>> Narrator: Live form Berlin, Germany, it's the Cube, covering NetApp insight 2017, brought to you by NetApp. Welcome back to the Cube's live coverage of NetApp insight 2017, we're here in Berlin, Germany, I'm your host, Rebecca Night along with my cohost Peter Burris. We have two guests on the program now, we have Rory McBride, who is the technical account manager at Aero and Bryan Mclosky, who is the vice president world wide for hyper converge infrastructure at NetApp. Bryan, Rory, thanks so much for coming on the show. >> Thanks. >> Let me start with you, Bryan, talk a little bit, tell our viewers a little bit about the value, that HCI delivers to customers, especially in terms of simplifying the data. >> In a nutshell, what NetApp HCI does is it takes what wold normally be hours and hours to implement a solution and 100s of inputs, generally, over 400 inputs and it simplifies it down to under 30 inputs in an installation, that will be done within 45 minutes. Traditionally HCI solutions have similar implementation characteristics, but you lose some of the enterprise flexibility and scale, that customers of NetApp have come to expect over the years. What we've done is we've provided that simplicity, while allowing customers to have the enterprise capabilities and flexibility, that they've grown accustomed to. >> Is this something, that you are talking with customers, in terms of the simplicity, what were you hearing from customers? >> Most customers these days are challenged of, everybody has to find a way to do more with less or to do minimally a lot more with the same. If you think of NetApp, we've always been wonderful about giving customers a great production experience. When you buy a typical NetApp product, you're gonna own it for three, four or five years and it will continue. NetApp has always been great for that three, four and five year time frame and what we've done with HCI is we really simplified the beginning part of that curve of how do you get it from the time it lands on your dock to implement it and usable by our users in a short manner, that's what HCI has brought to the NetApp portfolio, that's incremental to what was there before. >> One of the advantages to third parties, that work closely with NetApp is, that by having a simpler approach of doing things, you can do more of them, but on the other hand, you want to ensure, that you're also focused on the value add. In the field, when you're sitting down with a customer and working with them to ensure, that they get the value, that they want from these products, how do you affect that balance? As the product becomes simpler to the customer now being able to focus more on other things, other than configuration of limitation. >> We've been able to get to doing something with your data is the key. You needed a little bar of entry, which a lot of the software and hardware providers are trying to do today. I think HCI just has to pull all of that together, which is great. We're hearing from third party vendors, that it's great, that from day one, they've been integrated into the overall portfolio message and I think customers are just gonna be pretty excited with what they can do from zero with this hardware. >> When you think about ultimately how they're gonna spend their time, what are they going to be doing instead of now all this all configuration work? What is Aero gonna be doing now, that you're not doing that value added configuration work? >> Hopefully, we'll be helping to realize the full potential of what they bought, rather than spending a lot of time trying to make the hardware work, they're concentrating more on delivering a service or an application back to the business, it's gonna generate some revenue. In Aero we're talking a lot to people about IOT and it's gonna be the next wave of information, that people are gonna have to deal with and having a stable product, that can support and provide value, you have information back to business, it's gonna be key. >> Bryan, HCI, as you noted, dramatically reduces the time to get to value, not only now, but it also sustains that level of simplicity over the life of the utilization of the product. How does it fit into the rest of the NetApp product set, the rest of the NetApp portfolio? What does it make better, what makes it better in addition to just the HCI product? >> NetApp has a really robust portfolio of offerings, that we, at a high level categorize into our next generation offerings, which are Solid Fire, Flexpod Solid Fire, storage grid and hyper converge and then the traditional NetApp on tap based offerings. What the glue between the whole portfolio is the data fabric and HCI is very tightly integrated into the data fabric, one of the innovations we are delivering is snap mirror integration of the RHCI platform into the traditional on tap family of products. You can seamlessly move data from our hyper converge system to a traditional on tap base system and it also gives you seamless mobility to either your own private cloud or to public cloud platforms. As a company with a wide portfolio, it gives us the ability to be consultative with our partners and our customers. What we want is and we feel customers are best served on NetApp and we want them to use NetApp, and if an on tap base system is a better solution for them than hyper converge, then that's absolutely what we will recommend for them. Into your earlier question about the partners, one of the interesting things with HCI is it's the first time as NetAPP were delivering an integrated system with compute and with a hyperviser, it comes preconfigured with the emware and it's a wonderful opportunity for our partners to add incremental value through the sale cycle to what they've brought to NetApp in the past. Because as NetApp, we're really storage experts, where our partners have a much wider and deeper understanding of the whole ecosystem than we do. It's been interesting for us to have discussions with partners, cuz we're learning a lot, because we're now involved in layers and we're deeply involved at higher levels of the stack, than we have been. >> I'm really interested in that, because you say, that you have this consultative relationship with these customers, how are you able to learn from them, their best practices and then do you transfer what you've learned to other partners and other customers? >> From the customer and we try and disseminate the learning as much as we can, but we're a huge organization with many account teams, but it all starts with what the customers wants to accomplish, minimally they need a solution, that's gonna plug in and do what they expect it to do today. What's the more important part is where what their vision is for where they wanna be three years down the road, five years down the road, 10 years down the road. It's that vision piece, that tends to drive more towards one part of the portfolio, than the other. >> Take us through how this works. You walk into an account, presumably Aero ECS has a customer. The Aero ECS customer says, "Well, we have an issue, that's going to require some specialized capabilities and how we use our data". You can look at a lot of different options, but you immediately think NetApp, what is it, that leads you to NetApp HCI versus on tap, versus Solid Fire, is there immediate characteristic, that you say, "That's HCI"? >> I would say, that the driving factor was the fact, that they wanted something that's simple and easy to manage, they want to get a mango data base up and running or they've got some other application, that really depends on their business. The underlying hardware needs to function. Bryan was saying, that it's got element OS sitting underneath it, which is in its 10th iteration and you've got VM version six, which is the most adopted virtualization platform out there. These are two best breed partnerships coming together and people are happy with that, and can move, and manage it from a single pane of glass moving forward from day one right the way through when they need to transition to a new platform, which is seamless for them. That's great from any application point, because you don't wanna worry about the health of things, you wanna be able to give an application back to the business. We talked about education, this event is gauged towards bringing customers together with NetApp and understanding the messaging around HCI, which is great. >> What are the things, that you keep hearing form customers, does this need for data simplicity, this need for huge time saving products and services? What do you think, if you can think three to five years down the road, what will the next generation of concerns be and how are you, I'm gonna use the word, that we're hearing a lot, future proof, what you're doing now to serve those customers needs of the future? >> Three to five years down the road. I can't predict three to five years out very reliably. >> But you can predict, that they're gonna have more data, they're going to merge it in new and unseen ways and they need to do it more cheaply. >> The future proofing really comes in from the data fabric. With the integration into the data fabric, you could have information, that started on a NetApp system, that was announced eight years ago, seamlessly moves into a solid fire or flash array, which seamlessly moves to a hyperconverge system, which seamlessly moves to your private cloud, which eventually moves off to a public cloud and you can bring it back into any tiers and wherever you want that data in six, seven, eight years, the data fabric will extend to it. Within each individual product, there are investment protection technologies within each one, but it's the data fabric, that should make customers feel comfortable, that no matter where they're gonna end up, taking their first step with NetApp is a step in the right direction. >> The value added ecosystem, that NetApp and others use and Aero ECS has a big play around that, has historically been tied back into hardware assets, how does it feel to be moving more into worrying about your customers data assets? >> I think it's an exciting time to be bringing those things together. At the end of the day, it's what the customer wants, they want a solution, that integrates seamlessly from whether that be the rack right the way up to the application, they want something, that they can get on their phone, they want something they can get on their tablet, they want the same experience regardless whether they're in an airplane or right next to the data center. The demand on data is huge and will only get bigger over the next five years. I was looking at a recent cover of forest magazine, it was from a number of years ago about Nokia and how can anybody ever catch them and where are they now? I think you need to be able to spot the changes and adapt quickly and to steal one of the comments from the key note yesterday, is moving from a survivor to a thriver with your data, it's gonna be key to those companies. >> In talking about the demands on data growing, it's also true, that the demands on data professionals are growing too. How is that changing the way you recruit and retain top talent? >> For us, as NetApp, if you were to look at what we wanted in the CV five years ago, we wanted people, that understood storage, we wanted people, that knew about volumes, that knew about data layouts, that knew how to maximize performance by physical placement of data and now what we're looking for is people, that really understand the whole stack and that can talk to customers about their application needs their business problems, can talk to developers. Because what we've done is we've taken those people, that were good in all those other things I mentioned, when you ask them what did you love about this product, none of them ever came back and said I love the first week I spent installing it. We've taken that away and we've let them do more interesting work. A challenge for us is, us is a collective society, is to make sure we bring people forward from an education perspective skills enablement, so they're capable of rising to that next level of demand, but we're taking a lot of the busy work out. >> Making sure, that they have the skills to be able to take what they're seeing in the data and then take action. >> We want our customers to look at NetApp as data expert, that can work with them on their business problem, not a storage expert, that can explain how an array works. >> Bryan, Rory, thank you so much for coming on the show, it's been a great conversation. >> Thank you. >> Thank you very much. >> You are watching the Cube, we will have more from NetApp insight, I'm Rebecca Night for Peter Burris in just a little bit.