>> From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering SAP Sapphire Now 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend. We are in Orlando in the NetApp booth at SAP Sapphire 2018. We are joined by a new person to theCube, Amit Sinha, the Founder and Chief Customer Officer at WorkSpan. Amit, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me, excited to be here. >> So I'm really excited to understand more about WorkSpan, what you guys do. Tell us a little about that, what opportunity you saw in the market with respect to alliances that you went, "Ah why is it no one's doing that." You have this great idea. >> Yeah, absolutely, we had this ah-ha moment, in this day and age of connectedness around the world, there is not a single company that goes to market alone. Right, when the reality's that we all serve the same demanding end-customers. We got to align our marketing. We got to align our messages, We need to align our innovation. I mean just altogether in order to be more. Easier said then done, right. So that's we saw the opportunity, that what if there was a network of alliances that are connected with one another, and if they can truly define a joint innovation, a joint solution, take it to market, co-market it. When they co-market they can get twice the audience at half the cost, and then co-sell. That way they can improve their vendors, and we are truly seeing that, so that's the opportunity that we saw, to really make the life of the alliance manager, the alliance leader, simpler, and easier to do in this connected day and age. >> Well, essential because also on your website, 60 to 75 percent of announced alliances fail. That's enormous, so talk to us about some of the successes that you have had, talking with companies, as you say, that, you know, nobody goes to market alone these days, did they have those ah-ha moments as well when you came knocking on there and say, hey look what we're developing. >> Absolutely, so look at this large event here. Sapphire is one of the biggest enterprise events out here. Over 100 strategic alliances are here from SAP, and they will all make key announcements here about joint products, big golden markets, but can you imagine, three months down the line, 70 percent of them will be actually catching dust on the road. They won't even watch the people, the business cases will be the winner. And that's such a wasted opportunity. The amount of due diligence that goes into kind of creating an alliance, thinking about the business case, people putting together solutions. But then once they announce the keynote, that's where the decline really happens. There's no operational support behind, how do you take this to market. That's where WorkSpan comes in. People wanting to join sales plan, the joint marketing plan, the joint solution plan, to really operationalize that people coming together across the platform. In India we say that a marriage is between families, and that's very true. So really, an alliance is between companies, deep in the companies, not just the alliance manager working with another alliance manager. It's really marketeers, sales folks, alliance people. So, it's a family of two companies coming together. And that's where WorkSpan, why it's the foundation, the consistent process logic, and a data driven argument around it. So you can dig decisions on the base of data, to say, okay where is my alliance working, and where does it need help? You don't do post mortems after that, you can fix as you're going along. >> So let's talk about that process and data driven nature of alliances. Alliances are complex setups, just starting at the very beginning of saying, you know what, I'm, we're two companies, we overlap in areas of competition, but there's these outliers where we really can partner together to make that happy. You look on a show floor, you see brands that are obvious, you know, we're in the NetApp booth and we've talked SAP Hanna a lot, and right across the way is the Oracle booth, and they're talking heavily SAP on Oracle, so there's this opportunity to cooperate, and there's this area of competition. A lot of that is data driven, how do you capture that data and help create the process logic to help companies identify alliances and then execute upon, and manage those alliances going forward. >> Well I think that's an excellent question, so when you are living in a network in this interdependent work, you will partner in some areas and you will compete in some places. So for this network world, we need a new security model, so that only people who are allowed to see something are able to see that thing. We call this Attribute Base Access Control. Compare that to traditional applications which do role based access control, just because you're higher up in the organization, you get to see everything. But this new module of security, Attribute Based Access Control model, allows the right people to get into the right plans, so that they, and they alone, can see it. So you might be working for SAP on, let's say the Google relationship, or the Apple relationships, or the Oracle relationship, or the NetApp relationship, only those right people have those accesses. And the owners of those programs can control and secure that data. So what it allows a company to then do is, it's even more secure in this day and age. We can argue that in this day and age with GDPR and all those compliance efforts, that WorkSpan is far more secure, than sending spreadsheets out, which is the current mode of collaboration. So you can enforce a corporate policy around, what is your shared data, what's your private data. So in the same opportunity you can have private data for your own company, employees to see that as them as sort of partners. So that translucency, not transparency, but translucency is really really important when you do alliances, and that we understand is model of WorkSpan. >> So how do you help, like, for alliances marketing for example, and say there's a joint campaign, NetApp with one of their partners for example, and they wanted to do some lead generation activities, events, webinars, lunch and learns, digital campaigns, and they're gonna get leads that come in from that, and they might say, ah, okay, well I don't want to give you all of that. How do you help with some of that, I mean it kind of goes to the "coopertition" theme a little bit, but from a marketing standpoint, I'm just curious, how do you help either reduce or mitigate concerns that companies, alliance partners would have in that space, or do you come in and sort of help them from a strategic area to normalize some of these concerns? >> Yeah, so what we do is we partner with the company's marketing automation systems, so let's say NetApp is working with AP Cloud for customer. So at this event we announce the integration between WorkSpan and this AP Cloud for customer. Similarly other customers may have other marketing optimations, and you should see in a low quarter market, or a salesfirst.com, so we integrate with those systems. So what happens is marketeers can continue their contact database and their lead machine in those systems, and we get aggregate results in WorkSpan to really see which alliances are doing well. So we don't get into what marketing automation systems do, we partner and we integrate with them. So that, what happens in that, we are extending an investment the company already has made in their marketing automations tech, and we come across as a partner or alliance automations tech, so that really the alliances knew one another. And why is this important. This is important because if you're like an Intel or a NetApp, you may be working with a whole ecosystem of providers, and they themselves have their own marketing automation systems. So you imagine if you are at an intel or you're a NetApp or you're an SAP, you can get all this data back, because there's WorkSpan in the middle. So as a network, you may have just one percent of the data, but your overall network is far more intelligent than all the data you've been collecting. >> So again, whenever we get a topic like this, we have to invoke John Forrier's name and get some block chain conversation going on, from an ideal of, you know, basically there's just, you guys have become an authority of authentication, there's reputation, there's all these fundamental infrastructure things that you have to determine. And you think through, you scale this out beyond just, you know, alliances, and honestly technology is one area. There's all the attributes in manufacturing, in other companies, how does this align with, or a more aggressive question, how does this sort plant like, the ideas of smart contracts with the lies of block chain? >> Yeah, absolutely. So BlockShare is a really good implementation of what we really have done in WorkSpan. So, in WorkSpan, if you think about it, it's a network. There are transactions, they're like, flowing across different parties. And these transactions are trusted, right, across different parties. Let's say an Intel or a NetApp stays approved on our platform, the process extends to the partner and they get a contract, that simple. So in some ways, in living in a connected world, we need to have these kinds of smart contracts and trust in data source that is not just your own. We're living in a shared data world, right? So one of the key partners at Bolt, well NetApp works with this Bolt Intel as well as SAP, right. So, because SAP program funds the SAP marketing campaigns here, and they're both Intels, and they both come from trusted parties, NetApp is able to trust that data, trust that transaction that makes it too. So we provide that trans-foundation based on the qualities that.. >> Sorry, Amit, but that's kind of the trust foundation, as sort of aligns to what Bill Madridment said in his keynote this morning, about, you know, trust being this new currency. You guys have been attaining a lot of momentum in the Fortune 500 space. Tell us a little bit about how you're doing that, and then if there's a customer example that you, that's one of your favorites that you think really articulates your brand values, share that too. >> Absolutely, so we've been very fortunate that we've been trusted by a lot of Fortune 500 companies to come on the platform. Really want to orchestrate their platform and their ecosystem. And we are seeing this need that the head of alliances seen, they're going to be very strategic at the board, where they want to be data driven and numbers driven. They're no longer saying, I'm okay by saying that my alliance with such and such partner is going well. They want to be quantified, they wanna say it's going well by this much. So this is where the main value prop is, we have had companies on our platform that have generated 58 percent more leads, that have reduced their marketing cost by 50 percent. Intel and SAP specifically, this is their third year on our platform, and year on year they have collaborated more number of campaigns, deeper in the regions, where their marketeers are working with intel marketeers, for example. So they got a 24X internal marketing investment, [Lisa] Wow. where as they were expecting an eight to 10x marketing investment, so dramatically increased. For SAP, that meant 100 million dollars more than double at lower marketing cost, just because the two companies can unleash their shared potential with the shared customers across the world. Now this happened, this was not an overnight success, this is a three year success in the making, where there's deep partnership and collaboration at the regional level, at the marketeer level, and all rolling it up at the head of alliances. So Intel is one company, we have SAP of course as a marketing account. We not only work with hardware alliances like NetApp and Intel, but also their SI alliances are on WorkSpan, so large, as many as size you see here, those programs are coming at WorkSpan as well. People at Novel were invited on WorkSpan, HPE is on WorkSpan, so that's a great example as well of a Fortune 500 company. >> Wow, lot of momentum. You know, it's for companies like SAP, like WorkSpan, where you've got software and you've got something under the hood that a lot of people won't know what's happening, or further jobs don't have to know or care, it's always challenging for a brand to go, how do we show the value of our product and service is when it's not something we can touch, or see, or feel. And it's really through the validation, the best you can get, is through the voice of your customer. And the stats that you shared, you must be sort of salivating, with we can actually help you increase Legion by 58 percent, or increase revenue opportunities by 40 percent. I mean, you've got some really substantial data driven facts to show how you're transforming a business. That's got to be, that's gotta make doing business a little bit easier, that you know you've got such salitity. >> Actually when you think of the world, it's really diverse, right, but you can see patterns from this all. So when you work with a lot of partners and you're orchestrating them on your ecosystem, you're running different kinds of marketing campaigns or different sales opportunities. They have different traction depending on how you actually executed them, right. But when you step back and you say, hey, webinars don't really work well in Japan, late evening events work better in Japan. But in the US, one of the best course, it seems like webinars work better. Or such and such partner does a really good job of hiring clients in events, but this other partner I spent a lot of money with, it all seems to go in search or non advertising that I don't see a lot of benefit of, right. So you can make these data driven arguments by partner, by channel, by investment, by, you know by any metric that you want now. So now the head of alliance, this is exactly where the value profit for spenders. Now you can be totally data driven and say, this works, that doesn't work, so I should do more of this and spend less there. >> Fantastic, well Amit I wish we had more time to keep chatting, but thanks so much for stopping by and sharing not only who WorkSpan is and what you do, but some of the significant impact that you can deliver to your customers. >> Thank you so much for the opportunity, loved talking to you both. >> Likewise. We want to thank you for watching theCube, I am Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend, from SAP Sapphire 2018, thanks for watching. (electronic music)

>> Narrator: Live, from Las Vegas, it's the CUBE covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> And welcome back to The Sands everyone. John Walls here along with Keith Townsend, and we are at Dell Technologies World, day one of three days of coverage here on theCUBE. Keith, good to see you sir, it's been a while. >> It has been about six months. >> Where have we been, and you've got that going on. You look so distinguished and professorial. >> You know what, I'm trying to make up for the lack of hair. (laughing) I appreciate that you noticed. >> Well it looks good, it looks good. Two guests with us, talking today about Extreme IO. We have Chhandomay Mandal, who is a Vice President of, or rather Director of Marketing, I gave you a promotion. >> Yeah, actually I like that. >> Can I get one, too? >> Director to VP, just like that, at Dell, and Kandy O'Mara who's a solutions architect at VMware, I'm sorry no promotion, Kandy, that's the way it goes. So Chhandomay, if you would, before we get started, let's talk about Extreme IO a little bit, and tell the viewers at home a little bit about the product and then we'll get into VMware's use of it and how that's taking shape. >> Yeah, so Extreme IO is the purpose build market leading all flash add-in. It's built on unique content, however meta data centric, party controller architecture coupled with intelligent software that helps us deliver very high performance, ranging from hundreds of thousands to millions of IOPs with consistently low sub millisecond latency, irrespective of what the system load is, how much data has written through the alley, or whatever the workload characteristics are. Now, this metadata centric architecture lends itself to a lot of other benefits, for example, we do in-line all the time data reduction on the data path, and that leads to not only very high storage efficiencies, but also, since we do not write anything that's not unique, down to the SSDs, it gives much more longevity to the SSDs themselves, driving down costs. Our thing is it's pretty simple to use. >> And probably from a customer perspective, right, that's the huge value. >> Yes, it's pretty simple to deploy. We have an intelligent HTML 5 best EY, that's consumer grade easy to use at the same time, providing all the enterprise functionalities that you'll expect. The fourth thing I'll mention is integrated copy data management, so because this is a extremely high performance all flash alley, it is expected to do great in well TP environments, marginalizer environments, but on top of it, the way it is architected, because of this always in memory metadata architecture, the copies are literally as good as production volumes, so it's not just for production, you can actually use the copies to run workloads on them, and you get the same performance, same in-line all the time data surfaces on the production, on the copies, and you can not really figure out any difference between production volume and a copy volume, so that lives in to a lot of business benefits in terms of consolidating various copies and changing the application workflows. >> So Chhandomay, we'll dig into that in a second, with the inline dedupe, inline dedupe with copy data management, but first let's bring it up higher in the stack. Kandy, amazing performance numbers out of Extreme IO, but the all flash market is an extremely crowded market. For the average use end-user, as you engage customers, and you come to them, you know VMware runs VMware or Dell Technologies runs best on Dell Technologies, how do you help customers, even when you look at the Dell Technologies portfolio, when you have all flash V sand, you have Isolon, you have Isolon with flash, you have all these solutions, how do you help them navigate the broad portfolio and them come to the, give us some typical use cases for an Extreme IO. >> Right. For our instance, the first implementation of Extreme IO we have done was with SAP Hanna. Now that's an in-flash memory database, so, everything's in flash, you need a really fast backend storage array. So extreme IO, all flash with sub millisecond latency is a perfect fit. If your database is all-in memory, you can't have a slow storage behind it. You'll lose the performance, right, your database will become degraded. So that was our reason for going that direction, was because of the all flash memory of SAP Hanna. Now, the rest of those infrastructures actually have good use cases for other things, but in this case, for us, it was extreme IO. >> So let's focus in on that SAP Hanna usage. So SAP, in memory database, a lot of SI's will tell you you know what, the storage layer just needs to be fast, it doesn't have to be extreme IO fast, what do you guys find, what was the specific advantages in the SAP Hanna that brought you down to extreme IO. I mean the rights are done in memory, so. >> Well, actually the rights actually go to the disc. It is in memory, but it still has to write to disc and get the response back, especially the rights, right? >> Especially on SAP Hanna, it has very specific requirements in terms of when you're loading up the database, it needs to load up in a very specific. >> Kandy: It's like a tenth of a second, they use. >> For SAP Hanna, even though it is a new memory database. >> Right, that's where the misconception is, people think oh we put out slower storage, no you actually need the storage to be able to respond back to the database as quick as it does. The minimum requirement, I mean the maximum latency is like a tenth of a second, I mean it's really low. But it's sub millisecond, so we have no latency, we are actually getting a through-put in the performance. And there's other benefits with it as well, always on the reduction, that's huge, that's a big factor. When you don't have to have multiple copies sitting on your array, that saves you a lot of capacity. >> So people are saying, crowded market, lot of options, lot of choices, what was it for you that specifically said, okay, this is our product, this is what we want to dance with, so to speak, because you've got a lot of options. >> It was basically, it was the response that was needed for performance, and it was all flash, we were making a decision on where we wanted to run SAP Hanna, we did not have it implemented anywhere else, and we were like, we have existing infrastructure, and we were moving to a new data center, and we had to make a decision where we wanted to go, and extreme IO fit the bill, it met many of our different requirements. One of them was performance, the second one was the total lower cost of ownership, and then the snap technology, that was huge. >> So, let's talk a little bit more about that snap technology. I've spent a lot of time as an SAP infrastructure architect, and one of the most painful parts of SAP operations is being able to refresh DEV, QA, M plus One, the lower environments from production. What advantages have your, have you and your customers seen using snap management with extreme IO? >> So, let me kind of give you the broader view, and then you can talk about the very specific instances that you have seen. Extreme IO's snapshot technology, we call it Extreme IO actual copies, they are best in, best on the in-memory metadata. And extreme IO doesn't write anything on the SSDs unless it's unique across the entire cluster. Snapshots, by definition, is a copy. Like you mount it and make it writeable, so, for us, when you take a snapshot, it's an extremely fast operation, because all that we are doing is updating the metadata in memory, and then, if you are keeping it as a prediction copy, say for example, like as a read-only, just to recover from a disaster, then that's one purpose, but then the other purpose is use them as writeable snapshot, where, you can run your DES DEV, copy for backup, all of those things. Now, why can it do these things? The reason is, all these copies, they are not consuming any extra space. Until you are writing something unique to it as a DES DEV copy, right? So now, you have that capability of consolidating lots of copies, in our tradition, I mean, our customers base, for every database, there is literally like five to eight copies, 60% of the storage that gets consumed is essentially copies now if you consolidated all those copies into the single alley without consuming any extra capacity at the same time delivering that very high performance, not only for your production environment, but also for your DES DEVs, Qas, sandboxing, that gives the customer a lot of values, not only in terms of infrastructure dollars, but also transforming the application workflows, improving the productivity of the developers, and the storage admin, VM admin in general. So that's where we kind of see across the board from our VS customers. Now, alright, what's your experience? >> I'm like, "wow." No, actually what we do is, we're a little different. We actually use the writeable performance snapshots, we use them at our DR site, and what we'll do there is we'll mount those into a test bubble, and it is having our production environment, instead of needing a separate DEV environment, we can mount basically, in a little isolated bubble, those writeable snapshots, or copies, and test anything we want in our true little production environment. And then toss it away when we're done. So we can test out a new release, or we can do something different with the database or an application, and then when we're done, toss it away, that way we don't need so many different environments built out so it's a savings there. We don't make the local copies, what you guys were talking about for staging DEV, those are already built out, but we do put those on the same array now. Used to be, you'd have production on one array and stage on a different, right? But now, because they're similar, and you want the dedupe and the compression benefits, you want them on the same array, because that's where you gain that. The snapshots we do at the target, we play with those, the writeable, it's performance ready. It's the same performance as if you were on the source, which is a big game changer there for us. >> And I think it's really, from a technical perspective, really important to know why extreme IO is so much better at snapshot management. One of the things that Sanders will warn us, is that snapshots degrade performance over a period of time, so therefore the fact that you guys have a dedicated metadata subsystem helps improve overall performance. But I'd like to talk about your use case for extending to your DR side. So, from DR DI, what do you guys use to replicate data from one extreme IO to your DR? >> Right now, we, for us right now with SAP Hanna, we're using recover point with extreme io snapshots, which is fabulous because once the two sync up, the first initial sync, at that point, recover point literally just goes out and gets a snap diff and that's all the data is transferring over, so it lowers the requirements of your LAN, you know the bandwidth requirements are lower, so that's what we're using today. It's a great tool for us. And that way, we can mount it at the target site. >> And then just briefly, we're about out of time. Chhandomay, if you would, going forward, let's talk about where you are in terms of development, what you see as being maybe the next critical phase for extreme IO. >> So, in fact, here in Dell Technologies world, we are announcing the ability of our native repetition technology. Kandy mentioned she is using extreme IO with Recover Point that's a great solution. Now, we are going to have the native repetition technology and what's different from other solutions that are out there is this replication is also metadata aware, and as a result, it's not only sending only the unique data over the web, but also it's globally deduped and complex. And, suppose on your target site, you already have a data block. That might be unique for your primary site, and hence the primary says hey I need to send over this data and our protocol is going to say, yep, I have this metadata, I already have it, so send me the metadata pointer to it, and we are all done, we don't even need to send that unique block that was in the primary site, if it happens to stay, or it happens to exist, on the secondary site. As a result, we see great reduction in the wan bandwidth that's going to be used, and the total capacity that you will need between primary and secondary. So that will also be reduced. In fact, our numbers that we are going to say, you can get 38% less storage capacity wise, and wan bandwidth could be reduced as high as 75 to 80% based on the traditional mechanisms. >> So we actually did a test on this to see the performance between replicating a database using Recover Point on extreme IO with snapshots, and then we also did it with extreme IO data replication, and it was eight times faster. It was eight times faster replicating the same amount of data. >> So less data loss in case of emergency, just a higher level of service to the business. >> Nothing like a happy customer, right? >> Yeah. >> I actually love this product, I would not be talking about it, I really like extreme IO and I've been doing this for a while. >> Well, Kandy and Chhandomay, thanks for being with us, we appreciate the time, sorry about the promotion. (laughing) I think you've earned it though. Thanks for joining us, we appreciate it. >> Together: Thank you. >> Back with more from Dell Technologies World here in Las Vegas, you're watching theCUBE, back in just a bit.