Stephen Manley, Druva & Jason Cradit, Summit Carbon Solutions | AWS re:Invent 2022
>>Hey everyone, and welcome back to Las Vegas. Viva Las Vegas, baby. This is the Cube live at AWS Reinvent 2022 with tens of thousands of people. Lisa Martin here with Dave Valante. Dave, we've had some great conversations. This is day one of four days of wall to wall coverage on the cube. We've been talking data. Every company is a data company. Data protection, data resiliency, absolutely table stakes for organizations to, >>And I think ecosystem is the other big theme. And that really came to life last year. You know, we came out of the pandemic and it was like, wow, we are entering a new era. People no longer was the ecosystem worried about it, AWS competing with them. They were more worried about innovating and building on top of AWS and building their own value. And that's really, I think, the theme of the 2020s within the ecosystem. >>And we're gonna be talking about building on top of aws. Two guests join us, two alumni join us. Stephen Manley is here, the CTO of Druva. Welcome back. Jason crat as well is here. CIO and CTO of Summit Carbon Solutions. Guys, great to have you back on the program. >>Thank you. >>Let's start with you giving the audience an understanding of the company. What do you guys do? What do you deliver value for customers? All that good >>Stuff. Yeah, no, for sure. So Summit Carbon is the world's largest carbon capture and sequestration company capturing close to 15 million tons of carbon every year. So it doesn't go into the atmosphere. >>Wow, fantastic. Steven, the, the risk landscape today is crazy, right? There's, there's been massive changes. We've talked about this many times. What are some of the things, you know, ransomware is a, is, I know as you say, this is a, it's not a, if it's gonna happen, it's when it's how frequent, it's what's gonna be the damage. What are some of the challenges and concerns that you're hearing from customers out there today? >>Yeah, you know, it really comes down to three things. And, and everybody is, is terrified of ransomware and justifiably so. So, so the first thing that comes up is, how do I keep up? Because I have so much data in so many places, and the threats are evolving so quickly. I don't have enough money, I don't have enough people, I don't have enough skilled resources to be able to keep up. The second thing, and this ties in with what Dave said, is, is ecosystem. You know, it used to be that your, your backup was siloed, right? They'd sit in the basement and, and you wouldn't see, see them. But now they're saying, I've gotta work with my security team. So rather than hoping the security team stays away from me, how do I integrate with them? How do I tie together? And then the third one, which is on everybody's mind, is when that attack happens, and like you said, it's win and, and the bell rings and they come to me and they say, all right, it's time for you to recover. It's time for, for all this investment we've put in. Am I gonna be ready? Am I going to be able to execute? Because a ransom or recovery is so different than any other recovery they've ever done. So it's those three things that really are top of mind for >>How, so what is the, what are the key differences, if you could summarize? I mean, I >>Know it's so, so the first one is you can't trust the environment you're restoring into. Even with a disaster, it would finish and you'd say, okay, I'm gonna get my data center set up again and I'm gonna get things working. You know, when I try to recover, I don't know if everything's clean yet. I'm trying to recover while I'm still going through incident response. So that's one big difference. A second big difference is I'm not sure if the thing I'm recovering is good, I've gotta scan it. I've gotta make sure what's inside it is, is, is alright. And then the third thing is what we're seeing is the targets are usually not necessarily the crown jewels because those tend to be more protected. And so they're running into this, I need to recover a massive amount of what we might call tier two, tier three apps that I wasn't ready for because I've always been prepared for that tier one disaster. And so, so those three things they go, it's stuff I'm not prepared or covering. It's a flow. I'm not used to having to check things and I'm not sure where I'm gonna recover too when the, when the time comes. >>Yeah, just go ahead. Yeah, that's right. I mean, I think for me, the biggest concern is the blind spots of where did I actually back it up or not. You know, what did I get it? Cuz you, we always protect our e r p, we always protect these sort of classes of tiers of systems, but then it's like, oh, that user's email box didn't get it. Oh, that, you know, that one drive didn't get it. You know, or, or, or whatever it is. You know, the infrastructure behind it all. I forgot to back that up. That to me the blind spots are the scariest part of a ransomware attack. >>And, and if you think about it, some of the most high profile attacks, you know, on the, on the colonial pipeline, they didn't go after the core assets. They went after billing. That's right. But billing brought everything down so they're smart enough to say, right, I'm not gonna take the, the castle head on. Is there is they're that. Exactly. >>And so how do you, I get, I mean you can air gap and do things like that in terms of protecting the, the, the data, the corrupt data. How do you protect the corrupt environment? Like that's, that's a really challenging issue. Is >>It? I don't know. I mean, I'll, I'll you can go second here. I think that what's interesting to me about is that's what cloud's for. You can build as many environments as you want. You only pay for what you use, right? And so you have an opportunity to just reconstruct it. That's why things, everything is code matters. That's why having a cloud partner like Druva matters. So you can just go restore wherever you need to in a totally clean environment. >>So the answer is you gotta do it in the cloud. Yeah. What if it's on prem? >>So if it's on prem, what we see people do is, and, and, and this is where testing and, and where cloud can still be an asset, is you can look and say a lot of those assets I'm running in the data center, I could still recover in the cloud. And so you can go through DR testing and you can start to define what's in your on-prem so that you could make it, you know, so you can make it cloud recoverable. Now, a lot of the people that do that then say, well actually why am I even running this on prem anymore in the first place? I should just move this to the cloud now. But, but, but there are people in that interim step. But, but, but it's really important because you, you're gonna need a clean environment to play in. And it's so hard to have a clean environment set up in a data center cuz it basically means I'm not touching this, I'm just paying for something to sit idle. Whereas cloud, I can spin that up, right? Get a, a cloud foundation suite and, and just again, infrastructures code, spin things up, test it, spin it down. It doesn't cost me money on a daily basis. >>Jason, talk a little bit about how you are using Druva. Why Druva and give us a kind of a landscape of your IT environment with Druva. >>Yeah. You know, so when we first started, you know, we did have a competitor solution and, and, and it was only backing up, you know, we were a startup. It was only backing up our email. And so as you pointed out, the ecosystem really matters because we grew out of email pretty quick as a startup. And we had to have real use cases to protect and the legacy product just wouldn't support us. And so our whole direction, or my direction to my team is back it up wherever it is, you know, go get it. And so we needed somebody in the field, literally in the middle of Nebraska or Iowa to have their laptop backed up. We needed our infrastructure, our data center backed up and we needed our, our SaaS solutions backed up. We needed it all. And so we needed a partner like Druva to help us go get it wherever it's at. >>Talk about the value in, with Druva being cloud native. >>Yeah. To us it's a big deal, right? There's all sorts of products you could go by to go just do endpoint laptop protection or just do SAS backups. For us, the value is in learning one tool and mastering it and then taking it to wherever the data is. To me, we see a lot of value for that because we can have one team focus on one product, get good at it, and drive the value. >>That consolidation theme is big right now, you know, the economic headwinds and so forth. What was the catalyst for you? Was it, is that something you started, you know, years ago? Just it's good practice to do that? What's, >>Well, no, I mean luckily I'm in a very good position as a startup to do define it, you know, but I've been in those legacy organizations where we've got a lot of tech debt and then how do you consolidate your portfolio so that you can gain more value, right? Cause you only get one budget a year, right? And so I'm lucky in, in the learnings I've had in other enterprises to deal with this head on right now as we grow, don't add tech debt, put it in right. Today. >>Talk to us a little bit about the SaaS applications that you're backing up. You know, we, we talk a lot with customers, the shared, the shared responsibility model that a lot of customers aren't aware of. Where are you using that competing solution to protect SaaS applications before driven and talk about Yeah. The, the value in that going, the data protection is our responsibility and not the SA vendor. >>No, absolutely. I mean, and it is funny to go to, you know, it's like Office 365 applications and go to our, our CFO and a leadership and be like, no, we really gotta back it up to a third party. And they're like, but why? >>It's >>In the cloud, right? And so there's a lot of instruction I have to provide to my peers and, and, and my users to help them understand why these things matter. And, and, and it works out really well because we can show value really quick when anything happens. And now we get, I mean, even in SharePoint, people will come to us to restore things when they're fully empowered to do it. But my team's faster. And so we can just get it done for them. And so it's an extra from me, it's an extra SLA or never service level I can provide to my internal customers that, that gives them more faith and trust in my organization. >>How, how are the SEC op teams and the data protection teams, the backup teams, how are they coming together? Is is, is data protection backup just morphing into security? Is it more of an adjacency? What's that dynamic like? >>So I'd say right now, and, and I'll be curious to hear Jason's organization, but certainly what we see broadly is, you know, the, the teams are starting to work together, but I wouldn't say they're merging, right? Because, you know, you think of it in a couple of ways. The first is you've got a production environment and that needs to be secured. And then you've got a protection environment. And that protection environment also has to be secured. So the first conversation for a lot of backup teams is, alright, I need to actually work with the security team to make sure that, that my, my my backup environment, it's air gapped, it's encrypted, it's secured. Then I think the, the then I think you start to see people come together, especially as they go through, say, tabletop exercises for ransomware recovery, where it's, alright, where, where can the backup team add value here? >>Because certainly recovery, that's the basics. But as there log information you can provide, are there detection pieces that you can offer? So, so I think, you know, you start to see a partnership, but, but the reality is, you know, the, the two are still separate, right? Because, you know, my job as a a protection resiliency company is I wanna make sure that when you need your data, it's gonna be there for you. And I certainly want to, to to follow best secure practices and I wanna offer value to the security team, but there's a whole lot of the security ecosystem that I want to plug into. I'm not trying to replace them again. I want to be part of that broader ecosystem. >>So how, how do you guys approach it? Yeah, >>That's interesting. Yeah. So in my organization, we, we are one team and, and not to be too cheesy or you know, whatever, but as Amazon would say, security is job one. And so we treat it as if this is it. And so we never push something into production until we are ready. And ready to us means it's got a security package on it, it's backed up, the users have tested it, we are ready to go. It's not that we're ready just be to provide the service or the thing. It's that we are actually ready to productionize this. And so it's ready for production data and that slows us down in some cases. But that's where DevOps and this idea of just merging everything together into a central, how do we get this done together, has worked out really well for us. So, >>So it's really the DevOps team's responsibility. It's not a separate data protection function. >>Nope. Nope. We have specialists of course, right? Yeah, yeah. Because you need the extra level, the CISSPs and those people Yeah, yeah. To really know what they're doing, but they're just part of the team. Yeah. >>Talk about some of the business outcomes that you're achieving with Druva so far. >>Yeah. The business outcomes for me are, you know, I meet my SLAs that's promising. I can communicate that I feel more secure in the cloud and, and all of my workloads because I can restore it. And, and that to me helps everybody in my organization sleep well, sleep better. We are, we transport a lot of the carbon in a pipeline like Colonial. And so to us, we are, we are potential victims of, of a pipe, a non pipeline group, right? Attacking us, but it's carbon, you know, we're trying to get it outta atmosphere. And so by protecting it, no matter where it is, as long as we've got internet access, we can back it up. That provides tons of value to my team because we have hundreds of people in the field working for us every day who collect data and generate it. >>What would you say to a customer who's maybe on the fence looking at different technologies, why dva? >>You know, I think, you know, do the research in my mind, it'll win if you just do the research, right? I mean, there might be vendors that'll buy you nice dinners or whatever, and those are, those are nice things, but the, the reality is you have to protect your data no matter where it is. If it's in a SaaS application, if it's in a cloud provider, if it's infrastructure, wherever it is, you need it. And if you just go look at the facts, there it is, right? And so I, I'd say be objective. Look at the facts, it'll prove itself. >>Look at the data. There you go. Steven Druva recently announced a data resiliency guarantee with a big whopping financial sum. Talk to us a little bit about that, the value in it for your customers and for prospects, >>Right? So, so basically there's, there's really two parts to this guarantee. The first is, you know, across five different SLAs, and I'll talk about those, you know, if we violate those, the customers can get a payout of up to 10 million, right? So again, putting, putting our money where our mouth is in a pretty large amount. But, but for me, the exciting part, and this is, this is where Jason went, is it's about the SLAs, right? You know, one of Drew's goals is to say, look, we do the job for you, we do the service for you so you can offer that service to your company. And so the SLAs aren't just about ransomware, some of them certainly are, you know, that, that you're going to be able to recover your data in the event of a ransomware attack, that your data won't get exfiltrated as part of a ransomware attack. >>But also things like backup success rates, because as much as recovery matters a lot more than backup, you do need a backup if you're gonna be able to get that recovery done. There's also an SLA to say that, you know, if 10 years down the road you need to recover your data, it's still recoverable, right? So, so that kind of durability piece. And then of course the availability of the service because what's the point of a service if it's not there for you when you need it? And so, so having that breadth of coverage, I think really reflects who Druva is, which is we're doing this job for you, right? We want to make this this service available so you can focus on offering other value inside your business. And >>The insurance underwriters, if they threw holy water on >>That, they, they, they were okay with it. The legal people blessed it, you know, it, you know, the CEO signed off on it, the board of directors. So, you know, it, and it, it's all there in print, it's all there on the web. If you wanna look, you know, make sure, one of the things we wanted to be very clear on is that this isn't just a marketing gimmick that we're, we're putting, that we're putting substance behind it because a lot of these were already in our contracts anyway, because as a SAS vendor, you're signing up for service level agreements anyway. >>Yeah. But most of the service level agreements and SaaS vendors are crap. They're like, you know, hey, you know, if something bad happens, you know, we'll, we'll give you a credit, >>Right? >>For, you know, for when you were down. I mean, it's not, you never get into business impact. I mean, even aws, sorry, I mean, it's true. We're a customer. I read define print, I know what I'm signing up for. But, so that's, >>We read it a lot and we will not, we don't really care about the credits at all. We care about is it their force? Is it a partner? We trust, we fight that every day in our SLAs with our vendors >>In the end, right? I mean this, we are the last line of defense. We are the thing that keeps the business up and running. So if your business, you know, can't get to his data and can't operate, me coming to you and saying, Dave, I've got some credits for you after you, you know, after you declare bankruptcy, it'll be great. Yeah, that's not a win. >>It's no value, >>Not helpful. The goal's gotta be, your business is up and running cuz that's when we're both successful. So, so, so, you know, we view this as we're in it together, right? We wanna make sure your business succeeds. Again, it's not about slight of hand, it's not about, you know, just, just putting fine print in the contract. It's about standing up and delivering. Because if you can't do that, why are we here? Right? The number one thing we hear from our customers is Dr. Just works. And that's the thing I think I'm most proud of is Druva just works. >>So, speaking of Juva, just working, if there's a billboard in Santa Clara near the new offices about Druva, what's, what's the bumper sticker? What's the tagline? >>I, I, I think, I think that's it. I think Druva just works. Keeps your data safe. Simple as that. Safe and secure. Druva works to keep your data safe and secure. >>Saved me. >>Yeah. >>Truva just works. Guys, thanks so much for joining. David, me on the program. Great to have you back on the cube. Thank you. Talking about how you're working together, what Druva is doing to really putting, its its best foot forward. We appreciate your insights and your time. Thank >>You. Thanks guys. It's great to see you guys. Likewise >>The show for our guests and Dave Ante. I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching the Cube, the leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage.
SUMMARY :
This is the Cube live at And that really came to life last year. Guys, great to have you back on the program. Let's start with you giving the audience an understanding of the company. So Summit Carbon is the world's largest carbon capture and sequestration company capturing you know, ransomware is a, is, I know as you say, this is a, it's not a, if it's gonna happen, Yeah, you know, it really comes down to three things. Know it's so, so the first one is you can't trust the environment you're restoring into. you know, that one drive didn't get it. And, and if you think about it, some of the most high profile attacks, you know, on the, on the colonial pipeline, How do you protect the corrupt environment? And so you have an opportunity to just reconstruct it. So the answer is you gotta do it in the cloud. And so you can go through DR Jason, talk a little bit about how you are using Druva. And so as you pointed out, the ecosystem really matters because we grew out of email pretty quick as There's all sorts of products you could go by to go just do endpoint That consolidation theme is big right now, you know, the economic headwinds and so forth. And so I'm lucky in, in the learnings I've had in other enterprises to deal with this head Where are you using that competing solution I mean, and it is funny to go to, you know, it's like Office 365 applications And so there's a lot of instruction I have to provide to my peers and, and, and my users to help them but certainly what we see broadly is, you know, the, the teams are starting to work together, So, so I think, you know, or you know, whatever, but as Amazon would say, security is job one. So it's really the DevOps team's responsibility. Because you need the extra level, And so to us, we are, we are potential victims of, of a pipe, You know, I think, you know, do the research in my mind, it'll win if you just do the There you go. you know, that, that you're going to be able to recover your data in the event of a ransomware attack, to say that, you know, if 10 years down the road you need to recover your data, it's still recoverable, The legal people blessed it, you know, it, you know, hey, you know, if something bad happens, you know, we'll, For, you know, for when you were down. We read it a lot and we will not, we don't really care about the credits at all. me coming to you and saying, Dave, I've got some credits for you after you, you know, Again, it's not about slight of hand, it's not about, you know, just, I think Druva just works. Great to have you back on the cube. It's great to see you guys. the leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage.
SENTIMENT ANALYSIS :
ENTITIES
Entity | Category | Confidence |
---|---|---|
David | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Lisa Martin | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Dave | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Dave Valante | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Amazon | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Jason | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Stephen Manley | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Steven Druva | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Nebraska | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
AWS | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Las Vegas | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
Santa Clara | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
Iowa | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
Steven | PERSON | 0.99+ |
10 years | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Two guests | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Dave Ante | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Jason Cradit | PERSON | 0.99+ |
last year | DATE | 0.99+ |
two parts | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
first | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Summit Carbon | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Today | DATE | 0.99+ |
two alumni | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Summit Carbon Solutions | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
two | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
today | DATE | 0.99+ |
Druva | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
pandemic | EVENT | 0.98+ |
Drew | PERSON | 0.98+ |
SAS | ORGANIZATION | 0.98+ |
Office 365 | TITLE | 0.98+ |
one | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
one big | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
SharePoint | TITLE | 0.98+ |
second thing | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
both | QUANTITY | 0.97+ |
third one | QUANTITY | 0.97+ |
third thing | QUANTITY | 0.97+ |
four days | QUANTITY | 0.97+ |
up to 10 million | QUANTITY | 0.97+ |
three things | QUANTITY | 0.97+ |
one team | QUANTITY | 0.97+ |
Truva | ORGANIZATION | 0.97+ |
one product | QUANTITY | 0.96+ |
first one | QUANTITY | 0.96+ |
hundreds of people | QUANTITY | 0.94+ |
five different SLAs | QUANTITY | 0.94+ |
Jason crat | PERSON | 0.93+ |
2020s | DATE | 0.93+ |
second | QUANTITY | 0.93+ |
first thing | QUANTITY | 0.93+ |
Druva | TITLE | 0.91+ |
tens of thousands of people | QUANTITY | 0.91+ |
Juva | PERSON | 0.91+ |
second big | QUANTITY | 0.89+ |
CTO | PERSON | 0.89+ |
one tool | QUANTITY | 0.86+ |
Druva | PERSON | 0.85+ |
years ago | DATE | 0.85+ |
15 million tons of carbon | QUANTITY | 0.85+ |
DevOps | TITLE | 0.82+ |
one budget a year | QUANTITY | 0.82+ |
Druva | LOCATION | 0.79+ |
Dr. | PERSON | 0.77+ |
one drive | QUANTITY | 0.77+ |
every year | QUANTITY | 0.76+ |
tier one | QUANTITY | 0.73+ |
DevOps | ORGANIZATION | 0.72+ |
Muddu Sudhakar, Aisera | Supercloud22
(upbeat music) >> Welcome back everyone to Supercloud22, I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here in Palo Alto. For this next ecosystem's segment we have Muddu Sudhakar, who is the co-founder and CEO of Aisera, a friend of theCUBE, Cube alumni, serial entrepreneur, multiple exits, been on multiple times with great commentary. Muddu, thank you for coming on, and supporting our- >> Also thank you for having me, John. >> Yeah, thank you. Great handshake there, I love to do it. One, I wanted you here because, two reasons, one is, congratulations on your new funding. >> Thank you. >> For $90 million, Series D funding. >> Series D funding. >> So, huge validation in this market. >> It is. >> You have been experienced software so, it's a real testament to your team. But also, you're kind of in the Supercloud vortex. This new wave that Supercloud is part of is, I call it the pretext to what's coming with multi-clouds. It is the next level. >> I see. >> Structural change and we have been reporting on it, Dave and I, and we are being challenged. So, we decided to open it up. >> Very good, I would love it. >> And have a conversation rather than waiting eight months to prove that we are right. Which, we are right, but that is a long story. >> You're always right. (both laughs) >> What do you think of Supercloud, that's going on? What is the big trend? Because its public cloud is great, so there is no conflict there. >> Right. >> It's got great business, it's integrated, IaaS, to SaaS, PaaS, all in the beginning, or the middle. All that is called good. Now you have on-premise high rate cloud. >> Right. >> Edge is right around the corner. Exploding in new capabilities. So, complexity is still here. >> That's right, I think, you nailed it. We talk about hybrid cloud, and multi cloud. Supercloud is kind of elevates the message even better. Because you still have to leave for some of our clouds, public clouds. There will be some of our clouds, still running on the Edge. That's where, the Edge cloud comes in. Some will still be on-prem. So, the Supercloud as a concept is beyond hybrid and multi cloud. To me, I will run some of our cloud on Amazon. Some could be on Aisera, some could be running only on Edge, right? >> Mm hm >> And we still have, what we call remote executors. Some leaders of service now. You have, what we call the mid-server, is what I think it was called. Where you put in a small code and run it. >> Yeah. >> So, I think all those things will be running on-prem environment and VMware cloud, et cetera. >> And if you look back at, I think it has been five years now, maybe four or five years since Andy Jassy at reInvent announced Outposts. Think that was the moment in time that Dave and I took this pause back and said "Okay, that's Amazon." who listens to their customers. Acknowledging Hybrid. >> Right. >> Then we saw the rise of Snowflakes, the Databricks, specialty clouds. You start to see people who are building on top of AWS. But at MongoDB, it is a database, now they are a full blown, large scale data platform. These companies took advantage of the public cloud to build, as Jerry Chen calls it, "Castles in the cloud." >> Right. >> That seems to be happening in all areas. What do you think about that? >> Right, so what is driving the cloud? To me, we talk about machine learning in AI, right? Versus clouded options. We used to call it lift and shift. The outposts and lift and shift. Initially this was to get the data into the cloud. I think if you see, the vendor that I like the most, is, I'm not picking any favorite but, Microsoft Azure, they're thinking like your Supercloud, right? Amazon is other things, but Azure is a lot more because they run on-prem. They are also on Azure CloudFront, Amazon CloudFront. So I think, Azure and Amazon are doing a lot more in the area of Supercloud. What is really helping is the machine learning environment, needs Superclouds. Because I will be running some on the Edge, some compute, some will be running on the public cloud, some could be running on my data center. So, I think the Supercloud is really suited for AI and automation really well. >> Yeah, it is a good point about Microsoft, too. And I think Microsoft's existing install base saved Azure. >> Okay. >> They brought Office 365, Sequel Server, cause their customers weren't leaving Microsoft. They had the productivity thing nailed down as well as the ability to catch up >> That's right. >> To AWS. So, natural extension to on-premise with Microsoft. >> I think... >> Tell us- >> Your Supercloud is what Microsoft did. Right? Azure. If you think of, like, they had an Office 365, their SharePoint, their Dynamics, taking all of those properties, running on the Azure. And still giving the migration path into a data center. Is Supercloud. So, the early days Supercloud came from Azure. >> Well, that's a good point, we will certainly debate that. I will also say that Snowflake built on AWS. >> That's right. >> Okay, and became a super powerhouse with the data business. As did Databricks. >> That's right. >> Then went to Azure >> That's right. >> So, you're seeing kind of the Playbook. >> Right. >> Go fast on Cloud Native, the native cloud. Get that fly wheel going, then get going, somewhere else. >> It is, and to that point I think you and me are talking, right? If you are to start at one cloud and go to another cloud, the amount of work as a vendor for us to use for implement. Today, like we use all three clouds, including the Gov Cloud. It's a lot of work. So, what will happen, the next toolkit we use? Even services like Elastic. People will not, the word commoditize, is not the word, but people will create an abstraction layer, even for S3. >> Explain that, explain that in detail. So, elastic? What do you mean by that? >> Yeah, so what that means is today, Elasticsearch, if you do an Elasticsearch on Amazon, if I go to Azure, I don't want enter another Elasticsearch layer. Ideally I want us to write an abstracted search layer. So, that when I move my services into a different cloud I don't want to re-compute and re-calculate everything. That's a lot of work. Particularly once you have a production customer, if I were to shift the workloads, even to the point of infrastructure, take S3, if I read infrastructure to S3 and tomorrow I go to Azure. Azure will have its own objects store. I don't want to re-validate that. So what will happen is digital component, Kubernetes is already there, we want storage, we want network layer, we want VPM services, elastic as well as all fundamental stuff, including MongoDB, should be abstracted to run. On the Superclouds. >> Okay, well that is a little bit of a unicorn fantasy. But let's break that down. >> Sure. >> Do you think that's possible? >> It is. Because I think, if I am on MongoDB, I should be able to give a horizontal layer to MongoDB that is optimized for all three of them. I don't want MongoDB. >> First of all, everyone will buy that. >> Sure. >> I'm skeptical that that's possible. Given where we are at right now. So, you're saying that a vendor will provide an abstraction layer. >> No, I'm saying that either MongoDB, itself will do it, or a third party layer will come as a service which will abstract all this layer so that we will write to an AP layer. >> So what do you guys doing? How do you handle multiple clouds? You guys are taking that burden on, because it makes sense, you should build the abstraction layer. Not rely on a third party vendor right? >> We are doing it because there is no third party available offer it. But if you offer a third party tomorrow, I will use that as a Supercloud service. >> If they're 100% reliable? >> That's right. That's exactly it. >> They have to do the work. >> They have to do the work because if today I am doing it because no one else is offering it- >> Okay so what people might not know is that you are an angel investor as well as an entrepreneur been very successful, so you're rich, you have a lot of money. If I were a startup and I said, Muddu, I want to build this abstraction layer. What would be funding advice that you would give me as an entrepreneur? As a company to do that? >> I would do it like an Apigee that Google acquired, you should create an Apigee-like layer, for infrastructure upfront services, I think that is a very good option. >> And you think that is viable? >> It is very much viable. >> Would that be part of Supercloud architecture, in your opinion? >> It is. Right? And that will abstract all the clouds to some level. Like it is like Kubernetes abstract, so that if I am running on Kubernetes I can transfer to any cloud. >> Yeah >> But that should go from computer into other infrastructures. >> It's seems to me, Muddu, and I want to get your thoughts about this whole Supercloud defacto standard opportunity. It feels like we are waiting for a moment where there is some sort of defacto unification, whether it is in the distraction layer, or a standards body. There is no W3C here going on. I mean, W3C was for web consortium, for world wide web. The Supercloud seems to be having the same impact the web had. Transformative, disruptive, re-factoring business operations. Is there a standardized body or an opportunity for a defacto? Like Kubernetes was a great example of a unification around something for orchestration. Is there a better version in the Supercloud model where we need a standard? >> Yes and no. The reason is because by the time you come to standard, take time to look what happened. First, we started with VMs, then became Docker and Containers then we came to Kubernetes. So it goes through a journey. I think the next few years will be stood on SuperCloud let's make customers happy, let's make enough services going, and then the standards will come. Standards will be almost 2-3 years later. So I don't think standards should happen right now. Right now, all we need is, we need enough start ups to create the super layer abstraction, with the goal in mind of AI automation. The reason, AI is because AI needs to be able to run that. Automated because running a work flow is, I can either run a workflow in the cloud services, I can run it on on-prem, I can run it on database, so you have two good applications, take AI and automation with Supercloud and make enough enough noise on that make enough applications, then the standards will come. >> On this project we have been with SuperCloud these past day we have heard a lot of people talking. The themes that developers are okay, they are doing great. Open source is booming. >> Yes >> Cloud Native's got major traction. Developers are going fast and they love it, shifting left, all these great things. They're putting a lot of data, DevOps and the security teams, they're the ones who are leveling up. We are hearing a lot of conversations around how they can be faster. What is your view on this as relative to that Supercloud nirvana getting there? How are DevOps and security teams leveling up to devs? >> A couple of things. I think that in the world of DevSecOps and security ops. The reason security is important, right? Given what is going on, but you don't need to do security the manual way. I think that whole new operation that you and me talked about, AI ops should happen. Where the AI ops is for service operation, for performance, for incident or for security. Nobody thinks of AI security. So, the DevOps people should think more world of AI ops, so that I can predict, prevent things before they happen. Then the security will be much better. So AI ops with Supercloud will probably be that nirvana. But that is what should happen. >> In the AI side of things, what you guys are doing, what are you learning, on scale, relative to data? Is there, you said machine learning needs data, it needs scale operation. What's your view on the automation piece of all this? >> I think to me, the data is the single, underrated, unsung kind of hero in the whole machine learning. Everyone talks about AI and machine learning algorithms. Algorithms are as important, but even more important is data. Lack of data I can't do algorithms. So my advice to customers is don't lose your data. That is why I see, Frank, my old boss, setting everything up into the data cloud, in Snowflake. Data is so important, store the data, analyze the data. Data is the new AI. You and me talk so many times- >> Yeah >> It's underrated, people are not anticipating how important it is. But the data is coming from logs, events, whether there is knowledge documents, any data in any form. I think keep the data, analyze the data, data patterns, and then things like SuperCloud can really take advantage of that. >> So, in the Supercloud equation one of the things that has come up is that the native clouds do great. Their IaaS to SaaS is interactions that solve a lot of problems. There is integration that is good. >> Right. >> Now when you go off cloud, you get regions, get latency issues- >> Right >> You have more complexity. So what's the trade off in the Supercloud journey, if you had to guess? And just thinking out loud here, what would be some of the architectural trade offs of how you do it, what's the sequence? What's the order of operations to get Superclouding going? >> Yeah, very good questions here. I think once you start going from the public cloud, the clouds there scale to lets say, even a regional data center onto an Edge, latency will kick in. The lack of computer function will kick in. So there I think everything should become asynchronous, right? You will run the application in a limited environment. You should anticipate for small memories, small compute, long latencies, but still following should happen. So some operations should become the old-school following, like, it's like the email. I send an email, it's an asynchronous thing, I made a sponsor, I think most of message passing should go back to the old-school architectures They should become asynchronous where thing can rely. I think, as long as algorithms can take that into Edge, I think that Superclouds can really bridge between the public cloud to the edge. >> Muddu, thanks for coming, we really appreciate your insights here. You've always been a great friend, great commentator. If you weren't the CEO and a famous angel investor, we would certainly love to have you as a theCUBE analyst, here on theCUBE. >> I am always available for you. (John laughs) >> When you retire, you can come back. Final point, we've got time left. We'll give you a chance to talk about the company. I'm really intrigued by the success of your ninety million dollar financing realm because we are in a climate where people aren't getting those kinds of investments. It's usually down-rounds. >> Okay >> 409 adjustments, people are struggling. You got an up-round and you got a big number. Why the success? What is going on with the company? Why are you guys getting such great validation? Goldman Sachs, Thoma Bravo, Zoom, these are big names, these are the next gen winners. >> It is. >> Why are they picking you? Why are they investing in you? >> I think it is not one thing, it is many things. First all, I think it is a four-year journey for us where we are right now. So, the company started late 2017. It is getting the right customers, partners, employees, team members. So it is a lot hard work went in. So a lot of thanks to the Aisera community for where we are. Why customers and where we are? Look, fundamentally there is a problem to solve. Like, what Aisera is trying to solve is can we automate customer service? Whether internal employees, external customer support. Do it for IT, HR, sales, marketing, all the way to ops. Like you talk about DevSecOps, I don't want thousands of tune ups for ops. If I can make that job better, >> Yeah >> I want to, any job I want to automate. I call it, elevate the human, right? >> Yeah. >> And that's the reason- >> 'Cause you're saying people have to learn specialty tools, and there are consequences to that. >> Right, and to me, people should focus on more important tasks and use AI as a tool to automate those things right? It's like thinking of offering Apple City as Alexa as a service, that is how we are trying to offer customer service, like, right? And if it can do that consistently, and reduce costs, cost is a big reason why customers like us a lot, we have eliminated the cost in this down economy, I will amplify our message even more, right? I am going to take a bite out of their expense. Whether it is tool expense, it's on resources. Second, is user productivity And finally, experience. People want experience. >> Final question, folks out there, first of all, what do you think about Supercloud? And if someone asks you what is this Supercloud thing? How would you answer? >> Supercloud, is, to me, beyond multi cloud and hybrid cloud. It is to bridge applications that are build in Supercloud can run on all clouds seamlessly. You don't need to compile them, re-clear them. Supercloud is one place to build, develop, and deploy. >> Great, Muddu. Thank you for coming on. Supercloud22 here breaking it down with the ecosystem commentary, we have a lot of people coming to the small group of experts in our network, bringing you in open conversation around the future of cloud computing and applications globally. And again, it is all about the next generation cloud. This is theCUBE, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)
SUMMARY :
Muddu, thank you for coming Great handshake there, I love to do it. I call it the pretext to what's Dave and I, and we are being challenged. to prove that we are right. You're always right. What is the big trend? the beginning, or the middle. Edge is right around the corner. So, the Supercloud as a concept is beyond And we still have, what things will be running And if you look back at, of the public cloud to build, What do you think about that? I think if you see, And I think Microsoft's existing They had the productivity So, natural extension to And still giving the migration I will also say that Okay, and became a super powerhouse Native, the native cloud. and to that point I think you What do you mean by that? Kubernetes is already there, we want storage, But let's break that down. I should be able to give a a vendor will provide so that we will write to an AP layer. So what do you guys doing? I will use that as a Supercloud service. That's right. that you would give me I think that is a very good option. the clouds to some level. But that should go from computer in the Supercloud model in the cloud services, a lot of people talking. DevOps and the security teams, Then the security will be much better. what you guys are doing, I think to me, the data But the data is coming from logs, events, is that the native clouds do great. in the Supercloud journey, between the public cloud to the edge. have you as a theCUBE analyst, I am always available for you. I'm really intrigued by the success Why the success? So a lot of thanks to the Aisera I call it, elevate the human, right? and there are consequences to that. I am going to take a bite It is to bridge around the future of cloud computing
SENTIMENT ANALYSIS :
ENTITIES
Entity | Category | Confidence |
---|---|---|
Dave | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Frank | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Amazon | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Aisera | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Microsoft | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Andy Jassy | PERSON | 0.99+ |
$90 million | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Muddu Sudhakar | PERSON | 0.99+ |
100% | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Jerry Chen | PERSON | 0.99+ |
four-year | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
AWS | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
John | PERSON | 0.99+ |
John Furrier | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Goldman Sachs | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Palo Alto | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
Muddu | PERSON | 0.99+ |
ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ | |
five years | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
eight months | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
late 2017 | DATE | 0.99+ |
tomorrow | DATE | 0.99+ |
four | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
today | DATE | 0.99+ |
two reasons | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Second | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Today | DATE | 0.99+ |
Elasticsearch | TITLE | 0.99+ |
First | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
MongoDB | TITLE | 0.99+ |
Cube | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
one | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
W3C | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
S3 | TITLE | 0.98+ |
One | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
Office 365 | TITLE | 0.98+ |
Supercloud | ORGANIZATION | 0.98+ |
Elastic | TITLE | 0.98+ |
Databricks | ORGANIZATION | 0.98+ |
Aisera | PERSON | 0.98+ |
theCUBE | ORGANIZATION | 0.98+ |
two good applications | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
ninety million dollar | QUANTITY | 0.97+ |
thousands | QUANTITY | 0.96+ |
409 adjustments | QUANTITY | 0.96+ |
Dynamics | TITLE | 0.96+ |
single | QUANTITY | 0.96+ |
three | QUANTITY | 0.95+ |
Azure | TITLE | 0.95+ |
SharePoint | TITLE | 0.94+ |
Gov Cloud | TITLE | 0.94+ |
Edge | TITLE | 0.94+ |
Kubernetes | TITLE | 0.94+ |
Zoom | ORGANIZATION | 0.94+ |
one thing | QUANTITY | 0.93+ |
SuperCloud | ORGANIZATION | 0.93+ |
one cloud | QUANTITY | 0.91+ |
Bren Briggs, Hypergiant | CUBE Conversation, July 2021
(digital music) >> Welcome to this CUBE Conversation. I'm Lisa Martin. Bren Briggs, joins me next, the Director of DevOps and Cybersecurity at Hypergiant. Bren, welcome to theCUBE. >> Hey there, I'm glad to be here. >> You have a very cool background, which I wish we had time to get into your mandolin playing, but we don't. Tell me a little bit about Hypergiant this is a company that's new to me? >> So we are an AI and Machine Learning Company, and we had the slogan we talked about a lot, it's almost tongue in cheek, "Tomorrowing Today" where we want to build and focus on technology that advances the state-of-the-art and we want to, where this deep history and background in services, where we build custom solutions for companies that have data problems and that have AI and machine learning problems. And they come to us and we help them make sense of their data and we build a custom software solution from top to bottom. And we help them with their data problems and their really difficult problems that they have there in a very specialized way. And yeah, that's what we do. It's really fun. >> "Tomorrowing Today", I like that build T-shirts with that on that. (Bren chuckles) So talk to me about the work that you guys are doing with SUSE Rancher Government Labs. You're doing some very cool work with the air force, help me understand that. >> Sure, so about a year and some change ago, we had a government contract, an air force contract, to develop some new or just to basically write an experiment with some new sensing technology onboard a satellite. So we built this satellite, we were talking about how we're going to employ DevOps' best practices on the satellite and if that's even a thing that can be done. How we get these rights of space and really thinking through the entire process. And as we did this, we were getting more and more deeply involved with a very very new group. Actually, we kind of started at the same time. A new group within the air force called, Platform One. Platform One's mission is to bring DevSecOps to the DoD Enterprise. And so as we're kind of starting off together and getting to know each other, Rob Slaughter who started and ran Platform One for the first bit of his existence, he said, "hey, we're going to incorporate some Platform One stuff into this. Let's talk about just building an actual Platform One satellite and see what that looks like." And so that was kind of the start of this whole idea was what do we do and how do we do DevSecOps in low Earth orbit? Can we put Kubernetes on satellite and will it work? >> And tell me some of the results? So, I used to work for NASA, so I would geek out on anything that has to do with the space program. But talk to me about some of the things that you uncovered bringing Kubernetes, AI, machine learning to this, outer Edge of Earth? >> I think the first thing that we learned that I think, it's an understatement to say that space is hard. (Both laughing) But it really is. And that was the part that we learned about was it was hard in all of the ways that we did not expect. And a lot of it had to do with just government and logistics. We learned that it is difficult a lot of times to just to find a way to get into space and then once you're there, how you operate in the conditions that you're in and how you could even communicate with your satellite is it's just a logistical adventure on top of all of the other engineering problems that you have while you're on low Earth orbit? The other thing that we figured out was awkward things are difficult. While you're on orbit, they can be slow or fragmented and so it pays to get it right the first time but that's not the nature of modern software development is you'd never get it right and you're continually updating. So that was a problem that really nagged us for awhile was after we did the wider experiment, like how would we continuously update this and what would we do? And those ideas and questions fed into the experiment that became Sat One and then the follow one much bigger experiment that became the Edge One and Edge working group. >> Tell me a little bit about the wider experiment, give me some context of how that relates to Platform One, Sat One? >> I can't (laughing) I can't really go into details about what wider did or anything like that. It was not a classified mission, it's just not something that I can disclose. >> Okay, got it. >> Sorry. >> So talk to me about some of the work that you guys are doing together Hypergiant with SUSE in terms of pushing forward the next generation of Kubernetes to low Earth orbit and beyond. >> Sure, so SUSE RGS, specifically, Chris Nuber, like, one of the things that I have to do is I have to be a cheerleader for all of the amazing people that were on this project. And two people in particular, Chris Tacke and Chris Nuber, were instrumental in making this work. I was like almost tangentially involved where I was doing some input and architecture and helping debug but it was really Chris Tacke and Chris Nuber that made this thing, that built this thing and made it work. And Chris Nuber, was our assigned resource from SUSE RGS. And he said, "Obviously SUSE is going to prefer, or SUSE is going to prefer SUSE products." That it makes sense. But there's a reason because the products that he implemented and the patterns that he implemented and the architecture and expertise that he brought were second to none, I don't think that we could have done better with any other distribution of Kubernetes. He recommended a K3s is a very lightweight Kubernetes distribution that had really good opinions. It's a single binary. It was very easy to deploy and manage and update and it just, it really didn't break. That was the best thing that we were looking for (chuckles) it was one solid piece with no moving parts, relatively speaking. And so Chris Nuber was very essential in providing the Kubernetes architecture while Chris Tacky was the one who helped us write some of the demo applications and build the fail over and out of band interaction that we were going to have from the hardware on the satellite to the Kubernetes control plane. >> Very cool. It sounds like you had a great collaborative team there, which is essential in any environment. >> We deed. >> And I liked how you described space as a logistical adventure that reminds me very much of my days at NASA. (Bren laughing) It definitely is a logistical adventure to put it mildly. Talk to me a little bit about the work that you're doing to define the Edge for the Department of Defense? That sounds very intriguing. >> Yeah, so this was almost a direct result of what happened with the sat one experiment where Rob Slaughter and a few of the other folks who saw what we did with sat one, you know, were again, logistical adventure. We built this entire thing and we worked so hard and we're moving through fright flight readiness checks and as things happen, funding kind of went. And so you've got all this experience and this like, prototype that this really confident that it's space ready and everything and they said, "hey, listen, you know, we have the same problem on our flight with terrestrial environments, they're nearly identical the only difference is, you know, you don't have to worry about radiation nearly as much." (laughing) So then, you know, we joked about that and we started this new idea, this Edge One idea as part of the AVMs program, where they're figuring out this new, like battlefield communications pattern of the future. And one of the things that they're really concerned about is secure processing and how do you do applications at like where people are stationed, which could be anywhere in very remote locations. Then that's what turned into Edge One is, you know, we imagined initially Edge One as satellite one without wings and earth bound and that grew into, well, what about submarines? What about carriers? What about command and control squadrons that are stationed in cities? What about special operators that are far forward? What about first responders who are moving into, you know, hazardous environmental conditions? Can you wear a Kubernetes cluster with like super low power arm chips? And so we started thinking of all these different applications of what Edge could be anywhere from a five volt board all the way up to a data center in a box. And that caused us to realize that we're going to break Edge into really three categories based on the amount of material or resources needed to power it and how hard it is to get to. So we have the Near Edge, which is, you know, you have data center like capabilities, and it's easy to get to it, but you, because you have people stationed with it, but you may have reached back once every month or so. So think, you know, a shift that's underway or an air gap system or something like that. And then you have a Tiny Edge, which is exactly like kind of the more traditional idea that you think of when you think of Edge, which is really, really tiny compute, maybe it's on a windmill or something I don't really know, pick your thing to put Kubernetes on that should never have Kubernetes, that's the kind of thing. And then you've got Far Edge, which is, you know, if the control plane crashes, good luck, you'll never getting to it. And so that would be a satellite. And so the far it... so really a lot of these, it depends on the failure mode. Like what happens when it fails and that for the most part defines kind of what category you're going to be in. >> Tiny Edge, Near Edge and Far Edge. I think Sir. Richard Branson and his team went to the Far Edge (chuckles) low Earth orbit >> He did (laughing). >> This last weekend, I guess, yeah. That low Earth orbit does seem like it would be the Far Edge. Talk to me a little bit about, I mean, you talk about these applications then from a defense perspective that very dramatically, what are some of the important lessons that you've learned besides if it breaks in the Far Edge, you're not getting to it. >> Some of the important lessons that we learned. So I actually did this exact job in the air force. I was a combat communicator, which meant that we took, by pure coincidence I'm back in this, like, I did not intend for this to happen its pure coincidence, (Lisa laughing) but, you know, we communicate, we went out to the Edge, right. We went out to the Near Edge and we did all of this stuff. And the biggest lesson, I think learning from doing this or doing that and then going into this is that the world doesn't have to revolve around SharePoint anymore (Lisa laughing) because we can shape our own habitation (Both laughing) >> That is good to know. >> If it can be done on SharePoint, the air force and the army will do it in SharePoint, I promise you. They've done some actually terrifying things with it. All joking aside though, I think that one of the things that we learned was the difference between like something being complex and complicated when it came to systems engineering and management, like this is a very complex system it's actually orders of magnitude more complex than the current deployments that are out there which is effectively VMware and you're migrating virtual machines across multiple physical nodes in these remote data centers. But it's also complicated, it's really difficult to manage these deployments and the hardware. And I remember like when I was in combat comm, we had this 72 hour goal to get all of our systems up. And it was kind of like a 50-50, if we would make it, it felt like most of the time where you had priorities for getting things up and running. And obviously, you know, that certain applications weren't as important as others. So they were the ones that had to fall on the wayside if you're going to make your 72 hour mark. But I'm just thinking about like how difficult it was to deploy and manage all of this stuff and now with Kubernetes, yes, the complexity is far higher, but we can make it so it's not as complicated. We can offload a lot of that brain sweat, the people in the rear echelon, where they can connect in remotely after you come up and you get reached back, they push your config and your mission profile is there. And now you're focused on the mission you're not focused on debugging pods, and you're focused on the mission and not focused on, you know, why my virtual machine didn't migrate or something like that. And we can get applications that are built in-house and updated continuously, and we can verify and validate the sources of where these things are coming from. And all of these are important problems to everybody, not just the military, but the military tends to have the money and the ability to think about these things first, 'cause that's where these problems tend to get solved first. >> So interesting. You've sort of had this circular experience being in the air force, now coming back and working on projects like this, what are some of the things that Hypergiant has learned? And some of the things that are next next for Hypergiant as a company? >> I think that we are getting really good at being a small contractor in the Federal space where we actually were just awarded an IDIQ with a cap of $950 million in a small group of, I think, 23 other companies. And so that shows right there the investment that the Federal Government has in us and the potential that they see for us to build and deliver these highly tailored and specialized solutions. The other thing that we've learned is how to form like coalitions to collaborate with a lot of these other smaller companies. I think that the days of seeing the Defense Industrial Base dominated by the same four people or five people are over. And it's not that these people, I mean, they've been, they've basically been propping up most of the defense industry for a very long time and I think a lot of people would argue that, you know, this is a problem, right, you have this near monopoly of a very few people, but the other thing is that they're not as nimble, they grow by acquisition and we have this ability to be highly tailored and specialized and we don't need to do everything in the world to survive. We can go and form coalitions with other groups to go solve a particular problem. Like we're great at AI and ML, and we're great at DevSecOps, then maybe we're not so great at, you know, hardware or you know, things like that. Like we can go partner up with these people and solve problems together and we don't have to be a Boeing to do it and you don't have to go hire a Boeing to do this. And I think that's really, really great, no slight to Boeing, but I think it's really great that it's a lot easier for smaller companies to do this and we are navigating this new world and we're bringing Agile into the government and that's, yeah, in some cases we have to drag them, kicking and screaming into this decade, but, you know, that's what we're doing and I'm very excited to see that because when I was in Agile and DevOps, those were words you didn't say, you weren't allowed to do that. >> No. >> Now they've done a complete 180, it's really cool. >> That's cool. I have a minimum that brings in thought diversity, having more companies to work with, but to your point, the agility that you bring in as a smaller company helping them to actually embrace Agile, that's huge because to your point, that's kind of historically not what government organizations are used to. So it sounds like a little bit they've learned a tremendous amount from working with small companies like Pepperdine. >> I like the thing so. Platform One is a fantastic example. So it was really started as a what we're calling software factories within the air force and within the DOD and other DOD branches have now started to replicate the pattern. So we have several software factories within the air force and Platform One is like the DevSecOps Software factory, and we have the ski camp and space camping, Kobayashi Maru and you're noticing a theme here (laughing) and so they're very nerdy names, but so we have these software factories and there's all these projects are being worked. But one of the amazing things I noticed when I showed up to work on the first day was that I had no idea who was uniformed and who was civilian. It was a completely badge off rank, off situation. Very few people showed up in uniform and the ones that did typically had their blouse off so you had no idea what their rank was. Everybody went by first name and we behaved like a start-up. And these civilians were coming from other startups like Hypergiant or a Timo or other very small, very specialized groups and SUSE RGS, of course they were there too and they're embedded in several different teams. And so you have this, like this quasi company that got this startup really that got formed and the culture is very, you know, very varies, you know, bay area startup type in some ways, for both better and worse. There's, I mean, we're, definitely full tilt on (laughs) on the Agile train there, but it's just, it's like nothing I've ever seen inside the DOD. And they're not just learning from these small companies and from Agile companies, but they're behaving like them. And it's spreading, they're seeing what work is getting done and what can be accomplished and how you can continuously deliver value instead of working for, you know, six or eight months and then showing the customer something and them hating it and you sending it back and, you know, it's more of a continuous improvement type thing. And I think that they're embracing that and I'm very excited to see it. >> That's important 'cause changing a culture is incredibly hard but seeing and hearing that they're embracing that is exciting. And I'm sure there's going to be many more things you could talk about generally, but I got to ask you if somebody like SUSE gave you $250,000, and you could buy one of the tickets on Branson's next flight, would you do it? >> I mean, yeah, why would I not? Like, how can I pass up a trip, (Lisa laughing) you know, go to the Edge of space. >> The Far Edge. >> Like yeah, the Far Edge, maybe I'll just, you know, hurdle the satellite out the window, as you know, we're up there, you know, peak and probably could throw it quite that fast, but we'll see. (Lisa laughing) But yeah, no, I think I would take the trip, yeah, that'd be fun. >> You're brave. Brave than I'm, I don't know. Well, Bren it's been delightful talking to you. Thank you for sharing what you guys at Hypergiant and SUSE have been doing together, the Department of Defense, the exciting things going on there and for the new definitions and my lexicon of the Edge, it's been great talking to you. >> Thank you, have a great day. >> You too. For Bren Briggs, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching a CUBE Conversation. (digital music)
SUMMARY :
the Director of DevOps and this is a company that's new to me? and we had the slogan So talk to me about the and getting to know each other, the things that you uncovered and so it pays to get that I can disclose. that you guys are doing and the patterns that he implemented It sounds like you had a great And I liked how you described space and that for the most part Richard Branson and his team besides if it breaks in the Far Edge, and we did all of this stuff. and the ability to think And some of the things that and the potential that they see 180, it's really cool. the agility that you bring and the ones that did and you could buy one of the tickets you know, go to the Edge of space. the window, as you know, and my lexicon of the Edge, For Bren Briggs, I'm Lisa Martin.
SENTIMENT ANALYSIS :
ENTITIES
Entity | Category | Confidence |
---|---|---|
Lisa Martin | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Rob Slaughter | PERSON | 0.99+ |
$250,000 | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Chris Tacke | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Boeing | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
NASA | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
July 2021 | DATE | 0.99+ |
Hypergiant | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Bren Briggs | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Chris Nuber | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Richard Branson | PERSON | 0.99+ |
SUSE | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
72 hour | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
six | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
$950 million | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Bren | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Chris Tacky | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Department of Defense | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
two people | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Earth | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
Pepperdine | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
eight months | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
SUSE Rancher Government Labs | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Agile | TITLE | 0.99+ |
five people | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
first thing | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
SharePoint | TITLE | 0.98+ |
first time | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
four people | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
23 other companies | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
both | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
DevSecOps | ORGANIZATION | 0.98+ |
five volt | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
Both | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
Platform One | ORGANIZATION | 0.98+ |
one | QUANTITY | 0.97+ |
Lisa | PERSON | 0.97+ |
one solid piece | QUANTITY | 0.97+ |
Kobayashi Maru | ORGANIZATION | 0.95+ |
first day | QUANTITY | 0.95+ |
Kubernetes | TITLE | 0.95+ |
Edge One | COMMERCIAL_ITEM | 0.94+ |
DevOps | TITLE | 0.94+ |
Timo | ORGANIZATION | 0.94+ |
Branson | PERSON | 0.94+ |
DOD | TITLE | 0.93+ |
about a year | DATE | 0.93+ |
DevSecOps | TITLE | 0.93+ |
SUSE RGS | TITLE | 0.92+ |
three categories | QUANTITY | 0.92+ |
last weekend | DATE | 0.9+ |
first responders | QUANTITY | 0.87+ |
Danny Allan, Veeam | VeeamON 2021
(upbeat music) >> 2020 was the most unpredictable year of our lives, a forced shutdown of global economies left everyone have the conclusion that the tech industry spending would decline and of course it did, but you'd hardly know it if you watch the stock market and the momentum of several well-positioned companies. Those firms that had products and services that catered to the pivot to work from home, SAS based solutions were focused on business resiliency and cloud saw huge growth. The forced match to digital turned a buzzword into reality overnight, where if you weren't a digital business, you were out of business. And one of the companies participating in that growth trend was Veeam. Veeam virtual is scheduled to take place on May 25th and 26th. And it's one of our favorite physical events and the Cube will be there again as a virtual participant. One of our traditions prior to VeeamON has always been to bring in an executive into the Cube and talk not only about what to expect at the show, but what's happening in the market. And with me is many times Cube alum Danny Allan is the chief technology officer at Veeam. Danny welcome is always great to see you. >> I am delighted to be here again. Disappointed it's virtual, but excited to talk with you. >> Yeah, me too. You know, it's coming. It's getting jabbed but you know, you look at the surprises here. I mean, look at the chip shortage, you know everybody thought, Oh, well stop ordering chips. I mean furniture, et cetera, cars. And it's just kind of crazy. What was your expectation going into the pandemic and what did you actually see looking back? >> Well, it's funny, you never know what's going to happen. And for the first few weeks I would say there's a lot of disruption because all of a sudden you have people who've been going into an office for a long time, working from home and you know, from an R&D perspective at Veeam those people weren't used to working from home. So there's a lot of uncertainty I'll say for the first three or four weeks but what very quickly picked up was the opportunity. I'll say to focus more specifically on delivering things for our customers. And one of the things obviously that just exploded was use of digital technologies like Slack and Microsoft teams. And as you say, Veeam was well positioned to help customers as they move towards this new normal, as they say. >> So what were some of the growth vectors that you guys saw specifically that were helping your customers going to get get through this time? >> Yeah well, people always associate Veeam with knowing data protection for the virtual environment but two things really stood out last year as our emerging markets. One was Office365, and I think that's due to the uptake of Microsoft teams. I mean, if you look at the Microsoft results, you can see that people are doing SaaS. And we were very well positioned to take advantage of that. Help customers move towards collaborating online. So that was a huge growth vector for us. And the second one was cloud. We had more data moving to cloud than ever before in Veeam history. And that continues on into 2021. >> You guys, well, yeah, let's talk more about that set SAS piece of your business. You were very early on in terms of SAS data protection. You kind of had to educate the market. People are like, well, why do I need to back up my SAS doesn't the cloud provider do that? And then you sort of you had to educate, so it was you were early and but it's really paid off. Maybe talk about how that trend has benefited some of your customers. >> Yeah. So if you go back four years, we didn't even have data protection for Office365. And over the last four years, we've emerged into the market leader the largest in protection for Office365. And as you say, it was about education. Early on people knew that they needed to protect exchange when they ran it on premises. And when they first went to the cloud there was this expectation of, Hey Microsoft or my provider will do that for me. And very quickly they realized that's not the case and there's still the same threats. It might not be hardware failure, but certainly misconfiguration or deleted items or ransomware in 2021, sorry, 2020 was massive. And so we do data protection for Exchange, for SharePoint online, for one drive, and most recently for Microsoft teams. And so that data protection obviously helps organizations as they adopt Office365 and SaaS technologies. >> I sent him my last breaking analysis. When you look at the ETR data, Veeam has been really steady. You know, some competitors spike up and come down, others, you know, maybe aren't doing so well or the larger established players don't have as much momentum. It just seems like Veeam even though you cross the billion dollar revenue mark, you've been able to keep that spending momentum up. And I think it's, I would observe it's a function of your ability to identify that the waves and ride those waves and anticipate them. We just talked about SAS, talked about virtualization. You were there cloud, we'll talk about that more as well, plus your execution. It seems like since the acquisition by insight you guys have continued to execute. I wonder if you could help the audience understand how do you think about the phases that Veeam has gone through in its ascendancy and where you're headed? >> Yeah. And so I look at it as three things, it's having the right product, but it's not just enough to have the right product, the right product it's the right timing and it's the right execution. So if you think about where Veeam started, it was all in data protection for vSphere, for the hypervisor. And that was right at the time when VMware was taking off and the modernized data center was being virtualized. And so that helped us grow, I'll say into a $600 million company, but then about four years ago, we see the ascendancy of SaaS and specifically Office365. And so, you know, we weren't first to market but I would argue the timing with the best product, with the right execution has turned that into a massive a very significant contribution to our bottom line. And then actually the third wave through 2020 is the adoption of cloud. We moved last year, 242 petabytes into cloud storage and already in the first quarter of 2021, we've moved to 100 petabytes. So there's this massive adoption or migration of data into the cloud. And Veeam has been positioned with the right product, at the right time, with the right execution, to take advantage of that. >> So I wonder if you could help us quantify that IDC data you know, the IDC did a good job quantifying the market. Maybe you could share with us sort of your position there, maybe some of the growth that we're seeing. Can you add some color to that? >> Yeah. We have some very exciting results from the recent IDC report. So in the second half of 2020, we saw 17.9% year over year growth in our revenue. That was actually triple the closest competitor. And our sequential growth was over 21%. So massive growth and all of that is in the second half of the year, 563 million in revenue. So over a billion dollar company. So these aren't just, you know, 20% growth on small numbers. This is on a very significant number. And we see that continuing forward, we'll be announcing some things I'm sure at VMR coming up in a few weeks here, but that trend continues. And again, it's the right product, right time, with the right execution. >> Cloud continues to roll on. You're seeing, you know, solid weather. If you add them all up the big four 30 plus percent growth you're seeing Azure, even higher growth. You know, AWS is huge, Google growing, Google cloud, probably in the 60 to 70% range. So cloud still hot, it's kind of gone mainstream but there's still feels like there's a long way to go there. What's happening in cloud? You guys, again, leaning in, riding that wave. What can you tell us? >> We are leaning in, you're going to see some things coming up at Veeam related to that. But two things I would say, one is we're in the marketplace of all three of the major hyperscalers. So there's a Veeam backup for AWS, Veeam backup for Azure, and a Veeam backup for GCP. And not only is there products that are purpose-built for those clouds in the marketplace, all three of them have integrations to the core Veeam platform. And so this isn't just standalone products while it is in the marketplace, it's integrated into the full strategy around modern data protection for the organizations. And so I am thrilled about some of the things that we're going to be showing in there but we're leaning in very closely with those. We think we're in early days, like I say maybe first, second year, and it will be the next decade as they truly emerge into their dominant position. But even more than cloud if you asked me what I get excited about looking forward certainly cloud adoption is massive, but Kubernetes, that's what's enabling some of the models of both on-prem and cloud hosted. And we're clearly doing some things there as well. >> So I'm glad you brought that up because I think the first time I ever sort of stumbled into a company that was actually doing data protection for containers was out of a VeeamON event. It was one of your exhibitors. And I was like, Hmm, that's an interesting name. And yeah, of course he ended up buying the company. But so, you know, it's funny, right? Because containers have been around forever. And then when you started to see Kubernetes come to for, containers are really ephemeral they really didn't, you know, they weren't persistent but they didn't have state, but that's changing. I wonder if you could give us your perspective as to how you're thinking about that whole space. >> I truly believe that the third big wave of technology transformation, the first was around physical systems and mainframes and things. And then we went into the virtualized era. I think that the third world is not the cloud. I actually think it is containers. Now why containers? Because as you mentioned, Dave, they're a femoral, they're designed for the world of consumption. Everything else is designed for you, install it. And then you build to the high watermark. The whole thing about containers is that they're a femoral and they're built for the consumption model. The other thing about containers is that they're highly portable. So you can run it on premises with OpenShift but then you can move it to GKE or HKS or EKS or any of the big cloud platforms. So it definitely aligns with organization's desire to modernize and to choose the infrastructure of best choice. Now, at the same time, the reason why they haven't taken off I would argue as quickly as they could have is because they've been really complex, in early days the complexity of containers was very difficult, but the model, the platform or ecosystem is evolving, they are becoming more simple. And what is happening is IT operations teams are now considering the developer, their customer and they're building self-service models for the developers to be more productive. So I think of this as platform apps and certainly backup and security is a part of this but it is moving and we're seeing traction actually faster than it would have predicted in early 2020. >> Yeah. We've been putting forth this vision of a layer that abstracts the complexity of the underlying clouds whether it's on prem, across clouds, eventually the edge and containers are linchpin to enabling that. Let's talk about VeeamON 2021. Show us a little leg, give us a preview. >> So we always come with the excitement and we always come with showing a sneak peek of what's to come. So certainly we're going to celebrate some of the big successes. We brought version 11 to market earlier this year that had security capabilities around ransomware type, continuous data protection it at a whole lot of things. So we're going to celebrate some of the products have already recently launched but we're also going to give a sneak peek of what's coming over 2021. Now, if you ask me what that is, we talk an awful lot about cloud. So you should expect to see things around Veeam backup for AWS and Azure and GCP. You should expect to see things around our Kubernetes data protection with our casting Cape 10 product, you should expect to see evolution of capabilities with our SaaS data protection with Office365. So we're going to give a sneak peek of lots of things to come. And as always, we bring lots of innovation to the market. It's not just another checkbox theme has always said, how can we do it differently? How can we do a better? And then we're going to show that to our customers at VeeamON. >> Well, we're always super excited to participate in the Veeam community. We've always had a lot of fun. They're great events. Yes, it's virtual, but you guys always have an interesting spin on things and make it fun. It's May 25th and 26th. It starts at 9:00 AM Eastern time. You go to Veeam V-E-E-A-M.com and sign up, make sure you do that and check out all the content. The Cube of course will be there. I will be interviewing executives, customers, partners. There's tons of content for practitioners. And, you know, as always you guys got the great demos and always a few surprises. So Danny, really looking forward to that and really appreciate your time and the Cube today. >> Thank you, Dave. >> All right. And thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for the Cube. Again, May 25th and 26th 9:00 AM. Eastern time, go to veeam.com and sign up. We'll see you there. (upbeat music)
SUMMARY :
And one of the companies participating but excited to talk with you. I mean, look at the And for the first few weeks And the second one was cloud. And then you sort of you had to educate, And over the last four years, that the waves and ride those and it's the right execution. So I wonder if you could And again, it's the right in the 60 to 70% range. of the major hyperscalers. And then when you started to for the developers to be more productive. of a layer that abstracts the complexity of the big successes. in the Veeam community. And thank you for watching.
SENTIMENT ANALYSIS :
ENTITIES
Entity | Category | Confidence |
---|---|---|
Dave | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Microsoft | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Danny Allan | PERSON | 0.99+ |
60 | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Dave Vellante | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Danny | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Veeam | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
17.9% | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
2021 | DATE | 0.99+ |
last year | DATE | 0.99+ |
20% | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
AWS | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
100 petabytes | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
563 million | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
242 petabytes | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ | |
May 25th | DATE | 0.99+ |
one drive | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
first quarter of 2021 | DATE | 0.99+ |
26th | DATE | 0.99+ |
2020 | DATE | 0.99+ |
first | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
70% | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
both | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
$600 million | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
one | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
three things | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
One | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
SAS | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
two things | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
early 2020 | DATE | 0.98+ |
vSphere | TITLE | 0.98+ |
four weeks | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
30 plus percent | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
over 21% | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
Veeam | PERSON | 0.98+ |
next decade | DATE | 0.98+ |
second one | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
first time | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
Office365 | TITLE | 0.98+ |
first three | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
three | QUANTITY | 0.97+ |
IDC | ORGANIZATION | 0.97+ |
Slack | ORGANIZATION | 0.97+ |
veeam.com | OTHER | 0.97+ |
billion dollar | QUANTITY | 0.96+ |
today | DATE | 0.96+ |
pandemic | EVENT | 0.96+ |
over a billion dollar | QUANTITY | 0.95+ |
second half of 2020 | DATE | 0.95+ |
earlier this year | DATE | 0.94+ |
26th 9:00 AM | DATE | 0.94+ |
second year | QUANTITY | 0.93+ |
SharePoint | TITLE | 0.93+ |
first few weeks | QUANTITY | 0.92+ |
about four years ago | DATE | 0.92+ |
VMR | ORGANIZATION | 0.92+ |
Kubernetes | TITLE | 0.92+ |
four years | QUANTITY | 0.91+ |
VeeamON | ORGANIZATION | 0.89+ |
third wave | EVENT | 0.89+ |
EMABRGO Rob Emsley,Dell Technologies and Stephen Manley, Druva v2 w slides
(upbeat music) >> Overnight COVID completely exposed those companies that were really not ready for the digital age. There was a mad rush to the cloud in an effort to reshape the very notion of business resiliency and enable employees to remain productive so that they continue serve customers. Data protection was at the heart of this shift and cloud data protection has become a fundamental staple of organizations operating models. Hello, everyone. This is Dave Vellante and welcome to this CUBE conversation. I'm joined by two longtime friends of theCUBE, Rob Emsley is the director of product marketing at Dell Technologies. And Stephen Manley is the Chief Technology Officer at Druva. Guys, great to have you on the program. Thanks for being here. >> Yeah, great to be here, Dave. >> This is the high point of my day, Dave. >> I'm glad to hear it, Stephen. It's been a while since we... Missing you guys to tell you face to face maybe it'll happen before 22, >> We haven't aged a bit, Dave. >> (laughing) Ditto. Listen, we've been talking for years about this shift to the cloud. In the past 12 months, boy, we've seen the pace of workloads that have moved to the cloud really accelerate. So Rob, maybe you could start it off. How do you see the market and perhaps what are some of the blind spots maybe that people need to think about when they're moving workloads so fast in the cloud? >> Yeah. Good question Dave. I mean, you know, we've spoken a number of times around how our focus has significantly shifted over the last couple of years. I mean, only a couple of years ago, our focus was very much on on-premise data protection, but over the last couple of years, more workloads have shifted to the cloud. Customers have started adopting SaaS applications and all of these environments are creating data that is so critical to these customers to protect, we've definitely found that more and more of our conversations have been centered around what can you do for me when it comes to protecting workloads in the client environment? >> Yeah. Now of course, Stephen, this is kind of your wheelhouse. How are you thinking about the these market shifts? >> Yeah. You know, it's interesting in the data protection market. heck the data market in general, you see these sort of cycles happen. And for a long time, we had a cycle where applications and environments were consolidating a lot. It was all VMs and Oracle and SQL and we seem to be exploding out the other way to this massive sprawl of different types of applications in different places. Like Rob said, we've got Microsoft 365 and you've got Salesforce and you've got workloads running in the cloud. The world looks different. And you add on top of that the new security threats as people moving to the cloud. A number of years ago we talked how ransomware was an emerging threat. We're way past emerging into... there's a ransomware attack every six seconds and everybody wakes up terrified about it. And so we really see the market has shifted I think in terms of what the apps are and also in terms of what the threats and the focus and this that's come into play. >> Right. Well, thanks for that. There's some hard news which we're going to get to, but before we do, Rob, Stephen was mentioning the SaaS apps and we've been sort of watching that space for a while but a lot of people will ask why do I need a separate data protection layer? Doesn't my SaaS provider protect my data? Don't they replicate it? They're cloud vendors, why do I need to buy yet another backup product? >> Yeah, that's a fairly common misconception, Dave, that both SaaS application vendors and cloud vendors, inherently are providing all of the data protection that you need. The reality is that they're not, you know I think when you think about a lot of the data within those environments, certainly they're focused on providing availability. And availability is absolutely one thing that you can, for the most part, rely on the cloud vendors to deliver to you. But when it comes to actually protecting yourself from accidental deletion. Protecting yourself from cyber threats and cyber crime that may infect your data through malicious acts, that's really where you need to supplement the environment that the cloud providers provide you, with best in class data protection solutions. And this is really where, waywardly looking to introduce new innovations into the market to really, really help customers with that cloud based data protection. >> Yeah. Now you got some news here. Let's kind of dig in, if we could, to the innovations behind that. Maybe Rob, you could kick it off and then, Stephen, we'll bring you in. >> Yeah. So first piece of news that we're really happy to announce is the introduction of a new Dell EMC PowerProtect backup service which is a new cloud data protection solution powered by Druva, hence the reason that Stephen and I are here today. It's designed to deliver additional protection without increasing IT complexity. >> So powered by Druva. what does that mean? Can you add some color to that? >> Absolutely. So, when we really started looking at the expansion of our PowerProtect portfolio, we already have the ability to deliver both on-premises protection and to deliver that same software within the public cloud from a PowerProtect software delivery model. But what we really didn't have within the portfolio is a cloud data protection platform. And we really looked at what was available in the market. We looked at our ability to develop that ourselves. And we decided that the best path for our customers to bring capability to them as soon as we possibly could was to partner with Druva. And we really looked at the capabilities that Druva has been delivering for many years, the capabilities that they have across many dimensions of cloud-based workloads. And we already engaged with them probably about six months ago, first introduced Druva as an option to be resold by ourselves, Salesforce and partners. And then we're pleased to introduce a Dell EMC branded service PowerProtect backup service. >> Okay, so just one more point of clarification, then, Stephen, I want to bring you in. So we're talking about... this includes SaaS apps as well, I'm talking 365, the Google apps which we use extensively, CRM, Salesforce, for example. >> Absolutely. >> What platforms are you actually connecting to and providing protection for? >> Yeah, so the real priority for us was to expand our PowerProtect portfolio to support a variety of SaaS applications. You mentioned, real major ones with respect to Microsoft 365, Google workplace, as well as Salesforce. But the other thing that we also get with PowerProtect backup service is the ability to provide a cloud-based data protection service that supports endpoints such as laptops and desktops but also the ability to support hybrid workloads. So for some customers the ability to use PowerProtect backup service to give them support for virtual machine backups, both VMware and Hyper-V, but also application environments like Oracle and SQL. And lastly, but not least, one of the things that backup service also provides when it comes to virtual machines is not only virtual machines on premises, but also virtual machines within the public cloud, specifically VMware cloud on AWS. >> So, Stephen, I remember I was talking to Jaspreet several years ago, and I've always liked sort of the Druva model but it felt at the time you were like a little ahead of your time, but boy, the market has really come to you. Maybe you could just tell us a little bit more about the just generally cloud-based data protection and the sort of low down on your platform. >> Yeah, and I think you're right, the market has absolutely swept in this direction. Like we were talking about with applications in so many places and end points in so many places and data centers and remote offices with data sprawled everywhere. We find customers are looking for a solution that can connect to everything. I don't want seven different backup solutions, one for each of those things, I want one centralized solution. And so kind of a data protection as a service becomes really appealing because instead of setting all of these things up on your own, well, it's just built in for you. And then the fact that it's as a service helps with things like the ransomware protection because it's off site in another location under another account. And so we really see customers saying this is appealing because it helps keep my costs down. It helps keep my complexity down. There's fewer moving parts. And one of the nicest things is as I move to the cloud I get that one fixed cost, right? I'm not dealing with the, oh, wow, this bill is not what I was expecting. It just comes in with what I was carrying. And so it really comes down to, as you go to the cloud, you want a platform that's got everything built in, something that, and let's face it, Dell EMC, this has always been the case, that storage of last resort that backup that you can trust, right? You want something with a history, like you said, you've been talking to Jaspreet for awhile, Druva is a company that's got a proven track record that your data is going to be safe and it's going to be recoverable and you're going to want someone that can innovate quickly, right? So that as more new cloud applications arise, we're there to help you protect them as they emerge. >> So talk a little bit more about the timing. I mean, we talked earlier about, okay, COVID really forced this shift to the cloud and you guys clearly have skated to the pocket and you also... You referenced sort of new workloads and I'm just wondering how you see that from a timing standpoint. And at this moment in time why this is such a, you know, the right fit. >> We've seen a lot of customers over the last again 12 months or so, one really accelerate their shift to things like SaaS applications, Microsoft 365, and we're not just talking exchange online and One Drive, but SharePoint online, Microsoft teams, really going all in because they're finding that, as I'm distributed, as I have a remote workforce, my end points became more important again, but also the ability to have collaboration became important. And the more I depend on those tools to collaborate, the more I'm depending on them to replace what used to be in-person meetings where we could have a whiteboard and discuss things. And it's done through collaboration online tools. Well, I need to protect that. Not just because the data's important, but because that's now how my business is running. And so that entire environment is important. And so it's really accelerated people coming and looking for solutions because they've realized how important these environments and this data is. >> So, Stephen, you mentioned that you guys, I mean, obviously you have a track record but you got some vision too. And I want to sort of poke at that a little bit. I mean, essentially is what you're building is an abstraction layer that is essentially my data protection cloud. Is that how we should think about this? And you've referenced pricing, I've seen your pricing, it's clean. It looks to me anyway like a true cloud pricing. Going to dial it up, dial it down, pay as you go, consume it as you wish. Maybe talk about that a little bit. >> Yeah. I mean, I think if you think about the future of consumption is that so many customers are looking for different choices than what many vendors have provided them in the past. I think the days of of going through a long procurement cycle and working through purchasing in order to get a big capital expense approved it's just not the way that many of our customers are looking to operate now. So I think that one of the things that we're looking at across the portfolio, whether or not it be on premises solutions or cloud-based services, is to provide all of that capability as a service. I think that that will be a real future point of arrival for us as we really rotate to offer that across all of our capabilities, Dave, whether or not it be in the domain of storage, or in the domain of data protection, the concept of everything as a service is really something which is going to become more of the norm versus the exception. >> So what does a customer have to do to be up and running? What's that experience like, is he just going to log on and everything's sort of there to them, what do they see? What's the experience like? >> Yeah, that's one of the great things about PowerProtect backup services, that once the customer has worked through that, their Dell technologies sells a team or the Dell technologies partner, they effectively get an activation code to sign up and set up the credentials with PowerProtect backup service. And once they actually do that, one of the things that they don't have to worry about is the deployment of the infrastructure. The infrastructure is always on ready to go. So all they do is they simply point PowerProtect backup service at the data sources that they wish to protect. That's one of the great advantages around a SaaS based data protection platform and it's one of the things that makes it very easy to get customers up and running with PowerProtect backup service. >> So I'm guessing you have a roadmap, you may be, you may be not, you may be holding out on us in some of the other things that you're doing in this space, but what can you tell us about other things you might be doing or what might be coming? What can we expect? >> Well, I mean, Dave, that one of the things that we always talk about is the power of the portfolio. So, with the addition of PowerProtect backup service, it's not the only news that we're making with respect to client data protection. You know, I mentioned earlier that we have the ability to deploy our on premises solutions in the public cloud with PowerProtect data manager and our PowerProtect virtual appliances, and with this announcement that brings backup service into the portfolio. We're also pleased to expand our support of the public cloud with full support of Google cloud platform, making PowerProtect data manager available in the Google marketplace. And then lastly, but not least, you know our other cloud snapshot manager offering is now also fully integrated with our PowerProtect virtual appliances to allow customers to store AWS snapshots in a debilitative fashion within AWS S3. So that's an excellent capability that we've introduced to reduce the cost of storing AWS infrastructure backups for longer periods of time. So really, we've really continued to double down in bringing new client data protection capabilities to our customers, wherever they may be. >> And nice to have, Stephen, you guys must be stoked to have a partner like Dell, a massive distribution channel. I wonder if you could give us any final thoughts, thoughts on the relationship, how you see the future unfolding. >> Yeah, I mean, and obviously I've got history with Dell and EMC and Rob. And one of the things I think Dell has always been fabulous at is giving customers the flexibility to protect their data when they want, how they want, where they want, with the investment protection that if it shifts over time, they'll be there for them, right. Going all the way back to the data protection suite and all those fantastic things we've done historically. And so it's really, it's great to align with somebody that's got the same kind of value as we do, which is with Druva, it's that same model, right? Wherever you want to protect your data, wherever it is, we're going to be there for you. And so it was great that I think Dell and Druva both saw this demand from our customers. And we said, this is the right match, right? This is how we're going to help people keep their data safe as they start and continue and extend their journeys to the cloud. And so, Dell proposes the PowerProtect backup service powered by Druva. And everybody wins. The Dell's customers are safer. Dell completes this offering, and let's face it, it does help to really accelerate our momentum. So this is and it's a lot of fun just hanging out with the people I used to work with especially it's good seeing them again. >> Well, you guys both have kind of alluded to the portfolio and the optionality that Dell brings to its customers, but Rob, you know, I'll give you the final word. A lot of times optionality brings complexity, but this seems to be a really strong step in the direction of simplifying the world for your customers. But, Rob, we'll give you the last word. >> Yeah, for sure. I mean, we've always said that it's not a one size fits all world. You know, I think that one of the things that this evolution of a PowerProtect portfolio brings is an excellent added option for our customers. Many of the customers, if not, almost all of the customers that we currently sell to, have a requirement for SaaS application protection. Many of them now, especially after the last year, have an added sensitivity to endpoint protection. So those two things alone I think are two things that all Dell technology customers can really take advantage of with the introduction of perhaps that backup service. This is just a continued evolution of our capabilities to bring innovative data protection for multi-cloud workloads. >> That last point is a great point about the end points because you've got remote workers, so exposed, guys, thanks so much for sharing the announcement details, and the relationship, and really good luck with the offering. We'll be watching. >> Thanks, Dave. >> Thanks Dave. >> And thank you for watching this CUBE conversation. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. We'll see you next time. (soft music)
SUMMARY :
And Stephen Manley is the Chief I'm glad to hear it, Stephen. of the blind spots maybe but over the last couple of years, the these market shifts? and the focus and this and we've been sort of all of the data protection that you need. and then, Stephen, we'll bring you in. announce is the introduction Can you add some color to that? the capabilities that they I'm talking 365, the Google apps but also the ability to but it felt at the time you And one of the nicest things and I'm just wondering how you see but also the ability to have mentioned that you guys, more of the norm versus the exception. and it's one of the things that one of the things And nice to have, Stephen, And one of the things I think Dell and the optionality that of the customers that and the relationship, And thank you for watching
SENTIMENT ANALYSIS :
ENTITIES
Entity | Category | Confidence |
---|---|---|
Stephen | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Dave | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Dave Vellante | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Rob Emsley | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Rob | PERSON | 0.99+ |
EMC | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Stephen Manley | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Dell | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Microsoft | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
AWS | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
two things | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Ditto | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Dell Technologies | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
last year | DATE | 0.99+ |
one | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
first piece | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
SQL | TITLE | 0.99+ |
Druva | ORGANIZATION | 0.98+ |
both | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
12 months | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
today | DATE | 0.98+ |
one thing | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
two | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
Druva | TITLE | 0.98+ |
Dell EMC | ORGANIZATION | 0.97+ |
ORGANIZATION | 0.97+ | |
Salesforce | ORGANIZATION | 0.97+ |
first | QUANTITY | 0.97+ |
Hyper-V | TITLE | 0.96+ |
seven different backup solutions | QUANTITY | 0.95+ |
PowerProtect | TITLE | 0.95+ |
SharePoint | TITLE | 0.95+ |
Muddu Sudhakar, Investor | theCUBE on Cloud 2021
(gentle music) >> From the Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is theCube Conversation. >> Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante, we're back at Cube on Cloud, and with me is Muddu Sudhakar. He's a long time alum of theCube, a technologist and executive, a serial entrepreneur and an investor. Welcome my friend, good to see you. >> Good to see you, Dave. Pleasure to be with you. Happy elections, I guess. >> Yeah, yeah. So I wanted to start, this work from home, pivot's been amazing, and you've seen the enterprise collaboration explode. I wrote a piece a couple months ago, looking at valuations of various companies, right around the snowflake IPO, I want to ask you about that, but I was looking at the valuations of various companies, at Spotify, and Shopify, and of course Zoom was there. And I was looking at just simple revenue multiples, and I said, geez, Zoom actually looks, might look undervalued, which is crazy, right? And of course the stock went up after that, and you see teams, Microsoft Teams, and Microsoft doing a great job across the board, we've written about that, you're seeing Webex is exploding, I mean, what do you make of this whole enterprise collaboration play? >> No, I think the look there is a trend here, right? So I think this probably trend started before COVID, but COVID is going to probably accelerate this whole digital transformation, right? People are going to work remotely a lot more, not everybody's going to come back to the offices even after COVID, so I think this whole collaboration through Slack, and Zoom, and Microsoft Teams and Webex, it's going to be the new game now, right? Both the video, audio and chat solutions, that's really going to help people like eyeballs. You're not going to spend time on all four of them, right? It's like everyday from a consumer side, you're going to spend time on your Gmail, Facebook, maybe Twitter, maybe Instagram, so like in the consumer side, on your personal life, you have something on the enterprise. The eyeballs are going to be in these platforms. >> Yeah. Well. >> But we're not going to take everything. >> Well, So you are right, there's a permanence to this, and I got a lot of ground to cover with you. And I always like our conversations mood because you tell it like it is, I'm going to stay on that work from home pivot. You know a lot about security, but you've seen three big trends, like mega trends in security, Endpoint, Identity Access Management, and Cloud Security, you're seeing this in the stock prices of companies like CrowdStrike, Zscaler, Okta- >> Right >> Sailpoint- >> Right, I mean, they exploded, as a result of the pandemic, and I think I'm inferring from your comment that you see that as permanent, but that's a real challenge from a security standpoint. What's the impact of Cloud there? >> No, it isn't impact but look, first is all the services required to be Cloud, right? See, the whole ideas for it to collaborate and do these things. So you cannot be running an application, like you can't be running conference and SharePoint oN-Prem, and try to on a Zoom and MS teams. So that's why, if you look at Microsoft is very clever, they went with Office 365, SharePoint 365, now they have MS Teams, so I think that Cloud is going to drive all these workloads that you have been talking about a lot, right? You and John have been saying this for years now. The eruption of Cloud and SAS services are the vehicle to drive this next-generation collaboration. >> You know what's so cool? So Cloud obviously is the topic, I wonder how you look at the last 10 years of Cloud, and maybe we could project forward, I mean the big three Cloud vendors, they're running it like $20 billion a quarter, and they're growing collectively, 35, 40% clips, so we're really approaching a hundred billion dollars for these three. And you hear stats like only 20% of the workloads are in the public Cloud, so it feels like we're just getting started. How do you look at the impact of Cloud on the market, as you say, the last 10 years, and what do you expect going forward? >> No, I think it's very fascinating, right? So I remember when theCube, you guys are talking about 10 years back, now it's been what? More than 10 years, 15 years, since AWS came out with their first S3 service back in 2006. >> Right. >> Right? so I think look, Cloud is going to accelerate even more further. The areas is going to accelerate is for different reasons. I think now you're seeing the initial days, it's all about startups, initial workloads, Dev test and QA test, now you're talking about real production workloads are moving towards Cloud, right? Initially it was backup, we really didn't care for backup they really put there. Now you're going to have Cloud health primary services, your primary storage will be there, it's not going to be an EMC, It's not going to be a NetApp storage, right? So workloads are going to shift from the business applications, and these business applications, will be running on the Cloud, and I'll make another prediction, make customer service and support. Customer service and support, again, we should be running on the Cloud. You're not want to run the thing on a Dell server, or an IBM server, or an HP server, with your own hosted environment. That model is not because there's no economies of scale. So to your point, what will drive Cloud for the next 10 years, will be economies of scale. Where can you take the cost? How can I save money? If you don't move to the Cloud, you won't save money. So all those workloads are going to go to the Cloud are people who really want to save, like global gradual custom, right? If you stay on the ASP model, a hosted, you're not going to save your costs, your costs will constantly go up from a SaaS perspective. >> So that doesn't bode well for all the On-prem guys, and you hear a lot of the vendors that don't own a Cloud that talk about repatriation, but the numbers don't support that. So what do those guys do? I mean, they're talking multi-Cloud, of course they're talking hybrid, that's IBM's big play, how do you see it? >> I think, look, see there, to me, multi-Cloud makes sense, right? You don't want one vendor that you never want to get, so having Amazon, Microsoft, Google, it gives them a multi-Cloud. Even hybrid Cloud does make sense, right? There'll be some workloads. It's like, we are still running On-prem environment, we still have mainframe, so it's never going to be a hundred percent, but I would say the majority, your question is, can we get to 60, 70, 80% workers in the next 10 years? I think you will. I think by 2025, more than 78% of the Cloud Migration by the next five years, 70% of workload for enterprise will be on the Cloud. The remaining 25, maybe Hybrid, maybe On-prem, but I get panics, really doesn't matter. You have saved and part of your business is running on the Cloud. That's your cost saving, that's where you'll see the economies of scale, and that's where all the growth will happen. >> So square the circle for me, because again, you hear the stat on the IDC stat, IBM Ginni Rometty puts it out there a lot that only 20% of the workloads are in the public Cloud, everything else is On-prem, but it's not a zero sum game, right? I mean the Cloud native stuff is growing like crazy, the On-prem stuff is flat to down, so what's going to happen? When you talk about 70% of the workloads will be in the Cloud, do you see those mission critical apps and moving into the car, I mean the insurance companies going to put their claims apps in the Cloud, or the financial services companies going to put their mission critical workloads in the Cloud, or they just going to develop new stuff that's Cloud native that is sort of interacts with the On-prem. How do you see that playing out? >> Yeah, no, I think absolutely, I think a very good question. So two things will happen. I think if you take an enterprise, right? Most businesses what they'll do is the workloads that they should not be running On-prem, they'll move it up. So obviously things like take, as I said, I use the word SharePoint, right? SharePoint and conference, all the knowledge stuff is still running on people's data centers. There's no reason. I understand, I've seen statistics that 70, 80% of the On-prem for SharePoint will move to SharePoint on the Cloud. So Microsoft is going to make tons of money on that, right? Same thing, databases, right? Whether it's CQL server, whether there is Oracle database, things that you are running as a database, as a Cloud, we move to the Cloud. Whether that is posted in Oracle Cloud, or you're running Oracle or Mongo DB, or Dynamo DB on AWS or SQL server Microsoft, that's going to happen. Then what you're talking about is really the App concept, the applications themselves, the App server. Is the App server is going to run On-prem, how much it's going to laureate outside? There may be a hybrid Cloud, like for example, Kafka. I may use a Purse running on a Kafka as a service, or I may be using Elasticsearch for my indexing on AWS or Google Cloud, but I may be running my App locally. So there'll be some hybrid place, but what I would say is for every application, 75% of your Comprende will be on the Cloud. So think of it like the Dev. So even for the On-prem app, you're not going to be a 100 percent On-prem. The competent, the billing materials will move to the Cloud, your Purse, your storage, because if you put it On-prem, you need to add all this, you need to have all the whole things to buy it and hire the people, so that's what is going to happen. So from a competent perspective, 70% of your bill of materials will move to the Cloud, even for an On-prem application. >> So, Of course, the susification of the industry in the last decade and in my three favorite companies last decade, you've worked for two of them, Tableau, ServiceNow, and Splunk. I want to ask you about those, but I'm interested in the potential disruption there. I mean, you've got these SAS companies, Salesforce of course is another one, but they can't get started in 1999. What do you see happening with those? I mean, we're basically building these sort of large SAS, platforms, now. Do you think that the Cloud native world that developers can come at this from an angle where they can disrupt those companies, or are they too entrenched? I mean, look at service now, I mean, I don't know, $80 billion market capital where they are, they bigger than Workday, I mean, just amazing how much they've grown and you feel like, okay, nothing can stop them, but there's always disruption in this industry, what are your thoughts on that. >> Not very good with, I think there'll be disrupted. So to me actually to your point, ServiceNow is now close to a 100 billion now, 95 billion market coverage, crazy. So from evaluation perspective, so I think the reason they'll be disrupted is that the SAS vendors that you talked about, ServiceNow, and all this plan, most of these services, they're truly not a multi-tenant or what do you call the Cloud Native. And that is the Accenture. So because of that, they will not be able to pass the savings back to the enterprises. So the cost economics, the economics that the Cloud provides because of the multi tenancy ability will not. The second reason there'll be disrupted is AI. So far, we talked about Cloud, but AI is the core. So it's not really Cloud Native, Dave, I look at the AI in a two-piece. AI is going to change, see all the SAS vendors were created 20 years back, if you remember, was an operator typing it, I don't respond administered we'll type a Splunk query. I don't need a human to type a query anymore, system will actually find it, that's what the whole security game has changed, right? So what's going to happen is if you believe in that, that AI, your score will disrupt all the SAS vendors, so one angle SAS is going to have is a Cloud. That's where you make the Cloud will take up because a SAS application will be Cloudified. Being SAS is not Cloud, right? Second thing is SAS will be also, I call it, will be AI-fied. So AI and machine learning will be trying to drive at the core so that I don't need that many licenses. I don't need that many humans. I don't need that many administrators to manage, I call them the tuners. Once you get a driverless car, you don't need a thousand tuners to tune your Tesla, or Google Waymo car. So the same philosophy will happen is your Dev Apps, your administrators, your service management, people that you need for service now, and these products, Zendesk with AI, will tremendously will disrupt. >> So you're saying, okay, so yeah, I was going to ask you, won't the SAS vendors, won't they be able to just put, inject AI into their platforms, and I guess I'm inferring saying, yeah, but a lot of the problems that they're solving, are going to go away because of AI, is that right? And automation and RPA and things of that nature, is that right? >> Yes and no. So I'll tell you what, sorry, you have asked a very good question, let's answer, let me rephrase that question. What you're saying is, "Why can't the existing SAS vendors do the AI?" >> Yes, right. >> Right, >> And there's a reason they can't do it is their pricing model is by number of seats. So I'm not going to come to Dave, and say, come on, come pay me less money. It's the same reason why a board and general lover build an electric car. They're selling 10 million gasoline cars. There's no incentive for me, I'm not going to do any AI, I'm going to put, I'm not going to come to you and say, hey, buy me a hundred less license next year from it. So that is one reason why AI, even though these guys do any AI, it's going to be just so I call it, they're going to, what do you call it, a whitewash, kind of like you put some paint brush on it, trying to show you some AI you did from a marketing dynamics. But at the core, if you really implement the AI with you take the driver out, how are you going to change the pricing model? And being a public company, you got to take a hit on the pricing model and the price, and it's going to have a stocking part. So that, to your earlier question, will somebody disrupt them? The person who is going to disrupt them, will disrupt them on the pricing model. >> Right. So I want to ask you about that, because we saw a Snowflake, and it's IPO, we were able to pour through its S-1, and they have a different pricing model. It's a true Cloud consumption model, Whereas of course, most SAS companies, they're going to lock you in for at least one year term, maybe more, and then, you buy the license, you got to pay X. If you, don't use it, you still got to pay for it. Snowflake's different, actually they have a different problem, that people are using it too much and the sea is driving the CFO crazy because the bill is going up and up and up, but to me, that's the right model, It's just like the Amazon model, if you can justify it, so how do you see the pricing, that consumption model is actually, you're seeing some of the On-prem guys at HPE, Dell, they're doing as a service. They're kind of taking a page out of the last decade SAS model, so I think pricing is a real tricky one, isn't it? >> No, you nailed it, you nailed it. So I think the way in which the Snowflake there, how the disruptors are data warehouse, that disrupted the open source vendors too. Snowflake distributed, imagine the playbook, you disrupted something as the $ 0, right? It's an open source with Cloudera, Hortonworks, Mapper, that whole big data that you want me to, or that market is this, that disrupting data warehouses like Netezza, Teradata, and the charging more money, they're making more money and disrupting at $0, because the pricing models by consumption that you talked about. CMT is going to happen in the service now, Zen Desk, well, 'cause their pricing one is by number of seats. People are going to say, "How are my users are going to ask?" right? If you're an employee help desk, you're back to your original health collaborative. I may be on Slack, I could be on zoom, I'll maybe on MS Teams, I'm going to ask by using usage model on Slack, tools by employees to service now is the pricing model that people want to pay for. The more my employees use it, the more value I get. But I don't want to pay by number of seats, so the vendor, who's going to figure that out, and that's where I look, if you know me, I'm right over as I started, that's what I've tried to push that model look, I love that because that's the core of how you want to change the new game. >> I agree. I say, kill me with that problem, I mean, some people are trying to make it a criticism, but you hit on the point. If you pay more, it's only because you're getting more value out of it. So I wanted to flip the switch here a little bit and take a customer angle. Something that you've been on all sides. And I want to talk a little bit about strategies, you've been a strategist, I guess, once a strategist, always a strategist. How should organizations be thinking about their approach to Cloud, it's cost different for different industries, but, back when the cube started, financial services Cloud was a four-letter word. But of course the age of company is going to matter, but what's the framework for figuring out your Cloud strategy to get to your 70% and really take advantage of the economics? Should I be Mono Cloud, Multi-Cloud, Multi-vendor, what would you advise? >> Yeah, no, I mean, I mean, I actually call it the tech stack. Actually you and John taught me that what was the tech stack, like the lamp stack, I think there is a new Cloud stack needs to come, and that I think the bottomline there should be... First of all, anything with storage should be in the Cloud. I mean, if you want to start, whether you are, financial, doesn't matter, there's no way. I come from cybersecurity side, I've seen it. Your attackers will be more with insiders than being on the Cloud, so storage has to be in the Cloud then come compute, Kubernetes. If you really want to use containers and Kubernetes, it has to be in the public Cloud, leverage that have the computer on their databases. That's where it can be like if your data is so strong, maybe run it On-prem, maybe have it on a hosted model for when it comes to database, but there you have a choice between hybrid Cloud and public Cloud choice. Then on top when it comes to App, the app itself, you can run locally or anywhere, the App and database. Now the areas that you really want to go after to migrate is look at anything that's an enterprise workload that you don't need people to manage it. You want your own team to move up in the career. You don't want thousand people looking at... you don't want to have a, for example, IT administrators to call central people to the people to manage your compute storage. That workload should be more, right? You already saw Sierra moved out to Salesforce. We saw collaboration already moved out. Zoom is not running locally. You already saw SharePoint with knowledge management mode up, right? With a box, drawbacks, you name anything. The next global mode is a SAS workloads, right? I think Workday service running there, but work data will go into the Cloud. I bet at some point Zendesk, ServiceNow, then either they put it on the public Cloud, or they have to create a product and public Cloud. To your point, these public Cloud vendors are at $2 trillion market cap. They're they're bigger than the... I call them nation States. >> Yeah, >> So I'm servicing though. I mean, there's a 2 trillion market gap between Amazon and Azure, I'm not going to compete with them. So I want to take this workload to run it there. So all these vendors, if you see that's where Shandra from Adobe is pushing this right, Adobe, Workday, Anaplan, all the SAS vendors we'll move them into the public Cloud within these vendors. So those workloads need to move out, right? So that all those things will start, then you'll start migrating, but I call your procurement. That's where the RPA comes in. The other thing that we didn't talk about, back to your first question, what is the next 10 years of Cloud will be RPA? That third piece to Cloud is RPA because if you have your systems On-prem, I can't automate them. I have to do a VPN into your house there and then try to automate your systems, or your procurement, et cetera. So all these RPA vendors are still running On-prem, most of them, whether it's UI path automation anywhere. So the Cloud should be where the brain should be. That's what I call them like the octopus analogy, the brain is in the Cloud, the tentacles are everywhere, they should manage it. But if my tentacles have to do a VPN with your house to manage it, I'm always will have failures. So if you look at the why RPA did not have the growth, like the Snowflake, like the Cloud, because they are running it On-prem, most of them still. 80% of the RP revenue is On-prem, running On-prem, that needs to be called clarified. So AI, RPA and the SAS, are the three reasons Cloud will take off. >> Awesome. Thank you for that. Now I want to flip the switch again. You're an investor or a multi-tool player here, but so if you're, let's say you're an ecosystem player, and you're kind of looking at the landscape as you're in an investor, of course you've invested in the Cloud, because the Cloud is where it's at, but you got to be careful as an ecosystem player to pick a spot that both provides growth, but allows you to have a moat as, I mean, that's why I'm really curious to see how Snowflake's going to compete because they're competing with AWS, Microsoft, and Google, unlike, Frank, when he was at service now, he was competing with BMC and with on-prem and he crushed it, but the competitors are much more capable here, but it seems like they've got, maybe they've got a moat with MultiCloud, and that whole data sharing thing, we'll see. But, what about that? Where are the opportunities? Where's that white space? And I know there's a lot of white space, but what's the framework to look at, from an investor standpoint, or even a CEO standpoint, where you want to put place your bets. >> No, very good question, so look, I did something. We talk as an investor in the board with many companies, right? So one thing that says as an investor, if you come back and say, I want to create a next generation Docker or a computer, there's no way nobody's going to invest. So that we can motor off, even if you want to do object storage or a block storage, I mean, I've been an investor board member of so many storage companies, there's no way as an industry, I'll write a check for a compute or storage, right? If you want to create a next generation network, like either NetSuite, or restart Juniper, Cisco, there is no way. But if you come back and say, I want to create a next generation Viper for remote working environments, where AI is at the core, I'm interested in that, right? So if you look at how the packets are dropped, there's no intelligence in either not switching today. The packets come, I do it. The intelligence is not built into the network with AI level. So if somebody comes with an AI, what good is all this NVD, our GPS, et cetera, if you cannot do wire speed, packet inspection, looking at the content and then route the traffic. If I see if it's a video package, but in UN Boston, there's high interview day of they should be loading our package faster, because you are a premium ISP. That intelligence has not gone there. So you will see, and that will be a bad people will happen in the network, switching, et cetera, right? So that is still an angle. But if you work and it comes to platform services, remember when I was at Pivotal and VMware, all models was my boss, that would, yes, as a platform, service is a game already won by the Cloud guys. >> Right. (indistinct) >> Silicon Valley Investors, I don't think you want to invest in past services, right? I mean, you might come with some lecture edition database to do some updates, there could be some game, let's say we want to do a time series database, or some metrics database, there's always some small angle, but the opportunity to go create a national database there it's very few. So I'm kind of eliminating all the black spaces, right? >> Yeah. >> We have the white spaces that comes in is the SAS level. Now to your point, if I'm Amazon, I'm going to compete with Snowflake, I have Redshift. So this is where at some point, these Cloud platforms, I call them aircraft carriers. They're not going to stay on the aircraft carriers, they're going to own the land as well. So they're going to move up to the SAS space. The question is you want to create a SAS service like CRM. They are not going to create a CRM like service, they may not create a sales force and service now, but if you're going to add a data warehouse, I can very well see Azure, Google, and AWS, going to create something to compute a Snowflake. Why would I not? It's so close to my database and data warehouse, I already have Redshift. So that's going to be nightlights, same reason, If you look at Netflix, you have a Netflix and you have Amazon prime. Netflix runs on Amazon, but you have Amazon prime. So you have the same model, you have Snowflake, and you'll have Redshift. The both will help each other, there'll be a... What do you call it? Coexistence will happen. But if you really want to invest, you want to invest in SAS companies. You do not want to be investing in a compliment players. You don't want to a feature. >> Yeah, that's great, I appreciate that perspective. And I wonder, so obviously Microsoft play in SAS, Google's got G suite. And I wonder if people often ask the Andy Jassy, you're going to move up the stack, you got to be an application, a SAS vendor, and you never say never with Atavist, But I wonder, and we were talking to Jerry Chen about this, years ago on theCube, and his angle was that Amazon will play, but they'll play through developers. They'll enable developers, and they'll participate, they'll take their, lick off the cone. So it's going to be interesting to see how directly Amazon plays, but at some point you got Tam expansion, you got to play in that space. >> Yeah, I'll give you an example of knowing, I got acquired by a couple of times by EMC. So I learned a lot from Joe Tucci and Paul Merage over the years. see Paul and Joe, what they did is to look at how 20 years, and they are very close to Boston in your area, Joe, what games did is they used to sell storage, but you know what he did, he went and bought the Apps to drive them. He bought like Legato, he bought Documentum, he bought Captiva, if you remember how he acquired all these companies as a services, he bought VMware to drive that. So I think the good angle that Microsoft has is, I'm a SAS player, I have dynamics, I have CRM, I have SharePoint, I have Collaboration, I have Office 365, MS Teams for users, and then I have the platform as Azure. So I think if I'm Amazon, (indistinct). I got to own the apps so that I can drive this workforce on my platform. >> Interesting. >> Just going to developers, like I know Jerry Chan, he was my peer a BMF. I don't think just literally to developers and that model works in open source, but the open source game is pretty much gone, and not too many companies made money. >> Well, >> Most companies pretty much gone. >> Yeah, he's right. Red hats not bad idea. But it's very interesting what you're saying there. And so, hey, its why Oracle wants to have Tiktok, running on their platform, right? I mean, it's going to. (laughing) It's going to drive that further integration. I wanted to ask you something, you were talking about, you wouldn't invest in storage or compute, but I wonder, and you mentioned some commentary about GPU's. Of course the videos has been going crazy, but they're now saying, okay, how do we expand our Team, they make the acquisition of arm, et cetera. What about this DPU thing, if you follow that, that data processing unit where they're like hyper dis-aggregation and then they reaggregate, and as an offload and really to drive data centric workloads. Have you looked at that at all? >> I did, I think, and that's a good angle. So I think, look, it's like, it goes through it. I don't know if you remember in your career, we have seen it. I used to get Silicon graphics. I saw the first graphic GPU, right? That time GPU was more graphic processor unit, >> Right, yeah, work stations. >> So then become NPUs at work processing units, right? There was a TCP/IP office offloading, if you remember right, there was like vector processing unit. So I think every once in a while the industry, recreated this separate unit, as a co-processor to the main CPU, because main CPU's inefficient, and it makes sense. And then Google created TPU's and then we have the new world of the media GPU's, now we have DPS all these are good, but what's happening is, all these are driving for machine learning, AI for the training period there. Training period Sometimes it's so long with the workloads, if you can cut down, it makes sense. >> Yeah. >> Because, but the question is, these aren't so specialized in nature. I can't use it for everything. >> Yup. >> I want Ideally, algorithms to be paralyzed, I want the training to be paralyzed, I want so having deep use and GPS are important, I think where I want to see them as more, the algorithm, there should be more investment from the NVIDIA's and these guys, taking the algorithm to be highly paralyzed them. (indistinct) And I think that still has not happened in industry yet. >> All right, so we're pretty much out of time, but what are you doing these days? Where are you spending your time, are you still in Stealth, give us a little glimpse. >> Yeah, no, I'm out of the Stealth, I'm actually the CEO of Aisera now, Aisera, obviously I invested with them, but I'm the CEO of Aisero. It's funded by Menlo ventures, Norwest, True, along with Khosla ventures and Ram Shriram is a big investor. Robin's on the board of Google, so these guys, look, we are going out to the collaboration game. How do you automate customer service and support for employees and then users, right? In this whole game, we talked about the Zoom, Slack and MS Teams, that's what I'm spending time, I want to create next generation service now. >> Fantastic. Muddu, I always love having you on you, pull punches, you tell it like it is, that you're a great visionary technologist. Thanks so much for coming on theCube, and participating in our program. >> Dave, it's always a pleasure speaking to you sir. Thank you. >> Okay. Keep it right there, there's more coming from Cuba and Cloud right after this break. (slow music)
SUMMARY :
From the Cube Studios Welcome my friend, good to see you. Pleasure to be with you. I want to ask you about that, but COVID is going to probably accelerate Yeah. because you tell it like it is, that you see that as permanent, So that's why, if you look I wonder how you look at you guys are talking about 10 years back, So to your point, what will drive Cloud and you hear a lot of the I think you will. the On-prem stuff is flat to Is the App server is going to run On-prem, I want to ask you about those, So the same philosophy will So I'll tell you what, sorry, I'm not going to come to you and say, hey, the license, you got to pay X. I love that because that's the core But of course the age of Now the areas that you So AI, RPA and the SAS, where you want to put place your bets. So if you look at how Right. but the opportunity to go So you have the same So it's going to be interesting to see the Apps to drive them. I don't think just literally to developers I wanted to ask you something, I don't know if you AI for the training period there. Because, but the question is, taking the algorithm to but what are you doing these days? but I'm the CEO of Aisero. Muddu, I always love having you on you, pleasure speaking to you sir. right after this break.
SENTIMENT ANALYSIS :
ENTITIES
Entity | Category | Confidence |
---|---|---|
Dave Vellante | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Microsoft | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Dave | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Amazon | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
1999 | DATE | 0.99+ |
Jerry Chen | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Adobe | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ | |
$0 | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
AWS | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Oracle | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
$ 0 | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Paul | PERSON | 0.99+ |
John | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Netezza | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Ram Shriram | PERSON | 0.99+ |
2006 | DATE | 0.99+ |
two | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Cisco | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
35 | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Hortonworks | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Muddu Sudhakar | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Jerry Chan | PERSON | 0.99+ |
95 billion | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Joe | PERSON | 0.99+ |
2025 | DATE | 0.99+ |
Webex | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Teradata | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Dell | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
60 | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Boston | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
Palo Alto | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
70% | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Frank | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Aisero | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Paul Merage | PERSON | 0.99+ |
NVIDIA | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
$2 trillion | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
HP | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
70 | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
IBM | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Spotify | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Shopify | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Norwest | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
75% | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
BMC | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
first question | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Cloudera | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
EMC | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
two-piece | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Muddu | PERSON | 0.99+ |
VMware | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Andy Jassy | PERSON | 0.99+ |
15 years | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Accenture | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Mapper | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
SAS | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
80% | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
100 percent | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Aisera | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Pivotal | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Okta | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
$80 billion | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Joe Tucci | PERSON | 0.99+ |
next year | DATE | 0.99+ |
20 years | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Zscaler | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Cube | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Muddu Sudhakar | CUBE on Cloud
(gentle music) >> From the Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is theCube Conversation. >> Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante, we're back at Cube on Cloud, and with me is Muddu Sudhakar. He's a long time alum of theCube, a technologist and executive, a serial entrepreneur and an investor. Welcome my friend, good to see you. >> Good to see you, Dave. Pleasure to be with you. Happy elections, I guess. >> Yeah, yeah. So I wanted to start, this work from home, pivot's been amazing, and you've seen the enterprise collaboration explode. I wrote a piece a couple months ago, looking at valuations of various companies, right around the snowflake IPO, I want to ask you about that, but I was looking at the valuations of various companies, at Spotify, and Shopify, and of course Zoom was there. And I was looking at just simple revenue multiples, and I said, geez, Zoom actually looks, might look undervalued, which is crazy, right? And of course the stock went up after that, and you see teams, Microsoft Teams, and Microsoft doing a great job across the board, we've written about that, you're seeing Webex is exploding, I mean, what do you make of this whole enterprise collaboration play? >> No, I think the look there is a trend here, right? So I think this probably trend started before COVID, but COVID is going to probably accelerate this whole digital transformation, right? People are going to work remotely a lot more, not everybody's going to come back to the offices even after COVID, so I think this whole collaboration through Slack, and Zoom, and Microsoft Teams and Webex, it's going to be the new game now, right? Both the video, audio and chat solutions, that's really going to help people like eyeballs. You're not going to spend time on all four of them, right? It's like everyday from a consumer side, you're going to spend time on your Gmail, Facebook, maybe Twitter, maybe Instagram, so like in the consumer side, on your personal life, you have something on the enterprise. The eyeballs are going to be in these platforms. >> Yeah. Well. >> But we're not going to take everything. >> Well, So you are right, there's a permanence to this, and I got a lot of ground to cover with you. And I always like our conversations mood because you tell it like it is, I'm going to stay on that work from home pivot. You know a lot about security, but you've seen three big trends, like mega trends in security, Endpoint, Identity Access Management, and Cloud Security, you're seeing this in the stock prices of companies like CrowdStrike, Zscaler, Okta- >> Right >> Sailpoint- >> Right, I mean, they exploded, as a result of the pandemic, and I think I'm inferring from your comment that you see that as permanent, but that's a real challenge from a security standpoint. What's the impact of Cloud there? >> No, it isn't impact but look, first is all the services required to be Cloud, right? See, the whole ideas for it to collaborate and do these things. So you cannot be running an application, like you can't be running conference and SharePoint oN-Prem, and try to on a Zoom and MS teams. So that's why, if you look at Microsoft is very clever, they went with Office 365, SharePoint 365, now they have MS Teams, so I think that Cloud is going to drive all these workloads that you have been talking about a lot, right? You and John have been saying this for years now. The eruption of Cloud and SAS services are the vehicle to drive this next-generation collaboration. >> You know what's so cool? So Cloud obviously is the topic, I wonder how you look at the last 10 years of Cloud, and maybe we could project forward, I mean the big three Cloud vendors, they're running it like $20 billion a quarter, and they're growing collectively, 35, 40% clips, so we're really approaching a hundred billion dollars for these three. And you hear stats like only 20% of the workloads are in the public Cloud, so it feels like we're just getting started. How do you look at the impact of Cloud on the market, as you say, the last 10 years, and what do you expect going forward? >> No, I think it's very fascinating, right? So I remember when theCube, you guys are talking about 10 years back, now it's been what? More than 10 years, 15 years, since AWS came out with their first S3 service back in 2006. >> Right. >> Right? so I think look, Cloud is going to accelerate even more further. The areas is going to accelerate is for different reasons. I think now you're seeing the initial days, it's all about startups, initial workloads, Dev test and QA test, now you're talking about real production workloads are moving towards Cloud, right? Initially it was backup, we really didn't care for backup they really put there. Now you're going to have Cloud health primary services, your primary storage will be there, it's not going to be an EMC, It's not going to be a ETAP storage, right? So workloads are going to shift from the business applications, and this business App again, will be running on the Cloud, and I'll make another prediction, make customer service and support. Customer service and support, again, we should be running on the Cloud. You're not want to run the thing on a Dell server, or an IBM server, or an HP server, with your own hosted environment. That model is not because there's no economies of scale. So to your point, what will drive Cloud for the next 10 years, will be economies of scale. Where can you take the cost? How can I save money? If you don't move to the Cloud, you won't save money. So all those workloads are going to go to the Cloud are people who really want to save, like global gradual custom, right? If you stay on the ASP model, a hosted, you're not going to save your costs, your costs will constantly go up from a SAS perspective. >> So that doesn't bode well for all the On-prem guys, and you hear a lot of the vendors that don't own a Cloud that talk about repatriation, but the numbers don't support that. So what do those guys do? I mean, they're talking multi-Cloud, of course they're talking hybrid, that's IBM's big play, how do you see it? >> I think, look, see there, to me, multi-Cloud makes sense, right? You don't want one vendor that you never want to get, so having Amazon, Microsoft, Google, it gives them a multi-Cloud. Even hybrid Cloud does make sense, right? There'll be some workloads. It's like, we are still running On-prem environment, we still have mainframe, so it's never going to be a hundred percent, but I would say the majority, your question is, can we get to 60, 70, 80% workers in the next 10 years? I think you will. I think by 2025, more than 78% of the Cloud Migration by the next five years, 70% of workload for enterprise will be on the Cloud. The remaining 25, maybe Hybrid, maybe On-prem, but I get panics, really doesn't matter. You have saved and part of your business is running on the Cloud. That's your cost saving, that's where you'll see the economies of scale, and that's where all the growth will happen. >> So square the circle for me, because again, you hear the stat on the IDC stat, IBM Ginni Rometty puts it out there a lot that only 20% of the workloads are in the public Cloud, everything else is On-prem, but it's not a zero sum game, right? I mean the Cloud native stuff is growing like crazy, the On-prem stuff is flat to down, so what's going to happen? When you talk about 70% of the workloads will be in the Cloud, do you see those mission critical apps and moving into the car, I mean the insurance companies going to put their claims apps in the Cloud, or the financial services companies going to put their mission critical workloads in the Cloud, or they just going to develop new stuff that's Cloud native that is sort of interacts with the On-prem. How do you see that playing out? >> Yeah, no, I think absolutely, I think a very good question. So two things will happen. I think if you take an enterprise, right? Most businesses what they'll do is the workloads that they should not be running On-prem, they'll move it up. So obviously things like take, as I said, I use the word SharePoint, right? SharePoint and conference, all the knowledge stuff is still running on people's data centers. There's no reason. I understand, I've seen statistics that 70, 80% of the On-prem for SharePoint will move to SharePoint on the Cloud. So Microsoft is going to make tons of money on that, right? Same thing, databases, right? Whether it's CQL server, whether there is Oracle database, things that you are running as a database, as a Cloud, we move to the Cloud. Whether that is posted in Oracle Cloud, or you're running Oracle or Mongo DB, or Dynamo DB on AWS or SQL server Microsoft, that's going to happen. Then what you're talking about is really the App concept, the applications themselves, the App server. Is the App server is going to run On-prem, how much it's going to laureate outside? There may be a hybrid Cloud, like for example, Kafka. I may use a Purse running on a Kafka as a service, or I may be using Elasticsearch for my indexing on AWS or Google Cloud, but I may be running my App locally. So there'll be some hybrid place, but what I would say is for every application, 75% of your Comprende will be on the Cloud. So think of it like the Dev. So even for the On-prem app, you're not going to be a 100 percent On-prem. The competent, the billing materials will move to the Cloud, your Purse, your storage, because if you put it On-prem, you need to add all this, you need to have all the whole things to buy it and hire the people, so that's what is going to happen. So from a competent perspective, 70% of your bill of materials will move to the Cloud, even for an On-prem application. >> So, Of course, the susification of the industry in the last decade and in my three favorite companies last decade, you've worked for two of them, Tableau, ServiceNow, and Splunk. I want to ask you about those, but I'm interested in the potential disruption there. I mean, you've got these SAS companies, Salesforce of course is another one, but they can't get started in 1999. What do you see happening with those? I mean, we're basically building these sort of large SAS, platforms, now. Do you think that the Cloud native world that developers can come at this from an angle where they can disrupt those companies, or are they too entrenched? I mean, look at service now, I mean, I don't know, $80 billion market capital where they are, they bigger than Workday, I mean, just amazing how much they've grown and you feel like, okay, nothing can stop them, but there's always disruption in this industry, what are your thoughts on that. >> Not very good with, I think there'll be disrupted. So to me actually to your point, ServiceNow is now close to a 100 billion now, 95 billion market coverage, crazy. So from evaluation perspective, so I think the reason they'll be disrupted is that the SAS vendors that you talked about, ServiceNow, and all this plan, most of these services, they're truly not a multi-tenant or what do you call the Cloud Native. And that is the Accenture. So because of that, they will not be able to pass the savings back to the enterprises. So the cost economics, the economics that the Cloud provides because of the multi tenancy ability will not. The second reason there'll be disrupted is AI. So far, we talked about Cloud, but AI is the core. So it's not really Cloud Native, Dave, I look at the AI in a two-piece. AI is going to change, see all the SAS vendors were created 20 years back, if you remember, was an operator typing it, I don't respond administered we'll type a Splunk query. I don't need a human to type a query anymore, system will actually find it, that's what the whole security game has changed, right? So what's going to happen is if you believe in that, that AI, your score will disrupt all the SAS vendors, so one angle SAS is going to have is a Cloud. That's where you make the Cloud will take up because a SAS application will be Cloudified. Being SAS is not Cloud, right? Second thing is SAS will be also, I call it, will be AI-fied. So AI and machine learning will be trying to drive at the core so that I don't need that many licenses. I don't need that many humans. I don't need that many administrators to manage, I call them the tuners. Once you get a driverless car, you don't need a thousand tuners to tune your Tesla, or Google Waymo car. So the same philosophy will happen is your Dev Apps, your administrators, your service management, people that you need for service now, and these products, Zendesk with AI, will tremendously will disrupt. >> So you're saying, okay, so yeah, I was going to ask you, won't the SAS vendors, won't they be able to just put, inject AI into their platforms, and I guess I'm inferring saying, yeah, but a lot of the problems that they're solving, are going to go away because of AI, is that right? And automation and RPA and things of that nature, is that right? >> Yes and no. So I'll tell you what, sorry, you have asked a very good question, let's answer, let me rephrase that question. What you're saying is, "Why can't the existing SAS vendors do the AI?" >> Yes, right. >> Right, >> And there's a reason they can't do it is their pricing model is by number of seats. So I'm not going to come to Dave, and say, come on, come pay me less money. It's the same reason why a board and general lover build an electric car. They're selling 10 million gasoline cars. There's no incentive for me, I'm not going to do any AI, I'm going to put, I'm not going to come to you and say, hey, buy me a hundred less license next year from it. So that is one reason why AI, even though these guys do any AI, it's going to be just so I call it, they're going to, what do you call it, a whitewash, kind of like you put some paint brush on it, trying to show you some AI you did from a marketing dynamics. But at the core, if you really implement the AI with you take the driver out, how are you going to change the pricing model? And being a public company, you got to take a hit on the pricing model and the price, and it's going to have a stocking part. So that, to your earlier question, will somebody disrupt them? The person who is going to disrupt them, will disrupt them on the pricing model. >> Right. So I want to ask you about that, because we saw a Snowflake, and it's IPO, we were able to pour through its S-1, and they have a different pricing model. It's a true Cloud consumption model, Whereas of course, most SAS companies, they're going to lock you in for at least one year term, maybe more, and then, you buy the license, you got to pay X. If you, don't use it, you still got to pay for it. Snowflake's different, actually they have a different problem, that people are using it too much and the sea is driving the CFO crazy because the bill is going up and up and up, but to me, that's the right model, It's just like the Amazon model, if you can justify it, so how do you see the pricing, that consumption model is actually, you're seeing some of the On-prem guys at HPE, Dell, they're doing as a service. They're kind of taking a page out of the last decade SAS model, so I think pricing is a real tricky one, isn't it? >> No, you nailed it, you nailed it. So I think the way in which the Snowflake there, how the disruptors are data warehouse, that disrupted the open source vendors too. Snowflake distributed, imagine the playbook, you disrupted something as the $ 0, right? It's an open source with Cloudera, Hortonworks, Mapper, that whole big data that you want me to, or that market is this, that disrupting data warehouses like Netezza, Teradata, and the charging more money, they're making more money and disrupting at $0, because the pricing models by consumption that you talked about. CMT is going to happen in the service now, Zen Desk, well, 'cause their pricing one is by number of seats. People are going to say, "How are my users are going to ask?" right? If you're an employee help desk, you're back to your original health collaborative. I may be on Slack, I could be on zoom, I'll maybe on MS Teams, I'm going to ask by using usage model on Slack, tools by employees to service now is the pricing model that people want to pay for. The more my employees use it, the more value I get. But I don't want to pay by number of seats, so the vendor, who's going to figure that out, and that's where I look, if you know me, I'm right over as I started, that's what I've tried to push that model look, I love that because that's the core of how you want to change the new game. >> I agree. I say, kill me with that problem, I mean, some people are trying to make it a criticism, but you hit on the point. If you pay more, it's only because you're getting more value out of it. So I wanted to flip the switch here a little bit and take a customer angle. Something that you've been on all sides. And I want to talk a little bit about strategies, you've been a strategist, I guess, once a strategist, always a strategist. How should organizations be thinking about their approach to Cloud, it's cost different for different industries, but, back when the cube started, financial services Cloud was a four-letter word. But of course the age of company is going to matter, but what's the framework for figuring out your Cloud strategy to get to your 70% and really take advantage of the economics? Should I be Mono Cloud, Multi-Cloud, Multi-vendor, what would you advise? >> Yeah, no, I mean, I mean, I actually call it the tech stack. Actually you and John taught me that what was the tech stack, like the lamp stack, I think there is a new Cloud stack needs to come, and that I think the bottomline there should be... First of all, anything with storage should be in the Cloud. I mean, if you want to start, whether you are, financial, doesn't matter, there's no way. I come from cybersecurity side, I've seen it. Your attackers will be more with insiders than being on the Cloud, so storage has to be in the Cloud and encompass compute whoever it is. If you really want to use containers and Kubernetes, it has to be in the public Cloud, leverage that have the computer on their databases. That's where it can be like if your data is so strong, maybe run it On-prem, maybe have it on a hosted model for when it comes to database, but there you have a choice between hybrid Cloud and public Cloud choice. Then on top when it comes to App, the app itself, you can run locally or anywhere, the App and database. Now the areas that you really want to go after to migrate is look at anything that's an enterprise workload that you don't need people to manage it. You want your own team to move up in the career. You don't want thousand people looking at... you don't want to have a, for example, IT administrators to call central people to the people to manage your compute storage. That workload should be more, right? You already saw Sierra moved out to Salesforce. We saw collaboration already moved out. Zoom is not running locally. You already saw SharePoint with knowledge management mode up, right? With a box, drawbacks, you name anything. The next global mode is a SAS workloads, right? I think Workday service running there, but work data will go into the Cloud. I bet at some point Zendesk, ServiceNow, then either they put it on the public Cloud, or they have to create a product and public Cloud. To your point, these public Cloud vendors are at $2 trillion market cap. They're they're bigger than the... I call them nation States. >> Yeah, >> So I'm servicing though. I mean, there's a 2 trillion market gap between Amazon and Azure, I'm not going to compete with them. So I want to take this workload to run it there. So all these vendors, if you see that's where Shandra from Adobe is pushing this right, Adobe, Workday, Anaplan, all the SAS vendors we'll move them into the public Cloud within these vendors. So those workloads need to move out, right? So that all those things will start, then you'll start migrating, but I call your procurement. That's where the RPA comes in. The other thing that we didn't talk about, back to your first question, what is the next 10 years of Cloud will be RPA? That third piece to Cloud is RPA because if you have your systems On-prem, I can't automate them. I have to do a VPN into your house there and then try to automate your systems, or your procurement, et cetera. So all these RPA vendors are still running On-prem, most of them, whether it's UI path automation anywhere. So the Cloud should be where the brain should be. That's what I call them like the octopus analogy, the brain is in the Cloud, the tentacles are everywhere, they should manage it. But if my tentacles have to do a VPN with your house to manage it, I'm always will have failures. So if you look at the why RPA did not have the growth, like the Snowflake, like the Cloud, because they are running it On-prem, most of them still. 80% of the RP revenue is On-prem, running On-prem, that needs to be called clarified. So AI, RPA and the SAS, are the three reasons Cloud will take off. >> Awesome. Thank you for that. Now I want to flip the switch again. You're an investor or a multi-tool player here, but so if you're, let's say you're an ecosystem player, and you're kind of looking at the landscape as you're in an investor, of course you've invested in the Cloud, because the Cloud is where it's at, but you got to be careful as an ecosystem player to pick a spot that both provides growth, but allows you to have a moat as, I mean, that's why I'm really curious to see how Snowflake's going to compete because they're competing with AWS, Microsoft, and Google, unlike, Frank, when he was at service now, he was competing with BMC and with on-prem and he crushed it, but the competitors are much more capable here, but it seems like they've got, maybe they've got a moat with MultiCloud, and that whole data sharing thing, we'll see. But, what about that? Where are the opportunities? Where's that white space? And I know there's a lot of white space, but what's the framework to look at, from an investor standpoint, or even a CEO standpoint, where you want to put place your bets. >> No, very good question, so look, I did something. We talk as an investor in the board with many companies, right? So one thing that says as an investor, if you come back and say, I want to create a next generation Docker or a computer, there's no way nobody's going to invest. So that we can motor off, even if you want to do object storage or a block storage, I mean, I've been an investor board member of so many storage companies, there's no way as an industry, I'll write a check for a compute or storage, right? If you want to create a next generation network, like either NetSuite, or restart Juniper, Cisco, there is no way. But if you come back and say, I want to create a next generation Viper for remote working environments, where AI is at the core, I'm interested in that, right? So if you look at how the packets are dropped, there's no intelligence in either not switching today. The packets come, I do it. The intelligence is not built into the network with AI level. So if somebody comes with an AI, what good is all this NVD, our GPS, et cetera, if you cannot do wire speed, packet inspection, looking at the content and then route the traffic. If I see if it's a video package, but in UN Boston, there's high interview day of they should be loading our package faster, because you are a premium ISP. That intelligence has not gone there. So you will see, and that will be a bad people will happen in the network, switching, et cetera, right? So that is still an angle. But if you work and it comes to platform services, remember when I was at Pivotal and VMware, all models was my boss, that would, yes, as a platform, service is a game already won by the Cloud guys. >> Right. (indistinct) >> Silicon Valley Investors, I don't think you want to invest in past services, right? I mean, you might come with some lecture edition database to do some updates, there could be some game, let's say we want to do a time series database, or some metrics database, there's always some small angle, but the opportunity to go create a national database there it's very few. So I'm kind of eliminating all the black spaces, right? >> Yeah. >> We have the white spaces that comes in is the SAS level. Now to your point, if I'm Amazon, I'm going to compete with Snowflake, I have Redshift. So this is where at some point, these Cloud platforms, I call them aircraft carriers. They're not going to stay on the aircraft carriers, they're going to own the land as well. So they're going to move up to the SAS space. The question is you want to create a SAS service like CRM. They are not going to create a CRM like service, they may not create a sales force and service now, but if you're going to add a data warehouse, I can very well see Azure, Google, and AWS, going to create something to compute a Snowflake. Why would I not? It's so close to my database and data warehouse, I already have Redshift. So that's going to be nightlights, same reason, If you look at Netflix, you have a Netflix and you have Amazon prime. Netflix runs on Amazon, but you have Amazon prime. So you have the same model, you have Snowflake, and you'll have Redshift. The both will help each other, there'll be a... What do you call it? Coexistence will happen. But if you really want to invest, you want to invest in SAS companies. You do not want to be investing in a compliment players. You don't want to a feature. >> Yeah, that's great, I appreciate that perspective. And I wonder, so obviously Microsoft play in SAS, Google's got G suite. And I wonder if people often ask the Andy Jassy, you're going to move up the stack, you got to be an application, a SAS vendor, and you never say never with Atavist, But I wonder, and we were talking to Jerry Chen about this, years ago on theCube, and his angle was that Amazon will play, but they'll play through developers. They'll enable developers, and they'll participate, they'll take their, lick off the cone. So it's going to be interesting to see how directly Amazon plays, but at some point you got Tam expansion, you got to play in that space. >> Yeah, I'll give you an example of knowing, I got acquired by a couple of times by EMC. So I learned a lot from Joe Tucci and Paul Merage over the years. see Paul and Joe, what they did is to look at how 20 years, and they are very close to Boston in your area, Joe, what games did is they used to sell storage, but you know what he did, he went and bought the Apps to drive them. He bought like Legato, he bought Documentum, he bought Captiva, if you remember how he acquired all these companies as a services, he bought VMware to drive that. So I think the good angle that Microsoft has is, I'm a SAS player, I have dynamics, I have CRM, I have SharePoint, I have Collaboration, I have Office 365, MS Teams for users, and then I have the platform as Azure. So I think if I'm Amazon, (indistinct). I got to own the apps so that I can drive this workforce on my platform. >> Interesting. >> Just going to developers, like I know Jerry Chan, he was my peer a BMF. I don't think just literally to developers and that model works in open source, but the open source game is pretty much gone, and not too many companies made money. >> Well, >> Most companies pretty much gone. >> Yeah, he's right. Red hats not bad idea. But it's very interesting what you're saying there. And so, hey, its why Oracle wants to have Tiktok, running on their platform, right? I mean, it's going to. (laughing) It's going to drive that further integration. I wanted to ask you something, you were talking about, you wouldn't invest in storage or compute, but I wonder, and you mentioned some commentary about GPU's. Of course the videos has been going crazy, but they're now saying, okay, how do we expand our Team, they make the acquisition of arm, et cetera. What about this DPU thing, if you follow that, that data processing unit where they're like hyper dis-aggregation and then they reaggregate, and as an offload and really to drive data centric workloads. Have you looked at that at all? >> I did, I think, and that's a good angle. So I think, look, it's like, it goes through it. I don't know if you remember in your career, we have seen it. I used to get Silicon graphics. I saw the first graphic GPU, right? That time GPU was more graphic processor unit, >> Right, yeah, work stations. >> So then become NPUs at work processing units, right? There was a TCP/IP office offloading, if you remember right, there was like vector processing unit. So I think every once in a while the industry, recreated this separate unit, as a co-processor to the main CPU, because main CPU's inefficient, and it makes sense. And then Google created TPU's and then we have the new world of the media GPU's, now we have DPS all these are good, but what's happening is, all these are driving for machine learning, AI for the training period there. Training period Sometimes it's so long with the workloads, if you can cut down, it makes sense. >> Yeah. >> Because, but the question is, these aren't so specialized in nature. I can't use it for everything. >> Yup. >> I want Ideally, algorithms to be paralyzed, I want the training to be paralyzed, I want so having deep use and GPS are important, I think where I want to see them as more, the algorithm, there should be more investment from the NVIDIA's and these guys, taking the algorithm to be highly paralyzed them. (indistinct) And I think that still has not happened in industry yet. >> All right, so we're pretty much out of time, but what are you doing these days? Where are you spending your time, are you still in Stealth, give us a little glimpse. >> Yeah, no, I'm out of the Stealth, I'm actually the CEO of Aisera now, Aisera, obviously I invested with them, but I'm the CEO of Aisero. It's funded by Menlo ventures, Norwest, True, along with Khosla ventures and Ram Shriram is a big investor. Robin's on the board of Google, so these guys, look, we are going out to the collaboration game. How do you automate customer service and support for employees and then users, right? In this whole game, we talked about the Zoom, Slack and MS Teams, that's what I'm spending time, I want to create next generation service now. >> Fantastic. Muddu, I always love having you on you, pull punches, you tell it like it is, that you're a great visionary technologist. Thanks so much for coming on theCube, and participating in our program. >> Dave, it's always a pleasure speaking to you sir. Thank you. >> Okay. Keep it right there, there's more coming from Cuba and Cloud right after this break. (slow music)
SUMMARY :
From the Cube Studios Welcome my friend, good to see you. Pleasure to be with you. I want to ask you about that, but COVID is going to probably accelerate Yeah. because you tell it like it is, that you see that as permanent, So that's why, if you look and what do you expect going forward? you guys are talking about 10 years back, So to your point, what will drive Cloud and you hear a lot of the I think you will. the On-prem stuff is flat to Is the App server is going to run On-prem, I want to ask you about those, So the same philosophy will So I'll tell you what, sorry, I'm not going to come to you and say, hey, the license, you got to pay X. I love that because that's the core But of course the age of Now the areas that you So AI, RPA and the SAS, where you want to put place your bets. So if you look at how Right. but the opportunity to go So you have the same So it's going to be interesting to see the Apps to drive them. I don't think just literally to developers I wanted to ask you something, I don't know if you AI for the training period there. Because, but the question is, taking the algorithm to but what are you doing these days? but I'm the CEO of Aisero. Muddu, I always love having you on you, pleasure speaking to you sir. right after this break.
SENTIMENT ANALYSIS :
ENTITIES
Entity | Category | Confidence |
---|---|---|
Dave Vellante | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Microsoft | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
1999 | DATE | 0.99+ |
Amazon | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Adobe | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
$0 | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Jerry Chen | PERSON | 0.99+ |
ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ | |
Oracle | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Paul | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Dave | PERSON | 0.99+ |
AWS | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
John | PERSON | 0.99+ |
$ 0 | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
two | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Netezza | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
2006 | DATE | 0.99+ |
Hortonworks | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Cisco | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
35 | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Frank | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Muddu Sudhakar | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Ram Shriram | PERSON | 0.99+ |
95 billion | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Joe | PERSON | 0.99+ |
2025 | DATE | 0.99+ |
Webex | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Teradata | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
60 | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Jerry Chan | PERSON | 0.99+ |
$80 billion | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Boston | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
Dell | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Palo Alto | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
IBM | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Paul Merage | PERSON | 0.99+ |
NVIDIA | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
BMC | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
HP | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Norwest | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
70% | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
70 | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
first question | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Aisero | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Spotify | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Shopify | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
EMC | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
80% | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
VMware | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Cloudera | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
two-piece | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
2 trillion | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Andy Jassy | PERSON | 0.99+ |
100 percent | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Accenture | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
SAS | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
15 years | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Muddu | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Mapper | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
75% | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
100 billion | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Pivotal | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
$2 trillion | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Okta | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Joe Tucci | PERSON | 0.99+ |
20 years | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
next year | DATE | 0.99+ |
Aisera | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Zscaler | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Breaking Analysis: Azure Cloud Powers Microsoft's Future
>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> As we reported last week, we believe that in the next decade, there will be changes in public policy that are going to restrict the way in which big internet companies are able to appropriate user data. Big tech came under fire again this week with the CEOs of Facebook, Twitter, and Google going toe to toe with several U.S. senators. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, however, was not one of those CEOs in the firing line. Microsoft doesn't heavily rely on ad revenues, rather, the company's momentum is steadily building around Azure, which by my estimates is now roughly 19% of Microsoft's overall revenues. It's surpassed, maybe nearly got to $7 billion for the first time on a quarterly basis. I'll come back to you on that. Hello everyone, and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE insights powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we'll respond to the many requests we've had to dig into the business of Microsoft a little bit deeper and provide a snapshot of how the company is faring in the ETR dataset. Let's take a quick look at Microsoft's financials, and the scope of Microsoft's business is actually mind-boggling. The company has roughly $150 billion in revenue, and it grew its top line 12% last quarter. It has more than $136 billion in cash on the balance sheet. Microsoft generates over $60 billion annually in operating cashflow. And last quarter alone threw off more than 19 billion in operating cash. Its gross margins are expanding across virtually all of its major business lines. So let's look at those business sectors. Microsoft, it doesn't suffer from the nagging problems that we've talked about with a lot of older tech companies. Companies like IBM and Dell and Cisco and Oracle and SAP, they struggle with growth sometimes because their growth businesses are not yet large enough to offset the declines in their traditional on-premises business segments. Now at the highest level, Microsoft breaks its business into three broad categories, and they're all growing quite nicely. Let me add some color here. Let's start with the productivity and business process line of business. LinkedIn, which is growing at 16%, is in this category as is Office. This business is shifting from one of on-prem licenses, which are really headwinds right now from Microsoft, to the cloud, in the form of SaaS with Office 365, which is growing at a 20% clip within its commercial market base. Even the consumer side of O365 is growing in the double digits. Dynamics is Microsoft's ERP and CRM business, and that falls into this slice of the pie, that's growing at 18%. And then the newer Dynamics 365, that's growing at 37%. So you can see, Microsoft is easily able to show growth despite the transitions from its legacy business. Intelligent cloud is the next segment. It's kind of the kitchen sink category, meaning there's stuff in there that includes a bit of cloud washing in my opinion, but Microsoft is not nearly as egregious as IBM with the liberties that it takes around its cloud categorization. For Microsoft it's a $13 billion quarterly business. And it's growing at 19%, as we show in the pie chart. Azure is an increasingly large portion of this segment. Azure is the most direct comparison with AWS. And I have said in the past quarter, I'd say it's around 50% of the intelligent cloud, and that it's approaching by my estimates around $7 billion a quarter. Azure grew at 47% annually this past quarter, the same growth rate as last quarter. Ironically, both AWS and Google Cloud grew at the same year over year rate this quarter as they did last quarter. AWS is 29% GCP in the high 50s by at my estimates. AWS revenue was 11.6 billion this past quarter, and I have GCP still well under 2 billion. We'll be updating our cloud numbers and digging deeper next week into this topic. So consider these estimates preliminary for Azure and GCP, which the respective companies don't break out for as Amazon, as you know, breaks out AWS explicitly. Now, back to Microsoft's intelligent cloud business. It includes on-prem server software, which is a managed decline business from Microsoft. They also include enterprise services in this category. So as you can see, it's not a clean cloud number for comparison purposes. Now finally, the third big slice of the pie is more personal computing. I know, it's kind of a dorky name, but nonetheless it's nearly a $12 billion business that's growing at 6% annually. The Windows OEM business is in here, as is Windows 10 and some security offerings. Surface is also in here as well and it's growing in the mid-thirties. Search revenue is in this category as well. It's declining per my earlier statements that it's not a main piece of Microsoft's business. Now, one of the most interesting areas of this sector is gaming. Microsoft's gaming business is growing at 21% and they just acquired ZeniMax Media for seven and a half billion dollars. Let me land on gaming for a minute. The gaming experts at theCUBE are really excited about Microsoft's XBox content services, which grew at about 30% this past quarter. Game Pass is essentially Microsoft's Netflix, or you can think of it as maybe like a Spotify model. You can get in for as low as $5 a month. I think you can pay as much as $15 a month and get access to a huge catalog of games that you can download. In November of last year, Microsoft launched its xCloud beta service, which allows you to download to a PC or a game box. Now eventually with 5G, the box goes away. All you'll need is a screen and you know, controller with the joysticks, no download. In fact, this is how it works today for Android. Now, interestingly, Apple is blocking Microsoft and some others like Google's Stadia, saying that they don't allow streaming game apps like Microsoft's xCloud service, because they don't follow the company's guidelines. What Apple's not telling you is that its adjacent offering, Apple Arcade, is considered subpar by hardcore gamers. And while Apple allows the streaming of movies and music from any service on the iPhone, it's decided not to allow streaming games. Now, the last thing I want to stress about Microsoft is its leverage point around developers. Developers is a big one here, we all remember the sweaty Steve Ballmer running around the stage like a mad man, screaming, "Developers, developers, developers!" Well, despite his obsession with Windows, he sure got that one right. The GitHub acquisition was Microsoft's way of buying more developer love. It does concentrate power with a tech giant, but you know what, if it wasn't Microsoft that bought GitHub, it would have been Facebook or Amazon or Google or one of the other tech giants. Now, despite some angst in the developer community over this, GitHub, it really is a linchpin for Microsoft to more tightly integrate GitHub with its pretty vast developer tool set. All right. Let's look deeper into the Microsoft data and focus on the enterprise. We'll bring in the ETR as we always do. We said last week that Google needed to look to the cloud and edge and get its head out of its ads. Well, Microsoft recovered from its Windows myopia after Satya Nadella took over in 2014, and by all accounts from the ETR survey data, Microsoft is killing it across the board. Let me start by putting Microsoft in context with some of the most prominent companies that both compete with, and sometimes partner with Microsoft. So this xy graph, it's one of our favorites. I show it all the time and it shows net score on the vertical axis, which is a measure of spending momentum from ETR, and the horizontal axis shows what we call market share, which is a measure of pervasiveness in the survey. Now in the upper right hand table, you can see the data for each of the companies. There's an ETR survey taken in October and it had more than 1400 completes. Several points stand out here. Microsoft is by far the most pervasive in the dataset, and yet its net score or spending velocity is right there with AWS, ServiceNow, Salesforce, and Workday. Only Snowflake, which I put in there for context, because of its consistently strong net scores, shows a meaningfully higher net score, of course from a much smaller base. Now what makes this so impressive is it represents a pan-Microsoft view across its entire portfolio. And you can see where companies like IBM and Oracle struggle from a momentum standpoint compared to Microsoft, which is a much, much larger company. It's that problem that I referred to earlier regarding the smaller size of their respective growth businesses. Also called Cisco and SAP, which despite some earnings challenges lately, are able to maintain net scores that while not in the green, they're not in the red, either. Green essentially means your overall install base is expanding. Red indicates contraction. Now let's look at the spending patterns for Microsoft customers. This chart shows the granularity of ETR's net score for Microsoft. The green represents increased spend and the red decreased spend. What's impressive is that Microsoft's red zone, I mean it's essentially negligible at 6%, when you add two reds up, the pink and the bright red. Their customers, they're all spending more, or the same, and very few are leaving the platform. Now I made the case last week that Google should double or triple its efforts and focus on cloud and the edge. Microsoft has already made that transition in its business and is the, that's the premise really of my discussion today. Specifically, Microsoft Azure is powering the company across all of its products and services. It's giving Microsoft tremendous operating leverage and steadily improving marginal economics. You can see that in the gross margin lines this quarter, across all of its businesses. And here's a graphic showing its position within cloud computing in terms of net score. Microsoft Azure functions, which is the first bar on this chart, and Azure overall, which is the third set of bars, shows momentum that's as strong as any cloud category, including AWS Lambda, which as we've talked about many times is killing it. Now five over from the left, count them over, one, two, three, four, five, you can see AWS overall. So that's a really important reference point. And while its levels are still elevated, Azure overall, which again is number three from the left, has meaningfully more momentum with 65% net score versus 52% for AWS overall. Now reasonable people can debate the quality of these respective clouds and you could argue over feature sets, who's got the most features, who's got the most regions, which regions are most reliable, who's got the most data centers and all that stuff, but it's really hard to argue against Microsoft's "Good enough" strategy. It's working in the cloud, and it has been working for the company for decades. Now another Microsoft strategy has been to be a late comer to a category and then bundle multiple capabilities into one suite. We saw this at first, really in the late 1980s with Office, and it's continued in a number of areas. The latest example, Microsoft Teams. Teams combines features like meetings, phone, chat, collaboration, as well as business process workflows that leverage tools like SharePoint and PowerPoint. I mean, it's a killer strategy, and you can see the results in this chart. I mean, it's essentially competing with Zoom, it's competing with Slack and all the sort of productivity plays there in that space. And this graphic compares net scores from the year ago October survey for reference, the July survey from this year, and the most recent October survey, as I said, 1400 respondents. Look at the lead that Teams has relative to the competition. There's a story across Microsoft's portfolio. Look at Microsoft's products in the ETR taxonomy. Video conferencing with Teams, productivity apps, RPA, cloud, cloud functions, machine learning, artificial intelligence, containers, security, end point, analytics, mobile, even database. The only signs of softness are really seen in the company's legacy businesses like Skype or on-prem licenses business, which I said were a headwind for them. And while PCs and tablets are weaker, that's what you'd expect from this mature industry relative to some of these other categories. Now, again, the premise here today is that by pivoting to the cloud and going all in competing with infrastructure as a service, Microsoft has created a platform for innovation for its business, and its developer chops are really credible, so it's evolving its install base very successfully to Azure. It's got a very solid hybrid and multi-cloud strategy and story with Microsoft Arc, which eventually it can take to the edge. You know, we think its edge strategy needs some work, but nonetheless, the company is really, really well positioned. Microsoft has a huge partner ecosystem, heck, it even partners with Oracle and database, as well as using Azure to enter new markets, including vertical clouds like healthcare, which it talked about on its earnings call. I mean, there's really not much on which you can criticize Microsoft. You know, sure, they've had some high profile failures in the past. The Nokia acquisition, the Windows phone, you remember Zune? Mixer, you know, Bing. Is Bing a fail? I don't know. Maybe not really. I guess the fail is, you know, what I was talking about last week with antitrust, Microsoft was distracted by the DOJ and maybe that caused it to miss search, give it to Google, and in that sense, maybe it was a failure, but overall, pretty good track record from Microsoft. Yeah, maybe you can say Microsoft is somewhat of a copycat, you know, the graphical user interface that they copied from the Mac, but hey, even Steve Jobs stole that. Surface, okay. The cloud? But so what, ideas, they're plentiful, execution is the key, really. No matter how you slice it, the data doesn't lie. Microsoft's financial performance, its pivot to the cloud, and the success of its adjacent businesses, make it one of the most remarkable rebirths in the history of technology industry. Now I didn't use the word turnaround because the company was never really in trouble. It just became irrelevant and kind of boring. Today, Microsoft is far from immaterial. Okay. That's it for this week. Remember all these episodes are available as podcasts wherever you listen. So please subscribe. I publish weekly on Wikibon.com and Siliconangle.com. And don't forget to check out ETR.plus for all the survey data and analytics. I appreciate always the comments on my LinkedIn posts or you can DM me @DVellante, or email me at David.Vellante@SiliconAngle.com. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching everybody, be well, and we'll see you next time. (calm music)
SUMMARY :
This is Breaking Analysis Microsoft is by far the most
SENTIMENT ANALYSIS :
ENTITIES
Entity | Category | Confidence |
---|---|---|
IBM | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Cisco | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Dell | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Microsoft | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Dave Vellante | PERSON | 0.99+ |
AWS | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Oracle | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Steve Ballmer | PERSON | 0.99+ |
ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ | |
2014 | DATE | 0.99+ |
Amazon | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
October | DATE | 0.99+ |
Steve Jobs | PERSON | 0.99+ |
ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ | |
July | DATE | 0.99+ |
$7 billion | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
20% | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
11.6 billion | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Satya Nadella | PERSON | 0.99+ |
65% | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Apple | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
6% | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
21% | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Bing | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
18% | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
52% | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
16% | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
$13 billion | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Boston | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
last week | DATE | 0.99+ |
iPhone | COMMERCIAL_ITEM | 0.99+ |
19% | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Nokia | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
47% | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
more than $136 billion | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
last quarter | DATE | 0.99+ |
ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ | |
ZeniMax Media | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Skype | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Danny Allan, Veeam & Anton Gostev, Veeam | VeeamON 2020
(upbeat music) >> From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of VeeamON 2020. Brought to you by Veeam. >> Hi everybody, we're back. This is Dave Vellante, and you're watching theCUBE's continuous coverage of VeeamON 2020. Veeam Online 2020. And Danny Allen is here, he's the CTO and Senior Vice President of Product Strategy and he's joined by Anton Gostev, who's the Senior Vice President of Product Management. Gentlemen, good to see you again. Wish we were face-to-face, but thanks for coming on, virtually. >> Thanks Dave for having us. >> Always love being on with you. Thank you. >> So Danny, I want to start with you. In your keynote, you talked to, about great quote by Satya Nadella. He said "We basically compress two years of digital transformation in two months." And so, I'm interested in what that meant for Veeam but also specifically, for your customers and how you help. >> Yeah, I think about that in two different ways. So digital transformation is obviously the word that he used. But I think of this a lot about being remote. So in two months, every organization that we're ourselves included, has gone from, in person operations going into the office doing things to enabling remote operations. And so, I'm working from home today, Anton's working from home today. We're all working from home today. And so remote operations is a big part of that. And it's not just working from home, it's how do I actually conduct my operations, my backup, my archiving, my hearing, all of those things remotely. It's actually changed the way organizations think about their data management. Not just operations from the sense of internal processes, but also external processes as well. But I think about this as remote offering. So organizations say, "How can I take where we are today "in the world and turn this into competitive advantage? "How can I take the services that I offered today, "and help my customers be more successful remotely?" And so, it has those two aspects to it remote operations, remote offerings. And of course, all driven by data which we backed. >> So Anton, you know there's a saying "It's better to be lucky than good." And I say, "It's best to be lucky and good." So Danny was talking about some of the external processes, a lot of those processes were unknown. And people kind of making them up as they went along, with things that we've never seen before. So, I wonder if we could talk about your product suite, and how well you were able to adapt to some of these unknown. >> Well it's more customers using our product in creative ways. But, one feedback we got most recently in our annual user survey is that like, one of the customers was using tape as the off-site backups. And they had a process where obviously someone had to physically come to the office, pick up the exporter tapes and put them on the truck and move them some off-site location. And so this basically, the process was completely broken with COVID because of lockdown. And in that particular country, it was a stricter on the ground than in most and they were physically unable to basically leave the home. So they basically looked at, Luckily they upgraded already to version 10. And they looked at what version 10 has to offer. And then we're able to switch from using tape to fully automating this off-site backup and going directly to the public cloud to object storage. So, they still have the same off-site backups that, effectively air-gapped because of the first house you provide in virtual time for mutable backups. As soon as they created that they automatically ship to object storage, completely replacing this manual off-site process. So I don't know how long it will take them, if not COVID, to move to this process. Now they love it because it's so much better than what they did before. That's amazing. >> Yeah I bet, there's no doubt. That's interesting, that's an interesting use case. Do you see, others use cases that popped up. Again, I was saying that these processes were new. I mean, and I'm interested in from a product standpoint, how you guys were able to adapt to that. >> Well, another use case that seems to be on the rise is that the ability for customers to deploy the new machines to procure new hardware is severely limited now. Not only their supply chain issues, but also again, bring something into your data center. You have to physically be there and collaborate with other workers and doing installing the, whatever new hardware you purchase. So, we see a significant pick up of the functionality where that, we had in the product for a while, which we called direct resorts to cloud. So we support taking any backup, physical virtual machine. And restoring directory into cloud machine. So we see really the big uptick of migration, maybe a lot of migrations, maybe, not necessarily permanent migrations, but when people want to basically this, some of the applications start to struggle on their sources and they're unable to update the underlying hardware. So what they do is that they schedule the downtime, and then migrate, restore that latest backup into the cloud and continue using the machine in the cloud on much more powerful hardware. That's a lifesaver for them obviously in this situation. >> Yeah so the cloud, Danny is becoming a linchpin of these new models. In your keynote you talked about your vision. And it's interesting to note, I mean, VeeamON, last year, you actually talked about, what I call getting back to the basic of, backup, you kind of embrace backup, where a lot of the new entrants are like, "No no backup's, just one small part, it's data management." And, so I'd love to get your thoughts on that. But the vision you laid out was, backup and cloud data management. Maybe you could, unpack that a little bit. >> Yeah, the way I think about this is step one, in every infrastructure, it doesn't matter whether you're talking about on-prem or in the cloud. Step one is, to protect your data. So this is ingesting the data, whether be backup, whether it be replication, whether it be, long term retention. We have to do that, not only do we have to do that, but as you go to new cycles of infrastructure, it happens all over again. So, we backed up physical first and then virtual, and then we did, cloud and in some ways, containers we're going towards, we're not going backwards but people who are running containers on-prem so we always go back to the starting point of protect the data. And then of course, after you protect it then you, want to effectively begin to manage it. And that's exactly what Anton said. How do you automate the operational procedures to be able to make this part of the DNA of the organization and so, it doesn't matter whether it's on-prem or whether it's in the cloud, that protection of data and then the effective management and integration with existing processes, is fundamental for every infrastructure and will continue to be so into the future, including the cloud. And it's only then when you have this effective protection and management of it, can you begin to unleash the power of data, as you look out into the future, because you can reuse the data for additional purposes, you can move it to the optimal location, but we always start with protection and management of the data. >> So Anton, I want to come back to you on this notion of cloud being a portion of that, when you talk about security people say you layer, how should we think about the cloud? Is it a another layer of protection? And then Danny just said, "It doesn't really matter whether it's on-prem "or in the cloud, it well, it doesn't matter "if you can ensure the same experience." If it's a totally different experience well then it's problematic though. I wonder if you could address, both the layers. Is cloud just another layer and is the management of that, actually, how do you make it, quote, unquote, "Seamless"? I know it's an overused word, but from a product name? >> Well, for larger customers, it's not necessarily a new challenge, because it's rare when the customer had a single data center. And they had this challenge for always. How do I manage my multiple data centers with a single pane of glass? And, I will say public cloud does not necessarily mean that some new perspective in that sense. Yeah, maybe it even makes it easier because you no longer have to manage the physical aspect, the most important aspect of security, which is physical security. So someone else manages it for you and probably much better than most companies could ever afford. In terms of security answer, so then data center. But as far as networking security and how those multiple data centers interact with each other, that's essentially not a new challenge. It is a new challenge for smaller customers for SMBs that are just starting. So they have their own small data center, small world and now they are starting to move some workloads into the cloud. And I would say the biggest problem there is networking and VeeamON, sure provides some free tools to call Veeam PN to make it easier for them to make this step of, securing the networking aspect of public cloud and the private property also that they are in now as workloads move to the cloud, but also keeping some workloads on-prem. >> The other piece of cloud Danny, is SaaS. You weren't the first you were one of the first to offer SaaS back up particularly for Office 365. And a lot of people just, I think, rely on the SaaS vendor, "Hey, they've got me covered. "They've got me backed up", and maybe they do have them backed up, but they might not have them recovered. How is that market shaping up? What are the trends that you're seeing there? >> Well, you're absolutely right Dave. That the, focus here is not just on back up, but on recovery, and it's one of the things that Veeam is known for we don't just do the backup, but we have an Explorer for Exchange , an Explorer for SharePoint, an Explorer for OneDrive. You saw on stage today we demoed the Explorer for Microsoft Teams. So, it's not just about protecting the data, but getting back the specific element of data that you need for operations. And that is critically important. And our customers expect to need that. If you're depending on the SaaS vendor themselves to do that, and I won't, be derogatory or specific about any SaaS vendor, but what they'll often do is, take the entire data set from seven days ago, we'll say, and merge it back into the current data set. And that just results in, a complete chaos of your inbox, if that's what they're merging together. So having specific granularity to pull back that data, exactly the data you need when you need it, is critical. And that's why we're adding it, and the focus on Microsoft Teams now obviously, is because, as we have more intellectual property, in collaboration tools for remote operations, exactly what we're doing now, that only becomes more critical for the business. So, when you think about SaaS for backup, but we also think about it for recovery. And one thing that I'll credit Anton and the product management team for, we build all of this in-house, We don't give this to a third party to build it on our behalf because you need it to work and not only need it to work, but need it to work well, that completely integrated with the underlying cloud data management platform. >> So Anton, I wonder if I could ask you about that. So, from a recovery standpoint, there's one thing, is Dan was saying, you've got to have the granularity, you've got to be able to have a really relatively simple way to recover. But because it's the cloud, there's, latency involved and how are you from a product standpoint, dealing with, making that recovery as consistent and predictable and reliable as you have for a decade on-prem. >> So you mean recovery in the cloud or back to on-prem? >> Yeah, so, recovery from data that lives in the cloud. >> Okay. So basically, the most important feature of any cloud is the price of whatever you do. So, whenever we design anything, we always look at the costs even more than anything else. But, it in turn always translates into better performance as well. To give you example, without functionality where we can take the on-prem backup and make a copy in the public object storage for disaster recovery purposes, so that for example, when a hacker or ransomware wipes out your, entire data center, you have those backups in the cloud, and you can restore from them. So when you perform the restore from cloud backups, we are actually smart enough to understand that, we need to pull that and this in that block from the cloud backup, but many of those blocks actually shared with backups in another machines that are in your own prem backup repository. So we do this on the fly analysis, and we say, instead of pulling the 10 terabyte of the entire backup from the cloud, we can actually pull only 100 gigabytes off unique blocks. And the rest of the blocks we can take from on-prem repositories that have still survived the disaster. So, not only reduces the cost 20 times or whatever. The performance, obviously, of restoring from on-prem data versus pulling everything from the cloud through the internet links is dramatic. So again, we started from the cost, how do we reduce the cost of restore, because, that's where cloud vendors quote, unquote, "Get you." But in the end, it resulted in much better performance as well. >> Excellent, Anton as well in your keynote, you talked about the Veeam availability suite, gave a little sneak preview. You talked about continuous data protection. Cloud Tier, NAS recovery, which is oftentimes very challenging. What should we take away from that sneak peek? >> Three main directions basically, The first is Veeam CGP is we keep investing a lot in on-prem, data Protection, disaster recovery. VMware is a clear leader of on-prem virtualization. So, we keep building these, new ways to protect your web VMware with lower RPOs and RTOs that were never possible before with the classic snapshotting technologies. So that's one thing we keep investing on-prem. Second thing, we do major investments in the cloud in object storage specifically, from that regards, again, put a couple keynote in Google Cloud support. And we're adding the ability to work with coldest tier of object storage, which is Amazon Glacier Deep Archive or Microsoft Azure Blob Storage, archive tier. So that's the second big area of investment. And third, instant recovery Veaam has always been extremely well known for its instant recovery capabilities. And this race is going to be the biggest in terms of new instant recovery capabilities, that were introduced as many as three new major companies with capabilities there. (mumbles) >> So, Danny, I wonder if I could ask you. I'm interested in how you go from product strategy to actual product management and bring things to market. I mean, in the early days, Veeam. Very, very specific to virtualization. That of course, with the Bare-metal, you got a number of permutations and product capabilities. How do you guys work together in terms of assessing the market potential, the degree of difficulty, prioritizing, how does that all come to your customer value? >> Well, first of all, Anton and I, spend a lot of time together on the phone and collaborating just on a weekly basis about where we're going, what we're going to do. I always say there's four directions that we look at for the product strategy and what we're building. You look behind you, you have a, we have 375,000 customers and so those are the tail winds that are pushing you forward. We talked to them on all segments. What is it that you want? I say we look left and right, the left who are alliances. We have a rich ecosystem of partners and channel that we look to collect feedback from. Look right, we look out at the competitors in this space, what are they doing to make sure that we're not missing anything that we should be including and then look forward. Big focus of Veeam has always been not just creating check boxes and making sure that we have the required features but innovation. And you saw that on stage today when Anton was showing the NAS Instant Recovery in the database instant recovery and the capabilities that we have, we have a big focus on, not just checking a box but actually doing things better and differently than everyone else in the industry and that serve to see incredibly well. >> So I love that framework. But so now when you think about this pandemic, you look behind your customers have obviously been affected, your partners have been affected. Let's put your competitors to the side for a minute, we'll see how they respond. But then looking forward, future, as I've said many times, we're not just going back to 2019. We're new decade and really digital transformation is becoming real, for real this time around. So as you think about the pandemic and looking at those four dimensions, what initial conclusions are you drawing? >> Well, the first one would be that that Veeam is well positioned to win, continue to win and to win into the future. And the reason for that I would argue, is that we're software defined. Our whole model is based on being simple to use obviously, but software defined and because of the pandemic, as Anton said, can't go into the office anymore to switch your tapes from one system to another. And so being software defined set this apart positions as well for the future. And so make it simple, make it flexible. And ultimately, what our customers care about is the reliability of this end to the credit of research and development and Anton theme is, "We have product that as everyone says, it just worked". >> So Anton I wonder if I could ask you kind of a similar question. How has the pandemic affected your thinking along those dimensions and maybe some of your initial thinking on changes that you'll implement? >> Yes, sorry I wanted to add exactly on that. I will say that pandemic accelerated our vision becoming the reality. Basically, the vision we had and, I said a few years ago, one day that Veeam will become the biggest storage vendor without selling a single storage box. And this is just becoming the reality. We support a number of object storage providers today. Only a few of them actually track the consumption that is generated by different vendors. And just for those few who do track that and report numbers to us. We are already managing over hundreds of petabytes of data in the cloud. And we only just started a couple of years ago with object storage support. So that's the power of software defined. we don't need to sell you any storage to be eventually the biggest storage player on the market. And pandemic is clear accelerated that in the last three months we see the adoption, it was already like a hockey stick, but it's accelerating further. Because of the issues customers are facing today. Unable to actually physically go back to the office, do this backup handling the way they normally do it. >> Well guys, it's been really fun the last decade watching the ascendancy of Veeam, we've boarded on it and talked about it a lot. And as you guys have both said things have been accelerated. It's actually very exciting to see a company with, rich legacy, but also, very competitive with some of the new products and new companies that are hitting the market. So, congratulations, I know you've got a lot more to do here. You guys have been, for a private company, pretty transparent, more transparent than most and I have to say as an analyst, we appreciate that and, appreciate the partnership with theCUBE. So thanks very much for coming on. >> Thank you, Dave. Always a pleasure. >> Thanks Dave. >> All right, and thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE in our coverage of VeeamON 2020. Veeam Online. Keep it right there, I'll be right back. (upbeat music)
SUMMARY :
Brought to you by Veeam. Gentlemen, good to see you again. being on with you. And so, I'm interested in what that meant going into the office doing things and how well you were able to adapt of the first house you provide how you guys were able to adapt to that. is that the ability for customers But the vision you laid out was, and management of the data. and is the management of that, of public cloud and the the first to offer SaaS back exactly the data you need But because it's the cloud, data that lives in the cloud. is the price of whatever you do. the Veeam availability suite, So that's the second I mean, in the early days, Veeam. and the capabilities that we have, So as you think about the pandemic And the reason for that I would argue, How has the pandemic that in the last three and I have to say as an Always a pleasure. you for watching everybody.
SENTIMENT ANALYSIS :
ENTITIES
Entity | Category | Confidence |
---|---|---|
Anton Gostev | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Danny Allen | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Danny | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Satya Nadella | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Dave Vellante | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Anton | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Dave | PERSON | 0.99+ |
two years | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Danny Allan | PERSON | 0.99+ |
2019 | DATE | 0.99+ |
second | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Veeam | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Dan | PERSON | 0.99+ |
last year | DATE | 0.99+ |
Microsoft | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
10 terabyte | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
20 times | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
two months | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
375,000 customers | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
two aspects | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Office 365 | TITLE | 0.99+ |
100 gigabytes | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
third | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
two different ways | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Exchange | TITLE | 0.99+ |
both | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Anto | PERSON | 0.98+ |
today | DATE | 0.98+ |
Amazon | ORGANIZATION | 0.98+ |
SharePoint | TITLE | 0.98+ |
Second thing | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
first | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
pandemic | EVENT | 0.98+ |
seven days ago | DATE | 0.98+ |
one | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
Three main directions | QUANTITY | 0.97+ |
single storage box | QUANTITY | 0.97+ |
OneDrive | TITLE | 0.97+ |
first one | QUANTITY | 0.96+ |
single data center | QUANTITY | 0.96+ |
first house | QUANTITY | 0.96+ |
Veaam | ORGANIZATION | 0.95+ |
one system | QUANTITY | 0.95+ |
one feedback | QUANTITY | 0.93+ |
Explorer | TITLE | 0.92+ |
step one | QUANTITY | 0.92+ |
single pane | QUANTITY | 0.92+ |
VeeamON 2020 | TITLE | 0.92+ |
theCUBE | ORGANIZATION | 0.92+ |
one thing | QUANTITY | 0.92+ |
last three months | DATE | 0.91+ |
Step one | QUANTITY | 0.89+ |
a couple of years ago | DATE | 0.88+ |
Veeam | PERSON | 0.88+ |
three new | QUANTITY | 0.88+ |
Allan & Gostev Final
(upbeat music) >> From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of VeeamON 2020. Brought to you by Veeam. Everybody, we're back. This is Dave Vellante, and you're watching theCUBE's continuous coverage of VeeamON 2020. Veeam Online 2020. And Danny Allen is here, he's the CTO and Senior Vice President of Product Strategy and he's joined by Anton Gostev, who's the Senior Vice President of Product Management. Gentlemen, good to see you again. Wish we were face-to-face, but thanks for coming on, virtually. >> Thanks Dave for having us. >> Always love being on with you. Thank you. >> So Danny, I want to start with you. In your keynote, you talked to, about great quote by Satya Nadella. He said "We basically compress two years of digital transformation in two months." And so, I'm interested in what that meant for Veeam but also specifically, for your customers and how you help. >> Yeah, I think about that in two different ways. So digital transformation is obviously the word that he used. But I think of this a lot about being remote. So in two months, every organization that we're ourselves included, has gone from, in person operations going into the office doing things to enabling remote operations. And so, I'm working from home today, Anton's working from home today. We're all working from home today. And so remote operations is a big part of that. And it's not just working from home, it's how do I actually conduct my operations, my backup, my archiving, my hearing, all of those things remotely. It's actually changed the way organizations think about their data management. Not just operations from the sense of internal processes, but also external processes as well. But I think about this as remote offering. So organizations say, "How can I take where we are today "in the world and turn this into competitive advantage? "How can I take the services that I offered today, "and help my customers be more successful remotely?" And so, it has those two aspects to it remote operations, remote offerings. And of course, all driven by data which we backed. >> So Anton, you know there's a saying "It's better to be lucky than good." And I say, "It's best to be lucky and good." So Danny was talking about some of the external processes, a lot of those processes were unknown. And people kind of making them up as they went along, with things that we've never seen before. So, I wonder if we could talk about your product suite, and how well you were able to adapt to some of these unknown. >> Well it's more customers using our product in creative ways. But, one feedback we got most recently in our annual user survey is that like, one of the customers was using tape as the off-site backups. And they had a process where obviously someone had to physically come to the office, pick up the exporter tapes and put them on the truck and move them some off-site location. And so this basically, the process was completely broken with COVID because of lockdown. And in that particular country, it was a stricter on the ground than in most and they were physically unable to basically leave the home. So they basically looked at, Luckily they upgraded already to version 10. And they looked at what version 10 has to offer. And then we're able to switch from using tape to fully automating this off-site backup and going directly to the public cloud to object storage. So, they still have the same off-site backups that, effectively air-gapped because of the first house you provide in virtual time for mutable backups. As soon as they created that they automatically ship to object storage, completely replacing this manual off-site process. So I don't know how long it will take them, if not COVID, to move to this process. Now they love it because it's so much better than what they did before. That's amazing. >> Yeah I bet, there's no doubt. That's interesting, that's an interesting use case. Do you see, others use cases that popped up. Again, I was saying that these processes were new. I mean, and I'm interested in from a product standpoint, how you guys were able to adapt to that. >> Well, another use case that seems to be on the rise is that the ability for customers to deploy the new machines to procure new hardware is severely limited now. Not only their supply chain issues, but also again, bring something into your data center. You have to physically be there and collaborate with other workers and doing installing the, whatever new hardware you purchase. So, we see a significant pick up of the functionality where that, we had in the product for a while, which we called direct resorts to cloud. So we support taking any backup, physical virtual machine. And restoring directory into cloud machine. So we see really the big uptick of migration, maybe a lot of migrations, maybe, not necessarily permanent migrations, but when people want to basically this, some of the applications start to struggle on their sources and they're unable to update the underlying hardware. So what they do is that they schedule the downtime, and then migrate, restore that latest backup into the cloud and continue using the machine in the cloud on much more powerful hardware. That's a lifesaver for them obviously in this situation. >> Yeah so the cloud, Danny is becoming a linchpin of these new models. In your keynote you talked about your vision. And it's interesting to note, I mean, VeeamON, last year, you actually talked about, what I call getting back to the basic of, backup, you kind of embrace backup, where a lot of the new entrants are like, "No no backup's, just one small part, it's data management." And, so I'd love to get your thoughts on that. But the vision you laid out was, backup and cloud data management. Maybe you could, unpack that a little bit. >> Yeah, the way I think about this is step one, in every infrastructure, it doesn't matter whether you're talking about on-prem or in the cloud. Step one is, to protect your data. So this is ingesting the data, whether be backup, whether it be replication, whether it be, long term retention. We have to do that, not only do we have to do that, but as you go to new cycles of infrastructure, it happens all over again. So, we backed up physical first and then virtual, and then we did, cloud and in some ways, containers we're going towards, we're not going backwards but people who are running containers on-prem so we always go back to the starting point of protect the data. And then of course, after you protect it then you, want to effectively begin to manage it. And that's exactly what Anton said. How do you automate the operational procedures to be able to make this part of the DNA of the organization and so, it doesn't matter whether it's on-prem or whether it's in the cloud, that protection of data and then the effective management and integration with existing processes, is fundamental for every infrastructure and will continue to be so into the future, including the cloud. And it's only then when you have this effective protection and management of it, can you begin to unleash the power of data, as you look out into the future, because you can reuse the data for additional purposes, you can move it to the optimal location, but we always start with protection and management of the data. >> So Anton, I want to come back to you on this notion of cloud being a portion of that, when you talk about security people say you layer, how should we think about the cloud? Is it a another layer of protection? And then Danny just said, "It doesn't really matter whether it's on-prem "or in the cloud, it well, it doesn't matter "if you can ensure the same experience." If it's a totally different experience well then it's problematic though. I wonder if you could address, both the layers. Is cloud just another layer and is the management of that, actually, how do you make it, quote, unquote, "Seamless"? I know it's an overused word, but from a product name? >> Well, for larger customers, it's not necessarily a new challenge, because it's rare when the customer had a single data center. And they had this challenge for always. How do I manage my multiple data centers with a single pane of glass? And, I will say public cloud does not necessarily mean that some new perspective in that sense. Yeah, maybe it even makes it easier because you no longer have to manage the physical aspect, the most important aspect of security, which is physical security. So someone else manages it for you and probably much better than most companies could ever afford. In terms of security answer, so then data center. But as far as networking security and how those multiple data centers interact with each other, that's essentially not a new challenge. It is a new challenge for smaller customers for SMBs that are just starting. So they have their own small data center, small world and now they are starting to move some workloads into the cloud. And I would say the biggest problem there is networking and VeeamON, sure provides some free tools to call Veeam PN to make it easier for them to make this step of, securing the networking aspect of public cloud and the private property also that they are in now as workloads move to the cloud, but also keeping some workloads on-prem. >> The other piece of cloud Danny, is SaaS. You weren't the first you were one of the first to offer SaaS back up particularly for Office 365. And a lot of people just, I think, rely on the SaaS vendor, "Hey, they've got me covered. "They've got me backed up", and maybe they do have them backed up, but they might not have them recovered. How is that market shaping up? What are the trends that you're seeing there? >> Well, you're absolutely right Dave. That the, focus here is not just on back up, but on recovery, and it's one of the things that Veeam is known for we don't just do the backup, but we have an Explorer for Exchange , an Explorer for SharePoint, an Explorer for OneDrive. You saw on stage today we demoed the Explorer for Microsoft Teams. So, it's not just about protecting the data, but getting back the specific element of data that you need for operations. And that is critically important. And our customers expect to need that. If you're depending on the SaaS vendor themselves to do that, and I won't, be derogatory or specific about any SaaS vendor, but what they'll often do is, take the entire data set from seven days ago, we'll say, and merge it back into the current data set. And that just results in, a complete chaos of your inbox, if that's what they're merging together. So having specific granularity to pull back that data, exactly the data you need when you need it, is critical. And that's why we're adding it, and the focus on Microsoft Teams now obviously, is because, as we have more intellectual property, in collaboration tools for remote operations, exactly what we're doing now, that only becomes more critical for the business. So, when you think about SaaS for backup, but we also think about it for recovery. And one thing that I'll credit Anton and the product management team for, we build all of this in-house, We don't give this to a third party to build it on our behalf because you need it to work and not only need it to work, but need it to work well, that completely integrated with the underlying cloud data management platform. >> So Anton, I wonder if I could ask you about that. So, from a recovery standpoint, there's one thing, is Dan was saying, you've got to have the granularity, you've got to be able to have a really relatively simple way to recover. But because it's the cloud, there's, latency involved and how are you from a product standpoint, dealing with, making that recovery as consistent and predictable and reliable as you have for a decade on-prem. >> So you mean recovery in the cloud or back to on-prem? >> Yeah, so, recovery from data that lives in the cloud. >> Okay. So basically, the most important feature of any cloud is the price of whatever you do. So, whenever we design anything, we always look at the costs even more than anything else. But, it in turn always translates into better performance as well. To give you example, without functionality where we can take the on-prem backup and make a copy in the public object storage for disaster recovery purposes, so that for example, when a hacker or ransomware wipes out your, entire data center, you have those backups in the cloud, and you can restore from them. So when you perform the restore from cloud backups, we are actually smart enough to understand that, we need to pull that and this in that block from the cloud backup, but many of those blocks actually shared with backups in another machines that are in your own prem backup repository. So we do this on the fly analysis, and we say, instead of pulling the 10 terabyte of the entire backup from the cloud, we can actually pull only 100 gigabytes off unique blocks. And the rest of the blocks we can take from on-prem repositories that have still survived the disaster. So, not only reduces the cost 20 times or whatever. The performance, obviously, of restoring from on-prem data versus pulling everything from the cloud through the internet links is dramatic. So again, we started from the cost, how do we reduce the cost of restore, because, that's where cloud vendors quote, unquote, "Get you." But in the end, it resulted in much better performance as well. >> Excellent, Anton as well in your keynote, you talked about the Veeam availability suite, gave a little sneak preview. You talked about continuous data protection. Cloud Tier, NAS recovery, which is oftentimes very challenging. What should we take away from that sneak peek? >> Three main directions basically, The first is Veeam CGP is we keep investing a lot in on-prem, data Protection, disaster recovery. VMware is a clear leader of on-prem virtualization. So, we keep building these, new ways to protect your web VMware with lower RPOs and RTOs that were never possible before with the classic snapshotting technologies. So that's one thing we keep investing on-prem. Second thing, we do major investments in the cloud in object storage specifically, from that regards, again, put a couple keynote in Google Cloud support. And we're adding the ability to work with coldest tier of object storage, which is Amazon Glacier Deep Archive or Microsoft Azure Blob Storage, archive tier. So that's the second big area of investment. And third, instant recovery Veaam has always been extremely well known for its instant recovery capabilities. And this race is going to be the biggest in terms of new instant recovery capabilities, that were introduced as many as three new major companies with capabilities there. (mumbles) >> So, Danny, I wonder if I could ask you. I'm interested in how you go from product strategy to actual product management and bring things to market. I mean, in the early days, Veeam. Very, very specific to virtualization. That of course, with the Bare-metal, you got a number of permutations and product capabilities. How do you guys work together in terms of assessing the market potential, the degree of difficulty, prioritizing, how does that all come to your customer value? >> Well, first of all, Anton and I, spend a lot of time together on the phone and collaborating just on a weekly basis about where we're going, what we're going to do. I always say there's four directions that we look at for the product strategy and what we're building. You look behind you, you have a, we have 375,000 customers and so those are the tail winds that are pushing you forward. We talked to them on all segments. What is it that you want? I say we look left and right, the left who are alliances. We have a rich ecosystem of partners and channel that we look to collect feedback from. Look right, we look out at the competitors in this space, what are they doing to make sure that we're not missing anything that we should be including and then look forward. Big focus of Veeam has always been not just creating check boxes and making sure that we have the required features but innovation. And you saw that on stage today when Anton was showing the NAS Instant Recovery in the database instant recovery and the capabilities that we have, we have a big focus on, not just checking a box but actually doing things better and differently than everyone else in the industry and that serve to see incredibly well. >> So I love that framework. But so now when you think about this pandemic, you look behind your customers have obviously been affected, your partners have been affected. Let's put your competitors to the side for a minute, we'll see how they respond. But then looking forward, future, as I've said many times, we're not just going back to 2019. We're new decade and really digital transformation is becoming real, for real this time around. So as you think about the pandemic and looking at those four dimensions, what initial conclusions are you drawing? >> Well, the first one would be that that Veeam is well positioned to win, continue to win and to win into the future. And the reason for that I would argue, is that we're software defined. Our whole model is based on being simple to use obviously, but software defined and because of the pandemic, as Anton said, can't go into the office anymore to switch your tapes from one system to another. And so being software defined set this apart positions as well for the future. And so make it simple, make it flexible. And ultimately, what our customers care about is the reliability of this end to the credit of research and development and Anton theme is, "We have product that as everyone says, it just worked". >> So Anton I wonder if I could ask you kind of a similar question. How has the pandemic affected your thinking along those dimensions and maybe some of your initial thinking on changes that you'll implement? >> Yes, sorry I wanted to add exactly on that. I will say that pandemic accelerated our vision becoming the reality. Basically, the vision we had and, I said a few years ago, one day that Veeam will become the biggest storage vendor without selling a single storage box. And this is just becoming the reality. We support a number of object storage providers today. Only a few of them actually track the consumption that is generated by different vendors. And just for those few who do track that and report numbers to us. We are already managing over hundreds of petabytes of data in the cloud. And we only just started a couple of years ago with object storage support. So that's the power of software defined. we don't need to sell you any storage to be eventually the biggest storage player on the market. And pandemic is clear accelerated that in the last three months we see the adoption, it was already like a hockey stick, but it's accelerating further. Because of the issues customers are facing today. Unable to actually physically go back to the office, do this backup handling the way they normally do it. >> Well guys, it's been really fun the last decade watching the ascendancy of Veeam, we've boarded on it and talked about it a lot. And as you guys have both said things have been accelerated. It's actually very exciting to see a company with, rich legacy, but also, very competitive with some of the new products and new companies that are hitting the market. So, congratulations, I know you've got a lot more to do here. You guys have been, for a private company, pretty transparent, more transparent than most and I have to say as an analyst, we appreciate that and, appreciate the partnership with theCUBE. So thanks very much for coming on. >> Thank you, Dave. Always a pleasure. >> Thanks Dave. >> All right, and thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE in our coverage of VeeamON 2020. Veeam Online. Keep it right there, I'll be right back. (upbeat music)
SUMMARY :
Gentlemen, good to see you again. being on with you. And so, I'm interested in what that meant going into the office doing things and how well you were able to adapt of the first house you provide how you guys were able to adapt to that. is that the ability for customers But the vision you laid out was, and management of the data. and is the management of that, of public cloud and the the first to offer SaaS back exactly the data you need But because it's the cloud, data that lives in the cloud. is the price of whatever you do. the Veeam availability suite, So that's the second I mean, in the early days, Veeam. and the capabilities that we have, So as you think about the pandemic And the reason for that I would argue, How has the pandemic that in the last three and I have to say as an Always a pleasure. you for watching everybody.
SENTIMENT ANALYSIS :
ENTITIES
Entity | Category | Confidence |
---|---|---|
Anton Gostev | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Danny | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Danny Allen | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Satya Nadella | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Anton | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Dave | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Dave Vellante | PERSON | 0.99+ |
two years | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
2019 | DATE | 0.99+ |
second | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
two months | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
last year | DATE | 0.99+ |
Dan | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Veeam | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Microsoft | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
10 terabyte | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
20 times | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
two aspects | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
375,000 customers | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Office 365 | TITLE | 0.99+ |
100 gigabytes | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
two different ways | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
third | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Exchange | TITLE | 0.99+ |
both | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Amazon | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Second thing | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
first | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
today | DATE | 0.98+ |
SharePoint | TITLE | 0.98+ |
one | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
seven days ago | DATE | 0.98+ |
Three main directions | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
first one | QUANTITY | 0.97+ |
OneDrive | TITLE | 0.97+ |
pandemic | EVENT | 0.97+ |
Veaam | ORGANIZATION | 0.97+ |
one system | QUANTITY | 0.96+ |
single data center | QUANTITY | 0.96+ |
first house | QUANTITY | 0.95+ |
single storage box | QUANTITY | 0.94+ |
one feedback | QUANTITY | 0.94+ |
theCUBE | ORGANIZATION | 0.93+ |
Step one | QUANTITY | 0.93+ |
Explorer | TITLE | 0.92+ |
step one | QUANTITY | 0.92+ |
one thing | QUANTITY | 0.92+ |
last three months | DATE | 0.91+ |
four dimensions | QUANTITY | 0.9+ |
single pane | QUANTITY | 0.89+ |
last decade | DATE | 0.89+ |
Bare-metal | ORGANIZATION | 0.88+ |
VMware | ORGANIZATION | 0.88+ |
four directions | QUANTITY | 0.88+ |
Swami Sivasubramanian, AWS | AWS Summit Online 2020
>> Narrator: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hello everyone, welcome to this special CUBE interview. We are here at theCUBE Virtual covering AWS Summit Virtual Online. This is Amazon's Summits that they normally do all around the world. They're doing them now virtually. We are here in the Palo Alto COVID-19 quarantine crew getting all the interviews here with a special guest, Vice President of Machine Learning, we have Swami, CUBE Alumni, who's been involved in not only the machine learning, but all of the major activity around AWS around how machine learning's evolved, and all the services around machine learning workflows from transcribe, recognition, you name it. Swami, you've been at the helm for many years, and we've also chatted about that before. Welcome to the virtual CUBE covering AWS Summit. >> Hey, pleasure to be here, John. >> Great to see you. I know times are tough. Everything okay at Amazon? You guys are certainly cloud scaled, not too unfamiliar of working remotely. You do a lot of travel, but what's it like now for you guys right now? >> We're actually doing well. We have been I mean, this many of, we are working hard to make sure we continue to serve our customers. Even from their site, we have done, yeah, we had taken measures to prepare, and we are confident that we will be able to meet customer demands per capacity during this time. So we're also helping customers to react quickly and nimbly, current challenges, yeah. Various examples from amazing startups working in this area to reorganize themselves to serve customer. We can talk about that common layer. >> Large scale, you guys have done a great job and fun watching and chronicling the journey of AWS, as it now goes to a whole 'nother level with the post pandemic were expecting even more surge in everything from VPNs, workspaces, you name it, and all these workloads are going to be under a lot of pressure to do more and more value. You've been at the heart of one of the key areas, which is the tooling, and the scale around machine learning workflows. And this is where customers are really trying to figure out what are the adequate tools? How do my teams effectively deploy machine learning? Because now, more than ever, the data is going to start flowing in as virtualization, if you will, of life, is happening. We're going to be in a hybrid world with life. We're going to be online most of the time. And I think COVID-19 has proven that this new trajectory of virtualization, virtual work, applications are going to have to flex, and adjust, and scale, and be reinvented. This is a key thing. What's going on with machine learning, what's new? Tell us what are you guys doing right now. >> Yeah, I see now, in AWS, we offer broadest-- (poor audio capture obscures speech) All the way from like expert practitioners, we offer our frameworks and infrastructure layer support for all popular frameworks from like TensorFlow, Apache MXNet, and PyTorch, PowerShell, (poor audio capture obscures speech) custom chips like inference share. And then, for aspiring ML developers, who want to build their own custom machine learning models, we're actually building, we offer SageMaker, which is our end-to-end machine learning service that makes it easy for customers to be able to build, train, tune, and debug machine learning models, and it is one of our fastest growing machine learning services, and many startups and enterprises are starting to standardize their machine learning building on it. And then, the final tier is geared towards actually application developers, who did not want to go into model-building, just want an easy API to build capabilities to transcribe, run voice recognition, and so forth. And I wanted to talk about one of the new capabilities we are about to launch, enterprise search called Kendra, and-- >> So actually, so just from a news standpoint, that's GA now, that's being announced at the Summit. >> Yeah. >> That was a big hit at re:Invent, Kendra. >> Yeah. >> A lot of buzz! It's available. >> Yep, so I'm excited to say that Kendra is our new machine learning powered, highly accurate enterprise search service that has been made generally available. And if you look at what Kendra is, we have actually reimagined the traditional enterprise search service, which has historically been an underserved market segment, so to speak. If you look at it, on the public search, on the web search front, it is a relatively well-served area, whereas the enterprise search has been an area where data in enterprise, there are a huge amount of data silos, that is spread in file systems, SharePoint, or Salesforce, or various other areas. And deploying a traditional search index has always that even simple persons like when there's an ID desk open or when what is the security policy, or so forth. These kind of things have been historically, people have to find within an enterprise, let alone if I'm actually in a material science company or so forth like what 3M was trying to do. Enable collaboration of researchers spread across the world, to search their experiment archives and so forth. It has been super hard for them to be able to things, and this is one of those areas where Kendra has enabled the new, of course, where Kendra is a deep learning powered search service for enterprises, which breaks down data silos, and collects actually data across various things all the way from S3, or file system, or SharePoint, and various other data sources, and uses state-of-art NLP techniques to be able to actually index them, and then, you can query using natural language queries such as like when there's my ID desk-scoping, and the answer, it won't just give you a bunch of random, right? It'll tell you it opens at 8:30 a.m. in the morning. >> Yeah. >> Or what is the credit card cashback returns for my corporate credit card? It won't give you like a long list of links related to it. Instead it'll give you answer to be 2%. So it's that much highly accurate. (poor audio capture obscures speech) >> People who have been in the enterprise search or data business know how hard this is. And it is super, it's been a super hard problem, the old in the old guard models because databases were limiting to schemas and whatnot. Now, you have a data-driven world, and this becomes interesting. I think the big takeaway I took away from Kendra was not only the new kind of discovery navigation that's possible, in terms of low latency, getting relevant content, but it's really the under-the-covers impact, and I think I'd like to get your perspective on this because this has been an active conversation inside the community, in cloud scale, which is data silos have been a problem. People have had built these data silos, and they really talk about breaking them down but it's really again hard, there's legacy problems, and well, applications that are tied to them. How do I break my silos down? Or how do I leverage either silos? So I think you guys really solve a problem here around data silos and scale. >> Yeah. >> So talk about the data silos. And then, I'm going to follow up and get your take on the kind of size of of data, megabytes, petabytes, I mean, talk about data silos, and the scale behind it. >> Perfect, so if you look at actually how to set up something like a Kendra search cluster, even as simple as from your Management Console in the AWS, you'll be able to point Kendra to various data sources, such as Amazon S3, or SharePoint, and Salesforce, and various others. And say, these are kind of data I want to index. And Kendra automatically pulls in this data, index these using its deep learning and NLP models, and then, automatically builds a corpus. Then, I, as in user of the search index, can actually start querying it using natural language, and don't have to worry where it comes from, and Kendra takes care of things like access control, and it uses finely-tuned machine learning algorithms under the hood to understand the context of natural language query and return the most relevant. I'll give a real-world example of some of the field customers who are using Kendra. For instance, if you take a look at 3M, 3M is using Kendra to support search, support its material science R&D by enabling natural language search of their expansive repositories of past research documents that may be relevant to a new product. Imagine what this does to a company like 3M. Instead of researchers who are spread around the world, repeating the same experiments on material research over and over again, now, their engineers and researchers will allow everybody to quickly search through documents. And they can innovate faster instead of trying to literally reinvent the wheel all the time. So it is better acceleration to the market. Even we are in this situation, one of the interesting work that you might be interested in is the Semantic Scholar team at Allen Institute for AI, recently opened up what is a repository of scientific research called COVID-19 Open Research Dataset. These are expert research articles. (poor audio capture obscures speech) And now, the index is using Kendra, and it helps scientists, academics, and technologists to quickly find information in a sea of scientific literature. So you can even ask questions like, "Hey, how different is convalescent plasma "treatment compared to a vaccine?" And various in that question and Kendra automatically understand the context, and gets the summary answer to these questions for the customers, so. And this is one of the things where when we talk about breaking the data silos, it takes care of getting back the data, and putting it in a central location. Understanding the context behind each of these documents, and then, being able to also then, quickly answer the queries of customers using simple query natural language as well. >> So what's the scale? Talk about the scale behind this. What's the scale numbers? What are you guys seeing? I see you guys always do a good job, I've run a great announcement, and then following up with general availability, which means I know you've got some customers using it. What are we talking about in terms of scales? Petabytes, can you give some insight into the kind of data scale you're talking about here? >> So the nice thing about Kendra is it is easily linearly scalable. So I, as a developer, I can keep adding more and more data, and that is it linearly scales to whatever scale our customers want. So and that is one of the underpinnings of Kendra search engine. So this is where even if you see like customers like PricewaterhouseCoopers is using Kendra to power its regulatory application to help customers search through regulatory information quickly and easily. So instead of sifting through hundreds of pages of documents manually to answer certain questions, now, Kendra allows them to answer natural language question. I'll give another example, which is speaks to the scale. One is Baker Tilly, a leading advisory, tax, and assurance firm, is using Kendra to index documents. Compared to a traditional SharePoint-based full-text search, now, they are using Kendra to quickly search product manuals and so forth. And they're able to get answers up to 10x faster. Look at that kind of impact what Kendra has, being able to index vast amount of data, with in a linearly scalable fashion, keep adding in the order of terabytes, and keep going, and being able to search 10x faster than traditional, I mean traditional keyword search based algorithm is actually a big deal for these customers. They're very excited. >> So what is the main problem that you're solving with Kendra? What's the use case? If I'm the customer, what's my problem that you're solving? Is it just response to data, whether it's a call center, or support, or is it an app? I mean, what's the main focus that you guys came out? What was the vector of problem that you're solving here? >> So when we talked to customers before we started building Kendra, one of the things that constantly came back for us was that they wanted the same ease of use and the ability to search the world wide web, and customers like us to search within an enterprise. So it can be in the form of like an internal search to search within like the HR documents or internal wiki pages and so forth, or it can be to search like internal technical documentation or the public documentation to help the contact centers or is it the external search in terms of customer support and so forth, or to enable collaboration by sharing knowledge base and so forth. So each of these is really dissected. Why is this a problem? Why is it not being solved by traditional search techniques? One of the things that became obvious was that unlike the external world where the web pages are linked that easily with very well-defined structure, internal world is very messy within an enterprise. The documents are put in a SharePoint, or in a file system, or in a storage service like S3, or on naturally, tell-stores or Box, or various other things. And what really customers wanted was a system which knows how to actually pull the data from various these data silos, still understand the access control behind this, and enforce them in the search. And then, understand the real data behind it, and not just do simple keyword search, so that we can build remarkable search service that really answers queries in a natural language. And this has been the theme, premise of Kendra, and this is what had started to resonate with our customers. I talked with some of the other examples even in areas like contact centers. For instance, Magellan Health is using Kendra for its contact centers. So they are able to seamlessly tie like member, provider, or client specific information with other inside information about health care to its agents so that they can quickly resolve the call. Or it can be on internally to do things like external search as well. So very satisfied client. >> So you guys took the basic concept of discovery navigation, which is the consumer web, find what you're looking for as fast as possible, but also took advantage of building intelligence around understanding all the nuances and configuration, schemas, access, under the covers and allowing things to be discovered in a new way. So you basically makes data be discoverable, and then, provide an interface. >> Yeah. >> For discovery and navigation. So it's a broad use cat, then. >> Right, yeah that's sounds somewhat right except we did one thing more. We actually understood not just, we didn't just do discovery and also made it easy for people to find the information but they are sifting through like terabytes or hundreds of terabytes of internal documentation. Sometimes, one other things that happens is throwing a bunch of hundreds of links to these documents is not good enough. For instance, if I'm actually trying to find out for instance, what is the ALS marker in an health care setting, and for a particular research project, then, I don't want to actually sift through like thousands of links. Instead, I want to be able to correctly pinpoint which document contains answer to it. So that is the final element, which is to really understand the context behind each and every document using natural language processing techniques so that you not only find discover the information that is relevant but you also get like highly accurate possible precise answers to some of your questions. >> Well, that's great stuff, big fan. I was really liking the announcement of Kendra. Congratulations on the GA of that. We'll make some room on our CUBE Virtual site for your team to put more Kendra information up. I think it's fascinating. I think that's going to be the beginning of how the world changes, where this, this certainly with the voice activation and API-based applications integrating this in. I just see a ton of activity that this is going to have a lot of headroom. So appreciate that. The other thing I want to get to while I have you here is the news around the augmented artificial intelligence has been brought out as well. >> Yeah. >> So the GA of that is out. You guys are GA-ing everything, which is right on track with your cadence of AWS laws, I'd say. What is this about? Give us the headline story. What's the main thing to pay attention to of the GA? What have you learned? What's the learning curve, what's the results? >> So augmented artificial intelligence service, I called it A2I but Amazon A2I service, we made it generally available. And it is a very unique service that makes it easy for developers to augment human intelligence with machine learning predictions. And this is historically, has been a very challenging problem. We look at, so let me take a step back and explain the general idea behind it. You look at any developer building a machine learning application, there are use cases where even actually in 99% accuracy in machine learning is not going to be good enough to directly use that result as the response to back to the customer. Instead, you want to be able to augment that with human intelligence to make sure, hey, if my machine learning model is returning, saying hey, my confidence interval for this prediction is less than 70%, I would like it to be augmented with human intelligence. Then, A2I makes it super easy for customers to be, developers to use actually, a human reviewer workflow that comes in between. So then, I can actually send it either to the public pool using Mechanical Turk, where we have more than 500,000 Turkers, or I can use a private workflow as a vendor workflow. So now, A2I seamlessly integrates with our Textract, Rekognition, or SageMaker custom models. So now, for instance, NHS is integrated A2I with Textract, so that, and they are building these document processing workflows. The areas where the machine learning model confidence load is not as high, they will be able augment that with their human reviewer workflows so that they can actually build in highly accurate document processing workflow as well. So this, we think is a powerful capability. >> So this really kind of gets to what I've been feeling in some of the stuff we worked with you guys on our machine learning piece. It's hard for companies to hire machine learning people. This has been a real challenge. So I like this idea of human augmentation because humans and machines have to have that relationship, and if you build good abstraction layers, and you abstract away the complexity, which is what you guys do, and that's the vision of cloud, then, you're going to need to have that relationship solidified. So at what point do you think we're going to be ready for theCUBE team, or any customer that doesn't have the or can't find a machine learning person? Or may not want to pay the wages that's required? I mean it's hard to find a machine learning engineer, and when does the data science piece come in with visualization, the spectrum of pure computer science, math, machine learning guru to full end user productivity? Machine learning is where you guys are doing a lot of work. Can you just share your opinion on that evolution of where we are on that? Because people want to get to the point where they don't have to hire machine learning folks. >> Yeah. >> And have that kind support too. >> If you look at the history of technology, I actually always believe that many of these highly disruptive technology started as a way that it is available only to experts, and then, they quickly go through the cycles, where it becomes almost common place. I'll give an example with something totally outside the IT space. Let's take photography. I think more than probably 150 years ago, the first professional camera was invented, and built like three to four years still actually take a really good picture. And there were only very few expert photographers in the world. And then, fast forward to time where we are now, now, even my five-year-old daughter takes actually very good portraits, and actually gives it as a gift to her mom for Mother's Day. So now, if you look at Instagram, everyone is a professional photographer. I kind of think the same thing is about to, it will happen in machine learning too. Compared to 2012, where there were very few deep learning experts, who can really build these amazing applications, now, we are starting to see like tens of thousands of actually customers using machine learning in production in AWS, not just proof of concepts but in production. And this number is rapidly growing. I'll give one example. Internally, if you see Amazon, to aid our entire company to transform and make machine learning as a natural part of the business, six years ago, we started a Machine Learning University. And since then, we have been training all our engineers to take machine learning courses in this ML University, and a year ago, we actually made these coursework available through our Training and Certification platform in AWS, and within 48 hours, more than 100,000 people registered. Think about it, that's like a big all-time record. That's why I always like to believe that developers are always eager to learn, they're very hungry to pick up new technology, and I wouldn't be surprised if four or five years from now, machine learning is kind of becomes a normal feature of the app, the same with databases are, and that becomes less special. If that day happens, then, I would see it as my job is done, so. >> Well, you've got a lot more work to do because I know from the conversations I've been having around this COVID-19 pandemic is it's that there's general consensus and validation that the future got pulled forward, and what used to be an inside industry conversation that we used to have around machine learning and some of the visions that you're talking about has been accelerated on the pace of the new cloud scale, but now that people now recognize that virtual and experiencing it firsthand globally, everyone, there are now going to be an acceleration of applications. So we believe there's going to be a Cambrian explosion of new applications that got to reimagine and reinvent some of the plumbing or abstractions in cloud to deliver new experiences, because the expectations have changed. And I think one of the things we're seeing is that machine learning combined with cloud scale will create a whole new trajectory of a Cambrian explosion of applications. So this has kind of been validated. What's your reaction to that? I mean do you see something similar? What are some of the things that you're seeing as we come into this world, this virtualization of our lives, it's every vertical, it's not one vertical anymore that's maybe moving faster. I think everyone sees the impact. They see where the gaps are in this new reality here. What's your thoughts? >> Yeah, if you see the history from machine learning specifically around deep learning, while the technology is really not new, especially because the early deep learning paper was probably written like almost 30 years ago. And why didn't we see deep learning take us sooner? It is because historically, deep learning technologies have been hungry for computer resources, and hungry for like huge amount of data. And then, the abstractions were not easy enough. As you rightfully pointed out that cloud has come in made it super easy to get like access to huge amount of compute and huge amount of data, and you can literally pay by the hour or by the minute. And with new tools being made available to developers like SageMaker and all the AI services, we are talking about now, there is an explosion of options available that are easy to use for developers that we are starting to see, almost like a huge amount of like innovations starting to pop up. And unlike traditional disruptive technologies, which you usually see crashing in like one or two industry segments, and then, it crosses the chasm, and then goes mainstream, but machine learning, we are starting to see traction almost in like every industry segment, all the way from like in financial sector, where fintech companies like Intuit is using it to forecast its call center volume and then, personalization. In the health care sector, companies like Aidoc are using computer vision to assist radiologists. And then, we are seeing in areas like public sector. NASA has partnered with AWS to use machine learning to do anomaly detection, algorithms to detect solar flares in the space. And yeah, examples are plenty. It is because now, machine learning has become such common place that and almost every industry segment and every CIO is actually already looking at how can they reimagine, and reinvent, and make their customer experience better covered by machine learning. In the same way, Amazon actually asked itself, like eight or 10 years ago, so very exciting. >> Well, you guys continue to do the work, and I agree it's not just machine learning by itself, it's the integration and the perfect storm of elements that have come together at this time. Although pretty disastrous, but I think ultimately, it's going to come out, we're going to come out of this on a whole 'nother trajectory. It's going to be creativity will be emerged. You're going to start seeing really those builders thinking, "Okay hey, I got to get out there. "I can deliver, solve the gaps we are exposed. "Solve the problems, "pre-create new expectations, new experience." I think it's going to be great for software developers. I think it's going to change the computer science field, and it's really bringing the lifestyle aspect of things. Applications have to have a recognition of this convergence, this virtualization of life. >> Yeah. >> The applications are going to have to have that. So and remember virtualization helped Amazon formed the cloud. Maybe, we'll get some new kinds of virtualization, Swami. (laughs) Thanks for coming on, really appreciate it. Always great to see you. Thanks for taking the time. >> Okay, great to see you, John, also. Thank you, thanks again. >> We're with Swami, the Vice President of Machine Learning at AWS. Been on before theCUBE Alumni. Really sharing his insights around what we see around this virtualization, this online event at the Amazon Summit, we're covering with the Virtual CUBE. But as we go forward, more important than ever, the data is going to be important, searching it, finding it, and more importantly, having the humans use it building an application. So theCUBE coverage continues, for AWS Summit Virtual Online, I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (enlightening music)
SUMMARY :
leaders all around the world, and all the services around Great to see you. and we are confident that we will the data is going to start flowing in one of the new capabilities we are about announced at the Summit. That was a big hit A lot of buzz! and the answer, it won't just give you list of links related to it. and I think I'd like to get and the scale behind it. and then, being able to also then, into the kind of data scale So and that is one of the underpinnings One of the things that became obvious to be discovered in a new way. and navigation. So that is the final element, that this is going to What's the main thing to and explain the general idea behind it. and that's the vision of cloud, And have that and built like three to four years still and some of the visions of options available that are easy to use and it's really bringing the are going to have to have that. Okay, great to see you, John, also. the data is going to be important,
SENTIMENT ANALYSIS :
ENTITIES
Entity | Category | Confidence |
---|---|---|
NASA | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Amazon | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
John | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Swami | PERSON | 0.99+ |
AWS | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
2012 | DATE | 0.99+ |
John Furrier | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Palo Alto | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
Boston | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
99% | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
three | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
one | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Kendra | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Aidoc | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
2% | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
hundreds of pages | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Swami Sivasubramanian | PERSON | 0.99+ |
four years | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
less than 70% | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
thousands of links | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
S3 | TITLE | 0.99+ |
10x | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
more than 100,000 people | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
CUBE | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Intuit | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Mother's Day | EVENT | 0.99+ |
3M | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
six years ago | DATE | 0.99+ |
SharePoint | TITLE | 0.99+ |
Magellan Health | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
hundreds of links | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
eight | DATE | 0.98+ |
a year ago | DATE | 0.98+ |
each | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
8:30 a.m. | DATE | 0.98+ |
48 hours | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
Mechanical Turk | ORGANIZATION | 0.98+ |
PricewaterhouseCoopers | ORGANIZATION | 0.98+ |
one example | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
Textract | TITLE | 0.97+ |
Amazon Summit | EVENT | 0.97+ |
five-year-old | QUANTITY | 0.97+ |
Salesforce | TITLE | 0.97+ |
ML University | ORGANIZATION | 0.97+ |
hundreds of terabytes | QUANTITY | 0.97+ |
Allen Institute for AI | ORGANIZATION | 0.97+ |
first professional camera | QUANTITY | 0.96+ |
COVID-19 pandemic | EVENT | 0.96+ |
A2I | TITLE | 0.96+ |
One | QUANTITY | 0.95+ |
COVID-19 | OTHER | 0.95+ |
Machine Learning University | ORGANIZATION | 0.95+ |
GA | LOCATION | 0.94+ |
ORGANIZATION | 0.94+ | |
pandemic | EVENT | 0.93+ |
theCUBE Studios | ORGANIZATION | 0.93+ |
COVID | TITLE | 0.93+ |
Baker Tilly | ORGANIZATION | 0.92+ |
AWS Summit | EVENT | 0.92+ |
Kiran Narsu, Alation & William Murphy, BigID | CUBE Conversation, May 2020
from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation LeBron welcome to the cube studio I'm John Ferrier here in Palo Alto in our remote coverage of the tech industry we are in our quarantine crew here getting all the stories in the technology industry from all the thought leaders and all the newsmakers we've got a great story here about data data compliance and really about the platforms around how enterprises are using data I've got two great guests and some news to announce Kieran our CEO is the vice president of business development with elation and William Murphy vice president of technology alliances of big ID got some interesting news a integration partnership between the two companies really kind of compelling especially now as people have to look at the cloud scale what's happening in our world certainly in the new realities of kovin 19 and going forward the role of data new kinds of applications and the speed and agility are gonna require more and more automation more reality around making sure things are in place so guys thanks for coming on appreciate it Kieran William thanks for joining me thank you thank you so let's take a step back elation you guys have been on the cube many times we've been following you guys been a leader and Enterprise catalog a new approach it's a real new technology approach and methodology and team approach to building out the data catalogues so talk about the Alliance here why what's the news why you guys in Creighton is integration partnership well let me start and thank you for having us today you know as you know elation launched the data catalog a category seven years ago and even today we're acknowledging the leader as a leader in that space you know and but we really began with the core belief that ultimately data management will be drive driven more and more by business demand and less by information suppliers so you know another way to think about that is you know how people behave with data will drive how companies manage data so our philosophy put very simply is to start with people and not first not data and our customers really seem to agree with this approach and we've got close to 200 brands using our data you know our tool every single day to drive vibrant data communities and and foster a real data culture in the environment so one of the things that was really exciting to us is the in been in data privacy by large corporate customers to get their arms around this and you know we really strive to improve our ability to use the tool inside you know these enterprises across more use cases so the partnership that we're announcing with big ID today is really you know Big Ideas the leading modern data intelligence platform for privacy and what we're trying to do is to bring bring a level of integration between our two technologies so that enterprises in better manage and scale their their data privacy compliance capability William talked about big ID what you guys are doing you guys also have a date intelligence platform we've been covering gdpr for a very long time I once called I won't say it again because it wasn't really that complimentary but the reality has sit in and they and the users now understand more than ever privacy super important companies have to deal with this you guys have a solution take a minute to explain big-big ID and what you guys are doing yeah absolutely so our founders Demetri Shirota and Nimrod Beck's founded big idea in 2016 Sam you know gdpr was authored and the big reason there is that data changed and how companies and enterprises doubled data was changing pretty much forever that profound change meant that the status quo could no longer exist and so privacy was gonna have to become a day-to-day reality to these enterprises but what big ID realized is that to start to do to do anything with privacy you actually have to understand where your data is what it is and whose it is and so that's really the genesis of what dimitri nimrod created which which is a privacy centric data discovery and intelligence platform that allows our enterprise customers and we have over 70 customers in the enterprise space many within the Fortune hundred to be able to find classify and correlate sensitive data as they defined it across data sources whether its own Prem or in the cloud and this gives our users and kind of unprecedented ability to look into their data to get better visibility which if both allows for collaboration and also allows for real-time decision-making a big place with better accuracy and confidence that regulations are not being broken and that customers data is being treated appropriately great I'm just reading here from the release that I want to get you guys thoughts and unpack some of the concepts on here but the headline is elation strengthens privacy capabilities with big ID part nur ship empowering organizations to mitigate risks delivering privacy aware data use and improved adherence to data privacy regulations it's a mouthful but the bottom line is is that there's a lot of stuff to that's a lot of complexity around these rules and these platforms and what's interesting you mentioned discovery the enterprise discovery side of the business has always been a complex nightmare I think what's interesting about this partnership from my standpoint is that you guys are bringing an interface into a complex platform and creating an easy abstraction to kind of make it usable I mean the end of the day you know we're seeing the trends with Amazon they have Kendre which they announced and they're gonna have a ship soon fast speed of insights has to be there so unifying data interfaces with back-end is really what seems to be the pattern is that the magic going on here can you guys explain what's going on with this and what's the outcome gonna be for customers yeah I guess I'll kick off and we'll please please chime in I think really there's three overarching challenges that I think enterprises are facing is they're grappling with these regulations as as we'll talked about you know number one it's really hard to both identify and classify private data right it's it's not as easy as it might sound and you know we can talk a little bit more about that it's also very difficult to flag at the point of analysis when somebody wants to find information the relevant policies that might apply to the given data that they're looking to it to run an analysis on and lastly the enterprise's are constantly in motion as enterprises change and by new businesses and enter new markets and launch new products these policies have to keep up with that change and these are real challenges to address and you know with Big Idea halation we're trying to really accelerate that compliance right with the the you know the combination of our tools you know reduce the the cost and complexity of compliance and fundamentally keep up through a single interface so that users can know what to do with data at the point of consumption and I think that's the way to think about it well I don't know if you want to add something to that absolutely I think when Karen and I have been working on this for actually many months at this point but most companies don't have a business plan of just saying let's store as much data as possible without getting anything out of it but in order to get something out of it the ability to find that data rapidly and then analyze it so that decision makers make up-to-date decisions is pretty vital a lot of these things when they have to be done manually take a long time they're huge business issues there and so the ability to both automate data discovery and then cataloging across elation and big ID gives those decision makers whether the data steward the data analyst the chief data officer an ability to really dive deeper than they have previously with better speed you know one of the things that we've been talking about for a long time with big data as these data links and they're fairly easy to pull I mean you can put a bunch of data into a corpus and you you act on them but as you start to get across these silos there's a need for you know getting a process down around managing just not only the data wrangling but the policies behind it and platforms are becoming more complex can you guys talk about the product market fit here because there's sass involved so there's also a customer activity what's the product market fit that you guys see with this integration what are some of the things that you're envisioning to emerge out of this value proposition I think I can start I think you're exactly right enterprises have made huge investments in you know historically data warehouses data Mart's data lakes all kinds of other technology infrastructure aimed at making the data easier to get to but they've effectively just layered on to the problem so elations catalog has made it incredibly much more effective at helping organizations to find to understand trust to reuse and use that data so that stewards and people who know about the data can inform users who may need need to run a particular report or conduct a specific analysis can accelerate that process and compress the time the insights much much more than then it's are possible with today's technologies and if you if you overlay that on to the data privacy challenge its compounded and I think you know will it would be great for you to comment on what the data discovery capability it's a big ID do to improve that that even further yeah absolutely so as to companies we're trying to bridge this gap between data governance and privacy and and John as you mentioned there's been a proliferation of a lot of tools whether their data lakes data analysis tools etc what Big Idea is able to do is we're looking across over 70 different types of data platforms whether they be legacy systems like SharePoint and sequel whether they be on pram or in the cloud whether it's data at rest or in motion and we're able to auto populate our metadata findings into relations data catalog the main purpose there being that those data stewards and have access to the most authentic real time data possible so on the terms of the customer value they're going to see what more built in privacy aware features is its speed but you know what I mean the problem is compounded with the data getting that catalog and getting insights out of it but for this partnership is it speed to outcome what does the outcome that you guys are envisioning here for the customer I think it's a combination of speed as you said you know they can much more rapidly get up to speed so an analyst who needs to make a decision about specific data set whether they can use it or not and know at the point of analysis if this data is governed by policies that has been informed by big IDs so the elation catalog user can make a much more rapid decision about how to use that the second piece is the complexity and costs of compliance they can really reduce and start to winnow down their technology footprint because with the combination of the discovery that big ID provides the the the ongoing discovery the big ID provides and the enterprise it data catalog provided violation we give the framework for being able to keep up with these changes in policies as rules and as companies change so they don't have to keep reinventing the wheel every time so we think that there's a significant speed time the market advantage as well as an ability to really consolidate technology footprint well I'll add to that yeah yeah just one moment so elation when they helped create this marketplace seven years ago one of the goals there and I think we're Big Ideas assisting as well as the trusting confidence that both the users of these software's the data store of the analysts have and the data that they're using and then the the trust and confidence are building with their end consumers is much better knowing that there is the this is both bi-directional and ongoing continuously you know I've always been impressed with relations vision it's big vision around the role of the human and data and it's always been impressive and yeah I think the world spinning in that direction you starting to see that now William I want to get your thoughts with big id because you know one of the things is challenging out there from what we're hearing is you know people want to protect the sensitive data obviously with the hacks and everything else and personal information there's all kinds of regulation and believe me state by state nation by nation it's crazy complex at the same time they've got to ensure this compliance tripwires everywhere right so you have this kind of nested complex web of stuff and some real security concerns at the same time you want to make data available for machine learning and for things like that this is the real kind of things that the problem has twisted around so if I'm an enterprise I'm like oh man this is a pain in the butt so how are you guys seeing this evolve because this solution is one step in that direction what are some of the pain points what are some of the examples can you share any insights around how people are overcoming that because they want to get the data out there they want to create applications that are gonna be modern robust and augmented with whether it's augmented AI of some sort or some sort of application at the same time protecting the information and compliance it's a huge problem challenge your thoughts absolutely so to your point regulations and compliance measures both state-by-state and internationally they're growing I mean I think when we saw GDP our four years ago in the proliferation of other things whether it be in Latin America in Asia Pacific or across the United States potentially even at the federal level in the future it's not making it easier to add complexity to that every industry and many companies individually have their own policies in the way that they describe data whether what's sensitive to them is it patent numbers is it loyalty card numbers is it any number of different things where they could just that that enterprise says that this type of data is particularly sensitive the way we're trying to do this is we're saying that if we can be a force multiplier for the individuals within our organization that are in charge of the stewardship over their data whether it be on the privacy side on the security side or on the data and analytics side that's what we want to do and automation is a huge piece of this so yes the ID has a number of patents in the machine learning area around data discovery and classification cluster analysis being able to find duplicate of data out there and when we put that in conjunction with what elations doing and actually gave the users of the data the kind of unprecedented ability to curate deduplicate secure sensitive data all by a policy driven automated platform that's actually I think the magic gear is we want to make sure that when humans get involved their actions can be made how do I say this minimum minimum human interaction and when it's done it's done for a reason of remediation so they're there the second step not the first step here I'll get your thoughts you know I always riff on the idea of DevOps and it's a cloud term and when you apply that the data you talk about programmability scale automation but the humans are making calls whether you're a programmer and devops world or to a data customer of the catalog and halation i'm making decisions with my business I'm a human I'm taking action at the point of design or whatever this is where I think the magic can happen your thoughts on how this evolves for that use case because what you're doing is you're augmenting the value for the user by taking advantage of these things is is that right or am i around the right area yeah I think so I think the one way to think about elation and that analogy is that the the biggest struggle that enterprise business users have and we target the the consumers of data we're not a provider to the information suppliers if you will but the people who had need to make decisions every single day on the right set of data we're here to empower them to be able to do that with the data that they know has been given the thumbs up by people who know about the data connecting stewards who know about the subject matter at hand with the data that the analyst wants to use at the time of consumption and that powerful connection has been so effective in our customers that enabling them to do in our analytical work that they just couldn't dream of before so the key piece here is with the combination with big ID we can now layer in a privacy aware consumption angle which means if you have a question about running some customer propensity model and you don't know if you can use this data or that data the big ID data discovery platform informs the elation catalog of the usage capabilities of that given data set at the moment the analyst wants conduct his or her analysis with the appropriate data set as identified by the stewards and and as endorsed by the steward so that point in time is really critical because that's where the we can we can fundamentally shrink the decision sight yeah it's interesting and so have the point of attack on the user in this case the person in the business who's doing some real work that's where the action is yeah it's a whole nother meaning of actionable data right so you know this seems to where the values quits its agility really it's kind of what we're talking about here isn't it it is very agile on the differentiation between elation and big idea in what we're bringing to the market now is we're also bringing flexibility and you meant that the point of agility there is because we allow our customers to say what their policies are what their sense of gait is define that themselves within our platforms and then go out find that data classify and catalog at etc like that's giving them that extra flexibility the enterprise's today need so that it can make business decisions and faster and I actually operationalize data guys great job good good news it's I think this is kind of a interesting canary in the coal mine around the trends that are going on around how data is evolving what's next how you guys gonna go to market partnership obviously makes a lot of sense technical integration business model integration good fit what's next for you guys I'm sorry I mean I think the the great thing is that you know from the CEO down our organizations are very much aligned in terms of how we want to integrate our two solutions and how we want to go to market so myself and will have been really focused on making sure that the skill sets of the various constituents within both of our companies have the level of education and knowledge to bring these results to bear coupled with the integration of our two technologies well your thoughts yeah absolutely I mean between our CEOs who have a good cadence to care to myself who probably spend too much time on the phone at this point we might have to get him a guest bedroom or something alignments a huge key here ensuring that we've enabled our field to - and to evangelize this out to the marketplace itself and then doing whether it's this or our webinars or or however we're getting the news out it's important that the markets know that these capabilities are out there because the biggest obstacle honestly to adoption it's not that other solutions or build-it-yourself it's just lack of knowledge that it could be easier it could be done better that you could have you could know your data better you could catalog it better great final question to end the segment message to the potential customer out there what it what about their environment that might make them a great prospect for this solution is it is it a known problem is it a blind spot when would someone know to call you guys up in this to ship and leverage this partnership is it too much data as it's just too much many applications across geographies I'm just trying to understand the folks watching when it's an opportunity to call you guys welcome a relation perspective there that can never be too much data they the a signal that may may indicate an interest or a potential fit for us would be you know the need to be compliant with one or more data privacy regulations and as well said these are coming up left and right individual states in the in addition to the countries are rolling out data privacy regulations that require a whole set of capabilities to be in place and a very rigorous framework of compliance those those requirements and the ability to make decisions every single day all day long about what data to use and when and under what conditions are a perfect set of conditions for the use of a data catalog evacuation coupled with a data discovery and data privacy solution like big I well absolutely if you're an organization out there and you have a lot of customers you have a lot of employees you have a lot of different data sources and disparate locations whether they're on prime of the cloud these are solid indications that you should look at purchasing best-of-breed solutions like elation and Big Ideas opposed to trying to build something internally guys congratulations relations strengthening your privacy capabilities with the big ID partnership congratulations on the news and we'll we'll be tracking it thanks for coming I appreciate it thank you okay so cube coverage here in Palo Alto on remote interviews as we get through this kovat crisis we have our quarantine crew here in Palo Alto I'm John Fourier thanks for watching [Music] okay guys
**Summary and Sentiment Analysis are not been shown because of improper transcript**
ENTITIES
Entity | Category | Confidence |
---|---|---|
Kieran | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Karen | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Kieran William | PERSON | 0.99+ |
2016 | DATE | 0.99+ |
Palo Alto | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
John Fourier | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Palo Alto | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
Amazon | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
William | PERSON | 0.99+ |
May 2020 | DATE | 0.99+ |
two solutions | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
second piece | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Kiran Narsu | PERSON | 0.99+ |
two companies | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
William Murphy | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Nimrod Beck | PERSON | 0.99+ |
United States | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
Latin America | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
two technologies | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Demetri Shirota | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Asia Pacific | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
first step | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Alation | PERSON | 0.99+ |
John | PERSON | 0.99+ |
William Murphy | PERSON | 0.99+ |
today | DATE | 0.99+ |
seven years ago | DATE | 0.99+ |
over 70 customers | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
second step | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Boston | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
four years ago | DATE | 0.99+ |
LeBron | PERSON | 0.98+ |
John Ferrier | PERSON | 0.98+ |
both | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
two great guests | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
one | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
Kendre | ORGANIZATION | 0.97+ |
200 brands | QUANTITY | 0.96+ |
single interface | QUANTITY | 0.95+ |
SharePoint | TITLE | 0.95+ |
over 70 different types | QUANTITY | 0.94+ |
one step | QUANTITY | 0.93+ |
three overarching challenges | QUANTITY | 0.89+ |
BigID | ORGANIZATION | 0.85+ |
Big Idea | ORGANIZATION | 0.84+ |
Big Ideas | ORGANIZATION | 0.81+ |
Mart | ORGANIZATION | 0.78+ |
one moment | QUANTITY | 0.77+ |
gdpr | TITLE | 0.76+ |
every single day | QUANTITY | 0.74+ |
big ID | ORGANIZATION | 0.74+ |
one way | QUANTITY | 0.73+ |
months | QUANTITY | 0.73+ |
bunch of data | QUANTITY | 0.72+ |
every single day | QUANTITY | 0.7+ |
much | QUANTITY | 0.69+ |
a lot of stuff | QUANTITY | 0.68+ |
a lot of tools | QUANTITY | 0.67+ |
Creighton | LOCATION | 0.66+ |
DevOps | TITLE | 0.65+ |
vice | PERSON | 0.58+ |
nimrod | PERSON | 0.58+ |
things | QUANTITY | 0.57+ |
kovin 19 | ORGANIZATION | 0.55+ |
dimitri | PERSON | 0.52+ |
every industry | QUANTITY | 0.52+ |
big | ORGANIZATION | 0.47+ |
hundred | QUANTITY | 0.46+ |
big | TITLE | 0.44+ |
ID | TITLE | 0.35+ |
Martina Grom, atwork | Microsoft Ignite 2019
>>Live from Orlando, Florida. It's the cube covering Microsoft ignite brought to you by Cohesity. >>Welcome back everyone to the cubes live coverage of Microsoft ignite. We are in day three of three days of wall-to-wall coverage, all things Microsoft. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. Along with my cohost Stu, a minimum. We are joined by Martina grom. She is the CEO at work of at work in Vienna and a Microsoft MVP. >>Thank you so much for coming on the show. My tags for the invitation. I'm glad to be here. So tell us a little bit about at work, what do you do? So, so what we are doing, we are an ISV located in Australia and in Germany we are around 25 people and we do software development on the one side. And on the other side we support customers in going into the cloud to develop a deployment strategy to use Microsoft technology and yeah, governance, deployment, migration. And recently we also started with adoption and change management because it's a huge topic for many customers. So who >>are your customers? What, what kinds of industries are they in? >>Yeah. So, um, we actually do not focus on a specific industry. We are more focusing on enterprise customers. So every, every customer was a large customer. So one friend once told me, you like the complicated cases. So I like to work with enterprises and learn what they are doing from a security perspective and how they do that. And we have customers in the financial sector as well as in retail business. So all over that and mainly in Europe we have some customers in the U S as well. >>So, so Martina, I know from a Microsoft MVP standpoint, you focus on Oh three 65 is, is that the primary engagement that you have with customers or is it a span of product? >>Yes. Yeah. The interesting part is I started with Microsoft three 65 in 2008 when Microsoft started going into the cloud business. So that time back, my first product I looked at was exchange hosted services, which was the antivirus, anti-spam solution. Microsoft provided. And then, um, every single partner first told us, Matina you will never earn money with cloud technologies because no customer will do that. Everyone was still on premises. And in 2011 I got the MVP award because I was one of the first to focus so heavily on office three 65. And the benefit I have out of that is that I know all products services quite well. And currently I'm more focusing on the security and compliance side. >>Yeah, it's interesting because today when I talked to Microsoft customers in on premises to the exception and it's usually, Oh, I'm a government agency and I need to be completely cut off from certain environments, so therefore I can't do it. Um, you know, I, I've said for the last few years, Microsoft actually gave customers not only the green light, but the push to go sass with what they're doing. So tell, tell, give us a little bit of, you know, the landscape today is, is that, is that the exception rather than the rule and are most people kind of okay with O three 65 in the cloud? >>Yeah, I, I think cloud services, it's a matter of trust. So as I am located in Europe, we um, and especially in the German speaking countries like Austria, Germany, Switzerland, many people just didn't trust it from the beginning because they said it's a American company. We don't know where all our data is. Antawn at Microsoft is very open and um, and what the did, they are very transparent what they are doing. So you get tons of material around how to trust the cloud, how it works and so on. And the current state is more for an on premises customer. He is safer to go into a cloud service then stay on premises. And this is one of the things I really like about that because it's, it doesn't depend on the customer side. Even a small customer can have the same security features a large enterprise customer has. >>Okay. If you could just expand on that a little bit because you know, for the longest time security was the blocker to do there. And for many now looking at the cloud, it at least it lets me restart and rethink what I'm doing as opposed to, you know, often security was something that got pushed to the back burner in my data center. So is it that Microsoft has, you know, all of the security taking care of, is it a combination of getting to restart and rethink of it? How do you look at that? >>Um, I think the main point is traditionally when you are on premises, you think your data center is secure because you own it, you hosted, you organize it, you operate it and everything is there. And we are very an and those customers are very focused on endpoint security. So everything comes from the outside. Uh, might be dangerous. But with cloud technologies, it's not only your, your own network you need to just to have a safe place for, you also need to secure the cloud services. And that means if you broaden that experience and going into a SAS service, you have much more security there. In terms of the talking at the very beginning where you said, I liked the complicated cases, so we know you like a challenge. And then you also said you're getting into more adoption and change management. Talk about some of the challenges that you're seeing in terms of your clients embracing this, this, this technology. >>Yeah, so from my perspective, one of the biggest challenges customers currently have is Microsoft is moving very fast and people need to change and get comfortable with an evergreen service, which might change today and might change next week again. And this is something people need to adopt and, and use put a lot of pressure on that because they say, Oh, there are the nice, fancy tools, the new tools, it's teams, it's everything else. And we need that to do, to work properly and to be in a modern workplace. And this is quite the challenge for every it operations team because they need to build a secure environment. It needs governance and it also needs change and adoption. Okay. >>Martina, you mentioned the modern workplace. So another area you work on is enterprise social. So, you know, I worked for a large enterprise, you know, a vendor in this ecosystem back when that, you know, social wave was hitting, you know, use jive, uses Yammer when it first launched long before Microsoft had uh, brought it, um, you know, we don't talk about the wave anymore. Bring us, you know, what's happening in that space these days. >>Yeah. So enterprise, social and I love being there as well because I, I try to get people, so what, what I saw what, what I saw when Microsoft acquired Yama, it brought a lot of change into Microsoft itself because um, there was currently a graph technology in a, in, in Yammer as a product which brings up more relevant content to the users and people really liked that. And then you saw all the collaboration, which is mainly document based on SharePoint, SharePoint, online and so on. And currently those, um, services come together and then after a couple of years you got Microsoft teams and people that again got confused and that, so this is the next tool helped me what tools I use when, and that's one of the biggest question many customers have currently because they probably don't understand it from the beginning, but if they start adopting that, the use cases become pretty clear for them. >>That to say we work in teams in our project environment, but we, if we want to reach the whole organization, we go into Yammer or in an enterprise social tool. >> So talk about, there's been a lot of new changes to teams that have been announced this week here at ignite. What as an acre slapped MPP? What is most sparking your interest? Um, I'm not a Microsoft employee, but a VP, sorry. Yeah. Um, so what I like about that is that teams brings kind of a good user experience to use as they have one client. They have the outlook client, they have the teams client and they can work within the team. In Microsoft teams, they can use it for video calls, for conferences, anything. So it's, it's a one stop shop defined in teams and with the extension which is brought now in, in with the new Yammer experience, they also have the broad experience of the enterprise social network integrated into their teams client. And this will bring a fundamental change because then a project team which is working together can also look out of one client. What is going on in my organization. Are there any questions? Can I share that? And Tom, >>Martina, I want to go back to a word that you brought up. When you talk about the cloud, it's trust. It's something that we heard over and over. And again, the keynote is Sacha positioning Microsoft as a trusted partner. A, they've got, what? What's it 47, sorry, 54 different Azure regions worldwide. So, uh, you know, are they local enough? Are they engaged enough? Is Microsoft earning the trust of you as a partner and as your customers, do they, they seem Microsoft as a trusted partner? >>Yeah. So from my experience, Microsoft is a trust verse it company. Because what, what I learned from them during their whole cloud journey, they got a lot of push backs. In the beginning they said it's, it's just in the European union, we don't like that. We want our data centers, which are closer to us because it feels more secure if I have a data center region in South Africa, in France, in Switzerland or wherever I am. And Microsoft invests a lot in building that trust and it's completely transparent what they are doing. So you can go to the websites and can say, okay, I'm located in Switzerland. Um, I want my data in there, so what services to get there. So it's really, um, a good opportunities for customers. And also what I learned from customers is if you see a service running and you do not use it, you can't build up on trust because you just don't know. >>It's like swimming in the air without any water. So, and this is many customers just saw and they, um, they discovered, okay, it works, it doesn't fail. We can trust on the solution. And this is really important. You said that you mainly work with European customers, a few in the U S what do you think are the biggest differences between the two groups? Our European customers naturally a little more skeptical, particularly when it comes to data. It's um, in Europe we are very specific in data privacy and the thing that might be a difference between the U S and and Europe, especially in German, that people really look at privacy issues and could that happen on, and then we have GDPR, which was brought up by the European union, which would bring additional trust and security into our customers and on every single website we are surfing on. So I think that's one of the biggest differences from an enterprise side. The, the fears are quite the same. It's, it's like we are going to the cloud and we need to use a service and how can we work through that? I do not see that many differences. So >>Martina, you were proven right? You bet early on a technology adoption has been there. As you're looking forward, what are the things that, that we are early on today that are exciting you or that you think we're going to be talking about 2020 and beyond? >>Yeah. What I think what will come to us is more intelligence and more AI stuff because this is something which will really help us. And you see the, the little small things in PowerPoint that you get your beautiful designed PowerPoint slides automatically that your auto client says, Hey, you have an appointment, you have a really recording in five minutes, you need 10 minutes to go. Should I send an email that you are running late? So we will see much more intelligence in there. And also the new projects which, which are brought, they are, so knowledge sharing will be fundamental in the future that we find the resources we need and they're relevant what we need in, in, in the, in the time we need it. So what does this mean for the future? I mean you're just describing a, a world in which we all can be more productive. >>We are communicating more seamlessly. What does this mean for how teams communicate and collaborate? Yeah. Um, so what does think every positive side also might have a negative side? We go into an always on scenario, so we will be connected everywhere at home during cooking, doing, bringing kids to school and so on. So what I think what we as humans need to learn is how we can separate us from that and how we can just quiet down and get some space left out of the full amount of information which is around us because we can't get every single information and to see that very often when I talk with customers, have around Yammer, they said it's just too much. I have to read so much information because you feel you are losing control and you are losing information and this is what we need to learn as humans. >>Any, you know, what, what guidance do you give to people? The, the world of streams, right? I remember social media, they were like, Oh my gosh, I didn't look at it for the weekend. How do I, you know, look at all of that stuff that I missed. And usually I just frame, I'm like, you ignore everything that you missed and you start where it is today. But it's different in a work environment. >>Yeah. In a work environment. So my advice for customers is everything that I tell you at Tecton is interesting for you. If you're not tech, it's probably not for you. So this is the main curse. It's like unread emails or it's like the little notification bar. You got a message, a personal message to one-to-one message, then you should react on that. That's it. And not read everything because it's probably not relevant for you at. That's great advice. Words to live by. Thank you so much for Martina. Yeah. Pleasure having again, I'm Rebecca Knight for two minimums. Stay tuned for more of the cubes live coverage from Microsoft ignite..
SUMMARY :
Microsoft ignite brought to you by Cohesity. She is the CEO And on the other side we support customers So one friend once told me, you like the complicated cases. And in 2011 I got the MVP award because I was one of the first to focus so So tell, tell, give us a little bit of, you know, the landscape today is, So you get tons of material around how to trust the cloud, So is it that Microsoft has, you know, all of the security taking care of, I liked the complicated cases, so we know you like a challenge. And this is quite the challenge for every it operations team because they need to build a So another area you work on is enterprise social. And then you saw all the collaboration, That to say we work in teams in our project environment, but we, if we want to reach They have the outlook client, they have the teams client and they can work within the team. So, uh, you know, And also what I learned from customers is if you see a few in the U S what do you think are the biggest differences between the two groups? or that you think we're going to be talking about 2020 and beyond? the little small things in PowerPoint that you get your beautiful I have to read so much information because you feel you are losing control How do I, you know, look at all of that stuff that I missed. then you should react on that.
SENTIMENT ANALYSIS :
ENTITIES
Entity | Category | Confidence |
---|---|---|
Tom | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Rebecca Knight | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Martina | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Microsoft | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Australia | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
Germany | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
Europe | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
2008 | DATE | 0.99+ |
Switzerland | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
Vienna | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
10 minutes | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Martina Grom | PERSON | 0.99+ |
France | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
five minutes | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
2011 | DATE | 0.99+ |
two groups | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
next week | DATE | 0.99+ |
South Africa | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
Tecton | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Austria | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
three days | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
first product | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
PowerPoint | TITLE | 0.99+ |
Orlando, Florida | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
U S | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
54 | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
GDPR | TITLE | 0.99+ |
two | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
today | DATE | 0.98+ |
this week | DATE | 0.98+ |
one | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
SharePoint | TITLE | 0.98+ |
first | QUANTITY | 0.97+ |
MVP | TITLE | 0.97+ |
one client | QUANTITY | 0.97+ |
Martina grom | PERSON | 0.97+ |
around 25 people | QUANTITY | 0.96+ |
European union | ORGANIZATION | 0.96+ |
47 | QUANTITY | 0.96+ |
German | LOCATION | 0.94+ |
Sacha | PERSON | 0.93+ |
European | LOCATION | 0.93+ |
European | OTHER | 0.87+ |
2020 | DATE | 0.87+ |
German | OTHER | 0.86+ |
one side | QUANTITY | 0.86+ |
one friend | QUANTITY | 0.85+ |
three | QUANTITY | 0.84+ |
Dona Sarkar, Microsoft | Microsoft Ignite 2019
>>Live from Orlando, Florida. It's the cube covering Microsoft ignite brought to you by Cohesity. >>Welcome back everyone to the cubes live coverage of Microsoft ignite. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co host to minimun. We are doing joined by Donna Sarkar. She is the advocate lead Microsoft power platform at Microsoft. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you very much for having me. Tai cube land. So tell us a little bit about power platform. It's something we're hearing some buzz about, but we still need the overview. What is it all about? All right, so for years, decades we in the tech industry, you have been on this mission where we say everyone in the world can benefit from learning to code, right? Uh, whether you're a farmer and accountant, a teacher, a lawyer, a doctor, some sort of code will help you do your job better and you'll be able to automate away boring tasks and make apps and websites to solve your business problems. >>Right? We've been saying this forever and soon we started to realize like, why are we asking everyone to learn to code when the end goal is to solve those business problems, right? So instead of learning to code, why not create a suite of low code or no code tools? So all of these people who we call citizen developers who may not be professional developers as in they didn't go to computer science school, they didn't do a coding boot camp. They don't live in visual studio all day. How can they use these low code tools to solve their specific business problems? So that's like the vision of power platform and they're, I would say six independent pillars of it. Um, the first one, the one that most people know is power BI, which is a dashboard to visualize data and you know, um, traction in your business and all of that. >>So that's the one that most of the fortune 500 are like quite familiar with. The second one that I think a lot of people have used, used to be called Microsoft flow. So this is a automation tool where you'd say, if I get an email, send me a text, you know, a kind of a, if this happens, then that happens. It's just a logical tool that connects lots and lots of services in our life together that has been renamed to power automate to focus more on the automation that many businesses have that we actually have not thought about for decades. How do we automate some of these processes that people have to do all the time? Third thing if I could. So of course one of the new announcements this week, power automate is the RPA piece. Yes. Come out there. So I guess it's a suite and this is a new offering as RPA. >>The robotic process automation is how we can, um, do UI automation, which is a huge pain in the neck. Like it's terrible because you say, Oh click box, wait three seconds, wait for this thing to happen. Sleep 10 sec. It is terrible. I've done UI automation, I hate it. UI automation. So much. So RPA, what it does for you is you perform the act actions and the code is generated and it replays. So that is this powerful tool for anyone who has to do any sort of repetitive scan form, scan, form, scan form, you know, sort of thing. So power automate. The third pillar is PowerApps, which I think everyone hears a lot about today, which is um, apps that are generated from whatever data source that you've got. Say you've got an Excel spreadsheet having, and I saw all of your guests are it all tracked in an Excel spreadsheet, right? >>Donna's coming now, Christina is coming next and there's Christina now and imagine you can see them in an app instead. And all of you have this app on your phone, you can say, Oh, what's on the docket for today, right? Donna's showing up at 11 Christina's at 1130 what are the questions we want to ask Donna? Click on the Donna tab, you get all the questions you want to talk to her about, et cetera. So PowerApps is a way to quickly generate an app from a data source without code. We have a whole bunch of templates depending on what you're trying to do. So maybe you're trying to make a gallery of photos or you're trying to make like an expense tool or like a gas mileage tool or whatever you're trying to do that every single business in the world has the same tools, slightly different. >>So the fourth thing is, um, a new announcement called power virtual assist, which is, um, think about it as simplified chatbots, right? Chatbots are everywhere. Uh, the way people think about making them is, Oh, I have to go get Azure cognitive services and learn it deeply and become a AI expert and learn to like speak natural language processing stuff. But in fact, you can build a chat bot in five minutes using power virtual assist, which was fantastic and really cool. And running through all of this is my favorite that I learned a lot about this week, which is called the AI builder. And AI builder is a tool really that brings intelligence to all of these things and makes you feel it kind of a badass. I'm like, Oh, I trained an AI model and deployed it and tested it on stage. That's crazy and cool. And I learned to do that in five minutes and believe you me, I'm not a data scientist. >>So it was a really, really cool set of tools that I personally, even as a pro developer, I'm very excited about. Well, I want to dig into the tools more than what they can do. But I first want to ask you a personal question because you're new to the role. You've been there two weeks. What made you, what was exciting to you about working with power platforms? So I've been at Microsoft for 14 years and I've always been in the windows division and I've always worked in a software engineering function. So always dealing with like C plus plus code comm code, how do we, what product code do we changes, do we make to windows the. And recently I've been realizing that my personal mission that anyone in the world should have my opportunities. It's, that's really important to me. Right? I grew up underserved society in Detroit, Michigan, right? >>I don't, I often feel like I don't deserve this life that I have and I fell into it because of luck and circumstance and I want other people to have these opportunities and not feel that same kind of impostor thing. So I always believe that tech is this, you know, this sword, this weapon that you can wield and it will as you make your way through the world and it creates so many opportunities, right? It, the opera and anyone in the world wants to hire a software engineer. Every company, right? Every company wants to hire devs. It doesn't matter if you're like government or like oil rigs, you want software developers. And I thought, what an amazing economic power and I want lots of people to have that. And lo and behold, I was offered the opportunity to head up a brand new advocacy team for the power platform, um, as part of the Azure advocates organization. >>And I said, Oh, that's amazing to be able to line up my personal passion with a mission in the company that doesn't come along very often. So I love my job. So it's interesting thought. I would love your viewpoint as someone that's been with Microsoft for 14 years, cause I know a lot of the advocacy people and many of them are ones that if you ask them if they would have joined Microsoft five years ago, I'm not sure. Sure. So you know, moving from windows to there. Tell us a little bit about culturally what's different about Microsoft today and you know, much more obviously than just windows. Yeah. Um, I would say that there's three things that are dramatically different. There's a lot of like things that people notice, but three things I think that are just, you can't even argue about it. One, we are definitely a learn it all mindset rather than a nodal where it's actually much better now to say, I do not know. >>Let's go find out, let's go do an experiment and then we'll have an answer. And that's much better than with great confidence saying something wrong. Right. Oh I know this will work for sure. I guarantee you. And then it not working because you're being a know it all rather than the learn it all. So that tolerance is off the charts. It's, it's expected. If you come in with a strong opinion with no sort of experimental data to back it up, that's no longer a good thing right now. People almost are suspicious. Like, really? Why do you, why do you think that? Have you checked it? Have you done the experiment? The second thing is, um, this co-creating with customers before, like you're asking about windows. I've worked on windows five versions and it always went a little like this, right? We as the developers would go and hide in Redmond, Washington for three and a half years and one day we would show up and say, here is your operating system. >>We'll see you in three years, have fun using it by, and then we go off and make another operating system. Right? We didn't stick around to figure out, is this operating system working for you? Are you being successful? What's you're trying to do? Are your customer successful? We just went ahead and made what we thought was next, right? Because we were convinced we knew better. But with windows 10 and every other product at Microsoft, now we actually cocreate with our customers, right? That feedback loop is part of the product cycle where we don't ship a product without having a feedback loop. So we shipped something. How are we getting feedback? What is the time baked in to actually take that feedback and make changes? So that's one thing. It's dramatically different. Um, it used to all be timed to code, product, time to fix bugs. >>That's it. Now it's code product, listen to customer feedback, fixed bugs from customers. That's it. So it dramatically shorten the amount of time it took to build an operating system because we don't need to make a three year long product. Instead we make like a six month long product. And when I ran the windows insider program, we were testing windows every week, right? Twice a week we're rolling out versions of windows to millions of people and getting their feedback in real time. And the third thing I'd say that's been a dramatic transformation is this inclusivity of not just different kinds of, you know, race in the city, but work styles, the kinds of businesses we do work with. Like we're a, we do Linux now, right? We do eggs. Um, our platform itself pulls from all sorts of data sources. We don't just say we only pull from Microsoft tech. >>Like if you have Excel, if you have access, if you have Azure, if you've sequel, we support you and everyone else go the heck away. No, we're, we're saying whatever data source you've got, we don't care. We'll build you a power app based on your data source. Bring your whole self to work, right? It's that bring your whole self to a work mindset that I think has permeated just across the company and a chosen our products. So you were talking about this feedback loop and I'm interested because these, these, the power platform was rolled out into 2018 we haven't seen any major revenue yet, but Microsoft sees a ton of promise here. So what was the customer feedback you were given in terms of these updates that you've just announced here at ignite and what were customers demanding, wanting, needing from these platforms, these, these, these tools? >>Well, there's been a few things. One, um, the uptake in power platform, especially power apps is the fastest growth of any business app in Microsoft history. Um, in the last like just two years we've reached 84% of the fortune 500 are running power. Now. That's kind of wild, right? When you think these are normally traditional companies who can be quite conservative, but they've got people, whether it's an it, it's a citizen dove or a PRODA, they're actually building power apps to supplement their business needs, right? So it's been just astronomical growth, which is fantastic. Um, and the feedback from this group is actually what dictates all of the changes we've been making. So one of the key things a lot of people said was we just adopted teams like last year, right? Our company adopted teams, we're all in on teams. All of our communication like realtime has done on teams, but power platform is not with teams. >>What's, what's the deal with that? Right? So the par platform dev team engineering team actually went and figured out how can you have a teams channel, how can you build a power plant, a power app, and then share that power app within your teams specifically. So say the three of us are working on a teams channel and I make a Oh, track your attendees app, the one we're talking about, I can share it within the teams itself and we can just see it from within the team's window. So it'll run within the teams window. Um, we can just deploy it to our phones as well. And with the same team's credentials as we're working, that applies to the app as well. So that's something that just rolled out this week as direct feedback from people who say we're, we want an on the latest and greatest. And that means teams. That's one means SharePoint online. That means our platform. That means all the things now. >>Yeah. So Donna, one of the things I love that you talked about is it doesn't take months to get started on this. So many announcements that you talked through all the six pillars and everything. For those people out there seeing what's new, give them some final tips as to how they should get started with, with the power platform family. >>I would say that um, one of the best things you can do is just get your hands on it, right? Stop reading about it. Stop looking at the announcements. Just get your hands on it. Because I was at first reading all these blog posts trying to understand CDs, power platform, AI builder, all this stuff. Stop. Just don't do it. The best thing to do is to go get on Microsoft learn. There's a start, a starter tutorial called canvas apps for power platform. Um, and go do the tutorial. All it does is it deploys an Excel spreadsheet to your personal machine or your personal one drive, whatever it is and using that, it's just carpet, right? It's like black carpet, white carpet and shows pictures of carpet and then you generate a power app. And it shows it in a gallery view on an app that you just see on your computer and then you deploy it to your phone. >>All it does is show you the power of an Excel spreadsheet converted into an app. So I've created a short URL for it just to make life easier for everyone. So it's AKA dot. Ms power up, super straight forward, super simple. And I talk about this tutorial all the time, not because I think it's the best tutorial that's ever existed, but for someone who has absolutely no idea and they're feeling intimidated to start, this is exactly the right thing to do because this tutorial, I am not kidding you both of you can do it in five minutes. Like on the next break. Once you're finished with me and Christina, I challenge you to do the tutorial. All right? Okay. Challenge accepted. One, one final thing. So you are known for this Ted talk that you gave Unimpossible syndrome earlier in this, in our conversation you said you fell into this like, Oh absolutely, you've gotten lucky, but yet you're a smart woman. >>Talk about imposter syndrome. And then and then give your best advice for the young people out there and an old people to frankly who are suffering. Imposter syndrome is a killer because it is a disease that is a global epidemic. It's not. Some people think it's a woman's problem, it's a people of color problem. No, it's not. It's an everyone problem. Every time I give this talk, the Ted audience was thousands of people. I would say about 70% men and when I asked how many of you feel these symptoms? Hands are up. 70% of people, and this was men too, who feel like I got here. You know the thoughts are usually I got here by accident. It was dumb luck. There's a mistake in the process. I slipped in under the radar any minute. Now someone's going to show up here and say, you don't belong here. >>Get out or someone's going to check my credentials or ask me like, how do you think you're as good as the people around you? Or why are you qualified to speak on this topic? Right? People are convinced this is going to happen. Like, almost everyone is convinced and it's wild. And I've realized the reason that happens is because we are not used to doing that thing yet. That's it. We don't imposter about the things we do every day. You don't imposter about being in camera on front of the camera in front of everyone because you do it all the time and you've gotten good reviews and obviously people come to talk to you. But if tomorrow I was to be like you and I are going to write office abs, you may say, ah, I don't think I'm qualified to do that. I don't know if you are or not. >>I'm just making stuff up at this point. Um, and you may say, I am not qualified to do that. And the reason you say that is because you've never done it before. Why would you be qualified to do that? It's like me trying to be qualified to ride a unicycle, right? Which I can't. So my advice to people who feels this, well I don't feel like I belong here, is break it down right into steps, debug this process and say, all right, there are parts of this process that I feel qualified to do and there's parts I do not feel qualified to do. What are they? So from my own example, I absolutely do not feel qualified to lead an advocacy team for power platform. Right. I said, I joined this team two weeks ago. I just learned about this product last year. How am I qualified to lead advocacy for this? >>So I had to break it down and I said, what? What am I feeling and posturing about? Is it leading advocacy? No, I did it for windows. I did it for hollow lens. I do know how to do that. Is it speaking in front of lots of people? Not really. I do that all the time. Is it writing content so others can learn? Not really. I do that all the time. Is it the product? Yes, it's the product. It's the, I don't feel like I know the ins and outs of the product that well. So if you were to ask me where exactly is the connector for, you know, Azure sequeled or PowerApps, I would just freeze. Like I do not know. I think it's in the Azure portal somewhere, somewhere. So I would feel that sense of imposter and like, Oh, I don't know. >>So I don't belong here. It's no, I just don't know the product that well. That's okay. I know advocacy well, so what I need to do now is identify things. I'm good at advocacy things. I'm not good at product, learn the product. That's it. It just becomes a really easy to do list or to learn list. Right. Learn it all mindset, not know it all. Mindset. I love it. Thank you so much. Thank you is a really terrific conversation. Wonderful. Thanks for having me. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. Stay tuned for more of the cubes live coverage of Microsoft ignite.
SUMMARY :
Microsoft ignite brought to you by Cohesity. decades we in the tech industry, you have been on this mission where we say everyone in the world can So that's like the vision of power platform and they're, So of course one of the new announcements this week, power automate is the RPA piece. So that is this powerful tool for anyone who has to do any sort of repetitive Click on the Donna tab, you get all the questions you want to talk to her about, et cetera. And I learned to do that in five minutes and believe you me, I'm not a data scientist. But I first want to ask you a personal question because you're new to the role. you know, this sword, this weapon that you can wield and it will as you make your way through the world of the advocacy people and many of them are ones that if you ask them if they would have joined Microsoft five years ago, We as the developers would go and hide in Redmond, Washington for three and a half years What is the time baked in to actually take that feedback and make changes? shorten the amount of time it took to build an operating system because we don't need to make a three year long product. the customer feedback you were given in terms of these updates that you've just announced here at ignite and what were customers So one of the key things a lot of people said was we just adopted teams So say the three of us are working on a teams channel and I make a Oh, track your attendees app, So many announcements that you talked through all the six pillars and everything. I would say that um, one of the best things you can do is just get your hands on it, So you are known for this Ted talk that you Now someone's going to show up here and say, you don't belong here. Get out or someone's going to check my credentials or ask me like, how do you think you're as good as And the reason you say that is because you've never done it before. is the connector for, you know, Azure sequeled or PowerApps, I would just freeze. It's no, I just don't know the product that well.
SENTIMENT ANALYSIS :
ENTITIES
Entity | Category | Confidence |
---|---|---|
Rebecca Knight | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Donna Sarkar | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Donna | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Microsoft | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Dona Sarkar | PERSON | 0.99+ |
2018 | DATE | 0.99+ |
Christina | PERSON | 0.99+ |
five minutes | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
14 years | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
six month | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
84% | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
three | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Excel | TITLE | 0.99+ |
three seconds | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
three year | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
PowerApps | TITLE | 0.99+ |
windows 10 | TITLE | 0.99+ |
two weeks | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
last year | DATE | 0.99+ |
Orlando, Florida | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
windows | TITLE | 0.99+ |
three and a half years | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
two weeks ago | DATE | 0.99+ |
1130 | DATE | 0.99+ |
today | DATE | 0.99+ |
Linux | TITLE | 0.99+ |
Twice a week | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Stu Miniman | PERSON | 0.98+ |
one | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
tomorrow | DATE | 0.98+ |
C plus plus | TITLE | 0.98+ |
10 sec | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
second one | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
five years ago | DATE | 0.98+ |
three things | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
this week | DATE | 0.98+ |
second thing | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
One | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
first | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
third pillar | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
windows five | TITLE | 0.98+ |
three years | QUANTITY | 0.97+ |
Redmond, Washington | LOCATION | 0.97+ |
Azure | TITLE | 0.97+ |
first one | QUANTITY | 0.97+ |
both | QUANTITY | 0.96+ |
one thing | QUANTITY | 0.96+ |
thousands of people | QUANTITY | 0.96+ |
third thing | QUANTITY | 0.96+ |
fourth thing | QUANTITY | 0.95+ |
about 70% | QUANTITY | 0.93+ |
six pillars | QUANTITY | 0.9+ |
one final | QUANTITY | 0.89+ |
two years | QUANTITY | 0.89+ |
Detroit, | LOCATION | 0.88+ |
Shawn Gifford, Illinois Mutual | Microsoft Ignite 2019
>>Live from Orlando, Florida. It's the cube covering Microsoft ignite brought to you by Cohesity. >>Good afternoon everyone. You are watching the cubes live coverage of Microsoft ignite. I am your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost Stu Miniman. We are joined by Sean Gifford. He is the senior infrastructure administrator, administrator and infrastructure team lead at Illinois mutual. Thank you so much for coming on the cube. Thanks for having me. This is really fun. Yeah. So tell us a little bit about Illinois mutual. >>Sure. So Alou Mutual's a a life insurance company. We sell life insurance Dai and several other insurance products. We've been around for a little over a hundred years now. So, uh, not myself, but uh, you know, the company. Um, and uh, we are based in Peoria, Illinois, uh, about 200 employees. And uh, we're uh, mostly uh, based on one headquarters there with a couple of their uh, uh, one of their, uh, co located dead center. >>And you are a senior infrastructure administrator. Tell us, tell our viewers a little about what you do. >>Sure. So basically a infrastructure admin means you do just about everything now. Just seems that way sometimes. Um, so, uh, my team, uh, handles everything from windows system, ministration, um, individual systems like a, your exchange, SharePoint, you know, things like that that we would use on prem. Um, too. Also outside of the on prem side, any of our cloud management, et cetera. All right, so, so Sean, you know, this shows decades old and started out at the windows administrator and you know, what's now office or O three 65, uh, at its core. Uh, so have you been to the show before or is this your first time? Uh, on one time, watch. Never on before. Okay. So, but you know, I, I'd love just your viewpoint on Microsoft before we get into some of the environments. Cause of that, you know, Microsoft, you know, started out as people knew kind of windows and some of their apps, but now, you know, the sprawling company with, you know, apps everywhere in the cloud, the edge and the data center, uh, you know, such a big footprint is what they do. >>How you personally in Illinois mutual look at Microsoft? Well, Microsoft is definitely a major partner for Illinois mutual. Right. I mean, we are a very big Microsoft shop. Does that mean that everyone, uh, you know, thinks that Microsoft is the best that every product? Of course not, but, uh, they do a lot of things and they do them really well. So I mean, we obviously rely on them not only for our on prem active directory, but then replicating that out to, to as your, um, you know, I mean our email much just people like might not like to admit it is still one of the most essential pieces of the infrastructure. Um, and that's around on exchange. So I mean, honestly, uh, as much as a, you know, people might want to say Cisco networking is like the backbone of the network. Uh, my Microsoft technologies really are kind of the backbone as far as I look at it. >>Okay. So you still have exchange, you know, in your own shop. You haven't made the move. DOE Microsoft pressure in there. >> Yeah, I know, right? Um, so, uh, no. Yeah, we're, we're still on prem. Um, we have our O three 65 account and we're, um, full disclosure. So, you know, I've been in it for 20 some years, but, uh, uh, been into Eleni mutual for about four. When I was in consulting before only mutual. I did a lot of, uh, in a cloud consulting and getting people on. So it felt really weird to me, but that's, uh, you know, coming into Eleanor mutual where, uh, at the time they came on, uh, it was, the cloud in general was like a bad word. Um, so, and getting past that culture-wise has been a little bit of a struggle. >> Oh yeah. I would, I'd love you to just step back for a second. >>You know, you work for a company that's over a hundred years old, uh, so, you know, exchange in cloud and everything like that is, you know, been around for a very short piece of the overall company. So tell us some of the, you know, what are some of the changes, the pressures going on? Oftentimes there's M and a involved in pulling all those things together. So, uh, you know, Illinois mutual as a company, what are the, what are the drivers and stressors on, you know, your, your, your, your organization? >> Yeah, well first and foremost, data security, right? Um, getting it, uh, any data so that it's fully encrypted at rest in transit and all that sort of thing so that, uh, you know, and, and you don't have to worry about it, uh, leaving anywhere once it's on someone else's prem. Right. Um, it has always been a big part of it. >>Um, trust I mean in is really what it just comes down to. Uh, when you, when you're selling life insurance policies that, you know, go for the life of a human being, you know, that's a pretty longterm relationship. And, uh, going with something, uh, especially a technology like that, that is considered as you say, you know, new to the game, uh, has, has been a struggle for sure. I mean, we're, uh, just to give you an idea, we're a still on mainframe and, uh, we have now to be, to be fair, we have a sizable, uh, uh, project for getting, uh, things moved off of the mainframe, but that, you know, is 40 plus years old. Getting, getting that moving, uh, to, you know, try and hop just into the end of the 20th century, let alone the 21st is always a little bit hard. >>So talk about some of the specific challenges of managing legacy infrastructure, managing tape and, and sort of what, what you do as more of a on the Vanguard of technology in terms of how you're leading your organization to make changes that are, that are much needed. >>Yeah. Uh, so yeah, when, when I came in on, in fact until just a few months ago, you bring up the example of tape. I mean, uh, we had been doing tape off to a, on off-prem, a site that, uh, had been just the way they did it, right. And, uh, um, as a joke, when some people an earlier, um, as the new crew came in, uh, one of the things that we instituted is a, uh, that's how we always done it. Jar. Um, and, uh, instead of people having a swear jar, right, they'd have to throw money in a anytime. They didn't say, I can't do it cause that's how we've always done it. And that's always been just that struggle, you know, with tape, you know, why is it that we're sending our tapes, why are we sending tapes at all? But why are we sending them to this place that's a, you know, three miles away from our place and calling that disaster recovery. >>Um, so I, I, that has been one of the major struggles for sure. Um, getting through that. But, uh, I've been really impressed, uh, culture-wise with the fact that, uh, people are really starting to, to get in line with it. You know, they're seeing the, the advantages that we're bringing. Um, w when you have a cloud strategy that's well thought out and, uh, isn't, uh, at least inherently a, you know, tied to a given vendor as your AWS or whoever it might be. Um, and, and you're not making decisions for cloud just for the sake of calling it cloud. It makes a big difference. I think. So, uh, as you, as you started to embrace cloud, uh, how did things like data protection and security, you know, what stayed the same? You know, what, what things did you need to rethink as you roll those out? >>Data protection changes completely, right? Um, first of all, uh, you know, everyone had that, uh, idea that if it's in cloud, of course it's completely protected, right? It's not right. And so getting people to understand that, uh, as they say, Oh yeah, we're going to, you know, do this new sass offering. It's totally, you know, they take care of everything, the applications on them. You don't have to touch it. Right? Well, no, that's not really the case. You know, that they can lose a data just like anybody else. So getting through pieces like that on the, on the cloud side is, has been a struggle. But, uh, getting into just even normal or excuse me, newer, um, on-prem technologies has, has meant changing completely the way we're doing a lot of things. Um, the, uh, it was becoming harder and harder, especially as we moved data sets off of the, uh, uh, mainframe side to keep up with a lot of those replication timeframes and things like that because, uh, it, as you push more data through what is still a small pipe and it's never big enough, um, it, uh, it became everyday nightmares. >>So it's been a struggle. >>So when you are, when you, when you come to the conclusion that you need to make a change and you need to look for other kinds of solutions, how do you go about finding the right vendor for the problem that you're trying to solve? How do you find the best in class? Right. And that's, >>that's been an interesting piece with w with alimony mutual and, and, uh, having spent time at VARs for the first part of my career, I was used to, you know, answering things like RFPs and whatnot. Right. Um, and we don't necessarily do it within an RFP process, but, uh, honestly conventions like this one and stuff is how I like to do it. Um, you know, we get really stuck in the day to day doldrums and stuff like that too, right? As much as you're trying. And your goal might always be to, you know, get things to at least the cutting edge if not the bleeding edge. Uh, you really need to, you know, be at a places where you can learn about new new technologies now. So when it comes to us, we end up finding a lot of our vendors like that. And, uh, you know, cause we don't really want her to necessarily rely on, you know, the sales people or, or even really our, our, you know, sales people from a VAR or anything like that. >>It's about trying to find, uh, that, that third party knowledge to, to really understand what's the best thing for the needs and the, uh, pain points that you're having. And that's Sean, can you bring us in through, can you tell us, you know, which solutions you were, uh, you were deciding between and how you ultimately came to your final decision? Yeah. So, uh, so we looked at, uh, several different vendors. Um, when it came to our, uh, data protection, uh, analysis, we had looked at a beam for awhile. We had looked at rubric. Um, we had, we had looked at, uh, uh, of course, uh, you know, trying to continue things along with our current vendor at the time we should have been con ball. Um, and we did, uh, we did an M U a you right. a utility attribute analysis. Yeah. Uh, and we, uh, set that up and, uh, just tried to really compare and, uh, uh, you know, what are the actual things we really wanted, what were the selection criteria we have and grading each vendor on those things. >>Um, and ultimately that's what it took to be able to get it through to, you know, to our executives and, and whatnot, uh, building an algorithm that, uh, that, that looked at all those pieces and then, you know, as really address the pain points we were having, you know, uh, not just as a Jeep cause yes, as always a big thing. Right. But is it gonna replicate in time? Is it, is it going to, uh, reduce our overhead, uh, that we're in, that we're experiencing right now? Am I going to have to keep on a full time contractor just to, you know, do my data protection. So, all right, so you ended up choosing Cohesity. So what was it about Cohesity that separated it from, uh, from, from all the others? Yeah, so Cohesity, um, I had pretty given up, uh, when I did the analysis I was talking to you about a couple of years ago. >>Um, I looked around and nobody could quite fit the square peg into the round hole that I was trying to make it work. Right? I wanted a lot of things and nobody had exactly what I was looking for. Can we sit? He was the first one that could really do most of what I wanted to do. Uh, as an example. Um, being able to replicate your data, but while keeping it encrypted on both ends and but still having dedupe and compression and all those things built in, into the platform and, and weight, it's actually searchable wallets in those States, right? I can do like a Google type search and be able to find exactly what I'm looking for. Made a huge difference and it cut it down. Uh, you know, time wise, not only on the administrative effort but also when I had to do a restore and we had a major project just a, a month or so ago where, uh, I had my DBA doing a backup, uh, during a rollout. He accidentally set at the backup to go with the wrong side at the wrong data center. Everyone was kind of freaking out, right? What are we gonna do? We restored it across data centers, across the handling, kept within our timeframes. I was, that's the type of thing, type of thing that really makes it different stuff. So, >>so, so talk about some of the results that you've seen since implementing this. >>Yeah, so replication, um, that I brought up a couple of times, but, uh, it was a really big problem that we would take. For instance, um, I'll take SQL as an example, right? Our SQL data, we would do a data mirroring, right? So it replicated across our wind line for that. We would, uh, we would do a, uh, primary storage replication. So in this case, a nimble Sans that would replicate across with snapshots and then our actual data protection. Uh, so the same exact data would have to replicate across one tiny land line three times for every a replication. Um, since putting in Cohesity, we have experienced an actual, I was blown away when we actually calculated the results, but it was actually a four times increase in replication efficiency. Uh, it just allowed us to do a whole lot more without buying more land bandwidth. So this is a big deal for us. >>So, in terms of this show, as you said this, this is really helpful for you to go and meet different kinds of companies that you might not even know exists. There are new entrance all the time. So what are you going to bring back with you when you go back to Illinois mutual next week? What are some of the things that have stuck out to you, resonated most with you? >>Yeah, so I'm, I'm really encouraged and even with just Cohesity, for instance, I've talked to a, I'm actually met up with a couple of the engineers that I've talked with them, um, who had one of them and even put out a, uh, a new, uh, feature request for us. And he was telling me before lunchtime about some new features available that I can start to change up some of my jobs. I've, I'm really excited. I was texting my, my, uh, data protection, uh, you know, secondary admin, uh, uh, you know, texting furiously to them, we can do this. And, you know, I'm really excited about that. But, uh, honestly on the other side, is these your side? I'm, uh, really, uh, excited to learn about some of the things that we can actually implement, uh, even with older infrastructure, uh, in trying to pull some of those things, uh, into a cloud platform in ways that actually make sense and aren't gonna lose us money in the longterm. So I'm happy with that. Thank you so much for coming on the cube. Thank you very much. It's been fun. I'm Rebecca aid for Stu Miniman. Stay tuned for more of the cube.
SUMMARY :
Microsoft ignite brought to you by Cohesity. Thank you so much for coming on the cube. So, uh, not myself, but uh, you know, the company. And you are a senior infrastructure administrator. the edge and the data center, uh, you know, such a big footprint is what they do. Does that mean that everyone, uh, you know, thinks that Microsoft is the best that every product? You haven't made the move. So it felt really weird to me, but that's, uh, you know, coming into Eleanor mutual where, I would, I'd love you to just step back for a second. So, uh, you know, Illinois mutual as a company, what are the, what are the drivers and stressors encrypted at rest in transit and all that sort of thing so that, uh, you know, uh, to, you know, try and hop just into the end of the 20th century, let alone the 21st is and sort of what, what you do as more of a on the Vanguard of technology And that's always been just that struggle, you know, with tape, uh, isn't, uh, at least inherently a, you know, tied to a given vendor as your and things like that because, uh, it, as you push more data through what is So when you are, when you, when you come to the conclusion that you need to make a change and you need And, uh, you know, cause we don't really want her to necessarily rely uh, uh, of course, uh, you know, trying to continue things along with our uh, that, that looked at all those pieces and then, you know, Uh, you know, time wise, not only on the administrative effort but, uh, it was a really big problem that we would take. So what are you going to bring back secondary admin, uh, uh, you know, texting furiously to them, we can do this.
SENTIMENT ANALYSIS :
ENTITIES
Entity | Category | Confidence |
---|---|---|
Rebecca Knight | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Sean Gifford | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Microsoft | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
AWS | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Illinois | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
Sean | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Shawn Gifford | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Stu Miniman | PERSON | 0.99+ |
20 | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Orlando, Florida | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
three times | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
next week | DATE | 0.99+ |
Alou Mutual | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Rebecca | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Cisco | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
first time | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Jeep | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
one time | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
windows | TITLE | 0.99+ |
three miles | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
SharePoint | TITLE | 0.98+ |
21st | DATE | 0.98+ |
Peoria, Illinois | LOCATION | 0.98+ |
about 200 employees | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
one | QUANTITY | 0.97+ |
Eleanor | ORGANIZATION | 0.97+ |
each vendor | QUANTITY | 0.97+ |
ORGANIZATION | 0.97+ | |
first | QUANTITY | 0.97+ |
first one | QUANTITY | 0.96+ |
over a hundred years | QUANTITY | 0.94+ |
SQL | TITLE | 0.93+ |
2019 | DATE | 0.93+ |
over a hundred years old | QUANTITY | 0.88+ |
Eleni mutual | ORGANIZATION | 0.86+ |
one headquarters | QUANTITY | 0.86+ |
40 plus years old | QUANTITY | 0.84+ |
few months ago | DATE | 0.84+ |
both ends | QUANTITY | 0.82+ |
a couple of years ago | DATE | 0.8+ |
Illinois Mutual | ORGANIZATION | 0.79+ |
a month or | DATE | 0.79+ |
mutual | ORGANIZATION | 0.76+ |
one tiny | QUANTITY | 0.76+ |
Vanguard | ORGANIZATION | 0.75+ |
20th century | DATE | 0.74+ |
about four | QUANTITY | 0.73+ |
couple of times | QUANTITY | 0.72+ |
Cohesity | TITLE | 0.72+ |
first part | QUANTITY | 0.71+ |
O three 65 | OTHER | 0.71+ |
Illinois mutual | ORGANIZATION | 0.66+ |
four | QUANTITY | 0.65+ |
couple | QUANTITY | 0.6+ |
O three 65 | TITLE | 0.56+ |
Cohesity | ORGANIZATION | 0.55+ |
end | DATE | 0.51+ |
Ignite | COMMERCIAL_ITEM | 0.51+ |
years | QUANTITY | 0.49+ |
second | QUANTITY | 0.47+ |
decades | QUANTITY | 0.47+ |
Phoummala Schmitt, Microsoft | Microsoft Ignite 2019
>> Narrator: Live from Orlando, Florida it's theCUBE! Covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by Cohesity. >> Good afternoon everyone and welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite, one of Microsoft's biggest shows of the year 26,000 people here in Orlando. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight co-hosting alongside of Stu Miniman. We are joined by Phoummala Schmitt. She is the Senior Cloud Advocate, Microsoft Azure Engineering. Thank you so much for coming on the show. >> Well thank you for having me. >> Rebecca: For coming back on the show. >> Yeah, last year we were here-- Well, actually, we were what, a month earlier last year? It's November. >> Rebecca: We were indeed, we were indeed. >> Hoping the weather was better, but still warm. >> Well we're not getting much fresh air, but, we're going to talk today about cloud governance. So this is something that companies that are moving to the cloud, often as an experiment and then suddenly it's live. How do you make sure that your governance is in order and how do you help companies wrap their brains around getting things buttoned up? >> Part of it is enabling developers, operations. See, governance, typically is a negative, right? Oh my gosh, governance! It's a road blocker. We have to stop thinking in that way and think of it as an enabler and instead of governance, they're guardrails. We put those guardrails in place in the beginning, enable our developers. Now you've got control and speed, because everything is about speed right now, because if you are not, you know, developing at speed you're not at velocity. You're not meeting business and then developers are off doing their own thing and then, often times, when you're off doing things really, really fast, you forget about the little things. Like leaving a port open, or you're doing a POC and you're like oh we'll come back and fix all that stuff later, let's just get this out the door. And then next thing you know it, you're like, oh, wait! What happened here? >> Phoummala, it reminds me of just a lot of things when you talk about when you rollout DevOps. I need to think about things like security, governance and compliances. Part of what I'm doing and if I'm going to be releasing code constantly, it's not something that I can go back to later, 'cause you're never going to catch up, you're always going to be, you know, N minus X behind what you're doing. So, organizationally, what do companies need to do to make sure that governance is taken care of just as part of the ongoing day-to-day activity and development? >> Well, building is checks and balances, right? So we put those guardrails in place. Let's start with infrastructure guardrails. Your ports, do those audits, just making sure that what you have on premises is the same in the cloud. Once you do that, that's like one checkbox you've done. And then there's the app development portion of it. That's where we're going to get developers thinking let's build security into our application. It's going to make life a lot easier, like you said, than going back and trying to build and trying to put, you now, new code in. And then when you're doing DevOps and that's just like a combination of everything, keeping governance in mind helps the flow of all those different transactions. Personally, I think DevOps is probably the hardest, in terms of just maintaining governance, because you do have different teams working together. You know, it's these different principles all coming together, but it comes down to doing things right. You know, doing what's right, ultimately, because at the end of the day if there's something that's missing and then next you know it you're on the front of the page. Nobody wants to be on the front page. And it's those little things. Like, checking permissions, just making sure that we have the right identity access management. And it's just throwing in some audit, just making sure our ports are closed, multifactor, you can audit and check you know, your root accounts, your administrative accounts. Little things like that just making sure that we have like the proper authentication, multifactor all that good stuff and then you just start building upon that once you have a little bit of governance in play. >> Well, Phoummala, I think, you know, identity management's one of the real strengths that Microsoft has, you know? So, maybe give us a little viewpoint as to how that's gone from, you know, identity just about Outlook or Office 365 to, you know, today's environment where, my users can be anywhere, my applications are everywhere and I still need to make sure that, you now, those corporate guidelines and identity go with me wherever I am and whatever I'm doing? >> So from an Azure standpoint identity management we have Azure AD, we've got all that component, but when you're coming into Azure, we like to emphasize using our back, role-based access control. Let's just make sure that the people that we're giving access to, have access to what they really need to. Building those roles out and people can have multiple roles. I mean, it's as simple as that, right? We started off just defining what's your job? Right, Stu, you've got a job, what are your roles? Let's just make sure we give you those roles and then we build upon that. If you need a little bit more, okay. And then you can give external users access, as well and you can give them roles, but just giving anybody full access to everything... Do you really need it? And it's the same thing with, you know Office and E-mail and SharePoint. So we're just taking those concepts from those applications and putting it into access into the Azure infrastructure. And then developers can actually build that into their applications, as well. >> One of the things that we keep talking a lot about, because Satya Nadella was talking a lot about it is trust and that is really the bedrock of good governance and making sure that people have confidence in your systems and that things are going to be done right, as you say. How much does that play into your work with customers and clients in terms of there's just an inherent trust right now that Microsoft is worthy of this and it is sort of the grown up in the room when it comes to big technology? >> Trust is huge. If you have trust in us as a customer that's, you know, that's amazing. We're going to give you the tools, we're going to give you the features, so that you and your customers have trust. You know, Azure policies. I mean that's just one component of governance and it's-- Policies isn't about completely control, but it's about auditing. Just checking, right? Checks and balances, 'cause that's really what governance is. Those checks and balances make sure that your operations is meeting your business needs. So if we can just do those little checks, simple trust like check marks, it goes a long way. And then, then we've got Azure blueprints which is our governance at scale. So we've taken everything that we've learned about governance in general, those different tools that we had and now you're just going to stamp it. Every time you build a new subscription you're just going to rollout governance and it's just-- I don't want to say as easy as a button, but it sort of is, right? You can do it through the portal. And everything that you've built as a team, those roles that you've created, the policies you've been submitted from your audit checks to controlling who creates what, where they can create that from, because, you know, GDPR that's huge. Because we can actually help you control where you resources are being deployed from. I mean that's going to be huge for most organizations right now. So, knowing that we have the right tools in place for you to run your business, that's trust. >> Phoummala, give us a little bit of a walk-around the show in your shoes. You're speaking at the show, you're hosting people on channel 9, you're behind the scenes helping a lot of people. Give us what you're most looking forward to, what you're most looking to share at the event this week. >> Most looking forward to just meeting all my friends that I've made throughout the years, but meeting new friends and, of course, there's puppies with therapy dogs, as well. Thursday I'm doing several channel 9 live interviews and I've got two sessions-- Well diversity sessions, which, typically, I do technical sessions, but diversity sessions I feel are very, very important. We talk about stuff nobody really wants to talk about all the time, right? We actually have a parenting and tech session tomorrow. How do we handle being a parent and working full time? And then I'm talking about the career journey and those two actually kind of go together, in some way, I mean, I'm-- And everyone's been asking me how I'm doing, my son just went off to bootcamp and so as a parent, I felt it was really important to be part of that session and talk about how, how do I handle it? Where I wasn't here yesterday, the first day, I was off sending my son, starting off his life, his new career and my career, you know, has gone on for several years, but it's a new change now for me and balancing that, that FOMO right? Fear of missing out, like everyone's at work and I have to be here with my son. There is an adjustment and a lot of parents have actually reached out to me and said how do you handle that? So there's several of us speaking tomorrow that, we're going to talk to the attendees and then here are some tips to how we do it. Especially with our traveling schedule. >> Well, I'm interested to hear, because we had another guest who was talking about stress, I mean, I think it was your best friend, Teresa Miller. >> Yes! >> Talking about stress as endemic to this high, stressed, fast-paced industry. Where, as you said, there's a lot of demands on your time, a lot of demands on your travel schedule and really a push for excellence add-all time. How is it to be a hard driving professional and also want to make time for your family, because your kids matter, of course? >> It is-- There's a balance. So the tech career includes that balance. We always want more in that career, right? We all do, but sometimes we have to step back. We've got to play the game a little bit, you know? You can't always have everything all at once and I've learned that. So tomorrow's session's about sharing what I've gone through, you know, as a parent, as a woman in tech. It's been a tough journey, but it's been fulfilling. So I work for Microsoft now and here's what I've done. I've made some bad mistakes, I've made some, you know, some good choices, but overall, there's been a balance. There's been a give-and-take I've had to do and I feel like the journey I've been through could be helpful for others. I've had a lot of people ask me, especially about career journeys now with the cloud, it's very, very scary. And a lot of people are worried, will I still have a job? My job transitions, what do I do? And I'm like, let's talk about this. I went through the same thing, I mean, exchange got us, exchange servers. Most people don't deploy exchange anymore. It's Office 365. So I went through that several years ago, that transition, where do I go next? 'Cause I know I really don't have that much of a life anymore. Like the AS/400 engineers, right? >> And diversity is another, of course, hot button issue in the technology industry. There is a dearth of women, there is dearth of underrepresented groups and LGBTQ. How are you as someone who is a woman of color navigating these thorny issues and helping the next generation come up and to create a different technology industry for the future? >> So it's tough. I navigate through with a lot of candles, a lot of wine. (the ladies laugh) With friends, I've got a great support system, but I strongly believe in paying it forward. There's a lot of stuff I do behind the scenes a lot of people do not know. A lot of forwarding of hey, this person is really good, you know, in this space, you might want to speak with them. I, Tech Field Day, I'm sure you all know the great people over there. I've forwarded a lot of names over there. I feel like I'm-- I've come up the ladder or the elevator, it's time to push that button, send it back down to help others and I've been doing it a lot more, I've always felt it, but now I feel I'm in a position that I can really help others and it just feels really good when someone I've helped Tweets about it. Obviously they're not going to mention my name, but when I see them being so happy, it just makes me feel really, really good, like, wow, you know, you just feel-- Like your heart just fills up like okay. This is good. >> Rebecca: Contributing to their success. >> Yeah and it becomes addictive almost. Like, how can I, you know-- If I see an opportunity to help somebody I will, I'll help 'em, anyway I can. >> So you are an avid blogger and you are considered one of the top 50 tech influencers and thought leaders you should follow. So congratulations on that. >> Phoummala: Thank you. >> I'm interested to hear, how do you keep up on the news and what do you read, who do you talk to, what do you pay attention to? And tell our viewers, too, because they want to know. >> Twitter is probably my source of everything now, 'cause it's quick, but pretty much just keeping up on the internet. Honestly, it's a lot, between my travel schedule, my family, it is almost impossible to stay up to date on everything. And I've learned that I can't. I just-- 'Cause I don't want to get burnout. I've been burnout several times and now I just, I take one day at a time. Oh, there was something that was announced, I didn't hear about it and someone said something I'm like oh, okay, oh that's cool. I'll read up on that later. But I don't feel like I need to know everything all at once. I think when you get to a certain place you're just comfortable knowing what you know and, you know, I'll read, I'll read the news when I get home. You know, something like that where you're-- You've got to be at that place where you're comfortable and not always feeling like I have to know everything, 'cause we're humans, we can't know everything all at once. >> And as we've talked about there has been, talking about not being able to keep up with everything, this conference, Microsoft Ignite. So many new product announcements, new buzzwords, new strategies that are all washing over us. What has been most interesting to you, most exciting? Who have you talked to? What sessions have you seen, that have sort of, sparked your interest the most? >> Azure Arc. Now I'm just reading into it, I haven't gotten real deep into it, but from what I know, from what I've seen, I like it. I like it a lot. It's, when we think about the cloud, it's multicloud, you know, it is right? It's every organization, they're dipping in their toes into just about everything and Azure Arc is giving that opportunity to our customers to be able to say, hey, we know you're in the cloud, in different clouds, here's a view into it. And, you know, you're able to manage these environments and see what's going on. Because that is the future and... Its a hybrid, multicloud. I think that's going to be my word, you know. Hybrid-multi, because we're in everything. I expect every organization to be in a little bit of everything, because it's... It's like, you know, your personal lives, right? You're in that little bit of everything. It makes it more dynamic and I just don't think one, one thing is going to be an organization's like, you know, that's all they're doing. I truly believe everyone's meant to dip their toes in a little bit of everything. They'll have one defined set of, here we're just going to use this one cloud, or this one's servers, but for the most part, they are going to dabble. And we're-- Azure Arc is giving customers the opportunity to manage those environments, where they've decided to dabble a little bit or because of business needs. They need to be in different environments. >> Exactly, renaissance organizations. >> Phoummala: Yeah. >> I love it. Phoummala, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. Always a pleasure having you. >> Thank you for having me. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite. (theCUBE theme song)
SUMMARY :
Brought to you by Cohesity. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Well, actually, we were what, How do you make sure that your governance And then next thing you know it, a lot of things when you talk about and then next you know it you're on And it's the same thing with, you know going to be done right, as you say. We're going to give you the tools, what you're most looking to share and then here are some tips to how we do it. I think it was your best friend, Teresa Miller. How is it to be a hard driving professional We've got to play the game a little bit, you know? and to create a different technology industry hey, this person is really good, you know, Like, how can I, you know-- and you are considered one of the top 50 I'm interested to hear, how do you keep up I think when you get to a certain place Who have you talked to? I think that's going to be my word, you know. Phoummala, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. of Microsoft Ignite.
SENTIMENT ANALYSIS :
ENTITIES
Entity | Category | Confidence |
---|---|---|
Microsoft | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Rebecca | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Teresa Miller | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Phoummala Schmitt | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Rebecca Knight | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Satya Nadella | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Orlando | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
Phoummala | PERSON | 0.99+ |
tomorrow | DATE | 0.99+ |
Thursday | DATE | 0.99+ |
last year | DATE | 0.99+ |
two | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
yesterday | DATE | 0.99+ |
November | DATE | 0.99+ |
Orlando, Florida | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
Outlook | TITLE | 0.99+ |
channel 9 | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
26,000 people | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Stu Miniman | PERSON | 0.99+ |
GDPR | TITLE | 0.98+ |
one day | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
Office 365 | TITLE | 0.98+ |
Office | TITLE | 0.98+ |
this week | DATE | 0.98+ |
two sessions | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
today | DATE | 0.98+ |
One | QUANTITY | 0.97+ |
DevOps | TITLE | 0.97+ |
ORGANIZATION | 0.96+ | |
Stu | PERSON | 0.96+ |
SharePoint | TITLE | 0.96+ |
one | QUANTITY | 0.95+ |
Azure AD | TITLE | 0.93+ |
first day | QUANTITY | 0.93+ |
Azure Arc | TITLE | 0.92+ |
Azure | TITLE | 0.91+ |
several years ago | DATE | 0.9+ |
theCUBE | ORGANIZATION | 0.89+ |
one checkbox | QUANTITY | 0.89+ |
a month earlier last year | DATE | 0.88+ |
LGBTQ | ORGANIZATION | 0.87+ |
one component | QUANTITY | 0.81+ |
Microsoft Azure | ORGANIZATION | 0.73+ |
top | QUANTITY | 0.72+ |
Microsoft Ignite | ORGANIZATION | 0.69+ |
Tech Field Day | EVENT | 0.69+ |
50 tech influencers | QUANTITY | 0.69+ |
Azure | ORGANIZATION | 0.62+ |
Cohesity | ORGANIZATION | 0.52+ |
AS/400 | COMMERCIAL_ITEM | 0.51+ |
Ignite | EVENT | 0.48+ |
365 | TITLE | 0.44+ |
Ignite | TITLE | 0.41+ |
2019 | DATE | 0.41+ |
David Totten, Microsoft | Microsoft Ignite 2019
>>Live from Orlando, Florida. It's the cube covering Microsoft ignite brought to you by Cohesity. Hello everyone and welcome back to the cubes live coverage of Microsoft ignite. I am your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co host Stu Miniman. >>We are joined by Dave Totton. He is the CTO U S partner ecosystem at Microsoft. Thank you so much for coming on the course. Absolutely. Thank you for having me. So this is an incredible show. 26,000 people. We are here at the cube in the middle of the show floor. Yeah, high energy. Yeah. We're going to talk about what you do at Microsoft, but first I just want your impressions of this show in particular is incredible. I was saying as I, as I just walked in at first off 26,000 people, I think I shook 10,000 hands already. It's pretty amazing. I'll say two things. One, the partnerships and the and the groups and the companies that are building on Microsoft technology. If you just look around this room, it increasingly gets bigger. They had to take over to new halls this year. It's incredible. And the customers that we're getting at this event are extraordinary now. >>Everything from SMB small business accounts to every single enterprise company that I can think of in the strategic a thousand here in the U S they are here right now and it being a worldwide event. I hear languages, I hear people introducing each other to EDS. The energy in this room is just absolutely incredible. United nations of my, they really is. It really is. And it feels that way when you walk around the room for sure. Yeah. So you are the chief technology officer of us partner ecosystems. Talk a little bit about what you do at the company. Yeah. Yes. So what we're trying to do, obviously Microsoft being a channel company, right? We've built services and solutions through the channel, sold them through the channels since we started inception 45 years ago. So my team helps build that technology practice and those solutions with our partners. If you think about how you get access to the best and brightest engineers at the company, I'm pleased to say I actually have a bunch of those that get to work for me. >>And so every day we sit down with partners, we help them think about what technology solutions they want to create, where we see gaps in the marketplace, how do you make the biggest and best applications possible on the Microsoft stack? And then we help take those to market with our partners. So it's a, it's a wonderful experience of working with partners, both mature and sometimes immature startups. Brand new. Well, well, well Dave, one of the challenges, the surface area that Microsoft covers is so much bigger than before. You know, this is not the company that I use to get, you know, a disc, a, you know, in the mail to get to get started. You're now, you know, in the data center, of course, a strong player in SAS, in public cloud, at the edge in devices. You know, how do you manage all of those pieces and you know, give us a little snapshot. >>We feel like we're getting today at the announcement this week. Uh, really a, a rethinking of how hybrid should be thought of today and in the future. >> Yeah, I'm glad you said that. It's a really important differentiation there because if you think about our stack, we're a windows company, I've heard that before. Then we became an office company, right where the company does office and X-Box. Now we're really a services company. That's how we want to make sure that we talk to people about what we do everyday as we build services, applications and the layers that connect people to their productivity. Right? And so there were a lot of announcements this morning about Azure, which I think is phenomenal. Azure touches everything that we do, identity security monitoring, it touches everything that we absolutely do, but we bring that to life with applications like Microsoft three 65 and our productivity tools. >>There was a great demo this morning on power apps, RF, something. I'm really, really partial to having grown up a developer and then lost a lot of my technical skills, right? Like I don't get to code anymore. Something like power platform and leveraging all of the bots that we now have to democratize development work and make sure that the citizen developer can build really cool applications on our technology stack. As part of that, I will say everything for a while there moved the pendulum to Azure because it was this huge market opportunity in, there's lots of services out there and being that we're a really secure, trusted enterprise relationship, cuss a partner, a lot of people wanting to build applications and services on Azure. There's still a gigantic market opportunity within Microsoft three 65 productivity. What we're doing with exchange migrations is still a huge part of our business and then power apps and dynamics three 65 the ease of implementation and integration across all your applications, leveraging dynamics three 65 on equal opportunity. >>So, so David, you actually, I want to tease apart, you said a word services because Microsoft is still, it's a software company but it's more about the platforms that Microsoft delivers because one of the big challenges for users out there is there's just too many choices way too. There's no way anybody can listen through, you know all of the announcements this week and say, Oh okay, I'm up to speed on everything and I know what's going to work for my company. It's in many ways. It is the integration partners, the SIS, the MSPs, the channel partners, they're going to help pull those together. So, right. How do you make sure that you have, you know, comprehensive offerings that people can consume easier rather because we think that that's one of the challenges where at a certain inflection point with cloud is, remember cloud was supposed to be cheap and easy and it's neither of those shares, so how do we make sure that in today's day and age, you know, where do they turn to to be able to move their business forward, not spend hours and hours and months and years trying to figure out what the latest thing is when by the time I start doing it, the next thing's out. >>Yeah. Well, if you read a lot of the publications, it's like cloud is everywhere. The cloud adoption rate is actually fairly low across us and international business rates and there's several reasons for that, right? There's some, some trust issues there. There, there's some, I've got some on premise applications that I need to make sure that I migrate over. We launched today arc, right? Which is about really connecting all sorts of data services a, wherever your data center is, we'll come meet you. And I think that's a really nice platform story for Microsoft to tell. We've always been a customer and partner for six experience, so now we're gonna meet you where you are, where ever you are. You have the ability to manage, control, secure your it environments if you're on premise, if you're with another cloud provider, if you're in a co-location data center. >>And I think that ability to show along the the journey to the cloud and along the journey of the digital transformation where you're at, how are we going to help enable you, how are we going to make sure that we protect those end points and give you a consolidated, efficient UI to view through, right? Yeah. Actually. So there's Coobernetti's inside that arc. From my understanding what, what we've, we've been watching this trend for the last four plus years and one of the concerns is this is the Microsoft way to do things. Google has the way to do things. Every, there are lots of Kubernetes options out there and it's not a magic layer so there's still work. How does this become, you know, a driver for the ecosystem to participate and we don't end up with you all. I've got my Microsoft silo, my Amazon silo and Google silo. >>Something like arc is a great example of that though. We want to meet the customers where they are and we believe our technology stack in the long run, the different plugins to applications ISV, different services partners, the way customers want to see their data, we believe it will win out in the long run. So we're okay integrating our back end with SAP on Azure for example, row K with this data exchange with Oracle that we just announced a few months ago last year at this very event we were talking about before the SAP, Adobe, Microsoft data exchange program, right? We are officially an open services company that we believe you should have management control and identity right across all of your services, all of your data, and eventually you'll see, well Microsoft parties and our services and the ISV that are built on our services will win out in the long run. >>We really believe that. I think there's another thing about the Microsoft way. It's much different now, right? I mean I can remember still six, seven years ago where certain companies, whether it's IBM or Oracle or even red hat, we're randomize to us right now. We embrace those relationships and we embrace that data exchange because we're all trying to make sure that we optimize the experience for the customer and we think you can do it best through our our shared services environment. And the final thing I'll say is my, one of my favorite examples is our, our number one co-sale scenario out there with our ISV S is red hat. Now, if we said that when mr bomber was here or even on that five years ago, it was a much different experience there about red hat and how we embrace open source technologies, red hat, even something like OpenShift, which is their container services. >>We now enable as a first party through Azure. So it's okay, you don't have to use our Kubernetes brand. You can use third party services, put that on Azure for the most secure integrated experience possible. We absorb and we love, we embrace those relationships, right? Because we think once you get in there and you start leveraging the monitoring, security, identity provisioning, you know services are within our stack, we think you'll start adopting more and more services from Microsoft. >> So what's leading this trend? Because I mean it's so interesting that we're talking about this kind of open source approach to everything and this open brand in terms of using a little bit of Microsoft here, a little bit of AWS here. Yeah. How are is it that we're using so many though? Is that the, we're so willing to go for different companies in our lives as customers. >>If that or is it the technology industry that is pushing us? Yeah, I actually think it's the, it's the former. I think that the technology industry would love to say you're an Amazon person. You're a Microsoft shop, right? You're an open source shop. Right? And Microsoft used to be that way. Like in fact, you'll still hear some people talk about, Oh, I'm a Microsoft shop because I have windows server on premise. Now customers are looking for best in breed services, best in breed point solutions. When I started at Microsoft 15 years ago, you were a Microsoft customer and that meant you, you bought windows, you bought office, you bought window server, and then when we started launching SQL server, okay, you went to SQL server. Now it's a little bit different. You might use a security ISV solution here. You might use a data transfer or an identity management solution here. >>Microsoft has embraced that, that proliferation of purchasing based on point in time solutions. Right? Before the integration was very tricky, right? Between these applications or these different service layers. Now with something like Azure that integrates across all of these platforms, we're winning. We're winning that share because we listen. If you have an AWS data Lake out there, we're okay with that. You can secure it, you can monitor it, you can do analytics on it using Microsoft services, right? And eventually you'll see there's probably some cost benefit. There's probably some integration and some usability scenarios out there on why you'd want to migrate that to Azure. But while you get there, while you're on that journey, we're going to enable the connected infrastructure across that because customers want to buy best-in-breed, they want to buy what's available, what's easy to consume, what keeps their data secure. >>And so we're going to envelop, we're going to surround all those technologies with our service layer and one by one, right? Show the integration on that true best-in-breed connected experience that we think Microsoft can provide. So Dave, I love that message and I think it speaks to one of the reasons you said why the ecosystem is growing a, for those people that can't go through, come to the show, give us a little bit of a viewpoint. I mean, you know, we don't have an hour to go through all the options and I'm sure every partner is your favorite be the biggest or the smallest button. Give us a round it as is. So some of the areas that maybe, you know, you're hearing the most from customers that their most districts today, um, and some of the new areas that maybe might not have been here in previous years. >>Absolutely. I mean we're, we see success in the channel and frankly in the market places, you know, when we get out of talking about Azure or office three 65 or windows and we talk about what's the business outcome we're trying to drive, right? So like contract management is a, is a scenario that every customer needs, right? So something like I Certis which is a really strong contract management ISV solution that is embedded and built on dynamics three 65 is a great example of that, right? Do you want your contracts to touch your customer relationship database to get extended through outlook and exchange and then to be able to Mark up contracts with with our productivity tools, whether that's word, PowerPoint, et cetera. Contract management is an outcome that all customers need. We don't have to talk about Azure or dynamics three 65 we're talking about contract management. >>So I think is a really good example of somebody who's defined a market leading position for an actual workload, a business outcome that all customers need to drive and it just happens to be pulling through our technology. Another company, Nintex new Texas, right around the corner here, Nintex does an exceptional job of managing workflow. Any sort of scenario you need. Are you trying to hire a candidate? Are you trying to process paperwork? Are you trying to run your supply chain or inventory management? I could say go out and deploy SharePoint office three 65 go out and build an Azure database to go manage a virtual machine to spin up instances. Instead, I can say, do you have workflow that needs to be managed and connects to your database? Yes. Okay. Then go select Nintex, go see what they have to offer. They've got 30 plus offerings that you can take to catalog and customers want those outcomes. >>Customers at this day and age are getting less and less, I guess picky, I would say about the baseline infrastructure that runs all the services that they need. They're really about what's the application or the experience that integrates that secure that is easy to implement and that does a specific job to make me more efficient. Right? You spend more time with customers. I can drive more value. The fact that the 90% of those applications are powered on Azure is an okay secret, Hey, like that's okay for the channel do exist with all of these applications and services are built on Azure, built on dynamics three 65 that just happened to pull through business outcomes and if you're recommending them the Microsoft is this trusted brand and so there, that's the other part of that too. Yeah, I think so too. And I think there's a groups like Cohesity, another great organization out there that obviously we spend a lot of time and infrastructure with, right? >>Very driven to business and we're customers doing, if you think about the innovation curve that Cohesity has with their products in the marketplace, it's another great example of solve a business problem. You know, find a business problem worth, worth solving. Go out and invest in the it and infrastructure to go out and build it. Build a marketing and customer success plan around that and the fact that they can develop and take new solutions to marketplace in Azure quicker, more efficiently with more customer outcomes. Focus in that solution stack. They're using our shared services to build and have a faster time to market. Right? So it's not even just about the services that are built on Azure. It's how Azure and dynamics three 65 in modern workplace to be 65 Microsoft three 65 how we can enable partners to build solutions that solve customer's problems faster, right? And more efficient than we ever have in the past. Great. Well, Dave Totten, thank you so much for coming on the QBO is a really interesting conversation. Absolutely. Pleasure. Thank you for being here. Thank you to all of the sponsors that are out here, all the partners that are here to invest in this event. We appreciate your energy and support. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. Stay tuned for more of the cubes live coverage of Microsoft ignite.
SUMMARY :
Microsoft ignite brought to you by Cohesity. We're going to talk about what you do at Microsoft, but first I just want your impressions of this show And it feels that way when you walk around the room for sure. You know, this is not the company that I use to get, you know, We feel like we're getting today at the announcement this week. build services, applications and the layers that connect people to their productivity. Something like power platform and leveraging all of the bots that we now have to democratize so how do we make sure that in today's day and age, you know, where do they turn to to be able so now we're gonna meet you where you are, where ever you are. a driver for the ecosystem to participate and we don't end up with in the long run, the different plugins to applications ISV, different services partners, the experience for the customer and we think you can do it best through our our shared services environment. So it's okay, you don't have to use our Kubernetes Because I mean it's so interesting that we're talking about this kind of open source approach to everything and If that or is it the technology industry that is pushing us? You can secure it, you can monitor it, you can do analytics on it using Microsoft services, So some of the areas that maybe, you know, you're hearing the most from customers Do you want your contracts to touch your customer relationship database They've got 30 plus offerings that you can take to catalog and customers want The fact that the 90% of those applications are powered on Azure is Very driven to business and we're customers doing, if you think about the innovation curve that Cohesity has with
SENTIMENT ANALYSIS :
ENTITIES
Entity | Category | Confidence |
---|---|---|
Rebecca Knight | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Dave Totten | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Dave Totton | PERSON | 0.99+ |
David | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Nintex | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
IBM | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Microsoft | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Oracle | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
David Totten | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Stu Miniman | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Amazon | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
90% | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Adobe | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
AWS | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Orlando, Florida | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
Cohesity | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
PowerPoint | TITLE | 0.99+ |
Dave | PERSON | 0.99+ |
26,000 people | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ | |
windows | TITLE | 0.99+ |
10,000 hands | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
this week | DATE | 0.99+ |
SQL | TITLE | 0.99+ |
one | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
U S | LOCATION | 0.98+ |
today | DATE | 0.98+ |
five years ago | DATE | 0.98+ |
OpenShift | TITLE | 0.97+ |
two things | QUANTITY | 0.97+ |
both | QUANTITY | 0.96+ |
six experience | QUANTITY | 0.96+ |
SharePoint | TITLE | 0.96+ |
45 years ago | DATE | 0.96+ |
Azure | TITLE | 0.96+ |
Texas | LOCATION | 0.96+ |
15 years ago | DATE | 0.96+ |
this year | DATE | 0.95+ |
One | QUANTITY | 0.95+ |
bomber | PERSON | 0.94+ |
30 plus offerings | QUANTITY | 0.94+ |
first | QUANTITY | 0.94+ |
EDS | EVENT | 0.93+ |
six, | DATE | 0.93+ |
few months ago | DATE | 0.92+ |
SAS | ORGANIZATION | 0.91+ |
Erik Klein, FrieslandCampina | CUBEConversation, July 2019
(funky music) >> From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California. This is a CUBE conversation. >> Welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with the CUBE. We're in our Palo Alto studios havin' a CUBE conversation, but for a little bit of something different. Instead of having our guest here locally in Palo Alto we've got him all the way across the country, across the pond, all the way over to Holland, and he's in Utrecht, and we're happy to welcome Erik Klein. He is the infrastructure architect for FrieslandCampina. Erik thanks for joining us today. >> Thank you for having me. >> Absolutely, so before we get started, a little background on FrieslandCampina for people that aren't familiar with the company. >> FrieslandCampina is a co-operative company owned by farmers, predominantly in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany. It's a international company. We have about 34 countries with, we have, at our sales offices, our plans in there, we are one of the biggest dairy companies in the world, and love to be there. It's a very good company to work for. >> It's amazing, I was doing a little research, I mean the scale is amazing. You guys, you operate in 100 countries, exporting. You've got offices in 34 countries. I think it said of 23,000 plus employees. It's quite a big operation. >> Yup. >> So, >> A big operation doing about 10 billion liters, or kilograms, of milk a year. >> Great, so, it's a dairy, we're here talking about digital transformation; it's always fascinating to me, kind of, the reach of digital transformation in everybody's company. Everyone says everyone's really a software company, you know, kind of built around a different product or service. So what were some of the challenges that you were looking towards in 2018-2019 in terms of digital transformation in this mature industry of dairy? >> The challenges that we're having is that you have to make sure that everything is safe. The products are safe, but also the data is safe. But also that we have a lot of things move through the Cloud, and also that the performance of those applications moves through the Cloud, is to the end user's satisfaction as well. So you're not looking only at transferring data safely from the Cloud into our offices, into our production environment, also protecting our production environments from everything that's going bad on the Internet, but also having to make sure that the applications are performing to the liking of the end user, so to speak, to our customer and our consumers. >> And was the objective to build new applications in the Cloud, or was it more kind of lift-and-shift some of your older applications in the Cloud? Because those are two very different challenges. >> Yeah, it's a lift-and-shift of our older applications. For example we're now in the middle of moving our SAP environment to the Cloud, at least the development test and user environments are moved to the Cloud. The other ones remain still within a traditional data center environment, and we have moved all of our Office 365, so that's Skype for Business, SharePoint, but all the other applications to the Cloud as well. >> Ha ha. >> And there we have all this additional transformation, the challenges that really comes back to the end user. >> Those are huge applications; SAP and Office 365. Those are not insignificant >> Yup. >> applications at all. So what were some of the challenges, I'm sure we have a lot of your peers watching this. What is some of the tips and tricks that you can share with them? Big challenges that you had to overcome? Things you thought about, maybe some things that you didn't think about in that transformation? >> If you look at the SAP landscape, it's the sheer amount of interfaces between the different components of SAP. That's was something that made us decide not to move SAP to the Cloud, not the production environment and the systems Environment. That was too big of an impact. That would take too long to do and we don't have that time. If you look at Office 365, the fact that Microsoft is very averse in having anything in the middle, that brought us some real challenges. And and we did that already in 2014-2015 and we had our fair share of all fun and games. >> Ha ha ha, so what was different about it then than today? I mean obviously the Cloud has moved quite a bit. I don't know if you can mention which Cloud you put it in? >>Yeah correct, the fact that Zscaler now, does the updating, and all the changes within the Microsoft environment. So you don't have to do it yourself. You don't have to constantly monitor the ARS feeds from Microsoft, do all the changes yourself. Now it's all done by Zscaler, all the SSL bypass, the authentication bypass has been set correctly. So when that came on board that made our life a lot easier. >> Wow. >> The first part of the migration that we did in in Europe, especially in the bigger locations like Amersfoort, which has our headquarters, we really had our challenges to keep the end user satisfied. >> So just, again, kind of the scale of the end users. You mentioned that a couple of times. Is this in support of all the 23,000 people that are employed at FrieslandCampina? Is it a subset, or is it remote workers? How are you, kind of, allocating this effort? >> It is indeed all users, except for the factory workers. We don't allow people that work in production direct access to the internet. So those people are not as much excluded, but they have special PCs where they work on. So you're looking currently at about 15,000 people that are working with Office 365 directly on a day-to-day basis within FrieslandCampina. >> Wow, so the other thing you've talked about repeatedly is not only satisfaction with the users who are interfacing with the systems, but security. So what were some of the >> Yup. >> security considerations that you considered? How did you, kind of, bake security into your process? And, as we hear all the time as we go to different shows, including security shows, you know, it's not a bolt-on anymore; you have to be thinking security throughout the whole pipeline of the process. So how did you think about it? How did you attack it? How did you solve some of those problems? >> We started thinking about it already in 2012. We had, at that time within FrieslandCampina, a program specifically driven out of the LT environment, so the operational technology, so the production IT, so to speak, and they come up with an architecture based on the ISO 9599 norm, and we took that on board as IT and continued to work on that. So from 2014 we already had in our plans, the architecture to separate the various layers of the ISO 9599 framework into security zones, and we're constantly building on that one. We're refining it, we're improving it. >> Another question on security, really, and kind of the network architecture. Did you have to re-do anything within your network architecture to make this move to the Cloud possible? How did you address the network? >> It was a completely redesigned. It was a complete redesign. In the, previous to that, we just had IT, and we had one or two firewalls on-site that connects to a certain part of OT, and that was it. And now we have an architecture where we can integrate all different flavors of OT. There's no need for OT to have their own internet connections for maintenance, for support, et cetera. It's all integrated and secure. We made, and the reason for that is that you can't, in this day and age, have an island structure. Everything needs to be integrated. Everything needs to talk to each other, et cetera. >> So Erik, this interview is sponsored by Zscaler. You're a customer of theirs. I'm just curious if you can talk a little bit about how, you know, their offering enabled you to do stuff that maybe you couldn't do before. How did you get involved with them? How are they working with them throughout this project? And how has that really been an enabler for your, you know, your move to the Cloud? >> In 2013-2014 there was a request from the business, a very strong drive from the business, that looked into breakouts, specifically to get localized contact, driven out of the, how do say that, marketing department. And then we looked at, okay, how can we enable that without creating firewalls on every location we're having, making it very expensive, etcetera. And at that time our provider, Verizon, came up, let's do a Cloud security with Verizon, with Zscaler, and do a proof of concept, and build on that one. So that worked. That gave us more regularity, if the people in the countries that needed localized content got the localized content, speeding up the application for the specific countries, so no happening from Tokyo, Japan, back to Singapore, back to websites in Japan. So that helps a lot, but like I said it was early days so we had our challenges in getting that working, getting it secure, getting the traffic to the correct Zscaler node, and so on. So we did make, from the initial set-up of this network, a number of iterations to come to where we are today. >> Great. >> So it's not one decision and then it works. No, it's a decision, see what has worked, which challenge you're getting, and then take it to the next level. >> Right. >> If we do the same thing with Zscaler as they're offering today it will be a lot quicker. We will have a number of those challenges that we had at that time, we will not have today. >> So as you look forward, what's kind of next. As you mentioned this isn't a one-stop shop. This is an ongoing process. What are, kind of, your next priorities, you know, over the next six months or so as you guys continue on this journey? >> To another data center, so not to the Cloud but to a different data center, so that's a big, really a big program. The other thing we're looking at is how can we improve remote access, provide extra benefits as part. We also look at the ZPA product of Zscaler. We're doing a proof of concept, probably in the second half of this year. So, but on the other side, this year, 2019, FrieslandCampina is a, how do you say that in proper English, stop and look back and see what's really important, what we need to go forward. So it's not going crazy on all different kind of projects. It is, okay, what will actually contribute to the profitability of FrieslandCampina going forward. >> I think that's a really great close. I know it's late in Utrecht. I appreciate you taking some time out of your evening, and I was going to ask you the last question, you know, what advice would you have for your peers, for other practitioners that are looking at this, and, you know, either in the process or planning out their journey, but I think you hit on a big one right there which is really focus on the things that matter, focus on the things that really make a difference, and just don't start doing science experiments all over the place because you can, or it's fun, or it's interesting. >> Well, what my worries are for the future, and what, not keeps me awake at night, but that that's too much, is the bad that's going around in this world is getting stronger. They have more resources than we, as a company, has to defend for us against, and the acute challenge would be, is identifying what is your traffic that is good flowing in your network. Because if you're knowing what is good everything that's not defined as being good can be immediately defined as being bad. In that case you'll have a better position in preventing yourself against everything that's going wrong, like WannaCry. If you know that WannaCry is using a well known port used all over the place in FrieslandCampina. But if you then see that same port being used to communicate between servers that never communicated before, or to workstations to servers that never communicated before, then you say, okay, stop that one immediately, because that's not good. >> Right. >> And at that moment our biggest challenge is identifying what is the traffic that's good within our network. >> Well that's a great tip, you know, that's great. You know what the positives are, and if it doesn't make the the green list then shut 'er down and (chuckling) find out what's going on. >> Correct. >> All right. >> Correct. And the reason why we identified WannaCry is that somebody, for some reason, identified Hey this server never talked with that device: Why? >> Yeah, we're hearing that, >> And because, all. >> because with IOT you have to do that, right? >> You have to do that. >> 'Cause everything's IP connected, right? Whether it's the shades and the HVAC system all the way down to all your manufacturing processes, distribution processes, >> Correct. >> IT systems. >> Correct, correct. Our big advantage was that the call back to the command and control servers was already blocked by Zscaler so it didn't hurt us that much. >> Yeah, well good, we got to keep the cows safe, keep the milk safe, and the, >> Yeah, absolutely. >> what did you say, the 10 billion gallons of milk that you guys kick out a year, or something like that? >> Yep. >> It's amazing, ha ha. >> It's amazing. >> All right Erik, well thanks for sharing your story. Good luck on your future transformations, and good luck next week; thanks for stopping by. >> Thank you very much. >> All right. >> All right. >> All right, he's Erik, I'm Jeff, you're watching the CUBE. We're in our Palo Alto studios and Utrecht, Holland. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (funky music)
SUMMARY :
in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California. He is the infrastructure architect for FrieslandCampina. for people that aren't familiar with the company. and love to be there. I mean the scale is amazing. doing about 10 billion liters, or kilograms, of milk a year. So what were some of the challenges that you were that you have to make sure that everything is safe. in the Cloud, or was it more kind of lift-and-shift but all the other applications to the Cloud as well. the challenges that really comes back to the end user. Those are not insignificant Big challenges that you had to overcome? and the systems Environment. I mean obviously the Cloud has moved quite a bit. So you don't have to do it yourself. of the migration that we did in in Europe, So just, again, kind of the scale of the end users. direct access to the internet. Wow, so the other thing you've talked about repeatedly security considerations that you considered? the architecture to separate the various layers and kind of the network architecture. that connects to a certain part of OT, and that was it. that maybe you couldn't do before. in the countries that needed localized content and then take it to the next level. that we had at that time, we will not have today. So as you look forward, what's kind of next. So, but on the other side, this year, 2019, all over the place because you can, or it's fun, and the acute challenge would be, And at that moment and if it doesn't make the the green list then shut 'er down And the reason why we identified WannaCry Our big advantage was that the call back to the and good luck next week; thanks for stopping by. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time.
SENTIMENT ANALYSIS :
ENTITIES
Entity | Category | Confidence |
---|---|---|
Erik Klein | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Europe | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
Jeff Frick | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Erik | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Verizon | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
2012 | DATE | 0.99+ |
Japan | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
Utrecht | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
Jeff | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Germany | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
Belgium | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
Netherlands | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
Palo Alto | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
one | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Microsoft | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Silicon Valley | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
Holland | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
2014 | DATE | 0.99+ |
Singapore | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
July 2019 | DATE | 0.99+ |
Tokyo | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
2013-2014 | DATE | 0.99+ |
Office 365 | TITLE | 0.99+ |
2014-2015 | DATE | 0.99+ |
FrieslandCampina | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
today | DATE | 0.99+ |
23,000 people | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
next week | DATE | 0.99+ |
ISO 9599 | TITLE | 0.99+ |
two | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
100 countries | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Zscaler | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
2018-2019 | DATE | 0.99+ |
CUBE | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
about 10 billion liters | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
34 countries | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
first part | QUANTITY | 0.97+ |
this year | DATE | 0.97+ |
about 15,000 people | QUANTITY | 0.96+ |
23,000 plus employees | QUANTITY | 0.96+ |
SharePoint | TITLE | 0.95+ |
Cloud | TITLE | 0.94+ |
two very different challenges | QUANTITY | 0.93+ |
Amersfoort | LOCATION | 0.93+ |
a year | QUANTITY | 0.93+ |
2019 | DATE | 0.92+ |
Skype | ORGANIZATION | 0.92+ |
English | OTHER | 0.91+ |
Utrecht, Holland | LOCATION | 0.91+ |
CUBEConversation | EVENT | 0.9+ |
FrieslandCampina | LOCATION | 0.9+ |
one decision | QUANTITY | 0.89+ |
Zscaler | TITLE | 0.85+ |
Palo Alto, California | LOCATION | 0.84+ |
one-stop | QUANTITY | 0.83+ |
second half of this year | DATE | 0.82+ |
WannaCry | TITLE | 0.81+ |
10 billion gallons of milk | QUANTITY | 0.79+ |
ZPA | ORGANIZATION | 0.78+ |
about 34 | QUANTITY | 0.77+ |
next six months | DATE | 0.75+ |
SAP | TITLE | 0.67+ |
Erik Klein, FrieslandCampina | CUBEConversation, May 2019
(funky music) >> From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California. This is a CUBE conversation. >> Welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with the CUBE. We're in our Palo Alto studios havin' a CUBE conversation, but for a little bit of something different. Instead of having our guest here locally in Palo Alto we've got him all the way across the country, across the pond, all the way over to Holland, and he's in Utrecht, and we're happy to welcome Erik Klein. He is the infrastructure architect for FrieslandCampina. Eric thanks for joining us today. >> Thank you for having me. >> Absolutely, so before we get started, a little background on FrieslandCampina for people that aren't familiar with the company. >> FrieslandCampina is a co-operative company owned by farmers, predominantly in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany. It's a international company. We have about 34 countries with, we have, at our sales offices, our plans in there, we are one of the biggest dairy companies in the world, and love to be there. It's a very good company to work for. >> It's amazing, I was doing a little research, I mean the scale is amazing. You guys, you operate in 100 countries, exporting. You've got offices in 34 countries. I think it said of 23,000 plus employees. It's quite a big operation. >> Yup. >> So, >> A big operation doing about 10 billion liters, or kilograms, of milk a year. >> Great, so, it's a dairy, we're here talking about digital transformation; it's always fascinating to me, kind of, the reach of digital transformation in everybody's company. Everyone says everyone's really a software company, you know, kind of built around a different product or service. So what were some of the challenges that you were looking towards in 2018-2019 in terms of digital transformation in this mature industry of dairy? >> The challenges that we're having is that you have to make sure that everything is safe. The products are safe, but also the data is safe. But also that we have a lot of things move through the Cloud, and also that the performance of those applications moves through the Cloud, is to the end user's satisfaction as well. So you're not looking only at transferring data safely from the Cloud into our offices, into our production environment, also protecting our production environments from everything that's going bad on the Internet, but also having to make sure that the applications are performing to the liking of the end user, so to speak, to our customer and our consumers. >> And was the objective to build new applications in the Cloud, or was it more kind of lift-and-shift some of your older applications in the Cloud? Because those are two very different challenges. >> Yeah, it's a lift-and-shift of our older applications. For example we're now in the middle of moving our SAP environment to the Cloud, at least the development test and user environments are moved to the Cloud. The other ones remain still within a traditional data center environment, and we have moved all of our Office 365, so that's Skype for Business, SharePoint, but all the other applications to the Cloud as well. >> Ha ha. >> And there we have all this additional transformation, the challenges that really comes back to the end user. >> Those are huge applications; SAP and Office 365. Those are not insignificant >> Yup. >> applications at all. So what were some of the challenges, I'm sure we have a lot of your peers watching this. What is some of the tips and tricks that you can share with them? Big challenges that you had to overcome? Things you thought about, maybe some things that you didn't think about in that transformation? >> If you look at the SAP landscape, it's the sheer amount of interfaces between the different components of SAP. That's was something that made us decide not to move SAP to the Cloud, not the production environment and the systems Environment. That was too big of an impact. That would take too long to do and we don't have that time. If you look at Office 365, the fact that Microsoft is very adverse in having anything in the middle, that brought us some real challenges. And and we did that already in 2014-2015 and we had our fair share of all fun and games. >> Ha ha ha, so what was different about it then than today? I mean obviously the Cloud has moved quite a bit. I don't know if you can mention which Cloud you put it in? >> Yeah correct, the fact that Zscaling now, does the updating, and all the changes within the Microsoft environment. So you don't have to do it yourself. You don't have to constantly monitor the ARS feeds from Microsoft, do all the changes yourself. Now it's all done by Zscaler, all the SSL bypass, the authentication bypass has been set correctly. So when that came on board that made our life a lot easier. >> Wow. >> The first part of the migration that we did in in Europe, especially in the bigger locations like Amersfoort, which has our headquarters, we really had our challenges to keep the end user satisfied. >> So just, again, kind of the scale of the end users. You mentioned that a couple of times. Is this in support of all the 23,000 people that are employed at FrieslandCampina? Is it a subset, or is it remote workers? How are you, kind of, allocating this effort? >> It is indeed all users, except for the factory workers. We don't allow people that work in production direct access to the internet. So those people are not as much excluded, but they have special PCs where they work on. So you're looking currently at about 15,000 people that are working with Office 365 directly on a day-to-day basis within FrieslandCampina. >> Wow, so the other thing you've talked about repeatedly is not only satisfaction with the users who are interfacing with the systems, but security. So what were some of the >> Yup. >> security considerations that you considered? How did you, kind of, bake security into your process? And, as we hear all the time as we go to different shows, including security shows, you know, it's not a bolt-on anymore; you have to be thinking security throughout the whole pipeline of the process. So how did you think about it? How did you attack it? How did you solve some of those problems? >> We started thinking about it already in 2012. We had, at that time within FrieslandCampina, a program specifically driven out of the LT environment, so the operational technology, so the production IT, so to speak, and they come up with an architecture based on the ISO 9599 norm, and we took that on board as IT and continued to work on that. So from 2014 we already had in our plans, the architecture to separate the various layers of the ISO 9599 framework into security zones, and we're constantly building on that one. We're refining it, we're improving it. >> Another question on security, really, and kind of the network architecture. Did you have to re-do anything within your network architecture to make this move to the Cloud possible? How did you address the network? >> It was a completely redesigned. It was a complete redesign. In the, previous to that, we just had IT, and we had one or two firewalls on-site that connects to a certain part of OT, and that was it. And now we have an architecture where we can integrate all different flavors of OT. There's no need for OT to have their own internet connections for maintenance, for support, et cetera. It's all integrated and secure. We made, and the reason for that is that you can't, in this day and age, have an island structure. Everything needs to be integrated. Everything needs to talk to each other, et cetera. >> So Erik, this interview is sponsored Zscaler. You're a customer of theirs. I'm just curious if you can talk a little bit about how, you know, their offering enabled you to do stuff that maybe you couldn't do before. How did you get involved with them? How are they working with them throughout this project? And how has that really been an enabler for your, you know, your move to the Cloud? >> In 2013-2014 there was a request from the business, a very strong drive from the business, that looked into breakouts, specifically to get localized contact, driven out of the, how do say that, marketing department. And then we looked at, okay, how can we enable that without creating firewalls on every location we're having, making it very expensive, et cetera. And at that time our provider, Verizon, came up, let's do a Cloud security with Verizon, with Zscaler, and do a proof of concept, and build on that one. So that worked. That gave us more regularity, if the people in the countries that needed localized content got the localized content, speeding up the application for the specific countries, so no happening from Tokyo, Japan, back to Singapore, back to websites in Japan. So that helps a lot, but like I said it was early days so we had our challenges in getting that working, getting it secure, getting the traffic to the correct Zscaler node, and so on. So we did make, from the initial set-up of this network, a number of iterations to come to where we are today. >> Great. >> So it's not one decision and then it works. No, it's a decision, see what has worked, which challenge you're getting, and then take it to the next level. >> Right. >> If we do the same thing with Zscaler as they're offering today it will be a lot quicker. We will have a number of those challenges that we had at that time, we will not have today. >> So as you look forward, what's kind of next. As you mentioned this isn't a one-stop shop. This is an ongoing process. What are, kind of, your next priorities, you know, over the next six months or so as you guys continue on this journey? >> To another data center, so not to the Cloud but to a different data center, so that's a big, really a big program. The other thing we're looking at is how can we improve remote access, provide extra benefits as part. We also look at the CPA product of Zscaler. We're doing a proof of concept, probably in the second half of this year. So, but on the other side, this year, 2019, FrieslandCampina is a, how do you say that in proper English, stop and look back and see what's really important, what we need to go forward. So it's not going crazy on all different kind of projects. It is, okay, what will actually contribute to the profitability of FrieslandCampina going forward. >> I think that's a really great close. I know it's late in Utrecht. I appreciate you taking some time out of your evening, and I was going to ask you the last question, you know, what advice would you have for your peers, for other practitioners that are looking at this, and, you know, either in the process or planning out their journey, but I think you hit on a big one right there which is really focus on the things that matter, focus on the things that really make a difference, and just don't start doing science experiments all over the place because you can, or it's fun, or it's interesting. >> Well, what my worries are for the future, and what, not keeps me awake at night, but that that's too much, is the bad that's going around in this world is getting stronger. They have more resources than we, as a company, has to defend for us against, and the acute challenge would be, is identifying what is your traffic that is good flowing in your network. Because if you're knowing what is good everything that's not defined as being good can be immediately defined as being bad. In that case you'll have a better position in preventing yourself against everything that's going wrong, like WannaCry. If you know that WannaCry is using a well known port used all over the place in FrieslandCampina. But if you then see that same port being used to communicate between servers that never communicated before, or to workstations to servers that never communicated before, then you say, okay, stop that one immediately, because that's not good. >> Right. >> And at that moment our biggest challenge is identifying what is the traffic that's good within our network. >> Well that's a great tip, you know, that's great. You know what the positives are, and if it doesn't make the the green list then shut 'er down and (chuckling) find out what's going on. >> Correct. >> All right. >> Correct. And the reason why we identified WannaCry is that somebody, for some reason, identified Hey this server never talked with that device: Why? >> Yeah, we're hearing that, >> And because, all. >> because with IOT you have to do that, right? >> You have to do that. >> 'Cause everything's IP connected, right? Whether it's the shades and the HVAC system all the way down to all your manufacturing processes, distribution processes, >> Correct. >> IT systems. >> Correct, correct. Our big advantage was that the call back to the command and control servers was already blocked by Zscaler so it didn't hurt us that much. >> Yeah, well good, we got to keep the cows safe, keep the milk safe, and the, >> Yeah, absolutely. >> what did you say, the 10 billion gallons of milk that you guys kick out a year, or something like that? >> Yep. >> It's amazing, ha ha. >> It's amazing. >> All right Erik, well thanks for sharing your story. Good luck on your future transformations, and good luck next week; thanks for stopping by. >> Thank you very much. >> All right. >> All right. >> All right, he's Erik, I'm Jeff, you're watching the CUBE. We're in our Palo Alto studios and Utrecht, Holland. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (funky music)
SUMMARY :
in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California. He is the infrastructure architect for FrieslandCampina. for people that aren't familiar with the company. and love to be there. I mean the scale is amazing. doing about 10 billion liters, or kilograms, of milk a year. So what were some of the challenges that you were that you have to make sure that everything is safe. in the Cloud, or was it more kind of lift-and-shift but all the other applications to the Cloud as well. the challenges that really comes back to the end user. Those are not insignificant Big challenges that you had to overcome? and the systems Environment. I mean obviously the Cloud has moved quite a bit. So you don't have to do it yourself. of the migration that we did in in Europe, So just, again, kind of the scale of the end users. direct access to the internet. Wow, so the other thing you've talked about repeatedly security considerations that you considered? the architecture to separate the various layers and kind of the network architecture. that connects to a certain part of OT, and that was it. that maybe you couldn't do before. in the countries that needed localized content and then take it to the next level. that we had at that time, we will not have today. So as you look forward, what's kind of next. So, but on the other side, this year, 2019, all over the place because you can, or it's fun, and the acute challenge would be, And at that moment and if it doesn't make the the green list then shut 'er down And the reason why we identified WannaCry Our big advantage was that the call back to the and good luck next week; thanks for stopping by. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time.
SENTIMENT ANALYSIS :
ENTITIES
Entity | Category | Confidence |
---|---|---|
Erik Klein | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Europe | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
Jeff Frick | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Erik | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Verizon | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
2012 | DATE | 0.99+ |
Japan | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
Utrecht | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
Eric | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Jeff | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Germany | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
Belgium | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
Netherlands | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
Palo Alto | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
Silicon Valley | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
Microsoft | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Holland | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
Singapore | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
2014 | DATE | 0.99+ |
one | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
May 2019 | DATE | 0.99+ |
Tokyo | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
2013-2014 | DATE | 0.99+ |
Office 365 | TITLE | 0.99+ |
2014-2015 | DATE | 0.99+ |
FrieslandCampina | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
today | DATE | 0.99+ |
next week | DATE | 0.99+ |
two | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Zscaler | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
100 countries | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
23,000 people | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
2018-2019 | DATE | 0.99+ |
ISO 9599 | TITLE | 0.99+ |
CUBE | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
about 10 billion liters | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
34 countries | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
first part | QUANTITY | 0.97+ |
this year | DATE | 0.97+ |
about 15,000 people | QUANTITY | 0.97+ |
23,000 plus employees | QUANTITY | 0.96+ |
SharePoint | TITLE | 0.95+ |
Cloud | TITLE | 0.94+ |
two very different challenges | QUANTITY | 0.93+ |
a year | QUANTITY | 0.93+ |
2019 | DATE | 0.93+ |
Skype | ORGANIZATION | 0.92+ |
Amersfoort | LOCATION | 0.91+ |
English | OTHER | 0.91+ |
Utrecht, Holland | LOCATION | 0.91+ |
FrieslandCampina | LOCATION | 0.9+ |
one decision | QUANTITY | 0.89+ |
CUBEConversation | EVENT | 0.87+ |
Palo Alto, California | LOCATION | 0.84+ |
one-stop | QUANTITY | 0.83+ |
second half of this year | DATE | 0.82+ |
WannaCry | TITLE | 0.81+ |
10 billion gallons of milk | QUANTITY | 0.79+ |
Zscaling | TITLE | 0.77+ |
about 34 | QUANTITY | 0.77+ |
next six months | DATE | 0.75+ |
SAP | TITLE | 0.67+ |
Zscaler | TITLE | 0.65+ |
Nathan Hughes, Flex-N-Gate, & Jason Buffington, Veeam | VeeamON 2019
>> Announcer: Live from Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering VeeamON 2019. Brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back to the Fontainebleau, Miami, everybody. My name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with my co-host for this segment, Justin Warren. Justin it's great to see you. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage, day two of our coverage of VeeamON 2019 here in Miami. Jason Buffington, @Jbuff is here, he's the vice president of solution strategy congratulations on the promotion and great to see you again, my friend. >> Thank you very much. >> Dave: And Nathan Hughes who is the IT director at Flex-N-Gate. Great to see you, thanks for coming on. We love to get the customer's perspective, so welcome. >> Great to be here. >> Okay, so, Jason let me start with you. Former analyst, you've been at Veeam now for long enough to A, get promoted, but also, get the Kool-Aid injection, you're wearing the green, and, what are the big trends that you're seeing in the market that are really driving this next era, what do guys call it? Act two of data protection? >> Sure. So, I preached on this even before I joined Veeam that every 10 years or so, when the industry shifts the platform of choice, the data protection vendors almost always reset, right? The people that lead in NetWare don't lead in Windows. The people that lead in Windows didn't lead in Vert. The next wave is we're moving from servers to services. Right, we're going from on prem into cloud and so, and every time the problem is the secret sauce doesn't line up, right? So you got to reinvent yourself each time. And what we saw in the past generations, what we learned from, is, you can't be so busy taking care of your install base that you forget to keep innovating on what that next platform is and so for us, act two is all about cloud. We're going to take everything we know about reliability but we're moving into cloud. The difference is, that in virtualization there was one hero scenario. VMs, right? This time around it's IaaS, it's SaaS, it's PaaS, it's using cloud storage, it's BaaS and DRaaS, there's not a single hero scenario which means we have a lot more innovation to do. That's round two. >> And you made that point today, you used the Archimedes quote, give me a lever and a fulcrum and I'll change the world. You used the analogy of backup as now becoming much more than just backup, it's data protection, it's data management, we're going to get into that. And test some of that with Nathan. So, Nathan, tell us about Flex-N-Gate what does the company do and what does your role as IT director entail? >> Okay, so Flex-N-Gate is a tier one automotive supplier. Which means that we provide parts, most of the things that go into a car besides electronics and glass, to the final automotive makers. So most of the companies that you're familiar with when you go to buy one. >> Okay, so you guys are global, I think you've got what, 24,000 associates worldwide, 64 locations. So what're some of the things that are, fundamental drivers of your business, that are rippling through to your IT strategy? >> Well, our business is varied in the sense that we do a lot of different things in house so, we do, obviously, manufacturing, that's a big part of what we do. And then, even that is broken down into different kinds and then beyond manufacturing we have advanced product development and engineering so we do a lot of that in house. >> Dave: You support it all? >> Yes. >> So you've got diverse lines of business, you've got different roles and personas, you know, engineers versus business people versus finance people. And you got to make 'em all happy. >> We've got to make 'em all happy. >> So, one of the things I love about manufacturing examples, is if you think about it it's the two extremes of high tech and low tech, right? On the low tech side of things you've got this manufacturing floor and it's just producing real stuff, not the zeros and ones that we live with, but real things come off this line. And then you have the engineering and R and D side. Where they're absolutely focused on stuff that comes out of some engineer's head into a computer, which is truly unique data, so, one of the things I love about the story is, talk about the downtime challenges you have around the manufacturing floor. Because I learned some things when we first met, that I think is phenomenal when it comes to manufacturing things that I didn't realize. >> Sure. So, we have a lot of different kinds of manufacturing environments. Some of them are more passive and some of them are more active. The most active environments are, a form of manufacturing known as sequencing. And it's sort of where you bring final assembly of parts together right before they go to the customer. The way that customers order up parts these days, it's not like they used to back in the 70s and 80s. Where they would warehouse huge volumes of everything on their site and then just draw it down if they needed it. And you just kept the queue full. Now they want everything just in time delivery. So they basically want parts to come to the line right when they're needed and actually in the order they're needed. So, a final car maker, they're not necessarily making, 300 of the same thing in a row, they're going to make one of this in blue and one of that in red and they're all going to be sequenced behind each other, one right after the other on the assembly line. And they want the parts from the suppliers to come in the exact right order for that environment. So, the challenge with that from our perspective is that we have trucking windows that are between 30, maybe 60 minutes on the high end, and if anything goes badly, you can put the customer down. And now you're talking about stopping production at Ford, Chrysler, GM, whatever. And that's a lot of money and a lot of other suppliers impacted. >> Dave: So this is a data problem isn't it? >> Yeah, it definitely is. And it's an interesting point, 'cause, you talk about sequencing. Veeam has their own sequence about how customers use the product and they start with backup, everything starts with backup, and then they move further to the right so that you get, ideally, to fully automated data protection. So, what are you actually using Veeam for today? And where do you see yourself going with Veeam? >> So, right now, we're using Veeam primarily as backup and recovery. It's how we started with it. We came from another product that was, great conceptually, but in the real world it had terrible reliability and its performance was very poor as time went on and so, when Veeam came on the scene it was a breath of fresh air because we got to the place where we knew that what we had was dependable, it was reliable. We got to understand how the product worked and to improve the way that we'd implemented it. And so, one of the key features in Veeam that really actually excited us, especially in those sequencing environments are these instant recovery options, right? So, we were used to the idea of having to write down a VM out of snapshot storage. And then being put in a position where it might take an hour, two hours, three hours before you could get that thing back online now, or again, to be able to launch that right out of snapshot storage was a blessing in the industry we're in. >> Yeah, did you see the tech demo yesterday where they were showing off how you could do an instant recovery directly from cloud storage? >> Yes, yeah. >> Did that get you excited? >> Yes. That is exciting. >> Are you using cloud at the moment or is this something that you're looking to move towards? >> Cloud is something we're sort of investigating but it's not something that we're actively utilizing right now. >> So this instance recovery, you guys obviously make a big deal out of that, I was talking to Danny Allan yesterday offline about it. He claims it's unique in the industry. And I asked him a question, I said specifically, if you lose the catalog, can I actually get the data back? And he said yes. And I'm like, that sounds like magic. So, so I guess my question to maybe both of you is, instant, how instant? And how does it actually work? (he laughs) >> It just works, isn't that? >> It just works! >> It's just magic, new tagline? >> I guess we don't have to get into the weeds but when you say, when I hear instant recovery, we're talking like, (fingers clicking) instantaneous recovery with, very short RTOs? >> To us what that means is that in practice, we can expect to have a VM from snapshot data back into production in about a five minute window. >> Dave: Five minutes? Okay. >> And that is sufficient for our needs in any environment. >> Okay, so now we're talking RTO, right? And then, what about, so we said 64 sites across the world, 24,000 associates, is Veeam your enterprise wide data protection strategy or are you rolling it out now? Where are you at? >> Yes, no. Veeam, we started with it in a handful of key sites. And we were using it to specifically back up SharePoint and a few other platforms. But once we understood what the product was capable of, and we were sort of reaching the end of our rope with this former product, yeah, we began an active roll out and we've now had Veeam in our facilities for five, six years. >> So you swept the floor of that previous product. And how complicated was it for you to move from the legacy product to Veeam? >> It was a challenge just rethinking the way that we do things, the previous product, one thing that it really had going for it, if this could be considered a positive, I guess, is that it was very very simple to set up. So, you could take an entry level IT administrator and they just next, next, next, next, next. And it would do all the things that they needed it to do. But the problem was that in the real world, that was sort of the Achilles' Heel, because, it meant that it wasn't very well customized and it meant also that, the way that they've developed that product, it became performance, it had poor performance. >> So the reason I ask that question is because, so many times customers are stuck. And it's like they don't want to move, because it's a pain. But the longer they go, the more costly it is, down the road. So I'm always looking to IT practitioners like, advice that you would give in terms of others, things that you might do differently if you had a mulligan, I don't know, maybe you would've started sooner, or maybe there were some things that you'd do differently. What would you advise? >> Yeah, I mean, if we'd understood, the whole context of what was happening with that other product, we would've moved sooner. And the one thing that I will say about Veeam is, it's not click and point. It does involve a little more setup. But the Veeam team is excellent when it comes to support. So there's nothing to fear in that category because they stand behind their product and it's very easy to get qualified technicians to help you out. >> Is that by design? >> I don't know if it's. Well, the being great to work with, yes, that's by design. >> Yeah, but I mean. >> I was talking to Danny yesterday and asked about the interface thing. Because there is always that tension between making it really really simple to use but then it doesn't have any knobs to change when you need to. >> That's what I'm asking. >> But it can't be too complex either. >> Our gap actually comes a little bit later in the process, right? So, you asked earlier about, in what ways do you use Veeam? And we think about Veeam as a progression, right? So, everybody if they're using Veeam at all, they're using it for Veeam backup and replication and because foundationally, until you can protect your stuff, right? Until you can reliably do that, all the other stuff that you'd like to do around data management is aspirational and unattainable at best, right? So, we think the journey comes in at yeah, it is pretty easy, to go next, next, next, finish. Just a few tweaks, right? To get backup going. But then when you go beyond that, now there's a whole range of other things you can do, right? So Danny, I'm sure, talked about DataLabs yesterday. The orchestration engine, those are not, next, next, next, finish. But anything that's worthwhile takes a little bit of effort, right? So as we pivot from, now that you've solved backup, then you can do those other things and that's where we really start going back into something which is really more expertise driven. >> Well, and it's early days too and as you get more data and more experience you can begin to automate things. >> Yeah, absolutely. So Justin was asking, Nathan, where the direction is. Today it's really backup. You've seen the stages where, talking about full automation. Is that something that, is on the horizon, it is sort of near term, midterm, longterm? >> I mean, coming to the conference, our experience with backup, or Veeam, is primarily backup and recovery operations but, I've seen a lot of things in the last few days that have piqued my interest. Particularly when it comes to the cloud integration. That's being actively baked into the product now. And, some of the automated, API stuff, that's being built into the product. Any place where I can get to where we simplify our procedures for recovery, that's a plus. So I'm really excited about the idea of the virtual labs, being able to actively test backup on a regular basis without human intervention and have reporting out of that. Those are things that I don't see in any other product that's out there. >> You know, there's another piece of the innovation that we should think through, and, so we've talked about the sequencing side which is where we focus on RTO, how fast can you get back and running again? And when you and I talked earlier, the example that we worked on was think of a zipper, right? You've got the bumpers coming in to a line of cars and if either side slows down, everything breaks, and at the end, by the way, is the truck, right? And everything has to come at the same time at the same rate, if there's downtime on either side of the source, you're done. But that's an RTO problem. The engineering side, for high tech, is an RPO problem, right? You have unique stuff coming out of somebody's brain into a PC and it'll never come out that way again. And so, when we look at backup and replication, that should be the next pieces to go on. And then as you mentioned, DataLabs becomes really interesting and orchestration, so. >> Well speaking of human brains, and you kind of touched on it, Nathan, that you came here to learn some things and you've learned things from different sessions. So, what is it about coming to VeeamON that is worth the time for IT practitioners like yourself? >> I think it's all those, I mean we were talking about Veeam, doing backup and recovery operations, fairly straightforwardly, in terms of getting in, but once you see some of this stuff here at a conference like this, you get a better sense of all the more, elaborate aspects of the product. And, you wouldn't get that >> See the possibilities. >> I think, if you were just sitting in front of it using it conventionally, this is a good place to really learn the depth and the level that you can go with it. >> And you're like most of your peers here, is that right, highly virtualized, is that right? Lot of Microsoft apps. And, they say, mid-sized global organization, actually kind of bumping up into big. >> Nathan: Sure. >> Yeah, cool. I asked about the data problem before, it sounds like the zipper's coming together, that's some funky math that you got to figure out to make sure everything's there. So, talk about the data angle. How important data is to your organization, we know much data's growing, data's the new oil, all those promides but, what about your organization specifically as it relates to a digital strategy? It's a buzzword that we hear a lot but, does it have meaning for you, and what does it mean? >> Data is vital in any organization. I mean, we were referencing earlier, how you've got low tech in manufacturing, or at least people think of it as lower tech. And then high tech in R and D, and how those things merge together in a single company. But the reality is all of that is data driven, right? Even when you go to the shop floor, all your scheduling, all your automation equipment, all this stuff is talking and it's all laying down data. You're putting rivets in the parts, you're probably taking pictures of that now with imagers when you're in manufacturing. And you do that so that if you get 300 bad ones you can see exactly when that started and what happened at the machine level, right? So, >> That's a good one. >> We're just constantly collecting massive volumes of new data, and being able to store that reliably is everything. >> Well, and the reason I'm asking is you guys have been around for a while and your a highly distributed organization so, in the old days, even still today, you'd build, you'd get a server for an application, you'd harden that application, you'd secure that box and the application running on it, you'd lock the data inside and, my question is, can, the backup approach, the data protection approach, the data management, or whatever we want to call it, can it help solve that data silo problem? Is that part of the strategy or is it just too early for that? >> I'm, sorry, I'm going to get you to repeat that question in a slightly different way. >> Yeah so, am I correct that you've got data in silos from all the years and years and years of building up applications and-- >> I mean, we have-- >> And can you use something like Veeam to help unify that data model? >> Draw that all together? Yeah. I think a lot of that has, it's more on the hosting side, right? So it depends on how those systems were rolled out originally and all that kind of thing. But yeah, as we've moved towards Veeam, we've necessarily rebuilt some of those systems in such a way that they are more aggregated and that Veeam can pick them up in an integrated kind of way. >> You see that as a common theme? Veeam as one of the levers of the fulcrum to new data architecture? >> We're getting there, so here's the trick. So, first you got to solve for basic protection, right? But the next thing along the way to really get towards data management is you got to know what you got, right? You got to know what's actually in those zeros and ones. And so, some of the things that you've already seen from us are around what we do around GDPR compliance, some of the things we do around sanitization of data for DevOps scenarios and reuse scenarios. All of that opens up a box of, okay, now that the data is curated. Now that it's ingested into our system, what else can you do with it? You know, when I talk to C-level execs, what I tell them is, data protection, no matter who it comes from, including Veeam, is really expensive if the only thing you do is put that data in a box and wait for bad things to happen, right? Now the good news is, bad things are going to happen, so you're going to get ROI. But better is don't just leave your data in a box, right? Do other stuff with that data, unlock the value of it and some of that value comes in, now that I'm more aware of it, let's reduce some of the copies, let's reduce some of the compliance mandates. Let's only put data that has sovereignty requirements where it goes, but to do all of that, you got to know what you got. >> Go ahead, please. >> There was some impressive demo yesterday about exactly that, so, we have the data. You can use the API to script it and you can do all kinds of, basically, you're limited by your imagination. So it's going to be fascinating to see what customers do with it once they've put it in place, they've got their data protected. And then they start playing with things, come to a conference like this and learn, ooh, I might just give that a try on my data when I get back home. >> That's right. >> We'll give the customer the last word, Nathan. Impressions of VeeamON 2019? >> It's been great. And like I say, if you're a company that's been using Veeam even for a while, and you have your entry level setup for backup and recovery and I think there's a lot of, probably, companies out there that use Veeam in that kind of way, this is a great place to have a better understanding of all that's available to you in that product. And there's a lot more than just meets the eye. >> And it's fun, good food, fun people. Thanks you guys for coming on, really appreciate it. >> Yeah, thank you. >> Alright, keep it right there, buddy, we'll be back with our next guest, you're watching theCUBE, Dave Vellante, Justin Warren, and Peter Burris is also here. VeeamON 2019, we'll be right back. (electronic music)
SUMMARY :
Brought to you by Veeam. and great to see you again, my friend. We love to get the customer's perspective, so welcome. get the Kool-Aid injection, you're wearing the green, and, that you forget to keep innovating And you made that point today, So most of the companies that you're familiar with that are rippling through to your IT strategy? so we do a lot of that in house. And you got to make 'em all happy. talk about the downtime challenges you have and one of that in red and they're all going to be sequenced so that you get, ideally, and to improve the way that we'd implemented it. That is exciting. that we're actively utilizing right now. so I guess my question to maybe both of you is, we can expect to have a VM from snapshot data Dave: Five minutes? And that is sufficient And we were using it to specifically back up SharePoint And how complicated was it for you But the problem was that in the real world, advice that you would give in terms of others, to help you out. Well, the being great to work with, yes, that's by design. and asked about the interface thing. But then when you go beyond that, and as you get more data and more experience on the horizon, it is sort of near term, midterm, longterm? So I'm really excited about the idea that should be the next pieces to go on. that you came here to learn some things elaborate aspects of the product. that you can go with it. is that right, highly virtualized, is that right? that's some funky math that you got to figure out And you do that so that if you get 300 bad ones and being able to store that reliably is everything. sorry, I'm going to get you to repeat that question it's more on the hosting side, right? is really expensive if the only thing you do and you can do all kinds of, basically, We'll give the customer the last word, Nathan. of all that's available to you in that product. Thanks you guys for coming on, really appreciate it. and Peter Burris is also here.
SENTIMENT ANALYSIS :
ENTITIES
Entity | Category | Confidence |
---|---|---|
Nathan | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Ford | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Jason | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Justin Warren | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Danny | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Nathan Hughes | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Dave Vellante | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Chrysler | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Justin | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Jason Buffington | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Dave | PERSON | 0.99+ |
five | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Peter Burris | PERSON | 0.99+ |
GM | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Five minutes | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Veeam | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
an hour | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
three hours | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Miami | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
Danny Allan | PERSON | 0.99+ |
300 | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
64 sites | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
64 locations | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
two hours | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
24,000 associates | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Today | DATE | 0.99+ |
yesterday | DATE | 0.99+ |
Flex-N-Gate | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
one | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Miami Beach, Florida | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
60 minutes | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
both | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Microsoft | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
today | DATE | 0.98+ |
80s | DATE | 0.98+ |
70s | DATE | 0.98+ |
two extremes | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
Windows | TITLE | 0.98+ |
first | QUANTITY | 0.97+ |
GDPR | TITLE | 0.97+ |
@Jbuff | PERSON | 0.96+ |
Kool-Aid | ORGANIZATION | 0.96+ |
300 bad | QUANTITY | 0.96+ |
each time | QUANTITY | 0.95+ |
VeeamON | ORGANIZATION | 0.95+ |
SharePoint | TITLE | 0.93+ |
one hero scenario | QUANTITY | 0.93+ |
six years | QUANTITY | 0.93+ |
Archimedes | PERSON | 0.93+ |
single company | QUANTITY | 0.93+ |
BaaS | TITLE | 0.93+ |
DRaaS | TITLE | 0.92+ |
snapshot | TITLE | 0.9+ |
theCUBE | ORGANIZATION | 0.89+ |
round two | QUANTITY | 0.88+ |
Muddu Sudhakar, Investor & Entrepeneur | CUBEConversation, March 2019
from our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley Palo Alto California this is a cute conversation welcome everybody to this cube conversation my name is Dave Volante and we're here in our Palo Alto studios Medusa doc R is here he's an investor and entrepreneur and a friend we're do great to see you again thanks so much for coming in thank you it's a head too long it is you and I sat down and had a conversation on the cube so it's been well yeah yeah well you've been on the cube a bunch and you've a I've seen some great conversations that you had with with with Peter and John so thanks for making the time and coming back in thank you so I want to start with when I go around and talk to executives every CEO is trying to get digital right you know whatever that means you know they know it's important and they're trying to figure it out they know it relates to data they know they have to leverage data they know this buzzword of digital transformation what are you seeing when you talk to executives and companies how real is this digital transformation is it a fad or is it a substantive good question to look from my view point of view digital transformation is the word people use but at the end of the day CIOs have to disrupt their businesses every CEO has to figure out am i cutting the cost I'm a helping companies grow in revenue from a look at from a board perspective and what people are looking at the investor perspective most CEOs are CEOs are looking at somehow looking running their operations on a day-to-day basis to that point I think most CEOs are expecting see I was to do the new innovative things at you probably hearing that people are adding CDO as a title yeah so it's up to see I were to see will it be the innovate to CIO it's like you have two kids like in your case your four kids you have two how do you make sure that all four kids are given the equal responsibility so Ciara has to decide look I have budget X X by two goes to my existing business X by two goes to the new business that decision making is not happening with the see I was today and that's what the distal transformation has to be is going on in a what I call not in a disruptive manner but the CEOs who have figure out how to disrupt it I really taking the next stage the next thing that people are interested there is where do I start right you have all should I start with my CRM supply chain should I start with my IT you got to figure out what all the but start someplace you pick one the area but that has to be disruptive in the sense we are living in the age of where I call it autonomous everything right there's a data there is cloud and there's AI our mission like what are you these three are such a large disruption in our industry see us how to figure out and say what can I do in terms of cost saving in terms of revenue growth but that can't be incremental it has to be revolutionary so I often say we've decades we've marched to the cadence of Moore's law in this industry that's where innovation came from no longer it's as you said it's data now for the last 10 years and you were involved in this we were collecting all this data we lowered the cost of collecting data and and and in running data warehouses with Hadoop but now data's plentiful insights aren't so you have data you have to apply machine intelligence to that data and then cloud gives you scale so that's like the new innovation cocktail so you agree that digital I agree digital transformation is real and the other dynamic mudo is you see companies are because it's data are able to traverse industries used to be you're in an industry if you're in financial services that's it if you're in healthcare that's it now you see Amazon's and content apples into financial services so people are afraid of getting disrupted you've got this new innovation cocktail so your point was really get started so you've got a shift resources you don't have unlimited budget right so how do people do that how are they taking cost out of the business and how are they reapportioning that cost for innovation really good so I'll give you two examples from Megan again thinking of where I see it one is for CIOs has something called IT operations IT operation is a very big piece that people need to figure out how to get the cost out of it the IT operations cannot be developed we've been running IT for last 30 years I mean what are the word they used I know Gartner uses the word called AAA Hobbs I don't care what the word is but the key is you have to run your 18 autonomous manner we are living in the age of your trading is autonomous your my your four on game by four on K is being traded through hedge funds your add technologies autonomous with Facebook Google and Amazon with all data when I saw with with Casper and Splunk we made cybersecurity autonomous to whatever extent threat detection but when it came to IT operations and IT customer support today manual if I may see over right now I'll invest on customer service and support to start as a point of what can I do to make my service agents better or what can I do to make the end users or the users experience better without going to a human can I eliminate the human in the equation here the mileage may vary it's like the driverless consequence you have level 1 to level 5 they may like to have autopilot some people may have a fully autonomous car depending on the organization you got to have a right amount of autonomous City in your organization both for IT operations and IT Service Management that hasn't happened and that will be happen in the next 4 5 years so let's talk about that you were at ServiceNow for a period of time they've obviously disrupted the old-line helpdesk and you know they really did a job on BMC and hewlett-packard etc are they in a position to take that next step in when you go to service now analogy here folks talk about AI and infusing AI obviously there's a lot of data being collected is that the right model I mean if they've automated forms but you think you're talking about something more I help us understand that sure looks abused know is in a great position they'll continue to do well it's a great company right I think what's going to happen next is how can companies like ServiceNow take her to the next stage right either become a partner with ServiceNow or service now itself we'll do it a little bit new companies will be for me one angle is forces enterprises is this game going to be for enterprises same playbook as a playbook for the cloud so imagine an apps that are born on the cloud their IT operations data their ticketing data where will that go to that means we think through enterprise data which is enterprise apps and so as they need to figure out so if I am a company today if I'm daring I need to decide what will I do for my enterprise applications and services what do I do it for my cloud Orion services so that is addition you have to make it at the top once it goes down the next level then able to decide is it for IT support customer support or IT operations what can I do in terms of augmenting there if I do is just to make my agents better you can take the cost out of the equation the cost should be is can I automate to the point I can eliminate 50% of my DevOps 50% of my SR ease my role of the come is in the next four five years this 70 80 % of devops I tell you when I study jobs will be gone that should be automated it should be a driverless IT autonomous IT people should have him that's not even a moonshot goal we all in America let's make great our great again this is our time it's IT if we don't do it some other country will do it Chile is going to eat us for lunch so he basically putting forth the scenario a DevOps was essentially a stepping stone and you see that largely going away it has to be it has been automated I'm not going to hide hundreds of tunas I called Manuel tuners right yes I'll need some DevOps people I need some IT admin things that system cannot do it algorithmically should go to humans at some point but there are enough things like if you want to install something in your laptop why should I talk to somebody else if I want to upgrade to Microsoft Office if I want to buy a CRM license if I want to get a zoom provisioning why do I need to talk to a human being in this equation can I oughta mater complete autonomous can I get to a level five autonomous in IT right that's what I'm looking towards robotic process automation play a role here can our PA we've done some some events with automation anywhere new iPad you're seeing huge valuations uipath as supposedly as another six billion dollar evaluation I mean you know amazing unicorn plus plus plus can those technologies be applied to solve this problem yes or no I think it depends on what the HRP are under star doing IP is a great topic right not be resolved very successful what I'm talking about is our IT operations and IT support and customer support automation can our PA guys take their technology their substrate a platter sure they can try it but these are all have to be grown organically doing this in nit going for customer service and support doing it for the cloud has its own its own skin its own platform like you and me were talking earlier if I'm doing this thing on Amazon why wait and launch a VM I won't even do it like if a new ticket comes in I should be doing through kinases I should be doing through my lambda functions I shouldn't be my cost of goods with so much that I want it should not cost me anything until the point Dave generates a ticket to me first all why should Dave generate a ticket right look at the very much extreme model of the test laws just like our today tells me when should I service my car why should you do the same thing like I should be coming and telling your SharePoint is going to go down they have today your Kube application you cannot do an interview with me too unless you fix it that is what the world wants to go so back to service management for minutes so in the old days our service manager was too cumbersome we really didn't have a single CMDB it just really didn't work that well it didn't change anything a lot of tickets that's what it did service now obviously solved that that that problem but what I'm inferring from what you're saying is it's still too expensive the entire infrastructure it needs to be more streamlined and automation is the answer absolutely so I think if you take it'll add layers and layers the first is in the support starting women from CMDB most organizers say my CMD that I still all are stale that's never accurate how can I get a dynamic view of Dave's ink right I should know when and that has to be done at the level of services and apps and at kubernetes level 2 container level once I have a blueprint of what my organization is then I need to know how do I handle the tickets against it then I can I do a health monitoring for all my CIS right I should be telling the outage put it at the another what business carries is my business running correctly you do have a downtime what is going to happen even though if I am false positives few times people are expecting saying that tell me proactively what services will impact and who will be impacted so I can take a corrective action and that will happen starting from CMDB automation I actually call it cloud CMDB our dynamic CMDB in the world of cloud and dynamic let's make a good cmdbs dynamic and accurate then take it to the ultimate outage prediction right if I can give your business up time and outage prediction that would be Nirvana are you telling me that IT cannot solve it you and me are saying in Palo Alto a driverless cars are going around we are going to see it in our lifetime IT can be so complex that the car can be autonomous but IT cannot be I don't buy them well I mean you hear about all the systems are down or my systems are slow today that's that's a form of outage that costs Fortune 2000 companies and money I mean it's you know 50 60 thousand dollars a minute in this in some cases so the and I think sometimes people aren't aware as to how much how much revenue is lost to downtime or lost productivity so there's huge huge gains to be made there and it seems that the cloud is the platform on which you're going to you're gonna build these these these natural choice it has to be yeah and it has we want a cloud to you can't say we are in the eight if you are a noose new cloud you're building it I tell people bill it is a multi cloud your same code should work on GCP Amazon and Azure right and on VMware if you want to be a private cloud but should be same the same codebase should be able to compile and run on all multiple processor kubernetes micro services that's really the enabler there right right at once run it anywhere interesting conversation multi-cloud you're hearing a lot of discussion you know certainly in DC the Jedi case Oracle is contesting that when you read the rulings from the General Accounting Office that basically the the DoD determined that multi-cloud is is less secure more expensive more complex now that's the DoD everybody's gonna have multi cloud because multi-cloud is multi vendor sure but it's interesting you don't hear Amazon talking about multi cloud other than you don't want to do it because it's too expensive but everybody else is talking about multi cloud is kubernetes somewhat of a threat to that Amazon posture I don't think I think if you look at Amazon is saying they call it hybrid cloud the word may be different multi cloud or hybrid cloud yeah say they've already partnered like the best public cloud partner with the best pressure of your house is awesome announcement right so vehement software ever talk to Pat gal singer and his team and look they got VMware working with AWS vice-versa so that's it great I mean maybe even call it a two ecosystem but they got that whole thing working there yeah anything with agile is going to do with their public cloud on Azure with as you understand I'll just tack on prom yeah right everybody has 70 mgcp will figure out so then after a while if you and me as a customer I should be able to move things many times it happen is I'm not going to move things dynamically for a nibble but if I want I don't want to vendor lock it I want a code such that if tomorrow something happens I should be able to have an option to move my code base to a different cloud and that's what multi-cloud will happen as a requirement as you build it how much you exercise are not people will design software going for a formal techno so a whole new vector of conversation I would love to get your opinion on that multi-cloud opportunity obviously Cisco's going after VMware's in the strong position there certainly Microsoft is is vying for that you have a ton of startups looking at this IBM with the Red Hat acquisition now is in a in a pretty strong position you know given its open source chops how do you see that whole multi-cloud you know vendor landscape shaking out I think I got really good I have a TD for this at the end when the dust settles you won't have 100 aircraft carriers you will have only four or five yeah so it's like what happened in 90s compact went away Dec went away so same thing is going to happen here there will be four or five vendors will survive there will be Amazon's as yours maybe GCPs VMware's maybe it's Cisco and IBM talks about a I mean there's like maybe alley cloud in China you won't have hundreds of cloud so the number is already decreasing it will let be 10 will it be 5 will it before that still you will see the tall rise but it's already been the whole council isn't happening so if I'm a customer if I'm a vendor if I'm a startup or a public company I'm going to build it only for a few these multi cloud vendors I'm not going to across hundred yeah because the marginal economics of those those hyper clouds we've been saying this for years if there's just so much more compelling and at the end of the day if the economics are 10x less expensive and more attractive that they're gonna win you know and and I think even though you have thousands and thousands of service providers who call themselves cloud we're talking about a different kind of cloud it's got one of those you know it when you see it types of things and I'm going to add something so if you take this back to your earlier question about where the disruption is happening we talked about all the customer service support an IT service management industry but imagine if an app is born on the cloud call it cloud native applications you have millions of new apps that are there on this cloud platforms what is that going to do where is the data going there they want another customer service and support applicant on their platform it currently it's like I'm in your house I'm drinking your wine but when it comes to managing my customers of an operation I will take your log data your even data or take indeed and put in somebody else's house even though John is your partner when you put it there it doesn't make sense it should run it inside yours so all these vendors would want a native application that is running on their platform solving their customer data which hasn't happened yet well this is interesting so obviously Oracle has its own cloud but you're seeing well see work day Salesforce service now all these SAS companies just used to build their own clouds they're building their own data centers Chuck Chuck Philips oven forces I don't friends don't let friends build data centers so maybe he's prescient maybe the trend is that these apps are going to largely predominantly run in the public cloud the Oracle IBM notwithstanding they've got the resources to maybe you know tough it out is that the scenario that you see I have take the consumer companies whether you take V work Airbnb uber all these guys you are already seeing them on to some opinion maybe they have their own datacenter but there are vastly learning and public clouds right and you have already seen that's even the big SAS vendors whether it's Adobe yeah it'll be solid partner with Microsoft Azure workday is partnering with Amazon you saw em Salesforce partnering with Google cloud and AW so you're only seeing these vendors the large SAS when there's already saying in order for me for economics wise it doesn't make sense whether it's for my marketing cloud my service cloud my ecommerce cloud I want this to run on this cloud platform to get scale cost of economics and also I need my services that are built there with a new substrate like we talked about that's lambda functions to kinases I'm not going to do it on my platform but and that trend is going on it's just accelerating so how are you spending your time these days you've had a very successful entrepreneur investor you've been CEO of multiple companies what do you do in these days I'm look I'm very happy with what I'm doing right now so I spend a lot of time with this company called I set up that's right I'm even we talked about it it's a startup company in Palo Alto their vision is to apply like what we got AI ops applying AI for digital transformation for AI customer service I trps oh I like the region look I want to spend time with companies which are taking a big bet right it's like in our IT industry nobody talks about moonshot goals let's take a bigger bet let's take a much vision of for five year ten years what can we disrupt right and I look at those companies I invest with those companies and spending time with them I'm learning a lot in the process I'm contributing back to the those companies well you know sitter I was on Twitter yesterday with with a little group we're having an interesting discussion about you know how things are changing the dynamics of where innovation comes over so we started this conversation with that sort of new innovation cocktail and there just seems to be a whole new fabric of services not only it's not just remote cloud services anymore it's these embedded services that are can think they can act they can sense and it's ubiquitous now even the edge autonomous vehicles we're entering a whole new era it's very exciting right and again one thing that we didn't talk to see Mike and son and my it again it's society has to have regulations and will come if you look at the what's happened in this whole call center customer service industry if autonomous city will happen of any level from level even if I automate 30 percent of your customer service and you don't touch a human being when you are at home for your Comcast to your nest imagine all those services inside your home from field service to if they get automated what's going to happen first of all if Sally's gonna improve your costs are going to reduce if I'm a business I can take that money and invest somewhere else but more importantly those most of those things it's it's a big disruption happening in the outsourced industry right these are your jobs in China India Philippines Vietnam my concern is dart saying that there will be a certain is going to happen people are not paying attention to that and this this strain has already left the station yeah it's going to come to a platform again some next platform but next for five years you'll see a tremendous disruption in this area of digital transformation well I remember a couple decades ago there was a lot of talk about well you people spending a lot of money on IT but that you don't see it in the productivity numbers and all of a sudden because of the PC revolution the productivity went through the roof you're hearing similar sort of discussions now we feel like productivity is about to explode because of what you're saying here absolutely and again the per back to the RP has already shown the value our peers no longer in each category it's what we talked about success renders from you iPad automation anywhere blue prism that just on the back end of the supply chain and RPF cell taking the two front office applying that to customer service facing to your crm facing that your IT hasn't happened yet can I automatically can I ought Americans right from an employee experience to customer experience that productivity if you employ it you'll get more customers doing that yeah it scares people but but it's the future so you better embrace it and lean in voodoo thanks so much oh let's go always measure to see you alright thanks for watching everybody this is David day from our studios in Palo Alto and we'll see you next time thank you [Music]
**Summary and Sentiment Analysis are not been shown because of improper transcript**
ENTITIES
Entity | Category | Confidence |
---|---|---|
Peter | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Dave Volante | PERSON | 0.99+ |
two kids | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
30 percent | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Amazon | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
thousands | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
AWS | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
50% | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Palo Alto | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
March 2019 | DATE | 0.99+ |
Palo Alto | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
Oracle | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
IBM | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
John | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Cisco | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
two | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
five year | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Ciara | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Dave | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Microsoft | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
BMC | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
China | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
Mike | PERSON | 0.99+ |
ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ | |
yesterday | DATE | 0.99+ |
ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ | |
Adobe | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
America | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
today | DATE | 0.99+ |
four kids | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
five years | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
iPad | COMMERCIAL_ITEM | 0.99+ |
two examples | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Airbnb | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Comcast | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
five | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Silicon Valley | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
18 | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Gartner | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
DoD | TITLE | 0.99+ |
Megan | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Pat | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Muddu Sudhakar | PERSON | 0.99+ |
hundreds | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
10x | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
four | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
hundred | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
Casper | ORGANIZATION | 0.98+ |
hundreds of tunas | QUANTITY | 0.97+ |
each category | QUANTITY | 0.97+ |
Sally | PERSON | 0.97+ |
three | QUANTITY | 0.97+ |
uber | ORGANIZATION | 0.97+ |
100 aircraft | QUANTITY | 0.97+ |
four kids | QUANTITY | 0.97+ |
tomorrow | DATE | 0.96+ |
one angle | QUANTITY | 0.96+ |
General Accounting Office | ORGANIZATION | 0.96+ |
VMware | ORGANIZATION | 0.96+ |
ServiceNow | ORGANIZATION | 0.96+ |
90s | DATE | 0.96+ |
70 | QUANTITY | 0.96+ |
SharePoint | TITLE | 0.95+ |
SAS | ORGANIZATION | 0.95+ |
CMDB | ORGANIZATION | 0.95+ |
10 | QUANTITY | 0.95+ |
Dec | DATE | 0.94+ |
5 | QUANTITY | 0.94+ |
first | QUANTITY | 0.94+ |
70 80 % | QUANTITY | 0.94+ |
both | QUANTITY | 0.94+ |
China India | LOCATION | 0.94+ |
Tim Minahan, Citrix | CUBEConversation, March 2019
(suspenseful orchestral music) >> Every company is a cloud company today, right? Well, there's one company that was in the cloud long before it was fashionable. Citrix Systems, way back in 1989, was founded. Coming up on its 30th anniversary, and Citrix was a pioneer in the area of virtual desktop infrastructure, delivering desktops from servers to the, as a virtual machine, long before anybody was using the term cloud. Well, Citrix is still going strong 30 years later, and its Synergy Conference is coming up at the end of May, May 21st through 23rd in Atlanta. With me is Tim Minahan. I'm sorry, I was with Stu Miniman, our analyst. (laughing) Tim Minahan, who is the executive vice president of business strategy and the chief marketing officer at Citrix. Tim, welcome. >> Thank you, Paul, it's great to be here. >> I am Paul Gillin, this is The Cube, and with Synergy coming up, The Cube will be at Synergy, so we thought we'd take a chance today to look a little bit at where Citrix is going, where it's come from. A company that is still going strong, 50 acquisitions over the years, and really probably not the company that you would think of. People think of Citrix as desktop virtualization. I know you're still in that market, but I'm sure that Citrix is quite a different business today. So what business are you in? >> It absolutely is a much different business today, Paul. You know, this is not your father's virtualization company anymore. We still, as you point out, continue to lead that market both in market share as well as innovation. However, based on our customer needs as they've evolved to try to operate in this hybrid multi-cloud world, as they've tried to digitize their business, Citrix has also gone on a transformation journey. So really, I would organize it around three primary transitions. One is moving from a, let's say, disparate array of individual products to much more integrated solutions that more holistically address the needs of our customers around digital workspace, around networking and security, and around analytics. The second one, as you intimated in your introduction, is making our products, or our solutions, available not just on premise for customers to manage in their own data centers, but as cloud services, so that they can consume the technology in the way that they want and scale very quickly. But probably the most significant transition is moving from delivering application delivery products to really becoming this strategic platform for work. >> And when you talk about that in your messaging, It talks about powering a better way to work. What is a better way to work? >> Well, if you, Paul, if you think about today, really, as companies are beginning to digitize their businesses, they're trying to compete around the world, one of the things that continues to come to the top is the need to drive a superior employee experience. Those companies that can attract the right talent, develop the skills needed for today's modern age, and give them the tools and the flexibility to work where and how they want becomes a competitive advantage. And so when we talk about empowering a better way to work, we're bringing together our digital workplace, our networking, and our analytics technologies in order to empower companies to do that, to arm their employees with single sign-on access to everything they need to be productive in one unified experience that travels with them. Whether they're working in the office, whether they're on the road, at a client meeting, in a hospital room, really allowing them to power a better way to work. >> And you say that this is particularly important for attracting this new generation of knowledge workers. What are their expectations? How do you need to frame the workplace to make it appealing to them? >> Yeah, well, I think it's an interesting point you bring up. It's a misconceptions that, you know, it's all about the millennials. Well yes, we are introducing new work styles, new work types, and new generations into the workplace, but we have multiple generations in the workplace, each of which has different ways of which they engage with technologies, each of which has ways that they want to collaborate. But the one thing that is key to employee experience is, you know, gonna be a competitive advantage, what's holding us back. And it really is all this choice, all this technology that we've brought into the market, has created an unintended side effect, which is complexity. And employees are actually frustrated at work because they need to navigate multiple different environments, they need to remember multiple passwords, they need to spend time in a whole host of applications that may not be pertinent to their job, but it's something that they're required to do. So it's keeping them from their core job. And so really what we're trying to do is giving that unified experience, making it single sign-on to all of your applications, all of your content, regardless of where you are, and then literally bringing intelligence into the workspace to allow employees to actually be guided through their day so they don't need to log in to multiple applications, but presenting up the insights and the tasks that they need to do to remove the noise from their day and get on doing their core fulfilling work. >> Of course, this is not your father's single sing-on anymore. It used to be single sign-on was for primarily on-prem applications. Today everything's moving to the cloud. Citrix itself has undergone a sort of reinvention as a cloud-first company. Tell us what that involved and what that means for your customers. >> Yeah, well, the very first thing is I came from a host of companies that have made the transition to a cloud services model in the past. Most recently, SAP. And I thought I was coming here to help Citrix transition to the cloud, but it became very clear really quickly our job is to help our customers, you know, save our customers from the cloud, allowing them to pursue their very unique cloud strategies as everyone's on a different path on this journey, you know, this hybrid, multi-cloud environment, and to pursue that strategy with confidence. Giving them the latitude to be able to have portability of their workloads. If they want to move them out of the data center to maybe Microsoft Azure or AWS or Google Cloud platform or a private cloud, allowing them that flexibility, the interoperability, and the portability that they need to do that at their own pace. >> Now, what are the implications then for your product line? Because, are you talking about actually helping customers to manage the multi-cloud, to shift workloads, or is this more in the area of creating a unified work environment where all these applications come together? >> Well, the first step was certainly to make our offerings available as cloud services. So customers that wanted to consume them that way, they could. The second step was indeed to provide a control plane that allowed IT to really unify their entire environment, whether that workload was in the data center or in any of the public clouds I just mentioned, and have the portability to move them between those environments as they saw fit. Related to that is unifying the employee experience so that they, to your point, have single sign-on access to everything they need to be productive. So not just their, as you point out, their on-premise apps or their virtual apps, but their SaaS apps, which are growing in popularity and use against the enterprise. Their mobile apps, their web apps, but not just their apps too. You know those traditional virtual desktops that they might need. Or, importantly, their content, which we all need to organize and have the information we need to make the right decisions at the right time. So you're content needs to be available in that workspace too, in a similar way, regardless of where it's stored. It could be stored in any of the public cloud storage service providers. It might be stored on premise in a SharePoint environment, and you need to be able to have that with you regardless of whether you're working on your laptop at the office or on your smartphone on the train. >> Now, you have a lot of cloud experience. You were at Ariba, which was a cloud-native company. You went to SAP during their transition of the cloud. Now at Citrix. What kind of expectations are you helping the company set for how customer relationships change in a primarily cloud environment? >> You hit the point right on the nose. The big change everyone thinks is, wow, it's making your products available as a service. Well, that's part of it, certainly. Well, it's about transitioning to more of a subscription model. Well, that's also part of it. But the real big shift is the way you engage and support customers. In a traditional on-premise world, you would celebrate when the deal gets done, right? In a cloud services model, you are an ongoing service provider. Your real goal is to help the customer drive adoption and achievement of their business outcomes. And so within Citrix, what we've done, as in the previous companies we had before, I was at before, is we've made investments in that post-sale adoption. We have a full customer success team that is really your coach. You come into the gym, we'll get you on the treadmill, we'll make sure you get the health benefits you want, right, that's the type of environment and mentality we need to have even from a marketing perspective. There's a whole adoption marketing team now that is focused on working in unison with that customer success team so that we are ensuring that customers have the information they need, how to leverage the products, what functionalities available to them, and how to drive the business outcomes they were hoping to achieve. >> Are you finding the customer retention is actually better in a cloud environment? Do customers tend to stay longer, despite the fact they're not paying these large licensing fees up front? >> I think the real secret to customer retention and driving that customer retention is ensuring, okay, number one, there's clear alignment on what the business outcomes are to begin with, and number two, that you have this infrastructure in place, or this coaching organization in place, to make sure that they're driving to success. And because oftentimes you've heard, you know, you've been in the business for a long time, that IT projects, well, the implementation goes on for too long, or you know, we've implemented it but now no one's using it, and really, in a cloud services model, that can't happen, right? It's similar to any service you subscribe to as an individual, whether it's your cable service or the like, if you're not using something-- >> Turn it off. >> At the end of that subscription term, you're gonna turn it off. >> Yeah. >> And so, you know, in a cloud services model, the provider, like Citrix, is much more aligned with the business outcomes that the customer is hoping to achieve. >> Now, I know you're not development guy, but in the process of sort of overhauling the product line, there are a lot of new architectural tools that can be used, such as serverless computing, microservices. What have you done in terms of restructuring the way you build your products? >> Yeah, it's interesting, there's a few things. You know, the biggest one is, instead of, in an on-premise world, you would deliver a monolithic upgrade, here we go, every few, 18 months, two years, three years, and then work on helping your customers move that way. In a cloud services model, we're delivering innovation, you know, every week. And it just gets turned on as part of that service. So a much more agile development methodology. And yes, you know, behind the scenes, you mentioned microservices and the like that. What we're seeing within our customers as they're looking at how do I begin to abstract, you know, those monolithic applications and turn them into more microservices that are much more agile, that I can test things, I can deploy them very quickly. We're using those same type of techniques within Citrix ourselves. >> You've had a lot of experience with SaaS providers. How do you prepare a company culturally to make that leap from selling, you know, the big licensed package, to a subscription model? A lot of people are affected inside the company by a change like that. >> Yeah, no, absolutely. And part of it is transitioning literally from selling to being a trusted advisor, right? What is the business outcome you want to achieve? Let's land with this particular capability to get you going and then as you mature, as you begin to get the initial benefit, let's expand beyond that. And so what we were talking about with the customer success for post-sale adoption, really, to your point, moves back up the chain to how we engage customers even at the outset. >> The company has done more than 50 acquisitions, or I believe exactly 50 acquisitions. I know you weren't there for all of them, but do you have any thoughts, obviously very successful, the company does this very well. What are some secrets of making acquisitions work? >> I think one of the biggest opportunities and secrets to making such acquisitions work is having a really solid post-merger integration plan. And when I say post-merger integration, yes, you need to integrate that technology into your overall solution set so that it increases the value to the customers. Obviously, you know, having a clear roadmap on that, clearly articulating that both to the organization as well as to the customers. In fact, both your existing customers and the added value they're gonna get, but the ones of the company you've acquired. But I think the even, the bigger opportunity lies in making sure on the post-merger integration side you have a clear plan for how you're going to integrate that culture and the like. So as you acquire companies, particularly as you acquire SaaS companies, for example, infusing that SaaS mentality into your overall organization. You've acquired this company because they were doing well. They had a unique capability. Maybe they had unique skillsets that you need and making sure that you have a clear plan for how to help that thrive in your new environment. >> One of your roles is as head of marketing, and I understand you're sort of a data-driven guy. You're a big believer in data-driven marketing. >> I have more dashboards than you can imagine. (laughs) >> Really? Well, how, marketing and sales typically in B2B companies don't have the best of relationships. How are you using data to bridge that divide? >> Yeah, I think that's an excellent, that's an excellent question. And I do think data is the answer. You know, part of that traditional, kind of yin and yang, or friction between sales and marketing is a result of biases and opinions. When you organize around data, you begin to eliminate that. You get to the facts. And so I mentioned I have more dashboards than I care to note. But those dashboards are shared with my counterpart, the chief revenue officer, as well as his senior leadership team, so we're all looking at the same data. We're all identifying, hey, where we are with this customer, where we are with the overall pipeline growth. And it is going into a meeting and not spending the first 45 minutes disputing the data, but saying, "Hey, look, we are collectively seeing this." And, you know, looking at driving solutions on how to maybe accelerate something or provide a little extra service to a customer because we're all looking at the same data. Data is absolutely a great leveler at eliminating a lot of the traditional friction that is between sales and marketing. >> Citrix is one of the oldest, if that's a term, don't like to use that term in software, but it's been around a long time. >> 30 years young. >> One of the things, a big celebration coming up in April, I understand, your 30th anniversary. One of the things that happens to companies that have been around a long time is they acquire misperceptions. Customers tend to view them as they were many years ago. What misperception about Citrix would you most like to correct? >> I think, you know, the biggest misperception is the one you started with. That, hey, you know, Citrix is the virtualization company. And yes, we were the pioneer in virtualization, because at a time, when we burst onto the scene 30 years ago, you had this new rising information worker, you had client server technologies, and that worker wanted to work outside the office, and what were going to do? Well, Citrix provided an answer. Well, over the years, we've continued to innovate as companies moved to mobile, and now as they move to the cloud, and they want to embrace entirely new work models that allow them to give their employees, full time, contractors, gig workers, access to the tools they need to collaborate and be very effective and fulfilled in their jobs. We're there now, right? So we've continued to evolve with and even ahead of the market. So virtualization, still relevant for some key customers and some of the most mission-critical applications. But they have these other needs too, and Citrix has evolved to support those as well. >> And in two months, end of May, you'll be bringing your users together at Citrix Synergy in Atlanta. How many people do you expect to have there? >> Just about 6,000 or so. >> About 6,000, huge crowd. What are you gonna tell them? What are the messages you want them to take away? >> Well, the top line team for the conference is really, you know, how the future works. You know, we've talked a lot about this is the future of work, and it's coming, well guess what, it is here. We have multiple generations working in the workforce today. We have entirely new work styles. We have, as I mentioned, these gig workers, contractors, full time employees. We have entirely different devices and applications that have come into this environment and people want to collaborate through different channels, Teams, and Slack, as well as traditional email. So how do we bring all of that together? We believe that we're delivering this today. Our customers are seeing real benefit by having this unified digital workspace experience and making that available to their employees. You know, we're now injecting, like I mentioned, machine learning and simplified workflows or micro-apps into that environment to make employees even more productive within the workspace than outside of it, really guiding them through their day. So when we say this is how the future works, you know, the key message is, you know, we're, the future is here today. We're delivering the experience, the security, and the choice that employees and organizations need to drive innovation, to engage customers and employees in new digital ways, and to be productive any time, anywhere. >> Well it's a huge agenda in Atlanta, and if you're a Citrix customer you'll certainly want to be there. Even if you're not a Citrix customer, you'll want to follow us on The Cube, as The Cube will be on the ground in Atlanta at Citrix Synergy. Tim, have a great conference. Thanks very much for joining us. >> Thanks for having me, Paul. Look forward to seeing you in Atlanta. >> I'm Paul Gillin, this is The Cube. (upbeat electronic music)
SUMMARY :
and the chief marketing officer at Citrix. and really probably not the company that you would think of. that more holistically address the needs of our customers And when you talk about that in your messaging, is the need to drive a superior employee experience. to make it appealing to them? that they need to do to remove the noise from their day Today everything's moving to the cloud. our job is to help our customers, you know, and have the portability to move them What kind of expectations are you helping the company set You come into the gym, we'll get you on the treadmill, It's similar to any service you At the end of that subscription term, that the customer is hoping to achieve. the way you build your products? And yes, you know, behind the scenes, to make that leap from selling, you know, What is the business outcome you want to achieve? but do you have any thoughts, and making sure that you have a clear plan and I understand you're sort of a data-driven guy. I have more dashboards than you can imagine. don't have the best of relationships. and not spending the first 45 minutes disputing the data, if that's a term, don't like to use that term in software, One of the things that happens to companies is the one you started with. How many people do you expect to have there? What are the messages you want them to take away? and making that available to their employees. and if you're a Citrix customer Look forward to seeing you in Atlanta. I'm Paul Gillin, this is The Cube.
SENTIMENT ANALYSIS :
ENTITIES
Entity | Category | Confidence |
---|---|---|
Paul | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Tim Minahan | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Citrix | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Atlanta | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
Synergy | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Paul Gillin | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Stu Miniman | PERSON | 0.99+ |
two years | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
April | DATE | 0.99+ |
50 acquisitions | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Tim | PERSON | 0.99+ |
first step | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
three years | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Citrix Systems | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
March 2019 | DATE | 0.99+ |
30 years | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
second step | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
18 months | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
One | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Microsoft | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
both | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
today | DATE | 0.99+ |
more than 50 acquisitions | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
end of May | DATE | 0.99+ |
30 years later | DATE | 0.98+ |
SAP | ORGANIZATION | 0.98+ |
30th anniversary | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
one | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
23rd | DATE | 0.98+ |
about 6,000 | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
30 years ago | DATE | 0.98+ |
one company | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
Ariba | ORGANIZATION | 0.98+ |
About 6,000 | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
each | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
first 45 minutes | QUANTITY | 0.97+ |
1989 | DATE | 0.97+ |
Today | DATE | 0.97+ |
AWS | ORGANIZATION | 0.97+ |
end of May, May 21st | DATE | 0.96+ |
SharePoint | TITLE | 0.96+ |
first thing | QUANTITY | 0.96+ |
The Cube | ORGANIZATION | 0.95+ |
second one | QUANTITY | 0.93+ |
single | QUANTITY | 0.93+ |
three | QUANTITY | 0.92+ |
two months | QUANTITY | 0.92+ |
first | QUANTITY | 0.92+ |
single sing | QUANTITY | 0.92+ |
Alex Henthorn Iwane, ThousandEyes | Cisco Live EU 2019
(upbeat music) >> Live from Barcelona, Spain it's the Cube! Covering Cisco Live Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and it's ecosystem partners. >> Okay, welcome back everyone and we're live here at Cisco Live, 2019 in Europe. It's the Cube's three days of wall-to-wall coverage, day two. I'm John Furrier, your host, with Dave Vellante co-hosting with me as well as Stu Miniman who's been in and out on interviews. Our next guest is Alex Henthorn-Iwane, vice president of marketing for company Thousand Eyes. welcome back to the cube, welcome to the show. >> Thanks great to be here. >> So talk about what you guys do first, you guys do a very interesting business, a rapidly growing business. What is Thousand Eyes, what do you guys do, What's your product, who is your customer? >> OK, so the vision of thousand eyes was really to help organizations deal with all the connected experiences that they have to deliver. So we're giving visibility into those connected experiences but not just how there, you know if they're working or not but all the external dependencies that they rely on. So we developed a ton of expertise on how the internet works how the networks work, how routing works and all that. And we can give that insight so that all the things that IT now no longer controls and owns, but has to own the outcome for, we're giving that visibility. >> And when you guys sell a Saas Solutions, the software, what's the product? >> Yeah >> Who's the buyer? >> So we're Saas Platform and the way that we gather this data is we're primarily doing active monitoring at a few different layers; so we're monitoring the app layer things like HTTP and page loads and things like that you would think of that as synthetics classically but we've paired that with some patented ways of understanding how everything connects from a user out in the internet or from a branch office or from a data-center out to somewhere else typically across the internet all those networks the cloud networks going through things like Z-scaler all those complex pieces that again you don't control. We can trace all that and then map it down even to internet routing. One other kind of cool thing that we added to all that we do that on an agent basis so we have agents around the world that you can put them in your data-centers your VPC's and your branches. >> And the value proposition is what; visibility in the patterns; optimization; what's the outcome for the customer? >> The outcome is ultimately that we're going to help IT deliver the digital experiences for their employees for their customers that could be e-commerce, e-banking, it could be open banking or PSD2 here in Europe and UK. >> So full knowledge of what's going on >> Right >> But the name talks to that >> Yeah >> It talks to the problem you're solving >> Right, and it's really, the focus is and our specialty is all the external things, right. You've always had a lot of data, maybe too much data on the stuff that you did own, right, in IT. Okay, you could collect packets and flows and device status and all that sort of this and sort of, the challenge was always to know what does that mean, but whether or not that's perfect it exsited, but you simply can't get that from outside, you've got your four walls >> Yeah >> So you just have this big drop off in visibility once you get to the edge of your data-center etcetera >> Now, lets talk about the dynamics in IT; we were talking before we came on camera here about ya know, our lives in IT and going back and look at the history and how it's changed but there are new realities now >> Right >> Certainly Cisco here talking about intent based network ACI anywhere, Hyperflex anywhere, the ecosystem is growing the worlds changed. >> Right >> Security challenges, IOT, the whole things completely going high scale, more complexity. >> Right, Yeah. >> IT? What's the impact to IT? What's the structural change of IT from your prospective? >> Well, the way we see it what's happening with IT is the move from owning and controlling all the stuff, you know and managing that granting access to that. To a world where you really don't own a lot of the stuff anymore. You don't own the software, you don't own the networks. You don't own the infrastructure increasingly. Right? So how do you operate in that role? Changes. What the role of IT is in that role, really changes. And then out of that comes a big question. How does IT retain relevance? In that role? And a lot of that role is shifting away from being the proprietor, to being more of like a manager of an ecosystem. Right? And you need data to do that. So I think that's a really big step. >> So this is now, an actual job description kind of thing? >> Yeah. The roles and make up of the personnel in IT is changing. Because of the SAAS cloud, Hybrid cloud, Multi cloud? >> Right. It's more of like a product management role, than it is the classic operations role. You know? And we observed some really big changes in just operations. So, when you own all the stuff you can find a fix. Right? That's a classic statement of IT operations. But when all the stuff is outside, You can't fix it directly. So you go to what we call an evidence in escalation. You have to actually persuade someone else to fix it for you And if you can't persuade them, you don't have governance you don't have accountability and you don't have the outcome that you're supposed to deliver. >> So the infrastructure is to serve it's players; Google, Amazon, Microsoft, more SAAS All of this is taking data away from your control? >> Right >> And obviously network visibility? >> Sure >> So how are you guys dealing with that? What are some of the nuances of whether it's SAAS, or different infrastructures of service providers? >> And I would add to that SUN, Shift to the internet I would add to that just the increasing number of digital experiences that companies offer to customers. Right? >> Right. So the way that we deal with that is, that we believe that you need a highly correlated way of understanding things. Because at the top layer, if the outcome that IT is supposed to deliver is a digital experience. Right? The customers at the center now, not the infrastructure. Right? So I have to start with experience. So we need to look at, how is the app preforming? How is it delivering to that end user? And now you have to think about it from a persona basis. To who? Where? Right? So that's why we have all these agents floating around the world in different cities. Because if you're offering a let's say e-banking portal, and your surveying 100 cities as markets. You need to see from those cities, right? You also then need to be able to understand the why. When something is not working well, whose fault is it? Right? Is it us? >> Its the network guys! (laughing) >> What you don't to get is the everlasting war room circular firing squad kind of scenario. Where nobody actually knows, right? This is what happens, because the issue is that often times you suspect its not you. Maybe. Right? That search for innocents. >> Yeah. >> But again that's not enough because, the whole point is to deliver the experience. So, now who could it be? Say you're offering e-banking or e-commerce. Is it your CDM provider? Is it that your DMS manage provider is not responsive? Or somethings down? Are you under a D DOS attack? Or some of your ecosystem is. Is one of your back end providers, like your Braintree payments not working right. Right? There is so many pieces, is there an ISP in the middle there? That's being effected? >> There's so many moving parts now. >> If from each persona or location just to get to 1 URL. Could be traversing several ISP networks. Dozens of HOPS across the internet. How on earth are you supposed to isolate, and go an even find who to ask for help? That's a really sticky problem. >> So this will expose all those external credits? >> So we expose all those things. We expose all these multiple layers, and we have some patenting correlation, visual correlation. So you can say alright I see a drop in the responsiveness of a critical internal application or of .. I mean, we never have. Butt lets say like if SAAS like sails course, or something like that. And it may not be their fault by the way, its not them being a problem. But the users having a problem. So you see this drop and say well where's it happening? You can now say is it a network issue? Is it an app issue? Now if it is a network issue I can look at all the paths, from every where and say aha there's a commonality here. For example, we could surface through our collective intelligence that there's an ISP outage in the middle of the internet that's causing this. Or we could say, hey you know your ISP is having an issue. Or guess what? Sales force is maybe, you know things happen. People have problems in data centers sometimes. It's nothing you know, it's not.. >> So there's two things there's the post mortem view, and there's the reactive policy based intention. >> Right >> To say okay hey we've got an outage, go here do somethings take some action. >> Right. So some of those things you can automate. But the fact of the matter is that, automation requires learning. And machines need to be taught, and humans have to teach them. I mean that's one of the sort of sticky parts of automation. (laughing) Right, its not auto-magic its automation. >> So you guys are in the data business basically? >> Right, visibility, data. Right. >> Big data, its about data. You're servicing data. Insights, actionable insights, all this stuffs coming together. So the question is on AI. Cause AI plays a role here. IT OPS and machine learning you've got deterministic and non deterministic behavior. >> Sure. >> How do you solve the AI OPS problem here? Because this is a great opportunity for customers, to automate all this complexity and moving parts. To get faster time to data or insight. >> Okay so I would say that the prime place where you could do AI and ML is where you have a relatively closed system. Lets say an infrastructure that you do control. And you have a ton of data. You know like a high volumetric set of data-streams. That you can then train a machine to interpret. The problem with externalities is that One, you have sparse data. For example we have to use agents, cause you can't get all that traditional data from it. Right? So that means that that's why we built this in a visually correlated way. It's the only way to figure it out. But the other aspect to that is that, when your dealing with external providers you have an essential human part of this. There's no way as far as I know to automate an escalation process with your service providers. Which now we have so many, right? First of all, we have to figure out who. And then you have to have enough evidence, to get an escalation to happen to the right people. Empowered people. So they don't go through the three D's of provider response. Which is Deny, Deflect and Defer. (laughing) Right? You know you have to overcome plausible deniability, and that's very human interaction. So the way we deal with that. All this interactive correlated data we make it ridiculously easy, To share that. in an interactive way, with a deep link that you send to your provider and say "just look and see" and you can see that it's having issues. >> So get the evidence escalated, that's the goal as fast as possible? >> Right so then your time, like your mean time to repair now in the cloud is dependent on mean time to effective escalation. Right? >> Who are some of your customers? >> So, we have our kind of foundational customers. We have 20 of the top 25 SAAS companies in the world, as our customers. We have five of the top six US banks, four of the five top UK banks. 100 plus of global two thousand and growing fast. A lot of verticals, I would say enterprise I started with financials not surprisingly. But now we see heavy manufacturing, and telecom and oil and gas and all that. >> What's going on here at Cisco Live? What's your relationship with Cisco? >> So with Cisco we have a number of integration points, we have our enterprise agents. We have these could agents pre deployed, same software as what we call the enterprise agent. That's been certified as an VNF or as container deployments, on a variety of Cisco Adriatic platforms. So that's kind of our integration point. where we can add value and visibility from those you know, branch or data center or other places you know out to the cloud or outside in as well. >> And who's your buyer, typically? >> So I would say a couple of years ago we would be very network central. But now because of the change in IT, and our crossover into the largest enterprises we find that now it's the app owners. It's the folks who are rolling out sales force to forty thousand people and their adopting lighting. Right? You know or they're putting Office 365 out, and they're dealing with the complexities of a CDM based service or a centralized service like SharePoint. So we're seeing those kind of buyers emerge, along with the classic IT operations and network buyers. >> So it only gets better for you, as more API centric systems get out there. Because as its more moving parts, its basically an operating system. And you look at it wholistically, and you got to understand the IO if you will? >> Right. The microservices way of doing everything, means that when you click something or you interact with something as a user. There are probably 20 things happening at a back end, at least half of which are going off across the internet. And all of them have to work flawlessly. Right? For me to get that experience that I'm expecting. Whether I'm trying to buy something or, just get something done. >> What's your secret sauce in the application? >> So I'd say our secret sauce comes down to a couple really key things. One is the data that we generate. We have a unique data center from all these vantage points that we have now. That's what allows us to do this collective intelligence. No body else has that data. And an example we did a study, a couple studies last year. Major resource studies using our platform to look at public cloud performance from the internet within regions. Inter regions, and between clouds. And we found some really interesting phenomenon. And no body else had ever published that before. A lot of assumptions, a lot of inter-claims, we where actually able to show with data, exactly how this stuff performs. >> I'm sorry, you guys have published that? Where can we find that? >> Yeah, so we have that published, we also did another major report on DNS. >> Is that on your website? >> It's on our website, so definitely something to check out. >> Alright, Alex well thanks for coming on, give the quick plug, what's up for you guys? Hiring? What's new? Give the quick two cents. >> So here in Europe we're scaling up, hiring a lot and expanding across Europe. We have major offices in London and Dublin, so that's a big deal. And I think in this next year you'll see some bigger topped out ways that we can help folks understand. Not just how the internet is effecting them, but more of like the unknown of unknowns of internet behavior. So there's going to be some exciting things coming down the pipe. >> Well we need a thousand eyes on all the instrumentation as things become more instrumented having that data centric data. is it going to help feed machine learning? And again its just the beginning of more and more complexity being abstracted away by software on network Programmability. theCUBE bringing you The Data Here from Barcelona, for Cisco Live! Europe 2019 stay with us for more day 2 coverage after the short break. I'm Jeff Furrier here with Dave Vellante, thanks for watching. ( upbeat music )
SUMMARY :
Brought to you by Cisco and It's the Cube's three days So talk about what you guys so that all the things that IT the way that we gather this deliver the digital on the stuff that you the ecosystem is growing the whole things completely Well, the way we see it Because of the SAAS cloud, So you go to what we call Shift to the internet So the way that we deal with that is, is the everlasting war room the whole point is to Dozens of HOPS across the internet. a drop in the responsiveness So there's two things To say okay hey we've got an outage, I mean that's one of the sort Right. So the question is on AI. How do you solve the So the way we deal with that. repair now in the cloud We have 20 of the top 25 call the enterprise agent. But now because of the change in IT, the IO if you will? And all of them have to One is the data that we generate. Yeah, so we have that published, definitely something to check out. the quick two cents. but more of like the unknown of unknowns And again its just the beginning
SENTIMENT ANALYSIS :
ENTITIES
Entity | Category | Confidence |
---|---|---|
Cisco | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Stu Miniman | PERSON | 0.99+ |
London | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
Europe | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
five | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
John Furrier | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Dave Vellante | PERSON | 0.99+ |
20 | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Jeff Furrier | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Amazon | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Dublin | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
Microsoft | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
four | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
UK | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
100 cities | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Alex Henthorn-Iwane | PERSON | 0.99+ |
20 things | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Alex | PERSON | 0.99+ |
two things | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Office 365 | TITLE | 0.99+ |
Barcelona | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
Braintree | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
last year | DATE | 0.99+ |
Alex Henthorn | PERSON | 0.99+ |
forty thousand people | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ | |
Barcelona, Spain | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
two cents | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
Thousand Eyes | ORGANIZATION | 0.98+ |
SharePoint | TITLE | 0.98+ |
three days | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
1 URL | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
SUN | ORGANIZATION | 0.98+ |
day two | QUANTITY | 0.97+ |
SAAS | TITLE | 0.97+ |
One | QUANTITY | 0.96+ |
2019 | DATE | 0.96+ |
100 plus | QUANTITY | 0.96+ |
two thousand | QUANTITY | 0.96+ |
one | QUANTITY | 0.95+ |
first | QUANTITY | 0.95+ |
next year | DATE | 0.94+ |
thousand eyes | QUANTITY | 0.94+ |
each persona | QUANTITY | 0.94+ |
Dozens of HOPS | QUANTITY | 0.94+ |
Cisco Live | EVENT | 0.93+ |
Hyperflex | ORGANIZATION | 0.92+ |
First | QUANTITY | 0.91+ |
Cisco Live | ORGANIZATION | 0.91+ |
ACI | ORGANIZATION | 0.91+ |
US | LOCATION | 0.9+ |
day 2 | QUANTITY | 0.87+ |
Cisco Live | EVENT | 0.86+ |
theCUBE | ORGANIZATION | 0.86+ |
a couple of years ago | DATE | 0.83+ |
Cisco Adriatic | ORGANIZATION | 0.82+ |
couple studies | QUANTITY | 0.81+ |
thousand eyes | QUANTITY | 0.78+ |
Cisco Live! Europe 2019 | EVENT | 0.76+ |
a ton of data | QUANTITY | 0.76+ |
couple | QUANTITY | 0.72+ |
five top | QUANTITY | 0.69+ |
D DOS | TITLE | 0.68+ |
Saas Solutions | ORGANIZATION | 0.68+ |
ThousandEyes | ORGANIZATION | 0.65+ |
Iwane | PERSON | 0.65+ |
Cisco Live EU 2019 | EVENT | 0.64+ |
six | QUANTITY | 0.61+ |
25 SAAS companies | QUANTITY | 0.6+ |
top | QUANTITY | 0.56+ |
half | QUANTITY | 0.55+ |
Saas | ORGANIZATION | 0.53+ |
ton | QUANTITY | 0.45+ |
Aaron Kalb, Alation | CUBEConversation, January 2019
>> Hello everyone. Welcome to this Cube conversation here in Palo Alto. On John Furrier, co host of the Cube. I'm here. Aaron Kalb is the co founder and VP of design and Alation. Great to see them on some fresh funding news. Aaron, Thanks for coming. And spend the time. Good to see you again. >> Good to see you, John. Thanks for having me >> So big news. You guys got a very big round of financing because you go to the next level. A startup. Certainly coming out that start up phase and growth phase super exciting news. You guys doing some very innovative things around, date around community around people and really kind of cracking the code on this humanization democratization of data, but actually helping businesses. I want to talk about it with you. First. Give us the update on the financing, the amount what it means to the company. A lot of cash. >> Yeah. So we're very excited to have raised a fifty million dollar round. Sapphire led the round, and we also had, you know, re ups from all of our existing investors. And, you know, as as a co founder, he always had big dreams for growth. And it's just validating tohave. Ah, a community of investors who can see the future, too, as well as our great community of over one hundred customers now who want to build this data democratized future with us. >> We've been following you guys since the founding obviously watching you guys great use of capital. Fifty million's a lot of capital, so obviously validation check. Good, good job. But now you go to a whole other level growth. What's the capital gonna be deployed for? What's going on with company where you guys I and in terms of innovation, what's the key focus? >> It's a great question. So you know, obviously we have revenue from our customers. But getting this extra infusion from VC lets us just supercharge our development. It's growth. It's going to more customers, both domestically and abroad, goingto a broader user base. And we're Enterprise-wide Adoption within those customers, as well as innovation in the core product, new technology, great design and futures. that are really going to change the organization's access and use data to make better decisions? >> What was the key Learnings As you guys went into this round of funding outside the validation to get through due diligence, all that good stuff. But you guys have made some successful milestones. What was the key? Notable accomplishments that Alation hit to kind of hit this trigger point here for the fifty million? >> Yeah, I'm glad you asked about that. I think that the key thing that's changed it's enabled this. This next phase is that the data catalog market has really come into its own right. In the beginning, in the early days, we were knocking on doors, trying to say, You know, we don't even know it was going to be called data catalog in our first few months. And even though we had the technology, we said, Hey, we got this thing and we know it's useful. Please buy it. Please want it. And the question was, you know, what's the data catalog by what I ever even look at that? And it's just turned a corner. Now, you know, Thanks. In part of things like Gartner telling companies you know, in the next year by twenty twenty, if you have a data catalog, you're goingto see twice the ROI from your existing data investments than if you don't your stories like that are making companies say? Of course, you want to data catalog. It just turned out a dime. Now they're asking, Which data catalog should we get? Why is yours the best in this change of the market maturing? I think it's the biggest change we've seen >> with one thing that we've observed. I want to get your reaction to This is that I'll stay with cloud computing economics, a phenomenally C scale data data science working the cloud. We see great success there. Now there's multiple clouds, multi clouds, a big trend, but also the validation that it's not just all cloud anymore. The on premises activity steel is relevant, although it might have a cloud. Operations really kind of changes the role of data. You mentioned the data catalogue kind of being kind of having a common mainstream visibility from the analysts like Gardner and others on Wiki Bond as well. It makes data the center of the innovation. Now you have data challenges around. Okay, where's the data deployed? Where my using the data? Because data scientists want ease of data, they want quality data. They want to make sure their their algorithm, whether it's machine learning component or software actually running a good data. So data effectiveness is now part of the operations of most businesses. What's your reaction to that? Which your thoughts. Is that how you see it? Is there something different there? What's going on with the whole date at the center? >> Absolutely hit on two key themes for us. One of that idea of the center and the other is your point about data quality and data trust. So, so centrality, we think, is really essential. You know, we're seeing cataloging technology crop up more and more. A lot of people were coming out with catalogs or catalog kind of add ons to their products. But what our customers really tell us is they want the data catalog to be the hub, that one stop shop where they go to to access any data, wherever it lives, whether it's in the cloud or on Prem, whether it's in a relational database or a file system, so is one of Alations key. Differentiators early on was being that central index, much like Google is out of the front page to the Internet, even though it's linking to ad pages all over the place. And the other thing in terms of that data quality and data trustworthiness has been a differentiator, and this was something that was part of our technology when we launched that we didn't put the label out till later. Is this idea of Behavior IO, that's kind of looking at previous human behavior to influence future human behavior to be better. And there's another place we really took some inspiration from Google and Terry Winograd at Stanford before that, you know, he observed. You know, if you remember back before Google search sucked, frankly, right, the results on top are not the most development were not the most trustworthy. And the reason was those algorithms were based on saying, how often does your key word appear in that website? Built, in other words, and so you'd get results on top. That might just not be very good. Or even that were created by spammers who put in a lot of words to get SEO and and, you know, that isn't the best result for you on what Google did was turned that around with page rank and say, Let's use the signals that other people are getting behind about the pages they find valuable to get the best result on top. And Alation is the exact same thing our patented proprietary behavior technology lets us say Who's using this data? How were they using it? Is it reputable? And that enables us to get the right data and transfer the data in front of decision makers. >> And you call that Behavioral IO >> Behavior IO, that's right. >> I mean, certainly remember Google algorithmic search was pooh poohed. It first had to be a portal. Everyone kind of my age. You can't remember those those days and the results were key word stuff by spammer's. But algorithmic search accelerated the quality. So I got to ask you the behavioral Io to kind of impact a little bit. Go a little deeper. What does that mean for customers? Because now I'll see as people start thinking, OK, I need to catalogue my data because now I need to have replication, all kinds of least technical things that are going on around integrity of the data. But why Behavioral Aya? What's the angle on that? What's the impact of the customer? Why is this important? Absolutely so. >> Might have to work through an example, you know we joke about. You might be looking around in your SharePoint drive and find an Excel file called Q three Numbers final. Underscore final. Okay, that seems that'S inject the final numbers, and then you see next to it when it says underscore final underscore, final underscore finalist. Okay, well, is that one final? And it turns out what Data says about itself is less reliable than what other people say about the data. Same thing with Google that if everyone's linking with Wikipedia Page, that's a more reliable page than one that just has, you know, paid for a higher placement, Right? So what a means an organization is with Alation will tell you. You know, this is the data table that was refreshed yesterday and that the CFO and everybody in this department is using every day. That's a really strong signal. That's trustworthy data, as opposed to something that was only used once a year ago. >> So relevance is key there. >> Absolutely. It's relevant. And trustworthiness. We find both all right, indicated more strongly by who's using it and how than by the data itself. >> Are you seeing adoption with data scientist and people who were wrangling date or data analysts that if the date is not high quality, they abandoned. The usage is they're getting kind of stats around that are because that we're hearing a lot of Hey, you know, that I'm not going to really work on the data. But I'm not going to do all the heavy lifting on the front end the data qualities, not there. >> Absolutely. We see a really cool upward spiral. So in Alation, we have a mix of manual, human curated metadata, you know, data stewards and that a curator saying, this is endorsed data. It's a certified data. This is applicable for this context. But we also do this automatic behavior. Io. We parse the query logs. These logs were, you know, put there for audit on debugging purposes. But we were mining that for behavioral insight, and we'll show them side by side on what we see is overtime on day one. There's no manual curation. But as that curation gets added in, we see a strong correlation between the best highest quality data and the most used data. And we also see an upward spiral where, if on day one. People are using data that isn't trustworthy that stale or miscalculated as soon as Ah, an Alation steward slaps a deprecation or a warning on the data asset because of technology like trust check talking about last time I was here, that technology, that's the O part of behavior IO We then stop the future behavior from being on bad data, and we see an upward spiral where suddenly the bad sata is no longer being used and everyone's guided put the pound. >> One thing I'm really impressed with you guys on is you have a great management team and overall team with mixed disciplines. Okay, I think last night about your role, Stanford and the human side of the world. But you have to search analogy, which is interesting because you have search folks. You got hardcore data data geeks all working together. And if you think about Discovery and navigation, which is the Google parent, I need to find a Web page and go, Go, go to it. You guys were in that same business of helping people discover data and act on it or take action. Same kind of paradigm, so explain some customer impact anecdotes. People who bought Alation, what your service and offering and what happened after and what was it like before? We talk about some of that? And because I think you're onto something pretty big here with this discovery. Actionable data perspective. >> Yeah, well, one of our values, it Alation, is that we measure our success through customer impact, you know, not do financing or other other milestones that we are excited about them. So I I would love to talk about our customers. One example of a business impact is an example that our champion at Safeway Albertsons describes where, after safe, it was acquired by Albertson's. They've been sort of pioneers of sort of digital, ah, loyalty and engagement. And there was a move to kind of stop that in its tracks and switch should just mailing people big books of coupons that of customizing, you know, deals for you based on your buying behavior. And they talked about getting a thirty x ROI on the dollars they've spent on Alation by basically proving the value of their program and kind of maximizing their relationship with their customers. But the stories they're even more exciting to me, then just business impacts in dollars and cents when we can leave a positive impact on people's lives with data. There's a few examples of that Munich reinsurance, the biggest being sure and also a primary ensure in Europe, had some coverage and Forbes about the way that they use Alation, other data tools to be able to help people get back on their feet more quickly after, ah, earthquakes and other natural disasters. And similarly, there's a piece in The Wall Street Journal about how Pfizer is able to create diagnostics and treatments for rare diseases where it wouldn't have been a good ROI even invest in those if they didn't get that increased efficient CNN analytics from Alation on the other data. >> So it's not just one little vertical. It's kind of mean data is horizontally. Scaleable is not like one. Industry is going to leverage Alation, >> Absolutely so you know, I mentioned just now. Insurance and health care and retail were also in tech were in basically every vertical you can imagine and even multiple sectors. You know, I've been focusing on industry, but there's another case that you can read about at the city of San Diego were there. They're doing an open data initiative, enabling people to figure out everything from where parking is easiest, the hardest to anything else. >> The behavioral Io. And it's all about context and behavior, role of data and all this. It's kind of fundamental to businesses. >> That's right. It's all about taking everything about how people using data today and driving people to be even more data driven, more accurate, better able to satisfy their curiosity and be more rational in >> the future. So if I'm a from a potential customer and I heard a rAlation, get the buzz out there, why would I need you? What air? Some signals that would indicate that I should call Alation. What's some of that Corvette? What's the pitch? >> Yeah, it's a great question. No, I sometimes joke with the team that you know every five minutes another enterprise reaches that point where they can't do it the old way anymore. And the needle ations. And the reason for that is that data is growing exponentially and people can only grow at most, you know, linearly. So I compare it a bit again to the days of of Yahoo When the Internet was small, you make a table of contents for it. But as there came to be trillions of red pages, you needed an automatic index with pay drink to make sense of it. So I would say, once you find that your analytics team has spread out and they're spending, you know eighty percent of their time calling up other people to find where development data is, you're asked to Your point is this data high quality show even spend my time on it? You know that's probably not money is well spent with these highly paid people spending other times scrounging If you switch from scrounging to finding understanding and trusting their data for quick and accurate analysis, give us >> a call. So basically the pitches, if you want to be like Yahoo, do it the old way. We know what happened. Yeah, you want to be like Google, two algorithmic and have data >> God rAlation, and you'll be around for a while very well. After that, maybe the one see that that's my words. >> And and that's part of turning that corner. I think in the beginning we were trying to tell people this could be a nice toe have. And now customers are coming to us realizing it's a must have to stay a relevant, you know, And if you've made all these investments in data infrastructure and data people, but you can't connect the dots is you said, between the human side and the tech side that money's all wasted and you're going to not be able to compete against your competitors and impact of customers what you want. >> Well, Eric, congratulations. Certainly is the co founder. It's great success. And how hard is that you start ups? You guys worked hard and again. Why following you guys? Been interesting to see that growth and this innovation involved in creative, A lot of energy. You guys do a good job. So final question, talk about the secret sauce of Alation. What's the key innovation formula? And now that you got the funding where you're going to double down on, where's the innovation going to come next? So the innovation formula and where the innovation, the future, >> absolutely innovation has been critical for us to get here on our customers didn't just buy the exciting features with behavioral and trust. Check that we had but also are buying into the idea that we're going to continue to be the leaders and to innovate. Andi, we're going to do that. So I think the secret sauce which we've had in the past, we're going to continue to innovate in this vein, is to be really conscious of water computers great at and what humans uniquely good at what you humans like doing and trying to have the human and computers work together to really help the human achieve their goals. Right? So, Doctor, the Google example. You know, there's a bunch of systems for collaboratively ranking things, but it takes work to, you know, write a review on the upper Amazon. Google had the insight that we could leverage people are already doing and make it about it. Out of that, we're going to continue to do that. >> The other kind of innovation you'll see is bringing Alation to a wider and wider audience, with less and less technical skill needed. So I came from Syria Apple, and the idea is you have to learn a programming language to Queria database. You could just speak in English. That helps you ask answer questions like What's the weather today? Imagine taking that same kind of experience of seamless integration to the more important questions enterprises are asking. >> We'll have to tap your expertise is we want to have an app called the Cube Syria, which is a cube. What's the innovation in Silicon Valley and have it just spit out a video on the kidding? Final question just to double down on that piece, because I think the human interactions a big part of what you're saying I've always loved that about with your vision is. But this points to a major problems. Seeing whether it's, you know, media, the news cycle These days, people are challenging the efficacy of finding the research and the real deep research on the media. So I was seeing scale on data scale is a huge challenge. You mentioned the growth of data. Computers can scale things, but the knowledge and the curation kind of dynamic of packaging it, finding it, acting on it. It's kind of where you guys are hitting. Talk about that tie name, my getting that right and set is that important? Because, you know, certainly scale is table stakes these days. >> That is super insightful John, because I think human cognition and human thought excuse me, is the bottleneck four being data driven right we have on the Internet trillions of Web pages, you know, more than the Library of Alexandria a hundred times over, and we have in databases millions of columns and trillions of rose. But for that to actually impact the business and impact the world in a positive way, it's got to go through a person who could understand it. And so, in the same way that Google became the mechanism by which the Internet becomes accessible, we think that Alation for organizations is becoming the way that data can become actionable. And the other thing I would say is, you know, in this age of alternative facts and mistrust of data, you know, we've sort of realizing the just having more information out there doesn't actually make people wiser and better able to reason. It can actually be a lot of noise that muddies the signal and confuses people. So we think Alation by also using human computer interaction to help separate the signal from the noise and the quality from the garbage can help stop the garbage in garbage out and make people more rational and more curious and have more trust than what there. Hearing understanding >> build that Paige rang kind of metaphor is interesting because the human gestures, whether it's work or engaging on the data, is a signal tube, not just algorithmic meta data extraction. >> Absolutely anything you do with data and any tool, even outside of Alation. Alation will capture that and use it to guide future behavior for you and your appears to be better and smarter. >> Fifty million dollars. Where's this all going to lead to wins the next innovation. What do you guys see? The future for rAlation? >> Well, you know, I, uh I was just thinking before the show I used to be an apple kind of in the golden Age when Apple was really innovative. And there was the joke where they released something new and say, Redman, start your photocopier. So in this interview, I'm going to be a little close to the chest about the specifics, but we're releasing. But I will tell you we have a room that we're really excited about to go to a broader and broader audience that impactor customers more fully >> well you feel free to say one more thing? >> Yeah. I think the secret to the future is Aaron. Thanks for coming on. >> Really preachy. Congratulations on the funding. He has got a very innovative formula. Good luck. And we'll be following you guys. Thanks, but come on, keep commerce. Thanks so much. Eric Kalb, co founder and VP of designing Alation. Interesting formula. Great. Successful. Former great innovation. Alation. Check him out. I'm Jennifer here in Palo Alto for cube conversation. Thanks for watching.
SUMMARY :
Good to see you again. Good to see you, of cracking the code on this humanization democratization of data, but actually helping businesses. and we also had, you know, re ups from all of our existing investors. been following you guys since the founding obviously watching you guys great use of capital. So you know, obviously we have revenue from our customers. What was the key Learnings As you guys went into this round of funding outside the validation to get through due diligence, And the question was, you know, what's the data catalog by what I ever even look at that? Is that how you see it? One of that idea of the center and the other is your point So I got to ask you the behavioral Io Okay, that seems that'S inject the final numbers, and then you see next to it when it says underscore And trustworthiness. a lot of Hey, you know, that I'm not going to really work on the data. we have a mix of manual, human curated metadata, you know, One thing I'm really impressed with you guys on is you have a great management team and overall team with mixed disciplines. you know, deals for you based on your buying behavior. Industry is going to leverage Alation, the hardest to anything else. It's kind of fundamental to businesses. more data driven, more accurate, better able to satisfy their curiosity and be more rational So if I'm a from a potential customer and I heard a rAlation, get the buzz out there, the days of of Yahoo When the Internet was small, you make a table of contents for it. So basically the pitches, if you want to be like Yahoo, do it the old way. maybe the one see that that's my words. And now customers are coming to us realizing it's a must have to stay a relevant, you know, And now that you got the funding where you're going to double down on, where's the innovation going to come next? things, but it takes work to, you know, write a review on the upper Amazon. and the idea is you have to learn a programming language to Queria database. It's kind of where you guys are hitting. And the other thing I would say is, you know, in this age of alternative facts build that Paige rang kind of metaphor is interesting because the human gestures, whether it's work or Alation will capture that and use it to guide future behavior for you and your appears to be better and smarter. What do you guys see? But I will tell you we have a room that we're really excited about to go to a broader and broader Thanks for coming on. And we'll be following you guys.
SENTIMENT ANALYSIS :
ENTITIES
Entity | Category | Confidence |
---|---|---|
Eric | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Eric Kalb | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Aaron Kalb | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Jennifer | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Aaron | PERSON | 0.99+ |
John | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Pfizer | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Palo Alto | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
Europe | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
Yahoo | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Terry Winograd | PERSON | 0.99+ |
January 2019 | DATE | 0.99+ |
ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ | |
Amazon | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
CNN | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
San Diego | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
fifty million | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Silicon Valley | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
Fifty million dollars | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Apple | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Fifty million | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Gartner | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Gardner | PERSON | 0.99+ |
yesterday | DATE | 0.99+ |
First | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Excel | TITLE | 0.99+ |
Safeway Albertsons | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
eighty percent | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
twice | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Alation | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
One | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
thirty | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
both | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
Alation | PERSON | 0.98+ |
Stanford | ORGANIZATION | 0.98+ |
Library of Alexandria | ORGANIZATION | 0.98+ |
John Furrier | PERSON | 0.98+ |
next year | DATE | 0.98+ |
first | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
today | DATE | 0.98+ |
millions of columns | QUANTITY | 0.97+ |
over one hundred customers | QUANTITY | 0.97+ |
one thing | QUANTITY | 0.97+ |
two | QUANTITY | 0.97+ |
trillions of red pages | QUANTITY | 0.97+ |
Albertson | ORGANIZATION | 0.97+ |
one | QUANTITY | 0.96+ |
Alations | ORGANIZATION | 0.96+ |
two key themes | QUANTITY | 0.95+ |
Redman | PERSON | 0.95+ |
trillions of rose | QUANTITY | 0.95+ |
Forbes | ORGANIZATION | 0.95+ |
apple | ORGANIZATION | 0.95+ |
The Wall Street Journal | TITLE | 0.94+ |
Cube | ORGANIZATION | 0.94+ |
last night | DATE | 0.93+ |
Syria | LOCATION | 0.93+ |
fifty million dollar | QUANTITY | 0.92+ |
twenty twenty | QUANTITY | 0.91+ |
trillions of Web pages | QUANTITY | 0.91+ |
English | OTHER | 0.91+ |
Syria | COMMERCIAL_ITEM | 0.9+ |
Wikipedia | ORGANIZATION | 0.89+ |
first few months | QUANTITY | 0.89+ |
day one | QUANTITY | 0.89+ |
Sapphire | ORGANIZATION | 0.88+ |
day one | QUANTITY | 0.87+ |
a year ago | DATE | 0.86+ |
One thing | QUANTITY | 0.86+ |
Corvette | COMMERCIAL_ITEM | 0.83+ |
Michael Smith, HKS | Microsoft Ignite 2018
>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by Cohesity and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite, I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my cohost Stu Miniman. We're joined by Michael Smith, he is the director of infrastructure at HKS, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Hey thanks for having me, excited to be here. >> So Mike, HKS, tell us, you're based in Dallas you're an architecture firm, tell us about some of the big projects that you have worked on. >> Sure, yeah, so I've been with the firm since April. Really excited to get on board and really kind of understand the rich history, we actually turn 80 this year so we'll have a really big celebration of the company. So yeah, HKS, we do a lot of sports entertainment so Dallas Cowboys, AT&T stadium, the Vikings home, L.A. Rams, so about 30% of our mix is sports entertainment so you may not know the company but you certainly know the buildings we design. >> Some well known buildings, exactly. >> Actually when you talk an 80 year old firm, and I think of those two buildings, well I'm a techie, I'm a geek, there's a lot of technology that goes into that. I'd love just a viewpoint as to how the company looks because 80 years ago I'm sure they didn't have the tech people in there, design is very much there, how does that you know the culture and inside the company a little bit? >> Sure, yeah so that's really the neat thing right, so everyone thinks that it's a company full of architects right and for the most part it is, but we have nurses on staff right, why? Because we build hospitals. We have people that understand how buildings work. So part of our five stakeholders, the community, is actually one of those stakeholders. So we're not just listening to the client who's asking us how to build it, we're seeing how that building is going to fit into the community, into its surroundings, and how it's really going to interoperate right cause these buildings are going to be around for what, you know 10, 15, 20 years until the next one gets built. >> So what are you doing here at this conference? What are the kinds of people you want to meet, the kind of connections you want to make? >> Sure, yeah, so first off I made some great connections. And that's one of the things I love about coming to things like Ignite. This is my first time here but I've loved it. I tell ya I really enjoy hearing people and hearing about the same challenges that I'm facing and then there's understanding how they're using the various pieces of technology to kind of piece that together. >> Alright so Mike, you're director of infrastructure, so we know infrastructure well, it is our first time at this show but we have been doing infrastructure shows for many years, maybe give us a little bit about your background and what's under your domain at HKS? >> Sure, yeah, so yeah I've worked for the last 20 years mainly for architectural engineering firms right, and so and there's a lot to be said for understanding the specific industry that you're working in right, so obviously it's not just about Word documents and Excel files, you're talking about very large CAD files and having to traverse from office to office right, and so you have to have a very robust infrastructure. So I've got basically the entire networking servers, WAN, LAN, Internet, VoIP, oh yeah and I've got cyber security under my profile as well. We run a small shop at HKS, but yeah so the company's doing really really well and we've got 24 offices globally, 19 here in the US and like I said we manage that really a 24/7 shop. >> Alright so you've got a number of locations, when we talked to infrastructure people the role of data and how do I manage it, how do I do things like disaster recovery and like usually are pretty important, how is it in your world? >> Yeah so obviously disaster recovery, to me that's the backbone of IT right, specifically of my group, and if we can't do that right, if we can't do a data protection correctly then to me we really shouldn't be working on any other project. And that's really where Cohesity comes into the equation right, so when I came on board we had a legacy solution, it was working right, it just and talking with the business really partnering and understanding what their expectations were, we realize that there were some gaps. And ended up talking to Cohesity through a vendor did an amazing whiteboarding session with just some folks that I really felt like cared about and understood our business and then yeah so we've been I guess since about mid-July, we've been implemented on our Cohesity solution for data protection globally, we're about 75% of the way there in what, just a month and a half? So from a speed of implementation standpoint right. But we've really made some leaps and bounds, gains and kind of those requirements that our customers are asking of us and kind of returning, you know basically returning them back to work. >> Yeah, can you paint a little picture of kind of the before and after for us? >> Sure yeah so we've always had a cloud strategy, so we've been partnered with Microsoft for several years, great Office 365, we've used Azure for backup, but I wouldn't say that it was really an optimized solution. And so if we had an actual outage, what we were talking about is you know a fairly long time to pull those resources back down to on-prem and so what we've implemented with our Cohesity solution is basically a system now where when our customers come in and 95% of the time they can get their files back on the phone with the first level technician. So before I was going to a third level sysadmin, basically requiring them to stop what they're doing, work on their restore right, and in some instances it may have been a day before we returned that customer back to work so if you can think about the ability to really just return them back into their normal work process, almost instantaneously, I mean the RTO is really incalculable when you start talking about soft dollars like that. >> Talk about, you mentioned how coming here you talked with lot of people in your industry or people maybe not even in your industry, but you realize you all share similar challenges, and you just talked about the disaster recovery and how that can really keep you up at night. Can you talk about a few of the other problems and challenges that you encounter and how Cohesity has helped you? >> Sure, yeah, so you know I think obviously in the forefront of everybody's mind is security right, and the fact that I have security within my group so understanding that in the topics of data in motion, data in rest right, topics of encryption so you know all of our data as it's pulled into Cohesity is encrypted and so obviously and then as that sits in Azure that's encrypted so that transaction is secure. You know I think the overall management of the infrastructure really having that single pane of glass that Cohesity can offer, that was huge challenge when I came onboard because the solution that we were using was really meant for file replication and so in order to find out if something worked we had to go to 81 disparate sources to see if that worked right. And so today I can come in in the morning, I got a guy that starts at 6 a.m. God bless him, and by the time I get in anything that happened overnight is completely remediated, I can look at one single pane of glass, I can see a bunch of green and honestly if there's red I can see it and I know that something failed and I can pinpoint exactly what we need to do to fix it. >> Mike you said you were about 75% of the way deployed. Walk us through where you're going with it, what you've been learning along the way, and any lessons learned along the way that you could share with your peers, as to how the experience has been, what they might want to do to optimize things. >> Sure, yeah, so I think we're about 75% of the way, we've got a lot of our international sites that are coming onboard now, we're learning a lot about our network. We're learning a lot about different things and so I would say before you do an implementation of this size, really make sure that you have a good handle on patching. Making sure that all of your resources are patched. The last thing you want to do is find out you have a resource problem with slow latency and it's due to a patch not being applied right. And then just understanding you know the time frames involved right? So we've targeted about 75 days to get fully onboard but we're talking almost a petabyte of data across one gigabit connectivity right, and so when you start talking about that there's lot of, we're doing a lot of mix and mashing, bandwidth throttling and all that kind of fun stuff in order to get up and running. >> Yeah so I'm kind of laughing a little bit over here because it's been a punchline in the Microsoft community, it's like oh well you know is it patch Tuesday yet or things like that. We've come so far yet there's still some things that hold us back, that leads me to my next question is you know what's exciting you in the industry in tech and your job, what's working great and what on the other hand are you asking your vendors, what would make your job and your group's job even better whether that be Cohesity, Microsoft, or others? >> Yeah so I think as a company that, we have a lot of data right, and at first as the role of the person responsible for that data, you know it was oh my gosh we have a lot of data. And it was actually a couple of months ago, something clicked in my head and I said, we have a lot of data. (hosts laughing) And guess what? We can do analytics on that data. And so you know I think machine learning is going to be huge right. I think being able to do a lot of those tasks that we count on, you know I have people that are doing things two to three times a week, maybe between eight and five. Well those are things that with machine learning we can have those algorithms basically running 24/7 and so we can start making leaps and bounds progress over what we're doing today. HKS is really big into understanding what the value add is in building a building right? It's not just about the architecture. There's value to that, and so what other value items can we provide to our customers that because you know to be honest technology is becoming a commodity right? How much longer before core services like your architecture and your engineering start to become commodities? And so that's really where I think analyzing that data. And so I was at VMworld a few weeks ago and I was talking to a Cohesity engineer and I really expected him, I said what's next on the road map from data analytics? And I expected to hear x, y, and z. And he looked at me and he goes, What do you want to see next? What do you want to do with your data? Let's partner with you and make that happen right. Now I'm smart enough to go, I don't know what that next thing is but we have really smart PhD-type people that do so we're really looking forward to that next phase. >> I'm interested in teams because you talked about the very diverse employee base at HKS. You said you've got nurses on the team, I'm imagining you have hospitality experts, you've got the PhD types, you've got the science people, and the architects. So how do you get all these people with very different functional expertise to work together and pull together and all be on the same page? >> That's actually a great question. So interestingly enough, I sit right next to a librarian and she's in IT right, and they work in our Global Knowledge Management group which does SharePoint so who better to understand how to start to classify and organize information than someone who's a trained librarian right? So I think what we're really excited about is our IT team has really been really rebuilt say over the last two years and it's been rebuilt with people who have a real passion for their industry but also kind of a broad understanding of how everything interconnects and so we're really kind of building a culture that says if there's information there, it's shareable. We're not holding anything close to the vest. If you want to understand, if I use too many acronyms when I talk, then ask me what they are right. And so I think that right there, that fosters a lot more involvement and people give more of themselves incrementally when they understand that hey there's skin in the game and yes I'm a librarian and I may not know the technological things that you do, but if I say well hey what if we do it this way, we're not just going to blow that idea off and we're going to actually incorporate that into the greater solution. >> Great, Mike we talk a lot about AI at the show and IoT and you're doing buildings, I'm curious how things like all the censors and everything impact what you're doing, how you partner with your clients on that. >> Sure, yeah, so we've got a great team that really focuses on that entire extended set of technologies so obviously drone technologies, sensor technologies, and so I think a lot of those, those are I won't even say that they are even forward looking anymore. Those are, especially sensor technology, so I mean I've worked in environments where we had 24 by seven cameras on a job site so general contractor probably hates it but a PM from anywhere in the world can look at his project, his or her project, and they can see their progress right? Well you know then at what point does that extend to, well I'm going to launch a drone here and I'm going to go look at a very specific piece and a very part of that technology. And so yeah I think it's one of those things if you ever start sitting on your laurels in IT, if your feet ever get off of the toes moving forward, you're already behind. So you know I think things like AI, machine learning, you know I've talked to some people that'll go, well we're two to three years away from that. And I said, in two to three years those will be things of the past right? You have to, you don't have to be bleeding edge, but you have to understand where you can leverage those technologies for your business. >> Give us a little candy here. Paint a picture of what the building of the future is, whether it's the stadium of the future, the hotel of the future, just get us excited here. What are some of the things >> Sure yeah. that you're looking at? >> So I actually talked to a gentleman a couple weeks back and they're building a hotel and this hotel has Bluetooth sensors in the room right, can't do any kind of cameras or anything like that but basically what it can do is based upon the signal saturation of the Bluetooth, it can tell you how many people are in that room cause it understands the dissipation of the signal through the normal human body right. So take that down to your typical occupancy sensor that so you leave the room, maybe you're sleeping late, well the room doesn't think anybody's in there so it turns the temperature up, turns the lights on, does whatever it does right. Well with this new technology it can't do that. So fast forward on and maybe it's a little bit more scary. So now you go from your room and you walk down to the lobby bar, you walk past the lobby bar. Well the wireless devices know the MAC address of your phone because you used that number when you checked in, so as you get close it pops you a hey, you want to 15% or how much do you want to free drink at the bar if you come in here? So I think understanding the connectiveness of everything and then really not being afraid of it. There is a Big Brother aspect to all of this, but just kind of understanding that you know, kind of in the Elon Musk vein is that we have to understand and we have to control where that technology is going but I think if you're afraid of it like that and you know, I'm not going to, I'm never going to stay at that hotel because of the things that they do, then I think you're missing out. >> Right, exactly. Well thank you so much Mike, it's been a pleasure having you on the show. >> Thank you so much >> A lot of fun talking to you. I appreciate the opportunity. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman, we will have more from Microsoft Ignite here in Orlando, Florida coming up just after this. (light techno music)
SUMMARY :
Brought to you by Cohesity and theCUBE's he is the director of me, excited to be here. that you have worked on. so you may not know the company and inside the company a little bit? you know 10, 15, 20 years and hearing about the same challenges and so you have to have a of the way there in what, back to work so if you can and challenges that you encounter and so in order to find out and any lessons learned along the way that and so when you start talking it's like oh well you know And so you know I think machine learning So how do you get all these people and I may not know the lot about AI at the show So you know I think things building of the future is, that you're looking at? of it like that and you Well thank you so much Mike, A lot of fun talking to you. we will have more from Microsoft Ignite
SENTIMENT ANALYSIS :
ENTITIES
Entity | Category | Confidence |
---|---|---|
Michael Smith | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Rebecca Knight | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Microsoft | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Mike | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Dallas | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
24 | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
15% | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
95% | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
two | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
10 | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
24 offices | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
today | DATE | 0.99+ |
6 a.m. | DATE | 0.99+ |
three years | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
15 | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
five stakeholders | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Excel | TITLE | 0.99+ |
Word | TITLE | 0.99+ |
Orlando, Florida | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
Stu Miniman | PERSON | 0.99+ |
VMworld | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
HKS | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
first time | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
US | LOCATION | 0.99+ |
three years | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
a month and a half | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
seven cameras | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Office 365 | TITLE | 0.99+ |
20 years | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
first level | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
one | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Cohesity | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
19 | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
first | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
this year | DATE | 0.98+ |
theCUBE | ORGANIZATION | 0.98+ |
five | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
April | DATE | 0.98+ |
80 | QUANTITY | 0.97+ |
Dallas Cowboys | ORGANIZATION | 0.96+ |
80 years ago | DATE | 0.96+ |
AT&T | ORGANIZATION | 0.96+ |
third level | QUANTITY | 0.96+ |
Elon Musk | PERSON | 0.95+ |
80 year old | QUANTITY | 0.95+ |
L.A. Rams | ORGANIZATION | 0.95+ |
about 75 days | QUANTITY | 0.95+ |
one single pane | QUANTITY | 0.95+ |
single pane | QUANTITY | 0.94+ |
three times a week | QUANTITY | 0.94+ |
Azure | TITLE | 0.94+ |
SharePoint | TITLE | 0.93+ |
Global Knowledge Management | ORGANIZATION | 0.93+ |
about 75% | QUANTITY | 0.93+ |
Microsoft Ignite | ORGANIZATION | 0.93+ |
about 30% | QUANTITY | 0.92+ |
Tuesday | DATE | 0.92+ |
two buildings | QUANTITY | 0.92+ |
eight | QUANTITY | 0.9+ |
couple of months ago | DATE | 0.9+ |
mid-July | DATE | 0.9+ |
few weeks ago | DATE | 0.89+ |
a couple weeks back | DATE | 0.87+ |
one gigabit connectivity | QUANTITY | 0.84+ |
81 disparate sources | QUANTITY | 0.79+ |
last two years | DATE | 0.78+ |