customer problems are you focused on? What's the service optimized for presumably it's database but maybe you could double click on that. >> Sure. So, I mean, of course it's database. So it's a super fast network so that we can split the workload across two different clouds leveraging the best from both, but above the networking, what we had to do do is we had to think about what a true multi-cloud or what you're calling supercloud experience would be it's more than just making the network bites flow. So what we did is we took a look as Karan hinted at right, is where is my identity? Where is my observability? How do I connect these things across how it feels native to that other cloud? >> So what kind of engineering do you have to do to make that work? It's not just plugging stuff together. Maybe you could explain a little bit more detail, the the resources that you had to bring to bear and the technology behind the architecture. >> Sure. I think, it starts with actually, what our goal was, right? Our goal was to actually provide customers with a fully managed experience. What that means is we had to basically create a brand new service. So, we have obviously an Azure like portal and an experience that allows customers to do this but under the covers, we actually have a fully managed service that manages the networking layer, the physical infrastructure, and it actually calls APIs on both sides of the fence. It actually manages your Azure resources, creates them but it also interacts with OCI at the same time. And under the covers this service actually takes Azure primitives as inputs. And then it sort of like essentially translates them to OCI action. So, we actually truly integrated this as a service that's essentially built as a PaaS layer on top of these two clouds. >> So, the customer doesn't really care or know maybe they know cuz they might be coming through, an Azure experience, but you can run work on either Azure and or OCI. And it's a common experience across those clouds. Is that correct? >> That's correct. So like you said, the customer does know that they know there is a relationship with both clouds but thanks to all the things we built there's this thing we invented we created called a multi-cloud control plane. This control plane does operate against both clouds at the same time to make it as seamless as possible so that maybe they don't notice, you know, the power of the interconnect is extremely fast networking, as fast as what we could see inside a single cloud. If you think about how big a data center might be from edge to edge in that cloud, going across the interconnect makes it so that that workload is not important that it's spanning two clouds anymore. >> So you say extremely fast networking. I remember I used to, I wrote a piece a long time ago. Larry Ellison loves InfiniBand. I presume we've moved on from them, but maybe not. What is that interconnect? >> Yeah, so it's funny you mentioned interconnect you know, my previous history comes from Edge PC where we actually inside OCI today, we've moved from Infinite Band as is part of Exadata's core to what we call Rocky V two. So that's just another RDMA network. We actually use it very successfully, not just for Exadata but we use it for our standard computers that we provide to high performance computing customers. >> And the multi-cloud control plane runs. Where does that live? Does it live on OCI? Does it live on Azure? Yes? >> So it does it lives on our side. Our side of the house as part of our Oracle OCI control plane. And it is the veneer that makes these two clouds possible so that we can wire them together. So it knows how to take those Azure primitives and the OCI primitives and wire them at the appropriate levels together. >> Now I want to talk about this PaaS layer. Part of supercloud, we said to actually make it work you're going to have to have a super PaaS. I know we're taking this this term a little far but it's still it's instructive in that, what we surmised was you're probably not going to just use off the shelf, plain old vanilla PaaS, you're actually going to have a purpose built PaaS to solve for the specific problem. So as an example, if you're solving for ultra low latency, which I think you're doing, you're probably no offense to my friends at Red Hat but you're probably not going to develop this on OpenShift, but tell us about that PaaS layer or what we call the super PaaS layer. >> Go ahead, Chris. >> Well, so you're right. We weren't going to build it out on OpenShift. So we have Oracle OCI, you know, the standard is Terraform. So the back end of everything we do is based around Terraform. Today, what we've done is we built that control plane and it will be API drivable, it'll be drivable from the UI and it will let people operate and create primitives across both sides. So you can, you mentioned developers, developers love automation, right, because it makes our lives easy. We will be able to automate a multi-cloud workload from ground up config is code these days. So we can config an entire multi-cloud experience from one place. >> So, double click Chris on that developer experience. What is that like? They're using the same tool set irrespective of, which cloud we're running on is, and it's specific to this service or is it more generic, across other Oracle services? >> There's two parts to that. So one is the, we've only onboarded a portion. So the database portfolio and other services will be coming into this multi-cloud. For the majority of Oracle cloud, the automation, the config layer is based on Terraform. So using Terraform, anyone can configure everything from a mid-tier to an Exadata, all the way soup to nuts from smallest thing possible to the largest. What we've not done yet is integrated truly with the Azure API, from command line drivable. That is coming in the future. It is on the roadmap, it is coming. Then they could get into one tool but right now they would have half their automation for the multi-cloud config on the Azure tool set and half on the OCI tool set. >> But we're not crazy saying from a roadmap standpoint that will provide some benefit to developers and is a reasonable direction for the industry generally but Oracle and Microsoft specifically. >> Absolutely. I'm a developer at heart. And so one of the things we want to make sure is that developers' lives are as easy as possible. >> And is there a metadata management layer or intelligence that you've built in to optimize for performance or low latency or cost across the respective clouds? >> Yeah, definitely. I think, latency's going to be an important factor. The service that we've initially built isn't going to serve, the sort of the tens of microseconds but most applications that are sort of in, running on top of the enterprise applications that are running on top of the database are in the several millisecond range. And we've actually done a lot of work on the networking pairing side to make sure that when we launch these resources across the two clouds we actually picked the right trial site. We picked the right region we pick the right availability zone or domain. So we actually do the due diligence under the cover so the customer doesn't have to do the trial and error and try to find the right latency range. And this is actually one of the big reasons why we only launch the service on the interconnect regions. Even though we have close to, I think close to 40 regions at this point in OCI, this service is only built for the regions that we have an interconnect relationship with Microsoft. >> Okay, so you started with Microsoft in 2019. You're going deeper now in that relationship, is there any reason that you couldn't, I mean technically what would you have to do to go to other clouds? You talked about understanding the primitives and leveraging the primitives of Azure. Presumably if you wanted to do this with AWS or Google or Alibaba, you would have to do similar engineering work, is that correct? Or does what you've developed just kind of poured over to any cloud? >> Yeah, that's absolutely correct Dave. I think Chris talked a lot about the multi-cloud control plane, right? That's essentially the control plane that goes and does stuff on other clouds. We would have to essentially go and build that level of integration into the other clouds. And I think, as we get more popularity and as more products come online through these services I think we'll listen to what customers want. Whether it's, maybe it's the other way around too, Dave maybe it's the fact that they want to use Oracle cloud but they want to use other complimentary services within Oracle cloud. So I think it can go both ways. I think, the market and the customer base will dictate that. >> Yeah. So if I understand that correctly, somebody from another cloud Google cloud could say, Hey we actually want to run this service on OCI cuz we want to expand our market. And if TK gets together with his old friends and figures that out but then we're just, hypothesizing here. But, like you said, it can go both ways. And then, and I have another question related to that. So, multi clouds. Okay, great. Supercloud. How about the Edge? Do you ever see a day where that becomes part of the equation? Certainly the near Edge would, you know, a Home Depot or Lowe's store or a bank, but what about the far Edge, the tiny Edge. Can you talk about the Edge and where that fits in your vision? >> Yeah, absolutely. I think Edge is a interestingly, it's getting fuzzier and fuzzier day by day. I think, the term. Obviously every cloud has their own sort of philosophy in what Edge is, right. We have our own. It starts from, if you do want to do far Edge, we have devices like red devices, which is our ruggedized servers that talk back to our control plane in OCI. You could deploy those things unlike, into war zones and things like that underground. But then we also have things like clouded customer where customers can actually deploy components of our infrastructure like compute or Exadata into a facility where they only need that certain capability. And then a few years ago we launched, what's now called Dedicated Region. And that actually is a different take on Edge in some sense where you get the entire capability of our public commercial region, but within your facility. So imagine if a customer was to essentially point a finger on a commercial map and say, Hey, look, that region is just mine. Essentially that's the capability that we're providing to our customers, where if you have a white space if you have a facility, if you're exiting out of your data center space, you could essentially place an OCI region within your confines behind your firewall. And then you could interconnect that to a cloud provider if you wanted to, and get the same multi-cloud capability that you get in a commercial region. So we have all the spectrums of possibilities here. >> Guys, super interesting discussion. It's very clear to us that the next 10 years of cloud ain't going to be like the last 10. There's a whole new layer. Developing, data is a big key to that. We see industries getting involved. We obviously didn't get into the Oracle Cerner acquisitions. It's a little too early for that but we've actually predicted that companies like Cerner and you're seeing it with Goldman Sachs and Capital One they're actually building services on the cloud. So this is a really exciting new area and really appreciate you guys coming on the Supercloud22 event and sharing your insights. Thanks for your time. >> Thanks for having us. >> Okay. Keep it right there. #Supercloud22. We'll be right back with more great content right after this short break. (lighthearted marimba music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to the CUBE's Coverage of Coupa Inspire 2022 at the Cosmopolitan in bustling Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin, and very pleased to be welcoming back. One of our CUBE alumni, the chairman and CEO of Coupa, the man himself Rob Bernshteyn, Rob great to have you back on the program. >> Great to be with you again. >> It's great to be in person. >> Sure. >> I applaud Coupa for taking the risk and getting all the people here. People are absolutely ready for this. And if there's a company that brings the energy it's Coupa. >> Well, thank you for saying that, we're definitely feeling it. You're right, we took a bit of a risk when we opened up registration that was before COVID, omicron hit. We didn't know what would happen, but we just had such an overwhelming onslaught of registrations and people wanted to be here. And in the last two days of interaction with folks it's just been like a huge reunion after three years of kind of being in home and away. >> Absolutely a huge reunion. One that was, I just felt so normal walking into your keynote yesterday. And of course, I always look for numbers because I know you're going to have numbers. 3.3 trillion, spend under management. You're almost at a trillion, a year run rate, that's huge. The growth of Cuopa, just up into the right. >> It is and it's really in thanks to our customer community. I mean, there are just incredible champions here. Courageous folks that are pushing for change inside their of companies. And we're honored to be the technology platform that drives a lot of that change. A more and more spend driven through the system that spend being optimized going to the right channels. Companies are saving money and it's given them more fuel to pursue their own missions and visions and everything that their companies seek to do. >> I just had a conversation with a customer about an hour ago and he was talking about everything was paper-based, manual, no visibility, and I've talked to other customers and I think I've got Jabil on this afternoon who had like 6 billion in indirect spend. They couldn't see. And with Cuopa, the blinders are off. And there's that visibility, the BSM community is really helping organization glean value, drive profitability. Talk to me about from your perspective how the BSM community has grown to be able to deliver, as you say, value as a service. >> Look what's happening is that the customers we have, we have over 2,500 customers around the world. Every one of these customers, they have their own missions. They have their own visions, they're pursuing their goals, but in order to do that, they need energy. They need gas in their tank, right? And with every dollar we save them, with every method we allow them to become more efficient in the way that they work, the way that they have visibility, the way that they collaborate one another, the way that they think about fulfillment of demand through supply chain design, or sourcing activities, contract negotiations, procurement, sourcing, treasury the way they manage that cash. It's unlocking that firepower. It's given them more gas in the tank and that's incredibly rewarding for me and my colleagues and everyone here because our mission is the amplification of all of their missions on a daily basis, really. >> Right, that amplification that acceleration the AI and Coupa. I got to see you about, about a year and a half ago. We were a few months into the pandemic but I'm just curious what some of the customer conversations are that you've had given the challenges with the supply chain that's on the lips of every politician and pretty much everybody. What are some of the things that Coopa has really helped customers to mitigate? >> Well, first of all, the simplest things were when everyone went home they couldn't do those paper based processes anymore. So they leverage our platform much more, right? I mean, they couldn't write paper checks for example and go in the office and do that. And that's just a simple example, order things or or get goods and services to their folks that are now working from home, for example. But then they're also faced with the acute issue of supply chain needs and the agility of their supply chain. So we help them figure out different ways to transport the goods and services they need, different freighting routes in real time through our AI capabilities. So, I mean, those are just some of the examples but we really think of our value proposition as almost like a Swiss army knife. And what happened during COVID is, you know we went out into the jungle and you didn't know which of those tools you would've needed but we tried to be right there with our customer to give them, you know, the knife, the match, the scissors, the, you know the fishing line, whatever was needed at that point in time to help them survive and thrive. And that's really how we see ourselves is you know, a true partner to our customers. >> Yeah, a true enabler. Well, I was looking at your FY22 numbers growth in new business in excess of 60% percent record annual revenue, 725, be up for up 34% subscription revenue up. Coupa up into the right. >> Well, it is, and what we're trying to be very thoughtful with this business. We're trying not to grow so fast that suddenly we leave our customers behind. We really try to take it one customer at a time, but the beauty of this growth, this measured and thoughtful growth is that this, we have an incredible renewal rate. I mean, our customers stay with us and they add more and more capabilities. And that drives an incredible cash flow situation for our business. And that makes us as Coupa very resilient. That's why we love being so transparent with our customers. Here's our growth, here's our margins, here's our cash flow. Here's how we're investing into R&D and innovation. Here's the M&A that we're doing to bring you a greater set of value propositions. And I love that transparency. It's one of the beauties of being a public company everything's out there and everyone can see and decide whether they want to be a customer, be an investor, be a colleague. It's a wonderful thing. >> Talk about the power of the community. Community AI launched in FY22. You showed some numbers and just the power of all of that anonymized, aggregated data to be analyzed. What is that? How has that really driven the evolution of Coupa in the last 13 years you've been at the helm? >> Well, we set our sites on doing this as far back as 13 years ago. I know you interviewed Donna recently and she was sharing with you that we set up our contracts with the customers in a way where we could take their anonymized sanitized data, aggregate it, and see if we can glean insights from it that could be used to the benefit of each individual customer. Really break the silos of traditional enterprise software. You know, where you do one deployment at a time and you live in your own little silo in your own little world. Now we're pushing, you know, a myriad of prescriptions out to each of our customers. They can see the best ways in real time to avoid supplier risk for example, make sure that the goods and services they buy they get on time at the right price points, make sure that the suppliers that they're working with support their diverse needs, their minority own supplier needs. All of the transparency that comes with seeing trillions of dollars in data in real time and gleaning insights from it. And we're just scratching the surface in this area. We're absolutely just scratch and service. We've pushed out this platform to our customers and now they're coming back to us and saying, wow, could I glean this sign insight from the community? What if we can get access to that information? And we're encoding that for them and pushing that information and those applications out to them. So this is going to be an exciting couple of months and quarters and years to take this concept of community AI to a completely different level. And I think it's not only new for Coupa, but I really see it as something completely new for the enterprise software industry where the opportunity to break silos is really upon us. >> It's critical, but a lot of communities are very transactional episodic, Coupa isn't like that. >> Well, you know that there's no shortcut to that. That has taken 13 years. And I think that begins with the O in Coupa which is the openness, the openness, the transparency the authenticity in which we, with which we engage with our customers. They understand how we work. They have access to all of our other customers. They can interface with them and interact with them within their own industry, within their own company size, whether they're the largest companies in the world, or you know, upper mid-market or mid-market customers whether they're subscribing to our treasury applications or our supply chain or procurement applications. And by having access to this community in real time and a community that's grounded in that trust and authenticity, you know, only great things happen. Only great things happen. >> The trust in a authenticity is critical. It's easy to say, you can trust us. We're authentic. It's a whole other thing to actually feel it and believe it and see it. And you get that sense here from your keynote. Barbara Corcoran was fantastic. Inspiring, I loved how she said she'd probably never had an original good idea herself that always gets them from others. And I thought that's Coupa to me, that's the spirit of community, the spirit of collaboration. All of those Cs to me embody what Coupa is. >> Exactly, exactly. None of us is as smart as all of us. That's what it is. No doubt. >> It's true that power of that community is. And I think I read in Fast Company just really recently that you described the community AI as a moonshot. And I thought, where is he going to go from here? (laughing) >> Well, it's continuing to build on this concept. It's really continuing to build on this concept of breaking these siloed data stores, aggregating them and distilling insights from them in ways that we ourselves as Coupa, as our R&D team or Raj and our product team we don't know all the different ways the customers will want to use this power of community. But we know we have a very scalable underlying platform that operates in virtually every language and virtually every currency that will be there to support their evolving needs. As we continue our, you know, what we hope to be lifelong relationship with our customers. >> I was talking to one of your customers. I think it was Jabil recently, and we're having them on the program today. And they actually said they were an SAP ERP shop. They could have gone the SAP route and chose Coupa. And one of the main reasons was because Coupa was going to be able to evolve with them, but allow them to help Coupa evolve. And I get that sense from a lot of your customers that we have the opportunity to influence the direction that the technology goes. Because we are here in the back office now moving to the front. >> Rob: That's right. >> In a day to day, really figuring out what if it did this? What if it did that? Now it does all of these things because the community gets to be that influential >> That's right. And we also, the beauty is we're able to help them. Our customers unlock the value of their investments into core ERP platforms, whether it be SAP or Oracle a host of other ERPs, we help them get strategic leverage from those applications. And we're building this company very much on the shoulders of early, you know, enterprise software companies like themselves. So it's really a beautiful, you know relationship with our customers, but also a way to, to give them more and more leverage >> That's critical. Especially as every company these days it has to be a data company, but they have to be able to see the data, glean insights act on it, make pivots. It's one of the words that we probably use so often in the last two years is pivot, but I think without these companies having a data strategy from a competitive perspective, their toast. >> I think so I think it's really tough. You know, I frame it very simply. We spent many, many years in the industrial revolution. We're worried about, you know, physical labor, moving parts. We entered into the information revolution with the advent you know, the internet and now I think we're really in what I would call the knowledge revolution it's, as you said, it's not only the data, but gleaning valuable insights from that massive growing data store and delivering them at the point of need so that people can take advantage of that insight and that knowledge. And, you know, we're proud to be on the forefront of that as a growing, you know, technology company, a cloud based what we call values as a service company. >> Value as service, right. You mentioned in your keynote, you were talking about the the struggles of being a parent during the pandemic and trying to get your kids to watch some of the classics. I know it was right there with you, Superman, Rocky, was it Planes, Trains & Automobiles, that's another one, and I thought you mentioned, you know my kids had about three minutes of attention span. I thought in the business world, people have three seconds. The real time, get me what I need in the point of time when they need it. Is critical for every business in every industry because the consumer is so, our demands are just higher and higher. >> That's right. That's right. And you know, the U in Coupa stands for user centricity and the logic there was simply, if the machine could do the majority of the work there should be less and less stress upon the end user the user themselves, as I say, deliver exactly what they need at the point of need to them on the screen or on their phone or wherever it is so that they could keep business moving forward as efficiently thoughtfully and optimally as possible. And you know we take the responsibility as a value of service company, you know very seriously try to make sure that we optimize the time spent of the sort of the man machine, woman machine interaction then less and less is on the, on the man or woman, and much much more is on the, you know the platform that we continue to develop. >> One of the things I read that you said in the press release I think it was yesterday's, chief financial officers, chief information officers, CEOs, they need to be chief transformation officers. That's a hard thing to do, especially for, I can imagine organizations like I had Casey's General Store on, this is a company that was founded in the fifties. How are you seeing that manifest into reality when you're talking with those CFOs and CEOs, are they really becoming those chief transformation officers? >> Well, they're all aspiring to it and we're, in my view proudly helping them move as quickly as possible toward that end, to have companies that are highly agile, that can respond to shift and consumer demands, consumer needs, shifting supply chain, you know, challenges, shifting financial scenarios out in the marketplace given the volatility of the stock market. So if we could offer that agility and resiliency and that additional stool of digital transformation for CEOs, CFOs and CIOs, and, you know we're doing something special out there. >> So Rob, last question for you. What does tomorrow look like for Coupa? What are we going to see and feel next year? Any crystal ball insight you can share with me? >> You know, I don't know. One of the things about us is we're not we're a little bit of a boring company. It's one quarter after the next week. >> I saw the dancing video that is not boring. (Rob laughing) >> But you know, it's been what, 52 quarters of going at it, one quarter at a time, one customer at a time one interaction at a time, one line of code at a time, you know, one QA assurance at a time, one support ticket at a time just moving forward moving forward, moving forward. And before, you know, it, you turn around, you look around and we began as you know, know a couple of handfuls of people with a desire to inspire an industry is starting to take shape. And we feel like, you know, we're not just getting started, but we're certainly in the early innings of I think creating a very special company and more importantly, a very special community around the company that we're forming. I would say a very special community. Rob, great to have you on the program, congrats on doing the event in person, getting all of these people that are so ready to see you guys and to be able to interact with Coupa and its partner ecosystem, getting us all together. One of my favorite events, we appreciate you stopping by on the CUBE. >> Thank You. Thanks for having me again. >> All right. For Rob Bernshteyn, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the CUBE's coverage of day two Coupa Inspire 2022 from Las Vegas. Stick around. My next guest will join me shortly. (lighthearted music)

>>In our recent predictions post, we said 20, 22 would see a complete reset of how organizations think about remote work data from ETR shows that we exited 20, 21 with 45% of workers still remote and 29% working in a hybrid mode with only 26% fully back in the office. The expectation, however, is that hybrid will become the dominant work model in 2022 and beyond with only about a third of employees returning to the office permanently as such. We've said that the capabilities to support this new model must evolve and deliver a highly secure, scalable, and never can go down infrastructure. Hello, I'm David Lante and we're here with Rocky mystery. He was the director of product marketing at Cisco on the enterprise networking and cloud team. Welcome to the cube, Rocky. >>Thanks for having me, Dave, very excited to talk about hybrid work with you today. >>Great. Now, so Cisco, you've got a strong point of view on hybrid work and some big news to really lean into and support customers in this transition. Rocky, can you share a little bit about what we can expect from Cisco in this key area? >>Absolutely. We are thrilled to be diving into the details of our new networking innovation with the cube on February 15, our top wifi 5g and switching experts will be joining you Dave, and there'll be discussing these important topics and how to transform the hybrid work. All of our customers are exploring how to architect more hybrid work, and this is a great opportunity for them to learn how they can prepare their infrastructure for great experiences from anywhere to support smart and sustainable workplaces and deliver secure IOT at scale included in this announcement, our new wifi six solutions powered by our industry, leading capitals and Meraki access points. In addition, we're going to compliment this technology with our enterprise wifi stack, with our new private 5g service that's provided by our service provider partners to deliver more choice of mobile connectivity to our enterprise customers. And of course, we need to deliver a robust backbone. >>That's ready for all this wireless and IOT demand that's coming from today and into tomorrow. And we will reveal the catalyst 9,000 acts and extension of our flagship switching line. That will be now powered with Silicon one technology. After the cube interview that we have with you all on February 15, we will host our own customer virtual event on February 23rd and go even deeper into this technology with demos customer stories, and also new industry experts that will provide great advice on how to lead hybrid work and drive this transformation in your organization. This all aligns to Cisco strategy to help our customers secure and automate in this new world and deliver an inclusive future for all. >>Okay. Wow. Thank you, Rocky. Lots to unpack there and for sure every organization is trying to get hybrid work, right? So mark your calendars February 15th at 9:00 AM Pacific for the cubes preview of the network, powering hybrid work made possible by Cisco. We'll see you there.

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE in ETR. This is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante. >> Cisco is a company at the crossroads. It's transitioning from a high margin hardware business to a software subscription-based model, which also should be high margin through both organic moves and targeted acquisitions. It's doing so in the context of massive macro shifts to digital in the cloud. We believe Cisco's dominant position in networking combined with a large market opportunity and a strong track record of earning customer trust, put the company in a good position to capitalize on cloud momentum. However, there are clear challenges ahead for Cisco, not the least of which is the growing complexity of its portfolio, a large legacy business, and the mandate to maintain its higher profitability profile as it transitions into a new business model. Hello and welcome to this week's Wiki-bond cube insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we welcome in Zeus Kerravala, who's the founder and principal analyst at ZK Research, long time Cisco watcher who together with me crafted the premise of today's session. Zeus, great to see you welcome to the program. >> Thanks Dave. It's always a pleasure to be with you guys. >> Okay, here's what we're going to talk about today, set the agenda. The catalyst for this session, Zeus and I attended Cisco's financial analyst day. We received a day and a half of firehose presentations, drill downs, interactions, Q and A with Cisco execs and one key customer. So we're going to share our takeaways from these sessions and add our additional thoughts. Now, in particular, we're going to talk about Cisco's TAM, its transformation to a subscription-based model, and how we see that evolving. As always, we're going to bring in some ETR spending data for context and get Zeus' take on what that tells us. And we'll end with a summary of Cisco's cloud strategy and outlook for how it could win in the cloud. So let's talk about Cisco's sort of structure and TAM opportunities. First, Zeus, Cisco has four main lines of business where it's organized it's executives around sort of four product areas. And it's got a large service component as well. Network equipment, SP routing, data center, collaboration that security, and as I say services, that's not necessarily how it's going to market, but that's kind of the way it organizes its ELT, its executive leadership team. >> Yeah, the in fact, the ELT has been organized around those products, as you said. It used to report to the street three product segments, infrastructure platforms, which was by far the biggest, it was all their networking equipment, then applications, and then security. Now it's moved to five new segments, secure agile networks, hybrid work, end to end security, internet for the future and optimized app experiences. And I think what Cisco's trying to do is align their, the way they report along the lines of the way customers buy. 'Cause I think before, you know, they had a very simplistic model before. It was just infrastructure, apps, and security. The ELT is organized around product roadmap and the product innovation, but that's not necessarily the way customers purchase things and so, purchase things so I think they've tried to change things a little bit there. When you look at those segments though, you know, by, it's interesting. They're all big, right? So, by far the biggest distilled networking, which is almost a hundred billion dollar TAM as they reported and they have it growing a about a 9% CAGR as reported by other analyst firms. And when you think about how mature networking is Dave, the fact that that's still growing at high single digit CAGR is still pretty remarkable. So I think that's one of those things that, you know, watchers of Cisco historically have been calling for the network to be commoditized for decades. For as long as I've been watching Cisco, we've been, people have been waiting for the network to be commoditized. My thesis has always been, if you can drive enough innovation into things, you can stave off commoditization and that's what they've done. But that's really the anchor for them to sell all their other products, some of which are higher margin, some which are a little bit sore, but they're all good high margin businesses to your point. >> Awesome. We're going to dig into that. So, so they flattened the organization when Geckler left. You've got Todd Nightingale, Jonathan Davidson, Liz Centoni, and Jeetu Patel who we heard from and we'll make some comments on what we heard from them. One of the big takeaways at the financial analysts meeting was on the TAM, as you just mentioned. Liz Centoni who also is heavily involved in strategy and the CFO Scott Herren, showed this slide, which speaks to the company's TAM and the organizational structure that you were just talking about. So the big message was that Cisco has got a large and growing market, you know, no shortage of available market. Somewhere between eight and 900 billion, depending on which of the slides you pull out of the deck. And ironically Zeus, when you look at the current markets number here on the right hand side of this slide, 260 billion, it just about matches the company's market cap. Maybe an interesting coincidence, but at any rate, what was your takeaway from this data? >> Well, I think, you know, the big takeaway from the data is there's still a lot of room ahead for Cisco to grow, right? Again, this is a, it's a company that I think most people would put in the camp of legacy IT vendor, just because of how long they've been around. But they have done a very good job of staving off innovation. And part of that is just these markets that they play in continue to grow and they continue to have challenges that they can solve. I think one of the things Cisco has done though, since the arrival of Chuck Robbins, is they don't fight these trends anymore, Dave. I know prior to Chuck's arrival, they really fought the tide of software defined networking and you know, trends like that, and even cloud to some extent. And I remember one of the first meetings I had with Chuck, I asked him about that and he said that Cisco will never do that again. That under his watch, if customers are going through a market transition, Cisco wants to lead them through it, not try and hold them back. And I think for that reason, they're able to look at, all of those trends and try and take a leadership position in them, even though you might look at some of those and feel that some of them might be detrimental to Cisco's business in the short term. So something like software defined WANs, which you would throw into secure agile networks, certainly doesn't, may not carry the same kind of RPOs and margins with it that their traditional routers did, but ultimately customers are going to buy it and Cisco would like to be the ones to sell it to them. >> You know, you bring up a great point. This industry is littered, there's a graveyard of executives who fought the trend. Many people, some people remember Ken Olson of Digital Equipment Corporation. "Unix is snake oil," is what he said. IBM mainframe guys said, "PCs are a toy." And of course the history, they were the wrong side of history. The other big takeaway was the shift to software in subscription. They really made a big point of this. Here's a chart Cisco showed a couple of times to make the point that it's one of the largest software companies in the world. You know, in the top 10. They also made the point that Chuck Robbins, when he joined in 2015, and since that time, it's nearly 4x'ed it's subscription software revenue, and roughly doubled its software sales. And it now has an RPO, remaining performance obligations, that exceeds 30 billion. And it's committing to grow its subscription business in the forward-looking statements by 15 to 17% CAGR through 25, which would imply about a doubling of these, the blue lines. Zeus, it's unclear if that forward-looking forecast is just software. I presume it includes some services, but as Herren pointed out, over time, these services will be bundled into the product revenue, same way SAS companies do it. But the point is Cisco is committed, like many of their peers, to moving to an ARR model. But please, share your thoughts on Cisco's move to software subscriptions and how you see the future of consumption-based pricing. >> Yeah, this has been a big shift for Cisco, obviously. It's one that's highly disruptive. It's one that I know gave their partners a lot of angst for a long time because when you sell things upfront, you get a big check for selling that, right? And when you sell things in a subscription model, you get a much smaller check for a number of months over the period of the contract. It also changes the way you deal with the customer. When you sell a one-time product, you basically wipe your hands. You come back in three or four years and say, "it's time to upgrade." When you sell a subscription, now, the one thing that I've tried to talk to Cisco and its partners about is customers don't renew things they don't use. And so it becomes incumbent on the partner, it becomes incumbent upon Cisco to make sure that things that the customer is subscribing to, that they do use. And so Cisco's had to create a customer success organization. They've had to help their partners create those customer success organizations. So it's really changed the model. And Cisco not only made the shift, they've done it faster than they actually had originally forecast. So during the financial analyst day, they actually touted their execution on software, noting that it hit it's 30% revenue as percent of total target well before it was supposed to, it's actually exceeded its targets. And now it's looking to increase that to, it actually raised its guidance in this area a little bit by a few percentage points, looking out over the next few years. And so it's moved to the subscription model, Dave, the thing that you brought up, which I do see as somewhat of a challenge is the shift to consumption-based pricing. So subscription is one thing in that I write you a check every month for the same amount. When I go to the consumption-based pricing, that's easy to do for cloud services, things like WebEx or Duo or, you know, CloudLock, some of the security products. That that shift should be relatively simple. If customers want to buy it that way. It's unclear as to how you do that when you're selling on-prem equipment with the software add-on to it because in that case, you have to put metering technology in to understand how much they're using. You have to have a minimum baseline to start with. They've done it in some respects. The old HCS product that they sold, the Telcos, actually was sold with a minimum commit and then they tacked on a utilization on top of that. So maybe they move into that kind of model. But I know it's something that they've, they get asked about a lot. I know they're still thinking about it, but it's something that I believe is coming and it's going to come pretty fast. >> I want to pick up on that because I think, you know, they made the point that we're one of the top 10 software companies in the world. It's very difficult for hardware companies to make the transition to software. You know, HP couldn't do it. >> Well, no one's done it. >> Well, IBM has kind of done it, but they really struggle. It's kind of this mishmash of tooling and software products that aren't really well-integrated. But, I would say this, everybody now, Cisco, Dell, HPE with GreenLake, Lenovo, pretty much all the traditional hardware players are trying to move to an as a service model or at least for a portion of their business. HPE's all in, Dell transitioning. And for the most part, I would make the following observation. And I'd love to get your thoughts on this. They're pretty much following a SAS like model, which in my view is outdated and kind of flawed from a customer standpoint. All these guys say, "Hey, we're doing this because "this is what the customers want." I think the cloud is really a true consumption based model. And if you look at modern SAS companies, a lot of the startups, they're moving to a consumption based model. You see that with Snowflake, you see that with Stripe. Now they will offer incentives. But most of the traditional enterprise players, they're saying, "Okay, pay us upfront, "commit to some base level. "If you go over it, you know, "we'll charge you for it. "If you go under it, you're still going to pay "for that base level." So it's not true consumption base. It's not really necessarily the customer's best interest. So that's, I think there's some learnings there that are going to have to play out. >> Yeah, the reason customers are shying away from that SAS type model, I think during the pandemic, the one thing we learned, Dave, is that the business will ebb and flow greatly from month to month sometimes. And I was talking with somebody that worked for one of the big hotel chains, and she was telling me that what their CRM providers, she wouldn't tell me who it was, except said it rhymed with Shmalesforce, that their utilization of it went from, you know, from a nice steady level to spiking really high when customers started calling in to cancel hotel rooms. And then it dropped down to almost nothing as we went through that period of stay at home. And now it's risen back up. And so for her, she wanted to move to a consumption-based model because what happens otherwise is you wind up buying for peak utilization, your software subscriptions go largely underutilized the majority of the year, and you wind up paying, you know, a lot more than you need to. If you go to more of a true consumption model, it's harder to model out from a financial perspective 'cause there's a lot of ebbs and flows in the business, but over a longer period of time, it's more cost-effective, right? And so the, again, what the pandemic taught us was we don't really know what we're going to need from a consumption standpoint, you know, nevermind a year from now, maybe even six months from now. And consumption just creates a lot more flexibility and agility. You can scale up, you can scale down. You can bring in users, you can take out users, you can add consultants, things like that. And it just, it's much more aligned with the way businesses are run today. >> Yeah, churn is a silent killer of a software company. And so there's retention is the key here. So again, I think there's lots of learning. Let's put Cisco into context with some of its peers. So this chart we developed compares five companies to Cisco. Core Dell, meaning Dell, without VMware. VMware, HPE, IBM, we've put an AWS, and then Cisco as, IBM, AWS and Cisco is the integrated plays. So the chart shows the latest quarterly revenue multiplied by four to get a run rate, a three-year growth outlook, gross margin percentage, market cap, and revenue multiple. And the key points here are that one, Cisco has got a pretty awesome business model. It's got 60% gross margin, strong operating margins, not shown here, but in the mid twenties, 25%. It's got a higher growth rate than most of its peers. And as such, a much better, multiple than say, for instance, Core Dell gets 33 cents on the revenue dollar. HPE is double that. IBM's below two X. Cisco's revenue multiple rivals VMware, which is a pure software company. Now in a large part that's because VMware stock took a hit recently, but still the point is obvious. Cisco's got a great business. Now for context, we've added AWS, which blows away any company on this chart. We've inferred a market cap of nearly 600 billion, which frankly is conservative at a 10 X revenue multiple given it's inferred margins and growth rate. Now Zeus, if AWS were a separate company, it could have a market cap that approached 800 billion in my view. But what does this data tell you? >> Well, it just tells me that Cisco continues to be a very well-run company that has staved off commoditization, despite the calling for it for years. And I think the big lesson, and I've talked to financial analysts about this over the years, is that if, I don't really believe anything in this world is a commodity, Dave. I think even when Cisco went to the server market, if you remember back then, they created a new way of handling memory management. They were getting well above average margins for service, albeit less than Cisco's network margins, but still above average for server margins. And so I think if you can continue to innovate, you will see the margin stay where they are. You will see customers continue to buy and refresh. And I think one of the challenges Cisco's had in the past, and this is where the subscription business will help, is getting customers to stay with the latest and greatest. Prior to this refresh of network equipment, some of the stuff that I've seen in the fields, 10, 15 years old, once you move to that sell me a box and then tack on the subscription revenue that you pay month by month, you do drive more consistent refresh. Think about the way you just handle your own mobile phone. If you had to go pay, you know, a thousand dollars every three years, you might not do it at that three-year cycle. If you pay 40 bucks a month, every time there's a new phone, you're going to take it, right? So I think Cisco is able to drive greater, better refresh, keep their customers current, keep the features in there. And we've seen that with a lot of the new products. The new Cat 9,000, some of the new service provider products, the new wifi products, they've all done very well. In fact, they've all outpaced their previous generation products as far as growth rate goes. And so I think that is a testament to the way they've run the business. But I do think when people bucket Cisco in with HP and Dell, and I understand why they do, their businesses were similar at one time, it's really not a true comparison anymore. I think Cisco has completely changed their business and they're not trying to commoditize markets, they're trying to drive innovation and keep the margins up, where I think HP and Dell tend to really compete on price versus innovation. >> Well, and we are going to get to this point about the tailwinds and headwinds and cloud, and how Cisco to do it. But, to your point about, you know, the cell phone analogy. To the extent that Cisco can make that seamless for customers could hide that underlying complexity, that's going to be critical for the cloud. Now, but before we get there, I want to talk about one of the reasons why Cisco such a high multiple, and has been able to preserve its margins, to your point, not being commoditized. And it's been able to grow both organically, but also has a strong history of M and A. It's this chart shows a dominant position in core networking. So this shows, so ETR data within the Fortune 500. It plots companies in the ETR taxonomy in two dimensions, net score on the vertical axis, which is a measure of spending velocity, and market share on the horizontal axis, which is a measure of presence in the survey. It's not like IDC market share, it's mentioned market share if you will. The point is Cisco is far and away the most pervasive player in the market, it's generally held its dominant position. Although, it's been under pressure in the last few years in core networking, but it retains or maintains a very respectable net score and consistently performs well for such a large company. Zeus, anything you'd add with respect to Cisco's core networking business? >> Yeah, it's maintained a dominant network position historically. I think part of because it drives good products, but also because the competitive landscape, historically has been pretty weak, right? We saw companies like 3Com and Nortel who aren't around anymore. It'll be interesting to see moving forward now that companies like VMware are involved in networking. AWS is interested in networking. Arista is a much stronger company. You know, Juniper bought Mist and is in better position. Even Extreme Networks who most people thought was dead a few years ago has made a number of acquisitions and is now a billion dollar company. So while Cisco has done a great job of execution, they've done a great job on the innovation side, their competitive landscape, looking out over the next five years, I think is going to be more difficult than it has been over the previous five years. And largely, Dave, I think that's good for Cisco. I think whenever Cisco's pressed a little bit from competition, they tend to step on the innovation gas a little bit more. And I look back and even just the transition when VMware bought Nicira, that got Cisco's SDN business into gear, like nothing else could have, right? So competition for that company, they always seem to respond well to it. >> So, let's break down Cisco's net score a little bit. Explain why the company has been able to hold its spending momentum despite its large size. This will give you a little insight to the survey. So this chart shows the granular components of net score. The lime green is new adoptions to Cisco. The forest green is spending more than 6%. The gray is flat plus or minus 5%. The pink is spending drops by more than 5%. And the red is we're chucking the platform, we're getting off. And Cisco's overall net score here is 25%, which for a company of its size speaks to the relationships that it has with customers. It's of course got a fat middle in the gray area, like all sort of large established companies. But very low defections as well, it's got low new adoptions. But very respectable. So that is background, Zeus. Let's look at spending momentum over time across Cisco's portfolio. So this chart shows Cisco's net score by that methodology within the ETR taxonomy for Cisco over three survey periods. And what jumps out is Meraki on the left, very strong. Virtualization business, its core networking, analytics and security, all showing upward momentum. AppD is a little bit concerning, but that could be related to Cisco's sort of pivot to full stack observability. So maybe AppD is being bundled there. Although some practitioners have cited to us some concerns in that space. And then WebEx at the end of the chart, it's showing some relative strength, but not that high. Zeus, maybe you could comment on Meraki and any other takeaways across the portfolio. >> Yeah, Meraki has proven to be an excellent acquisition for Cisco. In fact, you might, I think it's arguable to say it's its best acquisition in history going all the way back to camp Kalpana and Grand Junction, the ones that brought up catalyst switches. So, in fact, I think Meraki's revenue might be larger than security now. So, that shows you the momentum it has. I think one of the lessons it brought to Cisco was that simpler is better, sometimes. I think when they first bought Meraki, the way Meraki's deployed, it's very easy to set up. There's a lot of engineering work though that goes into making a product simple to use. And I think a lot of Cisco engineers historically looked at Meraki as, that's a little bit of a toy. It's meant for small businesses, things like that, but it's not for enterprise. But, Rocky's done a nice job of expanding the portfolio, of leveraging the cloud for analytics and showing you a lot of things that you wouldn't necessarily get from traditional networking equipment. And one of the things that I was really delighted to see was when they put Todd Nightingale in charge of all the networking business, because that showed to me that Chuck Robbins understood that the things Meraki were doing were right and they infuse a little bit of Meraki into the rest of the company. You know, that's certainly a good thing. The other areas that you showed on the chart, not really a surprise, Dave. When you think of the shift hybrid work and you think of the, some of the other transitions going on, I think you would expect to see the server business in decline, the storage business, you know, maybe in a little bit of decline, just because people aren't building out data centers. Where the other ones are related more to hybrid working, hybrid cloud, things like that. So it is what you would expect. The WebEx one was interesting too, because it did show somewhat of a dip and then a rise. And I think that's indicative of what we've seen in the collaboration space since the pandemic came about. Companies like Zoom and RingCentral really got a lot of the headlines. Again, when you, the comment I made on competition, Cisco got caught a little bit flat-footed, they've caught up in features and now they really stepped on the gas there. Chuck joked that he gave the WebEx team a bit of a blank check to go do what it had to do. And I don't think that was a joke. I think he actually did that because they've added more features into WebEx in the last year then I think they did the previous five years before that. >> Well, let's just drill into video conferencing real quick here, if we could. Here's that two dimensional view, again, showing net score against market share or pervasiveness of mentions, and you can see Microsoft Teams in the upper right. I mean, it's off the chart, literally. Zoom's well ahead of Cisco in terms of, you know, mentions presence. And that could be a spate of freemium, you know, but it's basically a three horse race in this game. And Cisco, I don't think is trying to take Zoom head on, rather it seems to be making WebEx a core part of its broader collaboration agenda. But Zeus, maybe you could comment. >> Well, it's all coming together, right? So, it's hard to decouple calling from video from meetings. All of the vendors, including Teams, are going after the hybrid work experience. And if you believe the future is hybrid and not just work from home, then Cisco does have a pretty interesting advantage because it's the only one that makes its own end points, where Teams and Zoom doesn't. And so that end to end experience it can deliver. The Microsoft Teams one's interesting because that product, frankly, when you talk to users, it doesn't have a great user score, like as far as user satisfaction goes, but the one thing Microsoft has done a very good job of is bundling it in to the Office365 licenses, making it very easy for IT to deploy. Zoom is a little bit in the middle where they've appealed to the users. They've done a better job of appealing to IT, but there is a, there is a battleground now going on where video's not just video. It includes calling, includes meetings, includes room systems now, and I think this hybrid work friend is going to change the way we think about these meeting tools. >> Now we'd be remiss if we didn't spend a moment talking about security as a key part of Cisco's business. And we have a graphic on this same kind of X, Y. And it's been, we've seen several quarters of growth. Although, the last quarter security growth was in the low single digits, but Cisco is a major player in security. And this X, Y graph shows, they've got both a large presence and a solid spending momentum. Not nearly as much momentum as Okta or Zscaler or a CrowdStrike and some of the smaller companies, but they're, these guys are on a rocket ship, but others that we featured in these episodes, but much more than respectable for Cisco. And security is critical to the strategy. It's a big part of the subscriber base. And the last thing, Zeus, I'll say about Cisco made the point in analyst day, that this market is crowded. You can see that in this chart. And their goal is to simplify this picture and make it easier for customers to secure their data and apps. But that's not easy, Zeus. What are your thoughts on Cisco's security opportunities? >> Yeah, I've been waiting for Cisco go to break up in security a little more than it has. I do think, I was talking with a CSO the other day, Dave, that said to me he's starting to understand that you don't have to have best of breed everywhere to have best in class threat protection. In fact, there's a lot of buyers now will tell you that if you try and have best of breed everywhere, it actually creates a negative when it comes to threat protection because keeping all the policies and things up to date is very, very difficult. And so the industry is moving more to a platform model, right? Now, the challenge for Cisco is how do you get that, the customer to think of the network as part of the platform? Because while the platform model, I think, is starting to gain traction, FloridaNet, Palo Alto, even McAfee, companies like that also have their own version of a security platform. And if you look at the financial performance of companies like FloridaNet and Palo Alto over the past, you know, over the past couple of years, they've been through the roof, right? And so I think an interesting and unique challenge for Cisco is can they convince the security buyer that the network is as important a part of that platform as any other component? If they can do that, I think they can break away from the pack. If not, then they'll stay mixed in with those, you know, Palo, FloridaNet, Checkpoint, and, you know, and Cisco, in that mix. But I do think that may present their single biggest needle moving opportunity just because of how big the security TAM is, and the fact that there is no de facto leader in security today. If they could gain the same kind of position in security as they have a networking, who, I mean, that would move the needle like no other market would. >> Yeah, it's really interesting that they're coming at security, obviously from a position of networking strength. You've got, to your point, you've got best of breed, Okta in identity, you got CrowdStrike in endpoint, Zscaler in cloud security. They're all growing like crazy. And you got Cisco and you know, Palo Alto, CSOs tell us they want to work with Palo Alto because they're the thought leader and they're obviously a major player here. You mentioned FloridaNet, there's a zillion others. We could talk all day about security. But let's bring it back to cloud. We've talked about a number of the piece in Cisco's portfolio, and we haven't really spent any time on full stack observability, which is a big push for Cisco with AppD, Intersight and the ThousandEyes acquisition. And that plays into this equation. But my take, Zeus, is Cisco has a number of cloud knobs that it can turn, it sells core networking equipment to hyperscalers. It can be the abstraction layer to connect on-prem to the cloud and hybrid and across clouds. And it's in a good position with Telcos too, to go after the 5G. But let's use this chart to talk about Cisco's cloud prospects. It's an ETR cut of the cloud customer spending. So we cut it by cloud customers. And they're are, I don't know, 800 or so in the survey. And then looking at various companies performance within that cut. So these are companies that compete, or in the case of HashiCorp, partner with Cisco at some level. Let me just set this up and get your take. So the insert on the chart by the way shows the raw data that positions each dot, the net score and the shared n, i.e. the number of accounts in the survey that responded. The key points, first of all, Azure and AWS, dominant players in cloud. GCP is a distant third. We've reported on that a lot. Not only are these two companies big, they have spending momentum on their platforms. They're growing, they are on that flywheel. Second point, VMware and Cisco are very prominent. They have huge customer bases. And while they're often on a collision course, there's lots of room in cloud for multiple players. When we plotted some other Cisco properties like AppD and Meraki, which as we said, is strong. And then for context, we've placed Dell, HPE, Aruba, IBM and Oracle. And also VMware cloud and AWS, which is notable on its elevation. And as I say, we've added HashiCorp because they're critical partner of Cisco and it's a multi-cloud play. Okay, Zeus, there's the setup. What does Cisco have to do to make the cloud a tailwind? Let's talk about strategy, tailwinds, headwinds, competition, and bottom line it for us. >> Yeah, well, I do think, well, I talked about security being the biggest needle mover for Cisco, I think its biggest challenge is convincing Wall Street in particular, that the cloud is a tailwind. I think if you look at the companies with the really high multiples to their stock, Dave, they're all ones where they're viewed as, they go along with the cloud ride, Right? So the, if you can associate yourself with the cloud and then people believe that the cloud is going to, more cloud equals more business, that obviously creates a better multiple because the cloud has almost infinite potential ahead of it. Now with respect to Cisco, I do think cloud has presented somewhat of a double-edged sword for Cisco. I don't believe the current consumption model for cloud is really a tailwind for Cisco, not really a headwind, but it doesn't really change Cisco's business. But I do think the very definition of cloud is changing before our eyes, Dave. And it's shifting away from centralized clouds. If you think of the way customers bought cloud before, it might have used AWS, it might've used Azure, but it really, that's not really multi-cloud, it's just multiple clouds in which I put things in these centralized resources. It's shifting more to this concept of distributed cloud in which a single application can be built using resources from your private cloud, for AWS, from Azure, from Edge locations, all the cloud providers have built their portfolios to support this concept of distributed cloud and what becomes important there, is a highly agile dynamic network. And in that case with distributed cloud, that is a tailwind for Cisco because now the network is that resource that ties all those distributed cloud components together. Now the network itself has to change. It needs to become a lot more agile and microservices and container friendly itself so I can spin up resources and, you know, in an Edge location, as fast as I can on-prem and things like that. But I do think it creates another wave of innovation and networking, and in that case, I think it does act as a tailwind for Cisco, aside from just the work it's done with the web scalers, you know, those types of companies. So, but I do think that Cisco needs to rethink its delivery model on network services somewhat to take advantage of that. >> At the analyst meeting, Cisco made the point that it does sell to the hyperscalers. It talked about the top six hyperscalers. You know, you had mentioned to me, maybe IBM and Oracle were in there. I always talk about four hyperscalers and only four, but that's fine. Here's my question. Practitioners have told me, buyers have told me, the more money and more workloads I put in the cloud, the less I spend with Cisco. Now, even though that might be Cisco gear powering those clouds, do you see that as a potential threat in that they don't own that relationship anymore and value will confer to the cloud players? >> Yeah, that's, I've heard that too. And I don't, I believe that's true when it comes to general purpose compute. You're probably not buying as many UCS servers and things like that because you are putting them in the cloud. But I do think you do need a refresh the network. I think the network becomes a very important role, plays a very important role there. The variant, the really interesting trend will be, what is your WAM look like? Do you have thousands of workers scattered all over the place, or do you just have a few centralized locations? So I think also, you know, Cisco will wind up providing connectivity within the cloud. If you think of the transition we've seen in other industries, Dave, as far as cloud goes, you think of, you know, F5, a company like that. People thought that AWS would commoditize F5's business because AWS provides their own load balancers, right? But what AWS provides is a very basic, very basic functionality and then use F5's virtual edition or a cloud edition for a lot of the advanced capabilities. And I think you'll see the same thing with the cloud that customers will start buying versions of Cisco that go in the cloud to drive a lot of those advanced capabilities that only Cisco delivers. And so I think you wind up buying more Cisco over time, although the per unit price of what you buy might be a little bit lower. If that makes sense here. >> It does, I think it makes a lot of sense and that fits into the cloud model. You know, you bring up a good point, the conversation with the customer was Rakuten. And that individual was essentially sharing with us, somebody was asking, one of the analysts was asking, "Well, what about the cloud guys? "Aren't they going to really threaten the whole Telco "industry and disrupt it?" And his point was, "Look at, this stuff is not trivial." So to your point, you know, maybe they'll provide some basic functionality. Kind of like they do in a lot of different areas. Data protection is another good example. Security is another good example. Where there's plenty of room for partners, competitors, of on-prem players to add value. And I've always said, "Look, the opportunity "is the cloud players spend 100 billion dollars a year "on CapEx." It's a gift to companies like Cisco who can build an abstraction layer that connects on-prem, cloud for hybrid, across clouds, out to the edge, and really be that layer that is that layer that takes advantage of cloud native, but also delivers that experience, I don't want to use the word seamlessly, but that experience across those clouds as the cloud expands. And that's fundamentally Cisco's cloud strategy, isn't it? >> Oh yeah. And I think people have underestimated over the years, how hard it is to build good networking products. Anybody can go get some silicon and build a product to connect two things together. The question is, can you do it at scale? Can you do it securely? And lots of companies have tried to commoditize networking, you know, White Boxes was looked at as the existential threat to Cisco. Huawei was looked at as the big threat to Cisco. And all of those have kind of come and gone because building high quality network equipment that scales is tough. And it's tougher than most people realize. And your other point on the cloud providers as well, they will provide a basic level of functionality. You know, AWS network equipment doesn't work in Azure. And Azure stuff doesn't work in Google, and Google doesn't work in AWS. And so you do need a third party to come in and act as almost the cloud middleware that can connect all those things together with a consistent set of policies. And that's what Cisco does really well. They did that, you know back when they were founded with routing protocols and you can think this is just an extension of what they're doing just up at the cloud layer. >> Excellent. Okay, Zeus, we're going to leave it there. Thanks to my guest today, Zeus Kerravala. Great analysis as always. Would love to have you back. Check out ZKresearch.com to reach him. Thank you again. >> Thank you, Dave. >> Now, remember I publish each week on Wikibond.com and siliconangle.com. All these episodes are available as podcasts, just search "Braking Analysis" podcast, and you can connect on Twitter at DVallante or email me David.Vallante@siliconangle.com. Thanks for the comments on LinkedIn. Check out etr.plus for all the survey action. This is Dave Vallante for theCUBE insights powered by ETR. Be well and we'll see you next time. (light music)

from the silicon angle media office in Boston Massachusetts it's the queue now here's your host David on tape all right buddy welcome to this cute conversation my name is Dave Ville on time or the co-host of the cube and we're gonna have a conversation to really try to explore does infrastructure matter you hear a lot today I've ever since I've been in this business I've heard Oh infrastructure is dead hardware is dead but we're gonna explore that premise and with me is Randy Arsenault and Steve Kenaston they're both global market development execs at IBM guys thanks for coming in and let's riff thanks for having us Dave so here's one do I want to start with the data we were just recently at the MIT chief data officer event 10 years ago that role didn't even exist now data is everything so I want to start off with you here this bro my data is the new oil and we've said you know what data actually is more valuable than oil oil I can put in my car I can put in my house but I can't put it in both data is it doesn't follow the laws of scarcity I can use the same data multiple times and I can copy it and I can find new value I can cut cost I can raise revenue so data in some respects is more valuable what do you think right yeah I would agree and I think it's also to your point kind of a renewable resource right so so data has the ability to be reused regularly to be repurposed so I would take it even further we've been talking a lot lately about this whole concept that data is really evolving into its own tier so if you think about a traditional infrastructure model where you've got sort of compute and network and applications and workloads and on the edge you've got various consumers and producers of that data the data itself has those pieces have evolved the data has been evolving as well it's becoming more complicated it's becoming certainly larger and more voluminous it's better instrumented it carries much more metadata it's typically more proximal with code and compute so the data itself is evolving into its own tier in a sense so we we believe that we want to treat data as a tier we want to manage it to wrap the services around it that enable it to reach its maximum potential in a sense so guys let's we want to make this interactive in a way and I'd love to give you my opinions as well as links are okay with that but but so I want to make an observation Steve if you take a look at the top five companies in terms of market cap in the US of Apple Google Facebook Amazon and of course Microsoft which is now over a trillion dollars they're all data companies they've surpassed the bank's the insurance companies the the Exxon Mobil's of the world as the most valuable companies in the world what are your thoughts on that why is that I think it's interesting but I think it goes back to your original statement about data being the new oil the and unlike oil Ray's said you can you can put it in house what you can't put it in your car you also when it's burnt it's gone right but with data you you have it around you generate more of it you keep using it and the more you use it and the more value you get out of it the more value the company gets out of it and so as those the reason why they continue to grow in value is because they continue to collect data they continue to leverage that data for intelligent purposes to make user experiences better their business better to be able to go faster to be able to new new things faster it's all part of part of this growth so data is one of the superpowers the other superpower of course is machine intelligence or what everybody talks about as AI you know it used to be that processing power doubling every 18 months was what drove innovation in the industry today it's a combination of data which we have a lot of it's AI and cloud for scaling we're going to talk about cloud but I want to spend a minute talking about AI when I first came into this business AI was all the rage but we didn't have the amount of data that we had today we don't we didn't have the processing power it was too expensive to store all this data that's all changed so now we have this emerging machine intelligence layer being used for a lot of different inks but it's sort of sitting on top of all these workloads that's being injected into databases and applications it's being used to detect fraud to sell us more stuff you know in real time to save lives and I'm going to talk about that but it's one of these superpowers that really needs new hardware architectures so I want to explore machine intelligence a little bit it really is a game changers it really is and and and tying back to the first point about sort of the the evolution of data and the importance of data things like machine learning and adaptive infrastructure and cognitive infrastructure have driven to your point are a hard requirement to adapt and improve the infrastructure upon which that lives and runs and operates and moves and breathes so we always had Hardware evolution or development or improvements and networks and the basic you know components of the infrastructure being driven again by advances in material science and silicon etc well now what's happening is the growth and importance and and Dynamis city of data is far outpacing the ability of the physical sciences to keep pace right that's a reality that we live in so therefore things like you know cognitive computing machine learning AI are kind of bridging the gap almost between the limitations we're bumping up against in physical infrastructure and the immense unlocked potential of data so that intermediary is really where this phenomenon of AI and machine learning and deep learning is happening and you're also correct in pointing out that it's it's everywhere I mean it's imbuing every single workload it's transforming every industry and a fairly blistering pace IBM's been front and center around artificial intelligence in cognitive computing since the beginning we have a really interesting perspective on it and I think we bring that to a lot of the solutions that we offer as well Ginni Rometty a couple years ago actually use the term incumbent disruptors and when I think of that I think about artificial intelligence and I think about companies like the ones I mentioned before that are very valuable they have data at their core most incumbents don't they have data all over the place you know they might have a bottling plant at the core of the manufacturing plant or some human process at the core so to close that gap artificial intelligence from the incumbents the appointees they're gonna buy that from companies like IBM they're gonna you know procure Watson or other AI tools and you know or maybe you know use open-source AI tools but they're gonna then figure out how to apply those to their business to do whatever fraud detection or recommendation engines or maybe even improve security and we're going to talk about this in detail but Steve this there's got to be new infrastructure behind that we can't run these new workloads on infrastructure that was designed 30 40 years ago exactly I mean I think I am truly fascinated by with this growth of data it's now getting more exponential and why we think about why is it getting more exponential it's getting more exponential because the ease at which you can actually now take advantage of that data it's going beyond the big financial services companies the big healthcare companies right we're moving further and further and further towards the edge where people like you and I and Randi and I have talked about the maker economy right I want to be able to go in and build something on my own and then deliver it to either as a service as a person a new application or as a service to my infrastructure team to go then turn it on and make something out of that that infrastructure it's got to come down in cost but all the things that you said before performance reliability speed to get there intelligence about data movement how do we get smarter about those things all of the underlying ways we used to think about how we managed protect secure that it all has evolved and it's continuing to evolve everybody talks about the journey the journey to cloud why does that matter it's not just the cloud it's also the the componentry underneath and it's gonna go much broader much bigger much faster well and I would just add just amplify what Steve said about this whole maker movement one of the other pressures that that's putting on corporate IT is it's driving essentially driving product development and innovation out to the end to the very edge to the end user level so you have all these very smart people who are developing these amazing new services and applications and workloads when it gets to the point where they believe it can add value to the business they then hand it off to IT who is tasked with figuring out how to implement it scale it protect it secured debt cetera that's really where I believe I um plays a key role or where we can play a key role add a lot of values we understand that process of taking that from inception to scale and implementation in a secure enterprise way and I want to come back to that so we talked about data as one of the superpowers an AI and the third one is cloud so again it used to be processor speed now it's data plus AI and cloud why is cloud important because cloud enables scale there's so much innovation going on in cloud but I want to talk about you know cloud one dot o versus cloud two dot o IBM talks about you know the new era of cloud so what was cloud one dot o it was largely lift and shift it was taking a lot of crap locations and putting him in the public cloud it was a lot of tests in dev a lot of startups who said hey I don't need to you know have IT I guess like the cube we have no ID so it's great for small companies a great way to experiment and fail fast and pay for you know buy the drink that was one dot o cloud to dot all to datos is emerging is different it's hybrid it's multi cloud it's massively distributed systems distributed data on Prem in many many clouds and it's a whole new way of looking at infrastructure and systems design so as Steve as you and I have talked about it's programmable so it's the API economy very low latency we're gonna talk more about what that means but that concept of shipping code to data wherever it lives and making that cloud experience across the entire infrastructure no matter whether it's on Prem or in cloud a B or C it's a complicated problem it really is and when you think about the fact that you know the big the big challenge we started to run into when we were talking about cloud one always shadow IT right so folks really wanted to be able to move faster and they were taking data and they were actually copying it to these different locations to be able to use it for them simply and easily well once you broke that mold you started getting away from the security and the corporate furnance that was required to make sure that the business was safe right it but it but it but following the rules slowed business down so this is why they continued to do it in cloud 2.0 I like the way you position this right is the fact that I no longer want to move data around moving data it within the infrastructure is the most expensive thing to do in the data center so if I can move code to where I need to be able to work on it to get my answers to do my AI to do my intelligent learning that all of a sudden brings a lot more value and a lot more speed and speed as time as money rate if I can get it done faster I get more valuable and then just you know people often talk about moving data but you're right on you the last thing you want to do is move data in just think about how long it takes to back up the first time you ever backed up your iPhone how long it took well and that's relatively small compared to all the data in a data center there's another subtext here from a standpoint of cloud 2.0 and it involves the edge the edge is a new thing and we have a belief inside of wiki bond and the cube that we talk about all the time that a lot of the inference is going to be done at the edge what does that mean it means you're going to have factory devices autonomous vehicles a medical device equipment that's going to have intelligence in there with new types of processors and we'll talk about that but a lot of the the inference is that conclusions were made real-time and and by the way these machines will be able to talk to each other so you'll have a machine to machine communication no humans need to be involved to actually make a decision as to where should I turn or you know what should be the next move on the factory floor so again a lot of the data is gonna stay in place now what does that mean for IBM you still have an opportunity to have data hubs that collect that data analyze it maybe push it up to the cloud develop models iterate and push it back down but the edge is a fundamentally new type of approach that we've really not seen before and it brings in a whole ton of new data yeah that's a great point and it's a market phenomenon that has moved and is very rapidly moving from smartphones to the enterprise right so right so your point is well-taken if you look in the fact is we talked earlier that compute is now proximal to the data as opposed to the other way around and the emergence of things like mesh networking and you know high bandwidth local communications peer-to-peer communications it's it's not only changing the physical infrastructure model and the and the best practices around how to implement that infrastructure it's also fundamentally changing the way you buy them the way you consume them the way you charge for them so it's it's that shift is changing and having a ripple effect across our industry in every sense whether it's from the financial perspective the operational perspective the time to market perspective it's also and we talked a lot about industry transformation and disruptors that show up you know in an industry who work being the most obvious example and just got an industry from the from the bare metal and recreate it they are able to do that because they've mastered this new environment where the data is king how you exploit that data cost-effectively repeatably efficiently is what differentiates you from the pack and allows you to create a brand new business model that that didn't exist prior so that's really where every other industry is going you talking about those those those big five companies in North America that are that are the top top companies now because of data I often think about rewind you know 25 years do you think Amazon when they built Amazon really thought they were going to be in the food service business that the video surveillance business the drone business all these other book business right maybe the book business right but but their architecture had to scale and change and evolve with where that's going all around the data because then they can use these data components and all these other places to get smarter bigger and grow faster and that's that's why they're one of the top five this is a really important point especially for the young people in the audience so it used to be that if you were in an industry if you were in health care or you were in financial services or you were in manufacturing you were in that business for life every industry had its own stack the sales the marketing the R&D everything was wired to that industry and that industry domain expertise was really not portable across businesses because of data and because of digital transformations companies like Amazon can get into content they can get into music they can get it to financial services they can get into healthcare they can get into grocery it's all about that data model being portable across those industries it's a very powerful concept that you and I mean IBM owns the weather company right so I mean there's a million examples of traditional businesses that have developed ways to either enter new markets or expand their footprint in existing markets by leveraging new sources of data so you think about a retailer or a wholesale distributor they have to very accurately or as accurately as possible forecast demand for goods and make sure logistically the goods are in the right place at the right time well there are million factors that go into that there's whether there's population density there's local cultural phenomena there's all sorts of things that have to be taken into consideration previously that would be near impossible to do now you can sit down again as an individual maker I can sit down at my desk and I can craft a model that consumes data from five readily available public api's or data sets to enhance my forecast and I can then create that model execute it and give it to two of my IT guy to go scale-out okay so I want to start getting into the infrastructure conversation again remember the premise of this conversation it doesn't read for structure matter we want to we want to explore that oh I start at the high level with with with cloud multi-cloud specifically we said cloud 2.0 is about hybrid multi cloud I'm gonna make a statements of you guys chime in my my assertion is that multi cloud has largely been a symptom of multi-vendor shadow IT different developers different workloads different lines of business saying hey we want to we want to do stuff in the cloud this happened so many times in the IT business all and then I was gonna govern it how is this gonna be secure who's got access control on and on and on what about compliance what about security then they throw it over to IT and they say hey help us fix this and so itea said look we need a strategy around multi cloud it's horses for courses maybe we go for cloud a for our collaboration software cloud B for the cognitive stuff cloud C for the you know cheap and deep storage different workloads for different clouds but there's got to be a strategy around that so I think that's kind of point number one and I T is being asked to kind of clean up this stuff but the future today the clouds are loosely coupled there may be a network that connects them but there's there's not a really good way to take data or rather to take code ship it to data wherever it lives and have it be a consistent well you were talking about an enterprise data plane that's emerging and that's kind of really where the opportunity is and then you maybe move into the control plane and the management piece of it and then bring in the edge but envision this mesh of clouds if you will whether it's on pram or in the public cloud or some kind of hybrid where you can take metadata and code ship it to wherever the data is leave it there much smaller you know ship five megabytes of code to a petabyte of data as opposed to waiting three months to try to ship you know petabytes to over the network it's not going to work so that's kind of the the spectrum of multi cloud loosely coupled today going to this you know tightly coupled mesh your guys thoughts on that yeah that's that's a great point and and I would add to it or expand that even further to say that it's also driving behavioral fundamental behavioral and organizational challenges within a lot of organizations and large enterprises cloud and this multi cloud proliferation that you spoke about one of the other things that's done that we talked about but probably not enough is it's almost created this inversion situation where in the past you'd have the business saying to IT I need this I need this supply chain application I need this vendor relationship database I need this order processing system now with the emergence of this cloud and and how easy it is to consume and how cost-effective it is now you've got the IT guys and the engineers and the designers and the architects and the data scientists pushing ideas to the business hey we can expand our footprint and our reach dramatically if we do this so you've get this much more bi-directional conversation happening now which frankly a lot of traditional companies are still working their way through which is why you don't see you know 100% cloud adoption but it drives those very productive full-duplex conversations at a level that we've never seen before I mean we encounter clients every day who are having these discussions are sitting down across the table and IT is not just doesn't just have a seat at the table they are often driving the go-to-market strategy so that's a really interesting transformation that we see as well in addition to the technology so there are some amazing things happening Steve underneath the covers and the plumbing and infrastructure and look at we think infrastructure matters that's kind of why we're here we're infrastructure guys but I want to make a point so for decades this industry is marked to the cadence of Moore's law the idea that you can double processing speeds every 18 months disk drive processors disk drives you know they followed that curve you could plot it out the last ten years that started to attenuate so what happened is chip companies would start putting more cores on to the real estate well they're running out of real estate now so now what's happening is we've seen this emergence of alternative processors largely came from mobile now you have arm doing a lot of offload processing a lot of the storage processing that's getting offloaded those are ARM processors in video with GPUs powering a lot of a lot of a is yours even seeing FPGAs they're simple they're easy them to spin up Asics you know making a big comeback so you've seen these alternative processes processors powering things underneath where the x86 is and and of course they're still running applications on x86 so that's one sort of big thing big change in infrastructure to support this distributed systems the other is flash we saw flash basically take out spinning disk for all high-speed applications we're seeing the elimination of scuzzy which is a protocol that sits in between the the the disk you know and the rest of the network that's that's going away you're hearing things like nvme and rocky and PCIe basically allowing stores to directly talk to the so now a vision envision this multi-cloud system where you want to ship metadata and code anywhere these high speed capabilities interconnects low latency protocols are what sets that up so there's technology underneath this and obviously IBM is you know an inventor of a lot of this stuff that is really gonna power this next generation of workloads your comments yeah I think I think all that 100% true and I think the one component that we're fading a little bit about it even in the infrastructure is the infrastructure software right there's hardware we talked a lot talked about a lot of hardware component that are definitely evolving to get us better stronger faster more secure more reliable and that sort of thing and then there's also infrastructure software so not just the application databases or that sort of thing but but software to manage all this and I think in a hybrid multi cloud world you know you've got these multiple clauses for all practical purposes there's no way around it right marketing gets more value out of the Google analytic tools and Google's cloud and developers get more value out of using the tools in AWS they're gonna continue to use that at the end of the day I as a business though need to be able to extract the value from all of those things in order to make different business decisions to be able to move faster and surface my clients better there's hardware that's gonna help me accomplish that and then there are software things about managing that whole consetta component tree so that I can maximize the value across that entire stack and that stack is multiple clouds plus the internal clouds external clouds everything yeah so it's great point and you're seeing clear examples of companies investing in custom hardware you see you know Google has its own ship Amazon its own ship IBM's got you know power 9 on and on but none of this stuff works if you can't manage it so we talked before about programmable infrastructure we talked about the data plane and the control plane that software that's going to allow us to actually manage these multiple clouds as at least a quasi single entity you know something like a logical entity certainly within workload classes and in Nirvana across the entire you know network well and and the principal or the principle drivers of that evolution of course is containerization right so the containerization phenomenon and and you know obviously with our acquisition of red hat we're now very keenly aware and acutely plugged into the whole containerization phenomenon which is great we're you're seeing that becoming almost the I can't think of us a good metaphor but you're seeing containerization become the vernacular that's being spoken in multiple different types of reference architectures and use case environments that are vastly different in their characteristics whether they're high throughput low latency whether they're large volume whether they're edge specific whether they're more you know consolidated or hub-and-spoke models containerization is becoming the standard by which those architectures are being developed and with which they're being deployed so we think we're very well-positioned working with that emerging trend and that rapidly developing trend to instrument it in a way that makes it easier to deploy easier to instrument easier to develop so that's key and I want to sort of focus now on the relevance of IBM one side one thing that we understand because that that whole container is Asian think back to your original point Dave about moving data being very expensive and the fact that the fact that you want to move code out to the data now with containers microservices all of that stuff gets a lot easier development becomes a lot faster and you're actually pushing the speed of business faster well and the other key point is we talked about moving code you know to the data as you move the code to the data and run applications anywhere wherever the data is using containers the kubernetes etc you don't have to test it it's gonna run you know assuming you have the standard infrastructure in place to do that and the software to manage it that's huge because that means business agility it means better quality and speed alright let's talk about IBM the world is complex this stuff is not trivial the the more clouds we have the more edge we have the more data we have the more complex against IBM happens to be very good at complex three components of the innovation cocktail data AI and cloud IBM your customers have a lot of data you guys are good with data it's very strong analytics business artificial intelligence machine intelligence you've invested a lot in Watson that's a key component business and cloud you have a cloud it's not designed to compete not knock heads and the race to zero with with the cheap and deep you know storage clouds it's designed to really run workloads and applications but you've got all three ingredients as well you're going hard after the multi cloud world for you guys you've got infrastructure underneath you got hardware and software to manage that infrastructure all the modern stuff that we've talked about that's what's going to power the customers digital transformations and we'll talk about that in a moment but maybe you could expand on that in terms of IBM's relevance sure so so again using the kind of maker the maker economy metaphor bridging from that you know individual level of innovation and creativity and development to a broadly distributed you know globally available work loader or information source of some kind the process of that bridge is about scale and reach how do you scale it so that it runs effectively optimally is easily managed Hall looks and feels the same falls under the common umbrella of services and then how do you get it to as many endpoints as possible whether it's individuals or entities or agencies or whatever scale and reach iBM is all about scale and reach I mean that's kind of our stock and trade we we are able to take solutions from small kind of departmental level or kind of skunkworks level and make them large secure repeatable easily managed services and and make them as turnkey as possible our services organizations been doing it for decades exceptionally well our product portfolio supports that you talk about Watson and kind of the cognitive computing story we've been a thought leader in this space for decades I mean we didn't just arrive on the scene two years ago when machine learning and deep learning and IO ste started to become prominent and say this sounds interesting we're gonna plant our flag here we've been there we've been there for a long time so you know I kind of from an infrastructure perspective I kind of like to use the analogy that you know we are technology ethos is built on AI it's built on cognitive computing and and sort of adaptive computing every one of our portfolio products is imbued with that same capability so we use it internally we're kind of built from AI for AI so maybe that's the answer to this question of it so what do you say that somebody says well you know I want to buy you know my flash storage from pure AI one of my bi database from Oracle I want to buy my you know Intel servers from Dell you know whatever I want to I want to I want control and and and I gotta go build it myself why should I work with IBM do you do you get that a lot and how do you respond to that Steve I think I think this whole new data economy has opened up a lot of places for data to be stored anywhere I think at the end of the day it really comes down to management and one of the things that I was thinking about as you guys were we're conversing is the enterprise class or Enterprise need for things like security and protection that sort of thing that rounds out the software stack in our portfolio one of the things we can bring to the table is sure you can go by piece parts and component reform from different people that you want right and in that whole notion around fail-fast sure you can get some new things that might be a little bit faster that might be might be here first but one of the things that IBM takes a lot of pride was a lot of qual a lot of pride into is is the quality of their their delivery of both hardware and software right so so to me even though the infrastructure does matter quite a bit the question is is is how much into what degree so when you look at our core clients the global 2,000 right they want to fail fast they want to fail fast securely they want to fail fast and make sure they're protected they want to fail fast and make sure they're not accidentally giving away the keys to the kingdom at the end of the day a lot of the large vendor a lot of the large clients that we have need to be able to protect their are their IP their brain trust there but also need the flexibility to be creative and create new applications that gain new customer bases so the way I the way I look at it and when I talk to clients and when I talk to folks is is we want to give you them that while also making sure they're they're protected you know that said I would just add that that and 100% accurate depiction the data economy is really changing the way not only infrastructure is deployed and designed but the way it can be I mean it's opening up possibilities that didn't exist and there's new ones cropping up every day to your point if you want to go kind of best to breed or you want to have a solution that includes multi vendor solutions that's okay I mean the whole idea of using again for instance containerization thinking about kubernetes and docker for instance as a as a protocol standard or a platform standard across heterogeneous hardware that's fine like like we will still support that environment we believe there are significant additive advantages to to looking at IBM as a full solution or a full stack solution provider and our largest you know most mission critical application clients are doing that so we think we can tell a pretty compelling story and I would just finally add that we also often see situations where in the journey from the kind of maker to the largely deployed enterprise class workload there's a lot of pitfalls along the way and there's companies that will occasionally you know bump into one of them and come back six months later and say ok we encountered some scalability issues some security issues let's talk about how we can develop a new architecture that solves those problems without sacrificing any of our advanced capabilities all right let's talk about what this means for customers so everybody talks about digital transformation and digital business so what's the difference in a business in the digital business it's how they use data in order to leverage data to become one of those incumbent disruptors using Ginny's term you've got to have a modern infrastructure if you want to build this multi cloud you know connection point enterprise data pipeline to use your term Randy you've got to have modern infrastructure to do that that's low latency that allows me to ship data to code that allows me to run applet anywhere leave the data in place including the edge and really close that gap between those top five data you know value companies and yourselves now the other piece of that is you don't want to waste a lot of time and money managing infrastructure you've got to have intelligence infrastructure you've got to use modern infrastructure and you've got to redeploy those labor assets toward a higher value more productive for the company activities so we all know IT labor is a chop point and we spend more on IT labor managing Leung's provisioning servers tuning databases all that stuff that's gotta change in order for you to fund digital transformations so that to me is the big takeaway as to what it means for customer and we talked about that sorry what we talked about that all the time and specifically in the context of the enterprise data pipeline and within that pipeline kind of the newer generation machine learning deep learning cognitive workload phases the data scientists who are involved at various stages along the process are obviously kind of scarce resources they're very expensive so you can't afford for them to be burning cycles and managing environments you know spinning up VMs and moving data around and creating working sets and enriching metadata that they that's not the best use of their time so we've developed a portfolio of solutions specifically designed to optimize them as a resource as a very valuable resource so I would vehemently agree with your premise we talked about the rise of the infrastructure developer right so at the end of the day I'm glad you brought this topic up because it's not just customers it's personas Pete IBM talks to different personas within our client base or our prospect base about why is this infrastructure important to to them and one of the core components is skill if you have when we talk about this rise of the infrastructure developer what we mean is I need to be able to build composable intelligent programmatic infrastructure that I as IT can set up not have to worry about a lot of risk about it break have to do in a lot of troubleshooting but turn the keys over to the users now let them use the infrastructure in such a way that helps them get their job done better faster stronger but still keeps the business protected so don't make copies into production and screw stuff up there but if I want to make a copy of the data feel free go ahead and put it in a place that's safe and secure and it won't it won't get stolen and it also won't bring down the enterprise's is trying to do its business very key key components - we talked about I infused data protection and I infused storage at the end of the day it's what is an AI infused data center right it needs to be an intelligent data center and I don't have to spend a lot of time doing it the new IT person doesn't want to be troubleshooting all day long they want to be in looking at things like arm and vme what's that going to do for my business to make me more competitive that's where IT wants to be focused yeah and it's also we just to kind of again build on this this whole idea we haven't talked a lot about it but there's obviously a cost element to all this right I mean you know the enterprise's are still very cost-conscious and they're still trying to manage budgets and and they don't have an unlimited amount of capital resources so things like the ability to do fractional consumption so by you know pay paper drink right buy small bits of infrastructure and deploy them as you need and also to Steve's point and this is really Steve's kind of area of expertise and where he's a leader is kind of data efficiency you you also can't afford to have copy sprawl excessive data movement poor production schemes slow recovery times and recall times you've got a as especially as data volumes are ramping you know geometrically the efficiency piece and the cost piece is absolutely relevant and that's another one of the things that often gets lost in translation between kind of the maker level and the deployment level so I wanted to do a little thought exercise for those of you think that this is all you know bromide and des cloud 2.0 is also about we're moving from a world of cloud services to one where you have this mesh which is ubiquitous of of digital services you talked about intelligence Steve you know the intelligent data center so all these all these digital services what am I talking about AI blockchain 3d printing autonomous vehicles edge computing quantum RPA and all the other things on the Gartner hype cycle you'll be able to procure these as services they're part of this mesh so here's the thought exercise when do you think that owning and driving your own vehicle is no longer gonna be the norm right interesting thesis question like why do you ask the question well because these are some of the disruptions so the questions are designed to get you thinking about the potential disruptions you know is it possible that our children's children aren't gonna be driving their own car it's because it's a it's a cultural change when I was 16 year olds like I couldn't wait but you started to see a shifted quasi autonomous vehicles it's all sort of the rage personally I don't think they're quite ready yet but it's on the horizon okay I'll give you another one when will machines be able to make better diagnosis than doctors actually both of those are so so let's let's hit on autonomous and self-driving vehicles first I agree they're not there yet I will say that we have a pretty thriving business practice and competency around working with a das providers and and there's an interesting perception that a das autonomous driving projects are like there's okay there's ten of them around the world right maybe there's ten metal level hey das projects around the world what people often don't see is there is a gigantic ecosystem building around a das all the data sourcing all the telemetry all the hardware all the network support all the services I mean building around this is phenomenal it's growing at a had a ridiculous rate so we're very hooked into that we see tremendous growth opportunities there if I had to guess I would say within 10 to 12 years there will be functionally capable viable autonomous vehicles not everywhere but they will be you will be able as a consumer to purchase one yeah that's good okay and so that's good I agree that's a the time line is not you know within the next three to five years all right how about retail stores will well retail stores largely disappeared we're we're rainy I was just someplace the other day and I said there used to be a brick-and-mortar there and we were walking through the Cambridge Tseng Galleria and now the third floor there's no more stores right there's gonna be all offices they've shrunken down to just two floors of stores and I highly believe that it's because you know the brick you know the the retailers online are doing so well I mean think about it used to be tricky and how do you get in and and and I need the Walmart minute I go cuz I go get with Amazon and that became very difficult look at places like bombas or Casper or all the luggage plate all this little individual boutique selling online selling quickly never having to have to open up a store speed of deployment speed of product I mean it's it's it's phenomenal yeah and and frankly if if Amazon could and and they're investing billions of dollars and they're trying to solve the last mile problem if Amazon could figure out a way to deliver ninety five percent of their product catalog Prime within four to six hours brick-and-mortar stores would literally disappear within a month and I think that's a factual statement okay give me another one will banks lose control traditional banks lose control of the payment systems you can Moselle you see that banks are smart they're buying up you know fin tech companies but right these are entrenched yeah that's another one that's another one with an interesting philosophical element to it because people and some of its generational right like our parents generation would be horrified by the thought of taking a picture of a check or using blockchain or some kind of a FinTech coin or any kind of yeah exactly so Bitcoin might I do my dad ask you're not according I do I don't bit going to so we're gonna we're waiting it out though it's fine by the way I just wanted to mention that we don't hang out in the mall that's actually right across from our office I want to just add that to the previous comment so there is a philosophical piece of it they're like our generation we're fairly comfortable now because we've grown up in a sense with these technologies being adopted our children the concept of going to a bank for them will be foreign I mean it will make it all have no context for the content for the the the process of going to speak face to face to another human it just say it won't exist well will will automation whether its robotic process automation and other automation 3d printing will that begin to swing the pendulum back to onshore manufacturing maybe tariffs will help to but again the idea that machine intelligence increasingly will disrupt businesses there's no industry that's safe from disruption because of the data context that we talked about before Randy and I put together a you know IBM loves to use were big words of transformation agile and as a sales rep you're in the field and you're trying to think about okay what does that mean what does that mean for me to explain to my customer so he put together this whole thing about what his transformation mean to one of them was the taxi service right in the another one was retail so and not almost was fencers I mean you're hitting on on all the core things right but this transformation I mean it goes so deep and so wide when you think about exactly what Randy said before about uber just transforming just the taxi business retailers and taxis now and hotel chains and that's where the thing that know your customer they're getting all of that from data data that I'm putting it not that they're doing work to extract out of me that I'm putting in so that autonomous vehicle comes to pick up Steve Kenaston it knows that Steve likes iced coffee on his way to work gives me a coupon on a screen I hit the button it automatically stops at Starbucks for me and it pre-ordered it for me you're talking about that whole ecosystem wrapped around just autonomous vehicles and data now it's it's unbeliev we're not far off from the Minority Report era of like Anthem fuck advertising targeted at an individual in real time I mean that's gonna happen it's almost there now I mean you just use point you will get if I walk into Starbucks my phone says hey why don't you use some points while you're here Randy you know so so that's happening at facial recognition I mean that's all it's all coming together so and again underneath all this is infrastructure so infrastructure clearly matters if you don't have the infrastructure to power these new workloads you're drugged yeah and I would just add and I think we're all in agreement on that and and from from my perspective from an IBM perspective through my eyes I would say we're increasingly being viewed as kind of an arms dealer and that's a probably a horrible analogy but we're being used we're being viewed as a supplier to the providers of those services right so we provide the raw materials and the machinery and the tooling that enables those innovators to create those new services and do it quickly securely reliably repeatably at a at a reasonable cost right so it's it's a step back from direct engagement with consumer with with customers and clients and and architects but that's where our whole industry is going right we are increasingly more abstracted from the end consumer we're dealing with the sort of assembly we're dealing with the assemblers you know they take the pieces and assemble them and deliver the services so we're not as often doing the assembly as we are providing the raw materials guys great conversation I think we set a record tends to be like that so thank you very much for no problem yeah this is great thank you so much for watching everybody we'll see you next time you're watching the cube

>> from our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California It is a cute conversation. >> Welcome to this cube competition here at the Palo Alto Cube Studios. I'm John for a host of the Cube. Were here a special guests to keep alumni investor An entrepreneur who do Sudhakar, would you Good to see you again, John. Always a pleasure. You've been on as an entrepreneur, founder. As an investor, you're always out. Scour in the Valley was a great conversation. I want to get your thoughts as kind of a guest analyst on this segment around the state of the Union for Enterprise Tech. As you know, we covering the price tag. We got all the top enterprise B to B events. The world has changed and get reinvent coming up. We got VM World before that. The two big shows, too to cap out this year got sprung a variety of other events as well. So a lot of action cloud now is pretty much a done deal. Everyone's validating it. Micro cells gaining share a lot of growth areas around cloud that's been enable I want to get your thoughts first. Question is what are the top growth sectors in the enterprise that you're seeing >> papers. Thank you for having me. It's always a pleasure talking to you over the years. You and me have done this so many times. I'm learning a lot from you. So thank you. You are so yeah, I think Let's dig into the cloud side and in general market. So I think that there are 34 areas that I see a lot that's happening a lot. Cloud is still growing, a lot 100% are more growth and cloud and dog breeders. And what is the second? I see, a lot of I T services are close services. This includes service management. The areas that service now isn't They're >> still my ops was Maybe >> they opt in that category. E I said With management, the gutter is coming with the new canticle a service management. So they're replacing idea some with a different. So that's growing 800% as a category tourist. RP according to again, the industry analysts have seen that it's going at 65 to 70% so these three areas are going a lot in the last one that I see a lot of user experience. Can you build? It's like it's a 20,000,000,000 market cap, something. So if you let it out, it's a cloud service Management services RP user experience cos these are the four areas I see a lot dating all the oxygen rest. Everybody is like the bread crumbs. >> Okay, and why do you think the growth in our P A. So how's the hype? Is it really what? What is going on in our pee, In your opinion, >> on the rumors I'm hearing or there is some companies are already 1,000,000,000 revenue run great wise. That's a lot in our piece. So it's not really a hype that really so that if you look and below that, what's happening is I'd be a Companies are automating automation. The key for here is if I can improve the user experience and also automate things. RPS started doing screen scraping right in their leaders, looking at any reservations supply chain any workflow automation. So every company is so complex. Now somebody has to automate the workflow. How can you do this with less number of people, less number, resources, and improve the productivity >> coming? R P A. Is you know, robotic process automation is what it stands for, but ultimately it's software automation. I mean, it's software meets cloud meets automation. It seems to be the big thing. That's also where a I can play a part. Your take on the A I market right now. Obviously, Cloud and A I are probably the two biggest I think category people tend to talk about cloud and a eyes kind of a big kind of territories. RPG could fall under a little bit of bulls, but what you take on a guy, >> Yeah, so I think if you look at our pier, I actually call the traditional appears to be historical legacy. Wonders and R P companies are doing a good job to transform themselves to the next level, right? But our pianist Rocky I score. It's no longer the screen skipping tradition, making the workflow understanding. So there are new technology called conversational Rp. There's actually a separate market. Guys been critical conversation within a Can I talk to in a dialogue manner like what you experienced Instagram are what using what's up our dialogue flow? How can I make it? A conversational RPS is a new secretary is evolving it, but our becomes have done a good job. They leave all their going out. A >> lot has been has great success. We've been covering them like a blanket on a single cube. Um, I got it. I got to get your take on how this all comes into the next generation modern era because, um, you know, we're both been around the block. We've seen the waves of innovation. The modern error of clouds certainly cloud one Dato Amazon. Now Microsoft has your phone. Google anywhere else really goes. Dev Ops, The devil's movement cloud native amazing, create a lot of value continues to do well, but now there's a big culture on cloud 2.0, what is your definition of cloud two point? Oh, how do you see Cloud 2.0, evolving. But >> I like the name close to party. I think it's your third. It is going to continue as a trained. So look, throw two point with eyes. I don't know what it will be, but I can tell you what it should be and what it can have. Some other things that should do in the cloud is cloud is still very much gun to human beings. Lot of develops people. Lot of human being The next addition to a daughter should have things done programmatically I don't need tens of thousands off Assad ease and develops people. So back to your air, upside and everything. Some of those things should become close to become proactive. I don't want to wait until Amazon. Easter too is done. If I'm paying him is on this money. Amazon should be notifying me when my service is going to be done. The subsidy eaters They operated Chlo Trail Cloudwatch Exeter. But they need to take it to a notch level. But Amazon Azure. >> So making the experience of deploying, running and building APS scalable. Actually, that's scales with Clavet. Programmable kind of brings in the RPI a mean making a boat through automation edge of the network is also interesting. Comes up a lot like Okay, how do you deal with networking? Amazons Done computing storage and meet amazing. Well, cloud and networking has been built in, I guess to me, the trend of networking kicks in big because now it's like, OK, if you have no perimeter, you have a service area with I o t. >> There's nothing that >> cloud to point. It has to address riel time programming ability. Things like kubernetes continues to rise. You're gonna need to have service has taken up and down automatically know humans. So this >> is about people keep on fur cloak. What should be done before the human in the to rate still done. It develops. People are still using terror from lot of scripting. Lot of manual. Can you automata? That's one angle The second angle I see in cloud 2.0 is if you step back and say What, exactly? The intrinsic properties of Claude Majors. It's the work floor. It's automation, but it's also able to do it. Pro, actually. So what I don't have to raise if I'm playing club renders this much money. Tell me what outrageous are happening. Don't wait until outage happens. Can you predict voted? Yes, they have the capability to women. It should be Probably steal it. No, not 100%. So I want to know what age prediction. I wonder what service are going down. Are notified the user's that will become a a common denominator and solutions will be start providing, even though you see small startups doing this. Eventually they become features all these companies, and they'll get absorbed by the I called his aircraft carriers. You have Masson agile DCP. They're going to absorb all this, a ups to the point that provide that as the functionality. >> Yeah, let's get the consolidation in second. I want to get your thoughts on the cloud to point because we really getting at is that there's a lot of white space opportunity coming in. So I gotta ask you to start up. Question as you look at your investor, prolific investor in start ups. Also, you're an entrepreneur yourself. What >> is? >> They have opportunities out there because we'll get into the big the big whales Amazon, who were building and winning at scale. So embarrassed entry or higher every day, even though it's open sources, They're Amazons, betting on open source. Big time. We had John Thompson talk about that. That was excessive. Something Nutella. And so what? What if I was a printer out there? Would what do I do? I mean, is there Is there any real territory that I could create a base camp on and make money? >> That's plenty. So there's plenty of white faces to create. Look, first of all your look at what's catering, look at what's happening. IBM is auto business in service management, CSL itself to Broadcom. BMC is sold twice to private companies. Even the CEO got has left our war It is. Then you have to be soldiers of the Micro Focus. The only company that's left is so it's not so in that area, you can create plenty of good opportunities. That's a big weight. >> Sensors now just had a bad quarter. So actually, clarity will >> eventually they're gonna enough companies to go in that space. That play that's based can support 23 opportunities so I can see a publicly traded company in service. No space in next five years. My production is they'll be under company will go a p o in the service management space. Same things would happen. Rp, Rp vendors won't get acquired A little cleared enough work for automation. They become the next day because of the good. I can see a next publicly traded company. What happened in the 80 operations? Patriotism Probably. Computer company Pedro is doing really well. Watch it later. Don't. They're going to go public next. So that area also, you see plenty of open record companies in a UPS. >> So this is again back to the growth areas. Cloud hard to compete on Public Cloud. Yes, the big guys are out there. There's a cloud enablers, the people who don't have the clouds. So h p tried to do a cloud hp They had to come out, they'll try to cloud couldn't do It s a P technically is out there with a cloud. They're trying to be multi cloud. So you have a series of people who made it an oracle still on the fence. They still technically got a cloud, but it's really more Oracle and Oracle. So they're kind of stuck in the middle between the cloud and able nervous. The Cloud player. If you're not a cloud player large enterprise, what is the strategy? Because you got HP, IBM, Cisco and Dell. >> So I don't know. You didn't include its sales force in that If I'm Salesforce, I want sales force to get in. They have a sales cloud marketing cloud commerce code. Mark is not doing anything in the area of fighting clothes. They cannot go from 100,000,000,000 toe, half a trillion trillion market cap. Told I D. They have to embrace that and that's 100% growth area. You know, people get into this game at some point. It'll be is already hard and 50,000,000,000 market cap. Then that leaves. What is this going to do? Cisco has been buying more security software assets, but they don't wanna be a public company, their hybrid club. But they have to figure out How can they become an arms dealer in escape and by ruining different properties off close services? And that's gonna happen. And I've been really good job by acquiring Red Heart. So I think some place really figuring out this what is happening. But they have to get in the gaming club they have to do. Other service management have begun and are here. They have to get experience. None of these guys have experienced in this day and age that you killed and who are joining the workforce. They care for Airbnb naked for we work. They care for uber. They care for Netflix. It is not betting unders. So if I'm on the border, Francisco, I'm not talking about experience That's a problem to me. Hey, tree boredom is not talking about that. That's what if I'm I know Mark is on the board. Paramount reason. But Mark is investing in all the slack. Cos then why is it we are doing it either hit special? Get a separate board member. They should get somebody else. >> Why? He wouldn't tell. You have to move. Maybe. I don't know. We don't talk about injuries about that. But I want to get back to this experience thing because experience has become the new expectation. Yes, that's been kind of a design principle kind of ethos. Okay, so let's take that. The next little younger generation, they're consuming Airbnb. They're using the serious like their news and little chunks be built a video service for that. So things are changing. What is? I tease virgin as the consumption is a product issue. So how does I t cater to these new experience? What are some of those experiences? I >> think all of them. But I think I d for Social Kedrick, every property, every product should figure out how to offer to the young dreamers how they were contributed offer to the businesses on the B two baby to see. So the eye has to think every product or not. Should I start thinking about how my user should consume this and how should out for new experiences and how they want to see this in a new way, right? It's not in the same the same computer networking. How can a deluded proactively How can a dealer to a point where people can consume it and make other medications so darn edition making? That's where the air comes in. Don't wait for me toe. Ask the question. Suggest it's like Gmail auto complete. Every future should be thinking through problem. Still, what can I do to improve the experience that changes the product? Management's on? And that's what I'm looking at, companies who are thinking like that connection and see Adam Connection security. But that has to happen in the product. >> I was mentioning the people who didn't have clouds HP, IBM, Cisco and Dell you through sales force in there, I kind of would think sales were six, which is technically a cloud. They were cloud before cloud was even cloud. They built basically oracle for the cloud that became sales force. But you mentioned service now. Sales force. You got adobe, You got work day. These are application clouds. So they're not public clouds per se they get Amazon Web service is, you know, at Adobe runs on AWS, right? A lot of other people do. Microsoft has their own cloud, but they also have applications as well. Office 3 65 So what if some of these niche cloud these application clouds have to do differently? Because if you think about sales force, you mentioned a good point. Why isn't sales were doing more? People generally don't like Salesforce. You think that it's more of a lock inspect lesson with a wow. They've done really innovative things. I mean, I don't People don't really tend to talk about sales force in the same breath as innovation. They talk about Well, we run sales for us. We hate it or we use it and they never really break into these other markets. What's your take on them? >> I think Mark has done a good job to order. Yes, acquiring very cos it has to start from the top and at the market. His management team should say, I want to get in a new space. He got in tow. Commerce. Claudia got into marketing. He has to know, decide to get into idea or not. Once he comes out, he's really taken because today, science. What is below the market cap? Com Part of it'll be all right. If I am sales force, I need to go back down. Should I go after service? No. Industry should go after entire 80 services industry. Yes or no, But they have to make a suggestion. Something with Toby Toby is not gonna be any slower. They will get into. I decide. They're already doing the eyesight and experience. They're king of experience. Their king off what they're doing. Marketing site. They will expand. Writing. >> What does something We'll just launched a platform. Yes, that's right. The former executive from IBM. That's an interesting direction. They all have these platforms. Okay, so I got together to the Microsoft Amazon, Um, Google, the big clouds and then everybody else. A lot of discussion around consolidation. A lot of people say that the recession's coming next year. I doubt that. No, nos. The consolidation continues to happen. You can almost predict that. But where do you see the consolidation of you got some growth areas as you laid out cloud I t service is our p a experience based off where looks like where's the consolidation happening? If growth is happening, they're words to tell. >> It was happening. Really Like I see a lot in cyber security. I'm in Costa Rica, live in public. You have the scaler, the whole bunch of companies. So the next level of cos you always saw Sisko Bart, do your security followed has been buying aggressively companies. So secret is already going to a lot of consolidation. You're not seeing other people taking it, but in the I T services industry, you'll start seeing that you're already seeing that in the community space. That game is pretty much over right. Even the ember barred companies, even Net are barred companies and the currency. So I think console is always going to happen. People are picking up the right time. It's happening across the board. It's a great time to be an entrepreneur creator value. They come this public. So it's like I think it's cannot anymore very time. Look to your point where the decision happens or not. Nobody can predict. But if a chance now, it's best time to raise money. Build a company. >> Well, we do. I think the analysis, at least from my perspective, is looking at all the events we go to is the same theme comes up over and over. And Andy Jassy this heat of a tigress always talks about Old Garden new Guard. I think there's two sides of the streets developing old way in a new way, and I think the modern architect of the modern era of computer industry is coming, and it looks a lot different than it. Waas. So I think the consolidate is happening on those companies that didn't make the right bets, either technically or business model wise, for they took on too much technical debt and could not convert over to the cloud world or these really robust software environment. So I think consolidations from just just the passing of holder >> seems pretty set up for a member of the first men. First Main Computing was called mainframe Era, then, with clients Herrera and Kim, the club sodas 6 2009 13 years old, the new Errol called. Whatever the name, it will be something with a n mission in India that things would be so automated. That's what we have new area of computing, So that's I would like to see. So that's a new trick, this vendetta near turn. So even though we go through this >> chance all software software sales data 11. Yeah, it's interesting. And I think the opportunity, for starters is to build a new brands. His new branch would come out. Let's take an example of a company that but after our old incumbent space dying market share not not very attractive from a VC standpoint. From market space standpoint, Zoom Zoom went after Web conferencing, and they took on WebEx and portability. And they did it with a very simple formula. Be fast, be cloud native and go after that big market and just beat them on speed and simple >> experience. They give your greatest experience just on the Web, conferencing it and better than sky better than their backs better than anybody else in that market. Paid them with reward. Thanks, Vic. He had a good >> guy and he's very focused. He used clouds. Scale took the value proposition of WebEx. Get rid of all the other stuff brought its simple to video conference. And Dr Mantra is one >> happening. The A applying to air for 87 management. A ops A customer surveys. >> So this is what our Spurs could do. They can target big markets debt and go directly at either a specific differentiation. Whether it's experience or just a better mouse trap in this case could win, >> right? And one more thing we didn't talk about is where their underpants go after is the area number. Many of these abs are still enterprise abs. Nobody really focused on moving this enterprise after the club. Hollis Clubbers are still struggling with the thing. How can I move my workload number 10%. We're closing the club 90% still on track. So somebody needs to figure out how to migrate these clouds to the cloud really seamlessly. The Alps are gonna be born in the cloud club near the apse. So how do you address truckload in here? So there's enough opportunity to go after enterprise applications clouded your application. Yeah, >> I mean, I do buy the argument that they will still be on premises activity, but to your point will be stealing massive migration to the cloud either sunsetting absent being born the cloud or moving them over on Prem All in >> all the desert I keep telling the entree and follow the money. When there is a thing you look for it Is there a big market? Are people catering there? If people are dying and the old guard is there to your point and is that the new are you? God will happen. And if you can bet on the new guard in your experience, market will reward you. >> Where is the money? Follow the money. Worse. What do we follow? Show me where it is. Tell me where it is >> That all of the clothes, What is the big I mean, if you're not >> making money in the club for the cloud, you are a fool right now. If there any company on making out making in the club as a CEO, a board member, you need to think through it. Second automation whether you go r p a IittIe automation here to make money on, said his management. Whether it's from customer service to support the operation, you got to take the car. Start off it if you are Jesse ever today and you're not making birds that cementing. I see it mostly is that still don't want to take it back. They want to build empires. The message to see what's right, Nice. Either you do it or get out. Get the job to somebody that >> I hold a lot of sea cells and prayer. Preparing for reinforce Amazon's new security cloud security conference and overwhelmingly response from the sea. So's chief security officer is we are building stacks internally. When I asked him about multi cloud, you know what they said? Multi cloud is B s. I said, Why? Because Well, we have a secondary cloud, but I don't want to fork my development team. I want to keep my people focused on one cloud. It's Amazon. Go Amazon. It's azure. We stay with Azure. I don't wanna have three development teams. So this a trend to keep the stack building internally. That means they're investing in building their own text. Axe your thoughts on that >> look, I mean, that's again. There's no one size fits all. There will be some CEOs who want to have three different silos. Some people have a hard, gentle stack like I've seen companies. Right now. They write, the court wants it, compiles, and it's got an altar cloth. That's a new irritability you're not. We locate a stack for each of them. You're right. The court order to users and NATO service is but using the same court base. That's the whole The new startups are building it. If somebody's writing it like this, that's all we have. Thing is the CEO. So there's that. The news he always have to think through. How can you do? One court works on our clothes? >> Great. You do. Thank you for coming on again. Always great to get your commentary. I learned a lot from you as well. Appreciate it. I gotta ask the final question as you go around the VC circles. You don't need to mention any names you can if you want, but I want to get a taste of the market size of rounds, Seed Round A and B. What are hot rounds? What sizes of Siri's am seeing? Maur? No. 10,000,000? 15,000,000? Siri's >> A. >> Um >> Siri's bees are always harder to get than Siri's. A seeds. I always kind of easier. What's your take on the hot rounds that are hot right now. And what's the sizes of the >> very good question? So I'm in the series the most easy one, right? Your concept. But the seed sizes went up from 200 K to know mostly drones are 1,000,000 2 1,000,000 Most city says no oneto $10,000,000. So if you're a citizen calmly, you're not getting 10 to 15. Something's wrong because that become the norm because there's more easy money. It also helps entrepreneurs. You don't have to look for money. See, this beast are becoming $2025 $5,000,000 pounds, Siri sees. If you don't raise a $50,000,000 then that means you're in good company. So the minimum amount of dries 50,000,000 and CDC Then after that, you're really looking for expansions. $100,000,000 except >> you have private equity or secondary mortgage >> keys, market valuations, all the rent. So I tell entrepreneurs when there is an opportunity, if you have something, you can command the price. So if you're doing a serious be a $20,000,000 you should be commanding $100,000,000.150,000,000 dollars, 2,000,000 evaluations right if you're not other guys are getting that you're giving too much of your company, so you need to think through all of that. >> So serious bees at 100,000,000 >> good companies are much higher than that. That'll be 1 52 100 And again, this is a buyer's market. The underpinnings market. So he says, more money in the cash. Good players they're putting. Whether you have 1,000,000 revenue of 5,000,000 revenue, 10,000,000 series is the most hardest, but its commanding good premium >> good time to be in our prayers were with bubble. Always burst when it's a bite, mark it on the >> big money. Always start a company >> when the market busts. That's always my philosophy. Voodoo. Thanks for coming. I appreciate your insight. Always as usual. Great stuff way Do Sudhakar here on the Q investor friend of the Cube Entrepreneur, I'm John for your Thanks >> for watching. Thank you.

>> Live from San Diego, California It's the queue covering Sisqo Live US 2019 Tio by Cisco and its ecosystem. Barker's >> Welcome Back. The Cuba's Live at Cisco Live, San Diego, California That's your sunny San Diego. I'm Lisa Martin and my co hostess day Volante. Dave and I are gonna be talking about Baraki with Tony Carmichael, product manager A P I and developer platforms from San Francisco Muraki Tony, welcome. >> Yeah, Thank you. I'm super happy to be here. >> So you were in this really cool Muraki T shirt. I got that work and get one of those. >> We can get one >> for you for sure. Right. This is Muraki. Take over. Our here in the definite zone. This definite zone has been jam packed yesterday. All day Today, people are excited talking a little bit about what Muraki is. And let's talk about what the takeover isn't. What people are having the chance to learn right now. >> Sure. Yes. Oma Rocky, founded in two thousand six. I can't believe it's been over 10 years now. Way really started with the mission of simplifying technology, simplifying it, making it easy to manage and doing so through a cloud managed network. So that's really what Muraki was founded. And then, in 2012 Iraqi was acquired by Cisco. So we continue to grow, you know, triple digit, double digit growth every single year on, we've expanded the portfolio. Now we've got wireless way. Actually, just announced WiFi six capabilities. We got switching. We've got security appliances, we've got video cameras and then on top of all of that, we've got a platform to manage it so you can go in. And if you're in it, it's all about. Is it connected? Is it online? And if there's a problem solving it quickly, right And so that's why we're really here, a deb net and doing the take over because we're seeing this transition in the industry where you know, really is more about being able to just get the job done and work smart, not hard on. And a lot of times AP eyes and having a really simple a platform to do that is paramount, right? So that's what we're talking about here and the takeover. Just answer. The other question is on our here, where we just basically everything is Muraki, right? So we're doing training sessions were doing labs reading education and some fun, too. So reading social media and we've got beers. If you want to come up and have a beer with us as well, >> all right, hit the definite is on for that. >> So how does how does WiFi six effect, for example, what you guys are doing it. Muraki. >> Yeah, so that's a That's a really great question. So WiFi six means, you know, faster and more reliable, right? That is fundamentally what it's all about now. WiFi over the years has very quickly transitioned from, like, nice tohave. Teo, You know, you and I check into our hotel, and within seconds we want to be online talking to our family, right? So it's no longer best efforts must have, whether it's in a hospital, hotel or in office environment. WiFi six ads. You know a lot of new features and functionality, and this is true from Rocky for Cisco at large, and it's all about speed and reliability right now on the developer side. And this is a lot of what we're talking about here. A definite it also opens up completely new potential opportunities for developers. So if you think about, You know, when you go to a concert, for example, and you see a crowd of 30,000 people and they're doing things like lighting up lanyards the plumbing, right? The stuff making that tic is you know, it has to work at scale with 30,000 people or more, and that's all being delivered through WiFi technology. So it opens up not just the potential for us, maybe as as concertgoers, but for the developer being able to do really, really cool things for tech in real time. >> So you talked about a simplification, was kind of a mission of the company when it started, and it had some serious chops behind it. I think Sequoia Google was involved as well, right? So, anyway, were you able to our how have you affected complexity of security ableto Dr Simplification into that part of the stack? >> So that's a fantastic question. If you think about you know, this shift towards a cloud connected world not just for Muraki, but for for all devices, right, consumer ipads, iPhones and writhe thing that opens up from a security standpoint is that you have the ability from a zero day right, so you had a zero day vulnerability. You know, it gets reported to the vendor within seconds or minutes. You could roll out, uh, patch to that. Right, That is that is a very new kind of thing, right? And with Muraki, we've had a variety of vulnerabilities. We also work with the Talis T Mat Sisko who are, you know, they've got over 10 or 50 researchers worldwide that are finding these vulnerabilities proactively and again within, you know, certainly within a 24 hour period, because we've got that connectivity toe every single device around the globe. Customers now Khun rely on depend on us to get that patch out sometimes while they sleep right, which is really like it sounds nice. And it sounds great from a marketing standpoint, but it's really all right. We have retailers that, you know, they're running their business on this technology. They have to remain compliant. And any vulnerability like that, you've got to get it fixed right before it becomes a newsworthy, for example. >> So as networks have dramatically transformed changed as a cisco and the last you know, you can't name the number of years time we look at the demands of the network, the amount of data they mount. A video data being projected, you know, like 80% plus of data in 80 2022 is going to be video data. So in that construct of customers in any industry need to be able to get data from point A to point B across. You know, the proliferation of coyote devices edge core. How can Muraki be a facilitator of that network automation that's critical for businesses to do in order to be competitive? >> Yeah, so it's a fantastic question. I think it's something that's at the heart of what every I T operation is thinking about, right? You hear about, you know, digitization. What does that mean? It means supporting the business and whatever things, whatever they're trying to do. And a lot of times nowadays, it is video. It's being able to connect in real time with a team that's maybe working across the globe now to get right to your question. There's two things that that Muraki is delivering on that really enables it teams right to deliver on that promise or that really it's more an expectation, right? The first you know, we've got a serious of technologies, including rst one product. That a lot for you to really get the most efficient, effective use out of your win connectivity, right? So being able to bring in broadband, bringing whatever circuits you can get ahold of and then do you know application delivery that is just reliable in dependable Catskill? Thie. Other aspect to this is giving data and insights to the teams that are responsible, reliable for that delivery. And this is where ap isa Really, Really. You know, it's really at the heart of all of this because if you're operating more than, say, 50 sites, right, there's lots of beautiful ways that we can visualize this right, and we can, you know, add reports that give you top 10. But the thing is, depending on your business, depending on your industry, different things they're gonna matter. So this is where Iraqi is investing in an open platform and making it super easy to run system wide reports and queries on you know which sites were slow, which sites were fast, prioritizing the ones that really needs some love right? And giving data back to the teams that have those Big Harry questions that need to get answered. Whether it's you know, you're C suite that saying Are we out of the way or just a really proactive team? That's just trying to make sure that the employees experiences good. >> What about some of the cool tools you guys are doing? Like talking about them Iraqi camera? >> Oh, yeah. I mean, so the other thing I was thinking of when you asked about this was, you know, video as a delivery medium. Of course it's necessary when you're doing, you know, video conference saying and things like that. But when we look at, say, the Muraki M V, which is really our latest product innovation, it's really us kind of taking the architecture of, ah, typical videos, surveillance system and flipping on its head, making it really easy to deploy Really simple, no matter where in the world you are to connect and see that video footage right? The other thing we're learning, though, is that why do people watch video surveillance? Either You're responding to an incident, right? So someone tripped and fell. There was an incident. Someone stole someone or someone sold something, or you're just trying to understand behavioral patterns. So when it comes to video, it's not always about the raw footage. It's really about extracting what we often call like metadata, right? So them rocky envy Some of the really cool innovations happening on that product right now are giving customers the end state visualization. Whether that's show me all the people in real time in the in the frame, give me a count of how many people visited this frame in the last hour. Right? So imagine we have cameras all over. We want to know what those what those trends and peaks and valleys look like rate. That's actually what we're after. No one wants to sit there looking at a screen counting people s. So this is where we're starting to see this total shift in how video can be analyzed and used for business purposes >> are able to detect anomalies. You're basically using analytics. Okay. Show me when something changes. >> That's right. Right. And we've seen some incredibly cool things being built with our FBI. So we've got a cinema, a really large customer, cinemas all over. And they're doing these immersive experiences where they're using the cameras. A sensor on DH. There saying, OK, when there's more than a handful of people. So we've got kind of a crowding within the communal spaces of the cinema Changed the digital sign Ege, right? Make it a really immersive experience. Now, they didn't buy the cameras for that. They bought the cameras for security, right? But why not? Also, then two birds, one stone, right? Use that investment and use it as a data sensor. Feed that in and make it completely new experience for people in the environment. >> Well, I couldn't so I can see the use case to excuse me for for, like, security a large venue. Oh, yeah. Big time >> infected. Thank you de mode along that front >> easy. And Mandy >> dio definite create where there wasa like a stalker. Yeah, where there was, like, a soccer match. And they're showing this footage and asking everyone What did you see happen? You know, a few seconds and actually what they did was using Iraqi. They were able to zero in on a fight that was breaking out, alert the then use security team and dispatch them within a very short period of time. >> Yeah, and we've seen like there's amazing there's tons of use cases. But that's a great example where you've got large crowds really dynamic environment, and you're not again. You don't want to necessarily have to have folks just looking at that feed waiting for something to happen. You want an intelligence system that can tell you when something happens? Right? So we've seen a ton of really cool use cases being built on. We're gonna continue to invest in those open AP eyes so that our customer, you know, we can move at the speed of our customers, right? Because I'm a rocky like, ultimately, our mission is like, simple i t. There's different layers of simple, Like what matters to a customer is like getting what they need to get done. Done. Um, we want way. Want to really be ableto enable them to innovate quickly. Ap eyes really are the center of that. >> Yeah, and so talk a little bit more about your relationship with definite how you fit in to that on the symbiotic. You know, nature. Yeah, Iraqi and definite. >> I would love to. So we've been working with with Suzie and the and the definite team now for really, since the start of definite, and I think it's brilliant, right? Because Sisko were, of course, like from a networking standpoint, we're always at the forefront. But what we started to see early on and I certainly wasn't the visionary here was this transition from, you know, just just like your core. Quintessential networking tio starting toe like Bring together Your network stack with the ability is also right and rapidly developed applications. So that was kind of the, you know, the precipice of Like Bringing Together and founding Dev. Net. And we've been with definite sense, which which, you know, it's been exciting. It's also really influence where our direction right? Because it's a lot for us to see what our customers trying to dio, How are they trying to do it? And how can we, from the product side, enable that three FBI's but then work with Dev Net to actually bring, you know, bring That's a life. So we've got, you know, developer evangelists working with customers. We've got solution architects, working with customers, building incredibly cool things and then putting it back out into the open source community, building that community. I mean, that is really where we've had in a maze. Amazing relationship with definite rate that that has been huge. Like we've seen our adoption and usage just absolutely shoot through the roof. We're at 45,000,000 requests per day on DH. Straight up, like could have been done without >> having that visions. Amazing. We have Susie on in a minute. But I mean, I >> Why do you think >> other sort of traditional companies, you know in the computer business haven't created something similar? I mean, seems like Cisco has figured out Debs and traditional hardware companies haven't so >> It's a really good question, like at the end of the day, it's an investment, right? Like I think a lot of companies like they tend to be quite tactical. Um, and look at okay, like maybe here we are now and here's where we're going. But it's an investment, and customers really say OK, this is the thing that they're trying accomplish, and we're not going to keep it closed and closed source and try to develop intellectual property. We're going to enable and empower on ecosystem to do that. Now I think like you're quickly starting to see this trend, right? Like certainly I wouldn't say that Muraki or Cisco are the only ones that are doing this, which is this, you know, cultivation of technology partners that are building turnkey solutions for customers. You know, cultivation of customers and enabling them to be able to build. And you create things that perhaps Cisco might not even ever think about. But But that is a shift in mentality, I think right, and I think like we're starting to see this more in the industry. But I am proud to say that like we were right on that bleeding edge and now we're able to ride that wave. Iraqis also had the luxury of being cloud native for a cloud board. It's our technology has always been, you know, at a place where if we want to deploy or create a new a p i n point that provides new data like literally, the team behind me can take that from prototype to production to test it into a customer within weeks on. And that is in many cases, what we're doing. >> It seems to me looking kind of alluding to Dave's point from a Cisco overall perspective, a company that has been doing customer partner events for 30 years. What started this networker? We now notices go live a large organization. Large organizations are not historically known for pivoting quickly or necessarily being developer friendly to this. Seems to me what definite has generated in just five short years seems to be a competitive differentiator that Cisco should be leveraging because it's it's truly developer family. >> I could not agree more. I mean the and this goes right to the core of what, uh What I think has made us so successful, Which is this, you know, this idea that at the heart of everything we do, we have to think about not just the customer experience right, which is like, What does it look like toe by what does look like toe unbox? What does it look like to install and what his day to look like? But also, and very importantly, distinct track around thinking about developer experience, developer experience like when your first building AP eyes and things like it's easy to say. OK, this is what they need. This is what they want. But Cisco, and really definite more than anything, has gotten to the heart of way have to think about the way these AP eyes look, the way they shape of their responses, the data they contain, the ease of use, the scale at which they operate and how easy it is to actually build on that. Right? So that's where you're going to start seeing more and more of our kind of S, T K's and libraries and just a lot of like we just this week launched the automation exchange that is again right at the center of We're listening. And we're not just listening to the customers who are trying to deploy 4,000 sites in a in a month or two. Um, we're also listening to the developers and what the challenge is that they're facing, right? Um, I'd love to see more of this. I mean, we're seeing a huge amount of adoption across Cisco. Um, and I think that there's other you know, there's plenty about their tech companies, you know that are that are really, I think, just helping push this forward right. Adding momentum to it. >> Speaking of momentum in the Iraqi momentum's going that way. I >> mean, it's good. Yeah, I would agree with you. >> Well, Tony, it's been a pleasure having you on the program. Absolutely. Success. Were excited to talk to Susie next. And it's like this unlimited possibilities zone here. Thank you so much for your time. >> Absolutely thanks so much Happy to be here. >> Alright for David Dante, I am Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube live from Cisco Live San Diego. Thanks for watching.

>> live from Mountain View, California. It's the queue covering definite create twenty nineteen. Brought to you by Cisco. >> Welcome back to the cave. Lisa Martin with John Barrier on our first day of two days of coverage of Cisco Definite Create twenty nineteen at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. John Eyre. Please welcome to iniquitous and directors solutions, architecture and Devil Box from Liberty Technology. Tony, Welcome. >> How are you? >> Good, thanks for Thanks for having us tell our audience a little bit about liberty technology before we get into the community. What you doing your breakout session? >> Not a problem. The re technology is a company. Where? MSP company down in Griffin, Georgia. And so we handle a lot of a lot of clients are either public sector cities, all different types of all the different verticals. So well. And so do you have a client? A customer out there that needs needs an extra arm into it. We're there for them. >> So your basement of Georgia, Which means that how warm it is in here today Outside should be nothing for you right >> now. Tell me about >> well outside >> now, since there is no humanity I like it back home in few minutes, >> Californians were babies. >> Yeah, Joni, Public Sector. We've done a lot of interviews of public sector folks with their towns and cities, air, ground rules, municipalities, cities, their I t light. And then they don't have the Dev ops expertise, but clouds a perfect fit for them. But they have a lot of certain characters. Whether it's email is very ephemeral. People come and go, So getting people collaborating in these distinct user groups that have different roles and responsibilities is a challenge. How are you guys solving that? Because there's something I know you guys have worked on. There's a challenge that's only Republicans for enterprises do. How do you bring people that are distinct user populations that have an application or roll or use case into a collaborative, horizontally scaleable >> system? We show Be honest way. Go in there and we go in there and we discover as to what they're doing now, what are their pain points? What do they want? Change where they want to go and then we show them the collaboration started. We shone like what makes team's way? Show him all of the, uh, meetings room devices, things like that. And then not just on the collaboration side, but also if there helping with three, six, five their security than Rocky. That's how we bring. That's how we bring collaboration intothe public >> about the Cisco dynamic we've been covering definite create since it started. Definite. Now it's just go live couple years, seeing kind of a new vibe and new mojo going on with that within the Cisco ecosystem of actually coding stuff up, whether it's slinging AP eyes together or creating new ones. New capabilities. How is it changed the delivery in performance of the customers? Because this is not just your old school Cisco networking company. Yeah, they got APS. Things are connected. Date is moving from Point A to point B. All right, but he's kind of integration challenges. Kind of seamless program ability is the core theme here. What's your reaction? Thoughts on all this? >> No. >> Well, first off, this is my first definite create. I've been to other Siskel lives have not been too. Don't think great yet so so far, I'm enjoying this a lot. It's I like the tight niche, the community style of this of this event I'm sorry. Go back, >> Tio. Go live a little creations that are going on here. Very community already. Kind of be open source projects. Yeah, people talking to each other, a lot of hallway conversations. But it's a kind of a new kind of collaborative model that customers are now getting exposed to write. This is something >> new. I mean, it is. It's new, and I'm finding a lot times where a lot of customers and clients they've heard about it, but they don't know yet. So it's our job to actually get them to adopt to it and and also adapt to it as well. So it's almost like how we have our own like community here. For definite. It's almost how can we take that structure and show it to our clients >> and translation involved Kind of kind of taper down the excitement, maybe, or keeping up questions for you people watching that aren't here. A definite what's that? What's the vibe here? Like, what's some of the cools? Things you've seen and heard are something Well, the keynote was >> great either. Was amazing Kino how they actually showed how, especially with the Iraqi had when Mandy went while I was out there talking about from the small campus to the festival and to an actual >> there's a radio >> that was a great use of incredible, especially with like big Stadium and how John McDonough came out and showed about how there was a fight on the field with you. Yet no one saw it, but yet then, when they went through the actual demonstrate, the actual video were like, Oh, yeah, this's amazing how it's almost like it was like the minority report way. You're already >> exactly Dan. Yes, the data out there, >> all that data and they just machine learning A I just watching people, seeing what they're doing, kind of almost like predicting what they're going to do >> and every little bit, actually, a little bit. I agree with you. I thought they did a great job with that, Especially coming off the heels of Coachella and showing how they can enable Cisco enable developers for social folks to set up secure networks of different sizes and also be able to use in real time machine learning a eye to evaluate what's going on the offensive. And that was a very cool, real world example of what they showed. Leveraging machine learning, identifying. There's there's an issue here. There's an altercation. They surprised at a sports event, right? And deploying those. It has a lot security, many sports events, though I thought it was all that the security was just casually walking up to fight. That's another thing >> that you would slow >> down. But you don't know what >> you're right. >> And it is so many more etiquette rules now at events, whether it's, you know, hate crimes or just, you know, just violent language fights. Also, everyone sees those that write that events. But this actual now, surveillance tech out there. You know, you could tell the guys that how many beers he's had kicks in, You know, >> we're gonna have something where they can actually check out someone like Heat signature. They can't tell how >> much he's going to explode. Is the Red Sox going to blow the lead again? A. Having a good year? Well, you know, they wanted last year Yankee fans, so you would be off the charts now. Philly fans, a whole other story. I don't. Okay. My digress. You've >> got a breakout session. Sorry, John. A lightning session that's tomorrow Any time tomorrow. Tell us the title and what you're going to be talking about. >> Keisha, my title is orchestrate forty five percent. So >> we'LL just read the forty five percent correct Alright, Digging >> again tonight a little >> bit. I have a sly where we was actually Suzy. We actually did a presentation awhile back where she put up a slider, says where she talked about how fifty five percent of partners are creating APS and developing their own naps. So, way of liberty we saw that we were like, OK, what about the other forty five percent? So that's where that the idea came out too. Okay, let's I'll do a talk about how we orchestrate forty, forty five, forty five percent. So entails What I'm doing with that is that we actually have a platform called Consulate. Where there were that platform has the ability to integrate with multiple business processes. So we're connecting. We're integrating with connect allies with Iraqi doing eight about and so that I have it where that there'll be a trigger or Web hook from one my rocky cameras like emotion which will trigger which will create a ticket and connect allies so they can help out some help tasks service desk and then that which will also they get thrown into teams and click on the ticket and then also run commands and grab a snapshot from the camera. The right of the team's six teams >> fell by the Iraqi for a minute because we get a lot of hearing a lot of buzz about Muraki. It's not just wireless. It's not just what you might think it is, it seems to be connected tissue you meant. There's a great demo that added to she's showing around. They are with looking at network configuration. We're obviously to be connecting all of this together. What's your view on this? What's that? >> I for one, I love muraki. I run Rocky at home, so five the viol. Although the wireless is switching cameras and just that, it's it's one. Really. They have, like their own room platform that connects has all their devices connecting into the dashboard, and you could do so much with it that they're actually they're open up Now. The eyes, the web hooks this so much things that you can actually integrate with it. It's it's great, and it's the analytics that you get from it. >> And this is what you're talking about really about bringing these teams together through Webb Hooks for AP, eyes in through Morocco, the connected to direct and then allow the APS to be valuable, cross different groups >> very valuable, but then so that then you don't have it on. Engineer doesn't have have to touch different applications or devices. They get it all from one and from that one application, click and go to where you need to get got. >> So we're only on halfway through Day one of your first up that crate. But it sounds like you've already been exposed to so many things that I could see the wheels turning us without anticipating that you're going to be able to bring back to liberty. And that will really help drive. What you guys doing driving forward toward that customer engagement only, eh? Educate >> well, since it is, you know, it's like half day already on day one. There's still so much to see here. There's so much to see about Coyote. There's a bunch of workshops here about form Iraqi and the AP ice, which I want to join in and see what I can take out of that and bring it back. Um, you know, there's a bunch of stuff get on. So I want to gather all that and just be a sponge and then bring it back to liberty and say, Hey, this is what we can do. How can they fit into our business model? >> Awesome. Well, Tony, thank you so much for stopping by and talking with Jonah me on the program this afternoon. We appreciate it. Best of luck in your lightning session tomorrow as well. >> Thank you so much >> for John Ferrier. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching us on the Cube. Live from Cisco. Definite great. Twenty nineteen. Thanks for watching. >> No.

>> live from Mountain View, California It's the queue covering definite create twenty nineteen. Brought to You by Cisco >> Hi, Lisa Martin With the Cube. We're live at the Computer History Museum for Cisco. Definite Create twenty nineteen John for years my co host, and we're pleased to welcome back to the Cube. Mandy Whaley, senior director of developer experience for Definite Mandy. This event is bursting at the seams. This is the third definite create, but you've been involved for the last five years or so from the beginning, when this was really groundswell talk. Before we're going to talk about a history of Devon, tell our audience what definite is. What definite create is as well, >> Absolutely definite is Cisco's developer community so anywhere that Cisco has a P iis rst case anywhere that people can build on top of our platforms. Definite is the community that enables those developers. So we do. You know a lot of connecting of people within the community way also do a lot of developer enablement Sample code Documentation Blog's Learning Resource is in person workshops, online workshops. I lead our developer experienced team, which is our developer advocates who are you know being the voice of developer, helping the developers get inspired in buildings also are definite. Sandbox teams hosted labs. If you want to use some networking FBI's you may not have extra network playing around that you can program against an experiment. So we offer reserved hosted labs that anyone can use free by becoming a definite remember and then the other part is our our developer content and support. So really getting the information out there and supporting the developers so definite is our community that enables everyone to build on top of Cisco. >> And this community is now sorry, John. We're both very excited, Assistant Suzy was announcing this morning over five hundred eighty five thousand members strong and the energy and the excitement in the room this morning with the Kino people are jumping at the bid. When you guys talked about WiFi six, I loved the examples that you gave this community is it is engaged. That is one of >> the things that's really exciting. Teo, about working with the definite community is that I feel like the energy that we put in, we get back multiple fold from the community, right, and it's great to see people who started with us maybe five years ago who have, you know, made their first AP I call started down this path, and now they're building full applications and they're here sharing that information by presenting with the community and giving back and that excitement that engagement is really one of the funnest parts of my job. >> Man, you talk about the evolution of definite create definite, pretty good background on that. Tell the story. I know I've been there with you guys since the beginning of the Cube. I know little about, but I want you to tell the story because it was a genesis that came out of what you guys we're seeing in the definite community where Cloud was really becoming part of it. Tell the where the definite created portion came on. And what it means for the definite community and developers at large. >> Yes, absolutely. So I started working with Emmet before Devon. It had a name so before it was actually definite. That was five years ago and way started building the community. We have a developer event within Sisqo live. So we have the definite zone, and it's we offer a lot of our constant and classes and workshops. Their way started getting requests from that audience, saying WAY would like a smaller events with more ability, tohave, you know, deeper conversations more, one on one and just focused on the developer community. And this was when multi Cloud was really starting to become a big piece of the Cisco strategy. Are developers were trying to figure out howto work in that space. Cloud native was taking King off, and that was the first definite create on, which was three years ago. It was a very small venue in San Francisco, and it was our very closest and, you know, deepest engage set of members that came to that first year and then. But we had such great engagement. Some of that energy that you mentioned and everyone who helped build it towards the second year, which we had last year at the Computer History Museum, says same same than you. And what special, definite create. As we really try to get the two parts of our definite community together, the application developers and our infrastructure automation Dev ops teams right, and we try to bring them together. This one event where they can really exchange ideas, you know, get to be talking the same language. This morning we had conversations around WiFi six from the application Developer side Like what does that enable for the application developers and new things you could build? And then, you know, how is that also interesting? Teo, the networking site >> of any demos, are a big part of it. You got the hack a thon camp. Get the camp experience. You can create great tools, but the the events, not your classic event. It's not like that's Get the numbers up. Let's get tennis. Let's make some money. It's not about that vibe. This is a different vibe. It's more of let's make it intimate, somewhat structured, but disorganized enough to be collaborative. >> Yes, it's definitely collaborative, and it's definitely a community focused event over. I think over seventy five percent of the content this year came from the community, so they're here giving back and presenting their workshops. It's also very hands on. Hands on is actually kind of a core definite value. We, like Teo, always give people the ability Teo code something. Try something, build something So you mentioned can't create that is our it's >> it's We call it a build a thon because it's a little more structure >> than a free form hackathon. We start with some use cases. We make the technology available, and they actually started yesterday before the conference even began. Those teams started building solutions, and they'LL be presenting them on Thursday and then >> in the >> conference. We have hands on workshops in small groups with eight people, so you can really, you know, take the time to actually get in, run the code, do the work, ask questions right to the presenter on. And we really want that collaborative. You know, sharing ideas feels very intentional part of building this conference. >> So I'd love to ask you some probing questions around the future of where you see this going because you have the key ingredients are coming together. You mentioned them, so scaling this up it's going to be a challenge because you have definite. You have Definite Zone and Sisqo live, which is the Cisco proper. Then you kind of have this elite community as my words. I guess it's, you know, the best of the best, but it's really a cross section of unique profile of persona is the intention to have these guys then go back to their communities are within the communities. Is that the scale point? Because how do you run these intimate events right and not lose the spirit of the ethos. >> So that's something we're, you know, putting specific thought into because we do want to keep the spirit. We've actually heard that from some of our, you know, kind of core community members that they really want to keep that aspect. So couple of things that we are planning tto help with that one is you may have seen this morning we gave the definite Creator awards. So those air awards for people who contribute to the community and a lot of those are people who have come and learn skills, taken aback to their organizations and been able to scale that out to their organizations. That's something that we're really actively working with people to do and do that in a very organic and community lead way. Um, the other thing that we have been working with is a program called Definite Express. So this is actually where we take a small part of our definite content. We kind of package it up and make it available for anyone to run in their region. Jin so they can have it. You know, in a different country they can have some of the same feeling that we have here some of these same workshops we've had those in. It was about two hundred fifty of those events in forty nine countries. >> So wait, man kind of thing. Yes, it's a physical events. It's not just sass on site services. >> That's right. >> Portable portal >> event and they do workshops just like they are here way. Inject some of the fun, same fun kind of activities. And then we provide all the infrastructure. There are sandbox, >> you hologram in there. I mean, you're so popular you can't attend all of them. >> No, I cannot. >> But I love >> to see on Twitter you can look up definite express and see one's happening, you know, all over the world at the same time, which is really fun. >> And how did those folks that are doing these definite expressed events How are they able to collaborate with you guys provide feedback from what they're experiencing in the field to help create Maur no pun intended helped create more. Definitely more, exactly more opportunities, you know, and really help you guys with this larger event so that they feel like they were in this community. And five hundred eighty five thousand. There's only about four hundred here that can fit in Russian. What's that somebody else? It's like So one of the things >> we do is while we're here at definite create, we do live stream a lot of the content. So it was really fun today. When we finished the keynote, I heard from some people that told me I was in the keynote. I was watching and I started texting my friends. Hey, you got to get on the live stream And that's a great thing to hear from the community because you're giving away for this people to join in. We also have on definite our community chat room. It's on every page, chat with us definite. It gets you right into a room with the developer advocates on our team and other community members, and we see the community there, you know, answering each other's questions, giving us feedback, letting us know what they need to move ahead in their careers and their projects. So that community chat room is really key. >> Give some highlights on what change since just go live Barcelona. What? Some of the important notable successes and work areas that you guys are doing a definite and definite create. >> Right. So we, as we mentioned in the Kino, our community growth, we've reached five hundred eighty five thousand. So that registered Dove nut members, that is, it's great to see that growing. And then we also see those members you know, growing their engagement with them, not going deeper into the material, building, more content, taking it back to their organizations and things like that. Right now we are building up to Cisco Live Us, which is coming up in San Diego in June, will have our full definite zone there. So a lot of exciting activities that were planning for their We hope everybody can come and see us there, and then another thing is, could exchange. So could exchange. We actually announced it a definite create last year and launched it a little bit after definite create code exchanges the place for the community to share their projects so they can anything that is open source. They can share it by sending us there. Have link way curate that end Tio Francisco relevant sort of catalog. If you're looking for a sample to use DNA center and you want to see it in Python, you Khun, go search for exactly that. Get back some projects that the community have submitted. So we're excited to announce this week that we've reached over four hundred projects in code exchange of those curated, you know, projects that have gone to the process and been posted there. That was a really exciting milestone, looking back to create from LA >> So it's working. Yeah. So what's the vibe in? Certainly Cisco. I know Suzy has and Team have been kind of getting a lot of press and praise press externally, praise internally it Cisco, as the big battleship of Cisco, kind of gets on that cloud wave coming multi cloud hot area. >> It is so one of the things that is really exciting as we are seeing a p, I be available across our whole portfolio. So in every area that Cisco has products and up and down the stack at the device layer at the controller layer at the cloud layer. So that's very exciting from a definite perspective, because it gives us more for our community to work with more opportunity for developers. And that changes Ciscos very palpable. It's very exciting. And we're, you know, bringing the definite community into that as much as >> it's from creativity to we saw the demo for a fish about the virtual realities cable first peek in Barcelona. But here, amplifying that with with five six to you could just with virtual reality look at a devices. They see all the staff see with network coverage. Yeah, WeII to do work. >> Yeah, exactly. And >> me, that demo is a great you know, example of this applications meaning infrastructure message, which is really what definite create is about. We wrote an augmented reality application running on a mobile device, but you can check literally seeing the signal strength from all your access points on. So that's just a great example of those two things coming together. >> Speaking of coming together, one of the things that you touched on this a minute ago. But what in the keynote this morning, when I was looking at in the Mirror Rocky demo of the other things that you guys were doing and the evolution of Cisco. I just thought, What CART horse which ones, which was It has definite been really kind of fueling Cisco's evolution. Looking at all of the available, as you mentioned across the product portfolio has been around a long time. Is it is it fair to say that definite has kind of been a fuel for that? And Cisco's going Wow, we've got this phenomenal community were evolving because our customers are we need Teo. Yeah, I think it is. It is very much >> hand in hand. We worked really closely with our product teams and we worked hard to be that voice of the developer with our product teams and Cisco. And it's been a journey that started, you know, five years ago where we knew that the guys were going to come, we knew that there would be a prize across the portfolio and within definite. We really believed in that and are definite community believed in it. And you know, we've been building it very step wise and very intentionally since then. So it's really been a great partnership and a really exciting time to be it Cisco and being a part of that transition. >> Well, I just signed up to chat with you guys since you brought it up earlier. Developer dot cisco dot com That little chat with us on every page signing I signed with my get hub handles >> you can log in with. You're having >> your chair stealing the code and check it into the >> codex scene. >> We're gonna blow something for one. So many exciting has been great to watch. You guys, you got the Moroccan green jacket off. >> It's very Rocky demo today. >> Meraki has been a big part of definite success, and within the community's been the reaction's been very positive. It's not in the classic portfolio of collaboration. It's really going to a different What is muraki mean for the development? What? What has it done? What has enabled Why is it important? >> Yeah, so, um, a Rocky has been great because it's one. As Todd mentioned today, they really have this mission of simplifying their experience, and they've done that in there. You I and they've brought that to their developer experience as well, which is really exciting for me. Rocky is Cloud Managed Network Club managed WiFi, and then they have a very happy I'd driven approach where you can automate almost everything you could do through the eyes. And then there's additional services that you could get from Iraqi, like indoor location data and things like that. So it really opens up opportunities for both of our parts of our definite audience application developers who might be writing an indoor location based application or doing something with the cameras that we saw today on DH, then the infrastructure automation side who can very, very efficiently, you know, manage and deploy their networks. >> It's nice connective tissue for the developers kind of gives you best table two worlds, wireless on the front end, back and network connections. So it really becomes a big part than seems like >> it is. It is. And that's another reason why we were so excited about the new MURAKI developer hub that Todd adults today on Definite because it really is a place where we can show that connective aspect of it. I have all the code and use cases that really connects this to audience. >> We'LL talk will be very excited to know that some of your community members actually have Iraqi devices at their house. They way, they're running their cameras at their homes and everything's >> that's right. >> So being I think it's on the Web, one of the, if not the on ly conference community that brings together the APP developers, those girls and guys thie infrastructure, folks, What's one of your favorite stories that really shows thes two worlds coming together, understanding each other, communicating anything that really sticks out of the last few years for you? Gosh, there's >> many and a lot of them are just hallway conversations that I might stop by and hear people connecting and kind of learning about. You know what each person works on and learning to kind of speak the same language and get together. One story that I think really stands out as a big success is around a partner that we work with who does indoor location applications. And there's pure software company right. They write mobile applications that do indoor location, and but they they need a network underneath that, and so we have had a great coming together of some of our main Cisco loyal people who go out and stall the network's connecting with partners like that who come from the pier software side. We've written applications on DSO. That's that's a great one. And that is really something that we see replicating in many places. And I feel like some of the hallway conversations here are, you know, starting the next stories that happened like that. >> This is one of some of the best cause they're natural. Organic conversations are not scripted. It's not reading slides. Well, I wish we had more time, but we'll have to see you back at dusk alive. All right? What about six weeks or so? Yes, it's coming out coming, kid. And Oh, Mandy, congratulations on this success bursting at the seams. And we appreciate you taking some time to talk with John and me today. Absolutely. Thank you so much. Our pleasure for John, for your I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube live from Cisco. Definite. Create twenty nineteen. Thanks for watching. >> Yeah,

>> Announcer: Live from Vancouver, Canada. It's theCUBE covering OpenStack Summit North America 2018, brought to you by Red Hat, the OpenStack Foundation and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and my cohost John Troyer and you're watching theCUBE, the worldwide leader in tech coverage and this is exclusive coverage from OpenStack Summit 2018 in Vancouver. Usually this time of year it is a little bit overcast, but for the second time the OpenStack Summit has been here, the sun is shining. It has been gorgeous weather but we are in here really digging in and understanding it One of the people I have gotten to know through this community especially, is our wrap up guest today, Sean Michael Kerner, who is a senior editor with eWeek, amongst other bi-lines that you have. Pleasure to see you. >> Great, good seeing you too Stu. >> Alright, so we let you keep on the Toronto Bluejays hat >> Thank you, there we go. >> We have had quite a few Canadians on our program here. >> Well, seeing as how you're here in Canada, it's not all that surprising. >> It's lovely. They have you working on Victoria Day. >> Yeah, that's unfortunate but I will take Memorial Day off in a week, so it works out. >> Excellent. So Sean, for our audience that might not know you, give us a little bit about your background. You've been to umpteen of these shows. >> Sure. I have been with the same publication roughly, I guess 15-16 years at this point. I've been writing before there was cloud, core living and Opensource stuff, networking. And then through the magic of technology, I shifted a little bit to security, which is a core focus for me. I have been to every OpenStack Summit since the San Diego Summit, I guess, 2011. Somebody can correct me afterwards. I did miss the Sydney Summit for various reasons, but yeah, I've been to a bunch of these things, so interesting to see how things have shifted over the years from nothing to certain heights to where we are now. >> Alright, so bring us up to that, as to where we are now. Attendance is down a little bit. They haven't been talking a lot about it but quality I guess is here. Sessions, they've broadened down a bit of the scope. We have been digging into it, but want to get your take so far. >> Yeah, well it's like anything else, there are standard hype cycles, as it were and there's a trough of disillusionment. I wouldn't call this a trough of disillusionment, but when you get to a certain plateau, people just, there'sn't as much interest. In the early days, I remember the San Diego Summit I went to. They didn't schedule it properly. They didn't know how many people they were going to have, and they had to line up around the corner and stuff. That was six years ago, but that is when OpenStack was new. There was no such thing as the Foundation, and everyone was trying to figure out what was what. And, there was no clue at this point. Cloud is a well understood thing. There are competitive efforts or complimentary efforts, as the Foundation would probably like to put it; whether it's CNCF, there's the public cloud and it's different. There is, with all respect to the OpenStack Foundation and its member projects, there's not as much excitement. This in now a stable, mature ecosystem and because of that, I don't think there's as much of a draw. When something is brand new and shiny, you get more of a draw. If they would have put the name Blockchain somewhere, maybe, maybe they would have had a few more. They put Kubernetes in there, which is fine, but no machine learning or artificial intelligence quite yet, though that's a topic somewhere in there too. >> Yeah, John, you've been making a lot of comments this week talking about we've matured and the lower layer pieces just work a bit more. Give us your take about that. >> Sure. That's the way it seems. There wasn't a whole lot of talk about the release, news release, and all the different components, even the keynotes. But, the people we have talked to, both on the vendor and the customer side, they have working production OpenStack environments. They're very large. They require very few admins. They work. They're embedded in telecom and banking, et cetera. It's here and it's working. >> Yeah, that's so something that happened, maybe three cycles ago at this point, because they used to have the release the same time as the Summit and the Design Summit. It was together, so, there was essentially a celebration of the release. People would talk about the release and then they desegrigated that. I think that took a lot of steam out of the reason why you got developers to attend. So, when you don't have the Design Summit, there's this separate open endeavor, there's the forum, I don't quite understand how that works here now. There isn't as much momentum. Yeah, I agree with you. There has been very little talk about Queens. In each of the project update sessions I have been to, and I have been to a couple, there has always been a slight on Rocky, what's coming. I think we are on the second milestone of Rocky, at this point, so there's some development, but at this point it is incremental featurettes. There is no whiz bang. OK, we're going to have flying cars, you know send a Tesla to outer space kind of Earth shattering kind of news, literally, because that's not where it's at. It's just incremental tuck in features in stability and that kind of thing. >> Alright, you talk space and thinks like that and it brings to mind a certain attendee of the program that has actually been to outer space and maybe one of the more notable moments of the show so far. Give us your take on Mr. Shuttleworth. >> Well, I'm a big fan of Mr. Shuttleworth, top to bottom. Hey Mark. Big fan, always have been. He has his own opinion on things of course. Usually in a keynote you don't tend to take direct aim at competitors and he chose to do that. It made some people a little uncomfortable. I happened to be sitting in the front row, where I like to sit, and there was some Red Hat people, and there were some frantic emails going back and forth. And people were trying to see what was going on et cetera. I think, for me, a little bit of drama is okay. You guys go to more shows than I do, and sometimes you get these kind of sales kind of things. But in an open community, there's almost an unwritten rule, which perhaps will be written after this conference, that whether or not everybody is a business competitor or not, is that this is neutral territory as it were and everybody is kind of friendly. In the exhibit hall, you can say this and that, we are better, whatever, but on the stage you don't necessarily do that, so there was some drama there. Some of my peers wrote about that and I will be writing about it as well. It's a, I prefer to write about technology and not necessarily drama. Whether somebody is faster, better, stronger than others, you let the number prove them out. When we talk about Opensource, Opensource Innovation without Canonical, there probably wouldn't have been an OpenStack. All the initial OpenStack reference and limitations are on Canonical. They got a number of large public clouds, as does Red Hat. I think they both have their tactical merits and I'm sure on some respects Red Hat's better and on some respects Canonical is better, but him standing up there and beating on the competition was something that across the 13 summits I have been I have never seen before. One guy I talked to my first OpenStack Summit was in San Diego and the CTO of VMware at the time came up to, VMware was not an OpenStack contributor at the time, they were thinking about it, and he was fielding questions about how it was competitive or not and he was still complimentary. So there has always been that kind of thing. So, a little bit of an interesting shift, a little bit of drama, and gives this show something memorable, because you and I and others will be able to talk about this five years from now, et cetera. >> You talked about something you would write up. I mean part of your job is to take things back to the readers at eWeek. >> Yeah. >> What are the things, highlights you're going to be covering? >> The highlights for me, Stu and I talked about this at one point off the camera, this is not an OpenStack Summit necessarily, they're calling it Open Infrastructure. I almost thought that they would change, we almost thought that they would change the name of the entire organization to the Open Infrastructure Foundation. That whole shift, and I know the foundation has been talking about that since Sydney last year, that they're going to shift to that, but, that's the take away. The platform itself is not the only thing. Enabling the open infrastructure is nice. They're going to try and play well and where it fits within the whole stack. That gets very confusing because talking about collaboration is all fine and nice, but that is not necessarily news. That is how the hot dog is made and that's nice. But, people want to know what's in that dog and how it is going to work. I think it's a tougher show for me to cover than it has been in past years, because there has been less news. There's no new release. There was Kata 1.0 release and there was the Zuul project coming out on its own. Zuul project, they said it was 3.0, it was actually March was Zuul 3.03. Kata Container project, okay, interesting, we'll see how it goes. But a tougher project, tougher event for me to cover for that reason. Collaboration is all fine and nice. But, the CNCF CloudNativeCon KubeCon event two weeks ago, or three weeks ago, had a little bit more news and a lot it's same kind of issues come up here. So, long winded answer, tough to come up with lessons learned out of this, other than everyone wants to be friends, well some people want to be. And, collaboration is the way forward. But that is not necessarily a new message. >> When I think about Kubernetes, we are talking about the multi cloud world and that's still, the last few years, where it's been. Where does OpenStack really fit in that multi cloud world? One of the things I have been a little disappointed actually, is most of the time, when I'm having a conversation, it's almost the, yeah, there's public cloud, but we are going to claw things back and I need it for governments, and I need all of these other things. When I talk to customers, it is I'm going to choose what I put in my data center. I'm going to choose how I use probably multiple public cloud finders. It is not an anti-public cloud message, and it feels a little bit on the anti-public cloud mass. I want to work with what you're hearing when you >> talk to users? >> When I talk to users, vast majority of people, unless it's something, where there's regulatory issues or certain legacy issues or private cloud, public cloud period. The private cloud idea is gone or mostly gone. When I think about private clouds, it's really VmWare. We have virtualized instances that sitting there. >> What's OpenStack? >> OpenStack is fine, but how many are running OpenStack as a private cloud premise? >> Yeah, so what's OpenStack then? >> When I think of OpenStack, Oracles public cloud. Oracle is not here surprisingly. Oracle's public cloud, Larry Ellison, who I know you guys have spoken to more than once on theCUBE at various points on Oracle World and other things. Oracle's public cloud, they want to compete against AWS. That's all. OpenStack IBM cloud, all OpenStack. The various big providers out of China are OpenStack based. OEH is here. So that's where it fits in is that underlying infrastructure layer. Walmart uses it. Bestbuy, all these other places, Comcast, et cetera; ATT. But individual enterprises, not so much. I have a hard time finding individual enterprises that will tell me we are running our own private cloud as OpenStack. They will tell me they're running VmWare, they will tell me they're running REV or even some flavor of Citrix end server, but not a private cloud. They may have some kind of instances and they will burst out, but it's not, I don't think private cloud for mid tier enterprises ever took off the way some people thought five years ago. >> That's interesting. Let's go meta for a second. You talked about things you do and don't write about, you don't necessarily write the VC's are not here necessarily, but you don't write about necessarily financial stuff. >> Sometimes. There was actually at the Portland summit, I did a panel with press and analysts at the time and afterwards there might have been four different VC's that came up to me and asked me what I thought about different companies. They were looking at different things where they would invest. And I remember, we looked at the board and one VC who shall remain nameless, and I said you know what, we'll look at this board with all these companies and five years from now, three quarters of them will not be here. I think I was probably wrong because it is more than that. There are so many. I wrote a story, I don't remember the exact name of it, but I wrote a story not that long ago about OpenStack deadpool. There are so, multiple companies that raised funding that disappeared. In the networking space, there were things like Plumgrid, they mminorly acquired for assets by Vmware, if I'm not mistaken. There was Pivotal, Joshua McKenzie, one of the co-founders of OpenStack itself, got acquired by Cisco. But they would have collapsed perhaps otherwise. Nebula Computing is perhaps, it still shocks me. They raised whatever it was 50 odd million, someone will correct me afterward. Chris Kemp, CTO of NASA who helped start it. Gone. So, there has been tremendous consolidation. I think when VC's lose money, they lose interest really fast. The other thing you have to think about, from the VC side, they don't write too much on the financial. My good friend Fredrick, who didn't make it, Where are you, Fredrick, where are you? Does more on that funding side. But has there been a big exit for an OpenStack company? Not really, not really. And without that kind of thing, without that precedence it's a tough thing, especially for a market that is now eight years old, give or take. >> Even the exits that had a decent exit, you know that got bought into the say IBM's, Cisco's of the world, and when you look a couple of years later, there's not much left of those organizations. >> Yeah. It's also really hard. People really don't want to compete against, well, some people want to compete against AWS. But, if you're going to try to go toe to toe with them, it's a challenge. >> Okay, so what brings you back here every year? You're speaking at the show. You're talking to people. >> What brings me back here is regardless of the fact that momentum has probably shifted, it's not in that really hype stage, OpenStack's core infrastructure, literally, core infrastructure that runs important assets. Internet assets, whether it certain public cloud vendors, large Fortune 500 companies, or otherwise. So it's an important piece of the stack, whether it's in the hype cycle or not, so that brings me back, because it's important. It brings me back because I have a vested interest. I have written so much about it so I'm curious to see how it continues to evolve. Specifically, I'm speaking here on Thursday doing a panel on defending Cloud Counsel Security as a core competence, a core interest for me. With all these OpenStack assets out there, how they're defended or not is a critical interest. In the modern world, cyber attacks are a given. Everybody should assume they're always under a constant state of attack and how that security works is a core area of interest and why I will keep coming back. I will also keep coming back because I expect there to be another shift. I don't think we have heard the end of the OpenStack story yet. I think the shift towards open infrastructure will evolve a little bit and will come to an interesting conclusion. >> Alright, last thing is what's your favorite question you're asking at this show. Any final things you want to ask us as we wrap? >> Yeah, my favorite, well, I want to ask you guys, what the most interesting answer you got from all the great people you interviewed because I'm sure some of it was negative and you got mostly positive as well. >> Well, we aren't used to answering the questions Stu. >> I'm used to being on the other side here, right. >> Well, I do say we got a lot of stuff about some interesting and juicy cases, like I say, the practitioners I talked to were real. I was always impressed by how few administrators it takes to run a huge OpenStack based cloud once it's set up. I think that's something interesting to me. You asked some folks about a public cloud a lot. >> Yeah, so it has been interesting. For me, it's, we've reached that certain maturity level. I was looking at technology. What's kind of the watermark that this is going to come to? We had said years ago, I don't think you're going to have somebody selling a billion dollars worth of distribution on OpenStack. So, that story with how Kubernetes and Containers and everything fits in, OpenStack is part of the picture, and it might not be the most exciting thing, but then again, if you watch Linux as long as most of us have, Red Hat took a really long time to get a billion dollars and it was much more than just Linux that got them there. This still has the opportunity to be tooling inside the environment. We have talked to a number of users that use it. It's in there. It's not that the flagpole, we're an OpenStack company anymore because there really aren't many companies saying that that is the core of their mission, but that is still an important piece of the overall fabric of what we are covering. >> Exactly right. >> Alright, we on that note, Sean Michael Kerner, we really appreciate you joining us. Please support good technology journalism because it is people like him that help us understand the technology. I read his stuff all the time and always love chatting with him off the record and dragged him on here and Fredrick from Techron Show we are disappointed you could not join us, but we'll get you next time. For Jon Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman, be sure to join us for the third day tomorrow of three days of wall to wall live coverage here from OpenStack Summit 2018 in Vancouver. And once again, thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)