>>Welcome to this cube conversation which is part of our third Aws startup showcase of this year. I'm your host lisa martin and I'm pleased to welcome to the cube ceo and co founder of White Source Romney Sasse Rami, Welcome to the program. >>Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. >>I'm excited for our audience to hear about White Source, give us that high level overview of what the company is and what you how you're helping organizations. >>Sure. So we have software engineering teams keep track of their use of open source components sometimes referred to as dependencies and primarily focused on security aspect of those dependencies and are able to very natively and very quickly identify one all of the dependencies that are being used in a certain software that's being developed and alert to any known vulnerabilities that exist in those dependencies and then nick our users through the journey of finding them prioritizing them and fixing the vulnerability is such that their software when it gets released is not at risk, >>not at risk. And one of the things we've talked so much about In the last 18 months is the threat landscape. It's changed dramatically. We've seen a huge increase in ransom where huge increase in Ddos attacks. We also are in the fifth consecutive year of a cybersecurity skills gap. It's been there for a while. We know that there have been barriers between developers and security. How does White Source help address that cybersecurity skills gap. >>So we focus on automating as much of the security practices possible. Right. So basically our main premise is that we want to be the security expert for the engineering team so that they don't have to right? So we provide tools that automate the entire process of remediating the vulnerability so that we can save the developers effort and time in becoming security expert basically saying they don't need to become security expert, they can keep doing what they do best, which is developed software and provide more business value to their employer. And we will take care of anything that has to do with security in their software for them. So basically we're trying to alleviate the need for developers to develop any kind of security related skill set. >>I got to ask you how does that address? We talked about the skills gap but also the cultural shift required for developers to then kind of exhale and and put their trust in you guys and that's a big challenge to change cultures within organizations. How do you help influence that? >>Sure. So look, when you're talking about cultural shift, it always takes time. Like these things do not happen overnight And its gradual and so we are very well aware of it and we do not expect people to have 100% confidence in us immediately in day one. Okay, so our tools and and practices account for it and we help our users uh increasingly trust us more by proving ourselves to them by first starting with providing advice and allowing them to control the pace at which they automate more of the process. Right? So initially we will just tell them what they need to do and let them do it themselves until they are, they have gained enough experience without tools to just allow us to take the full cycle for them. That's one which maybe is even more important is that we rely very heavily on crowd sourcing, Right? So we have a very extensive customer base that is made up of some of the world's leading enterprise organizations that have very complex and a large environments and across those environments, combined with our ongoing and monitoring of everything that's going on in the large world of open source projects, we have compiled a very extensive crowd source database or knowledge base, if you will, that basically gives you intel on what others are doing with those vulnerable open stores dependencies, Right? And we can give you a lot of confidence when we see that the broader community of both commercial and free opens those users have upgraded a vulnerable dependency to a safe version and are speaking to the new version, right? They're not pulling it back there, not undoing that change. And so we give you a lot of visibility into all of that information and also, you know, when when things go bad, right? If we see that many people roll back some change and uh avoiding some dependency version, then we will warn you away from upgrading that version. So I think that the fact that we are establishing our recommendations on a lot of crowd sourced data is another way for us to provide more confidence, automating actions for our users. >>The C word confidence is absolutely critical. I got to ask you though Romney, something that you you mentioned, I was always, I always like to ask start ups, you know, what was the impetus to start the company? You're the Ceo and co founder? What were some of the gaps that were missing? Was it crowdsourcing? And was it the the lack of that community to really provide that visibility to developers that you guys saw as an opportunity to fix in the market? >>Alright. So at the risk of exposing my real age, Uh tell you that the company started over 10 years ago and was actually based on previous experience that as founders had in another company when when it was time to sell it. Right? So when we sold our previous company, we had to go through a two diligence process where we were required to provide a very detailed report of all the open source dependencies that we were using and we didn't have such a report and sort of caught us off guard and we had to spend a lot of time during, you know, the most stressful part of the due diligence, finding out which open source we were using and documenting it and coming up with the report. And so that was a very personal experience we had, but it was very obvious that it's not something that we did special. Right? Everyone is developing software is relying very heavily on open source and usually doesn't track it everywhere. Soon it initially started from just the very basic need for transparency, visibility and the ability to provide a, you know, simple bill of material that's now become a big thing right around S bahn Uh, but 10 years ago it was very difficult, it was very like manually laborious task to be able to come up with your bill of material and that's sort of the experience that big. Uh, the foundation of white suits >>got it and then talk to me about your relationship with AWS and mentioned in the beginning of this segment that this is part of our third AWS startup showcase of the year. Give us an overview of your relationship with AWS from a technology partnership perspective cells marketing product. >>Sure. So we've been working with us for a very long time and they are a wonderful partner to work with. It started right at the beginning where we are a cloud native company. Right? So we're staff solution provider and from the beginning we chose aws to be the infrastructure on which to no solution and we grew together with them over time over the last 10 years. We've been scaling again and again our environment and you know, the services that we provide and have been consuming more and more on AWS services, both for infrastructure and but also and very importantly for securing our runtime environment, which they do a great job at. But then it went even further and we are now integrated with a lot of AWS services and products and technologies. So our offering is very much integrated with several AWS offerings. And even beyond that, we are working closely as they go to market partner with AWS. So we have several co marketing initiatives with them and we are part of the startup coastal program. Such that AWS sales people can coastal white source to their customers. >>I imagine that is an advantage the partnership and the deep relationship that you have with a W. S in terms of getting those customers meetings and and helping them achieve the confidence in the technologies and the power of the two companies in 10 years. We're looking at 1000 customers and some big names. I saw from your website Microsoft Comcast, uh, Splunk 23% of the Fortune 100. Tell me how the aws partnership helps you give those developers the confidence that they need to trust in your technologies. >>Sure. So, first I think the synergy is very apparent, very obvious because both AWS and us sell to the engineering departments into the devil's people. All right. So we are catering to the same users the same customers the same, even decision makers. And so it's very easy to understand. It's also very easy to tell the better together story. Right? So, it's very easy for the the the THE AWS sales people to explain to their customers why it's easily integrate Herbal and it makes the sales motion easier and transparent and fluid and it makes the customer's consumption of the joint services easier. Right? So it's for them, it's easier to work with AWS is a window knowing that they can get all these added security features from them and gained the confidence of having this solution vetted by amazon and get us as a reference for us as a vendor also makes it easier for them to trust us and to use our services uh, with peace of life. >>Sounds like a synergistic cultures as well. I want to dig into something that I saw in the notes that you guys provided that white sources enabling organizations to eliminate up to 85% of security alerts. That's a big number. How do you do that? >>Okay. First, to clarify, we're talking about open source vulnerability or its rights are not in general. Not all security for open source security alliance. We've developed a deeper analysis that goes beyond just looking at your bill of material and identifying which dependencies are vulnerable and analyzes the way in which the developers are using those dependencies and what we've found over the last three years of running that technology with real customers? over many tens of thousands of development projects. Is that on average, 85% of the vulnerabilities in open source dependencies. I'll not reachable from your code. All right. So they are still there. You're still using the dependency but you're using some other function of it, which is not vulnerable. And the vulnerable function is never actively called in your code base. So this is like very specific. It's not some generic analysis. We had to analyze your code and figure that out. And so again, the average statistics statistics, is That just 15% of vulnerabilities are quote unquote, reachable form your code and makes your software vulnerable. Right? All the others are simply not exploitable. And so it can easily be eliminated for the need to remediate. Right? So you don't have to >>got it. How are you guys helping customers? There's been a lot of data that shows companies are spending millions uh annually using multiple web app and a P. I. Security tools on average but are still having problems with those tools being effective. How does white source help customers not waste time and resources and get right to being able to identify and remediate those vulnerabilities >>short. So look again in our philosophy, is that just detecting the problem? The security issues doesn't fix anything. Right. Doesn't help you solve your problem. Right, paramount to going to visit your dentist and having them find the cavity and maybe they do an x ray and they tell you exactly which tooth it's on and how deep it is. And then just send you home and you did you need to deal with it yourself. Right? So it doesn't really solve the problem. Your your mouth still painful. You have to fix the problem in order to get any kind of value for the security service of tool, you have to, you know, close the loop, finish the process and fix the vulnerability. And so by investing a lot in automating the remediation in enabling our tools to close that cycle right to finish the job and fix the vulnerability. We enable you to actually gain the value from the various tools that you're using and make sure that your software is not exposed and not vulnerable and not just give you a report with the vulnerabilities, right? Not just find them for you. >>Got It. Last question for you is if we look at your recommendations when you're talking to customers, especially as I mentioned earlier in the conversation, the threat landscape has changed dramatically in the last 18 months when you're in customer conversations, how do you advise them to start? You start with the developers. Do you start with security or do you start by saying you've got to bring everybody together. >>So we would normally start with security uh and you know, not necessarily the developers themselves, but the engineering managers. The heads of engineering again because our main effort is to leave the developers alone. Right. We want to get as little developer involvement as possible so that they can be free to do what they need to do. Security is something they have to right? It's a sure it's not, it doesn't add business value, it just protects the business from being exposed to greater risk. And so our approach and our practice is to be a sort of exception based tool for developers and only get them involved when you absolutely have to have them chime in and do something. Otherwise, we can fully take ownership and automate the entire process of identification, prioritization and remediation for the organization and just provide reports on, you know, how many vulnerabilities we fix this month and and give them better visibility into their security posture. Yeah, but you know, we invest most of our innovation attention resources as a company to automate as much of that process as possible so that the developers don't have to spend their time on security issues. We will do it for it. >>And I imagine developer productivity goes way up for your customers? I do have one more question for you, given that here we are in the fall of 2021, what are some of the things that you're looking forward to as we go into the new year? >>I love you in the new jewish year or then you >>Uh maybe both. I was thinking, you know, just as we go into 2020 to some of the things that you're excited about. >>Sure, so look, it's it's a little difficult to be happy about something that's a problem for other people, right? Because there is a growing threat for application security and there is more and more attacks going on in the world. But I'm really looking forward to helping more people be more protected while not wasting their time. All right. So it what drives me is the ability for us as a company to provide real value for customers and not be some shelf will not be a tool that just produces reports that no one knows what to do with. And the fact that we are able to steal our users and our customers away from risk and save them. The the hassle of being attacked, being hacked, having their data stolen or having the system broken into is what I mostly look >>and there's plenty of opportunities for you guys to do just that and really add that value for those developers And the company is like I said, big brands Microsoft Comcast block Romney, thank you for joining me on the program today, talking to us about white source and how you're really feeling the gaps in the cybersecurity skills landscape and helping really transform developer productivity where security is concerned. We appreciate your time. >>Thank you. Thank you so much for having me on the show. >>My pleasure for a missus I'm lisa martin. You're watching this cube conversation. Mhm mm mm.

>>Hello everyone. Welcome to the Special Cube presentation of Accelerating Business Transformation on vmc on aws. I'm John Furrier, host of the Queue. We have Chief Dawan, Director of global sales, and go to market for VMware Cloud Ons. This is a great showcase and should be a lot of fun. Ashish, thanks for coming on. >>Hi, John. Thank you so much. >>So VMware cloud on AWS has been well documented as this big success for VMware and aws. As customers move their workloads into the cloud IT operations of VMware customers has signaling a lot of change. This is changing the landscape globally as on cloud migration and beyond. What's your take on this? Can you open this up with the most important story around VMC on aws? >>Yes, John. The most important thing for our customers today is the how they can safely and swiftly move their ID infrastructure and applications to the cloud. Now, VMware Cloud AWS is a service that allows all vSphere based workloads to move to cloud safely, swiftly, and reliably. Banks can move their core, core banking platforms, insurance companies move their core insurance platforms, telcos move their GOs, bss, plat platforms, government organizations are moving their citizen engagement platforms using VMC on aws because this is one platform that allows you to move it, move their VMware based platforms very fast. Migrations can happen in a matter of days instead of months, extremely securely. It's a VMware managed service. It's very secure and highly reliably. It gets the, the reliability of the underlyings infrastructure along with it. So win-win from our customer's >>Perspective. You know, we reported on this big news in 2016 with Andy Chassis and Pat Geling at the time, a lot of people said it was a bad deal. It turned out to be a great deal because not only could VMware customers actually have a cloud migrate to the cloud, do it safely, which was their number one concern. They didn't want to have disruption to their operations, but also position themselves for what's beyond just shifting to the cloud. So I have to ask you, since you got the finger on the pulse here, what are we seeing in the market when it comes to migrating and modern modernizing in the cloud? Because that's the next step. They go to the cloud, you guys have done that, doing it, then they go, I gotta modernize, which means kind of upgrading or refactoring. What's your take on that? >>Yeah, absolutely. Look, the first step is to help our customers assess their infrastructure and licensing and entire ID operations. Once we've done the assessment, we then create their migration plans. A lot of our customers are at that inflection point. They're, they're looking at their real estate data center, real estate. They're looking at their contracts with colocation vendors. They really want to exit their data centers, right? And VMware cloud and AWS is a perfect solution for customers who wanna exit their data centers, migrate these applications onto the AWS platform using VMC on aws, get rid of additional real estate overheads, power overheads, be socially and environmentally conscious by doing that as well, right? So that's the migration story, but to your point, it doesn't end there, right? Modernization is a critical aspect of the entire customer journey is as well. Customers, once they've migrated their ID applications and infrastructure on cloud, get access to all the modernization services that AWS has. They can correct easily to our data lake services, to our AIML services, to custom databases, right? They can decide which applications they want to keep and which applications they wanna refactor. They want to take decisions on containerization, take decisions on service computing once they've come to the cloud. But the most important thing is to take that first step, you know, exit their data centers, come to AWS using VMC or aws, and then a whole host of modernization options available to them. >>Yeah, I gotta say, we had this right on this, on this story because you just pointed out a big thing, which was first order of business is to make sure to leverage the on-prem investments that those customers made and then migrate to the cloud where they can maintain their applications, their data, their infrastructure operations that they're used to, and then be in position to start getting modern. So I have to ask you, how are you guys specifically, or how is VMware cloud ons addressing these needs of the customers? Because what happens next is something that needs to happen faster, and sometimes the skills might not be there because if they're running old school IT ops now they gotta come in and jump in. They're gonna use data cloud, they're gonna want to use all kinds of machine learning, and there's a lot of great goodness going on above the stack there. So as you move with the higher level services, you know, it's a no brainer, obviously, but they're not, it's not yesterday's higher level services in the cloud. So how are, how is this being addressed? >>Absolutely. I think you hit up on a very important point, and that is skills, right? When our customers are operating, some of the most critical applications I just mentioned, core banking, core insurance, et cetera, they're most of the core applications that our customers have across industries, even even large scale ERP systems, they're actually sitting on VMware's vSphere platform right now. When the customer wants to migrate these to cloud, one of the key bottlenecks they face is skill sets. They have the trained manpower for these core applications, but for these high level services, they may not, right? So the first order of business is to help them ease this migration pain as much as possible by not wanting them to, to upscale immediately. And v VMware clouds exactly does that. I mean, you don't have to do anything. You don't have to create new skill set for doing this, right? Their existing skill sets suffice, but at the same time, it gives them that, that leeway to build that skills roadmap for their team. And AWS is invested in that, right? We want to help them build those skills in the high level services, be it aml, be it, be it iot, be it data lake and analytics. We want to invest in them, and we help our customers through that. So that ultimately the ultimate goal of making them draw data is, is, is front and center. >>I wanna get into some of the use cases and success stories, but I want to just reiterate, hit back your point on the skill thing. Because if you look at what you guys have done at aws, you've essentially, and Andy Chassey used to talk about this all the time when I would interview him, and now last year Adam was seeing the same thing. You guys do all the heavy lifting, but if you're a VMware customer user or operator, you are used to things. You don't have to be relearn to be a cloud architect. Now you're already in the game. So this is like almost like a instant path to cloud skills for the VMware, and there's hundreds of thousands of, of VMware architects and operators that now instantly become cloud architects, literally overnight. Can you respond to that? Do you agree with that? And then give an example. >>Yes, absolutely. You know, if you have skills on the VMware platform, you know, migrating to AWS using via by cloud and AWS is absolutely possible. You don't have to really change the skills. The operations are exactly the same. The management systems are exactly the same. So you don't really have to change anything, but the advantages that you get access to all the other AWS services. So you are instantly able to integrate with other AWS services, and you become a cloud architect immediately, right? You're able to solve some of the critical problems that your underlying IT infrastructure has immediately using this. And I think that's a great value proposition for our customers to use this service. >>And just one more point, I wanna just get into something that's really kind of inside baseball or nuanced VMC or VMware cloud on AWS means something. Could you take a minute to explain what on AWS means? Just because you're like hosting and using Amazon as a, as a work workload? Being ONS means something specific in your world, being VMC on AWS mean? >>Yes. This is a great question, by the way, You know, on AWS means that, you know, VMware's vSphere platform is, is a, is an iconic enterprise virtualization software. It's got, you know, a disproportionately high market share across industries. So when we wanted to create a cloud product along with them, obviously our aim was for them, for the, for this platform to have the goodness of the AWS underlying infrastructure, right? And, and therefore, when we created this VMware cloud solution, it, it literally used the AWS platform under the eighth, right? And that's why it's called VMs, VMware cloud on AWS, using, using the, the, the wide portfolio of our regions across the world and the strength of the underlying infrastructure, the reliability and, and, and sustainability that it offers. And therefore this product is called VMC on aws. >>It's a distinction I think is worth noting, and it does reflect engineering and some levels of integration that go well beyond just having a SASS app and, and basic platform as a service or past services. So I just wanna make sure that now super cloud, we'll talk about that a little bit in another interview, but I gotta get one more question in before we get into the use cases and customer success stories is in, in most of the VM world, VMware world, in that IT world that used to, when you heard migration, people would go, Oh my God, that's gonna take months. And when I hear about moving stuff around and doing cloud native, the first reaction people might have is complexity. So two questions for you before we move on to the next talk. Track complexity. How are you addressing the complexity issue and how long do these migrations take? Is it easy, is it hard? I mean, you know, the knee jerk reaction is month, You're very used to that. If they're dealing with Oracle or other old school vendors, like, they're, like the old guard would be like, takes a year to move stuff around. So can you comment on complexity and speed? >>Yeah. So the first, first thing is complexity. And you know, what makes what makes anything complex is if you're, if you're required to acquire new skill sets or you've gotta, if you're required to manage something differently, and as far as VMware cloud on AWS on both these aspects, you don't have to do anything, right? You don't have to acquire new skill sets. Your existing ideal operations skill sets on, on VMware's platforms are absolutely fine and you don't have to manage it any differently. Like Dan, what you're managing your, your ID infrastructure today. So in both these aspects, it's exactly the same. And therefore it is absolutely not complex as far as, as far as, as far as ve VMware, cloud and AWS is concerned. And the other thing is speed. Now, this is where the huge differentiation is. You have seen that, you know, large banks and large telcos have now moved their workloads, you know, literally in days instead of months. >>Because because of VMware cloud and aws, a lot of time customers come to us with specific deadlines because they want to exit their data centers on a particular date. And what happens, VMware cloud and AWS is called upon to do that migration, right? So speed is absolutely critical. The reason is also exactly the same because you are using the exactly the same platform, the same management systems, people are available to you, you're able to migrate quickly, right? I would just reference recently we got an award from President Linsky of Ukraine for, you know, migrating their entire ID digital infrastructure and, and that that happened because they were using VMware cloud radio based and happened very swiftly. >>That's not a great example. I mean, that's one political, but the economic advantage of getting outta the data center could be national security. You mentioned Ukraine, I mean I bombing and death over there. So clearly that's a critical crown jewel for their running their operations, which is, you know, world mission critical. So great stuff. I love the speed thing. I think that's a huge one. Let's get into some of the use cases. One of them is, the first one I wanted to talk about was we, you just hit on data, data center migration. It could be financial reasons on a downturn or our, or a market growth. People can make money by shifting to the cloud, either saving money or making money. You win on both sides. It's a, it's a, it's almost a recession proof, if you will. Cloud is so use case for number one data center migration. Take us through what that looks like. Give it an example of a success. Take us through a day in the life of a data center migration in, in a couple minutes. >>Yeah. You know, I can give you an example of, of a, of a large bank who decided to migrate, you know, their, all their data centers outside their existing interest. And they had, they had a set timeline, right? They had a set timeline to migrate the, they were coming up on a deal and they wanted to make sure that this set timeline is met. We did a, a complete assessment of their infrastructure. We did a complete assessment of their IT applications, more than 80% of their IT applications, underlying v vSphere platform. And we, we thought that the right solution for them in the timeline that they wanted, right, is VMware cloud gas. And obviously it was a large bank, it wanted to do it safely and securely. It wanted to have it completely managed, and therefore VMware cloud and aws, you know, ticked all the boxes as far as that is concerned. >>I'll be happy to report that the large bank has moved to most of their applications on AWS exiting three of their data centers, and they'll be exiting 12 more very soon. So that's a great example of, of, of the large bank exiting data centers. There's another gallery to that. Not only did they manage to manage to exit their data centers and of course be more agile, but they also met their sustainability goals. Their board of directors had given them goals to be carbon neutral by 2025. They found out that 35% of all their carbon F footprint was in their data centers. And if they moved their, their ID infrastructure to cloud, they would severely reduce the, the carbon footprint, which is 35% down to 17 to 18%. Right? And that met their, their, their, their sustainability targets and their commitment to the, to being carbon neutral as well. >>And that they, and they shift that to you guys. Would you guys take that burden? A heavy lifting there and you guys have a sustainability story, which is a whole nother showcase in and of itself. >>We can exactly. And, and cause of the scale of our, of our operations, we are able to, we are able to work on that really well as well. >>All right. So love the data migration. I think that's got real proof points. You got, I can save money, I can, I can and move and position my applications into the cloud for that reason and other reasons as a lot of other reasons to do that. But now it gets into what you mentioned earlier was, okay, data migration, clearly a use case and you laid out some successes. I'm sure there's a zillion others. But then the next step comes, now you got cloud architects becoming minted every, and you got managed services and higher level services. What happens next? Can you give us an example of the use case of the modernization around the NextGen workloads, NextGen applications? We're starting to see, you know, things like data clouds, not data warehouses. We're not gonna have data clouds. It's gonna be all kinds of clouds. These NextGen apps are pure digital transformation in action. Take us through a use case of how you guys make that happen with a success story. >>Yes, absolutely. And this is, this is an amazing success story and the customer here is s and p global ratings. As you know, s and p global ratings is, is the world leader as far as global ratings, global credit ratings is concerned. And for them, you know, the last couple of years have been tough as far as hardware procurement is concerned, right? The pandemic has really upended the, the supply chain. And it was taking a lot of time to procure hardware, you know, configure it in time, make sure that that's reliable. And then, you know, distributed in the wide variety of, of, of offices and locations that they have. And they came to us. We, we did, again, a, a a a alar, a fairly large comprehensive assessment of their ID infrastructure and their licensing contracts. And we also found out that VMware cloud and AWS is the right solution for them. >>So we worked there, migrated all their applications, and as soon as we migrated all their applications, they got, they got access to, you know, our high level services be a analytics services, our machine learning services, our, our, our, our artificial intelligence services that have been critical for them, for their growth. And, and that really is helping them, you know, get towards their next level of modern applications. Right Now, obviously going forward, they will have, they will have the choice to, you know, really think about which applications they want to, you know, refactor or which applications they want to go ahead with. That is really a choice in front of them. And, but you know, the, we VMware cloud and AWS really gave them the opportunity to first migrate and then, you know, move towards modernization with speed. >>You know, the speed of a startup is always the kind of the Silicon Valley story where you're, you know, people can make massive changes in 18 months, whether that's a pivot or a new product. You see that in startup world. Now, in the enterprise, you can see the same thing. I noticed behind you on your whiteboard, you got a slogan that says, are you thinking big? I know Amazon likes to think big, but also you work back from the customers. And, and I think this modern application thing's a big deal because I think the mindset has always been constrained because back before they moved to the cloud, most IT, and, and, and on-premise data center shops, it's slow. You gotta get the hardware, you gotta configure it, you gotta, you gotta stand it up, won't make sure all the software is validated on it, and loading a database and loading oss, I mean, yeah, it got easier and with scripting and whatnot, but when you move to the cloud, you have more scale, which means more speed, which means it opens up their capability to think differently and build product. What are you seeing there? Can you share your opinion on that epiphany of, Wow, things are going fast, I got more time to actually think about maybe doing a cloud native app or transforming this or that. What's your, what's your reaction to that? Can you share your opinion? >>Well, ultimately we, we want our customers to utilize, you know, most of our modern services, you know, applications should be microservices based when desired, they should use serverless, applic, serverless technology. They should not have monolithic, you know, relational database contracts. They should use custom databases. They should use containers when needed, right? So ultimately, we want our customers to use these modern technologies to make sure that their IT infrastructure, their licensing, their, their entire IT spend is completely native to cloud technologies. They work with the speed of a startup, but it's important for them to, to, to get to the first step, right? So that's why we create this journey for our customers, where you help them migrate, give them time to build the skills, they'll help them modernize, take our partners along with their, along with us to, to make sure that they can address the need for our customers. That's, that's what our customers need today, and that's what we are working backwards from. >>Yeah, and I think that opens up some big ideas. I'll just say that, you know, we were joking, I was joking the other night with someone here in, in Palo Alto around serverless, and I said, you know, soon you're gonna hear words like architecture lists. And that's a criticism on one hand, but you might say, Hey, you know, if you don't really need an architecture, you know, storage list, I mean, at the end of the day, infrastructure is code means developers can do all the it in the coding cycles and then make the operations cloud based. And I think this is kind of where I see the dots connecting. Final thought here, take us through what you're thinking around how this new world is evolving. I mean, architecture kind of a joke, but the point is, you know, you have to some sort of architecture, but you don't have to overthink it. >>Totally. Now, that's a great thought, by the way. I know it's a joke, but it's a great thought because at the end of the day, you know, what do the customers really want? They want outcomes, right? Why did service technology come? It was because there was an outcome that they needed. They didn't want to get stuck with, you know, the, the, the real estate of, of a, of a server. They wanted to use compute when they needed to, right? Similarly, what you're talking about is, you know, outcome based, you know, desire of our customers and, and, and that's exactly where the word is going to, Right? Cloud really enforces that, right? We are actually, you know, working backwards from a customer's outcome and using our area, the breadth and depth of our services to, to deliver those outcomes, right? And, and most of our services are in that path, right? When we use VMware cloud and aws, the outcome is a, to migrate then to modernize, but doesn't stop there, use our native services, you know, get the business outcomes using this. So I think that's, that's exactly what we are going through. >>Actually, I say she the director of global sales and go to market for VMware cloud on Aus. I wanna thank you for coming on, but I'll give you the final minute. Give a plug, explain what is the VMware cloud on Aus, Why is it great? Why should people engage with you and, and the team, and what ultimately is this path look like for them going forward? >>Yeah, at the end of the day, we want our customers to have the best parts to the cloud, right? The, the best parts to the cloud is making sure that they migrate safely, reliably, and securely as well as with speed, right? And then, you know, use that cloud platform to, to utilize AWS's native services to make sure that they modernize their IT infrastructure and applications, right? We want, ultimately that our customers, customers, customer get the best out of, you know, utilizing that, that whole application experience is enhanced tremendously by using our services. And I think that's, that's exactly what we are working towards VMware cloud AWS is, is helping our customers in that journey towards migrating, modernizing, whether they want to exit a data center or whether they wanna modernize their applications. It's in the central first step that we wanna help our customers with >>Wan, director of global sales and go to market with VMware cloud on neighbors. He's with aws sharing his thoughts on accelerating business transformation on aws. This is showcase, We're talking about the future path. We're talking about use cases with success stories from customers as she's thank you for spending time today on this showcase. >>Thank you, John. I >>Appreciate it. Okay. This is the cube, special coverage, special presentation of the AWS Showcase. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching.

[Music] from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston it's the cube covering the IBM thing brought to you by IBM hi everybody this is David Lally you're watching the cube and our multi day coverage of the IBM think Digital 20/20 experience the event experienced wall-to-wall coverage prasad saccharine is here he's the senior managing director at Accenture technology great to see you thanks for coming on for Sun and thank you for having me there pleasure to be on very welcome so um I'm looking at your bio here you're responsible for the relationship with with IBM Red Hat so I'm interested in that and you're driving the Accenture intelligent cloud and engineering practice so we got a lot to talk about here let's start with Red Hat obviously it's probably the most important in at least new part of IBM so here you're in the right spot what's going on with with with Red Hat these days in your practice there oh yeah so you know Red Hat is a extremely important part of our practice I am very much focused on what Accenture does within the hybrid cloud space for our clients and red hat with OpenShift is you know the most powerful platform that there is out there today in helping our clients both innovate in the new as they expand in what they're doing digitally as well as move and modernize some of the equipment they have you know from existing history you know I went when the Red Hat deal was completed I did a little braking analysis my sort of weekly editorial segment and I said you know this this Red Hat acquisition openshift is the linchpin and I went right there right we just went it was all about application modernization and hybrid cloud bringing that cloud experience to on-prem or cross clouds and so that it was always my take you know there was a lot of sort of marketing around cloud generally but but more specifically it's a to me it was always about that application modernization so I'm curious as to how your your clients have responded to that and you know whether or not I'm sort of on the right track there yeah I think there are multiple factors I mean if you look at just broadly the areas I think there are three areas the first as you correctly said there is application modernization so our clients are looking at the amount of technical debt that they have and their legacy systems they're looking to you know modernize the right parts of their legacy estate you know one looking at the trade-off around the costs as well as the performance so Red Hat and open ship really gives them the platform that allows them to do that and make take their journey forward from an app mod perspective onto the clouds and you know the various public clouds the second area is actually in greenfield development so as clients are building new applications they want to be able to you know build applications that they can run across you know multiple platforms whether it's private cloud or public cloud and particularly in areas like Europe I think this is particularly significant and we can talk about that in some more detail and then the third area which is emerging as you know is is the whole area of edge and IOT which is going to actually move a lot of the computer way from the central clouds into the into the edge and you know obviously open ship is going to play a big part there as well bringing all all the three parts of the enterprise as it were you know the edge and the cloud as well as all of the legacy and private estates that exist today so to talk more about Europe what's going on there is that a GDP or a related thing a country you know in country may keep the data in country what is the issue there yeah it's a little bit of board I you know if you look at particularly financial services but certainly other industries as well the regulator's are extremely focused on making sure that you know the right balance is being struck even if you're using public clouds you know they are going to talk about the amount of public cloud usage that can be for every application the various applications that have to be actually running on a private cloud estate so in a scenario like that you will really want to be able to build applications that you can run across you know multiple different platforms and you know open ship gives you the answer to be able to do that to be able to you know have a policy based approach where you know certain workloads can be working on your private cloud and certainly you can move it out to you know public cloud when the need arises result explain the edge angle is that about bringing a programmability or the cloud model to the data at the edge you can explain that more detail sure sure and you know the edge and IOT and the Internet of Things impacts different industries differently you know I can talk about you know since we mentioned financial services let me bring up insurance for example you look at autonomous you know cars and you know self driven vehicles and so on as their going to change daily life what happens in those cases is that you want a lot of that data to be processed at the vehicle level so at the edge rather than a lot of processing happening across the network you know up at the central crowd and then coming back down to the vehicle because the latency just doesn't allow these these sorts of applications to happen you look at multiple industries that are really being impacted by the edge and so as that starts to become more prevalent and about 50 to 60 percent of a lot of this compute moves off of the central cloud through various education what you really want to have is like the versions of these platforms running on those particular devices and the rest of it running either on your private or your central clouds so you have to be able to use and move a lot of these applications which are container base you know platform you know Ginni Rometty now arvind talked about how the only 20% of the workloads have moved to the cloud it's they're really difficult to move workloads that are sort of the next next wave how do you see that evolving from Accenture perspective I think I think you have I mean you get your technology agnostic right I mean you really you know you're not a purveyor of hardware or software and so how do you see as a kind of a quasi-independent here how do you see that that hybrid cloud that cloud journey playing out yeah I think you know the we have the same number by the way I mean we see about when we talk to our clients and we've surveyed several CEOs and CIOs the number we we arrive at is that about 20 percent I think of workloads having moved to the cloud now a lot of that has been SAS based you know they've taken a lot of functions that could really be satified so to speak now comes the part around really taking portions of your legacy estate that you need to move to the cloud whether you're going to do it as a pass or an i as you know doesn't really matter and then you know weave into that the requirements around data privacy around compliance around high performance etc which might either take you to a private cloud type of orientation or take it to various public clouds so there's a lot of that work be done so what we are doing with many of our clients is really working with them taking a lot of our tools we have a tool that that we use called my nav which allows you to really assess a client's legacy estate and figure out you know what part of it that really we should be modernizing and which of the partners brilliant that we need to be working with to be able to modernize that aspect in concurrence with that is all of the new development that's happening on the cloud native development which is naturally glowing going into you know a lot of these public as well as private cloud so a lot of that work the next you know let's say 30 to 40 percent over the next few years is going to be a lot of work that happens and that's going to be heavier lifting as compared to you know the initial 20% that is half of it well heavy heavy lifting is kind of your area of expertise and we think about Accenture deep industry expertise global presence I mean as does IBM empiricist essaouira your relationship with IBM what what's the partnership like maybe you could describe sort of where you guys complement each other I know you compete in certain segments but where do you complement each other you know like you pointed out earlier Dave you know we are we're very much technology agnostic we have been on a public cloud journey for the last several years and really built our skills and our you know support around that what the hyper scale is we're doing in the market as hybrid cloud has evolved over the last you know couple of years especially we see that open shift and Red Hat and IBM you know play a big part in you know in this part of the journey as well as IBM public cloud we see you know the use of IBM public cloud continue to increase in the market so all of these you know companies I think play a very important role in what our clients want to do to take their journeys to the cloud forward so you know we're trying to piece all of that together to to have the right you know solutions to our clients and really brings together I think the aspects one is you know country specific requirements the second is the specific industry that you're talking about and you know the third is technology so really it's a it's an intersection of region technology as well as industry it's something that you know we're naturally good at we have several clients where we do a lot of you know a lot we have deep existing relationships and we certainly partner with IBM very closely we are the largest system integrator of all of IBM software products globally outside of IBM themselves and we've been that maintaining that status for many years we've been doing the same on the Red Hat side so as IBM and Red Hat come together I think at many of our clients we're a very natural consultant and systems integrator for or IBM rather we haven't talked much about multi-cloud this week I know Stu minimun my colleague has been hosting the Red Hat summit and it talked a lot about it but again I want to tap you're sort of you know that you're agnostic brain you look at the landscape and you've got different suppliers coming at it from different angles right AWS won't use the term via Microsoft obviously has a good story there you know Google with anthos etc VMware wants its piece of the pie iBM is kind of to me one of the most interesting with red hat of course because not only does it have its own cloud but it's very aggressive around supporting multiple clouds it's it it seems to be you know intent on doing whatever the client wants clearly that's your business I wonder what you can share with us about your thoughts on on multi cloud specifically yeah absolutely I think you know multi cloud is certainly where a lot of our clients are at and they've started the multi cloud journey you know you know a few years ago they have gone with more than you know maybe one hyper scaler although they have had you know just few workloads perhaps in in in multiple of them and really focused on one of them but as they start increasing the percentage of work that they're doing within the within the clouds they start looking at a lot of these clouds for very specific reason and most of our clients end up using food with P public clouds and when I look at the public cloud certainly you mentioned all of them AWS Microsoft Azure Google you know to the GCP product as well as you know IBM with IBM's public cloud and then with OpenShift really being able to run across all of these public clouds allow you allows you to actually design you know micro services based applications that are containerized and you can you know pretty much run them across whichever cloud you want and this is where we really you know work with our clients to really understand their need and to help them with you know the specific clouds that we won't be working with and which applications really should reside where makes sense for them and like I said from a Europe perspective you know with gdpr etc I think that journey is a little bit you know further advanced than it is perhaps in other places other parts of the world but we're seeing you know much more use of multi-cloud in addition to of course sass and increase user way Superdog your role is global obviously not just yes not just us right pan-pan the world or is it US and Europe no it is its global so it's us Europe as well as what we call the growth market so it includes China then is that correct or yes yeah so okay so now you got Alibaba you know you're playing there that's yet another cloud and so and what your one of the roles that you play as a systems integrator and somebody who's you know trying to trust it is you help customers pick the right workload for the right you know infrastructure and make it work obviously and help them de-risk one of the things we've noted is you know going back to the 80/20 or 20 has moved 80 hasn't it's the hard stuff it's that a lot of that mission-critical stuff hasn't moved in mate may never move but some of it will it just seems to us that you know moving the mission critical workloads is very risky and so what you want to do is make sure that you D risk that maybe keep it on you know if it's an IBM mission-critical workload maybe IBM's got ways to keep it safe in the IBM cloud and you know cross connect them etc I wonder what your thoughts are on moving what has heretofore been hard to move workloads does it make sense to put them in the cloud or does it make sense to put a brick wall around them and leave them on Prem I know it depends but but but maybe you could frame that for us sure absolutely so we have you know a concept that we call digital decoupling and what that really entails is is to take a look at these monolithic applications that are running you know on the back end and then we look at certain speech ER extraction that you know you can you can perform take those features out especially things that will give you access to digital channels you know rewrite those applications containerize them and then be able to run them on on multiple clouds and we've been doing that with you know many clients for example you know large hotel chains where we've taken a lot of that functionality containerized it run it on public clouds and it's only the final commit after you go through the process of figuring out you know what kind of room do you want picking out the various features it's not till the final commit that that happens on the mainframe side so feature extraction through digital decoupling I think offers you tremendous offloading of a lot of those features as well as processing onto the public cloud certainly iBM is also looking at many in many ways in which they can move some of these core functions as well on to their public cloud so I think the journey continues like you said you know it may not be ever that you have a hundred percent of the processing that happens on the public cloud and again we have to take a look at the amount of work that there is the risk reward the cost that it will take and you know with the enormous amount of functionality that has to take place this is where we have to advise our clients on you know the journey as well as the order in which via TP for the landscape we talked earlier about edge you're talking about multiple clouds you've got on-prem you've got mission critical workloads and you mentioned you know containers people want portability of course containers are necessary ingredient of that portability but it's insufficient and so you just see complexity increasing as we as we proceed down this cloud journey you've got to secure those those those those containers and and micro services sometimes aren't so micro you've you've got to make them work across cloud so it seems to me that you guys and your your clients get a lot of work to do which is which is a good thing as long as they make the business case and it's adding value to the organization yeah absolutely and then this is where you know you take certain functions I think you have a lot of sass options particularly around certain things that you're doing that tend to be you know commoditized so to speak certain other functions where you don't need perhaps their elasticity either about offers so you can have you know past solutions that you can build more quickly but then you want other solutions that need to be more mission-critical more resilient and in certainly movement elastic and that's where you know you look at you know producing micro-services containerized applications that you can really burst across you know multiple clouds and so on so these are all part of the architectures that we're building designing and implementing a wrapper Versailles where can I go to get more info on this whole topic from you know a hybrid cloud perspective as well as a public cloud perspective we go to Accenture comm and you do go to the cloud section there's a lot of information as well as credentials and white papers that you'd be able to access and also gives you access to specific people that you can you know reach out to and contact and get for the information on what they've been able to do very interesting conversation prasad and it's great to see you guys working very closely with with IBM i love it two global companies deep industry expertise solving hard problems so thanks so much for coming with you Naruto thank you so much for doing this very welcome and thank you for watching everybody this is Dave Volante and it's a wall-to-wall coverage of the IBM digital event experience around think 2020 we're right back right at this short break you're watching the Hume [Music] you

>>live from Denver, Colorado. It's the Q covering com vault. Go 2019. Brought to you by combo. >>Hey, welcome back to the cubes. Coverage of combo go 19 from Colorado. Lisa Martin with stupid man. I got a couple of guys joining us with some really cool stuff to talk about. We've got robbed Colusa in the S V p and G m of metallic a combat venture. And we've got Michael, some principal architect from serious computer solutions. Guys, welcome to the Cube. >>Thank you. Thanks for having us. >>Yeah. So some big stuff came out yesterday. Metallic Rob, you are a convo, O g. I worked in the back, like, 10 years ago. I can't even believe it's been that long since I was there. But a lot of change in coma in the last nine months alone. Metallic came out yesterday. We're seeing a lot of momentum excitement around what come boats during strategically talk to us about metallic. What is it besides a cool name? And why is this so exciting? >>It's exciting for me for two reasons Specifically what we're doing with innovation. We've been an innovator and leader for two decades, but focusing on, things have changed. People have moved to cloud. People are looking at hybrid solutions. And with that comes SAS. So to me it's completing. I don't wanna say completing, but getting to that choice that that menu of options, the right ones not too confusing but the right ones. And so with metallic, we brought a sass portfolio to market around back in recovery aimed at some of the more common use cases. And the thing that was really exciting for me about this waas. We had this I p from the last two decades. Yet Sanjay empowered said, Look, I really want you innovate quickly. You've got all this I p put together a start up in the company marketing people working with engineering. And that's critical with the SAS offer because it's all about experience, >>right? Rob, I got all this I p We just had Sanjay on talking about all the patterns they have kind of going through my head. I'm like, Well, if you had all of these pieces we've been talking about Sascha now for you know, quite a few years. Why now? What? What has changed or what was the enabling piece other than Sanjay say and go that made metallic come to fruition now, rather that it hadn't before. >>Yeah, that's that's a good one. We've been working with partners and customers. Fact. I just talked to one, said Rob, I've wanted this for for a while. I think a lot of things came together, one putting together this start up approach to get the team's working cross functionally. That wasn't something we were accustomed to. So it wasn't just Sanjay saying Go. It was kind of doing things a little differently. I think The other thing looking at the market opportunity that we validate with our customers and an analyst. There's $1.6 billion target addressable market. Many customers are busy, Many customers are custom consuming lots of products, SAS or cloud and this just makes sense. So that's why we did it now. >>All right, well, so Michael Serious is a launch partner from metallic. My understanding. This is 100% built for the channel. Tell us what this means for your world, and your customers >>were really excited because this opens up the world of com vault toe a whole group of customers that we wouldn't focus on before with so you know, we're able to go in with our inside sales teams and with customers that maybe don't have full time employees for backup to spend, you know, multiple hours every day, Karen feeding for a larger, more advanced system. So this way you can off load a lot of that. Maybe not the ownership of back up, but at least the management of the infrastructure for you takes a lot of the overhead away they don't have to worry about. Okay, what about two sites? How did I manage that where, you know, that's a lot of complex stuff, So we're bringing in a company now that has 20 years experience. There's been a lot of new startups in the SAS area, but they don't have 20 years experience of knowing what the customers were looking for and back up and how they do it. And and to be honest, you learn a lot from your mistakes. And 20 years you made some mistakes. Everybody does, and they still have those mistakes to make, and these guys can all, you know, bring that to the customer, and then they don't have to worry about >>it. I'd liketo add to that a bit. So that's been the hardest thing is we have 20 years of innovation. We've got that. I'll call it a war chest, 812 patents. Who has that? And now it's like, Okay, Sascha, Sirs, want this unique experience? There's temptation to dip into the war chest. So we kind of moved everything out of the way and said, Let's take a fresh approach. Let's do a whole customer journey map. Let's worry about the experience. So the reason why we're able to innovate so quickly because we had this chest of patents andan enabled us to really focus on the customer and the partner experience to get it right. >>Can you talk a little bit about the combat adventures? When I saw that, that that's interesting. Is this kind of like what you're talking about? Like a startup within combo? Yes, Why was that important? >>It is important to us for two reasons. One, the brand brands about experience, right, and we needed to signal that internally, I mean, were traditionally executing really well in the enterprise space. Yes, we have mid market in some smaller customers, but we're known for handling big multi petting my customers, and we're known for maybe traditional approaches. So the brand allowed us to redefine and attach to that inexperience. The combo adventure part signaled the stability in the trust in a vendor that's been there for two decades with innovation. That's why we did that. >>Michael Being a sass offering the go to market has to be a little bit different. My understanding There's also like a 40 day, 45 day try A like, you know, full blown. You know, not just some, you know, test version of it. How will this change the way, or will it change the way you gotta market? >>It does change it quite drastically because the customer can get involved, they can start playing with it. They can ask for assistance during any time during that. But the nice thing is, after that 45 days, you don't lose what you did it it wasn't gonna download this. I'm gonna test it in my own little lab. You could be testing it with real world scenarios and then flip a switch. Your active you're going and what's nice is is is as that grows, right. I mean launch. They were recovering 90% of the workload people are doing and then immediately were growing it. But you know where they're gonna take this in the future, we'll be able to tie in to some of the old ways with the old combo and bring in the new >>Do you have no 3 65 practice of this ties into our >>we do and we actually have been. We were so excited for this because we were You know, we've been looking for a way to package not only Office 3 65 which which combo has done so well in the past, but but really touch those other customers that we weren't normally getting into with it. And everybody, especially the smaller companies, are using office 3 65 Nowadays, nobody has exchange on site. So being able to reach those and have that holistic message ease of use, the user interfaces you were saying is just it's it takes, what do we what other companies were doing? And it just makes it so much simpler >>When I saw the child at 45 days. Don't normally see that often. It's a 15 day trial and maybe you could mix it up to 30 days. And one of the things I heard during your keynote this morning was no posies talk to me about that as a differentiator. >>Yeah, maybe we'll both handle this. So there's two things one in this next six months will be learning a bit. We're gonna evolve just like a sass product does being fresh. So >>that may >>change. But what we found in our talk was many of the customers many of the other says products and they don't even have Ah, you're up in 15 minutes. That's right. It is. And some of them they have 30 day trials, but they let you extend it forever. And so what we found is many customers want to try and end a month back up, so tying it to 15 days isn't enough time to look. I think the unique differentiator, what we did because we re mapped all our business systems is of Michael has a customer that he's brought into this trial. He's gonna be informed where they are in the trial. He's going to see they did a backup. So just because it is 45 days we've got all this communication flowing back to the partner, so they can immediately say, Hey, you've already done a backup. You done to restore What else do you need? And we absolutely certainly hope that Michael or someone else's serious can close it quicker. I don't >>know too many times. People with P O sees they download the code, and they immediately get pulled into something else. So now we have a checks and balances we can communicate with combo. We know where they are. If some stagnating, they've had it for a couple days, they've moved on to another project. They take a week's vacation, they can come back to it. We can. We can know that we can engage with them and say, Hey, can we help out in some way? >>And is this sorry? Starting with office 3 65 is that kind of door opener to employ servers PM's for metallic for those minions. >>So right now we have three offers. I didn't cover that, so we've got three separate offers, but they're all the same thing, but you can consume VM file sequel. You can buy that separately if you want to buy Officer 65 separately, you can or metallic and point back in recovery. So we have all three of those in the suite, and we do anticipate some customers will come in and buy one. We've seen some trial activity already since launch where there's customers trying two or three. So there's a lot of incentive for them to go with multiple products in this. All right, >>So Rob Com Bold already has its core product releasing on a 90 day cadence. But bring us inside. From a development standpoint, Metallica's now is. It's as product. How's that need to change your methodology? What? What can customers expect from kind of a release cadence and gives a little bit as to what you might expect kind of over next six months? Sure. >>So I have my own engineering team. Like I said, it's a start up. So we're doing using a Dev Dev ops agile approach. We have two week sprints, and so if there is something critical that we think, see, they're gonna be a differentiator, maybe add value to the partner experience on the business system aside, or make it just that much easier for the customer that much more secure. We absolutely have worked out how to bring fresh features in that don't disrupt our customers like all modern SAS products do. So it'll be a little bit different experience with the SAS product than, say, a perpetual product, because the touch that we have into the into the product ourselves. >>You know, when you talked about the customer experience a few minutes ago, Rob in terms of even the design of comfort ventures, we can't go toe any event. Whatever technology we're talking about, customer experiences table states right and and as customers, if you're you know, 90 consumer, what not you are a consumer in your regular life. And so there's all these expectations that come from. I could go on Amazon and get anything that I wanted in 16 hours in 24 hours, and then we go into by software as business folks. The same expectation presents the user experience. I'm glad that you brought that up. That's like I said, it's table stakes for any organizations. Make or break >>right. I think for us that was like most of our focus, and I think to your point, since they can kind of go anywhere now. Then go to Amazon, try something. Then they jump in. Go to Azure. We thought it was really important to connect with the partners because of partners with ones that have usually solve what, 5 to 10 different I your business problems. And so we thought it was a smart thing to not only do that quick trial, but really go to market 100% with partners because they're the ones that helped the customer kind of make sense of it. All people get in there, they get frustrated trying 10 different things. So we kind of wanted to have that balance with this sort off. >>Well, And what we love out of this, which is so unique in the industry, is if we have that relationship with them, we know where they're consuming data and storage in the cloud. And with combo with metallic, we can bring our own storage. That customer already has. But there's a lot of customers that don't have that yet. Maybe they just have office 3 65 They're dabbling and cloud. Make it easy. I can use their storage right away. So having both those options makes our value. Add your perfect, >>Rob. Maybe you call it be called SAS. Plus, Yes, up on the keynote. So in my mind, one of the beauties of sass is I don't want to worry about anything. You know, I care about my data on everything below that in the stack. You know, it's like, you know, ordering delivery pizza. You're taking care of everything. They're so snapping a copy onto my own data center stuff leveraging storage from AWS and azure. I understand you want flexibility and choice, but, you know, how do I get concerned that, you know, while you've just added a whole level of complexity that my customers shouldn't have to worry about >>Oh, that's that's a great question. S o its ass out of the box. So all the data, all the control plane in the cloud, the option to be SAS plus, what we found in talking and hearing from hundreds of people was and >>we thought >>they'd say the same thing you did, and there were a variety of them, the dead. But if some said, Hey, I've got a physics issue. I've got 200 terabytes on Prem. I like the simplicity of this or my companies Cloud Vendor A or a cloud vendor B. I don't like having a copy in that clown. I've already got my largest. Some people are buying us for a department. They've got the enterprise on one cloud vendor. So So Back, back rolling back out of the box ass sask plus there for those unique requirements. And that's why we talk about flexible in on the customers own terms. We don't force them all of the cloud if there's compliance or other needs. GDP are whatever they can go to that use case for that workload. That makes sense. >>So yeah. So the news yesterday, just Michael from you. What? Some of the feedback within some of the customers have been doing the trial. What are some of the things that you're hearing? It's already taking in and gleaning insights from how they're using it. >>Well, to be honest, what they found with some other SAS offerings was they were kind of pigeonholed into exactly what they offered and nothing more, nothing less and having the option of having ah ah transport method on Prem having your own cloud. All of these options, they were extremely happy to have they were like, we're no longer being forced yet. It was presented in a way that they don't feel overwhelmed with the different options. A CZ you're saying by default you have the storage one button check I enter in my credentials. Now I'm using my own storage. They make it very simple, works you through the entire thing. The Wizards, the way they have really simplified the program. I was really surprised from come up because I think the command center, the U I within within traditional combo did very good on simplifying things. And they took, like, How can you make it easier? And with you I for metallic is way. It really talks to the SAS customers >>where some of the expected business outcomes I'm thinking like lower TCO, you know, eliminated or lower storage hardware costs big improvements to like FT time. What are some of the things that you're expecting? Customers t claim. >>To be honest, I think the most exciting thing that I've heard for my customers is that they're able to doom or so they weren't backing up everything that they needed to back up because they didn't have time. They didn't have the expertise, and so now they're gonna be able to protect things they've never been able to do in the past, just because of those limitations, >>and hopefully be able to actually see the data and extract insights from that. >>And I think from the value perspective, what was already mentioned. If they already have infrastructure that they want a leverage, you don't have to go buy something else. A lot of the other offers in the market kind of make you buy. Assuming you want to go there. That's one the other one is. If you look at the market, there's a lot of point products out there, so they start using one. Maybe it's not metallic. That happens, and then it has a scale issue. Then they're buying something else. So I think having a portfolio that matches a lot of use cases versus just today for launching a point product, I wouldn't be so excited. But being ableto handle the most common workloads across the market, I think that's that's goodness for them from a complex in R A Y t o type perspective, >>exciting stuff, guys. Well, congratulations on the launch and the expansion of the markets the next year you gotta bring some metallic customers that we can really dig into it with them and see what's really going on. >>Yes, we're excited about that. >>Rob. Michael, thank you for joining me on >>the show >>today. We appreciate it. First. You minimum. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube from coma. Go 19.

(groovy music) >> From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Everyone, welcome to this special CUBE Conversation here in Palo Alto Studios for theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, host for theCUBE. We're here with special guest, Arijit Mukherji, who's the CTO of SignalFx, hot startup that's now growing very very fast in this cloud native world. Arijit, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Great to see you too again, John. >> So cloud growth is changing the landscape of the enterprise. We're seeing it obviously, it's no real surprise, Cloud 1.0 has happened, public cloud. Cloud 2.0 as we're calling it is changing the game, where you're seeing enterprise cloud really the focus. We're seeing cloud native really move the needle. Kubernetes has kind of created that abstraction, kind of standard, defacto standard, if you will, people getting around. So you're seeing the game changing from how apps are built. >> Right. >> To security and everything in between. So a new set of services, web services at scale has certainly change the game. You guys are in the middle of this with monitoring and observability. And I want you to help us understand the core problem enterprises are having today because they know it's coming. They know it's here. They got investments out there. The cloud has changed the game for the enterprise, what's the problem? >> Yeah, so you're absolutely right, John. So everybody's moving to this sort of the new way of doing things, right. So monoliths are gone. Microservices are in, containers are in. And you're going to have to do that because we know if you don't do that, you're going to get lapped right, by the competition. And so the challenge right now is how do you make that successful? And the challenge there is these new environments are much much more complex as you mentioned. And the question is unless you understand how these systems behave, how will you be able to run them successfully? So the challenge as far as monitoring and observability is concerned is I think it's critical that it be there for it to be able to sort of do this cloud transformation successfully. But it's a far more complex and hard challenge than it used to be. >> We've seen the evolution. Yeah, we've been covering that for 10 years. It's the 10th year of theCUBE. We'll be celebrating that at VMworld this year. You've seen wave one, lift and shift, do some basic stuff, not a lot of heavy lifting. No tinkering with some of the tech in there. Monitoring is great. And then you've got rearchitect. Let's get some cloud native. Let's see some Kubernetes. And then the next path is this complete microservices. This is where everyone's really excited about. >> That's right. >> This is where the complexity is. So I got to ask you, that changes the notion of monitoring and observability. So given that this shift is happening, rearchitecting to full microservices, what is observability in that equation? >> Right, so there's a very interesting difference between I think, monitoring and observability that I think I would like to touch upon here. So you know, back in the days of the monolith, it was what we called classic monitoring. Monitoring is about looking at things, looking for things that you know might happen. So for example, if I know my server might fall down, I will run a probe to make sure that it's up or not, right? But when you move to this new world, I mean, have you, if you look at any cloud native environment with all the microservices and containers, for example Amazon's S3 has 120 different microservices powering it behind it. Now, if you were to go and ask an engineer like what is the map or how are the data flow happening in that environment? I guarantee you, no one person can probably do that well. So then, monitoring doesn't work because I don't even know what to look for. So what's important is I be able to gather telemetry, have the information available so that the unknowns, the kind of things that I'm not expecting because it's just too complex or just unanticipated. Like that data will allow us to figure out what went wrong. So observability is about gathering telemetry and information so that we can deal with that complexity, understand problems as they behave because the world is no longer simple anymore. >> So overall, observability is just monitoring in a dynamic environment, what you're saying. 'Cause monitoring used to be simple. You know it's going on. Static routes. >> That's right. >> Set policy, get some alarms. Network management, basic stuff. >> Exactly like Nagios checks and what not, yup. >> Now, you're saying there's unknowns happening, unexpected things going on around the services. What would that be just as an example? >> Yeah, so for example, again with microservices, why are we doing it? Because we want smaller teams to be able to innovate quicker, faster, right. So instead of my monolith, let's say I have whatever, SignalFx has 50 different microservices powering it. Now each of these teams, they are deploying software on their own because the whole idea of Cloud 2.0 is that we are able to move faster. So what that means is individual chunks of my overall service are adapting or changing over time or evolving. And so that's the complexity, like it's actually a changing landscape. Like my map does not stay the same on an ongoing basis. That is fundamentally a big challenge. The other challenge that I would mention too is that how ephemeral things are getting. So all these microservices that are themselves adapting, they're also being deployed in containers and by Kubernetes. Where these containers, they keep popping up and down all the time. Like even on infrastructure on which we are running it's extremely dynamic, right. Containers, Lambdas, sort of serverless is another great example of that. So it's a very shifting sands is what we're standing on, in some sense, right. >> And a lot of times, we cover a lot of real time. And you can't just throw in logs, you got to have that in there. This begs the question, okay, so I get the complexity. I'm a customer or I'm someone who wants to really go down this observability track with you. Why is it important? What's in it for me? >> So in the end, without it, how will you succeed? So it's almost like will a pilot with blinders on, will he be able to fly an aircraft? The answer is no. Similarly, I mean we may want to move to this modern awesome environment, which lets us move fast but unless you have visibility into it, unless you can find when problems are happening, unless you can, when those problems happen, be able to find the root cause and remediate them quickly, you're not really going to be successful. And so that's really why observability is important because it allows us to not only sort of run this well but it also allows us to understand the user experience because in the end, we are all service providers, we have users, right. And so understand what the user's experience is like. So that's important. Understand the key business metrics. If you look at a lot of the talk track that's been going around in the circuit around error budgets, and SLIs, and SLOs, which are sort of important things. The whole idea is that we want to measure and monitor what's important to the business, to the user. And that's kind of what observability allows us to get. >> You know gone are the days of a few application servers and a database. >> That's right. >> So on the why is it important, I got to follow up and say from an operations perspective, what is the new reality, okay? Because we know there's going to be a lot of databases out there, and a lot of different applications. You mentioned some of the containerization, dynamic microservices. But what's the impact and what's the importance to the operation side of the equation with observability? >> So what's happening now is again, back in the monolith days, the operators, the IT staff, who were running those infrastructure, they were the ones who would implement monitoring, right. But if you see the way now these environments are structured, these organizations are structured, it's the developers who are building tools. They are the ones who are also running them. And in order for an organization to be able to move fast, they need to give powerful tools to their developers to do their job. And because there is no one person who knows the right way of doing things. So it's really about sort of democratizing that capability. So you will need to give powerful observability tools to the developers, the operators, who are also the new operators, to sort of make with it what they will, in the sense that they are ones who best understand the meaning of the data that's being collected. Because it's all very specific to individual microservices. So that's really a powerful observability platform is one that allows you to easily collect a lot of information, allows you to analyze, visualize it, and sort of treat it in a way to sort of it helps you answer the questions you want to answer. >> So you're saying that okay, ops gets monitoring and observability. But a new persona, user is a developer. >> That is correct. >> And what do they care about? 'Cause they just want it to be abstracted away. They're not really probably wake up and say, "Hey, I can't wait to look at observability." So is it more of a use, so talk about the developer dynamic 'cause this is, that seems like a new trend. >> Yes, it totally is. So things are becoming less about black box testing, and more about sort of observability being an end-to-end process. So let me tell you what I mean. So back in the day, let's say, I implemented, I deployed a monolith. It was a Java server. There were standard ways to check them as a black box. I could run probes, et cetera, to run a health check end point and whatnot, life was great. But now, that's obviously not good enough. Because as I mentioned, because of interactions, because of complexity, a black box testing doesn't even work because like I said, the whole environment is very dynamic. So what the pattern now is that as I said, observability is an end-to-end process in the sense that developers care about observability when they're writing the software. It is not an afterthought anymore. So as I'm writing, as I'm developing software, I think about well, when this thing goes out into the wild, how will I monitor it? What are the things that I care about as a developer? Because I understand the system the best. And so you instrument, you build systems for observability is I think a big change that's happening. And once that happens, when you are the one person, who also is able to best read that data. >> So while they're developing, they get these benefits inherently right there on the spot. >> That is correct. >> This is kind of consistent with the live programming trend that's really popular in some languages. Rather than doing all the debugging, post event, coming back to it. >> That's right. >> So making it very efficient seems to be a use case. >> Yes, you are absolutely right. It's one of the things I'll actually talk about a lot actually is you know, observability, what is it for? Is it just for telling me when my production is not working well? The answer is no. Even when I'm developing, I may want to know well, did I have a performance degradation? How do I know that the code that I wrote is good? So I use again the same telemetry that I'm going to use later, even during the development process to make sure that the code that I wrote works well. We do the same thing during deployment. Again, I deploy a version or a canary or a few of them. Are they running well, right? So it is not just about what's happening in production, it's about end-to-end from development and deployment up to production. >> And that's what developers want. They want it in the moment, right when they're coding. >> That's right. >> Taken care of. >> It's instant gratification, like everybody else wants. >> And more efficiency. They know it's going to break, they know the consequences, they can deal with that. >> Yes. >> This is awesome, so the next question I have for you is how do you implement observability? >> That's a great question. So you can think of it as sort of in two ways. One is the means through which you get it. So you get observability through metrics, through logs, through traces, through probes, et cetera. That's one way. Another one is I think I alluded to a little bit earlier is what are your goals? Because everybody's goals are different, right? And if you think about in that sense, then the sort of the purpose of observability are a few. A, is it allowing your teams to move faster? So I spoke about some of the process just about earlier. Are they able to deploy code with confidence, faster? When problems happen, how quickly are we able to then triage them? So the whole incident review process. That's kind of important, observability better help me with that. The user experience is also something very important. As I mentioned, observability is going sort of more up the stack, so to speak. And so being able to understand what the user experience is, is very important. Similarly, understanding from the business point of view, what does the business care about? For example, when I had that outage, how much loss did I have? How many eyeballs did I miss on my side? So I think one way to think about it, you need to have good processes, good tools. At the same time, you need to be clear about what your goals are, and make sure that sort of whatever you're implementing, sort of furthers those to some extent. >> I'd like to play a little CUBE game here with you, and walk through the observability myths and reality. >> Sure. >> I'll say the myth, and you can tell me the reality. Myth number one, having observability reduces incidents. >> No, actually it might increase it. Let me put it that way, I'll tell you why. So it's almost like in a human, I may be measuring someone's temperature or pulse rate like every day. Does that make the person less or more prone to health problems? Chances are it's going to be the same. I might actually find things that I was not aware of, right. So in that sense, just having observability does not necessarily change anything about the process. But what it will do though is when a problem does happen, it I have this treasure trove of data, which I can then use to quickly isolate the problem. So what it does is it shrinks the outage time, which is in the end, what's very very important. So while it may not reduce your outages, it will definitely make them better from the end user point of view. >> Second myth, buying a tool means you have observability. Reality? >> No. Having a doctor doesn't mean I am healthy. In the sense that I think a tool is very important. It's a very very important step but the question is how well adopted is the tool? What kind of data am I sending to the tool? How are the users, my engineers, how well versed are they in using it, right? And so there's a lot of other stuff associated with it. So tool selection is very important but I think adoption and making it a success within the organization is also very very important. >> Okay, final myth, observability is free or cheap. >> I wish, so. >> Well you're a for-profit company. >> That's exactly right. No, I think, I really feel that observability is almost like a, it's an associated function. As I mentioned earlier, if I'm going to be successful flying this plane, I need commensurate amount of other services that sort of help me make that successful. So in a way, one way to think about it is it is it scales up as complex and as large as your environment gets and justifiably so. Because there's various other reasons too because in a way, adopting new technologies all the time. So tools are getting just more and more complicated. My requirements are getting more complicated. And then another thing I would add is the quality of my service like the level, the quality of service that I provide, the higher bar I want, I probably am spending more on observability. But it's a justified cost. So I think it's not a fixed cost obviously. It grows with your complexity and the kind of quality that you want to provide. >> Well, it's also, I mean I think the observability challenge with the complexity is there's a hidden cost though if you're not observing the right areas. >> Yes. >> The cost of not having that visibility, as a blind spot, could have business benefits, I mean not benefits, but consequences in a sense of outages, security, I mean there's a lot of different things that you got to have the observation space being enterprise. >> You totally have to do that. It's actually one thing we like to say is that instrument first, ask questions later. Now, coming from a for-profit vendor, it may sound sort of self-serving. But it's kind of not so too in the sense that I mean hindsight is 20-20. If I am stuck in a bad situation, I have no telemetry to sort of fall back on. Then where do I go with it? So I think we should be more conservative and sort of try and instrument the things that we think might be applicable, the kind of questions I may want to ask when a rainy day comes. So I think you're absolutely right. So it has to be something. It's a philosophy that developers, engineers, should sort of imbibe and they should then practice it as part of their sort of own workflows. >> I want to get into where company should invest in observability but I want to just throw a wildcard question at you, which is when you look at the big data space, even go back 10 years ago to now, cloud, there's always been they're talking about tool versus platform. And anything that's been data centric tend to be platform like conversations, not a tool. Tool can be like okay, it does a thing, does it really well, a hammer, everything's a nail with the hammer. But there's more dynamic range required 'cause you're talking about observation space, talking about cloud, horizontally scalable, hybrid on-premises. >> That's right. >> So again, it kind of feels like a platform technical challenge. >> You're absolutely right. So I think two factors at play if you ask my opinion. One is if you were interested in monitoring, a tool is perfect, right? Because you kind of know what you want. If a tool does that well, there's more power to it. But if you don't know what you want, if you are basically collecting stuff and you're depending on it as a way to answer questions on the unknown unknowns as Charity Majors like to say, then you do need a platform. Because that platform needs to be sort of inclusive. It must have data of different types, all be able to come into it. It's not really meant for a specific purpose. It's meant to be a generic tool. So we do see this trend in the industry towards more sort of a platform approach to this. Obviously, they will have tool-like capabilities because they're answering sort of particular use cases, et cetera. But the underlying platform, the more powerful it is, I think the better it is in the long run. >> Yeah and the argument there could be if it's an enabling platform, you can create abstraction layers for visualization. >> That's correct. >> Or APIs, other services. >> That's exactly right, yes. >> Okay, so now, I'm interested. I want to get started. How do I invest in good observability? I'm crossing the chasm, I'm going to full microservices. I've done a rearchitect, my team has got cultural buy-in. We're hiring, we're building our own stack, we're going to have on-premise, we'll be in the cloud. In some cases, fully cloud. What do I do, what do I invest? What's my play book? >> Sure, so I think we talked about the first one a little bit. So you have to choose the right tool. And the right tool in my opinion is not the one that does the best job now. When maybe I'm small, I'm not fully there yet. We have to think about what's the right tool or the right platform for when I'm, where for where I do want to go. Now, that may be commercial, that may be open source, that's not the point. But the point is that we need to have a very considered thought about what is it that we're betting the farm on, right. So that's number one. But that's not good enough. So as I mentioned, we need to make sure that there is a usage and understanding of the tool within the organization. So a big part of it is just around the practice and the culture of observability within the organization. So for example, good habits like every time we have an incident, you speak about these are the things that we measure, this is how we use our observability tool, here are the dashboards that we depended on. Sort of reinforcing those concepts over and over again so that those who are on board, they are obviously doing it right. Those who are not, they see the value and they start sort of using those good practices. That's kind of very important. The third thing I would say is start moving towards more higher level monitoring, observability. So measure the user experience, measure what's important to the business. Stuff like that are important. The fourth area that's sort of very very key is around sort of the whole incident management process. This is actually a very active topic. A lot of discussion going on out there right now is you know, it's great that I have this great tool, I have all this telemetry. I found there was a problem. But when that incident happened, there are a lot of again good practices. This is part of the whole culture and process of observability is how do we make that process smooth and standardized, and sort of become more efficient at it, right? And let's say you were to do that, the final sort of end goal is as we like to call is a self-running or a self-automated cloud, where do we really need humans in all of this? How can we sort of run remediation in a more and more automated fashion? At least for the stuff that maybe does not require a human intelligence, right? Actually, you'll find that 80, 90% of issues probably don't. If you think hard about it, don't require human. So I think this move towards automation is also another sort of very fantastic trend. I've seen that being very successful in the past. Some of my old companies. And I think that's going to be a trend in later stage. >> Yeah, for known processes, people and process. >> Yup. >> That's where problems come. Bad process or code and people mistakes. You can automate that. Mundane tasks or on differentiated kind of heavy lifting. >> That is exactly right because you know, there was this interesting study done that was commissioned by Stripe, where they found that among the CXOs, they value engineers and developers more than money. Because getting them, because they are such a scarce resource. So if you do get them, you probably don't want them to sort of run and do mundane things. That's not what you hired them for. So you want them to do the work of the business, and the more you can isolate them from sort of the mundane and they have automation come into play, I think it's just better across the board. >> Oh, they're investing more from the CSOs and the CIOs we talked to. >> Right. >> There's more investments in-house now for real development, real software development, real projects. And those top talent, they want to work on the toughest problem. >> That's exactly, that's why we're moving to a SASS future right? Because all the function that are not core to my business, I want to farm off and have somebody else take care of them. >> So you got me sold on observability, I'm a big believer in the observation space. And I certainly think cloud as they're horizontally scalable, elastic resource, and certainly, the Kubernetes trends with service measures and all the stuff going on, Kubeflow, and a bunch of other things. More and more services are going to be very dynamic. >> Yes. >> So you're going to have a lot of unknown and unusual patterns. >> That's right. >> That's just the way the internet works now. So you had me sold on that. Now, I need to get my team to the next level. They bought into devops. How do I take the temperature of where our IQ is in the life cycle of observability? Because I got to know where I am. Is there a way I can track my maturity or progress? >> Yes, yes, it's a topical question because I go out and I meet a lot of prospects and customers. And it's part of my job. And a lot of times, because sort of we are sort of in the leading edge, they will ask us, they look to us to tell them like are we doing it right? Or how did you guys do it? So just so that sharing of information, how can we get better? So as part of that, we actually, at SignalFx, we actually built a maturity model. It's a way for us to sort of evaluate ourselves across various dimensions to see how well are we doing? Not only, it's not just the score, it's also about how well are we doing? But how can we improve? Like if you wanted to go to the next level of maturity for example, like what are some of the things that we can do? And it spans multiple dimension. It starts with how are we even collecting data, right? How easy is it, in other words, for somebody starting a new service or using a new software to get to the business of observability? That's kind of important. You got the data, how will am I able to visualize it? Because effective visualization is as you can understand, very important. The next part comes with alerting. So well, things are running. I know how they're going. How well can I detect when problems are happening? How soon can I detect when problems are happening? What kind of items can I monitor? Can I monitor the low-level things? Or can I monitor the higher-level constructs? When the problem happen, let's talk about remediation. How quickly can I triage the problem to find out where it was? What kind of tools and slice-and-dice capabilities do I have? That's an important part of it. Let's say I did it. After that comes things like remediation. So I found the problem, how well can I remediate so like we talked about automation. So there is multiple different categories where we sort of, we talked about what, we've seen in the field in terms of what people are doing as well as some of the best practices. >> So you're going to make this tool available to customers? >> Yes, we have, it's actually available on our website. And if you come to our website, you'll be able to sort of run the assessment, as well as sort of see all of it yourself. >> Well, we've been following you guys since you launched. You've got a great management team, great technical chops, we've covered that. And this observability is a real trend as it moves into more complexity as we talked about. Most customers that are getting into this are trying to sift this from the signal, from the noise, and trying to think, decide who is the leader, and who is not. So how would you describe what a leader in enterprise observability looks like from a supplier's standpoint. You guys are one, you want to be the leader. You're the market leader. >> Right. >> What does a leader look like from a customer's standpoint? What are the things that have to be in place? What are the table stakes to be that leader? >> Sure, that's a great question. And yeah, so we did, SignalFx, we did build SignalFx to be a leader in this space, frankly. And there's a lot of different aspects that goes behind like what creates a good supplier in this space. One is I think you have to be open and flexible. Like you have to be, it's a platform play. You better be able to collect data from all the systems that are out there. The kind of the quality of the integration is very important. Another big thing we're finding is scale. A lot of these systems might not work when you move to sort of large numbers. And the problem that we are seeing is while I may have a hundred servers, I may be running 10,000 containers in those hundred servers. So now, everybody is a scale player, right. So the question is will your platform really be able to handle the complexity and the load? So that's an important one. Analytics as we mentioned is another very very important capability. I'll like to say that the ability to do analytics is not just good enough. How easy is it to use? Like are you developers and engineers, are they even using it? So the easy and the capability of analytics is important because that's kind of what allows us to measure those KPIs, those SLIs, those business metrics. And so that's kind of important. Slice-and-dice capability like how fast is the tool? Because when that outage happens, I don't want to run a five-minute query to sort of find some suspicion or you know to. And so the question is how quickly will it answer these ad hoc questions for me when the problem happens? So sort of the whole triage process that I talked about. The ability to support automation is one. The ability to, as I mentioned to take in different types of data, traces, metrics, be able to play with logs. All of those are sort of important aspects of it, yeah. >> Final question for you. If a customer says, "I'm going to cross the bridge "to the future with SignalFx." What's some of the head room? What's some of the futures that you would expect the customer to imagine or expect down the road as observability becomes more scalable? I can imagine the metrics are going to be all over the place. >> Yes. >> A lot of unusual patterns. New apps could come in that could be hits. And new data comes in. So as you take them today in observability, what's the next level, to cross that bridge to the future? >> Sure, sure. >> What's the next expectation? >> I think one thing will be to expect the unexpected. Because the world is changing so fast, I think you would probably be running things that you won't expect later. But a few things, I would say yes. So I think the proliferation of metrics and traces is like a big trend, where we see there used to be this dependence on sort of these monoliths and APM that sort of is transforming a little bit. There is this also this concept of using data science and artificial intelligence to come to bear on this space. So that's actually an interesting trend we see, where the idea is that it's hard because it's a complex system. It's hard for humans to define exactly what they want. But if the system can help them, can help identify things, that's actually really fantastic. Another one that we sort of briefly touched upon is automation or self-automated systems, where I think well, the time you're going to see that platforms like ours are going to help you automate much of this in a safe manner, because these are controlled systems, where if you, things can go awry and that's not a good position to be. So these are some exciting areas, where I think you will see some development down the road. >> And we've been seeing a lot of conversation around correlation and causation, and the interplay between those as these services are being stood up, torn down, stood up, torn down. You can look at the numbers all day long but you got to know causation, correlation. >> You bet, you bet because I think a lot of times, we naively think about this as a data problem, right? Where I find the kink in the graph, and if I go looking, I'll probably going to find a hundred different things that were sort of also correlated. Some of them may or may not be related to it. So I think a good tool is one that sort of gives you a sense. It sort of creates a boundary around the data set that it needs to look at, that is sort of relevant to your problem, and able to give you clues to causation. That you're exactly right because again, complexity is a hard problem to deal with. And anything that we can do to sort of help you short-circuit some of the pain is awesome. >> And I think you're on the right track with this developer focus because devops has proven that the developers want to code, build apps, and abstract away the complexity. And certainly, it's complex. >> That's right, that's right. It's fairly complex. >> Arijit, thanks for coming on. Arijit Mukherji, the CTO of SignalFx here inside the special CUBE Conversation breaking down the future of observability, where monitoring is going to the next level, certainly with cloud, impact to enterprise cloud. I'm John Furrier, here on theCUBE. Thanks for watching. >> Thank you. (groovy music)

>> Live from Boston, Massachusetts. It's theCube. Covering AWS Reinforce 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and its ecosystem partners. >> Hello everyone. Welcome back to the live Cube coverage here in Boston, Massachusetts for AWS, Amazon Web Services Reinforce with their inaugural conference around security, I'm (mumbles). We've got two great guests, from Splunk, Cube alumnis, and also, we do the Cube coverage Dot Conf., their annual conference, Haiyan Song, SVP, General Manager Security Market, Oliver Freidrichs, Vice President of Security Products, formerly with a company you sold to Splunk, doing Security Phantom, which was mentioned in the partner summit, so congratulations. Great to see you guys. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for having us. >> So you guys are a really great example of a company that's been constantly innovating, on top of AWS, as a partner, differentiating, continuing to do business, and been successful. All the talk about Amazon could compete with partners, there's always been that myth. You guys have been operating successfully, got great customers on AWS, now you have the security conference, so now it's like a whole new party for you guys. 'Cause you don't go off to reinvent anymore, certainly, the big event, what do you guys think about all this Reinforce focus? >> First of all, I'm just super impressed. The size, the scale, and the engagement from the ecosystem that they have over here, and I think, you know you mentioned we've been really partnering and being successful. I think the secret is really about, just be very customer-focused. It's about what the customer needs, it's not what does each of us need, and when we have that focus, we know how to partner, we know how to engage. One of the examples that we have here is we're partnering up as the capture the flag exercise and it's powered by Splunk, it's put up by AWS Reinforce, and we wanted to bring the best user engagement, gamification of learning to this audience. >> And there's a demand for a security conference because a new breed, a new generation of engineering and enterprises as they move to DevOps, with security, all those same principals now apply, but the stakes are higher because you got to share data, you got to get the data, it's the data-driven problem. You guys are thinking outside-- I think four years ago at Dot Conf, the cyber security focus front and center, mainstream. >> Very much so. And I think for us, security is a big part of our user conference, too. But we're getting inspirations from this event and how we can further, really implify that message for our customers. But we're just so glad we're part of this, thank you for having us. >> We're glad, big love covering you, big success story. Oliver, I want to get to you on the Phantom. Yesterday it was mentioned in a great demo of the security hub, security hub's the big news here, it's one of their major announcements, what is a security hub? >> Yeah, so security hub, and you're right it was just announced that it reached general availability, which means it's available now to the rest of the world. It's a place to centralize a lot of your security management in AWS. So when you have detections, or Amazon calls them findings, coming from other security servers so they're centralized in security hub, where you can then inspect them, take action, investigate them. And one of the reasons we're here, is we've established an integration with security hub, where you can now take a finding coming from security hub, pull it into Splunk Phantom, and run an automation playbook to be able to, at machine speed, take action on a threat. So typically, you know if you're a human, you're looking at an event, and you're deciding what do I do, well I might want to go an suspend an AMI or go and move that AMI or change the access control group to a different access control group so that AMI can only communicate with a certain protected network if it's infected. Automation lets you do that instantaneously, so if you have an attacker who unfortunately may have gained control of your AMI, this allows you to react immediately, very very quickly to take action in that environment. >> And this is where the holes are in the network, and its administrative errors and (mumbles) sittin' out there that someone just configure it, now they're like, they could be out there, no one knows. >> Exactly. >> Could be just tired, I didn't configure it properly. But you guys were in the demos, I want to get your reaction that, because I was sittin' in the room, they highlighted Phantom in the demo. >> That's right. >> And so that was super important. Talk about that integration. What's actually going on under the covers there. >> Yeah, so at a basic level, we're pulling findings through the security hub API, into the automation platform. And then at that point, a playbook kicks off. And a playbook is basically, think of it as a big if this/then that statement. You see a threat, and you go and take a number of actions. You might go and block a port, you might go an suspend that AMI, you might go and disable a user, but you basically build that logic up based on a known threat, and you decide, here's what I'm going to do when I see this threat, and I'm going to turn that into a codified playbook that you can then run very rapidly. On the back end, we've had to integrate with a dozen other APIs like EC2, S3, Guard Duty and others to be able to take action in the environment as well to remediate threats, like changing the access control list or group on a resource. So it's closing that end-to-end loop. >> Hold on, Dave , one quick question on that followup. Then the SISO came in from Capital One and was off the record with this comment, was not really a sensitive comment, but I want to highlight and your both reaction to this. He says in terms of workforce and talent, mentality, 'cause the question came up about talent and whatnot, he sees a shift from better detection to better alerts, because of some of the demos, and implying, kind of connecting the dots, that the trend is to automate the threat detections the way you guys had demoed with Phantom, and then he was tying it back to, from a resource perspective, it frees his team up to do other things. This is a real trend. You agree with that statement? >> Absolutely. >> What's your thoughts? >> Honestly, we believe that we can be automating up to 90% of the level one analysts. There's a lot of routine route work that's done today in the SOC, and it's unforgiving, nobody wants to be a Tier One analyst, they all want to get promoted or go somewhere else, because it's literally a rat race. >> It's boring and it's repetitive, you just automate it. >> Who wants to do that, so we can automate that, we can free up about 50% of the analysts' time to actually focus on proactive activities, things that actually matter, like hunting, research and other development, writing counter-measures, versus the continually keeping up and drinking from a fire hose. >> So I wonder if we could talk about how Splunk has evolved. You guys started before cloud, which came in 2006 and then really took off later, before the sort of big data craze, and you guys mopped up in big data. You never really use that term in your marketing, but you kind of became the big data leader defacto, you got an IPO with actually relatively, by today's comparisons, small raises, >> Compared to today, yeah, yeah (laughs). >> Incredibly successful story, very capital-efficient. But then the cloud comes in, you mopped up on prem, how would you describe how the cloud has changed your strategy, obviously you go out an acquire companies heavily focused on automation, but how would you describe your cloud strategy and how has that changed Splunk? >> That's a great question. I think the fact that you have so many people here, just tells you that the whole industry is going through this transformation. Not only the digital transformation, the cloud transformation. And I'm glad you mentioned our root, it's all about big data, and nowadays security, in many ways, is actually more about data than anything else. 'Cause the data represents your business, and you protect your data, how do you leverage the data, represents your security strategy. The evolution for us, when you zero that into cloud is, we have really been a very early adopter of cloud, we've been providing cloud services for our customers from the very beginning, at least six years ago when we introduced a product called Storm and we continued to evolve that as the technology evolved, we evolved that with customers. So nowadays you probably know cloud is one of our fastest-growing segments of our business. The technology team has been really innovating, really really fast. How do we take a technology that we built for on-prem, how do we rebuilt it to be cloud-native, to be elastic, to be secure in the new way of DevOps. Those are some of the super exciting things we're doing as a company, and on the security side we're also, how do we help customers secure a hybrid world? 'Cause we truly believe the world going to stay hybrid for a long long time and we have companies like AWS really sort of pioneering and focusing and doing things great for the cloud, we still have a lot of customers who need companies and technologies and solutions like what Splunk bring in to bridge the world. >> I want to get you guys' thoughts on some comments we've had with some SISOs in the past, and I really can't say the names probably, but one of them, she was very adamant around integration. And now when you're dealing with an ecosystem, integration's been a big part of the conversation, and the quote was, on integration, "have APIs and "don't have it suck." And we evaluate peoples' integration based upon the qualities of their APIs. Implying that APIs are an integration point. You guys have a lot of experience with APIs, your thoughts on this importance of integration and the roles that APIs play, because that's, again, feeds automation, again it's a key, central component of the conversations these days. Integration, your reaction to that. >> So, maybe I'll start. I'd say we would not have had the success of Phantom Cyber or the Soar market, if not for having those APIs. 'Cause automation was not a new concept. It's been tried and probably not succeeded for many times, and the reason that we've been experiencing this great adoption and success with Phantom technology is because the availability of APIs. I think the other thing I would just add, I'm sure he has lot of experience in working that, Splunk was always positioned ourself as we want to be the neutral party, to bring everything together. And nowadays we're so glad we're doin' the integration, not only on the data side, which is still important. Bring the data, bring the dark data and shining a light on top of that, but also turning that into action through this type of API integration. >> So good investment, betting on integration years ago. >> Absolutely. >> Early on. >> We also change our culture. We previously say how many apps we have in our Splunk base. Now with Oliver being part of the team, Phantom being part of the portfolio, we say how many apps and how many APIs we had to integrate. That a change of metrics. >> All right, Oliver. It's up to you now. I'm sure you know I know where you stand on this, APIs being, a renaissance of APIs going to the next level, 'cause a lot of new things goin' on with Kubernetes and other things. You've got State now, you got Stateless, which is classic rest APIs, but now you got State data that's going to play a big role. Your thoughts on that, don't make the APIs suck, and we're going to evaluate vendors based upon how good their API is. >> Yeah, I think, look it's a buying decision today. It's a procurement decision whether or not you have open APIs. I think buyers are forcing us as an industry, as vendors, to have APIs that don't suck. We're highly motivated to have APIs that work well. >> That sounds like a t-shirt ready to come out (laughs) >> That's a great idea. >> The Cube API's coming, by the way. >> What does that mean, to have APIs that don't suck? >> So the, a great definition I heard recently was, the API that you use as a vendor to interface with your product should be the same API that customers can use to interface with your product. And if all of a sudden they're different, and you're offering a lesser API to customers, that's when they start sucking. As long as you're eating your own dog food, I think that's a good definition. >> So it's not neutered, it's as robust, and as granular. >> Exactly, exactly. And I think what, 20 years ago there were no APIs in security. To do what we do today, to automate all of this security response techniques that we do today, it wasn't even possible. We had to get to a certain level of API availability to even get to this stage. And today, again, unless, if you're a black box, people aren't going to buy your product anymore. >> Yeah, so, again, go the next level is visibility's another topic. So if you open the APIs up, the data's gettin' better, so therefore you can automate the level one alert, threat detections, move people up to better alerting, better creativity, then begs the question, at what point does the visibility increase? What has to happen in the industry to have that total shared environment around data sharing, because open APIs implies sharing of data. Where visibility could be benefited greatly . >> Yeah, I think visibility is really the key. You can't measure what you can't, you can't manage what you can't measure, and you can't, you have to see everything in your environment, your assets, users, devices, and all of your data. So visibility is essential. And it comes in a number of forms. One is getting access to your policy data, your configuration data, seeing how are my things configured? What assets do I have? Where are my S3 buckets? How many AMIs do I have? Who owns them? How many accounts do I have? I think that was one of the challenges before, probably the last three to four years, before that period, enterprises were setting up a lot of these shadow cloud environments, 'cause you could buy Amazon with your credit card, essentially. So that was one of the problems that we would see in the enterprise, when a developer would go and create their own Amazon environment. So getting visibility into that is really been a big advancement in the last few years. Finding those things. >> The birth of multi-cloud. Go ahead John. >> Doesn't make it easier. >> We were talking earlier in our intro Dave and I on the keynote analysis around you can configure it, you can secure it, and then we were riffing on the DevOps movement, which essentially decimated the configuration management landscape. Which was at that time a provisioning issue around developers. They'd have to essentially stand up and manage the network, and go and make sure the ports are all there, and they got load balances are in place, and that was a developer's job. Infrastructure as code took that away. That was a major bottom, hierarchical needs, that was the lowest need. Now with security, if DevOps can take away the configuration management and infrastructure as code, it's time for security to take away a lot of the configuration or security provisioning, if you will. So the question is, what are some of those security provisioning, heavy liftings, tasks that are going to be taken away when developers don't have to worry about security? So as this continues with cloud native, it becomes security native. As a developer, and I don't want to get in and start configuring stuff. I want the security team to magically, security as code, as Dave said. Where are we on that? What's your guys' thoughts on getting to that point? Is it coming soon? Is it here now? What are some of those provisioning tasks that are going to be automated away? >> I think we made a lot of progress in that area already. The ability to simply configure your environment, that Amazon has continued to add layers of check boxes and compliance that allow you to configure the environment far more seamlessly than having to go down into the granular access control list and defining a granular access control policy on your network ports or AMIs, for example. So I think the simplification of that has improved pretty dramatically. And even some of the announcements today in terms of adding more capabilities to do that. Encryption by default. I don't have to go configure my encryption on my data at rest. It's there. And I don't even have to think about it. So if someone steals a physical hard drive, which is very difficult to begin with, out of an Amazon data center, my data's encrypted, and nobody can get access to that. I don't even have to worry about that. So that's one of the benefits that I think the cloud adds, is there's a lot of default security built in that ends up normalizing security and actually making the cloud far more secure than traditional corporate environments and data centers. >> Well I still think you have to opt in, though. Isn't that what I heard? >> Opt in, yes. I would just add to that, I think it's like a rising tides. So the cloud is making lot of the infrastructure side more secure, more native, and then that means we need to pay more attention to the upper level applications and APIs, and identities, and access controls. I think the security team continue to have lot of jobs. Even yesterday they said well, not only we need to do what we need to do to secure the AWS, we also now get involved in every decision, all the other compa-- you know, like functions are doing, taking new sort of SASS services. So I guess message is the security professional continue to have jobs, and your job going to be more and more sophisticated, but more and more relevant to the business, so that I think is the change. >> So question. Oliver, you described what a good API experience is, from a customer perspective, Haiyan, you talked about hybrid. Can you compare the on prem experience with the cloud experience for your customers and how and they coming together? >> You want me to try that first? >> Sure. >> Okay. So, I think lot of the things that people have learned to protect or defend, or do detection response in the on prem world, is still very relevant in the cloud world. It's just the cloud world, I think it's just now really transforming to become more DevOps-centric. How you should design security from the get-go, versus in the on prem world was more okay, let's try to figure out how to monitor this thing, because we didn't really give lot of thoughts to security at the very beginning. So I think that is probably the biggest sort of mentality or paradigm shift, but on the other hand, people don't go and just flip into one side versus the other, and they still need to have a way of connecting what's happening in the current world, the current business, the one that's bring home the bacon, to the new world that's going to bring home the bacon in the future. So they're both really important for them. And I think having a technology as AWS and their whole ecosystem, that all embracing that hybrid world and ecosystem plate no one sort of single vendor going to do all of them, and pick the right solutions to do what you do. So in security, I think it's, you going to continue to evolve, to become more, when the security's built in, what is the rising tide that's going to dictate the rest of the security vendors do. You cannot just think as 10 years ago, five years ago, even two years ago. >> So that bolt-on mentality in the first decade of the millennium was a boon for Splunk. It was beautiful. 'Cause we got to figure out what happened, and you provided the data to show that. How does Splunk differentiate from all the guys that are saying "oh yeah, Splunk, they're on prem, we're the cloud guys." What's your story there? >> Our story is you can't really sort of secure something if you don't have experience yourself. Splunk cloud is probably one of the top, say 10 customers of AWS. We live in the cloud, we experience the cloud, we use the word drink, you know, like eat our own dog food, we like to say we drink our own champagne, if you will, so that's really driving lot of our technology development and understanding the market and really built that into our data platform, build that into our monitoring capabilities, and build that into the new technologies. How, you know, it's all about streaming, it's not about just somebody sending you information. It's about, in a hybrid world, how do you do it in a way that you, we have a term called the distributed data fabric search, because data is never going to be in one place, or even sort of in one cloud. How do we enable that access so you can get value? From a security perspective, how do we integrate with companies and solutions that's so native into the cloud, so you have the visibility not and the Bodong, but from the very beginning. >> So you're saying that cloud is not magic for a software company, it's commitment and it's a cultural mindset. >> Absolutely. >> Guys, thanks so much for comin' on, great to see you, we'll see you at Dot Conf, the Cube will be there this year again, I think for the seventh straight year. Oliver, congratulations on your product success, and mention as part of the AWS security hub presentation. >> Thank you. >> Good stuff from Splunk. Splunk is inside the Cube, explaining, extracting the signal from the noise, from one of the market-leading companies in the data business, now cyber security, I'm with (mumbles), we'll be back with more Cube coverage after this short break. (techno music)

>> Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE. Covering Informatica World 2019, brought to you by Informatica. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Informatica World. I am your host, Rebecca Knight, along with co-host, John Furrier. We have two guests for this segment. We have Abhiman Matlapudi. He is the Product Master at Deloitte. Welcome. >> Thanks for having us. >> And we have Kubalahm Rajeev Krishnan, Specialist Leader at Deloitte. Thank you both so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks Rebecca, John. It's always good to be back on theCUBE. >> Love the new logos here, what's the pins? What's the new take on those? >> It looks like a honeycomb! >> Yeah, so interesting that you ask, so this is our joined Deloitte- Informatica label pin. You can see the Deloitte green colors, >> Nice! They're beautiful. >> And the Informatica colors. This shows the collaboration, the great collaboration that we've had over, you know, the past few years and plans, for the future as well. Well that's what we're here to talk about. So why don't you start the conversation by telling us a little bit about the history of the collaboration, and what you're planning ahead for the future. Yeah. So, you know, if we go like you know, ten years back the collaboration between Deloitte and Informatica has not always been that, that strong and specifically because Deloitte is a huge place to navigate, and you know, in order to have those meaningful collaborations. But over the past few years, we've... built solid relationships with Informatica and vise versa. I think we seek great value. The clear leaders in the Data Management Space. It's easy for us to kind of advise clients in terms of different facets of data management. You know, because no other company actually pulls together you know, the whole ecosystem this well. >> Well you're being polite. In reality, you know where it's weak and where it's real. I mean, the reality is there's a lot of fun out there, a lot of noise, and so, I got to ask you, cause this is the real question, because there's no one environment that's the same. Customers want to get to the truth faster, like, where's the deal? What's the real deal with data? What's gettable? What's attainable? What's aspirational? Because you could say "Hey, well I make data, data-driven organization, Sass apps everywhere." >> Yeah. Yeah absolutely. I mean every, every company wants to be more agile. Business agility is what's driving companies to kind of move all of their business apps to the Cloud. The uh, problem with that is that, is that people don't realize that you also need to have your data management governance house in order, right, so according to a recent Gartner study, they say by next year, 75% of companies who have moved their business apps to the Cloud, is going to, you know, unless they have their data management and data assets under control, they have some kind of information governance, that has, you know, context, or purview over all of these business apps, 50% of their data assets are going to erode in value. So, absolutely the need of the hour. So we've seen that great demand from our clients as well, and that's what we've been advising them as well. >> What's a modern MDM approach? Because this is really the heart of the conversation, we're here at Informatica World. What's- What does it look like? What is it? >> So I mean, there are different facets or functionalities within MDM that actually make up what is the holistic modern MDM, right. In the past, we've seen companies doing MDM to get to that 360-degree view. Somewhere along the line, the ball gets dropped. That 360 view doesn't get combined with your data warehouse and all of the transaction information, right, and, you know, your business uses don't get the value that they were looking for while they invested in that MDM platform. So in today's world, MDM needs to provide front office users with the agility that they need. It's not about someone at the back office doing some data stewardship. It's all about empowering the front office users as well. There's an aspect of AIML from a data stewardship perspective. I mean everyone wants cost take out, right, I mean there's fewer resources and more data coming in. So how how do you manage all of the data? Absolutely you need to have AIML. So Informatica's CLAIRE product helps with suggestions and recommendations for algorithms, matching those algorithms. Deloitte has our own MDM elevate solution that embeds AIML for data stewardship. So it learns from human data inputs, and you know, cuts through the mass of data records that have to be managed. >> You know Rajeev, it was interesting, last year we were talking, the big conversation was moving data around is really hard. Now there's solutions for that. Move the data integrity on premise, on Cloud. Give us an update on what's going on there, because there seems to be a lot of movement, positive movement, around that. In terms of, you know, quality, end to end. We heard Google up here earlier saying "Look, we can go into end to end all you want". This has been a big thing. How are you guys handling this? >> Yeah absolutely, so in today's key note you heard Anil Chakravarthy and Thomas Green up on the stage and Anil announced MDM on GCP, so that's an offering that Deloitte is hosting and managing. So it's going to be an absolutely white-glove service that gives you everything from advice to implement to operate, all hosted on GCP. So it's a three-way ecosystem offering between Deloitte, Informatica, and GCP. >> Well just something about GCP, just as a side note before you get there, is that they are really clever. They're using Sequel as a way to abstract all the under the hood kind of configuration stuff. Smart move, because there's a ton of Sequel people out there! >> Exactly. >> I mean, it's not structured query language for structured data. It's lingua franca for data. They've been changing the game on that. >> Exactly, it should be part of their Cloud journey. So organizations, when they start thinking about Cloud, first of all, what they need to do is they have to understand where all the data assets are and they read the data feeds coming in, where are the data lakes, and once they understand where their datas are, it's not always wise, or necessary to move all their data to the Cloud. So, Deloitte's approach or recommendation is to have a hybrid approach. So that they can keep some of their legacy datas, data assets, in the on premise and some in the Cloud applications. So, Informatica, MDM, and GCP, powered by Deloitte, so it acts as an MDM nimble hub. In respect of where your data assets are, it can give you the quick access to the data and it can enrich the data, it can do the master data, and also it can protect your data. And it's all done by Informatica. >> Describe what a nimble hub is real quick. What does a nimble hub mean? What does that mean? >> So it means that, in respect of wherever your data is coming in and going out, so it gives you a very light feeling that the client wouldn't know. All we- Informatica, MDM, on GCP powered by Deloitte, what we are saying is we are asking clients to just give the data. And everything, as Rajeev said, it's a white-glove approach. It's that from engagement, to the operation, they will just feel a seamless support from Deloitte. >> Yeah, and just to address the nimbleness factor right, so we see clients that suddenly need to get into new market, or they want to say, introduce a new product, so they need the nimbleness from a business perspective. Which means that, well suddenly you've got to like scale up and down your data workloads as well, right? And that's not just transactional data, but master data as well. And that's where the Cloud approach, you know, gives them a positive advantage. >> I want to get back to something Abhiman said about how it's not always wise or necessary to move to the Cloud. And this is a debate about where do you keep stuff. Should it be on on prem, and you said that Deloitte recommends a hybrid approach and I'm sure that's a data-driven recommendation. I'm wondering what evidence you have and what- why that recommendation? >> So, especially when it depends on the applications you're putting on for MDM, and the sources and data is what you are trying to get, for the Informatica MDM to work. So, it's not- some of your social systems are already tied up with so many other applications within your on premise, and they don't want to give every other data. And some might have concerns of sending this data to the Cloud. So that's when you want to keep those old world legacy systems, who doesn't want to get upgrades, to your on premise, and who are all Cloud-savy and they can all starting new. So they can think of what, and which, need a lot of compute power, and storage. And so those are the systems we want to recommend to the Cloud. So that's why we say, think where you want to move your data bases. >> And some of it is also driven by regulation, right, like GDPR, and where, you know, which providers offer in what countries. And there's also companies that want to say "Oh well my product strategy and my pricing around products, I don't want to give that away to someone." Especially in the high tech field, right. Your provider is going to be a confidere. >> Rajeev, one of the things I'm seeing here in this show, is clearly that the importance of the Cloud should not be understated. You see, and you guys, you mentioned you get the servers at Google. This is changing not just the customers opportunity, but your ability to service them. You got a white-glove service, I'm sure there's a ton more head room. Where do you guys see the Cloud going next? Obviously it's not going away, and the on premise isn't going away. But certainly, the importance of the Cloud should not be understated. That's what I'm hearing clearly. You see Amazon, Azure, Google, all big names with Informatica. But with respect to you guys, as you guys go out and do your services. This is good for business. For you guys, helping customers. >> Yeah absolutely, I think there's value for us, there's value for our clients. You know, it's not just the apps that are kind of going to the Cloud, right? I mean you see all data platforms that are going to the Cloud. For example, Cloudera. They just launched CDP. Being GA by July- August. You know, Snowflake's on the Cloud doing great, getting good traction in the market. So eventually what were seeing is, whether it's business applications or data platforms, they're all moving to the Cloud. Now the key things to look out for in the future is, how do we help our clients navigate a multi Cloud environment, for example, because sooner or later, they wouldn't want to have all of their eggs invested in one basket, right? So, how do we help navigate that? How do we make that seamless to the business user? Those are the challenges that we're thinking about. >> What's interesting about Databricks and Snowflake, you mentioned them, is that it really is a tell sign that start-ups can break through and crack the enterprise with Cloud and the ecosystem. And you're starting to see companies that have a Sass-like mindset with technology. Coming into an enterprise marketed with these ecosystems, it's a tough crowd believe me, you know the enterprise. It's not easy to break into the enterprise, so for Databricks and Snowflake, that's a huge tell sign. What's your reaction to that because it's great for Informatica because it's validation for them, but also the start-ups are now growing very fast. I mean, I wouldn't call Snowflake 3 billion dollar start-up their unicorn but, times three. But it's a tell sign. It's just something new we haven't seen. We've seen Cloudera break in. They kind of ramped their way in there with a lot of raise and they had a big field sales force. But Data Bear and Snowflake, they don't have a huge set in the sales force. >> Yeah, I think it's all about clients and understanding, what is the true value that someone provides. Is it someone that we can rely on to keep our data safe? Do they have the capacity to scale? If you can crack those things, then you'll be in the market. >> Who are you attracting to the MDM on Google Cloud? What's the early data look like? You don't have to name names, but whats some of the huge cases that get the white glove service from Deloitte on the Google Cloud? Tell us about that. Give us more data on that. >> So we've just announced that, here at Informatica World, we've got about three to four mid to large enterprises. One large enterprise and about three mid-size companies that are interested in it. So we've been in talks with them in terms of- and that how we want to do it. We don't want to open the flood gates. We'd like to make sure it's all stable, you know, clients are happy and there's word of mouth around. >> I'm sure the end to end management piece of it, that's probably attractive. The end to end... >> Exactly. I mean, Deloitte's clearly the leader in the data analytics space, according to Gartner Reports. Informatica is the leader in their space. GCP has great growth plans, so the three of them coming together is going to be a winner. >> One of the most pressing challenges facing the technology industry is the skills gap and the difficulty in finding talent. Surveys show that I.T. managers can't find qualified candidates for open Cloud roles. What are Deloitte's thought on this and also, what are you doing as a company to address it? >> I mean, this is absolutely a good problem to have, for us. Right, which means that there is a demand. But unless we beat that demand, it's a problem. So we've been taking some creative ways, in terms of addressing that. An example would be our analytics foundry offering, where we provide a pod of people that go from data engineers you know, with Python and Sparks skills, to, you know, Java associates, to front end developers. So a whole stack of developers, a full stack, we provide that full pod so that they can go and address a particular business analytics problem or some kind of visualization issues, in terms of what they want to get from the data. So, we teach Leverate that pod, across multiple clients, I think that's been helping us. >> If you could get an automated, full time employee, that would be great. >> Yeah, and this digital FD concept is something that we'd be looking at, as well. >> I would like to add on that, as well. So, earlier- with the data disruption, Informatica's so busy and Informatica's so busy that Deloitte is so busy. Now, earlier we used plain Informatica folks and then, later on because of the Cloud disruption, so we are training them on the Cloud concepts. Now what the organizations have to think, or the universities to think is that having the curriculum, the Cloud concepts in their universities and their curriculum so that they get all their Cloud skills and after, once they have their Cloud skills, we can train them on the Informatica skills. And Informatica has full training on that. >> I think it's a great opportunity for you guys. We were talking with Sally Jenkins to the team earlier, and the CEO. I was saying that it reminds me of early days of VMware, with virtualization you saw the shift. Certainly the economics. You replaced servers, do a virtual change to the economics. With the data, although not directly, it's a similar concept where there's new operational opportunities, whether it's using leverage in Google Cloud for say, high-end, modern data warehousing to whatever. The community is going to respond. That's going to be a great ecosystem money making opportunity. The ability to add new services, give you guys more capabilities with customers to really move the needle on creating value. >> Yeah, and it's interesting you mention VMware because I actually helped, as VMware stood up there, VMCA, AW's and NSA's offerings on the Cloud. We actually helped them get ready for that GA and their data strategy, in terms of support, both for data and analytics friendliness. So we see a lot of such tech companies who are moving to a flexible consumption service. I mean, the challenges are different and we've got a whole practice around that flex consumption. >> I'm sure Informatica would love the VMware valuation. Maybe not worry for Dell technology. >> We all would love that. >> Rajeem, Abhiman, thank you so much for joining us on theCube today. >> Thank you very much. Good talking to you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. We will have more from Informatica World tomorrow.

(upbeat theme music plays) >> Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCube. Covering Citrix Synergy, Atlanta, 2019, brought to you by Citrix. >> Hi, welcome back to theCube. Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend, and we are live in Atlanta, Georgia for Citrix Synergy, 2019. We are pleased to welcome Jack Gold to The Cube, President and founder of Jack Gold & Associates. Jack, it's great to have you join Keith and me this afternoon. >> Thank you for having me. >> So, we had a great day. We've talked to eight or nine folks or so, lot's of really relevant exciting news from Citrix this morning. Talking about the employee experience as, and how I kind of interpreted it, as a catalyst for digital transformation, cultural transformation. You've been working with Citrix for a long time. I'd love to get your perspective on not just what you heard today from Citrix, and with Google and Microsoft, but in the last year or so since they've really kind of done a re-brand effort. What're your thoughts on that? >> Yeah, it's interesting from a Citrix perspective. Citrix, the old Citrix I guess I would put in quotes right, was always known as the VDI company. I've got, you know, the screen that will talk to the server, that will talk to whatever other apps I need it to talk to, and I can have a nice thin client sitting on my desktop and I don't have to spend a lot of money. And I also don't have to worry about if I'm going to bank people stealing stuff off the hard drive, or whatever. They've made a pretty significant transition that was the old work space, if you will. The modern work spaces which is where Citrix is really moving is one where, look we've all grown up with smart phones for the last ten or fifteen years, our kids don't know anything different. They're not going to deal with anything that's complex, anything where I have to log in and out of applications, anything where I have to switch between screens, this just doesn't make any sense for them. And so, what we're seeing Citrix do is move into an environment where, as I said, it's about the modern workspace, it's about being able to help me do my job not getting in my way of me doing my job, and that's really the transition. It's not just Citrix, the industry is moving in that direction as well, but Citrix is really at the forefront of making a lot of that work now. >> So, Jack, talk to us about the new promise of the new Citrix. The, if you remember me, it had to have be about seven years ago, I did a blog post of running Windows XP on your iPad. It was taking, you know, the then desktop solution and running it on your iPad. >> (Jack) Sure. >> And it was a cool trick. But we talked about, today, we would hope by today, that mobile technology would of forced companies to rewrite applications, for a mobile first experience. But that simply hasn't happened. So, presenting a bad application on to a mobile dot, to a mobile work station, or a mobile device, doesn't work. We end up packing in, trying it, and squeezing, and trying to get our work done, how is Citrix promising to change that experience, even versus their competitors? >> Sure. Well, first of all so two bad's don't make a good. Right. Having a bad app on a bad device doesn't make it good. >> (Keith) Right. >> Doesn't make it easy to use, doesn't help me get my job done. What we really are talking about, now, is the ability to build a workspace. Something where I sit and look at, that helps me get my job done, as opposed to getting in the way. Which means that, instead of having to punch fourteen different holes, or you know, icons and sit at my keyboard and type forty-eight different commands and do thirty-eight different log-ins as each one is different, and by the way I couldn't remember them so I just called the help desk in-between, and that's another half an hour of my time that I didn't want to, that I wasted. >> (laughs) Give me my word perfect templates. >> (Lisa laughs) >> (Jack) There you go, there you go, word perfect I remember that no so well. I remember it well not so nicely. What we're really trying to focus on now is user experience, right. What we're really trying to focus on is if, if you wanted to get your work done, I want to make it easy. Think about it as going to a grocery store. If you can't, if you've got a list of groceries and you can't find what you want in five minutes, you leave, you go somewhere else. You go to another grocery store where things are much easier to find. It's the same at work, or it should be the same at work. Now, that said, a lot of apps and organizations, especially big enterprises where they have, some can have literally thousands of apps, are not going away. The notion that everything is going to go into the modern workspace, where everything looks like a phone, it's a nice idea, it's properly not going to happen. Legacy apps will be legacy apps for a very long time, it's like mainframes are dead, guess what, they're still around. That said, that doesn't mean that you can't take some of those legacy apps and make them easier to use with the proper front-end. And that's really what Citrix is trying to do with the workspaces, and other's again, it's not just Citrix in this, we have to be fair there are lots people working in this space. But, if you can make the front-end workspace more attractive, easier to use, easier to navigate, even if I've got old, clunky stuff in the background. For me as a user, you can give me back fifteen, twenty, thirty minutes a day, an hour a day, that's really productivity. Look, if you're paying me a hundred dollars an hour, and you save me an hour a day you just made a hundred dollars every day that I'm working at that company, that sounds like a lot, but there are people who make that kind of money. Or even a fifty or twenty-five dollars, it all adds up. And so, what we're really doing is trying to move into an environment where if I can make you more productive but making things more easier for you to navigate, and getting in and our of applications more quickly, getting more information to me more quickly, which makes the overall organization more productive because I'm sharing more information with you, then that's a real win-win, and that's where I think Citrix is really trying to position itself, and doing a fairly good job at doing that. Clearly they don't have all of the components yet, but then no one does. This is an ongoing process. >> So, employee experience is table-stakes for any business, as we look at the modern workforce it's highly disrupted. >> (Jack) Yes. >> It's composed of five different generations. >> (Jack) Yes. >> Who have varying expertise with technology. It is also demanding because we're all consumers. >> (Jack) Yes. >> And so we have this expectation, or this, yeah I'd say expectation that I want to be able to go in and have this personalized experience. I don't want to have to become an expert in sales-force because I might need to understand, can I talk to that costumer and ask them to be a reference? How much time are you going to take? But this personalization is becoming more and more critical as we see this influence from the consumer side. >> Right. >> Were some of the things that you heard today from Citrix, what are your thoughts on how their going to be able to improve that more personalized employee experience? >> So people think of personalization, I think sometimes, too narrowly. For some people personalization is, you know, I've got my phone out, and I have the apps that I want on my phone and that's personalization. I think of it a little bit differently. We need to extend personalization. When I'm at work, what I want is not just the apps I want, clearly I want those, right, but also the ability, to get help with those apps as I need it, right. And so where Citrix is going is trying to put intelligence into the system, so that when I'm interacting with back-end solutions or my neighbors, or with teams collaboration, I get the assistance I need to make it easier for me to do that work. It's not just the apps, it's also help with the apps. And if we can do that, that's really what we want. We go, you know, if I have a problem with my laptop I'm going to come to you and say, hey, you did this yesterday what was the result, can you help me for five minutes? Five minutes is never five minutes, it's usually an hour and a half, but still. I'll come to you. Why can't I have an app on my desk that does the same thing? I'm having trouble. Help me. Fix it. Let me know what I'm doing wrong, or let me know how I can do it better. And that's where Citrix is trying to go with the analytics that they've got in place. Which is huge, I think they're underplaying that, because I think that the whole analytic space in making things easier for people to use, because in understanding where my problems are is huge, and that's going to pick up. The notion of having a nice pretty, pretty may not be the right word, but attractive at least, workspace for me to go in that doesn't get frustrated, frustration is a killer in productivity, as everyone knows. There are examples I've heard multiple people tell me now that they go out and hire, especially with millennials, that go out an hire twenty or thirty new employees, and half of them quit within a week because their systems are so bad that they get so frustrated that they're not going to work there. So, the notion of having a modern workspace where I get the applications that I need, I get the assistance I need, because of the analytics of that backend telling the systems what I need, and making it easier for me to do it. And then allowing me to be productive not just for myself, but for the organization, is where we all need to go and I think that Citrix is making some real progress going that way. >> (Keith) Well Jack, we're talking about products that haven't quite been released yet, so I'm trying to get a sense or, worth's the right built versus buy stage, in complexity Citrix should be? You know, I can make it apple pie by going out and picking the apple. >> (Jack laughs) Right. >> And making my own crust or, I can go buy filling, or I can just go buy any mince pie, stick it in the oven and warm it up. Three very different experiences. Three different layers of investment, and outcomes frankly. In this world, I can go hire application developers to write these many apps, to write these customizations, to write these integrations, but that's, I think that's akin to picking the apple and that just simply doesn't scale. But, also while any mince pie is okay every now and again, I want, you know, something of higher quality. Where do you think Citrix is on the kind of range of built versus buy with this intelligent experience? >> So built versus buy is a very interesting phenomenon. And it's interesting because a lot of it has to do with where you think you are right now in the world, right. You know you mention going out and getting developers and building your own, that's all well and good, it doesn't scale, and by the way in today's market you can't find them to begin with. So you often don't even have a choice. So that's number one. Number two is that there are companies out there that still think for competitive advantage that they have to do everything from scratch, like building your pie. Yes, you probably make the best pie in the world, but guess what, sometimes a good enough pie is good enough. Right, and if you're in business sometimes good enough is the only way you survive. It doesn't have to be a hundred percent perfect, ninety percent's okay too. People can deal with that. So that's the other piece. The third piece of it is, from an end-user perspective, right, if end-users are accustom to having an interaction in a certain way and the you go out and get developers that come in and do it, something completely different, which they're apt to do because each will have their own kind of flavor to it, then you just force them to learn one, two, three, four, five different interface interactions I'm not going to do that. I'm going to get frustrated as heck, and I'm going to go call the help desk or I'm going to go get my app and say go do this for me. Both of which are counterproductive to the company and to me. So, it really depends on where you are in the stage of where your company is, I would say built versus buy it's not a one or a zero. There's lots of shades of gray in between, it's also not all or nothing. So, some applications might be built internally, some you may want to buy externally, some you may have a hybrid, and the nice thing about where workspaces is going now is that you plug all of those into the same environment. That's really the ultimate goal, is to make it as easy and transparent for the organization as possible, and also for the user because the user ultimately is the end consumer. And if it's not good for the end consumer, it's not good for the company either. >> (Lisa) So delivering this great game-changing customer experience for this, as we talked about before this distributed modern work force that wants to be able to access mobile apps, Sass apps. >> (Jack) Right. >> Web apps from tablets, PC, phone, desktop. >> (Jack) Your car, your refrigerator >> Exactly. >> (Jack) Anything with a screen on it. >> Oh yeah, the refrigerators. Wherever you are, I think, okay people >> (Jack) Sure. >> We're people, and we are the biggest single security threat there is. >> (Jack laughs) >> So in your perspective, how is what Citrix is talking about balancing security as an essential component of this employee experience? >> So there are a few things, number one is a lot of companies think that if they limit the end user experience they're more secure. The truth of the matter is, yes, I mean if you don't let me get in to an app I can't steal application or information, or lose it somehow. But I also can't get my work done. So there's a balance between security and privacy which many companies don't talk about which is not exactly the same thing, there are two unique things, more and more privacy is becoming as big or bigger an issue than security, but you know we can get at that in a minute. But, the notion of security really relates to what I was talking about earlier which is analytics. If I know what you're suppose to be doing, you're here at Synergy. If someone just got your credentials and logged in from Los Angeles or New York or Chicago or Denver or wherever, I know it's not you. I can shut that thing down very quickly and not have to worry about them stealing information, also if you're, if I know you're not suppose to be in a certain version of SAP, you're not suppose to be doing some ERP system and you're in it, then again the analytics tells me that there's something going on, there's something anomalous going on that I need to investigate. So, having a system that protects because there's a kind of a front end to everything that's going on in the back end, and a realization of what's going on behind that screen gives me a much higher sense of security from a corporate perspective, it's not perfect there is no such thing as perfect security, but it's a lot better than just letting us kind of do our own thing, and loading, you know, semantic or McAfee or whatever on your PC. And that's where the industry ultimately has to go. That becomes part of the new modern workspace. It's not just about more productive it's about more secure. It's about more private. It's about not letting information escape that shouldn't be there to begin with. >> (Keith) So last question on data grabbing. Because we haven't talked about data and data is, you know, probably the most important thing in this topic. The importance of the (unintelligible) and Google announcement. You know, we, the yottabyte, the first time I've heard that term, yottabye of data that data's going to be spread across the world and this, this ideal of centralized compute and us being able to present, compute into data centers, no longer going to work, that we're going to have to, applications are going to be spread across the world. Where do you Citrix advancing that discipline of providing apps where they need to be with these relationships? >> So, it's an interesting phenomenon what we're going through right now, if you look back a couple of decades ago everything was centralized, people were centralized, they all work in one building, computing was centralized it was all in the data center, IT was centralized, it was all, you know, working around the servers. The Cloud is the opposite direction, although I would argue The Cloud isn't new, The Cloud is just time-share in a different environment, for us old people who remember the old IBM time-share computers. But everything is becoming distributed, data is distributed, people are distributed, applications are distributed, networks are distributed, you name it. The key critical factor for companies in keeping their productivity, keeping up the productivity is to make sure that the distributed environment doesn't get in the way of doing work. So you've got things like latency, if it takes me, if I'm in. (crowd cheers) >> They're having a party behind us. >> No, they agree with you! >> (Jack laughs) Yes, apparently. I, you know, if I'm here at Synergy but I have to work back at my offices near Boston, I can't wait five minutes for information to come back and forth, it's like the old days. Latency now has to be within five microseconds or people get frustrated, so that becomes a network issue, applications, same way, if I have to go to a data center, the data isn't local to my server here, it has to go to London, I'm not going to wait three minutes for it to come back like we use to, or ten minutes or an hour and a half. Or come back the next morning. You know, you want to book a flight on an airline, are you going to wait thirty minutes for them to find you a seat? You're going to go to another airline. So the whole notion of distributed means that it's very different now, even though it's distributed, everything is local. And by local, keeping it local means that you have to have latency below a certain point (crowd cheers) so that I don't realize that it's distributed, or I don't care that it's distributed. Yottabyte's of data means that we're going to have data everywhere, accessible all the time, and we're going to produce data like crazy. You know, a typical car, an autonomous car will produce a gigabyte of data every minute. Hundreds every, you know, hour. So, the amount of data is going to be fantastic that we have to deal with. Then, the big question becomes, okay so, I can't personally deal with all this data, it's impossible, I have to have the assistance, the intelligence within the system to go off and make something of that data so that I can actually interact with it in a meaningful fashion. That's where Citrix would like to go, that's where other's would like to go. They can't do it alone, because the problem is just too darn big. But, it will, we will get there, companies will get there eventually, not all of them perhaps, only the ones that are going to be successful long term are going to get there. >> Well, Jack, I wish we had more time to chat with you. This has, I just feel like going dot, dot, dot, to be continued. And I want to say, coincidence, I don't know, there were two rounds of applause when you talked about latency. (Keith laughs) >> There we go. They're just waiting for the bar to open, it's taking too long. >> (Lisa laughs) You think that's what it is? >> (Jack) Properly. >> All right well we'll get you over there, and thank-you again for joining Keith and me this afternoon. >> Thank-you very much. >> (Lisa) Our pleasure. For Keith Townsend, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCube live from Citrix Synergy, 2019. Thanks for watching. (upbeat theme music plays)

>> Man: Live from Atlanta, Georgia. It's theCUBE. Covering Citrix Synergy Atlanta 2019. Brought to you by Citrix. >> Hey welcome back to theCUBE, Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend live from Atlanta, Georgia. We're at Citrix Synergy 2019, the first time theCUBE has been back here in eight years and I'm geakin out even more, yes, I know it's early, two man hand CMO and EBP of Strodigy CIRTIX TIBB, it's great to have you back on theCUBE. >> Well thanks for joining us here. >> The Keno was awesome this morning, Keith and I were both tweeting like crazy and like and we were like, Wow, we're going to have a great couple of days. >> Thank you. >> You can hear all of the networking and the innovation and the conversations going on behind us here in the Solutions EXPO. I think record number of people attending live, as well as watching the live stream today. There was at least one round of applause, standing here all night. Citrix, a lot of transformation in the last year alone. Really talking about the employee experience as a critical enabler of digital business transformation. Talk to us about that. Yeah, absolutely I mean, with all the technology, technology choices we've had with Cloud and Sass and Mobile. We've created a lot of opportunity but we've also created a lot of complexity. Both through IT and especially for the employee who now needs no navigate across all of this different environment to try get a bit of information or to get their key work done. And so, Citrix and our Customers were saying: Hey look, employee experience has become a sea level and board level imperative. So what we've done is, we've unveiled and continued to extend upon our digital work space. Not just a place where we've unified access to everything an employee needs to be productive. All their Sass Apps, Web Apps, Mobile Apps and content, wrapper that in a layer of security so that IT and the company are confident that Applications and information is more secure in the workspace than now. But now we're infusing intelligence into the workspace. Machine learning and simplified work flows, in order to guide an employee through their day, so they don't need to spend all their time navigating multiple apps, but the tasks and insides that they need to get done are presented to them veery quickly, they can move on and get to perform their best work. >> So Tim, you're literally preaching to the choir. Me and Lisa, we get it, we understand it and then even at they key note, David was preaching to all the major announcements, big claps. Thousands of people clapping. The innovation and ideal of extending the workspace to the intelligent experience, I think the Citrix faithful today, get that. But a seven trillion Dollar problem that you guys are addressing, you just mentioned, but now we're talking about talking to the CEO, the CIO, the CMO, the COO. Talk about expanding message beyond the faithful into the sea squeed. How's that impacting your jobs and how are you getting that message out there? >> Yeah, that's a great question. You're absolutely right. Employee experience is something that is shared. In fact, we've just done a considerable amount of research into that with the Economist on a global basis. What we were finding is IT and HR are sharing this problem together. The rethinking, not just the digital environment of how they're delivering technology to the employee but the physical space and the culture and how it all weaves together. And how we're engaging within Citrix at a much higher level with not just the CIO but with the Chief Human Resources officer, the CEO, the CFO, is because employee experience and how well an employee feels when they have access to the information and tools they need to get their job done, is directly related to the business outcomes the company is trying to achieve. You know, its proven to deliver greater customer satisfaction, increase revenues, greater profitability, all the metrics that really move a business. >> And you know, this is pervasive across any industry and every roll in every organization. I mean, the cool video that David showed this morning, show an example of a Senior Marketing Manager who wants to deliver Rock Star campaigns for her company, but she's got before Citrix workspace and intelligent experience. All these different apps and all this distraction, every couple of minutes distraction. And you think about how that impacts that Marketing Manager's role even all the way to like a call center. And how a call center employee is in the front lines with the customer, whether it's your ISP or something who has so much choice. If that call center person doesn't have access to all the apps and the information that they need, not only are you effecting the employee experience and potentially causing attrition, but the end user customer that service might say, forget it, I'm going to go somewhere else. >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you think about it, we all have that experience where you call a call center and they might not have the answer for you or in some cases the connection might be poor. So really what we're trying to do with the digital workspace is eliminate that. We talk about experiences, it's not just unifying and infusing intelligence into it, but we also leverage our networking portfolio to ensure reliable connectivity. So that employee has access to the applications they need, they can reliably access the information they need and any kind of their telephony or your voiceover IP is consistent. So you or I think they're on a landline in a big call center and they might be working from home but still have access to everything they need through the Citrix Workspace. >> So just a couple of weeks ago, I was at SAP Sapphire, we're talking about customer experience, employee experience. Kind of the ex-data versus the old-data, operational data. And Citrix in the past has been about operational data. You have to share stuff with your warehouse about improving analytics so administrators and engineers can deliver applications and experiences better. Lets talk about the user experience in this new, or the employee experience in this future of work. I have this SAP green screen and man, would my job be so much easier if I could just push a button and get that data into Salesforce, but I have to engage IT for that. I have to open the ticket and we have to take it through project, 6 months later we abandon it because the industry has moved on. How's Citrix going to make that faster for the employee and improving my employee experience? >> Well fist of all, coming from an Enterprise application background, myself, including SAP, I know the depth of functionality of those applications. And for specialized roles, whether you're in supply chain or finance or alike, they spend their day in that core application. However, the rest of us, we're hired for a specific purpose. Whether its the example we gave onstage today about Maria, the Senior Marketing Director, or whether its an engineer who wants to spend their time building product. We were at hight to spend our day navigating, expense reporting apps or performance review apps or other types of applications that we're all exposed to. They're not our primary application, we have to learn a new interphase, we have to manage different authentication. And what the workspace does is in the words of one of our customers, is by unifying is all and being able to reach into those applications and extract out the information and task that's very personal to you. One customer says to their employees, you may never need to log into an enterprise application again, but you'll still get all the utilities, all the value because you have all the insides you need and you can get them quickly without needing to navigate or search across multiple applications. So you can get that task, approve that expense report like that. Without needing to go through 4 screens to do it and take you away from your core job. So really what this is all about, is removing the noise from an employees day so they can perform at their very best. >> So critical because, Sorry Keith, one of the stats aslo I think David shared this morning, was that enterprise software is designed for power users. Which is 1% of the population. So for those folks who need to get their job done as effectively as possible, so that their delivering what they need to and the big end users experience is what it should be. That's to be able to say, you don't ever have to log into an enterprise application again and making that experience personalized, Game changers. >> Absolutely, I mean we think about the frustration that employees have today and that they would share the findings today from the Gallops study but 80% of employees are disengaged at work. The number one reason happens to be around their level of their manager, but the number two one is they don't feel they have access to the right information tools to do their job. They want to get that noise out of their day so they can do what they were hired to do and what they're passionate about. >> So we talked a lot today about the familiarization of enterprise tech. We love these things. We don't love these things because the hardware is great, we love these things because we're able to do our jobs. So whether I'm downloading a app or Angry Birds or whatever experience that I'm having on it is, I get instant gratification from this devise. Talk to us about the overall potential of speed to value in a repeatable process that Enterprises can enjoy around digital transformation based on Citrix versus you know, I've heard similar things from ISV's. They can come in and write a customization from an Enterprise app into another solution, simplify a specific job, but if I have to do that for every application, one I don have the money, bandwidth, time and the industry will pass me up. How are you guys bringing this consumerized experience to the future world. >> Yeah, that's a great illustration is our mobile devices. We live on our mobile devices. A lot of Enterprise application have created really good mobile applications. You know, concur from SAP where I came from, that's a great experience. Very quick to go in. Salesforce, an awesome tool, their mobile experience is different from their regular experience so you have to relearn and navigate. And then there's others that never really created a mobile experience so we're all doing this on our phone and trying to get that done. And even if every, to your point, if every individual enterprise app had a great mobile experience, that still means we need to navigate a whole bunch of interfaces. What we're doing by unifying this into a single digital workspace by curating and personalizing your workday and creating a work stream very similar to what Facebook and others have done for our personal screen and how we get information through that feed, how we get news through that feed. We're doing the same for work. So on a mobile device that experience is so much richer than we've seen since almost the invention of the smart phone. >> So as we talk about the consumerization of Tech, big announcements with Azure and Google. How does that impact that new audience when you go talk to another CMO at a big Car Manufacturer? Why should they get excited about Azure or Google compute? They really don't see that. >> There's no doubt that the world is moving to the cloud, but everyone's moving at their own pace right? Companies has invested decades in some cases of infrastructure and I promise they're not going to move that to the cloud over night, but they are beginning to move certain workloads, certain styles and, by the way, they want to choice of multiple clouds. Which is why Citrix has invested to partner with all the major cloud providers to allow our customers to have that choice. So if they want to leverage some aspects of Azure, they want to move some of the Citrix workloads there, they can do that. If they want to virtualize, as you heard today, the announcement with Google, if they want to take some of their Citrix virtualization, virtual apps or virtual desktops and move that to Google cloud, that's available to them. Including now, as we announced today, with automated provisioning. So IT can quickly set up a desktop, maybe its for a new hire, maybe its for a contractor to come in and give him the tools they need to be productive. So if companies want choice across those clouds, they don't want to have locked in, and they're going to move at their own pace. As we heard today from Partner's Healthcare for example, security first, cloud considered. Their considering aspect is to move to the cloud when it makes sense and they want to have that flexibility to allow them to move at their own pace and make it seamless with their on-premises infrastructure. And that's what we provide. >> That flexibility is key and you brought up, every business today lives in a hybrid multi cloud world. So employees, with that employee experience, needs to deliver access to Sass apps, mobile apps, web apps. To deliver that great employee experience, but I want to turn the times a little bit and take a look at what you guys are doing with marketing and on the business strategy side of Citrix to help deliver that outstanding employee experience to your customers. By way of you CSM team and you even have a relatively new adoption marketing team. I'd love to know how that ladder fits into your business strategy. >> Right, so I'll come to the adoption marketing team in a moment, but the first thing we're doing is, as illustrated here earlier, is that this discussion around employee experience, as it becomes a sea level and board level imperative, it's become a company wide initiative. And so, from a marketing perspective, we have not only gone higher up in the organization having a much more strategic discussion around how we can drive the business outcomes of the companies want to achieve. But also making sure we're putting it in the language of these other roles. All right, HR wants to talk about employee engagement and how we can demonstrate through the work space of how we're doing that. IT wants to talk about adoption of their technologies in the like. So getting to the customer adoption component, so within, as you move to the cloud, it's no longer, I'll sell you a product, good luck. When you engage with a customer, once you get that agreement, that's when the real work starts, right. You're in a long term service agreement and the value they extract from your application, the adoption they get, is going to determine their level of success and their level to renew with you at the end of the term. So we've put a lot of investment as a company into what we call our customer success team. Folks that are 'view them as the coach at the gym'. That's the difference between you buy a treadmill at home, you might use it for a while and it becomes a towel rack. Or you join the gym and your trainers there telling you how to get the best performance. That's what our customer success team does, but top do that at scale and to engage on a real time basis, we've paralleled that with the customer adoption marketing team. And really, we're providing both out-of-product and in-product marketing queue to the customer, to the user of how best to take advantage of the product they've already subscribed to. >> That's exciting, Tim. Speaking of customers' success, the last question as we wrap here. You guys kind of have the American Idol of Customer Awards, The Innovation Awards, there are down to three finalists. We will get to speak to all three of them over the next two days. But something that I mentioned to you that really peaked my interest is, is this is an Awards opportunity for other folks to vote on. And then the winner, all our Ryan Seacrests' are going to be here to announce it on Thursday. Tell us a little bit about the Customer Innovation Awards and how these customers are really articulating the value prop of Citrix. >> Yeah the Citrix Customer Innovation Award's one of my favorite times of the year. The program's been around for a number of years and its really grown a cold following within the Citrix community as customers get nominated based on their deployment and the business outcomes they're driving. We have an, initially an individual panel that widows all those nominations down so that panel consist of former winners as well as analysts and other influencers in the community. And then to your point, the three finalists that we have right now, we expose their stories to the world to everyone here at Synergy and beyond. And they get to vote. So the votes are going to be tallied, I believe the voting polls close on Wednesday night and then we'll announce the winner on Thursday and the customers love it. Not only do they get the recognition, but the other customers love it because I have those same problems. I want to be able to solve it and I want to understand how Citrix can help me. >> And that is as a marketer you know, I know I'm preaching to the choir, but there's no better brand validation than the voice of your customer articulating how their business is benefiting significantly and giving them the opportunity to talk to peers and in the industry. >> Absolutely, that's why we're in it, for the customer's success. >> Well, we'll be anxiously awaiting to hear the results on Thursday Tim, I'm already excited for next year. So, thank you so much for having theCUBE, Keith and me >> Great >> At Synergy 2019 >> Thank you for being here. Thank you for having me. Our pleasure, for Keith Townsend and I'm Lisa Martin, live from Citrix Synergy 2019 from Atlanta. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Voiceover: Live! From Anahiem, California, it's theCUBE. Covering Nutanix.next 2019 Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix.next, here in Anaheim California, I'm your host, Rebecca Knight along with my co-host John Furrier. We're joined by Sunil Potti, he is the chief product and development officer here at Nutanix. Thank you so much for coming on the show. >> Glad to be here. >> So we are talking about the era of invisible infrastructure and this morning on the main stage there was many many different announcements, new products and adjustments, augmentations to products. Can you walk our viewers a little bit, walk our viewers through a little bit what you were talking about today? >> Yeah, I mean (inaudible) so in fact, our vision really hasn't materially changed over the last few years. In fact, my team always teases me that all I do is essentially change the timeline but the same slideshow is up. But you know, something about vision being consistent and we sort of have broken that up into two major phases, the first phase is essentially to move cloud from being a destination to being an experience. What do I mean by that? Essentially, everyone knows about cloud as being something served by Amazon, or Google, or (inaudible) and ultimately, our belief has been that if we do an honest job of what Amazon or Google provided natively But bring cloud to the customers rather than having the customers go to a destination, Then they can essentially get maybe 60 or 70 percent of that experience but maybe at a tenth of the price or a tenth of the time. And most human beings as you guys know, is that once you get 60 or 70 percent, You're happy and you move on other things. And that's really the first act of this company is to sort of bring cloud to the customers. And in doing so, in my opinion solves one of clouds biggest, you know, perennial issues, which is migration. Because that's essentially what lift and shift, gets in the way, that I've gotta change something that I've invested 20 years in and I've gotta lift and shift it. And if something comes to you, that gap is dramatically reduced, right? And sure, we don't do everything that public clouds do but, like I said, if you can do an honest job of that 60 % then it turns out that most customers now adopt Nutanix looking at public cloud as more of a tailwind instead of a headwind because the more they taste amazon outside the more they want amazon inside. And so, so, that's really the first act of the company. A series of products that allow us to build out a full blown IA stack but also a bunch of services such as desktops, databases, all the usual services. So it's all about increasing the layers of abstraction to the user so they can do one take operations. So, that's the first act. And the second act which is much more a longer term bet for the next decade or so is that if the first act was about bringing cloud to you to replatform the data center, customers are also going to redesign their apps and when they redesign their apps Do you want to do it on an operating system that locks you only into one public cloud? Or do you want to do it in something that can moves across clouds? And that's our second act of the company. And there's a lot of details there. >> John Furrier: So hyper-convergence was a great concept and proved it out, great customer base, core business is humming along, solid, but the growth is gonna come from essentials which is the enterprise in multiple clouds. So I get that. As you guys look and build those products and you're the chief product officer, you have the keys to the kingdom, it's all on you. >> It's in my guide to work out. >> So you're a team. But this is a big pressure, this is the opportunity. As you think about a software company as you guys are shifting from being hardware to software things start to be different so as you start thinking about the act two the convergence of clouds. That really is a key part of it, what you did for the data center, HCI, >> Yeah, totally. >> You're doing HCI for the cloud. >> Yeah, like what does that actually mean? >> So explain that concept. >> No, it's a great question. So, and some of this, obviously, we are struggling through ourselves. But we are not afraid of making mistakes in this transition as you've seen other the last year, we've gone from being in the plans company to a software that runs on third party to being a subscription company, to now running on clouds. All within a span of 12 months, while building a business, right? And sometimes it works, sometimes we pick up ourselves and learn from mistakes and go but to your point I think, we're not afraid to become an app on somebody else's operating system. Just like Microsoft said "Look I'm gonna release office, "on Mac or Ipad before I even do it on Windows," that kind of thinking has to permeate and pretty much, in my opinion, every technology will end up going forward. A good example of that is look, if somebody wants to consume their applications that they built on Nutanix on premise but their idea was look they don't wanna be in the data center business tomorrow without changing the apps they should be able to take that entire infrastructure and applications and consume it inside Amazon's fabric because they provide a bunch of other services as well as data centers. So, a recent announcement of Nutanix in AWS not on AWS for a reason is an example of us becoming an app on somebody else's operating system. That's an example of us transforming further away from being an infrastructure only or an appliance only company. >> What does this mean for your customers and your partners because you guys have taken an open strategy with partnering, the HPE announcements, very successfully off the tee, in the middle of the fair way as we say, looking good. That seems to be the trend, others taking a different approach, you know that is, owning it all. >> Yeah yeah, in fact I would say that look, in some way, internally we joke about ourselves, as we have to prove the... You know, we always used to think about ourselves as a smart phone for the enterprise, consumerizing the data center. But we had to prove that model by owning the full stack like Apple did, but over a period of time, to democratization happens, by distribution. And so in some ways, we have to become more of an android like company while retaining the best practices of the delight and the security of an apple device. So that's the easiest analogy where, We're trying to work with partners like Dell, Lenovo, and now increasingly, Hitachi, Fujitsu, Inspur, Intel, everybody is signed up, just because everybody now knows that the customers want an experience. And now the lastest relationship with HP takes it to the next level now where we want to bring essentailly super micro like appliance goodness one click from away upgrades, support, everything. But with a HPE backed platform, that both companies can benefit from. >> You know, one of the big complaints from customers, I hear, on theCUBE, and also privately is there's so many tools, and management software, I've got management plane for this, I got this over here, >> For sure... >> So there's kinda this toolshed mentality of, you know, a new hire, learn this tool for that software, people don't want another tool, they don't want another platform. So, how do you see that, how do you address that with going forward, this act two, as you continue to build the products what's the strategy and what's the value proposition for customers? >> I mean, think it's no different than I think how we sort of launched the company in the first place which is there's no way you can say we'll simplify your life without removing parts. That was the original Steve Jobs thing, right? The true way to simplify is to remove parts, right? And essentially that's what hyper-convergence has done, it just we're doing this not just for infrastructure but for clouds because when you use Nutanix you throw away old computer, you throw away old storage, you throw away old (inaudible) I mean, that's the only way to converge your experience down to one tool. You can't stitch together ten tools into this magical fabric, I mean it doesn't work that way. But that's hard, because not every customer is ready to do that, every partner is ready to do that they've got their own little incumbencies. But that's the journey we're on, it's a right of passage for us, we have to earn it the old fashioned way and we've done reasonably well so far. >> So you mentioned Steve Jobs, he also said, when he was alive, in an interview, on the lost interviews on Netflix, I watched that recently. He said, also software gives you the opportunity to move the needle on efficiencies, and change the game, much more significantly then managing a process improvement which can give you maybe 30% yield. He's saying you can go 60s, 80% changeover with software. This is part of your strategy, how do you guys see Nutanix in the future, with the software lead or approach, changing the game for IT? >> I think clearly, software is fundamental, I mean the whole point of us, our product was I think, we have some folks on the platform group that help make sure that the software runs because software has to run somewhere, by the way. It doesn't run in air, it runs on hardware. So let's not under emphasize hardware for that reason, but, most of our IP has been in software. But I would say that the real thing for us that has kept us going is design of software which is essentially also, when you go back to the Apple thing, because a lot of software renders out that too. It's how you design it, starting with why, rather than just going to the how, is how we see ourselves differentiating what we deliver to our customers over the next 5 years. >> Rebecca Knight: I want to ask you about innovation and your process because here you are, you're the Chief product officer at this very creative company, I wanna know, what sparks you're creativity, where do you get your ideas? Of course you're gonna say, "I talk to customers, "and I find out their problems", but where do you go for inspiration? >> Yeah, I think it's an age old problem I'll give you my personal answer, I don't think it's representative of everyone in the company obviously. And that's one of the good things with Nutanix each of us have their own point of view and things, right? We have this term of "let chaos reign and then reign in chaos". Right? To some extent. That has been done well at other companies like Google, and so forth. So, I've always believed in a couple of vectors for inspiration. The most obvious one is to listen to others. More than talk. Whether it's listening to customers, listening to partners, listening to other employees with other ideas and have a curated way to do that because if you only listen to customers you build faster horses not carts, as Henry Ford said, okay? So that's the what I would call a generic theme and you'd think that it's easy to do so, but it's very hard to truly listen from signal from the noise by the way. So there's an art there that one has to get better at. But the DNA has to be there to listen that's the first thing I would say. The second thing which I think is maybe deeper, and that's probably more in the... The first one applies to maybe 1% The second one, probably applies to .001% which is having intuition of what's right. And this ability, people call it, I don't know, big words like vision and so forth the ability to see around corners and anticipate, you know, my old manager, a guy that I respect a lot, Mark Templeton who was the CEO for Citrix, used to always ask this question "Do you know why Michelin has three stars? "The first star is for food, obviously, "there has to be good food. "The second star is for service. "The third star, not many people know why it's for" According to him, and I haven't really checked it yet, I haven't really eaten in too many Michelin three star restaurants, is anticipation. And product strategy is a little bit like that, right? So to me, that's where Nutanix really trumps the competition. Is that second dimension of intuition. More so than even, listening to customers. >> It's seeing around those corners, and knowing which way the winds are blowing. >> Totally. >> One of the other things that we're talking about a lot about, here on theCUBE, particularly at this conference, is the importance of culture. Nutanix...we had Dheeraj on this morning talking about the sort of playful nature that he tries to bring to the company, and that really has filtered down, how would you describe the Nutanix culture and how do you maintain the culture? >> So I think, we... I'll tell you personally, the journey that I was on, that there were a couple of things that I brought to the table, a couple things that I learned myself, as well as what I could see, a couple things that you'll see in a company that has been built by founders, in my opinion, I'm not a founder, or entrepreneur myself, but I've seen them in action now, is they bring one dimension that I've not seen in big company leaders, which is continuous learning. Because that's the only way they can stay in the company when it goes from 0 to ninety, right? And the folks that continuously learn, stay. If they don't, they leave and we get professional leaders. So, continuous learning, if it can be applied, to the generic company becomes an amplifying effect now. People can learn how to grow, look around the corners, they can learn things, that otherwise they aren't born with, in my opinion. So I think that's one unique dimension that Nutanix I think, inculcates in a lot of people, is this continuous learning. The other dimension, which I think, everybody knows about Nutanix being this humble, hungry, honest, with heart, you know those four words sort of capture the, a sense of, the playful, authenticity. But I think we're not afraid to be wrong. And, we're not afraid to make fun of ourselves. We're not afraid to be, I guess, ourselves, right? And that, I think is easy to say, but very hard to do. >> John Furrier: You learn through your mistakes as they say, learn through failure. So, you mention intuition. What does your intuition tell you about the current ecosystem as the market starts to really accelerate with multi cloud on premise private cloud, which by the way, good intuition, of course we keep on, at the first private cloud reports dominion and team, they got that right. The waves are coming and they look different. There's gonna be more integration we think. What does your intuition tell you about these next couple waves that are gonna come in to the landscape of the tech industry? >> Yeah, I mean I think, since I do want to come back on theCUBE again and again, and have something left over, I will say one thing though, is I think the gain in multi cloud is going to move up the stack, okay? That's where the next set of cloud wars are going to be fought. Is whose going to provide not just a great database as a service, but a great database itself. Because, Oracle's time's up, as far as I'm concerned, right? And you're going to see that with many traditional software stacks, some of them are Sass stacks that have been around for 20 years, by the way. Some of the largest Sass companies have been around for 20 years. It's time for a reboot for most of those companies. >> How about the Edge? What does the intuition tell you on the Edge? Certainly very relevant, you've got power, you've got connectivity expanding, Wifi 6 around the corner, we've seen that. 5g, okay, I buy it. But as it really starts to figure itself out, it's just another note on the network. What's your intuition tell you? >> Yeah, I mean, this is one area that I'm not too deep in, I've got other guys in my team who know a lot more, but, my intuition tells me, the more things change, the more they'll remain the same, in that area, right? So don't be surprised if they just end up being another smart phone. You know, its got an operating system, it runs apps, it's centrally controlled, talks to services in the back end, I see no reason why the Edge should be any different, if that make sense. >> John Furrier: Yeah, exactly. Then data, big part of it. Big part of your strategy, the data piece, >> Of course, of course, yeah. I mean I think data being a core competency of any company is going to stand out, I think in the next 5, 10 years. >> John Furrier: Awesome. What's going on at the show? What's been your hottest conversation in the hallways, talking to customers, partners, employees, what's some of the trending conversation? >> I don't know, this conversations pretty interesting! (laughs) >> Of course! >> Rebecca Knight: We agree! (Laughs) >> My intuition is telling me this is a good conversation! Hope it comes out good! >> Keep using that word man. >> I love it! >> Anyway, always great to be with you guys. >> Sunil, thank you so much for returning to theCUBE. >> Anytime. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for John Furrier, we will have much more from Nutanix.next coming up in just a little bit. Stay with us. (upbeat music)

>> Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering IBM Think 2019. Brought to you by IBM. >> Hey, welcome back everyone this is theCUBE's live coverage in San Francisco, California Moscone Center for IBM Think 2019. It's the wrap up of our four days of wall-to-wall live coverage. All the publishing on Siliconangle.com. I've got the journalism team cranking it out. Dave Vellante just put up a post on Forbes, check that out. And Stu's got the team cranking on the videos. Stu and Dave, four days, team's done a great job. Tons of video, tons of content, tons of data coming through theCUBE. We're sharing that live, we're sharing it on Twitter, we're sharing it everywhere on LinkedIn. What's going on with the data? Let's synthesize, let's extract the signal from the noise, let's assess IBM's prospects in this chapter two, as Ginni says. A lot of A.I., lot of data, I mean IBM is an old company that has so much business, so many moving parts and they've been working years to kind of pivot themselves into a position to run the table on the Modern Era of computing and software. So, what do you think, Dave? >> Well, I mean, this has been a long time coming and we're here, you pointed out John, to me privately that IBM's taking a playbook similar to Microsoft in that they're cloudifying everything. But there's differences, right? There's a bigger emphasis on A.I. than when, not that Microsoft's not in A.I. they of course are, but when Microsoft cloudified itself there wasn't as much of an emphasis on A.I. Ginni Rometty said, "Well, the first chapter was only about 20%, the remaining 80% is going to be chapter two. We're going hard after that." I wrote in that post today that, in 2013, IBM had a wake-up call. They lost that deal to Amazon at the C.I.A. They had to go out and buy Softlayer because their product was deficient, their cloud product was deficient. >> And by the way it looks like they're going to lose the JEDI Contract by the D.O.D., another agency that's a 10 billion dollar contract. >> So we can talk about they're going to lose that one too. >> We can talk about is Amazon's lead extending in Cloud? And so, IBM cannot take on Amazon head-to-head in infrastructures of service period, the end. It doesn't have the volume, >> And they know that, I think. >> It doesn't have the margins, and they know that. They got to rely on it's, as a service business it's SaaS, it's data, it's data platforms, obviously A.I. and now Red Hat. The fact that IBM had to spend, or spent, 34 billion dollars on Red Hat, to me underscores the fact that it's Cloud and it's 10-year attempt to commercialize Watson, isn't enough. It needs more to be a leader in hybrid. >> And let's talk about the Red Hat acquisition because Ray Wang on theCUBE yesterday and said, "Oh, P.E., private equity prices are driving up 34 billion dollars, pretty much market in today's world." He thinks they overpaid and could have used those services. You debated that, you've heard me say that, hey I could have used that 34 billion dollars of cobbled-together stuff, but you made a comment around speed. They don't have the gestation period there to do it. So, if you take market price for Red Hat, Stu, with open shifts accelerated success since Kubernetes really accelerated its adoption. You got IBM now with a mechanism to address the legacy on premise into Cloud Modern, and you got with this Cloud Private, Stu, this really is a secret weapon for IBM and to me, what I'm pulling out of all the data is that Rob Thomas at Interpol, the CDO have a great data A.I. strategy as a group. They have a team that's one team and this Cloud Private is a secret weapon for them. I think it's going to be a very key product and not a lot of people are talking about it. >> Well John, it shouldn't be a secret weapon for IBM because of course IBM has a strong legacy in the data center. We've talked about Z this week, you talk about power, talk about all the various pieces. Red Hat absolutely can help that a lot. What we noticed is there wasn't a lot of talk about Red Hat here just because it's going through the final pieces. We expect later this year to come out, but it's about the developers. That is where Red Hat is going to be successful, where they are successful and where they should be able to help IBM leverage that going forward. The concern we have is culture. IBM says that Red Hat will be separate. There will be no layoffs, they'll keep that alone but when I wrote about the acquisition I said, we should be able to see, for this to really be a successful acquisition, we should be able to see the Red Hat culture actually influence what's happening at IBM. And to be honest when I talk to people around this show, they're like, "That's never going to happen, Stu." >> I just want to make a point about the price. Ray was saying how they overpaid and made the private equity thing. IBM's paying a hundred and ninety dollars a share. If you dial back to June of '18, Stu you and I talked about this in our offices, Red Hat was trading at one seventy five a share. So they're paying an 8 1/2% premium over that price. Yes, when they made the deal in the fall you're talking about a 60% premium. So, the premium is really single digits over what it was just a few months earlier. >> And Cisco, Google, >> It was competitive, right. >> Microsoft all could have gone after that. I think it's a great buy for IBM. >> That's what they had to pay to get it. >> And definitely it helped there. So from my stand-point, looking at the show this week, first of all I was impressed to see really that data strategy and how that's pervasive through the company and A.I. is something that everyone's talking about how it fits in. John you commented a bunch of times Ginni mentioned Kubernetes two times in her Keynote. So, they're in these communities, they're working on all these environments. The concern I have is if this is chapter two and if A.I. is one of the battlefields, Amazon's all deep into A.I. I think heavily about Google when I talk about that. When I talk to Microsoft people they're like, "Satya Nadella is Mr. A.I.", that's all they care about. >> I don't think Microsoft has a lot of meat on the A.I. bone either. >> Really? >> No look it, here's the bottom line. A.I. is a moonshot it is an aspirational marketplace. It's about machine learning and using data. A.I.'s been around for a while and whoever can take advantage of that is going to be about this low-hanging use cases of deterministic processes that you throw machine learning at no problem. Doing cognition and reasoning a whole 'nother ballgame. You got state, this is where the Cloud Native piece is important as a lynch-pin to future growth because that wave is coming. And I think it's not going to impact IBM so much now, as it is in the future, because you got developers with Red Hat and you got the enablement for Cloud growth, Modern Cloud, stuff in any Cloud. But IBM has a zillion customers Dave, they have a business, they have mission critical workloads. And you pointed out in the Forbes post that we posted and on the Silicon Angle, that I.T. Economics are changing. And that the cloud services market is growing, so IBM has pre existing, big mission critical companies that they're serving. So, you can't just throw Kubernetes at that and say lift and shift. Z's there, you got other things happening. So, to me, that is IBM's focus, they nail their bread and butter, they bring multi-cloud from the table. Throw hybrid at it with Private Cloud and they're stable. Everything else I think is window dressing in my mind, because I think you're going to see that adoption more downstream. >> Well, the other thing you gave me for the piece actually, you helped me understand that IBM with Red Hat can use Cloud Native techniques and apply them to its customer base and to really create a new breed of business developers, right? Probably not the hoodie crowd necessarily, but business developers that are driving value apps based on mission critical apps and using Cloud Native techniques. Your thoughts on that? >> The difference between Oracle and IBM is the following, Oracle has no traction in developers in Cloud Native, IBM now with Red Hat can take the Cloud Native growth and use containers and Kubernetes and these new technologies to essentially containerize legacy workloads and make them compatible with modern technologies. Which means, if you're in business or in I.T. or running a lot of big shops, you don't have to kill the old to bring in the new. That's one factor. The other factor is the model's flipped. Applications are dictating architecture. It used to be infrastructure dictates what applications can do, it's completely reversed. We've heard this time and time again from the leading platforms, the ones that are looking at the applications with data as a fabric in there will dictate resource, Whether it's one Cloud or multiple Clouds or whatever architecture that's the fundamental shift. The people who get that will win and the people who don't won't. >> And the other thing I've pointed out in that article is that Ginny kept saying it's not backend loaded, The Red Hat deal, it's not back end loaded. IBM has about a 20 billion dollar business, captive business, in outsourcing, application management, application modernization and they can just point Red Hat right at that base, bring it's services business, Stu you've made this point, it's about scaling Red Hat. Red Hat's what, about a three and a half billion dollar company? >> Yeah >> And so that really is, she was explaining the business case for the acquisition. >> Yeah absolutely, I mean we've watched IBM for years, Bluemix had a little bit of traction but really faltered after a while, that application modernization. You hear from IBM, similar to what we've heard from Cisco a few weeks ago, meet customers where they are and help them move forward. We did a nice interview this week with a UK financial services company talking about how they've modernized what they're doing. Things like I.T. ops, new ops, these environments that are helping people with that app development. 'Cause IBM does have a good application work flow. There's lots of the infrastructure companies don't have apps and that's a big strength. >> When was the last, I got a direct message from the crowd, I want to get to Stu, but I want to ask you guys a question. When was the last time you saw a real innovation and disruption in a positive way around business applications. We're talking about business applications, not a software app, that's in a created category. We're talking about blocking and tackling business applications. When have you seen any kind of large scale transition innovation. Transition and innovation at the business application level? >> Google Docs? I mean >> I mean think about it. >> Right? >> So I think this is where IBM has an opportunity. I think the data science piece is going to transform into a business app marketplace and I think that's where their value is. >> Workday? >> Service Now. >> It's a sass ification of everything. >> Salesforce? >> Service Now, features become products. Products become companies. I mean this a big debate. I mean you can win on >> But that's not, Service Now really not a business, I mean it is a business app but it's more of an I.T. app. Alright Workday I'd say is an example. Salesforce I guess. >> And look here's one of the flaws in that multi-cloud picture, is it's I'm going to take all this heterogeneous environment and I'm going to give you a multi-Cloud manager. We've seen that single pane of glass discussion my entire career and it never works. So I'm a little concerned about that. >> So Andy Jassy makes the case that multi-cloud is less secure, more complex, more expensive. It's a strong case that he makes. Now of course my argument is that it's multi-vendor. It's not really multi-cloud. >> Well here's the Silicon Valley >> So he didn't have any control over that. It's not a procurement thing, it's just the way that people go by. >> The world has changed with cloud and I'll give you a Silicon Valley example anecdote. It used to be an expression in Silicon Valley, in venture capital community if you were a start-up or entrepreneur you'd build a platform. And there was an old expression, that's a feature, not a company. Kind of a joke within the VC community and that's how they would vet deals. Oh, that's a good feature" >> "Oh it's a feature company." >> "That's a great idea." Now with Cloud as a platform and now with all the stuff that's coming to bear, horizontally scalable, all the things that IBM's rolling out, sets the table for a feature to be a company. Where you have an innovation at the business model level, you don't really need tech anymore other than to scale up build it out and that's all done for you by other people. So people who are innovating on say an idea, well let's change this little feature in HR app or, that could meet up to Workday. Or let's change this feature. Features can become companies now so I think that's my observation. >> I think it's really interesting >> It could live in the cloud marketplaces too. It's so easy to get that scale if I could plug into all those marketplaces. IBM for years has had thousands of partners in their ecosystem. Of course Amazon's Marketplace, growing like gangbusters. >> But this is what Jerry Chen said when we were at Reinvent last year and we were asking him about Amazon, will it go up the stack, will it develop applications? He said, well, look but then what we got to do is give people a platform for application developers to build those features to disrupt, to your point, the core enterprise apps. Now, can IBM get there before Amazon, who knows? I mean its. >> Alright guys let's look at the big picture, zoom out. Your thoughts on Think 2019 IBM Think, Stu what's your final thoughts? >> Yeah, final thoughts is, I think IBM first of all is coming together. Just as this show was six shows and last year it was in two locations, there's cohesion. I heard the four days of interviews, we saw a lot of different pieces. Everything from talking about augmented reality through storage and we talked about the Z, and those pervasive themes of data, A.I., Dave what do you call it, It's the innovation cocktail now in Cloud. Data A.I. in cloud, put those three together. >> Innovation sandwich, innovation cocktail. Got to have a cocktail with a sandwich. That's your big take away? Okay, my take away Dave is that the, you nailed it in your post I thought, you should go to Forbes and check out, search on IBM Think you'll find the post by me and Dave Vellante but it's really written by Dave. I think to me IBM can change the game on two fronts. I learned and I walked away with a learning this week about these business apps. To me, my walk away is there's going to be innovation at a new genre of developers. I think you're going to see IBM target, they should target these business app ties as well as with the Could Native in Red Hat. I really think highly of that acquisition. From a speed stand point, I think the culture of Red Hat, although different, will be a nice check against IBM's naturally ability to blue-wash it. Which means you don't want to lose the innovation. I think Ginni saying Kubernetes twice on stage, is a sign that she sees this path, I think the Cloud Private opportunity could be a nice lever to bring open shifts and Kubernetes into that growth. And I think A.I. is going to be one of those things where they're either going to go big or go home. I think it's going to be one of those things. >> My take, love the venue, way better than last year in terms of the logistics. I like the new Moscone, easy to get around. May next year, May 2020 is going to be better than February here. I would've liked to see Ginni sell harder. She laid out a vision, she talked about a lot of sort of of high level things. I would have liked to seen her sell the new IBM and Red Hat harder. I guess they couldn't do that because they're worried about compliance. >> Quiet Period? >> Yeah right, you know monopolistic behavior I guess. But that I'm really excited to hear that story and a harder sell on the new IBM. >> I think if they can take the Microsoft playbook of cloudifying everything going with the open source with Red Hat and then just getting the great Sass if app revenue up, they're going to, can do well. >> Alright guys, great job. Thanks for hosting this week. Lisa Martin's not here today. Want to thank Lisa Martin if you're out there watching, great time. Guys, thanks to the crew. Thanks to IBM. Thanks to all of our sponsors that make theCUBE do what we do and thanks for all of your support to the community. I'm John Furrier along with Stu Miniman. Thanks for watching. See you next time. (pulsing electronic music)

(lively music) >> Hello, and welcome to this special CUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier, founder of SiliconANGLE Media, co-host of theCUBE. We are here in our Palo Alto Studio to have a conversation around cloud computing, multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, the changes going on in the IT industry and for businesses across the globe as impacted by cloud computing, data, AI. All that's coming together, and a lot of people are trying to figure out how to architect their solution to scale globally but also take care of their businesses, not just cutting costs for information technologies, but delivering services that scale and benefit the businesses and ultimately their customers, the end users. I'm here with a very special guest, Donnie Berkholz, who's the VP of IT services delivery at CWT, Carlson Wagonlit Travel. Also the program chair of the Open Source summit, part of the Linux Foundation, formerly an analyst, a great friend of theCUBE. Donnie, great to see you. Thanks for joining us today. >> Well, thanks for having me on the show. I really appreciate it. >> So we've been having a lot of conversations around, obviously, cloud. We've been there, watching it, from day one. I know you have been covering it as an analyst. Part of that cloud ought to go back to 2007, '08 time frame roughly speaking, you know, even before that with Amazon. Just the massive growth certainly got everyone's attention. IBM once called Amazon irrelevant. Now going full cloud with buying Red Hat for billions and billions of dollars at a 63% premium. Open Source has grown significantly, and now cloud absolutely is the architectural linchpin for companies trying to change how they do business, gather more efficiencies, all built on the ethos of DevOps. That is now kind of going mainstream. So I want to get your thoughts and talk about this across a variety of touchpoints. One is what people are doing in your delivering services, IT services for CWT, and also trying to get positioned for the future. And then Open Source. You're on the Open Source program chair. Open Source driving all these benefits, now with IBM buying Red Hat, you've seen the commercialization of Open Source at a whole nother level which is causing a lot of conversation. So tell us what you're doing and what CWT is about and your role at the company. >> Absolutely, thank you. So CWT, we're in the middle of this journey we call CWT 3.0, which is really one about how do we take the old school green screens that you've seen when you've got travel agents or airline agents booking travel and bring people into the picture and blend together people with technology. So I joined about a year and a half ago to really help push things forward from the perspective of DevOps, because what we came to realize here was we can't deliver quickly and iterate quickly without the underlying platforms that give us the kind of agility that we need without the connections across a lot of our different product groups that led us, again, to iterate on the right things from the perspective of our customers. So I joined a year and a half ago. We've made a lot of strides since then in modernizing many of our technology platforms. The way I think about it here, it's a large enterprise. We've got hundreds of different applications. We've got many, many different product teams, and everything is on a spectrum. We've got some teams that are on the bleeding edge. Not even the leading edge, but I'd say the bleeding edge, trying out the very latest things that come out, experimenting with brand new Open Source tools, with brand new cloud offerings to see, can we incorporate that as quickly as possible so we can innovate faster than our competitors? Whether those are the traditional competitors or some of the new software companies coming into things from that angle. And then on the other end of the spectrum, we've got teams who are taking a much more conservative approach, and saying, "Let's wait and see what sticks "before we pick it up." And the fortunate thing, I think, about a company at the scale we are, is that we can have some of those groups really innovating and pushing the needle, and then other groups who can wait and see which parts stick before we start adopting those at scale. >> And so you've got to manage the production kind of stability versus kind of kicking the tires for the new functionality. So I've got to ask you first. Set up the architecture there. Are you guys on premise with cloud hybrid? Are you in the cloud-native? Do you have multiple clouds? Could you just give a sense of how you're deploying specifically with cloud? >> Yeah, absolutely. I think just like anything else, it's a spectrum of all we see here. There's a lot of different products. Some of them have been built cloud-native. They're using those serverless functions as service technologies from scratch. Brought in some leaders from Amazon to lead some of that drive here. They brought in a lot of good thinking, a lot of good culture, a lot of new perspective to the technologies we're adopting as a company that's not traditionally been a software company. But that is more and more so every day. So we've got some of that going on as completely cloud-native. We've got some going on that's more, I would say, hybrid cloud, where we're spanning between a public cloud environment back to our data centers, and then we've got some that are different applications across multiple different public clouds, because we're not in any one place right now. We're putting things in the best place to do the job. So that's very much the approach that we take, and it's one that, you know, back when I was in my analyst's world, as one of my colleagues called it, the best execution venue. What's the best place? What's the right place to do the right kind of task? We incorporate what are the best technologies we can adopt to help us differentiate more quickly, and where does the data live? What's the data gravity look like? Because we can't be shipping data back and forth. We can't have tons of transactions going back and forth all the time between different public clouds or between a public cloud and one of our data centers. So how do we best account for that when we're architecting what our applications should look like, whether they're brand new ones or whether they're ones we're in the middle of modernizing. >> Great, thanks for sharing, that's great, so yeah, I totally see that same thing. People put, you know, where the best cloud for the app, and if you're Microsoft Shop, you use Azure. If you want to kick the tires on Amazon, there's good roles for that, so we're seeing a lot of those multiple clouds. But while I've got you on the line here, I know you've been an analyst. I want you to just help me define something real quick because there's always kind of confusion between hybrid cloud and multi-cloud. Certainly the multi-cloud, we're getting a lot of hype on that. We're seeing with Kubernetes, with stateful applications versus stateless. You're seeing some conversations there. Certainly on Open Source, that's top of the agenda. Donnie, explain for folks watching the difference between hybrid cloud and multi-cloud, because there's some nuances there, and some people have different definitions. How do you guys look at that? Cause you have multiple clouds, but some aren't necessarily running a workload across clouds yet because of latency issues, so define what hybrid means to you guys and what multi-cloud means to you. >> All right, yeah, I think for us, hybrid cloud would be something where it's about integrating an on-prem workload off a more traditional workload with something in a public cloud environment. It's really, hybrid cloud to me is not two different public clouds working together or even the same application in two different public clouds. That's something a little bit different, and that's where you start to get, I think, into a lot of the questions of what is multi-cloud? We've seen that go through a lot of different transitions over the past decade or so. We've seen a lot of different, you know, vendors, going out there thinking they could sell multi-cloud management that, you know, panned out at different levels of success. I think for at least a decade, we've been talking about ideas like can we do cloud bursting? Has that ever really worked in practice? And I think it's almost as rare as a unicorn. You know, on-prem for the cost efficiencies and then we burst the cloud for the workload. Well, you know, to this day, I've never seen anything that gives you 100% functionality and 100% performance comparability between an on-prem workload and public cloud workload. There always seems to be some kind of difference, and this is a conversation that, I think, Randy Bias has actually been a great proponent of it's not just about the API compatibility. It's not just, you know, can I run Azure in their data centers or in mine? It's about what is the performance difference look like? What does the availability difference look like? Can I support that software in my data center as well as the engineers at Microsoft or at Amazon or at Google or wherever else they're supporting it today? Can I keep it up and running as well? Can I keep it performing as well? Can I find problems as quickly? And that's where it comes to the question of how do we focus on our differentiators and let the experts focus on theirs. >> That's a great point about Randy Bias. Love that great API debate. I was looking at some of that footage we had years ago. But this brings up a good point that I want to get your reaction to, because, you know, a lot of vendors going out there, saying, "Oh, our cloud's this. "We've got all this stuff going on," and there's a lot of hype and a lot of posturing and positioning. The great thing about cloud is that you really can't fake it until you make it. It's got to be working, right? So when you get into the kind of buying into the cloud. You say, "Okay, great, we're going to do some cloud," and maybe you get some cloud architects together. They say, "Okay, here's what it means to us. "In each environment, we'll have to, you know, "understand what that means and then go do it." The reality kind of kicks in, and this is what I'd like to get your reaction to. What is the realities when you say, "Okay, "I want to go to cloud," either for pushing the envelope and/or moving solid workloads that are in production into the cloud. What is the impact on the network, network security, and application performance? Because at the end of the day, those are going to be impacted. Those three areas come up a lot in conversations when all of the glam and all the bloom is off the rose, those are the things that are impacted. What's your thoughts on how practitioners should prepare for those three areas? The network impact, network security impact, and application performance? >> Yeah, I think preparation is exactly the right word there of how do we get the people we have up to speed? And how do we get more and more out of that kind of project mindset and into much more of the product mindset and whether that product is customer-facing or whether that product is some kind of infrastructure or platform product? That's the kind of thinking we're trying to have going into it of how do we get our people, who, you know, may run a Ci Cd pipeline, may run an on-prem container platform, may even be responsible for virtualization, may be responsible for on-prem networks or firewalls or security. How do we get them up to speed and turn them into real software engineers? That's a multi-year journey. That's not something that happens overnight. You can't bring in a team of consultants to fix that problem for you and say, "Oh, well, we came in and implemented it, "and now it's yours, and we walk out the door." It's no longer that, you know, build and operate mindset that you could take a little bit more with on-prem. Because everything is defined as code. And if you don't know how to deal with code, you're going to be in a real rough spot the next time you have to make a change to that stuff that that team of consultants came in and implemented for you. So I think it's turned into a much more long-term approach, which is very, very healthy for technology and for technology companies as a whole of how do we think about this long-term and in a sustainable way, think about scaling up our people. What do those training paths look like? What do those career paths look like? So we can decide, you know, how many people do we want certified? What kind of certifications should they have or equivalent skill sets? I remember hearing not too long ago that I think it was Capital One had over 10,000 people who were AWS certified, which is an enormously large number to think about, but that's the kind of transitions that we've been making as we become more and more cloud-native and cloud by default, is getting the right people. The people we have today trained up in these new kinds of skill sets instead of assuming that's something we can have some team fly in from magic land and implement and then fly away again afterwards. >> That's great, Don, thanks for sharing that insight. I also want to get your thoughts on the Open Source summit, but before we get there, I've got to ask you a question around some of the trends we've been seeing. Early on at DevOps we saw this together of the folks doing the hard work in the early pioneering days, where you saw the developers really getting closer to the front lines. They were becoming part of the business conversation. In the old world of IT, "Okay, here's our strategy. "Consolidate this, load some virtual machines," you know, "Get all this stuff up and running." The business decisions would then trickle down to the tech folks, then with the DevOps revolution, that's now cloud computing and all things, you know, IoT and everything else happening where the developers and the engineering side of it and the applications are on the front lines. They're in more of the business conversations, so I have to ask you. When you're at CWT, what are some of the business drivers and conversations that you guys are having with executive management around choices? Are they business drivers? Do you see an order of preference around agility? The transformation value for either customers or employees, compliance and security, are the top ones that people talk about generally. Of those business drivers, which ones do you guys see the most that are part of iterating through the architecture and ultimately the environment that you deploy? >> Yeah, I think as part of what I mentioned earlier, that we're on this journey we call CWT 3.0, and what's really new about that is bringing in speed and agility into the conversation of if we have something that we imagine as a five year transformation, how do we get to market quickly with new products so that we can start really executing and seeing the outcomes of it? So we've always had the expectations around availability, around security, around all these other factors. Those aren't going away. Instead, we're adding a new one, so we've got new conversations and a new balance to reach at an executive level of we now need a degree of speed that was not the expectation, let's say, a decade ago. It may not even have been the expectation in our industry five years ago, but is today. And so we're now incorporating speed into that balance of maybe we'll decide to very intentionally say, "We're not going to go over quite as many nine's today "so that we can be iterating more quickly on our software." Or, "We're going to invest more "in better release management approaches and tools," right? Like Canary releases, like, you know, Green-Blue releases, all these sorts of new techniques, feature flags, that sort of thing so that we can better deal with speed and better account for the risk and spread it to the smallest surface area possible. >> And you were probably doing those things also to understand the impact and look at kind of what's that's coming in that you're instrumenting in infrastructure because you don't want to have to put it out there and pray and hope that it works. Right, I mean? The old way. >> The product teams that are building it are really great and really quick at understanding about what the user experience looks like. And whether that's their Real User monitoring tools or through, you know, other tools and tricks that we may incorporate to understand what our users are doing on our tools in real time, that's the important part of this, is to shorten the iteration cycle and to understand what things look like in production. You've got to expose that back to the software engineers, to the business analysts, to the product managers who are building it or deciding what should be built in the first place. >> All right, so now that you're on the buyer's side, you've actually got people knocking on your door. "Hey, Donnie, buy my cloud. "Do this, you know, I've got all these solutions. "I've got all these tools. "I've got a toolshed full of," you know, the fool with the tool, as they say. You don't want to be that person, right? So ultimately you've got to pick an environment that's going to scale. When you look at the cloud, how do you evaluate the different clouds? You mentioned gravity or data gravity earlier. All kinds of new criteria is up there now in terms of cloud selection. You mentioned best cloud for the job. I get that. Is there certain things that you look for? Is there a list? Is there criteria on cloud selection that goes through your desk? >> Yeah, I think something that's been really healthy for me coming into the enterprise side from the analyst perspective is you get a couple of new criteria that start to rise up real quickly. You start thinking about things like what's that vendor relationship going to look like? How is the sales force? Are they willing to work with you? Are they willing to adapt to your needs? And then you can adapt back with them so you can build a really strong, healthy relationship with some of your strategic vendors, and to me, a public cloud vendor is absolutely a strategic vendor. That's one where you have to really care a lot and invest in that relationship and make sure things go well when you're sailing together, going in the same direction. And so to me, that's a little bit of a newer factor because it was easy to sit back and come in as the strategic advisor role and say, "Oh, you should go with this cloud. "You should go with that cloud "because of reasons X, Y, or Z," but that doesn't really account for a lot of things that happen behind the scenes, right? What's your sourcing and human department doing? How do they like to work with around contract, right? Will you negotiate a good MSA? All these sorts of things where you don't think about that when you're only thinking about technology and business value. You also have to think about the other, just the day to day, what does it look like? What's the blocking and tackling working with some of those strategic vendors? So you've got that to incorporate in addition to the other criteria around do they have great managed services? You know, self-service managed services that will work for your needs? For example, what do they have around data bases? What do they have around stream processing? What do they have around serverless platforms, right? Whatever it might be that suits the kinds of needs you have. Like for example, you might think about what does our business look like, and it's a graph, right? It's travelers, it's airports, it's planes, it's hotels. It's a bunch of different graphs all intersecting, and so we might imagine looking for a cloud provider that's really well-suited to processing those sorts of workloads. >> In the old days, the networking guys used to run the keys to the kingdom. Hey, you know, I'm going to rack and stack servers. I'm going to do all this stuff, but I've got to go talk to the networking guys, make sure all the routes are provisional and all that's locked down, mainly because that was a perimeter environment then. With cloud now, what's the impact of the networking? What's the role of the network? As we see DevOps notion of infrastructure as code, you've got to compute networking stores as three main pillars of all environments. Compute, check. Stores getting better. Networking, can you imagine Randy Bias? This was a big pet peeve for him. What's the role that cloud does? What's the role of the network with your cloud strategy? >> Yeah, I think something that I've seen following DevOps for the past decade or so has been that, you know, it really started as the ops doing development moved more into the developers and the ops working together and in many cases sharing roles in different ways, then incorporated, you know, QA, and incorporated product, to some extent. Most recently it's really been focused on security and how do we have that whole DevSecOps, SecDevOps thing going on. Something that's been trailing behind a little bit was network, absolutely. I had some very close friends about 10 years ago, maybe, who were getting into that, and they were the only people they knew and they only people they'd ever even heard of thinking beyond the level of using some kind of an expect script to automate your network interaction. But now I think networking as code is really starting to pick up. I mean, you look at what people are doing in public cloud environments. You look at what Open Source projects like Ansible are doing or on the new focus on network functionality. They're not alone in that. Many others are investing in that same kind of area. It's finally really starting to get up. Like for example, we have an internal DevOps Day that we run twice a year, and at the most recent one, guess who one of our speakers was? It was a network engineer talking about the kinds of automation they'd been starting to build against our network environments, not just in public cloud, but also on-premise. And so we're really investing in bringing them into our broader DevOps community, even though Net may not be in the name today. I don't think the name can ever extend to include all possible roles. But it is absolutely a big transition that more and more companies, I think, are going to see rolling along, and one that we've seen happening in public cloud externally for many, many years now. It's been inevitable that the network's going to get engaged in that automation piece. And the network teams are going to be more and more thinking about how do we focus our time in automation and on defining policy, and how do we enable the product teams to work in a self-service way, right? We set up the governance, but governance now means they can move at speed. It doesn't mean wait seven to 30 days for us to verify all of the port openings, match our requirements, and so on and so forth. That's defined up front. >> Yeah, and that's awesome, and I think that's the last leg of the stool in my opinion, and I think you nailed it. Making it operationally automation enabled, and then actually automating it. So, okay, before we get to the Open Source, one final question for you. You know, as you look at plan for the technologies around containers and microservices, what sounds a lot like networking constructs, provisioning, services. The role of stateless applications become a big part of that. As you look at those technologies, what are some of the things you're looking for and evaluating containers and microservices? And what role will that play in your environment and your job? >> I think something that we spend a lot of time focusing on is what is the day two experience going to look like? What is it going to be like? Not just to roll it out initially, but to, you know, operate on an ongoing basis, to make upgrades, to monitor it, to understand what's happening when things are going wrong, to understand, you know, the security stance we're at, right? How well are we locked down? Is everything up-to-date? How do we know that and verify it on a continuous basis instead of the, you know, older school approach of hey, we kind of do a ECI survey or an audit, you know, once a year, and that's the day we're in compliance, and then after that, we're not. Which I was just reading some stories the other day about companies saying, "Hey, there's a large percentage "of the time that you're out of compliance, "but you make sure to fix it just in time "for your quarterly surveys or scans or what have you." And so that's what we spend a lot of our time focusing on is not just the ease of installation, but the ease of ongoing operability and getting really good visibility into the security, into the health, of the underlying platforms that we're running. And in some cases, that may push us to, let's say, a cloud managed service. In some cases, we may say, "Well, that doesn't quite suit our needs." We might have some unique requirements, although I spend a lot of my time personally saying, "In most cases, we are not a snowflake, right?" We should be a snowflake where we differentiate as a company. We should not be a snowflake at the level of our monitoring tools. There's nothing unique we should really be doing in that area. So how can we make sure that we use, whether it's trusted vendors, trusted cloud providers, or trusted Open Source projects with a large and healthy community behind them to run that stuff instead of build it ourselves, 'cause that's not our forte. >> I love that. That's a great conversation I'd love to have with you another time around competitive advantage around IT which is coming back in vogue again. It hasn't been that way in awhile because of all the consolidation and outsourcing. You're seeing people really, really ramp up and say, "Wait a minute, we outsourced our core competency and IT," and now with cloud, there's a competitive advantage, so how do you balance the intellectual property that you need to build for the business and then also use the scale and agility with Open Source? So I want to move to that Open Source conversation. I think this is a good transition. Developers at the end of the day still have to build the apps and services they're going to run on these environments to add value. So Open Source has become, I won't say a professional circuit for developers. It really is become the place for developers because that's where now corporations and projects have been successful, and it's going to a whole nother level. Talk about how Open Source is changing, and specifically around it becoming a common vehicle for one, employees of companies to participate in as part of their job, and two, how it's going to a whole nother level with all this code that's flying around. You can't, you know, go dig without finding out that, you know, new TensorFlow library's been donated for Google, big code bases are being rolled in there, and still the same old success formula for Open Source is continuing to work. You're on the program chair for Open Source summit, which is part of the Linux foundation, which has been very, very successful in this modern era. How has that changed? What's going on in Open Source? And how does that help people who are trying to stand up architecture and build businesses? >> I think Open Source has gone through a lot of transitions over the past decade or so. All right, so it started, and in many ways it was driven by the end users. And now it's come back full circle so that it's again driven more and more by the end users in a way that there was a middle term there where Open Source was really heavily dominated by vendors, and it's started to come back around, and you see a lot of the web companies in particular, right? You're sort of Googles and Amazons and LinkedIns and Facebooks and Twitters, they're open sourcing tools on an almost daily basis, it feels like. I just saw another announcement yesterday, maybe the day before, about a whole set of kernel tools that I think it was Facebook had open sourced. And so you're seeing that pace just going so quickly, and you think back to the days of, for example, the Apache web server, right? Where did that come about from? It didn't come from a software vendor. It came from a coalition of end users all working together to develop the software that they needed because they felt like there's a big gap there and there's an opportunity to cooperate. So it's been really pleasing for me to see that kind of come back around full circle of now, you can hardly turn around and see a company that doesn't have some sort of Open Source program office or something along those lines where they start to develop a much more healthy approach to it. All right, the early 2000's, it was really heavy on that fear and uncertainty and doubt around Open Source. In particular by some vendors, but also a lot of uncertainty because it wasn't that common, or maybe it wasn't that visible inside of these Fortune 500 global 2000 companies. It may have been common, right? What we used to say back when I worked at RedMonk was you turned around, and you asked the database admins, you know, "Are you running MySQL? "Or are you running Postgres?" You asked the infrastructure engineers, "Are you running Linux here?" and you'll get a yes, nine times out of ten, but the CIO was the last to know. Well now, it's started to flip back around because the CIO's are seeing the business value and adopting Open Source and having a really healthy approach to it, and they're trying to kind of normalize the approach to it as a consequence to that, saying, "Look, it's awesome "that we're adopting Open Source. "We have to use this "so that we can get a competitive advantage "because every thousand lines of code we can adopt "is a thousand lines of code we don't have to write, "and we can focus on our own products instead." And then starting to balance that new model of it used to be, you know, is it buy versus built? And then Sass came around, and it's buy versus build versus rent. And now there's Open Source, and it's buy versus build versus rent versus adopt. So every one of these just shifts conversation a little bit of how do you make the right choice at the right time at the right level of the stack? >> Yeah, that's a great observation, and it's awesome insight. It feels like dumping a little bit, a lot of dumping going on in Open Source, and you worry that the flood of vendor-contributed code is the new tactic, but if you look at all the major inflection points from the web, you know, through bitcoin, which is now 10 years old this year, it all started out as organic community projects or conversations on a message board. So there's still a revolution, and I think you're right. Their script is flipping around. I love that comment about the CIO's were last to know about Open Source. I think now that might be flipping around to the CIO's will be last to know about some proprietary advantage that might come out. So it's interesting to see the trend where you're starting to see smart people look at using Open Source but really identifying how they can use their engineering and their intellectual capital to build something proprietary within Open Source for IT advantage. Are you seeing that same trend? Is that on the radar at all? Is that just more of a fantasy on my part? >> I think it's always on the radar, and I think especially with Open Source projects that might be just a little bit below the surface of where a company's line of business is, that's where it will happen the most often. And so, you know, if you were building an analytics product, and you decided to build it on top of, you know, maybe there's the ELK Stack or the Elastic Stack, or maybe there's Graylog. There's a bunch of tools in that space, right? Maybe, you know, Solar, that sort of thing. And you're building an analytics tool or some kind of graph tool or whatever it might be, yeah, you might be inclined to say, "Well, the functionality's not quite there. "Maybe we need to build a new plugin. "Maybe we need to enhance a little bit." And I think this is the same conversation that a lot of the Linux kernel embedded group went through some number of years ago, which is, it's long term a higher burden to maintain a lot of those forks in-house and keep updating them forever than it is to bring some of that functionality back upstream. That's a good, healthy dialogue that hopefully will be happening more and more inside a lot of these companies that are taking Open Source and enhancing it for their own purposes, is taking the right level of those enhancements, deciding what that right level is, and contributing those back upstream and building a really healthy upstream participation regardless of whether you're a software vendor or an adopter of that software that uses it as a really critical part of their product stack. >> Awesome, Donnie, thanks for spending the time chatting with me today. Great to see you, great to connect over our remote here in our studio in Palo Alto. A final question for you. Are you having fun, these days? And what are you most excited about because, again, you've seen. You've been on multiple sides of the table. You've seen what the vendors have. You actually had the realities of doing your job to build value for Carlson Wagonlit Travel, CWT. What are you excited about right now? What's hot for you? What's jazzing you these days? >> Yeah, I think what's hot for me is, you know, to me there's nothing or very little that's revolutionary in technology. A lot of it is evolutionary, right? So you can't say nothing's new. There's always something a little bit different. And so the serverless is another example of something that it's a little bit different. It's a little bit new. It's similar to some previous takes, but you got new angles, specifically around the financials and around, you know, how do you pay? How is it priced? How do you get really almost closer to the metal, right? Get the things you need to happen closer to the way you're paying for them or the way they're running. That's remains a really exciting area for me. I've been going to Serverlessconf for probably since the first or second one now. I haven't been to the most recent one, but you know, there's so much value left in there to be tapped that I'm not yet really on to say, "What's next? What's next?" I've helped myself move out of that analyst world of getting excited about what's next, and for me it's now, "What's ready now?" Where can I leverage some value today or tomorrow or next week? And not think about what's coming down the pipe. So for me, that's, "Well, what went GA?" Right? What can I pick up? What can I scale inside our company so that we can drive the kinds of change we're looking for? So, you know, you asked me what am I the most excited about right now, and it's being here a year and a half and seeing the culture change that I've been driving since day one start to come back. Seeing teams that have never built automation in their lives independently go and learn it and build some automation and save themselves 80 hours a month. That's one example that just came out of our group a couple months back. That's what's valuable for me. That's what I love to see happen. >> Automation's addicting. It's almost an addictive flywheel. We automate something. Oh, that's awesome. I can move on to something else, something better. That was grunt work. Why do I want to do that again? Donnie, thanks so much, and again, thanks for the insight. I appreciate you taking the time and sharing with theCUBE here in our studio. Donnie Berkholz is the VP of IT source of CWT, a great guest. I'm John Furrier here inside theCUBE studio in Palo Alto. Thanks for watching. (lively music)

>> Narrator: Live from Nashville, Tennessee. It's the Cube. Covering Commvault GO 2018. Brought to you by Comvault. >> Welcome back to the Music City. This is the Cube at Commvault GO. I'm Stu Miniman with my Co-host Keith Townsend. Happy to welcome to the program one of the users of the show, actually, going to get to see her on stage at the keynote tomorrow. Ah, Michele Buschman who's the Vice President of Information Services at American Pacific Mortgage. Thanks so much for jointing us. >> Thanks for having me. >> Alright, ah, give us a little bit about your company and your roles of responsibility there. >> Sure, so, um, as you mentioned, I'm the Vice President of Information Services at American Pacific Mortgage. Um, I pretty much am responsible, you know, in the acting role or CIO, CTO, and CISO. So, I manage all technology for the company reporting to the COO. Um, our company is a top 15 independent mortgage bank. Um, we do about 10 billion dollars in mortgages a year, and have about a 25 hundred employee user base. >> Alright, so you've just got a couple of roles there, and luckily your in an industry, not much regulation to worry about, things aren't changing, things are kind of static. You just kind of put in a couple hours at the office and go, go take a nap, right? >> Ya, right (laughing). >> Um, why don't you tell us, what are some of those dynamics that are driving your up level business that are impacting, uh, the technology side. >> Oh, absolutely, so, um, you know, the mortgage industry is somewhat cyclical, and we are in that range where interest rates are going up, um, margin pressures are high. So, you know it's all about doing more with less and saving money. Um, in traditionally in the mortgage banking world, um, you know, IT resources, you're always a little bit short? Um, and so, that, you know, drives me to look for strategies that allow me to leverage my technical resources more for business value operations, than managing infrastructure, keeping lights on, um, which has really motivated us to move to the Cloud, and adopt platform type solutions similar to Commvault to be able to be more efficient with our few resources that we do have in our technology team. >> Alright, can you speak a little bit about Cloud. What is that driver, what does Cloud mean to your organization? And ah, yeah, what is the strategy as it sits today? >> Absolutely, so, um, we're kind of unique, I guess, to an extent in that, you know, when I walked into the organization four and a half years ago. The bulk of our critical business applications were already Sass hosted applications. Um, that grew out of the need because they had such a small technical team, um, you know, for the investments to manage the infrastructure to host applications is very high. So, um, luckily enough, I already had a head start, ah, in that the bulk of our critical business applications were CSS Sass hosted, so, um, what I've done since then is to look for those solutions that are more commodities. So, you know, why manage email on Prem when, you know, Microsoft can do a way better job than we could with the small staff we have. So, you know, it's slowly been, you know, taking each application, pulling it out, putting it into the Cloud, so that my team can be better leveraged to actually work on security initiatives, and um, business value, and transformation type of solutions. So, it is part of it is a, you know accessibility as well. Um, you know, we're in a changing environment where we want to be able to deliver our, um, employee workforce to be able to work anywhere, anytime, on any device, and in order to do that, we have to have solutions that are sitting out there, and accessible to them, um, and not always just sitting behind the firewall in the data center. >> So, let's talk a little bit about data management, data protection as it pertains to the business. What are some of the drivers, especially if you are in the Sass world that make you look at data protection suites as opposed to consuming native solutions within those services? >> Oh, absolutely. So, I very much have a strategy around platform services. Uh, when I walked into the organization, there's probably 30 different applications that were out in the environment, and none of them talked to each other. Um, when you're trying to manage, you know, bringing data across the organization to compile it and aggregate it to actually have something useful to the business. You have to have connected systems, but when you have a small team, it's very difficult to do that development working, connect all those systems, and manage them. So, what I like to look for is a platform solution, um, that will allow me to grow, um, as my budget allows, to add on the different modules that that platform solution, um, offers to me. So, you know, for example, you know, today's budget, I might have a certain limited amount that I can invest, but if I pick a solution that ultimately might give me 70, maybe 80 percent of the needs, um, then I'm only having to add in maybe a couple of other solutions and that cost to integrate and manage, and so overall it reduces the overall cost and complexity of the environment. >> So, you're in a mismatch of ten billion dollars a year in mortgages issued, yet, small IT staff, Sass solutions. When you think of Commvault 20 years, enterprise less solution, you don't think necessarily simple, easy to use, initially, so, why Commvault? >> Oh, absolutely, so, um, again within the first year I was there we went through a huge market share grab and so we grew 75 percent market share, and when I walked in the door, we needed to do investment in infrastructure. So, um, the original forecasts were totally blown out of the water, so the investment we made in small to midsize business type of solutions, we out grew before our contracts were due. So, when I went into this, um, we took about an 18 months, um, to take out time to find the right solution. Uh, we looked at about 6 different vendors, um, you know, we did a little bit of POC work, uh, we did references, um, and ah, basically at the end of the day I was looking for something that had a really good vision, um, that was platform driven, so I could continue to add additional products as budget allowed. Um, that had the ability to have more of a single pane of glass and very little man power to manage, um, and then, reliability was huge. Um, you know, we had some challenges with our previous solution of feeling comfortable that our backups would work in the event we had an incident. So, you know, when we looked at Commvault, um, you know, it may have been, um, you know, it's an enterprise solution which is what I wanted. I could scale without rip and replace. Um, great reputation, great vision, good, technology, you know, bones. Um, and so, you know, when I would go to the board for that, I said, you know, the investment may be a little bit more than a lower end solution, but it's going to give us the capability to grow with the business. >> You know Michele, it's interesting, if you dialed back and said you were looking at this five years ago, I wonder if the pricing strategy that Commvault had in place would fit what you're looking for. I'm sure you've seen as a customer, um, when I hear, you know, I kind of want to be able to reach that vision, but do it incrementally. Sounds like something you might get more from a startup? Maybe give us a little bit of insight what you've seen, how you look at this relationship, and what are some of those things that you are looking to add on in the future. >> Oh, absolutely, so, you know, absolutely, financials always come into place, right? You've got to be able to afford what you're putting into place. Um, you know, I will say that, um, their pricing model did change, you know, cause we had looked at that previously, and it was a pretty high price point to get in with the licensing under the perpetual licensing models. Um, so, with the change of how Commvault kind of moved with the times, more subscription style, made it a little more affordable for some of the smaller businesses to take advantage of. Um, and so, you know, that's how I kind of looked at it for, plus at the end of the day, if you're looking for a quality product around security, and recovery, and backup, it's worth the money to invest in something you feel comfortable that's going to meet that need. Um, and grow with you without, again, having you know, who wants to go through a migration every three years when your contracts up, right? Um, and then, as far as the other products, I'm looking, you know, at some of the new products that they've officially announced. It was really exciting to hear the CEO and COO talk today about the automation that they are building cause that plays absolutely into what we're trying to do in our organization. As we need stuff, you know, again, acception processing is what I always talk about. I only want to have to touch things when it's not working, and, you know, when there's some sort of exception. Um, and, so, I'm really excited about the way Commvault's headed down that path with the automation. Um, and then, also the data piece. Being able to really categorized the data, know if it's outdated or not. I mean, this is a very well known industry issue that we have, we are data hogs in the mortgage business. Um, and our users are as well. Uh, and so being able to identify the data that I have, I mean, you know, I walked into a situation where there's been no purge of data. You know, being able to really identify what is valuable date to not purge vs. the data we want to purge to reduce that footprint to reduce the risk for any kind of potential breech, or security incident. You know, the more you have out there, the more the chance you are going to get hit. >> So, you wear a bunch of hats that seem kind of in conflict especially, seeing that you report up to the COO. Security being the most interesting one. >> (Michele) Uh huh. >> How does your role as the CISO and your selection of the data protection suite, data management, impact your decision to go with a Commvault. >> Oh absolutely, that's huge as well, right? Um, you know, in our industry, we obviously are responsible for um, being custodians to a lot of personal information to consumers, so we have NPI, PI all over, and it's not even just with my critical business system vendor, you know, caus I rely on them heavily, they're much larger, they have, um, larger security teams, and larger budgets to typically protect our data. But, we also have that data internally into our own data warehouse. So, um, data protection is key. Um, so looking at products that will allow us to simplify that, have visibility into it, you know, that's another area I'm really looking forward to expanding my Commvalt use into as we start to actually, Um, you know, one of the other projects we're going to be working on potentially is moving our data warehouse to Microsoft Azure. So, um, you know, really having that, um, security plan figure out before the data is up in the cloud. >> Michele, I wonder what your experience has been with recovery. Is that something you test? Have you had to actually do a recovery? What is your experience been? >> Yeah, so, you know, knock on wood, I'm not sure if there's wood under here, but, you know, knock on wood. We haven't had a major incident, um, however, what we do, have done, now that we've actually deployed Commvault fully, um, is in, you know, it's too bad it's not a couple weeks from now because we're actually going to do a full DR exercise with our new backups now that are fully deployed with Commvault. >> So, you'll take a vacation the week after (laughing). >> So, we're going to actually test that out. That's one of the things that I task my team with is once my backups and everything was in place that we're going to, you know, do a tabletop exercise, but actually try to do a full recovery of some systems with the new backups to make sure we are all in good shape. Uh, but with that being said, I can already tell you just from a, um, you know, our old system to our new system, you know, with the features sets that we have available in Commvault compared to what we had in our other solution. The time to recover individual files is exponential. You know, our other solution, we had to recover an entire folder, not just individual files. And then, we're really excited also of being able to eventually being able to push out some self service file restoration capabilities that Commvalt allows us to do as well. >> So, as a natural consumer of, as a service, offering a mission critical businesses. How important is Commvalut role map to, as a service, for enterprise class solutions. >> Oh, I think that's great. I actually can't wait to see what they have to offer around that. Again, you know, um, I might be a unique use case, I don't know, because that's really how we manage our business from the IT side because of limited budget, limited resources is leveraging vendors. Um, so, I'm really excited to see how that evolves actually. Um, you know, from a service perspective. >> Okay, Michele, it's your second time coming to this event. For audiences that didn't come, what did you get out of it, what excites you the most coming to an event like this? >> I think there's two key things that I really enjoy going to conferences about. Um, one of course, is always the networking opportunities. I always, meet other people who have the same challenges that I do, and you know, they're looking at the same products, and being able to exchange ideas, um, and how you solve problems, and, you know talking to other people about real life issues, um, is so valuable. Uh, the other piece is always getting myself out of the office and getting more education. So, you know, really seeing what's evolving, what's changing, um, you know, what are the partners doing that work with Commvault, what's Commvault, you know, doing? Really, getting out of the office to have a chance to really get educated around that and what's really unique to about Commvalt GO to, is that a lot of it is customer based. Uh, you have customers up talking about their use cases and how they've implemented the product, so it's real life, ah, education, and not just, you know, um, a vendor up there talking about their product and selling it, right? >> Absolutely, we appreciate you sharing your story, Ah, with our audience here, and uh, congratulations on all the progress, ah, American Pacific Mortgage. And ah, boy, you know, tired of thinking of all the hats you've been wearing for those of us that wear a few hats, ah, we can definitely, ah, you know, appreciate that, alright. For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman, we'll be back with more programming here at Commvault GO. Thanks for watching The Cube. >> Michele: Thank you.

>> Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Google Cloud Next 2018. Brought to you by Google Cloud and it's ecosystem partners. >> Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Google Cloud here at Moscone South, in San Francisco. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, covering all the stop stories here, and day one of three days of coverage with siliconeangle.com, thecube.net for all the great content. Our next guest is Suzanne Frey, director of security, trust, and compliance and privacy at Google Cloud, welcome to theCUBE, thanks for coming in today. >> Thank you so much, it's a pleasure to be here today. >> Don't you love the cube that Google built out here, fits the theme, it's beautiful. >> It is mighty fly, it is awesome. It's so exciting. >> That's great. Great to see Google kind of go the next level. The energy, the people in the company I've talked to, we've been following Diane's career since VMware. I knew she was an investor in Cloud, theCUBE actually started at the Cloud Air office when they got their first round of funding, so really a savvy industry executive. Now two years in the gestation period you can kind of see it. The best of Google being exposed to the world is really kind of a great strategy, we've been commenting on that, but one of things Google has, and has had for a long time is, they've had that really open culture of openness, open source, but trust; "Do no evil's" the slogan and they have all this expertise. >> Yep. >> Is your job to harness that. Take a minute, what is your job? Are you brokering all this greatness? Are you shepherding it? Are you influencing product? What's your role? >> My role, specifically, is to ensure that we make Google Cloud the most trusted place for user data. Now, trust is a multi-faceted thing. I often say that trust starts with making sure that what you expect is what you experience. That's the foundation of it and so my job is first to start there and make sure that everything that we do is in line with the customer's expectations and it's in line with what they experience once they're in the Cloud and that's everything from making sure that we're compliant, that we handle their data responsibly in line with all the rules and regulations around the world which vary greatly. You know all the way through to making sure that we're building exceptional, simple, smart, and secure products every single day across our stack. So that's my job and it's to galvanize that, not just in product and not just in expectations, but also in the people we hire and the culture we engender. >> You know it's interesting, we live in an interesting time right now, and as they say, if you look at the global landscape; from politics, play, to technology, a transformation is happening where security trust, the data, you got GDPR happening in Europe, you got fake news on Facebook, you got users not trusting where's my data, so you have this cultural dynamic, kind of independent of the mission of the big companies where there's an opportunity to use AI for good. There's an opportunity to have a compliance model that's going to maintain that. How does that affect you guys? I'm sure it does in some way, but this is on the minds of people. Surely no one want to be hacked, they want their data to be secure. I want to control my data. I want my data to be leverageable. I want to get utility out of the system, Because it's something bigger with Google Cloud, it's not part of a system. How are you guys talk about that internally? What are some of the conversations that you guys have around this cultural shift? >> It's day one of any new product of feature we develop, those conversations occur. It's part of our process in developing any new product or feature. We have a team, in fact a large portion of my organization is entirely dedicated to reviewing and scrutinizing every single feature, every single new product we bring to bear. Even if a customer wants to build, or I should say, even if an internal developer wants to build a new model, our team is responsible for reviewing that and making sure it's in line with the commitments we have to both legal commitments as well as our customers. So it's part of, and it continues all the way through to the point where I hit the launch button and say, "This is okay to go." >> (laughs) Nice. >> So the way you measure trust is that the expectations match the experience. Now when I look at your scope, we run our business on your scope. G-mail, Inbox, I personally love Inbox, I'm like an Inbox ambassador. >> Fantastic. >> And so thank you for developing that product. Google Drive, Docs, Sheets, you count it, I mean we run our business on your products. And so I wonder sometimes are we doing it right? Some of the challenges we have I think are onboarding and off-boarding folks. When somebody leaves the company or comes on the company you want to give them access to certain sheets or certain documents and then you sort of forget to take them off. How do you handle that? What's best practice there? Are you develop tooling around that? Maybe you could take about that a little bit. >> So we do it in many, many ways. And there certainly are best practices, they are documented out there through a number of tools and papers that we produce. We also have partners that work with our customers that engender those practices, but also then we bake the technology in so that you don't have to think about these things. And a good example would be; we released Team Drives last year. Team Drives is a great example of how you manage documentation for the inbound and outbound employees. It used to be that somebody'd actually have to think, "oh wait, Joe's no longer on this, We need to move him off," And all of that. But with the Team Drive that's handled automatically. Groups is another way. Google Groups is a great way to manage access to information and the like. And then we have tools like IRM, that allow you to sort of manage copying and forwarding information. And there's some more announcements that are coming tomorrow that'll let you also handle some of these things, but I can't talk about them quite yet. So stay tuned. >> You didn't want to release it too early. >> Can you talk about how you go to market with those cause every now and then I'll get a phone call or an e-mail from somebody at Google trying to either introduce me to something, maybe sell something, but it's kind of intermittent. What's the go-to market to inform people? We're obviously a small company. We heard today, "we want to help small, large, start-ups, big companies, governments." How do you guys go to market? >> We do it in lots of different ways. We certainly leverage our communication channels online heavily and we've been ramping up, I mean our investment in marketing and Cloud and getting all of these things, I mean you can see I right here at Next. This is a huge example of how we're trying to get the word out. We're at large across all of our verticals, across all of our customer sets, because I think that is information management and so that you understand, "hey I have these great tools to bear." That's super important for us to get right and we're continuing to evolve it. >> One of the things I always admire about Google from day one, the mission has always been speed. Load the pages faster, find what you're looking for, organize the information. With security and trust now, we were talking before we came on camera, I see Cloud as an opportunity, AI's an opportunity, as Diane Green said, security is the number one worry. Dave's asked this question every year, going back to since 2012, is security a do-over with the Cloud? You guys have such great experience with Sass and Cloud; is it an opportunity for customers going Cloud-native to do security over. Your thoughts? >> Well I think about this, so ill answer this in two ways, for us at Google it's not a do-over, it's been part of our DNA from day one because we were born in the Cloud. From the moment we started to think about how we design a data center to how we design a server to how we retire discs, this was mentioned in the keynote, that's been part of our DNA from day one. So for us we don't believe it's a do-over, we actually believe we're ahead of Darwin in terms of security, well ahead of it. And we'll put our words behind it, that we do believe, bar none, that we are the most secure cloud out there. Certainly customers using G-Suite, Chromebooks, Security Keys, we mentioned that at the keynote this morning as well- zero account hijackings. No one else can make that claim and we're proud to do it. For customers, however, I think many customers are realizing Patch Tuesdays and heterogeneous operating systems and tons of different platforms with customers that are storing information on their hard drives or their thumb drives- its a nightmare for many customers who have been operating on premise for many years and I think they're waking up to realize, "wait a minute, you're going to take care of all of that. You're going to take care of it. One operating system. All managed from the Cloud. One place. My documents are going to sit there. Oh my gosh, I can sleep again if I move to the Cloud." and that's really part of the overall narrative here. >> Just to follow up on that, so that was Chromebook, G Suite, and Two-factor authentication right? >> Yes. >> You called it Titan Security, is that right? >> Yes, Titan Security Keys, correct. >> And the Two-factor authentication comes from what, is it a dongle or- >> It's actually hardware based so if you think about- two-factor's not a new term, two-factor's been around for a long time. A lot of people would have these tokens that would generate a numeric key and you'd look at that and you'd plug it in. Well that's phishable actually, that key gets transmitted when you actually authenticate and that can be picked up. >> Exposed, yeah. >> Exposed. With hardware, its all base of the hardware, there's no key that's exchanged. It's all authenticated to your device and that makes it un-phishable. >> You don't think about it. >> Yeah, exactly. >> So lets talk about compliance for a second. That's part of your job. Honestly we see this year was kind of a- the earthquake, the tectonic plates of GDPR. >> Yes. (laughs) >> Certainly Google's experience, a little fine in the EU of some other areas of your business. Obviously data is a regional thing, obviously in Germany we know what's going on there, so as a customer goes global, you could be in the US, there's now policies that need to be implemented. Is that where softwares going to help? How are you guys talking to your customers and what's the solution that you guys see for compliance and making it seamless because it's a real hassle. >> Yep. >> Some sites and some companies aren't deploying their solution. Their website has been stripped down because they couldn't comply with the GDPR regulation which gives the users the ability to essentially tell you to forget me and all kinds of other things, I don't want to get into it, but the point is, that it puts the pressure on companies, like literally overnight, where it was policy. People in the database world know that data sprawls is a huge problem- people don't even know where the data is. What data base is that on. This is a huge issue. How do you guys talk about that? >> Well first I'll say that compliance is always a shared responsibility between ourselves and our customers. However, those customers who have worked with us, and have been going Cloud-native with us have found that the journey to be much much less friction-full, I will say, or I'd say its more friction-less. Because we are the team that's had to really implement the technical controls around the GDPR. And I want to emphasize, GDPR is incredibly important legislation. We believe it's very important. Two years ago we launched an initiative to be sure we were compliant on time. We're proud to say that we were among the first to announce that compliance in the Cloud. And we're really happy. Our customers have been happy. And our relationships- we take on a large responsibility for maintaining relationships with the legislators and the regulators around the world Many companies can't scale to do that and by going with Google you know you've got a tight and good relationship, a company that is focused on maintaining good relationships world-wide on that front and it's been important. >> So two years before GDPR went into effect, that's much better, most companies were two months before the fines went into effect. (laughs) >> It was roughly about two years, it wasn't quite exactly two years between the time it was announced, but it was close to that. >> But it's not just the technology problem too, which makes it so hard, it's a lot of people and a lot of process. >> Absolutely, yes. >> Shared responsibility as you said just now. >> Yes, and the fact that the data's all in one place of the Cloud, again, makes a huge huge difference with your posture, and your compliance posture for GDPR. >> Susanne, you've been at Google for over a decade, what's motivating you these days, obviously the Cloud market's pretty hot, so that's kind of a nice wave to be on. What's the culture like at Google now? What's the DNA? What's the in- cause Google Cloud's got to spring to their step, we can obviously feel it. We can see the results. But it's just the beginning of this new wave. >> Yep, yep. >> What's exciting you and what's the DNA of Google culture? Google Cloud culture? >> Well Sundar echoed this this morning and I was so happy to hear it. I'm at Google because of the mission. I'm here to manage the world's information, make it universally accessible and useful and secure. (laughs) I will add the "and secure" to my mission. I came because that was so exciting to me. As a kid I never got Encyclopedia's because my father was like, "there going to be out of date." (laughs) He know instantly. >> Data quality number one, he was smart. Data scientist- >> Yes he was, he was. And when Google started to evolve, I was so excited. I'm like, "oh my gosh, look at what's happening to information management in the world." And that's why I'm here and I'm surrounded by other fellow citizens who are so excited about that but also excited about the challenge of keeping information secure. So that's what excites me and to work around so many great data scientists and software engineers and site reliability engineers and customer engineers. Google is about engineering at it's core but we take such a human approach to working with our customers. Understanding how important their information, their productivity in the Cloud is, their security in the Cloud is, and that's what excites me every single day. >> Final question for you; talk about what you're working on. What's your guiding principles for your organization. Where are you guys hiring- obviously you mentioned earlier, which I loved, the expectation is the experience should match; that's a great quote, I think that's important but I would argue that, to add to that complexity, is that expectations that are coming are not yet known. You saying things like "block chain" for instance, that kind of hit a lot of exciting areas around security, decentralization, decentralized applications, token economics. So you're seeing the world starting to get a little bit different where those expectations are not yet seen. So you got to get out in front of that. How are you guys managing that? How are you hiring? What's the vision? >> Sure. So there's sort of three pillars that Prabhakar Raghavan talked about this morning; simple, smart, and secure. Those are kind of our guiding principles for everything we do and, for example, G Suite. How we're thinking about the future, well we're very very lucky that we are always getting low latency signals about what's happening in the world right now. We talk about spam and phishing protection and things like that and we get billions of signals every single day about malicious information or malware, ransomware, those sorts of things. So we have a very low latency view into what's happening at the next minute around the world in that respect. And that gives us a competitive edge in terms of really thinking about what's the next thing that's going to happen. We certainly know that machine learning, whether it's smart compose and smart reply, or it's actually based in security, an anomaly detection. What's an anomaly to one company, is not necessarily an anomaly to another, depends on what business you're in and the like. So investing in machine learning and understanding how to be that security guardian for our customers in an automated fashion, so the people don't have to worry about security, but we've taken care of it for them. That's the holy grail and that's what we're investing in right now. >> Suzanne thank you so much for coming on theCUBE, really appreciate it. We were just talking before we came on, Dave and I, before we went live that if security and some of these complexities can be just services under the wire, like electricity. All cue-ade before we even turn the lights on of computing. That's kind of the goal. (laughs) So we're super early. >> Yes, absolutely. >> That's great. Director of security, trust, compliance, and privacy at Google Cloud's theCUBE. Live coverage, stay with us. This is day one of three days of wall-to-wall coverage. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante, we'll be right back. >> Thank you. (techno music)

>> Hi, I'm Peter Burris and welcome to another Wikibon Action Item. (upbeat digital music) >> Cameraman: Three, two, one. >> Hi. Once again, we're broadcasting from our beautiful Palo Alto studios, theCUBE studios, and this week we've got another great group. David Floyer in the studio with me along with George Gilbert. And on the phone we've got Jim Kobielus and Ralph Finos. Hey, guys. >> Hi there. >> So we're going to talk about something that's going to become a big issue. It's only now starting to emerge. And that is, what will be the roadmap to automation? Automation is going to be absolutely crucial for the success of IT in the future and the success of any digital business. At its core, many people have presumed that automation was about reducing labor. So introducing software and other technologies, we would effectively be able to substitute for administrative, operator, and related labor. And while that is absolutely a feature of what we're talking about, the bigger issue is ultimately is that we cannot conceive of more complex workloads that are capable of providing better customer experience, superior operations, all the other things a digital business ultimately wants to achieve. If we don't have a capability for simplifying how those underlying resources get put together, configured, or organized, orchestrated, and ultimately sustained delivery of. So the other part of automation is to allow for much more work that can be performed on the same resources much faster. It's a basis for how we think about plasticity and the ability to reconfigure resources very quickly. Now, the challenge is this industry, the IT industry has always used standards as a weapon. We use standards as a basis of creating eco systems or scale, or mass for even something as, like mainframes. Where there weren't hundreds of millions of potential users. But IBM was successful at using that as a basis for driving their costs down and approving a superior product. That's clearly what Microsoft and Intel did many years ago, was achieve that kind of scale through the driving more, and more, and more, ultimately, volume of the technology, and they won. But along the way though, each time, each generation has featured a significant amount of competition at how those interfaces came together and how they worked. And this is going to be the mother of all standard-oriented competition. How does one automation framework and another automation framework fit together? One being able to create value in a way that serves another automation framework, but ultimately as a, for many companies, a way of creating more scale onto their platform. More volume onto that platform. So this notion of how automation is going to evolve is going to be crucially important. David Floyer, are APIs going to be enough to solve this problem? >> No. That's a short answer to that. This is a very complex problem, and I think it's worthwhile spending a minute just on what are the component parts that need to be brought together. We're going to have a multi-cloud environment. Multiple private clouds, multiple public clouds, and they've got to work together in some way. And the automation is about, and you've got the Edge as well. So you've got a huge amount of data all across all of these different areas. And automation and orchestration across that, are as you said, not just about efficiency, they're about making it work. Making it able to be, to work and to be available. So all of the issues of availability, of security, of compliance, all of these difficult issues are a subject to getting this whole environment to be able to work together through a set of APIs, yes, but a lot lot more than that. And in particular, when you think about it, to me, volume of data is critical. Is who has access to that data. >> Peter: Now, why is that? >> Because if you're dealing with AI and you're dealing with any form of automation like this, the more data you have, the better your models are. And if you can increase that amount of data, as Google show every day, you will maintain that handle on all that control over that area. >> So you said something really important, because the implied assumption, and obviously, it's a major feature of what's going on, is that we've been talking about doing more automation for a long time. But what's different this time is the availability of AI and machine learning, for example, >> Right. as a basis for recognizing patterns, taking remedial action or taking predictive action to avoid the need for remedial action. And it's the availability of that data that's going to improve the quality of those models. >> Yes. Now, George, you've done a lot of work around this a whole notion of ML for ITOM. What are the kind of different approaches? If there's two ways that we're looking at it right now, what are the two ways? >> So there are two ends of the extreme. One is I want to see end to end what's going on across my private cloud or clouds. As well as if I have different applications in different public clouds. But that's very difficult. You get end-to-end visibility but you have to relax a lot of assumptions about what's where. >> And that's called the-- >> Breadth first. So the pro is end-to-end visibility. Con is you don't know how all the pieces fit together quite as well, so you get less fidelity in terms of diagnosing root causes. >> So you're trying to optimize at a macro level while recognizing that you can't optimize at a micro level. >> Right. Now the other approach, the other end of the spectrum, is depth first. Where you constrain the set of workloads and services that you're building and that you know about, and how they fit together. And then the models, based on the data you collect there, can become so rich that you have very very high fidelity root cause determination which allows you to do very precise recommendations or even automated remediation. What we haven't figured out hot to do yet is marry the depth first with the breadth first. So that you have multiple focus depth first. That's very tricky. >> Now, if you think about how the industry has evolved, we wrote some stuff about what we call, what I call the iron triangle. Which is basically a very tight relationship between specialists in technology. So the people who were responsible for a particular asset, be it storage, or the system, or the network. The vendors, who provided a lot of the knowledge about how that worked, and therefore made that specialist more or less successful and competent. And then the automation technology that that vendor ultimately provided. Now, that was not automation technology that was associated with AI or anything along those lines. It was kind of out of the box, buy our tool, and this is how you're going to automate various workflows or scripts, or whatever else it might be. And every effort to try to break that has been met with screaming because, well, you're now breaking my automation routines. So the depth-first approach, even without ML, has been the way that we've done it historically. But, David, you're talking about something different. It's the availability of the data that starts to change that. >> Yeah. >> So are we going to start seeing new compacts put in place between users and vendors and OEMs and a lot of these other folks? And it sounds like it's going to be about access to the data. >> Absolutely. So you're going to start. let's start at the bottom. You've got people who have a particular component, whatever that component is. It might be storage. It might be networking. Whatever that component is. They have products in that area which will be collecting data. And they will need for their particular area to provide a degree of automation. A degree of capability. And they need to do two things. They need to do that optimization and also provide data to other people. So they have to have an OEM agreement not just for the equipment that they provide, but for the data that they're going to give and the data they're going to give back. The automatization of the data, for example, going up and the availability of data to help themselves. >> So contracts effectively mean that you're going to have to negotiate value capture on the data side as well as the revenue side. >> Absolutely. >> The ability to do contracting historically has been around individual products. And so we're pretty good at that. So we can say, you will buy this product. I'm delivering you the value. And then the utility of that product is up to you. When we start going to service contracts, we get a little bit different kind of an arrangement. Now, it's an ongoing continuous delivery. But for the most part, a lot of those service contracts have been predicated to known in advance classes of functions, like Salesforce, for example. Or the SASS business where you're able to write a contract that says over time you will have access to this service. When we start talking about some of this automation though, now we're talking about ongoing, but highly bespoke, and potentially highly divergent, over a relatively short period of time, that you have a hard time writing contracts that will prescribe the range of behaviors and the promise about how those behaviors are actually going to perform. I don't think we're there yet. What do you guys think? >> Well, >> No, no way. I mean, >> Especially when you think about realtime. (laughing) >> Yeah. It has to be realtime to get to the end point of automating the actual reply than the actual action that you take. That's where you have to get to. You can't, It won't be sufficient in realtime. I think it's a very interesting area, this contracts area. If you think about solutions for it, I would be going straight towards blockchain type architectures and dynamic blockchain contracts that would have to be put in place. >> Peter: But they're not realtime. >> The contracts aren't realtime. The contracts will never be realtime, but the >> Accessed? access to the data and the understanding of what data is required. Those will be realtime. >> Well, we'll see. I mean, the theorem's what? Every 12 seconds? >> Well. That's >> Everything gets updated? >> That's To me, that's good enough. >> Okay. >> That's realtime enough. It's not going to solve the problem of somebody >> Peter: It's not going to solve the problem at the edge. >> At the very edge, but it's certainly sufficient to solve the problem of contracts. >> Okay. >> But, and I would add to that and say, in addition to having all this data available. Let's go back like 10, 20 years and look at Cisco. A lot of their differentiation and what entrenched them was sort of universal familiarity with their admin interfaces and they might not expose APIs in a way that would make it common across their competitors. But if you had data from them and a constrained number of other providers for around which you would build let's say, these modern big data applications. It's if you constrain the problem, you can get to the depth first. >> Yeah, but Cisco is a great example of it's an archetype for what I said earlier, that notion of an iron triangle. You had Cisco admins >> Yeah. that were certified to run Cisco gear and therefore had a strong incentive to ensure that more Cisco gear was purchased utilizing a Cisco command line interface that did incorporate a fair amount of automation for that Cisco gear and it was almost impossible for a lot of companies to penetrate that tight arrangement between the Cisco admin that was certified, the Cisco gear, and the COI. >> And the exact same thing happened with Oracle. The Oracle admin skillset was pervasive within large >> Peter: Happened with everybody. >> Yes, absolutely >> But, >> Peter: The only reason it didn't happen in the IBM mainframe, David, was because of a >> It did happen, yeah, >> Well, but it did happen, but governments stepped in and said, this violates antitrust. And IBM was forced by law, by court decree, to open up those interfaces. >> Yes. That's true. >> But are we going to see the same type of thing >> I think it's very interesting to see the shape of this market. When we look a little bit ahead. People like Amazon are going to have IAS, they're going to be running applications. They are going to go for the depth way of doing things across, or what which way around is it? >> Peter: The breadth. They're going to be end to end. >> But they will go depth in individual-- >> Components. Or show of, but they will put together their own type of things for their services. >> Right. >> Equally, other players like Dell, for example, have a lot of different products. A lot of different components in a lot of different areas. They have to go piece by piece and put together a consortium of suppliers to them. Storage suppliers, chip suppliers, and put together that outside and it's going to have to be a different type of solution that they put together. HP will have the same issue there. And as of people like CA, for example, who we'll see an opportunity for them to be come in again with great products and overlooking the whole of all of this data coming in. >> Peter: Oh, sure. Absolutely. >> So there's a lot of players who could be in this area. Microsoft, I missed out, of course they will have the two ends that they can combine together. >> Well, they may have an advantage that nobody else has-- >> Exactly. Yeah. because they're strong in both places. But I have Jim Kobielus. Let me check, are you there now? Do we got Jim back? >> Can you hear me? >> Peter: I can barely hear you, Jim. Could we bring Jim's volume up a little bit? So, Jim, I asked the question earlier, about we have the tooling for AI. We know how to get data. How to build models and how to apply the models in a broad brush way. And we're certainly starting to see that happen within the IT operations management world. The ITOM world, but we don't yet know how we're going to write these contracts that are capable of better anticipating, putting in place a regime that really describes how the, what are the limits of data sharing? What are the limits of derivative use? Et cetera. I argued, and here in the studio we generally agreed, that's we still haven't figured that out and that this is going to be one of the places where the tension between, at least in the B2B world, data availability and derivative use and where you capture value and where those profitables go, is going to be significant. But I want to get your take. Has the AI community >> Yeah. started figuring out how we're going to contractually handle obligations around data, data use, data sharing, data derivative use. >> The short answer is, no they have not. The longer answer is, that can you hear me, first of all? >> Peter: Barely. >> Okay. Should I keep talking? >> Yeah. Go ahead. >> Okay. The short answer is, no that the AI community has not addressed those, those IP protection issues. But there is a growing push in the AI community to leverage blockchain for such requirements in terms of block chains to store smart contracts where related to downstream utilization of data and derivative models. But that's extraordinarily early on in its development in terms of insight in the AI community and in the blockchain community as well. In other words, in fact, in one of the posts that I'm working on right now, is looking at a company called 8base that's actually using blockchain to store all of those assets, those artifacts for the development and lifecycle along with the smart contracts to drive those downstream uses. So what I'm saying is that there's lots of smart people like yourselves are thinking about these problems, but there's no consensus, definitely, in the AI community for how to manage all those rights downstream. >> All right. So very quickly, Ralph Finos, if you're there. I want to get your perspective >> Yeah. on what this means from markets, market leadership. What do you think? How's this going to impact who are the leaders, who's likely to continue to grow and gain even more strength? What're your thoughts on this? >> Yeah. I think, my perspective on this thing in the near term is to focus on simplification. And to focus on depth, because you can get return, you can get payback for that kind of work and it simplifies the overall picture so when you're going broad, you've got less of a problem to deal with. To link all these things together. So I'm going to go with the Shaker kind of perspective on the world is to make things simple. And to focus there. And I think the complexity of what we're talking about for breadth is too difficult to handle at this point in time. I don't see it happening any time in the near future. >> Although there are some companies, like Splunk, for example, that are doing a decent job of presenting a more of a breadth approach, but they're not going deep into the various elements. So, George, really quick. Let's talk to you. >> I beg to disagree on that one. >> Peter: Oh! >> They're actually, they built a platform, originally that was breadth first. They built all these, essentially, forwarders which could understand the formats of the output of all sorts of different devices and services. But then they started building what they called curated experiences which is the equivalent of what we call depth first. They're doing it for IT service management. They're doing it for what's called user behavior. Analytics, which is it's a way of tracking bad actors or bad devices on a network. And they're going to be pumping out more of those. What's not clear yet, is how they're going to integrate those so that IT service management understands security and vice versa. >> And I think that's one of the key things, George, is that ultimately, the real question will be or not the real question, but when we think about the roadmap, it's probably that security is going to be early on one of the things that gets addressed here. And again, it's not just security from a perimeter standpoint. Some people are calling it a software-based perimeter. Our perspective is the data's going to go everywhere and ultimately how do you sustain a zero trust world where you know your data is going to be out in the clear so what are you going to do about it? All right. So look. Let's wrap this one up. Jim Kobielus, let's give you the first Action Item. Jim, Action Item. >> Action Item. Wow. Action Item Automation is just to follow the stack of assets that drive automation and figure out your overall sharing architecture for sharing out these assets. I think the core asset will remain orchestration models. I don't think predictive models in AI are a huge piece of the overall automation pie in terms of the logic. So just focus on building out and protecting and sharing and reusing your orchestration models. Those are critically important. In any domain. End to end or in specific automation domains. >> Peter: David Floyer, Action Item. >> So my Action Item is to acknowledge that the world of building your own automation yourself around a whole lot of piece parts that you put together are over. You won't have access to a sufficient data. So enterprises must take a broad view of getting data, of getting components that have data be giving them data. Make contracts with people to give them data, masking or whatever it is and become part of a broader scheme that will allow them to meet the automation requirements of the 21st century. >> Ralph Finos, Action Item. >> Yeah. Again, I would reiterate the importance of keeping it simple. Taking care of the depth questions and moving forward from there. The complexity is enormous, and-- >> Peter: George Gilbert, Action Item. >> I say, start with what customers always start with with a new technology, which is a constrained environment like a pilot and there's two areas that are potentially high return. One is big data, where it's been a multi vendor or multi-vendor component mix, and a mess. And so you take that and you constrain that and make that a depth-first approach in the cloud where there is data to manage that. And the second one is security, where we have now a more and more trained applications just for that. I say, don't start with a platform. Start with those solutions and then start adding more solutions around that. >> All right. Great. So here's our overall Action Item. The question of automation or roadmap to automation is crucial for multiple reasons. But one of the most important ones is it's inconceivable to us to envision how a business can institute even more complex applications if we don't have a way of improving the degree of automation on the underlying infrastructure. How this is going to play out, we're not exactly sure. But we do think that there are a few principals that are going to be important that users have to focus on. Number one is data. Be very clear that there is value in your data, both to you as well as to your suppliers and as you think about writing contracts, don't write contracts that are focused on a product now. Focus on even that product as a service over time where you are sharing data back and forth in addition to getting some return out of whatever assets you've put in place. And make sure that the negotiations specifically acknowledge the value of that data to your suppliers as well. Number two, that there is certainly going to be a scale here. There's certainly going to be a volume question here. And as we think about where a lot of the new approaches to doing these or this notion of automation, is going to come out of the cloud vendors. Once again, the cloud vendors are articulating what the overall model is going to look like. What that cloud experience is going to look like. And it's going to be a challenge to other suppliers who are providing an on-premises true private cloud and Edge orientation where the data must live sometimes it is not something that they just want to do because they want to do it. Because that data requires it to be able to reflect that cloud operating model. And expect, ultimately, that your suppliers also are going to have to have very clear contractual relationships with the cloud players and each other for how that data gets shared. Ultimately, however, we think it's crucially important that any CIO recognized that the existing environment that they have right now is not converged. The existing environment today remains operators, suppliers of technology, and suppliers of automation capabilities and breaking that up is going to be crucial. Not only to achieving automation objectives, but to achieve a converged infrastructure, hyper converged infrastructure, multi-cloud arrangements, including private cloud, true private cloud, and the cloud itself. And this is going to be a management challenge, goes way beyond just products and technology, to actually incorporating how you think about your shopping, organized, how you institutionalize the work that the business requires, and therefore what you identify as a tasks that will be first to be automated. Our expectation, security's going to be early on. Why? Because your CEO and your board of directors are going to demand it. So think about how automation can be improved and enhanced through a security lens, but do so in a way that ensures that over time you can bring new capabilities on with a depth-first approach at least, to the breadth that you need within your shop and within your business, your digital business, to achieve the success and the results that you want. Okay. Once again, I want to thank David Floyer and George Gilbert here in the studio with us. On the phone, Ralph Finos and Jim Kobielus. Couldn't get Neil Raiden in today, sorry Neil. And I am Peter Burris, and this has been an Action Item. Talk to you again soon. (upbeat digital music)

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE covering Flink Forward brought to you by Data Artisans. >> Hi this is George Gilbert. We are at Flink Forward on the ground in San Francisco. This is the user conference for the Apache Flink Community. It's the second one in the US and this is sponsored by Data Artisans. We have with us Greg Benson, who's Chief Scientist at Snap Logic and also professor of computer science at University of San Francisco. >> Yeah that's great, thanks for havin' me. >> Good to have you. So, Greg, tell us a little bit about how Snap Logic currently sets up its, well how it builds its current technology to connect different applications. And then talk about, a little bit, where you're headed and what you're trying to do. >> Sure, sure, so Snap Logic is a data and app integration Cloud platform. We provide a graphical interface that lets you drag and drop. You can open components that we call Snaps and you kind of put them together like Lego pieces to define relatively sophisticated tasks so that you don't have to write Java code. We use machine learning to help you build out these pipelines quickly so we can anticipate based on your data sources, what you are going to need next, and that lends itself to rapid building of these pipelines. We have a couple of different ways to execute these pipelines. You can think of it as sort of this specification of what the pipeline's supposed to do. We have a proprietary engine that we can execute on single notes, either in the Cloud or behind your firewall in your data center. We also have a mode which can translate these pipelines into Spark code and then execute those pipelines at scale. So, you can do sort of small, low latency processing to sort of larger, batch processing on very large data sets. >> Okay, and so you were telling me before that you're evaluating Flink or doing research with Flink as another option. Tell us what use cases that would address that the first two don't. >> Yeah, good question. I'd love to just back up a little bit. So, because I have this dual role of Chief Scientist and as a professor of Computer Science, I'm able to get graduate students to work on research projects for credit, and then eventually as interns at SnapLogic. A recent project that we've been working on since we started last fall so working on about six or seven months now is investigating Flink as a possible new back end for the SnapLogic platform. So this allows us to you know, to explore and prototype and just sort of figure out if there's going to be a good match between an emerging technology and our platform. So, to go back to your question. What would this address? Well, so, without going into too much of the technical differences between Flink and Spark which I imagine has come up in some of your conversations or it comes up here because they can solve similar use cases our experience with Flink is the code base is easy to work with both from taking our specification of pipelines and then converting them into Flink code that can run. But there's another benefit that we see from Flink and that is, whenever any product, whether it's our product or anybody else's product, that uses something like Spark or Flink as a back end, there's this challenge because you're converting something that your users understand into this target, right, this Spark API code or Flink API code. And the challenge there is if something goes wrong, how do you propagate that back to the users so the user doesn't have to read log files or get into the nuts and bolts of how Spark really works. >> It's almost like you've compiled the code, and now if something doesn't work right, you need to work at the source level. >> That's exactly right, and that's what we don't want our users to do, right? >> Right. >> So one promising thing about Flink is that we're able to integrate the code base in such a way that we have a better understanding of what's happening in the failure conditions that occur. And we're working on ways to propagate those back to the user so they can take actionable steps to remedy those without having to understand the Flink API code iself. >> And what is it, then, about Flink or its API that gives you that feedback about errors or you know, operational status that gives you better visibility than you would get in something else like Spark. >> Yeah, so without getting too too deep on the subject, what we have found is, one thing nice about the Flink code base is the core is written in Scala, but there's a lot of, all the IO and memory handling is written in Java and that's where we need to do our primary interfacing and the building blocks, sort of the core building blocks to get to, for example, something that you build with a dataset API to execution. We have found it easier to follow the transformation steps that Flink takes to end up with the resulting sort of optimized, optimized Flink pipeline. Now by understanding that transformation, like you were saying, the compilation step, by understanding it, then we can work backwards, and understand how, when something happens, how to trace it back to what the user was originally trying to specify. >> The GUI specification. >> Yeah. Right. >> So, help me understand though it sounds like you're the one essentially building a compiler from a graphical specification language down to Spark as the, you know, sort of, pseudo, you know, psuedo compile code, >> Yep. >> Or Flink. And, but if you're the one doing that compilation, I'm still struggling to understand why you would have better reverse engineering capabilities with one. >> It just is a matter of getting visibility into the steps that the underlying frameworks are taking and so, I'm not saying this is impossible to do in Spark, but we have found that we've had, it's been easier for us to get into the transformation steps that Flink is taking. >> Almost like, for someone who's had as much programming as a one semester in night school, like a variable and specter that's already there, >> Yeah, that's a good, there you go, yeah, yeah, yeah. >> Okay, so you don't have to go try and you can't actually add it, and you don't have to then infer it from all this log data. >> Now, I should add, there's another potential Flink. You were asking about use cases and what does Flink address. As you know, Flink is a streaming platform, in addition to being a batch platform, and Flink does streaming differently than how Spark does. Spark takes a microbatch approach. What we're also looking at in my research effort is how to take advantage of Flink's streaming approach to allow the SnapLogic GUI to be used to specify streaming Flink applications. Initially we're just focused on the batch mode but now we're also looking at the potential to convert these graphical pipelines into streaming Flink applications, which would be a great benefit to customers who want-- >> George: Real time integration. >> Want to do what Alibaba and all the other companies are doing but take advantage of it without having to get to the nuts and bolts of the programming. Do it through the GUI. >> Wow, so it's almost like, it's like, Flink, Beam, in terms of obstruction layers, >> Sure. >> And then SnapLogic. >> Greg: Sure, yes. >> Not that you would compile the beam, but the idea that you would have perv and processing and a real-time pipeline. >> Yes. >> Okay. So that's actually interesting, so that would open up a whole new set of capabilities. >> Yeah and, you know, it follows our you know, company's vision in allowing lots of users to do very sophisticated things without being, you know, Hadoop developers or Spark developers, or even Flink developers, we do a lot of the hard work of trying to give you a representation that's easier to work with, right but, also allow you to sort of evolve that and de-bug it and also eventually get the performance out of these systems One of the challenges of course of Spark and Flink is that they have to be tuned, and you have to, and so what we're trying to do is, using some of our machine learning, is eventually gather information that can help us identify how to tune different types of work flows in different environments. And that, if we're able to do that in it's entirety, then we, you know, we take out a lot of the really hard work that goes into making a lot of these streaming applications both scalable and performing. >> Performimg. So this would be, but you would have, to do that, you would probably have to collect well, what's the term? I guess data from the operations of many customers, >> Right. >> Because, as training data, just as the developer alone, you won't really have enough. >> Absolutely, and that's, so that you have to bootstrap that. For our machine learning that we currently use today, we leverage, you know, the thousands of pipelines, the trillions of documents that we now process on a monthly basis, and that allows us to provide good recommendations when you're building pipelines, because we have a lot of information. >> Oh, so you are serving the runtime, these runtime compilations. >> Yes. >> Oh, they're not all hosted on the customer premises. >> Oh, no no no, we do both. So it's interesting, we do both. So you can, you can deploy completely in the cloud, we're a complete SASS provider for you. Most of our customers though, you know, Banks Healthcare, want to run our engine behind their firewalls. Even when we do that though, we still have metadata that we can get introspection, sort of anonymized, but we can get introspection into how things are behaving. >> Okay. That's very interesting. Alright, Greg we're going to have to end it on that note, but uh you know, I guess everyone stay tuned. That sounds like a big step forward in sort of specification of real time pipelines at a graphical level. >> Yeah, well, it's, I hope to be talking to you again soon with more results. >> Looking forward to it. With that, this is George Gilbert, we are at Flink Forward, the user conference for the Apache Flink conference, sorry for the Apache Flink user community, sponsored by Data Artisans, we will be back shortly. (upbeat music)