>>The Cube presents Ignite 22, brought to you by Palo Alto Networks. >>Welcome back everyone. Happy afternoon. It's Lisa Martin and Dave Valante of the Cube. We are live at MGM Grand. This is Palo Alto Ignite 22, our second day of coverage. Dave, we've had some amazing conversations, as we always do on the queue, but cybersecurity one of my favorite topics. So interesting to hear what Palo Alto Networks is doing, how it's differentiating itself and how it's ecosystem is >>Growing. Yeah, well one of the things I always, I often use ServiceNow as a reference example. I go back to 2013, had a kind of a tiny ecosystem and then sort of watched it grow. And one of those key signs was when the global system integrators actually began to lean in Accenture, obviously world class, one of the, you know, definitely in the top, you know, they talk about top five QBs, Accenture, you know, top five GSI easily. >>Yep. So, and in fact, Accenture, we've got Rex Stex in here, senior managing director at Accenture Security. You guys have been the GSI partner of the year for Palo Alto Networks for four years in a row, six years plus strong partnership. Give us a little flavor and history of the pan of the Palo Alto partnership with et cetera. >>I think, you know, we started early, right? And I think as they've evolved, we've evolved our partnership with them and as they've gone, you know, to more of a software footprint with, you know, around cloud security and network security and sassy, we've, we've seen a lot of growth and we're super excited about the opportunity that's ahead of us and the meaningful outcomes that we've been providing our clients as it relates to, you know, vendor consolidation, toll consolidation, tech debt reduction. You know, there's a lot of opportunity here to simplify our clients' lives with them. And that's something we're super excited about. >>Simplification, consolidation, been a theme of the last couple of days. Talk about some of the joint accomplishments that you guys have achieved. I know that you developed a lot of offers across all of Palo Alto Network's, GTMs, what are some of the highlights that come to mind? I >>Think one of the things that we're most excited about, you know, that being client specific is what we've been able to do on, on, on the network side with sasi and, and zero trust, network access. You know, as when Covid hit, there was a lot of change that happened with remote workforce and, you know, clients couldn't log in because their VPNs were crashing left and right. And so we were able to, you know, go in and help stand up, you know, this, you know, zero trust network infrastructure and help our clients get back online and get their employees back to work in a productive manner. And then it's evolved with the hybrid work model over time. And so it's, it's been a, that's probably the most gratifying cause there was a real crisis at, at a certain point in time, you know, a couple years ago were >>There Rex, were there unintended consequences of that, you know, rapid, we were forced, you know, the forced march to digital in terms of just multiple tools, plugging holes, and then sort of stepping back, you know, post isolation economy saying, okay, hey, we got through this, but now we need to take a new direction, new >>Strategy. I think that there, there isn't an intended consequence if you look at, most clients have, I saw a number 76, we counted as around 80 different security vendors and tools that they managed because a lot of people went and went after best of breed type capabilities. And, and so what we've seen now is, is the need to, you know, rationalize that, you know, their, their infrastructure and their, and their capability and, and consolidate and reduce that and, and move to, you know, more of what I would call platform providers. Cause if you may have, when you have 80 products, you have 80 integrations, 80 points of failure, and it gets very complex and, you know, there's a lot of finger pointing. And so as we're starting to see clients take a step back and say, Hey, look, if I, you know, spend the time to, you know, I call it modernization, but you know, modernize my security infrastructure and footprint focused around, you know, automation, orchestration, leveraging, you know, true ml and I know there's are buzzwords, but, you know, but you know, using 'em in, in, in the proper fashion, right? >>They, they can, you know, reduce that footprint, save a bunch of money, right? And, and, and drive that cost savings and then help scale their business. Cuz you have all these different vendors and what security is typically in the digital footprint is the slowdown, right? We, we've typically been the bottleneck in the past. And what we're seeing with, with, with what, you know, we've been very focused on is helping our clients scale their security footprints and their infrastructure and, you know, through automation orchestration, I i, I always say some folks do it your mess for less with labor arbitrage and bodies, but they're not enough security people in the world to do this. And so we're very focused on automation and orchestration and driving that into, into the market. >>Yeah. So you don't want to be in the business of, of filling those holes with labor. >>Exactly. You >>Want to actually get paid for outcomes. >>A hundred percent. And everything we've done is we've tried to simplify things not only for, you know, big Accenture, but even for our clients so that, you know, we can be focused on business outcomes, not necessarily technology outcomes. Cuz doing technology for the sake of technology. Is that unintended consequence that you described earlier, >>Speaking of transformation and outcomes I should say, what are you hearing most from CIOs and CISOs in terms of what they need now to be able to transform, to deliver the business outcomes so that they can become secure data companies regardless of industry? Yep. >>I think the, the biggest thing we're seeing right now is the need to, you know, leverage true automation and orchestration. We have to break the headcount model. There's not enough security professionals in the world to do, you know, to solve the world's problems. In order to scale that, you know, it's one of the reasons we're, you know, partnering with Palo Alto is because of, you know, the capabilities and the investments they've made in innovation to help drive that automation and orchestration through, you know, numerous capabilities from stock transformation to to to sassy cloud security, et cetera. But our clients need scale. They need to be able to go fast and net pace and they need to, they need to do it with confidence securely. And that, that's one of the big focuses. But the other focus is, is we're starting to see a need to, you know, vendor consolidation in the market. You've seen the acquisitions, I'm sure you've talked to people in over the last couple days. You know, there's, there's a, a tremendous amount of consolidation going around. And what our clients, you know, are asking for is, Hey, I need to reduce the number of vendors I interact with. I need to simplify my infrastructure, I need to focus on automation and, and orchestration from that perspective, >>What's happening with multi-cloud? What are you hearing from from customers? You know, we hear a lot of the, the, the conversations about, oh it's, you know, it's, and I agree by the way, multi-cloud is kind of a symptom of multi-vendor, you know, Chuck Whittens thing about multi-cloud by default versus design, you know, it's good, good line and I think rings true, but, but what a customer's telling you in terms of the real challenges generally and then specifically around security. >>I think it's, you know, each cloud service product has their own security capabilities and security models and, and, and being able to train the people to be able to manage those different models. I think that's where, you know, tools like, you know, Prisma Cloud for instance come in and help clients be able to manage the security and compliance of those infrastructures in, in a way to do that. And then to be able to manage applications security consistently, right? It's not just the cloud itself, but it's actually the applications that may, you know, cross, you know, be for, for resiliency but you know, be in, you know, multi-cloud, you know, multiple clouds and being able to make sure you have consistent security across those. And I think, you know, one of the things that it's permeated is, is just the, with data and identity and, and you know, cloud infrastructure and tolerance management, it's been a big problem cuz it's like the wild, wild west. I always look, when I look at identity and the cloud and how it's done, it, it looks like 1995 identity. It's, it's, it's ridiculously backwards. And so, you know, we've seen things like, you know, keem that have come into play to help manage those relationships and, and simplify it across multiple clouds consistently, if that makes sense. >>Yep. >>You, you mentioned Prisma Cloud most recently Accenture and Palo Alto developed the Secure Cloud Express. Correct. Can you talk to us a little bit about what that is and what outcomes is it gonna enable? Yeah, >>So great question and we're pretty excited about this cuz what we did with that was we manage cloud, you know, our cloud environments for numerous customers. So we've developed hundreds of policies that, you know, we implemented in Prisma Cloud to manage, you know, multiple clients, our internal infrastructure. And what we did was we said, well, most of our clients have to build those from scratch. So what we said is we will come in, in the best of week of time and come in and, and do a data-driven exercise to show our clients, you know, where where they sit from a, from a security perspective as it relates leveraging Prisma cloud and, and those policies that we've created. And what, what that has led to is another step, which is where we're focused on auto remediation. So, you know, when you, when you get, when you get the findings, then what do you do with them, right? If you have hundreds or thousands in some cases we've had clients with 1100 findings and they just sit there and they go, whoa, you know, so to speak. And so what we've done is we try to take those highest, most frequent findings and build securities code to auto remediate those for clients so they can choose to implement that and work down those, you know, findings very quickly, which helps, you know, drive more value out of, out of their prisma cloud >>Purchases. Accenture obviously has deep industry expertise around the globe. What are you seeing in terms of industries actually? So as they digitize not just their IT transformation but a business transformation, there are starting to see companies, financial services in particular bring their business to their cloud, sify their business. And specifically I'm interested in what's happening at the edge with operations technology. We just talked about healthcare and and medical devices. What's happening there? How connected or disconnected is that to the rest of the estate, the multi-cloud on-prem, et cetera? I >>Mean, I think OT is, is fairly disconnected, right? Sure. From, from that perspective, obviously, but I, I, I think what we're starting to see is an uptick, you know, on, I think secure edge and Sassy will come to OT cause it's a better way. Because what happens is if someone, you know, gets into the network, they can traverse it, right? And if they can apply those zero trust principles to ot, which is you're talking to people that have been, you know, wearing hard hats Yeah. And engineers, that's a big shift for them. And so, but I think that you'll start to see that play more prevalence, you know, with the industries like, you know, financial services, we're seeing a huge uptick in cloud adoption, right? They were, they were slow to do it, but now they're, they're going at pace and faster than most, right? Yeah, sure. And I think, you know, healthcare is a, is another big one where we've seen a lot of migration and a lot of need for multi-cloud. Cuz you know, some, they may be running their analytics on, you know, Google and, and their workloads on Azure, right? Or aws. And so you're starting to see a lot of people leveraging the best of what each cloud provider does well >>From that. And, and just an aside on that Palo Alto survey, we saw construction was one of the hardest hit industries. Yeah. Which I, I was like, what? And then of course it's because they're not really focused on security. They're focused on building stuff. No, >>It's really interesting. We're working with a large builder, I can't say the name, but one of the things that they're looking to do is, you know, they're moving to the cloud and they're building the capability to manage some of the, you know, largest skyscrapers in the world, but also manage the OT sensors and also do selling that creating another business, not only just managing those buildings, but managing other people's buildings for them and ha and selling security as a service for that because they built that capability around their devices and, and, and switches, hvac, et cetera. Do, >>Do you think that because I mean, you know, the operations technology, they're engineers and they're hardcore, like, don't touch my stuff. Exactly. And so do you feel like as, I mean I know that business has kind of done a reach around everything, you know, be becoming connected, but do you feel like they're gonna be more on top of it then, then, then sort of the, the broad commercial market has been? Or is it gonna be wild West all over again? >>My hope is that, you know, us as gsi, you know, my fellow GSIs, that we will help our clients make the better decisions this time around and, and not go to the wild, wild west. And you know, we see a lot of it in manufacturing, you know, if you saw, you know, with the, you know, the invasion Ukraine, you know, one of the big groups that was hit was manufacturing, right? There was factory shut down all over the world, you know, and, and so, you know, and that is an OT environment, but I, you know, what we've seen is them are, you know, those clients take more serious steps to protect those environments cuz they're on, you know, windows 10 servers running, you know, large machines. So we're starting to see a lot more care and feeding in into those environments as well. >>Can I ask you a question about the conversations that you're having? That survey that Dave mentioned, it's was released yesterday. There's a board behind us, what's next in cyber? That was the survey and amazing data that came from it. Like 96% of organizations have been hit by at least one attack in the last year. They were surprised that the number was that high, but we know that no industry, no company is safe. But one of the things that the survey found that, that surprised me was that we always say, oh, security is a board level conversation. We know that to some degree. But what they found was lack of alignment between the board and the executive level. In your Accenture's relationships, I know you guys have deep relationships across organizations and their boards. Can you help bring the board together with the executives and, and really not just talk about cybersecurity, but really develop a cybersecurity transformation strategy that actually delivers resilience? >>Yeah, no ab absolutely. And we've, we, we actually took a step back and, and reorganized our business this last year. And one of those areas that we focused on was within strategy and the C-suite agenda, right? And we actually published looking at gia, it was either the CEO handbook, I think it's what we called it, but they helped them and board be able to, you know, drive more meaningful conversations that relates to risk and and whatnot. And so we're very focused on that right now. And it's, we need to up-level our conversations within the organization. Cause even the buyers in these large, you know, two years ago was mainly the cso, now we're dealing with the cio, CTOs, cfo because these are, you know, meaningful business conversations, right? That are driving business outcomes and security needs to be a business enabler, not, not a a, a bottleneck >>Is the chief data officer starting to emerge as, as we see, you know, Nikesh said yesterday in his keynote and we talked about it with him when he was here, security is a data problem. >>Yep. It is. It's a huge data problem. And we're starting to, you know, I think we've talked a lot about zero trust, but zero trust data is, is a, is a significant problem, right? Because that you talk about the wild, wild west is we see clients that have people that have in, you know, they, they have access to, you know, what we call dev development environment data, right? But then you find out that they can hop four levels over into production data and this been exposed to, you know, the wrong people, you know, not focused on that least privileged aspect. I think data's a real problem, you know, per na kesha's statement in the cloud. It's something that really needs to be addressed. And I think we're starting to see a lot of innovation around that area. Cuz what typical data security has always been, I have all these problems, it creates, I call it noise, right? I got thousands of findings and then just, you know, need just sit there and they go, what do I do? Right? It's too much. And so I think there, there's gonna be more intelligence around that and more, you know, what I call auto remediation, right? Being able to remediate those findings quickly from from that >>Perspective. I've been watching this board behind us. Yeah. It's this what's next in cyber. And people come in and they write, it's just been growing, you know, all week and somebody just wrote sock transformation. Yeah. We were just sort of talking about earlier what, what, in your estimation, what percent of organizations that you target. I understand that you're not going after the, you know, mom and pop organizations, but what percent of that, you know, fat middle and the tip of the pyramid, that a euro, that's your sweet spot. What percent of those organizations don't have a sock? >>I mean, most every organization has a sock. You know, I talked to, you know, CISOs of large financial service organization, they said, do we even need a sock anymore? It could be a virtual sock so to speak, but I think, you know, am was SOC transformation. I think we could potentially head to something like that. But you know, but what's really been strange is there's been, you know, what we call soar, right? Security, you know, orchestration, automation, whatever. And what another, >>Another acronym, their >>Acronym that I security that I might brain is >>Hold apologize. >>But you know, they've, people have never really driven the value out of it because they build these automation playbooks and, and for one company to do it and build 20 of 'em or 30 of 'em to ha it doesn't pay off in the long run. And what we're starting to see is people, you know, bring to the table more crowdsource these capabilities so that they can scale those sock transformations. Cause it's really about, you know, orchestration and automation. That's where, you know, nirvana comes in because it's not about people with headsets on looking at, you know, 20 screens. It's not helpful, right? The humans, we make mistakes. And so if we can automate as much of that as possible, get rid of the false positives, leverage AI and and ML to do that. And I think we're starting to see, you know, what I would call more advanced AI and ml. I think in the early days in security, AI and ML was very nascent and, and, and now you're starting to see, you know, more powerful concepts come in better learning, better outcomes out of that. >>Well, it was a lot of modeling in the cloud still is, but it's increasingly going toward real time inference and that's, you know, game changing. >>Agreed. >>Last question for you. What's are some of the things that are next on the plate for Accenture and Palo Networks? What's next up? >>I think, you know, we're very focused on, on Sassy right now in, in the market. And I think we think that is, you know, I think both of us think that's the next big wave, right? Because I think what we learned out of, you know, these last two and a half, three years is that these concepts work, but they can actually scale out to drive significant cost savings. I mean, if you look at Accenture, you know, we don't have a a network backbone anymore. We're pure cloud wan, right? We're leveraging the internet for that. And I think that and what we're trying to do with Palo Alto and driving, you know, cloud WAN and Sassy as a service, I think will be super, super meaningful. And, and, and, and >>Well that's interesting. That has implications for a number of companies out >>There. Yeah. Well I think, you know, it's obviously the, you know, it, it's a, it is a big implication for a lot of, a lot of, you know, our customers even, right? Yeah. And so we have to be very careful and thoughtful about how we work to make that happen over time. >>Right. A lot of opportunity. Rex, thank you so much for joining us on the program and really dissecting what Accenture and Palo Alto are doing, all the value in it for organizations across industries. We appreciate your insights. Yep. >>Thank you >>For Rex Dexon and Dave Valante. I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching the Cubes stick around. Dave and I will be right back with our next guest. This is the Cube, the leader in live, emerging and enterprise tech coverage.

>> Narrator: "TheCUBE" presents Ignite 22. Brought to you by Palo Alto Networks. >> Hey everyone. Welcome back to "TheCUBE's" live coverage of Palo Alto Network's Ignite 22 from the MGM Grand in beautiful Las Vegas. I am Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. Dave, we just had a great conversa- First of all, we got to hear the keynote, most of it. We also just had a great conversation with the CEO and chairman of Palo Alto Networks, Nikesh Arora. You know, this is a company that was founded back in 2005, he's been there four years, a lot has happened. A lot of growth, a lot of momentum in his tenure. You were saying in your breaking analysis, that they are on track to nearly double revenues from FY 20 to 23. Lots of momentum in this cloud security company. >> Yeah, I'd never met him before. I mean, I've been following a little bit. It's interesting, he came in as, sort of, a security outsider. You know, he joked today that he, the host, I forget the guy's name on the stage, what was his name? Hassan. Hassan, he said "He's the only guy in the room that knows less about security than I do." Because, normally, this is an industry that's steeped in deep expertise. He came in and I think is given a good compliment to the hardcore techies at Palo Alto Network. The company, it's really interesting. The company started out building their own data centers, they called it. Now they look back and call it cloud, but it was their own data centers, kind of like Salesforce did, it's kind of like ServiceNow. Because at the time, you really couldn't do it in the public cloud. The public cloud was a little too unknown. And so they needed that type of control. But Palo Alto's been amazing story since 2020, we wrote about this during the pandemic. So what they did, is they began to pivot to the the true cloud native public cloud, which is kind of immature still. They don't tell you that, but it's kind of still a little bit immature, but it's working. And when they were pivoting, it was around the same time, at Fortinet, who's a competitor there's like, I call 'em a poor man's Palo Alto, and Fortinet probably hates that, but it's kind of true. It's like a value play on a comprehensive platform, and you know Fortinet a little bit. And so, but what was happening is Fortinet was executing on its cloud strategy better than Palo Alto. And there was a real divergence in the valuations of these stocks. And we said at the time, we felt like Palo Alto, being the gold standard, would get through it. And they did. And what's happened is interesting, I wrote about this two weeks ago. If you go back to the pandemic, peak of the pandemic, or just before the peak, kind of in that tech bubble, if you will. Splunk's down 44% from that peak, Okta's down, sorry, not down 44%. 44% of the peak. Okta's 22% of their peak. CrowdStrike, 41%, Zscaler, 36%, Fortinet, 71%. Not so bad. Palo Altos maintained 93% of its peak value, right? So it's a combination of two things. One is, they didn't run up as much during the pandemic, and they're executing through their cloud strategy. And that's provided a sort of softer landing. And I think it's going to be interesting to see where they go from here. And you heard Nikesh, we're going to double, and then double again. So that's 7 billion, 14 billion, heading to 30 billion. >> Lisa: Yeah, yeah. He also talked about one of the things that he's done in his tenure here, as really a workforce transformation. And we talk all the time, it's not just technology and processes, it's people. They've also seemed to have done a pretty good job from a cultural transformation perspective, which is benefiting their customers. And they're also growing- The ecosystem, we talked a little bit about the ecosystem with Nikesh. We've got Google Cloud on, we've got AWS on the program today alone, talking about the partnerships. The ecosystem is expanding, as well. >> Have you ever met Nir Zuk? >> I have not, not yet. >> He's the founder and CTO. I haven't, we've never been on "theCUBE." He was supposed to come on one day down in New York City. Stu and I were going to interview him, and he cut out of the conference early, so we didn't interview him. But he's a very opinionated dude. And you're going to see, he's basically going to come on, and I mean, I hope he is as opinionated on "TheCUBE," but he'll talk about how the industry has screwed it up. And Nikesh sort of talked about that, it's a shiny new toy strategy. Oh, there's another one, here's another one. It's the best in that category. Okay, let's get, and that's how we've gotten to this point. I always use that Optive graphic, which shows the taxonomy, and shows hundreds and hundreds of suppliers in the industry. And again, it's true. Customers have 20, 30, sometimes 40 different tool sets. And so now it's going to be interesting to see. So I guess my point is, it starts at the top. The founder, he's an outspoken, smart, tough Israeli, who's like, "We're going to take this on." We're not afraid to be ambitious. And so, so to your point about people and the culture, it starts there. >> Absolutely. You know, one of the things that you've written about in your breaking analysis over the weekend, Nikesh talked about it, they want to be the consolidator. You see this as they're building out the security supercloud. Talk to me about that. What do you think? What is a security supercloud in your opinion? >> Yeah, so let me start with the consolidator. So Palo Alto obviously is executing on that strategy. CrowdStrike as well, wants to be a consolidator. I would say Zscaler wants to be a consolidator. I would say that Microsoft wants to be a consolidator, so does Cisco. So they're all coming at it from different angles. Cisco coming at it from network security, which is Palo Alto's wheelhouse, with their next gen firewalls, network security. What Palo Alto did was interesting, was they started out with kind of a hardware based firewall, but they didn't try to shove everything into it. They put the other function in there, their cloud. Zscaler. Zscaler is the one running around saying you don't need firewalls anymore. Just run everything through our cloud, our security cloud. I would think that as Zscaler expands its TAM, it's going to start to acquire, and do similar types of things. We'll see how that integrates. CrowdStrike is clearly executing on a similar portfolio strategy, but they're coming at it from endpoint, okay? They have to partner for network security. Cisco is this big and legacy, but they've done a really good job of acquiring and using services to hide some of that complexity. Microsoft is, you know, they probably hate me saying this, but it's the just good enough strategy. And that may have hurt CrowdStrike last quarter, because the SMB was a soft, we'll see. But to specifically answer your question, the opportunity, we think, is to build the security supercloud. What does that mean? That means to have a common security platform across all clouds. So irrespective of whether you're running an Amazon, whether you're running an on-prem, Google, or Azure, the security policies, and the edicts, and the way you secure your enterprise, look the same. There's a PaaS layer, super PaaS layer for developers, so that that the developers can secure their code in a common framework across cloud. So that essentially, Nikesh sort of balked at it, said, "No, no, no, we're not, we're not really building a super cloud." But essentially they kind of are headed in that direction, I think. Although, what I don't know, like CrowdStrike and Microsoft are big competitors. He mentioned AWS and Google. We run on AWS, Google, and in their own data centers. That sounds like they don't currently run a Microsoft. 'Cause Microsoft is much more competitive with the security ecosystem. They got Identity, so they compete with Okta. They got Endpoint, so they compete with CrowdStrike, and Palo Alto. So Microsoft's at war with everybody. So can you build a super cloud on top of the clouds, the hyperscalers, and not do Microsoft? I would say no. >> Right. >> But there's nothing stopping Palo Alto from running in the Microsoft cloud. I don't know if that's a strategy, we should ask them. >> Yeah. They've done a great job in our last few minutes, of really expanding their TAM in the last few years, particularly under Nikesh's leadership. What are some of the things that you heard this morning that you think, really they've done a great job of expanding that TAM. He talked a little bit about, I didn't write the number down, but he talked a little bit about the market opportunity there. What do you see them doing as being best of breed for organizations that have 30 to 50 tools and need to consolidate that? >> Well the market opportunity's enormous. >> Lisa: It is. >> I mean, we're talking about, well north of a hundred billion dollars, I mean 150, 180, depending on whose numerator you use. Gartner, IDC. Dave's, whatever, it's big. Okay, and they've got... Okay, they're headed towards 7 billion out of 180 billion, whatever, again, number you use. So they started with network security, they put most of the network function in the cloud. They moved to Endpoint, Sassy for the edge. They've done acquisitions, the Cortex acquisition, to really bring automated threat intelligence. They just bought Cider Security, which is sort of the shift left, code security, developer, assistance, if you will. That whole shift left, protect right. And so I think a lot of opportunities to continue to acquire best of breed. I liked what Nikesh said. Keep the founders on board, sell them on the mission. Let them help with that integration and putting forth the cultural aspects. And then, sort of, integrate in. So big opportunities, do they get into Endpoint and compete with Okta? I think Okta's probably the one sort of outlier. They want to be the consolidator of identity, right? And they'll probably partner with Okta, just like Okta partners with CrowdStrike. So I think that's part of the challenge of being the consolidator. You're probably not going to be the consolidator for everything, but maybe someday you'll see some kind of mega merger of these companies. CrowdStrike and Okta, or Palo Alto and Okta, or to take on Microsoft, which would be kind of cool to watch. >> That would be. We have a great lineup, Dave. Today and tomorrow, full days, two full days of cube coverage. You mentioned Nir Zuk, we already had the CEO on, founder and CTO. We've got the chief product officer coming on next. We've got chief transformation officer of customers, partners. We're going to have great conversations, and really understand how this organization is helping customers ultimately achieve their SecOps transformation, their digital transformation. And really moved the needle forward to becoming secure data companies. So I'm looking forward to the next two days. >> Yeah, and Wendy Whitmore is coming on. She heads Unit 42, which is, from what I could tell, it's pretty much the competitor to Mandiant, which Google just bought. We had Kevin Mandia on at September at the CrowdStrike event. So that's interesting. That's who I was poking Nikesh a little bit on industry collaboration. You're tight with Google, and then he had an interesting answer. He said "Hey, you start sharing data, you don't know where it's going to go." I think Snowflake could help with that problem, actually. >> Interesting. >> Yeah, little Snowflake and some of the announcements ar Reinvent with the data clean rooms. Data sharing, you know, trusted data. That's one of the other things we didn't talk about, is the real tension in between security and regulation. So the regulators in public policy saying you can't move the data out of the country. And you have to prove to me that you have a chain of custody. That when you say you deleted something, you have to show me that you not only deleted the file, then the data, but also the metadata. That's a really hard problem. So to my point, something that Palo Alto might be able to solve. >> It might be. It'll be an interesting conversation with Unit 42. And like we said, we have a great lineup of guests today and tomorrow with you, so stick around. Lisa Martin and Dave Vellante are covering Palo Alto Networks Ignite 22 for you. We look forward to seeing you in our next segment. Stick around. (light music)

>> From "theCube" Studios in Palo Alto in Boston bringing you data-driven insights from "theCube" and ETR. This is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante. >> As an independent pure play company, Palo Alto Networks has earned its status as the leader in security. You can measure this in a variety of ways. Revenue, market cap, execution, ethos, and most importantly, conversations with customers generally. In CISO specifically, who consistently affirm this position. The company's on track to double its revenues in fiscal year 23 relative to fiscal year 2020. Despite macro headwinds, which are likely to carry through next year, Palo Alto owes its position to a clarity of vision and strong execution on a TAM expansion strategy through acquisitions and integration into its cloud and SaaS offerings. Hello and welcome to this week's "Wikibon Cube Insights" powered by ETR and this breaking analysis and ahead of Palo Alto Ignite the company's user conference, we bring you the next chapter on top of the last week's cybersecurity update. We're going to dig into the ETR data on Palo Alto Networks as we promised and provide a glimpse of what we're going to look for at "Ignite" and posit what Palo Alto needs to do to stay on top of the hill. Now, the challenges for cybersecurity professionals. Dead simple to understand. Solving it, not so much. This is a taxonomic eye test, if you will, from Optiv. It's one of our favorite artifacts to make the point the cybersecurity landscape is a mosaic of stovepipes. Security professionals have to work with dozens of tools many legacy combined with shiny new toys to try and keep up with the relentless pace of innovation catalyzed by the incredibly capable well-funded and motivated adversaries. Cybersecurity is an anomalous market in that the leaders have low single digit market shares. Think about that. Cisco at one point held 60% market share in the networking business and it's still deep into the 40s. Oracle captures around 30% of database market revenue. EMC and storage at its peak had more than 30% of that market. Even Dell's PC market shares, you know, in the mid 20s or even over that from a revenue standpoint. So cybersecurity from a market share standpoint is even more fragmented perhaps than the software industry. Okay, you get the point. So despite its position as the number one player Palo Alto might have maybe three maybe 4% of the total market, depending on what you use as your denominator, but just a tiny slice. So how is it that we can sit here and declare Palo Alto as the undisputed leader? Well, we probably wouldn't go that far. They probably have quite a bit of competition. But this CISO from a recent ETR round table discussion with our friend Eric Bradley, summed up Palo Alto's allure. We thought pretty well. The question was why Palo Alto Networks? Here's the answer. Because of its completeness as a platform, its ability to integrate with its own products or they acquire, integrate then rebrand them as their own. We've looked at other vendors we just didn't think they were as mature and we already had implemented some of the Palo Alto tools like the firewalls and stuff and we thought why not go holistically with the vendor a single throat to choke, if you will, if stuff goes wrong. And I think that was probably the primary driver and familiarity with the tools and the resources that they provided. Now here's another stat from ETR's Eric Bradley. He gave us a glimpse of the January survey that's in the field now. The percent of IT buyers stating that they plan to consolidate redundant vendors, it went from 34% in the October survey and now stands at 44%. So we fo we feel this bodes well for consolidators like Palo Alto networks. And the same is true from Microsoft's kind of good enough approach. It should also be true for CrowdStrike although last quarter we saw softness reported on in their SMB market, whereas interestingly MongoDB actually saw consistent strength from its SMB and its self-serve. So that's something that we're watching very closely. Now, Palo Alto Networks has held up better than most of its peers in the stock market. So let's take a look at that real quick. This chart gives you a sense of how well. It's a one year comparison of Palo Alto with the bug ETF. That's the cyber basket that we like to compare often CrowdStrike, Zscaler, and Okta. Now remember Palo Alto, they didn't run up as much as CrowdStrike, ZS and Okta during the pandemic but you can see it's now down unquote only 9% for the year. Whereas the cyber basket ETF is off 27% roughly in line with the NASDAQ. We're not showing that CrowdStrike down 44%, Zscaler down 61% and Okta off a whopping 72% in the past 12 months. Now as we've indicated, Palo Alto is making a strong case for consolidating point tools and we think it will have a much harder time getting customers to switch off of big platforms like Cisco who's another leader in network security. But based on the fragmentation in the market there's plenty of room to grow in our view. We asked breaking analysis contributor Chip Simington for his take on the technicals of the stock and he said that despite Palo Alto's leadership position it doesn't seem to make much difference these days. It's all about interest rates. And even though this name has performed better than its peers, it looks like the stock wants to keep testing its 52 week lows, but he thinks Palo Alto got oversold during the last big selloff. And the fact that the company's free cash flow is so strong probably keeps it at the one 50 level or above maybe bouncing around there for a while. If it breaks through that under to the downside it's ne next test is at that low of around one 40 level. So thanks for that, Chip. Now having get that out of the way as we said on the previous chart Palo Alto has strong opinions, it's founder and CTO, Nir Zuk, is extremely clear on that point of view. So let's take a look at how Palo Alto got to where it is today and how we think you should think about his future. The company was founded around 18 years ago as a network security company focused on what they called NextGen firewalls. Now, what Palo Alto did was different. They didn't try to stuff a bunch of functionality inside of a hardware box. Rather they layered network security functions on top of its firewalls and delivered value as a service through software running at the time in its own cloud. So pretty obvious today, but forward thinking for the time and now they've moved to a more true cloud native platform and much more activity in the public cloud. In February, 2020, right before the pandemic we reported on the divergence in market values between Palo Alto and Fort Net and we cited some challenges that Palo Alto was happening having transitioning to a cloud native model. And at the time we said we were confident that Palo Alto would make it through the knot hole. And you could see from the previous chart that it has. So the company's architectural approach was to do the heavy lifting in the cloud. And this eliminates the need for customers to deploy sensors on prem or proxies on prem or sandboxes on prem sandboxes, you know for instance are vulnerable to overwhelming attacks. Think about it, if you're a sandbox is on prem you're not going to be updating that every day. No way. You're probably not going to updated even every week or every month. And if the capacity of your sandbox is let's say 20,000 files an hour you know a hacker's just going to turn up the volume, it'll overwhelm you. They'll send a hundred thousand emails attachments into your sandbox and they'll choke you out and then they'll have the run of the house while you're trying to recover. Now the cloud doesn't completely prevent that but what it does, it definitely increases the hacker's cost. So they're going to probably hit some easier targets and that's kind of the objective of security firms. You know, increase the denominator on the ROI. All right, the next thing that Palo Alto did is start acquiring aggressively, I think we counted 17 or 18 acquisitions to expand the TAM beyond network security into endpoint CASB, PaaS security, IaaS security, container security, serverless security, incident response, SD WAN, CICD pipeline security, attack service management, supply chain security. Just recently with the acquisition of Cider Security and Palo Alto by all accounts takes the time to integrate into its cloud and SaaS platform called Prisma. Unlike many acquisitive companies in the past EMC was a really good example where you ended up with a kind of a Franken portfolio. Now all this leads us to believe that Palo Alto wants to be the consolidator and is in a good position to do so. But beyond that, as multi-cloud becomes more prevalent and more of a strategy customers tell us they want a consistent experience across clouds. And is going to be the same by the way with IoT. So of the next wave here. Customers don't want another stove pipe. So we think Palo Alto is in a good position to build what we call the security super cloud that layer above the clouds that brings a common experience for devs and operational teams. So of course the obvious question is this, can Palo Alto networks continue on this path of acquire and integrate and still maintain best of breed status? Can it? Will it? Does it even have to? As Holger Mueller of Constellation Research and I talk about all the time integrated suites seem to always beat best of breed in the long run. We'll come back to that. Now, this next graphic that we're going to show you underscores this question about portfolio. Here's a picture and I don't expect you to digest it all but it's a screen grab of Palo Alto's product and solutions portfolios, network cloud, network security rather, cloud security, Sassy, CNAP, endpoint unit 42 which is their threat intelligence platform and every imaginable security service and solution for customers. Well, maybe not every, I'm sure there's more to come like supply chain with the recent Cider acquisition and maybe more IoT beyond ZingBox and earlier acquisition but we're sure there will be more in the future both organic and inorganic. Okay, let's bring in more of the ETR survey data. For those of you who don't know ETR, they are the number one enterprise data platform surveying thousands of end customers every quarter with additional drill down surveys and customer round tables just an awesome SaaS enabled platform. And here's a view that shows net score or spending momentum on the vertical axis in provision or presence within the ETR data set on the horizontal axis. You see that red dotted line at 40%. Anything at or over that indicates a highly elevated net score. And as you can see Palo Alto is right on that line just under. And I'll give you another glimpse it looks like Palo Alto despite the macro may even just edge up a bit in the next survey based on the glimpse that Eric gave us. Now those colored bars in the bottom right corner they show the breakdown of Palo Alto's net score and underscore the methodology that ETR uses. The lime green is new customer adoptions, that's 7%. The forest green at 38% represents the percent of customers that are spending 6% or more on Palo Alto solutions. The gray is at that 40 or 8% that's flat spending plus or minus 5%. The pinkish at 5% is spending is down on Palo Alto network products by 6% or worse. And the bright red at only 2% is churn or defections. Very low single digit numbers for Palo Alto, that's a real positive. What you do is you subtract the red from the green and you get a net score of 38% which is very good for a company of Palo Alto size. And we'll note this is based on just under 400 responses in the ETR survey that are Palo Alto customers out of around 1300 in the total survey. It's a really good representation of Palo Alto. And you can see the other leading companies like CrowdStrike, Okta, Zscaler, Forte, Cisco they loom large with similar aspirations. Well maybe not so much Okta. They don't necessarily rule want to rule the world. They want to rule identity and of course the ever ubiquitous Microsoft in the upper right. Now drilling deeper into the ETR data, let's look at how Palo Alto has progressed over the last three surveys in terms of market presence in the survey. This view of the data shows provision in the data going back to October, 2021, that's the gray bars. The blue is July 22 and the yellow is the latest survey from October, 2022. Remember, the January survey is currently in the field. Now the leftmost set of data there show size a company. The middle set of data shows the industry for a select number of industries in the right most shows, geographic region. Notice anything, yes, Palo Alto up across the board relative to both this past summer and last fall. So that's pretty impressive. Palo Alto network CEO, Nikesh Aurora, stressed on the last earnings call that the company is seeing somewhat elongated deal approvals and sometimes splitting up size of deals. He's stressed that certain industries like energy, government and financial services continue to spend. But we would expect even a pullback there as companies get more conservative. But the point is that Nikesh talked about how they're hiring more sales pros to work the pipeline because they understand that they have to work harder to pull deals forward 'cause they got to get more approvals and they got to increase the volume that's coming through the pipeline to account for the possibility that certain companies are going to split up the deals, you know, large deals they want to split into to smaller bite size chunks. So they're really going hard after they go to market expansion to account for that. All right, so we're going to wrap by sharing what we expect and what we're going to probe for at Palo Alto Ignite next week, Lisa Martin and I will be hosting "theCube" and here's what we'll be looking for. First, it's a four day event at the MGM with the meat of the program on days two and three. That's day two was the big keynote. That's when we'll start our broadcasting, we're going for two days. Now our understanding is we've never done Palo Alto Ignite before but our understanding it's a pretty technically oriented crowd that's going to be eager to hear what CTO and founder Nir Zuk has to say. And as well CEO Nikesh Aurora and as in addition to longtime friend of "theCube" and current president, BJ Jenkins, he's going to be speaking. Wendy Whitmore runs Unit 42 and is going to be several other high profile Palo Alto execs, as well, Thomas Kurian from Google is a featured speaker. Lee Claridge, who is Palo Alto's, chief product officer we think is going to be giving the audience heavy doses of Prisma Cloud and Cortex enhancements. Now, Cortex, you might remember, came from an acquisition and does threat detection and attack surface management. And we're going to hear a lot about we think about security automation. So we'll be listening for how Cortex has been integrated and what kind of uptake that it's getting. We've done some, you know, modeling in from the ETR. Guys have done some modeling of cortex, you know looks like it's got a lot of upside and through the Palo Alto go to market machine, you know could really pick up momentum. That's something that we'll be probing for. Now, one of the other things that we'll be watching is pricing. We want to talk to customers about their spend optimization, their spending patterns, their vendor consolidation strategies. Look, Palo Alto is a premium offering. It charges for value. It's expensive. So we also want to understand what kind of switching costs are customers willing to absorb and how onerous they are and what's the business case look like? How are they thinking about that business case. We also want to understand and really probe on how will Palo Alto maintain best of breed as it continues to acquire and integrate to expand its TAM and appeal as that one-stop shop. You know, can it do that as we talked about before. And will it do that? There's also an interesting tension going on sort of changing subjects here in security. There's a guy named Edward Hellekey who's been in "theCube" before. He hasn't been in "theCube" in a while but he's a security pro who has educated us on the nuances of protecting data privacy, public policy, how it varies by region and how complicated it is relative to security. Because securities you technically you have to show a chain of custody that proves unequivocally, for example that data has been deleted or scrubbed or that metadata does. It doesn't include any residual private data that violates the laws, the local laws. And the tension is this, you need good data and lots of it to have good security, really the more the better. But government policy is often at odds in a major blocker to sharing data and it's getting more so. So we want to understand this tension and how companies like Palo Alto are dealing with it. Our customers testing public policy in courts we think not quite yet, our government's making exceptions and policies like GDPR that favor security over data privacy. What are the trade-offs there? And finally, one theme of this breaking analysis is what does Palo Alto have to do to stay on top? And we would sum it up with three words. Ecosystem, ecosystem, ecosystem. And we said this at CrowdStrike Falcon in September that the one concern we had was the pace of ecosystem development for CrowdStrike. Is collaboration possible with competitors? Is being adopted aggressively? Is Palo Alto being adopted aggressively by global system integrators? What's the uptake there? What about developers? Look, the hallmark of a cloud company which Palo Alto is a cloud security company is a thriving ecosystem that has entries into and exits from its platform. So we'll be looking at what that ecosystem looks like how vibrant and inclusive it is where the public clouds fit and whether Palo Alto Networks can really become the security super cloud. Okay, that's a wrap stop by next week. If you're in Vegas, say hello to "theCube" team. We have an unbelievable lineup on the program. Now if you're not there, check out our coverage on theCube.net. I want to thank Eric Bradley for sharing a glimpse on short notice of the upcoming survey from ETR and his thoughts. And as always, thanks to Chip Symington for his sharp comments. Want to thank Alex Morrison, who's on production and manages the podcast Ken Schiffman as well in our Boston studio, Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight they help get the word out on social and of course in our newsletters, Rob Hoof, is our editor in chief over at Silicon Angle who does some awesome editing, thank you to all. Remember all these episodes they're available as podcasts. Wherever you listen, all you got to do is search "Breaking Analysis" podcasts. I publish each week on wikibon.com and silicon angle.com where you can email me at david.valante@siliconangle.com or dm me at D Valante or comment on our LinkedIn post. And please do check out etr.ai. They've got the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Valante for "theCube" Insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next week on "Ignite" or next time on "Breaking Analysis". (upbeat music)

welcome back everyone to thecube's live coverage in san francisco for vmware explorer 2022 formerly vmworld i'm john furrier david live dave 12 years we've been covering this event formerly vmware first time in west now it's explore we've been in north we've been in south we've been in vegas multi-cloud is now the exploration vmware community is coming in john siegel svp at dell cube alumni dave mccraw vp at vmware guys thanks for coming back both cube alumni it's great to see you very senior organizations senior roles in the organizations of vmware and dell one year since the split great partnership continuing i mean some of the conversations we've been having over the past few years is that control plane the management layer making everything work together it's essentially been the multi-cloud hybrid cloud story what's the update what's how's the partnership look yeah i you know i just to start off i mean i would say i don't think our partnership's been any has ever been any better um if you look at you mention our vision very much a shared vision in terms of the multi-cloud world and i don't think we've ever had more joint innovation projects at one time i think we have over 40 now dave that are going on across multi-cloud ai cyber security uh modern applications and and uh you know here just at you just vmworld vmware explorer we have over 30 uh vmware sessions that are featuring dell um and this is i think more than we've ever had so look i think um there's a lot of momentum there and we're really looking forward to what's to come so you guys obviously spent a lot of time together when vmware was part of dell and then you've been it's been a year since the spin and then you codified i think it was a five-year agreement you know so you had some time to figure that out and then put it into paper so you just kind of quantified some of the stuff that's going on but now we're entering a yet another phase so that that that that agreement's probably more important than ever now i mean list in terms of getting it documented and an understanding right yeah that agreement really defines a framework for solution development and for go to market so we've been doing it and refining it for the last five years so now you know putting and codifying it into a written signed agreement it basically is instantiating what we've been doing that we know works uh where we can drive uh solution development we can drive deep architectural co-innovation together as well and as john said across multiple you know project and solution areas so we we've been talking to years to you know a lot of these strat guys guys like matt baker about things like you know you see aws do nitro and then of course project monterey and and i know that you guys have had a you know a big sort of input into that and so now to see it come to fruition is is huge because you know from our view it's the future of computing architectures how do you handle you know data rich applications ai applications that's what are your thoughts on here i couldn't agree more uh project monterey is a great example of how we're innovating together we just talked about i mean first of all it's all so we have vxrail which let's let's start there right we have over 19 000 joint customers right now we continue to innovate more and more on the vxrail architecture great example of that as our partnership with project monterey and taking essentially vsphere 8 and running it for the first time on an hci system directly on the dp used itself right on the dpus ability now to offload nsxt from from the cpus to the dpus uh hope you know in the short term first of all great benefits for customers in terms of better performance but as you just mentioned it's game changing in terms of laying the foundation for the future architectures that we plan on together helping out customers there's one other dynamic for you on is um and it's not unique to dell but dell's the biggest you know supply supplier partner etc but you're able to take vmware software and drive it through your business and and that enables you to get more subscription revenue and makes it stickier and that's a really important change from you know 10 years ago yeah and it's it's a combination as you know of dell software and vmware software together absolutely and i think what's with this is a game-changing innovation that you can run on top of our joint system vxrail if you will um and now what our customers can expect is life cycle automation of now you know the dpus as well as tanzu as well as everything else we layer on top of that core foundation that we have over 19 000 customers running today so i mean like that 19 000 number i want to get back up to the vx rail and you mentioned vsphere that's big news here this year vsphere 8 big release a lot of going on what's the hci angle you mentioned that what's in it for the customer what does that mean for the folks here because let's face it the vsphere aids got everyone in that they've all the v-sections are going going crazy right another vsphere release getting training they have the labs here what's it mean for the customers what's the value there with that hci solution with the gpus well first of all vsphere 8 as we know it has a lot of goodies in it but you know what what i think to me what's been most powerful about this is the ability to run vsphere 8 uh and and specifically on the dpus now you can run it it is open up all new possibilities now and so that nsxt that i mentioned you know running that on gpus opens up a whole new uh architecture now for our customers going forward and now really sets us up for modern distributed architecture for the future so like edge okay yeah and vsphere 8 brings in you know cloud connectivity as well so you know customers can run in a cloud disconnected mode they can run in a cloud connected mode so you know that's going to bring in the ability to do specialized things on security cycle management there's a whole series of services that can now be added as well as you know leveraging you know vcenter management capabilities so what's happening at the edge we had i think it was lows on hotel tech world right okay good not the other one um but so so that's got to be exploding now with that with that because it just changes the game for for these stores there's i mean retail uh manufacturing maybe you can give us an update on there's so much happening on the edge side as you know i mean that's where most of the a lot of the innovations happening right now is at the edge and a lot of the companies we talked to 8x right 8x expectation of increase in uh edge workloads over the next and the data challenge too and the data challenge is huge so you heard about the innovations with vsphere 8. in addition to that we just introduced today as well the smallest vx rail for the edge ever this thing is it's like think picture a couple eight and a half by 11 notebooks not much not much you know maybe a little wider than that but not much more um you know these these are stacked on top of each other these are you can rack and stack and mount these things anywhere and it also is the first aci system that has you know a built-in hardware witness so this helps set it up for environments that are you know network bandwidth constrained or have high high latency no longer an issue next gen app is going to want to have a local data server at the edge right and with compute there right high performance right right so now you're getting it across the wire yes you get racket stack a couple of these small things i mean they can they can fit into like a you know clark kent's briefcase right these things are so small um you want to do the analytics on site and return responses back you don't want to be moving massive data payloads off the egg so you got to have the right level of compute to run machine learning algorithms and and do the analytics type work that you want to do to make local decisions yeah i mean we just had david lithimon who was one of the keynote speakers here at the event and we've been talking about super cloud and multi-cloud meta cloud all the different versions of what we see as this next-gen and this brings up a point of like his advice to young people learn how multi-cloud learn about system architecture because if you can figure out how to put it together you're going to have to make more money anyway that this whole edge piece opens up huge challenges and opportunities around how do you configure these next-gen apps what does the ai look like what's the data architecture this is not like get some training curriculum online and you get you know 101 and you're getting a job no this is more complicated but with the hardware you guys make it easier so where's the complexity shift between having a powerful edge device like the vxrail with the vsphere what's the ec button on that like how do you guys what's the vision because this is going to be a major battleground this whole edge piece yeah it's going to be huge well i think when you look at the innovation that dell is bringing to market with technologies like outlander and then designing that into vxrail and then you combine that with our tonzu capabilities to manage development and deployment of applications this is about heterogeneous deployment and management at scale of applications with technologies like tons of mission control then deploying service mesh right for security being able to use sassy to be able to secure you know with cloud security over the wire so it's bringing together multiple technologies to deliver simplicity to the customer the ability to go one to many you know in terms of being able to deploy and manage and update whether that's a security patch or an application update and do that very rapidly at a low cost so the benefit with this solution now just putting this together is i can ship a box small and or stack them and essentially it's done remotely it's that's provision the provisioning issues not a truck roll as they say or professional services enabled you can just drop that out there and this is where the customers need to be yeah that absolutely is that the vision don't get that right exactly you don't you don't need the you don't need the skills yeah you don't need the specialized skills you don't need a lot of space you don't need you know high network bandwidth all these things right all these innovations that we're talking about here um really combined into really enabling a whole new whole new future here for edge is are you doing apex now is that i think thickest part sure part of yours okay so um is apex fitting into the to the edge how does it fit yeah i mean well first of all you know a lot of what we talked with apex is really about a consumption a way to ensure there's a common cloud experience wherever the data is and where the applications are and so absolutely edge fits into this as well and so we have we have common ways to consume our infrastructure today our joint infrastructure whether it's in the data center at the edge um or you know uh in the cloud usain ragu when he was on i said it was great keynote loved it one of the things that i didn't think there was enough of was security and he's like yeah we only had so much time but vmware is a very strong security story we heard a really strong security story at dell tech world i mean half the innovations and the new you know storage products were security and the new os's and it was impressive what what's how are you guys working together on security is that one of those let me give you a few key things you know our teams are working together at the engineer to engineer level you know reference architectures for zero trust as an example being able to look you know hardware root of trust up into the application layer right so we're looking at really defense in depth here you know i mentioned what we're doing with sassy right with cloud security capabilities so you really have to look at this from the edge to the core with the you know from a networking perspective getting the network the insights on things that maybe anomalies that may be happening on the network so using our network insight technology you know uh nsx and then being able to ultimately uh have a secure development pipeline as well i mean you we all know about the supply chain attacks that happen right and so being able to have a you know secure pipeline for development is critical for both of our companies working together i think the tan zoo and you mentioned the developer self-service that experience combined with kind of the power of the dell you know let's face it the boxes are awesome hardware matters and software matters so bringing that expertise together michael daley always used to say on thecube better together in respect to vmware and dell a lot of fruit has been born from that labor right specifically around and now when you add the tan zoo and you get vsphere you got the operational excellence you got the you got the performance and scale with the dell boxes and hardware and software and now you've got the tan zoo what's missing or is it all there now i mean where how would you how would you guys peg the progress bar is it like it's all rocking right now or or i'd say you're never done first of all but i you know i look at some of the innovations that we've brought to market recently where we've are combining and stacking these technologies into a more defense in-depth like solution you know bringing nsx onto vxrail so that you can flip a switch easily and light up the firewall the new plug-in yeah that's a great example simple simple um carbon black workload another example where we're taking carbon black technology that was typically on endpoints you know on pcs bringing that into the data center right and leveraging all the analytics and insights around you know being able to identify anomalies and then remediate those anomalies so we're seeing very good traction with those and the cloud native developers containers they're all native container working with compute and container storage object store in the cloud kubernetes we've embraced it yeah i mean yeah containers running containers and vms on the same infrastructure common way to manage it all i mean that that's been a big part of it as well obviously a lot of the focus that dell's bringing here as well is is the inability to run that stack easily right you heard the announcement on uh tanzu for kubernetes operators right earlier today tko we call it uh you know that running on vxrail now is really targeted at the i.t operator in allowing them to easily stand up a self-service developer devops environment on vxrail going forward and then a piece that might be invisible to them is back to monterey isolation right encryption and data moving you know absolutely storage the security the compute right the management right that's that's a complete and it's about reducing attack services as well right the security perspective as well when you when you're moving nsxt onto a dpu you're doing that as well so there's it takes the little things right at the end of the day security is a mindset up across both companies in terms of how we approach our architectures um and it's the you know a lot of times it's the little things as well that we make sure right so shared vision working at the engineering levels together for many many years know that you guys are validating more of that coming what's next take us through okay we're here 2022 we got super cloud multi-cloud hybrid full throttle right now it's hybrid's a steady state that's cloud operations infrastructure as code has happened it's happening what's next for you guys in the relationship can you share a little bit that you can if you can what we can expect what you see uh with monterrey is the start of a re-architecting of i.t infrastructure not just in the data center but also at the edge right these technologies will move out and be pervasive you know across i think edge to colo to core data center to cloud right and so that's a starting point now we're looking at memory tiering right i think we talked last time about capitola and memory tiering and you know being able to bring that forward uh being able to do more with confidential computing as an example right secure enclaves and confidential computing so you know a lot of this is focused around simplicity and security going forward and ease of management around take the heavy lifting away from the customer abstract that in offer the power and performance that's right and it's going to come down to delivering time to value for our customers you know can we cut that time to value by 25 50 percent so they can be in production faster yeah i think project monterey is something we'll be building on for a long time right i mean this is the start of a major new future architecture of these companies so if you had to pick one we have 40 initiatives that are joined together real literally project monterey is one of my favorites for sure in terms of what it's going to do not just for that common cloud experience but for the edge and and we talked a lot about the edge today and where that's headed you think it's going to explode up new apps i really do think so well it's going to put you in a new it's going to put in curve yeah absolutely right and operationally uh security wise um from a modern apps perspective i mean all it checks all the boxes and it's going to allow us to to help and take our existing customers on that journey as well what's great about this conversation we've been following both you guys for a long time and your companies and and technology upgrades and and the business impact and open source and all doing all this for customers but the wave that's coming we're seeing the expo hall here i mean it's people are really excited they're enthused they're committed highly confident that this this wave is coming they kind of see it people kind of seeing the fog lift they're seeing money making value creation people kind of feeling more comfortable but still a little nervous around you know what's coming next because it's still uncertainty but pretty good ecosystem i'd have to say that's pretty pretty interesting yeah a lot of them are excited about you know what they can do at the edge and how they can differentiate their businesses i mean that's right well congratulations guys thanks for coming on thecube and sharing the update thank you it more innovation it's not stopping here at vmware explorer dell and vm we're continuing to have that kind of relationship joint engineering it's all coming together and you can mix and match this and the stack but it's ultimately going to be cloud operations edge is the action of course hybrid cloud as well it's thecube thanks for watching [Music] you

>>Hello, welcome to the special cube conversation. I'm John for your host of the queue here in Palo Alto, California. We're still remoting in getting great guests in events are coming back. Next few weeks, we'll be at a bunch of different events and you'll see the cube everywhere, but this conversation's about network challenges in a distributed hybrid workforce era. We've got a team say he principal, product manager, edge networking solutions, a Dell technologies and Rob McBride channel and partner sales engineer at versa networks. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on this cube conversation, >>John. Thank you, John. >>So first of all, obviously with the pandemic and now we're moving out of the pandemic, even with Omnichron out there, we still see visibility into kind of back to work and events and it's, but it's clearly hybrid environment cloud hybrid work. This has been a huge opening of everyone's eyes around network security provisioning, you know, unexpected disruptions around everyone being worked at home. Nobody really forecasted that. The fact that the whole workforce would be remote coming in. So again, put a lot of pressure on the network challenges over over the past two years. How is it coming out of this different what's your guys' take on this. >>Yeah, to then when we start looking at it, let's kind of focus a little bit on challenges, you know, you know, when this all kind of started off, obviously, as you stated, right, everyone was kind of taken by surprise in a way, right? What do we do? We don't know what to do at this moment. And you know, I go back and I remember a customer giving me a call, you know, when they were at first looking at, you know, your traditional land transformation and one of the changed their branches to do something from an SD perspective. And then the pandemic hit. And their question to me was Rob, what do I do? Or what do I need to start thinking about now, all of a sudden to your point, right? Everyone now is no longer in the office and how do I get them to connect. >>And more importantly, now that I can maybe figure out a way to connect them, how do I actually see what they're doing and be able to control what they're actually now accessing? Because I no longer have that level of control as of them coming into the office. And so a lot of customers, you know, we're, we're beginning to develop kind of homegrown solutions, look at various different things to kind of quick hot patches, if you will, to address the remote workers coming in and things of that nature. And we'll be seeing kind of progression through all this as a, as, as opposed to just solving, getting a user, to connect into the, into an environment that it can provide, you know, continuity for. They started coming up with other challenges to the point of security. They started, you know, I have other customers calling me up and saying, you know, I I've now got a ransomware problem, right? >>So, you know, what do I do about that? And what are the things I need to kind of consider with respect to now I'm much more vulnerable because my, my, my branch has state has basically become much more diversified and solutions and things that they're looking for, regardless, obviously around security connectivity, there they've been challenged with addressing how do they unify their levels of visibility without over encumbering themselves and how they actually manage now this kind of much more kind of distributed kind of network if you will. Right? So things around, you know, looking at, you know, acronyms around from like a Z TNA or, you know, cloud security and all this fun stuff starts coming into play. But what it, what it points to is that the biggest challenge ideas, how does, how do they converge networking and security together and provide equitable and uniform policy architecture to identify their users, to connect and access the applications that are relevant to the business and be able to have that uniformity between whether it's the branch for them being remote. And that's part of what we've kind of seen as this progression to the last two years and kind of solutions that they're looking for to kind of help them address that. It's almost like >>It's a good thing in a way. It actually opens up the kimono and say, Hey, this is the real world we've got to prepare for this next generation a TIF. I want to get your take because, you know, remember the old days we were like, oh yeah, we've got to prepare for these scenarios where maybe 30% will be dialing on the V land or remotely, you know, it's not 30%. It was like 100%. So budgets aren't out of whack and yet they want more resiliency at the edge. Right. So, so one, I didn't budget for it. They didn't predict it and it's gotta be better, faster, cheaper, more skier. >>Yeah. Yeah. So, so, so John, the difference is, is that, you know, Dell, for instance, as already was already working towards this distributed model, right? The pandemic just accelerated that transformation. So, so when customers came to us and said, oh, we've got a problem with our workforce and our users being so geographically suddenly dispersed, you know, we had some insight that we could immediately lean on. We had already started working on solutions and building those platforms that can help them address those, those problems. Right. Because we'd already done studies before this, right. We had done studies and we'd come back on this whole work from home or remote office scenario. And, and the results were pretty unanimous in that customers were, all users were always complaining about, you know, application performance issues and, and, you know, connectivity issues and, and things like that. So we, we, we kinda knew about this. And so we were able to proactively start building solutions. And so, you know, so when a customer comes, there's like Rob was talking about, you know, their infrastructure, wasn't set up for everybody to suddenly move on day one and start accessing all the corporate resources where the majority of the organization is accessing corporate resources from away from campus. Right? So we, we, we have solutions, we've been building solutions and we have guidance to offer these customers as they try to modernize that network and address these problems. >>Well, that's a great segue to the next topic. Talk track is, you know, what is a network? What is network monetization? Right. So let's, let's define that if you don't mind, well, I got you guys here. You're both pros get that sound bite, but then let's get into the benefits of the outcomes from what that enables. So if you guys want to take a stab at defining what is network modernization mean? >>I think there's a lot of definitions, or it kind of depends on your point, your point of view of where you're, where you're responsible for, from a network or within the stack, you know, are from a take obviously is, you know, working, working from a vendor. And with solutions that we provide modernization is really around solutions that begin to look at more software defined architectures and definitions to begin a level of decoupling between, you know, points of control, hardware and software, and other kinds of points of visibility and automation to the point where, where things are let's, let's kind of put an air quotes in a sense of being more digitized. And in the sense, like even how we're looking at things from a consumerization perspective, but looking at things a much more, more cloud aware cloud specific cloud native in built automation, as well as inbuilt kind of analytics where things are much more in a, in a broader SDN, kind of a construct would be a form of a definition from a, from a, from a, from a monetization perspective. >>Now, do the other element of your, kind of a question in regards to, it's kind of the benefits that come as a result of this. So as customers have been in the last 24 months, looking at different solutions to address part of what we've been talking about, part of it is you want, when you're looking at, whether it's like you're using a word like sassy to kind of define, you know, how are enterprises looking for ZTE and they based solutions or cloud security to augment their, their overall needs. The benefits that they're finding are simplicity of management, because they're now looking for more uniform solutions that can address secure access for remote workers, in addition to their own kind of traditional access, as it relates to their offices to better visibility. Because as this uniformity of this kind of architecture, the now able to actually really see the level of context, right? >>I can see you, John, as far as where you're coming in and access and what applications on what devices. And now I have a means to actually apply a policy to that matters to me as the business, from an IP perspective, to protect me as the business, but also to ensure that you're actually authorized and accessing things that I have from an it regular reg regulations perspective. So benefits and the summary are kind of like Mo in bill automation, better, you know, things get done faster, things repair on their own in a different way, as a result of automation, greater visibility. Now they have much more greater insights into what we are doing as users of the overall it infrastructure and better overall control. That's been ultimately simplified as result of consolidation and unification. >>That's awesome. Insight. I T what's your take on the benefits of ma network modernization? >>So I'd like to sort of double down on, on, you know, something Rob said, right? So the visibility, right? So enhanced visibility in layman's terms, that just means more insight, more insight means the ability to implement best practices around application usage, application performance, more insights means control that it departments are, are meeting. They need that to manage and address security threats, right? To be able to identify an abnormal traffic pattern or unauthorized data movement, to be able to push updates and, and patches quickly. So, so it's really about, you know, that, that manageability, that that level of control gives them the ability to offer a resilient and secure underlying networking infrastructure. And then, you know, finally one of the key benefits is cost savings of, you know, everybody is trying to be more efficient. And so from, from our perspective, it's, it's really about building an open platform. >>You know, we've built a platform or an x86 based platform. We've we chose that because we wanted to tap into a mature ecosystem that, you know, customers can leverage as they, as they build their build towards their modernizing modernization goals. And so we're like tech leveraging technologies, like UCPs so universal customer premise equipments. And so that's really just an open hardware platform, but what you get by consolidating your network functions like routing and firewall, and when optimization you, and when you consolidate it all onto a single device, you get hardware savings, cost savings. You, you get operational savings as well, right? So you've it, common hardware infrastructure means a common deployment model means a streamlined operations means fewer truck rolls, right? So, so there's a tremendous amount of, of, of benefit from the cost standpoint as well, because from our perspective, it's really that what customers are looking for, they need enterprise grade solutions that can scale in a cost-effective manner. >>That's awesome. You guys mentioned sassy earlier. I'm like, first of all, software as a service is very sassy, big modern application movements. Always get my hair sassy. I think, you know, a kind of a term around SAS software as a service, but for you guys, it's talking about secure access service edge, which is a huge category growth right now where, you know, per security and networking, it's a huge discussion SD win fits into that somehow, because it used to be campus networking before now. It's everyone's world is the same. Now it's connected. So sassy is huge. How does that fit into SD when it's in the trend of the SAS at the same? What's the difference? Cause wan has been booming for the past decade as well in terms of trends. How are you guys seeing those converging in what's the difference? >>You know, I like to also agree with you, this thing has been booming the last couple of years, right. You know, kind of, kind of bread and butter part of what we've been doing, but, you know, to your question in regards to kind of its linkage relative to sassy, right. You know, as you articulated, right. It's the sassy secure access service edge from a definition of the acronym. So it's authority is first kind of good to kind of define a little bit, maybe for some of those that may not be overly familiar with it. And I like to kind of dumb it down a little bit into the point of sassy is really an architecture that is around, you know, the convergence of networking and security being put together in a uniform platform or service that is delivered from both the cloud, as well as addressing, you know, their, their kind of traditional land requirements. >>Now digging in sassy is broken to two little buckets, right? It's broken into a network layer and the six security layer and by its definition, right, by, by a particular analyst, the network component, a big portion of that is SD wan. And so SD wan providing that value associated to what does, you know, dynamic lanes, steering automation, application attachments, so on and so forth is a core element of the foundation of the network layer associates, associate sassy. And then the other element of zesty is around the security bit. And so they're very much intrinsically linked, whether, you know, for example, like versus just the kind of mentioned this here, the, the, the sassy cloud that we built for our customers to leverage for private access, public access, you know, secure internet CASBY, DLP type of services is built upon SQM. In addition to our customers that are using Guesty Lampard or traditional land are using SD wan to connect to that cloud. >>So it's very, very much linked and they kind of go hand in hand, depending on your approach to the broader architecture. And, you know, another point I'll bring into that. What, what it also highlights is that whether it's around sassy or not, when we, when in pertinent to everything we'd been other kind of been talking about, the other thing that's coming with sun intrinsically and natively is really the concept of security it's around, whether it's security at the branch, or whether it's around some form of, you know, identity management or a point of improving posture for the, for the enterprise to, you know, obviously the spec traffic at the branch where remotely, but what we're seeing at a trend wise, which, you know, part by customer adoption from our own platform, if you will, is basically security and SD Wang coming together, whether for your traditional land transformation, or as a result of sassy services for a hybrid needs of connectivity, right? Remote workers, hybrid workforce, going into the cloud for, for their connectivity needs and optimizations. In addition to obviously the, the enterprises branch transformations, >>I like that native aspect of it. We used to joke and call SD way in St. Cloud because it's, we're all using cloud technologies. Talk about the security impact real quick. If you don't mind, I want to just double click them what you mentioned there, because I think the cloud effication plus the security piece seems to be a key part of this dynamic. Is that true? Or did they get that right? What's what's this all mean with cloud vacation? Yeah, >>And I, I would, I, I, I agree with, I guess kind of where you're leading into that is, you know, review all of us you're right now. Exactly. In talking with you right now, right. John is, as you stated at the beginning, we're all remote. And so from a business perspective, right, we are accessing, or from an engagement we're accessing a cloud service. Now what's critical for us, as you know, obviously enterprise employees is that our means of accessing this cloud service needs to have some level of hardening. We need to protect, right. Not only our own asset that we're using, right. Our laptops or other machinery that you use to connect to the network, but in addition to protect our company, right? So our company also needs to protect them. So how can we do that? Right? How can we do that in a very fast and distributed way? >>Sure. We can put security endpoints at every location with every user and every home. And that's one means of, of a particular solution. So your point about cloud is now take all of that and bring it to the cloud where you'd have a much more distributed means, right? And much more dynamically, scalable approach to actually doing that level of inspection, posture and, and enforcement. And so that's kind of where the rubber meets the road, right, is for us to access those cloud applications. The cloud that we're using as a conduit for security, as well as network also is now even connected and optimized paths to applications like what we're using right now, right. To, to, to do this conversation. So that's kind of where it meets together. And the security element is because we're so diverse, we just need, we, we, we need to ensure, right. We're all much, we're much more vulnerable. Right? My home network is, you know, maybe arguably maybe not as secure as when I go into an office. Right? >>So most people, because you have worked for virtual networks, >>I can make that argument. Yes. Right. But you know, the average, most of us, remote workers, you know, our homes aren't as hard. And so we point a point of risk, right? And so, as we, as we go to cloud apps, we're more connected to the internet. Right. You know, the, the, the point of being able to do this enforcement from a sassy concept helps provide that improved posture for enterprises to secure their traffic and get visibility into that. >>All my network engineer, friends are secure, as you read about. And I always joked to the malware, you missed, missed the wrong network engineer. If I go after them, their house, spear fishing. And you're trying to get into your network. I'd say, if I want to bring this back, because what we're bringing up here is cloud is actually enabling more on premises because you're working at home. That's a premise, right? So you're also edge is a premise edge and cloud. And a cloud kind of eliminates all this notion of what is cloud and edge, but at the end of the day is where you are. Right. So having the performance and the security and the partnership that same with Dell, I know you guys have been on this for a while because I've been covering it, but the notion of edge completely changes now, because what does that even mean? Home's edge is the camp of data centers and edge the, the cars and edge, the telco monopoles and edge. This is a big deal. This is the unit about the unification. This is all about making it all work. What's your, what's your take on this from the Dell perspective. >>Yeah. And I think, I mean, it that's, I mean, you, you kind of summarize it, right. I mean, what does edge mean to you? Right. It's and then, so every time I have a conversation with, with somebody, I always start with, let's define what your edge is. And so, you know, from, from our perspective, from the Dell perspective is, you know, we believe that we want to provide enterprise grade infrastructure. We want to give our customers the right tools. And we're seeing that with this trend of a hybrid workforce, a geographically dispersed user base, we're seeing a tremendous need for, you know, from it departments for tools, for solutions that can give them the control that they can sort of push out into their networks to ensure a safe and secure external access to corporate resources. Right. And so that's what we're committed to is making sure that, that, that management layer by either developing the solutions, in-house bringing the right partners to the table and just ensuring that our customers have the right tools because this sort of trend, or this, this, this new normal is not going away. And so we have to adapt. >>So thanks for coming on, Rob, we'll give you the final word. What's changed the most, in your opinion, with customers, environments, around how they're handling their networks as we come out of the pandemic, which has proven kind of which projects are working, which ones aren't where to double down on what was screwed up. I mean, come on. This is, we're kind of seeing it all play out. What's your, what's your take on as we come through the pandemic and people come out of this, what's the big learning. Okay. >>Well that you need partners. Right. Okay. So it's not even from a vendor perspective. What I mean by partners is what we're finding and what I think a lot of other customers I've engaged with and others is this ain't easy for even as much as we can within the technology vendor market, right. It's to make things easier to do. There's a lot of technology and the enterprise, it is recognized. They need a lot of these building blocks, right. To, to accomplish a lot of different things, whether it's around automation, to, in other tools as, as auto was leading into. And so we're finding that, you know, a lot of our, our base or our interactions are really trying to identify an appropriate partner that can help not only talk to the technology, but help them actually understand all the various different, you know, multi-colored legal blocks, they've got to put together, but also help help them actually put that into a realization. >>Right. And, you know, and then be able to then give the keys to them so they can eventually drive the car. Right. And so the learning that we're seeing here is this is a lot of tech, there's a lot of new tech, new approaches to existing technology of things that they've actually done. And they're, they're, they're looking for help. Right. And so they're looking for kind of, let's call it like trusted advisor kind of status of people that can help explain the technology to them and then help them understand how do they put it together. So they can then ultimately accomplish our overall kind of, you know, other kinds of objectives from an it perspective. And the other learning that I'll just say, and then I'll, then I'll stop. Here is SD wan isn't dead, right? Yes. The man is actually still driving. And it's actually an impetus for a lot of other things that enterprise is actually doing, whether it's around, you know, sassy, oriented services, remote access, private access, and other things of that nature. >>I totally agree. I think the networking, stuff's still going to be so much innovation going on with the edge exploding as well. That the really great, amazing stuff happening. Thanks for coming on this cube conversation, great conversation, taking it to the edge network challenges in the distributed hybrid workforce era is about moving things around the internet, making them secure. I'm John for your host. Thanks for watching.

>>Hi everyone. Welcome to the cubes coverage of eight of his public sector summit live in Washington D. C, where it's a face to face real event. I'm johN for a year host but virtual events. Hybrid events were hybrid event as well. We've got a great remote interview. Got a guest here in person, Jon Stankovic, president of cloud solutions. Smartronix and Britain was the VP of eight of his managed services, also known as A M. S with amazon web services, jOHN and jOHN and three johns here. Welcome to the cube remote >>in person. >>Hybrid. >>Thanks. Thank you. Great to be on the cube longtime viewer and I really appreciate what you >>do for fun to be here remotely but I feel like it right there. >>Yeah, I love the hybrid if it's only gonna get better next time will be in the metaverse soon. But uh, jOHn on the line there, I want to ask you with AWS managed services, take us through what you guys are doing with Smart Trust because this is an interesting service you guys are working together. How's that relates at the table for us. >>Yeah, well, you know, we're really excited about this announcement, We've been working with Smartronix since we launched A. M S 4.5 years ago. So we've been able to build up working with them, you know, a huge library of automation capabilities and this really just formalised as that in an offer for our joint customers where we can bring the expertise from AWS and Smartronix and offer a full solution that's highly integrated to help help our customers jointly accelerate their cloud adoption as well as their operating model transformation as they start to move to a more devops motion and they need help. We're there together to provide our expertise and make that simple for them. >>Well I appreciate the call. You john b john s over here. Js john Stankevich. Um tell me about Smart trust because you heard what's going on with devoPS to point a whole revolutions going on in devops, you're starting to see a highly accelerated modern application development environment which means that the software developers are setting the pace there, the pace car of the innovation, right? And so other teams like security or I. T. Become blockers. Blockers a drag and anchor. So the shift left on security for instance is causing a lot of problems on the security team. So all this is going on like right now so still the speed is the game. What's your take? >>Sure so absolutely. I think that's where this partnership really really excels. You know, we want customers to focus on their mission, you know, national security, health care outcomes. Um we want them to kind of take the rest off their plate. So when you say some of the quote unquote blockers around security uh Smartronix has invested heavily in a federally authorized platform that sits on top of what a WS has done from a Fed ramp and so right off the bat speed agility. We don't want our customers spending time replicating things that we've done at scale and leveraging what AWS has and so by kind of utilizing this, this joint offer all of a sudden a big part of that compliance is taken care of. Uh, and then things like devoPS, things like SRE models that you hear a lot about, we fold all that into this uh, combined service offering. >>I know a little about what you guys are doing. You mentioned SRE is very cool, but let's take a minute to explain what you guys are doing because you guys are on the cutting edge of solving a lot of problems from infrastructure fools around the deVOPS stack. What are you guys doing in the cloud services? >>Sure. So I think jOHN hit a little bit on it. But you know, we look at AMS as best in breed at scale managing core parts of the U. S. Infrastructure. What Smartronix does is many times customers have some unique requirements and we take that core kind of powered by aims and we try and fill in those kind of complementary skill sets and complementary requirements. And so something like the devops, which is basically making sure that those people developing that software, they have also the ability to manage it and on an ongoing basis. Kind of run it. We develop all the frameworks and that's part of this offering to enable that. >>What's the solution jOHN B because I think you guys don't, this is people have challenges. I want to understand those challenges. And then when they go to the external managed service, what's involved, you walk us through that? Because I think that's important. >>Yeah, sure. You know, it turns out jOHN nailed this one. That moving to the cloud can be, can be a big transformation for many, many enterprises and government teams. Right. They worked for many years and have an ecosystem in their traditional data center. But when they move to the cloud, there's a lot of moving pieces and so what we like to focus on is helping them with the undifferentiated aspects of safely and automating cloud operations. So working with, with Smartronix allows us to take what we're doing across the infrastructure services, around security, around automation, around patching instance management, container management, all of those uh, undifferentiated, heavy lifting passed by now with Smartronix and expertise across the application layer across customers, unique environments across federal and moderate the various government standards and compliance is, and we think we're able to get, take a customer um, from kind of really early stage cloud experience and rapidly deploy configure and get them into a very stable scalable posture operationally on the cloud so that they can start to invest in their people, their skills and their differentiated application on the cloud that really drive the differentiation in their business and not have to worry about best practice configurations and operational run books and, and and automation is and and and the latest dep sec ops capabilities that will pick up for them while they're training and getting, they're getting their emotions in place, >>jOHn is on the Smartronix side. Talk about the difference between scale okay. Which is a big issue with cloud these customers want to have with AMS but then you also have some scale, maybe some scale to but highly compliant environments, regulated industries, for instance, this is the hot areas because scale is unwieldy, but if you don't want get rain it in, it can be chaotic. Right? So also regulations and compliance is a huge issue. >>Yeah. What what we found is um, at times customers look at it and they just get frustrated because it can be kind of intimidating and we as a combined team really have spent a lot of time we have accelerators to walk customers through that process and a really flexible model. If they feel that they have a lot of domain expertise in it, then we'll just kind of be almost a supporter other customers look at it and say, you know, we'd like you to take the entire patch of that compliance and so highly regulated environments. Both commercial D. O. D. National Security, um federal civilian agencies, state and local, they're all looking to this and saying we really want someone that's been through things like the U. S. Audited managed service provider, things like they're managed security service provider, things like fed ramp or D. O. D. Ill four and five. And I think to be honest Smartronix has just invested heavily in that with the goal of reducing all that complexity and it's it's really been taken off and we really appreciate the partnership specifically with jOHn and uh the A. W. S. A. M. S. Team. >>All right so you guys were going together, what's the ultimate benefit to the customer? >>I can I'll give my thing right off the bat all this innovation coming out of A. W. S. Um It's fantastic but only if you have the ability to take advantage of it. And so thousands of new services being rolled out. We really want customers to be able to take advantage of that and let at times us do what we do best and let them focus on their mission. And I think that's what really AWS is all about and we just feel very fortunate to be an enabler of that >>john be talking about talking about the staffing issues too because one of the problems that we have been reporting and this has come up at every reinvest on the max. Peterson about this as well. He's promised last year was gonna train 29 million people. See how that comes out of reinvent when the report card comes back. I was kinda busting his chops a little bit there but he had a smile on his face I think is gonna hit the numbers a lot of times, Maybe people don't have an SRE they don't have a devout person or they have some staff that they're in transition or transforming this is a huge factor. What's your take on this, >>you know, that that is so important, you know, as john mentioned, it's all about helping the customers focused and and their their cloud talent is scarce and it's a scarce resource and you you want to make sure that your cloud talent is working on the cool stuff or they're going to leave and and as you train and skill, these folks, they want to focus on what really impacts the business, what's really differentiating doing, you know, doing the cloud and the necessities on operations and operational tasks and sec ops and things like that, sometimes, that's not the sexiest part of the work that the customer really wants to focus their team on. So again, I think together we're able to help drive high levels of automation and really do that day in and day out work that is not necessarily the differentiator of their business and that's going to attract and keep the best and brightest minds in these in these customers um which allows us to help them with the undifferentiated aspects of of the heavy lifting. >>Not only is availability of people, it's keeping the people, I love that great call out there, Okay, where does this go? Where's the relationship. So you guys are partnering, you have the M. S. Is going on? Strong managed services not gonna go away mormon people were using managed services. It's part of the ecosystem within the ecosystem. What's next in the relationship? >>Well, I think, you know, I'll speak first, john, I'm sure you've got some thoughts to, but you know, we've got so many things on our plate around predictive operations and the predictive capabilities that we're excited about tackling together. Obviously there's all sorts of unique applications that require even deeper capabilities and working with Smartronix to help us, you know, provide even greater insight into the application layer. So I kind of see us expanding um both horizontally as well as well as vertically and horizontally. We've got customers looking at the edge with the outpost solutions and we can snap into those capabilities as well. So there's a tremendous amount of kind of, I'd say vertical and horizontal opportunity that we can continue to expand it together, >>john your reaction, That's >>pretty right on Absolutely. I think john Berger really hit it and I think really machine learning, you know, that's a big area of focus, if you look at all this data is being collected, predictive modeling and so we have this kind of transition from a model where people were basically watching screens reacting and what the AWS MSP offer and what you know, AmS offers is really predicting, so you you're not doing that, you're not reacting, you're proactively ahead of things. And that's the honest truth is AWS is such a well run service. It just doesn't break, you know, it doesn't break like what you see in the traditional kind of legacy infrastructure. And so at times we're just continuing to climb that stack. As, as john mentioned, >>it's really interesting as you guys are, as you're talking, I'm thinking myself just go back a couple of years ago, eight years ago or so. DevoPS is a bad word. Dev's dominate up. So I was through them now, operational leverage is a huge part of this ai operations, um, the entire I. T service management being disrupted heavily by cloud operations that also facilitate rapid development models. Right? So, again, this is like under reported, but it's a really nuanced point hardened operations for security and not holding back the developers is the cloud scale. What's your guys reaction to that? >>Yeah, I completely agree. I think, you know, the automation piece of things and I think customers are still going through transitions. You know, traditionally managed services means a big staff and it's like I said, sitting there watching screens and you flip that model where you have developers actually deploying code and infrastructure to support it. It's, you know, it's very transitional and very transformative and I think that's where an offering, like what we've really partnered on really, really helps because at times it can be overwhelming for customers and we just want to simplify that. And as I've said, let them focus on their mission. >>Amen one last question before we break, because I was talking to another partner, a big part of AWS. Um, and we're talking about SAS versus solutions and sometimes if you're too Sassy, you're not really building a custom solution, but you can have the best of both worlds. A little professional services, maybe some headroom on the stack, if you will your building solutions. So the next question is, as you guys put this cutting edge innovative innovative solution together, how are your customers consuming it? Like what's the consumption? I'm assuming there must be happy because a lot of heavy lifting being taken away, they don't have to deal with house the contract process. >>Well, you know, I think, you know, we have the opportunity, we support customers and kind of all modes of their application stack. So, you know, a full stacks solution. You know, even a legacy architecture moving to the cloud requires a high degree of automation to support it. And then as those applications become modernized over time, they become much more cloud native at some point, they might even become a full stack Starzz offer. So many of our customers actually run their SAAS platform leveraging our capability as well. So, you know, I think it gives the customer a lot of optionality uh, and future kind of growth as they modernize their application stack. >>Yeah, john your reaction. Absolutely. >>I think one of the greatest benefits is it's freeing up funds to do mission work. And so instead of spending time procuring hardware and managing it and leasing data center space, they literally have more funding. And so we've seen customers literally transform their business because this piece of it's done more efficiently and they have really excess and really additional funding to do their mission. >>We love the business model innovation, faster um, higher quality, easy and inexpensive. That's the flywheel gentlemen, Thank you for coming on and get the three. John john thank you. Vice President Cloud Solutions. That Smartronix, thank you for coming on. John Barrington BP of amazon websites managed. There is a also known as AWS and A M. S. A W. S got upside down. W. M. Looks the same. Thank you guys for coming. I appreciate it. Thank you. We appreciate great great Cube covers here. eight of us summit we're live on the ground and were remote. It's a hybrid event. I'm John for your host. Thanks for watching. Mhm

>>Welcome back to our coverage of HBs. Green Lake announcement's gonna talk about transformation acceleration, who doesn't wanna go faster as they're transforming, right? Everybody is transforming and they want to go as fast as possible to get time to value keith White is here, he's the senior vice president and general manager of Green Lakes commercial business at HP. Michelle LaU is Green Lake cloud services solutions at HP gents. Welcome. Good to see you >>awesome to be here. Thanks so much. Great to be here. >>Dave keith, we've we've been talking virtually for >>quite some time now. >>Q three earnings beaten raise uh focusing on, you know, some real momentum uh want to understand where it's coming from. A r I've said it's headed toward a billion, I think you said 700 million was where you were at last quarter, 1100 customers, orders were up 46%,, Last quarter revenue up over 30%. Where's the momentum >>coming from? No, it's fantastic. And I think what you're seeing is, you know, the world is hybrid. So in essence customers are looking for that solution that says, hey, mere my public cloud with my on premise scenario and give me that hybrid solution and we're just seeing just tremendous momentum and interest across a variety of workloads across a variety of vertical solutions and frankly we're seeing customers basically uh lean in on really running their business on HP. Green Lake, so you know, we had a pretty exciting announcement with the s a a couple weeks back, $2 billion deal, um but again, this shows the value of what Green Lake and the on prem requirements are high level of security, high level of capability? They're doing analytics on all the data that's out there. I mean this is the number one intelligence agency in the world. Right? So super excited about that and it just validates our strategy and validates where we're going. Um the other thing that's really exciting is we're seeing a lot of customers with this whole S. A. P migration, right? Um so ongc, one of the largest oil and gas companies in India, I want to say it's one of the top five S. A. P. Implementations in the world has chosen. Green Lake is their opportunity as well, huge retailers like wal wars. Uh so worldwide we're seeing tremendous momentum. >>That's great. Congratulations on the momentum. I know you're not done uh Michelle new role for you. Awesome. Um when we covered uh discover this year in the cube, we talked about sort of new workload solutions that you guys had. Uh S. A. P. As keith was just mentioning Ml Ops V. D. I. A number of of those workloads that you were really focused on the solution side. How's that going? Give us the update there? >>No, it's coming along really well. I mean you highlighted some of the big ones there. I mean the way we are thinking about Green Lake. Right? I mean, you know, we talked about the great momentum that we've had. The question is why are we having that right? Why are missing that momentum in the market? And I think I'll kind of call out a few features of the green platform that's really making it attractive to customers. Right? What is the experience? What we're trying to do is make it a very, very seamless experience for them? Right. Quick provisioning, easy to manage, easy to monitor, kind of an automated solution. Right? So that's kind of a key element of what we're trying to offer performances. Another one. Right? I mean, the end of the day, what we're doing is we are building out our infrastructure stack and the software stack in such a way that is optimized for the performance. Right? I mean, if you take data for example, it's called the right elements to make sure that the analytics can be done in a machine learning algorithms can be run. So those are like, you know, some of the performance, I think it's a great experience is a big factor. Tco right? I mean customers are very, very focused on their cost base. Right? Especially as they are starting to run up the bills in public cloud. They're like, man, this is expensive, I need to start thinking about costs here because costs catch up pretty fast. So that's kind of another element that people are really focused on and I would say the last one being choice. Right? I mean we provide this platform which is open. Alright. So customers can use it if they want to migrate off it, they can migrate off it. We're not locking them in. So those are some of the value propositions that are really resonating in the marketplace and you're seeing that in the numbers that we just talked about. >>So keep speaking of transformation you guys are undergoing obviously a transformation your your cloud company now. Okay, so part of that is the ecosystem. The partners talk about your strategy in that regard, why you're so excited about welcoming the partners into this old Green Lake world, >>you bet and you know I'm a big fan of one plus one equals three. My seven year old daughter tells me that doesn't actually add up correctly but at the same time it's so true with what we're doing and as official just said an open platform that allows partners to really plug in so that we can leverage the power of S. A. P. Or the power of Nutanix. So the power of Citrix at the same time, all of these are solutions that require, you know deep system integration and capabilities to really be customized for that customers environment. So whether that's infosys or accenture or we pro you know that we need we need those partners as well along with our own advisory and professional services to help customers. But at the same time, you know we talked about the fact that this is really about bringing that cloud experience to the on prem world might be a data center but we're seeing a lot of customers get out of the data center management business and move into a Coehlo. And so the fact that we can partner with the ECU annexes and the Cyrus ones of the world really enable a whole new environment so that customers again can run their business and not get caught up with keeping the lights on and managing power and those types of things. And then finally I'll say, look, the channel itself is actually migrating to offer more services to their customers managed service providers, telcos, distance and resellers and now what we're providing them is that platform with which to offer their own manage services to customers in a much more cost effective cloud experience way with all the benefits of being on prem secure latency app integration and that sort of thing. So it's exciting to see the ecosystem really gate Gardner the momentum and really partner with us closely >>follow up on the partner question if I could. So partner services are part of Green Lake. It's a journey, not everything all at once. Uh but so it's essentially as simple as saying, okay, I want that service, that's my choice. Uh you've given them optionality and it's ideally as seamless as it is in HP services, that the direction that you're >>going. That's right, yeah. So the set that api set that Stalin team are building are basically saying, hey, leverage our cost analytics capabilities, leverage our capacity management, leverage the interface so that you can plug into that single control plane. And so they're making it super simple for our partner ecosystem to do that. And what I think is really important is that if you are a partner, you want to basically offer choice to the customer and if the customer decides, hey, I want to use um red hats open shift for the container platform versus rs morale offering, then they can get just as good of a first class offering with respect to that. Someone wants to use Citrix or Nutanix or VM ware for their video solution. They have that choice. And so we want to make sure we're offering customer choice for what's best for their situation, but also making sure that it's fully integrated with what we do. God thank >>You. So we see more software content of the show. I wonder if you could. I mean certainly as morale is a big piece of that. I talked earlier about margins hit record for HPE. Almost 35% gross margins. This course of software is gonna obviously push that further along um, Lighthouses, another one. How should we think about the direction that you're going >>software. Absolutely. So if you think about what we are building out here is a solution, right? This is solution that's very tightly integrated between the infrastructure stack and the soft and this software that enables it. So really there three or four components to the solution day. Right. So think about Lighthouse, which is an infrastructure stack that is optimized for what's going to run on that. Right? If it's a general purpose compute it will the infrastructure will look different. If it's a storage intensive workload, it will look different. If it's a machine learning workloads will look different. Right? So that's kind of the first component and just optimizing it for what's going to run on it. Second is, um, what we call the Green light platform, which is all about managing and orchestrating it. And what we want to do is we want to have a completely automated experience right from from the way you provisioned it to the way you run the workloads to the way you manage it, to the way you monitor it to the way partners link into it. Right to the way in the software vendors kind of sit on top of that. Right. And then we talked about escrow as well as the engine that runs it right from a container platform perspective or we spend some time talking about unified analytics today. Those are the types of data integration that power Green Lake and the last piece of software I would say is as we kind of think about the ecosystem that runs on top of Green Lake, whether it's our software or third party software. Right? They all have a place equal place on top of the green light platform. And we are very focused on building on the ecosystem. Right? So as a customer or an enterprise who wants to use you should have the choice to run you know 40 50 102 105 100 different software packages on top of Green Lake. And it should be all an automated fashion. But we have tested that in advance. There's there's commercials behind that. It becomes a very very self service provision, seamless experience from the customer's perspective. >>Great. Thank you. So keep 2020 was sort of like sometimes called the force marched to digital right? And some some customers they were already there. Uh so there's a majority now that we've been through this awful year and change, customers are kind of rethinking their digital strategies and their transformations that there can be a little bit more planned fel now you know the world didn't end and and you know I. T. Budgets kind of stabilized a bit actually, you know did better than perhaps we thought. So where are we in terms of transformations? What's the business angle? What are you seeing out there? >>Yeah. I mean customers found a lot of holes that they had in their environment because of the pandemic. I think customers are also seeing opportunities to grow pretty aggressively. You know we just announced Patrick terminals, one of the largest shipping companies in south pack and you know that whole shipping craziness that's going on right now they needed a new digital transformation in order to really make sure they could orchestrate their container ships effectively. Even we talked about Woolworth's there now, changing how they deal with their suppliers because of the Green Lake platform that they have. And so what you're seeing is, hey, you know, first phase of digital transformation public cloud was an interesting scenario. Now they're being able to be planned for like you said and say, where's the best place for me to run this for the latency required with that data, for the choice that we have from an I. S. V. Standpoint, you know, for the on prem capabilities of what we're trying to do from a security standpoint etcetera. So the nice thing is we've seen it move from, you know, hey, we're just trying to get the basic things modernized into truly modernizing data centers, monetizing the data that I have and continuing to transform that environment for their customers, partners, employees and products >>kind of a left field question a bit off topic, but certainly related edge. You guys talk about edge a lot. Hybrid is clear. I think in people's minds you've got an on prem you're connecting to a cloud maybe across clouds? Is edge an extension of hybrid or is it today sort of a bespoke opportunity that maybe we'll come back to this new version of cloud, What's happening at the edge >>that you see? Yeah. So let me just uh I mean think of the edge as it's a continuum. Right? The way at least we think about it, it's not data center or the edge. Right. Think of it as, you know, there's a data center, uh there's a hyper scale data center, there's a data center, there's a closet somewhere, right? There's a cola opportunity, Right? And then you're running something in the store. Right? So let's take the example of a retailer. They're running something in the store and what are they running? They're running? Point of service applications or they're running IOT devices. Right. And at some point they have to connect back into the cloud. Right. So we actually have, you know, something to find van capabilities that connect, you know, uh you know, the Edge devices or edge analytics back into the cloud, we actually have a small form factor kubernetes um operating system that runs on the edge. Right. So we think of all of that as kind of a distributed environment in which Edge is one place where the application runs and where the data sites but it needs to be connected back and so we provide the connectivity back, we provide the mechanism by which we run it and then there's a security model, especially around sassy that is emerging on securing that. So that's kind of how we think about it as part of the overall distributed architecture that we are building and that's where the world will be >>another node in the cloud. >>Another note in the distributed world. Exactly >>yeah. I think the other thing to think about with the edges that this is where the majority of your data is actually getting created. Right? You talked about IOT devices, you know, you'll hear from Zen's Act and what they're doing with respect to autonomous driving with vehicles. You know, we talk about folks like ab that are building the factory of the future and robotics as a service in order to be able to really make sure that that precision happens at that at that point. So a ton of data is coming from that. And so again, how do you analyze that? How do you monetize that? How do you make decisions off of it? And it's it's an exciting place for us. So it's great to have all the connectivity we talked >>about last question, maybe both could address it. Uh we've we we used to see this cadence of of products often times in the form of boxes come out from HP and HP. Now we're seeing a cadence of services, we're seeing more capabilities across this, this this this green lake uh state that you guys are building out. What should we expect in the future? What are the kinds of things that we should evaluate you on? >>Well, I'll start and then maybe you can jump in but you know, the reality is we are becoming much deeper partners with our customers right there looking to us to say help me run my data center, help me improve my data and analytics. Help me at the edge so that I can have the most effective scenario. So what you're seeing from us is this flip from hardware provider into deep partnerships with that with the open platform. I'd say the second thing that we're doing is we're helping them fuel that digital transformation because again, they're looking for that hybrid solution. And so now they're saying, hey HP come and showcase all the experience you have from point next from your advisor and professional services and help me understand what other customers are doing so that I can implement that faster, better, cheaper, easier, etcetera. And then from a product standpoint, kind of a ton of great things. >>That's exactly right. I mean uh we are taking a very, very focused customer back view as we are looking at the future of Green Lake. Right. And exactly the way kids said, right, I mean it's all about solving customer problems for us. Some customer problems are still in the data center, some of them are in close, some customer problems are in the edge. So they're all uh fair game for us as we think about, you know, what we are going to be building out and do your point earlier. Dave it's not about, you know, a server or storage is the institutions right. And the solutions have to have integrated hardware, integrated software, staff, integrated services. Right. There are partners who sell that, who service that and all that entire experience from a customer perspective has to be a seamless. Right? And it's just in our cloud platform, we kind of help the customer run it and manage it and we give them kind of the best performance at the lowest cost, which is what they're looking for. So that's kind of what you'll see us. You'll see more of a cadence of these services can come out, but it's all going in that direction in helping customers with new solutions. >>A lot of customer problems out there, which your opportunities and you know, generally the hyper scale as they are good at solutions. They don't, you know, there's not a lot of solution folks like that. That's a that's a wonderful opportunity for you to build on on top of that huge gift, that Capex gift >>at the hyper scholars have given us all. That's right. And we're seeing the momentum happen. So it's exciting. That's cool guys. Hey, thanks a lot for coming to the cube. Yeah, Yeah. All right, >>okay. And thank you for watching keep it right there more action from HP. Es Green Lake announcements, you're watching the cube. Mm. Mm

>>from around the globe. >>It's the cube >>covering fortunate security summit brought to you by ford in it. >>Welcome back to the cubes coverage, affording that security summit at the ford championship here in napa. I'm lisa martin and I'm very pleased to welcome back to the cube kenzi founder and chairman and ceo affording that, ken. Welcome back to the program. >>Thank you is uh, we're happy to be here after almost two years and uh, >>I know it's great to see you in person. I was saying before we went live, I forgot how tall you are. So this is a great event. But I want you to talk to me a little bit about some of the amazing growth. The Fortinet has seen 500,000 customers close to 30% year on year growth continuing to post solid earnings stock is more than double this year. What are some of the things that you attribute this group to and what do you think in your opinion differentiates format? >>I think some of the more strategic long term investment we made started paying off like uh, we're still the only company actually develop basic chip which can making a huge computing power advantage compared to using software to all the security function computing Because security tend to need about like 1300 times more company in power to process the same data as a routing switching. So that's where for the network security definitely a chap, a huge advantage And we invested very early and take a long term and also a big investment and so far started paying off the other thing we also keeping a lot of innovation and the internal organic growth for the company instead of do a lot of acquisition and that's also started making all these different products integrate well ultimately to get well. And that's also driving a huge growth, not just that was security, but also we see the fabric also has global fast, >>interesting. So you're really keeping it organic, which is not common a lot of these days we see a lot of acquisitions, but one of the things, a lot of growth, another thing that we do know that's growing is the threat landscape I was mentioning before we went live that I spoke with Derek Manky a couple times this summer and John Madison and the global threat landscape report showing ransomware up nearly 11 times in the last year. Of course we had this rapid transition to work from home and all these devices on accessing corporate networks from home. Talk to me about some of the security challenges that you're helping customers deal with. >>I think during the pandemic, definitely you see a lot of security issues that come up because work from home with your remote access a lot of important information, a lot of important data there At the same time. The ransomware attacks studying like a mentioning 11 times compared to like one or two years ago all this driving all there's a new technology for security. So now you cannot just secure the board anymore. So you have a secure the whole infrastructure. Both internal to a lot of internal segmentation And also go outside security when like I see when the 5G. Connection and how to secure work from home and they trust their trust access environment all these drive a lot of security growth. So we see the yeah it's a it's a pretty healthy market >>it's definitely a healthy market that's one thing looking at it from that lens. What are some of the customer conversation? How have the customer conversations changed? Are you now talking with different levels and organizations security Being a board level conversation discussion and talk to me about how those conversations have evolved. >>Security now become very important part of I. T. And uh pretty much all top one top two on the 80 spending now and the same time what to work from home or some other uh definitely seeing the board level conversation right now because you can see if there's a security issue for the company the damage could be huge. Right? So that's where the secure awareness especially ransomware is very very huge And plus the supply chain issues some other attack on the infrastructure. So we see a lot of security conversation in the bowl level in the Ceo in the in the executive level now compared to before more I. T. Conversation. So it's to drive the huge awareness of security and that's also we see everybody citing concerns security now. >>But I'm sure I imagine that's across every industry. Yes. >>Yeah pretty much all the vertical right? And especially a lot of new area traditionally they don't have much security like some smb some consumer some traditional Ot IOT space now it's all security studying that very important for them now. >>So let's talk about, here we are. The security summit at the fortunate championship. Give me your perspective on the P. G. A. Ford in that relationship. >>Uh first I think it's a golf is also event sports especially during the epidemic that's probably become the most favorite spot. And for me also I'm a golfer for 30 years. Never market golfer but I love the sport on the other side we see sometimes it's uh working with a lot of a customer a lot of a partner they behave if we can combine some business and there was certain like activity especially outdoor that's also be great. And also helping Brandon and that's another way we can contribute back to the community. So they say hey then then that's that's the first time for us. We just love it gets going. >>It's great to be outdoors right at 40 minutes doing an event outdoors showing that yes you can do that safely. But also I also hear from some of your other team members that it's a very culturally synergistic relationship. The pgn format. >>Yes. Exactly. Yeah that's where we love this golf and especially working with a different partner and different partner and also all the team working together. So it's a team sport kind of on the other side it's all do and enjoy a combined working uh activity altogether. Everybody love it. >>Something that so many of us have missed Ken for the last 18 months or so. So we're at the security summit, there's over 300 technology leaders here. Talk to me about some of the main innovations that are being discussed. >>Uh definitely see security starting uh little covered whole infrastructure and uh especially in a lot of environment. Traditionally no security cannot be deployed like internal segmentation because internal network can be 10, 200 faster than the one connection. So it has to be deployed in the in the internal high speed environment whether inside the company or kind of inside the data center, inside the cloud on the other side, like a lot of one connection traditionally like whether they see one or the traditional like cuba more than the S E O. They also need to be combined with security and also in the zero trust access environment to really supporting work from home and also a lot of ot operation technology and a lot of other IOT space utility. All these different kind of like environment need to be supported, sometimes recognized environment. So we see security studying deport everywhere whether the new small city or the like connected car environment and we just see become more and more important. That's also kind of we studying what we call in a secure driven networking because traditionally you can see today's networking just give you the connectivity and speed so they treat everything kind of uh no difference but with security driven network and you can make in the networking decision move based on the security function, like a different application or different content, different user, different device, even different location, you can make a different kind of level decision so that we see is a huge demand right now can make the whole environment, whole infrastructure much secure. >>That's absolutely critical that pivot to work from home was pretty much overnight a year and a half ago and we still have so many people who are permanently remote, remote but probably will be permanently and a good amount will be hybrid in the future, some TBD amount. Uh and one of the challenges is of course you've got people suddenly from home you've got a pandemic. So you've got an emotional situation, you've got people multitasking, they've got kids at home trying to learn maybe spouses working, they're trying to do Everything by a video conferencing and collaboration tools and the security risks. There are huge and we've seen some of that obviously reflected in the nearly 11 x increase in ransomware but talk to me about what 14 announced yesterday with links is to help on that front in a considerable way. >>That's where we totally agree with you the work from home or kind of hybrid way to work in. Pretty much will become permanent. And that's where how to make a home environment more kind of supporting is a remote working especially like when you have a meeting, there are some other things going on in the whole activity and also sometimes data you access can be pretty important, pretty confidential. That's where whether in the zero trust environment or making the home connection more reliable, more secure. It's all very, very important for us. Uh, that's where we were happy to partner with Lynxes and some other partner here uh, to support in this hybrid working environment to make work from home more secure. And uh, as we see is a huge opportunity, >>huge opportunity and a lot of industries, I had the pleasure of talking with links to Ceo Harry do is just an hour or so ago and I asked him what are some of the vertical, since we know from a security and a ransomware perspective, it's just wide open. Right, Nobody's safe anymore from it. But what are some of the verticals that you think are going to be early adopters of this technology, government health care schools, >>I think pretty much all vertical start and see this work from home and it's very, very important for us. There's a few top vertical, traditionally finance service, uh, spend a lot of money healthcare, spend a lot of money on security. So they are still the same? We don't see that change March on the other side. A lot of high tech company, which also one of the big vertical for us now, I say maybe half or even more than half the employee they want to work for home. So that's also making they say uh they call home branch now, so it's just make home always just secure and reliable as a branch office and at the same time of Southern government and the sort of education vertical and they all started C is very, very important to do this, remote their trust access approach and the same time working with a lot of service providers to supporting this, both the D. N. A. And also the sassy approach. So we are only companies on the saturday company partner, a lot of IT service provider. We do believe long term of the service provider, they have the best location, best infrastructure, best team to supporting Sassy, which we also build ourselves. If customers don't have a service provider, we're happy to supporting them. But if they have a service provider, we also prefer, they go to service provider to supporting them because we also want to have a better ecosystem and making everybody like uh benefit has women's situation. So that's what we see is whether they trust no access or sassy. Very happy to work with all the partners to making everybody successful. >>And where our customers in that evolution from traditional VPN to Z T and a for example, are you seeing an acceleration of that given where we are in this interesting climate >>uh definitely because work from home is uh if you try to access use VPN, you basically open up all the network to the home environment which sometimes not quite secure, not very reliable. Right? So that's where using a Z T N A, you can access a certain application in a certain like environment there. And the same leverage ste when there's other huge technology advantage can lower the cost of the multiple link and balance among different costs, different connection and uh different reliability there. Uh it's a huge advantage, >>definitely one of the many advantages that reporting it has. So this afternoon there's going to be a, as part of the security summit, a panel that you and several other Fortinet execs are on taking part in A Q and a, what are some of the topics that you think are going to come up? And as part of that Q and >>A. I see for certain enterprise customer, definitely the ransomware attack, how to do the internal segmentation, how to securely do the remote access work from home. So we are very important For some service provider. We also see how to supporting them for the sassy environment and certain whole infrastructure security, whether the 5G or the SD went because everyone has a huge demand and uh it's a group over for us, we become a leader in the space. It's very very important for them. We also see uh like a different vertical space, Some come from healthcare, some from come from education. Uh they all have their own kind of challenge. Especially like there's a lot of uh oh T IOT device in healthcare space need to be secured and the same thing for the O. T. IOT space, >>Tremendous amount of opportunity. One thing I want to ask it, get your opinion on is the cybersecurity skills gap. It's been growing year, over year for the last five years. I know that just last week 14 that pledge to train one million professionals in the next five years, you guys have been focused on this for a while. I love that you have a veterans program. I'm the daughter of a Vietnam combat veterans. So that always warms my heart. But is that something, is the cybersecurity skills got something that customers ask you ken? How do you recommend? We saw this? >>Yes, we have been doing this for over 10 years. We have the program, we call the network secured expert program a different level. So we have 24 million people. We also commit a traditional million people because there's a huge shortage of the scale separate security expert there. So we do work in with over like a 4500 university globally at the same time. We also want to offer the free training to all the people interested, especially all the veterans and other Like even high school graduate high school student there and at the same time anyone want to learn several security. We feel that that's, that's very good space, very exciting space and very fast-growing space also still have a huge shortage globally. There's a 3-4 million shortage of skilled people in the space, which is a or fast growing space. And so we were happy to support all the train education with different partners at the same time, try to contribute ourselves. >>I think that's fantastic. Will be excited to see over the next five years that impact on that training one million. And also to see it to your point with how much the industry is changing, how much, how fast supporting that's growing. There's a lot of job opportunity out there. I think it was Sandra who said that I was talking to her this morning that there's no job security like cybersecurity. It's really true. If you think about it. >>Yeah, I totally agree. Yeah. Like remember a few years ago when we started the first time to do all this interview, I said, hey, it's a barber hot space now, let's get harder and harder, more people interested now. And I really thank you cube and you give all the support it all these years and we're happy to be here. >>Absolutely. It's our pleasure. Well, I know you are paired up. You said tomorrow with Phil Mickelson for the pro am. That's pretty exciting, ken. >>I'm not sure I'm a very good golfer, but I will try my best. >>You try your best. I'm sure it will be a fantastic experience. Thank you for having the cube here for bringing people back together for this event, showing that we can do this, we can do this safely and securely. And also what Fortinet is doing to really help address that cyber security skills gap and uh, really make us more aware of the threats and the landscape and how we, as individuals and enterprises can help sort to quiet that storm >>also will be happy to be here and also being honored to be part of the program at the same time. We also want to thank you a lot of partner model customer and join us together for this big PJ event and thank you for everyone. >>Absolutely. And you guys are a big partner driven organization. I'm sure the partners appreciate that, ken, Thank you so much. >>Thank you. Thank you lisa >>for kenzi. I'm lisa martin. You're watching the cue from the Fortinet security summit in napa valley. >>Yeah. Mhm

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube presenting Cuban Cloud brought to you by Silicon Angle. Welcome back to the live segment of the Cuban cloud. I'm Dave, along with my co host, John Ferrier. John Rose is here. He's the global C T o Dell Technologies. John, great to see you as always, Really appreciate >>it. Absolutely good to know. >>Hey, so we're gonna talk edge, you know, the the edge, it's it's estimated. It's a multi multi trillion dollar opportunity, but it's a highly fragmented, very complex. I mean, it comprises from autonomous vehicles and windmills, even retail stores outer space. And it's so it brings in a lot of really gnarly technical issues that we want to pick your brain on. Let me start with just what to you is edge. How do you think about >>it? Yeah, I think I mean, I've been saying for a while that edges the when you reconstitute Ike back out in the real world. You know, for 10 years we've been sucking it out of the real world, taking it out of factories, you know, nobody has an email server under their desk anymore. On that was because we could put it in data centers and cloud public clouds, and you know that that's been a a good journey. And then we realized, Wait a minute, all the data actually was being created out in the real world. And a lot of the actions that have to come from that data have to happen in real time in the real world. And so we realized we actually had toe reconstitute a nightie capacity out near where the data is created, consumed and utilized. And, you know, that turns out to be smart cities, smart factories. You know, uh, we're dealing with military apparatus. What you're saying, how do you put, you know, edges in tow, warfighting theaters or first responder environments? It's really anywhere that data exists that needs to be processed and understood and acted on. That isn't in a data center. So it's kind of one of these things. Defining edge is easier to find. What it isn't. It's anywhere that you're going to have. I t capacity that isn't aggregated into a public or private cloud data center. That seems to be the answer. So >>follow. Follow that. Follow the data. And so you've got these big issue, of course, is late and see people saying, Well, some applications or some use cases like autonomous vehicles. You have to make the decision locally. Others you can you can send back. And you, Kamal, is there some kind of magic algorithm the technical people used to figure out? You know what, the right approaches? Yeah, >>the good news is math still works and way spent a lot of time thinking about why you build on edge. You know, not all things belong at the edge. Let's just get that out of the way. And so we started thinking about what does belong at the edge, and it turns out there's four things you need. You know, if you have a real time responsiveness in the full closed loop of processing data, you might want to put it in an edge. But then you have to define real time, and real time varies. You know, real time might be one millisecond. It might be 30 milliseconds. It might be 50 milliseconds. It turns out that it's 50 milliseconds. You probably could do that in a co located data center pretty far away from those devices. One millisecond you better be doing it on the device itself. And so so the Leighton see around real time processing matters. And, you know, the other reasons interesting enough to do edge actually don't have to do with real time crossing they have to do with. There's so much data being created at the edge that if you just blow it all the way across the Internet, you'll overwhelm the Internets. We have need toe pre process and post process data and control the flow across the world. The third one is the I T. O T boundary that we all know. That was the I O t. Thing that we were dealing with for a long time. And the fourth, which is the fascinating one, is it's actually a place where you might want to inject your security boundaries, because security tends to be a huge problem and connected things because they're kind of dumb and kind of simple and kind of exposed. And if you protect them on the other end of the Internet, the surface area of protecting is enormous, so there's a big shift basically move security functions to the average. I think Gardner made up a term for called Sassy. You know, it's a pretty enabled edge, but these are the four big ones. We've actually tested that for probably about a year with customers. And it turns out that, you know, seems to hold If it's one of those four things you might want to think about an edge of it isn't it probably doesn't belong in >>it. John. I want to get your thoughts on that point. The security things huge. We talked about that last time at Del Tech World when we did an interview with the Cube. But now look at what's happened. Over the past few months, we've been having a lot of investigative reporting here at Silicon angle on the notion of misinformation, not just fake news. Everyone talks about that with the election, but misinformation as a vulnerability because you have now edge devices that need to be secured. But I can send misinformation to devices. So, you know, faking news could be fake data say, Hey, Tesla, drive off the road or, you know, do this on the other thing. So you gotta have the vulnerabilities looked at and it could be everything. Data is one of them. Leighton. See secure. Is there a chip on the device? Could you share your vision on how you see that being handled? Cause it's a huge >>problem. Yeah, this is this is a big deal because, you know, what you're describing is the fact that if data is everything, the flow of data ultimately turns into the flow of information that knowledge and wisdom and action. And if you pollute the data, if you could compromise it the most rudimentary levels by I don't know, putting bad data into a sensor or tricking the sensor which lots of people can dio or simulating a sensor, you can actually distort things like a I algorithms. You can introduce bias into them and then that's a That's a real problem. The solution to it isn't making the sensors smarter. There's this weird Catch 22 when you sense arise the world, you know you have ah, you know, finite amount of power and budget and the making sensors fatter and more complex is actually the wrong direction. So edges have materialized from that security dimension is an interesting augment to those connected things. And so imagine a world where you know your sensor is creating data and maybe have hundreds or thousands of sensors that air flowing into an edge compute layer and the edge compute layer isn't just aggregating it. It's putting context on it. It's metadata that it's adding to the system saying, Hey, that particular stream of telemetry came from this device, and I'm watching that device and Aiken score it and understand whether it's been compromised or whether it's trustworthy or whether it's a risky device and is that all flows into the metadata world the the overall understanding of not just the data itself, but where did it come from? Is it likely to be trustworthy? Should you score it higher or lower in your neural net to basically manipulate your algorithm? These kind of things were really sophisticated and powerful tools to protect against this kind of injection of false information at the sensor, but you could never do that at a sensor. You have to do it in a place that has more compute capacity and is more able to kind of enriched the data and enhance it. So that's why we think edges are important in that fourth characteristic of they aren't the security system of the sensor itself. But they're the way to make sure that there's integrity in the sense arised world before it reaches the Internet before it reaches the cloud data centers. >>So access to that metadata is access to the metadata is critical, and it's gonna be it's gonna be near real time, if not real time, right? >>Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, the important thing is, Well, I'll tell you this. You know, if you haven't figured this out by looking at cybersecurity issues, you know, compromising from the authoritative metadata is a really good compromise. If you could get that, you can manipulate things that a scale you've never imagined. Well, in this case, if the metadata is actually authoritatively controlled by the edge note the edge note is processing is determining whether or not this is trustworthy or not. Those edge nodes are not $5 parts, their servers, their higher end systems. And you can inject a lot more sophisticated security technology and you can have hardware root of trust. You can have, you know, mawr advanced. PK I in it, you can have a I engines watching the behavior of it, and again, you'd never do that in a sensor. But if you do it at the first step into the overall data pipeline, which is really where the edges materializing, you can do much more sophisticated things to the data. But you can also protect that thing at a level that you'd never be able to do to protect a smart lightbulb. A thermostat in your house? >>Uh, yes. So give us the playbook on how you see the evolution of the this mark. I'll see these air key foundational things, a distributed network and it's a you know I o t trends into industrial i o t vice versa. As a software becomes critical, what is the programming model to build the modern applications is something that I know. You guys talk to Michael Dell about this in the Cuban, everyone, your companies as well as everyone else. Its software define everything these days, right? So what is the software framework? How did people code on this? What's the application aware viewpoint on this? >>Yeah, this is, uh, that's unfortunately it's a very complex area that's got a lot of dimensions to it. Let me let me walk you through a couple of them in terms of what is the software framework for for For the edge. The first is that we have to separate edge platforms from the actual edge workload today too many of the edge dialogues or this amorphous blob of code running on an appliance. We call that an edge, and the reality is that thing is actually doing two things. It's, ah, platform of compute out in the real world and it's some kind of extension of the cloud data pipeline of the cloud Operating model. Instance, he added, A software probably is containerized code sitting on that edge platform. Our first principle about the software world is we have to separate those two things. You do not build your cloud your edge platform co mingled with the thing that runs on it. That's like building your app into the OS. That's just dumb user space. Colonel, you keep those two things separate. We have Thio start to enforce that discipline in the software model at the edges. The first principle, the second is we have to recognize that the edges are are probably best implemented in ways that don't require a lot of human intervention. You know, humans air bad when it comes to really complex distributed systems. And so what we're finding is that most of the code being pushed into production benefits from using things like kubernetes or container orchestration or even functional frameworks like, you know, the server list fast type models because those low code architectures generally our interface with via AP, eyes through CCD pipelines without a lot of human touch on it. And it turns out that, you know, those actually worked reasonably well because the edges, when you look at them in production, the code actually doesn't change very often, they kind of do singular things relatively well over a period of time. And if you can make that a fully automated function by basically taking all of the human intervention away from it, and if you can program it through low code interfaces or through automated interfaces, you take a lot of the risk out of the human intervention piece of this type environment. We all know that you know most of the errors and conditions that break things are not because the technology fails it because it's because of human being touches it. So in the software paradigm, we're big fans of more modern software paradigms that have a lot less touch from human beings and a lot more automation being applied to the edge. The last thing I'll leave you with, though, is we do have a problem with some of the edge software architectures today because what happened early in the i o t world is people invented kind of new edge software platforms. And we were involved in these, you know, edge X foundry, mobile edge acts, a crane. Oh, and those were very important because they gave you a set of functions and capabilities of the edge that you kind of needed in the early days. Our long term vision, though for edge software, is that it really needs to be the same code base that we're using in data centers and public clouds. It needs to be the same cloud stack the same orchestration level, the same automation level, because what you're really doing at the edge is not something that spoke. You're taking a piece of your data pipeline and you're pushing it to the edge and the other pieces are living in private data centers and public clouds, and you like they all operate under the same framework. So we're big believers in, like pushing kubernetes orchestration all the way to the edge, pushing the same fast layer all the way to the edge. And don't create a bespoke world of the edge making an extension of the multi cloud software framework >>even though the underlying the underlying hardware might change the microprocessor, GPU might change GP or whatever it is. Uh, >>by the way, that that's a really good reason to use these modern framework because the energies compute where it's not always next 86 underneath it, programming down at the OS level and traditional languages has an awful lot of hardware dependencies. We need to separate that because we're gonna have a lot of arm. We're gonna have a lot of accelerators a lot of deep. Use a lot of other stuff out there. And so the software has to be modern and able to support header genius computer, which a lot of these new frameworks do quite well, John. >>Thanks. Thanks so much for for coming on, Really? Spending some time with us and you always a great guest to really appreciate it. >>Going to be a great stuff >>of a technical edge. Ongoing room. Dave, this is gonna be a great topic. It's a clubhouse room for us. Well, technical edge section every time. Really. Thanks >>again, Jon. Jon Rose. Okay, so now we're gonna We're gonna move to the second part of our of our technical edge discussion. Chris Wolf is here. He leads the advanced architecture group at VM Ware. And that really means So Chris's looks >>at I >>think it's three years out is kind of his time. Arise. And so, you know, advanced architecture, Er and yeah. So really excited to have you here. Chris, can you hear us? >>Okay. Uh, >>can Great. Right. Great to see you again. >>Great >>to see you. Thanks for coming on. Really appreciate it. >>So >>we're talking about the edge you're talking about the things that you see way set it up is a multi trillion dollar opportunity. It's It's defined all over the place. Uh, Joey joke. It's Could be a windmill. You know, it could be a retail store. It could be something in outer space. Its's It's it's, you know, whatever is defined A factory, a military installation, etcetera. How do you look at the edge. And And how do you think about the technical evolution? >>Yeah, I think it is. It was interesting listening to John, and I would say we're very well aligned there. You know, we also would see the edge is really the place where data is created, processed and are consumed. And I think what's interesting here is that you have a number off challenges in that edges are different. So, like John was talking about kubernetes. And there's there's multiple different kubernetes open source projects that are trying to address thes different edge use cases, whether it's K three s or Cubbage or open your it or super edge. And I mean the list goes on and on, and the reason that you see this conflict of projects is multiple reasons. You have a platform that's not really designed to supported computing, which kubernetes is designed for data center infrastructure. Uh, first on then you have these different environments where you have some edge sites that have connectivity to the cloud, and you have some websites that just simply don't write whether it's an oil rig or a cruise ship. You have all these different use cases, so What we're seeing is you can't just say this is our edge platform and, you know, go consume it because it won't work. You actually have to have multiple flavors of your edge platform and decide. You know what? You should time first. From a market perspective, I >>was gonna ask you great to have you on. We've had many chest on the Cube during when we actually would go to events and be on the credit. But we appreciate you coming into our virtual editorial event will be doing more of these things is our software will be put in the work to do kind of a clubhouse model. We get these talks going and make them really valuable. But this one is important because one of the things that's come up all day and we kind of introduced earlier to come back every time is the standardization openness of how open source is going to extend out this this interoperability kind of vibe. And then the second theme is and we were kind of like the U S side stack come throwback to the old days. Uh, talk about Cooper days is that next layer, but then also what is going to be the programming model for modern applications? Okay, with the edge being obviously a key part of it. What's your take on that vision? Because that's a complex area certain a lot of a lot of software to be written, still to come, some stuff that need to be written today as well. So what's your view on How do you programs on the edge? >>Yeah, it's a It's a great question, John and I would say, with Cove it We have seen some examples of organizations that have been successful when they had already built an edge for the expectation of change. So when you have a truly software to find edge, you can make some of these rapid pivots quite quickly, you know. Example was Vanderbilt University had to put 1000 hospital beds in a parking garage, and they needed dynamic network and security to be able to accommodate that. You know, we had a lab testing company that had to roll out 400 testing sites in a matter of weeks. So when you can start tohave first and foremost, think about the edge as being our edge. Agility is being defined as you know, what is the speed of software? How quickly can I push updates? How quickly can I transform my application posture or my security posture in lieu of these types of events is super important. Now, if then if we walk that back, you know, to your point on open source, you know, we see open source is really, uh you know, the key enabler for driving edge innovation and driving in I S V ecosystem around that edge Innovation. You know, we mentioned kubernetes, but there's other really important projects that we're already seeing strong traction in the edge. You know, projects such as edge X foundry is seeing significant growth in China. That is, the core ejects foundry was about giving you ah, pass for some of your I o T aps and services. Another one that's quite interesting is the open source faith project in the Linux Foundation. And fate is really addressing a melody edge through a Federated M L model, which we think is the going to be the long term dominant model for localized machine learning training as we continue to see massive scale out to these edge sites, >>right? So I wonder if you could You could pick up on that. I mean, in in thinking about ai influencing at the edge. Um, how do you see that? That evolving? Uh, maybe You know what, Z? Maybe you could We could double click on the architecture that you guys see. Uh, progressing. >>Yeah, Yeah. Right now we're doing some really good work. A zai mentioned with the Fate project. We're one of the key contributors to the project. Today. We see that you need to expand the breath of contributors to these types of projects. For starters, uh, some of these, what we've seen is sometimes the early momentum starts in China because there is a lot of innovation associated with the edge there, and now it starts to be pulled a bit further West. So when you look at Federated Learning, we do believe that the emergence of five g I's not doesn't really help you to centralized data. It really creates the more opportunity to create, put more data and more places. So that's, you know, that's the first challenge that you have. But then when you look at Federated learning in general, I'd say there's two challenges that we still have to overcome organizations that have very sophisticated data. Science practices are really well versed here, and I'd say they're at the forefront of some of these innovations. But that's 1% of enterprises today. We have to start looking at about solutions for the 99% of enterprises. And I'd say even VM Ware partners such as Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services as an example. They've been addressing ML for the 99%. I say That's a That's a positive development. When you look in the open source community, it's one thing to build a platform, right? Look, we love to talk about platforms. That's the easy part. But it's the APS that run on that platform in the services that run on that platform that drive adoption. So the work that we're incubating in the VM, or CTO office is not just about building platforms, but it's about building the applications that are needed by say that 99% of enterprises to drive that adoption. >>So if you if you carry that through that, I infer from that Chris that the developers are ultimately gonna kind of win the edge or define the edge Um, How do you see that From their >>perspective? Yeah, >>I think its way. I like to look at this. I like to call a pragmatic Dev ops where the winning formula is actually giving the developer the core services that they need using the native tools and the native AP eyes that they prefer and that is predominantly open source. It would some cloud services as they start to come to the edge as well. But then, beyond that, there's no reason that I t operations can't have the tools that they prefer to use. A swell. So we see this coming together of two worlds where I t operations has to think even for differently about edge computing, where it's not enough to assume that I t has full control of all of these different devices and sensors and things that exists at the edge. It doesn't happen. Often times it's the lines of business that air directly. Deploying these types of infrastructure solutions or application services is a better phrase and connecting them to the networks at the edge. So what does this mean From a nightie operations perspective? We need tohave, dynamic discovery capabilities and more policy and automation that can allow the developers to have the velocity they want but still have that consistency of security, agility, networking and all of the other hard stuff that somebody has to solve. And you can have the best of both worlds here. >>So if Amazon turned the data center into an A P I and then the traditional, you know, vendors sort of caught up or catching up and trying to do in the same premise is the edge one big happy I Is it coming from the cloud? Is it coming from the on Prem World? How do you see that evolving? >>Yes, that's the question and races on. Yeah, but it doesn't. It doesn't have to be exclusive in one way or another. The VM Ware perspective is that, you know, we can have a consistent platform for open source, a consistent platform for cloud services. And I think the key here is this. If you look at the partnerships we've been driving, you know, we've on boarded Amazon rds onto our platform. We announced the tech preview of Azure Arc sequel database as a service on our platform as well. In addition, toe everything we're doing with open source. So the way that we're looking at this is you don't wanna make a bet on an edge appliance with one cloud provider. Because what happens if you have a business partner that says I am a line to Google or on the line to AWS? So I want to use this open source. Our philosophy is to virtualized the edge so that software can dictate, you know, organizations velocity at the end of the day. >>Yeah. So, Chris, you come on, you're you're an analyst at Gartner. You know us. Everything is a zero sum game, but it's but But life is not like that, right? I mean, there's so much of an incremental opportunity, especially at the edge. I mean, the numbers are mind boggling when when you look at it, >>I I agree wholeheartedly. And I think you're seeing a maturity in the vendor landscape to where we know we can't solve all the problems ourselves and nobody can. So we have to partner, and we have to to your earlier point on a P. I s. We have to build external interfaces in tow, our platforms to make it very easy for customers have choice around ice vendors, partners and so on. >>So, Chris, I gotta ask you since you run the advanced technology group in charge of what's going on there, will there be a ship and focus on mawr ships at the edge with that girl singer going over to intel? Um, good to see Oh, shit, so to speak. Um, all kidding aside, but, you know, patch leaving big news around bm where I saw some of your tweets and you laid out there was a nice tribute, pat, but that's gonna be cool. That's gonna be a didn't tell. Maybe it's more more advanced stuff there. >>Yeah, I think >>for people pats staying on the VMRO board and to me it's it's really think about it. I mean, Pat was part of the team that brought us the X 86 right and to come back to Intel as the CEO. It's really the perfect book end to his career. So we're really sad to see him go. Can't blame him. Of course it's it's a It's a nice chapter for Pat, so totally understand that. And we prior to pack going to Intel, we announced major partnerships within video last year, where we've been doing a lot of work with >>arm. So >>thio us again. We see all of this is opportunity, and a lot of the advanced development projects were running right now in the CTO office is about expanding that ecosystem in terms of how vendors can participate, whether you're running an application on arm, whether it's running on X 86 or whatever, it's running on what comes next, including a variety of hardware accelerators. >>So is it really? Is that really irrelevant to you? I mean, you heard John Rose talk about that because it's all containerized is it is. It is a technologies. Is it truly irrelevant? What processor is underneath? And what underlying hardware architectures there are? >>No, it's not. You know it's funny, right? Because we always want to say these things like, Well, it's just a commodity, but it's not. You didn't then be asking the hardware vendors Thio pack up their balls and go home because there's just nothing nothing left to do, and we're seeing actually quite the opposite where there's this emergence and variety of so many hardware accelerators. So even from an innovation perspective, for us. We're looking at ways to increase the velocity by which organizations can take advantage of these different specialized hardware components, because that's that's going to continue to be a race. But the real key is to make it seamless that an application could take advantage of these benefits without having to go out and buy all of this different hardware on a per application basis. >>But if you do make bets, you can optimize for that architecture, true or not, I mean, our estimate is that the you know the number of wafer is coming out of arm based, you know, platforms is 10 x x 86. And so it appears that, you know, from a cost standpoint, that's that's got some real hard decisions to make. Or maybe maybe they're easy decisions, I don't know. But so you have to make bets, Do you not as a technologist and try to optimize for one of those architectures, even though you have to hedge those bets? >>Yeah, >>we do. It really boils down to use cases and seeing, you know, what do you need for a particular use case like, you know, you mentioned arm, you know, There's a lot of arm out at the edge and on smaller form factor devices. Not so much in the traditional enterprise data center today. So our bets and a lot of the focus there has been on those types of devices. And again, it's it's really the It's about timing, right? The customer demand versus when we need to make a particular move from an innovation >>perspective. It's my final question for you as we wrap up our day here with Great Cuban Cloud Day. What is the most important stories in in the cloud tech world, edge and or cloud? And you think people should be paying attention to that will matter most of them over the next few years. >>Wow, that's a huge question. How much time do we have? Not not enough. A >>architect. Architectural things. They gotta focus on a lot of people looking at this cove it saying I got to come out with a growth strategy obvious and clear, obvious things to see Cloud >>Yeah, yeah, let me let me break it down this way. I think the most important thing that people have to focus on >>is deciding How >>do they when they build architectures. What does the reliance on cloud services Native Cloud Services so far more proprietary services versus open source technologies such as kubernetes and the SV ecosystem around kubernetes. You know, one is an investment in flexibility and control, lots of management and for your intellectual property, right where Maybe I'm building this application in the cloud today. But tomorrow I have to run it out at the edge. Or I do an acquisition that I just wasn't expecting, or I just simply don't know. Sure way. Sure hope that cova doesn't come around again or something like it, right as we get past this and navigate this today. But architect ng for the expectation of change is really important and having flexibility of round your intellectual property, including flexibility to be able to deploy and run on different clouds, especially as you build up your different partnerships. That's really key. So building a discipline to say you know what >>this is >>database as a service, it's never going to define who I am is a business. It's something I have to do is an I T organization. I'm consuming that from the cloud This part of the application sacked that defines who I am is a business. My active team is building this with kubernetes. And I'm gonna maintain more flexibility around that intellectual property. The strategic discipline to operate this way among many of >>enterprise customers >>just hasn't gotten there yet. But I think that's going to be a key inflection point as we start to see. You know, these hybrid architectures continue to mature. >>Hey, Chris. Great stuff, man. Really appreciate you coming on the cube and participate in the Cuban cloud. Thank you for your perspectives. >>Great. Thank you very much. Always a pleasure >>to see you. >>Thank you, everybody for watching this ends the Cuban Cloud Day. Volonte and John Furry. All these sessions gonna be available on demand. All the write ups will hit silicon angle calm. So check that out. We'll have links to this site up there and really appreciate you know, you attending our our first virtual editorial >>event again? >>There's day Volonte for John Ferrier in the entire Cube and Cuba and Cloud Team >>Q 3 65. Thanks >>for watching. Mhm

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

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of VM World 2020 brought to you by VM Ware and its ecosystem partners. >>Welcome back. I'm stew Minuteman. And this is the Cube coverage of VM World 2020 our 11th year covering the show. And of course, networking has been a big growth story. Four vm where for a number years, going back to the Neisseria acquisition for over billion dollars. Really leveraging all of the virtual networking and SD wins been another hot topic. A couple years ago, it was the Velo Cloud acquisition. And now happy to welcome to the program two of the Velo Cloud business executives. First of all, we have Sanjay you Paul. He is the senior vice president and general manager of that mentioned division of VM Ware. Enjoining him is Craig Connors, whose the vice president and chief technology officer for that same division he was the chief architect of fellow Cloud Craig Sanjay. Thank you for joining us. >>Thank you. >>Thank you. >>Alright, So, Sanjay, first of all nice, you know, call outs and a lot of news that we're gonna get to dig into in the morning Keynote you know Pat Sanjay the team. Uh, you know, a couple of years ago, Pat talked about, you know, the next billion dollar businesses networking your team helping toe add to that. And, ah, a new term thrown out that we're gonna get to talk a little bit about. Our friends at Gartner termed it sassy. So I'll let you, you know, explain a little bit the news that this wonderful new four letter acronym that the Gartner spots that us. Um, why don't you start us there? >>Yeah. I couldn't be more excited to be here at VM World announcing this expansion of what's going on in Ste. Van. So I see Van was all about bringing branch office users to their applications and doing that in a really efficient manner, throwing out all those complex hardware appliances and simplifying everything with software, increasing the quality of experience for the user. But now what has happened is, you know they want security to be dealt off in the same way. Same simplicity and automation, same great user experience. And at the same time, you know, blocking all these attacks that are coming in from various places and covert has just driven that even more meaning that you need to get to networking and network security to be brought together in this simple and automated way while keeping the end user experience be great on while giving I t what they need, which is high security and good manageability. So this acronym sassy, secure access Service edge It really is the bringing together off net networking and network security both as a service. That service angle is really important. And the exciting part about what we're announcing at the at we'd be involved. Here is the expansion off the S, Stephen Pops and Gateways into becoming Sassy pops. And now customers can get a whole slew of services both networking and network security services from the anyway. So that's the announcement. >>Wonderful, Craig. You know, since since since you've helped with so much of the architecture here, I wanna kick out a little bit. When? When it comes to the security stuff that Sandy was talking about. I remember dealing back with land optimization solutions, trying to remember. Okay, wait. When can I compress? When can I encrypt? You know what do I lay on top of it? Um, SD when you know fits into this story, help us understand. What does you Novello Cloud do? What is it from the partner ecosystem? You know, So you know there's there's some good partners that you have helping us. Help us understand. You know what exactly we mean because security is such a broad term. >>Yeah, thanks. So there's four components in the sassy pop that we're bringing together. Obviously, VM Ware Ston is one of those Sanjay mentioned the changing workforce. We have off net users that aren't coming from behind Stu and Branch Mawr and Mawr today. So we also have secure access powered by our workspace. One solution that's bringing those remote users into the sassy pop and then two different security solutions. Secure Web gateway functionality. And that is the next generation secure Web gateway that includes things like DLP and remote browser isolation. And as you saw in the news today that's powered through ROM agreement with Menlo Security. And then we have next Gen firewall ing for securing corporate traffic. And that's powered by our own VM Ware NSX firewall, which has been recently augmented with our last line acquisition. So those are the four key components coming together within our sassy pop. And of course, we also have our continued partnership with the scaler for our our large joint via Mersey Scaler customer base to facilitate that security solution as well. >>Yeah. So, Sanjay, maybe it would make sense. As you said, you've got ah, portfolio now in this market, Uh, got v d I You've got edge walk us. Or if you could, some of the most important use cases for your business. >>Yeah. So you know the use case that has taken off in the last several years since the advent of SD. When is to get sites? So these would be branch offices and a branch office could be an agricultural field. It could be a plane. It could be an oil rig. You know, it could be any one of these. This is a branch office. So these sites how to get them connected to the applications that they need to get access to so telemedicine example. So how do you get doctors, diagnosticians and all that that are sitting in their clinics and hospitals? You get great access to the applications on the applications can be anywhere they don't have to be back in your data centers. You know, after data center consolidation happened, some of the apse you know, we're in the data centers. But then, after the cloud advent came, then the apse were everywhere there in the public cloud, both in I s as well as in SAS. And then now they're moving back towards the edge because of the advent of edge computing. So that's really the primary use case that s Stephen has been all about. And that's where you know, we have staked a claim to be the leader in that space. Now, with Covic, the use cases are expanding and obviously with work from home, you take the same telemedicine example. The doctors and diagnosticians who used to work from hospitals and clinics now have to get it done when they're working from the home. And, of course, this is a business critical app. And so what do you do? How do you get these folks who are at home to get the same quality of experience, the same security, the same manageability, but at the same time, you cannot disturb the other people who are working from home because that is an entire ecosystem. You serve the business user, but you also serve the needs off the home users keeping privacy in mind. So these two cases branch access and then remote access, which great talked about these are the primary use cases, and then they break down by vertical. So depending on whether it's health or it's federal or its manufacturing or its finance, then you have sub use cases underneath that. But this is how we from a from a V C n standpoint, you know, claimed to have 17,000 customers that have deployed our networking solutions. Ah, large fraction of those being our stu and solutions today. >>Yeah. Okay, Craig, one of those terms that gets thrown around a lot in the industry iss scale. I look at certain parts of the market, you know, say kubernetes kubernetes was about, you know, bringing together lots of sites. But now we're spending a lot of time talking about edge, which is a whole different scale. Same thing if you talk about devices and I o t can you speak to us a little bit about, you know, fundamentally, You know that branch architecture, I think, set you up well, but when I start thinking about EJ, it probably is. You know, uh, you know, larger number and some different challenges. So So maybe maybe some differences that happen to happen in the code to make that happen? >>Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think you know, we've been fortunate in the success that we've had in RST ran deployments. More than 280,000 branches deployed with RST ran solution. So scale is something that's been near and dear to our heart from the beginning. How do you build a multi tenant service in the cloud? How do you build cloud scale? And we brought that aspect into all of these components through container ization, as you mentioned through horizontal scalability, bringing them into our own dedicated pops. Where we control the hardware we control the hyper visor, obviously built on top of the m r E. S s. I that allows us to deliver scale in a way that other competitors may not be able to achieve. >>Yeah, son Sanjay, it's been a couple of years since the acquisition by VM Ware. Give us a little bit of an update, if you would as to, you know, what I'm sure. Obviously, customer reach on adoption greatly increased by by the channel and go to market. But, you know, directionally And you know, any difference in use cases that that you've seen now being part of the M R. >>Yeah, absolutely. No. There's there's been an expansion in the use cases, which is why this fit was very good, meaning Vela Cloud being a part of VM way. So if you look at it, what the wider network does, where the place where you know ties, we tie it all together and tie walk together. If you look at the end User computing, which Greg was mentioning, the clients are digital workspace, workspace. One client. Well, those clients now will connect to our sassy pop. So that's one tie in that obviously we couldn't have and we were an independent company. The other side of it, when you go from the sassy pop into the data center, then we tie into NSX. Not just that the Cloud firewall, but in the data center itself so we can extend micro segmentation. So that's another kid use case that is becoming prevalent. Then the third aspect of this is really when you run inside telecom operators and VM Ware has a very robust business as it goes after telcos with the software stack and so running our gateways running our sassy pops at the telco environment, then gets us to integrate with what's going on with our telecom business unit. We also have what we're doing on our visibility and Tellem entry perspective. So we had acquired a company called Neons A, which were crafting into on edge network intelligence product that then fits into VM Ware's overall. For in the space we have, ah, product suite called We Realize Network Insight. And so that network inside, combined with what we're doing from from a business unit standpoint, gives customers an end to end view from from an individual client through the cloud, even up to an individual container. And so we call this client to cloud to container. All of this is possible because we're part of VM Ware. In the last piece of this is something that's gonna happen. We believe next year, which is edge computing when edge computing comes in. You know, I jokingly say to my team this acronym of Sassy, which is s a s e you gotta insert of sea in the middle. So it becomes s a CSE and out of that pronounced that says sacks E. So I know it sounds a little bit awkward, but that c stands for the compute. So as you put compute in the computer is going to run in the edge, the computer that's going to run in the pop and the sassy is gonna become, you know, sexy. And who better to give that to you than VM Ware? Because, you know, we have that management stack that controls compute for customers today. >>Well, definitely. I think you're you're you're drawing from the Elon Musk school of You know how to name acronyms in products Do so sometimes It's really interesting. Uh, Craig, talk us a little a little bit about that vision to get there, you know? What do we need to do as an industry? How's the product mature? Give us a little bit of that. That that roadmap forward, if you would >>Yeah, I think you know Sassy is really the convergence of five key things. One is this distributed pop architecture. Er So how do you deliver this? Compute and these services near to the customers premise. And that's something that companies like us have have had years of experience and building out. And then the four key components of sassy that we have, you know, zero trust access S t u N next generation firewall ing and secure Web Gateway. We're fortunate, as Sanjay said, to be part of the M where where we don't have to invent some of these components because we already have a works based one and we already have the NSX distributed firewall. And we already have the m r s d when and so ah, lot of companies you'll see are trying to to put all of these parts together. We already had them in house. We're putting them under one umbrella, the one place where we didn't have a technology within VM Ware. That's where we're leveraging these partnerships with memo and see scaler to get it done. >>Sanjay e think the telco use case that you talked about is really important One we've definitely seen, you know, really good adoption from from VM Ware working in those spaces. One place I I wanna understand, though, if you look at vcf and how that moves. Thio ws toe Azure, even toe Oracle's talked about in the keynote this morning. How does SD win fit into just that kind of traditional hybrid cloud deployment we've been talking about for the last couple of years? >>Yeah, that's a great question. So, you know, when you look at Ste Van, that name can notes software defined, but it doesn't. It's not specific to branch office access at all. And when you look at DCF, what VCF is doing is really modernizing your compute stack. And now you can run this modern compute stack of your own data centers. You can run it in the private cloud. You can run it on the public cloud as well, right? So you can put these tax on Amazon, azure, Google and and then run them. So what an STV in architecture allows you to do is not just get your branch and secure users to access the applications that are running on those computes tax. But you can also intermediate between them. So when customers come in and they say that they want simplified networking and security between two public cloud providers, this is the multi cloud use case, then getting that networking toe work in a seamless fashion with high security can be done by an S Stephen architectures. And our sassy pop is perfectly situated to do that. And all you would need to do is add virtual services at the sassy pop. An enterprise customer would come in and they say they want some peanuts here and some VP CS there they want to look at them in an automated fashion. They want to set it up, you know, with the point and click architectures and not have to do all this manual work, and we can get that done. So there's a there's a really good fit between Sassy s Stephen and where VCF is going to solve the multi cloud problem that people are having right now. >>Excellent. I really appreciate that. That that explanation last thing, I guess I'll ask is, you know, here at VM World, I'm sure you've got a lot of breakouts. You've probably got some good customers sharing some of their stories. So anonymous if it has to be. But we would love if you've got either views of some examples, uh, to help bring home that the value that your solutions are delivering. >>Great. When I start with one and then creek and fill in the other one, eso let me start off with the telemedicine example. So we have, you know, customer called M. D. Anderson Cancer Center. And these are the folks in in Texas, and they provide a really, really important service. And that service is, you know, providing patients who are critically ill to give them all the kinds of services, whether they come into the clinic or whether they're across a network connection. And they're radiologists and doctors air sitting at home. So I think it's very important use case and, you know, we started off by deploying in the hospitals and the clinics. But when Cove, it hit there to send a lot of these folks to work from home, and then when they work from home, it's really this device that goes in which you can see here. This is our Belo cloud edge. And this, um, has said in one of the my my favorite song says, There's nothing this box can't do. All right, so this box goes home into the, you know, doctors home, and then they are talking to their patient, getting telemedicine done because it solves the problem off performance. Um, you know that some of those folks have literally said that this thing was a God sent. That's not very often that networking people, you know, have been told that their products are like godsend. So I'll take that to the limit of grain of salt. But we are solving a very important problems increasing the performance were also this is a secure device, so it's not gonna be hacked into and then makes things much more manageable from a nightie standpoint. So this is one of those use cases, and there's plenty of them. But Craig has his favorites all turn it over to him. >>There's so many I could bore you. I think you know one really interesting. One is a new investment banking company that we have is a customer, and they used to go work in the office five days a week, and everything that they did was on their computer in the office and with this pivot to work from home post Kobe, did they think their future is a flexible work workforce where sometimes there in the office and sometimes they're remote. And when the remote there are deep peeing into their desktop, that is sting in their office and with their like to remote access VPN solution, they had to connect, Say, I'm a user sitting in Southern California. I'm connecting my VPN to Chicago to then come across the network back to Los Angeles to get to my desktop so that I can work from home. And now with Sassy, my secure access client from workspace one connects to the closest asi pop I get to my desktop in my office. Tremendously lower, Leighton see tremendously higher quality to experience for the users, whether they're, you know, at home, on the road anywhere they need to access that device. >>Craig Sanjay, thank you so much. Love the customer example. Sanjay. Good job bringing out the box. Uh, show people It's a software world. But the sassy hardware is still needed at times, too. Thanks for joining us. All >>right. Thank you, Stew. Thanks. Great. Cheers. All >>right. Stay with us for more coverage of VM World 2020. I'm still minimum. Thanks. As always for watching the cube