(upbeat intro music) >> Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen and welcome back to fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada where we are theCUBE covering AWS re:Invent for the 10th year in a row. John Furrier, you've been here for all 10. How does this one stack up? >> It's feeling great. It's just back into the saddle of more people. Everyone's getting bigger and growing up. The companies that were originally on are getting stronger, bigger. They're doing takeovers in restaurants and still new players are coming in. More startups are coming in and taking care of what I call the (indistinct) on classic, all the primitives. And then you starting to see a lot more ecosystem platforms building on top of AWS. I call that NextGen Cloud, NextGen AWS. It's happening. It's happening right now. >> Best thing about all of these startups is they grow up, they mature, and we stay the same age, John. (John laughing) All right. All right. All right. Very excited to introduce you our next guest, he wears a lot of hats as the CEO, founder, and chairman at Reltio, please welcome Manish. Manish, welcome to the show. How is your show going so far? >> Well, thank you so much. You know, this is amazing. Just the energy, the number of people. You know, I was here last year, just after the pandemic, and I think it's almost double, if not more the number of people this year. >> John: Pushing 50,000. The high water mark was 65,000 in 2019. >> We should be doing like a Price Is Right sort of thing here on the show and figure out. >> Yeah, $1. >> Savannah: Yeah, yeah. (laughing) One guest, 80,000 guests. How many guests are here? Just in case the audience is not familiar, we know you're fast growing, very exciting business. Tell us what Reltio does. >> So, Reltio is a SaaS platform for data unification and we started Reltio in 2011. We have been serving some of the largest customers across industries like life sciences, healthcare, financial services, insurance, high tech, and retail. Those are, you know, some of the areas that we are focused on. The product capabilities are horizontal because we see the same data problem across every industry. Highly fragmented, highly siloed data that is slowing down the business for every organization out there. And that's the problem that we are solving. We are breaking down these silos, you know, one profile or one record, or one customer product supplier information record at a time, and bringing the acceleration of this unified data to every organization. >> This is the show Steam this year, Adam Celeste is going to be on stage talking about data end to end. Okay. Integrating in all aspects of a company. The word data analyst probably goes away pretty shortly. Everyone was going to be using data. This has been, and he talks about horizontal and vertical use cases. We've been saying that in theCUBE, I think it was about seven years ago, we first said we're going to start to see horizontally scalable data not just compute and cloud. This is now primetime conversation. Making that all work with governance is a real hard problem. Understanding the data. Companies have to put this horizontal and vertical capabilities in place together. >> Absolutely. You know, the data problem may be a horizontal problem, but every industry or vertical that you go into adds its own nuance or flavor to it. And that's why, you know, this has to be a combination of the horizontal and vertical. And we at Reltio thought about this for a while, where, you know, every time we enter a conversation, we are talking about patient data or physician data or client data and financial services or policy and customer information and insurance. But every time it's the number of silos that we encounter that is just an increasing number of applications, increasing number of third party data sources, and bringing that together in a manner where you can understand the semantics of it. Because, you know, every record is not created equal. Every piece of information is not created equal. But at the same time, you have to stitch it together in order to create that holistic, you know, the so-called 360 degree view. Because without that, the types of problems that you're trying to solve are not possible. Right? It's not possible to make those breakthroughs. And that's where I think the problem may be horizontal, but the application of the capabilities has to be verticalized. >> John: I'm smiling because, you know, when you're a founder like you are, and Dave, a lot here are at theCUBE, you're often misunderstood before people figure out what you do and why you started the company. And I can imagine, and knowing you and covering your company, that this is not just yesterday you came up with this idea that now everyone's talking about. There was probably moments in your history when you started, you're scratching it, "Hey the future's going to be this horizontal and vertical, especially where machine learning needs to know the data, the linguistics, whatever the data is, it's got to be very particular for the vertical, but you need to expand it." So when did you have the moment where people finally figured out like, what you guys doing is, like, relevant? I mean, now the whole world now sees- >> Savannah: Overnight success 11 years later. >> John: This shows the first time I've heard Amazon and the industry generally agree that horizontally scalable data systems with vertical value, that it's natural. We've been saying it for seven years on theCUBE. You've been doing the startup. >> Yeah. >> As a founder, you were there early. Now people are getting it. What's it like? Tell, take us through. When did you have the moment? When did you tipping point for the world getting it? >> Yeah, and you know, the key thing to remember is that, you know, not only have I been in this space for a long time but the experiences that we have gone through starting in 2011, there was a lot of focus on, you know, even AWS was at that point in time in the infancy stages. >> Yeah. >> And we said that we are going to set up a software as a service capability that runs only on public cloud because we had seen what customers had tried to do behind their firewalls and the types of hurdles that they had run into before. And while the concept was still in its nascent stages, but the directional signals, the fact that number of applications that you see in use today across any organization, that's growing. It used to be a case when in early 2000s, you know, this is early part of my career, where having six different applications across the enterprise landscape was considered complex. But now those same organizations are talking about 400, 500, a thousand different applications that they're using to run their business end to end. So, you know, this direction was clear. The need for digital transformation was becoming clear. And the fact that, you know, cloud was the only vehicle that you could use to solve these types of ad scale problems was also becoming clear. But what wasn't yet mainstream was this notion that, you know, if you're doing digital transformation, you need access to clean, consistent, trusted information. Or if you're doing machine learning or any kind of data analytics, you need similar kinds of trusted information. It wasn't a mainstream concept, but people were struggling with it because, you know, the whole notion of garbage in garbage out was becoming clearer to them as they started running into hurdles. And it's great to see that now, you know, after having gone through the transformation of, yes, we have provided the compute and the storage, but now we really need to unlock the value out of data that goes on this compute and storage. You know, it's great to see that even Amazon or AWS is talking about it. >> Well, as a founder, it's satisfying, and congratulations, we've been covering that. I got to ask, you mention this end to end. I like the example of in the 2006 applications considered complex, now hundreds and thousands of workloads are on an enterprise. Today we're going to hear more end to end data services on AWS and off AWS, hybrid or edge or whatever, that's happens. Now cross, it sounds like it's going to get more complex still. >> I mean... >> John: Right. I mean, that's not easy. >> Savannah: The gentle understatement of the century. I love that. Yes. >> If Adam's message is end to end, it's going to be more complex. How does it get easier? Because the enterprise, you know, the enterprise vendors love solving complexity with more complexity. That's the wrong answer. >> Well, you're absolutely right that things are going to get more complex. But you know, this is where, whether it is Amazon or you know, us, Reltio as a vendor coming in, the goal should always be what are we going to simplify for the customer? Because they are going to end up with a complex landscape on their hands anyway. Right? >> Savannah: Right. >> So that is where, what can be below the surface and simplified for the customers to use versus bringing their focus to the business value that they can get out of it. Unlocking that business value has to be the key aspect that we have to bring to the front. And, you know, that is where, yes, the landscape complexity may grow, but how is the solution making it simpler, easier, faster for you to get value out of the data that you're trying to work with? >> As a mission, that seems very clear and clean cut, but I'm curious, I can imagine there's so many different things that you're prioritizing when you're thinking about how to solve those problems. What is that decision matrix like for you? >> For us, it goes back to the core focus and the core problem that we are in the business of solving which is in a siloed, fragmented landscape, how can we create a single source of truth orientation that your business can depend on? If you're looking for the unified view of the customer, the product, the supplier, the location, the asset, all these are elements that are critical or crucial for you to run your business end to end. And we are there to provide that solution as Reltio to our customers. So, you know, we always, for our decision matrix have to go back to are we simplifying that problem for our customers and how much faster, easier, nimbler can it be, you know, both as a solution and also the time to value that it brings to the equation for the customer. >> Super important, end of the equation. Clearly you are on to something. You are not only a unicorn company, unicorn company being evaluated at over $1 billion latest evaluation, correct me if I'm wrong, is $1.7 billion as of last year. But you are also a centaur, which is seven times more rare than a unicorn, which for the audience maybe not familiar with the mythical creatures that define the Silicon Valley nomenclature in Lexicon. A centaur is a company with a hundred million in annual reoccurring revenue. How does it feel to be able to say that as a CEO or to hear me say that to you? >> Well, as a CEO, it's, you know, something that we have been working towards. the goal that we can deliver value to our customers, help every industry, you know, you just think about the types of products that you touch in a day, whether it's, you know, any healthcare related products that you're looking at. We are working with customers who are solving for the patient record to be unified with our platform. We are working with financial services companies who are helping you simplify how you do banking with them. We are working with retailers who are working in the area of, you know, leisure apparel or athletic goods and they are using our capabilities to simplify how they deliver better experience to you. So as I go across these industries, being able to influence and touch and simplify things overall for the customers that these companies are serving, that's an amazing feeling. And, you know, doing this while we are also making sure that we can build a durable business that has substantial revenue behind it- >> Savannah: Substantial. >> Gives us a lot of legs to stand on and talk about how we can change how the companies should run their entire data stack. >> And you're obviously a very efficient team practicing what you teach. You told me how many employees that you have? >> We have 450 employees across the globe. >> 450 employees and a hundred million in reoccurring revenue. It's pretty strong. It's pretty strong. >> Thank you. >> That's a quarter million in rev per employee. They're doing a pretty good job. That's absolutely fantastic. >> The cloud has been very successful, partnering with the cloud, a lot of leverage for the cloud. >> And that's been a part of our thesis from the very beginning that, you know, the capabilities that we build and bring to life have to be built on public cloud infrastructure. That's something that has been core to our innovation cycle because we look at it as a layer cake of innovation that we sit on and we can continue to drive faster value for our customers. >> John: Okay, so normally we do a bumper sticker. Tell me the bumper sticker for the show. We changed it to kind of modernize it called the Insta Challenge, Instagram challenge. Instagram has reels, short videos. What's the Instagram reel from your perspective? You have to do an Instagram reel right now about why this time in history, this time in for Amazon web services, this point for Reltio. Why is this moment in time important in the computer industry? Because, you know, we've reported, I put a story out, NextGen Clouds here. People are seeing their status go from ISV to ecosystem platforms on top of AWS. Your success has continued to grow. Something's going on. What's the Instagram reel about why this year's so important in the history of the cloud? >> Well, you know, just think about the overall macroeconomic conditions. You know, everybody's trying to think about where the next, you know, the set of growth is going to come from or how we are going to tackle, you know, what we have as challenges in front of us. And at the end of the day, most of the efficiency that came from applying new applications or, you know, buying new products in the application space has delivered its value. The next unlock is going to come from data. And that is the key that we have to think about because the traditional model of going across 500 different applications to run your business is no longer going to be a scalable model to work with. If you really want to move faster with your business, you have to think about how to use data as a strategic asset and think about things differently. And we are talking about delivering experience at the edge, delivering, you know, real time type of engagement with the customers that we work with. And that is where the entire data value proposition starts to deliver a whole new set of options to the customers. And that's something that we all have to think about differently. It's going to require a fundamentally different architecture, innovation, leading with data instead of thinking about the traditional landscape that we have been running with. >> Leading with data and transforming architecture. A couple themes we've had on the show lately already. >> John: Well I think there's been a great, I mean this is a great leadership example of what's going on in the industry. As young people are looking at their careers. I've talked with a lot of folks under 30, they're trying to figure out what's a good career path and they're looking at all this change in front of them. >> That's a great point, John. >> Whether it's a computer science student or someone in healthcare, these industries are being reinvented with data. What's your advice to those young, this up and coming generation that might not take the traditional path traveled 'cause it might not be there. What's your advice for those people making these career decisions? >> I think there are two things that are relevant to every career option out there. Knowledge and awareness of data and how to apply computing techniques to the data is key and relevant. It's the language that we all have to learn and be familiar with. Without that, you know, you'll be missing a key part of your arsenal that you will be required to bring to work but won't have access to if you're not well-versed or familiar with those two areas. So this is lingua franca that we all have to get used to. >> Data and computer technology applied to business or some application or some problem. >> Manish: Applied to business. You know, figuring out how to apply it to deliver business outcomes is the key thing to keep in mind. >> Okay. >> Yeah. Last question for you to wrap us up. It's obviously an exciting, thrilling, vibrant moment here on the show floor, but I'm curious because I can imagine some of your customers, especially given the scale that they're at, I mean we're talking about some Fortune 100s here, how are you delivering value in this uncertain market? I mean, I know you solved this baseline problem but I can imagine there's a little bit of frantic energy within your customer base. >> Manish: Yeah. You know, with data this has been a traditional challenge. Everybody talks about the motherhood and apple pie. If you have better data, you can drive better outcomes. But some of the work that we have been doing is quantifying, measuring those outcomes and translating what the dollar impact of that value is for each one of the customers. And this is where the work that we have done with large, you know, let's say life sciences companies like AstraZeneca or GSK or in financial services with companies like Northwestern Mutual or Fidelity or, you know, common household names like McDonald's where they're delivering their digital transformation with the data capabilities that we are helping build with them. That's the key part that's been, you know, extremely valuable. And that is where in each one of these situations, we are helping them measure what the ROI is at every turn. So being able to go into these discussions with the hard dollar ROI that you can expect out of it is the key thing that we are focused on. >> And that's so mission critical now and at any economic juncture. Just to echo that, I noticed that Forrester did an independent study looking at customers that invested in your MDM solution. 366% ROI and a total net present value of 13 million over three years. So you clearly deliver on what you just promised there with customers and brands that we touch in all of our everyday lives. Manish, thank you so much for being on the show with us today. You and Reltio are clearly crushing it. We can't wait to have you back hopefully for some more exciting updates at next year's AWS re:Invent. John, thanks for- >> Or sooner. >> Yeah, yeah. Or sooner or maybe in the studios or who knows, at one of the other fabulous events we'll all be at. I'm sure you'll be traveling around given the success that the company is seeing. And John, thanks for bringing the young folks into the conversation, was a really nice touch. >> We got skill gaps, we might as well solve that right now. >> Yeah. And I like to think that there are young minds watching theCUBE or at least watching, maybe their parents are- >> We're streaming to Twitch. All the gamers are watching this right now. Stop playing the video games. >> We have the hottest stream on Twitch right now if you're not already ready for it. John Furrier, Manish Sood, thank you so much for being on the show with us. Thank all of you at home or at the office or in outer space or wherever you happen to be tuned in to this fabulous live stream. You are watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech coverage. My name is Savannah Peterson. We're at AWS re:Invent here in Las Vegas where we'll have our head in the clouds all week.

>>Yeah. Hello and welcome to the Cubes Presentation of Women in text. Global event Celebrating International Women's Day I'm John for a host of the Cube were with Sally E. Senior Policy Advisor Global Foundation for Cyber Studies and Research. Sally, great to see you. Thanks for coming on the cue for International Women's Day. Appreciate it. >>Pleasure, John. Great speech again. >>Love your title. Global Foundation for Cyber Studies. Um, global is a big part of the theme this year. Uh, cyber studies. We're seeing a lot of cyber activity all around the world, networks, communities coming together, the role of data. I mean, everything is touching our lives. There are no boundaries anymore. What does it all mean? There's so much to talk about your in the middle of it before we get into it. Tell us about your career and your history. How you got interested in tech and what you're working on. >>Absolutely. I love it. Kind of this age of convergence coming together right now, isn't it? That's how I would describe it. And that's kind of a bit like my career. I think in many ways as well. So for the audience, really great to be here and share about that today, and I kind of say, three main palace, so one would be emergent technologies. So, you know, I started off right through from coding to advisory to CTO type roles as well also change management. And now I'm more advisors right across from a I to five G to to Iot and security, for example as well. Also passionate about education checking education for me. They always go hand in hand, some a professor at a number of universities and in my non for profit, we really do a lot of outreach around educational opportunities as well. And that third pillar opponent hinted at it already will be social impact. So really passionate about how we can use tech as a force for good things around sustainability right at the heart of that, but also around diversity equity and inclusion. So we do a lot of pro project your locally and globally around kind of reframing what a tech career looks like, giving people more democratised access. Those tech opportunities outside of that a bit like yourself, you know, podcast host and writer and speaker and things as well, so very much going to building that community around key tech topics. >>Well, folks watching should check it out on Twitter. She's that great content you mentioned Mobile World Congress. Before we get on camera, you mentioned convergence. I mean, we're at a time now. I got to ask you while I got you here before we get into the whole schools and career tech thing, we've seen this movie before, but never at this scale. The convergence and the confluence of education and scale of cloud computing, the ability to level up and get, um, I won't say democratised. That's kind of overused. But I'm just talking about like with cloud computing could be educated and in market with a job instantly. Um, the barriers just seem to be moving away because of the the openings and the roles are changing. So, more than ever, this whole new tech scene comes together in a way. Can you share your thoughts and vision because to me, we're seeing this happening at such a scale unprecedented in my career? >>It is. And that's one of those words that the part had been overused, unprecedented, but right now it really, really is. It's not just a speed of change. I think it's a scale of change as well. You know, I think previously we've talked about disciplines in silos to a certain extent. Haven't we know in terms of like, an AI special is, um or five g one or other disciplines as well? But really, now that convergence about what one tech enables another, it really is that smart technology coming together for more and more different use cases, but that residents around how important education is alongside that alongside process alongside culture and shared values as well it really is. It's kind of holistic integration of everything that matters at the moment. And it's evolving business models as well. You know, shared values rights centre stage around that MWC just come back from that, And the key topics there weren't just by G, it was the importance of ecosystem collaboration. For example, there are less tracks that were isolated on one technology. It was more this conflation of these different technologies coming together and what we can achieve from that from business but also for society so really exciting focus areas now things that maybe once or a few years ago, more than periphery. They're now absolutely centre stage. So it's good to see that progress in that area. And I love to advocate around that. >>And the education piece is so important, and we always stay here in Cuba. It's a data problem, right? Everything's a data problem when you look at schools and education is structured and unstructured data kind of our our systems right, So structured as schools, institutions, those kinds of career paths or education pathways. And then you haven't structured freeform communities, seeing a lot more education going on within groups. Um, off structured environments like schools, Can you and you do a lot with schools? Can you share more how you're doing? Um uh, work with schools specifically on the structured side to get girls into careers faster and tech? And then can you also comment on the other side? What's going on in the communities because it's it's kind of going on in parallel, but they're not mutually exclusive. >>No, absolutely community, absolutely key word that I love that, and I think when we're talking about diversity and technology, it's not just what we're doing now with what we're looking at is looking ahead, but also looking at future pipeline as well. So for me, I use this express a little bit. But change the narrative. That's what springs to mind for me when we're talking about that, and particularly for girls going into technology but also more broadly, diversity of experience. More broadly, we do have these drop offs, so UK is one example, but it is really representative of the global trends that we're seeing. Now. We get a drop off of girls in particular, taking ice subjects at GCSE level so kind of that subject choice choice at 12 to 14, that kind of area. We get the same thing at a level that's equivalent of 16 to 18 and then even safer university or even apprenticeships, whichever both equally valid. But even if people are taking those types of skills, they're not then choosing to apply them in their careers. So we're seeing these kind of three pillars where we need to intervene earlier. So for me, the more that we can do things you know from dedicated educational offers, but equally partnering with tech companies to do outreach around this area. We need to go in younger and younger is so important to address that. Why? Why are people thinking they can't? Why is his career not for me, for example, so addressing that is huge. And that's one of the things we do with my nonprofit that's called aspirational futures. We go into schools and two universities, but equally do things with older adults and re Skilling and up Skilling as well. Because again, we can't leave that behind either. There's something for all different kind of age groups and backgrounds here, but specifically, I think, in terms of getting people interested in this career, curiosity matters. You know, I think it's an underrated skills. So it's changing the narrative again. And what the tech career actually is, what skills are valid? You know, I mentioned, I have a coding background as a starter. But not all tech careers involve coding, particularly the rise of low code or no code, for example as well. So really valued skill. But so many other skills are valid as well, you know, creativity or emotional intelligence problem solving skills. So for me, I like to drive forward. All those skills can make a difference as an individual, as a team, so your you know your tech career. All those skills are valid and you can make a huge difference. And I also think, you know, just kind of really bringing to the fore what different types of projects you can be involved in in tech as well. And I found really resonating when you can talk about tech for good projects and show how you're making a difference about some of those big challenges. Um, that's kind of really kind of resonating responsible people as well. So again, the more we can show tangible projects where you can make a difference and the whole range of skills that are involved in that it really helps people to think differently and gain that skills confidence. So it's like, >>Well, that's awesome insight. I want to just double click on that for a second, because one the drop off. Can you just repeat the ages where you see the drop off with the drop offs are >>absolutely yeah, no problem, John. So it's kind of when you're making your first choices around your first kind of qualifications. Between that 12 to 14 age group, 16 to 18 and then 18 to 21 I think we've really got to tackle that So again the earlier we can go in the better and again supporting people within organisations as well. So I do a lot of work like internally, with organisations as well people looking to up skill and re skill. You mentioned about data and the importance of data literacy earlier on in the conversation as well. For example, going into organisations and really helping to support people in all roles, not just tech facing roles develop that skills, confidence as well. So for me it's access to skills really bringing forward the difference. You can make that holistic range of skills that makes a difference, but also the confidence to apply them as well. You know, we talk about agility, of organisations, a lot areas, one of those kind of words in the last 12 months. But maybe we don't talk about personal agility and team agility as well. So I kind of talked about it. This little toolbox, if we can give people more and more things to draw from it, the only constant is this rate of change. If you've got more things in your armoury to cope with that and be an agile to that. It takes that fear away about what happens next because you feel you've got more skills to dip into it and to apply. So for me, it's that that confidence, not just the access to the skills >>and the other thing, too, I thought was insightful. I want to just reiterate and bring to the surface again as skills, right? So you don't have to be a coder. And I see I have two daughters just with my family. Yeah, I do python. They kind of put their toe in the water cause it's cool. Maybe that's a path, and they kind of don't like, maybe get into it. But it's not about coding anymore because you said low code, no code. Certainly. Maybe AI writes the code. We all see that happening. It's problem solving. It's you could be in health care and you could be nerd native, as we say, as on some of the other interviews of that year at the problem, solving the aperture of skills is much broader now. Can >>you share more than >>more than because with your with your programme and your nonprofit, I know you're in the middle of it, and this is important to get that out there. >>Absolutely so skills. You know, I think we need to change the focus on what skills make a difference if you see what I mean. I think you're absolutely right. There's some misconceptions about, you know, you want to go into tech, you need to be a coda. And you're right with the upscale around low Skilling. Sorry, Low code and the code opportunities. Um, I think the niches around being a specialist. Koda. We're gonna get more roles in that area, but in other areas, we need to look at different skills gap. So I'm advising people to look at where the gaps are now. So cyber security is a key example of that testing architecture. Those gaps are getting bigger. Their amazing skills, opportunities. They're so focused on a particular discipline. But it's all those skills that surround that that make a difference as well. So as I mentioned, you know, e Q creativity, communication skills, because it's not just about having the skills to build the future, knew that imagination to refocus about what that could even be. You know, that was one of the MWC 20 to refrain, reimagine and I love to kind of galvanise that spirit and people that you can be part of that, you know, wherever you are now. And I actually run a little series called 365, and you mentioned something right at the start of our conversation about International Women's Day being such an important focus area. But also we need to think about this beyond that as well. So hence that's the title of the series that I run because it's a focus on that every single day of the year. You know, I interviewed people that could be a C suite roles, but equally I've had some amazing interviews with 12 to 14 year olds, even younger, the youngest of the seven year old. He's doing like an amazing project in their kitchen with a three D printer working with local school or a hospice doing something around Ukraine. Another project we're doing at the moment, actually, and it's so resonating it's trying to show people wherever you are now, wherever you want to be, there's somebody relatable that you can make. You can see whatever sector, in whatever age, whatever background, and I think it's to give that inspiration. Hey, you know what I can do that that can be me. So visibility of role models, it really matters. And to really broaden out what role model looks like, you know? >>And then I think people out there you see yourself. I mean, this is what we been >>proven right? >>It's proven I want to get into the aspirational futures thing that you have going on, and I know this is important to you, but also something else you said was, is that there's more jobs open and say cybersecurity than ever before. And you're seeing this trend where all these new roles are emerging because of the tech that weren't around years ago, right? And so we've been having conversations in the Cube saying, Hey, all these roles are new, but also problems are new to these New new problems are surfacing because of the this new environment we're in. So these new roles still have to solve problems, so we need people to solve those problems. This is the future. This is the conversation that people are trying to get zero in on misinformation, cybersecurity, you name it. Society is changing with >>new. You >>have new new problems and new opportunities. Could you share your aspirational future? How you vector into that? >>Yeah, absolutely. And for me it's just again that we're convergence around people in technology and partnership, and that's what we aim to do. We do projects at a very local level, but equally we do them at national and international level as well. And one of our kind of people assume I'm talking pillars a lot, but I like it as a framework. So one of those esteem learning. So putting an equal value on the arts as well as science, technology, engineering, mathematics because I think they are. You know, as I mentioned before, hand that imagination, creativity, curiosity, collaboration, skills. They're equally valid as a different types of tech skills as well. We need an equal value and all of them. I think that's hugely important, important today. I think over the last 5 to 10 years, maybe there's been less of a focus within curriculums on the arts area than the other areas. So for me, putting that equal focus back is hugely important to navigate change, you know, I think that's that's that's absolutely key. So we focus on that area and we do a whole range of tech for good projects, and that's the way we help people to learn, you know, for example, data 90% at the moment of data isn't touched again when it's archived after three months. How can we turn that into a learning opportunity? For example? Some of the projects we use some of this is not going to be used again. We do it in a very safe, secure way, but we use that as one of our training aids, and then we apply them for local projects. We have initiatives from hackathons and ideation right through to very tangible hubs that we've actually built out where people can go, learn up skill and kind of learn through play and experimentation as well. Because again, I think that sometimes under explored that type of value and that freedom to be able to do that. And we also do things, change management skills. We talk about agile learning, agile technology need agile change management as well. So it's a very holistic skills. Look at what you need to navigate that future and have the confidence to apply them. So steam is very much our focus, applying them for tech for good projects and doing that externally, but also within organisations as well. So that very much is shared value approach to good business, but good for society as well. So yes, that this toolbox, that technology I applied earlier we really try and give people that support. To be able to do that, to move forward with confidence and optimism. >>I think adding the aid to stem really for steam is really smart because entrepreneurship or any problem solving creativity is the spark of innovation. >>And that's a super >>important skill. And we've seen it, whether it's startup or in a big company or in society, so super, super insightful. So I got to ask you, as a policy senior policy advisor on cyber studies globally, what are the core issues you're looking at right now? What are you shutting the light on and what's the most important thing you're working on? And then what's the most important thing you're working that people aren't talking about, that people should pay attention to >>Absolutely so. One of my key roles of the foundation is is kind of share of global trust. Essentially, um, and again trust is that one of the key issues of our time? One thing that people are talking about so much that relates with that actually is there's there's research from a group called The Woman. They've been looking at this for about 17 years or so. The research that came out most recently and I've got some original research that kind of support this as well is that for the first time ever, consumers are looking at organisations like tech organisations and other large organisations, in particular the enterprise level, really, as the bastions of trust to a bigger extent than NGOs or even governments. And that's the first time we've seen it at that level. So trust really really matters. It's one of the biggest differentiators of our time, so we're trying to help people. How do you establish trust? How do you build transparency, commitment and accountability, particularly in areas where there's currently confusion, so as one example going back Security zero Trust That phrase is used an awful lot, isn't it? But it's sometimes causing some confusion. Actually, it against what it's trying to deliver if you see what to me. So now I just do something recently with SMB s in particular and there is a confusion that effectively, you know, you could You could buy off the shelf and it's once and done. Um, And then we're sorted for the zero Trust security. And obviously it's not like that. It's an ongoing journey, and there's so many different constituent parts. So there's some things I'm seeing at the moment in the market with there's confusion around around certain language, for example. So again it goes back to backing things up with the technology but also research and awareness so we can see where those skills gaps are. You can see where there's awareness gaps are we can help to fill them. So that's an important part of that particular role bringing the technology in the culture and the education hand in hand together. So it's something I'm really passionate about, and for me sort of related to this, Um, I do a lot of work around S G, um, to the sustainable development goals. In particular, environmental and social governance is something that's becoming much more of a bigger kind of centre stage conversation. I'm an action point in a moment which is fantastic because this is something I've been involved in kind as long as I can remember. So I work directly with organisations like, um Unesco, lots of different professional bodies. It's kind of a huge driver for me. So one thing to kind of look out for that's coming very soon. I'm seeing an issue around around measurement in this area. You know, we're seeing consumers becoming more and more conscious and employees, you know you want to work for by from advocate organisations that have that same value alignment that you have personally and professionally, hugely important. We're seeing some great reports coming out around better e S g measurement. But it can be hard to compare between different organisations, so we are getting more transparency. But it's difficult sometimes to make fare comparisons. Um, so what I'm trying to do a lot of work on at the moment is how you go beyond that transparency to commitment to accountability and that deeper level and that comparability. So I would say kind of to the audience moment, Look out for a bit of a new index. It's going to help people, I think, make those conscious choices make informed choices. So it's something I'm super, super passionate about. I want to try and take that to next level in terms of its actualisation. >>That's awesome. And certainly we'll link to it on our site. All the work you're doing on interviews will put links there as well. We'll make sure we'll follow up on that. Great to have you on. You're such an inspiration. Amazing work, cutting edge work. And I'm I'm super impressed with the cyber studies, and I think this is really important. I have to ask you a final question because you're in the middle of it again with covid and the unfortunate situations we've been living with Covid. And now, obviously with this Ukraine situation that the cyber has been pulled to the front of the agenda and you're seeing a cultural shift. You certainly got Web three. Cyber is now part of everyone's life, and they can see it. They've been seeing it living it. Everything's been pulled forward as a cultural shift happening, okay, and and it's really interesting right now, and I want to get your thoughts because this now people are now aware what cyberwar means cyber security cyber. At home, I have remote work. Cyber has become front and centre or digital. However you want to call it in our lives pulled forward. >>So I'm not even sure in some >>cases, maybe rightfully so, and others. What's your view on this whole cultural cyber being pulled forward? >>It is. It's really, really interesting. And so one of the things I do is I am now ready to a Cyber Insights magazine as well. So we're developing a lot of content pieces around this and lots of things I'm seeing here. So your covid point, I think one of the most interesting things there is around literacy. For example, you remember when we went back to 18 months ago? We're having daily briefings, whether that's from from UK Parliament or the U. S. Equivalent. And different phrases were coming into everyday language driven by the curve or driven by the data. And they're coming into everyday life and people family kitchen table. It was something that hasn't been spoken about before, but suddenly it was driving everyday decision making and what you could and couldn't do. And that's raised awareness. And I think it helped people to ask better questions and to challenge things that they're seeing. And where has that data come from? How has it been presented to have seen that there? I think similarly, where we're having that same understanding and raise of questioning around what we're hearing around cyber as well. You're looking at where that source has come from, and how can we look at that in a different way? So again, I think it's raising that awareness, which is really, really crucial, >>the >>other thing as well around cyber security in particular. And again, I don't think this is talked about as much. When we talk about aspects around inclusion, we talk about diversity equity. Um, I'll see inclusion. I talk about belonging a lot as well. I think there's other aspects around sustainability that Inter relate as well, because when we find, for example, communities that are not included, they tend to be more adversely affected by, for example, climate factors as well. There's an interrelation. They're equally We find that people that haven't got, for example, the same level of cybersecurity protection are also in that same. There's an interrelation across all those elements were not talking about that either. So that's the other thing. I want to kind of bring attention to their again. They aren't separate conversations is a huge crossover between these different conversations and actions that we can do to make a difference. So there's some positive aspects about things that have happened over the last period of time and also some challenges that if we're aware of them, we can work together again, that collaboration piece to be able to overcome them. You know, I've got I've got a book coming out, all for charity called Tech for Good and one of my kind of tag lines. There is around contagion of positive change. Again, let's reframe the language around what's been happening. And let's kind of put that together is something that's far more positive. >>Language is super important, great >>content here. So >>thanks so much for coming. I really appreciate all the great insight and taking the time out of your busy day to to join us here in the Cube. Women in tech Global Event. Thank you so much. >>My absolute pleasure. Thank you. Thank you all for watching. >>Okay. The cubes presentation of women in text. Global event Celebrating International Women's Day. I'm John for a host of the Cube. Thanks for watching

>>Hi, everyone. Welcome to the cubes presentation of the eight of us startup showcase open cloud innovations. This is season two episode one of the ongoing series covering the exciting startups from ABC ecosystems today. Uh, episode one, steam is the open source community and open cloud innovations. I'm Sean for your host got two great guests, Webb brown CEO of coop costs and as Thielen, head of business development, coop quest, gentlemen, thanks for coming on the cube for the showcase 80, but startups. >>Thanks for having a Sean. Great to be back, uh, really excited for the discussion we have here. >>I keep alumni from many, many coupons go. You guys are in a hot area right now, monitoring and reducing the Kubernetes spend. Okay. So first of all, we know one thing for sure. Kubernetes is the hottest thing going on because of all the benefits. So take us through you guys. Macro view of this market. Kubernetes is growing, what's going on with the company. What is your company's role? >>Yeah, so we've definitely seen this growth firsthand with our customers in addition to the broader market. Um, you know, and I think we believe that that's really indicative of the value that Kubernetes provides, right? And a lot of that is just faster time to market more scalability, improved agility for developer teams and, you know, there's even more there, but it's a really exciting time for our company and also for the broader cloud native community. Um, so what that means for our company is, you know, we're, we're scaling up quickly to meet our users and support our users, every, you know, metric that our company's grown about four X over the last year, including our team. Um, and the reason that one's the most important is just because, you know, the, the more folks and the larger that our company is, the better that we can support our users and help them monitor and reduce those costs, which ultimately makes Kubernetes easier to use for customers and users out there on the market. >>Okay. So I want to get into why Kubernetes is costing so much. Obviously the growth is there, but before we get there, what is the background? What's the origination story? Where did coop costs come from? Obviously you guys have a great name costs. Qube you guys probably reduced costs and Kubernetes great name, but what's the origination story. How'd you guys get here? What HR you scratching? What problem are you solving? >>So yeah, John, you, you guessed it, uh, you know, oftentimes the, the name is a dead giveaway there where we're cost monitoring cost management solutions for Kubernetes and cloud native. Um, and backstory here is our founding team was at Google before starting the company. Um, we were working on infrastructure monitoring, um, both on internal infrastructure, as well as Google cloud. Um, we had a handful of our teammates join the Kubernetes effort, you know, early days. And, uh, we saw a lot of teams, you know, struggling with the problems we're solving. We were solving internally at Google and we're we're solving today. Um, and to speak to those problems a little bit, uh, you know, you, you, you touched on how just scale alone is making this come to the forefront, right. You know, there's now many billions of dollars being spent on CU, um, that is bringing this issue, uh, to make it a business critical questions that is being asked in lots of organizations. Um, you know, that combined with, you know, the dynamic nature and complexity of Kubernetes, um, makes it really hard to manage, um, you know, costs, uh, when you scale across a very large organization. Um, so teams turned to coop costs today, you know, thousands of them do, uh, to get monitoring in place, you know, including alerts, recurring reports and like dynamic management insights or automation. >>Yeah. I know we talked to CubeCon before Webb and I want to come back to the problem statement because when you have these emerging growth areas that are really relevant and enabling technologies, um, you move to the next point of failure. And so, so you scaling these abstraction layers. Now services are being turned on more and more keeping it as clusters are out there. So I have to ask you, what is the main cost driver problem that's happening in the cube space that you guys are addressing? Is it just sheer volume? Is it different classes of services? Is it like different things are kind of working together, different monitoring tools? Is it not a platform and take us through the, the problem area? What do you guys see this? >>Yeah, the number one problem area is still actually what, uh, the CNCF fin ops survey highlighted earlier this year, um, which is that approximately two thirds of companies still don't have kind of baseline to visibility into spend when they moved to Kubernetes. Um, so, you know, even if you had a really complex, you know, chargeback program in place, when you're building all your applications on BMS, you move to Kubernetes and most teams again, can't answer these really simple questions. Um, so we're able to give them that visibility in real time, so they can start breaking these problems down. Right. They can start to see that, okay, it's these, you know, the deployments are staple sets that are driving our costs or no, it's actually, you know, these workloads that are talking to, you know, S3 buckets and, you know, really driving, you know, egress costs. Um, so it's really about first and foremost, just getting the visibility, getting the eyes and ears. We're able to give that to teams in real time at the largest scale Kubernetes clusters in the world. Um, and again, most teams, when they first start working with us, don't have that visibility, not having that visibility can have a whole bunch of downstream impacts, um, including kind of not getting, you know, costs right. You know, performance, right. Et cetera. >>Well, let's get into that downstream benefit, uh, um, problems and or situations. But the first question I have just throw naysayer comment at you would be like, oh, wait, I have all this cost monitoring stuff already. What's different about Kubernetes. Why what's what's the problem I can are my other tool is going to work for me. How do you answer that one? >>Yeah. So, you know, I think first and foremost containers are very dynamic right there. They're often complex, often transient and consume variable cluster resources. And so as much as this enables teams to contract construct powerful solutions, um, the associated costs and actually tracking those, those different variables can be really difficult. And so that's why we see why a solution like food costs. That's purpose built for developers using Kubernetes is really necessary because some of those older, you know, traditional cloud cost optimization tools are just not as fit for, for this space specifically. >>Yeah. I think that's exactly right, Alex. And I would add to that just the way that software is being architected deployed and managed is fundamentally changing with Kubernetes, right? It is deeply impacting every part of scifi software delivery process. And through that, you know, decisions are getting made and, you know, engineers are ultimately being empowered, um, to make more, you know, costs impacting decisions. Um, and so we've seen, you know, organizations that get real time kind of built for Kubernetes are built for cloud native, um, benefit from that massively throughout their, their culture, um, you know, cost performance, et cetera. >>Uh, well, can you just give a quick example because I think that's a great point. The architectures are shifting, they're changing there's new things coming in, so it's not like you can use an old tool and just retrofit it. That's sometimes that's awkward. What specific things you see changing with Kubernetes that's that environments are leveraging that's good. >>Yeah. Yeah. Um, one would be all these Kubernetes primitives are concepts that didn't exist before. Right. So, um, you know, I'm not, you know, managing just a generic workload, I'm managing a staple set and, or, you know, three replica sets. Right. And so having a language that is very much tailored towards all of these Kubernetes concepts and abstractions, et cetera. Um, but then secondly, it was like, you know, we're seeing this very obvious, you know, push towards microservices where, you know, typically again, you're shipping faster, um, you know, teams are making more distributed or decentralized decisions, uh, where there's not one single point where you can kind of gate check everything. Um, and that's a great thing for innovation, right? We can move much faster. Um, but for some teams, um, you know, not using a tool like coop costs, that means sacrificing having a safety net in place, right. >>Or guard rails in place to really help manage and monitor this. And I would just say, lastly, you know, uh, a solution like coop costs because it's built for Kubernetes sits in your infrastructure, um, it can be deployed with a single helmet stall. You don't have to share any data remotely. Um, but because it's listening to your infrastructure, it can give you data in real time. Right. And so we're moving from this world where you can make real time automated decisions or manual decisions as opposed to waiting for a bill, you know, a day, two days or a week later, um, when it may be already too late, you know, to avoid, >>Or he got the extra costs and you know what, he wants that. And he got to fight for a refund. Oh yeah. I threw a switch or wasn't paying attention or human error or code because a lot of automation is going on. So I could see that as a benefit. I gotta, I gotta ask the question on, um, developer uptake, because develop, you mentioned a good point. There that's another key modern dynamic developers are in, in the moment making decisions on security, on policy, um, things to do in the CIC D pipeline. So if I'm a developer, how do I engage with Qube cost? Do I have to, can I just download something? Is it easy? How's the onboarding process for your customers? >>Yeah. Great, great question. Um, so, you know, first and foremost, I think this gets to the roots of our company and the roots of coop costs, which is, you know, born in open-source, everything we do is built on top of open source. Uh, so the answer is, you know, you can go out and install it in minutes. Like, you know, thousands of other teams have, um, it is, you know, the, the recommended route or preferred route on our side is, you know, a helm installed. Um, again, you don't have to share any data remotely. You can truly not lock down, you know, namespace eat grass, for example, on the coop cost namespace. Um, and yeah, and in minutes you'll have this visibility and can start to see, you know, really interesting metrics that, again, most teams, when we started working with them, either didn't have them in place at all, or they had a really rough estimate based on maybe even a coop cost Scruff on a dashboard that they installed. >>How does cube cost provide the visibility across the environment? How do you guys actually make it work? >>Yeah, so we, you know, sit in your infrastructure. Um, we have integrations with, um, for on-prem like custom pricing sheets, uh, with card providers will integrate with your actual billing data, um, so that we can, uh, listen for events in your infrastructure, say like a nude node coming up, or a new pod being scheduled, et cetera. Um, we take that information, join with your billing data, whether it's on-prem or in one of the big three cloud providers. And then again, we can, in real time tell you the cost of, you know, any dimension of your infrastructure, whether it's one of the backing, you know, virtual assets you're using, or one of the application dimensions like a label or annotation namespace, you know, pod container, you name it >>Awesome. Alex, what's your take on the landscape with, with the customers as they look the cost reductions. I mean, everyone loves cost reductions as a, certainly I love the safety net comment that Webb made, but at the end of the day, Kubernetes is not so much a cost driver. It's more of a, I want the modern apps faster. Right? So, so, so people who are buying Kubernetes usually aren't price sensitive, but they also don't want to get gouged either on mistakes. Where is the customer path here around Kubernetes cost management and reduction and a scale? >>Yeah. So I think one thing that we're looking forward to hearing this upcoming year, just like we did last year is continuing to work with the various tools that customers are already using and, you know, meeting those customers where they are. So some examples of that are, you know, working with like CICT tools out there. Like we have a great integration with armoring Spinnaker to help customers actually take the insights from coop costs and deploy those, um, in a more efficient manner. Um, we're also working with a lot of partners, like, you know, for fauna to help customers visualize our data and, you know, integrate with or rancher, which are management platforms for Kubernetes. And all of that I think is just to make cost come more to the forefront of the conversation when folks are using Kubernetes and provide that, that data to customers and all the various tools that they're using across the ecosystem. Um, so I think we really want to surface this and make costs more of a first-class citizen across, you know, the, the ecosystem and then the community partners. >>What's your strategy of the biz dev side. As you guys look at a growing ecosystem with CubeCon CNCF, you mentioned that earlier, um, the community is growing. It's always been growing fast. You know, the number of people entering in are amazing, but now that we start going, you know, the S curves kicking in, um, integration and interoperability and openness is always a key part of company success. What's Qube costs is vision on how you're going to do biz dev going forward. >>Absolutely. So, you know, our products opensource that is deeply important to our company, we're always going to continue to drive innovation on our open source product. Um, as Webb mentioned, you know, we have thousands of teams that are, that are using our product. And most of that is actually on the free, but something that we want to make sure continues to be available for the community and continue to bring that development for the community. And so I think a part of that is making sure that we're working with folks not just on the commercial side, but also those open source, um, types of products, right? So, you know, for Fanta is open source Spinnaker's are open source. I think a lot of the biz dev strategies just sticking to our roots and make sure that we continue to drive it a strong open source presence and product for, for our community of users, keep that >>And a, an open source and commercial and keep it stable. Well, I got to ask you, obviously, the wave is here. I always joke, uh, going back. I remember when the word Kubernetes was just kicked around pre uh, the OpenStack days many, many years ago. It's the luxury of being a old cube guy that I am 11 years doing the cube, um, all fun. But if we remember talking to him in the early days, is that with Kubernetes was, if, if it worked, the, the phrase was rising, tide floats all boats, I would say right now, the tides rising pretty well right now, you guys are in a good spot with the cube costs. Are there areas that you see coming where cost monitoring, um, is going to expand more? Where do you see the Kubernetes? Um, what's the aperture, if you will, of the, of the cost monitoring space at your end that you think you can address. >>Yeah, John, I think you're exactly right. This, uh, tide has risen and it just keeps riding rising, right? Like, um, you know, the, the sheer number of organizations we use C using Kubernetes at massive scale is just mind blowing at this point. Um, you know, what we see is this really natural pattern for teams to start using a solution like coop costs, uh, start with, again, either limited or no visibility, get that visibility in place, and then really develop an action plan from there. And that could again be, you know, different governance solutions like alerts or, you know, management reports or, you know, engineering team reports, et cetera. Um, but it's really about, you know, phase two of taking that information and really starting to do something with it. Right. Um, we, we are seeing and expect to see more teams turn to an increasing amount of, of automation to do that. Um, but ultimately that is, uh, very much after you get this baseline highly accurate, uh, visibility that you feel very comfortable making, potentially critical, very critical related to reliability, performance decisions within your infrastructure. >>Yeah. I think getting it right key, you mentioned baseline. Let me ask you a quick follow-up on that. How fast can companies get there when you say baseline, there's probably levels of baseline. Obviously all environments are different now. Not all one's the same, but what's just anecdotally you see, as that baseline, how fast we will get there, is there a certain minimum viable configuration or architecture? Just take us through your thoughts on that. >>Yeah. Great question. It definitely depends on organizational complexity and, you know, can depend on applicational application complexity as well. But I would say most importantly is, um, you know, the, the array of cost centers, departments, you know, complexity across the org as opposed to, you know, technological. Um, so I would say for, you know, less complex organizations, we've seen it happen in, you know, hours or, you know, a day less, et cetera. Um, because that's, you know, one or two or a smaller engineering games, they can share that visibility really quickly. And, um, you know, they may be familiar with Kubernetes and they just get it right away. Um, for larger organizations, we've seen it take kind of up 90 days where it's really about infusing this kind of into their DNA. When again, there may not have been a visibility or transparency here before. Um, again, I think the, the, the bulk of the time there is really about kind of the cultural element, um, and kind of awareness building, um, and just buy in throughout the organization. >>Awesome. Well, guys got a great product. Congratulations, final question for both of you, it's early days in Kubernetes, even though the tide is rising, keeps rising, more boats are coming in. Harbor is getting bigger, whatever, whatever metaphor you want to use, it's really going great. You guys are seeing customer adoption. We're seeing cloud native. I was told that my friends at dock or the container side is going crazy as well. Everything's going great in cloud native. What's the vision on the innovation? How do you guys continue to push the envelope on value in open source and in the commercial area? What's the vision? >>Yeah, I think there's, there's many areas here and I know Alex will have more to add here. Um, but you know, one area that I know is relevant to his world is just more, really interesting integrations, right? So he mentioned coop costs, insights, powering decisions, and say Spinnaker, right? I think more and more of this tool chain really coming together and really seeing the benefits of all this interoperability. Right. Um, so that I think combined with, uh, just more and more intelligence and automation being deployed again, that's only after the fact that teams are really comfortable with his decisions and the information and the decisions that are being made. Um, but I think that increasingly we see the community again, being ready to leverage this information and really powerful ways. Um, just because, you know, as teams scale, there's just a lot to manage. And so a team, you know, leveraging automation can, you know, supercharge them and in really impactful ways. >>Awesome, great integration integrations, Alex, expand on that. A whole different kind of set of business development integrations. When you have lots of tool chains, lots of platforms and tools kind of coming together, sharing data, working together, automating together. >>Well. Yeah, we, so I think it's going to be super important to keep a pulse on the new tools. Right. Make sure that we're on the forefront of what customers are using and just continuing to meet them where they are. And a lot of that honestly, is working with AWS too, right? Like they have great services and EKS and managed Prometheus's. Um, so we want to make sure that we continue to work with that team and support their services as that launched as well. >>Great stuff. I got a couple of minutes left. I felt I'll throw one more question in there since I got two great experts here. Um, just, you know, a little bit change of pace, more of an industry question. That's really no wrong answer, but I'd love to get your reaction to, um, the SAS conversation cloud has changed what used to be SAS. SAS was, oh yeah. Software as a service. Now that you have all these kinds of new kinds of you have automation, horizontally, scalable cloud and edge, you now have vertical machine learning. Data-driven insights. A lot of things in the stack are changing. So the question is what's the new SAS look like it's the same as the old SAS? Or is it a new kind of refactoring of what SAS is? What's your take on this? >>Yeah. Um, there's a web, please jump in here wherever. But in, in my view, um, it's a spectrum, right? There's there's customers that are on both ends of this. Some customers just want a fully hosted, fully managed product that wouldn't benefit from the luxury of not having to do any, any sort of infrastructure management or patching or anything like that. And they just want to consume a great product. Um, on the other hand, there's other customers that have more highly regulated industries or security requirements, and they're going to need things to deploy in their environment. Um, right now QP cost is, is self hosted. But I think in the future, we want to make sure that, you know, we, we have versions of our product available for customers across that entire spectrum. Um, so that, you know, if somebody wants the benefit of just not having to manage anything, they can use a fully self hosted sat or a fully multitenant managed SAS, or, you know, other customers can use a self hosted product. And then there's going to be customers that are in the middle, right, where there's certain components that are okay to be a SAS or hosted elsewhere. But then there's going to be components that are really important to keep in their own environment. So I think, uh, it's really across the board and it's going to depend on customer and customer, but it's important to make sure we have options for all of them. >>Great guys, we have SAS, same as the old SAS. What's the SAS playbook. Now >>I think it is such a deep and interesting question and one that, um, it's going to touch so many aspects of software and on our lives, I predict that we'll continue to see this, um, you know, tension or real trade-off across on the one hand convenience. And now on the other hand, security, privacy and control. Um, and I think, you know, like Alex mentioned, you know, different organizations are going to make different decisions here based on kind of their relative trade-offs. Um, I think it's going to be of epic proportions. I think, you know, we'll look back on this period and just say that, you know, this was one of the foundational questions of how to get this right. We ultimately view it as like, again, we want to offer choice, um, and make, uh, make every choice be great, but let our users, uh, pick the right one, given their profile on those, on those streets. >>I think, I think it's a great comment choice. And also you got now dimensions of implementations, right? Multitenant, custom regulated, secure. I want have all these controls. Um, it's great. No one, no one SaaS rules the world, so to speak. So it's again, great, great dynamic. But ultimately, if you want to leverage the data, is it horizontally addressable? MultiTech and again, this is a whole nother ball game we're watching this closely and you guys are in the middle of it with cube costs, as you guys are creating that baseline for customers. Uh, congratulations. Uh, great to see you where thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. Thank you so much for having us again. Okay. Great. Conservation aiders startup showcase open cloud innovators here. Open source is driving a lot of value as it goes. Commercial, going to the next generation. This is season two episode, one of the AWS startup series with the cube. Thanks for watching.

>>from around >>the globe. It's >>the cube presenting future >>Cloud one >>event. A >>world of opportunities >>brought to you by Cisco. >>Okay. We're here with costume. Does, who is the Senior Vice President, General Manager of Cloud and compute at Cisco And VJ Venugopal, who is the Senior Director for Product management for Cloud, compute at Cisco. KTV J Good to see you guys welcome. >>Great to see you. Dave >>to be here. >>Katie. Let's talk about cloud. You. And I, last time we're face to face was in Barcelona where we love talking about cloud. And I always say to people look, Cisco is not a hyper scaler, but the big public cloud players, they're like giving you a gift. They spent almost actually over $100 billion last year on Capex. The big four. So you can build on that infrastructure. Cisco is all about hybrid cloud. So help us understand the strategy. There may be how you can leverage that build out and importantly what a customer is telling you they want out of hybrid cloud. >>Yeah, no, that's that's that's a perfect question to start with Dave. So yes, so the hybrid hyper scholars have invested heavily building out their assets. There's a great lot of innovation coming from that space. Um there's also a great innovation set of innovation coming from open source and and that's another source of uh a gift, in fact the I. T. Community. But when I look at my customers, they're saying, well how do I in the context of my business, implement a strategy that takes into consideration everything that I have to manage um in terms of my contemporary work clothes, in terms of my legacy, in terms of everything my developer community wants to do on devops and really harness that innovation that's built in the public cloud, that built an open source that built internally to me and that naturally leads them down the path of a hybrid cloud strategy. And Siskel's mission is to provide for that imperative, the simplest, more power, more powerful platform to deliver hybrid cloud. And that platform uh is inter site, we've been investing in Inner side, it's a it's a SAS um service um inner side delivers to them that bridge between their estates of today. There were clothes of today, the need for them to be guardians of enterprise grade resiliency with the agility uh that's needed for the future. The embracing of cloud, Native of new paradigms of deVOPS models, the embracing of innovation coming from public cloud and an open source and bridging those two is what inner side has been doing. That's kind of, that's kind of the crux of our strategy. Of course, we have the entire portfolio behind it to support any any version of that, Whether that is on prem in the cloud, hybrid, cloud, multi, cloud and so forth. >>But but if I understand it correctly from what I heard earlier today, the inter site is really a linchpin of that strategy, is it not? >>It really is and may take a second to uh to totally familiarize those who don't know inner side with what it is. We started building this platform quite a few years back and we we built a ground up to be an immensely scalable SAs super simple hybrid cloud platform and it's a platform that provides a slew of service is inherently. And then on top of that there are suites of services, the sweets of services that are tied to infrastructure, automation. Cisco, as well as Cisco partners, their suite of services that have nothing to do with Cisco um products from a hardware perspective and it's got to do with more cloud orchestration and cloud native and inner side and its suite of services um continue to kind of increase in pace and velocity of delivery video. It's just over the last two quarters we've announced a whole number of things will go a little bit deeper into some of those, but they span everything from infrastructure automation to kubernetes and delivering community than service to workload optimization and having visibility into your cloud estate. How much it's costing into your on premise state into your work clothes and how they're performing. It's got integrations with other tooling with both Cisco Abdi uh as well as non Cisco um, assets. And then and then it's got a whole slew of capabilities around orchestration because at the end of the day, the job of it is to deliver something that works and works at scale that you can monitor and make sure is resilient and that includes that. That includes a workflow and ability to say, you know, do this and do this and do this. Or it includes other ways of automation, like infrastructure as code and so forth. So it includes self service that so that expand that. But inside the world's simplest hybrid cloud platform, rapidly evolving rapidly delivering new services. And uh, we'll talk about some more of those days. >>Great. Thank you. Katie VJ Let's bring you into the discussion. You guys recently made an announcement with the ASCII corp. I was stoked because even though it seemed like a long time ago, pre covid, I mean in my predictions post, I said, ha she was a name to watch our data partners. Et are you look at the survey data and they really have become mainstream. You know, particularly we think very important in the whole multi cloud discussion. And as well, they're attractive to customers. They have open source offerings. You can very easily experiment, smaller organizations can take advantage, but if you want to upgrade to enterprise features like clustering or whatever, you can plug right in. Not a big complicated migration. So a very, very compelling story there. Why is this important? Why is this partnership important to Cisco's customers? >>Mhm. Absolutely. When the spot on every single thing that you said, let me just start by paraphrasing what ambition statement is in the cloud and compute group right ambition statement is to enable a cloud operating model for hybrid cloud. And what we mean by that is the ability to have extreme amounts of automation orchestration and observe ability across your hybrid cloud idea operations now. Uh So developers >>and applications >>team get a great amount of agility in public clouds and we're on a mission to bring that kind of agility and automation to the private cloud and to the data centers. And inter site is a quickie platform and lynchpin to enable that kind of operations. Uh, Cloud like operations in the in the private clouds and the key uh as you rightly said, harsher Carp is the, you know, they were the inventors of the concept of infrastructure at school and in terra form, they have the world's number one infrastructure as code platform. So it became a natural partnership for Cisco to enter into a technology partnership with Harsher Card to integrate inter site with hardship cops, terra form to bring the benefits of infrastructure as code to the to hybrid cloud operations. And we've entered into a very tight integration and uh partnership where we allow developers devops teams and infrastructure or administrators to allow the use of infrastructure as code in a SAS delivered manner for both public and private club. So it's a very unique partnership and a unique integration that allows the benefits of cloud managed. I see to be delivered to hybrid cloud operations and we've been very happy and proud to be partnering with Russia Carbonara. >>Yeah, telephone gets very high marks from customers. The a lot of value there, the inner side integration adds to that value. Let's stay on cloud Native for a minute. We all talk about cloud native cady was sort of mentioning before you got the the core apps uh you want to protect those, make sure their enterprise create but they gotta be cool as well for developers. You're connecting to other apps in the cloud or wherever. How are you guys thinking about this? Cloud native trend. What other movies are you making in this regard? >>I mean cloud Native is there is one of the paramount I. D. Trends of today and we're seeing massive amounts of adoption of cloud native architecture in all modern applications. Now. Cloud native has become synonymous with kubernetes these days and communities has emerged as a de facto cloud native platform for modern cloud native app development. Now, what Cisco has done is we have created a brand new SAs delivered kubernetes service that is integrated with inter site, we call it the inter site community service for a. Ks and this just gave a little over one month ago now, what interstate Kubernetes service does is it delivers a cloud managed and cloud delivered kubernetes service that can be deployed on any supportive target infrastructure. It could be a Cisco infrastructure, it could be a third party infrastructure or it could even be public club. But think of it as kubernetes anywhere delivered, as says, managed from inside. It's a very powerful capability that we've just released into inter site to enable the power of communities and cognitive to be used to be used anywhere. But today we made a very important aspect because we have today announced the brand new Cisco service mess manager. The Cisco service mesh manager, which is available as an extension to I K s are doing decide basically we see service measures as being the future of networking. Right in the past we had layer to networking and layer three networking and now with service measures, application networking and layer seven networking is the next frontier of of networking. But you need to think about networking for the application age very differently, how it is managed, how it is deployed, it needs to be ready, developer friendly and developer centric. And so what we have done is we've built out an application networking strategy and built out the service match manager as a very simple way to deliver application networking through the consumers, like like developers and application teams. This is built on an acquisition that Cisco made recently of Banzai Cloud. And we've taken the assets of Banzai Cloud and deliver the Cisco service mash Manager as an extension to KS. That brings the promise of future networking and modern networking to application and development gives >>God thank you BJ. And so Katie, let's let's let's wrap this up. I mean, there was a lot in this announcement today, a lot of themes around openness, heterogeneity and a lot of functionality and value. Give us your final thoughts. >>Absolutely. So couple of things to close on. First of all. Um, inner side is the simplest, most powerful hybrid cloud platform out there. It enables that that cloud operating model that VJ talked about but enables that across cloud. So it's sad, it's relatively easy to get into it and give it a spin so that I'd highly encouraged anybody who's not familiar with it to try it out and anybody who is familiar with it to look at it again, because they're probably services in there that you didn't notice or didn't know last time you looked at it because we're moving so fast. So that's the first thing, the second thing I close with is, um we've been talking about this bridge that's kind of bridging, bridging uh your your on prem your open source, your cloud estates. And it's so important to to make that mental leap because uh in past generation we used to talk about integrating technologies together and then with Public cloud, we started talking about move to public cloud, but it's really how do we integrate, how do we integrate all of that innovation that's coming from the hyper scale is everything they're doing to innovate superfast. All of that innovation is coming from open source, all of that innovation that's coming from from companies around the world including Cisco. How do we integrate that to deliver an outcome? Because at the end of the day, if you're a cloud of Steam, if you're an idea of Steam, your job is to deliver an outcome and our mission is to make it super simple for you to do that. That's the mission we're on and we're hoping that everybody that's excited as we are about how simple we made that. >>Great, thank you a lot in this announcement today, appreciate you guys coming back on and help us unpack you know, some of the details. Thanks so much. Great having you. >>Thank you. Dave. >>Thank you everyone for spending some time with us. This is Dave Volonte and you're watching the cube, the leader in tech event >>coverage. >>Mm mm.

>>mhm, mm. All right. Mhm. Mhm, mm mm. Mhm. Yeah, mm. Mhm. Yeah, yeah. Mhm, mm. Okay. Mm. Yeah, Yeah. >>Mhm. Mhm. Yeah. Welcome to future cloud made possible by Cisco. My name is Dave Volonte and I'm your host. You know, the cloud is evolving like the universe is expanding at an accelerated pace. No longer is the cloud. Just a remote set of services, you know, somewhere up there. No, the cloud, it's extending to on premises. Data centers are reaching into the cloud through adjacent locations. Clouds are being connected together to each other and eventually they're gonna stretch to the edge and the far edge workloads, location latency, local laws and economics will define the value customers can extract from this new cloud model which unifies the operating experience independent of location. Cloud is moving rapidly from a spare capacity slash infrastructure resource to a platform for application innovation. Now, the challenge is how to make this new cloud simple, secure, agile and programmable. Oh and it has to be cloud agnostic. Now, the real opportunity for customers is to tap into a layer across clouds and data centers that abstracts the underlying complexity of the respective clouds and locations. And it's got to accommodate both mission critical workloads as well as general purpose applications across the spectrum cost, effectively enabling simplicity with minimal labor costs requires infrastructure i. E. Hardware, software, tooling, machine intelligence, AI and partnerships within an ecosystem. It's kind of accommodate a variety of application deployment models like serverless and containers and support for traditional work on VMS. By the way, it also requires a roadmap that will take us well into the next decade because the next 10 years they will not be like the last So why are we here? Well, the cube is covering Cisco's announcements today that connect next generation compute shared memory, intelligent networking and storage resource pools, bringing automation, visibility, application assurance and security to this new decentralized cloud. Now, of course in today's world you wouldn't be considered modern without supporting containers ai and operational tooling that is demanded by forward thinking practitioners. So sit back and enjoy the cubes, special coverage of Cisco's future cloud >>From around the globe. It's the Cube presenting future cloud one event, a world of opportunities brought to you by Cisco. >>We're here with Dejoy Pandey, a VP of emerging tech and incubation at Cisco. V. Joy. Good to see you. Welcome. >>Good to see you as well. Thank you Dave and pleasure to be here. >>So in 2020 we kind of had to redefine the notion of agility when it came to digital business or you know organizations, they had to rethink their concept of agility and business resilience. What are you seeing in terms of how companies are thinking about their operations in this sort of new abnormal context? >>Yeah, I think that's a great question. I think what what we're seeing is that pretty much the application is the center of the universe. And if you think about it, the application is actually driving brand recognition and the brand experience and the brand value. So the example I like to give is think about a banking app uh recovered that did everything that you would expect it to do. But if you wanted to withdraw cash from your bank you would actually have to go to the ATM and punch in some numbers and then look at your screen and go through a process and then finally withdraw cash. Think about what that would have, what what that would do in a post pandemic era where people are trying to go contact less. And so in a situation like this, the digitization efforts that all of these companies are going through and and the modernization of the automation is what is driving brand recognition, brand trust and brand experience. >>Yeah. So I was gonna ask you when I heard you say that, I was gonna say well, but hasn't it always been about the application, but it's different now, isn't it? So I wonder if you talk more about how the application is experience is changing. Yes. As a result of this new digital mandate. But how should organizations think about optimizing those experiences in this new world? >>Absolutely. And I think, yes, it's always been about the application, but it's becoming the center of the universe right now because all interactions with customers and consumers and even businesses are happening through that application. So if the application is unreliable or if the application is not available is untrusted insecure, uh, there's a problem. There's a problem with the brand, with the company and the trust that consumers and customers have with our company. So if you think about an application developer, the weight he or she is carrying on their shoulders is tremendous because you're thinking about rolling features quickly to be competitive. That's the only way to be competitive in this world. You need to think about availability and resiliency. Like you pointed out and experience, you need to think about security and trust. Am I as a customer or consumer willing to put my data in that application? So velocity, availability, Security and trust and all of that depends on the developer. So the experience, the security, the trust, the feature, velocity is what is driving the brand experience now. >>So are those two tensions that say agility and trust, you know, Zero Trust used to be a buzzword now it's a mandate. But are those two vectors counter posed? Can they be merged into one and not affect each other? Does the question makes sense? Right? Security usually handcuffs my speed. But how do you address that? >>Yeah that's a great question. And I think if you think about it today that's the way things are. And if you think about this developer all they want to do is run fast because they want to build those features out and they're going to pick and choose a piece and services that matter to them and build up their app and they want the complexities of the infrastructure and security and trust to be handled by somebody else is not that they don't care about it but they want that abstraction so that is handled by somebody else. And typically within an organization we've seen in the past where this friction between Netapp Sec ops I. T. Tops and and the cloud platform Teams and the developer on one side and these these frictions and these meetings and toil actually take a toll on the developer and that's why companies and apps and developers are not as agile as they would like to be. So I think but it doesn't have to be that way. So I think if there was something that would allow a developer to pick and choose, discover the apis that they would like to use connect those api is in a very simple manner and then be able to scale them out and be able to secure them and in fact not just secure them during the run time when it's deployed. We're right off the back when the fire up that I'd and start developing the application. Wouldn't that be nice? And as you do that, there is a smooth transition between that discovery connectivity and ease of consumption and security with the idea cops. Netapp psych ops teams and see source to ensure that they are not doing something that the organization won't allow them to do in a very seamless manner. >>I want to go back and talk about security but I want to add another complexity before we do that. So for a lot of organizations in the public cloud became a staple of keeping the lights on during the pandemic but it brings new complexities and differences in terms of latency security, which I want to come back to deployment models etcetera. So what are some of the specific networking challenges that you've seen with the cloud native architecture is how are you addressing those? >>Yeah. In fact, if you think about cloud, to me that is a that is a different way of seeing a distributed system. And if you think about a distributed system, what is at the center of the distributed system is the network. So my my favorite comment here is that the network is the wrong time for all distribute systems and modern applications. And that is true because if you think about where things are today, like you said, there's there's cloud assets that a developer might use in the banking example that I gave earlier. I mean if you want to build a contact less app so that you get verified, a customer gets verified on the app. They walk over to the ATM and they were broadcast without touching that ATM. In that kind of an example, you're touching the mobile Rus, let's say U S A P is you're touching cloud API is where the back end might sit. You're touching on primary PS maybe it's an oracle database or a mainframe even where transactional data exists. You're touching branch pipes were the team actually exists and the need for consistency when you withdraw cash and you're carrying all of this and in fact there might be customer data sitting in salesforce somewhere. So it's cloud API is a song premise branch. It's ass is mobile and you need to bring all of these things together and over time you will see more and more of these API is coming from various as providers. So it's not just cloud providers but saas providers that the developer has to use. And so this complexity is very, very real. And this complexity is across the wide open internet. So the application is built across this wide open internet. So the problems of discovery ability, the problems of being able to simply connect these apis and manage the data flow across these apis. The problems of consistency of policy and consumption because all of these areas have their own nuances and what they mean, what the arguments mean and what the A. P. I. Actually means. How do you make it consistent and easy for the developer? That is the networking problem. And that is a problem of building out this network, making traffic engineering easy, making policy easy, making scale out, scale down easy, all of that our networking problems. And so we are solving those problems uh Francisco. >>Yeah the internet is the new private network but it's not so private. So I want to go back to security. I often say that the security model of building a moat, you dig the moat, you get the hardened castle that's just outdated now that the queen is left her castle, I always say it's dangerous out there. And the point is you touched on this, it's it's a huge decentralized system and with distributed apps and data, that notion of perimeter security, it's just no longer valid. So I wonder if you could talk more about how you're thinking about this problem and you definitely address some of that in your earlier comments. But what are you specifically doing to address this and how do you see it evolving? >>Yeah, I mean, that's that's a very important point. I mean, I think if you think about again the wide open internet being the wrong time for all modern applications, what is perimeter security in this uh in this new world? I mean, it's to me it boils down to securing an API because again, going with that running example of this contact lists cash withdrawal feature for a bank, the ap wherever it's it's entre branch SAs cloud, IOS android doesn't matter that FBI is your new security perimeter. And the data object that is trying to access is also the new security perimeter. So if you can secure ap to ap communication and P two data object communication, you should be good. So that is the new frontier. But guess what software is buggy? Everybody's software not saying Cisco software, everybody's Softwares buggy. Uh software is buggy, humans are not reliable and so things mature, things change, things evolve over time. So there needs to be defense in depth. So you need to secure at the API layer had the data object layer, but you also need to secure at every layer below it so that you have good defense and depth if any layer in between is not working out properly. So for us that means ensuring ap to ap communication, not just during long time when the app has been deployed and is running, but during deployment and also during the development life cycle. So as soon as the developer launches an ID, they should be able to figure out that this api is security uses reputable, it has compliant, it is compliant to my to my organization's needs because it is hosted, let's say from Germany and my organization wants appears to be used only if they are being hosted out of Germany so compliance needs and and security needs and reputation. Is it available all the time? Is it secure? And being able to provide that feedback all the time between the security teams and the developer teams in a very seamless real time manner. Yes, again, that's something that we're trying to solve through some of the services that we're trying to produce in san Francisco. >>Yeah, I mean those that layered approach that you're talking about is critical because every layer has, you know, some vulnerability. And so you you've got to protect that with some depth in terms of thinking about security, how should we think about where where Cisco's primary value add is, I mean as parts of the interview has a great security business is growing business, Is it your intention to to to to add value across the entire value chain? I mean obviously you can't do everything so you've got a partner but so has the we think about Cisco's role over the next I'm thinking longer term over the over the next decade. >>Yeah, I mean I think so, we do come in with good strength from the runtime side of the house. So if you think about the security aspects that we haven't played today, uh there's a significant set of assets that we have around user security around around uh with with do and password less. We have significant assets in runtime security. I mean, the entire portfolio that Cisco brings to the table is around one time security, the secure X aspects around posture and policy that will bring to the table. And as you see, Cisco evolve over time, you will see us shifting left. I mean, I know it's an overused term, but that is where security is moving towards. And so that is where api security and data security are moving towards. So learning what we have during runtime because again, runtime is where you learn what's available and that's where you can apply all of the M. L. And I models to figure out what works what doesn't taking those learnings, Taking those catalogs, taking that reputation database and moving it into the deployment and development life cycle and making sure that that's part of that entire they have to deploy to runtime chain is what you will see. Cisco do overtime. >>That's fantastic phenomenal perspective video. Thanks for coming on the cube. Great to have you and look forward to having you again. >>Absolutely. Thank you >>in a moment. We'll talk hybrid cloud applications operations and potential gaps that need to be addressed with costume, Das and VJ Venugopal. You're watching the cube the global leader in high tech coverage. Mhm >>You were cloud. It isn't just a cloud. It's everything flowing through it. It's alive. Yeah, connecting users, applications, data and devices and whether it's cloud, native hybrid or multi cloud, it's more distributed than ever. One company takes you inside, giving you the visibility and the insight you need to take action. >>One company >>has the vision to understand it, all the experience, to securely connect at all on any platform in any environment. So you can work wherever work takes you in a cloud first world between your cloud and being cloud smart, there's a bridge. Cisco the bridge to possible. >>Okay. We're here with costume does, who is the Senior Vice President, General Manager of Cloud and compute at Cisco. And VJ Venugopal, who is the Senior Director for Product Management for cloud compute at Cisco. KTV. J. Good to see you guys welcome. >>Great to see you. Dave to be here. >>Katie, let's talk about cloud you And I last time we're face to face was in Barcelona where we love talking about cloud and I always say to people look, Cisco is not a hyper Scaler, but the big public cloud players, they're like giving you a gift. They spent almost actually over $100 billion last year on Capex. The big four. So you can build on that infrastructure. Cisco is all about hybrid cloud. So help us understand the strategy. There may be how you can leverage that build out and importantly what a customer is telling you they want out of hybrid cloud. >>Yeah, no that's that's that's a perfect question to start with. Dave. So yes. So the hybrid hyper scholars have invested heavily building out their assets. There's a great lot of innovation coming from that space. Um There's also a great innovation set of innovation coming from open source and and that's another source of uh a gift. In fact the I. T. Community. But when I look at my customers they're saying well how do I in the context of my business implement a strategy that takes into consideration everything that I have to manage um in terms of my contemporary work clothes, in terms of my legacy, in terms of everything my developer community wants to do on DEVOPS and really harnessed that innovation that's built in the public cloud, that built an open source that built internally to me, and that naturally leads them down the path of a hybrid cloud strategy. And Siskel's mission is to provide for that imperative, the simplest more power, more powerful platform to deliver hybrid cloud and that platform. Uh It's inter site we've been investing in. Inner side, it's a it's a SAS um service um inner side delivers to them that bridge between their estates of today that were closer today, the need for them to be guardians of enterprise grade resiliency with the agility uh that's needed for the future. The embracing of cloud. Native of new paradigms of deVOPS models, the embracing of innovation coming from public cloud and an open source and bridging those two is what inner side has been doing. That's kind of that's kind of the crux of our strategy. Of course we have the entire portfolio behind it to support any, any version of that, whether that is on prem in the cloud, hybrid, cloud, multi cloud and so forth. >>But but if I understand it correctly from what I heard earlier today, the inter site is really a linchpin of that strategy, is it not? >>It really is and may take a second to totally familiarize those who don't know inner side with what it is. We started building this platform quite a few years back and we we built a ground up to be an immensely scalable SAs, super simple hybrid cloud platform and it's a platform that provides a slew of service is inherently and then on top of that there are suites of services, the sweets of services that are tied to infrastructure, automation. Cisco, as well as Cisco partners. The streets of services that have nothing to do with Cisco um products from a hardware perspective. And it's got to do with more cloud orchestration and cloud native and inner side and its suite of services um continue to kind of increase in pace and velocity of delivery video. Just over the last two quarters we've announced a whole number of things will go a little bit deeper into some of those but they span everything from infrastructure automation to kubernetes and delivering community than service to workload optimization and having visibility into your cloud estate. How much it's costing into your on premise state into your work clothes and how they're performing. It's got integrations with other tooling with both Cisco Abdi uh as well as non Cisco um, assets and then and then it's got a whole slew of capabilities around orchestration because at the end of the day, the job of it is to deliver something that works and works at scale that you can monitor and make sure is resilient and that includes that. That includes a workflow and ability to say, you know, do this and do this and do this. Or it includes other ways of automation, like infrastructure as code and so forth. So it includes self service that so that expand that. But inside the world's simplest hybrid cloud platform, rapidly evolving rapidly delivering new services. And uh we'll talk about some more of those day. >>Great, thank you, Katie VJ. Let's bring you into the discussion. You guys recently made an announcement with the ASCIi corp. I was stoked because even though it seemed like a long time ago, pre covid, I mean in my predictions post, I said, ha, she was a name to watch our data partners. Et are you look at the survey data and they really have become mainstream? You know, particularly we think very important in the whole multi cloud discussion. And as well, they're attractive to customers. They have open source offerings. You can very easily experiment. Smaller organizations can take advantage. But if you want to upgrade to enterprise features like clustering or whatever, you can plug right in. Not a big complicated migration. So a very, very compelling story there. Why is this important? Why is this partnership important to Cisco's customers? Mhm. >>Absolutely. When the spot on every single thing that you said, let me just start by paraphrasing what ambition statement is in the cloud and computer group. Right ambition statement is to enable a cloud operating model for hybrid cloud. And what we mean by that is the ability to have extreme amounts of automation orchestration and observe ability across your hybrid cloud idea operations now. Uh So developers and applications team get a great amount of agility in public clouds and we're on a mission to bring that kind of agility and automation to the private cloud and to the data centers and inter site is a quickie platform and lynchpin to enable that kind of operations. Uh, Cloud like operations in the in the private clouds and the key uh As you rightly said, harsher car is the, you know, they were the inventors of the concept of infrastructure at school and in terra form, they have the world's number one infrastructure as code platform. So it became a natural partnership for Cisco to enter into a technology partnership with harsher card to integrate inter site with hardship cops, terra form to bring the benefits of infrastructure as code to the to hybrid cloud operations. And we've entered into a very tight integration and uh partnership where we allow developers devops teams and infrastructure or administrators to allow the use of infrastructure as code in a SAS delivered manner for both public and private club. So it's a very unique partnership and a unique integration that allows the benefits of cloud managed i E C. To be delivered to hybrid cloud operations. And we've been very happy and proud to be partnering with Russian government shutdown. >>Yeah, Terra form gets very high marks from customers. The a lot of value there. The inner side integration adds to that value. Let's stay on cloud native for a minute. We all talk about cloud native cady was sort of mentioning before you got the the core apps, uh you want to protect those, make sure their enterprise create but they gotta be cool as well for developers. You're connecting to other apps in the cloud or wherever. How are you guys thinking about this? Cloud native trend? What other movies are you making in this regard? >>I mean cloud native is there is one of the paramount I. D. Trends of today and we're seeing massive amounts of adoption of cloud native architecture in all modern applications. Now, Cloud Native has become synonymous with kubernetes these days and communities has emerged as a de facto cloud native platform for modern cloud native app development. Now, what Cisco has done is we have created a brand new SAs delivered kubernetes service that is integrated with inter site, we call it the inter site community service for A. Ks. And this just geared a little over one month ago. Now, what interstate kubernetes service does is it delivers a cloud managed and cloud delivered kubernetes service that can be deployed on any supported target infrastructure. It could be a Cisco infrastructure, it could be a third party infrastructure or it could even be public club. But think of it as kubernetes anywhere delivered as says, managed from inside. It's a very powerful capability that we've just released into inter site to enable the power of communities and clog native to be used to be used anywhere. But today we made a very important aspect because we are today announced the brand new Cisco service mess manager, the Cisco service mesh manager, which is available as an extension to the KS are doing decide basically we see service measures as being the future of networking right in the past we had layer to networking and layer three networking and now with service measures, application networking and layer seven networking is the next frontier of, of networking. But you need to think about networking for the application age very differently how it is managed, how it is deployed. It needs to be ready, developer friendly and developer centric. And so what we've done is we've built out an application networking strategy and built out the service match manager as a very simple way to deliver application networking through the consumers, like like developers and application teams. This is built on an acquisition that Cisco made recently of Banzai Cloud and we've taken the assets of Banzai Cloud and deliver the Cisco service mesh manager as an extension to KS. That brings the promise of future networking and modern networking to application and development gives >>God thank you. BJ. And so Katie, let's let's let's wrap this up. I mean, there was a lot in this announcement today, a lot of themes around openness, heterogeneity and a lot of functionality and value. Give us your final thoughts. >>Absolutely. So, couple of things to close on, first of all, um Inner side is the simplest, most powerful hybrid cloud platform out there. It enables that that cloud operating model that VJ talked about, but enables that across cloud. So it's sad, it's relatively easy to get into it and give it a spin so that I'd highly encouraged anybody who's not familiar with it to try it out and anybody who is familiar with it to look at it again, because they're probably services in there that you didn't notice or didn't know last time you looked at it because we're moving so fast. So that's the first thing. The second thing I close with is um, we've been talking about this bridge that's kind of bridging, bridging uh your your on prem your open source, your cloud estates. And it's so important to to make that mental leap because uh in past generation, we used to talk about integrating technologies together and then with public cloud, we started talking about move to public cloud, but it's really how do we integrate, how do we integrate all of that innovation that's coming from the hyper scale, is everything they're doing to innovate superfast, All of that innovation is coming from open source, all of that innovation that's coming from from companies around the world, including Cisco, How do we integrate that to deliver an outcome? Because at the end of the day, if you're a cloud of Steam, if you're an idea of Steam, your job is to deliver an outcome and our mission is to make it super simple for you to do that. That's the mission we're on and we're hoping that everybody that's excited as we are about how simple we made that. >>Great, thank you a lot in this announcement today, appreciate you guys coming back on and help us unpack you know, some of the details. Thank thanks so much. Great having you. >>Thank you >>Dave in a moment. We're gonna come back and talk about disruptive technologies and futures in the age of hybrid cloud with Vegas Rattana and James leach. You're watching the cube, the global leader in high tech coverage. >>What if your server box >>wasn't a box at >>all? What if it could do anything run anything? >>Be any box you >>need with massive scale precision and intelligence managed and optimized from the cloud integrated with all your clouds, private, public or hybrid. So you can build whatever you need today and tomorrow. The potential of this box is unlimited. Unstoppable unseen ever before. Unbox the future with Cisco UCS X series powered by inter site >>Cisco. >>The bridge to possible. Yeah >>we're here with Vegas Rattana who's the director of product management for Pcs at Cisco. And James Leach is the director of business development for U. C. S. At the Cisco as well. We're gonna talk about computing in the age of hybrid cloud. Welcome gentlemen. Great to see you. >>Thank you. >>Thank you because let's start with you and talk about a little bit about computing architectures. We know that they're evolving. They're supporting new data intensive and other workloads especially as high performance workload requirements. What's this guy's point of view on all this? I mean specifically interested in your thoughts on fabrics. I mean it's kind of your wheelhouse, you've got accelerators. What are the workloads that are driving these evolving technologies and how how is it impacting customers? What are you seeing? >>Sure. First of all, very excited to be here today. You're absolutely right. The pace of innovation and foundational platform ingredients have just been phenomenal in recent years. The fabric that's writers that drives the processing power, the Golden city all have been evolving just an amazing place and the peace will only pick up further. But ultimately it is all about applications and the way applications leverage those innovations. And we do see applications evolving quite rapidly. The new classes of applications are evolving to absorb those innovations and deliver much better business values. Very, very exciting time step. We're talking about the impact on the customers. Well, these innovations have helped them very positively. We do see significant challenges in the data center with the point product based approach of delivering these platforms, innovations to the applications. What has happened is uh, these innovations today are being packaged as point point products to meet the needs of a specific application and as you know, the different applications have no different needs. Some applications need more to abuse, others need more memory, yet others need, you know, more course, something different kinds of fabrics. As a result, if you walk into a data center today, it is very common to see many different point products in the data center. This creates a manageability challenge. Imagine the aspect of managing, you know, several different form factors want you to you purpose built servers. The variety of, you know, a blade form factor, you know, this reminds me of the situation we had before smartphones arrived. You remember the days when you when we used to have a GPS device for navigation system, a cool music device for listening to the music. A phone device for making a call camera for taking the photos right? And we were all excited about it. It's when a smart phones the right that we realized all those cool innovations could be delivered in a much simpler, much convenient and easy to consume through one device. And you know, I could uh, that could completely transform our experience. So we see the customers were benefiting from these innovations to have a way to consume those things in a much more simplistic way than they are able to go to that. >>And I like to look, it's always been about the applications. But to your point, the applications are now moving in a much faster pace. The the customer experience is expectation is way escalated. And when you combine all these, I love your analogy there because because when you combine all these capabilities, it allows us to develop new Applications, new capabilities, new customer experiences. So that's that I always say the next 10 years, they ain't gonna be like the last James Public Cloud obviously is heavily influencing compute design and and and customer operating models. You know, it's funny when the public cloud first hit the market, everyone we were swooning about low cost standard off the shelf servers in storage devices, but it quickly became obvious that customers needed more. So I wonder if you could comment on this. How are the trends that we've seen from the hyper scale, Is how are they filtering into on prem infrastructure and maybe, you know, maybe there's some differences there as well that you could address. >>Absolutely. So I'd say, first of all, quite frankly, you know, public cloud has completely changed the expectations of how our customers want to consume, compute, right? So customers, especially in a public cloud environment, they've gotten used to or, you know, come to accept that they should consume from the application out, right? They want a very application focused view, a services focused view of the world. They don't want to think about infrastructure, right? They want to think about their application, they wanna move outward, Right? So this means that the infrastructure basically has to meet the application where it lives. So what that means for us is that, you know, we're taking a different approach. We're we've decided that we're not going to chase this single pane of glass view of the world, which, frankly, our customers don't want, they don't want a single pane of glass. What they want is a single operating model. They want an operating model that's similar to what they can get at the public with the public cloud, but they wanted across all of their cloud options they wanted across private cloud across hybrid cloud options as well. So what that means is they don't want to just consume infrastructure services. They want all of their cloud services from this operating model. So that means that they may want to consume infrastructure services for automation Orchestration, but they also need kubernetes services. They also need virtualization services, They may need terror form workload optimization. All of these services have to be available, um, from within the operating model, a consistent operating model. Right? So it doesn't matter whether you're talking about private cloud, hybrid cloud anywhere where the application lives. It doesn't matter what matters is that we have a consistent model that we think about it from the application out. And frankly, I'd say this has been the stumbling block for private cloud. Private cloud is hard, right. This is why it hasn't been really solved yet. This is why we had to take a brand new approach. And frankly, it's why we're super excited about X series and inter site as that operating model that fits the hybrid cloud better than anything else we've seen >>is acute. First, first time technology vendor has ever said it's not about a single pane of glass because I've been hearing for decades, we're gonna deliver a single pane of glass is going to be seamless and it never happens. It's like a single version of the truth. It's aspirational and, and it's just not reality. So can we stay in the X series for a minute James? Uh, maybe in this context, but in the launch that we saw today was like a fire hose of announcements. So how does the X series fit into the strategy with inter site and hybrid cloud and this operating model that you're talking about? >>Right. So I think it goes hand in hand, right. Um the two pieces go together very well. So we have uh, you know, this idea of a single operating model that is definitely something that our customers demand, right? It's what we have to have, but at the same time we need to solve the problems of the cost was talking about before we need a single infrastructure to go along with that single operating model. So no longer do we need to have silos within the infrastructure that give us different operating models are different sets of benefits when you want infrastructure that can kind of do all of those configurations, all those applications. And then, you know, the operating model is very important because that's where we abstract the complexity that could come with just throwing all that technology at the infrastructure so that, you know, this is, you know, the way that we think about is the data center is not centered right? It's no longer centered applications live everywhere. Infrastructure lives everywhere. And you know, we need to have that consistent operating model but we need to do things within the infrastructure as well to take full advantage. Right? So we want all the sas benefits um, of a Ci CD model of, you know, the inter site can bring, we want all that that proactive recommendation engine with the power of A I behind it. We want the connected support experience went all of that. They want to do it across the single infrastructure and we think that that's how they tie together, that's why one or the other doesn't really solve the problem. But both together, that's why we're here. That's why we're super excited. >>So Vegas, I make you laugh a little bit when I was an analyst at I D C, I was deep in infrastructure and then when I left I was doing, I was working with application development heads and like you said, uh infrastructure, it was just a, you know, roadblock but but so the target speakers with Cisco announced UCS a decade ago, I totally missed it. I didn't understand it. I thought it was Cisco getting into the traditional server business and it wasn't until I dug in then I realized that your vision was really to transform infrastructure, deployment and management and change them all. I was like, okay, I got that wrong uh but but so let's talk about the the ecosystem and the joint development efforts that are going on there, X series, how does it fit into this, this converged infrastructure business that you've, you've built and grown with partners, you got storage partners like Netapp and Pure, you've got i SV partners in the ecosystem. We see cohesive, he has been a while since we we hung out with all these companies at the Cisco live hopefully next year, but tell us what's happening in that regard. >>Absolutely, I'm looking forward to seeing you in the Cisco live next year. You know, they have absolutely you brought up a very good point. You see this is about the ecosystem that it brings together, it's about making our customers bring up the entire infrastructure from the core foundational hardware all the way to the application level so that they can, you know, go off and running pretty quick. The converse infrastructure has been one of the corners 2.5 hour of the strategy, as you pointed out in the last decade. And and and I'm I'm very glad to share that converse infrastructure continues to be a very popular architecture for several enterprise applications. Seven today, in fact, it is the preferred architecture for mission critical applications where performance resiliency latency are the critical requirements there almost a de facto standards for large scale deployments of virtualized and business critical data bases and so forth with X series with our partnerships with our Stories partners. Those architectures will absolutely continue and will get better. But in addition as a hybrid cloud world, so we are now bringing in the benefits of canvas in infrastructure uh to the world of hybrid cloud will be supporting the hybrid cloud applications now with the CIA infrastructure that we have built together with our strong partnership with the Stories partners to deliver the same benefits to the new ways applications as well. >>Yeah, that's what customers want. They want that cloud operating model. Right, go ahead please. >>I was going to say, you know, the CIA model will continue to thrive. It will transition uh it will expand the use cases now for the new use cases that were beginning to, you know, say they've absolutely >>great thank you for that. And James uh have said earlier today, we heard this huge announcement, um a lot of lot of parts to it and we heard Katie talk about this initiative is it's really computing built for the next decade. I mean I like that because it shows some vision and you've got a road map that you've thought through the coming changes in workloads and infrastructure management and and some of the technology that you can take advantage of beyond just uh, you know, one or two product cycles. So, but I want to understand what you've done here specifically that you feel differentiates you from other competitive architectures in the industry. >>Sure. You know that's a great question. Number one. Number two, um I'm frankly a little bit concerned at times for for customers in general for our customers customers in general because if you look at what's in the market, right, these rinse and repeat systems that were effectively just rehashes of the same old design, right? That we've seen since before 2000 and nine when we brought you C. S to market these are what we're seeing over and over and over again. That's that's not really going to work anymore frankly. And I think that people are getting lulled into a false sense of security by seeing those things continually put in the market. We rethought this from the ground up because frankly future proofing starts now, right? If you're not doing it right today, future proofing isn't even on your radar because you're not even you're not even today proved. So we re thought the entire chassis, the entire architecture from the ground up. Okay. If you look at other vendors, if you look at other solutions in the market, what you'll see is things like management inside the chassis. That's a great example, daisy chaining them together >>like who >>needs that? Who wants that? Like that kind of complexity is first of all, it's ridiculous. Um, second of all, um, if you want to manage across clouds, you have to do it from the cloud, right. It's just common sense. You have to move management where it can have the scale and the scope that it needs to impact your entire domain, your world, which is much larger now than it was before. We're talking about true hybrid cloud here. Right. So we had to solve certain problems that existed in the traditional architecture. You know, I can't tell you how many times I heard you talk about the mid plane is a great example. You know, the mid plane and a chastity is a limiting factor. It limits us on how much we can connect or how much bandwidth we have available to the chassis. It limits us on air flow and other things. So how do you solve that problem? Simple. Just get rid of it. Like we just we took it out, right. It's not no longer a problem. We designed an architecture that doesn't need it. It doesn't rely on it. No forklift upgrades. So, as we start moving down the path of needing liquid cooling or maybe we need to take advantage of some new, high performance, low latency fabrics. We can do that with almost. No problem at all. Right, So, we don't have any forklift upgrades. Park your forklift on the side. You won't need it anymore because you can upgrade gradually. You can move along as technologies come into existence that maybe don't even exist. They they may not even be on our radar today to take advantage of. But I like to think of these technologies, they're really important to our customers. These are, you know, we can call them disruptive technologies. The reality is that we don't want to disrupt our customers with these technologies. We want to give them these technologies so they can go out and be disruptive themselves. Right? And this is the way that we've designed this from the ground up to be easy to consume and to take advantage of what we know about today and what's coming in the future that we may not even know about. So we think this is a way to give our customers that ultimate capability flexibility and and future proofing. >>I like I like that phrase True hybrid cloud. It's one that we've used for years and but to me this is all about that horizontal infrastructure that can support that vision of what true hybrid cloud is. You can support the mission critical applications. You can you can develop on the system and you can support a variety of workload. You're not locked into one narrow stovepipe and that does have legs, Vegas and James. Thanks so much for coming on the program. Great to see you. >>Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. >>When we return shortly thomas Shiva who leads Cisco's data center group will be here and thomas has some thoughts about the transformation of networking I. T. Teams. You don't wanna miss what he has to say. You're watching the cube. The global leader in high tech company. Okay, >>mm. Mhm, mm. Okay. Mhm. Yeah. Mhm. Yeah. >>Mhm. Yes. Yeah. Okay. We're here with thomas Shiva who is the Vice president of Product Management, A K A VP of all things data center, networking STN cloud. You name it in that category. Welcome thomas. Good to see you again. >>Hey Sam. Yes. Thanks for having me on. >>Yeah, it's our pleasure. Okay, let's get right into observe ability. When you think about observe ability, visibility, infrastructure monitoring problem resolution across the network. How does cloud change things? In other words, what are the challenges that networking teams are currently facing as they're moving to the cloud and trying to implement hybrid cloud? >>Yeah. Yeah, visibility as always is very, very important. And it's quite frankly, it's not just it's not just the networking team is actually the application team to write. And as you pointed out, the underlying impetus to what's going on here is the data center is where the data is. And I think we set us a couple years back and really what happens the applications are going to be deployed uh in different locations, right. Whether it's in a public cloud, whether it's on prayer, uh, and they are built differently right there, built as microservices, they might actually be distributed as well at the same application. And so what that really means is you need as an operator as well as actually a user better visibility. Where are my pieces and you need to be able to correlate between where the app is and what the underlying network is that is in place in these different locations. So you have actually a good knowledge while the app is running so fantastic or sometimes not. So I think that's that's really the problem statement. What what we're trying to go afterwards, observe ability. >>Okay, and let's double click on that. So a lot of customers tell me that you gotta stare at log files until your eyes bleed and you gotta bring in guys with lab coats who have phds to figure all this stuff out. So, so you just described, it's getting more complex, but at the same time you have to simplify things. So how how are you doing that, >>correct? So what we basically have done is we have this fantastic product that that is called 1000 Ice. And so what this does is basically as the name, which I think is a fantastic fantastic name. You have these sensors everywhere. Um, and you can have a good correlation on uh links between if I run from a site to aside from a site to a cloud, from a cloud to cloud and you basically can measure what is the performance of these links. And so what we're, what we're doing here is we're actually extending the footprint of these thousands agent. Right? Instead of just having uh inversion machine clouds, we are now embedding them with the Cisco network devices. Right? We announced this with the catalyst 9000 and we're extending this now to our 8000 catalyst product line for the for the SD were in products as well as to the data center products the next line. Um and so what you see is is, you know, half a saying, you have 1000 eyes, you get a million insights and you get a billion dollar of improvements uh for how your applications run. And this is really uh, the power of tying together the footprint of where the network is with the visibility, what is going on. So you actually know the application behavior that is attached to this network. >>I see. So okay. So as the cloud evolves and expands it connects your actually enabling 1000 eyes to go further, not just confined within a single data center location, but out to the network across clouds, et cetera, >>correct. Wherever the network is, you're going to have 1000 I sensor and you can't bring this together and you can quite frankly pick if you want to say, hey, I have my application in public cloud provider, a uh, domain one and I have another one domain to, I can't do monitor that link. I can also monitor have a user that has a campus location or branch location. I kind of put an agent there and then I can monitor the connectivity from that branch location all the way to the let's say corporations that data centre, our headquarter or to the cloud. And I can have these probes and just we have visibility and saying, hey, if there's a performance, I know where the issue is and then I obviously can use all the other foods that we have to address those. >>All right, let's talk about the cloud operating model. Everybody tells us it's really the change in the model that drives big numbers in terms of R. O. I. And I want you to maybe address how you're bringing automation and devops to this world of of hybrid and specifically how is Cisco enabling I. T. Organizations to move to a cloud operating model? Is that cloud definition expands? >>Yeah, no that's that's another interesting topic beyond the observe ability. So really, really what we're seeing and this is going on for uh I want to say a couple of years now, it's really this transition from operating infrastructure as a networking team more like a service like what you would expect from a cloud provider. Right? It's really around the network team offering services like a cloud provided us. And that's really what the meaning is of cloud operating model. Right? But this is infrastructure running your own data center where that's linking that infrastructure was whatever runs on the public club is operating and like a cloud service. And so we are on this journey for why? So one of the examples uh then we have removing some of the control software assets, the customers that they can deploy on prayer uh to uh an instance that they can deploy in a cloud provider and just busy, insane. She ate things there and then just run it that way. Right. And so the latest example for this is what we have our identity service engine that is now limited availability available on AWS and will become available in mid this year, both in Italy as unusual as a service. You can just go to market place, you can load it there and now you create, you can start running your policy control in a cloud, managing your access infrastructure in your data center, in your campus wherever you want to do it. And so that's just one example of how we see our customers network operations team taking advantage of a cloud operating model and basically employing their, their tools where they need them and when they need them. >>So what's the scope of, I hope I'm saying it right. Ice, right. I see. I think it's called ice. What's the scope of that like for instance, turn in effect my or even, you know, address simplify my security approach. >>Absolutely. That's now coming to what is the beauty of the product itself? Yes. What you can do is really is that there's a lot of people talking about else. How do I get to zero trust approach to networking? How do I get to a much more dynamic, flexible segmentation in my infrastructure. Again, whether this is only campus X as well as a data center and Ice help today, you can use this as a point to define your policies and then any connect from there. Right. In this particular case we would instant Ice in the cloud as a software load. You now can connect and say, hey, I want to manage and program my network infrastructure and my data center on my campus, going to the respective control over this DNA Center for campus or whether it is the A. C. I. Policy controller. And so yes, what you get as an effect out of this is a very elegant way to automatically manage in one place. What is my policy and then drive the right segmentation in your network infrastructure? >>zero. Trust that, you know, it was pre pandemic. It was kind of a buzzword. Now it's become a mandate. I wonder if we could talk about right. I mean I wonder if you talk about cloud native apps, you got all these developers that are working inside organizations. They're maintaining legacy apps. They're connecting their data to systems in the cloud there, sharing that data. I need these developers, they're rapidly advancing their skill sets. How is Cisco enabling its infrastructure to support this world of cloud? Native making infrastructure more responsive and agile for application developers? >>Yeah. So, you know, we're going to the top of his visibility, we talked about the operating model, how how our network operators actually want to use tools going forward. Now, the next step to this is it's not just the operator. How do they actually, where do they want to put these tools, how they, how they interact with these tools as well as quite frankly as how, let's say, a devops team on application team or Oclock team also wants to take advantage of the program ability of the underlying network. And this is where we're moving into this whole cloud native discussion, right? Which is really two angles, that is the cloud native way, how applications are being built. And then there is the cloud native way, how you interact with infrastructure. Right? And so what we have done is we're a putting in place the on ramps between clouds and then on top of it we're exposing for all these tools, a P I S that can be used in leverage by standard uh cloud tools or uh cloud native tools. Right. And one example or two examples we always have and again, we're on this journey for a while is both answerable uh script capabilities that exist from red hat as well as uh Ashitaka from capabilities that you can orchestrate across infrastructure to drive infrastructure, automation and what what really stands behind it is what either the networking operations team wants to do or even the ap team. They want to be able to describe the application as a code and then drive automatically or programmatically in situation of infrastructure needed for that application. And so what you see us doing is providing all these capability as an interface for all our network tools. Right. Whether it's this ice that I just mentioned, whether this is our D. C. And controllers in the data center, uh whether these are the controllers in the in the campus for all of those, we have cloud native interfaces. So operator or uh devops team can actually interact directly with that infrastructure the way they would do today with everything that lives in the cloud, with everything how they brought the application. >>This is key. You can't even have the conversation of op cloud operating model that includes and comprises on prem without programmable infrastructure. So that's that's very important. Last question, thomas our customers actually using this, they made the announcement today. There are there are there any examples of customers out there doing this? >>We do have a lot of customers out there that are moving down the past and using the D. D. Cisco high performance infrastructure, but also on the compute side as well as on an exercise one of the customers. Uh and this is like an interesting case. It's Rakuten uh record and is a large tackle provider, a mobile five G. Operator uh in Japan and expanding and is in different countries. Uh and so people something oh, cloud, you must be talking about the public cloud provider, the big the big three or four. But if you look at it, there's a lot of the tackle service providers are actually cloud providers as well and expanding very rapidly. And so we're actually very proud to work together with with Rakuten and help them building a high performance uh, data and infrastructure based on hard gig and actually phone a gig uh to drive their deployment to. It's a five G mobile cloud infrastructure, which is which is uh where the whole the whole world where traffic is going. And so it's really exciting to see this development and see the power of automation visibility uh together with the high performance infrastructure becoming reality and delivering actually services, >>you have some great points you're making there. Yes, you have the big four clouds, your enormous, but then you have a lot of actually quite large clouds. Telcos that are either approximate to those clouds or they're in places where those hyper scholars may not have a presence and building out their own infrastructure. So so that's a great case study uh thomas, hey, great having you on. Thanks so much for spending some time with us. >>Yeah, same here. I appreciate it. Thanks a lot. >>I'd like to thank Cisco and our guests today V Joy, Katie VJ, viscous James and thomas for all your insights into this evolving world of hybrid cloud, as we said at the top of the next decade will be defined by an entirely new set of rules. And it's quite possible things will evolve more quickly because the cloud is maturing and has paved the way for a new operating model where everything is delivered as a service, automation has become a mandate because we just can't keep throwing it labor at the problem anymore. And with a I so much more as possible in terms of driving operational efficiencies, simplicity and support of the workloads that are driving the digital transformation that we talk about all the time. This is Dave Volonte and I hope you've enjoyed today's program. Stay Safe, be well and we'll see you next time.

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the special presentation from theCUBE, where we're exploring the future of cloud and its business impact in the coming decade, kind of where we've come from and where we're going. My name is Dave Vellante, and with me is a CIO/CTO/COO, and longtime colleague, Dan Sheehan. Hello, Dan, how're you doing? >> Hey, Dave, how are you doing? Thank you for having me. >> Yeah, you're very welcome. So folks, Dan has been in the technology industry for a number of years. He's overseen, you know, large-multi, tens of millions of dollar ERP application development efforts, He was a CIO of a marketing, you know, direct mail company. Dan, we met at ADVO, it seems like such a (snickers) long time ago. >> Yeah, that was a long time ago, back in Connecticut. Back in the early 2000s. >> Yeah, ancient days. But pretty serious data for back then, you know, the early 2000s, and then you did a six-year stint as a EVP and CIO at Dunkin' Brands. I remember I came out to see you when I was starting Wikibon and trying to understand. >> Oh yeah. >> You know, what the CIOs cared about. You were so helpful and thanks for that. And that was a big deal. I mean, Dunkin', 17,000 points of distribution. I mean, that was sort of a complicated situation, right? >> Oh yeah. >> So, great experience. >> I mean, when you get involved with franchisees and trying to make everybody happy, yes, that was a lot of fun. >> And then you had a number of other roles, one was as COO at Modell's, and then to fast-forward, Beacon Health. You were EVP and CIO there. And you also, it looked like you had a kind of a business and operational role. You helped the company get acquired by Anthem Blue Cross. So awesome, congrats on that. That must've been a great experience. >> It was. A year of my life, yes. (both laugh) >> You're still standing. So anyway, you can see Dan, he's like this multi-tool star, he's seen a lot of changes in the technology business. So Dan, again, welcome back. Dan Sheehan. >> Oh, thank you. >> So when you started in your career, you know, there was no cloud, right? I mean, you had to do everything. It's funny, I remember I was... You probably know Bill Rucci, CIO of Hartford Steam Boiler. I remember we were talking one day, and this again was pre-cloud and he said, you know, I'm thinking, do I really need to manage my own email? I mean, back then, we did everything. So you had to provision infrastructure so you could write apps, and that was important. That frustrated CFOs, but it was a necessary piece of the value chain. So how have you seen that sort of IT value contribution shift over the years? Let's start there. >> Ah, well, I think it comes down to demand versus capacity. If you look at where companies want to go, they want to do a lot with technology. Technology has taken on a larger role. It's no longer and has not been a, so to speak, cost center. So I think the demand for making change and driving a company forward or reducing costs, there are other executives, peers to the CIO, to the CTO that are looking to do more, and when it comes to doing more, that means more demand, and you step back and you look at what the CIO has for capacity. Looking at Quick Solution's data, solutions in the cloud is appealing, and there are, you know, times where other functions talk to a vendor and see that they can get a vertical solution done pretty quickly. They go off and take that on, or it could be, you know, a ServiceNow capability that you want to implement across the company, and you do that just like an ERP type of roll up. But the bottom line is there are solutions out there that have pushed, I would say the IT organization to look at their capacity versus demand, and sometimes you can get things done quicker with a cloud type of solution. >> So how did you look at that shadow IT as a CIO? Was it something that kind of ticked you off or like you're sort of implying that it made you better? >> Well, I think it does ultimately make you better, but I think you have to partner with the functions because if you don't, you get these types of scenarios, and I've been involved in these just as well. You are busy with, you know, fulfilling your objectives as the leader of IT, and then you get a knock on the door from, let's say marketing or operations, and they say, hey, we just purchased this X solution and we want to integrate it with A, B and C. Well, that was not on the budget or on the IT roadmap or the IT strategy that was linked to the IT, I'm sorry, to the business strategy, and all of a sudden now you have more demand versus the capacity, and then you have to go start reprioritizing. So it's more of, yeah, kind of disrupted, but at the same time, it pushed, you know, the needle of the company forward. But it's all about just working together to make it happen. And that's a lot of, you know, hard conversations when you have to start reprioritizing capacity. >> Well, so let's talk about that alignment. I mean, there's always been a sort of a schism between IT and its ability to deliver, manage demand, and the business will always want you to go faster. They want IT to develop the systems, you know, of course, for less and then they want you to eat the cost of maintaining them, so (chuckles) there's been that tension. But in many ways, that CIO's job is alignment. I mean, it seems to me anyway that schism has certainly narrowed and the cloud's been been part of that, but what do you see as that trajectory over the years and where do you see it going? >> Well, I think it's going to continue to move forward, and depending upon the service, you know, companies are going to take advantage of those services. So yes, some of the non-mission critical capabilities that you would want to move out to the cloud or have somebody else do it, so to speak, that's going to continue to happen because they should be able to do it a lot cheaper than you can, just like use you mentioned a few moments ago about email. I did not want to maintain, you know, exchange service and keeping that all up and running. I moved quickly to Microsoft 365 and that's been a world of difference, but that's just one example. But when you have mission critical apps, you're going to have to make a decision if you want to continue to house them in-house or push them out to an AWS and house them there. So maybe you don't need a large data center and you can utilize some of the best and brightest around security, around managing size of the infrastructure and getting some of their engineering help, which can help. So it just depends upon the application, so to speak, or a function that you're trying to support. And you got to really look at your enterprise architecture and see where that makes sense. So you got to have a hybrid. I see and I have, you know, managed towards a hybrid way of looking at your architecture. >> Okay, so obviously the cloud played a role in that change, and of course, you were in healthcare too so you had to be somewhat careful, >> Yep. >> With the cloud. But you mentioned this hybrid architecture. I mean, from a technologist standpoint and a business standpoint, what do you want out of, you know, you hear a hybrid, multi, all the buzz words. What are you looking for then? Is it a consistent experience? Is it a consistent security? Or is it sort of more horses for courses, where you're trying to run a workload in the right place? What's your philosophy on that? >> Well, I mean, all those things matter, but you're looking at obviously, cost, you're looking at engagement. How does these services engage? Whether it's internal employees or external clients who you're servicing, and you want to get to a cost structure that makes sense in terms of managing those services as well as those mission critical apps. So it comes down to looking at the dollars and cents, as well as what type of services you can provide. In many cases, if you can provide a cheaper and increase the overall services, you're going to go down that path. And just like we did with ServiceNow, I did that at Beacon and also at DentaQuest two healthcare companies. We were able to, you know, remove duplicated, so to speak, ticketing systems and move to one and allow a better experience for the internal employee. They can do self-service, they can look at metrics, they can see status, real-time status on where their request was. So that made a bigger difference. So you engaged the employee differently, better, and then you also reduce your costs. >> Well, how about the economics? I mean, your experience that cloud is cheaper. You hear a lot of the, you know, a lot of the legacy players are saying, oh, no cloud's super expensive. Wait till you get that Amazon bill. (laughs) What's the truth? >> Well, I think there's still a lot of maturing that needs to go on, because unfortunately, depending upon the company, so let's use a couple of examples. So let's look at a startup. You look at a startup, they're probably going to look at all their services being in the cloud and being delivered through a SaaS model, and that's going to be an expense, that's going to be most likely a per user expense per month or per year, however, they structure the contract. And right out of the gate, that's going to be a top line expense that has to be managed going forward. Now you look at companies that have been around for a while, and two of the last companies I worked with, had a lot of technical debt, had on-prem applications. And when you started to look at how to move forward, you know, you had CFOs that were used to going to buy software, capitalize in that software over, you know, five years, sometimes three years, and using that investment to be capitalized, and that would sit below the line, so to speak. Now, don't get me wrong, you still have to pay for it, it's just a matter of where it sits. And when you're running a company and you're looking at the financials, not having that cost on your operational expenses, so to speak, if you're not looking at the depreciation through those numbers, that was advantageous to a CFO many years ago. Now you come to them and say, hey, we're going to move forward with a new HR system, and it's all increasing the expense because there's nothing else to capitalize. Those are different conversations, and all of a sudden your expenses have increased, and yes, you have to make sure that the businesses behind you, with respects to an ROI and supporting it. >> Yeah, so as long as the value is there, and that's a part of the alignment. I want to ask you about cloud pricing strategies because you mentioned ServiceNow, you know, Salesforce is in there, Workday. If you look at the way these guys price, it's really not true cloud pricing in a way, cause they're going to have you sign up for an annual license, you know, a lot of times you got pay up front, or if you want a discount, you're going to have to sign up for two years or three years. But now you see guys like Snowflake coming in, you know, big high-profile IPO. They actually charge you on a consumption-based model. What are your thoughts on that? Do you see that as sort of a trend in the coming decade? >> No, I absolutely think it's going to be on a trend, because consumption means more transactions and more transactions means more computing, and they're going to look at charging it just like any other utility charges. So yes, I see that trend continuing. Did a big deal with UltiPro HR, and yeah, that was all based upon user head count, but they were talking about looking at their payroll and changing their costing on payroll down the road. With their merger, or they went from being a public company to a private company, and now looking to merge with Kronos. I can see where time and attendance and payroll will stop being looked at as a transaction, right? It's a weekly or bi-weekly or monthly, however the company pays, and yes, there is dollars to be made there. >> Well, so let me ask you as a CIO and a business, you know, COO. One of the challenges that you hear with the cloud is okay, if I get my Amazon bill, it's something that Snowflake has talked about, where you know, to me, it's the ideal model, but on the other hand, the transparency is not necessarily there. You don't know what it's going to be at the end of (mumbles) Would you rather have more certainty as to what that bill's going to look like? Or would you rather have it aligned with consumption and the value to the business? >> Well, you know, that's a great question, because yes, I mean, budgets are usually built upon a number that's fixed. Now, no, don't get me wrong. I mean, when I look at the wide area network, the cost for internet services, yes, sometimes we need to increase and that means an increase in the overall cost, but that consumption, that transactional, that's going to be a different way of having to go ahead and budget. You have to budget now for the maximum transactions you anticipate with a growth of a company, and then you need to take a look at that you know, if you're budgeting. I know we were on a calendar fiscal year, so we started up budgeting process in August and we finalized at sometime in the end of October, November for the proceeding year, and if that's the case, you need to get a little bit better on what your consumptions are going to be, because especially if you're a public company, going out on the street with some numbers, those numbers could vary based upon a high transaction volume and the cost, and maybe you're not getting the results on the top end, on the revenue side. So I think, yeah, it's going to be an interesting dilemma as we move forward. >> Yeah. So, I mean, it comes back to alignment, doesn't it? I mean, I know in our small example, you know, we're doing now, we were used to be physical events with theCUBE, now it's all virtual events and our Amazon bill is going through the roof because we're supporting all these users on these virtual events, and our CFO's like, well, look at this Amazon bill, and you say, yeah, but look at the revenue, it's supporting. And so to your point, if the revenue is there, if the ROI is there, then it makes sense. You can kind of live with it because you're growing with it, but if not, then you really got to question it. >> Yeah. So you got to need to partner with your financial folks and come up with better modeling around some of these transactional services and build that into your modeling for your budget and for your, you know, your top line and your expenses. >> So what do you think of some of these SaaS companies? I mean, you've had a lot of experience. They're really coming at it from largely an application perspective, although you've managed a lot of infrastructure too. But we've talked about ServiceNow. They've kind of mopped up in the ITSM. I mean, there's nobody left. I mean, ServiceNow has sort of taken over the whole (mumbles) You know, Salesforce, >> Yeah. >> I guess, sort of similarly, sort of dominating the CRM space. You hear a lot of complaints now about, you know, ServiceNow pricing. There is somebody the other day called them the Oracle of ITSM. Do you see that potentially getting disrupted by maybe some cloud native developers who are developing tools on top? You see in, like, for instance, Datadog going after Splunk and LogRhythm. And there seem to be examples popping up. Well, what's your take on all this? >> No, absolutely. I think cause, you know, when we were talking about back when I first met you, when I was at the ADVO, I mean, Oracle was on it's, you know, rise with their suite of capabilities, and then before you know it, other companies were popping up and took over, whether it was Firstbeat, PeopleSoft, Workday, and then other companies that just came into play, cause it's going to happen because people are going to get, you know, frustrated. And yes, I did get a little frustrated with ServiceNow when I was looking at a couple of new modules because the pricing was a little bit higher than it was when I first started out. So yes, when you're good and you're able to provide the right services, they're going to start pricing it that way. But yes, I think you're going to get smaller players, and then those smaller players will start grabbing up, so to speak, market share and get into it. I mean, look at Salesforce. I mean, there are some pretty good CRMs. I mean, even, ServiceNow is getting into the CRM space big time, as well as a company like Sugar and a few others that will continue to push Salesforce to look at their pricing as well as their services. I mean, they're out there buying up companies, but you just can't automatically assume that they're going to, you know, integrate day one, and it's going to take time for some of their services to come and become reality, so to speak. So yes, I agree that there will be players out there that will push these lager SaaS companies, and hopefully get the right behaviors and right pricing. >> I've said for years, Dan, that I've predicted that ServiceNow and Salesforce are on a collision course. It didn't really happen, but it's starting to, because ServiceNow, the valuation is so huge. They have to grow into other markets much in the same way that Salesforce has. So maybe we'll see McDermott start doing some acquisitions. It's maybe a little tougher for ServiceNow given their whole multi-instance architecture and sort of their own cloud. That's going to be interesting to see how that plays out. >> Yeah. Yeah. You got to play in that type of architecture, let's put it that way. Yes, it'll be interesting to see how that does play out. >> What are your thoughts on the big hyperscalers; Amazon, Microsoft, Google? What's the right strategy there? Do you go all in on one cloud like AWS or are you more worried about lock-in? Do you want to spread your bets across clouds? How real is multi-cloud? Is it a strategy or more sort of a reality that you get M and A and you got shadow IT? What's your take on all that? >> Yeah, that's a great question because it does make you think a little differently around you know, where to put all your eggs. And it's getting tougher because you do want to distribute those eggs out to multiple vendors, if you would, service providers. But, you know, for instance we had a situation where we were building a brand new business intelligence data warehouse, and we decided to go with Microsoft as its core database. And we did a bake-off on business analytic tools. We had like seven of them at Beacon and we ended up choosing Microsoft's Power BI, and a good part of that reason, not all of it, but a good part of it was because we felt they did everything else that the Tableau's and others did, but, you know, Microsoft would work to give, you know, additional capabilities to Power BI if it's sitting on their database. So we had to take that into consideration, and we did and we ended up going with Power BI. With Amazon, I think Amazon's a little bit more, I'll put it horizontal, whereby they can help you out because of the database and just kind of be in that data center, if you would, and be able to move some of your homegrown applications, some of your technical debt over to that, I'll say cloud. But it'll get interesting because when you talk about integration, when you talk about moving forward with a new functionality, yeah, you have to put your architecture in a somewhat of a center point, and then look to see what is easier, cheaper, cost-effective, but, you know, what's happening to my functionality over the next three to five years. >> But it sounds like you'd subscribe to a horses for courses approach, where you put the right workload in the right cloud, as opposed to saying, I'm going to go all in on one cloud and it's going to be, you know, same skillset, same security, et cetera. It sounds like you'd lean toward the former versus going all in with, you know, MANO cloud. >> Yeah, I guess again, when I look at the architecture. There will be major, you know, breaks if you would. So yes, there is somewhat of a, you know, movement to you know, go with one horse. But, you know, I could see looking back at the Beacon architecture that we could, you know, lift and put the claims adjudication capabilities up in Amazon and then have that conduct, you know, the left to right claims processing, and then those transactions could then be moved into Microsoft's data warehouse. So, you know, there is ways to go about spreading it out so that you don't have all those eggs in one basket and that you reduce the amount of risk, but that weighed heavily on my mind. >> So I was going to ask you, how much of a factor lock-in is it? It sounds like it's more, you know, spreading your eggs around, as you say and reducing your risk as opposed to, you know, worried about lock-in, but as a CIO, how worried are you about lock-in? Where is that fit in the sort of decision tree? >> Ah, I mean, I would say it's up there, but unfortunately, there's no number one, there's like five number ones, if you would. So it's definitely up there and it's something to consider when you're looking at, like you said, the cost, risk integration, and then time. You know, sometimes you're up against the time. And again, security, like I said. Security is a big key in healthcare. And actually security overall, whether you're retail, you're going to always have situations no matter what industry, you got to protect the business. >> Yeah, so I want to ask you about security. That's the other number one. Well, you might've been a defacto CSO, but kind of when we started in this business security was the problem of the security teams, and you know, it's now a team sport. But in thinking about the cloud and security, how big of a concern is the cloud? Is it just more, you're looking for consistency and be able to apply the corporate edicts? Are there other concerns like the shared responsibility model? What are your thoughts on security in the cloud? >> Well, it probably goes back to again, the industry, but when I looked at the past five years in healthcare, doing a lot of work with the CMS and Medicaid, Medicare, they had certain requirements and certain restrictions. So we had to make sure that we follow those requirements. And when you got audited, you needed to make sure that you can show that you are adhering to their requirements. So over the past, probably two years with Amazon's government capabilities that those restrictions have changed, but we were always looking to make sure that we owned and managed how we manage the provider and member data, because yes, we did not want to have obviously a breach, but we wanted to make sure we were following the guidelines, whether it's state or federal, and then and even some cases healthcare guidelines around managing that data. So yes, top of mind, making sure that we're protecting, you know, in my case so we had 37 million members, patients, and we needed to make sure that if we did put it in the cloud or if it was on-prem, that it was being protected. And as you mentioned, recently come off of, I was going to say Amazon, but it was an acquisition. That company that was looking at us doing the due diligence, they gave us thumbs up because of how we were managing the data at the lowest point and all the different levels within the architecture. So Anthem who did the acquisition, had a breach back in, I think it was 2015. That was top of mind for them. We had more questions during the due diligence around security than any other functional area. So it is critical, and I think slowly, some of that type of data will get up into the cloud, but again, it's going to go through some massive risk management and security measures, and audits, because how fragile that is. >> Yeah, I mean, that could be a deal breaker in an acquisition. I got two other questions for you. One is, you know, I know you follow the technologies very closely, but there's all the buzz words, the digital transformation, the AI, these new SaaS models that we talked about. You know, a lot of CIOs tell me, look, Dave, get the business right and the technology is the easy part. It's people, it's process. But what are you seeing in terms of some of this new stuff coming out, there's machine learning, you know, obviously massive scale, new cloud workloads. Anything out there that really excites you and that you could see on the horizon that could be, you know, really change agents for the next decade? >> Yeah, I think we did some RPA, robotics on some of the tasks that, you know, where, you know, if the analysis types of situations. So I think RPA is going to be a game changer as it continues to evolve. But I agree with what you just said. Doing this for quite a while now, it still comes down to the people. I can get the technology to do what it needs to do as long as I have the right requirements, so that goes back to people. Making sure we have the partnership that goes back to leadership and the people. And then the change management aspects. Right out of the gate, you should be worrying about how is it going to affect and then the adoption and engagement. Because adoption is critical, because you can go create the best thing you think from a technology perspective, but if it doesn't get used correctly, it's not worth the investment. So I agree, whether it's digital transformation or innovation, it still comes down to understanding the business model and injecting and utilizing technology to grow or reduce costs, grow the business or reduce costs. >> Yeah, usage really means value. Sorry, my last question. What's the one thing that vendors shouldn't do? What's the vendor no-no that'll alienate CIO's? >> To this day, I still don't like, there's a company out there that starts with an O. I still don't like it to that, every single technology module, if you would, has a separate sales rep. I want to work with my strategic partners and have one relationship and that single point of contact that spark and go back into their company and bring me whatever it is that we're looking at so that I don't get, you know, for instance from that company that starts with an O, you know, 17 calls from 17 different sales reps trying to sell me 17 different things. So what irritates me is, you know, you have a company that has a lot of breadth, a lot of, you know, capability and functional, you know that I may want. Give me one person that I can deal with. So a single point of contact, then that makes my life a lot easier. >> Well, Dan Sheehan, I really appreciate you spending some time on theCUBE, it's always a pleasure catching up with you and really appreciate you sharing your insights with our audience. Thank you. >> Oh, thank you, David. I appreciate the opportunity. You have a great day. >> All right. You too. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE on Cloud. Keep it right there. We'll be back with our next guest right after the short break. Awesome, Dan.

>> Go on my lead. >> Dan: All right, very good. >> Five, four. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the special presentation from theCUBE, where we're exploring the future of cloud and its business impact in the coming decade, kind of where we've come from and where we're going. My name is Dave Vellante, and with me is a CIO/CTO/COO, and longtime colleague, Dan Sheehan. Hello, Dan, how're you doing? >> Hey, Dave, how are you doing? Thank you for having me. >> Yeah, you're very welcome. So folks, Dan has been in the technology industry for a number of years. He's overseen, you know, large-multi, tens of millions of dollar ERP application development efforts, He was a CIO of a marketing, you know, direct mail company. Dan, we met at ADVO, it seems like such a (snickers) long time ago. >> Yeah, that was a long time ago, back in Connecticut. Back in the early 2000s. >> Yeah, ancient days. But pretty serious data for back then, you know, the early 2000s, and then you did a six-year stint as a EVP and CIO at Dunkin' Brands. I remember I came out to see you when I was starting Wikibon and trying to understand. >> Oh yeah. >> You know, what the CIOs cared about. You were so helpful and thanks for that. And that was a big deal. I mean, Dunkin', 17,000 points of distribution. I mean, that was sort of a complicated situation, right? >> Oh yeah. >> So, great experience. >> I mean, when you get involved with franchisees and trying to make everybody happy, yes, that was a lot of fun. >> And then you had a number of other roles, one was as COO at Modell's, and then to fast-forward, Beacon Health. You were EVP and CIO there. And you also, it looked like you had a kind of a business and operational role. You helped the company get acquired by Anthem Blue Cross. So awesome, congrats on that. That must've been a great experience. >> It was. A year of my life, yes. (both laugh) >> You're still standing. So anyway, you can see Dan, he's like this multi-tool star, he's seen a lot of changes in the technology business. So Dan, again, welcome back. Dan Sheehan. >> Oh, thank you. >> So when you started in your career, you know, there was no cloud, right? I mean, you had to do everything. It's funny, I remember I was... You probably know Bill Rucci, CIO of Hartford Steam Boiler. I remember we were talking one day, and this again was pre-cloud and he said, you know, I'm thinking, do I really need to manage my own email? I mean, back then, we did everything. So you had to provision infrastructure so you could write apps, and that was important. That frustrated CFOs, but it was a necessary piece of the value chain. So how have you seen that sort of IT value contribution shift over the years? Let's start there. >> Ah, well, I think it comes down to demand versus capacity. If you look at where companies want to go, they want to do a lot with technology. Technology has taken on a larger role. It's no longer and has not been a, so to speak, cost center. So I think the demand for making change and driving a company forward or reducing costs, there are other executives, peers to the CIO, to the CTO that are looking to do more, and when it comes to doing more, that means more demand, and you step back and you look at what the CIO has for capacity. Looking at Quick Solution's data, solutions in the cloud is appealing, and there are, you know, times where other functions talk to a vendor and see that they can get a vertical solution done pretty quickly. They go off and take that on, or it could be, you know, a ServiceNow capability that you want to implement across the company, and you do that just like an ERP type of roll up. But the bottom line is there are solutions out there that have pushed, I would say the IT organization to look at their capacity versus demand, and sometimes you can get things done quicker with a cloud type of solution. >> So how did you look at that shadow IT as a CIO? Was it something that kind of ticked you off or like you're sort of implying that it made you better? >> Well, I think it does ultimately make you better, but I think you have to partner with the functions because if you don't, you get these types of scenarios, and I've been involved in these just as well. You are busy with, you know, fulfilling your objectives as the leader of IT, and then you get a knock on the door from, let's say marketing or operations, and they say, hey, we just purchased this X solution and we want to integrate it with A, B and C. Well, that was not on the budget or on the IT roadmap or the IT strategy that was linked to the IT, I'm sorry, to the business strategy, and all of a sudden now you have more demand versus the capacity, and then you have to go start reprioritizing. So it's more of, yeah, kind of disrupted, but at the same time, it pushed, you know, the needle of the company forward. But it's all about just working together to make it happen. And that's a lot of, you know, hard conversations when you have to start reprioritizing capacity. >> Well, so let's talk about that alignment. I mean, there's always been a sort of a schism between IT and its ability to deliver, manage demand, and the business will always want you to go faster. They want IT to develop the systems, you know, of course, for less and then they want you to eat the cost of maintaining them, so (chuckles) there's been that tension. But in many ways, that CIO's job is alignment. I mean, it seems to me anyway that schism has certainly narrowed and the cloud's been been part of that, but what do you see as that trajectory over the years and where do you see it going? >> Well, I think it's going to continue to move forward, and depending upon the service, you know, companies are going to take advantage of those services. So yes, some of the non-mission critical capabilities that you would want to move out to the cloud or have somebody else do it, so to speak, that's going to continue to happen because they should be able to do it a lot cheaper than you can, just like use you mentioned a few moments ago about email. I did not want to maintain, you know, exchange service and keeping that all up and running. I moved quickly to Microsoft 365 and that's been a world of difference, but that's just one example. But when you have mission critical apps, you're going to have to make a decision if you want to continue to house them in-house or push them out to an AWS and house them there. So maybe you don't need a large data center and you can utilize some of the best and brightest around security, around managing size of the infrastructure and getting some of their engineering help, which can help. So it just depends upon the application, so to speak, or a function that you're trying to support. And you got to really look at your enterprise architecture and see where that makes sense. So you got to have a hybrid. I see and I have, you know, managed towards a hybrid way of looking at your architecture. >> Okay, so obviously the cloud played a role in that change, and of course, you were in healthcare too so you had to be somewhat careful, >> Yep. >> With the cloud. But you mentioned this hybrid architecture. I mean, from a technologist standpoint and a business standpoint, what do you want out of, you know, you hear a hybrid, multi, all the buzz words. What are you looking for then? Is it a consistent experience? Is it a consistent security? Or is it sort of more horses for courses, where you're trying to run a workload in the right place? What's your philosophy on that? >> Well, I mean, all those things matter, but you're looking at obviously, cost, you're looking at engagement. How does these services engage? Whether it's internal employees or external clients who you're servicing, and you want to get to a cost structure that makes sense in terms of managing those services as well as those mission critical apps. So it comes down to looking at the dollars and cents, as well as what type of services you can provide. In many cases, if you can provide a cheaper and increase the overall services, you're going to go down that path. And just like we did with ServiceNow, I did that at Beacon and also at DentaQuest two healthcare companies. We were able to, you know, remove duplicated, so to speak, ticketing systems and move to one and allow a better experience for the internal employee. They can do self-service, they can look at metrics, they can see status, real-time status on where their request was. So that made a bigger difference. So you engaged the employee differently, better, and then you also reduce your costs. >> Well, how about the economics? I mean, your experience that cloud is cheaper. You hear a lot of the, you know, a lot of the legacy players are saying, oh, no cloud's super expensive. Wait till you get that Amazon bill. (laughs) What's the truth? >> Well, I think there's still a lot of maturing that needs to go on, because unfortunately, depending upon the company, so let's use a couple of examples. So let's look at a startup. You look at a startup, they're probably going to look at all their services being in the cloud and being delivered through a SaaS model, and that's going to be an expense, that's going to be most likely a per user expense per month or per year, however, they structure the contract. And right out of the gate, that's going to be a top line expense that has to be managed going forward. Now you look at companies that have been around for a while, and two of the last companies I worked with, had a lot of technical debt, had on-prem applications. And when you started to look at how to move forward, you know, you had CFOs that were used to going to buy software, capitalize in that software over, you know, five years, sometimes three years, and using that investment to be capitalized, and that would sit below the line, so to speak. Now, don't get me wrong, you still have to pay for it, it's just a matter of where it sits. And when you're running a company and you're looking at the financials, not having that cost on your operational expenses, so to speak, if you're not looking at the depreciation through those numbers, that was advantageous to a CFO many years ago. Now you come to them and say, hey, we're going to move forward with a new HR system, and it's all increasing the expense because there's nothing else to capitalize. Those are different conversations, and all of a sudden your expenses have increased, and yes, you have to make sure that the businesses behind you, with respects to an ROI and supporting it. >> Yeah, so as long as the value is there, and that's a part of the alignment. I want to ask you about cloud pricing strategies because you mentioned ServiceNow, you know, Salesforce is in there, Workday. If you look at the way these guys price, it's really not true cloud pricing in a way, cause they're going to have you sign up for an annual license, you know, a lot of times you got pay up front, or if you want a discount, you're going to have to sign up for two years or three years. But now you see guys like Snowflake coming in, you know, big high-profile IPO. They actually charge you on a consumption-based model. What are your thoughts on that? Do you see that as sort of a trend in the coming decade? >> No, I absolutely think it's going to be on a trend, because consumption means more transactions and more transactions means more computing, and they're going to look at charging it just like any other utility charges. So yes, I see that trend continuing. Did a big deal with UltiPro HR, and yeah, that was all based upon user head count, but they were talking about looking at their payroll and changing their costing on payroll down the road. With their merger, or they went from being a public company to a private company, and now looking to merge with Kronos. I can see where time and attendance and payroll will stop being looked at as a transaction, right? It's a weekly or bi-weekly or monthly, however the company pays, and yes, there is dollars to be made there. >> Well, so let me ask you as a CIO and a business, you know, COO. One of the challenges that you hear with the cloud is okay, if I get my Amazon bill, it's something that Snowflake has talked about, where you know, to me, it's the ideal model, but on the other hand, the transparency is not necessarily there. You don't know what it's going to be at the end of (mumbles) Would you rather have more certainty as to what that bill's going to look like? Or would you rather have it aligned with consumption and the value to the business? >> Well, you know, that's a great question, because yes, I mean, budgets are usually built upon a number that's fixed. Now, no, don't get me wrong. I mean, when I look at the wide area network, the cost for internet services, yes, sometimes we need to increase and that means an increase in the overall cost, but that consumption, that transactional, that's going to be a different way of having to go ahead and budget. You have to budget now for the maximum transactions you anticipate with a growth of a company, and then you need to take a look at that you know, if you're budgeting. I know we were on a calendar fiscal year, so we started up budgeting process in August and we finalized at sometime in the end of October, November for the proceeding year, and if that's the case, you need to get a little bit better on what your consumptions are going to be, because especially if you're a public company, going out on the street with some numbers, those numbers could vary based upon a high transaction volume and the cost, and maybe you're not getting the results on the top end, on the revenue side. So I think, yeah, it's going to be an interesting dilemma as we move forward. >> Yeah. So, I mean, it comes back to alignment, doesn't it? I mean, I know in our small example, you know, we're doing now, we were used to be physical events with theCUBE, now it's all virtual events and our Amazon bill is going through the roof because we're supporting all these users on these virtual events, and our CFO's like, well, look at this Amazon bill, and you say, yeah, but look at the revenue, it's supporting. And so to your point, if the revenue is there, if the ROI is there, then it makes sense. You can kind of live with it because you're growing with it, but if not, then you really got to question it. >> Yeah. So you got to need to partner with your financial folks and come up with better modeling around some of these transactional services and build that into your modeling for your budget and for your, you know, your top line and your expenses. >> So what do you think of some of these SaaS companies? I mean, you've had a lot of experience. They're really coming at it from largely an application perspective, although you've managed a lot of infrastructure too. But we've talked about ServiceNow. They've kind of mopped up in the ITSM. I mean, there's nobody left. I mean, ServiceNow has sort of taken over the whole (mumbles) You know, Salesforce, >> Yeah. >> I guess, sort of similarly, sort of dominating the CRM space. You hear a lot of complaints now about, you know, ServiceNow pricing. There is somebody the other day called them the Oracle of ITSM. Do you see that potentially getting disrupted by maybe some cloud native developers who are developing tools on top? You see in, like, for instance, Datadog going after Splunk and LogRhythm. And there seem to be examples popping up. Well, what's your take on all this? >> No, absolutely. I think cause, you know, when we were talking about back when I first met you, when I was at the ADVO, I mean, Oracle was on it's, you know, rise with their suite of capabilities, and then before you know it, other companies were popping up and took over, whether it was Firstbeat, PeopleSoft, Workday, and then other companies that just came into play, cause it's going to happen because people are going to get, you know, frustrated. And yes, I did get a little frustrated with ServiceNow when I was looking at a couple of new modules because the pricing was a little bit higher than it was when I first started out. So yes, when you're good and you're able to provide the right services, they're going to start pricing it that way. But yes, I think you're going to get smaller players, and then those smaller players will start grabbing up, so to speak, market share and get into it. I mean, look at Salesforce. I mean, there are some pretty good CRMs. I mean, even, ServiceNow is getting into the CRM space big time, as well as a company like Sugar and a few others that will continue to push Salesforce to look at their pricing as well as their services. I mean, they're out there buying up companies, but you just can't automatically assume that they're going to, you know, integrate day one, and it's going to take time for some of their services to come and become reality, so to speak. So yes, I agree that there will be players out there that will push these lager SaaS companies, and hopefully get the right behaviors and right pricing. >> I've said for years, Dan, that I've predicted that ServiceNow and Salesforce are on a collision course. It didn't really happen, but it's starting to, because ServiceNow, the valuation is so huge. They have to grow into other markets much in the same way that Salesforce has. So maybe we'll see McDermott start doing some acquisitions. It's maybe a little tougher for ServiceNow given their whole multi-instance architecture and sort of their own cloud. That's going to be interesting to see how that plays out. >> Yeah. Yeah. You got to play in that type of architecture, let's put it that way. Yes, it'll be interesting to see how that does play out. >> What are your thoughts on the big hyperscalers; Amazon, Microsoft, Google? What's the right strategy there? Do you go all in on one cloud like AWS or are you more worried about lock-in? Do you want to spread your bets across clouds? How real is multi-cloud? Is it a strategy or more sort of a reality that you get M and A and you got shadow IT? What's your take on all that? >> Yeah, that's a great question because it does make you think a little differently around you know, where to put all your eggs. And it's getting tougher because you do want to distribute those eggs out to multiple vendors, if you would, service providers. But, you know, for instance we had a situation where we were building a brand new business intelligence data warehouse, and we decided to go with Microsoft as its core database. And we did a bake-off on business analytic tools. We had like seven of them at Beacon and we ended up choosing Microsoft's Power BI, and a good part of that reason, not all of it, but a good part of it was because we felt they did everything else that the Tableau's and others did, but, you know, Microsoft would work to give, you know, additional capabilities to Power BI if it's sitting on their database. So we had to take that into consideration, and we did and we ended up going with Power BI. With Amazon, I think Amazon's a little bit more, I'll put it horizontal, whereby they can help you out because of the database and just kind of be in that data center, if you would, and be able to move some of your homegrown applications, some of your technical debt over to that, I'll say cloud. But it'll get interesting because when you talk about integration, when you talk about moving forward with a new functionality, yeah, you have to put your architecture in a somewhat of a center point, and then look to see what is easier, cheaper, cost-effective, but, you know, what's happening to my functionality over the next three to five years. >> But it sounds like you'd subscribe to a horses for courses approach, where you put the right workload in the right cloud, as opposed to saying, I'm going to go all in on one cloud and it's going to be, you know, same skillset, same security, et cetera. It sounds like you'd lean toward the former versus going all in with, you know, MANO cloud. >> Yeah, I guess again, when I look at the architecture. There will be major, you know, breaks if you would. So yes, there is somewhat of a, you know, movement to you know, go with one horse. But, you know, I could see looking back at the Beacon architecture that we could, you know, lift and put the claims adjudication capabilities up in Amazon and then have that conduct, you know, the left to right claims processing, and then those transactions could then be moved into Microsoft's data warehouse. So, you know, there is ways to go about spreading it out so that you don't have all those eggs in one basket and that you reduce the amount of risk, but that weighed heavily on my mind. >> So I was going to ask you, how much of a factor lock-in is it? It sounds like it's more, you know, spreading your eggs around, as you say and reducing your risk as opposed to, you know, worried about lock-in, but as a CIO, how worried are you about lock-in? Where is that fit in the sort of decision tree? >> Ah, I mean, I would say it's up there, but unfortunately, there's no number one, there's like five number ones, if you would. So it's definitely up there and it's something to consider when you're looking at, like you said, the cost, risk integration, and then time. You know, sometimes you're up against the time. And again, security, like I said. Security is a big key in healthcare. And actually security overall, whether you're retail, you're going to always have situations no matter what industry, you got to protect the business. >> Yeah, so I want to ask you about security. That's the other number one. Well, you might've been a defacto CSO, but kind of when we started in this business security was the problem of the security teams, and you know, it's now a team sport. But in thinking about the cloud and security, how big of a concern is the cloud? Is it just more, you're looking for consistency and be able to apply the corporate edicts? Are there other concerns like the shared responsibility model? What are your thoughts on security in the cloud? >> Well, it probably goes back to again, the industry, but when I looked at the past five years in healthcare, doing a lot of work with the CMS and Medicaid, Medicare, they had certain requirements and certain restrictions. So we had to make sure that we follow those requirements. And when you got audited, you needed to make sure that you can show that you are adhering to their requirements. So over the past, probably two years with Amazon's government capabilities that those restrictions have changed, but we were always looking to make sure that we owned and managed how we manage the provider and member data, because yes, we did not want to have obviously a breach, but we wanted to make sure we were following the guidelines, whether it's state or federal, and then and even some cases healthcare guidelines around managing that data. So yes, top of mind, making sure that we're protecting, you know, in my case so we had 37 million members, patients, and we needed to make sure that if we did put it in the cloud or if it was on-prem, that it was being protected. And as you mentioned, recently come off of, I was going to say Amazon, but it was an acquisition. That company that was looking at us doing the due diligence, they gave us thumbs up because of how we were managing the data at the lowest point and all the different levels within the architecture. So Anthem who did the acquisition, had a breach back in, I think it was 2015. That was top of mind for them. We had more questions during the due diligence around security than any other functional area. So it is critical, and I think slowly, some of that type of data will get up into the cloud, but again, it's going to go through some massive risk management and security measures, and audits, because how fragile that is. >> Yeah, I mean, that could be a deal breaker in an acquisition. I got two other questions for you. One is, you know, I know you follow the technologies very closely, but there's all the buzz words, the digital transformation, the AI, these new SaaS models that we talked about. You know, a lot of CIOs tell me, look, Dave, get the business right and the technology is the easy part. It's people, it's process. But what are you seeing in terms of some of this new stuff coming out, there's machine learning, you know, obviously massive scale, new cloud workloads. Anything out there that really excites you and that you could see on the horizon that could be, you know, really change agents for the next decade? >> Yeah, I think we did some RPA, robotics on some of the tasks that, you know, where, you know, if the analysis types of situations. So I think RPA is going to be a game changer as it continues to evolve. But I agree with what you just said. Doing this for quite a while now, it still comes down to the people. I can get the technology to do what it needs to do as long as I have the right requirements, so that goes back to people. Making sure we have the partnership that goes back to leadership and the people. And then the change management aspects. Right out of the gate, you should be worrying about how is it going to affect and then the adoption and engagement. Because adoption is critical, because you can go create the best thing you think from a technology perspective, but if it doesn't get used correctly, it's not worth the investment. So I agree, whether it's digital transformation or innovation, it still comes down to understanding the business model and injecting and utilizing technology to grow or reduce costs, grow the business or reduce costs. >> Yeah, usage really means value. Sorry, my last question. What's the one thing that vendors shouldn't do? What's the vendor no-no that'll alienate CIO's? >> To this day, I still don't like, there's a company out there that starts with an O. I still don't like it to that, every single technology module, if you would, has a separate sales rep. I want to work with my strategic partners and have one relationship and that single point of contact that spark and go back into their company and bring me whatever it is that we're looking at so that I don't get, you know, for instance from that company that starts with an O, you know, 17 calls from 17 different sales reps trying to sell me 17 different things. So what irritates me is, you know, you have a company that has a lot of breadth, a lot of, you know, capability and functional, you know that I may want. Give me one person that I can deal with. So a single point of contact, then that makes my life a lot easier. >> Well, Dan Sheehan, I really appreciate you spending some time on theCUBE, it's always a pleasure catching up with you and really appreciate you sharing your insights with our audience. Thank you. >> Oh, thank you, David. I appreciate the opportunity. You have a great day. >> All right. You too. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE on Cloud. Keep it right there. We'll be back with our next guest right after the short break. Awesome, Dan.

>>from Las Vegas. It's the Q covering a ws re invent 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web service is and in along with its ecosystem partners. >>Hey, welcome back to the Cubes. Live coverage in Las Vegas for eight of his re invent 2019 R Seventh year out of the eight years I've had it, we've seen the rise and dominance of Amazon continued to thunder away at the competition span. Their lead printing money stew minimum in my coz right here next to me. I'm John, very extracting from noise. Our next guest, steam A lady who's the presidency of Aviatrix Cube alone was on Tuesdays part of our editorial segment. Who his company or one of his employees going to term. You take the tea at a cloud native cloud naive, which has been going viral. Welcome back to the Cube. Thank you. All right, so let's get into the aviatrix value. Probably wanna get digging more, but first explain what you guys do and what market you're targeting. >>So we do. I would say cloud native, not naive. Cloud native networking that embraces and extends the basic constructs the native constructs of the public clouds, not just a W s, but all the public clouds and builds a multi cloud architecture, networking in security architecture for enterprise customers that that delivers the simplicity and the automation that people want from cloud. That's why they want a cloud native but yet brings along the functionality, the performance and the visibility and control that they had on on Prem. So that kind of taste great less filling, not one of the other. Both. I want the simplicity and automation of anything that expect from the cloud. But I need that enterprise functionality that control the security, the performance that he used to have on Prem because I wasn't doing that for my own health. I need to bring that along. That's what we do. >>What main problem you solving for customers? What's the big pain point? So what are you enabling? >>The big pain point is the center of gravity, as Andy Joshi's talked is moving from on Prem into the cloud. So it's so it's no longer. I mean, data centers aren't going away. They're going to still be there. But the investment architecture is in the cloud and you're going to see the clouds start moving out with their their announcements. You see everything that outposts and on everything else they're doing is taking the architecture moving out. The problem we solve is A W S says to every enterprise customer. We will give you anything and everything you ever need from networking and security. You don't need anybody else. And so so what ends up happening is as enterprises. So for an SNB, that's great. If you've got a few, VP sees life is good. Use all the native stuff from AWS. What happens, though, is your Qualcomm or your USA or your new name it big 50 year old 100 year old enterprise. You have complex networking and security demands. You go to the cloud. There's so many limitations of what the native constructs of all the clouds could do. You start realizing, okay, I need Maur. And so we're very complimentary to AWS. We sit on top of that. We leverage those basic constructs. We program those contracts and then we extend that functionality to deliver the functionality that they need. >>That's awesome, stupid when I want to dig into that, but I want to first get to the hard news you guys have news here at reinvent? What's the big news story that you guys were putting out there? Two >>announcements and actually goes perfectly with the way the world's going and also with the embrace and extend of a W s. So the first is we introduced what we call aviatrix Cloud win. So they announced Transit Gateway Network manager with accelerated VPN leveraging global accelerator as just a way to bring in basically embraced branch offices into the cloud. So if you think of SD win in that market, if your if your center of gravity is on Prem in a data center on pls is horrible, you needed a better way to do branch office connectivity. SC wait is fantastic, and it's a great, optimal way to get back to that data center. Well, as the center of gravity moves into the cloud, their data centers in the cloud. I just need to get better optimal access performance in late and see into a W s because that's the center of gravity. So AWS with the global accelerator allows youto get on one of their 250 pops around the world as quickly as possible. So if you're in Singapore, get on that pop VPN in, and then you go across the global backbone of AWS all the way out to that BBC in Virginia. It's beautiful, because guess what? That is the most optimal way to get there instead of vpc to vpc across the Internet right on the AWS backbone. Well, Steve, it's fascinating stuff because if you look at the traditional network, it was I knew the knobs and how I need to get everything to work. But the big challenge for most network people is most of the network that they're responsible for. They can't touch it. That's right. They can adjust it. So are we recreating some of the environment? Or how? Because clubs supposed to be simple? Well, that's easy, but it needs to meet the enterprise requirements. Help that network administrator there there, sometimes going away to the cloud administrator. You still networkings tough and therefore, how do we make that? That's part of what we do is that's the other thing that we solve is people think they go to the cloud and they think, Oh, go build. I don't want to build anything. I want to consume. It's still difficult. We come in and abstract away a lot of the details for them such that we deliver that service on the cloud win. The other thing that we do again, back to embracing and extending. What do you What? What router is out in that branch office 87% of the time. Sisko, right? I mean, course it is. So the S D wearing guys will go in and say, We'll rip that box out and put in another little box like a 20,000 branches. I'm not ripping out anything, right? That's very painful. So with our cloud win, we can orchestrate and reconfigure the Sisko. All of our engineers came from Cisco. So any Cisco IOS router out there, we can orchestrate and reconfigure to set up the VPN automatically through our orchestrator so that when you don't rip and replace out that Roger that's existing there. So now AWS loves it because that's the last piece of friction. They want no friction, and it's always in that physical to cloud transition There. All the complexity is, and by enabling their network manager and an accelerated VPN and global accelerated to use the existing Cisco. Roger, that's out there. No one else does that Cisco doesn't do that. We're the only ones. So when you embrace a native construct, what's the native construct in the branch office? B, G P. And Cisco IOS. We embrace it and then and then enhance it and make it better. >>Are you only on Cisco about June 1st? >>Wait. Now it's just go. Francisco's 87% >>of every bridge your software abstraction software across. And you you basically change the game with SD. Win a little bit, you modernize >>It s t win is great for the old way of doing networking. When you look for the next five years, you're still gonna need SD went. It's a bubble market. It's like when optimization us riverbed. If when optimization is a great market, it was for a while, just like SC win. But that's kind of the old way. But Maur Maura, what you're gonna find is what Where my branches need to connect to is in the cloud. And if you do that, you don't need esti win. You just need better connectivity. Tate of us provide. >>I gotta ask you the question about the cloud naive because there's a lot of old school I t people who still think there's food in the data center. Still, action there on box makers are all in the vendor side supplying boxes. They're still want to supply boxes, right? So as those old guys and gals do their thing, they're stuck in their ways, right? That's friction. Total gas. He talks about the transformation as new leadership. What has to change in that old world? What should those C I ose and CEOs tell their their staff? And what should the staff do themselves? >>I actually think the customers air there. I think the vendors are that the vendors are the one that aren't They're the ones who are cloud naive. They actually don't even know what they don't know. The customers are the ones they say, Oh, no, And this is the whole shift that Josh was talking about business transformation. They understand. And they are bringing along all their people and they have some people that are probably further along and experts in AWS. But they absolutely number one requirement for them is we've got to bring along the people they don't want to leave them behind and say, You get to work on the old data center and these guys are gonna work in Cloud. They're bringing them all in. >>Talk about your customers who's buying from you? What's it look like? What kind of scope do you have? A customer base? >>It's funny. It's It's It's all the old networking guys. It is not. It's not developers signing that. It's it's It's old. I t. Now they don't want to do it the old way. They want to do it the new cloud way. But these guys understand BDP. They understand networking, and they're in charge now. And so it's like because it's gotten so serious for enterprises. This the networking team, the security team it is. It is I t that is running this, so that's a big company. Small companies, we get him. All right, Steve, I want to make sure I understand this because when I hear cod Native, I really think a lot about that application. Mind shift. Yeah, Micro Service is our protector, and that's on it for sure. Networking. Unfortunately, for the most part, it's nothing. Bites are going through the pipes, and I haven't really thought about that. So you know, it's not just because it's cloud but cloud native and therefore things like your container and doctors Dr. Rise thing. This is what this world is built for that your solution is solving for yes. So I'll give you a perfect example. So So we help. We actually helped a dhobi us come out with T g. W. Last year, Cheri, I found, was on stage with Day Brown and the networking keynote launching T g w whenever Great. Of course, before that, you were just doing bpc the vpc peering It was a horrible mess. So you need a transit architecture. So they came out with T g w Fantastic. So we embrace and extend T g w. So the problem is, they come out with T g. W. But guess what a Doris doesn't do. Don't propagate routes to spoke VP sees. Okay, so how did the routes get propagated? Well, you have a person. They need manual. If there's an update on the on from you manually update the routes. Well, that might work. If you've got three. VP sees again. You're an SNB. But I'm an enterprise. I got 3000 vpc That is not gonna work. So cloud native we are We are not just sitting on top of AWS. We are in the matrix we are in. We understand natively. So our central control, it will actually like we're not. There's no b g p running at that layer, but our central control it will push routes an update, routing tables everywhere. It needs to be learned. The routes from Amman Prem push it where it needs to be, and then everything automatically works. Yeah, it reminds me, you know, we had more than a decade ago. We went from all the north south traffic to the East west, propagated by VM. Yes, is an order of magnitude 8 12 and know that this cloud environment people can't do it. There's not enough people. I don't have enough man hours because the machine learning So here's devices need to be here. Another thing that's happened in guys is there is there is 100% of people in there in the universe that that that no cloud, that number's growing, but there's a fixed set. Everybody's going after all those people. You've got the big clock. They're all hiring like crazy. The vendors are probably hiring. You've got customers they're stealing from each other. It's very difficult to keep a staff. And so they look and they say I probably could figure this out, but there's no way I'm going to be able to operationalize it. There's just zero chance I could do that And there's just so much change. And honestly, they say it's a full time job just keeping up with what Amazon is announcing their get implementing. And so that's where they look and they come to Austin. They say there's zero chance that I can deploy networking architecturally without aviatrix >>on the network and guys because you and I always say the neighboring guys have the keys to the kingdom. They always have. I mean, people have tried to move the center of power away from the networking guys, But now, as the cloud gets the center of gravity, some of the power networking guys got to step up their game. But they don't want to rip and replace anything is as you went out earlier. It's complex, even pull one or two out. So the concern that I might have put the question to you is Steve. Great, great energy. But I'm really nervous that these routes are not gonna be. There's gonna be some coherency issues around updating routes because that's my number one concern. How do you guys solve that? >>Well, the one thing I've always seen, who's the worst? When? When? When most things happen, Who's the culprit? Human, right? It's always a human. Does something wrong. And so I would much rather trust some sort of automated software because at least if you program it correctly, it's going to do the right thing so way have not had. I mean, it's so >>you know what I'm sure is no issue there. >>Yeah, no, there's no issue, I mean, and what we do see, sometimes our people say, because there's a lot of people that are that are very smart, they get into the cloud and they are do it yourselfers and they love to go build, and they love the complexity, and they want all that they feel they feel like this job security and what we sometimes have to do is say you. But think about day to think about handing off the operations. You might get hit by a bus, and then your company is screwed, and you gotta almost get them enlightened to realize that they should be working on higher level things other than low level things. I'd say that's something that we kind of educate. People, >>houses Amazon there, one cloud of many 34 maybe one or two jazz. He said to me. You know, mostly primaries will be picked, probably Amazon. But in some cases, as you will be a primary less than that eight arrests. So multi cloud is the word that it was Something about an Amazon sees me loosening up a bit what it is, so they recognize it. What is multi cloud? I mean, what is really going on? I think >>I think if you're a small company, absolutely pick one cloud like for sure, right, like that doesn't make sense to go multiple clouds in your small medium business. If you're not that, if your needs are not that complex, pick one cloud right? And if it's a Toby asses the later stay with them. If it just happens to be, well, I got a bunch of credits and azure. Okay, maybe do them. I think. To date most people are picking eight of us There, there, there, there, The killer here. But when you talk to the enterprise, the real enterprise right that are just now moving into the cloud, they're all multi cloud Just had one today. Super large chip company down L a San Diego area. Guess what. Use it. All three clouds. I asked him why. Well, because we started in AWS. We got some things there we've got. We've got a bunch of stuff that runs and an azure with offers 3 65 other things that they dio and Google for ml and that kind of stuff. It runs better their enterprises. They're gonna pick where the workload run best, and they're big. And so they're gonna look and they're gonna They're gonna They're gonna elevate up building architecture that works across all of them. I don't think multi cloud means I'm gonna move this workload from here to here. That's never gonna happen. Maybe in 20 years. But I doubt it. It's just that the workloads heir destined, they run better on that and they're gonna focus on >>different park loads for the cloud that picked the right guy for the right workload. >>Yeah, and I'm so big and I require different companies and I get acquired. And and and And you got to think of the on Prem data centers eyes another cloud that's a multi. And then I go into Europe, and I have GDP are and I need another cloud. I mean, they're gonna have 45 clouds, and I don't think it's gonna be 20% across all >>that could be a power lot. They'll be more than 13 closets. Be specialty clouds a riff on this all the time. Well, Steve, I want to thank you for coming on the Q. Appreciate it. Give a quick blood for the company. How many employees you're gonna hire, some of your objectives >>growing fast. We've got over 400 customers and you ask one of our customers we've got customers spending millions of dollars a year with us all the way down the customer spending $5 a month. Why? Because of the wonderful thing of cloud they can consume. We've got 400 customers all over the world and even know who probably 300 of them are right. Why they go on the market place they go like this, they download. Maybe they come on drift. Ask one question. They launch and they spent $5 a month. I don't even know what they're doing. And eventually we watched their Amar are it just grows and grows and grows and grows. And eventually like, Whoa, Now you're spending 50 grand a year. We should talk. So it's kind of like how some companies used open source that ends up being our funnel a low friction zero friction High velocity Landon expand model. And then we have the traditional enterprises that you'd imagine every so everything in between >>your hiring, >>we're hiring like crazy, hiring a whole bunch of sales organization around the world. We just raised $40 million Siri see a month ago and we're going for >>fresh financing. Aviatrix see Mulaney, CEO of aviatrix here on the Cuba Reinvent 2019 Stay with us for more coverage. Day three of our three days of World War coverage Two sets here, thanks to Intel for the being our headline sponsor without their supporting our mission, which is bringing you the best confident possible. We want to thank Intel on. All of our sponsors were right back with more coverage after this short break

>>live from Las Vegas. It's the Cube covering Splunk dot com. 19. Brought to you by spunk. >>Welcome back to the Cube, everyone. I'm John Ferrier with an angle on the Cube here in Las Vegas for Splunk dot com. 19. It's there 10 years of their customer main event. All the top customers and partners were here and, of course, accuse. Been covering dot com for seven years at a great guests from a censure. Mike Heinlein. Ecosystem Adventures. Global Analytics Plays and offerings lead a century Now. First of all, welcome to the Q. Thank you, John says. You're always has >>long titles. It's a very long title. Your lead. That's a mouthful. Offerings. Yeah, this >>meanings to these titles of the century. This, like >>Esso, I'm part of the Ecosystem Adventures Group, which helps to incubate our various different channel partners. And Dr Service is with those partners and then within the splint partnership. I'm focused on driving analytics offerings with various different practices that are already considering analytics and taking those >>to market. So you guys have a relation with spunk is evolving pretty quickly. >>It is >>what's the future look like? What's the current path >>Well, as you may be aware, we recently renewed our partnership with Bronco back in February. After two and 1/2 years, we had achieved most of our goals. And where we were starting to see is that where our initial objective was to help our clients to get Maur costs takeout and risk associated with their I T and Security operations way also learned a few things along the way, which is the Splunk Analyze politics engine can also be used outside of I t and Security and we can start to take it into industry verticals. And so one of the exciting things that we're doing is we brought our digital practice into the tent with us. We renewed in February, way have a couple of years. We're looking into the future, and we're gonna not only double down in i t and Security, but we're also going to start to build business analytics and io ti type solutions on top of within the vertical industries that were focused on one >>of those industries. Can you share them? >>Yeah. Yeah, so? So it would be things like energy utilities where power line analytics to reduce the amount of vegetation that might take out power lines cause fires cause outages. Patient flow, which would be how to help accelerate getting patients through the e. R and also increase throughput. Four Hospitals within supply Chain We're doing number of different things way have four different offerings that focus on technology, telecom, retail, consumer goods and manufacturing. So, like industrial type clients, >>so pretty much standard vertical industry that we normally see that's cracking in the business. Yeah, so I'll get your thoughts on this. One of the observations I want to share with you and get your reaction is is that with cloud and with data, it's interesting these day. There's a really key part of all this you mentioned. I I t and Security. Obviously, it's pretty straightforward. You see, that way started adding machine learning and a I and the things that domain expertise of these verticals become the pacing item the ke ke i t, if you will with scale of that what's going on? That's right level. Are you seeing that this is a fertile ground for opportunities that how you guys see it? Can you >>you Absolutely I think I think where it centuries strong is in our industry, Ackerman not just to 19 security, but within different industry verticals on. Then you take our digital practice, which is where our data science is live, where they're developing advanced analytics models and essentially working with a lot of the open source modeling tools like python that integrates very well a Splunk. It gives us the opportunity to take that data that could be bundled up. It could be data rest, maybe three years of sales data, and we create a forecast with it and do that on top of spunk. Or maybe something where within a supply chain or a flow within a hospital, were able to use machine learning to start to move some of the computer and thought from human beings to machines >>were some of the innovative service is you guys have built on top of Splunk because they're enabling platform. So again, opportunities. What are you guys doing in the >>soles? So both in the retail and in the technology space, we've created a couple of punishment engines. When you think of a supply chain, I need to know what my forecast is. What do I plan to sell? How many items. Do I need to have an inventory in the warehouse and in the store? And then how am I gonna get those items? And then how many should I order the next day? So we're using Splint to figure all of that out. >>What sort of surprise? Learnings You've got a deal with flunk because has always seems to be a new revelation when people get data and they start playing with insights. Beyond that, some sort of business breakthroughs are weird. Things happen when you start playing with data. Any anecdotal surprises, their learnings. You've seen >>a, well, a tremendous number. And in fact, what what happens is when you start to open up the silos. So most of our clients are stuck with a lot of legacy technologies that they've acquired over the last two or three decades. Splunk enables to open that Optimus get insights that we couldn't before. So it could be it could be. I could get a patient through a particular process, you know, twice as fast is what historically had been able to do. Or maybe for examples, something that Doug Merit mentioned yesterday, which is where we're partying very closely with Splunk for human trafficking. We've created an offering where split it already gone out created Data Lake of a lot of data from educational entities. Ngo's government agencies we took that builds a machine learning on top of it and able to identify high value targets or establishments that have a high risk of human trafficking, which is already starting to get results. In Florida, >>you mentioned health care no multiple times, someone of your key verticals. >>It is one that's emerging is very exciting. And it's kind of evidence of where we're working really well, a sponge. A lot of cases we've developed things that we take into Splunk, and we go to market together. In this particular case, Splunk created patient flow, took it to us. And now we're working to identify about a dozen different hospitals where we're gonna go meet with their CEOs and talk to him about what we can do to help them increased profit and patient satisfaction at the same time. >>What some of those conversations, like when you go and knock on the doors and say, Hey, I got a new secret weapon to solve your problems because this is its new things that people have these problems that couldn't have attacked before in the past. Now they have potential capabilities. What are some of those conversations? Take out there like Come on in, educate me. I want to buy right away or door slammed in your face and get his attention. >>Well, so way just had a really exciting meeting with a very large brochure in the Midwest. And as was explaining the different things that we could do a Splunk she actually the head of supply chain. Excuse me. It almost seems like fairy dust to me. In other words, the hardest challenge that I have sometimes is able to say, Look, you're used to doing this 24 months, maybe 36 months. I think I could do it free in less than six, and that's just so hard for them to absorb. So So a lot of cases it's it's transitioning to Well, let us figure out how we could prove that to you. Doing some kind of a concept or a pilot. >>You know, it's interesting is that you know, when you see people get set up with data platform, it's kind of editor of stage. Let's set the foundation. Let's make sure things flowing in you well. And then they started getting some discoveries here and there, and then they get business value, and then it kind of goes to another level. I think this is where things I see you guys doing well and others here in the ecosystem floor, and that is that It's a workflow optimization issue, I think. Wait a minute, way have all this data. Well, let's go do this. That's a little bit more of a ballistic business process or some sort of. >>That's right. Your >>challenge. Is that how >>you Yes. So I would say you always have a business process, at least in the industry verticals, and you have a lot of data that silo on. Then you crack those silos open on, then it's really basically intersection of what we would call planning and execution, which is, for example, maybe I have on oil rig and I have a ship that is taking materials and people back and forth. But now I know that I have actual things. Head into that port where if I send this ship now, I'm gonna have to come back in the next 24 hours. If I hold that ship off for two or three hours, then I can get more materials and people on board, and I don't have to come back for another 48 hours. So now I've just reduced greatly my operating costs. >>And I think that's interesting. Is that you think about what you just said, Yeah, go back 15 years. What's the data base scheming and make that happen. Date is over there, it's over. They're gonna write a query that Leighton see. It never happens. >>It's Jackie, right? So we're kind of out of the business of trying to fit square pegs into relational round holes, which takes the better part of maybe 50% of a lot of projects to implement those solutions. And so, with spunk, you're basically dumping the date end and you're layering your scheme on top of it, which enables you to accelerate delivery. And additionally, I don't have to cobble together and stitched together multiple technologies to do ingestion analytic storage visualization so I could mobilize teams much more quickly. Then it would traditional solutions. >>You know, Mike, I'd love your thoughts on the center's transformation because looking at you. What you guys have done is a company. It's been interesting, a lot of successes. But firm's been around for a while, right? So impressed. Different names don't back the old school back minicomputers. You know, rolling out projects had long arises. Multiyear. Now the speedy a name has completely changed clouds. Here you got data. How has the Splunk on these Modern technology has changed the centers engagement practices. >>I think you're touching on what we would probably call agile delivery, right or continuous delivery, where our clients don't want to push off from shore into a big bang project where they don't get to see the results for 12 to 24 months. That's a lot of risk for them. So what's book enables us to do, really is to do a delivery and deliver value in Angel's sprints in three 12 you know, 16 weeks sprints where we're literally be giving them value. We also don't have to understand all of the data. If you're using relational databases, you pretty much have to understand everything before you push off from shore with spunk. I can no minimal amount and start and deliver value, and then as I go, I'm learning more about my data. I could deliver more use cases and more value. >>It's interesting, you know, go back to the old enterprise sales model. You know, you do a pilot or a POC poc that a pilot with pilots, a date and that's what months and then Then the decision makes. And then you got to start over for the time that it'll happen in about months. A year. Yeah, technology changes. >>That's right. >>You guys are doing essentially agile sprints that are kind of like a little Mini p O sees. That's that's correct. Docs are actually really work. >>That's right. That's >>the new seems like the new sales model is that >>Well, I would say it's something that, with the rapid prototyping capability, like a sponge that gives us that flexibility todo depending on what we're doing, we may not have that flexibility. We may be limited by the technology. >>How would you describe the strength of censure Splunk partnership? >>It's a very strong So like I mentioned before, we way started to a nap three years ago. Way just renewed that relationship in February, and we've added more practices from within Accenture like digital practice. So now we have strategy, digital technology and security. We're focusing in doubling down and security in our I T markets, but also then starting to explore new industry verticals in Business analytics and Io Ti. As I explained earlier, we're bringing things to Splunk in there helping us cell, and they're bringing things to Austin. We're helping themselves, and there's a lot of excitement. I mean, I think it's really a combination of the right people with the right industry knowledge at the right time with the right technology. >>Final question in the industry For a while, you see the waves pretty big wave run now. Lot of confluence coming together. Multiple different Durant cloud data scale, everything speed. What's exciting you these days? What's the big story that people should pay attention to right now? Well, in this space, I >>think it really dovetails into Doug Steam, and I don't mean Thio, really, you know, piggyback on that. But it's true, and that is that so many of our clients, you know, still have a lot of technical debt from decades ago, and we get to come in there and say, Look in a matter of weeks and months, we could help You make sense of this way, can help you capture revenue you couldn't capture before Dr Out costs that you couldn't drive out before and reduce risk that you couldn't reduce before. So I mean, it's it's probably the best time of my entire career. >>Frankly, Cooper, daddies and certainly containers helps. Yeah, make those legacy workloads somewhat compatible with modern infrastructure. When you have those technical debt conversations with customers kind of realizing like I'm on the verge of bankruptcy, what do I do it? Is it more advisor? You guys come in, more counseling slash get developed? >>Yeah, yeah, A lot of times it's It's helping them to come in and assess what their situation is. Help them build a road map into the future. Sometimes it's rationalizing some of the technical debt. Sometimes it's how can we augment what you already have? And then and then in the future is that reaches end of life. We almost just turn it off. But you're up and running, you know, on this other platform that we've augmented into that ecosystem >>So tech flow positive. >>There you go. >>Yeah, cash flow positive take from technical debt from checked bag. Mike. Thanks for coming up. Appreciate it. Thanks for the knights. Thanks for having me. Great insights. You get all the data and the insights here. Workflow is rocking the cube. Second day of three days. I'm John Barrymore coverage after this short break.

>>Live from Denver, Colorado. It's the cube covering com vault go 2019 brought to you by Combolt. >>Hey, welcome back to the cube at Lisa Martin with Steve men and men and we are coming to you alive from combo go 19 please to welcome to the cube, a gent from Microsoft Azure. We've got Ben call principal program manager. Ben, welcome. Thank you. Thanks for having me on. Thanks for coming on. So Microsoft combo, what's going on with the partnership? >>They wouldn't have have great storage pond is in data management space. We've been working with Convult for 20 years now in Microsoft and and they've been working with us on Azure for that as long as I can remember not being on that the Azure business for about seven years now. So just a long time in cloud terms like dog ears and it's sort of, they've been doing a huge amount there around getting customer data into the cloud, reducing costs, getting more resiliency and then also letting them do more with the data. So they're a pretty good partner to have and they make it much easy for their customers to to go and leverage cloud. >> So Ben, you know, in my career I've had lots of interactions with the Microsoft storage team. Things have changed a little bit when you're now talking about Azure compared to more, it was the interaction with the operating system or the business suite at had. >>So maybe bring us up to date as those people that might not have followed where kind of the storage positioning inside of Microsoft is now that when we talk about Azure and your title. Yeah, we, we sort of can just, just briefly, we worked very heavily with our own premises brethren, they are actually inside the O team is inside of the Azure engineering old male, which is kind of funny, but we do a load of things there. If he started looking at, firstly on that, that hybrid side, we have things like Azure files. It's a highly resilient as a service SMB NFS file Shafter a hundred terabytes, but that interacts directly with windows server to give you Azure file sync. So there is sort of synergies there as well. What I'm doing personally, my team, we work on scale storage. The big thing we have in there is owl is out blood storage technology, which really is the underpinning technology fault. >>Preapproval storage and Azure, which is an including our SAS offerings, which are hosted on Azure too. So disc is on blood storage of files on blood storage. You look at Xbox live, all these kind of stuff is a customer to us. So we build that out and we were doing work there and that's, that's really, really interesting. And how we do it. And that's not looking at going, we're gonna buy some compute, we're going to buy some storage, we're going to build it out, we're going to run windows or hyper V or maybe VM-ware with hoc with windows running on the VMware, whatever else. This is more a story about we're gonna provide you storage as a service. You didn't get a minimum of like 11 nines at your ability. And and be able to have that scale to petabytes of capacity in one logical namespace and give you multiple gigabytes, double digit gigabytes of throughput to that storage. >>And now we're even that about to multiple protocols. So rest API century. Today we've got Azure stack storage, EU API, she can go and use, but we give you that consistency of the actual backend storage and the objects and the data available via more than just one protocol. You can go and access that via HDFS API. We talk about data lakes all the time. For us, our blood storage is a data Lake. We turn on hierarchal namespace and you can go and access that via other protocols like as I mentioned HDFS as well. So that is a big story about what we want to do. We want to make that data available at crazy scale, have no limits in the end to the capacity or throughput or performance and over any protocol. That's kind of our lawn on the Hill about what we want to get to. >>And we've been talking to the Combolt team about some of the solutions that they are putting in the cloud. The new offering metallic that came out. They said if my customer has Azure storage or storage from that other cloud provider, you could just go ahead and use that. Maybe how familiar and how much I know you've been having about run metallic. >> We were working, we work pretty tightly with the product team over Convolt around this and my team as well around how do we design and how do we make it work the best and we're going to continue working to optimize as they get to beyond initial launch to go, wow, we've got data sets we we can analyze. We knew how to, we wanted out of tune it. Now really we love the solution particularly more because you know the default if you don't select the storage type where you want to go, you will run on Azure. >>So really sort of be cued off to the relationship there. They chose us as a first place we'll go to, but they've also done the choice for customers. So some customers may want to take it to another cloud. That's fine. It's reasonable. I mean we totally understand it's going to be a multicloud world and that's a reality for any large company. Our goal is to make sure we're growing faster than the competitors, not to knock out the competitors altogether because that just won't happen. So they've got that ability to go and, yeah, Hey, we'll use Azure as default because they feel we're offering the best support and the best solution there. But then if they have that customer, same customer wants to turn around and use a competitor of ours, fine as well. And I see people talking about that today where they may want to mitigate risks and say, I'm going to do, I'm doing off office three, six five on a, taken off this three 65 backup. It's cool. You use metallic, it'll take it maybe to a different region in Asia and they're backing up. They still going, well, I'm still all in on Microsoft. They may want to take it to another cloud or even take it back to on premise. So that does happen too because just in case of that moment we can get that data back in a different location. Something >>so metallic talking about that is this new venture is right. It's a Convolt venture and saw that the other day and thought that's interesting. So we dug into it a little bit yesterday and it's like a startup operating within a 20 year old company, which is very interesting. Not just from an incumbent customer perspective, but an incumbent partner perspective. How have you seen over the last few years and particularly bad in the last nine months with big leadership and GTM changes for condo? How has the partnership with Microsoft evolved as a result of those changes? >>Um, it's always been interesting. I guess when you start looking at adventure and everything seems to, things change a little bit. Priorities may change just to be fair, but we've had that tight relationship for a long time and a relationship level and an exec leadership level, nothing's really changed. But in the way they're building this platform, we, we sit down out of my team at the Azure engineering group and we'll sit down and do things like ideations. Like here's where we see gaps in the markets, here's what we believe could happen. And look back in July, we had inspire, which is our partner conference in Las Vegas and we sat down with their OT, our OT in a room, we'll talking about these kinds of things. And this is I think about two months after they may have started the initial development metallic from what I understand, but we're talking about exactly what they're doing with metallic offered as a service in Azure as, Hey, how about we do this? So we think it's really cool. It opens up a new market to convert I think too. I mean they're so strong in the enterprise, but they don't do much in the smaller businesses because with the full feature product, it also has inherent complexibility complexity around it. So by doing metallic, is it click, click, next done thing. They really opening I think new markets to them and also to us as a partner. >>I was going to add, you know, kind of click on that because they developed this very quickly. This is something that I think what student were here yesterday, metallic was kind of conceived, designed, built in about six months. So in terms of like acceleration, that's kind of a new area for Combolt. >>Yeah, and I think, I think they're really embracing the fact about let's release our code in production for, for products which are sort of getting the, getting to the, Hey, the product is at the viable stage now, not minimum viable, viable, let's release in production, let's find out how customers are using it and then let's keep optimizing and doing that constant iteration, taking that dev ops approach to let's get it out there, let's get it launched, and then let's do these small batches of changes based on customer need, based on tele telemetry. We can actually get in. We can't get the telemetry without having customers. So that's how it's going to keep working. So I think this initial product we see today, it's just going to keep evolving and improving as they get more data, as they get more information, more feedback, which is exactly what we want to see. >>Well, what will come to the cloud air or something you've been living in for a number of years. Ben, I'd love to hear you've been meeting with customers, they've been asking you questions, gives us some of the, you know, some of the things that, what's top of mind for some of the customers? What kinds of things did they come into Microsoft, Dawn, and how's that all fit together? >>There's many different conferences of interrelate, many different conversations and there'll be, we'll go from talking about, you know, Python machine learning or AI fits in PowerPoint. >>Yeah. >>It's a things like, you know, when are we gonna do incremental snapshots from the manage disks, get into the weeds on very infrastructure centric stuff. We're seeing range of conversations there. The big thing I think I see, keep seeing people call out and make assumptions of is that they're not going to be relevant because cloud, I don't know cloud yet. I don't know this whole coup cube thing, containers, I don't really understand that as well as I think I need to. And an AI, Oh my gosh, what do we even do there? Cause everyone's throwing the words and terms around. But to be honest, I think would still really evident is cloud is still is tiny fraction of enterprise workloads. So let's be honest, it's growing at a huge rate because it is that small fraction. So again, there's plenty of time for people to learn but they shouldn't go and try. >>And so it's not like you go and learn everything in the technology stack from networking to development to database management to, to running a data set of power and cooling. You learn the things that are applicable to what you're trying to do. And the same thing goes to cloud. Any of these technologies go and look at what you need to build for your business. Take it that step and then go and find out the details and levels you want to know. And as someone who's been on Azure for, like I said, almost seven years, which is crazy long. That was, that was literally like being in a startup instead of Microsoft when I joined and I wasn't sure if I wanted to join a licensing company. It's been very evident to me. I will not say I'm an Azure expert and I've been seven years in the platform. >>There are too many things for for me to be an expert in everything on, and I think people sort of just have to realize that anyone's saying that it's bravado. Nothing else. Oh, people. The goal is Microsoft as a platform provider. Hopefully you've got the software and the solution does make a lot of this easier for the customer, so hopefully they shouldn't need to become a Coobernetti's expert because it's baked into your platform. They shouldn't have to worry about some of these offerings because it's SAS. Most customers are there. Some things you need to learn between going from exchange to go into Oh three 65 absolutely. There's some nuances and things like that, but once you get over that initial hurdle, it should be a little easier. I think it's right and I think going back to that, sort of going back to bear principles going, what is the highest level of distraction that's viable for your business or that application or this workload has to always be done with everything. If it's like, well, class, not even viable, running on premises, don't, don't need to apologize for not running in cloud. If I as this, what's happening for you because of security, because of application architecture, run it that way. Don't feel the need and the pressure to have to push it that way. I think too many people get caught up in this shiny stuff up here, which is what you know 1% of people are doing versus the other 99% which is still happening in a lot of the areas we work and have challenges in today. >>That's a great point that you bring up because there is all the buzz words, right? AI, machine learning cloud. You've got to be cloud ready. You've got to be data-driven to customer. To your point going, I just need to make sure that what we have set up for our business is going to allow our business one to remain relevant, but to also be able to harness the power of the data that they have to extract new opportunities, new insights, and not get caught up with, shoot, should we be using automation? Should we be using AI? Everybody's talking about it. I liked that you brought up and I find it very respectfully, he said, Hey, I'm not an Azure expert. You'd been there seven, seven dog years like you said. And I think that's what customers probably gained confidence in is hearing the folks like you that they look to for that guidance and that leadership saying, no, I don't know everything to know. But giving them the confidence that their tribe, they're trusting you with that data and also helping look, trusting you to help them make the right decisions for their business. >>Yeah, and that's, we've got to do that. I mean, I as a tech guy, it's like I've, I've loved seeing the changes. When I joined Microsoft, I, I wasn't lying. I was almost there go enough. I really want to join this company. I was going to go join a startup instead and I got asked to one stage in an interview going, why do you want to join Microsoft? We see you've never applied to, I'd never wanted to. A friend told me to come in and it's just been amazing to see those changes and I'm pretty proud on that. So when we talk about those things we're doing, I mean, I think there is no shame going, I'm just going to lift and shift machines because cloud's about flexibility. If you're doing it just on cost, probably doing it for the wrong reason. It's about that flexibility to go and do something. >>Then change within months and slowly make steps to make things better and better as you find a need as you find the ability, whatever it may be. And some of the big things that we focus on right now with customers is we've got a product called Azure advisor. It'll go until people, when one, you don't build things in a resilient manner. Hey, do you know this has not ha because of this and you can do this. It's like, great. We'll also will tell you about security vulnerabilities that maybe should a gateway here for security. Maybe you should do this or this is not patched. But the big thing of that, it also goes and tells you, Hey, you're overspending. You don't need this much. It provisions, you provision like a Ferrari, you need a, you just need a Prius. Go and run a Prius because it's going to do what you need. >>I need a paler list and that's part of that trusted suit. Getting that understanding, and it's counterintuitive, but we're now like, it's coming out of mozzarella too, which is great. But seeing these guys were dropping contracts and licenses and basically, you know, once every three years I may call the customer, Hey, how about renewal? Now, go from that to now being focused on the customer's actual success. I've focused on their growth in Azure as a platform. Our services growth, like utilization not in sales has been a huge change. It scared some people away, but it's brought a lot more people in and and that sort of counterintuitive spend less money thing actually leads in the longterm to people using more. >>Absolutely. That's definitely not the shrink wrap software company of Microsoft that I remember from the 90s yeah. might be similar to, you know, just as to get Convolt to 2019 is not the same combo that many of us know from 15 years ago. A good >>mutual friend of ours, sort of Simon and myself before I took this job, he and I sat down, we're having a beer and discussing the merits, all not Yvette go to things like that. Same with Convolt there. They're changing such such a great deal with, you know, what they're putting in the cloud, what they're doing with the data, where they're trying to achieve with things like for data management across on premises and cloud with microservices applications and stuff going, Hey, this won't work like this anymore. When you now are doing it on premises and with containers, it's pretty good to see. I'm interested to see how they take that even further to their current audience, which is product predominantly. You know the it pro, the data center admin, storage manager. >>It's funny when you talked about just the choice that customers have and those saying, aye, we shouldn't be following the trends because they're the trends. We actually interviewed a couple of hours ago, one of customers that is all on prime healthcare company and said, he's like, I want to make a sticker that says no cloud and proud and it just what there was, we don't normally hear from them. We always talk about cloud, but for a company to sit down and look at what's best for our business, whether it's, you know, FedRAMP certification challenges or HIPAA or GDPR, other compelling requirements to keep it on prem, it was just refreshing to hear this customer say, >>yeah, I mean it's just appropriate for them. You do what's right for you. I, yeah, it's no shame in any of it. It's, I mean you don't, you definitely don't get fans by it by shaming people about not doing something right. And I mean I've, I'm personally very happy to fee fee, you know, see sort of hype around things like blockchain die down a little bit. So it's a slow database and we should use it for this specific case of that shared ledger. You know, things like that where people don't have to know blockchain. Now I have to know IOT. It's like, yeah, and that hype gets people there, but it also causes a lot of anxiety and it's good to see someone actually not be ashamed of it. And they agree the ones when they do take a step and use cloud citizen may be in the business already, they're probably going to do it appropriately because have a reason, not just because we think this would be cool, right? >>Well not. And how much inherit and complexity does that bring in if somebody is really feeling pressured to follow those trends. And maybe that's when you end up with this hodgepodge of technologies that don't work well together. You're spending way more in as as business it folks are consumers, you know, consumers in their personal lives, they expect things to be accessible, visible, but also cost efficient because they have so much choice. >>Yeah, the choice choice is hard. It's just a, just the conversation I was having recently, for example, just we'll take the storage cause of where we are, right? It's like I'm running something on Azure, I'm a, I'm using Souza, I want an NFS Mount point, which is available to me in Fs. Great, perfect. what do I use as like, well you can use any one of these seven options like that, but what's the right choice? And that's the thing about being a platform can be, we give you a lot of choices, but it's still up to you or up to app hotness. It can really help the customers as well to make the most appropriate choice. And, and I, I pushed back really hard in terms of best practices and things. I hate it because again, it's making the assumption this is the best thing to do. >>It's not. It's always about, you know, what are the patterns that have worked for other people? What are the anti-patterns and what's the appropriate path for me to take? And that's actually how we're building our docs now too. So we, we keep, we keep focusing on our Azure technology and we're bringing out some of the biggest things we've done is how we manage our documentation. It's all open sourced, it's all in markdown on get hub. So you can go in and read a document from someone like myself is doing product management going, this is how to use this product and you're actually, this bit's wrong, this bit needs to be like this and you can go in yourself even now, make a change and we can go, Oh yeah and take that committed in and dual this kind of stuff in that way. So we're constantly taking those documents in that way and getting realtime feedback from customers who are using it, not just ourself in an echo chamber. >>So you get this great insight and visibility that you never had before. Well, Ben, thank you, Georgie stew and me on the queue this afternoon. Excited to hear what's coming up next for Azure. Makes appreciate your time. Thank you for steam and event. I, Lisa Martin, you're watching the cue from Convault go 19.

>> live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage. It's the Cube covering Veum, World 2019 brought to you by IBM Wear and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back inside the Moscow The Center. We're here, Mosconi North, Wrapping up our coverage here. Veum World 2019 Glad to have you with us here on the Cuba's. We continue our 10th year of 10th consecutive year of coverage here of the events to minimum, along with John Wall's joined now by Robin's Lee, who was director of data protection, product marketing and L E M C Rob. Good to see you, sir. >> Hey, Joan. >> So you almost want to walk to the first person I saw when I walked in the room the other day? >> You. And >> now you won't be one of the last on effort to tell Shy, Who is the director of Data protection and Cloud native APS. Adele AMC Effort. Good to see you, sir. Good to see you. Yeah, First off, let's just let's just talk about the world of data protection in general here by sucking multi and hybrid and all these things. Your world's changing a little bit, right? Because of these new environments in these new opportunities. So if you could just paint that 30,000 foot picture first off thematically, how how your world is evolving. >> Yeah. I mean, I think the key would indebted protection is data, you know, and I think that wherever it is created, and wherever it is managed, customers need to look after it. You know this? The old adage that there's only two things that customers worry about one is their employees, and two, is there data. So as we've seen the adoption of of Cloud is a A zone infrastructure model on you're starting to see many customers extend their own premises infrastructure to the cloud on using the cloud for production level applications. They realize that on often they're told, you gotta do something about your data. So that's led to all vendors and especially ourselves over the last several years, really expanding the portfolio and the capabilities that we have from a non premises centric environment to the multi class. >> Yeah, so every ah, a lot of discussion about kubernetes. Before we get into that, you've got cloud native in your title, and Rob talked about data and talk about the applications I'm hoping you can bring us inside is to you know, what's different when we're talking about cloud native applications that from a data protection standpoint, you know, what do you have to think about differently? Is it the micro Service's architecture in containers Fundamentally changed the way things are done, is it, You know, similar what we've done in the past? >> Definitely. We see customers. Some customers are taking what they head back now and they move it in tow. Cloud native infrastructures. A lot of customers are building new applications and new workloads, and they build it on top off new applications. So they basically building a whole new set off applications and infrastructure and want to combine in together and they come to us on Dad, ask us, How do I protect this? And these things spin up, spin down, move around. They have very different life cycle than the traditional applications. >> Okay, Yeah, it's funny. You know, Rob, I think back to you know, it's like tape. You know how we dealt this because of the environment versus disc versus, you know, containerized application. Buoyed by the time I want to set something up isn't that gone and things move around all over the place. It's You gotta put a different different types of environments than you need to span. All of these >> I was chatting with with every earlier, and we were talking about what? What's what's changed, kind of in the last couple of years around the deployment and usage of of kubernetes, the deployment of containers. And after he was saying that one of the most fundamental changes is the introduction of persistent volumes on a Sooners. Persistency comes into the mix. You know, that's where things start to change. And, you know, Jeffrey's phone started ringing with respect to hate. What are you doing to bring dead protection into you know, this environment? >> I think two years ago, everything was Toby stateless on then suddenly, people understand that's not enough. You need to add states some states to existing applications. And then the notion of persistent volumes came along and then customers and developers so that it's actually working quite nicely. And they started relying more and more on moving more state in tow, their applications running on containers, environments. So the first thing that customers ask us about is where I store my data. Where's the primary volume that is done by our storage folks? The next question is, how do I protect my data? And this is where we come into the picture. And we offer an architecture that is built for containers environment and takes care off that life cycle that we talked about before. Containers are coming and going. You need to protect the data and the containers, the data and the meta data together in order to bring that protection level of customers. Looks from, >> you know, as as the concerns about data protection have been elevated now and sea sweet discussions now, um has that created a different approach, or maybe a change of tone or tenor from your clients to you, because the discussions are being elevated in their own businesses. And and so there's Is there a different kind of attention being paid to this or different kinds of concerns that maybe 34 years ago? Yeah, >> I mean, it's interesting. I mean, one of things we were on every couple of years is a ah, global study. We called it the Global Day Protection Index. This year, we we interviewed 2200 i t. Decision makers and we kind of asked them about you know, how how are they value in dead protection and also how the valuing data and the one thing that has definitely changed is that the value of data to them has become Maur critically important. I think it's always been important, but I think you know, if they start thinking about data is capital, you know they are starting to realize that it's only capital if you've got it. If you don't have it, it's It's nothing Thio >> and it's only yours if you have it. Well, yeah, and nobody else. Absolutely. Right here. >> Every kubernetes courses open source and everybody's got what they're what they're doing in it. You've got announcement, some work you're doing with VM, where it's open source. Also bring us inside a little bit. Valero, how did we get to this point? You know this, you know, part of the C n c f. Yet it kind of being submitted, or how does that fit into the whole community? >> Yeah, sure. So, as you said and we talked about earlier this week with Beth and people at the protection announcements We are working with collaboration with Valero now part off Veum, where in orderto being that data protection solution So Valero is an open source projects. It's out there in the open. You have thousands off stars get up. Stars are very popular among the Dev Ops community about communities users you can hear about it from customers that are looking for for solutions. There is very good at backing up cluster containers and applications. And we have a lot of experience in enterprise data protection making sure that you have a solution that, um, has compliance reporting. You contract your data, you can define policies scheduling all of that eso we are combining these two and collaborating with Valero in orderto have a solution that answers. Boston is off the back of that mean and they just want to go home knowing that the production environment is protected, the and the develops people in the communities administrators and they just want toe, get the volume and forget about the protection. Everybody can work in their environment with the tools that they know with permissions that they want, and they can both work together and be happy. And the companies that we work with are the ones that have good relationship between the devil steam and the backup administrators. And they see that the same table and talk to us, and everybody tells us what they want and what they need. As a result, we build a solution so that we'll be able to answer the needs of both of them. >> So do you have to build sometimes those relationships within a company to get them to talk or collaborate in a more conducive environment cause you see all kinds, right? I mean, you see, the full range just talked by then a free that some very successful, some very constructive, maybe some that that aren't on the same page agent. So that's almost part of your responsibility. Coming before you even get to where you could talk about the work, we've got to talk about the collaboration. Yeah, that they're not area >> we really come When there is a story, people try to move their applications to production. The developers are really already working on something, and now the developers want volumes on the I T ops people. Tell them No, no, no. If you can't protect it. According to our rules. We will not pass the audience. We can do that for you, and that creates the friction inside those teams in the organization that we talked with. There is recognition off that already and now they come together to the table and they want to hear something that would they would be able to work with us both on the management on the I T ops and and management on cube control and what develops people are using. >> And it's it's large companies that are coming in talking to us. And I think, you know, when you get a large companies, quite often you have some more of these things different fiefdoms of, of, of users inside. But because they're large companies, they have, you know, certain requirements from regulations and compliance is perspective. So they have those concerns, but and every has been saying is we look at the early design partners, customers that were looking to work with, you know, the big the big companies coming to us. >> Rob, can you just help us understand? We talked about Valero there says some open, soft, soft, soft words. That's the power tech. Just sit on top of that >> s Oh, it's a great question. So, you know, as you know, we introduced power protects after exile technologies world. It started shipping to customers at the end of July. And Coop, in any support, is really the first example of what we said that we were going to be able to do, which is more rapidly bring new workload to new capabilities into our power, protect softer offering than we've ever been able to do before. You know, we're really embarking on a quarterly release cadence, you know, which will allow us to, you know, to do things that, you know in our existing portfolio are released cadences. What's being measured in in many, many months and quite often is long as a year and beyond. So what we will do is the tech preview that we that we announced this week. You know, we will roll that out in a nup coming release in production on that will become available to any of the parent protect software users. So right within the power protect software match me interface. You know that has the VMS support Oracle sequel in file systems. We'll add the additional workload support have been able to protect kubernetes using the same workloads, the abilities to create protection policies and I'm interested every is is with protection policies. Because that she was saying about how the environment can change quite rapidly is that by using a policy, you don't need to watch for those changes as changes happen, the policy. We'll keep track of what it needs to do as far as protecting the new applications as they come up and have to go away. >> What happens is the ones we find. The policies are the arty operations in the back apartments. They want to comply with the rules that they have, and they define the gold, silver, bronze policies, whatever have you and then they can give it to the Cuban, said Means. And, the criminalist admits, can say OK, these are my volumes. These are more applications I will just use keep control and potatoes objects We will discover that will automatically create a schedule that would create that that backup. So in essence, the community suddenly doesn't need really need to care about the compliance rules they need to care about policies and the Becca pod mean can take care of other wrist >> and the applications of driving the policies and not not the other way around. >> Yeah, I mean, the creepiest ad means are used to defining policies in terms of five day provisions, their storage, for example. We want to do the same in the data protection area. >> So as far as things like retention periods, as far as whether or not the data needs to be replicated, where not the data needs to be a tear to the cloud that those are all things that the I T admin team can do on it sort of separates kind of orchestration and governance is, is a big part of perfect ex often >> love to get your viewpoint on is data protection historically was not one of the faster moving things in the I T. Realm Last two or three years at VM World, it's been one of the hottest topic, I said. You know, the keynote on Monday felt like we were kubernetes world. Not quite Cube con just yet, because there's a lot of projects there, but I walked down to the the show floor. It's not storage world like Thursday. Its data protection world is Cygnus lots of glowing parties of people so that customers, you know, the embracing change. And what does that mean for your portfolio? >> Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. I mean, I think over the years, if you think about where you go if you want to learn about data protection, VM world is probably one of the best shows to go to because >> we're >> all here. I mean, I mean, you know when you know, you know, I've you know, I've been crazy enough to be in the debt protection business for almost 15 years now. Um, and it hasn't changed. If you if you want to talk to data protection vendors than VM World, is a really good show to go to. You know, I think that that for us, you know what I am. Where has done is It's It's It's It's It's provoked provided a common foundation, you know, And that's also providing a common foundation to get us from on premises into the multi cloud environment. So once she developed, um uh, great data protection solutions in the van, where environment is that you're your target market becomes quite broad because, you know, there's so much VM were virtual ization out there in the market, but you're absolutely correct. Is that you on the show floor? And it's It's It's an interesting sight >> thinking. In addition to that, you also have obviously been at this in the show, and I think what we have seen over the last couple of years is that customers were coming tow us, asking for solutions. And this is why we were able, with the power, protect architecture and platform to innovate more quickly and respond to those faster changing trends. Because now you have persistency of volumes. Now you have protection. The M were acquired. Help tell, you know, we could work together on creating the solution. >> Yeah, absolutely. Have we've been at the Cube contract for number years. Help Theo. Of course, the president's last year VM were had a bigger presence, but that maturation of the storage component with something we knew would take time. You know, we watched it in the virtual ization world. Those of us that lived through that, you know, 10 to 15 years ago and container ization. It's starting to reach that maturity, and we're getting that inflection point >> if you also want to think about the announcement that path made on the keynote on Monday where he said we're goingto work much more with park protects, toe address, spot data protection capabilities. This is one of the things we're collaborating With the help to your team, we're contributing to the open source. We're building together things that can move in the pace off communities and address the needs off our more legacy. Companies that needed protection with complaints. >> So, Rob, that will keep you in business for another 15 years? >> I hope >> so, gentlemen. Thanks for the time. Thank you. Appreciate that. Especially on your birthday. Right? Tomorrow. Tomorrow, Right here. Tomorrow. Your birthday home for that Happy early birthday. >> Thank you very much. >> We should have a cute cake, but should especially >> the end of the day. >> I know, I know. I'll end of the day. We got something better than a cake. Gentlemen. Thank you again. Thanks. We'll be back in a little bit. Streaming content. Continuing coverage here. Avian World 2019 with some final thoughts from our panelists. Just a little bit. See on the other side for that

(funky music) >> Announcer: Live from San Francisco celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage it's "theCUBE" covering Vmworld 2019 brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners >> John: Hey welcome back everyone its "theCUBE" live coverage here of VMworld 2019. We're in Moscone North in San Francisco, California. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. Our tenth year covering VMworlds. The last show that's still around since "theCUBE" started. EMC World's now a part of Dell Technology World so VMworld was our first show of "theCUBE" in 2010 and we're here with then the Senior Director now the CMO of VMware Robin Matlock. Great to have you. Thanks for coming. 10 years ago we were across the street at the South. The first ever "CUBE", now 10 years later, what a run. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. >> Robin: Well how 'about the fact that this is number 11 VMworld for me so I think we're on, like, number 16 or so for VMworld so, yeah, we've driving been this ship for a while and it's still going strong. >> John: And, you know, when you came in the studio we did a little preview video and one of the things we talked about and you jumped on was this notion of resiliency around VMware. I want to get into that because the keynote this year I thought really used some of his primetime real estate to highlight Tech for Good and really some of the efforts around that so 1. Shareholder value, you guys have been doing great. Stock prices up. But in this era of, you know, corporate responsibility and accountability, this Tech for Good message is real. You guys have been doing it for a while. It's not new, it's not like you're doing it for fashion, it's the real deal and it was a big part of the keynote. >> Robin: It was. In fact, it was really a highlight for part of the keynote for me personally. I mean, I think when it's in our DNA, and that is consistent with our values, and we've been at that for some time. We have values that are all about, you know, customer and community and that's who we are. We also have very high aspirations that of course we have to be performant. We have to perform well as a business and deliver shareholder value but that isn't enough. You know, I do think that Pat leads this narrative that we as a company have to think about giving back more than we take. And it's not just PowerPoint slides, it's real. We empower our employees. I hope you enjoyed the story about Callum Eade swimming the English Channel all for a cause that he chose. He raised the money, he drove that and VMware just opens up those opportunities to allow our employees to do that so I think, we think it's a really important topic, we tried to give it a lot of air time, and give a way for the attendees to connect with it and see what they could take action against. >> John: And also, you guys are also voted one of the best places to work. Your campus in Palo Alto, beautiful and it is a great place to work. But this is the ethos, but it's still competitive and had Carl Eschenbach recently in our studios in Palo Alto and he made a comment he's like, "You know, I've been at VMware "for many, many years", now he's a VC at Sequoia Capital, and Carl said, "You know, everyone's been "trying to kill VMware. This is going to VMware, "that's going to kill virtuals." The resiliency just around the staying power of the product and technology leadership happens. This year it's containers, the attendees are excited by it, the numbers are up, 20,000 people here. Still evolution on the technology side, still great community. >> Robin: Yeah, I mean I think, you know resiliency is in the fabric of VMware but I think innovation is what is the secret sauce and we know in Silicon Valley you better innovate and keep moving forward or you're going to find yourself kind of, left out and, you know, Pat's been an incredible visionary. He's got a team of leaders that are very confident, strong technological disrupters. I mean some of the big acquisitions that we announced just last Thursday at earnings that we are educating folks here about, the intent to acquire Pivotal, the intent to acquire Carbon Black, you know, further that we'll either do it organically or we will acquire interesting combinations of companies to drive unique value to our customers. So I think there was a whole bunch of that today. >> Dave: We were talking in "theCUBE" earlier, Robin, about how now it's a post-virtual machine world and if we go back to 2009, which was my first VMworld as well, Paul Maritz at the time said we're building this software mainframe. Now, of course, you got promoted and I'm sure killed that mainframe from all marketing but (laughs) so well done but you kind of evolved the software-defined data center vision. But one of the takeaways for me from the keynote was this notion of any workload, any app , which was kind of the vision back then and now in a cloud which the cloud wasn't as prominent then. And so from a marketing standpoint you've really, the vision has been consistent but now with all these acquisitions you're making you're really embracing a much broader vision and your marketing message has to evolve as well. >> Robin: To support that, I think the fact that our vision has been incredibly consistent for many years now, I mean, that's Pat's leadership kind of setting that foundation for the company. My job as a marketer is to help find the way to articulate that in a way that's consumable and people understand. But what's happened over the years is we deliver on that vision 'cause, you know, a vision it's not all perfect, we don't have every piece of it or it's not all optimized. All of these moves year after year are just validating and supporting the delivery of that vision to our customers and I think the big moves this year are no different, whether it's Tanzu for Kubernetes, whether it's the Carbon Black acquisition idea, whether it's Pivotal, these are just steps along a journey that's going to deliver on our vision which is delivering any application on any cloud consumed by any device, all with security intrinsically built in the fabric. >> Dave: Well and the gauntlet that you lay down this year in talking to your practitioner audience was that technologists who master multi-cloud will own the next decade. Okay. That kind of says it all, right? And that is a strong message that you're sending to your buyers, to your practitioners so. >> Robin: Yeah, and I think the people that are right here at VMworld, these are the kinds of technologists that have that opportunity in front of them. That's why this whole notion of make your mark it's like, lean into this opportunity. Betting on VMware, building your career on virtualization has opened up many opportunities. It went from compute to storage to networking. It's now into multi-cloud. These are incredible opportunities and these technologists are the ones that can deliver this value for their enterprises. >> Dave: And there's diversity in the messages, you know, all the major cloud players say, "Well no. Just our cloud." You guys are pushing in a new direction. I mean that's what leaders are supposed to do, right? >> Robin: Our strategy has always been about choice, you know, we've really been advocates of letting customers choose the path that's right for them and we know in this cloud war that we're all a part of that customers they are choosing. Some are leaning into AWS, some are leaning into Azure, some are biased towards IBM. Our job is really to enable them to have a rich, powerful experience without friction, efficiently, and operate those workloads in any of those environments. >> John: Have you seen any demographic shift in your primary audience because obviously the operating side, even with Kubernetes, they love it, containers, a messaging channel that's in and of itself but still containers seems to be that next step function with Kubernetes that VM's brought to computing. But when you bring in the dev and the ops that's where it starts to get magical when the operating's got to meet up with the developers. That's been the theme. cloud-Native. All this enablement's coming in. Has there been a shift in demographics to your audience? >> Robin: Well it is an evolving journey, if you will, and yes but it's still, I think we have a long ways to go. We are largely still have an infrastructure audience here, there's a mobility crowd here, there's a cloud architect crowd here. The new audiences are going to be the platform architects that dev/ops community and we do have shifts in that but I would say that's part of the value as we bring Pivotal into the family, we can now merge these audiences and, I think, do a much formidable job at that. >> John: It's interesting, Telco will have them on later. 5G was a big part of the keynote as well >> Robin: Yeah. >> John: A new opportunity, a new affinity group there. >> Robin: Without a doubt, I mean, the whole Edge and Telco clouds are really opening up new entirely new markets. The Telco, the 5G, we do think that's going to be a very significant wave and is going to create new opportunity for new application types, new fundamental architectures that we can now merge between Telco and Enterprise so we think it's really a rich ground for innovation. >> John: You mentioned Pivotal, I think that's more of they were already in the fold, now they're officially in the fold with Dell Technologies but your other acquisitions, there's a lot of them. You got to kind of bring them into the fold so is there the marketing playbook do you have an off-site meeting and you just give them the playbook? How do you handle all the integrations? 'Cause that's always a big challenge. IT integration, messaging integration, again it helps if they're on the fault line of the value proposition but >> Yeah. >> John: What's your strategy to integrate all these companies? >> Robin: Well, you know, any time you're doing a lot of mergers and acquisitions you definitely have to think very strategically about integration and then sometimes you want to integrate fully, right away and sometimes you want to let an acquired company be stand-alone for a little while. Got to get used to the culture a bit-- >> John: Like Velocloud? >> Robin: Velocloud is kind of independent-- >> John: They've got their own building. >> Robin: within the networking team. AirWatch was held very independent for a couple of years. Some other ones are just tuck-ins. You just bring 'em right into the family, you just merge 'em in, it just depends on the size, the scope, the culture and the strategy. I think we take a very purposeful approach to M&A integration and we don't really have a one-size-fits-all strategy. Depends on the circumstances. >> Dave: So follow up on that because clearly there's an engineering culture here at VMware and take the Carbon Black example for instance you talked about how you guys have sort of pretested it with AppDefense but from your standpoint, how do you think about the architecture of the marketing and the messaging? I think you answered it in part. It was sometimes it makes sense to keep it separate sometimes but when you think about the vision do you look at it and say, "Okay this plugs nicely into the vision "and so here's what I'm going to do?" How integrated is it with the rest of the sort of decision-making process? >> Robin: Well, you know, I would take the position that all these acquisitions are plugging into the vision. They are that's why we're buying them because they are very aligned to our strategy and vision. Now I have the challenge as a marketer to deal with a lot of different brands that are coming into the family. I mean, how and when do I consolidate and kind of unite the brands and that is a journey that we're going to be on. We'll take some time to do that. You don't want to rush things in that regard. I think it's very important that the market sees one VMware, one vision and strategy, you know, if it's delivered in a product and it's through an acquisition as a different brand that's okay, we can work on that over time but as long as we're laying out one strategy and vision to the marketplace and just showing these are evidence of proof points of that journey. >> John: Yeah. I mean, you guys, you're pretty clear. Your strategy is to evaluate, understand where they are in the value chain of what you're trying to do. Unlike others like IBM which brings companies in quickly, makes them IBM, you guys are a little bit different, You'll play with whatever the market will give you. That's pretty much what I hear you're saying. >> Robin: Well for example, Carbon Black, experts in security, you know. I think we want to capitalize on that expertise. We want to protect that expertise. They've already been partnering with AppDefense now for some period of time rather than, you know, it's like which one is >> Right. >> Robin: consuming the other (laughing) so our strategy is let's combine AppDefense with Carbon Black and then start working with Patrick and Carbon Black to merge that into the-- >> Yeah. >> Dave: Organizationally, I think that's, at least what I read >> Yeah. >> Dave: was you can set up essentially a cloud security division, right, that Patrick is going to >> That Patrick is going to run. >> Dave: run, so >> That's right. >> John: Okay so VMworld 2019, what's the update here? Give us some factoids, some of the exciting things happening here. We're in the meadow, there's birds chirping here. This is Moscone North, nice build-out, always good build-outs here. Moscone, we're back in from Vegas but what's going on? Labs, activities-- >> Robin: We've got it >> Give the-- >> Robin: all, John >> Give us the highlights. >> Dave: Klingons >> That's right. >> Robin: First of all you've got two great days of keynotes, right, those are really important highlights. Tomorrow we're going to do some really interesting things, demo, technical, deep dive. Great guest celebrity speakers, right, We're going with the sports theme this year and elite athletes and what they're giving back to the world with Lindsey Vonn and Steve Young. But here for the program we have the Hands-On Labs are on fire. They broke records on Sunday so I know they've been really well-attended and consumed. We have over 600 break-outs, so many it's mind-boggling. We have 230 sponsors in the Solutions Exchange and that's probably a place where you can go not just to get the VMware stuff but get that good exposure and lay of the land of the entire ecosystem. And they're all showcasing their innovation. What's new, what's the latest. So I think those give people a really good quick snapshot in one week, you can pretty much get an overview of the entire industry. >> John: Are there any must-sees in your opinion? >> Robin: (breathing in) Oh-- >> John: Or that people are talking about? >> Robin: I think for sure you got to get into this Kubernetes stuff. If you don't come out of this week of VMworld with a good handle on what is Tanzu, what's Tanzu Mission Control, what are we doing with the Heptio acquisition, what is PKS evolution happening, I think you would be missing something if you don't really grok that. Project Pacific work, Kubernetes in vSphere, tightly integrated, so that's a must-do. I think there's a lot happening in the networking space, right. Pat was pretty bold up there about, you know, what is the opportunity relative to network virtualization and the time is now so I think you've really got to get into that from the data center to the Edge to the cloud. Network transformation's hot. And then of course I think the cloud and I think we're really clear on hybrid-cloud and multi-cloud and how to really think about those environments and how, if you're architecting cloud for your company, what you want to be thinking about, what are we doing across multi-cloud, and, you know, I think all that hybrid-cloud stuff, it's all there. >> Dave: As we move to this, you know, this post-VMworld, VMware world how do you-- >> Robin: Is there a post-VMware world? >> Dave: What role, post-virtual-- >> John: Oh look at that, there we go. (laughing) >> Robin: I don't think there's a post-VMware world. >> Dave: Post-VM. I mean virtual machines. >> Robin: Virtualization. >> John: Are you changing the name to container world? >> Robin: No. (laughing) >> Dave: Right, exactly. So what (laughing) yeah what specifically are you guys doing to sort of educate folks, I mean, obviously you've got a lot of Kubernetes sessions, et cetera but just in terms of helping people sort of transform their skill sets into infrastructures of code, being able to take advantage of Kubernetes, you know, we've seen some things in the industry at events like this where you know, guys learn how to program in Python or, you know, whatever it is >> Right. >> Dave: Are there specific plans to do that? Is that actually happening at the event or? >> Robin: Well that's part of what all this content is about, I mean, you know, 600 break-out sessions aren't about, you know, compute virtualization. You can find those but this is about all these different dimensions, right? Whether it's what is Kubernetes, fundamentals, how you think about that in what kind of environment you're running. And I think that's the spirit of what VMworld is about. It's about hands-on, it's about meet the experts, it's about sessions, it's about the ecosystem, it's about having that all at your disposal in one week. >> You forgot something. >> Oh did I? >> The parties. >> The party? >> Everyone >> Well that's not helping your technical-- >> Everyone >> Aptitude >> Everyone knows VMworld has great parties at night and that's where all the action, you guys work hard/play hard one of the ethos of VMware culture. >> Robin: That's right, that's right. Well, we do work hard/play hard because this is intense, right? These guys are trying to jam as much as they can into four days and so we got to let off a little steam and OneRepublic is on stage on Wednesday night. We're going to have a great time. But I do think it's on the back drop of them here they are just like sponges trying to absorb this information. >> John: My final question is, and you guys brought it up in the keynote, around the tech industry good, bad, and Pat says neutral, it's how you shape the technology. Really a call to action and a strategic imperative to be more proactive in accountability and driving change for good. So I got to ask you about the word trust. I've seen a lot of marketing around companies always try to market around trust. Now more than ever the trust, whether it's fake news, company responsibility to security, which is a big part of what you guys do. How do you see that a marketer and what's the conscience of VMware because trust is certainly a big part of what you guys do. Is that a marketing, going to be a marketing ethos? Is it built into everything? Just curious how you personally feel about the word trust. >> Robin: Yeah, well first of all, I think it's foundational to doing good, healthy business. I think you got to be very careful as a marketer to market trust. I think you need to demonstrate your trustworthiness. You need to be consistent. You need to be credible. You need to be there when the times are tough. You need to be, you know, not always asking for something in return and if you earn trust you don't really have to say it. I believe we can position our validity and our credibility proven, you know, having customers say that we're trustworthy, having customers articulate >> Yeah >> Robin: why they depend on us, I believe that's more effective for our customers and, at the end of the day, probably more authentic. >> John: Yeah, and I think people, yeah that tends to be the track record of people who say it maybe haven't earned it, right, earning it's the better marketing strategy-- Yeah, I think these 20,000 (laughing) people are saying it as they show up here with their time and energy and investment. And I think our customers, you heard from a lot of customers on stage today. Gap, Freddie Mac, Verizon, there'll be more tomorrow. You know, I think there's over 100 customers in these sessions here and they're here advocating because they trust VMware. >> John: Well they run their business on you guys. Dave had a survey hey did, just published it yesterday, the spend is not going down. I mean the cloud impacts your business, you're getting into the cloud so that's pretty obvious but just overall the business is healthy >> Oh very >> John: for VMware (laughing) >> Robin: Very healthy. And you know we do that by really trying to have a balanced approach. It is about shareholder value but it's about tech as a force for good, we're passionate about that and ultimately we put customers at the center of our thinking, of our decisions, of our behaviors, and I think that ultimately keeps rewarding us. >> John: Well, Robin, it's been great to work with you over the past 10 years. Continue on. I think you guys have earned the trust, certainly the proof is in the results, and, you know, it is what it is, and the community votes with their wallet on the product and their participation so congratulations. >> Robin: Well if that's an indicator, I think we're getting a pretty good report card. >> John: Thanks, yeah. (laughing) >> Thanks for inviting me. Love being here, guys. Take care. >> John: Alright, Robin Matlock, CMO of VMware here inside "theCUBE" for our 10th year but also as VMware goes to the next level step function with virtualization to containers, Kubernetes, big theme here, I'm John with Dave Vallente, stay with us for more coverage after this short break. (funky music)

>> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jefe Rick here with the Cube were at Oracle Park, and they're moving a bunch of dirt downstairs, but we're happy to be her. Anyway. We're here to really cool thing called Sports Tech Tokyo World Demo Day. And we're excited to have our next guest. He's heavier. Altamirano, the director of innovation for sport Radar of your Nice to see you. >> Hi. Nice to see you, Jeff. Thank you for having me. >> So for people aren't familiar with sport radar. What you guys all about? >> Yes, the world all about sports date on day and fan engagement. So whenever you want to place a a safe ah, bad Latina market, that's biddings. Regulated are mostly in Europe, for example. Ah, you would use ultimately our data also, whenever you're looking for first time Ah, stat line coming out or you're one to power your fantasy game. That data ultimately comes from us. So >> we talked about before we turn the cameras on. There's lots of sources of data, but your guy's unique value proposition, speed and accuracy is all right. >> Absolutely, Absolutely. You want to think >> of sports data like the same us? Your ticker from the stock market, right? You want to have it fast and reliable as possible. We've been doing that for almost two decades. We have experience, keys and experience in many different ways of collecting. Collecting data from around the world were 2000 people strong 30 offices around the world, dedicated just to collect and into into work with data and evolve and change the narrative of how people talk about sports. >> Okay. Were you guys base? Where's headquarters, >> eh? So we're ahead course in St Gallen, Switzerland, and in the US we have offices in San Francisco in a Minneapolis, uh, New York and endless magazines. All >> right, cool. So we're here in sports Tech? Tokyo will Demo day. What do you doing here? What does this event all about for you? >> Absolutely. This is >> Ah, great events. The grain. And they were shot out to Michael Pearlman and scram Ventures, and they're putting together this ecosystem, right? They want to bring all the best technology, the best sports technology that's out there in the world. Uh, you know, with Japan having all these events leading up to the Olympics next year, bowl so all the way through 2026 what they do, Jeff. They come up and they bring all of those large, great companies that they have conglomerates. And they make you make all of this, um, big opportunity for everyone who's due in something with sports technology in some way, shape or form. And then there's a lot of collaboration. There's investment. There's a lot of things happening there. We we definitely would certainly fit in, especially with our accelerator program. >> Okay. And then, are you guys already in the market in Japan, or is this just kind of a new boost? Into what? What you've already got? >> Things definitely knew boost >> for us. Uh, Asia? Absolutely. Ah, A future focus of also pressing and future focus of us. There's great things happening there, for sure. >> Okay, Now you're director of innovation. So you're actually looking for Toby to be opportunities to take your technology in some different directions, tell us a little bit more about what you're working on? >> Absolutely. Um, I leave the accelerate our program where we provide our data to Some early stage companies were doing something innovative with sports data, so that allows us to a keep tabs on, keep a pulse on innovation that's happening outside of our walls s Oh, that's our external innovation initiatives. But that allows early stage companies to get data and to use their funds into product or marketing or what have you so that they can really develop it and really, you know, uh, deliver something that which we think they can >> write. And you said, you have a couple of partner companies that are here today, correct? >> Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, we have two companies who made it to the finalists were absolutely, very, very proud of those that Edison and also a really So So the guy's a shock. It ah, Edison and Colin and steam, Really, they're great people, and I'm really in a really happy and on really proud to to see them here. >> Good. So what are they doing with your data that's unique in it? Different? >> Absolutely. So what? Edison? What is Zoom with our data's? Our data allows him to better tag and better identify each player that's showing on on the screen. Edison's technology allows for a personalization that its unique you and I could be watching the same game. Let's say we're watching European soccer and your run all the fun, and I'm a messy fun. So you would see targeted messaging and targeted information on Mass. And I will see targeted information on Ronaldo even though we're both watching the same game. That's what, uh, their technology allows an hour. Data propels >> them coming through the lower thirds and the graphics. And how is that house that >> excited zone over late? So it's overlays. >> Html overlays that they can. They provide. So especially for O. T t providers. >> Okay, because obviously I need to have the apse. They know it's me watching and not you for for >> what, exactly that allows for personalization. It's all about personalization, and that's that's definitely something We're very interested in a sport. Reiter. We believe that's the future personalization of the experience watching and engaging with sports. >> It's interesting, though, gives so much of the sports is the communal effect, right? I mean, so much of so much of the greatness of sports is that, you know, two people from different sides of the city can come together and stand shoulder to shoulder and root for their team. So I don't know. Is there some some downside to >> the civilization >> because they kind of or does. It doesn't support the community, because now I hang out with a bunch of other messy A fans and you hang out with their own, although family curious, kind of where personalization fits with community in kind of engaging >> with think baseball park, you know, putting the move to send that and a nice curveball, But definitely you, maybe you you have a >> lot of massive fans who, you know, But they may not be watching the game with you, right? So when you're watching at home, then you're gonna have that experience, and that can allow them for more communication with other people who like the same things that you like, right. But really, personalization is out there in and it's everywhere, right? Like you're everything that you're getting it more and more targeted and we want to avoid you was one of always spam, right? So if anything, a message, that is, if somebody wants to sell your allow those shirt while you're ah, big messy fund, you're probably not gonna like seeing that ad right. So and neither the advertiser will want to advertise you something that you? Definitely not like so that's exactly >> yeah. No, it's interesting. One of my favorite lines about Big Data, right is when it's done well, it's magic. And when it's done poorly, it's creepy. Definitely. Make sure you're gonna tell me the right jersey and other wrong. Absolutely. Alright. Well, Javier. Well, thanks for taking a few minutes. And good luck to your to your two. Ah, entrance into the finals. >> Absolutely. I Thank you so >> much for the opportunity, Jeff. And you're looking forward to seeing the finals >> here. All right. He saw me have Jeff, You're watching. The Cube were in Oracle Park on the shores of McCovey Cove. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

>> Live from Barcelona, Spain. It's the cue covering Sisqo Live Europe, brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Hi, everybody. Welcome back to Barcelona. This is Cisco Live. I'm Dave a lot with stew Mina, man. And you're watching the Cube. The leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. Dr. Thomas Shearer's here is the chief architect of tle Indus looks onboard and David Cope is back. He's a senior director of marketing development for the Cisco Cloud Platform and Solutions Group. Gentlemen, welcome to the Cube. Thank you. Thanks. So you're very welcome. So Telindus. Tell us about Telindus. >>So Telindus we are actually an integrator, a cloud operator, and a tech company. And, uh, we're partnering over the years with Cisco with all the products that they have notably, we are moving also into the public cloud. We have private cloud offering, but we see a first appetite coming up with our customers in the public cloud, which are heavily regulated industries. And there we are working notably with the team of Dave to have an offering there that enables them to move into the clouds. >> So these guys are a customer or a partner? >> Well, you know what's special about them, they're actually both. So they're a big customer of Cisco offerings, cloud center. and other offerings. The Cisco container platform, but they also use those to provide services to their customers. So they are a great sounding board about what the market needs and how our products are working. So Thomas telling has been around since. If I saw right. Nineteen seventy nine. So you know, we weren't talking multi cloud back then, but it is a big discussion point here at the show. You said private public, You're using Cloud Center, maybe explain to us what multi cloud means to you and your customers today. >> I would say most customers that we have a large organizations >> B >> managed dalati infrastructure. We're also doing integration projects. But those customers down, I'm really not really technology companies, you know, date. There are searching to work process because we deal with the good part off their operations. So at this, cos they come from a private infrastructure, they have there these days. They're bm vary installation there, private clouds and and I think also, it will stay like this for for a good amount of time. So there's no good reason to just go into the cloud because it's fancy because there is something that you cannot have certainly days. But that's it, stable progress that they're following. So what we need is actually tow catch the low hanging fruit that exist in a public cloud for our customers. But in such a way that it satisfies their day today I T operations and sometimes it's our operations. Who is doing that since we are managing this? So for us, actually, hyper cloud, to say short, is actually just end up >> so our mighty close. So I wonder we're almost two years into GDP are one year into the owner's finds. How has GPR affect you and your customers? And Ted? What's it like out there these days? >> Gpr. It's for me. Not the main reason for public private mighty cloud installations for us and that involves GDP are it is the regulation that so our customers are notably from the financial sector, and that's they're very strict on conservative security Woods for good because their main business is they are selling trust. There is not much more business where you trust that much. Then a bank I know everything about you, and that's something they cannot sacrifice now. In Europe, we have the advantage. Data is that strict regulation which puts kind of standards and that involves obviously also the GDP arcing. But if I look into that standards, that regulation imposes its very technical, they say. For example, please make sure if you move into the clouds that avoid a locket, be confident on what will be your exit costs. What will be a transition because and don't get married to anyone. And that's where Dave Steam comes into the game because that they provide that solution. Actually, that's >> music to your ears. I would think. I mean, have to be honest. If I were a public cloud provider, I'd say No, don't do multi cloud. We have one cloud, does it all? But no customer speaks like that. No, >> you're right. And I think to me what I love about Linda's in the way they use the product is they work in such a highly regulated environment, where policies managing common policies across very different environments becomes critical. So how do I manage access control and security profiles and placement policies all across very different multiplied environments. That's hard, and that's been one of the cornerstones that we've focused on in Cloud Centre. >> Yeah, so look, double click on that fucking Teo a guest earlier and I was asking them, sort of poking it. There's a lot of people who want that business because it's a huge business opportunity. It's, um, some big, well established companies. Cisco's coming at it from a position of strength, which is course network. But I'll ask you the same question. What gives you confidence that Cisco is in the best position for customers? Two. Urn, The right tio manage their multi cloud data and environment. >> I think it's I think it's a great question. I mean, for my perspective of action, love our customer's perspective. But if you think about Cisco's heritage around the network and security, I think most people would agree. They're very strong there. It's a very natural extension. Tohave Sisko Be a leader and multi cloud because, after all, it's how doe I securely connect very diverse environments together. And now a little further. Now, how do I help customers manage workloads, whether they be existing or new cloud native workloads, So we find It's a very natural extension to our core strengths and through both development and acquisition system has got a very, very broad and deep portfolio to do that. So your >> thoughts on that? Yeah, Yes, sister is coming from a network in history. But if your now leg look into the components days actually, yeah, Networking foundation s U. C s, which we have, for example, in our infrastructure, this hyper flex there are there solutions like CCP that you can run a deaf ops organization, can combine it with Cloud Center to make it high pret. And just today I learned a new thing, which is cute flow. I just recognized Cisco. It's the first one that is coming up with a platform is a service in Able Private Cloud. So if you go private, Cloud usually talk about running the M's. But now, with with With a CCP and it's Open sauce Project cute flow, which I think Ah, bee, very interesting to see in conjunction with C. C. P. And I heard that it's going to happen. You're actually Cisco is to first one delivering such a solution to the markets. So it's It's gross that just have >> a thing for the cnc es eso >> que bernetti Slow way Don't have to send a cease and desist letter, right? >> Ccp that Francisco Container platform. Ryan out sad. Some while ago on Prim Cooper. Nettie Stack. Right. So, Thomas, you know, we were the update on Cloud Center. Sweet. Now it's containerized. You got micro services. It's built with communities underneath and using cube flow. I'm guessing that's meaningful to you. There's a lot of things in this announcement that it's like, Okay, it sounds good, but in the real world, you know what? What do you super excited for? The container ization? You know, I would think things like the action orchestrator and the cost Optimizer would have value. But, you know, police tell us yourself, >> like Cloud Center was already variable before, you know, be a did investigation about what kind of flout brokering cloud orchestrations solutions exist big in those days when it was called Clicker Cloud Center. And I'm me and my colleagues know that click a team back then as well as now as assist. Greatly appreciated that, David, they became one family now for me, cloud center for face, certain requirements that I simply have to fulfill for our customer. And it's a mandatory effect that I have to feel for them, like being able to ensure and guarantee portability. Implementing policies, segregation of duties were necessary, things like that. I have to say now that it becomes containerized, that's a lot off ease and managing Cloud Center as a solution by itself, and also you have the flexibility to have it better. Also, my credible It's an important key point that Cloud Santa eyes a non cloud centric products that you can run it on. Prem that the orchestration that you don't have to log in on the orchestration there and have it on now can easily move it on such a cheeky because it's it's a container by solution. But I think also there's a sass option available so you can just subscribe to it. So you have full range off flexibilities so that day to day management work for engine doesn't become a day to day management things by itself. >> So I wonder if you could paint a picture for us of your environment. Bronson since nineteen seventy nine so You must have a lot of a lot of stuff A lot of you developed over the years, but you mentioned that you're starting to look a public clouds. You just mentioned your customer base, largely financial services, so they're highly regulated and maybe a little nervous about the cloud. But so paint a picture of your Maybe not for certain workloads. Paint a picture of your environment kind of where you want to go from. From an architecture in an infrastructure >> perspective, we haven't own what we call private. Manage cloud. That's a product recall. You flex witches, flex port reference architecture. That's Cisco that working. Get up storage. Cisco, UCS in conjunction with, we embarrass completely. It's the use since many years and as I already have said, the regulated market started opening up towards public law. So what does it mean? European Banking Authority. So Ebba, who's the umbrella organization on European level days, send out a recommendation. Dear countries, place your financial institution if they go into the cloud that have to do a B C. The country's I have put in place those regulations they have put in place those controls and for them. What They're mostly now in that let's investigate what its influence in the public they come from their private infrastructure. They are in our infrastructure, which is like private infrastructure virtualized and managed by us, mainly v m base. And now the news thing on top that they investigate at things like big data, artificial intelligence and things like that which you mostly don't have a private infrastructure. So in that combination is what we have to provide our customers but their most in and investigative >> okay. And okay. And Cisco is your policy engine management engine across all those clouds that the >> yes, we are able to managed our struggles with cloud centre. Sometimes it depends also on the operating modern. The customer himself is the one using cloud center, you know? So so it depends Since we are in integrate icloud operate and also off our services in the public cloud. It's always the question about who has to manage one and one >> of the things that I just had on that we see people providing our products as a service. We're just talking about Cooper Netease. Customers today are starting to move you, Burnett. He's just from being like development now into production. And what we're seeing is that these new communities based applications have non containerized dependencies reach out to another traditional app, reach out to pass a database. And what we try to do is to say, How do you give your customers the ability to get the new and the old working together? Because it'll be that way for quite some time. And that's a part of sort of the new cloud center capabilities. Also, >> that's that's a valid reason. So you have those legislate services and you don't want just do it. You can't just replace them now. Now >> let's go all >> in. Let's be cloud native. So you have always sees interoperability things to handle. And And, yeah, that's true. Actually, you can quite some my creation path using content or ization. I >> mean, you can't customer cancers over rotate to all the new fun buzz words. They've got a business to run. So what? >> This And how do I apply security policies and access control and to this very mixed environment now common policies and that becomes challenging. >> But that's also part of our business. Yes, there have there, for example, financial institution than not a ninety company. That's where we come in as a provida towards such an industry and daddy. Here I highly value the partnership with Cisco Heavy Cat Build new services together. We had that early adopters program, for example, regarding CCP. So Cisco is bringing a service provider into the loop bill. What's just right for the customer For them? >> Yes, you describe that is very challenging, is it's In some cases, it's chaos. But that's the opportunity I heard this morning that you guys are going after pretty hard, right? Oh, >> it's right. And you've got one set of desires for developers, but now we move into production. Now I t cops gets involved, the sea so gets involved. And how do we have then well thought out integrations into security and network management. Those air, all of the things that we're trying to really focus on. >> Well, where's the definite zone? You were surrounded by infrastructures code and it fits and cloud. Well, guys, thanks so much for coming in Cuba and telling your story. Really appreciate it. Thank you. Enjoyed it. Thank you. Alright, Keep it right there, buddy. Stupid and Dave. Alon. Today we're live from Cisco Live Barcelona. You watching the Cuba >> booth?

[Music] when welcome to the special exclusive cube conversation here in Palo Alto in our studios I'm John for your host of the cube we have a very special guest speaking for the first time around some alleged alleged accusations and also innuendo around the Amazon Web Services Jedi contract and his firm c5 capital our guest as Andre Pienaar who's the founder of c5 capital Andre is here for the first time to talk about some of the hard conversations and questions surrounding his role his firm and the story from the BBC Andre thanks for a rat for meeting with me John great to have me thank you so you're at the center of a controversy and just for the folks who know the cube know we interviewed a lot of people I've interviewed you at Amazon web sources summit Teresa Carl's event and last year I met you and bought a rein the work you're doing there so I've met you a few times so I don't know your background but I want to drill into it because I was surprised to see the BBC story come out last week that was basically accusing you of many things including are you a spy are you infiltrating the US government through the Jedi contract through Amazon and knowing c-5 capital I saw no correlation when reading your article I was kind of disturbed but then I saw I said a follow-on stories it just didn't hang together so I wanted to press you on some questions and thanks for coming in and addressing them appreciate it John thanks for having me so first thing I want to ask you is you know it has you at the center this firm c5 capital that you the founder of at the center of what looks like to be the fight for the big ten billion dollar DoD contract which has been put out to multiple vendors so it's not a single source deal we've covered extensively on silicon angle calm and the cube and the government the government Accounting Office has ruled that there are six main benefits of going with a sole provider cloud this seems to be the war so Oracle IBM and others have been been involved we've been covering that so it kind of smells like something's going along with the story and I just didn't believe some of the things I read and I want to especially about you and see five capitals so I want to dig into what the first thing is it's c5 capital involved in the Jedi contract with AWS Sean not at all we have absolutely no involvement in the Jedi contract in any way we're not a bidder and we haven't done any lobbying as has been alleged by some of the people who've been making this allegation c5 has got no involvement in the general contract we're a venture capital firm with a British venture capital firm we have the privilege of investing here in the US as a foreign investor and our focus really is on the growth and the success of the startups that we are invested in so you have no business interest at all in the deal Department of Defense Jedi contract none whatsoever okay so to take a minute to explain c5 firm I read some of the stories there and some of the things were intricate structures of c5 cap made it sound like there was like a cloak-and-dagger situation I want to ask you some hard questions around that because there's a link to a Russian situation but before we get to there I want to ask you explain what is c5 capital your mission what are the things that you're doing c5 is a is a British venture capital firm and we are focused on investing into fast-growing technology companies in three areas cloud computing cyber security and artificial intelligence we have two parts our business c5 capital which invests into late stage companies so these are companies that typically already have revenue visibility and profitability but still very fast-growing and then we also have a very early stage startup platform that look at seed state investment and this we do through two accelerators to social impact accelerators one in Washington and one in Bahrain and it's just size of money involved just sort of order magnitude how many funds do you have how is it structure again just share some insight on that is it is there one firm is there multiple firms how is it knows it work well today the venture capital business has to be very transparent it's required by compliance we are a regulated regulated firm we are regulated in multiple markets we regulated here in the US the sec as a foreign investor in london by the financial conduct authority and in Luxembourg where Afonso based by the regulatory authorities there so in the venture capital industry today you can't afford to be an opaque business you have to be transparent at all levels and money in the Western world have become almost completely transparent so there's a very comprehensive and thorough due diligence when you onboard capital called know your client and the requirements standard requirement now is that whenever you're onboard capital from investor you're gonna take it right up to the level of the ultimate beneficial ownership so who actually owns this money and then every time you invest and you move your money around it gets diligence together different regulators and in terms of disclosure and the same applies often now with clients when our portfolio companies have important or significant clients they also want to know who's behind the products and the services they receive so often our boards our board directors and a shell team also get diligence by by important clients so explain this piece about the due diligence and the cross country vetting that goes on is I think it's important I want to get it out because how long has been operating how many deals have you done you mentioned foreign investor in the United States you're doing deals in the United States I know I've met one of your portfolio companies at an event iron iron on it iron net general Keith Alexander former head of the NSA you know get to just work with him without being vetted I guess so so how long a c5 capital been in business and where have you made your investments you mentioned cross jurisdiction across countries whatever it's called I don't know that so we've been and we've been in existence for about six years now our main focus is investing in Europe so we help European companies grow globally Europe historically has been underserved by venture capital we on an annual basis we invest about twenty seven billion dollars gets invested in venture capital in Europe as opposed to several multiples of that in the US so we have a very important part to play in Europe to how European enterprise software companies grow globally other important markets for us of course are Israel which is a major center of technology innovation and and the Middle East and then the u.s. the u.s. is still the world leader and venture capital both in terms of size but also in terms of the size of the market and of course the face and the excitement of the innovation here I want to get into me early career because again timing is key we're seeing this with you know whether it's a Supreme Court justice or anyone in their career their past comes back to haunt them it appears that has for you before we get there I want to ask you about you know when you look at the kind of scope of fraud and corruption that I've seen in just on the surface of government thing the government bit Beltway bandits in America is you got a nonprofit that feeds a for-profit and then what you know someone else runs a shell corporation so there's this intricate structures and that word was used which it kind of implies shell corporations a variety of backroom kind of smokey deals going on you mentioned transparency I do you have anything to hide John in in in our business we've got absolutely nothing to hide we have to be transparent we have to be open if you look at our social media profile you'll see we are communicating with the market almost on a daily basis every time we make an investment we press release that our website is very clear about who's involved enough who our partners are and the same applies to my own personal website and so in terms of the money movement around in terms of deploying investments we've seen Silicon Valley VCS move to China get their butts handed to them and then kind of adjust their scenes China money move around when you move money around you mentioned disclosure what do you mean there's filings to explain that piece it's just a little bit so every time we make an investment into a into a new portfolio company and we move the money to that market to make the investment we have to disclose who all the investors are who are involved in that investment so we have to disclose the ultimate beneficial ownership of all our limited partners to the law firms that are involved in the transactions and those law firms in turn have applications in terms of they own anti-money laundering laws in the local markets and this happens every time you move money around so I I think that the level of transparency in venture capital is just continue to rise exponentially and it's virtually impossible to conceal the identity of an investor this interesting this BBC article has a theme of national security risk kind of gloom and doom nuclear codes as mentioned it's like you want to scare someone you throw nuclear codes at it you want to get people's attention you play the Russian card I saw an article on the web that that said you know anything these days the me2 movement for governments just play the Russian card and you know instantly can discredit someone's kind of a desperation act so you got confident of interest in the government national security risk seems to be kind of a theme but before we get into the BBC news I noticed that there was a lot of conflated pieces kind of pulling together you know on one hand you know you're c5 you've done some things with your hat your past and then they just make basically associate that with running amazon's jedi project yes which i know is not to be true and you clarified that joan ends a problem joan so as a venture capital firm focused on investing in the space we have to work with all the Tier one cloud providers we are great believers in commercial cloud public cloud we believe that this is absolutely transformative not only for innovation but also for the way in which we do venture capital investment so we work with Amazon Web Services we work with Microsoft who work with Google and we believe that firstly that cloud has been made in America the first 15 companies in the world are all in cloud companies are all American and we believe that cloud like the internet and GPS are two great boons which the US economy the u.s. innovation economy have provided to the rest of the world cloud computing is reducing the cost of computing power with 50 percent every three years opening up innovation and opportunities for Entrepreneurship for health and well-being for the growth of economies on an unprecedented scale cloud computing is as important to the global economy today as the dollar ease as the world's reserve currency so we are great believers in cloud we great believers in American cloud computing companies as far as Amazon is concerned our relationship with Amazon Amazon is very Amazon Web Services is very clear and it's very defined we participate in a public Marcus program called AWS activate through which AWS supports hundreds of accelerators around the world with know-how with mentoring with teaching and with cloud credits to help entrepreneurs and startups grow their businesses and we have a very exciting focus for our two accelerators which is on in Washington we focus on peace technology we focus on taking entrepreneurs from conflict countries like Sudan Nigeria Pakistan to come to Washington to work on campus in the US government building the u.s. Institute for peace to scale these startups to learn all about cloud computing to learn how they can grow their businesses with cloud computing and to go back to their own countries to build peace and stability and prosperity their heaven so we're very proud of this mission in the Middle East and Bahrain our focus is on on female founders and female entrepreneurs we've got a program called nebula through which we empower female founders and female entrepreneurs interesting in the Middle East the statistics are the reverse from what we have in the West the majority of IT graduates in the Middle East are fimo and so there's a tremendous talent pool of of young dynamic female entrepreneurs coming out of not only the Gulf but the whole of the MENA region how about a relation with Amazon websites outside of their normal incubators they have incubators all over the place in the Amazon put out as Amazon Web Services put out a statement that said hey you know we have a lot of relationships with incubators this is normal course of business I know here in Silicon Valley at the startup loft this is this is their market filled market playbook so you fit into that is that correct as I'm I get that that's that's absolutely correct what we what is unusual about a table insists that this is a huge company that's focused on tiny startups a table started with startups it double uses first clients with startups and so here you have a huge business that has a deep understanding of startups and focus on startups and that's enormous the attractor for us and terrific for our accelerators department with them have you at c5 Capitol or individually have any formal or conversation with Amazon employees where you've had outside of giving feedback on products where you've tried to make change on their technology make change with their product management teams engineering you ever had at c5 capital whore have you personally been involved in influencing Amazon's product roadmap outside they're just giving normal feedback in the course of business that's way above my pay grade John firstly we don't have that kind of technical expertise in C 5 C 5 steam consists of a combination of entrepreneurs like myself people understand money really well and leaders we don't have that level of technical expertise and secondly that's what one our relationship with AWS is all about our relationship is entirely limited to the two startups and making sure that the two accelerators in making sure that the startups who pass through those accelerators succeed and make social impact and as a partner network component Amazon it's all put out there yes so in in a Barren accelerator we've we formed part of the Amazon partner network and the reason why we we did that was because we wanted to give some of the young people who come through the accelerator and know mastering cloud skills an opportunity to work on some real projects and real live projects so some of our young golf entrepreneurs female entrepreneurs have been working on building websites on Amazon Cloud and c5 capital has a relationship with former government officials you funded startups and cybersecurity that's kind of normal can you explain that positioning of it of how former government if it's whether it's US and abroad are involved in entrepreneurial activities and why that is may or may not be a problem certainly is a lot of kind of I would say smoke around this conversation around coffin of interest and you can you explain intelligence what that was it so I think the model for venture capital has been evolving and increasingly you get more and more differentiated models one of the key areas in which the venture capital model is changed is the fact that operating partners have become much more important to the success of venture capital firms so operating partners are people who bring real world experience to the investment experience of the investment team and in c-five we have the privilege of having a terrific group of operating partners people with both government and commercial backgrounds and they work very actively enough firm at all levels from our decision-making to the training and the mentoring of our team to helping us understand the way in which the world is exchanging to risk management to helping uh portfolio companies grow and Silicon Valley true with that to injuries in Horowitz two founders mr. friendly they bring in operating people that have entrepreneurial skills this is the new model understand order which has been a great source of inspiration to us for our model and and we built really believe this is a new model and it's really critical for the success of venture capitals to be going forward and the global impact is pretty significant one of things you mentioned I want to get your take on is as you operate a global transaction a lots happened a lot has to happen I mean we look at the ICO market on the cryptocurrency side its kind of you know plummeting obsoletes it's over now the mood security children's regulatory and transparency becomes critical you feel fully confident that you haven't you know from a regulatory standpoint c5 capital everything's out there absolutely risk management and regulated compliance and legal as the workstream have become absolutely critical for the success of venture capital firms and one of the reasons why this becomes so important John is because the venture capital world over the last few years have changed dramatically historically all the people involved in venture capital had very familiar names and came from very familiar places over the last few years with a diversification of global economic growth we've seen it's very significant amounts of money being invest invested in startups in China some people more money will invest in startups this year in China than in the US and we've seen countries like Saudi Arabia becoming a major source of venture capital funding some people say that as much as 70% of funding rounds this year in some way or another originated from the Gulf and we've seen places like Russia beginning to take an interest in technology innovation so the venture capital world is changing and for that reason compliance and regulation have become much more important but if Russians put 200 million dollars in face book and write out the check companies bright before that when the after 2008 we saw the rise of social networking I think global money certainly has something that I think a lot of people start getting used to and I want on trill down into that a little bit we talked about this BBC story that that hit and the the follow-on stories which actually didn't get picked up was mostly doing more regurgitation of the same story but one of the things that that they focus in on and the story was you and the trend now is your past is your enemy these days you know they try to drum up stuff in the past you've had a long career some of the stuff that they've been bringing in to paint you and the light that they did was from your past so I wanted to explore that with you I know you this is the first time you've talked about this and I appreciate you taking the time talk about your early career your background where you went to school because the way I'm reading this it sounds like you're a shady character I like like I interviewed on the queue but I didn't see that but you know I'm going to pressure here for that if you don't mind I'd like to to dig into that John thank you for that so I've had the I've had the privilege of a really amazingly interesting life and at the heart of at the heart of that great adventures been people and the privilege to work with really great people and good people I was born in South Africa I grew up in Africa went to school there qualified as a lawyer and then came to study in Britain when I studied international politics when I finished my studies international politics I got head hunted by a US consulting firm called crow which was a start of a 20 years career as an investigator first in crawl where I was a managing director in the London and then in building my own consulting firm which was called g3 and all of this led me to cybersecurity because as an investigator looking into organized crime looking into corruption looking into asset racing increasingly as the years went on everything became digital and I became very interested in finding evidence on electronic devices but starting my career and CRO was tremendous because Jules Kroll was a incredible mentor he could walk through an office and call everybody by their first name any Kroll office anywhere in the world and he always took a kindly interest in the people who work for him so it was a great school to go to and and I worked on some terrific cases including some very interesting Russian cases and Russian organized crime cases just this bag of Kroll was I've had a core competency in doing investigative work and also due diligence was that kind of focus yes although Kroll was the first company in the world to really have a strong digital practice led by Alan Brugler of New York Alan established the first computer forensics practice which was all focused about finding evidence on devices and everything I know about cyber security today started with me going to school with Alan Brolin crawl and they also focused on corruption uncovering this is from Wikipedia Kroll clients help Kroll helps clients improve operations by uncovering kickbacks fraud another form of corruptions other specialty areas is forensic accounting background screening drug testing electronic investigation data recovery SATA result Omar's McLennan in 2004 for 1.9 billion mark divested Kroll to another company I'll take credit risk management to diligence investigator in Falls Church Virginia over 150 countries call Kroll was the first CRO was the first household brand name in this field of of investigations and today's still is probably one of the strongest brand names and so it was a great firm to work in and was a great privilege to be part of it yeah high-end high-profile deals were there how many employees were in Kroll cuz I'd imagine that the alumni that that came out of Kroll probably have found places in other jobs similar to yes do an investigative work like you know they out them all over the world many many alumni from Kroll and many of them doing really well and doing great work ok great so now the next question want to ask you is when you in Kroll the South Africa connection came up so I got to ask you it says business side that you're a former South African spy are you a former South African spy no John I've never worked for any government agency and in developing my career my my whole focus has been on investigations out of the Kroll London office I did have the opportunity to work in South Africa out of the Kroll London office and this was really a seminal moment in my career when I went to South Africa on a case for a major international credit-card company immediately after the end of apartheid when democracy started to look into the scale and extent of credit card fraud at the request of this guy what year was there - how old were you this was in 1995 1996 I was 25 26 years old and one of the things which this credit card company asked me to do was to assess what was the capability of the new democratic government in South Africa under Nelson Mandela to deal with crime and so I had the privilege of meeting mr. Mandela as the president to discuss this issue with him and it was an extraordinary man the country's history because there was such an openness and a willingness to to address issues of this nature and to grapple with them so he was released from prison at that time I remember those days and he became president that's why he called you and you met with him face to face of a business conversation around working on what the future democracy is and trying to look at from a corruption standpoint or just kind of in general was that what was that conversation can you share so so that so the meeting involved President Mandela and and the relevant cabinet ministers the relevant secretaries and his cabinet - responsible for for these issues and the focus of our conversation really started with well how do you deal with credit card fraud and how do you deal with large-scale fraud that could be driven by organized crime and at the time this was an issue of great concern to the president because there was bombing in Kate of a Planet Hollywood cafe where a number of people got very severely injured and the president believed that this could have been the result of a protection racket in Cape Town and so he wanted to do something about it he was incredibly proactive and forward-leaning and in an extraordinary way he ended the conversation by by asking where the Kroll can help him and so he commissioned Kroll to build the capacity of all the black officers that came out of the ANC and have gone into key government positions on how to manage organized crime investigations it was the challenge at that time honestly I can imagine apartheid I remember you know I was just at a college that's not properly around the same age as you it was a dynamic time to say the least was his issue around lack of training old school techniques because you know that was right down post-cold-war and then did what were the concerns not enough people was it just out of control was it a corrupt I mean just I mean what was the core issue that Nelson wanted to hire Kroll and you could work his core issue was he wanted to ensure the stability of South Africa's democracy that was his core focus and he wanted to make South Africa an attractive place where international companies felt comfortable and confident in investing and that was his focus and he felt that at that time because so many of the key people in the ANC only had training in a cold war context that there wasn't a Nessy skill set to do complex financial or more modern investigations and it was very much focused he was always the innovator he was very much focused on bringing the best practices and the best investigative techniques to the country he was I felt in such a hurry that he doesn't want to do this by going to other governments and asking for the help he wanted to Commission it himself and so he gave he gave a crawl with me as the project leader a contract to do this and my namesake Francois Pienaar has become very well known because of the film Invictus and he's been he had the benefit of Mandela as a mentor and as a supporter and that changed his career the same thing happened to me so what did he actually asked you to do was it to train build a force because there's this talk that and was a despite corruption specifically it was it more both corruption and or stability because they kind of go hand in hand policy and it's a very close link between corruption and instability and and president Ellis instructions were very clear to Crowley said go out and find me the best people in the world the most experienced people in the world who can come to South Africa and train my people how to fight organized crime so I went out and I found some of the best people from the CIA from mi6 the British intelligence service from the Drug Enforcement Agency here in the US form officers from the Federal Bureau of Investigation's detectives from Scotland Yard prosecutors from the US Justice Department and all of them for a number of years traveled to South Africa to train black officers who were newly appointed in key roles in how to combat organized crime and this was you acting as an employee he had crow there's not some operative this is he this was me very much acting as a as an executive and crow I was the project leader Kroll was very well structured and organized and I reported to the chief executive officer in the London office nor Garret who was the former head of the CIA's Near East Division and Nelson Mandela was intimately involved in this with you at Krall President Mandela was the ultimate support of this project and he then designated several ministers to work on it and also senior officials in the stories that had been put out this past week they talked about this to try to make it sound like you're involved on two sides of the equation they bring up scorpions was this the scorpions project that they referred to so it was the scorpions scorpion sounds so dangerous and a movie well there's a movie a movie does feature this so at the end of the training project President Mandela and deputy president Thabo Mbeki who subsequently succeeded him as president put together a ministerial committee to look at what should they do with the capacity that's been built with this investment that they made because for a period of about three years we had all the leading people the most experienced people that have come out of some of the best law enforcement agencies and some of the best intelligence services come and trained in South Africa and this was quite this was quite something John because many of the senior officers in the ANC came from a background where they were trained by the opponents of the people came to treat trained them so so many of them were trained by the Stasi in East Germany some of them were trained by the Russian KGB some of them were trained by the Cubans so we not only had to train them we also had to win their trust and when we started this that's a diverse set of potential dogma and or just habits a theory modernised if you will right is that what the there was there was a question of of learning new skills and there was a question about also about learning management capabilities there was also question of learning the importance of the media for when you do difficult and complex investigations there was a question about using digital resources but there was also fundamentally a question of just building trust and when we started this program none of the black officers wanted to be photographed with all these foreign trainers who were senior foreign intelligence officers when we finished that everyone wanted to be in the photograph and so this was a great South African success story but the President and the deputy president then reflected on what to do with his capacity and they appointed the ministerial task force to do this and we were asked to make recommendations to this Minister ministerial task force and one of the things which we did was we showed them a movie because you referenced the movie and the movie we showed them was the untouchables with Kevin Costner and Sean Connery which is still one of my favorite and and greatest movies and the story The Untouchables is about police corruption in Chicago and how in the Treasury Department a man called Eliot Ness put together a group of officers from which he selected from different places with clean hands to go after corruption during the Probie and this really captured the president's imagination and so he said that's what he want and Ella yeah okay so he said della one of the untouchables he wanted Eliot Ness exactly Al Capone's out there and and how many people were in that goodness so we asked that we we established the government then established decided to establish and this was passed as a law through Parliament the director of special operations the DSO which colloquy became known as the scorpions and it had a scorpion as a symbol for this unit and this became a standalone anti-corruption unit and the brilliant thing about it John was that the first intake of scorpion officers were all young black graduates many of them law graduates and at the time Janet Reno was the US Attorney General played a very crucial role she allowed half of the first intake of young cratchits to go to Quantico and to do the full FBI course in Quantico and this was the first group of foreign students who've ever been admitted to Quantico to do the full Quantico were you involved at what score's at that time yes sir and so you worked with President Mandela yes the set of the scorpions is untouchable skiing for the first time as a new democracy is emerging the landscape is certainly changing there's a transformation happening we all know the history laugh you don't watch Invictus probably great movie to do that you then worked with the Attorney General United States to cross-pollinate the folks in South Africa black officers law degrees Samar's fresh yes this unit with Quantico yes in the United States I had the privilege of attending the the graduation ceremony of the first of South African officers that completed the Quantico course and representing crow they on the day you had us relationships at that time to crawl across pollen I had the privilege of working with some of the best law enforcement officers and best intelligence officers that has come out of the u.s. services and they've been tremendous mentors in my career they've really shaped my thinking they've shaped my values and they've they've shaved my character so you're still under 30 at this time so give us a is that where this where are we in time now just about a 30 so you know around the nine late nineties still 90s yeah so client-server technologies there okay so also the story references Leonard McCarthy and these spy tapes what is this spy tape saga about it says you had a conversation with McCarthy me I'm thinking that a phone tap explain that spy tape saga what does it mean who's Lennon McCarthy explain yourself so so so Leonard McCarthy it's a US citizen today he served two terms as the vice president for institutional integrity at the World Bank which is the world's most important anti-corruption official he started his career as a prosecutor in South Africa many years ago and then became the head of the economic crimes division in the South African Justice Department and eventually became the head of the scorpions and many years after I've left Kroll and were no longer involved in in the work of the scorpions he texted me one evening expressing a concern and an anxiety that I had about the safety of his family and I replied to him with two text messages one was a Bible verse and the other one was a Latin saying and my advice name was follow the rule of law and put the safety of your family first and that was the advice I gave him so this is how I imagined the year I think of it the internet was just there this was him this was roundabout 2000 December 2007 okay so there was I phone just hit so text messaging Nokia phones all those big yeah probably more text message there so you sitting anywhere in London you get a text message from your friend yep later this past late tonight asking for help and advice and I gave him the best advice I can he unfortunately was being wiretapped and those wiretaps were subsequently published and became the subject of much controversy they've now been scrutinized by South Africa's highest court and the court has decided that those wiretaps are of no impact and of importance in the scheme of judicial decision-making and our unknown provenance and on and on unknown reliability they threw it out basically yeah they're basically that's the president he had some scandals priors and corruption but back to the tapes you the only involvement on the spy tapes was friend sending you a text message that says hey I'm running a corruption you know I'm afraid for my life my family what do I do and you give some advice general advice and that's it as there was there any more interactions with us no that's it that's it okay so you weren't like yeah working with it hey here's what we get strategy there was nothing that going on no other interactions just a friendly advice and that's what they put you I gave him my I gave him my best advice when you when you work in when you work as an investigator very much as and it's very similar in venture capital it's all about relationships and you want to preserve relationships for the long term and you develop deep royalties to its people particularly people with whom you've been through difficult situations as I have been with Leonard much earlier on when I was still involved in Kroll and giving advice to South African government on issues related to the scorpius so that that has a lot of holes and I did think that was kind of weird they actually can produce the actual tax I couldn't find that the spy tapes so there's a spy tape scandal out there your name is on out on one little transaction globbed on to you I mean how do you feel about that I mean you must've been pretty pissed when you saw that when you do it when when you do when you do investigative work you see really see everything and all kinds of things and the bigger the issues that you deal with the more frequently you see things that other people might find unusual I are you doing any work right now with c5 at South Africa and none whatsoever so I've I retired from my investigative Korea in 2014 I did terrific 20 years as an investigator during my time as investigator I came to understood the importance of digital and cyber and so at the end of it I saw an opportunity to serve a sector that historically have been underserved with capital which is cyber security and of course there are two areas very closely related to cyber security artificial intelligence and cloud and that's why I created c5 after I sold my investigator firm with five other families who equally believed in the importance of investing private capital to make a difference invest in private capital to help bring about innovation that can bring stability to the digital world and that's the mission of c-5 before I get to the heart news I want to drill in on the BBC stories I think that's really the focal point of you know why we're talking just you know from my standpoint I remember living as a young person in that time breaking into the business you know my 20s and 30s you had Live Aid in 1985 and you had 1995 the internet happened there was so much going on between those that decade 85 to 95 you were there I was an American so I didn't really have a lot exposure I did some work for IBM and Europe in 1980 says it's co-op student but you know I had some peak in the international world it must been pretty dynamic the cross-pollination the melting pot of countries you know the Berlin Wall goes down you had the cold war's ending you had apartheid a lot of things were going on around you yes so in that dynamic because if if the standard is you had links to someone you know talked about why how important it was that this melting pot and how it affected your relationships and how it looks now looking back because now you can almost tie anything to anything yes so I think the 90s was one of the most exciting periods of time because you had the birth of the internet and I started working on Internet related issues yet 20 million users today we have three and a half billion users and ten billion devices unthinkable at the time but in the wake of the internet also came a lot of changes as you say the Berlin Wall came down democracy in South Africa the Oslo peace process in the time that I worked in Kroll some of them made most important and damaging civil wars in Africa came to an end including the great war in the Congo peace came to Sudan and Angola the Ivory Coast so a lot of things happening and if you have a if you had a an international career at that time when globalization was accelerating you got to no a lot of people in different markets and both in crow and in my consulting business a key part of what it but we did was to keep us and Western corporations that were investing in emerging markets safe your credibility has been called in questions with this article and when I get to in a second what I want to ask you straight up is it possible to survive in the international theatre to the level that you're surviving if what they say is true if you if you're out scamming people or you're a bad actor pretty much over the the time as things get more transparent it's hard to survive right I mean talk about that dynamic because I just find it hard to believe that to be successful the way you are it's not a johnny-come-lately firms been multiple years operating vetted by the US government are people getting away in the shadows is it is is it hard because I almost imagine those are a lot of arbitrage I imagine ton of arbitrage that you that are happening there how hard or how easy it is to survive to be that shady and corrupt in this new era because with with with investigated with with intelligence communities with some terrific if you follow the money now Bitcoin that's a whole nother story but that's more today but to survive the eighties and nineties and to be where you are and what they're alleging I just what's your thoughts well to be able to attract capital and investors you have to have very high standards of governance and compliance because ultimately that's what investors are looking for and what investors will diligence when they make an investment with you so to carry the confidence of investors good standards of governance and compliance are of critical importance and raising venture capital and Europe is tough it's not like the US babe there's an abundance of venture capital available it's very hard Europe is under served by capital the venture capital invested in the US market is multiple of what we invest in Europe so you need to be even more focused on governance and compliance in Europe than you would be perhaps on other markets I think the second important point with Gmail John is that technology is brought about a lot of transparency and this is a major area of focus for our piece tech accelerator where we have startups who help to bring transparency to markets which previously did not have transparency for example one of the startups that came through our accelerator has brought complete transparency to the supply chain for subsistence farmers in Africa all the way to to the to the shelf of Walmart or a big grocery retailer in in the US or Europe and so I think technology is bringing a lot more more transparency we also have a global anti-corruption Innovation Challenge called shield in the cloud where we try and find and recognize the most innovative corporations governments and countries in the space so let's talk about the BBC story that hit 12 it says is a US military cloud the DoD Jedi contractor that's coming to award the eleventh hour safe from Russia fears over sensitive data so if this essentially the headline that's bolded says a technology company bidding for a Pentagon contract that's Amazon Web Services to store sensitive data has close partnerships with a firm linked to a sanctioned Russian oligarch the BBC has learned goes on to essentially put fear and tries to hang a story that says the national security of America is at risk because of c5u that's what we're talking about right now so so what's your take on this story I mean did you wake up and get an email said hey check out the BBC you're featured in and they're alleging that you have links to Russia and Amazon what Jon first I have to go I first have to do a disclosure I've worked for the BBC as an investigator when I was in Kroll and in fact I let the litigation support for the BBC in the biggest libel claim in British history which was post 9/11 when the BBC did a broadcast mistakenly accusing a mining company in Africa of laundering money for al-qaeda and so I represented the BBC in this case I was the manager hired you they hired me to delete this case for them and I'm I helped the BBC to reduce a libel claim of 25 million dollars to $750,000 so I'm very familiar with the BBC its integrity its standards and how it does things and I've always held the BBC in the highest regard and believed that the BBC makes a very important contribution to make people better informed about the world so when I heard about the story I was very disappointed because it seemed to me that the BBC have compromised the independence and the independence of the editorial control in broadcasting the story the reason why I say that is because the principal commentator in this story as a gentleman called John Wheeler who's familiar to me as a someone who's been trolling our firm on internet for the last year making all sorts of allegations the BBC did not disclose that mr. Weiler is a former Oracle executive the company that's protesting the Jedi bidding contract and secondly that he runs a lobbying firm with paid clients and that he himself often bid for government contracts in the US government context you're saying that John Wheeler who's sourced in the story has a quote expert and I did check him out I did look at what he was doing I checked out his Twitter he seems to be trying to socialise a story heavily first he needed eyes on LinkedIn he seems to be a consultant firm like a Beltway yes he runs a he runs a phone called in interoperability Clearing House and a related firm called the IT acquisition Advisory Council and these two organizations work very closely together the interoperability Clearing House or IC H is a consulting business where mr. Weiler acts for paying clients including competitors for this bidding contract and none of this was disclosed by the BBC in their program the second part of this program that I found very disappointing was the fact that the BBC in focusing on the Russian technology parks cocuwa did not disclose the list of skok of our partners that are a matter of public record on the Internet if you look at this list very closely you'll see c5 is not on there neither Amazon Web Services but the list of companies that are on there are very familiar names many of them competitors in this bidding process who acted as founding partners of skok about Oracle for example as recently as the 28th of November hosted what was described as the largest cloud computing conference in Russia's history at Skolkovo this is the this is the place which the BBC described as this notorious den of spies and at this event which Oracle hosted they had the Russian presidential administration on a big screen as one of their clients in Russia so some Oracle is doing business in Russia they have like legit real links to Russia well things you're saying if they suddenly have very close links with Skolkovo and so having a great many other Khayyam is there IBM Accenture cisco say Microsoft is saying Oracle is there so Skolkovo has a has a very distinguished roster of partners and if the BBC was fair and even-handed they would have disclosed us and they would have disclosed the fact that neither c5 nor Amazon feature as Corcovado you feel that the BBC has been duped the BBC clearly has been duped the program that they broadcasted is really a parlor game of six degrees of separation which they try to spun into a national security crisis all right so let's tell us John while ago you're saying John Wyler who's quoted in the story as an expert and by the way I read in the story my favorite line that I wanted to ask you on was there seems to be questions being raised but the question is being raised or referring to him so are you saying that he is not an expert but a plant for the story what's what's his role he's saying he works for Oracle or you think do you think he's being paid by Oracle like I can't comment on mr. Wireless motivation what strikes me is the fact that is a former Oracle executive what's striking is that he clearly on his website for the IC H identifies several competitors for the Jedi business clients and that all of this should have been disclosed by the BBC rather than to try and characterize and portray him as an independent expert on this story well AWS put out a press release or a blog post essentially hum this you know you guys had won it we're very clear and this I know it goes to the top because that's how Amazon works nothing goes out until it goes to the top which is Andy chassis and the senior people over there it says here's the relationship with c5 and ATS what school you use are the same page there but also they hinted the old guard manipulation distant I don't think they use the word disinformation campaign they kind of insinuate it and that's what I'm looking into I want to ask you are you part are you a victim of a disinformation campaign do you believe that you're not a victim being targeted with c5 as part of a disinformation campaign put on by a competitor to AWS I think what we've seen over the course of this last here is an enormous amount of disinformation around this contract and around this bidding process and they've a lot of the information that has been disseminated has not only not been factual but in some cases have been patently malicious well I have been covering Amazon for many many years this guy Tom Wyler is in seems to be circulating multiple reports invested in preparing for this interview I checked Vanity Fair he's quoted in Vanity Fair he's quoted in the BBC story and there's no real or original reporting other than those two there's some business side our article which is just regurgitating the Business Insider I mean the BBC story and a few other kind of blog stories but no real original yes no content don't so in every story that that's been written on this subject and as you say most serious publication have thrown this thrown these allegations out but in the in those few instances where they've managed to to publish these allegations and to leverage other people's credibility to their advantage and leverage other people's credibility for their competitive advantage John Wheeler has been the most important and prominent source of the allegations someone who clearly has vested commercial interests someone who clearly works for competitors as disclosed on his own website and none of this has ever been surfaced or addressed I have multiple sources have confirmed to me that there's a dossier that has been created and paid for by a firm or collection of firms to discredit AWS I've seen some of the summary documents of that and that is being peddled around to journalists we have not been approached yet I'm not sure they will because we actually know the cloud what cloud computing is so I'm sure we could debunk it by just looking at it and what they were putting fors was interesting is this an eleventh-hour a desperation attempt because I have the Geo a report here that was issued under Oracle's change it says there are six conditions why we're looking at one sole cloud although it's not a it's a multiple bid it's not an exclusive to amazon but so there's reasons why and they list six service levels highly specialized check more favorable terms and conditions with a single award expected cause of administration of multiple contracts outweighs the benefits of multiple awards the projected orders are so intricately related that only a single contractor can reasonably be perform the work meaning that Amazon has the only cloud that can do that work now I've reported on the cube and it's looking angle that it's true there's things that other clouds just don't have anyone has private they have the secret the secret clouds the total estimated value of the contract is less than the simplified acquisition threshold or multiple awards would not be in the best interest this is from them this is a government report so it seems like there's a conspiracy against Amazon where you are upon and in in this game collect you feel that collateral damage song do you do you believe that to be true collateral damage okay well okay so now the the John Wheeler guys so investigate you've been an investigator so you mean you're not you know you're not a retired into this a retired investigator you're retired investigated worked on things with Nelson Mandela Kroll Janet Reno Attorney General you've vetted by the United States government you have credibility you have relationships with people who have have top-secret clearance all kinds of stuff but I mean do you have where people have top-secret clearance or or former people who had done well we have we have the privilege of of working with a very distinguished group of senior national security leaders as operating partisan c5 and many of them have retained their clearances and have been only been able to do so because c5 had to pass through a very deep vetting process so for you to be smeared like this you've been in an investigative has you work at a lot of people this is pretty obvious to you this is like a oh is it like a deep state conspiracy you feel it's one vendor - what is your take and what does collateral damage mean to you well I recently spoke at the mahkum conference on a session on digital warfare and one of the key points I made there was that there are two things that are absolutely critical for business leaders and technology leaders at this point in time one we have to clearly say that our countries are worth defending we can't walk away from our countries because the innovation that we are able to build and scale we're only able to do because we live in democracies and then free societies that are governed by the rule of law the second thing that I think is absolutely crucial for business leaders in the technology community is to accept that there must be a point where national interest overrides competition it must be a point where we say the benefit and the growth and the success of our country is more important to us than making commercial profits and therefore there's a reason for us either to cooperate or to cease competition or to compete in a different way what might takes a little bit more simple than that's a good explanation is I find these smear campaigns and fake news and I was just talking with Kara Swisher on Twitter just pinging back and forth you know either journalists are chasing Twitter and not really doing the original courting or they're being fed stories if this is truly a smear campaign as being fed by a paid dossier then that hurts people when families and that puts corporate interests over the right thing so I think I a personal issue with that that's fake news that's just disinformation but it's also putting corporate inches over over families and people so I just find that to be kind of really weird when you say collateral damage earlier what did you mean by that just part of the campaign you personally what's what's your view okay I think competition which is not focused on on performance and on innovation and on price points that's competition that's hugely destructive its destructive to the fabric of innovation its destructive of course to the reputation of the people who fall in the line of sight of this kind of competition but it's also hugely destructive to national interest Andrae one of the key stories here with the BBC which has holes in it is that the Amazon link which we just talked about but there's one that they bring up that seems to be core in all this and just the connections to Russia can you talk about your career over the career from whether you when you were younger to now your relationship with Russia why is this Russian angle seems to be why they bring into the Russia angle into it they seem to say that c-5 Cable has connections they call deep links personal links into Russia so to see what that so c5 is a venture capital firm have no links to Russia c5 has had one individual who is originally of Russian origin but it's been a longtime Swiss resident and you national as a co investor into a enterprise software company we invested in in 2015 in Europe we've since sold that company but this individual Vladimir Kuznetsov who's became the focus of the BBC's story was a co investor with us and the way in which we structure our investment structures is that everything is transparent so the investment vehicle for this investment was a London registered company which was on the records of Companies House not an offshore entity and when Vladimir came into this company as a co investor for compliance and regulatory purposes we asked him to make his investment through this vehicle which we controlled and which was subject to our compliance standards and completely transparent and in this way he made this investment now when we take on both investors and Co investors we do that subject to very extensive due diligence and we have a very robust and rigorous due diligence regime which in which our operating partners who are leaders of great experience play an important role in which we use outside due diligence firms to augment our own judgment and to make sure we have all the facts and finally we also compare notes with other financial institutions and peers and having done that with Vladimir Kuznetsov when he made this one investment with us we reached the conclusion that he was acting in his own right as an independent angel investor that his left renova many years ago as a career executive and that he was completely acceptable as an investor so that you think that the BBC is making an inaccurate Association the way they describe your relationship with Russia absolutely the the whole this whole issue of the provenance of capital has become of growing importance to the venture capital industry as you and I discussed earlier with many more different sources of capital coming out of places like China like Russia Saudi Arabia other parts of the world and therefore going back again to you the earlier point we discussed compliance and due diligence our critical success factors and we have every confidence in due diligence conclusions that we reached about vladimir quits net source co-investment with us in 2015 so I did some digging on c5 razor bidco this was the the portion of the company in reference to the article I need to get your your take on this and they want to get you on the record on this because it's you mentioned I've been a law above board with all the compliance no offshore entities this is a personal investment that he made Co investment into an entity you guys set up for the transparency and compliance is that true that's correct no side didn't see didn't discover this would my my children could have found this this this company was in a transparent way on the records in Companies House and and Vladimir's role and investment in it was completely on the on the public record all of this was subject to financial conduct authority regulation and anti money laundering and no your client standards and compliance so there was no great big discovery this was all transparent all out in the open and we felt very confident in our due diligence findings and so you feel very confident Oh issue there at all special purpose none whatsoever is it this is classic this is international finance yes sir so in the venture capital industry creating a special purpose vehicle for a particular investment is a standard practice in c-five we focus on structuring those special-purpose vehicles in the most transparent way possible and that was his money from probably from Russia and you co invested into this for this purpose of doing these kinds of deals with Russia well we just right this is kind of the purpose of that no no no this so in 2015 we invested into a European enterprise software company that's a strategic partner of Microsoft in Scandinavian country and we invested in amount of 16 million pounds about at the time just more than 20 million dollars and subsequent in August of that year that Amir Kuznetsov having retired for nova and some time ago in his own right as an angel investor came in as a minority invest alongside us into this investment but we wanted to be sure that his investment was on our control and subject to our compliance standards so we requested him to make his investment through our special purpose vehicle c5 raised a bit co this investment has since been realized it's been a great success and this business is going on to do great things and serve great clients it c5 taking russian money no see if I was not taking Russian money since since the onset of sanctions onboarding Russian money is just impossible sanctions have introduced complexity and have introduced regulatory risk related to Russian capital and so we've taken a decision that we will not and we can't onboard Russian capital and sanctions have also impacted my investigative career sanctions have also completely changed because what the US have done very effectively is to make sanctions a truly global regime and in which ever country are based it doesn't really matter you have to comply with US sanctions this is not optional for anybody on any sanctions regime including the most recent sanctions on Iran so if there are sanctions in place you can't touch it have you ever managed Russian oligarchs money or interests at any time I've never managed a Russian oligarchs money at any point in time I served for a period of a year honest on the board of a South African mining company in which Renova is a minority invest alongside an Australian company called South 32 and the reason why I did this was because of my support for African entrepreneurship this was one of the first black owned mining companies in South Africa that was established with a British investment in 2004 this business have just grown to be a tremendous success and so for a period of a year I offered to help them on the board and to support them as they as they looked at how they can grow and scale the business I have a couple more questions Gabe so I don't know if you wanna take a break you want to keep let's take a break okay let's take a quick break do a quick break I think that's great that's the meat of it great job by the way fantastic lady here thanks for answering those questions the next section I want to do is compliment