(uplifting music) >> Hello and welcome to this Cube Conversation. I'm John Furrier, host of theCube here in Palo Alto, California. We've got two great remote guests to talk about some big news hitting with Scality and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Jerome Lecat CEO of Scality and Chris Tinker, Distinguished Technologist from HPE, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Jerome, Chris, great to see you both Cube alumnis from an original gangster days as we'd say back then when we started almost 11 years ago. Great to see you both. >> It's great to be back. >> Good to see you John. >> So, really compelling news around kind of this next generation storage cloud native solution. Okay, it's really kind of an impact on the next gen, I call next gen, dev ops meets application, modern application world and something we've been covering heavily. There's some big news here around Scality and HPE offering a pretty amazing product. You guys introduced essentially the next gen piece of it, Artesca, we'll get into in a second, but this is a game-changing announcement you guys announced, this is an evolution continuing I think is more of a revolution, but I think, you know storage is kind of abstractionally of evolution to this app centric world. So talk about this environment we're in and we'll get to the announcement, which is object store for modern workloads, but this whole shift is happening Jerome. This is a game changer to storage and customers are going to be deploying workloads. >> Yeah, Scality really, I mean, I personally really started working on Scality more than 10 years ago, close to 15 now. And if we think about it I mean the cloud has really revolutionized IT. And within the cloud, we really see layers and layers of technology. I mean, it all start at around 2006 with Amazon and Google and Facebook finding ways to do initially what was consumer IT at very large scale, very low credible reliability and then slowly creeped into the enterprise. And at the very beginning, I would say that everyone was kind of wizards trying things and really coupling technologies together. And to some degree we were some of the first wizard doing this, but we, we're now close to 15 years later and there's a lot of knowledge and a lot of experience, a lot of tools. And this is really a new generation. I'll call it cloud native, or you can call it next gen whatever, but there is now enough experience in the world, both at the development level and at the infrastructure level to deliver truly distributed automated systems that run on industry standard servers. Obviously good quality server deliver a better service than others, but there is now enough knowledge for this to truly go at scale. And call this cloud or call this cloud native. Really the core concept here is to deliver scalable IT at very low cost, very high level of reliability, all based on software. And we've, we've been participated in this motion, but we feel that now the breadth of what's coming is at the new level, and it was time for us to think, develop and launch a new product that's specifically adapted to that. And Chris, I will let you comment on this because the customers or some of them, you can add a customer, you do that. >> Well, you know, you're right. You know, I've been in the, I've been like you I've been in this industry for a, well, along time. Give a long, 20 to 21 years in HPE in engineering. And look at the actual landscape has changed with how we're doing scale-out software-defined storage for particular workloads. And we're a catalyst has evolved here is an analytics normally what was only done in the three letter acronyms and massively scale-out parallel namespace file systems, parallel file systems. The application space has encroached into the enterprise world where the enterprise world needed a way to actually take a look at how to, how do I simplify the operations? How do I actually be able to bring about an application that can run in the public cloud or on premise or hybrid, be able to actually look at a workload optimized step that aligns the actual cost to the actual analytics that I'm going to be doing the workload that I'm going to be doing and be able to bridge those gaps and be able to spin this up and simplify operations. And you know, and if you, if you are familiar with these parallel processes which by the way we actually have on our truck, I, I do engineer those, but they are, they are, they are they have their own unique challenges, but in the world of enterprise where customers are looking to simplify operations, then take advantage of new application, analytic workloads whether it be smart, Mesa, whatever it might be, right. I mean, if I want to spin up a Mongo DB or maybe maybe a, you know, last a search capability how do I actually take those technologies, embrace a modern scale-out storage stack that without without breaking the bank, but also provide a simple operations. And that's, that's why we look for object storage capabilities because it brings us this massive parallelization. Back to you John. >> Well before we get into the product. I want to just touch on one thing Jerome you mentioned, and Chris, you, you brought up the DevOps piece next gen, next level, whatever term you use. It is cloud native, cloud native has proven that DevOps infrastructure is code is not only legit. It's being operationalized in all enterprises and add security in there, you have DevSecOps, this is the reality and hybrid cloud in particular has been pretty much the consensus is that standard. So our defacto center whatever you want to call it, that's happening. Multicloud are on the horizon. So these new workloads are have these new architectural changes, cloud on premises and edge. This is the number one story. And the number one challenge all enterprises are now working on. How do I build the architecture for the cloud on premises and edge? This is forcing the DevOps team to flex and build new apps. Can you guys talk about that particular trend? And is it, and is that relevant here? >> Yeah, I, I now talk about really storage anywhere and cloud anywhere and and really the key concept is edge to go to cloud. I mean, we all understand now that the edge will host a lot of that time and the edge is many different things. I mean, it's obviously a smartphone, whatever that is, but it's also factories, it's also production. It's also, you know, moving moving machinery, trains, planes, satellites that that's all the edge, cars obviously. And a lot of that I will be both produced and process there, but from the edge who will want to be able to send the data for analysis, for backup, for logging to a call, and that call could be regional, maybe not, you know, one call for the whole planet, but maybe one corporate region the state in the U.S. And then from there you will also want to push some of the data to public cloud. One of the thing that we see more and more is that the D.R that has centered the disaster recovery is not another physical data center. It's actually the cloud, and that's a very efficient infrastructure very cost efficient, especially. So really it, it, it's changing the paradigm on how you think about storage because you really need to integrate these three layers in a consistent approach especially around the topic of security because you want the data to be secure all along the way. And data is not just data, its data, and who can access the data, who can modify the data what are the conditions that allow modification all automatically erasure of the data? In some cases, it's super important that the data automatically erased after 10 years and all this needs to be transported from edge to core to cloud. So that that's one of the aspects. Another aspects that resonates for me with what you said is a word you didn't say, but it's actually crucial this whole revolution. It's Kubernetes I mean, Kubernetes is in now a mature technology, and it's, it's just, you know the next level of automatized operation for distributed system, which we didn't have 5 or 10 years ago. And that is so powerful that it's going to allow application developers to develop much faster system that can be distributed again edge to go to cloud, because it's going to be an underlying technology that spans the three layers. >> Chris, your thoughts hybrid cloud. I've been, I've been having questions with the HPE folks for God years and years on hybrid clouds, now here. >> Right (chuckles) >> Well, you know, and, and it's exciting in a layout right, so you look at like a, whether it be enterprise virtualization, that is a scale-out general purpose virtualization workloads whether it be analytic workloads, whether it be no data protection is a paramount to all of this, orchestration is paramount. If you look at that DevSecOps, absolutely. I mean, securing the actual data the digital last set is, is absolutely paramount. And if you look at how we do this look at the investments we're making, we're making enough and look at the collaborative platform development which goes to our partnership with Scality. It is, we're providing them an integral aspect of everything we do, whether we're bringing in Ezmeral which is our software we use for orchestration look at the veneer of its control plane, controlling Kubernetes. Being able to actually control the active clusters and the actual backing store for all the analytics that we just talked about. Whether it be a web-scale app that is traditionally using a politics namespace and now been modernized and take advantage of newer technologies running an NBME burst buffers or a hundred gig networks with Slingshot network of 200 and 400 gigabit looking at how do we actually get the actual analytics, the workload to the CPU and have it attached to the data at risk. Where's the data, how do we land the data? How do we actually align, essentially locality, locality of the actual asset to the computer. And this is where, you know, we can look leverage whether it be a Zair or Google or name your favorite hybrid, hyperscaler, leverage those technologies leveraging the actual persistent store. And this is where Scality is, with this object store capability has it been an industry trendsetter, setting the actual landscape of how provide an object store on premise and hybrid cloud run it in a public cloud, but being able to facilitate data mobility and tie it back to, and tie it back to an application. And this is where a lot of things have changed in the world of analytics, because the applications that you, the newer technologies that are coming on the market have taken advantage of this particular protocol as threes. So they can do web scale massively parallel concurrent workloads. >> You know what let's get into the announcement. I love cool and relevant products. And I think this hits the mark. Scality you guys have Artesca, which is just announced. And I think it, you know, we obviously we reported on it. You guys have a lightweight true enterprise grade object store software for Kubernetes. This is the announcement, Jerome, tell us about it. What's the big deal? Cool and relevant, come on, this is cool. Right, tell us. >> I'm super excited. I'm not sure, if you can see it as well on the screen, but I'm super, super excited. You know, we, we introduced the ring 11 years ago and they says our biggest announcements for the past 11 years. So yes, do pay attention. And, you know, after, after looking at, at all these trends and understanding where we see the future going. We decided that it was time to embark (indistinct) So there's not one line of code that's the same as our previous generation product. They will both exist, they both have a space in the market. And Artesca was specifically designed for this cloud native era. And what we see is that people want something that's lightweight especially because it had to go to the edge. They still want the enterprise grid that Scality is known for. And it has to be modern. What we really mean by modern is, we see object storage now being the primary storage for many application more and more applications. And so we have to be able to deliver the performance, that primary storage expects. This idea of a Scality of serving primary storage is actually not completely new. When we launched Scality 10 years ago, the first application that we were supporting was consumer email for which we were, and we are still today, the primary storage. So we have, we know what it is to be the primary store. We know what's the level of reliability you need to hit. We know what, what latency means and latency is different from throughput, you really need to optimize both. And I think that still today we're the only object storage company that protects data from both replication and original encoding Because we understand that replication is faster, but the original encoding is more better, and more, of file where fast internet latency doesn't matter so much. So we we've been being all that experience, but really rethinking of product for that new generation that really is here now. And so where we're truly excited, I guess people a bit more about the product. It's a software, Scality is a software company and that's why we love to partner with HPE who's producing amazing servers, you know for the record and the history. The very first deployment of Scality in 2010 was on the HP servers. So this is a long love story here. And so to come back to our desk is lightweight in the sense that it's easy to use. We can start small, we can start from just one server or one VM I mean, you would start really small, but he can grow infinitely. The fact that we start small, we didn't, you know limit the technology because of that. So you can start from one to many and it's cloud native in the sense that it's completely Kubernetes compatible it's Kubernetes office traded. It will deploy on many Kubernetes distributions. We're talking obviously with Ezmeral we're also talking with zoo and with the other all those of communities distribution it will also be able to be run in the cloud. Now, I'm not sure that there will be many true production deployment of Artesca going the cloud, because you already have really good object storage by the cloud providers but when you are developing something and you want to test that, you know just doing it in the cloud is very practical. So you'll be able to deploy our Kubernetes cloud distribution, and it's more than object storage in the sense that it's application centric. A lot of our work is actually validating that our storage is fit for this single purpose application. And making sure that we understand the requirement of these application, that we can guide our customers on how to deploy. And it's really designed to be the primary storage for these new workloads. >> The big part of the news is your relationship with Hewlett Packard Enterprise is some exclusivity here as part of this and as you mentioned the relationship goes back many, many years. We've covered the, your relationship in the past. Chris also, you know, we cover HP like a blanket. This is big news for HPE as well. >> This is very big news. >> What is the relationship, talk about this exclusivity Could you share about the partnership and the exclusivity piece? >> Well, there's the partnership expands into the pan HPE portfolio. we look, we made a massive investment in edge IOT device. So we actually have how did we align the cost to the demand. Our customers come to us, wanting to looking at think about what we're doing with Greenlake, like in consumption based modeling. They want to be able to be able to consume the asset without having to do a capital outlay out of the gate. Number two, look at, you know how do you deploy technology, really demand. It depends on the scale, right? So in a lot of your web skill, you know, scale out technologies, it putting them on a diet is challenging. Meaning how skinny can you get it. Getting it down into the 50 terabyte range and then the complexities of those technologies at as you take a day one implementation and scale it out over you know, you know, multiple iterations over quarters, the growth becomes a challenge so working with Scality we, we believe we've actually cracked this nut. We figured out how to a number one, how to start small, but not limit a customer's ability to scale it out incrementally or grotesquely. You can eat depending on the quarters, the month, whatever whatever the workload is, how do you actually align and be able to consume it? So now whether it be on our Edgeline products our DL products go right there, now what that Jerome was talking about earlier you know, we, we, we ship a server every few seconds. That won't be a problem. But then of course, into our density optimized compute with the Apollo products. And this where our two companies have worked in an exclusivity where they scale the software bonds on the HP ecosystem. And then we can, of course provide you, our customers the ability to consume that through our GreenLake financial models or through a CapEx partners. >> Awesome, so Jerome and, and Chris, who's the customer here obviously, there's an exclusive period. Talk about the target customer and how the customers get the product and how they get the software. And how does this exclusivity with HP fit into it? >> Yeah, so there there's really a three types of customers and we've really, we've worked a lot with a company called UseDesign to optimize the user interface for each the types of customers. So we really thought about each customer role and providing with each of them the best product. So the, the first type of customer are application owners who are deploying an application that requires an object storage in the backend, you typically want a simple object store for one application, they want it to be simple and work. Honestly they want no thrill, just want an object store that works. And they want to be able to start as small as they start with their application. Often it's, you know, the first deployment maybe a small deployment, you know applications like a backup like VML, Rubrik, or analytics like (indistinct), file system that now, now available as a software, you know like CGI does a really great departmental NAS that works very well that needs an object store in the backend. Or for high performance computing a wake-up house system is an amazing file system. We will also have vertical application like road peak, for example, who provides origin and the view of the software broadcasters. So all these are application, they request an object store in the backend and you just need a simple high-performance working well object store and I'll discuss perfect for that. Now, the second type of people that we think will be interested by Artesca are essentially developer who are currently developing some capabilities or cloud native application, your next gen. And as part of their development stack, it's getting better and better when you're developing a cloud native application to really target an object storage rather than NFS, as you're persistent. It just, you know, think about generations of technologies and NFS and filesystem were great 25 years ago. I mean, it's an amazing technology. Now, when you want to develop a distributed scalable application object storage is a better fit because it's the same generation. And so same thing, I mean, you know, they're developing something they need an object store that they can develop on. So they want it very lightweight, but they also want the product that their enterprise or their customers will be able to rely on for years and years on. And this guy's really great fit to do that. The third type of customer are more architects, I would say are the architects that are designing a system where they are going to have 50 factories, a thousand planes, a million cars, they are going to have some local storage which will they want to replicate to the core and possibly also to the cloud. And as the design is really new generation workloads that are incredibly distributed but with local storage Artesca are really great for that. >> And tell about the HPE exclusive Chris. What's the, how does that fit in? Do they buy through Scality? Can they get it for the HP? Are you guys working together on how customers can procure it? >> Both ways, yeah both ways they can procure it through Scality. They can secure it through HPE and it's, it's it's the software stack running on our density optimized compute platforms which you would choose and align those and to provide an enterprise quality. Cause if it comes back to it in all of these use cases is how do we align up into a true enterprise stack, bringing about multitenancy bringing about the, the, the fact that you know, if you look at like a local coding one of the things that they're bringing to it, so that we can get down into the DL325. So with the exclusivity, you actually get choice. And that choice comes into our entire portfolio whether it be the Edgeline platform the DL325 AMD processing stack or the Intel 380, or whether it be the Apollos or like I said, there's, there's, there's so many ample choices there that facilitate this, and it's this allows us to align those two strategies. >> Awesome, and I think the Kubernetes piece is really relevant because, you know, I've been interviewing folks practitioners and Kubernetes is very much maturing fast. It's definitely the centerpiece of the cloud native both below the, the line, if you will below under the hood for the, for the infrastructure and then for apps, they want a program on top of it that's critical. I mean, Jerome, this is like, this is the future. >> Yeah, and if you don't mind like to come back to the myth on the exclusivity with HP. So we did a six month exclusive and the very reason we could do this is because HP has such breadth of server portfolio. And so we can go from, you know, really simple, very cheap you know, DL380, machine that we tell us for a few dollars. I mean, it's really like simple system, 50 terabyte. We can have the DL325 that Chris mentioned that is really a powerhouse all NVME, clash over storage is NVME, very fast processors you know, dense, large, large system, like the APOE 4,500. So it's a very large graph of portfolio. We support the whole portfolio and we work together on this. So I want to say that you know, one of the reason I want to send kudos to HP for the breadth of their server line really. As mentioned, Artesca can be ordered from either company. In hand-in-hand together, so anyway, you'll see both of us and our field working incredibly well together. >> Well, just on that point, I think just for clarification was this co-design by Scality and HPE, because Chris you mentioned, you know, the, the configuration of your systems. Can you guys, Chris quickly talk about the design. >> From, from, from the code base the software is entirely designed and developed by Scality, from testing and performance, so this really was a joint work with HP providing both a hardware and manpower so that we could accelerate the testing phase. >> You know, Chris HPE has just been doing such a great job of really focused on this. I know I've been covering it for years before it was fashionable. The idea of apps working no matter where it lives, public cloud, data center, edge. And you mentioned edge line's been around for awhile, you know, app centric, developer friendly, cloud first, has been an HPE kind of guiding first principle for many, many years. >> Well, it has. And, you know, as our CEO here intended, by 2022 everything will be able to be consumed as a service in our portfolio. And then this stack allows us the simplicity and the consumability of the technology and the granulation of it allows us to simplify the installation. Simplify the actual deployment bringing into a cloud ecosystem, but more importantly for the end customer. They simply get an enterprise quality product running on an optimized stack that they can consume through a orchestrated simplistic interface. That customers that's what they're wanting for today's but they come to me and ask, hey how do I need a, I've got this new app, new project. And, you know, it goes back to who's actually coming. It's no longer the IT people who are actually coming to us. It's the lines of business. It's that entire dimension of business owners coming to us, going this is my challenge. And how can you, HPE help us? And we rely on our breadth of technology, but also our breadth of partners to come together in our, of course Scality is hand in hand and our collaborative business unit our collaborative storage product engineering group that actually brought, brought this to market. So we're very excited about this solution. >> Chris, thanks for that input and great insight. Jerome, congratulations on a great partnership with HPE obviously great joint customer base. Congratulations on the product release here. Big moving the ball down the field, as they say. New functionality, clouds, cloud native object store. Phenomenal, so wrap, wrap, wrap up the interview. Tell us your vision for Scality and the future of storage. >> Yeah, I think I started in, Scality is going to be an amazing leader, it is already. But yeah, so, you know I have three things that I think will govern how storage is going. And obviously Marc Andreessen said it software is everywhere and software is eating the world. So definitely that's going to be true in the data center in storage in particular, but the three trends that are more specific are first of all, I think that security performance and agility is now basic expectation. It's, it's not, you know it's not like an additional feature. It's just the basic tables, security performance and our job. The second thing is, and we've talked about it during this conversation is edge to go. You need to think your platform with edge, core and cloud. You know, you, you don't want to have separate systems separate design interface point for edge and then think about the core and then think about cloud, and then think about the diverse power. All this needs to be integrated in a design. And the third thing that I see as a major trend for the next 10 years is data sovereignty. More and more, you need to think about where is the data residing? What are the legal challenges? What is the level of protection, against who are you protected? What is your independence strategy? How do you keep as a company being independent from the people you need to be in the band? And I mean, I say companies, but this is also true for public services. So these, these for me are the three big trends. And I do believe that software defined distributed architecture are necessary for these trends but you also need to think about being truly enterprise grade. and that has been one of our focus with design of Artesca. How do we combine a lightweight product with all of the security requirements and data sovereignty requirements that we expect to have in the next thing? >> That's awesome. Congratulations on the news Scality, Artesca. The big release with HPE exclusive for six months, Chris Tinker, Distinguished Engineer at HPE. Great to see you Jerome Lecat CEO of Scality, great to see you as well. Congratulations on the big news. I'm John Furrier from theCube. Thanks for watching. (uplifting music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube covering HP Discover Virtual experience Brought to you by HP >>Hi, welcome to the Cube's coverage of HP Discover 2020 Virtual experience. I'm Lisa Martin, and I'm pleased to welcome from scale any one of our long Time Cube alumni. We have, all specially the chief product officer at agility. Hey, Paul, welcome back to the Cube. >>Hi, Lisa. It's been a long time, and it's just wonderful to be back. Thank you. >>This is our new virtual cube that appear where everybody is very socially distant but socially connected. So since it's been a while since we've had you on and your peers from stability tell us a little bit about scale and then we'll dive into what you're doing with HP, >>Okay? Absolutely. Let me give you kind of a pop down recap of where we're at. So interestingly, we're now it 10 year old company. We actually celebrated our never anniversary last year. Um, we still have our flagship product, the Ring, which we launched originally in 2000 and 10 that is distributed file and object storage software. But about three years ago, we added a second product called Zenko, which is for multi cloud data management. We do continue to invest in the ring a lot, both on the file side and the object side. The current release now is Ring eight. The target market for this is pretty broad, but we really focus on financial services institutions. That's a big base for us. We have something like half of the world's banks, about 60% of the world service providers, a lot of government institutions. But what's been fastest growing for us now is healthcare. We have a lot of growth there in medical imaging and genomics research. And then I guess the last thing I'll add is that partners are just super important to us. We continue to certify and test with SDI Solutions. I think we have 80 of them now deployed and ready to go. But there's a real focus here now on partners like Said Era and with a Iot and Splunk VM HP East or one. So those partners are critical to our business and we just love to partner with them. >>Do you been partners with HP for quite a while? Tell me about the evolution of the partnership as you've evolved your technology. >>Yeah, absolutely. It's interesting, cause I just noted this Ah, a couple of weeks ago. The company is 10 years old. We've been partners with HP for over half of that. It's about 5.5 years. The way to think about this is that we have a worldwide OM relationship with HP for the Apollo 4000 server line. The official name for our product is HP Apollo 4000 systems with scale itty ring scalable storage. Also quite a mouthful, but very descriptive. Ah, and then we work very closely with the HP storage and big data teams. I'm very tied into the product side, talking to the product managers, but also the marketing side and very much so. On the sales side, we've had super success with them in Europe, also here in the US, and there's growing business, but also in a P J in Japan. Specifically, >>you mentioned that one of the doctors right now that's really urging a healthcare and given the fact that we are three months into a global pandemic, anything that's interesting that you want to share in terms of how skeleton is helping some of your health care customers rapidly pivot in this very unprecedented time. >>Yeah, I would say that there's a couple of very notable trends here. The 1st 1 started a few years ago. We really, honestly didn't focus so much on health care until about 2000 and 17 18. But since that time, we now have something like 40 hospital hospital systems globally using our product and notably on H P E servers. Uh, and that's to retain medical images for long term retention. These are things like digital diagnostic images. MRI's CAT scans CT scans. These hospitals are mandated to keep them for a long term right, sometimes for five years, 10 years or even page patient Lifetime. I would say the newer thing that we're seeing now just in the last year or so is genomics research. There's so much concentration now on pharmaceutical and biotechnology around genomics. That data tends to be very voluminous, you know, it can go from hundreds of terabytes and petabytes, and moreover, they need to run simulations on that to do you know, fast iteration on different drug research. We've now been applied to that problem, and a lot of times we do it with a partner or something like a fast tier one file system and then us as the archive here. But we're seeing that the popularity of that just wrote tremendously within hospitals, hospital groups and also just dedicated research for biotechnology. >>The vault. You talked about volumes there, and the volumes are growing and growing each year as his retention periods, depending on the type of data, the type of of ah, imagery, for example. But from a use case perspective, what is it that you're helping your health care customers achieve? Is it is it backup targets? Is it disaster? Recovery is speed of access All the above. >>Yeah, so where we focus in health care is really on the unstructured data. This is all the file content that they deal with, you know, in a hospital. Think about all the different medical image studies that they have, things like digital files for CAT scans and MRI's. These are becoming huge files, you know. One multi slice X ray or digital scan, for example, can be gigabytes in size and profile, and that's per patient. Now think about the number of patients and the right attention of all of that. It's a perfect use case for what we do, which is capacity optimized storage for long term retention. But we can also be used for other things. For example, backups of the electronic patient records. Those are typically stored in databases, but they need to be backed up. What we found is that we're an ideal long term backup target. So the way hospitals look at us is that they can consolidate multiple use cases, undo our ring system on HP. They can grow it over time. They could just keep adding servers, and typically what they do is they start with a single use case, what they think of as a single modality, perhaps an imaging. And then they grow over time to encompass more and more and eventually think about a comprehensive image management system within a hospital. But those are popular today. Hospitals are also starting to look at other use cases. Obviously, we mentioned genomics, but hybrid cloud is coming at them as well. >>Talk to me about that as we see growing volumes of data, different types of modalities, lots of urgent need to you, said backup data, So data protection is critical. But as as healthcare organizations move to multi cloud, how considerate Ian HP help facilitate that migration? >>Yeah, So what we've noticed is, you know, there's both a feeling that they're fast and they're slow to embrace the public clouds. But one of the things that's obvious is that from a sass perspective, software as a service, they've really embraced it. Most of the big EMR systems, the electronic medical records, are already SAS based, so they are there, and in fact they're probably already multi cloud. But on the data management side, that's where we focus. And we hear a lot of use cases that would involve taking older data from on Prem and perhaps archiving it long term in a HIPAA compliant cloud in the US, for example, for long term retention. But there are other things. For example, they may want to push some data that they've generated on Prem to a public cloud like Amazon or azure, and do some kind of computing against it. Perhaps an analytic service, some kind of image recognition or, you know, image pattern detection. Um, the 3rd 1 that we see now in hybrid cloud is their interest in having second copies of the data so that they can continue operations. Right? I think we all know that hospitals have an absolute uptime need. They need to be running 24 by seven. One of the things that's starting to happen is rather than a second physical data center. They established a second site in a public cloud on and then they stage their applications and we can help with HP. Move the data from on Prem to the public cloud to have this sort of cloud disaster recovery solution. >>So cloud here interesting topic. Do you see there that in healthcare in particular, that hospitals and healthcare organizations are getting less concerned about cloud from a security perspective and more open to it as an enabler of scale? >>I think what they've seen is that the cloud vendors have really matured in terms of providing all of the hardening that you want in terms of data, privacy and data security. You know, 10 years ago, if you looked at the cloud, you would have been extremely nervous about putting your data up there. But now all of the right principles are there in terms of multi tenancy. Ah, secure authentication based on very strong keys. Encryption of the data. One of the first healthcare customers we worked with was completely ready to do this. But then, of course, they said, the images that we store in the cloud must be infected. So we were able to work in collaboration with them, to develop encryption and actually use their own management service for encrypting those images so that our system or the HP servers don't store the keys for encryption. So I would say yes, It's a combination of the cloud's becoming super mature. Some of them are now certified and compliant for this use case on, the customers are just sort of. They passed the first step of trying it on there really to sort of go into these use cases a little bit more broadly. >>And so with that maturity of the technologies and the more the willingness on the part of the customer to try and tell me how to HP and scale a go to market together. >>Yeah, so what we do is we've really focused on specific market verticals, healthcare being one of them, but there are others. Financial services is where we've had other success with them. The way we do it is that we first start by building very specific swim lanes. In HP parlance, that helps aimed the Salesforce on where we can provide a great solution not only with Ring but perhaps with complementary software. Like I mentioned H p e store once for data protection backup. They have other partner solutions that we just love to work with. Vendors like Wicca. Iot has a wonderful fast file system that is now useful in biotech. Um, and they use a system like the ring for storing the data from their file system and the snapshots in that. But the way it's been organized is really by vertical and to go and have specialized kind of teams that understand how to sell that message. We jointly sell with them, so their teams and our teams Goto calls together. It's obviously been very virtual, but we've usually collaborated very extensively in the field working kind of air cover at the marketing level, and now one of the newer things with obviously the new way of working is lots of virtual events were not only doing a discover virtual experience, but we started doing more and more webinars, especially with HP and these other joint part >>and carries in this new virtual era where everything like, he said, This is how we're communicating now. And thankfully, we have the technology. Couple questions on that related to sales and engagement. One. What are some of the things that the sales team but the joint sales teams are hearing now from customers that might be changing requirements given the Koven situation? First >>question. Yeah, I think what one of the things we've certainly seen is that almost nothing has slowed down in these industries. I mean, we're focused on industries that seem to kind of think long term, right? I obviously healthcare. They're dealing with the current crisis as much as they can. But what we've seen is that there still planning, right, so they want to build their I T infrastructure. They're certainly thinking about how to leverage hybrid cloud. I think that's it becomes very clear that they see that as not only a way to offer new services in the future, but also to save money today. They're very interested in that right. How can they save on capital expenses and human talent is an example. I think those have been the themes for us. You know, we do have some exposure to industries that might have a little bit more, you know, sensitivity to the current climate, things like travel related services. But honestly, it's been minor. And what we're finding is that even those companies are still investing in this kind of technology, really to think about the 2 to 3 and you're being horizon and beyond. >>Have you done any any messaging, your positioning changes? I know you also in product marketing or corporate marketing that relate to customers. You know, everybody prepares for different types of disruptions or natural disasters. But now we have this invisible disruptor. Any change in your messaging, your positioning either at stability or with the partnership with HP that will help customers understand if you're not on this journey yet, why they need to be >>so, Yeah, we have looked at how we message the technology and the solution, especially in the light of the pandemic. You know, we stayed true to kind of a top level hybrid cloud data management message, but underneath the covers, what do customers care about? They care about a solution that you provide, but they also care about what they pay for it. Let's let's be honest. One of the things we've done very historically is to have a very simplified pricing model. It's based on usable protected capacity. So the user says I have a petabytes of data. That's the license fee. It's not based on how much disk they have or how many copies they want to create or how many sites they want to spread it across. So one of the things we want to do is make that a little bit more clear. Eso that's come out a bit more in our messaging in recent months. The second is that what we feel is that customers really want to know us as a company. They want to feel assured that were here, that will support them in all cases and that were available at all times. And what that's translated into is a more of a customer community focus. We are very much carrying about, you know, our customers. We see them invest in our systems today, but they also continue to expand. So we're doing things like new community portals where they can engage us in discourse. They can ask questions live. We're online. We have a lot of tips and knowledge available for them. So I would say that those are the two changes that we put in our messaging, both on pricing and on a community involved >>and where community involvement is concerned. It's even more critical now because we can't get together face to face and have conversations or meetings or conferences as chief product officer. Imagine that was a lot of what you were doing before. Tell me what it is from your perspective to engage with the community, to engage with sales and your partners during this TBD timeframe of we don't know when we're going to get back together. What do you find? It works really well for continuing continuing that engagement. >>Yeah, I think the keyword for me has just been transparency. You know, customers have always bonded to know, really, what's what's going on behind the scenes. How does the tech work? Right? What's the architecture? And I think now what we're seeing is there sort of a ramp up on that. For example, what's very important for community is for people to know what's coming right? They want to know the roadmaps. They want to be alerted to new things that are not only the next quarter, but in the next year. Right? So I think that's our focus here is to make this community a place where people can learn absolutely everything so that they can plan not only for the next year, but like we said there, they're thinking three years and beyond. So we're going to do our best to be totally transparent and be expressed as we can possibly be >>transparent entrusted. Paul, those are two great words to end on. We Thank you so much for joining us on the Cube, sharing what's new at stability and with the HP partnership. >>It's been a pleasure. Lisa. Thank you for your time. >>Likewise. For my guest, Paul Scott. Sally, I am Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube's coverage of HP Discover 2020. The virtual experience. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

(calm and chill electronic music) (moves into upbeat and energetic electronic music) >> Announcer: Live from Austin Texas, it's theCUBE. Covering DockerCon 2017. Brought to you by Docker and support from its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back. I'm Stu Miniman with my co-host and singer and, you know, lyricist everyone once in a while, Jim Kobielus. >> Partner in crime. >> And happy to bring back to the program Giorgio Regni, who is the CTO of Scality. So good to see you again. >> Hey. Hi Jim, Hi Stu. Very nice to see you again. >> So Giorgio, I interviewed you at Amazon Reinvent. So we talked about where you fit in the cloud environment. So here at DockerCon, you bring us up to space. You're a software defined storage company, where do containers and Docker fit into the offering that you have? >> Absolutely. So with software defined storage for the enterprise, one of our goal is to simplify storage operations because it's hard to actually build a verified scale system, how can we make it easier for our customers to use, right? And one other thing that containers give us is the ability to easily package your software and deploy it anywhere. For example, we have options. Where do you want your interface to be for storage? Should it be on the client side, should it be on the server side, should it be somewhere else? With container, it's very easy to automate. And one container can do a lot of things, right? So, it's pretty easy. >> Yeah. And talk about how scalability fits into your environment. My understanding is you work with Docker Swarm, do you also work with Kubernetes? Where does that fit in? >> So we talk about an announcement we made today. Just before I do that, just a quick. So the container, we follow the imagable container design. So when you have a container, you can kill it any point in time, right? And another container will take over. So there's nothing in our architecture that's a single point of failure. So with Docker, it's very easy to do. Which we did before, but Docker simplifies all these operation aspect for us. >> Alright. And so the announcement is, did you also do Kubernetes then, or is it just the Docker Swarm right now, or? >> Yeah, so there is a container automation war. We haven't picked a side yet. >> Okay. (Giorgio chuckles) >> Yeah, absolutely. Talk to us about your customers. How much is it a pull for them, asking you about containers? How much? Is it just something your building it to your architecture because it makes sense going forward? >> So we work with very large enterprises. They don't know what the other department is doing. So sometimes you talk to a storage team and they try to tell you we never deploy containers. But then if you talk inside a company, you will see that another group has deployed containers for the last two years in production, and they actually have a support contract with Docker, they have an enterprise deployment. And so you have to find out is there Docker experience. And 99% of the time, there is Docker experience. >> Stu: It reminds me of Linux a lot. >> Yes, exactly. >> You know, 15, 10 or 15 years ago, you talked to a big group, "Are you doing Linux?" and they got no, and they're like "Wait, "Bob's been doing Linux a bunch." And we are doing it and everything. (Giorgio chuckles) So yeah, absolutely. >> Giorgio: It is the same thing, yeah. >> And this been such a huge explosion of what's been happening. You know, I've talked to some of the vendors here that have been working with containers for, you know, eight, 10 years almost. But with Docker, it's really helped, ya know, just bring it to the masses. So, yeah, can you maybe speak to how its changing your environment as CTO, how it influences your vision of the future? >> Yeah, so as a CTO, it allows us to go from the development platform of a laptop of developers to via simple one server deployment for our open source versions, but can start on any VM or any one machine, down to a distributed system with thousands of servers and hundreds of petabytes. And it's all the same container. So the flexibility is huge. And for continuous delivery, continuous integration platforms that we have, being able to use the exact same code from a laptop workstation to the actual deployment improves quality a lot. >> Alright. And Giorgio, the keynotes today talked about a lot of open source things there, there's the Moby Project, there's Linux kit. You know, are you guys involved in any of the open source? How are your customers, you know, embracing open source these days? >> So Dockers, we're using a lot of software. We can not take everything and bring it to enterprise. You know it's not, we're a software company that sells products, so we don't actually also own platform. It's our customers. So we need to go a little bit slower. So Docker is faster than ever with these new features. But that means that official (mumbles) that was released last year, like Swarm, now is ready to be used in production for all customers. And so that brings me back to the announcement from today. So the last time we talked in Las Vegas our open source was new and we had $50,000. Now we have $250,000. So in less than six months I think its four month and a half we added $200,000. And one of our reasons for that is that it's so easy to use it with Docker. And then people in the community were telling us that they need to be deployed in a, you know, a (mumbles) fashion, so being able to lose a machine and continue having the storage working, which makes sense, but not at the scale of a wing. Not at a scale of our multi petabyte systems. So something in the middle. And so we tried to look at developing our own automation, our own fault tolerance, and we said "Wait a minute. Docker is doing that." They built Docker Swarm, that does exactly what we wanted to do. So can we use that? So our videos from today is you can actually deploy our storage system using Docker Swarm, so if you come online, it will automatically be fault tolerant. If you lose a machine, it will start from another machine. And it all works, load balance automatically. And with security as well because communication can be unencrypted. So it's all of these benefits. By just using Swarm, we don't have to code anything. So we'll follow up on that. >> Giorgio, Solomon talked about this morning. Docker will be where you want it to be. So you know, on premise, in the public cloud, around. You talk a little bit, you know, your software, the breath of support you have. We talked to you at AWS, think you guys support Azure. What's driving you to certain environments, what are your customers doing, and what is that breathe that you guys offer? >> So a lot of things that Solomon said resonate with our customers. So one things is that you don't want to be stuck with one platform. You want the liberty to be able to pick and choose and change. And so storage is very sticky, so if you have a petabyte somewhere, it's going to be hard to move. But what you can be sure is the next year, it's going to be two petabyte. So when the extension comes in, you want to be able to select your hardware vendor for private, but also for public. What about if you could decide the next four petabyte go on Google Cloud Compute and the next five petabyte go on Azure so that you're not stuck with any of them. And so what we are realizing, but first we need to talk about that, is the ability to deploy your SV service, so our objects, your service, and target within some instance multiple storage backend. And it can be local, so local volumes, drives on your machine, very simple stuff. Maybe even a NFS, ZFS mount point works as well. It can be public using AWS. And we're adding Azure and Google Cloud Compute. So the same S3 code base can actually give you different location, and the location can be hybrid, local, private, public, you name it. >> Another key focus that Docker talked about, especially in the open source community, is security. Can you can speak to how security fits into your environment? Anything in your announcement that enhances the security pieces? >> Yes. So there is a lot of key management to be done. So access keys, identification key, SSL keys. And each vendor is going to build their own. They're trying to think about their own ways to actually store this sensitive information. With Docker, we haven't done it yet, but what Solomon said, there wasn't any keys there. What about if you use Docker as your security identification provider, so it takes one shop for everything else? And this is something I am going to look at. We haven't implemented it yet, but I'm going to look at it. The other thing that was said, I think it was in it, but that is portability. So we developed our own identification engine called Volt, which actually implements via Amazon IM interface, so an identity and access management. So it's pretty standard. But if you use Volt, the same identification taken for local will work on AWS. It will also work on Azure and also work on Google Cloud. So as an IT admin, I can just use mine to deactivate, connect it to a security Volt. And if a user leaves a company I can just delete it from a directory and it will disappear from all the clouds in one big portable transparent way. So yeah, this is kind of the things we look at as well. >> Jim: With multi level access control and roll based. >> So groups, roll based-- >> The delegations and so forth? >> The delegation is in there as well. So it's a big bet. Last year we decided to implement IM, which nobody else has done. And it pays off a lot because a lot of our customers are banks, insurance companies, and they need that level of security. Alright? It's a big advantage. >> Now Giorgio, one of the big things that's been talked about for the last six months or so is how things like IoT are really going to drive edge computing. I think back to the early days of object storage and I am curious how that whole development fits into what you're doing and how you think about storage. >> So we're looking at IoT very closely. There's a lot of volumes, but with volumes arrived after the data has been crunched, you got some sort of consolidation, right? And the object storage is perfect for material. So lets say we daily start a VH with very precise granularity. Then it get compressed into some kind of time service data. And this keeps very well in object storage. For the edge storage itself, I don't think there is a solution today. And there's no standard as well. So I'm looking at this and seeing what was going to happen. But I think object storage are great for for storing all of the archive but not good for the real time IoT data. But I'm still looking into what standards are going on in the archives. >> You have federated object storage for the fog, ya know, and the IoT. >> It's both a database type workload and object storage, so it's fascinating. But there's no answer yet. I don't think so, unless you guys tell me you've seen it. (laughs) >> Jim: I'm not aware of it. >> Okay Giorgio, so you've got the announcement. What other things can you tell us Scality, what's going on this week? Have you had any customer conversations this week yet that have stood out to you? >> Yes, we have a few partners at DockerCon, so it's great to be able to meet them here. I'm also looking at automation. So Docker Swarm is one, Swarm kit, but there's also Kubernetes and Mesosphere. They are all here this week, so I'm going to talk to them. And HP, which is one of our partners, is here too, so we're going to talk about this as well. And I need to find some time to understand the security model we talked about. >> Alright, well Giorgio, we really appreciate all the updates here. Want to give you a final word on what's exciting you. You talked about some of the partner things, but anything else you would want people to take away from this show? >> Yes. So I think the hybrid model for storage makes a lot of sense because you don't want to be stuck to a provider. And I was just going to say that in a few months, so in June, we're going to make a big announcement. And that will show that with Scality, you can leverage any cloud and automatically like manage your data on multiple providers. And we're going to give a hint of that next week at NAB. Where I'll be presenting a large customer of some of the prototypes that we've been working on. >> Well Giorgio Regni, really appreciate you to talk to you again. We'll be back, wrapping up day one of Docker Con 2017. You're watching theCUBE. (calm and chill electronic music) >> Thanks for watching theCUBE.

>> Narrator: Live from Chicago, Illinois It's theCUBE covering VeeamOn 2018 Brought to you by Veeam. >> Dave: Welcome back to VeeamOn 2018. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the Noise. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with my cohost, Stu Miniman. This is our second year at VeeamOn, #VeeamOn. Alan Stern is here. He's the technical solutions architect at Cisco. Alan, thanks for coming to theCUBE. >> Alan: Great to be here. It's a real honor and privilege, so I'm excited. >> It's a great show. It's smallish. It's not as big as Cisco Live which will be at the next month but it's clean, it's focused. Let's start with your role at Cisco as a solutions architect. What's your focus? >> So my focus is really on three areas of technology. Data protection being one of them, software defined storage or object storage, and then the Hadoop ecosystem. And I work with our sales teams to help them understand how the technology is relevant to Cisco as a solutions partner, and also work with the partners to help them understand how Cisco-- the benefit of working with Cisco is advantageous to all of us in order to help our customers come to solutions that benefit their enterprise. So your job as a catalyst and a technical expert-- so you identify workloads, use cases, and figure out how can we take Cisco products and services and point them there and add the most value for customers. That's really your job. >> To some degree, yeah, I mean in a lot of these solutions, this is an area that our executive team has said, "Hey this is something we can go help our customers with" and then it's handed down to my team and my job is then to make it happen. Along with a lot of other people. >> So let's look at these. Data protection is obviously relevant at VeeamOn. What role does Cisco play in the data protection matrix? >> So Cisco provides an optimal platform for great partners like Veeam to land these backups. It's critical, it's funny we often talk about backup, and what we should be talking about is restore. Cause nobody backs up just for the sake of backing up. But how do I restore quickly, and having that backup on premise on an optimized platform where Cisco has done all of the integration work to make sure everything is going to work is critical to the customer's success. Because as we know maintenance windows and downtime are a thing of the past. They don't exist anymore. We live in an always-on enterprise and that's really where folks like Veeam are focused. >> For you younger people out there, we used to talk about planned downtime which is just-- what? What is that? Why would anybody plan for downtime? It's ridiculous. >> Stu: Alan, what if we can unpack that a little. I think back and the data center group, you and Cisco launched UCS, the memory that it had was really geared for virtualization and I could see why Veeam and Cisco would work well together because some unique architecture that's there. This is a few years ago now that UCS has been on the market, What's the differentiation and maybe bring us inside some of the engineering work that happened between Cisco and Veeam in some of these spaces. >> So we take our engineers and lock them in with Veeam engineers into a lab and they go in and deploy the solution, they turn all the various nerd knobs to get the platform optimized. Primarily we talk about our S3260 which in a 4U space holds about 672 terabytes of storage and they optimize it and then publish a document that goes with it. We call them Cisco-validated designs. And these designs allow the customer to deploy the solution without having to go through the hit-or-miss of "what happens when I turn "this nerd knob or that nerd knob, "alter this network configuration or that one" and to get the best performance in the shortest possible time. >> Those CVDs are critical, but field knows them, they trust them, can you speak a bit to -- the presence that you have having Veeam in your pricebook, what that means, to kind of take that out to the broad Cisco ecosystem. Yeah, and it's more than just having it on the pricelist. It's the integrated support, so that the customer knows that if there's a problem they're not going to end up in a finger-pointing solution of Cisco saying "Call Veeam" or Veeam saying "Call Cisco." They have a solution and we're in lockstep so that there aren't going to be the problems. The CVD insures that problems are kept to a minimum. Cisco has fantastic support, Veeam has great support. They were talking this morning about the net promoter score being 73 which is unbelievably good. So that in the event that there is a problem, they know they're going to get to resolution incredibly quickly and they're going to get their environment restored as quickly as possible. >> So when I think about the three areas of your focus, data protection, object storage, and Hadoop ecosystem, there's definitely intersection amongst those. We talked a little bit about data protection. The object store piece, the whole software defined, is a trend that's taking off, we were talking earlier about some of the trade-offs of software defined. Bill Philbin was saying, "Well if I go out "and put it together myself when there's "a problem, I've got to fix it myself." So there's a trade-off there. I don't know if you watch Silicon Valley, Stu but the box. Sometimes it's nice to have an appliance. What are you seeing in terms of the trends toward software defined-- What's driving that? Is it choice, is it flexibility? What are the trade-offs? >> It's a couple of things. The biggest thing that's driving it is just the explosion of data. Data that's born in the cloud-- It's probably pretty good to store with one of the cloud providers. But data that's born in your data center or that is extremely proprietary and sensitive; customers are increasingly looking to say "You know what, I want to keep that onsite." and that's in addition to the regulatory issues that we're going to see with GDPR and others. So they want to keep it on site, but they like the idea of the ease of use of cloud and the nature of object storage and the cost-- the cost model for object storage is great. I take a X86 based server like UCS and I overlay a storage software that's going to give me that resiliency through erasure coding or replication. And now I've got a cost model that looks a lot like the cloud, but it's on premise forming. So that also allows me, I'm putting archival data there, I can store it cheaply and bring it back quickly. Because the one challenge with the cloud is my connectivity to my cloud provider is finite. >> Just a quick follow-up on that, I know Scality's a partner or there are other options for optic storage. >> Sure, both Scality and Swiftstack are on our global pricelist like Veeam. We also work with some other folks like IBM cloud object store, Cohesity, which sort of fits in between space, as well as, we're doing some initial work with Cloudy. >> Think about the hadoop ecosystem. That brings in new challenges, I mean A lot of Hadoop is basically software defined file system. And it's also in a distributed-- The idea of bringing five megabytes of computing to a petabyte of data. So it's leave the data where it is. So that brings new challenges with regard to architectures, protecting that data, talk about that a little bit. >> The issue with Hadoop is data has gravity. Moving lots of data around is really inefficient. That's where MapReduce was born. The data is already there. I don't have to move it across the network to process it. Data protection was sort of an afterthought. You do have replication of data, but that was really for locality, not so much for data protection. >> Or recovery to your earlier. >> But even with all of that the network is still critical. Without sounding like an advertisement for Cisco, we're really the only server provider that thought about the network as we're building the servers and as we're designing the entire ecosystem. Nobody else can do that. Nobody has that expertise. And a number of hardware features that we have in the products give us that advantage like the Cisco virtual interface card. >> That's a true point, you managed your heritage so of course that's where you started. So what advantage does that give you and one of the things we talked about in theCUBE a lot is, Flash changed everything. We used to just use spinning disks to persist and we certainly didn't it for performance. Did unnatural acts to try to get performance going. So, in many respects, Flash exposed some of the challenges with network performance. So how has that affected the market, technology, and Cisco's business? >> We're in this period of shift on Flash. Because if you think about it, at the end of the day, the Flash is still sitting on a PCI bus, it's probably ISCSI with a SATA interface. >> You got the horrible storage stack >> We move the bottleneck away from the disk drive itself, now to the bus. Now we're going to solve a lot of that with NBME and then it will come to the network. But the network's already ahead of that. We're looking at-- We have 10 gig, 40 gig, we're going to see 100 gig ethernet. So we're in pretty good shape in order to survive and really flourish as the storage improves the performance. We know with compute, the bottlenecks just move. You know, I think this morning you said Whack-a-Mole. >> Thinking about the next progression in the Whack-a-Mole, what is the next bottleneck? Is it the latency to the cloud, is it-- I mean if it's not the network, because it sounds like you're prepared for NVMe. Is it getting outside the data center? Is the next bottleneck? >> I think that's always going to be the bottleneck I use analogies like roads. We think about a roadway inside my network it's sort of the superhighway but then once I go off, I'm on a connector road. And gigabit ethernet, multi-gigabit, some folks will have fiber in the metropolitan area, but at some point they're going to hit that bottleneck. And so it becomes increasingly important to manage the data properly so that you're not moving the data around unnecessarily. >> I wonder if we could talk a little bit about the cloud here. at the Veeam show we're talking about beyond just the data center virtualization. Talking about a multi-cloud world. I had the opportunity to go to Cisco Live Barcelona, interviewed Rowan Trollope, he talked heavily about Cisco's software strategy, living in that multi-cloud world, maybe help connect the dots for us as to how Cisco and Veeam go beyond the data center and where Cisco lives beyond that. >> So beyond the data center, we really believe the multi-cloud world is where it's going to happen. Whether the cloud is on-prem, off-prem, multiple providers, software, and servers, all of those things and both Cisco and Veeam are committed to giving that consistent performance, availability, security. Veeam, obviously, is an expert at the data management, data availability. Cisco, we're going to provide some application availability and performance through apt dynamics, we have our security portfolio in order to protect the data in the cloud and then the virtualized networking features that are there to again insure that the network policy is consistent whether you're on prem in Cloud A, Cloud B, or the Cloud yet to be developed. >> So we'll come back backup, which is the first of the three that we talked about. What's Cisco's point of view, your point of view, on how that's evolving from one -- think about Veeam started out as a virtualization specialist generally but specifically for Veeamware. Now we've got messaging around the digital economy, multi-cloud, hyperavailability, etc. What does that mean from a customer's standpoint? How is it evolving? >> Well, it's evolving in ways we couldn't have imagined. Everything is connected now, and that data -- that's the value. The data that the customer has is their crown jewels. What Veeam has done really well is yeah they start off as a small virtualization player, but as they've seen the market grow and evolve, they've made adaptations to really be able to expand and stay with their customers as their needs have morphed and changed. And in many ways, similar to Cisco. We didn't start in the server space, we saw an opportunity to do something that nobody else was doing, to make sure the network was robust and well-built and the system was well managed, and that's when we entered the space. So I think it's two companies that understand consistency is critical and availability is critical. And we both evolved with our customers as the markets and demands of the business had changed. >> Last question: What are some of the biggest challenges you're working on with customers that get you excited, that you say, "Alright I'm really going to "attack this one" Give me some color on that. >> I think the biggest challenge we're seeing today is a lot of customers are-- their infrastructure because of budgets, hasn't been able to evolve fast enough and they have legacy platforms and legacy software on those platforms in terms of availability that they've got to make the migration to. So helping them determine which platform is going to be best, which platform is going to let them scale the way they need, and then which software package is going to give them all the tools and features that they need. That's exciting because you're making sure that that company is going to be around tomorrow. >> Well that's a great point. And we've been talking all day Stu, about some of the research that we've done at WikiBon the day before, quantified in a Fortune1000, they leave between one and a half and 2 billion dollars over a three to four year period on the table because of poorly architected, or non-modern infrastructure and poorly architected availability, and backup and recovery procedures. It's a hard problem because you can't just snap your fingers and modernize and the CFO's going "How we going to pay for this" We've got this risk, this threat, We're sort of losing soft dollars, but at the end of the day they actually come down they do affect the bottom line. Do you agree that-- I said last question I lied. Do you agree that CXOs are becoming aware of this problem and ideally will start to fund it? >> Absolutely, because we talked earlier about the days of planned downtime are gone. Let a CXO have a minute of downtime and look at the amount of lost revenue that he sees and suddenly you've got his/her attention. >> Great point. Alan we've got to run. Thanks very much for coming to theCUBE >> My pleasure. Great to meet you both. >> Thanks for watching everybody. This is theCUBE live from VeeamON 2018 in Chicago. We'll be right back.

>> Hi I'm Peter Burris. Welcome to another Wikibon Action Item. (upbeat music) We're once again broadcasting from theCube's beautiful Palo Alto, California studio. I'm joined here in the studio by George Gilbert and David Floyer. And then remotely, we have Jim Kobielus, David Vellante, Neil Raden and Ralph Finos. Hi guys. >> Hey. >> Hi >> How you all doing? >> This is a great, great group of people to talk about the topic we're going to talk about, guys. We're going to talk about the notion of de-risking digital business. Now, the reason why this becomes interesting is, the Wikibon perspective for quite some time has been that the difference between business and digital business is the role that data assets play in a digital business. Now, if you think about what that means. Every business institutionalizes its work around what it regards as its most important assets. A bottling company, for example, organizes around the bottling plant. A financial services company organizes around the regulatory impacts or limitations on how they share information and what is regarded as fair use of data and other resources, and assets. The same thing exists in a digital business. There's a difference between, say, Sears and Walmart. Walmart mades use of data differently than Sears. And that specific assets that are employed and had a significant impact on how the retail business was structured. Along comes Amazon, which is even deeper in the use of data as a basis for how it conducts its business and Amazon is institutionalizing work in quite different ways and has been incredibly successful. We could go on and on and on with a number of different examples of this, and we'll get into that. But what it means ultimately is that the tie between data and what is regarded as valuable in the business is becoming increasingly clear, even if it's not perfect. And so traditional approaches to de-risking data, through backup and restore, now needs to be re-thought so that it's not just de-risking the data, it's de-risking the data assets. And, since those data assets are so central to the business operations of many of these digital businesses, what it means to de-risk the whole business. So, David Vellante, give us a starting point. How should folks think about this different approach to envisioning business? And digital business, and the notion of risk? >> Okay thanks Peter, I mean I agree with a lot of what you just said and I want to pick up on that. I see the future of digital business as really built around data sort of agreeing with you, building on what you just said. Really where organizations are putting data at the core and increasingly I believe that organizations that have traditionally relied on human expertise as the primary differentiator, will be disrupted by companies where data is the fundamental value driver and I think there are some examples of that and I'm sure we'll talk about it. And in this new world humans have expertise that leverage the organization's data model and create value from that data with augmented machine intelligence. I'm not crazy about the term artificial intelligence. And you hear a lot about data-driven companies and I think such companies are going to have a technology foundation that is increasingly described as autonomous, aware, anticipatory, and importantly in the context of today's discussion, self-healing. So able to withstand failures and recover very quickly. So de-risking a digital business is going to require new ways of thinking about data protection and security and privacy. Specifically as it relates to data protection, I think it's going to be a fundamental component of the so-called data-driven company's technology fabric. This can be designed into applications, into data stores, into file systems, into middleware, and into infrastructure, as code. And many technology companies are going to try to attack this problem from a lot of different angles. Trying to infuse machine intelligence into the hardware, software and automated processes. And the premise is that meaty companies will architect their technology foundations, not as a set of remote cloud services that they're calling, but rather as a ubiquitous set of functional capabilities that largely mimic a range of human activities. Including storing, backing up, and virtually instantaneous recovery from failure. >> So let me build on that. So what you're kind of saying if I can summarize, and we'll get into whether or not it's human expertise or some other approach or notion of business. But you're saying that increasingly patterns in the data are going to have absolute consequential impacts on how a business ultimately behaves. We got that right? >> Yeah absolutely. And how you construct that data model, and provide access to the data model, is going to be a fundamental determinant of success. >> Neil Raden, does that mean that people are no longer important? >> Well no, no I wouldn't say that at all. I'm talking with the head of a medical school a couple of weeks ago, and he said something that really resonated. He said that there're as many doctors who graduated at the bottom of their class as the top of their class. And I think that's true of organizations too. You know what, 20 years ago I had the privilege of interviewing Peter Drucker for an hour and he foresaw this, 20 years ago, he said that people who run companies have traditionally had IT departments that provided operational data but they needed to start to figure out how to get value from that data and not only get value from that data but get value from data outside the company, not just internal data. So he kind of saw this big data thing happening 20 years ago. Unfortunately, he had a prejudice for senior executives. You know, he never really thought about any other people in an organization except the highest people. And I think what we're talking about here is really the whole organization. I think that, I have some concerns about the ability of organizations to really implement this without a lot of fumbles. I mean it's fine to talk about the five digital giants but there's a lot of companies out there that, you know the bar isn't really that high for them to stay in business. And they just seem to get along. And I think if we're going to de-risk we really need to help companies understand the whole process of transformation, not just the technology. >> Well, take us through it. What is this process of transformation? That includes the role of technology but is bigger than the role of technology. >> Well, it's like anything else, right. There has to be communication, there has to be some element of control, there has to be a lot of flexibility and most importantly I think there has to be acceptability by the people who are going to be affected by it, that is the right thing to do. And I would say you start with assumptions, I call it assumption analysis, in other words let's all get together and figure out what our assumptions are, and see if we can't line em up. Typically IT is not good at this. So I think it's going to require the help of a lot of practitioners who can guide them. >> So Dave Vellante, reconcile one point that you made I want to come back to this notion of how we're moving from businesses built on expertise and people to businesses built on expertise resident as patterns in the data, or data models. Why is it that the most valuable companies in the world seem to be the ones that have the most real hardcore data scientists. Isn't that expertise and people? >> Yeah it is, and I think it's worth pointing out. Look, the stock market is volatile, but right now the top-five companies: Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook and Microsoft, in terms of market cap, account for about $3.5 trillion and there's a big distance between them, and they've clearly surpassed the big banks and the oil companies. Now again, that could change, but I believe that it's because they are data-driven. So called data-driven. Does that mean they don't need humans? No, but human expertise surrounds the data as opposed to most companies, human expertise is at the center and the data lives in silos and I think it's very hard to protect data, and leverage data, that lives in silos. >> Yes, so here's where I'll take exception to that, Dave. And I want to get everybody to build on top of this just very quickly. I think that human expertise has surrounded, in other businesses, the buildings. Or, the bottling plant. Or, the wealth management. Or, the platoon. So I think that the organization of assets has always been the determining factor of how a business behaves and we institutionalized work, in other words where we put people, based on the business' understanding of assets. Do you disagree with that? Is that, are we wrong in that regard? I think data scientists are an example of reinstitutionalizing work around a very core asset in this case, data. >> Yeah, you're saying that the most valuable asset is shifting from some of those physical assets, the bottling plant et cetera, to data. >> Yeah we are, we are. Absolutely. Alright, David Foyer. >> Neil: I'd like to come in. >> Panelist: I agree with that too. >> Okay, go ahead Neil. >> I'd like to give an example from the news. Cigna's acquisition of Express Scripts for $67 billion. Who the hell is Cigna, right? Connecticut General is just a sleepy life insurance company and INA was a second-tier property and casualty company. They merged a long time ago, they got into health insurance and suddenly, who's Express Scripts? I mean that's a company that nobody ever even heard of. They're a pharmacy benefit manager, what is that? They're an information management company, period. That's all they do. >> David Foyer, what does this mean from a technology standpoint? >> So I wanted to to emphasize one thing that evolution has always taught us. That you have to be able to come from where you are. You have to be able to evolve from where you are and take the assets that you have. And the assets that people have are their current systems of records, other things like that. They must be able to evolve into the future to better utilize what those systems are. And the other thing I would like to say-- >> Let me give you an example just to interrupt you, because this is a very important point. One of the primary reasons why the telecommunications companies, whom so many people believed, analysts believed, had this fundamental advantage, because so much information's flowing through them is when you're writing assets off for 30 years, that kind of locks you into an operational mode, doesn't it? >> Exactly. And the other thing I want to emphasize is that the most important thing is sources of data not the data itself. So for example, real-time data is very very important. So what is your source of your real-time data? If you've given that away to Google or your IOT vendor you have made a fundamental strategic mistake. So understanding the sources of data, making sure that you have access to that data, is going to enable you to be able to build the sort of processes and data digitalization. >> So let's turn that concept into kind of a Geoffrey Moore kind of strategy bromide. At the end of the day you look at your value proposition and then what activities are central to that value proposition and what data is thrown off by those activities and what data's required by those activities. >> Right, both internal-- >> We got that right? >> Yeah. Both internal and external data. What are those sources that you require? Yes, that's exactly right. And then you need to put together a plan which takes you from where you are, as the sources of data and then focuses on how you can use that data to either improve revenue or to reduce costs, or a combination of those two things, as a series of specific exercises. And in particular, using that data to automate in real-time as much as possible. That to me is the fundamental requirement to actually be able to do this and make money from it. If you look at every example, it's all real-time. It's real-time bidding at Google, it's real-time allocation of resources by Uber. That is where people need to focus on. So it's those steps, practical steps, that organizations need to take that I think we should be giving a lot of focus on. >> You mention Uber. David Vellante, we're just not talking about the, once again, talking about the Uberization of things, are we? Or is that what we mean here? So, what we'll do is we'll turn the conversation very quickly over to you George. And there are existing today a number of different domains where we're starting to see a new emphasis on how we start pricing some of this risk. Because when we think about de-risking as it relates to data give us an example of one. >> Well we were talking earlier, in financial services risk itself is priced just the way time is priced in terms of what premium you'll pay in terms of interest rates. But there's also something that's softer that's come into much more widely-held consciousness recently which is reputational risk. Which is different from operational risk. Reputational risk is about, are you a trusted steward for data? Some of that could be personal information and a use case that's very prominent now with the European GDPR regulation is, you know, if I ask you as a consumer or an individual to erase my data, can you say with extreme confidence that you have? That's just one example. >> Well I'll give you a specific number on that. We've mentioned it here on Action Item before. I had a conversation with a Chief Privacy Officer a few months ago who told me that they had priced out what the fines to Equifax would have been had the problem occurred after GDPR fines were enacted. It was $160 billion, was the estimate. There's not a lot of companies on the planet that could deal with $160 billion liability. Like that. >> Okay, so we have a price now that might have been kind of, sort of mushy before. And the notion of trust hasn't really changed over time what's changed is the technical implementations that support it. And in the old world with systems of record we basically collected from our operational applications as much data as we could put it in the data warehouse and it's data marked satellites. And we try to govern it within that perimeter. But now we know that data basically originates and goes just about anywhere. There's no well-defined perimeter. It's much more porous, far more distributed. You might think of it as a distributed data fabric and the only way you can be a trusted steward of that is if you now, across the silos, without trying to centralize all the data that's in silos or across them, you can enforce, who's allowed to access it, what they're allowed to do, audit who's done what to what type of data, when and where? And then there's a variety of approaches. Just to pick two, one is where it's discovery-oriented to figure out what's going on with the data estate. Using machine learning this is, Alation is an example. And then there's another example, which is where you try and get everyone to plug into what's essentially a new system catalog. That's not in a in a deviant mesh but that acts like the fabric for your data fabric, deviant mesh. >> That's an example of another, one of the properties of looking at coming at this. But when we think, Dave Vellante coming back to you for a second. When we think about the conversation there's been a lot of presumption or a lot of bromide. Analysts like to talk about, don't get Uberized. We're not just talking about getting Uberized. We're talking about something a little bit different aren't we? >> Well yeah, absolutely. I think Uber's going to get Uberized, personally. But I think there's a lot of evidence, I mentioned the big five, but if you look at Spotify, Waze, AirbnB, yes Uber, yes Twitter, Netflix, Bitcoin is an example, 23andme. These are all examples of companies that, I'll go back to what I said before, are putting data at the core and building humans expertise around that core to leverage that expertise. And I think it's easy to sit back, for some companies to sit back and say, "Well I'm going to wait and see what happens." But to me anyway, there's a big gap between kind of the haves and the have-nots. And I think that, that gap is around applying machine intelligence to data and applying cloud economics. Zero marginal economics and API economy. An always-on sort of mentality, et cetera et cetera. And that's what the economy, in my view anyway, is going to look like in the future. >> So let me put out a challenge, Jim I'm going to come to you in a second, very quickly on some of the things that start looking like data assets. But today, when we talk about data protection we're talking about simply a whole bunch of applications and a whole bunch of devices. Just spinning that data off, so we have it at a third site. And then we can, and it takes to someone in real-time, and then if there's a catastrophe or we have, you know, large or small, being able to restore it often in hours or days. So we're talking about an improvement on RPO and RTO but when we talk about data assets, and I'm going to come to you in a second with that David Floyer, but when we talk about data assets, we're talking about, not only the data, the bits. We're talking about the relationships and the organization, and the metadata, as being a key element of that. So David, I'm sorry Jim Kobielus, just really quickly, thirty seconds. Models, what do they look like? What are the new nature of some of these assets look like? >> Well the new nature of these assets are the machine learning models that are driving so many business processes right now. And so really the core assets there are the data obviously from which they are developed, and also from which they are trained. But also very much the knowledge of the data scientists and engineers who build and tune this stuff. And so really, what you need to do is, you need to protect that knowledge and grow that knowledge base of data science professionals in your organization, in a way that builds on it. And hopefully you keep the smartest people in house. And they can encode more of their knowledge in automated programs to manage the entire pipeline of development. >> We're not talking about files. We're not even talking about databases, are we David Floyer? We're talking about something different. Algorithms and models are today's technology's really really set up to do a good job of protecting the full organization of those data assets. >> I would say that they're not even being thought about yet. And going back on what Jim was saying, Those data scientists are the only people who understand that in the same way as in the year 2000, the COBOL programmers were the only people who understood what was going on inside those applications. And we as an industry have to allow organizations to be able to protect the assets inside their applications and use AI if you like to actually understand what is in those applications and how are they working? And I think that's an incredibly important de-risking is ensuring that you're not dependent on a few experts who could leave at any moment, in the same way as COBOL programmers could have left. >> But it's not just the data, and it's not just the metadata, it really is the data structure. >> It is the model. Just the whole way that this has been put together and the reason why. And the ability to continue to upgrade that and change that over time. So those assets are incredibly important but at the moment there is no way that you can, there isn't technology available for you to actually protect those assets. >> So if I combine what you just said with what Neil Raden was talking about, David Vallante's put forward a good vision of what's required. Neil Raden's made the observation that this is going to be much more than technology. There's a lot of change, not change management at a low level inside the IT, but business change and the technology companies also have to step up and be able to support this. We're seeing this, we're seeing a number of different vendor types start to enter into this space. Certainly storage guys, Dylon Sears talking about doing a better job of data protection we're seeing middleware companies, TIBCO and DISCO, talk about doing this differently. We're seeing file systems, Scality, WekaIO talk about doing this differently. Backup and restore companies, Veeam, Veritas. I mean, everybody's looking at this and they're all coming at it. Just really quickly David, where's the inside track at this point? >> For me it is so much whitespace as to be unbelievable. >> So nobody has an inside track yet. >> Nobody has an inside track. Just to start with a few things. It's clear that you should keep data where it is. The cost of moving data around an organization from inside to out, is crazy. >> So companies that keep data in place, or technologies to keep data in place, are going to have an advantage. >> Much, much, much greater advantage. Sure, there must be backups somewhere. But you need to keep the working copies of data where they are because it's the real-time access, usually that's important. So if it originates in the cloud, keep it in the cloud. If it originates in a data-provider, on another cloud, that's where you should keep it. If it originates on your premise, keep it where it originated. >> Unless you need to combine it. But that's a new origination point. >> Then you're taking subsets of that data and then combining that up for itself. So that would be my first point. So organizations are going to need to put together what George was talking about, this metadata of all the data, how it interconnects, how it's being used. The flow of data through the organization, it's amazing to me that when you go to an IT shop they cannot define for you how the data flows through that data center or that organization. That's the requirement that you have to have and AI is going to be part of that solution, of looking at all of the applications and the data and telling you where it's going and how it's working together. >> So the second thing would be companies that are able to build or conceive of networks as data. Will also have an advantage. And I think I'd add a third one. Companies that demonstrate perennial observations, a real understanding of the unbelievable change that's required you can't just say, oh Facebook wants this therefore everybody's going to want it. There's going to be a lot of push marketing that goes on at the technology side. Alright so let's get to some Action Items. David Vellante, I'll start with you. Action Item. >> Well the future's going to be one where systems see, they talk, they sense, they recognize, they control, they optimize. It may be tempting to say, you know what I'm going to wait, I'm going to sit back and wait to figure out how I'm going to close that machine intelligence gap. I think that's a mistake. I think you have to start now, and you have to start with your data model. >> George Gilbert, Action Item. >> I think you have to keep in mind the guardrails related to governance, and trust, when you're building applications on the new data fabric. And you can take the approach of a platform-oriented one where you're plugging into an API, like Apache Atlas, that Hortonworks is driving, or a discovery-oriented one as David was talking about which would be something like Alation, using machine learning. But if, let's say the use case starts out as an IOT, edge analytics and cloud inferencing, that data science pipeline itself has to now be part of this fabric. Including the output of the design time. Meaning the models themselves, so they can be managed. >> Excellent. Jim Kobielus, you've been pretty quiet but I know you've got a lot to offer. Action Item, Jim. >> I'll be very brief. What you need to do is protect your data science knowledge base. That's the way to de-risk this entire process. And that involves more than just a data catalog. You need a data science expertise registry within your distributed value chain. And you need to manage that as a very human asset that needs to grow. That is your number one asset going forward. >> Ralph Finos, you've also been pretty quiet. Action Item, Ralph. >> Yeah, I think you've got to be careful about what you're trying to get done. Whether it's, it depends on your industry, whether it's finance or whether it's the entertainment business, there are different requirements about data in those different environments. And you need to be cautious about that and you need leadership on the executive business side of things. The last thing in the world you want to do is depend on data scientists to figure this stuff out. >> And I'll give you the second to last answer or Action Item. Neil Raden, Action Item. >> I think there's been a lot of progress lately in creating tools for data scientists to be more efficient and they need to be, because the big digital giants are draining them from other companies. So that's very encouraging. But in general I think becoming a data-driven, a digital transformation company for most companies, is a big job and I think they need to it in piece parts because if they try to do it all at once they're going to be in trouble. >> Alright, so that's great conversation guys. Oh, David Floyer, Action Item. David's looking at me saying, ah what about me? David Floyer, Action Item. >> (laughing) So my Action Item comes from an Irish proverb. Which if you ask for directions they will always answer you, "I wouldn't start from here." So the Action Item that I have is, if somebody is coming in saying you have to re-do all of your applications and re-write them from scratch, and start in a completely different direction, that is going to be a 20-year job and you're not going to ever get it done. So you have to start from what you have. The digital assets that you have, and you have to focus on improving those with additional applications, additional data using that as the foundation for how you build that business with a clear long-term view. And if you look at some of the examples that were given early, particularly in the insurance industries, that's what they did. >> Thank you very much guys. So, let's do an overall Action Item. We've been talking today about the challenges of de-risking digital business which ties directly to the overall understanding of the role of data assets play in businesses and the technology's ability to move from just protecting data, restoring data, to actually restoring the relationships in the data, the structures of the data and very importantly the models that are resident in the data. This is going to be a significant journey. There's clear evidence that this is driving a new valuation within the business. Folks talk about data as the new oil. We don't necessarily see things that way because data, quite frankly, is a very very different kind of asset. The cost could be shared because it doesn't suffer the same limits on scarcity. So as a consequence, what has to happen is, you have to start with where you are. What is your current value proposition? And what data do you have in support of that value proposition? And then whiteboard it, clean slate it and say, what data would we like to have in support of the activities that we perform? Figure out what those gaps are. Find ways to get access to that data through piecemeal, piece-part investments. That provide a roadmap of priorities looking forward. Out of that will come a better understanding of the fundamental data assets that are being created. New models of how you engage customers. New models of how operations works in the shop floor. New models of how financial services are being employed and utilized. And use that as a basis for then starting to put forward plans for bringing technologies in, that are capable of not just supporting the data and protecting the data but protecting the overall organization of data in the form of these models, in the form of these relationships, so that the business can, as it creates these, as it throws off these new assets, treat them as the special resource that the business requires. Once that is in place, we'll start seeing businesses more successfully reorganize, reinstitutionalize the work around data, and it won't just be the big technology companies who have, who people call digital native, that are well down this path. I want to thank George Gilbert, David Floyer here in the studio with me. David Vellante, Ralph Finos, Neil Raden and Jim Kobelius on the phone. Thanks very much guys. Great conversation. And that's been another Wikibon Action Item. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Veritas Vision 2017. Brought to you by Veritas. (peppy digital music) >> Veritas Vision 2017 everybody. We're here at The Aria Hotel. This is day two of theCUBE's coverage of Vtas, #VtasVision, and this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with Stuart Miniman who is my cohost for the week. Stu, we heard Richard Branson this morning. The world-renowned entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson came up from the British Virgin Islands where he lives. He lives in the Caribbean. And evidently he was holed out during the hurricane in his wine cellar, but he was able to make it up here for the keynote. We saw on Twitter, so, great keynote, we'll talk about that a little bit. We saw on Twitter that he actually stopped by the Hitachi event, Hitachi NEXT for women in tech, a little mini event that they had over there. So, pretty cool guy. Some of the takeaways: he talked a lot about- well, first of all, welcome to day two. >> Thanks, Dave. Yeah, and people are pretty excited that sometimes they bring in those marquee guests, someone that's going to get everybody to say, "Okay, wait, it's day two. "I want to get up early, get in the groove." Some really interesting topics, I mean talking about, thinking about the community at large, one of the things I loved he talked about. I've got all of these, I've got hotels, I've got different things. We draw a circle around it. Think about the community, think about the schools that are there, think about if there's people that don't have homes. All these things to, giving back to the community, he says we can all do our piece there, and talking about sustainable business. >> As far as, I mean we do a lot of these, as you know, and as far as the keynote speakers go, I thought he was one of the better ones. Certainly one of the bigger names. Some of the ones that we've seen in the past that I think are comparable, Bill Clinton at Dell World 2012 was pretty happening. >> There's a reason that Bill Clinton is known as the orator that he is. >> Yeah, so he was quite good. And then Robert Gates, both at ServiceNow and Nutanics, Condi Rice at Nutanics, both very impressive. Malcolm Gladwell, who's been on theCUBE and Nate Silver, who's also been on theCUBE, again, very impressive. Thomas Friedman we've seen at the IBM shows. The author, the guy who wrote the Jobs book was very very strong, come on, help me. >> Oh, yeah, Walter Isaacson. >> Walter Isaacson was at Tableau, so you've seen some- >> Yeah, I've seen Elon Musk also at the Dell show. >> Oh, I didn't see Elon, okay. >> Yeah, I think that was the year you didn't come. >> So I say Branson, from the ones I've seen, I don't know how he compared to Musk, was probably the best I think I've ever seen. Very inspirational, talking about the disaster. They had really well-thought-out and well-produced videos that he sort of laid in. The first one was sort of a commercial for Richard Branson and who he was and how he's, his passion for changing the world, which is so genuine. And then a lot of stuff on the disaster in the British Virgin Islands, the total devastation. And then he sort of went into his passion for entrepreneurs, and what he sees as an entrepreneur is he sort of defined it as somebody who wants to make the world a better place, innovations, disruptive innovations to make the world a better place. And then had a sort of interesting Q&A session with Lynn Lucas. >> Yeah, and one of the lines he said, people, you don't go out with the idea that, "I'm going to be a businessman." It's, "I want to go out, I want to build something, "I want to create something." I love one of the early anecdotes that he said when he was in school, and he had, what was it, a newsletter or something he was writing against the Vietnam War, and the school said, "Well, you can either stay in school, "or you can keep doing your thing." He said, "Well, that choice is easy, buh-bye." And when he was leaving, they said, "Well, you're either going to be, end up in jail or be a millionaire, we're not sure." And he said, "Well, what do ya know, I ended up doing both." (both laughing) >> So he is quite a character, and just very understated, but he's got this aura that allows him to be understated and still appear as this sort of mega-personality. He talked about, actually some of the interesting things he said about rebuilding after Irma, obviously you got to build stronger homes, and he really sort of pounded the reducing the reliance on fossil fuels, and can't be the same old, same old, basically calling for a Marshall Plan for the Caribbean. One of the things that struck me, and it's a tech audience, generally a more liberal audience, he got some fond applause for that, but he said, "You guys are about data, you don't just ignore data." And one of the data points that he threw out was that the Atlantic Ocean at some points during Irma was 86 degrees, which is quite astounding. So, he's basically saying, "Time to make a commitment "to not retreat from the Paris Agreement." And then he also talked about, from an entrepreneurial standpoint and building a company that taking note of the little things, he said, makes a big difference. And talking about open cultures, letting people work from home, letting people take unpaid sabbaticals, he did say unpaid. And then he touted his new book, Finding My Virginity, which is the sequel to Losing My Virginity. So it was all very good. Some of the things to be successful: you need to learn to learn, you need to listen, sort of an age-old bromide, but somehow it seemed to have more impact coming from Branson. And then, actually then Lucas asked one of the questions that I put forth, was what's his relationship with Musk and Bezos? And he said he actually is very quite friendly with Elon, and of course they are sort of birds of a feather, all three of them, with the rocket ships. And he said, "We don't talk much about that, "we just sort of-" specifically in reference to Bezos. But overall, I thought it was very strong. >> Yeah Dave, what was the line I think he said? "You want to be friends with your competitors "but fight hard against them all day, "go drinking with them at night." >> Right, fight like crazy during the day, right. So, that was sort of the setup, and again, I thought Lynn Lucas did a very good job. He's, I guess in one respect he's an easy interview 'cause he's such a- we interview these dynamic figures, they just sort of talk and they're good. But she kept the conversation going and asked some good questions and wasn't intimidated, which you can be sometimes by those big personalities. So I thought that was all good. And then we turned into- which I was also surprised and appreciative that they put Branson on first. A lot of companies would've held him to the end. >> Stu: Right. >> Said, "Alright, let's get everybody in the room "and we'll force them to listen to our product stuff, "and then we can get the highlight, the headliner." Veritas chose to do it differently. Now, maybe it was a scheduling thing, I don't know. But that was kind of cool. Go right to where the action is. You're not coming here to watch 60 Minutes, you want to see the headline show right away, and that's what they did, so from a content standpoint I was appreciative of that. >> Yeah, absolutely. And then, of course, they brought on David Noy, who we're going to have on in a little while, and went through, really, the updates. So really it's the expansion, Dave, of their software-defined storage, the family of products called InfoScale. Yesterday we talked a bit about the Veritas HyperScale, so that is, they've got the HyperScale for OpenStack, they've got the HyperScale for containers, and then filling out the product line is the Veritas Access, which is really their scale-out NAS solution, including, they did one of the classic unveils of Veritas Software Company. It was a little odd for me to be like, "Here's an appliance "for Veritas Bezel." >> Here's a box! >> Partnership with Seagate. So they said very clearly, "Look, if you really want it simple, "and you want it to come just from us, "and that's what you'd like, great. "Here's an appliance, trusted supplier, "we've put the whole thing together, "but that's not going to be our primary business, "that's not the main way we want to do things. "We want to offer the software, "and you can choose your hardware piece." Once again, knocking on some of those integrated hardware suppliers with the 70 point margin. And then the last one, one of the bigger announcements of the show, is the Veritas Cloud Storage, which they're calling is object storage with brains. And one thing we want to dig into: those brains, what is that functionality, 'cause object storage from day one always had a little bit more intelligence than the traditional storage. Metadata is usually built in, so where is the artificial intelligence, machine learning, what is that knowledge that's kind of built into it, because I find, Dave, on the consumer side, I'm amazed these days as how much extra metadata and knowledge gets built into things. So, on my phone, I'll start searching for things, and it'll just have things appear. I know you're not fond of the automated assistants, but I've got a couple of them in my house, so I can ask them questions, and they are getting smarter and smarter over time, and they already know everything we're doing anyway. >> You know, I like the automated assistants. We have, well, my kid has an Echo, but what concerns me, Stu, is when I am speaking to those automated assistants about, "Hey, maybe we should take a trip "to this place or that place," and then all of a sudden the next day on my laptop I start to see ads for trips to that place. I start to think about, wow, this is strange. I worry about the privacy of those systems. They're going to, they already know more about me than I know about me. But I want to come back to those three announcements we're going to have David Noy on: HyperScale, Access, and Cloud Object. So some of the things we want to ask that we don't really know is the HyperScale: is it Block, is it File, it's OpenStack specific, but it's general. >> Right, but the two flavors: one's for OpenStack, and of course OpenStack has a number of projects, so I would think you could be able to do Block and File but would definitely love that clarification. And then they have a different one for containers. >> Okay, so I kind of don't understand that, right? 'Cause is it OpenStack containers, or is it Linux containers, or is it- >> Well, containers are always going to be on Linux, and containers can fit with OpenStack, but we've got their Chief Product Officer, and we've got David Noy. >> Dave: So we'll attack some of that. >> So we'll dig into all of those. >> And then, the Access piece, you know, after the apocalypse, there are going to be three things left in this world: cockroaches, mainframes, and Dot Hill RAID arrays. When Seagate was up on stage, Seagate bought this company called Dot Hill, which has been around longer than I have, and so, like you said, that was kind of strange seeing an appliance unveil from the software company. But hey, they need boxes to run on this stuff. It was interesting, too, the engineer Abhijit came out, and they talked about software-defined, and we've been doing software-defined, is what he said, way before the term ever came out. It's true, Veritas was, if not the first, one of the first software-defined storage companies. >> Stu: Oh yeah. >> And the problem back then was there were always scaling issues, there were performance issues, and now, with the advancements in microprocessor, in DRAM, and flash technologies, software-defined has plenty of horsepower underneath it. >> Oh yeah, well, Dave, 15 years ago, the FUD from every storage company was, "You can't trust storage functionality "just on some generic server." Reminds me back, I go back 20 years, it was like, "Oh, you wouldn't run some "mission-critical thing on Windows." It's always, "That's not ready for prime time, "it's not enterprise-grade." And now, of course, everybody's on the software-defined bandwagon. >> Well, and of course when you talk to the hardware companies, and you call them hardware companies, specifically HPE and Dell EMC as examples, and Lenovo, etc. Lenovo not so much, the Chinese sort of embraced hardware. >> And even Hitachi's trying to rebrand themselves; they're very much a hardware company, but they've got software assets. >> So when you worked at EMC, and you know when you sat down and talked to the guys like Brian Gallagher, he would stress, "Oh, all my guys, all my engineers "are software engineers. We're not a hardware company." So there's a nuance there, it's sort of more the delivery and the culture and the ethos, which I think defines the software culture, and of course the gross margins. And then of course the Cloud Object piece; we want to understand what's different from, you know, object storage embeds metadata in the data and obviously is a lower cost sort of option. Think of S3 as the sort of poster child for cloud object storage. So Veritas is an arms dealer that's putting their hat in the ring kind of late, right? There's a lot of object going on out there, but it's not really taking off, other than with the cloud guys. So you got a few object guys around there. Cleversafe got bought out by IBM, Scality's still around doing some stuff with HPE. So really, it hasn't even taken off yet, so maybe the timing's not so bad. >> Absolutely, and love to hear some of the use cases, what their customers are doing. Yeah, Dave, if we have but one critique, saw a lot of partners up on stage but not as many customers. Usually expect a few more customers to be out there. Part of it is they're launching some new products, not talking about very much the products they've had in there. I know in the breakouts there are a lot of customers here, but would have liked to see a few more early customers front and center. >> Well, I think that's the key issue for this company, Stu, is that, we talked about this at the close yesterday, is how do they transition that legacy install base to the new platform. Bill Coleman said, "It's ours to lose." And I think that's right, and so the answer for a company like that in the playbook is clear: go private so you don't have to get exposed to the 90 day shock lock, invest, build out a modern platform. He talked about microservices and modern development platform. And create products that people want, and migrate people over. You're in a position to do that. But you're right, when you talk to the customers here, they're NetBackup customers, that's really what they're doing, and they're here to sort of learn, learn about best practice and see where they're going. NetBackup, I think, 8.1 was announced this week, so people are glomming onto that, but the vast majority of the revenue of this company is from their existing legacy enterprise business. That's a transition that has to take place. Luckily it doesn't have to take place in the public eye from a financial standpoint. So they can have some patient capital and work through it. Alright Stu, lineup today: a lot of product stuff. We got Jason Buffington coming on for getting the analyst perspective. So we'll be here all day. Last word? >> Yeah, and end of the day with Foreigner, it feels like the first time we're here. Veritas feels hot-blooded. We'll keep rolling. >> Alright, luckily we're not seeing double vision. Alright, keep it right there everybody. We'll be back right after this short break. This is theCUBE, we're live from Vertias Vision 2017 in Las Vegas. We'll be right back. (peppy digital music)

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