>> From the SiliconANGLE media office, in Boston, Massachusetts, it's the CUBE. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. Hi, CUBE nation, I'm Sam Kahane. Thanks for watching the CUBE. Due to popular demand from the community, I will be interviewing the legendary Stu Miniman, here today. He is S-T-U on Twitter. Stu and I are going to be digging in to the 2019 predictions, and also recapping 2018 for you here. So, Stu, let's get into it a little bit. 2018, can you set the stage? How many events did you go to? How many interviews did you conduct? >> Boy, Sam, it's tough to look back. We did so much with the CUBE this year. I, personally, did over 20 shows, and somewhere between 400 and 450 interviews, out of, we as a team did over a 100 shows, over 2000 interviews. So, really great to be in the community, and immerse ourselves, drink from the fire hose, and some of the data. (laughs) >> So, over 400 interviews this year, that's amazing. What about some of the key learnings from 2018? Yeah, Sam,my premise when I'm going out is, how are we maturing? My background, as you know, Sam, I'm an infrastructure guy. My early training was in networking. I worked on virtualization, and I've been riding this wave of cloud for about the last 10 years. So, about two years ago, it was, software companies, how are they living in these public clouds? Amazon, of course, the dominant player in the marketplace, but we know it will be a multi-cloud world. And the update, for 2018, is we've gone from, how do I live in those public clouds, to how are we maturing? We call it hybrid clouds, or multi-cloud, but living between these worlds. We saw the rise in Kubernetes, as a piece of it, but customers have lots of environments, and how they get their arms around that, is a serious challenge out there, today. So, how are the suppliers and communities, and the systems integration, helping customers with this really challenging new environment, that we have today. >> I'd love to hear any OMG moments from you. What surprised you the most this year? >> It's interesting, when I wanna think about some of the big moves in the industry, I mean, we had the largest software acquisition in tech history. IBM, the company you used to work for, Sam, buying Red Hat, a company I've worked with, for about 20 years, for 34 billion dollars. I mean, Red Hat has been the poster child for open source, and the exemplar of that. It was something that was like, wow, this is a big deal. We've been talking for a long time, how important developers are, and how important open source is, and there's nothing like seeing Big Blue, a 107-year-old company, putting in huge dollars, to really, not just validate, cause IBM's been working in open source, working with Linux for a long time, but how important this is to the future. And that sits right at that core of that multi-cloud world. Red Hat wants to position itself to live in a lot of those environments, not just for Linux, but the Middleware, Kubernetes is a big play. We saw a number of acquisitions in the space there. Red Hat bought CoreOS for $250 million. VMware bought Heptio, and was kind of surprised, at the sticker shock, $550 million. Great team, we know the Heptio team well. We talked to them, some of the core people, back when they were at Google. But, some big dollars are being thrown around, in this space, and, as you said, the big one in the world is Amazon. One of the stories that everybody tracked all year was the whole hq2 thing. It kind of struck me as funny, as Amazon is in Seattle. I actually got to visit Seattle, for the first time, this year, and somebody told me, if you look at the top 50 companies that have employees in Seattle, of course, Amazon is number one, but you need to take number two through 43, and add them together, to make them as big as Amazon. Here in Boston, there's a new facility going up, with 5,000 employees. I know they're going to have 25,000 in Long Island City, right in the Queens, in New York City, as well as Crystal City, right outside of DC, 25,000. But, the realization is that, of course, Amazon's going to have data centers, in pretty much every country, and they're going to have employees all around the world. This doesn't just stay to the US, but Amazon, overall. So, Amazon, just a massive employer. I know so many people who have joined them. (laughs) Some that have left them. But, almost everything that I talk about, tends to come back to Amazon, and what there are doing, or how people are trying to compete, or live in that ecosystem. >> You're always talking to the community. What are some of the hottest topics you're hearing out there? >> So, living in this new world, how are we dealing with developers? A story that I really liked, my networking background, the Cisco DevNet team, led by Suzie Wee, is a really phenomenal example, and one of my favorite interviews of the year. I actually got to talk to Suzie twice this year. We've known her for many years. She got promoted to be a Senior Vice President, which is a great validation, but what she built is a community from the ground up. It took about four years to build this platform, and it's not about, "Oh, we have some products, and developers love it.", but it's the marketplace that they live in, really do have builders there. It's the most exciting piece of what's happening at Cisco. My first show for 2019 will be back at Cisco, live in Barcelona, and Cisco going through this massive transformation, to be the dominant networking company. When they talk about their future, it is as a software company. That actually, it blew my mind, Sam. You know, Cisco is the networking company. When they say, "When you think of us, "five to ten years from now, "you won't think of us as a networking company. "You'll think of us as a software company." That's massive. They were one of the four horsemen of the internet era. And, if Cisco is making that change, everything changes. IBM, people said if they don't make this move for Red Hat, is there danger in the future? So, everything is changing so fast, it is one of the things that everybody tries to sort out and deal with. I've got some thoughts on that, which I'm sure we'll get to later on. >> (laughs) As is Suzie Wee one of your top interviews of 2018, could you give your top three interviews? >> First of all, my favorite, Sam, is always when I get to talk to the practitioners. A few of the practitioners I love talking to, at the Nutanix show in New Orleans this year, I talked to Vijay Luthra, with Northern Trust. My co-host of the show was Keith Townsend. Keith, Chicago guy, said, "Northern Trust is one "of the most conservative financial companies", and they are all-in on containerization, modernized their application. It is great to see a financial company that is driving that kind of change. That's kind of a theme I think you'll see, Sam. Another, one, was actually funny enough, Another Nutanix show, at London, had the Manchester City Council. So, the government, what they're doing, how they're driving change, what they're doing with their digital transformation, how they're thinking of IOT. Some of my favorite interviews I've done the last few years, have been in the government, because you don't think of government as innovating, but, they're usually resource-constrained. They have a lot of constituencies, and therefore, they need to do this. The Amazon public sector show was super-impressive. Everything from, I interviewed a person from the White House Historical Society. They brought on Jackie O's original guidebook, of being able to tour the White House. So, some really cool human interest, but it's all a digital platform on Amazon. What Amazon is doing in all of the industry-specific areas, is really impressive. Some of these smaller shows that we've done, are super-impressive. Another small show, that really impressed me, is UiPath, robotic process automation, or RPA, been called the gateway drug to AI, really phenomenal. I've got some background in operations, and one of the users on the program was talking about how you could get that process to somewhere around 97 to 98% compliance, and standardize, but when they put in RPA, they get it to a full six sigma, which is like 99.999%, and usually, that's something that just humans can't do. They can't just take the variation out of a process, with people involved. And, this has been the promise of automation, and it's a theme. One of my favorite questions, this year, has been, we've been talking about things like automation, and intelligence in systems, for decades, but, now, with the advent of AI machine learning, we can argue whether these things are actually artificial intelligence, in what they are learning, but the programming and learning models, that can be set up and trained, and what they can do on their own, are super-impressive, and really poised to take the industry to the next level. >> So, I wanna fast forward to 2019, but before we do so, anything else that people need to know about 2018? >> 2018, Sam, it's this hybrid multi-cloud world. The relationship that I think we spend the most time talking about, is we talked a lot about Amazon, but, VMware. VMware now has over 600,000 customers, and that partnership with VMware is really interesting. The warning, of course, is that Amazon is learning a lot from Vmware, When we joke with my friends, we say, "Okay, you've learned a lot from them means that "maybe I don't need them in the long term." But in the short term, great move for VMware, where they've solidified their position with customers. Customers feel happy as to where they live, in that multi-cloud environment, and I guess we throw out these terms like hybrid, and multi, and things like that, but when I talk to users, they're just figuring out their digital transformation. They're worried about their business. Yes, they're doing cloud, so sassify what you can, put in the public cloud what makes sense, and modernize. Beware of lift and shift, it's really not the answer. It could be a piece of the overall puzzle, to be able to modernize and pull things apart. An area, I always try to keep ahead of what the next bleeding-edge thing is, Sam. A thing I've been looking at, deeply, the last two years, has been serverless. Serverless is phenomenal. It could just disrupt everything we're talking about, and, Amazon, of course, has the lead there. So, it was kind of an undercurrent discussion at the KubeCon Show, that we were just at. Final thing, things are changing all the time, Sam, and it is impossible for anybody to keep up on all of it. I get the chance to talk to some of the most brilliant people, at some of the most amazing companies, and even those, you know, the PhD's, the people inventing stuff, they're like, "I can't keep up with what's going on at my company, "let alone what's going on in the industry." So, that's the wrong thing. Of course, one of the things we helped to do, is to extract the signal from the noise, help people distill that. We put it into video, we put it into articles, we put it into podcasts, to help you understand some of the basics, and where you might wanna go to learn more. So, we're all swimming in this. You know, the only constant, Sam, in the industry is change. >> Absolutely. (laughing in unison) >> So, things are changing. The whole landscape, as you said, is changing. Going into 2019, what should people expect? Any predictions from you? Any big mergers and acquisitions you might see? >> It's amazing, Sam. The analogy I always use is, when you have the hundred year flood, you always say, "Oh gosh, we got through it, "and we should be okay." No, no, no, the concern is, if you have the hundred year flood, or the big earthquake, the chances are that you're going to have maybe something of the same magnitude, might even be more or less, but rather soon. A couple of years ago, Dell bought EMC, largest acquisition in tech history. We spent a lot of time analyzing it. By the way, Dell's gonna go public, December 28. Interesting move, billions of dollars. As Larry Ellison said, "Michael Dell, "he's no dummy when it comes to money.' He is going to make, personally, billions of dollars off of this transaction, and, overall, looks good for the Dell technologies family, as they're doing. So, that acquisition, the Red Hat acquisition, yeah, we're probably gonna see a 10-to-20 billion dollar acquisition this year. I'm not sure who it is. There's a lot of tech IPOs on the horizon. The data protection space is one that we've kept a close eye on. From what I hear, Zeam, who does over a billion dollars a year, not looking to go public. Rubrik, on the other hand, somewhere in the north of 200 million dollars worth of revenue, I kind of remember 200, 250 in run rate, right now, likely going to go public in 2019. Could somebody sweep in, and buy them before they go public? Absolutely. Now, I don't think Rubrik's looking to be acquired. In that space, you've got Rubrik, you've got Cohesity, you've got a whole lot of players, that it has been a little bit frothy, I guess you'd say. But, customers are looking for a change in how they're doing things, because their environments are changing. They've got lots of stuff in sass, gotta protect that data. They've got things all over the cloud, and that data issue is core. When we actually did our predictions for 2018, data was at the center of everything, when I talked about Wikibon. It was just talking to Peter Burris and David Floyer, and they said there is some hesitancy in the enterprise, like, I'm using Salesforce, I'm using Workday I'm using ServiceNow. We hear all the things about Facebook giving my data away, Google, maybe the wrong people own data, there's that concern I want to pull things back. I always bristle a little bit, when you talk about things like repatriation, and "I'm not gonna trust the cloud." Look, the public clouds are more secure, than my data centers are in general, and they're changing and updating much faster. One of the biggest things we have, in IT, is that I put something in, and making changes is tough. Change, as we said, is the only thing constant. It was something I wrote about. Red Hat, actually, is a company that has dealt with a lot of change. Anybody that sells anything with Linux, or Kubernetes, there are so many changes happening, on not only weekly, but a daily basis, that they help bring a little bit of order, and adult supervision, to what most people would say is chaos out there. That's the kind of thing we need more in the industry, is I need to be able to manage that change. A line I've used many times is, you don't go into a company and say, "Hey, what version of Azure are you running?" You're running whatever Microsoft says is the latest and greatest. You don't have to worry about Patch Tuesday, or 08. I've got that things that's gonna slow down my system for awhile. Microsoft needs to make that invisible to me. They do make that thing invisible to me. So does Amazon, so does Google. >> What's your number one company to watch, this upcoming year. Is it Amazon, Sam? Look, Amazon is the company at the center of it all. Their ecosystem is amazing. While Amazon adds more in revenue, than the number two infrastructure player does in revenue. So, look, in the cloud space, it is not only Amazon's world. There definitely is a multi-cloud world. I went to the Microsoft show for the first time, this year, and Microsoft's super-impressive. They focus on your business applications, and their customers love it. Office 365 really helped move everybody towards sass, in a big way, and it's a big service industry. Microsoft's been a phenomenal turnaround story, the last couple of years. Definitely want to dig in more with that ecosystem, in 2019 and beyond. But, Amazon, you know, we could do more shows of the CUBE, in 2019, than we did our first couple of years. They have, of course, Amazon re:Invent, our biggest show of the year, but their second year, it's about 20 shows, that they do, and we're increasing those. I've been to the New York City Summit, and the San Francisco Summit. I've already mentioned their Public Sector Summit. Really, really, really good ecosystems, phenomenal users, and I already told you how I feel about talking to users. It's great to hear what they're doing, and those customers are moving things around. Google, love doing the Google show. We'll be back there in April. Diane Greene is one of the big guests of the year, for us this year. I was sorry to miss it in person, 'cause I actually have some background. I worked with Diane. Back before EMC bought VMware. I had the pleasure of working with Vmware, when they were, like, a hundred person company. Sam, one of the things, I look back at my career, and I'm still a little bit agog. I mean, I was in my mid-20s, working in this little company, of about 100 people, signed an NDA, started working with them, and that's VMware, with 600,000 customers. I've watched their ascendancy. It's been one of the pleasures of my career. There's small ones, heck. Nutanix I've mentioned a couple of times. I started working them when they were real small. They have over a billion in revenue. New Cure, since the early days. Some companies have done really well. The cloud is really the center of gravity of what I watch. Edge computing we got into a bit. I'm surprised we got almost 20 minutes into this conversation, without mentioning it. That, the whole IOT space, and edge computing, really interesting. We did a fun show with PTC, here in Boston. Got to talk to the father of AI, the father of virtual reality. It's like all these technologies, many of which have been bouncing around for a couple of decades. How are they gonna become real? We've got a fun virtual reality place right next door. The guy running the cameras for us is a huge VR enthusiast. How much will those take the next step? And, how much are things stalling out? I worry, was having conversations. Autonomous vehicles, we're even looking at the space. Been talking about it. Will it really start to accelerate? Or have we hit road blocks, and it's gonna get delayed. Some of these are technologies, some of these are policies in place, in governments and the like, and that's still one of the things that slows down crowded options. You know, GDPR was the big discussion, leading into the beginning of 2018. Now, we barely talk about it. There's more regulations coming, in California and the like, but we do need to worry about some of those macro-economical and political things that sometimes get in the way, of some of the technology pieces. >> I'd love to put something out into the universe, here. If you could interview anyone in the world, who would it be? Let's see if we can make it happen. It's amazing to me, Sam, some of the interviews we've done. I got a one-on-one with Michael Dell this year. It was phenomenal, Michael was one. It took us about three or four years before we got Michael on the program, the first time. Now, we have him two or three times a year. Really, to get to talk to him. There is the founder culture John Furrier always talks about. Some of these founders are very different. Michael, amazing, got to speak to him a couple of times. There's something that makes him special, and there's a reason why he's a billionaire, and he's done very well for himself. So, that was one. Furrier also interviewed John Chambers, who is one of the big gets I was looking at. I was jealous that I wasn't able to get there. I got to interview one of my favorite authors this year, Walter Isaacson, at the shows. When I look at, Elon Musk, of course, as a technologist, is, I'm amazed. I read his bio, I've heard some phenomenal interviews with him. Kara Swisher did a phenomenal sit-down on her podcast with him. Even the 60 Minutes interview was decent this year. >> The Joe Rogan one was great >> Yeah, so, you'd want to be able to sit down. I wouldn't expect Elon to be a 15-minute, rapid-fire conversation, like we usually have. But, we do some longer forms, sit down. So he would be one. Andrew Jassy, we've interviewed a number of times now. Phenomenal. We've got to get Bezos on the program. Some of the big tech players out there. Look, Larry Ellison's another one that we haven't had on the program. We've had Mark Hurd on the program, We've had lots of the Oracle executives. Oracle's one that you don't count out. They still have so many customers, and have strong power in new issues, So there are some big names. I do love some of the authors, that we've had on the program, some thought leaders in the space. Every time we go to a show, it's like, I was a little disappointed I didn't get to interview Jane Goodall, when she was at a show. Things like that. So, we ask, and never know when you can get 'em. A lot of times, it's individual stories of the users, which are phenomenal, and there's just thousands of good stories. That's why we go to some small shows, and make sure we always have some editorial coverage. So that, if their customers are comfortable sharing their story, that's the foundation our research was founded on. Peers sharing with their peers. Some of the most powerful stories of change, and taking advantage of new technologies, and really transforming, not just business, but health care and finance, and government. There's so much opportunity for innovation, and drivers in the marketplace today. >> Stu, I love it. Thanks for wrapping up 2018 for us, and giving us the predictions. CUBE nation, you heard it here. We gotta get Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Larry Ellison on the CUBE this year. We could use your help. Stu, thank you, and CUBE nation, thank you for watching. (electronic techno music)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from San Jose, it's theCUBE presenting Big Data Silicon Valley brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media and its ecosystem partner. >> What am I going to spend time, next 15, 20 minutes or so, talking about. I'm going to answer three things. Our research has gone deep into where are we now in the big data community. I'm sorry, where is the big data community going, number one. Number two is how are we going to get there and number three, what do the numbers say about where we are? So those are the three things. Now, since when we want to get out of here, I'm going to fly through some of these slides but again there's a lot of opportunity for additional conversation because we're all about having conversations with the community. So let's start here. The first thing to know, when we think about where this is all going is it has to be bound. It's inextricably bound up with digital transformation. Well, what is digital transformation? We've done a lot of research on this. This is Peter Drucker who famously said many years ago, that the purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer. That's what a business is. Now what's the difference between a business and a digital business? What's the business between Sears Roebuck, or what's the difference between Sears Roebuck and Amazon? It's data. A digital business uses data as an asset to create and keep customers. It infuses data and operations differently to create more automation. It infuses data and engagement differently to catalyze superior customer experiences. It reformats and restructures its concept of value proposition and product to move from a product to a services orientation. The role of data is the centerpiece of digital business transformation and in many respects that is where we're going, is an understanding and appreciation of that. Now, we think there's going to be a number of strategic capabilities that will have to be built out to make that possible. First off, we have to start thinking about what it means to put data to work. The whole notion of an asset is an asset is something that can be applied to a productive activity. Data can be applied to a productive activity. Now, there's a lot of very interesting implications that we won't get into now, but essentially if we're going to treat data as an asset and think about how we could put more data to work, we're going to focus on three core strategic capabilities about how to make that possible. One, we need to build a capability for collecting and capturing data. That's a lot of what IoT is about. It's a lot of what mobile computing is about. There's going to be a lot of implications around how to ethically and properly do some of those things but a lot of that investment is about finding better and superior ways to capture data. Two, once we are able to capture that data, we have to turn it into value. That in many respects is the essence of big data. How we turn data into data assets, in the form of models, in the form of insights, in the form of any number of other approaches to thinking about how we're going to appropriate value out of data. But it's not just enough to create value out of it and have it sit there as potential value. We have to turn it into kinetic value, to actually do the work with it and that is the last piece. We have to build new capabilities for how we're going to apply data to perform work better, to enact based on data. Now, we've got a concept we're researching now that we call systems of agency, which is the idea that there's going to be a lot of new approaches, new systems with a lot of intelligence and a lot of data that act on behalf of the brand. I'm not going to spend a lot of time going into this but remember that word because I will come back to it. Systems of agency is about how you're going to apply data to perform work with automation, augmentation, and actuation on behalf of your brand. Now, all this is going to happen against the backdrop of cloud optimization. I'll explain what we mean by that right now. Very importantly, increasingly how you create value out of data, how you create future options on the value of your data is going to drive your technology choices. For the first 10 years of the cloud, the presumption is all data was going to go to the cloud. We think that a better way of thinking about it is how is the cloud experience going to come to the data. We've done a lot of research on the cost of data movement and both in terms of the actual out-of-pocket costs but also the potential uncertainty, the transaction costs, etc, associated with data movement. And that's going to be one of the fundamental pieces or elements of how we think about the future of big data and how digital business works, is what we think about data movement. I'll come to that in a bit. But our proposition is increasingly, we're going to see architectural approaches that focus on how we're going to move the cloud experience to the data. We've got this notion of true private cloud which is effectively the idea of the cloud experience on or near premise. That doesn't diminish the role that the cloud's going to play on industry or doesn't say that Amazon and AWS and Microsoft Azure and all the other options are not important. They're crucially important but it means we have to start thinking architecturally about how we're going to create value of data out of data and recognize that means that it, we have to start envisioning how our organization and infrastructure is going to be set up so that we can use data where it needs to be or where it's most valuable and often that's close to the action. So if we think then about that very quickly because it's a backdrop for everything, increasingly we're going to start talking about the idea of where's the workload going to go? Where's workload the dog going to be against this kind of backdrop of the divorce of infrastructure? We believe that and our research pretty strongly shows that a lot of workloads are going to go to true private cloud but a lot of big data is moving into the cloud. This is a prediction we made a few years ago and it's clearly happening and it's underway and we'll get into what some of the implications are. So again, when we say that a lot of the big data elements, a lot of the process of creating value out of data is going to move into the cloud. That doesn't mean that all the systems of agency that build or rely on that data, the inference engines, etc, are also in a public cloud. A lot of them are going to be distributed out to the edge, out to where the action needs to be because of latency and other types of issues. This is a fundamental proposition and I know I'm going fast but hopefully I'm being clear. All right, so let's now get to the second part. This is kind of where the industry's going. Data is an asset. Invest in strategic business capabilities to appreciate, to create those data assets and appreciate the value of those assets and utilize the cloud intelligently to generate and ensure increasing returns. So the next question is well, how will we get there? Now. Right now, not too far from here, Neil Raden for example, was on the show floor yesterday. Neil made the observation that, as he wandered around, he only heard the word big data two or three times. The concept of big data is not dead. Whether the term is or is not is somebody else's decision. Our perspective, very simply, is that the notion is bifurcating. And it's bifurcating because we see different strategic imperatives happening at two different levels. On the one hand, we see infrastructure convergence. The idea that increasingly we have to think about how we're going to bring and federated data together, both from a systems and a data management standpoint. And on the other hand, we're going to see infrastructure or application specialization. That's going to have an enormous implication over next few years, if only because there just aren't enough people in the world that understand how to create value out of data. And there's going to be a lot of effort made over the next few years to find new ways to go from that one expertise group to billions of people, billions of devices, and those are the two dominant considerations in the industry right now. How can we converge data physically, logically, and on the other hand, how can we liberate more of the smarts associated with this very, very powerful approach so that more people get access to the capacities and the capabilities and the assets that are being generated by that process. Now, we've done at Wikibon, probably I don't know, 18, 20, 23 predictions overall on the role that or on the changes being wrought by digital business. Here I'm going to focus on four of them that are central to our big data research. We have many more but I'm just going to focus on four. The first one, when we think about infrastructure convergence we worry about hardware. Here's a prediction about what we think is going to happen with hardware and our observation is we believe pretty strongly that future systems are going to be built on the concept of how do you increase the value of data assets. The technologies are all in place. Simpler parts that it more successfully bind specifically through all its storage and network are going to play together. Why, because increasingly that's the fundamental constraint. How do I make data available to other machines, actors, sources of change, sources of process within the business. Now, we envision or we are watching before our very eyes, new technologies that allow us to take these simple piece parts and weave them together in very powerful fabrics or grids, what we call UniGrid. So that there is almost no latency between data that exists within one of these, call it a molecule, and anywhere else in that grid or lattice. Now again, these are not systems that are going to be here in five years. All the piece parts are here today and there are companies that are actually delivering them. So if you take a look at what Micron has done with Mellanox and other players, that's an example of one of these true private cloud oriented machines in place. The bottom line though is that there is a lot of room left in hardware. A lot of room. This is what cloud suppliers are building and are going to build but increasingly as we think about true private cloud, enterprises are going to look at this as well. So future systems for improving data assets. The capacity of this type of a system with low latency amongst any source of data means that we can now think about data not as... Not as a set of sources that have to be each individually, each having some control over its own data and sinks woven together by middleware and applications but literally as networks of data. As we start to think about distributing data and distributing control and authority associated with that data more broadly across systems, we now have to think about what does it mean to create networks of data? Because that, in many respects, is how these assets are going to be forged. I haven't even mentioned the role that security is going to play in all of this by the way but fundamentally that's how it's likely to play out. We'll have a lot of different sources but from a business standpoint, we're going to think about how those sources come together into a persistent network that can be acted upon by the business. One of the primary drivers of this is what's going on at the edge. Marc Andreessen famously said that software is eating the world, well our observation is great but if software's eating the world, it's eating it at the edge. That's where it's happening. Secondly, that this notion of agency zones. I said I'm going to bring that word up again, how systems act on behalf of a brand or act on behalf of an institution or business is very, very crucial because the time necessary to do the analysis, perform the intelligence, and then take action is a real constraint on how we do things. And our expectation is that we're going to see what we call an agency zone or a hub zone or cloud zone defined by latency and how we architect data to get the data that's necessary to perform that piece of work into the zone where it's required. Now, the implications of this is none of this is going to happen if we don't use AI and related technologies to increasingly automate how we handle infrastructure. And technologies like blockchain have the potential to provide a interesting way of imagining how these networks of data actually get structured. It's not going to solve everything. There's some people that think the blockchain is kind of everything that's necessary but it will be a way of describing a network of data. So we see those technologies on the ascension. But what does it mean for DBMS? In the old way, in the old world, the old way of thinking, the database manager was the control point for data. In the new world these networks of data are going to exist beyond a single DBMS and in fact, over time, that concept of federated data actually has a potential to become real. When we have these networks of data, we're going to need people to act upon them and that's essentially a lot of what the data scientist is going to be doing. Identifying the outcome, identifying the data that's required, and weaving that data through the construction and management, manipulation of pipelines, to ensure that the data as an asset can persist for the purposes of solving a near-term problem or over whatever duration is required to solve a longer term problem. Data scientists remain very important but we're going to see, as a consequence of improvements in tooling capable of doing these things, an increasing recognition that there's a difference between a data scientist and a data scientist. There's going to be a lot of folks that participate in the process of manipulating, maintaining, managing these networks of data to create these business outcomes but we're going to see specialization in those ranks as the tooling is more targeted to specific types of activities. So the data scientist is going to become or will remain an important job, going to lose a little bit of its luster because it's going to become clear what it means. So some data scientists will probably become more, let's call them data network administrators or networks of data administrators. And very importantly as I said earlier, there's just not enough of these people on the planet and so increasingly when we think about again, digital business and the idea of creating data assets. A central challenge is going to be how to create the data or how to turn all the data that can be captured into assets that can be applied to a lot of different uses. There's going to be two fundamental changes to the way we are currently conceiving of the big data world on the horizon. One is well, it's pretty clear that Hadoop can only go so far. Hadoop is a great tool for certain types of activities and certain numbers of individuals. So Hadoop solves problems for an important but relatively limited subset of the world. Some of the new data science platforms that we just talked about, that I just talked about, they're going to help with a degree of specialization that hasn't been available before in the data world, will certainly also help but it also will only take it so far. The real way that we see the work that we're doing, the work that the big data community is performing, turned into sources of value that extend into virtually every single corner of humankind is going to be through these cloud services that are being built and increasingly through packaged applications. A lot of computer science, it still exists between what I just said and when this actually happens. But in many respects, that's the challenge of the vendor ecosystem. How to reconstruct the idea of packaged software, which has historically been built around operations and transaction processing, with a known data model and an unknown or the known process and some technology challenges. How do we reapply that to a world where we now are thinking about, well we don't know exactly what the process is because the data tells us at the moment that the actions going to be taking place. It's a very different way of thinking about application development. A very different way of thinking about what's important in IT and very different way of thinking about how business is going to be constructed and how strategy's going to be established. Packaged applications are going to be crucially important. So in the last few minutes here, what are the numbers? So this is kind of the basis for our analysis. Digital business, role of data is an asset, having an enormous impact in how we think about hardware, how do we think about database management or data management, how we think about the people involved in this, and ultimately how we think about how we're going to deliver all this value out to the world. And the numbers are starting to reflect that. So why don't you think about four numbers as I go through the two or three slides. Hundred and three billion, 68%, 11%, and 2017. So of all the numbers that you will see, those are four of the most important numbers. So let's start by looking at the total market place. This is the growth of the hardware, software, and services pieces of the big data universe. Now we have a fair amount of additional research that breaks all these down into tighter segments, especially in software side. But the key number here is we're talking about big numbers. 103 billion over the course of next 10 years and let's be clear that 103 billion dollars actually has a dramatic amplification on the rest of the computing industry because a lot of the pricing models associated with, especially the software, are tied back to open source which has its own issues. And very importantly, the fact that the services business is going to go through an enormous amount of change over the next five years as service companies better understand how to deliver some of these big data rich applications. The second point to note here is that it was in 2017 that the software market surpassed the hardware market in big data. Again, for first number of years we focused on buying the hardware and the system software associated with that and the software became something that we hope to discover. So I was having a conversation here in theCUBE with the CEO of Transwarp which is a very interesting Chinese big data company and I asked what's the difference between how you do things in China and how we do things in the US? He said well, in the US you guys focus on proof of concept. You spend an enormous amount of time asking, does the hardware work? Does the database software work? Does the data management software work? In China we focus on the outcome. That's what we focus on. Here you have to placate the IT organization to make sure that everybody in IT is comfortable with what's about to happen. In China, were focused on the business people. This is the first year that software is bigger than hardware and it's only going to get bigger and bigger over time. It doesn't mean again, that hardware is dead or hardware is not important. It's going to remain very important but it does mean that the centerpiece of the locus of the industry is moving. Now, when we think about what the market shares look like, it's a very fragmented market. 60%, 68% of the market is still other. This is a highly immature market that's going to go through a number of changes over the next few years. Partly catalyzed by that notion of infrastructure convergence. So in four years our expectation is that, that 68% is going to start going down pretty fast as we see greater consolidation in how some of these numbers come together. Now IBM is the biggest one on the basis of the fact that they operate in all these different segments. They operating the hardware, software, and services segment but especially because they're very strong within the services business. The last one I want to point your attention to is this one. I mentioned earlier on, that our expectation is that the market increasingly is going to move to a packaged application orientation or packaged services orientation as a way of delivering expertise about big data to customers. Splunk is the leading software player right now. Why, because that's the perspective that they've taken. Now, perhaps we're a limited subset. It's perhaps for a limited subset of individuals or markets or of sectors but it takes a packaged application, weaves these technologies together, and applies them to an outcome. And we think this presages more of that kind of activity over the course of the next few years. Oracle, kind of different approach and we'll see how that plays out over the course of the next five years as well. Okay, so that's where the numbers are. Again, a lot more numbers, a lot of people you can talk to. Let me give you some action items. First one, if data was a core asset, how would IT, how would your business be different? Stop and think about that. If it wasn't your buildings that were the asset, it wasn't the machines that were the asset, it wasn't your people by themselves who were the asset, but data was the asset. How would you reinstitutionalize work? That's what every business is starting to ask, even if they don't ask it in the same way. And our advice is, then do it because that's the future of business. Not that data is the only asset but data is a recognized central asset and that's going to have enormous impacts on a lot of things. The second point I want to leave you with, tens of billions of users and I'm including people and devices, are dependent on thousands of data scientists that's an impedance mismatch that cannot be sustained. Packaged apps and these cloud services are going to be the way to bridge that gap. I'd love to tell you that it's all going to be about tools, that we're going to have hundreds of thousands or millions or tens of millions or hundreds of millions of data scientists suddenly emerge out of the woodwork. It's not going to happen. The third thing is we think that big businesses, enterprises, have to master what we call the big inflection. The big tech inflection. The first 50 years were about known process and unknown technology. How do I take an accounting package and do I put on a mainframe or a mini computer a client/server or do I do it on the web? Unknown technology. Well increasingly today, all of us have a pretty good idea what the base technology is going to be. Does anybody doubt it's going to be the cloud? We got a pretty good idea what the base technology is going to be. What we don't know is what are the new problems that we can attack, that we can address with data rich approaches to thinking about how we turn those systems into actors on behalf of our business and customers. So I'm a couple minutes over, I apologize. I want to make sure everybody can get over to the keynotes if you want to. Feel free to stay, theCUBE's going to be live at 9:30. If I got that right. So it's actually pretty exciting if anybody wants to see how it works, feel free to stay. Georgia's here, Neil's here, I'm here. I mentioned Greg Terrio, Dave Volante, John Greco, I think I saw Sam Kahane back in the corner. Any questions, come and ask us, we'll be more than happy. Thank you very much for, oh David Volante. >> David: I have a question. >> Yes. >> David: Do you have time? >> Yep. >> David: So you talk about data as a core asset, that if you look at the top five companies by market cap in the US, Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc. They're data companies, they got data at the core which is kind of what your first bullet here describes. How do you see traditional companies closing that gap where humans, buildings, etc at the core as we enter this machine intelligence era, what's your advice to the traditional companies on how they close that gap? >> All right. So the question was, the most valuable companies in the world are companies that are well down the path of treating data as an asset. How does everybody else get going? Our observation is you go back to what's the value proposition? What actions are most important? what's data is necessary to perform those actions? Can changing the way the data is orchestrated and organized and put together inform or change the cost of performing that work by changing the cost transactions? Can you increase a new service along the same lines and then architect your infrastructure and your business to make sure that the data is near the action in time for the action to be absolute genius to your customer. So it's a relatively simple thought process. That's how Amazon thought, Apple increasingly thinks like that, where they design the experience and they think what data is necessary to deliver that experience. That's a simple approach but it works. Yes, sir. >> Audience Member: With the slide that you had a few slides ago, the market share, the big spenders, and you mentioned that, you asked the question do any of us doubt that cloud is the future? I'm with Snowflake, I don't see many of those large vendors in the cloud and I was wondering if you could speak to what are you seeing in terms of emerging vendors in that space. >> What a great question. So the question was, when you look at the companies that are catalyzing a lot of the change, you don't see a lot of the big companies being at the leadership. And someone from Snowflake just said, well who's going to lead it? That's a big question that has a lot of implications but at this point time it's very clear that the big companies are suffering a bit from the old, from the old, trying to remember what the... RCA syndrome. I think Clay Christensen talked about this. You know, the innovators dilemma. So RCA actually is one of the first creators. They created the transistor and they held a lot of original patents on it. They put that incredible new technology, back in the forties and fifties, under the control of the people who ran the vacuum tube business. When was the last time anybody bought RCA stock? The same problem is existing today. Now, how is that going to play out? Are we going to see a lot of, as we've always seen, a lot of new vendors emerge out of this industry, grow into big vendors with IPO related exits to try to scale their business? Or are we going to see a whole bunch of gobbling up? That's what I'm not clear on but it's pretty clear at this point in time that a lot of the technology, a lot of the science, is being done in smaller places. The moderating feature of that is the services side. Because there's limited groupings of expertise that the companies that today are able to attract that expertise. The Googles, the Facebooks, the AWSs, etc, the Amazons. Are doing so in support of a particular service. IBM and others are trying to attract that talent so they can apply it to customer problems. We'll see over the next few years whether the IBMs and the Accentures and the big service providers are able to attract the kind of talent necessary to diffuse that knowledge into the industry faster. So it's the rate at which that the idea of internet scale computing, the idea of big data being applied to business problems, can diffuse into the marketplace through services. If it can diffuse faster that will have both an accelerating impact for smaller vendors, as it has in the past. But it may also again, have a moderating impact because a lot of that expertise that comes out of IBM, IBM is going to find ways to drive in the product faster than it ever has before. So it's a complicated answer but that's our thinking at this point time. >> Dave: Can I add to that? >> Yeah. (audience member speaking faintly) >> I think that's true now but I think the real question, not to not to argue with Dave but this is part of what we do. The real question is how is that knowledge going to diffuse into the enterprise broadly? Because Airbnb, I doubt is going to get into the business of providing services. (audience member speaking faintly) So I think that the whole concept of community, partnership, ecosystem is going to remain very important as it always has and we'll see how fast those service companies that are dedicated to diffusing knowledge, diffusing knowledge into customer problems actually occurs. Our expectation is that as the tooling gets better, we will see more people be able to present themselves truly as capable of doing this and that will accelerate the process. But the next few years are going to be really turbulent and we'll see which way it actually ends up going. (audience member speaking faintly) >> Audience Member: So I'm with IBM. So I can tell you 100% for sure that we are, I hired literally 50 data scientists in the last three months to go out and do exactly what you're saying. Sit down with clients and help them figure out how to do data science in the enterprise. And so we are in fact scaling it, we're getting people that have done this at Google, Facebook. Not a whole lot of those 'cause we want to do it with people that have actually done it in legacy fortune 500 Companies, right? Because there's a little bit difference there. >> So. >> Audience Member: So we are doing exactly what you said and Microsoft is doing the same thing, Amazon is actually doing the same thing too, Domino Data Lab. >> They don't like they're like talking about it too much but they're doing it. >> Audience Member: But all the big players from the data science platform game are doing this at a different scale. >> Exactly. >> Audience Member: IBM is doing it on a much bigger scale than anyone else. >> And that will have an impact on ultimately how the market gets structured and who the winners end up being. >> Audience Member: To add too, a lot of people thought that, you mentioned the Red Hat of big data, a lot of people thought Cloudera was going to be the Red Hat of big data and if you look at what's happened to their business. (background noise drowns out other sounds) They're getting surrounded by the cloud. We look at like how can we get closer to companies like AWS? That was like a wild card that wasn't expected. >> Yeah but look, at the end of the day Red Hat isn't even the Red Hat of open source. So the bottom line is the thing to focus on is how is this knowledge going to diffuse. That's the thing to focus on. And there's a lot of different ways, some of its going to diffuse through tools. If it diffuses through tools, it increases the likelihood that we'll have more people capable of doing this in IBM and others can hire more. That Citibank can hire more. That's an important participant, that's an important play. So you have something to say about that but it also says we're going to see more of the packaged applications emerge because that facilitates the diffusion. This is not, we haven't figured out, I don't know exactly, nobody knows exactly the exact shape it's going to take. But that's the centerpiece of our big data researches. How is that diffusion process going to happen, accelerate, and what's the resulting structure going to look like? And ultimately how are enterprises going to create value with whatever results. Yes, sir. (audience member asks question faintly) So the recap question is you see more people coming in and promising the moon but being incapable of delivering because they are, partly because the technology is uncertain and for other reasons. So here's our approach. Or here's our observation. We actually did a fair amount of research on this. When you take a look at what we call a approach to doing big data that's optimized for the costs of procurement i.e. let's get the simplest combination of infrastructure, the simplest combination of open-source software, the simplest contracting, to create that proof of concept that you can stand things up very quickly if you have enough expertise but you can create that proof of concept but the process of turning that into actually a production system extends dramatically. And that's one of the reasons why the Clouderas did not take over the universe. There are other reasons. As George Gilbert's research has pointed out, that Cloudera is spending 53, 55 % of their money right now just integrating all the stuff that they bought into the distribution five years ago. Which is a real great recipe for creating customer value. The bottom line though is that if we focus on the time to value in production, we end up taking a different path. We don't focus as much on whether the hardware is going to work and the network is going to work and the storage can be integrated and how it's going to impact the database and what that's going to mean to our Oracle license pool and all the other things that people tend to think about if they're focused on the technology. And so as a consequence, you get better time to value if you focus on bringing the domain expertise, working with the right partner, working with the appropriate approach, to go from what's the value proposition, what actions are associated with a value proposition, what's stated in that area to perform those actions, how can I take transaction costs out of performing those actions, where's the data need to be, what infrastructure do I require? So we have to focus on a time to value not the time to procure. And that's not what a lot of professional IT oriented people are doing because many of them, I hate say it, but many of them still acquire new technology with the promise to helping the business but having a stronger focus on what it's going to mean to their careers. All right, I want to be really respectful to everybody's time. The keynotes start in about five minutes which means you just got time. If you want to stay, feel free to stay. We'll be here, we'll be happy to talk but I think that's pretty much going to close our presentation broadcast. Thank you very much for being an attentive audience and I hope you found this useful. (upbeat music)

>> Hi everyone, I'm Sam Kahane and you're watching The Cube from VM World 2017. Excited to be here with Henning Volkmer, the American CEO of ThinPrint. Henning, thanks for coming on the Cube today. >> Sam, thanks for having me. >> So, can you tell us a little bit about your company? >> Sure, ThinPrint's a pretty well-known name in the virtualization space I think. VM are actually licensed a bit of our technology for us and view we've been working with us Centrics for almost 20 years, Microsoft around their term of services offering. And really trying to build solutions that allow people to manage printing and the enterprise and make it as easy and performance oriented as possible. >> Great so we're now at Wednesday. The event's been going on for a while. And you've been talking to the community and customers, what have you been hearing? >> It's been pretty incredible. I think everyone's extremely excited about the announcement, about the new technologies that are coming out, things moving to the cloud and we've had an announcement of our own, I think that was well received, so it's been a good week. >> So that's part of the reason we wanted to bring you up here. You have an announcement, a big announcement. Could you share that with the community? >> Sure, we're announcing ez-bash. It's a truly cloud-based server that's print management solution. All of the annoying things like assigning drivers to printers, assigning printers to users, that all moves into the cloud. But the actual print process remains a local direct IP printing directly from the user to their printers so that they don't rely on any of the network connections outside of their office and also we never actually see any of the print data for anyone's concerned about privacy. >> What do you want the viewers to take away from this interview, one or two lines, what's the takeaway? >> Printing's important to their business. They may not recognize it as much as it actually is important. It probably is a little bit annoying at times. It really doesn't have to be. Just come talk to us, and we'll have a solution for you. >> Thank you, you heard it here on the Cube.

>> Hi everyone, I'm Sam Kahane and you're watching theCUBE, on the ground, extremely excited for our segment here. Wasabi just launched last week on Wednesday. We have their co-founder and CEO with us here today on theCUBE. David, thank you for coming on today. >> Hey, nice to be here Sam. Thank you. >> So, unbelievably exciting. Can you tell the world about Wasabi? >> So if you know what Amazon S3 cloud storage is, you pretty much know what Wasabi is, except we're one-fifth the price and six-times as fast. (laughing) >> Incredible. So, you know, co-founder and CEO of Carbonite decided to start Wasabi. Tell us, why Wasabi? >> Why the name Wasabi? >> Well, the name as well. >> Cause it's hot. (laughing) My co-founder Jeff Flowers, who's one of the great technical geniuses I've ever met in my life, came to me about three years ago, with this paper design for a new storage architecture, and said, "I think we could do something that's going to be far faster and far more efficient in storage than what the cloud providers Google, Amazon and Microsoft are doing," and I said okay, "Well you should go check it out." So he left Carbonite, and we spent about a year doing design work, and eventually we ended up with this design that was so compelling to me that I decided it was time to jump on board, and join Jeff again, and this is this is the sixth company that we founded together since 1980. So we kind of know how to complete each other's sentences. It's been a winning combination, there's been quite a lot of successes there. >> So, I'd love to hear about the vision of Wasabi. >> My vision of Wasabi and cloud storage in general is that cloud storage ought to be like electricity or bandwidth, it should just be a commodity. Right now you have all these silly tiers, you have Coldline and Nearline and Standard and Glacier, and these artificial tiers that Amazon, Google and Microsoft have made to try to protect their high price spread. Wasabi is faster than the fastest of them and it's cheaper than the cheapest of them, so why do you need all these silly things in the middle? It's just like electricity, you go to plug your computer or your blender into the wall, you don't have three different plugs, one for great electricity, one for so-so electricity and one for crumby but cheap electricity, you know, you just have one. So one size fits almost all needs, and I think that's the way cloud storage is going to be as well. When we get to that, it'll be best man wins, right? The guy with the best performance and the lowest cost is going to win, and we feel we can compete in that environment. >> So a buzzword I've been hearing is 'immutable buckets', can you tell me about that? >> Yeah, so that's the one functional difference between Amazon S3 and Wasabi, otherwise Wasabi is completely 100% plug compatible with Amazon. You can unplug Amazon, plug in Wasabi and all your applications should work, and the other way around too. That's part of being a commodity, right? Your suppliers should be interchangeable. But, immutable buckets is something which really came from our Carbonite heritage. We know from Carbonite that most data loss is not due to failing disk drives and things like that today, it's stupid mistakes, you know people accidentally overwrite or delete a file? It's bugs in application software cause data to get overwritten or deleted. Then you get things like Wannacry, which come in, grabs all the data on your computer and encrypts it. So immutability means if you store data in an immutable bucket, it cannot be altered, and it cannot be deleted. It can't be deleted by you, it can't be deleted by us, and it certainly can't be deleted by a hacker or somebody breaking in from the outside. So, about 10 or 20 years ago, people invented something called the WORM tape, write-once-read-many, that was really one of the first forms of immutable digital storage. Once you put your data on there, that was it, when the tape is full, you take it off, put it in the drawer, and it's safe. That's not a very good system by today's standards, but we've built immutability into Wasabi, so that when you create a bucket in Wasabi, and for those people who don't know about object storage technology, a bucket is like a folder, and an object is like a file, when you create a bucket in Wasabi, you can flip a switch and you can say, "I want to make this bucket immutable for 10 years," let's say, and any time you go in and try to erase or alter any of the data that's been written, you just get an error message, which is what the wannabe virus would have gotten had it tried to encrypt that data. So the only downside of immutability is once you put something in there, you can't go in and clean it up. You're going to be stuck paying to store that data for a long time, but at our price of 0.39 cents per gigabyte per month, I don't think anybody would bother ever trying to clean it up anyway. You know, it's like when's a good time to go empty that U-Haul storage locker? Eh, I'll write another cheque for $40 and think about it next time. (laughing) >> So your tag-on is a hot storage? >> Hot storage, yeah. >> So you launched one week ago, on Wednesday. Tell us about that first week, how crazy was it? >> Well the only thing we did was some PR, so there were a number of articles that appeared about us, and we were expecting maybe 15, 20 companies would come sign up in the first week, do a free trial. But by 48 hours in, we were over 150, and by one more day we were at over 200. And we kind of had to shut down new sign-ups because it was just more than we could handle. We were just worried that we would get overwhelmed. Now we're trying to catch up, we just put more storage online in the last 24 hours, and now we're working through the stack of people. I don't know how many more have come in since then, but it's been a lot, so we're working through that now to give people their passcodes so that they can get on the system, hopefully by this time next week we'll be caught up. >> Well congratulations. >> Thanks, thanks! >> Any last words that you want to leave the people with about Wasabi? >> Well anytime you drop the price of anything by 80%, unexpected things are going to happen. When bandwidth suddenly got cheap, you got Netflix and movies over the internet and that kind of stuff, which people hadn't even dreamed about. I'll be really interested to see what people do with really cheap, fast storage. When you think about all these storage intensive apps like Pinterest, Instagram and things that involve videos and so forth, storage has got to be your biggest cost. And most of these apps are free, so the only revenue you're going to get is going to be advertising. I'll bet there are a lot of business models that just won't work at Amazon's prices, but drop those prices by 80%, and now suddenly you say, "Wow, this could be profitable." I'm not going to invent those apps, but I'm sure that some of the people who are signing up for Wasabi today are thinking about things that didn't work in the old regime, but with commodity cloud storage at these low prices, it starts to make sense. So we'll see, I think it's going to change the world. >> I hope so, and it's going to be exciting to watch. >> Yeah, it'll be fun. >> We'll need to catch up again soon and check back in on the growth. But David, thank you for coming on theCUBE tonight! >> You're welcome Sam, thank you. >> And CUBENation, thank you for watching. (Outro music)

>> Announcer: From the SiliconANGLE Media Office, in Boston, Massachusetts. It's theCUBE. (upbeat music) >> Hi everyone, I'm Sam Kahane with senior WIKIBon analyst, Stu Miniman and you're watching theCUBE. In 10 minutes or less, we're going to teach you everything you need to know about DockerCon 2017. Here's the agenda, we're going to start with the basics, what is DockerCon and why you should care. Then we're going to discuss the maturity of the container ecosystem. After that, we're going to talk about Docker as a business. And then we're going to finish by talking about the users, and what they should look for at the show. So real excited to have Stu Miniman with me, he is our DockerCon expert. Stu, how many years have you been at the show? >> So Sam, it's the fourth year of DockerCon. It will be my third show, also the third year we've had theCUBE. I was at the first one in 2014. Super exciting show. Everybody got all hyped up for a couple of years, we just Docker, Docker, Docker everything. And then from the second year on, we've done the North American show. Maybe we'll do the Copenhagen show later this year because Docker will be back in Europe. But super exciting, going to do two full days of live coverage from Austin, Texas and you'll be joining us. >> I will be, and who will you be hosting with? >> So John Furrier will be there. John and I host a lot of the open source shows. John's known DockerCon since that first 2014. It was actually at a Red Hat Summit, we interviewed Solomon Hykes, who's the founder of Docker, the company. And so much history we can't get through all of it in the, under 10 minutes, but super excited for the container ecosystem, everything that's going on. It's still been a bubbling and exciting area. >> So you've seen this show grow. Let's talk a little bit about the maturity of the Docker Ecosystem. >> Yeah so, as you said, there's so much history here Sam, there's the little D, Docker, which is the open-source project itself. And big D, the company. So let's talk about containers in the ecosystem. So while Docker didn't create containers, Docker is the company that really has democratized it for the world. So reminds me a lot of VMware. So VMware didn't come up with the idea for virtual machines, which actually goes back to the mainframe era. But they helped bring it into the PC world. And in the same way, Docker is really taking this container format which had existed in a couple of other operating systems and it takes that Linux container which is how we look at bundling things really at the application layer, making it really simple, usually ties into, a lot of people talking about how microservices fits into it. A lot of these new frameworks are leveraging containers. So containers are maturing. And some of the problems that we've had in the past with infrastructure, how does it work with infrastructure? How does things like storage and networking work? The community in the container world have been knocking those down. And Docker, the company has also been knocking those down. So containers are definitely maturing, it's definitely something that in many ways we've gone through the peak of hype, through a little bit of the trough of disillusionment, if you follow the normal hype curve. And today, containers are being used in a lot of ways, we still want to see is how many companies are actually fully using containers in production environments. Is it all stateless storage? Is there stateful storage? There's lots of start-ups, lots of big companies, everything from, heck, Microsoft just bought a big company, Deis. Which if you look them up, oh, it's in the container ecosystem. We'll talk about the competitive piece at the end. Every cloud today is talking about containers in there. So, containers are here to stay, they're an underlying foundational piece of what's happening kind of in the infrastructure and application world. And so, DockerCon, is really the center place for a lot of us to gather and talk about that. >> Great, so this is Docker show. How is Docker doing as a business? >> It's interesting, we had a couple of, it's been some struggles over the last couple of years as to, reseparating containers and Docker the open source, versus Docker the company. Last year, there was a little bit of air sucked out of the ecosystem when Docker said, oh well we have this way to manage lots of containers called Docker Swarm. Docker Swarm's great, it's pretty simple, it works well. But when Docker said, when you buy our solution, it comes bundled with it. Also, people were saying, well, I might prefer to use Mesos, I might want to do Kubernetes. We've covered Kubernetes, really cool stuff, with CubeCon show that we've done, itself. So Docker's like, well, the old term was batteries are included but swappable. But the community kind of bristled at a lot of that. What I like is that Docker has done some repackaging. They now have two flavors that you can get of the Docker solution. There's Docker CE, which is the community edition, which is the free open source. Releases are coming like every six weeks, that could be tough for a lot of people. And how much? Do I just take it and use it? So Docker understands that they want to bring this to the enterprise, so they created the EE, or enterprise edition, which has release cycles that fits with the enterprise more. It has really the service and support that you kind of expect there. It reminds me lot of anybody that's been in this space. You look at what happened in the Linux world, you look at what happened with VMware, and their maturation over time. And we see Docker kind of moving in that general direction, but it still remains to be seen. We go to the show, last year, Docker Swarm, some people got frustrated as to what Docker put together. What will Docker announce this year? Will they take on a piece of the ecosystem where people are taking dollars? Or where are the dollars and how the customer consume, are some of the big questions that we look at. >> What are the competitive dynamics here? >> Yeah, so Sam, I mentioned containers are fitting in everywhere. Every note that I get from cloud players here, it's kind of assumed that there's containers underneath. When you go to Amazon show, Google show, Microsoft show, containers are there and Docker is in a big way. Most of the cloud services that are put together, have Docker, there's great partnership. Docker with Amazon. Microsoft actually created containers for Microsoft. People were like, oh my god. I looked at it and said, this is probably going to take three years. Microsoft moved faster than I ever thought they would, to be able to make, I can have Linux containers, and I can have the Windows containers, and I can actually manage them together. They're not swappable, they're still two different formats but Docker supports, has support and has worked on both of those. It was amazing to see. Google is greatly involved in containers and Docker's there. And of course, I can do on-prem solutions also. Competitively, the big question is, who makes money? Because all of these cloud players, whether you're IBM, Amazon, there's pieces of the pie that they're going to take. So where can Docker actually get a footprint, that big D Docker? Because there's lots of companies that I talk to that say, oh yeah, we're using containers and I use the Docker format. But maybe I'm only using the registry from Docker. Or, oh wait, IBM has a registry, Microsoft does registries, everybody has that. Where am I actually coming to Docker, the company? And I think as we see kind of that CE and EE that I mentioned earlier, play out, Docker does have an opportunity there, but it's an interesting competitive dynamic. There's always that given push from the ecosystem as to Docker built a big ecosystem and did they eat parts of it? AHLA, Intel in the past, even VMware has done some of that. Or can they live amongst that and make a good living because they're UNICORE? I think they were over a billion dollar in valuation when they had less than 10 million dollars in revenue, which is just one of those astronomical Valley things that you look at. But containers are all over the globe, huge adoption of the project itself. And it's going to be great next week to get the pulse from everybody as to where they are, where they're winning, and what customers are doing really cool things with that they couldn't do before they had containers in general and Docker specifically. >> Yeah, so speaking of the show, it's going to be the biggest DockerCon to date, I'm very excited for that. The users and the community that's at the event, what should they look for? >> Yeah so, the first thing is, let's look to our peers. What customers are going to get on stage? Are these, one from the Valley? Or kind of the web 2.0 companies, that you're like, oh yeah, that's interesting but people want to see the financial services companies. People want to see retail companies. Where are they using containers? Were they using it in production? What kind of use cases are they doing? How have they rewritten, changed their businesses to take advantage of this? Because the business can only move as fast as their applications are, and Docker is one of those things that can really help accelerate that pace of change and move people along. Hearing from users, hearing from that update, hearing that Docker is doing well, understand what their future is, understand where they fit into the ecosystem, I think is one things that we want to kind of take away from that show. >> Right. And if you're not at the show, you can watch theCUBE. So we'll be broadcasting on Tuesday and Wednesday. We have some great guests coming on from Cisco, Canonical, Red Hat, Scality, Logz.io, AppLariat, even more companies. Any interviews you're really excited for? >> Yeah so, first of all, some of the Docker executives, we get Solomon Hykes on. Is Solomon the benevolent dictator of the Docker community? You know, or he's the founder of Docker, so he's great. Ben is the CEO of the company. Jerry Chen, is the one who invested in it. And as you mentioned, we've got a bunch of the vendor ecosystem. Big thanks to our sponsors that allow us to broadcast from that show. Hoping to have a few users on. We always get in some of the keynote people, some of the other guests. Any practitioners that are out there, that are willing to tell their story, we always appreciate when they can reach out and talk to us. >> Great Stu, thank you so much. That's all the time we have today. Watch us next week, Tuesday and Wednesday, full days of coverage from DockerCon. And come by theCUBE on Wednesday, we're going to have Franklin Barbecue at 1:00 p.m. (upbeat music)