(upbeat music) >> Welcome to theCube's coverage of AWS Storage Day. We're here with a couple of AWS product experts. Covering AWS's migration and transfer services, Randy Boutin is the general manager of AWS DataSync, and Mat Matthews, GM of AWS Transfer Family. Guys, good to see you again. Thanks for coming on. >> Dave, thanks. >> So look, we saw during the pandemic, the acceleration to cloud migration. We've tracked that, we've quantified that. What's driving that today? >> Yeah, so Dave, great to be back here. Saw you last year at Storage Day. >> Nice to be in studio too, isn't it? Thanks, guys, for coming in. >> We've conquered COVID. >> So yeah, I mean, this is a great question. I think digital transformation is really what's driving a lot of the focus right now from companies, and it's really not about just driving down costs. It's also about what are the opportunities available once you get into the cloud in terms of, what does that unlock in terms of innovation? So companies are focused on the usual things, optimizing costs, but ensuring they have the right security and agility. You know, a lot has happened over the last year, and companies need to be able to react, right? They need to be able to react quickly, so cloud gives them a lot of these capabilities, but the real benefit that we see is that once your data's in the cloud, it opens up the power of the cloud for analytics, for new application development, and things of that sort, so what we're seeing is that companies are really just focused on understanding cloud migration strategy, and how they can get their data there, and then use that to unlock that data for the value. >> I mean, if I've said it once, I've said it 100 times, if you weren't a digital business during the pandemic, you were out of business. You know, migration historically is a bad word in IT. Your CIOs see it and go, "Ugh." So what's the playbook for taking years of data on-prem, and moving it into the cloud? What are you seeing as best practice there? >> Yeah, so as you said, the migration historically has been painful, right? And it's a daunting task for any business or any IT executive, but fortunately, AWS has a broad suite of capabilities to help enable these migrations. And by that, I mean, we have tools to help you understand your existing on-prem workloads, understand what services in the AWS offering align to those needs, but also help you estimate the cost, right? Cost is a big part of this move. We can help you estimate that cost, and predict that cost, and then use tools like DataSync to help you move that data when that time comes. >> So you're saying you help predict the cost of the migration, or the cost of running in the cloud? >> Running in the cloud, right. Yeah, we can help estimate the run time. Based on the performance that we assess on-prem, we can then project that into a cloud service, and estimate that cost. >> So can you guys explain DataSync? Sometimes I get confused, DataSync, what's the difference between DataSync and Storage Gateway? And I want to get into when we should use each, but let's start there if we could. >> Yeah, sure, I'll take that. So Storage Gateway is primarily a means for a customer to access their data in the cloud from on-prem. All right, so if you have an application that you want to keep on-prem, you're not ready yet to migrate that application to the cloud, Gateway is a strong solution, because you can move a lot of that data, a lot of your cold or long tail data into something like S3 or EFS, but still access it from your on-prem location. DataSync's all about data movement, so if you need to move your data from A to B, DataSync is your optimized solution to do that. >> Are you finding that people, that's ideally a one time move, or is it actually, sometimes you're seeing customers do it more? Again, moving data, if I don't- Move as much data as you need to, but no more, to paraphrase Einstein. >> What we're seeing in DataSync is that customers do use DataSync for their initial migration. They'll also, as Matt was mentioning earlier, once you get your data into the cloud, that flywheel of potential starts to take hold, and customers want to ultimately move that data within the cloud to optimize its value. So you might move from service to service. You might move from EFS to S3, et cetera, to enable the cloud flywheel to benefit you. DataSync does that as well, so customers use us to initially migrate, they use us to move within the cloud, and also we just recently announced service for other clouds, so you can actually bring data in now from Google and Azure as well. >> Oh, how convenient. So okay, so that's cool. So you helped us understand the use cases, but can we dig one more layer, like what protocols are supported? I'm trying to understand really the right fit for the right job. >> Yeah, so that's really important. So for transfer specifically, one of the things that we see with customers is you've got obviously a lot of internal data within your company, but today it's a very highly interconnected world, so companies deal with lots of business partners, and historically they've used, there's a big prevalence of using file transfer to exchange data with business partners, and as you can imagine, there's a lot of value in that data, right? Sometimes it's purchase orders, inventory data from suppliers, or things like that. So historically customers have had protocols like SFTP or FTP to help them interface with or exchange data or files with external partners. So for transfer, that's what we focus on is helping customers exchange data over those existing protocols that they've used for many years. And the real focus is it's one thing to migrate your own data into the cloud, but you can't force thousands or tens of thousands sometimes of partners to also work in a different way to get you their data, so we want to make that very seamless for customers using the same exact protocols like SFTP that they've used for years. We just announced AS2 protocol, which is very heavily used in supply chains to exchange inventory and information across multi-tiers of partners, and things of that nature. So we're really focused on letting customers not have to impact their partners, and how they work and how they exchange, but also take advantage of the data, so get that data into the cloud so they can immediately unlock the value with analytics. >> So AS2 is specifically in the context of supply chain, and I'm presuming it's secure, and kind of governed, and safe. Can you explain that a little bit? >> Yeah, so AS2 has a lot of really interesting features for transactional type of exchanges, so it has signing and encryption built in, and also has notification so you can basically say, "Hey, I sent you this purchase order," and to prove that you received it, it has capability called non-repudiation, which means it's actually a legal transaction. So those things are very important in transactional type of exchanges, and allows customers in supply chains, whether it's vendors dealing with their suppliers, or transportation partners, or things like that to leverage file transfer for those types of exchanges. >> So encryption, providence of transactions, am I correct, without having to use the blockchain, and all the overhead associated with that? >> It's got some built in capabilities. >> I mean, I love blockchain, but there's drawbacks. >> Exactly, and that's why it's been popular. >> That's really interesting, 'cause Andy Jassy one day, I was on a phone call with him and John Furrier, and we were talking up crypto and blockchain. He said, "Well, why do, explain to me." You know Jassy, right? He always wants to go deeper. "Explain why I can't do this with some other approach." And so I think he was recognizing some of the drawbacks. So that's kind of a cool thing, and it leads me- We're running this obviously today, August 10th. Yesterday we had our Supercloud event in Palo Alto on August 9th, and it's all about the ecosystem. One of the observations we made about the 2020s is the cloud is totally different now. People are building value on top of the infrastructure that you guys have built out over the last 15 years. And so once an organization's data gets into the cloud, how does it affect, and it relates to AS2 somewhat, how does it affect the workflows in terms of interacting with external partners, and other ecosystem players that are also in the cloud? >> Yeah, great, yeah, again, we want to try and not have to affect those workflows, take them as they are as much as possible, get the data exchange working. One of the things that we focus on a lot is, how do you process this data once it comes in? Every company has governance requirements, security requirements, and things like that, so they usually have a set of things that they need to automate and orchestrate for the data as it's coming in, and a lot of these companies use something called Managed File Transfer Solutions that allow them to automate and orchestrate those things. We also see that many times this is very customer specific, so a bank might have a certain set of processes they have to follow, and it needs to be customized. As you know, AWS is a great solution for building custom solutions, and actually today, we're just announcing a new set of of partners in a program called the Service Delivery Program with AWS Transfer Family that allows customers to work with partners that are very well versed in transfer family and related services to help build a very specific solution that allows them to build that automation orchestration, and keep their partners kind of unaware that they're interfacing in a different way. >> And once this data is in the cloud, or actually, maybe stays on-prem in some cases, but it basically plugs in to the AWS services portfolio, the whole security model, the governance model, shared responsibility comes in, is that right? It's all, sort of all in there? >> Yeah, that's right, that's exactly right, and we're working with it's all about the customer's needs, and making sure that their investment in AWS doesn't disrupt their existing workflows and their relationships with their customers and their partners, and that's exactly what Matt's been describing is we're taking a close look at how we can extend the value of AWS, integrate into our customer's workflows, and bring that value to them with minimal investment or disruption. >> So follow up on that. So I love that, because less disruption means it's easier, less friction, and I think of like, trying to think of examples. Think about data de-duplication like purpose-built backup appliances, right? Data domain won that battle, because they could just plug right in. Avamar, they were trying to get you to redo everything, okay, and so we saw that movie play out. At the same time, I've talked to CIOs that say, "I love that, but the cloud opens up all these cool new opportunities for me to change my operating model." So are you seeing that as well? Where okay, we make it easy to get in. We're not disrupting workflows, and then once they get in, they say, "Well if we did it this way, we'd take out a bunch of costs. We'd accelerate our business." What's that dynamic like? >> Exactly that, right. So that moved to the Cloud Continuum. We don't think it's going to be binary. There's always going to be something on-prem. We accept that, but there's a continuum there, so day one, they'll migrate a portion of that workload into the cloud, start to extract and see value there, but then they'll continue, as you said, they'll continue to see opportunities. With all of the various capabilities that AWS has to offer, all the value that represents, they'll start to see that opportunity, and then start to engage and consume more of those features over time. >> Great, all right, give us the bumper sticker. What's next in transfer services from your perspectives? >> Yeah, so we're obviously always going to listen to our customers, that's our focus. >> You guys say that a lot. (all laughing) We say it a lot. But yeah, so we're focused on helping customers again increase that level of automation orchestration, again that suite of capability, generally, in our industry, known as managed file transfer, when a file comes in, it needs to get maybe encrypted, or decrypted, or compressed, or decompressed, scanned for viruses, those kind of capabilities, make that easier for customers. If you remember last year at Storage Day, we announced a low code workflow framework that allows customers to kind of build those steps. We're continuing to add built-in capabilities to that so customers can easily just say, "Okay, I want these set of activities to happen when files come in and out." So that's really what's next for us. >> All right, Randy, we'll give you the last word. Bring us home. >> I'm going to surprise you with the customer theme. >> Oh, great, love it. >> Yeah, so we're listening to customers, and what they're asking for our support for more sources, so we'll be adding support for more cloud sources, more on-prem sources, and giving the customers more options, also performance and usability, right? So we want to make it easier, as the enterprise continues to consume the cloud, we want to make DataSync and the movement of their data as easy as possible. >> I've always said it starts with the data. S3, that was the first service, and the other thing I've said a lot is the cloud is expanding. We're seeing connections to on-prem. We're seeing connections out to the edge. It's just becoming this massive global system, as Werner Vogels talks about all the time. Thanks, guys, really appreciate it. >> Dave, thank you very much. >> Thanks, Dave. >> All right, keep it right there for more coverage of AWS Storage Day 2022. You're watching theCube. (upbeat music)

[Narrator] Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware, and it's ecosystem partner. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, here with my cohost Keith Townsend. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2017 here in Las Vegas. Happy to welcome to the program two guests who are going to dig into what's happening in the cloud space. A big, big hot topic of the show. Dave Shacochis, who is the vice president of product management at CenturyLink, Ajay Patel, SVP/GM of now Cloud Provider Software at VMware. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you Stu. >> Nice to see you again Stu. >> Alright, so Dave. Here's a question we've asked coming into this week. VMware was doing this vCloud Air for a bunch of years. They're a competitor, no they're a partner with the vCloud network ... vCloud air now went over to OVH, and I think they waited 48 hours before they made this big deal with AWS so, tell us how the relationship has been not just one of the 4,500 service providers, but you're sitting on panels with VMware, you're one of the larger partners. >> We were on a panel discussion and we were talking about this earlier today. I think when vCloud Air launched we had some of these same conversations, and there were probably cube discussions where almost the same question was asked. What I said back then, and what a lot of us in the service provider community said back then, and we say it again now, is that ... And this is true, not just of VMware, but this is true of any enterprise architect, you run a better system, you build better software when you're running it 24-7 as a live service. It's just better. The software is better. The user experience is better. You're thinking about integration angles, and availability issues. The software gets better when you run it operationally, and VMware's technology got better when they launched vCloud Air and figured out that their virtualization technology, what they had been working with the service provider community around for years, it improved when they went and launched it and lived the life of a service provider. So we're actually excited about that. We're aligning to the same architecture. What's nice is that what they're running in the cloud, in the VMware cloud foundation, is the same thing we're running in our cloud-neutral facilities inside of the CenturyLink data center footprint. So, it's very interoperable. >> Ajay please ... >> So my response would be there are a few things that I've changed. One is, there wasn't a Cloud provider software business unit. I am dedicated to making the likes of David successful. Taking that IP and commercializing that, that's fundamental to our strategy. Second one is, we rebranded this to VMware cloud providers. The idea is you can get VMware cloud in one of three ways. You can build it yourself, get it on VMware cloud or AWS, more importantly but get it through our partners. Your choice based on the best cloud that fits your needs. So it's that level playing field, both on go to market, in terms of Geoff Waters, now the cloud sales leader over all of the different programs, technology, IP being made available, compensation neutrality ... These are all the things we "learn" from our VCM experience, if you will to do this right. So that we continue driving multi-cloud strategy, and certainly about centered around customer choice. >> Can we talk about the basic difference between those three delivery methods? From a customer's perspective, what's the difference in the look and feel of those? >> I think at the end of the day it's about getting VMware value in an integrated fashion. But that's not just sufficient, so when you go to cloud it's no longer just say, "Give me a virtualized environment." That's the "hard bit" of packaging stuff infrastructure, but that's not enough value. On top of that is the application is really the value. Managing that application, and the life cycle of the value. This is where the likes of CenturyLink really come into play. So we believe we're kind of democratizing in terms of the consumption of a cloud stack in one of three ways. It's really customer preference, and really how much burden they want to take on. On the private cloud side they're building it instead of buying it as a service. They prefer to go on AWS for whatever reason for their cloud strategy. They now have a VMware choice. Or they can go to a partner like CenturyLink to help them manage the entire journey including managing multiple clouds. So it's really about the customer choice, what's right for them versus putting them in a silo. >> What's really been good for us especially around the VMware cloud foundation reference architecture is that it starts to make the private clouds react predictably. Our offer net has now been architected and based around VMware Cloud Foundation. It stands up with the software defined data center architecture at each layer of the stack. We don't have to orchestrate nearly as many technology sets in order to make a private cloud app. We've been running hosted private cloud for as long as there have been hosted private clouds. CenturyLink has been managing as part of the cloud service provider program and all its earlier naming variances. But what this latest architecture allows us to do is not only remove the number of things that we need to integrate against, the integration code we need to write and all the different vendor technologies we need to orchestrate against it, it pulls it all into one scale out software, a divine stack, which makes our customer experience better. It drives better self-service, more reliable self-service, into the hands of our customers so that they can move faster. It allows our private cloud to become more predictable so that we can start managing it with our multi-cloud cloud application manager product. So we launched that earlier this year. It was a combination of some of the managed hosting tools and capabilities that we've had back in the days. It combines in the abstraction software we got from a company called ElasticBox that we acquired last year. We weave that together into one multi-cloud layer, so it now looks at private clouds and other public clouds as just another deployment destination on that multi-cloud managing journey. >> Effectively competition moving above the SVC layer. We're kind of making SVC common. Let's compete on the value, and the solution that we both want. >> Ironically this was the promise of open source projects to make this common platform across private, public, and multi-clouds. You use the term that a lot of people may not be familiar with, cloud neutral facilities. What is that term? >> A cloud neutral facility is one that can basically get you connected to a number of different cloud deployment form factors. It's not a one note show, a one approach kind of model. It's really about a service provider that from... When you said the term facility, that can really just be a service provider environment that basically gets the particular workload to the best execution venue for that individual set of run time conditions. To us, being in more of a cloud neutral posture, certainly means we're bringing some parts of our hosted environment, whether it's private or We have a multi-tenant environment that we can provision to as well. We use that multi-tenant environment to actually speed up our own development of higher level services. And then we partner across the different cloud service providers like AWS and Microsoft Azure. We tie into that. It's really about looking at the data center as an extension of all the potential run time venues, both ones that you might build on your own, and then ones that are available to you. >> Dave, I want you to expand on that. One of the things I've been getting out of this week is that maturation of how we've been talking about clouds. A couple years ago I was critical of VMware. It was like, any device, any application, one cloud. I was like "Wrong". No. Amazon. Absolutely, 100 percent public cloud ... I think they understand, if not 100 percent, we'll see where Amazon goes in the future. You said you're tying into the likes of Amazon and Azure. I'm assuming that's direct connect, and those kinds of services. How do we think of CenturyLink? Where do you add value? How do you make money in these various pieces? I remember (old company name) was one of the vCloud era data centers, and boy margins were going to be real tight on something like that. >> Our multi-cloud posture and the direction we see things going is really one that starts and the largest anchor point for CenturyLink's strategy is the strength of our network. It's all the places that that network can take us. A lot of the investments that we've made in virtualization management, a lot of the investments we've made around managing workloads inside data centers we control has really been a precursor to how we need to evolve the core of our network, and how our networking is becoming more software defined. We built and we launched, as I said before, CenturyLink Cloud which is a multi-tenant hosting environment. That has been a huge IT accelerator for us. As we've started to advance and start to figure out how do we manage virtualization inside the core of our points of presence on the network, and as our network starts to expand, as most folks know, we're in the closing stages of the announced acquisition of level three, as that transaction completes and the whole network gets even stronger, and now we have more software assets to be able to drive even further into the core of that network. So it starts from the network and everything we do from either a cloud neutral or multi-cloud perspective is really around helping customers at the workload layer to really thicken that network value proposition. >> I'm also excited about the whole notion of competing on the edge. And once you have a network of this scale, and the ability to then distribute, compute, either on the edge, consult in the back, or even leverage third party probably clouds, seamlessly with a high bandwidth, low jitter network. I think that's a foundational infrastructure that's needed. These guys have really done a good job of kind of bringing that to bear. Pretty excited about that opportunity. >> Ajay, wondering if you can give us a little color on service providers. When I go to most service providers, most of them, networking key strength, obviously we know CenturyLink, Telco, all that kind of background. Management layer. Most service providers build their own. So there's a lot of pieces now, when I see the cloud foundation suite and they're embracing it. How did you work through some of those, "Hey, no, we've got our way of doing things. We know better." As opposed to embracing them. Where is that give and take? >> I think what's happening is, depending on the sophistication of the service provider, the larger ones have the ability to kind of create a bare metal service, kind of drive higher automation, have the infrastructure spend to drive that. As you go a little bit down the market, they're really looking for "a cloud in a box". You and I spoke about this last year, right? They want an easy to type experience for the end customers without the cost and the complexity of building one. So my opportunity as a service provider business is, how do I give them that platform? That multi-tenant platform that can cover resources? But in the future, elastically leverage a VMware cloud on AWS, right, as an endpoint that they can start to use for geo distribution, DR, or simply new capacity. So we're going to see a world where they're going to start mixing and matching what they build, what they buy and how they drive that. And the management solution around that, around a high performance network, is going to be the future that I see together. >> So one of the buzzwords over the past few year in the industry has been the invisible infrastructure. This concept that infrastructure should be something that people use and don't see. How does CenturyLink help support, not necessarily making an invisible infrastructure, but this concept that this is something we use and don't see. From the network, to the software layer that we're now talking about. Where's the differentiating value that CenturyLink brings versus me rolling my own? >> Yeah, I think where we've been making most of our investments, and where we've been driving and focusing on success for our customers has been up at that managed services and application layer. The way we view the infrastructure layer of the stack ... When we think of stacks, we think of the network at the base level of the foundation, data center infrastructure at the next tier up and then workloads and applications. It's not a groundbreaking tiered model, but it's helped me kind of think and organize a lot of what's in our business. When it comes to the infrastructure layer, as I said before, we're in a highly interoperable posture with a lot of the other partner clouds, because our network can link us there pretty seamlessly, and because we still know how to orchestrate enough at the infrastructure layer. But the investment has really been inside the core of the network, as we start driving that virtualization capabilities into the core, and then up at the workload layer, what we're really trying to work around is creating, as in all computer science problems, an abstraction layer. The trick about an abstraction layer in our part of the world, and in our part of the industry is not creating one that creates a new layer of lock in. That allows each of the individual underpinning infrastructure venues to do their thing, and do what they're good at. We build that abstraction layer with the idea of a best execution venue mindset that lets each of those individual underpinning infrastructure offerings, whether its the VCF architecture or hosted up on AWS, or whether it's one of the other particular software platforms because of geography or performance, or service capabilities that they're good at. The trick of creating an abstraction layer is not locking anybody in or reducing those platforms to lowest common denominator. So what our cloud application manager offering being able to manage our private cloud based on VCF, as well as manage other environments down the road ... That's really where we try to make that infrastructure invisible is to sort of create a lightweight abstraction layer that they can think more at the workload layer than at the individual nuts and bolts layer. >> The great thing about creating an abstraction layer, when you own the underlying infrastructure, it makes it a lot easier to support. So I want to make sure that I understand this concept from the ground up. You talked about the network as being the glue or the foundation that ties all this together, especially with the level three acquisition. From an ILT perspective, if I need those far flung services I have the physical network capability to get it there. If I need to put (data terminology) in at the edge, we just had a guest on talking about (data terminology), and at the edge. And get that data into a CenturyLink data center using VCF to get it there and consistently have that same level of abstraction, and then I can build cloud native applications on Azure, Google Compute... (cross talking) and it's a consistent experience across that whole abstraction layer. >> Right. Right. Going back to that idea that, what we call the hybrid IT stack of network infrastructure and workloads, what we're trying to build is a platform that spans those layers, that doesn't try to own or be one or indifferentiate at one of those layers, is build a connective tissue that spans them, so a workload running on the right infrastructure venue connected to the right networks. We're investing in orchestration that crosses all of that, and it's really some of the great conversations we've been having this week with VMware about what they're thinking, we think PTS is interesting because container based deployment models are going to be what makes the most sense as you get further into the core of the network and out towards the edge. We think Pulse is interesting. As we start to do more things in our smart cities, and smart venue type of initiatives, that we're doing at the Internet Of Things solutions base as well. >> Ajay, last thing I want to get to is when you look at your partners, how do you see them? Both that similarity that they're going to have, but how do they differentiate, and also how will they participate in the VMware on AWS piece that we've been talking about? >> Yes, so I think I'll break it into two parts. As I talk to customers, the consistent feedback I get is we made resource consumption ubiquitous. And we're hoping to standardize that with VMware Cloud Foundation and other approaches. What's hard is the experienced skillset and knowledge of how to use this technology. So increasingly we're constrained with the folks who know how to take this complexity, put an organized plan together, and drive the set of value in our own applications. So I believe the cloud provider program and the partnership is really about moving up from trying to build infrastructure, to build solutions, and offer value to our partners. And the differentiation is really moving up stack in terms that manage services value. The second part is- They themselves now have a choice. If I'm a regional player, or customer who, everyone's a multinational nowadays, you always have some customer who happens to reach beyond the boundaries ... How do I now go into a new market? How can I leverage VMware Cloud on AWS as another data center? So the management technology we're trying to provide is we will priority manage your endpoint, customer endpoint, or even VMware Cloud. You mix and match what makes business sense. Then abstract the complexity. As we talked about the cloud as a new hardware. How do we take that infrastructure and really make it easy? And the issues are on security, management, are going to be different ... So, application usage, value added services, being able to leverage resources, build or buy is really the basis of our strategy. >> Yep. So we're excited to ... As we know that that program starts to expand a little bit more in 2018 and we've had some early discussions with the VMware team around what that starts to look like, but at our most foundational level, because what we're already launching and what we launched here this week at VMware is just what we call our dedicated cloud compute product, which is now based on the VMware Cloud Foundation reference architecture. It's going to look the exact same as the VMware Cloud Foundation architecture that runs in AWS. Our approach towards managing both is to let their own individual control panels do what they do best, but then manage over the top of it with our cloud application manager service. >> Dave and Ajay. Thank you so much for sharing with us all the updates. Look forward to watching the continued maturation and development of what's happening in the cloud environment. >> Great chat, thank you. >> Thank you. >> Keith Townsend and I will be back with lots more coverage here of VMworld 2017. You're watching theCUBE. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Coverage DataWorks Summit Europe 2017 brought to you by Hortonworks. >> Welcome back everyone. Live here in Munich, Germany for theCUBE'S special presentation of Hortonworks Hadoop Summit now called DataWorks 2017. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Dave Vellante, our next guest is Shaun Connolly, Vice President of Corporate Strategy, Chief Strategy Officer. Shaun great to see you again. >> Thanks for having me guys. Always a pleasure. >> Super exciting. Obviously we always pontificating on the status of Hadoop and Hadoop is dead, long live Hadoop, but runs in demise is greatly over-exaggerated, but reality is is that no major shifts in the trends other than the fact that the amplification with AI and machine learning has upleveled the narrative to mainstream around data, big data has been written on on gen one on Hadoop, DevOps, culture, open-source. Starting with Hadoop you guys certainly have been way out in front of all the trends. How you guys have been rolling out the products. But it's now with IoT and AI as that sizzle, the future self driving cars, smart cities, you're starting to really see demand for comprehensive solutions that involve data-centric thinking. Okay, said one. Two, open-source continues to dominate MuleSoft went public, you guys went public years ago, Cloudera filed their S-1. A crop of public companies that are open-source, haven't seen that since Red Hat. >> Exactly. 99 is when Red Hat went public. >> Data-centric, big megatrend with open-source powering it, you couldn't be happier for the stars lining up. >> Yeah, well we definitely placed our bets on that. We went public in 2014 and it's nice to see that graduating class of Taal and MuleSoft, Cloudera coming out. That just I think helps socializes movement that enterprise open-source, whether it's for on-prem or powering cloud solutions pushed out to the edge, and technologies that are relevant in IoT. That's the wave. We had a panel earlier today where Dahl Jeppe from Centric of British Gas, was talking about his ... The digitization of energy and virtual power plant notions. He can't achieve that without open-source powering and fueling that. >> And the thing about it is is just kind of ... For me personally being my age in this generation of computer industry since I was 19, to see the open-source go mainstream the way it is, is even gets better every time, but it really is the thousandth flower bloom strategy. Throwing the seeds out there of innovation. I want to ask you as a strategy question, you guys from a performance standpoint, I would say kind of got hammered in the public market. Cloudera's valuation privately is 4.1 billion, you guys are close to 700 million. Certainly Cloudera's going to get a haircut looks like. The public market is based on the multiples from Dave and I's intro, but there's so much value being created. Where's the value for you guys as you look at the horizon? You're talking about white spaces that are really developing with use cases that are creating value. The practitioners in the field creating value, real value for customers. >> So you covered some of the trends, but I'll translate em into how the customers are deploying. Cloud computing and IoT are somewhat related. One is a centralization, the other is decentralization, so it actually calls for a connected data architecture as we refer to it. We're working with a variety of IoT-related use cases. Coca-Cola, East Japan spoke at Tokyo Summit about beverage replenishment analytics. Getting vending machine analytics from vending machines even on Mount Fuji. And optimizing their flow-through of inventory in just-in-time delivery. That's an IoT-related to run on Azure. It's a cloud-related story and it's a big data analytics story that's actually driving better margins for the business and actually better revenues cuz they're getting the inventory where it needs to be so people can buy it. Those are really interesting use cases that we're seeing being deployed and it's at this convergence of IoT cloud and big data. Ultimately that leads to AI, but I think that's what we're seeing the rise of. >> Can you help us understand that sort of value chain. You've got the edge, you got the cloud, you need something in-between, you're calling it connected data platform. How do you guys participate in that value chain? >> When we went public our primary workhorse platform was Hortonworks Data Platform. We had first class cloud services with Azure HDInsight and Hortonworks Data Cloud for AWS, curated cloud services pay-as-you-go, and Hortonworks DataFlow, I call as our connective tissue, it manages all of your data motion, it's a data logistics platform, it's like FedEx for data delivery. It goes all the way out to the edge. There's a little component called Minify, mini and ify, which does secure intelligent analytics at the edge and transmission. These smart manufacturing lines, you're gathering the data, you're doing analytics on the manufacturing lines, and then you're bringing the historical stuff into the data center where you can do historical analytics across manufacturing lines. Those are the use cases that are connect the data archives-- >> Dave: A subset of that data comes back, right? >> A subset of the data, yep. The key events of that data it may not be full of-- >> 10%, half, 90%? >> It depends if you have operational events that you want to store, sometimes you may want to bring full fidelity of that data so you can do ... As you manufacture stuff and when it got deployed and you're seeing issues in the field, like Western Digital Hard Drives, that failure's in the field, they want that data full fidelity to connect the data architecture and analytics around that data. You need to ... One of the terms I use is in the new world, you need to play it where it lies. If it's out at the edge, you need to play it there. If it makes a stop in the cloud, you need to play it there. If it comes into the data center, you also need to play it there. >> So a couple years ago, you and I were doing a panel at our Big Data NYC event and I used the term "profitless prosperity," I got the hairy eyeball from you, but nonetheless, we talked about you guys as a steward of the industry, you have to invest in open-source projects. And it's expensive. I mean HDFS itself, YARN, Tez, you guys lead a lot of those initiatives. >> Shaun: With the community, yeah, but we-- >> With the community yeah, but you provided contributions and co-leadership let's say. You're there at the front of the pack. How do we project it forward without making forward-looking statements, but how does this industry become a cashflow positive industry? >> Public companies since end of 2014, the markets turned beginning at 2016 towards, prior to that high growth with some losses was palatable, losses were not palatable. That his us, Splunk, Tableau most of the IT sector. That's just the nature of the public markets. As more public open-source, data-driven companies will come in I think it will better educate the market of the value. There's only so much I can do to control the stock price. What I can from a business perspective is hit key measures from a path to profitability. The end of Q4 2016, we hit what we call the just-to-even or breakeven, which is a stepping stone. On our earnings call at the end of 2016 we ended with 185 million in revenue for the year. Only five years into this journey, so that's a hard revenue growth pace and we basically stated in Q3 or Q4 of 17, we will hit operating cashflow neutrality. So we are operating business-- >> John: But you guys also hit a 100 million at record pace too, I believe. >> Yeah, in four years. So revenue is one thing, but operating margins, like if you look at our margins on our subscription business for instance, we've got 84% margin on that. It's a really nice margin business. We can make that better margins, but that's a software margin. >> You know what's ironic, we were talking about Red Hat off camera. Here's Red Hat kicking butt, really hitting all cylinders, three billion dollars in bookings, one would think, okay hey I can maybe project forth some of these open-source companies. Maybe the flip side of this, oh wow we want it now. To your point, the market kind of flipped, but you would think that Red Hat is an indicator of how an open-source model can work. >> By the way Red Hat went public in 99, so it was a different trajectory, like you know I charted their trajectory out. Oracle's trajectory was different. They didn't even in inflation adjusted dollars they didn't hit a 100 million in four years, I think it was seven or eight years or what have you. Salesforce did it in five. So these SaaS models and these subscription models and the cloud services, which is an area that's near and dear to my heart. >> John: Goes faster. >> You get multiple revenue streams across different products. We're a multi-products cloud service company. Not just a single platform. >> So we were actually teasing this out on our-- >> And that's how you grow the business, and that's how Red Hat did it. >> Well I want to get your thoughts on this while we're just kind of ripping live here because Dave and I were talking on our intro segment about the business model and how there's some camouflage out there, at least from my standpoint. One of the main areas that I was kind of pointing at and trying to poke at and want to get your reaction to is in the classic enterprise go-to-market, you have sales force expansive, you guys pay handsomely for that today. Incubating that market, getting the profitability for it is a good thing, but there's also channels, VARs, ISVs, and so on. You guys have an open-source channel that kind of not as a VAR or an ISV, these are entrepreneurs and or businesses themselves. There's got to be a monetization shift there for you guys in the subscription business certainly. When you look at these partners, they're co-developing, they're in open-source, you can almost see the dots connecting. Is this new ecosystem, there's always been an ecosystem, but now that you have kind of a monetization inherently in a pure open distribution model. >> It forces you to collaborate. IBM was on stage talking about our system certified on the Power Systems. Many may look at IBM as competitive, we view them as a partner. Amazon, some may view them as a competitor with us, they've been a great partner in our for AWS. So it forces you to think about how do you collaborate around deeply engineered systems and value and we get great revenue streams that are pulled through that they can sell into the market to their ecosystems. >> How do you vision monetizing the partners? Let's just say Dave and I start this epic idea and we create some connective tissue with your orchestrator called the Data Platform you have and we start making some serious bang. We make a billion dollars. Do you get paid on that if it's open-source? I mean would we be more subscriptions? I'm trying to see how the tide comes in, whose boats float on the rising tide of the innovation in these white spaces. >> Platform thinking is you provide the platform. You provide the platform for 10x value that rides atop that platform. That's how the model works. So if you're riding atop the platform, I expect you and that ecosystem to drive at least 10x above and beyond what I would make as a platform provider in that space. >> So you expect some contributions? >> That's how it works. You need a thousand flowers to be running on the platform. >> You saw that with VMware. They hit 10x and ultimately got to 15 or 16, 17x. >> Shaun: Exactly. >> I think they don't talk about it anymore. I think it's probably trading the other way. >> You know my days at JBoss Red Hat it was somewhere between 15 to 20x. That was the value that was created on top of the platforms. >> What about the ... I want to ask you about the forking of the Hadoop distros. I mean there was a time when everybody was announcing Hadoop distros. John Furrier announced SiliconANGLE was announcing Hadoop distro. So we saw consolidation, and then you guys announced the ODP, then the ODPI initiative, but there seems to be a bit of a forking in Hadoop distros. Is that a fair statement? Unfair? >> I think if you look at how the Linux market played out. You have clearly Red Hat, you had Conicho Ubuntu, you had SUSE. You're always going to have curated platforms for different purposes. We have a strong opinion and a strong focus in the area of IoT, fast analytic data from the edge, and a centralized platform with HDP in the cloud and on-prem. Others in the market Cloudera is running sort of a different play where they're curating different elements and investing in different elements. Doesn't make either one bad or good, we are just going after the markets slightly differently. The other point I'll make there is in 2014 if you looked at the then chart diagrams, there was a lot of overlap. Now if you draw the areas of focus, there's a lot of white space that we're going after that they aren't going after, and they're going after other places and other new vendors are going after others. With the market dynamics of IoT, cloud and AI, you're going to see folks chase the market opportunities. >> Is that dispersity not a problem for customers now or is it challenging? >> There has to be a core level of interoperability and that's one of the reasons why we're collaborating with folks in the ODPI, as an example. There's still when it comes to some of the core components, there has to be a level of predictability, because if you're an ISV riding atop, you're slowed down by death by infinite certification and choices. So ultimately it has to come down to just a much more sane approach to what you can rely on. >> When you guys announced ODP, then ODPI, the extension, Mike Olson wrote a blog saying it's not necessary, people came out against it. Now we're three years in looking back. Was he right or not? >> I think ODPI take away this year, there's more than we can do above and beyond the Hadoop platform. It's expanded to include SQL and other things recently, so there's been some movement on this spec, but frankly you talk to John Mertic at ODPI, you talk to SAS and others, I think we want to be a bit more aggressive in the areas that we go after and try and drive there from a standardization perspective. >> We had Wei Wang on earlier-- >> Shaun: There's more we can do and there's more we should do. >> We had Wei on with Microsoft at our Big Data SV event a couple weeks ago. Talk about the Microsoft relationship with you guys. It seems to be doing very well. Comments on that. >> Microsoft was one of the two companies we chose to partner with early on, so and 2011, 2012 Microsoft and Teradata were the two. Microsoft was how do I democratize and make this technology easy for people. That's manifest itself as Azure Cloud Service, Azure HDInsight-- >> Which is growing like crazy. >> Which is globally deployed and we just had another update. It's fundamentally changed our engineering and delivering model. This latest release was a cloud first delivery model, so one of the things that we're proud of is the interactive SQL and the LLAP technology that's in HDP, that went out through Azure HDInsight what works data cloud first. Then it certified in HDP 2.6 and it went power at the same time. It's that cadence of delivery and cloud first delivery model. We couldn't do it without a partnership with Microsoft. I think we've really learned what it takes-- >> If you look at Microsoft at that time. I remember interviewing you on theCUBE. Microsoft was trading something like $26 a share at that time, around their low point. Now the stock is performing really well. Stockinnetel very cloud oriented-- >> Shaun: They're very open-source. >> They're very open-source and friendly they've been donating a lot to the OCP, to the data center piece. Extremely different Microsoft, so you slipped into that beautiful spot, reacted on that growth. >> I think as one of the stalwarts of enterprise software providers, I think they've done a really great job of bending the curve towards cloud and still having a mixed portfolio, but in sending a field, and sending a channel, and selling cloud and growing that revenue stream, that's nontrivial, that's hard. >> They know the enterprise sales motions too. I want to ask you how that's going over all within Hortonworks. What are some of the conversations that you're involved in with customers today? Again we were saying in our opening segment, it's on YouTube if you're not watching, but the customers is the forcing function right now. They're really putting the pressure one the suppliers, you're one of them, to get tight, reduce friction, lower costs of ownership, get into the cloud, flywheel. And so you see a lot-- >> I'll throw in another aspect some of the more late majority adopters traditionally, over and over right here by 2025 they want to power down the data center and have more things running in the public cloud, if not most everything. That's another eight years or what have you, so it's still a journey, but this journey to making that an imperative because of the operational, because of the agility, because of better predictability, ease of use. That's fundamental. >> As you get into the connected tissue, I love that example, with Kubernetes containers, you've got developers, a big open-source participant and you got all the stuff you have, you just start to see some coalescing around the cloud native. How do you guys look at that conversation? >> I view container platforms, whether they're container services that are running one on cloud or what have you, as the new lightweight rail that everything will ride atop. The cloud currently plays a key role in that, I think that's going to be the defacto way. In particularly if you go cloud first models, particularly for delivery. You need that packaging notion and you need the agility of updates that that's going to provide. I think Red Hat as a partner has been doing great things on hardening that, making it secure. There's others in the ecosystem as well as the cloud providers. All three cloud providers actually are investing in it. >> John: So it's good for your business? >> It removes friction of deployment ... And I ride atop that new rail. It can't get here soon enough from my perspective. >> So I want to ask about clouds. You were talking about the Microsoft shift, personally I think Microsoft realized holy cow, we could actaully make a lot of money if we're selling hardware services. We can make more money if we're selling the full stack. It was sort of an epiphany and so Amazon seems to be doing the same thing. You mentioned earlier you know Amazon is a great partner, even though a lot of people look at them as a competitor, it seems like Amazon, Azure etc., they're building out their own big data stack and offering it as a service. People say that's a threat to you guys, is it a threat or is it a tailwind, is it it is what it is? >> This is why I bring up industry-wide we always have waves of centralization, decentralization. They're playing out simultaneously right now with cloud and IoT. The fact of the matter is that you're going to have multiple clouds on-prem data and data at the edge. That's the problem I am looking to facilitate and solve. I don't view them as competitors, I view them as partners because we need to collaborate because there's a value chain of the flow of the data and some of it's going to be running through and on those platforms. >> The cloud's not going to solve the edge problem. Too expensive. It's just physics. >> So I think that's where things need to go. I think that's why we talk about this notion of connected data. I don't talk hybrid cloud computing, that's for compute. I talk about how do you connect to your data, how do you know where your data is and are you getting the right value out of the data by playing it where it lies. >> I think IoT has been a great sweet trend for the big data industry. It really accelerates the value proposition of the cloud too because now you have a connected network, you can have your cake and eat it too. Central and distributed. >> There's different dynamics in the US versus Europe, as an example. US definitely we're seeing a cloud adoption that's independent of IoT. Here in Europe, I would argue the smart mobility initiatives, the smart manufacturing initiatives, and the connected grid initiatives are bringing cloud in, so it's IoT and cloud and that's opening up the cloud opportunity here. >> Interesting. So on a prospects for Hortonworks cashflow positive Q4 you guys have made a public statement, any other thoughts you want to share. >> Just continue to grow the business, focus on these customer use cases, get them to talk about them at things like DataWorks Summit, and then the more the merrier, the more data-oriented open-source driven companies that can graduate in the public markets, I think is awesome. I think it will just help the industry. >> Operating in the open, with full transparency-- >> Shaun: On the business and the code. (laughter) >> Welcome to the party baby. This is theCUBE here at DataWorks 2017 in Munich, Germany. Live coverage, I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Stay with us. More great coverage coming after this short break. (upbeat music)