(electronica music) >> Hello everybody. This is Dave Volante and we are covering HPE's big GreenLake announcements. We've got wall-to-wall coverage, a ton of content. We've been watching GreenLake since the beginning. And of one of the things we said early on was let's watch and see how frequently, what the cadence of innovations that HPE brings to the market. Because that's what a cloud company does. So, we're here to welcome you. Keith White is here as the Senior Vice President General Manager of GreenLake cloud services. He runs the commercial business. Keith, thanks for coming on. Help me kick off. >> Thanks for having me. It's awesome to be here. >> So you guys got some momentum orders, 40% growth a year to year on year. You got a lot of momentum, customer growth. >> Yeah, it's fantastic. It's 46%. >> Kyle, thank you for that clarification. And in 46. Big different from 40 to 46. >> No, I think what we're seeing is we're seeing the momentum happen in the marketplace, right? We have a scenario where we're bringing the cloud experience to the customer on their premises. They get to have it automated. Self-serve, easy to consume. They pay for what they use. They can have it in their data center. They can have it at the edge. They can have it at the colo, and, we can manage it all for them. And so they're really getting that true cloud experience and we're seeing it manifest itself in a variety of different customer scenarios. You know, we talked about at Discover, a lot of work that we're doing on the hybrid cloud side of the house, and a lot of work that we're doing on the edge side of things with our partners. But you know, it's exciting to see the explosion of data and how now we're providing this data capability for our customers. >> What are the big trends you're hearing from customers? And how is that informing what you're doing with Green? I mean, I feel like in a lot of ways, Keith, what happened last year, you guys were, were in a better position maybe than most. But what are you hearing and how is that informing your go forward? >> Yeah, I think it's really three things with customers, right? First off, Hey, we're trying to accelerate our digital transformation and it's all becoming about the data. So help us monetize the data, help us protect that data. Help us analyze it to make decisions. And so, you know, number one, it's all about data. Number two is wow, this pandemic, you know, we need to look for cost savings. So, we still need to move our business forward. We've got to accelerate our business, but help me find some cost savings with respect to what I can do. And third, what we're hearing is, hey, we're in a situation, where there's a lot of different capabilities happening with our workforce. They're working from home. They're working hybrid. Help us make sure that we can stay connected to those folks, but also in a secure way, making sure that they have all the tools and resources they need. So those are sort of three of the big themes that we're seeing that GreenLake really helps manifest itself, with the data we're doing now. With all the hybrid cloud capabilities. With the cost savings that we get with respect to our platform, as well as with solutions such as VDI or workforce enablements that we've, we create from a solution standpoint. . >> So, what's the customer reaction, I mean, I mean, everybody now, who's has a big on-premise state, has an as a service capability. A customer saying, oh yeah, oh yeah, how do you make it not me too? In the customer conversations? >> Yeah. I think it turns into, you know, you have to bring the holistic solution to the customer. So yes, there's technology there and we're hearing from, you know, some of the competitors out there. Yeah, we're doing as a service as well, but maybe it's a little bit of storage here. Maybe it's a little bit of networking there. Customers need that end to end solution. And so as you've seen us announce over time, we've got the building blocks, of course, compute storage and networking, but everything runs in a virtual machine. Everything runs in a container or everything runs on the bare metal itself. And that package that we've created for customers means that they can do whatever solution, or whatever workload they want So, if you're a hospital and you're running Epic for your electronic medical records, you can go that route. If you're upgrading SAP and you're using virtual machines at a very large scale, you can use this, use a GreenLake for that as well. So, as you go down the list, there's just so many opportunities with respect to bring those solutions to our customers. And then you bring in our point-next capabilities to support that. You bring in our advisory and professional services, along with our ecosystem to help enable that. You bring in our HPE financial services to help fund that digital transformation. And you've got the complete package. And that's why customers are saying, hey, you guys are now partners of us. You're not just a hardware provider, you're a partner you're helping us solve our business problems and helping us accelerate our business. >> So what should people expect today? You guys got some announcements. What should people look for? >> Well, I think this is, as we've talked about, you know, now we're sort of providing much more capabilities around the data side of the house. Because data is so such, it's the gold, if you will, of a customer's environment. So first off we want to do analytics. So we want an open platform that provides really a unified set of analytics capabilities. And this is where we have a real strong, sweet spot with respect to some of the, the software that we've built around Esperal. But also with the hardware capabilities. As you know, we have all the way up to the Cray supercomputers that, that are doing all of the analytics for whether this or, or financial data that. So, I think that's one of the key things. The second is you got to protect that data. And, and so if it's going to be on prem, I want to know that it's protected and secured. So how do I back it up? How do I have a disaster recovery plan? How do I watch out for ransomware attacks, as well? So we're providing some capabilities there. And then I'd say, lastly, because of all the experience we have with our customers now implementing these hybrid solutions, they're saying, hey, help me with this edge to cloud framework and how do I go and implement that on my own? And so we've taken all the experience and we've bucketed that into our edge to cloud adoption framework to provide that capability for our customers. So we, you know, we're really excited about, again, talking about solutions, talking about accelerating your business, not just talking about technology. >> I said up the top, Keith, that one of the ways I was evaluating you as the pace and the cadence of the innovations. And, and is that, is that fair? How do you guys think about that internally? Are you, you know, you're pushing yourself to go faster, I'm sure you are, but what's that conversation like? >> I think it's a great question because in essence, we're now pivoting the company holistically to being a cloud services and a software company. And that's really exciting and we're seeing that happen internally. But this pace of innovation is really built on what customers are asking us for us. So now that we've grown over 1200 customers worldwide. You know, over $5 billion of total contract value. You know, signing some, some large deals in a variety of solutions and workloads and verticals, et cetera. What we're now seeing is, hey, this is what we need. Help me with my internal IT out to my business groups. Help me with my edge strategy as I build the factory of the future, or, you know, help me with my data and analytics that I'm trying to accomplish for my, you know, diagnosis of, of x-rays and, and capabilities such as Carestream, if you will. So it's, it's exciting to see them come to us and say, this is the capabilities that we're requiring, and we've got our foot on the gas to provide that innovation. And we're miles ahead of the competition. >> All right, we've got an exciting day ahead. We got all kinds of technology discussions, solution discussions. We got, we got, we're going to hear from the analyst community. Really bringing you the, the full package of announcements here. Keith, thanks for helping me set this up. >> Always. Yeah. Thanks so much for having me. >> I look forward today. And thank you for watching. Keep it right there. Tons of content coming your way. You're watching The Cubes coverage of HP's big GreenLake announcement. Right back. (electronica music)

>>Welcome back to HP discover 2021 My name is Dave Volonte and you're watching the cubes, virtual coverage of H. P. S. Big customer event. Of course, the virtual edition, we're gonna dig into transformations the role of technology in the role of senior technology leadership. Look, let's face it, H P. E. Has gone through a pretty dramatic transformation itself in the past few years. So it makes a great example in case study and with me is rashmi kumari who is the senior vice president and C. I. O. At HP rashmi welcome come on inside the cube. >>Dave Nice to be here. >>Well, it's been almost a year since Covid changed the world as we know it. How would you say the role of the CEO specifically and generally it has changed. I mean you got digital Zero Trust has gone from buzzword to >>mandate >>digital. Everybody was complacent about digital in many ways and now it's really accelerated remote work hybrid. How do you see it? >>Absolutely. As I said in the last discover that Covid has been the biggest reason to accelerate digital transformation in the company's I. C. C. I O. S role has changed tremendously in the last 15 months. It's no more just keep the operations running that's become a table stick. Our roles have become not only to create digital customer experience engaged with our customers in different ways, but also to transform the company operations from inside out to be able to give that digital experience from beginning to end off the customer engagement going forward. We have also become responsible for switching our strategies around the companies as the Covid. Covid hit in different parts of the world at different times and how companies structured their operations to go from one region to another. A global company like H. B had to look into its supply chain differently. Had to look into strategies to mitigate the risk that was created because of the supply chain disruptions as well as you go to taking care of our employees. How do you create this digital collaboration experience where teams can still come together and make the work happen for our end customers? How do we think about future employee engagement when people are not coming into these big buildings and offices and working together, But how to create the same level of collaboration coordination as well as delivery or faster uh goods and services which is enabled by technology going forward. So see I. O. And I. T. S. Role has gone from giving a different level of customer experience to a different level of employee experience as well as enabling day to day operations of the company's. Ceos have realized that digital is the way to go forward. It does not matter what industry you are in and now see a as have their seat at the table to define what the future of every company now, which is a technology company respective you are in oil and gas or mining or a technical product or a card or a mobility company. End of the day you have to act and behave like a technology company. >>So I want to ask you about that because you've you've been a Ceo and uh you know, leading technology provider now for the last three years and you've had previous roles and where you know non technical technology, you know, selling to I. T. Companies and as you point out those worlds are coming together, everybody is a technology company today. How do you think that changes the role of the C. I. O. Because it would always seem to me that there was a difference between A C. I. O. And a tech company. You know what I mean by that? And the C. I. O. It's sort of every other company is those two worlds converging. >>Absolutely. And it's interesting you pointed out that I have worked in many different industries from healthcare and pharma to entertainment to utilities. Um And now at a technology company end of the day um The issues that I. T. Deals with are pretty similar across the organization. What is different here is now my customers are people like me in other industries and I have a little bit of an advantage because just having the experience across various ecosystem. Even at H. B. Look I was fortunate um at H. B. Because of Antonio's leadership, we have topped out mandate to transform how we did business. And I talked about my next gen IT program in last year's cube interview. But at the same time while we were changing our customer partners experience from ordering to order processing to supply chain to finance. Uh We decided this pivot of becoming as a service company. And if you think about that pivot it's pretty common if it was a technology company or non technology company at HP. We were very used to selling a product and coming back three years later at the time of refresh of infrastructure or hardware. That's no more true for us now we are becoming as a service or a subscription company and I. T. Played a major role to enable that quote to cash experience. Which is very different than the traditional experience around how we stay connected with our customer, how we proactively understand their behavior. I always talk about this term. Um Digital exhaust which results into data which can result into better insight and you can not only Upsell cross l because now you have more data about your product usage, but first and the foremost give what your customer wants in a much better way because you can proactively understand their needs and wants because you are providing a digital product versus a physical product. So this is the change that most of the companies are now going through. If you look at Domino's transition, there are pills a sellers but they did better because they had better digital experience. If you look at Chipotle, these are food service companies I. K which is a furniture manufacturer across the board. We have helped our customers and industries to understand how to become a more digital provider. And and remember when uh hp says edge to cloud platform as a service edges the product, the customers who we deal with and how do we get that? Help them get their data to understand how the product is behaving and then get the information to cloud for further analysis. Um and understanding from the data that comes out of the products that gets up, >>I think you've been HP now think around three years and I've been watching of course for decades. Hp. Hp then HP is I feel like it's entering now the sort of third phase of its transformation, your phase one was okay, we gotta figure out how to deal or or operate as a separate companies. Okay. That took some time and then it was okay. Now how do we align our resources and you know, what are the waves that we're gonna ride? And how do we how do we take our human capital, our investments and what bets do we place and and all in on as a service. And now it's like okay how do we deliver on all those promises? So pretty massive transformations. You talked about edge to cloud as a service so you've got this huge pivot in your in your business. What's the technology strategy to support that transformation? >>Yeah that's a that's a great question. So as I mentioned first your second phase which was becoming a stand alone company was the next N. I. T. Program very broad and um S. Four and 60 related ecosystem application. We're even in the traditional business there was a realization that we were 100 20 billion company. We are 30 billion company. We need different types of technologies as well as more integrated across our product line across the globe. And um we I'm very happy to report that we are the last leg of next in I. T. Transformation where we have brought in new customer experience through low touch or not touch order pressing. A very strong as four capabilities. Where we are now able to run all global orders across all our hardware and services business together. And I'm happy to report that we have been able to successfully run through the transformation which a typical company of our size would take five or six years to do in around close to three years. But at the same time while we were building this foundation and the capabilities to be able to do other management, supply chain and data and analytics platforms. We also made the pivot to go to as a service now for as a service and subscription selling. It needs a very different quote to Kazakh cash experience for our customers and that's where we had to bring in um platforms like brim to do um subscription building, convergent charging and a whole different way to address. But we were lucky to have this transformation completed on which we could bolt on this new capability and we had the data and another X platform built which now these as a service products can also use to drive better insight into our customer behavior um as well as how they're using our product a real time for our operations teams. >>Well they say follow the money in the cube. We love to say follow the day to day is obviously a crucial component of competitive advantage business value. So you talk a little bit more about the role of data. I'm interested I'm interested in where I. T. Fits uh you know a lot of companies that have a Chief data officer or Ceo sometimes they're separate. Sometimes they they work you know for each other or Cdo works for C. I. O. How do you guys approach the whole data conversation? >>Yeah that's a that's a great question and has been top of the mind of a lot of C E O C I O S. Chief digital officers in many different companies. The way we have set it up here is do we do have a chief data officer and we do have a head of uh technology and platform and data within I. T. Look. The way I see is that I call the term data torture if we have multiple data lakes, if we have multiple data locations and the data is not coming together at one place at the first time that it comes out of the source system, we end up with data swamps and it's very difficult to drive insights. It's very difficult to have a single version of truth. So HP had two pronged approach. First one was as part of this next gen i. T. Transformation we embarked upon the journey first of all to define our customers and products in a very uniform way across the globe. It's called entity Master Data and Product Master Data Program. These were very very difficult program. We are now happy to report that we can understand the customer from code stage to servicing stage beginning to end across all our system. It's been a tough journey but it was a effort well spent at the same time while we were building this message capability, we also invest the time in our analytics platform because we are generating so much data now globally as one footprint. How do we link our data link to R. S. A. P. And Salesforce and all these systems where our customer data flows through and create analytics and insight from it from our customers or our operations team. At the same time, we also created a chief data officer role where the responsibility is really to drive business from understanding what decision making an analytics they need around product, around customer, around their usage, around their experience to be able to drive better alignment with our customers and products going forward. So this creates efficiencies in the organization. If you have a leader who is taking care of your platforms and data building single source of truth and you have a leader who is propagating this mature notion of handling data as enterprise data and driving that focus on understanding the metrics and the insight that the businesses need to drive better customer alignment. That's when we gain those efficiencies and behind the scenes, the chief data officer and the data leader within my organization worked very, very closely to understand each other needs sometimes out of the possible where do we need the data processing? Is it at the edge? Is it in the cloud? What's the best way to drive the technology and the platform forward? And they kind of rely on each other's knowledge and intelligence to give us give us superior results. And I have done data analytics in many different companies. This model works where you have focused on insight and analytics without because data without insight is of no value, but at the same time you need clean data. You need efficient, fast platforms to process that insight at the functional nonfunctional requirements that are business partners have and that's how we have established in here and we have seen many successes recently. As of now, >>I want to ask you a kind of a harder maybe it's not harder question. It's a weird question around single version of the truth because it's clearly a challenge for organizations and there's many applications workloads that require that single version of the truth. The operational systems, the transaction systems, the HR the salesforce. Clearly you have to have a single version of the truth. I feel like however we're on the cusp of a new era where business lines see an opportunity for whatever their own truth to work with a partner to create some kind of new data product. And it's early days in that. But I want to and maybe not the right question for HP. But I wonder if you see it with in your ecosystems where where it's it's yes, single version of truth is sort of one class of data and analytics gotta have that nail down data quality, everything else. But then there's this sort of artistic version of the data where business people need more freedom. They need more latitude to create. Are you seeing that? And maybe you can help me put that into context. >>Uh, that's a great question. David. I'm glad you asked it. So I think tom Davenport who is known in the data space talks about the offensive and the defensive use cases of leveraging data. I think the piece that you talked about where it's clean, it's pristine, it's quality. It's all that most of those offer the offensive use cases where you are improving company's operations incrementally because you have very clean that I have very good understanding of how my territories are doing, how my customers are doing how my products are doing. How am I meeting my sls or how my financials are looking? There's no room for failure in that area. The other area is though, which works on the same set of data. It's not a different set of data, but the need is more around finding needles in the haystack to come up with new needs, new ones and customers or new business models that we go with. The way we have done it is we do take this data take out what's not allowed for everybody to be seen and then what we call is a private space. But that's this entire data available to our business leader, not real time because the need is not as real time because they're doing more what we call this predictive analytics to be able to leverage the same data set and run their analytics. And we work very closely with business in its we educate them. We tell them how to leverage this data set and use it and gather their feedback to understand what they need in that space to continue to run with their with their analytics. I think as we talk about hindsight insight and foresight hindsight and insight happens more from this clean data lakes where you have authenticity, you have quality and then most of the foresight happens in a different space where the users have more leverage to use data in many different ways to drive analytics and insights which is not readily available. >>Thank you for that. That's interesting discussion. You know digital transformation. It's a journey and it's going to take many years. A lot of ways, not a lot of ways 2020 was a forced March to digital. If you weren't a digital business, you were out of business and you really didn't have much time to plan. So now organizations are stepping back saying, okay let's really lean into our strategy the journey and along the way there's gonna be blind spots, there's bumps in the road when you look out what are the potential disruptions that you see maybe in terms of how companies are currently approaching their digital transformations? That's a great question. >>Dave and I'm going to take a little bit more longer term view on this topic. Right in what's top of my mind um recently is the whole topic of E. S. G. Environmental, social and governance. Most of the companies have governance in place, right? Because they are either public companies or they're under some kind of uh scrutiny from different regulatory bodies or what not. Even if you're a startup, you need to do things with our customers and what not. It has been there for companies. It continues to be there. We the public companies are very good at making sure that we have the right compliance, right privacy, right governance in in in place. Now we'll talk about cyber security. I think that creates a whole new challenge in that governance space. However, we have the set up within our companies to be able to handle that challenge. Now, when we go to social, what happened last year was really important. And now as each and every company, we need to think about what are we doing from our perspective to play our part in that. And not only the bigger companies leaders at our level, I would say that Between last March and this year, I have hired more than 400 people during pandemic, which was all virtual, but me and my team have made sure that we are doing the right thing to drive inclusion and diversity, which is also very big objective for h P E. And Antonio himself has been very active in various round tables in us at the world Economic forum level and I think it's really important for companies to create that opportunity, remove that disparity that's there for the underserved communities. If we want to continue to be successful in this world too, create innovative products and services, we need to sell it to the broader cross section of populations and to be able to do that, we need to bring them in our fold and enable them to create that um, equal consumption capabilities across different sets of people. Hp has taken many initiatives and so are many companies. I feel like uh, The momentum that companies have now created around the topic of equality is very important. I'm also very excited to see that a lot of startups are now coming up to serve that 99% versus just the shiny ones, as you know, in the bay area to create better delivery methods of food or products. Right. The third piece, which is environmental, is extremely important as well as we have seen recently in many companies and where even the dollar or the economic value is flowing are around the companies which are serious about environmental HP recently published its living Progress report. We have been in the forefront of innovation to reduce carbon emissions, we help our customers, um, through those processes. Again, if we do, if our planet is on fire, none of us will exist, right. So we all have to do that every little part to be able to do better. And I'm happy to report, I myself as a person, solar panels, battery electric cars, whatever I can do, but I think something more needs to happen right where as an individual I need to pitch in, but maybe utilities will be so green in the future that I don't need to put panels on my roof, which again creates a different kind of uh waste going forward. So when you ask me about disruptions, I personally feel that successful company like ours have to have E. S. G. Top of their mind and think of products and services from that perspective, which creates equal opportunity for people, which creates better environment sustainability going forward. And, you know, our customers are investors are very interested in seeing what we are doing to be able to serve that cause uh for for bigger cross section of companies, and I'm most of the time very happy to share with my C I. O cohort around how are H. P E F s capabilities creates or feeds into the circular economy, how much e waste we have recycled or kept it off of landfills are green capabilities, How it reduces the evils going forward as well as our sustainability initiatives, which can help other, see IOS to be more um carbon neutral going forward as well. >>You know, that's a great answer, rashmi, thank you for that because I gotta tell you hear a lot of mumbo jumbo about E S G. But that was a very substantive, thoughtful response that I think, I think tech companies in particular are have to lead in our leading in this area. So I really appreciate that sentiment. I want to end with a very important topic which is cyber. It's obviously, you know, escalated in, in the news the last several months. It's always in the news, but You know, 10 or 15 years ago there was this mentality of failure equals fire. Now we realize, hey, they're gonna get in, it's how you handle it. Cyber has become a board level topic, you know? Years ago there was a lot of discussion, oh, you can't have the sec ops team working for the C. I. O. Because that's like the Fox watching the Henhouse, that's changed. Uh it's been a real awakening, a kind of a rude awakening. So the world is now more virtual, you've gotta secure physical uh assets. I mean, any knucklehead can now become a ransomware attack, er they can, they can, they can buy ransomware as a services in the dark, dark web. So that's something we've never seen before. You're seeing supply chains get hacked and self forming malware. I mean, it's a really scary time. So you've got these intellectual assets, it's a top priority for organizations. Are you seeing a convergence of the sea? So roll the C. I. O. Roll the line of business roles relative to sort of prior years in terms of driving security throughout organizations. >>This is a great question. And this was a big discussion at my public board meeting a couple of days ago. It's as as I talk about many topics, if you think digital, if you think data, if you think is you, it's no more one organizations, business, it's now everybody's responsibility. I saw a Wall Street Journal article a couple of days ago where Somebody has compared cyber to 9-11-type scenario that if it happens for a company, that's the level of impact you feel on your on your operations. So, you know, all models are going to change where C so reports to see IO at H P E. We are also into products or security and that's why I see. So is a peer of mine who I worked with very closely who also worked with product teams where we are saving our customers from a lot of pain in this space going forward. And H. B. E. Itself is investing enormous amount of efforts in time in coming out of products which are which are secured and are not vulnerable to these types of attacks. The way I see it is see So role has become extremely critical in every company and the big part of that role is to make people understand that cybersecurity is also everybody's responsibility. That's why in I. T. V. Propagate def sec ups. Um As we talk about it, we are very very careful about picking the right products and services. This is one area where companies cannot shy away from investing. You have to continuously looking at cyber security architecture, you have to continuously look at and understand where the gaps are and how do we switch our product or service that we use from the providers to make sure our companies stay secure The training, not only for individual employees around anti phishing or what does cybersecurity mean, but also to the executive committee and to the board around what cybersecurity means, what zero trust means, but at the same time doing drive ins, we did it for business continuity and disaster recovery. Before now at this time we do it for a ransomware attack and stay prepared as you mentioned. And we all say in tech community, it's always if not when no company can them their chest and say, oh, we are fully secured because something can happen going forward. But what is the readiness for something that can happen? It has to be handled at the same risk level as a pandemic or earthquake or a natural disaster. And assume that it's going to happen and how as a company we will behave when when something like this happen. So I'm here's believer in the framework of uh protect, detect, govern and respond um as these things happen. So we need to have exercises within the company to ensure that everybody is aware of the part that they play day today but at the same time when some event happen and making sure we do very periodic reviews of I. T. And cyber practices across the company. There is no more differentiation between I. T. And O. T. That was 10 years ago. I remember working with different industries where OT was totally out of reach of I. T. And guess what happened? Wanna cry and Petra and XP machines were still running your supply chains and they were not protected. So if it's a technology it needs to be protected. That's the mindset. People need to go with invest in education, training, um awareness of your employees, your management committee, your board and do frequent exercises to understand how to respond when something like this happen. See it's a big responsibility to protect our customer data, our customers operations and we all need to be responsible and accountable to be able to provide all our products and services to our customers when something unforeseen like this happens, >>Russian, very generous with your time. Thank you so much for coming back in the CUBA is great to have you again. >>Thank you. Dave was really nice chatting with you. Thanks >>for being with us for our ongoing coverage of HP discover 21 This is Dave Volonte, you're watching the virtual cube, the leader in digital tech coverage. Be right back. >>Mm hmm, mm.

>> Narrator: Live from San Jose, California in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, covering QuickBooks Connect 2016. Sponsored by Intuit QuickBooks. Now here are your hosts, Jeff Frick and John Walls. >> And welcome back here to San Jose, the Convention Center. We're on theCUBE to continue our coverage of QuickBooks Connect 2016. We're here for the rest of today and onto tomorrow for two days at this great event, third year event, that is now going on with 5,000 attendees. So record attendance, great keynotes this morning, another keynote session coming up, by the way, in just about a half hour or so. We'll have some guests after that and then continue our coverage here tomorrow on theCUBE. Along with Jeff Frick, I am John Walls. We're joined by Yumi Clark who's the SVP of product development at Capital One. And Yumi, thank you for being with us here on theCUBE. >> Thank you very much. >> First time, right? >> Yes. >> On theCUBE. >> Yes, first time. >> So Capital One, what are you doing here? In a good way, of course. But what do you find of interest from a professional standpoint with the small business crowd? >> Yes, so Capital One is here because we want to meet our customers where they are today, and many of our customers are actually here at the show, QuickBooks Connect. Whether they be accountants or small business owners themselves, we are looking to build products for them and solutions for them based off of the pains that they have and the problems that they're having. So we're here to do much of a data gathering exercise and see what we can provide to our users. >> So I assume this is an ongoing process, right? This isn't just a one-time hit. Generally speaking, what do you hear from the people with whom you work or that you're supporting, in terms of their pain points for the services you provide and what you can do from a solutions standpoint? >> Yes, well actually here at QuickBooks Connect we have been doing some informal polls with the people that have been attending, and we often hear these types of things also as we're leading the businesses within the product development space. We're seeing a lot of the people talk about the passions that they have with regards to the business, and oftentimes they start the business because of their passion. They're actually not starting it because they want to start a business itself. Because oftentimes those businesses have a lot of administrivia tied to them in process. That's not what they're doing to start that business. They want to make sure that they're creating something that really speaks to them and speaks to their passions, and because of that, they've created a small business. >> But then, unfortunately, they have to tasks and they have to do accounting and they have to do payroll, they have to pay the vendors, and they have to get up from making whatever they're making and selling whatever they're selling to deal with the reality, and that's really where the opportunity at QuickBooks has done. But part of the thing they're trying to do is build this ecosystem not only to provide the tools, but really to provide other services to enable these folks to be successful. So within the Capital One world, as you look at small businesses as kind of a category, what are some of the unique challenges that they have that you guys are trying to help them with? How do you see the small business world as an opportunity? >> Yes, so in the same way, Capital One is also looking at that ecosystem. First and foremost what we do as a financial institution is provide very competitive savings and checkings and credit cards as part of our plethora of products that we offer. From a savings perspective, we have a 1% cash back, and from a credit card perspective we have a 2% cash back rate so that we're truly competitive from that perspective. In our recent surveys and the research that we've done, we've also seen that many of these small businesses, whether they're here or somewhere else, they have more than two bank accounts in order to run their small business. Also what we see is that they have anywhere between 10 to 12 different applications that they are stitching together to get their financial health of their small business right. Knowing that that's the problem, what we're doing at Capital One is helping them stitch that together. Not only do we have a competitive checking and savings accounts so that they can actually pay their bills and do the invoicing and the payroll, we are also looking at things to help them in future. And most recently in August what we did as Capital One is launch the Spark 401k service. 50% of all Americans either own or work for a small business so it's a huge crowd that needs to be addressed. Even though it's 50%, only 13% of those small businesses are offering some type of retirement benefit. And because of that we saw that as an opportunity and challenge that we can help resolve, and that's why we've launched the Spark 401k service this past August, which is specifically targeted to those small businesses so they can help not only themselves but the employees that work for them think about the future. >> So how has this changed the way you do business? Because you're looking for new products, you're looking for new services, you're looking to be more expansive in the kinds of things that you're offering, right? >> Yumi: Yes. >> But I'm sure the migration has... sometimes it's not natural. You're introducing new concepts to your workforce and to your people and so how's this impacted what Capital One does, in terms of looking to stretch yourself? Basically to create new opportunities for your clients. >> Right. Well, there's two ways that we're addressing the client relationship. One is that we're definitely seeing that digital transformation happen. Most recently in a poll that we took there was about 30% of small businesses were using some type of mobile device, but in the most recent study that we've seen it's about 60%, it's more than doubled in terms of the mobile banking and the mobile device that they're using to run their small business. And because of it we're leaning in to many of the mobile solutions that Capital One can provide so that small businesses can do things anytime, anywhere and any place as they're trying to run their business. 'Cause the reality is is that they're not just sitting in one place nine to five running their business. They're running off, doing other things, they're doing it at home. Also we're exploring different experiments so that if we're meeting the small businesses where they are, trying out different devices and different technologies, I don't know if you've seen some of the announcements that we've made but we're also looking at IoT and some of the Alexa form factors by which you can test and see how is my daily balance, what are the transactions going through and the sort of thing as well. So we're marrying a lot of the technologies that we are seeing and helping small businesses make that transformation themselves where they are today. If they're using one type of device, we'll be helping them with that mobile device. We're helping them with Alexa, for example, as well. And the helping them make that transition. >> So many choices. >> Go ahead, Jeff. >> I was just going to say and then there's now the gig economy, right? >> Yes. >> I wonder if you guys are, I'm sure you're looking at it, how do you see that as being fundamentally different? We were at a thing at the Stanford graduate school the other day and we were talking about the gig economy. At least a small business are thinking about things like retirement and setting aside money for taxes and potentially there's all types of retirement options if you're a small, self-employed person. But then you think of the gig economy, it's a guy doing four hours of week before class to run its Uber, or Postmates or all these kind of little bits and pieces. It doesn't appear from the outside looking in, I have no data, that they're really thinking through what is their total cost? Not only for the insurance and the wear and tear on the car, but then to set aside for taxes, and then are they putting some aside for insurance? Are they putting some aside for retirement? It just feels like that's a whole different kind of category of work and yet it's the one that's growing the most rapidly. >> It is and it isn't, actually. I think that oftentimes financial institutions have been geared more towards companies, business entities and that sort of thing. If we think about the most recent Spark 401k launch that we did, we're looking at companies of one, which are actually gig economy workers, if you really think about it. And then we are able to support those types of employees or businesses as well. The second thing that we're doing in terms of the gig economy is the reality is a lot of these people are, in the same way as I was mentioning before, stitching together their work life. And stitching together their work life means that they're using multiple applications and multiple revenue streams in order to be financially stable. And because of that, one of the pain points that we wanted to address was can we make it easy for these people to stitch together? And that's why we have the aggregation of the top 12 financial institutions within Spark Business so that they can get a complete financial health history of where they are today. >> We've been speaking with different folks from Intuit today and one of the striking conversations we had was about adoption within the accountant community and the cloud migrations, and people with very traditional perspectives or very regimented viewpoints about this is how I do things and the reluctance to change. What are you seeing in terms of digital adoption, what businesses are doing, how willing are they to accept some of these new products, or understanding this is a better mousetrap? And how do you grow that to make them understand this is maximize your efficiency and lower your cost, it's all good. But it's hard to get 'em there. >> Yes. One of the things that we actually see is not solving for the sake of creating a new feature. In the same way that I would feel if I were a small business, just because there's something out there doesn't necessarily mean I want to use it. You have to show the benefit to that small business owner. And if you think about where small businesses have been, they have been going to the bank, but they become more technologically savvy using, for example, mobile deposit capture because that saves them time, and all they have to do is take a picture of the check and it just works to deposit those moneys into a financial institution. And that's what we're providing as part of Capital One. If you show the benefit first, rather than the solution first, I suspect that more people will say, I'll give it a try. And that's what we're seeing in our base as well. We're seeing people saying, I'll give it a try, I am technologically savvy, I am using my mobile device more than I was before, sure, why not, and I'll give it a try. >> John: And that works? >> It has been working for us and we're seeing definitely more people going towards our Spark ecosystem solution, and they're stitching together all of the different applications because they are definitely feeling the pain of trying to do it themselves. And it's really hard to figure out themselves. >> So what's your biggest challenge, then? In terms of, it sounds like adoption, you're working and making progress on that front, you're here surveying your customer base, trying to understand what their needs are. It sounds like everything's great, everything's good, but that isn't always the case, obviously. There are challenges. In your perspective, from your viewpoint, what is it? What's the big hurdle you think that is keeping in the way a progress for you as Capital One and for the small business owner? >> I think really honing in, I think a lot of people often talk about small business owners trying to manage their financial health and their cashflow. That's the reality of running a small business. The question is how you solve that. Is it thinking about the savings and the checking accounts? Is it about thinking about the 401k in the future? Is it about that balance? Is it about tying savings and efficiency? And there's quite a fine line between thinking about just the actual solutions themselves and really offering the benefit. And so that, for us, is kind of the biggest challenge. Meaning that as we test into all these different applications, we need to make sure that we are improving their cashflow and showing them transparency around their financial health. >> It's funny you talk about whether there's a benefit or not and I just think from your customers' point of view, the small businesses, just all these different ways to pay. They want to take that money in and put it in and put it in their Capital One account. Whether it's Google Pay or Apple Pay or they even have Samsung Pay, I don't know why I'd ever want Samsung Pay, and who knows what tomorrow pay is going to be. From your customers' point of view, what do they think of this wave of options that their customers, the end customers, want to have, they think they want to have? They got people pushing these different alternatives down their throat. Are they really necessary? Do we need Samsung Pay along with Apple Pay and Google Pay and I already have credit cards and ATM cards and chip cards and god help us if I pull the 20 out. I went to one restaurant, they wouldn't even take cash. Like, we don't take cash. What, you don't take cash? It's so much more complicated now. There's just so many options coming out. I think of driving through a snowstorm at night with your headlights on. It's just like-- What do you tell 'em? How do they navigate this way? Oh, by the way, I'm still trying to just run my business. >> Right, actually, that's one of the things that we want to do at Capital One. We wanted to give small business owners the personalized delivery of data and looking at what would help them as they're running their small business. Because there are so many choices there, we want to help them make the choices by showing them the data that nudges them towards perhaps you might want this rather than this. That's what we're doing from a short term perspective, and more longer term, what we're also looking at, what is the benefit that we can actually provide? And showing those benefits clearly and transparently to the small business owner. There are a lot of choices out there. >> A lot of choices. Well, Yumi, we've asked you a lot of questions. The one that I think we don't have to ask is what's in your wallet, right? (laughs) We know what's in your wallet. >> Yes, a Venture credit card. (laughs) >> Yumi Clark from Capital One, thank you for joining us here on theCUBE. We appreciate the time. And good luck with the rest of the surveying. I'm sure this is a pretty fertile territory for you in terms of finding out what your customers need, what they want, and what you can do for 'em. >> Thank you so much for having me. >> Thanks. >> Thank you. Back with more on theCUBE here form San Jose in just a minute. (elecronic music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, welcome to the Cube's coverage of International Women's Day 2023. I'm John Furrier, host of the CUBE series of profiles around leaders in the tech industry sharing their stories, advice, best practices, what they're doing in their jobs their vision of the future, and more importantly, passing it on and encouraging more and more networking and telling the stories that matter. Our next guest is a great executive leader talking about how to lead in challenging times. Krista Satterthwaite, who is Senior Vice President and GM of Mainstream Compute. Krista great to see you're Cube alumni. We've had you on before talking about compute power. And by the way, congratulations on your BPT and Black Professional Tech Network 2023 Black Tech Exec of the Year Award. >> Thank you very much. Appreciate it. And thanks for having me. >> I knew I liked you the first time we were doing interviews together. You were so smart and so on top of it. Thanks for coming on. >> No problem. >> All kidding aside, let's get into it. You know, one of the things that's coming out on these interviews is leadership is being showcased and there's a network effect happening in the industry and you're starting to see people look and hear stories that they may or may not have heard before or news stories are coming out. So, one of the things that's interesting is that also in the backdrop of post pandemic, there's been a turn in the industry a little bit, there's a little bit of headwind in certain areas, some tailwinds in cloud and other areas. Compute, your area is doing very well. It could be challenging. And as a leader, has the conversation changed? And where are you at right now in the network of folks you're working with? What's the mood? >> Yeah, so actually I, things are much better. Obviously we had a chip shortage last year. Things are much, much better. But I learned a lot when it came to going through challenging times and leadership. And I think when we talk to customers, a lot of 'em are in challenging situations. Sometimes it's budget, sometimes it's attracting and retaining talent and sometimes it's just demands because, it's really exciting that technology is behind everything. But that means the demands on IT are bigger than ever before. So what I find when it comes to challenging times is that there's really three qualities that are game changers when it comes to leading and challenging times. And the first one is positivity. People have to feel like there's a light at the end of the tunnel to make sure that, their attitudes stay up, that they stay working really really hard and they look to the leader for that. The second one is communication. And I read somewhere that communication is leadership. And we had a great example from our CEO Antonio Neri when the pandemic hit and everything shut down. He had an all employee meeting every week for a month and we have tens of thousands of employees. And then even after that month, we had 'em very regularly. But he wanted to make sure that everybody heard from, him his thoughts had all the updates, knew how their peers were doing, how we were helping customers. And I really learned a lot from that in terms of communicating and communicating more during tough times. And then I would say the third one is making sure that they are informed and they feel empowered. So I would say a leader who is able to do that really, really stands out in a challenging time. >> So how do you get yourself together? Obviously you the chip shortage everyone knows in the industry and for the folks not in the tech industry, it was an economic potential disaster, because you don't get the chips you need. You guys make servers and technology, chips power everything. If you miss a shipment, it could cause a lot of backlash. So Cisco had an earnings impact. It has impact to the business. When do you have that code red moment where it's like, okay, we have to kind of put the pause and go into emergency mode. And how do you handle that? >> Well, you know, it is funny 'cause when it, when we have challenges, I come to learn that people can look at challenges and hard work as a burden or a mission and they behave totally different. If they see it as a burden, then they're doing the bare minimum and they're pointing fingers and they're complaining and they're probably not getting a whole lot done. If they see it as a mission, then all of a sudden they're going above and beyond. They're working really hard, they're really partnering. And if it affects customers for HPE, obviously we, HPE is a very customer centric company, so everyone pays attention and tries to pitch in. But when it comes to a mission, I started thinking, what are the real ingredients for a mission? And I think it's important. I think it's, people feel like they can make an impact. And then I think the third one is that the goal is clear, even if the path isn't, 'cause you may have to pivot a lot if it's a challenge. And so when it came to the chip shortage, it was a mission. We wanted to make sure that we could ship to customers as quickly as possible. And it was a mission. Everybody pulled together. I learned how much our team could pull off and pull together through that challenge. >> And the consequences can be quantified in economics. So it's like the burn the boats example, you got to burn the boats, you're stuck. You got to figure out a solution. How does that change the demands on people? Because this is, okay, there's a mission it they're not, it's not normal. What are some of those new demands that arise during those times and how do you manage that? How do you be a leader? >> Yeah, so it's funny, I was reading this statement from James White who used to be the CEO of Jamba Juice. And he was talking about how he got that job. He said, "I think it was one thing I said that really convinced them that I was the right person." And what he said was something like, "I will get more out of people than nine out of 10 leaders on the planet." He said, "Because I will look at their strengths and their capabilities and I will play to their passions." and their capabilities and I will play their passions. and getting the most out people in difficult times, it is all about how much you can get out of people for their own sake and for the company's sake. >> That's great feedback. And to people watching who are early in their careers, leading is getting the best out of your team, attitude. Some of the things you mentioned. What advice would you give folks that are starting to get into the workforce, that are starting to get into that leadership track or might have a trajectory or even might have an innate ability that they know they have and they want to pursue that dream? >> Yeah so. >> What advice would you give them? >> Yeah, what I would say, I say this all the time that, for the first half of my career I was very job conscious, but I wasn't very career conscious. So I'd get in a role and I'd stay in that role for long periods of time and I'd do a good job, but I wasn't really very career conscious. And what I would say is, everybody says how important risk taking is. Well, risk taking can be a little bit of a scary word, right? Or term. And the way I see it is give it a shot and see what happens. You're interested in something, give it a shot and see what happens. It's kind of a less intimidating way of looking at risk because even though I was job conscious, and not career conscious, one thing I did when people asked me to take something on, hey Krista, would you like to take on more responsibility here? The answer was always yes, yes, yes, yes. So I said yes because I said, hey I'll give it a shot and see what happens. And that helped me tremendously because I felt like I am giving it a try. And the more you do that, the the better it is. >> It's great. >> And actually the the less scary it is because you do that, a few times and it goes well. It's like a muscle that builds. >> It's funny, a woman executive was on the program. I said, the word balance comes up a lot. And she stopped and said, "Let's just talk about balance for a second." And then she went contrarian and said, "It's about not being unbalanced. It's about being, taking a chance and being a little bit off balance to put yourself outside your comfort zone to try new things." And then she also came up and followed and said, "If you do that alone, you increase your risk. But if you do it with people, a team that you trust and you're authentic and you're vulnerable and you're communicating, that is the chemistry." And that was a really good point. What's your reaction? 'Cause you were talking about authentic conversations good communications with Antonio. How does someone get, feel, find that team and do you agree with it? And what was your, how would you react to that? >> Yes, I agree with that. And when it comes to being authentic, that's the magic and when someone isn't, if someone's not really being themselves, it's really funny because you can feel it, you can sense it. There's kind of a wall between you and them. And over time people won't be able to put their finger on it, but they'll feel a distance from you. But when you're authentic and you share who you are, what you find is you find things in common with other people. 'Cause you're sharing more of who you are and it's like, oh, I do that too. Oh, I'm interested in that too. And build the bonds between people and the authenticity. And that's what people crave. They want people to be authentic and people can tell when you're authentic and when you're not. >> Is managing and leading through a crisis a born talent or can you learn it? >> Oh, definitely learned. I think that we're born knowing nothing and I once read people are nurtured into greatness and I think that's true. So yeah, definitely learned. >> What are some examples that can come out of a tough time as folks may look at a crisis and be shy away from it? How do they lean into it? What advice would you give folks? How do you handle it? I mean, everyone's got different personality. Okay, they get to a position but stepping through that door. >> Yeah, well, I do this presentation called, "10 things I Wish I Knew Earlier in my Career." And one of those things is about the growth mindset and the growth mindset. There's a book called "Mindset" by Carol Dweck and the growth mindset is all about learning and not always having to know everything, but really the winning is in the learning. And so if you have a growth mindset it makes you feel better about everything because you can't lose. You're winning because you're learning. So when I've learned that, I started looking at things much differently. And when it comes to going through tough times, what I find is you're exercising muscles that you didn't even know you had, which makes you stronger when the crisis is over, obviously. And I also feel like you become a lot a much more creative when you're in challenging times. You're forced to do things that you hadn't had to do before. And it also bonds the team. It's almost like going through bootcamp together. When you go through a challenge together it bonds you for life. >> I mean, you could have bonding, could be trauma bonding or success bonding. People love to be on the success side because that's positive and that's really the key mindset. You're always winning if you have that attitude. And learnings is also positive. So it's not, it's never a failure unless you make it. >> That's right, exactly. As long as you learn from it. And that's the name of the game. So, learning is the goal. >> So I have to ask you, on your job now, you have a really big responsibility HPE compute and big division. What's the current mindset that you have right now in your career, where you're at? What are some of the things on your mind that you think about? We had other, other seniors leaders say, hey, you know I got the software as my brain and the hardware's my body. I like to keep software and hardware working together. What is your current state of your career and how you looking at it, what's next and what's going on in your mind right now? >> Yeah, so for me, I really want to make sure that for my team we're nurturing the next generation of leadership and that we're helping with career development and career growth. And people feel like they can grow their careers here. Luckily at HPE, we have a lot of people stay at HPE a long time, and even people who leave HPE a lot of times they come back because the culture's fantastic. So I just want to make sure I'm contributing to that culture and I'm bringing up the next generation of leaders. >> What's next for you? What are you looking at from a career personal standpoint? >> You know, it's funny, I, I love what I'm doing right now. I'm actually on a joint venture board with H3C, which is HPE Joint Venture Company. And so I'm really enjoying that and exploring more board service opportunities. >> You have a focus of good growth mindset, challenging through, managing through tough times. How do you stay focused on that North star? How do you keep the reinforcement of the mission? How do you nurture the team to greatness? >> Yeah, so I think it's a lot of clarity, providing a lot of clarity about what's important right now. And it goes back to some of the communication that I mentioned earlier, making sure that everybody knows where the North Star is, so everybody's focused on the same thing, because I feel like with the, I always felt like throughout my career I was set up for success if I had the right information, the right guidance and the right goals. And I try to make sure that I do that with my team. >> What are some of the things that you could share as we wrap up here for the folks watching, as the networks increase, as the stories start to unfold more and more on digital like we're doing here, what do you hope people walk away with? What's working, what needs work, and what is some things that people aren't talking about that should be discussed publicly? >> Do you mean from a career standpoint or? >> For career? For growing into tech and into leadership positions. >> Okay. >> Big migration tech is now a wide field. I mean, when I grew up, broke into the eighties, it was computer science, software engineering, and three degrees in engineering, right? >> I see huge swath of AI coming. So many technical careers. There's a lot more women. >> Yeah. And that's what's so exciting about being in a technical career, technical company, is that everything's always changing. There's always opportunity to learn something new. And frankly, you know, every company is in the business of technology right now, because they want to closer to their customers. Typically, they're using technology to do that. Everyone's digitally transforming. And so what I would say is that there's so much opportunity, keep your mind open, explore what interests you and keep learning because it's changing all the time. >> You know I was talking with Sue, former HP, she's on a lot of boards. The balance at the board level still needs a lot of work and the leaderships are getting better, but the board at the seats at the table needs work. Where do you see that transition for you in the future? Is that something on your mind? Maybe a board seat? You mentioned you're on a board with HPE, but maybe sitting on some other boards? Any, any? >> Yes, actually, actually, we actually have a program here at HPE called the Board Ready Now program that I'm a part of. And so HPE is very supportive of me exploring an independent board seat. And so they have some education and programming around that. And I know Sue well, she's awesome. And so yes, I'm looking into those opportunities right now. >> She advises do one no more than two. The day job. >> Yeah, I would only be doing one current job that I have. >> Well, kris, it was great to chat with you about these topics and leadership and challenging times. Great masterclass, great advice. As SVP and GM of mainstream compute for HPE, what's going on in your job these days? What's the most exciting thing happening? Share some of your work situations. >> Sure, so the most exciting thing happening right now is HPE Gen 11, which we just announced and started shipping, brings tremendous performance benefit, has an intuitive operating experience, a trusted security by design, and it's optimized to run workloads so much faster. So if anybody is interested, they should go check it out on hpe.com. >> And of course the CUBE will be at HPE Discover. We'll see you there. Any final wisdom you'd like to share as we wrap up the last minute here? >> Yeah, so I think the last thing I'll say is that when it comes to setting your sights, I think, expecting it, good things to happen usually happens when you believe you deserve it. So what happens is you believe you deserve it, then you expect it and you get it. And so sometimes that's about making sure you raise your thermostat to expect more. And I always talk about you don't have to raise it all up at once. You could do that incrementally and other people can set your thermostat too when they say, hey, you should be, you should get a level this high or that high, but raise your thermostat because what you expect is what you get. >> Krista, thank you so much for contributing to this program. We're going to do it quarterly. We're going to do getting more stories out there, so we'll have you back and if you know anyone with good stories, send them our way. And congratulations on your BPTN Tech Executive of the Year award for 2023. Congratulations, great prize there and great recognition for your hard work. >> Thank you so much, John, I appreciate it. >> Okay, this is the Cube's coverage of National Woodman's Day. I'm John Furrier, stories from the front lines, management ranks, developers, all there, global coverage of international events with theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (soft music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone, welcome to this event: Build Your Cloud Center of Excellence. I'm your host, Lisa Martin, and I have two guests here with me today to talk about the hybrid cloud, the multi-cloud trends, and specifically the complexity. While we know these trends provide agility and flexibility for customers, they also bring in complexity. And this session is going to focus on exploring that with RBI and HitachiVantara. Please welcome my guests, Adithya Sastry the SVP of Digital Solutions at HitachiVantara and Werner Mayer, head of group core IT and head of group data at RBI International. Guys, welcome to the program. >> Thank you Lisa. Werner, nice to see you again. >> Great to see you both. >> And Werner, we're going to start with you. Talk about RBI. Tell the audience a little bit about what the business is and then we're going to get into your cloud transformation journey over the last couple of years. >> Yes, thank you. So Raiffeisen Bank International is international working banking groups. So our core markets are Central Eastern European, Central Eastern Europe and Austria. And we are serving around 50 million clients in this market. So we active in 13 markets. >> Got it. Talk to me, Werner about the cloud transformation journey that RBI has been on over the last couple of years and some of the complexities that you've experienced as you've launched it. >> Sure. Thank you for the question. So in 2020, we decided that we have to renew our IT strategy. And the aim of the strategy was to change the organization in a way that it can react and adapt fast to the future challenges. So one of the important pillars for us was that we are adapting fast also for new technologies. And this was core pillar in our strategy. So we're searching for technologies which are fit in to our HR transformation. And we found that the cloud and the public cloud environment fits to this venture. So we tested that. We are building up also the competent centers for that and also established the group cloud platform for that. Because our invoice to onboard our international group with the 13 units to this group cloud platform. So that means we have a lot to do to hardening the platforms in terms of security to put in. We have standard for that. We have to introduce large scale programs to train hundreds of engineers. We tested the approach, We convinced the top management and we implemented this, this program. So one of the highlights was, of course, also the the safeguarding of the Ukraine, let's say, banking environment. So we had to lift and shift the complete bank in three months. And it shows that let's say our platforms works. And let's say the approach is proven that we can scale it over the group. >> That's a big challenge. A lot of complexity especially with some of the global things going on. Adithya, these challenges are, are not unique to RBI. A lot of your customers are facing challenges with complexity around cloud management, cloud ops. What can you unpack was the real issue is here? >> Yeah, Lisa, absolutely. And you know, before I answer your question, I do want to, you know, just say a couple of things about Raiffeisen Bank. And you know, we've had the pleasure of working with them for about a year, a little bit more than a year now. And, and, and the way they approach the cloud transformation journey is - should be a template for a lot of the organizations in terms of the preparation in terms of understanding, you know. How other companies have done it and what are the pitfalls. What's worked, and really what's the recipe for their, you know, journey, right? Which is very unique because, you know, you look at you know, being present across 30 different countries within central and eastern Europe as Werner said. And the complexities of dealing with local regulations, GDPR and all these other issues that come with it, right? And not to mention the language variation from country to country. So, you know, phenomenal story there. The journey and the journey still goes, right Werner? It's not complete yet. But Lisa, to your question, you know. When we look at, you know, the complexities of this transformation, that most modern enterprises are going through. It's not very unique, right? What is unique for a Raiffeisen Bank is - has been the preparation. As you get into this journey of moving workloads to cloud, be it refactoring, modernizing, migrating, etc. One of the things that really is often overlooked is: "Are my applications and data workloads resilient on the cloud?" Meaning  how is the performance? Are they just running or are they performing with high availability to meet your customers goals? Is it scalable? And are my cost in line with what I projected when I moved prep. >> Because that's one of the areas we are seeing where you know, what enterprises projected from a cost savings to what they're realizing a year and a half into the journey is a pretty big delta, right? And, and, and a lot of it is dependent on are the cloud - are the applications and the workloads cloud, designed for the cloud? Or are they designed for on-prem which you just move to the cloud. >> So Werner, it sounds like what Adithya said is a compliment to, to you guys and the team at RBI in terms of this being a template for managing complexity. Give us, Werner, your perspective in terms of modern cloud ops. What's in? What's out? What is it that customers really need to be focusing on to be successful? >> Thanks for the compliment, Lisa. And I think this is a great relationship also in the journey. Topic is, is, is a - is a complex program where a lot of things have to fit together. But it was mentioning the resilience. The course, we call it finops, security operations and so on have to come together and have to work on spot. At the end, it's also, let's say, how we are able enabling our teams and how we are ramping out the skills of our teams to deal with these multidimensional, let's say environments. And this is something what we spend a lot of time in order to prepare, but also to bring up the people on a certain level that they can operate at. Because card guard handling is, is different than before. Because beforehand you have central operations team. They do everything for you. But in this world let's say we are also putting the responsibility of the run component of the absent to the - in the tribes and the application teams. And they have to do much more than before. On the other hand, we have first central rules. We have monitoring functions. We have support functions on that in order to best support them in their journey. So this is a hybrid between, let's say, what the teams have to do with the responsibility in the teams, but also with the central functions which are supporting them. And everything have to work together and goes hand in - right, to go hand-in-hand. >> Yeah. Yeah. And if, if I could just add Lisa really quick and and Werner hit the nail on the head, right? Because you cannot look at cloud operation the way we have traditionally looked at managed services. That's the key thing, right? You cannot, you know, traditional managed services you had L1, L2, L3 and then it goes into some sort of a vacuum and then all of a sudden somebody calls you at some point, right? >> Werner: Exactly. >> And it really has flipped, right? To, to Werner's point. And Werner hit that name on the head because you really have to understand. Bring an engineering led approach to make sure that the problems, you know, when you see an issue that you have some level of automation in terms of problem isolation. And then the problem is routed the right individual ie the application engineering team or the data engineering team for resolution in a rapid manner. Right? I think that the key - >> Yes. A very important point with that is said, yeah. So you cannot traditional transport let's say, the operation model what you have now into the cloud because this will not work, yeah. And finally at the end you will not benefit on the technology possibilities there. So super important point. My vision in the cloud and this is also something what we are working on is a sort of zero-ops environment, yeah? Because we're ultimately dealing with the automatization technologies and so on, you can that much - to much more compared to the traditional environment and the benefit of the cloud is: You can test it. You can give it feedback when it is not working, yeah? So it's a completely different operating model. What we try to establish in the cloud environment. >> So really what this seems like guys is is quite a delicate balance that you're solving for. Not the only delicate balance but Werner sticking with you. Talk to us about some of the challenges that you've had around cloud cost management in particular. Help us understand that. >> Thanks for the question. So in principle, we are doing very well on the cost side, surprisingly. And we also started the cloud journey that is said this is not the cost case. Because as I said before, let's say one of the pillars in the strategy strategy was the enablement of technology to the benefit of customer solutions to be adaptive, to be faster. But at the end it turned out that let's say with giving the responsibility of the operation to the dedicated team, they found they - they were working much closer to the cost, and let's say monitoring the cost, then we headed into traditional environments, yeah? I also saw some examples in the group where sort of gamification of the cost were going on. To say who can save more To say who can save more and make more much more out of that what you have in the cloud. And at the end we see that in minimum the cost are balance to the traditional environments in the data centers. But we also saw that let's say, the cost were brought down much more than before. So at the beginning we were relative conservative with the assumptions, yeah? But it turns out that we are really getting the benefit. The things are getting faster and also the costs are going down. And we see this in real cases. >> Yeah. And, and, and Lisa, if I could add something really quick, right? Because - There's been a mad rush to the cloud, right? Everybody kind of, it was, you know, the buzz the buzz was let's get to the cloud. We'll start to realize all these savings. And all of a sudden, everything kind of magically gets better, right? And what we have seen is also, you know, companies or customers or enterprises that have started this journey about 5, 6 years ago and are about, you know, a few years into it. What we are realizing is the cloud costs have increased significantly to what their projections were early on. And the way they're trying to address the cloud cost is by creating a FinOps organization that's looking at, you know, the cost of cloud from a structure standpoint and support as a reactive measure. Saying, "Hey if we move from Azure or one provider to another is there any benefit? If we move certain applications from the cloud back to on-prem, is there any benefit?" When in fact, one of the things that we have noticed really is: The problem needs to shift left to the engineering teams. Because if you are designing the applications and the systems the right way to begin with, then you can manage the data cost issues or the cost overruns, right? So you design for the cloud as opposed to designing and then looking at how do we optimize cloud. >> So Adithya, you talked about the RBI use case as really kind of a template but also some of the challenges with respect to hybrid and multi-cloud are kind of like a chicken and egg scenario. Talk to us kind of like overall about how Hitachi is really helping customers address these challenges and maximize the benefits to get the flexibility to get the agility so that they can deliver what their end user customers are expecting. >> Yeah, yeah. So, so one of the things we are doing, Lisa, when we work with customers, is really trying to understand, you know, look at their entire portfolio of applications, right? And, and look at what the intent of the applications is between customer facing, external customer, internal customer, high availability, production, etc., right? And then we go through a methodology called E3 which is envision, enable and execute. Which is really envision what the end stage should be regardless of what the environment is, right? And then we enable, which is really kind of go through a proof of value to move a few workloads, to modernize, rearchitect, replatform, etc. And look at the benefit of that application on its destination. If it's a cloud - if it's a cloud service provider or if it's another data center, whatever it may be, right? And finally, you know, once we've proven the value and the benefit and and say and kind of monetize the, you know realize the value of it from an agility, from a cost, from security and resilience, etc. Then we go through the execution, which was look we look at the entire portfolio, the entire landscape. And we go through a very disciplined manner working with our customers to roadmap it. And then we execute in a very deliberate manner where you can see value every 2-3 months. Because gone the days when you can do things as a science project that took 2-3 years, right? We, we - Everyone wants to see value, want to see - wants to see progress, and most importantly we want to see cost benefit and agility sooner than later. >> Those are incredibly important outcomes. You guys have done a great job explaining what you're doing together. This sounds like a great relationship. All right, so my last question to both of you is: "If I'm a customer and I'm planning a cloud transformation for my company, what are the two things you want me to remember and consider as I plan this? Werner, we'll start with you. >> I would pick up two things, yeah? The first one is: When you are organizing your company in HR way, then cloud is the HR technology for the HR transformation. Because HR teams needs HR technology. And the second important thing is, what I would say is: Cloud is a large scale and fast moving technology enabler to the company. So if your company is going forward to say: Technology is their enabler tool from a future business then cloud can support this journey. >> Excellent. I'm going to walk away with those. And Adithya, same question to you. I'm a, I'm a customer. I'm at an organization. I'm planning a cloud transformation. Top two things you want me to walk away with. >> Yeah. And I think Werner kind of actually touched on that in the second one, which is: it's not a tech, just an IT or a technology initiative. It is a business initiative, right? Because ultimately what you do from this cloud journey should drive, you know, should lead into business transformation or help your business grow top line or drive margin expansion, etc. So couple of things I would say, right? One is, you know, get Being and prioritize. Work with your business owners, with, you know with the cross-functional team not just the technology team. That's one. The second thing is: as the technology team or the IT team shepherds this journey, you know, keep everyone informed and engaged as you go through this journey. Because as you go through moving workloads modernizing workload, there is an impact to, you know receivables through omnichannel experiences the way customers interact and transact with you, right? And that comes with making making sure your businesses are aware your business stakeholders are aware. So in turn the end customers are aware. So you know, it's not a one and done from an engagement, it's a journey. And bring in the right experts. Talk to people who've done it, done this before, who have kind of stepped in all the pitfalls so you don't have to, right? That's the key. >> That's great advice. That's great advice for anything in life, I think. You talk about the collaboration, the importance of the business and the technology folks coming together. It really has to be - It's a delicate balance as we said before but it really has to be a holistic collaborative approach. Guys, thank you so much for joining me talking through what HitachiVantara and RBI are doing together. It sounds like you're well into this journey and it sounds like it's going quite well. We thank you so much for your insights and your perspectives. >> Thank you, Lisa. Werner, thank you again. >> Good stuff guys. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. Thank you so much for watching our event: Build Your Cloud Center of Excellence. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: TheCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) (logo background tingles) >> Hey everyone, it's so good to see you, welcome back to theCube's day two coverage of MWC 23. We are live in Barcelona, Lisa Martin with Dave Nicholson, Dave we have had no signage of people dropping out, this conference is absolutely jam packed. There's so much interest in the industry, you've had a lot of interviews this morning, before we introduce our guests and have a great conversation about the industry and challenges and how they're being solved, what are some of the things that stuck out to you in conversations today? >> Well, I think the interesting, kind of umbrella conversation, that seems to be overlapping you know, overlying everything is this question about Open RAN and open standards in radio access network technology and where the operators of networks and the providers of technology come together to chart a better path forward. A lot of discussion of private 5G networks, it's very interesting, I think I've said this a few times, from a consumer's perspective, we feel like 5G has been with us for a long time- >> We do. >> But it's very clear that this, that we're really at the beginning of stages of this and I'm super excited for our guests that we have here because we're going to be able to talk to an actual operator- >> Yes. >> And hear what they have to say, we've heard a lot of people talking about the cool stuff they build, but we're going to get to hear from someone who actually works with this stuff, so- >> Who actually built it, absolutely. Please welcome our two guests, we have Ihab Tarazi CTO and SVP at Dell Technologies, and Juan Carlos Garcia SVP Technology Innovation and Ecosystems at Telephonica, it's great to have you guys on the program. >> So, thank you very much. >> So the buzz around this conference is incredible, 80,000 plus people, 2000 exhibitors, it's standing room only. Lot of opportunity in the industry, a lot of challenges though, Juan Carlos we'd love to get your perspective on, what are some of the industry challenges that Telephonica has faced that your peers are probably facing as well? >> Well we have two kinds of challenges, one is a business challenge, I would say that we may find in other industries, like profitability and growth and I will talk about it. And the second challenge is our technology challenge, we need the network to be ready to embrace a new wave of technologies and applications that are, you know, very demanding in terms of network characteristics and features. On the efficiency and profitability and growth, the solution comes as a challenge from changing the way networks are built and operated, from the traditional way to make them become software platforms. And this is not just at the knowledge challenge, it's also changing the mindset of network operators from a network and service provider to a digital service provider, okay? And this means several things, your network needs to become software-based so that you can manage it digitally and on top of it, you need to be able to deliver detail services digitally, okay? So there are three aspects, making your network so (indistinct) and cloud and cloud waste and then be able to sell in a different way to our customers. >> So some pretty significant challenges, but to your point, Juan Carlos, you share some of those challenges with other industries so there's some commonality there. I wanted to bring Ihab into the conversation, from Dell's perspective, we're seeing, you know, the explosion of data. Every company has to be a data company, we expect to have access to data in real time, if it's a new app, whatever it is. What are some of the challenges that you're seeing from your seat at Dell? >> Yeah, I think Juan Carlos explained that really well, what all the operators are talking about here between new applications, think metaverse, think video streaming, going all the way to the edge, think all the automation of factories and everything that's happening. It's not only requiring a whole new model for delivery and for building networks, but it's throwing out enormous amount of data and the data needs to be acted on to get the value of it. So the challenge is how do I collect the data? How do I catalog it? How do I make it usable? And then how do I make it persistent? So you know, it's high performance data storage and then after that, how do I move it to where I want to and be able to use it. And for many applications that has to happen in milliseconds for the value to come out. So now we've seen this before with enterprise but now I would say this digital transformation is happening at very large scale for all the telcos and starting to deal with very familiar themes we've seen before. >> So Juan Carlos, Telephonica, you hear from partners, vendors that they've done this before, don't worry, you're in good hands. >> Juan Carlos: Yeah, yeah. >> But as a practical matter, when you look at the challenges that you have and you think about the things you'll do to address them as you move forward, what are the immediate short term priorities? >> Okay. >> Versus the longer term priorities? What's realistic? You have a network to operate- >> Yeah. >> You're not just building something out of nothing, so you have to keep the lights on. >> Yeah. >> And you have to innovate, we call that by the way, in the CTO trade, ambidextrous, management using both hands, so what's your order of priorities? >> Well, the first thing, new technologies you are getting into the network need to come with a detail shape, so being cloud native, working by software. On the legacies that you need to keep alive, you need to go for a program to switch (indistinct) off progressively, okay? In fact, in Spain we are going to switch up the copper network in two years, so in 2024, Telephonica will celebrate 100 years and the celebration will be switching up the copper network and we'll have on the fixed access only fiber, okay. So more than likely, the network is necessary, all this digitalization may happen only on the new technologies because the new technologies are cloud-based, cloud native, become already ready for this digitalization process. And not only that, so you need also to build new things, we need an abstraction layer on top of the physical infrastructure to be able to manage the network by software, okay. This is something that happened in the computing world, okay, where the servers, you know, were covered with a cloud stack layer and we are doing the same thing in the network. We are trained to abstract the network services and capabilities and be able to offer them digitally to our customers. And this is a process that we are ongoing with many initiatives in the market, so one was the CAMARA community that was opened in Linux Foundation and the other one was the announcement we made yesterday of the open gateway initiative here at Mobile World Congress where all telecom operators have agreed to launch in this year a set of service APIs that are common worldwide, okay. This is a similar thing to what we did with 2G 35 years ago, to agree on a standard way of delivering a service and in this case is digital services based on APIs. >> What's the net result of? What are the benefits of having those open standards? Is it a benefit that myself as a consumer would enjoy? It seems, I mean, I've been, I'm old enough to remember, you know, a time before cellular telephones and I remember a time when it was very, very difficult to travel from North America to Europe with a cell phone. Now I land and my provider says, "Hey, welcome-" >> Juan Carlos: Yes. >> "Welcome, we're going to charge you a little extra money." And I say, "Hallelujah, awesome." So is part of that interoperability a benefit to consumers or, how, what? >> Yeah, you touch the right point. So in the same way you travel anywhere and you want to still make a call and send an SMS and connect to the internet, you will like your applications in your smartphone to work being them edge applications, okay, and these applications, each application will have to work to be executed very close to where you are, in a way that if you travel abroad the visitor network is serving you, okay. So this means that we are somehow extending the current interconnection and roaming agreements between operators to be able also to deliver edge applications wherever you are, in whatever network, with whatever technology. >> We have that expectation on the consumer side, that it's just going to work no matter where we are, we want apps to be updated, whether I'm banking or I'm shopping for groceries, I want to make sure that they know who I am, the data's got to be there, it's got to be real time, it's got to be right, it's got to serve me personally, but it just has to work. You guys talked about some of the big challenges, but also the opportunities in terms of the future of networking, the data turning companies in the data companies. Walk us through the future of networking from Telephonica's lens, you talked about some of the big initiatives that you have by 2024. >> Yes. >> But if you had a crystal ball and you could look in there and go it looks like this for operators, what would you say? And I'd love to get your feedback too. >> Yeah, I liked how Juan Carlos talked about how the future is, I think I want to add one thing to it, to say, a lot of times the user is no longer a consumer, it's an automated thing, you know, AI think robots, so a lot of times, more and more the usage is happening by some autonomous thing and it needs to always connect. And more and more these things are extending to places where even cellular coverage doesn't exist today, so you have edge compute show up. So, and when you think about it, the things we have to solve as a community here and this is all the discussions is, number one, how you make it a fully open standard model, so everything plugs and play, more and more, there's so many pieces coming, software, hardware, from different components and the integration of all of that is probably one of the biggest challenges people want solved. You know, how it's no longer one box, you buy from one person and put it away, now you have a complex combination of hardware and software. Also the operational model is very important and that is one of the areas we're focused on at Dell, is that while the operational model works inside the data centers for certain application, for telcos, it looks different when you're out at the cell tower and you're going to have these extended temperature changes. And sometimes this may not be inside a cabinet, maybe outside and the person servicing it is not an IT technician. This is somebody that needs to know exactly how to plug it, to be able to place equipment quickly and add capacity, those are just two of the areas, the cloud, making it work like a cloud, where it's intuitive, automated and you can easily add capacity, you can, you know, get a lot of monitoring, a lot of metrics, those are some of the things that we're all solving in this community. >> Let's talk about exactly how you're achieving this, Telephonica and Dell have been working together for a couple of years, you said before we went live. Talk about, you're doing this, you talked about the challenges, the opportunities how are you solving them and why with Dell? >> Okay, well you need to go with the right partners, not to this kind of process of transforming your network into a digital platform. There are big challenges on creating the cloud infrastructure that you need to support the complex, functionality and network requires. And I think you need to have with you, companies that know about the processors, that know about the hardware, the server, that know about how to make an abstraction of that hardware layer so that you can manage that digitally and this is not something any company can do, so you need companies that are very specialized. Telecom operators are changing the way to work, we work in the past with traditionally, with network equipment vendors, now we need to start working with technology providers, hardware (indistinct) providers with cloud providers with an ecosystem that is probably wider than what we had in the past. >> Yes. >> So I come from a background, I call myself a "knuckle dragging hardware engineer" sort of guy, so I'm almost fascinated by the physical part of this. You have a network, part of that network includes towers that have transmitters, receivers, at the base of those towers and like you mentioned, they're not all necessarily in urban areas or easy to access. There's equipment there, let's say that, that tower has been there for 5 years, 10 years, in the traditional world of IT, we have this this concept of the "refresh cycle" >> Juan Carlos: Yeah. >> Where a server may have a useful life of 36 months before it's consuming more power than it should based on the technology. How do you move from, kind of a legacy more proprietary, all-inclusive stack to an open system? I mean, is this a, "Okay, we're planning for an outage for the tower and you're wheeling out old equipment and wheeling in new equipment?" >> Juan Carlos: Yeah. >> I mean that's not, that's what we say as a non-trivial exercise, it's something that isn't, it's not something that's just easy to do, but is that what progress looks like? Sort of, methodically one site at a time? >> Yeah, well, I mean, you have touched an important point. In the technology renewal cycles, we were taking an appliance and replacing that by another one. Now with the current technology, you have the couple, the hardware from the software and the hardware, you need to replace it only when you run out of processing capacity to do what you want, okay? So then we'll be there 2, 3, 4, 5 years, whatever, when you need additional capacity, you replace it, but on the software side you can make the replacement every hour, every week. And this is something that the new technologies are bringing, a flexibility for the telecom operator to introduce a new feature without having to be physically there in the place, okay, by software remotely and this is the kind of software network we want to build. >> Lisa Martin: You know- >> Yeah, I want to add to that if I can- >> Please. >> Yeah. >> I think this is one of the biggest benefits of the open model. If the stack is all integrated as one appliance, when a new technology, we all know how quickly selecon technology comes out and now we have GPU's coming out for AI more increasingly, in an appliance model it may take you two years to take advantage of some new selecon that just came out. In this new open model, as Juan Carlos was saying, you just swap out, you know, you have time to market CPUs launched, it can be put out there at the cell tower and it could double capacity instantly and we're going to need that in that world, that easily going to be AI enabled- >> Lisa Martin: Right. >> So- >> So my last question to you, we only got a minute left or so, is given everything that we've talked about, the challenges, the opportunities, what you're doing together, how would you Juan Carlos summarize how the business is benefiting from the Dell partnership and the technologies that you're enabling with this new future network? >> Well, as I said before, we will need to be able to cover all the characteristics and performance of our network. We will need the right kind of processing capacity, the right kind of hardware solutions. We know that the functionality of the network is a very demanding one, we need hardware acceleration, we need a synchronization, we need time-sensitive solutions and all these can only done by hardware, so you need a good hardware partner, that ensures that you have the processing capacity you need to be able then to run your software, you know, with the confidence that it will work and with the performance that you need. >> That confidence is key. Well it sounds like what Telephonica and Dell have achieved together has been quite successful. Congratulations on the first couple of years, sounds like it's really helping Telephonica's business move in the strategic direction that it wants. We appreciate you joining us on the program today, describing all this, thank you both so much for your time. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you, this was fun. >> A pleasure. >> Good, our pleasure. For our guests and for Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE live day two from Barcelona, MWC 23. Don't go anywhere, Dave and I will be right back with our next guests. (cheerful bouncy music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone, welcome to this event: Build Your Cloud Center of Excellence. I'm your host, Lisa Martin, and I have two guests here with me today to talk about the hybrid cloud, the multi-cloud trends, and specifically the complexity. While we know these trends provide agility and flexibility for customers, they also bring in complexity. And this session is going to focus on exploring that with RBI and HitachiVantara. Please welcome my guests, Adithya Sastry the SVP of Digital Solutions at HitachiVantara and Werner Mayer, head of group core IT and head of group data at RBI International. Guys, welcome to the program. >> Thank you Lisa. Werner, nice to see you again. >> Great to see you both. >> And Werner, we're going to start with you. Talk about RBI. Tell the audience a little bit about what the business is and then we're going to get into your cloud transformation journey over the last couple of years. >> Yes, thank you. So Raiffeisen Bank International is international working banking groups. So our core markets are Central Eastern European, Central Eastern Europe and Austria. And we are serving around 50 million clients in this market. So we active in 13 markets. >> Got it. Talk to me, Werner about the cloud transformation journey that RBI has been on over the last couple of years and some of the complexities that you've experienced as you've launched it. >> Sure. Thank you for the question. So in 2020, we decided that we have to renew our IT strategy. And the aim of the strategy was to change the organization in a way that it can react and adapt fast to the future challenges. So one of the important pillars for us was that we are adapting fast also for new technologies. And this was core pillar in our strategy. So we're searching for technologies which are fit in to our HR transformation. And we found that the cloud and the public cloud environment fits to this venture. So we tested that. We are building up also the competent centers for that and also established the group cloud platform for that. Because our invoice to onboard our international group with the 13 units to this group cloud platform. So that means we have a lot to do to hardening the platforms in terms of security to put in. We have standard for that. We have to introduce large scale programs to train hundreds of engineers. We tested the approach, We convinced the top management and we implemented this, this program. So one of the highlights was, of course, also the the safeguarding of the Ukraine, let's say, banking environment. So we had to lift and shift the complete bank in three months. And it shows that let's say our platforms works. And let's say the approach is proven that we can scale it over the group. >> That's a big challenge. A lot of complexity especially with some of the global things going on. Adithya, these challenges are, are not unique to RBI. A lot of your customers are facing challenges with complexity around cloud management, cloud ops. What can you unpack was the real issue is here? >> Yeah, Lisa, absolutely. And you know, before I answer your question, I do want to, you know, just say a couple of things about Raiffeisen Bank. And you know, we've had the pleasure of working with them for about a year, a little bit more than a year now. And, and, and the way they approach the cloud transformation journey is - should be a template for a lot of the organizations in terms of the preparation in terms of understanding, you know. How other companies have done it and what are the pitfalls. What's worked, and really what's the recipe for their, you know, journey, right? Which is very unique because, you know, you look at you know, being present across 30 different countries within central and eastern Europe as Werner said. And the complexities of dealing with local regulations, GDPR and all these other issues that come with it, right? And not to mention the language variation from country to country. So, you know, phenomenal story there. The journey and the journey still goes, right Werner? It's not complete yet. But Lisa, to your question, you know. When we look at, you know, the complexities of this transformation, that most modern enterprises are going through. It's not very unique, right? What is unique for a Raiffeisen Bank is - has been the preparation. But as you get into this journey of moving workloads to cloud, be it refactoring, modernizing, migrating, etc. One of the things that really is often overlooked is: "Are my applications applications and data workloads resilient on, on the, on the cloud?" Meaning are they - How is the performance? Are they just running or are they performing with high availability to meet your customers goals? Is it scalable? And are my cost in line with what I projected when I moved prep, right? Because that's one of the areas we are seeing where you know, what enterprises projected from a cost savings to what they're realizing a year and a half into the journey is a pretty big delta, right? And, and, and a lot of it is dependent on are the cloud - are the applications and the workloads cloud, designed for the cloud? Or are they designed for on-prem which you just move to the cloud. >> So Werner, it sounds like what Adithya said is a compliment to, to you guys and the team at RBI in terms of this being a template for managing complexity. Give us, Werner, your perspective in terms of modern cloud ops. What's in? What's out? What is it that customers really need to be focusing on to be successful? >> Thanks for the compliment, Lisa. And I think this is a great relationship also in the journey. Topic is, is, is a - is a complex program where a lot of things have to fit together. But it was mentioning the resilience. The course, we call it finops, security operations and so on have to come together and have to work on spot. At the end, it's also, let's say, how we are able enabling our teams and how we are ramping out the skills of our teams to deal with these multidimensional, let's say environments. And this is something what we spend a lot of time in order to prepare, but also to bring up the people on a certain level that they can operate at. Because card guard handling is, is different than before. Because beforehand you have central operations team. They do everything for you. But in this world let's say we are also putting the responsibility of the run component of the absent to the - in the tribes and the application teams. And they have to do much more than before. On the other hand, we have first central rules. We have monitoring functions. We have support functions on that in order to best support them in their journey. So this is a hybrid between, let's say, what the teams have to do with the responsibility in the teams, but also with the central functions which are supporting them. And everything have to work together and goes hand in - right, to go hand-in-hand. >> Yeah. Yeah. And if, if I could just add Lisa really quick and and Werner hit the nail on the head, right? Because you cannot look at cloud operation the way we have traditionally looked at managed services. That's the key thing, right? You cannot, you know, traditional managed services you had L1, L2, L3 and then it goes into some sort of a vacuum and then all of a sudden somebody calls you at some point, right? >> Werner: Exactly. >> And it really has flipped, right? To, to Werner's point. And Werner hit that name on the head because you really have to understand. Bring an engineering led approach to make sure that the problems, you know, when you see an issue that you have some level of automation in terms of problem isolation. And then the problem is routed the right individual ie the application engineering team or the data engineering team for resolution in a rapid manner. Right? I think that the key - >> Yes. A very important point with that is said, yeah. So you cannot traditional transport let's say, the operation model what you have now into the cloud because this will not work, yeah. And finally at the end you will not benefit on the technology possibilities there. So super important point. My vision in the cloud and this is also something what we are working on is a sort of zero-ops environment, yeah? Because we're ultimately dealing with the automatization technologies and so on, you can that much - to much more compared to the traditional environment and the benefit of the cloud is: You can test it. You can give it feedback when it is not working, yeah? So it's a completely different operating model. What we try to establish in the cloud environment. >> So really what this seems like guys is is quite a delicate balance that you're solving for. Not the only delicate balance but Werner sticking with you. Talk to us about some of the challenges that you've had around cloud cost management in particular. Help us understand that. >> Thanks for the question. So in principle, we are doing very well on the cost side, surprisingly. And we also started the cloud journey that is said this is not the cost case. Because as I said before, let's say one of the pillars in the strategy strategy was the enablement of technology to the benefit of customer solutions to be adaptive, to be faster. But at the end it turned out that let's say with giving the responsibility of the operation to the dedicated team, they found they - they were working much closer to the cost, and let's say monitoring the cost, then we headed into traditional environments, yeah? I also saw some examples in the group where sort of gamification of the cost were going on. To say who can save more To say who can save more and make more much more out of that what you have in the cloud. And at the end we see that in minimum the cost are balance to the traditional environments in the data centers. But we also saw that let's say, the cost were brought down much more than before. So at the beginning we were relative conservative with the assumptions, yeah? But it turns out that we are really getting the benefit. The things are getting faster and also the costs are going down. And we see this in real cases. >> Yeah. And, and, and Lisa, if I could add something really quick, right? Because - You know, there's been a mad rush to the cloud, right? Everybody kind of, it was, you know, the buzz the buzz was let's get to the cloud. We'll start to realize all these savings. And all of a sudden, everything kind of magically gets better, right? And what we have seen is also, you know, companies or customers or enterprises that have started this journey about 5, 6 years ago and are about, you know, a few years into it. What we are realizing is the cloud costs have increased significantly to what their projections were early on. And the way they're trying to address the cloud cost is by creating a FinOps organization that's looking at, you know, the cost of cloud from a structure standpoint and support as a reactive measure. Saying, "Hey if we move from Azure or one provider to another is there any benefit? If we move certain applications from the cloud back to on-prem, is there any benefit?" When in fact, one of the things that we have noticed really is: The problem needs to shift left to the engineering teams. Because if you are designing the applications and the systems the right way to begin with, then you can manage the data cost issues or the cost overruns, right? So you design for the cloud as opposed to designing and then looking at how do we optimize cloud. >> So Adithya, you talked about the RBI use case as really kind of a template but also some of the challenges with respect to hybrid and multi-cloud are kind of like a chicken and egg scenario. Talk to us kind of like overall about how Hitachi is really helping customers address these challenges and maximize the benefits to get the flexibility to get the agility so that they can deliver what their end user customers are expecting. >> Yeah, yeah. So, so one of the things we are doing, Lisa, when we work with customers, is really trying to understand, you know, look at their entire portfolio of applications, right? And, and look at what the intent of the applications is between customer facing, external customer, internal customer, high availability, production, etc., right? And then we go through a methodology called E3 which is envision, enable and execute. Which is really envision what the end stage should be regardless of what the environment is, right? And then we enable, which is really kind of go through a proof of value to move a few workloads, to modernize, rearchitect, replatform, etc. And look at the benefit of that application on its destination. If it's a cloud - if it's a cloud service provider or if it's another data center, whatever it may be, right? And finally, you know, once we've proven the value and the benefit and and say and kind of monetize the, you know realize the value of it from an agility, from a cost, from security and resilience, etc. Then we go through the execution, which was look we look at the entire portfolio, the entire landscape. And we go through a very disciplined manner working with our customers to roadmap it. And then we execute in a very deliberate manner where you can see value every 2-3 months. Because gone the days when you can do things as a science project that took 2-3 years, right? We, we - Everyone wants to see value, want to see - wants to see progress, and most importantly we want to see cost benefit and agility sooner than later. >> Those are incredibly important outcomes. You guys have done a great job explaining what you're doing together. This sounds like a great relationship. All right, so my last question to both of you is: "If I'm a customer and I'm planning a cloud transformation for my company, what are the two things you want me to remember and consider as I plan this? Werner, we'll start with you. >> I would pick up two things, yeah? The first one is: When you are organizing your company in HR way, then cloud is the HR technology for the HR transformation. Because HR teams needs HR technology. And the second important thing is, what I would say is: Cloud is a large scale and fast moving technology enabler to the company. So if your company is going forward to say: Technology is their enabler tool from a future business then cloud can support this journey. >> Excellent. I'm going to walk away with those. And Adithya, same question to you. I'm a, I'm a customer. I'm at an organization. I'm planning a cloud transformation. Top two things you want me to walk away with. >> Yeah. And I think Werner kind of actually touched on that in the second one, which is: it's not a tech, just an IT or a technology initiative. It is a business initiative, right? Because ultimately what you do from this cloud journey should drive, you know, should lead into business transformation or help your business grow top line or drive margin expansion, etc. So couple of things I would say, right? One is, you know, get Being and prioritize. Work with your business owners, with, you know with the cross-functional team not just the technology team. That's one. The second thing is: as the technology team or the IT team shepherds this journey, you know, keep everyone informed and engaged as you go through this journey. Because as you go through moving workloads modernizing workload, there is an impact to, you know receivables through omnichannel experiences the way customers interact and transact with you, right? And that comes with making making sure your businesses are aware your business stakeholders are aware. So in turn the end customers are aware. So you know, it's not a one and done from an engagement, it's a journey. And bring in the right experts. Talk to people who've done it, done this before, who have kind of stepped in all the pitfalls so you don't have to, right? That's the key. >> That's great advice. That's great advice for anything in life, I think. You talk about the collaboration, the importance of the business and the technology folks coming together. It really has to be - It's a delicate balance as we said before but it really has to be a holistic collaborative approach. Guys, thank you so much for joining me talking through what HitachiVantara and RBI are doing together. It sounds like you're well into this journey and it sounds like it's going quite well. We thank you so much for your insights and your perspectives. >> Thank you, Lisa. Werner, thank you again. >> Good stuff guys. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. Thank you so much for watching our event: Build Your Cloud Center of Excellence. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone, welcome to this event: Build Your Cloud Center of Excellence. I'm your host, Lisa Martin, and I have two guests here with me today to talk about the hybrid cloud, the multi-cloud trends, and specifically the complexity. While we know these trends provide agility and flexibility for customers, they also bring in complexity. And this session is going to focus on exploring that with RBI and HitachiVantara. Please welcome my guests, Adithya Sastry the SVP of Digital Solutions at HitachiVantara and Werner Mayer, head of group core IT and head of group data at RBI International. Guys, welcome to the program. >> Thank you Lisa. Werner, nice to see you again. >> Great to see you both. >> And Werner, we're going to start with you. Talk about RBI. Tell the audience a little bit about what the business is and then we're going to get into your cloud transformation journey over the last couple of years. >> Yes, thank you. So Raiffeisen Bank International is international working banking groups. So our core markets are Central Eastern European, Central Eastern Europe and Austria. And we are serving around 50 million clients in this market. So we active in 13 markets. >> Got it. Talk to me, Werner about the cloud transformation journey that RBI has been on over the last couple of years and some of the complexities that you've experienced as you've launched it. >> Sure. Thank you for the question. So in 2020, we decided that we have to renew our IT strategy. And the aim of the strategy was to change the organization in a way that it can react and adapt fast to the future challenges. So one of the important pillars for us was that we are adapting fast also for new technologies. And this was core pillar in our strategy. So we're searching for technologies which are fit in to our HR transformation. And we found that the cloud and the public cloud environment fits to this venture. So we tested that. We are building up also the competent centers for that and also established the group cloud platform for that. Because our invoice to onboard our international group with the 13 units to this group cloud platform. So that means we have a lot to do to hardening the platforms in terms of security to put in. We have standard for that. We have to introduce large scale programs to train hundreds of engineers. We tested the approach, We convinced the top management and we implemented this, this program. So one of the highlights was, of course, also the the safeguarding of the Ukraine, let's say, banking environment. So we had to lift and shift the complete bank in three months. And it shows that let's say our platforms works. And let's say the approach is proven that we can scale it over the group. >> That's a big challenge. A lot of complexity especially with some of the global things going on. Adithya, these challenges are, are not unique to RBI. A lot of your customers are facing challenges with complexity around cloud management, cloud ops. What can you unpack was the real issue is here? >> Yeah, Lisa, absolutely. And you know, before I answer your question, I do want to, you know, just say a couple of things about Raiffeisen Bank. And you know, we've had the pleasure of working with them for about a year, a little bit more than a year now. And, and, and the way they approach the cloud transformation journey is - should be a template for a lot of the organizations in terms of the preparation in terms of understanding, you know. How other companies have done it and what are the pitfalls. What's worked, and really what's the recipe for their, you know, journey, right? Which is very unique because, you know, you look at you know, being present across 30 different countries within central and eastern Europe as Werner said. And the complexities of dealing with local regulations, GDPR and all these other issues that come with it, right? And not to mention the language variation from country to country. So, you know, phenomenal story there. The journey and the journey still goes, right Werner? It's not complete yet. But Lisa, to your question, you know. When we look at, you know, the complexities of this transformation, that most modern enterprises are going through. It's not very unique, right? What is unique for a Raiffeisen Bank is - has been the preparation. But as you get into this journey of moving workloads to cloud, be it refactoring, modernizing, migrating, etc. One of the things that really is often overlooked is: "Are my applications applications and data workloads resilient on, on the, on the cloud?" Meaning are they - How is the performance? Are they just running or are they performing with high availability to meet your customers goals? Is it scalable? And are my cost in line with what I projected when I moved prep, right? Because that's one of the areas we are seeing where you know, what enterprises projected from a cost savings to what they're realizing a year and a half into the journey is a pretty big delta, right? And, and, and a lot of it is dependent on are the cloud - are the applications and the workloads cloud, designed for the cloud? Or are they designed for on-prem which you just move to the cloud. >> So Werner, it sounds like what Adithya said is a compliment to, to you guys and the team at RBI in terms of this being a template for managing complexity. Give us, Werner, your perspective in terms of modern cloud ops. What's in? What's out? What is it that customers really need to be focusing on to be successful? >> Thanks for the compliment, Lisa. And I think this is a great relationship also in the journey. Topic is, is, is a - is a complex program where a lot of things have to fit together. But it was mentioning the resilience. The course, we call it finops, security operations and so on have to come together and have to work on spot. At the end, it's also, let's say, how we are able enabling our teams and how we are ramping out the skills of our teams to deal with these multidimensional, let's say environments. And this is something what we spend a lot of time in order to prepare, but also to bring up the people on a certain level that they can operate at. Because card guard handling is, is different than before. Because beforehand you have central operations team. They do everything for you. But in this world let's say we are also putting the responsibility of the run component of the absent to the - in the tribes and the application teams. And they have to do much more than before. On the other hand, we have first central rules. We have monitoring functions. We have support functions on that in order to best support them in their journey. So this is a hybrid between, let's say, what the teams have to do with the responsibility in the teams, but also with the central functions which are supporting them. And everything have to work together and goes hand in - right, to go hand-in-hand. >> Yeah. Yeah. And if, if I could just add Lisa really quick and and Werner hit the nail on the head, right? Because you cannot look at cloud operation the way we have traditionally looked at managed services. That's the key thing, right? You cannot, you know, traditional managed services you had L1, L2, L3 and then it goes into some sort of a vacuum and then all of a sudden somebody calls you at some point, right? >> Werner: Exactly. >> And it really has flipped, right? To, to Werner's point. And Werner hit that name on the head because you really have to understand. Bring an engineering led approach to make sure that the problems, you know, when you see an issue that you have some level of automation in terms of problem isolation. And then the problem is routed the right individual ie the application engineering team or the data engineering team for resolution in a rapid manner. Right? I think that the key - >> Yes. A very important point with that is said, yeah. So you cannot traditional transport let's say, the operation model what you have now into the cloud because this will not work, yeah. And finally at the end you will not benefit on the technology possibilities there. So super important point. My vision in the cloud and this is also something what we are working on is a sort of zero-ops environment, yeah? Because we're ultimately dealing with the automatization technologies and so on, you can that much - to much more compared to the traditional environment and the benefit of the cloud is: You can test it. You can give it feedback when it is not working, yeah? So it's a completely different operating model. What we try to establish in the cloud environment. >> So really what this seems like guys is is quite a delicate balance that you're solving for. Not the only delicate balance but Werner sticking with you. Talk to us about some of the challenges that you've had around cloud cost management in particular. Help us understand that. >> Thanks for the question. So in principle, we are doing very well on the cost side, surprisingly. And we also started the cloud journey that is said this is not the cost case. Because as I said before, let's say one of the pillars in the strategy strategy was the enablement of technology to the benefit of customer solutions to be adaptive, to be faster. But at the end it turned out that let's say with giving the responsibility of the operation to the dedicated team, they found they - they were working much closer to the cost, and let's say monitoring the cost, then we headed into traditional environments, yeah? I also saw some examples in the group where sort of gamification of the cost were going on. To say who can save more To say who can save more and make more much more out of that what you have in the cloud. And at the end we see that in minimum the cost are balance to the traditional environments in the data centers. But we also saw that let's say, the cost were brought down much more than before. So at the beginning we were relative conservative with the assumptions, yeah? But it turns out that we are really getting the benefit. The things are getting faster and also the costs are going down. And we see this in real cases. >> Yeah. And, and, and Lisa, if I could add something really quick, right? Because - You know, there's been a mad rush to the cloud, right? Everybody kind of, it was, you know, the buzz the buzz was let's get to the cloud. We'll start to realize all these savings. And all of a sudden, everything kind of magically gets better, right? And what we have seen is also, you know, companies or customers or enterprises that have started this journey about 5, 6 years ago and are about, you know, a few years into it. What we are realizing is the cloud costs have increased significantly to what their projections were early on. And the way they're trying to address the cloud cost is by creating a FinOps organization that's looking at, you know, the cost of cloud from a structure standpoint and support as a reactive measure. Saying, "Hey if we move from Azure or one provider to another is there any benefit? If we move certain applications from the cloud back to on-prem, is there any benefit?" When in fact, one of the things that we have noticed really is: The problem needs to shift left to the engineering teams. Because if you are designing the applications and the systems the right way to begin with, then you can manage the data cost issues or the cost overruns, right? So you design for the cloud as opposed to designing and then looking at how do we optimize cloud. >> So Adithya, you talked about the RBI use case as really kind of a template but also some of the challenges with respect to hybrid and multi-cloud are kind of like a chicken and egg scenario. Talk to us kind of like overall about how Hitachi is really helping customers address these challenges and maximize the benefits to get the flexibility to get the agility so that they can deliver what their end user customers are expecting. >> Yeah, yeah. So, so one of the things we are doing, Lisa, when we work with customers, is really trying to understand, you know, look at their entire portfolio of applications, right? And, and look at what the intent of the applications is between customer facing, external customer, internal customer, high availability, production, etc., right? And then we go through a methodology called E3 which is envision, enable and execute. Which is really envision what the end stage should be regardless of what the environment is, right? And then we enable, which is really kind of go through a proof of value to move a few workloads, to modernize, rearchitect, replatform, etc. And look at the benefit of that application on its destination. If it's a cloud - if it's a cloud service provider or if it's another data center, whatever it may be, right? And finally, you know, once we've proven the value and the benefit and and say and kind of monetize the, you know realize the value of it from an agility, from a cost, from security and resilience, etc. Then we go through the execution, which was look we look at the entire portfolio, the entire landscape. And we go through a very disciplined manner working with our customers to roadmap it. And then we execute in a very deliberate manner where you can see value every 2-3 months. Because gone the days when you can do things as a science project that took 2-3 years, right? We, we - Everyone wants to see value, want to see - wants to see progress, and most importantly we want to see cost benefit and agility sooner than later. >> Those are incredibly important outcomes. You guys have done a great job explaining what you're doing together. This sounds like a great relationship. All right, so my last question to both of you is: "If I'm a customer and I'm planning a cloud transformation for my company, what are the two things you want me to remember and consider as I plan this? Werner, we'll start with you. >> I would pick up two things, yeah? The first one is: When you are organizing your company in HR way, then cloud is the HR technology for the HR transformation. Because HR teams needs HR technology. And the second important thing is, what I would say is: Cloud is a large scale and fast moving technology enabler to the company. So if your company is going forward to say: Technology is their enabler tool from a future business then cloud can support this journey. >> Excellent. I'm going to walk away with those. And Adithya, same question to you. I'm a, I'm a customer. I'm at an organization. I'm planning a cloud transformation. Top two things you want me to walk away with. >> Yeah. And I think Werner kind of actually touched on that in the second one, which is: it's not a tech, just an IT or a technology initiative. It is a business initiative, right? Because ultimately what you do from this cloud journey should drive, you know, should lead into business transformation or help your business grow top line or drive margin expansion, etc. So couple of things I would say, right? One is, you know, get Being and prioritize. Work with your business owners, with, you know with the cross-functional team not just the technology team. That's one. The second thing is: as the technology team or the IT team shepherds this journey, you know, keep everyone informed and engaged as you go through this journey. Because as you go through moving workloads modernizing workload, there is an impact to, you know receivables through omnichannel experiences the way customers interact and transact with you, right? And that comes with making making sure your businesses are aware your business stakeholders are aware. So in turn the end customers are aware. So you know, it's not a one and done from an engagement, it's a journey. And bring in the right experts. Talk to people who've done it, done this before, who have kind of stepped in all the pitfalls so you don't have to, right? That's the key. >> That's great advice. That's great advice for anything in life, I think. You talk about the collaboration, the importance of the business and the technology folks coming together. It really has to be - It's a delicate balance as we said before but it really has to be a holistic collaborative approach. Guys, thank you so much for joining me talking through what HitachiVantara and RBI are doing together. It sounds like you're well into this journey and it sounds like it's going quite well. We thank you so much for your insights and your perspectives. >> Thank you, Lisa. Werner, thank you again. >> Good stuff guys. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. Thank you so much for watching our event: Build Your Cloud Center of Excellence. (upbeat music)

>> Hello, everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Compute Engineered For Your Hybrid World, sponsored by HPE and Intel. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. I'm pleased to be joined by Krista Satterthwaite, SVP and general manager for HPE Mainstream Compute, and Lisa Spelman, corporate vice president, and general manager of Intel Xeon Products, here to discuss the major announcement. Thanks for joining us today. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having us. >> Great to be here. >> Great to see you guys. And exciting announcement. Krista, Compute continues to evolve to meet the challenges of businesses. We're seeing more and more high performance, more Compute, I mean, it's getting more Compute every day. You guys officially announced this next generation of ProLiant Gen11s in November. Can you share and talk about what this means? >> Yeah, so first of all, thanks so much for having me. I'm really excited about this announcement. And yeah, in November we announced our HPE ProLiant NextGen, and it really was about one thing. It's about engineering Compute for customers' hybrid world. And we have three different design principles when we designed this generation. First is intuitive cloud operating experience, and that's with our HPE GreenLake for Compute Ops Management. And that's all about management that is simple, unified, and automated. So it's all about seeing everything from one council. So you have a customer that's using this, and they were so surprised at how much they could see, and they were excited because they had servers in multiple locations. This was a hotel, so they had servers everywhere, and they can now see all their different firmware levels. And with that type of visibility, they thought their planning was going to be much, much easier. And then when it comes to updates, they're much quicker and much easier, so it's an exciting thing, whether you have servers just in the data center, or you have them distributed, you could see and do more than you ever could before with HPE GreenLake for Compute Ops Management. So that's number one. Number two is trusted security by design. Now, when we launched our HPE ProLiant Gen10 servers years ago, we launched groundbreaking innovative security features, and we haven't stopped, we've continued to enhance that every since then. And this generation's no exception. So we have new innovations around security. Security is a huge focus area for us, and so we're excited about delivering those. And then lastly, performance for every workload. We have a huge increase in performance with HPE ProLiant Gen11, and we have customers that are clamoring for this additional performance right now. And what's great about this is that, it doesn't matter where the bottleneck is, whether it's CPU, memory or IO, we have advancements across the board that are going to make real differences in what customers are going to be able to get out of their workloads. And then we have customers that are trying to build headroom in. So even if they don't need a today, what they put in their environment today, they know needs to last and need to be built for the future. >> That's awesome. Thanks for the recap. And that's great news for folks looking to power those workloads, more and more optimizations needed. I got to ask though, how is what you guys are announcing today, meeting these customer needs for the future, and what are your customers looking for and what are HPE and Intel announcing today? >> Yeah, so customers are doing more than ever before with their servers. So they're really pushing things to the max. I'll give you an example. There's a retail customer that is waiting to get their hands on our ProLiant Gen11 servers, because they want to do video streaming in every one of their retail stores and what they're building, when they're building what they need, we started talking to 'em about what their needs were today, and they were like, "Forget about what my needs are today. We're buying for headroom. We don't want to touch these servers for a while." So they're maxing things out, because they know the needs are coming. And so what you'll see with this generation is that we've built all of that in so that customers can deploy with confidence and know they have the headroom for all the things they want to do. The applications that we see and what people are trying to do with their servers is light years different than the last big announcement we had, which was our ProLiant Gen10 servers. People are trying to do more than ever before and they're trying to do that at the Edge as well as as the data center. So I'll tell you a little bit about the servers we have. So in partnership with Intel, we're really excited to announce a new batch of servers. And these servers feature the 4th Gen Intel Xeon scalable processors, bringing a lot more performance and efficiency. And I'll talk about the servers, one, the first one is a HPE ProLiant DL320 Gen11. Now, I told you about that retail customer that's trying to do video streaming in their stores. This is the server they were looking at. This server is a new server, we didn't have a Gen10 or a Gen10+ version of the server. This is a new server and it's optimized for Edge use cases. It's a rack-based server and it's very, very flexible. So different types of storage, different types of GPU configurations, really designed to take care of many, many use cases at the Edge and doing more at the Edge than ever before. So I mentioned video streaming, but also VDI and analytics at the Edge. The next two servers are some of our most popular servers, our HPE ProLiant DL360 Gen11, and that's our density-optimized server for enterprise. And that is getting an upgrade across the board as well, big, big improvements in terms of performance, and expansion. And for those customers that need even more expansion when it comes to, let's say, storage or accelerators then the DL 380 Gen11 is a server that's new as well. And that's really for folks that need more expandability than the DL360, which is a one use server. And then lastly, our ML350, which is a tower server. These tower servers are typically used at remote sites, branch offices and this particular server holds a world record for energy efficiency for tower servers. So those are some of the servers we have today that we're announcing. I also want to talk a little bit about our Cray portfolio. So we're announcing two new servers with our HPE Cray portfolio. And what's great about this is that these servers make super computing more accessible to more enterprise customers. These servers are going to be smaller, they're going to come in at lower price points, and deliver tremendous energy efficiency. So these are the Cray XD servers, and there's more servers to come, but these are the ones that we're announcing with this first iteration. >> Great stuff. I can talk about servers all day long, I love server innovation. It's been following for many, many years, and you guys know. Lisa, we'll bring you in. Servers have been powered by Intel Xeon, we've been talking a lot about the scalable processors. This is your 4th Gen, they're in Gen11 and you're at 4th Gen. Krista mentioned this generation's about Security Edge, which is essentially becoming like a data center model now, the Edges are exploding. What are some of the design principles that went into the 4th Gen this time around the scalable processor? Can you share the Intel role here? >> Sure. I love what Krista said about headroom. If there's anything we've learned in these past few years, it's that you can plan for today, and you can even plan for tomorrow, but your tomorrow might look a lot different than what you thought it was going to. So to meet these business challenges, as we think about the underlying processor that powers all that amazing server lineup that Krista just went through, we are really looking at delivering that increased performance, the power efficient compute and then strong security. And of course, attention to the overall operating cost of the customer environment. Intel's focused on a very workload-first approach to solving our customers' real problems. So this is the applications that they're running every day to drive their digital transformation, and we really like to focus our innovation, and leadership for those highest value, and also the highest growth workloads. Some of those that we've uniquely focused on in 4th Gen Xeon, our artificial intelligence, high performance computing, network, storage, and as well as the deployments, like you were mentioning, ranging from the cloud all the way out to the Edge. And those are all satisfied by 4th Gen Xeon scalable. So our strategy for architecting is based off of all of that. And in addition to doing things like adding core count, improving the platform, updating the memory and the IO, all those standard things that you do, we've invested deeply in delivering the industry's CPU with the most built-in accelerators. And I'll just give an example, in artificial intelligence with built-in AMX acceleration, plus the framework optimizations, customers can see a 10X performance improvement gen over gen, that's on both training and inference. So it further cements Xeon as the world's foundation for inference, and it now delivers performance equivalent of a modern GPU, but all within your CPU. The flexibility that, that opens up for customers is tremendous and it's so many new ways to utilize their infrastructure. And like Krista said, I just want to say that, that best-in-class security, and security solutions are an absolute requirement. We believe that starts at the hardware level, and we continue to invest in our security features with that full ecosystem support so that our customers, like HPE, can deliver that full stacked solution to really deliver on that promise. >> I love that scalable processor messaging too around the silicon and all those advanced features, the accelerators. AI's certainly seeing a lot of that in demand now. Krista, similar question to you on your end. How do you guys look at these, your core design principles around the ProLiant Gen11, and how that helps solve the challenges for your customers that are living in this hybrid world today? >> Yeah, so we see how fast things are changing and we kept that in mind when we decided to design this generation. We talked all already about distributed environments. We see the intensity of the requirements that are at the Edge, and that's part of what we're trying to address with the new platform that I mentioned. It's also part of what we're trying to address with our management, making sure that people can manage no matter where a server is and get a great experience. The other thing we're realizing when it comes to what's happening is customers are looking at how they operate. Many want to buy as a service and with HPE GreenLake, we see that becoming more and more popular. With HPE GreenLake, we can offer that to customers, which is really helpful, especially when they're trying to get new technology like this. Sometimes they don't have it in the budget. With something like HP GreenLake, there's no upfront costs so they can enjoy this technology without having to come up with a big capital outlay for it. So that's great. Another one is around, I liked what Lisa said about security starting at the hardware. And that's exactly, the foundation has to be secure, or you're starting at the wrong place. So that's also something that we feel like we've advanced this time around. This secure root of trust that we started in Gen10, we've extended that to additional partners, so we're excited about that as well. >> That's great, Krista. We're seeing and hearing a lot about customers challenges at the Edge. Lisa, I want to bring you back in on this one. What are the needs that you see at the Edge from an Intel perspective? How is Intel addressing the Edge? >> Yeah, thanks, John. You know, one of the best things about Xeon is that it can span workloads and environments all the way from the Edge back to the core data center all within the same software environment. Customers really love that portability. For the Edge, we have seen an explosion of use cases coming from all industries and I think Krista would say the same. Where we're focused on delivering is that performant-enough compute that can fit into a constrained environment, and those constraints can be physical space, they can be the thermal environment. The Network Edge has been a big focus for us. Not only adding features and integrating acceleration, but investing deeply in that software environment so that more and more critical applications can be ported to Xeon and HPE industry standard servers versus requiring expensive, proprietary systems that were quite frankly not designed for this explosion of use cases that we're seeing. Across a variety of Edge to cloud use cases, we have identified ways to provide step function improvements in both performance and that power efficiency. For example, in this generation, we're delivering an up to 2.9X average improvement in performance per watt versus not using accelerators, and up to 70 watt power savings per CPU opportunity with some unique power management features, and improve total cost of ownership, and just overall power- >> What's the closing thoughts? What should people take away from this announcement around scalable processors, 4th Gen Intel, and then Gen11 ProLiant? What's the walkaway? What's the main super thought here? >> So I can go first. I think the main thought is that, obviously, we have partnered with Intel for many, many years. We continue to partner this generation with years in the making. In fact, we've been working on this for years, so we're both very excited that it's finally here. But we're laser focused on making sure that customers get the most out of their workloads, the most out of their infrastructure, and that they can meet those challenges that people are throwing at 'em. I think IT is under more pressure than ever before and the demands are there. They're critical to the business success with digital transformation and our job is to make sure they have everything they need, and they could do and meet the business needs as they come at 'em. >> Lisa, your thoughts on this reflection point we're in right now? >> Well, I agree with everything that Krista said. It's just a really exciting time right now. There's a ton of challenges in front of us, but the opportunity to bring technology solutions to our customers' digital transformation is tremendous right now. I think I would also like our customers to take away that between the work that Intel and HPE have done together for generations, they have a community that they can trust. We are committed to delivering customer-led solutions that do solve these business transformation challenges that we know are in front of everyone, and we're pretty excited for this launch. >> Yeah, I'm super enthusiastic right now. I think you guys are on the right track. This title Compute Engineered for Hybrid World really kind of highlights the word, "Engineered." You're starting to see this distributed computing architecture take shape with the Edge. Cloud on-premise computing is everywhere. This is real relevant to your customers, and it's a great announcement. Thanks for taking the time and joining us today. >> Thank you. >> Yeah, thank you. >> This is the first episode of theCUBE's coverage of Compute Engineered For Your Hybrid World. Please continue to check out thecube.net, our site, for the future episodes where we'll discuss how to build high performance AI applications, transforming compute management experiences, and accelerating VDI at the Edge. Also, to learn more about the new HPE ProLiant servers with the 4th Gen Intel Xeon processors, you can go to hpe.com. And check out the URL below, click on it. I'm John Furrier at theCUBE. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech, enterprise coverage. (bright music)

the cube presents ignite 22. brought to you by Palo Alto Networks hey guys and girls welcome back to Las Vegas it's thecube we are live at Palo Alto networks ignite 22. this is day one of two days of cube coverage Lisa Martin here with Dave vellante Dave we've had great conversations today talking with Executives the partner ecosystem is evolving it's growing at Palo Alto networks going to be digging into that next well we heard a lot of talk about you know Palo Alto you know the goal 100 billion dollar you know market cap company and to me a way and I think a critical way in which you get there is partner with the ecosystem because you can't do it alone the power of many versus the resources of one agree completely agree we've got Carl Sutherland with us SVP of North America ecosystem sales at Palo Alto networks welcome to the cube thanks so much for having me it's great being here so here we are the first full day of the conference actually started yesterday with the partner Summit give the audience a flavor of the partner Summit who was there what was talked about what's the current voice of the partner these days yeah great questions so we had a 150 Partners from around the globe representing all of our different routes to Market and for us our partner Community is expanding we work with system integrators we work with gsis we work with service providers Distributors traditional value-added resellers so it was a whole host of partners that were there it was a c-level audience and we really talked about the direction of where we're going as a company how they can continue to invest with us and have greater success long term and so from a voice of the partner standpoint what they're here to do is share with us where they want to engage more how we can enable them to be successful you talked about the Power of One Versus a community we're really looking at a segment of the marketplace right now for us to scale and hit our aspirational goals we can't do it with Palo Alto Network employees we have an employee base of 12 000 people if you take our ecosystem it's over a hundred thousand employees so if we can get them aligned and selling and motivated it's going to be a good day for all of us what so what are they telling you where do they want to spend their time where do they want to add value where are they winning yeah that's a great question so there's a transformation that's going on right now in the partner Community what's happening is a lot of Partners going that are transitioning from what would be traditional transactional Partners or resale Partners to being services-led and the Market's driving them there and what I mean by that is that customers are in a desperate dire State needing assistance figuring out and solving these very complex security problems so if there is a subset of Partners out there that have the skill set and capabilities that can come in from a consultative standpoint help them to develop the structure through deployment a full-blown management and do life cycle management that's a tremendous value I mean the numbers you hear thrown around in the industry right now is up to seven million uh security I.T jobs right now that are out there the open head count is tremendous people can't hire people fast enough all of us in the industry are going through and trying to find early in career or college graduates so we can train quickly or cross-train from other segments to get them into cyber security so if our part of the community can continue to get skilled and expand it's only going to help and the cloud is obviously where does the cloud fit in Carl because you know a lot of the partners when the clouds really start on the Steep part of the s-curve are like we have an opportunity here and by the way if we don't transition our business we could get commoditized yes so that you know that but you were talking about the transactional we can help people move to the cloud and a big part of that has got to be we can secure them in the cloud because it's a more in a lot of ways you know Cloud security is great but in a lot of ways it adds complexity what are you hearing from the party yeah so we are fortunate at Palo Alto networks when you look across the three loud largest cloud service provider from a Google AWS and Microsoft Azure we're either their number one isv or absolutely their number one security ISP so we've got a great uh relationships with them now our partners are coming along and saying how do we transact how do we add value a lot of times that value to your question is wrapping services around it to make sure it's a successful deployment because exactly what you stated the complexity is an all-time high so how do we make sure that we can solve a complex problem in a short term while increasing their security posture and that's really the goal and so where there there's sometimes complexity and mystery there's opportunity and partners can be profitable in doing that I wrote a piece once chaos is cash I have a security you know the criminals and vendors as well yes yes where there is is challenge and complexity there is great opportunity yeah talk about some of the partner program Evolution and some of the things that were announced with respect to the next wave program just yesterday yeah so at next wave um the program's been around for 12 years we constantly are looking to make enhancements and how we make those enhancements are by going out and speaking with these partners and listening to what they need so I have the honor to get to represent what their needs are and how we bring it to market for them so a couple interesting announcements that we made yesterday first of all we announced a new structural format for the program which is really going to allow our different route to markets to have a program that's fit for them because in the past when we were just traditionally a firewall company when the ecosystem just meant resale it was an easy model to have it's complex right now sometimes it's resale sometimes it's influence sometimes its services only we really need to be flexible and credible so we announced a Services only path so if you are a consulting company if you are a insurance company and you want to bring opportunities and leads to Palo Alto Network and you want to provide the services if you're not interested in the transaction you don't want to get involved in that we now have a pathway for you to support you to enable you and Kennedy to give you recognition within Palo Alto networks from an alignment standpoint so we're super excited about that uh as I know you guys speak quite a bit about the managed Services industry so it's a red hot area within Palo Alto networks one of the needs out there was that all not all managed Service Partners are created equally and so some have fantastic capabilities some have gaps we were calling it a P2P part of the partner program within managed services so our two managed Services Partners can actually work together to solve the problem that the end user has and give them a better outcome and fill each other's gaps so candidly it's been going on for a while the partnering but we've never really recognized it so we really built a program around it and now are sponsoring and supporting it versus people doing it on a sidebar so those guys were here in force yesterday yes sir right and and so obviously a lot of energy I'm sure do you see a day where they're here in force on the show floor yeah and and how do you see that evolving so they are here enforcement just right here you see a few of them I'm looking at AWS who's our you know we are their largest isv I'm looking at CDW we had them on the floor is our if not largest second largest partner globally right now and continuing to grow at a rate well they will probably be our first billion dollar partner to think about the size and scale of that relationship and where we've come from um their name CDW don't they never really thought of CDW right as a as a security firm wow what a transformation but please carry on and think about that let's talk about CDW saying think about reach that CDW has it's a 23 billion dollar organization and in a way an inside out sales model meaning there's a tremendous reach they have from their inside sales team and the relationships that they have traditionally historically they were procurement relationships in a way and I said this to the CDW team they were the easy button in the past now what they're doing is they made Seven Acquisitions over the last two years all of them Services oriented so now they're coming in as a consultative Viewpoint and solving a lot of complex problems and I see Google Cloud right here another great partner for us that we continue to invest in we have a great amount of integration and Technology integration with them and so and those are the three that I'm seeing just looking over my left shoulder right if I turn around I'll probably name five more so the majority of this room are the partners that fall within our ecosystem today fantastic so okay so what's your vision for where you want to take this ecosystem because as I said at the top I mean ecosystems are sort of the Hallmark of a I guess you're not a cloud company see I think you of you as a cloud company and so okay good so and I know you don't own your own public cloud and you know your history is you had your own data centers but yeah but you're the security Cloud yeah and so a security Cloud any Cloud needs a great ecosystem so what's your vision for the ecosystem let's go you know five plus years out sure you we start with the end in mind and what I mean by that is we always start with the end user what's the end user's needs the end user today needs flexibility with how they consume the technology they need help in how they support and deploy the technology they need guidance in how they plan out for their future and what their growth is so what we're doing is building a very diverse set of Partners in our ecosystem that all have special skills that they bring to the table so when nikesh sits up here and talks about being a 10 billion or a 20 billion or a 50 billion dollar company we absolutely cannot do it without our ecosystem and without having a very diverse ecosystem that all has different skills that can help us scale because again Palo Alto does not want to be a services company right let's work with the people who are the best at that when we think about the deloittees and accentures and the value they have within the end user base and our joint customer base what a fantastic time to to partner together and solve those boardroom challenges and that's where I really see the vision is that at the boardroom we're building out a plan that's three to five years that's going to continue to increase their security posture because we're not thinking if we're not forward thinking like that will be left behind because the Bad actors are thinking about how they find the different areas to penetrate they're getting so sophisticated the badocracy adversaries they are well funded they're motivated Grant the ransomware attack numbers in terms of the Velocity the complexity yes no longer are we going to get if it's when yeah uh big challenge for organizations Acro across I mean really across an organization regardless of Industry are you guys having any conversations with boards in the partner organization to help align the board with the executive level and really not just have security as a board level initiative but actually being able to execute a strategy yeah and you you nailed it it's not an initiative the initiative to me means there's a beginning and an end right a strategy means there's going to be a comprehensive approach how you continue to improve and we are very fortunate that a lot of our largest Partners around the globe have that position within the boards where they are the trusted advisor so what we're doing now is enabling them and giving them the skills so they can have a more comprehensive conversation around our platform approach around the challenges you know BJ I knew who was with you earlier today likes to say that the average customer he goes and sees has 50 to 70 disparate Technologies within their environment how do you manage that how do you maintain it how do you do renewals oh and by the way most likely the people who actually initially procured that aren't with you anymore they're in a different company so the need for a platform approach is there more so than ever but the decision for the platform quite often has to come from the most senior levels within the organization because again I'm going to go back to your what was your chaos line that you said chaos is Cash chaos is Cash well also chaos is job security so if you're at at the lower level within an organization that chaos and that magic gives you a little job security but that's a short term long term you really need to think about how you're protecting the environment holistically so it is a boardroom decision down that we need to have and you know that chaos the the motivation for that piece that I wrote was from the criminals standpoint right and then I was like okay but there's great opportunities for the technology industry but but I think that you know where we're headed I wonder if I get your thoughts on thoughts on this Carlos we always talk about the Board Room I think we're going now Beyond it here I am you know I'm hypersensitive about my security I got password managers two-factor authentication I don't want SMS based two-factor authentication I want my own authenticator and that's still not enough yeah I got air gaps yeah you know for my crypto you know and I'm super paranoid my point is I think the the individuals are getting much more Savvy about security why because we've all been hacked you know it's like when you lost your data in the because you weren't backed up you know that never happens anymore it's in the cloud or you know some people have multiple backups so it's it's becoming a cultural Trend beyond the board and it's because of the board lord said hey this is really important and so I think it's not only top down I think you're going to see bottom up and middle out and the exciting part for Palo Alto networks is and maybe for you as well is there any more exciting environment to talk about that's rapidly changing and constantly changing you could come back next week and our conversation is going to change as far as what we're doing we constantly need to be thinking three steps ahead of where we're going to move and be flexible and dynamic enough to change and that's what's going to keep us ahead of the economy yeah there's no segment as Dynamic I mean data is dynamic but not as fast changing as cyber I mean because of the adversary as you mentioned I mean so smart so now now they have open adversary ecosystems I mean the adversaries are building ecosystems right absolutely insane I've got peers that are bad guys yeah right right chaos is Cash what's your favorite partner story that you think really demonstrates the value of the ecosystem that Palo Alto networks has built yeah so without sharing names I'll talk about a large U.S national partner that was very uh that was founded on a networking business and partnered with a very large networking company and built that business and was successful doing that they wanted to Pivot into the security space and very early on they made a commitment to Paulo and Ulta networks to say we're going to learn we're going to invest we're going to align with your sales force and we're going to work together and right now they are our largest partner globally and they grew 70 year over year wow so think about that this is not on a small base we're talking about a half a billion dollars in Revenue growing at 70 year over year because to your point earlier it wasn't an initiative it was a strategy and they're executing on the strategy so I tell a lot of we call War Stories like that to other partners that are looking to invest from different markets it could be a large service provider that's you know trying to transform themselves into a security player and talk about the potential of what it could be in for their Marketplace and by the way I say publicly quite often Palo Alto networks will be your most profitable relationship that you have because of the total addressable Market that we're going after because of the solutions that we bring to Market and because of the opportunity within the end users right now and we're excited I want to come back to the mssp in that in its context so we've seen the rise of the mssp and particularly you know we were talking earlier I think it was with Wendy that uh no it was with CDW like 50 of the organizations in North America don't even have a sock yeah right so they need a service provider to come out so you said we you don't want to be in the services business right you're a product company right and that's from a financial standpoint that's phenomenal you're roughly 50 billion dollar market cap company let's let's call it six billion in Revenue so that's a nice Revenue multiple 8X you know and and and the Market's down so you're a 10x Revenue multiple company typically services companies are a 1x or a 2X are you seeing a change there where technology is giving these service providers operating leverage where they're able to scale whether it's because of the cloud because of the Partnerships the Eco would you call it before the the peer-to-peer ecosystem yes like the Gap fillers yes are you do you see the economics of services changing yeah from a baseline economic standpoint not looking at the valuations but let's look at it from a an opportunity to be profitable with Palo Alto networks we know if you are just doing the transaction you have a certain range of margin that you're going to make in the opportunity we know if you wrap services around it you're going to get 3x to 4X that margin we know that if it's managed services and there's life cycle management you're talking 5x to 8X that initial transaction and by the way it's recurring revenue for them so when you think about it if you just do a transaction you're only recurring revenue is a renewal that's predictable but it's not extremely profitable now we're saying the operating leverage you get is if you wrap that services and you're going to have an increased opportunity for a greater margin and it's sticky it's hard to replace a partner who's adding value to your team and A lot of times you walk in the end user you can't tell who the partner is and who the end user is because they are one team that's value yes and that's going to drive ebit yep for your partners and that's going to drive valuation you know you know I want to come back to valuation not that I'm not you can do that okay but because I was I predicted I do my prediction post every year and I predicted last year that we're going to see you know a Spate of MSS mssps I predicted you're going to see someone go public nobody's going public these days but I still think it's a great business yeah that's an untapped opportunity it's not an 8X or it's not a software marginal economics or but it's really sticky super high value yeah and I think it has you know long-term potential yeah to your point if you want to talk valuations for a second let's look at what's happened to the marketplace over the last 12 to 18 months the large majority of the non-public partners that we work with have taken on Capital from private Equity the private Equity that has come in has challenged them to go through a transformation that transformation is you we need you to be Services LED and that service is value because they believe there's going to is going to be a great greater evaluation from that end and they'll be able to scale and grow and stay ahead of the market doing that so when we have conversations when I have conversations yes I'm talking about the technology and the direction of the company but I'm also in there as a consultant saying where's the direction of your company and how do we have this great platform and how do we build it into your business and you wrap services around it and those are the conversations that CEOs want to have when I'm sitting down with our partner CEOs I bet they don't want to talk about our product being better than someone else's product they want to talk about the direction and health of their business yeah it's their business that's a business discussion business decision and they're thinking about okay what's my five-year strategic plan because they got to make bets yeah they're going to bet on a platform that they can add value to that creates that flywheel effect and they get a bet on your ecosystem as well correct oh correct absolutely good to be the leader it's good to be a leader and you know I'm sure as you've heard a few times we believe that economic headwinds are going to favor the market leaders and economic headwinds are going to favor the platform approach so we're going in more aggressive with our partner Community than ever before and there's just so much energy and excitement I feel like I keep on using that term over and over again but that's really what we walk away with last question for you is we have about 30 seconds left a lot of momentum in the partner ecosystem as you've described eloquently what's next what's next what's next yeah so when I I rolled out the strategy for what's next and what it is is a foundational platform that is going to allow flexibility for the partners and for them to decide where they want to invest and it can be in new areas it can be I went online closer with the cloud service providers it could be I want to build a managed Services business can you help us do this it could be I want to go through and I want to drive greater penetration into geographical areas we haven't been before so again we're almost acting as a consultant looking at what they're going from the direction and building a program and a platform where we can grow and work with them it's exciting it's fun it's great highly collaborative highly collaborative highly collaborative thank you for joining us on the program on the partner program the ecosystem Better Together what you guys are doing and ultimately how it benefits the end user customer we really appreciate your insights excellent thank you thank you so much appreciate it all right our pleasure for our guests and Dave vellante I'm Lisa Martin you're watching the cube the leader in live Enterprise and emerging Tech coverage [Music]

>> Narrator: theCUBE presents Ignite 22. Brought to you by Palo Alto Networks. >> Hey, welcome back to Las Vegas. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. This is day two of theCUBE's coverage of Palo Alto Ignite 2022. Dave we're just talking about how many times we're in Vegas. And we were here two weeks ago with our guest who's back in Alumni. And it's a blur, right? >> It's true, I lost count. Luckily I'm not flying red eye tonight. So that's good. >> I'm impressed. >> Excited about that. >> Yeah >> I'm actually going to enjoy the, nightlife here for a period of time. And, you know, we were at re-Invent. >> Yeah. >> And what a difference. This is nice and relaxed. You have time. You're not getting bumped in the hallway. >> Right. >> A lot of time for learning. So it's been great show. >> It's been great. And one of the things that we've been talking about is the supply chain. Securing the modern software supply chain is really complicated. We've got an Alumni back with us, to talk about what Palo Alto is doing in that respect. Ankur Shah joins us. The SVP and GM of Cloud Security at Palo Alto Networks. Welcome back. >> Yeah, happy to be back. Good to see you again. Dave and Lisa. >> It's been two long weeks. >> Ankur: I know. It's been two weeks, yeah >> Dave: It's kind of crazy. I mean, ReInvent really was a blur. And it's like you had everything coming at you. And there was obviously a big chunk of security, but you. It was just so much to absorb. >> Yeah. >> Right? >> Yeah, and I couldn't get into any of the sessions versus at Ignite. I mean, you could, you could learn a lot. To your point Dave. And 70,000 people versus 3000 in change. Big difference. >> Dave: Yeah. >> Lisa: Huge difference. >> Yeah. >> Lisa: Huge difference. So we touched on the Cider acquisition. >> Ankur: Yeah. >> Which was announced the intent to acquire last month. Let's dig into a little bit more of that, and then some of the great things that had been announced. >> Ankur: Yeah. >> In the last couple of days. >> Oh, absolutely. So, this is something that we have been marinating for last nine months. Thinking about how best to secure supply chain. And this is software supply chain. The modern application software is fairly complex. You know, back in the days when I was a developer, it was a simple three tier application. Ship the code once a year, et cetera. But now with microservices, new architectures, Kubernetes Public Cloud, we talked about this. It's getting super complicated, and the customers are really worried about securing their entire supply chain. Which is nothing but the software pipeline. And so we started looking at a whole bunch of companies and Cider really stood out. I mean, they had, they were the innovators in this space. Very early days, we've seen supply chain attack. But there hasn't been a really good and strong solution in that space. And Cider just delivered that incredible team. Great technology, super excited about what that integration will look like. in the coming quarters. >> What do we need to know about them? I mean, I'll be honest with you, I wasn't familiar with Cider until I saw you guys made the announcement of the intent to acquire them. What, what should we know about them? Why Cider? What was it that attracted you to them? >> Ankur: Yeah, so, you know, we have a history of technology acquisitions as you know, over the last four years, just in the public cloud. We acquire over half a a dozen companies, small and large. And typically we are always looking for companies who have the next gen technology available. Technology that is more in tune with how application software is going to look like in future. So we're not always going after companies that are making you know, tens of hundreds of millions of dollars in a year and all. We're looking for the right tech. The future. And that's what we found in Cider. Like they have a really strong application security background. And AppSec just broadly speaking, supply chain is part of it. But application security, just broadly speaking, is right for disruption. You've got a lot of vendors, who have been around for like last two decades. Old school stuff, lots and lots of false positives. So we've been bolstering, beefing up our portfolio in the application security space. And Cider really fits right nicely into it. Because it can like I said, secure a lot of technology and tooling, that software developers use as part of their software supply chain. So, great founding team, great technology. It was a perfect fit. >> Talk about integration. We spoke with Nikesh yesterday, with Nir, with a whole bunch of folks. Lee this morning. BJ yesterday as well. And one of the things that seems to stick out at me. With all the shows that we do, is the focus that Palo Alto has on ensuring that it's making the right acquisitions. But that it's the integration, is really seems to be like leading part of the strategy. That seems to be a little bit of a differentiator to me. >> Yeah, it absolutely is. There are two ways to integrate a technology into an existing platform. And Prisma Cloud is a platform as you know. Code-to-cloud, CNAPP platform as we call it. One is just kind of slotted in, put the whole thing in a box. And that's basically making one plus one equal to two. We're looking for high leverage in integrations, whereby once that integration comes along. It makes the rest of the platform even better and superior. It makes that technology look even better. So that's why there's a lot of focus on ensuring that we're delivering the right type of integration, that delivers instant customer value. And that makes the overall platform even superior. So customers don't feel like hey, like there's just one more add-on, on top of the other thing. >> Lisa: Right, not a bolt on. >> So that's why there's a lot of focus on that. Getting the strategy nailed. Because the founding teams generally have a preconceived notion about how the world looks like. Then they understand how Prisma cloud and Palo Alto Networks think about it. And then, we sort of merge the two ideas, and build something that's incredible. So I am, we're spending a lot of time in integration. That honeymoon phase of like, let's high five acquisitions done, that's over. Now it's the grinding work of actually getting this right. And you know, getting hundreds and thousands of customers. >> Well I like how you don't have the private equity mentality. It's not about EBITDA and cashflow. We'll take care of that. >> Ankur: Yeah. >> You know, it's about getting that integration. Getting that flywheel effect, inside the platform. You know, we said one plus one equals, maybe even more than two. Can you explain Prisma Cloud Secrets Security? What is that all about? What do we need to know about that? >> Ankur: Absolutely. So, the developers, you know generally store some stuff in the code repo for their automation work to build application. And that thing, the API keys or as Secrets are stored in code repo. It shouldn't be. Or even if they are, they should be encrypted, or locked down and things of that nature. But, you know, the need for speed trumps everything else. Developers want to go fast. And sometimes they're like, okay well. I guess my application needs this particular, you know API access token or secret. I'm just going to stick it in the code. Now the challenge with that is that, if somebody gets hold of your code repo. Now not only is your code repo, which has all your sensitive data. Your code is the life and blood of a technology company. That's in trouble. But also those secrets and API access keys can be used to log into your cloud accounts. And there you may have sensitive customer data. Everything that you have as a technology company stored in that public cloud accounts. So that's the worry. It's usually the initial access for the kill chain. Because that's where the attacks start. Let me get the secret, let me get the API access key. And let me see what I can do in public cloud. So we are now giving customers the visibility into where the secrets are stored. More importantly, it just right there on developer's face. In the code repo as they're checking in the code. They say why, hey, there's a secret here. Are you sure you want to, you want to keep it like this, no? Okay, well then you can either encrypt it, or just get rid of it. So we're making, we're bringing security where the developers are in their code repo, et cetera. >> So I can see a lot of developers saying, yeah, go ahead, encrypt it. So I don't have to do anything else, you know, extra. It's almost, the analogy is a very small you know, version of this. Its like, use a password manager. You store all your passwords in your contacts on your phone, right? I mean, somebody gets a hold of your contacts, you're screwed. >> Ankur: That's exactly right. >> And so, but I could still see a lot of developers say, check in the box. Say, yeah just encrypt it, leave it there. But you're saying best practice is to not to do that, right? >> Yeah, usually you're not supposed to, you know, store all your secrets, et cetera in code repo to begin with. But if you do, you know, you use a key wall like technology to really encrypt it and store it in a secret manner, yeah. >> Dave: There's an old saying, bad user behavior trump's great security every time. >> Ankur: Every time. >> But this is an example where, we know you're going to have bad behavior. So we're going to protect the bad behavior. >> Yeah, and actually, sorry Lisa, just to that point. The bad user behavior trumps good security. The classic example, this happened three weeks ago. Three, four weeks ago, where Dropbox, one of the file sharing companies there. 120 plus code repos were exposed. And the way their attack started, was a simple social engineering attack. Bad user behavior. There was an email, hey, like your passwords are updated for your, you know, this code plugin. Can you enter the password? And boom, now you have access to the code repo. And now if you have secrets inside of it, now, you know all bets are off. >> Are there hard-coded secrets versus like, I mean, like I think like, like you were saying, Dave. Like usernames and passwords and tokens, versus like soft coded secrets. >> Ankur: It's, I think it, this is more so two forms of it, you know. The most primary one is what we call the API access keys. And this keys are used to access cloud accounts, workloads and things of that nature. But there are actually secret secrets. Could be database login passwords, et cetera. The application is using it to spin up databases. Now, you know, you have access to the data stores. Any other application, there's a login password, all of that stuff. So it's less about the user password, but more the application and databases and things of that nature. >> Dave: So again, and, again, everybody should be using password managers. But when you use a password manager, it's going to give you a long list of passwords, that are either been compromised or are weak. And you just go uh, okay. So can you help? How do you help customers identify what the high risk? You know, API, you know, access are versus those ones that they may not have to worry about. >> Ankur: Yeah, look. You know, secrets aside. Risk prioritization is one of the biggest topics that our customers have across the board, in cloud security. All the security vendors are really, really good at one thing, generating alerts. Everybody does it. They generate an alert. You know, your ring camera, if you've got one. I mean this pop up every day, like every minute rather. Well like can you prioritize it for me? What should I really look at it? So that's a number one thing. What Prisma Cloud does is, you know, contextualize it. What the real risk is? They can tell you like, hey, here's the kill chain. If this thing, you know, goes to public internet. These are the potential exposures that you have. So we provide a prioritized risk of critical alerts that customers have to take care of before they can start taking care of more hygiene type of stuff, right? So that's how we do it. Like we leverage a lot of technology. We apply a lot of context. We tell you like, hey, this code repo is not protected by multifactor authentication. And then there's a secret inside. Are you sure, you know, you don't want to fix it? So that's what we do. But it's a great question. Top of mind for all our customers. And that's how we think about it across the board. Versus generating just alerts all the time. >> Dave: Is the strategy, Because we all know phishing is the sort of most, you know obvious way to. It's the top way in which people get hacked. >> Ankur: Yeah. >> Is your strategy essentially to say. Okay we know that's going to happen, so we're going to try to protect it at the back end. How much of the, maybe it's an industry question. more so than just a Palo Alto specifically, How much emphasis is do you think the industry is taking or should be taking on stopping that, you know that those phishing attacks? Because if that's the number one problem you know, maybe that's where we should be starting. >> Yeah, it's a great question. It's typically the initial vector, for a lot of attacks to your point. But there is one thing that technology and AI cannot solve. Which is the user behavior, to your point. Like we can't get into the heads of the user. I mean, you can train them, you can do everything. You can't prevent somebody from clicking a button. Of course there's technology out there for email security that does that. But your point is, right, it's going to happen. Now what do you do? How do you protect your applications, your crown jewel? You know, whether it's in the cloud or it's in the code repo. So a lot of what we are trying to do in code security, or cloud security, or in general at Palo Alto Networks. is to protect those crown jewel. Because we can't prevent somebody from doing something. User behavior is hard to change. >> Dave: So it's almost like, okay, you left your front door open. Somebody's going to walk in, but oh, they walk into a vault. And they don't know where to go. And there's nowhere they can- >> Ankur: Yeah. >> You know, nothing they can take. They can't get to the silverware or the jewelry. >> I think that's it, yeah. >> What are some of the things, like as we look at, we're wrapping up calendar year '22 heading into '23. That customers can look to Palo Alto Networks to help them achieve? One of the things that we talked about with Nikesh and Niri yesterday, is consolidation. Like, and you guys just did a recent, survey. >> Ankur: Yeah. >> About the state of Cyber, and organizations on average have 366 apps in their environment. 31 security tools, 30 to 50 security tools. >> Ankur: Yeah. >> Consolidation is really key there. What are some of the things that you are excited about to deliver to customers where consolidation is concerned? >> Ankur: Yeah. >> Where software supply chain security is concerned in the next year? >> Yeah, absolutely. Look, there are over 3000 security vendors. And this can be, I mean you talked about average customer having 300. I was talking to a CSO, this was last year for one of the largest financial institution I go, "How many security tools do you have?" He got 120. I said, why? He goes, we have a no vendor left behind policy. >> Wow. >> It's crazy. >> Dave: What? >> Obviously he was joking, but it's crazy, right? Like that's how the CSO's are. >> Dave: I mean, he was kidding. >> Yeah. >> Dave: But recognized that. Wow. >> Yeah, and, this is the state the security industry is in. And our mission has been, and Lee and Nikesh and Niri talked about it. Is just platforms, will platforms take moonshots, things long term. And especially the, macro headwinds that we're seeing. We're hearing more and more from the customers that, look we're not going to buy point product. Then we got to buy another product that stitches it all together. We need platforms, whether it's for zero trust, Prisma SaaS, whether it's cloud. Prisma cloud or for your sock transformation. You know XIM and Cortex line of products. So I think you're going to see more and more of that in 2023. I'm confident in that. >> We heard from Lee today, the world record's 400. >> Yes. >> Yeah. >> That's crazy. >> He's going for it. He's got a ways to go. 120 He's got to... >> Maybe he wasn't, that guy wasn't kidding about his no vendor left behind policy. (laughing) Do you have Ankur, a favorite customer story that really articulates the value of what Palo Alto delivers and continues to. You know, 'cause one of the things that Nikesh said in his keynote was that you know, security's a data problem. Well every company these days, in every industry has to be a data company. But really what they need to be able to be is a secured data company. >> Ankur: Yeah. >> How are you guys enabling that? >> Oh, absolutely. Look, many customer examples come to mind, but speaking of data. You know, one of, some of our largest customers who are protecting their PCI workers where they have sensitive data. They're using for example, Prisma Cloud, to ensure that malicious attacks don't happen. And those workloads are used for credit card processing. They're processing tens of thousands of credit card transactions a second. And make sure that nobody gets hold of that. And that's why they have to make sure that nobody is. No attacker is trying to get hold of the sensitive data, to your point, So we have customers across financial services, media and entertainment technology company. Where we are helping them go as fast as possible in public cloud. Go through digital transformation, by securing their applications. >> Dave: What's the T-shirt say? I see code. >> Oh yeah. >> Dave: Secure from Code to Cloud. >> Lisa: Shift Happens. >> Shift Happens, Secrets from Code to Cloud. >> I love that. I was looking at that, going back to that, what's next in cyber survey? >> Ankur: Yeah. >> It said 74% of respondents, and I believe there was 1300 CIO's, CXO's that were surveyed globally. Where they said security is slowing down DevOps. Can customers look to Palo Alto Networks to help them? >> Ankur: Be enablers? >> Yes. >> Yeah, hundred percent. Look, the conversation over the last few years have changed now. Security used to say like, oh, I don't know about these people who are building applications. The DevOps is like security slowing down. I think there's an opportunity for companies like Palo Alto Networks, to build the bridge between the two. And the way we do it is make the securities easy, simple and not super intrusive. Where developers have to do a natural thing. And one part of it, and I talked about it earlier, is bring security where the developers are. In their code repo, in their IDE. Make it super simple. Don't make them do unnatural things. And it just, this is no different from changing the behavior of our kids. Right? Like you make them do unnatural things, they're not going to do it. But if it is part of their regular, you know, day-to-day operating procedures. I think they're going to be more open to change. Yeah. So I think it's possible. And Palo Alto has a huge responsibility to bridge the divide between the apps team, or the DevOps and the security organization. >> Lisa: Lots of great stuff to come. We thank you so much for coming back, two weeks. Only being on two weeks ago. We appreciate your insights, learning more information. It's great to see you at Palo Alto Ignite. And we'll have to have you back on. 'Cause we know that there's so much more to follow with respect to what you're doing. And shifting left, shift happens. >> Awesome. Lisa, Dave, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure. >> Lisa: Thank you so much. For Ankur Shah and Dave Vellante. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE. The leader in live and emerging tech coverage.

>>Hi everyone, welcome to this conversation. Lisa Martin here with Kim King, the SVP of Strategic Partners and Alliances at Hitachi. Kim, it's great to have you on the program. Thank you so much for joining me today. >>Thanks Lisa. It's great to be here. >>Let's talk about, so as we know, we talk about cloud all the time, the landscape, the cloud infrastructure landscape increasingly getting more and more complex. What are some of the biggest challenges and pain points that you're hearing from customers today? >>Yeah, so lot. There are lots, but I would say the, the few that we hear consistently, our cost, the complexity, right? Really the complexity of where do they go, how do they do it, and then availability. They have a lot of available options, but again, going back to complexity and cost, where do they think that they should move and how, how do they make that a successful move to the cloud? >>So talk to me, Hitachi vent has a great partner ecosystem. Where do partners play a role in helping customers to address some of the challenges with respect to the cloud landscape? >>Yeah, so part, our partners are really leading the way in the area of cloud in terms of helping customers understand the complexity is of the cloud. As we talked about, they're truly the trusted advisor. So when they look at a customer's complete infrastructure, what are the workloads, what are the CRI critical applications that they work with? What's the unique architecture that they have to drive with that customer for successful outcome and help them architect that? And so partners are truly leading the way across the board, understanding the complexities of each individual customer and then helping them make the right decisions with and for them. And then bringing us along as part of that, >>Talk to me a little bit about the partner landscape, the partner ecosystem at Hitachi. How does this fit into the overall sheet for the company? >>So we really look at our ecosystem as an extension of our sales organization and and really extension across the board, I would say our goal is to marry the right customer with the right partner and help them achieve their goals, ensure that they keep costs in check, that they ensure they don't have any security concerns, and that they have availability for the solutions and applications that they're trying to move to the cloud, which is most important. So we really, we really look at our ecosystem as a specialty ecosystem that adds high value for the right customers. >>So Kim, talk to me about how partners fit into Hitachi van's overall strategy. >>So I think our biggest differentiators with partners is that they're not just another number. Our partner organization is that valued extension of our overall sales pre-sales services organization. And we treat them like an extension of our organization. It's funny because I was just on a call with an analyst earlier this week and they said that AWS has increased their number of partners to 150,000 partners from, it was just under a hundred thousand. And I'm really not sure how you provide quality engagement to partners, right? And is how is that really a sustainable strategy? So for us, we look at trusted engagement across the ecosystem as a def differentiation. Really our goal is to make their life simple and profitable and really become their primary trusted partner when we go to market with them. And we see that paying dividends with our partners as they engage with us and as they expand and grow across the segments and then grow globally with us as well. >>And that's key, right? That synergistic approach when you're in customer conversations, what do you articulate as the key competitive differentiators where it relates to your partners? >>So really the, that they're the trusted advisor for that partner, right? That they understand our solutions better than any solution out there. And because we are not trying to be all things to our customers and our partners, that we being bring best breaths of breed, best of breed solutions to our customers through our partner community, they can truly provide that end user experience and the successful outcome that's needed without, you know, sort of all kinds of, you know, crazy cha challenges, right? When you look at it, they really wanna make sure that they're driving that co-developed solution and the successful outcome for that customer. >>So then how do you feel that Hitachi Ventura helps partners really to grow and expand their own business? >>Wow, so that's, there's tons of ways, but we've, we've created a very simplified, what we call digital selling platform. And in that digital selling platform, we've allowed our partners to choose their own price and pre-approve their pricing and their promotions. They've actually, we've expanded the way we go to market with our partners from a sort of a technical capabilities. We give them online what we call Hitachi online labs that allow them to really leverage all of the solutions and demo systems out there today. And they have complete access to any one of our resources, product management. And so we really have, like I said, we actually provide our partners with better tools and resources sometimes than we do our own sales and pre-sales organization. So we, we look at them as, because they have so many other solutions out there that we have to be one step ahead of everybody else to give them that solution capability and the expertise that they need for their customers. >>So if you dig in, where is it that hit Tashi van is helping partners succeed with your portfolio? >>Wow. So I think just across the board, I think we're really driving that profitable, trusted, and simplified engagement with our partner community because it's a value based and ease of doing business. I say that we allow them to scale and drive that sort of double digit growth through all of the solutions and and offerings that we have today. And because we've taken the approach of a very complex technical sort of infrastructure from a high end perspective and scaled it all the way through to our midsize enterprise, that allows them to really enter any customer at any vertical and provide them a really quality solution with that 100% data availability guarantee that we provide all of our customers. >>So then if we look at the overall sales cycle and the engagements, where is it that you're helping cus your partners rather succeed with the portfolio? >>Say that again? Sorry, my brain broke. No, >>No worries. So if we look at the overall sales cycle, where is it specifically where you're helping customers to succeed with the portfolio? >>So from the sales cycle, I think because we have the, a solution that is simple, easy, and really scaled for the type of customer that we have out there, it allows them to basically right size their infrastructure based on the application, the workload, the quality or the need that application may have and ensure that we provide them with that best solution. >>So then from a partner's perspective, how is it that Hitachi Valar is helping them to actually close deals faster? >>So lots of great ways I think between our pre-sales organization that's on call and available a hundred percent of the time. I think that we've seen, again, the trusted engagement with them from a pricing and packaging perspective. You know, we, you know, two years ago it would take them two to three weeks to get a pre-approved quote where today they pre-approved their own quotes in less than an hour and can have that in the hands of a customer. So we've seen that the ability for our partners to create and close orders in very short periods of time and actually get to the customers needs very quickly, >>So dramatically faster. Yes. Talk about overall, so the partner relationship's quite strong, very synergistic that that Hitachi Van Tara has with its customers. Let's kind of step back out and look at the cloud infrastructure. How do you see it evolving the market evolving overall in say the next six months, 12 months? >>Yeah, so we see it significantly, we've been doing a lot of studies around this specifically. So we have a couple of different teams. We have our sort of our standard partner team that's out there and now we have a specialty cloud service provider team that really focuses on partners that are building and their own infrastructure or leveraging the infrastructure of a large hyperscaler or another GSI and selling that out. And then what we found is when we dig down deeper into our standard sort of partner reseller or value added reseller market, what we're seeing is that they are want to have the capability to resell the solution, but they don't necessarily wanna have to own and manage the infrastructure themselves. So we're helping both of them through that transition. We see that it's gonna, so it's funny cuz you're seeing a combination of many customers move to really the hyperscale or public cloud and many of them want to repatriate their infrastructure back because they see costs and they see challenges around all of that. And so our partners are helping them understand, again, what is the best solution for them as opposed to let's just throw everything in the public cloud and hope that it works. We're we're really helping them make the right choices and decisions and we're putting the right partners together to make that happen. >>And how is that feedback, that data helping you to really grow and expand the partner program as a whole? >>Yeah, so it's been fantastic. We have a whole methodology that we, we created, which is called PDM plan, develop monetize with partners. And so we went specifically to market with cloud service providers that'll, and we really tested this out with them. We didn't just take a solution and say, here, go sell it, good luck and have, you know, have a nice day. Many vendors are doing that to their partners and the partners are struggling to monetize those solutions. So we spend a lot of time up front planning with them. What is not only the storage infrastructure but your potentially your data resiliency and, and everything else that you're looking at, your security solutions. How do we package those all together? How do we help you monetize them? And then who do you target from a customer perspective so that they've built up a pipeline of opportunities that they can go and work with us on and we really sit side by side with them in a co-development environment. >>In terms of that side by side relationship, how does the partner ecosystem play a role in Hitachi Ventura's as a service business? >>So our primary go to market with our, as a service business is with and through partners. So our goal is to drive all, almost all of our as a service. Unless it's super highly complex and something that a partner cannot support, we will make sure that they really, we leverage that with them, with all of our partners. >>So strong partner relationships, very strong partner ecosystem. What would you say, Kim, are the priorities for the partner ecosystem going forward? The next say year? >>Yeah, so we have tons of priorities, right? I think really it's double digit growth for them and for us. And understanding how a simpler approach that's customized for the specific vertical or customer base or go to market that they have that helps them quickly navigate to be successful. Our goal is always to facilitate trusted engagements with our partners, right? And then really, as I said, directionally our goal is to be 95 to a hundred percent of all of our business through partners, which helps customers and then really use that trusted advisor status they have to provide that value base to the customer. And then going back on our core tenants, which are, you know, really a trusted, simplified, profitable engagement with our partner community that allows them to really drive successful outcomes and go to market with us. And the end users. >>Trust is such an important word, we can't underutilize it in these conversations. Last question. From a channel business perspective, what are some of the priorities coming down the pike? >>Oh, again, my biggest priority, right, is always to increase the number of partner success stories that we have and increase the value to our partners. So we really dig in, we, we right now sit about number one or number two in, in our space with our partners in ease of doing business and value to our channel community. We wanna be number one across the board, right? Our goal is to make sure that our partner community is successful and that they really have those profitable engagements and that we're globally working with them to drive that engagement and, and help them build more profitable businesses. And so we just take tons of feedback from our partners regularly to help them understand, but we, we act on it very quickly so that we can make sure we incorporate that into our new program and our go to markets as we roll out every year. >>It sounds like a great flywheel of communications from the partners. Kim, thank you so much for joining me today, talking about what Hitachi van is doing with its partner ecosystem, the value in it for customers. We appreciate your insights. >>Thank you very much. >>You're watching the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage.

(corporate electronic xylophone jingle intro) >> Good afternoon everyone. Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of AWS re:Invent 22 from Vegas. We're at the Venetian Expo Hall with we're hearing, north of 50,000 people. I know we've been giving you different numbers but, that's kind of what we've settled on here. Hundreds of thousands are watching online. This is a huge event. People, John Furrier, Lisa Martin are ready to be back. >> Yes, it's really great show. A lot of change going on at Amazon. They're continuing the innovation, continuing to grow. The theme this year's data security and their partner ecosystem, which is continuing to grow. Their partners are filling the gaps on solutions and, it's just a whole another, I think, partner friendly cloud. This next gen wave that's coming, it's really next segment I think speaks to, I'm looking forward to this. >> It does. We're going to be digging into that partner network. We've got two guests. One of them's an alumni, Reza Honarmand SVP Global Cloud at TD SYNNEX. Great to have you back. >> Hello. >> Sergio Farache joins us as well, the Chief Strategy Officer at TD SYNNEX. Welcome to the program. >> Thank you. Thank you for having us. >> Great to be back in person, isn't it? >> Yeah, absolutely. It's a great experience. >> Amazing. The energy here has been hot at the highest levels since we came here Monday, Monday night, which is great. Sergio, I want to start with you. Last year when you guys were on the show, Tech Data. Tech Data has been around a long time. Now your TD SYNNEX. Talk a little bit about that. What's new, that transformation? >> Yeah, that is correct. It's great to be able now to present TD Synnex as a new merger between Tech Data and Synnex Corporation. Now, we are the largest distributor basically, across the world, with more than 62 billion dollar in a business. And, Amazon is obviously a strategic partner with a hyper growth and, we has been very focused to working with them to expand that partner ecosystem across solution ISVs and service providers. There has been very nice experience combine these two company and now have the reach and a scale that enable more than 140,000 partners across the world. >> Wow. >> And, the partner's message here is changing too. The new leader, Aruba is up on stage talking about this new partner paths. A lot of changes in a good way. They're bringing people together. What's your guys take and reaction to AWS's new posture towards partners? Obviously, the ecosystem we see going to be doubling and tripling we see in size and, also the value proposition is going to be stronger too and, more money making of course. But, the new Amazon's posture with partners. What's your reaction? >> We were at Aruba just an hour ago. Fantastic. If I look at the change from when we first got here a few years ago to now, it is beyond comparison. The realization is that technology and, especially what we work with Amazon is deflationary force and, we need scale to actually drive that across all of our partners to the customers. And, I can only see that accelerating now in terms of what Amazon is doing and actually with the channel and what Aruba is doing. I think this is exactly the right direction. >> John: What's your message? >> My message is, this is now channel. This is channel and this is serious. So, partners with Amazon equals growth. >> As we've seen so much transformation in the last couple of years, Sergio, with every business having to become digital to survive, right. And then, to eventually thrive and succeed and grow and the challenging economic times that we've had. What are some of the pivots that TD Synnex has made through your partner program to meet customer needs to accelerate their transformation? >> Yeah, as you said, has been a significant transformation. I think that in the past was clear what was a technology company and what an industrial company etcetera and, those frontiers are blending right now. Then, as a consequence we has been investing in several elements. One is to really increase the capability of the partner network in a way that they can on one side provide more solution-oriented activities to those customers to drive either growth or cost optimization. The other element has been verticalization meaning, know the industry where you are playing. We have been investing in the healthcare market, of course, as a consequence of all the demand that has been generating. But, at the same time and, we recently announced the competency in the government sector where we expand drastically our capabilities around specifically the federal and non federal business. But, not only in US but, across the world with those elements. Then, I would say that it's a combination of enhancing the skill, enhancing the knowledge on the industry, and finally provide the tools through our platform to enable the partner to operate in a digital way and enable the access of ISVs to the Iotly and serving the customers end to end. >> Is that the ISV experience project that I heard about, ISV experience with SaaS companies? Is that what you're referring to? >> Yeah, ISVs is one, ISV experience is one of the components that we use but, basically what we are trying to achieve with the ISV is helping in the journey of certification. Is how you transform either a partner that is born in the cloud or a partner that is still in the on-premise side. How you transition to the cloud and enabling how you reach to the end user in a more effective way and, how we expose 140,000 partner across the multiple geographies to help those ISVs to reach more customers. >> It's great distribute, it's great distribution. It's a business model innovation. >> Sorry? >> It's a business model innovation for these ISVs. >> Absolutely. Some of the ISVs, as you can imagine, they're incumbent with us. We work with them. So, actually it's finding new ways of consuming technology but, there's thousands of them that actually do not understand how to operate with a channel. And, this is a part where we help them with the channel, build a program, coach them through the process, help them access their partners and the customers that Sergio was referring to. >> Let me ask you guys a question. Where's the growth going to come from? You mentioned ecosystem, more growth, Aruba mentioned that's where the growth is. They are serious. So, you going to deliver that keynote now. Where do you guys see your growth coming from? >> Well, to be honest, the growth is unlimited in our opinion, right? It's so many areas. >> John: The wave is still coming. Yeah, the wave is still there. When you see still the amount of platform that need to be migrated to the cloud then, we have been investing in a significant way in enable capabilities of migration programs from the on-premise to the off-premise. At the same time, we have been expanding geographically because, it's still several segments and markets we operate globally. As an example, we recently launched our public sector capability in Latin America and Europe, expanding those segments. And, in addition to that, again, how we bring more ISVs more solution oriented driven. There's many spots of growth. And, I think that Amazon message recently recognized more and more the value of, nobody have all the solutions. You need this ecosystem playing together to bring those solutions to market. >> So if I build on that. If we look at the growth in the public cloud last year, was around 40 billion dollars. We expect a similar growth level this year as well. I mentioned about deflationary force, the technology being a deflationary force. Now, everybody knows a lot of businesses out there are going under a lot of challenges. So, they have to compete, they have to have the insights, they have to be efficient, and actually, they're going to get a lot of that through the technologies that we're talking about here. The key to that is partners with the right skill sets. What we are seeing is the partners with the skill sets who can participate in that 40 billion dollar growth, take a big, big share of it. >> And you guys are providing a great service. I think, when I wrote the story on Friday that I published. One of my premise was is that, this next-gen cloud is going to lift up more ISVs which is kind of a legacy classic, independent software vendor, create new kinds of partners that have platforms or unique solutions for verticals. So, the ISV classic definition will still exist and, new customers are emerging. It's got a new dynamic developing. We're seeing people build clouds on top of the cloud, tap the ecosystem, partner distribution services. It's a whole new way to build and take something to market. What do you guys think about that? >> Yeah, I think that the beauty of our position in the market is that we are in the center of that ecosystem. Again, we have access to thousands of ISVs, thousands of hardware vendors, the hyperscalers. Then somebody need to put all those pieces together. That is our role in the market. >> John: It's a good position to be in. >> It's a good place to be. And, enabling those partners now to collaborate with all those entities to bring the solution because, the customer is not acquiring technology anymore. They're acquiring a solution to a problem now. And, that solution require multiple components. >> Last year, no, this year, I'm sorry, you guys were announced as EMEA Distributor of the Year. Congratulations on that. >> Yeah, thank you. >> Talk about that in terms of just the evolution of the partnership. >> The partnership in EMEA is now across our entire geo. The growth that we've driven across the EMEA market space is I think, the reason why we have won it, as well as the competencies that we have built. Now, you were just talking about ISVs to give you an example. There are many ISVs that sit in EMEA that want to access the US market and vice versa. So, where we sit in the middle and enable that access, the frameworks that they need to move. So, those are the kind of things that contribute to the strength in the relationship what those awards are coming from. >> Yeah, the other critical factor here is again, how we bring more capability in terms of the serve to the market to Amazon. And, that has been another component of data where that we are very thankful. Again, we has been enabling and bringing numerous new partners and numerous new end customers that now have access, support, and services including, again, the competencies that we already described but, including service oriented businesses like migration, like cost optimization of the use, et cetera, that now we through partner serve to the market. >> Reza, Sergio. I want to ask you guys a question around trust. Trust. You're a trust broker because you have a lot of services and people and companies to put together. We were just talking about the good position you're in. Trust is a big part of your relationship with your customers. You've got two sides of your business. You got one side is the supply side and you got the distribution side, and then both sides are working together. Requires a lot of trust. What's that look like inside your company? Could you just take a minute to explain, take a bit to explain what's that like, the culture of the company and that trust. >> Yeah, absolutely. And, that is why the term of Trust Advisor came to the table, right? And, and again, for more than 40 years we has been building this ecosystem. We has been driving that motion and, we have been proving to the market a consistent approach with a strong support to the two tier model. We never get in opposition to our customers and, we enable those customers in a consistent way. Then, I think that trust is something that you earn not something that you ask for. And, that is what we are doing day basis. >> Well, congratulations. It's been great chatting with you. Challenge time for the challenge >> Lisa: Challenge Time, all right guys. >> A new challenge on theCUBE, new format. We usually say... >> Yes at the end of the interview. What's the take on the show? What's the bumper sticker? So, think of it like an Instagram Reel. Thought leadership, hot take. Each of you, spend a minute, 30 seconds to share a hot take, thought leadership, what you think was going on at Amazon, why you're here, what's important. What would you say if you were going to do an Instagram Reel right now? >> Yeah, the Amazon enable a new way to do business and a new transformation of the Iotly economy. We are here in TD Synnex to expand that capability across the segments enhancing partners to reach to their goals and, in users to get those transformations. In general, we will provide what is needed and, we continue investing to continue growing the capacity across all geographies and all the type of solutions that we deliver. >> All right, Sergio, you nailed it. Reza, you're up, your hot take, your sizzle reel. >> Well, frankly, I think, Sergio nailed it. It's about covering the geos and taking the competencies and, make sure we execute consistently across all of our geos. >> All right, nailed it. Thanks so much. >> Consistent execution. Reza, Sergio, thank you so much... >> Thank you so much. for joining John and me on the program, talking about what TD SYNNEX has done since we've last seen you. What you're doing with AWS and the partner ecosystem. We really appreciate you stopping by the set >> Thank you. >> Thank you for the time. >> All right, our pleasure. For our guests and for John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader at live tech coverage. (corporate electronic xylophone jingle outro)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, welcome back to theCUBE's AWS RE:Invent 2022 Coverage. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Got a great lineup here, Itamar Ankorion SVP Technology Alliance at Qlik and Peter McDonald, vice President, cloud partnerships and business development Snowflake. We're going to talk about bringing SAP data to life, for joint Snowflake, Qlik and AWS Solution. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on theCUBE Really appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, great meeting you John. >> Just to get started, introduce yourselves to the audience, then going to jump into what you guys are doing together, unique relationship here, really compelling solution in cloud. Big story about applications and scale this year. Let's introduce yourselves. Peter, we'll start with you. >> Great. I'm Peter MacDonald. I am vice president of Cloud Partners and business development here at Snowflake. On the Cloud Partner side, that means I manage AWS relationship along with Microsoft and Google Cloud. What we do together in terms of complimentary products, GTM, co-selling, things like that. Importantly, working with other third parties like Qlik for joint solutions. On business development, it's negotiating custom commercial partnerships, large companies like Salesforce and Dell, smaller companies at most for our venture portfolio. >> Thanks Peter and hi John. It's great to be back here. So I'm Itamar Ankorion and I'm the senior vice president responsible for technology alliances here at Qlik. With that, own strategic alliances, including our key partners in the cloud, including Snowflake and AWS. I've been in the data and analytics enterprise software market for 20 plus years, and my main focus is product management, marketing, alliances, and business development. I joined Qlik about three and a half years ago through the acquisition of Attunity, which is now the foundation for Qlik data integration. So again, we focus in my team on creating joint solution alignment with our key partners to provide more value to our customers. >> Great to have both you guys, senior executives in the industry on theCUBE here, talking about data, obviously bringing SAP data to life is the theme of this segment, but this reinvent, it's all about the data, big data end-to-end story, a lot about data being intrinsic as the CEO says on stage around in the organizations in all aspects. Take a minute to explain what you guys are doing as from a company standpoint. Snowflake and Qlik and the solutions, why here at AWS? Peter, we'll start with you at Snowflake, what you guys do as a company, your mission, your focus. >> That was great, John. Yeah, so here at Snowflake, we focus on the data platform and until recently, data platforms required expensive on-prem hardware appliances. And despite all that expense, customers had capacity constraints, inexpensive maintenance, and had limited functionality that all impeded these organizations from reaching their goals. Snowflake is a cloud native SaaS platform, and we've become so successful because we've addressed these pain points and have other new special features. For example, securely sharing data across both the organization and the value chain without copying the data, support for new data types such as JSON and structured data, and also advance in database data governance. Snowflake integrates with complimentary AWS services and other partner products. So we can enable holistic solutions that include, for example, here, both Qlik and AWS SageMaker, and comprehend and bring those to joint customers. Our customers want to convert data into insights along with advanced analytics platforms in AI. That is how they make holistic data-driven solutions that will give them competitive advantage. With Snowflake, our approach is to focus on customer solutions that leverage data from existing systems such as SAP, wherever they are in the cloud or on-premise. And to do this, we leverage partners like Qlik native US to help customers transform their businesses. We provide customers with a premier data analytics platform as a result. Itamar, why don't you talk about Qlik a little bit and then we can dive into the specific SAP solution here and some trends >> Sounds great, Peter. So Qlik provides modern data integration and analytics software used by over 38,000 customers worldwide. Our focus is to help our customers turn data into value and help them close the gap between data all the way through insight and action. We offer click data integration and click data analytics. Click data integration helps to automate the data pipelines to deliver data to where they want to use them in real-time and make the data ready for analytics and then Qlik data analytics is a robust platform for analytics and business intelligence has been a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for over 11 years now in the market. And both of these come together into what we call Qlik Cloud, which is our SaaS based platform. So providing a more seamless way to consume all these services and accelerate time to value with customer solutions. In terms of partnerships, both Snowflake and AWS are very strategic to us here at Qlik, so we have very comprehensive investment to ensure strong joint value proposition to we can bring to our mutual customers, everything from aligning our roadmaps through optimizing and validating integrations, collaborating on best practices, packaging joint solutions like the one we'll talk about today. And with that investment, we are an elite level, top level partner with Snowflake. We fly that our technology is Snowflake-ready across the entire product set and we have hundreds of joint customers together and with AWS we've also partnered for a long time. We're here to reinvent. We've been here with the first reinvent since the inaugural one, so it kind of gives you an idea for how long we've been working with AWS. We provide very comprehensive integration with AWS data analytics services, and we have several competencies ranging from data analytics to migration and modernization. So that's our focus and again, we're excited about working with Snowflake and AWS to bring solutions together to market. >> Well, I'm looking forward to unpacking the solutions specifically, and congratulations on the continued success of both your companies. We've been following them obviously for a very long time and seeing the platform evolve beyond just SaaS and a lot more going on in cloud these days, kind of next generation emerging. You know, we're seeing a lot of macro trends that are going to be powering some of the things we're going to get into real quickly. But before we get into the solution, what are some of those power dynamics in the industry that you're seeing in trends specifically that are impacting your customers that are taking us down this road of getting more out of the data and specifically the SAP, but in general trends and dynamics. What are you hearing from your customers? Why do they care? Why are they going down this road? Peter, we'll start with you. >> Yeah, I'll go ahead and start. Thanks. Yeah, I'd say we continue to see customers being, being very eager to transform their businesses and they know they need to leverage technology and data to do so. They're also increasingly depending upon the cloud to bring that agility, that elasticity, new functionality necessary to react in real-time to every evolving customer needs. You look at what's happened over the last three years, and boy, the macro environment customers, it's all changing so fast. With our partnerships with AWS and Qlik, we've been able to bring to market innovative solutions like the one we're announcing today that spans all three companies. It provides a holistic solution and an integrated solution for our customer. >> Itamar let's get into it, you've been with theCUBE, you've seen the journey, you have your own journey, many, many years, you've seen the waves. What's going on now? I mean, what's the big wave? What's the dynamic powering this trend? >> Yeah, in a nutshell I'll call it, it's all about time. You know, it's time to value and it's about real-time data. I'll kind of talk about that a bit. So, I mean, you hear a lot about the data being the new oil, but it's definitely, we see more and more customers seeing data as their critical enabler for innovation and digital transformation. They look for ways to monetize data. They look as the data as the way in which they can innovate and bring different value to the customers. So we see customers want to use more data so to get more value from data. We definitely see them wanting to do it faster, right, than before. And we definitely see them looking for agility and automation as ways to accelerate time to value, and also reduce overall costs. I did mention real-time data, so we definitely see more and more customers, they want to be able to act and make decisions based on fresh data. So yesterday's data is just not good enough. >> John: Yeah. >> It's got to be down to the hour, down to the minutes and sometimes even lower than that. And then I think we're also seeing customers look to their core business systems where they have a lot of value, like the SAP, like mainframe and thinking, okay, our core data is there, how can we get more value from this data? So that's key things we see all the time with customers. >> Yeah, we did a big editorial segment this year on, we called data as code. Data as code is kind of a riff on infrastructure as code and you start to see data becoming proliferating into all aspects, fresh data. It's not just where you store it, it's how you share it, it's how you turn it into an application intrinsically involved in all aspects. This is the big theme this year and that's driving all the conversations here at RE:Invent. And I'm guaranteeing you, it's going to happen for another five and 10 years. It's not stopping. So I got to get into the solution, you guys mentioned SAP and you've announced the solution by Qlik, Snowflake and AWS for your customers using SAP. Can you share more about this solution? What's unique about it? Why is it important and why now? Peter, Itamar, we'll start with you first. >> Let me jump in, this is really, I'll jump because I'm excited. We're very excited about this solution and it's also a solution by the way and again, we've seen proven customer success with it. So to your point, it's ready to scale, it's starting, I think we're going to see a lot of companies doing this over the next few years. But before we jump to the solution, let me maybe take a few minutes just to clarify the need, why we're seeing, why we're seeing customers jump to do this. So customers that use SAP, they use it to manage the core of their business. So think order processing, management, finance, inventory, supply chain, and so much more. So if you're running SAP in your company, that data creates a great opportunity for you to drive innovation and modernization. So what we see customers want to do, they want to do more with their data and more means they want to take SAP with non-SAP data and use it together to drive new insights. They want to use real-time data to drive real-time analytics, which they couldn't do to date. They want to bring together descriptive with predictive analytics. So adding machine learning in AI to drive more value from the data. And naturally they want to do it faster. So find ways to iterate faster on their solutions, have freedom with the data and agility. And I think this is really where cloud data platforms like Snowflake and AWS, you know, bring that value to be able to drive that. Now to do that you need to unlock the SAP data, which is a lot of also where Qlik comes in because typical challenges these customers run into is the complexity, inherent in SAP data. Tens of thousands of tables, proprietary formats, complex data models, licensing restrictions, and more than, you have performance issues, they usually run into how do we handle the throughput, the volumes while maintaining lower latency and impact. Where do we find knowledge to really understand how to get all this done? So these are the things we've looked at when we came together to create a solution and make it unique. So when you think about its uniqueness, because we put together a lot, and I'll go through three, four key things that come together to make this unique. First is about data delivery. How do you have the SAP data delivery? So how do you get it from ECC, from HANA from S/4HANA, how do you deliver the data and the metadata and how that integration well into Snowflake. And what we've done is we've focused a lot on optimizing that process and the continuous ingestion, so the real-time ingestion of the data in a way that works really well with the Snowflake system, data cloud. Second thing is we looked at SAP data transformation, so once the data arrives at Snowflake, how do we turn it into being analytics ready? So that's where data transformation and data worth automation come in. And these are all elements of this solution. So creating derivative datasets, creating data marts, and all of that is done by again, creating an optimized integration that pushes down SQL based transformations, so they can be processed inside Snowflake, leveraging its powerful engine. And then the third element is bringing together data visualization analytics that can also take all the data now that in organizing inside Snowflake, bring other data in, bring machine learning from SageMaker, and then you go to create a seamless integration to bring analytic applications to life. So these are all things we put together in the solution. And maybe the last point is we actually took the next step with this and we created something we refer to as solution accelerators, which we're really, really keen about. Think about this as prepackaged templates for common business analytic needs like order to cash, finance, inventory. And we can either dig into that a little more later, but this gets the next level of value to the customers all built into this joint solution. >> Yeah, I want to get to the accelerators, but real quick, Peter, your reaction to the solution, what's unique about it? And obviously Snowflake, we've been seeing the progression data applications, more developers developing on top of Snowflake, data as code kind of implies developer ecosystem. This is kind of interesting. I mean, you got partnering with Qlik and AWS, it's kind of a developer-like thinking real solution. What's unique about this SAP solution that's, that's different than what customers can get anywhere else or not? >> Yeah, well listen, I think first of all, you have to start with the idea of the solution. This are three companies coming together to build a holistic solution that is all about, you know, creating a great opportunity to turn SAP data into value this is Itamar was talking about, that's really what we're talking about here and there's a lot of technology underneath it. I'll talk more about the Snowflake technology, what's involved here, and then cover some of the AWS pieces as well. But you know, we're focusing on getting that value out and accelerating time to value for our joint customers. As Itamar was saying, you know, there's a lot of complexity with the SAP data and a lot of value there. How can we manage that in a prepackaged way, bringing together best of breed solutions with proven capabilities and bringing this to market quickly for our joint customers. You know, Snowflake and AWS have been strong partners for a number of years now, and that's not only on how Snowflake runs on top of AWS, but also how we integrate with their complementary analytics and then all products. And so, you know, we want to be able to leverage those in addition to what Qlik is bringing in terms of the data transformations, bringing data out of SAP in the visualization as well. All very critical. And then we want to bring in the predictive analytics, AWS brings and what Sage brings. We'll talk about that a little bit later on. Some of the technologies that we're leveraging are some of our latest cutting edge technologies that really make things easier for both our partners and our customers. For example, Qlik leverages Snowflakes recently released Snowpark for Python functionality to push down those data transformations from clicking the Snowflake that Itamar's mentioning. And while we also leverage Snowpark for integrations with Amazon SageMaker, but there's a lot of great new technology that just makes this easy and compelling for customers. >> I think that's the big word, easy button here for what may look like a complex kind of integration, kind of turnkey, really, really compelling example of the modern era we're living in, as we always say in theCUBE. You mentioned accelerators, SAP accelerators. Can you give an example of how that works with the technology from the third party providers to deliver this business value Itamar, 'cause that was an interesting comment. What's the example? Give an example of this acceleration. >> Yes, certainly. I think this is something that really makes this truly, truly unique in the industry and again, a great opportunity for customers. So we kind talked earlier about there's a lot of things that need to be done with SP data to turn it to value. And these accelerator, as the name suggests, are designed to do just that, to kind of jumpstart the process and reduce the time and the risk involved in such project. So again, these are pre-packaged templates. We basically took a lot of knowledge, and a lot of configurations, best practices about to get things done and we put 'em together. So think about all the steps, it includes things like data extraction, so already knowing which tables, all the relevant tables that you need to get data from in the contexts of the solution you're looking for, say like order to cash, we'll get back to that one. How do you continuously deliver that data into Snowflake in an in efficient manner, handling things like data type mappings, metadata naming conventions and transformations. The data models you build all the way to data mart definitions and all the transformations that the data needs to go through moving through steps until it's fully analytics ready. And then on top of that, even adding a library of comprehensive analytic dashboards and integrations through machine learning and AI and put all of that in a way that's in pre-integrated and tested to work with Snowflake and AWS. So this is where again, you get this entire recipe that's ready. So take for example, I think I mentioned order to cash. So again, all these things I just talked about, I mean, for those who are not familiar, I mean order to cash is a critical business process for every organization. So especially if you're in retail, manufacturing, enterprise, it's a big... This is where, you know, starting with booking a sales order, following by fulfilling the order, billing the customer, then managing the accounts receivable when the customer actually pays, right? So this all process, you got sales order fulfillment and the billing impacts customer satisfaction, you got receivable payments, you know, the impact's working capital, cash liquidity. So again, as a result this order to cash process is a lifeblood for many businesses and it's critical to optimize and understand. So the solution accelerator we created specifically for order to cash takes care of understanding all these aspects and the data that needs to come with it. So everything we outline before to make the data available in Snowflake in a way that's really useful for downstream analytics, along with dashboards that are already common for that, for that use case. So again, this enables customers to gain real-time visibility into their sales orders, fulfillment, accounts receivable performance. That's what the Excel's are all about. And very similarly, we have another one for example, for finance analytics, right? So this will optimize financial data reporting, helps customers get insights into P&L, financial risk of stability or inventory analytics that helps with, you know, improve planning and inventory management, utilization, increased efficiencies, you know, so in supply chain. So again, these accelerators really help customers get a jumpstart and move faster with their solutions. >> Peter, this is the easy button we just talked about, getting things going, you know, get the ball rolling, get some acceleration. Big part of this are the three companies coming together doing this. >> Yeah, and to build on what Itamar just said that the SAP data obviously has tremendous value. Those sales orders, distribution data, financial data, bringing that into Snowflake makes it easily accessible, but also it enables it to be combined with other data too, is one of the things that Snowflake does so well. So you can get a full view of the end-to-end process and the business overall. You know, for example, I'll just take one, you know, one example that, that may not come to mind right away, but you know, looking at the impact of weather conditions on supply chain logistics is relevant and material and have interest to our customers. How do you bring those different data sets together in an easy way, bringing the data out of SAP, bringing maybe other data out of other systems through Qlik or through Snowflake, directly bringing data in from our data marketplace and bring that all together to make it work. You know, fundamentally organizational silos and the data fragmentation exist otherwise make it really difficult to drive modern analytics projects. And that in turn limits the value that our customers are getting from SAP data and these other data sets. We want to enable that and unleash. >> Yeah, time for value. This is great stuff. Itamar final question, you know, what are customers using this? What do you have? I'm sure you have customers examples already using the solution. Can you share kind of what these examples look like in the use cases and the value? >> Oh yeah, absolutely. Thank you. Happy to. We have customers across different, different sectors. You see manufacturing, retail, energy, oil and gas, CPG. So again, customers in those segments, typically sectors typically have SAP. So we have customers in all of them. A great example is like Siemens Energy. Siemens Energy is a global provider of gas par services. You know, over what, 28 billion, 30 billion in revenue. 90,000 employees. They operate globally in over 90 countries. So they've used SAP HANA as a core system, so it's running on premises, multiple locations around the world. And what they were looking for is a way to bring all these data together so they can innovate with it. And the thing is, Peter mentioned earlier, not just the SAP data, but also bring other data from other systems to bring it together for more value. That includes finance data, these logistics data, these customer CRM data. So they bring data from over 20 different SAP systems. Okay, with Qlik data integration, feeding that into Snowflake in under 20 minutes, 24/7, 365, you know, days a year. Okay, they get data from over 20,000 tables, you know, over million, hundreds of millions of records daily going in. So it is a great example of the type of scale, scalability, agility and speed that they can get to drive these kind of innovation. So that's a great example with Siemens. You know, another one comes to mind is a global manufacturer. Very similar scenario, but you know, they're using it for real-time executive reporting. So it's more like feasibility to the production data as well as for financial analytics. So think, think, think about everything from audit to texts to innovate financial intelligence because all the data's coming from SAP. >> It's a great time to be in the data business again. It keeps getting better and better. There's more data coming. It's not stopping, you know, it's growing so fast, it keeps coming. Every year, it's the same story, Peter. It's like, doesn't stop coming. As we wrap up here, let's just get customers some information on how to get started. I mean, obviously you're starting to see the accelerators, it's a great program there. What a great partnership between the two companies and AWS. How can customers get started to learn about the solution and take advantage of it, getting more out of their SAP data, Peter? >> Yeah, I think the first place to go to is talk to Snowflake, talk to AWS, talk to our account executives that are assigned to your account. Reach out to them and they will be able to educate you on the solution. We have packages up very nicely and can be deployed very, very quickly. >> Well gentlemen, thank you so much for coming on. Appreciate the conversation. Great overview of the partnership between, you know, Snowflake and Qlik and AWS on a joint solution. You know, getting more out of the SAP data. It's really kind of a key, key solution, bringing SAP data to life. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Thank you John. >> Okay, this is theCUBE coverage here at RE:Invent 2022. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Okay, welcome back, everyone, it's CUBE's live coverage. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here with Paul Gillen. Got a great guest coming up here, talking about cloud security, all things going on in the cloud. Paul, great day. How you doing? How you holding up? >> I'm about at the end of my, running on fumes, John. (John laughs) >> Let's bring it home. >> And we got another day coming up. >> Day three, let's bring it home, come on, let's go. Lot of energy. >> Lot of energy on the floor and certainly a lot of talk about security at this conference. Busy, busy market, lots of vendors. And one of the more notable ones, Cohesity, recently introduced a brand new suite, a brand new approach to security that combines data protection and security and backup. With us, to talk about that is Amith Nair, who is the Senior Vice president and General Manager of cloud at Cohesity. Welcome. >> Thank you very much. Thanks for having me, Paul and John. >> So tell us about DataHawk, your new product. >> Yeah, just to set a little bit of perspective on Cohesity, and how we think about DataHawk and security in general is, Cohesity is the leading solution for data security and management. And if you think about all the pillars that we provide in terms of solution around that data solutions, so we have data protection, data security, data access, data mobility and data insights. So the focus for us over the last many months was really to make our data security solutions really strong. So generally when customers think about security, they think about starting with security at the perimeter, on the edge. They think about firewalls, network layer, and so on and so forth. But in the end, what they're really trying to protect is the data that aligns to what they're really trying to save. Right? So DataHawk was formulated and built in order to help extend our existing solutions to provide additional security, layers of security, and also work with partners to enable doing that. Many months ago, we released this product called FortKnox, which is our cyber vaulting solution. One that customers really love and use today. >> It's an air gap solution, right? >> It's an air gap solution with forum capabilities, and so on. Extremely liked by customers, very well adopted, and we extended that to provide lots more data classification capabilities, and ransomware checks as well. So malware checks in the product itself in terms of what it is being backed up. And is there malware in the backed up data and so on? >> Maybe, we can talk about the evolution of ransomware, because ransomware is getting a lot more sophisticated. It used to start at the end point and then penetrate into the network. Increasingly, now, we're seeing it move into the backup, and actually corrupt backup files before moving into the production data. How is ransomware evolving? >> I mean, there's a ransomware attack that's happening right now as we speak, right? What is it? One in every 11 seconds or so on. And it's getting very, very sophisticated. And you're absolutely right, the target early on used to be the network, or the firewall and so on and so forth. Now, it is the backup. So you have to be very smart about how you protect your backup and if you do get attacked, which a lot of CSOs are starting to realize, it's not about just preventing. But it's also what do you do if it does happen? How can you be resilient in the case of an attack? How can you recover if something happens? And that's where we come in to play as well. >> What's some of the state of the art posture, security posture and cyber resilient techniques? Can you share your observations on what are some of the current state of the art positions? I mean, besides they buy everything, and they want everything, but we're looking at a cost reduction, slow down in the recession, customer's going to look at belt tightening. We heard that from Adam Celeste. Has that changed or enhanced the posture, and impact to the resiliency on the cyber side? >> Yeah, I think customers are getting really smart in terms of how they're adopting cloud. We saw a tremendous amount of growth from a cloud usage perspective, I think, over the last two years and through the pandemic. But now they're getting smart about, "How am I consuming that cloud?" Which is where the consumption's starting to slow down. But that does not mean they're not using cloud, right? And security from a cloud perspective is way different from the old world, which was very static. You're in a completely dynamic environment now. So everybody talks about zero trust security. You have to have that level of no trust, trust nothing, authenticate everything, in terms of how you approach what connects to your network, what services connect to your network and so on. And we follow the same approach, but we also believe that one solution cannot solve it. And which is why we had this announcement around our security advisory council, and security partnership and alliances, where we are providing data to additional solutions, or insights into other security solutions that will help the customer in the end. We talked about how some customers have anywhere between 50 to 70 vendors on their network for security. We want to reduce that noise and that clutter, especially when it comes to cost and expenses. Right? >> Awesome. I want to ask you a personal question if you don't mind. You're new, relatively new to Cohesity, SVP, Senior Vice President, General Manager of the cloud. Obviously, AWS, the biggest cloud, there's other clouds. What attracted you to Cohesity? What was the key thing that attracted you to this company to take a leadership role as this next wave comes in for cloud, and security and what Cohesity is doing? >> Yeah, there are a couple of reasons. Number one and most important was the maturity of the product and the quality of the product. Mohit Aron was our founder, you know, known as the grandfather or as the father of hyperconverge networking. >> He's a legend. >> He's a legend, right? >> (laughs) Just say it. >> And he's built a phenomenal set of technologies that really helps customers and that brings me to the second point, which is customers. We are a customer-obsessed company. And as I was talking to Mohit and Sanjay was our CEO, and Lynn was our CMO and others in the company, it was very evident to me that the core DNA of the company is really helping our customers be successful. Those two things put together. And the third thing, really, I am very culturally-obsessed when it comes to how organizations are run. We have a very strong culture in terms of how we treat employees, how we build the right set of products, and how we go to market. Right? Those three things put together, helped me really make a decision. Obviously, the leadership team within Cohesity was top notch as well. So every one of them that I spoke to had that same core belief system. That had helped a lot. >> Sanjay's a good friend of theCUBE, we've interviewed him many times with VMware. Paul, you know Sanjay's, he loves to get on cam. We hope to have him on tomorrow, if we can get him on the calendar. But you know, Sanjay told me one time, "I never missed a quarter." In his SAP, VMware, he's proud. We'll see, Paul, we're- >> Well, I'm going to hold him to that. >> We better not miss a quarter, I'm going to hold him to that. How's business? How's it, healthy? >> It's been great. We are seeing consistent demand for all of our products. As you can see, we continue to release new products into the market that customers are asking for. We are listening to what customers really want. Our roadmap is really based on two things, customer demand and market and where the market is growing. We have to stay on top of how the market is evolving based on the new challenges that customers are facing. Right? So markets, we are doing really good, company continues to grow and Sanjay has been fantastic in terms of driving that leadership. >> Yeah, he's a good driver. And again, he's Mr. Quarter for a reason, he's disciplined. >> (laughs) Very disciplined. >> Another reason, initiative, Cohesity's is the data security alliance. You put together a group of about a dozen security companies. Getting security companies to work with each other is always a challenge. How did you convince them to join with you? >> Well, one, we aligned on a mission. I mean, in the end, all the partners that we are talking about, they all care about what customers want. And we talked earlier about having that, you know, what is that single pane of glass when it comes to security? Is there one? Probably not. But if you can reduce the chatter, and the noise amongst all these companies, that helps. The other thing is they also understood our mission was really around the security, around data. We talked earlier about how security used to be very parameter or centric, but what you're really trying to save and secure is your data, which is your Queen Bee. And so a couple of months ago at our customer advisory council, I talked about moving and shifting the focus of security to be very data centric. And what we do in this partnership and alliance is a true integration. So there's a lot of engineering work that goes in, is us providing insights around the data to the security partners who can then leverage that to help customers be protected early on. Conversely, they can provide insights into an attack that's emanating possibly, to let us know that there's something happening, so we can lock up the data. So it's a bidirectional, symbiotic relationship between these partners and they all believe in that common cause of making sure the customers get protected. As we talked about earlier, lots of cyber attacks happening even as we speak, if we can collectively do something good in terms of making customers secure and successful, let's do it. >> So what will result from this alliance other than a press release? >> Customers will be successful, hopefully, not just protect customers from ransomware attacks, but also respond and recover if something does happen. We also announce our security council led by Kevin Mandia, and then we have some other big security advisors in that council as well. And that's been very helpful. So it's not just about the product itself, but it's also the collective experience of all these folks who can help and advise and coach CSOs, and other organizations on, what are the best practices? What are the things you're not really considering? What is the vision for you from an architecture standpoint? How is security threats starting to get more, and more mature? And how can you account for that? How can you reduce cost, to your point, right? How can you reduce cost when it comes to managing all these security solutions? >> No, there's no industry where working, it's more important for vendors to work together than in this one. >> Absolutely. I mean, especially for security, I don't think there's a one size fits all solution. So we have to work together. Right? >> What's your state of the union? You were at HashiCorp before you came here, you've been in the industry for a while, you've seen a few cycles of innovation. We're in a really weird time right now, because AWS wasn't really as powerful in 2008, when the last recession was hard too. They weren't really that big then. Now, they're a big part of the economic equation. So agility means fast speed. Can they help us get out of the pandemic? Customer's going to tighten their belts? Is there going to be a pullback? Is there tech spending? All these questions are looming. What are your customers seeing? What do you think is going to happen given the history? 'Cause I don't see the building stopping. I think you'll see more cloud, more savings. So is there fine-tuning solutions? What are customers thinking like now? >> I mean, if you think back to the last recession, the last major one, 2009, that's really about the time when you saw customers thinking about that whole digital transformation, because they started understanding that the way to connect with customers is through a digital engagement. Right? Now, as we've gone through a 10, 15 year period where there has been a lot of digital transformation, there's been a lot of investment in the cloud. Cloud is no longer seen with suspicion. Now, it's about getting smart on how to use it, how to build the right applications. Are there the right set of applications that need to stay in the cloud? And there might be others that need to stay on-prem. Right? I've talked to customers and CIOs who've mentioned to me in the past, that they would go a hundred percent in the cloud, and six months later they come back and they're like, "Nope, you're not going a hundred percent in the cloud. Maybe it's 10% or 15%." >> So they're moving. So what's your plan? You're the GM, you're in charge, you've got to take that next hill. Is it a tailwind, headwind? You've got to navigate the waters here, so to speak, mixed metaphors, but for the most part, you got a business opportunity. >> Absolutely. >> What's the outlook look like? What's your vision? What's the plan? >> Yeah. When it comes to cloud, there are certain things that are a common denominator. Right? One is how do you enable not just applications that are completely on cloud, but also that's on-prem? So for us, that hybrid movement is extremely important. But to create a single seamless UI and experience from an end-customer perspective. So for me, maintaining that and more at team, the R and D team at Cohesity have done a phenomenal job around that. For me, it's to maintain that, and then build additional workloads that make sense from a customer standpoint. There's a lot of investment customers are making. We also have to make sure that they're utilized correctly, and their stored, backed up data, recovered in a way that makes sense for them. And then if things do go south in terms of attacks or other issues, how can we help them get back up to speed, and make sure their business does not suffer? Right? So all of those combined, I think from a cloud perspective, it's the agility, the scalability, and the speed and swiftness that we can work with. >> Well, it sounds like he's ready for the Instagram Real Challenge, our new format on theCUBE. We're going to do a little segment where you can deliver a YouTube Short, Instagram Reel, TikTok or CUBE Gem. More of a thought leadership soundbite for 30 seconds around your view of why is cloud important right now. What's going on at this event that people should pay attention to? What's Cohesity doing? If you can put together a reel, a sizzle reel, or a thought leadership statement. What would that be? >> It would be that cloud is important for any business to be successful. And that's a given right now. I mean, digital transformation is an overused term, but the reality is it's here to stay. And it is the reason why everybody has a mobile phone. Half the people walking on the floor right now is looking at their phone and walking around. And that's your engagement method. So if you don't transform yourself to be able to connect with your end-user, your customer, you will not be successful. And Cohesity can help you by making sure that all of that data that you have, everything that you need in order to be successful to drive that engagement with your customers secure is backed up. No matter what, we will get you back up and running, and you will be successful. And we are in the success journey with you. >> Amith Nair, Senior Vice President, General Manager, Cohesity, the Cloud. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. For Paul Gillen, my co-host. I'm John Furrier here, live on the floor, wrapping up day two, few more segments, stay with us. We got a lot of action coming. We'll be right back with more after the short break. theCUBE, the leader in tech coverage. (bright music)