>> From the SiliconANGLE media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE! Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman! (bubbly music) >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and you're watching theCUBE's Boston area studio. Happy to welcome back to the program Randy Arseneau and Steve Kenniston. Gentlemen. >> We're back! (Stu laughs) >> Absolutely. >> It sees like only minutes ago we were here. >> How can I miss you if you don't go away, oh wow. Gentlemen, thank you so much. We've been talking storage and SDI, which of course, is software defined infrastructure essentials. We're gonna dig inside and Steve, let's start with, you know, sometimes we argue over definitional things, and when you hear software defined, oh it's about software, and especially when you talk about the storage world, it's like wait, there's always been software when we talk about storage. So explain why it's a little bit different now, then what we were doing, you know, even five years ago. >> Sure thing Stu, I think one of the number one things that we run into a lot of that we hear, conversationally, it's storage and it's software. And now we're hearing a lot more about data services, right? The ability to connect data, so forget the physical storage for a second. Connect the data to the people, right? Because as we've been talking all along today, right, this evolutionary platform is being able to provide more people access to more data than they've ever had before in a very secure way, right? Such that, they can actually not only get their jobs done, get 'em done better, get 'em done stronger, get 'em done faster, without all the, as my boss likes to say bouja bouja, (laughs) dealing with having to get at that data. So, if I look at before and after, right? If I look at the before aspect that dealt with, you know, how do I get to my data, right? Or how do I get access to that data if I'm a developer of five years ago, right? It ends up being, and you can attest to this, and please do, right? A conversation between the developer and IT. And then it becomes a myriad of questions back and forth about why do you need it. What do you need it for? How much do you need? Where does it need to live? How fast does it need to be? All of the things that you can get today programmed, right? Into a programmable infrastructure, and just say click and then we provide that to you, right? So before it was all these conversations. Then I gotta buy it, then I gotta procure it, then I gotta secure it, then I gotta know how many LUNs you need, and, how fast it is, and then I gotta provision that out to you, right? And you go okay, and then you say well now you need that. And then the next conversation is well I can't get to it with this application which is on this server which is, now it's another whole, you know, before a developer can start working, it could be a month. Whereas afterwards, it should be, if you have a good programmable infrastructure, I have my application like a Chef or a Puppet or an Ansible, and I push a button and it says, okay I need this particular data set, and it needs to have this set of services. It needs to be this available, it needs to perform this fast, I need to be able to make these types of copies, click go, right? That's kinda where we're at today with what we're hoping the software can do for you. >> Yeah, I always worry, sometimes we try to oversimplify things and we miss, kinda the why, so. One of my favorite jokes we all had is, you know, there is no cloud, it's just a computer somewhere else, because, and it was like no, no, no, wait, there's still gear underneath it. But I missed the: well why does that matter? It's like, oh wait, I've got an order of magnitude more, you know, that I can access for short periods of time, and therefore I can do things that I couldn't do before. And when I think about data it's, you know, you know, big data, you know, massive data, things like no, no, no, no, no, it's not just storing bunch of bits somewhere in case I need them for a regulatory thing, because I've gotta do governance compliance, blah, blah, blah, and everything, but, it's like: Wow! You know, data is, you know, a driver for business, and therefore, you know, data services that allow me to protect and secure and access all those data, is so super important. >> Absolutely, and there's another analog I think is it's, if you think about data services, as we're talking about it right now, it's becoming more of, and the self service metaphor is a very important one I think because, to Steve's earlier point, in the old world, you know, you used to have to go through this complicated workflow and checkpoints and sign-offs and all these procedural, you know, loopholes that you'd have to jump through in order to provision something which, by the time it became available it was probably outdated, right? So, you're constantly behind, right? Now, at the pace of global business and digital business and the importance of data as a driver of global business, you just don't have that luxury anymore, you can't afford to be waiting on the availability of that piece of information so, not only does the immediacy of it improve the actual value of the data, because there's always a temporal element of value for that data, and every second you waste is potentially value that's diminished from data. So not only do we now reduce that kind of latency, we also provide much better reuse, so we talk about this idea of incremental value, right? So you can take the same data element or data construct and now instantaneously repurpose it in multiple ways to extract additional maybe unforeseen value from it, right? So we've gotten away from the concept of these kinda siloed systems that are, you know, this is my production system, this is my OLAP system, my reporting system, we now have this convergence, cross pollination of data, that flows between and among all these systems, which can now be made available via something like a data services platform or a, you know, fill in the blank as a service type platform in the self service mode, where it can be used by any number of different applications and users for any number of different purposes. >> Yeah and what I like about it, what I hear from customers, it used to be, you had to have the budget of a nation or a team of PhDs to try to figure this out. And as you say, with this cross pollination, when I get the data versus when I'm gonna need the data, yes there's the temporal piece, but sometimes it's, I might be doing it for a different purpose, or I'm not sure and things are changing all the time. So that, going back to our initial conversation, that agility and flexibility, being able to access and, you know, tie into that data, and have a range of services is so critically important. >> Well that's a good comment, right? You need to have the budget of a nation in order to do this, and then along came all the cloud providers and said: no you don't, swipe your credit card and start working, right? The tricky part for me, the consumer, of that, great, now I've got the processing power I need, but I need my data to build my particular application. I love, sorta to finish that outright. In order to build the right application, to make sure it works for what I'm gonna do because at some point, right, and I know Dave likes to talk about this a lot, I need to be able to integrate it into my existing systems, and if the performance isn't the same and that's what, I'm gonna probably run into a lot of buggy stuff over here. So I need to be careful with that. What I think is interesting is, and I love to use the analogy, think of the first bank that came up with the application where I could snap a picture of my check, right? I bet the CIO of the competitive company went to his development team the next morning after seeing that commercial and said I want one of those. Do you think, I mean, if you broke, and I don't like always like to use particular verticals, because I think this conversation extends across all applications. But do you, if you had to break down what does one banking customer cost the bank over time, right? And then you said for every day I'm late I lose five customers, and you had to go through that whole lengthy process just to get started for the development team to start working on something like that, with their data, right? I've gotta make sure that the data fits into how does a deposit work, how does it transact, how does it show, when does it show? All those stuff matter to my data, right? I need to put that underneath. But now I can do it, if I can do it programmatically, or provide the infrastructure as a service, hit a button, and I don't have to be a rocket scientist, right, I can just do it for my application, now I'm up and running. >> Well, and flipping it, and looking at it from the providers perspective. So if I'm the consumer of those data services, it's great for me. If I'm the provider of those services it's also very beneficial to me, because now, having that elasticity and that fractional consumption model where I can offer you exactly as much compute or storage or, you know, analytic horsepower you need for your particular use-case and environment for as long as you need it. That gives me a tremendous value proposition that I can then provide to you, so it's really, mutually beneficial on both the supply and demand side, if you think about it. >> Actually, so David Floyer from our team has done lots of research talking about just, real business value that can be driven back when I can like leverage that data. It's like, oh wait, now I have things like Flash that allow me, you know, very fast to make snaps, wait, I have real, this is the actual data, and then I can test on that and then how fast can I get that back into production if need be. There's a lot of things we can do now that just those enablers in the new technologies at scale. >> Well, and I also think it's pretty interesting, we talked earlier about our three patterns, right? Modernize, transform, and the next gen. If you think about the next gen, right? That's, now what I wanna do as a corporation is I wanna bring on new people and I wanna do some data analytics. That data analytics is gonna allow me to learn stuff about my business, and I'm gonna wanna start to do stuff in a new way. I'm gonna wanna start to do stuff in a new way, today. Right? I don't wanna wait and say okay now that I know what I think I wanna do is X, and wait six months for the infrastructure to be there to start programming against it. No, I wanna make real time decisions today, I wanna do real time things today. That's how that evolution starts to happen and it needs to be faster for those people. >> Yeah well one of the promises is, you know, we're at cloud computing, when I need it, it's there, I don't need to worry about what's available. Talk to me about what is scale, and you know, that speed mean to your customers? What kinda architectures do they need to go to to be able to, you know, have that kind of experience no matter where they are? >> Yeah I think you're starting to boil it down into products and while that's good, right new technologies, and new capabilities like Flash and NVME and that sorta thing, that's the raw performance, that's the engine of the car, right? But you start thinking about all the telemetry data that racers collect to then tweak the car, not just the engine, the car, the foils, and that sorta thing, in order to get the maximum amount of speed out of the car, that's really the performance stuff that we're talking about and that's all the instrumentation around the different products and that sorta thing that sit within the portfolio, that enable things like self service, it enables things like, which is speed in its own way, right? And it's data protection, and it's faster RPOs and RTOs, different types of protections sets of services. It's disaster recovery, faster replication, replication to the cloud, lower costs, right, replication into the cloud, maybe not necessarily in on the data center. All of those thins in the portfolio equal speed. Whether speed be raw performance, getting from A to B, or speed of business, which means I can be, I can be doing whatever that thing is that makes me more competitive, quicker than the other guy can do it. >> Yeah, and when you have these services which are much more encapsulated and kind of, you know, to use a very old term, kinda self documenting in a way. If you think about taking a data element or a data structure or some piece of knowledge or information that we're gonna do some kind of processing on, and you load that with as many definitional characteristics as you can, without A: slowing it down, or B: making it too expensive, then you inherently improve the value of that thing, whatever that is, right? So, you know, great, there's a million examples, the picture of the check is a good one, you know, the telemetry coming from delivery trucks, for FedEx or UPS, there's a million examples where the ability to gather data, which would be gathered anyway, and used for some other purpose, but now you layer on some of these additional service characteristics and dimensions to it, and it becomes a whole new entity that now has a whole other set of values that can be expanded upon. So it's really this multiplicative effect that we see, that allows you to take your data, which is your most valuable asset typically, and leverage it across multiple use-cases and in multiple dimensions. >> Yeah, so, Steve, when I think about data services, you know, if I think the old world was rather fixed, and the new world is, you know where are we today, and what's kinda the near future look like? Help us walk through that a little bit. >> Yeah, I think you painted it very well in the beginning, right, we always like to look out front and say this is utopia, this is where we're going. Where are people today? I think there're a lot of technologies out there that, if you're starting to modernize, and I think we're in that modernization trend right now, where a lot of the newer technologies, or even some of the older technologies that you might have installed in your environment, are building out a robust API set. Because the new stuff is all API driven, so if I'm an incumbent and I'm in a data center and I wanna maintain my hold, my footprint, I need to start working with other things. Newer versions of a lot of the incumbent technology is building in restful APIs. Now you're bringing in newer technologies, maybe a Chef or Puppet sitting on top of your infrastructure that has restful APIs. The trick for the infrastructure, for the IT team, is to slowly evolve into that infrastructure developer that we talked about. Now they're learning how to connect those two, right? And as I'm learning how to connect those two, I'm also learning about how to make that data available in other locations, or how to make those applications talk in other locations, that they'll impact my production, right? So where are we today? I think we're slowly starting to understand what these API connectivities are, and if there isn't that connectivity, I think folks are really starting to look at what do I replace that incumbent with to make sure that I'm getting that out of what I'm gonna need for the future, so, I'd say we're 20% down the road, right? But things are moving fast, I mean, as time goes forward it goes faster and faster and faster, and, you know, a year from today we might be at 50%, right? Or 60. >> Yeah, and I would just add to that that the level of integration that exists between the products in the spectrum portfolio is very foundational and very, you know, it's a very intricate structure, right? So, as we evolve products and solutions, you know, we just had an announcement this week of the new Flash platform on the hardware side, so there's, as these things become available, they start to then elevate the value and improve the capabilities of other parts of the portfolio as well. So there's this kind of platform story that you start to be able to tell, and that's really what these, this series has been about and what the follow on sessions will be about drilling into specific solutions at a lower level of detail, is how do we build, you know, the information platform of the future for our clients? >> Yeah, great. And I know there's more coming in the future, but the last thing I wanted to ask you here is we had a while that we were saying well I'm just gonna simplify everything. Public cloud is cheap and easy, you know, hyper converge is gonna boil everything down, and it's just like this one box. Well, and if you look at both of those spaces, they've evolved and now the line I've used I think if I was going to, you know, build compute in Amazon, or go buy a server from pick your favorite OEM of choice, you know, the cloud probably has more options and is more complicated to buy. You know, we'll figure out how the pricing is depending on whether you buy the three years reserved instances or anything like that. But, you know, customers, the paradox in choices is really tough for people as they do so. How do you balance that flexibility, but still try to make it easier, because you know, staffing, you know, I can't have, you know engineers dedicated to, you know, helping trying to figure this out. Oh, the next release comes out in a month, and everything I learned is already old. >> I'd appreciate your input and feedback on that, because what I'm about to say is, is I think easy is relative, right? And it's relative to the person who needs to access the systems or the data or the equipment or that sorta thing right, so, if I may, if I'm someone who's graduated from college and looking to join the IT workforce today or in the next few years, right? To me, simple means, right, a myriad of things, right? And I might've been trained on and educated on, but I'm gonna stay in that world. Why do you continually buy an iPhone? You don't switch over to Android, why? >> They're from different ecosystems, yeah exactly. >> Right, or why does someone go the other way, right? It doesn't matter, you pick one, and that's what you know, and that becomes easy for you, right? And then, as I'm learning, so lets say I pick AWS, right? As I start to continue to learn, and they come out with new things, and that's what I pay attention to, I find these new things that plug in, right? And it's only when vendors come to you and talk about not just hey I've got this new fidget spinner, (chuckles) right, or wiz bang technology, it's, it's I know how to integrate with your platforms to make your life easier. Those are the conversations that actually pick peoples head up and go, oh okay that does make my life easier, right? >> And that's exactly what I was just gonna say, we talked earlier about this whole concept of integrate and automate verus rip and replace. You know, innovate as opposed to institutionalized, so this is exactly that. This is, we as trusted advisors and integrators at a factor are able to go to our clients and say look you have typically a complex environment that has multiple different platforms and stacks that you're working with. You may be able to standardize on a common model or a common model portfolio structure for everything. Not likely though, you're probably gonna continue to have, you know, different pieces of the puzzle. We, it's our job and our sellers job and our partners job to develop an integration strategy and an automation strategy that exploits each of those that are in place to the best of their current ability, and provides a path forward, so to your point, eventually will all things live in the cloud, and will the cloud become, you know, so self aware and so sophisticated that's it's able to provision itself and manage itself and write your apps for you, perhaps. You know, probably not in our lifetimes. So, in the mean time, large organizations and small organizations still have to get from point A to point B. They have to run their business, they can't afford to spend, you know, a king's ransom on IT. But they also have to be secure and reliable and perform, etc. So, we provide a portfolio of solutions that plugs into exiting infrastructure, augments it, maybe replaces it but not necessarily, and helps our clients get between here and there and provides them the headroom to grow into the future as well. >> What's your answer to the simple and easy? >> Yeah, well, first of all right. I think, just on the definitional piece, you know, we'll all be living in the cloud when we've just redefined that means it's, it's hooked up to the internet. (Steve and Randy laughing) It means that it's cloud because everything is. And, here's the challenge of the day, no one can keep up on everything, you know, I've had the pleasure to talk to some of the smartest dang people in this industry, and, >> Thank you. (laughs) even the ones, you know, absolutely, but the people that, you know, are creating new stuff, and you know, whatever it is, they're like, I can't keep up with my own firm. >> How do you have time to learn? >> You know, it's like, they say, you know, the doctor would need, you know, every week would need a thousand hours to read up on everything in their specialty. But, it doesn't mean that we're out of jobs, actually we've got lots of new jobs because we love, we've done some events with MIT, where it's, you know, racing with machines, it's people plus machines, you know, automation does not get rid of your job, what it hopefully gets rid of is the crap you didn't wanna deal with anyway. We saw for a while, we wanted to get rid of undifferentiated heavy lifting, well, let's hope that, you know, as, if you talk to the IT people, it's like the thing that you look at every month and you're like oh God I have to do that, or can't you automate that piece of it? >> And it actually raises a really interesting point, and we haven't touched on it, I don't think, up til this point, but, this is another one of the areas where IBM is uniquely positioned in this discussion, and in this space, to bring to bare a level of sophistication and advanced artificial intelligence, cognitive capability, machine learning, we are, today, delivering the worlds most sophisticated, powerful, capable solutions in that space, and not surprisingly that technology is imbuing everything that we do. So our entire portfolio is interspersed with very sophisticated AI capabilities, analytic capabilities for self adaptation, you know, self learning, self healing. So, it gives us again a competitive advantage I think, as we take these solutions to market that they are imbued with this very sophisticated level of advanced processing. >> Yeah and, the other thing I'd say, I know Steve you brought it up in one of our discussions there, IBM has a lot of partners. I never look at IBM saying we are the only one, we are the be all and end all, we'll have everything, no. The CIs and the MSPs and the CSPs and, you know, software partners and everything like that. You mentioned competitive environment, I think the first time I heard the word cooperative, it was almost always about IBM. Because, yes, IBM probably has a product that does something along those lines, but they know they're not the only ones and they'll continue to partner to make sure that customers get the solutions they need. Alright, any final words you wanna leave on this segment, gentleman? >> I wanna thank you very much for hosting us for this event. >> Indeed. Yeah, thank you for your insight, Stu, we appreciate it, you know it's always important for us to not read our own press clippings too much, it's important to get the external viewpoint and get the outside perspective, so we appreciate your input. >> Well hey, and thank you so much for bringin', both of you, we've worked with you for many years, always appreciate your viewpoints, and look forward to continuing the conversation. Alright, thank you so much as always. Give us any feedback if you have, check out theCUBE.net for all the websites, Randy Arseneau, Steve Kenniston, I'm Stu Miniman, thanks for watching theCUBE. (bubbly music)

>> From the Silicon Angle media office, in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. >> I'm Stu Miniman, and you're watching theCUBE's Boston area studio, where we're talking about storage, and SDI essentials. And of course, storage, and infrastructure, really are there for the data in the application. To help me dig into this, Rob Coventry, and Steve Kenniston, thank you so much, gentlemen. >> Thanks, Stu. >> Alright, so, yeah, when we talk about one of the only constant in the industry, Steve, you said in one of our other interviews, is change. The role of all of this infrastructure stuff is to run your applications, and of course the application's, you know, the really critical piece of everything we're doing, is the data. So, Rob, maybe talk to us a little bit about your viewpoint, what you're hearing from customers, help set up this conversation. >> Well, one of the biggest changes that's going on these days, is the move towards cloud. And I often kinda want to reset the definition of what we mean with, when we say cloud, 'cause it means so many different things to so many different people. To me, cloud is all about, not a place, not somewhere where you're running computing. While it may have started out that way, when Amazon launched AWS back in, what was it, '02 or '03? Or salesforce.com, and when they were running everything in the cloud. But, it's really evolved more to a style of computing, distinct and different from your traditional computing. It has certain attributes, those attributes are what distinguish cloud computing from traditional computing, more than anything. And so, basically now, storage has gotta evolve, and support that, just as like we did with virtualization. >> Yeah, absolutely. You know, when we did it, in the industry, we spent so much time arguing over definitions, and we went, "Hybrid, public, multi, composable, "composite, everything like that." Well, you know, when I talk to customers, most of them do have a cloud strategy, but, number one is, the ink's still drying on what that strategy is, and the pieces that make up that strategy are definitely changing over time, as they grow and mature. But, they absolutely know that no matter where it is, their data is one of the biggest assets that they have, outside of people, and therefore how can they leverage, how can they get more out of data? The whole wave of big data that we were well into, and the next wave of AI, is all data at the center of it. >> Yeah, I think, I like the way Rob kind of positioned this. We've, we talked about, you hear a lot of folks talk about cloud. You know, a big part of what we're trying to do is have our sellers, as well as the community, understand that cloud isn't a place, right, it's a thing. And you've kind of alluded to what I want to do, specific types of either development, or programming, or provide assets to the world, whether it'd be data, or whether it'd be things like websites, or that sort of thing. It's got to live somewhere. And where that lives is becoming more cloudy. Now, whether that place is on-prem, or it's in a cloud, or it's in a remote data center someplace, at the end of the day the functions that you want to be able to deliver on, behave in a cloud-like behavior, and I think that's becoming more the trend of what people want. And really, it's the consumption model of where it lives, and how you pay for it, is really the bigger part of how things evolve. >> Yeah, applications are changing a lot. You used to say, the era of shrink-wrapped software is mostly over now. It's, talk a lot about microservices now, and when I'm building things, you mention functions, which catch into functions, and services, and serverless. You know, a whole new area that's changing. What's needed for this world, you look at it, you've got, you know, most customers have hundreds if not thousands of applications. Most of those aren't ready for that brave new world of cloud-native. There's usually some stuff, so, maybe Rob give us a little bit on that spectrum, and where your customers... >> So, look, I think we recognize that people have the vast majority of their infrastructures running, or applications are running, on traditional infrastructure, right? And so, they've got a couple different choices. They've either got to modernize what they've got, and the modernization is, you know, it, I was sharing with Steve last week, you know, we're modernizing our house, because we built the house back in '01, it was golden oak, it was gold handles everywhere, and so now we're getting rid of all the gold, we're painting all the golden oak, and repainting the whole house, right? So, that's a modernization. It's not a complete refurbish, remodel, that's what we would refer as refactoring, right. That's a much bigger, heavy-duty thing. And so, businesses are going to have to look at those traditional applications, and decide which of them should be just simply modernized, and then adapted, or modernized to work, and orchestrated, with that bigger cloud-like environment, and which of them need to be refactored to operate with the underlying cloud infrastructure. Which, by the way, expectation is that it's completely virtualized, it's automated, it's policy-driven, it's orchestrated, it's got all those types of cloudy-like, you know, pay on demand types of characteristics, that people learned and love from AWS, and from Google, but now they're getting on-prem as well. >> Yeah, and let me poke at one thing, because you said, you know, virtualized, and I think you don't mean just a hyper-visor, but we have things like containerization, you know, bare metal's back, you know, it's so funny, what's old is new again. Remember, it was like, "Oh, we're gonna go 100% virtual," except for containers and everything else, now, so now we've got lots of flexibility into how it's deployed. And there's that modernizing the platform, and modernizing the applications, and sometimes you do one before the other, depending on how you're doing it. >> Great point. I mean, not everybody understands the distinction, right, between containers and VMs, right. But the way I look at it, containers, one of the first things that they were really trying to attack is, a more efficient way to do virtualization than what we had with VMs in the past, right? And one of the things that they learned, is if they break those applications into smaller functional microservices, then they get another benefit, and that is continuous development. That's critical to the flexibility and agility that the business needs, to be able to constantly evolve those applications. And the third factor is, what I call asynchronous scale. So, each little function can consume however much memory, storage, and compute that it needs, independent of all the other functions in there, whereas when it was operating as a monolithic application, the traditional approach, well you were kinda stuck with however much the largest footprint was required. Now, you get a lot more efficiency out of it, you get a lot more availability, and you get continuous development. That's what you get out of containerization. >> And if you bring that up even one more step now, right, and I like to use this analogy when I'm presenting to clients, and maybe this is helpful, is, if you look at our, just take two of our product. We'd take Spectrum Protect if you take Spectrum Protect Plus, right. Spectrum Protect, you know, 25 years in the industry, number two in the world, everything, right, millions of lines of code, might even be tens of millions of lines of code. Any time you have to do anything to that code, like I want it to support X, all ten million lines of code need to kinda make sure it's adaptable to that thing, and it needs to be able to lift and shift. And we were talking about agile development, which we do now, but you were also talking about the release trains, and all that stuff, right, and what ends up going in and out. Versus, look at Spectrum Protect Plus, built on an agile development, built on microservices. I want to put in a service, I can just grab that service and plug it in pretty easily. I don't have to kind of drag all that code kicking and screaming, so to speak, along with it. But, um, now I want to ask you a question, Stu. Because I tend to think the analysts, as well as kinda the thought leaders in any company that are trying to think about helping sellers sell, and that sort of thing, we're about 12 to 18 months ahead of the customer. We have to be, because we gotta kinda see what's out there. What are you hearing around this containerization, refactoring? I think we have an opinion, it'd be interesting to hear an outside view of what you think is happening. >> Sure, Steve. And in the last few years, I spent a lot of time going to the cloud shows, I go to CubeCon, going to my second year of doing serverless comps, so, look, yeah, serverless functions, as a service, we're still in the early adopter phase. Some cool startups out there, I'm excited to talk to real customers that are doing some cool things. But even I asked Andy Jassy if, you know, the CEO of AWS, he had made some comment, you know, if we had said a couple years ago, "If Amazon was built today, it would be built on AWS." And he had made this, "If Amazon was built today, "it would be built on Lambda Serverless." And I was like, come on, really? He's like, "Well, no, I mean, what I mean is, "that's the direction we're going, "but no, we're not there yet, because we can't run one "of the biggest global companies on this yet." So, look, we understand, what could be done today, and what can't, when we talk servers? Containers, containers are doing phenomenal, we're now, containers have been around over a decade, you know, Google's been talking for many years of how many billions of containers they spin up and down. But, I've talked to much smaller companies than, you know, the Googles and Yahoos of the world, that like containers, are moving in that environment. I'm not sure we've completely crossed the chasm to the majority, but most people have heard of Docker, they're starting to play with these things. You know, companies like IBM and everyone else have lots of offerings that leverage and use containers, because a lot of these things, it just gets baked in under the hood. When you talked to, you brought up virtualization, it's like, oh. It's, you know, we watched this wave from the last 15 years of virtualization, it's just for basic, we don't even think about, sure there's environments that aren't virtualized for a certain reason, if it's containers. But, you know, when you've seen Microsoft get up on stage, and talk about how they've embraced Linux. And a lot of the reason that they've embraced Linux is to do more with containers, that's there. So, containerization is going strong, but, when you're talking of the spectrum of applications, yeah, we're still early because, the long pole in the tent, at least customers like to, it's those applications. If I've been running a company for 20 years, and I have my database that keeps everything running, making a change is really hard. If I'm a brand new application, oh, I'm doing some cool, you know, no sequel, my sequel, you know, cool applications. So, it's a spectrum as we've been talking about, Steve, but, um, yeah, the progress is definitely happening faster than it ever has, but, you take those applications, there's a lot of them that I need to either start with a lift-and-shift and then talk about refactoring things, because making change in the application's tough. APIs, we haven't talked about yet, though, is a critical piece into this. As worry about, okay, we're just gonna have API sprawl just like we have with every other thing in IT. >> I definitely want to get to API, but one more, just one more piece of color. When you're at these conferences, and the users are there, listening to the folks, but one more piece of color is, do they have, applications run the business. But it has to sit on top of something, so there's the infrastructure piece. What are the questions around refactoring, and containerization, that happen around infrastructure? I'm trying to to think about how to get from A to B, what do I think about the underlying infrastructure, or is that even a conversation, because a lot of the stuff is cloud-native, right, I mean, or can be cloud-native. >> Yeah, and the nice thing about containers is, it just lives on top of Linux, so, you know, if I've got the skillset, and I understand that, it's relatively easy to move up that way. Yeah, for a lot of the developers, when they say, "The nice thing, if I do containers, if I do Kubernetes." I really don't care, the answer is yes. Am I gonna have stuff in my data center, yeah, of course. Am I gonna do stuff in the public cloud? Yes, and that's if I can have the same Linux image. We've been talking for years about, how much of the stack do I need to make sure is the same both places to make it work, because that was always the last mile of, "Okay, it's tested, my vendor said it's good, "but I get an okay, what about my application, "my configuration, and what I did?" When I use Salesforce, I don't need to worry about it. I can pull up on any device, well, the mobile is a little bit different than the browser, but for the most part, I'm anywhere in the world, or I work for any company, it's relatively the same look and feel. So, a little bit long answer on this, but when it comes to containers, what we've been trying to do, and what I found really interesting, is, the Nirvana's always been, "I don't want to worry about what's underneath the stack." And when I said, I mentioned the cool new thing, serverless-- >> The reason for that, is the business, with containers, gets that continuous development, and continuous availability, and scalability, all in that infrastructure. The infrastructure enables that, right? So, in my mind, the reason people want to do it is, they know, the speed of change in their business is never gonna get any slower. And this platform enables that speed of change. >> So, the one thing, those of us that live through the virtualization wave, virtualization, great, I don't need to worry about what server, or how many servers, or anything. Yeah, but, the storage and networking stuff, oh wait, that kind of all broke. And we spent a decade fixing that, and trust me, when containerization first went, I had, like three years ago, went into a conference, someone is like, "It's so much faster than virtualization, "it's this and this and this." And I got off, I'm like, "Hey, uh, "we've all got the wounds, and, y'know. "You know, less hair, now that we've gone through a decade "fixing all of these issues, what about this?" Docker did a great service to the industry, helped make containers available broadly, and have done a lot. I'd say networking is a little bit further along than storages, most of the the things, you know we talk serverless, it's mostly stateless today. When we talk containers, okay, where's my repository on the side, that I do things, so, state is still something we need to worry about. >> That said, you know we've made a big investment in our ability for a block storage, and by the way, all of our file storage offerings, to be able to work with both Kubernetes and OpenShift, so, those are two of the predominant, prevalent container-based systems out there. So, I think that, at least it gives that ability to attach anything that needs persistence to our storage. >> So, what I'd love to get your perspective on, because we talk about, boy these changes that are happening on the infrastructure side. For a while it used to be, okay, business needs a new application, let's go build a temple for it. So, the business people says app, and then the infrastructure comes, team's set in, okay, I've got the building specs, give me a million bucks and 18 months, and now I'll build it. Well, today, you don't have as much money, you don't have as much time, but that relationship between infrastructure and application, they've gotta be working so much closer, so, how do they, you know, when I'm building this, who is that that builds it, and how do they work even closer? >> Well, that's this, we can talk about the infrastructure developer, I guess, too. Because really, this is the role that kind of is an evolution from what maybe was in the past a storage administrator, right? It's somebody who is setting up a set of policies, and templates, and classes of storage, that abstracts the physical from the logical, so that the application developer, who is going into Kubernetes, or into OpenShifts, says, I need a class B usage for storage, that has backed-up, and maybe replicated. Or, I need a class C, that is backup, replicated, and highly available. And the storage administrator, in that case, is setting up those templates, and just simply making sure that he's monitoring all this, so that when the additional demand comes, he just plugs it in and starts to continue to add more. >> Okay, so, I've talked a lot to developers, I haven't run across an infrastructure developer, before, as a term, so, where do they come from, what's their skill-set, maybe help flesh that out a little bit for me. >> I was gonna say, I think in a number of customer presentations I've given over the course of this last year, it's come up a number of times. So, I think, and granted in a larger companies. And it typically comes across in a chart that shows, not the number of people are changing, but the skillset in the different organizations I have are changing. So, today where I spend a lot of time doing administration, five years from now I'm not gonna be doing that much administration. So, what I want are capabilities, well, first of all I need to program the infrastructure, so that it is programmatic, to either the application, connect through API so maybe I have a chef or puppet doing dev-ops, but when I make that call, as a developer in the company, to chef or puppet because I want this, to Rob's point, everything underneath that-- >> It's orchestrated underneath there. There's a set of policies that are set, that says, this is how much compute, how much network, what kind of storage you're gonna get. That's the infrastructure developer, who sent, using APIs that are in the infrastructure, and at the higher-level platforms like Kubernetes and OpenShift, that basically allow that developer that just says, "I need some of that, I need some of that." The experience is not a lot different than what they get with Amazon Web Services, or Google App Server. It's a similar kind of experience, but you can do this on premises now. >> Yeah, and, it's very similar, as you said, and it makes a lot of sense to me. Because, for sure, chef puppet, been hearing lots of people talk, that's the people, it's like, you're not configuring luns anymore, I don't need to do all the old masking, and all the configurations. The network people, it's like, no, you've got a different job, and it's shifted, that whole vision of infrastructure as code is starting to come to fruition. >> And we talk a lot, or at least I do, right around, IT, and technology, and infrastructure's made up of three things. People, process, and technology. And the people are evolving just as fast as the infrastructure needs to evolve. So, tomorrow, I want to be building a programmatic infrastructure today, so that my people can be focused on, like you said, where is the future, I don't know, but I constantly need to be thinking like the analysts think. I need to be 12 to 18 months ahead of the company, so that I can continuously evolve that infrastructure, and help them get there, but I don't disrupt the flow of the people that need access to the data, or the applications, or that sort of thing. It's gotta be constant, and that's how that skillset is changing. >> Okay, so, is that, what's that infrastructure developer's role in helping with the app modernization? How do I figure out, you know, what do I just build new, what do I move over, how do I start pulling things apart? >> Yeah, I think it definitely starts by looking at the different applications that they have, I think you made a good example where, okay so now I want to modernize as much as I can, and now I want to start drilling into by taking a break, gaining some knowledge and some insights about containerization, and APIs, and that of sort of thing, and figuring out which applications in my stack today, I can refactor, which makes sense to build out of microservices, you know, refactor into microservices and that sort of thing. Start doing that, get that done, and then start looking at, ahead of that, what's next? So, getting that infrastructure programmed and plumbed ready, so that anyone who needs to access it can, so it's more hands-off. Think of the younger generation coming into technology today, right? I want to use my iPhone, I want to do this, I want that piece of storage, I want it to be a click of a button. I, as an infrastructure developer, need to help set that up and make that happen, so that as we move forward, I'm doing other new things. Would you agree? >> Absolutely, absolutely. So, at the end of the day, those guys are basically taking advantage of those large pool of services, whether it be storage, networking, or computing, creating APIs, or leveraging APIs, in that infrastructure, and wiring it up so that the end-user developers can go and access them at will, without waiting. >> Yeah. Last thing I want to ask in this segment, is, you know, change is tough. And when I look at my application portfolio, it can be a little bit daunting, so what sort of things should they be doing, to make sure that they're ready for the modernization, the transformation, to get along that journey a little bit faster? >> Well, the first thing is, is that you've gotta have a software to find infrastructure to be able to do any of this. And basically what that software to find infrastructure has, is has a number of attributes. The first of which is, an actual separation between the physical and the software. It has policies, it has the ability to, APIs that allow you to control that, that are either through command-line interfaces or rust interfaces, such that it can be orchestrated, and then you take advantage of all those all policies, such that you can automate it, monitor it, and manage it centrally. That is the base definition of software-defined infrastructure, and we've had it with CPUs for a long time, we've had it with networking, people have been doing network separation of software and hardware, and it's really IBM that is unique in this business, that has a set of software-defining capabilities that I think is different than the rest of the marketplace. >> Yeah, I mentioned it earlier, but I think I'll close on it too, is, you know, lots of customers, gotta modernize the platform, and that really sets you up to be able to modernize the application. Alright, Rob and Steve, thanks so much for joining us, helping us walk through the data, and the applications. Alright, thank you so much, I'm Stu Miniman, and, appreciate you watching theCUBE.

>> From the SiliconANGLE media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE! Now here's your host, Stu Miniman! (bubbly music) >> I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's Boston area studio, we're talking about storage and SDI solutions. But before we get into STI and all the industry buzz, we're gonna talk a little bit about some of the real business drivers. And joining me for this segment, happy to welcome back, Randy Arseneau and Steve Kenniston, gentleman, great to see you. >> Thanks for bein' here Stu. >> Thanks Stu great to be here. >> Thank you! Alright, so, talkin' about transformation, customers are going through transformations, IBM's going through transformation, everything's going in some kind of journey. But, let's talk about, you know, it used to be IT sat on the side, Randy we talked about in the intro, you know, IT in the business, you know, wait, they actually need to talk, communicate, work together. What are some of the key drivers that you're hearing from customers? >> So, it's a good question, and we talked a little bit about it on the previous segment. But, I think what's really happening now is that a lot of the terms that our industry has kind of overused and commoditized, have sorta become devalued, right? So, they no longer really mean anything significant. Terms like agility and flexibility and IT business alignment and transformation, which we hear a million times everyday, they've become just kind of background noise, but the reality is, especially now, in this era where, you know, information and data and analytics are driving businesses, and they're no longer, you know, nice things to have for the super advanced very sophisticated companies, they're table stakes, I mean, they're needed to survive in today's global economy. So they've taken on a whole different meaning, so when we talk about agility, for instance, agility means something very specific in the context of IT business alignment, and our solution stacks in particular. Generally speaking, the kinda the way I like to think of it is, I, I overuse sports analogies, but I think this one's relevant. So, a good quarterback is able to read and react. So, as the defense is shifting and making pre-snap adjustments, the quarterback views the field, sees what's happening, and is able to very quickly develop or institute a new offensive game, play, to take advantage of that situation. So that whole read and react idea is something that's very important for a business, especially now. So businesses are under constant pressure, competitive pressure, market pressure, compliance pressure, to be able to exploit their own IP, and their own data, and their own information, very very quickly. So that's number one. By using things like integration and automation within their IT organization as opposed to the old, you know, kind of vertical method of doing things. IT organizations are now able to respond to those rapid course corrections much more effectively. Same thing with flexibility, so when an organization needs to be flexible, or wants to be flexible, to adapt to a very rapidly changing environment. Things like, and this is really where Steve's product line is particularly relevant, things like data reuse, right? So we've got organizations that are running their business on this data, which is their most important asset. We're helping them develop new and creative ways to repurpose that data, efficiently, quickly, cost-effectively, so they can expand the value. So any given piece of data can now have a multiplicative value compared to its original form. >> Yeah, I think it's actually pretty important. When you think about, we're out there talking about products, right? And a lot of vendors are doing this, right? Buy my products you'll get agility or you'll get flexibility or that sorta thing, or maybe even more importantly, in a lot of the enablement we use to educate people on, we'll say, you know, this product enables data reuse. Well what does that really mean, right? What does that mean for business, right? And, when you say okay well it makes the business more agile well, how do you do that? Then it encompasses a whole breadth of solution sets around making that data available for the user, things like software defined storage, things like particular technologies, that can do data reuse. So, it kinda boils itself down in the stack, but to Randy's point, it's been so commoditized, the words, that we don't really understand what they mean, and I think part of what we're trying to do is, make sure when we talk agility, flexibility, or even our three patterns that we talked about, modernize and transform. What do they mean to us? What do they mean to you, the user? What do they mean--? Because that's very important to connect those two. >> Yeah, and I love, 'cause for a while we used to say, it used to be well, you know, do I get it faster, better, or cheaper? Or maybe I can give you some combination, and there're certain customers you talk to and it's like look, if you can just go faster, faster, faster, that's what I need. But, it's not speed alone, like the differentiation for things like agility is, number one: we are all horrible at predicting. It's like, okay, I'm gonna buy this, I'm gonna use this for the next three to five years, and six months into it, I either greatly over or underestimated, or everything changed, we made an acquisition, competition came in. I need to be able to adjust to that, so that was, I love the sports analogy, we love sports analogies on theCUBE. >> Well, you know. >> So that, you know, if I planned for, you know, this was the plan of attack, and what do ya know, they traded for a player the day before or their star quarterback went down, and the backup, who I didn't train against, all of a sudden their offense is different and we get torn apart, because we didn't plan, we couldn't react to it, you run back at halftime and try to adjust, but, you know, you need to be able to change. >> And again, I think another, from my perspective, from and IT business alignment, another, another metaphor that works well, is, you know, kinda what I call the DevOps-ification of business, right? So what's happening now, and it's interesting I think, is that you're seeing some of the practices around DevOps and agile development, which by the way, IBM uses for our own products. You're seeing that push upstream to the business, so the business is actually adopting DevOps-like methodologies for prototyping, you know, testing hypothesis, they're doing interesting things that kinda grew out of that world. So if you think about, even 10 years ago, that would've been kind of unimaginable, you would always have the business applying pressure, and projecting it's requirements onto IT, now you're seeing much more of a collaborative approach to attacking the market, gaining competitive advantage, and succeeding financially. >> Yeah, and if people aren't really familiar with DevOps, the thing that, you know, I really like about it is, number one it's no longer, you know, we used to be on these release trains. Okay, everybody on board the 18 to 24 month release train, we're gonna plan, oh wait, we didn't get this feature in, it'll be in the next one, we'll do a patch in six or eight months, no, no, no. There's the term CICD, continuous, you know, integration, and continuous deployment. It's, you know, push. Often. You know, daily, if not hourly, if not more, and, it's like wait what about security, what about all these things? No, no, no. If we actually plan and have a culture that buys in and understands and communicates, and you've got proper automation. You know, it's a game changer, all of those things that you used to be like: ugh, I couldn't do it. Now it's like no, we can do it, so. >> The only thing constant in business these days is change. >> Absolutely. >> So, if you know that, and you have to be able to plan and articulate and be ready for change, how do you make sure that the underlying infrastructure is ready to kind of adapt to whatever request you may have of it, right? It's now alive, right, it's like a person, I wanna ask it a question, and I need it to help respond quickly. >> And a lot of the focus of this series, as we talked about in the intro section, is our software defined infrastructure portfolio, which in many ways is kinda the fabric upon which a lot of these things are being woven now, right? So, we talk about DevOps, we talk about this rapid cycle, and this continuous pace of change and adaptability, adaptation. We're delivering solutions to market that really accelerate and enable that, right, so, one of the things we wanna make sure we communicate, you know, both internally and externally is the connective tissue that exists between solutions, products, technology capabilities on the software defined infrastructure side, and how that affects the business, and how that allows the business to be more agile, to be more flexible, to transform the way it thinks about taking solutions to market, competing, opening up new markets, you know, seizing opportunities in the marketplace. >> Yeah, it's, if you think about when you talk about strategy, smart companies, they've got feedback loops, and strategy is something you revisit often and come back leads to, when you talk about modernizing an environment, I always used to, you poke fun at marketing, oh we're going to make you future ready! Well when can I be in the future? Well, the future will be soon, well, then when I get to there am I now out of date because the future's not now? So, what is modernize, what does that really mean, and, you know, how does that fit in? >> Yeah, and it's a great point, and I think, we look at modernization as kind of the the constant retooling, right? So, IT is constantly looking for ways to be more responsive, to be more agile, be more closely aligned than a lockstep with the business, and align business. And again, we're trying to deliver solutions to market that enable them to do that effectively, cost effectively, quickly, you know, get up to speed rapidly. There's another, so we talked a little bit in the intro section about the C-level survey, the study that was done globally by IBM, it's done every year, the 2018 one was introduced recently, or published recently. Another one of the themes that was very important is that it's this concept of innovate don't institutionalize and the idea is that old companies, slow moving companies, more traditional companies, have a tendency to solve a problem or introduce and implement a system of some sort and be wed to it, because they adapt all of the ancillary work flows and everything around it, to fit that model. Which may make sense the day that it implements and goes live, but it almost immediately becomes obsolete or gets phased out, so, you need to have the ability to integrate, automate, innovate, like constantly be changing and adapting. >> Yeah, I love that, actually, in the innovation communities they say you don't want best practices, you want next practices, because I always need to be able to look at how I can do, right, learn what works and share that information, but, you're right not, this is the way we're doing it, this is the way it must always be, so let it be written, so let it be done. You know, no, we need to move and adjust. >> And I think, if you think about these things as in, in the beginning of the year when IBM launched global refining was, when we launched kind of our educational context for our sellers in the beginning of the year, it was really three patterns, right? There was modernize and transform, next gen applications, and then application refactoring. And in the beginning when we started to talk about, which I think is where 90% of the clients fall into, it's this modernize and transform, right? Easy to say, but what does it really mean? So, if you break it down into that fact that we know what clients have today, right? We know, you know, VMware's big, KVM is big, you know, Sequel is big, Oracle is big, right? If that's foundationally who you're talking to on an everyday basis, how do you help them take that solution set, and, don't start refactoring today, right, but take them to a point where when they start to do the refactoring, they're well positioned to do that simply and easily, right? So it's a long journey, but to get there you really need to kind of free up and shake loose some of that, some of the bolts, so that it's a lot more flexible over here. >> Yeah, so, talking about things that are changing all the time, so tell me, transformation, it's not about an angle, it's, you know, it's about journeys and being ready, so, you know, help us close the loop on that. >> Yeah, so we talk a lot about that internally, and again, transformation is another one of those kinda buzzwords that we're, we're trying to sorta demystify it, because it can be applied in a million different ways, and they're all relevant and valid, right, so transformation is a very broadly applicable term. When we talk about transformation, we're specifically talking about kind of the structural transformation of the infrastructure itself, so how are we making the storage and the compute more cloud like, more flexible, more easily provisioned, more self-service. So there's kind of a foundational level piece at the infrastructure level. We talk about transformation at the workflow level, so things like DevOps, like continuous development and integration. How do we provide our clients with the material they need, the raw materials, whether it's software, technology, education, best practices, all of the above, to be able to implement these new ways of doing business? And then there's really transformation of the business itself, now, a couple of those, the first two, are kind of happening within IT, but they are being driven by the transformation that the business is undergoing, so, the business is constantly, again, if they're still around and they're prospering, they're constantly looking for new markets to reach into, looking for ways to compete more effectively, looking for ways to gain and sustain competitive advantage in this very very dynamic environment. So transformation touches all of those, they're all equally valid, from our perspective, specifically as IBM, we're trying to tackle the sorta foundational level, and then kinda, by using assets like this, you know, research that we do at the C-level, we're trying to kinda build the connective tissue between the ground level IT stuff, and how the business is changing. >> Think, think, I mean, really as importantly, right, we're trying to build the foundation such that as we're thinking about the business, think taxis transforming to I wanna be more Uber like, or think even automotive industries wanting to be more Uber like, right? I read an interesting article about, you know, auto manufacturers today are thinking about no more buying of cars, right? That's a transformation of my business, right? How do I do that? Now a lot of it is, you know, I gotta set up the infrastructure, I gotta set up, you know, people, and process to do some of this, but the infrastructure has to adapt as well, right? And we gotta cause, and that's not gonna happen tomorrow, to your point Stu, like I wanna design for tomorrow, then the next day, then the next day, then the future, when is the future, right? But I need to have an infrastructure that can evolve with me as my business evolves and I get to this goal. >> And the shifts are now happening, they're no longer kinda tectonic shifts, they're seismic, right, they're not gradual, incremental, I mean they are in some cases, but they're more often seismic changes, and that's a great example. Uber burst onto the scene and fundamentally changed the way humans transport themselves from one place to another. And there's a million examples of that right? There's been genomic research, and even in media and entertainment, there's lots of ways and lots of places in which this shift towards more seismic change in the industry, or in a particular use-case is happening everyday. >> Yeah, so I love your insight, when you talk about your partners, you know, the old days were great where you used to just say hey, you've got a problem, I've got a product that will solve what you need, transaction, box, done. Now, it's like, we've been saying, when are we gonna have that silver belt in security, it's like, never. It's like, security is, you know, it's a practice, or, you know, it's a general theme that you have to do, it's like DevOps isn't a product, it's something we need to do. I heard a great line it was like, you know, oh, this whole AI stuff, well can I have a box and a data scientist and I can solve this stuff? No, no, no, this is going to be an initiative, we're gonna go through lots of iterations, and there's lots of pieces, so. It's a different world today, how do you help people through this as to, you know, what the relationship is now? >> No, it's very interesting, and to your point, can I buy a box that does that, right? We were at Think this year, and our security team, or actually I think it was our blockchain team was up, and I'm very interested in blockchain and what is it gonna do for the community as we kinda grow and that sorta thing. And up on the, on a chart they put this slide that had a million different, I mean thousands of different partners that we partner with, and we also enable to kinda deliver stuff, and in some cases we're competitive, in some cases it solves security, in some cases it does this. Now all of a sudden, it's not one thing anymore, it's like how does it fit into our infrastructure, but, back to your point about partnerships. I think IBM is constantly looking to its partners because they have really that trusted value and trusted relationship with the client, and at the end of the day, as much as we can come in and say oh this box will solve your problem, we don't really know what their problems are, right? It's the people who have those relationships that know where they're going along that evolutionary scale, that we really need to work and tie in with closely, to make sure that the solutions that we deliver on the underlying side are meeting their needs, which then in tern meet our clients needs, I think that's where we're goin'. >> And actually the blockchain is a great example of kinda building these vibrant ecosystems, right? Which is something else that large companies like IBM sometimes struggle with kinda building these very dynamic, very vibrant ecosystems, but I think IBM's very good at it, and I think we've demonstrated that in a number of different places, blockchain being a recent example, but there are many others. And the STI portfolio is no different right, we've got strong partnerships across the board with other software providers, other go-to-market partners, you know, other content providers, there's a million different angles that we are able to, to introduce into the conversation. So we think all of those things taken together allow our sellers and our partners to bring a solution to their clients, regardless of their industry or their size or their particular use-case, that helps them optimize their performance in this new world of super agile, constantly changing, continuous transformation, and do so, we think, better than anyone else in the industry >> Constantly changing, distributed in nature, sounds just like the blockchain itself. (both laugh) Alright, Steve, Randy, thank you so much for helpin' us demystify some of these key business drivers that we're going to. Lots more we'll be covering, I'm Stu Miniman, thanks for watching theCUBE. (bubbly music)

>> From the SiliconANGLE media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE! Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman! >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and you're watching theCUBE here in our Boston area studio. We're gonna be talking about storage and SDI essentials. Happy to welcome back to the program Randy Arsenault and welcome to the program for the first time Rob Coventry. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you. >> So, on theCUBE, we've been documenting it, so many shows and so many interviews, digital transformation, how everyone's going through various changes in the industry, and we're gonna do a series of interviews here from our studio talking about what IBM's doing about transformation and enablement. So why don't we start there? Randy, we'll start with you. We've discussed many of these things with you. You're back to IBM, so give us what brought you back and what's changing at Big Blue. >> Yeah, thanks Stu, it's great to be back. So it's been an interesting, so, I came back late last year, December last year, so I've had an opportunity to kind of come into this process that Rob and his team have been working on for a while, so I kinda got dropped in midstream and it gave me sort of an interesting perspective on how things have changed, first of all, so there's been a fairly significant change in the way products are brought to market, the way we message, the way we communicate, the way we enable our sellers and partners, so it's been really interesting to kind of dive right in and get right into the meat of it. And I think Rob and his team have done a really good job of building a programmatic and systematic approach to delivering enablement and education to our sellers and our partners. So there's a whole process, a formalized process, around how we create it, how we deliver it. I'll let Rob expand on that a little bit, but from my perspective, it's been interesting to be able to participate right from the beginning in kind of adding an outside end view since I'm sort of coming at it with fresh eyes. So I think it's been a really good collaboration, working with the two teams coming together. So, the process, I think Rob and his team, again, have really perfected the engine that we use to produce these things. >> Yeah. Rob, love to get your viewpoint. I mean, industry watchers, I think back to even when I did my MBA, or when I worked on the vendor side, and as I've been an analyst, IBM's one of the companies that breaks the rules as to everything changes all the time, you have companies come and go. Living here in Massachusetts, we've seen lots of brands come and go. IBM's stalwart in the industry, so give us a little insight as to what you're working on. >> So yeah, IBM is the survivor in that dinosaur game that we seem to manage to evolve constantly. The evolution is an important aspect of it, and so one of the things that we did about a year and a half ago is we evolved our sales force and storage. We went from several different discrete roles to a single storage sales role. We knew what we had to do in that regard is to bring everybody up to speed to at least a minimum level in order to sell our entire portfolio, and what its strengths bring to the table, instead of just the product they were familiar with, that they were comfortable with, and that they had success with in the past. So one of the things that we did was, we kinda observed, how did we do transformation or education in the past? And it was predominately what I call a bottoms-up approach. Have a product, it solves a set of problems, here's how to do it, here's how to sell it, here's what it does, here's how it competes, works great in the industry. When you've got a large number of products, you cannot educate people in the right amount of time following that bottoms-up because by the time that you learn it, we'll have moved on the the next set of products and our competitors will outpace us. So what did was we said, let's take a tops-down approach and ask the question, what kind of conversations do our customers wanna have that lead into the various solutions that we're trying to sell, that'll give you an opportunity to have some credibility, solve the problems on your way in, and let the conversation dictate which product it is. So we created a set of five conversation that focused on things like dev ops, modernization, resiliency, life cycle management, you know, the kind of things that every IT department does, and then go from there, and it's worked pretty well. But one of the things that we observed was, we assumed a certain base knowledge when we put that enablement together, and we realized there's a set of terms that I think that they're lacking that we need to help them with. >> Yeah, so that was kinda my first project when I came back, was getting involved in the creation of these kinda streams and assets for this education in January, and it was delivered and it was successful and it was fairly detailed and pretty explicit, but it introduced a lot of terminology that we sort of presumed people were already familiar with, and we found out that wasn't necessarily always the case. So the real goal of this session or this series, is to kinda set the stage a little bit so we almost think of this as kind of a prequel, like this is really meant to functionally proceed what we did in January, so the goal is that once this is put together, folks will be able to go through this and then go reconsume or reintroduce themselves to the January content, and have a much better sense for what the terminology is. Hopefully we can demystify some of the buzzwords and some of the industry lingo that they're hearing from clients, and really provide a better framework in which to have the conversations that Robert was talking about. >> Yeah, it's fascinating. We talk sometimes the analogies we use is, right, are you talking in the right language? For me, I think food comes to mind. It's like okay, if I go to a foreign country and even if I don't speak the language, they can point me towards, here's the meat, here's the fish, here's the vegetable, and then I kinda know what I'd like, but it's kinda nice if you know, okay, well, Portuguese food, I'm kinda going to be looking at this, so getting some of the basic down to an understand and then participate and get deeper involved. >> And the other challenge is that a lot of the terminology that we use has become very commoditized, right? The words that every vendor in our space uses and uses and overuses, things like agility and transformation and modernization and refactoring and containerization, these are all terms that our sellers and our clients and our partners see a million times every day. So not only do we need to understand that a fairly baseline foundational level, what do those actually mean, but what do they mean specifically in the context of our solution portfolios? So as we go talk to clients, we can now translate from the very abstract sort of idea of refactoring, for instance, into a specific set of best practices and solutions that our clients can capitalize upon and use to achieve that goal. >> Rob, I have to think that we've seen this transformation from the customers too. IT is not this silo that just waits for the business to come, and well now, I can't do that, or it'll take me six months. No, IT needs to be with the business, driving the business, so your sellers need to be aligned with that and helping, is we're all in this journey together. >> No doubt about it. In fact, one of our primary goals here is the give the sellers context of, I call it the explain the hard candy shell that IT needs to look like, and don't worry about how everything inside of it works. The business looks at IT as that hard candy shell. They just wanna consume simple things like flexibility and agility, so that they can turn around and deliver the business that they need to deliver in the very competitive world that they live in, and we need to explain IT in all these terms in the context from the businessperson's perspective, and from that, then I think what it'll do is help them better use that in the context of their sales efforts. >> Yeah, and a lot of this is being driven by, so IBM every year does a sea level global survey, which is a pretty big deal for the company. So this year, 2018, first one was published recently, with a population of almost 13,000 sea level clients from around the world, so this is a pretty robust piece of research, and a lot of the findings, probably not surprisingly this year, are focused on these concepts of agility, these concepts of rapid prototyping. There's three very specific best practices that are called out: interrogate your environment, so constantly be on the lookout for opportunities, changes, threats, both from a business outside-in perspective, and also from an IT perspective in support of the business goals. Commit with frequency, so constantly be evaluating where you're investing, how you're prioritizing, where you're focusing your scarce IT resources. And experiment deliberately, so do lots of pilot programs, lots of prototypes. Introduce things like dev ops and rapid development, which by the way, IBM has done, so one of the interesting things that's changed since I was here last time is internally within the spectrum portfolio, we now have a fully agile workflow, which is one of the reasons why the portfolio was so dramatically transformed over the last five years that I was elsewhere. So I find it interesting that we're litting it internally, but we're also able to communicate that to the outside world as well. >> Excellent, I'll take a large box of ready for the future. I have no idea what it will be, and I can't ask you for for it, but I'll take three. >> Alright. >> You know, you might say that if you're a big company, but we recognize that some of the sounds very big, very large enterprise, and it may not apply to somebody that's small, and one of the things that I observed in this CXO study is I think it's applicable to no matter who you are, in the value chain of some of these very large companies, because there's a recognition that you have to operate in that orchestrated world that works with the supply chain that you're part of, and if you don't continually reinvent, continually evolve your IT to enable your business to keep pace with the expectations of that orchestrated business, then you're not going to be relevant in the future either. So we think that there's applicability here whether you're a large company or you're a small company, and one of the things that we're gonna try to do here is try to help our sellers understand that. >> Absolutely, great point is no matter whether you're big or small, everybody is being affected by a lot of these-- >> That's right. >> Stressors, it's just order of magnitude for some of them. Alright, Randy and Rob, thank you so much for helping us kick off the series. >> The best, thanks Stu. >> Looking forward into digging into much more of it. >> Thank you Stu, I appreciate it. >> Alright, and I'm Stu Miniman, thanks so much for watching theCUBE.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube covering HP Discover Virtual experience Brought to you by HP >>Hi, welcome to the Cube's coverage of HP Discover 2020 Virtual experience. I'm Lisa Martin, and I'm pleased to welcome from scale any one of our long Time Cube alumni. We have, all specially the chief product officer at agility. Hey, Paul, welcome back to the Cube. >>Hi, Lisa. It's been a long time, and it's just wonderful to be back. Thank you. >>This is our new virtual cube that appear where everybody is very socially distant but socially connected. So since it's been a while since we've had you on and your peers from stability tell us a little bit about scale and then we'll dive into what you're doing with HP, >>Okay? Absolutely. Let me give you kind of a pop down recap of where we're at. So interestingly, we're now it 10 year old company. We actually celebrated our never anniversary last year. Um, we still have our flagship product, the Ring, which we launched originally in 2000 and 10 that is distributed file and object storage software. But about three years ago, we added a second product called Zenko, which is for multi cloud data management. We do continue to invest in the ring a lot, both on the file side and the object side. The current release now is Ring eight. The target market for this is pretty broad, but we really focus on financial services institutions. That's a big base for us. We have something like half of the world's banks, about 60% of the world service providers, a lot of government institutions. But what's been fastest growing for us now is healthcare. We have a lot of growth there in medical imaging and genomics research. And then I guess the last thing I'll add is that partners are just super important to us. We continue to certify and test with SDI Solutions. I think we have 80 of them now deployed and ready to go. But there's a real focus here now on partners like Said Era and with a Iot and Splunk VM HP East or one. So those partners are critical to our business and we just love to partner with them. >>Do you been partners with HP for quite a while? Tell me about the evolution of the partnership as you've evolved your technology. >>Yeah, absolutely. It's interesting, cause I just noted this Ah, a couple of weeks ago. The company is 10 years old. We've been partners with HP for over half of that. It's about 5.5 years. The way to think about this is that we have a worldwide OM relationship with HP for the Apollo 4000 server line. The official name for our product is HP Apollo 4000 systems with scale itty ring scalable storage. Also quite a mouthful, but very descriptive. Ah, and then we work very closely with the HP storage and big data teams. I'm very tied into the product side, talking to the product managers, but also the marketing side and very much so. On the sales side, we've had super success with them in Europe, also here in the US, and there's growing business, but also in a P J in Japan. Specifically, >>you mentioned that one of the doctors right now that's really urging a healthcare and given the fact that we are three months into a global pandemic, anything that's interesting that you want to share in terms of how skeleton is helping some of your health care customers rapidly pivot in this very unprecedented time. >>Yeah, I would say that there's a couple of very notable trends here. The 1st 1 started a few years ago. We really, honestly didn't focus so much on health care until about 2000 and 17 18. But since that time, we now have something like 40 hospital hospital systems globally using our product and notably on H P E servers. Uh, and that's to retain medical images for long term retention. These are things like digital diagnostic images. MRI's CAT scans CT scans. These hospitals are mandated to keep them for a long term right, sometimes for five years, 10 years or even page patient Lifetime. I would say the newer thing that we're seeing now just in the last year or so is genomics research. There's so much concentration now on pharmaceutical and biotechnology around genomics. That data tends to be very voluminous, you know, it can go from hundreds of terabytes and petabytes, and moreover, they need to run simulations on that to do you know, fast iteration on different drug research. We've now been applied to that problem, and a lot of times we do it with a partner or something like a fast tier one file system and then us as the archive here. But we're seeing that the popularity of that just wrote tremendously within hospitals, hospital groups and also just dedicated research for biotechnology. >>The vault. You talked about volumes there, and the volumes are growing and growing each year as his retention periods, depending on the type of data, the type of of ah, imagery, for example. But from a use case perspective, what is it that you're helping your health care customers achieve? Is it is it backup targets? Is it disaster? Recovery is speed of access All the above. >>Yeah, so where we focus in health care is really on the unstructured data. This is all the file content that they deal with, you know, in a hospital. Think about all the different medical image studies that they have, things like digital files for CAT scans and MRI's. These are becoming huge files, you know. One multi slice X ray or digital scan, for example, can be gigabytes in size and profile, and that's per patient. Now think about the number of patients and the right attention of all of that. It's a perfect use case for what we do, which is capacity optimized storage for long term retention. But we can also be used for other things. For example, backups of the electronic patient records. Those are typically stored in databases, but they need to be backed up. What we found is that we're an ideal long term backup target. So the way hospitals look at us is that they can consolidate multiple use cases, undo our ring system on HP. They can grow it over time. They could just keep adding servers, and typically what they do is they start with a single use case, what they think of as a single modality, perhaps an imaging. And then they grow over time to encompass more and more and eventually think about a comprehensive image management system within a hospital. But those are popular today. Hospitals are also starting to look at other use cases. Obviously, we mentioned genomics, but hybrid cloud is coming at them as well. >>Talk to me about that as we see growing volumes of data, different types of modalities, lots of urgent need to you, said backup data, So data protection is critical. But as as healthcare organizations move to multi cloud, how considerate Ian HP help facilitate that migration? >>Yeah, So what we've noticed is, you know, there's both a feeling that they're fast and they're slow to embrace the public clouds. But one of the things that's obvious is that from a sass perspective, software as a service, they've really embraced it. Most of the big EMR systems, the electronic medical records, are already SAS based, so they are there, and in fact they're probably already multi cloud. But on the data management side, that's where we focus. And we hear a lot of use cases that would involve taking older data from on Prem and perhaps archiving it long term in a HIPAA compliant cloud in the US, for example, for long term retention. But there are other things. For example, they may want to push some data that they've generated on Prem to a public cloud like Amazon or azure, and do some kind of computing against it. Perhaps an analytic service, some kind of image recognition or, you know, image pattern detection. Um, the 3rd 1 that we see now in hybrid cloud is their interest in having second copies of the data so that they can continue operations. Right? I think we all know that hospitals have an absolute uptime need. They need to be running 24 by seven. One of the things that's starting to happen is rather than a second physical data center. They established a second site in a public cloud on and then they stage their applications and we can help with HP. Move the data from on Prem to the public cloud to have this sort of cloud disaster recovery solution. >>So cloud here interesting topic. Do you see there that in healthcare in particular, that hospitals and healthcare organizations are getting less concerned about cloud from a security perspective and more open to it as an enabler of scale? >>I think what they've seen is that the cloud vendors have really matured in terms of providing all of the hardening that you want in terms of data, privacy and data security. You know, 10 years ago, if you looked at the cloud, you would have been extremely nervous about putting your data up there. But now all of the right principles are there in terms of multi tenancy. Ah, secure authentication based on very strong keys. Encryption of the data. One of the first healthcare customers we worked with was completely ready to do this. But then, of course, they said, the images that we store in the cloud must be infected. So we were able to work in collaboration with them, to develop encryption and actually use their own management service for encrypting those images so that our system or the HP servers don't store the keys for encryption. So I would say yes, It's a combination of the cloud's becoming super mature. Some of them are now certified and compliant for this use case on, the customers are just sort of. They passed the first step of trying it on there really to sort of go into these use cases a little bit more broadly. >>And so with that maturity of the technologies and the more the willingness on the part of the customer to try and tell me how to HP and scale a go to market together. >>Yeah, so what we do is we've really focused on specific market verticals, healthcare being one of them, but there are others. Financial services is where we've had other success with them. The way we do it is that we first start by building very specific swim lanes. In HP parlance, that helps aimed the Salesforce on where we can provide a great solution not only with Ring but perhaps with complementary software. Like I mentioned H p e store once for data protection backup. They have other partner solutions that we just love to work with. Vendors like Wicca. Iot has a wonderful fast file system that is now useful in biotech. Um, and they use a system like the ring for storing the data from their file system and the snapshots in that. But the way it's been organized is really by vertical and to go and have specialized kind of teams that understand how to sell that message. We jointly sell with them, so their teams and our teams Goto calls together. It's obviously been very virtual, but we've usually collaborated very extensively in the field working kind of air cover at the marketing level, and now one of the newer things with obviously the new way of working is lots of virtual events were not only doing a discover virtual experience, but we started doing more and more webinars, especially with HP and these other joint part >>and carries in this new virtual era where everything like, he said, This is how we're communicating now. And thankfully, we have the technology. Couple questions on that related to sales and engagement. One. What are some of the things that the sales team but the joint sales teams are hearing now from customers that might be changing requirements given the Koven situation? First >>question. Yeah, I think what one of the things we've certainly seen is that almost nothing has slowed down in these industries. I mean, we're focused on industries that seem to kind of think long term, right? I obviously healthcare. They're dealing with the current crisis as much as they can. But what we've seen is that there still planning, right, so they want to build their I T infrastructure. They're certainly thinking about how to leverage hybrid cloud. I think that's it becomes very clear that they see that as not only a way to offer new services in the future, but also to save money today. They're very interested in that right. How can they save on capital expenses and human talent is an example. I think those have been the themes for us. You know, we do have some exposure to industries that might have a little bit more, you know, sensitivity to the current climate, things like travel related services. But honestly, it's been minor. And what we're finding is that even those companies are still investing in this kind of technology, really to think about the 2 to 3 and you're being horizon and beyond. >>Have you done any any messaging, your positioning changes? I know you also in product marketing or corporate marketing that relate to customers. You know, everybody prepares for different types of disruptions or natural disasters. But now we have this invisible disruptor. Any change in your messaging, your positioning either at stability or with the partnership with HP that will help customers understand if you're not on this journey yet, why they need to be >>so, Yeah, we have looked at how we message the technology and the solution, especially in the light of the pandemic. You know, we stayed true to kind of a top level hybrid cloud data management message, but underneath the covers, what do customers care about? They care about a solution that you provide, but they also care about what they pay for it. Let's let's be honest. One of the things we've done very historically is to have a very simplified pricing model. It's based on usable protected capacity. So the user says I have a petabytes of data. That's the license fee. It's not based on how much disk they have or how many copies they want to create or how many sites they want to spread it across. So one of the things we want to do is make that a little bit more clear. Eso that's come out a bit more in our messaging in recent months. The second is that what we feel is that customers really want to know us as a company. They want to feel assured that were here, that will support them in all cases and that were available at all times. And what that's translated into is a more of a customer community focus. We are very much carrying about, you know, our customers. We see them invest in our systems today, but they also continue to expand. So we're doing things like new community portals where they can engage us in discourse. They can ask questions live. We're online. We have a lot of tips and knowledge available for them. So I would say that those are the two changes that we put in our messaging, both on pricing and on a community involved >>and where community involvement is concerned. It's even more critical now because we can't get together face to face and have conversations or meetings or conferences as chief product officer. Imagine that was a lot of what you were doing before. Tell me what it is from your perspective to engage with the community, to engage with sales and your partners during this TBD timeframe of we don't know when we're going to get back together. What do you find? It works really well for continuing continuing that engagement. >>Yeah, I think the keyword for me has just been transparency. You know, customers have always bonded to know, really, what's what's going on behind the scenes. How does the tech work? Right? What's the architecture? And I think now what we're seeing is there sort of a ramp up on that. For example, what's very important for community is for people to know what's coming right? They want to know the roadmaps. They want to be alerted to new things that are not only the next quarter, but in the next year. Right? So I think that's our focus here is to make this community a place where people can learn absolutely everything so that they can plan not only for the next year, but like we said there, they're thinking three years and beyond. So we're going to do our best to be totally transparent and be expressed as we can possibly be >>transparent entrusted. Paul, those are two great words to end on. We Thank you so much for joining us on the Cube, sharing what's new at stability and with the HP partnership. >>It's been a pleasure. Lisa. Thank you for your time. >>Likewise. For my guest, Paul Scott. Sally, I am Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube's coverage of HP Discover 2020. The virtual experience. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

(bright music) >> Hello, everyone. Welcome to theCUBE Studio here in Palo Alto. We're here for our next segment, The Future of Networking. We're going to experience the future of networking through a demo of SD-WAN in action with Riverbed. I'm here with Josh Dobies, the vice president of product marketing, and Vivek Ganti, senior technical marketing engineer. We're going to give a demo of SteelConnect in action. Guys, thanks for joining me on this segment. Let's get into what are we going to show here, showing SD-WAN in action. This is experiencing the future of networking. >> Thanks, John. So what's exciting about this next wave of networking is just how much you can do with minimal effort in a short amount of time. So in this segment, we're actually going to show a typical transformation of a company that's going from a traditional, 100% on-premises world into something that's going to be going into the cloud. And so we're going to kind of basically go in timelapse fashion through those phases that a company will go through to bring the internet closer to their business. >> Great, Vivek, you're going to show a demo, set up the demo, what is the state? It's a real demo, is it a canned demo, what's going on under the hood? Tell us through what's going to happen. >> It's an absolutely real demo. Everything you'll see in today's demo is going to be real, the real appliances, the links you'll see are going to be real. The traffic is going to be real. And it's going to be a fun demo. >> Well the future of networking, and experiencing it is going to be exciting. Let's get through in the demo. I'll just say, as someone who's looking at all the complexity out there, people want to be agile. There's so much complexity with IoT and AI and all this network connections, people want simplicity. >> Right. >> So you can show simplicity and ease of use and value, I'm all interested. >> That's exactly it. Step one is we have to get out of the world of managing boxes. And we have to get into a software-defined world that's based on policies. So one of the first things that a company needs to do to start realizing these benefits of efficiency is to get away from the provisioning work that's involved in bringing up a new site. So that's the first thing that Vivek's going to show right now. >> John: Vivek, jump into it, show us the demo. >> Absolutely, so what you're looking at right now is the web console of SteelConnect manager. This Riverbed's SD-WAN solution. You're looking at a bunch of sites for a company called Global Retail, which is spread all over the world. What I'm going to do now is bring up a new site, really zero touch provisioning in Dallas, sitting here in Palo Alto. So let's get started. I'm going to jump right into network design and look at sites. I'll click here on add sites and really just enter a few physical location details for my site in Dallas. And the moment I click here on submit, not only is a pointer being created on the map for me, but there's a lot of automation and orchestration happening in the backend. What I mean by that is that there's a default uplink created for my Dallas site, and there's also a VLAN created for my site in Dallas. Of course I can go and add more uplinks and VLANS for my site, but then a lot of this heavy lifting in terms of creating these is automatically done for me by SteelConnect. But right now it's just a pointer on the map. It's not a real site. We don't have an appliance. But that's the beauty of it, John. What SteelConnect lets me do is it gives me the flexibility and the freedom to deploy my entire site from ground up, my entire network from ground up, before I deploy the first piece of hardware. The way I'm able to do that is with this concept called shadow appliance, which is really a cardboard cutout of what will be once I have the hardware appliance. So I'm going to click here on add appliances. I'm going to say create shadow appliance. >> So shadow appliance, the customer knows the appliance, they might have the serial number. >> Yeah. >> But it's not connected, it's not even there yet. >> No, it's not even there yet. >> They're doing all the heavy lifting, preparing for it to drop in. >> Yeah, think of it as just designing it or drawing it on white paper, except you get to see what your network's going to look like before you deploy anything. So I'm going to drop, let's say an SDI-130 gateway, add my site in Dallas, which I just created, and click here on submit. And that's the beauty of this, that now with this shadow appliance, I can click on this and really configure everything, right down to the very port level. And once I do have the hardware, which I ship to someone and have someone plug it in. >> So now you're configured. Now the appliance gets shipped there, someone, it could be anybody, could be a non-employee, just says, instructions: plug it in and put this ethernet cable in. >> Yeah, and sitting here in Palo Alto, I'm entering my appliance serial number. Click here on submit, and now that the appliance is connected to the internet, it knows to contact core services in the cloud, download its configuration, it knows what organization it belongs to, and it comes online in a matter of seconds, really. You'll see that it's already online as I was talking to you. >> John: Let's look at that, hold on. Dallas, right there, online, okay. >> Vivek: Yeah, and when it says pending, it means that it's actually downloading its current configuration. It's going to be up to date in less than a minute. And once it does that, when I look at the dashboard, this checkmark will be green, and it's going to start forming all those IPSec VPN tunnels, there you go. It's going to now start forming all those IPSec VPN tunnels to all my other existing sites, automatically forming so that I don't have to do any of the heavy lifting. >> John: So it does a self-discovery of the network. It just went red there, real quick. >> Josh: That's okay, this is where it's going to start creating the VPN tunnels. >> Vivek: Right, it's basically associating all those, it's negotiating all the security associations with all my other appliances. >> So no one's involved? No humans involved, this is the machine, get plugged in, downloads the code, then goes out and says where do I got to connect to my other networks. >> Yeah, the power of this is what you're not doing, right? So you could do all this by hand. And this is the way that legacy networks are configured, if you're still, you know, hardware-based approach. You have to go in and really think hard about the IP addresses, the subnets for each individual box, if you're going to create that full mesh connectivity, you're going to have to do that at an exponential level every time you deploy a new piece of hardware. So with this approach, with the design first, you don't have to do any staging. And when you deploy, the connectivity is going to happen, you know, for you automatically. >> John: Let's take a look at the site, see if it turned green. >> Vivek: Yeah, it's right now, if I click on it, you'll see that my appliance is online, but right now all the lines are red because it's still in the process of creating those IPSec VPN tunnels. But you'll see that in the next couple of minutes or so, all these lights will turn green, and what that means is now I have a single unified fabric of my entire network. But while we're waiting on that, let's actually move ahead and do something even cooler. Let's say our company called Global Network, Global Retail, wants to transition some of its applications to the cloud, because as we know, John, a lot of companies want to do that. For a few pennies on the dollar, you can make a lot of things somebody else's problem. So we've worked really hard with AWS and Microsoft to make that integration really work well. What I mean by that is when I click here on network design and AWS, I have a cross-account access going between my SteelConnect manager and AWS Marketplace so that I don't ever have to log back into the AWS Marketplace again. Once I do that, I can see all of my VPCs across all of my regions so that with a single click, and that's what I'm going to do here, I'm going to say connect to all my subnets in Frankfurt, I can choose to deploy a gateway of instance of my choice in the Frankfurt site. So what I'm going to do now- >> John: So you're essentially telling Frankfurt, connect to my Amazon. >> Vivek: Yes. >> John: And I'm going to set up some cloud stuff for you to work with. >> Vivek: So you already have your VPC infrastructure or your VNet infrastructure on AWS or Azure. What I'm doing is I'm providing optimized, automated connectivity for you. So I can choose to deploy- [John] All with just one click of the button. >> Vivek: All with one click of the button. So you see that I can choose an EC2 instance of my choice for the gateway. I'm going to leave it to t2.medium, and then SteelHead, because, WAN optimization because the moment we start migrating huge data sets to the cloud in Frankfurt or, say, Ireland in Azure, latency becomes a real issue. So we want to be sure that we're also optimizing the traffic end to end. I'm going to leave redundancy to on so that there's high availability, and I'll leave AWS routing to auto, and I'll talk about that in just a bit. So when I click here on subnet, what's happening is SteelConnect is logging into my AWS account. It's looking at all my VPCs, it knows what subnets it has to connect to, it's going to plop a gateway appliance as well as a WAN optimization appliance, do all the plumbing between those appliances, and make sure that all traffic is routed through the SteelHeads for WAN optimization, and it creates all those downloads for me automatically. And the beauty of this solution, again, is that not only does it provide automated connectivity for me between, say, different regions of AWS but also between AWS and Azure. We've suddenly become the cloud brokers of the world. We can provide automated, optimized connectivity between AWS and Azure. So let me show that to you also. >> John: Yeah, show me the Azure integration. >> Vivek: So I'm going to search for maybe subnets in Europe, Ireland, I'm going to connect to that. The workflow is exactly the same. Once I do connect, it gives me the option to deploy an instance of my gateway and my SteelHead. So I'm going to select that and then click on submit. So now when I go back to my dashboard, you'll see that, oh by the way, my Dallas site is now online. And when I click on it, you'll see all my tunnels have also come online. >> John: Beautiful. >> Vivek: Going back to what we just talked about- >> John: Frankfurt and Ireland are up an running. >> Vivek: Exactly. >> John: With Amazon and Azure piece there. >> Vivek: Yeah, it does take about four or seven minutes for those appliances to come online, they download their latest firmware, but that's nothing- >> John: Minutes aren't hours, and that's not days. >> Vivek: Exactly, not hours, not days, not weeks. >> Right, I mean a key use case here, when you think about cloud connectivity today, it's still rather tedious to connect your on-premise location into these cloud-based, virtual environments. And so what network operators do is they do that in as few locations as possible, typically in a data center. And what that means is now you're limited, because all the traffic that you need to go into those environments has to get backhauled into your data center before going there. So now, because this is automated, and it's all part of that same secure VPN, if you have some developers that are working on an app and they're using infrastructure as a service, you know, as part of their work, they can do that from whichever remote office they're sitting at or their home office or at a coffee shop. And there's no need to create that additional latency by backhauling them to the data center before going to the cloud. >> So all that stuff gets done automatically, on the networking side, with you guys. >> Exactly, exactly. So step one is really creating this easy button to have connectivity, both on premises and in the cloud. >> Connectivity with all those benefits of the tunneling and stuff, that's either pre-existing or that's been set up by an instance. >> Exactly, secure VPN, full mesh connectivity across all the places where you're doing business or you need assets to run in the cloud. Then the second phase is, okay, how do you want to dictate which applications are running over which circuits in this environment? And this is where, again, with a legacy approach, it's been really tedious to define which applications should be steered across one link, if you can identify those applications at all. So what Vivek's going to show next is the power of policy and how you can make it easy to do some things that are very common: steering video, steering voice and dealing with, you know, SaaS applications in the cloud. So you want to give them a taste of that? >> Vivek: Absolutely. So let's go to rules, and let's create a new traffic rule, say, I want to make sure that across all my sites for my organization, I want video, which is a bandwidth-intensive application, as you all know, doesn't really choke up my MPLS link, which is my most precious link across all my sites. I should be able to configure that with as much ease as I just said it. So let's do that. We can do that with the software defined intelligence of SteelConnect. I can apply that rule to all my sites, all my users, and I'm going to select applications, where I search for video. There's already a pre-configured application group for video. I'm going to select online collaboration and video. And under path preference, I'm going to say that for this application, don't use my MPLS as my primary, but use my internet link as the primary. >> John: And the reason for that is to split traffic between the value of the link's cost or >> Vivek: Exactly. >> John: Importance. >> Vivek: Exactly. Load balance gets really important. So I'm going to save that as my primary- >> John: So plenty of people that are watching YouTube videos or, you know. >> Vivek: (laughs) Right, exactly. >> Exactly, video is one of the biggest hogs of bandwidth. It's basically creating an insatiable demand, right, so you definitely need to look for your best option in terms of capacity. And with internet broadband, maybe you're going to sacrifice a little bit on quality, but video, you know, deals with that pretty well. But it's just hard to configure that at each and every single box where you're trying to do that, so. >> Vivek: Yeah, as opposed to configuring that on each and every individual box or every individual site, I'm creating this globally applied rule to all my sites. And I'm going to select MPLS as a secondary. I'm going to select a path quality profile, which means that if there's some severe degradation in my internet link, go ahead and use my MPLS link. So I'm going to say latency sensitive metrics, and I'm going to apply a DSCP tag of high, click here on submit, and the moment I turn this rule on, it automatically updates all of the IPs, all of the uplinks, all of the routes across my entire organization. >> John: So you're paying the quality of service concept to all dimensions of apps. >> Vivek: Absolutely, whether it's video- >> John: Video, Snapchat, livestreaming, to downloading, uploading. >> Vivek: Yeah, and I can create the same kind of rule even for voice, where maybe I have my MPLS, since that's my primary and most precious link available for all my sites, have that as a primary and my secondary as my route VPN, which is my- [John] If you're a call center, you want to have it probably go over the best links, right? >> Vivek: Exactly. And assign it the DSCP tag of urgent so that that traffic gets sent at the expense of all my other traffic. >> John: Awesome, that's great stuff. Policy is great for cloud. What about security? Take us through a demo of security. >> So that's a really good question. I mean, as soon as you're starting to use internet broadband connectivity in these remote locations, one of the first things you think about is security. With the secure VPN connectivity, you're assuring that that traffic is encrypted, you know, end to end, if it's going from branch to data center or even branch into cloud. And that was really step one that Vivek showed earlier. Step two is when you realize, you know what, there are certain applications that are living in the cloud, things like Office 365 or Salesforce.com that truly are a trusted extension of your business. So let's turn that spigot up a little bit, and let's steer those applications that we trust direct from branch to the internet, and by doing that we can avoid, again, that backhaul into the data center. And with an application-defined approach, this becomes really easy. >> Vivek: Yeah, and I can do that with a very simple rule here, too. I'm going to apply that rule to all my sites. I'm going to say for applications, let's say trusted SaaS apps like Salesforce, Dropbox, and Box, I'm going to select a group called trusted SaaS apps, and now under path preference, I'm going to say for these applications, I know that I've set an organizational default that for all my traffic, go over my MPLS link and break out to the internet that way, but for some applications that I've defined as trusted SaaS apps, break out to the internet directly. >> John: Those are apps that they basically say are part of our business operation. >> Vivek: Yeah. >> John: Salesforce, Workday, whatever they might be. >> Vivek: Absolutely. So you're opening that spigot just a little bit, as Josh was talking about. And I can choose to apply a path quality profile so that there's a dynamic path quality-based path selection and apply a QoS priority. I'm going to leave it to high and submit. And the powerful thing about this is even though I've applied this to all my sites, I can choose to apply this to individual sites or maybe an individual VLAN in a site or an individual user group or even a single user for follow the user policies. And that's the entire essence of the software-defined intelligence of SteelConnect. The ease with which we can deploy these rules across our entire organization or go as granular to a single user is a very powerful concept. >> Josh: One of the things too, John, in terms of security, which you were asking about earlier, is that not only is a policy-based approach helping you be efficient at how you configure this but it's also helping you be efficient in how you audit that your security policies are in place because if you were doing this on a box-by-box basis, if you really, truly wanted to do an audit with the security team, you're going to have to look at every single box, make sure there's no typo whatsoever in any of those commands. But here we've just made a policy within the company that there are certain applications that are trusted. We have one policy, we see that it's on, and we know that our default is to backhaul everything else. And so that becomes the extent of the audit. The other thing that's interesting is that by just turning off this policy, that becomes your roll back, right? The other thing that's really hard about configuring boxes with lots of commands is that it's almost sometimes impossible to roll things back. So here you have a really easy button on a policy-by-policy basis to roll back if you need to. >> John: And just go, you know, clean sheet. But this path-based steering is an interesting concept. You go global, across all devices, you have the roll back, and go in individually to devices as well. >> Josh: That's right, that's right. Now, this next click of bringing that internet closer to you, is where you say, you know what? In addition to trusted SaaS applications, let's go ahead and have even recreational internet traffic go straight from the branch out to the internet at large. >> John: Love that term, recreational internet. (laughing) It's basically the playground, go play out there in the wild. (laughing) >> Josh: Exactly. >> John: There's bad guys out there. But that's what you mean, is traffic that's essentially, you're basically saying, this is classified as, assume the worst, hope for the best. >> Right, exactly. And that's where you do have to protect yourself from a network security standpoint. So that next step is to say okay, well instead of backhauling all of that recreational, dangerous internet traffic, what if we could put some more powerful IDS, IPS capabilities out there at the edge? And you can do that by deploying traditional firewall, more hardware, at those edge devices. But there's also cloud-based approaches to security today. So what Vivek is going to show next is some of the power of automation and policy that we've integrated with one cloud security broker named Zscaler. >> Vivek: Zscaler, yeah, so- >> John: Jump into it. >> Vivek: Our engineers have been working very closely with engineers from Zscaler, and really the end result is this, where we do a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of connecting to the Zscaler cloud. What I mean by that is what you're looking at on the SteelConnect interface, going back to that entire concept of single pane of glass, is that you can see all your Zscaler nodes from SteelConnect right here. And on a site-by-site basis, we will automatically select for you what Zscaler nodes are the closest to you based on minimum latency. And we select a primary and a secondary. We also give you the option of manually selecting that, but by default, we'll select that for you so that any traffic that you want to break out to the internet will go to the Zscaler cloud like it's a WAN cloud by itself. So I can go to my organization and networking default and say that hey, you know what, for all of my traffic, break out by default to the Zscaler cloud as the primary so that it's all additionally inspected over there for all those IDS and IPS capabilities that Josh was talking about. And then break out to the internet from there. And that's, again, a very powerful concept. And just to remind you though, the traffic path rule that we just created for trusted SaaS apps will still bypass the Zscaler cloud because we've asked those applications to go directly out to the internet. >> John: Because of the path information. But Zscaler, talk about how that works because you mentioned it's a cloud. >> Vivek: Yes. >> John: Is it truly a cloud, is it always on? What's the relationship with- >> I mean, this is what's interesting. And the cloud is basically a collection of, you know, data centers that are all connected together. And so some of the complexity and effort involved in integrating a cloud-based security solution like Zscaler is still often very manual. So without this type of integration, this collaboration we've done with them, you would still have to go into each box and basically manually select and choose which, you know, data center of Zscaler's should we be redirecting to. And you know, if they add a new data center that's closer, you would have to go and reconfigure it. So there's a lot of automation here where the system is just checking, what's my best access into Zscaler's cloud, over and over again and making sure that traffic is going to be routed that way. >> John: And Zscaler's always on, is an always-on security model. >> Yeah, active backup, exactly. There's many of those locations. >> Alright, so visibility. Now, as the internet connections are key to the, you know, zero touch provisioning you guys demoed earlier, IoT is coming around the corner, and it's bringing new devices to the network. That's more network connections. >> Josh: Right. >> Usually they're who is that person out there, what's that device, a lot of unknown, autonomous, so how do I use the visibility of all this data? >> Yeah, visibility's important to every organization, and once we start talking about autonomous networks, it becomes even more important for us to dive deeper and make sure that our networks are performing the way we want them to perform. It goes back to that entire concept of trust but verify. So I'm creating all these policy rules, but how do I know that it's actually working? So if you look at my interface now, actually, let's pause for a second and just enjoy what we've done so far. (laughing) >> John: A lot of green. >> Vivek: You'll see that my, a lot of green, and a lot of green lines. So this is my site in AWS, which I just brought up, and this is my site in Ireland. So if I click on the tunnel between- >> John: Are those the only two cloud sites? Are the rest on premise? >> Vivek: The rest are all on premise, exactly. So if I want to, say, click on the tunnel over here between my Azure site and my AWS site, which I just brought up, it gives me some basic visibility parameters, like what's my outbound and inbound throughput, what's my latency and packet loss. We don't see any real values here because we're not sending any data right now. >> John: But if you would, you would see full connection points so you can make decisions or like, workloads to be there, so as you look at- >> Vivek: Absolutely. >> John: Connection to the cloud. >> Vivek: It's all real time data. But if you want to dive in deeper, we can look at what we call SteelCentral Insights for SteelConnect so you can look at- >> John: Hold on, you're going too fast. Back up for a second. This is an Insight's dashboard. >> Vivek: Yes. >> John: Powered by what data? >> Vivek: Powered by the data that is being pulled from all of those- >> John: Those green- >> Vivek: All those gateways. >> John: All those points. >> Vivek: All those green points. >> John: So this is where the visualization of the data gives the user some information to act on, understand, make course corrections. >> Vivek: Exactly. >> John: Okay, now take us through this again. >> Vivek: So you can look at what your top uplinks are. So I'm looking at my site in New York City. So I can look at what my top uplinks are, what my top applications are, who are my top users? Who's using BitTorrent? I can see here that Nancy Clark is using the BitTorrent. So I might have to go ahead and create a rule to block that. >> John: You know what kind of movie she just downloaded, you know, music? >> Josh: Exactly, exactly. >> John: So you can actually look at the application type. So you mentioned BitTorrent. So same with the video, even though you're path steering, you still see everything through this? >> Vivek: Absolutely. >> Exactly, I mean this is application defined networking in action, where, you know, the new primitives that network administrators and architects are now able to use are things like application, user, location, you know, performance SLA, like the priority of that application, any security constraint. And that's very much aligned to the natural language of business. You know, when the business is talking about, you know, which users are really important for which applications that they're sending to which locations, I mean, now you have a pane of glass that you can interact with that is basically aligned to that. And that's some of the power there. >> John: Alright, so what are you showing here now? Back to the demo. >> Vivek: Back to the demo. The next part of the demo is, it's actually a bonus segment. We're going to talk about our integration with Xirrus Wifi. We recently announced that we are working with Xirrus. We bought them, and we're really excited to show how these two products, Xirrus access points, Xirrus wifi, and SteelConnect, can work hand in glove with each other. Because this goes back to the entire concept of not just SD-WAN but SD-LAN for an end-to-end software-defined network. So what I want to show you next is really hot off the presses. >> John: This is new tech you're showing, new technology? >> Vivek: Yes. >> Josh: So when SteelConnect was launched last year, there are wifi capabilities in the gateways that Vivek showed during the zero touch provisioning part. Xirrus is well regarded as having some of the, you know, most dense capabilities for accessing- >> John: Like stadiums, we all know that, we all lived that nightmare. >> Josh: Exactly. >> John: I got all these bars on wifi but no connectivity. >> Josh: Exactly, so stadiums, conventions, you know, when you think about the world of IoT that's coming and just how many devices are going to be vying for that local area wifi bandwidth, you need to have an architecture like Xirrus that has multiple radios that can service all of those things. And so what we've been doing is taking, you know, the steps as quickly as possible to bring the Xirrus wifi, in addition with the wifi that SteelConnect already had, into the same policy framework, right? Cause you don't want to manage those things, necessarily, going forward as different and distinct entities. >> John: So SteelConnect has the wifi in the demo. >> Exactly, so I'm now moving to a different org, where we have about four or five sites, and I'm going to go ahead and add an appliance. And I'm going to add this Xirrus access point and deploy it in my site at Chicago. So I just click here on submit, and you'll see that the access point will come online within, in less than a minute. And once it does come online, I can actually start controlling this Xirrus access point, not just from the XMS cloud, which is the Xirrus dashboard, but also from SteelConnect manager, going back to that concept of single pane of glass, so- >> John: So we have another example of zero touch provisioning. >> Vivek: Zero touch provisioning. >> John: Send the device, and someone just plugs it in and installs it, doesn't have to be an expert. Could be the UPS guy, could be anybody. >> Vivek: Yeah, anybody. Just connect it to the right port and you're done. And that's what it is here, so you see that this appliance in Chicago, which is a Xirrus access point, is online. And now I can go ahead and play with it. I can choose to deploy an SSID and broadcast it at my site in Chicago. You see that I'm only broadcasting Riverbed dash two, and when I go to my XMS dashboard, and can see that one access point is actually up. This is the same access point that we just deployed in the Chicago site, and that profile called Chicago is already configured. So when I click on it, I can see that my SSID is also displaying over here, and I can do so much more with this interface. >> John: It really brings network management into the operational realm of networking. >> Vivek: Absolutely. >> John: Future experience of networking is not making it as a separate function, but making it an integral part of deploying, provisioning, configuring. >> Exactly, and the policies to automate how it's all used, right, so if we just take a step back, what we literally did in just a few minutes, we deployed a new location in Dallas without anybody needing to be there other than to plug in the box. We extended the connectivity from on premises, not only into one cloud but two clouds, AWS and Azure. We started leveraging public internet in these remote sites to offload our MPLS for video. We steered SaaS applications that were trusted out there directly to the internet. And then we pulled in a third-party capability of Zscaler to do additional security scrubbing in these remote locations. That applies to every single site that's in this environment. And we literally did it while we were talking about the value in the use cases, you know? >> Great demo, great SD-WAN in action. Josh, Vivek, thanks for taking the time to give the demo. Experiencing the future of networking in real time, thanks for the demo, great stuff. >> Thanks, John. >> This is theCUBE, watching special SD-WAN in action with Riverbed, thanks for watching. I'm John Furrier. (bright music)