(gentle music playing) >> For centuries, we've been captivated by the concept of machines doing the job of humans. And over the past decade or so, we've really focused on AI and the possibility of intelligent machines that can perform cognitive tasks. Now in the past few years, with the popularity of machine learning models ranging from recent ChatGPT to Bert, we're starting to see how AI is changing the way we interact with the world. How is AI transforming the way we do business? And what does the future hold for us there. At theCube, we've covered Oracle's AI and ML strategy for years, which has really been used to drive automation into Oracle's autonomous database. We've talked a lot about MySQL HeatWave in database machine learning, and AI pushed into Oracle's business apps. Oracle, it tends to lead in AI, but not competing as a direct AI player per se, but rather embedding AI and machine learning into its portfolio to enhance its existing products, and bring new services and offerings to the market. Now, last October at Cloud World in Las Vegas, Oracle partnered with Nvidia, which is the go-to AI silicon provider for vendors. And they announced an investment, a pretty significant investment to deploy tens of thousands more Nvidia GPUs to OCI, the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and build out Oracle's infrastructure for enterprise scale AI. Now, Oracle CEO, Safra Catz said something to the effect of this alliance is going to help customers across industries from healthcare, manufacturing, telecoms, and financial services to overcome the multitude of challenges they face. Presumably she was talking about just driving more automation and more productivity. Now, to learn more about Oracle's plans for AI, we'd like to welcome in Elad Ziklik, who's the vice president of AI services at Oracle. Elad, great to see you. Welcome to the show. >> Thank you. Thanks for having me. >> You're very welcome. So first let's talk about Oracle's path to AI. I mean, it's the hottest topic going for years you've been incorporating machine learning into your products and services, you know, could you tell us what you've been working on, how you got here? >> So great question. So as you mentioned, I think most of the original four-way into AI was on embedding AI and using AI to make our applications, and databases better. So inside mySQL HeatWave, inside our autonomous database in power, we've been driving AI, all of course are SaaS apps. So Fusion, our large enterprise business suite for HR applications and CRM and ELP, and whatnot has built in AI inside it. Most recently, NetSuite, our small medium business SaaS suite started using AI for things like automated invoice processing and whatnot. And most recently, over the last, I would say two years, we've started exposing and bringing these capabilities into the broader OCI Oracle Cloud infrastructure. So the developers, and ISVs and customers can start using our AI capabilities to make their apps better and their experiences and business workflow better, and not just consume these as embedded inside Oracle. And this recent partnership that you mentioned with Nvidia is another step in bringing the best AI infrastructure capabilities into this platform so you can actually build any type of machine learning workflow or AI model that you want on Oracle Cloud. >> So when I look at the market, I see companies out there like DataRobot or C3 AI, there's maybe a half dozen that sort of pop up on my radar anyway. And my premise has always been that most customers, they don't want to become AI experts, they want to buy applications and have AI embedded or they want AI to manage their infrastructure. So my question to you is, how does Oracle help its OCI customers support their business with AI? >> So it's a great question. So I think what most customers want is business AI. They want AI that works for the business. They want AI that works for the enterprise. I call it the last mile of AI. And they want this thing to work. The majority of them don't want to hire a large and expensive data science teams to go and build everything from scratch. They just want the business problem solved by applying AI to it. My best analogy is Lego. So if you think of Lego, Lego has these millions Lego blocks that you can use to build anything that you want. But the majority of people like me or like my kids, they want the Lego death style kit or the Lego Eiffel Tower thing. They want a thing that just works, and it's very easy to use. And still Lego blocks, you still need to build some things together, which just works for the scenario that you're looking for. So that's our focus. Our focus is making it easy for customers to apply AI where they need to, in the right business context. So whether it's embedding it inside the business applications, like adding forecasting capabilities to your supply chain management or financial planning software, whether it's adding chat bots into the line of business applications, integrating these things into your analytics dashboard, even all the way to, we have a new platform piece we call ML applications that allows you to take a machine learning model, and scale it for the thousands of tenants that you would be. 'Cause this is a big problem for most of the ML use cases. It's very easy to build something for a proof of concept or a pilot or a demo. But then if you need to take this and then deploy it across your thousands of customers or your thousands of regions or facilities, then it becomes messy. So this is where we spend our time making it easy to take these things into production in the context of your business application or your business use case that you're interested in right now. >> So you mentioned chat bots, and I want to talk about ChatGPT, but my question here is different, we'll talk about that in a minute. So when you think about these chat bots, the ones that are conversational, my experience anyway is they're just meh, they're not that great. But the ones that actually work pretty well, they have a conditioned response. Now they're limited, but they say, which of the following is your problem? And then if that's one of the following is your problem, you can maybe solve your problem. But this is clearly a trend and it helps the line of business. How does Oracle think about these use cases for your customers? >> Yeah, so I think the key here is exactly what you said. It's about task completion. The general purpose bots are interesting, but as you said, like are still limited. They're getting much better, I'm sure we'll talk about ChatGPT. But I think what most enterprises want is around task completion. I want to automate my expense report processing. So today inside Oracle we have a chat bot where I submit my expenses the bot ask a couple of question, I answer them, and then I'm done. Like I don't need to go to our fancy application, and manually submit an expense report. I do this via Slack. And the key is around managing the right expectations of what this thing is capable of doing. Like, I have a story from I think five, six years ago when technology was much inferior than it is today. Well, one of the telco providers I was working with wanted to roll a chat bot that does realtime translation. So it was for a support center for of the call centers. And what they wanted do is, Hey, we have English speaking employees, whatever, 24/7, if somebody's calling, and the native tongue is different like Hebrew in my case, or Chinese or whatnot, then we'll give them a chat bot that they will interact with and will translate this on the fly and everything would work. And when they rolled it out, the feedback from customers was horrendous. Customers said, the technology sucks. It's not good. I hate it, I hate your company, I hate your support. And what they've done is they've changed the narrative. Instead of, you go to a support center, and you assume you're going to talk to a human, and instead you get a crappy chat bot, they're like, Hey, if you want to talk to a Hebrew speaking person, there's a four hour wait, please leave your phone and we'll call you back. Or you can try a new amazing Hebrew speaking AI powered bot and it may help your use case. Do you want to try it out? And some people said, yeah, let's try it out. Plus one to try it out. And the feedback, even though it was the exact same technology was amazing. People were like, oh my God, this is so innovative, this is great. Even though it was the exact same experience that they hated a few weeks earlier on. So I think the key lesson that I picked from this experience is it's all about setting the right expectations, and working around the right use case. If you are replacing a human, the level is different than if you are just helping or augmenting something that otherwise would take a lot of time. And I think this is the focus that we are doing, picking up the tasks that people want to accomplish or that enterprise want to accomplish for the customers, for the employees. And using chat bots to make those specific ones better rather than, hey, this is going to replace all humans everywhere, and just be better than that. >> Yeah, I mean, to the point you mentioned expense reports. I'm in a Twitter thread and one guy says, my favorite part of business travel is filling out expense reports. It's an hour of excitement to figure out which receipts won't scan. We can all relate to that. It's just the worst. When you think about companies that are building custom AI driven apps, what can they do on OCI? What are the best options for them? Do they need to hire an army of machine intelligence experts and AI specialists? Help us understand your point of view there. >> So over the last, I would say the two or three years we've developed a full suite of machine learning and AI services for, I would say probably much every use case that you would expect right now from applying natural language processing to understanding customer support tickets or social media, or whatnot to computer vision platforms or computer vision services that can understand and detect objects, and count objects on shelves or detect cracks in the pipe or defecting parts, all the way to speech services. It can actually transcribe human speech. And most recently we've launched a new document AI service. That can actually look at unstructured documents like receipts or invoices or government IDs or even proprietary documents, loan application, student application forms, patient ingestion and whatnot and completely automate them using AI. So if you want to do one of the things that are, I would say common bread and butter for any industry, whether it's financial services or healthcare or manufacturing, we have a suite of services that any developer can go, and use easily customized with their own data. You don't need to be an expert in deep learning or large language models. You could just use our automobile capabilities, and build your own version of the models. Just go ahead and use them. And if you do have proprietary complex scenarios that you need customer from scratch, we actually have the most cost effective platform for that. So we have the OCI data science as well as built-in machine learning platform inside the databases inside the Oracle database, and mySQL HeatWave that allow data scientists, python welding people that actually like to build and tweak and control and improve, have everything that they need to go and build the machine learning models from scratch, deploy them, monitor and manage them at scale in production environment. And most of it is brand new. So we did not have these technologies four or five years ago and we've started building them and they're now at enterprise scale over the last couple of years. >> So what are some of the state-of-the-art tools, that AI specialists and data scientists need if they're going to go out and develop these new models? >> So I think it's on three layers. I think there's an infrastructure layer where the Nvidia's of the world come into play. For some of these things, you want massively efficient, massively scaled infrastructure place. So we are the most cost effective and performant large scale GPU training environment today. We're going to be first to onboard the new Nvidia H100s. These are the new super powerful GPU's for large language model training. So we have that covered for you in case you need this 'cause you want to build these ginormous things. You need a data science platform, a platform where you can open a Python notebook, and just use all these fancy open source frameworks and create the models that you want, and then click on a button and deploy it. And it infinitely scales wherever you need it. And in many cases you just need the, what I call the applied AI services. You need the Lego sets, the Lego death style, Lego Eiffel Tower. So we have a suite of these sets for typical scenarios, whether it's cognitive services of like, again, understanding images, or documents all the way to solving particular business problems. So an anomaly detection service, demand focusing service that will be the equivalent of these Lego sets. So if this is the business problem that you're looking to solve, we have services out there where we can bring your data, call an API, train a model, get the model and use it in your production environment. So wherever you want to play, all the way into embedding this thing, inside this applications, obviously, wherever you want to play, we have the tools for you to go and engage from infrastructure to SaaS at the top, and everything in the middle. >> So when you think about the data pipeline, and the data life cycle, and the specialized roles that came out of kind of the (indistinct) era if you will. I want to focus on two developers and data scientists. So the developers, they hate dealing with infrastructure and they got to deal with infrastructure. Now they're being asked to secure the infrastructure, they just want to write code. And a data scientist, they're spending all their time trying to figure out, okay, what's the data quality? And they're wrangling data and they don't spend enough time doing what they want to do. So there's been a lack of collaboration. Have you seen that change, are these approaches allowing collaboration between data scientists and developers on a single platform? Can you talk about that a little bit? >> Yeah, that is a great question. One of the biggest set of scars that I have on my back from for building these platforms in other companies is exactly that. Every persona had a set of tools, and these tools didn't talk to each other and the handoff was painful. And most of the machine learning things evaporate or die on the floor because of this problem. It's very rarely that they are unsuccessful because the algorithm wasn't good enough. In most cases it's somebody builds something, and then you can't take it to production, you can't integrate it into your business application. You can't take the data out, train, create an endpoint and integrate it back like it's too painful. So the way we are approaching this is focused on this problem exactly. We have a single set of tools that if you publish a model as a data scientist and developers, and even business analysts that are seeing a inside of business application could be able to consume it. We have a single model store, a single feature store, a single management experience across the various personas that need to play in this. And we spend a lot of time building, and borrowing a word that cellular folks used, and I really liked it, building inside highways to make it easier to bring these insights into where you need them inside applications, both inside our applications, inside our SaaS applications, but also inside custom third party and even first party applications. And this is where a lot of our focus goes to just because we have dealt with so much pain doing this inside our own SaaS that we now have built the tools, and we're making them available for others to make this process of building a machine learning outcome driven insight in your app easier. And it's not just the model development, and it's not just the deployment, it's the entire journey of taking the data, building the model, training it, deploying it, looking at the real data that comes from the app, and creating this feedback loop in a more efficient way. And that's our focus area. Exactly this problem. >> Well thank you for that. So, last week we had our super cloud two event, and I had Juan Loza on and he spent a lot of time talking about how open Oracle is in its philosophy, and I got a lot of feedback. They were like, Oracle open, I don't really think, but the truth is if you think about database Oracle database, it never met a hardware platform that it didn't like. So in that sense it's open. So, but my point is, a big part of of machine learning and AI is driven by open source tools, frameworks, what's your open source strategy? What do you support from an open source standpoint? >> So I'm a strong believer that you don't actually know, nobody knows where the next slip fog or the next industry shifting innovation in AI is going to come from. If you look six months ago, nobody foreseen Dali, the magical text to image generation and the exploding brought into just art and design type of experiences. If you look six weeks ago, I don't think anybody's seen ChatGPT, and what it can do for a whole bunch of industries. So to me, assuming that a customer or partner or developer would want to lock themselves into only the tools that a specific vendor can produce is ridiculous. 'Cause nobody knows, if anybody claims that they know where the innovation is going to come from in a year or two, let alone in five or 10, they're just wrong or lying. So our strategy for Oracle is to, I call this the Netflix of AI. So if you think about Netflix, they produced a bunch of high quality shows on their own. A few years ago it was House of Cards. Last month my wife and I binge watched Ginny and Georgie, but they also curated a lot of shows that they found around the world and bought them to their customers. So it started with things like Seinfeld or Friends and most recently it was Squid games and those are famous Israeli TV series called Founder that Netflix bought in, and they bought it as is and they gave it the Netflix value. So you have captioning and you have the ability to speed the movie and you have it inside your app, and you can download it and watch it offline and everything, but nobody Netflix was involved in the production of these first seasons. Now if these things hunt and they're great, then the third season or the fourth season will get the full Netflix production value, high value budget, high value location shooting or whatever. But you as a customer, you don't care whether the producer and director, and screenplay writing is a Netflix employee or is somebody else's employee. It is fulfilled by Netflix. I believe that we will become, or we are looking to become the Netflix of AI. We are building a bunch of AI in a bunch of places where we think it's important and we have some competitive advantage like healthcare with Acellular partnership or whatnot. But I want to bring the best AI software and hardware to OCI and do a fulfillment by Oracle on that. So you'll get the Oracle security and identity and single bill and everything you'd expect from a company like Oracle. But we don't have to be building the data science, and the models for everything. So this means both open source recently announced a partnership with Anaconda, the leading provider of Python distribution in the data science ecosystem where we are are doing a joint strategic partnership of bringing all the goodness into Oracle customers as well as in the process of doing the same with Nvidia, and all those software libraries, not just the Hubble, both for other stuff like Triton, but also for healthcare specific stuff as well as other ISVs, other AI leading ISVs that we are in the process of partnering with to get their stuff into OCI and into Oracle so that you can truly consume the best AI hardware, and the best AI software in the world on Oracle. 'Cause that is what I believe our customers would want the ability to choose from any open source engine, and honestly from any ISV type of solution that is AI powered and they want to use it in their experiences. >> So you mentioned ChatGPT, I want to talk about some of the innovations that are coming. As an AI expert, you see ChatGPT on the one hand, I'm sure you weren't surprised. On the other hand, maybe the reaction in the market, and the hype is somewhat surprising. You know, they say that we tend to under or over-hype things in the early stages and under hype them long term, you kind of use the internet as example. What's your take on that premise? >> So. I think that this type of technology is going to be an inflection point in how software is being developed. I truly believe this. I think this is an internet style moment, and the way software interfaces, software applications are being developed will dramatically change over the next year two or three because of this type of technologies. I think there will be industries that will be shifted. I think education is a good example. I saw this thing opened on my son's laptop. So I think education is going to be transformed. Design industry like images or whatever, it's already been transformed. But I think that for mass adoption, like beyond the hype, beyond the peak of inflected expectations, if I'm using Gartner terminology, I think certain things need to go and happen. One is this thing needs to become more reliable. So right now it is a complete black box that sometimes produce magic, and sometimes produce just nonsense. And it needs to have better explainability and better lineage to, how did you get to this answer? 'Cause I think enterprises are going to really care about the things that they surface with the customers or use internally. So I think that is one thing that's going to come out. And the other thing that's going to come out is I think it's going to come industry specific large language models or industry specific ChatGPTs. Something like how OpenAI did co-pilot for writing code. I think we will start seeing this type of apps solving for specific business problems, understanding contracts, understanding healthcare, writing doctor's notes on behalf of doctors so they don't have to spend time manually recording and analyzing conversations. And I think that would become the sweet spot of this thing. There will be companies, whether it's OpenAI or Microsoft or Google or hopefully Oracle that will use this type of technology to solve for specific very high value business needs. And I think this will change how interfaces happen. So going back to your expense report, the world of, I'm going to go into an app, and I'm going to click on seven buttons in order to get some job done like this world is gone. Like I'm going to say, hey, please do this and that. And I expect an answer to come out. I've seen a recent demo about, marketing in sales. So a customer sends an email that is interested in something and then a ChatGPT powered thing just produces the answer. I think this is how the world is going to evolve. Like yes, there's a ton of hype, yes, it looks like magic and right now it is magic, but it's not yet productive for most enterprise scenarios. But in the next 6, 12, 24 months, this will start getting more dependable, and it's going to change how these industries are being managed. Like I think it's an internet level revolution. That's my take. >> It's very interesting. And it's going to change the way in which we have. Instead of accessing the data center through APIs, we're going to access it through natural language processing and that opens up technology to a huge audience. Last question, is a two part question. And the first part is what you guys are working on from the futures, but the second part of the question is, we got data scientists and developers in our audience. They love the new shiny toy. So give us a little glimpse of what you're working on in the future, and what would you say to them to persuade them to check out Oracle's AI services? >> Yep. So I think there's two main things that we're doing, one is around healthcare. With a new recent acquisition, we are spending a significant effort around revolutionizing healthcare with AI. Of course many scenarios from patient care using computer vision and cameras through automating, and making better insurance claims to research and pharma. We are making the best models from leading organizations, and internal available for hospitals and researchers, and insurance providers everywhere. And we truly are looking to become the leader in AI for healthcare. So I think that's a huge focus area. And the second part is, again, going back to the enterprise AI angle. Like we want to, if you have a business problem that you want to apply here to solve, we want to be your platform. Like you could use others if you want to build everything complicated and whatnot. We have a platform for that as well. But like, if you want to apply AI to solve a business problem, we want to be your platform. We want to be the, again, the Netflix of AI kind of a thing where we are the place for the greatest AI innovations accessible to any developer, any business analyst, any user, any data scientist on Oracle Cloud. And we're making a significant effort on these two fronts as well as developing a lot of the missing pieces, and building blocks that we see are needed in this space to make truly like a great experience for developers and data scientists. And what would I recommend? Get started, try it out. We actually have a shameless sales plug here. We have a free deal for all of our AI services. So it typically cost you nothing. I would highly recommend to just go, and try these things out. Go play with it. If you are a python welding developer, and you want to try a little bit of auto mail, go down that path. If you're not even there and you're just like, hey, I have these customer feedback things and I want to try out, if I can understand them and apply AI and visualize, and do some cool stuff, we have services for that. My recommendation is, and I think ChatGPT got us 'cause I see people that have nothing to do with AI, and can't even spell AI going and trying it out. I think this is the time. Go play with these things, go play with these technologies and find what AI can do to you or for you. And I think Oracle is a great place to start playing with these things. >> Elad, thank you. Appreciate you sharing your vision of making Oracle the Netflix of AI. Love that and really appreciate your time. >> Awesome. Thank you. Thank you for having me. >> Okay. Thanks for watching this Cube conversation. This is Dave Vellante. We'll see you next time. (gentle music playing)

>> Live from San Diego, California It's the queue covering Sisqo live US 2019 Tio by Cisco and its ecosystem barters >> Hey, welcome back to the cubes. Coverage of Sisqo Live from San Diego. Sunny San Diego. I'm Lisa Martin with Stew Minutemen today and stew and I are very pleased to welcome to the Cube for the first time. Peter Sprigg gotta distinguished engineer from red Hat. Peter, Welcome. >> Thank you. I'm really excited to be here. >> We're excited to have you here today. I'd like to say Welcome to the sun. Its pretty toasty for in this very cool sales pavilion, which is Ah, very nice. A bright. So we got a lot of bright, but we do have some heat. So you've been with Cisco Cisco? No, actually. >> Was what? Siskel Ugo? >> Two degrees of Kevin Bacon Way where? In this room. Right. You've been with Red Hat since the answerable acquisition. One of the things that was funny that Chuck Robbins mention this morning was this the 30th anniversary of Cisco event with customers and partners. He also mentioned 30 years ago Seinfeld started. So I'm gonna do a Jerry Seinfeld on go digital transformation. What's the deal with that. >> You know, I think that, you know, one of the things that's really exciting and being part of Ansel and actually coming from the network's base. You know, we've had the opportunity to really be out in front of this whole digital transfer station. We've been doing it for you very long time on it's been just It's really been all about a journey on DH. That's really what I think. Earmarks. Really? What answer was all about >> Peter? So another thing. We've been on a journey a long time. That whole automation thing. Yes, we've been talking about that my entire career in the network. So bring us forward. You know, maybe, you know, did not 30 years. But you know what's going on in the last couple of years, That's different about automation, you know, 30 2019. Then we would have talked about, you know, when you first joined. And >> yeah, you know, I think that when I first joined, you know, everything was we were just trying to convince people that this is something you should think about doing you. Now you look around, you see what's going on here, alive and at definite and it's become a whole world unto itself. It's really starting to define its own space and networking, which is really exciting to see because I've been part of this journey really since the get go. And it's just it's really exciting to watch this homeworld start to come together. And people really taken interest in changing really the way that we approached, cooperating in >> person, and I'm glad actually mentioned the definite zone that we're in here. So there's lots of workshops happening right next to us. Hear developers really helping to drive that transformation software a big piece of your world. I'm assuming >> it is. It really is, you know, And I always love to tell the story of, you know, I've got a software development background, but I also have a network operations background watching these two worlds come together. It's so exciting and being out at the forefront, really pushing the envelope off. What we can do from an automation perspective is really been exciting >> so as to mention we're in the definite zone. This definite communities mass it is John Fourier and I had the opportunity to cover definite create back in Mountain View about six or eight weeks ago. I think that number this is Yoo, he mentioned, is 585,000 members, strong looking at Red hat and the spirit of this open source community. Talk to us about sort of the alignment of these communities and how this is helping to drive, not just technology forward, but be able to get that feedback from customers in any industry to drive these emerging technologies into mainstream. >> You know, I think you touched on the key there. It really is all about the customer and the customer's experience. You know, the wonderful thing about open source community is the fact that we can all come together. Vendor supply our customer, you know, consulting team, whoever you are, we all can come together, and it really does become right. We're all better together, and we're all pushing forward and trying. Teo really change the way that we approach how we build design and operate now destruction. >> Peter Peter Wonder if you've got a you know, a customer example. I know sometimes you need to anonymous things are what kind of things are customers Went, went when they're going through this. The outcomes and results that change how their business works, >> you know? So one of the things that and I got one particular customer mind. I can't say who they are, but one particular customer that that we worked a lot of time with him. What >> they were >> able to do is they were actually able. We gave them back the gift of time. That's what we talked about with automation. And what we mean by that is they were able to take a job that used to take them literally weeks to get done, that we could now automate and get it done once a night twice, you know, do it in a single night as opposed to them taking ways to get that job done. That frees them up to doing the more high value work. That networking here's really wanted you and not saddle them with more Monday and stuff. >> So just to follow up on that because, you know, traditionally that's been one of the pieces right is how do you know make my employees mohr efficient? Howto I give them more environment, something that they talked about. The keynote this morning is some of the scale and some of the you know you're dealing with EJ applications and all these environments is even if I had the resource, I probably couldn't keep up with the pace of change. Correct. They're doing so when you start throwing in things like a I and ML on top of those. But there's time to find their way intersect with what you're doing. >> Absolutely, they really are. And it's areas that we're starting to look into a swell. You know, Ansel's been doing this for a long time, but we're starting to see how do we bring some of these other two separate pieces and bring them together underneath this automation umbrella? And really again, we want to drive out that that everyday task out of of the operations Hansel. They can focus on the high value things of evaluating technology and moving things forward for their organizations. >> You say you were able to give that particular customer back the gift of time. I've got everybody breathing on the planet today, wants back the gift of time. But I would love to follow that story down the road because the gift of time has so much potential. Posit did impact all the way up to the C suite. Teo, you know, being able to move resources around to identify new revenue streams, new business nodules, new products, new services expanded into new markets. So that gift of time is transformative. >> Absolutely. Without, without a doubt, it is. And you know what we're seeing and what we're getting feedback from our customers on is that because of that gift of time, they're able to now focus on pushing their businesses forward. Right? And they're starting to solve challenges that have always been on that traditional, ever going task list. Right? That never you never get Teo. And they're really starting to be able to focus on those tasks such that they can start to become more innovative. They become more agile and they focus on their business, not on the active managing technology. >> All right, So, Peter, another another big theme of the show here is multi cloud, something we heard. A lot of red has something. Also, it's this skill set that one of the biggest challenges for customers working behind between those various environment. How sensible helping customers bridge some of those worlds today. >> Well, so you know, obviously, Ansel's not just a network to write. We automate anything and everything. And we like to talk about Ansel as the language of automation and really what it does for organizations. Whether you're looking at at infrastructure, whether you're looking at hybrid Cloud, what we do is we bring a language to the operations team where you get these two separate teams talking in a dialect that they can understand each other. And that's really what Ancel starts to bring your two. Those organizations. >> That internal collaboration. Absolutely. Maybe bridging business folks and folks who not wouldn't normally necessarily be driving towards the same types of solution. Correct? Correct. And it really >> kind of starts. And this is actually how we see Answer will kind of unfolding most organizations, right? It starts in these pockets, and small teams will start to use answerable. And then it just kind of grows and grows and grows. And what we find is all of a sudden, you've got, you know, a cloud Administrator's going out talk to a network engineer, and they can talk through this language of automation instead of trying to figure out how to communicate. They actually become productive immediately. >> OKay, Peter, Some of the big waves coming down the line that we're talking the keynote this morning, You know, five g y 56 You know, just incremental changes, you know, in your world. Or, you know, what will some of these new architectures that they're talking about, you know, have some dramatic impacts? >> Well, they're gonna have huge. In fact, you know, I think you know one of the things That's very interesting. You look at some of these technologies coming down, the coming down the ways now is everything is getting faster. I mean, that's nothing that we've been. You know, anyone who's been a knight for any period of time knows it's always faster, faster, faster. But what it's doing is is it's really motivating us to look at ants one and rethink how we do certain things so that we can keep up with the demand and allow organizations to, you know, meet the demands of their customers in accelerating their time to market. >> Maybe dig into that a little bit more in terms of the customer feedback. How are you guys? How is answerable being able to work with your customers across any industry, get their feedback to really accelerate what you guys are able to then deliver back to the market. What's that feedback loop? Well, I think >> you know, when you think about automation, automation is certainly it's a technology, but it's also very much about how organizations work, right? I like to talk about automation is really more a state of mind, Not so necessarily a state of action. And so therefore, you know, we spend a lot of time with our customers to understand how do they run their business and how Khun Automation become a way that they think about running the organization and really help them move forward. So we spent a lot of time understanding our customers business before we ever get into the bits and bytes of what automation really is. >> Yeah, you mentioned some of those organizational pieces, like the cloud guy in the network guy. What are some of the biggest challenges that you're seeing customers these days, and, you know, how are they helping to, you know, mature the organization to this new modern, multi cloud developer centric? You know, software defined, you know, Buzz, word of the day. >> You know, I think that you know, the biggest challenge that we see every single day with our car? Does Moses. You know, just where to get started, how you get started with. There's so much of it out there. Now it's it's they're looking at, and how do you get started with this? And how do you let this thing take on a life of its own? And so we spent a lot of time just getting them. You 123 steps down the road, get going in the open source and then let it expand from there. And we bring a whole suite of capabilities, then to the customer, whether it's through red at consulting, whether it's you're working through our open source communities to really help them on that journey. >> Wondering customer meetings. Where is this conversation now with respect to automation? Is he talked about giving the gift back of time. That would go all the way up to the C suite. So much potential there. Are you still having the conversation with more? The technical folks are where the lines of business or maybe even the executive sweet in terms of being a part of this decision in understanding the massive impact that automation will deliver. >> Yeah, it was just starting to see that that trend transition. Now, you know, we just came off of Redhead Summit, and we spent a lot of time talking with senior directors. See sweet individuals about kind of that transition in how automation is. As I mentioned before, it's no longer just a technical tool in the tool back. It really is becoming a business tool and how you could leverage it to really drive the business. So that's those conversations air starting now. We're just starting to see that, and it's really it's really exciting is really an exciting time to be part of this. >> All right, Peter, what will tell us a little bit about what red hats got going out of the show? I happen to show this to stop down the show floor, I saw the like command line video game, which I see that Red House seems that's making the go around there. I know your team's having a lot of fun team who can get the high score. What else at the show should people be looking at for red hat? >> Well, so you know, In addition, to answer. Well, of course, we also spent a lot of time talking about open shift, which is the other big red hat, you know, flagship product and really, what we're doing in terms of being able to deliver and the multi G hybrid cloud infrastructure and be able to run workloads in any cloud infrastructure, no matter where that may be. And then, of course, they'd always always comes back. Tio the operating system Red hat. Lennox, you know, they go hand in hand, way are always gonna be about the operating system, and everything kind of bubbles up from there. >> So here we are, halfway through calendar year 2019 which is scary. What are some of the things that you're looking forward to as the rest of the year progresses? Some, you know, exciting things going with Red had a big blue, for example. >> Well, there there is there. Certainly that although you could probably tell me more about how that's going that I get to know even anymore. But you know, I think really, What? What's exciting about the second half of this year and you're going to hear more about it? Actually, a definite this is a good time for me to mention this is that you know, we're doing a lot with Cisco right now. One of the things that course you know, Cisco's making a huge investment in definite and Red Hat is really becoming a very key partner with Cisco in that. So you're going to see a lot of open source community work around red Hand Cisco collaborating together to enhance what Ansel's doing and try and bring even more traditional and nontraditional people into these communities. >> More collaboration, I presume, over some of their cognitive collaborations, >> like absolutely, absolutely. >> That does work on linen because I've been using blue jeans most the time. >> It does. I You know, I I I pushed them really hard because yes, at first I had troubles with it, But yes, now it worked fantastic on Lenny. I couldn't be happier. >> You heard it. Here, Peter, Thank you so much for joining stew and me on the Cube this afternoon. We appreciate your time. I >> appreciate it. Thank you so much for >> having all right. It was fun for stupid aman. I am Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube live from Cisco live in sunny San Diego. Thanks for watching

>> Announcer: Live from San Diego, California, it's the cube covering Cisco Live, U.S. 2019. Brought to you by Cisco and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome to sunny San Diego. Lisa Martin with the Cube live at Cisco Live in the U.S. here. I'm here the next three days with Stu Miniman and Dave Volante. Gentlemen, great to see you. >> It is sunny. >> It is very sunny. >> Lisa, big 30th anniversary celebration here at Cisco live. Where were you in 1989, you don't have to answer that. >> But I thought about that this morning, I know exactly where I was. So the 30th year of them doing a customer partner event. Other 30 year anniversary notables this year, Tetris is 30, Seinfeld premiered 30 years ago. That's kind of scary when you remember exactly where you were. So we came from the keynote just a minute ago, not a lot of news here, but Stu, let's start with you. In terms of where Cisco is, you guys were in Cisco Live Barcelona just a few months ago, John and I covered Cisco DevNet about six weeks ago, lots of excitement around these waves of 5G, Wi-Fi 6, Compute architectures, your thoughts on Cisco where are they are today, where they are in their transition to becoming more software services? >> Yeah, so lately say a great place to start you. We've been watching the last two years that we've done theCube at their European and U.S. events, this transformation to become a software company. It's really interesting to see Chuck Robbins bring out this 30 year old box, and he's like, it's ribbon cables and multi-protocol routers and everything, and then most of the keynotes, most of the things that they're discussing, sure they had some boxes out there on display, I saw somebody on Twitter, they let all the cats out of the bag, 'cause they're all, Cat. 9000, Cat 6300, things like that, but it's software driven. The point they want to make is that cloud and software defined networking was going to destroy Cisco, well and here we are five or 10 years into some of these waves, and Cisco's still going strong. they have positioning in a lot of these environments. Cisco still does have a lot of hardware. When I look at how we track Cisco, it is more about the ports in the boxes than it is the software revenue, but they are climbing up the charts there, and they are being more software. They are showing up at all the cloud shows. When we were at Google Next, we talked to Cisco there. At AWS we talked to AppDynamics and many of the software pieces, and here in the DevNet zone, it's all about enabling developers which is at the core of so much of what's happening for that software transformation. So Cisco, making good measurable progress. Still a nice robust mix of hardware and software, and I personally, 30 years, I was actually at the 20 year reunion. I bumped into a friend of mine that we'd done a video with 10 years ago. We're comparing how we both have a little bit less hair than we did there, but amazing to think about the technologies we were looking at 10 years ago. Cloud was so early in some of these spaces, so a lot has changed in 10 years, and Cisco continually matriculating the ball down the field as they would say in the old analogy. >> And in terms of revenue, Dave, I was looking at their Q3 2019 report which was just a few weeks ago, sixth consecutive revenue growth quarter under Chuck Robbins, your thoughts on where they are from a revenue perspective? >> Well, Cisco's been doing very well. the Stock's been crushing it since 2011. After the downturn Cisco came out of the downturn as a stronger company. They're about almost 50 billion dollars in annual revenue. They've got a 250 billion dollar market cap, which as, Stu, you and I were talking about, it's almost a 5X revenue multiple, and that's software-like revenue multiples. Hardware companies don't typically get that. I mean unless you're like a pure storage, and your growing super fast. But so, this is a company with 60, almost 65% gross margins, it's got a 25% operating income. Again, that's like AWS. AWS is an incredibly profitable company. Just to put that into perspective, Oracle which is predominantly a software company even though it has some hardware, has operating margins in the low to mid 30s, and that's an extremely profitable company. Cisco's got a net of 10 billion dollars in cash on the balance sheet, actually more, but it's got some debts if you're talking about the net debt, and it's growing at 5 or 6% a year. For a 50 billion dollar company, that's quite impressive. So I think to answer your question Lisa, they're doin' quite well from a revenue standpoint. Chuck has done a great job with Wall Street. They obviously trust him. The stock's up. It's on a, I wouldn't say a rocket ship, but Cisco is a cashflow machine. Now where do they allocate that capital? Obviously they spend some on R and D and operations. they spent seven and a half billion dollars last year on stock buybacks, and dividends. So that's a big nut, and so Cisco's going to continue, in my opinion, to use it's funds to obviously fund R and D, but also do stock buybacks, dividends, prop up the stock. >> Stu: And acquisitions. >> And acquisitions. Is that a good move? Well, so balancing organic R and D with acquisitions is good. We talked about the Meraki acquisition earlier. Obviously Cisco's done a lot of growth through it's acquisition, but I would say this. Stock buybacks are a good idea when your stock is undervalued. Is Cisco undervalued, I don't know. Everything's up these days, hard to predict, but the concern that I have for companies like Cisco and Oracle, who do a lot of big buybacks is when the market sentiment flips, and shifts toward profit based companies like a Cisco or an Oracle, cashflow based companies, stocks tend to depress, and then the market sentiment shifts. So there might be some better buying opportunities ahead, but companies today who have a lot of cash, they have to do buybacks because they got to keep Wall Street happy. >> So as we look at these big waves of the explosion of 5G, 400 gigabit ethernet, GPUs, AI everywhere, one of the things that Chuck Robbins said this morning was that, and it made me think of the network as this common denominator in this changing architectural world we live in, hybrid multi-cloud. So going from their first show 30 years ago that was called Networker, what are your thoughts, Stu, we'll start with you, about where they're positioned with the network as really this common denominator in changing architectures, and the network that data that traverses it can be gleaned by organizations to extract insights, new value, new business models, where does Cisco sit in your opinion? >> Great question Lisa. So first of all we need to look at where does Cisco play, and where do they win? If you talk about the enterprise, switching and routing, they are dominant in that environment. We're going to be digging into some of the service providers. Service providers is not, Cisco is not nearly as dominant with service providers as they are in the enterprise. Then if you talk in the hyperscale players, they don't do as much gear, and that's where they're looking to have their software in there. Cisco wants to make sure that in this new hybrid multi-cloud world, wherever you live, there's going to be some piece of the stack that Cisco is part of. But there are opportunities for growth, but there are risks. Some of the traditional business, enterprises are not building as many data centers, and they're going to go to hosting providers, and therefore the network that most companies manage, most of what they're managing isn't under their purview. they don't touch it, they don't cable it, they don't put any of that together, and so Cisco needs to be extending who they work with, help with common interfaces across them. An area we spend a lot of time looking at is this multi-cloud management where Cisco is going up against some of their traditional partners. People like VMware and Microsoft used to just be the software pieces that ran on top of Cisco, now they're going for some of that same piece of the market because that is a control point, and Cisco needs to have leverage there, so can they be strong there? So it's interesting some of these waves that we have where Cisco plays, and where they will have a lot of competition. >> So guys, I think as Cisco moves from just a purely data center player to all these other opportunities, and they talk about the bridge to possible, I see it as Cisco's in a position to connect all the world's data sources. When you talk about multi-cloud, Cisco's got an opportunity and a challenge to convince the world that it's networks are higher performance, more cost effective, and more secure than everybody else, and you saw David Goeckeler today put up a slide, and he talked about 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 things. He said, automated, secure, agile, cheaper, easier to manage, drives of business outcomes. Now easier to manage, cheaper, automated, those are all cost efficiency sort of plays. So Cisco is in a good position because it's such a huge piece of the market, you know two thirds of the market, and it's been able to maintain that. It doesn't have a monopoly quite, but it's been able to maintain that huge market share for a long time. >> And Dave, if I can, just a comment that number one is Cisco has not been known to have the simplest networks out there, nor in the past it was the best network I could do, I would buy Cisco only. Today, as you've said it many times Dave. Today's multi-cloud is the old multi-vendor. Cisco, sure they would do interops, and they would make sure to test it out, and they follow all the standards, and they drive all of the standards, but in today's world, if Cisco is not the dominant player in the market, will they win in those environments, and you look at something like 5G. Cisco's not the leader in 4G and LTE roll outs. they're working with the telecom providers, but they have a strong position with Meraki on the WiFi, so something like WiFi 6 and their strong connection between the WiFi 6 and the 5G to be able to make sure my indoor and outdoor can now work seamlessly, but there's areas where Cisco's trying to go into that have not necessarily been their stronghold in the past, and at the end of the day, it's frictionless and simplicity is what's driving a lot of these cloudways, and that's not Cisco traditionally. >> Well to that point, you know complexity means cash historically in this business, and so 25% of Cisco's revenue comes from professional services, and 60% from infrastructure, and then the balance is for other stuff. What's the point? The point is that Cisco is transitioning it's business to more of a subscription model. Now they talk about that they had huge growth in the subscriptions business, but they don't really tell you how much of their business is software. It's sort of opaque. You got to kind of dig through that, but it's clearly on a big upswing. So Cisco's got to transition it's business from, you know back in 1989 it was a lot of break/fix right, then it's become a lot more sort of consulting and other professional services. Now it's going more toward an as a service model, and maybe still some of the professional services to, how do I secure my network, how do I architect that, what about cloud, what about multi-cloud, a lot of opportunities there for services value add, but it has to transition. >> Speaking of security, wanted to kind of touch on that for a second, Dave. They just announced the intent to acquire Sentryo SAS, which is a cybersecurity company out of France for industrial control. Their cybersecurity's one of their fastest growing businesses. Is that an opportunity for Cisco to differentiate itself with respect to network security? >> Well, it's imperative. I mean their security business grew 21% last quarter which is what, triple, more than triple the overall company. What they set at around that acquisition, it made total sense to me, is that it used to be you would just invest in protecting the perimeter. That's where all the money went. Now with things like the Edge, and that's part of this acquisition, you've got to really secure the devices, and the applications that are out there, but also I think increasingly the big opportunity is how do we respond? So things like Stealthwatch, and other machine machine intelligence and analytics help organizations that are ultimately, we know they're going to get breached, but the question is how do they respond? >> Yep, excellent. Well guys, I'm looking forward to three days of wall to wall coverage with you, talking with Cisco folks, DevNet folks, customers, partners. It's going to be bright. I think we can guarantee that, but it's going to be good. >> Yeah, we should say that we're here in the DevNet zone, right? So stop by and see us. A lot of action here. there'll be a lot of takeovers, and we'll be coverin' it. >> Yes, the Sails Pavilion which feels just like that. All right guys, going to be a great week. I'm Lisa Martin for Stu Miniman and Dave Volante, you're watching the Cube Live from Cisco Live in sunny San Diego. Stick around, our guests lineup begins in just a minute. (upbeat music)

live from the mandalay bay convention center in las vegas it's the cues covering vmworld 2016 rock you by vmware and its ecosystem sponsors it's legal yeah everything's legal welcome inside walls here on the cube as we continue our coverage here at vmworld once again we're back or what is going to be an exciting three days here in Mandalay Bay and i'm joined by my partner in crime you might say mark farley the producer Vulcan cast a host of Vulcan cast and tell us about Vulcan kestrel quick mark well you've seen comedy in cars you've seen singing in cars with carpool karaoke this is discussions about technology and cars it's tech talk and cars I see it on you can see it on Vulcan cast calm what a novel name for a website I'm pretty you figure good all day coming up with that one didn't you yeah but it's cool you know what it's like to look for a name absolutely benefit but it's a neat neat concept Tech Talk comes the cars you're kind of like the the james corbett of tech there you go except we don't sing about it I'm more like the Jerry Seinfeld maybe that's the next time we're joined by a couple of guests who are they become partners to more or less here in the business and solutely with Vaughn Stewart who is the enterprise architect and chief evangelist I love that by the way of on a pure storage and that evangelist looked up you do have it you getting the whole thing today and kimbark is a CEO of cata logic software and gentlemen ulcers thank you for being here we appreciate that so if you would start off by telling us a little bit about your individual companies you know what you do and then the marriage you to have partnered up here for the past four months came together pretty quickly and what that's all about and if you would bomb what you go first sure so pure storage is recognized widely as being the number one independent all-flash storage vendor we've been recognized for three years as being the leader in gartner's solid-state array Magic Quadrant we've really allowed flash to be consumed by the masses by making it more affordable than traditional disk based storage arrays and deliver all the promise of of the performance of flash kent and in a nutshell cattle objects software's that spin out three years ago from the syncsort company and what we've got about twenty nine patents we're working hard what we did is we evolved our technology to this whole copy data management space which is very exciting and when you marry copy data management to flash technology you drive some really serious effects and catback savings for customers so it's kind of a peanut butter and chocolate on here right was together really really does right so let's talk about your relationship then this has only been four months in the making you've known each other for a long time but you put together your business venture here very quickly what brought it together so fast and how did it make that kind of sense that boom it just happened almost overnight like that to start going on with the Kent listen we were lucky enough that these guys actually found us that a trade show it was a mug event Vav mug event in Austin Texas they found some for a show they have been absolutely brilliant to work with in the business that we're in we're what's called in place copy data management and why that's important is because we get to pick our partners and it's a lot easier to build a technology if you have a partner that cooperates and these guys have been so cooperative that's what made this thing tick they saw a gap that we could fill they were kind enough they sent us a box up to work with the team culturally has been aligned I mean we we've kind of do things all up and down the stack the same way pricing I think we're very similar channel driven we're similar the way we we look at at working together is very similar say just been brilliant and that's kind of what it is it's a neat at the end of the date and to try to squeeze the effects and capex savings out for customers that's kind of the do yeah and we're also seeing a lot of requests from our from our customer base we have a large number of joint customers as well as customers that were interested in purchasing the other technology but we're waiting for a point of integration and so as we're seeing this shift in the the mid market and the enterprise to a more DevOps centric model more of infrastructure teams converging their their server and their compute management or application owners into owning the entire stack there was this this need for taking the data management constructs that we had and allowing an end-to-end ecosystem enable meant so that dev teams could just you know at the push of a button and refresh their data sets move they move their development efforts forward and get rid of all the old legacy time centric based provisioning models yeah I mean I mean CDM has kind of become you know one of these hot buzzwords right all of a sudden as as our data storage just become more capable and has become cheaper we tend to hoard more stuff right now listen we're hanging on things a lot longer so what is the gap exactly you're talking about that you're filling and what's the need that you're addressing specifically then you have all this data at your disposal and and and I guess with Flash movie great question John so what what happens is when you first of all let's talk about what's driving the flash analogy right why why flash is so popular right now everybody that we've talked to is either moving to flash or thinking about moving to flash simply for their primary applications you know those are things like databases virtualization filers you know SharePoint right and as you start to move you get you get really good benefits around effects from using your flash because the speed and the performance particularly with what they do they've got some compression stuff that's unbelievable and then what we do is we overlay that so if you take CDM which was your question if you look at CDM what CDM does copy data management it allows you to deal with all of these copies in the in the world today you've got so many of the vendors that are taking different snapshots at different times and you end up at any given time I think IDC did a study what was it like 50 50 versions of an email that you've got floating around is any given time floating in your organization right so what Vaughn was referring to let's take one example in a test dev environment right we could drive home on that which they do a lot more than that but if you take the test stab and let's say you're a developer and you have an Oracle database that you really want to test the latest data right now without flash without CDM what happens is you make a copy of that database you move it to the developers and getting that copy if you're a developer getting that copy away from the internal IT infrastructure department can take you hours can take days go ahead we've we've got customers whose current copy data management process is it is is fulfilled by either a full-time employee or a staff that runs around doing arm and restores or restores from tape and development teams have to try to anticipate weeks in advance when a new copy of the data that model has been the the de facto standard in the industry for a decade or more and in what you're seeing from from all conversations around DevOps is agility it's time to how can I no increase the rate at which we innovate part of it is by bringing agility into your development process and so so this is a real nice pairing of technologies the performance capabilities within a flash a flash array allows you to scale a large number of instances the instant ability to clone the data set gives you gives you the agility but it's just an engine I still have to take care of the rest of the stack I got a role based access which users get to see which data do I need a datum ask the data or do they get direct access are they having a virtual copy or a physical right and best part can I make it a portal or can I make it right into their native workflow so they never hit the storage team or even the infrastructure team so let's talk about how customers are going to use this right pure has been a big leader not just in flash but and also digital efficiency capacity efficiency and you've had to be that right from the get-go people are saying well how am I going to be able to get the cost you know the effect of costs down of this flash well you have dee doop and you have compression and now you're adding this application layer or higher layer if you will another layer of the stack towards you know data density do you think this is going to have you done run the numbers on what kind of percentage or anything like that that customers will see absolutely kind of kind of absolute ken so I'm actually doing in the solution booth I think 430 tomorrow's solution a the vmworld booth we've got a customer six flags theme park operator that doing this test dev case we saved ninety percent affects efficiency for these guys so there's some really solid number again 90 90 90 / such a big number what's a huge number but it's what is what Vaughn was trying to say if you start marrying the workflow if you take their ability to make the storage and the moving the data more efficient and you'll ever their tool and then you overlay it with our api's we have rest api is that you can tie into a customer environment and then we've got to work flow this workflow engine that we call full stack automation the customer can start automating a lot of the stuff that they're trying to do and it's a home run yeah let's be let's be get a little bit in greater depth here but not too deep yeah these capabilities have existed in market for a long time yeah but the customers had to assemble and build their own scriptures in a fool's the phone and again we're not talking just copying of the data yeah we're giving you an efficiency in the copy data engine with it running on the flash array right what cata logic is doing is giving you a single interface either via portal or API for the entire orc for the orchestration of the entire stack the test Network the virtual machines the physical servers the volume managers all the way down to the copy of the data absolutely so I'm going to dive even deeper bond what kind of skill set be careful what did I get wet what kind of skill set does a customer need to have to take advantage of this solution so that's that's a beautiful question because it goes back to the synergy between our two companies right we're known for being able to set up storage in under an hour that requires no administrative skill set right nothing to tune much like very much like an iphone right kind of out of the box there's no manual right cata logics in the same boat you download an ova you're up and running in 30 minutes you're connected to the pure array in four at 40 minutes yeah you're connected ad and 50 and you're running you're off to the races right we don't have any boxes no appliance versus our competitors out there right we don't have any agents to install no appliances it's just it's the perfect match simplistic and we're running and through api's right we're getting we're getting consistent application consistent copies of the data sets right and we're orchestrating through the built in infrastructures that that already exists whether we're looking at vSphere or the rest of the ecosystem so say a customer does their own development and they've got they've got people that know how to use api's program for api's will they be able to will they be any faster be able to do more with it or does it really not what it does this gets back to the effects issue right so so with our REST API they can tie it in and we've already got a lot of things that are tied in like some of the development tools out there chef puppet bluemix from IBM I mean these are all things that we we can kind of work with to complete the environment and allowed them to lever is amazing platform does that answer your question I think yeah so what about the market for this right it a happy data management took a while to take off right it's one of those things in data management has always been a tough thing and it takes a while for customers to sort of get a what what I'm going to say a group think and the critical mass of people thinking about it it looks like you've had some help in the last year with other vendors getting in well and popularizing it you know EMC has theirs and commvault I think is doing something in my response is talking about it now you know 18 months ago those of what he did but what started it mark and this is and that's a great question is what I was alluding to earlier once flash comes on the scene and particularly flash vendors that can do what they do that have got a huge cat-back saving or opik savings for the customer then you can start working in their workflow in their processes and saving them even more money so it actually is copy data management with flash storage can becomes almost to have to have versus and the other things that we were doing a year ago it was a nice to have what i call a nice to have right because if you start looking at how to save yourself money from an effects perspective you might as well look at how to go all the way and sometimes you can triple to 10 times your savings geometrically by adding see the right CDM what i call enhance CDM what our customers sometimes say is they call us a CDM on steroids copy data management on steroids that's energy is a big thing if you've looked at the industry historically what you've seen as storage vendors put out their own homogeneous right automation walls right point bond and then you've seen a number of heterogeneous vendors to play their tools but they don't want to have any correlation with any hardware vendor right right and so and so as a storage provider right and customers are looking to say well look I don't wanna get locked in a particular storage provider and right so that's one aspect as a storage vendor we're sitting there saying we'd like to have greater integration your ecosystem so we can bubble up our value cattle logics kind of hit that sweet spot and said we're going to be heterogeneous we're going to be multi-platform and we're going to leverage leverage the channel right hundred percent channel driven and we're going to leverage the API and the data management ecosystem the storage vendors so they've kind of got a perfect storm going on in terms of a technology and market momentum if you like ok so let's talk about how the solution is going to be delivered you sell it do you sell it do you sell into pure accounts you talked about channel we're getting we're going to meet in the channel okay we're also talking about doing some more creative things possibly up for right now it's a meet in the channel we think there's enough enough good networking the teams are in touch with each other you know the value proposition proves itself right if somebody when's it going to be available in another month or so so there are demonstrations available both in the cat illogic and in the pure storage booth here at vmworld I so we would we would encourage those who are interested in seeing the power of this this solution to stop by either booth at any time we're going to speaking sessions in each others as well this week absolutely up and we are currently targeting for somewhere between mid to end-september for a ga release right and I need to say one other thing going back to this the reason this works is because these guys have but one care and they are customer driven right they don't have an ego they are driving to the customer and fulfill the needs because as he said it's sometimes hard for a heterogeneous vendor that controls a lot to be welcomed as much as we've been welcomed with this group it's because they know they want to drive it through the customer get the best solution in the world of the customer so on the customer side you've talked about the perfect storm of services and products who's the perfect customer who's the optimal customer something like this that I i think the low-hanging fruit is any development team that has as some requirement where they are taking copies of their current data set and are developing off of that platform I think that's the low-hanging fruit I think at a more macro level any organization that says they have a DevOps initiative and particularly they want to turn key DevOps platform to be riding with and launch launch ahead versus a try to acquire talent to build their own this is rate rate within your wheelhouse good deal no brainer and if people aren't looking at that right now you know they're not they're not in this century right because everybody's moving to flash for the primary all the projections are going forward to going off the charts in terms of the growth of flash of what's gonna happen at any what's changed with flash right where four years ago sure had to kind of get over the hurdle of the price berry for flat right we did that with industry-leading data reduction that's still two x better than the rest of the industry but as flash prices keep coming down not what you're seeing as a pivot around around value is around making multiple data sets I mean if you get into a depth use case and I'm making ten copies of a data footprint that's already reduced by x 5x and you're getting to a price point that you just you can't you can't meet with with this because you couldn't drive enough performance either death actually that's not possible yeah well before I let you go I want to tell you it's just disappointing to us that you're not more enthusiastic so and super a little it's really impressed today we had a long night life maybe tomorrow things will pick up but congratulations on the business venture and wish you the best of luck down the road thanks for being well thank you thank you guys for having us on really enjoyed it appreciate it thank huh thank you back with more from vmworld right after this here on the cube

(upbeat music) >> From Phoenix, Arizona, theCUBE, at Catalyst Conference. Here's your host, JefF Frick. (upbeat music) >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are in Phoenix, Arizona at the Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference. About 400 people, fourth year of the conference. Something in the water here in Phoenix, every time we come down here to some Women in Tech event. We were here two years ago for the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing which was fantastic, so we're really happy to be here, get a wide variety, really of women in tech stories from the people here at the conference, so we're excited by our next guest, Tejal Shah, the founder and CEO of Kid Admit. Welcome. >> Well thank you for having me. >> So what is Kid Admit? >> So we help parents search, compare, and apply to preschools based on criteria that's important to them. And so we partner with the schools, we give them the technology to bring their admissions process online, hence making it easier for parents to find schools nearby to them and based on criteria like philosophy that's important, schedule, that sort of stuff. >> So just for preschool? >> Right now just for preschool. The bigger vision is to add more products and services as the kids get older and so we'll have this great, rich data set of information on parents, so then we can give them more relevant recommendations and things that fit in their lives for their kids, like other extracurricular activities and that sort of stuff. >> So it's kind of like helping people with the college admissions process but for-- >> For preschool. >> The five year old right? So I mean, I've got kids, it seems like it's really kind of a function of proximity, is probably the number one thing, or is it in route to my office so I can drop the kid on the way to or from. What are some of the factors that are less obvious that people use in kind of deciding where they want their child to go to preschool? >> Yeah, I mean parenting has changed, because everything is available on the tips of your smartphone, so everyone is researching so many more things that are trying to make it more relevant to the child. It's not like, "Oh we're going to send the kid down the street "to the nearby preschool" anymore. It's like, "Oh we really want this philosophy "because they're going to excel in that." And really, that's kind of the more subtle things that parents are doing now is because it's so easy to find this information, matching up what's going to make their child succeed in these environments. >> And then how are the preschools, because now that you are saying that, I'm thinking of all these preschools in our neighborhood, that are very, very different, in kind of look and feel and the way they operate. How are you collecting that data, how are they getting you that data? How excited are they to have the opportunity to actually communicate how they're different, rather than whether they're on the main strip to the freeway? >> Yeah, it's actually really exciting, because I think the technology has changed so much since we started Kid Admit. And at first, there was a little bit of hesitancy, because people are like, "What are you doing? "What is this? "Why do you need a technology solution here?" And as technology has changed so drastic in the last few years, all of these schools are very excited to be part of a platform that makes their reach a lot bigger. You don't have to just put up fliers in your neighborhood anymore. You can attract people in a slightly bigger geo code. And there's been a lot of new preschools opening up as well for the demand. And it's nice for them to be able to be a part of a platform and easily get to families really quickly. >> Okay, so just a little bit more on Kid Admit. So you said you're three and a half years old? >> Yes, correct. >> And did you raise some outside funding? >> Yes, we raised 1.15 million dollars over a pre-seed and a seed round, so we're still early stage. >> Congratulations. >> Thank you. >> And what metro areas do you operate in? >> So we're in about 9,000 preschools across 20 states, and we're poised to be nationwide soon. So we are actually here in Phoenix, we just launched here recently, which has been pretty exciting. And yeah, so we actually have listings for more than that many schools, but the ones that partner with us. So we get the information from the state licensing, and then we do our own data, and get more data on our data-mining efforts. After that, we reach out to the schools directly, so they become member schools, and then they can add any information that they need that makes their program special. And with that, once they be part of the platform, then it's easier for parents to navigate the whole process. >> And from how many preschools do generally people kind of search through, what's kind of their tam if you will when they're trying to figure out their preschool? They start with how many and whittle it down to one, what do you kind of see? >> Yeah, so it's interesting. Most people only hear about five, and then you go on Kid Admit and the search in San Francisco, there's 357 preschools so, obviously that's not the pool that they're going to go after, it's probably based on a couple of criteria filters, it will probably whittle down to maybe 10. And so now you're not researching 350, you're getting down to 10. But even if they go a little bit specific, it's usually they'll really evaluate about four to five. >> And what are the top five factors? Not necessarily the value in the factors, but the factors that they're looking at that help drive the decision? >> Yeah, location is definitely a big, big factor. You want to make your life as convenient as possible, and you don't want to have to, if you're dealing with work, and kids, and if you have multiple kids, you want to keep that obviously pretty proximal. And it could be on your way to work too, like you mentioned earlier. Then philosophy, so Montessori, Reggio, is it play based, those, and schedule is a big thing, whether you want part-time or full-time. Interestingly, people talk about price, but ends up being a secondary factor, cause people want what's best for their children, and they want to see what all of those options that are available. >> What is the most surprising factor that you had no idea mattered so much to people as you've gone through this process? >> That they think that it's going to dictate the rest of their child's life on this first educational milestone. And it's just surprising that how it's completely false. And it's just crazy to see how much people still buy into this. >> Right, right. It's like the old Seinfeld episodes right? From Manhattan, and people trying to get in that first, getting in that school, but that's not what you're about at all, you're really about just knowing what the options are and finding the right fit. >> Yeah, we want to like democratize it a little bit, get the access to it. So a lot of people in Manhattan, or even San Francisco hire consultants to help for this, and they're like $15,000 to help you just with preschool. And so you can search Kid Admit for free, you get to see all the information, things that giving access to more families to make better choices for their kids, and it's all about finding a nice environment for your kid, who's going to develop a life-long love of learning. That's the only thing about preschool that makes it great. >> And how did you come up with this idea? >> So I have kids myself, and I went through the process. It was super, super crazy cause Google didn't spit out any results when I did this, my oldest one's seven and a half. And when I was pregnant, people were like, "Are you on the wait list?" I'm like, "I don't even know my child, "how am I going to go and find a preschool at this stage?" So I didn't take that advice, I'm like, "You know what. "I will do this when it's appropriate, "and I feel comfortable." And I did, and then I created this crazy spreadsheet, and cause there wasn't a lot of information available on the internet, so I'd have to call around, and ended up being another full-time job of mine. And once I created this, then a lot of my friends started using it, and using it, and so that was kind of the start of Kid Admit. >> Awesome. So we've had a lot of conversations here over the course of the day, about pivoting and getting involved in tech, and not necessarily being a tech person, and changing career paths. We talked a little bit offline before we came on air, you've got kind of an interesting journey. You started out as a mechanical engineer I think you said, and then got into finance, and now you're doing a kid based, basically marketplace exchange. >> Yes. >> How did that happen? I think I've always wanted to be an entrepreneur, though I didn't quite, was not truthful to myself when I was younger. I became a mechanical engineer. I worked at Ford Motor Company right out of school designing fuel systems, and then I did a lot of other things. Ended up in finance and I kept switching these careers, but I learned all these different skill sets. And all these different things then when you become CEO and start a company, they actually really are very relevant cause you get to, I have to book keep, and manage my own finances for the start-up. I've had to, for when I did financial services, I also cold called. I did that when I started doing early customer development. I did marketing for a medical devices company a long time ago and that's part of it. So all of this journey, as different as it is, it kind of led me to be able to be a generalist to start a company. >> Right, and then what was the tipping point that you said, "Okay, I'm doing it. "I'm going to start this company, I'm going to quit my job and do this?" >> Yeah, so I wanted to leave financial services after 2008. So it's been a-- >> Good timing. >> Yeah, well, but I still stuck onto it for two more years, because in that timeframe, actually four more years, in 2010 we left to start our own wealth management firm, my husband and I, and then I wanted to ramp that up before I could actually formally leave to start my own. So I always wanted knew I did it, but I wanted to have the timing, as well as the idea. >> Right, right. Okay so we're running low on time. So what advice would you give to the budding entrepreneur out there that's got an idea, that's just needs that final little kick out of the nest to go for it? What are some of the learnings that you can share, and advice that you would give them? >> Yeah, you'll never have, you'll never be ready. Just like anything else in life. You just have to kind of take that leap of faith. You're not going to know everything on the journey, and there's something sweet about that. It's something, I kind of miss some of the naitivity I had when I first started this because it keeps you really excited and passionate and relevant in that. And tenacity, resourcefulness, you definitely have to have those things. And just enjoy the journey cause as much as it's a high and low and roller coaster of a start-up experience, you definitely have to enjoy it. And I've gotten to do some really amazing, amazing things and meet some incredible people along the way, and I relish those times. >> Excellent. Well, Tejal thanks for sharing your story with us. >> Well thank you, thanks for having me. >> Absolutely. So great story on entrepreneurship. Eventually you've got to jump out of the nest. It's never easy, but as you said, there's never a right time. You just got to go for it, like everything else that's important in life. So thanks for watching, we're here at the Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference. I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)