>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE in ETR. This is breaking analysis with Dave Vellante. >> ServiceNow is a company that investors love to love, but there's caution in the investor community right now is confusion about transitory inflation and higher interest rates looms. ServiceNow also suffers from a perfection syndrome of sorts. The company has seen that the slightest misstep can cause many freak outs from the investor community. So what it's done is it's architected a financial and communications model that allows it to beat expectations and raise its outlook on a consistent basis. Regardless, ServiceNow appears to be on track to vie for what its CEO Bill McDermott refers to as the next great enterprise software company. Wait, I thought Marc Benioff had his hands on that steering wheel. Hello everyone, and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we'll dig into one of the companies we began following almost 10 years ago and provide some thoughts on ServiceNow's March to 15 billion by 2026, which we think is a highly probable achievement. In 2020, despite the contraction in IT spending, SeviceNow outperformed both the S&P 500 and the NASDAQ, but here's a view of 2021. And you can see while the stock has done well since it saw a softness in May and again in early June, and it bounced off that double bottom, it's performance is well below those other benchmarks. This is not a big surprise given the fact that this is a high growth stock and we all know that those names with high multiples get hurt in an inflationary environment, but still the gaps are notable. This is especially true given the performance of the company. It's not often that you see a company with four to $5 billion in revenue growing at a 30% clip, throwing off billions of dollars in free cash flow and increasing operating margins at 100 basis points a year and promising to do that over the next several years. In fact, I don't think we've ever seen that before. I remember years ago, when the trade press was criticizing SeviceNow for its lofty valuation, despite the fact that it was losing money, then CEO, Frank Slootman said to me, "Dave, we can be highly profitable tomorrow if we want it to be, but this is a marathon and we're planning to go big." So essentially Slootman was telling me that this company was going to be an ATM machine that prints money. And that seems to be how it's shaping up. I happened to be at SeviceNow headquarters in 2017, literally the first day on the job for John Donahoe, the CEO replaced Slootman, and I remember while I was there thinking Donahoe was certainly capable, but why the heck I said, would the board let Frank Slootman get away? You know what? It turned great for Slootman, he's at snowflake. Donahoe, I always felt was a consumer guy anyway, and not long for SeviceNow. And now you have this guy, new CEO, Bill McDermott at the helm. He's not a more qualified CEO for the company in my view. About two months ago, McDermott led a virtual investor day. We've had McDermott on theCUBE a couple of times back when he was CEO of SAP and this individual is very compelling. He's got JFK like looks and charisma, but more than that, he's passionate and convincing. And he obviously knows enterprise software. And with conviction, he laid the groundwork for how SeviceNow will get to $10 billion in revenue by 2024 on its way to 15 billion two years thereafter. And one of the big things McDermott's stressed was they're going to get there without any big M&A moves. And that's important because previously the door was left open for that possibility. And now the company is assuring investors that it can get there organically, even with slower growth. So this chart implies no big M&A, and you can see Slootman handed over the reigns at that year one tick on the horizontal axis. This was not a turnaround story. It was a rocket ship at the time. And look at the logos on this chart. This is a revenue view and SeviceNow is aiming to be the fastest to get to 10 billion in software industry history. SeviceNow is valuation just to sort of shift gears here for a minute blew by workdays years ago. Its sites are now set on SAP which is currently valued at 170 billion. And then there's Oracle and Salesforce. They're at around 250 billion and 225 billion in valuation respectively. And these lines back to revenue show the trajectory that these companies took to get to 10 billion. And you can see how SeviceNow plans to get there with those dotted lines. And this is why I call this a collision course with Salesforce, because I think Marc Benioff might say, "Hey, we are ready." Are the next great enterprise software company. We have no plans to give up that post, that mantle anytime soon. I want to share a clip from four years ago. something we've been saying for a long, long time. Roll the clip. >> As they say their goal now is to be four billion by 2020. It feels like, you know, when we first covered SeviceNow knowledge, we said, wow, this company reminds us a lot of the early days of Salesforce. They've got this platform you can develop on this platform, you know, call it paths or, you know, whatever you want to call it, but we at the time said, they're on a collision course with Salesforce. Now there's plenty of room for both of those companies in the marketplace. Salesforce obviously focused predominantly on Salesforce automation, SeviceNow really on workflow automation, but you can see those sort of two markets coming together. >> Now you may be thinking isn't Salesforce's revenue like 5X that of SeviceNow? And yes it is. But I would say a couple of things. One is that Salesforce has gotten to where it is with a lot of M&A, more than 60 acquisitions. At some high profile wants to like slack and Tableau as well as MuleSoft and Heroku back in the day and many others. So we'll see how far McDermott can get before he reverts to his inquisitive self that we saw at SAP. But the second thing I'll say is serviceNow positions itself as the platform of platforms. And the thing is it runs its own cloud. And when it does acquisitions, it replatforms the acquiree into the now platform so that it can drive integrations more seamlessly. That's fundamentally part of its value proposition, a big part of its value proposition. And that means it's somewhat limited on the acquisitions it can make, it has to be pretty selective. Otherwise it's got to do a heavy lift to get it the now platform. It's the power of the models, especially if customers can get to a single CMDB, that configuration database management system, which by the way, a lot of customers never get to that kind of skirt that, but remember SeviceNow is like the ERP for IT. So the more you can get to a single data model, the more effective you're going to be, especially in this data era where you got to put data at the core of your organization, something we've talked about a lot. And the third thing I'll mention the SeviceNow wants to use this platform to attack what it sees as a very large TAM as shown here. Now, a couple of things I want to point out. One is when SeviceNow IPO in 2012, a lot of the analysts said that they were way overvalued because they were in a market. It was help desk and writing tickets was a $2 billion business that was in decline and BMC remedy. Wasn't really that big of a base to attack. In 2013, the Wikibon team took a stab at sizing the TAM. I dug back into the old Wiki. We had well over 30 billion at the time and we expected the company to move deeper into IT and then beyond IT into lines of business and line of business management. Yeah, we felt we were being conservative. We thought the number could be as big as 100 billion, but we felt like putting that number out there, was too aggressive but, you know, it turns out from SeviceNow standpoint, it sees these new software opportunities coming together. And SeviceNow in a way they can double dip both in and beyond their current markets. What I mean by that is it can partner with, for instance, HCM vendors and then at the same time offer employee workflows. They can partner or even purchase RPA tools from specialists like UI path or automation anywhere. And it can go acquire a company which it did like Intel a bot and integrate what I would consider lighter-weight RPA into its platform. So it can manage workflows for best of breed and pick off functionality throughout the software stack. Now what's interesting in this chart is first, the size of the TAM that SeviceNow sees 175 billion, but also how it's now reorganizing its business around workflows, which you see in the left-hand side. This was done of course, to simplify the many, many, many things that you can buy from SeviceNow. But there's also speculation that SeviceNow is leveraging its orchestration and service catalog capabilities, which are meaningful from a revenue standpoint and using them to power these workflows because the way it was organized was both confusing and not as effective as it could be. Now, it's well known that SeviceNow has ITSM this comprises the biggest piece of its revenue pie, probably a couple billion. And it's adding to that with ITSM pro and ITSM enterprise going deeper, deeper into the ITSM space. And it's ITAM business is also doing well against the likes of Datadog and Elastic and Splunk and others and its acquisition of LightStep. It's going to push it further into this space, which is both crowded is morphing into observability as we've been reporting. What's unclear though is how well, for instance, HR and the CSM businesses are doing as sort of standalone businesses, you might remember they used to be standalone businesses with standalone GMs. They've sort of changed that up a little bit. So this is potentially not only a way to simplify, but also shuffle the deck chairs a bit and maybe prop up the non IT workflows, which then allows SeviceNow to show this chart, which essentially says to the street, see, we have this huge TAM and our TAM expansion strategy is working as the overall business is growing nicely yet the mix is shifting toward customer, employee and creator workflows. See how awesome our business is and see how smart we are. So this is possibly a way to hide some of the warts and accentuate the growth. Look, there's not a lot to criticize SeviceNow about, but they've been pretty good at featuring what some perceive as weaknesses. Like for instance, the way it marketed it's a multi-instance and turned that into an advantage as a better model. Even though the whole cloud world was going multitenant and within a ServiceNow you got to really plan new releases, which they drop every six months, although CJ decide. So he's SeviceNows head of products. He did say at the investor meeting, that event that they held last May, that they do certain releases now bi-monthly and even some bi-weekly. So, yeah, maybe a little bit of nitpicking here, but I always liked to question when such changes are made to the reporting structures to the street. And if workflows are the new black, so to speak, I wonder will SeviceNow start pricing by workflows versus what really has been a legacy of, you know, what's your ticket volume and how many agents need access to the model and we'll charge you accordingly? Now, I'm not a service pricing expert and they don't make it easy to figure out that pricing. So let's dig a little bit more on that and keep an eye on it. Now I want to turn to the customers survey data from ETR on ServiceNow. First, here's the latest update on IT spending from ETR, something that we've been tracking for quite some time. We've been consistently saying to expect this year a seven to 8% growth for 2021 IT spend off of last year's contraction. And the latest ETR survey data puts it right at 8%. So we really liked that number. You know, could even be higher push 10% this year. Now, let's look at the spending profile within the ETR dataset. Of the 1100 plus respondents to this quarter, there were 377 SeviceNow customers, and this chart shows the breakdown of net score or spending velocity among those respondents. Remember, net score is a measure of that spending momentum. What it does is it takes the lime green bar, which is adopting new, that says 11% of that 377 customers are adopting ServiceNow for the first time. It takes that lime green and it adds the forest green bar that's growth in spending of 6% or more this half relative to the first half. That's 43% of the customers that have been surveyed here. And then it subtracts out the reds, which is that pinkish is spending less, that's 3%, small number of spending less. And then the bright red is we're leaving the platform. That's a minuscule 1% of the respondents. And you can see the rest in that gray area is flat spending, which is ignored. And so what this does is it calculates out, you'd take the greens minus the reds. It calculates out to a net score 50% for SeviceNow, which is well above that magic 40% elevated mark that we'd like to see. It's rare for a company of this size, except for the hyperscalers. You see AWS and Microsoft and Google are up that high and oh, there's another great enterprise software company at the 45% net score level. Guess who that is, salesforce.com. But anyway, it's rare to see that large of a company have that much spending momentum in the ETR surveys. Now let's take a look at the time series data for ServiceNow. This chart shows the net score granularity over time. So you see the bars, that time series, the blue line is net score. And you can see that it was dragged down during last year's lockdown. As, even though SeviceNow did pretty well last year and it's now spiking back to pre-COVID levels, which is a very positive sign for the company. That red call-out that ETR makes it shows market share. That's an indicator of pervasiveness in the dataset. I'm not overlyconcern there that downturn. I don't think it's a meaningful indicator because ServiceNow revenue is skewed towards a big spender accounts and this is an account unit indicator, if you will not spending level metric. And okay, and here's another reason and why I'm not concerned about SeviceNow is a so-called market share number in the ETR dataset as ETR defines it. This is an X, Y Z view chart that we'd like to show here. We've got net score on the vertical axis and market share in the horizontal plane. This is focusing on enterprise software. So remember that 40% red line is the magic level, anything above that is really indicative of momentum. Oh look, there's Salesforce and ServiceNow on that little collision course that I talked about. Now, CEO McDermott, I would say as by the way, would his predecessors, look, we're a platform of platforms and we partner with other companies, we'll meet at the customer level and sure we'll integrate functions where we think it can add value to customers. But we also understand we have to work with the vendors that our customers are using. So it's all good, plenty of room for growth for all of us, which by the way is true. But I would say this, anyone who's ever been in the enterprise software industry knows that enterprise software execs and their salespeople believe that every dollar spent on software should go to them. And if it's a good market with momentum and growth, they believe they can either organically write software to deliver customer function and value, or they can acquire to fill gaps. So, well, what McDermott would say is true. The likes of Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, Salesforce, Infor, et cetera, they all want as big of a budget piece as possible in the enterprise software space. That's just the way it is. Now, we're going to close with some anecdotal comments from ETR insights, formerly called VENN, which is a round table discussion with CXOs. You can read the summaries when we post on Wikibon and SiliconANGLE but let me summarize. This first comment comes from an assistant VP in retail who says SeviceNow is a key part of their digital transformation. They moved off of BMC remedy two years ago for the global ticketing system. And this person is saying that while the platform is extremely powerful, you got to buy into specific modules to just get one feature that you want. You may not need a lot of the other features, so it starts to get expensive. The other thing this individual is saying is initially, it's a very services heavy project. And so I'll tell you, when you look at the SeviceNow ecosystem the big SIs, the big names, they have big appetites. They love to eat at the trough as I sometimes say, and they want big clients with big budgets. So if you're not one of those top 500 or 700 customers, the big name SIs, you know, they might not be for you. They're not going to pay attention to you. They're going after the big prizes. So what I would suggest is you call up someone like Jason Wojahn of third era, he's the CEO over there and he's got a lot of experience in this space or some more specialized SeviceNow consultancy like them because you're going to get better value for the money. And you're going to get short-term ROI faster with a long-term sustainable ROI as a measurable objective. And I think this last comment sums it up nice, let me to skip over the second one and go just jump to the third one. This basically says the platform is integrated. It's like a mesh. It's not a bunch of stovepipes and cul-de-sacs. Yes it's expensive, but people love it. And like the iPhone, it just works. And their feature pace is accelerating. So pretty strong testimonials, but I want to keep an eye on price transparency any possible backlash there and how the ecosystem evolves. It's something that we called out early on. It's an indicator and SeviceNow needs to continue to invest in that partner network is especially as it builds out its vertical industry practices and expands internationally. Okay, we'll leave it there for now. Remember I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. These episodes they're all available as podcasts. All you got to do is search for breaking analysis podcast. You can always connect with me on Twitter @DVellante or email me @david.vellantesiliconangle.com. Appreciate the comments on LinkedIn. And don't forget to check out etr.plus for all the survey data. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE insights powered by ETR. Be well, and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>>Hey guys and girls, welcome back to Motor City, Lisa Martin here with John Furrier on the Cube's third day of coverage of Coon Cloud Native Con North America. John, we've had some great conversations over the last two and a half days. We've been talking about identity and security management as a critical need for enterprises within the cloud native space. We're gonna have another quick conversation >>On that. Yeah, we got a great segment coming up from someone who's been in the industry, a long time expert, running a great company. Now it's gonna be one of those pieces that fits into what we call super cloud. Others are calling cloud operating system. Some are calling just Cloud 2.0, 3.0. But there's definitely a major trend happening around how cloud is going Next generation. We've been covering it. So this segment should be >>Great. Let's unpack those trends. One of our alumni is back with us, O Rika Zi, co-founder and CEO of Aerio. Omri. Great to have you back on the >>Cube. Thank you. Great to be here. >>So identity move to the cloud, Access authorization did not talk to us about why you found it assertive, what you guys are doing and how you're flipping that script. >>Yeah, so back 15 years ago, I helped start Azure at Microsoft. You know, one of the first few folks that you know, really focused on enterprise services within the Azure family. And at the time I was working for the guy who ran all of Windows server and you know, active directory. He called it the linchpin workload for the Windows Server franchise, like big words. But what he meant was we had 95% market share and all of these new SAS applications like ServiceNow and you know, Workday and salesforce.com, they had to invent login and they had to invent access control. And so we were like, well, we're gonna lose it unless we figure out how to replace active directory. And that's how Azure Active Directory was born. And the first thing that we had to do as an industry was fix identity, right? Yeah. So, you know, we worked on things like oof Two and Open, Id Connect and SAML and Jot as an industry and now 15 years later, no one has to go build login if you don't want to, right? You have companies like Odd Zero and Okta and one login Ping ID that solve that problem solve single sign-on, on the web. But access Control hasn't really moved forward at all in the last 15 years. And so my co-founder and I who were both involved in the early beginnings of Azure Active directory, wanted to go back to that problem. And that problem is even bigger than identity and it's far from >>Solved. Yeah, this is huge. I think, you know, self-service has been a developer thing that's, everyone knows developer productivity, we've all experienced click sign in with your LinkedIn or Twitter or Google or Apple handle. So that's single sign on check. Now the security conversation kicks in. If you look at with this no perimeter and cloud, now you've got multi-cloud or super cloud on the horizon. You've got all kinds of opportunities to innovate on the security paradigm. I think this is kind of where I'm hearing the most conversation around access control as well as operationally eliminating a lot of potential problems. So there's one clean up the siloed or fragmented access and two streamlined for security. What's your reaction to that? Do you agree? And if not, where, where am I missing that? >>Yeah, absolutely. If you look at the life of an IT pro, you know, back in the two thousands they had, you know, l d or active directory, they add in one place to configure groups and they'd map users to groups. And groups typically corresponded to roles and business applications. And it was clunky, but life was pretty simple. And now they live in dozens or hundreds of different admin consoles. So misconfigurations are rampant and over provisioning is a real problem. If you look at zero trust and the principle of lease privilege, you know, all these applications have these course grained permissions. And so when you have a breach, and it's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when you wanna limit the blast radius of you know what happened, and you can't do that unless you have fine grained access control. So all those, you know, all those reasons together are forcing us as an industry to come to terms with the fact that we really need to revisit access control and bring it to the age of cloud. >>You guys recently, just this week I saw the blog on Topaz. Congratulations. Thank you. Talk to us about what that is and some of the gaps that's gonna help sarto to fill for what's out there in the marketplace. >>Yeah, so right now there really isn't a way to go build fine grains policy based real time access control based on open source, right? We have the open policy agent, which is a great decision engine, but really optimized for infrastructure scenarios like Kubernetes admission control. And then on the other hand, you have this new, you know, generation of access control ideas. This model called relationship based access control that was popularized by Google Zanzibar system. So Zanzibar is how they do access control for Google Docs and Google Drive. If you've ever kind of looked at a Google Doc and you know you're a viewer or an owner or a commenter, Zanzibar is the system behind it. And so what we've done is we've married these two things together. We have a policy based system, OPPA based system, and at the same time we've brought together a directory, an embedded directory in Topaz that allows you to answer questions like, does this user have this permission on this object? And bringing it all together, making it open sources a real game changer from our perspective, real >>Game changer. That's good to hear. What are some of the key use cases that it's gonna help your customers address? >>So a lot of our customers really like the idea of policy based access management, but they don't know how to bring data to that decision engine. And so we basically have a, you know, a, a very opinionated way of how to model that data. So you import data out of your identity providers. So you connect us to Okta or oze or Azure, Azure Active directory. And so now you have the user data, you can define groups and then you can define, you know, your object hierarchy, your domain model. So let's say you have an applicant tracking system, you have nouns like job, you know, know job descriptions or candidates. And so you wanna model these things and you want to be able to say who has access to, you know, the candidates for this job, for example. Those are the kinds of rules that people can express really easily in Topaz and in assertive. >>What are some of the challenges that are happening right now that dissolve? What, what are you looking at to solve? Is it complexity, sprawl, logic problems? What's the main problem set you guys >>See? Yeah, so as organizations grow and they have more and more microservices, each one of these microservices does authorization differently. And so it's impossible to reason about the full surface area of, you know, permissions in your application. And more and more of these organizations are saying, You know what, we need a standard layer for this. So it's not just Google with Zanzibar, it's Intuit with Oddy, it's Carta with their own oddy system, it's Netflix, you know, it's Airbnb with heed. All of them are now talking about how they solve access control extracted into its own service to basically manage complexity and regain agility. The other thing is all about, you know, time to market and, and tco. >>So, so how do you work with those services? Do you replace them, you unify them? What is the approach that you're taking? >>So basically these organizations are saying, you know what? We want one access control service. We want all of our microservices to call that thing instead of having to roll out our own. And so we, you know, give you the guts for that service, right? Topaz is basically the way that you're gonna go implement an access control service without having to go build it the same way that you know, large companies like Airbnb or Google or, or a car to >>Have. What's the competition look like for you guys? I'm not really seeing a lot of competition out there. Are there competitors? Are there different approaches? What makes you different? >>Yeah, so I would say that, you know, the biggest competitor is roll your own. So a lot of these companies that find us, they say, We're sick and tired of investing 2, 3, 4 engineers, five engineers on this thing. You know, it's the gift that keeps on giving. We have to maintain this thing and so we can, we can use your solution at a fraction of the cost a, a fifth, a 10th of what it would cost us to maintain it locally. There are others like Sty for example, you know, they are in the space, but more in on the infrastructure side. So they solve the problem of Kubernetes submission control or things like that. So >>Rolling your own, there's a couple problems there. One is do they get all the corner cases who built a they still, it's a company. Exactly. It's heavy lifting, it's undifferentiated, you just gotta check the box. So probably will be not optimized. >>That's right. As Bezo says, only focus on the things that make your beer taste better. And access control is one of those things. It's part of your security, you know, posture, it's a critical thing to get right, but you know, I wanna work on access control, said no developer ever, right? So it's kind of like this boring, you know, like back office thing that you need to do. And so we give you the mechanisms to be able to build it securely and robustly. >>Do you have a, a customer story example that is one of your go-tos that really highlights how you're improving developer productivity? >>Yeah, so we have a couple of them actually. So there's the largest third party B2B marketplace in the us. Free retail. Instead of building their own, they actually brought in aer. And what they wanted to do with AER was be the authorization layer for both their externally facing applications as well as their internal apps. So basically every one of their applications now hooks up to AER to do authorization. They define users and groups and roles and permissions in one place and then every application can actually plug into that instead of having to roll out their own. >>I'd like to switch gears if you don't mind. I get first of all, great update on the company and progress. I'd like to get your thoughts on the cloud computing market. Obviously you were your legendary position, Azure, I mean look at the, look at the progress over the past few years. Just been spectacular from Microsoft and you set the table there. Amazon web service is still, you know, thundering away even though earnings came out, the market's kind of soft still. You know, you see the cloud hyperscalers just continuing to differentiate from software to chips. Yep. Across the board. So the hyperscalers kicking ass taking names, doing great Microsoft right up there. What's the future? Cuz you now have the conversation where, okay, we're calling it super cloud, somebody calling multi-cloud, somebody calling it distributed computing, whatever you wanna call it. The old is now new again, it just looks different as cloud becomes now the next computer industry, >>You got an operating system, you got applications, you got hardware, I mean it's all kind of playing out just on a massive global scale, but you got regions, you got all kinds of connected systems edge. What's your vision on how this plays out? Because things are starting to fall into place. Web assembly to me just points to, you know, app servers are coming back, middleware, Kubernetes containers, VMs are gonna still be there. So you got the progression. What's your, what's your take on this? How would you share, share your thoughts to a friend or the industry, the audience? So what's going on? What's, what's happening right now? What's, what's going on? >>Yeah, it's funny because you know, I remember doing this quite a few years ago with you probably in, you know, 2015 and we were talking about, back then we called it hybrid cloud, right? And it was a vision, but it is actually what's going on. It just took longer for it to get here, right? So back then, you know, the big debate was public cloud or private cloud and you know, back when we were, you know, talking about these ideas, you know, we said, well you know, some applications will always stay on-prem and some applications will move to the cloud. I was just talking to a big bank and they basically said, look, our stated objective now is to move everything we can to the public cloud and we still have a large private cloud investment that will never go away. And so now we have essentially this big operating system that can, you know, abstract all of this stuff. So we have developer platforms that can, you know, sit on top of all these different pieces of infrastructure and you know, kind of based on policy decide where these applications are gonna be scheduled. So, you know, the >>Operating schedule shows like an operating system function. >>Exactly. I mean like we now, we used to have schedulers for one CPU or you know, one box, then we had schedulers for, you know, kind of like a whole cluster and now we have schedulers across the world. >>Yeah. My final question before we kind of get run outta time is what's your thoughts on web assembly? Cuz that's getting a lot of hype here again to kind of look at this next evolution again that's lighter weight kind of feels like an app server kind of direction. What's your, what's your, it's hyped up now, what's your take on that? >>Yeah, it's interesting. I mean back, you know, what's, what's old is new again, right? So, you know, I remember back in the late nineties we got really excited about, you know, JVMs and you know, this notion of right once run anywhere and yeah, you know, I would say that web assembly provides a pretty exciting, you know, window into that where you can take the, you know, sandboxing technology from the JavaScript world, from the browser essentially. And you can, you know, compile an application down to web assembly and have it real, really truly portable. So, you know, we see for example, policies in our world, you know, with opa, one of the hottest things is to take these policies and can compile them to web assemblies so you can actually execute them at the edge, you know, wherever it is that you have a web assembly runtime. >>And so, you know, I was just talking to Scott over at Docker and you know, they're excited about kind of bringing Docker packaging, OCI packaging to web assemblies. So we're gonna see a convergence of all these technologies right now. They're kind of each, each of our, each of them are in a silo, but you know, like we'll see a lot of the patterns, like for example, OCI is gonna become the packaging format for web assemblies as it is becoming the packaging format for policies. So we did the same thing. We basically said, you know what, we want these policies to be packaged as OCI assembly so that you can sign them with cosign and bring the entire ecosystem of tools to bear on OCI packages. So convergence is I think what >>We're, and love, I love your attitude too because it's the open source community and the developers who are actually voting on the quote defacto standard. Yes. You know, if it doesn't work, right, know people know about it. Exactly. It's actually a great new production system. >>So great momentum going on to the press released earlier this week, clearly filling the gaps there that, that you and your, your co-founder saw a long time ago. What's next for the assertive business? Are you hiring? What's going on there? >>Yeah, we are really excited about launching commercially at the end of this year. So one of the things that we were, we wanted to do that we had a promise around and we delivered on our promise was open sourcing our edge authorizer. That was a huge thing for us. And we've now completed, you know, pretty much all the big pieces for AER and now it's time to commercially launch launch. We already have customers in production, you know, design partners, and you know, next year is gonna be the year to really drive commercialization. >>All right. We will be watching this space ery. Thank you so much for joining John and me on the keep. Great to have you back on the program. >>Thank you so much. It was a pleasure. >>Our pleasure as well For our guest and John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching The Cube Live. Michelle floor of Con Cloud Native Con 22. This is day three of our coverage. We will be back with more coverage after a short break. See that.

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from the cube and ETR, this is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Organizations have considerable room to improve their performance without making expensive changes to their talent, their structure, or their fundamental business model. You don't need a slew of consultants to tell you what to do. You already know. What you need is to immediately ratchet up expectations, energy, urgency, and intensity. You have to fight mediocrity every step of the way. Amp it up and the results will follow. This is the fundamental premise of a hard-hitting new book written by Frank Slootman, CEO of Snowflake, and published earlier this year. It's called "Amp It Up, Leading for Hypergrowth "by Raising Expectations, Increasing Urgency, "and Elevating Intensity." Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights, powered by ETR. At Snowflake Summit last month, I was asked to interview Frank on stage about his new book. I've read it several times. And if you haven't read it, you should. Even if you have read it, in this Breaking Analysis, we'll dig deeper into the book and share some clarifying insights and nuances directly from Slootman himself from my one-on-one conversation with him. My first question to Slootman was why do you write this book? Okay, it's kind of a common throwaway question. And how the heck did you find time to do it? It's fairly well-known that a few years ago, Slootman put up a post on LinkedIn with the title Amp It Up. It generated so much buzz and so many requests for Frank's time that he decided that the best way to efficiently scale and share his thoughts on how to create high-performing companies and organizations was to publish a book. Now, he wrote the book during the pandemic. And I joked that they must not have Netflix in Montana where he resides. In a pretty funny moment, he said that writing the book was easier than promoting it. Take a listen. >> Denise, our CMO, you know, she just made sure that this process wasn't going to. It was more work for me to promote this book with all these damn podcasts and other crap, than actually writing the book, you know. And after a while, I was like I'm not doing another podcast. >> Now, the book gives a lot of interesting background information on Slootman's career and what he learned at various companies that he led and participated in. Now, I'm not going to go into most of that today, which is why you should read the book yourself. But Slootman, he's become somewhat of a business hero to many people, myself included. Leaders like Frank, Scott McNealy, Jayshree Ullal, and my old boss, Pat McGovern at IDG, have inspired me over the years. And each has applied his or her own approach to building cultures and companies. Now, when Slootman first took over the reins at Snowflake, I published a Breaking Analysis talking about Snowflake and what we could expect from the company now that Slootman and CFO Mike Scarpelli were back together. In that post, buried toward the end, I referenced the playbook that Frank used at Data Domain and ServiceNow, two companies that I followed quite closely as an analyst, and how it would be applied at Snowflake, that playbook if you will. Frank reached out to me afterwards and said something to the effect of, "I don't use playbooks. "I am a situational leader. "Playbooks, you know, they work in football games. "But in the military, they teach you "situational leadership." Pretty interesting learning moment for me. So I asked Frank on the stage about this. Here's what he said. >> The older you get, the more experience that you have, the more you become a prisoner of your own background because you sort of think in terms of what you know as opposed to, you know, getting outside of what you know and trying to sort of look at things like a five-year-old that has never seen this before. And then how would you, you know, deal with it? And I really try to force myself into I've never seen this before and how do I think about it? Because at least they're very different, you know, interpretations. And be open-minded, just really avoid that rinse and repeat mentality. And you know, I've brought people in from who have worked with me before. Some of them come with me from company to company. And they were falling prey to, you know, rinse and repeat. I would just literally go like that's not what we want. >> So think about that for a moment. I mean, imagine coming in to lead a new company and forcing yourself and your people to forget what they know that works and has worked in the past, put that aside and assess the current situation with an open mind, essentially start over. Now, that doesn't mean you don't apply what has worked in the past. Slootman talked to me about bringing back Scarpelli and the synergistic relationship that they have and how they build cultures and the no BS and hard truth mentality they bring to companies. But he bristles when people ask him, "What type of CEO are you?" He says, "Do we have to put a label on it? "It really depends on the situation." Now, one of the other really hard-hitting parts of the book was the way Frank deals with who to keep and who to let go. He uses the Volkswagen tagline of drivers wanted. He says in his book, in companies there are passengers and there are drivers, and we want drivers. He said, "You have to figure out really quickly "who the drivers are and basically throw the wrong people "off the bus, keep the right people, bring in new people "that fit the culture and put them "in the right seats on the bus." Now, these are not easy decisions to make. But as it pertains to getting rid of people, I'm reminded of the movie "Moneyball." Art Howe, the manager of the Oakland As, he refused to play Scott Hatteberg at first base. So the GM, Billy Bean played by Brad Pitt says to Peter Brand who was played by Jonah Hill, "You have to fire Carlos Pena." Don't learn how to fire people. Billy Bean says, "Just keep it quick. "Tell him he's been traded and that's it." So I asked Frank, "Okay, I get it. "Like the movie, when you have the wrong person "on the bus, you just have to make the decision, "be straightforward, and do it." But I asked him, "What if you're on the fence? "What if you're not completely sure if this person "is a driver or a passenger, if he or she "should be on the bus or not on the bus? "How do you handle that?" Listen to what he said. >> I have a very simple way to break ties. And when there's doubt, there's no doubt, okay? >> When there's doubt, there's no doubt. Slootman's philosophy is you have to be emphatic and have high conviction. You know, back to the baseball analogy, if you're thinking about taking the pitcher out of the game, take 'em out. Confrontation is the single hardest thing in business according to Slootman but you have to be intellectually honest and do what's best for the organization, period. Okay, so wow, that may sound harsh but that's how Slootman approaches it, very Belichickian if you will. But how can you amp it up on a daily basis? What's the approach that Slootman takes? We got into this conversation with a discussion about MBOs, management by objective. Slootman in his book says he's killed MBOs at every company he's led. And I asked him to explain why. His rationale was that individual MBOs invariably end up in a discussion about relief of the MBO if the person is not hitting his or her targets. And that detracts from the organizational alignment. He said at Snowflake everyone gets paid the same way, from the execs on down. It's a key way he creates focus and energy in an organization, by creating alignment, urgency, and putting more resources into the most important things. This is especially hard, Slootman says, as the organization gets bigger. But if you do approach it this way, everything gets easier. The cadence changes, the tempo accelerates, and it works. Now, and to emphasize that point, he said the following. Play the clip. >> Every meeting that you have, every email, every encounter in the hallway, whatever it is, is an opportunity to amp things up. That's why I use that title. But do you take that opportunity? >> And according to Slootman, if you don't take that opportunity, if you're not in the moment, amping it up, then you're thinking about your golf game or the tennis match that's going on this weekend or being out on your boat. And to the point, this approach is not for everyone. You're either built for it or you're not. But if you can bring people into the organization that can handle this type of dynamic, it creates energy. It becomes fun. Everything moves faster. The conversations are exciting. They're inspiring. And it becomes addictive. Now let's talk about priorities. I said to Frank that for me anyway, his book was an uncomfortable read. And he was somewhat surprised by that. "Really," he said. I said, "Yeah. "I mean, it was an easy read but uncomfortable "because over my career, I've managed thousands of people, "not tens of thousands but thousands, "enough to have to take this stuff very seriously." And I found myself throughout the book, oh, you know, on the one hand saying to myself, "Oh, I got that right, good job, Dave." And then other times, I was thinking to myself, "Oh wow, I probably need to rethink that. "I need to amp it up on that front." And the point is to Frank's leadership philosophy, there's no one correct way to approach all situations. You have to figure it out for yourself. But the one thing in the book that I found the hardest was Slootman challenged the reader. If you had to drop everything and focus on one thing, just one thing, for the rest of the year, what would that one thing be? Think about that for a moment. Were you able to come up with that one thing? What would happen to all the other things on your priority list? Are they all necessary? If so, how would you delegate those? Do you have someone in your organization who can take those off your plate? What would happen if you only focused on that one thing? These are hard questions. But Slootman really forces you to think about them and do that mental exercise. Look at Frank's body language in this screenshot. Imagine going into a management meeting with Frank and being prepared to share all the things you're working on that you're so proud of and all the priorities you have for the coming year. Listen to Frank in this clip and tell me it doesn't really make you think. >> I've been in, you know, on other boards and stuff. And I got a PowerPoint back from the CEO and there's like 15 things. They're our priorities for the year. I'm like you got 15, you got none, right? It's like you just can't decide, you know, what's important. So I'll tell you everything because I just can't figure out. And the thing is it's very hard to just say one thing. But it's really the mental exercise that matters. >> Going through that mental exercise is really important according to Slootman. Let's have a conversation about what really matters at this point in time. Why does it need to happen? And does it take priority over other things? Slootman says you have to pull apart the hairball and drive extraordinary clarity. You could be wrong, he says. And he admits he's been wrong on many things before. He, like everyone, is fearful of being wrong. But if you don't have the conversation according to Slootman, you're already defeated. And one of the most important things Slootman emphasizes in the book is execution. He said that's one of the reasons he wrote "Amp It Up." In our discussion, he referenced Pat Gelsinger, his former boss, who bought Data Domain when he was working for Joe Tucci at EMC. Listen to Frank describe the interaction with Gelsinger. >> Well, one of my prior bosses, you know, Pat Gelsinger, when they acquired Data Domain through EMC, Pat was CEO of Intel. And he quoted Andy Grove as saying, 'cause he was Intel for a long time when he was younger man. And he said no strategy is better than its execution, which if I find one of the most brilliant things. >> Now, before you go changing your strategy, says Slootman, you have to eliminate execution as a potential point of failure. All too often, he says, Silicon Valley wants to change strategy without really understanding whether the execution is right. All too often companies don't consider that maybe the product isn't that great. They will frequently, for example, make a change to sales leadership without questioning whether or not there's a product fit. According to Slootman, you have to drive hardcore intellectual honesty. And as uncomfortable as that may be, it's incredibly important and powerful. Okay, one of the other contrarian points in the book was whether or not to have a customer success department. Slootman says this became really fashionable in Silicon Valley with the SaaS craze. Everyone was following and pattern matching the lead of salesforce.com. He says he's eliminated the customer service department at every company he's led which had a customer success department. Listen to Frank Slootman in his own words talk about the customer success department. >> I view the whole company as a customer success function. Okay, I'm customer success, you know. I said it in my presentation yesterday. We're a customer-first organization. I don't need a department. >> Now, he went on to say that sales owns the commercial relationship with the customer. Engineering owns the technical relationship. And oh, by the way, he always puts support inside of the engineering department because engineering has to back up support. And rather than having a separate department for customer success, he focuses on making sure that the existing departments are functioning properly. Slootman also has always been big on net promoter score, NPS. And Snowflake's is very high at 72. And according to Slootman, it's not just the product. It's the people that drive that type of loyalty. Now, Slootman stresses amping up the big things and even the little things too. He told a story about someone who came into his office to ask his opinion about a tee shirt. And he turned it around on her and said, "Well, what do you think?" And she said, "Well, it's okay." So Frank made the point by flipping the situation. Why are you coming to me with something that's just okay? If we're going to do something, let's do it. Let's do it all out. Let's do it right and get excited about it, not just check the box and get something off your desk. Amp it up, all aspects of our business. Listen to Slootman talk about Steve Jobs and the relevance of demanding excellence and shunning mediocrity. >> He was incredibly intolerant of anything that he didn't think of as great. You know, he was immediately done with it and with the person. You know, I'm not that aggressive, you know, in that way. I'm a little bit nicer, you know, about it. But I still, you know, I don't want to give into expediency and mediocrity. I just don't, I'm just going to fight it, you know, every step of the way. >> Now, that story was about a little thing like some swag. But Slootman talked about some big things too. And one of the major ways Snowflake was making big, sweeping changes to amp up its business was reorganizing its go-to-market around industries like financial services, media, and healthcare. Here's some ETR data that shows Snowflake's net score or spending momentum for key industry segments over time. The red dotted line at 40% is an indicator of highly elevated spending momentum. And you can see for the key areas shown, Snowflake is well above that level. And we cut this data where responses were greater, the response numbers were greater than 15. So not huge ends but large enough to have meaning. Most were in the 20s. Now, it's relatively uncommon to see a company that's having the success of Snowflake make this kind of non-trivial change in the middle of steep S-curve growth. Why did they make this move? Well, I think it's because Snowflake realizes that its data cloud is going to increasingly have industry diversity and unique value by industry, that ecosystems and data marketplaces are forming around industries. So the more industry affinity Snowflake can create, the stronger its moat will be. It also aligns with how the largest and most prominent global system integrators, global SIs, go to market. This is important because as companies are transforming, they are radically changing their data architecture, how they think about data, how they approach data as a competitive advantage, and they're looking at data as specifically a monetization opportunity. So having industry expertise and knowledge and aligning with those customer objectives is going to serve Snowflake and its ecosystems well in my view. Slootman even said he joined the board of Instacart not because he needed another board seat but because he wanted to get out of his comfort zone and expose himself to other industries as a way to learn. So look, we're just barely scratching the surface of Slootman's book and I've pulled some highlights from our conversation. There's so much more that I can share just even from our conversation. And I will as the opportunity arises. But for now, I'll just give you the kind of bumper sticker of "Amp It Up." Raise your standards by taking every opportunity, every interaction, to increase your intensity. Get your people aligned and moving in the same direction. If it's the wrong direction, figure it out and course correct quickly. Prioritize and sharpen your focus on things that will really make a difference. If you do these things and increase the urgency in your organization, you'll naturally pick up the pace and accelerate your company. Do these things and you'll be able to transform, better identify adjacent opportunities and go attack them, and create a lasting and meaningful experience for your employees, customers, and partners. Okay, that's it for today. Thanks for watching. And thank you to Alex Myerson who's on production and he manages the podcast for Breaking Analysis. Kristin Martin and Cheryl Knight help get the word out on social and in our newsletters. And Rob Hove is our EIC over at Silicon Angle who does some wonderful and tremendous editing. Thank you all. Remember, all these episodes are available as podcasts. Wherever you listen, just search Breaking Analysis podcast. I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. And you can email me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com or DM me @dvellante or comment on my LinkedIn posts. And please do check out etr.ai for the best survey data in enterprise tech. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights, powered by ETR. Thanks for watching. Be well. And we'll see you next time on Breaking Analysis. (upbeat music)

>>Welcome to the cube conversation here. I'm Sean ferry with the cube in Palo Alto, California. We've got two great guests here featuring armory who has with them Patrion open-source and talking open source and the enterprise. I'm your host, John ferry with the cube. Thanks for watching guys. Thanks for coming on. Really appreciate. I've got two great guests, Ben mapping, and SVP, a strategic partner in the armory and Ian Della horn, S staff SRE at Patrion gentlemen, you know, open source and enterprise is here and we wouldn't talk about thanks for coming. I appreciate it. >>Yeah. Thank you, John. Really happy to be here. Thank you to the Cuban and your whole crew. I'll start with a quick intro. My name is Ben Mappin, farmers founders, lead strategic partnerships. As John mentioned, you know, it all, it really starts with a premise that traditional businesses, such as hotels, banks, car manufacturers are now acting and behaving much more like software companies than they did in the past. And so if you believe that that's true. What does it mean? It means that these businesses need to get great at delivering their software and specifically to the cloud, like AWS. And that's exactly what armory aims to do for our customers. We're based on opensource Spinnaker, which is a continuous delivery platform. And, and I'm very happy that Ian from Patrion is here to talk about our journey together >>And introduce yourself what you do at Patriot and when Patrion does, and then why you guys together here? What's the, what's the story? >>Absolutely. Hi, John and Ben. Thanks for, thanks for having me. So I am Ian. I am a site reliability engineer at Patrion and Patrion is a membership platform for creators. And what we're our mission is to get creators paid, changing the way the art is valued so that creators can make money by having a membership relationship with, with fans. And we are, we're built on top of AWS and we are using Spinnaker with armory to deploy our applications that, you know, help, help creators get paid. Basically >>Talk about the original story of Ben. How are you guys together? What brought you together? Obviously patron is well-known in the creator circles. Congratulations, by the way, all your success. You've done a great service for the industry and have changed the game you were doing creators before it was fashionable. And also you got some cutting-edge decentralization business models as well. So again, we'll come back to that in a minute, but Ben, talk about how this all comes together. Yeah, >>Yeah. So Ian's got a great kind of origin story on our relationship together. I'll give him a lead in which is, you know, what we've learned over the years from our large customers is that in order to get great at deploying software, it really comes down to three things or at least three things. The first being velocity, you have to ship your software with velocity. So if you're deploying your software once a quarter or even once a year, that does no good to your customers or to your business, like just code sitting in a feature branch on a shelf, more or less not creating any business value. So you have to ship with speed. Second, you have to ship with reliability. So invariably there will be bugs. There will be some outages, but you know, one of the things that armory provides with Spinnaker open sources, the ability to create hardened deployment pipeline so that you're testing the right things at the right times with the right folks involved to do reviews. >>And if there is hopefully not, but if there is a problem in production, you're isolating that problem to a small group of users. And then we call this the progressive deployment or Canary deployment where you're deploying to a small number of users. You measure the results, make sure it's good, expand it and expand it. And so I think, you know, preventing outages is incredibly incredibly important. And then the last thing is being able to deploy multi target multi-cloud. And so in the AWS ecosystem, we're talking about ECS, EKS Lambda. And so I think that these pieces of value or kind of the, the pain points that, that enterprises face can resonate with a lot of companies out there, including ENN Patriot. And so I'll, I'll, I'll let you tell the story. >>Yeah, go ahead. Absolutely. Thanks. Thanks for the intro, man. So background background of our partnership with armory as back in the backend, February of 2019, we had a payments payments slowed down for payments processing, and we were risking not getting creators paid on time, which is a doc great for creators because they rely on us for income to be able to pay themselves, pay their rent or mortgage, but also pay staff because they have video editors, website admins, people that nature work with them. And there were, they're a very, there's a very many root causes to this, to this incident, all kind of culminate at once. One of the things that we saw was that deploying D point fixes to remediate. This took too long or taking at least 45 minutes to deploy a new version of the application. And so we've had continuous delivery before using a custom custom home built, rolling deploy. >>We needed to get that time down. We also needed to be secure in our knowledge of like that deploy was stable. So we had had to place a break in the middle due to various factors that that can happen during the deploy previously, I had used a Spinnaker at previous employers. I have been set it up myself and introduced it. And I knew about, I knew like, oh, this is something we could, this would be great. But the Patriot team, the patron SRE team at that time was two people. So I don't have the ability to manage Spinnaker on my own. It's a complex open-source product. It can do a lot of things. There's a lot of knobs to tweak a lot of various settings and stuff you need to know about tangentially. One of the co-founders of, of armory had been, had to hit, had hit me up earlier. I was like, Hey, have you heard of armory? We're doing this thing, opens our Spinnaker, we're packaging this and managing it, check us out if you want. I kind of like filed it away. Like, okay, well that might be something we can use later. And then like two weeks later, I was like, oh wait, this company that does Spinnaker, I know of them. We should probably have a conversation with them and engage with them. >>And so you hit him up and said, Hey, too many knobs and buttons to push what's the deal. >>Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So I was, I was like, Hey, so by the way, I about that thing, how, how soon can you get someone get someone over here? >>So Ben take us through the progression. Cause that really is how things work in the open source. Open source is really one of those things where a lot of community outreach, a lot of people are literally a one degree or two separation from someone who either wrote the project or is involved in the project. Here's a great example. He saw the need for Spinnaker. The business model was there for him to solve. Okay. Fixes rolling deployments, homegrown all the things, pick your pick, your use case, but he wanted to make it easier. This tends to, this is kind of a pattern. What did you guys do? What's the next step? How did this go from here? >>Yeah. You know, Spinnaker being source is critical to armory's success. Many companies, not just pastry on open source software, I think is not really debatable anymore in terms of being applicable to enterprise companies. But the thing with selling open source software to large companies is that they need a backstop. They need not just enterprise support, but they need features and functionality that enable them to use that software at scale and safely. And so those are really the things that, that we focus on and we use open source as a really, it's a great community to collaborate and to contribute fixes that other companies can use. Other companies contribute fixes and functionality that we then use. But it's, it's really a great place to get feedback and to find new customers that perhaps need that enhanced level of functionality and support. And, and I'm very, very happy that Patrion was one of those companies. >>Okay. So let's talk about the Patrion. Okay. Obviously scaling is a big part of it. You're an SRE site, reliability engineers with folks who don't know what that is, is your, your job is essentially, you know, managing scale. Some say you the dev ops manager, but that's not really right answer. What is the SRE role at patriotics share with folks out there who are either having an SRE. They don't even know it yet or need to have SRS because this is a huge transition that, and new, new and emerging must have role in companies, >>Right? Yeah. We're the history of Patrion covers a lot. We cover a wide swath of a wide swath of, of, of things that we work with and, and areas that we consider to be our, our purview. Not only are we working on working with our AWS environment, but we also are involved in how can we make the site more reliable or performance so that, so that creators fans have a good experience. So we work with our content delivery numbers or caching strategies for caching caching assets. We work inside the application itself for doing performance performance, a hassle. This is also in proving observability with distributed tracing and metrics on a lot of that stuff, but also on the build and deploy side, if we can, if we can get that deploy time faster, like give engineers faster feedback on features that they're working on or bug fixes and also being secure and knowing that the, the code that they're working on it gets delivered reliably. >>Yeah. I think I, you have the continuous delivery is always the, the, the killer killer workflow as both the Spinnaker question here. Well, how has Spinnaker, well, what, how, how does Spinnaker being an open source project help you guys? I mean, obviously open source code is great. How has that been significant and beneficial for both armory and Patrion? >>Yeah, I'll take the first stab at this one. And it starts at the beginning. Spinnaker was created by Netflix and since Netflix open source that four or five years ago, there have been countless and significant contributions from many other companies, including armory, including AWS and those contributions collectively push the industry forward and allow the, the companies that, you know, that use open-source Spinnaker or armory, they can now benefit from all of the collective effort together. So just that community aspect working together is huge. Absolutely huge. And, you know, open source, I guess on the go-to-market side is a big driver for us. You know, there's many, many companies using open-source Spinnaker in production that are not our customers yet. And we, we survey them. We want to know how they're using open-source Spinnaker so that we can then improve open-source Spinnaker, but also build features that are critical for large companies to run at scale, deploy at scale, deploy with velocity and with reliability. >>Yeah. What's your take on, on the benefits of Spinnaker being open source? >>A lot of what Ben, it's been really beneficial to be able to like, be able to go in and look at the source code for components. I've been wondering something like, why is this thing working like this? Or how did they solve this? It's also been useful for, I can go ask the community for, for advice on things. If armory doesn't has the, it doesn't have the time or bandwidth to work on some things I've been able to ask the special interest groups in the source community. Like, can we, can we help improve this or something like that. And I've also been able to commit simple bug fixes for features that I've, that I've needed. I was like, well, I don't need to, I don't need to go engage are very on this. I can just like, I can just write up a simple patch on and have that out for review. >>You know, that's the beautiful thing about open sources. You get the source code and that's, and some people just think it's so easy, Ben, you know, just, Hey, just give me the open source. I'll code it. I got an unlimited resource team. Not, not always the case. So I gotta ask you guys on Patrion. Why use a company like armory, if you have the open source code and armory, why did you build a business on the open source project? Like Spinnaker? >>Yeah. Like I see. Absolutely. Yeah. Like I, like I said earlier, the atrium, the Patrion SRE team was wasn't is fairly small. There's two people. Now we're six. People are still people down. We're six people now. So being sure we could run a Spinnaker on our own if we, if we wanted to. And, but then we'd have no time to do anything else basically. And that's not the best use of our, of our creators money. Our fans, the fans being the creators artists. We have obviously take a percentage on top of that. And we, we need to spend our, that money well, and having armory who's dedicated to the Spinnaker is dedicated, involved the open source project. But also there are experts on this Sunday. It was something that would take me like a week of stumbling around trying to find documentation on how to set this thing up. They done this like 15, 20 times and they can just go, oh yeah, this is what we do for this. And let me go fix it for you >>At score. You know, you've got a teammate. I think that's where, what you're getting at. I got to ask you what other things is that free you up? Because this is the classic business model of life. You know, you have a partner you're moving fast, it slows you down to get into it. Sure. You can do it yourself, but why it's faster to go with it, go together with a partner and a wing man as we will. What things did does that free you up to work on as an SRE? >>Oh, that's freed me up to work on a bigger parts of our build and deploy pipeline. It's freed me up to work on moving from a usage based deploys onto a containerization strategy. It's freed me up to work on more broader observability issues instead of just being laser-focused on running an operating spending. >>Yeah. And that really kind of highlights. I'm glad you said that because it highlights what's going on. You had a lot of speed and velocity. You've got scale, you've got security and you've got new challenges you got to fix in and move fast. It's a whole new world. So again, this is why I love cloud native. Right? So you got open source, you got scale and you guys are applying directly to the, to the infrastructure of the business. So Ben, I got to ask you armory. Co-founder why did you guys build your business on an open source project? Like Spinnaker? What was the mindset? How did you attack this? What did you guys do? Take us through that piece because this is truly a great entrepreneurial story about open source. >>Yeah. Yeah. I'll give you the abridged version, which is that my co-founders and I, we solved the same problem, which is CD at a previous company, but we did it kind of the old fashioned way we home role. We handled it ourselves. We built it on top of Jenkins and it was great for that company, but, and that was kind of the inspiration for us to then ask questions. Hey, is this bigger? We, when at the time we found that Spinnaker had just been, you know, dog food inside of Netflix and they were open sourcing it. And we thought it was a great opportunity for us to partner. But the bigger reason is that Spinnaker is a platform that deploys to other platforms like AWS and Kubernetes and the sheer amount of surface area that's required to build a great product is enormous. And I actually believe that the only way to be successful in this space is to be open source, to have a community of large companies and passionate developers that contribute the roads if you will, to deploy into various targets. >>And so that's the reason, number one for it being open source and us wanting to build our business on top of open source. And then the second reason is because we focus almost exclusively on solving enterprise scale problems. We have a platform that needs to be extensible and open source is by definition extensible. So our customers, I mean, Ian just had a great example, right? Like he needed to fix something he was able to do so solve it in open source. And then, you know, shortly thereafter that that fix in mainline gets into the armory official build and then he can consume his fix. So we see a lot of that from our other customers. And then even, you know, take a very, very large company. They may have custom off that they need to integrate with, but that doesn't, that's not in open-source Spinnaker, but they can go and build that themselves. >>Yeah, it's real. It really is the new modern way to develop. And I, you know, last 80 with startup showcase last season, Emily Freeman gave a talk on, you know, you know, retiring, I call it killing the software, SDLC, the lifecycle of how software was developed in the past. And I got to ask you guys, and, and this cube conversation is that this is kind of like the, the kind of the big wave we're on now is cloud scale, open source, cloud, native data security, all being built in on this in the pipelines to your point is SRS enabling a new infrastructure and a new environment for people to build essentially SAS. So I got to ask you guys as, and you mentioned it Ben, the old way you hand rolled something, Netflix, open source, something, you got to look at Lyft with Envoy. I mean, large-scale comes, are donating their stuff into open source and people getting on top of it and building it. So the world's changed. So we've got to ask you, what's the difference between standing up a SAS application today versus say five to eight years ago, because we all see salesforce.com. You know, they're out there, they built their own data center. Cloud skills changed the dynamics of how software is being built. And with open-source accelerating every quarter, you're seeing more growth in software. How has building a platform for applications changed and how has that changed? How people build SAS applications, Ben, what's your take on this? It's kind of a thought exercise here. >>Yeah. I mean, I wouldn't even call it a thought exercise. We're seeing it firsthand from our customers. And then I'll, you know, I'll, I'll give my answer and you can weigh in on like practical, like what you're actually doing at Patrion with SAS, but the, the costs and the kind of entry fee, if you will, for building a SAS application has tremendously dropped. You don't need to buy servers and put them inside data centers anymore. You just spin up a VM or Kubernetes cluster with AWS. AWS has led the way in public cloud to make this incredible easy. And the tool sets being built around cloud native, like armory and like many other companies in the space are making it even easier. So we're just seeing the proliferation of, of software being developed and, and hopefully, you know, armory is playing a role in, in making it easier and better. >>So before we get to Unum for a second, I just want to just double down on it because there's great conversation that implies that there's going to be a new migration of apps everywhere, right. As tsunami of clutter good or bad, is that good or bad or is it all open source? Is it all good then? >>Absolutely good. For sure. There will be, you know, good stuff developed and not so good stuff developed, but survival of the fittest will hopefully promote those, the best apps with the highest value to the end user and, and society at large and push us all forward. So, >>And what's your take, obviously, Kubernetes, you seeing things like observability talking about how we're managing stateful and services that are being deployed and tear down in real time, automated, all new things are developing. How does building a true scalable SAS application change today versus say five, eight years ago? >>I mean, like you said, there's a, there's a lot, there's a lot of new, both open source. So SAS products available that you can use to build a scale stuff. Like if you're going to need that to build like secure authentication, instead of having to roll that out and you could go with something like Okta raw zero, you can just pull that off the shelf stuff for like managing push notifications before that was like something really hard to really hard to do. Then Firebase came on the scene and also for manic state and application and stuff like that. And also for like being, being able to deliver before >>You had Jenkins, maybe even for that, you didn't really have anything Jenkins came along. And then now you have open-source products like Spinnaker that you can use to deliver. And then you have companies built around that, that you can just go and say, Hey, can you please help us deliver this? Like you just help us, enable us to be able to build, build our products so that we can focus on delivering value to our creators and fans instead of having to focus on, on other things. >>So bill it builds faster. You can compose stuff faster. You don't have to roll your own code. You can just roll your own modules basically, and then exactly what prietary on top of it. Absolutely. Yeah. And that's why commercial open source is booming. Guys. Thank you so much, Ben, congratulations on armory and great to have you on from Patrion well-known success. So we'll accompany you congratulate. If we don't know patriarch, check it out, they have changed the game on creators and leading the industry. Ben. Great, great shot with armory and Spinnaker. Thanks for coming on. Thank you >>So much. Thank you >>So much. Okay. I'm Sean Ferrer here with the cube conversation with Palo Alto. Thanks for watching.

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from the cube in ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> On Friday, December 10th, Oracle announced a strong earnings beat and raise, on the strength of its licensed business, and slightly better than expected cloud performance. The stock was up sharply on the day and closed up nearly 16% surpassing 280 billion in market value. Oracle's success is due largely to its execution, of a highly differentiated strategy, that has really evolved over the past decade or more, deeply integrating its hardware and software, heavily investing in next generation cloud, creating a homogeneous experience across its application portfolio, and becoming the number one platform. Number one for the world's most mission critical applications. Now, while investors piled into the stock, skeptics will point to the beat being weighed toward licensed revenue and likely keep one finger on the sell button until they're convinced Oracle's cloud momentum, is more consistent and predictable. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibond CUBE insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we'll review Oracle's most recent quarter, and pull in some ETR survey data, to frame the company's cloud business, the momentum of fusion ERP, where the company is winning and some gaps and opportunities that we see. The numbers this quarter was strong, particularly top line growth. Here are a few highlights. Oracle's revenues that grew 6% year on year that's in constant currency, surpassed $10 billion for the quarter. Oracle's non-gap operating margins, were an impressive 47%. Safra Catz has always said cloud is more profitable business and it's really starting to show in the income statement. Operating cash and free cash flow were 10.3 billion and 7.1 billion respectively, for the past four quarters, and would have been higher, if not for charges largely related to litigation expenses tied to the hiring of Mark Hurd, which the company said would not repeat in the future quarters. And you can see in this chart how Oracle breaks down its business, which is kind of a mishmash of items they lump into so-called the cloud. The largest piece of the revenue pie is cloud services, and licensed support, which in reading 10Ks, you'll find statements like the following; licensed support revenues are our largest revenue stream and include product upgrades, and maintenance releases and patches, as well as technical support assistance and statements like the following; cloud and licensed revenue, include the sale of cloud services, cloud licenses and on-premises licenses, which typically represent perpetual software licenses purchased by customers, for use in both cloud, and on-premises, IT environments. And cloud license and on-prem license revenues primarily represent amounts earned from granting customers perpetual licenses to use our database middleware application in industry specific products, which our customers use for cloud-based, on-premise and other IT environments. So you tell me, "is that cloud? I don't know." In the early days of Oracle cloud, the company used to break out, IaaS, PaaS and SaaS revenue separately, but it changed its mind, which really makes it difficult to determine what's happening in true cloud. Look I have no problem including same same hardware software control plane, et cetera. The hybrid if it's on-prem in a true hybrid environment like exadata cloud@customer or AWS outposts. But you have to question what's really cloud in these numbers. And Larry in the earnings call mentioned that Salesforce licenses the Oracle database, to run its cloud and Oracle doesn't count that in its cloud number, rather it counts it in license revenue, but as you can see it varies that into a line item that starts with the word cloud. So I guess I would say that Oracle's reporting is maybe somewhat better than IBM's cloud reporting, which is the worst, but I can't really say what is and isn't cloud, in these numbers. Nonetheless, Oracle is getting it done for investors. Here's a chart comparing the five-year performance of Oracle to some of its legacy peers. We excluded Microsoft because it skews the numbers. Microsoft would really crush all these names including Oracle. But look at Oracle. It's wedged in between the performance of the NASDAQ and the S&P 500, it's up over 160% in that five-year timeframe, well ahead of SAP which is up 59% in that time, and way ahead of the dismal -22% performance of IBM. Well, it's a shame. The tech tide is rising, it's lifting all boats but, IBM has unfortunately not been able to capitalize. That's a story for another day. As a market watcher, you can't help but love Larry Ellison. I only met him once at an IDC conference in Paris where I got to interview Scott McNealy, CEO at the time. Ellison is great for analysts because, he's not afraid to talk about the competition. He'll brag, he'll insult, he'll explain, and he'll pitch his stories. Now on the earnings call last night, he went off. Educating the analyst community, on the upside in the fusion ERP business, making the case that because only a thousand of the 7,500 legacy on-prem ERP customers from Oracle, JD Edwards and PeopleSoft have moved Oracle's fusion cloud ERP, and he predicted that Oracle's cloud ERP business will surpass 20 billion in five years. In fact, he said it's going to bigger than that. He slammed the hybrid cloud washing. You can see one of the quotes here in this chart, that's going on when companies have customers running in the cloud and they claim whatever they have on premise hybrid, he called that ridiculous. I would agree. And then he took an opportunity to slam the hyperscale cloud vendors, citing a telco customer that said Oracle's cloud never goes down, and of course, he chose the same week, that AWS had a major outage. And so to these points, I would say that Oracle really was the first tech company, to announce a true hybrid cloud strategy, where you have an entirely identical experience on prem and in the cloud. This was announced with cloud@customer, two years, before AWS announced outposts. Now it probably took Oracle two years to get it working as advertised, but they were first. And to the second point, this is where Oracle differentiates itself. Oracle is number one for mission critical applications. No other vendor really can come close to Oracle in this regard. And I would say that Oracle is recent quarterly performance to a large extent, is due to this differentiated approach. Over the past 10 years, we've talked to hundreds literally. Hundreds and hundreds of Oracle customers. And while they may not always like the tactics and licensing policies of Oracle in their contracting, they will tell you, that business case for investing and staying with Oracle are very strong. And yes, a big part of that is lock-in but R&D investments innovation and a keen sense of market direction, are just as important to these customers. When you're chairman and founder is a technologist and also the CTO, and has the cash on hand to invest, the results are a highly competitive story. Now that's not to say Oracle is not without its challenges. That's not to say Oracle is without its challenges. Those who follow this program know that when it comes to ETR survey data, the story is not always pretty for Oracle. So let's take a look. This chart shows the breakdown of ETR is net score methodology, Net score measures spending momentum and works ETR. Each quarter asks customers, are you adding in the platform, That's the lime green. Increasing spend by 6% or more, that's the fourth green. Is you're spending E+ or minus 5%, that's the gray. You're spending climbing by 6%, that's the pinkish. Or are you leaving the platform, that's the bright red retiring. You subtract the reds from the greens, and that yields a net score, which an Oracle's overall case, is an uninspiring -4%. This is one of the anomalies in the ETR dataset. The net score doesn't track absolute actual levels, of spending the dollars. Remember, as the leader in mission critical workloads, Oracle commands a premium price. And so what happens here is the gray, is still spending a large amount of money, enough to offset the declines, and the greens are spending more than they would on other platforms because Oracle could command higher prices. And so that's how Oracle is able to grow its overall revenue by 6% for example, whereas the ETR methodology, doesn't capture that trend. So you have to dig into the data a bit deeper. We're not going to go too deep today, but let's take a look at how some of Oracle's businesses are performing relative to its competitors. This is a popular view that we like to share. It shows net score or spending momentum on the vertical axis, and market share. Market share is a measure of pervasiveness in the survey. Think of it as mentioned share. That's on the x-axis. And we've broken down and circled Oracle overall, Oracle on prem, which is declining on the vertical axis, Oracle fusion and NetSuite, which are much higher than Oracle overall. And in the case of fusion, much closer to that 40% magic red horizontal line, remember anything above that line, we consider to be elevated. Now we've added SAP overall which has, momentum comparable to fusion in the survey, using this methodology and IBM, which is in between fusion and Oracle, overall on the y-axis. Oracle as you can see on the horizontal axis, has a larger presence than any of these firms that are below the 40% line. Now, above that 40% line, you see companies with a smaller presence in the survey like Workday, salesforce.com, pretty big presence still, Google cloud also, and Snowflake. Smaller presence but much much higher net score than anybody else on this chart. And AWS and Microsoft overall with both a strong presence, and impressive momentum, especially for their respective sizes. Now that view that we just showed you excluded on purpose Oracle specific cloud offering. So let's now take a look at that relative to other cloud providers. This chart shows the same XY view, but it cuts the data by cloud only. And you can see Oracle while still well below the 40% line, has a net score of +15 compared to a -4 overall that we showed you earlier. So here we see two key points. One, despite the convoluted reporting that we talked about earlier, the ETR data supports that Oracle's cloud business has significantly more momentum than Oracle's overall average momentum. And two, while Oracle is smaller and doesn't have the growth of the hyperscale giants, it's cloud is performing noticeably better than IBM's within the ETR survey data. Now a key point Ellison emphasized on the earnings call, was the importance of ERP, and the work that Oracle has done in this space. It lives by this notion of a cloud first mentality. It builds stuff for the cloud and then, would bring it on-prem. And it's been attracting new customers according to the company. He said Oracle has 8,500 fusion ERP customers, and 28,000 NetSuite customers in the cloud. And unlike Microsoft, it hasn't migrated its on-prem install base, to the cloud yet. Meaning these are largely new customers. Now this chart isolates fusion and NetSuite, within a sector ETR calls GPP. The very giant, public and private companies. And this is a bellwether of spending in the ETR dataset. They've gone back and it correlates to performance. So think large public companies, the biggest ones, and also privates big privates like Mars or Cargo or Fidelity. The chart shows the net score breakdown over time for fusion and NetSuite going back to 2019. And you can see, a big uptick as shown in the blue line from the October, 2020 survey. So Oracle has done a good job building and now marketing its cloud ERP to these important customers. Now, the last thing we want to show you is Oracle's performance within industry sectors. On the earnings call, Oracle said that it had a very strong momentum for fusion in financial services and healthcare. And this chart shows the net score for fusion, across each industry sector that ETR tracks, for three survey points. October, 2020, that's the gray bars, July 21, that's the blue bars and October, 2021, the yellow bars. So look it confirms Oracles assertions across the board that they're seeing fusion perform very well including the two verticals that are called out healthcare and banking slash financial services. Now the big question is where does Oracle go from here? Oracle has had a history of looking like it's going to break out, only to hit some bumps in the road. And so investors are likely going to remain a bit cautious and take profits off the table along the way. But since the Barron's article came out, we reported on that earlier this year in February, declaring Oracle a cloud giant, the stock is up more than 50% of course. 16 of those points were from Friday's move upward, but still, Oracle's highly differentiated strategy of integrating hardware and software together, investing in a modern cloud platform and selectively offering services that cater to the hardcore mission critical buyer, these have served the company, its customers and investors as well. From a cloud standpoint, we'd like to see Oracle be more inclusive, and aggressively expand its marketplace and its ecosystem. This would provide both greater optionality for customers, and further establish Oracle as a major cloud player. Indeed, one of the hallmarks of both AWS and Azure is the momentum being created, by their respective ecosystems. As well, we'd like to see more clear confirmation that Oracle's performance is being driven by its investments in technology IE cloud, same same hybrid, and industry features these modern investments, versus a legacy licensed cycles. We are generally encouraged and are reminded, of years ago when Sam Palmisano, he was retiring and leaving as the CEO of IBM. At the time, HP under the direction ironically of Mark Hurd, was the now company, Palmisano was asked, "do you worry about HP?" And he said in fact, "I don't worry about HP. I worry about Oracle because Oracle invests in R&D." And that statement has proven present. What do you think? Has Oracle hit the next inflection point? Let me know. Don't forget these episodes they're all available as podcasts wherever you listen, all you do is search it. Breaking Analysis podcast, check out ETR website at etr.plus. We also publish a full report every week on wikibon.com and siliconANGLE.com. You can get in touch with me on email David.vellante@siliconangle.com, you can DM me @dvellante on Twitter or, comment on our LinkedIn posts. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights. Powered by ETR. Have a great week everybody. Stay safe, be well, and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage, day one wrap-up. I'm John Furrier, with Dave Vellante. We have Jerry Chen, special guest who's been with us every year on theCUBE since inception. Certainly every AWS re:Invent, nine years straight. Jerry Chen, great to see you for our guest analyst's wrap up VC general partner, Greylock partners, good to see you. >> John, Dave, it's great to see you guys. Thanks for having me again. It wouldn't be re:Invent without the three of us sitting here and we missed last year, right, because of COVID. So we have to make up for lost time. >> John: We did a virtual one- >> Dave: we did virtual stuff= >> John: wasn't the same as in-person. >> Dave: Definitely not the same. >> Jerry: Not the same thing. So, it's good to see you guys again in person, and less than 6 feet apart. >> Cheers, yeah. >> And 7,000 people here, showing that the event's still relevant. >> Jerry: Yeah. >> Some people would kill for those numbers, it's a bad year for Amazon, down from 60,000. >> Jerry: Yeah. >> So, ecosystem's booming. Okay, let's get to it. Day one in the books, new CEO, new sheriff in town, his name's Adam Selipsky. Your take? >> Well, Adam's new, but he's old, right? Something, you know, like something new, something old, something blue, right? It's so, Adam was early Amazon, so he had that founding DNA. Left, you know, CEO of Tableau, acquired by Salesforce, came back few months ago. So I think it was a great move, because one, he's got the history and culture under Jassy, so he's definitely the Bezos Jassy tree of leadership, but yet he's been outside the bubble. Right? So he actually knows what it means to run a company not on the Amazon platform. So, I think Adam's a great choice to lead AWS for what we call it, like maybe act two, right? Act one, the first X years with Jassy, and maybe this is the second act under Adam. >> Yeah. And he's got- and he was very technical, hung around all the techies, James Hamilton, DeSantis, all the engineers, built that core primitives. Now, as they say, this cloud next gen's here, act two, it's about applications. >> Jerry: Yeah. >> Infrastructure as code is in place. Interesting area. Where's the growth come from? So, look, you know, the ecosystem has got to build these super clouds, or as you say, Castles on the Cloud, which you coined, but you brought this up years ago, that the moats and the value has to be in there somewhere. Do you want to revise that prediction now that you see what's coming from Selipsky? >> Okay, well, so let's refresh. Greylock.com/castles has worked out, like we did, but a lot of thought leadership and the two of you, have informed my thinking at Castles in the Cloud, how to compete against Amazon in the cloud. So you'd argue act one, the startup phase, the first, you know, X years at Amazon was from 2008 to, you know, 2021, the first X years, building the platform, digging the moats. Right? So what did you have? You have castle the platform business, economies of scale, which means decreasing marginal costs and natural network effects. So once the moat's in place and you had huge market share, what do you for act two, right? Now the moats are in place, you can start exploring the moats for I think, Adam talked about in your article, horizontal and verticals, right? Horizontal solutions up the stack, like Amazon Connect, CRM solutions, right? Horizontal apps, maybe the app layer, and verticals, industrials, financials, healthcare, et cetera. So, I think Jassy did a foundation of the castle and now we're seeing, you know, what Adam and his generation would do for act two. >> So he's, so there's almost like an act one A, because if you take the four hyperscalers, they're about, maybe do 120 billion this year, out of, I don't know, pick a number, it's many hundreds of billions, at least in infrastructure. >> Jerry: Correct. >> And those four hyperscalers growing at 35% collectively, right? So there's some growth there, but I feel like there's got to be deeper business integration, right? It's not just about IT transformation, it's about deeper- So that's maybe where this Connect like stuff comes, but are there enough of those? You know, I didn't, I haven't, I didn't hear a lot of that this morning. I heard a little bit, ML- >> Jerry: Sure. >> AI into Connect, but where's the next Connect, right? They've got to do dozens of those in order to go deeper. >> Either, Dave, dozens of those Connects or more of those premise, so the ML announcement was today. So you look at what Twilio did by buying Segment, right? Deconstruct a CRM to compete against Adam Selipsky's old acquire of Salesforce.com. They bought Segment, so Twilio now has communicates, like texting, messaging, email, but all the data come from Segment. >> Dave: With consumption-based pricing. >> With consumption-based pricing. So, right? So that's an example of kind of what the second act of cloud looks like. It may not look like full SaaS apps like Salesforce.com, but these primitives, both horizontally vertically, because again, what does Amazon have as an asset that other guys don't? Install based developers. Developers aren't going to necessarily build or consume SaaS apps, but they're going to consume things like these API's and primitives. And so you look around, what's cloud act two look like? It may not be VM's or containers. It may be API's like Stripe and Billing, Twilio messaging, right? Concepts like that. So, we'll see what the next act at cloud looks like. And they announced a bunch of stuff today, serverless for the data analytics, right? So serverless is this move towards not consuming raw compute and storage, but APIs. >> What about competition? Microsoft is nipping at the heels of AWS. >> Dave: John put them out of business earlier today. [John and Dave Laugh] >> No, I said, quote, I'll just- let me rephrase. I said, if Amazon goes unchecked- >> Jerry: Sure. >> They'll annihilate Microsoft's ecosystem. Because if you're an ISV, why wouldn't you want to run on the best platform? >> Jerry: Sure. >> Speeds and feeds matter when you have these shifts of software development. >> Jerry: You want them both. >> So, you know, I mean, you thought about the 80's, if you were at database, you wanted the best processor. So I think this Annapurna vertical integrated stacks are interesting because if my app runs better and I have a platform, prefabricated or purpose-built platform, to be there for me, I'm going to build a great SaaS app. If it runs faster and it cost less, I'm going to flop to Amazon. That's just, that's my prediction. >> So I think better changes, right? And so I think if you're Amazon, you say cheaper, better, faster, and they're investing in chips, proprietary silicon to run better, faster, their machine learning training chips, but if you're Azure or Google, you got to redefine what better is. And as a startup investor, we're always trying to do category definition, right? Like here's a category by spin. So now, if you're Azure or Google, there are things you can say that are better, and Google argued their chips, their TensorFlow, are better. Azure say our regions, our security, our enterprise readiness is better. And so all of a sudden, the criteria "what's better" changes. So from faster and cheaper to maybe better compliance, better visibility, better manageability, different colors, I don't know, right? You have to change the game , because if you play the same game on Amazon's turf, to your point, John, it- it's game over because they have economies of scale. But I think Azure and Google and other clouds, the superclouds, or subclouds are changing the game, what it means to compete. And so I think what's going on, just two more seconds, from decentralized cloud, being Web 3 and crypto, that's a whole 'nother can of worms, to Edge compute, what Cloudflare are doing with R2 and storage, they're trying to change the name of the game. >> Well, that's right. If you go frontal against Amazon, you're got to get decimated. You got to move the goalposts for better. And I think that's a good way to look at it, Dave. What does better mean? So that's the question that's on the table. What does that look like? And I think that's an unknown, that's coming. Okay, back to the start-ups. Category definition. That's an awesome term. That to me is a key thing. How do you look at what a category is on your sub- on your Castles of the Cloud, you brought up how many categories of- >> Jerry: 33 markets and a bunch of submarkets, yeah. >> Yeah. Explain that concept. >> So, we did Castle in the Clouds where my team looked at all the services offered at Azure, Google, and Amazon. We downloaded the services and recategorized them to like, 30 plus markets and a bunch of submarkets. Because, the reason why is apples to apples, you know, Amazon, Google, Azure all have databases, but they might call them different things. And so I think first things first is, let's give developers and customers kind of apples to apples comparisons. So I think those are known markets. The key in investing in the cloud, or investing in general, is you're either investing in budget replacement, replacing a known market, cheaper, better database, to your point, or a net new market, right? Which is always tricky. So I think the biggest threat to a lot of the startups and incumbents, the biggest threat by startups and incumbents, is either one, do something cheaper, better in a current market, or find a net new market that they haven't thought about yet. And if you can win that net new market before the rest, then that's unbelievable. We call it the, you know, the blue ocean strategy, >> Dave: Is that essentially what Snowflake has done, started with cheaper, better, and now they're building the data cloud? >> Jerry: I think there's- it's evolution, correct. So they said cheaper, better. And the Castle in the Cloud, we talked about, they actually built deep IP. So they went a known category, data warehouses, right? You had Teradata, Redshift, Snowflake cheaper, better, faster. And now let's say, okay, once you have the customers, let's change the name of the game and create a data cloud. And it's TBD whether or not Snowflake can win data cloud. Like we talked about Rockset, one of my investments that's actually move the goalpost saying, oh, data cloud is nice, but real time data is where it's at, and Snowflake and those guys can't play in real time. >> Dave: No, they're not in a position to play in real time data. >> Jerry: Right. >> Dave: I mean, that's right. >> So again, so that's an example of a startup moving the goalpost on what previously was a startup that moved the goalpost on an incumbent. >> Dave: And when you think about Edge, it's going to be real-time AI inferencing at the Edge, and you're right, Snowflake's not set up well at all for that. >> John: So competition wise, how do the people compete? Because this is what Databricks did the same exact thing. I have Ali on the record going back years, "Well, we love Amazon. We're only on Amazon." Now he's talking multicloud. >> So, you know, once you get there, you kind of change your tune cause you've got some scale, but then you got new potential entrants coming in, like Rockset. >> Jerry: Correct. >> So. >> Dave: But then, and if you add up the market caps of just those two companies, Databricks and Snowflake, it's much larger than the database market. So this, we're defining new markets now. >> Jerry: I think there's market cap, especially Snowflake that's in the public market, Databricks is still private, is optimism that there's a second or third act in the database space left to be unlocked. And you look at what's going on in that space, these real-time analytics or real-time apps, for sure there's optimism there. But, but to John's point, you're right, like you earn the right to play the next act, but it's tricky because startups disrupt incumbents and become incumbents, and they're also victims their own success, right? So you're- there's technical debt, there's also business model debt. So you're victims of your own business model, victims of your own success. And so what got you here may not get you to the next phase. And so I think for Amazon, that's a question. For Databricks and Snowflake, that's a question, is what got them here? Can they play to the next act? And look, Apple did it, multiple acts. >> John: Well, I mean, I think I- [Crosstalk] >> John: I think it's whether you take shortcuts or not, if you have debt, you make it a little bit of a shortcut bet. >> Jerry: Yeah. >> Okay. That's cool. But ultimately what you're getting at here is beachhead thinking. Get a beachhead- >> Jerry: Correct. >> Get in the market, and then sequence to a different position. Classic competitive strategy, 101. That's hard to do because you want to win the beachhead- >> I know. >> John: And take a little technical debt and business model debt, cheat a little bit, and then, is it not fortified yet? So beachhead to expansion is the question. >> Jerry: That's every board meeting, John and Dave, that we're in, right? It's called you need a narrow enough wedge to land. And it is like, I don't want the tip of the spear, I want the poison on the tip of a spear, right? [Dave and John Laugh] >> You want, especially in this cloud market, a super focused wedge to land. And the problem is, as a founder, as investor, you're always thinking about the global max, right? Like the ultimate platform winner, but you don't get the right to play the early- the late innings if you don't make it out of the early innings. And so narrow beachhead, sharp wedge, but you got to land in a space, a place of real estate with adjacent tan, adjacent markets, right? Like Uber, black cars, taxi's, food, whatever, right? Snowflake, data warehouse, data cloud. And so I think the key with all startups is you'll hit some ceiling of market size. Is there a second ramp? >> Dave: So it's- the art is when to scale and how fast to scale. >> Right. Picking when, how fast, in which- which best place, it was tough. And so, the best companies are always thinking about their second or third act while the first act's still going. >> John: Yeah. And leveraging cloud to refactor, I think that's the key to Snowflake, was they had the wedge with data warehouse, they saw the position, but refactored and in the cloud with services that they knew Teradata wouldn't use. >> Jerry: Correct. >> And they're in. From there, it's just competitive IP, crank, go to market. >> And then you have the other unnatural things. You have channel, you have installed base of customers, right? And then you start selling more stuff to the same channel, to the same customers. That's what Amazon's doing. All the incumbent's do that. Amazon's got, you know, 300 services now, launching more this week, so now they have channel distribution, right? Every credit card for all the developers, and they have installed base of customers. And so they will just launch new things and serve the customers. So the startups had to disrupt them somehow. >> Well, it's always great to chat with Jerry. Every year we discover and we riff and we identify, in real time, new stuff. We were talking about this whole vertical, horizontal scale and kind of castles early on, years ago. And now it's happened. You were right. Congratulations. That's a great thesis. There's real advantages to build on a cloud. You can get the- you can build a business there. >> Jerry: Right. >> John: That's your thesis. And by the way, these markets are changing. So if you're smart, you can actually compete. >> Jerry: I think you beat, and to Dave's earlier point, you have to adapt, right? And so what's the Darwin thing, it's not the strongest, but the most adaptable. So both- Amazon's adapt and the startups who are the most adaptable will win. >> Dave: Where are you, you guys might've talked about this, where do you stand on the cost of goods sold issue? >> Jerry: Oh, I think everything's true, right? I think you can save money at some scale to repatriate your cloud, but again, Wall Street rewards growth versus COGS, right? So I think you've got a choice between a dollar of growth versus a dollar reducing COGS, people choose growth right now. That may not always be the case, but at some point, if you're a company at some scale and the dollars of growth is slowing down, you definitely have to reduce the dollars in cost. And so you start optimizing cloud costs, and that could be going to Amazon, Azure, or Google, reducing COGS. >> Dave: Negotiate, yeah. >> John: Or, you have no visibility on new net new opportunities. So growth is about new opportunities. >> Correct. >> If you repatriating things, there's no growth. >> Jerry: It's not either, or- >> That's my opinion. >> Jerry: COGS or growth, right? But they're both valid, definitely, so you can do both. And so I don't think- it's what's your priorities, you can't do everything at once. So if I'm a founder or CEO or in this case investor, and I said, "Hey, Dave, and John, if you said I can either save you 25 basis points in gross margin, or I can increase another 10% top line this year", I'm going to say increase the top line, we'll deal with the gross margin later. Not that it's not important, but right now the early phase- >> Priorities. >> Jerry: It's growth. >> Yeah. All right, Jerry Chen, great to see you. Great to have you on, great CUBE alumni, great guest analyst. Thanks for breaking it down. CUBE coverage here in Las Vegas for re:Invent, back in person. Of course, it's a virtual event, we've got a hybrid event for Amazon, as well as theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, you're watching the leader in worldwide tech coverage. Thanks for watching. (Gentle music)

(upbeat music) >> There are many constants in the storage business, relentlessly declining costs per bit. Innovations that perpetually battle the laws of physics, a seemingly endless flow of venture capital, very intense competition. And there's one other constant in the storage industry, Eric Herzog. And he joins us today in this CUBE video exclusive to talk about IBM's recent storage announcements. Eric, welcome back to theCUBE. Great to see you, my friend. >> Great Dave, thank you very much. Of course, IBM always loves to participate with theCUBE and everything you guys do. Thank you very much for inviting us to come today. >> Really our pleasure. So we're going to cover a lot of ground. IBM Storage made a number of announcements this month around data resilience. You've got a new as a service model. You've got performance enhancements. Eric, can you give us, give us the top line summary of the hard news? >> Yeah. Top line. IBM is enhancing data and cyber resiliency across all non mainframe platforms. We already have it on the mainframe of course, and we're changing CapEx to OpEx with our storage as a service. Those are the key takeaways and the hot ticket items from an end user perspective. >> So maybe we could start with sort of the cyber piece. I mean, wow. I mean the last 18 months have been incredible and you're just seeing, you know, new levels of threats. The work from home pivot has created greater exposure. Organizations are kind of rethinking hybrid. You're seeing the ascendancy of some of the sort of hot cyber startups, but, but you're also seeing the, not only of the attack vectors winded, but the, the techniques are different. You know, threat hunting has become much more important. Your responses to threats. You have to be really careful the whole ransomware thing. So what are some of the big trends that you guys are seeing that are kind of informing how you approach the market? >> Well, first of all, it's gotten a lot worse. In fact, Fortune magazine just released the Fortune 500 a couple of weeks ago, and they had a survey that's public of CEOs, and they said, "What's the number one threat to your business? With no list just what's the number one threat?" Cyber security was number one 66% of the Fortune 500 Chief Executive Officers. Not CIOs not CTOs, but literally the CEOs of the biggest companies in the world. However, it's not just big companies. It hits the mid size, the small companies, everyone is open now to cyber threats and cyber attacks. >> Yeah. So for sure. And it's (chuckles) across the board. Let's talk about your solution, the announcement that you made here. Safeguard Copy, I think is what the branding is. >> Yeah. So what we've done is we've got a number of different technologies within our storage portfolio. For example, with our Spectrum Protect product, we can see anomalous pattern detection and backup data sets. Why would that matter? If I am going to hold theCUBE for ransom, if I don't get control of your secondary storage, snaps, replicas, and backups, you can just essentially say, I'm not paying you. You could just do a recovery, right? So we have anomalous protection there. We see encryption, we encrypt at rest with no performance penalty with our FlashSystem's family. We do air gapping. And in case of safeguarded copy, it's a form of air gapping. So we see physical air gapping with tape. logical air gapping, but to a remote location with snaps or replicas to your Cloud provider, and then local logical on-prem, which is what safeguarded copy does. We've had this technology for many years now on the mainframe platform. And we brought it down to the non mainframe environments, Linux, UNIX, and the Windows Server world by putting safeguarded copy on our FlashSystem's portfolio. >> So, okay. So part of the strategy is air gapping. So you're taking a copy, your air gapping it. You probably, you probably take those snaps, you know, at different intervals, you mix that up, et cetera. How do you manage the copies? How do you ensure if I have to do a recovery that you've got kind of a consistent data set? >> Yeah. So a couple things, first of all, we can create on a single FlashSystem array the full array up to 15,000 immutable copies, essentially they're weren't, you can't delete them, you can't change them. On a per volume basis, you can have 255. This is all managed with our storage copy manager, which can automate the entire process. Creation, deletion, frequency, and even recovery mode. So for example, I could have volume one and volume one perhaps I need to make immutable copies every four hours, while at 255 divided by four a day, I can go for many months and still be making those immutable copies. But with our Copy Services Manager, you can set up to be only 30 days, 60 days, you can set the frequency and once you set it up, it's all automated. And you can even integrate with IBM's QRadar, which is a threat detection and breach software from the security division of IBM. And when certain threats hit, it can actually automatically kick off a safeguarded copy. So what we do is make sure you've got that incredibly rapid recovery. And in fact, you can get air gapping, remotely. We have this on the main frame and a number of large global Fortune 500's actually do double air gapping, local logical, right? So they can do recovery in just a couple hours if they have an attack. And then they take that local logical and either go remote logical. Okay. Which gives them a second level of protection, or they'll go out to tape. So you can use this in a myriad of ways. You can have multiple protection. We even, by the way Dave, have three separate different admin levels. So you can have three different types of admins. One admin can't delete, one admin can. So that way you're also safe from what I'll call industrial espionage. So you can never know if someone's going to be stealing stuff from inside with multiple administrative capabilities, it makes it more difficult for someone to steal your data and then sell it to somebody. >> So, okay. Yeah, right. Because immutable is sort of, well, you're saying that you can set it up so that only one admin has control over that, is that right? If you want it... >> There's three, there's three admins with different levels of control. >> Right. >> And the whole point of having a three admins with different levels of control, is you have that extra security from an internal IT perspective versus one person, again, think of the old war movies, you know, nuclear war movies. Thank God it's never happened. Where two guys turn the key. So you've got some protection, we've got multiple admin level to do that as well. So it's a great solution with the air gapping. It's rapid recovery because it's local, but it is fully logically air gapped separated from the host. It's immutable, it's WORM, Write Once, Read Many can't delete can't change. Can't do anything. And you can automate all the management with our Copy Services Manager software that will work with safeguard copy. >> You, you talked about earlier, you could detect anomalous behavior. So, so presumably this can help with, with detecting threats, is that? >> Well, that's what our spectrum protect product does. My key point was we have all levels of data resiliency across the whole portfolio, whether it be encrypting data at rest, with our VTLs, we can encrypt in-flight. We have safeguarded copy on the mainframe, safeguarded copy on FlashSystems, any type of storage, including our competitor storage. You could air gap it to tape, right? With our spectrum virtualized software in our SAN Volume Controller, you could actually air gap out to a Cloud for 500 arrays that aren't even ours. So what we've done is put in a huge set of data and cyber resiliency across the portfolio. One thing that I've noticed, Dave, that's really strange. Storage is intrinsic to every data center, whether you're big, medium, or small. And when most people think about a cybersecurity strategy from a corporate perspective, they usually don't even think about storage. I've been shocked, but I've been in meetings with CEOs and VPs and they said, "oh, you're right, storage is, is a risk." I don't know why they don't think of it. And clearly many of the security channel partners, right? You have channel that are very focused on security and security consultants, they often don't think about the storage gaps. So we're trying to make sure, A, we've got broad coverage, primary storage, secondary storage, backup, you know, all kinds of things that we can do. And we make sure that we're talking to the end users, as well as the channel to realize that if you don't have data resilience storage, you do not have a corporate cybersecurity strategy because you just left out the storage part. >> Right on. Eric, are you seeing any use case patterns emerge in the customer base? >> Well, the main use case is prioritizing workloads. Obviously, as you do the immutable copies, you chew up capacity. Right now there's a good reason to do that. So you've got these immutable copies, but what they're doing is prioritizing workloads. What are the workloads? I absolutely have to have up and going rapidly. What are other workloads that are super important, but I could do maybe remote logical air gapping? What ones can I put out to tape? Where I have a logical, where I have a true physical air gap. But of course tape can take a long recovery time. So they're prioritizing their applications, workloads and use case to figure out what they need to have a safeguarded copy with what they could do. And by the way, they're trying to do that as well. You know, with our FlashSystem products, we could encrypt data at rest with no performance penalty. So if you were getting, you know, 30,000 database records and they were taken, you know, 10 seconds for sake of argument, when you encrypt, normally you slow that down. Well, guess what, when you encrypt with our FlashSystem product. So in fact, you know, it's interesting Dave, we have a comprehensive and free cyber resiliency assessment, no charge to the end-user, no charge to a business partner if they want to engage with us. And we will look at based on the NIST framework, any gaps. So for example, if theCUBE said, these five databases are most critical databases, then part of our cyber resilience assess and say, "ah, well, we noticed that you're not encrypting those. Why are you not encrypting those?" And by the way, that cyber resilience assessment works not only for IBM storage, but any storage estate they've got. So if they're homogenous, we can evaluate that if they're heterogeneous in their storage estate would evaluate that, and it is vendor agnostic and conforms to the NIST framework, which of course is adopted all over the world. And it's a great thing for people to get free, no obligation. You don't have to buy a single thing from IBM. It's just a free assessment of their storage and what cyber security exposure they have in their storage estate. And that's a free thing that we offer that includes safeguarded copy, encryption, air gapping, all the various functionality. And we'll say, "why are you not encrypting? Why are you not air gapping?" That if it's that important, "what, why are you leaving these things exposed?" So that's what our free cyber resilience assessment does. >> Got to love those freebies take advantage of those for sure. A lot of, a lot of organizations will charge big bucks for those. You know, maybe not ridiculously huge bucks, but you're talking tens of thousands. Sometimes you'll get up to hundreds of thousands of dollars for that type of type of assessment. So that's, you've got to take advantage of that if you're a customer out there. You know, I, I wanted to ask you about just kind of shift topics here and get into the, as a service piece of it. So you guys announced your, your as a service for storage, a lot of people have also done that. What do we need to know about the IBM Solution? And what's different from the others, maybe two part question, but what's the first part. What do we need to know? >> A couple of thing is, from an overall strategy perspective, you don't buy storage. It's a full OpEx model. IBM retains legal title. We own it. We'll do the software upgrades as needed. We may even go ahead and swap the physical system out. You buy an SLA, a tier if you will. You buy capacity, performance, we own it. So let's take an easy one. Our tier two, we give you our worst case performance at 2,250 IOPS per terabyte. Our competitors by the way, when you look at their contracts and look what they're putting out there, they will give you their best case number. So if they're two is 2,250, that's the best case. With us it's our worst case, which means if your applications or workloads get 4,000 IOPS per terabyte, it's free. We don't charge you for that. We give you the worst case scenario and our numbers are higher than our competition. So we make sure that we're differentiated true OpEx model. It's not a modified Lease model. So it's truly converts CapEx into operational expense. We have a base as everybody does, but we have a variable. And guess what? There's the base price and the variable price are the same. So if you don't use the variable, we don't charge you. We bill you for 1/4 in arrears, every feature function that's on our FlashSystem technology such as safeguarded copy, which we just talked about. AI based tiering, data at rest encryption with no performance penalty, data in compression with no performance, all those features you get, all of them, all we're doing is giving you an option. We still let you buy CapEx. We will let you lease with IBM Global Financial Services. And guess what? You could do a full OpEx model. The technology though, our flash core modules, our spectrum virtualized software is all the same. So it's all the same feature function. It's not some sort of stripped down model. We even offer Dave, 100% availability option. We give Six Nines of availability as a default, several of the competitor, which is only five minutes and 26 seconds of downtime, several of our competitors, guess what they give? Fournines. If you want five or six, you got to pay for it. We just give you six as a default differentiator, but then we're the only vendor to offer 100% availability guarantee. Now that is an option. It's the one option. But since we're already at Six Nines, when our competitors are at Four or Five Nines, we already have better availability with our storage as a service than the competition does. >> So let me just make this, make sure I'm clear on this. So you got Six Nines as part of the service. That's >> Absolutely >> Fundamental. And I get, I can pay up for 100% availability option. And, >> Yes you can. >> So what does that, what does that mean? Practically? You're putting in redundancies and, >> Right, right. So we have a technology known as HyperSwap. We have several public references by the way, at ibm.com. We've been shipping HyperSwap on both the mainframe, probably eight or nine years now. We brought it to our FlashSystem product probably five years ago. As I mentioned, we've got public references. You don't pay for the software by the way, you do have to have a dual node cluster. And HyperSwap allows you to do that. But you can do that as a service. You can buy it. You can do as CapEx, right? When you need the additional FlashSystem to go with it again, the software is free. So you're not to pay for the software. You just have to pay for the additional system level componentry, but you can do that as a service and have it completely be an OpEx model as well. We even assign a technical account manager to every account. Every account gets a technical account manager. If you will, concierge service comes with every OpEx version of our storage as a service. >> So what does that mean? What does that concierge do? Just paying attention to (indistinct) >> Concierge service will do a quarterly, a quarterly review with you. So let's say theCUBE bought 10,000 other analyst firms in the industry. You're now the behemoth. And you at theCUBE are using IBM storage as a service. You call up your technical account manager to say, "Guess what? We just bought these companies. We're going to convert them all to storage as a service, A, we need a higher tier, you could upgrade the tier B, we have a one-year contract, but you know what we'd like to extend it to two, C, we think we need more capacity." You tell your technical account manager, they'll take care of all of that for you, as well as giving you best practices. For example, if you decide you want to do safeguarded copy, which you can do, because it's built into our spectrum virtualized software, which is part of our storage as a service, we can give you best practices on that he would tell you, or she would tell you about our integration with our security visions, QRadar. So those are various best practices. So the technical account manager makes sure the software is always up to date, right? All the little things that you would have to do yourself if you own it, we take care of, because we legally own it, which is allow you to buy it as a service. So it is a true OpEx model from a financial perspective. >> In the term of the contracts are what? One, two and three years. >> One to five. >> Yeah. Okay. >> If you don't renew and you don't cancel, we'll automatically re up you at the exact tier you're at, at the exact same price. Several of our competitors, by the way, if you do that, they actually charge you a premium until you sign a contract. We do not. So if you have a contract based on tier two, right? We go buy SLA tier one, tier two, tier three. So if I have a tier two contract at theCUBE, and you forgot to get the contract done at the end of two years, but you still want it, you can go for the next 2/4. I mean, well our business partner as I should say, "Dave, don't you want to sign a contract, you said you like it." Obviously you would, but we will let you stay. You just say, now I want to keep it without a contract. And we don't charge your premium. Our competitors if you don't have a contract, they charge your premium. If you keep it installed without putting a contract in place. So little things like that clearly differentiate what we do. We don't charge a premium. If you go above the base. One of the competitors, in fact, when you go into the variable space, okay? And by the way, we provide 50% extra capacity. We over-provision. The other competitors usually do 25%. We do 50%. No charge, is just part of the service. So the other vendors, if you go into the variable space, they raised the price. So if it's $5, you know, for X capacity and you go into the, which is your base, and then you go above that, they charge you $7 and 50 cents. We don't. It's $5 at the base and $5 at the variable. Now obviously your variable can be very big or very small, but whatever the variable is, we charge you. But we do not charge you an a bigger price. Couple of competitors when you go into the variable world, they charge you more. Guess what it gets you to do, raise your base capacity. (Eric laughs) >> Yeah. I mean, that's, that should, the math should be the opposite of that, in my view. If you make a commitment to a vendor, say, okay, I'm going to commit to X. You have a nice chart on this, actually in your, in your deck. If I'm going to commit to X, and then I'm going to add on, I would think the add on price per bit should be at the same or lower. It shouldn't be higher. Right? And I get, I get what you're saying there. They're forcing you to jack up the base, but then you're taking all the risk. That's not a shared risk model. I get... >> And that's why we made sure that we don't do that. In fact, Dave, you can, you know, the fact that we don't charge you a premium if you go beyond your contract period and say, "I still wanted to do it, but I haven't done the contract yet." The other guys charge you a premium, if you go beyond your contract period. We don't do that either. So we try to be end-user friendly, customer friendly, and we've also factored in our business partners can participate in this program. At least one of our competitors came out with a program and guess what? Partners could not participate. It was all direct. And that company by happens to have about 80% of their business through the channel and their partners were basically cut out of the model, which by the way, is what a lot of Cloud providers had done in the past as well. So it was not a channel friendly model, we're channel friendly, we're end user-friendly, it's all about ease of use. In fact, when you need more capacity, it takes about 10 minutes to get the new capacity up and going, that's it? >> How long does it take to set up? How long does it take to set up initially? And how long does it take to get new capacity? >> So, first of all, we deploy either in a Colo facility that you've contracted with, including Equinix, Equinix, is part of our press release, or we install on your site. So the technical account managers is assigned, he would call up theCUBE and say, "When is it okay for us to come install the storage?" We install it. You don't install anything. You just say, here's your space. Go ahead and install. We do the installation. You then of course do the normal rationing of the capacity to this goes to this Oracle, this goes to SAP. This goes to Mongo or Cassandra, right? You do that part, but we install it. We get it up and going. We get it turned on. We hook it up to your switching infrastructure. If you've got switching infrastructure, we do all of that. And then when you need more capacity, we use our storage insights pro which automatically monitors capacity, performance, and potential tech support problems. So we give you 50% extra, right? If you drop that to 25%, so you now don't have 50% extra anymore, you only have 25% extra, we'll, the technical account manager would call you and say, "Dave, do you know that we'd like to come install extra capacity at no charge to get you back up to that 50% margin?" So we always call because it's on your site or in your Colo facility, right? We own the asset, but we set it up and you know, it takes a week or two, whatever it takes to ship to whatever location. Now by the way, our storage as a service for 2021 will be in North America and Europe only, we are really expanding our storage as a service outside into Asia and into Latin America, et cetera, but not until 2022. So we'll start out with North America and Europe first. >> So I presume part of that is figuring out just the compensation models right? And so how, how did you solve that? I mean, you can't, you know, you don't seem to be struggling with that. Like some do. I think there's some people dipping their toes in the water. Was that because, you know, IBM's got experience with like SAS pricing or how were you thinking about that and how did you deal with kind of the internal (indistinct) >> Sure. So, first of all, we've had for several years, our storage utility model. >> Right? >> Our storage utility model has been sort of a hybrid part CapEx and part OpEx. So first of all, we were already halfway there to an OpEx model with our storage utility model that's item, number one. It also gave us the experience of the billing. So for example, we bill you for a full quarter. We don't send you a monthly bill. We send you a quarterly bill. And guess what, we always bill you in arrears. So for example, since theCUBE is going to be a customer this quarter, we will send you a bill for this quarter in October for the October quarter, we'll send you a bill for that quarter in January. Okay. And if it goes up, it goes up. If it goes down, it goes down. And if you don't use any variable, there's no bill. Because what we do is the base you pay for once a year, the variable you pay for by on a quarterly basis. So if you, if you are within the base, we don't send you a bill at all because there's no bill. You didn't go into the variable capacity area at all. >> I love that. >> When you have a variable It can go up and down. >> Is that unique to some, do some competitors try to charge you up front? Like if it's a one-year term. (Dave laughs) >> Everbody charges, everybody builds yearly on the base capacity. Pretty much everyone does that. >> Okay, so upfront you pay for the base? Okay. >> Right. And the variable can be zero. If you really only use the base, then there is no variable. We only bill for it's a pay for what you use model. So if you don't use any of the variable, we never charge you for variable. Now, you know, because you guys have written about it, storage grows exponentially. So the odds of them ending up needing some of the variable is moderately high. The other thing we've done is we didn't just look at what we've done with our storage utility model, but we actually looked at Cloud providers. And in fact, not only IBM storage, but almost every of our competitors does a comparison to Cloud pricing. And when you do apples to apples, Cloud vendors are more expensive than storage as a services, not just from us, but pretty much for a moment. So let's take an example. We're Six Nines by default. Okay. So as you know, most Cloud providers provide three or Fournines as the default. They'll let you get five or Six Nines, but guess what? They charge you extra. So item number one. Second thing, performance, as you know, the performance of Cloud storage is usually very weak, but you can make it faster if you want to. They charge extra for that. We're sitting at 2,250 terabytes per IOPS, excuse me, per terabytes. That's incredible performance If you've got 100 terabytes, okay. And if your applications and workloads and that's the worst case, by the way, which differentiates from our competitors who usually quote the best case, we quote you the worst case and our worst case by the way, is almost always higher than their best cases in each of the tiers. So at their middle tier, our worst case is usually better than their best case. But the point is, if you get 4,000 IOPS per terabyte and you're on a tier two contract, it's a two-tier contract. And in fact, let's say that theCUBE has a five-year deal. And we base this on our FlashSystem technology. And so let's say for tier two, for sake of argument, FlashSystem, 7,200. We come out two years after theCUBE has it installed with the FlashSystem, 7,400. And let's say the FlashSystem, 7,400, won't deliver a 2,250 IOPS per terabyte, but 5,000, if we choose to replace it, 'cause remember it's our physical property. We own it. If we choose to replace that 7,200 with a 7,400, and now you get 5,000 IOPS per terabyte, it's free. You signed a tier two contract for five years. So two years later, if we decide to put a different physical system there and it's faster, or has four more software features, we don't charge you for any of that. You signed an SLA for tier two. >> You haven't Paid for capacity, right? All right. >> You are paying for the capacity (indistinct) performance, you don't pay for that. If we swap it out and the, the array is physically faster, and has got five new software features. You pay nothing, you pay what your original contract was based on the capacity. >> What I'm saying is you're learning from the Cloud providers 'cause you are a Cloud provider. But you know, a lot of the Cloud providers always sort of talk about how they lower prices. They lower prices, but you know, well, you worked at storage companies your whole life and they, they lower prices on a regular basis because they 'cause the cost of the curve. And so. >> Right. The cost of storage to Cloud, I mean, the average price decline in the storage industry is between 15 and 25%, depending on the year, every single year. >> Right. >> As, you know, you used to be with one of those analysts firms that used to track it by the numbers. So you've seen the numbers. >> For sure. Absolutely. >> On average it drops 15 to 25% every year. >> So, what's driving this then? If it's, it's not necessarily, is it the shift from, from CapEx to OPEX? Is it just a more convenient model than on a Cloud like model? How do you see that? >> So what's happened in IT overall is of course it started with people like salesforce.com. Well, over 10 years ago, and of course it's swept the software industry software as a service. So once that happened, then you now see infrastructure as a service, servers, switches, storage, and an IBM with our storage as a service, we're providing that storage capability. So that as a service model, getting off of the traditional licensing in the software world, which still is out there, but it's mostly now is mostly software as a service has now moved into the infrastructure space. From our perspective, we are giving our business partners and our customers, the choice. You still want to buy it. No problem. You want to lease it? No problem. You want a full OpEx model. No problem. So for us, we're able to offer any of the three options. The, as a service model that started in software has moved now into the systems world. So people want to change often that CapEx into OpEx, we can even see Global Fortune 500s where one division is doing something and a different division might do something else, or they might do it different by geography. In a certain geography, they buy our FlashSystem products and other geographies they lease them. And in other geographies it's, as a service. We are delivering the same feature, function, benefit from a performance availability software function. We just give them a different way to procure. Do you want CapEx you want leasing or OpEx you pick what you want, we'll deliver the right solution for you. >> So, you got the optionality. And that's great. You've thought that out, but, but the reason I'm asking Eric, is I'm trying to figure out this is not just for you for everybody. Is this a check-off item or is this going to be the prevailing way in which storage is consumed? So if you had, if you had a guess, let's go far out. So we're not making any near-term forecast, but end of the decade, is this going to be the dominant model or is it going to be, you know, one of the few. >> It will be one of a few, but it'll be a big few. It'll be the big, one of the biggest. So for sake of argument, there we'll still be CapEx, they'll still be OpEx they'll still be, or there will be OpEx and they're still be leasing, but I will bet you, you know, at the end of this decade, it'll be 40 to 50% will be on the OpEx model. And the other two will have the other 50%. I don't think it's going to move to everything 'cause remember, it's a little easier during the software world. In the system world, you've got to put the storage, the servers, or the networking on the prem, right? Otherwise you're not truly, you know, you got to make it a true OpEx model. There's legal restrictions. You have to make it OpEx, if not, then, you know, based on the a country's practice, depending on the country, you're in, they could say, "Well, no, you really bought that. It's not really a service model." So there's legal constraints that the software worldwise easier to get through and easier to get to bypass. Right? So, and remember, now everything is software as a service, but go back when salesforce.com was started, everyone in the enterprise was doing ELAs and all the small companies were buying some sort of contract, right, or buying by the (indistinct) basis. It took a while for that to change. Now, obviously the predominant model is software as a service, but I would argue given when salesforce.com started, which was, you know, 2007 or so, it took a good 10 years for software as a service to become the dominant level. So I think A, it won't take 10 full years because the software world has blazed a trail now for the systems world. But I do think you'll see, right. We're sitting here know halfway through 2021, that you're going to have a huge percentage. Like I said, the dominant percentage will be OpEx, but the other two will still be there as well. >> Right. >> By the way, you know in software, almost, no one's doing ELAs these days, right? A few people still do, but it's very rare, right? It's all software as a service. So we see that over time doing the same thing in the, in the infrastructure side, but we do think it will be slower. And we'll, we'll offer all three as, as long as customers want it. >> I think you're right. I think it's going to be mixed. Like, do I care more about my income statement or my balance sheet and the different companies or individual different divisions are going to have different requirements. Eric, you got to leave it there. Thanks much for your time and taking us through this announcement. Always great to see you. >> Great. Thank you very much. We really appreciate our time with theCUBE. >> All right. Thank you for watching this CUBE conversation. This is Dave Vellante and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. >>Hi everyone. Welcome back to the cubes. Live coverage cube live program for re:Invent 2020. This is our Q virtual. We're not in person like we normally are. Today is the AWS public sector. Worldwide celebration day. A lot of content coming from Teresa Carlson and her team and highlighting everything. Of course, the cube channel on the re:Invent events site. Well, the content we streaming there, if you go to the description, you can click on the link and check out all the on-demand interviews. We've done hundreds of videos live before the event pre recorded as well as here live today for public sector day, I'm showing Lisa Martin co-hosts of the cube. Who's been involved in a lot of those interviews. Uh, Lisa, great to see you before we good to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>Likewise. Good to see you too, John. Glad that you're staying safe. >>Well, a lot of good action. And before we get started, I do want to put a plug out for, um, some Salesforce, big party virtual event. Uh, Salesforce is having a big party at re:Invent 2020 a virtual house party with chance the rapper performing an exclusive set with surprise celebrities and DJ in residence December 10th that's tomorrow at 5:00 PM Pacific, go to salesforce.com/big party to check out chance the rapper. Uh, I'm a big fan. Of course my kids are more fans than, uh, check out the sales report. Okay. Back to cube virtual Lisa. Great to see you. >>Likewise John. So public sector day, a lot of transformation mean re:Invent being reinvented, being virtual 500,000 registered. And so, so much has changed, but a lot also that Teresa Carlson spoke about in her keynote and this morning about the transformation across the public sector, that's really been driven by necessity with COVID. It was really impressive to hear and see all of the good things that AWS is facilitating across healthcare, government, education, state, and local. You name it. >>Yeah. The thing I love about Theresa is she's always been ever since I've known her now she's been on the cube every year, since 2013, since we've been covering re:Invent, she's always had a big, bold vision, and she's always kind of stayed on that track. And this year that was really clear out of the box on her, her leadership session. You got to think big and you got to look at the value of the data. That was the key message from her, her and her group public sector, by the way, has been highly active with the COVID pandemic. A lot of public services have been leveraging Amazon cloud to serve, uh, their, their, their people, whether it's getting them the checks for entitlements or getting them, you know, pharmacy drugs and whatnot, and helping them with the pandemic. But clearly Amazon has stepped up and helped education with, with, uh, remotes. So Theresa's team has been pretty busy. So I think that they had more time to prepare for the virtual keynote. I should've gotten chock full of more announcements. >>Yeah. And also some great examples. As you mentioned, we heard from UK biobank, some of the interviews also that have already happened on the kid that you've done showed some amazing work that AWS has helped to facilitate for school districts in Los Angeles, for example, the government of Rhode Island. And those are some of the great things cabbage, what they were able to enable Kevin's to do, to deliver small business loans of so quickly. A lot of that, I thought, I wish we're hearing more about how technology is facilitating so much. Goodness, in COVID on the news. Of course, we're hearing a lot of the challenges with online learning, but there's a lot of amazing things that AWS has been able to facilitate incredibly quickly. >>You know, one of the concerns I have with Theresa and her team years and years ago was this idea of national parks, right? You know, we have spaces where we can go visit and why isn't there a cyber version of that. And so you S you saw that progression and she'd been doing a lot of deals where they're using the cloud and donating their technology for the betterment of society. And one of the things that was, um, news today was an advancement of their open data registry, which has been kind of this open commons of, you know, health data and whatnot. And now they have all the sequencing data that's searchable, readable, uh, from the national Institute of health for DNA sequencing. So this is going to be, again, more commons, like approach is starting to see that I think this is going to be a real big trend lease. >>I think you're going to start to see the big companies have to really contribute to society in a way that we've never seen before, because they have the large scale. You can donate large compute to say research projects. So you starting to see, uh, from Teresa's team, the bubbling up of these new shared experiences around technology for the betterment of society. I think that sequencing was one, the renewable energy project. Another one, again, they're investing in women owned businesses and underrepresented minorities, and at small, medium size businesses to fund them, we saw a guy launching stuff in space that can create, you know, synthetic satellites. So you can look through clouds. This is new. I mean, this is interesting. >>It is interesting. And it actually, to your point is impactful at every level across the globe, going from when they talked about we farm creating this network of small scale of farmers, connectivity was their biggest problem. And now there's over a million. I'm sure that number it's probably even bigger. I've connected farmers due to AWS. You talked about also it's the cord 19 search, which is the expansion of their open research dataset. COVID open research data set that is only possible because of cloud computing and AWS hundreds of thousands of assets in there. Um, 200 plus open data sets for genomic research. She talked about how that's been at the of some of the things that we've seen go on so quickly with operation work speed, uh, with respect to the vaccine. So a lot of acceleration when we know public sector kind of traditionally not necessarily fast movers, but of course, as we've all said, a number of times recently necessity is the mother of invention and the speed element and the connectivity element were things that really spoke loudly to me with what Teresa said today, about the importance of extracting value from data. >>You know, when I talked to Andy Jassy and he talked about this in his keynote, the digital transformation is on full display. And the necessity being the mother of invention is a great phrase, the system and sticking because you can't hide. I mean, you have to deliver these services in the public sector, or, you know, people's lives are going to be impacted in certainly this there's death involved, right? So you have that and then you've got education. I mean, people want to see that changed quicker. There's always been conscious, Oh, education has got to be re-imagined well, guess what? There's no school open. So we got to re-imagine it now. So you get a lot of pressure, unprecedented demand. She said, Theresa said, three's a crosswind actually set onstage for education change. Um, so that's huge. Right? And then the other thing that she mentioned, I think that's going to be a big focus. >>It's not as, um, you know, headline news oriented is this whole jobs training piece. Um, that's a huge deal because the, the tsunami that hits so fast on this digital transformation, because the COVID, we're going to have a post COVID era of rapid acceleration of new skills. So people gotta get trained. So this ain't going to be the boring training programs, the guy who get kind of get better. So I think you're going to see some innovation Lisa, around how people think about delivering and constructing training programs to be much more real world thinking outside the box, you're going to start to see new things. Otherwise it's just going to be too slowly, the training right now. It's just, you know, sign up for the courseware and get a certification. Yeah, you got to do those things, but how can you get sort of cases done faster? How do you get people with the skills in their hands and virtual hands, if you will, to stand up more cloud, more AI, the pressure's there. So we can, that's going to be a huge thing to watch. >>Okay. The pressure is there. You're right. And a need is there. She talked about a lot of the demand that their customers are driving for some of the services and the education services as well that they're offering. But I'd like to point about upskilling focusing on the people, not just the people, but also the diversity inclusion. And we all know how impactful thought diversity is. So their, their dedication, their in their focus there, and also her recommendation to be bold. And I think in the education, respect was really critical. There is no time like now to move digital transformation. If education systems aren't there, then you know, it's a huge challenge and it impacts every person, every element of every family. So what they're able to do there, by focusing on the people and enabling folks to get trained faster, more resources online can only be a good, you know, Theresa >>Has always, um, has her own flare to style to her. She's incredible business woman and have such respect for her. She's been so successful. Um, but she always sends her presentations with the, kind of the, the kind of her to dues. Um, and you kind of pointed that out. So just review them with you. And I want to get your reaction. Number one, she said, you got to re-imagine and enable a digital, a digitally enabled business. Number two, identify data has an realized value and then increase your diversity. And she pointed to avis.training. Um, and that's kind of her kind of get out there and do those things so digitally enabled business, get that unrealized day to get it into work and increase your diversity. And then she had had a big party every year just said, instead of a party go out and do a random act of kindness act. So, yeah, typical, three's a flare, you know, she kind of ended it with a random act of kindness, but, but her bold vision, those are practical, uh, mandates. What's your reaction to, to that? >>I bold vision. I absolutely 100% I think right now is the time that no business can afford to be hiding under the covers. We have to be, they have to be very thoughtful and very prescriptive, but be bold. There's so much opportunity right now. We're seeing a ton of invention and innovation, John, that we've seen over the last nine months. There's a lot of COVID catalysts that we've been talking about on the cube that are really fantastic. So I think that recommendation to set a bold vision is absolutely imperative, not easy to achieve, but I think right now more than ever, it could really be what sets apart, the winners and losers of tomorrow. >>Yeah. I love it. I just say that on this final note, um, cloud and AI is really in play cloud-scale machine learning, which essentially feeds AI is all about data compute going down to the chip level, AI and software and data is critical for cloud. So really awesome keynote again, leadership session by Teresa Carlson, and there's a whole site of content available. Checkout the cube page, click down on the main page. You'll see that description. You'll see a link to the re:Invent page and check on public sector. A lot of great content. Lisa final question for us to kind of close out this keynote leadership session analysis here on all sector day. I want to get your take on, um, the interviews you've done with the Amazon folks and partners and customers. What are the themes that have been boiling out of those? What have you have been hearing? What's your take and observation of the common pattern? >>You know, given the fact that we haven't all been able to be together at my last cube event in person was reinvent 2019. And we're so used to having, you know, three, four days of wall-to-wall coverage, two sides, being able to have those close personal conversations with our guests this year really did a phenomenal job of recreating that same experience, digitally there's tremendous amount of innovation happening. I think that was the one thing that really jumped out at me, the speed with which it's happening, how so many different types businesses have pivoted, not once, but again and again, and again, as times are changing and how even I yesterday I interviewed Boone, supersonic CEO, some of the things that they're facilitating to get commercial supersonic flight back that fully cloud and AI machine learning can do that. There was no stoppage of innovation this year. In fact, that actually got faster. And I think that was a resounding theme and a lot of positivity from the guests. >>You know, the cue, his business was to go to events and extract the signal from the noise. Guess what? There's no physical events. We have the cube virtual. We have pivoted. We are now in our eighth, ninth month of cube virtual. It's been a new model. We've gotten more interviews, more people can just click into the cube virtual. We have more virtual sets, the Cuban virtualized Lisa. Although I miss them in real life as a whole new ballgame for us, >>It is a whole new ball game. And it also provides a lot of opportunities for businesses to get their messaging out and connect and engage with their audience, which is important. >>Well, I miss real life. I miss everybody out there. I wish we could be there in person. Uh, the world will stay hybrid. I think with virtual, I think this has been a great format. There's been some great benefits, but we want to be in person. I want you on the desk with us. So, and all the folks out there I wish we could see. And then we'll see you next year. Thanks everyone for watching the key. This is our keynote analysis and leadership analysis of the worldwide public sector. Teresa Carlson, Kenya. I'm John from Lisa Martin. Thanks for watching.

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Dell Technologies World Digital Experience brought to you by Dell Technologies. >> Hi welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE coming to you from our Palo Alto studios, with our ongoing coverage of the Dell Technology World 2020, the digital experience, we can't be together this year, but we can still get together this way. And we're excited for our very next segment, really talking about one of the big leverage points that the Dell VMware relationship can result in, so we're excited. Joining us our next guest is Guy Bartram, he is the Director of Product Marketing for Cloud Director, for VMware. Guy great to see you, where are you coming in from? >> Thanks for having me on Jeff. >> Where are you coming in from today? (Guy chuckles) >> So this yeah, this London for me, this is from London. >> Excellent, great to see you. >> In the UK. >> And also joining us, Doug Lieberman, he is the Global Solutions Director for Dell Technology, Doug, great to see you, where are you coming in from today? >> Well, thanks for having me, I'm calling in from just outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in the United States. >> Excellent, love Philly's lived there for a couple of years and man, there's some terrific food in that part of the world, I tell yah. So let's get into--- >> You say--- >> Are you Pat's or Geno's. >> Actually I'll eat either one but I think I prefer Pat. >> Okay buddy, I used to get one of each and eat half and half and piss people off that were the purest, but that's a difference--- >> That's the right way to do it. (Jeff and Guy laughs) >> Right, so let's get into it, you know, before we turned on the cameras, you guys were talking about this exciting announcement that you've been working on for a really long time. So before we get kind of into the depths and the importance, why don't we just go ahead and tell us, what is the big announcement that we're sharing today? Go to you Guy. >> And so VMware and Dell really have worked together and we both have partner programs that are focused on service providers, Cloud Service providers, and systems integrators and strategic outsourcers. And what we've done is work together to build a solution that is really targeted towards them in the cloud arena, so taking our cloud capabilities and solutions and optimizing it for cloud providers and doing that through what we call, leveraging our Dell Technologies Cloud Platform and putting VMware Cloud Director on top of that. >> So that's pretty amazing, and really, to you Guy, what does that enable Cloud Service providers to do that they couldn't do so well before? >> It brings a whole lot of benefits to a Cloud Service provider, I mean, for cloud providers, historically they've had to have infrastructure services that've been, you know, quite heavy for them to build, taken a long time to get the market, and really had a high burn and operational costs and this solution VMware Cloud Director on Dell Technologies Cloud Platform is going to bring them the multitenancy aspects of cloud director and all of the speed and efficiencies in application and infrastructure delivery to enable them to address the common need now around hybrid cloud management and hybrid cloud operations. >> And you talked about before, I'm sorry, go ahead, Doug. >> No, I was saying, you know, I think that the big key piece is that, there're special requirements that cloud providers really need from their infrastructure, from their cloud, that makes it special to their business model, and what this aims to do, is to provide those capabilities in a easily consumable and rapid implementation format so that they can get to revenue faster and they can get to higher level services faster. >> It's funny, you talked about getting to revenue faster, back in the day I worked at Intel and Craig Barrett was famous for TTM. TTM, everyone used to think it was time to market bringing a new product to market, and he said, no, no, no, it's time to money, right, how fast can you get operational, so that you can basically get this thing to start generating revenue, I always think of that when you look at seven 37 sitting at a gate, you know, how do you get it operational? So Doug, what were some of those special challenges that they have in their market and how are you helping them solve them? >> So it's a great question, Jeff, as we work with service providers all over the world, they've given us a consistent message, that the days of the value in their service being, how they build the underlying cloud and how they do that orchestration automation are really behind us, right, they're expecting today, an end to end capability delivered as sort of an appliance for that underlying infrastructure for the cloud components, so that they can focus on the higher level services and the things that provide more value and more margin for them, and so, you know, the as a service offerings that run on top of the underlying cloud. And so what this joint solution does is really provide a validated design so that they can redirect their engineering resources from figuring out how to make that base cloud work in a service provider format, with multitenancy, chargeback, showback, portals, et cetera, and get that up and running faster and not have to worry about how to automate all that themselves, so they can focus their engineering efforts on those higher level services that provide greater value to their bottom line, to be honest, >> Great, that's great, and Guy, I want to go back to you, you know, the Cloud Service providers probably don't get as much of publicity as you know, we hear all the time about the big public Cloud Providers, you know, the big three or four or however you want to count them and we hear a lot about data centers and staff migrating between those two, we don't hear a lot of conversation in kind of the hybrid or the multicloud discussion about the role of the smaller Cloud Service providers. So I wonder if you can share a little bit about how they play in the market, you know why this is a really important segment for everyone's, you know, kind of architecture and ability to deliver applications. >> That's great common, I mean, one of the things we tend to call on our partners internally is the fall of mega cloud, that you know you really haven't heard of, there's 4,000 partners in our partner program and all of them are providing very valuable cloud services. They provide cloud services they've in all areas of cloud, so this could be into Azure, Google, AWS or in their own data centers, and many of them have come from infrastructure rich environments or what we call asset heavy environments and delivering services in these environments. The recent kind of drive to cloud adoption and digital transformation has meant that there's been a growing demand for Cloud Service providers to deliver valuable managed services and professional services to help customer do that digital transformation and really help the customer identify, where their customer's workloads, would be best apt and running. And, you know, cloud providers specialize in delivering these services like Doug was saying, they're looking at that higher value and they brought a lot of skills and capability in those areas. >> That's great, 'cause it's really good to keep in mind they pay a really important role in this whole thing. And Doug I want to go back to you in terms of working together with VMware in the solution space, right, so it's one thing to talk about a relationship between two companies, it's one thing to see Michael Dell and Pat Gelsinger on stage together, it's a whole nother deal to get together and put in the investment in these joint solutions. So I wonder if you could share a little bit more color on not only today's announcement, but what this really means for you guys going forward and more importantly, your customers, and ultimately your customer's customers. >> Absolutely, so Dell and VMware are both committed to really driving the success of our Cloud Provider partners all over the world, and to do that, we recognize that there's an additional level of capabilities that we need to bring together and jointly do that. And so we agreed to work together to go build a series of capabilities that are really targeted at going beyond just the basic HCI market and the basic cloud market and extending that for capabilities that are targeted specifically and built specifically for our service providers. And so this solution that we're announcing today is the first step on a journey, but we both committed to and made investments in, continuing that and adding more and more capabilities as we move forward and really addressing that very specific market. And working with our Cloud Service provider partners to figure out what is the next step, what do they need from us, at the end of the day, we're looking to jointly help them be more successful and accelerate their time to market and their go to market capabilities. >> Right, that's great, and Guy back to you, you actually had some numbers, some IDC numbers that you can share in terms of some of the real measurable benefits of this. >> That's right Jeff, yeah, we have, IDC did a recent analysis for us with about 12 partners interviewed across the globe, and some of the results that came back were pretty astounding actually, this pay-for is available on our VCE product page on vmware.com. But just as kind of summarize, you know, we talk about getting to revenue faster, they found that on average service providers were able to onboard customers, i.e migrate them, into their cloud environment around 72% faster, 57% faster delivery of new services and we all know that, you know, portfolio and construction of services takes a long time, but you get business units to buy in to give it support services, so 57% faster delivery of services is incredible. And then, you know, obviously getting to revenue 32% more revenue from VCD services than without VCD and 51% overall more growth with VCD from things like more efficient operations, which are also marked at like 31%. So, you know, significant advantages to having Cloud Director bringing those economies of scale, bringing that capability to migrate from a customer premise into service providers cloud, and then obviously be able to utilize multiple larger clouds across multiple regions. >> That's great, and Doug, I wonder if you could share, are there some specific applications that are driving this more than others, is there any particular kind of subset of the solutions that you can highlight where you're getting the most demand and where you see kind of the both short term opportunity as well as mid and longterm opportunity? >> A great question, I think it really evolves around a couple of different aspects. So one is from a pure security standpoint and things like data sovereignty, we're seeing an increased demand for the service providers that are our partners, as in the ecosystem of cloud, there will always be a role for the hyperscaler clouds as well as the role of these independent Cloud Service providers that are at the next tier down, both for the data sovereignty issues, things like GDPR, but as well as kind of that personal feel, that personal touch and specialty in applications, some of the specific areas we're seeing are things like business process management capabilities, database as a service, VDI as a service, but even more critically things like cyber recovery and backup as a service we're seeing, especially in the current situation that we're in, really an uptick in the cyber attacks and the ransomware, et cetera, and so solutions such as our cyber recovery are critical in those capabilities and those higher level services tied into and integrated with an overall service provider framework are key. And so in the area that we're really seeing uptake are really the business critical mission functions that enterprises are looking to run in a trusted partner's data center, and that's what we're seeing, where we're a lot of traction for this Dell Technologies Cloud Platform, combining VCD and VCF together to give you all those features and enterprise reliability. >> Right, and I didn't ask you Guy kind of the partnership question about having the opportunity to put your capability, you know, on the Dell Cloud Platform, opens up a whole new set of field resources, a whole new set of technical resources, you know, a whole different resources, not that VMware's short on resources by any stretch of the imagination, but it's certainly an additive, you know, kind of one plus one makes three opportunity. >> Yeah, I mean, it's great to be doing this and we've actually already been doing this on a couple of other initiatives, so from my perspective, I, you know, I manage Cloud Director Portfolio and we've already integrated Dell, Data Domain Dell, Avamar backup solutions, Data Protection Suite, into VCD as self service and we've already put in quite a bit of work, working together with Dell on that, as we go forward we're going to be putting more work into supporting VCD on the Dell Technologies Cloud Platform and integrating more services from Dell and from other vendors into the solution as well. So all we want to really provide is the capability for service provider to have the easy to consume hardware model, easy to consume subscription software model, with our program, and then the extensibility of services over and above just the infrastructure layer. So looking at things like object storage, and as Doug said, data protection, migration services, container cluster services, there's a myriad of services that VCD provides today out the box, and then there's the a whole extensibility framework, which we use when we work with partners, like we've done with Dell to deliver things like data protection. >> Yeah, I want to go back to you Doug, in terms of kind of a higher level, this whole transition to as a service, you've been in the business for a long time, you've been in the solutions a long time, but, you know, switching everything to as a service, as often as we can, and as frequently as we can, and as broadly across portfolio is really a terrific response to what the customers now, are looking for. So I'm wondering if you share some color on, you know, this philosophy of trying to get to, as a service, as much as you can, across the broadest solution set as you can. >> Yeah and if you look over the last decade, and decade and a half, there has been this increasing trend to moving to as a service offerings and the public clouds really drove a large part of that, than in tier two service providers around the globe. The key piece especially in the current business model, then going forward is how do you optimize, your CapEx versus OPEX and how do you really leverage the IT infrastructure to the maximum extent possible, based upon current business conditions, and that means the ability to grow and train and the ability to only consume what you need. In the past, when we had traditional data centers, you basically built for the worst case, and so the worst case was you had, an accounting run that happened at the end of the month that required a lot of processing power, then you built to that and that's what you use, and for the rest of the month, it really mostly idle. The cloud model really gives you the ability to A, improve their, or only use what you need and consume when you want to use it, but also adds in really shifting the responsibility for the management and the operations into someone, people who are experts in that area, so that again, you as a business can focus on your mission critical aspects of what you do whether that's developing a drug, building cars, making pizza, whatever it is, really as a service model enables your business to drive their core competency and not have to worry about the IT infrastructure that other people can do more efficiently and with better value than you could do it internally. And all that drive to that as a service model with the additional financial models that really aligned to the business paradigm that really companies are looking for. >> As you're saying that I'm thinking, wow, remember those days when our worst case scenario, was running a big batch load at the end of the month or the end of the quarter, and that would be re-missed, right, we are 2020, we're spread out all over the country and the world on both sides of the Atlantics. If I didn't say something about, you know, kind of the COVID impacts in terms of this accelerate, 'cause we hear it all the time in social media, right, who's driving your digital transformation, is it the CEO, the CIO, of COVID, and we've moved from this kind of light switch moment and then merged to, hey, this is an ongoing thing, and you know, kind of the new normal, is the new normal. And it's really shifted, a lot of people are talking about, you know, kind of shifts in the cloud infrastructure, the direction of the traffic, right, from going now from East to West and it's North to South, 'cause it's going to everybody's home. I wonder, I'll go back to you Guy, in terms of, the response that you've heard from some of your customers, in a response to, you know, kind of A, let's put a stop gap in early March that was interesting, and critical, and done, but now, kind of looking forward as to, you know, kind of a redistribution of workloads and architecture and users and I think Doug talked about security. How are you seeing any kind of ongoing effects and how is this impacting, you know, kind of you go to market and what you guys are bringing to market. >> Yeah, we're definitely seeing a lot of change in the way that service providers are trying to address this now. At the start of COVID, it was really a struggle, I think, for everyone to get the resources that they required to keep customers up from running, a lot of people started re-examining their disaster recovery contingency planning, and realizing that actually, what has happened in the last couple of years is, you know, workloads have exploded, a lot of patient workloads have completely gone through the roof and container workloads have grown drastically, and what's happened is the contingency plans behind all this stuff haven't changed and they just simply can't keep up the dynamic nature of the way we're doing business. Quite simply put technology is outpacing our weight, our ability to deal with that, so, you know, service providers need to provide a platform solution that enables them to be able to orchestrate at scale and enables them to orchestrate securely at scale, and really that means they've got to move away from this is hardware analog and move into virtual resourcing, cloud resource pooling elasticity, and particularly hypothesy. I know VMware we talk a lot about hybrid solutions and multicloud, but it's a reality when you look at where customers are today in their cloud journey, most of them have a footprint in their premise, have a footprint in a cloud provider premise and have multiple footprints in public cloud environments, so they need to have that consistent security model across that, they need to have data contingency and backup solutions, and someone needs to be in that to manage that, and that's where the service providers come in. They need to move away from the kind of infrastructure day to day operations that they were doing before and scale it out to now application protection and application development environments. >> Right, so Doug, I'm going to give you the last word as we wrap up this segment, you know, it's easy for us and pundits and people to write about multicloud and hybrid cloud and all these concepts, you guys actually have to make it work on the ground with real customers and real workloads. So I wonder if you could just kind of, you know, share your perspective, you've been working on this Dell Cloud Platform, you know, kind of how you see this evolving over time, and again, kind of what gets you up in the morning as you look forward as to what this journey is going to be over the next six months, one year, two year, three years down the road. >> Brought a lot of functionality capabilities to the world, right, the ability to consume things as you need them, the ability to really rely on a combined set of clouds and multicloud, and if you look at any enterprise that by any estimate, any company of any size, it's probably got 12, 15 clouds that contain their multicloud between using hyperscalers, tier two service providers, as well as cloud based services like Salesforce.com or Office 365, and you combine all those together and what that provides is a lot of flexibility, a lot of functionality, but also an extreme amount of complexity. And that complexity is really where Dell Technologies Cloud and Dell Technologies Cloud Platform is looking to help and to reduce that complexity, 'cause ultimately a successful enterprise is going to leverage the best from multiple clouds across multiple different implementations in order to provide the end to end IT experience that they need for both their external facing and internal IT operations. And with Dell Technologies Cloud Platform and working with our service providers, what we aim to do is to simplify the implementation of those multiple clouds and how they work together and make it as seamless as possible to shift workloads where they need to be, see your entire virtual enterprise IT environment, no matter where it's running, and to really optimize on your business to understand how you're using cloud, where you're using cloud, and how those clouds work together. And so the integration of all the different features with VMware and Dell bring together that end to end capability to significantly simplify the multicloud experience, and then ultimately our service provider partners, can help you on that journey to provide that management and orchestration across those different clouds and the data transformation, the digital transformation necessary in order to drive success. >> That's great, well, thank you Doug, for putting a nice big bow on it, and congratulations to you both for getting this release out, I know there's a lot of hard work and effort behind it, so it's always kind of good to finally get to expose it to the real world, so thanks for taking a few minutes with us. >> Great, thank you for having us. >> Absolutely. >> Yeah thanks Jeff, thank you. >> All right, he's Guy, he's Doug, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE's continuous coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020, the digital experience. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (soft upbeat music)

(bright music) >> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Dell Technologies World Digital Experience. Brought to you by Dell Technologies. >> Hello, and welcome back to theCUBE's virtual coverage of Dell Technologies World Digital Experience. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE here for this interview. We're not face to face this year, we're remote because of the pandemic. We've got a great guest, CUBE alumni, John Roese who's the Global Chief Technology Officer at Dell Technologies. John, great to see you. Thank you for remoting in from New Hampshire. Thanks for your time and thanks for coming on. >> Oh, glad to be here. Glad to be here from New Hampshire. The travel is a lot easier this way so-- >> It's been an interesting time. What a year it's been with the pandemic, the good, bad, and the ugly has been playing out. But if you look at the role of technology, the big theme this year at Dell Technologies World is the digital transformation acceleration. Everyone is kind of talking about that, but when you unpack the technology side of it, you're seeing a technology enablement theme that is just unprecedented from an acceleration standpoint. COVID has forced people to look at things that they never had to look at before. Disruption to business models and business systems like working at home. (Furrier laughs) Who would have forecasted that kind of disruption. Workloads changing, workforces working differently with in the mid of things. So an absolute exposure to the core issues and challenges that need to be worked on and double down on. And some cases, projects that might not have been as a priority. So you have all of this going on, customers really trying to double down on the things that are working, the things they need to fix, so they can come out of the pandemic with a growth strategy with modern apps, with cloud and hybrid and multicloud. This has been a huge forcing function. I'd love to get your first reaction to that big wave. >> Yeah, no, no, I think as a technologist, sometimes you can see the future maybe a little clearer than the business people can. Because there's one thing about technology, it either is, or it isn't. Either is code or hardware and real or it's marketing. And we knew the technology evolution was occurring, we knew the multicloud world was real, we knew that machine intelligence was real. And we've been working on this for maybe decades. But prior to COVID, many of these areas were still considered risky or speculative. And people couldn't quite grok exactly why they wanted a machine doing work on their behalf or why they might want an AI to be a participant in their collaboration sessions or why they might want an autonomous vehicle at all. And we were talking about how many people autonomous vehicles that were going to kill as opposed to how many that we're going to help. Then we had COVID. And suddenly we realized that the fragility of our physical world and the need for digital is much higher. And so it's actually opened up an enormous accelerant on people's willingness to embrace new technologies. And so whether it's a predictable acceleration of machine intelligence or autonomous systems, or this realization that the cloud world is actually more than one answer, there's multiple clouds working together. Because if you try to do a digital transformation acceleration, you realize that it's not one problem. It's many, many problems all working together, and then you discover that, hey, some of these can be solved with cloud one and some can be solving with cloud two, and some of them you want to do in your own infrastructure, in a private cloud, and some might belong at the edge. And then suddenly you come to this conclusion that, hey, having strategy has to deal with this system as a system. And so across the board, COVID has been an interesting catalyst to get people to really think practically about the technology available to them and how they might be able to take advantage of it quicker. And that's a mixed blessing for us technologists because they want things sooner, and that means we have to do more engineering. But at the same time, open-minded consumers of technology are very helpful in digital transformations. >> Well, I want to unpack that rethinking with COVID and post COVID. I mean, everything is going to come down to before COVID and after COVID world. I think it's going to be the demarcation that's going to be looked at historically. Before we get into that though, I want to get your thoughts on some of the key pillars of these transformational technologies in play today. Last year at Dell World, when we were physically face to face, we were laying out on theCUBE and in our analysis, the Dell Technologies has got an end to end view. You saw a little bit at VMworld this year, the Project Monterey, is looking much more systematically across the board. You mentioned systems as consequences. The reaction of changes. But lay out for us the key areas, the key pillars of the transformational technologies that customers need to look at now to drive the digital path. >> Yeah, we cast a very wide net. We look at literally thousands of technologies, we organize them and we try to understand and predict which ones are going to matter. And it turns out that over the last couple of years, we figured out there's really six, what I'll call expanding technology areas that are actually probably likely to be necessary for almost any digital transformation. And they aren't exactly what people have been doing historically. So in no particular order, and they may sound obvious, but when you think about your future, it's very likely all six of these are going to touch you. The first is, the obvious one of being able to develop and deliver a multicloud. The cloud journey is by no means done. We are at like the second inning of a nine inning game, maybe even earlier. We have barely created the multiple cloud world, much less the true multicloud world, and then really exploiting and automating has work to be done. But that's a strategic area for us and everybody to navigate forward. In parallel to that, what we realize is that multiple cloud is no longer just present in data centers and public clouds, it's actually existing in the real world. So this idea of edge, the reconstituting of IT out in the real world to deliver the real time behavior necessary to actually serve what we predict will be about 70% of the world's data that will happen outside of data centers. The third is 5G. And that's a very specific technology, and I have a long telco background. I was the CTO of one of the largest telecom companies in the world and I was involved in 2G, 3G and 4G. (Furrier chuckles) 5G is not another G. It is not just faster 4G. It does that, but with things like massive machine type communication with having a million sensorized devices in a kilometer or ultra reliable, low latency communication. The ability to get preferential services to critical streams of data across the infrastructure, mobile edge compute, putting the edge IT out into the cellular environment. And the fact that it's built in the cloud and IT era. So it's programmable, software defined. 5G is going to go from being an outside of the IT discussion to being the fabric inside the IT discussion. And so I will bet that anybody who has people in the real world and that they're trying to deliver a digital experience, will have to take advantage of the capabilities of 5G to do it right. But super strategic important area for Dell and for our industry. Continuing on, we have the data world, the data management world. It's funny, we've been doing data as an industry for a very long time, but the world we were in was the data at rest world, databases, data lakes, traditional applications. And that's great. It still matters, but this new world of data in motion is beginning. And what that means is the data is now moving into pipelines. We're not moving it somewhere and then figuring it out, we're figuring it out as the data flows across this multicloud environment. And that requires an entirely different tool, chain, architecture and infrastructure. But it's incredibly important because it's actually the thing that powers most digital transformation if they're real time. In parallel to that, number five on the list is AI and machine learning. And we have a controversial view on this. We don't view AI as purely a technology. It clearly is a technology, but what we really think customers should think about it as is as a new class of user. Because AIs are actually some of the most aggressive producers and consumers of data and consumers of IT infrastructure. We actually estimate that within the next four or five years, the majority of IT capacity in an enterprise environment will actually be consumed at the behest of the machine learning algorithm or an AI system than a traditional application or person. And all you have to do is do one AI project to understand that I'm correct, because they are just massive demand drivers for your infrastructure, but they have massive return on that demand. They give you things you can't do without them. And then last on the list is this area of security. And to be candid, we have really messed up this area as an industry. We have a security product for every problem, we have proliferation of security technologies. And to make matters worse, we now operate most enterprises on the assumption the bad guys are already inside and we're doing things to prevent them from causing harm. Now, if that's all it is, we really lost this one. So we have an obligation to reverse this trend, to start moving back to embedding the security and the infrastructure with intrinsic security, with zero trust models, with things like SASSY, which is basically creating new models of the edge security paradigm to be more agile and software defined. But most importantly, we have to pull it all together and say, "You know what we're really measuring is the trustworthiness "of the systems we work with, "not the individual components." So this elevation of security to trust is going to be a big journey for all of us. And every one of those six are individual areas, but when you combine them, they actually describe the foundation of a digital transformation. And so it's important for people to be aware of them, it's important for companies like Dell to be very active in all of them, because ultimately what you have today, plus those six properly executed, is the digital transformation outcome that most people are heading towards. >> You just packed it all six pillars into one soundbite. That was awesome. Great insight there. One of the things that's interesting, you mentioned AI. I love that piece around AI being a consumer. They are a consumer of data, they're also a consumer of what used to be handled by either systems or humans. That's interesting. 5G is another one. Pat Gelsinger has said at VMworld that 5G, and when I interviewed him he said 5G is a business app, not a consumer app. Yet, if you look at the recent iPhone announcement by Apple, iPhone 12, and iPhone 12 Pro, 5G is at the center of that announcement. But they're taking it from a different perspective. That's a real world application. They've got the watch, they have new chips in their devices, huge advantage. It's not just bandwidth. And remember the original iPhone launch with 3G if you remember. That made the iPhone. Some are saying if it didn't have the 3G or 2G and 3G, I think it was 3G in the first iPhone. 3G, it would have not been as successful. So again, Apple is endorsing 5G. Gelsinger talks about it as a business app. Double down on that, because I think 5G will highlight some of the COVID issues because people are working at home. They're on the go. They want to do video conferencing. Maybe they want to do this programmable. Unpack the importance of 5G as an enabler and as an IT component. >> Yeah. As I mentioned, 5G isn't just about enhanced mobile broadband which is faster YouTube. It's about much more than that. And because of that combination of technologies, it becomes the connective tissue for almost every digital transformation. So our view by the way, just to give you the Dell official position, we actually view that the 5G or the telecom industry is going through three phases around 5G. The first phase has already happened. It was an early deployment of 5G using traditional technology. It was just 5G as an extension of the 4G environment. That's great, it's out there. There's a phase that we're in right now, which I call the geopolitical phase, where all of a sudden, everybody from companies to countries to industries have realized this is really important. And we have to figure out how to make sure we have a secure source of supply that is based on the best technology. And that has created an interest by people like Dell and VMware and Microsoft, and many other companies to say, "Wait a minute. "This isn't just a telecom thing. "This is, as Pat said a business system. "This is part of the core of all digital." And so that's pulled people like Dell and others more aggressively into the telecom world in this middle phase. But what really is happening is the third phase. And the third phase is a recasting of the architecture of telecom to make it much more like the cloud and IT world. To separate hardware from software, to implemented software defined principles, to putting machine interfaces, to treat it like a cloud and IT system architecturally. And that's where things like OpenRAN, integrated open networks, and these new initiatives are coming into play. All of that from Dell perspective is fantastic because what it says is the telecom world is heading towards companies like us. And so, as you may know, we set up a brand new telecom business at scale up here to our other businesses this year. We already are doing billions of dollars in telecom, but now we believe we should be playing a meaningful tier-one role in this modern telecom ecosystem. It will be a team sport. There's lots of other players we have to work with. But because of the breadth of applications of 5G. And whether it's again, an iPhone with 5G is great to do YouTube, but it's incredibly powerful if you run your business applications on there, and what you want to actually deliver is an immersive augmented experience. So without 5G, it will be very hard to do that. So it becomes a new and improved client. We announced a Latitude 9,000 Series, and we're one of the first to put out a 5G enabled laptop. In certain parts of the world, we're now starting to ship these. Well again, when you have access to millimeter wave and gigabit speed capacity, you can do some really interesting things on that device, more oriented towards what we call collaborative computing which the client device and the adjacent infrastructure have so much bandwidth between them, that they look like one system. And they can share the burden of augmented reality, of data processing, of AI processing all in the real time domain. Carry that a little further, and when we get into the areas like healthcare transformation or educational transformation. What we realize immediately is reach is everything. You want to have a premium broadband experience, and you need a better system to do that. But really the thing that has to happen is not just a Zoom call, but an immersive experience in which a combination of low bandwidth, always on sensors are able to send their data streams back. But also, if you want to have a more immersive experience to really exploit your health situation, being able to do it with holography and other tools, which require a lot more bandwidth is critical. So no matter where you go in a digital transformation in the real world that has real people and things out in the real world involved in it, the digital fabric for connectivity is critical. And you suddenly realize the current architecture's pre-5G aren't sufficient. And so 5G becomes this linchpin to basically make sure that the client and the cloud and the data center all have a framework that they can actually work together without, let's call it a buffering resistance between them called the network. Imagine if the network was an enabler, not an impediment. >> Yeah, I think you're on point here. I think this is really teases out to me the next-gen business transformation, digital transformation because if you think about what you just talked about, connective tissue, linchpin with 5G, data as a driver, multicloud, the six pillars you laid out, and you mentioned systems, connective tissue systems. I mean, you're basically talking tech under the hood like operating system mindset. These systems design are interesting. If you put the pieces together, you can create business value. Not so much speeds and feeds, business value. You mentioned telco cloud. I find that fascinating. I've been saying on theCUBE for years, and I think it's finally playing out. I want to get your reactions of this is, this rise of the specialty cloud. I called it tier-one on the power law kind of the second wave of cloud. Look at Snowflake. They went public. Biggest IPO in the history of the New York Stock Exchange of Wall Street, second to VMware. They built on Amazon. (Furrier laughs) Okay. You have the telco cloud, we have theCUBE cloud, we have the media cloud. So you're seeing businesses looking at the cloud as a business model opportunity, not just buying gear to run something faster, right? So you're getting at something here where it's real benefits are now materializing and are now visible. First of all, do you agree with that? I'm sure you do. I'd love to get your thoughts on that. And if you do, how do companies put this together? Because you need software, you got to have the power source with cloud. What's your reaction to that? >> Absolutely. I think, now obviously there are many clouds. We have some mega clouds out there and then we have lots of other specialty clouds. And by the way, sometimes you remember we view cloud as an operating model, an experience, a way to present an IT service. How it's implemented is less important than what it looks like to the user. Your example of Snowflake. I don't view Snowflake as AWS. I view Snowflake as a storage business. (Furrier chuckles) >> It's a business. >> It's a business cloud. I mean, they could lift it up and move it onto another cloud infrastructure and still be Snowflake. So, as we look forward, we do see more of the consumables that we're going to use and digital transformation appearing as these cloud services. Sometimes they're SaaS cloud, sometimes they're an infrastructure cloud, sometimes they're a private cloud. One of the most interesting ones though that we see that hasn't happened yet is the edge clouds that are going to form. Edge is different. It's in the real time domain, it's distributed. If you do it at scale, it might look like massive amounts of capacity, but it isn't infinite in one place. Public cloud is infinite capacity all in one place. An edge cloud is infinite capacity distributed across 50,000 points of presence at which each of them has a finite amount of capacity. And the other difference though, is that edge clouds tend to live in the real time domain. So 30 millisecond round trip latency. Well, the reason this one's exciting to me is that when you think about what happened at the software and business model innovation, when for instance public clouds and even co-location became more accessible, companies who had this idea that needed a very large capacity of infrastructure that could be consumed as a service suddenly came into existence. Salesforce.com go through the laundry list. But all of those examples were non-real time functions because the clouds they were built on were non-real time clouds if you take them in the end to end, in the system perspective. We know that there are going to be both from the telecom operators and from cloud providers and co-location providers, and even enterprises, a proliferation of infrastructure out in the real time domain called edges. And those are going to be organized and delivered as cloud services. They're going to be pools of flexible elastic capacity. What excites me is suddenly we're going to spawn a level of innovation, where people who had this great idea that they needed to access cloud light capacity, but they ran into the problem that the capacity was too far away from the time domain they needed to operate. And we've already seen some examples of this in AR and VR. Autonomous vehicles require a real time cloud near the car, which doesn't exist yet. When we think about things like smart cities and smart factories, they really need to have that cloud capacity in the time domain that matters if they want to be a real time control system. And so, I don't know exactly what the innovation is going to be, but when you see a new capability show up, in this case, it's inevitable that we're going to see pools of elastic, consumable capacity in the real time environment as edges start to form. It's going to spawn another innovation cycle that could be as big as what happened in the public cloud environment for non-real time. >> Well, I think that's a great point in time series. Databases for one would be one instant innovation. You mentioned data, data management, time is valuable to the latency and this maybe not viable after if you're a car, right? So you pass them. So again, all different concepts. And the one thing that, first of all, I agree with you on this whole cloud thing. A nice edge cloud is going to develop nicely. But the question there is it's going to be software defined, agreed. Security, data, you've got databases, you've got software operated. You mentioned security being broken, and security product for every problem. And you want to bake it in, intrinsic or whatever you call it these days. How do you get the security model? Because you've got access. Do you federate that? How do you build in security at that level? Whether it's a space satellite or a moving vehicle, the edge is the edge. So what's your thoughts on security as you're looking at this mobility, this agility is horizontally scalable distributed system. What's the security paradigm? >> Well the first thing, it has nothing to do with security, but impacts your security outcome in a meaningful way when you talk about the edge. And that is, we have got to stop getting confused that an edge is a single monolithic thing. And we have got to start understanding that an edge is actually a combination of two things. It is a platform that will provide the capacity and a workload that will do the job, the code. And today, what we find is many people are advocating for edges are actually delivering an end to end stack that includes bespoke hardware, its infrastructure, and the workloads and capabilities. If that happens, we end up with 1,000 black boxes that all do one thing, which doesn't make any sense out in the real world. So the minute you shift to what the edge is really going to be, which is a combination of edge platforms and edge workloads, you start your journey towards a better security model. First thing that happens is you can secure and make a high integrity the edge platform. You can make sure that that platform has a hardware to trust, that it operates potentially in a zero trust model, that it has survivability and resiliency, but it doesn't really care what's running on it as much as it has to be stable. Now if you get that one right, now at least you have a stable platform between your public and private environments and the edge. At the workload level though, now you have to think about, well, edge workloads actually should not be bloated. They should not be extremely large scale because there's not enough capacity at the edge. So concepts like SASSY is a good example, which is one of the analyst firms that coined that term. But I like the concept, which is, hey, what if at the edge you're delivering the workload, but the workload is protected by a bunch of cloud-oriented security services that effectively are presented as part of the service chain? So you don't have to have your own firewall built into every workload because you're in an edge architecture, you can use virtual firewalling that's coming to you as a software service, or you can use the SDN, the service chain it into the networking path, and then you can provide deep packet inspection and other services. It all goes back to this idea that, when you deal with the edge, first and foremost, you have to have a reliable stable platform to guarantee a robust foundation. And that is an infrastructure security problem. But then you have to basically deal with the security problems of the workload in a different way than you do it in a data center. In a data center, you have infinite computing. You can put all kinds of appendages on your code, and it's fine because there's just more compute next to you. In the edge, we have to keep the code pure. It has to be an analytics engine or an AI engine for systems control in a factory. And the security services actually have to be a function of the end to end path. More likely delivered as software services slightly upstream. That architectural shift is not something people have figured out yet. But if we get it right, now we actually have a modern, zero trust distributed, software defined, service changeable, dynamic security architecture, which is a much better approach to an intrinsic security than trying to just hard-code the security into the workload and tie it to the platform which never has worked. So we're going to have to have a pretty big rethink to get through this. But for me, it's pretty clear what we have to do. >> Now I'd say that's good observation. Great insight. I'll just double down and ask a followup on that. I get that. I see where you're going with that software defined, software operated service. I love the SASSY concept. We've covered it. But the edge is still purpose-built devices. I mean, we've talked about an iPhone, and you're talking about a watch, you're talking about a space module, whatever it is at the edge on a tower, it could be a radio. I mean, whatever it is, you seem to have purpose-built hardware. You mentioned this root of trust. That'll kind of never kind of go away. You're going to have that. What's your thoughts on that as someone who realizes I got to harden the edge, at least from a hardware standpoint, but I want to be enabled for self-defined. I don't want to have a product be purpose-built and then be obsolete in a year. Because that's again the challenge of supply chain management, building hardware. What's your thoughts on that? >> Yeah. Our edge strategy, we double click a little bit is different than the strategy to build for a data center. We want consistency between them, but there's actually five areas of edge that actually are specific to it. The first is the hardware platform itself. Edge hardware platforms are different than the platforms you put in data centers, whether it be a client or the infrastructure underneath it. And so we're already building hardened devices and devices that are optimized for power and cooling and space constraints in that environment. The second is the runtime on that system is likely to be different. Today we use the V Cloud Foundation where that works very well, but as you get smaller and smaller and further away, you have to miniaturize and reduce the footprint. The control plane, we would like to make that consistent. We are using Tanzu and Dell Technologies Cloud Platform to extend out to the edge. And we think that having a consistent control plan is important, but the way you adapt something like Tanzu from the edge is different because it's in a different place. The fourth is life cycle, which is really about how you secure, how you deploy, how you deal with day two operations. There's no IT person out at the edge, so you're not in a data center. So you have to automate those systems and deal with them in a different way. And then lastly, the way you package an edge solution and deliver it is much different than the way you build a data center. You actually don't want to deal with those four things I just described as individual snowflakes. You want them packaged and delivered as an outcome. And that's why more and more of the edge platform offerings are really cloudlets or they're a platform that you can use to extend your IT capacity without having to think about Kubernetes versus VMs versus other things. It's just part of the infrastructure. So all of that tells us that edge is different enough, that the way you designed for it, the way you implement it, and even the life cycle, it has to take into account that it's not in a data center. The trick is to then turn that into an extended multicloud where the control plane is consistent, or when you push code into production with Kubernetes, you can choose to land that container in a data center or push it out to the edge. So you have both a system consistency goal, but also the specialization of the edge environment. Everything from hardware, to control plane, to lifecycle, that's the reality of how these things have to be built. >> That's a great point. It's a systems architecture, whether you're looking at from the bottoms up component level to top down kind of policy and or software defined. So great insight. I wish we had more time. I'd love to get you back and talk about data. We were talking before you came on camera about data. But quickly before we go, your thoughts on AI and the consequences of AI. AI is a consumer. I love that insight. Totally agree. Certainly it's an application. Technology is kind of horizontal. It can be vertically specialized with data. What's your thoughts on how AI can be better for society and some of the unintended consequences that we manage that. >> Yeah, I'm an optimist. I actually, we've worked with enough AI systems for long enough to see the benefit. Every one of Dell's products today has machine intelligence inside of it. So we can exceed the potential of its hardware and software without it. It's a very powerful tool. And it does things that human beings just simply can't do. I truly believe that it's the catalyst for the next wave of business process functionality, of new innovation. So it's definitely not something to stay away from. That being said, we don't know exactly how it can go wrong. And we know that there are examples where corrupted or bad bias data could influence it and have a bad outcome. And there are an infinite set of problems to go solve with AI, but there are ones that are a little dangerous to go pursue if you're not sure. And so our advice to customers today is, look, you do not need to build The Terminator to get advantage from AI. You can do something much simpler. In fact, in most enterprise context, we believe that the best path is go look at your existing business processes, where there is a decision that's made by a human being, and it's an inefficient decision. And if you can locate those points where a supply chain decision or an engineering decision or a testing decision is done by human beings poorly, and you can use machine intelligence to improve it by five or 10%, you will get a significant material impact on your business if you go after the right processes. At Dell we're doing a ton of AI and machine learning in our supply chain. Why is that important? Well, we happen to have the largest tech supply chain in the world. If we improve it by 1%, it's a gigantic impact on the company. And so our advice to people is you don't have to build man autonomous car. You don't have to build The Terminator. You can apply it much more tactically in spaces that are much safer. Even in the HR examples, we tell our HR people, "Hey, use it for things like performance management "and simplifying the processing of data. "Don't use it to hire a bot." That's a little dangerous right now. Because you might inadvertently introduce racism or sexism into that, and we still have some work to do there. So it's a very large surface area. Go where the safe areas are. It'll keep you busy for the next several years, improving your business in dramatic ways. And as we improve the technology for bias correction and management of AI systems and fault tolerance and simplicity, then go after the hard one. So this is a great one. Go after the easy stuff. You'll get a big benefit and you won't take the risk. >> You get the low hanging fruit learn, iterate through it. I'm glad you guys are using machine learning and AI in the supply chain. Make sure it's secure, big issue. I know you guys were on top of it and have a great operation there. John, great to have you on. John Roese, the Global Chief Technology Officer at Dell Technologies. Great to have you on. Take a minute to close out the last minute here. What's the most important story from Dell Technologies World this year? I know it's virtual. It's not face to face. But beyond that, what's the big takeaway in your mind, if you could share one point, what would it be for the folks watching? >> Yeah, I think the biggest point is something we talked about, which is we are in a period of digital transformation acceleration. COVID is bad, but it woke us up to the possibilities and the need for digital transformation. And so if you were on the fence or if you're moving slowly and now you have an opportunity to move fast. However, moving fast is hard if you try to do it by yourself. And so we've structured Dell, we've the six big areas we're focused on. They only have one purpose, it's to build the modern infrastructure platforms to enable digital transformation to happen faster. And my advice to people is, great. You're moving faster. Pick your partners well. Choose the people that you want to go on the journey with. And we think we're well positioned for that. And you will have much better progress if you take a broad view of the technology ecosystem and you've lightened up the appropriate partnerships with the people that can help you get there. And the outcome is a successful digital leader just is going to handle things like COVID and ease disruption better than a digital laggard. And we now have the data to prove that. So it's all about digital acceleration is the punchline. >> Well great to have you on. Great segment, great insight. And thank you for sharing the six pillars and the conversation. Super relevant on what's going on to create new business value, new opportunities for businesses and society. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (bright music)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE covering Google Cloud Next OnAir '20. >> Hi everybody, welcome back. This is Dave Vellante and you're watching theCUBE's continuous coverage of Google Next OnAir, nine weeks of cloud content. There was just a buffet of content. It started out with sort of industry trends, we got into productivity, infrastructure, deep dive in security analytics, database, app modernization, cloud AI and we're wrapping up the nine weeks with Business Application Platform. And with me is Amit Zavery, who's the general manager and vice president of the Business Application Platform at Google cloud. Amit, always a pleasure. Thanks for coming on. >> Definitely, Thanks for having me Dave. You're welcome. So tell me more about this role and kind of your swim lane, if you will. >> Definitely. I think as you can imagine with especially all this digital transformation getting accelerated due to COVID, that's a huge amount of demand and interest from customers to be able to build applications, integrate them and modernize systems and automate all of them very quickly and easily in a cost effective manner. So that has been driving a lot of the thinking at Google for quite a few of years already. But I think that a little more accelerated with some of the work we've been doing previously with our stack around API management, no code app development, automation capabilities in our platform as well and we're bringing a lot of these things together in an offering so that customers can take advantage of a lot of the innovation in this space and improve the digital transformation and innovate quickly as well. So that's what we've done with Business Application Platform. We're providing capabilities for any kind of developers, be it the technical user who has a lot of programming experience as well as the other spectrum, which are the system developers who don't really have any kind of a software engineering background, but want be able to build applications and automate and there're processes very quickly and easily. So we want to provide them all the tooling and capabilities so that they can do that and be more effective than they would otherwise be. >> I want to ask you about digital transformation. I mean, obviously it's a word that's thrown around, a phrase that's thrown around a lot and there's a spectrum of what it means to people. I was talking to somebody the other day, and this obviously will resonate with you, with your background in enterprise apps but they were talking about an ERP system that was put in 15 years ago before Iphone, before cloud and it just says you know those systems are fossilized and the business has changed dramatically but the ERP system hasn't. To them, digital transformation was basically upgrading the system. And so, but obviously to Google and your role, it means something much different, doesn't it? >> I saw a lot more, right? I think no doubt having a digital application. No doubt is important, it's a good starting point. But you said some of the systems are pretty old and they're not connected together between different parts of the business. And this is huge amount of manual processes. and there's a lot of, I would say disparate pieces which never come together if you don't really put a well thought out digital transformation project or intimidation around it. So a lot of times all these businesses, when they're connecting things together, they do need a platform to kind of bring their business processes, their workflows, their applications, and the interaction between different users, be it external and internal into a more automated system. And that's really where digital transformation really shines and improves a lot of the ability for customers to compete as well as meet their customer demands and be more effective than otherwise they would be. >> And cloud is critical there but it's connecting to an ecosystem. So I want to ask you about your strategy of the Business Application Platform. And of course, Google is known for great tech. It's very open, a lot of downstream contributions, you think about Kubernetes and Anthos. So how would you describe your group strategy and how does it dovetail with Google cloud overall? >> Yeah no doubt, I think the cloud is kind of the central team underneath the covers, right? So it does run on a multicloud and hybrid mechanism. So that is available anywhere as well as you have choice of and flexibility of deployment. It's also a platform on top of Anthos so you have the advantage of multicloud as well as support for all the different systems. You might have both on-prem as well as in various other cloud providers as well. And the other things we are doing is we're taking advantage a lot of the AIML capabilities, a lot of our data analytics capabilities and bringing a lot of those underlying technologies and extracting it out to a SaaS based offering on Business Application Platform. So the customer's perspective, they want to build an application, They use, we recently acquired a company called AppSheet at the start of this year. So they can easily now use AppSheet to build those applications without writing a single line of code. And then if you create that application, it provides connectivity to also a lot of other systems out there be it applications like SAP, salesforce.com. But also a lot of legacy systems in house or custom systems you might have built and put connectors to that. And then allows you to now monetize and take systems and provide API so then you can now extend it and bring it out into the partner community, as well as customers to be able to build applications around that as well. So it connects all those things together, takes advantage of the Google cloud and the ecosystem we have built and provides customers and users a much easier way to kind of build and deliver applications and automation on it. >> Okay, so that makes sense in terms of why you acquired, made that acquisition. But I want to talk about no code development. It's something that you've been talking about quite a bit lately. Tell the audience, what is no code development? Why do we need it? >> Yeah, I think if you look at some of these report nowadays, there's a limited amount of capacity and capabilities IT can provide. And for complicated and very large systems, you of course need IT to kind of make your business efficient and implement a lot of the systems together. But there a lot of other applications which departments and line of business users want to use and build and they can't wait around for IT. And there, I think you look at some of the reports from Gartner, for example, they're going to be four times more developers outside IT than they are going to be in IT. And those folks are not going to be software engineers, they're not professional programmers but still they need efficiency and automation and application development tools. This is where no code really brings a lot of value. So tools like AppSheet, which we acquired, as market leading no code development platform makes it very easy for anybody without any experience writing any code and building applications. They can point click and start building an application and be effectively produce something which they can collaborate and use between different users inside the company or outside without spending a lot of money and time to deliver that. And that's why the no-code application platforms are becoming very popular because it does make your business more efficient, makes your business more automated, it's cost effective and it's very productive, right? So that has been the trend now more and more, and we speak a lot of, especially nowadays, if you look at telehealth, you look at say, if you want to do mortgage lending, you want to build an app easily quickly without having to wait around for it. You are interacting with a lot of people through digital mediums now and instead of people using a lot of digital tools. And that's why I think there's no-code a platforms become much more important, powerful and usable in this mechanism as well. >> Okay, I think it's important to point out. We're talking about no-code here, not low-code, no-code, there's a difference. >> There's a big difference. I think the low-code was kind of the interim stage where tools, which are coming out into the market were available to make it a little easier for development but not enough to kind of democratize it for everybody. With no-code, you are now allowing and opening it up to a lot more vaster community of users who can multiple build applications and take advantage of a lot of technology innovation happening in the platform like cloud and other things as well. Media reporting is another good example where you want to be able to build dashboards quickly and easily without again writing codes. So the no-code becomes a lot more important and usable for this kind of needs. >> So I wonder if we could stay on this for a minute. You've used the example of programming a VCR, many of us remember how difficult that was early on and now it's just you talk to it and it works. You used that as an example of what no code is like. Can you explain that a little bit more? >> I think, basically it should be natural, right? I think when we used to program a VCR, you'd read some manuals, you'd read some code, you have to kind of go through the whole process. I don't even know how many of our audience nowadays even know about that or even think about it anymore. makes us all very dated. But it was a very cumbersome process and then you would worry about whether you recorded it or not, and that you got it on the right time and did you get the right show? And then you'd up deleting the wrong things or whatever it may be the case. A Lot of those things are now getting extracted and simpler in terms of the no-code development where if you are looking for a particular application interface, if you're looking to build say a mortgage lending app, a lot of those building blocks are already available to you. You kind of making it specific to your need, but really using a lot of the building blocks and get you the final solution versus learning about wiring, everything yourself with a lot of pieces of code in there, right? So that's becoming a straightforward. We have customers like Solvay, for example, which is a large chemical automation company. And they are being able to build multiple applications with 400 plus users inside the company and deliver a lot more automation inside the organization than they would otherwise be. >> So you kind of touched on this with the different modules and capabilities and functions within an organization. But when I think about that VCR analogy, I mean, it's doing one thing and that's pretty simple. How does that apply? And again, you kind of touched on it, but it seems like IT is much or business is much more complicated but so this actually works? >> Yeah I think it's a works. We provide a lot of our kind of templates and system examples in the no-code tooling, as well as the a lot of complexity, which is built underneath the cover which is completely hidden from the user perspective, right? So when I'm building an application, I'm still getting the power of the cloud, I'm getting the power of our underlying platform, the scalability, reliability, the security, the integration, all that kind of stuff is brought into this tooling without you having to learn any of those things. And that really is where the power comes in and it's flexible enough that you can kind of pretty much do any kind of application deployment. I will not build a full blown eCommerce site with it, but I can do a lot of typical day to day kind of applications like vacation approval or things you might want to do for mortgage lending, understanding a telehealth app for doctors. And so we're seeing a lot of the, we had customers who were doing this for hospital bed tracking during the COVID current crisis going on, right? Where they want to know what kind of PPE is available? How many beds are empty? So tracking that at the hospital level, at the health care departments, all that kind of stuff we're done very quickly and powerfully than they otherwise would have. >> Is there a concern amongst your customers about privacy, governance, compliance, security with all these citizen developers? How do you ensure that those fundamental edicts of the organization are preserved? >> Yeah, I think this is a similar thing than any other system we will make available to our customers in the cloud. We guarantee that all the data is only available to the people who are allowed to based on the privileges and the security profiles and everything else. So there's no really any kind of fear from the system perspective that you will get access to something which you're not allowed to. You do log in, you do have to have an account, you do have to have all the relevant credentials before you get access to it. Same thing with privacy. We make sure that nothing is shared with anybody who's not allowed to. So we apply the same tenant, same kind of rules to any kind of data or information we keep in the cloud for any other application development. All we're doing is abstracting it out and making it easier so that everybody who wants to build things don't have to learn 20 other things to kind of get going. So the ability to do this in faster and quickly is there but all the underlying philosophy and principles still remain intact into our products as well. >> Right, makes sense. You guys obviously you have this API first mentality. I've heard about things like API gateway, Apogee, data capabilities, automating AppSheets. Can you bring us up to date on some of those innovations? >> You will see a lot of updates in this area. So we've been innovating very aggressively. Of course, we have a product called Apogee which is a market leading API management product in the industry today. It does the full life cycle of APIs, including testing, development, publishing, monetization, security, all that kind of stuff for API. And we have thousands of customers using it today. Beyond that, what we've done is we've added a lot of ability from that Stack to kind of expose APIs and consume them through AppSheet. So we have an API data source for AppSheet. So it's easy for you to find APIs and build an app is one. Second, we also released something called API gateway, which is a very high performance, low latency cloud native gateway running on serverless. So a lot of applications are built on serverless platform nowadays. And if you want to now manage that to an API layer, we provide a gateway on top of Google cloud. So anybody can also use it very quickly and easily as well. So that's another area which we added. And the third thing which we are announcing is something called actually AppSheet automation. So as I talked about AppSheet for app development, we're also now adding a lot of workflow and business process automation underneath the covers as part of AppSheet. That's something we're making available to our customers so they can automate a business process and connect things together very quickly but also get the value of the automation in their application as well. So those are new innovations, new releases we're adding to our platform as part of business application offering so that anybody can take advantage of it. >> I mean, I love this trend because to the extent you've been able, I mean, this is the Holy grail. If you can enable business users, they're closer obviously to what's going on, closer to the customer and they can respond much more quickly. Are you seeing, for instance a user builds an app using an AppSheet, are you seeing because of the API richness, are you seeing other innovation around those occurring? Are we at that point yet? Or are they still kind of islands of- >> No, i think The scope of usage is growing very fast, right? We have more than 400,000 users on AppSheet are building applications. Thousands of thousands of applications been built on it, millions of users kind of using it at the end from the logging in and using those applications as well. So I think the innovation is happening very fast, where they're connecting different things, as well as now building an ecosystem, even in Solvay as example, I was giving you. The multiple apps are built by multiple departments, and they're kind of bringing those ecosystem together into a reuse, be able to kind of find new use cases around it, those kinds of things as well. >> Are organization's coming back to say, hey, we love this? But remember when we first started spinning up VMs, it was so easy. Are you seeing organizations say, hey, we need better line of sight on it. It could be in a catalog of what we're doing or marketplace. Are you seeing demand for that? >> Yeah, so we seeing a lot. I think there's a lot of reuse. Like we have partners who also build a build applications and put that into our marketplace as well and then we're also seeing a lot of interest from solution providers who build applications on top of what you might have as modules and deliver to our end customers as well. So now there's a lot of interest in that regards and there's a lot of good examples coming out and we're seeing a lot of ways of bringing some of these things together as well. >> I mean, how does machine intelligence, AI, how does it fit into your whole agenda and strategy? And what does it mean for a customer? >> Yeah, I think as you know, Google has been innovating and has been one of the top AIML vendor out in the marketplace today. And we have definitely taken a lot of advantage of that innovation and experience in that. So for example, when I talked about automation, a lot of the automation in AppSheet is being done using AIML technologies Google has built in terms of predicting the way the customer is going to use the application, how they're going to be able to take a business process and connect them together. A lot of that things have been built using AIML technologies at Google cloud. Beyond that on API management for our operational dashboards and operational monitoring. So make sure that we can give you five nines of availability. We kind of really use lot of AIML technologies to understand anomalies, figure out where the issues might be and predict those things and make sure that we kind of fixing those things in advance before things go down, right? Same thing in security, abuse, usage, make any kind of DDoS kind of things or whatever may be the security issues as well. We use a lot of AIML capabilities to make sure we're monitoring and securing our systems as well. So we're in the middle of everything. >> Right. Has the pandemic, you know, the last 150 days, obviously it's changed things and we've talked about digital transformation being accelerated. How are you thinking about sort of the go forward as a result of the post isolation era? >> Yeah, I think this is probably going to be... I don't think this is good. Once we get out of the COVID situation whenever that happens, some of the way we work and where we operate will definitely change than what it used to be pretty much in a way. So I do expect a lot more of video conferencing, for example I do expect a lot of digitalization. I do expect a lot of automation requirements, everybody trying to be more efficient and sharing things and working remotely. Those kinds of things will continue as a trend. So from our perspective, the work we're doing around API management, around digitalization, around digital transformation, around AppSheet automation, all those things are probably right things for the right kind of future where these technologies and tech offerings we do in Google cloud as well as other things we are doing broadly will make a big difference for everyone. >> Yeah recently, I want to kind of end just to get your industry perspectives. Recently, I wrote a piece that a video just on the enterprise app space, kind of the systems of record. And, you know, these are entrenched companies and even you see some of the new SaaS startups, but they're large companies and done very well. I was trying to sort of noodle on where does the potential of disruption come? Where's the new innovation? And I think some of the things that we're talking about here, this no-code, cloud. I mean, obviously you guys play in the application space but it seems like a part of your strategy is to enable developers to really build new types of applications. And maybe that's where the next wave of disruption comes, perhaps in vertical industries, perhaps with this no code. What are your thoughts on that? >> I know, you're right. I think the productivity in the collaboration space, no doubt is going through a huge transformation and change. I mean, Google being in the forefront of it with G Suite. If you look at some of the numbers and the metrics in terms of video conferencing and this collaboration in general has been going through the roof in terms of usage. AppSheet combination with that, for example, right? So if you're building an application, you're doing video conferencing, I might be able to build a telehealth app very quickly and easily. So that's where the no-code and collaboration, for example and productivity becomes part that story. Similarly, as you said, the industry solutions where you probably heard some of the innovation we're doing in that area by specific industry with business processes. Again, adding an API layer underneath the covers to connect different systems together, and then publishing that to an application through AppSheet becomes, again, a very much a great thought out solution and very easy to kind of provide that to our customers as well. So changes in productivity and collaboration, changes in no code app development, having a platform to connect all these things and make it easy to adopt is really a big part of our story as we move forward. And that's the reason why we're kind of increasing our investment in the Business Application Platform and just kind of pour to a lot of things we're doing. We did an acquisition on Looker, for example, for business intelligence. And that's an important part as part of business application platform, to be able to provide intelligence to what people are doing, what data you have to be able to do self service reporting, and then publish that to on a dashboard as well, which might be created through AppSheet or custom doesn't matter. But we provide you that whole end to end onto it. And then technology like Anthos ties it together to give you multicloud as well as a hybrid kind of delivery mechanism. So you have flexibility of choice how you deliver and run those systems. >> Yeah, I love that Looker example for sure. We're basically seeing the democratization of business apps. Amit, thanks so much for coming back in theCUBE. It's great to see you. Hopefully sometime soon we can see each other face to face. >> Yeah. I look forward to it and thank you again for having me. >> And thank you for watching our continuous coverage on theCUBE with Google's Next OnAir nine weeks of coverage. Keep it right there. Be right back after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from San Francisco It's theCUBE. Covering RSA Conference 2020, San Francisco. Brought to you by Silicon Angled Media >> Hi everyone, welcome to theCUBE's coverage here at RSA Conference 2020. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE We're on the floor getting all the data, sharing it with you here, Cube coverage. Got the best new generation shift happening as cloud computing goes to the whole other level. Multi-cloud, hybrid cloud changing the game. You're seeing the companies transition from an on-premises to cloud architecture. This is forcing all the companies to change. So a new generation of security is here and we've got a great guest, so a hot start-up. Masha Sedova, co-founder of Elevate Security. Welcome to theCUBE, thanks for joining us. >> Thank you so much for having me, John. >> So the next generation in what will be a multi-generational security paradigm, is kind of happening right now with the beginning of, we're seeing the transition, Palo Alto Networks announced earnings yesterday down 13% after hours because of the shift to the cloud. Now I think they're going to do well, they're well positioned, but it highlights this next generation security. You guys are a hot start-up, Elevate Security. What is the sea change? What is going on with security? What is this next generation paradigm about? >> Yeah, so it's interesting that you talk about this as next generation. In some ways, I see this as a two-prong move between, yes, we're moving more into the cloud but we're also going back to our roots. We're figuring out how to do asset management right, we're figuring out how to do patching right, and for the first time, we're figuring how to do the human element right. And that's what where we come in. >> You know, the disruption of these new shifts, it also kind of hits like this, the old expression, 'same wine, new bottle', all this, but it's a data problem. Security has always been a data problem, and we've seen some learnings around data. Visualization, wrangling, there's a lot of best practices around there. You guys are trying to change the security paradigm by incorporating a data-centric view with changing the behavior of the humans and the machines and kind of making it easier to manage. Could you share what you guys are doing? What's the vision for Elevate? >> Yeah, so we believe and we've seen, from our experience being practitioners, you can't change what you can't measure. If you don't have visibility, you don't know where you're going. And that's probably been one of the biggest pain-point in the security awareness space traditionally. We just roll out training and hope it works. And it doesn't, which is why human error is a huge source of our breaches. But we keep rolling out the same one-size fits all approach without wanting to measure or, being able to. So, we've decided to turn the problem on its head and we use existing data sets that most organizations who have a baseline level of maturity already have in place. Your end point protections, your DLP solutions, your proxies, your email security gateways and using that to understand what your employees are doing on the network to see if user generated incidents are getting better over time or getting worse. And using that as the instrumentation and the level of visibility into understanding how you should be orchestrating your program in this space. >> You know, that's a great point. I was just having a conversation last night at one of the cocktail parties here around RSA and we were debating on, we talk about the kind of breaches, you mentioned breaches, well there's the pure breach where I'm going to attack and penetrate the well fortified network. But then there's just human error, an S3 bucket laying open or some configuration problem. I guess it's not really a breach, it's kind of an open door so the kind of notion of a breach is multifold. How do you see that, because again, human error, insider threats or human error, these are enabling the hackers. >> Yeah >> This is not new. >> Yeah. >> How bad is the problem? >> It depends on what report you read. The biggest number I've seen so far is something like 95% of breaches have human error. But I honestly, I couldn't tell you what the 5% that don't include it because if you go far enough back, it's because a patch wasn't applied and there is a human being involved there because there is vulnerability in code, that's probably a secure coding practice when you're a development organization. Maybe it's a process that wasn't followed or even created in the first place. There's a human being at the core of every one of these breaches and, it needs to be addressed as holistically as our technologies and our processes right now in the space. >> The evolution of human intelligence augmented by machines will certainly help. >> That's it, yeah. >> I mean, I've got to ask you, obviously you're well-funded. Costanova Ventures well known in the enterprise space, Greg Sands and the team there, really strong, but you guys entered the market, why? I mean you guys, you and your founder both at Salesforce.com. Salesforce gurus doing a lot of work there. Obviously you've seen the large scale, first wave of the cloud. >> Yeah >> Why do the start-up? What was the problem statement you guys were going after? >> So, my co-founder and I both came from the world of being practitioners and we saw how limited the space was and actually changing human behavior, I was given some animated PowerPoints, said use this to keep the Russians out of your network, which is a practical joke unless your job is on the line, so I took a huge step back and I said, there are other fields that have figured this out. Behavioral science being one of them, they use positive reinforcement, gamification, marketing and advertisements have figured out how to engage the human element, just look around the RSA floor, and there's so many learnings of how we make decisions as human beings that can be applied into changing people's behaviors in security. So that's what we did. >> And what was the behavior you're trying to change? >> Yeah, so the top one's always that our attackers are getting into organizations, so, reducing phishing click-throughs an obvious one, increasing reporting rates, reducing malware infection rates, improving sensitive data handling, all of which have ties back to, as I was mentioning earlier, security data sources. So, we get to map those and use that data to then drive behavior change that's rooted in concepts like social proof, how are you doing compared to your peers? We make dinner decisions on that and Amazon buying decisions on that, why not influence security like that? >> So building some intelligence into the system, is there a particular market you're targeting? I mean, here people like to talk in segments, is there a certain market that you guys are targeting? >> Yeah, so the amazing thing about this is, and probably no surprise, the human element is a ubiquitous problem. We are in over a dozen different industries and we've seen this approach work across all of those industries because human beings make the same mistakes, no matter what kind of company they're in. We really work well with larger enterprises. We work well with larger enterprises because they tend to have the data sets that really provides insights into human behavior. >> And what's the business model you guys envision happening with your service product? >> We sell to enterprises and security, the CISO and the package as a whole, gives them the tools to have the voice internally in their organization We sell to Fortune 1000 companies, >> So it's a SAAS service? >> Yeah, SAAS service, yeah. >> And so what's the technology secret sauce? (laughing) >> Um, that's a great question but really, our expertise is understanding what information people need at what time and under what circumstances, that best changes their behavior. So we really are content diagnostic, we are much more about the engine that understands what content needs to be presented to whom and why. So that everyone is getting only the information they need, they understand why they need it and they don't need anything extra-superfluous to their... >> Okay, so I was saying on theCUBE, my last event was at, CIO's can have good days and bad days. They have good days, CISOs really have good days, many will say bad days, >> Masha: Yeah, it's a hard job. >> So how do I know I need the Elevate Solution? What problem do I have, what's in it for me? What do I get out of it? When do I know when to engage with you guys? >> I take a look at how many user generated incidents your (mumbles) responding to, and I would imagine it is a large majority of them. We've seen, while we were working at Salesforce and across our current customers, close to a 40% reduction rate in user generated incidents, which clearly correlates to time spent on much more useful things than cleaning up mistakes. It's also one of the biggest ROI's you can get for the cheapest investment. By investing a little bit in your organization now, the impact you have in your culture and investing in the future decision, the future mistakes that never get made, are actually untold, the benefit of that is untold. >> So you're really kind of coming in as a holistic, kind of a security data plane if you will, aggregating the data points, making a visualization in human component. >> You've got it. >> Now, what's the human touchpoint? Is it a dashboard? Is it notifications? Personalization? How is the benefit rendered for the customer? >> So we give security teams and CSOs a dashboard that maps their organization's strengths and weaknesses. But for every employee, we give personalized, tailored feedback. Right now it shows up in an email that they get on an ongoing basis. We also have one that we tailor for executives, so the executive gets one for their department and we create an executive leaderboard that compares their performance to fellow peers and I'll tell you, execs love to win, so we've seen immense change from that move alone. >> Well, impressive pedigree on your entrepreneurial background, I see Salesforce has really kind of, I consider real first generation cloud before cloud actually happened, and there's a lot of learn, it was always an Apple case, now it's AWS, but it's it's own cloud as we all know, what are the learnings that you saw from Salesforce that you said hey, I'm going to connect those dots to the new opportunity? What's the real key there? >> So, I had two major aha's that I've been sharing with my work since. One, it's not what people know, but it's what they do that matters, and if you can sit with a moment and think about that, you realize it's not more training, because people might actually know the information, but they just choose not to do it. How many people smoke, and they still know it kills them? They think that it doesn't apply to them, same thing with security. I know what I need to do, I'm just not incentivized to do it, so there's a huge motivation factor that needs to be addressed. That's one thing that I don't see a lot of other players on the market doing and one thing we just really wanted to do as well. >> So it sounds like you guys are providing a vision around using sheet learning and AI and data synthesis wrangling and all that good stuff, to be an assistant, a personal assistant to security folks, because it sounds like you're trying to make their life easier, make better decisions. Sounds like you guys are trying to distract away all these signals, >> You're right. >> See what to pay attention to. >> And make it more relevant, yeah. Well think about what Fitbit did for your own personal fitness. It curates a personal relationship based on a whole bunch of data. How you're doing, goals you've set, and all of a sudden, a couple of miles walk leads to an immense lifestyle change. Same thing with security, yeah. >> That's interesting, I love the Fitbit analogy because if you think about the digital ecosystem of an enterprise, it used to be siloed, IT driven, now with digital, everything's connected so technically, you're instrumenting a lot of things for everything. >> Yeah. >> So the question's not so much instrumentation, it's what's happening when and contextually why. >> That's it, why, that's exactly it. Yeah, you totally got it. >> Okay. I got it. >> Yeah, I can see the light bulb. >> Okay, aha, ding ding. All right, so back to the customer pain point. You mentioned some data points around KPI's that they might or things that they might want to call you so it's incidents, what kind of incidents? When do I know I need to get you involved? Will you repeat those again? >> There's two places where it's a great time to involve. Now, because of the human element is, or think about this as an investment. If you do non-investor security culture, one way or another, you have security culture. It's either hurting you or it's helping you and by hurting you, people are choosing to forego investing security processes or secure cultures and you are just increasing your security debt. By stepping in to address that now, you are actually paying it forward. The second best time, is after you realize you should have done that. Post-breaches or post incidents, is a really great time to come in and look at your culture because people are willing to suspend their beliefs of what good behavior looks like, what's acceptable and when you look at an organization and their culture, it is most valuable after a time of crisis, public or otherwise, and that is a really great time to consider it. >> I think that human error is a huge thing, whether it's as trivial as leaving an S3 bucket open or whatever, I think it's going to get more acute with service meshes and cloud-native microservices. It's going to get much more dynamic and sometimes services can be stood up and torn down without any human knowledge, so there's a lot of blind spots potentially. This brings up the question of how does the collaboration piece, because one of the things about the security industry is, it's a community. Sharing data's important, having access to data, how do you think about that as the founder of a start-up that has a 20 mile steer to the future around data access, data diversity, blind spots, how do you look at that and how do you advise your clients to think about that? >> I've always been really pro data sharing. I think it's one of the things that has held us back as an industry, we're very siloed in this space, especially as it relates to human behavior. I have no idea, as a regular CISO of a company, if I am doing enough to protect my employees, is my phishing click (mumbles), are my malware download rates above normal, below or should I invest more, am I doing enough? How do I do compared to my peers and without sharing industry stats, we have no idea if we're investing enough or quite honestly, not enough in this space. And the second thing is, what are approaches that are most effective? So let's say I have a malware infection problem, which approach, is it this training? Is it a communication? Is it positive reinforcement, is it punishment? What is the most effective to leverage this type of output? What's the input output relation? And we're real excited to have shared data with Horizon Data Breach Report for the first time this year, to start giving back to the communities, specifically to help answer some of these questions. >> Well, I think you're onto something with this behavioral science intersection with human behavior and executive around security practices. I think it's going to be an awesome, thanks for sharing the insights, Miss Masha on theCUBE here. A quick plug for your company, (mumbles) you're funded, Series A funding, take us through the stats, you're hiring what kind of positions, give a plug to the company. >> So, Elevate Security, we're three years old. We have raised ten million to date. We're based in both Berkeley and Montreal and we're hiring sales reps on the west coast, a security product manager and any engineering talent really focused on building an awesome data warehouse infrastructure. So, please check out our website, www.elevatesecurity.com/careers for jobs. >> Two hot engineering markets, Berkeley I see poaching out of Cal, and also Montreal, >> Montreal, McGill and Monterey. >> You got that whole top belt of computer science up in Canada. >> Yeah. >> Well, congratulations. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, sharing your story. >> Thank you. >> Security kind of giving the next generation all kinds of new opportunities to make security better. Some CUBE coverage here in San Francisco, at the Moscone Center. I'm John Furrier, we'll be right back after this break. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, everyone, welcome to this CUBE conversation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here with a very special guest, Amit Walia CEO of Informatica. Newly appointed CEO, about a month ago, a little bit over a month ago. Head of product before that. Been with Informatica since 2013. Informatica went private in 2015, and has since been at the center of the digital transformation around data, data transformation, data privacy, data everything around data and value and AI. Amit, great to see you, and congratulations on the new CEO role at Informatica. >> Thank you. Always good to be back here, John. >> It's been great to follow you, and for the folks who don't know you, you've been a very product centric CEO. You're a product set CEO, as they call it. But also now you have a company in the middle of the transformation. CloudScale is really mainstream. Enterprise is looking to multicloud, hybrid cloud. This is something that you've been on for many, many years. We've talked about it. So now that you're in charge, you've got the ship, the wheel in your hands. Where are you taking it? What is the update of Informatica? Give us the update. >> Well, thank you. So look, business couldn't be better. I think to give you a little bit of color where we're coming from the last couple of years Informatica went through a huge amount of transformation. All things trying to transform a business model, pivoting to subscription, all things have really been into Cloud, the new workloads as we talked about and all things new like AI. To give a little bit of color, we basically exited last year with a a billion dollars of ARR, not just revenues. So we had a billion dollar ARR company and as we pivoted to subscription, our subscription business for the last couple of years has been growing North of 55%. So that's the scale at which we are running multimillion dollars and if you look at the other two metrics which we keep very clicked near and dear to heart, one is innovation. So we are participating in five Magic Quadrants and we are the leader in all five Magic Quadrants. Five on five as we like to call it Gartner Magic Quadrants, very critical to us because innovation in the tech is very important. Also customer loyalty, very important to us. So we again, we're the number one in customer sat from a TSI survey and Gartner publishes the vendor ratings. We basically have a very strong positioning in that. And lastly, our market share continues to grow. So last IDC survey, our market share continued to grow and with the number one in all our markets. So business couldn't be at a better place where we are right now. >> I want to get into some of the business discussion. We first on the Magic Quadrant front, it's very difficult for the folks that aren't in the Cloud as to understand that to participate in multiple Magic Quadrants, what many do is hard because Clouds horizontally scalable Magic Quadrants used to be old IT kind of categories but to be in multiple Magic Quadrants is the nature of the beast but to be a leader is very difficult because Magic Quarter doesn't truly capture that if you're just a pure play and then try to be Cloud. So you guys are truly that horizontal brand and technology. We've covered this on theCUBE so it's no secret, but I want to get your comments on to be a leader in today, in these quadrants, you have to be on all the right waves. You've got data warehouses are growing and changing, you got the rise of Snowflake. You guys partner with Databricks, again, machine learning and AI, changing very rapidly and there's a huge growth wave behind it as well as the existing enterprises who were transforming analytics and operational workloads. This is really, really challenging. Can you just share your thoughts on why is it so hard? What are some of the key things behind these trends? We've got analytics, I guess you can do if it's just Analytics and Cloud, great, but this is a, this horizontal data play Is not easy. Can you share why? >> No, so yes, first we are actually I would say a very hidden secret. We're the only software company and I'll say that again, the only software company that was the leader in the traditional workloads legacy on premise and via the leader and the Cloud workloads. Not a single software company can say that they were the leader of and they were started 27 years ago and they're still the leader in the Magic Quadrants today. Our Cloud by the way runs at 10 trillion transactions a month scale and obviously we partnered with all the hyperscalers across the board and our goal is to be the Switzerland of data for our customers. And the question you ask is is a critical one, when you think of the key business drivers, what are customers trying to do? One of them is all things Cloud, all things AI is obviously there but one is all data warehouses are going to Cloud, we just talked about that. Moving workloads to Cloud, whether it is analytical, operational, basically we are front and center helping customers do that. Second, a big trend in the world of digital transformation is helping our customers, customer experience and driving that, fueling that is a master data management business, so on and so products behind that, but driving customer experiences, big, big driver of our growth and the third one is no large enterprise can live without data governance, data privacy. Even this is a thing today. You going to make sure that you would deliver a good governance, whether it's compliance oriented or brand oriented, privacy and risk management. And all three of them basically span the business initiatives that featured into those five Magic Quadrants. Our goal is to play across all of them and that's what we do. >> Pat Gelsinger here said a quote on theCUBE, many years ago. He said, "If you're not on the right wave, your could be driftwood," meaning you're going to get crashed over. >> He said very well. >> A lot of people have, we've seen a lot of companies have a good scale and then get washed away, if you will, by a wave. You're seeing like AI and machine learning. We talked a little bit about that. You guys are in there and I want to get your thoughts on this one. Whenever this executive changes, there's always questions around what's happening with the company. So I want you to talk about the state of Informatica because you're now the CEO, there's been some changes. Has there been a pivot? Has there been a sharpening focus? What is going on with Informatica? >> So I think our goal right now is to scale and hyperscale, that's the word. I mean we are in a very strong position. In fact, we use this phrase internally within the company, the next phase of great. We're at a great place and we are chartering the next phase of great for the company. And the goal that is helping our customers, I talked about these three big, big initiatives that companies are investing in, data warehousing and analytics, going to the Cloud, transforming customer experiences and data governance and privacy. And the fourth one that underpins all of them is all things AI. I mean, as we've talked about it before, right? All of these things are complex, hard to do. Look at the volume and complexity of data and what we're investing in is what we call native AI. AI needs, data, data needs AI, as I always said, right? And we had investing in AI to make these things easy for our customers, to make sure that they can scale and grow into the future. And what we've also been very diligent about is partnering. We partnered very well with the hyperscalers, like whether it's AWS, Microsoft, whether it's GCP, Snowflake, great partner of ours, Databricks great partner of ours, Tablo, great partners of ours. We have a variety of these partners and our goal is always customer first. Customers are investing in these technologies. Our goal is to help customers adopt these technologies, not for the sake of technologies, but for the sake of transforming those three business initiatives I talked about. >> You brought up, I was going to ask you the next question about Snowflake and Databricks. Databricks has been on theCUBE, Ali, >> And here's a good friend of ours. And he's got chops, I mean Stanford, Berkeley, he'll kill me with that, he's a cowl at Stanford but Databricks is doing well. They made some good bets and it's paying off for them. Snowflake, a rising star, Frank Slootman's over there now, they are clearly a choice for modern data warehouses as is, inhibits Redshift. How are you working with Snowflake? How do you take advantage of that? Can you just unpack your relationship with Snowflake? >> It's a very deep partnership. Our goal is to help our customers as they pick these technology choices for data warehousing as an example where Snowflake comes into play to make sure that the underlying data infrastructure can work seamlessly for them. See, customers build this complex logic sitting in the old technologies. As they move to anything new, they want to make sure that their transition, migration is seamless, as seamless as it can be. And typically they'll start something new before they retire to something old. With us, they can carry all of that business logic for the last 27 years, their business logic seamlessly and run natively in this case, in the Cloud. So basically we allow them this whole from-to and also the ability to have the best of new technology in the context of data management to power up these new infrastructures where they are going. >> Let me ask you the question around the industry trends, what are the top trends, industry trends that are driving your business and your product direction and customer value? >> Look, digital transformation has been a big trend and digital transformation has fueled all things like customer experiences being transformed, so that remains a big vector of growth. I would say Clouded option is still relatively that an early innings. So now you love baseballs, so we can still say what second, third inning as much as we'd like to believe Cloud has been there. Customers more with that analytical workloads first, still happening. The operational workloads are still in its very, very infancy so that is still a big vector of growth and and a big trend to BC for the next five plus years. >> And you guys are in the middle of that because of data? >> Absolutely. Absolutely because if you're running a large operation workload, it's all about the data at the end of the day because you can change the app, but it's the data that you want to carry, the logic that you've written that you want to carry and we participate in that. >> I've asked you before what I want to ask you again because I want to get the modern update because PureCloud, born in the Cloud startups and whatever, it's easy to say that, do that, everyone knows that. Hybrid is clear now, everyone that sees it as an architectural thing. Multicloud is kind of a state of, I have multiple Clouds but being true multicloud a little bit different maybe downstream conversation but certainly relevant. So as Cloud evolves from public Cloud, hybrid and maybe multi or certainly multi, how do you see those things evolving for Informatica? >> Well, we believe in the word hybrid and I define hybrid exactly as these two things. One is hybrid is multicloud. You're going to have hybrid Clouds. Second is hybrid means you're going to have ground and Cloud inter-operate for a period of time. So to us, we in the center of this hybrid Cloud trail and our goal is to help customers go Cloud native but make sure that they can run whatever was the only business that they were running as much possible in the most seamless way before they can at some point contour. And which is why, as I said, I mean our Cloud native business, our Cloud platform, which we call Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services, runs at scale globally across the globe by the way, on all hyperscalers at 10 plus trillion transactions a month. But yet we've allowed customers to run their on-prem technologies as much as they can because they cannot just rip the bandaid over there, right? So multicloud, ground Cloud, our goal is to help customers, large enterprise customers manage that complexity. Then AI plays a big role because these are all very complex environments and our investment in AI, our AI being called Clare is to help them manage that as in an as automated way, as seamless a way and to be honest, the most important with them is, in the most governed way because that's where the biggest risk or risks come into play. That's when our investments are. >> Let's talk about customers for a second. I want to get your thoughts on this 'cause at Amazon reinvent last year in December, there was a meme going around that we starred on theCUBE called, "If you take the T out of Cloud native, it's Cloud naive," and so the point was is to say, hey, doing Cloud native makes sense in certain cases, but if you'd not really thinking about the overall hybrid and the architecture of what's going on, you kind of could get into a naive situation. So I asked Andy this and I want to ask you any chance and I want to ask you the same question is that, what would be naive for a customer to think about Cloud, so they can be Cloud native or operated in a Cloud, what are some of the things they should avoid so they don't fall into that naive category? Now you've being, hi, I am doing Cloud for Cloud's sake. I mean, so there's kind of this perception of you got to do Cloud right, what's your view on Cloud native and how does people avoid the Cloud naive label? >> It's a good question. I think to me when I talk to customers and hundreds of them across the globe as I meet them in a year, is to really think of their Cloud as a reference architecture for at least the next five years, if not 10. I mean technology changes think of a reference architecture for the next five years. In that, you've got to think of multiple best of breed technologies that can help you. I mean, you've got to think of best of breed as much as possible. Now, you're not going to go have hundreds of different technologies running around because you've got to scale them. But think as much as possible that you are best of breed yet settled to what I call a few platforms as much as possible and then make sure that you basically have the right connection points across different workloads will be optimal for different, let's say Cloud environments, analytical workload and operational workload, financial workload, each one of them will have something that will work best in somewhere else, right? So to me, putting the business focus on what the right business outcome is and working your way back to what Cloud environments are best suited for that and building that reference architecture thoughtfully with a five year goal in mind then jumping to the next most exciting thing, hot thing and trying to experiment your way through it that will not scale would be the right way to go. >> It's not naive to be focusing on the business problems and operating it in a Cloud architecture is specifically what you're saying. Okay so let's talk about the customer journey around AI because this has become a big one. You guys been on the AI wave for many, many years, but now that it's become full mainstream enterprise, how are the applications, software guys looking at this because if I'm an enterprise and I want to go Cloud native, I have to make my apps work. Apps are driving everything these days and you guys play a big role. Data is more important than ever for applicants. What's your view on the app developer DevOps market? >> So to me the big chains that we see, in fact we're going to talk a lot about that in a couple of months when we are at Informatica World, our user conference in May is how data is moving to the next phase. And it's what developers today are doing is that they are building the apps with data in mind first, data first apps. I mean if you're building, let's say a great customer service app, you've got to first figure out what all data do you need to service that customer before you go build an app. So that is a very fundamental shift that has happened. And in that context what happens is that in a Cloud native environment, obviously you have a lot of flexibility to begin with that bring data over there and DevOps is getting complimented by what we see is data Ops, having all kinds of data available for you to make those decisions as you're building an application and in that discussion you and me are having before is that, there is so much data that you would not be able to understand that investing in metadata so you can understand data about the data. I call metadata as the intelligent data. If you're an intelligent enterprise, you've got to invest in metadata. Those are the places where we see developers going first and from there ground up building what we call apps that are more intelligent apps on the future not just business process apps. >> Cloud native versus Cloud naive discussion we were just having it's interesting, you talk about best of breed. I want to get your thoughts on some trends we're seeing you seeing even in cybersecurity with RSA coming up, there's been consolidation. You saw Dell just sold RSA to a private equity company. So you starting to see a lot of these shiny new toy type companies being consolidated in because there's too much for companies to deal with. You're seeing also skills gaps, but also skill shortages. There's not enough people. >> That is true. >> So now you have multiple Clouds, you got Amazon, you got Azure, you got Google GCP, you got Oracle, IBM, VMware, now you have a shortage problem. >> True. So this is putting pressure on the customers. So with that in mind, how are the customers reacting to this and what is best of breed really mean? >> So that is actually a really good one. Look, we all live in Silicon Valley, so we get excited about the latest technology and we have the best of skills here, even though we have a skills problem over here, right? Think about as you move up here from Silicon Valley and you start flying and I fly all over the world and you start seeing that if you're in the middle of nowhere, that is not a whole lot of developers who understand the latest cutting edge technology that happens here. Our goal has been to solve that problem for our customers. Look, our goal is to help the developers but as much as possible provide the customers the ability to have a handful of skilled developers but they can still take our offerings and we abstract away that complexity so that they are dealing only at a higher level. The underlying technology comes and goes and it'll come and go a hundred times. They don't have to worry about that. So our goal is abstract of the underlying changes in technology, focus at the business logically and you could move, you can basically run your business for over the course of 20 years. And that's what we've done for customers. Customers have invested with us, have run their businesses seamlessly for two decades, three decades while so much technology has changed over a period of time. >> And the Cloud is right here scaling up. So I want to get your thoughts on the different Clouds, I'll say Amazon Web Services number one in the Cloud, hyperscaler we're talking pure Cloud, they've got more announcements, more capabilities. Then you've got Azure again, hyperscale trying to catch up to Amazon. More enterprise-focused, they're doing very, very well in the enterprise. I said on Twitter, they're mopping up the enterprise because it's easy, they have an install base there. They've been leveraging it very well. So I think Nadella has done the team, has done a great job with that. You had Google try to specialize and figure out where they're going to fit, Oracle, IBM and everyone else. As you'd have to deal with this, you're kind of an arms dealer in a way with data. >> I would love to say I dance with it, not an arms dealer. >> Not an arms dealer, that's a bad analogy, but you get my point. You have to play well, you have to. It's not like an aspiration, your requirement is you have to play and operate with value in all the Clouds. One, how is that going and what are the different Clouds like? >> Well, look, I always begin with the philosophy that it's customer first. You go where the customers are going and customers choose different technologies for different use cases as deems fit for them. Our job is to make sure our customers are successful. So we begin with the customer in mind and we solve from there. Number two, that's a big market. There is plenty of room for everybody to play. Of course there is competition across the board, but plenty of room for everybody to play and our job is to make sure that we assist all of them to help at the end of the day, our joint customers, we have great success stories with all of them. Again, within mind, the end customer. So that has always been Informatica's philosophy, customer first and we partner with a critical strategic partners in that context and we invest and we've invested with all of them, deep partnerships with all of them. They've all been at Informatica well you've seen them. So again, as I said and I think the easiest way we obviously believe that the subset of data, but keep the customer in mind all the time and everything follows from there. >> What is multicloud mean to your customers if your customer century house, we hear people say, yeah, I use this for that and I get that. When I talk to CIOs and CSOs where there's real dollars and impact on the business, there tends to be a gravitational pull towards one Cloud. Why do people are building their own stacks which is why in-house development is shifted to be very DevOps, Cloud native and then we'll have a secondary Cloud, but they recognize that they have multiple Clouds but they're not spreading their staff around for the reasons around skill shortage. Are you seeing that same trend and two, what do you see is multicloud? >> Well, it is multicloud. I think people sometimes don't realize they're already in a multicloud world. I mean you have so many SaaS applications running around, right? Look around that, so whether you have Workday, whether you have Salesforce and I can keep going on and on and on, right. There are multiple, similarly, multi platform Clouds are there, right? I mean people are using Azure for some use cases. They may want to go AWS for certain other native use cases. So quite naturally customers begin with something to begin with and then the scale from there. But they realize as we, as I talked to customers, I realize, hey look, I have use cases and they're optimally set for some things that are multicloud and they'll end up there, but they all have to begin somewhere before they go somewhere. >> So I have multipleclouds, which I agree with you by the way and talking about this on theCUBE a lot. There's multi multiple Clouds and then this interoperability among Clouds. I mean, remember multi-vendor back in the old days, multicloud, it kind of feels like a multi-vendor kind of value proposition. But if I have Salesforce or Workday and these different Clouds and Amazon where I'm developing or Azure, what is the multi-Cloud interoperability? Is it the data control plane? What problems are the customers facing and the challenge that they want to turn into opportunities around multicloud. >> See a good example, one of the biggest areas of growth for us is helping our customers transform their customer experience. Now if you think about an enterprise company that is thinking about having a great understanding of their customer. Now just think about the number of places that customer data sits. One of our big areas of investment for data is a CRM product called salesforce.com right? Good customer data sits there but there could be where ticketing data sits. There could be where marketing data sits. There could be some legacy applications. The customer data sits in so many places. More often than not we realize when we talked to a customer, it sits in at least 20 places within an enterprise and then there is so much customer data sitting outside of the firewalls of an enterprise. Clickstream data where people are social media data partner data. So in that context, bringing that data together becomes extremely important for you to have a full view of your customer and deliver a better customer experience from there. So it is the customer. >> Is that the problem? >> It's a huge problem right now. Huge problem right now across the board where our customer like, hey, I want to serve my customer better but I need to know my customer better before I can serve them better. So we are squarely in the middle of that helping and we being the Switzerland of data, being fully understanding the application layer and the platform layer, we can bring all that stuff together and through the lens of our customer 360 which is fueled by our master data management product, we allow customers to get to see that full view. And from there you can service them better, give them a next best offer or you can understand the full lifetime value for customer, so on and so forth. So that's how we see the world and that's how we help our customers in this really fragmented Cloud world. >> And that's your primary value proposition. >> A huge value proposition and again as I said, always think customer first. >> I mean you got your big event coming up this Spring, so looking forward to seeing you there. I want to get your take as now that you're looking at the next great chapter of Informatica, what is your vision? How do you see that 20 mile stare out in the marketplace? As you execute, again, your product oriented CEO 'cause your product shops, now you're leading the team. What's your vision? What's the 20 mile stare? >> Well as simple as possible, we're going to double the company. Our goal is to double the company across the board. We have a great foundation of innovation we've put together and we remain paranoid all the time as to where and we always try to look where the world is going, serve our customers and as long as we have great customer loyalty, which we have today, have the foundations of great innovation and a great team and culture at the company, which we fundamentally believe in, we basically right now have the vision of doubling the company. >> That's awesome. Well really appreciate you taking the time. One final question I want to get your thoughts on the Silicon Valley and in the industry, is starting to see Indian-American executives become CEO. You now see you have Informatica. Congratulations. >> Amit: Thank you. >> Arvind over at IBM, Satya Nadella. This has been a culture of the technology for generations 'cause I remember when I broke into the business in the late 80s, 90s, this is the pure love of tech and the meritocracy of technology is at play here. This is a historic moment and it's been written about, but I want to get your thoughts on how you see it evolving and advice for young entrepreneurs out there, future CEOs, what's it take to get there? What's it like? What's your personal thoughts? >> Well, first of all, it's been a humbling moment for me to lead Informatica. It's a great company and a great opportunity. I mean I can say it's the true American dream. I mean I came here in 1998. As a lot of the immigrants didn't have much in my pocket. I went to business school, I was deep in loans and I believed in the opportunity. And I think there is something very special about America. And I would say something really special about Silicon Valley where it's all about at the end of the day value, it's all about meritocracy. The color of your skin and your accent and your, those things don't really matter. And I think we are such an embracing culture typically over here. And, and my advice to anybody is that look, believe, and I genuinely used that word and I've gone through stages in my life where you sometimes doubt it, but you have to believe and stay honest on what you want and look, there is no substitute to hard work. Sometimes luck does play a role, but there is no substitute for hard work. And at the end of the day, good things happen. >> As we say, the for the love of the game, love of tech, your tech athlete, loved it, loved to interview and congratulate, been great to follow your career and get to know you and, and Informatica. It's great to see you at the helm. >> Thank you John, pleasure being here. >> I'm John Furrier here at CUBE conversation at Palo Alto, getting the update on the new CEO from Informatica, Amit Walia, a friend of theCUBE and of course a great tech athlete, and now running a great company. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

[Music] hello and welcome to this cube conversation here in Palo Alto California I'm John for your host of the cube we're here the very special guest I met while he is CEO of informatica newly appointed CEO about a month ago a little over a month ago had a product before that been with informatics in 2013 informatica went private in 2015 and has since been at the center of the digital transformation around data data transformation data privacy data everything around data and value in AI that made great to see you and congratulations on the new CEO role at informatica so thank you all it's good to be back here John it's been great to follow you and for the folks who don't know you you've been a very product centric CEO your products and CEO as they call it but also now you have a company in the middle of the transformation cloud scale is really mainstream enterprises look at multi cloud hybrid cloud this is something that you've been on for many many years we've talked about it so now that you're in charge you get the ship you get the wheel and you're in your hands were you taking it what is the update of informatica give us the update well thank you solook business couldn't be better I think to give you a little bit of color wavy coming from the last couple of years informatica went through a huge amount of transformation all things trying to transform our business model pivoting to subscription all things heavily bet into cloud the new workloads as we talked about and all things new like AI to give a little bit of color we basically exited it last year with a billion dollars of ARR not just revenue so we're a billion-dollar AR our company and as we pivot it to subscription as subscription business for the last couple of years has been growing north of 55 percent so that's the scale at which we are running multi-billion dollars and if you look at the other two metrics which we keep very click near and dear to hard one is innovation so we are participated in five magic quadrants and we are the leader in all five magic quadrants five one five as we like to call it Gartner Magic Quadrant very very critical to us because innovation in the tech is you know is very important also customer loyalty very important to us so we again were the number one in customer satisfaction continues to grow sore last IDC survey our market share continue to grow and be the number one in all our markets so business couldn't be at a better place where we are and what again some of the business discussed which first method on the Magic Quadrant front it's very difficult the folks that aren't in the club is to understand that to participate in multiple magic quadrants with many many do is hard because clouds horizontally scalable magic partners used to be old IT kind of categories but to be in multiple magic quadrants is the nature of the beast but to be a leader is very difficult because magic question doesn't truly capture that if you just appear play and then try to be cloud so you guys are truly that horizontal brand and and technology we've covered this on the cube so there's no secret but I want to get your comments on to be a leader and today in these quadrants you have to be on all the right waves you've got data warehouses are growing and changing at the rise of snowflake you guys partner with data bricks again machine learning and AI changing very rapidly and there's a huge growth wave behind it as well as the existing enterprises who were you know transforming you know analytics and operational workloads this is really really challenging can you just share your thoughts on why is it so hard what are the some of the key things behind these trends we can analytics I guess you can do if it's just analytics without great but this is a this horizontal data play is not easy can you share why no so yes first we are actually a I would say a very hidden secret we're the only software company and I'll say that again the only software company that was the leader in the traditional world traditional workloads legacy on-premise and via the leader in the cloud workloads not a single software company can say that they were the leader when they were started 27 years ago and there's still the leader in the magic quadrants today our cloud by the way runs at 10 trillion transactions a month scale and obviously we partner with all the hyper scalars across the board and our goal is to be the Switzerland of data for our customers and the question you ask is is a critical one when you think of he business drivers what a customer's trying to do one of them is all all things cloud all things the eye is obviously there but one is all data warehouses are going to cloud we just talked about that moving workloads to cloud whether it is analytical operational basically we have front and center helping customers do that second a big trend in the world of digital transformation is helping our customers customer experience and driving that fueling that is a master data management business so on and so products behind that but driving customer experiences big big driver of our growth and the third one is no large enterprise can live without data governance need a privacy man this is a thing today right you got to make sure that you deliver good governance whether it's compliance oriented or brand oriented privacy and risk management and all three of them basically span the business initiatives that feature into those five magic quadrants our goal is to play across all of them and that's what we do Pat Cal senior had a quote on the cube many years ago he said if you're not on the right wave you could be driftwood its meaning you're gonna get crashed oh sorry well a lot of people have we've seen a lot of companies have a good skill and then get washed away if you will by a wave you're seeing like AI and machine learning we talked a little bit about that you guys are in there I want to get your thoughts on this one is there whenever this executive changes there's always questions around you know what's happening with the company so I want you to talk about the state of informatica because you're now the CEO there's been some changes has there been a pivot has there been a sharpening focus what's going on with informatica so I think I'm cool right now is to scale and hyper scale that's the word I mean we're in a very strong position in fact we use this phrase internally within the company next phase of great we're at a great place and we are chartering the next phase of great for the company and the cool there is helping our customers I talked about these three big big initiatives that companies are investing in data warehousing and analytics going to the cloud transforming customer experiences and data governance and privacy and the fourth one that underpins all of them is all things a I mean as we've talked about before right all of these things are complex hard to do look at the volume and complexity of data and what we're investing in is what we call native ai ai needs data data needs AI as I always said right and we are investing in AI to make these things easy for our customers to make sure that they can scale and grow into the future and what we've also been very diligent about this partnering we partnered very well with the hyper scalars like whether it's AWS Microsoft whether it's GCP snowflake great partner of ours data brick skate part of ours tableau great partner of ours we have a variety of these partners and our cool is always customer first customers are investing in these technologies our goal is to help customers adopt these technologies not for the sake of technologies but for the sake of transforming those three business initiatives I thought you brought up I was gonna ask you the next question but snowflake and data versus data Brooks has been on the cube Holly a great that's a good friend of ours and he's got chops you Stan I'm not Stanford Berkeley he'll kill me with that if it's ow he's but beta Brooks is doing well they made some good bets and it's paying off of them snowflake a rising star Frank's Lubin's over there now they are clearly a choice for modern data warehouses as is any of us redshift how are you working with snowflake how do you take advantage of that can you just unpack your relationship with snowflake it's a it's a very deep partnership our goal is to help our customers you know as they pick these technology choices for data warehousing an example where snowflake comes into play to make sure that the underlying data infrastructure can work seamlessly for them see customers build this complex logic sitting in the old technologies as they move to anything new they want to make sure that that transition migration is seamless as seamless as it can be and typically they'll start something new before they retire something old with us they can carry all of that business logic for the last 27 years their business logic seamlessly and run natively in this case in the cloud so basically we allow them this whole from tool and also the ability to have the best of breed technology in the context of data management to power up these new infrastructures where they are going let me ask you the question around the industry trends what are the top and trends industry trends that are driving your business and your product direction and customer value look digital transformation has been a big trend and digital transformation has fueled all things like customer experiences being transformed so that remains a big vector of growth I would say cloud adoption is still relatively literally inning so no you love these balls we can still say what second third inning as much as we would like to believe cloud has been their customers mode with their analytical workloads first still happening the operational workloads are still in its very very infancy so that is still a big vector of growth and and a big trend that we see for the next five plus years and you guys in the middle of that oh absolutely yeah absolutely because if you're running a large operational workload it's all about the data at the end of the day because you can change the app but it's the data that you want to carry the logic that you've written that you want to carry and we participate in that I have ashes before but I want to ask you again because I want to get the modern update because pure cloud born in the cloud like you know startups and whatever it's easy to say that do that everyone knows that hybrid is clear now everyone that sees that as an architectural thing Multi cloud is kind of a state of I have multiple clouds but being true multi-cloud a little bit different maybe downstream conversation but certainly relevant so as cloud evolves from public cloud hybrid and maybe multi or certainly multi how do you see those things evolving for informatica well we believe in the word hybrid and I define hybrid exactly as these two things one is hybrid is multi cloud you can have hybrid clouds second is hybrid means you're gonna have ground and cloud interoperate for a period of time so to us we sit in the center of this hybrid cloud trend and our goal is to help customers go cloud native but make sure that they can run whatever was the old business that they were running as much possible in the most seamlessly before they can at some point cut over and which is why as I said I've been our cloud native business a cloud platform which we call informatica intelligent cloud services runs at scale globally across the globe by the way on all hyper scalars at ten plus trillion transactions a month but yet we will allowed customers to run their own Prem technologies as much as they can because they cannot just rip the band-aid over there right so multi cloud ground cloud our goal is to help customers large enterprise customers manage that complexity their AI plays a big role because these are all very complex environments and our investment in AI our REI being called Claire is to help them manage that as in an as automated way as seen this away and to be honest the most important thing for them is in the most governed way because that's where the biggest risk risks come into play that's where our investments let's say what customers per second I want to get your thoughts on this because at Amazon reinvent last year in December it was a meme going around on the queue that we that we start on the cube called if you think the tea out of cloud native it's cloud naive and so the the the point was is to say hey doing cloud native makes sense in certain cases but if you're not really thinking about the overall hybrid and the architecture of what's going on you kind of could get into a night naive situation so I asked any of this and I want to ask you any chat so I'll ask you the same question is that what would be naive for a customer to think about cloud so they can be cloud native or operate in a cloud what are some of the things they should avoid so they don't fall into that naive category now you've been you know I hey I'm doing cloud yeah for clouds sake I mean so there's kind of this perception have you got to do cloud right mm-hmm what's your view on cloud native and how does people avoid the cloud naive label it's it's a good question I think to me when I talk to customers and hundreds of them across the globe is I meet them in a year is to really think of their cloud as a reference architecture for at least the next five years if not I'm a technology changes think of a reference architecture for the next five years and in that you got to think of multiple best-of-breed technologies that can help you I mean you got to think best-of-breed as much as possible now you're not going to go have hundreds of different technologies running around because you got to scale them but think as much as possible that you are Best of Breed yet settled to what I call a few platforms as much as possible and then make sure that you basically have the right connection points across different workloads will be optimal for different let's say cloud environments analytical workload and operation workload a financial workload each one of them will have something that will work best in somewhere else right so to me putting the business focus on what the right business outcome is and working you will be back to what cloud environments are best suited for that and building that reference architecture thoughtfully with a five-year goal in mind then jumping to the next most exciting thing hot thing and try to experiment your way through it that will not scale would be the right way to go yeah it's not naive to be focusing on the business problems and operating it in a cloud architecture this is what you're saying okay so let's talk about like the customer journey around AI because this has become a big one you guys been on the AI way for many many years but now that it's become full mainstream enterprise how are the applications software guys looking at this because if I'm an enterprise and I want to go cloud native app to make my apps work yes apps are driving everything these days and you guys play a big role data is more important than ever for applicants what's your view on the app developer DevOps market so to me the big chains of VC in fact we're gonna talk a lot about that in a couple of months when we are at informatica world our user conference in May is how data is moving to the next phase and it's what developers today are doing is that they are building the apps with data in mind first data first apps I mean if you're building let's see a great customer service app you gotta first figure out what all data do you need to service a customer before you go build an app so that is a very fundamental shift that has happened and and in that context what happens is that in a cloud native environment obviously you have a lot of flexibility to begin with that bring data over there and DevOps is getting complemented by what we see is data ops having all kinds of data available for you to make those decisions as you build an application and in that discussion you're near having before is that there is so much data that you will not be able to understand that investing in metadata so you can understand data about the data I called metadata as the intelligent data if you're an intelligent enterprise you gotta invest in metadata those are the places where we see developers going first and from their ground up building what we call apps that are more intelligent apps of the future not just business process apps cloud native versus cloud naive connotation we were just having is interesting you talk about Best of Breed I want to get your thoughts on some trends we're seeing seeing even in cybersecurity with RSA coming up there's been consolidation you saw our Dell Jesolo RSA 2 private equity company so you starting to see a lot of these shiny new toy type companies being consolidated in because there's too much for companies to deal with you're seeing also skills gaps but also skills shortages there's not enough people oh now you have multiple clouds you got Amazon you got Azure you got Google GCP you've got Oracle IBM VMware now you have a shortage problem true so this is putting pressure on the customers so with that in mind how are the customers reacting to this and what is best to breed really mean so that is actually a very good point look we all live in Silicon Valley so we get excited about the latest technology and we have the best of skills here even though we have a skills problem over here right think about as you move away from Silicon Valley and you start flying and I fly all over the world and you start seeing that if you're in the middle of nowhere there is not a whole lot of developers who understand the latest cutting-edge technology that happens here our goal has been to solve that problem for our customers look our goal is to help the developers but as much as possible provide the customers the ability to have a handful of skilled developers but they can still take our offerings and we abstract away that complexity so that they are dealing only at a higher level the underlying technology comes and goes and you know it will come and go 100 times they don't have to worry about that so our goal is abstract away the underlying changes in technology focus at the business logic layer and you can move you can basically run your business for over the course of 20 years and that's what we've done for customers customers were invested with us have run their businesses seamlessly for two decades three decades while so much technology has changed with a period of time and the cloud is right here scaling up so I want to get your thoughts on the different clouds I see Amazon Web Services number one the cloud hyper scalar we're talking pure cloud that gets more announcements more capabilities then you got a sure again hyper scale trying to catch up to Amazon more Enterprise focused are doing very very well on the enterprise I was I said on Twitter they're mopping up the enterprise because it's easy to have an install base there they've been leveraging your very well stuff in atella has done team done a great job that you got Google trying to specialize and figure out where they're gonna fit Oracle IBM everyone else as you'd have to deal with this you're kind of an arms dealer in a way with data I would love to say no hands but not absolute I'm dealing that's the bad analogy but you get my point you have to play well you have to it's not like an aspiration show your requirements you have to play and operate with value in all the clouds one how is that going and what are the different clouds like well I always begin with the philosophy that its customer first you go with the customers a queen and customers choose different technologies for different use cases as deems fit for them our job is to make sure our customers are successful so we begin with the customer in mind and we solve from there number two that's a big market there is plenty of room for everybody to play of course there is competition across the board but plenty of room for everybody to play and our job is to make sure that we assist all of them to help at the end of the day our joint customers we have great success stories with all of them again you get in mind the end customer so that has always been informatic as philosophy customer first and we partner with a critical strategic partners in that context and and we invest and we've invested with all of them deep partnerships of all of them they've all been at informatica well you've seen them so again as I said and I think the easiest way we obviously believe they do this incident of data but keep the customer in mind all the time and everything follows from there what is multi-cloud me to your customers if your customer centric obviously we hear people say yeah I use this for that and I get that when I talk to CIOs and see says with his real dollars and interact on the business there tends to be a gravitational pull towards one cloud a lot of people are building their own stacks in house development has shifted to be very DevOps I'm cloud native and then I'll have a secondary cloud but they recognize that they have multiple clouds but they're not spreading their staff around for the reasons around skill shortage yeah are you seeing that same trend and to what do you see is multi cloud well it is 1d cloud I think I think people sometimes don't realize they're already in a multi cloud world I mean you have so many SAS applications running around right look around that so whether you have work day with your salesforce.com and I can keep going on and on and on right there are multiple similarly multi platform clouds are there right I mean people are using hash or for some use case they may want to go a dime us for certain other negative use cases so quite naturally customers begin with something to begin with and then the scale from there but they realize as we as I talk to customers I realize hey look I have use cases and they're optimally set for some things that are multi-cloud and they'll end up there but they all have to begin somewhere before they go somewhere so I have multiple clouds which I agree with you by the way and talking about this one cube a lot there's multi multiple clouds and then this interoperability among clouds I mean remember multi-vendor back in the old days multi-cloud it kind of feels like a multi vendor kind of value proposition but if I have Salesforce or workday in these different clouds in Amazon where I'm developing or Azure what is the multi cloud interoperability is it the data control plane what problems are the customers facing and the challenge that they want to turn into opportunities do a good example multi-cloud see a good example one of the biggest areas of growth for us is helping a customers transform the customer experience now if you think about an enterprise company that is thinking about having a great understanding of their customer now just think about the number of places that customer data sets one of the one of the big areas of investment viability the CRM product called salesforce.com right good customer data sits there but there could be where ticketing data sets there could be where marketing data sits there could be some legacy applications the customer data sits in so many places more often than not we realize when we talk to a customer it sits in at least 20 places within an enterprise and then there is so much customer data sitting outside of the firewalls of an enterprise right clickstream data where people had parts or shared a partner data so in that context bringing that data together becomes extremely important for you to have a full view of your customer and deliver a better customer experience from there so it is the cost the customers have the problem it's a huge problem right now huge problem right now across the board where cup a per customer like hey I want to serve my customer better but I need to know my customer better before I can serve them better so we are squarely in the middle of that helping and B being the Switzerland of data being fully understanding the application layer and the platform layer we can bring all that stuff and through the lens of our customer 360 which is fueled by our master data management product we allow customers to get to see that full view and from there you can service them better give them a next best offer or you can understand their lives either full lifetime value for customer so on and so forth so that's how we see the world and that's how we help our customers in this really fragmented cloud world that's your primary value proposition it's a huge value proposition and again as I said always think customer first I met you got your big event coming up this spring so looking forward to seeing you there I want to get your take as now that you're looking at the next great chapter of informatica what is your vision how do you see that twenty miles stare out in the marketplace as you execute again your product oriented CEO because your product chops now you're leading the team what's your vision what's the 20 mile stair well as simple as possible we're gonna double the company our goal is to double the company across the board we have a great foundation of innovation we put together and we remain paranoid all the time as to where and we always start to look where the world is going serve our customers and as long as we have great customer loyalty which we have today have the foundations of great innovation and a great team and culture at the company which we fundamentally believe in we basically right now have the vision of doubling the company that's awesome well really appreciate you taking the time one final question I want to get your thoughts on you know it's looking valley and in the industry starting to see Indian American executives become CEOs you now see you have informatica congratulations Arvind over at IBM sathi natella this has been a culture of the technology for generations I remember when I broken the business in the late 80s 90s this is the pure love of tech and the and the meritocracy of Technology is at play here this is a historic moment it's been written about but I want to get your thoughts on how you see it evolving and advice for young entrepreneurs out there future CEOs what's it take to get there what's it like what's your personal thoughts well first of all it's been a humbling moment for me to lead in from it's a great company and a great opportunity I mean I can say like it's the true Americans dream I mean I came here in 1998 I mean as a lot of immigrants Ted didn't have much in my pocket I went to business school I was deep in loans and and I believed in the opportunity and I think there is something very special about America and I would say something really special about Silicon Valley where it's all about at the end of the day value it's all about meritocracy the color of your skin and your accent and your those things don't really matter and I think we're such an embracing culture typically over here and my advice to anybody is that look believe and I genuinely use that word and I've gone through stages in my life where you sometimes doubt it but you have to believe and stay honest what you want and look there is no substitute to hard work sometimes luck does play a role but there is no substitute artwork and at the end of the day good things happen as we say that for the love of the game love attack your tech athlete love to love to interview and congratulate been great to follow your career get to know you and informatica it's great to see you at the helm thank you John pleasure being here I'm John 4 here is cube conversation in Palo Alto getting the update on the new CEO from informatics at MIT Walia friend of the cube and of course a great tech athlete and now running the great company I'm John forever here thanks for watching [Music] you [Music]

(upbeat music) >> Hello, and welcome to our Palo Alto studios in California. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. This is a CUBE conversation with Jason Zintak, CEO of 6sense. This is part of our next gen conversation series. We talk about the technologies and the news and the people making it happen for the next generation technologies, clouds, and solutions. Jason, welcome to theCUBE conversation. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks, happy to be here. >> So you guys got some news. So you got a couple weeks ago you announced $40 million in funding, which we'll talk about. I want to get that out right away. But I think, more importantly, we're seeing a trend where this next gen blank is happening. You know, I'm watching just the Super Bowl next gen stats is for NFL. You got next gen cloud, you got next gen data. The world of the technology is kind of shifting to a new architecture. You're starting to see visibility into what this next gen looks like. Your company is squarely in the middle of this next gen sales and marketing platform, solutions in the new model. Cloud-scale, data first, this is a core, major shift and it's a huge market. Look at Salesforce, look at all these companies that've been around. And they're incumbents now, you're the new guard. >> Jason: Yeah, yeah. >> Tell us, what's going on with you guys? >> Sure, well you're right. We just raised $40 million. It's our Series C from Insight Partners. Went through a lengthy evaluation process and compete and happy to have announce that last month. And as far as next generation, you're correct. I grew up in a world of email platforms and then big data platforms, marketing automation. And this is a data first strategy, where we allow, we now have compute power that allows us to process huge amounts of data sets. So it's our belief that it should all be data first and driven from AI and ML on top of data that drives a next generation marketing tactic or sales tactic, an email, or a display ad. >> What's interesting is that you mentioned you worked in previous old school technology. You were CEO of Responsys, which was sold to Oracle. That was a great wave that brought in the marketing technology stack. We saw the sales and marketing solutions from Salesforce.com obviously. That was the first wave that you were part of. Now the new wave is going to that next level. This is really the fundamental shift. And it's not so much they're being replaced, but they're just being abstracted away with new capabilities, in some cases being replaced. What's the core problem that customers are having, or the core problem that you're solving because some of these old solutions can't scale. >> Jason: Sure. >> Some of them are because they're big, but what's the core problem in the industry? >> The core problem is that these systems were designed to be contact first, or lead first. And as you know today, no one likes an abundance of emails in their inbox. And so companies have said, hey I want to have a relationship with my customer or prospect. I want it to be a cycle of engagement, an infinity loop. Which means we don't blast emails. We monitor a relationship, what that's like, how we might engage. And the data allows us to do that. We can see what's going on with the activity, and based on that engagement, AI tells us what tactic might be the most appropriate. Which is actually send less but more effective and more targeted. So it's a data-driven approach. It's an account based focus in B2B world, as opposed to old generation which is lead and actually rule based. And so we used to write these, call them journey maps, these if then statements, which were manual. And the second we got done doing weeks of if then statements, they become stale. And so now data helps us and AI helps us understand real time behavior with intent and then the tactic. >> Love the name 6sense. Obviously you want to get a sense of what's going on around you, six degrees of separation. You got network effect. We're seeing a new reality and that is organic kind of user experience is different happening outside the funnel, sometimes inside the funnel, as they talk about in the sales and marketing. But users, at the end of the day, they're downloading Brave browser. They don't necessarily want the ads, and so they're making these decisions based on their experience that they want. So this is changing some of the tactics. >> Jason: Absolutely. >> So talk about that dynamic because the old way was based on see an ad, click on it, go to a landing page, get a lead, throw it in the funnel, matriculate down, and sell them something. And time's not on your side. It's not real time. It's slow, antiquated, you know how to quit. >> Exactly right, so if you don't look at Forrester or Gartner, they'll give you stats that 80% of the B2B sales cycle is done anonymously today. Meaning, they don't want to contact the vendor. There's an abundance of data on the web. And so we appreciate that. We want to actually enable an engagement through learning. We call it the actual dark funnel. This is all the research where it's happening without the vendor being contacted, without someone raising their hand and saying I want a vendor message. Because of this activity that we're able to see and be patient with, we're allowed to engage when the prospect or customer says they want to. But in a nurture format, so it's more respectful of their time. And all the while, this engagement idea is we're giving them content when they want it, when it's on demand, and when it's appropriate. >> And there's all kinds of new data laws coming, so you got to navigate that kind of regulatory environment. But we've been saying on theCUBE, this is our 10th year, and you know the old way and now we got a new way that you're on with company is that people are connected. Everything can be instrumented. This is the big data revelation that started about 10 years ago when the big data movement, and when people said hey data's going to be a big part of it. But with the internet, everyone's kind of connected, so you can technically measure everything. So as a company, how do you look at data? I mean data's fundamental to your vision and your execution. How is that ingrained into the culture and your product? >> Good question and first like to say we respect privacy in the data and personal and companies. So we are GDPR compliant, SOC 2, CCPA, the new California laws as you know. And that is part and parcel to our strategy, respect it. But at the same time, today's consumers generally want to be known in some way, shape or form because they understand the experience of engagement, whether it's an account or an individual customer. The experience is that much richer, if it's personalized and done with taste. Meaning, it's not spam. It's not a thousand emails. It's a meaningful, purposeful, time-based engagement,' content's relative to when they want to know something. >> Well I like what you guys are doing. I like this next gen architecture. It's definitely been valid. You've seen the rise of Amazon. Microsoft's shifted their business model to the cloud. And you're starting to see other ones, other people shifting. IBM shifting to the cloud. So they're all shifting to this new business model. So for you guys, 6sense, talk about and tell me about your target market. What market are you going after? Is it the marketing automation? Is it like the sales platform? What's the market that you're in now, and what market are you expanding into? >> Interesting you say that, so we're classically B2B. We obviously have a bunch of tech customers as our, in the account universe. But also manufacturers, service businesses. We are going after the entire B2B organization because the world as you know it, relative to marketing and sales, is changing. And so it's not just marketing automation that we're replacing, or a next generation of, it's customer success. It's the sellers. Our customers' sales organizations use it with their sales people to understand insights of their accounts and how to engage. So I'd say it's that whole universe, and it's that infinity loop across customer, sellers, marketers. >> You know, I want to just before I get into some of the business model questions and target audience, the buyer, you mentioned customer success. We're seeing a lot of energy around what that is. It used to be customer success was like customer satisfaction, support organization. You're seeing companies bring customer success much further forward into the sales and marketing process for pre-sales and or ongoing engagement as some of these SaaS environments evolve. >> Jason: Yep. >> Are you seeing that, and what's going on with this customer success? I'm seeing a lot more other than lip service. It's pretty integral with companies, organizations these days. What's your thoughts on that? >> I think all of us drive to be customer first, customer happiness, loyalty. Sure, why not? I mean, that's what we should do as organizations. Our software actually, interestingly enough, allows customers to monitor how their customers are engaging with the vendor. And for instance, they may be, if we see a spike in looking at a competitor, the customer will say, hey are you happy? Or product telemetry and usage. We help companies track that usage and see spikes and based on that intent, you might engage with your customer differently, high or low propensity to actually churn. We help with churn mitigation and churn management. >> Okay, let's get in to the product. We're kind of teasing around the product. What is the product? What's the core jewel? What's the IP? What's the main platform look like? What's the product? >> So as mentioned, we're a big data company first. Meaning, we believe it all starts with the data. Because of the compute power available, we're analyzing data, which is your first party data. So all your historical sales and marketing outbound, maybe your CRM system, your marketing automation system, some of the systems that will continue to evolve. And we'll match that data with behavioral data. So what's happening on the web, what's happening through maybe it's cookies, email hashes, display account ID, advertising ID. And we've patented an approach called a company ID graph. And this ID graph is essentially this marriage of people, personas, and accounts and what's going on. Based on the insight that comes from this monitoring, you can create audiences or segments to market to, to sell to. So the insights would be on the marketing side, relative to how do I parse my total addressable market. Or on the seller's side, Oh, I can understand what my count or my prospect might be doing today, therefore I want to execute XYZ tactic, and all led by AI. >> And so I got a, good point there about sales and marketing. In the old way you had a marketing tech, and a sales tech. The lines have blurred, almost seem to be fully integrated now, they're one in the same now, seems like that's the way you guys look at it. Is that true? >> Absolutely, I grew up in sales and marketing and the old world they didn't talk to each other. Today this is absolutely the glue, the connective tissue for sales and marketing so you can start with, whether it's marketing or sales ops, you start with a central plan around your account universe, and then parse from there and segment from there. And so, marketers and sellers will come up with the annual strategy, but allows the conversation. So it's no longer is my lead any good. We've got data around the lead, is the customer responding to an ad campaign. We've got data that it's true. It's not, you know, maybe. >> Yeah, it's always the sales guys always tripping about the leads, these are good leads. The leads are from Glen Gary, Glen Ross, always great quote, good quote that in there. All kidding aside, at the end of the day it's about customer satisfaction. No one wants to be marketed to, so it's a wave of personalization coming. And we're starting to see that now with Big Data, kind of set the tone on that. How are you seeing this new account based marketing and company selling platform. To deliver this kind of personalization it adds value. How do you orchestrate all that? So this is the big challenge, how do you bring that all together? What's your thoughts? >> So, actually our platform allows for that. So as you might imagine, you mentioned the sales funnel, and start with you know customer having initial curiosity, or maybe down at the bottom of the funnel there, actual buying stages through procurement. Based on where we detect someone is in the funnel, you would personalize the content. So if we detect through ID graph, that the company or person might be interested in general awareness, awareness content. If they're down in the buying cycle, far down into the funnel, then it's more related to transactional, meaningful clips that would be more relevant. And that is the personalization, so it's stage appropriate as someone would want to consume it. As there engaging with us. >> Jason give us some of the top use cases that you guys are seeing, as you start to see visibility, you got $40 million in funding, third round venture. You got customer growth, good growth. What's the visibility, what do you see in front of you, what are the use cases? >> Great, so for the capital, I assume you mean. We've had two great years, we've doubled the company two years in a row. We're expanding, so it's actually going to be sort of broad brush, we're expanding our field organization, we're expanding the engineering. We're looking for acquisitions that are strategic, and so our growth will be both organic and inorganic, but it's because of the success and the growth. We want to build the product better to make the customer happier. And that is the general use, of our international expansion. >> So I'm a customer, sell me on this, what's the pitch? >> So-- >> I'm a big tech company, I've got five tons of data. People, internal knife fights going on, I got this platform, we got to get the ROI out of it. How do you, what's the, what's in it for me, pitch me? >> Hey, John is your sales organization happy with the leads? Do they think it's quality? >> The leads are shit. (John laughs) >> The leads are shit, we can help you there, we actually have you know AI helping us understand your account prospects of whose high propensity to buy. We help your sellers. Does marketing talk to sales, John? >> They have meetings, no one want to attend them, I mean this is the kind of thing that goes on. I mean we're talking about, kind of role playing here, but in real time, Hey, no, we're good. It's the sales guys fault, they're not good enough. >> Yeah, exactly, so-- >> The leads are terrible. So there's obviously, again, this is the kind of thing, the tension that goes on. >> Yes, so from the marketers perspective they're looking for a more data driven approach to, and again data helps, data doesn't lie. You know it's sort of math. And so it's no longer speculative, it's we can see the engagement if we run a campaign, whether it be email, ads, social posts, chat bots. All this is collecting data, and showing data relative to efficacy, and that is actually what the marketer wants, and candidly the CEO wants to the see the result of those joint selling and marketing efforts. >> All right, so you got me hooked. Let's do something. How do your clients engage with you? What do they do? A POC? Do they just have a sandbox, is there kind of a freemium tier? can you explain some of the business model and engagement? >> Sure, yeah. We do POC's, we do sandbox. But interestingly enough, we can turn the data on in an hour, an actually a prospect can see what's happening in their universe, they're competitive universe or their own. website, for instance. And so that's a very easy way, tell-tale sign to see data at work. We have low entry points, where companies can come in at 30K at 20K, and start. Or we have million dollar plus contracts that you know span the breadth of sales, marketing and customer success. So it's an easy entry point, you can grow with data, you can grow with users, or you can grow with models. >> So Facebook, and LinkedIn are on, and Twitter, but mainly Facebook and LinkedIn are showing micro targeting as highly valuable. I mean the election train wreck that's happened this past few years, and even this year, I see Facebook has their own issues, but LinkedIn, a lot of people from a B2B standpoint, like LinkedIn. It's network effect kind of distribution, you got targeting, you got a lot of metadata in there. So it's kind of brought up the conversation around micro-targeting. Why can't you just go at the people? You guys do an account based marketing and sales orchestration platform, and you've got these little walled garden organizations out there like LinkedIn. I'm not sure they're selling the data, do they do that? Do you work with LinkedIn, so will there be more LinkedIn? Nope, we got our data, we're going to keep it? Data becomes the key, but if they're going to hoard the data, it's a problem. How do you address that? First of all, do they hoard the data or not? And if so, how do you guys get around that? >> Well you know LinkedIn's got a wonderful business, and they, to agree some of this wall, are a partner of ours, and actually we'll have some announcements pending. So I'll save that for later, but -- >> So they are engaging with platforms, LinkedIn from a data standpoint. >> Very much so, we're an active talks with LinkedIn. And I think we all want to share for the benefit of the ultimate customer experience. And we believe that because we have the Big Data, and we also allow for that micro-segmenting. LinkedIn's another channel, and we want to activate every channel through our platform and that is our strategy. So we allow you as mentioned before, email, display, social sites. >> Do you guys have a program or approach or posture to the marketplace in terms of, if I have a platform, do I engage with you. Can I be a partner or am I a customer? How do you look at the biz dev or partner side of it? >> You know part of the $40 million funding is going to allow us to build out the partner ecosystem that's already in play. We work with agencies, ad agencies. We work with professional service organizations. We work with complimentary software products. We want it to be an open system. We want to be able to bring your own data, and we'll carry it for you to make the AI that much smarter. >> Awesome, great stuff, quick plug of the company, we're you guys at in terms of head count? What are some of your goals this year? And what are you guys looking for, obviously hiring, you said, you mentioned earlier? Give a quick plug for the company. >> Yeah, thank you for that. As I mentioned we doubled the company two years in a row. We've tripled our head count. You know we're hiring everyday in every single segment, looking for people. We'd love to talk to you. We've also tripled our customer base in that same period. So, things are going well, we're happy and I think the big challenge is just keep doing it, and deliver delightful experience for customers. >> Interesting, companies can be very successful Jason if they have a certain you know view. You guys are data first, you got to a horizontal view of the data, but yet providing a specific unique solution to differentiate off that. We're video first, that's our angle. A lot of people having virtual first. Your starting to see this new kind of scale with companies. So I want to ask you about your vision for the next few years. As you look out as the wave is coming in, it's very clear. Cloud-scale, the roll of data, machine learning and AI. It's going to build this Application Layer that has to be horizontally scalable, but yet vertically specialized, for the use cases. Which requires a very dynamic data intensive environment. What's your vision of the next few years? How do you see the world evolving? Because there's a lot of big companies, and start-ups that have been around doing a lot of these point solutions that are features. How do you see this next wave go in the next five years? >> I had a thesis three years ago, I joined the company that these point solutions would go away because they weren't data driven. The hard work is in the large data, the applying the ML and AI on top of that and then doing something with that. We surfaced in applications for the last two years, we've been building the apps that allow marketers, sellers, and customer success organizations to prosecute that data, understand the data and let AI recommend a tactic. So I think it'll just be more of the same but specialized by use case. So where some of our applicability is generic use cases, we'll get specific to telecom on that use case, we'll get more specific in customer success enabling turn mitigation as opposed to just sellers and marketers. >> That's awesome. And if you look at the current events, I got to get your expert opinion. Donald Trump, the Democrats, they've been using social platforms, political ads are being kicked off, but there is a lot more innovation that they're actually doing. So with all that they had actors out there, there's actually an innovation story that's going on under the covers. What's your view of that, I mean the bad stuff's out there, but they're leveraging the new architecture. Facebook's on record saying that Donald Trump ran the best campaign ever. Mentions why he's winning. >> That's the story and back story is sort of history unfolds when we understand it. Is that these election cycles have leveraged data to run their campaigns and it's the new world. And so while there may be bad actors, I think hopefully the world is majority good. And much like our story, we tryna bring a data solution and help decisioning. Obviously, the political campaigns are leveraging it to. >> Yeah, it's disastrous to see the applications fail like they did in Iowa, but the data's there, I mean it's about time. I always say it's going to be on block chain, and Andrew Yang is, just recently came out and said, All the voting should be on block chain. Maybe that's going to happen someday, we'll see. Jason thanks for coming, I appreciate the conversation. >> I appreciate the opportunity, thanks John. >> Jason Zintak, here the CEO of 6sense, industry veteran. Big pedigree, big company with $40 million in fresh funding. We're talking about next generation platforms, I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)