ladies and gentlemen this is your captain speaking we will soon be taking off on our way to altitude please keep your seatbelts fastened and remain in your seats we will be experiencing turbulence until we are above the clouds ladies and gentlemen we are now cruising at altitude sit back and enjoy the ride [Music] altitude is a community of thought leaders and pioneers cloud architects and enlightened network engineers who have individually and are now collectively leading their own IT teams and the industry on a path to lift cloud networking above the clouds empowering Enterprise IT to architect design and control their own cloud network regardless of the turbulent clouds beneath them it's time to gain altitude ladies and gentlemen Steve Mulaney president and CEO of aviatrix the leader of multi cloud networking [Music] [Applause] all right good morning everybody here in Santa Clara as well as to the what millions of people watching the livestream worldwide welcome to altitude 2020 alright so we've got a fantastic event today really excited about the speakers that we have today and the experts that we have and really excited to get started so one of the things I wanted to just share was this is not a one-time event this is not a one-time thing that we're gonna do sorry for the aviation analogy but you know sherry way aviatrix means female pilot so everything we do as an aviation theme this is a take-off for a movement this isn't an event this is a take-off of a movement a multi-cloud networking movement and community that we're inviting all of you to become part of and-and-and why we're doing that is we want to enable enterprises to rise above the clouds so to speak and build their network architecture regardless of which public cloud they're using whether it's one or more of these public clouds so the good news for today there's lots of good news but this is one good news is we don't have any powerpoint presentations no marketing speak we know that marketing people have their own language we're not using any of that in those sales pitches right so instead what are we doing we're going to have expert panels we've got Simone Rashard Gartner here we've got 10 different network architects cloud architects real practitioners they're going to share their best practices and there are real-world experiences on their journey to the multi cloud so before we start and everybody know what today is in the u.s. it's Super Tuesday I'm not gonna get political but Super Tuesday there was a bigger Super Tuesday that happened 18 months ago and maybe eight six employees know what I'm talking about 18 months ago on a Tuesday every enterprise said I'm gonna go to the cloud and so what that was was the Cambrian explosion for cloud for the price so Frank kibrit you know what a Cambrian explosion is he had to look it up on Google 500 million years ago what happened there was an explosion of life where it went from very simple single-cell organisms to very complex multi-celled organisms guess what happened 18 months ago on a Tuesday I don't really know why but every enterprise like I said all woke up that day and said now I'm really gonna go to cloud and that Cambrian explosion of cloud went meant that I'm moving from very simple single cloud single use case simple environment to a very complex multi cloud complex use case environment and what we're here today is we're gonna go and dress that and how do you handle those those those complexities and when you look at what's happening with customers right now this is a business transformation right people like to talk about transitions this is a transformation and it's actually not just the technology transformation it's a business transformation it started from the CEO and the boards of enterprise customers where they said I have an existential threat to the survival of my company if you look at every industry who they're worried about is not the other 30 year old enterprise what they're worried about is the three year old enterprise that's leveraging cloud that's leveraging AI and that's where they fear that they're going to actually get wiped out right and so because of this existential threat this is CEO lead this is board led this is not technology led it is mandated in the organization's we are going to digitally transform our enterprise because of this existential threat and the movement to cloud is going to enable us to go do that and so IT is now put back in charge if you think back just a few years ago in cloud it was led by DevOps it was led by the applications and it was like I said before their Cambrian explosion is very simple now with this Cambrian explosion and enterprises getting very serious and mission critical they care about visibility they care about control they care about compliance conformance everything governance IT is in charge and and and that's why we're here today to discuss that so what we're going to do today is much of things but we're gonna validate this journey with customers did they see the same thing we're gonna validate the requirements for multi-cloud because honestly I've never met an enterprise that is not going to be multi-cloud many are one cloud today but they all say I need to architect my network for multiple clouds because that's just what the network is there to support the applications and the applications will run and whatever cloud it runs best in and you have to be prepared for that the second thing is is architecture again with IT in charge you architecture matters whether it's your career whether it's how you build your house it doesn't matter horrible architecture your life is horrible forever good architecture your life is pretty good so we're gonna talk about architecture and how the most fundamental and critical part of that architecture and that basic infrastructure is the network if you don't get that right nothing works right way more important and compute way more important than storm dense storage network is the foundational element of your infrastructure then we're going to talk about day 2 operations what does that mean well day 1 is one day of your life that's who you wire things up they do and beyond I tell everyone in networking and IT it's every day of your life and if you don't get that right your life is bad forever and so things like operations visibility security things like that how do I get my operations team to be able to handle this in an automated way because it's not just about configuring it in the cloud it's actually about how do I operationalize it and that's a huge benefit that we bring as aviatrix and then the last thing we're going to talk and it's the last panel we have I always say you can't forget about the humans right so all this technology all these things that we're doing it's always enabled by the humans at the end of the day if the humans fight it it won't get deployed and we have a massive skills gap in cloud and we also have a massive skill shortage you have everyone in the world trying to hire cloud network architects right there's just not enough of them going around so at aviatrix we as leaders do we're gonna help address that issue and try to create more people we created a program and we call the ACE program again an aviation theme it stands for aviatrix certified engineer very similar to what Cisco did with CCI ease where Cisco taught you about IP networking a little bit of Cisco we're doing the same thing we're gonna teach network architects about multi-cloud networking and architecture and yeah you'll get a little bit of aviatrix training in there but this is the missing element for people's careers and also within their organization so we're gonna we're gonna go talk about that so great great event great show when to try to keep it moving I'd next want to introduce my my host he's the best in the business you guys have probably seen him multiple million times he's the co CEO and co-founder of tube Jon Fourier okay awesome great great speech they're awesome I'd totally agree with everything you said about the explosion happening and I'm excited here at the heart of Silicon Valley to have this event it's a special digital event with the cube and aviatrix were we live streaming to millions of people as you said maybe not a million maybe not really take this program to the world this is a little special for me because multi-cloud is the hottest wave and cloud and cloud native networking is fast becoming the key engine of the innovation so we got an hour and a half of action-packed programming we have a customer panel two customer panels before that Gartner is going to come on talk about the industry we have a global system integrators we talk about how they're advising and building these networks and cloud native networking and then finally the Aces the aviatrix certified engineer is gonna talk more about their certifications and the expertise needed so let's jump right in and let's ask someone rashard to come on stage from Gartner check it all up [Applause] okay so kicking things off sitting started gartner the industry experts on cloud really kind of more to your background talk about your background before you got the gardener yeah before because gardener was a chief network architect of a fortune five companies with thousands of sites over the world and I've been doing everything and IT from a C programmer in a 92 a security architect to a network engineer to finally becoming a network analyst so you rode the wave now you're covering at the marketplace with hybrid cloud and now moving quickly to multi cloud is really was talking about cloud natives been discussed but the networking piece is super important how do you see that evolving well the way we see Enterprise adapt in cloud first thing you do about networking the initial phases they either go in a very ad hoc way is usually led by non non IT like a shadow I to your application people are some kind of DevOps team and it's it just goes as it's completely unplanned decreed VP sees left and right with different account and they create mesh to manage them and their direct connect or Express route to any of them so that's what that's a first approach and on the other side again it within our first approach you see what I call the lift and shift way we see like enterprise IT trying to basically replicate what they have in a data center in the cloud so they spend a lot of time planning doing Direct Connect putting Cisco routers and f5 and Citrix and any checkpoint Palo Alto divides that the audinate that are sent removing that to that cloud and I ask you the aha moments gonna come up a lot of our panels is where people realize that it's a multi cloud world I mean they either inherit clouds certainly they're using public cloud and on-premises is now more relevant than ever when's that aha moment that you're seeing where people go well I got to get my act together and get on this well the first but even before multi-cloud so these two approach the first one like the ad hoc way doesn't scale at some point idea has to save them because they don't think about the two they don't think about operations they have a bunch of VPC and multiple clouds the other way that if you do the left and shift wake they cannot take any advantages of the cloud they lose elasticity auto-scaling pay by the drink these feature of agility features so they both realize okay neither of these ways are good so I have to optimize that so I have to have a mix of what I call the cloud native services within each cloud so they start adapting like other AWS constructor is your construct or Google construct then that's what I call the optimal phase but even that they realize after that they are very different all these approaches different the cloud are different identities is completely difficult to manage across clouds I mean for example AWS has accounts there's subscription and in adarand GCP their projects it's a real mess so they realize well I can't really like concentrate use the cloud the cloud product and every cloud that doesn't work so I have I'm doing multi cloud I like to abstract all of that I still wanna manage the cloud from an API to interview I don't necessarily want to bring my incumbent data center products but I have to do that in a more API driven cloud they're not they're not scaling piece and you were mentioning that's because there's too many different clouds yes that's the piece there so what are they doing whether they really building different development teams as its software what's the solution well this the solution is to start architecting the cloud that's the third phase I call that the multi cloud architect phase where they have to think about abstraction that works across cloud fact even across one cloud it might not scale as well if you start having like 10,000 security group in AWS that doesn't scale you have to manage that if you have multiple VPC it doesn't scale you need a third party identity provider so it barely scales within one cloud if you go multiple cloud it gets worse and worse see way in here what's your thoughts I thought we said this wasn't gonna be a sales pitch for aviatrix you just said exactly what we do so anyway I'm just a joke what do you see in terms of where people are in that multi-cloud so a lot of people you know everyone I talked to started in one cloud right but then they look and they say okay but I'm now gonna move to adjourn I'm gonna move do you see a similar thing well yes they are moving but they're not there's not a lot of application that use a tree cloud at once they move one app in deserve one app in individuals one get happen Google that's what we see so far okay yeah I mean one of the mistakes that people think is they think multi-cloud no one is ever gonna go multi-cloud for arbitrage they're not gonna go and say well today I might go into Azure because I got a better rate of my instance that's never do you agree with that's never going to happen what I've seen with enterprise is I'm gonna put the workload in the app the app decides where it runs best that may be a sure maybe Google and for different reasons and they're gonna stick there and they're not gonna move let me ask you infrastructure has to be able to support from a networking team be able to do that do you agree with that yes I agree and one thing is also very important is connecting to that cloud is kind of the easiest thing so though while their network part of the cloud connectivity to the cloud is kind of simple I agree IPSec VP and I reckon Express that's a simple part what's difficult and even a provisioning part is easy you can use terraform and create v pieces and v nets across which free cloud providers right what's difficult is the day-to-day operations so it's what to find a to operations what is that what does that actually mean this is the day-to-day operations after you know the natural let's add an app let's add a server let's troubleshoot a problem so so your life something changes how would he do so what's the big concerns I want to just get back to this cloud native networking because everyone kind of knows with cloud native apps are that's been a hot trend what is cloud native networking how do you how do you guys define that because that seems to be the oddest part of the multi cloud wave that's coming as cloud native networking well there's no you know official garner definition but I can create one on and if another spot is do it I just want to leverage the cloud construct and a cloud epi I don't want to have to install like like for example the first version was let's put a virtual router that doesn't even understand and then the cloud environment right if I have if I have to install a virtual machine it has to be cloud aware it has to understand the security group if it's a router it has to be programmable to the cloud API and and understand the cloud environment you know one things I hear a lot from either see Saussure CIOs or CXOs in general is this idea of I'm definitely on going API so it's been an API economy so API is key on that point but then they say okay I need to essentially have the right relationship with my suppliers aka clouds you call it above the clouds so the question is what do i do from an architecture standpoint do I just hire more developers and have different teams because you mentioned that's a scale point how do you solve this this problem of okay I got AWS I got GCP or Azure or whatever do I just have different teams or just expose api's where is that optimization where's the focus well I take what you need from an android point of view is a way a control plane across the three clouds and be able to use the api of the cloud to build networks but also to troubleshoot them and do they to operation so you need a view across a three cloud that takes care of routing connectivity that's you know that's the aviatrix plug of you right there so so how do you see so again your Gartner you you you you see the industry you've been a network architect how do you see this this plane out what are the what are the legacy incumbent client-server on-prem networking people gonna do well these versus people like aviatrix well how do you see that plane out well obviously all the incumbent like Arista cisco juniper NSX right they want to basically do the lift and ship or they want to bring and you know VM I want to bring in a section that cloud they call that NSX everywhere and cisco monks bring you star and the cloud recall that each guy anywhere right so everyone what and and then there's cloud vision for my red star and contrail is in the cloud so they just want to bring the management plane in the cloud but it's still based most of them it's still based on putting a VM them in controlling them right you you extend your management console to the cloud that's not truly cloud native right cloud native you almost have to build it from scratch we like to call that cloud naive clown that so close one letter yeah so that was a big con surgeon reinvent take the tea out of cloud native it's cloud naive that went super viral you guys got t-shirts now I know you love but yeah but that really ultimately is kind of double edged sword you got to be you can be naive on the on the architecture side and rolling out but also suppliers are can be naive so how would you define who's naive and who's not well in fact they're evolving as well so for example in Cisco you it's a little bit more native than other ones because they're really scr in the cloud you can't you you really like configure API so the cloud and NSX is going that way and so is Arista but they're incumbent they have their own tools is difficult for them they're moving slowly so it's much easier to start from scratch Avenue like and you know a network happiness started a few years ago there's only really two aviatrix was the first one they've been there for at least three or four years and there's other ones like al kira for example that just started now that doing more connectivity but they wanna create an overlay network across the cloud and start doing policies and trying abstracting all the clouds within one platform so I gotta ask you I interviewed an executive at VMware Sanjay Pune and he said to me at RSA last week oh the only b2 networking vendors left Cisco and VMware what's your respect what's your response to that obviously I mean when you have these waves as new brands that emerge like aviation others though I think there'll be a lot of startups coming out of the woodwork how do you respond to that comment well there's still a data center there's still like a lot of action on campus and there's the one but from the cloud provisioning and clown networking in general I mean they're behind I think you know in fact you don't even need them to start to it you can if you're small enough you can just keep if you're in AWS you can user it with us construct they have to insert themselves I mean they're running behind they're all certainly incumbents I love the term Andy Jesse's that Amazon Web Services uses old guard new guard to talk about the industry what does the new guard have to do the new and new brands that emerge in is it be more DevOps oriented neck Nets a cops is that net ops is the programmability these are some of the key discussions we've been having what's your view on how you this programmability their most important part is they have to make the network's simple for the dev teams and from you cannot have that you cannot make a phone call and get every line in two weeks anymore so if you move to that cloud you have to make the cloud construct as simple enough so that for example a dev team could say okay I'm going to create this VP see but this VP see automatically being associate to your account you cannot go out on the internet you have to go to the transit VP see so there's a lot of action in terms of the I am part and you have to put the control around them too so to make it as simple as possible you guys both I mean you're the COC aviatrix but also you guys a lot of experience going back to networking going back to I call the OSI mace which for us old folks know what that means but you guys know what this means I want to ask you the question as you look at the future of networking here a couple of objectives oh the cloud guys they got networking we're all set with them how do you respond to the fact that networking is changing and the cloud guys have their own networking what some of the pain points that's going on premises and these enterprises so are they good with the clouds what needs what are the key things that's going on in networking that makes it more than just the cloud networking what's your take on well as I said earlier that once you you could easily provision in the cloud you can easily connect to that cloud is when you start troubleshooting application in the cloud and try to scale so this that's where the problem occurs see what you're taking on it and you'll hear from the from the customers that that we have on stage and I think what happens is all the cloud the clouds by definition designed to the 80/20 rule which means they'll design 80% of the basic functionality and they'll lead to 20% extra functionality that of course every Enterprise needs they'll leave that to ISVs like aviatrix because why because they have to make money they have a service and they can't have huge instances for functionality that not everybody needs so they have to design to the common and that's they all do it right they have to and then the extra the problem is that Cambrian explosion that I talked about with enterprises that's holy that's what they need that they're the ones who need that extra 20% so that's that's what I see is is there's always gonna be that extra functionality the in in an automated and simple way that you talked about but yet powerful with up with the visible in control that they expect of on prep that that's that kind of combination that yin and the yang that people like us are providing some I want to ask you were gonna ask some of the cloud architect customer panels it's the same question this pioneers doing some work here and there's also the laggers who come in behind the early adopters what's gonna be the tipping point what are some of those conversations that the cloud architects are having out there or what's the signs that they need to be on this multi cloud or cloud native networking trend what are some the signals that are going on in their environment what are some of the thresholds or things that are going on that there can pay attention to well well once they have application and multiple cloud and they have they get wake up at 2:00 in the morning to troubleshoot them they don't know it's important so I think that's the that's where the robber will hit the road but as I said it's easier to prove it it's ok it's 80s it's easy use a transit gateway put a few V PCs and you're done and use create some presents like equinox and do Direct Connect and Express route with Azure that looks simple is the operations that's when they'll realize ok now I need to understand our car networking works I also need a tool that give me visibility and control not button tell me that I need to understand the basic underneath it as well what are some of the day in the life scenarios that you envision happening with multi Bob because you think about what's happening it kind of has that same vibe of interoperability choice multi-vendor because you have multi clouds essentially multi vendor these are kind of old paradigms that we've lived through the client server and internet working wave what are some of those scenarios of success and that might be possible it would be possible with multi cloud and cloud native networking well I think once you have good enough visibility to satisfy your customers you know not only like to keep the service running an application running but to be able to provision fast enough I think that's what you want to achieve small final question advice for folks watching on the live stream if they're sitting there as a cloud architect or a CXO what's your advice to them right now in this more because honestly public cloud check hybrid cloud they're working on that that gets on-premise is done now multi clouds right behind it what's your advice the first thing they should do is really try to understand cloud networking for each of their cloud providers and then understand the limitation and is what there's cloud service provider offers enough or you need to look to a third party but you don't look at a third party to start with especially an incumbent one so it's tempting to say on and I have a bunch of f5 experts nothing against that five I'm going to bring my five in the cloud when you can use a needle be that automatically understand Easy's and auto scaling and so on and you understand that's much simpler but sometimes you need you have five because you have requirements you have like AI rules and that kind of stuff that you use for years you cannot do it's okay I have requirement and that met I'm going to use legacy stuff and then you have to start thinking okay what about visibility control about the tree cloud but before you do that you have to understand the limitation of the existing cloud providers so first try to be as native as possible until things don't work after that you can start taking multi-cloud great insight somewhat thank you for coming someone in charge with Gardner thanks for sharing informatica is known as the leading enterprise cloud data management company we are known for being the top in our industry in at least five different products over the last few years especially we've been transforming into a cloud model which allows us to work better with the trends of our customers in order to see agile and effective in the business you need to make sure that your products and your offerings are just as relevant in all these different clouds than what you're used to and what you're comfortable with one of the most difficult challenges we've always had is that because we're a data company we're talking about data that a customer owns some of that data may be in the cloud some of that data may be on Prem some of that data may be actually in their data center in another region or even another country and having that data connect back to our systems that are located in the cloud has always been a challenge when we first started our engagement with aviatrix we only had one plan that was Amazon it wasn't till later that a jerk came up and all of a sudden we found hey the solution we already had in place for her aviatrix already working in Amazon and now works in Missouri as well before we knew what GCP came up but it really wasn't a big deal for us because we already had the same solution in Amazon and integer now just working in GCP by having a multi cloud approach we have access to all three of them but more commonly it's not just one it's actually integrations between multiple we have some data and ensure that we want to integrate with Amazon we have some data in GCP that we want to bring over to a data Lake assure one of the nice things about aviatrix is that it gives a very simple interface that my staff can understand and use and manage literally hundreds of VPNs around the world and while talking to and working with our customers who are literally around the world now that we've been using aviatrix for a couple years we're actually finding that even problems that we didn't realize we had were actually solved even before we came across the problem and it just worked cloud companies as a whole are based on reputation we need to be able to protect our reputation and part of that reputation is being able to protect our customers and being able to protect more importantly our customers data aviatrix has been helpful for us in that we only have one system that can manage this whole huge system in a simple easy direct model aviatrix is directly responsible for helping us secure and manage our customers not only across the world but across multiple clouds users don't have to be VPN or networking experts in order to be able to use the system all the members on my team can manage it all the members regardless of their experience can do different levels of it one of the unexpected advantages of aviatrix is that I don't have to sell it to my management the fact that we're not in the news at 3 o'clock in the morning or that we don't have to get calls in the middle of the night no news is good news especially in networking things that used to take weeks to build or done in hours I think the most important thing about a matrix is it provides me a Beatrix gives me a consistent model that I can use across multiple regions multiple clouds multiple customers okay welcome back to altitude 2020 for the folks on the livestream I'm John for Steve Mulaney with CEO of aviatrix for our first of two customer panels on cloud with cloud network architects we got Bobby Willoughby they gone Luis Castillo of National Instruments David should Nick with fact set guys welcome to the stage for this digital event come on up [Applause] [Music] hey good to see you thank you okay okay customer panelist is my favorite part we get to hear the real scoop gets a gardener given this the industry overview certainly multi clouds very relevant and cloud native networking is the hot trend with a live stream out there and the digital event so guys let's get into it the journey is you guys are pioneering this journey of multi cloud and cloud native networking and is soon gonna be a lot more coming so we want to get into the journey what's it been like is it real you got a lot of scar tissue and what are some of the learnings yeah absolutely so multi cloud is whether or not we we accepted as a network engineers is is a reality like Steve said about two years ago companies really decided to to just to just bite the bullet and and and move there whether or not whether or not we we accept that fact we need to now create a consistent architecture across across multiple clouds and that that is challenging without orchestration layers as you start managing different different tool sets and different languages across different clouds so that's it's really important that to start thinking about that guys on the other panelists here there's different phases of this journey some come at it from a networking perspective some come in from a problem troubleshooting which what's your experiences yeah so from a networking perspective it's been incredibly exciting it's kind of a once-in-a-generation 'el opportunity to look at how you're building out your network you can start to embrace things like infrastructure as code that maybe your peers on the systems teams have been doing for years but it just never really worked on bram so it's really it's really exciting to look at all the opportunities that we have and then all the interesting challenges that come up that you that you get to tackle an effect said you guys are mostly AWS right yep right now though we're we are looking at multiple clouds we have production workloads running in multiple clouds today but a lot of the initial work has been with Amazon and you've seen it from a networking perspective that's where you guys are coming at it from yep we evolved more from a customer requirement perspective started out primarily as AWS but as the customer needed more resources from Azure like HPC you know as your ad things like that even recently Google Google Analytics our journey has evolved into more of a multi cloud environment Steve weigh in on the architecture because this has been the big conversation I want you to lead this second yeah so I mean I think you guys agree the journey you know it seems like the journey started a couple years ago got real serious the need for multi cloud whether you're there today of course it's gonna be there in the future so that's really important I think the next thing is just architecture I'd love to hear what you you know had some comments about architecture matters it all starts I mean every Enterprise I talk to maybe talk about architecture and the importance of architecture maybe Bobby it's a fun architecture perspective we sorted a journey five years ago Wow okay and we're just now starting our fourth evolution of our network marketer and we call it networking security net SEC yeah versus Justice Network yeah and that fourth generation architectures be based primarily upon Palo Alto Networks an aviatrix I have Atrix doing the orchestration piece of it but that journey came because of the need for simplicity ok the need for a multi cloud orchestration without us having to go and do reprogramming efforts across every cloud as it comes along right I guess the other question I also had around architectures also Louis maybe just talk about I know we've talked a little bit about you know scripting right and some of your thoughts on that yeah absolutely so so for us we started we started creating the network constructs with cloud formation and we've we've stuck with that for the most part what's interesting about that is today on premise we have a lot of a lot of automation around around how we provision networks but cloud formation has become a little bit like the new manual for us so we we're now having issues with having the to automate that component and making it consistent with our on premise architecture making it consistent with Azure architecture and Google cloud so it's really interesting to see to see companies now bring that layer of abstraction that SEO and brought to the to the web side now it's going up into into the into the cloud networking architecture so on the fourth generation of you mentioned you're in the fourth gen architecture what do you guys what have you learned is there any lessons scar tissue what to avoid what worked what was some of the that's probably the biggest list and there is that when you think you finally figured it out you have it right Amazon will change something as you or change something you know transit gateways a game changer so in listening to the business requirements is probably the biggest thing we need to do up front but I think from a simplicity perspective we like I said we don't want to do things four times we want to do things one time we won't be able to write to an API which aviatrix has and have them do the orchestration for us so that we don't have to do it four times how important is architecture in the progression is it you guys get thrown in the deep end to solve these problems or you guys zooming out and looking at it it's that I mean how are you guys looking at the architecture I mean you can't get off the ground if you don't have the network there so all of those that we've gone through similar evolutions we're on our fourth or fifth evolution I think about what we started off with Amazon without a direct connect gate without a trans a gateway without a lot of the things that are available today kind of the 80/20 that Steve was talking about just because it wasn't there doesn't mean we didn't need it so we needed to figure out a way to do it we couldn't say oh you need to come back to the network team in a year and maybe Amazon will have a solution for it right you need to do it now and in evolve later and maybe optimize or change the way you're doing things in the future but don't sit around and wait you can't I'd love to have you guys each individually answer this question for the live stream because it comes up a lot a lot of cloud architects out in the community what should they be thinking about the folks that are coming into this proactively and/or realizing the business benefits are there what advice would you guys give them an architecture what should be they be thinking about and what are some guiding principles you could share so I would start with looking at an architecture model that that can that can spread and and give consistency they're different to different cloud vendors that you will absolutely have to support cloud vendors tend to want to pull you into using their native toolset and that's good if only it was realistic to talk about only one cloud but because it doesn't it's it's it's super important to talk about and have a conversation with the business and with your technology teams about a consistent model how do I do my day one work so that I'm not you know spending 80 percent of my time troubleshooting or managing my network because I'm doing that then I'm missing out on ways that I can make improvements or embrace new technologies so it's really important early on to figure out how do I make this as low maintenance as possible so that I can focus on the things that the team really should be focusing on Bobby your advice the architect I don't know what else I can do that simplicity operations is key right all right so the holistic view of j2 operation you mentioned let's can jump in day one is your your your getting stuff set up day two is your life after all right this is kind of what you're getting at David so what does that look like what are you envisioning as you look at that 20 mile stare at post multi-cloud world what are some of the things that you want in a day to operations yeah infrastructure is code is really important to us so how do we how do we design it so that we can fit start making network changes and fitting them into like a release pipeline and start looking at it like that rather than somebody logging into a router seoi and troubleshooting things on in an ad hoc nature so moving more towards the DevOps model yes anything on that day - yeah I would love to add something so in terms of day 2 operations you can you can either sort of ignore the day 2 operations for a little while where you get well you get your feet wet or you can start approaching it from the beginning the fact is that the the cloud native tools don't have a lot of maturity in that space and when you run into an issue you're gonna end up having a bad day going through millions and millions of logs just to try to understand what's going on so that's something that that the industry just now is beginning to realize it's it's such as such a big gap I think that's key because for us we're moving to more of an event-driven operations in the past monitoring got the job done it's impossible to modern monitor something there's nothing there when the event happens all right so the event-driven application and then detection is important yeah I think Gardiner was all about the cloud native wave coming into networking that's going to be here thing I want to get your guys perspectives I know you have different views of how you came on into the journey and how you're executing and I always say the beauties in the eye of the beholder and that kind of applies the network's laid out so Bobby you guys do a lot of high-performance encryption both on AWS and Azure that's kind of a unique thing for you how are you seeing that impact with multi cloud yeah and that's a new requirement for us to where we we have a requirement to encrypt and they never get the question should I encryption or not encrypt the answer is always yes you should encrypt when you can encrypt for our perspective we we need to migrate a bunch of data from our data centers we have some huge data centers and then getting that data to the cloud is the timely expense in some cases so we have been mandated that we have to encrypt everything leave from the data center so we're looking at using the aviatrix insane mode appliances to be able to encrypt you know 10 20 gigabits of data as it moves to the cloud itself David you're using terraform you got fire Ned you've got a lot of complexity in your network what do you guys look at the future for yours environment yeah so something exciting that or yeah now is fire net so for our security team they obviously have a lot of a lot of knowledge base around Palo Alto and with our commitments to our clients you know it's it's it's not very easy to shift your security model to a specific cloud vendor right so there's a lot of stuck to compliance of things like that where being able to take some of what you've you know you've worked on for years on Bram and put it in the cloud and have the same type of assurance that things are gonna work and be secured in the same way that they are on prem helps make that journey into the cloud a lot easier and Louis you guys got scripting and get a lot of things going on what's your what's your unique angle on this yeah no absolutely so full disclosure I'm not a not not an aviatrix customer yet it's okay we want to hear the truth that's good Ellis what are you thinking about what's on your mind no really when you when you talk about implementing the tool like this it's really just really important to talk about automation and focus on on value so when you talk about things like encryption and things like so you're encrypting tunnels and crypting the path and those things are it should it should should be second nature really when you when you look at building those back ends and managing them with your team it becomes really painful so tools like a Beatrix that that add a lot of automation it's out of out of sight out of mind you can focus on the value and you don't have to focus on so I gotta ask you guys I'll see aviatrix is here they're their supplier to this sector but you guys are customers everyone's pitching you stuff people are not going to buy my stuff how do you guys have that conversation with the suppliers like the cloud vendors and other folks what's that what's it like we're API all the way you got to support this what are some of the what are some of your requirements how do you talk to and evaluate people that walk in and want to knock on your door and pitch you something what's the conversation like it's definitely it's definitely API driven we we definitely look at the at the PAP i structure of the vendors provide before we select anything that that is always first in mind and also what a problem are we really trying to solve usually people try to sell or try to give us something that isn't really valuable like implementing a solution on the on the on the cloud isn't really it doesn't really add a lot of value that's where we go David what's your conversation like with suppliers you have a certain new way to do things as as becomes more agile and essentially the networking and more dynamic what are some of the conversation is with the either incumbents or new new vendors that you're having what do what do you require yeah so ease of use is definitely definitely high up there we've had some vendors come in and say you know hey you know when you go to set this up we're gonna want to send somebody on site and they're gonna sit with you for your day to configure it and that's kind of a red flag what wait a minute you know do we really if one of my really talented engineers can't figure it out on his own what's going on there and why is that so I you know having having some ease-of-use and the team being comfortable with it and understanding it is really important Bobby how about you I mean the old days was do a bake-off and you know the winner takes all I mean is it like that anymore but what's the Volvic a bake-off last year for us do you win so but that's different now because now when you when you get the product you can install the product and they double your energy or have it in a matter of minutes and so the key is is they can you be operational you know within hours or days instead of weeks but but do we also have the flexibility to customize it to meet your needs could you want to be you want to be put into a box with the other customers when you have needs that your pastor cut their needs yeah almost see the challenge that you guys are living where you've got the cloud immediate value depending how you can roll up any solutions but then you have might have other needs so you got to be careful not to buy into stuff that's not shipping so you're trying to be proactive at the same time deal with what you got I mean how do you guys see that evolving because multi-cloud to me is definitely relevant but it's not yet clear how to implement across how do you guys look at this baked versus you know future solutions coming how do you balance that so again so right now we we're we're taking the the ad hoc approach and experimenting with the different concepts of cloud and and really leveraging the the native constructs of each cloud but but there's a there's a breaking point for sure you don't you don't get to scale this like Alexa mom said and you have to focus on being able to deliver a developer they're their sandbox or they're their play area for the for the things that they're trying to build quickly and the only way to do that is with the with with some sort of consistent orchestration layer that allows you to so use a lot more stuff to be coming pretty quickly hides area I do expect things to start to start maturing quite quite quickly this year and you guys see similar trend new stuff coming fast yeah part of the biggest challenge we've got now is being able to segment within the network being able to provide segmentation between production on production workloads even businesses because we support many businesses worldwide and and isolation between those is a key criteria there so the ability to identify and quickly isolate those workloads is key so the CIOs that are watching or that are saying hey take that he'll do multi cloud and then you know the bottoms-up organization Nick pops you're kind of like off a little bit it's not how it works I mean what is the reality in terms of implementing you know in as fast as possible because the business benefits are but it's not always clear in the technology how to move that fast yeah what are some of the barriers one of the blockers what are the enablers I think the reality is is that you may not think you're multi-cloud but your business is right so I think the biggest barriers there is understanding what the requirements are and how best to meet those requirements and then secure manner because you need to make sure that things are working from a latency perspective that things work the way they did and get out of the mind shift that you know it was a cheery application in the data center it doesn't have to be a Tier three application in the cloud so lift and shift is is not the way to go yeah scale is a big part of what I see is the competitive advantage to a lot these clouds and needs to be proprietary network stacks in the old days and then open systems came that was a good thing but as clouds become bigger there's kind of an inherent lock in there with the scale how do you guys keep the choice open how're you guys thinking about interoperability what are some of the conversations and you guys are having around those key concepts well when we look at when we look at the upfront from a networking perspective it it's really key for you to just enable enable all the all the clouds to be to be able to communicate between them developers will will find a way to use the cloud that best suits their their business need and and like like you said it's whether whether you're in denial or not of the multi cloud fact that then your company is in already that's it becomes really important for you to move quickly yeah and I a lot of it also hinges on how well is the provider embracing what that specific cloud is doing so are they are they swimming with Amazon or Azure and just helping facilitate things they're doing the you know the heavy lifting API work for you or are they swimming upstream and they're trying to hack it all together in a messy way and so that helps you you know stay out of the lock-in because they're you know if they're doing if they're using Amazon native tools to help you get where you need to be it's not like Amazon's gonna release something in the future that completely you know makes you have designed yourself into a corner so the closer they're more than cloud native they are the more the easier it is to to deploy but you also need to be aligned in such a way that you can take advantage of those cloud native technologies will it make sense tgw is a game changer in terms of cost and performance right so to completely ignore that would be wrong but you know if you needed to have encryption you know teach Adobe's not encrypted so you need to have some type of a gateway to do the VPN encryption you know so the aviatrix tool give you the beauty of both worlds you can use tgw with a gateway Wow real quick in the last minute we have I want to just get a quick feedback from you guys I hear a lot of people say to me hey the I picked the best cloud for the workload you got and then figure out multi cloud behind the scenes so that seems to be do you guys agree with that I mean is it do I go Mull one cloud across the whole company or this workload works great on AWS that work was great on this from a cloud standpoint do you agree with that premise and then witness multi-cloud stitch them all together yeah from from an application perspective it it can be per workload but it can also be an economical decision certain enterprise contracts will will pull you in one direction that value but the the network problem is still the same doesn't go away yeah yeah yeah I mean you don't want to be trying to fit a square into a round Hall right so if it works better on that cloud provider then it's our job to make sure that that service is there and people can use it agree you just need to stay ahead of the game make sure that the network infrastructure is there secure is available and is multi cloud capable yeah I'm at the end of the day you guys just validating that it's the networking game now cloud storage compute check networking is where the action is awesome thanks for your insights guys appreciate you coming on the panel appreciate it thanks thank you [Applause] [Music] [Applause] okay welcome back on the live feed I'm John fritz T Blaney my co-host with aviatrix I'm with the cube for the special digital event our next customer panel got great another set of cloud network architects Justin Smith was aura Justin broadly with Ellie Mae and Amit Oh tree job with Koopa welcome to stage [Applause] all right thank you thank you okay he's got all the the cliff notes from the last session welcome back rinse and repeat yeah yeah we're going to go under the hood a little bit I think I think they nailed the what we've been reporting and we've been having this conversation around networking is where the action is because that's the end of the day you got a move a pack from A to B and you get workloads exchanging data so it's really killer so let's get started Amit what are you seeing as the journey of multi cloud as you go under the hood and say okay I got to implement this I have to engineer the network make it enabling make it programmable make it interoperable across clouds and that's like I mean almost sounds impossible to me what's your take yeah I mean it it seems impossible but if you are running an organization which is running infrastructure as a cordon all right it is easily doable like you can use tools out there that's available today you can use third-party products that can do a better job but but put your architecture first don't wait architecture may not be perfect put the best architecture that's available today and be agile to iterate and make improvements over the time we get to Justin's over here so I have to be careful when I point a question in Justin they both have the answer but okay journeys what's the journey been like I mean is there phases we heard that from Gartner people come in to multi cloud and cloud native networking from different perspectives what's your take on the journey Justin yeah I mean from our perspective we started out very much focused on one cloud and as we started doing errands we started doing new products the market the need for multi cloud comes very apparent very quickly for us and so you know having an architecture that we can plug in play into and be able to add and change things as it changes is super important for what we're doing in the space just in your journey yes for us we were very ad hoc oriented and the idea is that we were reinventing all the time trying to move into these new things and coming up with great new ideas and so rather than it being some iterative approach with our deployments that became a number of different deployments and so we shifted that tore in the network has been a real enabler of this is that it there's one network and it touches whatever cloud we want it to touch and it touches the data centers that we need it to touch and it touches the customers that we need it to touch our job is to make sure that the services that are available and one of those locations are available in all of the locations so the idea is not that we need to come up with this new solution every time it's that we're just iterating on what we've already decided to do before we get the architecture section I want to ask you guys a question I'm a big fan of you know let the app developers have infrastructure as code so check but having the right cloud run that workload I'm a big fan of that if it works great but we just heard from the other panel you can't change the network so I want to get your thoughts what is cloud native networking and is that the engine really that's the enabler for this multi cloud trend but you guys taken we'll start with Amit what do you think about that yeah so you are gonna have workloads running in different clouds and the workloads would have affinity to one cloud over other but how you expose that it matter of how you are going to build your networks how we are gonna run security how we are going to do egress ingress out of it so it's a big problem how do you split says what's the solution what's the end the key pain points and problem statement I mean the key pain point for most companies is how do you take your traditionally on-premise network and then blow that out to the cloud in a way that makes sense you know IP conflicts you have IP space you pub public eye peas and premise as well as in the cloud and how do you kind of make a sense of all of that and I think that's where tools like a v8 ryx make a lot of sense in that space from our site it's it's really simple its latency its bandwidth and availability these don't change whether we're talking about cloud or data center or even corporate IT networking so our job when when these all of these things are simplified into like s3 for instance and our developers want to use those we have to be able to deliver that and for a particular group or another group that wants to use just just GCP resources these aren't we have to support these requirements and these wants as opposed to saying hey that's not a good idea our job is to enable them not to disable them do you think you guys think infrastructure is code which I love that I think it's that's the future it is we saw that with DevOps but I do start getting the networking is it getting down to the network portion where it's network is code because storage and compute working really well is seeing all kubernetes and service master and network as code reality is it there is got work to do it's absolutely there I mean you mentioned net DevOps and it's it's very real I mean in Cooper we build our networks through terraform and on not only just out of fun build an API so that we can consistently build V nets and VPC all across in the same unit yeah and even security groups and then on top an aviatrix comes in we can peer the networks bridge bridge all the different regions through code same with you guys but yeah everything we deploy is done with automation and then we also run things like lambda on top to make changes in real time we don't make manual changes on our network in the data center funny enough it's still manual but the cloud has enabled us to move into this automation mindset and and all my guys that's what they focus on is bringing what now what they're doing in the cloud into the data center which is kind of opposite of what it should be that's full or what it used to be it's full DevOps then yes yeah I mean for us was similar on-premise still somewhat very manual although we're moving more Norton ninja and terraform concepts but everything in the production environment is colored Confirmation terraform code and now coming into the datacenter same I just wanted to jump in on a Justin Smith one of the comment that you made because it's something that we always talk about a lot is that the center of gravity of architecture used to be an on-prem and now it's shifted in the cloud and once you have your strategic architecture what you--what do you do you push that everywhere so what you used to see at the beginning of cloud was pushing the architecture on prem into cloud now I want to pick up on what you said to you others agree that the center of architect of gravity is here I'm now pushing what I do in the cloud back into on pram and and then so first that and then also in the journey where are you at from 0 to 100 of actually in the journey to cloud DUI you 50% there are you 10% yes I mean are you evacuating data centers next year I mean were you guys at yeah so there's there's two types of gravity that you typically are dealing with no migration first is data gravity and your data set and where that data lives and then the second is the network platform that interrupts all that together right in our case the data gravity sold mostly on Prem but our network is now extending out to the app tier that's going to be in cloud right eventually that data gravity will also move to cloud as we start getting more sophisticated but you know in our journey we're about halfway there about halfway through the process we're taking a handle of you know lift and shift and when did that start and we started about three years ago okay okay go by it's a very different story it started from a garage and one hundred percent on the clock it's a business spend management platform as a software-as-a-service one hundred percent on the cloud it was like ten years ago right yes yeah you guys are riding the wave love that architecture Justin I want to ask user you guys mentioned DevOps I mean obviously we saw the huge observability wave which is essentially network management for the cloud in my opinion right yeah it's more dynamic but this isn't about visibility we heard from the last panel you don't know what's being turned on or turned off from a services standpoint at any given time how is all this playing out when you start getting into the DevOps down well this this is the big challenge for all of us as visibility when you talk transport within a cloud you know we very interesting we we have moved from having a backbone that we bought that we own that would be data center connectivity we now I work for as or as a subscription billing company so we want to support the subscription mindset so rather than going and buying circuits and having to wait three months to install and then coming up with some way to get things connected and resiliency and redundancy I my backbone is in the cloud I use the cloud providers interconnections between regions to transport data across and and so if you do that with their native solutions you you do lose visibility there are areas in that that you don't get which is why controlling you know controllers and having some type of management plane is a requirement for us to do what we're supposed to do and provide consistency while doing it a great conversation I loved when you said earlier latency bandwidth I think availability with your sim pop3 things guys SLA I mean you just do ping times between clouds it's like you don't know what you're getting for round-trip times this becomes a huge kind of risk management black hole whatever you want to call blind spot how are you guys looking at the interconnects between clouds because you know I can see that working from you know ground to cloud I'm per cloud but when you start doing with multi clouds workload I mean SL leis will be all over the map won't they just inherently but how do you guys view that yeah I think we talked about workload and we know that the workloads are going to be different in different clouds but they are going to be calling each other so it's very important to have that visibility that you can see how data is flowing at what latency and what our ability is hour is there and our authority needs to operate on that so it's solely use the software dashboard look at the times and look at the latency in the old days strong so on open so on you try to figure it out and then your day is you have to figure out just and what's your answer to that because you're in the middle of it yeah I mean I think the the key thing there is that we have to plan for that failure we have to plan for that latency and our applications it's starting start tracking in your SLI something you start planning for and you loosely couple these services and a much more micro services approach so you actually can handle that kind of failure or that type of unknown latency and unfortunately the cloud has made us much better at handling exceptions a much better way you guys are all great examples of cloud native from day one and you guys had when did you have the tipping point moment or the Epiphany of saying a multi clouds real I can't ignore it I got to factor it into all my design design principles and and everything you're doing what's it was there a moment or was it was it from day one now there are two divisions one was the business so in business there was some affinity to not be in one cloud or to be in one cloud and that drove from the business side so it has a cloud architect our responsibility was to support that business and other is the technology some things are really running better in like if you are running dot network load or you are going to run machine learning or AI so that you have you would have that preference of one cloud over other so it was the bill that we got from AWS I mean that's that's what drives a lot of these conversations is the financial viability of what you're building on top of it which is so we this failure domain idea which is which is fairly interesting is how do I solve or guarantee against a failure domain you have methodologies with you know back-end direct connects or interconnect with GCP all of these ideas are something that you have to take into account but that transport layer should not matter to whoever we're building this for our job is to deliver the frames in the packets what that flows across how you get there we want to make that seamless and so whether it's a public internet API call or it's a back-end connectivity through Direct Connect it doesn't matter it just has to meet a contract that you signed with your application folks yeah that's the availability piece just on your thoughts on that I think any comment on that so actually multi clouds become something much more recent in the last six to eight months I'd say we always kind of had a very much an attitude of like moving to Amazon from our private cloud is hard enough why complicate it further but the realities of the business and as we start seeing you know improvements in Google and Asia and different technology spaces the need for multi cloud becomes much more important as well as those are acquisition strategies I matured we're seeing that companies that used to be on premise that we typically acquire are now very much already on a cloud and if they're on a cloud I need to plug them into our ecosystem and so that's really change our multi cloud story in a big way I'd love to get your thoughts on the clouds versus the clouds because you know you compare them Amazon's got more features they're rich with features I see the bills are haiku people using them but Google's got a great Network Google's networks pretty damn good and then you got a sure what's the difference between the clouds who where they've evolved something whether they peak in certain areas better than others what what are the characteristics which makes one cloud better do they have a unique feature that makes Azure better than Google and vice versa what do you guys think about the different clouds yeah to my experience I think there is the approach is different in many places Google has a different approach very devops friendly and you can run your workload like your network can spend regions time I mean but our application ready to accept that MS one is evolving I mean I remember ten years back Amazon's network was a flat network we will be launching servers and 10.0.0.0 mode multi-account came out so they are evolving as you are at a late start but because they have a late start they saw the pattern and they they have some mature set up on the I mean I think they're all trying to say they're equal in their own ways I think they all have very specific design philosophies that allow them to be successful in different ways and you have to kind of that in mine is your architectural and solution for example Amazon has a very much a very regional affinity they don't like to go cross region in their architecture whereas Google is very much it's a global network we're gonna think about as a global solution I think Google also has advantages there to market and so it has seen what asier did wrong it's seen what AWS did wrong and it's made those improvements and I think that's one of their big advantage at great scale to Justin thoughts on the cloud so yeah Amazon built from the system up and Google built from the network down so their ideas and approaches are from a global versus or regional I agree with you completely that that is the big number one thing but the if you look at it from the outset interestingly the the inability or the ability for Amazon to limit layer 2 broadcasting and and what that really means from a VPC perspective changed all the routing protocols you can use all the things that we have built inside of a data center to provide resiliency and and and make things seamless to users all of that disappeared and so because we had to accept that at the VPC level now we have to accept it at the LAN level Google's done a better job of being able to overcome those things and provide those traditional Network facilities to us it's just great panel can go all day here's awesome so I heard we could we'll get to the cloud native naive question so kind of think about what's not even what's cloud is that next but I got to ask you had a conversation with a friend he's like when is the new land so if you think about what the land was at a data center when is the new link you get talking about the cloud impact so that means st when the old st was kind of changing into the new land how do you guys look at that because if you think about it what lands were for inside a premises was all about networking high speed but now when you take the win and make essentially a land do you agree with that and how do you view this trend and is it good or bad or is it ugly and what's what you guys take on this yeah I think it's the it's a thing that you have to work with your application architect so if you are managing networks and if you're a sorry engineer you need to work with them to expose the unreliability that would bring in so the application has to hand a lot of this the difference in the Layton sees and and the reliability has to be worked through the application there land when same concept as it be yesterday I think we've been talking about for a long time the erosion of the edge and so is this is just a continuation of that journey we've been on for the last several years as we get more and more cloud native when we start about API is the ability to lock my data in place and not be able to access it really goes away and so I think this is just continuation that thing I think it has challenges we start talking about weighing scale versus land scale the tooling doesn't work the same the scale of that tooling is much larger and the need to automation is much much higher in a way than it was in a land that's what we're seeing so much infrastructure as code yeah yeah so for me I'll go back again to this its bandwidth and its latency right that bet define those two land versus win but the other thing that's comes up more and more with cloud deployments is where is our security boundary and where can I extend this secure aware appliance or set of rules to protect what's inside of it so for us we're able to deliver VRS or route forwarding tables for different segments wherever we're at in the world and so they're they're trusted to talk to each other but if they're gonna go to someplace that's outside of their their network then they have to cross a security boundary and where we enforce policy very heavily so for me there's it's not just land when it's it's how does environment get to environment more importantly that's a great point and security we haven't talked to yet but that's got to be baked in from the beginning that's architecture thoughts on security are you guys are dealing with it yeah start from the base have app to have security built in have TLS have encryption on the data I transit data at rest but as you bring the application to the cloud and they are going to go multi-cloud talking to over the Internet in some places well have apt web security I mean I mean our principals day Security's day zero every day and so we we always build it into our design we load entire architecture into our applications it's encrypt everything it's TLS everywhere it's make sure that that data is secured at all times yeah one of the cool trends at RSA just as a side note was the data in use encryption piece which is a homomorphic stuff was interesting all right guys final question you know we heard on the earlier panel was also trending at reinvent we take the tea out of cloud native it spells cloud naive okay they got shirts now he being sure he's gonna got this trend going what does that mean to be naive so if you're to your peers out there watching a live stream and also the suppliers that are trying to you know supply you guys with technology and services what's naive look like and what's native look like when is someone naive about implementing all this stuff so for me it's because we are in hundred-percent cloud for us its main thing is ready for the change and you will you will find new building blocks coming in and the network design will evolve and change so don't be naive and think that it's static you wall with the change I think the big naivety that people have is that well I've been doing it this way for twenty years and been successful it's going to be successful in cloud the reality is that's not the case you have to think some of the stuff a little bit differently and you need to think about it early enough so that you can become cloud native and really enable your business on cloud yeah for me it's it's being open minded right the the our industry the network industry as a whole has been very much I am smarter than everybody else and we're gonna tell everybody how it's going to be done and we have we fell into a lull when it came to producing infrastructure and and and so embracing this idea that we can deploy a new solution or a new environment in minutes as opposed to hours or weeks or four months in some cases is really important and and so you know it's are you being closed-minded native being open-minded exactly and and it took a for me it was that was a transformative kind of where I was looking to solve problems in a cloud way as opposed to looking to solve problems in this traditional old-school way all right I know we're out of time but I ask one more question so you guys so good it could be a quick answer what's the BS language when you the BS meter goes off when people talk to you about solutions what's the kind of jargon that you hear that's the BS meter going off what are people talking about that in your opinion you here you go that's total B yes what what triggers use it so that I have two lines out of movies that are really I can if the if I say them without actually thinking them it's like 1.21 jigowatts how you're out of your mind from Back to the Future right somebody's gonna be a bank and then and then Martin ball and and Michael Keaton and mr. mom when he goes to 22 21 whatever it takes yeah those two right there if those go off in my mind somebody's talking to me I know they're full of baloney so a lot of speeds would be a lot of speeds and feeds a lot of data did it instead of talking about what you're actually doing and solutioning for you're talking about well I does this this this and okay 220 221 anytime I start seeing the cloud vendor start benchmarking against each other it's your workload is your workload you need to benchmark yourself don't don't listen to the marketing on that that's that's all I'm a what triggers you and the bsp I think if somebody explains you a not simple they cannot explain you in simplicity then that's a good one all right guys thanks for the great insight great panel how about a round of applause practitioners DX easy solutions integrating company than we service customers from all industry verticals and we're helping them to move to the digital world so as a solutions integrator we interface with many many customers that have many different types of needs and they're on their IT journey to modernize their applications into the cloud so we encounter many different scenarios many different reasons for those migrations all of them seeking to optimize their IT solutions to better enable their business we have our CPS organization it's cloud platform services we support AWS does your Google Alibaba corkle will help move those workloads to wherever it's most appropriate no one buys the house for the plumbing equally no one buys the solution for the networking but if the plumbing doesn't work no one likes the house and if this network doesn't work no one likes a solution so network is ubiquitous it is a key component of every solution we do the network connectivity is the lifeblood of any architecture without network connectivity nothing works properly planning and building a scalable robust network that's gonna be able to adapt with the application needs its when encountering some network design and talking about speed the deployment aviatrix came up in discussion and we then further pursued an area DHT products that incorporated aviatrix is part of a new offering that we are in the process of developing that really enhances our ability to provide cloud connectivity for the lance cloud connectivity there's a new line of networking services that we're getting into as our clients move into hybrid cloud networking it is much different than our traditional based services an aviatrix provides a key component in that service before we found aviatrix we were using just native peering connections but there wasn't a way to visualize all those peering connections and with multiple accounts multiple contacts for security with a v8 church we were able to visualize those different peering connections of security groups it helped a lot especially in areas of early deployment scenarios were quickly able to then take those deployment scenarios and turn them into scripts that we can then deploy repeatedly their solutions were designed for work with the cloud native capabilities first and where those cloud native capabilities fall short they then have solution sets that augment those capabilities I was pleasantly surprised number one with the aviatrix team as a whole in their level of engagement with us you know we weren't only buying the product we were buying a team that came on board to help us implement and solution that was really good to work together to learn both what aviatrix had to offer as well as enhancements that we had to bring that aviatrix was able to put into their product and meet our needs even better aviatrix was a joy to find because they really provided us the technology that we needed in order to provide multi cloud connectivity that really added to the functionality that you can't get from the basic law providing services we're taking our customers on a journey to simplify and optimize their IT infrastructure aviatrix certainly has made my job much easier okay welcome back to altitude 2020 for the digital event for the live feed welcome back I'm John Ford with the cube with Steve Mulaney CEO aviatrix for the next panel from global system integrators the folks who are building and working with folks on their journey to multi cloud and cloud native networking we've got a great panel George Buckman with dxc and Derek Monahan with wwt welcome to the stage [Applause] [Music] okay you guys are the ones out there advising building and getting down and dirty with multi cloud and cloud native networking we heard from the customer panel you can see the diversity of where people come into the journey of cloud it kind of depends upon where you are but the trends are all clear cloud native networking DevOps up and down the stack this has been the main engine what's your guys take of the disk journey to multi cloud what do you guys seeing yeah it's it's critical I mean we're seeing all of our enterprise customers enter into this they've been through the migrations of the easy stuff you know now they're trying to optimize and get more improvement so now the tough stuffs coming on right and you know they need their data processing near where their data is so that's driving them to a multi cloud environment okay we heard some of the edge stuff I mean you guys are exactly you've seen this movie before but now it's a whole new ballgame what's your take yeah so I'll give you a hint so our practice it's not called the cloud practice it's the multi cloud practice and so if that gives you a hint of how we approach things it's very consultative and so when we look at what the trends are let's look a little year ago about a year ago we were having conversations with customers let's build a data center in the cloud let's put some VP C's let's throw some firewalls with some DNS and other infrastructure out there and let's hope it works this isn't a science project so what we're trying we're starting to see is customers are starting to have more of a vision and we're helping with that consultative nature but it's totally based on the business and you got to start understanding how the lines of business are using the apps and then we evolved into that next journey which is a foundational approach to what are some of the problem statement customers are solving when they come to you what are the top things that are on their my house or the ease of use of jelly all that stuff but what specifically they did digging into yeah some complexity I think when you look at multi cloud approach in my view is network requirements are complex you know I think they are but I think the approach can be let's simplify that so one thing that we try to do and this is how we talk to customers is let's just like you simplify an aviatrix simplifies the automation orchestration of cloud networking we're trying to simplify the design the planning implementation of infrastructure across multiple workloads across multiple platforms and so the way we do it is we sit down we look at not just use cases and not just the questions in common we anticipate we actually build out based on the business and function requirements we build out a strategy and then create a set of documents and guess what we actually build in the lab and that lab that we platform we built proves out this reference architecture actually works absolutely we implement similar concepts I mean we they're proven practices they work great so well George you mentioned that the hard part is now upon us are you referring to networking what is specifically were you getting at Tara so the easy parts done now so for the enterprises themselves migrating their more critical apps or more difficult apps into the environments you know they've just we've just scratched the surface I believe on what enterprises that are doing to move into the cloud to optimize their environments to take advantage of the scale and speed to deployment and to be able to better enable their businesses so they're just now really starting the >> so do you get you guys see what I talked about them in terms of their Cambrian explosion I mean you're both monster system integrators with you know top fortune enterprise customers you know really rely on you for for guidance and consulting and so forth and boy they're networks is that something that you you've seen I mean does that resonate did you notice a year and a half ago and all of a sudden the importance of cloud for enterprise shoot up yeah I mean we're seeing it okay in our internal environment as yeah you know we're a huge company or right customer zero or an IT so we're experiencing that internal okay and every one of our other customers so I have another question oh I don't know the answer to this and the lawyer never asks a question that you don't know the answer to but I'm gonna ask it anyway d XE @ wwt massive system integrators why aviatrix yep so great question Steve so I think the way we approach things I think we have a similar vision a similar strategy how you approach things how we approach things that it worldwide technology number one we want to simplify the complexity and so that's your number one priorities let's take the networking but simplify it and I think part of the other point I'm making is we have we see this automation piece as not just an afterthought anymore if you look at what customers care about visibility and automation is probably the at the top three maybe the third on the list and I think that's where we see the value and I think the partnership that we're building and what I what I get excited about is not just putting yours in our lab and showing customers how it works it's Co developing a solution with you figuring out hey how can we make this better right mr. piller is a huge thing Jenna insecurity alone Network everything's around visibility what automation do you see happening in terms of progression order of operations if you will it's the low-hanging fruit what are people working on now and what are what are some of the aspirational goals around when you start thinking about multi cloud and automation yep so I wanted to get back to answer that question I want to answer your question you know what led us there and why aviatrix you know in working some large internal IT projects and and looking at how we were going to integrate those solutions you know we like to build everything with recipes where Network is probably playing catch-up in the DevOps world but with a DevOps mindset looking to speed to deploy support all those things so when you start building your recipes you take a little of this a little of that and you mix it all together well when you look around you say wow look there's this big bag of a VHS let me plop that in that solves a big part of my problems that I have to speed to integrate speed to deploy and the operational views that I need to run this so that was 11 years about reference architectures yeah absolutely so you know they came with a full slate of reference architectures already the out there and ready to go that fit our needs so it's very very easy for us to integrate those into our recipes what do you guys think about all the multi vendor interoperability conversations that have been going on choice has been a big part of multi cloud in terms of you know customers want choice didn't you know they'll put a workload in the cloud that works but this notion of choice and interoperability is become a big conversation it is and I think our approach and that's why we talk to customers is let's let's speed and be risk of that decision making process and how do we do that because the interoperability is key you're not just putting it's not just a single vendor we're talking you know many many vendors I mean think about the average number of cloud applications a customer uses a business and enterprise business today you know it's it's above 30 it's it's skyrocketing and so what we do and we look at it from an Billy approaches how do things interoperate we test it out we validate it we build a reference architecture it says these are the critical design elements now let's build one with aviatrix and show how this works with aviatrix and I think the the important part there though is the automation piece that we add to it invisibility so I think the visibility is what's what I see lacking across the industry today and the cloud needed that's been a big topic yep okay in terms of aviatrix that you guys see them coming in there one of the ones that are emerging and the new brands emerging with multi cloud you still got the old guard incumbents with huge footprints how our customers dealing with that that kind of component in dealing with both of them yeah I mean where we have customers that are ingrained with a particular vendor and you know we have partnerships with many vendors so our objective is to provide the solution that meets that client and you they all want multi vendor they all want interoperability correct all right so I got to ask you guys a question while we were defining de to operations what does that mean I mean you guys are looking at the big business and technical components of architecture what does de two operations mean what's the definition of that yeah so I think from our perspective my experience we you know de to operations whether it's it's not just the you know the orchestration piece and setting up and let it a lot of automate and have some you know change control you're looking at this from a data perspective how do I support this ongoing and make it easy to make changes as we evolve that the the cloud is very dynamic the the nature of how that fast is expanding the number of features is astonishing trying to keep up to date with a number of just networking capabilities and services that are added so I think day to operation starts with a fundable understanding of you know building out supporting a customer's environments and making it the automation piece easy from from you know a distance I think yeah and you know taking that to the next level of being able to enable customers to have catalog items that they can pick and choose hey I need this network connectivity from this cloud location back to this on pram and being able to have that automated and provisioned just simply by ordering it for the folks watching out there guys take a minute to explain as you guys are in the trenches doing a lot of good work what are some of the engagement that you guys get into how does that progress what is that what's what happens there they call you up and say hey I need multi-cloud or you're already in there I mean take us through why how someone can engage to use a global si to come in and make this thing happen what's looks like typical engagement look like yeah so from our perspective we typically have a series of workshops in a methodology that we kind of go along the journey number one we have a foundational approach and I don't mean foundation meaning the network foundation that's a very critical element we got a factor in security we got a factor in automation so we think about foundation we do a workshop that starts with education a lot of times we'll go in and we'll just educate the customer what does VPC sharing you know what is a private link and Azure how does that impact your business you know customers I want to share services out in an ecosystem with other customers and partners well there's many ways to accomplish that so our goal is to you know understand those requirements and then build that strategy with them thoughts George oh yeah I mean I'm one of the guys that's down in the weeds making things happen so I'm not the guy on the front line interfacing with the customers every day but we have a similar approach you know we have a consulting practice that will go out and and apply their practices to see what those and when do you parachute in yeah when I then is I'm on the back end working with our offering development leads for the networking so we understand or seeing what customers are asking for and we're on the back end developing the solutions that integrate with our own offerings as well as enable other customers to just deploy quickly to meet their connectivity needs it so the patterns are similar great final question for you guys I want to ask you to paint a picture of what success looks like and you know for name customers you don't forget in reveal of kind of who they are but what does success look like in multi-cloud as you as you paint a picture for the folks here and watching on the live stream it's if someone says hey I want to be multi-cloud I got to have my operations agile I want full DevOps I want programmability security built in from day zero what does success look like yeah I think success looks like this so when you're building out a network the network is a harder thing to change than some other aspects of cloud so what we think is even if you're thinking about that second cloud which we have most of our customers are on to public clouds today they might be dabbling in that is you build that network foundation an architecture that takes in consideration where you're going and so once we start building that reference architecture out that shows this is how to sit from a multi-cloud perspective not a single cloud and let's not forget our branches let's not forget our data centers let's not forget how all this connects together because that's how we define multi-cloud it's not just in the cloud it's on Prem and it's off Prem and so collectively I think the key is also is that we provide them an hld you got to start with in a high-level design that can be tweaked as you go through the journey but you got to give a solid structural foundation and that networking which we think most customers think as not not the network engineers but as an afterthought we want to make that the most critical element before you start the journey Jorge from your seed had a success look for you so you know it starts out on these journeys often start out people not even thinking about what is gonna happen what what their network needs are when they start their migration journey to the cloud so I want this success to me looks like them being able to end up not worrying about what's happening in the network when they move to the cloud good guys great insight thanks for coming on share and pen I've got a round of applause the global system integrators [Applause] [Music] okay welcome back from the live feed I'm shuffle with the cube Steve Eleni CEO of aviatrix my co-host our next panel is the aviatrix certified engineers also known as aces this is the folks that are certified their engineering they're building these new solutions please welcome Toby Foster min from Attica Stacy linear from Terra data and Jennifer Reid with Victor Davis to the stage I was just gonna I was just gonna rip you guys and say where's your jackets and Jen's got the jacket on okay good love the aviatrix aces pile of gear there above the clouds soaring to new heights that's right so guys aviatrix aces love the name I think it's great certified this is all about getting things engineered so there's a level of certification I want to get into that but first take us through the day in the life of an ace and just to point out Stacey's a squad leader so he's like a squadron leader Roger and leader yeah squadron leader so he's got a bunch of aces underneath him but share your perspective day-in-the-life Jeff we'll start with you sure so I have actually a whole team that works for me both in the in the North America both in the US and in Mexico and so I'm eagerly working to get them certified as well so I can become a squad leader myself but it's important because one of the the critical gaps that we've found is people having the networking background because they're you graduate from college and you have a lot of computer science background you can program you've got Python but networking in packets they just don't get and so just taking them through all the processes that it's really necessary to understand when you're troubleshooting is really critical mm-hmm and because you're gonna get an issue where you need to figure out where exactly is that happening on the network you know is my my issue just in the V PCs and on the instant side is a security group or is it going on print and this is something actually embedded within Amazon itself I mean I should troubleshot an issue for about six months going back and forth with Amazon and it was the vgw VPN because they were auto-scaling on two sides and we ended up having to pull out the Cisco's and put in aviatrix so I could just say okay it's fixed and actually actually helped the application teams get to that and get it solved yeah but I'm taking a lot of junior people and getting them through that certification process so they can understand and see the network the way I see the network I mean look I've been doing this such for 25 years but I got out when I went in the Marine Corps that's what I did and coming out the network is still the network but people don't get the same training they get they got in the 90s it's just so easy just write some software and they work takes care of itself yes I'll be will get I'll come back to that I want to come back to that that problem solved with Amazon but Toby I think the only thing I have to add to that is that it's always the network fault as long as I've been in network have always been the network's fault and I'm even to this day you know it's still the network's fault and part of being a network guy is that you need to prove when it is and when it's not your fault and that means you need to know a little bit about a hundred different things to make that and now you got a full stack DevOps you gotta know a lot more times another hundred and these times are changing yeah they say you're a squadron leader I get that right what is what does a squadron leader first can you describe what it is I think probably just leading all the network components of it but not they from my perspective when to think about what you asked them was it's about no issues and no escalation soft my day is a good that's a good day yes it's a good day Jennifer you mentioned the Amazon thing this brings up a good point you know when you have these new waves come in you have a lot of new things newly use cases a lot of the finger-pointing it's that guy's problem that girl's problem so what is how do you solve that and how do you get the young guns up to speed is there training is that this is where the certification comes in well is where the certification is really going to come in I know when we we got together at reinvent one of the the questions that that we had with Stephen the team was what what should our certification look like you know she would just be teaching about what aviatrix troubleshooting brings to bear but what should that be like and I think Toby and I were like no no no that's going a little too high we need to get really low because the the better someone can get at actually understanding what actually happening in the network and and where to actually troubleshoot the problem how to step back each of those processes because without that it's just a big black box and they don't know you know because everything is abstracted in Amazon Internet and Azure and Google is substracted and they have these virtual gateways they have VPNs that you just don't have the logs on it's you just don't know and so then what tools can you put in front of them of where they can look because there are full logs well as long as we turned on the flow logs when they built it you know and there's like each one of those little things that well if they had decided to do that when they built it it's there but if you can come in later to really supplement that with training to actual troubleshoot and do a packet capture here as it's going through then teaching them how to read that even yeah Toby we were talking before we came on up on stage about your career you've been networking all your time and then you know you're now entering a lot of younger people how is that going because the people who come in fresh they don't have all the old war stories they don't know you talk about you know that's dimmer fault I walk in bare feet in the snow when I was your age I mean it's so easy now right they say what's your take on how you train the young P so I've noticed two things one is that they are up to speed a lot faster in generalities of networking they can tell you what a network is in high school level now where I didn't learn that too midway through my career and they're learning it faster but they don't necessarily understand why it's that way or you know everybody thinks that it's always slash 24 for a subnet and they don't understand why you can break it down smaller why it's really necessary so the the ramp up speed is much faster for these guys that are coming in but they don't understand why and they need some of that background knowledge to see where it's coming from and why is it important and old guys that's where we thrive Jennifer you mentioned you you got in from the Marines health spa when you got into networking how what was it like then and compared it now almost like we heard earlier static versus dynamic don't be static cuz then you just set the network you got a perimeter yeah no there was no such thing ya know so back in the day I mean I mean we had banyan vines for email and you know we had token ring and I had to set up token ring networks and figure out why that didn't work because how many of things were actually sharing it but then actually just cutting fiber and running fiber cables and dropping them over you know shelters to plug them in and oh crap they swung it too hard and shattered it now I gotta be great polished this thing and actually shoot like to see if it works I mean that was the network crimped five cat5 cables to run an Ethernet you know and then from that just said network switches dumb switches like those were the most common ones you had then actually configuring routers and you know logging into a Cisco router and actually knowing how to configure that and it was funny because I had gone all the way up and was a software product manager for a while so I've gone all the way up the stack and then two and a half three years ago I came across to to work with entity group that it became Victor Davis but we went to help one of our customers Davis and it was like okay so we need to fix the network okay I haven't done this in 20 years but all right let's get to it you know because it really fundamentally does not change it's still the network I mean I've had people tell me well you know when we go to containers we will not have to worry about the network and I'm like yeah you don't I do and then with this were the program abilities it really interesting so I think this brings up the certification what are some of the new things that people should be aware of that come in with the aviatrix ace certification what are some of the highlights can you guys share some of the some of the highlights around the certifications I think some of the importance is that it's it doesn't need to be vendor specific for network generality or basic networking knowledge and instead of learning how Cisco does something or how Palo Alto does something we need to understand how and why it works as a basic model and then understand how each vendor has gone about that problem and solved it in a general that's true in multi cloud as well you can't learn how cloud networking works without understanding how a double u.s. senator and GCP are all slightly the same but slightly different and some things work and some things don't I think that's probably the number one take I think having a certification across clouds is really valuable cuz we heard the global si help the business issues what does it mean to do that is it code is that networking is it configuration is that aviatrix what is the I mean op C aviatrix is the ASA certification but what is it about the multi cloud that makes it multi networking and multi vendor easy answer is yes so you got to be a generalist getting your hands and all you have to be right it takes experience because it's every every cloud vendor has their own certification whether that's hops and advanced networking and advanced security or whatever it might be yeah they can take the test but they have no idea how to figure out what's wrong with that system and the same thing with any certification but it's really getting your hands in there and actually having to troubleshoot the problems you know actually work the problem you know and calm down it's going to be okay I mean because I don't know how many calls I've been on or even had aviatrix join me on it's like okay so everyone calm down let's figure out what's happening it's like we've looked at that screen three times looking at it again it's not gonna solve that problem right but at the same time you know remaining calm but knowing that it really is I'm getting a packet from here to go over here it's not working so what could be the problem you know and actually stepping them through with those scenarios but that's like you only get that by having to do it you know and seeing it and going through it and then I have a question so we you know I just see it we started this program maybe months ago we're seeing a huge amount of interest I mean we're oversubscribed on all the training sessions we've got people flying from around the country even with coronavirus flying to go to Seattle to go to these events were oversubscribed good is that watching leader would put there yeah is that something that you see in your organization's are you recommending that to people do you see I mean I'm just I guess I'm surprised I'm not surprised but I'm really surprised by the demand if you would of this multi cloud network certification because it really isn't anything like that is that something you guys can comment on or do you see the same things in your organization's I say from my side because we operate in the multi cloud environment so it really helps and it's beneficial for us yeah I think I would add that uh networking guys have always needed to use certifications to prove that they know what they know right it's not good enough to say yeah I know IP addresses or I know how a network works and a couple little check marks or a little letters buying helps give you validity um so even in our team we can say hey you know we're using these certifications to know that you know enough of the basics and enough of the understandings that you have the tools necessary right so I guess my final question for you guys is why an eighth certification is relevant and then second part is share what the livestream folks who aren't yet a certified or might want to jump in to be AVH or certified engineers why is it important so why is it relevant and why shouldn't someone want to be an ace-certified I'm uses the right engineer I think my views a little different I think certification comes from proving that you have the knowledge not proving that you get a certification to get no I mean they're backwards so when you've got the training and the understanding and the you use that to prove and you can like grow your certification list with it versus studying for a test to get a certification and have no understanding of ok so that who is the right person that look at this is saying I'm qualified is it a network engineer is it a DevOps person what's your view you know is it a certain you know I think cloud is really the answer it's the as we talked like the edge is getting eroded so is the network definitions eating eroded we're getting more and more of some network some DevOps some security lots and lots of security because network is so involved in so many of them that's just the next progression there I would say I expand that to more automation engineers because we have those now probably extended as well well I think that the training classes themselves are helpful especially the entry-level ones for people who may be quote-unquote cloud architects but I've never done anything and networking for them to understand why we need those things to really work whether or not they go through to eventually get a certification is something different but I really think fundamentally understanding how these things work it makes them a better architect makes them better application developer but even more so as you deploy more of your applications into the cloud really getting an understanding even from our people who have tradition down on Prem networking they can understand how that's going to work in the cloud - well I know we've got just under 30 seconds left I want to get one more question than just one more for the folks watching that are maybe younger that don't have that networking training from your experiences each of you can answer why is it should they know about networking what's the benefit what's in it for them motivate them share some insights and why they should go a little bit deeper in networking Stacey we'll start with you we'll go down I'd say it's probably fundamental right if you don't deliver solutions networking use the very top I would say if you fundamental of an operating system running on a machine how those machines talk together as a fundamental change is something that starts from the base and work your way up right well I think it's a challenge because you you've come from top down now you're gonna start looking from bottom up and you want those different systems to cross communicate and say you built something and you're overlapping IP space not that that doesn't happen but how can I actually make that still operate without having to reappear e-platform it's like those challenges like those younger developers or sis engineers can really start to get their hands around and understand those complexities and bring that forward in their career they got to know the how the pipes are working and because know what's going some plumbing that's right and the works a how to code it that's right awesome thank you guys for great insights ace certified engineers also known as aces give a round of applause thank you okay all right that concludes my portion thank you Steve thanks for have Don thank you very much that was fantastic everybody round of applause for John Currier yeah so great event great event I'm not going to take long we've got we've got lunch outside for that for the people here just a couple of things just call to action right so we saw the Aces you know for those of you out on the stream here become a certified right it's great for your career it's great for knowledge is is fantastic it's not just an aviatrix thing it's gonna teach you about cloud networking multi-cloud networking with a little bit of aviatrix exactly what the Cisco CCIE program was for IP network that type of the thing that's number one second thing is is is is learn right so so there's a there's a link up there for the four to join the community again like I started this this is a community this is the kickoff to this community and it's a movement so go to what a v8 community bh6 comm starting a community at multi cloud so you know get get trained learn I'd say the next thing is we're doing over a hundred seminars in across the United States and also starting into Europe soon will come out and will actually spend a couple hours and talk about architecture and talk about those beginning things for those of you on the you know on the livestream in here as well you know we're coming to a city near you go to one of those events it's a great way to network with other people that are in the industry as well as to start to learn and get on that multi-cloud journey and then I'd say the last thing is you know we haven't talked a lot about what aviatrix does here and that's intentional we want you you know leaving with wanting to know more and schedule get with us in schedule a multi our architecture workshop session so we we sit out with customers and we talk about where they're at in that journey and more importantly where they're going in that in-state architecture from networking compute storage everything and everything you heard today every panel kept talking about architecture talking about operations those are the types of things that we saw we help you cook define that canonical architecture that system architecture that's yours so for so many of our customers they have three by five plotted lucid charts architecture drawings and it's the customer name slash aviatrix arc network architecture and they put it on their whiteboard that's what what we and that's the most valuable thing they get from us so this becomes their twenty-year network architecture drawing that they don't do anything without talking to us and look at that architecture that's what we do in these multi hour workshop sessions with customers and that's super super powerful so if you're interested definitely call us and let's schedule that with our team so anyway I just want to thank everybody on the livestream thank everybody here hopefully it was it was very useful I think it was and joined the movement and for those of you here join us for lunch and thank you very much [Applause] [Music]

(electronic music) >> From Santa Clara, California in the heart of Silicon Valley, its theCUBE. Covering Altitude 2020, brought to you by Aviatrix. (electronic music) >> Female pilot: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking, we will soon be taking off on our way to altitude. (upbeat music) Please keep your seat belts fastened and remain in your seat. We will be experiencing turbulence, until we are above the clouds. (thunder blasting) (electronic music) (seatbelt alert sounds) Ladies and gentlemen, we are now cruising at altitude. Sit back and enjoy the ride. (electronic music) >> Female pilot: Altitude is a community of thought leaders and pioneers, cloud architects and enlightened network engineers, who have individually and are now collectively, leading their own IT teams and the industry. On a path to lift cloud networking above the clouds. Empowering enterprise IT to architect, design and control their own cloud network, regardless of the turbulent clouds beneath them. It's time to gain altitude. Ladies and gentlemen, Steve Mullaney, president and CEO of Aviatrix. The leader of multi-cloud networking. (electronic music) (audience clapping) >> Steve: All right. (audience clapping) Good morning everybody, here in Santa Clara as well as to the millions of people watching the livestream worldwide. Welcome to Altitude 2020, all right. So, we've got a fantastic event, today, I'm really excited about the speakers that we have today and the experts that we have and really excited to get started. So, one of the things I wanted to share was this is not a one-time event. This is not a one-time thing that we're going to do. Sorry for the Aviation analogy, but, you know, Sherry Wei, aviatrix means female pilot so everything we do has an aviation theme. This is a take-off, for a movement. This isn't an event, this is a take-off of a movement. A multi-cloud networking movement and community that we're inviting all of you to become part of. And why we're doing that, is we want to enable enterprises to rise above the clouds, so to speak and build their network architecture, regardless of which public cloud they're using. Whether it's one or more of these public clouds. So the good news, for today, there's lots of good news but this is one good news, is we don't have any PowerPoint presentations, no marketing speak. We know that marketing people have their own language. We're not using any of that, and no sales pitches, right? So instead, what are we doing? We're going to have expert panels, we've got Simon Richard, of Gartner here. We've got ten different network architects, cloud architects, real practitioners that are going to share their best practices and their real world experiences on their journey to the multi-cloud. So, before we start, everybody know what today is? In the U.S., it's Super Tuesday. I'm not going to get political, but Super Tuesday there was a bigger, Super Tuesday that happened 18 months ago. And Aviatrix employees know what I'm talking about. Eighteen months ago, on a Tuesday, every enterprise said, "I'm going to go to the cloud". And so what that was, was the Cambrian explosion, for cloud, for the enterprise. So, Frank Cabri, you know what a Cambrian explosion is. He had to look it up on Google. 500 million years ago, what happened, there was an explosion of life where it went from very simple single-cell organisms to very complex, multi-cell organisms. Guess what happened 18 months ago, on a Tuesday, I don't really know why, but every enterprise, like I said, all woke up that day and said, "Now I'm really going to go to cloud" and that Cambrian explosion of cloud meant that I'm moving from a very simple, single cloud, single-use case, simple environment, to a very complex, multi-cloud, complex use case environment. And what we're here today, is we're going to go undress that and how do you handle those, those complexities? And, when you look at what's happening, with customers right now, this is a business transformation, right? People like to talk about transitions, this is a transformation and it's actually not just a technology transformation, it's a business transformation. It started from the CEO and the Boards of enterprise customers where they said, "I have an existential threat to the survival of my company." If you look at every industry, who they're worried about is not the other 30-year-old enterprise. What they're worried about is the three year old enterprise that's leveraging cloud, that's leveraging AI, and that's where they fear that they're going to actually wiped out, right? And so, because of this existential threat, this is CEO led, this is Board led, this is not technology led, it is mandated in the organizations. We are going to digitally transform our enterprise, because of this existential threat and the movement to cloud is going to enable us to go do that. And so, IT is now put back in charge. If you think back just a few years ago, in cloud, it was led by DevOps, it was led by the applications and it was, like I said, before the Cambrian explosion, it was very simple. Now, with this Cambrian explosion, an enterprise is getting very serious and mission critical. They care about visibility, they care about control, they care about compliance, conformance, everything, governance. IT is in charge and that's why we're here today to discuss that. So, what we're going to do today, is much of things but we're going to validate this journey with customers. >> Steve: Did they see the same thing? We're going to validate the requirements for multi-cloud because, honestly, I've never met an enterprise that is not going to be multicloud. Many are one cloud today but they all say, " I need to architect my network for multiple clouds", because that's just what, the network is there to support the applications and the applications will run in whatever cloud it runs best in and you have to be prepared for that. The second thing is, is architecture. Again, with IT in charge, you, architecture matters. Whether its your career, whether its how you build your house, it doesn't matter. Horrible architecture, your life is horrible forever. Good architecture, your life is pretty good. So, we're going to talk about architecture and how the most fundamental and critical part of that architecture and that basic infrastructure is the network. If you don't get that right, nothing works, right? Way more important than compute. Way more important than storage. Network is the foundational element of your infrastructure. Then we're going to talk about day two operations. What does that mean? Well day one is one day of your life, where you wire things up they do and beyond. I tell everyone in networking and IT -- it's every day of your life. And if you don't get that right, your life is bad forever. And so things like operations, visibility, security, things like that, how do I get my operations team to be able to handle this in an automated way because it's not just about configuring it in the cloud, it's actually about how do I operationalize it? And that's a huge benefit that we bring as Aviatrix. And then the last thing we're going to talk and it's the last panel we have, I always sayyou can't forget about the humans, right? So all this technology, all these things that we're doing, it's always enabled by the humans. At the end of the day, if the humans fight it, it won't get deployed. And we have a massive skills gap, in cloud and we also have a massive skills shortage. You have everyone in the world trying to hire cloud network architects, right? There's just not enough of them going around. So, at Aviatrix, we said as leaders do, "We're going to help address that issue and try to create more people." We created a program, what we call the ACE Program, again, aviation theme, it stands for Aviatrix Certified Engineer. Very similar to what Cisco did with CCIEs where Cisco taught you about IP networking, a little bit of Cisco, we're doing the same thing, we're going to teach network architects about multicloud networking and architecture and yeah, you'll get a little bit of Aviatrix training in there, but this is the missing element for people's careers and also within their organizations. So we're going to go talk about that. So, great, great event, great show. We're going to try to keep it moving. I next want to introduce, my host, he is the best in the business, you guys have probably seen him multiple, many times, he is the co-CEO and co founder of theCUBE, John Furrier. (audience clapping) (electronic music) >> John: Okay, awesome, great speech there, awesome. >> Yeah. >> I totally agree with everything you said about the explosion happening and I'm excited, here at the heart of silicon valley to have this event. It's a special digital event with theCUBE and Aviatrix, where we're live-streaming to, millions of people, as you said, maybe not a million. >> Maybe not a million. (laughs) Really to take this program to the world and this is really special for me, because multi-cloud is the hottest wave in cloud. And cloud-native networking is fast becoming the key engine, of the innovations, so we got an hour and a half of action-packed programming. We have a customer panel. Two customer panels. Before that Gartner's going to come out, talk about the industry. We have global system integrators, that will talk about, how their advising and building these networks and cloud native networking. And then finally the ACE's, the Aviatrix Certified Engineers, are going to talk more about their certifications and the expertise needed. So, let's jump right in, let's ask, Simon Richard to come on stage, from Gartner. We'll kick it all off. (electronic music) (clapping) >> John: Hi, can I help you. Okay, so kicking things off, getting started. Gartner, the industry experts on cloud. Really kind of more, cue your background. Talk about your background before you got to Gartner? >> Simon: Before being at Gartner, I was a chief network architect, of a Fortune 500 company, that with thousands of sites over the world and I've been doing everything in IT from a C programmer, in the 90, to a security architect, to a network engineer, to finally becoming a network analyst. >> So you rode the wave. Now you're covering the marketplace with hybrid cloud and now moving quickly to multi-cloud, is really what everyone is talking about. >> Yes. >> Cloud-native's been discussed, but the networking piece is super important. How do you see that evolving? >> Well, the way we see Enterprise adapting, cloud. The first thing you do about networking, the initial phases they either go in a very ad hoc way. Is usually led by none IT, like a shadow IT, or application people, sometime a DevOps team and it just goes as, it's completely unplanned. They create VPC's left and right with different account and they create mesh to manage them and they have Direct Connect or Express Route to any of them. So that's the first approach and on the other side. again within our first approach you see what I call, the lift and shift. Where we see like enterprise IT trying to, basically replicate what they have in a data center, in the Cloud. So they spend a lot of time planning, doing Direct Connect, putting Cisco routers and F5 and Citrix and any checkpoint, Palo Alto device, that in a sense are removing that to the cloud. >> I got to ask you, the aha moment is going to come up a lot, in one our panels, is where people realize, that it's a multi-cloud world. I mean, they either inherit clouds, certainly they're using public cloud and on-premises is now more relevant than ever. When's that aha moment? That you're seeing, where people go, "Well I got to get my act together and get on this cloud." >> Well the first, right, even before multi-cloud. So there is two approach's. The first one, like the adult way doesn't scare. At some point IT has to save them, 'cause they don't think about the tools, they don't think about operation, they have a bunch of VPC and multiple cloud. The other way, if you do the lift and shift way, they cannot take any advantages of the cloud. They lose elasticity, auto-scaling, pay by the drink. All these agility features. So they both realize, okay, neither of these ways are good, so I have to optimize that. So I have to have a mix of what I call, the cloud native services, within each cloud. So they start adapting, like all the AWS Construct, Azure Construct or Google Construct and that's what I call the optimal phase. But even that they realize, after that, they are all very different, all these approaches different, the cloud are different. Identities is constantly, difficult to manage across clouds. I mean, for example, anybody who access' accounts, there's subscription, in Azure and GCP, their projects. It's a real mess, so they realized, well I don't really like constantly use the cloud product and every cloud, that doesn't work. So I have, I'm going multi-cloud, I like to abstract all of that. I still want to manage the cloud from an EPI point of view, I don't necessarily want to bring my incumbent data center products, but I have to do that and in a more EPI driven cloud environment. >> So, the not scaling piece that you where mentioning, that's because there's too many different clouds? >> Yes. >> That's the least they are, so what are they doing? What are they, building different development teams? Is it software? What's the solution? >> Well, the solution is to start architecting the cloud. That's the third phase. I called that the multi-cloud architect phase, where they have to think about abstraction that works across cloud. Fact, even across one cloud it might not scale as well, If you start having like ten thousand security agreement, anybody who has that doesn't scale. You have to manage that. If you have multiple VPC, it doesn't scale. You need a third-party, identity provider. In variously scales within one cloud, if you go multiple cloud, it gets worse and worse. >> Steve, weigh in here. What's your thoughts? >> I thought we said this wasn't going to be a sales pitch for Aviatrix. (laughter) You just said exactly what we do, so anyway, that's a joke. What do you see in terms of where people are, in that multi-cloud? So, like lot of people, you know, everyone I talk to, started at one cloud, right, but then they look and then say okay but I'm now going to move to Azure and I'm going to move to... (trails off) Do you see a similar thing? >> Well, yes. They are moving but there's not a lot of application, that uses three cloud at once, they move one app in Azure, one app in AWS and one app in Google. That's what we see so far. >> Okay, yeah, one of the mistakes that people think, is they think multi-cloud. No one is ever going to go multi-cloud, for arbitrage. They're not going to go and say, well, today I might go into Azure, 'cause I get a better rate on my instance. Do you agree? That's never going to happen. What I've seen with enterprise, is I'm going to put the workload in the app, the app decides where it runs best. That may be Azure, maybe Google and for different reasons and they're going to stick there and they're not going to move. >> Let me ask you guys-- >> But the infrastructure, has to be able to support, from a networking team. >> Yes. >> Be able to do that. Do you agree with that? >> Yes, I agree. And one thing is also very important, is connecting to the cloud, is kind of the easiest thing. So, the wide area network part of the cloud, connectivity to the cloud is kind of simple. >> Steve: I agree. >> IP's like VPN, Direct Connect, Express Route. That's the simple part, what's difficult and even the provisioning part is easy. You can use Terraform and create VPC's and Vnet's across your three cloud provider. >> Steve: Right. >> What's difficult is that they choose the operation. So we'll define day two operation. What does that actually mean? >> Its just the day to day operations, after you know, the natural, lets add an app, lets add a server, lets troubleshoot a problem. >> Something changes, now what do you do? >> So what's the big concerns? I want to just get back to the cloud native networking, because everyone kind of knows what cloud native apps are. That's been the hot trend. What is cloud native networking? How do you guys, define that? Because that seems to be the hardest part of the multi-cloud wave that's coming, is cloud native networking. >> Well there's no, you know, official Gartner definition but I can create one on the spot. >> John: Do it. (laughter) >> I just want to leverage the Cloud Construct and the cloud EPI. I don't want to have to install, like a... (trails off) For example, the first version was, let's put a virtual router that doesn't even understand the cloud environment. >> Right. If I have if I have to install a virtual machine, it has to be cloud aware. It has to understand the security group, if it's a router. It has to be programmable, to the cloud API. And understand the cloud environment. >> And one thing I hear a lot from either CSO's, CIO's or CXO's in general, is this idea of, I'm definitely not going API. So, its been an API economy. So API is key on that point, but then they say. Okay, I need to essentially have the right relationship with my suppliers, aka you called it above the clouds. So the question is... What do I do from an architectural standpoint? Do I just hire more developers and have different teams, because you mentioned that's a scale point. How do you solve this problem of, okay, I got AWS, I got GCP, or Azure, or whatever. Do I just have different teams or do I just expose EPI's? Where is that optimization? Where's the focus? >> Well, I think what you need, from a network point of view is a way, a control plane across the three clouds. And be able to use the API's of the cloud, to build networks but also to troubleshoot them and do day to day operation. So you need a view across the three clouds, that takes care of routing, connectivity. >> Steve: Performance. >> John: That's the Aviatrix plugin, right there. >> Steve: Yeah. So, how do you see, so again, your Gartner, you see the industry. You've been a network architect. How do you see this this playing out? What are the legacy incumbent client server, On Prem networking people, going to do? >> Well they need to.. >> Versus people like a Aviatrix? How do you see that playing out? >> Well obviously, all the incumbents, like Arista, Cisco, Juniper, NSX. >> Steve: Right. >> They want to basically do the lift and shift part, they want to bring, and you know, VMware want to bring in NSX on the cloud, they call that "NSX everywhere" and Cisco want to bring in ACI to the cloud, they call that "ACI Anywhere". So, everyone's.. (trails off) And then there's CloudVision from Arista, and Contrail is in the cloud. So, they just want to bring the management plane, in the cloud, but it's still based, most of them, is still based on putting a VM in them and controlling them. You extend your management console to the cloud, that's not truly cloud native. >> Right. >> Cloud native you almost have to build it from scratch. >> We like to call that cloud naive. >> Cloud naive, yeah. >> So close, one letter, right? >> Yes. >> That was a big.. (slurs) Reinvent, take the T out of Cloud Native. It's Cloud Naive. (laughter) >> That went super viral, you guys got T-shirts now. I know you're loving that. >> Steve: Yeah. >> But that really, ultimately, is kind of a double-edged sword. You can be naive on the architecture side and ruleing that. And also suppliers or can be naive. So how would you define who's naive and who's not? >> Well, in fact, their evolving as well, so for example, in Cisco, it's a little bit more native than other ones, because there really is, "ACI in the cloud", you can't really figure API's out of the cloud. NSX is going that way and so is Arista, but they're incumbent, they have their own tools, its difficult for them. They're moving slowly, so it's much easier to start from scratch. Even you, like, you know, a network company that started a few years ago. There's only really two, Aviatrix was the first one, they've been there for at least three or four years. >> Steve: Yeah. >> And there's other one's, like Akira, for example that just started. Now they're doing more connectivity, but they want to create an overlay network, across the cloud and start doing policies and things. Abstracting all the clouds within one platform. >> So, I got to ask you. I interviewed an executive at VMware, Sanjay Poonen, he said to me at RSA last week. Oh, there'll only be two networking vendors left, Cisco and VMware. (laughter) >> What's you're response to that? Obviously when you have these waves, these new brands that emerge, like Aviatrix and others. I think there'll be a lot of startups coming out of the woodwork. How do you respond to that comment? >> Well there's still a data center, there's still, like a lot, of action on campus and there's the wan. But from the cloud provisioning and cloud networking in general, I mean, they're behind I think. You know, you don't even need them to start with, you can, if you're small enough, you can just keep.. If you have AWS, you can use the AWS construct, they have to insert themselves, I mean, they're running behind. From my point of view. >> They are, certainly incumbents. I love the term Andy Jess uses at Amazon web services. He uses "Old guard, new guard", to talk about the industry. What does the new guard have to do? The new brands that are emerging. Is it be more DevOp's oriented? Is it NetSec ops? Is it NetOps? Is it programmability? These are some of the key discussions we've been having. What's your view, on how you see this programmability? >> The most important part is, they have to make the network simple for the Dev teams. You cannot make a phone call and get a Vline in two weeks anymore. So if you move to the cloud, you have to make that cloud construct as simple enough, so that for example, a Dev team could say, "Okay, I'm going to create this VPC, but this VPC automatically associates your account, you cannot go out on the internet. You have to go to the transit VPC, so there's lot of action in terms of, the IAM part and you have to put the control around them to. So to make it as simple as possible. >> You guys, both. You're the CEO of Aviatrix, but also you've got a lot of experience, going back to networking, going back to the, I call it the OSI days. For us old folks know what that means, but, you guys know what this means. I want to ask you the question. As you look at the future of networking, you hear a couple objections. "Oh, the cloud guys, they got networking, we're all set with them. How do you respond to the fact that networking's changing and the cloud guys have their own networking. What's some of the paying points that's going on premises of these enterprises? So are they good with the clouds? What needs... What are the key things that's going on in networking, that makes it more than just the cloud networking? What's your take on it? >> Well as I said earlier. Once you could easily provision in the cloud, you can easily connect to the cloud, its when you start troubleshooting applications in the cloud and try to scale. So that's where the problem occurred. >> Okay, what's your take on it. >> And you'll hear from the customers, that we have on stage and I think what happens is all the clouds by definition, designed to the 80-20 rule which means they'll design 80% of the basic functionality. And then lead to 20% extra functionality, that of course every Enterprise needs, to leave that to ISV's, like Aviatrix. Because why? Because they have to make money, they have a service and they can't have huge instances, for functionality that not everybody needs. So they have to design to the common and that, they all do it, right? They have to and then the extra, the problem is, that Cambrian explosion, that I talked about with enterprises. That's what they need. They're the ones who need that extra 20%. So that's what I see, there's always going to be that extra functionality. In an automated and simple way, that you talked about, but yet powerful. With the up with the visibility and control, that they expect of On Prem. That kind of combination, that Yin and the Yang, that people like us are providing. >> Simon I want to ask you? We're going to ask some of the cloud architect, customer panels, that same question. There's pioneer's doing some work here and there's also the laggards who come in behind their early adopters. What's going to be the tipping point? What are some of these conversations, that the cloud architects are having out there? Or what's the signs, that they need to be on this, multi-cloud or cloud native networking trend? What are some of the signal's that are going on in the environment? What are some of the thresholds? Are things that are going on, that they can pay attention to? >> Well, once they have the application on multiple cloud and they have to get wake up at two in the morning, to troubleshoot them. They'll know it's important. (laughter) So, I think that's when the rubber will hit the road. But, as I said, it's easier to prove, at any case. Okay, it's AWS, it's easy, user transit gateway, put a few VPC's and you're done. And you create some presents like Equinox and do a Direct Connect and Express Route with Azure. That looks simple, its the operations, that's when they'll realize. Okay, now I need to understand! How cloud networking works? I also need a tool, that gives me visibility and control. But not only that, I need to understand the basic underneath it as well. >> What are some of the day in the life scenarios. you envision happening with multi-cloud, because you think about what's happening. It kind of has that same vibe of interoperability, choice, multi-vendor, 'cause they're multi-cloud. Essentially multi-vendor. These are kind of old paradigms, that we've lived through with client server and internet working. What are some of the scenarios of success, that might be possible? Will be possible, with multi-cloud and cloud native networking. >> Well, I think, once you have good enough visibility, to satisfy your customers, not only, like to, keep the service running and application running. But to be able to provision fast enough, I think that's what you want to achieve. >> Simon, final question. Advice for folks watching on the Livestream, if they're sitting there as a cloud architect or CXO. What's your advice to them right now, in this market, 'cause obviously, public cloud check, hybrid cloud, they're working on that. That gets on premises done, now multi-cloud's right behind it. What's your advice? >> The first thing they should do, is really try to understand cloud networking. For each of their cloud providers and then understand the limitations. And, is what the cloud service provider offers enough? Or you need to look to a third party, but you don't look at a third party to start with. Especially an incumbent one, so it's tempting to say "I have a bunch of F5 experts", nothing against F5. I'm going to bring my F5 in the Cloud, when you can use an ELB, that automatically understand eases and auto scaling and so on. And you understand that's much simpler, but sometimes you need your F5, because you have requirements. You have like iRules and that kind of stuff, that you've used for years. 'cause you cannot do it. Okay, I have requirement and that's not met, I'm going to use Legacy Star and then you have to start thinking, okay, what about visibility control, above the true cloud. But before you do that you have to understand the limitations of the existing cloud providers. First, try to be as native as possible, until things don't work, after that you can start thinking of the cloud. >> Great insight, Simon. Thank you. >> That's great. >> With Gartner, thank you for sharing. (electronic music) >> Welcome back to ALTITUDE 2020. For the folks in the live stream, I'm John Furrier, Steve Mullaney, CEO of Aviatrix. For our first of two customer panels with cloud network architects, we've got Bobby Willoughby, AEGON Luis Castillo from National Instruments and David Shinnick with FactSet. Guys, welcome to the stage for this digital event. Come on up. (audience clapping) (upbeat music) Hey good to see you, thank you. Customer panel, this is my favorite part. We get to hear the real scoop, we get the Gardener giving us the industry overview. Certainly, multi-cloud is very relevant, and cloud-native networking is a hot trend with the live stream out there in the digital events. So guys, let's get into it. The journey is, you guys are pioneering this journey of multi-cloud and cloud-native networking and are soon going to be a lot more coming. So I want to get into the journey. What's it been like? Is it real? You've got a lot of scar tissue? What are some of the learnings? >> Absolutely. Multi-cloud is whether or not we accept it, as network engineers is a reality. Like Steve said, about two years ago, companies really decided to just bite the bullet and move there. Whether or not we accept that fact, we need to not create a consistent architecture across multiple clouds. And that is challenging without orchestration layers as you start managing different tool sets and different languages across different clouds. So it's really important to start thinking about that. >> Guys on the other panelists here, there's different phases of this journey. Some come at it from a networking perspective, some come in from a problem troubleshooting, what's your experiences? >> From a networking perspective, it's been incredibly exciting, it's kind of once in a generational opportunity to look at how you're building out your network. You can start to embrace things like infrastructure as code that maybe your peers on the systems teams have been doing for years, but it just never really worked on-prem. So it's really exciting to look at all the opportunities that we have and all of the interesting challenges that come up that you get to tackle. >> And effects that you guys are mostly AWS, right? >> Yeah. Right now though, we are looking at multiple clouds. We have production workloads running in multiple clouds today but a lot of the initial work has been with Amazon. >> And you've seen it from a networking perspective, that's where you guys are coming at it from? >> Yup. >> Awesome. How about you? >> We evolve more from a customer requirement perspective. Started out primarily as AWS, but as the customer needed more resources from Azure like HPC, Azure AD, things like that, even recently, Google analytics, our journey has evolved into more of a multi-cloud environment. >> Steve, weigh in on the architecture because this is going to be a big conversation, and I wanted you to lead this section. >> I think you guys agree the journey, it seems like the journey started a couple of years ago. Got real serious, the need for multi-cloud, whether you're there today. Of course, it's going to be there in the future. So that's really important. I think the next thing is just architecture. I'd love to hear what you, had some comments about architecture matters, it all starts, every enterprise I talked to. Maybe talk about architecture and the importance of architects, maybe Bobby. >> From architecture perspective, we started our journey five years ago. >> Wow, okay. >> And we're just now starting our fourth evolution over network architect. And we call it networking security net sec, versus just as network. And that fourth-generation architecture should be based primarily upon the Palo Alto Networks and Aviatrix. Aviatrix to new orchestration piece of it. But that journey came because of the need for simplicity, the need for a multi-cloud orchestration without us having to go and do reprogramming efforts across every cloud as it comes along. >> I guess the other question I also had around architecture is also... Luis maybe just talk about it. I know we've talked a little bit about scripting, and some of your thoughts on that. >> Absolutely. So for us, we started creating the network constructs with cloud formation, and we've stuck with that for the most part. What's interesting about that is today, on-premise, we have a lot of automation around how we provision networks, but cloud formation has become a little bit like the new manual for us. We're now having issues with having to automate that component and making it consistent with our on-premise architecture and making it consistent with Azure architecture and Google cloud. So, it's really interesting to see companies now bring that layer of abstraction that SD-WAN brought to the wound side, now it's going up into the cloud networking architecture. >> Great. So on the fourth generation, you mentioned you're on the fourth-gen architecture. What have you learned? Is there any lessons, scratch issue, what to avoid, what worked? What was the path that you touched? >> It's probably the biggest lesson there is that when you think you finally figured it out, you haven't. Amazon will change something, Azure change something. Transit Gateway is a game-changer. And listening to the business requirements is probably the biggest thing we need to do upfront. But I think from a simplicity perspective, like I said, we don't want to do things four times. We want to do things one time, we want be able to write to an API which Aviatrix has and have them do the orchestration for us. So that we don't have to do it four times. >> How important is architecture in the progression? Is it do you guys get thrown in the deep end, to solve these problems, are you guys zooming out and looking at it? How are you guys looking at the architecture? >> You can't get off the ground if you don't have the network there. So all of those, we've gone through similar evolutions, we're on our fourth or fifth evolution. I think about what we started off with Amazon without Direct Connect Gateway, without Transit Gateway, without a lot of the things that are available today, kind of the 80, 20 that Steve was talking about. Just because it wasn't there doesn't mean we didn't need it. So we needed to figure out a way to do it, we couldn't say, "Oh, you need to come back to the network team in a year, and maybe Amazon will have a solution for it." We need to do it now and evolve later and maybe optimize or change the way you're doing things in the future. But don't sit around and wait, you can't. >> I'd love to have you guys each individually answer this question for the live streams that comes up a lot. A lot of cloud architects out in the community, what should they be thinking about the folks that are coming into this proactively and, or realizing the business benefits are there? What advice would you guys give them on architecture? What should be they'd be thinking about, and what are some guiding principles you could share? >> So I would start with looking at an architecture model that can spread and give consistency to the different cloud vendors that you will absolutely have to support. Cloud vendors tend to want to pull you into using their native tool set, and that's good if only it was realistic to talk about only one cloud. But because it doesn't, it's super important to talk about, and have a conversation with the business and with your technology teams about a consistent model. >> And how do I do my day one work so that I'm not spending 80% of my time troubleshooting or managing my network? Because if I'm doing that, then I'm missing out on ways that I can make improvements or embrace new technologies. So it's really important early on to figure out, how do I make this as low maintenance as possible so that I can focus on the things that the team really should be focusing on? >> Bobby, your advice there, architecture. >> I don't know what else I can add to that. Simplicity of operations is key. >> So the holistic view of day two operations you mentioned, let's can jump in day one as you're getting stuff set up, day two is your life after. This is kind of of what you're getting at, David. So what does that look like? What are you envisioning as you look at that 20-mile stair, out post multi-cloud world? What are some of the things that you want in the day two operations? >> Infrastructure as code is really important to us. So how do we design it so that we can start fit start making network changes and fitting them into a release pipeline and start looking at it like that, rather than somebody logging into a router CLI and troubleshooting things in an ad hoc nature? So, moving more towards a dev-ops model. >> You guys, anything to add on that day two? >> Yeah, I would love to add something. In terms of day two operations you can either sort of ignore the day two operations for a little while, where you get your feet wet, or you can start approaching it from the beginning. The fact is that the cloud-native tools don't have a lot of maturity in that space and when you run into an issue, you're going to end up having a bad day, going through millions and millions of logs just to try to understand what's going on. That's something that the industry just now is beginning to realize it's such a big gap. >> I think that's key because for us, we're moving to more of an event-driven or operations. In the past, monitoring got the job done. It's impossible to monitor something that is not there when the event happens. So the event-driven application and then detection is important. >> Gardner is all about the cloud-native wave coming into networking. That's going to be a serious thing. I want to get your guys' perspective, I know you have each different views of how you come into the journey and how you're executing. And I always say the beauty's in the eye of the beholder and that applies to how the network's laid out. So, Bobby, you guys do a lot of high-performance encryption, both on AWS and Azure. That's a unique thing for you. How are you seeing that impact with multi-cloud? >> That's a new requirement for us too, where we have an increment to encrypt. And then if you ever get the question, should I encrypt, should I not encrypt? The answer is always yes. You should encrypt when you can encrypt. For our perspective, we need to migrate a bunch of data from our data centers. We have some huge data centers, and getting that data to the cloud is a timely expense in some cases. So we have been mandated, we have to encrypt everything, leave in the data center. So we're looking at using the Aviatrix insane mode appliances to be able to encrypt 10, 20 gigabits of data as it moves to the cloud itself. >> David, you're using Terraform, you've got FireNet, you've got a lot of complexity in your network. What do you guys look at the future for your environment? >> So many exciting that we're working on now as FireNet. So for our security team that obviously have a lot of knowledge base around Palo Alto, and with our commitments to our clients, it's not very easy to shift your security model to a specific cloud vendor. So there's a lot of SOC 2 compliance and things like that were being able to take some of what you've worked on for years on-prem and put it in the cloud and have the same type of assurance that things are going to work and be secure in the same way that they are on-prem, helps make that journey into the cloud a lot easier. >> And Louis, you guys got scripting, you got a lot of things going on. What's your unique angle on this? >> Absolutely. So for disclosure, I'm not an Aviatrix customer yet. (laughs) >> It's okay, we want to hear the truth, so that's good. Tell us, what are you thinking about? What's on your mind? >> When you talk about implementing a tool like this, it's really just really important to talk about automation focus on value. When you talk about things like encryption and things like so you're encrypting tunnels and encrypting the path, and those things should be second nature really. When you look at building those back-ends and managing them with your team, it becomes really painful. So tools like Aviatrix that add a lot automation it's out of sight, out of mind. You can focus on the value, and you don't have to focus on this. >> So I got to ask you guys. I see Aviatrix was here, they're supplier to this sector, but you guys are customers. Everyone's pitching your stuff, people knock on you, "Buy my stuff." How do you guys have that conversation with the suppliers, like the cloud vendors and other folks? What's it like? We're API all the way? You've got to support this? What are some of your requirements? How do you talk to and evaluate people that walk in and want to knock on your door and pitch you something? What's the conversation like? >> It's definitely API driven. We definitely look at the API structure that the vendors provide before we select anything. That is always first of mine and also, what problem are we really trying to solve? Usually, people try to sell or try to give us something that isn't really valuable, like implementing a Cisco solution on the cloud doesn't really add a lot of value, that's where we go. >> David, what's your conversation like with suppliers? Do you have a certain new way to do things? As it becomes more agile, essentially networking, and getting more dynamic, what are some of the conversations with either in commits or new vendors that you're having? What do you require? >> Ease of use is definitely high up there. We've had some vendors come in and say, "Hey, when you go to set this up, "we're going to want to send somebody on-site." And they're going to sit with you for a day to configure it. And that's a red flag. Well, wait a minute, do we really, if one of my really talented engineers can't figure it out on his own, what's going on there and why is that? Having some ease of use and the team being comfortable with it and understanding it is really important. >> Bobby, how about you? Old days was, do a bake-off and the winner takes all. Is it like that anymore? What's evolving? Bake-off last year for but still win. But that's different now because now when you get the product, you can install the product in AWS and Azure, have it up running in a matter of minutes. So the key is that can you be operational within hours or days instead of weeks? But do we also have the flexibility to customize it, to meet your needs? Because you don't want to be put into a box with the other customers when you have needs that are past their needs. >> I can almost see the challenge that you guys are living, where you've got the cloud immediate value, depending how you can roll up any solutions, but then you might have other needs. So you've got to be careful not to buy into stuff that's not shipping. So you're trying to be proactive and at the same time, deal with what you got. How do you guys see that evolving? Because multi-cloud to me is definitely relevant, but it's not yet clear how to implement across. How do you guys look at this baked versus future solutions coming? How do you balance that? >> Again, so right now, we're taking the ad hoc approach and experimenting what the different concepts of cloud are and really leveraging the native constructs of each cloud. But there's a breaking point for sure. You don't get to scale this like someone said, and you have to focus on being able to deliver, developers their sandbox or their play area for the things that they're trying to build quickly. And the only way to do that is with some consistent orchestration layer that allows you to-- >> So you expect a lot more stuff to becoming pretty quickly in that area. >> I do expect things to start maturing quite quickly this year. >> And you guys see similar trend, new stuff coming fast? >> Yeah. Probably the biggest challenge we've got now is being able to segment within the network, being able to provide segmentation between production, non-production workloads, even businesses, because we support many businesses worldwide and isolation between those is a key criteria there. So the ability to identify and quickly isolate those workloads is key. So the CIOs that are watching are saying, "Hey, take that hill, do multi-cloud." And then you have the bottoms up organization, "Pause, you're like off a little bit, it's not how it works." What is the reality in terms of implementing as fast as possible? Because the business benefits are clear, but it's not always clear on the technology how to move that fast. What are some of the barriers, what are the blockers, what are the enablers? >> I think the reality is that you may not think you're multi-cloud, but your business is. So I think the biggest barrier there is understanding what the requirements are and how best to meet those requirements in a secure manner. Because you need to make sure that things are working from a latency perspective that things work the way they did and get out of the mind shift that it was a tier-three application and the data center, it doesn't have to be a tier-three application in the cloud. So, lift and shift is not the way to go. >> Scale is a big part of what I see is the competitive advantage by these clouds and used to be proprietary network stacks in the old days, and then open systems came, that was a good thing. But as cloud has become bigger, there's an inherent lock-in there with the scale. How do you guys keep the choice open? How are you guys thinking about interoperability? What are some of the conversations that you guys are having around those key concepts? >> When we look at from a networking perspective, it's really key for you to just enable all the class to be able to communicate between them. Developers will find a way to use the cloud that best suits their business needs. And like you said, it's whether you're in denial or not, of the multi-cloud fact that your company is in already that's it becomes really important for you to move quickly. >> Yeah. And a lot of it also hinges on how well is the provider embracing what that specific cloud is doing? So, are they swimming with Amazon or Azure and just helping facilitate things, and they're doing the heavy lifting API work for you? Or are they swimming upstream and they're trying to hack it all together in messy way? And so that helps you stay out of the lock-in because there, if they're using Amazon native tools to help you get where you need to be, it's not like Amazon is going to release something in the future that completely makes you have designed yourself into a corner. So the closer, more than cloud-native they are, the more, the easier it is to deploy. >> Which also need to be aligned in such a way that you can take advantage of those cloud-native technologies. Will it make sense? TGW is a gamechanger in terms of cost and performance. So to completely ignore that, would be wrong. But if you needed to have encryption, TGW is not encrypted, so you need to have some type of Gateway to do the VPN encryption. So, the Aviatrix tool will give you the beauty of both worlds. You can use TGW or the Gateway. Real quick on the last minute we have, I want to just get a quick feedback from you guys. I hear a lot of people say to me, "Hey, pick the best cloud for the workload you got, then figure out multicloud behind the scenes." Do you guys agree with that? Do I go more to one cloud across the whole company or this workload works great on AWS, that workload works great on this. From a cloud standpoint, do you agree with that premise, and then when is multi-cloud stitching altogether? >> From an application perspective, it can be per workload, but it can also be an economical decision, certain enterprise contracts will pull you in one direction to add value, but the network problem is still the same. >> It doesn't go away. >> You don't want to be trying to fit a square into a round hall. If it works better on that cloud provider, then it's our job to make sure that service is there and people can use it. >> I agree, you just need to stay ahead of the game, make sure that the network infrastructure is there, security is available and is multi-cloud capable. >> At the end of the day, you guys are just validating that it's the networking game now. Cloud storage, compute check, networking is where the action is. Awesome. Thanks for your insights guys, appreciate you coming on the panel. Appreciate it, thanks. (upbeat music) >> John: Our next customer panel, got great another set of cloud network architects, Justin Smith with Zuora, Justin Brodley with EllieMae and Amit Utreja with Coupa. Welcome to stage. (audience applauds) (upbeat music) >> All right, thank you. >> How are ya? >> Thank you. Thank You. >> Hey Amit. How are ya? >> Did he say it right? >> Yeah. >> Okay he's got all the cliff notes from the last session, welcome back. Rinse and repeat. We're going to go into the hood a little bit. And I think they nailed what we've been reporting, we've been having this conversation around, networking is where the action is because that's at the end of the day you got to move packet from A to B and you got workloads exchanging data. So it's really killer. So let's get started. Amit, what are you seeing as the journey of multicloud as you go under the hood and say, "Okay, I got to implement this. "I have to engineer the network, "make it enabling, make it programmable, "make it interoperable across clouds." That almost sounds impossible to me. What's your take? >> Yeah, it seems impossible but if you are running an organization which is running infrastructure as a code it is easily doable. Like you can use tools out there that's available today, you can use third party products that can do a better job. But put your architecture first, don't wait. Architecture may not be perfect, put the best architecture that's available today and be agile, to iterate and make improvements over the time. >> We get to Justin's over here, so I have to be careful when I point a question to Justin, they both have the answer. Okay, journeys, what's the journey been like? Is there phases, We heard that from Gardner, people come into multicloud and cloud native networking from different perspectives? What's your take on the journey, Justin? >> Yeah, from our perspective, we started out very much focused on one cloud and as we've started doing acquisitions, we started doing new products to the market, the need for multicloud becomes very apparent, very quickly for us. And so having an architecture that we can plug and play into and be able to add and change things as it changes is super important for what we're doing in the space. >> Justin, your journey. >> Yes. For us, we were very ad hoc oriented and the idea is that we were reinventing all the time, trying to move into these new things and coming up with great new ideas. And so rather than it being some iterative approach with our deployments that became a number of different deployments. And so we shifted that toward and the network has been a real enabler of this. There's one network and it touches whatever cloud we want it to touch, and it touches the data centers that we need it to touch, and it touches the customers that we needed to touch. Our job is to make sure that the services that are available in one of those locations are available in all of the locations. So the idea is not that we need to come up with this new solution every time, it's that we're just iterating on what we've already decided to do. >> Before we get the architecture section, I want to ask you guys a question? I'm a big fan of let the app developers have infrastructure as code, so check. But having the right cloud run that workload, I'm a big fan of that, if it works great. But we just heard from the other panel, you can't change the network. So I want to get your thoughts, what is cloud native networking? And is that the engine really, that's the enabler for this multicloud trend? What's you guys take? We'll start with Amit, what do you think about that? >> Yeah, so you're going to have workloads running in different clouds and the workloads would have affinity to one cloud or other. But how you expose that it's a matter of how you are going to build your networks. How you're going to run security. How you're going to do egress, ingress out of it so -- >> You said networking is the big problem to solve. >> Yes. >> What's the solution? What's the key pain points and problem statement? >> The key pain point for most companies is how do you take your traditionally on premise network and then blow it out to the cloud in a way that makes sense. You have IP conflicts, you have IP space, you have public IPs on premise as well as in the cloud. And how do you kind of make sense of all of that? And I think that's where tools like Aviatrix make a lot of sense in that space. >> From our side, it's really simple. It's a latency, it's bandwidth and availability. These don't change whether we're talking about cloud or data center, or even corporate IT networking. So our job when these all of these things are simplified into like, S3, for instance and our developers want to use those. We have to be able to deliver that and for a particular group or another group that wants to use just just GCP resources. We have to support these requirements and these wants, as opposed to saying, "Hey, that's not a good idea." No, our job is to enable them not to disable them. >> Do you guys think infrastructure is code? Which I love that, I think that's the future in this. We even saw that with DevOps. But as you start getting the networking, is it getting down to the network portion where its network as code? Because storage and compute working really well, we're seeing all Kubernetes on service mesh trend. Network has code, reality is it there? Is it still got work to do? >> It's absolutely there, you mentioned net DevOps and it's very real. In Coupa we build our networks through terraform and not only just terraform, build an API so that we can consistently build VNets and VPC all across in the same way. >> So you guys are doing it? >> Yup. And even security groups. And then on top and Aviatrix comes in, we can peer the networks bridge all the different regions through code. >> Same with you guys. >> Yeah. >> What do you think about this? >> Everything we deploy is done with automation and then we also run things like Lambda on top to make changes in real time, we don't make manual changes on our network. In the data center, funny enough, it's still manual but the cloud has enabled us to move into this automation mindset. And all my guys, that's what they focus on is bringing, now what they're doing in the cloud into the data center, which is kind of opposite of what it should be or what it used to be. >> It's full DevOps then? >> Yes. >> For us, it was similar on-prem is still somewhat very manual, although we're moving more and more to ninja and terraform type concepts. But everything in the production environment is code, confirmation terraform code and now coming into the data center same (mumbles). >> So I just wanted to jump in Justin Smith, one of the comment that you made, because it's something that we always talk about a lot is that the center of gravity of architecture used to be an on-prem and now it's shifted in the cloud. And once you have your strategic architecture, what do you do? You push that everywhere. So what you used to see at the beginning of cloud was pushing the architecture on-prem into cloud. Now, I want to pick up on what you said, do you others agree that the center of gravity is here, I'm now pushing what I do in the cloud back into on-prem? And then so first that and then also in the journey, where are you at from zero to 100 of actually in the journey to cloud? Are you 50% there, are you 10%? Are you evacuating data centers next year? Where are you guys at? >> Yeah, so there's there's two types of gravity that you typically are dealing with, with the migration. First is data, gravity and your data set, and where that data lives. And then the second is the network platform that wraps all that together. In our case, the data gravity solely mostly on-prem but our network is now extending out to the app tier, it's going to be in cloud. Eventually, that data, gravity will also move to cloud as we start getting more sophisticated but in our journey, we're about halfway there. About halfway through the process, we're taking a handle of lift and shift and -- >> Steve: And when did that start? >> We started about three years ago. >> Okay, okay. >> Well for Coupa it's a very different story. It started from a garage and 100% on the cloud. So it's a business plan management platform, software as a service run 100% on the cloud. >> That was was like 10 years ago, right? >> Yes. >> Yeah. >> You guys are riding the wave of the architecture. Justin I want to ask you, Zuora, you guys mentioned DevOps. Obviously, we saw the huge observability wave, which essentially network management for the cloud, in my opinion. It's more dynamic, but this is about visibility. We heard from the last panel you don't know what's being turned on or turned off from a services standpoint, at any given time. How is all this playing out when you start getting into the DevOps down (mumbles)? >> This is the big challenge for all of us is visibility. When you talk transport within a cloud, very interestingly we we have moved from having a backbone that we bought, that we own, that would be data center connectivity. Zuora's a subscription billing company, so we want to support the subscription mindset. So rather than going and buying circuits and having to wait three months to install and then coming up with some way to get things connected and resiliency and redundancy. My backbone is in the cloud. I use the cloud providers interconnections between regions to transport data across and so if you do that with their native solutions, you do lose visibility. There are areas in that that you don't get, which is why controllers and having some type of management plane is a requirement for us to do what we're supposed to do and provide consistency while doing it. >> Great conversation. I loved what you said earlier latency, bandwidth, I think availability were your top three things. Guys SLA, just do ping times between clouds it's like, you don't know what you're getting for round trip time. This becomes a huge kind of risk management, black hole, whatever you want to call it, blind spot. How are you guys looking at the interconnect between clouds? Because I can see that working from ground to cloud on per cloud but when you start dealing with multiclouds workloads, SLAs will be all over the map, won't they just inherently. How do you guys view that? >> Yeah, I think we talked about workload and we know that the workloads are going to be different in different clouds, but they're going to be calling each other. So it's very important to have that visibility, that you can see how data is flowing at what latency and what availability is there and our authority needs to operate on that. >> So use the software dashboard, look at the times and look at the latency -- >> In the old days, Strongswan Openswan you try to figure it out, in the new days you have to figure out. >> Justin, what's your answer to that because you're in the middle of it? >> Yeah, I think the key thing there is that we have to plan for that failure, we have to plan for that latency in our applications. If certain things are tracking in your SLI, certain things are planning for and you loosely coupled these services in a much more microservices approach. So you actually can handle that kind of failure or that type of unknown latency and unfortunately, the cloud has made us much better at handling exceptions in a much better way. >> You guys are all great examples of cloud native from day one. When did you have the tipping point moment or the epiphany of saying a multiclouds real, I can't ignore it, I got to factor that into all my design principles and everything you're doing? Was there a moment or was it from day one? >> There are two reasons, one was the business. So in business, there were some affinity to not be in one cloud or to be in one cloud and that drove from the business side. So as a cloud architect our responsibility was to support that business. Another is the technology, some things are really running better in, like if you're running Dotnet workload or your going to run machine learning or AI so that you would have that preference of one cloud over other. >> Guys, any thoughts on that? >> That was the bill that we got from AWS. That's what drives a lot of these conversations is the financial viability of what you're building on top of. This failure domain idea which is fairly interesting. How do I solve our guarantee against a failure domain? You have methodologies with back end direct connects or interconnect with GCP. All of these ideas are something that you have to take into account but that transport layer should not matter to whoever we're building this for. Our job is to deliver the frames and the packets, what that flows across, how you get there? We want to make that seamless. And so whether it's a public internet API call or it's a back end connectivity through direct connect, it doesn't matter. It just has to meet a contract that you've signed with your application, folks. >> Yeah, that's the availability piece. >> Justin, your thoughts on that, any comment on that? >> So actually multiclouds become something much more recent in the last six to eight months, I'd say. We always kind of had a very much an attitude of like moving to Amazon from our private cloud is hard enough, why complicate it further? But the realities of the business and as we start seeing, improvements in Google and Azure and different technology spaces, the need for multicloud becomes much more important. As well as our acquisition strategies are matured, we're seeing that companies that used to be on premise that we typically acquire are now very much already on a cloud. And if they're on a cloud, I need to plug them into our ecosystem. And so that's really changed our multicloud story in a big way. >> I'd love to get your thoughts on the clouds versus the clouds, because you compare them Amazon's got more features, they're rich with features. Obviously, the bills are high to people using them. But Google's got a great network, Google's networks pretty damn good And then you got Azure. What's the difference between the clouds? Where do they fall? Where do they peak in certain areas better than others? What are the characteristics, which makes one cloud better? Do they have a unique feature that makes Azure better than Google and vice versa? What do you guys think about the different clouds? >> Yeah, to my experience, I think the approach is different in many places. Google has a different approach very DevOps friendly and you can run your workloads with your network can span regions. But our application ready to accept that. Amazon is evolving. I remember 10 years back Amazon's network was a flat network, we would be launching servers in 10.0.0/8, right. And then the VPCs came out. >> We'll have to translate that to English for the live feed. Not good. So the VPCs concept came out, multi account came out, so they are evolving. Azure had a late start but because they have a late start, they saw the pattern and they have some mature setup on the network. >> They've got around the same price too. >> I think they're all trying to say they're equal in their own ways. I think they all have very specific design philosophies that allow them to be successful in different ways and you have to kind of keep that in mind as you architect your own solution. For example, Amazon has a very regional affinity, they don't like to go cross region in their architecture. Whereas Google is very much it's a global network, we're going to think about as a global solution. I think Google also has advantage that it's third to market and so has seen what Azure did wrong, it seeing what AWS did wrong and it's made those improvements and I think that's one of their big advantage. >> They got great scale too. Justin thoughts on the cloud. >> So yeah, Amazon built from the system up and Google built from the network down. So their ideas and approaches are from a global versus original, I agree with you completely that is the big number one thing. But the if you look at it from the outset, interestingly, the inability or the ability for Amazon to limit layer to broadcasting and what that really means from a VPC perspective, changed all the routing protocols you can use. All the things that we had built inside of a data center to provide resiliency and make things seamless to users, all of that disappeared. And so because we had to accept that at the VPC level, now we have to accept that at the WAN level. Google's done a better job of being able to overcome those things and provide those traditional network facilities to us. >> Just a great panel, we could go all day here, it's awesome. So I heard, we will get to the cloud native naive questions. So kind of think about what's naive and what's cloud, I'll ask that next but I got to ask you I had a conversation with a friend he's like, "WAN is the new LAN?" So if you think about what the LAN was at a data center, WAN is the new LAN, cause you keep talking about the cloud impact? So that means ST-WAN, the old ST-WAN kind of changing. There's a new LAN. How do you guys look at that? Because if you think about it, what LANs were for inside a premises was all about networking, high speed. But now when you take the WAN and make it, essentially a LAN, do you agree with that? And how do you view this trend? Is it good or bad or is it ugly? What you guys take on this? >> Yeah, I think it's a thing that you have to work with your application architects. So if you are managing networks and if you're a server engineer, you need to work with them to expose the unreliability that it would bring in. So the application has to handle a lot of the difference in the latencies and the reliability has to be worked through the application there. >> LAN, WAN, same concept is that BS? Can you give some insight? >> I think we've been talking about for a long time the erosion of the edge. And so is this just a continuation of that journey we've been on for last several years. As we get more and more cloud native and we talked about API's, the ability to lock my data in place and not be able to access it really goes away. And so I think this is just continuation. I think it has challenges. We start talking about WAN scale versus LAN scale, the tooling doesn't work the same, the scale of that tooling is much larger. and the need to automation is much, much higher in a WAN than it wasn't a LAN. That's why you're seeing so much infrastructure as code. >> Yeah. So for me, I'll go back again to this, it's bandwidth and its latency that define those two LAN versus WAN. But the other thing that's comes up more and more with cloud deployments is whereas our security boundary and where can I extend this secure aware appliance or set of rules to protect what's inside of it. So for us, we're able to deliver VRFs or route forwarding tables for different segments wherever we're at in the world. And so they're trusted to talk to each other but if they're going to go to someplace that's outside of their network, then they have to cross the security boundary, where we enforce policy very heavily. So for me, there's it's not just LAN, WAN it's how does environment get to environment more importantly. >> That's a great point in security, we haven't talked it yet but that's got to be baked in from the beginning, this architecture. Thoughts on security, how you guys are dealing with it? >> Yeah, start from the base, have app to app security built in. Have TLS, have encryption on the data at transit, data at rest. But as you bring the application to the cloud and they're going to go multicloud, talking to over the internet, in some places, well have app to app security. >> Our principles day, security is day zero every day. And so we always build it into our design, build into our architecture, into our applications. It's encrypt everything, it's TLS everywhere. It's make sure that that data is secure at all times. >> Yeah, one of the cool trends at RSA, just as a side note was the data in use encryption piece, which is homomorphic stuff was interesting. Alright guys, final question. We heard on the earlier panel was also trending at re:Invent, we think the T out of cloud native, it spells cloud naive. They have shirts now, Aviatrix kind of got this trend going. What does that mean to be naive? To your peers out there watching the live stream and also the suppliers that are trying to supply you guys with technology and services, what's naive look like and what's native look like? When is someone naive about implementing all this stuff? >> So for me, because we are in 100% cloud, for us its main thing is ready for the change. And you will find new building blocks coming in and the network design will evolve and change. So don't be naive and think that it's static, evolve with the change. >> I think the biggest naivety that people have is that well, I've been doing it this way for 20 years, I've been successful, it's going to be successful in cloud. The reality is that's not the case. You got to think some of the stuff a little bit differently and you need to think about it early enough, so that you can become cloud native and really enable your business on cloud. >> Yeah for me it's being open minded. Our industry, the network industry as a whole, has been very much I'm smarter than everybody else and we're going to tell everybody how it's going to be done. And we fell into a lull when it came to producing infrastructure and so embracing this idea that we can deploy a new solution or a new environment in minutes as opposed to hours, or weeks or months in some cases, is really important in and so >> - >> It's naive being closed minded, native being open minded. >> Exactly. For me that was a transformative kind of where I was looking to solve problems in a cloud way as opposed to looking to solve problems in this traditional old school way. >> All right, I know we're at a time but I got to asked one more question, so you guys so good. Give me a quick answer. What's the BS language when you, the BS meter goes off when people talk to you about solutions? What's the kind of jargon that you hear, that's the BS meter going off? What are people talking about that in your opinion you here you go, "That's total BS?" What triggers you? >> So that I have two lines out of movies if I say them without actually thinking them. It's like 1.21 gigawatts are you out of your mind from Back to the Future right? Somebody's giving you all these wiz bang things. And then Martin Maul and Michael Keaton in Mr Mom when he goes to 220, 221, whatever it takes. >> Yeah. >> Those two right there, if those go off in my mind where somebody's talking to me, I know they're full of baloney. >> So a lot of speeds and feeds, a lot of speeds and feeds a lot of -- >> Just data. Instead of talking about what you're actually doing and solutioning for. You're talking about, "Well, it does this this this." Okay to 220, 221. (laughter) >> Justin, what's your take? >> Anytime I start seeing the cloud vendors start benchmarking against each other. Your workload is your workload, you need to benchmark yourself. Don't listen to the marketing on that, that's just awful. >> Amit, what triggers you in the BS meter? >> I think if somebody explains to you are not simple, they cannot explain you in simplicity, then it's all bull shit. >> (laughs) That's a good one. Alright guys, thanks for the great insight, great panel. How about a round of applause to practitioners. (audience applauds) (upbeat music) >> John: Okay, welcome back to Altitude 2020 for the digital event for the live feed. Welcome back, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE with Steve Mullaney, CEO Aviatrix. For the next panel from Global System Integrated, the folks who are building and working with folks on their journey to multicloud and cloud-native networking. We've got a great panel, George Buckman with DXC and Derrick Monahan with WWT, welcome to the stage. (Audience applauds) >> Hey >> Thank you >> Groovy spot >> All right (upbeat music) >> Okay, you guys are the ones out there advising, building, and getting down and dirty with multicloud and cloud-native networking, we just heard from the customer panel. You can see the diversity of where people come in to the journey of cloud, it kind of depends upon where you are, but the trends are all clear, cloud-native networking, DevOps, up and down the stack, this has been the main engine. What's your guys' take of this journey to multicloud? What do you guys think? >> Yeah, it's critical, I mean we're seeing all of our enterprise customers enter into this, they've been through the migrations of the easy stuff, ya know? Now they're trying to optimize and get more improvements, so now the tough stuff's coming on, right? They need their data processing near where their data is. So that's driving them to a multicloud environment. >> Yeah, we've heard some of the Edge stuff, I mean, you guys are-- >> Exactly. >> You've seen this movie before, but now it's a whole new ballgame, what's your take? Yeah, so, I'll give you a hint, our practice is not called the cloud practice, it's the multicloud practice, and so if that gives you a hint of how we approach things. It's very consultative. And so when we look at what the trends are, like a year ago. About a year ago we were having conversations with customers, "Let's build a data center in the cloud. Let's put some VPCs, let's throw some firewalls, let's put some DNS and other infrastructure out there and let's hope it works." This isn't a science project. What we're starting to see is customers are starting to have more of a vision, we're helping with that consultative nature, but it's totally based on the business. And you've got to start understanding how lines of business are using the apps and then we evolve into the next journey which is a foundational approach to-- >> What are some of the problems some of your customers are solving when they come to you? What are the top things that are on their mind, obviously the ease of use, agility, all that stuff, what specifically are they digging into? >> Yeah, so complexity, I think when you look at a multicloud approach, in my view is, network requirements are complex. You know, I think they are, but I think the approach can be, "Let's simplify that." So one thing that we try to do, and this is how we talk to customers is, just like you simplify in Aviatrix, simplifies the automation orchestration of cloud networking, we're trying to simplify the design, the plan, and implementation of the infrastructure across multiple workloads, across multiple platforms. And so the way we do it, is we sit down, we look at not just use cases, not just the questions we commonly anticipate, we actually build out, based on the business and function requirements, we build out a strategy and then create a set of documents, and guess what? We actually build it in a lab, and that lab that we platform rebuilt, proves out this reference architectural actually works. >> Absolutely, we implement similar concepts. I mean, they're proven practices, they work, right? >> But George, you mentioned that the hard part's now upon us, are you referring to networking, what specifically were you getting at there when you said, "The easy part's done, now the hard part?" >> So for the enterprises themselves, migrating their more critical apps or more difficult apps into the environments, ya know, we've just scratched the surface, I believe, on what enterprises are doing to move into the cloud, to optimize their environments, to take advantage of the scale and speed to deployment and to be able to better enable their businesses. So they're just now really starting to-- >> So do you guys see what I talked about? I mean, in terms of that Cambrian explosion, I mean, you're both monster system integrators with top fortune enterprise customers, you know, really rely on you for guidance and consulting and so forth, and deploy their networks. Is that something that you've seen? I mean, does that resonate? Did you notice a year and a half ago all of a sudden the importance of cloud for enterprise shoot up? >> Yeah, I mean, we're seeing it now. >> Okay. >> In our internal environment as well, ya know, we're a huge company ourselves, customer zero, our internal IT, so, we're experiencing that internally and every one of our other customers as well. >> So I have another question and I don't know the answer to this, and a lawyer never asks a question that you don't know the answer to, but I'm going to ask it anyway. DXC and WWT, massive system integrators, why Aviatrix? >> Great question, Steve, so I think the way we approach things, I think we have a similar vision, a similar strategy, how you approach things, how we approach things, at World Wide Technology. Number one, we want a simplify the complexity. And so that's your number one priority. Let's take the networking, let's simplify it, and I think part of the other point I'm making is we see this automation piece as not just an after thought anymore. If you look at what customers care about, visibility and automation is probably at the top three, maybe the third on the list, and I think that's where we see the value. I think the partnership that we're building and what I get excited about is not just putting yours and our lab and showing customers how it works, it's co-developing a solution with you. Figuring out, "Hey, how can we make this better?" >> Right >> Visibility is a huge thing, just in security alone, network everything's around visibility. What automation do you see happening, in terms of progression, order of operations, if you will? What's the low hanging fruit? What are people working on now? What are some of the aspirational goals around when you start thinking about multicloud and automation? >> So I wanted to get back to his question. >> Answer that question. >> I wanted to answer your question, you know, what led us there and why Aviatrix. You know, in working some large internal IT projects, and looking at how we were going to integrate those solutions, you know, we like to build everything with recipes. Network is probably playing catch-up in the DevOps world but with a DevOps mindset, looking to speed to deploy, support, all those things, so when you start building your recipe, you take a little of this, a little of that, and you mix it all together, well, when you look around, you say, "Wow, look, there's this big bag of Aviatrix. "Let me plop that in. That solves a big part "of my problems that I had, the speed to integrate, "the speed to deploy, and the operational views "that I need to run this." So that was what led me to-- >> John: So how about reference architectures? >> Yeah, absolutely, so, you know, they came with a full slate of reference architectures already out there and ready to go that fit our needs, so it was very easy for us to integrate those into our recipes. >> What do you guys think about all the multi-vendor inter-operability conversations that have been going on? Choice has been a big part of multicloud in terms of, you know, customers want choice, they'll put a workload in the cloud if it works, but this notion of choice and interoperability has become a big conversation. >> It is, and I think that our approach, and that's the way we talk to customers is, "Let's speed and de-risk that decision making process, "and how do we do that?" Because interoperability is key. You're not just putting, it's not just a single vendor, we're talking, you know, many many vendors, I mean think about the average number of cloud applications a customer uses, a business, an enterprise business today, you know, it's above 30, it's skyrocketing and so what we do, and we look at it from an interoperability approach is, "How do things inter-operate?" We test it out, we validate it, we build a reference architecture that says, "These are the critical design elements, "now let's build one with Aviatrix "and show how this works with Aviatrix." And I think the important part there, though, is the automation piece that we add to it and visibility. So I think the visibility is what I see lacking across industry today. >> In cloud-native that's been a big topic. >> Yep >> Okay, in terms of Aviatrix, as you guys see them coming in, they're one of the ones that are emerging and the new brands emerging with multicloud, you've still got the old guard encumbered with huge footprints. How are customers dealing with that kind of component in dealing with both of them? >> Yeah, I mean, we have customers that are ingrained with a particular vendor and you know, we have partnerships with many vendors. So our objective is to provide the solution that meets that client. >> John: And they all want multi-vendor, they all want interoperability. >> Correct. >> All right, so I got to ask you guys a question while we were defining Day-2 operations. What does that mean? You guys are looking at the big business and technical components of architecture, what does Day-2 operations mean, what's the definition of that? >> Yeah, so I think from our perspective, with my experience, we, you know, Day-2 operations, whether it's not just the orchestration piece in setting up and let it automate and have some, you know, change control, you're looking at this from a Day-2 perspective, "How do I support this ongoing "and make it easy to make changes as we evolve?" The cloud is very dynamic. The nature of how fast it's expanding, the number features is astonishing. Trying to keep up to date with the number of just networking capabilities and services that are added. So I think Day-2 operations starts with a fundamental understanding of building out supporting a customer's environments, and making the automation piece easy from a distance, I think. >> Yeah and, you know, taking that to the next level of being able to enable customers to have catalog items that they can pick and choose, "Hey I need this network connectivity "from this cloud location back to this on-prem." And being able to have that automated and provisioned just simply by ordering it. >> For the folks watching out there, guys, take a minute to explain as you guys are in the trenches doing a lot of good work. What are some of the engagements that you guys get into? How does that progress? What happens there, they call you up and say, "Hey I need some multicloud," or you're already in there? I mean, take us through how someone can engage to use a global SI, they come in and make this thing happen, what's the typical engagement look like? >> Derrick: Yeah, so from our perspective, we typically have a series of workshops in the methodology that we kind of go along the journey. Number one, we have a foundational approach. And I don't mean foundation meaning the network foundation, that's a very critical element, we got to factor in security and we got to factor in automation. So when you think about foundation, we do a workshop that starts with education. A lot of times we'll go in and we'll just educate the customer, what is VPC sharing? You know, what is a private link in Azure? How does that impact your business? We have customers that want to share services out in an ecosystem with other customers and partners. Well there's many ways to accomplish that. Our goal is to understand those requirements and then build that strategy with them. >> Thoughts George, on-- >> Yeah, I mean, I'm one of the guys that's down in the weeds making things happen, so I'm not the guy on the front line interfacing with the customers every day. But we have a similar approach. We have a consulting practice that will go out and apply their practices to see what those-- >> And when do you parachute in? >> Yeah, when I parachute in is, I'm on the back end working with our offering development leads for networking, so we understand and are seeing what customers are asking for and we're on the back end developing the solutions that integrate with our own offerings as well as enable other customers to just deploy quickly to meet their connectivity needs. So the patterns are similar. >> Right, final question for you guys, I want to ask you to paint a picture of what success looks like. You don't have to name customers, you don't have to get in and reveal who they are, but what does success look like in multicloud as you paint a picture for the folks here and watching on the live stream, if someone says, "Hey I want to be multicloud, I got to to have my operations Agile, I want full DevOps, I want programmability and security built in from Day-zero." What does success look like? >> Yeah, I think success looks like this, so when you're building out a network, the network is a harder thing to change than some other aspects of cloud. So what we think is, even if you're thinking about that second cloud, which we have most of our customers are on two public clouds today, they might be dabbling in it. As you build that network foundation, that architecture, that takes in to consideration where you're going, and so once we start building that reference architecture out that shows, this is how to approach it from a multicloud perspective, not a single cloud, and let's not forget our branches, let's not forget our data centers, let's not forget how all this connects together because that's how we define multicloud, it's not just in the cloud, it's on-prem and it's off-prem. And so collectively, I think the key is also is that we provide them an HLD. You got to start with a high level design that can be tweaked as you go through the journey but you got to give it a solid structural foundation, and that networking which we think, most customers think as not the network engineers, but as an after thought. We want to make that the most critical element before you start the journey. >> George, from your seat, how does success look for you? >> So, you know it starts out on these journeys, often start out people not even thinking about what is going to happen, what their network needs are when they start their migration journey to the cloud. So I want, success to me looks like them being able to end up not worrying about what's happening in the network when they move to the cloud. >> Steve: Good point. >> Guys, great insight, thanks for coming on and sharing. How about a round of applause for the global system integrators? (Audience applauds) (Upbeat music) >> The next panel is the AVH certified engineers, also known as ACEs. This is the folks that are certified, they're engineering, they're building these new solutions. Please welcome Toby Foss from Informatica, Stacey Lanier from Teradata, and Jennifer Reed with Viqtor Davis to the stage. (upbeat music) (audience cheering) (panelists exchanging pleasantries) >> You got to show up. Where's your jacket Toby? (laughing) You get it done. I was just going to rib you guys and say, where's your jackets, and Jen's got the jacket on. Okay, good. >> Love the Aviatrix, ACEs Pilot gear there above the Clouds. Going to new heights. >> That's right. >> So guys Aviatrix aces, I love the name, think it's great, certified. This is all about getting things engineered. So there's a level of certification, I want to get into that. But first take us through the day in the life of an ACE, and just to point out, Stacy is a squad leader. So he's, he's like a-- >> Squadron Leader. >> Squadron Leader. >> Yeah. >> Squadron Leader, so he's got a bunch of ACEs underneath him, but share your perspective a day in the Life. Jennifer, we'll start with you. >> Sure, so I have actually a whole team that works for me both in the North America, both in the US and in Mexico. So I'm eagerly working to get them certified as well, so I can become a squad leader myself. But it's important because one of the critical gaps that we've found is people having the networking background because you graduate from college, and you have a lot of computer science background, you can program you've got Python, but networking in packets they just don't get. So, just taking them through all the processes that it's really necessary to understand when you're troubleshooting is really critical. Because you're going to get an issue where you need to figure out where exactly is that happening on the network, Is my issue just in the VPCs? Is it on the instance side is a security group, or is it going on prem? This is something actually embedded within Amazon itself? I mean, I troubleshot an issue for about six months going back and forth with Amazon, and it was the VGW VPN. Because they were auto scaling on two sides, and we ended up having to pull out the Cisco's, and put in Aviatrix so I could just say, " okay, it's fixed," and actually helped the application teams get to that and get it solved. But I'm taking a lot of junior people and getting them through that certification process, so they can understand and see the network, the way I see the network. I mean, look, I've been doing this for 25 years when I got out. When I went in the Marine Corps, that's what I did, and coming out, the network is still the network. But people don't get the same training they got in the 90s. >> Was just so easy, just write some software, and they were, takes care of itself. I know, it's pixie dust.  >> I'll come back to that, I want to come back to that, the problem solved with Amazon, but Toby. >> I think the only thing I have to add to that is that it's always the network's fault. As long as I've been in networking, it's always been the network's fault. I'm even to this day, it's still the network's fault, and part of being a network guy is that you need to prove when it is and when it's not your fault. That means you need to know a little bit about 100 different things, to make that work. >> Now you got a full stack DevOps, you got to know a lot more times another hundred. >> Toby: And the times are changing, yeah. >> This year the Squadron Leader and get that right. What is the Squadron Leader firstly? Describe what it is. >> I think is probably just leading on the network components of it. But I think, from my perspective, when to think about what you asked them was, it's about no issues and no escalations. So of my day is like that, I'm happy to be a squadron leader. >> That is a good outcome, that's a good day. >> Yeah, sure, it is. >> Is there good days? You said you had a good day with Amazon? Jennifer, you mentioned the Amazon, and this brings up a good point, when you have these new waves come in, you have a lot of new things, new use cases. A lot of the finger pointing it's that guy's problem , that girl's problems, so how do you solve that, and how do you get the Young Guns up to speed? Is there training, is it this where the certification comes in? >> This is where the certifications really going to come in. I know when we got together at Reinvent, one of the questions that we had with Steve and the team was, what should our certification look like? Should we just be teaching about what AVH troubleshooting brings to bear, but what should that be like? I think Toby and I were like, No, no, no, no. That's going a little too high, we need to get really low because the better someone can get at actually understanding what's actually happening in the network, and where to actually troubleshoot the problem, how to step back each of those processes. Because without that, it's just a big black box, and they don't know. Because everything is abstracted, in Amazon and in Azure and in Google, is abstracted, and they have these virtual gateways, they have VPNs, that you just don't have the logs on, is you just don't know. So then what tools can you put in front of them of where they can look? Because there are full logs. Well, as long as they turned on the flow logs when they built it, and there's like, each one of those little things that well, if they'd had decided to do that, when they built it, it's there. But if you can come in later to really supplement that with training to actual troubleshoot, and do a packet capture here, as it's going through, then teaching them how to read that even. >> Yeah, Toby, we were talking before we came on up on stage about your career, you've been networking all your time, and then, you're now mentoring a lot of younger people. How is that going? Because the people who come in fresh they don't have all the old war stories, like they don't talk about it, There's never for, I walk in bare feet in the snow when I was your age, I mean, it's so easy now, right, they say. What's your take on how you train the young People. >> So I've noticed two things. One is that they are up to speed a lot faster in generalities of networking. They can tell you what a network is in high school level now, where I didn't learn that til midway through my career, and they're learning it faster, but they don't necessarily understand why it's that way here. Everybody thinks that it's always slash 24 for a subnet, and they don't understand why you can break it down smaller, why it's really necessary. So the ramp up speed is much faster for these guys that are coming in. But they don't understand why and they need some of that background knowledge to see where it's coming from, and why is it important, and that's old guys, that's where we thrive. >> Jennifer, you mentioned you got in from the Marines, it helps, but when you got into networking, what was it like then and compare it now? Because most like we heard earlier static versus dynamic Don't be static is like that. You just set the network, you got a perimeter. >> Yeah, no, there was no such thing. So back in the day, I mean, we had Banyan vines for email, and we had token ring, and I had to set up token ring networks and figure out why that didn't work. Because how many of things were actually sharing it. But then actually just cutting fiber and running fiber cables and dropping them over shelters to plug them in and all crap, they swung it too hard and shattered it and now I got to figure eight Polish this thing and actually should like to see if it works. I mean, that was the network , current cat five cables to run an Ethernet, and then from that I just said, network switches, dumb switches, like those were the most common ones you had. Then actually configuring routers and logging into a Cisco router and actually knowing how to configure that. It was funny because I had gone all the way up, I was the software product manager for a while. So I've gone all the way up the stack, and then two and a half, three years ago, I came across to work with Entity group that became Viqtor Davis. But we went to help one of our customers Avis, and it was like, okay, so we need to fix the network. Okay, I haven't done this in 20 years, but all right, let's get to it. Because it really fundamentally does not change. It's still the network. I mean, I've had people tell me, Well, when we go to containers, we will not have to worry about the network. And I'm like, yeah, you don't I do. >> And that's within programmability is a really interesting, so I think this brings up the certification. What are some of the new things that people should be aware of that come in with the Aviatrix A certification? What are some of the highlights? Can you guys share some of the highlights around the certifications? >> I think some of the importance is that it doesn't need to be vendor specific for network generality or basic networking knowledge, and instead of learning how Cisco does something, or how Palo Alto does something, We need to understand how and why it works as a basic model, and then understand how each vendor has gone about that problem and solved it in a general. That's true in multicloud as well. You can't learn how Cloud networking works without understanding how AWS and Azure and GCP are all slightly the same but slightly different, and some things work and some things don't. I think that's probably the number one take. >> I think having a certification across Clouds is really valuable because we heard the global s eyes as you have a business issues. What does it mean to do that? Is it code, is it networking? Is it configurations of the Aviatrix? what is, he says,the certification but, what is it about the multiCloud that makes it multi networking and multi vendor? >> The easy answer is yes, >> Yes is all of us. >> All of us. So you got to be in general what's good your hands and all You have to be. Right, it takes experience. Because every Cloud vendor has their own certification. Whether that's SOPs and advanced networking and event security, or whatever it might be, yeah, they can take the test, but they have no idea how to figure out what's wrong with that system. The same thing with any certification, but it's really getting your hands in there, and actually having to troubleshoot the problems, actually work the problem, and calm down. It's going to be okay. I mean, because I don't know how many calls I've been on or even had aviators join me on. It's like, okay, so everyone calm down, let's figure out what's happening. It's like, we've looked at that screen three times, looking at it again is not going to solve that problem, right. But at the same time, remaining calm but knowing that it really is, I'm getting a packet from here to go over here, it's not working, so what could be the problem? Actually stepping them through those scenarios, but that's like, you only get that by having to do it, and seeing it, and going through it, and then you get it. >> I have a question, so, I just see it. We started this program maybe six months ago, we're seeing a huge amount of interest. I mean, we're oversubscribed on all the training sessions. We've got people flying from around the country, even with Coronavirus, flying to go to Seattle to go to these events where we're subscribed, is that-- >> A good emerging leader would put there. >> Yeah. So, is that something that you see in your organizations? Are you recommending that to people? Do you see, I mean, I'm just, I guess I'm surprised or not surprised. But I'm really surprised by the demand if you would, of this MultiCloud network certification because there really isn't anything like that. Is that something you guys can comment on? Or do you see the same things in your organization? >> I see from my side, because we operate in a multiCloud environments that really helps and some beneficial for us. >> Yeah, true. I think I would add that networking guys have always needed to use certifications to prove that they know what they know. >> Right. >> It's not good enough to say, Yeah, I know IP addresses or I know how a network works. A couple little check marks or a little letters body writing helps give you validity. So even in our team, we can say, Hey, we're using these certifications to know that you know enough of the basics and enough of the understandings, that you have the tools necessary, right. >> I guess my final question for you guys is, why an ACE certification is relevant, and then second part is share with the live stream folks who aren't yet ACE certified or might want to jump in to be aviatrix certified engineers. Why is it important, so why is it relevant and why should someone want to be a certified aviatrix certified engineer? >> I think my views a little different. I think certification comes from proving that you have the knowledge, not proving that you get a certification to get an army there backwards. So when you've got the training and the understanding and you use that to prove and you can, like, grow your certification list with it, versus studying for a test to get a certification and have no understanding of it. >> Okay, so that who is the right person that look at this and say, I'm qualified, is it a network engineer, is it a DevOps person? What's your view, a little certain. >> I think Cloud is really the answer. It's the, as we talked like the edges getting eroded, so is the network definition getting eroded? We're getting more and more of some network, some DevOps, some security, lots and lots of security, because network is so involved in so many of them. That's just the next progression. >> Do you want to add something there? >> I would say expand that to more automation engineers, because we have those now, so I probably extend it beyond this one. >> Jennifer you want to? >> Well, I think the training classes themselves are helpful, especially the entry level ones for people who may be "Cloud architects" but have never done anything in networking for them to understand why we need those things to really work, whether or not they go through to eventually get a certification is something different. But I really think fundamentally understanding how these things work, it makes them a better architect, makes them better application developer. But even more so as you deploy more of your applications into the Cloud, really getting an understanding, even from people who have traditionally done Onprem networking, they can understand how that's going to work in Cloud. >> Well, I know we've got just under 30 seconds left. I want to get one more question then just one more, for the folks watching that are maybe younger than, that don't have that networking training. From your experiences each of you can answer why should they know about networking, what's the benefit? What's in it for them? Motivate them, share some insights of why they should go a little bit deeper in networking. Stacy, we'll start with you, we'll go then. >> I'll say it's probably fundamental, right? If you want to deliver solutions, networking is the very top. >> I would say if you, fundamental of an operating system running on a machine, how those machines start together is a fundamental changes, something that start from the base and work your way up. >> Jennifer? >> Right, well, I think it's a challenge. Because you've come from top down, now you're going to start looking from bottom up, and you want those different systems to cross-communicate, and say you've built something, and you're overlapping IP space, note that that doesn't happen. But how can I actually make that still operate without having to re IP re platform. Just like those challenges, like those younger developers or assistant engineers can really start to get their hands around and understand those complexities and bring that forward in their career. >> They get to know then how the pipes are working, and they're got to know it--it's the plumbing. >> That's right, >> They got to know how it works, and how to code it. >> That's right. >> Awesome, thank you guys for great insights, ACE Certified Engineers, also known as ACEs, give them a round of applause. (audience clapping) (upbeat music) >> Thank you, okay. All right, that concludes my portion. Thank you, Steve Thanks for having me. >> John, thank you very much, that was fantastic. Everybody round of applause for John Furrier. (audience applauding) Yeah, so great event, great event. I'm not going to take long, we got lunch outside for the people here, just a couple of things. Just to call the action, right? So we saw the ACEs, for those of you out of the stream here, become a certified, right, it's great for your career, it's great for not knowledge, is fantastic. It's not just an aviator's thing, it's going to teach you about Cloud networking, MultiCloud networking, with a little bit of aviatrix, exactly like the Cisco CCIE program was for IP network, that type of the thing, that's number one. Second thing is learning, right? So there's a link up there to join the community. Again like I started this, this is a community, this is the kickoff to this community, and it's a movement. So go to community.avh.com, starting a community of multiCloud. So get get trained, learn. I'd say the next thing is we're doing over 100 seminars across the United States and also starting into Europe soon, we will come out and we'll actually spend a couple hours and talk about architecture, and talk about those beginning things. For those of you on the livestream in here as well, we're coming to a city near you, go to one of those events, it's a great way to network with other people that are in the industry, as well as to start alone and get on that MultiCloud journey. Then I'd say the last thing is, we haven't talked a lot about what Aviatrix does here, and that's intentional. We want you leaving with wanting to know more, and schedule, get with us and schedule a multi hour architecture workshop session. So we sit down with customers, and we talk about where they're at in that journey, and more importantly, where they're going, and define that end state architecture from networking, computer, storage, everything. Everything you've heard today, everybody panel kept talking about architecture, talking about operations. Those are the types of things that we solve, we help you define that canonical architecture, that system architecture, that's yours. So many of our customers, they have three by five, plotted lucid charts, architecture drawings, and it's the customer name slash Aviatrix, network architecture, and they put it on their whiteboard. That's the most valuable thing they get from us. So this becomes their 20 year network architecture drawing that they don't do anything without talking to us and look at that architecture. That's what we do in these multi hour workshop sessions with customers, and that's super, super powerful. So if you're interested, definitely call us, and let's schedule that with our team. So anyway, I just want to thank everybody on the livestream. Thank everybody here. Hopefully it was it was very useful. I think it was, and Join the movement, and for those of you here, join us for lunch, and thank you very much. (audience applauding) (upbeat music)

>> From the Amazon Meeting Center in downtown Seattle, it's theCUBE. Covering Imagine A Better World. A global education conference sponsored by Amazon Web Services. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in downtown Seattle at the AWS Imagine Educate Show. It's a public sector show. It's the first time they've ever done it really focusing just on education as opposed to the regular public sector show or the AWS Summits and re:Invent that you're very familiar with. We're excited to be here. One of the big themes here is colleges partnering with high schools. And we're excited to have our next guest really talk about how that's working in this program. We have Howard Stahl. He's a professor at Santa Monica College. Howard, great to see you. >> Thank you. >> And with him is Koda Kol. He's a teacher at Roosevelt High in East L.A. and also an adjunct professor at Santa Monica College. Welcome. >> Thank you. >> So, let's just jump into it. There's a big conversation about training people for the next generation of cloud skills. It's good for the kids, it's also good for the employers, it's good for Amazon, it's good for their customers and their partners. How are the kids feeling about this? How is this program being accepted by kids? Is it cool, is it something they want to do? How hard of a sell is it? >> The students are engaged. They're learning something that is immediately relevant to societal's demand. Our students, they're setting up, spinning up web servers, file servers, even VPN, and the VPN servers is going to disrupt the way schools strategize and implement security, because now when they go back to the high schools they're bypassing all these web securities using VPN. >> Right. >> But they really do love it. The students seem to really drink it up. >> They get it. >> Yeah, they do. >> So is there a particular classification of app or of all the different things that you're teaching 'em, database, security, this or that, that resonates more than others or what is it that connects to what they do every day that makes them think, "Hey, this is cool, I engage "these things every day. "What a great career to get into." >> Yeah, I think, they see Amazon in their daily life every day. Delivering them stuff, making them buy stuff, having them deliver things. And they can see as they peel apart the layers and see behind the scenes how Amazon actually gets that done. >> Right. >> And it seems immediately relevant to them. >> Right. >> And so the student interest has been fantastic. >> Been fantastic. And Koda too, I think it's always the thing too with, especially the kids when they're in high school, 15, 16 right, they're starting to get a little bit of attitude. "Why should I read 400-year English novels Dad, "how's that going to help me in my job?" or "Why am I taking chemistry, I don't want to be a doctor? "I get it I got to take it to get into college "but I don't really want to take Chemistry." This is probably something a little bit different in terms of direct visibility into the application. I mean, those other things have applications too, you just don't see it when you're 15. But this they can see, right? They can see how it's going to directly impact them in a positive way. >> Yes, and it also puts everyone at the same playing field. Students that normally fail their English classes, Math classes, now they're in the same classroom and learning content where everyone is on the same page. So, you got your high performing students also with your students that are failing a class, trying to discover what they want to do in life. >> Right. >> They're together, they're working together. Find a common interest and excelling, engaged and asking for more. "Where can we take more classes? "This is what I want to do, "this is where I want to be." >> That's great. Another thing, we were just at a high school competition called Technovation earlier this week where mainly girl's teams from all over the world building applications. Same kind of a thing. Get 'em involved in an application that they can really see a difference and they get it. And I wonder if some of your kids talk about, everybody wants to be mission driven today, and kids want to do stuff that has a higher impact on society, right? We've got four different garbage cans we have to sort our stuff in 'cause we want to be renewable and take care of the environment. Do they see that software is the easiest way to make a huge impact globally, do they get that? >> They get that, they see it. They're instantly creating servers in 5-10 minutes. Going on their servers, setting up websites. They see the relevance. They're taking advantage of the technology. >> Yeah, that's great. So Howard, I wonder if you could speak a little bit about how a partnership with AWS enables you to do things that you wouldn't be able to do if they weren't helping in this whole process? >> At SMC we've been working with AWS for about four years now to spin up this program. The partnership has been fantastic. AWS has been really giving and helpful. They helped train faculty. So we got professional development from them. Now, as part of this program students get credits on the platforms. Faculty get credits on the platform. They've been helping us with advertising and all kinds of other great things and it's really been a wonderful, wonderful partnership, really fantastic. And that industry connection really makes a big difference in making the program succeed. >> You mentioned something I want to follow up on in terms of the staff. We talk a lot about the kids here and the impact on the kids and their education, but I'm curious to get your take on how this has impacted the staff. This new classification of learning if you will, around cloud computing specifically. This subset of computer science which has had a hard time squeezing in between science and math, especially at the high school level. But how are the staff, the teachers taking to this? Do they see this as a great new opportunity? A bunch of new skills to learn? That's got to be kind of invigorating for them, I imagine as well. >> I think so. I think it's really invigorated people who've been around. It keeps us on our toes, makes us learn new things. It's very exciting for many of us and it has been great. And the wonderful thing about computer science is that it changes a lot. As I often say in math, "They haven't invented any new numbers." But in computer science, what I learned when I was in school. Oh my gosh, things have changed a great deal. And so there's a commitment to keep current. And in the community colleges definitely we try to keep our curriculum current with what industry needs. >> Right, I think it's a really great statement on the role of community colleges, in a very specific role to help match skills with needs in jobs. I mean just really concrete, really straightforward, really kind of a simple mission. >> Yeah, and Amazon actually has connected us with local employers near SMC that have helped us validate our curriculum and actually are very interested in hiring the graduates out of our program right away, 'cause there is such a dearth of industry talent in this particular field. >> Which is great, just to close that loop, right. And if I recall, your certificate program is the model now that's been rolled out to all 19 of the L.A. community colleges. >> Yeah, so this program has really spun up, and become much, much bigger than just one particular college. So we developed a number of classes at SMC and a certificate, and we're using that now as a model throughout L.A. county to bootstrap AWS skills in all the local community colleges. 19 other colleges are working with us. >> Right, right. Agreeing to run the same classes at their institutions. And that's very exciting as well. They've also agreed to find local partner high schools to work with as well. So we're really trying to build a hub of AWS experience down in L.A. in what we call "Silicon Beach". >> Right, right. And then the goal ultimately is to get an associate program, right, over some period of time when you get whatever the certification is, or that process. >> Yeah, so we're working on building an AA Degree in cloud computing as well. >> That's great. Koda, you look like you had something to jump in there. All good? >> All good. >> Okay, good. So I want to give you the last word in terms of what would you say to educators that are not in L.A. about what this type of program has brought to you, and more importantly your students in your everyday life at Roosevelt High? >> It has changed the lives of many students. It's changed my perspective on how I see education because in fact it was a little difficult getting the students to be engaged initially, but ever since we launched this cloud computing every student, we can't get enough classes, sections, open. We open one section up and it gets filled. The students are in class. They want to learn the material. It's a good time to be in education. I love it. >> Well good. Well thanks for sharing the passion, it comes through. >> Well the passion starts with our department chair, Howard Stahl here. He's very passionate and it resonates with all the staff members, which resonates with the students. So now we have the synergy that's happening that we hope to eventually distribute to all the other campuses, and make a model. Use Santa Monica as a model. >> Great. Well Koda, Howard, thanks for taking a few minutes. And, really enjoy this story. I look forward to the follow up next year. >> Thank you. >> Alright he's Koda, he's Howard, I'm Jeff! You're watching theCUBE from downtown Seattle at AWS Imagine Education. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From the Computer Museum in Mountain View, California, it's theCUBE. Covering AGC Silicon Valley GROW! Awards. Brought to you by ACG Silicon Valley. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. The program is just about to begin here at the ACGSV GROW! Awards, 14th Annual. We're excited to be here for our third year. 300 people are going to be giving out some hardware here shortly. But, before we do that we're excited to have Alex Wolf, all the way up from Santa Cruz. He's the dean of the Baskin School of Engineering at UC Santa Cruz. Welcome, Alex. >> Thank you very much, it's great to be here. >> Absolutely. So, what do you think of this organization? How did you get involved? >> Well, it's been great for us. We've been drawn in by some great alumni who have been involved with the organization, and they're interested in helping Santa Cruz UC Santa Cruz School of Engineering, and partnering with ACG is just a perfect way to do it. >> Excellent. So, I was doing a little homework, obviously, before you came on. I was looking through the curriculum of the school, the engineering school, and you've got CS and E, and all the normal stuff, but two things jumped out to me, biomolecular engineering and computational media. >> That's right. >> What are those disciplines? >> Well, let's start with biomolecular engineering. That's where we are doing a lot of work in health and life. Santa Cruz is famous for one particular thing that happened a number of years ago, which was the sequencing of the human genome. Now, Santa Cruz played a huge role in that. This was the place where we were able to assemble the human genome for the first time, and publish it on the web. >> What year was that? >> That was 2003. >> And back then it took massive amount of computer, massive amount of time. >> Lots of time, millions and millions of dollars. This was a project that was run by the government. Many partners and Santa Cruz researchers in School of Engineering were able to crack that nut and get this genome sequenced. >> And now we can do it-- Now, it's getting cheaper and cheaper, we've got researchers who've been working on that, we've spun out a bunch of companies that have worked on less and less expensive, faster and faster sequencing techniques. >> Really, with the goal to get to individualized medicine, right, to get to individualized treatment. >> That's right, personalized medicine, precision medicine, that's the goal. It's amazing what you can do if you know the genome history, if you can apply that to the drug treatments, it's fantastic. >> I think medical science is so interesting, because from whatever point you are, you look back 10 years and it looks like bloodletting. No matter what we do today, in 10 years from now, we're going to look back >> It's true at cancer treatment, like we give people poison until they almost die, >> That's right. >> that's the way we treat 'em? >> That's right, and the genome will tell you so much about that cancer treatment. We're doing other things too, in stem cell and nanopore technology, so there's just a wonderful set of technologies that people are inventing in the school. >> Great, now what about computational media? >> Computational media is a rather different thing. That is a concept where we're looking at how media can be generated through algorithms, and this has very interesting applications in the game industry, in journalism, in many parts of our interaction with humans. It's great to be able to have a computer that really understands how to generate meaningful, realistic text. >> What is the main benefit in some of the early research that you see, because we've seen some really simple versions of this out there, straight little app that kids play sports, you know, you finish the game, you hit the game over, and it generates a nice little article for you. >> Absolutely. You know, you mentioned personalization before. It's the same thing with computational media. You can get a game to be much more personalized to the player. It can understand that experience, understand the interests of the game player, and then tailor itself to that player. >> So, how much do you work with the psychology department in this world, because it's so much human factors, right? >> Absolutely. We have a great collaboration with psychology. That's really, really important. You know, the computational media department is actually going to be growing into Silicon Valley. You see Santa Cruz has recently opened a campus in Silicon Valley. >> Where? >> It's in Santa Clara, and we're right now hiring faculty into that campus. >> So, is it open then, or when will it be open? >> The facility is open. We held an ACG event there in January. We're going to be holding more of them there. It's a great location. >> Excellent. All right, well, maybe we'll have to come by and do a field trip >> Please do. when you get it all outfitted. >> Absolutely, absolutely. >> All right, well, unfortunately, we have to leave it there. They're going to pull everybody into the keynotes, but thanks taking a few minutes. >> I'm looking forward to it. Thank you very much. >> All right, he's Alex, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE from ACGSV, Mountain View, California. Thanks for watching. (techy music)

>> Hey welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with the CUBE. We're at the Accenture Technology Vision 2018, actually, the preview event, 'about 200 people. The actual report comes out in a couple of days. A lot of interesting conversations about what are the big trends in 2018 in Accenture. Surveyed Paul Daugherty and team and really excited. Just was a panel discussion to get into a little bit of the not exactly a technology, but really the trust and ethics conversations. We're joined by Dr. Shannon Vallor. She's a professor at Santa Clara University. Dr. Vallor, great to see you. >> Great to be here, thank you! >> So you were just on the panel, and of course there was a car guy on the panel. So everybody loves this talk about cars and autonomous vehicles. You didn't get enough time. (chuckles) So we've got a little more time, which is great. >> Great! >> But one of the things that you brought up that I think was pretty interesting is really, kind of a higher-level view of what role technology plays in our life before. And you said before it was ancillary, it was a toy, it was a gimmick. It was a cool new car, a status symbol, or whatever. But now technology is really defining who we are, what we do, how we interact, not only with the technology of other people. It's really taken such a much more fundamental role with a bunch more new challenges. >> Yeah, and fundamentally that means that these new technologies are helping to determine how our lives go, not just whether we have the latest gadget or status symbol. Previously, as I said, we tended to take on technologies as ornaments to our life, as luxuries to enrich our life. Increasingly, they are the medium through which we live our lives, right? They're the ways that we find the people we want to marry. They're the ways that we access resources, capital, healthcare, knowledge. They're the ways that we participate as citizens in a democracy. They are entering our bodies. They're entering our homes. And the level of trust that's required to really welcome technology in this way without ambivalence or fear, it's a kind of trust that many technology companies weren't prepared to earn. >> Jeff: Right, Right. >> Because it goes much deeper than simply having to behave in a lawful manner, or satisfy your shareholders, right? It means actually having to think about whether your technologies are helping people live better lives, and whether you're earning the trust that your marketing department, your engineers, your salespeople are out there trying to get from your customers. >> Right. And it's this really interesting. When you talked about a refrigerator, I just love that example 'cause most people would never let their next door neighbor look into their refrigerator. >> Shannon: Or their medicine cabinet, right? >> Or their medicine cabinet, right. And now you want to open that up to automatic replenishment. And it's interesting 'cause I don't think a lot of companies that came into the business with the idea that they were going to have this intimate relationship with their customers to a degree, and a personal responsibility to that data. They just want to sell them some good stuff and move on >> Sure. >> to the next customer. >> Yes. >> So it's a very different mindset. Are they adjusting? How are the legacy folks dealing with this? >> Well, the good news is, is that there are a lot more conversations happening about technology and ethics within industry circles. And you even see large organizations coming together to try to lead in an effort to develop more ethical approaches to technology design and development. So, for example, the big five leaders in AI have come together to form the partnership for AI and social good. And this is a really groundbreaking movement that could potentially lead other industry participants to say, "Hey we need to get on board with this, "and we have to start thinking >> Right. >> "about what ethical leadership looks like for us," as opposed to just a sort of PR kind of thing. Yeah, we throw the word "ethics" on a few websites or slides and then we're good, right? >> Right. >> It has to go much deeper than that. And that's going to be a challenge. But it has to be at a level where rank and file workers and project managers have procedures that they know how to go through that involve ethical analysis, prediction, and preparing ethical responses to failures or conflicts that might arise. >> Right, there's just so many layers to this that we could go on for a long time. >> Sure. >> But the autonomous band has kicked up. >> Yes, yes! >> But one of the things is when you're collecting the data for a specific purpose, and you put all the efficacy in as to why and how, and what you're going to treat, what you don't know is how that data might be used by someone else next week, >> Yes. >> next year, >> Yes. >> ten years from now. >> Absolutely. >> And you can't really know because there's maybe things that you aren't aware of. So a very difficult challenge. >> And I think we have to just start thinking in terms of different kinds of metaphors. So data up until now has been seen as something that had value and very little risk associated with it. Now our attitudes are starting to shift, and we're starting to understand that data carries not just value, not just the ability to monetized, but immense power. And that power can be both constructive or destructive. Data is like jet fuel, right? It can do great things. >> Right. >> But you've got to store it carefully. You have to make sure that the people handling it are properly trained. That they know what can go wrong. >> Right. >> Right? That they've got safety regimes in place. No one who handles jet fuel treats it the way that some companies treat data today. But today, data can cause disasters on a scale similar to a chemical explosion. People can die, lives can be ruined, and people can lose their life savings over a breach or a misuse of data that causes someone to be unjustly accused of fraud or a crime. So we have to start thinking about data as something much more powerful than we have in the past. >> Jeff: Right. >> And you have the responsibility to handle it appropriately. >> Right, but we're still so far away, right? We're still sending money to the Nigerian prince who needs help getting out of the airport at Newark Airport. I mean, even just the social, >> Yes. >> the social factors still haven't caught up. And then you've got this kind of whole API economy where so many apps are connected to so many apps. >> Right. >> So even, where is the data? >> Yeah. >> And that's before you even get into a plane flying over international borders while you send an email, I mean. >> Right, yes. >> The complexity is crazy! >> Yep, and we're never going to get a handle on all of it. So one of the things I like to tell people is, it's important not to let the perfect become the enemy of the good, right? >> Jeff: Right. >> So the idea is, yes, the problem is massive. Yes, it's incredibly complex. Can we address every possible risk? Can we forestall every possible disaster? No. Can we do much better than we're doing now? Absolutely. So, I think, the important thing is not to focus on how massive the problem or the complexities are, but think about how can we move forward from here to get ourselves in a better and more responsible position. And there's lots of ways to do that. Lots of companies are already leading the way in that direction. So I think that there's so much progress to be made that we don't have to worry too much about the progress that we might never get around to making. >> Right, right. But then there's this other interesting thing that's going on that we've seen with kind of the whole "fake news," right? Which is algorithms are determining what we see. >> Shannon: Yes. >> And if you look at the ad tech model as kind of where the market has taken over the way that that operates, >> Shannon: Yep. >> there's no people involved. So then you have things happen like what happened with YouTube, where advertisers' stuff is getting put into places where they don't want it. >> Yeah. >> But there's really no people, there's no monitoring. >> Yes. >> So how do you see that kind of evolving? 'Cause on one hand, you want more social responsibility and keeping track of things. On the other hand, so much is moving to software, automation, and giving people more of what they want, not necessarily what they need. >> Well, and that means that we have to do a much better job of investing in human intelligence. We have to, for every new form of artificial intelligence, we need an even more powerful provision of human intelligence to guide it, to provide oversight. So what I like to say is, AI is not ready for solo flight, right? And a lot of people would like that to be the case because, of course, you can save money if you can put an automated adjudication system in there and take the people out. But we've seen over and over again that that leads again and again to disaster and to huge reputational losses to companies, often huge legal liabilities, right? So we have to be able to get companies to understand that they are really protecting themselves and their long-term health if they invest in human expertise and human intelligence to support AI, to support data, to support all of the technologies that are giving these companies greater competitive advantage and profitability. >> But does the delta in the machine scale versus human scale just become unbearable? Or can we use the machine scale to filter out the relatively small number of things that need a person to get involved. I mean. >> Yeah, and the-- >> How do you see some kind of some best practices? >> Yeah, so the answer depends on the industry, depends upon the application. So there's no one size fits all solution. But what we can often do is recognize that typically human and AI function best together, right? So we can figure out the ways in which the AI can amplify the human expertise and wisdom, and the human expertise can fill in some of the gaps that still exist in artificial intelligence. Some of the things that AIs just don't see, just don't recognize, just aren't able to value or predict. And so when we figure out the ways that human and artificial intelligence can compliment each other in a particular stetting, then we can get the most reliable results, and often the fairest and safest results. They might not always be the most efficient from the narrow standpoint of speed and profit, right? >> Jeff: Right, right. >> So they have able to step back and say at the end of the day, quality matters, trust matters. And just as if we put together a shoddy project on the cheap and put it out there, it's going to come back to bite us. If we put shoddy AI in place of important human decisions that affect human lives, it's going to come back to bite us. So we need to invest in the human expertise and the human wisdom, which has that ethical insight to round out what AI still lacks. >> So do you think the execution of that trust building becomes the next great competitive advance? I mean, >> Yeah. >> nobody talks about that right? Data's the new oil, >> Sure! And blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And software defined, AI driven automation, but that's not necessarily only to the goal in road, right? There's issues. >> Right. >> So is trust, you think? >> Absolutely. >> The next great competitive differentiator? >> Absolutely. I think in the long run it will be. If you look at, for example, the way that companies like Facebook and Equifax have really damaged, in pretty profound ways, the public perception of them as trustworthy actors in, not just the corporate space, right? But in the political space for Facebook, in the economic space for Equifax. And we have to be able to recognize that those associations of a major company with that level of failure are really lasting, right? Those things don't get forgotten in one news cycle. So I think we have to recognize that today people don't know who to trust, right? It used to be that you could trust the big names, the big Fortune 500 companies. >> The blue chips, right. >> The blue chips, right. >> Right. >> And then it was the little fly by night companies that you didn't really know whether you could trust, and maybe you'd be more cautious in dealing with them. Now the public has no way of understanding which companies will genuinely fulfill the trust in the relationship >> Right. >> that the customer gives them. And so there's a huge opportunity from a competitive standpoint for companies to step up and actually earn that trust and say, in a way that can be backed up by action and results, "Your data's safe with us," right? "Your property's safe with us. "Your bank account is safe with us. "Your personal privacy is safe with us. "Your votes are safe with us. "Your news is safe with us." >> Right. >> Right? And that's the next step. >> But everyone is so cynical that, unfortunately Walter Cronkite is dead, right? >> Sure. >> We don't trust politicians anymore. We don't trust news anymore. We don't trust, now more and more, the companies. So it's a really kind of rough world in the trust space. >> Yeah! >> So do you see any kind of (chuckles) silver lining? I mean, how do we execute in this kind of crazy world where you just don't know? >> Well, what I like to say is that you have to be cautiously optimistic about this because society simply doesn't keep going without some level of trust, right? Markets depend on trust. Democracy depends on trust. Neighborhoods depend on trust, right? >> Jeff: Right. >> So either trust comes back into our lives at some deep level or everything falls apart. Frankly, those are the only choices. So if nature abhors a vacuum, and right now we have a vacuum of trust, then there's a huge opportunity for people to start stepping into that space and filling that void. So I'd like to focus on the positive potential here rather than the worst case scenario, right? The worst case scenario is, we keep going as things have been going and trust in our most important institutions continues to crumble. Well, that just ends in societal collapse >> Right, right. >> one way or the other. If we don't want to do that, and I presume that if there's anything we can all agree on, it's that that's not where we want to go. >> Right. >> Then now is the time for companies, if need be, to come together and say, "We have to step into this space "and create new trusted institutions and practices "that will help stabilize society and drive progress "in ways that aren't just reflected in GDP "but are reflected in human wellbeing, "happiness, a sense of security, a sense of hope. "A sense that technology actually does gives us a future "that we want to to be happy about moving into." >> Right, right. >> Right? >> So I'll give you the last word. >> Sure. >> We'll end on a positive note. What are some examples of companies or practices that you see out there as kind of shining lights that other people should be either aware of, emulate. Let's talk about the positive before we >> Sure. cut you lose. >> Well, one thing that I mentioned already is the AI partnership that has come together with companies that are really leading the conversation along with a lot of other organizations like AI Now, which is an organization on the East Coast that's doing a lot of fantastic work. There are a lot of companies supporting research into ethical development, design, and implementation of new technologies. That's something we haven't seen before, right? This is something that's only happened in the last two or three years. It's an incredibly positive development. Now we just have to make sure that the recommendations that are developed by these groups are actually taken onboard and implemented. And it'll be up to many of the industry leaders to set an example of how that can be done because they have the resources >> Right. >> and the ability to lead in that way. I think one of the other things that we can look at is that people are starting to become less naive about technology. Perhaps the silver lining of the loss of trust is the ability of consumers to be a little wiser, a little more appropriately critical and skeptical, and to figure out ways that they can, in fact, protect their interests. That they can actually seek out and determine who earns their trust. >> Right. >> Where their data is safest. And so I'm optimistic that there will be a sort of meeting, if you will, of the public interest and the interests of technology developers who really need the public to be on board, right? >> Jeff: Right. >> You can't make a better world if society doesn't want to come along with you. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> So my hope is, and I'm cautiously optimistic about that, that these forces will come together and create a future for us that we actually want to move into. >> All right, good. I don't want to leave on a sad note! >> Great, yes. >> Dr. Shannon Vallor, she's positive about the future. It's all about trust. Thanks for taking a few minutes. >> Thank you. >> I'm Jeff Frick, she's Dr. Shannon. Thanks for watching. We'll catch you next time. (upbeat techno music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome to theCube's coverage of International Women's Day. I'm John Furrier, your host of "theCUBE." We've got great two remote guests coming into our Palo Alto Studios, some tech athletes, as we say, people that've been in the trenches, years of experience, Lena Smart, CISO at MongoDB, Cube alumni, and Tara Hernandez, VP of Developer Productivity at MongoDB as well. Thanks for coming in to this program and supporting our efforts today. Thanks so much. >> Thanks for having us. >> Yeah, everyone talk about the journey in tech, where it all started. Before we get there, talk about what you guys are doing at MongoDB specifically. MongoDB is kind of gone the next level as a platform. You have your own ecosystem, lot of developers, very technical crowd, but it's changing the business transformation. What do you guys do at Mongo? We'll start with you, Lena. >> So I'm the CISO, so all security goes through me. I like to say, well, I don't like to say, I'm described as the ones throat to choke. So anything to do with security basically starts and ends with me. We do have a fantastic Cloud engineering security team and a product security team, and they don't report directly to me, but obviously we have very close relationships. I like to keep that kind of church and state separate and I know I've spoken about that before. And we just recently set up a physical security team with an amazing gentleman who left the FBI and he came to join us after 26 years for the agency. So, really starting to look at the physical aspects of what we offer as well. >> I interviewed a CISO the other day and she said, "Every day is day zero for me." Kind of goofing on the Amazon Day one thing, but Tara, go ahead. Tara, go ahead. What's your role there, developer productivity? What are you focusing on? >> Sure. Developer productivity is kind of the latest description for things that we've described over the years as, you know, DevOps oriented engineering or platform engineering or build and release engineering development infrastructure. It's all part and parcel, which is how do we actually get our code from developer to customer, you know, and all the mechanics that go into that. It's been something I discovered from my first job way back in the early '90s at Borland. And the art has just evolved enormously ever since, so. >> Yeah, this is a very great conversation both of you guys, right in the middle of all the action and data infrastructures changing, exploding, and involving big time AI and data tsunami and security never stops. Well, let's get into, we'll talk about that later, but let's get into what motivated you guys to pursue a career in tech and what were some of the challenges that you faced along the way? >> I'll go first. The fact of the matter was I intended to be a double major in history and literature when I went off to university, but I was informed that I had to do a math or a science degree or else the university would not be paid for. At the time, UC Santa Cruz had a policy that called Open Access Computing. This is, you know, the late '80s, early '90s. And anybody at the university could get an email account and that was unusual at the time if you were, those of us who remember, you used to have to pay for that CompuServe or AOL or, there's another one, I forget what it was called, but if a student at Santa Cruz could have an email account. And because of that email account, I met people who were computer science majors and I'm like, "Okay, I'll try that." That seems good. And it was a little bit of a struggle for me, a lot I won't lie, but I can't complain with how it ended up. And certainly once I found my niche, which was development infrastructure, I found my true love and I've been doing it for almost 30 years now. >> Awesome. Great story. Can't wait to ask a few questions on that. We'll go back to that late '80s, early '90s. Lena, your journey, how you got into it. >> So slightly different start. I did not go to university. I had to leave school when I was 16, got a job, had to help support my family. Worked a bunch of various jobs till I was about 21 and then computers became more, I think, I wouldn't say they were ubiquitous, but they were certainly out there. And I'd also been saving up every penny I could earn to buy my own computer and bought an Amstrad 1640, 20 meg hard drive. It rocked. And kind of took that apart, put it back together again, and thought that could be money in this. And so basically just teaching myself about computers any job that I got. 'Cause most of my jobs were like clerical work and secretary at that point. But any job that had a computer in front of that, I would make it my business to go find the guy who did computing 'cause it was always a guy. And I would say, you know, I want to learn how these work. Let, you know, show me. And, you know, I would take my lunch hour and after work and anytime I could with these people and they were very kind with their time and I just kept learning, so yep. >> Yeah, those early days remind me of the inflection point we're going through now. This major C change coming. Back then, if you had a computer, you had to kind of be your own internal engineer to fix things. Remember back on the systems revolution, late '80s, Tara, when, you know, your career started, those were major inflection points. Now we're seeing a similar wave right now, security, infrastructure. It feels like it's going to a whole nother level. At Mongo, you guys certainly see this as well, with this AI surge coming in. A lot more action is coming in. And so there's a lot of parallels between these inflection points. How do you guys see this next wave of change? Obviously, the AI stuff's blowing everyone away. Oh, new user interface. It's been called the browser moment, the mobile iPhone moment, kind of for this generation. There's a lot of people out there who are watching that are young in their careers, what's your take on this? How would you talk to those folks around how important this wave is? >> It, you know, it's funny, I've been having this conversation quite a bit recently in part because, you know, to me AI in a lot of ways is very similar to, you know, back in the '90s when we were talking about bringing in the worldwide web to the forefront of the world, right. And we tended to think in terms of all the optimistic benefits that would come of it. You know, free passing of information, availability to anyone, anywhere. You just needed an internet connection, which back then of course meant a modem. >> John: Not everyone had though. >> Exactly. But what we found in the subsequent years is that human beings are what they are and we bring ourselves to whatever platforms that are there, right. And so, you know, as much as it was amazing to have this freely available HTML based internet experience, it also meant that the negatives came to the forefront quite quickly. And there were ramifications of that. And so to me, when I look at AI, we're already seeing the ramifications to that. Yes, are there these amazing, optimistic, wonderful things that can be done? Yes. >> Yeah. >> But we're also human and the bad stuff's going to come out too. And how do we- >> Yeah. >> How do we as an industry, as a community, you know, understand and mitigate those ramifications so that we can benefit more from the positive than the negative. So it is interesting that it comes kind of full circle in really interesting ways. >> Yeah. The underbelly takes place first, gets it in the early adopter mode. Normally industries with, you know, money involved arbitrage, no standards. But we've seen this movie before. Is there hope, Lena, that we can have a more secure environment? >> I would hope so. (Lena laughs) Although depressingly, we've been in this well for 30 years now and we're, at the end of the day, still telling people not to click links on emails. So yeah, that kind of still keeps me awake at night a wee bit. The whole thing about AI, I mean, it's, obviously I am not an expert by any stretch of the imagination in AI. I did read (indistinct) book recently about AI and that was kind of interesting. And I'm just trying to teach myself as much as I can about it to the extent of even buying the "Dummies Guide to AI." Just because, it's actually not a dummies guide. It's actually fairly interesting, but I'm always thinking about it from a security standpoint. So it's kind of my worst nightmare and the best thing that could ever happen in the same dream. You know, you've got this technology where I can ask it a question and you know, it spits out generally a reasonable answer. And my team are working on with Mark Porter our CTO and his team on almost like an incubation of AI link. What would it look like from MongoDB? What's the legal ramifications? 'Cause there will be legal ramifications even though it's the wild, wild west just now, I think. Regulation's going to catch up to us pretty quickly, I would think. >> John: Yeah, yeah. >> And so I think, you know, as long as companies have a seat at the table and governments perhaps don't become too dictatorial over this, then hopefully we'll be in a good place. But we'll see. I think it's a really interest, there's that curse, we're living in interesting times. I think that's where we are. >> It's interesting just to stay on this tech trend for a minute. The standards bodies are different now. Back in the old days there were, you know, IEEE standards, ITF standards. >> Tara: TPC. >> The developers are the new standard. I mean, now you're seeing open source completely different where it was in the '90s to here beginning, that was gen one, some say gen two, but I say gen one, now we're exploding with open source. You have kind of developers setting the standards. If developers like it in droves, it becomes defacto, which then kind of rolls into implementation. >> Yeah, I mean I think if you don't have developer input, and this is why I love working with Tara and her team so much is 'cause they get it. If we don't have input from developers, it's not going to get used. There's going to be ways of of working around it, especially when it comes to security. If they don't, you know, if you're a developer and you're sat at your screen and you don't want to do that particular thing, you're going to find a way around it. You're a smart person. >> Yeah. >> So. >> Developers on the front lines now versus, even back in the '90s, they're like, "Okay, consider the dev's, got a QA team." Everything was Waterfall, now it's Cloud, and developers are on the front lines of everything. Tara, I mean, this is where the standards are being met. What's your reaction to that? >> Well, I think it's outstanding. I mean, you know, like I was at Netscape and part of the crowd that released the browser as open source and we founded mozilla.org, right. And that was, you know, in many ways kind of the birth of the modern open source movement beyond what we used to have, what was basically free software foundation was sort of the only game in town. And I think it is so incredibly valuable. I want to emphasize, you know, and pile onto what Lena was saying, it's not just that the developers are having input on a sort of company by company basis. Open source to me is like a checks and balance, where it allows us as a broader community to be able to agree on and enforce certain standards in order to try and keep the technology platforms as accessible as possible. I think Kubernetes is a great example of that, right. If we didn't have Kubernetes, that would've really changed the nature of how we think about container orchestration. But even before that, Linux, right. Linux allowed us as an industry to end the Unix Wars and as someone who was on the front lines of that as well and having to support 42 different operating systems with our product, you know, that was a huge win. And it allowed us to stop arguing about operating systems and start arguing about software or not arguing, but developing it in positive ways. So with, you know, with Kubernetes, with container orchestration, we all agree, okay, that's just how we're going to orchestrate. Now we can build up this huge ecosystem, everybody gets taken along, right. And now it changes the game for what we're defining as business differentials, right. And so when we talk about crypto, that's a little bit harder, but certainly with AI, right, you know, what are the checks and balances that as an industry and as the developers around this, that we can in, you know, enforce to make sure that no one company or no one body is able to overly control how these things are managed, how it's defined. And I think that is only for the benefit in the industry as a whole, particularly when we think about the only other option is it gets regulated in ways that do not involve the people who actually know the details of what they're talking about. >> Regulated and or thrown away or bankrupt or- >> Driven underground. >> Yeah. >> Which would be even worse actually. >> Yeah, that's a really interesting, the checks and balances. I love that call out. And I was just talking with another interview part of the series around women being represented in the 51% ratio. Software is for everybody. So that we believe that open source movement around the collective intelligence of the participants in the industry and independent of gender, this is going to be the next wave. You're starting to see these videos really have impact because there are a lot more leaders now at the table in companies developing software systems and with AI, the aperture increases for applications. And this is the new dynamic. What's your guys view on this dynamic? How does this go forward in a positive way? Is there a certain trajectory you see? For women in the industry? >> I mean, I think some of the states are trying to, again, from the government angle, some of the states are trying to force women into the boardroom, for example, California, which can be no bad thing, but I don't know, sometimes I feel a bit iffy about all this kind of forced- >> John: Yeah. >> You know, making, I don't even know how to say it properly so you can cut this part of the interview. (John laughs) >> Tara: Well, and I think that they're >> I'll say it's not organic. >> No, and I think they're already pulling it out, right. It's already been challenged so they're in the process- >> Well, this is the open source angle, Tara, you are getting at it. The change agent is open, right? So to me, the history of the proven model is openness drives transparency drives progress. >> No, it's- >> If you believe that to be true, this could have another impact. >> Yeah, it's so interesting, right. Because if you look at McKinsey Consulting or Boston Consulting or some of the other, I'm blocking on all of the names. There has been a decade or more of research that shows that a non homogeneous employee base, be it gender or ethnicity or whatever, generates more revenue, right? There's dollar signs that can be attached to this, but it's not enough for all companies to want to invest in that way. And it's not enough for all, you know, venture firms or investment firms to grant that seed money or do those seed rounds. I think it's getting better very slowly, but socialization is a much harder thing to overcome over time. Particularly, when you're not just talking about one country like the United States in our case, but around the world. You know, tech centers now exist all over the world, including places that even 10 years ago we might not have expected like Nairobi, right. Which I think is amazing, but you have to factor in the cultural implications of that as well, right. So yes, the openness is important and we have, it's important that we have those voices, but I don't think it's a panacea solution, right. It's just one more piece. I think honestly that one of the most important opportunities has been with Cloud computing and Cloud's been around for a while. So why would I say that? It's because if you think about like everybody holds up the Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, back in the '70s, or Sergey and Larry for Google, you know, you had to have access to enough credit card limit to go to Fry's and buy your servers and then access to somebody like Susan Wojcicki to borrow the garage or whatever. But there was still a certain amount of upfrontness that you had to be able to commit to, whereas now, and we've, I think, seen a really good evidence of this being able to lease server resources by the second and have development platforms that you can do on your phone. I mean, for a while I think Africa, that the majority of development happened on mobile devices because there wasn't a sufficient supply chain of laptops yet. And that's no longer true now as far as I know. But like the power that that enables for people who would otherwise be underrepresented in our industry instantly opens it up, right? And so to me that's I think probably the biggest opportunity that we've seen from an industry on how to make more availability in underrepresented representation for entrepreneurship. >> Yeah. >> Something like AI, I think that's actually going to take us backwards if we're not careful. >> Yeah. >> Because of we're reinforcing that socialization. >> Well, also the bias. A lot of people commenting on the biases of the large language inherently built in are also problem. Lena, I want you to weigh on this too, because I think the skills question comes up here and I've been advocating that you don't need the pedigree, college pedigree, to get into a certain jobs, you mentioned Cloud computing. I mean, it's been around for you think a long time, but not really, really think about it. The ability to level up, okay, if you're going to join something new and half the jobs in cybersecurity are created in the past year, right? So, you have this what used to be a barrier, your degree, your pedigree, your certification would take years, would be a blocker. Now that's gone. >> Lena: Yeah, it's the opposite. >> That's, in fact, psychology. >> I think so, but the people who I, by and large, who I interview for jobs, they have, I think security people and also I work with our compliance folks and I can't forget them, but let's talk about security just now. I've always found a particular kind of mindset with security folks. We're very curious, not very good at following rules a lot of the time, and we'd love to teach others. I mean, that's one of the big things stem from the start of my career. People were always interested in teaching and I was interested in learning. So it was perfect. And I think also having, you know, strong women leaders at MongoDB allows other underrepresented groups to actually apply to the company 'cause they see that we're kind of talking the talk. And that's been important. I think it's really important. You know, you've got Tara and I on here today. There's obviously other senior women at MongoDB that you can talk to as well. There's a bunch of us. There's not a whole ton of us, but there's a bunch of us. And it's good. It's definitely growing. I've been there for four years now and I've seen a growth in women in senior leadership positions. And I think having that kind of track record of getting really good quality underrepresented candidates to not just interview, but come and join us, it's seen. And it's seen in the industry and people take notice and they're like, "Oh, okay, well if that person's working, you know, if Tara Hernandez is working there, I'm going to apply for that." And that in itself I think can really, you know, reap the rewards. But it's getting started. It's like how do you get your first strong female into that position or your first strong underrepresented person into that position? It's hard. I get it. If it was easy, we would've sold already. >> It's like anything. I want to see people like me, my friends in there. Am I going to be alone? Am I going to be of a group? It's a group psychology. Why wouldn't? So getting it out there is key. Is there skills that you think that people should pay attention to? One's come up as curiosity, learning. What are some of the best practices for folks trying to get into the tech field or that's in the tech field and advancing through? What advice are you guys- >> I mean, yeah, definitely, what I say to my team is within my budget, we try and give every at least one training course a year. And there's so much free stuff out there as well. But, you know, keep learning. And even if it's not right in your wheelhouse, don't pick about it. Don't, you know, take a look at what else could be out there that could interest you and then go for it. You know, what does it take you few minutes each night to read a book on something that might change your entire career? You know, be enthusiastic about the opportunities out there. And there's so many opportunities in security. Just so many. >> Tara, what's your advice for folks out there? Tons of stuff to taste, taste test, try things. >> Absolutely. I mean, I always say, you know, my primary qualifications for people, I'm looking for them to be smart and motivated, right. Because the industry changes so quickly. What we're doing now versus what we did even last year versus five years ago, you know, is completely different though themes are certainly the same. You know, we still have to code and we still have to compile that code or package the code and ship the code so, you know, how well can we adapt to these new things instead of creating floppy disks, which was my first job. Five and a quarters, even. The big ones. >> That's old school, OG. There it is. Well done. >> And now it's, you know, containers, you know, (indistinct) image containers. And so, you know, I've gotten a lot of really great success hiring boot campers, you know, career transitioners. Because they bring a lot experience in addition to the technical skills. I think the most important thing is to experiment and figuring out what do you like, because, you know, maybe you are really into security or maybe you're really into like deep level coding and you want to go back, you know, try to go to school to get a degree where you would actually want that level of learning. Or maybe you're a front end engineer, you want to be full stacked. Like there's so many different things, data science, right. Maybe you want to go learn R right. You know, I think it's like figure out what you like because once you find that, that in turn is going to energize you 'cause you're going to feel motivated. I think the worst thing you could do is try to force yourself to learn something that you really could not care less about. That's just the worst. You're going in handicapped. >> Yeah and there's choices now versus when we were breaking into the business. It was like, okay, you software engineer. They call it software engineering, that's all it was. You were that or you were in sales. Like, you know, some sort of systems engineer or sales and now it's,- >> I had never heard of my job when I was in school, right. I didn't even know it was a possibility. But there's so many different types of technical roles, you know, absolutely. >> It's so exciting. I wish I was young again. >> One of the- >> Me too. (Lena laughs) >> I don't. I like the age I am. So one of the things that I did to kind of harness that curiosity is we've set up a security champions programs. About 120, I guess, volunteers globally. And these are people from all different backgrounds and all genders, diversity groups, underrepresented groups, we feel are now represented within this champions program. And people basically give up about an hour or two of their time each week, with their supervisors permission, and we basically teach them different things about security. And we've now had seven full-time people move from different areas within MongoDB into my team as a result of that program. So, you know, monetarily and time, yeah, saved us both. But also we're showing people that there is a path, you know, if you start off in Tara's team, for example, doing X, you join the champions program, you're like, "You know, I'd really like to get into red teaming. That would be so cool." If it fits, then we make that happen. And that has been really important for me, especially to give, you know, the women in the underrepresented groups within MongoDB just that window into something they might never have seen otherwise. >> That's a great common fit is fit matters. Also that getting access to what you fit is also access to either mentoring or sponsorship or some sort of, at least some navigation. Like what's out there and not being afraid to like, you know, just ask. >> Yeah, we just actually kicked off our big mentor program last week, so I'm the executive sponsor of that. I know Tara is part of it, which is fantastic. >> We'll put a plug in for it. Go ahead. >> Yeah, no, it's amazing. There's, gosh, I don't even know the numbers anymore, but there's a lot of people involved in this and so much so that we've had to set up mentoring groups rather than one-on-one. And I think it was 45% of the mentors are actually male, which is quite incredible for a program called Mentor Her. And then what we want to do in the future is actually create a program called Mentor Them so that it's not, you know, not just on the female and so that we can live other groups represented and, you know, kind of break down those groups a wee bit more and have some more granularity in the offering. >> Tara, talk about mentoring and sponsorship. Open source has been there for a long time. People help each other. It's community-oriented. What's your view of how to work with mentors and sponsors if someone's moving through ranks? >> You know, one of the things that was really interesting, unfortunately, in some of the earliest open source communities is there was a lot of pervasive misogyny to be perfectly honest. >> Yeah. >> And one of the important adaptations that we made as an open source community was the idea, an introduction of code of conducts. And so when I'm talking to women who are thinking about expanding their skills, I encourage them to join open source communities to have opportunity, even if they're not getting paid for it, you know, to develop their skills to work with people to get those code reviews, right. I'm like, "Whatever you join, make sure they have a code of conduct and a good leadership team. It's very important." And there are plenty, right. And then that idea has come into, you know, conferences now. So now conferences have codes of contact, if there are any good, and maybe not all of them, but most of them, right. And the ideas of expanding that idea of intentional healthy culture. >> John: Yeah. >> As a business goal and business differentiator. I mean, I won't lie, when I was recruited to come to MongoDB, the culture that I was able to discern through talking to people, in addition to seeing that there was actually women in senior leadership roles like Lena, like Kayla Nelson, that was a huge win. And so it just builds on momentum. And so now, you know, those of us who are in that are now representing. And so that kind of reinforces, but it's all ties together, right. As the open source world goes, particularly for a company like MongoDB, which has an open source product, you know, and our community builds. You know, it's a good thing to be mindful of for us, how we interact with the community and you know, because that could also become an opportunity for recruiting. >> John: Yeah. >> Right. So we, in addition to people who might become advocates on Mongo's behalf in their own company as a solution for themselves, so. >> You guys had great successful company and great leadership there. I mean, I can't tell you how many times someone's told me "MongoDB doesn't scale. It's going to be dead next year." I mean, I was going back 10 years. It's like, just keeps getting better and better. You guys do a great job. So it's so fun to see the success of developers. Really appreciate you guys coming on the program. Final question, what are you guys excited about to end the segment? We'll give you guys the last word. Lena will start with you and Tara, you can wrap us up. What are you excited about? >> I'm excited to see what this year brings. I think with ChatGPT and its copycats, I think it'll be a very interesting year when it comes to AI and always in the lookout for the authentic deep fakes that we see coming out. So just trying to make people aware that this is a real thing. It's not just pretend. And then of course, our old friend ransomware, let's see where that's going to go. >> John: Yeah. >> And let's see where we get to and just genuine hygiene and housekeeping when it comes to security. >> Excellent. Tara. >> Ah, well for us, you know, we're always constantly trying to up our game from a security perspective in the software development life cycle. But also, you know, what can we do? You know, one interesting application of AI that maybe Google doesn't like to talk about is it is really cool as an addendum to search and you know, how we might incorporate that as far as our learning environment and developer productivity, and how can we enable our developers to be more efficient, productive in their day-to-day work. So, I don't know, there's all kinds of opportunities that we're looking at for how we might improve that process here at MongoDB and then maybe be able to share it with the world. One of the things I love about working at MongoDB is we get to use our own products, right. And so being able to have this interesting document database in order to put information and then maybe apply some sort of AI to get it out again, is something that we may well be looking at, if not this year, then certainly in the coming year. >> Awesome. Lena Smart, the chief information security officer. Tara Hernandez, vice president developer of productivity from MongoDB. Thank you so much for sharing here on International Women's Day. We're going to do this quarterly every year. We're going to do it and then we're going to do quarterly updates. Thank you so much for being part of this program. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for having us. >> Okay, this is theCube's coverage of International Women's Day. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> OpenAI The company, and ChatGPT have taken the world by storm. Microsoft reportedly is investing an additional 10 billion dollars into the company. But in our view, while the hype around ChatGPT is justified, we don't believe OpenAI will lock up the market with its first mover advantage. Rather, we believe that success in this market will be directly proportional to the quality and quantity of data that a technology company has at its disposal, and the compute power that it could deploy to run its system. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE insights, powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we unpack the excitement around ChatGPT, and debate the premise that the company's early entry into the space may not confer winner take all advantage to OpenAI. And to do so, we welcome CUBE collaborator, alum, Sarbjeet Johal, (chuckles) and John Furrier, co-host of the Cube. Great to see you Sarbjeet, John. Really appreciate you guys coming to the program. >> Great to be on. >> Okay, so what is ChatGPT? Well, actually we asked ChatGPT, what is ChatGPT? So here's what it said. ChatGPT is a state-of-the-art language model developed by OpenAI that can generate human-like text. It could be fine tuned for a variety of language tasks, such as conversation, summarization, and language translation. So I asked it, give it to me in 50 words or less. How did it do? Anything to add? >> Yeah, think it did good. It's large language model, like previous models, but it started applying the transformers sort of mechanism to focus on what prompt you have given it to itself. And then also the what answer it gave you in the first, sort of, one sentence or two sentences, and then introspect on itself, like what I have already said to you. And so just work on that. So it it's self sort of focus if you will. It does, the transformers help the large language models to do that. >> So to your point, it's a large language model, and GPT stands for generative pre-trained transformer. >> And if you put the definition back up there again, if you put it back up on the screen, let's see it back up. Okay, it actually missed the large, word large. So one of the problems with ChatGPT, it's not always accurate. It's actually a large language model, and it says state of the art language model. And if you look at Google, Google has dominated AI for many times and they're well known as being the best at this. And apparently Google has their own large language model, LLM, in play and have been holding it back to release because of backlash on the accuracy. Like just in that example you showed is a great point. They got almost right, but they missed the key word. >> You know what's funny about that John, is I had previously asked it in my prompt to give me it in less than a hundred words, and it was too long, I said I was too long for Breaking Analysis, and there it went into the fact that it's a large language model. So it largely, it gave me a really different answer the, for both times. So, but it's still pretty amazing for those of you who haven't played with it yet. And one of the best examples that I saw was Ben Charrington from This Week In ML AI podcast. And I stumbled on this thanks to Brian Gracely, who was listening to one of his Cloudcasts. Basically what Ben did is he took, he prompted ChatGPT to interview ChatGPT, and he simply gave the system the prompts, and then he ran the questions and answers into this avatar builder and sped it up 2X so it didn't sound like a machine. And voila, it was amazing. So John is ChatGPT going to take over as a cube host? >> Well, I was thinking, we get the questions in advance sometimes from PR people. We should actually just plug it in ChatGPT, add it to our notes, and saying, "Is this good enough for you? Let's ask the real question." So I think, you know, I think there's a lot of heavy lifting that gets done. I think the ChatGPT is a phenomenal revolution. I think it highlights the use case. Like that example we showed earlier. It gets most of it right. So it's directionally correct and it feels like it's an answer, but it's not a hundred percent accurate. And I think that's where people are seeing value in it. Writing marketing, copy, brainstorming, guest list, gift list for somebody. Write me some lyrics to a song. Give me a thesis about healthcare policy in the United States. It'll do a bang up job, and then you got to go in and you can massage it. So we're going to do three quarters of the work. That's why plagiarism and schools are kind of freaking out. And that's why Microsoft put 10 billion in, because why wouldn't this be a feature of Word, or the OS to help it do stuff on behalf of the user. So linguistically it's a beautiful thing. You can input a string and get a good answer. It's not a search result. >> And we're going to get your take on on Microsoft and, but it kind of levels the playing- but ChatGPT writes better than I do, Sarbjeet, and I know you have some good examples too. You mentioned the Reed Hastings example. >> Yeah, I was listening to Reed Hastings fireside chat with ChatGPT, and the answers were coming as sort of voice, in the voice format. And it was amazing what, he was having very sort of philosophy kind of talk with the ChatGPT, the longer sentences, like he was going on, like, just like we are talking, he was talking for like almost two minutes and then ChatGPT was answering. It was not one sentence question, and then a lot of answers from ChatGPT and yeah, you're right. I, this is our ability. I've been thinking deep about this since yesterday, we talked about, like, we want to do this segment. The data is fed into the data model. It can be the current data as well, but I think that, like, models like ChatGPT, other companies will have those too. They can, they're democratizing the intelligence, but they're not creating intelligence yet, definitely yet I can say that. They will give you all the finite answers. Like, okay, how do you do this for loop in Java, versus, you know, C sharp, and as a programmer you can do that, in, but they can't tell you that, how to write a new algorithm or write a new search algorithm for you. They cannot create a secretive code for you to- >> Not yet. >> Have competitive advantage. >> Not yet, not yet. >> but you- >> Can Google do that today? >> No one really can. The reasoning side of the data is, we talked about at our Supercloud event, with Zhamak Dehghani who's was CEO of, now of Nextdata. This next wave of data intelligence is going to come from entrepreneurs that are probably cross discipline, computer science and some other discipline. But they're going to be new things, for example, data, metadata, and data. It's hard to do reasoning like a human being, so that needs more data to train itself. So I think the first gen of this training module for the large language model they have is a corpus of text. Lot of that's why blog posts are, but the facts are wrong and sometimes out of context, because that contextual reasoning takes time, it takes intelligence. So machines need to become intelligent, and so therefore they need to be trained. So you're going to start to see, I think, a lot of acceleration on training the data sets. And again, it's only as good as the data you can get. And again, proprietary data sets will be a huge winner. Anyone who's got a large corpus of content, proprietary content like theCUBE or SiliconANGLE as a publisher will benefit from this. Large FinTech companies, anyone with large proprietary data will probably be a big winner on this generative AI wave, because it just, it will eat that up, and turn that back into something better. So I think there's going to be a lot of interesting things to look at here. And certainly productivity's going to be off the charts for vanilla and the internet is going to get swarmed with vanilla content. So if you're in the content business, and you're an original content producer of any kind, you're going to be not vanilla, so you're going to be better. So I think there's so much at play Dave (indistinct). >> I think the playing field has been risen, so we- >> Risen and leveled? >> Yeah, and leveled to certain extent. So it's now like that few people as consumers, as consumers of AI, we will have a advantage and others cannot have that advantage. So it will be democratized. That's, I'm sure about that. But if you take the example of calculator, when the calculator came in, and a lot of people are, "Oh, people can't do math anymore because calculator is there." right? So it's a similar sort of moment, just like a calculator for the next level. But, again- >> I see it more like open source, Sarbjeet, because like if you think about what ChatGPT's doing, you do a query and it comes from somewhere the value of a post from ChatGPT is just a reuse of AI. The original content accent will be come from a human. So if I lay out a paragraph from ChatGPT, did some heavy lifting on some facts, I check the facts, save me about maybe- >> Yeah, it's productive. >> An hour writing, and then I write a killer two, three sentences of, like, sharp original thinking or critical analysis. I then took that body of work, open source content, and then laid something on top of it. >> And Sarbjeet's example is a good one, because like if the calculator kids don't do math as well anymore, the slide rule, remember we had slide rules as kids, remember we first started using Waze, you know, we were this minority and you had an advantage over other drivers. Now Waze is like, you know, social traffic, you know, navigation, everybody had, you know- >> All the back roads are crowded. >> They're car crowded. (group laughs) Exactly. All right, let's, let's move on. What about this notion that futurist Ray Amara put forth and really Amara's Law that we're showing here, it's, the law is we, you know, "We tend to overestimate the effect of technology in the short run and underestimate it in the long run." Is that the case, do you think, with ChatGPT? What do you think Sarbjeet? >> I think that's true actually. There's a lot of, >> We don't debate this. >> There's a lot of awe, like when people see the results from ChatGPT, they say what, what the heck? Like, it can do this? But then if you use it more and more and more, and I ask the set of similar question, not the same question, and it gives you like same answer. It's like reading from the same bucket of text in, the interior read (indistinct) where the ChatGPT, you will see that in some couple of segments. It's very, it sounds so boring that the ChatGPT is coming out the same two sentences every time. So it is kind of good, but it's not as good as people think it is right now. But we will have, go through this, you know, hype sort of cycle and get realistic with it. And then in the long term, I think it's a great thing in the short term, it's not something which will (indistinct) >> What's your counter point? You're saying it's not. >> I, no I think the question was, it's hyped up in the short term and not it's underestimated long term. That's what I think what he said, quote. >> Yes, yeah. That's what he said. >> Okay, I think that's wrong with this, because this is a unique, ChatGPT is a unique kind of impact and it's very generational. People have been comparing it, I have been comparing to the internet, like the web, web browser Mosaic and Netscape, right, Navigator. I mean, I clearly still remember the days seeing Navigator for the first time, wow. And there weren't not many sites you could go to, everyone typed in, you know, cars.com, you know. >> That (indistinct) wasn't that overestimated, the overhyped at the beginning and underestimated. >> No, it was, it was underestimated long run, people thought. >> But that Amara's law. >> That's what is. >> No, they said overestimated? >> Overestimated near term underestimated- overhyped near term, underestimated long term. I got, right I mean? >> Well, I, yeah okay, so I would then agree, okay then- >> We were off the charts about the internet in the early days, and it actually exceeded our expectations. >> Well there were people who were, like, poo-pooing it early on. So when the browser came out, people were like, "Oh, the web's a toy for kids." I mean, in 1995 the web was a joke, right? So '96, you had online populations growing, so you had structural changes going on around the browser, internet population. And then that replaced other things, direct mail, other business activities that were once analog then went to the web, kind of read only as you, as we always talk about. So I think that's a moment where the hype long term, the smart money, and the smart industry experts all get the long term. And in this case, there's more poo-pooing in the short term. "Ah, it's not a big deal, it's just AI." I've heard many people poo-pooing ChatGPT, and a lot of smart people saying, "No this is next gen, this is different and it's only going to get better." So I think people are estimating a big long game on this one. >> So you're saying it's bifurcated. There's those who say- >> Yes. >> Okay, all right, let's get to the heart of the premise, and possibly the debate for today's episode. Will OpenAI's early entry into the market confer sustainable competitive advantage for the company. And if you look at the history of tech, the technology industry, it's kind of littered with first mover failures. Altair, IBM, Tandy, Commodore, they and Apple even, they were really early in the PC game. They took a backseat to Dell who came in the scene years later with a better business model. Netscape, you were just talking about, was all the rage in Silicon Valley, with the first browser, drove up all the housing prices out here. AltaVista was the first search engine to really, you know, index full text. >> Owned by Dell, I mean DEC. >> Owned by Digital. >> Yeah, Digital Equipment >> Compaq bought it. And of course as an aside, Digital, they wanted to showcase their hardware, right? Their super computer stuff. And then so Friendster and MySpace, they came before Facebook. The iPhone certainly wasn't the first mobile device. So lots of failed examples, but there are some recent successes like AWS and cloud. >> You could say smartphone. So I mean. >> Well I know, and you can, we can parse this so we'll debate it. Now Twitter, you could argue, had first mover advantage. You kind of gave me that one John. Bitcoin and crypto clearly had first mover advantage, and sustaining that. Guys, will OpenAI make it to the list on the right with ChatGPT, what do you think? >> I think categorically as a company, it probably won't, but as a category, I think what they're doing will, so OpenAI as a company, they get funding, there's power dynamics involved. Microsoft put a billion dollars in early on, then they just pony it up. Now they're reporting 10 billion more. So, like, if the browsers, Microsoft had competitive advantage over Netscape, and used monopoly power, and convicted by the Department of Justice for killing Netscape with their monopoly, Netscape should have had won that battle, but Microsoft killed it. In this case, Microsoft's not killing it, they're buying into it. So I think the embrace extend Microsoft power here makes OpenAI vulnerable for that one vendor solution. So the AI as a company might not make the list, but the category of what this is, large language model AI, is probably will be on the right hand side. >> Okay, we're going to come back to the government intervention and maybe do some comparisons, but what are your thoughts on this premise here? That, it will basically set- put forth the premise that it, that ChatGPT, its early entry into the market will not confer competitive advantage to >> For OpenAI. >> To Open- Yeah, do you agree with that? >> I agree with that actually. It, because Google has been at it, and they have been holding back, as John said because of the scrutiny from the Fed, right, so- >> And privacy too. >> And the privacy and the accuracy as well. But I think Sam Altman and the company on those guys, right? They have put this in a hasty way out there, you know, because it makes mistakes, and there are a lot of questions around the, sort of, where the content is coming from. You saw that as your example, it just stole the content, and without your permission, you know? >> Yeah. So as quick this aside- >> And it codes on people's behalf and the, those codes are wrong. So there's a lot of, sort of, false information it's putting out there. So it's a very vulnerable thing to do what Sam Altman- >> So even though it'll get better, others will compete. >> So look, just side note, a term which Reid Hoffman used a little bit. Like he said, it's experimental launch, like, you know, it's- >> It's pretty damn good. >> It is clever because according to Sam- >> It's more than clever. It's good. >> It's awesome, if you haven't used it. I mean you write- you read what it writes and you go, "This thing writes so well, it writes so much better than you." >> The human emotion drives that too. I think that's a big thing. But- >> I Want to add one more- >> Make your last point. >> Last one. Okay. So, but he's still holding back. He's conducting quite a few interviews. If you want to get the gist of it, there's an interview with StrictlyVC interview from yesterday with Sam Altman. Listen to that one it's an eye opening what they want- where they want to take it. But my last one I want to make it on this point is that Satya Nadella yesterday did an interview with Wall Street Journal. I think he was doing- >> You were not impressed. >> I was not impressed because he was pushing it too much. So Sam Altman's holding back so there's less backlash. >> Got 10 billion reasons to push. >> I think he's almost- >> Microsoft just laid off 10000 people. Hey ChatGPT, find me a job. You know like. (group laughs) >> He's overselling it to an extent that I think it will backfire on Microsoft. And he's over promising a lot of stuff right now, I think. I don't know why he's very jittery about all these things. And he did the same thing during Ignite as well. So he said, "Oh, this AI will write code for you and this and that." Like you called him out- >> The hyperbole- >> During your- >> from Satya Nadella, he's got a lot of hyperbole. (group talks over each other) >> All right, Let's, go ahead. >> Well, can I weigh in on the whole- >> Yeah, sure. >> Microsoft thing on whether OpenAI, here's the take on this. I think it's more like the browser moment to me, because I could relate to that experience with ChatG, personally, emotionally, when I saw that, and I remember vividly- >> You mean that aha moment (indistinct). >> Like this is obviously the future. Anything else in the old world is dead, website's going to be everywhere. It was just instant dot connection for me. And a lot of other smart people who saw this. Lot of people by the way, didn't see it. Someone said the web's a toy. At the company I was worked for at the time, Hewlett Packard, they like, they could have been in, they had invented HTML, and so like all this stuff was, like, they just passed, the web was just being passed over. But at that time, the browser got better, more websites came on board. So the structural advantage there was online web usage was growing, online user population. So that was growing exponentially with the rise of the Netscape browser. So OpenAI could stay on the right side of your list as durable, if they leverage the category that they're creating, can get the scale. And if they can get the scale, just like Twitter, that failed so many times that they still hung around. So it was a product that was always successful, right? So I mean, it should have- >> You're right, it was terrible, we kept coming back. >> The fail whale, but it still grew. So OpenAI has that moment. They could do it if Microsoft doesn't meddle too much with too much power as a vendor. They could be the Netscape Navigator, without the anti-competitive behavior of somebody else. So to me, they have the pole position. So they have an opportunity. So if not, if they don't execute, then there's opportunity. There's not a lot of barriers to entry, vis-a-vis say the CapEx of say a cloud company like AWS. You can't replicate that, Many have tried, but I think you can replicate OpenAI. >> And we're going to talk about that. Okay, so real quick, I want to bring in some ETR data. This isn't an ETR heavy segment, only because this so new, you know, they haven't coverage yet, but they do cover AI. So basically what we're seeing here is a slide on the vertical axis's net score, which is a measure of spending momentum, and in the horizontal axis's is presence in the dataset. Think of it as, like, market presence. And in the insert right there, you can see how the dots are plotted, the two columns. And so, but the key point here that we want to make, there's a bunch of companies on the left, is he like, you know, DataRobot and C3 AI and some others, but the big whales, Google, AWS, Microsoft, are really dominant in this market. So that's really the key takeaway that, can we- >> I notice IBM is way low. >> Yeah, IBM's low, and actually bring that back up and you, but then you see Oracle who actually is injecting. So I guess that's the other point is, you're not necessarily going to go buy AI, and you know, build your own AI, you're going to, it's going to be there and, it, Salesforce is going to embed it into its platform, the SaaS companies, and you're going to purchase AI. You're not necessarily going to build it. But some companies obviously are. >> I mean to quote IBM's general manager Rob Thomas, "You can't have AI with IA." information architecture and David Flynn- >> You can't Have AI without IA >> without, you can't have AI without IA. You can't have, if you have an Information Architecture, you then can power AI. Yesterday David Flynn, with Hammersmith, was on our Supercloud. He was pointing out that the relationship of storage, where you store things, also impacts the data and stressablity, and Zhamak from Nextdata, she was pointing out that same thing. So the data problem factors into all this too, Dave. >> So you got the big cloud and internet giants, they're all poised to go after this opportunity. Microsoft is investing up to 10 billion. Google's code red, which was, you know, the headline in the New York Times. Of course Apple is there and several alternatives in the market today. Guys like Chinchilla, Bloom, and there's a company Jasper and several others, and then Lena Khan looms large and the government's around the world, EU, US, China, all taking notice before the market really is coalesced around a single player. You know, John, you mentioned Netscape, they kind of really, the US government was way late to that game. It was kind of game over. And Netscape, I remember Barksdale was like, "Eh, we're going to be selling software in the enterprise anyway." and then, pshew, the company just dissipated. So, but it looks like the US government, especially with Lena Khan, they're changing the definition of antitrust and what the cause is to go after people, and they're really much more aggressive. It's only what, two years ago that (indistinct). >> Yeah, the problem I have with the federal oversight is this, they're always like late to the game, and they're slow to catch up. So in other words, they're working on stuff that should have been solved a year and a half, two years ago around some of the social networks hiding behind some of the rules around open web back in the days, and I think- >> But they're like 15 years late to that. >> Yeah, and now they got this new thing on top of it. So like, I just worry about them getting their fingers. >> But there's only two years, you know, OpenAI. >> No, but the thing (indistinct). >> No, they're still fighting other battles. But the problem with government is that they're going to label Big Tech as like a evil thing like Pharma, it's like smoke- >> You know Lena Khan wants to kill Big Tech, there's no question. >> So I think Big Tech is getting a very seriously bad rap. And I think anything that the government does that shades darkness on tech, is politically motivated in most cases. You can almost look at everything, and my 80 20 rule is in play here. 80% of the government activity around tech is bullshit, it's politically motivated, and the 20% is probably relevant, but off the mark and not organized. >> Well market forces have always been the determining factor of success. The governments, you know, have been pretty much failed. I mean you look at IBM's antitrust, that, what did that do? The market ultimately beat them. You look at Microsoft back in the day, right? Windows 95 was peaking, the government came in. But you know, like you said, they missed the web, right, and >> so they were hanging on- >> There's nobody in government >> to Windows. >> that actually knows- >> And so, you, I think you're right. It's market forces that are going to determine this. But Sarbjeet, what do you make of Microsoft's big bet here, you weren't impressed with with Nadella. How do you think, where are they going to apply it? Is this going to be a Hail Mary for Bing, or is it going to be applied elsewhere? What do you think. >> They are saying that they will, sort of, weave this into their products, office products, productivity and also to write code as well, developer productivity as well. That's a big play for them. But coming back to your antitrust sort of comments, right? I believe the, your comment was like, oh, fed was late 10 years or 15 years earlier, but now they're two years. But things are moving very fast now as compared to they used to move. >> So two years is like 10 Years. >> Yeah, two years is like 10 years. Just want to make that point. (Dave laughs) This thing is going like wildfire. Any new tech which comes in that I think they're going against distribution channels. Lina Khan has commented time and again that the marketplace model is that she wants to have some grip on. Cloud marketplaces are a kind of monopolistic kind of way. >> I don't, I don't see this, I don't see a Chat AI. >> You told me it's not Bing, you had an interesting comment. >> No, no. First of all, this is great from Microsoft. If you're Microsoft- >> Why? >> Because Microsoft doesn't have the AI chops that Google has, right? Google is got so much core competency on how they run their search, how they run their backends, their cloud, even though they don't get a lot of cloud market share in the enterprise, they got a kick ass cloud cause they needed one. >> Totally. >> They've invented SRE. I mean Google's development and engineering chops are off the scales, right? Amazon's got some good chops, but Google's got like 10 times more chops than AWS in my opinion. Cloud's a whole different story. Microsoft gets AI, they get a playbook, they get a product they can render into, the not only Bing, productivity software, helping people write papers, PowerPoint, also don't forget the cloud AI can super help. We had this conversation on our Supercloud event, where AI's going to do a lot of the heavy lifting around understanding observability and managing service meshes, to managing microservices, to turning on and off applications, and or maybe writing code in real time. So there's a plethora of use cases for Microsoft to deploy this. combined with their R and D budgets, they can then turbocharge more research, build on it. So I think this gives them a car in the game, Google may have pole position with AI, but this puts Microsoft right in the game, and they already have a lot of stuff going on. But this just, I mean everything gets lifted up. Security, cloud, productivity suite, everything. >> What's under the hood at Google, and why aren't they talking about it? I mean they got to be freaked out about this. No? Or do they have kind of a magic bullet? >> I think they have the, they have the chops definitely. Magic bullet, I don't know where they are, as compared to the ChatGPT 3 or 4 models. Like they, but if you look at the online sort of activity and the videos put out there from Google folks, Google technology folks, that's account you should look at if you are looking there, they have put all these distinctions what ChatGPT 3 has used, they have been talking about for a while as well. So it's not like it's a secret thing that you cannot replicate. As you said earlier, like in the beginning of this segment, that anybody who has more data and the capacity to process that data, which Google has both, I think they will win this. >> Obviously living in Palo Alto where the Google founders are, and Google's headquarters next town over we have- >> We're so close to them. We have inside information on some of the thinking and that hasn't been reported by any outlet yet. And that is, is that, from what I'm hearing from my sources, is Google has it, they don't want to release it for many reasons. One is it might screw up their search monopoly, one, two, they're worried about the accuracy, 'cause Google will get sued. 'Cause a lot of people are jamming on this ChatGPT as, "Oh it does everything for me." when it's clearly not a hundred percent accurate all the time. >> So Lina Kahn is looming, and so Google's like be careful. >> Yeah so Google's just like, this is the third, could be a third rail. >> But the first thing you said is a concern. >> Well no. >> The disruptive (indistinct) >> What they will do is do a Waymo kind of thing, where they spin out a separate company. >> They're doing that. >> The discussions happening, they're going to spin out the separate company and put it over there, and saying, "This is AI, got search over there, don't touch that search, 'cause that's where all the revenue is." (chuckles) >> So, okay, so that's how they deal with the Clay Christensen dilemma. What's the business model here? I mean it's not advertising, right? Is it to charge you for a query? What, how do you make money at this? >> It's a good question, I mean my thinking is, first of all, it's cool to type stuff in and see a paper get written, or write a blog post, or gimme a marketing slogan for this or that or write some code. I think the API side of the business will be critical. And I think Howie Xu, I know you're going to reference some of his comments yesterday on Supercloud, I think this brings a whole 'nother user interface into technology consumption. I think the business model, not yet clear, but it will probably be some sort of either API and developer environment or just a straight up free consumer product, with some sort of freemium backend thing for business. >> And he was saying too, it's natural language is the way in which you're going to interact with these systems. >> I think it's APIs, it's APIs, APIs, APIs, because these people who are cooking up these models, and it takes a lot of compute power to train these and to, for inference as well. Somebody did the analysis on the how many cents a Google search costs to Google, and how many cents the ChatGPT query costs. It's, you know, 100x or something on that. You can take a look at that. >> A 100x on which side? >> You're saying two orders of magnitude more expensive for ChatGPT >> Much more, yeah. >> Than for Google. >> It's very expensive. >> So Google's got the data, they got the infrastructure and they got, you're saying they got the cost (indistinct) >> No actually it's a simple query as well, but they are trying to put together the answers, and they're going through a lot more data versus index data already, you know. >> Let me clarify, you're saying that Google's version of ChatGPT is more efficient? >> No, I'm, I'm saying Google search results. >> Ah, search results. >> What are used to today, but cheaper. >> But that, does that, is that going to confer advantage to Google's large language (indistinct)? >> It will, because there were deep science (indistinct). >> Google, I don't think Google search is doing a large language model on their search, it's keyword search. You know, what's the weather in Santa Cruz? Or how, what's the weather going to be? Or you know, how do I find this? Now they have done a smart job of doing some things with those queries, auto complete, re direct navigation. But it's, it's not entity. It's not like, "Hey, what's Dave Vellante thinking this week in Breaking Analysis?" ChatGPT might get that, because it'll get your Breaking Analysis, it'll synthesize it. There'll be some, maybe some clips. It'll be like, you know, I mean. >> Well I got to tell you, I asked ChatGPT to, like, I said, I'm going to enter a transcript of a discussion I had with Nir Zuk, the CTO of Palo Alto Networks, And I want you to write a 750 word blog. I never input the transcript. It wrote a 750 word blog. It attributed quotes to him, and it just pulled a bunch of stuff that, and said, okay, here it is. It talked about Supercloud, it defined Supercloud. >> It's made, it makes you- >> Wow, But it was a big lie. It was fraudulent, but still, blew me away. >> Again, vanilla content and non accurate content. So we are going to see a surge of misinformation on steroids, but I call it the vanilla content. Wow, that's just so boring, (indistinct). >> There's so many dangers. >> Make your point, cause we got to, almost out of time. >> Okay, so the consumption, like how do you consume this thing. As humans, we are consuming it and we are, like, getting a nicely, like, surprisingly shocked, you know, wow, that's cool. It's going to increase productivity and all that stuff, right? And on the danger side as well, the bad actors can take hold of it and create fake content and we have the fake sort of intelligence, if you go out there. So that's one thing. The second thing is, we are as humans are consuming this as language. Like we read that, we listen to it, whatever format we consume that is, but the ultimate usage of that will be when the machines can take that output from likes of ChatGPT, and do actions based on that. The robots can work, the robot can paint your house, we were talking about, right? Right now we can't do that. >> Data apps. >> So the data has to be ingested by the machines. It has to be digestible by the machines. And the machines cannot digest unorganized data right now, we will get better on the ingestion side as well. So we are getting better. >> Data, reasoning, insights, and action. >> I like that mall, paint my house. >> So, okay- >> By the way, that means drones that'll come in. Spray painting your house. >> Hey, it wasn't too long ago that robots couldn't climb stairs, as I like to point out. Okay, and of course it's no surprise the venture capitalists are lining up to eat at the trough, as I'd like to say. Let's hear, you'd referenced this earlier, John, let's hear what AI expert Howie Xu said at the Supercloud event, about what it takes to clone ChatGPT. Please, play the clip. >> So one of the VCs actually asked me the other day, right? "Hey, how much money do I need to spend, invest to get a, you know, another shot to the openAI sort of the level." You know, I did a (indistinct) >> Line up. >> A hundred million dollar is the order of magnitude that I came up with, right? You know, not a billion, not 10 million, right? So a hundred- >> Guys a hundred million dollars, that's an astoundingly low figure. What do you make of it? >> I was in an interview with, I was interviewing, I think he said hundred million or so, but in the hundreds of millions, not a billion right? >> You were trying to get him up, you were like "Hundreds of millions." >> Well I think, I- >> He's like, eh, not 10, not a billion. >> Well first of all, Howie Xu's an expert machine learning. He's at Zscaler, he's a machine learning AI guy. But he comes from VMware, he's got his technology pedigrees really off the chart. Great friend of theCUBE and kind of like a CUBE analyst for us. And he's smart. He's right. I think the barriers to entry from a dollar standpoint are lower than say the CapEx required to compete with AWS. Clearly, the CapEx spending to build all the tech for the run a cloud. >> And you don't need a huge sales force. >> And in some case apps too, it's the same thing. But I think it's not that hard. >> But am I right about that? You don't need a huge sales force either. It's, what, you know >> If the product's good, it will sell, this is a new era. The better mouse trap will win. This is the new economics in software, right? So- >> Because you look at the amount of money Lacework, and Snyk, Snowflake, Databrooks. Look at the amount of money they've raised. I mean it's like a billion dollars before they get to IPO or more. 'Cause they need promotion, they need go to market. You don't need (indistinct) >> OpenAI's been working on this for multiple five years plus it's, hasn't, wasn't born yesterday. Took a lot of years to get going. And Sam is depositioning all the success, because he's trying to manage expectations, To your point Sarbjeet, earlier. It's like, yeah, he's trying to "Whoa, whoa, settle down everybody, (Dave laughs) it's not that great." because he doesn't want to fall into that, you know, hero and then get taken down, so. >> It may take a 100 million or 150 or 200 million to train the model. But to, for the inference to, yeah to for the inference machine, It will take a lot more, I believe. >> Give it, so imagine, >> Because- >> Go ahead, sorry. >> Go ahead. But because it consumes a lot more compute cycles and it's certain level of storage and everything, right, which they already have. So I think to compute is different. To frame the model is a different cost. But to run the business is different, because I think 100 million can go into just fighting the Fed. >> Well there's a flywheel too. >> Oh that's (indistinct) >> (indistinct) >> We are running the business, right? >> It's an interesting number, but it's also kind of, like, context to it. So here, a hundred million spend it, you get there, but you got to factor in the fact that the ways companies win these days is critical mass scale, hitting a flywheel. If they can keep that flywheel of the value that they got going on and get better, you can almost imagine a marketplace where, hey, we have proprietary data, we're SiliconANGLE in theCUBE. We have proprietary content, CUBE videos, transcripts. Well wouldn't it be great if someone in a marketplace could sell a module for us, right? We buy that, Amazon's thing and things like that. So if they can get a marketplace going where you can apply to data sets that may be proprietary, you can start to see this become bigger. And so I think the key barriers to entry is going to be success. I'll give you an example, Reddit. Reddit is successful and it's hard to copy, not because of the software. >> They built the moat. >> Because you can, buy Reddit open source software and try To compete. >> They built the moat with their community. >> Their community, their scale, their user expectation. Twitter, we referenced earlier, that thing should have gone under the first two years, but there was such a great emotional product. People would tolerate the fail whale. And then, you know, well that was a whole 'nother thing. >> Then a plane landed in (John laughs) the Hudson and it was over. >> I think verticals, a lot of verticals will build applications using these models like for lawyers, for doctors, for scientists, for content creators, for- >> So you'll have many hundreds of millions of dollars investments that are going to be seeping out. If, all right, we got to wrap, if you had to put odds on it that that OpenAI is going to be the leader, maybe not a winner take all leader, but like you look at like Amazon and cloud, they're not winner take all, these aren't necessarily winner take all markets. It's not necessarily a zero sum game, but let's call it winner take most. What odds would you give that open AI 10 years from now will be in that position. >> If I'm 0 to 10 kind of thing? >> Yeah, it's like horse race, 3 to 1, 2 to 1, even money, 10 to 1, 50 to 1. >> Maybe 2 to 1, >> 2 to 1, that's pretty low odds. That's basically saying they're the favorite, they're the front runner. Would you agree with that? >> I'd say 4 to 1. >> Yeah, I was going to say I'm like a 5 to 1, 7 to 1 type of person, 'cause I'm a skeptic with, you know, there's so much competition, but- >> I think they're definitely the leader. I mean you got to say, I mean. >> Oh there's no question. There's no question about it. >> The question is can they execute? >> They're not Friendster, is what you're saying. >> They're not Friendster and they're more like Twitter and Reddit where they have momentum. If they can execute on the product side, and if they don't stumble on that, they will continue to have the lead. >> If they say stay neutral, as Sam is, has been saying, that, hey, Microsoft is one of our partners, if you look at their company model, how they have structured the company, then they're going to pay back to the investors, like Microsoft is the biggest one, up to certain, like by certain number of years, they're going to pay back from all the money they make, and after that, they're going to give the money back to the public, to the, I don't know who they give it to, like non-profit or something. (indistinct) >> Okay, the odds are dropping. (group talks over each other) That's a good point though >> Actually they might have done that to fend off the criticism of this. But it's really interesting to see the model they have adopted. >> The wildcard in all this, My last word on this is that, if there's a developer shift in how developers and data can come together again, we have conferences around the future of data, Supercloud and meshs versus, you know, how the data world, coding with data, how that evolves will also dictate, 'cause a wild card could be a shift in the landscape around how developers are using either machine learning or AI like techniques to code into their apps, so. >> That's fantastic insight. I can't thank you enough for your time, on the heels of Supercloud 2, really appreciate it. All right, thanks to John and Sarbjeet for the outstanding conversation today. Special thanks to the Palo Alto studio team. My goodness, Anderson, this great backdrop. You guys got it all out here, I'm jealous. And Noah, really appreciate it, Chuck, Andrew Frick and Cameron, Andrew Frick switching, Cameron on the video lake, great job. And Alex Myerson, he's on production, manages the podcast for us, Ken Schiffman as well. Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight help get the word out on social media and our newsletters. Rob Hof is our editor-in-chief over at SiliconANGLE, does some great editing, thanks to all. Remember, all these episodes are available as podcasts. All you got to do is search Breaking Analysis podcast, wherever you listen. Publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. Want to get in touch, email me directly, david.vellante@siliconangle.com or DM me at dvellante, or comment on our LinkedIn post. And by all means, check out etr.ai. They got really great survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching, We'll see you next time on Breaking Analysis. (electronic music)

>>Hey everyone, and welcome back to The Cube's live coverage of AWS Reinvented 2022 Live from the Venetian Expo in Las Vegas. We're happy to be back. This is first full day of coverage over here last night. We've got three full days of coverage in addition to last night, and there's about 50,000 people here. This event is ready, people are ready to be back, which is so exciting. Lisa Martin here with Paul Gill and Paul, it's great to be back in person. Great to be hosting with you >>And likewise with you, Lisa. I think the first time we hosted again, >>It is our first time exactly. >>And we come here to the biggest event that the cube ever does during the year. >>It's the Super Bowl of the >>Cube. It's it's elbow to elbow out there. It's, it's, it's full tackle football, totally on the, on the floor of reinvent. And very exciting. This, you know, I've been to a lot of conferences going back 40 years, long as I can remember. Been going to tech conferences. This one, the, the intensity, the excitement around this is really unusual. People are jazzed, they're excited to be here, and that's great to see, particularly coming back from two years of isolation. >>Absolutely. The energy is so palpable. Even yesterday, evening, afternoon when I was walking in, you just feel it with all the people here. You know, we talk to so many different companies on the Q Paul. Every company these days has to be a data company. The most important thing about data is making sure that it's backed up and it's protected, that it's secure, that it can be recovered if anything happens. So we're gonna be having a great conversation next about data resiliency with one of our alumni. >>And that would be Rick Scott, Rick, excuse me, Rick Scott, >>Rick Clark. Rick Clark, say Rick Scott, cloud sales Veritas. Rick, welcome back >>To the program. Thank you. Thank you so much. It's a pleasure being here, you know, thank you so much. You're definitely very excited to myself and 40,000 of my closest cousins and friends all in one place. Yep. Or I could possibly go wrong, right? So >>Yeah, absolutely nothing. So, Rick, so Veritas has made some exciting announcements. Talk to us about some of the new things that you've >>Unveiled. Yeah, we've been, we've been incredibly busy and, you know, the journey that we've been on, one of the big announcement that we made about three or four weeks ago is the introduction, really, of a brand new cloud native data management platform that we call Veritas Alta. And this is a journey that we've been on for the better part of seven years. We actually started it with our, our flex appliances. We continued, that was a containerization of our traditional net backup business in, into a highly secured appliance that was loved by our customers. And we continued that theme and that investment into what we call a scale out and scale up form factor appliance as well, what we called flex scale. And then we continued on that investment theme, basically spending over a billion dollars over that seven year journey in our cloud native. And we call that basically the Veritas altar platform with our cloud native platform. And I think if you really look at what that is, it truly is a data management platform. And I emphasize the term cloud native. And so our traditional technologies around data protection, obviously application resiliency and digital compliance or data compliance and governance. We are the only, the first and only company in the world to provide really a cloud optimized, cloud native platform, really, that addresses that. So it's been fun, it's been a fun journey. >>Talk a little bit about the customer experience. I see over 85% of the Fortune 100 trust Veritas with their data management. That's >>A big number. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it is incredible actually. And it really comes back to the Veritas older platform. We sort of built that with, with four tenants in mind, all driving back to this very similar to AWS's customer obsession. Everything we do each and every day of our waiting moments is a Veritas employee is really surrounds the customer. So it starts with the customer experience on how do they find us to, how do they procure our solutions through things like AWS marketplace and how do they deploy it? And the second thing is around really cost optimization, as we know, you know, to, to say that companies are going through a digital transformation and moving workloads to the cloud. I mean, I've got customers that literally were 20% in cloud a year ago and 80% a year later, we've never seen that kind of velocity. >>And so we've doubled down on this notion of cost optimization. You can only do that with these huge investments that I talked about. And so we're a very profitable company. We've been around, got a great heritage of over 30 years, and we've really taken those investments in r and d to provide that sort of cloud native technology to ultimately make it elastic. And so everything from will spin up and spin down services to optimize the cloud bill for our customers, but we'll also provide the greatest workload support. You know, obviously on-prem workloads are very different from cloud workloads and it's almost like turning the clock back 20 years to see all of those new systems. There's no standard API like s and MP on the network. And so we have to talk to every single PAs service, every single DB PAs, and we capture that information and protect it. So it's really has been a phenomenal journey. It's been great. >>You said this, that that al represents a shift from clouds from flex scale to cloud native. What is the difference there? >>The, the main difference really is we took, you know, obviously our traditional product that you've known for many media years, net backup. It's got, you know, tens of millions of lines of code in that. And we knew if we lifted and shifted it up into the cloud, into an I AEs infrastructure, it's just not, it obviously would perform extremely well, but it wasn't cost optimized for our customer. It was too expensive to to run. And so what we did is we rewrote with microservices and containerization, Kubernetes huge parts of that particular product to really optimize it for the cloud. And not only have we done it for that technology, what we now call alter data protection, but we've done it across our entire port portfolio. That was really the main change that we made as part of this particular transition. And >>What have you done to prepare customers for that shift? Is this gonna be a, a drop in simple upgrade for them? >>Absolutely. Yeah. In fact, one of the things that we introduced is we, we invest still very heavily with regards to our OnPrem solutions. We're certainly not abandoning, we're still innovating. There's a lot of data still OnPrem that needs to move to the cloud. And so we have a unique advantage of all of the different workload supports that we provide OnPrem. We continue that expansion into the cloud. So we, we create it as part of the Veritas AL Vision, a technology, we call it AL view. So it's a single painter glass across both OnPrem and cloud for our customers. And so now they can actually see all of their data protection, all our application availability, single collect, all through that single unified interface, which is really game changing in the industry for us. >>It's game changing for customers too, because customers have what generally six to seven different backup technologies in their environment that they're having to individually manage and provision. So the, the workforce productivity improvements I can imagine are, are huge with Veritas. >>Yeah. You you nailed it, right? You must have seen my script, but Absolutely. I mean, I look at the analogy of, you think about the airlines, what's one of the first things airlines do with efficiency? South Southwest Airlines was the best example, a standardized on the 7 37, right? And so all of their pilots, all of their mechanics, all know how to operate the 7 37. So we are doing the same thing with enterprise data protection. So whether you're OnPrem at the edge or in the cloud or even multi-cloud, we can provide that single painter glass. We've done it for our customers for 30 plus years. We'll continue to do it for another 30 something years. And so it's really the first time with Veritas altar that, that we're, we're coming out with something that we've invested for so long and put, put such a huge investment on that can create those changes and that compelling solution for our customers. So as you can see, we're pretty pumped and excited about it. >>Yes, I can >>Use the term data management to describe Alta, and I want to ask about that term because I hear it a lot these days. Data management used to be database, now data management is being applied to all kinds of different functions across the spectrum. How do you define data management in Veritas >>Perspective? Yeah, there's a, we, we see it as really three main pillars across the environment. So one is protection, and we'll talk a little bit about this notion of ransomware is probably the number one use case. So the ability to take the most complex and the biggest, most vast applications. SAP is an example with hundreds of different moving parts to it and being able to protect that. The second is application resiliency. If, if you look at the cloud, there's this notion of, of responsibility, shared responsibility in the cloud. You've heard it, right? Yep. Every single one of the cloud service providers, certainly AWS has up on their website, this is what we protect, here's the demarcation line, the line in the sand, and you, the customer are responsible for that other level. And so we've had a technology, you previously knew it as InfoScale, we now call it alter application resiliency. >>And it can provide availability zone to availability zone, real time replication, high availability of your mission critical applications, right? So not only do we do the traditional backups, but we can also provide application resiliency for mission critical. And then the third thing really from a data management standpoint is all around governance and compliance. You know, ac a lot of our customers need to keep data for five, 10 years or forever. They're audited. There's regulations and different geographies around the world. And, and those regulations require them to be able to really take control of their cloud, take control of their data. And so we have a whole portfolio of solutions under that data compliance, data government. So back to your, your question Paul, it's really the integration and the intersection of those three main pillars. We're not a one trick pony. We've been at this for a long time, and they're not just new products that we invented a couple of months ago and brought to market. They're tried and tested with eight 80,000 customers and the most complex early solutions on the planet that we've been supporting. >>I gotta ask you, you know, we talked about those three pillars and you talked about the shared responsibility model. And think of that where you mentioned aws, Salesforce, Microsoft 365, Google workspace, whatnot. Are you finding that most customers aren't aware of that and haven't been protecting those workloads and then come to you and saying, Hey guys, guess what, this is what this is what they're responsible for. The data is >>You Yeah, I, it's, it's our probably biggest challenge is, is one of awareness, you know, with the cloud, I mean, how many times have you spoken to someone? You just put it in the cloud. Your applications, like the cloud providers like aws, they'll protect everything. Nothing will ever go down. And it's kind like if you, unless your house was ever broken into, you're probably not gonna install that burglar alarm or that fire alarm, right? Hopefully that won't be an event that you guys have to suffer through. So yeah, it's definitely, it wasn't till the last year or so the cloud service providers really published jointly as to where is their responsibility, right? So a great example is an attack vector for a lot of corporations is their SAS applications. So, you know, whether it it's your traditional SA applications that is available that's available on the web to their customers as a sas. >>And so it's certainly available to the bad actors. They're gonna, where there's, there's gonna be a point they're gonna try to get in. And so no matter what your resiliency plan is, at the end of the day, you really need to protect it. And protection isn't just, for example, with M 365 having a snapshot or a recycle bin, that's just not good enough. And so we actually have some pretty compelling technology, what we call ALTA SAS protection, which covers the, pretty much the, the gamut of the major SAS technologies to protect those and make it available for our customers. So yeah, certainly it's a big part of it is awareness. Yeah. >>Well, I understand that the shared responsibility model, I, I realize there's a lot of confusion about that still, but in the SaaS world that's somewhat different. The responsibility of the SaaS provider for protecting data is somewhat different. How, how should, what should customers know about that? >>I think, you know, the, the related to that, if, if you look at OnPrem, you know, approximately 35 to 40% of OnPrem enterprise data is protected. It's kind of in a long traditional problem. Everyone's aware of it. You know, I remember going to a presentation from IBM 20 something years ago, and someone held their push hand up in the room about the dis drives and says, you need to back it up. And the IBM sales guy said, no, IBM dis drives never crash. Right? And so fast forward to here we are today, things have changed. So we're going through almost a similar sort of changes and culture in the cloud. 8% of the data in the cloud is protected today, 8%. That's incredible. Meaning >>That there is independent backup devoted >>To that data in some cases, not at all. And something many cases, the customer just assumes that it's in the cloud, therefore it's always available. I never have to worry about protecting it, right? And so that's a big problem that we're obviously trying to, trying to solve. And we do that all under the umbrella of ransomware. That's a huge theme, huge investment that, that Veritas does with regards to providing that resiliency for our >>Customers. Ransomware is scary. It is becoming so prolific. The bad actors have access to technologies. Obviously companies are fighting them, but now ransomware has evolved into, no longer are we gonna get hit, it's when, yeah, it's how often it's what's the damage going to be. So the ability to help customers recover from ransomware, that resiliency is table stakes for businesses in any industry these days. Does that, that one of the primary pain points that your customers are coming to you with? >>It's the number one pain point. Yeah, it's, it's incredible. I mean, there's not a single briefing that our teams are doing customer meetings where that term ransomware doesn't come up as, as their number one use case. Just to give you something, a couple of statistics. There's a ransomware attack attack that happens 11 times a second right around the globe. And this isn't just, you know, minor stuff, right? I've got friends that are, you know, executives of large company that have been hit that have that some, you know, multimillion dollar ransom attack. So our, our play on this is, when you think about it, is data protection is the last line of defense. Yes. And so if they break through, it's not a case, Lisa, as you mentioned, if it's a case of when Yeah. And so it's gonna happen. So one of the most important things is knowing how do you know you have a gold copy, a clean copy, and you can recover at speed in some cases. >>We're talking about tens of thousands of systems to do that at speed. That's in our dna. We've been doing it for many, many years. And we spoke through a lot of the cyber insurance companies on this particular topic as well. And what really came back from that is that they're actually now demanding things like immutable storage, malware detection, air gaping, right? Anomaly detection is sort of core technologies tick the box that they literally won't ensure you unless you have those core components. And so what we've done is we've doubled down on that investment. We use AI in ML technologies, particularly around the anomaly detection. One of the, the, the unique and ne differentiators that Verto provides is a ransomware resiliency scorecard. Imagine the ability to save uran a corporation. We can come in and run our analytics on your environment and kind of give you a grade, right? Wouldn't you prefer that than waiting for the event to take place to see where your vulnerability really is? And so these are some of the advantages that we can actually provide for our customers, really, really >>To help. Just a final quick question. There is a, a common perception, I believe that ransomware is an on premise problem. In fact, it is also a cloud problem. Is that not right? >>Oh, absolutely. I I think that probably the biggest attack vector is in the cloud. If it's, if it's OnPrem, you've certainly got a certain line of defense that's trying to break through. But, you know, you're in the open world there. Obviously with SAS applications in the cloud, it's not a case of if, but when, and it's, and it's gonna continue to get, you know, more and more prevalent within corporations. There's always gonna be those attack factors that they find the, the flash wounds that they can attack to break through. What we are concentrating on is that resiliency, that ability for customers to recover at speed. We've done that with our traditional appliances from our heritage OnPrem. We continue to do that with regard to resiliency at speed with our customers in the cloud, with partners like aws >>For sure. Almost done. Give me your 30 seconds on AWS and Veritas. >>We've had a partnership for the better part of 10 years. It's incredible when you think about aws, where they released the elastic compute back in 2006, right? We've been delivering data protection, a data management solutions for, for the better part of 30 years, right? So, so we're, we're Junos in our space. We're the leader in, in data protection and enterprise data protection. We were on-prem. We, we continue to be in the cloud as AWS was with the cloud service provided. So the synergies are incredible. About 80 to 85% of our, our joint customers are the same. We take core unique superpowers of aws, like AWS outposts and AWS Glacier Instant retrieval, for example, those core technologies and incorporate them into our products as we go to Mark. And so we released a core technology a few months ago, we call it ultra recovery vault. And it's an air gap, a mutable storage, worm storage, right Once, right? You can't change it even when the bad actors try to get in. They're independent from the customer's tenant and aws. So we manage it as a managed backup service for our customers. Got it. And so our customers are using that to really help them with their ransomware. So it's been a tremendous partnership with AWS >>Standing 10 years of accounting. Last question for you, Rick. You got a billboard on the 1 0 1 in Santa Clara, right? By the fancy Verto >>1 0 1? >>Yeah. Right. Well, there's no traffic. What does that billboard say? What's that bumper sticker about? Vertus, >>I think, I think the billboard would say, welcome to the new Veritas. This is not your grandfather's old mobile. We've done a phenomenal job in, in the last, particularly the last three or four years, to really reinvent ourselves in the cloud and the investments that we made are really paying off for our customers today. So I'm excited to be part of this journey and excited to talk to you guys today. >>Love it. Not your grandfather's Veritas. Rick, thank you so much for joining Paula, me on the forgot talking about what you guys are doing, how you're helping customers, really established that cyber of resiliency, which is absolutely critical these days. We appreciate your >>Time. My pleasure. Thank you so much. >>All right, for our guest and Paul Gilland, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching the Queue, which as you know is the leader in live enterprise and emerging check coverage.

>>Hey everyone, and welcome back to Las Vegas. Viva Las Vegas, baby. This is the Cube live at AWS Reinvent 2022 with tens of thousands of people. Lisa Martin here with Dave Valante. Dave, we've had some great conversations. This is day one of four days of wall to wall coverage on the cube. We've been talking data. Every company is a data company. Data protection, data resiliency, absolutely table stakes for organizations to, >>And I think ecosystem is the other big theme. And that really came to life last year. You know, we came out of the pandemic and it was like, wow, we are entering a new era. People no longer was the ecosystem worried about it, AWS competing with them. They were more worried about innovating and building on top of AWS and building their own value. And that's really, I think, the theme of the 2020s within the ecosystem. >>And we're gonna be talking about building on top of aws. Two guests join us, two alumni join us. Stephen Manley is here, the CTO of Druva. Welcome back. Jason crat as well is here. CIO and CTO of Summit Carbon Solutions. Guys, great to have you back on the program. >>Thank you. >>Let's start with you giving the audience an understanding of the company. What do you guys do? What do you deliver value for customers? All that good >>Stuff. Yeah, no, for sure. So Summit Carbon is the world's largest carbon capture and sequestration company capturing close to 15 million tons of carbon every year. So it doesn't go into the atmosphere. >>Wow, fantastic. Steven, the, the risk landscape today is crazy, right? There's, there's been massive changes. We've talked about this many times. What are some of the things, you know, ransomware is a, is, I know as you say, this is a, it's not a, if it's gonna happen, it's when it's how frequent, it's what's gonna be the damage. What are some of the challenges and concerns that you're hearing from customers out there today? >>Yeah, you know, it really comes down to three things. And, and everybody is, is terrified of ransomware and justifiably so. So, so the first thing that comes up is, how do I keep up? Because I have so much data in so many places, and the threats are evolving so quickly. I don't have enough money, I don't have enough people, I don't have enough skilled resources to be able to keep up. The second thing, and this ties in with what Dave said, is, is ecosystem. You know, it used to be that your, your backup was siloed, right? They'd sit in the basement and, and you wouldn't see, see them. But now they're saying, I've gotta work with my security team. So rather than hoping the security team stays away from me, how do I integrate with them? How do I tie together? And then the third one, which is on everybody's mind, is when that attack happens, and like you said, it's win and, and the bell rings and they come to me and they say, all right, it's time for you to recover. It's time for, for all this investment we've put in. Am I gonna be ready? Am I going to be able to execute? Because a ransom or recovery is so different than any other recovery they've ever done. So it's those three things that really are top of mind for >>How, so what is the, what are the key differences, if you could summarize? I mean, I >>Know it's so, so the first one is you can't trust the environment you're restoring into. Even with a disaster, it would finish and you'd say, okay, I'm gonna get my data center set up again and I'm gonna get things working. You know, when I try to recover, I don't know if everything's clean yet. I'm trying to recover while I'm still going through incident response. So that's one big difference. A second big difference is I'm not sure if the thing I'm recovering is good, I've gotta scan it. I've gotta make sure what's inside it is, is, is alright. And then the third thing is what we're seeing is the targets are usually not necessarily the crown jewels because those tend to be more protected. And so they're running into this, I need to recover a massive amount of what we might call tier two, tier three apps that I wasn't ready for because I've always been prepared for that tier one disaster. And so, so those three things they go, it's stuff I'm not prepared or covering. It's a flow. I'm not used to having to check things and I'm not sure where I'm gonna recover too when the, when the time comes. >>Yeah, just go ahead. Yeah, that's right. I mean, I think for me, the biggest concern is the blind spots of where did I actually back it up or not. You know, what did I get it? Cuz you, we always protect our e r p, we always protect these sort of classes of tiers of systems, but then it's like, oh, that user's email box didn't get it. Oh, that, you know, that one drive didn't get it. You know, or, or, or whatever it is. You know, the infrastructure behind it all. I forgot to back that up. That to me the blind spots are the scariest part of a ransomware attack. >>And, and if you think about it, some of the most high profile attacks, you know, on the, on the colonial pipeline, they didn't go after the core assets. They went after billing. That's right. But billing brought everything down so they're smart enough to say, right, I'm not gonna take the, the castle head on. Is there is they're that. Exactly. >>And so how do you, I get, I mean you can air gap and do things like that in terms of protecting the, the, the data, the corrupt data. How do you protect the corrupt environment? Like that's, that's a really challenging issue. Is >>It? I don't know. I mean, I'll, I'll you can go second here. I think that what's interesting to me about is that's what cloud's for. You can build as many environments as you want. You only pay for what you use, right? And so you have an opportunity to just reconstruct it. That's why things, everything is code matters. That's why having a cloud partner like Druva matters. So you can just go restore wherever you need to in a totally clean environment. >>So the answer is you gotta do it in the cloud. Yeah. What if it's on prem? >>So if it's on prem, what we see people do is, and, and, and this is where testing and, and where cloud can still be an asset, is you can look and say a lot of those assets I'm running in the data center, I could still recover in the cloud. And so you can go through DR testing and you can start to define what's in your on-prem so that you could make it, you know, so you can make it cloud recoverable. Now, a lot of the people that do that then say, well actually why am I even running this on prem anymore in the first place? I should just move this to the cloud now. But, but, but there are people in that interim step. But, but, but it's really important because you, you're gonna need a clean environment to play in. And it's so hard to have a clean environment set up in a data center cuz it basically means I'm not touching this, I'm just paying for something to sit idle. Whereas cloud, I can spin that up, right? Get a, a cloud foundation suite and, and just again, infrastructures code, spin things up, test it, spin it down. It doesn't cost me money on a daily basis. >>Jason, talk a little bit about how you are using Druva. Why Druva and give us a kind of a landscape of your IT environment with Druva. >>Yeah. You know, so when we first started, you know, we did have a competitor solution and, and, and it was only backing up, you know, we were a startup. It was only backing up our email. And so as you pointed out, the ecosystem really matters because we grew out of email pretty quick as a startup. And we had to have real use cases to protect and the legacy product just wouldn't support us. And so our whole direction, or my direction to my team is back it up wherever it is, you know, go get it. And so we needed somebody in the field, literally in the middle of Nebraska or Iowa to have their laptop backed up. We needed our infrastructure, our data center backed up and we needed our, our SaaS solutions backed up. We needed it all. And so we needed a partner like Druva to help us go get it wherever it's at. >>Talk about the value in, with Druva being cloud native. >>Yeah. To us it's a big deal, right? There's all sorts of products you could go by to go just do endpoint laptop protection or just do SAS backups. For us, the value is in learning one tool and mastering it and then taking it to wherever the data is. To me, we see a lot of value for that because we can have one team focus on one product, get good at it, and drive the value. >>That consolidation theme is big right now, you know, the economic headwinds and so forth. What was the catalyst for you? Was it, is that something you started, you know, years ago? Just it's good practice to do that? What's, >>Well, no, I mean luckily I'm in a very good position as a startup to do define it, you know, but I've been in those legacy organizations where we've got a lot of tech debt and then how do you consolidate your portfolio so that you can gain more value, right? Cause you only get one budget a year, right? And so I'm lucky in, in the learnings I've had in other enterprises to deal with this head on right now as we grow, don't add tech debt, put it in right. Today. >>Talk to us a little bit about the SaaS applications that you're backing up. You know, we, we talk a lot with customers, the shared, the shared responsibility model that a lot of customers aren't aware of. Where are you using that competing solution to protect SaaS applications before driven and talk about Yeah. The, the value in that going, the data protection is our responsibility and not the SA vendor. >>No, absolutely. I mean, and it is funny to go to, you know, it's like Office 365 applications and go to our, our CFO and a leadership and be like, no, we really gotta back it up to a third party. And they're like, but why? >>It's >>In the cloud, right? And so there's a lot of instruction I have to provide to my peers and, and, and my users to help them understand why these things matter. And, and, and it works out really well because we can show value really quick when anything happens. And now we get, I mean, even in SharePoint, people will come to us to restore things when they're fully empowered to do it. But my team's faster. And so we can just get it done for them. And so it's an extra from me, it's an extra SLA or never service level I can provide to my internal customers that, that gives them more faith and trust in my organization. >>How, how are the SEC op teams and the data protection teams, the backup teams, how are they coming together? Is is, is data protection backup just morphing into security? Is it more of an adjacency? What's that dynamic like? >>So I'd say right now, and, and I'll be curious to hear Jason's organization, but certainly what we see broadly is, you know, the, the teams are starting to work together, but I wouldn't say they're merging, right? Because, you know, you think of it in a couple of ways. The first is you've got a production environment and that needs to be secured. And then you've got a protection environment. And that protection environment also has to be secured. So the first conversation for a lot of backup teams is, alright, I need to actually work with the security team to make sure that, that my, my my backup environment, it's air gapped, it's encrypted, it's secured. Then I think the, the then I think you start to see people come together, especially as they go through, say, tabletop exercises for ransomware recovery, where it's, alright, where, where can the backup team add value here? >>Because certainly recovery, that's the basics. But as there log information you can provide, are there detection pieces that you can offer? So, so I think, you know, you start to see a partnership, but, but the reality is, you know, the, the two are still separate, right? Because, you know, my job as a a protection resiliency company is I wanna make sure that when you need your data, it's gonna be there for you. And I certainly want to, to to follow best secure practices and I wanna offer value to the security team, but there's a whole lot of the security ecosystem that I want to plug into. I'm not trying to replace them again. I want to be part of that broader ecosystem. >>So how, how do you guys approach it? Yeah, >>That's interesting. Yeah. So in my organization, we, we are one team and, and not to be too cheesy or you know, whatever, but as Amazon would say, security is job one. And so we treat it as if this is it. And so we never push something into production until we are ready. And ready to us means it's got a security package on it, it's backed up, the users have tested it, we are ready to go. It's not that we're ready just be to provide the service or the thing. It's that we are actually ready to productionize this. And so it's ready for production data and that slows us down in some cases. But that's where DevOps and this idea of just merging everything together into a central, how do we get this done together, has worked out really well for us. So, >>So it's really the DevOps team's responsibility. It's not a separate data protection function. >>Nope. Nope. We have specialists of course, right? Yeah, yeah. Because you need the extra level, the CISSPs and those people Yeah, yeah. To really know what they're doing, but they're just part of the team. Yeah. >>Talk about some of the business outcomes that you're achieving with Druva so far. >>Yeah. The business outcomes for me are, you know, I meet my SLAs that's promising. I can communicate that I feel more secure in the cloud and, and all of my workloads because I can restore it. And, and that to me helps everybody in my organization sleep well, sleep better. We are, we transport a lot of the carbon in a pipeline like Colonial. And so to us, we are, we are potential victims of, of a pipe, a non pipeline group, right? Attacking us, but it's carbon, you know, we're trying to get it outta atmosphere. And so by protecting it, no matter where it is, as long as we've got internet access, we can back it up. That provides tons of value to my team because we have hundreds of people in the field working for us every day who collect data and generate it. >>What would you say to a customer who's maybe on the fence looking at different technologies, why dva? >>You know, I think, you know, do the research in my mind, it'll win if you just do the research, right? I mean, there might be vendors that'll buy you nice dinners or whatever, and those are, those are nice things, but the, the reality is you have to protect your data no matter where it is. If it's in a SaaS application, if it's in a cloud provider, if it's infrastructure, wherever it is, you need it. And if you just go look at the facts, there it is, right? And so I, I'd say be objective. Look at the facts, it'll prove itself. >>Look at the data. There you go. Steven Druva recently announced a data resiliency guarantee with a big whopping financial sum. Talk to us a little bit about that, the value in it for your customers and for prospects, >>Right? So, so basically there's, there's really two parts to this guarantee. The first is, you know, across five different SLAs, and I'll talk about those, you know, if we violate those, the customers can get a payout of up to 10 million, right? So again, putting, putting our money where our mouth is in a pretty large amount. But, but for me, the exciting part, and this is, this is where Jason went, is it's about the SLAs, right? You know, one of Drew's goals is to say, look, we do the job for you, we do the service for you so you can offer that service to your company. And so the SLAs aren't just about ransomware, some of them certainly are, you know, that, that you're going to be able to recover your data in the event of a ransomware attack, that your data won't get exfiltrated as part of a ransomware attack. >>But also things like backup success rates, because as much as recovery matters a lot more than backup, you do need a backup if you're gonna be able to get that recovery done. There's also an SLA to say that, you know, if 10 years down the road you need to recover your data, it's still recoverable, right? So, so that kind of durability piece. And then of course the availability of the service because what's the point of a service if it's not there for you when you need it? And so, so having that breadth of coverage, I think really reflects who Druva is, which is we're doing this job for you, right? We want to make this this service available so you can focus on offering other value inside your business. And >>The insurance underwriters, if they threw holy water on >>That, they, they, they were okay with it. The legal people blessed it, you know, it, you know, the CEO signed off on it, the board of directors. So, you know, it, and it, it's all there in print, it's all there on the web. If you wanna look, you know, make sure, one of the things we wanted to be very clear on is that this isn't just a marketing gimmick that we're, we're putting, that we're putting substance behind it because a lot of these were already in our contracts anyway, because as a SAS vendor, you're signing up for service level agreements anyway. >>Yeah. But most of the service level agreements and SaaS vendors are crap. They're like, you know, hey, you know, if something bad happens, you know, we'll, we'll give you a credit, >>Right? >>For, you know, for when you were down. I mean, it's not, you never get into business impact. I mean, even aws, sorry, I mean, it's true. We're a customer. I read define print, I know what I'm signing up for. But, so that's, >>We read it a lot and we will not, we don't really care about the credits at all. We care about is it their force? Is it a partner? We trust, we fight that every day in our SLAs with our vendors >>In the end, right? I mean this, we are the last line of defense. We are the thing that keeps the business up and running. So if your business, you know, can't get to his data and can't operate, me coming to you and saying, Dave, I've got some credits for you after you, you know, after you declare bankruptcy, it'll be great. Yeah, that's not a win. >>It's no value, >>Not helpful. The goal's gotta be, your business is up and running cuz that's when we're both successful. So, so, so, you know, we view this as we're in it together, right? We wanna make sure your business succeeds. Again, it's not about slight of hand, it's not about, you know, just, just putting fine print in the contract. It's about standing up and delivering. Because if you can't do that, why are we here? Right? The number one thing we hear from our customers is Dr. Just works. And that's the thing I think I'm most proud of is Druva just works. >>So, speaking of Juva, just working, if there's a billboard in Santa Clara near the new offices about Druva, what's, what's the bumper sticker? What's the tagline? >>I, I, I think, I think that's it. I think Druva just works. Keeps your data safe. Simple as that. Safe and secure. Druva works to keep your data safe and secure. >>Saved me. >>Yeah. >>Truva just works. Guys, thanks so much for joining. David, me on the program. Great to have you back on the cube. Thank you. Talking about how you're working together, what Druva is doing to really putting, its its best foot forward. We appreciate your insights and your time. Thank >>You. Thanks guys. It's great to see you guys. Likewise >>The show for our guests and Dave Ante. I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching the Cube, the leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back. We're here at Supercomputing 22 in Dallas. My name's Paul Gill, I'm your host. With me, Dave Nicholson, my co-host. And one thing that struck me about this conference arriving here, was the number of universities that are exhibiting here. I mean, big, big exhibits from universities. Never seen that at a conference before. And one of those universities is Indiana University. Our two guests, Dave Jent, who's the AVP of Networks at Indiana University, Aaron Neal, Deputy CIO at Indiana University. Welcome, thanks for joining us. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you. >> I've always thought that the CIO job at a university has got to be the toughest CIO job there is, because you're managing this sprawling network, people are doing all kinds of different things on it. You've got to secure it. You've got to make it performant. And it just seems to be a big challenge. Talk about the network at Indiana University and what you have done particularly since the pandemic, how that has affected the architecture of your network. And what you do to maintain the levels of performance and security that you need. >> On the network side one of the things we've done is, kept in close contact with what the incoming students are looking for. It's a different environment than it was then 10 years ago when a student would come, maybe they had a phone, maybe they had one laptop. Today they're coming with multiple phones, multiple laptops, gaming devices. And the expectation that they have to come on a campus and plug all that stuff in causes lots of problems for us, in managing just the security aspect of it, the capacity, the IP space required to manage six, seven devices per student when you have 35,000 students on campus, has always been a challenge. And keeping ahead of that knowing what students are going to come in with, has been interesting. During the pandemic the campus was closed for a bit of time. What we found was our biggest challenge was keeping up with the number of people who wanted to VPN to campus. We had to buy additional VPN licenses so they could do their work, authenticate to the network. We doubled, maybe even tripled our our VPN license count. And that has settled down now that we're back on campus. But again, they came back with a vengeance. More gaming devices, more things to be connected, and into an environment that was a couple years old, that we hadn't done much with. We had gone through a pretty good size network deployment of new hardware to try to get ready for them. And it's worked well, but it's always challenging to keep up with students. >> Aaron, I want to ask you about security because that really is one of your key areas of focus. And you're collaborating with counties, local municipalities, as well as other educational institutions. How's your security strategy evolving in light of some of the vulnerabilities of VPNs that became obvious during the pandemic, and this kind of perfusion of new devices that that Dave was talking about? >> Yeah, so one of the things that we we did several years ago was establish what we call OmniSOC, which is a shared security operations center in collaboration with other institutions as well as research centers across the United States and in Indiana. And really what that is, is we took the lessons that we've learned and the capabilities that we've had within the institution and looked to partner with those key institutions to bring that data in-house, utilize our staff such that we can look for security threats and share that information across the the other institutions so that we can give each of those areas a heads up and work with those institutions to address any kind of vulnerabilities that might be out there. One of the other things that you mentioned is, we're partnering with Purdue in the Indiana Office of Technology on a grant to actually work with municipalities, county governments, to really assess their posture as it relates to security in those areas. It's a great opportunity for us to work together as institutions as well as work with the state in general to increase our posture as it relates to security. >> Dave, what brings IU to Supercomputing 2022? >> We've been here for a long time. And I think one of the things that we're always interested in is, what's next? What's new? There's so many, there's network vendors, software vendors, hardware vendors, high performance computing suppliers. What is out there that we're interested in? IU runs a large Cray system in Indiana called Big Red 200. And with any system you procure it, you get it running, you operate it, and your next goal is to upgrade it. And what's out there that we might be interested? That I think why we come to IU. We also like to showcase what we do at IU. If you come by the booth you'll see the OmniSOC, there's some video on that. The GlobalNOC, which I manage, which supports a lot of the RNE institutions in the country. We talk about that. Being able to have a place for people to come and see us. If you stand by the booth long enough people come and find you, and want to talk about a project they have, or a collaboration they'd like to partner with. We had a guy come by a while ago wanting a job. Those are all good things having a big booth can do for you. >> Well, so on that subject, in each of your areas of expertise and your purview are you kind of interleaved with the academic side of things on campus? Do you include students? I mean, I would think it would be a great source of cheap labor for you at least. Or is there kind of a wall between what you guys are responsible for and what students? >> Absolutely we try to support faculty and students as much as we can. And just to go back a little bit on the OmniSOC discussion. One of the things that we provide is internships for each of the universities that we work with. They have to sponsor at least three students every year and make that financial commitment. We bring them on site for three weeks. They learn us alongside the other analysts, information security analysts and work in a real world environment and gain those skills to be able to go back to their institutions and do an additional work there. So it's a great program for us to work with students. I think the other thing that we do is we provide obviously the infrastructure that enable our faculty members to do the research that they need to do. Whether that's through Big Red 200, our Supercomputer or just kind of the everyday infrastructure that allows them to do what they need to do. We have an environment on premise called our Intelligent Infrastructure, that we provide managed access to hardware and storage resources in a way that we know it's secure and they can utilize that environment to do virtually anything that they need in a server environment. >> Dave, I want to get back to the GigaPOP, which you mentioned earlier you're the managing director of the Indiana GigaPOP. What exactly is it? >> Well, the GigaPOP and there are a number of GigaPOP around the country. It was really the aggregation facility for Indiana and all of the universities in Indiana to connect to outside resources. GigaPOP has connections to internet too, the commodity internet, Esnet, the Big Ten or the BTAA a network in Chicago. It's a way for all universities in Indiana to connect to a single source to allow them to connect nationally to research organizations. >> And what are the benefits of having this collaboration of university. >> If you could think of a researcher at Indiana wants to do something with a researcher in Wisconsin, they both connect to their research networks in Wisconsin and Indiana, and they have essentially direct connection. There's no commodity internet, there's no throttling of of capacity. Both networks and the interconnects because we use internet too, are essentially UNT throttled access for the researchers to do anything they need to do. It's secure, it's fast, easy to use, in fact, so easy they don't even know that they're using it. It just we manage the networks and organize the networks in a way configure them that's the path of least resistance and that's the path traffic will take. And that's nationally. There are lots of these that are interconnected in various ways. I do want to get back to the labor point, just for a moment. (laughs) Because... >> You're here to claim you're not violating any labor laws. Is that what you're going to be? >> I'm here to hopefully hire, get more people to be interested to coming to IU. >> Stop by the booth. >> It's a great place to work. >> Exactly. >> We hire lots of interns and in the network space hiring really experienced network engineers, really hard to do, hard to attract people. And these days when you can work from anywhere, you don't have to be any place to work for anybody. We try to attract as many students as we can. And really we're exposing 'em to an environment that exists in very few places. Tens of thousands of wireless access points, big fast networks, interconnections and national international networks. We support the Noah network which supports satellite systems and secure traffic. It really is a very unique experience and you can come to IU, spend lots of years there and never see the same thing twice. We think we have an environment that's really a good way for people to come out of college, graduate school, work for some number of years and hopefully stay at IU, but if not, leave and get a good job and talk well about IU. In fact, the wireless network today here at SC was installed and is managed by a person who manages our campus network wireless, James Dickerson. That's the kind of opportunity we can provide people at IU. >> Aaron, I'd like to ask, you hear a lot about everything moving to the cloud these days, but in the HPC world I don't think that move is happening as quickly as it is in some areas. In fact, there's a good argument some workloads should never move to the cloud. You're having to balance these decisions. Where are you on the thinking of what belongs in the data center and what belongs in the cloud? >> I think our approach has really been specific to what the needs are. As an institution, we've not pushed all our chips in on the cloud, whether it be for high performance computing or otherwise. It's really looking at what the specific need is and addressing it with the proper solution. We made an investment several years ago in a data center internally, and we're leveraging that through the intelligent infrastructure that I spoke about. But really it's addressing what the specific need is and finding the specific solution, rather than going all in in one direction or another. I dunno if Jet Stream is something that you would like to bring up as well. >> By having our own data center and having our own facilities we're able to compete for NSF grants and work on projects that provide shared resources for the research community. Just dream is a project that does that. Without a data center and without the ability to work on large projects, we don't have any of that. If you don't have that then you're dependent on someone else. We like to say that, what we are proud of is the people come to IU and ask us if they can partner on our projects. Without a data center and those resources we are the ones who have to go out and say can we partner on your project? We'd like to be the leaders of that in that space. >> I wanted to kind of double click on something you mentioned. Couple of things. Historically IU has been I'm sure closely associated with Chicago. You think of what are students thinking of doing when they graduate? Maybe they're going to go home, but the sort of center of gravity it's like Chicago. You mentioned talking about, especially post pandemic, the idea that you can live anywhere. Not everybody wants to live in Manhattan or Santa Clara. And of course, technology over decades has given us the ability to do things remotely and IU is plugged into the globe, doesn't matter where you are. But have you seen either during or post pandemic 'cause we're really in the early stages of this. Are you seeing that? Are you seeing people say, Hey, thinking about their family, where do I want to live? Where do I want to raise my family? I'm in academia and no, I don't want to live in Manhattan. Hey, we can go to IU and we're plugged into the globe. And then students in California we see this, there's some schools on the central coast where people loved living there when they were in college but there was no economic opportunity there. Are you seeing a shift, are basically houses in Bloomington becoming unaffordable because people are saying, you know what, I'm going to stay here. What does that look like? >> I mean, for our group there are a lot of people who do work from home, have chosen to stay in Bloomington. We have had some people who for various reasons want to leave. We want to retain them, so we allow them to work remotely. And that has turned into a tool for recruiting. The kid that graduates from Caltech. Doesn't want to stay in Caltech in California, we have an opportunity now he can move to wherever between here and there and we can hire him do work. We love to have people come to Indiana. We think it is a unique experience, Bloomington, Indianapolis are great places. But I think the reality is, we're not going to get everybody to come live, be a Hoosier, how do we get them to come and work at IU? In some ways disappointing when we don't have buildings full of people, but 40 paying Zoom or teams window, not kind the same thing. But I think this is what we're going to have to figure out, how do we make this kind of environment work. >> Last question here, give you a chance to put in a plug for Indiana University. For those those data scientists those researchers who may be open to working somewhere else, why would they come to Indiana University? What's different about what you do from what every other academic institution does, Aaron? >> Yeah, I think a lot of what we just talked about today in terms of from a network's perspective, that were plugged in globally. I think if you look beyond the networks I think there are tremendous opportunities for folks to come to Bloomington and experience some bleeding edge technology and to work with some very talented people. I've been amazed, I've been at IU for 20 years and as I look at our peers across higher ed, well, I don't want to say they're not doing as well I do want brag at how well we're doing in terms of organizationally addressing things like security in a centralized way that really puts us in a better position. We're just doing a lot of things that I think some of our peers are catching up to and have been catching up to over the last 10, 12 years. >> And I think to sure scale of IU goes unnoticed at times. IU has the largest medical school in the country. One of the largest nursing schools in the country. And people just kind of overlook some of that. Maybe we need to do a better job of talking about it. But for those who are aware there are a lot of opportunities in life sciences, healthcare, the social sciences. IU has the largest logistics program in the world. We teach more languages than anybody else in the world. The varying kinds of things you can get involved with at IU including networks, I think pretty unparalleled. >> Well, making the case for high performance computing in the Hoosier State. Aaron, Dave, thanks very much for joining you making a great case. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> We'll be back right after this short message. This is theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante. >> Virtually all tech companies have expressed caution in their respective earnings calls, and why not? I know you're sick in talking about the macroeconomic environment, but it's full of uncertainties and there's no upside to providing aggressive guidance when sellers are in control. They punish even the slightest miss. Moreover, the spending data confirms the softening market across the board, so it's becoming expected that CFOs will guide cautiously. But companies facing execution challenges, they can't hide behind the macro, which is why it's important to understand which firms are best positioned to maintain momentum through the headwinds and come out the other side stronger. Hello, and welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube Insights powered by ETR. In this "Breaking Analysis," we'll do three things. First, we're going to share a high-level view of the spending pinch that almost all sectors are experiencing. Second, we're going to highlight some of those companies that continue to show notably strong momentum and relatively high spending velocity on their platforms, albeit less robust than last year. And third, we're going to give you a peak at how one senior technology leader in the financial sector sees the competitive dynamic between AWS, Snowflake, and Databricks. So I landed on the red eye this morning and opened my eyes, and then opened my email to see this. My Barron's Daily had a headline telling me how bad things are and why they could get worse. The S&P Thursday hit a new closing low for the year. The safe haven of bonds are sucking wind. The market hasn't seemed to find a floor. Central banks are raising rates. Inflation is still high, but the job market remains strong. Oh, not to mention that the US debt service is headed toward a trillion dollars per year, and the geopolitical situation is pretty tense, and Europe seems to be really struggling. Yeah, so the Santa Claus rally is really looking pretty precarious, especially if there's a liquidity crunch coming, like guess why they call Barron's Barron's. Last week, we showed you this graphic ahead of the UiPath event. For months, the big four sectors, cloud, containers, AI, and RPA, have shown spending momentum above the rest. Now, this chart shows net score or spending velocity on specific sectors, and these four have consistently trended above the 40% red line for two years now, until this past ETR survey. ML/AI and RPA have decelerated as shown by the squiggly lines, and our premise was that they are more discretionary than the other sectors. The big four is now the big two: cloud and containers. But the reality is almost every sector in the ETR taxonomy is down as shown here. This chart shows the sectors that have decreased in a meaningful way. Almost all sectors are now below the trend line and only cloud and containers, as we showed earlier, are above the magic 40% mark. Container platforms and container orchestration are those gray dots. And no sector has shown a significant increase in spending velocity relative to October 2021 survey. In addition to ML/AI and RPA, information security, yes, security, virtualizations, video conferencing, outsourced IT, syndicated research. Syndicated research, yeah, those Gartner, IDC, Forrester, they stand out as seemingly the most discretionary, although we would argue that security is less discretionary. But what you're seeing is a share shift as we've previously reported toward modern platforms and away from point tools. But the point is there is no sector that is immune from the macroeconomic environment. Although remember, as we reported last week, we're still expecting five to 6% IT spending growth this year relative to 2021, but it's a dynamic environment. So let's now take a look at some of the key players and see how they're performing on a relative basis. This chart shows the net score or spending momentum on the y-axis and the pervasiveness of the vendor within the ETR survey measured as the percentage of respondents citing the vendor in use. As usual, Microsoft and AWS stand out because they are both pervasive on the x-axis and they're highly elevated on the vertical axis. For two companies of this size that demonstrate and maintain net scores above the 40% mark is extremely impressive. Although AWS is now showing much higher on the vertical scale relative to Microsoft, which is a new trend. Normally, we see Microsoft dominating on both dimensions. Salesforce is impressive as well because it's so large, but it's below those two on the vertical axis. Now, Google is meaningfully large, but relative to the other big public clouds, AWS and Azure, we see this as disappointing. John Blackledge of Cowen went on CNBC this past week and said that GCP, by his estimates, are 75% of Google Cloud's reported revenue and is now only five years behind AWS in Azure. Now, our models say, "No way." Google Cloud Platform, by our estimate, is running at about $3 billion per quarter or more like 60% of Google's reported overall cloud revenue. You have to go back to 2016 to find AWS running at that level and 2018 for Azure. So we would estimate that GCP is six years behind AWS and four years behind Azure from a revenue performance standpoint. Now, tech-wise, you can make a stronger case for Google. They have really strong tech. But revenue is, in our view, a really good indicator. Now, we circle here ServiceNow because they have become a generational company and impressively remain above the 40% line. We were at CrowdStrike with theCUBE two weeks ago, and we saw firsthand what we see as another generational company in the making. And you can see the company spending momentum is quite impressive. Now, HashiCorp and Snowflake have now surpassed Kubernetes to claim the top net score spots. Now, we know Kubernetes isn't a company, but ETR tracks it as though it were just for context. And we've highlighted Databricks as well, showing momentum, but it doesn't have the market presence of Snowflake. And there are a number of other players in the green: Pure Storage, Workday, Elastic, JFrog, Datadog, Palo Alto, Zscaler, CyberArk, Fortinet. Those last ones are in security, but again, they're all off their recent highs of 2021 and early 2022. Now, speaking of AWS, Snowflake, and Databricks, our colleague Eric Bradley of ETR recently held an in-depth interview with a senior executive at a large financial institution to dig into the analytics space. And there were some interesting takeaways that we'd like to share. The first is a discussion about whether or not AWS can usurp Snowflake as the top dog in analytics. I'll let you read this at your at your leisure, but I'll pull out some call-outs as indicated by the red lines. This individual's take was quite interesting. Note the comment that quote, this is my area of expertise. This person cited AWS's numerous databases as problematic, but Redshift was cited as the closest competitors to Snowflake. This individual also called out Snowflake's current cross-cloud Advantage, what we sometimes call supercloud, as well as the value add in their marketplace as a differentiator. But the point is this person was actually making, the point that this person was actually making is that cloud vendors make a lot of money from Snowflake. AWS, for example, see Snowflake as much more of a partner than a competitor. And as we've reported, Snowflake drives a lot of EC2 and storage revenue for AWS. Now, as well, this doesn't mean AWS does not have a strong marketplace. It does. Probably the best in the business, but the point is Snowflake's marketplace is exclusively focused on a data marketplace and the company's challenge or opportunity is to build up that ecosystem and to continue to add partners and create network effects that allow them to create long-term sustainable moat for the company, while at the same time, staying ahead of the competition with innovation. Now, the other comment that caught our attention was Snowflake's differentiators. This individual cited three areas. One, the well-known separation of compute and storage, which, of course, AWS has replicated sort of, maybe not as elegant in the sense that you can reduce the compute load with Redshift, but unlike Snowflake, you can't shut it down. Two, with Snowflake's data sharing capability, which is becoming quite well-known and a key part of its value proposition. And three, its marketplace. And again, key opportunity for Snowflake to build out its ecosystem. Close feature gaps that it's not necessarily going to deliver on its own. And really importantly, create governed and secure data sharing experiences for anyone on the data cloud or across clouds. Now, the last thing this individual addressed in the ETR interview that we'll share is how Databricks and Snowflake are attacking a similar problem, i.e. simplifying data, data sharing, and getting more value from data. The key messages here are there's overlap with these two platforms, but Databricks appeals to a more techy crowd. You open a notebook, when you're working with Databricks, you're more likely to be a data scientist, whereas with Snowflake, you're more likely to be aligned with the lines of business within sometimes an industry emphasis. We've talked about this quite often on "Breaking Analysis." Snowflake is moving into the data science arena from its data warehouse strength, and Databricks is moving into analytics and the world of SQL from its AI/ML position of strength, and both companies are doing well, although Snowflake was able to get to the public markets at IPO, Databricks has not. Now, even though Snowflake is on the quarterly shock clock as we saw earlier, it has a larger presence in the market. That's at least partly due to the tailwind of an IPO, and, of course, a stronger go-to market posture. Okay, so we wanted to share some of that with you, and I realize it's a bit of a tangent, but it's good stuff from a qualitative practitioner perspective. All right, let's close with some final thoughts. Look forward a little bit. Things in the short-term are really hard to predict. We've seen these oversold rallies peter out for the last couple of months because the world is such a mess right now, and it's really difficult to reconcile these counterveiling trends. Nothing seems to be working from a public policy perspective. Now, we know tech spending is softening, but let's not forget it, five to 6% growth. It's at or above historical norms, but there's no question the trend line is down. That said, there are certain growth companies, several mentioned in this episode, that are modern and vying to be generational platforms. They're well-positioned, financially sound, disciplined, with strong cash positions, with inherent profitability. What I mean by that is they can dial down growth if they wanted to, dial up EBIT, but being a growth company today is not what it was a year ago. Because of rising rates, the discounted cash flows are just less attractive. So earnings estimates, along with revenue multiples on these growth companies, are reverting toward the mean. However, companies like Snowflake, and CrowdStrike, and some others are able to still command a relative premium because of their execution and continued momentum. Others, as we reported last week, like UiPath for example, despite really strong momentum and customer spending, have had execution challenges. Okta is another example of a company with strong spending momentum, but is absorbing off zero for example. And as a result, they're getting hit harder from evaluation standpoint. The bottom line is sellers are still firmly in control, the bulls have been humbled, and the traders aren't buying growth tech or much tech at all right now. But long-term investors are looking for entry points because these generational companies are going to be worth significantly more five to 10 years down the line. Okay, that's it for today. Thanks for watching this "Breaking Analysis" episode. Thanks to Alex Myerson and Ken Schiffman on production. And Alex manages our podcast as well. Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight. They help get the word out on social media and in our newsletters. And Rob Hof is our editor-in-chief over at SiliconANGLE do some wonderful editing for us, so thank you. Thank you all. Remember that all these episodes are available as podcast wherever you listen. All you do is search "Breaking Analysis" podcast. I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com and you can email me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com, or DM me @dvellante, or comment on my LinkedIn post. And please check out etr.ai for the very best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights, powered by ETR. Thanks for watching, and we'll see you next time on "Breaking Analysis." (gentle music)

>>Hello, welcome back to the cubes coverage of Monaco, crypto summit presented by digital bits. It's a conference where a lot of the people using digital bits and the industry coming together around the future of crypto in the applicates got a great guest garage, rod cot, founder, and CEO of an innovative company. Love this co I love this company, Luke mogul, Rob, thanks for coming on the queue. Appreciate it. Oh, >>Thank you for having >>Us. Yeah. So I checked out what you guys are doing. You've got the sports metaverse angle going on with super valuable, cuz sports is super entertaining. Uh, people are engaged. There's huge fan base, huge online now, digital convergence going on with the physical, you know, you see all kinds of sports betting going on now everything's going digital. There's a whole nother consumer experience going on with sports and the game is still the same on the, on the field or so to, or the court. That's correct. Yeah. Now it's going to digital take a minute to explain what you guys are working on. >>Yeah, so yes, we are building out a sports ERs where we are bringing athletes, whether they're NBA stars, NFL stars, w N B a many of those athletes into meows giving them the ownership of the entire, um, meows commerce along with gameplay. So that's something from our perspective, this, uh, this is something that we're focused on. We're building out stadiums. Athletes can own stadiums. Athlete can create their own training centers, media hubs. Um, and imagine Lisa, Leslie for example, is building out a woman leadership sports academy, right? We have Michael Cooper building out defensive academy. So those are all the brands. We have 174 NBA w N B stars. And, um, and we are building out this, >>The brand is the brand, is the platform that's correct. That's the trend we're seeing. And it's, it's also an extension of their reach in community. So there's, they can convert their star power and athlete with owner's approval. If they probably write it on to the contracts, he, they can imagine all the complications, but they bring that online and extend that energy and brand equity yep. To fans and social network. Yeah. >>And many of these athletes are tremendous successful in their web two careers, right? Yeah. Um, some are current athletes, some are former athletes, but they have built such a brand persona where people are following them on Instagram. For example, Carlos Boozer. He has like almost 6 million followers between Twitter and Instagram and those kind of brands are looking or how do I give back to the community? How do I engage with my community and web three? And especially with our platform, we are giving that power back to the players. >>So you guys got some big names booers on there. You mentioned Carlos Boozer. You mentioned that Lisa, Leslie others among others, Michael Cooper throw back to the old Lakers, uh, magic. Johnson's kind actually here in crypto. We just saw him in the lobbies and in dinner and the other night, um, at Nobu, um, you got a lot of NBA support. Take a take, take, even explain how you're working this angle. Uh, you got some great traction, uh, momentum. Um, you got great pedigree, riot games in your career. Uh, you kind of get the world, the tech world, the media world, as it comes together. What's the secret sauce here? Is it the NBA relationship combination of the team explained >>It's really focusing on what, uh, we are building on me was focusing on players first, right? So players are literally, we call our platform as, uh, owned by the players, made for the players. Uh, and engagement is really all done through the players, right? So that's our key sauce. And when we worked out with NBA, we, we are part of the NBA BPA acceleration program for 2022 that is funded by a six Z, uh, and, and many others. Um, and our partnership with league is very critical. So it's not only partnered with player association partnered with leagues, whether it's NBA, w N B a NFL. So those are the venues. And this becomes almost a program, especially for athletes to really generate this lifetime engagement and royalty model because some of this famous athletes really want to give back to the communities. So like for example, I use Lisa Leslie a lot, but Lisa, Leslie really wants to empower women leadership, leadership, and really help, um, women in sports, for example. Right? So those are the angles that, um, that really people are excited about. >>Well, for the people watching that might not understand some of the ins and outs of sports and, and rod, your background in your team, it's interesting. The sports teams have been on the big day to train for many, many years. You look at all the stadiums. Now they've got mobile devices, they got wifi under the chairs. They use data and technology to manage the team. Mm-hmm, <affirmative> manage the stadium and venue and operations suppliers, whatnot. And then also the fans. So you, they, they got about a decade or so experience already in the digital world. This is not new to the, to the sports world. Yeah. So you guys come to the table kind of at a good time. >>Yeah. Especially the defi of the sports, right? So there's a defi of the finance, but this is the really, uh, a, a decentralization of the sports is something that there's a lot of traction. And there are many companies that are really focusing on that. Our focus obviously is players first, right? How do we give power to the players? Uh, and those are really driving the entire engagement. And also the brands >>How's the NBA feel about this because, you know, you got the NBA and you get the team, you got the owners. I mean, the democratization of the players, which I love by the way that angle kind of brings their power. Now's the new kind of balance of power. How is the NBA handling this? What's some of the conversations you've had with the, the organization. >>Yeah. So obviously there are a lot of things that, uh, people have to be careful about, right? They have existing contracts, existing, digital media rights. Um, so that's something that, uh, we have to be very tactful when we are working with NBA and NPA, uh, on what we can say, we cannot say. So that is obviously they have a lot of existing multimillion or billion dollar contracts that they cannot void with the web because the evolution of web three, >>You know, I love, uh, riffing on the notion of contract compliance when there's major structural change happening. Remember back in baseball, back in the days before the internet, the franchise rights was geographic territory. Mm-hmm <affirmative> well, if you're the New York Yankees, you're doing great. If you're Milwaukee, you're not doing too good, but then comes the internet. That's good. That's no geography. There's no boundaries. That's good. So you're gonna have stadiums have virtual Bo. So again, how do they keep up with the contracts? Yeah. I mean, this is gonna be a fundamental issue. >>That's >>Good. Good. And I think if they don't move, the players are gonna fill that void. >>That's correct. Yeah. And especially with this, this an IL deal, right. That happened for the players, uh, especially college athletes. So we are in process of onboarding 1.5 million college athletes. Uh, and those athletes are looking for not only paying for the tuition for the colleges, but also for engagement and generating this early on, uh, >>More okay. Rod, we're gonna make a prediction here in the cube, 20, 20 we're in Monaco, all the NBA, NHL, the teams they're gonna be run by player Dows. Yeah. What do you think? A very good prediction. Yeah. Very good prediction. Yeah. I mean you, I mean, that's a joke, I'm joking aside. I mean, it's kind of connecting the dots, but you know, whether that happens or not, what this means is if this continues to go down this road, that's correct. Get the players collectively could come together. Yeah. And flip the script. >>Yeah. And that's the entire decentralization, right. So it's like the web three has really disrupted this industry as you know. Um, and, and I know your community knows that too. >>Of course, course we do. We love it. >>Something from sports perspective, we are very excited. >>Well, I love it. Love talking. Let's get to the, to the weeds here on the product, under the hood, tell about the roadmap, obviously NFTs are involved. That's kind of sexy right now. I get the digital asset model on there. Uh, but there's a lot more under the coverage. You gotta have a platform, you gotta have the big data and then ultimately align into connecting other systems together. How do you view the tech roadmap and the product roadmap? What's your vision? >>Yeah. So the, the one thing that you had to be T full, uh, as a company, whether it's LUT, mogul or any other startup, is you have to be really part of the ecosystem. So the reason why we are here at Monaco is that we obviously are looking at partnership with digital bits, um, and those kind of partnership, whether it's fourth centric, centric are very critical for the ecosystem in the community to grow. Um, and that's one thing you cannot build a, another, uh, isolated metaverse right? So that's one thing. Many companies have done it, but obviously not. >>It's a wall garden doesn't work. >>Exactly. So you have to be more open platform. So one things that we did early on in our platform, we have open APIs and SDKs where not only you as an athlete can bring in your, uh, other eCommerce or web, uh, NFTs or anything you want, but you can also bring in other real estate properties. So when we are building out this metaverse, you start with real estate, then you build out obviously stadiums and arenas and academies training academies, but then athletes can bring their, uh, web commerce, right. Where it's NFT wearables shoe line. So >>Not an ecosystem on top of Luke Mo. So you're like, I'm almost like you think about a platform as a service and a cloud computing paradigm. Yeah. Look different, not decentralized, but similarly enabling others, do the heavy lifting on their behalf. Yeah. Is that right? >>So that's correct. Yes. So we are calling ourself as the sports platform as a service, right. So we want to add the word sports because we, uh, in, in many contexts, right. When you're building metaverse, you can get distracted with them, especially we are in Los Angeles. Right. >>Can I get a luxury box for the cube and some of the metaverse islands and the stadiums you're doing? >>We, we are working >>On it. We're >>Definitely working on, especially the, uh, Los Angeles, uh, stadium. Yeah. >>Well, we're looking for some hosts, anyone out there looking for some hosts, uh, for the metaverse bring your avatar. You can host the cube, bro. Thanks for coming on the cube. Really appreciate. What's the, what's next for you guys, obviously, continuing to build momentum. You got your playful, how many people on the team what's going on, give a plug for the company. What are you looking for share with the audience, some of the, some of your goals. Yeah. >>So, uh, the main thing we're looking for is really, um, from a brand perspective, if you are looking at buying properties, this would be an amazing time to buy virtual sports stadium. Um, so we are, obviously we have 175 stadiums in roadmap right now. We started with Los Angeles. Then we are in San Francisco, New York, Qatar, Dubai. So all those sports stadiums, whether they're basketball, football, soccer are all the properties. And, uh, from a community perspective, if you want to get an early access, we are all about giving back to the community. Uh, so you can buy it at a much better presale price right now. Uh, so that's one, the second thing is that if you have any innovative ideas or a player that you want to integrate into, we have an very open platform from a community engagement perspective. If you have something unique from a land sale perspective yeah. Or the NFD perspective plug, contact us at, at Raj lumo.com. >>And I'm assuming virtual team, you in LA area where where's your home. >>So, yeah, so I live in Malibu, um, and our office is in Santa Monica. We have an office in India. Uh, we have few developers also in Europe. So, uh, and then we are team of 34 people right now >>Looking to hire some folks >>We are looking for, what >>Are you, what are you looking for? >>So, uh, we are looking for a passionate sports, uh, fanatics. >>It's a lot, not hard to find. Yeah. >><laugh> who knows how to also code. Right? So from blockchain perspective, we are, uh, chain agnostic. Uh, but obviously right now we are building on polygon, but we are chain agnostic. So if you have any blockchain development experience, uh, that's something we, we are looking for. Yeah. >>RA, thanks for coming out. Luke Mo check him out. I'm John furry with the cube here in Monaco for the mono crypto summit presented by digital bits. We got all the action, a lot of great guests going on, stay with us for more coverage. Um, John furrier, thanks for watching.

>>The cube presents HPE discover 2022 brought to you by HPE. >>Welcome back to the Cube's coverage. We're wrapping up day two, John furrier and Dave ante. We got some friends and colleagues, longtime friends, Crawford Del Pret is the president of IDC. Matt Eastwood is the senior vice president of infrastructure and cloud guys. Thanks for coming on spending time. Great to you guys. >>That's fun to do it. Awesome. >>Cravin I want to ask you, I, I think this correct me if I'm wrong, but this was your first physical directions as, as president. Is that true or did you do one in 2019? >>Uh, no, we did one in 20. We did, we did one in 20. I was president at the time and then, and then everything started, >>Well, how was directions this year? You must have been stoked to get back together. Yeah, >>It was great. I mean, it was actually pretty emotional, you know, it's, it's a community, right? I mean, we have a lot of customers that have been coming to that event for a long, long time and to stand up on the stage and look out and see people, you know, getting a little bit emotional and a lot of hugs and a lot of bringing people together. And this year in Boston, we were the first event really of any size that kind of came back. And when I kind of didn't see that coming in terms of how people, how ready people were to be together. Cause >>When did you did it April >>In Boston? Yeah, we did it March in March. Yeah, it was, it was, it was, it was a game day decision. I mean, we were, we had negotiated it, we were going back and forth and then I kind of made the call at the last minute, say, let's go and do it. And in Santa Clara, I felt like we were kind of opening up the crypt at the convention center. I mean, all the production people said, you know what? You guys were really the first event to be back. And attendance was really strong. You know, we, we, we got over a thousand. It was, it was really good. >>Good. It's always a fun when I was there. It was, it's a big deal. You guys prepare for it. Yeah. Some new faces up on the stage. Yeah. So, so Matt, um, you've been doing the circuit. I take it like, like all top analysts, super busy. Right. This is kind of end of the spring. I mean, I know it's summer, right. That's right. But, um, how do you look at, at discover relative some, some of the other events you've been at? >>So I think if you go back to what Crawford was just talking about our event in March, I mean, March was sort of the, the reopening and there was, I think people just felt so happy to be, to be back out there. You still get a little bit at, at these events. I mean, cuz for each, each company it's their first time back at it, but I think we're starting to get down what these events are gonna feel like going forward. Um, and it, I mean, there's good energy here. There's been a good attendance. I think the, the interest in getting back live and having face to face meetings is clearly strong. >>Yeah. I mean, this definitely shows that hybrids, the steady state, both events cloud. Yeah. Virtualization remotes. So what are you guys seeing with that hybrid mode? Just from a workforce, certainly people excited to get back together, but it's gonna continue. You're starting to see that digital piece. How is that impacting some of the, some of the customers you're tracking, who's winning and who's losing, coming out of the pandemic. What's the big picture look like? >>Yeah. I mean, if you, if you take a look at hybrid work, um, people are testing many, many, many different models. And I think as we move from a pandemic to an em, we're gonna have just waves and waves and waves of people needing that flexibility for a lot of different reasons, whether they have, uh, you know, preexisting conditions, whether they're just not comfortable, whether they have people who can't be vaccinated at home. So I think we're gonna be in this hybrid work for a long, long time. I do think though that we are gonna transition back into some kind of a normal, um, and I, and I think the big difference is that I think leaders back in the day, a long time ago, when people weren't coming into work, it was kind of like, oh, I know nothing's going on there. People aren't getting worked. And I think we're over that stage. Yeah. I think we're now into a stage where we know people can be productive. We know people can effectively work from home and now we're into the reason to be in the office. And the reason to be in the office is that collaboration, it's that mentoring it's that, you know, think about your 25 year old self. Do you wanna be staring at a windshield all day long and not kind of building those relationships? People want face to face, it's difficult. They want face >>To face and I would, and you guys had a great culture and it's a young culture. How are you handling it as an executive in terms of, is there a policy for hybrid or >>Yeah, so, so, so at IDC, what we did is we're in a pilot period and we've kind of said that the summertime is gonna be a pilot period and we've asked people, we're actually serving shocker, we're >>Serving, >>But we're, but we're, but, but we're actually asking people to work with their manager on what works for them. And then we'll come up with, you know, whether you are in, out of the office worker, which will be less than two days a hybrid worker, which will be three days or, uh, in, in the office, which is more than three days a week. And you know, we all know there's, there's, there's limitation, there's, there's, there's variability in that, but that's kind of what we're shooting for. And we'd like to be able to have that in place in the fall. >>Are you pretty much there? >>Yeah, I am. I, I am there three days a week. I I, Mondays and Fridays, unless, >>Because you got the CEO radius, right? Yeah. >><laugh>, <laugh> >>The same way I'm in the office, the smaller, smaller office. But so, uh, let's talk a little bit about the, the numbers we were chatting earlier, trying to squint through you guys are, you know, obviously the gold standard for what the market does, what happened in, you know, during the pandemic, what happened in 2021 and what do you expect to happen in, in 2022 in terms of it spending growth? >>Yeah. So this is, this is a crazy time, right? We've never seen this. You and I have a long history of, uh, of tracking this. So we saw in, in, in, in 2020, the market decelerated dramatically, um, the GDP went down to a negative like it always does in these cases, it was, you know, probably negative six in that, in that, in that kind of range for the first time, since I've been tracking it, which goes back over 30 years, tech didn't go negative tech went to about just under 3%. And then as we went to 2021, we saw, you know, everything kind of snap back, we saw tech go up to about 11% growth. And then of course we saw, you know, GDP come back to about a 4%, you know, ki kind of range growth. Now what's I think the story there is that companies and you saw this anecdotally everywhere companies leaned into tech, uh, company. >>You know, I think, you know, Matt, you have a great statistic that, you know, 80% of companies used COVID as their point to pivot into digital transformation, right. And to invest in a different way. And so what we saw now is that tech is now where I think companies need to focus. They need to invest in tech. They need to make people more productive with tech and it played out in the numbers now. So this year what's fascinating is we're looking at two Fastly different markets. We've got gasoline at $7 a gallon. We've got that affecting food prices. Uh, interesting fun fact recently it now costs over $1,000 to fill an 18 Wheeler. All right. Based on, I mean this just kind of can't continue. So you think about it, don't put the boat >>In the wall. Yeah. Yeah. >>Good, good, good, good luck. It's good. Yeah, exactly. <laugh> so a family has kind of this bag of money, right? And that bag of money goes up by maybe three, 4% every year, depending upon earnings. So that is sort of sloshing around. So if food and fuel and rent is taking up more gadgets and consumer tech are not, you know, you're gonna use that iPhone a little longer. You're gonna use that Android phone a little longer. You're gonna use that TV a little longer. So consumer tech is getting crushed, you know, really it's very, very, and you saw it immediately and ad spending, you've seen it in meta. You've seen it in Facebook. Consumer tech is doing very, very it's tough enterprise tech. We haven't been in the office for two and a half years. We haven't upgraded whether that be campus wifi, whether that be, uh, servers, whether that be, uh, commercial PCs, as much as we would have. So enterprise tech, we're seeing double digit order rates. We're seeing strong, strong demand. Um, we have combined that with a component shortage and you're seeing some enterprise companies with a quarter of backlog. I mean, that's, you know, really unheard at higher >>Prices, which >>Also, and therefore that drives that >>Drives. It shouldn't be that way. If there's a shortage of chips, it shouldn't be that way, >>But it is, but it is, but it is. And then you look at software and we saw this, you know, we've seen this in previous cycles, but we really saw it in the COVID downturn where, uh, in software, the stickiness of SaaS means that you just, you're not gonna take that stuff out. So the, the second half of last year we saw double digit rates in software surprise. We're seeing high single digit revenue growth in software now, so that we think is gonna sustain, which means that overall it demand. We expect to be between five and 6% this year. Okay, fine. We have a war going on. We have, you know, potentially, uh, a recession. We think if we do, it'll be with a lower case, R maybe you see a banded down to maybe 4% growth, but it's gonna grow this. >>Is it, is it both the structural change of the disruption of COVID plus the digital transformation yeah. Together? Or is it, >>I, I think you make a great point. Um, I, I, I think that we are entering a new era for tech. I think that, you know, Andrew's famous wall street journal oped 10 years ago, software is even world was absolutely correct. And now we're finding that software is, is eing into every nook and cranny people have to invest. They, they know disruptors are coming around every single corner. And if I'm not leaning into digital transformation, I'm dead. So >>The number of players in tech is, is growing, >>Cuz there's well, the number of players in tech number >>Industry's coming >>In. Yeah. The industry's coming in. So I think the interesting dynamic you're gonna see there is now we have high interest rates. Yeah. Which means that the price of funding these companies and buying them and putting data on is gonna get higher and higher, which means that I think you could, you could see another wave of consolidation. Mm-hmm <affirmative> because tech large install based tech companies are saying, oh, you know what? I like that now >>4 0 9 S are being reset too. That's another point. >>Yeah. I mean, so if you think about this, this transformation, right. So it's all about apps, absent data and differentiating and absent data. What the, the big winner the last couple years was cloud. And I would just say that if this is the first potential recession that we're talking about, where the cloud service providers. So I think a cloud as an operating model, not necessarily a destination, but for these cloud service providers, they've actually never experienced a slowdown. So how, and, and if you think about the numbers, 30% of, of the typical it budget is now quote, unquote cloud and 30% of all expenditures are it related. So there's a lot of exposure there. And I think you're gonna see a lot of, a lot of focus on how we can rationalize some of those investments. >>Well, that's a great point. I want to just double click on that. So yeah, the cloud did well during the pandemic. We saw that with SAS, have you guys tracked like the Tams of what got pulled forward? So the bit, a big discussion about something that pulled forward because of the pandemic, um, like zoom, for instance, obviously everyone's using zoom. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Was there fake Tams? There was one, uh, couple analysts who were pointing out that some companies were hot during the pandemic will go away that that Tam doesn't really exist, but there's some that got pulled forward early. That's where the growth is. So is there a, is there a line between the, I call fake Tam or pulled forward TA that was only for the pandemic situationally, um, devices might be like virtual event, virtual event. Software was one, I know Hoppin got laid a lot of layoffs. And so that was kind of gone coming, coming and going. And you got SAS which got pulled forward. Yep. And it's not going away, but it's >>Sustaining. Yeah. Yeah. But it's, but, but it's sustaining, um, you know, I definitely think there was a, there was a lot of spending that absolutely got pulled forward. And I think it's really about CEO's ability to control expectations and to kind of message what it, what it looks like. Um, you know, I think I look, I, I, I think virtual event platforms probably have a role. I think you can, you can definitely, you know, raise your margins in the event, business, significantly using those platforms. There's a role for them. But if you were out there thinking that this thing was gonna continue, then you know, that that was unrealistic, you know, Dave, to, to your point on devices, I'm not necessarily, you know. Sure. I think, I think we definitely got ahead of our expectations and things like consumer PCs, those things will go back to historical growth >>Rates. Yeah. I mean, you got the install base is pretty young right now, but I think the one way to look at it too, is there was some technical debt brought in because people didn't necessarily expect that we'd be moving to a permanent hybrid state two years ago. So now we have to actually invest on both. We have to make, create a little bit more permanency around the hybrid world. And then also like Crawford's talking about the permanency of, of having an office and having people work in, in multiple modes. Yeah. It actually requires investment in both the office. And >>Also, so you're saying operationally, you gotta run the company and do the digital transformation to level up the hybrid. >>Yeah. Yeah. Just the way people work. Right. So, so, you know, you basically have to, I mean, even for like us internally, Crawford was saying, we're experimenting with what works for us. My team before the pandemic was like one third virtual. Now it's two third virtual, which means that all of our internal meetings are gonna be on, on teams or zoom. Right. Yeah. They're not gonna necessarily be, Hey, just coming to the office today, cuz two thirds of people aren't in the Boston area. >>Right. Matt, you said if you see cloud as an operating model, not necessarily a place. I remember when you were out, I was in the, on the, on the, on the zoom when, when first met Adam Celski yeah. Um, he said, you were asking him about, you know, the, the on-prem guys and he's like, nah, it's not cloud. And he kind of was very dismissive of it. Yeah. Yeah. I wanna get your take on, you know, what we're seeing with as Azure service GreenLake, apex, Cisco's got their version. IBM. Fewer is doing it. Is that cloud. >>I think if it's, I, I don't think all of it is by default. I think it is. If I actually think what HPE is doing is cloud, because it's really about how you present the services and how you allow customers to engage with the platform. So they're actually creating a cloud model. I think a lot of people get lost in the transition from, you know, CapEx to OPEX and the financing element of this. But the reality is what HPE is doing and they're sort of setting the standard. I think for the industry here is actually setting up what I would consider a cloud model. >>Well, in the early days of, of GreenLake, for sure it was more of a financial, you >>Know, it was kind of bespoke, right. But now you've got 70 services. And so you can, you can build that out. But >>You know, we were talking to Keith Townsend right after the keynote and we were sort of UN unpacking it a little bit. And I, I asked the question, you know, if you, if you had to pin this in terms of AWS's maturity, where are we? And the consensus was 2014 console filling, is that fair or unfair? >>Oh, that's a good question. I mean, um, I think it's, well, clouds come a long way, right? So it'd be, I, I, I think 20, fourteen's probably a little bit too far back because >>You have more modern tools I Kubernetes is. Yeah. >>And, but you also have, I would say the market still getting to a point of, of, of readiness and in terms of buying this way. So if you think about the HP's kind of strategy around edge, the core platform as a, as a service, you know, we're all big believers in edge and the apps follow the data and the data's being created in new locations and you gotta put the infrastructure there. And for an end user, there's a lot of risk there because they don't know how to actually plan for capacity at the edge. So they're gonna look to offload that, but this is a long term play to actually, uh, build out and deploy at the edge. It's not gonna happen tomorrow. It's a five, 10 year play. >>Yeah. I mean, I like the operating model. I'd agree with you, Matt, that if it's, if it's cloud operations, DevSecOps and all that, all that jazz it's cloud it's cloud operating and, and, and public cloud is a public cloud hyperscaler on premise. And the storage folks were presented. That's a single pane of glass. That's old school concepts, but cloud based. Yep. Shipping hardwares, auto figures. Yeah. That's the kind of consumption they're going for now. I like it. Then I, then they got the partner led thing is the partner piece. How do you guys see that? Because if I'm a partner, there's two things, wait a minute, am I at bottleneck to the direct self-service? Or is that an enabler to get more cash, to make more money? If I'm a partner. Cause you see what Essentia's doing with what they do with Amazon and Deloitte and et C. Yeah. You know, it's interesting, right? Like they've a channel partner, I'm making more cash. >>Yeah. I mean, well, and those channel partners are all in transition too. They're trying to yeah. Right. Figure out. Right, right. Are they, you know, what are their managed services gonna look like? You know, what kind of applications are they gonna stand up? They're they're not gonna just be >>Reselling, bought a big house in a boat. The box is not selling. I wanna ask you guys about growth because you know, the big three cloud, big four growing pick a number, I dunno, 30, 35% revenue big. And like you said, it's 30% of the business now. I think Dell's growing double digits. I don't know how much of that is sustainable. A lot of that is PCs, but still strong growth. Yep. I think Cisco has promised 9% >>In, in that. Right, right. >>About that. Something like that. I think IBM Arvin is at 6%. Yep. And I think HPE has said, Hey, we're gonna do three to 4%. Right. Which is so really sort of lagging and which I think a lot of people in wall street is like, okay, well that's not necessarily so compelling. Right. What does HPE have to do to double that growth? Or even triple that growth. >>Yeah. So they're gonna need, so, so obviously you're right. I mean, being able to show growth is Tanem out to this company getting, you know, more attention, more heat from, from investors. I think that they're rightly pointing to the triple digit growth that they've seen on green lake. I think if you look at the trailing, you know, 12 month bookings, you got over, you know, 7 billion, which means that in a year, you're gonna have a significant portion of the company is as a service. And you're gonna see that revenue that's rat being, you know, recognized over a series of months. So I think that this is sort of the classic SAS trough that we've seen applied to an infrastructure company where you're basically have to kind of be in the desert for a long time. But if they can, I think the most important number for HPE right now is that GreenLake booking snow. >>And if you look at that number and you see that number, you know, rapidly come down, which it hasn't, I mean off a very large number, you're still in triple digits. They will ultimately start to show revenue growth, um, in the business. And I think the one thing people are missing about HPE is there aren't, there are a lot of companies that want to build a platform, but they're small and nobody cares. And nobody let's say they throw a party and nobody comes. HP has such a significant installed base that if they do build a platform, they can attract partners to that platform. What I mean by that is partners that deliver services on GreenLake that they're not delivering. They have the girth to really start to change an industry and change the way stuff is being built. And that's the be they're making. And frankly, they are showing progress in that direction. >>So I buy that. But the one thing that concerns me is they kind of hide the ball on services. Right. And I, and I worry about that is like, is this a services kind of just, you know, same wine, new bottle or, >>Or, yeah. So, so I, I, I would argue that it's not about hiding the ball. It's about eliminating confusion of the marketplace. This is the company that bought EDS only to spin it off <laugh>. Okay. And so you don't wanna have a situation where you're getting back into services. >>Yeah. They're the only one >>They're product, not the only ones who does, I mean, look at the way IBM used to count and still >>I get it. I get it. But I think it's, it's really about clarity of mission. Well, I point next they are in the Ts business, absolutely. Point of it. It's important prop >>Drive for them at the top. Right. The global 50 say there's still a lot of uniqueness in what they want to buy. So there's definitely a lot of bespoke kind of delivery. That's still happening there. The real promise here is when you get into the global 2000 and yeah. And can start them to getting them to consume very standardized offers. And then the margins are, are healthy >>And they got they're what? Below 30, 33, 30 3%. I think 34% last quarter gross margin. Yeah. That that's solid. Just compare that with Dell is, I don't know. They're happy with 20, 21% of correct. You get that, which is, you know, I I'll come back. Go ahead. I want, I wanna ask >>Guys. No, I wanna, I wanna just, he said one thing I like, which was, I think he nailed it. They have such, um, big install base. They have a great channel. They know how to use it. Right. That's a real asset. Yeah. And Microsoft, I remember when their stock was trading at 26 when Baltimore was CEO. Yep. What they did with no, they had office and windows, so a little bit different. Yep. But similar strategy, leverage our install base, bring something up to them. That's what you're kind of connecting the >>Absolutely. You have this velocity, uh, machine with a significant girth that you can now move to a new model. They move that to a new model. To Matt's point. They lead the industry, they change the way large swath the customers buy and you will see it in steady revenue growth over time. Okay. So I just in that, well, >>So your point is the focus and there the right it's the right focus. And I would agree what's >>What's the other move. What's their other move, >>The problem. Triple digit booking growth off a number that gets bigger >>Inspired. Okay. >>Whats what's the scoreboard. Okay. Now they're go at the growth. That's the scoreboard. What are the signals? Are you looking at on the scoreboard Crawford and Matt in terms of success? What are the benchmarks? Is it ecosystem growth, number of services, triple growth. Yeah. What's the, what are some of the metrics that you guys are gonna be watching and we should be watching? >>Yeah. I mean, I dunno if >>You wanna jump in, I mean, I think ecosystem's really critical. Yeah. You want to, you want to have well and, and you need to sell both ways like HPE needs to be selling their technology on other cloud providers and vice versa. You need to have the VMs of the world on, you know, offering services on your platform and, and kind of capturing some, some motion off that. I think that's pretty critical. The channel definitely. I mean, you have to help and what you're gonna see happen there is there will be channel partners that succeed in transforming and succeeding and there'll be a lot that go away and that some, some of that's, uh, generational there'll be people that just kind of age outta the system and, and just go home. >>Yeah. Yeah. So I would argue it's, it's, it's, it's gonna be, uh, bookings growth rate. It's gonna be retention rate of the, of, of, of the customers, uh, that they have. And then it's gonna be that, that, um, you know, ultimately you're gonna see revenue, um, growth, and which is that revenue growth is gonna have to be correlated to the booking's growth for green lake cross. >>What's the Achilles heel on, on HPE. If you had to do the SWAT, what's the, what's the w for HPE that they really need to pay >>Attention to. I mean, they, they need to continue their relentless focus on cost, particularly in the, in the core compute, you know, segment they need to be, they need to be able to be as cost effective as possible while the higher profit dollars associated with GreenLake and other services come in and then increase the overall operating margin and gross margin >>Picture for the, I mean, I think the biggest thing is they just have, they have to continue the motion that they've been on. Right. And they've been consistent about that. Mm-hmm, <affirmative> what you see where others have, have kind of slipped up is when you go to, to customers and you present the, the OPEX as a service and the traditional CapEx side by side, and the customers put in this position of trying to detangle what's in that OPEX service, you don't wanna do that obviously. And, and HP has not done that, but we've seen others kind of slip up. And, but >>A lot of companies still wanna buy CapEx. Right. Absolutely liquid. And, and I think, >>But you shouldn't do a, you shouldn't do that bake off by putting those two offers out. You should basically ascertain what they want to do. >>What's kind of what Dell does. Right. Hey, how, what do you want? We got this, we got >>This on one hand, we got this, the, we got that, right. Uh, the two hand sales rep, no, this CapEx. Thing's interesting. And if you're Amazon and Azure and, and GCP, what are they thinking right now? Cause remember what, four years ago outpost was launched, which essentially hardware. Yeah. This is cloud operating model. Yep. Yeah. They're essentially bringing outpost. This is what they got basically is Amazon and Azure, like, is this ABL on the radar for them? How would you, what, what are they thinking in your mind if we're on, if we're in their office, in their brain trust, are they laughing? Are they like saying, oh, they're scared. Is this real threat >>Opportunity? I, I, I mean, I wouldn't say they're laughing at all. I, I would say they're probably discounting a little bit and saying, okay, fine. You know, that's a strategy that a traditional hardware company is moving to. But I think if you look underneath the covers, you know, two years ago it was, you know, pretty basic stuff they were offering. But now when you start getting into some, you know, HPC is a service, you start getting into data fabric, you start getting into some of the more, um, sophisticated services that they're offering. And, and I think what's interesting about HP. What my, my take is that they're not gonna go after the 250 services the Amazon's offering, they're gonna basically have a portfolio of services that really focus on the core use cases of their infrastructure set. And, and I think one of the danger things, one, one of the, one of the red flags would be, if they start going way up the stack and wanting to offer the entire application stack, that would be like a big flashing warning sign, cuz it's not their sweet spot. It's not, not what they have. >>So machine learning, machine learning and quantum, okay. One you can argue might be up the stack machine learning quantum should be in their wheelhouse. >>I would argue machine learning is not up the stack because what they would focus on is inference. They'd focus on learning. If they came out and said, machine learning all the way up to the, you know, what a, what, what a drug discovery company needs to do. >>So they're bringing it down. >>Yeah. Yeah. Well, no, I think they're focusing on that middle layer, right? That, that, that data layer. And I think that helping companies manage their data make more sense outta their data structure, their data that's core to what they wanna do. >>I, I feel as though what they're doing now is table stakes. Honestly, I do. I do feel like, okay, Hey finally, you know, I say the same thing about apex, you >>Know, we finally got, >>It's like, okay guys, the >>Party. Great. Welcome to the, >>But the one thing I would just say about, about AWS and the other big clouds is whether they might be a little dismissive of what's truly gonna happen at the edge. I think the traditional OEMs that are transforming are really betting on that edge, being a huge play and a huge differentiator for them where the public cloud obviously have their own bets there. But I think they were pretty dismissive initially about how big that went. >>I don't, and I don't think anybody's really figured out the edge yet. >>Well, that's an, it's a battleground. That's what he's saying. I think you're >>Saying, but on the ecosystem, I wanna say up the stack, I think it's the ecosystem. That's gotta fill that out. You gotta see more governance tools and catalogs and AI tools and, and >>It immediately goes more, it goes more vertical when you go edge, you're gonna have different conversations and >>They're >>Lacking. Yeah. And they, but they're in there though. They're in the verticals. HP's in the, yeah, >>For sure. But they gotta build out an ego. Like you walk around here, the data, the number of data companies here. I mean, Starburst is here. I'm actually impressed that Starburst is here. Cause I think they're a forward thinking company. I wanna see that times a hundred. Right. I mean, that's >>You see HP's in all the verticals. That's I think the point here, >>So they should be able to attract that ecosystem and build that, that flywheel that's the, that's the hallmark of a cloud that marketplace. >>Yeah, it is. But I think there's a, again, I go back to, they really gotta stay focused on that infrastructure and data management. Yeah. >>But they'll be focused on that, but, but their ecosystem, >>Their ecosystem will then take it up from there. And I think that's the next stage >>And that ecosystem's gotta include OT players and communications technologies players as well. Right. Because that stuff gets kind of sucked up in that, in that edge play. Do >>You feel like HPE has a, has a leg up on that or like a little, a little bit of a lead or is it pretty much, you know, even raced right now? >>I think they've, I think the big infrastructure companies have all had OEM businesses and they've all played there. It's it's, it's also helping those OT players actually convert their own needs into more of a software play and, and not so much of >>Physical. You've been, you've been following and you guys both have been following HP and HPE for years. They've been on the edge for a long time. I've been focused on this edge. Yeah. Now they might not have the product traction that's right. Or they might not develop as fast, but industrial OT and IOT they've been talking about it, focused on it. I think Amazon was mostly like, okay, we gotta get to the edge and like the enterprise. And, and I think HP's got a leg up in my opinion on that. Well, I question is can they execute? >>Yeah. I mean, PTC was here years ago on stage talking >>About, but I mean, you think about, if you think about the edge, right. I mean, I would argue one of the best acquisitions this company ever did was Aruba. Right. I mean, it basically changed the whole conversation of the edge changed the whole conversation. >>If >>Became GreenLake, it was GreenLake. >>Well, it became a big department. They gave a big, but, but, but I mean, you know, I mean they, they, they went after going selling edge line servers and frankly it's very difficult to gain traction there. Yeah. Aruba, huge area. And I think the March announcement was when they brought Aruba management into. Yeah. Yeah. >>Totally. >>Last question. Love >>That. >>What are you guys saying about the, the Broadcom VMware acquisition? What's the, what are the implications for the ecosystem for companies like HPE and just generally for the it business? >>Yeah. So >>You start. Yeah, sure. I'll start, I'll start there. So look, you know, we've, you know, spent some time, uh, going through it spent some time, you know, speaking, uh, to the, to the, to the folks involved and, and, and I gotta tell you, I think this is a really interesting moment for Broadcom. This is Broadcom's opportunity to basically build a different kind of a conversation with developers to, uh, try to invest in. I mean, just for perspective, right? These numbers may not be exact. And I know a dollar is not a dollar, but in 2001, anybody, remember what HP paid for? Compact >>8,000,000,020, >>So 25 billion, 25 billion. Wow. VMware just got sold for 61 billion. Wow. Okay. Unbill dollars. Okay. That gives you a perspective. No, again, I know a dollar is not a dollar 2000. >>It's still big numbers, >>2022. So having said that, if you just did it to, to, to basically build your DCF model and say, okay, over this amount of time, I'll pay you this. And I'll take the money out of this period of time, which is what people have criticized them for. I think that's a little shortsighted. I, yeah, I think this is Broadcom's opportunity to invest in that product and really try to figure out how to get a seat at the table in software and pivot their company to enterprise software in a different way. They have to prove that they're willing to do that. And then frankly, that they can develop the skills to do that over time. But I do believe this is a, a different, this is a pivot point. This is not >>CA this is not CA >>It's not CA >>In my, in my mind, it can't be CA they would, they would destroy too much. Now you and I, Dave had some, had some conversations on Twitter. I, I don't think it's the step up to them sort of thinking differently about semiconductor, dying, doing some custom semi I, I don't think that's. Yeah. I agree with that. Yeah. I think I, I think this is really about, I got two aspiration for them pivoting the company. They could >>Justify the >>Price to the, getting a seat at the adults table in software is, >>Well, if, if Broadcom has been squeezing their supplies, we all hear the scutle butt. Yeah. If they're squeezing, they can use VMware to justify the prices. Yeah. Maybe use that hostage. And that installed base. That's kind of Mike conspiracy. >>I think they've told us what they're gonna do. >><laugh> I do. >>Maybe it's not like C what's your conspiracy theory like Symantec, but what >>Do you think? Well, I mean, there's still, I mean, so VMware there's really nobody that can do all the things that VMware does say. So really impossible for an enterprise to just rip 'em out. But obviously you can, you can sour people's taste and you can very much influence the direction they head in with the collection of, of providers. One thing, interesting thing here is, was the 37% of VMware's revenues sold through Dell. So there's, there's lots of dependencies. It's not, it's not as simple as I think John, you you're right. You can't just pull the CA playbook out and rerun it here. This is a lot more complex. Yeah. It's a lot more volume of, of, of distribution, but a fair amount of VMware's install >>Base Dell's influence is still there basically >>Is in the mid-market. It's not, it's not something that they're gonna touch directly. >>You think about what VMware did. I mean, they kept adding new businesses, buying new businesses. I mean, is security business gonna stay >>Networking security, I think are interesting. >>Same >>Customers >>Over and over. Haven't done anything. VMware has the same customers. What new >>Customers. So imagine simplifying VMware. Right, right. Becomes a different equation. It's really interesting. And to your point, yeah. I mean, I think Broadcom is, I mean, Tom Crouse knows how to run a business. >>Yeah. He knows how to run a business. He's gonna, I, I think it's gonna be, you know, it's gonna be an efficient business. It's gonna be a well run business, but I think it's a pivot point for >>Broadcom. It's amazing to me, Broadcom sells to HPE. They sell it to Dell and they've got a market cap. That's 10 X, you know? Yes. Yeah. All we gotta go guys. Awesome. Great conversation guys. >>A lot. Thanks for having us on. >>Okay. Listen, uh, day two is a, is a wrap. We'll be here tomorrow, all day. Dave ante, John furrier, Lisa Martin, Lisa. Hope you're feeling okay. We'll see you tomorrow. Thanks for watching the cube, your leader in enterprise tech, live coverage.

>>Welcome back to the cubes, continuous coverage of AWS reinvent 2021. I'm Lisa Martin. We are winning one of the industry's most important in hybrid tech events this year with AWS and its enormous ecosystem of partners to life sets we have going on right now. There's a dueling set right across from me, two remote studios over 100 guests on the program. We'll be digging into really the next decade of cloud innovation. I'm pleased to welcome two guests that sit next to me here. We've got Aaron Arnold Santa's partner at BCG gamma and a diesel associate director of data science at BCG gamma guys. Welcome to the program. Thanks for having us. I D let's go ahead and start with you. Give us the low down what's going on at BCG gamma. >>We are focused on building responsible, sustainable, and efficient AI at scale to solve pressing business problems. >>Good. We're going to dig into that more. There was a lot of talk about AI this morning during the keynote yesterday as well. And you know, one of the things Aaron that we talked about the last day and a half is that every company, these days has to be a data company, but the volume of data is so great that we've got to have AI to be able to help all the humans process it, find all of the nuggets that are buried within these volumes of data for companies to be competitive. You talk about a sustainable efficient let's go ahead and talk about what do you mean by efficient AI? It sounds great, but help unpack what that actually means. And, and how does an organization in any industry actually achieving? >>Yeah. So when we talk about efficient AI, we're really talking about resilience, scale and adoption. So we all know that the environment in which AI tools and systems are deployed change and update very frequently, and those changes and updates can lead to errors, downtime, which erode user trust. And so when you're designing your AI, it's really critical to build it right and, and ensure it's resilient to those types of changes in the operational environment. And that really means designing it upfront to adhere to company standards around documentation, um, testing bias as well as approved model architecture. So, so that piece is really critical. The other piece about efficient AI is we're really talking about using better code structure to ensure that and enable that teams can search learn, um, and really clone AI IP to bring AI at scale across company silos. So what efficient AI does is it ensures that companies can go from proof of concept and exploration to deploying AI at scale. The final piece is really about solving the right business problems quickly in a way that ensures that users and customers will adopt and actually use the tool and capability >>That adoption there is absolutely critical. And >>You know, when we, when we're talking about AI, most of the time we're talking about three components and we call it like the ten twenty, seventy rule, 10% of the change is really about the better AI algorithms that are coming out. 20% is a better architecture, the technology, all of those components, but 70% of it is really about how are we influencing our business partners to make better decisions? How are we making sure AI is built right into the operational decision flow? And that's really, when we start talking about better AI, we move it away from kind of our pet project, buzzword bingo, into decision operational flows, you know, and, and there's, there's a journey there, there's a journey that we all are on. You see the evolution of AI right now. And I th and I liken it a lot to, um, myself when I'm, I'm a big football fan, right. And I've fantasy football is like my passion. I see. And when I look at the decision-makings, I've made 10 years ago versus now, now I actually have my own models. I'm running against it. I'm, I'm very much into the details of what is the data telling me, but, um, it's not until I bring that together with my decision making process, that really makes it so that I have bragging rights on Sundays. >>I wouldn't want to compete against Aaron. I mean, you know, I've got a lot of friends that do fantasy football, but I don't think they're taking, they're actually doing data-driven approaches as you are. One of the things I'm glad that you talked about the 10, 20, 70 formula for in dividing investments in AI. One of the things that really surprised me, and I'm looking at my notes here, because I was writing this down was that you said 10% AI and machine learning algorithms, 20% software and technology infrastructure, 70% though is also change management. That is hard, especially the speed with which every industry is operating today. What we've seen in the last 22 months, we've seen a massive acceleration to the cloud, every business pivoting, many times where our customers, in terms of understanding the challenges that they can solve with AI, given the fact that we're still in such a dynamic global environment, do what are you seeing? >>So I think it's actually quite, bi-modal some companies, including the public sector are really leaning in and exploring all the different applications and all the different solutions. Unfortunately, if they're not emphasizing that 70% on change management and the culture change and user adoption, those are substantial, but you don't get the return on the investment. Right. On the other hand, the other part of that bi-modal distribution is there are folks who are still really reluctant because they have made investments and it hasn't right. Brought about the change that they were hoping for. And so I think it's really critical to bring that holistic approach to bringing AI and advanced analytic tools to really change the way, you know, a company's attacking its problems and bringing solutions to its users and customers. >>Yeah. I like it a lot to us as us, as adults have when we teach our kids about math, right? Like less of my time with my own kids is focused on teaching them, the principles, the, and all those things, but it's more teaching them to be comfortable. Why are they learning math? What are they doing? How is that going to prepare them to be more competitive and, uh, later on in life. And so, and then the same thing's happening in this evolution in AI, right? There is this big tech and AI transformations that are happening. But the questions we need to ask ourselves within is are we taking the time to make sure our companies and our people are on the journey with us and that they understand that this is going to be better for them and give them a competitive advantage. >>That's critical. We know we've talked a lot in Alaska. We talk a lot about every show about people, process technologies and people as part of that. But I've definitely seen more of a focus. I think the last two and a half days of the people emphasis going, we have to have, we have to upskill our people. We have to train our people. We have to make sure that they're understand how this technology can partner with them and enable them rather than take things away. So it's nice to hear you talking about the big focus there being on the people that is because without that, then a deed to your point, a lot of those projects aren't successful >>And not only, I think the other piece there in terms of bringing the user along for the journey is you don't want them to feel like this is just another tool, right? Another part of their, in addition to their workflow, right? You want to take the burden away. You want it to really, um, not add, but to, to their, to their list of, of daily tasks, but subtract and make it easier. Right. And I think that that's really critical for a lot of companies as well. >>I think along with what you're talking about, we have to teach people to be responsible. So it's, it's one thing to do the job better, but it's another thing to be responsible because in today's world, we have to think about our responsibilities back to our communities, to our consumers, to our shareholders and into ultimately to the environment itself. And so responsive as we are thinking about AI, we need to think differently too, because let's face it. Data is fuel and we can accidentally make the wrong decisions for the globe by making the right decisions for stakeholders. We have to do a better job of understanding the why we're doing what we're doing, what we're doing, and not only the, the intended consequences of our decisions, but also the unintended consequences. And then we need to be responsible in the ways that we're using AI and that we're transparent in our use thereof. >>Yeah, Aaron, I think that's incredibly critical. I think responsible AI, um, has to be at the heart of, of AI transformation. And one of the interesting things that we have found is that organizations perceive their responsible AI maturity to be substantially higher than it actually is. Right. And less than 50% of organizations that have, you know, a fully implemented AI at scale, do not have a responsible AI, um, capability. And so at BCG, we've been working quite hard to integrate our gamma responsible AI program into the big AI transformations, because it's so critical. It's so absolutely important. And, and really that there's a lot of facets to that. But one of that, one of the critical ones is an ensures the goals and the outcomes of the AI systems are fair and unbiased and explainable, which is so critical. Um, I think it also ensures best that we follow best practices for data governance to protect user privacy, which I think is another critical, um, piece here, as well as minimizing any negative social or environmental impact, which again, I it's, it's just gotta be at the forefront of AI development. What about, >>And I think that there's a tech part to that too. So like one thing that we're working on called a gamma facet is really, you know, for the longest time in this AI transformation, AI was kind of a black box and it's kind of mystical, but we, we optimize our results. The transformation, when we talk about better, AI is, uh, the decision maker is in the center and knows the outcome. And so we make it a clear box. And so they're really, we're working a lot on, you know, the most common Python packages, uh, to make them more clear too, so that the business user and the data scientist understands the decisions that they're making and how it will impact the company and longer term society. >>What about the sustainability front? I mean, it's clear that I can understand why you have the 10 20, 70 approach that, that 70% is really important. There are companies that think they're much farther advanced in terms of responsible use of responsible AI responsibly than they really are. Um, but you know, we talk about sustainability all the time. It's a buzzword, but it's also something that's incredibly important to you to companies like AWS. I imagined a companies like yourself, where does, what does sustainable AI look like and how to organizations implemented along with responsible AI efficient AI? >>Yeah, I think it's the question in some ways right now, given everything that's happening around the world. And so AI for sustainability is, is really critical. I think we all have a part to play in this fight, um, to ensure our, our global environment. So I think we need to use the same AI expertise, the same AI technology that we bring to maximize revenue and minimize cost, um, to, to minimizing a company's footprint. Long-term I think that's really critical. One of the things we've seen is that 85% of companies want to reduce their emissions, but less than 10% of them know how to accurately measure right. Their footprint. And so we've been focusing on AI for sustainability across a couple of different pillars. The first is measuring the current impact from operations. The second is data mining, um, for optimal decisions to reduce that footprint. And the third is scenarios to plan better strategies to alter our impact. >>Excellent. Well, there's so much work to be done, guys. Thank you for joining me talking about what BCG is doing for responsible, efficient, ethical, and sustainable AI, a lot of opportunities. I'm sure for you guys with AWS and your list of clients, but we thank you for taking the time out to talk with us this morning. So much. I write for my guests. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube, the global leader in live tech coverage.

(calm electronic music) >> Welcome to this CUBE Conversation with Fortinet. I'm Lisa Martin. John Madison joins me, the CMO and EVP of products. John, welcome back to the program. >> Thanks Lisa. Good to be here. >> Good to see you. So, so much has changed since I last saw you. The move to remote work caused by the pandemic led so many organizations to invest in modern networking and security technologies. And we see, you know, the rise in the threat landscape that protecting digital assets is becoming even more and more urgent because the threats are continuing to escalate. Talk to me about some of the things that you're seeing with this current threat landscape. >> Yeah. Well, it keeps changing that's for sure. You saw some recent surveys where, you know, now companies are seeing, in terms of where employees are located, you know, 25% expecting to be in the office, 25% expected to be permanently in the home. And then there's this big 50% of hybrid, which we think will move a bit more towards the office as people get back in the office. But that's going to take some time. We're actually starting to move back in the office here in Santa Clara, Sunnyvale. but it's very different in every region in the U.S and regulations and laws around the world. And so we think it's going to be very much work from anywhere. There's a bit of travel starting as well. And so this work from anywhere concept is going to be very important to customers going forward. And the ability to change the dynamics of that ratio as they go forward. >> (indistinct) This work from anywhere that over- last year overnight sort of became an absolute essential. But now, as you said, we're going to have this hybrid model of some going back, some staying home and the security and the perimeter is dissolving. When you look at supporting customers and their remote work from anywhere, their new work from anywhere model, what are some of the things that are top of mind that you're hearing from customers? >> Well, I, you know, I sometimes hear this premise is disappearing. I think in some ways it's moving to the user and the devices. And there's this concept called zero trust network access which I've said in many occasions should be zero trust application access, but they named it that way which is going to be an important technology because as I said, it kind of moves that premise then to that user and previous technology that we had VPN technology was good technology. And in fact, a lot of companies, if you go back to when the pandemic started last year, put a lot of people on the VPN technology as quick as possible and it was reasonably robust. But as we go forward, what we're going to have to do is make sure that perimeter- at that perimeter, that users only get access to the applications they're using rather than the whole network. Eventually when they're on the network you need to make sure that it's segmented so they can't go everywhere as well. And so this zero trust network access or zero trust or zero trust access, there's lots of kind of different versions of it, is going to be very important concept for users. The other piece of it, I think, is also that it needs to be more intuitive to use, as anything you kind of have users do like the VPN where you had to kind of dial in and- or bring up- you're bringing up your connection and your IPsec connection, et cetera, et cetera means that people tend not to use it. And so to make it intuitive and automatic is going to be really important. >> Intuitive and automatic. One of the things that we also saw was this massive rise in digital transformation last year, right? SAS adoption, these SAS applications keeping many of us in collaboration. So I'm thinking, you know, in that sense with the perimeter changing and the work from anywhere, this consistent, secure internet connection among users at the branch or the branch of one has to be there to keep organizations productive and safe. How is the Fortinet enabling the ZTNA- this evolution of VPN? >> Yeah. That's another piece of it. So not only are users on and off the network or traveling so that- or both, so the applications are moving. So a lot of them are moved from data centers to public cloud in the form of infrastructure or SAS. We're now seeing customers actually move some applications towards the building or building compute or edge compute. So the applications keep moving which also causes this problem. And so another function of zero trust access or ZTNA is to not care where the application is. You rely on some technology and it's called proxy technology, which allows the proxy to track where the applications are. And for us, that sits inside of our firewalls. And that makes it very flexible. And so we've been able to kind of just ramp up that proxy against the policy engine, whether it be in the data center or in the cloud, or even on your premise. Even integrated inside a branch or something like that. That's going to be very important because, as you just said, those applications will just keep moving into different areas and different zones as you go forward. >> (Lisa) And that's probably going to be permanent for a lot of organizations. So it- so they haven't renamed it zero trust application access, like you think it should be. But when organizations are looking into zero trust network access, what should- what are some of the key things that they need to be looking for and mindful of? >> Yeah, (indistinct) And so it's probably the, you know, the number one conversation they've had over the last six months. I think people initially just had to get something working. Now they're looking seriously at a longer term architecture for their access, their user access and device access. I think what I find is that something like zero trust network access is more of a use case across multiple components. And so if you look inside it, you need a client component endpoint; you need a proxy that in front of the cloud capabilities; you need a policy engine; you need to use identity-based systems. If you haven't got- if you can't get an agent on the device, you may need a NAC system. And so usually what customers find is I've got four or five current- different vendors in those areas. And cybersecurity vendors are not the best at working together, which they were, because then we do better for customers. And so trying to get two vendors to work is hard enough, trying to get five or six is really hard. And so what they're looking at over time is to say, maybe I get the minimum basic ZTNA working. And then as I go forward, for example, what they really want is this continuing posture assessment. Well, you can do that with some EDR technology, but is that EDR technology integrated into your policy engine? No. So I think what customers are saying is, let me start with the base ZTNA with maybe two vendors. And then as I go forward implement a, you know, a fabric or a platform approach to get everything working together. 'Cause it's just too hard with five or six vendors. >> Right. Is there, I'm curious if there's a shared responsibility model with customers working with different vendors; what actions and security responsibilities fall on the customer that they need to be aware of? >> Well, and it also comes back to this, you know, there's convergence of networking and security. And I've said a few times I'm definitely seeing CIOs and CSOs, security teams, and networking teams working much more closely. And especially when you've got a use case now that goes across security items and networking items and networking, the proxy has always been in the control of the networking team. Endpoint security is always been in the- you know, the security team. It's just forcing this convergence not just of the technologies itself but of the organizations inside enterprises. >> (Lisa) Well, and that's a challenging one for every organization is getting, you know, if you're talking about it in general, the business folks, the IT folks. Now this is not just a security problem. This is a problem for the entire corporation, as we just saw with the Colonial Pipeline. Ransomware is now becoming a household name. These are business-critical board-level discussions I imagine on the security side. How is Fortinet helping customers kind of bridge that gap between the biz folks and the IT folks where security is concerned? >> Yeah. You know, ransomware has been around quite a while. I think two years ago, we saw a lot of it in the schools. K-12 schools in the U.S. I think they're picking some richer targets now. The colonial one, I think there was a 4 million ransom. I think that they managed to get some of that money back. But, you know, instead of, you know, demanding $5,000 or $10,000 from a small business or a school they're obviously demanding millions from these larger companies. And you know, one of the problems with ransomware is, you know, it still relies heavily on social engineering. I don't think you can eliminate that people clicking on stuff, you know, a very small percentage still. I think what it means is you have to put some more proactive things in place, like the zero trust, like micro-segmentation, like web application file warning. All these capabilities to try and make your systems as strong as possible. So then put in detection and response systems to assume that someone's clicking on something somewhere just to help. But it's definitely the environment. You know, the threat environment. It's not really gotten more sophisticated; yes, there are still advanced threats. I fear more about those weaponized APTs and state sponsored, but there's definitely a huge volume of ransomware now going after, you know, not only, you know, meat processing factories, but pipelines and critical infrastructure as we go forward. That's the more worrying. >> (Lisa) Right. You bring up a good point about, sort of, people being one of the biggest challenges from a security perspective. Clicking on links, not checking to see if a link is bogus or legitimate. So, help me understand a little bit more how is zero trust can help maybe take some of that human error out of the equation? >> Well, because I think before, you know, when you got access, when you're off the network and you've got access to the network, you've got access to everything, okay. So once you're on the network, and I think the Colonial Pipeline was a good example where traditionally, operational technology networks, physical networks sort of separate from the IT network and they had something called an air gap. And that air gap meant you really couldn't get to it. Now when people had to be remote because of the pandemic, they started taking these air gaps. And so now we had remote access. And so again, when you- when they got that remote access and they got into the network, they could- the network was very flat and you could see everything you can go anywhere. And so that's what zero trust does. It kind of says, I kind of did the zero trust approach to you that I'm only going to allow you access to this application. And I'm going to keep checking on you to make sure you are you are who you say you are on a continuous basis. And that really provides a bit more safety. Now, I still- we still think you need to put things like segmentation in place and some other capabilities and monitoring everything else, but it just narrows the attack surface down from this giant network approach to a specific application >> Narrowing that is the right direction. How do organizations, when you're working with customers, how do they go- How do they evolve from a traditional VPN to zero trust? What are some of the steps involved in that? >> Well, I think it's, you know, what's interesting is customers still have data centers. In fact, you know, some of the customers who have legacy applications will have a data center for a long time. And in fact, what I find is even if you've implemented zero trust to a certain population, employee population, they still have VPNs in place. And sometimes they use them for the IT folks. Sometimes they use them for a specialized developers and stuff like that. And so I think it's going to be like everything, everything goes a hundred percent this way and it stays this way. And so it's going to be hybrid for a while where we see VPN technology and zero trust together. You know- our approach is that you can have both together and it's both on the same platform and it'll just gradually evolve as you go forward. >> What are some of the things you're looking forward to in the next year as this hybrid environment continues, but hopefully things start to open up more? What are some of the things that we can expect to hear and see from Fortinet? >> Well, I'm looking forward to getting out of my home office, that's for sure. >> (Lisa laughing) >> It's like I've been imprisoned here for eighteen months. >> I agree with you on that! So we'll try that. And, you know, I always thought I traveled too much before and now I'm contemplating on the travel piece. But from, you know, Fortinet's perspective, you know, our goal is to make sure that, you know, our customers can increase. We'll make sure they can protect themselves. And so we want to help them and keep working with them such that they put best practices in place and they start architecting longer-term to implement things like zero trust or sassy or some of these other capabilities. And so, you know, I think the- we've had a lot of interest with customers on these virtual sessions. I'm really looking forward to getting them back in our new building, our new executive briefing center, which we're opening up in the next few weeks. You may have more of those face-to-face and white boarding conversations with customers. >> Oh, that sounds so exciting. I agree with you on the travel front, but going from traveling a ton to none was a big challenge. But also, I imagined it'll be great to actually get to collaborate with customers again, and partners. You know, you can only do so much by Zoom. Talk to me a little bit about some of the things on the partnership front that we might be seeing. >> Yeah, our partners, you know, we're a hundred percent partner-driven company and partners are very important to us. And, you know, and that's why we always, when we introduce new technology, we work with the partners to make sure that they understand it. So for example, we provide free what they call an NSE training to all our partners. And then we also work with them very closely to put systems in their labs and the demos and make sure they can architect. And so partners are really important to us and, you know, making sure that they can provide value as part of a solution set to our customers, because customers trust them. And so we want to make sure that we work with our partners closely so they can help the customer implementing architect solutions as they go forward. >> That trust is critical. Right? I mean, we can talk about that at every event, every CUBE Conversation, the trust that an a customer has in you, the trust that you have in a partner and vice versa. That whole trust circle kind of goes along the lines with what we're talking about in terms of being able to establish that trust. So that threat landscape that's probably only going to continue to get bigger is in the trusted hands of folks like Fortinet and your partners to be able to enable those customers to narrow that threat landscape. >> Yeah, yeah. And so it could be the smallest partner to the largest service provider. We don't mind. We want to make sure that we're working with them to provide that implementation from the customers. And again, the word trust is sometimes overused, but that's what customers are looking for. >> (Lisa) So, John, point me to when our audience is some of the information that they can find on Dotcom about zero trust. What are some of the things that you think are great calls to action for the audience? >> Yeah. I mean, it depends. I think it depends on what level you want to get into where we have a bunch of assets, videos, and training but start at the very highest level, you know, why is zero trust something you need to implement? And then it goes down into more details and then even the architecture, long-term architecture and connectivity and implementation. So there's a lot of assets on Fortinet.com If you go on our training sessions, there's- all our training's free to our customers. And so you can go in all those NSE levels and look at the capabilities. So yeah, definitely it's a- it's an area of high interest from our customers. But as I say to them, it's more of a journey. Yes, you can implement something today really quickly, but will that work for you over the long-term in making sure you can take all the information from the, like I said, you know, how is the voice, the posture of that device? What is the device with an agent doing, you know, as my contextual engine integrated as well? So it's a journey for customers and, but you can start with something simple but you need to have that plan for that journey in place. >> I imagine though, John, it's a journey that is either accelerating, or with the threat landscape and some of the things that we've already talked about, is becoming an absolutely board-critical conversation. So, and on that journey, does Fortinet work with customers to accelerate certain parts of it? Because you know, these businesses have been pivoting so much in the last year and they've got to not just survive, but now thrive in this new landscape, this new hybrid work from home, work from anywhere environment and also with more threats. >> Yeah, no, it's a good point. And so, you know, even those internally are implementing it starting the most critical assets first. So let's say, you know, I've got somebody working on source code, they should be the first ones to get the zero trust implementation. I've got somebody asking from the internet to search for stuff. Maybe they're okay for now, but yeah. So you kind of prioritize your assets and users against, you know, the threat and then implement. That's why I'm saying you can roll it out across everyone as, you know, a certain version of it. But I think it's better to prioritize first the most important assets in IP and then roll it out that way. >> (Lisa) Great advice. >> Because some of- a lot of those assets are still sitting in the data center. >> Right. >> So they're not sitting in the cloud. >> Right. John, great advice. Thank you so much for joining me. Good to see you, glad all is well and that you will be able to get out of your home office. You're just days away from that. I'm sure that's going to feel great. >> Certainly is. And thank you, Lisa. >> Nice to see you. For John Madison, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching this CUBE Conversation. (calm electronic music with piano)