>> The Cube on cloud continues. We're here with Ana Pinczuk, who's the chief development officer at Anaplan, and we've been unpacking the future of cloud. We've heard from a number of CIOs how they're thinking about cloud in the coming decade. And first of all, Ana, welcome back to the Cube. Thanks for participating. It's great to see you again >> It's great to see you, Dave, and I'm so excited to be here with you again. So hopefully, we'll be doing this soon. >> I hope in 2021, we'll be able to be face-to-face >> Face-to-face, I know. >> and everybody out there, we miss you all. >> I know, I know. >> Now, Ana, in a lot of respects, you think about the CIO role, something that you're intimately familiar with, and it's unique, because she or he has a very wide observation space across the company. Whereas a GM or a business line manager, they're most concerned with their respective business, the CIO, they got to worry about the whole enchilada. And we've heard a lot in this program about digital transformation. We've heard a lot, of course, in the past couple of years. A lot of it was lip service, but digital transformation is no longer optional. What's changed, in your view, in the way that businesses are going about it? >> You know, Dave, from my perspective, it's interesting, and this year, in particular, has been really telling for us. So I think, before, many companies were thinking about, hey, I want to be online, I want to grow my revenues with digital, I want to have a presence. But what's happened, actually, this year, with COVID in particular, is that it's gone from being a good to have to really a fundamental necessity, we must have it. And so when I talk to CIOs today, they're really thinking about different kinds of things than before, not just going digital, but how do I enable my people to work remotely? I've got to enable that. How do I bring the agility and the flexibility that I need in our business, especially with these new ways of working? How do I look at business resiliency, not just from something happens and then how do I recover from it, but also how do I help our company and our people then actually spring forward and grow from where we are? So it's gone from a topic that was happening at the CIO, maybe at the business level, but now it's really also a fundamental CEO and board conversation, and so now we're seeing the CIOs having to present to boards what is our digital transformation, our digital strategy. >> So I wonder what you've seen in that regard. I'm interested in what role cloud plays in supporting those digital initiatives, but more specifically, cloud migration came off the charts in terms of interest 'cause of COVID, but you had those that were deep into cloud, had a lot of experience, and those maybe not as much. Are you seeing any kind of schism in the marketplace, where there's maybe a great advantage to those who really had years of experience, and maybe disadvantages to those who didn't, or is there an equilibrium you're seeing in the marketplace? How do you see that playing out? >> Yeah, what I'm seeing is that, I think there used to be a spectrum of CIOs, in effect, the ones that were a little bit forward, ahead on the cloud, both on cloud infrastructure as well as SaaS, and what are the services that we have, and then there were some that were really trying to think about what's the security implications of the cloud, and is it more expensive? So there was this spectrum of CIOs. And I think now what's happened is there's such a business imperative that I think CIOs are saying, "Look, I'm either going to survive in this new world with the agility and the flexibility that I need." And so cloud, I'm seeing a lot of CIOs really saying okay, cloud is not just fashionable, but it's in, and a necessity, and we must do it. And I think, frankly, the CIOs that don't embrace the cloud and that level of agility are going to struggle. It's really a personal imperative for a CIO, in addition to for the company. >> So a lot of times, we talk about the the three dimensions of people, process, and technology, and I'm interested in your thoughts on how cloud has affected those traditional structures and the value chains. You've got some people are really good at tech, some people are really good at people, some people are really good at process. Has the cloud affected that? Has it upended it, changed it in any way? >> Yeah, let's unpack that a little bit, Dave, 'cause if you think about process, one of the interesting things about the cloud is that- and if you think about the cloud as going all the way from IaaS, or infrastructure, all the way up this stack to actually providing business processes embedded in a SaaS service, then from a process perspective, and for CIOs, it's really upended how they think about business process re-engineering in their companies. If I think, even five years ago, where you would have a whole organization that's focused on business process re-engineering, you do that, it takes a long time, you get a consultant, maybe, to help you, and then you work through that process. If you look at a SaaS service like Anaplan today, where we- Our goal is, for example, to orchestrate business performance. We are a SaaS business planning platform. We've incorporated into our platform that business process, so the role of the CIO relative to business process, in effect, changes. Now it's about how to leverage a cloud infrastructure, and then how do you enable the customizations on top of that? But generally speaking, that's a lot easier than having to think about re-engineering the whole company. If you think about the technology stack, obviously, the cloud embeds a lot of technology in the cloud, so you have a lot of native services that are available to you. That is awesome from a talent perspective, because before, maybe you needed to have database experts or Kubernetes experts. And not that we don't need those today, but many of those capabilities come native in the cloud today. So, in effect, how it helps the CIO is to provide this ecosystem of talent embedded in what the cloud provider does. >> So I wonder, so let's stay on that for a minute. So I remember, before Amazon announced AWS in, was it 2006, a CIO said to me, "Yeah, I'm thinking about maybe I don't need to run my own email," (chuckles). And so- >> That's right, that was those days. >> And then, of course, it happens that we see the SaaSification of businesses, which, to your point, makes things simpler, in that I can focus on other areas, and not to worry about managing infrastructure to support apps. At the same time, you've had this proliferation of cloud. You mentioned, of course, that you're with Anaplan, you see, you got Workday, you got Salesforce, you got ServiceNow, Oracle apps, and people struggle. How do I get these things talking to others, they're worried about that data layer, so there's this new level of complexity. How do you see that playing out in the next decade? >> Yeah, and we used to say that we shift what we do at a certain level, and now, as an organization, we start to look at higher value outcomes. And so I see that happening, and you're absolutely right. The conversations that I have with customers now are, hey, there's things that are enabled by the cloud, and then on top of that, you need a set of APIs, or connectors, or ways to get data in and out of a particular system, or ways to link. In our case, we're linking with Salesforce, to Anaplan, to Workday, or other tools, and so you start to think more about the business outcome that you want. The CIO needs to be focused on that, instead of maybe the fundamentals of the technology. Those come for you. And then it's really more about the partnership with the business side, to say, okay, what is it that you're trying to do, and can I enable that through my cloud architecture, the Workdays, the Adobes, or the Salesforces of the world? So I think the conversation is changing. And from my perspective, what's really cool about that is it brings the CIO to, really makes the CIO, a business and thought leader, a strategic leader, because the IT shop is not just talking tech, the IT shop has to talk a lot more about the outcome that they're trying to deliver. >> So in the early days of cloud, I just want to pick up on what you just said, a lot of people in IT saw the cloud as a threat to their livelihoods, and I think I'm inferring from your statements that we're largely through that dynamic, and the CIOs are now really trying to make the cloud a platform for transformation, and monetization, or whatever other organizational goal, might be saving lives, or better government. Is that how you see it, that the role >> Look, I talk- >> Has changed to that? >> I know, I talk to so many companies, and we're still going through that transition, so I don't think we're completely over the hump of cloud all day, everywhere, but at the same time, I think what the CIO's really focused on these days is really around business agility and business outcomes for their partners. By the way, that's one of the things. The second thing, specially these days, is around people, collaboration, communication. How do we facilitate interaction of people, whether inside or outside of the company? And so that's a very different conversation for the CIO. It doesn't mean that we're not still having the basic conversation of how safe is the cloud, what security do you have built into the cloud? But I think, frankly, Dave, that we've crossed the chasm, where before it used to be, hey, I'm a lot more secure on prem, and given the tremendous focus that the cloud providers and SaaS companies have put on security, I see many more companies feeling very at ease, and in fact, telling their organizations we actually need to switch to the cloud, including large companies that have compliance issues, or large financial companies. Many of those are making that switch as well. >> Well, it's interesting, we could talk about security, but I think it's a two-edged sword, because I think a lot of, frankly, I think a lot of executives, early days, used security as a way to kick the can down the road. But the reality was the cloud, better or worse, you could make that argument, but it's different, and so different concerns people, but it's still, at the end of the day, bad security practices trump good security, and so that's what we've seen so many times, the shared responsibility model. And so people are still learning there. So security is almost this beast in and of itself. I'm interested in your thoughts on the priorities. Are customers, are they streamlining their tech investments? The major focus, as you pointed out, on cloud has been it's a driver of agility and shifting resources, as we talked about, but there's this constant cost pressure, the procurement, looking at the Amazon bill. Do you see a lot of the same going forward, or do you think the value equation is shifting such that there'll be, maybe, IT is less cost pressure? There's always going to be cost pressure, I know, but more value producer. >> I think you're right. I see it, and over the last six months I've seen it really accelerate, where CIOs are thinking about three things, and one is business resiliency, and when I talk about business resiliency, I talk about the ability to recover from crap that happens, whether it's pandemics or global events and shifts, that companies have to accommodate. So that's one thing that I see them thinking about. The second one that we talked about a little bit is just agility. I see them really focused on that, and the cloud enables that. And the third one in conversations is really speed to innovation, because when companies are talking to the cloud providers, and particularly SaaS companies, what I see them talking about is, look, I've got this particular need, and it would take me two years to do it with a legacy player because I've got to do this on prem, but you have the fundamentals built in, and I think I can do it with you in three months. So I think business resiliency, both to grow and to recover from stuff, agility, and innovation, are really three fundamental levers that I see for movement to the cloud. And any one of those that these days, it's funny, depending on who you talk to, any one of those can propel a CIO to make that choice, and when they have all of that together, they have a lot more lift, in effect, as a CIO. They have a lot more leverage in terms of what they can do for their companies. >> Well, let's stay on innovation. Innovation, I've said many times, in tech, for decades it came from Moore's Law. It seems so '90s to even say that, >> I know, I know. >> but it's true. So what's going to drive innovation in the coming years. I'm interested in your perspective on how machine intelligence, and AI, and ML, and cloud, of course, play into that innovation agenda? >> Yeah, it's interesting. I see it a lot in our business with Anaplan, innovation comes from the ability to bring in what you do internally and match it with what's available in the external world. And you mentioned it earlier, data. Data is like the new currency, that's like software eats the world, now we talk about data. And I think what's really going to drive innovation is being able to have access to the world's data. Once a company builds this digital DNA, this digital foundation, and is able to have access to that data, then you start to make decisions, you start to offer services, you start to bring intelligence that wasn't available before, and that's a really powerful thing for any company, whether you're doing forecasting and you need to bring the world's data, whether you are a agricultural company. And in these days, innovation comes in the form of speed, being able to just deliver something new to an audience faster. So to me, the cloud enables all of that, the ability to bring in data. And then on top of that, think about all the AIML innovation that's happening around the world. We just launched an offer, actually, to be able to do forecasting, intelligent forecasting, on top of the cloud. We partner with AWS Forecast for that. If we didn't have a cloud platform to do that, and a set of APIs, being digital that way really enables us the opportunity to match, one plus one equals 100, really, and bring in the power of that to get two companies together to be able to enable that type of innovation. >> Well, that's interesting. It reminds me of, one of my friends, Ed Walsh, is the CEO of a new startup called ChaosSearch, and he used this statement, he said, "We're standing on the shoulders of the giants. We're not trying to recreate it." And I think what you just said is the same thing. You're relying on others to build out cloud infrastructure. >> Totally. >> So here's a totally left-field question. When you hear all the talks about breaking up big tech, I wonder, is that irrelevant to you because you figured, okay, the cloud's going to be there, it's maybe more about search, or it's about Facebook, or Amazon's dominance. Interestingly, Microsoft's really not in those discussions anymore. They were the center of it back in the '90's. >> I know, I know. >> But as the head of development for a company, does that even factor into the equation, or do you just not worry about that? >> I'll be honest, for me personally, what I do is I compartmentalize my world. In a sense, I view the partnerships, and we have partnerships with Google, and AWS, and Microsoft, and others, so I view those as part of an opportunity to really provide an ecosystem set of solutions to customers, and those are very powerful. I think those partnerships enable companies like ours, like SaaS companies, to innovate faster. And so I compartmentalize, and I say those things are wonderful, I don't know why you would want to break up those companies. At the same time, part of what you're referring to has to do with more the social and the consumer elements of what's going on. But as a business leader, I really focus on what the power is, and particularly in the enterprise, what is it that we can do for global enterprise companies? And at least in my mind, those two things tend to be separate. >> A couple of things you said there that triggered my mind. One was ecosystems. We've been talking about data. One of our guests in this program, Allen Nance, has been talking about ecosystems and the power of ecosystems, and I definitely see cloud as a platform to allow data-sharing across those clouds and then to form ecosystems and share data in ways that we really couldn't have half a decade, or even longer ago. And that seems to be where a lot of the innovation is going to occur. Some of the people talk about the flywheel effect, but it's the power of many versus the resources of a few. >> And I'm such a big believer in the ecosystem play, and part of that is because, frankly, even over the last 20 years, the skills that are required and the knowledge that is required is so specialized, Dave, if you think about AIML and all the algorithms that we need to know and the innovation that's happening there, and so I really don't think that there's any one company that can serve a customer alone. And if you think about it from a customer perspective, their business is made up of needs from a lot of different parties that they're putting together to accommodate their business outcome, and so the only way to play, right now, in tech, is in a collaborative way, in an ecosystem way. I think the more that companies like ours work with other companies on these partnerships, and frankly, by the way, I think in the past, many companies that have made bold announcements and they would say, oh, I'm partnering with so-and-so, and I've got this great partnership, and then nothing would happen (laughs). It was just a lot of talk. But I think what's actually happening now, and it's enabled by the cloud, is we have much more of a show me culture. We can actually say, okay, well, let's say, Anaplan is partnering with Google, show me, show me what you're actually doing. And I see our customers asking for references of how these ecosystem partnerships are playing. And because these stories are out there more, I think partnerships are actually much more feasible, and real, and pragmatic. >> Yeah, Ana, we call those barney deals, I love you, you love me, we do a press release, and then nothing ever happens. >> That's right, that's right. And I think that's not going to work going forward, Dave. People are asking for a lot more transparency, and so when we think about ecosystems, they really want the meat on the bone. They don't want just announcements that don't really help their business move forward. >> Yeah, and the other thing too, we come back to data, it's always coming back to data, every conversation, but the data that's created out of that ecosystem is going to throw off new capabilities, and new data products, data services, and that, to me, is a really exciting new chapter, I think, of cloud. >> Yeah, and it's interesting, the conversations I'm having now are about data, and believe it or not, also about metadata, because people are trying to analyze what's happening among cloud providers, what are customers doing with the data, how are they using data, how often are they accessing data. Security, from that perspective, looking at who's accessing what. So the data conversation and the metadata conversation are truly enabled by the cloud, and they're key. And they weren't that easy to do in a prior legacy environment. >> It's a great point, I'm glad you brought that up, because in a legacy environment, all that metadata, that data about the data, is locked inside of these systems, and if you're going to go across clouds, and you're going to have it secure and governed, you've got to have that metadata visibility and a point of control that actually you can see that and can manage it, so thank you for that point. And thank you, Ana, for coming on the Cube and participating in the Cube on Cloud. It's been great having you. >> Thank you so much for having me, it's been a pleasure. >> All right, keep it right there, everybody. More from the Cube on Cloud right after this short break. (bouncy music)

>> From the Silicon Angle Media Office in Boston Massachusetts, it's "The Cube." (groovy techno music) Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hello, everyone. The rise of open source is really powering the digital economy. And in a world where every company is essentially under pressure to become a software firm, open source software really becomes the linchpin of digital services for both incumbents and, of course, digital natives. Here's the challenge, is when developers tap and apply open source, they're often bringing in hundreds, or even thousands of lines of code that reside in open sourced packages and libraries. And these code bases, they have dependencies, and essentially hidden traps. Now typically, security vulnerabilities in code, they're attacked after the software's developed. Or maybe thrown over the fence to the sec-ops team and SNYK is a company that set out to solve this problem within the application development life cycle, not after the fact as a built-on. Now, with us to talk about this mega-trend is Peter McKay, a friend of The Cube and CEO of SNYK. Peter, great to see you again. >> Good to see you, dude. >> So I got to start with the name. SNYK, what does it mean? >> SNYK, So Now You Know. You know, people it's sneakers sneak. And they tend to use the snick. So it's SNYK or snick. But it is SNYK and it stands for So Now You Know. Kind of a security, so now you know a lot more about your applications than you ever did before. So it's kind of a fitting name. >> So you heard my narrative upfront. Maybe you can add a little color to that and provide some additional background. >> Yeah, I mean, it's a, you know, when you think of the larger trends that are going on in the market, you know, every company is going through this digital transformation. You know, and every CEO, it's the number one priority. We've got to change our business from, you know, financial services, healthcare, insurance company, whatever, are all switching to digital, you know, more of a software company. And with that, more software equals more software risk and cybersecurity continues to be, you know, a major. I think 72% of CEOs worry about cybersecurity as a top issue in protecting companies' data. And so for us, we've been in the software in the security space for the four and a half years. I've been in the security space since, you know, Watchfire 20 years ago. And right now, with more and more, as you said, open source and containers, the challenge of being able to address the cybersecurity issues that have never been more challenging. And so especially when you add the gap between the need for security professionals and what they have. I think it's four million open positions for security people. So you know, with all this added risk, more and more open source, more and more digitization, it's created this opportunity in the market where you're traditional approaches to addressing security don't work today, you know? Like you said, throwing it over the fence and having someone in security, you know, check and make sure and finding all these vulnerabilities, and throw it back to developers to fix is very slow and something at this point is not driving to success. >> So talk a little bit more about what attracted you to SNYK early. I mean, you've been with the company, you're at least involved in the company for a couple years now. What were the trends that you saw, and what was it about SNYK that, you know, led you to become an investor and ultimately, CEO? >> Yeah, so four years involved in the business. So you know, I've always loved the security space. I've been in it for a number, almost 20 years. So I enjoy the space. You know, I've watched it. The founder, Guy Podjarny, one of the founders of SNYK, has been a friend of mine for 16 years from back in the Watchfire days. So we've always stayed connected. I've always worked well together with him. And so when you started, and I was on the board, the first board member of the company, so I could see what was going on, and it was this, you know, changing, kind of the right place at the right time in terms of developer first security. Really taking all the things that are going on in the security space that impacts a developer or can be addressed by the developer, and embedding it into the software into that developer community, in a way that developers use, the tools that they use. So it's a developer-first mindset with security expertise built-in. And so when you look at the market, the number of open source container evolution, you know, it's a huge market opportunity. Then you look at the business momentum, just took off over the past, you know, four years. That it was something that I was getting more and more involved in. And then when Guy asked me to join as the CEO, it was like, "Sure, what took you so long?" (Dave laughing) >> We had Guy on at Node JS Summit. I want to say it was a couple years ago now. And what he was describing is when you package, take the example of Node. When you package code in Node, you bring in all these dependencies, kind of what I was talking about there, but the challenge that he sort of described was really making it seamless as part of the development workflow. It seems like that's unique to SNYK. Maybe you could talk about-- >> Yeah, it is. And you know, we've built it from the ground up. You know, it's very difficult. If it was a security tool for security people, and then say, "Oh, let's adapt it for the developer," that is almost impossible. Why I think we've been so successful from the 400,000 developers in the community using Freemium to paid, was we built it from the ground up for developer, embedded into the application-development life cycle. Into their process, the look and feel, easy for them to use, easy for them to try it, and then we focused on just developer adoption. A great experience, developers will continue to use it and expand with it. And most of our opportunities that we've been successful at, the customers, we have over 400 customers. That had been this try, you know, start it with the community. They used the Freemium, they tried it for their new application, then they tried it for all their new, and then they go back and replace the old. So it was kind of this Freemium, land and expand has been a great way for developers to try it, use it. Does it work, yes, buy more. And that's the way we work. >> We're really happy, Peter, that you came on because you've got some news today that you're choosing to share with us in our Cube community. So it's around financing, bring us up to date. What's the news? >> Yeah so you know, I'd say four months ago, five months ago, we raised a $70 million round from great investors. And that was really led by one of our existing investors, who kind of knew us the best and it was you know, Excel Venture, and then Excel Growth came in and led the $70 million round. And part of that was a few new investors that came in and Stripes, which is you know a very large growth equity investor were part of that $70 million round said you know, preempted it and said, "Look it, we know you don't need the money, but we want to," you know, "We want to preempt. We believe your customer momentum," here we did, you know, five or six really large deals. You know, one, 700, seven million, 7.4 million, one's 3.5 million. So we started getting these bigger deals and we doubled since the $70 million round. And so we said, "Okay, we want to make money not the issue." So they led the next round, which is $150 million round, at a valuation of over a billion. That really allows us now to, with the number of other really top tier, (mumbles) and Tiger and Trend and others, who have been part of watching the space and understand the market. And are really helping us grow this business internationally. So it's an exciting time. So you know, again, we weren't looking to raise. This was something that kind of came to us and you know, when people are that excited about it like we are and they know us the best because they've been part of our board of directors since their round, it allows us to do the things that we want to do faster. >> So $150 million raise this round, brings you up to the 250, is that correct? >> Yes, 250. >> And obviously, an up-round. So congratulations, that's great. >> Yeah, you know, I think a big part of that is you know, we're not, I mean, we've always been very fiscally responsible. I mean, yes we have the money and most of it's still in the bank. We're growing at the pace that we think is right for us and right for the market. You know, we continue to invest product, product, product, is making sure we continue our product-led organization. You know, from that bottoms up, which is something we continue to do. This allows us to accelerate that more aggressively, but also the community, which is a big part of what makes that, you know, when you have a bottoms up, you need to have that community. And we've grown that and we're going to continue to invest aggressively and build in that community. And lastly, go to market. Not only invest, invest aggressively in the North America, but also Europe and APJ, which, you know, a lot of the things we've learned from my Veeam experience, you know how to grow fast, go big or go home. You know, are things that we're going to do but we're going to do it in the right way. >> So the Golden Rule is product and sales, right? >> Yes, you're either building it or selling it. >> Right, that's kind of where you're going to put your money. You know, you talk a lot about people, companies will do IPOs to get seen, but companies today, I mean, even software companies, which is a capital-efficient industry, they raise a lot of dough and they put it towards promotion to compete. What are your thoughts on that? >> You know, we've had, the model is very straightforward. It's bottoms up, you know? Developers, you know, there's 28 million developers in the world, you know? What we want is every one of those 28 million to be using our product. Whether it's free or paid, I want SNYK used in every application-development life cycle. If you're one developer, or you're a sales force with standardized on 12,000 developers, we want them using SNYK. So for us, it's get it in the hands. And that, you know, it's not like-- developers aren't going to look at Super Bowl ads, they're not going to be looking. It's you know, it's finding the ways, like the conference. We bought the DevSecCon, you know, the conference for developer security. Another way to promote kind of our, you know, security for developers and grow that developer community. That's not to say that there isn't a security part. Because, you know, what we do is help security organizations with visibility and finding a much more scalable way that gets them out of the, you know, the slows-down, the speed bump to the moving apps more aggressively into production. And so this is very much about helping security people. A lot of times the budgets do come from security or dev-ops. But it's because of our focus on the developer and the success of fixing, finding, fixing, and auto-remediating that developer environment is what makes us special. >> And it's sounds like a key to your success is you're not asking developer to context switch into a new environment, right? It's part of their existing workflow. >> It has to be, right? Don't change how they do their job, right? I mean, their job is to develop incredible applications that are better than the competitors, get them to market faster than they can, than they've ever been able to do before and faster than the competitor, but do it securely. Our goal is to do the third, but not sacrifice on one and two, right? Help you drive it, help you get your applications to market, help you beat your competition, but do it in a secure fashion. So don't slow them down. >> Well, the other thing I like about you guys is the emphasis is on fixing. It's not just alerting people that there's a problem. I mean, for instance, a company like Red Hat, is that they're going to put a lot of fixes in. But you, of course, have to go implement them. What you're doing is saying, "Hey, we're going to do that for you. Push the button and then we'll do it," right? So that, to me, that's important because it enables automation, it enables scale. >> Exactly, and I think this has been one of the challenges for kind of more of the traditional legacy, is they find a whole bunch of vulnerabilities, right? And we feel as though just that alone, we're the best in the world at. Finding vulnerabilities in applications in open source container. And so the other part of it is, okay, you find all them, but prioritizing what it is that I should fix first? And that's become really big issue because the vulnerabilities, as you can imagine, continue to grow. But focusing on hey, fix this top 10%, then the next, and to the extent you can, auto-fix. Auto-remediate those problems, that's ultimately, we're measured by how many vulnerabilities do we fix, right? I mean, finding them, that's one thing. But fixing them is how we judge a successful customer. And now it's possible. Before, it was like, "Oh, okay, you're just going to show me more things." No, when you talk about Google and Salesforce and Intuit, and all of our customers, they're actually getting far better. They're seeing what they have in terms of their exposure, and they're fixing the problems. And that's ultimately what we're focused on. >> So some of those big whales that you just mentioned, it seems to me that the value proposition for those guys, Peter, is the quality of the code that they can develop and obviously, the time that it takes to do that. But if you think about it more of a traditional enterprise, which I'm sure is part of your (mumbles), they'll tell you, the (mumbles) will tell you our biggest problem is we don't have enough people with the skills. Does this help? >> It absolutely-- >> And how so? >> Yeah, I mean, there's a massive gap in security expertise. And the current approach, the tools, are, you know, like you said at the very beginning, it's I'm doing too late in the process. I need to do it upstream. So you've got to leverage the 28 million developers that are developing the applications. It's the only way to solve the problem of, you know, this application security challenge. We call it Cloud Dative Application Security, which all these applications usually are new apps that they're moving into the Cloud. And so to really fix it, to solve the problem, you got to embed it, make it really easy for developers to leverage SNYK in their whole, we call it, you know, it's that concept of shift left, you know? Our view is that it needs to be embedded within the development process. And that's how you fix the problem. >> And talk about the business model again. You said it's Freemium model, you just talked about a big seven figure deals that you're doing and that starts with a Freemium, and then what? I upgrade to a subscription and then it's a land and expand? Describe that. >> Yeah we call it, it's you know, it's the community. Let's get every developer in a community. 28 million, we want to get into our community. From there, you know, leverage our Freemium, use it. You know, we encourage you to use it. Everybody to use our Freemium. And it's full functionality. It's not restricted in anyway. You can use it. And there's a subset of those that are ready to say, "Look it, I want to use the paid version," which allows me to get more visibility across more developers. So as you get larger organization, you want to leverage the power of kind of a bigger, managing multiple developers, like a lot of, in different teams. And so that kind of gets that shift to that paid. Then it goes into that Freemium, land, expand, we call it explode. Sales force, kind of explode. And then renew. That's been our model. Get in the door, get them using Freemium, we have a great experience, go to paid. And that's usually for an application, then it goes to 10 applications, and then 300 developers and then the way we price is by developer. So the more developers who use, the better your developer adoption, the bigger the ultimate opportunity is for us. >> There's a subscription service right? >> All subscription. >> Okay and then you guys have experts that are identifying vulnerabilities, right? You put them into a database, presumably, and then you sort of operationalize that into your software and your service. >> Yeah, we have 15 people in our security team that do nothing everyday but looking for the next vulnerability. That's our vulnerability database, in a large case, is a lot of our big companies start with the database. Because you think of like Netflix and you think of Facebook, all of these companies have large security organizations that are looking for issues, looking for vulnerabilities. And they're saying, "Well okay, if I can get that feed from you, why do I have my own?" And so a lot of companies start just with the database feed and say, "Look, I'll get rid of mine, and use yours." And then eventually, we'll use this scanning and we'll evolve down the process. But there's no doubt in the market people who use our solution or other solution will say our known the database of known vulnerabilities, is far better than anybody else in the market. >> And who do you sell to, again? Who are the constituencies? Is it sec-ops, is it, you know, software engineering? Is it developers, dev-ops? >> Users are always developers. In some cases dev-ops, or dev-sec. Apps-sec, you're starting to see kind of the world, the developer security becoming bigger. You know, as you get larger, you're definitely security becomes a bigger part of the journey and some of the budget comes from the security teams. Or the risk or dev-ops. But I think if we were to, you know, with the user and some of the influencers from developers, dev-ops, and security are kind of the key people in the equation. >> Is your, you have a lot of experience in the enterprise. How do you see your go to market in this world different, given that it's really a developer constituency that you're targeting? I mean, normally, you'd go out, hire a bunch of expensive sales guys, go to market, is that the model or is it a little different here because of the target? >> Yeah, you know, to be honest, a lot of the momentum that we've had at this point has been inbound. Like most of the opportunities that come in, come to us from the community, from this ground up. And so we have a very large inside sales team that just kind of follows up on the inbound interest. And that's still, you know, 65, 70% of the opportunities that come to us both here and Europe and APJ, are coming from the community inbound. Okay, I'm using 10 licenses of SNYK, you know, I want to get the enterprise version of it. And so that's been how we've grown. Very much of a very cost-effective inside sales. Now, when you get to the Googles and Salesforces and Nordstroms of the world, and they have already 500 licenses us, either paid or free, then we usually have more of a, you know, senior sales person that will be involved in those deals. >> To sort of mine those accounts. But it's really all about driving the efficiency of that inbound, and then at some point driving more inbound and sort of getting that flywheel effect. >> Developer adoption, developer adoption. That's the number one driver for everybody in our company. We have a customer success team, developer adoption. You know, just make the developer successful and good things happen to all the other parts of the organization. >> Okay, so that's a key performance indicator. What are the, let's wrap kind of the milestones and the things that you want to accomplish in the next, let's call it 12 months, 18 months? What should we be watching? >> Yeah, so I mean it continues to be the community, right? The community, recruiting more developers around the globe. We're expanding, you know, APJ's becoming a bigger part. And a lot of it is through just our efforts and just building out this community. We now have 20 people, their sole job is to build out, is to continue to build our developer community. Which is, you know, content, you know, information, how to learn, you know, webinars, all these things that are very separate and apart from the commercial side of the business and the community side of the business. So community adoption is a critical measurement for us, you know, yeah, you look at Freemium adoption. And then, you know, new customers. How are we adding new customers and retaining our existing customers? And you know, we have a 95% retention rate. So it's very sticky because you're getting the data feed, is a daily data feed. So it's like, you know, it's not one that you're going to hook on and then stop at any time soon. So you know, those are the measurements. You look at your community, you look at your Freemium, you look at your customer growth, your retention rates, those are all the things that we measure our business by. >> And your big pockets of brain power here, obviously in Boston, kind of CEO's prerogative, you got a big presence in London, right? And also in Israel, is that correct? >> Yeah, I would say we have four hubs and then we have a lot of remote employees. So, you know, Tel Aviv, where a lot of our security expertise is, in London, a lot of engineering. So between London and Tel Aviv is kind of the security teams, the developers are all in the community is kind of there. You know, Boston, is kind of more go to market side of things, and then we have Ottawa, which is kind of where Watchfire started, so a lot of good security experience there. And then, you know, we've, like a lot of modern companies, we hired the best people wherever we can find them. You know, we have some in Sydney, we've got some all around the world. Especially security, where finding really good security talent is a challenge. And so we're always looking for the best and brightest wherever they are. >> Well, Peter, congratulations on the raise, the new role, really, thank you for coming in and sharing with The Cube community. Really appreciate it. >> Well, it's great to be here. Always enjoy the conversations, especially the Patriots, Red Sox, kind of banter back and forth. It's always good. >> Well, how do you feel about that? >> Which one? >> Well, the Patriots, you know, sort of strange that they're not deep into the playoffs, I mean, for us. But how about the Red Sox now? Is it a team of shame? All my friends who were sort of jealous of Boston sports are saying you should be embarrassed, what are your thoughts? >> It's all about Houston, you know? Alex Cora, was one of the assistant coaches at Houston where all the issues are, I'm not sure those issues apply to Boston, but we'll see, TBD. TBD, I am optimistic as usual. I'm a Boston fan making sure that there isn't any spillover from the Houston world. >> Well we just got our Sox tickets, so you know, hopefully, they'll recover quickly, you know, from this. >> They will, they got to get a coach first. >> Yeah, they got to get a coach first. >> We need something to distract us from the Patriots. >> So you're not ready to attach an asterisk yet to 2018? >> No, no. No, no, no. >> All right, I like the optimism. Maybe you made the right call on Tom Brady. >> Did I? >> Yeah a couple years ago. >> Still since we talked what, two in one. And they won one. >> So they were in two, won one, and he threw for what, 600 yards in the first one so you can't, it wasn't his fault. >> And they'll sign him again, he'll be back. >> Is that your prediction? I hope so. >> I do, I do. >> All right, Peter. Always a pleasure, man. >> Great to see you. >> Thank you so much, and thank you for watching everybody, we'll see you next time. (groovy techno music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are high atop San Franciscso, in the Salesforce Tower in the brand new Accenture, the Innovation Hub. It opened up, I don't know, six months ago or so. We were here for the opening. It's a really spectacular space with a really cool Cinderella stair, so if you come, make sure you check that out. We're talking about cloud and the evolution of cloud, and hybrid cloud, and clearly, two players that are right in the middle of this, helping customers get through this journey, and do these migrations are Accenture and HPE. So we're excited to have our next guest, Melissa Besse. She is the Managing Director, Intelligent Cloud and Infrastructure Strategic Partnerships, at Accenture. Melissa, welcome. >> Thanks Jeff. >> And joining us from HP is David Stone. He is the VP of Ecosystem Sales. David great to see you. >> Great, thanks for having me. >> So, let's just jump into it. The cloud discussion has taken over for the last 10 years, but it's really continuing to evolve. It was kind of this new entrance, with AWS coming on the scene, one of the great lines that Jeff Bezos talks about, is they had no competition for seven years. Nobody recognized that the bookseller, out on the left hand edge, was coming in to take their infrastructure business. But as things have moved to public cloud, now there's hybrid cloud, now all applications, or work loads, are right for public clouds, so now, all the Enterprises are trying to figure this out, they want to make their moves but it's complicated. So, first of all, let's talk about some of the vocabulary, hybrid cloud versus Multi-Cloud. What do those terms mean to you and your customers? Let's start with you, Melissa. >> Sure. So when you think of Multi-Cloud, right, we're seeing a big convergence of, I would say, a Multi-Cloud operating model, that really has to integrate across all the clouds. So, you have your public cloud providers, you have your SaaS, like Salesforce, work day, you have your PAS, right. And so when you think of Multi-Cloud, any customer is going to have a plethora, of all of these types of clouds. And really being able to manage across those, becomes critical. When you think of Hybrid-Cloud, Hybrid-Cloud is really thinking about the placement of Ous. We usually look at it from a data perspective, right. Are you going to in the public, or in the private space? And you kind of look at it from that perspective. And it really enables that data movement across both, of those clouds. >> So what do you see, David, in your customers? >> I see a lot of the customers, that we see today, are confused, right? The people who have gone to the Public Cloud, had scratched their heads and said, "Geez, what do I do?", "It's not as cheap as I thought it was going to be." So, the ones who are early adopters, are confused. The ones who haven't moved, yet, are really scratching their head as well, right. Because if you don't the right strategy, you'll end up getting boxed in. You'll pay a ton of money to get your data in, and you'll pay a ton of money to get your data out. And so, all of our customers, you know, want the right hybrid strategy. And, I think that's where the market, and I know Accenture and HPE, clearly see the market really becoming a hybrid world. >> It's interesting, you said it's based on the data, and you just talked about moving data in and out. Where we more often here it talked about workload, this kind of horses for courses, you know. It's a workload specific, should be deployed in this particular, kind of infrastructure configuration. But you both mention data, and there's a lot of conversation, kind of pre-cloud, about data gravity and how expensive it is to move the data, and the age old thing, do you move the compute to the data, or move the data to the compute? There's a lot of advantages, if you have that data in the cloud, but you're highlighting a couple of the real negatives, in terms of potential cost implications, and we didn't even get into regulations, and some of the other things that drive workloads to stay, in the data center. So, how should people start thinking about these variables, when they're trying to figure out what to do next? >> Accenture's position definitely, like when we started off on our Hybrid Cloud journey, was to capture the workload, right. And, once you have that workload, you could really balance the public benefits of speed, innovation, and consumption, with the private benefits of, actual regulation, data gravity, and performance, right. And so, our whole approach and big bet, has been to- Basically, we had really good leading public capabilities, cause we got into the market early. But we knew our customers were not going to be able to, migrate their entire estate over to public. And so in doing that, we said okay, if we create a hybrid capability, that is highly automated, that is consumed like public, and that is standard, we'd be able to offer our customers a way to pick really, the right workload, in the right place, at the right price. And that was really what our whole goal was. >> Go ahead. >> Yeah, and so just to add on to what Melissa said, I think we also think about, at least, you know, keeping the data in a place that you want, but then being cloud adjacent, so getting in the right data centers, and we often use a cloud saying, to bring the cloud to the data. So, if you have the right hybrid strategy, you put the data where it makes the most sense. Where you want to maintain the security and privacy, but then have access to the APIs, and whatever else you might need to get the full advantages, of the public cloud. >> Yeah, and we here a lot of the data center providers like, Equinix and stuff, talking about features, like direct connect and, you know, to have this proximity between the public cloud, and the stuff that's in your private cloud, so that you do have, you know, low latency, and you can, when you do have to move things, or you do need to access that data, it's not so far away. I'm curious about the impact of companies like, Salesforce in the Salesforce tower, here in San Francisco, at the center offices, and office 365, and Work Day, on how can the adoption of the SaaS applications, have changed the conversation about cloud, and what's important and not important, it used to be security, I don't trust anything outside my data center, and know I might argue that public clouds are more secure, in some ways that private cloud, you don't have disgruntled employees per se, running around the data centers unplugging things. So, how it the adoption of things like Office 365, clearly Microsoft's leveraged that in a big way, to grow their own cloud presence, change the conversation about what's good about cloud, what's not good about cloud, why should we move in this direction. David, you have a thought? >> No, look, I think it's a great question, and I think if you think about the, as Melissa said, the used cases, right. And, how Microsoft has successfully pivoted, their business to it as a service model, right. And so what I think it's done, it's opened up innovation, and a lot of the Salesforces of the world, have adapted their business models. And that's truly to your point, a SaaS based offer, and so when you can do a Work Day, or Salesforce.com implementation, sure, it's been built, it's tested and everything else. I think what then becomes the bigger question, and the bigger challenge is, most companies are sitting on a thousand applications, that have been built over time. And what do you do with those, right? And so, in many cases you need to be connected, to those SaaS space providers, but you need the right hybrid strategy, again, to be able to figure out, how to connect those SaaS space services, to whatever you're going to do, with those thousand workloads. And those thousand workloads, running on different things, you need the right strategy, to figure out where to put the actual workloads. And, as people are trying to go, I know one of the questions that comes up is, do you migrate? Or do you modernize? >> David: And so, as people put that strategy together, I think how you tie to those SaaS space services, clearly ties into your hybrid strategy. >> I would agree, and so, as David mentioned, right. That's where the cloud adjacency, you're seeing a lot of blur, between public and private, I mean, Google's providing Bare-metal as a service. So it is actually dedicated, hybrid cloud capabilities, right. So you're seeing a lot of everyone, and as David talked about, all of the surrounding applications around your SAP, around your oracle. When we created our Exensor Hyper Cloud, we were going after the Enterprise workload. But there's a lot of legacy and other ones, that need that data, and or, the Salesforce data. Whatever the data is, right. And really be able to utilize it when they need to, in a real low latency. >> So, I was wondering I we could unpack, the Accenture Hybrid Cloud. >> Melissa: Sure. >> What is that? Is that your guys own cloud? Is this, you know, kind of the solution set? I've heard that mentioned a couple times. So what is the Accenture Hybrid Cloud? >> So Accenture Hybrid Cloud, was a big bet that we made, as we saw the convergence of MultiCloud. We really said, we know, everything is not going to go public. And in some cases, it's all coming back. And so, customers really needed a way, to look at all of their workloads, right. Because part of the issue with, the getting the cost and benefits out of public is, the workload goes but you really aren't able, to get out of the data center. We term it the "Wild Animal Park", because there's a lot of applications that, right, are you going to modernize, are you going to let them to end of life. So there's a lot of things you have to consider, to truly exit the data center strategy. And so, Accenture Hybrid Cloud is actually, a big bet we made, it is a highly automated, standard private cloud capability, that really augments all of the leading capability, we had in the cloud area. It is, it's differentiated, we made a big bet with HPE, it's differentiated on it's hardware. One of the reasons, when we were going after the Enterprise, was they need large compute, and large storage requirements. And what we're able to do is, when we created this, use some of our automation differentiation. We have actually a client, that we had in the existing I-O-N environment, and we were actually able to achieve, some significant benefits, just from the automation. We got 50 percent in the provisioning of applications. We got 40 percent in the provisioning of the V.M. And we were able to take a lot of what I'll call, the manual tasks, and down to, it was like 62 percent reduction in the effort. As well as, 33 percent savings overall, in getting things production ready. So, this capability is highly automated. It will actually repeat the provisioning, at the application level, because we're going after the Enterprise workloads. And it will create these, it's an ASA that came from government, so it's highly secured, and it really was able to preserve, I think what our customer needed. And being able to span that public/private, capability they need out there in the hybrid world. >> Yeah, I was going to say, I don't know that there's enough talk, about the complexity of the management in these worlds. Nobody ever wants to talk about writing, the CIS Admin piece of the software, right? It's all about the core functionality. Let's shift gears a little bit and talk about HPC, a lot of conversation about high performance computing, a lot going on with A.I. and machine learning now. Which, you know, most of those benefits are going to be, realized in a specific application, right? It's machine learning or artificial intelligence, applied to a specific application. So, again, you guys make big iron, and have been making big iron for a long time, what is this kind of hybrid cloud open up, in terms of, for HPE to have the big heavy metal, and still have kind of the agility and flexibility, of a cloud type of infrastructure. >> Yeah, no, I think it's a great question. I think if you think about HPE's strategy has been, in this area of high performance compute. That we bought the company S.G.I. And as you have seen the announcements, we're hopefully going to close on the Cray acquisition as well. And so we in the world of the data continuing to expand, and at huge volumes. The need to have incredible horsepower to drive that, that's associated with it, now all of this really requires, where's your data being created, and where's it actually being consumed? And so, you need to have the right edge, to cloud strategy in everything. And so, in many cases, you need enough compute at the edge, to be able to compute and do stuff in real time. But in many cases you need to feed all that data, back into another cloud or some sort of mother. HPE, you know, type of high performance compute environment, that can actually run the more, advanced A.I. machine learning type of applications, to really get the insights and tune the algorithms. And then, push some of those APIs and applications, back to the edge. So, it's an area of huge investment, it's an area where because of the latency, you know, things like the autonomous driving, and things like that. You can't put all that stuff into the public cloud. But you need the public cloud, or you need cloud type capability, if you will, to be able to compute and make the right decisions, at the right time. So, it's about having the right compute technology, at the right place, at the right time, at the right cost, and the right perform. >> A lot of rights, good opportunity for Accenture. So, I mean it's funny as we talk about hybrid cloud, and that kind of new, verbs around cloud-like things. Is where we're going to see the same thing, kind of the edge versus the data center comparison, in terms of where the data is, where the processing is, because it's going to be this really dynamic situation, and how much can you push out of the edge, cause, you know, there's no air conditioning a lot of times, and the power might not be that great, and maybe connectivity is a little bit limited. So, you know, Edge offers a whole bunch of, different challenges that you can control for, in a data center but it is going to be this crazy, kind of hybrid world there too, in terms of where the allocation of those resources are. You guys get into the deeper end of that model, Melissa? >> Yeah, so we're definitely working with HPE, to create some of, I'll call it our edge managed services, again, going back to what we were saying about the data, right, we saw the centralization of data with the cloud, with the initial entrance into the cloud, now we're seeing the decentralization of that data, back out to the Edge. With that, right, in these hybrid cloud models, you're really going to need- They require a lot of high performance compute, especially for certain industries, right? If you take a look at gas, oil, and exploration, if you look at media processing, right, all of these need to be able to do that. One of the things, and depending on where it's located, if it's on the Edge, how you're going to feedback the data as we talked about. And so, we're looking at, how do you take this foundation, right, this, I'll call it Exensor Hybrid architecture, right. Take that, and play that intermediate role. I'm going to call it intermediary, right, because you really need a really good, you know, global data map, you need a good supply chain, right. Really to make sure that the data, no matter where it's coming from, is going to be available for that application, at the right time. With, right, the ability to do it at speed. And so, all of these things are factors, as you look at our whole Exensor Hybrid Cloud strategy, right. And being able to manage that, Edge to core and then back up to Cloud, etcetera. >> Right, now I wonder if you could share some stories, cause the value proposition around Cloud, is significantly shifted for those who are paying attention, right. But it's not about cost, it's not about cost savings, I mean there's a lot of that in there and that's good, but really the opportunity is about speed. Speed and innovation. And enabling more innovation across your Enterprise, with more people having more access to more data, to build more apps, and really, to react. Are people getting that? Or, are they still, the customer still kind of encumbered, by this kind of transition phase, they're still trying to sort it out, or do they get it? That really this opportunity is about speed, speed, speed. >> No, go ahead. I mean we use a phrase first off, it's, "fear no cloud", right. To your point, you know, how do you figure out the right strategy. But, I think within that you get, what's the right application? And how do you, you know, fit it in to the overall strategy, of what you're trying to do. >> Yeah. >> And I think the other thing that we're seeing is, you know, customers are trying to figure that out. We have a whole, right, when you start with that application map, you know, there could be 500 to 1000 workloads, right, and applications, and how are you going to, some you're going to retain, some you're going to retire, some you're going to (stutters) refactor for the cloud, or for your private cloud capability. Whatever it is, you're going to be looking at doing, I think, you know, we're seeing early adopters, like even the hyperscalers, themselves, right. They recognize the speed, so you know, we're working with Google for instance. They wanted to get into the Bare-metal, as a service capability, right. Them actually building it, getting it out to market would take so much longer. We already had this whole Exensor Hybrid Cloud architecture, that was cloud adjacent, so we had sub-millisecond latency, right. And so, they're the ones, right, everyone's figuring out that utilizing all of these, I'll call it platforms and prebook capabilities. Many of our partners have them as well, is really allowing them that innovation, get products to market sooner, be able to respond to their customers. Because it is, as we talked about in this multicloud world, lots of things that you have to manage, if you can get pieces from multiple, you know, from a partner, right, that can provide more of the services that you need, it really enables the management of those clouds sources. >> Right, so we're going to wrap it up, but I just want to give you the last word in terms of, what's the most consistent blind spot, that you see when you're first engaging with a customer, who's relatively early on this journey, that they miss, that you see over, and over, and over, and you're like, you know, these are some of the thing you really got to think about, that they haven't thought about. >> Yeah so, for me, I think it's- the cloud isn't about a destination, it's about an experience. And so, how do you get- you talked about the operations, but how do you provide that overall experience? I like to use this simple analogy, that if you and I needed a car, for five or 10, or 15 minutes, you go get an Uber. Cause it's easy, it's quick. If you need a car for a couple days, you do a rental car. You need a car for a year, you might do a lease. You need a car for three, four year, you probably by it, right? And so, if you use that analogy and think, Hmmm, I need a workload application for five/six years, putting something at a persistent workload, that you know about on a public cloud, may be the right answer, but it might be a lot more cost prohibited. But, if you need something, that you can stand up in five minutes, and shut it right back down, the public cloud is absolutely, the right way to go, as long as you can deal with the security requirements, and stuff. And so, if you think about, what are the actual requirements, is it cost, is it performance, you've talked about speed and everything else. It's really trying to figure out how you get an experience, and the only experience that can really hit you, what you need to do today, is having the right hybrid strategy. And every company, I know Accenture was out, way in front of the market on public cloud, and now they've come to the realization, so has many other places. The world is going to be hybrid, it's going to be multicloud. And as long as you can have an experience, and a partner, that can manage, you know, help you define the right path, you'll be on the right journey. >> Jeff: Melissa. >> I think blind spot we run into is, it does start off as a cost savings activity. And there really, it really is so much more about, how are you going to manage that enterprise workload? How are you going to worry about the data? Are you going to have access to it? Are you going to be able to make it fluid, right? The whole essence of cloud, right, what it disrupted was the thought, that something had to stay in one place, right. And, where the real time decisions were being made. Where things needed to happen. Now, through all the different clouds, as well as, that you had to own it yourself, right. I mean, everyone always thought, okay, I'll take all the, you know, I.T. department, and very protective of everything that it wanted to keep. Now, it's about saying, all right, how do I utilize, the best of each of these multiclouds, to stand up, what I'll call, what their core capability is as a customer, right. Are they doing the next chip design? Are they, you know, doing financial market models, right? That requires a high performance capability, right. So, when you start to think about all of this stuff, right, that's the true power, is having a strategy that looks at those outcomes. What am I trying to achieve in getting my products, and services to market, and touching the customers I need. Versus, oh, I'm going to move this out to an infrastructure, because that's what cloud, it'll save me money, right. That's typically the downfall we see, because they're not looking at it from the workload, or the application. >> Same old story, right? Focus on your core differentiator, and outsource the heavy lifting on the stuff, (laughs) that's not your core. Alright, well Melissa, David, thanks for taking a minute, and I really enjoyed the conversation. >> Thanks, Jeff. >> She's Melissa, He's David, and I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE. We are high above the San Francisco skyline, in the Salesforce tower at the Accenture Innovation Hub. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (tech music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are high atop San Franciscso, in the Salesforce Tower in the brand new Accenture, the Innovation Hub. It opened up, I don't know, six months ago or so. We were here for the opening. It's a really spectacular space with a really cool Cinderella stair, so if you come, make sure you check that out. We're talking about cloud and the evolution of cloud, and hybrid cloud, and clearly, two players that are right in the middle of this, helping customers get through this journey, and do these migrations are Accenture and HPE. So we're excited to have our next guest, Melissa Besse. She is the Managing Director, Intelligent Cloud and Infrastructure Strategic Partnerships, at Accenture. Melissa, welcome. >> Thanks Jeff. >> And joining us from HP is David Stone. He is the VP of Ecosystem Sales. David great to see you. >> Great, thanks for having me. >> So, let's just jump into it. The cloud discussion has taken over for the last 10 years, but it's really continuing to evolve. It was kind of this new entrance, with AWS coming on the scene, one of the great lines that Jeff Bezos talks about, is they had no competition for seven years. Nobody recognized that the bookseller, out on the left hand edge, was coming in to take their infrastructure business. But as things have moved to public cloud, now there's hybrid cloud, now all applications, or work loads, are right for public clouds, so now, all the Enterprises are trying to figure this out, they want to make their moves but it's complicated. So, first of all, let's talk about some of the vocabulary, hybrid cloud versus Multi-Cloud. What do those terms mean to you and your customers? Let's start with you, Melissa. >> Sure. So when you think of Multi-Cloud, right, we're seeing a big convergence of, I would say, a Multi-Cloud operating model, that really has to integrate across all the clouds. So, you have your public cloud providers, you have your SaaS, like Salesforce, work day, you have your PAS, right. And so when you think of Multi-Cloud, any customer is going to have a plethora, of all of these types of clouds. And really being able to manage across those, becomes critical. When you think of Hybrid-Cloud, Hybrid-Cloud is really thinking about the placement of Ous. We usually look at it from a data perspective, right. Are you going to in the public, or in the private space? And you kind of look at it from that perspective. And it really enables that data movement across both, of those clouds. >> So what do you see, David, in your customers? >> I see a lot of the customers, that we see today, are confused, right? The people who have gone to the Public Cloud, had scratched their heads and said, "Geez, what do I do?", "It's not as cheap as I thought it was going to be." So, the ones who are early adopters, are confused. The ones who haven't moved, yet, are really scratching their head as well, right. Because if you don't the right strategy, you'll end up getting boxed in. You'll pay a ton of money to get your data in, and you'll pay a ton of money to get your data out. And so, all of our customers, you know, want the right hybrid strategy. And, I think that's where the market, and I know Accenture and HPE, clearly see the market really becoming a hybrid world. >> It's interesting, you said it's based on the data, and you just talked about moving data in and out. Where we more often here it talked about workload, this kind of horses for courses, you know. It's a workload specific, should be deployed in this particular, kind of infrastructure configuration. But you both mention data, and there's a lot of conversation, kind of pre-cloud, about data gravity and how expensive it is to move the data, and the age old thing, do you move the compute to the data, or move the data to the compute? There's a lot of advantages, if you have that data in the cloud, but you're highlighting a couple of the real negatives, in terms of potential cost implications, and we didn't even get into regulations, and some of the other things that drive workloads to stay, in the data center. So, how should people start thinking about these variables, when they're trying to figure out what to do next? >> Accenture's position definitely, like when we started off on our Hybrid Cloud journey, was to capture the workload, right. And, once you have that workload, you could really balance the public benefits of speed, innovation, and consumption, with the private benefits of, actual regulation, data gravity, and performance, right. And so, our whole approach and big bet, has been to- Basically, we had really good leading public capabilities, cause we got into the market early. But we knew our customers were not going to be able to, migrate their entire estate over to public. And so in doing that, we said okay, if we create a hybrid capability, that is highly automated, that is consumed like public, and that is standard, we'd be able to offer our customers a way to pick really, the right workload, in the right place, at the right price. And that was really what our whole goal was. >> Go ahead. >> Yeah, and so just to add on to what Melissa said, I think we also think about, at least, you know, keeping the data in a place that you want, but then being cloud adjacent, so getting in the right data centers, and we often use a cloud saying, to bring the cloud to the data. So, if you have the right hybrid strategy, you put the data where it makes the most sense. Where you want to maintain the security and privacy, but then have access to the APIs, and whatever else you might need to get the full advantages, of the public cloud. >> Yeah, and we here a lot of the data center providers like, Equinix and stuff, talking about features, like direct connect and, you know, to have this proximity between the public cloud, and the stuff that's in your private cloud, so that you do have, you know, low latency, and you can, when you do have to move things, or you do need to access that data, it's not so far away. I'm curious about the impact of companies like, Salesforce in the Salesforce tower, here in San Francisco, at the center offices, and office 365, and Work Day, on how can the adoption of the SaaS applications, have changed the conversation about cloud, and what's important and not important, it used to be security, I don't trust anything outside my data center, and know I might argue that public clouds are more secure, in some ways that private cloud, you don't have disgruntled employees per se, running around the data centers unplugging things. So, how it the adoption of things like Office 365, clearly Microsoft's leveraged that in a big way, to grow their own cloud presence, change the conversation about what's good about cloud, what's not good about cloud, why should we move in this direction. David, you have a thought? >> No, look, I think it's a great question, and I think if you think about the, as Melissa said, the used cases, right. And, how Microsoft has successfully pivoted, their business to it as a service model, right. And so what I think it's done, it's opened up innovation, and a lot of the Salesforces of the world, have adapted their business models. And that's truly to your point, a SaaS based offer, and so when you can do a Work Day, or Salesforce.com implementation, sure, it's been built, it's tested and everything else. I think what then becomes the bigger question, and the bigger challenge is, most companies are sitting on a thousand applications, that have been built over time. And what do you do with those, right? And so, in many cases you need to be connected, to those SaaS space providers, but you need the right hybrid strategy, again, to be able to figure out, how to connect those SaaS space services, to whatever you're going to do, with those thousand workloads. And those thousand workloads, running on different things, you need the right strategy, to figure out where to put the actual workloads. And, as people are trying to go, I know one of the questions that comes up is, do you migrate? Or do you modernize? >> David: And so, as people put that strategy together, I think how you tie to those SaaS space services, clearly ties into your hybrid strategy. >> I would agree, and so, as David mentioned, right. That's where the cloud adjacency, you're seeing a lot of blur, between public and private, I mean, Google's providing Bare-metal as a service. So it is actually dedicated, hybrid cloud capabilities, right. So you're seeing a lot of everyone, and as David talked about, all of the surrounding applications around your SAP, around your oracle. When we created our Exensor Hyper Cloud, we were going after the Enterprise workload. But there's a lot of legacy and other ones, that need that data, and or, the Salesforce data. Whatever the data is, right. And really be able to utilize it when they need to, in a real low latency. >> So, I was wondering I we could unpack, the Accenture Hybrid Cloud. >> Melissa: Sure. >> What is that? Is that your guys own cloud? Is this, you know, kind of the solution set? I've heard that mentioned a couple times. So what is the Accenture Hybrid Cloud? >> So Accenture Hybrid Cloud, was a big bet that we made, as we saw the convergence of MultiCloud. We really said, we know, everything is not going to go public. And in some cases, it's all coming back. And so, customers really needed a way, to look at all of their workloads, right. Because part of the issue with, the getting the cost and benefits out of public is, the workload goes but you really aren't able, to get out of the data center. We term it the "Wild Animal Park", because there's a lot of applications that, right, are you going to modernize, are you going to let them to end of life. So there's a lot of things you have to consider, to truly exit the data center strategy. And so, Accenture Hybrid Cloud is actually, a big bet we made, it is a highly automated, standard private cloud capability, that really augments all of the leading capability, we had in the cloud area. It is, it's differentiated, we made a big bet with HPE, it's differentiated on it's hardware. One of the reasons, when we were going after the Enterprise, was they need large compute, and large storage requirements. And what we're able to do is, when we created this, use some of our automation differentiation. We have actually a client, that we had in the existing I-O-N environment, and we were actually able to achieve, some significant benefits, just from the automation. We got 50 percent in the provisioning of applications. We got 40 percent in the provisioning of the V.M. And we were able to take a lot of what I'll call, the manual tasks, and down to, it was like 62 percent reduction in the effort. As well as, 33 percent savings overall, in getting things production ready. So, this capability is highly automated. It will actually repeat the provisioning, at the application level, because we're going after the Enterprise workloads. And it will create these, it's an ASA that came from government, so it's highly secured, and it really was able to preserve, I think what our customer needed. And being able to span that public/private, capability they need out there in the hybrid world. >> Yeah, I was going to say, I don't know that there's enough talk, about the complexity of the management in these worlds. Nobody ever wants to talk about writing, the CIS Admin piece of the software, right? It's all about the core functionality. Let's shift gears a little bit and talk about HPC, a lot of conversation about high performance computing, a lot going on with A.I. and machine learning now. Which, you know, most of those benefits are going to be, realized in a specific application, right? It's machine learning or artificial intelligence, applied to a specific application. So, again, you guys make big iron, and have been making big iron for a long time, what is this kind of hybrid cloud open up, in terms of, for HPE to have the big heavy metal, and still have kind of the agility and flexibility, of a cloud type of infrastructure. >> Yeah, no, I think it's a great question. I think if you think about HPE's strategy has been, in this area of high performance compute. That we bought the company S.G.I. And as you have seen the announcements, we're hopefully going to close on the Cray acquisition as well. And so we in the world of the data continuing to expand, and at huge volumes. The need to have incredible horsepower to drive that, that's associated with it, now all of this really requires, where's your data being created, and where's it actually being consumed? And so, you need to have the right edge, to cloud strategy in everything. And so, in many cases, you need enough compute at the edge, to be able to compute and do stuff in real time. But in many cases you need to feed all that data, back into another cloud or some sort of mother. HPE, you know, type of high performance compute environment, that can actually run the more, advanced A.I. machine learning type of applications, to really get the insights and tune the algorithms. And then, push some of those APIs and applications, back to the edge. So, it's an area of huge investment, it's an area where because of the latency, you know, things like the autonomous driving, and things like that. You can't put all that stuff into the public cloud. But you need the public cloud, or you need cloud type capability, if you will, to be able to compute and make the right decisions, at the right time. So, it's about having the right compute technology, at the right place, at the right time, at the right cost, and the right perform. >> A lot of rights, good opportunity for Accenture. So, I mean it's funny as we talk about hybrid cloud, and that kind of new, verbs around cloud-like things. Is where we're going to see the same thing, kind of the edge versus the data center comparison, in terms of where the data is, where the processing is, because it's going to be this really dynamic situation, and how much can you push out of the edge, cause, you know, there's no air conditioning a lot of times, and the power might not be that great, and maybe connectivity is a little bit limited. So, you know, Edge offers a whole bunch of, different challenges that you can control for, in a data center but it is going to be this crazy, kind of hybrid world there too, in terms of where the allocation of those resources are. You guys get into the deeper end of that model, Melissa? >> Yeah, so we're definitely working with HPE, to create some of, I'll call it our edge managed services, again, going back to what we were saying about the data, right, we saw the centralization of data with the cloud, with the initial entrance into the cloud, now we're seeing the decentralization of that data, back out to the Edge. With that, right, in these hybrid cloud models, you're really going to need- They require a lot of high performance compute, especially for certain industries, right? If you take a look at gas, oil, and exploration, if you look at media processing, right, all of these need to be able to do that. One of the things, and depending on where it's located, if it's on the Edge, how you're going to feedback the data as we talked about. And so, we're looking at, how do you take this foundation, right, this, I'll call it Exensor Hybrid architecture, right. Take that, and play that intermediate role. I'm going to call it intermediary, right, because you really need a really good, you know, global data map, you need a good supply chain, right. Really to make sure that the data, no matter where it's coming from, is going to be available for that application, at the right time. With, right, the ability to do it at speed. And so, all of these things are factors, as you look at our whole Exensor Hybrid Cloud strategy, right. And being able to manage that, Edge to core and then back up to Cloud, etcetera. >> Right, now I wonder if you could share some stories, cause the value proposition around Cloud, is significantly shifted for those who are paying attention, right. But it's not about cost, it's not about cost savings, I mean there's a lot of that in there and that's good, but really the opportunity is about speed. Speed and innovation. And enabling more innovation across your Enterprise, with more people having more access to more data, to build more apps, and really, to react. Are people getting that? Or, are they still, the customer still kind of encumbered, by this kind of transition phase, they're still trying to sort it out, or do they get it? That really this opportunity is about speed, speed, speed. >> No, go ahead. I mean we use a phrase first off, it's, "fear no cloud", right. To your point, you know, how do you figure out the right strategy. But, I think within that you get, what's the right application? And how do you, you know, fit it in to the overall strategy, of what you're trying to do. >> Yeah. >> And I think the other thing that we're seeing is, you know, customers are trying to figure that out. We have a whole, right, when you start with that application map, you know, there could be 500 to 1000 workloads, right, and applications, and how are you going to, some you're going to retain, some you're going to retire, some you're going to (stutters) refactor for the cloud, or for your private cloud capability. Whatever it is, you're going to be looking at doing, I think, you know, we're seeing early adopters, like even the hyperscalers, themselves, right. They recognize the speed, so you know, we're working with Google for instance. They wanted to get into the Bare-metal, as a service capability, right. Them actually building it, getting it out to market would take so much longer. We already had this whole Exensor Hybrid Cloud architecture, that was cloud adjacent, so we had sub-millisecond latency, right. And so, they're the ones, right, everyone's figuring out that utilizing all of these, I'll call it platforms and prebook capabilities. Many of our partners have them as well, is really allowing them that innovation, get products to market sooner, be able to respond to their customers. Because it is, as we talked about in this multicloud world, lots of things that you have to manage, if you can get pieces from multiple, you know, from a partner, right, that can provide more of the services that you need, it really enables the management of those clouds sources. >> Right, so we're going to wrap it up, but I just want to give you the last word in terms of, what's the most consistent blind spot, that you see when you're first engaging with a customer, who's relatively early on this journey, that they miss, that you see over, and over, and over, and you're like, you know, these are some of the thing you really got to think about, that they haven't thought about. >> Yeah so, for me, I think it's- the cloud isn't about a destination, it's about an experience. And so, how do you get- you talked about the operations, but how do you provide that overall experience? I like to use this simple analogy, that if you and I needed a car, for five or 10, or 15 minutes, you go get an Uber. Cause it's easy, it's quick. If you need a car for a couple days, you do a rental car. You need a car for a year, you might do a lease. You need a car for three, four year, you probably by it, right? And so, if you use that analogy and think, Hmmm, I need a workload application for five/six years, putting something at a persistent workload, that you know about on a public cloud, may be the right answer, but it might be a lot more cost prohibited. But, if you need something, that you can stand up in five minutes, and shut it right back down, the public cloud is absolutely, the right way to go, as long as you can deal with the security requirements, and stuff. And so, if you think about, what are the actual requirements, is it cost, is it performance, you've talked about speed and everything else. It's really trying to figure out how you get an experience, and the only experience that can really hit you, what you need to do today, is having the right hybrid strategy. And every company, I know Accenture was out, way in front of the market on public cloud, and now they've come to the realization, so has many other places. The world is going to be hybrid, it's going to be multicloud. And as long as you can have an experience, and a partner, that can manage, you know, help you define the right path, you'll be on the right journey. >> Jeff: Melissa. >> I think blind spot we run into is, it does start off as a cost savings activity. And there really, it really is so much more about, how are you going to manage that enterprise workload? How are you going to worry about the data? Are you going to have access to it? Are you going to be able to make it fluid, right? The whole essence of cloud, right, what it disrupted was the thought, that something had to stay in one place, right. And, where the real time decisions were being made. Where things needed to happen. Now, through all the different clouds, as well as, that you had to own it yourself, right. I mean, everyone always thought, okay, I'll take all the, you know, I.T. department, and very protective of everything that it wanted to keep. Now, it's about saying, all right, how do I utilize, the best of each of these multiclouds, to stand up, what I'll call, what their core capability is as a customer, right. Are they doing the next chip design? Are they, you know, doing financial market models, right? That requires a high performance capability, right. So, when you start to think about all of this stuff, right, that's the true power, is having a strategy that looks at those outcomes. What am I trying to achieve in getting my products, and services to market, and touching the customers I need. Versus, oh, I'm going to move this out to an infrastructure, because that's what cloud, it'll save me money, right. That's typically the downfall we see, because they're not looking at it from the workload, or the application. >> Same old story, right? Focus on your core differentiator, and outsource the heavy lifting on the stuff, (laughs) that's not your core. Alright, well Melissa, David, thanks for taking a minute, and I really enjoyed the conversation. >> Thanks, Jeff. >> She's Melissa, He's David, and I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE. We are high above the San Francisco skyline, in the Salesforce tower at the Accenture Innovation Hub. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (tech music)

>> Announcer: Live from New Orleans, it's theCUBE covering VeeamON 2017, brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back to New Orleans everybody. This is Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. This is our first day of coverage of VeeamON 2017, the first year Stu we've ever done VeeamON, and we love the customer segments. We have a great one coming up now. Martin Hood is the IS Manager of Hologic, and Chris VanAsselberg is the manager of Server Ops, also at Hologic. Gents, welcome to theCUBE. >> [Martin And Chris] Thanks very much, thank you so much. >> Chris, give us the set-up on Hologic. What do you guys do, what's your shtick? >> Sure, Hologic is a developer, manufacturer and supplier of diagnostic surgical and breast imaging equipment all in the medical field. >> So what's happening in the business that affects IT? What's the conversation like from the business? The good stuff. >> The conversation the last couple of years has all been cloud, cloud, cloud. Very, very interesting topic, but this year it's all about digital transformation, IoT, and probably most importantly to Martin and I is availability. >> Well, when you think about IoT, it just changes everything. It scares the life out of you with security and-- >> Always being watched. >> And then availability obviously, they're like two sides of the same coin, so when you guys sit down and, the business moves fast. I mean, generally speaking, don't hate me for saying this, but the business oftentimes moves faster than IT can move. Is that changing in your organization? How are you changing it and what are you doing to change it? >> I think we're using better tools. We haven't the stuff like many IT departments so we have to adapt by using the best tools that are available. About 12 to 15 months ago explored Veeam as an opportunity and it's clearly made a difference. Staff have a lot more time to dedicate to things that will make a positive difference to the business rather than fixing problems. Those problems were taking up an awful lot of time in the past, not so much so now. >> So, maybe paint a picture of what your environment looks like. Apps that you're servicing, what the infrastructure looks like, virtualization, maybe components of that, major vendors. >> Our core infrastructure is foundation on Cisco UCS, EMC storage and back-ups using obviously ExoGrid storage and then Veeam is our availability platform. From an internal IT organization, we run everything from Oracle to Salesforce to Hadoop, Iceone storage with petabytes of image data, et cetera, so lots and lots of applications. Obviously, no down time expected from anybody but we have a pretty good infrastructure to run all that on. >> What is your sort of strategy and architecture around availability? Back-up, availability is sort of morphing together. >> Yeah, well we live in a world where everybody wants things instantly and it's no different when it comes to restoring fails, for example. Hologic has gone on a heavy recruitment drive for top talent and obviously that top talent has high expectations, so we have to deliver on those expectations. No longer can we wait a week to restore a fail. Even a few days is too long, so we need the right tools to get that job done quickly. >> Yeah, and to be honest, availability is not out of our grasp anymore with the technology available today, it's actually very easy to do it. We have data centers around the world we're able to replicate real time over a gigabyte, plus, you know, connection, five gig connections, 10 gig connections if need be. Replicate data real time, failover between data centers and also even between on prem and in the cloud. That is all possible today to achieve superior up time. >> And when you sit down with a business, do you, well first of all, do you do chargebacks? >> We do not do chargeback, we do showback. It's important for people to understand what something costs but obviously chargeback is a different model that we don't use. >> So when you have a conversation with a business about back-up, I mean in the old days it was, and maybe not so old days, it was one-size-fits-all, here you go, you get the bronze level of service, everybody gets it. Are you able to tune the granularity of your service offering to the business? >> Chris: Absolutely, there are systems that we want to back up and we, for example, back up our east coast data center to an exogrid. We replicate that to San Diego and for DR purposes the acceptance is that it's okay that it might take a day, a week, or even up to a month to be able to restore that data, to become back online. We also have the option to restore to Microsoft Azure if we want to, but we also have systems where it's not a back-up issue, it's yes, we need the back-ups, we need them every fifteen minutes, two disk replicated off-site as soon as possible, but they also want us to replicate the data real time from data center to data center, provide real time monitoring and real time failover. >> Sorry Stu, I'm going to let you jump in. Is the enabler there Veeam? Is it stuff that you've architected yourself? Some kind of combination? >> Veeam's our primary system for our back-ups. It's obviously phenomenal, works great, goes to an exogrid, replicates real time exogrid to exogrid, east coast to west coast. Veeam availability also has replication which we've pursued on many core VMs that require it. System integration tools that are not really on prem, they're tools that exist on prem but their purpose is to pull data from the Salesforces of the world, interface with business systems that might also be off site and we replicate them from the east coast to the west coast, real time. >> You mentioned that from on top you were hearing the cloud, cloud, cloud message. Is cloud a strategic initiative now? How do you put together the pieces, and where does Veeam fit in that discussion? >> I think it's being looked at, it's quite an expensive option for us to go down and I think we have the results-- >> You're saying public cloud would be expensive? >> Yeah, for us yes, I mean we have the resources ourselves. We have multiple data centers globally and we have the staff with the skill set to deliver so it's not really been a financially viable option at the moment. >> Stu: Azure you're doing some things with. >> We actually do business with Azure and vCloud Air. We're actually one of VMware's first customers in vCloud Air and we also do business in AWS. The important thing about a cloud strategy is to understand its strengths and its weaknesses. The idea of the cloud for Hologic is not to put a virtual machine up in the cloud. We can run those virtual machines on prem less expensive than we can run them on the cloud. Now on the flip side, if you look at some SAAS applications like email, Skype for Business, IoT, et cetera. Where the cost isn't the compute, memory, storage, et cetera, it's really in the whole package of maintaining these systems, patching these systems, the skill sets to maintain it, et cetera, it sometimes makes sense for the SAAS apps to host it in the public cloud but for the virtual machines that exist as legacy systems, to host them on prem. >> How's that ride for vCloud Air been for you? They recently moved. I believe it's OVH that's taken over management of that. What's your experience been? >> It's been interesting. Lot of premises, strong VMware partnership, we have always been an EMC partner. Obviously that continued when they acquired VMware, and unfortunately we started in their Texas data center. They offered to move us to Japan seamlessly. It wasn't the most seamless thing, but it worked well overall. They then asked us to move out of their Japan data center because they closed it March 31st I believe, so we had to move out of that, so they're no longer one of our key public clouds. We have a Germany data center that we replicate exchange real time using DAG replication and front-end it with load balancers. One of the data centers that we're utilizing is a vCloud instance in Germany that will also go away shortly. >> And what brings both of you to VeeamOn? What were your expectations coming in and how's the experience been so far? >> A lot of the things we saw this morning, the new innovations, these are all things that we've been on our wish list if you want for some time. Particularly things like continuous replication. That's a huge, huge thing for us. It's sort of phase two, we've rolled out Veeam. Now we're looking for the next step and that's the continuous replication of RVMs so that was a real boon to hear such news coming soon. >> Some of the other priorities obviously, we really want to hear about the new technology. As Martin just said, the replication piece is working well today, but the continuous replication, the method where we're no longer snapshot based and instead there's a driver within the VMware tools, there's some other methodology to allow that real time OS replication is a benefit to us, but we are looking at lots of SAAS apps. Obviously, SharePoint for Hologic is in Office 365. We don't want to go back to five years ago where it was five different back-up products depending on what system we're looking at. We want to use Veeam to back up our SharePoint environment. We want to use Veeam to back up our exchange environment, whether it's on prem or Office 365, and long-term we want to back up AWS or Office Veeam or Azure as well, to make sure that we have one system to back it all up. >> [You want Veeam to be your single back up platform and it is today, or it's becoming today? >> Veeam is our only back up product today that we have. When we sent Sharepoint to the cloud, we put a halt on the second phase, which is to move our team sites which is where our data is, and it is literally waiting for the Veeam SharePoint back up technology to become available, and then the rest of it will move up there seamlessly to make sure that Hologic is protected. >> The business value and benefit of having that simple, single architecture is worth the wait is what you're saying. >> Yeah, I mean if you look at VMware, the reason they've been successful isn't just their technology is amazing. It's also their certification program. They brought a bunch of IT people in. Companies everywhere have VCPs or even higher nowadays, so you have talented people working on a stable platform. With Veeam we sent three of our guys off to get their VMCs and that's been hugely successful. They're very confident with the system. They're able to do everything we need to quickly. They're not guessing, they're not Googling. They just know how to use the system. Going to other platforms will be a complete failure because now when someone wants something, you're in the hot seat, something's down, you need to bring it back up, but you don't use it every day so what do you do? >> Pull out the manual, Google. What's the coolest thing you guys have seen here? Anything that really excites you? >> Good question. It's been great hospitality outside of these four walls, of course. It's been superb. We've been well looked after, and looking forward to further experiences tomorrow as well. We're on stage tomorrow as well, so a little nervous about that. >> And the CVP's interesting to you. >> Particularly interesting. We were actually looking at other solutions to purchase in the next year to take it to the next level to provide the more real time replication for systems that really have to stay up rather than be restored. >> And the driver there is just to minimize, get as close to RPO zero as possible? >> Absolutely. If you look at an exchange environment for example their typical design is to build four servers in a DAG cluster so that you can do active-passive but instantaneous failover, right? But the problem with that comes in licensing. If you do Oracle it's the same thing. It doesn't cost a license if a system goes down to then restore that system someplace else, so do you want to pay twice as much licensing and build environments twice as big, or do you want to be able to just instantaneously failover, which won't cost more money. Which one meets the business needs? They both meet the business needs and one costs a lot less which means more money to do other things for the business. >> At SAAS they always love the practitioner perspective. Thanks guys for coming on theCUBE. Really, I appreciate it. >> Yeah, thanks. >> No problem. >> You're welcome. All right, keep it right there buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBEr live from VeeamOn 2017. We'll be right back. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Silicon Valley, it's the Cube. Covering Google Cloud Next 17. (ambient music) >> Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Palo Alto for a special two days of coverage of Google Next 2017 events in San Francisco. Sold out, 10,000 plus people. Yeah, really, an amazing turn of events. Amazon Web Services Reinvent had 36,000, Google's nipping at their heels, although different, we're going to break down the differences with Google versus Amazon because they're really two different things and again, this is Cube coverage here in Palo Alto studio, getting reaction. Sponsored by Intel, thanks, Intel, for allowing us to continue the wall-to-wall coverage of the key events in the tech industry. Our next guest is Val Bercovici who's the boardmember of the Cloud Native Compute Foundation, boardmember. >> That's right. >> Welcome back, you were here last week from Mobile World Congress, great to see you. Silicon contributor, what your reaction to the Google keynote, Google news? Not a lot of news, we saw the SAP, that was the biggest news and the rest were showcasing customers, most of the customers were G Suite customers. >> Yeah, exactly. So, I would say my first reaction is bit of a rough keynote, you know, there's definitely not as quit as much polish as Microsoft had in their heyday and of course, Amazon nowadays in the Cloud era. But what's interesting to me is there's the whole battle around empathy right now. So, the next gen developers and the Clouderati talk about user empathy and that means understanding the workflow of the user and getting the user to consume more of your stuff, you know, Snapchat gets user empathy for the millennial generation but anybody else. Facebook as well. So, you see Google, we emphasize, even the Google Twitter account, it emphasizes developer productivity and they have pretty strong developer empathy. But what AWS has, Amazon with AWS is enterprise empathy, right, they really understand how to package themselves and make themselves more consumable right now for a lot of mainstream enterprises, they've been doing this for three, four years at their Reinvent events now. Whereas Google is just catching up. They've got great developer empathy but they're just catching up on enterprise empathy. Those are the main differences I see. >> Yeah, I think that's an important point, Val, great, great point, I think Amazon certainly has, and I wrote this in my blog post this morning, getting a lot of reaction from that, actually, and some things I want to drill down on the network and security side. Some Google folks DMing me we're going to do that. But really, Amazon's lead is way out front on this. But the rest, you know, call 'em IBM, not in any particular, IBM, Oracle, Google, SAP, others, put Salesforces, we're talking Sass and Adobe, they're all in this kind of pack. It's like a NASCAR, you know, pack and you don't know who's going to slimshot around and get out there. But they all have their own unique use cases, they're using their own products to differentiate. We're hearing Google and again, this is a red flag for me because it kind of smells like they're hiding the ball. G Suite, I get the workplace productivity is a Cloud app, but that's not pure Cloud conversations, if you look at the Gartner, Gartner's recent, last report which I had a chance to get a peek at, there's no mention of Sassifications, Google G Suite's not in there, so the way Cloud is strictly defined doesn't even include Sass. >> Yeah. >> If you're going to include Sass, then you got to include Salesforce in that conversation or Adobe or others. >> Exactly. >> So, this is kind of an optical illusion in my mind. And I think that's something that points to Google's lack of traction on customers in the enterprise. >> This is where behind the scenes, Kubernetes, is so important and why I'm involved with the the CNCF. If anything, the first wave of Clouded option particularly by enterprise was centered around the VM model. And you know, infrastructure's a service based on VMs, Amazon, AWS is the king of that. What we're seeing right now is developers in particular that are developing the next generation of apps, most of them are already on our phones and our tablets and our houses and stuff, which is, you know, all these Echo-style devices. That is a container-based architecture that these next gen applications are based on. And so, Kubernetes, in my mind, is really nothing more than Google's attempt to create as much of a container-based ecosystem at scale so that the natural home for container-based apps will be GCP as opposed to AWS. That's the real long term play in why Google's investing so heavily in Kubernetes. >> Is that counterintuitive? Is that a good thing? I mean, it sounds like they're trying to change the goalpost, if you will, to change the game because we had Joe Arnold on, the founder of Swiftstack and you know, ultimately, you know, Clouds are Clouds and inter-Clouding and multi-Cloud is important. Does Kubernete actually help the industry? Or is that more Google specific in your mind? >> I think it will help the industry but the industry itself is moving so rapidly, we're seeing server-less right now and functions of service, and so, I think the landscape is shifting away from what we would think of as either VM or container-based infrastructure service towards having the right abstractions. What I'm seeing is that, really, even the most innovative enterprises today don't really care about their per minute or per hour cost for a cycle of computer, a byte of, you know, network transferred or stored. They care about big table, big quarry, the natural language processing, visual search, and a whole category of these AI based applications that they want to base their own new revenue-generating products and services based on. So, it's abstraction now as a new battlefield. AWS brings that cult of modularity to it, they're delivering a lot of cool services that are very high level Lambda centered based on really cool modularity, whereas Google's doing it, which is very, very elegant abstraction. It's at the developer level, at the technical level, that's what the landscape is at right now. >> Are you happy with Google's approach because I think Google actually doesn't want to be compared to AWS in a way. I mean, from what I can see from the keynote... >> Only by revenue. (laughs) >> Well, certainly, they're going to win that by throwing G Suite on it but, I mean, this is, again, a philosophy game, right? I mean, Andy Jassy is very customer focused, but they don't have their own Sass app, except for Amazon which they don't count on the Cloud. So, their success is all about customers, building on Amazon. Google actually has its own customer and they actually include that in, as does Microsoft with Office 365. >> Yeah, that's the irony, is if we go back to enterprise empathy I think it's Microsoft has that legacy of understanding the enterprise better than all the others. And they're beginning to leverage that, we're definitely seeing, as you're sliding comfortably to a number two position behind AWS, but it really does come back to, you know, are you going to lead with a propeller head lead in technology which Google clearly has, they've got some of the most superior technology, we were rattling off some the speeds and feeds that one of their product managers shared with you this morning. They've had amazing technology, that's unquestioned. But they do have also is this reputation of almost flying in rarefied air when it comes to enterprises. >> What do you mean by that? >> What I mean by that is that most enterprise IT organizations, even the progressive ones, have a hard time relating to Google technology. It's too far out there, it's too advanced, in some cases, they just can't understand it. They've never been trained in college courses on it or even post-grad courses on it. MBA is older than three years old, don't even reference the Cloud. So, there's a lot of training, a lot of knowledge that has to be, you know, conducted on the enterprise side. AWS is packaged, that technology there is the modularity in such a way that's more consumable. Not perfect, but more consumable than any other Cloud render and that's why, with an early head start, they've got the biggest enterprise traction today. >> Yeah, I mean, and I'm really bullish on Google, I love the company, I've been following them since '98, a lot of friends here at Palo Alto, a lot of Googlers living in my neighborhood, they're all around us. Larry Page, seen him around town. Great, great company and very, always been kind of like an academic, speed of academic. Very strong, technically, and that is, clearly, they're playing that card, "We have the technology." So, I would just say that, to counter that argument would be if Google, I'm Google, I'm on the team, the guy in green and you know, lookit, what I want to do is, we want to be the intel for the Cloud. So, the hard and top is we don't really care if people are trained, should be so easy to use, training doesn't matter. So, I mean, that's really more of an arrogant approach, but I don't think Google's being arrogant in the Cloud. I think that ship has sailed, I think Google has kind of been humbled in the sense, in recognizing that the enterprise is hard, they're checking the boxes. They have a partner program. >> Yeah, you're right, I mean, if you take a look at their customers today, you've got Spotify, and Snap, and Evernote, and you know, Pokemon Go and Niantic, all of the leading edge technology companies that have gone mainstream that are, you know, startup oriented Snap, of course. They're on Google Cloud. But that's not enough, you know, the enterprise, I did a seminar just last week promoting Container World with Jim Forge from ADP. The enterprise is not homogeneous, the enterprise is complicated. The L word legacy is all over, what they have to budget and plan for. So, the enterprise is just a lot more complicated than Google will acknowledge right now. And I believe if they were to humanize some of their advanced technology and package it and price it in such a way that AWS, you know, where they're seeing success, they'll accelerate their inevitable sort of leap to being one of those top three contenders. >> So, I'm just reading some of my, I'm putting together because for the Google folks, I'm going to interview them, just prepping for this, but just networking alone, isolating Cloud resources. That's hard, right? So, you know, virtual network in the Cloud, Google's got the virtual network. You get multiple IP addresses, for instance, ability to move network interfaces and IPs between instances, and AS networking support. Network traffic logging, virtual network peering, manage NAT gateways, subnet level filtering, IP V stick support, use any CIDR including RC 1918. Multiple network interface instances, I mean, this is complicated! (laughs) It's not easy so, you know, I think the strategy's going to be interesting to see how, does Google go into the point to point solution set, or they just say, "This is what we got, take it or leave it," and try to change the game? >> That's where they've been up until now and I don't think it's working because they have very formidable competitors that are not standing still. So, I think they're going to have to keep upping their game, again, not in terms of better technology but in terms of better packaging, better accessibility to their technology. Better trust, if you will, overseas. Cloud is a global game, it's not US only. And trust is so critical, there's a lot of skepticism in Europe today with the latest Wikileaks announcements, or Asia Today around. Any American based Cloud provider truly being able to isolate and protect my citizen's data, you know, within my borders. >> I think Google Cloud has one fatal flaw that I, looking at all the data, is that and the analysis that we've been looking at with Bookie Bontine and our research is that there's one thing that jumps out at me. I mean, the rest are all, I look at as, you know, Google's got such great technologies, they can move up fast, they can scale up to code. But the one thing that's interesting is their architecture, the way they handle their architecture is they can't let customers dictate data where data's stored. That is a huge issue for them. And if, to your point, if a user in Germany is using an app and it's got to stay in Germany. >> This is back to the empathy disconnect, right? As an abstraction layer for a developer, what I want is exactly what Google offers. I don't want to care as a developer where the bits and bytes are stored, I want this consistent, uniform API, I want to do cool stuff with the data. The operation side, particularly within legal parameters, regulatory parameters, you know, all sorts of other costs and quality assurance parameters, they really care about where that data is stored, and that's where having more enterprise empathy, and their thinking, and their offerings, and their pricing, and their packaging will leapfrog Google to where they want to be today. >> Val Bercovici, great analysis, I mean, I would totally agree just to lock that in, their developer empathy is so strong. And their operational one needs to be, they got a blind spot there where they got to work on that. And this is interesting because people who don't know Google are very strong operations, it's not like they don't have any ops chops. (Val laughs) They're absolutely in the five nines, they are awesome operations. But they've been operations for themselves. >> Exactly. >> So, that's the distinction you're getting at, right? >> Absolutely. >> Okay, so the next question I got to ask you is back to the developer empathy, 'cause I think it's a really big opportunity for Google. So, pointing out the fatal flaw in my opinions in the data locality thing. But I think the opportunity for Google to change the game, using the developer community opportunity because you mentioned the Kubernetes. There is a huge, open source, I don't want to say transformation but an evolution to the next generation, you're starting to see machine learning and AI start to tease out the leverage of not just data now. Data's become so massive now, you have data sets. That can be addressable and be treated like software programs. So, data as code becomes a new dynamic with AI. So, with AI, with open source, you're seeing a lot of activity, CNCF, the Cloud Native Compute Foundation, folks should check that out, that's an amazing group, analytics foundation. This is an awesome opportunity for Google to use Kubernetes as saying, "Hey, we will make orchestration of application workloads." >> Absolutely. >> This is something, Amazon's been great with open source, but they don't get a lot of love... >> Amazon has a blind spot on containers, let's not, you know, let's not call, you know, let's call it the speed of speed, let's not, you know, beat around the bush, they do have a blind spot around containers. It is something they strategically have to get a hold of, they've got some really interesting proprietary offerings. But it's not a natural home for a Docker workflow, it's not a natural home for a Kubernetes workflow yet. And it's something they have to work on and AI as a use case could not be more pertinent to business today because it's that quote, you know, "The future is here "but unevenly distributed." That's exactly where AI is today, the businesses that are figuring it out are really leaping ahead of their competitors. >> We're getting some great tweets, my phone's blowing up. Val, you've got great commentary. I want to bring up, so, I've been kind of over the top with the comment that I've been making. It's maybe mischaracterized but I'll say it again. There seems to be a Cold War going on inside the communities between, as Kubernetes have done, we've seen doc, or we've seen Docker Containers be so successful in this service list, server list vision, which is absolutely where Cloud Native needs to be in that notion of, you know, separating out fiscal gear and addressability, making it completely transparent, full dev ops, if you will. To who's going to own the orchestration and where does it sit on the stack? And with Kubernetes, to me, is interesting is that it tugs at some sacred cows in the container world. >> Yes. >> And it opens up the notion of multi-Cloud. I mean, assume latency can be solved at some point, but... >> It's actually core religion, what impressed me about he whole Kubernetes community, and community is its greatest strength, by the way, is the fact that they had a religion on multi-Cloud from day one. It wasn't about, "We'll add it later "'cause we know it's important," it's about portability and you know, even Docker lent that to the community. Portability is just a number one priority and now portability, at scale, across multiple Clouds, dynamically orchestrated, not through, you know, potential for human error, human interventions we saw last week. That the secret sauce there to stay. >> I think not only is, a Cold War is a negative connotation, but I think it's an opportunity to be sitting in the sun, if you will, on the beach with a pina colada because if you take the Kubernetes trend that's got developer empathy with portability, that speaks to what developers want, I want to have the ability to write code, ship it up to the network, and have it integrate in nicely and seamlessly so, you know, things can self-work and do all that. And AI can help in all those things. Connecting with operational challenges. So, what is, in your mind, that intersection? Because let's just say that Kubernetes is going to develop a nice trajectory which it has now and continues to be a nice way to galvanize a community around orchestration, portability, etc. Where does that intersect with some of the challenges and needs for operational effectiveness and efficiency? >> So, the dirtiest secret in that world is data gravity, rigtht? It's all well and fine to have workload portability across, you know, multiple instances and a cluster across multiple Clouds, so to speak. But data has weight, data has mass and gravity, and it's very hard to move particularly at scale. Kubernetes only in the last few releases with a furious pace in evolution, one four, one five, has a notion of provisioning persistent volumes, this thing they affectionately called pet sets that are not a stateful sets, I love that name. >> Cattle. >> Exactly. (laughs) So, Google is waking up and Kubernetes, I should say, in particular is waking up to the whole notion of managing data is really that last mile problem of Cloud portability and operational maturity. And planning around data gravity and overcoming where you can data gravity through meta-operational procedures is where this thing is going to really take off. >> I think that's where Google, I like Google's messaging, I like their posture on machine learning AI, I think that's key. But Amazon has been doing AI, they've got machine learning as a service, they've had Kineses for a while. In fact, Redshift and Kineses were their fastest growing services before Aurora became the big thing that they had. So, I think, you know, they're interested in the jets, with the trucks, and the snowmobile stuff. So I think certainly, Amazon's been doing that data and then rolling in as some sort of AI. >> And they've been humanizing it better, right? I can relate to some of Amazon's offering and sometimes I have it in the house. You know, so, the packaging and just the consumerability of these Amazon services today is ahead of where Google is and Google arguably has the superior technology. >> Yeah, and I think, you know, I was laying out my analysis of Google versus Amazon but I think it's not fair to try to compare them too much because Google is just making their opening moves on the chessboard. Because they had Diane Green, got to give her credit, she's really starting behind. And that's been talked about but they are serious, they're going to get there. The question is what does an enterprise need to do? So, your advice to enterprise would be what? Stick with the use cases that are either Google specific apps or Cloud Native, where do you go, how do you...? >> I would say to remember the lock-in days of the Linux vendors and even Microsoft in their heyday and definitely think multi-Cloud, you know, Cloud first is fine. But think, we need data first in a Cloud before I think a particular Cloud first. Always keep your options open, seek the highest levels of abstraction, particularly as you're innovating early on and fast failing in the Cloud. Don't go low right away, go low later on when you're operationalizing and scaled and looking to squeeze efficiencies out of a new product or service. >> Don't go low, you mean don't go low in the stack? >> Don't go low in the stack, exactly. Start very high in the stack. >> What would be an example? >> Lambda, you know, taking advantage of, if we bring in Kineses, IOT workflows, all sorts of sensor data coming in from the Edge. Don't code that for efficiency day one and switch to Kafka or something else that's more sophisticated, but keep it really high level as events triggering off, whether it's the IOTICK in the sensor inputs or whether it's S3 events, Dynamo, DB events. Write your functions that are very, very high level. >> Yeah. >> Get the workflows right. Pay a bit more money up front, pay premium for the fast... >> Well, there's also Bootstraps and the Training Channel Digimation, so, with Google, pick some things that are known out there. But you mentioned IOT and one of the things I was kind of disappointed in the keynote today, there wasn't much talk about IOT. You're not seeing IOT in the Google story. >> That may come up in tomorrow's keynote, it may come up tomorrow in a more technical context. But you're right, it's an area both Agar and AWS have a monster of a lead right now, as they've had really good SDKs out there to be able to create workflows without even being an expert in some of the devices that you know, you might own and maintain. >> Google's got some differentiation, they've got something, I'll highlight one that I like that I think is really compelling. Tensor flow. Tensor flow as got a lot of great traction and then Intel is writing chips with their Skylake product that actually runs much faster silicon... >> What was that, Nvidia? You know, it's a GPU game as much as a CPU game when it comes to machine learning. And it's just... >> What does that mean for you? I mean, that's exciting, you smile on that, I get geeked out on that because if you think about that, if you can have a relationship between the silicon and software, what does it mean from an impact standpoint? Do you think that's going to be a good accelerant for the game? >> Massive accelerant, you know, and this is where we get into sort of more rarefied air with Elon Musk's quote around the fact we'll need universal income for society. There a lot of static tasks that are automated today. There's more and more dynamic tasks now that these AI algorithms, through machine learning, can be trained to conduct in a very intelligent manner. So, more and more task based work all over the world, including in a robotic context but also call centers, stock brokerage, for example, it's been demonstrated that AI ML algorithms are superior to humans nine times out of ten in terms of recommending stocks. So, there's a lot of white collars, while it's blue collared work that just going to be augmented and then eliminated with these technologies and the fact that you have major players, economies at scales such as Intel and Nvidia and so forth accelerating that, making it affordable, fast, low power in certain edge context. That's, you know, really good for the industry. >> So, day one of two days of coverage here with Google, just thoughts real quick on what Google needs to do to really conquer the enterprise and really be credible, viable, successful, number two, or leader in the enterprise? >> I'm a big fan, you know, I've had personal experiences with fast following as opposed to leading and innovating sometimes in terms of getting market traction. I think they should unabashedly, unashamedly examine what Microsoft or what Amazon are doing right in the Cloud. Because you know, simple things like conducting a bit more of a smooth keynote, Google doesn't seem to have mastered it yet, right now in the Cloud space. And it's not rocket science, but shamelessly copying what works, shamelessly copying the packaging and the humanization that some of the advanced technologies that Amazon and Microsoft have done in particular. And then applying their technical superiority, you know, their uptime availability advantages, their faster networks, their strong consistency which is a big deal for developers across their regions. Emphasizing their strengths after they package and make their technology more consumable. As opposed to leading where the tech specs. >> And you have a lot of experience in the enterprise, table stakes out there that are pretty obvious that they need to check the boxes on, and would be what? >> A very good question, I would say, first and foremost, you really have to focus on more, you know, transparent pricing. Think something that is a whole black art in terms of optimizing your AWS usage in this industry that's formed around that. I think Google has and they enact blogs advertising a lot of advantages they have in the granularity, in the efficiency of their auto scaling up and down. But businesses don't really map that, they don't think of that first even though it can save them millions of dollars as they do move to Cloud first approaches. >> Yeah and I think Google got to shake that academic arrogance, in a way, that they've had a reputation for. Not that that's a bad thing, I'll give you an example, I love the fact that Google leads a lot of price performance on many levels in the Cloud, yet their SLAs are kind of wonky here and there. So, it's like, okay, enterprises like SLAs. You got to nail that. And then maybe keep their price a little high here, it can make more money, but... So, you were saying, is that enterprise might not get the fact that it's such a good deal. >> It's like enterprise sales 101, you talk about, you know, the operational benefits but you also talk about financial benefits and business benefits. Catching into those three contexts in terms of their technical superiority would do them a world of good as they seek more and more enterprise opportunities. >> Alright, Val Bercovici, CTO, also CTO, and also on the board of the Cloud Native Compute Foundation known as CNCF, a newly formed organization, part of the Linux Foundation. Really looking at the orchestration, looking at the containers, looking at Kubernetes, looking at a whole new world of app enablement. Val, thanks for the company, great to see you. Turning out to be guest contributor here on the Cube studio, appreciate his time. This is the Cube, two days of live coverage. Hope to have someone from Google on the security and network side coming in and calling in, we're going to try to set that up, a lot of conversations happening around that. Lot of great stuff happening at Google Next, we've got all the wall-to-wall coverage, reporters on the ground in San Francisco as well as analysts. And of course, in studio reaction here in Palo Alto. We'll be right back. (ambient music)