Sanjay Poonen, VMware | RSAC USA 2020
>>Fly from San Francisco. It's the cube covering RSA conference, 2020 San Francisco brought to you by Silicon angle media. >>Hi everyone. Welcome back to the cubes coverage here at in San Francisco, the Moscone center for RSA conference 2020 I'm job for your host. We are the very special guests, the COO of VMware, Sanjay Poonen, cube alumni. When you talk about security, talk about the modern enterprise as it transforms new use cases, new problems emerge. New opportunities exist here to break it down. Sanjay, welcome back. Thank you John. Always a pleasure to be on your show and I think it's my first time at RSA. We've talked a number of times, but nice to see you here. Well, it's a security guard. Well, this is really why I wanted you to talk, talk to you because operations is become now the big conversation around security. So you know, security was once part of it. It comes out and part of the board conversation, but when you look at security, all the conversations that we're seeing that are the most important conversations are almost a business model conversation. >>Almost like if you're the CEO of the company, you've got HR people, HR, organizational behavior, collaboration, technology, stack compliance and risk management. So the threat of cyber has to cut across now multiple operational functions of the business. It's no longer one thing, it's everything. So this is really kind of makes it the pressure of the business owners to be mindful of a bigger picture. And the attack velocity is happening so much faster, more volume of attacks, milliseconds and nanosecond attacks. So this is a huge, huge problem. I need you to break it down for me. >> Good. But then wonderful intro. No, I would say you're absolutely right. First off, security is a boardroom topic. Uh, audit committees are asking, you know, the CIO so often, you know, reports a report directly, sometimes, often not even to the CIO, to the head of legal or finance and often to the audit. >>So it's a boardroom topic then. You're right, every department right now cares about security because they've got both threat and security of nation state, all malicious, organized crime trying to come at them. But they've also got physical security mind. I mean, listen, growing a virus is a serious threat to our physical security. And we're really concerned about employees and the idea of a cyber security and physical security. We've put at VMware, cybersecurity and, and um, um, physical security. One guy, the CIO. So he actually runs vote. So I think you're absolutely right and if you're a head of HR, you care about your employees. If you're care ahead of communications, you care about your reputation and marketing the same way. If you're a finance, you care about your accounting systems and having all of the it systems that are. So we certainly think that holistic approach does, deserves a different approach to security, which is it can't be silo, silo, silo. >>It has to be intrinsic. And I've talked on your show about why intrinsic and how differentiated that intrinsic security, what I talked about this morning in my keynote. >> Well, and then again, the connect the dots there. It's not just security, it's the applications that are being built on mobile. For instance, I've got a mobile app. I have milliseconds, serious bond to whether something's yes or no. That's the app on mobile. But still the security threat is still over here and I've got the app over here. This is now the reality. And again, AirWatch was a big acquisition that you did. I also had some security. Carbon black was a $2 billion acquisition that VMware made. That's a security practice. How's it all coming together? Can you think of any questions? Blame the VMware because it's not just security, it's what's around it. >> Yeah. I think we began to see over the course of the last several years that there were certain control points and security that could help, you know, bring order to this chaos of 5,000 security vendors. >>They're all legitimate. They're all here at the show. They're good vendors. But you cannot, if you are trying to say healthy, go to a doctor and expect the doctor to tell you, eat 5,000 tablets and sailed. He just is not sustainable. It has to be baked into your diet. You eat your proteins, your vegetables, your fruit, your drink, your water. The same way we believe security needs to become intrinsically deeper parts, the platform. So what were the key platforms and control points? We decided to focus on the network, the endpoint, and you could think of endpoint as to both client and workload identity, cloud analytics. You take a few of those and network. We've been laboring the last seven years to build a definitive networking company and now a networking security company where we can do everything from data center networking, Dell firewalls to load balancing to SDN in this NSX platform. >>You remember where you bought an nice syrup. The industry woke up like what's VM ever doing in networking? We've now built on that 13,000 customers really good growing revenue business in networking and and now doing that working security. That space is fragmented across Cisco, Palo Alto, FIU, NetScaler, checkpoint Riverbed, VMware cleans that up. You get to the end point side. We saw the same thing. You know you had an endpoint management now workspace one the sequel of what AirWatch was, but endpoint security again, fragmented. You had Symantec McAfee, now CrowdStrike, tenable Qualis, you know, I mean just so many fragmented IOM. We felt like we could come in now and clean that up too, so I have to worry about to do >> well basically explaining that, but I want to get now to the next conversation point that I'm interested in operational impact because when you have all these things to operationalize, you saw that with dev ops and cloud now hybrid, you got to operationalize this stuff. >>You guys have been in the operations side of the business for our VMware. That's what you're known for and the developers and now on the horizon I gotta operationalize all the security. What do I do? I'm the CSO. I think it's really important that in understanding operations of the infrastructure, we have that control point called vSphere and we're now going to take carbon black and make it agentless on the silverside workloads, which has never been done before. That's operationalizing it at the infrastructure level. At the end point we're going to unify carbon black and workspace one into a unified agent, never been done before. That's operationalizing it on the client side. And then on the container and the dev ops site, you're going to start bringing security into the container world. We actually happened in our grade point of view in containers. You've seen us do stuff with Tansu and Kubernetes and pivotal. >>Bringing that together and data security is a very logical thing that we will add there. So we have a very good view of where the infrastructure and operations parts that we know well, a vSphere, NSX workspace one containers with 10 Xu, we're going to bring security to all of them and then bake it more and more in so it's not feeling like it's a point tool. The same platform, carbon black will be able to handle the security of all of those use cases. One platform, several use cases. Are you happy with the carbon black acquisition? Listen, you know, you stay humble and hungry. Uh, John for a fundamental reason, I've been involved with number of acquisitions from my SAP VMware days, billion dollar plus. We've done talking to us. The Harvard business review had an article several years ago, which Carney called acquisitions and majority of them fail and they feel not because of process of product they feel because good people leave. >>One of the things that we have as a recipe does acquisition. We applied that to AirWatch, we apply the deny Sera. There is usually some brain trust. You remember in the days of nice area, it was my team Cosato and the case of AirWatch. It was John Marshall and that team. We want to preserve that team to help incubate this and then what breve EV brings a scale, so I'm delighted about Patrick earlier. I want to have him on your show next time because he's now the head of our security business unit. He's culturally a fit for the mr. humble, hungry. He wants to see just, we were billion dollar business now with security across networking endpoint and then he wants to take just he's piece of it, right? The common black piece of it, make it a billion dollar business while the overall security business goes from three to five. >>And I think we're going to count them for many years to come to really be a key part of VMware's fabric, a great leader. So we're successful. If he's successful, what's my job then? He reports to me is to get all the obstacles out of the way. Get every one of my core reps to sell carbon black. Every one of the partners like Dell to sell carbon black. So one of the deals we did within a month is Dell has now announced that their preferred solution on at Dell laptops, this carbon bike, they will work in the past with silence and crowd CrowdStrike. Now it's common black every day laptop now as a default option. That's called blank. So as we do these, John, the way we roll is one on here to basically come in and occupy that acquisition, get the obstacles out of the way, and that let Patrick scaled us the same way. >>Martine Casado or jumbo. So we have a playbook. We're gonna apply that playbook. Stay humble and hungry. And you ask me that question every year. How are we doing a carbon black? I will be saying, I love you putting a check on you. It will be checking in when we've done an AirWatch. What do you think? Pretty good. Very good. I think good. Stayed line to the radar. Kept growing. It's top right. Known every magic quadrant. That business is significant. Bigger than the 100 million while nice here. How do we do a nice hero? NSX? It's evolved quite a bit. It's evolved. So this is back to the point. VMware makes bets. So unlike other acquisitions where they're big numbers, still big numbers, billions or billions, but they're bets. AirWatch was a good bet. Turned out okay. That the betting, you're being conservative today anyway. That's it. You're making now. >>How would you classify those bets? What are the big bets that you're making right now? Listen, >> I think there's, um, a handful of them. I like to think of things as no more than three to five. We're making a big bet. A multi-cloud. Okay. The world is going to be private, public edge. You and us have talked a lot about VMware. AWS expanded now to Azure and others. We've a big future that private cloud, public cloud edge number two, we're making a big bet on AB motorization with the container level 10 zoos. I think number three, we're making a big bet in virtual cloud networking cause we think longterm there's going to be only two networking companies in matter, VMware and Cisco. Number four, we're making a big bet in the digital workspace and build on what we've done with AirWatch and other technologies. Number five, and make it a big bet security. >>So these five we think of what can take the company from 10 to 20 billion. So we, you know, uh, we, we've talked about the $10 billion Mark. Um, and the next big milestone for the company is a 20 billion ball Mark. And you have to ask yourself, can you see this company with these five bets going from where they are about a 10 billion revenue company to 20. Boom. We hope again, >> Dave, a lot that's doing a braking and now he might've already shipped the piece this morning on multi-cloud. Um, he and I were commenting that, well, I said it's the third wave of cloud computing, public cloud, hybrid multi-cloud and hybrids, the first step towards multi-cloud. Everyone kind of knows that. Um, but I want to ask you, because I told Dave and we kind of talked about this is a multi-decade growth opportunity, wealth creation, innovation, growth, new opportunity multicloud for the generation. >>Take the, this industry the next level. How do you see that multicloud wave? Do you agree on the multigenerational and if so, what specifically do you see that unfolding into this? And I'm deeply inspired by what Andy Jassy, Satya Nadella, you know, the past leading up to Thomas Korea and these folks are creating big cloud businesses. Amazon's the biggest, uh, in the iOS pass world. Azure is second, Google is third, and just market shares. These folks collectively are growing, growing really well. In some senses, VM-ware gets to feed off that ecosystem in the public cloud. So we are firm believers in what you're described. Hybrid cloud is the pot to the multicloud. We coined that term hybrid thought. In fact, the first incantation of eco there was called via cloud hybrid service. So we coined the term hybrid cloud, but the world is not multi-cloud. The the, the key though is that I don't think you're gonna walk away from those three clouds I mentioned have deep pockets. >>Then none of them are going away and they're going to compete hard with each other. The market shares may stay the same. Our odd goal is to be a Switzerland player that can help our customers take VM or workloads, optimize them in the private cloud first. Okay? When a bank of America says on their earnings caller, Brian Warren and said, I can run a private cloud better than a public cloud and I can save 2 billion doing that, okay? It turns off any of the banks are actually running on VMware. That's their goal. But there are other companies like Freddie Mac, we're going all in with Amazon. We want to ride the best of both worlds. If you're a private cloud, we're going to make you the most efficient private cloud, VMware software, well public cloud, and going to Amazon like a Freddie Mac will help you ride your apps into that through VMware. >>So sometimes history can be a predictor of future behavior. And just to kind of rewind the computer industry clock, if you looked at mainframe mini-computers, inter networking, internet proprietary network operating systems dominated it, but you saw the shift and it was driven by choice for customers, multiple vendors, interoperability. So to me, I think cloud multicloud is going to come down to the best choice for the workload and then the environment of the business. And that's going to be a spectrum. But the key in that is multi-vendor, multi, a friend choice, multi-vendor, interoperability. This is going to be the next equation in the modern error. It's not gonna look the same as mainframe mini's networking, but it'll create the next Cisco, the create the next new brand that may or may not be out there yet that might be competing with you or you might be that next brand. >>So interoperability, multi-vendor choice has been a theme in open systems for a long time. Your reactions, I think it's absolutely right, John, you're onto something there. Listen, the multicloud world is almost a replay of the multi hardware system world. 20 years ago, if you asked who was a multi hardware player before, it was Dell, HP at the time, IBM, now, Lenovo, EMC, NetApp, so and so forth and Silva storage, networking. The multicloud world today is Amazon, Azure, Google. If you go to China, Alibaba, so on and so forth. A Motiva somebody has to be a Switzerland player that can serve the old hardware economy and the new hardware economy, which is the, which is the cloud and then of course, don't forget the device economy of Apple, Google, Microsoft, there too. I think that if you have some fundamental first principles, you expressed one of them. >>Listen where open source exists, embrace it. That's why we're going big on Kubernetes. If there are multiple clouds, embrace it. Do what's right for the customer, abstract away. That's what virtualization is. Managed common infrastructure across Ahmed, which is what our management principles are, secure things. At the point of every device and every workload. So those are the principles. Now the engineering of it changes. The way in which we're doing virtualization today in 2020 is slightly different from when Diane started the company and around the year 2020 years ago. But the principals are saying, we're just not working just with the hardware vendors working toward the cloud vendors. So using choices where it's at, the choice is what they want. Absolutely, absolutely. And you're right. It's choice because it was the big workloads. We see, for example, Amazon having a headstart in the public cloud markets, but there's some use cases where Azure is applicable. >>Some use his word, Google's applicable, and to us, if the entire world was only one hardware player or only one cloud player, only one device player, you don't need VMware. We thrive in heterogeneity. It's awesome. I love that word. No heterogeneity provides not 3000 vendors. There's almost three, three of every kind, three silver vendors, three storage vendors, three networking vendors, three cloud vendors, three device vendors. We was the middle of all of it. And yeah, there may be other companies who tried to do that too. If they are, we should learn from them, do it better than them. And competition even to us is a good thing. All right. My final question for you is in the, yeah, the Dell technologies family of which VMware is a part of, although big part of it, the crown jewel as we've been calling them the cube, they announced RSA is being sold to a private equity company. >>What's the general reaction amongst VMware folks and the, and the Dell technology family? Good move, no impact. What we support Dell and you know, all the moves that they've made. Um, and from our perspective, you know, if we're not owning it, we're going to partner it. So I see no overlap with RSA. We partner with them. They've got three core pillars, secure ID, net witness and Archer. We partnered with them very well. We have no aspirations to get into those aspects of governance. Risk and compliance or security has been, so it's a partner. So whoever's running it, Rohit runs on very well. He also owns the events conference. We have a great relationship and then we'll keep doing that. Well, we are focused in the areas I described, network, endpoint security. And I think what Michael has done brilliantly through the course of the last few years is set up a hardware and systems company in Dell and allow the software company called Vima to continue to operate. >>And I think, you know, the movement of some of these assets between the companies like pivotal to us and so on and so forth, cleans it up so that now you've got both these companies doing well. Dell has gone public, we Hammer's gone public and he has said on the record, what's good for Dell is good, what's good for VMware and vice versa and good for the customer. And I think the key is there's no visibility on what cloud native looks like. Hybrid, public, multi, multi, not so much. But you get almost, it's an easy bridge to get across and get there. AI, cyber are all big clear trends. They're waves. Sasha. Great. Thank you. Thanks for coming on. Um, your thoughts on the security show here. Uh, what's your, what's your take to, uh, definitive security shows? I hope it stays that way. Even with the change of where RSA is. >>Ownership goes is this conference in black hat and we play in both, uh, Amazon's conference. I was totally starting to, uh, reinforce, reinforce cloud security will show up there too. Uh, but we, we think, listen, there's what, 30,000 people here. So it's a force. It's a little bit like VMworld. We will play here. We'll play a big, we've got, you know, it just so happens because the acquisition happened before we told them, but we have two big presences here. We were at carbon black, um, and it's an important business for us. And I said, like I said, we have $1 billion business and security today by 30,000 customers using us in a security network, endpoints cloud. I want to take that to be a multi, multiple times that size. And I think there's a pot to do that because it's an adjacent us and security. So we have our own kind of selfish motives here in terms of getting more Mindshare and security. >>We did a keynote this morning, which was well received with Southwest airlines. She did a great job. Carrie Miller, she was a fantastic speaker and it was our way of showing in 20 minutes, not just to our point of view, because you don't want to be self serving a practitioner's point of view. And that's what's really important. Well finally on a personal note, um, you know, I always use the term tech athlete, which I think you are one, you really work hard and smart, but I got to get your thoughts. But then I saw you're not on Twitter. I'm on. When IBM announced a new CEO, Arvin, um, fishnet Indian American, another CEO, this is a pattern. We're starting to see Indian American CEOs running cup American companies because this is the leadership and it's really a great thing in my mind, I think is one of the most successful stories of meritocracy of all time. >>You're quick. I'm a big fan of oven, big fan of Shantanu, Sundar Pichai, something that Ellen, many of them are close friends of mine. Uh, many of them have grown up in Southern India. We're a different ages. Some of them are older than me and in many cases, you know, we were falling behind other great players like Vino Cosla who came even 10 to 15 years prior. And you know, it's hard for an immigrant in this country. You know, um, when I first got here and I came as an immigrant to Dartmouth college, there may have been five or 10 Brown skin people in the town of Hanover, New Hampshire. I don't know if you've been to New Hampshire. I've been there, there's not many at that time. And then the late 1980s, now of course, there's much more, uh, so, you know, uh, we stay humble and hungry. >>There's a part of our culture in India that's really valued education and hard work and people like Arvin and some of these other people are products. I look up to them, the things I learned from them. And um, you know, it's true of India. It's a really good thing to see these people be successful at name brand American companies, whether it's IBM or Microsoft or Google or Adobe or MasterCard. So we're, we're, I'm in that fan club and there's a lot I learned from that. I just love being around people who love entrepreneurship, love innovation, love technology, and work hard. So congratulations. Thank you so much for your success. Great to see you again soon as you put in the COO of VM-ware here on the ground floor here at RSA conference at Moscone, sharing his insight into the security practice that is now carbon black and VMware. All the good things that are going on there. Thanks for watching.
SUMMARY :
RSA conference, 2020 San Francisco brought to you by Silicon We've talked a number of times, but nice to see you here. So the threat of cyber has to cut across now multiple the CIO so often, you know, reports a report directly, sometimes, employees and the idea of a cyber security and physical security. It has to be intrinsic. And again, AirWatch was a big acquisition that you did. that there were certain control points and security that could help, you know, the endpoint, and you could think of endpoint as to both client and workload identity, We saw the same thing. conversation point that I'm interested in operational impact because when you have all these things to operationalize, You guys have been in the operations side of the business for our VMware. Listen, you know, you stay humble and hungry. One of the things that we have as a recipe does acquisition. So one of the deals we did within a month is So this is back to the point. I like to think of things as no more than three to five. So we, you know, uh, we, we've talked about the $10 billion Mark. Dave, a lot that's doing a braking and now he might've already shipped the piece this morning on Hybrid cloud is the pot to the multicloud. and going to Amazon like a Freddie Mac will help you ride your apps into that through VMware. I think cloud multicloud is going to come down to the best choice for the workload serve the old hardware economy and the new hardware economy, which is the, which is the cloud and then of We see, for example, Amazon having a headstart in the public cloud markets, but there's some use cases where Azure although big part of it, the crown jewel as we've been calling them the cube, they announced RSA is being What we support Dell and you know, all the moves that they've made. And I think, you know, the movement of some of these assets between the companies like pivotal to us and so on and so forth, And I think there's a pot to do that because it's an adjacent us and note, um, you know, I always use the term tech athlete, which I think you are one, And you know, Great to see you again soon as you put in the COO
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Dheeraj Pandey, Nutanix | CUBEConversation, September 2019
(funky music) >> Announcer: From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Everyone, welcome to this special CUBE Conversation here in Palo Alto, California with CUBE Studios. I'm John Furrier, your host of this CUBE Conversation with Dheeraj Pandey, CEO of Nutanix. CUBE alumni, very special part of our community. Great to see you again, thanks for coming in. We're previewing your big show coming up, Nutanix NEXT in Europe. Thanks for joining me. >> It's an honor. >> It's always great to get you. I saw your interview on Bloomberg with Emily Chang. Kind of short interview, but still, you're putting the message out there. You've been talking software. We covered your show here in North America. Clearly moving to the subscription model, and I want to get into that conversation. I think there's some notable things to talk about now that we're in this cloud 2.0 era, as we're calling it, kind of a goof on web 2.0. But cloud 2.0 is a whole shift happening, and you've been on it for a while. But you got the event coming up in Europe, Nutanix NEXT. What's the focus? Give a quick plug for that event. Let's talk about that. >> Yeah, in fact, the reiteration of the message is a key part of any of our user conferences. We have 14,000 customers around the world now, across 150 countries. We've done almost more than $5 billion worth of just software business in the last six, seven years of selling. It's a billion six run rate. There's a lot going on in the business, but we need to take a step back and in our user conference talk about the vision. So what's the vision of Nutanix? And the best part is that it hasn't changed. It's basically one of those timeless things that hopefully will withstand the test of time in the future as well. Make computing invisible anywhere. People scratch their heads. What does computing mean? What does invisible mean? What does anywhere mean? And that's where we'll actually go to these user conferences, talk about what is computing for us. Is it just infrastructure? Is it infrastructure and platform? Now that we're getting into desktop delivery, is it also about business users and applications? The same thing about invisible, what's invisible? For us, it's always been a special word. It's a very esoteric word. If you think about the B2B world, it doesn't talk about the word invisible a lot. But for us it's a very profound word. It's about autonomous software. It's about continuous, virtues of continuous delivery, continuous consumption, continuous mobility. That's how you make things invisible. And subscription is a big part of that continuous delivery message and continuous consumption message. >> So the event is October 9th, around the first week of October. You got some time there, but getting geared up for that. I wanted to ask you what you've learned from the North America conference and going into the European conference. It's ultimately the same message, same vision, with a tweak, you got some time under your belt since then. The subscription model business, which you were talking in your Bloomberg interview, is in play. It is not a new thing. It's been in operation for a while. Could you talk about that specifically? Because I think most people would say, hey, hardware to software, hard to do. Software subscription, hard to maintain and grow. Where are you on that transition? Explain and clarify your mix of business, hardware, software. Where are you in the progress of that transformation? >> Well, you know, I have been a big student of history, and I can't think of a company that's gone from hardware to software and software subscription in such a short span. Actually, I don't know of any company. If you know of one, please let me know. But why? The why of subscription is to be frictionless. Hybrid is impossible without having the same kind of consumption model, both on-prem and off-prem. And if we didn't go through that, we would be hypocritical as a company to talk about cloud and hybrid itself. The next 10 years for this company is about hybrid, and doing it as if private and public are one in the same is basically the essence of Nutanix's architecture. >> Well, I can think of some hardware-software dynamics that, again, might not match your criteria, but some might say Apple. Is it a software or hardware company? Hardware drives the ecosystem, they commoditize it. Peloton bicycle is a bike, but it's mainly a software business and in-person business. So there's different models. Oracle has hardware, they have software. It doesn't always relate to the enterprise. What's the argument to say, hey, why don't you just create your own box and kick ass with that box, or is it just different dynamics? What's that? >> Well, there's a tension in the system. People want to buy experiences as opposed to buying things. They don't want to integrate things, like, oh, I need to actually now get a hardware vendor to behave as a software vendor when it comes to support issues and such. And at the same time, you want to be flexible and portable. How do you really work with the customer with their relationships that they have with their hardware vendors? So the word anywhere in our vision is exactly that. It's like, okay, we can work on multiple servers, multiple hypervisors, and multiple clouds. At the end of the day, the customer experience is king. And that's one thing that the last 10 years has taught us, John, if anything, is don't sell things to people. You know, Kubernetes is a thing. Cloud is a thing. Can you really go sell experiences? The biggest lesson in the last year for us has been integrate better. Not just with partners, but also within your own products. And now if you can do that well, customers will buy from you. >> I think you just kind of clarified where I was thinking out loud, because if you think about Apple, the hardware is part of the experience. So they have to have it. >> Mm-hmm. >> You don't have to have the hardware to create those experiences. Is that right? >> Absolutely, which is why it's now 2% of our business, and yet we are saying that we take the burden of responsibility of supporting it, integrating with it. One of the biggest issues with cloud is operations. What is operations? It's day two patching. How do you do day two patching? Intel is coming up with microcode upgrades every quarter now because of security reasons. If we are not doing an awesome job of one-click upgrade of firmware and microcode and BIOS, we don't belong in the hybrid cloud world. I think that's the level of mundaneness that we've gotten to with our software that makes us such a high NPS company with our customers. >> I want to just drill in on the notion of a thing versus experience. You mentioned Kubernetes is a thing. I would say Hadoop was a thing. But Hadoop was a great example. It was hard to do. Kubernetes, jury's still out. People love them. Kubernetes, we'll see how that goes. If it can be abstracted away, it's not a thing anymore. We'll see. But Hadoop was a great example. Unbelievable technology direction, big data, all the goodness of object storage and unstructured data. We knew that. Just hard to work with. Setting up clusters, managing clusters. And it ended up being the death of the sector, in my opinion. What is an experience? Define what does that mean. Is it frictionless only? Is there a trust equation? Just unpack your vision on what that means. A thing, which could be a box with software on it, and experience, which is something different. >> Yeah, I mean, now you start to unpeel the word experience. It's really about being frictionless, trusted, and invisible. If you can really do these things well, around the word, define frictionless. Well, it has to be consumer-grade. It has to be web scalable, 'cause customers are looking for the Amazon architecture inside, and aren't just going and renting it from Amazon, but also saying, can I get the same experience inside? So you've got to make it web scale. You've got to make it consumer-grade. Because our operators and users, talk about Hadoop, I mean, they struggled with the experience of Hadoop itself because it was a thing, it was a technology, as opposed to being something that was consumer-grade itself. And then finally, security. Trust is very important. We must secure always on resilient. The word resilience is very important. In fact, that's one of the things we'll actually talk about at our conference, is resilience. What does it mean, not just for Nutanix stock, to be where it is today from where it was six months ago. And that's what I'm most proud of, is you go through these transitions, you actually talk about resilience of software, resilience of systems, resilience of customer support, and resilience of companies. >> So you mentioned hybrid cloud. We were talking before we came on camera about hybrid cloud. But software's a two-way relationship. Talk about what you mean by that, and then I want to ask you a follow-up question of where hardware may or may be an opportunity or a problem in that construct. >> Yeah, I mean, look, in the world of hybrid, what's really important is delivering an experience that's really without silos. Ideally, on-prem infrastructure is an availability zone. How do you make it look like an availability zone that can stand up shoulder-to-shoulder with a public cloud availability zone? That's where you sell an experience. That's how you talk about a management plane where you can actually have a single pane of glass that really delivers a cloud experience both ways. >> You're kind of a contrarian. I always love interviewing you because you seem to be on the next wave before any realizes it. Right now everyone's trying to go on-premise and you're moving from on-premise to the cloud. Not you guys moving, but your whole vision is. You've been there, done that on premises. Now you've got to be where the customers are, which is where they need to be, which is the cloud. I heard you say that. It's interesting, you're going the other way, right? >> Mm-hmm. But you could look at the infrastructure and say, hey, there's a lot of hardware inside these clouds that have a lot of hardware-specific features like hardware assist that software or network latency might not be able to deliver. Is that a missed opportunity for you guys, or does your software leverage these trends? And even on premises, there's hardware offload-like features coming. How do you reconcile that? Because I would just argue inside of the company, say, hey, Dheeraj, let's not go all in on software. We can maximize this new technology, this thing, for our software. How do you-- >> Look, I think if you look at our features, like security, the way we use TPM, which is a piece of assist that you get from Intel's motherboards for doing key encryption management. What does it mean to really do encryption at scale using Intel's vectored instructions? How do you do RDMA? How do you look at InfiniBand? How do you look at Optane drives? We've been really good at that lowest level, but making sure that it's actually selling a solution that can then go drive SAP HANA and Oracle databases and GPU for graphics and desktops. So as a company, we don't talk about those things because they are the how of the business. You don't talk about the how. You'd rather talk about the why and the what, actually. >> So from a business strategy standpoint, I just want to get this clear because there's downfalls for getting into the hardware business. You know them. Inventory, all these hardware cycles are moving fast. You mentioned Intel shipping microcode for security reasons. So you're basically saying you'd rather optimize for decoupling hardware from the software and ride the innovation of the hardware guys, like Nvidia and Intel and others. >> Absolutely, and do it faster than anybody else, but more integrated than anybody else. You know, all together now is kind of our message for .NEXT. How do you bring it all together? Because the world is struggling with things, and that's the opportunity for Nutanix. >> Well, I would say making compute invisible is a great tagline. I would add storage and networking to that too. >> Yeah, computing, by the way. >> Computing. >> I said computing. >> Okay, computing. >> 'Cause computing is compute storage networking. Computing is infrastructure, platform, and apps. It's a very clever word, and it's a very profound word as well. >> Well, let's just throw Kubernetes in there too and move up the stack, because ultimately, we're writing a lot of stories on covering this editorially, is that the world's flipped upside down. It used to be the infrastructure. We're calling this cloud 2.0, like I said earlier. The world used to be the infrastructure enabled what the apps could do, and they were limited to the resources they had. Now the apps are in charge. They're dictating terms below the software line, if you want to call it the app line. So the apps are in charge now. Whoever can serve up the best infrastructure capability, which changes the entire computing industry because now the suppliers who can deliver that elastic or flexible capacity or resource, wins. >> Absolutely. >> And that's ultimately a complete shift. >> You know, I tell people, John, about the strategy of Nutanix because we have some apps now. Frame is an app for us. Beam is an app. Calm is an app. These are apps, they're drawn on the platform, which is the core platform of Nutanix, the core hyper-convergence innovation that we did. If you go back to the '90s, who was to say that Windows really fueled Office or Office fueled Windows? They had to work in conjunction, because without one, there would be no, the other, actually. So without Office there would be no Windows. Without Windows there would be no Office. How platforms and apps work with each other synergistically is at the core of delivering that experience. >> I want to add just you're a student of history. As an entrepreneur, you've been there through the many waves and you also invest a lot, and I want to ask you this question. It used to be that platforms was the holy grail. You'd go to a VC and say, hey, I'm building a platform. Big time investment. An entrepreneur will come back: I got a tool. You're a feature. You're a feature, not a platform. Platforms was the elite engineering position to come in to look for the big money. How would you define platforms now? Because with cloud, if apps are in charge, and there's potential features that are coming around the corner that no one's yet invented, what is this platform 2.0 world look like if you were coming out of grad school or you were a young engineer or a young entrepreneur? How do you think about that right now? >> Well, the biggest thing is around extensibility and openness. You know, we were talking about openness before, but the idea of APIs, where API is the new graphically why, because the developer is the builder. And how do you really go sell to them and still deliver a great experience? And not just from the point of view of, well, I've given you the best APIs, but the best SDKs. What does it mean to give them a development kit that gets them up and running in no time? And maybe even a graphical Kickstarter. We're working with our partners a lot, where it's not just about delivering APIs or raw APIs because they're not as consumable, but to deliver SDKs and to deliver graphical structural kits to them so that they can be up and running, building applications in two months rather than two years. I think that's at the core of what our platform is. >> And data and having an operating system thinking seems to be another common pattern. Understand the subsystems of data. Running and assembling things together. >> I think what is Nutanix, I mean, if people ask me what is Nutanix, I start with data. Data is the core of the company. We've done data for virtualization. We're now doing data for applications with Nutanix Files. We have object store data. We are doing Era, which is database as a service. Without data, we'd be dead as a company. That's how important it is. Now, how do you meld that with design and delivery is basically where the three Ds come together: data-- >> I wrote a blog post. Dave Vellante always laughs when I bring this up because he always references it too. In 2007 I said, data is the new development kit. 'Cause back then, development kits existed. SDKs, software development kits. MSDN was Microsoft's thing. You remember those glory days, Dheeraj, I know. But the thesis was, if data does actually come in, it's actually an input into the software. This is what I think you guys are doing that is clever that's not well understood, is data is an input, like a software library almost. A module, but it's dynamic and it's always changing. And writing software for that is a nouveau kind of thing. This is new. >> Yeah, I know, and delivered to the developer, because right now data and hardware data is sitting in silos which are mainframe-like systems. How do you deliver it where they can spin it up on their own? Making sure that we democratize data is the biggest challenge in most companies. >> We're in a new era, I think you just pointed that out, and we talk about it at CUBE all the time. We don't really talk about up-front. It used to be UI was the thing, user interface, ease of use. I think now the new table stake feature in all companies is if you can't show value instantly in any solution that has a thing or things in it, then it's pretty much not going to happen. I mean, this is the new expectation that becomes the experience for-- >> Yeah, I mean, millennials are the new developers, and they need to actually see instant gratification, many of these-- >> Well, cost too. I don't want to spend a million dollars to find out it didn't work. I want to maybe spend something variable. >> And look, agility, the cliched word, and I don't want to talk about agility per se, but at the end of the day it's all about, can we provide that experience where you don't have to really learn something over 18 months and provide it in the next three hours. >> Great conversation here with Dheeraj Pandey, CEO of Nutanix, about his vision. I always loved your software vision. You guys have smart engineers there. Let's talk about your company. I think a lot of people at your conference and your community and others want to know, is how you're doing and how the company's doing. Because I think you guys are in the midst of a major transition we talked about earlier, hardware to software, software to subscription, recurring revenue. I mean, it's pretty much a disruptive enabler for you guys at one level as an opportunity. It's changing how you do accounting. It's having product management. Your customers are going to consume it differently. It's been a big challenge. And stock's taken a little bit of a hit, but you're kind of playing the long game. Talk about the growth strategy as you guys go forward. This has been a struggle. There's been some personnel changes in the company. What's going on? Give us the straight scoop. >> Yeah, in fact the biggest thing is about the transformation for this coming decade. And there's fundamental things that need to change for the world of cloud. Otherwise, you're basically just talking the word rather than walking the walk itself. So this last quarter I was very pleased to announce that we finally showed the first strong point of this whole transformation. There's a really good data point coming out that the company is growing back again. We beat street estimates on pretty much every metric. Billings, revenue, gross margin. And we also guided above street estimates for billings, revenue, and gross margin, and I think that's probably one of the biggest things I'm proud of in the last six, nine months of this subscription transition. We're also telling the street about how to look at us from software and support billings point of view as opposed to looking at overall billings and revenue. If you take a step back into the company, I talk about this in our earnings call, 'til three years ago, we were a commercial company, also doing federal and some international. And the last three years we proved to ourselves and to the community that we can do enterprise, you know, high-end customers, upmarket, and also do a very good job of international. Now, the next three years is really about saying, can we do both enterprise and commercial together? All together now, which is also our, coincidentally, our .NEXT message, is the proof that we actually have to go and show that we can do federal, enterprise, and commercial to really build a very large business from it. >> Well, federal's got certification levels. We know that's different depending upon which agency you're talking to. Commercial, a little bit different ball game. SaaS becomes important, cloud becomes important. The big trend is on-premise hardware. Outposts for AWS, Azure Stack for Microsoft. How do you fit into that? Because you, again, you said you're both ways. >> Mm-hmm. >> So are you worried about that? Is that a headwind, tailwind for you? What's the impact for this now fashionable on-premises shift? Which I think is just a temporary thing as cloud continues to grow. But I still argue with Michael Dell about this. I think cloud is going to be a bigger TAM. Even though there's a huge total addressable market on enterprise, that's like saying there's a great TAM for horses and buggies when cars are coming out. It's different world between public cloud and on-premises. How does that impact Nutanix, this on-premise-- >> Well, remember I said about the word anywhere in our vision? Make computing invisible anywhere? With software you can actually reduce the tension between public and private. It's not this or that. It's this and that. Our software running on Outpost is a reality. It's not like we're saying, Outpost is one thing and Nutanix is another. And that's the value of software. It's so fungible, it's so portable, that you don't have to take sides between-- >> Are you guys at ISV inside Amazon Marketplace? >> No, but again, it's still a thing. Marketplace is still not where it should be, and it's hard to search and discover things from there. So we are saying, let's do it right. Remember, we were not the first hyper-convergence company. Right? We were probably the ninth one, like the way Google was as a search engine, actually. But we did it right, because the experience mattered. You know that search box that did everything? That's what Nutanix's overall experience is today. We will do the public cloud right with our software so that we can use the customer's credits with Amazon-- >> But you're still selling direct. And your partners. >> Well, everything is coming through partners, so at the end of the day we have to do an even better job of that, like what we're doing at HPE now. I think being able to go and find that common ground with partners is what commercial is all about. Commercial is a lot about distribution. As a company, we've done a really good job of enterprise and federal. But doing it with partners-- >> What are the biggest impact areas for your business and business model, elements with software transition that you're scaling up on the subscription side? What are the biggest areas? >> Well, one is just communication, 'cause obviously a lot is changing. At a private company, things change, nobody cares. The board just needs to know about it. But at a public company, we have investors in the public market. And many of them are in the nosebleeding section, actually, of this arena. So really, you're sitting in the arena, being the man in the arena, or the woman in the arena. How do you really take this message to the bleachers section is probably the biggest one, actually. >> Well, I think one of the things I've always speculated on, you look at the growth of, just pick some stocks that we all know. VMware, Microsoft. You look at the demarcation point where, right when the stock was low to high was the shift to cloud and software. With VMware, it was they had a failing strategy and they kill it and they do a deal with Amazon. Game has changed, now they're all in the software-defined data center. Microsoft, Satya Nadella comes in, boom, they're in cloud. Real commitment. And with Microsoft specifically, that was a real management commitment. They were committed to software. They were committed to the cloud business model, and took whatever medicine they needed to take. >> That's it. That's it, you take short-term pain for long-term gain, and look, anything that becomes large over time, to me it's all about long-term greed, and I use this word a lot. I want all our employees and our customers and our investors to really think about the word. There's greed, but it's long-term greed, and that's how most companies have become large over time. So I think for us to have done this right, to say, look, we are set for the next 10 years, was very important. >> It's interesting. Everyone wants to be like Jeff Bezos. Everyone wants to be like you guys now, because long-term greed or long-term thinking is the new fashion. It's the new standard and tack. >> Yeah, I mean, look the CEOs, the top 200 CEOs, came out and talked about, are we taking good care of main street, or are we just focused on this hamster wheel of three months reporting to Wall Street alone? And I think consensus is emerging that you got to take care of main street. You and I were talking about, that I look at investors as customers, and I look at customers as investors. Which is really kind of a contrarian way of thinking about it. >> It's interesting. We live in the world, we've seen many waves. I think the wave we're on now from an entrepreneurial and venture creation standpoint, whether you're public or private, is the long game is the new 3D chess. It's where the masters are playing their best game. You look at the results of the best companies. I just bought the book about Uber from Mike Isaac from the New York Times. Short-term thinking, win at all costs, that's not the 3D chess game that's going on with entrepreneurs these days. All the investment thesis is stay long-term. And certainly now, with this perceived bubble popping, or this downturn that may or may not happen, long-term game is more important than ever. Your thoughts on it? >> I think the word authenticity has never been more important, not just in the Valley, but around the world, actually. What you're seeing with all this Me Too movement and a lot of skeletons in the cupboard out there, I think at the end of the day, the word authentic cannot be artificially created. It has to come from within. What you talk about, Satya... I look at Shantanu Narayen, the Adobe CEO, and they're authentic CEOs. I mean, I look at Dara now, at Uber, he's talking about bringing authenticity to Uber. I think there's no shortcuts to success in this world. >> I think Adobe's a great example. What they've done has been amazing. I know you're on the board there, so congratulations. Final word, I'll let you get your plug in for the event and your customer base. Talk to your customers and investors out there that might watch this. From your state of mind, what's the state of the union for Nutanix? Speak directly to your customers and investors right now. >> Well, the tagline for .NEXT Copenhagen is all together now. We're bringing clouds together. We're bringing app infrastructure and data together. I think it's a really large opportunity for us to go sell an experience to our customers, rather than selling things. All these buzzwords that come up in technology, as a company, we've done a really good job of integrating them, and the next decade is about integrating the public cloud and the private cloud. And I look at investors and customers alike. I talk about long-term greed with them. Providing an experience to them is the core of our journey. >> Thanks for your insight, Dheeraj. This was a CUBE Conversation here in Palo Alto. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (funky music)
SUMMARY :
in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, Great to see you again, thanks for coming in. I think there's some notable things to talk about it doesn't talk about the word invisible a lot. and going into the European conference. and doing it as if private and public are one in the same What's the argument to say, hey, And at the same time, you want to be flexible and portable. I think you just kind of clarified You don't have to have the hardware One of the biggest issues with cloud is operations. all the goodness of object storage and unstructured data. In fact, that's one of the things and then I want to ask you a follow-up question Yeah, I mean, look, in the world of hybrid, I always love interviewing you Is that a missed opportunity for you guys, the way we use TPM, which is a piece of assist and ride the innovation of the hardware guys, and that's the opportunity for Nutanix. I would add storage and networking to that too. and it's a very profound word as well. is that the world's flipped upside down. And that's ultimately is at the core of delivering that experience. and I want to ask you this question. And not just from the point of view of, Understand the subsystems of data. Data is the core of the company. This is what I think you guys are doing that is clever is the biggest challenge in most companies. that becomes the experience for-- I don't want to spend a million dollars to find out but at the end of the day it's all about, Talk about the growth strategy as you guys go forward. is the proof that we actually have to go and show How do you fit into that? I think cloud is going to be a bigger TAM. And that's the value of software. and it's hard to search and discover things from there. And your partners. I think being able to go is probably the biggest one, actually. You look at the demarcation point where, to say, look, we are set for the next 10 years, is the new fashion. that you got to take care of main street. is the long game is the new 3D chess. and a lot of skeletons in the cupboard out there, Final word, I'll let you get your plug in for the event and the next decade is about integrating Thanks for your insight, Dheeraj.
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Ronell Hugh, Adobe | Adobe Summit 2019
>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering Adobe Summit, 2019. Brought to you by Adobe. Welcome back everyone to the Cube's coverage, here in Las Vegas for Adobe Summit 2019. I'm John Furrier with Jeff Frick, our next guest is Ronell Hugh, head of product strategy and marketing for Adobe and Adobe Cloud Experience, which was announced available today, welcome to theCUBE, thanks for joining us. >> Hey, thank you John, thanks for having us. >> So the Experience Cloud Platform, is game changer for Adobe. >> Yes. Could you describe what is it? Like, where'd it come from, how'd it all start? >> Yeah I can definitely do that. So, the Experience Platform, Adobe Experience Platform, the genesis of it came from, data is such an important part, I think you've had lots of people on here talking about data and what it can do. And really it's like, when you have data that is dispersed across an enterprise, how do you actually, what do you do with that, right? A lot of customers are out there, and I, terminology I came across the other day was data swamps, you know, data lakes, data warehouse, we're all aware of those ideas. But how do you take that data and actually do something meaningful? The idea came from, we have siloed repositories for our data, sitting across all of our solutions, how do we bring that together and rationalize and standardize that data, so that it's more useful for a customer, so they actually can do something that's truly meaningful with it? And that's really around driving these real time personalized experiences with customers, right? And so I think that's where it started. And as we've evolved that, what you heard today is kind of what you're seeing about how do we then take that to the next level? How do you apply machine learning? How do you provide a data model that standardizes the taxonomy across the ecosystem? How do you then leverage that and how do you have it being open? To now, you give customers, developers an opportunity to start to develop new applications that advances what they're trying to do in their environment. >> What I think, what I found super impressive was, you guys really cracked the code on what I call cloud scale architecture, >> Yeah. >> While not, missing out on the opportunities to innovate at the user level. You have the creativity, the applications, and then the data almost is like this DevOps kind of mindset where it's like the data's being available in a diverse way for the use cases that matter at the right time, so. That's a hard nut to crack. >> Yeah it is a hard nut to crack, I think. But at the core, again, it's like, it's the data that's important. Once you have that centralized, you've created some rules around that, you're governing it so that you can now leverage, depending on what you're trying to use it for, it's really then down to the use cases. To your point, like, what are the specific use cases a customer has, that they're trying to solve? There could be industry ones that we could apply them to, we've identified a few of those that we think are important for customers, some of those around the real-time customer data platform and how Experience Platform from along with Audience Manager helps to solve that use case for a customer. But there's others around, how do you enable customers, from a development standpoint? Applications, they're really trying to figure out, hey, I need an open system, but I can start to develop something rich and new, right? And drive advancements in their organizations. And so there's a lot that we've had, there's kind of four that we've identified from a use case standpoint. But that's not limited to those four. Every customer is going to apply either one or all of those in a unique way within their environment. >> When you say four, you mean clouds, like analytical cloud, ad cloud-- >> No, no, I mean, so the use cases that we've identified. >> Oh okay. >> So we have, real-time customer data platform, we have one around, application, customer experience application development, customer journey intelligence is all around how do you take and leverage AI ML tools, to help enrich data? And then we have one around how you take and deliver across multiple applications. What's the channel execution looks like, now that you have data standardized in one place? What does that mean for your channels that you're now trying to execute across your ecosystem? >> Well you guys did the product development on this and the product marketing and all the stuff that goes in to building a platform, you got to go out an talk to customers, right? So what was the, when you guys talked to customers, what was their initial feedback to you guys? And when you 'em the platform now, where are they, I mean, what's the reaction? Can you share some either anecdotal or, specific? >> Yeah, anecdotally, I mean we started talking about a platform and the idea and a vision of a platform, I think, three or four years ago. Last year we then laid the groundwork around, there's three areas to this, a profile, the data side too and a content side, what you're seeing now is a data piece of this, like, how does data then really drive a lot of the interactions there? And as we've progressed, the reception has been great. Customers are like, we understand this. And it's really around the notion of real-time. Real-time is really built on the knowledge that, hey, you're taking data, you're not just doing batch any more. I know batch is predominantly what customers like to use. But real-time means getting data in, that's current. That therefore you can then action upon. Which really is the relevant data that you need. And I think that started to resonate really well. >> How do they define real-time? 'Cause it could depend based upon the application. If you're a doctor you need real-time now. >> If you're an investor, >> Yeah, you need it now! >> You need it now! If you're a BI application on a query, it could be a little slower. I mean real-time is a relative term, can you just unpack the customer's expectation of real-time? >> Yeah I mean, you look across multiple verticals, right? So, depending which vertical you're in, to your point, it could vary, right? But if you're a brand that's delivering consumer experiences, real-time is like, are you interacting with them with the right data to help inform that interaction with that customer, right? And that is real-time. So it varies by industry of course, right? Hospitality, you think of that, when you walk into a hotel, getting a notification that your room is ready. Me recently coming here on a plane trip, having to check my luggage, notified that the bag was check in, and also now that it's being delivered now for me to pick up. Those are all, that's real-time, right? And it varies, I think, by industry. And I think that's where it starts to get really exciting, is like how do you apply it? What does it mean for real-time for each company that's starting to apply Experience Platform to their infrastructure? >> That's my favorite definition of that, real-time is in time to do something about it. (all laughing) Which depending on what the situation is, could be a short period of time or a longer period of time. But Ronall I'm curious, 'cause we've always had the transactional data and real-time's always been a focus on the transactional data, but on the behavioral data to then pull back in to transactional activity, that's a little bit more recent. Especially with so many sources of data that are coming in and changing all the time. How are people dealing with that data flow challenge and as you said, aggregating it and coalescing it into a single platform that now you can take action on it? >> Yeah, I mean the behavioral data's a core to Adobe it's definitely a part of our bread and butter. And I think it's combining it with all the other data sources that will make it even more richer for our customers, right? You think about a customer, if the real Holy Grail, in a way, of our Experience Platform is that real-time customer profile. There're so many different data points that help to build that. When you isolate it just behavioral, that's great. We know the interactions that a customer is having with the brand, but there's other parts that, transactional, POS, social, that helps to build out the view of that customer. And then, think of then at that point, for a customer, any of our customers are using this today, some that were heard today as part of our keynote. How they're then taking that to the next level of how they then build experiences for their customers. It's because it's a culmination of all of that, right? I think behavioral is a huge part of it. Because it's not static data or stagnant data, it's kind of like that data that we have that's been gathered over the last several years of a customer, and how they're currently interacting with a brand. But then it's, again, bringing it all together. Harnessing that, and then building that real-time customer profile, it really is a powerful piece of the platform. >> You know when I looked at the slide on the keynote, it was clear that this'll have a lot of data chops within Adobe. Because you had the data pipelining piece after data input sources, and then the other side of the chart was the piece around the applications, ISVs, ecosystem, and then you had your real-time profile, which I get is the centerpiece. But before that you had something that was around semantic data pipelining, >> Semantic data pipelining yeah. >> Data pipelining and semantics. >> Yeah. >> What is that piece? Is that really where the transformations are happening? Is that the input into the, you're smiling, wow. >> Yeah this is great, I love talking about this. >> You're nerding out. Okay. >> So, pipeline and semantics is all around, so pipeline is the thought process around, we have connectors that we built, right? That's really where the data comes in. When we see at the beginning of the diagram is the bit that said streaming, it's the connectors that allow that streaming to happen but it also gives customers the option of saying, now you can batch it, right? You can batch it, which is what you've been doing, but streaming is really what we're pushing. 80% of customers still think that batching is the only way to manage their data right? And then really it's more about, hey, if you want to action in real-time, where is that data currently at? So that's what we say that happens with the data in the pipeline part of it. Additionally you have things like Adobe Experience Platform Launch and Auditor, Launch is all around data collection as well. But it's also about deployment of tags. When you deploy a tag you're also connecting information that can feed back into the system as well, and then the last piece of that is we have a feature of Platform that's called Auditor, and really it's about auditing your environment to make sure that it's being implemented correctly, right? Semantics is all about governance and control of the data. Standardizing the data, so we have something we call Experience Data Model, they talked a little bit about that, or ExDM, Experience Data Model is all around, it's an open source initiative to help standardize taxonomy of your data. I grew up in Germany, first language is German, and when I moved to the US if I were to walk into a room and started speaking German, no one would've understood me, right? It would've been stares and everything. But if I had switched my language, luckily I speak English too, so I was able to share and speak English, it's the same with data. You can't have it labeled differently for it to communicate. And that's what really happens in semantics and the data pipeline piece we did. >> And it's important too, I want to unpack it a little bit >> It's great to know. >> because semantics also feeds into contextual awareness. And one of the things we've observed doing these CUBE interviews with a lot of experts is, we've heard diverged data and flow, creates more visibility into potential blind spots. Just in data science parlance. Talk about that streaming piece, I think that's something that I see, the people who get data right, will stream as much as they could to get some flow going, to get data sources coming in, to have more diverse data. Talk about that dynamic of diverse data. >> Diverse data, I mean, a part of that diagram you saw, on the left of that when Anjul was speaking, was around data sources, data inputs, right? And so we talked about behavioral, transactional, third party, POS, and it's the variety of data, and that coming in consistently that helps you create that picture of a customer. So you need a variety of data. I think just having our data gives you, again, like we talked about before, the behavioral components of that, but consistently bringing in multiple pieces of data helps to take that further. Now one thing you talked about was AI, and I want to take you there just a little bit 'cause that piece of then how you can manipulate the data, and enrich with new insights, is key. Again, lots more data, standardized, controlled, now being governed in the right way to meet different regulations and policies that are out there. And then now adding AI models to that, ML models to that, to take your organization further. I think that's where we see the power of that data, and having lots of data. Open and extensible is one of the key things that we've been talking about with the platform. >> And clean data feeds clean machine learning. >> Yeah. >> Dirty data gives dirty machine learning. >> Yeah, dirty insights, right? (both laughing) And we always want it to be clean, right? But that's so important, we sit here and think about it, customers want that. They're desiring to have that so they can innovate within their infrastructure and their organizations to take their businesses further. >> And that's where we see the machine, that's why data's so core for you guys in this piece. Alright, so what is the customer environment like? Are they all tuned in to what you just said? I can see some progress in the big companies and maybe, cloud native folks getting, jazzed up on that but, are the big companies tuning in to this? In your mind, where are they on the progress bar? >> Yeah, so John and Jeff, the big companies that we have talked to, are typically further along, that are cloud native, they're more pushing the boundaries of innovation and when we looked at this by industry, you tend to see more of the typical companies by industry that are kind of leaning into this. You know, hospitality, automotive, you have entertainment, media, you also have retail, you know. There's been a lot of interest from those from healthcare and financial services as well because they see the implications of what it means to them in terms of managing their data and executing that data to drive more engagement with their customers. >> They get an edge too, if they can nail the customer experience with data, they'll have a competitive advantage, I mean, if I had to choose between a hotel that was going to take care of me on my app, versus one that doesn't, I think I'm going to go with the one with the app every time. >> Definitely. >> If the price is, all things being equal. >> A key part to that though, and Shantanu I think, and Anjul, multiple people mentioned today, was that customer journey, right? Depending on where you are, data plays a key role in all aspects of that customer journey. And how do you activate it then in each part of the customer journey? To drive those experiences in real-time. So I think it's a key part to how we see it working. And I think that the AI and ML, it explodes even further, to your point, that cleanliness of the data then just makes that more potent in terms of what it can deliver. >> Well one of the things that you guys have is Adobe products, your customers have other things besides Adobe. So one of the things Anjul said in her keynote was open data open APIs. So how do you bring that other stuff in, when, first party data is getting harder and harder to get with all the stuff we're seeing online these days with privacy and regulations? First party data's great, if you can get it. >> Yeah. >> So how is this all impacting, outside the Adobe realm from a customer standpoint because they want to have a platform that can be easily tied together? How do you guys look at that changing landscape? It's changing pretty radically. >> It's high priority for our customers, right? They've always had a challenge with isolated vendors, right? And how do you then bring that data together? One of the things that we'd readily notice when I talked to customers is that, this excites them. The opportunity that they have now, to have a platform, regardless of which whether it's first party or third party, to bring that together, is something that they deem as necessary for their organizations to be successful, right? And so now it's all about, we've built now the tools to help them do that. We actually have third party connectors, right? So you can bring in data or we have ETL partners that we can work with to bring that data through that source-- >> And developers can develop on it, right? >> And developers can develop on it. >> Is there a developer program for the Experience Platform yet, or is that still ongoing? >> There is, a big component of what we're doing is the developer betas for this so now developers can go to adobe.com, adobe.io actually, and find a lot of the APIs that are there, available for them, and documentation to help them build an application on top of Platform. >> So they can do that today? >> They can do that today. >> Awesome. >> They can go check that out today, and that, but you're pointing out something that's really important. A platform that is open and extensible, now makes itself available to customers who have, large developer teams. Many CTOs have an organization engineers area, chomping at the bit to build new applications for their organizations. They also have big data science teams too, that are, wanting this take. Data science teams have always been about massaging data, they've been managing it, that gets old for them. They don't want to do that, they want to build something that's unique, innovative and actually inspire their organizations. >> High quality data, real-time and relevant, fast and cool, that's what it's all about. >> Yeah. >> And you guys got a platform, so final question for you. To get a platform right, we've observed, you got to enable success. You've got to be an enabling technology. What's the big secret sauce for this platform? >> The secret sauce. I think it comes down to something that may seem simple. But I think there's a couple pieces that are a secret sauce to it, the ultimate secret sauce that is powered by those other areas, is that real-time customer profile. And that's only the secret sauce because of, what we do from out data connector standpoint of bringing in data in real-time, and standardizing that with the right taxonomy to then inform that real-time customer profile. It's the power of what the platform can do. And then after that, how you use query to develop more data inputs from that, or how you then deliver that, through decisioning or other triggers that you might have available, that's really the secret sauce of what we have within the platform. >> Awesome, Ronall, thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Appreciate the insights we'll follow up, love the streaming, love the real-time profiling, love the data. Adobe's Experience Platform, hitting the market. It's theCUBE, live coverage, day one of two days, of wall to wall coverage. We'll be right back after this short break. (electronic music)
SUMMARY :
Brought to you by Adobe. So the Experience Cloud Platform, And as we've evolved that, what you heard today missing out on the opportunities to innovate it's really then down to the use cases. so the use cases that we've identified. And then we have one around how you take Which really is the relevant data that you need. How do they define real-time? can you just unpack the customer's expectation of real-time? notified that the bag was check in, but on the behavioral data to then pull back Yeah, I mean the behavioral data's a core to Adobe But before that you had something Is that the input into the, I love talking about this. it's the connectors that allow that streaming to happen And one of the things we've observed 'cause that piece of then how you can manipulate the data, And clean data feeds and their organizations to take their businesses further. Are they all tuned in to what you just said? and executing that data to drive more engagement I think I'm going to go with the one with the app every time. that cleanliness of the data then Well one of the things that you guys have How do you guys look at that changing landscape? And how do you then bring that data together? And developers can develop adobe.io actually, and find a lot of the APIs chomping at the bit to build new applications fast and cool, that's what it's all about. And you guys got a platform, and standardizing that with the right taxonomy love the real-time profiling, love the data.
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