>> Announcer: theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Hey everyone, welcome back to theCube's first day of coverage of MWC 23 from Barcelona, Spain. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante and Dave Nicholson. I'm literally in between two Daves. We've had a great first day of coverage of the event. There's been lots of conversations, Dave, on disaggregation, on the change of mobility. I want to be able to get your perspectives from both of you on what you saw on the show floor, what you saw and heard from our guests today. So we'll start with you, Dave V. What were some of the things that were our takeaways from day one for you? >> Well, the big takeaway is the event itself. On day one, you get a feel for what this show is like. Now that we're back, face-to-face kind of pretty much full face-to-face. A lot of excitement here. 2000 plus exhibitors, I mean, planes, trains, automobiles, VR, AI, servers, software, I mean everything. I mean, everybody is here. So it's a really comprehensive show. It's not just about mobile. That's why they changed the name from Mobile World Congress. I think the other thing is from the keynotes this morning, I mean, you heard, there's a lot of, you know, action around the telcos and the transformation, but in a lot of ways they're sort of protecting their existing past from the future. And so they have to be careful about how fast they move. But at the same time if they don't move fast, they're going to get disrupted. We heard some complaints, essentially, you know, veiled complaints that the over the top guys aren't paying their fair share and Telco should be able to charge them more. We heard the chairman of Ericsson talk about how we can't let the OTTs do that again. We're going to charge directly for access through APIs to our network, to our data. We heard from Chris Lewis. Yeah. They've only got, or maybe it was San Ji Choha, how they've only got eight APIs. So, you know the developers are the ones who are going to actually build out the innovation at the edge. The telcos are going to provide the connectivity and the infrastructure companies like Dell as well. But it's really to me all about the developers. And that's where the action's going to be. And it's going to be interesting to see how the developers respond to, you know, the gun to the head. If you want access, you're going to have to pay for it. Now maybe there's so much money to be made that they'll go for it, but I feel like there's maybe a different model. And I think some of the emerging telcos are going to say, you know what, here developers, here's a platform, have at it. We're not going to charge you for all the data until you succeed. Then we're going to figure out a monetization model. >> Right. A lot of opportunity for the developer. That skillset is certainly one that's in demand here. And certainly the transformation of the telecom industry is, there's a lot of conundrums that I was hearing going on today, kind of chicken and egg scenarios. But Dave, you had a chance to walk around the show floor. We were here interviewing all day. What were some of the things that you saw that really stuck out to you? >> I think I was struck by how much attention was being paid to private 5G networks. You sort of read between the lines and it appears as though people kind of accept that the big incumbent telecom players are going to be slower to move. And this idea of things like open RAN where you're leveraging open protocols in a stack to deliver more agility and more value. So it sort of goes back to the generalized IT discussion of moving to cloud for agility. It appears as though a lot of players realize that the wild wild west, the real opportunity, is in the private sphere. So it's really interesting to see how that works, how 5G implemented into an environment with wifi how that actually works. It's really interesting. >> So it's, obviously when you talk to companies like Dell, I haven't hit HPE yet. I'm going to go over there and check out their booth. They got an analyst thing going on but it's really early days for them. I mean, they started in this business by taking an X86 box, putting a name on it, you know, that sounded like it was edged, throwing it over, you know, the wall. That's sort of how they all started in this business. And now they're, you know, but they knew they had to form partnerships. They had to build purpose-built systems. Now with 16 G out, you're seeing that. And so it's still really early days, talking about O RAN, open RAN, the open RAN alliance. You know, it's just, I mean, not even, the game hasn't even barely started yet but we heard from Dish today. They're trying to roll out a massive 5G network. Rakuten is really focused on sort of open RAN that's more reliable, you know, or as reliable as the existing networks but not as nearly as huge a scale as Dish. So it's going to take a decade for this to evolve. >> Which is surprising to the average consumer to hear that. Because as far as we know 5G has been around for a long time. We've been talking about 5G, implementing 5G, you sort of assume it's ubiquitous but the reality is it is just the beginning. >> Yeah. And you know, it's got a fake 5G too, right? I mean you see it on your phone and you're like, what's the difference here? And it's, you know, just, >> Dave N.: What does it really mean? >> Right. And so I think your point about private is interesting, the conversation Dave that we had earlier, I had throughout, hey I don't think it's a replacement for wifi. And you said, "well, why not?" I guess it comes down to economics. I mean if you can get the private network priced close enough then you're right. Why wouldn't it replace wifi? Now you got wifi six coming in. So that's a, you know, and WiFi's flexible, it's cheap, it's good for homes, good for offices, but these private networks are going to be like kickass, right? They're going to be designed to run whatever, warehouses and robots, and energy drilling facilities. And so, you know the economics I don't think are there today but maybe they can be at volume. >> Maybe at some point you sort of think of today's science experiment becoming the enterprise-grade solution in the future. I had a chance to have some conversations with folks around the show. And I think, and what I was surprised by was I was reminded, frankly, I wasn't surprised. I was reminded that when we start talking about 5G, we're talking about spectrum that is managed by government entities. Of course all broadcast, all spectrum, is managed in one way or another. But in particular, you can't simply put a SIM in every device now because there are a lot of regulatory hurdles that have to take place. So typically what these things look like today is 5G backhaul to the network, communication from that box to wifi. That's a huge improvement already. So yeah, my question about whether, you know, why not put a SIM in everything? Maybe eventually, but I think, but there are other things that I was not aware of that are standing in the way. >> Your point about spectrum's an interesting one though because private networks, you're going to be able to leverage that spectrum in different ways, and tune it essentially, use different parts of the spectrum, make it programmable so that you can apply it to that specific use case, right? So it's going to be a lot more flexible, you know, because I presume the needs spectrum needs of a hospital are going to be different than, you know, an agribusiness are going to be different than a drilling, you know, unit, offshore drilling unit. And so the ability to have the flexibility to use the spectrum in different ways and apply it to that use case, I think is going to be powerful. But I suspect it's going to be expensive initially. I think the other thing we talked about is public policy and regulation, and it's San Ji Choha brought up the point, is telcos have been highly regulated. They don't just do something and ask for permission, you know, they have to work within the confines of that regulated environment. And there's a lot of these greenfield companies and private networks that don't necessarily have to follow those rules. So that's a potential disruptive force. So at the same time, the telcos are spending what'd we hear, a billion, a trillion and a half over the next seven years? Building out 5G networks. So they got to figure out, you know how to get a payback on that. They'll get it I think on connectivity, 'cause they have a monopoly but they want more. They're greedy. They see the over, they see the Netflixes of the world and the Googles and the Amazons mopping up services and they want a piece of that action but they've never really been good at it. >> Well, I've got a question for both of you. I mean, what do you think the odds are that by the time the Shangri La of fully deployed 5G happens that we have so much data going through it that effectively it feels exactly the same as 3G? What are the odds? >> That's a good point. Well, the thing that gets me about 5G is there's so much of it on, if I go to the consumer side when we're all consumers in our daily lives so much of it's marketing hype. And, you know all the messaging about that, when it's really early innings yet they're talking about 6G. What does actual fully deployed 5G look like? What is that going to enable a hospital to achieve or an oil refinery out in the middle of the ocean? That's something that interests me is what's next for that? Are we going to hear that at this event? >> I mean, walking around, you see a fair amount of discussion of, you know, the internet of things. Edge devices, the increase in connectivity. And again, what I was surprised by was that there's very little talk about a sim card in every one of those devices at this point. It's like, no, no, no, we got wifi to handle all that but aggregating it back into a central network that's leveraging 5G. That's really interesting. That's really interesting. >> I think you, the odds of your, to go back to your question, I think the odds are even money, that by the time it's all built out there's going to be so much data and so much new capability it's going to work similarly at similar speeds as we see in the networks today. You're just going to be able to do so many more things. You know, and your video's going to look better, the graphics are going to look better. But I think over the course of history, this is what's happening. I mean, even when you go back to dial up, if you were in an AOL chat room in 1996, it was, you know, yeah it took a while. You're like, (screeches) (Lisa laughs) the modem and everything else, but once you were in there- >> Once you're there, 2400 baud. >> It was basically real time. And so you could talk to your friends and, you know, little chat room but that's all you could do. You know, if you wanted to watch a video, forget it, right? And then, you know, early days of streaming video, stop, start, stop, start, you know, look at Amazon Prime when it first started, Prime Video was not that great. It's sort of catching up to Netflix. But, so I think your point, that question is really prescient because more data, more capability, more apps means same speed. >> Well, you know, you've used the phrase over the top. And so just just so we're clear so we're talking about the same thing. Typically we're talking about, you've got, you have network providers. Outside of that, you know, Netflix, internet connection, I don't need Comcast, right? Perfect example. Well, what about the over the top that's coming from direct satellite communications with devices. There are times when I don't have a signal on my, happens to be an Apple iPhone, when I get a little SOS satellite logo because I can communicate under very limited circumstances now directly to the satellite for very limited text messaging purposes. Here at the show, I think it might be a Motorola device. It's a dongle that allows any mobile device to leverage direct satellite communication. Again, for texting back to the 2,400 baud modem, you know, days, 1200 even, 300 even, go back far enough. What's that going to look like? Is that too far in the future to think that eventually it's all going to be over the top? It's all going to be handset to satellite and we don't need these RANs anymore. It's all going to be satellite networks. >> Dave V.: I think you're going to see- >> Little too science fiction-y? (laughs) >> No, I, no, I think it's a good question and I think you're going to see fragments. I think you're going to see fragmentation of private networks. I think you're going to see fragmentation of satellites. I think you're going to see legacy incumbents kind of hanging on, you know, the cable companies. I think that's coming. I think by 2030 it'll, the picture will be much more clear. The question is, and I think it's come down to the innovation on top, which platform is going to be the most developer friendly? Right, and you know, I've not heard anything from the big carriers that they're going to be developer friendly. I've heard "we have proprietary data that we're going to charge access for and developers are going to have to pay for that." But I haven't heard them saying "Developers, developers, developers!" You know, Steve Bomber running around, like bend over backwards for developers, they're asking the developers to bend over. And so if a network can, let's say the satellite network is more developer friendly, you know, you're going to see more innovation there potentially. You know, or if a dish network says, "You know what? We're going after developers, we're going after innovation. We're not going to gouge them for all this network data. Rather we're going to make the platform open or maybe we're going to do an app store-like model where we take a piece of the action after they succeed." You know, take it out of the backend, like a Silicon Valley VC as opposed to an East Coast VC. They're not going to get you in the front end. (Lisa laughs) >> Well, you can see the sort of disruptive forces at play between open RAN and the legacy, call it proprietary stack, right? But what is the, you know, if that's sort of a horizontal disruptive model, what's the vertically disruptive model? Is it private networks coming in? Is it a private 5G network that comes in that says, "We're starting from the ground up, everything is containerized. We're going to go find people at KubeCon who are, who understand how to orchestrate with Kubernetes and use containers in microservices, and we're going to have this little 5G network that's going to deliver capabilities that you can't get from the big boys." Is there a way to monetize that? Is there a way for them to be disrupted, be disruptive, or are these private 5G networks that everybody's talking about just relegated to industrial use cases where you're just squeezing better economics out of wireless communication amongst all your devices in your factory? >> That's an interesting question. I mean, there are a lot of those smart factory industrial use cases. I mean, it's basically industry 4.0 use cases. But yeah, I don't count the cloud guys out. You know, everybody says, "oh, the narrative is, well, the latency of the cloud." Well, not if the cloud is at the edge. If you take a local zone and put storage, compute, and data right next to each other and the cloud model with the cloud APIs, and then you got an asynchronous, you know, connection back. I think that's a reasonable model. I think the cloud guys figured out developers, right? Pretty well. Certainly Microsoft and, and Amazon and Google, they know developers. I don't see any reason why they can't bring their model to the edge. So, and that's really disruptive to the legacy telco guys, you know? So they have to be careful. >> One step closer to my dream of eliminating the word "cloud" from IT lexicon. (Lisa laughs) I contend that it has always been IT, and it will always be IT. And this whole idea of cloud, what is cloud? If AWS, for example, is delivering hardware to the edge where it needs to be, is that cloud? Do we go back to the idea that cloud is an operational model and not a question of physical location? I hope we get to that point. >> Well, what's Apex and GreenLake? Apex is, you know, Dell's as a service. GreenLake is- >> HPE. >> HPE's as a service. That's outposts. >> Dave N.: Right. >> Yeah. >> That's their outpost. >> Yeah. >> Well AWS's position used to be, you know, to use them as a proxy for hyperscale cloud. We'll just, we'll grow in a very straight trajectory forever on the back of net new stuff. Forget about the old stuff. As James T. Kirk said of the Klingons, "let them die." (Lisa laughs) As far as the cloud providers were concerned just, yeah, let, let that old stuff go away. Well then they found out, there came a point in time where they realized there's a lot of friction and stickiness associated with that. So they had to deal with the reality of hybridity, if that's the word, the hybrid nature of things. So what are they doing? They're pushing stuff out to the edge, so... >> With the same operating model. >> With the same operating model. >> Similar. I mean, it's limited, right? >> So you see- >> You can't run a lot of database on outpost, you can run RES- >> You see this clash of Titans where some may have written off traditional IT infrastructure vendors, might have been written off as part of the past. Whereas hyperscale cloud providers represent the future. It seems here at this show they're coming head to head and competing evenly. >> And this is where I think a company like Dell or HPE or Cisco has some advantages in that they're not going to compete with the telcos, but the hyperscalers will. >> Lisa: Right. >> Right. You know, and they're already, Google's, how much undersea cable does Google own? A lot. Probably more than anybody. >> Well, we heard from Google and Microsoft this morning in the keynote. It'd be interesting to see if we hear from AWS and then over the next couple of days. But guys, clearly there is, this is a great wrap of day one. And the crazy thing is this is only day one. We've got three more days of coverage, more news, more information to break down and unpack on theCUBE. Look forward to doing that with you guys over the next three days. Thank you for sharing what you saw on the show floor, what you heard from our guests today as we had about 10 interviews. Appreciate your insights and your perspectives and can't wait for tomorrow. >> Right on. >> All right. For Dave Vellante and Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's day one wrap from MWC 23. We'll see you tomorrow. (relaxing music)

>> From the Cube Studios in Palo Alto in Boston bringing you data-driven insights from the Cube and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> The unraveling of market enthusiasm continued in Q4 of 2022 with the earnings reports from the US hyperscalers, the big three now all in. As we said earlier this year, even the cloud is an immune from the macro headwinds and the cracks in the armor that we saw from the data that we shared last summer, they're playing out into 2023. For the most part actuals are disappointing beyond expectations including our own. It turns out that our estimates for the big three hyperscaler's revenue missed by 1.2 billion or 2.7% lower than we had forecast from even our most recent November estimates. And we expect continued decelerating growth rates for the hyperscalers through the summer of 2023 and we don't think that's going to abate until comparisons get easier. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube Insights powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we share our view of what's happening in cloud markets not just for the hyperscalers but other firms that have hitched a ride on the cloud. And we'll share new ETR data that shows why these trends are playing out tactics that customers are employing to deal with their cost challenges and how long the pain is likely to last. You know, riding the cloud wave, it's a two-edged sword. Let's look at the players that have gone all in on or are exposed to both the positive and negative trends of cloud. Look the cloud has been a huge tailwind for so many companies like Snowflake and Databricks, Workday, Salesforce, Mongo's move with Atlas, Red Hats Cloud strategy with OpenShift and so forth. And you know, the flip side is because cloud is elastic what comes up can also go down very easily. Here's an XY graphic from ETR that shows spending momentum or net score on the vertical axis and market presence in the dataset on the horizontal axis provision or called overlap. This is data from the January 2023 survey and that the red dotted lines show the positions of several companies that we've highlighted going back to January 2021. So let's unpack this for a bit starting with the big three hyperscalers. The first point is AWS and Azure continue to solidify their moat relative to Google Cloud platform. And we're going to get into this in a moment, but Azure and AWS revenues are five to six times that of GCP for IaaS. And at those deltas, Google should be gaining ground much faster than the big two. The second point on Google is notice the red line on GCP relative to its starting point. While it appears to be gaining ground on the horizontal axis, its net score is now below that of AWS and Azure in the survey. So despite its significantly smaller size it's just not keeping pace with the leaders in terms of market momentum. Now looking at AWS and Microsoft, what we see is basically AWS is holding serve. As we know both Google and Microsoft benefit from including SaaS in their cloud numbers. So the fact that AWS hasn't seen a huge downward momentum relative to a January 2021 position is one positive in the data. And both companies are well above that magic 40% line on the Y-axis, anything above 40% we consider to be highly elevated. But the fact remains that they're down as are most of the names on this chart. So let's take a closer look. I want to start with Snowflake and Databricks. Snowflake, as we reported from several quarters back came down to Earth, it was up in the 80% range in the Y-axis here. And it's still highly elevated in the 60% range and it continues to move to the right, which is positive but as we'll address in a moment it's customers can dial down consumption just as in any cloud. Now, Databricks is really interesting. It's not a public company, it never made it to IPO during the sort of tech bubble. So we don't have the same level of transparency that we do with other companies that did make it through. But look at how much more prominent it is on the X-axis relative to January 2021. And it's net score is basically held up over that period of time. So that's a real positive for Databricks. Next, look at Workday and Salesforce. They've held up relatively well, both inching to the right and generally holding their net scores. Same from Mongo, which is the brown dot above its name that says Elastic, it says a little gets a little crowded which Elastic's actually the blue dot above it. But generally, SaaS is harder to dial down, Workday, Salesforce, Oracles, SaaS and others. So it's harder to dial down because commitments have been made in advance, they're kind of locked in. Now, one of the discussions from last summer was as Mongo, less discretionary than analytics i.e. Snowflake. And it's an interesting debate but maybe Snowflake customers, you know, they're also generally committed to a dollar amount. So over time the spending is going to be there. But in the short term, yeah maybe Snowflake customers can dial down. Now that highlighted dotted red line, that bolded one is Datadog and you can see it's made major strides on the X-axis but its net score has decelerated quite dramatically. Openshift's momentum in the survey has dropped although IBM just announced that OpenShift has a a billion dollar ARR and I suspect what's happening there is IBM consulting is bundling OpenShift into its modernization projects. It's got a, that sort of captive base if you will. And as such it's probably not as top of mind to the respondents but I'll bet you the developers are certainly aware of it. Now the other really notable call out here is CloudFlare, We've reported on them earlier. Cloudflare's net score has held up really well since January of 2021. It really hasn't seen the downdraft of some of these others, but it's making major major moves to the right gaining market presence. We really like how CloudFlare is performing. And the last comment is on Oracle which as you can see, despite its much, much lower net score continues to gain ground in the market and thrive from a profitability standpoint. But the data pretty clearly shows that there's a downdraft in the market. Okay, so what's happening here? Let's dig deeper into this data. Here's a graphic from the most recent ETR drill down asking customers that said they were going to cut spending what technique they're using to do so. Now, as we've previously reported, consolidating redundant vendors is by far the most cited approach but there's two key points we want to make here. One is reducing excess cloud resources. As you can see in the bars is the second most cited technique and it's up from the previous polling period. The second we're not showing, you know directly but we've got some red call outs there. Reducing cloud costs jumps to 29% and 28% respectively in financial services and tech telco. And it's much closer to second. It's basically neck and neck with consolidating redundant vendors in those two industries. So they're being really aggressive about optimizing cloud cost. Okay, so as we said, cloud is great 'cause you can dial it up but it's just as easy to dial down. We've identified six factors that customers tell us are affecting their cloud consumption and there are probably more, if you got more we'd love to hear them but these are the ones that are fairly prominent that have hit our radar. First, rising mortgage rates mean banks are processing fewer loans means less cloud. The crypto crash means less trading activity and that means less cloud resources. Third lower ad spend has led companies to reduce not only you know, their ad buying but also their frequency of running their analytics and their calculations. And they're also often using less data, maybe compressing the timeframe of the corpus down to a shorter time period. Also very prominent is down to the bottom left, using lower cost compute instances. For example, Graviton from AWS or AMD chips and tiering storage to cheaper S3 or deep archived tiers. And finally, optimizing based on better pricing plans. So customers are moving from, you know, smaller companies in particular moving maybe from on demand or other larger companies that are experimenting using on demand or they're moving to spot pricing or reserved instances or optimized savings plans. That all lowers cost and that means less cloud resource consumption and less cloud revenue. Now in the days when everything was on prem CFOs, what would they do? They would freeze CapEx and IT Pros would have to try to do more with less and often that meant a lot of manual tasks. With the cloud it's much easier to move things around. It still takes some thinking and some effort but it's dramatically simpler to do so. So you can get those savings a lot faster. Now of course the other huge factor is you can cut or you can freeze. And this graphic shows data from a recent ETR survey with 159 respondents and you can see the meaningful uptick in hiring freezes, freezing new IT deployments and layoffs. And as we've been reporting, this has been trending up since earlier last year. And note the call out, this is especially prominent in retail sectors, all three of these techniques jump up in retail and that's a bit of a concern because oftentimes consumer spending helps the economy make a softer landing out of a pullback. But this is a potential canary in the coal mine. If retail firms are pulling back it's because consumers aren't spending as much. And so we're keeping a close eye on that. So let's boil this down to the market data and what this all means. So in this graphic we show our estimates for Q4 IaaS revenues compared to the "actual" IaaS revenues. And we say quote because AWS is the only one that reports, you know clean revenue and IaaS, Azure and GCP don't report actuals. Why would they? Because it would make them look even, you know smaller relative to AWS. Rather, they bury the figures in overall cloud which includes their, you know G-Suite for Google and all the Microsoft SaaS. And then they give us little tidbits about in Microsoft's case, Azure, they give growth rates. Google gives kind of relative growth of GCP. So, and we use survey data and you know, other data to try to really pinpoint and we've been covering this for, I don't know, five or six years ever since the cloud really became a thing. But looking at the data, we had AWS growing at 25% this quarter and it came in at 20%. So a significant decline relative to our expectations. AWS announced that it exited December, actually, sorry it's January data showed about a 15% mid-teens growth rate. So that's, you know, something we're watching. Azure was two points off our forecast coming in at 38% growth. It said it exited December in the 35% growth range and it said that it's expecting five points of deceleration off of that. So think 30% for Azure. GCP came in three points off our expectation coming in 35% and Alibaba has yet to report but we've shaved a bid off that forecast based on some survey data and you know what maybe 9% is even still not enough. Now for the year, the big four hyperscalers generated almost 160 billion of revenue, but that was 7 billion lower than what what we expected coming into 2022. For 2023, we're expecting 21% growth for a total of 193.3 billion. And while it's, you know, lower, you know, significantly lower than historical expectations it's still four to five times the overall spending forecast that we just shared with you in our predictions post of between 4 and 5% for the overall market. We think AWS is going to come in in around 93 billion this year with Azure closing in at over 71 billion. This is, again, we're talking IaaS here. Now, despite Amazon focusing investors on the fact that AWS's absolute dollar growth is still larger than its competitors. By our estimates Azure will come in at more than 75% of AWS's forecasted revenue. That's a significant milestone. AWS is operating margins by the way declined significantly this past quarter, dropping from 30% of revenue to 24%, 30% the year earlier to 24%. Now that's still extremely healthy and we've seen wild fluctuations like this before so I don't get too freaked out about that. But I'll say this, Microsoft has a marginal cost advantage relative to AWS because one, it has a captive cloud on which to run its massive software estate. So it can just throw software at its own cloud and two software marginal costs. Marginal economics despite AWS's awesomeness in high degrees of automation, software is just a better business. Now the upshot for AWS is the ecosystem. AWS is essentially in our view positioning very smartly as a platform for data partners like Snowflake and Databricks, security partners like CrowdStrike and Okta and Palo Alto and many others and SaaS companies. You know, Microsoft is more competitive even though AWS does have competitive products. Now of course Amazon's competitive to retail companies so that's another factor but generally speaking for tech players, Amazon is a really thriving ecosystem that is a secret weapon in our view. AWS happy to spin the meter with its partners even though it sells competitive products, you know, more so in our view than other cloud players. Microsoft, of course is, don't forget is hyping now, we're hearing a lot OpenAI and ChatGPT we reported last week in our predictions post. How OpenAI is shot up in terms of market sentiment in ETR's emerging technology company surveys and people are moving to Azure to get OpenAI and get ChatGPT that is a an interesting lever. Amazon in our view has to have a response. They have lots of AI and they're going to have to make some moves there. Meanwhile, Google is emphasizing itself as an AI first company. In fact, Google spent at least five minutes of continuous dialogue, nonstop on its AI chops during its latest earnings call. So that's an area that we're watching very closely as the buzz around large language models continues. All right, let's wrap up with some assumptions for 2023. We think SaaS players are going to continue to be sticky. They're going to be somewhat insulated from all these downdrafts because they're so tied in and customers, you know they make the commitment up front, you've got the lock in. Now having said that, we do expect some backlash over time on the onerous and generally customer unfriendly pricing models of most large SaaS companies. But that's going to play out over a longer period of time. Now for cloud generally and the hyperscalers specifically we do expect accelerating growth rates into Q3 but the amplitude of the demand swings from this rubber band economy, we expect to continue to compress and become more predictable throughout the year. Estimates are coming down, CEOs we think are going to be more cautious when the market snaps back more cautious about hiring and spending and as such a perhaps we expect a more orderly return to growth which we think will slightly accelerate in Q4 as comps get easier. Now of course the big risk to these scenarios is of course the economy, the FED, consumer spending, inflation, supply chain, energy prices, wars, geopolitics, China relations, you know, all the usual stuff. But as always with our partners at ETR and the Cube community, we're here for you. We have the data and we'll be the first to report when we see a change at the margin. Okay, that's a wrap for today. I want to thank Alex Morrison who's on production and manages the podcast, Ken Schiffman as well out of our Boston studio getting this up on LinkedIn Live. Thank you for that. Kristen Martin also and Cheryl Knight help get the word out on social media and in our newsletters. And Rob Hof is our Editor-in-Chief over at siliconangle.com. He does some great editing for us. Thank you all. Remember all these episodes are available as podcast. Wherever you listen, just search Breaking Analysis podcast. I publish each week on wikibon.com, at siliconangle.com where you can see all the data and you want to get in touch. Just all you can do is email me david.vellante@siliconangle.com or DM me @dvellante if you if you got something interesting, I'll respond. If you don't, it's either 'cause I'm swamped or it's just not tickling me. You can comment on our LinkedIn post as well. And please check out ETR.ai for the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for the Cube Insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching and we'll see you next time on Breaking Analysis. (gentle upbeat music)

>> Welcome to "theCUBE's" coverage of "Compute Engineered for Your Hybrid World" sponsored by HPE and Intel. I'm John Furrier, host of "theCUBE" with the new fourth gen Intel Z on scalable process being announced, HPE is releasing four new HPE ProLiant Gen 11 servers and here to talk about the feature of those servers as well as the partnership between HPE and Intel, we have Darren Anthony, director compute server product manager with HPE, and Suzi Jewett, general manager of the Zion products with Intel. Thanks for joining us folks. Appreciate you coming on. >> Thanks for having us. (Suzi's speech drowned out) >> This segment is about NextGen enhanced scale of process. Obviously the Zion fourth gen. This is really cool stuff. What's the most exciting element of the new Intel fourth gen Zion processor? >> Yeah, John, thanks for asking. Of course, I'm very excited about the fourth gen Intel Zion processor. I think the best thing that we'll be delivering is our new ong package accelerators, which you know allows us to service the majority of the server market, which still is buying in that mid core count range and provide workload acceleration that matters for every one of the products that we sell. And that workload acceleration allows us to drive better efficiency and allows us to really dive into improved sustainability and workload optimizations for the data center. >> It's about al the rage about the cores. Now we got the acceleration continued to innovate with Zion. Congratulations. Darren what does the new Intel fourth Gen Zion processes mean for HPE from the ProLiant perspective? You're on Gen 11 servers. What's in it? What's it mean for you guys and for your customers? >> Well, John, first we got to talk about the great partnership. HPE and Intel have been partners delivering innovation for our server products for over 30 years, and we're continuing that partnership with HP ProLiant Gen 11 servers to deliver compelling business outcomes for our customers. Customers are on a digital transformation journey, and they need the right compute to power applications, accelerate analytics, and turn data into value. HP ProLiant Compute is engineered for your hybrid world and delivers optimized performance for your workloads. With HP ProLiant Gen 11 servers and Intel fourth gen Zion processors, you can have the performance to accelerate workloads from the data center to the edge. With Gen 11, we have more. More performance to meet new workload demands. With PCI Gen five which delivers increased bandwidth with room for more data and graphics accelerators for workloads like VDI, our new demands at the edge. DDR5 memory springs greater bandwidth and performance increases for low latency and memory solutions for database and analytics workloads and higher clock speed CPU chipset combinations for processor intensive AI and machine learning applications. >> Got to love the low latency. Got to love the more performance. Got to love the engineered for the hybrid world. You mentioned that. Can you elaborate more on engineered for the hybrid world? What does that mean? Can you elaborate? >> Well, HP ProLiant Compute is based on three pillars. First, an intuitive cloud operating experience with HPE GreenLake compute ops management. Second, trusted security by design with a zero trust approach from silicone to cloud. And third, optimize for performance for your workloads, whether you deploy as a traditional infrastructure or a pay-as-you-go model with HPE GreenLake on-premise at the edge in a colo and in the public cloud. >> Well, thanks Suzi and Darren, we'll be right back. We're going to take a quick break. We're going to come back and do a deep dive and get into the ProLiant Gen 11 servers. We're going to dig into it. You're watching "theCUBE," the leader in high tech enterprise coverage. We'll be right back. (upbeat music) >> Hello everyone. Welcome back continuing coverage of "theCUBE's" "Compute Engineered for Your Hybrid World" with HP and Intel. I'm John Furrier, host of "theCUBE'" joined back by Darren Anthony from HPE and Suzie Jewitt from Intel. as we continue our conversation on the fourth gen Zion scalable processor and HP Gen 11 servers. Suzi, we'll start with you first. Can you give us some use cases around the new fourth gen, Intel Zion scalable processors? >> Yeah, I'd love to. What we're really seeing with an ever-changing market, and you know, adapting to that is we're leading with that workload focus approach. Some examples, you know, that we see are with vRAN. For in vRAN, we estimate the 2021 market size was about 150 million, and we expect a CAG of almost 30% all the way through 2030. So we're really focused on that, on, you know deployed edge use cases, growing about 10% to over 50% in 2026. And HPC use cases, of course, continue to grow at a study CAGR around, you know, about 7%. Then last but not least is cloud. So we're, you know, targeting a growth rate of almost 20% over a five year CAGR. And the fourth G Zion is targeted to all of those workloads, both through our architectural improvements that, you know deliver node level performance as well as our operational improvements that deliver data center performance. And wrapping that all around with the accelerators that I talked about earlier that provide that workload specific improvements that get us to where our customers need to operationalize in their data center. >> I love the focus solutions around seeing compute used that way and the processors. Great stuff. Darren, how do you see the new ProLiant Gen 11 servers being used on your side? I mean obviously, you've got the customers deploying the servers. What are you seeing on those workloads? Those targeted workloads? (John chuckling) >> Well, you know, very much in line with what Suzi was talking about. The generational improvements that we're seeing in performance for Gen 11. They're outstanding for many different use cases. You know, obviously VDI. what we're seeing a lot is around the analytics. You know, with moving to the edge, there's a lot more data. Customers need to convert that data into something tangible. Something that's actionable. And so we're really seeing the strong use cases around analytics in order to mine that data and to make better, faster decisions for the customers. >> You know what I love about this market is people really want to hear about performance. They love speed, they love the power, and low power, by the way on the other side. So, you know, this has really been a big part of the focus now this year. We're seeing a lot more discussion. Suzi, can you tell us more about the key performance improvements on the processors? And Darren, if you don't mind, if you can follow up on the benefits of the new servers relative to the performance. Suzi? >> Sure, so, you know, at a standard expectant rate we're looking at, you know, 60% gen over gen, from our previous third gen Zion, but more importantly as we've been mentioning is the performance improvement we get with the accelerators. As an example, an average accelerator proof point that we have is 2.9 times improvement in performance per wat for accelerated workloads versus non-accelerated workloads. Additionally, we're seeing really great and performance improvement in low jitter so almost 20 to 50 times improvement versus previous gen in jitter on particular workloads which is really important, you know to our cloud service providers. >> Darren, what's your follow up on this? This is obviously translates into the the gen 11 servers. >> Well, you know, this generation. Huge improvements across the board. And what we're seeing is that not only customers are prepared for what they need now you know, workloads are evolving and transitioning. Customers need more. They're doing more. They're doing more analytics. And so not only do you have the performance you need now, but it's actually built for the future. We know that customers are looking to take in that data and do something and work with the data wherever it resides within their infrastructure. We also see customers that are beginning to move servers out of a centralized data center more to the edge, closer to the way that where the data resides. And so this new generation really tremendous for that. Seeing a lot of benefits for the customers from that perspective. >> Okay, Suzi, Darren, I want to get your thoughts on one of the hottest trends happening right now. Obviously machine learning and AI has always been hot, but recently more and more focus has been on AI. As you start to see this kind of next gen kind of AI coming on, and the younger generation of developers, you know, they're all into this. This is really the one of the hottest trends of AI. We've seen the momentum and accelerations kind of going next level. Can you guys comment on how Zion here and Gen 11 are tying into that? What's that mean for AI? >> So, exactly. With the fourth gen Intel Zion, we have one of our key you know, on package accelerators in every core is our AMX. It delivers up to 10 times improvement on inference and training versus previous gens, and, you know throws the competition out of the water. So we are really excited for our AI performance leading with Zion >> And- >> And John, what we're seeing is that this next generation, you know you're absolutely right, you know. Workloads a lot more focused. A lot more taking more advantage of AI machine learning capabilities. And with this generation together with the Intel Zion fourth gen, you know what we're seeing is the opportunity with that increase in IO bandwidth that now we have an opportunity for those applications and those use cases and those workloads to take advantage of this capability. We haven't had that before, but now more than ever, we've actually, you know opened the throttle with the performance and with the capabilities to support those workloads. >> That's great stuff. And you know, the AI stuff also does all lot on differentiated heavy lifting, and it needs processing power. It needs the servers. This is just, (John chuckling) it creates more and more value. This is right in line. Congratulations. Super excited by that call out. Really appreciate it. Thanks Suzi and Darren. Really appreciate. A lot more discuss with you guys as we go a little bit deeper. We're going to talk about security and wrap things up after this short break. I'm John Furrier, "theCUBE," the leader in enterprise tech coverage. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to "theCUBE's" coverage of "Compute Engineered for Your Hybrid World." I'm John Furrier, host of "theCUBE" joined by Darren Anthony from HPE and Suzi Jewett from Intel as we turn our discussion to security. A lot of great features with the new Zion scalable processor's gen four and the ProLiant gen 11. Let's get into it. Suzi, what are some of the cool features of the fourth gen Intel Zion scalable processors? >> Sure, John, I'd love to talk about it. With fourth gen, Intel offers the most comprehensive confidential computing portfolio to really enhance data security and ingest regulatory compliance and sovereignty concerns. A couple examples of those features and technologies that we've included are a larger baseline enclave with the SGX technology, which is our application isolation technology and our Intel CET substantially reduces the risk of whole class software-based attacks. That wrapped around at a platform level really allows us, you know, to secure workload acceleration software and ensure platform integrity. >> Darren, this is a great enablement for HPE. Can you tell us about the security with the the new HP ProLiant Gen 11 servers? >> Absolutely, John. So HP ProLiant engineered with a fundamental security approach to defend against increasingly complex threats and uncompromising focus on state-of-the-art security innovations that are built right into our DNA, from silicon to software, from the factory to the cloud. It's our goal to protect the customer's infrastructure, workloads, and the data from threats to hardware and risk from third party software and devices. So Gen 11 is just a continuation of the the great technological innovations that we've had around providing zero trust architecture. We're extending our Silicon Root of Trust, and it's just a motion forward for innovating on that Silicon Root of Trust that we've had. So with Silicon Root of Trust, we protect millions of lines of firmware code from malware and ransomware with the digital footprint that's unique to the server. With this Silicon Root of Trust, we're securing over 4 million HPE servers around the world and beyond that Silicon, the authentication of and extending this to our partner ecosystem, the authentication of platform components, such as network interface cards and storage controllers just gives us that protection against additional entry points of security threats that can compromise the entire server infrastructure. With this latest version, we're also doing authentication integrity with those components using the security protocol and data model protocol or SPDM. But we know that trusted and protected infrastructure begins with a secure supply chain, a layer of protection that starts at the manufacturing floor. HP provides you optimized protection for ProLiant servers from trusted suppliers to the factories and into transit to the customer. >> Any final messages Darren you'd like to share with your audience on the hybrid world engineering for the hybrid world security overall the new Gen 11 servers with the Zion fourth generation process scalable processors? >> Well, it's really about choice. Having the right choice for your compute, and we know HPE ProLiant servers, together, ProLiant Gen 11 servers together with the new Zion processors is the right choice. Delivering the capabilities to performance and the efficiency that customers need to run their most complex workloads and their most performance hungry work workloads. We're really excited about this next generation of platforms. >> ProLiant Gen 11. Suzi, great customer for Intel. You got the fourth generation Zion scalable processes. We've been tracking multiple generations for both of you guys for many, many years now, the past decade. A lot of growth, a lot of innovation. I'll give you the last word on the series here on this segment. Can you share the the collaboration between Intel and HP? What does it mean and what's that mean for customers? Can you give your thoughts and share your views on the relationship with with HPE? >> Yeah, we value, obviously HPE as one of our key customers. We partner with them from the beginning of when we are defining the product all the way through the development and validation. HP has been a great partner in making sure that we deliver collaboratively to the needs of their customers and our customers all together to make sure that we get the best product in the market that meets our customer needs allowing for the flexibility, the operational efficiency, the security that our markets demand. >> Darren, Suzi, thank you so much. You know, "Compute for an Engineered Hybrid World" is really important. Compute is... (John stuttering) We need more compute. (John chuckling) Give us more power and less power on the sustainability side. So a lot of great advances. Thank you so much for spending the time and give us an overview on the innovation around the Zion and, and the ProLiant Gen 11. Appreciate your time. Appreciate it. >> You're welcome. Thanks for having us. >> You're watching "theCUBE's" coverage of "Compute Engineered for Your Hybrid World" sponsored by HPE and Intel. I'm John Furrier with "theCUBE." Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>From the Cube Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from the cube and E T R. This is breaking analysis with Dave Valante. >>Making technology predictions in 2022 was tricky business, especially if you were projecting the performance of markets or identifying I P O prospects and making binary forecast on data AI and the macro spending climate and other related topics in enterprise tech 2022, of course was characterized by a seesaw economy where central banks were restructuring their balance sheets. The war on Ukraine fueled inflation supply chains were a mess. And the unintended consequences of of forced march to digital and the acceleration still being sorted out. Hello and welcome to this week's weekly on Cube Insights powered by E T R. In this breaking analysis, we continue our annual tradition of transparently grading last year's enterprise tech predictions. And you may or may not agree with our self grading system, but look, we're gonna give you the data and you can draw your own conclusions and tell you what, tell us what you think. >>All right, let's get right to it. So our first prediction was tech spending increases by 8% in 2022. And as we exited 2021 CIOs, they were optimistic about their digital transformation plans. You know, they rushed to make changes to their business and were eager to sharpen their focus and continue to iterate on their digital business models and plug the holes that they, the, in the learnings that they had. And so we predicted that 8% rise in enterprise tech spending, which looked pretty good until Ukraine and the Fed decided that, you know, had to rush and make up for lost time. We kind of nailed the momentum in the energy sector, but we can't give ourselves too much credit for that layup. And as of October, Gartner had it spending growing at just over 5%. I think it was 5.1%. So we're gonna take a C plus on this one and, and move on. >>Our next prediction was basically kind of a slow ground ball. The second base, if I have to be honest, but we felt it was important to highlight that security would remain front and center as the number one priority for organizations in 2022. As is our tradition, you know, we try to up the degree of difficulty by specifically identifying companies that are gonna benefit from these trends. So we highlighted some possible I P O candidates, which of course didn't pan out. S NQ was on our radar. The company had just had to do another raise and they recently took a valuation hit and it was a down round. They raised 196 million. So good chunk of cash, but, but not the i p O that we had predicted Aqua Securities focus on containers and cloud native. That was a trendy call and we thought maybe an M SS P or multiple managed security service providers like Arctic Wolf would I p o, but no way that was happening in the crummy market. >>Nonetheless, we think these types of companies, they're still faring well as the talent shortage in security remains really acute, particularly in the sort of mid-size and small businesses that often don't have a sock Lacework laid off 20% of its workforce in 2022. And CO C e o Dave Hatfield left the company. So that I p o didn't, didn't happen. It was probably too early for Lacework. Anyway, meanwhile you got Netscope, which we've cited as strong in the E T R data as particularly in the emerging technology survey. And then, you know, I lumia holding its own, you know, we never liked that 7 billion price tag that Okta paid for auth zero, but we loved the TAM expansion strategy to target developers beyond sort of Okta's enterprise strength. But we gotta take some points off of the failure thus far of, of Okta to really nail the integration and the go to market model with azero and build, you know, bring that into the, the, the core Okta. >>So the focus on endpoint security that was a winner in 2022 is CrowdStrike led that charge with others holding their own, not the least of which was Palo Alto Networks as it continued to expand beyond its core network security and firewall business, you know, through acquisition. So overall we're gonna give ourselves an A minus for this relatively easy call, but again, we had some specifics associated with it to make it a little tougher. And of course we're watching ve very closely this this coming year in 2023. The vendor consolidation trend. You know, according to a recent Palo Alto network survey with 1300 SecOps pros on average organizations have more than 30 tools to manage security tools. So this is a logical way to optimize cost consolidating vendors and consolidating redundant vendors. The E T R data shows that's clearly a trend that's on the upswing. >>Now moving on, a big theme of 2020 and 2021 of course was remote work and hybrid work and new ways to work and return to work. So we predicted in 2022 that hybrid work models would become the dominant protocol, which clearly is the case. We predicted that about 33% of the workforce would come back to the office in 2022 in September. The E T R data showed that figure was at 29%, but organizations expected that 32% would be in the office, you know, pretty much full-time by year end. That hasn't quite happened, but we were pretty close with the projection, so we're gonna take an A minus on this one. Now, supply chain disruption was another big theme that we felt would carry through 2022. And sure that sounds like another easy one, but as is our tradition, again we try to put some binary metrics around our predictions to put some meat in the bone, so to speak, and and allow us than you to say, okay, did it come true or not? >>So we had some data that we presented last year and supply chain issues impacting hardware spend. We said at the time, you can see this on the left hand side of this chart, the PC laptop demand would remain above pre covid levels, which would reverse a decade of year on year declines, which I think started in around 2011, 2012. Now, while demand is down this year pretty substantially relative to 2021, I D C has worldwide unit shipments for PCs at just over 300 million for 22. If you go back to 2019 and you're looking at around let's say 260 million units shipped globally, you know, roughly, so, you know, pretty good call there. Definitely much higher than pre covid levels. But so what you might be asking why the B, well, we projected that 30% of customers would replace security appliances with cloud-based services and that more than a third would replace their internal data center server and storage hardware with cloud services like 30 and 40% respectively. >>And we don't have explicit survey data on exactly these metrics, but anecdotally we see this happening in earnest. And we do have some data that we're showing here on cloud adoption from ET R'S October survey where the midpoint of workloads running in the cloud is around 34% and forecast, as you can see, to grow steadily over the next three years. So this, well look, this is not, we understand it's not a one-to-one correlation with our prediction, but it's a pretty good bet that we were right, but we gotta take some points off, we think for the lack of unequivocal proof. Cause again, we always strive to make our predictions in ways that can be measured as accurate or not. Is it binary? Did it happen, did it not? Kind of like an O K R and you know, we strive to provide data as proof and in this case it's a bit fuzzy. >>We have to admit that although we're pretty comfortable that the prediction was accurate. And look, when you make an hard forecast, sometimes you gotta pay the price. All right, next, we said in 2022 that the big four cloud players would generate 167 billion in IS and PaaS revenue combining for 38% market growth. And our current forecasts are shown here with a comparison to our January, 2022 figures. So coming into this year now where we are today, so currently we expect 162 billion in total revenue and a 33% growth rate. Still very healthy, but not on our mark. So we think a w s is gonna miss our predictions by about a billion dollars, not, you know, not bad for an 80 billion company. So they're not gonna hit that expectation though of getting really close to a hundred billion run rate. We thought they'd exit the year, you know, closer to, you know, 25 billion a quarter and we don't think they're gonna get there. >>Look, we pretty much nailed Azure even though our prediction W was was correct about g Google Cloud platform surpassing Alibaba, Alibaba, we way overestimated the performance of both of those companies. So we're gonna give ourselves a C plus here and we think, yeah, you might think it's a little bit harsh, we could argue for a B minus to the professor, but the misses on GCP and Alibaba we think warrant a a self penalty on this one. All right, let's move on to our prediction about Supercloud. We said it becomes a thing in 2022 and we think by many accounts it has, despite the naysayers, we're seeing clear evidence that the concept of a layer of value add that sits above and across clouds is taking shape. And on this slide we showed just some of the pickup in the industry. I mean one of the most interesting is CloudFlare, the biggest supercloud antagonist. >>Charles Fitzgerald even predicted that no vendor would ever use the term in their marketing. And that would be proof if that happened that Supercloud was a thing and he said it would never happen. Well CloudFlare has, and they launched their version of Supercloud at their developer week. Chris Miller of the register put out a Supercloud block diagram, something else that Charles Fitzgerald was, it was was pushing us for, which is rightly so, it was a good call on his part. And Chris Miller actually came up with one that's pretty good at David Linthicum also has produced a a a A block diagram, kind of similar, David uses the term metacloud and he uses the term supercloud kind of interchangeably to describe that trend. And so we we're aligned on that front. Brian Gracely has covered the concept on the popular cloud podcast. Berkeley launched the Sky computing initiative. >>You read through that white paper and many of the concepts highlighted in the Supercloud 3.0 community developed definition align with that. Walmart launched a platform with many of the supercloud salient attributes. So did Goldman Sachs, so did Capital One, so did nasdaq. So you know, sorry you can hate the term, but very clearly the evidence is gathering for the super cloud storm. We're gonna take an a plus on this one. Sorry, haters. Alright, let's talk about data mesh in our 21 predictions posts. We said that in the 2020s, 75% of large organizations are gonna re-architect their big data platforms. So kind of a decade long prediction. We don't like to do that always, but sometimes it's warranted. And because it was a longer term prediction, we, at the time in, in coming into 22 when we were evaluating our 21 predictions, we took a grade of incomplete because the sort of decade long or majority of the decade better part of the decade prediction. >>So last year, earlier this year, we said our number seven prediction was data mesh gains momentum in 22. But it's largely confined and narrow data problems with limited scope as you can see here with some of the key bullets. So there's a lot of discussion in the data community about data mesh and while there are an increasing number of examples, JP Morgan Chase, Intuit, H S P C, HelloFresh, and others that are completely rearchitecting parts of their data platform completely rearchitecting entire data platforms is non-trivial. There are organizational challenges, there're data, data ownership, debates, technical considerations, and in particular two of the four fundamental data mesh principles that the, the need for a self-service infrastructure and federated computational governance are challenging. Look, democratizing data and facilitating data sharing creates conflicts with regulatory requirements around data privacy. As such many organizations are being really selective with their data mesh implementations and hence our prediction of narrowing the scope of data mesh initiatives. >>I think that was right on J P M C is a good example of this, where you got a single group within a, within a division narrowly implementing the data mesh architecture. They're using a w s, they're using data lakes, they're using Amazon Glue, creating a catalog and a variety of other techniques to meet their objectives. They kind of automating data quality and it was pretty well thought out and interesting approach and I think it's gonna be made easier by some of the announcements that Amazon made at the recent, you know, reinvent, particularly trying to eliminate ET t l, better connections between Aurora and Redshift and, and, and better data sharing the data clean room. So a lot of that is gonna help. Of course, snowflake has been on this for a while now. Many other companies are facing, you know, limitations as we said here and this slide with their Hadoop data platforms. They need to do new, some new thinking around that to scale. HelloFresh is a really good example of this. Look, the bottom line is that organizations want to get more value from data and having a centralized, highly specialized teams that own the data problem, it's been a barrier and a blocker to success. The data mesh starts with organizational considerations as described in great detail by Ash Nair of Warner Brothers. So take a listen to this clip. >>Yeah, so when people think of Warner Brothers, you always think of like the movie studio, but we're more than that, right? I mean, you think of H B O, you think of t n t, you think of C N N. We have 30 plus brands in our portfolio and each have their own needs. So the, the idea of a data mesh really helps us because what we can do is we can federate access across the company so that, you know, CNN can work at their own pace. You know, when there's election season, they can ingest their own data and they don't have to, you know, bump up against, as an example, HBO if Game of Thrones is going on. >>So it's often the case that data mesh is in the eyes of the implementer. And while a company's implementation may not strictly adhere to Jamma Dani's vision of data mesh, and that's okay, the goal is to use data more effectively. And despite Gartner's attempts to deposition data mesh in favor of the somewhat confusing or frankly far more confusing data fabric concept that they stole from NetApp data mesh is taking hold in organizations globally today. So we're gonna take a B on this one. The prediction is shaping up the way we envision, but as we previously reported, it's gonna take some time. The better part of a decade in our view, new standards have to emerge to make this vision become reality and they'll come in the form of both open and de facto approaches. Okay, our eighth prediction last year focused on the face off between Snowflake and Databricks. >>And we realized this popular topic, and maybe one that's getting a little overplayed, but these are two companies that initially, you know, looked like they were shaping up as partners and they, by the way, they are still partnering in the field. But you go back a couple years ago, the idea of using an AW w s infrastructure, Databricks machine intelligence and applying that on top of Snowflake as a facile data warehouse, still very viable. But both of these companies, they have much larger ambitions. They got big total available markets to chase and large valuations that they have to justify. So what's happening is, as we've previously reported, each of these companies is moving toward the other firm's core domain and they're building out an ecosystem that'll be critical for their future. So as part of that effort, we said each is gonna become aggressive investors and maybe start doing some m and a and they have in various companies. >>And on this chart that we produced last year, we studied some of the companies that were targets and we've added some recent investments of both Snowflake and Databricks. As you can see, they've both, for example, invested in elation snowflake's, put money into Lacework, the Secur security firm, ThoughtSpot, which is trying to democratize data with ai. Collibra is a governance platform and you can see Databricks investments in data transformation with D B T labs, Matillion doing simplified business intelligence hunters. So that's, you know, they're security investment and so forth. So other than our thought that we'd see Databricks I p o last year, this prediction been pretty spot on. So we'll give ourselves an A on that one. Now observability has been a hot topic and we've been covering it for a while with our friends at E T R, particularly Eric Bradley. Our number nine prediction last year was basically that if you're not cloud native and observability, you are gonna be in big trouble. >>So everything guys gotta go cloud native. And that's clearly been the case. Splunk, the big player in the space has been transitioning to the cloud, hasn't always been pretty, as we reported, Datadog real momentum, the elk stack, that's open source model. You got new entrants that we've cited before, like observe, honeycomb, chaos search and others that we've, we've reported on, they're all born in the cloud. So we're gonna take another a on this one, admittedly, yeah, it's a re reasonably easy call, but you gotta have a few of those in the mix. Okay, our last prediction, our number 10 was around events. Something the cube knows a little bit about. We said that a new category of events would emerge as hybrid and that for the most part is happened. So that's gonna be the mainstay is what we said. That pure play virtual events are gonna give way to hi hybrid. >>And the narrative is that virtual only events are, you know, they're good for quick hits, but lousy replacements for in-person events. And you know that said, organizations of all shapes and sizes, they learn how to create better virtual content and support remote audiences during the pandemic. So when we set at pure play is gonna give way to hybrid, we said we, we i we implied or specific or specified that the physical event that v i p experience is going defined. That overall experience and those v i p events would create a little fomo, fear of, of missing out in a virtual component would overlay that serves an audience 10 x the size of the physical. We saw that really two really good examples. Red Hat Summit in Boston, small event, couple thousand people served tens of thousands, you know, online. Second was Google Cloud next v i p event in, in New York City. >>Everything else was, was, was, was virtual. You know, even examples of our prediction of metaverse like immersion have popped up and, and and, and you know, other companies are doing roadshow as we predicted like a lot of companies are doing it. You're seeing that as a major trend where organizations are going with their sales teams out into the regions and doing a little belly to belly action as opposed to the big giant event. That's a definitely a, a trend that we're seeing. So in reviewing this prediction, the grade we gave ourselves is, you know, maybe a bit unfair, it should be, you could argue for a higher grade, but the, but the organization still haven't figured it out. They have hybrid experiences but they generally do a really poor job of leveraging the afterglow and of event of an event. It still tends to be one and done, let's move on to the next event or the next city. >>Let the sales team pick up the pieces if they were paying attention. So because of that, we're only taking a B plus on this one. Okay, so that's the review of last year's predictions. You know, overall if you average out our grade on the 10 predictions that come out to a b plus, I dunno why we can't seem to get that elusive a, but we're gonna keep trying our friends at E T R and we are starting to look at the data for 2023 from the surveys and all the work that we've done on the cube and our, our analysis and we're gonna put together our predictions. We've had literally hundreds of inbounds from PR pros pitching us. We've got this huge thick folder that we've started to review with our yellow highlighter. And our plan is to review it this month, take a look at all the data, get some ideas from the inbounds and then the e t R of January surveys in the field. >>It's probably got a little over a thousand responses right now. You know, they'll get up to, you know, 1400 or so. And once we've digested all that, we're gonna go back and publish our predictions for 2023 sometime in January. So stay tuned for that. All right, we're gonna leave it there for today. You wanna thank Alex Myerson who's on production and he manages the podcast, Ken Schiffman as well out of our, our Boston studio. I gotta really heartfelt thank you to Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight and their team. They helped get the word out on social and in our newsletters. Rob Ho is our editor in chief over at Silicon Angle who does some great editing for us. Thank you all. Remember all these podcasts are available or all these episodes are available is podcasts. Wherever you listen, just all you do Search Breaking analysis podcast, really getting some great traction there. Appreciate you guys subscribing. I published each week on wikibon.com, silicon angle.com or you can email me directly at david dot valante silicon angle.com or dm me Dante, or you can comment on my LinkedIn post. And please check out ETR AI for the very best survey data in the enterprise tech business. Some awesome stuff in there. This is Dante for the Cube Insights powered by etr. Thanks for watching and we'll see you next time on breaking analysis.

>>The Cube presents Ignite 22, brought to you by Palo Alto Networks. >>Welcome back everyone. We're so glad that you're still with us. It's the Cube Live at the MGM Grand. This is our second day of coverage of Palo Alto Networks Ignite. This is takeaways from Ignite 22. Lisa Martin here with two really smart guys, Dave Valante. Dave, we're joined by one of our cube alumni, a friend, a friend of the, we say friend of the Cube. >>Yeah, otc. A friend of the Cube >>Karala joined us. Guys, it's great to have you here. It's been an exciting show. A lot of cybersecurity is one of my favorite topics to talk about. But I'd love to get some of the big takeaways from both of you. Dave, we'll start with you. >>A breathing room from two weeks ago. Yeah, that was, that was really pleasant. You know, I mean, I know was, yes, you sat in the analyst program, interested in what your takeaways were from there. But, you know, coming into this, we wrote a piece, Palo Alto's Gold Standard, what they need to do to, to keep that, that status. And we hear it a lot about consolidation. That's their big theme now, which is timely, right? Cause people wanna save money, they wanna do more with less. But I'm really interested in hearing zeus's thoughts on how that's playing in the market. How customers, how easy is it to just say, oh, hey, I'm gonna consolidate. I wanna get into that a little bit with you, how well the strategy's working. We're gonna get into some of the m and a activity and really bring your perspectives to the table. Well, >>It's, it's not easy. I mean, people have been calling for the consolidation of security for decades, and it's, it's, they're the first company that's actually made it happen. Right? And, and I think this is what we're seeing here is the culmination of this long term strategy, this company trying to build more of a platform. And they, you know, they, they came out as a firewall vendor. And I think it's safe to say they're more than firewall today. That's only about two thirds of their revenue now. So down from 80% a few years ago. And when I think of what Palo Alto has become, they're really a data company. Now, if you look at, you know, unit 42 in Cortex, the, the, the Cortex Data Lake, they've done an excellent job of taking telemetry from their products and from the acquisitions they have, right? And bringing that together into one big data lake. >>And then they're able to use that to, to do faster threat notification, forensics, things like that. And so I think the old model of security of create signatures for known threats, it's safe to say it never really worked and it wasn't ever gonna work. You had too many day zero exploits and things. The only way to fight security today is with a AI and ML based analytics. And they have, they're the gold standard. I think the one thing about your post that I would add the gold standard from a data standpoint, and that's given them this competitive advantage to go out and become a platform for a security. Which, like I said, the people have tried to do that for years. And the first one that's actually done it, well, >>We've heard this from some of the startups, like Lacework will say, oh, we treat security as a data problem. Of course there's a startup, Palo Alto's got, you know, whatever, 10, 15 years of, of, of history. But one of the things I wanted to explore with you coming into this was the notion of can you be best of breed and develop a suite? And we, we've been hearing a consistent answer to that question, which is, and, and do you need to, and the answer is, well, best of breed in security requires that full spectrum, that full view. So here's my question to you. So, okay, let's take Esty win relatively new for these guys, right? Yeah. Okay. And >>And one of the few products are not top two, top three in, right? Exactly. >>Yeah. So that's why I want to take that. Yeah. Because in bakeoffs, they're gonna lose on a head-to-head best of breed. And so the customer's gonna say, Hey, you know, I love your, your consolidation play, your esty win's. Just, okay, how about a little discount on that? And you know, these guys are premium priced. Yes. So, you know, are they in essentially through their pricing strategies, sort of creating that stuff, fighting that, is that friction for them where they've got, you know, the customer says, all right, well forget it, we're gonna go stove pipe with the SD WAN will consolidate some of the stuff. Are you seeing that? >>Yeah, I, I, I still think the sales model is that way. And I think that's something they need to work on changing. If they get into a situation where they have to get down into a feature battle of my SD WAN versus your SD wan, my firewall versus your firewall, frankly they've already lost, you know, because their value prop is the suite and, and is the platform. And I was talking to the CISO here that told me, he realizes now that you don't need best of breed everywhere to have best in class threat protection. In fact, best of breed everywhere leads to suboptimal threat protection. Cuz you have all these data data sets that are in silos, right? And so from a data scientist standpoint, right, there's the good data leads to good insights. Well, partial data leads to fragmented insights and that's, that's what the best, best of breed approach gives you. And so I was talking with Palo about this, can they have this vision of being best of breed and platform? I don't really think you can maintain best of breed everywhere across this portfolio this big, but you don't need to. >>That was my second point of my >>Question. That's the point. >>Yeah. And so, cuz cuz because you know, we've talked about this, that that sweets always win in the long run, >>Sweets >>Win. Yeah. But here's the thing, I, I wonder to your your point about, you know, the customer, you know, understanding that that that, that this resonates with them. I, my guess is a lot of customers, you know, at that mid-level and the fat middle are like still sort of wed, you know, hugging that, that tool. So there's, there's work to be done here, but I think they, they, they got it right Because if they devolve, to your point, if they devolve down to that speeds and feeds, eh, what's the point of that? Where's their valuable? >>You do not wanna get into a knife fight. And I, and I, and I think for them the, a big challenge now is convincing customers that the suite, the suite approach does work. And they have to be able to do that in actual customer examples. And so, you know, I I interviewed a bunch of customers here and the ones that have bought into XDR and xor and even are looking at their sim have told me that the, the, so think of soc operations, the old way heavily manually oriented, right? You have multiple panes of glass and you know, and then you've got, so there's a lot of people work before you bring the tools in, right? If done correctly with AI and ml, the machines would do all the heavy lifting and then you'd bring people in at the end to clean up the little bits that were missed, right? >>And so you, you moved to, from something that was very people heavy to something that's machine heavy and machines can work a lot faster than people. And the, and so the ones that I've talked that have, that have done that have said, look, our engineers have moved on to a lot different things. They're doing penetration testing, they're, you know, helping us with, with strategy and they're not fighting that, that daily fight of looking through log files. And the only proof point you need, Dave, is look at every big breach that we've had over the last five years. There's some SIM vendor up there that says, we caught it. Yeah. >>Yeah. We we had the data. >>Yeah. But, but, but the security team missed it. Well they missed it because you're, nobody can look at that much data manually. And so the, I I think their approach of relying heavily on machines to fight the fight is actually the right way. >>Is that a differentiator for them versus, we were talking before we went live that you and I first hit our very first segment back in 2017 at Fort Net. Is that, where do the two stand in your >>Yeah, it's funny cuz if you talk to the two vendors, they don't really see each other in a lot of accounts because Fort Net's more small market mid-market. It's the same strategy to some degree where Fort Net relies heavily on in-house development and Palo Alto relies heavily on acquisition. Yeah. And so I think from a consistently feature set, you know, Fort Net has an advantage there because it, it's all run off their, their their silicon. Where, where Palo's able to innovate very quickly. The, it it requires a lot of work right? To, to bring the front end and back ends together. But they're serving different markets. So >>Do you see that as a differentiator? The integration strategy that Palo Alto has as a differentiator? We talk to so many companies who have an a strong m and a strategy and, and execution arm. But the challenge is always integrating the technology so that the customer to, you know, ultimately it's the customer. >>I actually think they're, they're underrated as a, an acquirer. In fact, Dave wrote a post to a prior on Silicon Angle prior to Accelerate and he, he on, you put it on Twitter and you asked people to rank 'em as an acquirer and they were in the middle of the pack, >>Right? It was, it was. So it was Oracle, VMware, emc, ibm, Cisco, ServiceNow, and Palo Alto. Yeah. Or Oracle got very high marks. It was like 8.5 out of, you know, 10. Yeah. VMware I think was 6.5. Nice. Era was high emc, big range. IBM five to seven. Cisco was three to eight. Yeah. Yeah, right. ServiceNow was a seven. And then, yeah, Palo Alto was like a five. And I, which I think it was unfair. >>Well, and I think it depends on how you look at it. And I, so I think a lot of the acquisitions Palo Altos made, they've done a good job of integrating their backend data and they've almost ignored the front end. And so when you buy some of the products, it's a little clunky today. You know, if you work with Prisma Cloud, it could be a little bit cleaner. And even with, you know, the SD wan that took 'em a long time to bring CloudGenix in and stuff. But I think the approach is right. I don't, I don't necessarily believe you should integrate the front end until you've integrated the back end. >>That's >>The hard part, right? Because UL ultimately what you're gonna get, you're gonna get two panes of glass and one pane of glass and it might look pretty all mush together, but ultimately you're not solving the bigger problem, right. Of, of being able to create that big data like the, the fight security. And so I think, you know, the approach they've taken is the right one. I think from a user standpoint, maybe it doesn't show up as neatly because you don't see the frontend integration, but the way they're doing it is the right way to do it. And I'm glad they're doing it that way versus caving to the pressures of what, you know, the industry might want >>Showed up in the performance of the company. I mean, this company was basically gonna double revenues to 7 billion from 2020 to >>2023. Three. Think about that at that, that >>Make a, that's unbelievable, right? I mean, and then and they wanna double again. Yeah. You know, so, well >>What did, what did Nikesh was quoted as saying they wanna be the first cyber company that's a hundred billion dollars. He didn't give a timeline market cap. >>Right. >>Market cap, right. Do what I wanna get both of your opinions on what you saw and heard and felt this week. What do you think the likelihood is? And and do you have any projections on how, you know, how many years it's gonna take for them to get there? >>Well, >>Well I think so if they're gonna get that big, right? And, and we were talking about this pre-show, any company that's becoming a big company does it through ecosystem >>Bingo. >>Right? And that when you look around the show floor, it's not that impressive. And if that, if there's an area they need to focus on, it's building that ecosystem. And it's not with other security vendors, it's with application vendors and it's with the cloud companies and stuff. And they've got some relationships there, but they need to do more. I actually challenge 'em on that. One of the analyst sessions. They said, look, we've got 800 cortex partners. Well where are they? Right? Why isn't there a cortex stand here with a bunch of the small companies here? So I do think that that is an area they need to focus on. If they are gonna get to that, that market caps number, they will do so do so through ecosystem. Because every company that's achieved that has done it through ecosystem. >>A hundred percent agree. And you know, if you look at CrowdStrike's ecosystem, it's pretty similar. Yeah. You know, it doesn't really, you know, make much, much, not much different from this, but I went back and just looked at some, you know, peak valuations during the pandemic and shortly thereafter CrowdStrike was 70 billion. You know, that's what their roughly their peak Palo Alto was 56, fortune was 59 for the actually diverged. Right. And now Palo Alto has taken the, the top mantle, you know, today it's market cap's 52. So it's held 93% of its peak value. Everybody else is tanking. Even Okta was 45 billion. It's been crushed as you well know. But, so Palo Alto wasn't always, you know, the number one in terms of market cap. But I guess my point is, look, if CrowdStrike could got to 70 billion during Yeah. During the frenzy, I think it's gonna take, to answer your question, I think it's gonna be five years. Okay. Before they get back there. I think this market's gonna be tough for a while from a valuation standpoint. I think generally tech is gonna kind of go up and down and sideways for a good year and a half, maybe even two years could be even longer. And then I think there's gonna be some next wave of productivity innovation that that hits. And then you're gonna, you're almost always gonna exceed the previous highs. It's gonna take a while. Yeah, >>Yeah, yeah. But I think their ability to disrupt the SIM market actually is something I, I believe they're gonna do. I've been calling for the death of the sim for a long time and I know some people at Palo Alto are very cautious about saying that cuz the Splunks and the, you know, they're, they're their partners. But I, I think the, you know, it's what I said before, the, the tools are catching them, but they're, it's not in a way that's useful for the IT pro and, but I, I don't think the SIM vendors have that ecosystem of insight across network cloud endpoint. Right. Which is what you need in order to make a sim useful. >>CISO at an ETR roundtable said, if, if it weren't for my regulators, I would chuck my sim. >>Yes. >>But that's the only reason that, that this person was keeping it. So, >>Yeah. And I think the, the fact that most of those companies have moved to a perpetual MO or a a recurring revenue model actually helps unseat them. Typically when you pour a bunch of money into something, you remember the old computer associate days, nobody ever took it out cuz the sunk dollars you spent to do it. But now that you're paying an annual recurring fee, it's actually makes it easier to take out. So >>Yeah, it's it's an ebb and flow, right? Yeah. Because the maintenance costs were, you know, relatively low. Maybe it was 20% of the total. And then, you know, once every five years you had to do a refresh and you were still locked into the sort of maintenance and, and so yeah, I think you're right. The switching costs with sas, you know, in theory anyway, should be less >>Yeah. As long as you can migrate the data over. And I think they've got a pretty good handle on that. So, >>Yeah. So guys, I wanna get your perspective as a whole bunch of announcements here. We've only been here for a couple days, not a big conference as, as you can see from behind us. What Zs in your opinion was Palo Alto's main message and and what do you think about it main message at this event? And then same question for you. >>Yeah, I, I think their message largely wrapped around disruption, right? And, and they, in The's keynote already talked about that, right? And where they disrupted the firewall market by creating a NextGen firewall. In fact, if you look at all the new services they added to their firewall, you, you could almost say it's a NextGen NextGen firewall. But, but I do think the, the work they've done in the area of cloud and cortex actually I think is, is pretty impressive. And I think that's the, the SOC is ripe for disruption because it's for, for the most part, most socks still, you know, run off legacy playbooks. They run off legacy, you know, forensic models and things and they don't work. It's why we have so many breaches today. The, the dirty little secret that nobody ever wants to talk about is the bad guys are using machine learning, right? And so if you're using a signature based model, all they're do is tweak their model a little bit and it becomes, it bypasses them. So I, I think the only way to fight the the bad guys today is with you gotta fight fire with fire. And I think that's, that's the path they've, they've headed >>Down and the bad guys are hiding in plain sight, you know? >>Yeah, yeah. Well it's, it's not hard to do now with a lot of those legacy tools. So >>I think, I think for me, you know, the stat that we threw out earlier, I think yesterday at our keynote analysis was, you know, the ETR data shows that are, that are that last survey around 35% of the respondents said we are actively consolidating, sorry, 44%, sorry, 35 says we're actively consolidating vendors, redundant vendors today. That number's up to 44%. Yeah. It's by far the number one cost optimization technique. That's what these guys are pitching. And I think it's gonna resonate with people and, and I think to your point, they're integrating at the backend, their beeps are technical, right? I mean, they can deal with that complexity. Yeah. And so they don't need eye candy. Eventually they, they, they want to have that cuz it'll allow 'em to have deeper market penetration and make people more productive. But you know, that consolidation message came through loud and clear. >>Yeah. The big change in this industry too is all the new startups are all cloud native, right? They're all built on Amazon or Google or whatever. Yeah. And when your cloud native and you buy a cloud native integration is fast. It's not like having to integrate this big monolithic software stack anymore. Right. So I I think their pace of integration will only accelerate from here because everything's now cloud native. >>If a customer comes to you or when a customer comes to you and says, Zs help us with this cyber transformation we have, our board isn't necessarily with our executives in terms of execution of a security strategy. How do you advise them where Palo Alto is concerned? >>Yeah. You know, a lot, a lot of this is just fighting legacy mindset. And I've, I was talking with some CISOs here from state and local governments and things and they're, you know, they can't get more budget. They're fighting the tide. But what they did find is through the use of automation technology, they're able to bring their people costs way down. Right. And then be able to use that budget to invest in a lot of new projects. And so with that, you, you have to start with your biggest pain points, apply automation where you can, and then be able to use that budget to reinvest back in your security strategy. And it's good for the IT pros too, the security pros, my advice to, to it pros is if you're doing things today that aren't resume building, stop doing them. Right? Find a way to automate the money your job. And so if you're patching systems and you're looking through log files, there's no reason machines can't do that. And you go do something a lot more interesting. >>So true. It's like storage guys 10 years ago, provisioning loans. Yes. It's like, stop doing that. Yeah. You're gonna be outta a job. And so who, last question I have is, is who do you see as the big competitors, the horses on the track question, right? So obviously Cisco kind of service has led for a while and you know, big portfolio company, CrowdStrike coming at it from end point. You know who, who, who do you see as the real players going for that? You know, right now the market's three to 4%. The leader has three, three 4% of the market. You know who they're all going for? 10, 15, maybe 20% of the market. Who, who are the likely candidates? Yeah, >>I don't know if CrowdStrike really has the breadth of portfolio to compete long term though. I I think they've had a nice run, but I, we might start to see the follow 'em. I think Microsoft is gonna be for middle. They've laid down the gauntlet, right? They are a security vendor, right? We, we were at Reinvent and a AWS is the platform for security vendors. Yes. Middle, somewhere in the middle. But Microsoft make no mistake, they're in security. They've got some good products. I think a lot of 'em are kind of good enough and they, they tie it to the licensing and I'm not sure that works in security, but they've certainly got the ear of a lot of it pros. >>It might work in smb. >>Yeah. Yeah. It, it might. And, and I do like Zscaler. I, I know these guys poo poo the proxy model, but they've, they've done about as much with proxies as you can. And I, I think it's, it's a battle of, I love the, the, the near, you know, proxies are dead and Jay's model, you know, Jay over at c skater throw 'em back at 'em. So I, it's good to see that kind of fight going on between the two. >>Oh, it's great. Well, and, and again, ZScaler's coming at it from their cloud security angle. CrowdStrike's coming at it from endpoint. I, I do think CrowdStrike has an opportunity to build out the portfolio through m and a and maybe ecosystem. And then obviously, you know, Palo Alto's getting it done. How about Cisco? >>Yeah. Cisco's interesting. And I, I think if Cisco can make the network matter in security and it should, right? We're talking about how a lot of you need a lot of forensics to fight security today. Well, they're gonna see things long before anybody else because they have all that network data. If they can tie network security, I, I mean they could really have that business take off. But we've been saying that about Cisco for 20 years. >>But big install based though. Yeah. It's hard for a company, any company to just say, okay, hey Cisco customer sweep the floor and come with us. That's, that's >>A tough thing. They have a lot of good peace parts, right? And like duo's a good product and umbrella's a good product. They've, they've not done a good job. >>They're the opposite of these guys. >>They've not done a good job of the backend integration that, that's where Cisco needs to, to focus. And I do think g G two Patel there fixed the WebEx group and I think he's now, in fact when you talk to him, he's doing very little on WebEx that that group's running itself and he's more focused in security. So I, I think we could see a resurgence there. But you know, they have a, from a revenue perspective, it's a little misleading cuz they have this big legacy base that's in decline while they're moving to cloud and stuff. So, but they, but they, there's a lot of work there're trying to, to tie to network. >>Right. Lots of fuel for conversation. We're gonna have to carry this on, on Silicon angle.com guys. Yes. And Wikibon, lets do see us. Thank you so much for joining Dave and me giving us your insights as to this event. Where are you gonna be next? Are you gonna be on vacation? >>There's nothing more fun than mean on the cube, so, right. What's outside of that though? Yeah, you know, Christmas coming up, I gotta go see family and do the obligatory, although for me that's a lot of travel, so I guess >>More planes. Yeah. >>Hopefully not in Vegas. >>Not in Vegas. >>Awesome. Nothing against Vegas. Yeah, no, >>We love it. We >>Love it. Although I will say my year started off with ces. Yeah. And it's finishing up with Palo Alto here. The bookends. Yeah, exactly. In Vegas bookends. >>Well thanks so much for joining us. Thank you Dave. Always a pleasure to host a show with you and hear your insights. Reading your breaking analysis always kicks off my prep for show and it's always great to see, but predictions come true. So thank you for being my co-host bet. All right. For Dave Valante Enz as Carla, I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching The Cube, the leader in live, emerging and enterprise tech coverage. Thanks for watching.

>>The Cube presents Ignite 22, brought to you by Palo Alto Networks. >>Welcome back everyone. We're so glad that you're still with us. It's the Cube Live at the MGM Grand. This is our second day of coverage of Palo Alto Networks Ignite. This is takeaways from Ignite 22. Lisa Martin here with two really smart guys, Dave Valante. Dave, we're joined by one of our cube alumni, a friend, a friend of the, we say friend of the Cube. >>Yeah, F otc. A friend of the Cube >>Karala joins us. Guys, it's great to have you here. It's been an exciting show. A lot of cybersecurity is one of my favorite topics to talk about. But I'd love to get some of the big takeaways from both of you. Dave, we'll start with >>You. A breathing room from two weeks ago. Yeah, that was, that was really pleasant. You know, I mean, I know was, yes, you sat in the analyst program, interested in what your takeaways were from there. But, you know, coming into this, we wrote a piece, Palo Alto's Gold Standard, what they need to do to, to keep that, that status. And we hear it a lot about consolidation. That's their big theme now, which is timely, right? Cause people wanna save money, they wanna do more with less. But I'm really interested in hearing zeus's thoughts on how that's playing in the market. How customers, how easy is it to just say, oh, hey, I'm gonna consolidate. I wanna get into that a little bit with you, how well the strategy's working. We're gonna get into some of the m and a activity and really bring your perspectives to the table. Well, >>It's, it's not easy. I mean, people have been calling for the consolidation of security for decades, and it's, it's, they're the first company that's actually made it happen. Right? And, and I think this is what we're seeing here is the culmination of this long-term strategy, this company trying to build more of a platform. And they, you know, they, they came out as a firewall vendor. And I think it's safe to say they're more than firewall today. That's only about two thirds of their revenue now. So down from 80% a few years ago. And when I think of what Palo Alto has become, they're really a data company. Now, if you look at, you know, unit 42 in Cortex, the, the, the Cortex Data Lake, they've done an excellent job of taking telemetry from their products and from the acquisitions they have, right? And bringing that together into one big data lake. >>And then they're able to use that to, to do faster threat notification, forensics, things like that. And so I think the old model of security of create signatures for known threats, it's safe to say it never really worked and it wasn't ever gonna work. You had too many days, zero exploits and things. The only way to fight security today is with a AI and ML based analytics. And they have, they're the gold standard. I think the one thing about your post that I would add, they're the gold standard from a data standpoint. And that's given them this competitive advantage to go out and become a platform for security. Which, like I said, the people have tried to do that for years. And the first one that's actually done it, well, >>We've heard this from some of the startups, like Lacework will say, oh, we treat security as a data problem. Of course there's a startup, Palo Alto's got, you know, whatever, 10, 15 years of, of, of history. But one of the things I wanted to explore with you coming into this was the notion of can you be best of breed and develop a suite? And we, we've been hearing a consistent answer to that question, which is, and, and do you need to, and the answer is, well, best of breed in security requires that full spectrum, that full view. So here's my question to you. So, okay, let's take Estee win relatively new for these guys, right? Yeah. Okay. And >>And one of the few products are not top two, top three in, right? >>Exactly. Yeah. So that's why I want to take that. Yeah. Because in bakeoffs, they're gonna lose on a head-to-head best of breed. And so the customer's gonna say, Hey, you know, I love your, your consolidation play, your esty win's. Just, okay, how about a little discount on that? And you know, these guys are premium priced. Yes. So, you know, are they in essentially through their pricing strategies, sort of creating that stuff, fighting that, is that friction for them where they've got, you know, the customer says, all right, well forget it, we're gonna go stove pipe with the SD WAN will consolidate some of the stuff. Are you seeing that? >>Yeah, I, I, I still think the sales model is that way. And I think that's something they need to work on changing. If they get into a situation where they have to get down into a feature battle of my SD WAN versus your SD wan, my firewall versus your firewall, frankly they've already lost, you know, because their value prop is the suite and, and is the platform. And I was talking with the CISO here that told me, he realizes now that you don't need best of breed everywhere to have best in class threat protection. In fact, best of breed everywhere leads to suboptimal threat protection. Cuz you have all these data data sets that are in silos, right? And so from a data scientist standpoint, right, there's the good data leads to good insights. Well, partial data leads to fragmented insights and that's, that's what the best, best of breed approach gives you. And so I was talking with Palo about this, can they have this vision of being best of breed and platform? I don't really think you can maintain best of breed everywhere across this portfolio this big, but you don't need to. >>That was my second point of my question. That's the point I'm saying. Yeah. And so, cuz cuz because you know, we've talked about this, that that sweets always win in the long run, >>Sweets win. >>Yeah. But here's the thing, I, I wonder to your your point about, you know, the customer, you know, understanding that that that, that this resonates with them. I, my guess is a lot of customers, you know, at that mid-level and the fat middle are like still sort of wed, you know, hugging that, that tool. So there's, there's work to be done here, but I think they, they, they got it right Because if they devolve, to your point, if they devolve down to that speeds and feeds, eh, what's the point of that? Where's their >>Valuable? You do not wanna get into a knife fight. And I, and I, and I think for them the, a big challenge now is convincing customers that the suite, the suite approach does work. And they have to be able to do that in actual customer examples. And so, you know, I I interviewed a bunch of customers here and the ones that have bought into XDR and xor and even are looking at their sim have told me that the, the, so think of soc operations, the old way heavily manually oriented, right? You have multiple panes of glass and you know, and then you've got, so there's a lot of people work before you bring the tools in, right? If done correctly with AI and ml, the machines would do all the heavy lifting and then you'd bring people in at the end to clean up the little bits that were missed, right? >>And so you, you moved to, from something that was very people heavy to something that's machine heavy and machines can work a lot faster than people. And the, and so the ones that I've talked that have, that have done that have said, look, our engineers have moved on to a lot different things. They're doing penetration testing, they're, you know, helping us with, with strategy and they're not fighting that, that daily fight of looking through log files. And the only proof point you need, Dave, is look at every big breach that we've had over the last five years. There's some SIM vendor up there that says, we caught it. Yeah. >>Yeah. We we had the data. >>Yeah. But, but, but the security team missed it. Well they missed it because you're, nobody can look at that much data manually. And so the, I I think their approach of relying heavily on machines to fight the fight is actually the right way. >>Is that a differentiator for them versus, we were talking before we went live that you and I first hit our very first segment back in 2017 at Fort Net. Is that, where do the two stand in your >>Yeah, it's funny cuz if you talk to the two vendors, they don't really see each other in a lot of accounts because Fort Net's more small market mid-market. It's the same strategy to some degree where Fort Net relies heavily on in-house development in Palo Alto relies heavily on acquisition. Yeah. And so I think from a consistently feature set, you know, Fort Net has an advantage there because it, it's all run off their, their their silicon. Where, where Palo's able to innovate very quickly. The, it it requires a lot of work right? To, to bring the front end and back ends together. But they're serving different markets. So >>Do you see that as a differentiator? The integration strategy that Palo Alto has as a differentiator? We talk to so many companies who have an a strong m and a strategy and, and execution arm. But the challenge is always integrating the technology so that the customer to, you know, ultimately it's the customer. >>I actually think they're, they're underrated as a, an acquirer. In fact, Dave wrote a post to a prior on Silicon Angle prior to Accelerate and he, he on, you put it on Twitter and you asked people to rank 'em as an acquirer and they were in the middle of the pack, >>Right? It was, it was. So it was Oracle, VMware, emc, ibm, Cisco, ServiceNow, and Palo Alto. Yeah. Or Oracle got very high marks. It was like 8.5 out of, you know, 10. Yeah. VMware I think was 6.5. Naira was high emc, big range. IBM five to seven. Cisco was three to eight. Yeah. Yeah, right. ServiceNow was a seven. And then, yeah, Palo Alto was like a five. And I, which I think it was unfair. Well, >>And I think it depends on how you look at it. And I, so I think a lot of the acquisitions Palo Alto's made, they've done a good job of integrating the backend data and they've almost ignored the front end. And so when you buy some of the products, it's a little clunky today. You know, if you work with Prisma Cloud, it could be a little bit cleaner. And even with, you know, the SD wan that took 'em a long time to bring CloudGenix in and stuff. But I think the approach is right. I don't, I don't necessarily believe you should integrate the front end until you've integrated the back end. >>That's >>The hard part, right? Because UL ultimately what you're gonna get, you're gonna get two panes of glass and one pane of glass and it might look pretty and all mush together, but ultimately you're not solving the bigger problem, right. Of, of being able to create that big data lake to, to fight security. And so I think, you know, the approach they've taken is the right one. I think from a user standpoint, maybe it doesn't show up as neatly because you don't see the frontend integration, but the way they're doing it is the right way to do it. And I'm glad they're doing it that way versus caving to the pressures of what, you know, the industry might want or >>Showed up in the performance of the company. I mean, this company was basically gonna double revenues to 7 billion from 2020 to >>2023. Think about that at that. That makes, >>I mean that's unbelievable, right? I mean, and then and they wanna double again. Yeah. You know, so, well >>What did, what did Nikesh was quoted as saying they wanna be the first cyber company that's a hundred billion dollars. He didn't give a timeline market >>Cap. Right. >>Market cap, right. Do what I wanna get both of your opinions on what you saw and heard and felt this week. What do you think the likelihood is? And and do you have any projections on how, you know, how many years it's gonna take for them to get there? >>Well, >>Well I think so if they're gonna get that big, right? And, and we were talking about this pre-show, any company that's becoming a big company does it through ecosystem >>Bingo >>Go, right? And that when you look around the show floor, it's not that impressive. No. And if that, if there's an area they need to focus on, it's building that ecosystem. And it's not with other security vendors, it's with application vendors and it's with the cloud companies and stuff. And they've got some relationships there, but they need to do more. I actually challenge 'em on that. One of the analyst sessions. They said, look, we've got 800 cortex partners. Well where are they? Right? Why isn't there a cortex stand here with a bunch of the small companies here? So I do think that that is an area they need to focus on. If they are gonna get to that, that market caps number, they will do so do so through ecosystem. Because every company that's achieved that has done it through ecosystem. >>A hundred percent agree. And you know, if you look at CrowdStrike's ecosystem, it's, I mean, pretty similar. Yeah. You know, it doesn't really, you know, make much, much, not much different from this, but I went back and just looked at some, you know, peak valuations during the pandemic and shortly thereafter CrowdStrike was 70 billion. You know, that's what their roughly their peak Palo Alto was 56, fortune was 59 for the actually diverged. Right. And now Palo Alto has taken the, the top mantle, you know, today it's market cap's 52. So it's held 93% of its peak value. Everybody else is tanking. Even Okta was 45 billion. It's been crushed as you well know. But, so Palo Alto wasn't always, you know, the number one in terms of market cap. But I guess my point is, look, if CrowdStrike could got to 70 billion during Yeah. During the frenzy, I think it's gonna take, to answer your question, I think it's gonna be five years. Okay. Before they get back there. I think this market's gonna be tough for a while from a valuation standpoint. I think generally tech is gonna kind of go up and down and sideways for a good year and a half, maybe even two years could be even longer. And then I think there's gonna be some next wave of productivity innovation that that hits. And then you're gonna, you're almost always gonna exceed the previous highs. It's gonna take a while. Yeah. >>Yeah, yeah. But I think their ability to disrupt the SIM market actually is something that I, I believe they're gonna do. I've been calling for the death of the sim for a long time and I know some people of Palo Alto are very cautious about saying that cuz the Splunks and the, you know, they're, they're their partners. But I, I think the, you know, it's what I said before, the, the tools are catching them, but they're, it's not in a way that's useful for the IT pro and, but I, I don't think the SIM vendors have that ecosystem of insight across network cloud endpoint. Right. Which is what you need in order to make a sim useful. >>CISO at an ETR round table said, if, if it weren't for my regulators, I would chuck my sim. >>Yes. >>But that's the only reason that, that this person was keeping it. No. >>Yeah. And I think the, the fact that most of those companies have moved to a perpetual MO or a a recurring revenue model actually helps unseat them. Typically when you pour a bunch of money into something, you remember the old computer associate says nobody ever took it out cuz the sunk dollars you spent to do it. But now that you're paying an annual recurring fee, it's actually makes it easier to take out. So >>Yeah, it's just an ebb and flow, right? Yeah. Because the maintenance costs were, you know, relatively low. Maybe it was 20% of the total. And then, you know, once every five years you had to do a refresh and you were still locked into the sort of maintenance and, and so yeah, I think you're right. The switching costs with sas, you know, in theory anyway, should be less >>Yeah. As long as you can migrate the data over. And I think they've got a pretty good handle on that. So, >>Yeah. So guys, I wanna get your perspective as a whole bunch of announcements here. We've only been here for a couple days, not a big conference as, as you can see from behind us. What Zs in your opinion was Palo Alto's main message and and what do you think about it main message at this event? And then same question for you. >>Yeah, I, I think their message largely wrapped around disruption, right? And, and they, and The's keynote already talked about that, right? And where they disrupted the firewall market by creating a NextGen firewall. In fact, if you look at all the new services they added to their firewall, you, you could almost say it's a NextGen NextGen firewall. But, but I do think the, the work they've done in the area of cloud and cortex actually I think is, is pretty impressive. And I think that's the, the SOC is ripe for disruption because it's for, for the most part, most socks still, you know, run off legacy playbooks. They run off legacy, you know, forensic models and things and they don't work. It's why we have so many breaches today. The, the dirty little secret that nobody ever wants to talk about is the bad guys are using machine learning, right? And so if you're using a signature based model, all they gotta do is tweak their model a little bit and it becomes, it bypasses them. So I, I think the only way to fight the the bad guys today is with you're gonna fight fire with fire. And I think that's, that's the path they've, they've headed >>Down. Yeah. The bad guys are hiding in plain sight, you know? Yeah, >>Yeah. Well it's, it's not hard to do now with a lot of those legacy tools. So >>I think, I think for me, you know, the stat that we threw out earlier, I think yesterday at our keynote analysis was, you know, the ETR data shows that are, that are that last survey around 35% of the respondents said we are actively consolidating, sorry, 44%, sorry, 35 says who are actively consolidating vendors, redundant vendors today that number's up to 44%. Yeah. It's by far the number one cost optimization technique. That's what these guys are pitching. And I think it's gonna resonate with people and, and I think to your point, they're integrating at the backend, their beeps are technical, right? I mean, they can deal with that complexity. Yeah. And so they don't need eye candy. Eventually they, they, they want to have that cuz it'll allow 'em to have deeper market penetration and make people more productive. But you know, that consolidation message came through loud and clear. >>Yeah. The big change in this industry too is all the new startups are all cloud native, right? They're all built on Amazon or Google or whatever. Yeah. And when your cloud native and you buy a cloud native integration is fast. It's not like having to integrate this big monolithic software stack anymore. Right. So I, I think their pace of integration will only accelerate from here because everything's now cloud native. >>If a customer comes to you or when a customer comes to you and says, Zs help us with this cyber transformation we have, our board isn't necessarily aligned with our executives in terms of execution of a security strategy. How do you advise them where Palo Alto is concerned? >>Yeah. You know, a lot, a lot of this is just fighting legacy mindset. And I've, I was talking with some CISOs here from state and local governments and things and they're, you know, they can't get more budget. They're fighting the tide. But what they did find is through the use of automation technology, they're able to bring their people costs way down. Right. And then be able to use that budget to invest in a lot of new projects. And so with that, you, you have to start with your biggest pain points, apply automation where you can, and then be able to use that budget to reinvest back in your security strategy. And it's good for the IT pros too, the security pros, my advice to the IT pros is, is if you're doing things today that aren't resume building, stop doing them. Right. Find a way to automate the money your job. And so if you're patching systems and you're looking through log files, there's no reason machines can't do that. And you go do something a lot more interesting. >>So true. It's like storage guys 10 years ago, provisioning loans. Yes. It's like, stop doing that. Yeah. You're gonna be outta a job. So who, last question I have is, is who do you see as the big competitors, the horses on the track question, right? So obviously Cisco kind of service has led for a while and you know, big portfolio company, CrowdStrike coming at it from end point. You know who, who, who do you see as the real players going for that? You know, right now the market's three to 4%. The leader has three, three 4% of the market. You know who they're all going for? 10, 15, maybe 20% of the market. Who, who are the likely candidates? Yeah, >>I don't know if CrowdStrike really has the breadth of portfolio to compete long term though. I I think they've had a nice run, but I, we might start to see the follow 'em. I think Microsoft is gonna be for middle. They've laid down the gauntlet, right? They are a security vendor, right? We, we were at Reinvent and a AWS is the platform for security vendors. Yes. Middle, somewhere in the middle. But Microsoft make no mistake, they're in security. They've got some good products. I think a lot of 'em are kind of good enough and they, they tie it to the licensing and I'm not sure that works in security, but they've certainly got the ear of a lot of it pros. >>It might work in smb. >>Yeah, yeah. It, it might. And, and I do like Zscaler. I, I know these guys poo poo the proxy model, but they've, they've done about as much with prox as you can. And I, I think it's, it's a battle of, I love the, the, the near, you know, proxies are dead and Jay's model, you know, Jay over at csca, throw 'em back at 'em. So I, it's good to see that kind of fight going on between the >>Two. Oh, it's great. Well, and, and again, ZScaler's coming at it from their cloud security angle. CrowdStrike's coming at it from endpoint. I, I do think CrowdStrike has an opportunity to build out the portfolio through m and a and maybe ecosystem. And then obviously, you know, Palo Alto's getting it done. How about Cisco? >>Yeah, Cisco's interesting. And I I think if Cisco can make the network matter in security and it should, right? We're talking about how a lot of you need a lot of forensics to fight security today. Well, they're gonna see things long before anybody else because they have all that network data. If they can tie network security, I, I mean they could really have that business take off. But we've been saying that about Cisco for 20 years. >>But big install based though. Yeah. It's hard for a company, any company to say, okay, hey Cisco customer sweep the floor and come with us. That's, that's >>A tough thing. They have a lot of good peace parts, right? And like duo's a good product and umbrella's a good product. They've, they've not done a good job. >>They're the opposite of these guys. >>They've not done a good job of the backend integration and that, that's where Cisco needs to, to focus. And I do think g G two Patel there fixed the WebEx group and I think he's now, in fact when you talk to him, he's doing very little on WebEx that that group's running itself and he's more focused in security. So I, I think we could see a resurgence there. But you know, they have a, from a revenue perspective, it's a little misleading cuz they have this big legacy base that's in decline while they're moving to cloud and stuff. So, but they, but they, there's a lot of Rick there trying to, to tie to network. >>Lots of fuel for conversation. We're gonna have to carry this on, on Silicon angle.com guys. Yes. And Wi KeePon. Lets do see us. Thank you so much for joining Dave and me giving us your insights as to this event. Where are gonna be next? Are you gonna be on >>Vacation? There's nothing more fun than mean on the cube. So what's outside of that though? Yeah, you know, Christmas coming up, I gotta go see family and be the obligatory, although for me that's a lot of travel, so I guess >>More planes. Yeah. >>Hopefully not in Vegas. >>Not in Vegas. >>Awesome. Nothing against Vegas. Yeah, no, >>We love it. We love >>It. Although I will say my year started off with ces. Yeah. And it's finishing up with Palo Alto here. The bookends. Yeah, exactly. In Vegas bookends. >>Well thanks so much for joining us. Thank you Dave. Always a pleasure to host a show with you and hear your insights. Reading your breaking analysis always kicks off my prep for show. And it, it's always great to see, but predictions come true. So thank you for being my co-host bet. All right. For Dave Valante Enz as Carla, I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching The Cube, the leader in live, emerging and enterprise tech coverage. Thanks for watching.

>>In the early part of this century, we're talking about the 2005 to 2007 timeframe. There was a lot of talk about so-called green it. And at that time there was some organizational friction. Like for example, the line was that the CIO never saw the power bill, so he or she didn't care, or that the facilities folks, they rarely talked to the IT department. So it was kind of that split brain. And, and then the oh 7 0 8 financial crisis really created an inflection point in a couple of ways. First, it caused organizations to kind of pump the brakes on it spending, and then they took their eye off the sustainability ball. And the second big trend, of course, was the cloud model, you know, kind of became a benchmark for it. Simplicity and automation and efficiency, the ability to dial down and dial up capacity as needed. >>And the third was by the end of the first decade of the, the two thousands, the technology of virtualization was really hitting its best stride. And then you had innovations like flash storage, which largely eliminated the need for these massive farms of spinning mechanical devices that sucked up a lot of power. And so really these technologies began their march to mainstream adoption. And as we progressed through the 2020s, the effect of climate change really come into focus as a critical component of esg. Environmental, social, and governance. Shareholders have come to demand metrics around sustainability. Employees are often choosing employers based on their ESG posture. And most importantly, companies are finding that savings on power cooling and footprint, it has a bottom line impact on the income statement. Now you add to that the energy challenges around the world, particularly facing Europe right now, the effects of global inflation and even more advanced technologies like machine intelligence. >>And you've got a perfect storm where technology can really provide some relief to organizations. Hello and welcome to the Path to Sustainable It Made Possible by Pure Storage and Collaboration with the Cube. My name is Dave Valante and I'm one of the host of the program, along with my colleague Lisa Martin. Now, today we're gonna hear from three leaders on the sustainability topic. First up, Lisa will talk to Nicole Johnson. She's the head of Social Impact and Sustainability at Pure Storage. Nicole will talk about the results from a study of around a thousand sustainability leaders worldwide, and she'll share some metrics from that study. And then next, Lisa will speak to AJ Singh. He's the Chief Product Officer at Pure Storage. We've had had him on the cube before, and not only will he share some useful stats in the market, I'll also talk about some of the technology innovations that customers can tap to address their energy consumption, not the least of which is ai, which is is entering every aspect of our lives, including how we deal with energy consumption. And then we'll bring it back to our Boston studio and go north of Italy with Mattia Ballero of Elec Informatica, a services provider with deep expertise on the topic of sustainability. We hope you enjoyed the program today. Thanks for watching. Let's get started >>At Pure Storage, the opportunity for change and our commitment to a sustainable future are a direct reflection of the way we've always operated and the values we live by every day. We are making significant and immediate impact worldwide through our environmental sustainability efforts. The milestones of change can be seen everywhere in everything we do. Pure's Evergreen Storage architecture delivers two key environmental benefits to customers, the reduction of wasted energy and the reduction of e-waste. Additionally, Pure's implemented a series of product packaging redesigns, promoting recycled and reuse in order to reduce waste that will not only benefit our customers, but also the environment. Pure is committed to doing what is right and leading the way with innovation. That has always been the pure difference, making a difference by enabling our customers to drive out energy usage and their data storage systems by up to 80%. Today, more than 97% of pure arrays purchased six years ago are still in service. And tomorrow our goal for the future is to reduce Scope three. Emissions Pure is committing to further reducing our sold products emissions by 66% per petabyte by 2030. All of this means what we said at the beginning, change that is simple and that is what it has always been about. Pure has a vision for the future today, tomorrow, forever. >>Hi everyone, welcome to this special event, pure Storage, the Path to Sustainable it. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. Very pleased to be joined by Nicole Johnson, the head of Social Impact and Sustainability at Pure Storage. Nicole, welcome to the Cube. Thanks >>For having me, Lisa. >>Sustainability is such an important topic to talk about and I understand that Pure just announced a report today about sustainability. What can you tell me what nuggets are in this report? >>Well, actually quite a few really interesting nuggets, at least for us. And I, I think probably for you and your viewers as well. So we actually commissioned about a thousand sustainability leaders across the globe to understand, you know, what are their sustainability goals, what are they working on, and what are the impacts of buying decisions, particularly around infrastructure when it comes to sustainable goals. I think one of the things that was really interesting for us was the fact that around the world we did not see a significant variation in terms of sustainability being a top priority. You've, I'm sure you've heard about the energy crisis that's happening across Europe. And so, you know, there was some thought that perhaps that might play into AMEA being a larger, you know, having sustainability goals that were more significant. But we actually did not find that we found sustainability to be really important no matter where the respondents were located. >>So very interesting at Pure sustainability is really at the heart of what we do and has been since our founding. It's interesting because we set out to make storage really simple, but it turns out really simple is also really sustainable. And the products and services that we bring to our customers have really powerful outcomes when it comes to decreasing their, their own carbon footprints. And so, you know, we often hear from customers that we've actually really helped them to significantly improve their storage performance, but also allow them to save on space power and cooling costs and, and their footprint. So really significant findings. One example of that is a company called Cengage, which is a global education technology company. They recently shared with us that they have actually been able to reduce their overall storage footprint by 80% while doubling to tripling the performance of their storage systems. So it's really critical for, for companies who are thinking about their sustainability goals, to consider the dynamic between their sustainability program and their IT teams who are making these buying decisions, >>Right? Those two teams need to be really inextricably linked these days. You talked about the fact that there was really consistency across the regions in terms of sustainability being of high priority for organizations. You had a great customer story that you shared that showed significant impact can be made there by bringing the sustainability both together with it. But I'm wondering why are we seeing that so much of the vendor selection process still isn't revolving around sustainability or it's overlooked? What are some of the things that you received despite so many people saying sustainability, huge priority? >>Well, in this survey, the most commonly cited challenge was really around the fact that there was a lack of management buy-in. 40% of respondents told us this was the top roadblock. So getting, I think getting that out of the way. And then we also just heard that sustainability teams were not brought into tech purchasing processes until after it's already rolling, right? So they're not even looped in. And that being said, you know, we know that it has been identified as one of the key departments to supporting a company sustainability goals. So we, we really want to ensure that these two teams are talking more to each other. When we look even closer at the data from the respondents, we see some really positive correlations. We see that 65% of respondents reported that they're on track to meet their sustainability goals. And the IT of those 65%, it is significantly engaged with reporting data for those sustainability initiatives. We saw that, that for those who did report, the sustainability is a top priority for vendor selection. They were twice as likely to be on track with their goals and their sustainability directors said that they were getting involved at the beginning of the tech purchasing program. Our process, I'm sorry, rather than towards the end. And so, you know, we know that to curb the impact of climate crisis, we really need to embrace sustainability from a cross-functional viewpoint. >>Definitely has to be cross-functional. So, so strong correlations there in the report that organizations that had closer alignment between the sustainability folks and the IT folks were farther along in their sustainability program development, execution, et cetera, those co was correlations, were they a surprise? >>Not entirely. You know, when we look at some of the statistics that come from the, you know, places like the World Economic Forum, they say that digitization generated 4% of greenhouse gas emissions in 2020. So, and that, you know, that's now almost three years ago, digital data only accelerates, and by 2025, we expect that number could be almost double. And so we know that that communication and that correlation is gonna be really important because data centers are taking up such a huge footprint of when companies are looking at their emissions. And it's, I mean, quite frankly, a really interesting opportunity for it to be a trailblazer in the sustainability journey. And, you know, perhaps people that are in IT haven't thought about how they can make an impact in this area, but there really is some incredible ways to help us work on cutting carbon emissions, both from your company's perspective and from the world's perspective, right? >>Like we are, we're all doing this because it's something that we know we have to do to drive down climate change. So I think when you, when you think about how to be a trailblazer, how to do things differently, how to differentiate your own department, it's a really interesting connection that IT and sustainability work together. I would also say, you know, I'll just note that of the respondents to the survey we were discussing, we do over half of those respondents expect to see closer alignment between the organization's IT and sustainability teams as they move forward. >>And that's really a, a tip a hat to those organizations embracing cultural change. That's always hard to do, but for those two, for sustainability in IT to come together as part of really the overall ethos of an organization, that's huge. And it's great to see the data demonstrating that, that those, that alignment, that close alignment is really on its way to helping organizations across industries make a big impact. I wanna dig in a little bit to here's ESG goals. What can you share with us about >>That? Absolutely. So as I mentioned peers kind of at the beginning of our formal ESG journey, but really has been working on the, on the sustainability front for a long time. I would, it's funny as we're, as we're doing a lot of this work and, and kind of building our own profile around this, we're coming back to some of the things that we have done in the past that consumers weren't necessarily interested in then but are now because the world has changed, becoming more and more invested in. So that's exciting. So we did a baseline scope one, two, and three analysis and discovered, interestingly enough that 70% of our emissions comes from use of sold products. So our customers work running our products in their data centers. So we know that we, we've made some ambitious goals around our Scope one and two emissions, which is our own office, our utilities, you know, those, they only account for 6% of our emissions. So we know that to really address the issue of climate change, we need to work on the use of sold products. So we've also made a, a really ambitious commitment to decrease our carbon emissions by 66% per bed per petabyte by 2030 in our product. So decreasing our own carbon footprint, but also affecting our customers as well. And we've also committed to a science-based target initiative and our road mapping how to achieve the ambitious goals set out in the Paris agreement. >>That's fantastic. It sounds like you really dialed in on where is the biggest opportunity for us as Pure Storage to make the biggest impact across our organization, across our customers organizations. There lofty goals that pure set, but knowing what I know about Pure, you guys are probably well on track to, to accomplish those goals in record time, >>I hope So. >>Talk a little bit about advice that you would give to viewers who might be at the very beginning of their sustainability journey and really wondering what are the core elements besides it, sustainability, team alignment that I need to bring into this program to make it actually successful? >>Yeah, so I think, you know, understanding that you don't have to pick between really powerful technology and sustainable technology. There are opportunities to get both and not just in storage right in, in your entire IT portfolio. We know that, you know, we're in a place in the world where we have to look at things from the bigger picture. We have to solve new challenges and we have to approach business a little bit differently. So adopting solutions and services that are environmentally efficient can actually help to scale and deliver more effective and efficient IT solutions over time. So I think that that's something that we need to, to really remind ourselves, right? We have to go about business a little bit differently and that's okay. We also know that data centers utilize an incredible amount of, of energy and, and carbon. And so everything that we can do to drive that down is going to address the sustainability goals for us individually as well as, again, drive down that climate change. So we, we need to get out of the mindset that data centers are, are about reliability or cost, et cetera, and really think about efficiency and carbon footprint when you're making those business decisions. I'll also say that, you know, the earlier that we can get sustainability teams into the conversation, the more impactful your business decisions are going to be and helping you to guide sustainable decision making. >>So shifting sustainability and IT left almost together really shows that the correlation between those folks getting together in the beginning with intention, the report shows and the successes that peers had demonstrate that that's very impactful for organizations to actually be able to implement even the cultural change that's needed for sustainability programs to be successful. My last question for you goes back to that report. You mentioned in there that the data show a lot of organizations are hampered by management buy-in, where sustainability is concerned. How can pure help its customers navigate around those barriers so that they get that management buy-in and they understand that the value in it for >>Them? Yeah, so I mean, I think that for me, my advice is always to speak to hearts and minds, right? And help the management to understand, first of all, the impact right on climate change. So I think that's the kind of hearts piece on the mind piece. I think it's addressing the sustainability goals that these companies have set for themselves and helping management understand how to, you know, how their IT buying decisions can actually really help them to reach these goals. We also, you know, we always run kind of TCOs for customers to understand what is the actual cost of, of the equipment. And so, you know, especially if you're in a, in a location in which energy costs are rising, I mean, I think we're seeing that around the world right now with inflation. Better understanding your energy costs can really help your management to understand the, again, the bigger picture and what that total cost is gonna be. Often we see, you know, that maybe the I the person who's buying the IT equipment isn't the same person who's purchasing, who's paying the, the electricity bills, right? And so sometimes even those two teams aren't talking. And there's a great opportunity there, I think, to just to just, you know, look at it from a more high level lens to better understand what total cost of ownership is. >>That's a great point. Great advice. Nicole, thank you so much for joining me on the program today, talking about the new report that on sustainability that Pure put out some really compelling nuggets in there, but really also some great successes that you've already achieved internally on your own ESG goals and what you're helping customers to achieve in terms of driving down their carbon footprint and emissions. We so appreciate your insights and your thoughts. >>Thank you, Lisa. It's been great speaking with you. >>AJ Singh joins me, the Chief Product Officer at Peer Storage. Aj, it's great to have you back on the program. >>Great to be back on, Lisa, good morning. >>Good morning. And sustainability is such an important topic to talk about. So we're gonna really unpack what PEER is doing, we're gonna get your viewpoints on what you're seeing and you're gonna leave the audience with some recommendations on how they can get started on their ESG journey. First question, we've been hearing a lot from pure AJ about the role that technology plays in organizations achieving sustainability goals. What's been the biggest environmental impact associated with, with customers achieving that given the massive volumes of data that keep being generated? >>Absolutely, Lisa, you can imagine that the data is only growing and exploding and, and, and, and there's a good reason for it. You know, data is the new currency. Some people call it the new oil. And the opportunity to go process this data gain insights is really helping customers drive an edge in the digital transformation. It's gonna make a difference between them being on the leaderboard a decade from now when the digital transformation kind of pans out versus, you know, being kind of somebody that, you know, quite missed the boat. So data is super critical and and obviously as part of that we see all these big benefits, but it has to be stored and, and, and that means it's gonna consume a lot of resources and, and the, and therefore data center usage has only accelerated, right? You can imagine the amount of data being generated, you know, recent study pointed to roughly by twenty twenty five, a hundred and seventy five zetabytes, which where each zettabyte is a billion terabytes. So just think of that size and scale of data. That's huge. And, and they also say that, you know, pretty soon, today, in fact in the developed world, every person is having an interaction with the data center literally every 18 seconds. So whether it's on Facebook or Twitter or you know, your email, people are constantly interacting with data. So you can imagine this data is only exploding. It has to be stored and it consumes a lot of energy. In fact, >>It, oh, go ahead. Sorry. >>No, I was saying in fact, you know, there's some studies have shown that data center usage literally consumes one to 2% of global energy consumption. So if there's one place we could really help climate change and, and all those aspects, if you can kind of really, you know, tamp down the data center, energy consumption, sorry, you were saying, >>I was just gonna say, it's, it's an incredibly important topic and the, the, the stats on data that you provided and also I, I like how you talked about, you know, every 18 seconds we're interacting with a data center, whether we know it or not, we think about the long term implications, the fact that data is growing massively. As you shared with the stats that you mentioned. If we think about though the responsibility that companies have, every company in today's world needs to be a data company, right? And we consumers expect it. We expect that you are gonna deliver these relevant, personalized experiences whether we're doing a transaction in our personal lives or in business. But what is the, what requirements do technology companies have to really start billing down their carbon footprints? >>No, absolutely. If you can think about it, just to kind of finish up the data story a little bit, the explosion is to the point where, in fact, if you just recently was in the news that Ireland went up and said, sorry, we can't have any more data centers here. We just don't have the power to supply them. That was big in the news and you know, all the hyperscale that was crashing the head. I know they've come around that and figured out a way around it, but it's getting there. Some, some organizations and and areas jurisdictions are saying pretty much no data center the law, you know, we're, we just can't do it. And so as you said, so companies like Pure, I mean, our view is that it has an opportunity here to really do our bit for climate change and be able to, you know, drive a sustainable environment. >>And, and at Pure we believe that, you know, today's data success really ultimately hinges on energy efficiency, you know, so to to really be energy efficient means you are gonna be successful long term with data. Because if you think of classic data infrastructures, the legacy infrastructures, you know, we've got disk infrastructures, hybrid infrastructures, flash infrastructures, low end systems, medium end systems, high end systems. So a lot of silos, you know, a lot of inefficiency across the silos. Cause the data doesn't get used across that. In fact, you know, today a lot of data centers are not really built with kind of the efficiency and environmental mindset. So there's a big opportunity there. >>So aj, talk to me about some of the steps that Pure is implementing as its chief product officer. Would love to get your your thoughts, what steps is it implementing to help Pures customers become more sustainable? >>No, absolutely. So essentially we are all inherently motivated, like pure and, and, and, and everybody else to solve problems for customers and really forward the status quo, right? You know, innovation, you know, that's what we are all about. And while we are doing that, the challenge is to how do you make technology and the data we feed into it faster, smarter, scalable obviously, but more importantly sustainable. And you can do all of that, but if you miss the sustainability bit, you're kind of missing the boat. And I also feel from an ethical perspective, that's really important for us. Not only you do all the other things, but also kind of make it sustainable. In fact, today 80% of the companies, the companies are realizing this, 80% today are in fact report out on sustainability, which is great. In fact, 80% of leadership at companies, you know, CEOs and senior executives say they've been impacted by some climate change event, you know, where it's a fire in the place they had to evacuate or floods or storms or hurricanes, you, you name it, right? >>So mitigating the carbon impact can in fact today be a competitive advantage for companies because that's where the puck is going and everybody's, you know, it's skating, wanting to skate towards the, and it's good, it's good business too to be sustainable and, and, and meet these, you know, customer requirements. In fact, the the recent survey that we released today is saying that more and more organizations are kickstarting, their sustainability initiatives and many take are aiming to make a significant progress against that over the next decade. So that's, that's really, you know, part of the big, the really, so our view is that that IT infrastructure, you know, can really make a big push towards greener it and not just kind of greenwash it, but actually, you know, you know, make things more greener and, and, and really take the, the lead in, in esg. And so it's important that organizations can reach alignment with their IT teams and challenge their IT teams to continue to lead, you know, for the organization, the sustainability aspects. >>I'm curious, aj, when you're in customer conversations, are you seeing that it's really the C-suite plus it coming together and, and how does peer help facilitate that? To your point, it needs to be able to deliver this, but it's, it's a board level objective these days. >>Absolutely. We're seeing increasingly, especially in Europe with the, you know, the war in Ukraine and the energy crisis that, you know, that's, that's, you know, unleashed. We definitely see it's becoming a bigger and bigger board level objective for, for a lot of companies. And we definitely see customers in starting to do that. So, so in particular, I do want to touch briefly on what steps we are taking as a company, you know, to to to make it sustainable. And obviously customers are doing all the things we talked about and, and we're also helping them become smarter with data. But the key difference is, you know, we have a big focus on efficiency, which is really optimizing performance per wat with unmatched storage density. So you can reduce the footprint and dramatically lower the power required. And and how efficient is that? You know, compared to other old flash systems, we tend to be one fifth, we tend to take one fifth the power compared to other flash systems and substantially lower compared to spinning this. >>So you can imagine, you know, cutting your, if data center consumption is a 2% of global consumption, roughly 40% of that tends to be storage cause of all the spinning disc. So you add about, you know, 0.8% to global consumption and if you can cut that by four fifths, you know, you can already start to make an impact. So, so we feel we can do that. And also we're quite a bit more denser, 10 times more denser. So imagine one fifth the power, one 10th the density, but then we take it a step further because okay, you've got the storage system in the data center, but what about the end of life aspect? What about the waste and reclamation? So we also have something called non-disruptive upgrades. We, using our AI technology in pure one, we can start to sense when a particular part is going to fail and just before it goes to failure, we actually replace it in a non-disruptive fashion. So customer's data is not impacted and then we recycle that so you get a full end to end life cycle, you know, from all the way from the time you deploy much lower power, much lower density, but then also at the back end, you know, reduction in e-waste and those kind of things. >>That's a great point you, that you bring up in terms of the reclamation process. It sounds like Pure does that on its own, the customer doesn't have to be involved in that. >>That's right. And we do that, it's a part of our evergreen, you know, service that we offer. A lot of customers sign up for that service and in fact they don't even, we tell them, Hey, you know, that part's about to go, we're gonna come in, we're gonna swap it out and, and then we actually recycle that part, >>The power of ai. Love that. What are some of the, the things that companies can do if they're, if they're early in this journey on sustainability, what are some of the specific steps companies can take to get started and maybe accelerate that journey as it's becoming climate change and things are becoming just more and more of a, of a daily topic on the news? >>No, absolutely. There's a lot of things companies can do. In fact, the four four item that we're gonna highlight, the first one is, you know, they can just start by doing a materiality assessment and a materiality assessment essentially engages all the stakeholders to find out which specific issues are important for the business, right? So you identify your key priorities that intersect with what the stakeholders want, you know, your different groups from sales, customers, partners, you know, different departments in the organization. And for example, for us, when we conducted our materiality assessment, for us, our product we felt was the biggest area of focus that could contribute a lot towards, you know, making an impact in, in, in from a sustainability standpoint. That's number one. I think number two companies can also think about taking an Azure service approach. The beauty of the Azure service approach is that you are buying a, your customer, they're buying outcomes with SLAs and, and when you are starting to buy outcomes with SLAs, you can start small and then grow as you consume more. >>So that way you don't have systems sitting idle waiting for you to consume more, right? And that's the beauty of the as service approach. And so for example, for us, you know, we have something called Evergreen one, which is our as service offer, where essentially customers are able to only use and have systems turned onto as much as they're consuming. So, so that reduces the waste associated with underutilized systems, right? That's number two. Number three is also you can optimize your supply chains end to end, right? Basically by making sure you're moving, recycling, packaging and eliminating waste in that thing so you can recycle it back to your suppliers. And you can also choose a sustainable supplier network that following sort of good practices, you know, you know, across the globe and such supply chains that are responsive and diverse can really help you. Also, the big business benefit benefited. >>You can also handle surges and demand, for example, for us during the pandemic with this global supply chain shortages, you know, whereas most of our competitors, you know, lead times went to 40, 50 weeks, our lead times went from three to six weeks cuz you know, we had this sustainable, you know, supply chain. And so all of these things, you know, the three things important, but the fourth thing I say more cultural and, and the cultural thing is how do you actually begin to have sustainability become a core part of your ethos at the company, you know, across all the departments, you know, and we've at Pure, definitely it's big for us, you know, you know, around sustainability starting with a product design, but all of the areas as well, if you follow those four items, they'll do the great place to start. >>That's great advice, great recommendations. You talk about the, the, the supply chain, sustainable supply chain optimization. We've been having a lot of conversations with businesses and vendors alike about that and how important it is. You bring up a great point too on supplier diversity, if we could have a whole conversation on that. Yes. But I'm also glad that you brought up culture that's huge to, for organizations to adopt an ESG strategy and really drive sustainability in their business. It has to become, to your point, part of their ethos. Yes. It's challenging. Cultural change management is challenging. Although I think with climate change and the things that are so public, it's, it's more on, on the top mindset folks. But it's a great point that the organization really as a whole needs to embrace the sustainability mindset so that it as a, as an organization lives and breathes that. Yes. And last question for you is advice. So you, you outlined the Four Steps organizations can take. I look how you made that quite simple. What advice would you give organizations who are on that journey to adopting those, those actions, as you said, as they look to really build and deploy and execute an ESG strategy? >>No, absolutely. And so obviously, you know, the advice is gonna come from, you know, a company like Pure, you know, our background kind of being a supplier of products. And so, you know, our advice is for companies that have products, usually they tend to be the biggest generator, the products that you sell to your, your customers, especially if they've got hardware components in it. But, you know, the biggest generator of e-waste and, and and, and, and, and kind of from a sustainability standpoint. So it's really important to have an intentional design approach towards your products with sustainability in mind. So it's not something that's, that you can handle at the very back end. You design it front in the product and so that sustainable design becomes very intentional. So for us, for example, doing these non-disruptive upgrades had to be designed up front so that, you know, a, you know, one of our repair person could go into a customer shop and be able to pull out a card and put in a new card without any change in the customer system. >>That non-receptive approach, it has to be designed into the hardware software systems to be able to pull that on. And that intentional design enables you to recover pieces just when they're about to fail and then putting them through a recovery, you know, waste recovery process. So that, that's kind of the one thing I would say that philosophy, again, it comes down to if that is, you know, seeping into the culture, into your core ethos, you will start to do, you know, you know, that type of work. So, so I mean it's important thing, you know, look, this year, you know, with the spike in energy prices, you know, you know, gas prices going up, it's super important that all of us, you know, do our bit in there and start to drive products that are fundamentally sustainable, not just at the initial, you know, install point, but from an end to end full life cycle standpoint. >>Absolutely. And I love that you brought up intention that is everything that peers doing is with, with such thought and intention and really for organizations and any industry to become more sustainable, to develop an ESG strategy. To your point, it all needs to start with intention. And of course that that cultural adoption, aj, it's been so great to have you on the program talking about what PEER is doing to help organizations really navigate that path to sustainable it. We appreciate your insights on your time. >>Thank you, Lisa. Pleasure being on board >>At Pure Storage. The opportunity for change and our commitment to a sustainable future are a direct reflection of the way we've always operated and the values we live by every day. We are making significant and immediate impact worldwide through our environmental sustainability efforts. The milestones of change can be seen everywhere in everything we do. Pures Evergreen storage architecture delivers two key environmental benefits to customers, the reduction of wasted energy and the reduction of e-waste. Additionally, pures implemented a series of product packaging redesigns, promoting recycle and reuse in order to reduce waste that will not only benefit our customers, but also the environment. Pure is committed to doing what is right and leading the way with innovation. That has always been the pure difference, making a difference by enabling our customers to drive out energy usage and their data storage systems by up to 80% today, more than 97% of Pure Array purchased six years ago are still in service. And tomorrow our goal for the future is to reduce Scope three emissions Pure is committing to further reducing our sold products emissions by 66% per petabyte by 2030. All of this means what we said at the beginning, change that is simple and that is what it has always been about. Pure has a vision for the future today, tomorrow, forever. >>We're back talking about the path to sustainable it and now we're gonna get the perspective from Mattia Valerio, who is with Elec Informatica and IT services firm and the beautiful Lombardi region of Italy north of Milano. Mattia, welcome to the Cube. Thanks so much for coming on. >>Thank you very much, Dave. Thank you. >>All right, before we jump in, tell us a little bit more about Elec Informatica. What's your focus, talk about your unique value add to customers. >>Yeah, so basically Alma Informatica is middle company from the north part of Italy and is managed service provider in the IT area. Okay. So the, the main focus area of Al Meca is reach digital transformation innovation to our clients with focus on infrastructure services, workplace services, and also cybersecurity services. Okay. And we try to follow the path of our clients to the digital transformation and the innovation through technology and sustainability. >>Yeah. Obviously very hot topics right now. Sustainability, environmental impact, they're growing areas of focus among leaders across all industries. A particularly acute right now in, in Europe with the, you know, the energy challenges you've talked about things like sustainable business. What does that mean? What does that term Yeah. You know, speak to and, and what can others learn from it? >>Yeah. At at, at our approach to sustainability is grounded in science and, and values and also in customer territory, but also employee centered. I mean, we conduct regular assessments to understand the most significant environment and social issues for our business with, with the goal of prioritizing what we do for a sustainability future. Our service delivery methodology, employee care relationship with the local supplier and local area and institution are a major factor for us to, to build a such a responsibility strategy. Specifically during the past year, we have been particularly focused on define sustainability governance in the company based on stakeholder engagement, defining material issues, establishing quantitative indicators to monitor and setting medium to long-term goals. >>Okay, so you have a lot of data. You can go into a customer, you can do an assessment, you can set a baseline, and then you have other data by which you can compare that and, and understand what's achievable. So what's your vision for sustainable business? You know, that strategy, you know, how has it affected your business in terms of the evolution? Cuz this wasn't, hasn't always been as hot a topic as it is today. And and is it a competitive advantage for you? >>Yeah, yeah. For, for, for all intense and proposed sustainability is a competitive advantage for elec. I mean, it's so, because at the time of profound transformation in the work, in the world of work, CSR issues make a company more attractive when searching for new talent to enter in the workforce of our company. In addition, efforts to ensure people's proper work life balance are a strong retention factor. And regarding our business proposition, ELEX attempts is to meet high standard of sustainability and reliability. Our green data center, you said is a prime example of this approach as at the same time, is there a conditioning activity that is done to give a second life to technology devices that come from back from rental? I mean, our customer inquiries with respect to sustainability are increasingly frequent and in depth and which is why we monitor our performance and invest in certification such as EcoVadis or ISO 14,001. Okay, >>Got it. So in a previous life I actually did some work with, with, with power companies and there were two big factors in it that affected the power consumption. Obviously virtualization was a big one, if you could consolidate servers, you know, that was huge. But the other was the advent of flash storage and that was, we used to actually go in with the, the engineers and the power company put in alligator clips to measure of, of, of an all flash array versus, you know, the spinning disc and it was a big impact. So you, I wanna talk about your, your experience with Pure Storage. You use Flash Array and the Evergreen architecture. Can you talk about what your experience there, why did you make that decision to select Pure Storage? How does that help you meet sustainability and operational requirements? Do those benefits scale as your customers grow? What's your experience been? >>Yeah, it was basically an easy and easy answer to our, to our business needs. Okay. Because you said before that in Elec we, we manage a lot of data, okay? And in the past we, we, we see it, we see that the constraints of managing so many, many data was very, very difficult to manage in terms of power consumption or simply for the, the space of storing the data. And when, when Pure came to us and share our products, their vision to the data management journey for Element Informatica, it was very easy to choose pure why with values and numbers. We, we create a business case and we said that we, we see that our power consumption usage was much less, more than 90% of previous technology that we used in the past. Okay. And so of course you have to manage a grade oil deploy of flash technology storage, but it was a good target. >>So we have tried to monitoring the adoption of flash technology and monitor monitoring also the power consumption and the efficiency that the pure technology bring to our, to our IT systems and of course the IT systems of our clients. And so this is one, the first part, the first good part of our trip with, with Pure. And after that we approach also the sustainability in long term of choosing pure technology storage. You mentioned the Evergreen models of Pure, and of course this was, again, challenge for us because it allows, it allow us to extend the life cycle management of our data centers, but also the, IT allows us to improve the facility of the facilities of using technology from our technical side. Okay. So we are much more efficient than in the past with the choose of Pure storage technologies. Okay. Of course, this easy users, easy usage mode, let me say it, allow us to bring this value to our, to all our clients that put their data in our data centers. >>So you talked about how you've seen a 90% improvement relative to previous technologies. I always, I haven't put you in the spot. Yeah, because I, I, I was on Pure's website and I saw in their ESG report some com, you know, it was a comparison with a generic competitor presuming that competitor was not, you know, a 2010 spinning disc system. But, but, so I'm curious as to the results that you're seeing with Pure in terms of footprint and power usage. You, you're referencing some of that. We heard some metrics from Nicole and AJ earlier in the program. Do you think, again, I'm gonna put you in the spot, do you think that Pure's architecture and the way they've applied, whether it's machine intelligence or the Evergreen model, et cetera, is more competitive than other platforms that you've seen? >>Yeah, of course. Is more competitor improve competitive because basically it allows to service provider to do much more efficient value proposition and offer services that are more, that brings more values to, to the customers. Okay. So the customer is always at the center of a proposition of a service provider and trying to adopt the methodology and also the, the value that pure as inside by design in the technology is, is for us very, very, very important and very, very strategic because, because with like a glass, we can, our self transfer try to transfer the values of pure, pure technologies to our service provider client. >>Okay. Matta, let's wrap and talk about sort of near term 2023 and then longer term it looks like sustainability is a topic that's here to stay. Unlike when we were putting alligator clips on storage arrays, trying to help customers get rebates that just didn't have legs. It was too complicated. Now it's a, a topic that everybody's measuring. What's next for elec in its sustainability journey? What advice would you might have? Sustainability leaders that wanna make a meaningful impact on the environment, but also on the bottom line. >>Okay, so sustainability is fortunately a widely spread concept. And our role in, in this great game is to define a strategy, align with the common and fundamentals goals for the future of planet and capable of expressing our inclination and the, and the particularities and accessibility goals in the near future. I, I say, I can say that are will be basically free one define sustainability plan. Okay? It's fundamentals to define a sustainability plan. Then it's very important to monitor the its emissions and we will calculate our carbon footprint. Okay? And least button list produces certifiable and comprehensive sustainability report with respect to the demands of customers, suppliers, and also partners. Okay. So I can say that this three target will be our direction in the, in the future. Okay. >>Yeah. So I mean, pretty straightforward. Make a plan. You gotta monitor and measure, you can't improve what you can't measure. So you gonna set a baseline, you're gonna report on that. Yep. You're gonna analyze the data and you're gonna make continuous improvement. >>Yep. >>Matea, thanks so much for joining us today in sharing your perspectives from the, the northern part of Italy. Really appreciate it. >>Yeah, thank you for having aboard. Thank you very >>Much. It was really our pleasure. Okay, in a moment, I'm gonna be back to wrap up the program and share some resources that could be valuable in your sustainability journey. Keep it right there. >>Sustainability is becoming increasingly important and is hitting more RFPs than ever before as a critical decision point for customers. Environmental benefits are not the only impetus. Rather bottom line cost savings are proving that sustainability actually means better business. You can make a strong business case around sustainability and you should, many more organizations are setting mid and long-term goals for sustainability and putting forth published metrics for shareholders and customers. Whereas early green IT initiatives at the beginning of this century, were met with skepticism and somewhat disappointing results. Today, vendor r and d is driving innovation in system design, semiconductor advancements, automation in machine intelligence that's really beginning to show tangible results. Thankfully. Now remember, all these videos are available on demand@thecube.net. So check them out at your convenience and don't forget to go to silicon angle.com for all the enterprise tech news of the day. You also want to check out pure storage.com. >>There are a ton of resources there. As an aside, pure is the only company I can recall to allow you to access resources like a Gartner Magic Quadrant without forcing you to fill out a lead gen form. So thank you for that. Pure storage, I love that. There's no squeeze page on that. No friction. It's kind of on brand there for pure well done. But to the topic today, sustainability, there's some really good information on the site around esg, Pure's Environmental, social and Governance mission. So there's more in there than just sustainability. You'll see some transparent statistics on things like gender and ethnic diversity, and of course you'll see that Pure has some work to do there. But kudos for publishing those stats transparently and setting goals so we can track your progress. And there's plenty on the sustainability topic as well, including some competitive benchmarks, which are interesting to look at and may give you some other things to think about. We hope you've enjoyed the path to Sustainable it made possible by Pure Storage produced with the Cube, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech, tech coverage.

>>Oh, welcome back to the Cube here at aws Reinvent 22. As we continue our coverage here, the AWS Global Showcase, the Startup Showcase, John Wall is here hosting for the Cube as we've been here all week. Hope you're enjoying our coverage here. This is day three, by the way. We're wrapping it up shortly with us to talk about what's going on in the, kind of the hotel world in it and what's going on in the cloud, especially at I hg is Eric Norman, head of infrastructure, architecture, and innovation at I H G Hotels and Resorts. Eric, good to see you, >>Sir. Oh, thank you. And thank you for inviting me. Yeah, >>You bet. Glad to have you board here on the queue. First time, I think too, by the way, right? >>It is. And can I just tell you who IHG is >>Real quick? Yeah, wait a second. First I want another rest. I got Introduc to Rod Stuller, who is the Vice president and of Solutions marketing at Aviatrix and Rod. Good to see you, sir. Thanks a lot. Now let's talk about I ih. >>Great. Well, IHGs a a hospitality company, it's been around for 200 years, that has 17 brands globally in over a hundred countries. We sleek, you know, up could up to 888,000 people a night. So it's a pretty large company that we compete with, you know, all the hotel companies globally. >>So let's talk about your, your footprint right now in, in terms of what your needs are, because you've mentioned obviously a lot of, you have a lot of customers needs, you have a lot of internal stakeholder needs. Yeah. So just from that perspective, how are you balancing out, you know, the products you wanna launch as opposed to the, on the development side and the maintenance side? >>Yeah, I mean we, we have focused our, our attention to our, our guests and our hotels globally and, and taking technology and from a foundation, getting it at, at the edge so that way the consumer and the hotel owner can deliver a quality product to a guest experience. You know, we've have moved larger, a large deployment of our mission critical applications over the last five years really, of moving into more SaaS and infrastructure like AWS and GCP and, and leveraging their global scale to be able to deliver at the edge or get closer to the edge. And so we've, you know, I'm pretty sure you've seen, you know, kind of people building, you know, mission critical apps. You know, probably in the last three years it's probably escalating and more of like a hockey stick of moving stuff. I'd love to hear what AVIA is seeing. Oh >>Yeah. Now we're, we're seeing that quite a bit, right? As people move into the cloud, it's now business critical applications that are going there. So good enough isn't good enough anymore, right? It has to be, you know, a powerful capability that's business critical, can support that, give people the ability to troubleshoot it when something goes wrong. And then multi-cloud, you mentioned a couple different cloud companies, a lot of enterprises are moving to multiple clouds and you don't want to have to do it differently in every cloud. You want a infrastructure management layer that allows you to do that across >>Clouds. So how do you go about that, you know, deciding what goes where. I mean, it sounds like a simple question, but, but if you are dealing in a lot of different kinds of environments, different needs and different requirements, whatever, you know, how are you sorting out, delegating, you know, you know, you're, you're you're gonna be working here, you're gonna be >>Working there. Yeah. So we built some standards base that says, you know, certain types of apps, you know, transactional base, you know, go to this cloud provider and data analytics that's gonna go to another, another cloud provider based on our decision of key capability, native capability, and, and also coverage. You know, cuz we are in China, right? You know, you know, I, I've gotta be able to get into China and, and build not only a network that can support that, but also business apps locally to meet, compete with compliance, regulatory type activities. I mean, even in, in the US market, I got, you know, California privacy laws, you know, you have globally, you've gotta deal with getting data applications into compliance for those globally, right? >>Yeah. So, so you got that compliance slash governance Yeah. Issue. Huge issue. Yeah. I would think for you, you gotta decide who's gonna get to what when, and also we have to meet certain regulatory standards as you pointed out. And not just there, but you got European footprint, right? I mean, you're global. Yeah. So, so you know, handling that kind of scope or scale, what kind of nightmares or challenges does that provide you and how's Aviatrix helping you solve >>That? Yeah, in the early days, you know, we were using cloud native, you know, constructs for networking and a little bit of a security type angle to it. What we found was, you know, you can't get the automation you need. You can't get the, the scalability, you know, cuz we're, we're trying to shift left our, you know, our DevOps and our ability to deploy infrastructure. Aviatrix had come in and, and provided a, a solution that gets us there quicker than anybody else. It's allow us to, you know, build a mesh network across all our regions globally. I'm able to deploy, you know, new landing zones or, you know, public cloud fairly quickly with my, you know, networking construct. We also, we found that because we are a multi hybrid cloud, we, we introduced on the edge a a new network. We had to introduce a performance hub architecture that's using Equinix that sits in every region in every public cloud and partner. Cuz all our partners, you know, we, we've moved a lot of stuff to sas. You know, Amadeus is our centralized reservation system. That's our key, you know? Sure. You know, reservation tool, it's so sourced out. I need to bring them in and I need to get data that's closer to where, in a region to where it needs the land so I can process it. Right. >>And it's a big world out there too. I mean, you're, you're not in your head Rod. So talk about if you would share some of the, the aviatrix experience in that regard. When you have a client like this that has these, you know, multinational locations and, and yet you're looking for some consistency and some uniformity. You don't, you know, you can't be reinventing the wheel every time something pops up, right? >>Right. No. And then, and it's about agility and speed and, you know, being able to do it with less people than you used to have to do things, right? You, you want to be able to give the developers what they need when they need it. There was a time when people were going around it, swiping their credit card and, and saying, it doesn't give me what I need. And so cloud is supposed to change that. So we're trying to deliver the ability to do that for the developers a lot faster than had been done in the past. But at the same time, giving the enterprise the controls, the security, the compliance that they need. And sometimes those things got in the way, but now we're building systems that allow that to happen at, at the piece that developers needed to happen. >>But what Rod said about, you know, one of the big things you sparked my thinking is it also, you know, building a overlay of the cloud native construct allows for visibility that, you know, you didn't have, you know, from a developer or even a operations day two operations, now you get that visibility into the network space and controls and management of that space a lot easier now, you know? >>Yeah. I mean, business critical applications, right? People, the people, the business does not care about networking, right? They see it as electricity and if it's down somebody else's problem to fix it. But the people who do need to keep it up, they need the telemetry. They need the ability to understand, are we trending in the wrong direction? Should we be doing something so that we don't get to the point where it goes down? And that's the kind of information that we're providing in this multi-cloud environment. You mentioned Equinix, we, we just have a partnership with Equinix where we're extending the cloud operational model that Aviatrix delivers all the way out to Equinix and that global fabric that you're talking about. So this is allowing the, the comp companies to have that visibility, that operational ability all the way globally. >>Yeah. Because you know, when you start building all these clouds now and multi regions, multiple AZs or different cloud providers or SaaS providers, you're moving data all over the place. And if you, if you don't have a single pane of glass to see that entire network and be able to route stuff accordingly, it's gonna be a zoo. It's not gonna >>Work. We were, I was talking earlier with, with another guest and we were just talking about companies in your case, I, I IHG kind of knowing what you have and it's not like such a basic thing he said, but yeah, you'd be surprised how many people don't know what they have. Oh, yeah. And so they're trying to provide that visibility and, and, and awareness. So, so I'm kind of curious because you were just the next interview up, so sorry Ken, but, but do you know what you have, I mean, are you learning what you have or is how do you identify, prioritize? How valuable is this asset as opposed to this can wait? I mean, is that still an ongoing process for >>You? It, it's definitely an ongoing process. I mean, we've done over the last three years of constantly assessing all our inventory of what we have, making sure we have the right mo roadmaps for each of the apps and products that we have. Cause we've turned to more of a product driven organization and a DevOps and we're, we're moving more and more product teams onto that DevOps process. Yep. So we can shift left a lot of the activities that developer in the past had to go over a fence to ask for help and, and, you know, kind of the automation of the network and the security built in allows us to be able to shift that left. >>Did that, I, you were saying too three years, right? You've been on, on this path Yep. Going back then to 2019 right. Pandemic hits, right. The world changes. How has that affected this three year period for you? And where are you in terms of where you expected to be and, and Yep. And then what's your, what are your headlights seeing down the road as to what your, your eventual journey, how you want that to end? >>I probably, the biggest story that we have a success story is when the pandemic did happen, you know, all our call centers, all agents had to go home. We were able within 30 days be able to bring up remote desktops, you know, workspaces an a uws and give access to globally in China and in Singapore and in the Americas. There's >>No small task there, >>That's for sure. So we built a desktop, certified it, and, and agents were able to answer calls for guests, you know, you know, so it was a huge success to us. Sure. It did slow down. I mean, during the pandemic it did slow us down from what gets migrated. You know, our focus is, you know, again, back to what I was saying earlier is around our guests and our loyalty and, you know, how do we give value back to our hotel owners and our guests? >>And how do you measure that? I mean, how do you know that what you're doing is working with, with that key audience? >>We'd measured by, you know, one occupa >>There so many, how many people do we have in the rooms? Right? But in terms of the interface, in terms of the effectiveness, the applications, in terms of what you're offering. Yeah. >>It gets back to uptime of our systems and you know, being able to deploy an application in multiple regions elevates the availability of the product to our guest. You know, the longer I'm up, the more revenue I can produce. Right. So, you know, so we, we try to, you know, we measure also guest satisfaction at the properties, you know, them using our tech and that kind of stuff to >>Be so you surveying just to find out what, how they feel about, so some, >>Cause we have a lot of tech inside of our hotels that allow for, we have ISG connect, which allows for people to go from one hotel another and not ask for passwords and, you know, that kind of stuff. >>That would not be made by the way. I'd be begging for help. Let's talk about skills, because I hear that a lot. Talk a lot about that this week. Hearing that, that, you know, the advancement of knowledge is obviously a very powerful thing, but it's also a bit of a shortcoming right now in terms of, of having a need for skills and not having that kind of firepower horsepower on your bench. What, what do you see in that regard? And, and first off, what did you see about it? And then I'll follow >>Up with Yeah, I mean, over our journey, it started off where you didn't have the skills, you know, you didn't have the skill from an operations engineering architecture. So we went on a, you know, you know, how do we build training programs? How do we get, you know, tools to, to either virtual training, bringing teachers, we built, you know, daily, our weekly calls where we bring our experts from our vendors in there to be able to ask questions to help engineering people or architecture people or operations to ask questions and get answers. You know, we, we've been on a role of, you know, upscaling over the last three years and we continue to drive that, you know, we have lunch and learns that we bring people to. Yep. You know, and, and we, and we, we ta tailor the, the content for that training based on what we are consuming and what we're using as opposed to just a, you know, a broad stroke of, of public cloud or, it's >>Almost like you don't have to be holistic about it. You just need to, what do you need to know to >>Make >>Them successful, to be better at what you're doing here? Right. Sure. >>And that's been huge. And, >>And yeah, we, and we have a program called ace, which is AVIATRIX certified engineer. And there's a bunch of different types of classes. So if you're a networking person in the past it's like A C C I E, but we have about 18,000 people over the last three years who have gone through that training. One of them. One of them, right? Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. And, and this is not necessarily about aviatrix. What we're doing is trying to give multi-cloud, you know, networking expertise because a lot of the people that we're talking about are coming from the data center world. And networking is so different in the cloud. We're helping them understand it's not as scary as they might think. Right. If your whole career has been networking in the data center and all of a sudden there's this cloud thing that you don't really understand, you need somebody to help you sort of get there. And we're doing that in a multi-cloud way. And we have all kinds of different levels to teach people how to do, do infrastructure as code. That's another thing, you know, data center guys, they never did infrastructure as code. It was, you had to bolt it in and plug stuff in. Right. But now things are being done much faster with infrastructure as code. And we're teaching people how >>To do that. Yeah. I mean, yesterday, one of the keynotes is about the partner in the, the marketplace. And they use the image imagery of, of marathon runner, you know, a marathon runner. Yeah. You could do a marathon by yourself, but if you want to improve and become a, a great marathon runner, you need a coach, you need nutritionist, you need people running with you to, to make that engine go faster a little bit. Yeah, exactly. And you know, having a partner like Aviatrix helps you know the team to be successful. >>Well, it is, it is a marathon, not a sprint. That's for sure. And you've been on this kind of three year jog. You might feel like you've been running a marathon a little bit, but it sounds like you're really off to a great start and, and have a pretty good partnership here. So thank you. Congratulations on that, Eric. Thank you for being with us. And Rod, same to you. Thank you. Appreciate the time here on the AWS Global Showcase. I'm John Wal, you're watching The Cube. We're out in Las Vegas and of course the cube, as you well know, is the leader in high tech coverage.

>> Good afternoon from Vegas, guys and gals. We're so happy that you're with us. This is theCUBE live at AWS re:Invent '22. This is our third day of coverage. We started Monday night, so we're counting that as day one. Loads of conversations we've had already. We know that you know that 'cause you've been watching. I'm here with Dave Vellante. Dave, great to be here with you with somewhere between 50,000 and 70,000 people. And we're excited for our next conversation. We've got two folks joining us who are new to theCUBE, soon will be alumni. Milan Bhatt joins us, the president and head of Cloud at Hexaware. And Nikhil Date, the Director of Engineering and Application Services at Domestic & General. Guys, welcome to the program. >> Thank you >> Thanks for having us. >> So Domestic & General, or D&G, is a customer of Hexaware, but Milan, we want to start with you. Give the audience an overview of Hexaware. What do you do? What's the business model? >> Yeah. So, Hexaware is a technology services company. We are a global partner of AWS, and essentially, we help customers like Domestic & General, you know, accelerate their digital transformation journeys. We like to think of ourselves as a billion dollar startup. And like Amazon, it is always day one at Hexaware. And, you know, I look forward to the conversation, but any company in the world that is looking at cloud-led digital transformation, they have to put Hexaware on the consideration list. Because, you know, not only do we work with a lot of customers, analysts like Gartner, they have rated us as a visionary in helping customers become, you know, digitally enabled, bring better customer experience to their end customers. >> Excellent. Well, we're glad to feature Hexaware on the program. >> Milan: Thank you. >> Nikhil let's bring you into the conversation. Talk to the audience about Domestic & General. What kind of business is it? What's the business model? >> Sure, thank you. So we are, you know, 110-year-old business, right? I mean, we started insuring sheep in Australia, if you believe it, you know, which is quite an origin story. But at the moment, you know, the primary business is keeping our customers world running. So what do I mean by that? We protect in warranty and out-of-warranty care for domestic appliances. You know, TVs, boilers, refrigerators, washing machines, that kind of thing. But we are also a B2B company in the sense that, you know, you might think you are getting a warranty from some of our biggest customers, like Whirlpool or, you know, Bosch, Siemens, or Samsung, but actually it's D&G at the back trying to administer that for you. So, you know, we are in 13 countries. Just launched in the US last year, but big plans. >> So it's really interesting because we all have appliances, and we can relate to, especially, you know pre or post-pandemic, how difficult it is to get service. So you're kind of like, in a way, you've got to build a digital platform like Uber, connecting drivers and passengers, right? And so you've got the supply of individuals who know how to fix stuff, right? And you want to make it as easy as possible for the customer. So was that the genesis of this digital transformation? Can you talk about those business drivers? >> It was, actually, and it's a fantastic point, because trying to become a platform business is what this journey has been all about for us, right? I think, you know, we are a pioneer in what we consider the subscription model. So customers pay a small amount per month as opposed to a big lump sum amount that they have to pay at the point you buy the appliance. And importantly, you can actually buy our product to pay in installments at the point something breaks down. So it's not just something that you buy at the point of sale or at the point you try to register. You can buy it at any time. And the goal really is to have warranty in a box that you can take anywhere, you know, anywhere in the world. So, you know, but it's a great point. Digital transformation is what it is all about. >> And there is a real lack right now of qualified technicians. >> That's right. >> Is there anything within the platform to incent those individuals to participate in your business? >> You know, this is what we consider a multi-tier approach. I think at the moment, the service that we offer is largely top tier, right? So we will get you an engineer that is certified by the manufacturer with the manufacturer warranty. And it's a no fix, no fee model, you know? So, you know, we guarantee either to repair or replace the appliance, you know? That's the model. But you are right, I think in the future stage would be, you know, why wouldn't we want to have anybody who's got the right skills to come in and work off the platform? Absolutely right. >> Nikhil, talk about, you said this is a legacy business, been around for quite some time. You've been there for not quite two years. What drew you to the organization? And where were they in their digital transformation journey? Because I always think legacy companies, this a big challenge, and it's cultural challenge to really transform, but companies these days have no choice. >> Again, a fantastic point, right? I think some of the, you know, 110-year-old business, right? And some of the tech, you would be forgiven for thinking it's that old. But the assets that we had are our people, right? Who are really passionate about the business. And I think what we had to do is to find a partner that can upskill the tech, but also upskill the people at the same time and upskill the delivery model, right? So we've a very traditional left-to-right waterfall, you know, planet first, big upfront planning, and then deliver kind of organization. And by working with a partner such as Hexaware and embracing cloud, because, you know, our first and our go-to will be a SaaS or a cloud provider. And, you know, doing that was the massive agenda that drew me to the company. But I think what is also fair is, you know, digitization or digitalization, is a misunderstood and often abused term, right? Because for the most part, when companies start, and I'm not saying it's right or wrong, but, you know, for the most part, when companies start on this journey, they take a journey that works in the brick and mortar world, and we were a contact center business, and just try to move it to the digital journey, right? It's not a great customer experience. I'll give you an example, right? Now, if you call our agent and say, "Yeah, I'm trying to register an appliance," they will tell you where to look for the serial number. But if you're on a digital channel, you don't know where to look. There's nobody, you know, who can help you. The model number, who remembers the model number of the washing machine they bought, right? I mean, you know, it's stuff like that, you know, which would feel, you know, for a digital native, my son, you know, for example, would think, "How can you even ask a customer for that?" But, you know, it's that change in the model, that's what this is all about. >> Yeah, it's like when you get to go, "What's your account number?" I have no idea what my account number is. So when did this whole project start? How was Hexaware involved? And where did Hexaware start? Like, how did you sort of gauge what the requirement was? Take us through that little- >> Sure. So, you know, when Nikhil and the rest of the management team came in, they came up with a competitive process where, you know, and it is refreshing to remember, I think they've stuck true to their vision. They were very clear that they were not looking for someone who can just digitize their paper processes, but who can help them completely re-imagine, you know, what the new process would look like what the new experience would look like. And, you know, remember, they were running this process at the height of the pandemic, so we couldn't meet anybody in person. We did everything virtual. And we were using cloud technology, but, you know, the way they run the process, they wanted to make sure that a provider brings in a mix of experience and engineering expertise. And that's really hard to find. But equally importantly, you remember those culture sessions that we did? They figured out some very creative ways of making sure that there is a cultural fit. So, for example, they did virtual breakout sessions where, you know, people were sort of asking each other, you know, if you want to have dinner with someone like a celebrity, who would it be? So, you know, these little things to make sure that there is a match and people can actually work. >> Relationship building too. >> The relationship building. It's hard to do in a virtual environment, but it was a competitive process. They looked at us in terms of engineering, you know, experience, our ability to transcend change and run, and, you know, really focus and align to keep their objectives first, right? Work as a true partnership. Do you agree? >> I would agree. And I think, you know, one of the biggest goals here was to make sure that, this is not an arms length vendor relationship, right? You know, this is an extension of our team. So these are our people, you know, for the people that work on D&G, you know, they work in the D&G way, you know, and that means that they can also challenge us, you know, which is quite refreshing, right? People stopping and saying, "Why are you asking me to do this?" You know, it's very refreshing, I think, you know, to work with a partner that is sold on the vision and committed to helping you achieve success. >> That synergy creates that flywheel. And like you said, at D&G, Hexaware, we're a team, we're working together. Nikhil, share with us some of the significant business outcomes that Hexaware services and AWS are helping the company to achieve? Because there's some big numbers there. >> Indeed. Yeah. So, you know, in the digital journey itself, like I said, we are also a B2B business. You know, one of the key challenges is every client wants their own brand, right? So, you know, a journey for customer X has to look like the customer X brand. And our journey for customer Y will have to do the same. You know, when you try to stretch this to a technology problem though, it means that, you know, we were trying to be too many things for too many people, and that slowed things down and increased complexity. So from our point of view, you know, when we started with the digital journey or in the middle of the digital journey, we thought, we need to have a library of reusable components. We need white labeling, right? So there was a root in branch re-engineering of the digital proposition to allow us to, you know, serve multiple clients with the same underlying technology. And that has meant that, you know, in some cases, we are going to market, you know, two, three times faster than what we were. Costs, obviously, you know, 50% cheaper. But, you know, I think the big thing here, and, you know, this is the unstated benefit, is because now there is a common underlying technology innovation that client X wants to do becomes available for client Y. You know, which means that, you know, there's a virtual circle of, you know, constant improvement. So, you know that, from my point of view, that's the big benefit. >> And would you agree that you are still only in the first quarter of a football game? >> Absolutely. >> I think a lot of ambitious plans. So, you know, this is just the beginning. And the way they have built the organization, the way they have driven the culture change, you know, I'm very hopeful for great things to come. >> Paint a picture of the tech. I'm interested in the architecture, and I'm really interested in the data component and how that's affected your business. >> So I mean, you know, multilayered tech architecture, as you can imagine. Then, you know, we still have a legacy, you know, legacy components running off our own PET mainframe, as we like to call it. But, you know, from a forward point of view, what we really want is to allow clients to self-serve, right? Not have to, you know, because at the moment, the only service we can offer is what I call the white glove, right? Which means, you know, somebody has to sit down with us, have a discussion on the requirements, but people should be able to self-serve, you know, look at the catalog of what it is we can do for them and go for it. Data is a very interesting point, right? Because not only are there, you know, geography restrictions around where customer data can go to, obviously, payments and PCI compliance is an issue. But last but not least, you know, some of this data is very, you know, unique to what the clients want to own and manage. And, you know, if you are a, you know, a typical homeowner, you will have appliance from all kinds of manufacturers, right? Many of whom would be our customers. But how much data we can share, because we recognize you as a person, but how much data we can share, there are restrictions. But, you know, building our data abstraction layer allows us to, you know, take care of that. But you're absolutely right, in terms of, But again, the potential for where the data can be mined, because, you know, the engineer also has to be local to where you live. You know, you can't come from 100 miles away. So, you know, the ability to use data to, you know, not just transform our business, but our client's business is phenomenal, you know? >> Do you actually have a mainframe? >> Yes >> We do do. (laughter) >> Adam Selinsky wants to move it into the cloud. (laughter) >> They have every possible technology that you can think of. I mean, 100-year-old business evolved over a period of time. And, you know, if I could add, you know, what has been really impressive about the decision making at D&G is that they have adopted cloud in the right way, right? So they are one of the few customers who have truly taken AWS well architected to heart. They have taken things like, you know, take the right workloads to the cloud and wait to do the right remediations before you take the rest of the workloads to the cloud. They've used native services available on AWS from apps perspective as well as a data perspective. So that's sort of a little bit more color on the technology and architecture. >> But you've essentially SaaSified your business and you basically have D&G cloud that you're delivering to your customers for self-serve. Is that fair? >> That's the vision, yes. The idea is to get there. And, you know, if we assemble what I call, you know, out-the-box solutions in a clever way, then that becomes the platform that we can replicate success on. And at the moment, our business needs what I call boots on the ground. When we are a true platform business, we should be able to operate without having, you know, any presence in country, with the partners leveraging the platform to do what what's next. >> I'm curious, Milan, you said that one of the great things that D&G has done is really adopted cloud in the right way. Do you, Nikhil, think of cloud first or cloud right approach? Because you've got a mainframe, so I'm just wondering if it's more what's right for cloud versus everything cloud first. >> Correct. I mean, I actually, you know, or we actually tend to start even two steps before that, right? I think it's really whether we need to buy or whether we need to build, right? And if we need to buy, then, you know, how easily would that thing that has been bought fit into what is a very complex architecture, as Milan said, right? I mean, any technology you can imagine we probably have it, but we want to simplify it, right? And this is a journey. So which means that, you know, we start with can SaaS product do it? And then we also want to go wherever we are building, then it has to be on the cloud. It has to be designed for scaling. It has to be designed to be in multiple geographies, multiple countries with the relevant data protection baked in. So, you know, that's the decision-thinking process. You know, that the goal is to not, I mean, you know, we had a project started 18 months ago that wanted to buy more tin, but we put a stop to that, right? And saying that, "You know, come on, you can't have that." Not in this day and age, you know, when the cloud can pretty much do everything that you need. >> Do you think of D&G, this is a question for you. We're almost out of time, but I'm just curious, I'm looking at your website, D&G, the experts who repair and replace the household products everyone relies on. Do you think about it as a repair company? Do you think about it as a tech company that delivers these repair services? >> I mean, this is the conversation we have in our teams all the time, right? That when our vision is successful, we will become a tech business. At the moment, I don't think we are, you know? At the moment, I think we are on a journey, you know, because, you know, we are multi-channel, you know, and our customers love us, you know, touch wood. But are we a true tech company? No, but we are getting there, right? I think, you know, that's the plan. >> You're on the journey? >> Yeah. >> Awesome stuff. Last question for each of you, a little bit different. Milan, question for you. You have a billboard or a bumper sticker, whichever, or maybe a sticker for your laptop and it's about Hexaware, and you want to really convey, in a compelling, but really short way, why are we so great? What would that sticker say? >> Awesome. Like I said at the beginning, if you are thinking about a digital transformation, if you are a company that has been around for a long time, you've got to think of us, you know, as a partner. So that's what I would say, because, you know, the purpose of our company is creating smiles through a combination of great people and technology. So that's what we live for. And, you know, brought a smile to me when Nikhil said that our customers love us, and somewhere, we have a small role to play in that. >> I love that. Nikhil, I'm going to ask the same question. I was going to ask you a different one, but I would love to, I mean, we talked a lot about D&G and the incredible business transformation that you've been on. What's that bumper sticker for D&G? What is that bumper sticker for D&G? >> Oh, yeah. Okay. We want keep your world running, right? I mean, you know, from our point of view, you know, you rely on the appliances to keep your home running, and we want you to rely on us to make sure your world keeps running. You know, that's what this is all about. It has to be slick. Touch wood, hopefully, you never have a problem, but if you do, we want to be there, you know, to make sure that your world keeps running. >> I love it. Awesome, guys. Thank you, Milan. Nikhil, thank you so much for joining Dave and me on the program. >> Thank you. I enjoyed the conversation. >> Great partnership. Hexaware, first time on theCUBE, now you're an alumni. You're an alumni too. We appreciate your insights, sharing the story. It's a really compelling story. Thank you. >> And thank you for all the support, Nikhil. >> Of course. >> All right. >> For our guests and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage.

>>Welcome back here on the Cube. I'm John Walls. We are in Las Vegas at the Venetian, and this is Reinvent 22 in the Executive Summit sponsored by Accenture. Glad to have you with us here as we continue our conversations. I'm joined by Paul Puckett, who's the former director of the Enterprise Cloud Management Services at the US Army. Paul, good to see you sir. Hey, you as well, John. Thank you. And Justin, she who is managing director and cloud go to market lead at Accenture Federal Services. Justin, good morning to you. Good morning, John. Yeah, glad to have you both here on the cube. First time too, I believe, right? Yes sir. Well, welcome. I wish we had some kind of baptism or indoctrination, but I'll see what I can come up with in the next 10 minutes for you. Let's talk about the Army, Paul. So enterprise cloud management, US Army. You know, I can't imagine the scale we're talking about here. I can't imagine the solutions we're talking about. I can't imagine the users we're talking about. Just for our folks at home, paint the picture a little bit of what kind of landscape it is that you have to cover with that kind of title. >>Sure. The United States Army, about 1.4 million people. Obviously a global organization responsible for protecting and defending the United States as part of our sister services in the Department of Defense. And scale often comes up a lot, right? And we talk about any capability to your solution for the United States Army scale is the, the number one thing, but oftentimes people overlook quality first. And actually when you think of the partnership between the Army and Accenture Federal, we thought a lot when it came to establishing the enterprise Cloud management agency that we wanted to deliver quality first when it came to adopting cloud computing and then scale that quality and not so much be afraid of the, the scale of the army and the size that forces us to make bad decisions. Cuz we wanted to make sure that we proved that there was opportunity and value in the cloud first, and then we wanted to truly scale that. And so no doubt, an immense challenge. The organization's been around for now three years, but I think that we've established irreversible momentum when it comes to modernization, leveraging cloud computing >>For the army. So let's back up. You kind of threw it in there, the ecma. So this agency was, was your a collaboration, right? To create from the ground up and it's in three years in existence. So let's just talk about that. What went into that thinking? What went into the planning and then how did you actually get it up and run into the extent that it is today? >>Sure. Well, it was once the enterprise cloud management office. It was a directorate within the, the CIO G six of the United States Army. So at the headquarters, the army, the chief information Officer, and the G six, which is essentially the military arm for all IT capability were once a joint's organization and the ECMO was created to catalyze the adoption of cloud computing. The army had actually been on a, a cloud adoption journey for many years, but there wasn't a lot of value that was actually derived. And so they created the ecma, well, the ECMO at the time brought me in as the director. And so we were responsible for establishing the new strategy for the adoption of cloud. One of the components of that strategy was essentially we needed an opportunity to be able to buy cloud services at scale. And this was part of our buy secure and build model that we had in place. And so part of the buy piece, we put an acquisition strategy together around how we wanted to buy cloud at scale. We called it the cloud account management optimization. OTA >>Just rolls right off the >>Tongue, it just rolls right off the tongue. And for those that love acronyms, camo, >>Which I liked it when I was say cama, I loved that. That was, that was, >>You always have to have like a tundra, a little >>Piece of that. Very good. It was good. >>But at the time it was novetta, no, Nevada's been bought up by afs, but Novea won that agreement. And so we've had this partnership in place now for just about a year and a half for buying cloud computing net scale. >>So let's talk about, about what you deal with on, on the federal services side here, Justin, in terms of the army. So obviously governance, a major issue, compliance, a major issue, security, you know, paramount importance and all that STEM leads up to quality that Paul was talking about. So when you were looking at this and keeping all those factors in, in your mind, right? I mean, how many, like, oh my God, what kind of days did you have? Oh, well, because this was a handful. >>Well, it was, but you could see when we were responding to the acquisition that it was really, you know, forward thinking and forward leaning in terms of how they thought about cloud acquisition and cloud governance and cloud management. And it's really kind of a sleepy area like cloud account acquisition. Everyone's like, oh, it's easy to get in the cloud, you know, run your credit card on Amazon and you're in, in 30 seconds or less. That's really not the case inside the federal government, whether it's the army, the Air Force or whoever, right? Those, those are, they're real challenges in procuring and acquiring cloud. And so it was clear from, you know, Paul's office that they understood those challenges and we were excited to really meet them with them. >>And, and how, I guess from an institutional perspective, before this was right, I I assume very protective, very tight cloistered, right? You, you, in terms of being open to or, or a more open environment, there might have been some pushback was they're not. Right? So dealing with that, what did you find that to be the case? Well, so >>There's kind of a few pieces to unpacking that. There's a lot of fear in trepidation around something you don't understand, right? And so part of it is the teaching and training and the, and the capability and the opportunity in the cloud and the ability to be exceptionally secure when it comes to no doubt, the sensitivity of the information of the Department of Defense, but also from an action acquisition strategy perspective, more from a financial perspective, the DOD is accustomed to buying hardware. We make these big bets of these big things to, to live in today's centers. And so when we talk about consuming cloud as a utility, there's a lot of fear there as well, because they don't really understand how to kind of pay for something by the drink, if you will, because it incentivizes them to be more efficient with their utilization of resources. >>But when you look at the budgeting process of the d od, there really is not that much of incentive for efficiency. The p PPE process, the planning program, budgeting, execution, they care about execution, which is spending money and you can spend a lot of money in the cloud, right? But how are you actually utilizing that? And so what we wanted to do is create that feedback loop and so the utilization is actually fed into our financial systems that help us then estimate into the future. And that's the capability that we partnered with AFS on is establishing the closing of that feedback loop. So now we can actually optimize our utilization of the cloud. And that's actually driving better incentives in the PPE >>Process. You know, when you think about these keywords here, modernized, digitized, data driven, so on, so forth, I, I don't think a lot of people might connect that to the US government in general just because of, you know, it's a large intentionally slow moving bureaucratic machine, right? Is that fair to characterize it that way? It >>Is, but not in this case. Right? So what we done, >>You you totally juxtapose that. Yeah. >>Yeah. So what we've done is we've really enabled data driven decision making as it relates to cloud accounts and cloud governance. And so we have a, a tool called Cloud Tracker. We deployed for the army at a number of different classifications, and you get a full 360 view of all of your cloud utilization and cloud spend, you know, really up to date within 24 hours of it occurring, right? And there a lot of folks, you know, they didn't never went into the console, they never looked at what they were spending in cloud previously. And so now you just go to a simple web portal and see the entire entirety of the army cloud spend right there at your fingertips. So that really enables like better decision making in terms of like purchasing savings plans and reserved instances and other sorts of AWS specific tools to help you save money. >>So Paul, tell me about Cloud Tracker then. Yeah, I mean from the client side then, can you just say this dashboard lays it out for you right? In great detail about what kind of usage, what kind of efficiencies I assume Yeah. What's working, what's not? >>Absolutely. Well, and, and I think a few things to unpack that's really important here is listen, any cloud service provider has a concept. You can see what you're actually spending. But when it comes to money in the United States government, there are different colors of money. There's regulations when it comes to how money is identified for different capabilities or incentives. And you've gotta be very explicit in how you track and how you spend that money from an auditability perspective. Beyond that, there is a move when it comes to the technology business management, which is the actual labeling of what we actually spend money on for different services or labor or software. And what Cloud Tracker allows us to do is speak the language of the different colors of money. It allows us to also get very fine grain in the actual analysis of, from a TBM perspective, what we're spending on. >>But then also it has real time hooks into our financial systems for execution. And so what that really does for us is it allows us to complete the picture, not just be able to see our spend in the cloud, but also be able to able to see that spending context of all things in the P P P E process as well as the execution process that then really empowers the government to make better investments. And all we're seeing is either cost avoidance or cost savings simply because we're able to close that loop, like I said. Yep. And then we're able to redirect those funds, retag them, remove them through our actual financial office within the headquarters of the army, and be able to repurpose that to other modernization efforts that Congress is essentially asking us to invest >>In. Right. So you know how much money you have, basically. Exactly. Right. You know how much you've already spent, you know how you're spending it, and now you how much you have left, >>You can provide a reliable forecast for your spend. >>Right. You know, hey, we're, we're halfway through this quarter, we're halfway through the, the fiscal year, whatever the case might be. >>Exactly. And the focus on expenditures, you know, the government rates you on, you know, how much have you spent, right? So you have a clear total transparency into what you're going to spend through the rest of the fiscal. Sure. >>All right. Let's just talk about the relationship quickly then about going forward then in terms of federal services and then what on, on the, the US Army side. I mean, what now you've laid this great groundwork, right? You have a really solid foundation where now what next? >>We wanna be all things cloud to the army. I mean, we think there's tremendous opportunity to really aid the modernization efforts and governance across the holistic part of the army. So, you know, we just, we want to, we wanna do it all with the Army as much as we can. It's, it's, it's a fantastic >>Opportunity. Yeah. AFS is, is in a very kind of a strategic role. So as part of the ecma, we own the greater strategy and execution for adoption of cloud on behalf of the entire army. Now, when it comes to delivery of individual capabilities for mission here and there, that's all specific to system owners and different organizations. AFS plays a different role in this instance where they're able to more facilitate the greater strategy on the financial side of the house. And what we've done is we've proven the ability to adopt cloud as a utility rather than this fixed thing, kind of predict the future, spend a whole bunch of money and never use the resource. We're seeing the efficiency for the actual utilization of cloud as a utility. This actually came out as one of the previous NDAs. And so how we actually address nda, I believe it was 2018 in the adoption of cloud as a utility, really is now cornerstone of modernization across all of the do d and really feeds into the Jo Warfighting cloud capability, major acquisition on behalf of all of the D O D to establish buying cloud as just a common service for everyone. >>And so we've been fortunate to inform that team of some of our lessons learned, but when it comes to the partnership, we just see camo moving into production. We've been live for now a year and a half. And so there's another two and a half years of runway there. And then AFS also plays a strategic role at part of our cloud enablement division, which is essentially back to that teaching part, helping the Army understand the opportunity of cloud computing, align the architectures to actually leverage those resources and then deliver capabilities that save soldier's >>Lives. Well, you know, we've, we've always known that the Army does its best work on the ground, and you've done all this groundwork for the military, so I'm not surprised, right? It's, it's a winning formula. Thanks to both of you for being with us here in the executive summit. Great conversation. Awesome. Thanks for having us. A good deal. All right. Thank you. All right. You are watching the executive summit sponsored by Accenture here at Reinvent 22, and you're catching it all on the cube, the leader in high tech coverage.

>>We're back at Super Computing, 22 in Dallas, winding down the final day here. A big show floor behind me. Lots of excitement out there, wouldn't you say, Dave? Just >>Oh, it's crazy. I mean, any, any time you have NASA presentations going on and, and steampunk iterations of cooling systems that the, you know, it's, it's >>The greatest. I've been to hundreds of trade shows. I don't think I've ever seen NASA exhibiting at one like they are here. Dave Nicholson, my co-host. I'm Paul Gell, in which with us is Satish Ier. He is the vice president of emerging services at Dell Technologies and Satit, thanks for joining us on the cube. >>Thank you. Paul, >>What are emerging services? >>Emerging services are actually the growth areas for Dell. So it's telecom, it's cloud, it's edge. So we, we especially focus on all the growth vectors for, for the companies. >>And, and one of the key areas that comes under your jurisdiction is called apex. Now I'm sure there are people who don't know what Apex is. Can you just give us a quick definition? >>Absolutely. So Apex is actually Dells for a into cloud, and I manage the Apex services business. So this is our way of actually bringing cloud experience to our customers, OnPrem and in color. >>But, but it's not a cloud. I mean, you don't, you don't have a Dell cloud, right? It's, it's of infrastructure as >>A service. It's infrastructure and platform and solutions as a service. Yes, we don't have our own e of a public cloud, but we want to, you know, this is a multi-cloud world, so technically customers want to consume where they want to consume. So this is Dell's way of actually, you know, supporting a multi-cloud strategy for our customers. >>You, you mentioned something just ahead of us going on air. A great way to describe Apex, to contrast Apex with CapEx. There's no c there's no cash up front necessary. Yeah, I thought that was great. Explain that, explain that a little more. Well, >>I mean, you know, one, one of the main things about cloud is the consumption model, right? So customers would like to pay for what they consume, they would like to pay in a subscription. They would like to not prepay CapEx ahead of time. They want that economic option, right? So I think that's one of the key tenets for anything in cloud. So I think it's important for us to recognize that and think Apex is basically a way by which customers pay for what they consume, right? So that's a absolutely a key tenant for how, how we want to design Apex. So it's absolutely right. >>And, and among those services are high performance computing services. Now I was not familiar with that as an offering in the Apex line. What constitutes a high performance computing Apex service? >>Yeah, I mean, you know, I mean, this conference is great, like you said, you know, I, there's so many HPC and high performance computing folks here, but one of the things is, you know, fundamentally, if you look at high performance computing ecosystem, it is quite complex, right? And when you call it as an Apex HPC or Apex offering offer, it brings a lot of the cloud economics and cloud, you know, experience to the HPC offer. So fundamentally, it's about our ability for customers to pay for what they consume. It's where Dell takes a lot of the day to day management of the infrastructure on our own so that customers don't need to do the grunge work of managing it, and they can really focus on the actual workload, which actually they run on the CHPC ecosystem. So it, it is, it is high performance computing offer, but instead of them buying the infrastructure, running all of that by themself, we make it super easy for customers to consume and manage it across, you know, proven designs, which Dell always implements across these verticals. >>So what, what makes the high performance computing offering as opposed to, to a rack of powered servers? What do you add in to make it >>Hpc? Ah, that's a great question. So, I mean, you know, so this is a platform, right? So we are not just selling infrastructure by the drink. So we actually are fundamentally, it's based on, you know, we, we, we launch two validated designs, one for life science sales, one for manufacturing. So we actually know how these PPO work together, how they actually are validated design tested solution. And we also, it's a platform. So we actually integrate the softwares on the top. So it's just not the infrastructure. So we actually integrate a cluster manager, we integrate a job scheduler, we integrate a contained orchestration layer. So a lot of these things, customers have to do it by themself, right? If they're buy the infrastructure. So by basically we are actually giving a platform or an ecosystem for our customers to run their workloads. So make it easy for them to actually consume those. >>That's Now is this, is this available on premises for customer? >>Yeah, so we, we, we make it available customers both ways. So we make it available OnPrem for customers who want to, you know, kind of, they want to take that, take that economics. We also make it available in a colo environment if the customers want to actually, you know, extend colo as that OnPrem environment. So we do both. >>What are, what are the requirements for a customer before you roll that equipment in? How do they sort of have to set the groundwork for, >>For Well, I think, you know, fundamentally it starts off with what the actual use case is, right? So, so if you really look at, you know, the two validated designs we talked about, you know, one for, you know, healthcare life sciences, and one other one for manufacturing, they do have fundamentally different requirements in terms of what you need from those infrastructure systems. So, you know, the customers initially figure out, okay, how do they actually require something which is going to require a lot of memory intensive loads, or do they actually require something which has got a lot of compute power. So, you know, it all depends on what they would require in terms of the workloads to be, and then we do havet sizing. So we do have small, medium, large, we have, you know, multiple infrastructure options, CPU core options. Sometimes the customer would also wanna say, you know what, as long as the regular CPUs, I also want some GPU power on top of that. So those are determinations typically a customer makes as part of the ecosystem, right? And so those are things which would, they would talk to us about to say, okay, what is my best option in terms of, you know, kind of workloads I wanna run? And then they can make a determination in terms of how, how they would actually going. >>So this, this is probably a particularly interesting time to be looking at something like HPC via Apex with, with this season of Rolling Thunder from various partners that you have, you know? Yep. We're, we're all expecting that Intel is gonna be rolling out new CPU sets from a powered perspective. You have your 16th generation of PowerEdge servers coming out, P C I E, gen five, and all of the components from partners like Invidia and Broadcom, et cetera, plugging into them. Yep. What, what does that, what does that look like from your, from your perch in terms of talking to customers who maybe, maybe they're doing things traditionally and they're likely to be not, not fif not 15 G, not generation 15 servers. Yeah. But probably more like 14. Yeah, you're offering a pretty huge uplift. Yep. What, what do those conversations look >>Like? I mean, customers, so talking about partners, right? I mean, of course Dell, you know, we, we, we don't bring any solutions to the market without really working with all of our partners, whether that's at the infrastructure level, like you talked about, you know, Intel, amd, Broadcom, right? All the chip vendors, all the way to software layer, right? So we have cluster managers, we have communities orchestrators. So we usually what we do is we bring the best in class, whether it's a software player or a hardware player, right? And we bring it together as a solution. So we do give the customers a choice, and the customers always want to pick what you they know actually is awesome, right? So they that, that we actually do that. And, you know, and one of the main aspects of, especially when you talk about these things, bringing it as a service, right? >>We take a lot of guesswork away from our customer, right? You know, one of the good example of HPC is capacity, right? So customers, these are very, you know, I would say very intensive systems. Very complex systems, right? So customers would like to buy certain amount of capacity, they would like to grow and, you know, come back, right? So give, giving them the flexibility to actually consume more if they want, giving them the buffer and coming down. All of those things are very important as we actually design these things, right? And that takes some, you know, customers are given a choice, but it actually, they don't need to worry about, oh, you know, what happens if I actually have a spike, right? There's already buffer capacity built in. So those are awesome things. When we talk about things as a service, >>When customers are doing their ROI analysis, buying CapEx on-prem versus, versus using Apex, is there a point, is there a crossover point typically at which it's probably a better deal for them to, to go OnPrem? >>Yeah, I mean, it it like specifically talking about hpc, right? I mean, why, you know, we do have a ma no, a lot of customers consume high performance compute and public cloud, right? That's not gonna go away, right? But there are certain reasons why they would look at OnPrem or they would look at, for example, Ola environment, right? One of the main reasons they would like to do that is purely have to do with cost, right? These are pretty expensive systems, right? There is a lot of ingress, egress, there is a lot of data going back and forth, right? Public cloud, you know, it costs money to put data in or actually pull data back, right? And the second one is data residency and security requirements, right? A lot of these things are probably proprietary set of information. We talked about life sciences, there's a lot of research, right? >>Manufacturing, a lot of these things are just, just in time decision making, right? You are on a factory floor, you gotta be able to do that. Now there is a latency requirement. So I mean, I think a lot of things play, you know, plays into this outside of just cost, but data residency requirements, ingress, egress are big things. And when you're talking about mass moments of data you wanna put and pull it back in, they would like to kind of keep it close, keep it local, and you know, get a, get a, get a price >>Point. Nevertheless, I mean, we were just talking to Ian Coley from aws and he was talking about how customers have the need to sort of move workloads back and forth between the cloud and on-prem. That's something that they're addressing without posts. You are very much in the, in the on-prem world. Do you have, or will you have facilities for customers to move workloads back and forth? Yeah, >>I wouldn't, I wouldn't necessarily say, you know, Dell's cloud strategy is multi-cloud, right? So we basically, so it kind of falls into three, I mean we, some customers, some workloads are suited always for public cloud. It's easier to consume, right? There are, you know, customers also consume on-prem, the customers also consuming Kohler. And we also have like Dell's amazing piece of software like storage software. You know, we make some of these things available for customers to consume a software IP on their public cloud, right? So, you know, so this is our multi-cloud strategy. So we announced a project in Alpine, in Delta fold. So you know, if you look at those, basically customers are saying, I love your Dell IP on this, on this product, on the storage, can you make it available through, in this public environment, whether, you know, it's any of the hyper skill players. So if we do all of that, right? So I think it's, it shows that, you know, it's not always tied to an infrastructure, right? Customers want to consume the best thumb and if we need to be consumed in hyperscale, we can make it available. >>Do you support containers? >>Yeah, we do support containers on hpc. We have, we have two container orchestrators we have to support. We, we, we have aner similarity, we also have a container options to customers. Both options. >>What kind of customers are you signing up for the, for the HPC offerings? Are they university research centers or is it tend to be smaller >>Companies? It, it's, it's, you know, the last three days, this conference has been great. We probably had like, you know, many, many customers talking to us. But HC somewhere in the range of 40, 50 customers, I would probably say lot of interest from educational institutions, universities research, to your point, a lot of interest from manufacturing, factory floor automation. A lot of customers want to do dynamic simulations on factory floor. That is also quite a bit of interest from life sciences pharmacies because you know, like I said, we have two designs, one on life sciences, one on manufacturing, both with different dynamics on the infrastructure. So yeah, quite a, quite a few interest definitely from academics, from life sciences, manufacturing. We also have a lot of financials, big banks, you know, who wants to simulate a lot of the, you know, brokerage, a lot of, lot of financial data because we have some, you know, really optimized hardware we announced in Dell for, especially for financial services. So there's quite a bit of interest from financial services as well. >>That's why that was great. We often think of Dell as, as the organization that democratizes all things in it eventually. And, and, and, and in that context, you know, this is super computing 22 HPC is like the little sibling trailing around, trailing behind the super computing trend. But we definitely have seen this move out of just purely academia into the business world. Dell is clearly a leader in that space. How has Apex overall been doing since you rolled out that strategy, what, two couple? It's been, it's been a couple years now, hasn't it? >>Yeah, it's been less than two years. >>How are, how are, how are mainstream Dell customers embracing Apex versus the traditional, you know, maybe 18 months to three year upgrade cycle CapEx? Yeah, >>I mean I look, I, I think that is absolutely strong momentum for Apex and like we, Paul pointed out earlier, we started with, you know, making the infrastructure and the platforms available to customers to consume as a service, right? We have options for customers, you know, to where Dell can fully manage everything end to end, take a lot of the pain points away, like we talked about because you know, managing a cloud scale, you know, basically environment for the customers, we also have options where customers would say, you know what, I actually have a pretty sophisticated IT organization. I want Dell to manage the infrastructure, but up to this level in the layer up to the guest operating system, I'll take care of the rest, right? So we are seeing customers who are coming to us with various requirements in terms of saying, I can do up to here, but you take all of this pain point away from me or you do everything for me. >>It all depends on the customer. So we do have wide interest. So our, I would say our products and the portfolio set in Apex is expanding and we are also learning, right? We are getting a lot of feedback from customers in terms of what they would like to see on some of these offers. Like the example we just talked about in terms of making some of the software IP available on a public cloud where they'll look at Dell as a software player, right? That's also is absolutely critical. So I think we are giving customers a lot of choices. Our, I would say the choice factor and you know, we are democratizing, like you said, expanding in terms of the customer choices. And I >>Think it's, we're almost outta our time, but I do wanna be sure we get to Dell validated designs, which you've mentioned a couple of times. How specific are the, well, what's the purpose of these designs? How specific are they? >>They, they are, I mean I, you know, so the most of these valid, I mean, again, we look at these industries, right? And we look at understanding exactly how would, I mean we have huge embedded base of customers utilizing HPC across our ecosystem in Dell, right? So a lot of them are CapEx customers. We actually do have an active customer profile. So these validated designs takes into account a lot of customer feedback, lot of partner feedback in terms of how they utilize this. And when you build these solutions, which are kind of end to end and integrated, you need to start anchoring on something, right? And a lot of these things have different characteristics. So these validated design basically prove to us that, you know, it gives a very good jump off point for customers. That's the way I look at it, right? So a lot of them will come to the table with, they don't come to the blank sheet of paper when they say, oh, you know what I'm, this, this is my characteristics of what I want. I think this is a great point for me to start from, right? So I think that that gives that, and plus it's the power of validation, really, right? We test, validate, integrate, so they know it works, right? So all of those are hypercritical. When you talk to, >>And you mentioned healthcare, you, you mentioned manufacturing, other design >>Factoring. We just announced validated design for financial services as well, I think a couple of days ago in the event. So yep, we are expanding all those DVDs so that we, we can, we can give our customers a choice. >>We're out of time. Sat ier. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. At the center of the move to subscription to everything as a service, everything is on a subscription basis. You really are on the leading edge of where, where your industry is going. Thanks for joining us. >>Thank you, Paul. Thank you Dave. >>Paul Gillum with Dave Nicholson here from Supercomputing 22 in Dallas, wrapping up the show this afternoon and stay with us for, they'll be half more soon.

>>Hello >>Everyone and welcome back to Dallas where we're live from, Super computing. My name is Savannah Peterson, joined with my co-host David, and we have a rocket of a show for you this afternoon. The doctors are in the house and we are joined by nasa, ladies and gentlemen. So excited. Please welcome Dr. Dan Duffy and Dr. Bill Putman. Thank you so much for being here, guys. I know this is kind of last minute. How's it to be on the show floor? What's it like being NASA here? >>What's exciting? We haven't, we haven't been here for three years, so this is actually really exciting to come back and see everybody, to see the showroom floor, see the innovations that have happened over the last three years. It's pretty exciting. >>Yeah, it's great. And, and so, because your jobs are so cool, and I don't wanna even remotely give even too little of the picture or, or not do it justice, could you give the audience a little bit of background on what you do as I think you have one of the coolest jobs ever. YouTube bill. >>I, I appreciate that. I, I, I run high Performance Computing Center at NASA Goddard for science. It's high performance information technology. So we do everything from networking to security, to high performance computing, to data sciences, artificial intelligence and machine learning is huge for us now. Yeah, large amounts of data, big data sets, but we also do scientific visualizations and then cloud and commercial cloud computing, as well as on premises cloud computing. And quite frankly, we support a lot of what Bill and his team does. >>Bill, why don't you tell us what your team >>Does? Yeah, so I'm a, I'm an earth scientist. I work as the associate chief at the global modeling assimilation office. And our job is to really, you know, maximize the use of all the observations that NASA takes from space and build that into a coherent, consistent physical system of the earth. Right? And we're focused on utilizing the HC that, that Dan and the folks at the nccs provide to us, to the best of our abilities to integrate those observations, you know, on time scales from hours, days to, to seasonal to to monthly time scales. That's, that's the essence of our focus at the GMA o >>Casual modeling, all of NASA's earth data. That, that in itself as a sentence is pretty wild. I imagine you're dealing with a ton of data. >>Oh, massive amounts of data. Yes, >>Probably, I mean, as much as one probably could, now that I'm thinking about it. I mean, and especially with how far things have to travel. Bill, sticking with you, just to open us up, what technology here excites you the most about the future and that will make your job easier? Let's put it that way. >>To me, it's the accelerator technologies, right? So there's the limited, the limiting factor for, for us as scientists is how fast we can get an answer. And if we can get our answer faster through accelerated technologies, you know, with the support of the, of the nccs and the computing centers, but also the software engineers enabling that for us, then we can do more, right. And push the questions even further, you know, so once we've gotten fast enough to do what we want to do, there's always something next that we wanna look for. So, >>I mean, at nasa you have to exercise such patience, whether that be data, coming back, images from a rover, doesn't matter what it is. Sometimes there's a lot of time, days, hours, years, depending on the situation. Right? I really, I really admire that. What about you, Dan? What's got you really excited about the future here? So >>Bill talked about the, the accelerated technology, which is absolutely true and, and, and is needed to get us not to only to the point where we have the compute resources to do the simulations that Bill wants to do, and also do it in a energy efficient way. But it's really the software frameworks that go around that and the software frameworks, the technology that dealing with how to use those in an energy efficient and and most efficient way is extremely important. And that's some of the, you know, that's what I'm really here to try to understand better about is how can I support these scientists with not just the hardware, but the software frameworks by which they can be successful. >>Yeah. We've, we've had a lot of kind of philosophical discussion about this, the difference between the quantitative increases in power in computing that we're seeing versus the question of whether or not we need truly qualitative changes moving forward. Where do you see the limits of, of, of, you know, if you, if you're looking at the ability to gather more data and process more data more quickly, what you can do with that data changes when you're getting updates every second versus every month seems pretty obvious. Is there a, is there, but is there, is there a near term target that you have specifically where once you reach that target, if you weren't thinking ahead of that target, you'd kind of be going, Okay, well we solved that problem, we're getting the data in so fast that you can, you can ask me, what is the temperature in this area? And you can go, Oh, well, huh, an hour ago the data said this. Beyond that, do you need a qualitative change in our ability to process information and tease insight into out of chaos? Or do you just need more quantity to be able to get to the point where you can do things like predict weather six months in advance? What are, what are your thoughts on that? Yeah, >>It's an interesting question, right? And, and you ended it with predicting whether six months in advance, and actually I was thinking the other way, right? I was thinking going to finer and finer scales and shorter time scales when you talk about having data more frequently, right? So one of the things that I'm excited about as a modeler is going to hire resolution and representing smaller scale processes at nasa, we're, we're interested in observations that are global. So our models are global and we'd like to push those to as fine a resolution as possible to do things like severe storm predictions and so forth. So the faster we can get the data, the more data we can have, and that area would improve our ability to do that as well. So, >>And your background is in meteorology, right? >>Yes, I'm a meteorologist. >>Excellent. Okay. Yeah, yeah, >>Yeah. So, so I have to ask a question, and I'm sure all the audience cares about this. And I went through this when I was talking about the ghost satellites as well. What, what is it about weather that makes it so hard to predict? >>Oh, it's the classic chaos problem. The, the butterfly effects problem, and it's just true. You know, you always hear the story of a butterfly in Africa flaps, its rings and wings, and the weather changes in, in New York City, and it's just, computers are an excellent example of that, right? So we have a model of the earth, we can run it two times in a row and get the exact same answer, but if we flip a bit somewhere, then the answer changes 10 days later significantly. So it's a, it's a really interesting problem. So, >>Yeah. So do you have any issue with the fact that your colleague believes that butterflies are responsible for weather? No, I does that, does that, is it responsible for climate? Does that bother you at all? >>No, it doesn't. As a matter of fact, they actually run those butterfly like experi experiments within the systems where they do actually flip some bits and see what the uncertainties are that happen out 7, 8, 9 days out in advance to understand exactly what he's saying, to understand the uncertainties, but also the sensitivity with respect to the observations that they're taking. So >>Yeah, it's fascinating. It is. >>That is fascinating. Sticking with you for a second, Dan. So you're at the Center for Climate Simulation. Is that the center that's gonna help us navigate what happens over the next decade? >>Okay, so I, no one center is gonna help us navigate what's gonna happen over the next decade or the next 50 or a hundred years, right. It's gonna be everybody together. And I think NASA's role in that is really to pioneer the, the, the models that that bill and others are doing to understand what's gonna happen in not just the seasonal sub, but we also work with G, which is the God Institute for Space Studies. Yeah. Which does the decatal and, and the century long studies. Our, our job is to really help that research, understand what's happening with the client, but then feed that back into what observations we need to make next in order to better understand and better quantify the risks that we have to better quantify the mitigations that we can make to understand how and, and, and affect how the climate is gonna go for the future. So that's really what we trying to do. We're trying to do that research to understand the climate, understand what mitigations we can have, but also feedback into what observations we can make for the future. >>Yeah. And and what's the partnership ecosystem around that? You mentioned that it's gonna take all of us, I assume you work with a lot of >>Partners, Probably both of you. I mean, obviously the, the, the federal agencies work huge amounts together. Nasa, Noah is our huge partnerships. Sgs, a huge partnerships doe we've talked to doe several times this, so this, this this week already. So there's huge partnerships that go across the federal agency. We, we work also with Europeans as much as we can given the, the, the, you know, sort of the barriers of the countries and the financials. But we do collaborate as much as we can with, And the nice thing about NASA, I would say is the, all the observations that we take are public, they're paid for by the public. They're public, everybody can down them, anybody can down around the world. So that's also, and they're global measurements as Bill said, they're not just regional. >>Do you have, do you have specific, when you think about improving your ability to gain insights from data that that's being gathered? Yeah. Do you set out specific milestones that you're looking for? Like, you know, I hope by June of next year we will have achieved a place where we are able to accomplish X. Yeah. Do you, do you, Yeah. Bill, do you put, what, >>What milestones do we have here? So, yeah, I mean, do you have >>Yeah. Are, are you, are you sort of kept track of that way? Do you think of things like that? Like very specific things? Or is it just so fluid that as long as you're making progress towards the future, you feel okay? >>No, I would say we absolutely have milestones that we like to keep in track, especially from the modeling side of things, right? So whether it's observations that exist now that we want to use in our system, milestones to getting those observations integrated in, but also thinking even further ahead to the observations that we don't have yet. So we can use the models that we have today to simulate those kind of observations that we might want in the future that can help us do things that we can do right now. So those missions are, are aided by the work that we do at the GBO and, and the nccs, but, >>Okay, so if we, if we extrapolate really to the, to the what if future is really trying to understand the entire earth system as best as we can. So all the observations coming in, like you said, in in near real time, feeding that into an earth system model and to be able to predict short term, midterm or even long term predictions with, with some degree of certainty. And that may be things like climate change or it may be even more important, shorter term effects of, of severe weather. Yeah. Which is very important. And so we are trying to work towards that high resolution, immediate impact model that we can, that we can, you know, really share with the world and share those results as best, as best we can. >>Yeah. I, I have a quick, I have a quick follow up on that. I I bet we both did. >>So, so if you think about AI and ml, artificial intelligence and machine learning, something that, you know, people, people talk about a lot. Yeah. There's the concept of teaching a machine to go look for things, call it machine learning. A lot of it's machine teaching we're saying, you know, hit, you know, hit the rack on this side with a stick or the other side with the stick to get it to, to kind of go back and forth. Do you think that humans will be able to guide these systems moving forward enough to tease out the insights that we want? Or do you think we're gonna have to rely on what people think of as artificial intelligence to be able to go in with this massive amount of information with an almost infinite amount of variables and have the AI figure out that, you know what, it was the butterfly, It really was the butterfly. We all did models with it, but, but you understand the nuance that I'm saying. It's like we, we, we think we know what all the variables are and that it's chaotic because there's so many variables and there's so much data, but maybe there's something we're not taking into >>A account. Yeah, I I, I'm, I'm, I'm sure that's absolutely the case. And I'll, I'll start and let Bill, Bill jump in here. Yeah, there's a lot of nuances with a aiml. And so the, the, the, the real approach to get to where we want to be with this earth system model approach is a combination of both AI ML train models as best as we can and as unbiased way as we can. And there's a, there's a big conversation we have around that, but also with a physics or physical based model as well, Those two combined with the humans or the experts in the loop, we're not just gonna ask the artificial intelligence to predict anything and everything. The experts need to be in the loop to guide the training in as best as we, as, as we can in an unbiased, equitable way, but also interpret the results and not just give over to the ai. But that's the combination of that earth system model that we really wanna see. The future's a combination of AI l with physics based, >>But there's, there's a, there's an obvious place for a AI and ML in the modeling world that is in the parameterizations of the estimations that we have to do in our systems, right? So when we think about the earth system and modeling the earth system, there are many things like the equations of motions and thermodynamics that have fixed equations that we know how to solve on a computer. But there's a lot of things that happen physically in the atmosphere that we don't have equations for, and we have to estimate them. And machine learning through the use of high resolution models or observations in training the models to understand and, and represent that, yeah, that that's the place where it's really useful >>For us. There's so many factors, but >>We have to, but we have to make sure that we have the physics in that machine learning in those, in those training. So physics informed training isn't very important. So we're not just gonna go and let a model go off and do whatever it wants. It has to be constrained within physical constraints that the, that the experts know. >>Yeah. And with the wild amount of variables that affect our, our earth, quite frankly. Yeah, yeah. Which is geez. Which is insane. My god. So what's, what, what technology or what advancement needs to happen for your jobs to get easier, faster for our ability to predict to be even more successful than it is currently? >>You know, I think for me, the vision that I have for the future is that at some point, you know, all data is centrally located, essentially shared. We have our applications are then services that sit around all that data. I don't have to sit as a user and worry about, oh, is this all this data in place before I run my application? It's already there, it's already ready for me. My service is prepared and I just launch it out on that service. But that coupled with the performance that I need to get the result that I want in time. And I don't know when that's gonna happen, but at some point it might, you know, I don't know rooting for you, but that's, >>So there are, there are a lot of technologies we can talk about. What I'd like to mention is, is open science. So NASA is really trying to make a push and transformation towards open science. 2023 is gonna be the year of open science for nasa. And what does that mean? It means a lot of what Bill just said is that we have equity and fairness and accessibility and you can find the data, it's findability, it's fair data, you know, a fair findability accessibility reproducibility, and I forget what the eye stands for, but these are, these are tools and, and, and things that we need to, as, as a computing centers and including all the HC centers here, as well as the scientists need to support, to be as transparent as possible with the data sets and the, and the research that we're doing. And that's where I think is gonna be the best thing is if we can get this data out there that anybody can use in an equitable way and as transparent as possible, that's gonna eliminate, in my opinion, the bias over time because mistakes will be found and mistakes will be corrected over time. >>I love that. Yeah. The open source science end of this. No, it's great. And the more people that have access people I find in the academic world, especially people don't know what's going on in the private sector and vice versa. And so I love that you just brought that up. Closing question for you, because I suspect there might be some members of our audience who maybe have fantasized about working at nasa. You've both been working there for over a decade. Is it as cool as we all think of it? It is on the outside. >>I mean, it's, it's definitely pretty cool. >>You don't have to be modest about it, you know, >>I mean, just being at Goddard and being at the center where they build the James web web telescope and you can go to that clean room and see it, it's just fascinating. So it, it's really an amazing opportunity. >>Yeah. So NASA Goddard as a, as a center has, you know, information technologist, It has engineers, it has scientists, it has support staff, support team members. We have built more things, more instruments that have flown in this space than any other place in the world. The James Lab, we were part of that, part of a huge group of people that worked on James. We and James, we came through and was assembled in our, our, our clean room. It's one of the biggest clean rooms in, in, in the world. And we all took opportunities to go over and take selfies with this as they put those loveness mirrors on them. Yeah, it was awesome. It was amazing. And to see what the James we has done in such a short amount of time, the successes that they've gone through is just incredible. Now, I'm not a, I'm not a part of the James web team, but to be a, to be at the same center, to to listen to scientists like Bill talk about their work, to listen to scientists that, that talk about James, we, that's what's inspiring. And, and we get that all the time. >>And to have the opportunity to work with the astronauts that service the, the Hubble Telescope, you know, these things are, >>That's literally giving me goosebumps right now. I'm sitting over >>Here just, just an amazing opportunity. And woo. >>Well, Dan, Bill, thank you both so much for being on the show. I know it was a bit last minute, but I can guarantee we all got a lot out of it. David and I both, I know I speak for us in the whole cube audience, so thank you. We'll have you, anytime you wanna come talk science on the cube. Thank you all for tuning into our supercomputing footage here, live in Dallas. My name is Savannah Peterson. I feel cooler having sat next to these two gentlemen for the last 15 minutes and I hope you did too. We'll see you again soon.

>>Good morning, brilliant humans. Good afternoon or good evening, depending on your time zone. My name is Savannah Peterson and I'm here live with the Cube. We are at CubeCon in Detroit, Michigan. And joining me is my beautiful co-host, Lisa, how you feeling? Afternoon of day three. >>Afternoon day three. We've had such great conversations. We have's been fantastic. The momentum has just been going like this. I love it. >>Yes. You know, sometimes we feel a little low when we're at the end of a conference. Not today. Don't feel that that way at all, which is very exciting. Just like the guests that we have up for you next. Kind of an unexpected player when we think about technology. However, since every company, one of the themes is every company is trying to be a software company. I love that we're talking to I n G. Joining us today is Ty Evers and Arno vk. Welcome to the show gentlemen. Thank >>You very much. Glad to be you. Thank you. >>Yes, it's wonderful. All the way in from Amsterdam. Probably some of the farthest flying folks here for this adventure. Starting off. I forgot what's going on with the shirts guys. You match very well. Tell, tell everyone. >>Well these are our VR code shirts. VR code is basically the player of our company to get people interested as an IT person in banking. Right? Actually, people don't think banking is a good place to work as an IT professional, but actually this, and we are using the OC went with these nice logos to get it attention. >>I love that. So let's actually, let's just talk about that for a second. Why is it such an exciting role to be working in technology at a company like I N G or traditional bank? >>I N G is a challenging environment. That's how do you make an engineer happy, basically give them a problem to solve. So we have lots and lots of problems to solve. So that makes it challenging. But yeah, also rewarding. And you can say a lot of things about banks and with looking at the IT perspective, we are doing amazing things in I and that's what we talked about. Can >>You, can you tell us any of those amazing things or are they secrets? >>Think we talked about last Tuesday at S shift commons conference. Yeah, so we had two, two presentations I presented with my coho sand on my journey over the last three years. So what has IG done? Basically building a secure container hosting platform. Yeah. How do we live a banking cot with cloud native technology and together with our coho young villa presented actually showed it by demo making life and >>Awesome >>In person. So we were not just presenting, >>It's not all smoke and mirrors. It's >>Not smoke and mirror, which we're not presenting our fufu marketing block now. We actually doing it today. And that's what we wanted to share here. >>Well, and as consumers we expect we can access our banking on any device 24 by seven. I wanna be able to do all my transactions in a way that I know is secure. Obviously security's a huge thing there, but talk about I n G Bank aren't always been around for a very long time. Talk about this financial institution as a software company. Really obviously a lot of challenges to solve, a lot of opportunity. But talk about what it's like working for a history and bank that's really now a tech company. >>Yes. It's been really changing as a bank to a tech company. Yeah. We have a lot of developers and operators and we do deliver offer. We OnPrem, we run in the public. So we have a huge engineers and people around to make our software. Yes. And I am responsible for the i Container Ocean platform and we deliver that the name space as a surface and as a real, real secure environment. So our developers, all our developers in, I can request it, but they only get a name space. Yeah, that's very important there. They >>Have >>Resources and all sort of things. Yeah. And it is, they cannot access it. They can only access it by one wifi. So, >>So Lisa and I were chatting before we brought you up here. Name space as a service. This is a newer term for us. Educate us. What does that mean? >>Basically it means we don't give a full cluster to our consumers, right? We only give them basically cpu, memory networking. That's all they need to host application. Everything else we abstract away. And especially in a banking context where compliance is a big thing, you don't need to do compliance for an entire s clusterized developer. It's really saves development time for the colleagues in the bank. It >>Decreases the complexity of projects, which is a huge theme here, especially at scale. I can imagine. I mean, my gosh, you're serving so many different people, it probably saves you time. Let's talk about regulation. What, how challenging is that for you as technologists to balance in all the regulations around banking and FinTech? It's, it's, it's, it's not like some of these kind of wild, wild west industries where we can just go out and play and prototype and do whatever we want. There's a lot of >>Rules. There's a lot of rules. And the problem is you have legislation and you have the real world. Right. And you have to find something in, they're >>Not the same thing. >>You have to find something in between with both parties on the stands and cannot adhere to. Yeah. So the challenge we had, basically we had to wide our, in our own container security standards to prove that the things we were doing were the white things to be in control as a bank because there was no market standard for container security. So basically we took some input from this. So n did a lot of good work. We basically added some things on top to be valid for a bank in Europe. So yeah, that's what we did. And the nice thing is today we take all the boxes we defined back in 2019. >>Hey, so you what it's, I guess, I guess the rules are a little bit easier when you get to help define them. Yep. Yeah. That it feels like a very good strategic call >>And they makes sense. Yeah. Right. Because the hardest problem is try to be compliant for something which doesn't make sense. Right, >>Right. Arnold, talk about, let's double click on namespace as a service. You talked about what that is, but give us a little bit of information on why I N G really believes this is the right approach for this company. >>It's protects for the security that developers doing things they don't shoot. Yeah. They cannot access their store anymore when it is running in production. And that is the most, most important. That is, it is immutable running in our platform. >>Excellent. Talk about both of you. How long have you, have you both been at I n G for a long time? >>I've been with I N G since September, 2001. So that's more than 20 years >>Now. Long time. Ana, what about you? >>Before 2000 already before. >>So both of your comment on that's a long time. Yeah. Talk about the culture of innovation that's at I N G to be able to move at such speed and be groundbreaking in what you're, how you're using technology, what, what's the appetite like at the bank to embrace new and emerging technologies? >>So we are really looking, basically the, the mantra of the bank is to help our customers get a step ahead in life and in business. And we do that by one superior customer service and secondly, sustainability at the heart. So anything which contributes to those targets, you can go to your manager and if you can make goods case why it contributes most of the cases you get some time or some budgets or even some additional colleagues to help you out and give it a try require from a culture perspective required open to trying things out before we reach production. Once you go to production. Yeah. Then we are back to being a bank and you need to take all the boxes to make really sure that we are confident with our customers data and basically we're still a bank but a lot of is possible. >>A lot. It is possible. And there's the customer on the other end who's expecting, like I said earlier, that they can access their data any time that they want, be able to do any transaction they want, making sure the content that's delivered to them is relevant, that it's secure. Obviously with, that's the biggest challenge especially is we think about how many generations are alive today and and those that aren't tech savvy. Yeah. Have challenges with that. Talk about what the bank's dedication is to ensuring from a security perspective that its customers don't have anything to worry about. >>That's always a thin line between security and the user experience. So I n g, like every other bank needs to make choices. Yes. We want the really ease of customers and take the risk that somebody abuses it or do we make it really, really secure and alienate part of our customer base. And that's an ongoing, that's a, that's a a hard, >>It's a trade off. That's >>A line. >>So it's really hard. Interesting part is in Netherlands we had some debates about banks closing down locations, but the moment we introduced our mobile weapon iPads, basically the debates became a lot quieter because a lot of elderly people couldn't work with an iPhone. It turned out they were perfectly fine with a well-designed iPad app to do their banking. Really? >>Okay. >>But that's already learning from like 15 years ago. >>What was the, what was the product roadmap on that? So how, I mean I can imagine you released a mobile app, you're not really thinking that. >>That's basically, I think that was a heavy coincidence. We just, Yeah, okay. Went out to design a very good mobile app. Yeah. And then looking out afterwards at the statistics we say, hey, who was using this way? We've got somebody who's signing on and I dunno the exact age, but it was something like somebody of 90 plus who signed on to use that mobile app. >>Wow. Wow. I mean you really are the five different generations living and working right now. Designing technology. Everybody has to go to the bank whether we are fans of our bank or we're not. Although now I'm thinking about IG as a bank in general. Y'all have a a very good attitude about it. What has kept you at the company for over 20 years? That is we, we see people move around, especially in this technology industry. Yes. Yeah. You know, every two to three years. Sometimes obviously you're in positions of leadership, they're obviously taking good care of you. But I mean multiple decades. Why have you stuck? >>Well first I didn't have the same job in I N D for two decades. Nice. So I went around the infrastructure domain. I did storage initially I did security, I did solution design and in the end I ended up in enterprise architecture. So yeah, it's not like I stuck 20 years in the same role. So every so years >>Go up the ladder but also grow your own skill sets. >>Explore. Yeah. >>So basically I think that's what's every, everybody should be thinking in these days. If you're in a cloud head industry, if you're good at it, you can out quite a nice salary. But it also means that you have some kind of obligation to society to make a difference. And I think, yeah, >>I wouldn't say that everybody feels that way. I >>Need to make a difference with I N G A difference for being more available to our consumers, be more secure to, to our consumers. I, I think that's what's driving me to stick with the company. >>What about you R Now? >>Yes, for me it's very important. Every two, three years are doing new things. I can work with the latest technology so I become really, really innovative so that it is the place to be. >>Yeah. You sort of get that rotation every two to three years with the different tools that you're using. Speaking of or here we're at Cuan, we're talking cloud native, we're talking Kubernetes. Do you think it's possible to, I'm coming back to the regulations. Do you think it's possible to get to banking grade security with cloud native Tech? >>Initially I said we would be at least as secure traditional la but last Tuesday we've proven we can get more secure than situational it. So yeah, definitely. Yes. >>Awesome. I mean, sounds like you proved it to yourself too, which is really saying something. >>Well we actually have Penta results and of course I cannot divulge those, but I about pretty good. >>Can you define, I wanna kind of double book on thanking great security, define what that is, thanking great security and how could other industries aim to Yeah, >>Hit that, that >>Standard. I want security everywhere. Especially my bank. The >>Architecture is zero privilege. So you hear a lot about lease privilege in all the security talks. That's not what you should be aiming for. Zero privilege is what you should be aiming for. And once you're at zero privileged environments, okay, who can leak data because no natural person has access to it. Even if you have somebody invading your infrastructure, there are no privileges. They cannot do privilege escalations. Yeah. So the answer for me is really clear. If you are handling customer data, if you're and customer funds aim for zero privilege architecture, >>What, what are you most excited about next? What's next for you guys? What's next for I n G? What are we gonna be talking about when we're chatting to you Right here? Atan next year or in Amsterdam actually, since we're headed that way in the spring, which is fun. Yes. >>Happy to be your host in Amsterdam. The >>Other way around. We're holding you to that. You've talked about how fun the culture is. Now you're gonna ask, she and I we need, but we need the tee-shirts. We, we obviously need a matching outfit. >>Definitely. We'll arrange some teachers for you as well. Yeah, no, for me, two highlights from this com. The first one was kcp. That can potentially be a paradigm change on how we deal with workloads on Kubernetes. So that's very interesting. I don't know if you see any implementations by next year, but it's definitely something. Looks >>Like we had them on the show as well. Yeah. So it's, it's very fun. I'm sure, I'm sure they'll be very flattered that you just just said. What about you Arnoldo that got you most excited? >>The most important for me was talking to a lot of Asian is other people. What if they thinking how we go forward? So the, the, the community and talk to each other. And also we found those and people how we go forward. >>Yeah, that's been a big thing for us here on the cube and just the energy, the morale. I mean the open source community is so collaborative. It creates an entirely different ethos. Arna. Ty, thank you so much for being here. It's wonderful to have you and hear what I n g is doing in the technology space. Lisa, always a pleasure to co-host with you. Of course. And thank you Cube fans for hanging out with us here on day three of Cuban Live from Detroit, Michigan. My name is Savannah Peterson and we'll see you up next for a great chat coming soon.

>>Keon Cloud Native Con kicks off in Detroit on October 24th, and we're pleased to have Stewart Miniman, who's the director of Market Insights, hi, at, for hybrid platforms at Red Hat back in the studio to help us understand the key trends to look for at the events. Do welcome back, like old, old, old >>Home. Thank you, David. It's great to, great to see you and always love doing these previews, even though Dave, come on. How many years have I told you Cloud native con, It's a hoodie crowd. They're gonna totally call you out for where in a tie and things like that. I, I know you want to be an ESPN sportscaster, but you know, I I, I, I still don't think even after, you know, this show's been around for so many years that there's gonna be too many ties into Troy. I >>Know I left the hoodie in my off, I'm sorry folks, but hey, we'll just have to go for it. Okay. Containers generally, and Kubernetes specifically continue to show very strong spending momentum in the ETR survey data. So let's bring up this slide that shows the ETR sectors, all the sectors in the tax taxonomy with net score or spending velocity in the vertical axis and pervasiveness on the horizontal axis. Now, that red dotted line that you see, that marks the elevated 40% mark, anything above that is considered highly elevated in terms of momentum. Now, for years, the big four areas of momentum that shine above all the rest have been cloud containers, rpa, and ML slash ai for the first time in 10 quarters, ML and AI and RPA have dropped below the 40% line, leaving only cloud and containers in rarefied air. Now, Stu, I'm sure this data doesn't surprise you, but what do you make of this? >>Yeah, well, well, Dave, I, I did an interview with at Deepak who owns all the container and open source activity at Amazon earlier this year, and his comment was, the default deployment mechanism in Amazon is containers. So when I look at your data and I see containers and cloud going in sync, yeah, that, that's, that's how we see things. We're helping lots of customers in their overall adoption. And this cloud native ecosystem is still, you know, we're still in that Cambridge explosion of new projects, new opportunities, AI's a great workload for these type type of technologies. So it's really becoming pervasive in the marketplace. >>And, and I feel like the cloud and containers go hand in hand, so it's not surprising to see those two above >>The 40%. You know, there, there's nothing to say that, Look, can I run my containers in my data center and not do the public cloud? Sure. But in the public cloud, the default is the container. And one of the hot discussions we've been having in this ecosystem for a number of years is edge computing. And of course, you know, I want something that that's small and lightweight and can do things really fast. A lot of times it's an AI workload out there, and containers is a great fit at the edge too. So wherever it goes, containers is a good fit, which has been keeping my group at Red Hat pretty busy. >>So let's talk about some of those high level stats that we put together and preview for the event. So it's really around the adoption of open source software and Kubernetes. Here's, you know, a few fun facts. So according to the state of enterprise open source report, which was published by Red Hat, although it was based on a blind survey, nobody knew that that Red Hat was, you know, initiating it. 80% of IT execs expect to increase their use of enterprise open source software. Now, the CNCF community has currently more than 120,000 developers. That's insane when you think about that developer resource. 73% of organizations in the most recent CNCF annual survey are using Kubernetes. Now, despite the momentum, according to that same Red Hat survey, adoption barriers remain for some organizations. Stu, I'd love you to talk about this specifically around skill sets, and then we've highlighted some of the other trends that we expect to see at the event around Stu. I'd love to, again, your, get your thoughts on the preview. You've done a number of these events, automation, security, governance, governance at scale, edge deployments, which you just mentioned among others. Now Kubernetes is eight years old, and I always hear people talking about there's something coming beyond Kubernetes, but it looks like we're just getting started. Yeah, >>Dave, It, it is still relatively early days. The CMC F survey, I think said, you know, 96% of companies when they, when CMC F surveyed them last year, were either deploying Kubernetes or had plans to deploy it. But when I talked to enterprises, nobody has said like, Hey, we've got every group on board and all of our applications are on. It is a multi-year journey for most companies and plenty of them. If you, you look at the general adoption of technology, we're still working through kind of that early majority. We, you know, passed the, the chasm a couple of years ago. But to a point, you and I we're talking about this ecosystem, there are plenty of people in this ecosystem that could care less about containers and Kubernetes. Lots of conversations at this show won't even talk about Kubernetes. You've got, you know, big security group that's in there. >>You've got, you know, certain workloads like we talked about, you know, AI and ml and that are in there. And automation absolutely is playing a, a good role in what's going on here. So in some ways, Kubernetes kind of takes a, a backseat because it is table stakes at this point. So lots of people involved in it, lots of activities still going on. I mean, we're still at a cadence of three times a year now. We slowed it down from four times a year as an industry, but there's, there's still lots of innovation happening, lots of adoption, and oh my gosh, Dave, I mean, there's just no shortage of new projects and new people getting involved. And what's phenomenal about it is there's, you know, end user practitioners that aren't just contributing. But many of the projects were spawned out of work by the likes of Intuit and Spotify and, and many others that created some of the projects that sit alongside or above the, the, you know, the container orchestration itself. >>So before we talked about some of that, it's, it's kind of interesting. It's like Kubernetes is the big dog, right? And it's, it's kind of maturing after, you know, eight years, but it's still important. I wanna share another data point that underscores the traction that containers generally are getting in Kubernetes specifically have, So this is data from the latest ETR survey and shows the spending breakdown for Kubernetes in the ETR data set for it's cut for respondents with 50 or more citations in, in by the IT practitioners that lime green is new adoptions, the forest green is spending 6% or more relative to last year. The gray is flat spending year on year, and those little pink bars, that's 6% or down spending, and the bright red is retirements. So they're leaving the platform. And the blue dots are net score, which is derived by subtracting the reds from the greens. And the yellow dots are pervasiveness in the survey relative to the sector. So the big takeaway here is that there is virtually no red, essentially zero churn across all sectors, large companies, public companies, private firms, telcos, finance, insurance, et cetera. So again, sometimes I hear this things beyond Kubernetes, you've mentioned several, but it feels like Kubernetes is still a driving force, but a lot of other projects around Kubernetes, which we're gonna hear about at the show. >>Yeah. So, so, so Dave, right? First of all, there was for a number of years, like, oh wait, you know, don't waste your time on, on containers because serverless is gonna rule the world. Well, serverless is now a little bit of a broader term. Can I do a serverless viewpoint for my developers that they don't need to think about the infrastructure but still have containers underneath it? Absolutely. So our friends at Amazon have a solution called Fargate, their proprietary offering to kind of hide that piece of it. And in the open source world, there's a project called Can Native, I think it's the second or third can Native Con's gonna happen at the cncf. And even if you use this, I can still call things over on Lambda and use some of those functions. So we know Dave, it is additive and nothing ever dominates the entire world and nothing ever dies. >>So we have, we have a long runway of activities still to go on in containers and Kubernetes. We're always looking for what that next thing is. And what's great about this ecosystem is most of it tends to be additive and plug into the pieces there, there's certain tools that, you know, span beyond what can happen in the container world and aren't limited to it. And there's others that are specific for it. And to talk about the industries, Dave, you know, I love, we we have, we have a community event that we run that's gonna happen at Cubans called OpenShift Commons. And when you look at like, who's speaking there? Oh, we've got, you know, for Lockheed Martin, University of Michigan and I g Bank all speaking there. So you look and it's like, okay, cool, I've got automotive, I've got, you know, public sector, I've got, you know, university education and I've got finance. So all of you know, there is not an industry that is not touched by this. And the general wave of software adoption is the reason why, you know, not just adoption, but the creation of new software is one of the differentiators for companies. And that is what, that's the reason why I do containers, isn't because it's some cool technology and Kubernetes is great to put on my resume, but that it can actually accelerate my developers and help me create technology that makes me respond to my business and my ultimate end users. Well, >>And you know, as you know, we've been talking about the Supercloud a lot and the Kubernetes is clearly enabler to, to Supercloud, but I wanted to go back, you and John Furrier have done so many of, you know, the, the cube cons, but but go back to Docker con before Kubernetes was even a thing. And so you sort of saw this, you know, grow. I think there's what, how many projects are in CNCF now? I mean, hundreds. Hundreds, okay. And so you're, Will we hear things in Detroit, things like, you know, new projects like, you know, Argo and capabilities around SI store and things like that? Well, you're gonna hear a lot about that. Or is it just too much to cover? >>So I, I mean the, the good news, Dave, is that the CNCF really is, is a good steward for this community and new things got in get in. So there's so much going on with the existing projects that some of the new ones sometimes have a little bit of a harder time making a little bit of buzz. One of the more interesting ones is a project that's been around for a while that I think back to the first couple of Cube Cuban that John and I did service Mesh and Istio, which was created by Google, but lived under basically a, I guess you would say a Google dominated governance for a number of years is now finally under the CNCF Foundation. So I talked to a number of companies over the years and definitely many of the contributors over the years that didn't love that it was a Google Run thing, and now it is finally part. >>So just like Kubernetes is, we have SEO and also can Native that I mentioned before also came outta Google and those are all in the cncf. So will there be new projects? Yes. The CNCF is sometimes they, they do matchmaking. So in some of the observability space, there were a couple of projects that they said, Hey, maybe you can go merge down the road. And they ended up doing that. So there's still you, you look at all these projects and if I was an end user saying, Oh my God, there is so much change and so many projects, you know, I can't spend the time in the effort to learn about all of these. And that's one of the challenges and something obviously at Red Hat, we spend a lot of time figuring out, you know, not to make winners, but which are the things that customers need, Where can we help make them run in production for our, our customers and, and help bring some stability and a little bit of security for the overall ecosystem. >>Well, speaking of security, security and, and skill sets, we've talked about those two things and they sort of go hand in hand when I go to security events. I mean, we're at reinforced last summer, we were just recently at the CrowdStrike event. A lot of the discussion is sort of best practice because it's so complicated. And, and, and will you, I presume you're gonna hear a lot of that here because security securing containers now, you know, the whole shift left thing and shield right is, is a complicated matter, especially when you saw with the earlier data from the Red Hat survey, the the gaps are around skill sets. People don't have the skill. So should we expect to hear a lot about that, A lot of sort of how to, how to take advantage of some of these new capabilities? >>Yeah, Dave, absolutely. So, you know, one of the conversations going on in the community right now is, you know, has DevOps maybe played out as we expect to see it? There's a newer term called platform engineering, and how much do I need to do there? Something that I, I know your, your team's written a lot about Dave, is how much do you need to know versus what can you shift to just a platform or a service that I can consume? I've talked a number of times with you since I've been at Red Hat about the cloud services that we offer. So you want to use our offering in the public cloud. Our first recommendation is, hey, we've got cloud services, how much Kubernetes do you really want to learn versus you want to do what you can build on top of it, modernize the pieces and have less running the plumbing and electric and more, you know, taking advantage of the, the technologies there. So that's a big thing we've seen, you know, we've got a big SRE team that can manage that for use so that you have to spend less time worrying about what really is un differentiated heavy lifting and spend more time on what's important to your business and your >>Customers. So, and that's, and that's through a managed service. >>Yeah, absolutely. >>That whole space is just taken off. All right, Stu I'll give you the final word. You know, what are you excited about for, for, for this upcoming event and Detroit? Interesting choice of venue? Yeah, >>Look, first of off, easy flight. I've, I've never been to Detroit, so I'm, I'm willing to give it a shot and hopefully, you know, that awesome airport. There's some, some, some good things there to learn. The show itself is really a choose your own adventure because there's so much going on. The main show of QAN and cloud Native Con is Wednesday through Friday, but a lot of a really interesting stuff happens on Monday and Tuesday. So we talked about things like OpenShift Commons in the security space. There's cloud Native Security Day, which is actually two days and a SIG store event. There, there's a get up show, there's, you know, k native day. There's so many things that if you want to go deep on a topic, you can go spend like a workshop in some of those you can get hands on to. And then at the show itself, there's so much, and again, you can learn from your peers. >>So it was good to see we had, during the pandemic, it tilted a little bit more vendor heavy because I think most practitioners were pretty busy focused on what they could work on and less, okay, hey, I'm gonna put together a presentation and maybe I'm restricted at going to a show. Yeah, not, we definitely saw that last year when I went to LA I was disappointed how few customer sessions there were. It, it's back when I go look through the schedule now there's way more end users sharing their stories and it, it's phenomenal to see that. And the hallway track, Dave, I didn't go to Valencia, but I hear it was really hopping felt way more like it was pre pandemic. And while there's a few people that probably won't come because Detroit, we think there's, what we've heard and what I've heard from the CNCF team is they are expecting a sizable group up there. I know a lot of the hotels right near the, where it's being held are all sold out. So it should be, should be a lot of fun. Good thing I'm speaking on an edge panel. First time I get to be a speaker at the show, Dave, it's kind of interesting to be a little bit of a different role at the show. >>So yeah, Detroit's super convenient, as I said. Awesome. Airports too. Good luck at the show. So it's a full week. The cube will be there for three days, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Thanks for coming. >>Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, sorry, >>Wednesday, Thursday, Friday is the cube, right? So thank you for that. >>And, and no ties from the host, >>No ties, only hoodies. All right Stu, thanks. Appreciate you coming in. Awesome. And thank you for watching this preview of CubeCon plus cloud Native Con with at Stu, which again starts the 24th of October, three days of broadcasting. Go to the cube.net and you can see all the action. We'll see you there.